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Authors: Gene Wolfe

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BOOK: Castleview
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The group that faced them was only somewhat more numerous, and many among it appeared spectral themselves, whether called ghosts or goblins, ogres or elves—this though von Madadh, with his red-gold beard and cigar, might have dominated a convention of the American Medical Association, and the erect and nearly human apes who flanked him were as solid as gorillas in a zoo.
“Stop here,” Morgan instructed Jose; she touched his hand, and the Cadillac halted abruptly, as though its brake pedal were beneath her feet. “Follow me, both of you.”
She got out, and Jose opened the door on the driver’s side and joined her; together they strode toward the spectral cluster headed by von Madadh.
Hwan left the big car more slowly, and for a moment stood staring from one group to the other.
Ann exclaimed, “Mr. Hwan!”
He turned to look at her, and after a second or two walked toward her. Morgan glanced back and whistled to him as if to a dog, but he did not appear to hear it. “Now war?” he asked Ann.
“I’m afraid so. We were chasing a man on a horse—shooting at him, even. Then we found out
he
was chasing that woman who whistled—she was the one who got Mercedes into so
much trouble, we think, so we started chasing
her.
Then we found this—”
Wild and clear as the sea-wind across the waves, Morgan’s voice silenced her. “My brothers! We have summoned you, your lemen, your knights and ladies to battle, for we will take you fairly if we can. Choose your champion. Who is the bravest you breed? The strongest and most skilled?”
G. Gordon Kitty bowed. “Though modesty—”
But the time was already past. It seemed to Shields that he himself did not advance; rather, Ann, Mercedes, and the rest fell ever farther behind him while Morgan and her fay henchmen drew nearer without taking a step. There was a centaur in armor there; a squat brute with six hands held a long knife in each.
Shields leveled the rifle that von Madadh had given him, and pushed off its safety.
THE LAND OF APPLES
HWAN HEARD the sharp report of Shields’s rifle echo and re-echo between the beetling walls and the slanting, unearthly towers until it seemed it must shake the sky. The brown-haired lady gasped; but if the bullet struck von Madadh, he gave no sign of it, grinning like a wolf. “What’s this, Will? Would you shoot an unarmed man?”
“It’s a whole lot safer that way,” Shields told him. “But I’ve a feeling you’re not unarmed, and you’re certainly not a man.” He fired again as spoke. Before he could get off a third shot, von Madadh was at his throat. As Hwan drew Tom Howard’s pistol from beneath his shirt, they fell to the lichen-gnawed stones together.
The boy with the bandaged face shouted, “Here!” and tossed a flashing silver sword to the pale little man (he was scarcely taller than Hwan himself) whom Hwan had once been ordered to kill. The boy produced a second sword as he ran.
The cat-man dashed after him, a pistol in either hand. The pale man raised his shining sword, and his big revolver boomed. An ape dropped as though clubbed; the second charged him.
Others were charging as well, nightmare shapes dashing from Morgan’s side to join the fight. Though he did not understand its sights, Hwan trained his pistol on Jose like a sensible man and pulled the trigger.
“The king is dead!”
Von Madadh sprang up, his once-golden beard red with blood.
“The king is dead
—
and the world lives! The end is not yet!”
Morgan’s high, uncanny voice joined his:
“ … will live again!”
Their echo did not die away, but swelled to the rattle of iron-shod hooves. His green cloak billowing, a huge rider on an eight-legged horse thundered into the courtyard, followed by a wild-eyed, riderless hunter who looked small only by comparison. Phantom and specter scattered like bats before them, so that for a moment Hwan supposed the battle won.
Yet there was a single, stooped figure that did not flee. Slowly, it straightened until its snowy beard hung no farther than its knees; and Hwan saw that it was crowned, and what he had first thought a staff or crutch was in fact a long straight sword. King Geimhreadh’s cracked voice was nearly lost in the immensity of the courtyard. “You are come at last.”
“Blood-bought, I am here to die,” the green-cloaked giant acknowledged; he pointed to Shields. “To die, so that you and many another may live.” Throwing his great horned helm to the cobbles, he leaped from his eight-legged horse to kneel before the old king. “Strike me, as in time I shall smite you.”
The long sword rose and flashed down. Green-faced beneath —then above—its olive hair, the giant’s head tumbled over the stones to rest beside his helm. It had not yet ceased to roll when the first snowflakes fell.
 
“What happened to the Chinaman?” Roberts asked. He was driving his daughter’s Oldsmobile; she sat beside him.
From the rear seat Seth muttered, “He shot the guy with the big jungle knife, the man who came with him and Ms. Morgan—just shot him down.”
Sally said, “He’s a murderer, then, like whoever it was who killed Tom. He wouldn’t have taken a ride back to town.”
Roberts asked, “You think it was von Madadh?”
From her place beside Seth, Judy said, “It was the man that wanted your house. Morgan told me.”
Her aunt nodded. “Mr. Fee? Yes, I suppose it was. It would be just like him.”
Seth felt very tired, and the deep glass-cuts in his cheeks and scalp loosed yellow waves of pain across his mind; still he asked, “Where’s your cat, Judy? He saved us. Did he go in the Cherokee with Merc?”
Judy shook her head. “He’ll come back by and by. He always does.”
“I’ll bet. Won’t he be just an ordinary cat, though?”
“He’s my cat,” Judy said. “He never is.”
Sally sighed. “That’s the part I don’t understand. How could Judy’s cat talk? How could he help Seth get away from them?” When her father did not reply, she added, “I saw it, too, when they were going to fight us. It walked on its hind legs like a man.”
Roberts gunned the engine as the car slowed on a hill that seemed as steep as many stairways. “Things aren’t the same in fairyland. When you and Katie were little, I used to read you stories about it. Remember ‘Puss in Boots’? You used to love it.”
Sally shook her head. “It was Kate that liked it so much, Dad. But fairyland? You don’t mean that. There isn’t any.”
“A lot of people have believed in fairies. That’s where those stories came from to begin with.”
“That’s the sort of thing Dr. von Madadh used to say.”
“Right. And maybe he was trying to tell us something. You ever think of that? He was the best of ’em.”
“He was the worst! He was the one who killed Mr. Shields.”
“I know.” Something dark bounded across the road. Roberts blinked, then decided it was only a rabbit. “Sally, he was the one they sent out to fight for them. They asked us to pick out a champion, remember? The best we had. So we sent Mr. Shields. That cowboy’s still pretty weak; so’s Seth, and Seth’s too young anyhow. I’ve got too darned old now, and I didn’t see none of you women comin’ forward. But he did. The cat would have gone in a minute or two, but Mr. Shields, he stepped forward as soon as they said it. You don’t send the worst at a
time like that, Sally. You pick out your best, and von Madadh was the one they picked. Recollect how I was in Germany for a while right after the war?”
“Sure, Dad. You’ve told us about it.”
Seth was half asleep, but Judy said, “Not me. You never told me, Grandpa.”
“That’s right, I guess I haven’t. Well, Judy, all my life I’d heard about this place called Germany, and I knew as well as a man can know anything where it was and that the people who lived there were the Germans. We’d been fighting them for four years. I’d seen dead Germans and German prisoners, and I’d seen German planes fly over a few times. But when I got there, I found out it wasn’t Germany at all. They called it
Deutschland,
and they were
Deutsch.
Germany wasn’t any real place. It was just like fairyland.”
A strip of black asphalt speckled with snow appeared in the headlights. Roberts had to wait for a pickup that left ghostly, serpentine tracks before he could pull the Oldsmobile out onto the road.
 
In the Cherokee, Sissy said, “I sure hope she makes it.”
Wrangler, who was driving, nodded solemnly.
“Boomer’s Lisa’s horse, and if anybody can get him out, she can, I guess. I tried to tell her how it is there—to watch out for Sancha, and so on.”
Mercedes glanced at her mother. “I thought you said that Sancha was in the hospital. Didn’t you and Dad take her?”
“Back home, she’s in the hospital,” Ann told her wearily. “Here I don’t know. Neither do you.” Dry-eyed and grim, Ann stared straight ahead at the back of Wrangler’s head.
Mercedes swallowed to summon courage, and at last said, “We should’ve taken Dad’s body.”
“They wouldn’t let us have it.”
“We could’ve fought them for it.” Mercedes spoke with an intensity that surprised even herself. “I’ve got this sword. Some of you have guns.”
Sissy slid around in the front seat. “So did they, or some of them. Long Jim had a gun.”
Ann told Mercedes, “We could have fought them for it, and more people would have died—more and more, until there weren’t enough left to carry all the dead away. You might have died, Mercedes, and you’re all I’ve got left.”
For a half mile no one said anything more; then Mercedes began to sing, hesitantly at first.
“’Twas just about a year ago, I went to see the queen …
”
Louder and stronger then, until her vibrant young voice filled the car and spilled from the open window through which Wrangler thrust his elbow.
“You’ve heard o’ Cleopatra,
The serpent o’ the Nile,
An’ how she conquered Tony,
Wi’ one allurin’ smile.
She tried to conquer Ireland,
But we would not give in,
An’ we beat her off wi’ cabbage leaves,
From the town o’ Magheralin.”
After he had dropped Ann and Mercedes at the Red Stove Inn and driven back to Meadow Grass, Wrangler emptied the old trunk from which he had taken his dead brother’s revolver. He wrapped the bright sword Seth had thrown him in a horse blanket and laid it at the bottom, covering it with folded jeans and faded work shirts. When everything had been put away again, he locked the trunk and went to the kitchen to make coffee.
Sissy had been there before him. He filled a cup from the graniteware percolator and carried it into the lounge.
Sissy had built a fire as well, and sat staring at the new flames from the kindling as they licked the split logs.
“Coffee’s done,” Wrangler said.
“I’ll get some after a while.”
He sat down, choosing a chair rather too big for him, with
broad wooden arms and leather cushions. “You oughta go to bed. You must be beat.”
“I’ll wait,” Sissy told him.
“Boomer was done up,” Wrangler said. “She’ll probably walk him most of the way. She won’t even try to make him trot.”
“You think they’ll let her out, really? Not try to hurt her somehow?”
He sipped his coffee, still too hot to drink. “They said they would, and they let us out. If they don’t, I’ll tell you I’m goin’ back to see about it.”
“I don’t think you could find the way back.”
“I’ve got that sword,” he told her.
For a moment, Sissy turned her attention from the fire to him. “Do you trust them, Wrangler?”
He shook his head.
“Me neither.”
 
Sissy was sound asleep on the sofa, under the cheerful red and yellow Indian blanket he had drawn over her an hour before, when he heard Buck neigh. He walked out into the softly falling snow, and for a time he and Lisa embraced without speaking. At last he said, “You go in. I’ll see to them.”
“I’ll help you,” Lisa told him; and when he had lifted off Boomer’s saddle, she led Boomer to his stall, saw that Wrangler had already forked down clean bedding straw, slipped the bridle from Boomer’s head, and shut the stall door. She heard the big horse lying down before she had taken a step away.
“Going to have to get some new doors before hard winter,” Wrangler told her. “That Mrs. Shields did for the old ones.”
Lisa nodded wearily, thinking of money and insurance they did not have. The telephone rang in her office in the lodge, a faint, insistent buzzing through the thermalpaned windows.
“We better get that,” Wrangler said. “Sissy’s sleepin’ in front of the fire.”
Lisa nodded again; and they went up the steps together, she holding the railing because she was so tired and the treads were slippery with snow. He opened the door for her, and she walked softly to her old wooden desk and picked up the handset, saying, “Meadow Grass.”
“‘Ello? Lisa? Eet’s me! I ’ave not get you out of the bed?”
“Sancha!”
“I am not die, you see. My nurse, she say you seet weeth me long time, always come back, no? Now I am wake up, but Lisa, I am the most terreeble dream!”
When Lisa had hung up the telephone, Wrangler said, “She’s goin’ to pull through.”
Lisa nodded, and even smiled a little.
“It’s all over now, and we’ll pull through, too, Miss Lisa. Know that big pine up on the bluff? Tomorrow I’ll take it down and slab out boards with the chain saw. I’ll open stack ’em in the barn till Christmas, and they ought to season in there pretty good. Before January I’ll make new doors—I can use the hardware off the old ones, it was only the wood got broke. Come spring, there’ll be more campers. Sissy’ll come back sure, and maybe not go home at all. Then come spring, we’ll get married. You’ll marry me, Miss Lisa, won’t you?”
She could only weep and nod and hug him. “Oh, Wrangler,” she whispered. “Oh,
Artie
!”
 
Back home in the big old house that had been Tom Howard’s, Seth awoke from an uneasy sleep and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. As he returned to his own room, he heard soft voices from his mother’s bedroom and stopped to listen. As soon as he was certain of the other voice, he returned to bed; he too had liked the doctor, Seth reflected, as sleep crept once more across his mind. Still, he wondered what his half brothers and sisters might be like, if there were any. Should he tell Merc?
BOOK: Castleview
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