The Lion of Farside tlof-1 Read online

  "Haven't you ever wanted to be a daddy, Curtis?" she asked. Her voice was soft when she said it, not at all like a witch.

  I swallowed and told her I'd never thought about it.

  "Well then, have you ever wanted to be in bed with a pretty woman?"

  I couldn't more'n nod. Frank and me'd been to see the Linzler sisters a couple times, on their farm outside Salem; they charge two dollars. And I screwed Maudie Hodge a few times in her daddy's hayloft. Wearing a French safe, except the first time with Maudie. I didn't want to have to marry anyone, surely not Maudie Hodge, and you couldn't know but what the Linzler sisters might have the clap, or worse. None of them were really pretty; nowhere near as pretty as Varia. Of course, they didn't drop whole litters of strange, smiling little kids, either.

  Anyway she took me by the hand and we walked out of the house together, her transparent in the moonlight. And somehow I didn't have my pajamas on, but my regular pants and shirt, and my barn boots. Which about three-quarters decided me I was still dreaming. I've looked back on that night more times than I'd care to count, and I'm still not sure.

  When we got to her house, another her was waiting on the back porch, this second Varia not transparent at all. She wore what looked like the same shirt, plaid flannel. The first Varia stepped up to the second Varia and they melted right into one another, while I found myself taking off my barn boots. Then, chuckling like she does, she opened the storm door. And the hinge squeaked, making me start like someone waking up.

  And there I was, really on her porch, like I'd sleepwalked there. I mean really on her porch. No way was this a dream any longer. "You didn't eat your pie," she said softly, and chuckled again. I walked through that door like I was bewitched-I couldn't have stayed out any more than I could have flown by flapping my arms-and she closed it behind us. Then, in the kitchen, she put her arms around me and kissed me like nothing I ever imagined, and led me by the hand into her bedroom.

  "Curtis," she said softly, "since Will died, you're the strongest of the Macurdies, and you're smarter than Will. A lot smarter; you have no idea yet how smart, how able. Perhaps you never will. Although your uncle was more intelligent than people gave him credit for, and a nice nice man. I became very fond of him."

  I only about half heard what she was saying, because she was unbuttoning my shirt while she talked. "You'll give us fine children, Curtis. More than fine. They'll be pleased about that." They? I thought. Then she kissed me again, and stepped back and smiled at me. "Will and I did have children, you know. The ones you saw in the pictures this morning."

  I stared at her. She knew all right, just like I figured. Then she stepped around behind me and pulled off my shirt, put her arms around me and unbuckled my belt-and felt around inside while she kissed my back. Now she knew what I didn't-how I sized up with Will. I couldn't hardly breathe, and my knees like to have buckled. When she'd finished undressing me, she shucked out of Will's old shirt, and I'd never seen anything like her. So sweet and pretty, it made my throat hurt just to look. Then she pulled me onto the bed, and after that-no way could I describe what it was like. Between times, she told me she wanted me to marry her. I told her that's what I wanted, too. At least part of me did, no doubt of that, but I wasn't so sure about the rest of me, and I guess she knew what I was thinking, because she said there wasn't any hurry. Then she chuckled again and said next week would be soon enough, and started wriggling around on top of me and eating my face.

  After another hour or so, I washed up and got dressed, and the transparent Varia led me back home. I was worried that someone would see us, but she said there wasn't any danger of that. That's the first I ever knew of invisibility spells.

  The next day I finished off her manure pile, and while I was forking manure that morning, I got to worrying. She hadn't aged for more'n twenty years, while I'd gone from a bitty little boy to six-foot-one, and two-twenty-four on the creamery scales with my clothes on. In twenty more years, I'd be forty-six and she'd still be twenty. And in forty years… Folks already talked; some were even a little scared of her. That was one reason she didn't go into town any more than she needed to. First Will and then ma had done most of Varia's shopping in recent years. They even went to the library to get books she wanted.

  No doubt about it, being married with her would be somewhat more than just thrashing around on the bed together. And by the light of day, riding behind a team of Belgians spreading cow manure, it seemed to me we needed to talk about that. So when I heard the eleven-forty train whistle, I left my pitchfork there and went up to her house and knocked. She let me in, then cranked up Ma on the phone. Asked if I could stay for lunch and help her eat leftovers before she had to throw them out.

  Ma didn't answer right away; there was half a minute there I couldn't hear her voice. Maybe she wondered if I'd started doing more at Varia's than just work. But she said that'd be fine. Anyway I sat down at the table, and we began talking while Varia rustled up a meal. I told her what was bothering me, and she just smiled. "We won't stay here," she said.

  "Where-Where would we go?" I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer to that. Because suddenly I wanted to be with Varia the rest of my life, and was scared her answer would be something I couldn't live with.

  "Where would you like?"

  I thought for a minute. "Since the Depression hit last fall," I reminded her, "lots of folks are out of work. It's hard to get a job nowadays."

  "We'll get a farm," she said, reasonable as could be. "Somewhere well away from here; maybe some black land in Illinois."

  I shook my head. "That'd cost a lot of money. Especially that Illinois black land."

  "Land prices are way down. I talked to them at the bank before I sold out to your father. And my grandmother's got money that belongs to me."

  Her grandmother. I supposed I'd meet her. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

  "She looks a lot like me," Varia said without my asking.

  "Just as young?" I was a little scared of what the answer might be.

  Varia laughed. "A little older. Maybe twenty-one." Light danced in her eyes when she said it. She was so bright and lively, I couldn't help thinking she'd be a wife like no one ever had before, except Will. But still-

  "How about when I'm fifty," I said, "and you still look twenty?"

  She looked at me a long time before she answered. "You won't need to look fifty, if you don't want to. Not you. You can look just as young then as you do today."

  The first thing that hit me was, I'd have to sell my soul to the devil. I've never actually believed in the devil, but that's the thought that came to me. I set it aside. "Will aged," I reminded her.

  "Will never had the choice. I tried. He was a nice man, a gentle man, and he had some unusual genes we need. But not the talent; not enough. I planned to stay with him till the situation here got dangerous-from my not aging, I mean-have sixty or seventy children by him, then disappear. I'd leave a note that I was afraid to stay, because I wasn't aging. That I was going somewhere where people thought I was twenty."

  I guess I must have looked troubled, because she put her hand on my cheek again, soft as goose down, and said: "I never actually loved Will, as fond of him as I came to be. It's you I've loved. For a dozen or more years now, since I realized what you might be. Or who."

  For a dozen years! That was a stopper. But she wasn't done. "And in the Sisterhood," she said, "we learn self-control." Her mouth twisted a bit. "Self-abnegation, really. It's not always easy, even though we're from selected stock. There's a lot about a person that's not genetic."

  It's funny how much I remember of what she said, considering I didn't understand half of it then. The biggest puzzles were who this we was she talked about. And Will's jeans? I never knew him to own a pair of jeans. He'd always worn overalls, like most farmers.

  Anyway, the upshot of it was, we'd tell Ma and Pa that we planned to get married and go somewhere else to live. And when we got there, we'd tell folks I was twenty-five and she was twen
ty. Then, in twelve, fifteen years we'd move again. Might be interesting to live different places.

  We got married ten days later. The family didn't announce it beforehand; Varia asked them not to. We just got the blood tests and license, and one evening after supper, my folks went with us to the parsonage. Took Reverend Fleming totally by surprise. I suppose he thought I'd got Varia pregnant. Anyway he took us next door to the church, turned on the lights, and married us in our coats, it being cold out and no fire in the furnace. When it was over, we all went home-Ma, Pa, Frank and Edith to their house, Max and Julie to theirs, and me and Varia to ours. Varia Macurdy. She didn't even get a new name out of it, nor much in the way of wedding gifts. The ring was the one Will gave her.

  I said something about it when we went inside. She said none of it mattered, that she'd got me, and that was what counted. Then we went upstairs to bed. We hadn't been to bed together except that one night, but we made up for it before we went to sleep.

  We'd already packed most everything she wanted to take with us-not a whole heck of a lot. The week before, I'd hammered together sort of a shed for the back of the Model A, with stakes for the stake pockets, that we could use to move. So by ten the next morning we were sitting in the cab together, headed south for the Ohio River, happy as two worms in an apple.

  We didn't have a notion of what we were getting into.

  2: Idri

  " ^ "

  Evansville actually was where her gramma lived, except her gramma wasn't her gramma. More like her cousin. And almost as good-looking as Varia. The big difference was their personalities; I could see that right away. Idri's eyes were mean and hard, not laughing like Varia's. As if she held grudges; I recall thinking that. She didn't seem to be married-didn't wear a ring, anyway-but I smelled and saw cigar butts in an ashtray. Maybe a brother, I thought. Not knowing Idri at the time.

  After Varia introduced me as her new husband, Idri looked me up and down and scowled. The first thing she said was, "You'll have to take him through! He's needed there right now!" Not "It's nice to know you," or "Welcome to the family," or "I suppose you'd like to meet your stepchildren." Just giving orders: "You'll have to take him through." Whatever that meant.

  Varia's eyebrows shot up. "I have no intention of taking him through," she said. "We're moving to Illinois. I just came here to let you know, and draw five hundred dollars from the contingency account."

  Idri raised more than her eyebrows; she raised her voice. I don't know what she said, because they started talking in some foreign language. But she sounded as mad as anyone I'd ever heard, ripping Varia up one side and down the other. Varia looked shocked at first, but after a minute she snapped something sharp and hard at Idri that stopped her in mid-snarl. Called her something, I suppose. Then she took my sleeve and dragged me out the door, and right on out to the truck. When we'd got in the cab, she started shaking, and I asked her what was wrong.

  "There's a lot I didn't tell you," she said. "It didn't seem important. Now it is."

  I didn't say anything, just nodded and sat listening, my eyes on that beautiful face.

  "Idri and I are not-Americans. And not from some place in Europe. We're from another world entirely, a world called Yuulith." She looked at me as if begging me to believe. "It's as if it's right beside this one, and now and then, in a few special places, openings develop between them for a few minutes. We call them gates. We can go through them from one world to the other. The nearest is across the river in Kentucky; that's the one we use."

  I'd heard or read some strange things in my life, but this was the strangest. Yet somehow I believed. For one thing, the name Yuulith gave me chills. No, she was telling the truth, and she knew I knew. "I can't tell you everything about it all at once," she said, "why we're here, why I'm making babies here-except that it seemed very important. In our world, there's a land with very bad people-soldiers, and lords of magic-evil, and very powerful. But recently-recently they sent an army into our country and killed most of us."

  Her voice was quiet while she told me all this, but her face was drawn up tight. "Idri and I belong to a Sisterhood that over the past three hundred years has worked to develop our power. But when the gate opened, the time before last, Idri learned what the enemy had done. The ylver, they're called. They'd captured our Cloister-our town-and destroyed it, taking most of our Sisters captive."

  Varia'd cried the edge off her grief a couple months earlier, though none of us knew it then, but the tears were running again. "Then they killed the children," she said, "and their soldiers raped the Sisters over and over, making the people watch. Finally they set their war dogs on them, on the Sisters that is, to tear them apart."

  I sat staring at her. "And Idri wants us to go there?"

  She nodded, and her voice took new strength "But I'm not. It's over with there, it's all turned evil, and this is my world now. You and I are going to Illinois and make babies, beautiful babies, one or two at a time, and bring them up ourselves, and love each of them. And each other."

  What could I say? I kissed her right there in the cab in broad daylight, then put the truck in gear and headed out of Evansville, bound for Illinois.

  3: The Blackland

  " ^ "

  Within a week we'd moved onto 120 acres of blackland in Macon County, Illinois, north of Decatur. And it was ours as long as we kept making the mortgage payments. Varia made the down payment, $600, from money left her by Will, and what Pa had paid down on Will's place. And had enough left over to buy a team and harness for $80, and equipment we hadn't brought with us, plus seed and some house furnishings. Everything secondhand, of course, but lots of people were selling stuff, good stuff, to keep food on the table. We weren't bad off, compared to them. We still had money for potatoes and beans, bacon and oatmeal, and salt and sugar and flour. Buying livestock would have to wait though. Except for pasture and hay, I figured to plant most of the ground to corn-corn and a big truck garden-and enough oats for the team next winter, and for the cow I figured to buy when I'd made a crop. In the barn there was already hay and oats enough for the team a few months, while the woodshed had wood and cobs for the stoves awhile. Even a couple sacks of coal for the kitchen.

  The buildings were pretty decent, and the house was more than big enough for the two of us. They all needed paint, but that'd have to wait. The five hundred dollars Varia hadn't been able to get from Idri would have made a big difference-except it wouldn't have, the way things turned out. But anyway, it seemed to me we'd get by in good shape.

  You never know entirely what to expect, working a new team, but when I brought them home, Varia talked to them awhile, and they worked out real well. She was always good with horses, riding or handling them. I started plowing that same day.

  I even got a job milking eight Brown Swiss cows for a neighbor, morning and evening. Given the hard times, it paid pretty decent-fifty cents a day-and each morning I took home a big jar of milk and some fresh butter, worth another twenty cents or so.

  It also meant I got up at four every morning, to eat before going to Morath's to milk, and finished up there at seven or so in the evening. Between milkings I walked a furrow behind the team all day, keeping the plow where it belonged. So I made a point of being in bed before nine, and I'm talking about in bed for the purpose of sleeping.

  Nonetheless, we had time to sit around a little before bedtime, and the very first night, Varia told me she wanted to lay a spell on me. Naturally I kind of backed off from that. "What for?" I asked her.

  "So you'll understand me better."

  "Hon," I said, "I understand you pretty well already."

  She didn't say anything for a minute, just sort of chewed on her lower lip as if she was thinking. Finally she said, "Why do you suppose the Macurdy family was chosen to father my children?"

  I stared at her without knowing a thing to say.

  "Where do you think the Macurdies came from?" she asked.

  "What d'you mean? From Kentucky, way back when
James Madison was president."

  "And before Kentucky?"

  It seemed to me right then that I was going to learn something I didn't want to know. I shook my head. "Grampa said we're Scotch-Irish. In school they told us that means from Scotland by way of Ireland."

  "Let me put a spell on you, and afterward I'll tell you. It will make it easier for both of us."

  I squirmed in my chair. "Will it take long? I thought maybe the two of us could go to bed early."

  She laughed, the same young-girl laugh I'd heard since I was a little boy. "It won't take long. And it's as good as an hour's sleep anyway."

  It took me half a minute to say yes, but I knew right away I'd do it. I mean, I'd trusted her so far, and she'd trusted me, and we'd bound ourselves together till death us do part. And what was I scared of? She'd never do me any harm. Besides, it seemed to me she'd spelled me that night she'd taken me to her house, and that had worked out just fine. "Okay," I told her, "I'll do it."

  "Thank you, darling," she said, and pulled her chair up closer. "Now look in my eyes."

  That was always easy to do, but this time was different. It was like they drew me right in, and I went limp, but after what seemed like ten, fifteen seconds I came back to normal again. "Sorry it didn't work," I said, thinking she'd be disappointed. But she laughed.

  "Look at the clock."

  I looked, and my mouth must have dropped open. We'd sat down at ten to eight, and now it was a quarter after. "What happened?" I asked.

  "You and I did what was necessary. Told your body not to get old; that it's got the ylvin genes. And got you ready to start learning." She came over and knelt down beside me, and kissed me sweeter'n honey. Old Junior started to swell up right away, and Varia began to purr. "Do you still want to go to bed early?" she asked me.