I Get No Kick from Champagne

DR WANG HELPS (4)

“What must we discuss?” I snapped. I was eager to start my self-sacrificing and save the world. A world. Any world. I’d clearly lost my marbles. Yet, amazingly enough, that fact didn’t bother me.

Dr Wang raised his eyebrows. They were remarkably expressive eyebrows. Anyone else would have had to threaten me with physical damage to get the same effect. I felt suitably chastised.

“I feel,” he said, his accent stronger than normal, “that I must try and improve the odds that you come back alive. Or at least, that you have the choice to come back alive. So I might come with you. But first I must find the facts. Truth is all, you know.” He looked at me earnestly through his bifocals, strongly Scandinavian in his earnest desire to do good. I mistrusted his attitude at once.

“What if other elves or aliens or werewolves need medical treatment while you’re away?” I asked nastily.

He gave me a cold look, and I remembered to be afraid of him. “Ask him why he was attacked,” he ordered, jerking his head towards Tiltheus. I prepared to be translator again.

“I was travelling to Darthai, the capital of the kingdom, carrying something from the high Hegemon to the Queen,” Til explained, when I had told him what Dr Dictator wanted.

“What were you carrying?” asked the doctor.

“I cannot say,” replied Tiltheus, hesitating. “It is . . . . . . . very secret, and vital that I put it into the hands of the Queen herself.”

Dr Wang looked skeptical. “Indeed!” he said dryly, both syllables loaded with sarcasm.

I gave him what I hoped was a quelling look. “And then?” I asked, in Greek. Mr Wizard could follow as best he could. If he was going to come with us, he had better start learning the language.

Tiltheus began his tale. “I spent the night at an inn, not far from where you found me,” he said, gesturing towards the cupboard and what lay beyond. “In the morning, I set off towards the capital. I hoped to reach that small town you can see in the distance, and spend the night there. I was travelling . . . . . . . . .

He’d known quite clearly the danger to himself if he was caught with what he was bearing to the Queen. He’d known that if the enemy got even a whiff of his cargo, his life would be in danger. Worse, his soul might be lost too. Robbers and bandits would take his pack, and perhaps slit his throat, and he would perish, though his soul would go to the Light, where he would be received into the embraces of the God and the Goddess. But if he was caught by the enemy, he would be perverted to the Dark, and his soul would be taken, and he would never be received into the Light. He knew the risks, and he took them willingly.

As he came over the rise – he could see the town where he would spend the night in the far distance, the sun glinting off gold statues brilliant against the green of the tarnished copper roofs of the temples and the Archon’s palace – he heard the sound of the dark ones’ steeds. The Darklings treated their horses surprisingly well, on the whole. They were too valuable not too. It was their slaves that they beat and tortured. They enjoyed bending their living possessions to their will, as painfully as possible. They drew great pleasure from turning all to their perversions.

He left the road, and hastened towards a copse in the low point of the valley. He didn’t gallop because the dark ones’ ears were very sharp – after all, they had once been in the light, beings like himself, in the favour of the most high Goddess and Her Consort. He brushed his hand over his own mount’s nose, to stop it betraying him with a whinny or neigh. True horses were terrified by the fell emanations of the dark ones, and often they would betray themselves inadvertently.

It was a large party – he estimated that there were perhaps a hundred mounted warriors, and an equal number of slaves. As they went past, he could feel the sinister enchantment and seductive glamour of the warriors as well as the psychic bonds they had placed on their menials. His heart was wrung with pity for those who had fallen into the grasp of the Darklings, yet he was determined that he himself would not fall into their clutches. Rather than that, he would take his own life. He fingered the sharp edge and thorny point of his dagger, ready to cut his own throat if it were necessary. But it was not. The troop of dark elves disappeared over the rise he’d just come down, and he waited until the sounds of their passage had completely faded away before coming out of the copse and making his way back up the hill to the road.

His relief had made him careless. There were other dangers in the world than the dark ones. He heard the whistling sound of a plunging kribothneion too late, and though he leapt off his horse and drew his sword to defend himself, the beast’s massive talons scored his body. Luckily for him, but not for his horse, the kribothneion turned away from the dangerous, sword-wielding prey, and attacked the easier target. As he fell, weak with blood loss and horror, he heard a scream of terror and pain, and then the sickening sound of bones crunching and rending flesh. He wept for his horse, which had been his friend – intelligent and good-natured and glad to see him after he’d been away. He would miss him

“ . . . . . . . . . And then you found me.” Tiltheus’s face had paled with the memories of his dangers, and there was grief there too, as he remembered his loss.

Without thinking about it, I reached over and squeezed his shoulder, looking solemnly at him. I didn’t know whether the loss of a horse felt quite the same as the loss of a dog, but I remember to this day how it felt when Jacko, my fox terrier, had to be put down because he the pain he was enduring as the tumour grew inside him. Grandpa had wanted to do it for me—take him down to the vet for the long green injection—but, though I was tempted (I’m not very brave), I knew that Jacko would be frightened by the chemical smells, by the strangeness. I knew he would be more comfortable with me with him. So I stroked him and held him close as the vet prepared the injection, and felt his body instantly flop when the life force left it. It was a good preparation for grandpa’s death six years later, though grandpa wasn’t allowed the easy exit we gave Jacko. With Tiltheus, I knew that a friend needed comfort, and I didn’t care that any gesture of comfort might be misinterpreted, by him, or anybody else. There was nothing to say – when you grieve, the only comfort is the love of those around you. Tiltheus needed mine. And he would get it.

Dr Wang looked backwards and forwards between the two of us, and he smiled gently, not a knowing, hard-arse, superior smile, but a smile you make to someone you very much like, or to a child playing with a kitten, or to young lovers, still innocent and unspoiled. He was a nice man really. He saw more than we saw, certainly much more than I saw then, with my limited experience of life. But he didn’t say anything, and later I was glad, because it made all that happened possible.

“There’s something else, which I suspect, but don’t know. Could you go through the portal into the log cabin? I want to test something.” He was talking to me.

“Fair enough,” I said. “What do you want to test?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.” We went through, ducking past the rail in the cupboard, and we all stood on the earthen floor. I raised my eyebrows inquiringly at the doctor. He didn’t speak, but stood in silence for a few minutes, and when the silence began to grow uncomfortable, he abruptly grabbed my hand and pressed his hand against it, the way he’d done before with Tiltheus, making smooth little gestures with the fingers of his other hand. He nodded once to himself, as if he was pleased with the result.

“Well?” I said, when we were back in the attic.

He drew breath – not quite a sigh, but close.

“You are much more than you seem,” he said, “whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not.” He shook his head as I opened my mouth to protest. “You are – you have the potential to be – a wizard, especially in that world, which is why I tested you there. You are a bard, too. Bards are not just musicians – they have magical powers. They can make things happen with their music.” He raised his hands in a pacifying gesture as I shook my head and started to speak. “You would not have been able to contact me if you had not had some potential.”

“The ad in the directory was gone in the morning,” I interrupted him, suddenly remembering.

He nodded. “Precisely. No one else would even have seen it the first time. But you did, when you needed it.”

“Does that mean that I lost my power in the morning?” I was a little puzzled and also a bit pissed off. What was the use of magical powers if they disappeared after just a few hours?

“No.” He smiled reassuringly. “Without proper training, your abilities will appear to come and go, randomly. You are tapping into unknown powers in your brain, your whole body, and you haven’t learnt how to do it efficiently and well, yet, so it will appear as if they are very strong sometimes, and weak at other times. Also, you spent some time in Tiltheus’s world, rescuing him, and that would have enhanced your powers. The longer you stay there, the greater your abilities will become.”

“Ti phêsi?” What’s he saying?

“He says that I am a man like him, a wizard.” I used the English word, then added the approximate Greek equivalents. “He says that if I learn, I will have great powers.”

“I guessed that from the moment I saw you,” Tiltheus said solemnly, his eyes flashing grey for a moment. I looked at Til for a moment or two, wondering what emotions and thoughts were going through his mind. Whatever they were, I knew that I could trust him implicitly. I’d trusted grandpa like that, and I trusted Damo almost as much. With some people, you just know they can be trusted. I would trust Tiltheus with my life. Why then did I feel that there was some sort of danger in him, that his presence would be risky for me?

I turned to a potential source of information. “Dr Wang, what’s this got to do with the portal and Tiltheus and his task in the other world?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, call me ‘Ken’,” he snapped irritably. “We will be seeing a lot of each other. We might as well drop the formalities.”

“Well,” I replied, “you may call me ‘Steven’, or if I’m in a very good mood, ‘Stevie-babe’.”

“How kind,” said Dr Wang, equally sarcastic.

“And this is Tiltheus,” I said, putting my hand briefly on his shoulder. So I liked touching his shoulder – that didn’t make me gay, OK? It was a good shoulder to touch, warm and muscled and comforting. Tiltheus was my friend, and . . . . . I liked touching him. I make no apologies. “Tiltheus, the doctor/seer/priest wants you to call him ‘Ken’.”

“Ken,” said Tiltheus rolling the sounds around his mouth. It was all I could do not to laugh, he looked so solemn and thoughtful.

“He will have to start learning your language.” I’d explained to Tiltheus that the language he spoke was what we called ‘Greek’ in our world, but he told me that was not the name they gave in his world. They called their country Rhistên, and the language the spoke Rhistênika. But it was a Greek dialect, believe me.

For the sheer pleasure of annoying Ken, I said, “You will have to learn Tiltheus’s language.”

He knew what I was up to, and he grinned in triumph at me.

“No, I won’t. Or at least, I will, but not the way you think. Come, I’ll show you.” He took one of my hands in one of his and one of Tiltheus’s in the other, and dragged us over to the bed. “Sit down and hold each others’ hand,” he commanded. “Now close your eyes, and repeat what I say.” I translated for Tiltheus. The wizard produced three syllables, which he repeated again and again, speaking more and more softly as he continued, until he was almost silent. We copied him. Suddenly I felt him and Tiltheus in my mind. I felt him rifling through my memories, and when I talked about it to Tiltheus afterwards, he said that he’d had the same impression, and that he’d felt me in his mind.

Then Ken said that we could open our eyes. When I did, I found that my knowledge of Greek had expanded, that I knew Rhistên and where it differed from the Greek I’d learnt. I knew the slang, the secret words lovers say to each other, the endearments a mother used with her child. And I could see from the amazement and delight in Tiltheus’s eyes that he knew English.

“Way cool!” he said, savouring the words and their pronunciation.

“So why do you speak with an accent, Ken?” I asked.

“I am Norwegian. I learnt English as a child, long ago, by the normal method. Once you have learnt a language, you cannot unlearn it, even if you learnt the wrong pronunciation the first time. So Tiltheus will always speak with a mixture of an Australian and Norwegian accent, because he learnt English from you and me. And you will always speak Rhistênika with an accent, because you learnt Ancient Greek first.” He smiled generously. “Now that’s over, we had better get ready to go ‘across’. We will need some basic provisions, money, stuff for magic, that kind of thing.”

“I have some money in my saddle-bags, on the horse. It might still be there. We should go and fetch it before it’s too late. Let’s go back and see if it’s still there.”

“Come then, let’s go!” said Ken, briskly. “But what about the thing that attacked you?”

“It’s called a kribothneion,” said Til, and then hesitated for a moment while he tried to find the right word for it in English. “A ‘harpy’? It’s a kind of cross between an eagle and an elf, with wings and a beak. It has claws instead of feet, and wings instead of arms. It has some of the intelligence, the sentience of mankind or elvenkind. But they do not regard us as kindred, and there has been war, on and off, between our peoples for centuries. If they catch us, they eat us.”

“Why don’t you exterminate them, or make peace with them? Surely there is enough space for all of you?”

“Exterminate! They are stronger than we are, and even though they are not as clever, they have a robust native cunning. And they live on inaccessible cliffs, where any attackers would be vulnerable to retaliation. As for peace – we have tried a few times. Each time, they ate the ambassadors we sent. Our army has trained archers with special longbows to kill them. Even with these they are a terrible threat.”

“Well, provided we are only attacked by one or two, I can probably hold them off with a few well chosen spells.” Ken was very confident, in fact, rather smug.

We pressed through the membrane into the world at the back of the cupboard. Ken muttered some words, and made a few gestures, and the open doorway into my cupboard appeared to turn into an extension of the logs either side. Then we lifted the beam holding the log cabin’s door in place, and stood on the stone steps leading down from the door onto the ground.

“Where’s the horse?” asked Ken.

Tiltheus indicated far down the hill, near where I had found him. Ken made some more gestures, and softly spoke a few more words, and in an instant, we were transported a kilometre down the slope. The body of the horse lay a few yards away, its bones picked clean, shining white in the strong spring sunshine. The saddlebags were still there. Til went over and opened them, and withdrew a large drawstring bag made of leather, clearly heavy with gold.

“It’s still here,” he said, triumphantly.

“Excellent!” said Ken. “Now let’s go back!” As he spoke, we heard the terrifying whistling sound of plunging kribothneia. From the volume, there were more than one. Many more than one.

Oh shit! I thought. What now? I could hear the beating of mighty wings, and was almost paralysed with terror.

Ken gave a great roar, though I couldn’t make out the words, and then there was a blinding flash, followed by the thump of a body hitting the ground hard. I opened my eyes, shame following hard upon the terror. A kribothneion lay in a crumpled heap on the grass, blood leaking from its mouth. Its feathers were burnt off, and its skin was blackened. It was male. In death, it appeared pathetic and sad, rather than a deadly killer. We looked at each other in silence, aware of the poignancy of the moment. Killer, or no, it belonged somewhere, maybe had young. Its appearance was sufficiently human to make its demise affecting. But there were still the others, and they were clearly angered by the death of their companion.

“Use your powers!” yelled Ken.

How? What could I do, loser that I was? Then I remembered a comment grandpa had made while we were reading “Lord of the Rings”. Ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things. So I opened my mouth and began to sing. I don’t know, to this day, how I knew that that’s what I had to do. I sang no words, just nonsense words, but I felt it all in me – our fear, the kribothneia’s hatred of us, of our hands and our cruelty, my compassion for them and their fallen comrade. My voice swelled, and expanded, and I could feel my bones vibrating with the volume. Distantly I was aware of other voices, and then the desperately sad calls of the winged creatures, and then silence. Slowly I came to myself, my cheeks wet with tears.

“Do you doubt me now?” Ken’s voice was matter-of-fact, dry, but underneath there was awe, and respect, and something else – sorrow, perhaps? With a few quick gestures, he transported us back to the log cabin.

Once we were back in my room, the log cabin’s door securely barred, I took a deep breath and said, “This, um, quest. How long will we be gone?”

“Who know? Perhaps months.”

“What about my job? What about Graziella?” But I didn’t think they mattered any more, at least my job didn’t, not after that display of what I might be, of what I truly was.

“Who’s she? I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,” he added, confused.

“I don’t, any more. Graziella is my motor-bike.”

“Could you leave her – it – with someone?”

“I’ll ask Damo. He’s got a garage at his house, and Graziella could fit across the back. And what about my job?” My dead end, pointless, job with a total arsehole of a boss, working for a company whose sole purpose seemed to be to pay million-dollar bonuses to heartless directors and top managers.

“If you come back, you won’t be needing a job again. You will be a powerful enchanter and bard, able to do most things. If you succeed in Rhistên, you will no doubt be well rewarded by her queen. But for form’s sake, you may wish to tell your employers that you are leaving. Why don’t you send them an email?”

“I don’t have a computer or an email address.”

“No matter. You may use mine.” He opened his doctor’s bag and pulled out a lozenge-shaped grey object the size of a large paperback. It had no keyboard, screen, visible power source or aerial. I looked at him, trying to raise my eyebrows like he did, and failing. “Just speak your message, and the person you want it to go to.”

I gave my boss’s name, and the company, then said: “Dear Harry, I’ve always wanted to tell you what an upper-class ill-mannered arsehole you were. But that would take too much effort. So why don’t you get stuffed with the rough end of a pineapple? And stop rooting Janine. By the way, just in case you missed it, thickie – this is my resignation. I quit. Best wishes, Steven.” Childish, I freely concede. But immensely satisfying. A lovely golden voice, with an unidentifiable accent, said “message sent”, and I leant back to enjoy the sensation of burnt bridges.

“Useful little gadget,” I said, handing it back to Ken. “Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift from an admirer. Very handy for hacking into bank computers.” In which reality? On what world? I wondered. Presumably, if we could go back to more primitive cultures, there might also be gateways to more advanced civilisations. It was an exciting idea.

“Hacking into computers – to steal money, I suppose. That’s immoral!” I said indignantly.

“How did you think we would fund our little expedition? On buttons? These socks? Tiltheus’s gold won’t be enough, I suspect.” He gestured disdainfully at the offending objects. “Believe me, the bank won’t miss it – we will take much less that the CEO’s bonus, and we might save a world.”

“But not their world,” I said quietly.

“Does it matter? If Tiltheus could return the favour for our world, would he hesitate for one moment?” He spoke just as quietly, his eyes watching me intently.

I sighed. “It seems wrong to me.”

He gave me a small smile. To my relief, it was approving and almost – ridiculously – proud.

“I understand. But we will all the same need some money, to pay for things while we are across.”

“You’re a wizard. Can’t you just make it? Copy the coins Tiltheus’s got?”

“In the end, it amounts to the same thing. If I copy coins and they subsequently vanish, we will have stolen from whoever owns them at the time. All I was proposing doing was taking one cent from each bank account. That will be enough to buy several pounds of gold and silver, and I will use Tiltheus’s coins as templates to make lots more. We will increase the coins in circulation in that world, but such a small amount might actually be beneficial, especially . . . . . . .” He launched into a tedious explanation of money supply and inflation and money illusion and . . . . . . . Obviously, he was an economist manqué. Why want to be an economist when you can be a wizard¹? People are so strange.

I shook my head. I wondered what grandpa would have thought, his inflexible morality so much a part of him, and in things like this, of me. I had no doubt he’d disapprove. I sighed. There was no alternative.

“I’ll sell Graziella. She’s worth eight or ten thou. That should be enough.”

“You’ll sell your bike, to save my world? That beautiful, exquisite machine, that you love so much?” Tiltheus looked at me, his face awestruck, his eyes a stormy wash of grey. Then he embarrassed me utterly. He fell to one knee in front of me, and looking up into my no doubt startled face, said in Greek, his voice choked with emotion, “Great lord. I honour thee above all others.”

Was it my offering to sell Graziella, or my singing? I didn’t know. But it made me profoundly uncomfortable. I almost said, “I’m not doing this for your world, but for you.” But I wasn’t ready to admit that to myself, let alone him. Anyway, I was too overcome with awkwardness. So I just said, very gruffly, “Stop it! You’d do the same for me, you know you would.”

Dr Wang looked at us both, and a smile tickled his lips. When he saw my expression he instantly wiped it away.

“Graziella will be spared. No doubt she is a magical artefact, anyway, since she is the property of a wizard,” he said. Wizard! What was he on about? “I know where we can go for money, seeing as you’re so squeamish! They live quite close by. But we can only go and see them this evening.”

I accepted this delay without question, though later on it became clear why.

“I suppose we might as well take Graziella to Damo’s house.” I went to the cupboard to get the helmets and the jackets. The gateway was still open. I averted my eyes from the log-cabin room and the door that led to an unknown world, full of danger and excitement and unexpected revelations. “Will you come round here later on?” I asked the wizard.

“Yes – I’ll see you around six.” He gestured with his fingers, making what looked like an eye with his forefinger and thumb, and vanished. Tiltheus ignored it. In fact, he rolled his eyes at me in amusement. He was a fast learner.

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