The Bronze King (6 page)

Paavo laughed a real guffaw. “Okay,” he said, “that's a start, anyhow.”

“What?” Joel said. “I didn't get a word.”

“It's Korean for ‘I can't take a picture of you from here; there's a tree growing out of your ear.' Your King Jagiello's only a statue. He's got nothing much in his head, you know? He only knows what he's heard people say around him. But he hears us and he's answering. Let's try again.”

“You know Korean?” Joel said, sounding outraged and hopeless. But Paavo was playing again, the same question:
Where are you?

I heard this same big metal voice come out of my throat: “What shrill-voiced suppliant makes this eager cry?”

“Ah,” said Paavo. “Joel, pay attention. Write down everything Val says.”

The violin sang,
I am a friend, an adept, and your Master. Where are you, Defender?

And I answered, or the big voice answered, anyhow, “This palace of dim night . . . When I was at home, I was in a better place.”

How were you taken from that home?

“Imprisoned in the viewless winds, and blown with restless violence round about the pendant world.”

Oh, oh. “Round the world” sounded pretty serious. What if Jagiello was in China? And who in the world had been hanging around Jagiello's statue talking like this?

Paavo's violin sang,
Defender, what do you see?

I myself saw small ripples on the brownish surface of the lake, spreading from where one of the little kids was stirring the water with a stick. The huge voice poured out of me and all around me, the voice nobody else seemed to hear: “Night and silence . . . Out went the candle, and we were left darkling . . . Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!”

What do you feel?

“
Are you not mov'd when all the sway of earth shakes like a thing infirm?”

I hoped Paavo could make something out of all this because I sure couldn't. I felt stupid, being in the middle of whatever was going on but left out at the same time because I didn't understand it.

Paavo played,
What do you hear?

“This dreadful night that thunders, lightens, opens graves, roars as doth the lion in the Capitol.”

Ha!
Jagiello was talking Shakespeare! I'd read
Julius Caesar
in English class, and “the lion in the Capitol” is part of somebody's speech about the terrible storm that happens the night before Caesar gets killed. Jagiello was putting his answers together with the words he'd soaked up from the plays performed every summer in the open-air theater at the other end of the lake. I started to giggle.

The great voice pushed right on through me: “To the dread rattling thunder have I given fire . . . and rifted Jove's stout oak with his own bolt . . . the strong-based promontory have I made shake . . . and by the spurs pluck'd up the pine and cedar . . . graves at my command have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth by my so potent art.”

Graves again. I was completely baffled. Where could he be?

Especially when almost as an afterthought the huge voice added, “The rabblement hooted . . . I heard a bustling rumor like a fray.”

First silence, and then roaring noise, and someplace in there he could hear voices? I was as confused as ever and getting tired.

And what scents the air about you?
sang the violin. Which struck me as a funny question to a statue that had a solid bronze nose that no scent could possibly get into. It crossed my mind that I was completely nuts and hallucinating and probably actually in a mental ward someplace, just a poor cuckoo case like whatsername who wrote that book
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
.

“The fire and cracks of sulphurous roaring—”

Then there came this horrendous blast of noise like a hurricane. I reeled out of the chalk outline and crashed down on the pavement, with my palms stinging from the impact.

The noise came from the boom box that Tattoo had brought up behind us and turned on full blast. The three Princes had sneaked up on us in plain sight, in the park, and they had us surrounded.

 

5
Mugged

 

 

J
OEL DROPPED THE BOOK
he'd been writing in and jumped up, but the Princes moved fast and they ignored him and me completely. They closed in around Paavo, and there was a quick, heaving kind of struggle. Then Pins-and-Grins stepped back, holding Paavo's violin high in the air.

That stopped Joel in his tracks, his eyes on the instrument. Tattoo and the Chewer had Paavo's arms clamped behind his back.

The whole thing happened so fast it paralyzed me. I gaped.

Pins-and-Grins said, “You make any money playing today, old man? We're just poor students, we wouldn't mind if you'd sort of help us out.”

“Hey,” Joel said. What was he waiting for? I started to get up, though what I was going to do I didn't know. The suddenness, the violence so close and so fast had sort of shocked me flat, the way it can do if you're not used to that kind of thing. I had this slow, sluggish feeling in my arms and legs so that it was all of a sudden a huge production to get up off the pavement.

“Let him go!” Joel said loudly. Maybe he had the same heaviness on him that I had, maybe he couldn't move?

Or maybe he was plain scared. There were three of them, and they were bigger than he was except for Tattoo, who looked strong in that ropy way that small, skinny guys can be strong.

Paavo stood braced back in their grip. He looked awful—yellow in the face and blank like someone who'd been yanked out of a deep sleep.

“Not making out so good, eh?” Pins sneered. He looked at the violin. “What about this? Maybe it's a priceless Stradivarius or something?”

“Hell no,” Tattoo crowed. “It's a piece of junk, man! All he can get out of it is those weird noises we heard.”

“Oh, well, if it's just a piece of junk,” Pins said, and he turned and swung it hard against the edge of the pink marble plinth where Jagiello used to stand. The instrument exploded into fragments. Shards of wood hung from the scroll by the strings.

“Oops,” said Pins, right over a raw, deep gasp from Paavo. “Look what happened. But the way it sounded, I figured we just did you a favor, you know?”

Joel flung himself on Pins. With a lot of grunting and scrabbling the two of them went down. Tattoo let go of Paavo and danced around them, looking for a chance to clobber Joel with that huge radio of his.

Paavo, with the Chewer holding one of his arms twisted behind him, threw back his head and let out this terrible cry that made me go all lurchy inside.

But then I heard something else—a siren, a police siren! One of the police cars that patrol the park must be coming! Someone had reported something. We were going to be saved!

Tattoo hugged his blaster to his chest and took off, hollering back over his shoulder, “Come on, let's go!” Pins-and-Grins whomped Joel in the stomach and scrambled up. The Chewer gave Paavo a shove that sent him staggering. Then he and Pins-and-Grins careened out of the park after Tattoo, laughing and whooping as if it had all been a great game.

The sirens got louder and nearer and seemed to pass by us, following the Princes, and then they died away. Where were the police cars?

I climbed to my feet, all gulpy with shock.

The mommies were still sitting on the grass, and the kids were playing at the edge of the water. Nobody else had been flattened and battered but us three, nobody else had heard sirens.

Paavo had done it.

He stood sort of holding himself up on one of the lacy antique lampposts on the terrace. I felt terrible, and I was angry. At him. What kind of a wizard lets himself get roughed up like that by a bunch of creeps, anyway? I couldn't stand looking at Paavo and being sorry for him.

He spat out a word:
“Perkele!”

“What?” I said.

“It means ‘damn,' ” he said harshly.

“In Korean?” I was really half out of it, that's all I can say in my defense.

“In Finn.”

“Oh.”

“Ugh,” he said. He let go of the lamppost and worked his shoulders as if they ached. “Everybody okay?”

“I'm fine, I'm fine,” I said. “But you said they wouldn't come. What happened?”

He looked bitterly disgusted. “I got careless.
Damn it.
I thought I had them all fixed, I gave them plenty to do. I been going around the city today, playing some strength back into some of the markers and guardians they been fooling with. The kraken's had them neutralizing all kinds of things. I thought if I put most of it right, they'd be sent out again with the spray can, hammers, and pliers—some of your markers are pretty easy to wreck. It doesn't take much, it doesn't take long, not as long as to fix it again. But long enough, I thought. I was wrong. The kraken has a stronghold here already.”

He coughed.

“Are you all right?” I said. Maybe they'd really hurt him. I felt scared and furious.

“Tired,” he said. “They didn't do me any real damage personally. But it's always bad to get interrupted like that in the middle of things. Also I think I did too much this morning. I'm not used to conditions here. My conditions.” He looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. “I should have waited.”

He bent over like an old man, I mean a really old man, picked up the bow he'd been using, and sat down on the wall, shaking his head.

“Too impatient, too quick, always the same thing. Damn. If I wasn't already tired out from this morning's work, I'd have felt them coming, I wouldn't have let them catch me like that. I'd have been faster when they moved in, I might have stopped them. Shaa.” He shoved one hand through his hair and looked at us. “You sure you're both all right?”

Joel nodded. His lips looked white. He got up carefully. He still didn't ask anything. I would have admired him for that, except that I was so upset. So I did what you do when you're upset, I guess. I turned on him.

“God, Joel, why didn't you jump in sooner? If only you'd done something right away—”

Ignoring me, he walked over, limping a little, and looked down at the smashed violin. Then he stood in front of Paavo, who was fumbling around with his cigarettes.

“Look,” Joel said in this low, trembly voice, “I'm sorry. If I'd realized—”

Paavo inhaled and blew smoke through his nostrils. “Realized what?” he said. “You still don't really believe even what you saw, do you? Don't apologize, you did fine. I'm the only one who knows all about what goes on here, so I'm the only one to blame, okay? And I don't like blame, so I better do something to fix it, yah? First thing, let's see what we got before the Princes came.”

We looked for Joel's history text. He'd been taking Jagiello's dictation on the inside back cover. The book was gone. The Princes must have gotten it.

“Shakespeare,” I said. “It was Shakespeare and it was all about darkness and roaring and stuff.”

“Yes, but that's not exact enough,” Paavo said. “If we could just try a little more—” You could see him stiffening against the impulse to turn toward the ruined violin.

“Listen,” Joel said. “Maybe I can do something, um, I mean there's a possibility—I don't know exactly what you were—what we were doing, what you were playing just now. But could you take up where we left off if you had another fiddle?”

Paavo looked at his bow. “Well,” he said, “maybe we could do something, I don't know how much. There's no time to do the job right.” Now he did glance over at the smashed violin and quickly away again. I knew without being told that he'd worked with it for years, filling it with magic one thin layer at a time.

“Still, with a decent instrument, maybe we could do something tomorrow. Today is shot anyhow. But a good fiddle is expensive, isn't it? I don't have a bank account. I didn't know to fix that up. You got something in mind?”

Joel said, “Let's go to my house. I think I have something there you could use.”

Paavo nodded and got up. He took the smashed remains of the old violin, laid them gently in the battered black case, and went to the edge of the water. I didn't watch what he did—it had made me feel terrible to see how lovingly he'd handled the broken bits—but I think he sank the case and the wreckage in the lake.

He rejoined us with just his bow in his hand. We trudged out of the park to the East Side and got a cab. Joel said he had money. We headed uptown.

Paavo sat in the middle of the back seat. He didn't smoke, maybe because the cab had a sign in it, “This is my home. I don't come fill your living room with smoke and butts and ashes.” Something like that.

Joel was rubbing his left hand, stretching the fingers out and pulling on them gingerly.

“Let's see your hand,” Paavo said.

He took Joel's hand and felt it all over and even reached up under Joel's sleeve a little. “What did you do, punch him?”

Joel nodded, looking miserable and mad.

“Next time bite. Kick, use your knees, your skull. They're harder and stronger than hands. Anyhow, you just bruised yourself a little, you'll be okay.”

“For the guitar, maybe,” Joel said. “What about playing the violin?”

“I thought you didn't play,” Paavo said.

“I don't, not anymore,” Joel muttered, looking at the floor of the cab. “I mean I used to, but I quit. I'm thinking of going back to it again.”

“No real problem with the hand,” Paavo said. “How long since you played?”

“A few years.”

Paavo thought. He said, “Depends what you want to do. A concert career, solo performance—you've lost some time.”

“I know that,” Joel snapped. “I didn't say I
was
going back. I said I was thinking about it. Right on this corner is fine,” he told the driver, and we piled out in front of a superluxury apartment building on Park Avenue.