#157: Untold Winter Tales:
The Sleeping Hero

YE who listen to stories told, When hearths are cheery and nights are cold, Of the lone Wood-side, and the hungry pack That howls on the fainting traveller's track, Flame-red eyeballs that waylay, By the wintry moon, the belated sleigh, The lost child sought in the dismal wood, The little shoes and the stains of blood On the trampled snow, O ye that hear, With thrills of pity or chills of fear, Wishing some angel had been sent To shield the hapless and innocent, Know ye the fiend that is crueller far Than the gaunt gray herds of the forest are?. Excerpted from “The Wolves”, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1861 Quoted at http://www.edheritage.org/wolves/resources.htm     He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt warm. He could no longer even feel his fingers. Every movement hurt and his tears froze as he blinked. He was hungry and exhausted and ready to die.     It had seemed so simple three weeks before, when he had bidden his mother goodbye with a cheery whistle, and hoisted his pack, and followed the forest road. A quest sounded like a grand and noble thing, and it would save Rose and save the village and everything would be happy ever after. But nobody had told him about the cold.     Jack wasn’t a hero. He knew that now. A hero wouldn’t have quailed from the wolf-howls and hidden up a tree until dawn. A hero wouldn’t have fled from the troll and gone the long way round, over the icy fjords that had cost him three whole days. A hero wouldn’t have lost his pack and his map and almost lost an arm to the moor-grim in the blizzard. A hero wouldn’t be here like this, struggling, dying.     In the mound, though, there lay a hero. The people of the village told stories of the hero under the hill. Thousands of years ago he had been laid there, not dead but sleeping, waiting to be awoken at the time of greatest need. Nobody knew his name now, or his deeds, but everyone knew he was a hero.     Sometimes on his quest to reach the mound across the arctic ice Jack had wondered if he’d been fooled by a story. How could anybody, even a hero, sleep for so very long? But perhaps this was the grave of a warrior, and there might be a magic weapon, or a pile of gold that could be used to buy a champion?     Except the village already had a champion, didn’t it? When the winter wolves had come howling during the worst of the storms, emboldened by their hunger to scratch at cottage doors and break the gates of the sheep-pens, they had been chased back by the Baron. As an overlord should, he had ridden against them, battled they said with the terrible Wolf King himself and sent the demon fleeing.     The village was already saved, at least for now, until the wolves grew hungry again. And if the beasts returned, the Baron stood ready, with sword and lance and night-black steed. And all he demanded…     “Of course I’ll marry him,” said Rose, Rose of the shining golden hair and the eyes like summer days. “He saved us all and he’s a great lord, handsome and noble and brave. A girl couldn’t do better.”     “No,” Jack had agreed, his stomach as heavy as lead, looking down. “I suppose not.”     “Besides, it’s his right, isn’t it?” Rose carried on. “He could have taken me however he wanted, and nobody say a thing about it. It’s a Baron’s right, the old law. But he asked for me to wife, fair and honest, as his reward for saving the village, and it was granted full willingly by all the people.”     Not all the people, Jack wanted to say. But instead he mumbled, “He’s been married before.”     “That just means he’s a man of experience, Jack, and a widower needs his share of happiness too. Why a man who has been so unlucky as to have six wives die surely needs a chance at joy.”     Jack didn’t like the Baron. He didn’t like his swagger, or his ruthlessness, or the way he looked at Rose. But the Baron was a champion, and he had his rights, and Jack was nothing and nobody, a widow’s son with no future at all.     Rose had looked at the forlorn young man she’d grown up with and cast him a pitying smile. “We’re not children any more now, Jack,” she’d told him. “We can’t cling to children’s dreams. Soon I’ll be Baroness and then… well, everything will be different. Will have to be different. But I’ll never forget you.”     The hot flush of anger at the memory of that dismissal spurred Jack’s frozen limbs the last few yards. There before him, rimed with frost, was an old iron door buried in the side of a snow-buried mound. A huge ring was let into the portal, a handle for anybody strong enough to open the barrow.     Nobody had opened it in five thousand years.     Jack could feel the magics as he wrapped numb hands around the ring. He wasn’t just lifting weight he was fighting destiny. The legends said the hero had been locked in this tomb by his enemy, imprisoned, and surely any prison was meant to be secure?     Jack strained with his waning strength, but the door didn’t even move. The sleet pelted him harder. His torn shoulder began to bleed again. His body told him it was time to lie down and die.     The memory of the Baron’s laugh kept him going.     Jack had met the Baron the day the betrothal was made. In one waning and waxing of the moon Rose would become the champion’s bride, his due reward for fighting back the servants of the Wolf King. Jack didn’t even want to look upon her husband-to-be.     “You want her,” the Baron had noted as Jack slunk out of his way. “You want her so badly I can taste it.”     “What’s that to you?” Jack had demanded roughly. And then, because this was the Lord of the Land he added reluctantly, “Sir.”     “Not much,” the Baron admitted, “but I shall take her with all the more pleasure knowing I’m taking what you desire.”     “She’s not a thing to be taken,” Jack answered, stung by the mockery.     “She is my property,” the Baron answered, “and like all my property she will be disposed to my will. Mine to use and mine to hold. Mine to discard and mine to dispose.”     “Oh yes?” challenged the angry young man. “Is that what happened to your other wives then? You discarded and disposed of them, did you?”     The Baron smiled then, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “And if I did, who would know? And if I did, who would stop me? And if I do the same to Rose, who would know and stop me then? You, little peasant boy?”     “You will never harm Rose,” Jack warned the champion.     The Baron leaned forward. “She will lie beneath me and bleed beneath me and cry beneath me, and that is my right and that is my will,” the nobleman promised. “And I shall have the sunlight from her eyes and the summer from her smile and the joy from her heart and the purity from her soul and they shall be mine forever.”     “No!” shouted Jack.     But the Baron had raised his whip and showed it to Jack, and Jack’s heart had failed him. And the Baron had gone on his way laughing.     And the memory of that shame gave Jack’s dead muscles strength, and with a cry of rage and frustration he heaved away the door and pulled it aside.     Jack lay for a long time in the snow until his screaming muscles had stopped hurting. At last, when he knew he must move or else lie there forever, he forced himself to crawl into the barrow.     It was somehow colder inside the vault than it was outside. There was light from somewhere, an eerie blue glow that cast rippling shadows over the stones of the rounded roof. Jack’s breath made brief clouds as he groped his way down steps that spiralled widdershins into the tundra.     And there was the burial chamber, carved from glacial ice, lit by that dead blue glow. In the centre of the room a giant frozen pillar propped up the vault. In the heart of the ice column was the frozen hero.     Jack could hardly believe it. Suddenly the gnawing in his stomach, the aching in his bones all seemed worth it. The stranger hadn’t lied to him. The stupid, reckless journey had not been in vain.     Jack had lost the sword he had borrowed, but he still had his skinning knife. He pulled it from it’s ankle-sheathe and began to attack the iron-hard ice. He had to free the hero. He’d been told…     Jack was used to being alone when he went to the old well. Nobody came here now since it had dried up, only him and Rose sometimes when the sheep wandered near. So Jack was surprised to find someone peering down into the dark shaft.     “Good evening,” said the cowled stranger. He was tall and clad in grey, and his hood shadowed his face.     “Hello,” replied Jack, cautiously, for this was an enchanted land and not all strangers were what they seemed. It was said that even the Wolf King could take a pleasing human shape if he so chose.     “What you need,” suggested the stranger, “is a hero.”     “Why?”     “Because the wolves always return. Because injustice prevails. Because this village needs to be saved, though it knows it not.”     “You?”     The stranger snorted. “Hardly. No, this is a task for someone whose heart is pure. Someone with the naivety to believe in happy endings. Someone stupid enough to risk their life for others, maybe spend their life for others. A hero.”     Jack considered this. “The Baron fought off the wolves,” he noted.     “Not all wolves are hairy,” answered the Hooded Hood. “Not on the outside.”     “Heroes are rare,” Jack said. “I don’t know any heroes outside storybooks.”     “Then seek one there,” the cowled crime czar suggested. “There is a tale of a sleeping hero in the hills.”     “Up in the ancient mound?” Jack agreed. “Yes. I know that one.”     “If you go to the mound you will find a hero,” the Hooded Hood promised. “But you will need this.” And then he gave Jack the magic talisman and went on his way.     And Jack had spoken with his mother, and he had followed his heart; and his heart had led him north, to the snow and the troll and the grim and the barrow.     Jack considered the talisman now. It was little more than a circle of cloth, embroidered with rune. Jack thought it looked something like a gate, or perhaps a stile; two upright bars joined by a crosspiece in their middle. Maybe it was the arms of the hero, symbolising a knight who could get where others dare not go?     Jack had no idea how long it took to chip away the ice from around the frozen man. If the hero was anything but a corpse it was hard to see it. He was covered in blood – ice-hard of course – and his raiment was torn. His flesh was mottled with cold. Even the bruised and lesions seemed lumpy where the flesh had been flash-chilled. His face had a look of utter torment.     At last the body fell free, heavier than Jack expected so that he almost dropped the hero. Jack had a terrible vision of the hero shattering like glass if he fumbled.     Jack unfolded the talisman and laid it on the hero’s chest. Nothing happened.     Jack began to cry then, the sobs of a man at the utter end of his endurance, the racking sobs of a man who has failed at everything.     Jack considered the talisman again. It was like a little bag, a hemisphere when opened out, with a ridged edge harder than the rest. It was almost like…     “A cap?” speculated Jack, turning the object over. Viewed in a certain way it seemed like headgear. Jack couldn’t help but feel that a warrior should really have a helmet, but perhaps this was some kind of magic wishing cap or something?     With cold-numbed fingers he arranged the cap on the frozen hero’s head. “Please,” he whispered. “Wake up. We need a hero. Really badly.”     And the hero woke.     Actually, he jerked up into a sitting position and screamed “Whitney!” The hero wasn’t what Jack had expected. He seemed more like a confused, wounded young man.     “I don’t understand,” Jay Boaz admitted as he tried out his aching limbs. “I was with the Lair Legion, in a running battle against the Wish Hounds of the Wilde Hunt. Then I was left behind, injured, and captured by some kind of changeling that took my shape and imprisoned me so it could take my place. I was frozen in that moment, knowing that thing was going to stalk Whitney and my friends. But that seems like just a minute ago.”     “People have known about the hero of the mound for many generations,” Jack assured him. “For thousands of years.” He glanced around as if looking for another hero but he couldn’t see one.     “But I’m still in Faerie, right? This is still the Many Coloured Land?”     Jack looked even more uncertain. “I come from the Downs,” he apologised. “All that land belongs to the Baron.”     Jay’s hand reached down to his waist, then came away again empty. “Gone,” he remembered. “That shapeshifter took my Hatility Belt. I don’t have any powers without my hats.”     Jack really wasn’t following. “Um, you have a hat, sir,” he pointed out, indicating the baseball cap with the red H on it that he had delivered to the hero. “And I can give you my belt if you want it.”     “That’s not it,” Jay explained. “I have this… magical stuff in my brain. It lets me take on the powers associated with any kind of headgear. If I wear a soldier’s helmet I’m a great fighter. If I wear a miner’s helmet I can burrow through the ground. I kept all my various hats collected in a special pouch called a Hatility Belt, a cunning thing of many pockets that were bigger inside than out. I won it in one of my earliest adventures. But without my hats I have no powers at all. I’m normal.”     Jack pointed to the cap on Hatman’s head.     “That?” Jay shrugged. “That’s just my default Hatman hat. It doesn’t give me any gifts at all – except in this case, when it reminded me of who I am and broke me out of that frozen stasis I guess. Where did you get it?”     Jack explained about the hooded stranger, and Jack frowned. “If that’s who I think it was then he’s up to something. He’s not usually helpful except for a reason.”     “Then you’re not a hero,” Jack despaired. “He said I’d find a hero here. I need… we need a hero very badly.”     Jay realised that of the two of them in the ice-barrow he was actually in the better condition. “The Hooded hood doesn’t actually lie,” he considered. “I might not have my powers, but I’ll still try and do what’s right. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”     “But what about this changeling who stole your shape and seeks to wreak horror on your friends?”     “They’d want me to deal with your problems too,” Hatman assured Jack. “If so much time has passed they… they may all be long dead anyway. I might be centuries too late to do anything but avenge them. But that’s for later. Right now, tell me what is so terrible that if forced you here in your condition. How did you get hurt? Why do you need help?”     So in gulping breaths Jack explained everything; about the Wolf King and his marauders; about the Baron and Rose; about the doubts and fears that things were not as settled as they seemed, or as safe as they should be; about his quest for the hero’s mound.     “Right,” considered Jay after Jack had finally finished pouring out his story. “Well the Hooded Hood told the truth about one thing. You found a hero in the old barrow.”     “You’ll help me then?” Jack asked urgently.     “I will, but I think the hero you found was you, Jack,” Jay explained carefully. “Look at the things you did to get here.”     “I ran away from things and nearly died in the wilderness.”     “And you fulfilled your mission,” Hatman pointed out.     Jack blinked. “I did, didn’t I? or at least half of it. But I’ve lost track of time. It can’t be long now till the full moon and Rose’s wedding.”     “Then we’d better get back fast,” Jay decided. “I’ve come across these sort of stories before, and I don’t like the sound of your Baron.”     “It took me maybe three weeks to get up here,” Jack despaired. “And you said you had no powers.”     “I said I had no powers yet” Jay Boaz told him. “Come and dig a hole with me. I suddenly fancy a lovely wolfskin hood.”     Rose was married on the shortest day of the year, before the first night of the full moon. The Baron and his men came down from the castle and feasted at the village, although the villagers had to strip their winter stores for the means to feed the host. There was music and dancing and toasts, although nobody seemed as happy as they thought they would be.     There was no sign of Jack, Nobody had seen him since he headed north a month ago. Rose looked for him and wondered why she did. What was she hoping for?     The village elder had conducted the service in the town square, and the threatening weather had held off as if afraid to defy the lord of the land. Rose’s father had given her to the Baron, and she knew that the other men of the village were quietly making their contributions towards her dower in gratitude for her family’s sacrifice. Once she was the Baroness she wouldn’t be able to see her family very often, the Baron had told her. They were peasants, and she would be noble.     Then the ceremony was over, and the baron kissed his bride. His rough tongue scraped her lips, and she shuddered without meaning to. His fingernails gripped her arms cruelly, nearly tearing through the fabric of her dress.     “Soon, my dear,” he promised her, as if reading her mind, “you won’t need your dress any more.”     She had nearly found the courage, once, to ask if he loved her; but she knew the answer anyway. He didn’t want to love her, only to own her.     Then the ceremony was over, and the Baron threw her across his coal-black horse and led his men away to the manor, riding like devils as the sun sank beneath a cloudy sky. The winds rose and brought the first flakes of snowfall in the blizzard that was to come.     The courtyard of the Baron’s manor was full of wolves.     “Now you begin to see,” the Baron observed as Rose made a little squeak of fear. “There are many things a maiden must learn upon her bridal night, many truths she must endure.”     “These are the creatures of the Wolf King,” Rose understood.     “So they are,” agreed the Baron. “And so they are mine.”     “But… you chased them away. You saved the village.”     “I forbore from destroying your kith and kin for a while, in exchange for a sacrifice,” the Baron explained. He ran a sharp-nailed finger over Rose’s pale cheek. “They gave me what I wanted.”     Rose swallowed. “What is to become of me? What happened to your other wives?”     “I’m sure you can guess, my dear, my pretty,” the Baron told her. “I’m sure you know what happens to maidens who encounter the big bad wolf.”     The pack seemed amused by that, and howled their mirth to the rising full moon. Then the Baron’s soldiers slipped from their horses and pulled off their skins to join their brothers. The horses themselves did likewise, until Rose was surrounded by nothing but wolves and werewolves, baying and snarling, and the Baron still on his night-dark steed.     “When I am dead,” Rose asked, “what will happen to my village?”     “I can’t protect every village in my domain forever,” the Baron told her. “And they have nothing left to give me worth keeping them alive.”     Rose knew than that she had lost, and she was going to pay the price. “I never loved you,” she told the Wolf King. “Maybe I thought I did, when I was a foolish maiden, but I never loved you. I love Jack.”     “Jack!” growled the Baron, with that rasping laugh of his. “Jack fled into the wilderness with my minions at his heels, and Jack will never return.”     “They always say something like that,” Hatman growled back, leaping at the Baron and tumbling him to the snow. “I think it’s some kind of villain compulsion.” The capped crusader still had his wolf-pelt strapped to his head like a hooded cape and he used the gifts of the wolf to attack with tooth and claw.     Baron and hero rolled over each other in a vicious bundle. The black horse reared and Rose fell.     Jack caught her.     “Run!” Jay called to the young lovers. “Now!”     Jack grabbed the horse’s harness and hoisted himself on the creature’s back. “Come with me!” he called to Rose.     As marriage proposals go it was the best she’d ever heard. She hurled herself into his arms and found she fitted as if she was born to be there. Jack spurred the steed forward and held on for dear life as it broke from the wolf-pack.     “After them!” roared the Baron to his wolves. “Bring them down. But leave my wife for me!”     Hatman concentrated all his rage and frustration about what was happening to him into his attacks. The combat with the Baron was bloody and furious, with no quarter given. But the Baron was the larger, stronger wolf. That was why he was the leader of the pack. His talons raked harder, his teeth bit deeper, and he was the Wolf King.     “Obey me now, hero,” the baron snarled, using his own power. “Tear that wolfskin from your head and cast it away.”     And Jay Boaz, with the gifts of a wolf, had no choice but to obey.     The other wolves around fell upon the discarded hood and tore it to shreds.     The Baron looked upon Hatman in triumph. A savage strike with one massive clawed hand raked Jay across the chest, spilling him to the snow in a welter of blood. “Tear him to shreds,” he commanded the pack.     Then the Wolf King shifted to the shape of a full wolf and loped away under the moon after the fool that had stolen his bride.     Jay lay hurting on the frozen ground and fumbled in his torn jacket for the other hat he’d added to his collection. He shook it out and put it on his head, a threadbare peasant’s cap bereft even of a feather. He staggered to his feet and looked at the beasts that surrounded him.     “Right,” Hatman said, “Try me now.”     The hero had said run, so Jack ran. He let the horse have it’s head and clung onto the Rose and the stallion for dear life. But there was inside him some part that wondered if he shouldn’t be turning back to help. Or to die with Jay.     “Yes,” whispered Rose in his ear, as if she was able to read his mind. “Turn back if you have to.”     But Jack instead wheeled the horse westward, down towards the river. At this time of year it was surfaced with ice, but still fast-running beneath. The village children were warned not to play on it because the surface was treacherous and easily broke.     Jack urged the black stallion onto the slippery ice and spurred it over the river. The wolf-pack howled behind them, closing the distance now with frightening speed. Wherever the horse’s dinner-plate hooves set down on the frozen water the ice cracked.     The wolves reached the water’s edge and loped effortlessly over the ice towards Jack and Rose.     Then the frozen covering shattered, plunging horse, riders, and wolves alike into the bitter river. Rose gasped once as the icy water dragged the breath from her body. But Jack was ready, and with a strong arm around her he dragged her by her sodden bridal gown onto the largest of the broken icepacks.     The wolves clawed at the shards of ice but couldn’t gain purchase. Some of them yelped piteously before the cold and the current took them as they had taken the Baron’s horse.     “Are we… are we safe?” Rose wondered, clinging to Jack on the treacherous ice fragment in the rushing river.     “Not yet,” her hero told her. He lifted her awkwardly in his arms, forcing his muscles to do one last deed. Then he hurled them both off the tilting ice fragment onto the opposite shore.     “Very heroic, Jack,” the Wolf King declared, rising up from grizzled wolf to eight foot high man-beast, Hatman’s blood still on his jowls.     “The Baron!” shrieked Rose, her last courage barely keeping her by Jack’s side; but she would not leave him now, not for an Emperor’s bed if the choice was hers.     “Not the bridal bower I had intended,” the Baron admitted, looking at the snowy ground, “but there will be some novelty to our coupling.”     “Stay away from her,” Jack warned, pushing the girl behind him and struggling to rise. He was trembling with more than cold, but he would never back down again.     Again that mocking laugh; and the Baron deliberately and slowly paced forward.     “No!” commanded Hatman, hooking a shepherd’s crook around the wolf-man’s neck and jerking him backwards. “Come by!”     The Baron rolled to his feet and saw the tattered bloody shape of Jay Boaz between him and his prey. And on the hero’s head, a ragged peasant’s cap, nothing more, borrowed from Jack himself two days earlier.     No, not a peasant’s cap; a shepherd’s cap. The humble hood of a man whose life is dedicated to protecting the flock from wolves.     “Go to,” warned Hatman, hefting his stave.     The Baron snarled from the depths of his black soul and lurched to kill the hero. Jay reversed his stave so the monster was impaled on it.     The Wolf King growled in pain and pushed his way up the crook that transfixed him. “Right through the heart, master hero,” he mocked Hatman, “and a killing blow it would have been if only your makeshift weapon had been silver-tipped.”     “Oh, but it was,” said the Hooded Hood, appearing through the blizzard, his own dark mantle wrapped tight against the bitter wind. “Look again.” He glanced down at Jack and Rose trembling in each other’s arms. “My wedding gift to you both,” he explained with a thin little smile. “Congratulations.”     The Baron tried to claw away Jay’s face but his strength was gone; and unlike a hero he could not command more than he had. And so the big bad wolf died.     “It is not over,” the Hooded Hood warned the villagers as they welcomed Jack and Rose into their fold. “The Wolf King is dead but there will be many other oppressors willing to take what he no longer holds.”     “The hero will protect us,” the villagers said, pointing to Jay who was being treated for his many wounds.     “I can’t stay,” Hatman warned them. “I have to get home.” He glanced at the Hooded Hood suspiciously. “Somehow.”     “I am the Baroness, even though the Baron is gone” Rose reminded her people. “I will find ways to protect us all.”     “How?” the villagers asked.     Rose gripped Jack’s hand determinedly. “I shall marry a hero,” she promised them.     Then the Hooded Hood and Hatman slipped away in the celebrations that followed; and Rose and Jack lived happily ever after to the end of their days. Weep no more at the tales you hear, The danger is close and the wolves are near. Shudder not at the murderer's name, Marvel not at the maiden's shame. Pass not by with averted eye The door where the stricken children cry. But when the beat of the unseen feet Sounds by night through the stormy street, Follow thou where the spectres glide; Stand like Hope by the mother's side; And be thyself the angel sent To shield the hapless and innocent. He gives but little who gives his tears, He gives his best who aids and cheers. He does well in the forest wild Who slays the monster and saves the child; But he does better, and merits more, Who drives the wolf from the poor man's door. Also excerpted from “The Wolves”, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1861 Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Graphics from http://www.tendermoon.com/TenderMoon.htm