Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II (14 page)

“My wife?” I asked.

“And daughters.” Her stare went into a remoteness I didn’t like. If this was acting, it was effective work. “Explain yourself,” demanded my son. His dark eyes were cold and furious. Whatever was wrong, he’d blame me. “This is truth,” she said. “She’s been taken by your enemies.” The girl, Chael, was working her lips together, restless, looking like she wanted to say something.

Lohengrin looked fierce. I suppose he was.

“Well,” I said, “am I supposed to be convinced?”

She shrugged.

“As you like,” she said. “Your family was betrayed.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Lohengrin. “It’s too convenient. “

The witch started walking away, back through the maze of hedges. We followed. What else? She went on talking with Lohengrin.

“Just tell me where you put it, and I’ll give you the gold.”

He followed, a step behind me.

“Ha, ha,” he said.

He fled past me and snatched at her slim, bared neck under the sun-fired red hair. His hand was as big and hard as my own.

She dipped her hip without looking back. He missed and staggered past, off balance. Her small foot flashed and caught him behind the knee. He went flat and cracked his nose on the path. I winced. He cursed. She turned around the next angle of hedge.

No wonder she was unworried. I’d assumed we would overmatch the castle force. Not if there were two like her.

“Foul whore,” he snarled, getting up and following again, in a fighting crouch.

“Hold on,” I called out. “Leave her alone.” For his sake. His noseblood already spattered his face. I ran to follow past the young girl. Around the bend I was in time to see him spring, swinging his fist for her face as she turned and seemed lightly to touch his chest with her open hand.

He dropped again, fighting for breath. The soft-looking girl went and crouched by his side. He fainted. I lifted my sword. She’d already taught me to kill women, I reflected, remembering the dead girl in my armor. She faced me now.

“He’ll not die,” she assured me. Her eyes were hot, glassy blue. Her power was ecstasy. I could see that. “He can rest here. He will help secure his father’s loyalty in service.”

“I’m not in service,” I said.

“Yes, you are. And you can trust me.”

“Poor Lohengrin,” the soft girl was murmuring to him.

I dropped the swordpoint. “Oh, yes, I’ve seen that right along. Every moment sings

the truth of that to me. It’s been a bright beacon in a cruel and unjust world.” She wasn’t amused. No surprise. She must have meant to use him to get to me. She’d have had no way of knowing I’d be following him. Or … was it some arcane craft, in fact? My mind wasn’t ever made up on the subject.

“You can trust me,” she repeated. Saying it twice must make it so.

I shrugged.

“Lead on,” I suggested. “You’re sitting in the saddle.”
For
now
…

She liked that. I wondered how her other handmaiden, the one with the whip, was faring, locked away with the dwarf. Her focus appraised me now with more interest. She liked what I said, I imagine.

“Maybe,” she said, thoughtfully, “we’ll both learn new manners, riding together.” I had just bent over my son. He was breathing, snoring faintly. The girl was stroking his forehead, rather tenderly.

“He’ll be fine,” she whispered.

Morgana’s arms were cocked at her boyish hips. Her smile was sweetly corrupt and secret. “Come on, buck,” she said, making a chucking sound as if to stir a horse along, “we ride to joust.”

LOHENGRIN

I don’t know how she did it. I wish I knew the trick. When I came to, she and my father were gone. Chael was consoling me. I was starting to believe she meant it.

“I hate her,” she was saying. “I’m just a slave here.”

I rubbed my face and yawned, sitting up on the warm, grassy earth beside the path through the hedgemaze. It seemed to be twilight.

“She put me to sleep,” I complained, yawning, “better than a sermon.”

“Yes,” Chael said. Touched my hair.

“So you hate her?”

She nodded, eagerly.

“Yes.”

I stood up.

“I can’t say I’m taken with her, myself,” I said. I kissed her very nice, soft mouth that opened like a tender flower under my tongue. “We’ll escape together,” I murmured.

“Yes,” she agreed. “But it dooms us, because there is no escape.”

I nuzzled her ear and whispered, “Let me worry about that. Get the gold, and I’ll take you to the spear. “

She tensed just a fraction. “You mean to keep your bargain with her?”

I laughed. “Why not?”

She moved her face free, a dead-serious girl. I could see her going a little fanatical around the edges, under pressure. “With the power object,” she explained, “Morgana will be all-powerful.” That seemed a reasonably demented point of view.

“Well,” I suggested, “we’ll keep it ourselves. Then
we’ll
be all-powerful. “

She liked that.

“Yes,” she whispered, eyes far away. “Then we’ll teach
her
a lesson.” No doubt there was something to it. Not what this sweet thing imagined. But, perhaps, something, all the same. Get the thing. Get away, and leave the irritating parent to boil himself in the pot of his wrath, as they say.

“You’re all witches here then?” I asked.

“Some are.”

“But she’s the chase hound?” She didn’t get it. A baby witch. What was she, sixteen? “The mean queen of this hayrick.”

She blinked. So pretty, so void of humor. “I hate her. She held us in disgusting thrall. Made us do disgusting things sometimes.”

“Ah. I prefer that job for myself.”

The stare was off somewhere. “She thinks I’m her damned thrall. Well, we’ll see.”

“We certainly will.” I touched her wonderfully elastic breasts. She absently disengaged my hand.

“We’ll kill her,” she said. “The power spear will see to that.” She looked so gentle and fragile. Made you want to squeeze her into a fragrant ball and wedge yourself into her secrets. A ball of pleasure. “We’ll kill her together —” Her eyes were bright and innocently happy. “— and then rule this kingdom ourselves.”

Make that ‘rule a miserable, barren, foggy island.’

“I’m in your service, my love,” I declared. “I’ll take you to the magic power.” I knew we’d better hurry, because once face-to-face with Morgana, she’d unravel again like a frayed rope.

I suppose the chief witch assumed no one could get away. And that I was broken in spirit. I guessed she was bent almost, but not quite, to the limit. I determined to ride her until she was properly blown.

We were heading for the nearest gate in the outer wall when I heard a clash of arms. I looked back across the castle yard. Assumed it was my fun-loving sire passing the time. Lots of yelling and banging. Too much.

I paused with her under the shadow of the portcullis. The dusty yard was yellowish in the blunt sun.

“What’s this?” I muttered. She clung to my arm. They’d hurt her nerves badly while doing whatever they did to her here. She was terrified of Morgana. But what, past pain or death, could anybody inflict on anybody else? Well, I was younger then and I could take that sketch of reason for an answer …

I blinked in shock. A scattered few of the witch’s troops (I had gradually realized that she had only a skeletal army at best and clearly wasn’t depending on numbers to force her will on the world) backed in half panic out of the main door. One or two were already running away.

My father didn’t come hopping out in pursuit; instead, out came a swarm of black, stinging mites. I thought of mechanical toys, just over knee-high in jet black, glittering armor. Like something in a fever dream.

They scuttled, bounced, darted, circled, and cut down their normal-sized foes. I was too fascinated, at first, to really react. They chopped, stabbed, and swarmed all over those fellows. More were coming out windows too narrow for normals. From inside, I thought, like termites.

We’d been spotted and a wave of little ones broke from the main mass and kicked up a dust, running across the yard, coming our way. I wanted no part of that crew. Except for a dagger I’d plucked from a wall decoration, I was unarmed.

“Come on,” I said. “Plans are changing. Time for haste.”

She was shaking like a knight at his first combat. I was afraid she might melt into pudding. “Yes,” she said. She said that a lot. Probably too much. I threw back the little gate door and slammed it shut from outside. The deadly bugs were still coming.

I thrust, then jammed the hinges with the dagger. Bought time. Survival and all victory is won by half steps and hairs’ breadths. In life and death matters, there are no comfortable margins. You learn to live within sword’s reach if you expect results.

We headed for the scraggly trees and bleak rocks.

HOWTLANDE

We stayed underground. Endless tunnels with paved floors. Our troops carried torches which cast a dismal light and unsettling shadows on the grim walls. I was heartily sick of walking. Gobble said we’d have mounts when the time came. One has to sacrifice for success.

The girl captive was strange. She looked like she’d eaten nothing but air for a year. Her pale feet floated as she walked. I swore I could dimly see the light through her pale shape. Her hair scraggled down to her bony buns. She might have been fair once, when there was some substance on her bones. My wife, who had left me for a bigger fool, was still plump as a festival goose and had a good wit, in her way. Once I made my fortune, I might recover her. I’d considered it. Poverty is a disease that eats, like a canker worm, at the soft heart of love.

This captive lady didn’t seem to pay much attention to anything. She had faraway eyes, inwardly luminous. Undoubtedly, she’d suffered much.

Gobble rocked along in the lead, his shadow crazy on the torch-splashed walls. There were, I learned, tribes living in these endless tunnels and caves that secretly honeycombed beneath the surface. Amazing thing. The average fellow never looks past the nose end and misses all the mysteries around him. The great man is he who learns to turn the mysteries and forces to concrete advantage. I was, you might say, lying in wait for my profit.

A whole underground world of strange tribes, crude, savage, dangerous men. Some, I was informed, ate human flesh. Some were magicians. Clinschor himself was a hybrid of the underground races, Gobble more or less said. Most were small, though he was not. They feared him seriously. His mother, I gathered, had been a royal lady, seduced by a black dwarf. Clinschor had mated with his mother’s youngest sister and, they said (I’d heard this elsewhere), her husband had mutilated him.

There were races in the earth, supposedly down to the hollow heart of the world. There were kingdoms down there feared by all. Clinschor wanted power over the surface because he already had command over vast inner armies though there were depths even he dared not invade …

We came, at length, to an underground stronghold, an open place with hundreds of small caves dug into the dark walls. Dull torches smoked and a black chill river flowed through the center.

Gobble stopped by the water and took a crooked horn from his belt, and wound a crooked note or two from the brass.

Scores of tiny men scuttled from their holes like spiders and swarmed into the open area, backing us to the water’s edge. They were naked, pale things. They seemed to glow faintly, like animate fungi. Some were partly dressed in black armor. All held some kind of weapon.

Gobble addressed them in a tongue of rasps and barks that made my native Saxon seem as melodious as sweet Italian.

They seemed to like what they heard. They scraped cheers out of themselves. Became very excited. Milled around. Females of their race emerged and began dressing them all in black metal.

A fire was ignited that burned with a greenish hue.

“What did you say to them?” I asked Gobble.

He was rolling his eyes and beaming with evident satisfaction.

“Eh?” he responded. Our original hairy company were huddled close around us. They were obviously uneasy in the face of these vigorous mites. “I told them King Clinschor commands them to follow me. He promises them savory food. Food, for these creatures, is precious pay indeed. They live on blind fish and strange growths.”

“Ah,” I comprehended. Gobble smiled and weaved slowly, watching the clamorous activity as the creatures made ready for war. “Dainties and delights,” he chuckled. “And the metal that they love best.”

“Metal? Steel?”

“No.”

“Ah, gold.”

“They hate gold. Offer them gold and they’ll gut you. It’s the color of the sun. They love lead and prize it.”

“Lead?” I frowned. Peered at these pale and (I knew from the fighting at the Grail castle) deadly bugs. The girl captive, I noted, was staring out at the surface of the water, her back to the festivities. “Lead,” I repeated.

He nodded.

“They gather it in great, shapeless lumps in the recesses of their tunnels. It soothes them, I imagine. They kill any who come near their lumps, even kindred. They never can get enough. They are full of fury about it and only the lead itself soothes them.” He almost sniggered.

“But surely,” I protested, “there is ample lead in these places to mine.”

He cut me off. “They are warriors. They do no work. We pay them for their services.” He smirked, eyes tracking as ever. “They rather enjoy dying, I think — an admirable quality in any creature.”

We marched for days. I’d grown calluses in the past weeks that served me well. But I was sick of shanks mare. The woman captive floated along. I suppose she ate, but I never saw her doing it.

Then Gobble led the woman, myself and his bodyguard to the surface while the armored dwarfs waited below. We came out, at night, on a rocky coastline. Gobble spoke to the girl a little apart from the rest of us. Then he consulted a map, I think. Pointed over the water where the moonlight sparkled on the foaming surf. Wet gusts of wind broke over us.

At one point, he gripped her long, thin, almost translucent throat and shook her. I thought she’d snap in pieces. I was about to intercede when he stepped back, grinning and wobbling. She just stood there, remote.

He ordered us back down into the cave-like opening in the damp rocks.

I cried out over the surf and wind rush but by the time Gobble understood and whirled, the ghostly woman, ragged robes fluttering, had either jumped or was sucked off the ledge by a violent swirl of spray-shot wind.

She was instantly lost in the shattering waves and darkness. Hopeless. General Gobble paused, then shrugged and headed back into the hole with the rest of us.

I was strangely disturbed by that enigmatical creature …

We went on, down, down, and around in the glimmering underworld. The small creatures followed those forsaken twists and turns the way I’d walk around some local village.

We came to the surface in a dim castle cellar. We passed dungeons, hearing the usual moans, mutters, curses, and cracked-voice singing. We didn’t bother to open any locks. One prisoner seemed to be batting his head on the plank door. I shuddered at the idea of a lifetime sealed away with rats and unutterable loneliness and despair. How horrible. I’d choose any manner of death, I think, to such a fate …

On the stairs, going up, Gobble said:

“This is Morgan’s hole. We’re within it.” He rolled his bulged eyes and drew his sword. “All things are known to Lordmaster Clinschor,” he informed me. “All ways fall open before his name.”

“Ah,” I reacted, “I see. Quite a coup. What happens now, sir?”

“We capture her alive.” He flashed his shark smile, showing a great many tiny teeth crowding his thin-lipped mouth. “We bring her to the castle that holds the power.”

We’d reached the landing. The main hall probably lay around a bend or two. “We flay her inch by inch.” He liked that idea. I could see that. My allies were not what they might have been. But, again, exceptional men, men who dare to dare and reshape the world are often somewhat bent by quirks.

“We roast out all her witch’s secrets.”

They were the fellows for the work, no question of that …