Tempting Fate (16 page)

She took the leather bag onto her lap. She was plainly in awe of it.

“Will you remember?” He had never put his trust in anyone so young, and it troubled him. “It will be very bad for me if I don’t have the bag, Laisha.” He watched her duck her head, and decided that he had done all he could to impress upon her how necessary the bag was to him without telling her everything about himself, which he had no desire to do. He sighed once and moved back from her. “Once I lie down, you must not talk to me or disturb me in any way unless there is real danger. If the bushes rustle, don’t be concerned. On the other hand, if you see a farmer approaching, or hear an automobile or an aeroplane, then tell me. I will not respond easily, but shake me until I do. Will you do that, Laisha?”

“Yes,” she promised, not daring to look away from him.

“All right.” He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging pat, then stretched out on the ground, his hands locked behind his head. It was never easy to achieve that first, drifting state of mind, and this time was harder than usual. He looked up into the night sky, watching stars and the curve of the moon. Slowly his breath deepened, and his eyes closed. There were dogs, several of them, fierce and loyal. Each in turn was lulled from watchfulness to curled ease to dreamless slumber. One of the dogs whined as Ragoczy’s influence touched him, but this did not last, and the animal was soon asleep. When he was satisfied that the dogs would rest, he brought his concentration back to himself and opened his eyes.

Laisha was staring at him. “You looked so strange, so still. You were away.” She did not realize that seeing him then she had touched some essential part of his great age; her own youth guarded her from recognition.

“Yes,” he said, rising awkwardly, extending his hand to her.

She misunderstood the gesture and offered the leather bag, upset by his quick frown. “You told me…”

“So I did,” he relented. “But first let’s get you on your feet.” His fleeting smile dispelled her anxiety, and she took his hand at once, letting him lift her several inches into the air before standing. He picked up the bag and motioned for her to follow him. “We must stay low and speak very little once we start across the fields. The dogs can still be roused by a real disturbance. Are you ready?”

She tugged at the tail of her shirt and bit her lip, but wagged her head. Then she bent over to demonstrate her readiness to do as he had bade her.

“Excellent,” he murmured, tapped her shoulder, and began to move forward quickly. So swift and powerfully controlled was his crouching run that he seemed to drift over the ground, a shadow detached from all other shadows. Behind him, Laisha struggled to keep up, and did not know that when she did come abreast of him, it was because he had slowed down for her.

The houses in the village were of stone and planking with wattle roofs and tiny, unglazed windows. At the backs of the dwellings were pigpens and sheepfolds, and the shelter for the various dogs of the peasants; all remained silent as Ragoczy and Laisha approached. At one end of the village, near the church, was the midden, redolent from the warmth of the day. At the other end of the village, away from the holy building, was the bathhouse where the families went once a week to scrub themselves clean of their grime and enjoy the faint and pleasurable frisson of doing something wicked. Ragoczy slipped between two houses with little more than a startled bleat from a ewe, and into the open space around the village well. He paused a moment, holding out his hand to Laisha.

“Are you thirsty?” he whispered.

“Um.” She was afraid to speak aloud, so adamant had he been about the need for silence.

He reached for the bucket beside the well and dropped it down, hoping that the handle would not squeak too much. He brought the water up as quickly as he dared and held the bucket for her as she drank eagerly from it. “Don’t talk,” he cautioned her when he pulled it away. “You won’t be able to run if you do.”

Conscientiously she wiped her hands on her shirt, studying her toes. “I’m ready,” she muttered.

He turned away from the well and slipped gratefully into the shadow of the church’s steeple. He pressed against the wall, listening, but no sound came from within. The priest was not keeping vigil, chanting prayers as some did. Ragoczy was grateful. He went along the side of the building toward the sanctuary door, feeling the pull on his jacket from where Laisha had grabbed it. His hand closed on the latch. Delicately he lifted it, and to his relief it opened with little more than a pop. Long experience had taught him the folly of pressing his luck, and so he waited until he had counted three hundred before stepping through the door.

The tithing basket hung in the narrow passageway. It was made of heavy wicker and was secured to the rafter above it by an old, rusty chain. When Ragoczy pressed it, the basket resisted the swing; Ragoczy smiled. The basket was full.

Laisha was tugging at his coat, holding back her panting with an effort. She blurted out one word: “Sausage.”

Ragoczy did not reprimand her for this. He pressed her hand, and then reached into the basket, pulling out two long links of sausages in greasy casings. He touched apples and what felt like onions, and pulled out three items at random. “Here,” he said in a voice so low that it was nearly inaudible. “Put them in your shirt. Now.”

Laisha sniffed as she obeyed. The sausages felt peculiar next to her skin, and the apples were intrusive lumps, but she knew that no matter how alien they seemed now, they were food. She swallowed impatiently and thrust another length of sausage into her shirt as Ragoczy handed it to her.

“That’s enough, I think,” he said in that very quiet tone.

She had to resist the urge to protest, but her emotion was plain in her face.

“No, mahya dotch,” he chided her affectionately. “Any more, and we could not carry them. As it is, I fear the dogs will be able to smell our trail for the better part of a week.”

She accepted this, fear closing around her again. As his small hand touched her shoulder in sympathy, she straightened up, determined not to be cast down.

Then a sound caught his attention, and he turned, lifting a hand in warning. He had let himself become dangerously inattentive while he stole from the tithing basket, he told himself harshly. It was the sort of error he had not made in centuries.

The hollow sound of horses coming into the village grew louder.

“Three,” Ragoczy whispered.

From outside there came a shout. “Andrzej! Stefan! Casimir! Zygmunt! Where are you?” This was followed by a few indistinct words; then another voice called out, “This is Wladyslaw! Come out!”

At the far end of the village a door opened and there was a jumble of voices. One old man demanded querulously what had become of the dogs, that men could ride into the village without a warning being sounded.

“That’s it,” Ragoczy said resignedly. His influence on the animals would cease as soon as their masters called them. He reached around and grabbed Laisha by the waist. “We must run now, just as the dogs begin to bark, or we will be chased.”

“But…” She was baffled by this change, and her terror was growing stronger.

He lifted her onto his shoulders, ignoring her protests and admonishing her to be silent. “Hold on to my hair,” he said, letting the increasing noise in the village square cover the sound of his voice. “Once I begin to run, you must keep steady and still or I will fall and it is likely we will be caught. That would not be wise.”

“I will,” she said.

“Here.” He gave her his bag again, adding, “Put your arms through the handles. You’ll balance better that way.”

The first hysterical barking erupted in the night, and the farm animals responded with bleats and grunts and crowings. Another dog awoke and did its best to make up for its earlier failure. Doors were banging open.

Ragoczy stood in the shadow of the church at the sanctuary door for as long as he dared, then sprinted away across the fields, moving westward from the village. The weight of the child, the food, and his bag was annoying, and once he faltered at an obstacle he would usually have jumped with ease. But the manipulation of the dogs had tired him, and the added weight made him cautious; he struck out away from the low stone boundary marker, toward a line of brush, hoping that he would be able to get through the thicket without hurting the girl on his shoulders.

A light came on in the church and sliced through the night bright as a polished sword. “Demons!” cried a voice in a better accent than any other Ragoczy had heard in the village. He feared the priest had seen him.

Another man ran up to the robed figure in the sanctuary door and looked where the trembling arm pointed. Then both crossed themselves, for they knew that anything moving at that speed and of so unnatural a shape must be sent by the powers of Hell.

Ragoczy had heard the yelling and recognized what they had been called, and his heart lightened. The villagers would waste no time chasing supernatural beings. For the moment they had escaped and were free.

The woods loomed ahead and he moved even lower, his speed increasing as he used more of his great strength for a last dash into the stand of brush. They would, he knew, leave a most undemonlike hole in their passing, but at night it would not be seen, and by morning, he and Laisha would be a good distance away.

Twigs snapped around his head and branches whipped them. Laisha yelled once, her hands twisting his hair painfully; then she lowered her head so that it was close against the leather bag, and hung on as Ragoczy plunged on until they came to a marshy glade, where he allowed himself the chance to rest.

“Can you get down?” he asked the girl, whose hands were wrapped around his neck.

“I don’t know,” she answered, then did her best to release him. “I’ll try.”

“It’s just like getting off a horse,” Ragoczy coaxed her, his breath ragged as he spoke. “Only not so far to the ground.”

She wriggled, then slid off him, the bag falling beside her. She reached for it, holding it in her arms, attempting to ignore the discomfort she now felt from the sausages and fruit inside her shirt.

Ragoczy took the bag and stood up straight, feeling just for a moment that he had nearly reached his limits. “You did well,” he told Laisha. “You did very well.”

At first she could say nothing; then she met his dark eyes for a moment. “I was frightened.”

His laughter was brief and not entirely pleasant. “My child, so was I.” As he spoke he looked away over the glade. At the far end there was stagnant water, which made him frown. He did not want to chance crossing water in his currently weakened state. The earth in the soles of his shoes—his native earth—insulated him to a degree, but he would have preferred not to have to deal with water just now. He glanced across the clearing and saw the suggestion of a path, too well-maintained to be an animal’s trail. That would mean another village close by. There was nothing for it: they would have to cross water.

“What’s wrong?” Laisha asked. She had already reached into her shirt and pulled out an apple. “Do you want one?” Her face was set into a well-mannered smile, but her eyes begged him to refuse.

“No thank you,” he responded, equally politely, thinking that there would come a time when the girl would ask him why he did not eat. He wanted to postpone that moment as long as possible.

Smiling gratefully, she bit into the apple and then found it difficult to swallow the fruit; she was too near weeping. At last she choked the first mouthful down, and then her hunger took over. She gobbled the apple, attempting to lick the juice from her chin between bites.

Ragoczy watched her, delighted at her pleasure, and was reluctant to intrude on it. “Laisha, when you are through,” he said at last when there was little left of the apple but the core, “we must move on. In the morning the peasants may have second thoughts about the demons, and if they do, we must not be here for them to find.”

“Why?” Now that she had eaten, she was touched with the onset of sleep; her eyelids felt as sticky as her fingers.

“Because it could go badly for us.” He wanted to give her a more complete answer, but this was not the time for it “If you want to talk about it, we’ll do that later, when we’re away from here and have found shelter. Can you walk now?”

Laisha was terribly hungry, for the apple had only whetted her appetite. She hung back, her lower lip forward and sleepiness making her eyes heavy. “Can I have a sausage?”

“While we walk,” he said in a tone that would not tolerate opposition. He held out his hand to her. “Come, Laisha,”

She scuffed her toe in the spongy grass. “I’m hungry.”

There was no softening of the order now. “Come, Laisha,” he repeated, his dark eyes on hers.

Although she was not precisely afraid of him, still she did not want to argue, not when his voice grew so quiet and uncompromising. She reached into her shirt and pulled out a sausage. “I’ll eat this,” she announced, refusing his hand.

“All right. We will go across the marsh”—he pointed toward the far end of the glade, hoping as he did that there would be a reasonably well-marked path through the hummocks and reeds—“and then turn more to the south.” He took three or four steps away from her and waited as she tagged along petulantly. “Laisha?”

“Oh, well.” With an exaggerated show of compliance she fell into step beside him, pausing now and again to chew on the sausage she held in her hand.

The ground underfoot was less firm, and water shone blackly in the night. Ahead of them something small scuttled and splashed away from them, and a little later the low, eerie shape of a water bird skimmed over the marsh less than ten strides ahead of them. There was the marsh sound all around them, like an old man sucking on false teeth.

There was an irregular sort of path marked across the worst of the marsh, and Ragoczy thought he would not like to have to follow it if he had not had his remarkable vision: even a man who knew the way well would be hard-put to follow it at night.

Laisha hesitated as she looked from one patch of reeds to the next. For her, they were indistinct shapes in the dark water. She wished now she had held on to Ragoczy’s hand. He was two steps ahead of her, then three. Her features tightened into a grimace as she tried not to call out to him. She was terrified of being left alone in the marsh, but her pride would not allow her to make a sound.