The Book Man, Chapters 61-62 (Revised)

61 MORROW THE YOUNGER

The Rover king glanced at him as he neared. His eyes were less bleary than before and his face had lost some of its puffiness, but his hands shook so badly that he could not open his canteen. He fidgeted with it for a full minute after he noticed Christian, but his own ineptitude seemed to embarrass him; he threw the canteen aside with a muttered curse.

Without a word, Christian picked up the canteen, unscrewed the cap, and handed it to Morrow. The Rover took it but hesitated before drinking.

“Thanks,” he said. He took a swig of whatever was in the canteen and spilled it all down his chin and the front of his coat. He tried and failed to replace the cap. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Christian said, taking the canteen from him to close it. Morrow wiped his chin on his sleeve and put the canteen away. Then he dug about inside his pack and pulled out a pair of leather boots much like his own.

“Here. Graham said you were barefoot.”

The boots were soft with wear, but they were whole and fit well. Christian sat beside him to tug them on, trying to push away the images of his dream, the silence and the aloneness and the feeling of falling.

“Thank you,” he said.

Morrow clasped his shaking hands around his knees and sucked in several deep breaths through his nose.

“Are you alright?” Christian asked.

“Trying not to find a fresh bottle. It’d help, but Rowan’ll send me back to my cabin if she catches me drinking at dinner.”

“She will?”

The Rover gave a wry smile, a rasping chuckle. “She’s not all smiles and circus-tricks, you know. She and her sister are the cheerfullest people I know, but they’re not afraid to dish out tough love to people they think deserve it.”

Upon reflection, Christian decided this made more sense than he had first thought. Cheerful the two ringmasters may have been, but that did not stop them from feuding with each other.

Morrow put his forehead on his knees with a low moan.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Alright enough,” came the muffled reply. “I’ve been worse.”

There was the sound of several more deep breaths and a long exhale. Christian marveled at it: here was a man who had achieved great things in the past, led his people to victory against Goblin, and yet he was an alcoholic—an alcoholic whom, according to Rowan, the other Fair-folk would hardly talk to. The accountant couldn’t understand it.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “why’d you start?”

Morrow ran a hand through his hair.

“My father was a great man,” he said. “A great man, much admired and beloved by the people. The bastard. He got to be a recluse in his later years—well, look at the state of that cabin and you can tell, eh? But I’ve been trying to fill his shoes for forty-six years, and I’ve never been good enough—not for him or the people, not for anyone but my mother, God rest her. And then, round about twenty years ago, he went and got himself killed—far as anyone knows—and I was left trying to take care of this lot, and none of them wanted my help. And then Mum died and I got depressed, and—well, drinking’s a lot easier than not drinking.”

He stopped talking abruptly, patting his coat with his shaking hands as if hoping to find a bottle hidden in a pocket somewhere. After a moment he gave up.

“I don’t understand,” Christian said.

“You’re lucky, then,” Morrow replied, “because if you can’t understand it means you had a dad what would give you the time of day.”

“Not that,” Christian said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand that either, really, but—you saved these people from Goblin. How could they be anything but grateful to you? I thought they fought with you. Don’t they know what you did for them?”

Morrow shook his head and said, “Not me. My father.”

“Your—your father what?”

“He saved them. That’s why they all thought the sun rose and set out of his ass. Next to that I’m an incidental.”

A feeling of dawning horror cut through Christian’s confusion.

“But—but you’re Morrow,” he said helplessly. “I mean, that is your name.”

“Yeah,” said the Rover. “Morrow the Younger. Named after dear old Dad.”

62 MORROW’S TALE

After the battle with Goblin, as Morrow the Elder worked with the Mayor of the Town to plan and construct the park and the fairgrounds, Neva himself came to Earth to offer the Rover king anything he wanted.

“That’s always how he said it,” Morrow the Younger said. “‘Neva himself came to Earth…’ Pretentious git.”

Morrow the Elder was in his mid-fifties at the time, a cunning but benevolent leader who was unafraid of the toils and travels of his people. But there was one thing he did fear: old age. He would clash swords with a hundred enemies, spit in the faces of those who insulted his clan, but he could not bear the thought he might someday grow old and decrepit, that it might be his lot in life to die peacefully in his sleep with veins in his hands and wrinkles in his forehead. So when Neva offered a reward for trapping his brother, Morrow asked for immortality.

“I understand he was overjoyed at first,” his son said. “Knew he was getting older and older, but at ninety he had the same body and vitality he had at forty. Kept doing what he wanted, living like there was no tomorrow because, for him, there wasn’t.”

It was during that time the triumphant Rover king met Morrow the Younger’s mother, a wood-elf he met walking under starlight in the Sunforest. They fell in love and were wedded in the clearing, in sight of all the Fair-folk who were there between Earth’s dawn and dusk, and they lived happily together for a long time. But by the time Morrow the Younger was fifteen, his father had become disenchanted with the lure of deathlessness.

“I remember he used to say to me: Son, people think immortality is a grand thing, but it’s not. He’d started to wonder what the point was—day in, day out, he could do whatever he wanted, but it all started to taste the same. And he was so tired all the time, bone-weary, saying he could sleep forever—maybe that was just him wishing for death. I don’t know.”

When his son was in his mid-twenties, Morrow the Elder finally decided to find Neva and ask to be made mortal once again. None of the Fair-folk had ever ventured beyond their clearing in the Sunforest, and Neva had never come to visit them, so no one was sure where the angel lived. They only knew what they had heard, which was that he dwelt in a golden palace somewhere in the mountain range to the west. So Morrow set out for the mountains.

He wandered them for months without success, returning home in defeat in early winter. His supplies had run out after several weeks and there was no game to be found. He had starved, and when he came home his belt was loose and his jaw thick with whiskers for the first time in his son’s memory.

“Wait,” said Christian. “How could he have starved? I thought he was immortal.”

Morrow the Younger grinned humorlessly. “So he was. But deathless doesn’t mean invulnerable. My father survived his trek in the mountains when others could not have, but it was worse, he said, than if he had been mortal. He had all the gnawing hunger of starvation and no possibility of release.”

His wife convinced him to stay home for several months afterward while she fed and healed him, but he was restless. That spring, he set out again. This time he planned to circumvent the mountains, go south around them and come upon the palace from the other side where the climbing might be less treacherous and the hunting more plentiful.

It took him months, for to the south the mountains curved around to the west, but he finally made it around them. He found himself in a bog not more than a two or three days’ journey from the place where he hoped to find Neva’s golden palace.

“We know he made it,” Morrow the Younger said, a frown creasing his forehead. “One of Neva’s messengers came to tell my mother that my father had gotten what he came for and was on his way home.”

Neva, the messenger said, had offered to bring him back to the Sunforest himself, but Morrow the Elder respectfully declined. Independent and proud, he decided to make his journey back the way he’d come, through the forest and bog and around the southern arm of the mountains.

“That was the last we heard of him,” his son said. “The bastard never came back and my mother wasted away in her grief and died, and I was left alone as a symbol to the people—a symbol of the old ways and their times of deliverance, a symbol they didn’t want. So I started drinking.”

He dragged his hands through his black hair, mussing it up again.

“Always knew this was coming, though,” he said. “Dad told me Goblin wasn’t destroyed, would be coming back eventually despite all he did to trap him. Told me I’d have to deal with it if he wasn’t around anymore. Always knew this was coming.”