Warrior (The Word and the Void) Read online

  He kept close watch on the road signs as he drove to be sure he was doing everything he had been told. But as time wore on and the towns and farms grew sparser, he began to wonder if perhaps he had missed a turning. It wasn’t until he saw a sign indicating Betws-y-Coed was only twenty kilometers away that he decided he was on the right track and began to look for the side road that would take him to his lodgings.

  Once arrived, he would have two nights to wait for the rise of the full moon, and then he would meet the Lady. He was to ask directions to the Fairy Glen, but give no explanation as to why he was going beyond saying that he had heard it was beautiful during the full moon and he wanted to see if it was true. There was to be no mention of the Lady or Two Bears. There was to be no mention of anything that seemed out of the ordinary. He was simply to show up as requested, drive to the Fairy Glen, and listen to what the Lady had to say.

  He didn’t even know how he was supposed to let the Lady know he was there. Two Bears was no longer around to advise him, and he had already been told it would be a mistake to ask his host for anything other than directions.

  So, when he pulled his rental into a parking area next to a well-kept stone cottage just off a side road he had only barely avoided missing, he was resolved to keep everything about what he was doing in Wales secret. He would simply pretend he was on vacation, having just graduated college. He climbed out of the car and was standing there, having a slow look around, when the front door opened and a bearded oldster wearing jeans and a flannel shirt came out to greet him.

  “Mr. McCall?” the other asked, advancing down the stone walkway.

  Jack waved. “That would be me.”

  “Arthur Henry.” He arrived with his hand extended and a pleased look on his face. “Found your way here all right?”

  “I had directions.”

  “Good ones, too. Most manage to miss us on the first try. Have to call in or muck around a bit first. None of that for you. Come on in. Here, I’ll help with the luggage.”

  There wasn’t much luggage to begin with, since Jack had packed everything in a duffel, but Arthur Henry insisted on carrying it himself, refusing to let Jack do the work. “You just go through, leave the rest to me. Got tea and beer, whichever you prefer. College student, right? Got to get a good education these days, if you want to get ahead in the world. Go on, sit in the room with the fire. It gets cold here at night.”

  Arthur Henry, it turned out, was a talker. He asked about Jack’s flight, then told a few stories about flights of his own. He asked about Jack’s education, then gave a quick survey of his own. He asked about Jack’s plans for his future, then talked about his own plans for the cottage and the surrounding land. He spent a good deal more time afterwards weighing in on the Welsh economy, Welsh politics and Wales’s place in the British Commonwealth and how it related to the place of Great Britain in the larger world. He then went on to advise Jack how best to use these first several months out of college before entering the work force.

  “Plenty of time to be a vital cog in the business world, Jack. But you need a bit of seasoning first, and this is the time to get that odd bit of experience you won’t find in the nine to five workday. Travel is the answer. See the world. See how the other nine-tenths live. This will give you a larger frame of reference, meaning you’ll have a significant advantage over almost everyone else. Because most folks never see even a little of what is out there.”

  By now, they were settled in a sitting room before a fire blazing in an old stone hearth, glasses of Welsh beer in their hands and a ruddy glow on their faces. Arthur Henry hadn’t stopped talking since they sat down, although Jack had managed to squeeze one or two words in edgewise in a futile effort to hold up his end of the conversation. Mostly, he just smiled and nodded and let the old man say whatever he chose, content to let him do so for as long as it took to exhaust him.

  Although, as the first hour passed and a sizeable chunk of the second with it, he began to wonder if he was expecting too much.

  Finally, Arthur seemed to realize what he has doing and sprang to his feet with a hearty laugh. “Well, I’m just going on and on, taking up all the air in the room. Come, Mr. McCall, and share some dinner with me. If you’re good, I’ll spare you a few moments of the evening to talk a bit about yourself!”

  A stew had been prepared on an old iron stove, and it was delicious. After adding fresh-baked bread (“Make all my own bread,” Arthur advised) and another glass or two of the beer, Jack McCall could honestly say he had never enjoyed a meal more. And he could say that because his host finally took a break from nonstop talking to concentrate on his food.

  When that was finished, Arthur directed Jack to his quarters – a cozy bedroom at the rear of the cottage, complete with its own bathroom – to let him unpack before coming to sit once more by the fire. He did invite Jack to talk about himself, and Jack managed to give a sketchy account of his early life, education, family situation before his time was at an end and Arthur was off and running once again. Wife and kids (three), the former dead now, the kids grown and living elsewhere, life spent working at a lumber mill, fond of cricket, fond of football (European), politics mostly an exercise in futility in his opinion, and the world in shambles mostly because this new generation (Jack’s?) just didn’t understand what it meant to work for a living.

  Finally talk worked its way around to Jack’s plans for the time he was spending in Wales. Jack gave a brief overview, consisting of trips into the Snowdonia area, visits to some of the castle ruins that had once been Edward’s detested Iron Ring, built to subdue the wild savages he believed the Welsh people to be, and finally a journey up to Llandudno for a night.

  Then he added, as casually as he could manage it, “A friend of mine who’s been here before told me there was a place I needed to visit that’s right around here. Said it was very beautiful, almost magical. He called it Fairy Glen. Do you know it?”

  The old man grunted. “I do. Right down the road a short distance from here.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Aye. Twice. Once to see it, once to be sure I was seeing it right. You should go. But in the daytime, not at night.”

  “Why is that? I thought it would be beautiful under the full moon.”

  The old man went quiet for a moment, lost in thought. “Odd things happen there at night. You can’t be sure what you’re seeing. Daytime, you see it all much better, can’t be so easily fooled. You go when there’s sunlight.”

  He didn’t make it a suggestion; he made it a command. And Jack knew when to back off. “Sure, I’ll go during the day, if that’s what you think best.”

  His host’s sharp old eyes fixed on him. “That is what I think best.”

  Jack smiled to show his agreement, but Two Bears’ instructions trumped the old man’s superstitions. He would go on the night of the full moon, as requested.

  Chapter 4

  Two nights later – when the sun was down and the stars just beginning to come out, but the full moon still below the horizon – Jack went to the Fairy Glen to meet the Lady.

  He had gone to the glen earlier in the day, making a point of telling Arthur, providing him with some reassurance that he was doing what the old man had suggested. He found the Fairy Glen charming. It was a shallow gorge with a deep stream running along its winding floor. A waterfall, perhaps thirty feet in height, spilled down from a precipice at one end to feed the stream, which then tumbled in a series of rapids through huge, ancient boulders and broken rocks for several hundred feet before taking a sharp left and disappearing into the trees at the other end. A trail led down into the glen – a twisty descent – through slopes overhung by heavy tree limbs, and thick with brush and wildflowers. The sound of the stream was a constant burbling that was matched by birdsong and the soft rush of the wind through the leaves.

  If it isn’t magical, he found himself thinking as he looked around, it should be.

  He had stood there, transfixed. He was lost in t
he moment, and the moment stretched away endlessly.

  When he went back to the house, he told Arthur he was going up to Llandudno for the night and would be back sometime the following day. Arthur made a point of asking him what he thought of the Fairy Glen, but Jack just smiled and dissembled. He said it was a pretty place, but nothing special. He said nothing about feeling that he was being watched while he explored. He said nothing about the voices that seemed to rise from the rushing of the stream’s waters. He said nothing of the small, sudden movements he caught out of the corner of his eye at least half-a-dozen times while he stood there, a willing captive.

  But he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t mistaken. Not until he went back. Not until he was there at night. There was enough happening in the daytime to persuade him he must.

  More than once, he questioned his motives. Mostly, he wondered at his own willingness to blindly follow the orders of a stranger. This was not like him. He was usually very pragmatic – thought things through carefully, considered and weighed his options before making decisions. Yet this decision he had made impulsively, and mostly based on the fact that Two Bears knew so much about his past – about Pick and the dragon and Sinnissippi Park. And about his cancer, which he never talked about with anyone.

  He still had questions, and secretly wondered if he might not find his answers tonight. He had no reason to believe he would, but still he kept thinking he might.

  On his return to the Fairy Glen, he found a fisherman occupying the near bank, clothed in woodsman garb and an old fishing hat. He wore boots, and his pole was ancient and hand-wrought, with a strange reel attached – the like of which Jack had never seen before. The man stood on the bank and cast, then slowly reeled in his line, hitched up his rod and cast again. Jack watched for a while, then walked over.

  “Catch anything?” he asked.

  The man glanced at him and smiled but made no response. His beard was thick and his hair long, his face seamed and his skin brown from the sun. He was of indeterminate age – neither young nor old, but some of both. Jack waited for the fisherman to say something, but he just went back to fishing as if Jack wasn’t there.

  Jack turned away at the sound of a high, fierce shriek, searching the woods as a spike of fear ran up his spine, then glanced up at the rising full moon. There was a fresh chill in the air, and suddenly Jack felt a deep-seated sense of unease.

  He looked back at the fisherman, but the man was gone.

  Standing alone now on the banks of the stream, Jack watched the moonlight skip and dance along the rims of the waves and through the ripples caused by the water’s anxious rush. An owl hooted somewhere nearby – a haunting sound that lingered as an echo. Off to his right, a long dark shadow moved within the brush, staying just out of view.

  And then the fairies appeared. There was no question about what they were, no doubt in his mind. An explosion of bright forms surfaced out of the waterfall – silvery, twinkling apparitions that soared above stream and skipped along its surface with unrestrained abandon. Bells sounded from all around, and bright bursts of light emanated from within the stream’s flow, as if something living in its depths was seeking to break free. Jack might have turned and run if he had felt threatened in any way, but he did not. Rather, he felt embraced, welcomed, brought home to a place he had never known existed but had always been searching for. The feeling was so unexpectedly wondrous that he suddenly burst into tears, yearning to wrap himself up in it forever.

  Then the Lady appeared – a diaphanous gowned bit of shadow and light, and beautiful beyond anything Jack had ever imagined possible. She floated above the churning surface of the stream, the fairies circling all about her as she approached, borne on the night air and the crest of white-capped waves. A procession formed as the Lady neared, a retinue falling into place behind her – reaching down to lift the train of her gown and to smooth the waters of the stream so her slippers might remain dry. Jack felt her eyes on him, this spirit creature not wholly substantive and not completely there, and her gaze warmed him. He saw the kindness in her face and instantly felt the blood rush to his cheeks in response.

  Then abruptly she was standing before him, changed entirely – become as solid as he was and no longer so much a creature of another world. Her retinue disappeared. The waters of the stream lost their bright shimmer, the bells went silent, and the Fairy Glen became as it had been when he first approached it, as if none of what he had just witnessed had ever happened.

  “Will you serve me?” the Lady asked in a voice so warm and musical it brought him to his knees.

  He could not speak for a moment. Her request was a naked plea that demanded explanation and yet offered none. At the same time, it was so compelling, so impossibly irresistible, that he could not envision a world in which he would refuse. In those four words, he found a promise of the moral commitment he had always been seeking. He found, too, the answers to all his questions about his childhood brush with death – about Sinnissippi Park and Pick and the dragon that would have brought him down, had he not defeated it.

  With an eager willingness that frightened him, he whispered, “I will serve you.”

  The voice did not seem his own and the words appeared to come from somewhere else. Yet the Lady reached down and stroked his cheek, a gentle brushing of fingers that reached deep into his heart.

  “Let it be so, then, Jack McCall. As of this moment, you are a Knight of the Word. You must never forget what you are. And you must never forsake me.”

  Then she lifted him up to stand before her and touched his face once more. This time images began to appear before his eyes, a long continuous stream of history that revealed in detail all that had gone before and of which he would now become a part. Knowledge flowed into him and took root. It swept before his eyes swiftly and without slowing, and yet he knew instinctively he would never forget any of it. The images seemed to last only a few moments, but when they were gone he glanced upward and saw that the moon had moved all the way across the nighttime sky.

  “Know, brave Knight, that your service is unique. It will be required once and once only. But you will need to be vigilant always, because they will come for you and seek to destroy you, and this must not be allowed. You must be preserved for that one high service you have been chosen to perform.”

  “What service . . .?” he tried to ask, but her fingers silenced his lips with a touch.

  “It is not yet time for you to know. Go now. Go to the life you will make for yourself. Go to the family that will become your own. We will not speak again until the need arrives.”

  Her fingers found his chin. “Know this, too, Jack McCall. All brave knights who serve the Word must suffer the dreams of the damned. All must dream of the future that arises when they fail in the present. For most, those dreams are of a future that lies generations away. But you, and you alone, will dream of a future that will come to pass in your own lifetime – a future that will befall you and yours if you fail in your service. Be wary of your dreams, brave knight, for they will be treacherous and misleading, and not all that you dream will be as it seems.”

  One last time, the fingers shifted across his face, this time coming to rest upon his eyes, closing them so that he felt himself drifting into such a deep inexorable slumber that he could do nothing but let it take him.

  “Sleep now,” he heard her whisper, and he slept.

  When he awoke again, it was dawn, and he was alone in the Fairy Glen. He blinked and rose from his bed of damp grasses, shivering and confused. His thoughts returned to the events of the night just passed, and there at their forefront was the memory of his meeting with the Lady.

  No other proof of it remained to indicate that it had ever happened, yet he knew – as surely as he knew his life was changed forever – that it had.

  He went back to the cottage and Arthur Henry and rested. He stayed for another day, so it would not appear that his departure was too abrupt, and then he returned home to discover how much of what the L
ady had told him would turn out to be true.

  f

  Chapter 5

  They came for Jack McCall less than two months after his return. The Lady had not told him who it was that would come for him or why. She had not told him what he was supposed to do if they did come. Had he been left to his own devices, he probably wouldn’t have survived the encounter. But the Lady had foreseen what would happen and had taken steps to prevent any harm from befalling him.

  With college behind him, Jack was back in Hopewell and living with his parents as he began his search for a more far-reaching future. His time with them was temporary, a bridge to finding a residence and a career of his own. He had already decided against going further with his schooling, anxious to get on with his life. He wanted to begin exploring its possibilities – through trial and error, if needed – while still asserting his independence. He found a job immediately, albeit one that might not last beyond the summer. He was hired by the Hopewell Municipal District of Parks and Recreation, through the encouragement of an old middle school teacher who had always liked Jack and had made the recommendation to a few of his friends who had connections, providing a strong letter of reference. Jack was hired on the spot as a Park Ranger and, within a week of returning, was hard at work patrolling and caring for the entire three-hundred-acre expanse of Sinnissippi Park.

  The assignment was perfect – a job that required a daily commute of not much more than a short walk to the maintenance shed to fetch the all-terrain vehicle he was assigned. It was also ironic. Here he was, working for the benefit of the very park that Pick had told him he was responsible for as Guardian of the Magic ten years earlier. Jack thought there was a possibility they might meet again now, working in such close proximity on a daily basis.