The Hero King (28 page)

And I thought I was bored? I didn’t care to meet the person who had placed all those dominoes out there, but I had a sneaking hunch that I had discovered the secret hobby of the Great Earth Mother.

I had another sneaking hunch as well, a premonition I would have wagered heavily on if there had been anyone to take my action. I would have bet that those dominoes were going to get tipped before I got to the temple on the other side of the valley. Being that certain, I spent a lot of time studying the patterns that the dominoes were arranged in, trying to pick out the safest route through the mess.

“I wonder how long it will take all of those dominoes to fall once they start?” I asked.

Nobody answered, which was just as well.

I could remember an announcer on television talking about a setup in some college gym in Japan. The dominoes would need more than half an hour to fall, and those were regular-sized dominoes, and a lot less than a million of them. I guessed that it would take several hours for all of these to fall, especially if it was set up so that they would go one at a time, not with parallel lines dropping together.

I didn’t
see
anything that looked like it might be a trigger for several rows going simultaneously.

“Let’s eat first,” I decided. I used the last of the wood Geezer was carrying to build a fire. I wasn’t worried about giving away our position. If the Great Earth Mother didn’t already know exactly where we were, she wouldn’t be much of an adversary. Anyway, those camping meals are just so much cardboard unless you eat them as hot as possible.

I decided to eat big. Like as not it would be my last meal, so I splurged, fixing a full half-dozen of my packaged dinners. It still wasn’t a proper Varayan feast, but I did what I could and let the horses graze while I was doing it. The only thing missing was beer. A six-pack of Michelob Dry would have topped everything off perfectly.

When I finished eating, I stood and let out a couple of well-deserved belches before I mounted Electrum and said, “Let’s go, boy.” I have never, to the best of my recollection, used the phrase “giddy-up” to a horse. I’d be too self-conscious … I just
know
any self-respecting horse would turn his head to laugh at me.

Before we could get to the valley floor and all of those humongous dominoes, we had to descend a long, gentle slope, too easy to pose any threat even to tired horses unless they were galloping full out, and mine weren’t. I was looking ahead, still concentrating on the patterns of the dominoes, when somebody started playing games with the law of gravity.

All of a sudden,
down
was straight out to my left. Abruptly. We were still on the slope, and the horses kept walking, but my senses started screaming that we were about to fall sideways, parallel to the ground. The horses seemed to be doing a fly act, walking on the wall. Then we flip-flopped just as suddenly and down was straight out to my right. After yet another hiccup of reality, down was straight up. It never changed the actual working of things, just the perception. We didn’t fall, but the horses neighed and tried to break and run … and I ended up losing most of that big meal I had just eaten.

It did take my mind off the dominoes for a time.

Then we reached the beginning of the domino pattern. There were still no pips visible on any of the blocks, but the proportions were right. They
were
dominoes to all intents and purposes.

At least up and down straightened themselves out before we got to them.

I had spotted a lane between two rows of dominoes that seemed to extend about a third of the way across the valley before giving way to rows running east and west. I couldn’t be sure of a safe path beyond that. The angle had been wrong from the ridge. Navigation would have to be by guess and luck once we got that far, if we got that far. And as near as I could judge from the spot where I had done my studying, the pattern appeared to start and end right over under the temple—the way golf courses start and end right by the clubhouse.

The moment I edged Electrum between the first two dominoes, I heard a distant thump, and I knew that the pattern had been tripped. The thumps came regularly—all too close together—and I hurried the horses down the lane I had chosen. If the dominoes were all aligned properly, we would be safe there even if the blocks on both sides of us went down.

The metronomic precision of the heavy stones falling came closer and moved farther away, came back, paralleled us. Distance translated to volume, which gave me a constantly updated clue as to where the action was taking place. I stopped at the end of the safe lane I had picked up from the ridge and looked both ways, trying to decide which way to go next. There was a section that looked terribly confused just ahead, as several rows of dominoes met, crossed, and went off at different angles. I chose the shortest path to another straight row, and this time I really put my heels to Electrum. The sound of falling blocks was coming straight toward us.

It was our closest call. Half a step slower, and Geezer would have lost his tail, and perhaps more.

Fear drove us on from there. Electrum and Geezer both gave me everything they had, without waiting for my urging. A row of dominoes just to our right chased us for several minutes, then passed us by. The racket of that got the horses moving a bit faster than they should have been capable of.

We had to zig left, then right, past another collapsing row. I had trouble holding the horses on course with dominoes coming toward us from in front—on our left side. But then we had a clear track ahead of us. The dominoes along that lane were already down, clear to the north side of the valley.

We were nearly up to the level of the temple before the horses were willing to check their speed. By that time, we were above the tops of the dominoes. I finally got the animals stopped and looked back across the valley. As near as I could tell, less than ten percent of the blocks had fallen—in more than an hour.

“It’s going to take all day for them to finish,” I said, somewhat awed by the thought.

I watched for a couple of minutes, fascinated by the display. But the break also gave the horses time to catch their breath—if little more—and when I turned away from the falling dominoes, Electrum and Geezer were ready to climb. Maybe they sensed that the end of our journey was near.

The ledge was even larger than it had appeared from the south ridge. It had to be at least five miles wide and four deep. The temple was situated close to the exact middle of the shelf, and it was perhaps twice the size of the other shrines.

A couple of modest creeks came across the ledge from the hill behind. Electrum and Geezer started walking toward the nearest. They were moving slowly, and they stopped to graze whenever I gave them a slack rein.

“Go ahead, you’re entitled,” I whispered. I couldn’t let them just run for the water in any case. With all the running, they needed time to cool off before they drank. I turned them a little, so they would need longer to work their way to the water, and when we finally got there, I dismounted and dug out the picket line. I hooked the horses to the line so they could get their fill of green grass and cool water. They would be content. Me, I turned and walked toward the temple.

I finished my journey on foot, the way pilgrimages are supposed to be made. I walked the last mile, and I had a feeling that the phrase was appropriate. I had to go around to the south face of the temple again. There were no doors on the west, where I had left the horses.

No soldiers came out to challenge me the way they had at the shrine in the Titan Mountains.

No sea serpents coiled around this temple the way one had around the island temple in the Mist.

No companions walked at my sides.

This temple did have large gold doors, just like the others, only much larger. The gold was beaten into fancy designs. I stood in front of the doors for several minutes and just stared at them. When I took my next step forward, the doors swung open.

I waited until the doors stopped moving, then stepped forward again. I didn’t need a formal introduction to know that the woman waiting just inside was the Great Earth Mother.

17
Great Earth Mother

I’m not sure what I expected. Okay, that was a frequent occurrence. But the apparition of the Great Earth Mother I had seen in her shrine on the island in the Mist hadn’t been very promising. Part by part, I guess there was nothing wrong, but as for the combination … the word “hideous” springs readily to mind. Beyond that apparition, I had never been able to completely shake the thought that—just maybe—the Great Earth Mother was really the myth I had taken her for in my early days in Varay, just another primitive fertility symbol. Sure, I should have known better, but I had twenty-one years of “real world” experience compared to less than four years of the buffer zone and Fairy.

I walked through the doorway into her temple, and she was standing there, hands on hips, legs spread a bit, waiting for me. I saw one immediate problem. Scale. The Great Earth Mother was at least fourteen feet tall, maybe a little more—considerably taller than the eunuch who had guarded her shrine in the Titan Mountains. If I had bumped into her … there is no delicate way to express the images that flickered through my mind at the time. I could have put my face right
into
her. A problem of scale.

Fortunately or not, I didn’t bump into her. I got inside the door and stopped. And stared. She was put together properly, if you allow for proportion, not all mismatched the way her apparition had been. She had dark hair, and curves that kept my eyes roaming over them. She even looked a little familiar. The resemblance wasn’t exact, but she reminded me of Raquel Welch back in
One Million
B.C.—but the Great Earth Mother didn’t have even the scantiest of clothes on. Fourteen feet tall, stark naked: that’s a lot of skin. She didn’t have so much as a jewel in her navel. For that matter, she didn’t even have a navel. I noticed that after a few minutes of noticing other things like the fact that if I stood close to her, she would provide shade for a good part of the day.

The Great Earth Mother was certainly beautiful enough to make any man horny, but mortal flesh will only stretch so far, no matter how aroused it gets. She needed more than a Hero, she needed at least a hero and a half.

What a way to go, I thought.

“You’re here,” she said. Her voice was a bit too deep and husky for my tastes, but I suspect that was a function of her size.

“The obstacles you put in my way weren’t really very daunting,” I said.

“They amused me.”

“And the dominoes?”

She chuckled. “Those have been waiting for just this time. When the last one falls, it will catapult the seventh moon into orbit and the last of Vara’s get will be gone.”

“You’re that ready for your own oblivion?” I asked. I was trying to be cautious. She hadn’t immediately snapped my head off, but I had no way to judge how far her tolerance might extend. My danger sense had blown a fuse when I walked through the door. It went crazy, and then it went dead.

“I seem to be the last of Vara’s get, as you put it, and I also have the souvenirs you clipped from him,” I said. “If
we
go, there’s no chance for you to find someone else to make a new plaything with. No one who could possibly live up to expectations. The way I understand things.”

She shrugged, and her huge breasts jiggled with the motion.

“I’ve been debating that question ever since you set the destruction in motion.”

“And what have you decided?”

“I haven’t, not yet.”

“Not deciding is a decision in itself.” And then I tried to recall just where the hell I had come across
that
line. It sounded hokey as hell, but it did seem appropriate.

“We have a little of your time left. You must be hungry. Come with me.”

I followed her butt across a corner of the main central room of the temple. As long as I thought of her as a figure on a movie screen, I could keep from being totally overwhelmed by her size. We went between two interior columns and into a room at the side of the temple. The room was large enough that the Great Earth Mother didn’t look out of place in it. There was a table set up—about the size of the table in Xayber’s banquet room. The Great Earth Mother settled herself on a pile of fancy pillows on one side of the table and gestured me toward a chair—a normal, human-sized chair—on the other. We were almost eye to eye when we were both down.

“Eat,” she said. “If I do decide to play with you, you’ll need all of the energy you can possibly find. If I don’t—well, then you might as well meet your end with a full stomach.”

If I had any shreds of sanity left when I reached the temple, I think they had started running for cover as soon as I saw the Great Earth Mother. When she said, “Eat,” my eyes locked onto one of her nipples and my mouth started to water.

“A little wine to start the meal?” she suggested. She pointed at a decanter and it got up and poured dark red wine into a fancy goblet in front of me. I gulped down about a pint of the strong, heady wine and felt the alcohol burning on its way down.

“Eat,” the Great Earth Mother said again. She reached out and grabbed what looked like a whole leg of lamb and started gnawing on it. In
her
hand, it looked about the way a chicken leg looks in my hand.

Soft, unobtrusive music started playing in the background. It wasn’t elevator music, but something that sounded classical even though it didn’t remind me of any composer that I knew anything about.

Since I had already decided that sanity was no longer a factor in anything that was going on, I ate with all of the enthusiasm that a big meal deserved. There were about two dozen different dishes on the table. The hot foods stayed hot and the cold foods stayed cold—without Styrofoam packaging. The serving platters and bowls remained full. The loaf of bread kept growing to replace the chunks that the Great Earth Mother and I ripped off. The decanter kept filling my goblet, varying the wine to go along with whatever I happened to be eating at the moment. Same decanter, same goblet. Different wines: sweet, dry; red, white. When I got to the salted fish, there was even beer in the goblet.