The Fellowship of the Talisman (37 page)

A short distance ahead a small island loomed, no more than a tiny clump of rocks jutting out of the water only a hundred yards or so from the wailing island. Looking up, Duncan looked again at the three sharp peaks of the bigger island, outlined as deep blue spires against the paler blue of sky. The moon was almost down; it swam just a hand's breadth above the darkness of the western horizon. Looking toward the east it seemed to him that just possibly dawn might be breaking soon. He could not be certain, but it appeared that the eastern sky was lightening, the first faint hint of a rising sun.

The stubby dark form of the demon climbed the little rocky islet just ahead and disappeared down its far side. Behind him came Daniel, with Meg clinging like a bug upon his back. Behind Daniel was Beauty, mincing daintily along, choosing her footsteps precisely and with grace. The whiteness of the pack strapped to her back glimmered in the dark. Then Diane, supporting the stumbling Andrew, who still carried his staff, clutching it in a death grip despite his feebleness. And behind these two came the spidery figure of Snoopy, skittering busily from rock to rock, with Conrad's club carried precariously upon a shoulder, the club threatening every now and then to overbalance him.

Tiny came splashing back through the water to see how Duncan and Conrad were making out, his forehead all wrinkled up with worry. He nuzzled gently at Conrad.

“It's all right,” said Conrad, speaking to him with teeth clenched against the pain. “Go ahead now. Catch up with the others.”

Satisfied, Tiny turned and trotted through the water.

They came up to the small clump of rocks. “Take it easy,” Duncan said to Conrad. “Grab tight hold of me. I can take your weight.”

“Yes, m'lord,” said Conrad.

“Be sure of your footing before you move,” said Duncan. “You can't fall down and hurt that arm again.”

They worked their way slowly and carefully up the rocks, went cautiously down the other side, were in the water once again. Those ahead of them were more than halfway to the wailing island.

There had been no dragons. Thank God, said Duncan to himself, there have been no dragons.

“Just a little ways farther,” he said to Conrad. “Then we can rest. Get some sleep.”

He had not thought, he remembered, that it would be this way. Two days, he had figured, when they had started out, for them to cross the fen. But instead they had crossed it, or almost crossed it, in a single night.

He had been watching his feet, he realized, as if watching them might tell him how best to place them. Now, looking up, he saw that those ahead of him had stopped, all of them with their heads bent back, staring up into the sky. Diane had let loose her hold on Andrew, who had fallen and was floundering in the water. Daniel was rearing on his hind legs and Meg was sliding, as if in slow motion, off his back, to sprawl into the waters of the fen. Directly above Daniel was a black shape against the sky, a batlike shape with wings far stretched out, curved tail lashing behind it, vicious head thrust out.

“Stay here!” Duncan yelled at Conrad. “A dragon! Stay here.”

He wrenched himself free of Conrad's clutching hand, leaped forward, sword rasping from its sheath. Beneath him one foot skidded on the slippery underwater rock and as he tried to right himself, the other foot also slipped and he went down upon his back, the water closing over him.

He tried to rise, feeling a sense of blind panic washing over him, and slipped again. A shrill scream split the silence and he saw that the dragon, gripping Beauty with its two taloned feet, was beating its wings frantically to lift itself. Daniel, rearing high, had seized the dragon's neck with his teeth and was hanging on. As Duncan watched, the struggling dragon lifted Daniel off his feet and then sank down again. To one side Duncan saw the flash of Diane's sword. As she swung, a second dragon, seeking to avoid the blow, slithered sideways, almost crashing into the water. The sweep of one of its wings knocked Diane off her feet.

Conrad was running toward Daniel and as Duncan watched, he launched himself into the air, his one good arm reaching out. The arm encircled the dragon's neck and the dragon sprawled in the water, unable to beat its way to safety with Conrad's added weight.

Beauty had ceased her screaming. Her limp body, released by the dragon, bobbed in the water, which was being thrashed into foam by the dragon's struggles to escape. Tiny leaped at the dragon's throat, his head making a slashing motion. The dragon stiffened, tried frantically to hump itself out of the water, and then collapsed and lay still. The dragon that had attacked Diane was beating its way upward. Diane had regained her feet.

There was a sound of wings above him, and looking up, Duncan saw that the air seemed full of dragons circling swiftly in upon them, heading for the kill. And this, he knew, was the end of it; this was where the journey ended. His company, beaten down by the long night of travel, caught in the open no more than a hundred feet from the safety of the wailing island, could not stand against such an attack. Bitterness flared so deeply within him that he tasted gall inside his mouth. Roaring out a challenge that had no words, a berserker roar of hate, he lifted his sword arm high, running forward to take his stand with the others of the band.

From overhead, above the circling dragons, somewhere in the deep blueness of the sky, came the sudden clatter of driving hoofs, a wild bugling and the baying of a hundred hunting hounds.

The dragons broke their circling, milling wildly as they sought to get away, and down through them, scattering them, came the Wild Huntsman on his neighing charger whose pounding hoofs struck sparks in the air. The horse and huntsman swooped so low that for a moment Duncan caught sight of his face, eyes glowing wildly under bushy brows, beard blowing back across his shoulder in the wind of his own charge. Then the horse, with frenzied hoofs, was climbing into the blue again, the Huntsman flourishing his horn in hand. The dragons were fleeing wildly from the hunting dogs that bayed them down the sky.

The rest of his band, Duncan saw, was lunging through the water toward the safety of the island, Diane dragging a limp and struggling Andrew, Conrad plunging steadily ahead on his own.

Duncan waded out and seized Beauty. When he touched her he knew that she was dead. Her body floated and he towed her to shore. There he sat down and laid her head across his lap. He put down a hesitant hand and stroked her, pulled gently at her long and silky ears. No more, he thought, the little mincing feet, dancing along the trail ahead of him. The least and the humblest of them all and now it had come to this.

A soft nose nuzzled his shoulder and he turned his head. Daniel snorted softly at him. He reached up a hand to stroke the horse. “We've lost her, boy,” he said. “We have lost our Beauty.”

30

Duncan was walking down a woodland path when he met the giant. It was early spring and all the trees had the soft, green-yellow, lacy look they have when the leaves first start unfurling from the buds, and there were many flowers—the floor of the woods carpeted with flowers of every hue—little flowers that nodded at Duncan as he went past, as if they had seen him and wanted to say hello. The woods were a friendly place, fairly open, with a lot of space for light and air, not one of your thick, somber, even threatening woods that all the time is closing in as if they meant to trap the traveler.

Duncan didn't know where the woods were, he didn't know where he had started from nor where he might be going; it was enough that he was there. He walked in the present moment only and that, he thought, was good. He had no past to be remorseful over, he had no future he must fear.

And then the giant came into sight and each of them walked forward until they confronted one another. The path was narrow and there was not room for the both of them. To pass by one another the both of them, or at least one of them, must step aside. But neither of them did. They stopped, facing one another, Duncan glaring up at the giant, the giant glaring down at him.

Then the giant reached down with an enormous hand, lifted him, and shook him. He shook him lustily. Duncan's head snapped back and forth and his legs were jerking every which way. His arms did not move because the giant's great fist was holding them tightly in its grasp.

And the giant was saying, “Wake up, my lord. Wake up. There is someone here to see you.”

Duncan tried to crawl back into the dream again. “Leave me be,” he mumbled. But the giant said, “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.” And the funny thing about it was that it was not the giant's voice that was speaking, but another grating voice that he thought he recognized. It seemed to him it must be Scratch's voice. The shaking kept right on, someone shaking his shoulder rather violently.

He opened one eye and saw Scratch bending over him. He opened the other eye and saw that he was lying flat upon his back, with a projection of rock hanging over him.

“You're awake now,” said Scratch. “Stay awake. Don't fall back to sleep.”

The demon squatted back upon his heels, but he did not make a move to leave. Scratch stayed there, watching him.

Duncan pulled himself to a sitting position, lifted a fist to rub his eyes. He was on a small bench of stone with another outcropping of stone extending over him. Beyond the outcrop the sun was shining brightly and almost at his feet he saw the water of the fen. A little distance off Conrad lay huddled on one side, with a sleeping Tiny squeezed very close against him. Andrew was on his back, with his mouth wide open, snoring.

Duncan started to get up and then sat back, faint with the panic that had flooded over him. He had gone to sleep, he realized, perhaps all of them had fallen into exhausted sleep, with no proper precautions taken. No guard had been set, no one had spied out the land. They must have simply fallen down and slept. And that, he knew, was inexcusable of him, a failure as a leader.

He asked in a weak voice, “Is everything all right?”

“Everything's all right,” said Scratch. “I stood the watch while my companions slept.”

“But you were tired as well.”

Scratch shook his head. “Not tired. A demon does not know fatigue. But there are people waiting, sire. Otherwise I'd not have wakened you.”

“Who's waiting?”

“Some old women. Rather nice old women.”

Duncan groaned and rose to his feet.

“Thank you, Scratch,” he said.

Where the slab on which he had been lying ended, a path began, and he stepped out onto it. As soon as he left the protection of the overhanging ledge of stone the pressure and the weight of the wailing struck him, although there was no wailing now. And if there were no wailing, he asked himself rather numbly, how could there be weight and pressure? Almost instantly he had the answer—not the pressure of the wailing, but the pressure and the weight of the world's misery flowing in upon this place, flowing in to be exorcised, to be canceled by the wailing. The pressure seemed so great that momentarily he staggered under it and became, as well, aware of the sadness of it, an all-encompassing sadness that damped every other feeling, that set the joy of life at naught, that made one numb with the enormity of the hate and terror in the world.

The women that Scratch had mentioned were standing, the three of them, just up the path that led from the fen's edge into the island's height. They were dressed in flowing gowns that came down to their ankles, very simple gowns, with no frills or ruffles on them, that once had been white but now were rather grimy.

They carried baskets on their arms, standing there together, awaiting him. He squared his shoulders against the pressure of the misery and marched up the path to face them.

When they were face-to-face they stood silent for a moment, he and the three of them, looking one another over.

They were no longer young, he saw; it had been a long time since they had been young, if ever. They had the look of women who never had been young. Yet they were not hags, despite the wrinkles on their faces. The wrinkles, rather, gave them dignity, and there was about them a calmness that was at odds with the concentrated misery pouring in upon this place.

Then one of them spoke, the one who stood slightly in the forefront of the three.

“Young man,” she asked, “can you be the one who did violence on our dragons?”

The question was so unexpected and the implication so incongruous that Duncan laughed involuntarily. The laugh was short and harsh, little better than a bark.

“You should not have,” the woman said. “You have badly frightened them. They have not as yet returned and we are very worried of them. I believe you killed one of them, as well.”

“Not until it had done its best to kill us,” said Duncan sharply. “Not until it had killed little Beauty.”

“Beauty?” asked the woman.

“A burro, ma'am.”

“Only a burro?”

“One of my company,” said Duncan. “There is a horse and dog as well, and they also are of our company. Not pets, not animals, but truly part of us.”

“Also a demon,” said the woman, “an ugly club-footed demon that challenged us and threatened us with his weapon when we came down the path.”

“The demon also,” said Duncan. “He, likewise, is one of us. And, if you will, with us also is a witch, a goblin and a hermit who thinks he is a soldier of the Lord.”

The woman shook her head. “I have never heard the like,” she said. “And who, may I ask, are you?”

“Ma'am, I am Duncan of the House of Standish.”

“Of Standish House? Then why are you not at Standish House rather than out here in the fen harassing inoffensive dragons?”

“Madam,” he said evenly, “I can't imagine how you fail to know, but since you don't, I'll tell you. Your inoffensive dragons are the most bloodthirsty raveners I have ever happened on. Further I will tell you that while we had the right good will to harass them handsomely, it was not we who really did the job. We were too worn out from the crossing of the fen to do it creditably. It was the Wild Huntsman who put the run on them.”