Monsters and Magicians (3 page)

Shaking his head, Fitz set about doing the necessary—first cleaning out the firepit, gathering squaw-wood and laying a new fire, then fully dressing the ruminant and the two birds for cooking. He was not in the least worried about Sir Gautier for, if any man could take care of himself in this primitive world, it was certainly that doughty, medieval Anglo-Norman warrior. As for Cool Cat, strands of baby-blue fur showed that the ensorcelled, one-time bopster musician had slept at least once in the rock overhang and

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most likely was out hunting, his lion-body requiring sizable amounts of high-protein food.

While the wood burned down into cooking-coals, Fitz unloaded the bike and side-car, sorted out the supplies and equipment and stored it in the cave with the shrouded bike at the rear, for his previous sojourn had emphasized the impracticality of trying to use the bike in the broken, rocky, heavily wooded or swampy country that lay beyond to east, west or north. His required journeying must be on shank's mare, perforce.

Taking into account the Norman knight's ingrained senses of honor, duty and loyalty, Fitz doubted that his liegeman had gone far from the rendezvous point and likely would be returning soon, so he would just await that return. Even had he not had a plentitude of supplies, the land abounded with game of all types and descriptions, berries, nuts, wild fruits and other edible wild plants, with springs and brooks and rills almost everywhere. The rocks still were lying nearby with which he could partially barricade the rear area of the overhang at nights so that, with the banked fire and the weapons he always took into his sleeping bag, he felt himself safe from nocturnal predators even without Sir Gautier or the baby-blue lion nearby.

By the time he had done to his satisfaction all that was needful, the first logs were become coals, so Fitz spitted one of the pheasants over the firepit, nestling two canteen cups of water near the edges—one for boullion, one for tea—then sat before the coal-bed watching the bird cook. The other pheasant and the dressed hoofed-beast had been hung high enough to be safe from the predations of anything save insects.

"Odd," he thought, "but after the weeks here, then the last couple of days . . . and the nights— those beautiful, rapturous, very strenuous nights— with Danna; after the stresses and strains of today, even, I'm still not really tired. Used to be, two or three years ago, before all of this started, a normal day of peddling those damned vacuum cleaners would often leave me exhausted. I burned more than one TV dinner through just nodding off in my chair while the blasted thing was cooking."

As he sat, relaxed, watching the spitted fowl brown over the bed of coals, the first tenuous wisps of steam arise from the kidney-shaped steel cups of crystal water, his mind went racing back to the bad old times, when war and mischance had slain his son, made a hopeless alcoholic of his wife, driven his daughter away from their home and then brought her back—drug-addicted, diseased and pregnant. Driving drunk, his wife had had an accident fatal to her and the unborn child. His daughter had been rendered a human vegetable—kept alive only by machines and seeming miles of tubing—and when the greedy physicians and even greedier hospital had made of him a virtual pauper, had taken the worth of the house and everything else he had managed to accumulate throughout a lifetime of work, he had made the opportunity to do that which he had felt he must do: had granted his daughter, the husk that once had contained her, the boon of a dignified death.

They had branded him "murderer," of course, but everyone had seemed to feel sorry for him—a good, decent, hard-working sales executive who had suf-

fered far more than most, for a very long time and completely through no fault of his own—and his very last assets had secured him the services of a competent attorney who had managed to convince the court and jury that so much suffering over so protracted a period had finally brought about a moment of insanity. But the verdict had cost him his job, his position, his career. They had been kind about it: they did not fire Fitz, just retired him, complete with gold watch and pension, for stated "reasons of health." But the sizable loan he had felt constrained to take out with the firm's credit union had had to be repaid, of course, and the monthly installments left damned little pension on which to try to live.

With his record of a felony trial and a finding of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, he quickly discovered that he might as well forget employment in his previous field and in most others for which he was otherwise eminently qualified. He wound up selling vacuum cleaners on a straight-commission basis out of a rusty clunker of a car, living in a rented, ill-furnished and dilapidated tract-house in a rundown neighborhood, his only companion being Tom, his big grey tomcat, last survivor of his one-time happy family, last reminder of the good times that then seemed gone forever.

Then, to pile Ossa atop Pelion, a sadistic juvenile delinquent armed with at cheap, battered, .22-caliber rifle had senselessly shot Tom. Gutshot and dying in hideous agony, the creature had still managed to make it back to the foot of the crumbling, concrete rear stairs, where Fitz had found his body, the eyes just beginning to assume the glaze of death.

In the back yard of the rented house was a peculiar, oval mound of overgrown earth, said to have existed as long as white men had inhabited the area. Tom had liked in life to snooze atop the mound under a bush, and so, when the grieving Fitz had washed and arranged the stiffening body, had shrouded it in his best, threadbare bath towel, he had sought out a rusty spade and begun to dig a cat-size grave atop the mound, under the bush.

But only a foot or so down into the black loam he had struck stone. Afraid to risk the flaking blade of the venerable spade in any attempt to pry up the obstruction, he had essayed to dig around it, only to discover that it was more than just a stray boulder beneath the soil of that mound. At the end of his labor, he had disclosed a rectangle of worked stones, precisely fitted one to the other by a skilled stonemason. And fitted within that rectangle was a much larger single stone that, he had quickly found, was so balanced as to pivot up and down within its lodgement.

His curiosity piqued, equipped with a flashlight and the old snake-gun from out his tackle box, fortified with a couple of fingers of neat Irish whiskey, he had entered the damp, earthy-smelling stone vault, descended stairs with peculiarly small, shallow treads and arrived at last in a bare, stone-walled chamber well below the surface. Careful search having revealed nothing of any sort in the crypt, his flashlight beginning to dim, Fitz had started back up the slimy stairs, lost footing and balance and felt himself falling backward.

Steeled for the impact of his unprotected head against the hard, cold stone, he had instead landed

with a breathless thump on a hard, but tvarm, surface. Even before he opened his eyes he was certain that he was badly injured: lying, despite sensations of warmth and dryness, on that damp, cold floor of the crypt and hallucinating from trauma and pain. Then he became dead certain of the fact.

His vision and other senses indicated that he lay on the sand of a sunlit beach . . . well, at least most of him did. His eyes* testament was that his legs ended abruptly a bit above the knees, beyond the spot whereon his thighs rested athwart a near-buried, weathered and bleached log of driftwood. But he still could move the unseen limbs, could feel with them the cold, slimy stones whereon they rested.

When his mind had ceased to whirl, his incipient hysteria been forced down, Fitz had slid forward far enough to make the discovery that just beyond the log was an invisible portal of some kind—on the one side the cold, stygian stone crypt, on the other the warm, sunny beach—and solid as the stonework appeared to his eyes, he still was able to pass back and forth through it as freely as through empty air.

That discovery made, he decided to just accept the patent impossibility of the situation, to save the reasoning-out of it for another time. After carefully marking the location of the invisible portal on the thick, heavy log, he set out to explore the strange new world.

It had not been until he had left the beach and climbed the high dunes that he found any single trace of mankind. There, partially buried in the sand, he had found a long, wooden ship or rather what was left of one—masts all snapped off, sand completely filling its forecastle and part-decked hull.

However, when he had forced open two doors below the quarterdeck, he had found some artifacts—a big knife and a small, copper cup—in the first. Behind the second door, in the larger of the two cabins, he had found more artifacts . . . and treasure, real treasure, a cour bouilli casket almost filled with ancient coins of gold.

"And that," he muttered to himself as he again turned the spitted fowl, "was when all hell really started popping."

Knowing next to nothing about coins, he had taken a double handful of the ones he had found, just what his pockets could easily hold, back to his own world with him, hoping to get only the bullion value of them, perhaps as much as fifteen hundred dollars— enough to pay off the balance of his ailing automotive abortion, get some needed repairs and, possibly, a decent-looking suit from the Goodwill store.

He had driven the miles into the city of his former residence and taken the coins into the shop of a dealer, a retired Army NCO he knew vaguely from the VFW. Then he had come within an ace of actually fainting, right there in the coin shop, upon being given a rough estimate of the true values of the coins—mostly from the Mediterranean littoral, none of them minted less than a full millennium past though some were centuries older than even that, and all in unbelievably good condition for such archaic rareties. —

Then it had all just snowballed, happening almost too fast for comprehension. Believing Fitz's spur-of-the-moment fabrication that the coins had been the bequest of some deceased uncle, Gus Tolliver had

taken advantage of his guild's far-flung network of contacts to begin to sell and mail-auction the exceedingly rare collector gold pieces all over the world, taking a fee of twenty percent of the profits and giving Fitz the remaining eighty.

The very first thing that Fitz had done with his newcome wealth was to buy the rental house and land outright. Then he had hired a general contractor to convert the decaying edifice into a small luxury home with attached double garage to house the two new vehicles with which he had quickly replaced his clunker.

Next he had paid off the balance of the credit-union loan, which meant that he then began to receive his full retirement pension from his former firm—not that he had any need of so trifling a sum anymore, with money pouring in from sales of the forty pounds or so of golden coins from the casket in the wrecked ship.

In his by then copious spare time, he had spent many full days in what he had come to think of as the sand world, and further exploration of the old ship had disclosed another and much larger cabin behind the two smaller ones, extending completely across the beam of the wrecked vessel. With bits of furniture from the other two cabins and modern items laboriously brought down the narrow, ever-treacherous stone stairs Fitz had fashioned of the sterncabin a moderately comfortable pied-a-terre in this world of sea and sand, birds and sea creatures but with no recent trace of man.

The dunes seemed to march on into infinity to the east, the west and the north, as far as he had walked.

It had not been until he had thought to buy and wrestle down the stairs an off-road motorcycle that he had begun to learn more of the sand world, had seen the long, broad Pony Plain north of the dunes and glimpsed the succession of dark-green, forested hills rising on the other side.

He had first brought firearms into the seemingly uninhabited sand world because no matter where he went or travelled within it, he experienced the unpleasant, uncanny feeling that he was being watched, being observed. Even within the locked, barred and shuttered sterncabin he often felt that he was not truly alone, that someone or some thing was invisibly with him.

Trouble was brewing in the other, more mundane world, too, coming fast to a roiling boil for him and Gus Tolliver. First came a succession of break-ins at Fitz's house during various of his sojourns in the sand world; although little of any real value was ever taken—save the two artifacts, the knife and the copper cup which had been his first finds aboard the beached ship—he had liked so little the idea of strangers poking about his home that he had taken extreme and very expensive steps to harden up the place and its grounds—steel-sheathed solid doors, special windows and state-of-the-art locks, high cyclone fencing for the perimeter of the entire property topped with barbed wire, floodlights, trip-flares, banshee-loud alarms, the works, the best that money could buy.

Gus Tolliver, too, had had at least one break-in at his shop. Although a good number of silver coins had lain exposed in glass cases and there had been some modern gold coins in the big, old-fashioned, deliber-

ately visible safe that had been skillfully opened, then just as skillfully reclosed, none of this had been so much as touched. Despite intensive, destructive searchings, the location of his hidden safe had never been found. But what had upset the old soldier more than this had been when word had been privately passed to him that certain governmental agencies had been putting pressure on officials of his bank to disclose certain information of a private, financial nature.

That had been when he first had confided in Fitz of his fierce distrust of certain bureaus of the government he had served so long and so faithfully. Furthermore, he had announced his avowed intent of foiling them all.

Fitz had heard his partner out, sympathized aloud, and then simply forgotten the matter, figuring that it had been just one more instance of a disgruntled taxpayer blowing off a little steam. Months later, to his sorrow, he discovered that Tolliver had been serious, dead serious, and that his manner of foiling the Internal Revenue Service had tarred them both with the same brush in the mind of one Agent Henry Fowler Blutegel.