Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (20 page)

The boy, exhausted, curls up in a pile of blankets and drifts off to sleep.

Awake!

Awake?

Only upon awakening did Heraclix realize that he had been unconscious. But was that even possible? Could the undead sleep? Could the dead wake? Or had a black veil been drawn over all of his senses? He opened his eyes a bit wider and felt gravity pull him from below.
That direction
, he thought as his sight slowly focused,
must be down
.

He was on his back, but whatever he was laying on was unstable, lolling his body with a gentle rocking.

His eyesight was blurred. He reached up with heavy hands and rubbed his eyes, trying to clear a milky smudge from his vision. The smudge remained. He realized that he was looking up at the sky. The milky smudge was the moon glowing behind the clouds, like a ghost passing behind a thin, gray curtain.

A ghost.

He shivered, not from fear of spirits, but because he was wet—no, drenched—and the night air was cool.

Recollection filtered back into him as water drained off his body, a bizarre trading scheme: droplets and streams for memes and memory. He sat up, water cascading from his skin and clothing, the undead raised from a watery grave.

Looking around him, he discovered that he was sitting on a flat barge floating down a river. But this was not the River Styx. No, the river into which he had fallen was
not
this river. Though there must be some sort of passageway between the two, since he had hurled himself into one yet emerged from the other.

His feet had been dangling over the edge, in the water. Behind him stood a man, one hand holding a cowl close around him, shielding Heraclix from the cold, the other hand holding a staff from which dangled a dimly glowing spherical lamp. Only the bottom half of the face was visible under the hood. The chin was wrinkled and covered with a wispy grey beard. Behind the hooded old man a bundle of cloth rustled and yawned.

“You are alive,” the old man said in a voice that squeaked ever so slightly. “You are lucky we found you when we did. You would have drowned, otherwise.”

“Where are we?” Heraclix asked.

“On the Danube,” the old man said, “west of Pest, heading downstream.”

Finally
, thought Heraclix,
a stroke of good luck
.

“And where were you headed, friend?” the old man asked.

“Szentendre.”

“Ah, then you will not be far, once we arrive in Pest.”

“How long until we reach Pest?” Heraclix asked.

“Mere hours, my friend. We should be there for the sunrise.”

“And what compels you to travel to Pest?” Heraclix asked.

“Nothing compels us, friend. That is, in fact, the very reason we were able to stop and pull you from the drink.”

The man waited for a response, a query of some sort, but Heraclix remained silent, so he carried on.

“My grandson and I, we have no home. We have lost the others in our family to the ravages of war and disease. We felt compelled, as you say it, to make a living, at first, to work for the good things in life, establish a home, and so forth. Then we realized that we had the good things, such as each other. And we found that we had a home wherever we were at the moment. So we left all that, sold what we had, and bought this little barge. We travel where we wish when we wish. We trade up and down the river for the things we need, and we are never in want, sometimes fishing,
sometimes delivering goods, always in good company with each other. We have no itinerary, else you would be dead and sinking to the bottom. The captains of other boats would have paid you heed only long enough to check your pockets for money. Then they would have rolled you right back into the water. They don’t have much time to meddle in the affairs of a man already dead. After all, a dead man isn’t of much use to those seeking riches, unless his riches are with him.”

Heraclix carefully, secretly, checked his pouch and found that it was soggy, but still full of coin. They hadn’t tried to rob him, though they might have, had they wished to do so.

“A live man, however, might be of more use to those seeking riches,” Heraclix said.

The old man laughed much like a mouse hiccups. “We’ve heard there is a reward out upstream for the capture of a giant,” he said.

The old man removed his hood to show a bald scalp, save for a ring of long wispy hair falling down from above his ears. “We have no desire to turn you in. If we did, we’d be heading to Vienna. Besides, me and Alva here wouldn’t be up to the task. Neither of us is strong enough to take you in, and we don’t have the stomach to sell someone into slavery. No, we enjoy our freedom,” he smiled, “and grant others the same privilege.”

Heraclix felt movement in his cloak.

“I trust them,” Pomp whispered into Heraclix’s ear. “They help you, helped you. They are good.”

Heraclix and Pomp disembarked several miles north and west of Pest. Heraclix slipped up the muddy embankment and waved goodbye as the pair floated downstream. He turned and walked into the woods as the glow of the rising sun creased the horizon.

“It’s tempting,” Heraclix said to Pomp, who had made herself visible to him there in the woods, where no strangers would see her as they traveled, “to live like that: free of worry, no schedule, no obligations, no hurry—”

“No desire,” Pomp interrupted.

“What?”

“No desire. They think they want for nothing, but they want nothing. They fear nothing. They are boring.”

“This is something new to you, isn’t it, Pomp?”

“Being bored?”

“No, having to think about these things.”

She pursed her lips shut, petulant.

“It’s okay to admit that maybe you’ve been thinking too much,” he teased, referring to her frequent jabs at him.

“They think they have everything,” she said, ignoring the comment, though she caught Heraclix’s intent, “so nothing can be rewarding to them. No reward without challenges. No comfort without fear. No happiness without sadness. Everything is flat.”

“You have been thinking . . .” Heraclix stopped in his tracks, listening. “Wait,” he whispered. “What is that?”

Pomp flies up into the topmost branches of a tall yew tree for a better view. She sees four figures spying on Heraclix. They peer out from behind a large clump of sprawling oaks, signaling one to another with a series of gestures and short, sharp grunts.

Two of them, crouched on the verge of the clump of trees, crouch, preparing to spring.

“Heraclix! To your left!” Pomp cries out.

All four look up at her and growl. They resemble boars, with blunted snouts and dangerous-looking tusks curving out like sabers from under their snarling lips. But these pigs, more massive than a man, stand on their rear hoofs, and their fore-legs end in a single sharp claw, like a stiletto. They are covered in rust-colored fur, and their eyes glow like coals in the shadows of the morning light.

Two of them climb the trees, springing up the outstretched tree limbs toward Pomp. Surely, these are demons that followed Heraclix and Pomp from the abyss to retrieve them and drag them back to Hell. She goes invisible, but she thinks the creatures can still see her, as they pursue her all the more doggedly. But Pomp isn’t about to submit to them and go back through Hell. Her mind buzzes with fear at the thought.

Or is it fear? She looks around, then above, and finds the source of the buzzing that she had thought was just in her head.

Just above her, a large wasp nest is crawling with insects. She flies above the structure, much larger than herself, and tears at the paper that holds it to a thin branch. The wasps are confused, then
agitated, by their invisible assailant. The nearest swine-demon is almost within arm’s reach of Pomp when the nest falls into its mouth. It bites down hard, destroying the nest and unleashing a small cloud of furious wasps, which sting the pig-thing’s mouth, snout, and head repeatedly. This occupies it long enough for Pomp to break off a dead branch. She drives it into the demon-swine’s left eye, causing her pursuer to fall backward out of the tree. The falling body catches its companion mid-chest, and the two tumble down through crackling branches with cracking of bones onto the hard earth and roots beneath.

They can be hurt, then!

The other two tackled Heraclix, knocking him to the ground with suprising force. One pinned his shoulders to the ground while the other gored him in the side of the chest, thrusting its tusk in where a heart should have been. The pain was intense and real. Self-loathing washed over him, a sense of inadequacy at his past inability to save his daughter and his wife. He thought of the condemned in Hell, of their sufferings, and felt sure that he would be brought to that same place to suffer that same fate, no matter what he did. His utmost desire at that moment was to simply give up and give in. Then he looked up to the trees and saw Pomp repel her opponent. It fell through the trees as if in slow-motion, snapping branches, bouncing until it hit its comrade and sent them both to the ground.

Seeing this caused him a glimmer of concern for her, a ray of tentative hope. He kneed the demon-swine next to him in the jaw, knocking it off of him, then swung his feet up over his head to kick the other one in the snout, freeing himself from the demon’s claws. He tore at the face of the one that had gored him, gouging great pieces of pork from its snout then grabbing a tusk and yanking it from its roots. The pig fell to the ground, then dissipated in a gaseous wisp.

The other had regained its feet by then and was circling Heraclix, looking for an opening to strike.

“Tell your master,” Heraclix said, “that he won’t have the pleasure of our presence in Hell today.”

The demon, seeing an opening, leaped at Heraclix.

The golem, having feigned the weakness in the defense, caught the pig-man mid-air, the blue left hand clasping the demon’s throat.

The demon wheezed and rasped until it caught enough breath to speak. Its voice was that of a petulant little girl, a disquieting contrast to the fierce demon’s face. “Do what you will. I’ll see you again in Hell, brother!” The demon tittered until Heraclix crushed the beast’s trachea. The creature disolved into mist, leaving the smell of sulfur on the air.

Heraclix fell to his knees, holding his side where the tusk had penetrated.

“That took everything I had in me. I am so . . . tired.”

Pomp patted him on the head. She made herself visible, but he was staring at the ground, not giving her his full attention.

“You have more in you. If not, you’d stop complaining. Come, Heraclix. We are close to Szentendre. Very close,” she said with a smile, hoping to encourage him. “We must go. We go through Hell, then we go to Szentendre, right? Isn’t that what the fly-devil tells us?”

“And another devil just told me I was its brother.”

“You don’t believe it, do you?” Pomp said.

“I don’t know what I believe any more.”

“You are sad,” Pomp said. “When you are sad, you must hope.”

“For what?”

“To know who you are!” Pomp said. “Besides, this isn’t just about you!”

“No one cares about me,” Heraclix said. “I have no one left. I let them all die: Rhoda, Elsie, even myself.”

“Then you must hope to see them again. Don’t you think they would hope to see you . . . again . . . if you had . . . died?” Pomp looked a bit puzzled, but pleased with the words she spoke.

He looked up to the sky. “I suppose they would.”

“There, you see? They have hope that you can share!”

Heraclix stood, staggered for a moment, then regained his balance. “Yes, Pomp. I think you may be right.”

“Listen to little Pomp! She hopes for you, too.”

The golem looked at her with tired eyes, but the hint of a smile was beginning to show on his face.

“Then let’s go on, Pomp. To Szentendre!”

C
HAPTER
13

H
eraclix’s senses came back to him as they approached Szentendre. He had no idea how long he had been traveling. Vigor was slowly filtering back into his veins. He felt, as he came closer, a faint sense of familiarity punctuated by powerful impressions of déjà vu. The village was bucolic, a quaint picture of peasant life. The sun shone down, not harshly, and the skies were as blue as he could ever remember them. A gentle breeze brushed his skin.