Stairway to Forever (26 page)

"Right now, as matters stand, you're in as much trouble as is Gus; Blutegel has seen you tarred with the same brush. He's going after you on the same grounds they used to nail so many racketeers. Yes, you could be arrested if you stay in the country too long or are careless about your activities while here, so don't stay and don't be careless, Fitz. That's my professional advice to you as a client. You asked, I told you."

Once Danna had driven the loaded Jeep into the garage and had closed the door, Fitz straightened up, got out and began to unload by hand before he remembered and commenced to float the items out of the back of the Jeep and into the house.

Danna, who had done most of the actual shopping in the larger places in town, had asked, "Fitz, why so much soap? You can't eat soap."

He had chuckled. "It's Sir Gautier, my sworn Nor-

man liegeman. When I first met him, he smelled like an open sewer, but since he's discovered that regular baths wont kill you or unman you or turn your feet into cloven hooves or whatnot, he's become a regular bathing fanatic and he goes through one hell of a lot of soap."

With everything in the house, Danna began to open the glass bottles of mineral water, while Fitz stepped onto the back porch to bring in the plastic jugs, still swaying in the evening breeze on their string. And the shotgun boomed even as his foot touched the first step. Fitz dived for the ground, for all that the shot had missed him and plowed into the side of the house by the doorway. With the instinct of his decades-old combat training and experience, he kept rolling until the concrete foundation of the porch was between him and the source of the gunfire, then chanced a peek around the protective masonry.

Just on the other side of the fence stood Yancy Mathews, a cheap, battered, double-barrelled twelve-bore in his hands and the neck of a bottle sticking out of his pocket.

"You uppity fucker, you," he shouted, slurring his words a bit, "you think Is gonna fergit how you come to git me th'owed in jail and half worked to death out to the County Farm and all? My boy, Calvin, he seen you sneak in here with your stuck-up fancy woman this mornin' and he come tol' me. I hadda work today, all day, cause if I misses work even one day, them fuckers'll put me back out there on thet damn farm. I'm gon' kill your ass, Mister Fitzassgilbert!"

Fitz realized just how hopelessly drunk the man was when he put the gun to his shoulder and tried to hold it steady. Mathews tried to shoot at the corner

of the porch, around which Fitz was peeking, but the load of buckshot instead plowed into the side of the mound. Cursing, the drunken would-be murderer opened the gun and began to fumble in his shirt pocket for shells.

Fitz made his move. Rising suddenly twenty feet into the air, he sped across the intervening distance and his feet came to earth only a half-yard from Mathews' mud-caked clodhoppers. He easily jerked the still-open gun from the pie-eyed man and hurled it over his fence to clatter into his yard. Then he disposed of Yancy Mathews, almost bloodlessly.

As he and Danna floated the last loads across the darkening yard, into the tent and down the stairway, she said, "Fitz, no matter what he is or what he tried to do to you, I think we ought to lower him out of that tree before we go back to the sand world. When he wakes up, he could fall and injure himself badly; that's at least ten feet up to that limb he's on, you know."

Fitz just laughed. "Danna, Yancy Mathews couldn't fall if he tried. He's not on that limb, he's just an inch or so above it, and he's on 'hold.' I'm releasing him from that right now, but there's still no fear, I took off his belt and put it around both him and the limb.

"Now, let's get everything through to the ship. I should leave for the hills fairly soon, but first I'm going to want you to help me test out the comfort quotient of this double-size air mattress I bought. If you don't mind and can make the time, that is, counselor."

Yancy Mathews came awake with a terrible hangover and someone nearby shouting at him. He cracked a single bloodshot eye to see old Collingwood, who

owned the house next door to that fucking Fitzgilbert bastard, standing in his yard and shouting up at him.

"... no-count drunk, that's all you ever been, you stump-jumpin\ hillbilly sonuvabitch! What in tarnation you think you doin' up there in my tree? You come to steal apples, like them two thievin' brats of yourn does all the time, you in the wrong fuckin' tree.

"I tell you, you git down from there and outen my yard or I'm gone call Sher'ff Vaughan to send depitties to git you out. Put you back on the county farm where white trash like you b'longs! You no good white nigger, you!"

Stung to the very quick by such baseless slander, Yancy made to sit up in preparation for launching himself at the seventy-odd-year-old man and beating him to death. But when he moved, he rolled off the narrow limb and wound up under it, hanging from it by his belt and screaming in his terror. By the time the two deputies arrived, Yancy was almost hysterical and they finally had to cold-cock him in order to get him down out of the tree and into the car to be driven down to a place he had seen many a time before—the drunk tank of the county jail.

"I don't know but what all his boozin' has fin'ly rotted out his brains, if he ever had any," Collingwood had opined to one of the deputies " Tore you fellers got here, he'uz trying for to tell me that Mister Fitzgilbert it was had flung him up in that there tree. And not only is Mister Fitzgilbert not got the built it would take to put a man as big as Yancy Mathews up there, they tells me the genulman has done been in Africa for the best part of two months.

"I sure lawd hopes you keeps that Yancy Mathews in the pokey a good, long time, like you should ought to of done last time. I tell you, a body can't go away

to visit with his own daughter and his grandchillun for two pitiful days, but he's gotta come back to crap like this with the meanest drunk in the county up in one his trees.

"Was he up there all night? Hell, I don't know, depitty. I come in 'bout midnight, it was darker'n the inside of a cow out here. I just noticed him up there after I got up this mornin', for to fix my cawfee and tie some flies.

"You do eny fishin', depitty? Well, you wanna buy some flies?"

Special bonus chapter!

Here is a chapter from Book II in the Stairway to Forever series, MONSTERS AND MAGICIANS, coming from Baen Books in early 1989:

Fitz had just finished eating his spit-broiled pheasant and was carefully sipped at his canteen-cup of steaming, fragrant tea when, with the now-familiar faint tickling of the mind that bespoke telepathy, a "voice" declared, "I smell fresh meat and like, man, I'm hungry as a lion."

With that, a full-size blue lion strode from among the brush and bushes of the hillside into the tiny clearing before the rock shelter, facing Fitz across the firepit. His normal baby-blue hue was closer to a royal blue, which fact told Fitz that he was or recently had been upset about something.

The blue lion flopped down on the rocky ground,

pointedly eying the pint-size antelope hung in the tree. "Hunting like sucked today, man," he declared dolefully. "Old Saint Germain must of like let some of his damn pets loose around these parts, them fuckers like scare all the game away from wherever they're at, they stink as bad as snakes or alligators. I'm like flat bushed and my stomach's growling like I was still a damn old boar-hog, too."

Nestling his steel cup back among the coals, Fitz stood up, paced over to the tree, untied the rope, then took the lowered carcass over to the waiting lion. While the huge beast rent flesh and crunched bones, they continued to silently converse.

"Where's Sir Gautier?" asked Fitz.

"Well, like man, he nor me expected you back so damn soon. Like, you ain't been gone a whole day, you know. He went off to see could he find the rest of his Normans. He shouldn't have no trouble there, like, man, he can just follow the stink." The feeding carnivore added. "He should ought to be back in two, three days, like anyway. Hang around, man. You can spend the time like shooting some more of these; they're good eating, see, but the little fuckers are like too fast for me to catch one, usually. I'll be done with this soon, man, hand me down that bird up there too, huh?"

Fitz shook his head. "That pheasant's my breakfast, Cool Blue. Do you want what's left of the one I just ate?"

"Like is the Pope a Catholic, man?" was the lion's reply. "Like throw them over here; I'm like starving, tramping around these fucking boondocks all day for nothing but a few damn frogs. What'd you like do with the guts and the head and legs and all of this little thing, huh, man? Like they're some of the best parts."

But when Fitz had directed Cool Blue to the spot he had dumped 'the offal from his kills, little was left aside from bloodstained leaves and stray feathers. The lion's color became almost navy blue and Fitz ended by giving his companion the other pheasant, reflecting to himself that he could breakfast out of the supplies he had brought from the other world, Sir Gautier not being on hand to take a share. Then he banked the fire and zipped himself into his sleeping bag under the overhang, the entrance more or less blocked by rocks, the motorcycle and other gear, and the huge, blue lion sleeping just the other side of the firepit.

Hungry as the lion still remained, Fitz doubted that any edible creature would survive long enough to get across the small clearing to the overhang and him, so he went to sleep feeling as secure as if he had been in the soft bed in his other-world bedroom, guarded by multitudinous alarms and a twelve-foot cyclone fence topped with barbed wire.

He slept until he suddenly became aware that he was rolling down a grassy slope, vastly enjoying the feel of the coarse blades lashing at the skin of his nude body, just as he loved the feel of the hot sun and the sweet scents of the wildflowers and herbs that grew here and there among the grasses, the occasional puffs of warm, gentle winds.

At the bottom of the slope, he sat up and gazed out across a plain grown with higher, coarser grasses, dense stands of dark-green bushes and some scattered trees. In the dim distance, a small herd of wild cattle grazed and, closer to him, several cervines browsed on the fringes of a thicket of thorny shrubs.

Fitz had assumed that he was alone, but then a silent, unspoken, mind-to-mind beaming asked, "Are you hungry, Seos?"

"No, I have no hunger for food." Fitz sensed the return beaming of "his" body. "But if you do, become a deer; there are more than enough shrubs over there to feed another."

I am rather going to become a cat and eat a deer," 'said' the other. "What about you?"

"Sister-mine," beamed Fitz's body, "do as you wish, indulge yourself, for we two must return soon enough from this lovely place. I think I'll become a young bull and trot over to visit with the heifers of yonder herd."

"You would!" came the response from the other. "Just for that, I should become a lioness and make my meal of young bull flesh, this day . . . but I wont. But before you change, watch me make my kill . . . please?"

"Of course I will, sister-mine," the body beamed. "Then I will be able to use some of that kill in forming my young bull."

A few rods away, a slender but well-formed body rose up into the air, moved through the air at some speed and then sank, as lightly as a falling feather, into the depths of the thicket around which the cervines browsed. To the mind of Fitz, the sun browned body appeared to be that of a girl in her mid-teens, as totally devoid of clothing as was the masculine body he just now inhabited. Like "his" body, the female's was possessed of reddish-blonde hair, almond-shaped blue-green eyes separated by the bridge of a straight, slender nose. Her face of course lacked the curly, fair beard that his bore, but both owned full lips that smiled often to show the white teeth. Fitz guessed her height at between five feet even and five feet four, her weight at around a hundred pounds, tops. Her nipples were the same red-pink as her lips and the breasts, though smallish,

stood up proudly. Though her hands and feet were on the small side, they were proportionate to her body which, at the distance from which "his" body's eyes had viewed it, had seemed almost hairless, apparent hirsute adornments only appearing at armpits and crotch. The fine bone had all looked to be properly sheathed in flat muscles.

While the cervines browsed on, unsuspectingly, the eyes of the body within which Fitz was visiting continued to watch the base of the thicket, knowing what to expect.

Then, with the suddenness of a lightning-bolt, a yellow-and-black, hook-clawed streak launched itself from out the dense dimness of the thicket, landing squarely on the back of a plump doe. One taloned paw hooked under the chin o£ the frantically plunging deer and drew the head up and back so far and at such angle that the spine was compelled to snap . . . as it quickly did. As the dying doe sank beneath her deadly rider, the rest of the deer scattered at flank speeds, making no single offer to fight, as was their natural way unless defending fawns or cornered by predators of any kind.

The cat speeded the death of the kicking, twitching cervine by using strong jaws and sharp fangs to tear out the throat, the torrents of deer-blood from the veins and arteries drenching her yellow-gold, black-spotted hide, dripping from her stiff whiskers.

To his own big-boned, hundred-sixty-pound body-mass, Seos began to gather and add a vast assortment of natural materials—animal (from the new-slain doe), vegetable (from the plants and trees and grasses all about) and mineral (from the rock-studded soil and that soil itself). Adapting and restructuring and shaping the constituents of all these in the manner first taught hundreds of generations before to the first

hybrids by the Elder Ones, the blond young man slowly became transformed into a large wild ox—a bovine that later, much later, generations of humans would call aurochs or bos taurus primigenius.

The final creation was, to say the least, impressive in the extreme, to Fitz. In this dream as in previous ones of similar nature, he was not only participant but observer as well, and so he could view the formed beast as from a close distance even while he realized that he along with his host-body were actually a part of the beast.