Tyrant Trouble (Mudflat Magic) (3 page)

Thing
is, this guy was creeping me out and it seemed wise to humor him. He stood
silently, watching me, then handed me the brown piece, some sort of smoked
meat, maybe? I could not guess what to do with it. It felt hard and dry in my
hands, and had an unpleasant odor.

“What
is this?”

“Dried
mutton,” he said.

I
handed it back to him. “Thanks, anyway, I'm a vegetarian.”

His
eyebrows shot up, wrinkling his forehead. “You are what?”

So
we were still game-playing.

I
bowed my head and said, “Kind sir, I do not eat meat because I am not a
barbarian.”

“What
is a barbarian?” he asked.

“You
-” I began, then stopped. Whoops? Had I misread the costume? Did he think he
was someone in a Shakespearean play, Romeo, MacBeth? Okay, he was Danish blond,
but the costume didn't look like any Hamlet I'd ever seen. How far did he want
to carry the word play? “Barbarians are wolves, this is the forest and I am Little
Red Riding Hood. Now can we move on out of here? Damn bugs are chewing my
hide.”

He
nodded, thank God. “Soon I will be missed and my guards will search for me. I
must return to my camp and you must return with me. Do exactly as I tell you,
Stargazer, and I may choose to let you live.”

Again
he caught my wrist and I felt the heat and sweat in his hand. Was there
something he feared? Certainly not me, not the way he held on to me. He hurried
me through the woods until we reached the clearing. In its center stood this
humongous horse and who knew they let those things into national forests?

A
pseudo-barbarian I could manage, but not a horse.

It
threw back its huge head, opened its jaws baring wide yellow teeth, and made a
terrible sound. Its long white tail switched around its hind legs. I figured it
would rear up and come pounding down on me with its hooves.

“Come
along, girl.”

“No!”

He
peered into my face, his mouth curled up at the corners, and he laughed. “Are
you afraid of my horse?”

“Had
a really bad experience once,” I mumbled, not much wanting to elaborate.

I
fell off a pony at Woodland Park Zoo when I was about five and everyone laughed
at me and to this day I do not consider horses my friends.

“You
must ride on my horse,” he said. “He will not hurt you. See? He is as gentle as
a lamb.”

He
walked up to the horse and scratched behind its ears. The horse dropped its
head and pressed its nose into the guy's shoulder.

“I'll
walk.”

“No.
You cannot. You do not understand. If you walk into the camp my men will attack
you before I can stop them. No, you must ride on my horse so they will know you
are mine.”

“And
why should that stop them?”

'You
will see. Whatever I say, you must agree with me.”

He
dragged me over to the horse and pulled my hand toward it until my fingers
touched its nose. It was warm and oddly soft beneath its coarse mat of hair,
probably a nice horse, yes, but I still didn't want it as a friend.

“There,
Stargazer. He is not wild. His name is Banner and if you speak softly to him,
he will love you.”

I
managed to say, “Never much wanted to be loved by a horse.” Though, God knows,
I'd had a few pigs fall for me.

Before
I realized what he had in mind, the guy pressed his hands around my waist and
lifted me off my feet as though I was no heavier than a backpack. My whole body
went cold with fear when he sat me on that damn horse. Beneath me it twitched
and snorted and I figured it would at any moment rise up and buck me off. Its hot,
heavy odor nauseated me. The guy jumped up behind me, stretched his arms around
me and caught the reins.

“Hold
onto his mane,” he said, and when I did not move, he added, “The hair on his
neck.”

“Oh,
is that the mane,” I grumbled and considered grabbing the ears.

Oh
yeah, don't make jokes around the obviously mentally deranged. Drugs? No, drugs
were what was back on the picnic table and none of that crowd was up to jumping
onto a tall horse. I grasped the coarse mane in my hands and hoped Banner would
not be annoyed. What followed was plain old pain and my mind deserted me.

The
horse lurched forward and I bounced and jerked on its back, held there in the
circle of strong arms, while we pounded through the forest. Wind blew my hair
across my eyes and branches caught at me, but we rushed on, crashing through
the trees. The forest blurred around me, green shadows shot with sunlight. I
expected at any moment to be thrown to the ground, every bone in my body
shattered.

The
horse shuddered and stopped. I flew forward against its neck and the boy pulled
me back, his hands pressing hard against my ribs.

When
my mind stopped whirling, I looked down at a circle of faces. Their surprise
raised all of their pale eyebrows so they looked like copies of each other, all
staring with their mouths open, all blond and heavyset and wearing matching
costumes. How much time did these folks spend on rehearsing?

“I
claim her as my captive,” he said to them, and they all looked at him and they
all listened. “Any man who touches her will die.”

Right,
and that's the cue to drag me from the horse, beat the kid, tie me to a stake
and dance around singing rude songs. Or was that some other sort of gathering?
Instead, they backed away from us, still staring but not arguing.

Only
one of the men stepped forward and said, “Will you take her to your father?”

“When
it pleases me,” he answered.

I
said, “Enough's enough, I need aspirin and I need it now.”

Maybe
they were all deaf. Or I was suddenly invisible. No one acknowledged my
heartrending request.

The
man who had spoken shook his head. His hair was sun-streaked blond on the top
and underneath it was several shades darker. Did he wear it that way to his day
job? “You must take her now. I will travel with you. I cannot guarantee your
safety with a captive in your tent.”

“Artur,
I am able to care for myself,” the boy said. His voice was low but shook with
fury.

“Well
enough for you, my prince. If she kills you, it is I who will die a painful
death at the hands of your father.”

Okay,
a clue, the barbarian was supposed to be a prince of something.

His
princely and slightly sweaty arm tightened around me, his ringed fingers
digging into my waist. He raised his other hand to hold up his sword.

“Look
at her! She is a priest of the Daughter. Dare you touch her?”

The
men leaned toward me and their eyes narrowed. The one called Artur shook his
head slowly. In his expression I saw recognition and then fear, but I could not
imagine why and it seemed unfair that no one handed me a script. Right after
aspirin, I needed a script. Because it hit me then, all the matching makeup and
costumes, this had to be a low budget film, probably an entry for an amateur
contest.

“I
will take her to my tent,” my captor said. “Tomorrow I will take her to Kovat.”

The
horse walked slowly through the camp, me and Prince Whatever still stuck on its
back.

Between
the tents stood a dozen or more gamers or actors and every one of them staring
at me. They wore sleeveless leather tunics. The bulging muscles of their arms
were banded in metal bracelets and they were a great ad for their favorite gym.
Some wore belts covered with metal discs and a few wore silver hoops that
looked as though they were passed right through their ear lobes, taking the
whole costume craze a bit far.

A
stench rose from their sweat soaked bodies that was worse than the smell of the
horse, and was that the result of TV reality shows meeting costume fairs? If
they wanted a guest lecturer on their program, I could explain about soap and
deodorant and I knew a couple of slick methods for removing sweat stains from
fabric.

As
several of the kids I worked with at the Center were young teens, I knew how to
be very firm with this lecture.

Swords
hung from their belts and some of them held tall spears. Ribbons of yellow and
red fluttered from the spears and from the tops of the tent poles.

My
captor slid off the horse, pulled me after him, then caught me before I fell
sprawling on the ground. He half-carried, half-dragged me into his tent, one
arm around me, his other hand hard on my wrist. While the men watched, a few
with their lips pulled back from their teeth in wide frat boy grins, I kept my
face quiet. This was the nuttiest bunch I had ever met and until I figured them
out, the low profile approach seemed best.

Once
the tent flap dropped behind us, I glanced about, saw no one else, and lifting
the wrist he still grasped, I bit hard on his hand.

He
gasped. I twisted away from him, swung to face him and stared directly into his
eyes, my teeth clenched. Until I figured out that group outside, I decided to
refrain from kneeing him.

“You
are my prisoner! You have no right to bite me!” he cried.

His
face contorted in anger and pain. I suppose I should not have lost control, but
he really did look like a little kid cheated in a game of hide-and-seek.

I
laughed, then clapped my hands over my mouth.

“Dare
you laugh at me?” He stared at the half circle of red marks my teeth left on
his skin.

“Well,
gosh oh golly, you forgot to tell me the rules,” I snapped back.

“You
are my slave. I may treat you as I please. I captured you and that is the law.”

“Oh
please. I am no slave, for sure not yours, and you're sounding more like a
sexist pig every minute,” I shouted, unable to control my anger.

Yes,
yes, I know anger is a weakness, but this guy was rapidly becoming my undoing.

He
stared, wide-eyed. “Have you no slaves in the outlands?”

“Okay,
fella, define slave.”

“A
captive caught fair, from another tribe. A slave must do whatever its master
tells it to do.”

“Really
bad casting,” I said, “and anyway, I am a priest. You said so.”

“That
might work later. For now, you are my slave.”

His
tent was the size of a large room and contained a table covered with wooden bowls
and flasks of pounded metal. The floor was piled with cushions, blankets, and
sheepskins and was one a bearskin? Huh, didn't know those were legal. The tent
held no hiding places but at least it separated me from that very smelly crowd
outside.

“Tell
me what a priest is and who the Daughter is and how I must act and what must I
say?” If I could keep him talking, I might think of a shortcut to the final
curtain.

He
shrugged, moving nearer to me than I liked, but I tried not to act nervous.
Weird makes me nervous because it's hard to know where a weird stranger is
headed. He was probably harmless, but maybe not. I made myself think of him as
Prince, a tad better than thinking of him as The Barbarian.

The
typecasting worked because he did look a bit like a short version of a Disney
prince, handsome enough if I ignored the frown. His hair looked rather like a
dandelion, pale yellow, thick, and tumbled about his forehead and ears, chopped
off in jagged layers.

“The
Daughter is our guide to the Sun. We have built the Sun a great temple so one
day he may find us. She has promised he will come north and we will never more
suffer winter,” he said.

“Uh-huh?”

“It
has been promised by the Daughter. She came to us with her beloved, and they
told us many things. Now they have returned to their father, the Sun, and left
us to darkness. We watch at the temple for their returning, knowing they have
not forgotten the line of Kovat. They guard us even now and will one day
return.”

I
had not heard such bad lines since I once heard a crazy neighbor say he could
send the ghosts of the dead to Hell and the ghosts would return with messages.
Maybe that could be worked into this script.

The
role assigned to me was a puzzle. “Why did you say I was a priest?”

He
smiled, looking pleased with himself. “I knew my men would believe it.” He
caught my chin in his hand and turned my head so that I had to stare into his
eyes. “You look enough like the Daughter that I knew they would believe me.”

“Is
that why you brought me here? Because I look like whoever plays this Daughter
person?”

“It
is why I did not kill you when I saw you in the stream.”

Rewind
time. I did not like the word kill. At first I thought it was some scorekeeping
thing and I can fall over and howl and tremble and then go stiff. I used to do
that back in the days of Aliens versus Astronauts on the playground. Something
else was going on here. I needed to have “kill” and “dead” defined.

Before
I could ask, a man backed into the tent through the flap and turned slowly. He
carried in his hands a heavy tray covered with food which he placed on the
table. Although he was blond like the others, he was dressed differently,
wearing rough wool cloth, and around his ankles were metal bands. A chain ran
between them so that he could walk but not run. He bowed to my captor, cast a
frightened glance at me, stared at the floor and backed out of the tent.

“Uh,
he's joking, right?” I asked.

Prince
grinned. “He is a slave who behaves as a slave should.”

“I
will carry trays for you, if that's what you want. Only I hope you don't expect
me to do the cooking. You wouldn't want to eat it.”

“You
cannot prepare food? What can you do?”

“I
am a priest of the Daughter, whatever that is,” I said solemnly, hoping to
distract him while I considered escape routes.

“Eat
your meal. I will go out with my men.”

He
sounded annoyed. I hoped he was. If I could manipulate his emotions so easily,
that could be useful. I'd offer to rewrite the storyline for these amateurs
except more and more I was getting this odd message that they didn't know they
were playacting.