Son of the Hero

When dawn came I was near exhaustion, but we got moving as soon as there was any light at all. The morning's ride was silent. As the wagon wheels dragged mile after mile under them, the danger decreased, but I remained too lost in my thoughts for talk. And I was so tired that I may have dozed off and on too. At noon, we ate the freeze-dried meals I had been carrying in my pack. They didn't go far among so many of us, but we weren't hungry enough for salted beef again. That afternoon, I brought down a small deer with my bow, so we had fresh meat for the rest of our journey. It took three days to get to Basil with the wagon.

After that first morning, I learned more of my hidden heritage. Mother seemed to have a need to talk, and I was content to listen.

The title Hero of Varay was as old as the seven kingdoms. Varay was named for Vara, a legendary superhero who brought the magic out of Fairy and held the land for its more mortal inhabitants as king and hero. Traditionally then, Varay's Heroes came from outside the kingdom. A Varayan might be King's Champion, but he was never given the formal title Hero of Varay. "That's one of the reasons we kept the truth from you," Mother said. "Your father wanted you to follow in his footsteps-if you chose to. But you remained an outsider, even though you are also heir to the throne. We stopped bringing you for visits when you were five."

"Why is it so important that I be both king and Hero?"

"The two have never been united in one man since Vara. Our legends promise a new golden age when one man can again hold both titles legitimately. It may be superstitious nonsense, but I don't know of another time when it's been possible to test it."

"More of the same kind of legend that makes the Etevars want to reunite the seven kingdoms under their rule?" I asked.

"Perhaps. But Varay has never sought to dominate the other kingdoms." Maybe not. Or maybe the Varayan storytellers were just better liars.

"What about the other magic doorways at home? Where do they lead?"

"All to places in Varay," Mother said. "To Basil, Arrowroot on the Mist, Coriander in the Battle Forest at the edge of Xayber and Fairy. They lead to most of the important places in Varay."

To the edge of Fairy but not to Castle Thyme? I thought, but what I asked was, "How is it done? How do you create a doorway?"

"The easiest way requires two members of the family, one at each end, linking their efforts through the rings, bringing themselves to each other. One can do it alone, but that takes longer. You have to go to each place and implant the silver, then you have to concentrate to take yourself back through the untried passage to make it permanent. Draining work."

"Where does the silver come from?"

"It's a seaweed that grows in the shallows of the Mist, along the shore of Xayber, in Fairy."

That figured. It wouldn't be anything convenient. "Do we have a stockpile of it somewhere?"

"No. The silver must be living when it's implanted in the doorway, and it lives for only a few months after being harvested from the Mist."

There were other items. Uncle Parthet was something over a thousand years old. There was nobody around who could say definitely how much over, and he tended to be vague on the subject. His first foray into our world was well before the First Crusade. Back then, according to him, there was little to separate the three realms-mortal, buffer, and Fairy. Technology was the distancing factor. Now, the mortal realms were slow poison for creatures out of Fairy and only reachable through potent magics for people from the seven kingdoms. And Fairy was consistently hazardous to the health of all outsiders. Even Mother was twenty years older than I had thought, nearing sixty-five. She could pass for half that, easily.

"We do live longer, and the middle decades pass more slowly for our bodies," she explained. "When you were a baby, Grandfather could still lead his soldiers in battle. His hair was black and full. He had the stamina of a teenager. And he was already over a hundred years old."

That led to another question. "What about me? I'm half one world and half the other."

"According to Parthet, the blood of Vara always proves true."

We didn't speak of any future beyond our return to Basil. Until Father was properly seen to, the future had to wait.

At Nushur, people lined the road. We stopped at the i

On the road past Nushur, I asked why everything was so medieval, why it was always like that in the books I read too. "What's so special about this stuff?" Mother didn't have a ready answer, but Parthet did.

"Many people have had glimpses of the truth, or memories of it. There was a time when the three realms were so intertwined that you could go from one to another as easily as you can drive from Louisville to Lexington today. For a long while, there were no obstacles. But people re-create their past every moment, just as surely as they create their futures."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.

"You think that the past is rigid, unchanging history, right?"

"The interpretations may change, but the facts have to be the same."

"Not on your life, lad. Both change. The past is a fragile tissue of memories-'a lie everyone agrees on,' I think somebody in your world once said. That's very close. And when the memories change, the past changes. Some people have a greater control over their past and future than others do, but everyone participates to some degree. And the nonsense that grows out of people's heads! Your father once told me that historians now say that Richard the Lionhearted was homosexual and blame the centuries of war and distrust between France and England on a lovers' spat between Robin Hood's king and Philip of France. Nonsense! And I remember King Arthur and his queen. Arthur was no miserable warlord the way they make him out to be now. Camelot was real, and glorious."

"You were there, I suppose?" I asked, not even pretending to take this story at face value.

"Merlin was a valued friend," Parthet said, ignoring my tone.

"If all the worlds were one back then, what made it change, and when did it change?"

Parthet took a moment to think about that. "You've heard of Carolingian minuscule?" he asked. The term sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. "The common script you write in, the lowercase letters at least. It was part of the revival of learning that the man you know as Charlemagne fostered. That's where it started." He laughed. "The pen is mightier than the sword."

People were waiting for us in the streets of Basil Town also. Sad faces watched our cortege. I had a little trouble dealing with the fact that all of these strangers were so moved by the fact of my father's death. And everyone in the castle was out and waiting in the courtyard, even King Pregel. Dad was placed on a fancy wooden stretcher type of platform and carried into the keep by four soldiers. They took him to a small chapel dedicated to the Great Earth Mother at the side of the great hall.

"At dawn," Pregel a

A vigil continued through the night, mostly in silence. I saw tears on more than one strong, rugged face. These were my father's people, not the Hendersons and McCreareys back in Louisville. The people of Basil mourned Dad as they would a brother, or their own fathers. Mother sat next to the catafalque all night, her face nearly as rigid as Dad's. I could see the pain in her eyes, though. I could feel what she was feeling. I could almost view the mourners through her eyes, and I knew it was a new magic holding me, not just some trick of my mind.