The Lost Gate (2 page)

The world would be better if there had never been such gods as these. Taking whatever we wanted because we could, killing anyone who got in our way, deposing kings and setting up new ones, sending our disciples out a-conquering—who did we think we were? In the long-lost world of Westil, where everyone was talented, it might have been fair, for everyone might have had a chance. But here in Mittlegard—on Earth—where only the few Westilian families had such powers, it was unjust.

These were the thoughts that Danny was free to think as he watched the teenagers come out of the high schools of Buena Vista and Lexington and ride off in buses or drive off in their cars. At home he never let himself think such things, because if he did his face might reveal his repugnance or dismay at something that a relative did or some old story of an ancestor's adventures. His only hope of having any kind of useful life was to convince them that he could be trusted to be allowed out into the world, that his loyalty to the Family was unshakeable.

Meanwhile, he pored over the books that children were allowed to read, especially the mythologies, trying to understand the real history of the Westilians from the tantalizing tales the drowthers had collected. He once asked Auntie Uck which of the tales from
Bulfinch's Mythology
were true, and she just glared at him and said, “All of them,” which was just stupid.

Somewhere there were books that told the true stories. He knew that family histories were kept—histories that went back thousands of years. How else could the adults make their cryptic references to this or that person or event in the distant past? All the adults knew these histories, and someday the other cousins would be given these secrets—but not Danny, the one best suited to read, understand, and remember. If he ever learned the truth about anything, he would have to find it out himself.

Meanwhile, he had to stay alive. Which meant that as much as he loved to run outside the compound, he only did it now and then, when he couldn't stand to be confined in his loneliness another day; when it began to seem that it might be better just to go up to Hammernip Hill, dig his own grave, lie down in it, and wait for someone to come up and finish the job.

When he was analytical about it, he realized that running outside the compound
was
a kind of suicide. A game of Russian roulette, without any idea of how many chambers there were in the revolver, nor how many bullets there might be. Just run to a secret passageway and keep on running—that was how he pulled the trigger.

His life was not unrelenting solitude and hostility, of course. There were aunts and uncles who had loved him from childhood on, and they seemed to love him still, though some were certainly more distant now. And since Baba and Mama themselves had never particularly doted on him, certainly he could detect no difference in their indifference now. In many ways his life at home was normal. Normal
ish,
anyway.

And maybe he would find a way to make himself useful to the Family so they would let him live.

He had tried to get them to let him become the family computer expert. “Let me set up a local area network,” he said. “I've been reading about it online. We could have computers in every house, in every
room,
and they could share the same internet connection so we wouldn't have to pay the cable company a dollar more.”

But all they could think to say was, “How did you learn about these things?”

“I googled them,” he said.

The result was that the family made a new rule that kids could access computers only with an adult in the room, and you had to be able to demonstrate at any moment just how the stuff you had on the screen was related to the classroom assignment you were supposed to be doing.

“Thanks a lot, drekka,” Lem and Stem said as they beat him up a little behind the haybarn the next day. They were particularly annoyed because Danny's inquiry had led to Auntie Tweng finding their files of pornography, which got them a screaming tongue-lashing from their drekka mother, Miz Jane, and a whipping from one of Uncle Poot's most savage hickories.

So now Danny was trying to make himself useful by helping train the kids who were just learning to create clants with their outselves. Not that Danny knew anything about clanting, but since the kids couldn't see their own clants, Danny watched how the clants took shape and then reported to them on their results. Pure observation, but because Danny was doing it, an adult was free to do something else.

The trouble was that the three children whose clants he was supervising were Tina, Mona, and Crista, and instead of working on their assignment—to make their clant as close to lifesize as possible—they were remaining under a foot in height and trying to make themselves as voluptuous as they could. All three girls were just starting to develop as women in their real bodies, but the miniature female bodies they were forming out of fallen twigs, leaves, and nutshells were shaping up with huge breasts and exaggerated hips. Forest fairies, a drowther would have called them. Or sluts.

“I'll report this, you know,” said Danny. But it was wasted breath—none of them was good enough at clanting to be able to hear anything through their clants. They could see, however—the outself could see whether it was formed into a clant or not—and one of them noticed Danny's lips moving.

Almost at once, all three of the forest fairies turned to face him. Two of them flaunted their chests; the other turned around, thrust her buttocks toward him, and waggled it back and forth. They could not have made their contempt more clear.

Danny didn't care. It was better than getting beaten up by Lem and Stem. But it was his responsibility to make sure they worked on what they were supposed to work on. He had no authority himself, and even if he had, he couldn't have done anything if they chose to defy him. Adults could use their own outselves to give the girls' clants a shove, which they would feel in their own bodies as well. But Danny had no outself, or hadn't found one, anyway. The only thing he could do was find an adult and report them—but by the time an adult arrived, they'd be working on what they were supposed to work on, and the adult would be annoyed at Danny.

Not that the adult would doubt Danny's word—he was known not to lie, and besides, they knew exactly what Tina, Mona, and Crista were like. But the very fact that Danny had to fetch an adult to enforce the rules meant that he really wasn't worth very much as a clant-minder. Sometimes Danny was conscientious enough to report such antics as these, but most of the time he put his own survival ahead of the goal of pushing the children to develop their skills, and let them get away with whatever they wanted.

The danger was that when these children grew up, they would remember how worthless Danny had been as a child-minder, and far from being grateful that he hadn't reported them when they were young, they'd realize he couldn't be trusted to take care of their own children. Then he'd just be Poor Uncle Danny the drekka. Or Poor Old Danny, the body under the nameless headstone on Hammernip Hill.

All he could do was kick out at them, dispersing the stuff out of which their clants were formed, so they'd have to take a few moments to gather them up and shape themselves again. It took only a second or two—they'd been making forest fairies of
this
size since they were nine or ten, and Danny was the darling little eight-year-old that they liked to pamper when adults were around or torture when they weren't.

Well, even though Danny couldn't make a clant the size of a thimble, he had listened well during the early lessons and remembered things that those with talent often forgot. For instance, he knew the warning about letting drowthers capture a small and fragile clant. “You hold the clant,” Uncle Poot had told them, “and the clant holds
you.
If you let them capture you when you're little, they can keep your outself from returning to your body, which leaves you completely helpless.”

“Why can't we just toss away the clant?” Danny had asked—for in those days, he still expected to be able to use these lessons.

“You have to be able to spin and leap to cast away the bits from which you made the clant,” said Uncle Poot. “If they trap you so you can't move far enough, the bits of clant stay bound to you. It's just the way it works.”

“I'll just make
my
clant with scissors,” Friggy, Danny's best friend in those days, had boasted. “Then I'll cut my way out.”

“Make your clant with scissors?” Uncle Poot had laughed. “Why not make it with a gun and shoot your captors through the sack they caught you in?”

“The clants that children make are faint and small,” said Danny. “They have no strength in them.”

“That's right,” said Uncle Poot. “The son of Odin never forgets. It's only truly a clant when it's full-size and every bit as solid as you are in your own body. Until then it's a small or a faint or a face, and it could no more lift a pair of scissors than a boulder.”

Remembering such lessons, Danny pulled his tee-shirt off over his head and then idly scratched his side, as if that had been his purpose. The girls made their clants point at him and pantomime rolling on the ground with laughter—they really were quite good at giving lifelike movements to their smalls—but all that mattered to Danny was that they weren't paying attention to the danger they were in. It took only a moment for Danny to have his shirt down on top of the two nearest fairies and another moment for him to gather it into a sack containing them.

The third was free, and it leapt and scampered up the sack, up his arms, into his face. But it was a mere annoyance—he swept it away with a brush of his hand and the pieces of it fell to the ground. He expected that girl—he had no way of knowing which it was, since they weren't good enough yet to put their face on the clants they made—to drop her outself back to the ground and form the clant again, so he didn't wait around to see. Instead he gripped the tee-shirt in his teeth and began to climb the nearest branchy tree.

No one climbed trees better than Danny, and this time he moved so fast it seemed to him that he was flying, just tapping the branches with his hands and feet. Meanwhile the fairies in the bag kept trying to jump and spin so they could shed their clants and return to their bodies, but they didn't have the strength to do much more than jostle the bag a little.

At a high branch, Danny stopped climbing, took the tee-shirt out of his mouth, and tied it so tightly to a slender branch that there was hardly room for the clants to move at all. Then he let himself back down the tree, taking much longer jumps downward than he had managed on the way up. When he reached the bottom, the third girl's clant was nowhere to be seen.

So Danny walked back to the house, to tell Uncle Poot what he had done.

But it was Great-uncle Zog and Grandpa Gyish who intercepted him on the path, and they gave him no chance at all to explain that he was only teaching the girls a lesson.

“Where are they!” screamed Grandpa Gyish.

“What kind of drekka bags a child!” Great-uncle Zog bellowed at him. “I'll have you up the hill for this, you fairy-thief, you child-abuser!” And then he was shaking Danny so hard that he was afraid his head would come clear off. Years of flying with the eagles had caused old Zog's arms and shoulders to bulk up and he had so much strength that he could break a big man's neck with a swipe of his hand—he'd done it more than once in the wars. So it was a relief when Auntie Uck and Auntie Tweng showed up and clung to both Zog's arms, dragging him away from Danny.

As it was, Zog didn't let go—the Aunts dragged him, but he dragged Danny, his grip like a talon on Danny's shoulder. He staggered to keep his feet under him so that he didn't have his full weight dangling from Zog's massive grip. Who would have thought an old man could be so strong?

A few minutes later, the adults who were in the compound had gathered, and Danny found himself in the midst of something like a trial—but without the legal forms they saw in the TV shows. There was Danny and there was his accuser, Crista, the oldest of the girls, and there was Gyish, presiding like a judge in Baba's absence, with Zog as the prosecutor.

But that's where the resemblance to a fair trial left off, for there was no one to speak in Danny's defense. Not even Danny—whenever he tried to speak, Zog slapped him or Gyish shouted him into silence. So the only story anyone could hear was Crista's.

“We were trying so hard to make our clants big,” she said, “that we didn't even see that Danny was sneaking up on us with a giant sack. He caught all three of us but I just barely managed to get out before he sealed the neck of it with Tina and Mona inside. And then he broke my clant in pieces and before I could put myself together he was gone, up in the sky.”

“He flew?” demanded Gyish.

“Yes!” cried Crista. “He flew away and dropped the bag outside the compound and now we'll never get them back!”

It took a moment before she realized that she had pushed too hard. For the adults were all shaking their heads and some were laughing derisively.

“Danny? Fly?” said Uncle Poot. “If only he could.”

“You can see that Crista's lying,” said Uncle Mook. “Maybe everything she said's a lie.”

“It's not a lie!” shouted Gyish—he had made no pretense of impartiality. “I saw the poor girls' bodies lying helpless in the house! Children so young don't have the strength to bring their outselves back when their clant is captured! Nor the skill to wake up their own bodies when their outselves are clanting! They might never wake up!”

“Let's hear from Danny,” said Aunt Lummy mildly.

Zog turned on her savagely. “A drekka has no voice here!”

“But the son of Odin and Gerd has the right to speak in his own defense,” said Lummy. And Mook, her husband, moved closer to her, standing beside her, to give more force to what she said.