His Majesty's Elephant (20 page)

His Majesty's Elephant

Judith Tarr

Book View Café Edition January 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-240-2
Copyright © 1993, 2013 Judith Tarr

First published: Harcourt, 1993

Cover elements courtesy Andrey Popov, Dreamstime; Potowizard, Dreamstime

Cover design by
Dave Smeds

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www.bookviewcafe.com

Judith Tarr
holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale. She is the author of over three dozen novels and many works of short fiction. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and has won the Crawford Award for
The Isle of Glass
and its sequels. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses.

Novels

Ars Magica

Alamut

The Dagger and the Cross

A Wind in Cairo

Lord of the Two Lands

His Majesty's Elephant

The Hound and the Falcon

The Isle of Glass

The Golden Horn

The Hounds of God

Nonfiction

Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting it Right

BVC Anthologies

Beyond Grimm

Breaking Waves

Brewing Fine Fiction

Ways to Trash Your Writing Career

Dragon Lords and Warrior Women

Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls

The Shadow Conspiracy

The Shadow Conspiracy

The Shadow Conspiracy II

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That was the absolute best and the absolute worst summer of my life, the summer I turned sixteen.

Sixteen is a weird year. Make it sixteen with your dad off finding himself again—not that he'd been around much even before the divorce—and your mom in remission from ovarian cancer, and you can pretty much figure you're being dumped on from somewhere.

What I didn't figure, and couldn't ever have figured, was how bad it was going to get—and how completely impossible both the bad and the good part would be.

Magic. It's dead, they say. Or never existed.

They aren't looking in the places I fell into, or finding it where I found it, that wonderful and terrible summer.

I had plans with the usual suspects: Cat and Rick and Kristen. They had their licenses already, got them before school let out. I was
this
close to mine, with the September birthday and being the class baby.

It was going to be our summer on wheels, when it wasn't on horseback or out on the beaches. We had it all mapped out.

Then Mom dropped the bomb.

I came home from the barn early that day, the day after the last day of school. Rick had the car, but his dad wanted it back by noon. So we'd hit the trails at sunup, then done our stalls and hay and water in a hurry with him already revving up the SUV.

When I got home, wringing wet and filthy and so smelly even I could tell I'd been around a manure pile, Mom was sitting out by the pool.

That wasn't where she usually was on a Thursday morning. She still had her work clothes on, but she'd tossed off the stodgy black pumps and splashed her feet in the water.

Her hair had all grown back since the chemo. It was short and curly, and still a little strange, but I liked it. I thought it made her look younger and prettier.

She turned and smiled at me. She looked tired, part of me said, but the rest of me told that part to shut up. “Good ride?” she asked.

“Good one,” I answered. “Bonnie only threw in a couple of Airs. And that was because Rick was riding Stupid, and she was living up to her name. Bonnie had to put her in her place.”

Mom laughed.

As long as I was out there, I figured I'd do the sensible thing. I dropped my shirt and riding tights and got down to the bathing suit any sane person wears under clothes in Florida summer, and dived into the pool.

The water felt absolutely wonderful. Mom watched me do a couple of laps.

Finally I gave in. I swam up beside her and folded my arms on the tiles and floated there, and said, “All right. Tell me.”

She was still smiling. It must be something really good, to bring her out of court and all the way home.

“I've been talking to Aunt Jessie,” she said. “She's staying in Egypt this summer, instead of coming back home to Massachusetts.”

I knew that. I talked to Aunt Jessie, too. She Skyped in at least once a week. Checking on me, and on Mom through me.

But Mom was in story mode. I kept quiet and let her go on.

“She's really excited,” Mom said. “She's made some discoveries that she thinks are very important, and with everything that's been going on over there, she hasn't been at all sure she can keep getting the permits. She actually got a grant, which is just about unheard of these days.”

“She must be over the moon,” I said.

“Oh, she is.” Mom paused. “It's a big grant. Big enough for a whole team.”

“Including you?”

That came out of the way Mom was smiling—excited, as if she had a secret and she couldn't wait to share. She'd been dreaming about Egypt for years, following all of Aunt Jessie's adventures and reading and studying and talking about maybe someday, if she had time, if she could get away, if—

There were always reasons not to go. First she had to make partner in the law firm. Then she got asked to be a judge in the county court, and that needed her to be always on. Always perfect. And then there was the cancer.

So maybe she figured it was now or never. I could see that. Even get behind it. But I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

Mom away for the whole summer? Was she really ready to leave me for that long? I didn't have my license yet. How was I going to—

All that zipped through my head between the time I asked my question and the time Mom answered, “Including you.”

That stopped me cold.

Mom grinned at my expression. “You really thought it was me? I wish, but there are a couple of big cases coming on trial, and I might be called to the bench for another one, and—”

“You said you were going to take it easy this summer,” I said. “We both were. What would I do in Egypt?”

“Learn,” said Mom. “Explore. Be part of something big.”

“Florida is big enough for me,” I said. “What about Bonnie? And the trip to Disney World? And turtle watch? Turtle watch is important. The college needs us to count those eggs. That's big, too. It's real. It's now. Not fifty million years ago.”

“Four thousand, give or take,” said Mom, “and Disney World will keep. So will the turtles.”

“Bonnie won't. Bonnie needs me. She just got bred. We don't even know if she's pregnant yet.”

“We will tomorrow,” Mom said. “You've got a week till you leave. It's all taken care of. Visas, everything. Aunt Jessie's been working on it for months. It's her birthday present to you.”

She'd never said a word to me. Not even a hint.

“I hate surprises,” I said. “I hate her.”

“Hate me,” Mom said. “It was my idea.”

“It's your dream. Mine is to spend the summer with my friends and my horse. Not baking in a desert on the other side of the world. There are terrorists over there. Revolutionaries. Things get blown up.
People
get blown up.”

“You will not get blown up,” Mom said.

I pulled myself out of the water. “I'm not going,” I said.

Mom didn't say anything. I grabbed a towel off the pile on the picnic table and rubbed myself dry, hard enough to make my skin sting, and marched off into the house.