“You know what’s going on?”
She nodded.
Rudy looked down at her doubtfully, not quite satisfied and sensing something amiss. Still, in one real sense this girl was Ingold’s contact with reality, which in spite of his obvious shrewdness and charm the old man sorely needed. And yet—and yet—Troubled visions of the old man stumbling out of a blazing aura of silver light returned to him as he started up the steps, Gil climbing at his heels. He swung around on her abruptly, to ask, “Do you believe him?”
But before Gil could answer, the cabin door opened again, and Ingold re-emerged onto the narrow porch, a flushed, sleepy infant in his arms. “This is Prince Altir Endorion,” he introduced.
Gil and Rudy came up the last few steps to join him, the question left unanswered. On the whole, Gil disliked children, but, like most hard-hearted women, she had a soft spot for the very young and helpless. She touched the round pink cheek with gingerly reverence, as if afraid the child would shatter on contact. “He’s very beautiful,” she whispered.
“And very wet,” Ingold replied, and led the way back into the house.
It was Rudy who ended up doing the changing as the only one with experience in the task, while Gil made a lunch of beef stew and coffee on the kerosene stove, and Ingold investigated the light switches to see how electricity worked. Rudy noticed that, among other things, Gil had brought an extra can of kerosene; though, if he recalled, the little stove had been out of sight beneath a counter when he’d first come in, and there had been no signs that the house had been entered in years.
How had Ingold known?
Gil came over to him and set a styrofoam cup of steaming black liquid on the floor at his side. She watched Rudy playing tickle-me with Tir for some moments, smiling, then said, “You know, you’re probably the first man I’ve ever seen who’d volunteer for diaper duty.”
“Hell,” Rudy told her, grinning. “With six younger brothers and sisters, you get used to it.”
“I suppose so.” She tested one of the wobbly chairs, then sat in it, her arm resting over the back. “I only had the one sister, and she’s just two years younger than I am, so I never knew.”
Rudy glanced up at her. “Is she like you?” he asked.
Gil shook her head ruefully. “No. She’s pretty. She’s twenty-two and already getting her second divorce.”
“Yeah, my next-next younger sister’s like that,” Rudy said thoughtfully, fishing in the pocket of his discarded jacket for his motorcycle keys, which Tir received with blissful fascination and proceeded to try to eat. “She’s seventeen years old, and she’s been around more than I have.” He caught Gil’s raised eyebrow and askance look, and followed her eye to the decoration on the back of his jacket—skulls, roses, black flames, and all. “Aah, that,” he said, a little embarrassed at it “Picasso had a Blue Period. I had my Pachuco Period.”
“Oh,” Gil said distastefully, not believing him. “Are you in a gang?”
Rudy sat back on his heels, hearing the tone in her voice. “What the hell do you think I do, live in Fontana and go out on raids?”
Since that was exactly what she thought he did, she said, “No. I mean—” She broke off in confusion. “You mean you painted that yourself?”
“Sure,” Rudy said, reaching over to spread out the offending garment with its elaborate symbology and multiple grease stains. “I’d do it better now—I’d have different lettering, and no fire; the fire makes it look kind of trashy. That is, if I did it at all. It’s kind of tacky,” he admitted. “But it’s good advertising.”
“You mean you make your living at that?”
“Oh, yeah. For now, anyway. I work at Wild David Wilde’s Paint and Body Shop in Berdoo, and painting’s a hell of a lot easier than body work, let me tell you.”
Gil contemplated the jacket for a moment longer, her chin resting on her folded hands on the back of the chair. Though morbid, violent, and weird, the design was well executed and argued a certain ability and sensitivity of style. “Then you’re not a biker yourself?”
“I ride a motorcycle,” Rudy said. “I like bikes, work on them. I’m not in a gang, though. You can run yourself into real trouble that way.” He shrugged. “Those guys are really heavy-duty. I couldn’t do it.”
Ingold came back in, having traced the power cables to their sources and explored the land around the little house as if seeking something in the dusty silence of the groves. Gil dished up canned beef stew and bread. As they ate, Rudy listened to the girl and the wizard talk and wondered again how much this thin, spooky-looking woman believed the old man, and how much of her conversation was tactful humoring of an old, well-loved, and totally crazy friend.
It was impossible to tell. That she was fond of him was obvious; her guarded stiffness relaxed, and with liveliness her face was almost pretty. But it was Ingold who dominated and led, she who followed, and there were times when Rudy wondered if she was as crazy as the old man.
“I never understood that about the memories,” Gil was saying, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “You and Eldor talked about it, but I don’t understand.”
“No one really understands it,” Ingold said. “It’s a rare phenomenon, far rarer than wizardry. To my knowledge, in all the history of the Realm it has appeared in only three noble houses and two peasant ones. We don’t know what it is or why it works, why a son will suddenly recall events that happened to his grandfather, when the grandfather never exhibited such a talent in his life, why it seems to descend only in the male line, why it skips one generation, or two, or five, why some sons will remember certain events and be ignorant of others that their brothers recall with exacting clarity.”
“I could be like a double-recessive gene,” Gil began thoughtfully.
“A what?”
“A genetic trait … ” She stopped. “Jeez, you people don’t understand genetics, do you?”
“As in horse breeding?” Ingold asked with a smile.
She nodded. “Sort of. It’s how you breed for a trait, how you get throwbacks, the more you inbreed. I’ll explain it sometime.”
“You mean,” Rudy said, drawn into the conversation in spite of himself, “Pugsley here is supposed to remember stuff that happened to his dad and his grandpa and stuff like that?” He jiggled the baby sitting in his lap.
“He should,” Ingold said. “But it’s a gamble, for we do not know for certain if—and what—he will remember. His father remembers—remembered—” There was a slight shift, almost a crack, in the wizard’s rusty voice as he changed the tense. “—things that happened at the time of their most remote ancestor, Dare of Renweth. And, Gil, it was Dare of Renweth who was King at the time of the rising of the Dark Ones.”
“The who?” Rudy asked.
“The Dark Ones.” The touch of that heavy-lidded, blue gaze gave Rudy the uncomfortable feeling of having his mind read. “The enemy whom we flee.” His eyes shifted back to Gil, the light from the western window slanting strong and yellow on the sharp bones of her face. “Unfortunately, I fear the Dark Ones know it. They know many things—their power is different from mine, of a different nature, as if from a different source. I believe their attacks were concentrated on the Palace at Gae because they knew that Eldor and Tir were dangerous to them, that the memories the King and Prince held were the clue to their ultimate defeat. They have—eliminated—Eldor. Now only Tir is left.”
Gil cocked her head and glanced across at the pink-cheeked baby, gravely manipulating a bunch of motorcycle keys in Rudy’s lap, then at the wizard, profiled against the cracked and grimy glass of the window through which the hills could be seen, desolate, isolated, dyed gold by the deep slant of the light. Her voice was quiet. “Could they have followed you here?”
Ingold looked up at her quickly, his azure-crystal eyes meeting hers, then shifting away. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said mildly. “They have no notion that the Void exists, much less how to cross it.”