"Son of the Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Shelley Rick)

2 – Parthet

… and fell flat on my face in the damp cave.

I didn't try to get to my feet right away. That wasn't because I felt foolish or anything like that-at least, not entirely. One of Dad's early lessons for me was to not jump right up after a fall but to stay down and take stock first to make sure that I wasn't badly hurt-unless staying down risked greater injury, as in a fight. I wasn't hurt, except maybe in the ego. My fall just knocked the air out of me. There was a difference in level between the basement and the cave, or the doorway was placed above the ground in the cave. I hadn't noticed. Banging my head on the rock floor of the cave didn't help. It wasn't the most auspicious start to my rescue mission.

After a moment the cave stopped spinning and I could breathe again. I became aware of a sore spot on my head and noticed the sound of water dripping nearby.

Then I heard something else, sort of a soft scraping sound. The first time, it came and went so quickly that it might have been my imagination. But it certainly got my attention.

"What the hell's going on?" I mumbled as I stood. I looked around quickly while I dug out my flashlight. My heart seemed to be thumping around a little crazily. It didn't help at all to see that I was certainly in a cave, not just in some part of the basement I had never known about. I could see a faint light-still off to my left-and guessed that it was coming from the mouth of the cave.

Then I got the flashlight turned on and discovered that I wasn't alone in the cave. The flashlight started shaking as if 1 had a bad case of coffee nerves, like after pulling an all-nighter to get ready for finals. Deeper in the cave-on the side away from the faint glow-maybe twenty feet from me, beyond a small pool of water, there was a lizard staring at me. Some lizard. It was seven feet from nose to tail, two feet high, as close as I could make out under the circumstances-the circumstances being that I was scared a lot worse than I like to admit. A long forked tongue flicked in my direction. The eyes blinked once. It was no Komodo dragon, and I couldn't think of any other lizards that could be so big.

I thought it looked hungry, but that might easily have been my imagination.

For a long moment I stood frozen in place, not daring to move an inch, though that didn't stop the beam of my flashlight from continuing to wobble all over the place. I wondered how much time I would have to react if the lizard decided to charge. I had both hands full, bow and flashlight. I couldn't use the bow one-handed, and I couldn't do much of anything without the flashlight. I ruled out running for the cave's exit. First of all, I didn't know if I would be able to outrun the lizard. Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I could find the doorway back to the basement before I moved too far from where I was. I didn't know any other route home, and it looked all too certain that I was going to want to find my way back, maybe pretty damn fast.

Drop the bow, switch the flashlight to the left hand, pull the pistol, and shoot the damn thing, I told myself. Then I realized that I hadn't jacked a cartridge into the chamber.

"You're not scoring points for being prepared," I told myself as softly as I could.

The lizard's tongue kept flicking in and out. It blinked again. I glanced at the wall but didn't see any trace of the doorway at first, and that pumped another load of adrenaline through my system. When I finally caught a glimpse of badly tarnished silver, I breathed a little easier.

Pop back through the basement, get the gun ready, and shoot the damn thing from the doorway.

That sounded like an excellent plan. I could even run upstairs and get more firepower to bolster my courage.

That's the ticket, I decided. I counted three in my head and made my move. But the second I started to move, the lizard moved too-in my direction. It didn't move fast, but I wasn't waiting to find out for sure if it had "hostile intent." I threw my bow to the ground, more or less in the direction of the lizard, and started fumbling to get my pistol out and ready.

I was slow-way too slow. If that lizard had really been determined, I'd have been supper before I got a shell jacked into the chamber. But when my bow clattered on the stone, the lizard turned and scuttled off deeper into the cave. I could hear it moving farther off even after I lost sight of it.

I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. A deep breath helped, but for a bit all I could do was stand there. That lizard didn't have any business being there-or anywhere.

Finally, I realized that I wasn't accomplishing anything and that the damn lizard might come back. I took another deep breath and then took a long, close look at the wall until I could follow enough of the silver tracing to locate the door mentally. When I touched the silver with my rings, I could see into the basement room, and that reassured me.

I stepped right through then, just to assure myself that I could. Back in that strange-but-familiar basement room, I took my hand away from the door and breathed deeply, several times. There was a crazy jumble of thoughts bouncing around in my head, and "crazy" was still the operative word. I dearly wanted to dig out the rest of those beers and polish them off… but I remembered why I was in the cave in the first place.

"You're going to have to go back through there," I told myself. I may even have nodded. But after my encounter with that damn lizard, I had to make a quick trip upstairs. Somehow, my bladder managed to avoid letting go when I saw the lizard, but it was clamoring for attention-and it gave me an excuse to put off my return for a few more minutes.

Then, reluctantly, I stepped back through into the cave and let the doorway close behind me. This time, I had the pistol in my hand, cocked, with the safety off. At least I knew that if I could get back to the cave, I could get home.

If I could get by the lizard again.

I picked up my bow and started toward the mouth of the cave, counting my steps going out so I would know how far I had to come in to reach the door tracing.

Although I didn't waste a lot of thought on it (I had enough on my mind without that), the cave didn't look altogether natural. Dad and I had done a little spelunking. There wasn't much that we hadn't sampled over the years. Dad was gone so often on his "business trips" that he always wanted to spend a lot of time with me when he was home. For Dad, that meant doing things like hiking, camping, and exploring caves, not just watching ballgames or parades-though we did that too. This cave had been altered. Low spots in the ceiling had been hacked out. The floor was flat and met the walls almost at right angles. Most of the passage was room-high and eight feet wide.

Twenty paces from the tracing I didn't need the flashlight any longer. A few steps beyond that, the cave widened into a chamber about twenty feet square. In the center of the chamber, an altar-a large cube of rock with arcane symbols chiseled into its surfaces-had been erected. The cave walls around it were painted with exaggerated nudes, fat-bottomed women with huge breasts, like the fertility goddesses of the ancient Mideast.

Beyond that chamber, the cave narrowed down again, but the mouth wasn't far off. The last few steps I had to take hunched over. I stayed inside the mouth of the cave long enough to let my eyes adjust to the outside light. I had had one surprise too many already.

It seemed to be about mid-afternoon, not thirty minutes past dark-wherever I was. It had to be afternoon (rather than morning) because there had been light visible in the cave when I first looked through the green-trout door. I saw a lot of green outside the cave, even wilder and more disorganized than our backyard. The hillside around me was covered with something like Scottish heather, except for a few large bushes and trees. The cave mouth was some feet above the path. I could see it running off into the forest. The path didn't come directly to the cave but went around the base of the hill to my right. It was a well-defined track, wide enough for a subcompact car, but rough enough that I'd want four-wheel drive to try it. In the ten minutes that I watched, I didn't see any traffic.

"None of this is real," I told myself. "It can't be." There was no tract of land like this anywhere near our house. It wasn't in our yard, and that cave hadn't been long enough to get me clear of our subdivision.

I wasn't too crazy about continuing, but I also wasn't quite ready to go back and risk facing that lizard again. Well, I knew what was behind me, and I didn't know what was in front of me. That may have made the difference. I moved out of the cave, put the safety on my pistol and holstered it, then stretched. The hill rose two hundred feet behind me. I considered climbing to get a better look at the land, but that scratchy heather wasn't very inviting. It was knee-deep, stiff and prickly. It smelled vaguely like lilacs.

Mother's note didn't say which way to follow the path, just to bear left at the fork. I didn't see the fork. I assumed-initial hypothesis-that I wanted to head toward the forest. The temperature was comfortable, the breeze perfect. "Nice day for a hike," I mumbled as I started. Sometimes I can't help being sarcastic even when I'm my only audience.

I don't know what I expected. After the lizard, I don't think anything would have surprised me. I felt relieved that the forest looked so normal when I got into it. The bottom twenty or thirty feet of the trees were bare trunk, giving it the air of a pillared hall with a thick canopy. Firs, some oaks, other types I didn't recognize. From the new green, I assumed it was spring there too. Birds sang somewhere. I didn't recognize the calls, but I only know about half-dozen. A flaw in my education as an outdoors-man. The only birds I've ever been interested in watching are beyond singing-usually brown and steaming, on their backs on a platter on the dining-room table… or in one of the Colonel's boxes or buckets.

There was a heavy earth smell of recent rain in the air. The path was soft, spongy but not muddy. Part of the time, I moved slowly, observing, checking out the scenery. The rest of the time, I stepped out smartly, trying to cover ground fast since I didn't know how far I had to go-and I might have to backtrack to try the path in the other direction.

It was a pleasant place to walk. It gave my nerves a chance to unwind a little, gave me time to start breathing normally. I might almost have been down in the Land Between the Lakes, or any of a dozen other places where Dad and I had gone hiking and camping over the years.

I had walked about a quarter of a mile before I saw any animal life on the ground in the forest-another one of the damn lizards. It disappeared too quickly for me to be positive, but with the better light, the lizard appeared to have rudimentary wings folded back along its sides. Crazy-there's that word again, but it's hard to avoid. I stopped and listened, not nearly as nervous as I had been when I stumbled on the lizard in the cave. I was out in the open and this one was farther off than the first had been. The beast wasn't very quiet. I drew my pistol again and kept it ready until I was long past where the animal crossed the path. I've never liked reptiles.

The fork in the path was about three-quarters of a mile from the cave. The track to the left was the less well traveled, no more than a footpath. There were thick brambles, knotty vines, along both sides for quite a distance. The trees seemed shorter, meaner. Low branches needed ducking under. Uncle Parker-Parthet-evidently didn't get a lot of company.

The farther I went, the more disorganized the forest became. It made me think of a PBS show a long time back that showed the crazy webs spun by spiders on drugs. Smaller, twisted trees forced the path to detour back and forth. The underbrush got thicker, thornier. Stickers reached out to poke me. I was glad I was wearing good fatigues. Those thorns would have shredded the leggings of a Robin Hood costume.

I almost missed the cottage. It was concealed better than our house, almost invisible among the trees and brambles. The cottage was small (well, cottages are supposed to be small, aren't they?) and had a thatched roof with new greenery growing out of it. I was surprised that Dad hadn't tried for that effect at home. It would have been the crowning touch. The two windows I saw had no glass. Warped wooden shutters stuck out and creaked in the light breeze.

"Uncle Parker?" I called. "Uncle Parker?"

"Is that you, Carl? Are you back? Did Avedell find you?" The questions tripped over each other before the door opened and Uncle Parker-Parthet-came out. Carl was my father, Avedell my mother.

"It's me, Gil," I said. Parthet squinted up at me. He was barely five feet tall and had acquired a stoop since I last saw him.

"Gil?" He came closer and squinted so tightly that his eyes seemed to be closed. "How'd you get here?"

"Mother left a note. What's going on?"

"What's going on? What's going on?" He snorted and shook his head. "Come in, lad, and I'll try to explain."

The cottage was even bleaker on the inside than it was from out front. Everything was wood, gray with age. The planks in a small table were all warped differently. Some of the wall planks were missing completely. The floor was dirt. A fireplace at one end of the room provided the only contrast to the ash gray-soot black. A single door led to another room-a bedroom, I guessed, since there didn't seem to be much chance that the cottage had indoor plumbing. Parthet sat me on a bench at the table. I found a splinter immediately, the hard way.

"Young Gil, is it?" He sat across the table from me and leaned across it-as far as he reached.

"It's me, Uncle Parker. Mom left a note that said Dad was overdue and she was going after him, and she told me how to find you."

"Ah, yes, she would." Parthet nodded. "And what do you propose to do?"

Good question. I'd been asking myself the same thing. "I don't know what the hell's going on," I said. "I don't even know where I am."

"You're in my home, not that I use it all that much. This is the Forest of Precarra in the Kingdom of Varay."

That didn't help much.

"I didn't think it was Kentucky. Nobody gave me a script to this madness. Those doors in our basement. All this nonsense. What the hell is it all about?" I may have started sputtering. It was so insane that I wasn't even sure what questions to ask.

"Your father was going to tell you soon," Parthet said.

"All I know is what was in Mom's note." I dug it out of my pocket and handed it to him. Parthet looked at the paper, sniffed at it, turned it over, then handed it back to me.

"Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced my spectacles and I haven't been able to find them," he said.

"Don't you have a spare set?"

"I have trouble enough keeping track of one pair, let alone two."

I read the note to him, with some difficulty. There wasn't much light in the place. Parthet listened and nodded a lot. The nodding continued after I finished.

"It's so hard to know where to begin," he said.

"Well, let's not go back all the way to Adam and Eve." It was meant to be a joke, but it didn't sound that way, even to me. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded, Uncle Parker." I couldn't call him Parthet yet. He had always been Uncle Parker, and the habit was hard to break.

"That's all right, lad," he said. "I was never much of a storyteller. I could never remember which bits go where." He shrugged, a peculiar gesture the way he was stooped. "I was never even that much of a wizard."

"Hold it! Time out! What do you mean, wizard?"

"Well, yes, I think that's still the word." He paused a moment, then said, "Conjuring, spells, potions, the odd bit of magic. That sort of lot."

And I'm the King of Siam, I thought. Okay, the whole family was crazy. That was the obvious explanation. And I just happened to pick my twenty-first birthday to join the club.

"My eyesight's always been bad, and getting worse all the time," Parthet continued. "Weak eyes are a terrible handicap to a wizard. So much of the craft depends on being able to see what you're doing. A wizard who can't see the end of his nose isn't worth much." He sighed, rather theatrically, I thought. "I was so glad when spectacles were invented. It gave me the chance to do a spot of business now and again."

"Uncle Parker, I think glasses were invented more than six hundred years ago, back in the Middle Ages."

He looked toward the ceiling for a moment, then nodded. "That sounds about right. As soon as I heard about this newfangled invention, I went and had a pair made for me. I got this last pair-wherever they've gotten themselves off to-while I was visiting the World's Fair in St. Louis in your world."

"More than eighty years ago?"

"Why, yes, I suppose it was. My, how time flies. I'm due for a new pair, but I never seem to find the time."

We were getting way off track, drifting farther off into Never-Never Land. "Mom said you called Dad for help. What kind of help?"

"Well, there was a job of work to be done, the kind of to-do your father has handled for us for the last twenty-odd years. He wasn't much older than you are now the first time he came to Varay." Parthet licked his lips. "This will be thirsty work. Would you care for a flagon of wine with me?" I was beginning to see where Mom's discursive notes came from.

"I'd prefer beer if you've got it," I said.

"Ah, me, so would I, but I don't have any to hand, and it would take time to fetch some in."

Then I remembered. "I have some with me." I stripped off my pack-which shows how distracted I had been; all that time and I still had it on-and took out two bottles. Good thing I'd fallen forward in the cave. None of my bottles had broken. "It's not as cold as it could be, but I think it'll do." I handed one bottle to Parthet.

"It will indeed." He held the bottle close to his eyes. "Did you remember to fetch along an opener?"

"Don't need one. Just twist the cap." I demonstrated with mine and he managed his.

"Now, that's convenient." He almost drowned the last word by pouring beer all over it. He took a long swallow, smacked his lips, and held the bottle close to his eyes again. The afternoon was getting late and the inside of the cottage was getting darker by the minute. It hardly mattered that Uncle Parthet was more than half blind and I had perfect eyesight. Neither of us could see much.

"The doorways are a bit of family magic," Parthet said after a second pull on his Michelob. I wasn't sure if that was a non sequitur or a good place to begin whatever he had to tell me. "Been in the family for ages." He paused for a moment.

"I guess this story really starts when I went looking for a Hero, two, maybe three years before you were born. Your mother had been kidnapped by the Etevar of Dorthin, the neighboring kingdom. To the east. Her grandfather, your great-grandfather Pregel, is King of Varay. The Etevar wanted to marry his son to your mother to unite the two kingdoms. King Pregel didn't want any part of the union on general principles, and he couldn't stand the old Etevar anyway, so he absolutely refused-rather less than diplomatically, not that diplomacy would have mattered. That's why the Etevar kidnapped your mother, to force the marriage, but Pregel still refused to countenance the union. We had to rescue your mother, but open war wasn't considered a smart response. While Dorthin wasn't strong enough to invade and conquer us as we were, if we invaded Dorthin to try to rescue Avedell, our losses might easily have weakened us enough to make us vulnerable. And my magic wasn't enough, even though I did have my glasses then. The Etevar's wizard was a tad bit better than me even when I was at my best. I counseled that we find ourselves a Hero. That's the traditional method. It took a bit of doing-it always does-but we ended up with your father. He had no family of his own and he had most of the necessary skills after serving in Vietnam."

Parthet fell quiet then. His face was lost in the shadows. Maybe that's where his mind was too-not to mention mine. I brought out my last two beers and we started on them. After a couple of minutes, Parthet resumed his tale.

"How your father rescued your mother and gave the old Etevar and his wizard their just reward is too long a story to tell just now. And modesty forbids me telling my own part in that adventure. For a time afterward, your father lived here in Varay. He married Avedell. They didn't go to your world until Avedell was expecting you. Since then, Carl has returned whenever we've needed our Hero. Varay is generally a peaceful little kingdom, but we have need for a Hero more often than you might imagine. That's the way of things here."

"What about this time?" I asked.

"The young Etevar-oh, not so young as you, lad, more your father's age-has been causing trouble, more than usual. He's always looking for ways to avenge his father's death. His army took a small castle on the march between our lands, a fief belonging to a Varayan knight, a distant cousin of yours, I believe. His Majesty was angry, but there were other complications, a dispute with the elflord on our nothern border. Our army, such as it is, is fully occupied with that. Since it didn't appear that the Etevar would leave much of a garrison to hold Castle Thyme, His Majesty thought that your father might be able to handle the incident with such modest help as we could give."

I sat there and tried to soak it all in. No matter how it sounded, I had to accept everything as real until proved otherwise. Sure, it all sounded like the premise for an arcade game, but just maybe we weren't all crazy. I wasn't sure about this Hero jazz, but it would explain all of Dad's scars, and the way new ones appeared now and then. While I was on my James Bond kick, I thought Dad was a spy, off on dangerous missions with beautiful lady spies.

"What did Mother think she could do?" I asked.

Parthet chuckled. "Well, she's not all that helpless, lad. She's really deadly with a bow. I've seen her skewer a hot dog-the long way-from fifty yards. And she does control a wee bit of magic of her own. Nothing major, you understand, but a little, a little."

"So what do I do?"

"I'm not sure." He shook his head a couple of times. "If your father and mother didn't succeed, there may be more to this than I thought. There may be wizardry involved."

"It's getting dark," I said, since Parthet didn't seem to have noticed. "You have any candles or anything?" The shadows were so deep that I could do no more than make out Parthet's outline.

"There's a lamp, if there's any fuel left. Hold on, I'll try to find it." He got up and went to the end of the fireplace, right to the lantern. He shook it gently and brought it back. "There seems to be a bit of kerosene left." When the light came on, I was surprised to see that it was a Coleman lantern, not some primitive local thingie.

"Ah, yes, that is better." Parthet sat across from me again. "Now, where were we?"

"You said there might be wizardry involved."

"Yes, certainly there might be. A wizard with better eyesight than mine. You may have a touch of the gift yourself, lad, like your mother. Your father was going to bring you around so I could make some tests. Should have done years ago, but your parents didn't want to expose you to any of this until you grew up."

"So I gather. Still, I have to do something. I guess that means I have to go to this castle and see if I can find them."

"I suppose you do, lad." He steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them. "And I suppose I need to go along. Not that I'll be much use. I can't even see well enough to conjure up a meal in the field."

"Then we'll do it the old-fashioned way," I said, glad to have any company at all. I was feeling way out of my depth. "There is game around, isn't there?"

"Plenty of game and fish, but it takes so long that way."

"Well, you have any idea where you might have lost your glasses?"

"I expect they're around here somewhere. Perhaps a packrat grabbed them."

"Wonderful," I mumbled under my breath. Louder: "Maybe I can find them. I've got a good flashlight and I can see well enough." I didn't give him much chance to answer. I just got busy. The cottage was so small that I knew it wouldn't take long to give it the once-over, even if I had to do it two or three times.

"How long's it been?" I asked.

"I'm not rightly sure. Maybe a month or two."

"How do you get by?"

"Oh, I know where 'most everything I need is at. And I'm truly not here all that much."

I only needed ten minutes to find the glasses, but finding them at all was a fluke. I happened to glance up at the ceiling at the right place. The glasses were stuck in the thatch over the front door. The halogen beam of my flashlight glinted off a lens. The glasses were absolutely cruddy and the left lens was badly starred. I cleaned them as well as I could, then handed them to Uncle Parthet.

"How in the world did they get up there?" he asked as he slipped the wires over his ears.

"Somebody had to put them there, and I doubt it was your packrat."

"Much better." He looked at me-still squinting.

"How much difference do those glasses really make?" I asked.

"Oh, worlds, worlds. I still couldn't read anything but very large letters, but oh, this is so much better." He came right over to me. "You look more and more like your mother, lad-the jaw line, the nose, the-"

"When do we leave?" I asked, cutting off the comparisons.

"First thing in the morning. No good starting out this time of the day."

I nodded. That made sense. Anyway, I was ready for sleep. I took the thermal blanket from my pack and looked for an area light on the cobwebs to spread it.

"Just one more question for now," I said. "Where's the john?" That beer was screaming to get out.