Fool on the Hill (45 page)

AT THE HOSPITAL

I.

When Ragnarok’s senses returned to him he was lying in a private room in Tompkins County General. His forehead was bandaged and one of his ribs had been taped up, but other than that he was in remarkably good shape, except for the drained and ashen pallor of his face.

“You look like tofu,” Myoko said affectionately, when he blinked his eyes open.

“Maybe next time you decide to steal my horse,” Lion-Heart added, “you’ll remember to ask for a few riding lessons first.”

Wincing, Ragnarok raised his head a few inches, looked around curiously. “Did I kill him?” he asked, his voice weak.

“Charlemagne’s fine,” said Lion-Heart, thinking he meant the horse. “Luckily enough, and no thanks to you. What the hell were you up to, anyway?”

“Never mind that now,” Myoko interrupted. “How do you feel, Ragnarok?”

The Black Knight’s head dropped back against the pillow. He seemed not to have heard them. Withdrawn, he whispered to himself: “No, I didn’t. Not yet.”

Myoko and Lion-Heart exchanged glances. Then she said, more tentatively: “Ragnarok? Visiting hours are almost over, but Jinsei ought to be here in about fifteen minutes. Do you want to see her when she gets here?”

“Not yet,” Ragnarok repeated, and all at once he was sitting up, struggling to get out of bed.

“Wait a second, Rag,” Lion-Heart said, alarmed. “Doctor said you’re supposed to rest. They don’t know if you’ve got a concussion or not.”

“I have to talk to Stephen George,” the Black Knight insisted.

“You can thank him for bringing you in tomorrow, Rag. You can call him on the phone, OK?”

“Don’t need to.” His feet tested the floor for firmness; he tried to stand, did stand. “Don’t need the phone, he’s here in the hospital.”

“No, George went home a while ago. Said he hoped you’d be—”

“He’s
here
. Visiting Aurora.”

“Aurora?” Myoko said.

“How do you know that?” Lion-Heart asked. “How do you know that, Rag?”

Ragnarok paused, puzzled by the question. “How? . . . I just
do
. Someone—” he glanced briefly at Myoko, “—someone must have whispered in my ear while I was out. In a dream, maybe. I’ve got to give George a message.”

“Tomorrow, Rag. You can give it to him tomorrow, OK?”

“Tomorrow’s too late,” said Ragnarok. He fought his way out of the thin blue hospital robe someone had dressed him in, looked around for his own clothes. “Tomorrow’s what it’s all about. . . .”

II.

There were two other beds in Aurora’s hospital room, but both were empty. The lights were out, leaving the moon—the clouds had dispersed—to shine in and illuminate the sleeping Princess. The storyteller sat in the darkened half of the room, watching her; she was, as he had told her, a beautiful sleeper. Radiantly beautiful now, despite three days in a sickbed. As much as anything else, this beauty gave him hope.

It still had the feel of a fairy tale, that was the thing. He had been made a fool of today, in his quest for a chivalric act to perform (in his mind, his discovery of Ragnarok did not come close to qualifying), that much was true, but it didn’t change the basic situation. The Poisoned Apple; the Sleeping Princess; the test of valor waiting to be taken. Being drenched by the rain and laughed at by the clouds had not caused George to doubt his sanity, or, for long, dampened his optimism. He had been balked, he was still angry; but he wasn’t ready to quit.

Loosely cupped in his right hand were four seeds from the Apple; every so often he shook them like dice, listening to the sound they made. He had them rattling like wind-up teeth when he became aware of a third presence in the room, a figure standing directly behind him.

For an instant George thought it must be Calliope. When he turned and saw Ragnarok instead, though, he wasn’t really surprised.

“In The Boneyard,” Ragnarok said. The Bohemian spoke with the voice of a ghost reciting lines in someone else’s play.

“What’s that?” George’s fist was clenched tight, the apple seeds silenced.

“It’s in The Boneyard.” Ragnarok told him. “What you’ve been looking for. Calliope left you a present.”

He slumped a little, his duty discharged. A hand stole its way up to touch the bandage above his eye. “Tired,” he said, in a voice more his own. “Headache.”

“Wait,” George said, as he turned to go, and Ragnarok waited . . . but there didn’t seem much point in questioning him. Instead the storyteller reached for something on the nightstand beside Aurora’s bed, offered it, a return gift. “This is yours, I think. It was lying next to you on the bridge.”

Ragnarok flinched a bit at the sight of his mace. At first he seemed reluctant to claim it, but then a burning in one eye called up a memory of Jack Baron, and his hand closed around the black handle of the weapon. “All right,” he said, accepting it. And then: “I’ll see you tomorrow, George. You do what you have to do tonight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He turned, shambled out of the room. Alone again with the Princess, George wondered if he might have hallucinated the whole thing. But not for long.

He called a taxi, and fifteen minutes later was on his way back to The Hill. To The Boneyard.

FRACTOR DRACONIS

The Boneyard was large, but it wasn’t hard for him to guess where he had to go. He entered the cemetery from the downhill side, scrambling up a slope between jutting mausoleums, heading for the far north end.

The wind blew at his back as he made his way through the trees; it blew cold, offering no comfort. George moved as swiftly as he could, and soon entered the area where the main body of Rasferret’s army was preparing for a pre-dawn march up The Hill. George passed the demon-adorned tombstone of Harold Lazarus without noticing it. The marble gargoyle crouched atop the stone watched him pass; so did the company of Rats clustered at its base. As the storyteller topped another rise, a cordon began to close behind him.

He stood at the crest of a burial mound, the bones of Ithaca war dead beneath his feet. Moonlight cast a circle around him, ringed the mound with shadow. From these shadows came the first sound, a rustling of rotten leaves like the approach of small animals. The second sound was harder to identify, a faint twanging.

He was on his way down the far side of the mound when the first tiny crossbow bolt struck him. George felt a sharp sting in his ankle and reached down to pluck a sharp sliver of bone from his pants cuff. More missiles flew, some bone, some metal. George jerked around as pain flared in his calves; his feet tangled and he fell, landing in a shallow gully.

Small dark shapes came swarming over the burial mound after him. All the storyteller could think of was Gulliver and the Lilliputians. He scrambled backwards, groping for some sort of weapon. One hand clutched a stone and hurled it, felling two of his opponents.

The Rats returned fire. George’s chest became a pin-cushion; only luck saved him from a serious puncture or the loss of an eye. He continued to retreat, yanking the miniature bolts out of himself as another volley flew.

All at once he felt something cold and hard beneath him. He gripped it in his fists: an iron bar, left lying in the grass. Using the small crosspiece at
one end of the bar like a mallet head, he swept through the advancing ranks (he still could not clearly see what they were), batting them right and left like croquet balls.

Crossbow bolts were no longer flying; now it was the Rats who were airborne. Suddenly overmatched, they routed, scattering for safety, and George let them go with one last swing. “Send something bigger next time!” he called after them, only later reflecting that this might not have been a wise thing to say.

Bleeding from a dozen pin-sized wounds, the storyteller stood up and continued his walk. Coming to The ‘Yard’s northern fringe, he found Calliope’s present easily enough; the moon led him right to it. Though the
PANDORA
stone was no more, the spearhead that Calliope had thrust into the bole of an oak tree on her way out of town still remained. Its exposed portion glimmered like a beacon.

George grabbed at it and tried to pull it out, succeeding only in slicing a finger. The spear blade
wanted
to cut something, yet the oak held it fast. George had another idea. He raised the iron bar, inserting it into the square socket at the base of the spearhead.

It fit perfectly.

“OK,” George said. “OK, I think I understand.”

“Understand?” a chuckling voice said behind him. “You make it sound as if you really do know something. But then I didn’t choose you for humility; that’s not a storyteller’s trait.”

George turned, pulling as he did the bar which was now a shaft, drawing the spearhead out of the oak easily, revealing the inscription:
Fractor Draconis.

“Who are you?”

Mr. Sunshine smiled from his seat atop a squat tombstone. His sandaled feet were crossed one over the other, and in his hair a circlet of laurel leaves rustled with the wind.

“Someone very old, that’s who I am,” Mr. Sunshine said. “And a Storyteller. You’ve guessed that much correctly.”

“You put me in a fairy tale.” George replied. “That’s what all this is, isn’t it, a fairy tale brought to life?”

“Close enough. I didn’t have to Meddle much to fit you in the Story, though. You’re a very lucky coincidence for me, George—if I’d ever Written about Ithaca before I’d have to wonder if the Monkeys had something to do with you. Your first and middle initials are almost too much to believe.”

“St. George,” the storyteller nodded, a last piece of the puzzle falling into place for him. “And the Dragon Parade’s tomorrow.”

“Now
that
I had a little more of a hand in,” admitted the Storyteller.

“So the Princess is asleep,” George continued, “and what happens next is the Dragon comes to life somehow, and I kill it to save her and the town
from—” But here he stopped, for Mr. Sunshine had burst out with a familiar-sounding laugh.

“I kill it,” the Storyteller repeated, amused. “Ego! Ego! We’re not rewriting
Romeo and Juliet
here, George. It’s
my
Story, and no one said you’re obliged to survive it, or live happily ever after with the woman. I like tragedy; after all, I’m Greek.”

“But your fairy tale’s about a Saint, with the Brothers Grimm thrown in for good measure, so how Greek . . .”

“My Story,” the Storyteller insisted, “is about a Fool on a Hill, a Fool who has put the wind at his beck and call, a Fool who accepted without question when his Uncle told him that artists were the only beings other than the gods who could grant immortality. Which is a dangerous attitude to take, whether you’re Greek pagan, Christian, or Jew.”

“But if you’re a storytelling pagan,” George countered, “it’s the
only
attitude to take.”

More laughter. “Pity you aren’t
really
immortal, George—I have a feeling we’d have made good friends. Same pride, same spirit of hanging on to the end, never admitting defeat. Who knows, maybe the Fool who rushes in really can save the day"—he raised an eyebrow—"or at least die in a truly interesting fashion, one worthy of a Story.”

“Promise me,” George pressed him, “promise me Aurora gets to live if I win.”

“
Promise
you? Oh, please, I—”

“It’s a
good
ending, damn it! Save your damn tragedy for some masochist who’ll get off on it, not me.”

“
Patience
, George. The Ending hasn’t even been Written yet. But if I were you, I’d be more worried about the Dragon than the Lady.”

“I’ll win,” George insisted. “I’ll win whether you want me to or not. But when I win, Aurora gets to live, OK? Deal?”

“Go home and get some sleep,” the Greek Original said. “Tomorrow I’ll call you when it’s time, and we’ll write the last Chapter together.”

“
Wait
—” George reached out, to restrain him or run him through with the Spear, it did not matter which, for all at once Mr. Sunshine flickered like a projected image and faded out.

“No, no, no!” George cut the air with the Spear blade as if trying to bleed it. “You come back here! You come back here!”

Fool or Saint, he received no answer, not even a mocking laugh, and all was still in The Boneyard except for a light breeze that wafted the scent of hills, and rain, and laurel.

Book Four

THE IDES OF MARCH

1866—AT THE HILL'S CREST

. . . And so at the last they reach the top, the gullied pasture that is the crest of The Hill. There are no school buildings here yet, no students, but Mr. Sunshine can sense them like phantoms still to be. The thing he does not sense, no matter how hard he squints into the Future, is the one thing that would make his Story idea complete.

“No Dragon,” he sighs. “Not even a statue of one. Maybe at Oxford . . .”

“Ahem,” says Ezra Cornell, his boots caked with mud, his strength sapped by the long climb.

“Well Hades,” continues Mr. Sunshine, ignoring him. “Hades, I've got this much, I suppose I could Meddle out a Dragon. Did you say"—all at once Cornell is present again—"that you planned to have instruction in every study?”

“Eventually,” Cornell agrees. “But as you can see, there's not much to see right now, so I'd really appreciate it if we could—”

“Engineering?” Mr. Sunshine presses him. “Architecture and design?”

“Of course engineering and architecture. What—”

“Then that's it.” The Greek Original withdraws into his own musing. “A budding architect or engineer, sort of fellow who likes building things. I could send Calliope to inspire him. And it could be a yearly event, a college tradition, the Annual Snow Dragon, maybe . . .”

“My dear sir,” Cornell tries once again, “I'm cold. I would like to go home now.”

“Certainly,” Mr. Sunshine surprises him by saying. “Certainly, you need your rest. You have a great undertaking in the works here—and I have quite a Story.” He hands Ezra the lantern. “Build your University well, Mr. Cornell. I have interesting things in mind for it.”

“Do you?” Cornell sounds less than fascinated; his thoughts are
already on the long walk down to town. He is more than a little surprised when Mr. Sunshine vanishes into thin air a moment later; even before that, he is startled by Mr. Sunshine's last words to him.

“There will have to .be women here, of course, “the Greek Original says in parting. “Your plan for coeducation is a good one. If Denman Halfast gives you any more trouble warn him that he'd better start listening to reason or risk waking up one day with the ears of an ass.”

He smiles, fading.

“I can still do that, you know . . .”

Fading.

Gone.

And then Cornell is alone, and all is still on The Hilltop except for a light breeze that wafts the scents of hills, and rain, and laurel.