Stairway to Forever (23 page)

Once in the sand world, by the driftwood log, Danna strapped the cooler onto the rack behind the seat and hung one water jug from each of the cooler's handles before starting the bike.

She had been spending most of her weekends in the sand world since Fitz had left. Unlike him, she had no desire to go exploring, but had spent her time lazing on the beach or on the ship she called her sand yacht. Just as Fitz had told her he felt constantly in the sand world, Danna too had felt a constant twinge of an uneasy sense that something, somewhere, was ever watching her; therefore, the only place in the sand world that she ever went without a revolver was when she swam in the sea.

Often, she brought along her briefcase and read and made notes and listed precedents known or to be researched in the stern cabin of the ancient wreck

or stretched on a blanket covering the deck above that cabin. Despite the feeling of being watched, observed, she never felt as really good in the other world as she did in the sand world. She felt far more alive, vibrant, thoroughly healthy, even younger than her age. Also, she felt as if she truly belonged in the sand world, as if it were her personal world, created solely for her and Fitz, their private domain.

She missed Fitz terribly, of course, missed him by night and by day, in this world or in the other, but nights in the narrow cot in the center of the stern cabin were the worst, the hardest to bear. Often, she would extend a hand and caress the Very pistol that she kept on the low table near the cot and think of immediately going up on deck and firing the first star-shell to summon him back to her so-empty arms.

But she had not done so yet, of course. For considering the time differential of the two worlds, although a month had gone by for her—a month without Fitz. Could she really keep her sanity through two more months without him—it had been only some ten days or even less for him, and he could have done little of what he had intended within so short a time, she knew. It would not be fair to him to recall him so soon, so she had not. Even so, she still kept the flare projector close beside the cot, where she could reach out and caress its metal surfaces and think of Fitz during the long, lonely nights.

Fitz always insisted that night camps be made in open places—vales or clearings, with as little overhanging foliage as possible, so as to allow him to see a great swath of sky, preferably southerly sky.

'Tm watching for a sign," he had told both Sir Gautier and Cool Blue, in explanation. "If either of you, by night or by day, see a burst of color, red or

green, in the southern sky, followed immediately by three stars of that same color falling from the place of the burst, tell me of it at once, it is very important to me."

As they were making camp one late afternoon, a doe, spooked apparently by something in the surrounding forest, bounded into their clearing and stood stock-still, obviously not expecting the clearing to be tenanted. Sir Gautier was deadly poetry in motion. In but a single, silken-smooth movement, he had leaned to pick up a spear, cocked his right arm and cast it with such power and accuracy that it transfixed the heart of the doe and she was dead even as she made one final, useless bound.

The meat was most welcome. Fitz had been getting a little tired of game birds, rabbit and squirrel meat, so venison steaks broiled on a grill (that Sir Gautier quickly and expertly fashioned of green sticks) over a bed of fragrant hardwood coals, basted with margarine and sprinkled with coarse-grind pepper, were a decided treat. Cool Blue, of course, got the lion's share of the carcass, but Fitz made certain that a joint was hung high beyond any animal thievery that they might have a bit more of the meat for their breakfast.

Fitz had wondered at the size of the grill and the spread of the bed of coals, then at the number of steaks Sir Gautier had insisted be set to cook. But once they were cooked, he ceased to wonder. Despite his hunger and the added spice of variety, three of the steaks were the most he could manage to cram down his gullet, but not so Sir Gautier. The Norman knight proceeded to wolf what his companion estimated to be at least seven and possibly nine pounds of cooked meat, followed with a double handful of berries and two cups of orange pekoe tea (of which the medieval warrior had become quite fond).

Following this—to Fitz, monumental—gorge, the young knight had lain flat on his back for a few minutes, belching and sighing with clear contentment, arisen to go off into the woods for a while, then returned to the fireside to use Fitz's axe stone on the edges of his sword and the machete, then the knife stone on the knives and the dirk. Before he finally rolled himself into his thick cloak, the Norman had grilled and consumed three more steaks, then polished off the last of the berries and the tea, grumbling about the lack of good red wine which should properly accompany venison.

But before his "bedtime snack," while he squatted with Arkansas stone and the Ka-bar knife (he always saw to his overlord's blades first, never failing to remark on the rare and fine quality of their steel— how tough and resilient they were, how well they held their edges in use and how little touching up those edges ever needed), he said, blundy, "You are no evil wizard, Lord Alfred, but rather a decent and Christian man like your servant, Gautier de Montjoie. So please, I beg of you, Lord Alfred, tell me just how you called down thunder and fiery lightning and so slew my sergeant, Alain?"

Knowing the young, 11th-century Norman to be far from unintelligent, indeed, possessed of a quick and relatively open mind, Fitz nodded, drew his revolver and ejected all five of the cartridges.

Holding one up between thumb and forefinger, he tapped the nail of his other forefinger on the case. "Inside this brass cylinder, Gautier, is a powdery compound called gunpowder. When a spark strikes into it, it burns faster than the eye could follow and thus creates smoke and fire that must have room to expand and, in search of that needed room, they push this leaden plug out of the end of the brass cylinder.

"Now," he laid down the cartridge and picked up the silvery, stainless-steel revolver, "the brass cylinders are contained in the openings bored into this larger steel cylinder, here. This flat strap of steel inside this steel circle is called a 'trigger/ Observe, when the finger draws it to the rear, gears and springs you cannot see bring this forked thing back—it is called the 'hammer—then let it fall with some force against this little steel button here in this groove. On the other side of the button is a very short steel rod called a 'firing pin/ When the button is struck by the hammer, the firing pin strikes the base of one of the cylinders and that creates the spark that ignites the gunpowder, the smoke and fire of which, expanding, cast out the leaden plug. The plug then continues up the length of this longer, slenderer steel cylinder, which is called the 'barrel/ The smoke and fire still are behind the leaden plug, pushing it with extreme force, so that when it emerges into open air, it will penetrate almost anything that happens to be in its way.

"The entire device is called a 'revolver/ Gautier, because this largest steel cylinder turns on a rod, see, to bring a fresh brazen cylinder beneath the firing pin each time the trigger is pulled. It is in no way magical, merely a man-made instrument for killing easily at distances greater than a spear can be thrown.

"As for your sergeant, he already had struck me with the ferrule of his spear and I believed he was making ready to thrust the point into me, so I shot him. A man must protect himself."

"My lord should not concern himself with the killing of an oaf of Alain's water," said Sir Gautier, shrugging. "He ever was impetuous, and I was often compelled to beat him for putting on airs not at all commensurate to his baseborn station in life. So he is no great loss."

Laying aside knife and stone, the knight rolled a cartridge in his fingers, examining it closely by the firelight. Then he handed it back and asked, 'This powder, Lord Alfred, of what constituents is it compounded?"

Fitz had no idea of the formula for smokeless powder, of course, but he had to answer something. "Nitre, brimstone and charcoal, Gautier. Differing proportions for different purposes, but mostly nitre in all of them."

"Very interesting, Lord Alfred. Could you make one or more of these devices a good deal bigger, of a bigness sufficient to hurling good-sized boulders, there would be no motte in all the land could stand against my lord's war band, he could quickly become king of any land he desired to rule . . . ?"

"So much," thought Fitz to himself, "for the myth of the hidebound, stubbornly conservative, superstitious and hag-ridden, unimaginative and unprogres-sive medieval man taught by historians of my time!"

my horn. So it took me damn near a whole year after they finally let me go just to like get my lip back and get aholt of a decent axe again, you know. Hadn't of been for the fucking draft, like I'd of been way up there, one of the really big names, pulling down top gigs and good bread and I wouldn't of had to let none them loan sharks get their like claws into me, neither. Like, you know, man, it's all the fault of the fucking draft board and the Yew Ess Army that I would up here in this like lion get-up. You dig, man?"

"Frankly," said Fitz truthfully, "no, I don't understand the connection, Cool Blue. You must have been separated long before you came to this place."

"Well, like it was them fuckers interrupted my damn career and all so I had to like start all over again when I got out," "said" the now-navy-blue lion. "That took bread, like big bread, and like I wasn't hitting no really rich gigs yet, see. It won't no sense in going to no banks, 'cause I didn't own no co-lat'ral, banks only loans money to people as can prove they don't really need it. So I went the only place I could, to Fat Tony, the loan shark. He lent me the three grand and, like bang, I started in getting good gigs and all. But still I couldn't never get enough together to pay him no big chunks and with the vigorish and all keeping on piling up, it looked like Fat Tony was gonna be into me for the rest of my natcherl life, man.

"But then, man, like after a couple really groovy years, things went sour for me all of a sudden, like. You know, like two, three gigs welshed on me right together and I like had to miss some payments to Fat Tony, 'cause like, man, I just didn't have the bread. After the first time his goons come around and beat up on me, like I sold off ever thing 'cept my horn

and give all the bread—I mean like all of it, man—to Fat Tony, but with more bread coming in so slow, like, I just kept on getting further and further behind.

"When one the deadbeat clubs finally come through with the bread they owed me, I hustled it right down to Fat Tony and he took it . . . but then he said I was setting a bad example to his other what he called clients and said I was just gonna have to be a example and he told his goons to take me out and kill me and dump me in the lake, but to make damn sure I floated so's they'd find me.

"Them fuckers, they beat the pure, living shit out of me in the back seat of their Caddy, too. And they told me that, before they did kill me, they was gonna jam a service station air hose up my ass and fill me fulla air so's I'd be sure to float. When they pulled into a all-night gas station, man, I like figured I didn't have nothing to lose if they had to kill me before they like filled up my ass with air, so when that bastard of a Nick the Knucks opened his door, I went across him like sixty and put my knee in his crotch on the way, too. Then I took off running like the hounds of hell was after me, and they was, too, you know.

"I wound up in this little-bitty park I'd never been in before, down by the lakeside, and after the beating and all that running and scared shitless, too, like I was, I was about to drop, like I mean it, man. I could hear the fuckers running and yelling to each other and then I seen this kind of tunnel-like up ahead with the sidewalk running right into it, but no lights in it, and like, man, that's where Cool Blue went. But when I heard them big feet slap-slapping off the sidewalk and coming my way, I started back to running, too, you know.

"But when I come out the other end of that damn

tunnel, I run face-first into a big old tree, and when I woke up, it was no park to be seen, no lake, neither. I was here, man, I was like herel"

"As a man," asked Fitz, "or as a lion?"

"No, man," Cool Blue "replied", "the lion bit came later. I was one beat-up nigger, but I was a man when I first come here. It's account of that fucking, black-hearted Count of Saint Germain and his bunch of wizards and warlocks that I'm running around this place on four legs, 'stead of two, him and his bunch and, 'specially, that oreo-cookie cooze he keeps around."

"Can you imagine that kind of shit, man? Here's this sister—dark-complected, good-looking, name of Sursy—puts the, like I mean the real make on me. And hell, man, like I'm, you know, I mean like as horny as any other cat. But when I like went after what she was damn near to like rubbing in my face, she ups and changes me into a pig, man, like I mean a real-ass pig, a boar-hog, right down to the little curly tail, you dig.

"So, like there I was, man, three, four hundred pounds of pork. She done said she wouldn't make it with me 'less I let her change me into what turned her on, see, so like I did. She did make it with me, like with the boar-hog I was then, I mean. But then the cow-cunted calico queen just left me, wouldn't change me back to a man, said I was gonna stay what I'd always really been.

"And, man, like it ain't no fun being a hog, I tell you. You starving hungry all the fucking time, you know, so you'll eat anything you comes acrost. And, man, like you don't know what heartburns and bellyaches is 'til you been a pig for awhile. Well, man, like I took it all for a while, living out in the woods, but then I went back into old Saint Germain's place

and I started like tearing the living shit out of any-fucking-thing I could get my big old tusks into. I wasted two of his warlocks and like ate part of one of the creeps, man.

"Won't 'till then the Count, he come to find out what that Sursy, she done done to me, he thought Td just wandered off somewheres. When he did find out, he turned her into a pink lioness and sent her away somewheres, then he turned me from a hog into this blue lion and told me did I ever come to find her, the minute we two got it on, we'd both be real human beings again. Like, I mean, you know, can you beat that, man?"