The Road to Amber (28 page)

“Alice,” Lucer said softly, “I am going to break these chains now and fight him. We are of about equal strength but I will lose because his technique is better. When I appear to be going down for the third time, cry out for Yuleki to come to you. And use your name.”

“Why are you as strong as that thing he has become?” she asked.

“I forget.”

“…And why is his technique better?”

“Not sure. No matter.”

“Then why must you fight?”

“I must hold him till the moon is higher.”

“Why?”

“I don’t remember. But it will help us against him.”

“…Now, on this night of all nights of the year,” Beangern intoned, “we are gathered together in the eyes of Yuleki and anyone else who cares to look, and we will join in matrimony the master and lady of this place.”

“Lady?” Alice said. “Where is she?”

“That’s you,” Lucer answered, raising his hands and spreading them. He drew them taut and beads of perspiration broke out upon his brow. Then the chains snapped and he bent to draw upon those which held his ankles.

Beangern raised his shotgun. Alice moved to stand before Lucer.

“Damn it, lady! Get out of the way!” Beangern cried.

“No,” Alice replied. “Something’s wrong here and I want to see it right.”

“You’re going about it wrong!” he roared.

Lucer’s chains broke and he rose to his full height. Beangern sighed. “All right. We must settle this yet again,” he said.

Lucer advanced to the center of the chapel and Beangern set aside the shotgun and moved to meet him.

A flash of lightning crossed the sky as they met. Then the two were rolling about the pentagram.

The door to the chapel was opened and the figute o fa White Rabbit entered. Alice thought that she heard him mutter, “Oh dear!” as he seated himself in a pew near the front. He watched the fray as the two combatants struck, their fists shattering brick, stone, or flagging when they missed each other.

Finally, she felt the rabbit’s gaze upon her. He stared for a long while before his eves widened in recognition. She nodded then.

The Rabbit rose and made his way slowly along the lefthand wall. When he came to the throne he said, “Alice.”

“How’s the Dormouse?” she asked.

“Still in the teapot. How are you?”

“Oh, time has taken its ticket for the show,” she said. “And yourself?”

“You freed me earlier with your singing.”

“What? How?”

“You’re magic. You must know that by now. I was with the Jabberwock after you sang him loose. He’s waiting outside to eat Beangern if he can.”

The Rabbit’s eyes turned toward the combatants. “Tough pair, those two. Hard to tell which is master or man.”

“Not for me. Beangern has ceased to be a man.”

“He will always be a mere man-at-arms among the skiey hosts.”

“What are you saying? He is a fallen star—a higher being whose contact with this world may have corrupted him.”

The Queen of Hearts shrieked as the combatants rolled near to her, Beangern’s horns scoring the stone at her feet. Then the combatants rolled away again.

“Lord Lucer is the fallen star,” replied the Rabbit, “who must be made this night to remember himself. Beangern was his servant, who usurped his place when the forgetfulness fell upon Lucer.”

“What?” cried Alice. “Beangern an imposter?”

“Indeed. Now that you’ve freed me, I hope to see him pass one way or the other this night.”

There came a crash as the two men struck the wall and the building shook.

“Why does Beangern outclass his boss?” Alice asked.

“A man-at-arms has special combat training, for service against the dark legions,” replied the rabbit.

It seemed that Beangern and Lucer hammered upon each other forever, as the moon rose higher and higher. Then Beangern’s blows began to appear more telling, and finally he knelt upon Lucer, and, catching hold of his head, began to bang it upon the stone floor. Seeing this, Alice cried out, “Yuleki, Yark Angel, help us now! This is Alice calling.” Then she moved toward them.

With a flash, a ball ofwhite light appeared above the pentagram. Beangern rose and faced it, leaving a panting, bleeding figure upon the floor.

“It is not fair that you should come for me now, Yuleki!” he cried. “I am tired and cannot face you properly!”

“All the better then,” a musical voice rang out. “Transform! You lose no face by coming along with me without strife.”

Beangern glanced at Lucer. “Do you remember?” he called out.

“Remember what?” Lucer responded.

Beangern looked back at Yuleki. “I maintain my battle mode and we fight,” he said.

“Very well.”

He plunged forward. When he made contact with the bright sphere, it raised him above the ground, spun him round like a whirlwind, then slammed him down upon the stone. It drifted into a position above his chest. He attempted to raise his arms and legs and could not.

“You should have made it last longer,” he whispered, “for his sake. I have been trying to cure him for decades. I thought that this might do it. I wanted him whole, so that he could be returned.”

“My plan was otherwise.”

Beangern turned his head toward Lucer. “Master!” he cried. “Remember! Please!”

“I do, faithful servant,” came the response; and Lucer took Alice’s hand in his own. A faint glow suddenly surrounded her.

“Your job here is done,” Yuleki said to Beangern. “But his is not, though he is whole again. He will repair this land, which you sacrificed in the cause of his healing.”

“I could help him!”

“That would not be prudent. Their memories of you are bad.”

There followed a crash of thunder and both Beangern and the light were gone.

Alice felt the years fall away as her odd aura strengthened.

“What is happening?” she asked.

Lucer drew her to her feet.

“I take you back along the years to your yourh, old friend,” he said. “By the way, there really should be a wedding tonight. Are you game?”

“Are you serious?”

“Indeed I am. I do want your help as well as your company. After all, you are the true goddess of this place.”

“This is too much,” she said, staring at the back of her hand as the wrinkles faded. “I’ll never understand.”

“Come with me.”

He walked to the door of the chapel and flung it open. They were all there, Humpty and the grinning Cat, the Dormouse and the Hatter, the March Hare, the Walrus and the Jabberwock. The Choipery Girl passed overhead. A great cry rose up.

“Lucer and Alice! Lucer and Alice!”

“This seems as good a place as any,” he said. “Will you have me, AlIce?”

She looked out over the multitude of creatures, many still arriving. Then the Queen said, “Do it, Alice. I know we need you. Beangern’s fief is yours now, of course. Do it.”

Alice looked at Lucer, looked at the crowd, then back at Lucer.

“You’re all mad,” she said. “But so am I.”

Music fell from the skies. Looking up, she saw a small star rising through the spheres to the empyrean.

An
epithalamium
is a bridal song. Zelazny occasionally alluded to Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
; in this story he imagines what happens to Alice after she grew up.

Characters from Alice’s adventures appear here, with Zelazny’s additions. The style with its frequent rhymes evokes Carroll’s.
Axel J. Beangern
and
Lucer
are not from Carroll. Lucer appears to be Lucifer, the archangel cast out from heaven; here he has forgotten his true identity until near the end.
Beangern
is a minor devil. Demons have corrupted the Alice story.
Fields of Flanders
refers to the terrible WWI battle at Ypres and the soldiers buried there; it also refers to the famous poem “In Flanders Fields,” by Canadian soldier John McCrae, anguished over lost comrades buried under the poppy fields (starting the tradition of wearing poppies to honor war dead).
Incandesced
means that his arm glowed and warmed.
Whitcomb pie
refers to the poem “Our Hired Girl” by James Whitcomb Riley: the working girl’s pies attract her beau with their aroma.

Callooh Callay
are nonsense words from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”; Zelazny also alluded to that poem in “Divine Madness.” The
Queen of Hearts
(a playing card) screams
“off with his head!”
in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
but the
Red King and Queen
(chess pieces) are different characters from Through the Looking-Glass.

Coined word
yuleki
echoes Yuletide; other words made up in Carroll’s style include
Kibling
and
Dars Dadisdada
,
Rottery Khan
,
Choipery Girl
,
Challkers Rose
,
Twittikins
,
Yark Angel
.
Kibling
might be Rudyard Kipling,
Dars Dadisdada
suggests Addis Ababa (the capitol of Ethiopia), and
Yark Angel
could be Archangel.
Decretal
or decree is a formal statement that has the force of law.
Scrivener
is a scribe. Legend says that
St. George
fought dragons.
Caterwauling
is a loud, unpleasant wailing.
Sacrosanct
means sacred.
Nietzsche
was the German philosopher who declared, “God is dead.”
Empyrean
is heaven.

Kinesthesia
is the sense that detects movement in the muscles, tendons and joints.
Something is rotten but dad’s ghost on the castle wall
recalls Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
.

Frustrate
, as an adjective, means ineffectual. A
phalanx
is a finger bone, or a body of military troops in close formation.

P
rince Rango stepped out onto the balcony and regarded the pair of comets hung in the night sky.

Pair?

He squinted at the strange, low patch of light in the west which had not been present the previous evening. It looked pretty much the way the others had but a few nights ago. Therefore, a third comet was probably on its way. Things such as this were supposed to presage the deaths of monarchs, changes in administration, social upheavals, natural disasters, the loss of price supports in industries run by one’s relatives, bad weather, plagues, and losing lottery tickets. Rango smiled. He did not need signs in the heavens to tell him that change was in the air. He was part of it.

Abruptly, an ear-tormenting squeal filled the night. It was the sound of a stringed instrument played at at least a hundred times the volume of any stringed instrument ever heard in the area. Since last night, anyway. It had been occurring in the middle of the night, on and off, for about a week, and once it fell into a regular rhythm other amplified instruments joined it. Yes. There came some sort of bass… And now a frantic drumbeat. Soon an invisible singer would begin shouting incomprehensible lyrics in an unknown language.

A tall, darkly handsome man, Rango raised his wine goblet and sipped from it as a ground-shaking thudding began somewhere to the east.

He sighed and turned his head in that direction. It had been strange enough, these past two months, living in a land that was not torn by civil war, a place that, for well over a decade, had been backdrop to assassinations, dark sorceries, skirmishes, quests, pursuits, escapes, vendettas, duels, betrayals, great acts of courage as well as treachery, all of them leading at last to a war in which the line was finally drawn and Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Order and Chaos, and all those other antonyms had faced off and had it out, steel against steel, spell against spell, dark gods and goddesses against their brighter relatives, toe to toe and hand to hand, the world red in tooth and claw and other combative appendages. When the dust settled, Good—in the person of himself and his followers—had just managed to squeak by.

Rango lowered his goblet and smiled. It had been touch and go there at the end, and, ultimately, nothing had gone according to the book, but he stood now in the imperial palace in Caltus, capital of the Faltane, with less than two months before the day of his wedding and coronation. Finally, with all of the perils laid to rest, he would be wed to his betrothed, the tall, dark-haired Rissa.