But Luco and Herm pulled switchblades, flicked them open, and stepped in, grinning.
Suddenly it wasn’t just bullying anymore. Matt stepped away from the tree and out into the street. His ears told him there were no cars to worry about, but he heard the bus coming. Hope quickened.
Luco thrust, cat-quick, but Matt was quicker. He caught the wrist and twisted as he turned, throwing
Luco against the wall of the store. Luco shouted with pain, but Herm lunged even as Matt turned back.
The knife ripped his shirt, but he stepped aside and kicked the kid’s feet out from under him, then saw the dead branch that had fallen with his minor earth tremor and snatched it up. He whirled it moulinet style, glaring at Choy and Liam as they came panting up. They drew back, hesitating as they saw the two switchblades on the ground. Matt could see them wondering what he could do with that stick…
A diesel horn brayed. Matt jumped back. The boys scattered away, and the bus pulled up, slowing for the corner. The door hissed open. Matt dropped the stick and jumped aboard.
Luco and his gang realized what was happening and shouted, running toward the bus, but the door closed as the driver started moving to turn the corner. A couple of thuds clattered on the side of the bus, and the three other passengers made disapproving noises. “Kids today!” one grandfather grunted. “Ought to take the strap to every one of them!”
“Thanks, Mr. Joe,” Matt panted.
“Hey, you ain’t been around in months, I got to give you a ride.”
“Really good to be on your bus again,” Matt said fervently. “Sorry about the excitement back there.”
“Them!” Joe said with scorn. “I won’t let them ride my bus no more. Last time I did, one of them lit up a joint, and I sat at the curb for fifteen minutes before he gave up and threw it away. I caught hell from the checker, too.”
Matt nodded. “They’re not much to worry about, as gangs go.”
Actually, he was surprised to find that they weren’t. They had terrorized him through junior high and high school, but now he found out that they couldn’t really fight all that well. They hadn’t been trained, of course, but even as street fighters went, they weren’t much to worry about… clumsy and slow, and they didn’t know very many moves. What had he ever been afraid of?
Well, even the last time he’d been home, they’d been a lot better fighters than he had been, and there had never been fewer than three of them to his one. Now he’d had Sir Guy’s lessons, and Saul’s… and had the muscles Sayeesa had wished on him for her own purposes. And he’d been knighted. In Merovence, that carried a lot of benefits: authority, understanding of military strategy, fighting ability… and courage.
So that was why he hadn’t been swamped by the surge of boyhood fears! Apparently the enchantment of the knighting ceremony stayed with him, even in a nonmagical universe. It made sense… the knowledge and skills were in his brain, no matter how they’d come to be there.
Nonetheless, Matt reminded himself, he still wasn’t any world-class street fighter. It wasn’t just his own improvements that made the neighborhood gang look inept. They really were… and maybe it wasn’t just that he was better, maybe it was that they were worse. Six years of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco could do that. There were a lot worse than them around, and not all that far away, either.
“The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be, Joe,” he said.
“Used to look a lot better,” Joe agreed. “Used to be some nice kids in it, too. Not now, though. Drugs and TV, that’s what it is.”
So it wasn’t just the contrast of the cramped, working-class neighborhood with the fields of Merovence or the luxury of Alisande’s castle. The neighborhood really had gone downhill, and badly. Matt found himself wishing there were some way he could get his parents out of it.
Matt changed buses across from the supermarket. It was a shock to see it closed, but it was a bigger shock to see the chain-link fence around the whole property, even the parking lot. Of course, he hadn’t been down this way in a year or more… six, in his own time… since the last time he’d had to take the bus into Bloomfield, but it was still a shock.
“Six months closed, an’ no sign of anyone startin’ it up again,” said a woman waiting nearby. “Why’d they have to close it down, anyway?”
“Said there was too much shopliftin’,” the other woman answered. “Where they think us poor folks gonna go shoppin’ now?”
Come to think of it, Matt did remember a lot of signs warning people not to shoplift.
Matt caught the bus to Main Street, handed the driver his transfer, and watched the familiar neighborhoods roll by. It still looked awfully run-down compared to Merovence, but at least the urban-renewal project in the shopping district had been very successful. The plastic canopies all along the central blocks made it look much nicer, anyway.
He got off at the post office and enjoyed the feeling of stepping back into a more affluent era as he came into the lobby of the 1930s Federal-Classic building. The ceiling was high, the wainscoting was real wood, and so were the windows. Matt rented a post-office box, wrote the number down on a piece of scrap paper, then also wrote down the longitude and latitude… he still had them memorized from a grade-school assignment. It had been twenty years, but things drummed into young brains tend to stay there.
He bought a hundred stamps, then wrote down the exact wording above the slots for outgoing mail … “local” and “out of town.” After all, he wanted to be able to send Christmas cards, didn’t he? He picked up a couple of the “moving” booklets, with their forms for letting people know his new address, filled out two of them, mailing one to his parents and the other to Mrs. Vogel, the next-door neighbor who had been so kind to him when he was little. When he was a teenager, too, in fact. Then he went out for a stroll.
He went quite a bit faster than strolling, of course. Time was wasting… a week in Merovence for every half hour here.
Around behind the train station he went, through the bridge under the tracks to the far side. He glanced around before he entered… it was an ideal place for an ambush, but also for a tramp to hide out from the rain. It was empty at the moment, though, aside from some stale smells that he didn’t like to think about.
He took up a stance right in the middle, out of sight of anybody but some nosy kid who might happen to be wandering by, and began to recite the words of the parchment that had originally brought him to Merovence.
They were nonsense syllables.
Matt tried again, beginning to sweat. He’d been speaking this language for five years now! He should know it as thoroughly as he knew English! But the words remained stubbornly opaque, devoid of meaning. If they would just start making sense, his mind would be in tune with the universe in which the language was spoken; if he could let the beauty of the words sink in, begin to feel the body-rush that came with that beauty, he would find himself in Alisande’s castle.
He took a deep breath and reminded himself that it had taken two months and more of reciting those syllables, of digging into the origins of those words, before their meaning had come beating through.
Surely he couldn’t expect the magic to work on the first try!