Songs of the Dancing Gods (4 page)

The boy looked sullen. “So?”

“So cut the crap! In a couple of days, we’ll reach the river, and not long after that we’ll be at Castle Terindell. Still nothing supermodern, but comfortable. Lots of good food, featherbeds, and the like.”

“Yeah? Why we goin’ there, though? Just for laughs or what?”

“Uh-uh. Time you went to school, son.”

“School! You ain’t said nothin’ ‘bout no school!”

“Not the kind you’re thinking of, although, God knows, you sure could use one. The same kind of school I once went to at Terindell. Survival school, you might call it. Learning how to survive to my age around here.”

The boy was suddenly interested. “You mean fightin’? Like swords and knives and shi—er, stuff like that? O-boy!”

‘ ‘I mean stuff exactly like that. Don’t get your hopes too high, though, tough boy. We’re gonna see just how tough you really are. And if you wash out, you might have a real future as a stablehand shoveling horse shit for the rest of your life.”

“Hey! Wait just a damn second! You sayin’ if I flunk out of this hero school I’m a nothin’? I might just not like it.”

“Oh, I guarantee you won’t like it, at least at the start,” his father assured him. “But nobody flunks out. You keep at it until you get it and you pass—or you get killed trying or you quit and walk out. The only one that flunks you is you. If you can’t hack this, then you can’t hack it anywhere on your own in this world, and anybody—I mean anybody— who can’t handle himself out here on his own winds up practically owned by somebody else. You’ve seen that already. There are only three kinds of people here. The rulers, maybe five in a hundred folks; the ruled, which is ninety-four point nine of the rest, and that tiny one in thousands who’s an independent like me. You weren’t born royal and -you haven’t shown any talent for magic, so being independent or one of the ruled is all you can get. And of the ruled, if you can’t fight, can’t read or write the chicken scratches they use here, and have no skills, you shovel shit. Hell, son, somebody’s got to do it.”

“Not me!”

“Yeah? Well, you prove it. Because if you walk, that’s the best you can hope for and I won’t stick around to help you do it. Do that or you’re dead. Those are the choices if you walk. Remember that.”

Irv seemed to have lost a lot of his confidence all of a sudden, but he still maintained a brave front. “You got through it, didn’t you? If you can do it, I can do it!”

“Wagons coming, Joe,” Tiana cut in.

Joe pulled his horse up and looked at the oncoming traffic. It was less wagons than a wagon train, coming single file, pulled by massed teams of horses.

“Man!” Irv swore. “Whatever they’re carryin’, it’s heavy as gold and big as a subway!”

The boy wasn’t far off the mark in his comments on the load. When they got right up to the lead wagon, they could see the eight-horse team straining, the driver and brakeman working constantly to keep them straight, balanced, and in line.

“Hello!” Joe shouted to them. “What are you hauling?”

“Sorry! Can’t stop to chat!” the brakeman shouted back. He. gestured at the load in back of him. “Rules change sheets! If we stop, there’ll be two more revisions of these right in back of us!”

Irv looked at the wagons. Five … six … seven of them. Each the size of a locomotive, or so it seemed. He knew what the Rules were—the crazy books of laws that governed everything and everybody in this nutty place. But— “What’re Rules change sheets?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“You know the history,” Tiana replied as they made way and watched the huge train go by. ‘ ‘In the Creation, Husaquahr was created in a kind of backwash, with the leftover energy from the creation of your world. The Creator Himself took charge of Earth, but He delegated Husaquahr to the lesser angels who weren’t as thorough or competent. They mated with the ones here and produced the first in the line of sorcerers, people of great power who were half human, half angel.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. You told me. But—change sheets!”

“In the beginning,” Tiana explained, “the incomplete universe which contained Husaquahr was basically chaotic. Even the basics, like gravity, only worked some of the time. The Founding Angels rushed in to do what they could, establish a basic set of Angelic Laws to supplement natural laws where they were weak, creating stability out of the chaos. Being lesser, they still took a number of short cuts, creating much imitation of Earth but often not quite like Earth. Given a core number of souls by the Creator, early experiments produced strange results, in which the soul itself took on physical reality and mated with those things of animal and plant which imitated forms from Earth. The offspring of those created the thousands of races of faerie.* Essentially immune to age, they were made very slow to breed, and set to supplementing the angels in their establishing tasks, from climatological management, like the legendary Frost Giants, to the mineral management of the dwarves, the flower-tending of the pixies, and the husbandry of the nymphs and satyrs. The basics were maintained by the least of the souls, the elementals.

Faerie refers to the heritage, magic nature, power, and “realm” of fairies in general; it has a connotation of that which is withdrawn from human ken. Fairy refers in more specific-manner to individuals, races, traits, and abilities of the fairy folk; its connotation is more that of a normal, day-today existence.

“After the Great Upheaval on Earth, some of the fallen humans were given to the angels of Husaquahr to establish their dominion here and duplicate the basic system. But since they were already stained by sin, these humans had a hard time from the start and even less wisdom. To compensate, the angels mated with men and produced a hybrid race. Half retained more of the angelic powers and began the line of sorcery; the other half gained higher wisdom, and became the founders of the royal lines. The sorcerers then became the finishers of the work, as the angelic powers had to withdraw, and, from experience living in this new world and from their own humanity, wrote the Books of Rules to bind and control and shape the subsequent history of Husaquahr for both faerie and human.

“That, of course, was close to the dawn of human time. After a while—who knew how long—these first founders felt their job done and went on to some higher, perhaps angelic plane, themselves; their children now became the sorcerers. But, although sorcerers tended to live impossibly long lives, as each generation of them grew and the elders eventually tired and went on to wherever sorcerers went on to, the angelic blood was diluted more and more with humans. The powers of five generations before were only shadows of what their ancestors could do; those today mere shadows of that generation. And yet, each generation, generation after generation, kept on finding loopholes or specifics not addressed in the Rules and, as such, amended them. They couldn’t really change what their more powerful predecessors had decreed, but they could keep adding, keep ‘plugging in the holes’ as time passed. And the less power and the less wisdom that they had, the more holes they found and the more new Rules they wrote.

“By now, the sorcerous bureaucracy was incredibly well organized; it only remained for that huge assembly to get out the amendations and hair-splitting new Rules to all those magical folk and royal, temporal powers throughout the world so that they would know what was being done.”

“There’s probably a Rule in this batch regulating the length of nose hairs,” Joe muttered.

“Oh, no,” Tiana responded sourly. “They would have addressed something that major generations ago.”

Irv looked at the last wagon to pass and imagined the mountain of paper contained within. “Is there anybody who knows even half of what’s in them papers?” he asked.

“Probably not, not even among those that create them,” Tiana responded honestly. “It doesn’t make any difference. Once the Rules are properly distributed, they go into force and we’re stuck with them. They’re not like laws, you know. Those are made by governments, which we also have plenty of. Everyone, even nonhumans, will be bound by whatever is in there as if it is natural law, like breathing or what goes up usually comes down.”

“And you ain’t worried? I mean, that somethin’ buried in one of them wagons won’t suddenly change the way we look or talk or think or act?”

“I was born here,” she reminded him, “I sort of take it for granted.”

“You just learn to forget that it’s going on,” Joe told him. ” You can’t do anything about it anyway, and by this time everything really nasty that they could do has either been done or been stepped on by some prior rule so it’s canceled out anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

The boy frowned. “But if all them papers don’t make no difference, then why do it at all?”

“Oh, they might make some minor differences,” Tiana told him. “Still, you are right—it’s mostly harmless at this point. But, you see, constantly revising and perfecting the Rules takes a huge bureaucracy, larger than the kind that runs most governments. Thousands upon thousands of people and fairies, all employed in everything from proposing the additions to arguing for them or against them, helping adopt and implement them, printing and delivering them—it’s a massive undertaking.”

“And yet all them people do all that work and nothin’ much happens because of it?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Then why do they do it? Seems like a total waste of time.”

“Oh, their positions are essential,” she responded matter-of-factly. “If they didn’t do what they did, then all those masses would be unemployed, and, being bureaucrats, most of them couldn’t do anything useful. Why, they wouldn’t survive!”

“Or, worse, they might get together and try to do something really useful,” Joe added. “That would be a disaster. So, don’t worry much about it, and particularly not yet. You’re still not quite within the Rules. So long as you aren’t physically changed here by some magic, you’re still outside the more specific rules. Unless you’re a changeling, which I seriously doubt, since we’d have noticed by this time, you’ll just slowly come under more and more the longer you’re here, without even noticing it.”

“Changeling. Yeah, Like that sexy broad with the wings we melon the boat.”

“Uh-huh. Marge. She came over with me and at the time was as human as Tiana or me. She changed into one of the fairy races after she was here. It happens. But I doubt if you qualify.

I seriously doubt if your mother had that trigger in her genes, and I sure don’t. And, judging by the time she took to change, I think you’d have done it by now if you were going to, anyway.”

“What do’ya mean by trigger in my jeans? I ain’t got no jeans on.”

“In your blood,” Joe told him. “If you’d ever gone to church back home, you’d know that it wasn’t just here that angels mated with people. That was so long ago, though, back before Moses’ time, that it’s even more diluted back there than here. But some folks have a little of that blood, either from the angels or from demons, too, or early fairy-human matings, passed down in them. If you do, you become a changeling when you get here.”

“Jeaz … I think that’d be kind a neat,” the boy said. “Maybe growin’ wings and gettin’ magic powers and all that. Uh—did you say demons?”

Joe nodded. “There’s some pretty mean fairies, too. Pray you don’t meet them, believe me!”

“But being one of the fairy folk isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Tiana pointed out, glad mat the boy was at least interested in something. “Our souls are eternal; they do not die with our body. In the fairies, the soul is made flesh and is the body. They never really grow old, although experience gives them that look after a long time, but as they are flesh, they are mortal. Iron, for example, is deadly to most of them, except gnomes and a few other special races, and they are also subject to some forms of accidents and even murder. If they die, they’re dead. To kill a fairy is to kill its soul as well. They don’t even have the option of dying. Their only chance is to remain alive and well until Judgment.”

“Un-huh,” Joe put in. “And they’re sort of one-dimensional. Stuck. Remember, son, the fairies were shaped to do particular kinds of things and nothing else. They can’t change, can’t learn or do other things, outside what they were basically designed to do. They can’t quit and try something else. It’s got to become either boring or frustrating after a while, maybe after a few hundred years, no matter what you’re doing, particularly if you’re smart and curious and ambitious. They can no more change than a horse can decide one day it would rather be a cat.”

Tiana nodded in agreement with him. “Yes, sometimes I feel rather sorry for Marge. Even more, now that I have a similar if more mortal situation. Her changeling race was dictated by her own soul at the time and was what she needed to be at that time, but, now … I’m not so sure. She’s intelligent, educated, adventurous, and could have been someone really important.”

Joe looked over at Tiana. “Do you feel frustrated?”

“No, not really. I admit that some days I’m still not used to being this small and light, but when have you ever heard of a woman complaining of that!” Tiana’s original body had been as large as he was, and as massive. Thanks to the body and soul snatching techniques of the Master of the Dead, her soul had wound up first in the body of a mermaid, then this dancer’s.

“Yeah, but what about bein’ somebody real important?” Irv asked her.

She shrugged. “I was somebody important. A queen, in fact. And, by sorcery, your dad at the time looked like some northern barbarian instead of his old self.”

“And your body got stole?”

“Well, in the end, I could have had it back,” she admitted. ‘ ‘But, then, you see, I ‘d have to have come back to being Queen. And if your dad had gone back to the way he was most of the time here, he’d have been King.”