The Bronze King

  “Well, where are they? I mean, is it an actual place called Sorcery Hall?”

  “It’s just on a different plane from this one, that’s all, a sort of level where we like to get together and keep in touch.”

  “How many of you?”

  “Depends.”

  “Why can’t you get help from there? I mean somebody stronger and smarter than I am to help you?”

  “We didn’t realize how serious it was, or you can bet I’d have come prepared better.” He sounded really grim. “Your message was general, you know what I mean? It wasn’t clear what you had on your hands here. Now I know, but you got so much static coming off the kraken, I can’t get through. And in Sorcery Hall they don’t know how to get through to me without maybe doing more damage here than the kraken itself wants to do.”

  “So it’s just us?”

  “It’s just us.”

  Thing about Paavo, he never faked it. I would have liked him to have faked that particular part just then, but I guess it was better that he didn’t.

  There was a taint in the air, a little like what you get when there’s a garbage strike in the city: rot.

  I was restless. We got moving again.

  We walked along Madison Avenue eating hot dogs I got us at some corner joint. One thing about sleeping out like that, you wake a lot and you notice that you haven’t eaten since dinner and you get hungry. I still had some of Gran’s money, so we didn’t have to dig other people’s garbage out of the trash cans to eat, like real street people do. I was very glad I could spare Paavo that, though I knew if he had to do it he would, and no fuss.

  We were coming up to a row of pay phones. I thought about stopping to phone my mom and reassure her, but it occurred to me that she might have the police all ready to trace the call. Besides, what could I tell her? Don’t worry, Mom, I’m sleeping out tonight with an old wizard from another plane, and tomorrow I go down into the kraken’s territory? Great.

  I kept walking.

  “How did Granny Gran get to be a member of Sorcery Hall?” I said.

  “She was a natural,” Paavo said. “You got a lot of wild talent here. We noticed her because she was doing the kind of crude work that can get dangerous if you really don’t know what you’re doing. So we contacted her. She learned fast. It was a loss to us when she retired.”

  We went over to Lexington, walking slowly in the chilly, quiet night. I felt danger all around us. Maybe because we’d already come through some danger together, I was more sensitive to it. It was funny, I wasn’t as scared as I should have been, though. Being in trouble along with somebody you absolutely trust is different from just being terrified. It’s a strange feeling, to be happy at the same time you’re in danger and you’re a little cold and a lot tired. Not happy, exactly: more like contented, which is pretty weird. But I liked it. I liked us looking out for each other, walking around tired and grubby in the night.

  A cab came rocketing up the empty avenue and Paavo yanked me away from the curb. The cab kept going, and he kept his hand on my shoulder. I knew what he was thinking: suppose the Princes had been in that cab, ready to snatch me right off the street?

  There really was nobody else to help us. We were in this on our own.

  13

  Trust

  IT GOT TO ME, I GUESS, a little after that, when we passed a station of the East Side subway on Lexington. All of a sudden my skin turned cold and I started to cry.

  “What?” said Paavo, stopping and turning me so he could look in my face. “What is it?”

  “Paavo, I can’t go into the subway again. I’m scared the kraken and the Princes will get me.”

  I felt as if I’d said magic words. It was time for him to smile and tell me the test was over, he had never meant for me to really go back into the subway, and that he was bringing in a whole army from Sorcery Hall. Thanks to me and Granny Gran, he and his professional association of wizards would handle the kraken themselves.

  Frankly, I just wanted to go home and crawl into my bed and let my mom yell until she was tired and live with that until it went away. Just to be done with it all, out of it, and safe.

  Paavo said, “Shaa. Val. You’ll be okay.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff. I’m not a fighter, Paavo.”

  “Oh?” he said, walking on. “What about going into the laundry room to empty the clothes dryer in spite of the ghost that all the kids said lived in the basement? What about every day going past Mr. Carneros’s dog that you were scared would jump out of its yard and chew your leg off? What about when those addicts who hung around outside your school tried to take the watch you got from your dad?”

  “Hey,” I said, “wait a minute. Those are private and personal things from when I was younger. You can’t bring them up now. They have nothing to do with this.”

  He said, “I’m just reminding you, you’re not as sheltered as you think. This city, this world—they don’t encourage survival except for tough people—like you, Val.”

  I said, “But we’re talking about walking out along the subway tracks. I bet they didn’t even have subways when you were around here last. You just don’t understand. If you grow up here, you get told from the time you’re two-feet high that one of the things you never, never do is walk on the subway tracks. It’s for good reasons, even when you don’t have a kraken after you.”

  “True,” he said. He shoved the curly hair off his forehead with the back of his wrist.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  I was so surprised that I didn’t say anything for a block.

  “ ‘Okay’?” I said finally. “What do you mean, ‘okay’?”

  A shrug.

  “I want to know what that means, Paavo.”

  “I’ll figure out something.”

  Which meant that he would go into the subway himself. Without resting, without his magic fiddle, without even his bow, which Joel still had.

  Well, Paavo was a grown-up, and this was his job. Probably he could do a lot better than I could.

  We walked. He coughed and pulled out his cigarettes. I saw his face when he bent over the match flame: creased, tired, dark around the eyes. Patient. He had known all along that I couldn’t be counted on. No, he’d hoped I would do it, but he knew better than to depend on me. But he wasn’t going to make me feel bad for letting him down.

  On the other hand, he was obviously just too tired to put on a show of casual good humor about it.

  Too tired.

  “Okay,” I said miserably. “I’ll do it. I’ll find Joel, and I’ll get the key and bring it to you at Eighty-first Street.”

  He pressed my shoulder. “Good,” he said.

  Sometime later on he shuffled me out of the all-night movie house we were trying to sleep in and back over to the new Penn Station, underneath the Port Authority—I hoped that lady cop from before wasn’t still around—where we finished the night. I woke up feeling cramped and smelling something sharpish and stale, and feeling that it was late. The smell was that tobacco stink that smokers carry with them. For an instant I thought it was my mom. She never smoked but people at her office did, and she always came home scented with burnt tobacco.

  I opened my eyes.

  Well, of course it wasn’t her. It was Paavo, sitting next to me on a bench.

  “Have I overslept?” I said. It was Sunday morning and the waiting room echoed with people to-ing and fro-ing.

  “I let you sleep,” he said. “You don’t go kraken-running without plenty of sleep.”

  “You make it sound like walking the dog!”

  “A dog that eats worlds,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if he smelled something bad.

  “Can it really do that?” I said. “The kraken? How can it do that if it’s small enough to fit under New York?” Which wasn’t exactly my idea of small, but even New York kids learn after a while that the world is one heck of a lot bigger than their ci
ty.

  “Oh, it starts pretty modest,” he said. “But it could grow very big and fast, using a town like this one for an appetizer.”

  “Hey, I dreamed about Joel!”

  The dream was clear in my memory: there was Joel, reaching out of this drinking fountain in the park to pull me into the water where he was, perfectly dry and very jittery and excited. He held onto my hand and talked very fast and anxiously to me. He said I had to get him out of there quickly. He was playing music to keep sane and because it seemed to make the kraken angry, although it didn't attack him. Either Paavo’s bow was protecting him, or the kraken was keeping him around as bait for—well, for me, or Paavo, or both of us I guess.

  “I can hear it thrashing around in the tunnels,” he said, “and sometimes it stinks so bad I can hardly breathe. What you smell gets pretty important when you can’t see anything.”

  He couldn’t see, of course. He had taken off his scarf and tied it around his eyes, and sure enough, there was the red mark on his neck, the fiddler’s brand.

  I was scared, in the dream, to hear that his playing was stirring up the kraken, but I couldn’t tell him to stop. “Keep playing, Joel,” I said. “It’s the only way I have of finding you.”

  He grinned and squeezed my hand and was all of a sudden a very likable person, a person I cared about a lot. “Like Richard the Lion-Hearted finding Blondel,” he said, and I laughed and said it was the other way around, but he went right on. “Don’t sing. Go fishing.”

  He let go of my hand and started using Paavo’s bow like a fishing rod, as if he were casting an imaginary line. End of dream.

  I told it all to Paavo.

  “Funny thing to dream,” I said. “Blondel and Richard the Lion-Hearted! That’s just a myth anyway, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Who’s Richard the Lion-Hearted?”

  I have to admit I was a little shocked at his ignorance, until I realized that probably while we were having Richard the Lion-Hearted, Paavo was off saving some other planet from a kraken or worse. I liked being the one to explain something to him for a change.

  “Richard the Lion-Hearted was an English king who led the Crusades, and one of his enemies, the King of Austria I think, grabbed him while he was heading home across Europe and locked him up in some dungeon someplace. Nobody knew where Richard was, to ransom him. His minstrel, Blondel, found him by wandering around Europe singing outside prison windows until King Richard answered him. Bet you the song was ‘Strawberry Whirl.’ ”

  As I said that, I had the funniest feeling—a terrible sadness just rushed up in me as I sat there smiling at Paavo.

  Because I realized that when we beat the kraken, it was all going to end. Our adventure, our partnership, our kidding around, everything. Paavo had come here to do this particular thing. When it was over, he wouldn’t stay around.

  Why should he be an old street musician in our world when he belonged in Sorcery Hall as a great wizard? Would I even ever suggest anything like that? I could want it, I could want it really badly, but I couldn’t say so. At least I didn’t have to try and work out the mechanics—explaining him and the kraken to my mom, for instance. Because no way in the world could I ask Paavo to settle for what he could do and be here, just so he would stay around and be my friend.

  Maybe later on he’d drop in once in a while to say hello or something, if I was lucky, if he had a little time; if I even remembered and believed my own memories when I got older. Maybe now and then I’d hear violin music on some street corner someplace and I’d hurry to see and find him there, just stopping by to make sure things are all right. But in general my life in our world-without-wizards was not seriously going to include him, that was all.

  “I think it’s just a story,” he said.

  “What is?” I said. I kept staring at him because a time was coming when he wouldn’t be there, and boy, did that hurt.

  “Richard the Lion-Hearted and Blondel,” he said patiently. He tapped my forehead with his knuckle. “Hey, how you doing in there? Anyway, from your dream it sounds like Joel is ready. So, what about you? How do you feel?”

  That brought me down hard from whatever cloudy place I’d been: I had to get started, if I still meant to.

  It was just like Paavo to ask me again, to give me another chance to say no.

  I stalled a little: “You mean, have I changed my mind about going into the subway?”

  “That’s right.”

  I thought about it, feeling the beginning of fear all mixed up with hunger for breakfast, and then suddenly I started to laugh.

  “Hey, Paavo.” I said, “I don’t have to walk in the tunnels! I don’t have to go into the subway at all! I’m just supposed to bring the key out, right?”

  “That’s the important part, yah,” he said.

  “Well, if Joel is playing music, I can find him from the street, through the subway ventilation gratings. I can get the key, too, from up above. That’s what Joel was telling me, in my dream!”

  I explained to Paavo how city kids go fishing: you get a long string and some gum you’ve chewed that’s good and sticky, and you tie something small and heavy to the end of the string to weight it and you stick the gum to the weight. Then you lower the whole thing through a street grating and try to get the gum to stick to and pick up coins that you imagine have fallen out of the pockets of people walking over the grating. You never catch anything much, but it’s a good game if you pretend there’s all kinds of treasure coming up from down there.

  “The key’s the treasure,” I said. “All I have to do is locate the grating over the phantom station. The kraken wouldn’t make a station without all the street grilles over it, would it?”

  Paavo scratched the mark on his neck. “They don’t invent, they only imitate, and they do that pretty good. There’s probably a grating, but listen, it won’t open like the one over the real closed-down station. Otherwise Joel might be able to escape, blind or not. The grille will just be window-dressing, you know what I mean? You can’t get Joel out through there, only the key, if this works.”

  “It’ll work, it’ll work!” I said, really excited. “The gratings over the Broadway line are right above the stations. You can look in and see the trains go by underneath. All I need is some string.”

  “But,” he said, “it might not be so easy, Val. And you might still have to go underground at some point. Don’t discount that.”

  “I’ll chance it,” I said. I was feeling great.

  “Okay,” he said. “How about something to eat? But we better go wash up a little first.”

  I went to the ladies room and cleaned up the best I could.

  Looking in the mirror, I started to get all trembly. This was me, the me that Paavo saw when he looked at me: not some wimpy brat or a grade-school kid, but this person who was helping him fight the kraken.

  I’d give him the key and he’d fix the kraken and then he’d go, and maybe that me would be gone too. Anyway, the one person I knew I could trust completely was going to leave me, and whose one-person-they-knew-they-could-trust-completely would I be then?

  I guess I got pretty rattled, because when I came out I sat down next to him and I said, “Paavo, can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think I love you.” Oh God, did I really say that?

  “Good,” he said. Then he added, “I mean, good that you said it.”

  “You knew!” I squeaked, more horrified than before.

  “Sure I knew. When you feel that pull toward another person—just here, right?” He tapped himself below the middle of the chest, under the breastbone: “Yah. That’s what it is.”

  “You feel it too?” What if he did, what then? All of a sudden we were going way too fast for me.

  “Sure I do,” he said. “The other person always feels it, even if they pretend they don’t.”

  “Oh,” I croaked.

  “Okay if I smoke?” he said. I nodded and he took the last b
ent cigarette from a rumpled package and lit up and blew smoke through his nose. “Val,” he said, “your mother has ideas about love, yah?”

  “Ideas?” I said. “She has whole lectures!”

  “Okay, I have a lecture too. You want to hear it?”

  “Yes,” I said, not daring to look at him. Love? We were going to talk about love, me and this old wizard from another plane? What had I gotten myself into? I should have just gone charging off into the kraken’s lair, it would have been easier.

  “Here’s what I think,” he said. “Love is never bad, you understand? Complicated, maybe. Sometimes it’s so tied up it can only be, it can’t do anything. And sometimes that’s plenty, and sometimes it’s a damn good thing. I’m talking about love now, this kind.” He touched the same spot on his chest again. “Not just appetite, or flirting, or mischief. This is the kind where what you want for the other person is what they want for themselves, whether you like it or not. You don’t ever want to pretend that feeling isn’t there when it is; or vice versa, either. That kind of faking can twist you up something terrible. So you always want to say to yourself, no, this isn’t it; or yes, it is. And if it is, where you go from there, you got to make some careful choices.”

  “Choices?” I said. I was petrified of what he was going to say.

  “For me, it’s not to do anything to make us uncomfortable with each other, you and me. For you—whatever you decide, inside what my choice leaves.”

  I felt this dizzy rush of relief—he meant I was safe. But who did he think he was, anyhow, telling me what was left for me to decide after he decided?

  Words rushed out of me: “You mean—I wasn’t thinking—I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, you’re so old!” And I wanted to die. Of course I’d had this fleeting thought of, well, us kissing and a sort of whirling, suffocating blank beyond that, and of course he knew, and now I’d said this awful thing.