Fractious (15 page)

We made a quick decision to leave the ponies with the Goat People, after Roger
promised they wouldn't be eaten. We'd make better time without them, and, after being assured
that they would not become food, the ponies weren't too upset about it. We waved goodbye to
our new friends and left, lacking one. Crista didn't even come out of the women's hut to say bye
to us. I felt bad, but I'd feel worse if I never made it back to apologize to her for being such a
dope. So I vowed to make it a point to live so I could come back.

Bob the horse conveyed both Cu and me through the forest, following a nearly unseen
pathway back to the road we'd been on before being accosted and goat-napped by Goat People.
Bob also conveyed our packs without any protest whatsoever. My pony would have been
whining and complaining the entire time, as was his nature. I had certainly grown to like my
pony, but I liked Bob a whole lot better. Bob was less inclined to protest anything.

Cu rode behind me, hanging on to my waist for dear life as I kept Bob to a slow walk. It
was a long fall for a Tuatha Dé from Bob's back to the ground below, so I didn't blame
him for holding on. Our packs hung over Bob's shoulders, tied together with rope, and my sword
swung lazily from my hip. We didn't talk much, and we all knew we still had a long way to go. I
was brooding. Cu was thinking.

Finally, he said, "You know, you certainly are living up to your name."

"Guy?" I muttered.

"No."

"Can't be Alamode," I grumbled. "I'm more out of the fashion than in it."

"No. Fractious. You're irritable, touchy and always complaining."

"I'm not complaining now."

"And you tend to be troublesome," Cu said.

"Trouble has a way of finding me," I said. "And what are you? A walking
thesaurus?"

"Quite possibly," Cu said.

I snorted, a sound Bob echoed just for fun. I leaned forward and rubbed him between his
ears.

"Hey, stop that!" Cu yelled from behind me as I lifted him off his butt.

"Sorry," I said, sitting back down properly. "Forgot you were there."

"How could you? Oh, never mind."

"Hey, Cu?"

"What?" he grumbled.

I laughed. "Heh, heycu. Now you're a Chinese poem."

"What in all hell is wrong with you, Fractious?" Cu belted in my ear.

My head rang for a moment then I just sighed. "I think I might like her," I said.

"Who? Marcie?"

I snorted laugher and was once again echoed by Bob, just for fun. "No, Crista."

"What's she like, in real life?"

"Crista?"

Cu jabbed me in the ribs. "No, Crista."

"Oh,
Crista
," I said to which I received yet another jab. "I dunno. I know she
hates kids. Which is fine. I don't much like 'em either. She works at the bank where I used to
work. She's nice. She fucks like nobody's business." I paused, lost in thought then added, "I saw
that much when she was with that Ken dude."

"Fractious?"

"Hhm?"

"I might have been wrong about you," Cu said.

I tried to look at him over my shoulder and failed. "Wrong how?"

"You aren't an asshole," he said. "At least, not completely."

"Ah, thanks Cu." I said, feeling all girly inside. "You're not so bad yourself."

"Okay, that's enough."

"Good," I said quickly.

We were quiet for a while, riding comfortably along on Bob's bare back, two pairs of
balls bouncing up and down his horse spine and getting bruised along the way.

I tried not to think about Crista. I tried not to think about a lot of things, but I found I
was regretting the things I had said. I had been drunk and sometimes I don't think when I'm
drunk. I don't think much when I'm sober either, but that's a different kind of not thinking. Like
spending days in the park trying to catch what I thought at the time was a leprechaun but turned
out to be a Tuatha Dé. Like agreeing in the first place to go find this Amergin whosie, all
for a house in Beverly Hills and a butler.

What did I know about killing a wizard? I could do as Lug suggested and throw peaches
at his head, but what good would that do me? All it would probably do was make Amergin even
angrier and he'd lob something even worse back at me, like stones or perhaps prunes. Lobbing
peaches... What was I thinking?

I wanted to go home. I had no job, probably had no apartment and I certainly had no
friends. But I wanted to be back in New York. I
knew
New York. I understood it. I even
liked
it. I wanted to smell the subway and hear the crazies. I wanted to hail a cab or try
not to get hit by a bus. I wanted a curbside hot dog really, really bad. I wanted to see a movie
starring anyone but Tom Cruise. It was bad enough that the man was on the money here. I
wanted more and more.

But what I really wanted was Crista.

"Damn it," I swore under my breath. "Fuck. Shit. Bitch. Asshole. Dickwad. Reamer." I
went on and on, going through cuss words that hadn't been bad words until I decided to add them
to my list. At the end, I called myself a wallie, although I had no idea what that meant only that it
was some British swear and decided I was done. I passed a hand over my brow, exhausted by the
effort.

"That was pleasant," Cu said from behind me. "You left out snogger and shyster."

"What's a shyster?" I said.

Cu was probably raising an eyebrow at me, but I couldn't see him so I just assumed. He
didn't answer me, anyway.

"I should never have come here," I said to Cu, and to Bob, who had his ears pricked
back, listening intently.

"You didn't come here," Cu said. "I dragged you. Remember?"

"I guess," I said.

"Look, Fractious, could you just forget about last night and think about the task at
hand?"

"Okay," I mumbled.

"This isn't just your love life at stake here," Cu said seriously. "This is my
world
. And yours. Have you forgotten?"

"No," I said. "It's just... I'm a jerk."

"Yes, but use that to defeat Amergin. Then we'll go back to Roger and the Goat People,
pick up your chick and I might even hold up my end of the bargain and buy you a house in
Beverly Hills."

"Swimming pools, movie stars," I said dreamily. "And it was Mac said he'd buy me a
house in Beverly Hills, not you."

Cu didn't answer me. So I kicked Bob into a trot and got on a little faster. I could feel Cu
clinging to me like a very large burr, his body bouncing against mine as we rode. I wasn't afraid
that he'd fall off. I was more afraid of getting back to the Goat People and discovering that Crista
was no longer there.

* * * *

We made a camp that night in a large, overly green meadow. Cu built a fire by use of his
teepee method, which he was very good at. He sat beside it, looking smugly at his creation, as if
he invented the thing or something. I couldn't tell what was on his mind and I'm not sure that I
much cared. I just sat on an old, hollow log, listening to the beetles scurrying around in its
interior and sharpening my sword with a whetstone given us by Tat the sword maker. The sound
of the stone against the blade was somehow soothing, not unlike listening to the tunes of AC/DC.
I closed my eyes at times and just listened to the scraping. Not that I really knew what I was
doing.

"So," I said to Cu later, as I was examining my whetstone work on the blade. Looked
pretty good considering I'd never done that before. "How much longer 'til we reach Black
Mountain?"

"We should reach the base of it tomorrow evening."

"That soon?"

Cu shrugged. "That's what Roger told me."

"Oh."

"I've never been there before, remember?"

"Guess so," I mumbled.

"You really are a downer, Fractious," Cu said. "You know, I fell in love with a girl
once."

"You did?" I leaned forward, intrigued.

"Yeah," he said, licking his chops like a hungry, shaggy dog. "Remember that girl that
was humping the wooden post back in Tara?"

"Yeah," I said drawing the word out.

"Her," Cu said dreamily, eyes towards the sky, his chin resting in his hand. "Wow, she
was quite the looker. Doing the nasty with that pole and all. She had it going on." He clapped his
hands together to emphasize his point.

"You never even talked to her," I said.

"So? Who says you have to talk to be in love?"

I laughed. "I certainly would have been better off as a mute."

Bob the horse snorted laughter, leaning over my shoulder to nip at my shirt.

"Are you hungry again?" I said.

Bob nodded, brown eyes eager.

I dug in the nearest pack and produced a bright, red apple. "Here you go."

Bob took said apple and devoured it on the spot, tossing it back like a shot of
tequila.

"That should hold you over for another ten minutes," I said as Bob went off to nibble on
some of that overly green meadow grass. "So anyway," I said, getting back to Cu. "You never
even talked to her, how do you even know what she's like?"

"Don't matter," Cu said. "If a girl can hump like that, she don't need anything else."

I shook my head. I could believe it. I decided to change the subject. "So, do you have
any idea what we'll find when we reach Black Mountain? Will there be guards? A wall?
Elephants maybe?"

"Definitely be guards at the gate," Cu said, "which must mean there's a wall somewhere.
I don't know about elephants, though. We don't even
have
those here."

"You don't have elephants?" I said in disbelief. "How can you live without
elephants?"

"We manage," Cu said. "And I've heard tell that the guards are dumb fucks."

"Who told you that?"

"Roger," he said.

"You believed him? He wears stretchy pink pants."

Cu raised an eyebrow. "And that's a reason not to believe him?"

"Reason enough for me," I muttered, wondering what Roger and Crista were up to at
that very moment.

Cu rolled his eyes. "Either way, there will be a fight. Think you're up to it?"

"What have I got to lose?" I said. "My life ain't worth much anyway."

In the open meadow, with Bob the horse standing as a lazy lookout, Cu and I fell asleep.
Nothing came to kidnap us and nothing ate us slowly at any time during the entire night. Bob
even fell asleep, for which I reprimanded him later, but not too harshly since we lived through
the night anyway. With that night out of the way, we began to make our way to the base of Black
Mountain.

We made it there at midday.

"I thought you said we'd be there at evening time," I said to Cu as he peered around my
back, still clinging to my waist. Bob bobbed his head in agreement with my statement.

"I didn't reckon on the horse," Cu said.

"We had Bob yesterday," I pointed out.

"Details," Cu said.

Black Mountain lived up to its name.

It was stark black.

I stared up at it, at its pointy peaks and its rounded tops. Some peaks were even so high
that they had snow on them and even some more were shrouded in white, fluffy clouds. But it
wasn't really a mountain so much as a mountain range. Black Mountain wasn't even the tallest
peak but it was still black in color. The rest of the mountain range had pretty green shadings and
nice green trees.

"Why is that one mountain black?" I said as we stood there, staring like fools.

"Because it's Black Mountain."

"But why is it
black?"

Cu jabbed me in the ribs with a pointy elbow. "We need to get there," he said, pointing
past me to a spot about half way up the mountainside.

"And how do we go about doing that?" I said, looking along the line of his finger to an
even blacker place on the mountainside.

"I'm sure there's a path," Cu said.

"How sure?"

"Oh, about ten percent."

I snorted. "That's not very sure."

"It is in my world," Cu said.

"Not in mine."

Cu kicked Bob's ribs with his heels and the horse got moving, making a grumbling noise
deep in his chest. His chestnut coat was coated with dust from the ride we'd taken that day. I
could tell he wasn't feeling as handsome as he normally was, but then again, I wasn't looking my
best either. As we made our way to a trailhead at the very base of the mountainside, I thought
about this stuff. I hadn't had a shower in a while and I probably stank to high heaven, but I
couldn't smell myself. I didn't know if that made it worse or better. Cu didn't stink any more than
he usually did. He'd smelled like Cu since the day he'd dragged me into his tree and into his
world to have me sent on this quest to kill a wizard.

It was the smell of Crista I missed the most. Sure, there was the lingering scent of Ken
on her and now probably the scent of a goat or possibly, if miracles occurred, of Roger. She
smelled of the earth, but in a good way.

I missed her, even though I had only just met her, really. I'd known her at work, but that
didn't make us friends. That didn't even make us acquaintances. The most she ever said to me at
the bank was, "Have you seen my calculator?" or "Something in this room makes me itch and it
might be you." Stuff like that.

With Black Mountain and Amergin the wizard/sorcerer/druid priest dude looming
before me, I knew I had to forget about Crista. I didn't even know how I felt about her anyway. I
liked her, sure. She was pretty and smelled nice. That didn't mean I was in love with her. No
straight man alive would pass up the chance to fuck her if he was single and able and she was the
same. She was sweet, kind and caring. What else could I ask for?

"You're drooling."

I snapped back to life. I glanced around to discover that we were about halfway up the
mountainside already, approaching the point Cu had pointed at a whole lot sooner than I thought
we would. "Are we there already?"

"Almost," Cu said. "Another fifteen minutes or so and we should reach a gate of some
kind."

"You really have no idea what you're doing, do you?"