Dominion, Fred Saberhagen [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

him—he was thirty years old again. He began to remember that he was only reliving events that had  happened to him years ago.

   Only?

   He slowed to a stop, looking round him and trying to orient himself. Yes, he was in the same woods, outside the castle. Though he tried to shake it, the vision of his experience in the past persisted strongly. In one part of his mind he was still just fifteen. He was going to swim and wade his way back across the river, letting it do what it could to cleanse him of the dirt and sweat of the day just past. When he got back to his aunt’s and uncle’s house, the adults wouldn’t be back from their meeting yet, and he’d go right upstairs to his small room and fall into his narrow bed. He knew that the image of Vivian was coming with him as never before, and that it would draw him back again and again to the deserted grotto, where he would never have to worry about Gregory appearing in the bright daytime. Where, on the stone table, Vivian’s shape could be brought bursting out of Simon’s imagination with intensity never before realized, to be made to do exactly what he wanted her to do…

   At last it faded, his vision of that exhausted fifteen-year-old walking through the twilight. Simon was thirty, and though he stood in the same woods it was now dawn not twilight, and he was no longer on the trail that wound so familiarly down the bluff. He raised a hand to his face, assuring himself of beard-stubble on his cheeks. He was dressed in the pseudo-magician’s costume he’d put on for the night before—

   At last it faded, his vision of that exhausted fifteen-year-old walking through the twilight. Simon was thirty, and though he stood in the same woods it was now dawn not twilight, and he was no longer on the trail that wound so familiarly down the bluff. He raised a hand to his face, assuring himself of beard-stubble on his cheeks. He was dressed in the pseudo-magician’s costume he’d put on for the night before—

   Ah, yes. The night before. The last thing Simon could remember before the strangely realistic memory-flashback was himself in the castle, entering the hidden tunnel again at Vivian’s urging. It could lead him, she had said, to many places, many times. It had looped him back into his own memory, and then… somehow it had delivered him here outside the castle? Through the grotto again, he supposed. He couldn’t remember.

   Vivian had ordered him to find an object. She’d called it simply the Sword, without explanation, as if there were no possibility of his not understanding. And on some deep level of his mind he did understand what he was commanded to look for. He hadn’t found it yet, just because it was hidden with superlative magic. But he would find it in time, if he kept on looking. He knew that the power existed in him to see, find, anything.

   Unconsciously he had slowly started walking again, slowly shuffling rather, through the woods. And now he halted once more, trying to orient himself. Just where was he? Somewhere not far from the castle, certainly. The wooded land was quite limited in extent.

   Gradually increasing light assured Simon that the day was coming, if it was not already here behind the clouds. During the night it had rained heavily, and the air was still full of mist. Last year’s dead leaves made a thick sodden carpet on the ground, else he’d probably be ankle deep in mud. Every leaf and twig in sight seemed to be dripping steadily. But the sky no longer really threatened, and innumerable birds were up and being cheerful. The show must go on. Oh God. At least he’d tried his best, last night, to give a good performance. That was something that they could carve on his tombstone.

   The sky was solid with light cloud or high fog, pearly gray and almost featureless. Simon was standing at the top of a deep, tree-grown slope. Of course it had to be the familiar bluff, though now with the odd light and the surface fog the decline appeared somewhat too gradual. Downslope, where the fog naturally was even thicker, the river remained completely invisible. Somewhere on the far shore a heavy truck was negotiating the highway; one moment the sound came very clearly, and the next it had been completely cut off. An effect of curves and hills, maybe, or some trick of foggy atmosphere. The truck made Simon think of all the lucky people over there, including most of the population of the world, who’d never heard of Vivian.

   He wanted to simply walk away from her, and keep on walking. He would, as soon as he’d found Marge. Something told him that would not be easy, but he’d do it, and then the two of them would walk away. At the moment he felt capable of rebelling against Vivian’s orders—of course he hadn’t really tried as yet. It couldn’t possibly be as easy as it felt right now. She wouldn’t let him go. His special powers—and he could no longer doubt he had them—made him far too valuable for that.

   A small bird flew close to him, in a half circle. There was something odd about its wing movements; could it have been a bat? Now it was gone again.

   Leaning against a tree, Simon reached out with his free hand in the motion of a man trying to catch some fog. This was the world, the existence of psychic powers demonstrated, such stuff as dreams are made on. How did that whole passage go, in Shakespeare? Something about the fabric of a dream. But it would be too much, if the whole world-dream turned out to be a nightmare.

   The bluff here was really not that steep, he thought. If the slope