Willow (25 page)

Then, men squealed, finding they were no longer men but swine in the shreds of clothes. And among those who had once been men were Madmartigan and Airk.

“Oh, Mother, no! No!” Sorsha sank to her knees, her eyes filling with tears at the sight of Madmartigan, who grunted, and grinned, and stared at her out of little pigish eyes.

“And
you
, Sorsha! I warned you never to disobey me! So, you’ve made your choice!”

“Moth . . .” Then Sorsha also was screaming, squealing, her bones cracking, her skin splitting and reshaping around the flesh of a fat sow.

When Bavmorda’s laughter faded from the battlement, when Willow dared look again, he could see only pigs rooting in the slaggy ground, including two piglets—Franjean and Rool.

“Oh, Raziel, it’s horrible!”

“Yes,” the goat said, “but it is not the end. You’ve done well, Willow Ufgood, but you must do even better now.”

“No, no, I’ve come all this way and now Elora Danan’s going to die!”

“It’s worse than death she faces, Willow, unless you save her. You know that. And we can still defeat Bavmorda.”

“She’s too powerful, Raziel!”

“No! Transform me! The hexagram!”

Shaking violently, Willow picked up Madmartigan’s sword and scratched a hexagram in the dirt around Raziel. The goat stood with her head bowed. Then he drew forth Cherlindrea’s wand, clasped it in both hands, braced his feet, closed his eyes, and gave his whole attention to the transformation. He spoke the magic words, and then: “Elements of eternity, above and below; balance of essence, fire beget snow!”

The wand trembled. Fin Raziel’s goat-form began to change.

“Don’t give up, Willow! Be strong!” Her voice stretched and echoed through long tunnels of time. Willow concentrated, pouring all his remaining strength into the wand, and it took that strength, and drained him.
“Locktwarr danalora luatha danu, tuatha, tuatha, chnox danu
. . .”

Willow’s knees sagged, but he clung to consciousness. He concentrated.

Had his eyes been open, Willow would have seen Raziel pass through many changes in those moments.

From her goat-form she became an amorphous protoplasm, neither vegetable nor animal, and yet pulsing with blood; and then she became a stately deer; and then human—a child, a girl, a beautiful young woman . . .

Opening his eyes, Willow saw Raziel as she had been those years ago, when she and Bavmorda and the king had been young together, with all their lives ahead of them. For several moments she lingered in this state, smiling radiantly and beckoning as if she longed to speak, and then before his eyes she changed again, slowly and finally, into an old woman. Her flaxen hair grew glistening white; her shoulders hunched, her face creased and furrowed; her breasts and belly, once full and rounded, sagged into pouches of flesh.

Willow covered her with a smock. “Oh, Raziel . . .”

Sadly she looked down at her gnarled hands, her knobby feet. “It’s been so long,” she said. And then she gathered her concentration. Her eyes focused with purpose. “Give me the wand. We have a task, Willow, to undo Bavmorda’s sorcery, and time is short. Quickly, now! And quietly!”

Willow hurried alongside as she passed among the pigs in the darkness, touching each on the snout with the wand and whispering the countercharm to Bavmorda’s curse.
“Tuatha grain chnox, y foel famau . . .
”

One by one, painlessly, they changed back into their human selves, huddling in fearful little groups, glancing at Nockmaar’s battlements.

“Demoralized!” Airk said when they had gathered in his tent. “The whole camp! We’ll never get through the gates of Nockmaar with these troops!”

“She cannot transform you again,” Raziel said firmly. “My spell has protected you.”

He stared skeptically through the gloom and drifting smoke. He shook his head. “Too well defended. We should retire, Madmartigan. Regroup. Come back another day.”

White light flashed at the top of Bavmorda’s tower, the clang of a gong echoed down the valley, and a tiny scream drifted out to them, the cry of a child in pain and mortal terror.

Willow groaned.

“We must attack tonight,” Sorsha said. “Otherwise it will be too late.”

“She’s right.” Raziel’s face was pale but resolute. “Bavmorda has begun the Ritual. If we do not save her, Elora Danan will be gone on the thirteenth ringing of the gong.”

“Then we’ve got to fight!” Madmartigan said. “Raziel, can you use your magic to get us into the fortress?”

“No.”

“Hopeless, then,” Airk said. “We haven’t the men or the machinery to storm those walls.”

Willow had been walking in little circles, biting his lip, pounding his fist into his palm. Now, as he gazed at Nockmaar and the ground before it, his eyes lit up. “Wait a minute! Back home we have a lot of hedgehogs!”

Madmartigan and Airk looked at one another. “Willow,” Madmartigan said, “this is warfare, not agriculture.”

“I know, I know. But I have an idea how we can get inside the castle. Listen!”

Hurriedly, while the weird light glowed again in Bavmorda’s tower and the gong rang again, Willow outlined his plan.

“Impossible, little friend!” Airk said when he had finished. “Too much work to get done by dawn.”

“Besides,” Sorsha said, shaking her head, “Kael would never fall for it.”

The gong sounded again.

“Madmartigan, tell them! Elora needs us!”

“The chances aren’t good, Willow.”

“But at least it’s
something
!”

“He’s right.” Raziel looked around at the group. “If the child dies, all hope for the future will be lost. It’s a desperate chance, but we must try it. Otherwise . . .” She held out her hands to Bavmorda’s tower, as if giving over the world.

Silver light flickered there; the fourth blow on the gong echoed across the slate hills of Nockmaar.

“I’m going to fight!” Willow said.

Airk smiled sadly down at him, but Madmartigan laid his hand on the Nelwyn’s shoulder. “It’s time to decide who is going to fight and who is going to retreat.”

In the tower conjuring room, the dark Ritual had begun. As soon as they had seen Kael rush into the courtyard with Elora Danan held triumphantly above his head, the three priests began to prepare. They summoned guards to clear the room of trolls, who protested vehemently, slobbering and cursing as they were dragged downstairs. They freed the night herons, who rose through the opening in the roof, circled, then turned thankfully toward the marshes of Galladoorn. They prepared the copper altar, inlaid with its blood-red rubies, and chanted incantations over it, and laid the leather thongs upon it. They cleansed and readied the great stone crucible, and swept clear the platform around it. They tossed the skulls and bones from other ceremonies into a basket in an alcove ossuary, lest any clinging auras distract the queen from the great business at hand. They poured the bowl of blood from a bronze pitcher, with all proper ceremony. They readied on their pedestals the five small crucibles. They scoured the queen’s great shield with fire, burnishing it until its bolt of lightning gleamed. They chanted the solemn spell to open the secret recess, and when the hinged dolmens swung back, they bore out the bronze gong and set it in its place of honor. They ignited the flambeaux in the wall sconces. They arranged and sanctified the Thirteen Tapers.

When all was ready, they notified the queen. Alone, Bavmorda came out of her apartment. Alone, she climbed the stairs of the tower. When she stood before the altar, her gown wrapped tightly around her, they brought her the child. Then they sealed the door of the chamber.

Bavmorda nodded to the altar, and the priest bearing Elora laid her on it and bound her down with the crisscrossing thongs. The child screamed.

“Your Majesty . . .” For a moment the old priest faltered.

“Silence! Move away!”

The Ritual began.

“Come thunder,” Bavmorda murmured, drawing her hands out of her cloak and reaching toward the opening in the massive granite ceiling. “Come lightning. Touch this altar with your power.”

Sheet lightning shimmered down, wrapping queen and child with baleful radiance.

Elora shrieked again, struggling helplessly against her bonds.

The gong sounded once; flame glimmered on the wick of the first of the sacred tapers. The tallow burned with the scent of death.

Bavmorda smiled. “Dark runes, dark powers! Blend and bind, bind and blend this night of Nockmaar with the universal Night!” From her sleeve she drew a thin knife taken from the elves long ago. A perfect knife. A knife that never needed sharpening, never lost its razor edge. She drew it gently across her palm and, sliding close to the bound child, cut three locks of her brilliant red hair and placed them in the first of the five small crucibles.

“Black fire forever kindled within, let the second rite begin!”

The priest at the gong swung his muffled hammer twice, and the repercussions swelled through the window slits, blending with the swirling smoke of the volcano. Another priest lit the second of the Thirteen Tapers.

A cold wind blew through the tower. The candles guttered. The gong swayed on its straps, moaning as the wind crossed its embossed face.

The priests shivered. One of them glided forward to daub Elora with livid paint—feet and hands, brow and heart.

Bavmorda plunged her hands into the bowl of blood and raised them toward the opening in the roof, toward dark stars which only she could see. Blood streamed down her arms. Inside the folds of her gown it coursed over her breasts, trickled across her belly.

The gong sounded, thrice.

The queen trembled. Her lips twitched. She muttered incantations unknown to the priests. She was growing darker as the Ritual proceeded, thicker, uglier at every stage, as if the energy to summon the powers for this destruction were being drawn from the marrow of her bones. Her eyes sank deeper. Cords stretched in her neck. Skin drew tighter about her teeth in a grimace increasingly hideous.

“Ocht veth nockthirth bordak!”
She gestured upward, and the small body of Elora Danan, magically freed of bonds but clenched in the grip of the charm, rose off the copper altar.

The gong sounded again, four times. Four dark tapers burned. The air sucked in to feed them whistled through the window slits . . .

Through the first light, through drifting smoke, alone on an empty field, Willow and Fin Raziel walked toward Nockmaar. In one hand, Willow carried a drum on a tripod, and a stick. In the other, he held the braid of Kiaya’s hair.

“Your wife, your family will remember this day, Willow,” Fin Raziel said, seeing the braid clutched in his small fist. “And I shall remember. I’ve waited all these years to face Bavmorda, and you have made it possible. Thank you.”

“Oh, Raziel, do we still have time? That was twelve blows on the gong!”

“Yes. If our plan works we have time. The last stage of the Ritual is the longest and hardest, and the child is safe until the very end.”

Just beyond arrow-shot from the castle wall they stopped. Willow set down the tripod and the drum. On both sides, the slate and barren hills of Nockmaar loomed over them. Behind, where Airk’s army had bivouacked in the cold winds the night before, there was now nothing but flattened tents and abandoned equipment. Ahead, stood the dark fortress.

Raucous laughter echoed down from the parapet. Summoned at first light from his carousing, Kael had climbed up to the battlements to savor his victory. He gazed out over the desolate litter on the plain deserted by the broken and demoralized rebel army. He laughed coldly with his lieutenants, slapping the cold stone.

So insignificant were the two small figures of Willow and Fin Raziel that at first no one saw them. Not until more light had spilled into the valley did one of Kael’s officers point them out.

Kael leaned forward, squinting.

“Surrender!” Fin Raziel commanded.

“What?”

“Surrender!” Willow shouted. “We are all-powerful sorcerers! Give us the baby or we will destroy you!”

Kael and his men laughed incredulously. They roared, enjoying this good joke. And then, when he had grown tired of laughing, Kael brushed his hand outward as if at a pesky fly. “Kill them!”

Fin Raziel clasped her wand, Willow his drumstick, watching the bridge descend across the festering moat.

“Ready, Willow!”

“Courage, Raziel!” he answered, managing a smile.

And then, as the drawbridge fell and a squad ran out to do Kael’s bidding, Willow turned and struck his drum. The sound boomed down the valley.

Kael roared in laughter again, slapping the parapet. “Is that your magic, little man? Is that your fearful sorcery?”

“Yes!” Willow shouted back. “I bring warriors out of the ground! Like hedgehogs!”

Suddenly the valley came alive. With a surging cry, men and horses threw off their coverings and lunged up out of shallow pits. Some had trained their mounts so well that they had lain down still in the saddle, and horse and man now rose as one. So fast were they, and so complete was the surprise, that before Kael even had time to shout, “Raise the bridge!” the first of Airk’s men had charged over it and was inside the Nockmaar courtyard. The assassins who had come out to kill Raziel and Willow were slain in their tracks.

Airk bent down and scooped Willow onto his saddle, and Sorsha lifted Fin Raziel onto hers. Madmartigan had been one of the first inside, and by the time Willow reached him three gatemen lay dead at his horse’s feet and a fourth was gaping at blood spurting from his arm. In no time Kael was on his horse and roaring his battle cry, rallying his defenders at the top of a long ramp which led up to the tower. “Form your line there! Loose the dogs!”

Sorsha slipped Fin Raziel off her horse at the foot of a broad staircase and then dismounted herself, giving Rak a slap on the rump that sent him back out through the gates and away from the fighting. A moment later, Madmartigan found her there. He was laughing as he leaned down and reached to embrace her. “Sorsha, you are my moon, my sun, my stars!”

“What? Not again!”

“I mean it! You are!” He drew her close and kissed her.