The Hero of Varay (25 page)

Near sunset, we had to start detouring to find a place to cross one river that did meander through the wilds. It ran in a narrow canyon between steep walls. Even if we could have worked our horses down to the river, the waters was too swift and too deep to ford.

“Comes down off the mountains,” Lesh said. “It’ll be cold water too.”

We followed the canyon upstream, toward the mountains, looking for a place to cross. We didn’t find it that afternoon. We just went on until we found a decent place to camp, in an area of broken rock, boulders the size of houses scattered around.

“Can’t sleep just out in the open,” Lesh said. “Even if those forest trolls aren’t chasing after, there’s rock trolls and always the chance of a dragon flying over looking for a feed.”

There was no fuel handy for a fire, so we made do with cold food. Lesh lowered a canvas bucket to the river on a long rope, several times, to water our horses after they cooled off. The water was frigid. I thought about hanging a six-pack of beer down to cool in the river, but decided that we had better save it for a while longer.

The night passed without alarm, and we got an early start in the morning. A couple of hours later we crossed the river and turned east again. There were other rivers, creeks, and dry canyons to cross, but eventually we managed to get over each. We spent a full week riding east like that before our elf finally said that it was time to angle south to the mountains. We were near the pass we needed to use to enter the Titans.

    When I first arrived in Varay, all that anyone had to say about the Titans was that they were impassable, unscalable, the southern boundary of the buffer zone, an
absolute
barrier. No one knew how far south they extended or what might lie beyond. No one went there. At least, no one came back. Gradually, I learned that there were qualifications. The Titans weren’t simply a blank wall. There were foothills, and then a progressively higher series of mountain ranges, one beyond the other. People did go into the nearer reaches. Some folks lived on the lower slopes of the northernmost mountains. There were a few villages, collections of people with their farms, their sheep and cattle. There were also the mines that produced the metals, precious and common, that Varay and the other kingdoms needed. To the people of the buffer zone, the steel, tin, and copper found in the mountains were as important as the gold and silver. Our precious metals weren’t draped with the same mystique in the buffer zone. Gold and silver were used as money, but barter was more common. The standard of exchange was more likely to be weights of corn or wheat than weights of gold or silver. The metals were measured against the grain, not the reverse. Mostly, gold and silver were considered useful for paying Heroes, for occasional trade with the mortal realm, and for decorative purposes. It was local currency only by default, when something more compact than grain was required. That was one of the things about the seven kingdoms that I had the most trouble adapting to.

The Titan Mountains. You could see them from any prominence in the southern half of Varay, which made it easy to keep your directions straight. There was always a line of white and purple and brown separating sky from ground in the south, though the intersection was often blurred or hidden by clouds or haze. The closer you got to the mountains, the more impressive they became, always reaching into the sky, towering. Until you got so close that the mountains overwhelmed everything else.

As we approached the bulwark, we crossed two ridges in the-foothills, then went down a long, deep valley that left us in shadow from midafternoon on. The way led downhill to the base of the first range of the real mountains. I spent so much time looking up toward the peaks that my neck ached. The way ahead of us did seem to be nearly sheer, but I knew that it wasn’t.

When we camped for the night, the sky overhead was still bright, but the shadows in our valley made it seem like twilight. The trees in the valley were all stunted, perhaps from the limited sunlight they received. Lesh collected enough wood to keep a decent fire going through the night. We thought it might be quite chilly.

“It’ll be worse when we get up into the mountains, and we can’t count on being able to run a fire every night, even if there’s wood,” I reminded him.

“But no sense freezing when we don’t have to,” Lesh said. Then, “‘Less you think it’s too risky.”

I thought about it. The idea of a fire made me nervous on general principles, but it didn’t cause any recognizable twitching of my danger sense. “We’ll try it, tonight at least,” I said. We were going to light a fire to heat supper, so we might as well let it burn afterward.

I was glad for the fire when I got up for my second sentry turn a couple of hours before dawn. It might be August, and we might be in the southernmost reaches of Varay, but we had already picked up a couple of thousand feet of altitude, and that night was chilly, maybe even in the low forties. I put several extra branches on the fire and brewed fresh coffee to carry the warmth inside. My danger sense was absolutely quiet. For the moment at least, we were probably safe.

“You know, there’s one benefit about coming this way,” I told Lesh when we started riding again. “We’re far enough south that it’s not so bad going on field rations. The food will last that much longer.”

Lesh grunted. “I’d still like a good Basil breakfast.”

“Well, so would I, but it could be worse.”

“And will be soon, like as not,” Lesh said. It was an easy prophecy.

But our first days in the Titans were glorious. I quickly wished that I had found time to make the journey when there was no deadly threat hurrying me along. The lower reaches of the mountains were mostly gentle. We rode basically east, but along a curved and climbing path, edging gradually farther south. From one mountain to the next we rode through heather and scrub trees, sometimes through vast fields of wild berries that were ripe and tasted something like strawberries, but not as tart. The path we followed wasn’t the best-defined route I had ever seen, but animals both wild and domestic had climbed it. People used it. We found the remains of campfires in several places, ages of fires built in the same premium locations.

The view looking back out of the mountains was even more spectacular than the view coming toward them. All of Varay and Dorthin lay spread out below us, endless miles of green and brown, distant plumes of smoke, more distant fluffs of clouds, blue sky, and sunlight. The sun felt particularly hot on bare skin, but the mountain breeze remained quite comfortable all day. The chain mail and leather padding weren’t nearly the burden they had been down in the flatlands.

We couldn’t travel very fast even though the path wasn’t particularly dangerous, and each afternoon we camped at spots where others had camped before us, many times.

Each day took us higher, farther south, deeper into the mountains. By the third afternoon like that, we had high peaks on both sides and we were riding above a steep-walled valley that might have seemed at home in Switzerland. Where sunlight hit the patches of grass and wild flowers, the colors were brilliant—greens and yellows and golds, fewer blues and reds. Once we saw a shepherd and his sheep, sixty animals or so, on the opposite slope, north of us. On a straight line, they were probably only a quarter mile away, but we would have had to travel at least three miles, most of it on foot and nearly vertical, to get to them. The shepherd watched us carefully but didn’t return our greeting.

“We must be almost south of Carsol by now,” Lesh said when we made camp that night at our highest point yet. Carsol was the chief city of Dorthin.

“But the mountains aren’t part of any kingdom,” I said.

“As far as folks normally go, they are,” Lesh corrected me. “When we get back into the high parts, then nobody owns them.”

“Tomorrow,” Xayber’s son said. It was a way of getting our attention. “If memory serves, you’ll see what real mountains are like then. There’ll be a high pass. This path will continue on below it, leaving the narrowest of tracks up to a high pasture. The horses won’t be able to go any farther than that. There’s grass and water for them there. You’ll have to block this end of the pass enough to keep them from wandering over the edge. Then you’ll have to walk on to the shrine of the Great Earth Mother.”

He certainly had our attention. It was the most information he had ever given out at one time.

“How far do we have to go then?” I asked.

“That depends on how long you can survive up there,” the elf said. “Once you go beyond that high pass, the defenders of the shrine will know that you are coming. And none may enter without their permission.”

13
The Shrine

“You might have mentioned that before,” I said.

“And what good would it have done?” the elf asked, scorn oozing from every word. “Would it have stopped you from making the attempt or merely distracted you at a time when your puny mind could stand no additional distractions?”

“Puny mind?” I challenged. “Whose mind is on the platter and whose is still on his shoulders?” I went on before we could get bogged down in a useless argument. “Who are these defenders, and what can we expect from them?”

“They are the Keepers of the Shrine, beings created by the Great Earth Mother for just that purpose. And for what you can expect, you can expect to lose your lives, your minds, and the very fabric of your souls.”

“Which will cheer you no end,” I said.

He made a spitting sound, but it was dry. “Though I am dead already, I have more to lose than you ever could.”

We were setting up camp in a narrow cave that promised some protection from the wind. The days had been comfortable in the mountains, but the nights were getting colder. With sunset still a half hour off, the temperature was close to freezing and the wind chill made the mountainside feel like Soldier Field on New Year’s Day. I couldn’t wait to get into thermal underwear. We had packed sets for each of us. But changing into them meant a few moments of really freezing exposure.

“Can you be more specific about what we’ll face?” I asked.

“Only in part,” the elf said. His cage was resting on a pile of supplies just inside our cave. The wind didn’t seem to affect him. At least he said nothing about it and his teeth didn’t chatter.

“The defenders will offer whatever measures they believe necessary in order to destroy you. Maybe they will think that their routine precautions are enough. The shrine itself is at the center of a deadly maze—a labyrinth that can’t be unraveled by logic or intuition. Acceptable visitors are escorted through by the defenders. And the inside of the shrine is defended by one of the Great Earth Mother’s prime eunuchs, and you have yet to see
their
like in any world.”

Cheerful sort. “I’ve been in plenty of her shrines,” I said. “None of them had any fancy defenses.”

The elf snorted. “This is no hovel thrown together by peasants with shit-stained feet. This is one of the very pillars of creation, erected by the Great Earth Mother herself, bordering on her own realms outside time and space.”

I had heard stories about the Great Earth Mother since I first arrived in Varay. Her cult was the only religious or quasi-religious one in the seven kingdoms. Although there was no organized priesthood or dogma, she had shrines in every castle, town, and village, with more scattered around the countryside—like the cave I first entered Varay through. But I had never given the Great Earth Mother any more serious though than I might have given the gods and goddesses of Greek or Norse mythology. Even when all the talk about finding her balls started, I never thought of the Great Earth Mother as a real being. I knew a lot about the buffer zone after three years there, and I had been in Fairy, but it wasn’t until that evening in a shallow cave maybe four thousand feet above the plain of Varay that I had a real gut realization that I might be out to plunder the greatest treasures of an immortal being who might actually be a real goddess and the creator of all the universes.

It wasn’t a good feeling.

“And if we succeed here, then we have to go through the same thing at the other shrine?” I asked. My voice didn’t want to say the words. My voice didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of me.

“Not precisely the same, but the same,” the elf said. His voice sounded very satisfied, which didn’t make sense if he really believed that he had more to lose than we did.

I stood there for a moment, the outside cold forgotten, the inner chill growing, threatening to freeze me from the inside out. Lesh and Timon had finished unpacking our things and had tethered the horses just outside the cave. There was a wide shelf out there, but we couldn’t let the horses wander. The drop beyond was more than five hundred feet. Harkane was sitting at the back of the cave. The others, still solicitous of his wound, wouldn’t let him do any of the work. There did seem to be a slight trace of infection in his cut now. The skin along the wound was an angry red, and there was a little seepage of pus. I had been treating it with penicillin and I didn’t think that he was in any real danger, but I’m not a doctor, so I was still concerned.

Maybe the mountain cold contributed to the sudden depression I felt. I was twenty-four years old, newly married, a computer specialist who had got lost through an accident of heredity and dumped in an alien world with an impossible job. And I was freezing my butt off in a cave high on a mountain getting ready to challenge the Great Earth Mother on her home turf.

“I’ll get a fire going,” Lesh said.

He startled me. I was so lost in my brooding that I had lost track of my immediate surroundings. “Good idea,” I said when I recovered. “Is there enough fuel around?”

“Plenty of deadwood. These scraggly little trees don’t take much killing.”

“You need the flashlight?”

“Not all that dark yet, lord,” Lesh said.

I turned and looked back out. No, it wasn’t that dark yet.

“Something wrong?” Lesh asked softly.

“No, just lost in thought,” I said.

It didn’t sound very convincing, but Lesh didn’t argue the point. He collected the wood, arranged loose rocks to protect his makeshift hearth and hold the heat, then built a small fire inside the mouth of the cave. The breeze going past sucked out enough smoke to keep the cave bearable. We heated our food and ate in silence. Afterward, Lesh and Timon took the flashlight and collected more of the stunted, bent wood so we could burn the fire all night. That helped, and so did the thermal underwear, but we were all still cold.