Songs of the Dancing Gods (11 page)

The storm itself was over in perhaps half an hour, perhaps less, but the runoff continued for almost as long as the rain made its way down below. By the time they were through, they were in a muddy, wet steambath. Worse, they had lost an hour and it would be slow going for a while from this point as well.

“What do we do now?” Irving asked his father miserably.

“Well, all those in favor of camping here, in ankle-deep water and smelly swamp, have a seat. I’m for pressing on. We may not make it out, but the closer we are to out the better; at least, it’ll give things time to dry. There’s not a prayer I Ve got anything dry to put on, either, so I’m gonna shock you all and go bare-ass on a wet horse blanket and hang this loincloth on the side to dry as we ride. Irv, I’d suggest you do the same with your leather, since, when that stuff dries, it’s gonna cut right into you.”

“But—suppose we meet somebody on the trail?” the boy responded, embarrassed.

“Have we met anybody yet? And we’re not likely to meet anybody, either, at least not anybody who’s here for honest purposes. We’re more than halfway, I’m pretty sure, and only nuts like us would start in on this route after sunup.”

Ti was busy wringing out her hair, almost to no avail, but she commented, seeing the boy’s nervousness, “Come, come! I have seen much worse than you and lived!”

The leather thongs were already starting to irritate his skin, so he knew he had no choice, and finally stripped. Seems like this place is hell bent on gettin’ everybody stark naked, he thought sourly.

The horse blanket was also soaked through and felt like a wooly sponge, but there was no getting rid of it. Bare-assed and truly bareback on a horse was an open invitation to saddle sores, as he’d learned early on in his experience here. Until Husaquahr, he’d never been on a horse that moved unless you stuck a quarter in the slot first, but his father had been a good teacher and he a quick learner. It no longer even hurt like hell to get off anymore.

The problem really was, it didn’t seem to get any dryer as they went on slowly through the muck that had been the road and was still better than what was on either side of it. Instead, the rain forest took on an even more eerie cast, with fog forming just above the ground and thickening as they went. Irving couldn’t help noticing that his father was still wearing the sword that was the boy’s namesake, and in a position where it could be easily drawn while mounted.

The fog grew thicker, as did the silence of the land, with only the drip, drip, drip of water making its way down to join its whole at the base of the great trees. What sunlight remained created only a grim, ghostly gray, and it seemed that it was getting darker and darker with each passing minute.

Joe had given up any idea of getting out before full darkness; now he was looking at every place that gave any potential for both safety and protection. Cursing himself for not allowing for any variables and maybe waiting until morning for this passage, he spotted an area that might just have to do.

“We’ll have to camp there,” he told them, gesturing to an area on a slight rise about twenty feet off the right side of the road. “The trees are close enough to give us some protection for our backs, and there’s fallen logs and thick wood shavings all over. It’s not much, but it’s the best I’ve seen since we took this road and I don’t expect any better if we keep on. On the other hand, I’d rather be there than in the swamp.”

Tiana looked it over. “This is almost like a fairy circle,” she noted. “Are we certain we’re not going to camp in the middle of trouble?”

He shrugged.’ ‘Maybe, but it’s suddenly almost dark as pitch, and I don’t think we have much choice.” He couldn’t explain it to them or to himself, but this place felt right, felt, somehow, safe and secure. It was a mystery, and he didn’t plan to trust the feeling absolutely, but he knew this was the right place.

When the darkness fell, it fell. There was no light at all, anywhere. Irving had thought he’d seen darkness out on the trail under cloudy or moonless skies, but this was the darkness of a cellar, or maybe the grave. Tiana tried the flint, but there was nothing around dry enough to set afire, and the brief sparks, hardly noticeable in other circumstances, briefly lit the scene like flashes of lightning on a dark night.

“We’re lucky it’s midsummer here,” Joe said, trying to sound optimistic. “That means we’ve only got eleven hours of this instead of thirteen. Now if I can find the pack—ah! Anybody want some soggy, half-stale bread and some warmed wine?”

They managed to eat something, although none of them had a lot of appetite. Nerves made it nearly impossible to sleep, either, although Joe suggested a guard rotation, but being wide awake and seeing nothing but darkness while sitting in back of logs against great trees and on soaked wood chips wasn’t exactly thrilling. It seemed, somehow, even risky to be talking, but there wasn’t much else to do. Even so, they all found themselves whispering, although none could really say why.

“Hey, I been here a pretty long time now,” Irving said, trying to make some conversation, “and mostly it’s been gettin’ the horses, goin’ off into that plains area and campin’ out and learnin’ how to ride and doin’ a litde huntin’ and fishin’ and all, but how come it ain’t ‘til we’re in this pesthole that this slave bit comes up?”

“It’s the Rules again, kicking in, most likely,” Joe replied as they huddled together. “They can be pretty cruel sometimes. And tremendously inconvenient.”

“I’m sure of it,” Tiana agreed. “This body was not even fully defined, I think, when I became it. I was from the upper classes; I thought in those terms, even when I didn’t realize it. It never occurred to me that I would drop in class or could. But almost from the start, everybody kept commenting on how I had an athlete’s body, then a dancer’s body. I’m native to here; the Rules bind me always. Even I began thinking of athletic dancing, idly fantasizing as a dancing girl, that kind of thing. I was defined by that. Slowly, the Rules under which I had unconsciously lived slipped away as no longer relevant; the Rules that replaced them were the ones I and others defined without even thinking about it.”

“That don’t seem fair.”

“It’s not,” Joe agreed, “but it’s only a kind of legal thing of what we both already knew from Earth. People always looked at me, particularly in the east, and they started defining me. At first they thought I was Hispanic, and when I told them I was a full-blooded native American, the real jokes began. I was called ‘Chief,’ talked to in mock-Tonto, everything. That’s one reason I grew up tough. I had to take it or fight. I fought. That’s why I wound up driving a truck instead of getting a decent education and maybe going on to college. I always thought I would be some kind of sports superstar. Jim Thorpe, a full-blooded native American who was also born in Pennsylvania, was a sports superstar and my big hero. But I never really worked at it and I got passed over. Wound up doing some bare-knuckle boxing at truck stops and doing repairs of big rigs. Everybody remembers those dumb cowboy movies and figures, hey, he’s an Indian. He’s got muscles and all that but no real brains. Pretty soon, you find yourself thinking that way, too.”

“You mean like the way white folks looked at me back home. First they saw black, and then they saw kid, and all of a sudden there was some kinda wall between us, even if we was friendly. Only the black kids, they saw the high cheeks and straight black hair and they started callin’ me ‘Geronimo’ and stuff like that. It was like nobody could see me in here.”

“Uh-huh,” Tiana responded. “Only there there’s at least a chance of breaking out of it. Here, once, even for a short time, you get that in your or other folks’ heads, the Rules grab you and define you and you’re stuck. It seems to be human nature that everybody tries to define and pigeonhole everybody else. Here, though, once you’re defined, even incorrectly, that’s it. I started doing the exercises to get in shape, then the dance stuff, and it just started coming naturally to me. The erotic part I guess was my fault, for fantasies at the wrong time. Each time I was defined a little more and a little more. When we started the dances for money, that finished it. I was defined. People who do that are slaves. Slaves have more Rules. Today, without even realizing I’d changed, I found myself thinking like a slave. The responses I gave the guardsman just came naturally to me. When I was explaining the situation to you earlier, I was really also explaining it to me. I know, we had the Rules read to us, but they were abstract and didn’t cover the half of it.”

“You mean you’re gettin’ to like it?” the boy asked, still confused.

“No, I never have to like it, but accepting it is something else again. I have to accept it or go crazy or kill myself, because I’ve got no choice but to be that way.”

Irving thought about it a bit. “Am gonna be trapped by them Rules?”

“Eventually,” Joe told him. “Not right off. That’s part of the idea of taking you to be trained at Terindell as I was. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Ruddygore wasn’t just providing me with training; the training and my success at it defined me, so by the time I finally was put under the Rules they only made me what I already had become. You think about that if things get tough. There are male slaves here, too. Here, nobody will be prejudiced because of your looks or color. They’ll think you look downright exotic. Because so much is always the same here, differences are admired, even envied, not looked down on. Right now you’re still a clean slate to the Rules, and you even have some resistance because of that to magic—but I wouldn’t count too much on that in a pinch. But if you wind up a loser here, you’ll have done it to yourself.”

Tiana yawned in spite of herself. “Some of us should get some sleep,” she told the others. “I think I might be able to drift off now.”

“I slept the latest; I’ll take the first watch,” Joe told them. “When I get too tired, I’ll awaken the one of you who goes to sleep first. That second one does the same for the third. It’s the best system I can think of.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to sleep all night,” Irving muttered as Tiana settled down beside him. “But I’ll try.”

The fact was, he almost beat her into slumber.

Joe didn’t fed all that tired, but if it was boring to sit around staring at nothingness with two others, it was much more boring to do it alone. Still, he prayed for a deathly boring night.

Some leader I’ve become! he thought sourly. I’m as scared of this place and this darkness as they are. Worse, he’d gotten them into this partly out of emotion. He hadn’t stayed alive this long by letting two people get on horses and ride out of camp while he slept. He knew she’d gone and probably where and for what and where the extra money had come from. The thing was, he hadn’t stopped her, although he easily could have, and he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t, particularly after the kid had gone after her. Now Irving knew, too, and was keeping a Big Secret from Dad. The worst thing was, considering his real mother, he probably was getting a very weird idea of women. Some father he was!

And now here he was, sticking the kid in this kind of danger, just because he couldn’t bring himself to leave Tiana free in that town for a night.

Not that he was a great shining example of fidelity, either. She, at least, could tell herself it was the Rules, and maybe be right. She was not the same woman he had married and was becoming less so as time passed. He was the poor dumb Injun who wound up marrying the highly educated and cultured princess like some fairy tale and it had really fed his ego. Now he was the same poor dumb Injun with a dancing whore for a slave and mistress.

He didn’t blame her for that. It was nobody’s fault, as she said, and even this beat the boring hell out of being reigning gods. The thing was, he’d reached the heights of society and acceptance and found out that it was less fun than driving a truck. Now he found himself wondering if he’d married her for love or lust, the same as he had the first time, or just because .some of her blue blood and education might rub off on him and cause all those other educated blue-blooded males to turn green-with envy.

It still wasn’t fair to her, though. He had to give it up; he was strangling as ruler and lived again only when they had to go into action. She, on the other hand, had given it up for his sake. He was back where he wanted to be, but she was lower than her worst nightmares because of him.

He knew well how absolute those Rules were when they all kicked in, too. He’d never been aware of them as a barbarian, a warrior, but when he’d been dumped in that wood nymph’s body, he’d slowly become a wood nymph—at one and the same time becoming two hundred percent seductive fairy female and forgetting his knowledge, his experience, his common sense, just to go with the flow emotion. Joe de Oro had literally ceased to exist; it took a wish from that most powerful of magic things, the Lamp of Lakash, ancient product of that third world beyond even this one, the Land of the Djinn, where only magic, no natural law at all, applied. But for mat, he wouldn’t really exist; there’d just be some sexy, curvaceous, light green, barely thinking bimbo living inside a tree and thinking about nothing but seducing all and sundry until Judgment Day.

Irving had been forced to grow up too soon; maybe it was time he did, too. He couldn’t really help Ti, but he owed her, and particularly he owed her protection, loyalty, and a very loose leash.

He had started to doze in his musings in spite of himself, but something suddenly stirred him awake. His hand went automatically to his sword, but he did hot draw it or wake the others, not yet. It might just be nerves or a figment of a dream.