Enchanted Pilgrimage (11 page)

“I suppose that you are right,” said the bishop, more good-naturedly than might have been expected. “It ill behooves any one at this jovial board to contend with one another. There are other matters that we should discuss. I understand, Sir Scholar, that you seek the Old Ones out of the curiosity of the intellect. I suppose this comes from the reading you have done.”

“Reading most painfully come by,” said Oliver. “I watched him many nights, hunched above a table in the library, reading ancient scripts, taking down the books that had not been touched for centuries and blowing off the dust that had accumulated, reading by the feeble light of a too-short candle, since poverty dictated he must use them to their bitter end. Shivering in the winter, since you must know that all the buildings of the university, and perhaps the library most of all, are ill-constructed old stone piles through which the wind has little trouble blowing.”

“And, pray,” the bishop said to Cornwall, “tell us what you found.”

“Not a great deal,” said Cornwall. “A sentence here, another sentence there. Enough to convince me that the Old Ones are not, as many think, entirely myth. There is a book, a very thin book, and most unsatisfactory, which purports to instruct one in the language of the Old Ones. I can speak that language, the little that there is of it. I do not know if it is truth or not. I do not know if there is a language or not. No niceties at all, no nuances to the thought that it conveys. I cannot be convinced, however, that such a work could be entirely without basis. Surely the man who wrote it thought the Old Ones had a language.”

“There is no clue as to why he might have thought so? He does not explain how he learned the language?”

“He does not,” said Cornwall. “I go on faith alone.”

“It is not,” the bishop said, “when you give it thought, an entirely bad reason for the going.”

“Good enough for me,” said Cornwall. “Perhaps not good enough for others.”

“And it is good enough for me,” said Oliver. “It is an excuse for me, if nothing else. I could not spend my life as a rafter goblin. Now that I look back on it. I was getting nowhere.”

“Perhaps,” said Cornwall, “I can understand you, Oliver. There's something about a university that gets into the blood. It is a place not of the world; it partakes of a certain fantasy. It is, in many ways, not entirely sane. The reaching after knowledge becomes a purpose that bears no relationship to reality. But Gib and Hal I worry over. I could take along the ax.”

“You think so,” Gib told him, “because you did not know the hermit. He did so much for all of us and we did so little for him. We'd look up at the craggy bluff where he had his cave and knowing he was there made the world seem right. I can't tell you why it was, but that was the way of it. I sat with him the last hour of his life. I pulled up the blanket to shield him from the world once the life was gone. I built the wall of stone to keep away the wolves. There's one thing more I must do for him. No one else, you understand; I'm the one to do it. He put the trust into my hands, and I must see it carried out.”

The bishop stirred uncomfortably. “I can see,” he said, “that there's nothing I can do to stop the rest of you from going out to get your heads smashed most horribly, and it might be a mercy if the head smashing was all you'd have to suffer. But I cannot understand why the sweet child, Mary, must insist—”

“Your grace,” said Mary, “you do not know because I have not told you. When I was no more than a toddler, I came stumbling down a path and an old couple took me in and raised me as their own. I have told the others this, but I did not tell them that I've wondered many times where I might have come from. The path, you see, came out of the Wasteland.…”

“You cannot think,” the bishop said, aghast, “that you came out of the Wasteland. It makes no sense, at all.”

“At times,” said Mary, “I have a certain memory. An old house high upon a hill and strange playmates that plead to be recognized, but I cannot recognize them. I do not know who or what they were.”

“You do not need to know,” the bishop said.

“It seems to me, your grace, I do,” said Mary. “And if I do not find out now, I will never know.”

“Let her go,” said Sniveley. “Quit this pestering of her. She goes in goodly company and has every right to go. Perhaps more right than any of the rest of us.”

“And you, Sniveley,” said Hal, trying to speak lightly. “I imagine it will be old home week for you.”

Sniveley snorted. “I could not sleep of nights. Thinking of the hand I had in it, and how destiny had so unerringly guided my hand to take a part in it. I forged the sword that the scholar carries. Fate must have foreordained the shaping of that sword. Otherwise, why would there have been this single pocket of the purest ore? Why the pocket of it in a drift that otherwise was acceptable, but of much poorer grade? It was placed there for a purpose, for there is nothing ever done without a purpose. And I could not put out of my mind the feeling that the purpose was the sword.”

“If so,” said Cornwall, “it was badly placed. I should be wearing no such sword. I am not a swordsman.”

Hal said, “You did all right that night back in the stable.”

“What is this?” the bishop asked. “What about a stable? You were brawling in a stable?”

Cornwall said, “We had not told you. I think we felt we should not tell you. We fear we have fallen greatly out of favor with a man named Lawrence Beckett. You may have heard of him.”

The bishop made a face. “Indeed, I have,” he said. “If you had sat down and thought and planned and really put your mind to it in the picking of an enemy, you could have done no better than Beckett. I never have met the man, but his reputation has preceded him. He is a ruthless monster. If you are at cross-purposes with him, perhaps it is just as well you go into the Wasteland.”

“But he is going there as well,” said Gib.

The bishop heaved himself straight up in his chair. “You had not told me this. Why did you not tell me this?”

“One reason I can think of,” said Cornwall, “is that Beckett is of the Inquisition.”

“And you thought, perhaps, because this is so, he stands in the high regard of everyone in Holy Mother Church?”

“I suppose we did think so,” said Cornwall.

“The Church is far flung,” the bishop said, “and in it is the room for many different kinds of men. There is room for so saintly a personality as our late-lamented hermit and room as well, lamentably, for sundry kinds of rascals. We are too big and too widespread to police ourselves as well as might be wished. There are men the Church would be better off without, and one of the chief of these is Beckett. He uses the cloak of the Inquisition for his own bloodthirsty purposes; he has made it a political arm rather than ecclesiastical. And you say that now he is heading for the Wasteland?”

“We think he is,” Hal said.

“We have had years of peace,” the bishop said. “Years ago the military was withdrawn from this outpost because there seemed no need of it. For decades there had been no trouble, and there has been no trouble since the soldiers were withdrawn. But now I do not know. Now I fear the worst. A spark is all that's needed to touch the Borderland to flame and Beckett may be that very spark. Let me tell you with all the force at my command that with Beckett loose now is not the time to venture in the Wasteland.”

“Nevertheless,” said Gib, “we're going.”

“I suppose so,” said the bishop. “You all are addlepated and it's a waste of honest breath to try to talk with you. A few years younger and I'd join you to protect you from your folly. But since age and occupation bar me from it, I still shall do my part. It is not meet that you should go walking to your deaths. There shall be horses for you and whatever otherwise you need.”

17

The noses of Sniveley and Oliver were greatly out of joint. They had been dealt a grave injustice and had been the victims of heartless discrimination; they had to share a horse.

“Look at me,” said Hal. “I am sharing mine with Coon.”

“But Coon's your pet,” said Oliver.

“No, he's not,” said Hal. “He is my friend. The two of us together own a tree back home. We live there together. We share and share alike.”

“You only took him up,” said Sniveley, “so he wouldn't get wet when we crossed the river. He won't ride with you all the time. He doesn't even like to ride.”

“The horse,” said Hal, “is his as much as mine.”

“I do not think,” said Gib, “the horse shares in that opinion. He looks skittish to me. He's never been ridden by a coon.”

They had crossed the river ford, the old historic ford once guarded by the tower. But as they wheeled about once the river had been crossed, the tower and wall that flanked it on either side seemed rather puny structures, no longer guarding anything, no longer military, with all the formidability gone out of them, age-encrusted ruins that were no more man an echo of the time when they had stood foursquare against invasion from the Wasteland. Here and there trees grew atop the wall, while the massive stones of the tower were masked and softened by the clinging vines that had gained footholds in the masonry.

Tiny figures, unrecognizable at that distance, grouped together on one section of the ruined wall, raised matchstick arms to them in a gesture of farewell.

“There still is time,” Cornwall said to Mary, “to turn back and cross the river. This is no place for you. There may be rough days ahead.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “What do you think would happen to me back there? A scullery wench again? I'll not be a scullery wench again.”

Cornwall wheeled his horse around, and it plodded slowly along the faint path that angled up the low hill that rose above the river. Once the river had been crossed, the character of the land had changed. South of the river, thick forests crawled up the flanks of massive bluffs, gashed by steep ravines. Here the hills were lower, and the forest, while it still remained, was not so heavy. There were groves of trees covering many acres, but there were open spaces here and there and, looking to the east, Cornwall could see that some of the bluffs on this northern side were bald.

He could have wished, he told himself, that there might have been a map—any sort of map, even a poor one with many errors in it, that might have given some idea of where they might be going. He had talked with the bishop about it, but so far as the bishop knew there was no map and had never been. The soldiery that through the years had guarded the ford had done no more than guard. They had never made so much as a single foray across the river. Any forays that occurred had been made by the people of the Wasteland and these, apparently, had been very few. Duty at the tower had been dreary duty, unbroken, for the most part, by any kind of action. The only people, it seemed, who had ever ventured into the Wasteland had been occasional travelers, like Taylor, who had written the account that now lay in Wyalusing. But whether any of the few accounts written by such travelers had been true was very much a question. Cornwall wrinkled his brow at the thought. There was nothing, he realized, that would argue the Taylor account as any more factual than the rest of them. The man had not actually visited the Old Ones but had only heard of them; and he need not have even traveled to the Wasteland to have heard of them. The ancient fist ax, carried by Gib, was better evidence that they existed than had been Taylor's words. It was strange, he reminded himself, that the bishop had instantly recognized the ax as belonging to the Old Ones. He realized that he should have talked further with the bishop about the matter, but there had been little time and much else to talk about.

It was a matchless autumn day. They had made a late start and the sun already had climbed far into the sky. There were no clouds and the weather was rather warm and as they climbed the hill, the panorama of the river valley spread out below them like a canvas painted by a man mad with the sense of color.

“There is something up there on the ridge,” said Mary. “Something watching us.”

He raised his head, scanning the horizon.

“I don't see a thing,” he said.

“I saw it only for a moment,” she said. “Maybe not really seeing it. Maybe just the movement of it. That might have been all. Not really seeing anything, but seeing it move.”

“We'll be watched,” said Sniveley, who along with Oliver had forced their horse toward the head of the column. “We can count on that. There'll never be a moment we'll be out of their sight. They'll know everything we do.”

“They?” asked Cornwall.

Sniveley shrugged. “How is one to know? There are so many different kinds of us. Goblins, gnomes, banshees. Maybe even brownies and fairies, for respectable as such folk may be considered by you humans, they still are a part of all this. And other things as well. Many other things, far less respectable and well intentioned.”

“We'll give them no offense,” said Cornwall. “We'll not lift a hand against them.”

“Be that as it may,” said Sniveley, “we are still intruders.”

“Even you?” asked Mary.

“Even we,” said Sniveley. “Even Oliver and I. We are outlanders, too. Traitors, perhaps deserters. For we or our forefathers deserted the homeland and went to live in the Borderland with their enemies.”

“We shall see,” said Cornwall.

The horses plodded up the path and finally reached the ridge. Before them spread, not a plateau, as might have been suspected, but a succession of other ridges, each one higher as they spread out horizonward, like regularly spaced and frozen waves.

The path angled down a barren slope covered with browning grass. At the lower edge of the slope, a dense forest covered the span that lay between the hills. There was not a living thing in sight, not even birds. An eerie feeling of loneliness closed in about them, and yet in all that loneliness Cornwall had an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades.