The Bronze King (14 page)

Without opening his eyes, Paavo said, “Valentine, you're sure a slick liar. I hope you never get carried away by your talent. A talent like that can run off with you if you get too comfortable with it. But you know that, right?”

“You're a
terrible
singer,” I hissed. “Where did you
get
that song? ‘Strawberry whirl' sounds like an ice-cream flavor!”

“I forgot that part so I had to make it up,” he said. “Is she gone?” He peered after the policewoman. “Good. Come on.”

We walked eastward, away from dirty old Eighth Avenue.

I said, “I guess she was just trying to protect me, you know? She thought you were—” Now how was I going to tell him she probably had figured I might be in the clutches of a
mole
-ster or worse? A little late, if you ask me, considering the guy with the cowboy outfit and the wonderful car waiting right outside.

“I know what she thought,” he said.

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm not,” he said firmly. “I'm glad she took an interest. Maybe sometime she'll help some other kid that needs it. You got a mean world here, Valentine, that devours its stray children.”

“What would we have done if she hadn't believed me?” I said. You know how when the danger's more or less past, you like to wallow in how bad it might have been.

“Whatever we could,” Paavo said. He was not a wallower.

“Was that a magic song? ‘Strawberry Whirl'?”

“I learned it a long time ago from your Granny Gran. That's the only magic in it.”

I looked up at the sky. You can't see the stars well at night in New York because there's so much light from the city, but you can make some of them out if you let your eyes get adjusted.

Not that night. It was cloudy.

I said, “Paavo, what star do you come from? What planet?”

“This planet,” he said, sounding surprised. “But long ago. I forgot how long. I forgot how it is here. Money, for one thing. And I forgot how I would have to be, coming back here now.”

Old, he meant. So in Sorcery Hall he looked different: younger. I didn't pursue that. I liked the way he was now, I liked him as I knew him.

We strolled back over toward the Library and sat down on the steps outside the entrance to Bryant Park. The park was locked, so nobody could come up behind us. Outside we could see anyone coming toward us, cops or whoever.

“Paavo,” I said, “what is Sorcery Hall, exactly?”

“Oh, it's like a club,” he said, “a professional association. The members come from all over, you know, to learn from each other and work together on projects.”

“What kind of projects?”

“Keeping worlds like yours out of trouble, for one thing. You had some knowledgeable people here in some earlier cycles of your history.” Like himself, I guessed. Maybe he'd been a Druid, or something even earlier that nobody knows about anymore. I was shy about asking, so I didn't.

He went on, “Some of them are still keeping an eye on you now that it's all youngsters here. I mean young spirits. Mostly we try not to interfere because you only learn by taking care of your own problems, but a kraken—well, that's a little more than you can handle without help.”

“Well, where are they? I mean, is it an actual place called Sorcery Hall?”

“It's just on a different plane from this one, that's all, a sort of level where we like to get together and keep in touch.”

“How many of you?”

“Depends.”

“Why can't you get help from there? I mean somebody stronger and smarter than I am to help you?”

“We didn't realize how serious it was, or you can bet I'd have come prepared better.” He sounded really grim. “Your message was general, you know what I mean? It wasn't clear what you had on your hands here. Now I know, but you got so much static coming off the kraken, I can't get through. And in Sorcery Hall they don't know how to get through to me without maybe doing more damage here than the kraken itself wants to do.”

“So it's just us?”

“It's just us.”

Thing about Paavo, he never faked it. I would have liked him to have faked that particular part just then, but I guess it was better that he didn't.

There was a taint in the air, a little like what you get when there's a garbage strike in the city: rot.

I was restless. We got moving again.

We walked along Madison Avenue eating hot dogs I got us at some corner joint. One thing about sleeping out like that, you wake a lot and you notice that you haven't eaten since dinner and you get hungry. I still had some of Gran's money, so we didn't have to dig other people's garbage out of the trash cans to eat, like real street people do. I was very glad I could spare Paavo that, though I knew if he had to do it he would, and no fuss.

We were coming up to a row of pay phones. I thought about stopping to phone my mom and reassure her, but it occurred to me that she might have the police all ready to trace the call. Besides, what could I tell her? Don't worry, Mom, I'm sleeping out tonight with an old wizard from another plane, and tomorrow I go down into the kraken's territory? Great.

I kept walking.

“How did Granny Gran get to be a member of Sorcery Hall?” I said.

“She was a natural,” Paavo said. “You got a lot of wild talent here. We noticed her because she was doing the kind of crude work that can get dangerous if you really don't know what you're doing. So we contacted her. She learned fast. It was a loss to us when she retired.”

We went over to Lexington, walking slowly in the chilly, quiet night. I felt danger all around us. Maybe because we'd already come through some danger together, I was more sensitive to it. It was funny, I wasn't as scared as I should have been, though. Being in trouble along with somebody you absolutely trust is different from just being terrified. It's a strange feeling, to be happy at the same time you're in danger and you're a little cold and a lot tired. Not happy, exactly: more like contented, which is pretty weird. But I liked it. I liked us looking out for each other, walking around tired and grubby in the night.

A cab came rocketing up the empty avenue and Paavo yanked me away from the curb. The cab kept going, and he kept his hand on my shoulder. I knew what he was thinking: suppose the Princes had been in that cab, ready to snatch me right off the street?

There really was nobody else to help us. We were in this on our own.

 

13
Trust

 

 

I
T GOT TO ME, I GUESS,
a little after that, when we passed a station of the East Side subway on Lexington. All of a sudden my skin turned cold and I started to cry.

“What?” said Paavo, stopping and turning me so he could look in my face. “What is it?”

“Paavo, I can't go into the subway again. I'm scared the kraken and the Princes will get me.”

I felt as if I'd said magic words. It was time for him to smile and tell me the test was over, he had never meant for me to really go back into the subway, and that he was bringing in a whole army from Sorcery Hall. Thanks to me and Granny Gran, he and his professional association of wizards would handle the kraken themselves.

Frankly, I just wanted to go home and crawl into my bed and let my mom yell until she was tired and live with that until it went away. Just to be done with it all, out of it, and safe.

Paavo said, “Shaa. Val. You'll be okay.”

“I can't,” I said. “I don't know anything about this kind of stuff. I'm not a fighter, Paavo.”

“Oh?” he said, walking on. “What about going into the laundry room to empty the clothes dryer in spite of the ghost that all the kids said lived in the basement? What about every day going past Mr. Carneros's dog that you were scared would jump out of its yard and chew your leg off? What about when those addicts who hung around outside your school tried to take the watch you got from your dad?”

“Hey,” I said, “wait a minute. Those are private and personal things from when I was younger. You can't bring them up now. They have nothing to do with this.”

He said, “I'm just reminding you, you're not as sheltered as you think. This city, this world—they don't encourage survival except for tough people—like you, Val.”

I said, “But we're talking about walking out along the subway tracks. I bet they didn't even have subways when you were around here last. You just don't understand. If you grow up here, you get told from the time you're two-feet high that one of the things you never, never do is walk on the subway tracks. It's for good reasons, even when you don't have a kraken after you.”

“True,” he said. He shoved the curly hair off his forehead with the back of his wrist.

“I can't,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

I was so surprised that I didn't say anything for a block.

“ ‘Okay'?” I said finally. “What do you mean, ‘okay'?”

A shrug.

“I want to know what that means, Paavo.”

“I'll figure out something.”

Which meant that he would go into the subway himself. Without resting, without his magic fiddle, without even his bow, which Joel still had.

Well, Paavo was a grown-up, and this was his job. Probably he could do a lot better than I could.

We walked. He coughed and pulled out his cigarettes. I saw his face when he bent over the match flame: creased, tired, dark around the eyes. Patient. He had known all along that I couldn't be counted on. No, he'd hoped I would do it, but he knew better than to depend on me. But he wasn't going to make me feel bad for letting him down.

On the other hand, he was obviously just too tired to put on a show of casual good humor about it.

Too tired.

“Okay,” I said miserably. “I'll do it. I'll find Joel, and I'll get the key and bring it to you at Eighty-first Street.”

He pressed my shoulder. “Good,” he said.

Sometime later on he shuffled me out of the all-night movie house we were trying to sleep in and back over to the new Penn Station, underneath the Port Authority—I hoped that lady cop from before wasn't still around—where we finished the night. I woke up feeling cramped and smelling something sharpish and stale, and feeling that it was late. The smell was that tobacco stink that smokers carry with them. For an instant I thought it was my mom. She never smoked but people at her office did, and she always came home scented with burnt tobacco.

I opened my eyes.

Well, of course it wasn't her. It was Paavo, sitting next to me on a bench.

“Have I overslept?” I said. It was Sunday morning and the waiting room echoed with people to-ing and fro-ing.

“I let you sleep,” he said. “You don't go kraken-running without plenty of sleep.”

“You make it sound like walking the dog!”

“A dog that eats worlds,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if he smelled something bad.

“Can it really do that?” I said. “The kraken? How can it do that if it's small enough to fit under New York?” Which wasn't exactly my idea of small, but even New York kids learn after a while that the world is one heck of a lot bigger than their city.

“Oh, it starts pretty modest,” he said. “But it could grow very big and fast, using a town like this one for an appetizer.”

“Hey, I dreamed about Joel!”

The dream was clear in my memory: there was Joel, reaching out of this drinking fountain in the park to pull me into the water where he was, perfectly dry and very jittery and excited. He held onto my hand and talked very fast and anxiously to me. He said I had to get him out of there quickly. He was playing music to keep sane and because it seemed to make the kraken angry, although it didn't attack him. Either Paavo's bow was protecting him, or the kraken was keeping him around as bait for—well, for me, or Paavo, or both of us I guess.

“I can hear it thrashing around in the tunnels,” he said, “and sometimes it stinks so bad I can hardly breathe. What you smell gets pretty important when you can't see anything.”

He couldn't see, of course. He had taken off his scarf and tied it around his eyes, and sure enough, there was the red mark on his neck, the fiddler's brand.

I was scared, in the dream, to hear that his playing was stirring up the kraken, but I couldn't tell him to stop. “Keep playing, Joel,” I said. “It's the only way I have of finding you.”

He grinned and squeezed my hand and was all of a sudden a very likable person, a person I cared about a lot. “Like Richard the Lion-Hearted finding Blondel,” he said, and I laughed and said it was the other way around, but he went right on. “Don't sing. Go fishing.”

He let go of my hand and started using Paavo's bow like a fishing rod, as if he were casting an imaginary line. End of dream.

I told it all to Paavo.

“Funny thing to dream,” I said. “Blondel and Richard the Lion-Hearted! That's just a myth anyway, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Who's Richard the Lion-Hearted?”

I have to admit I was a little shocked at his ignorance, until I realized that probably while we were having Richard the Lion-Hearted, Paavo was off saving some other planet from a kraken or worse. I liked being the one to explain something to him for a change.

“Richard the Lion-Hearted was an English king who led the Crusades, and one of his enemies, the King of Austria I think, grabbed him while he was heading home across Europe and locked him up in some dungeon someplace. Nobody knew where Richard was, to ransom him. His minstrel, Blondel, found him by wandering around Europe singing outside prison windows until King Richard answered him. Bet you the song was ‘Strawberry Whirl.' ”

As I said that, I had the funniest feeling—a terrible sadness just rushed up in me as I sat there smiling at Paavo.