Mara’s explanation went on for some time. “I hope she’ll remember to tell us all the stuff she’s inventing,” Shona remarked. “It could be awkward.”
“Godlike snacks,” Lydda murmured. “Those will distract him. Come on, Elda. The rest of you ask her.”
Barnabas turned eagerly to the tray of Umru-style pastries Lydda brought out to him. He accepted coffee from Elda. While he was occupied, Callette managed to insert herself between Barnabas and Mara, which separated them by some way. “I kept it simple,” Mara whispered to Shona, under Callette’s big striped wing. “I told him there’s a very old dragon just woken up after three hundred years—all truth, except I told him the old dragon’s up north, and the younger dragons sent Derk an urgent message for help, and Derk rushed off at once. After all, it’s just what your father would do.”
“But have you said we’re going to fill in for Dad?” Shona whispered back.
“Several times,” Mara assured her. “Barnabas was terrified he’d have to deal with the soldiers on his own. Now let me rush off and get into proper clothes before I freeze.”
They saw why Barnabas was so frightened when they all arrived at the end of the valley half an hour later, the humans on horseback and the griffins on the wing. There was an enormous crowd of men just beyond the ruins of the village. Each man was dressed in shiny black and armed with a shiny black helmet and a long sword in a shiny black scabbard. Most of them were simply standing. Some were wandering in circles. A few others were sitting on the ground. And there was something very wrong with all of them. Beauty, who was carrying Shona, refused to go anywhere near. The other horses trembled and sweated.
“What’s wrong with these people?” Callette asked, peering into the nearest blank face.
“It’s all right,” Barnabas said reassuringly. “They send them through drugged.”
“Why?” said Callette.
“Er, well, you see they’re all convicted criminals—mostly for murder and assault and so on,” Barnabas explained. “The tours clear out the prisons once a year. I believe Mr. Chesney has a contract with some of the governments in his world, and they pay him to take these convicts off their hands. It’s a very neat arrangement. Most of them get killed over here, but they’re all promised pardons and free land and so on. All we have to do at the moment is to get them to the camp I’ve made for them a couple of miles over there.”
Blade had spent the morning hastily reading the Dark Lord sections of the black book. “But don’t we have to get them to march right across to Umru’s country?”
“Burning and pillaging and trampling crops on the way,” Barnabas agreed. “But your father can do that at intervals after the tours arrive. I’ve got camps set up for him all along the route. No problem.”
Blade swallowed. Mara said, “And when does the drugging wear off?”
“In three days or so,” Barnabas said. “But they’ll have been promised money if they behave themselves and do just what the Dark Lord says. We don’t often have trouble.”
Derk’s family looked at one another expressively and then back at the black shiny men. The sight was somehow even more unpleasant after this explanation. They were like cockroaches waiting to be squished.
“Ah, well,” said Kit. “Let’s get going.”
Moving the men was a little like driving cows, except, Blade thought, you had to imagine the cows were deaf, twice as stupid as the Friendly Cows, and walking very slowly on two legs. And as Elda said, even the Friendly Cows didn’t get in one another’s way all the time. After Barnabas got the men moving with one of his weary, practiced little spells, it took most of the day to reach the camp, and it was not easy. Going through open fields, they worked out that the best way was for the griffins to walk with their wings spread, herding from behind, with mounted humans two on either side to keep the vast shuffling horde together. But getting through gates was terrible. They tried shooing the men through in batches, but that took so long that Kit decided simply to break down every hedge or wall they came to.
“They’re supposed to be laying the country waste,” he said. “They may as well start now.”
“True,” Barnabas said cheerfully. “I’ll break the walls. If it’s a hedge, you and Callette can just walk through it.”
“But mind the thorns!” Mara called out anxiously. “Don’t tear your wing feathers.”
As the drive went on, its pace slowed to a crawl. Men in the midst of the crowd kept stumbling. When that happened, one of the riders would have to force their way among the shiny black bodies and haul the fallen man up before the others trod all over him. As Beauty would not go near the army and Barnabas had to lead the way, it was mostly Blade or Mara who had to do this. Blade was riding Nancy Cobber, who was the most obliging of all the horses, so he did most of it. He hated it. Probably Nancy did, too. The black armor smelled like tar, and the men themselves had a nasty smell of sweat and the drug and something Blade had never smelled before, which he suspected was the smell of prison. And he hated being surrounded by all their blankly staring faces.
By evening it was worse. Men were stumbling so often by then that Don and Elda were flying overhead shrieking a warning every time a man fell. And when Blade went to pull the latest fellow up, he found expressions beginning to grow on some of the faces he was pushing past. They were not pleasant expressions. They were angry or sullen. Some were jeering or plain brutal. But a few faces were full of simple flat hatred. Blade went in and out as quickly as he could, and his stomach felt odd. He was sure the drug was wearing off. And unless Derk made a truly miraculous recovery, Blade knew that he and Shona and the griffins were going to have to march these dangerous people to more than just the one camp they were making for tonight.
The camp was a large transparent dome of magic in the middle of a big field, shining a faint blue-green in the evening light. Even the soldiers seemed to be aware of it. Their stumbling steps went faster, and they streamed through the opening Barnabas made in the side of the dome at what was for them a brisk walk. Inside, Blade could see heaps of bedding, piles of bread and barrels of other food and drink, and latrine huts at intervals.
“There. That should keep them safe and happy until Derk gets back,” Barnabas said cheerfully, sealing the dome shut. Kit, to Blade’s admiration, hung over Barnabas while he did it, trying to learn how it was done. Blade felt sick. He saw one man pick up a loaf inside the dome and have it instantly snatched off him by another. When the drug wore off, he knew there would be bullying, quarrels, and strong ones forming gangs to terrorize the rest.
“Shouldn’t we take their swords away?” he said.
Barnabas shrugged. “We don’t usually bother. They have to be armed for the battles, after all. I don’t suppose we’ll lose many in camp fights. You reckon on twenty or so, most years.”
“They’re criminals, Blade,” Shona said, seeing how Blade was looking.
Blade was not sure even criminals deserved this sort of thing, but he had no idea what to do instead. He felt miserable. He was still miserable when Barnabas said good-bye and vanished in a cheerful clap of thunder, horse and all. He found himself thinking of that camp most of the way home.
Mara had arranged for the skeletal Fran Taylor to come up from the village and nurse Derk. Fran met them at the gate, surrounded by pigs, who were all giving out anxious squeaks and snorts and fanning their wings in distress.
“I’ve got the supper on,” Fran said, “since you were all so late. And there’s been no change. I had to spend all day chasing these pigs away from him.”
“I expect they’re worried about him,” Mara explained, getting stiffly down from her horse.
“And the owls, too. You ask Old George,” said Fran. “He’s had no end of bother with those birds. If he turns his back for a moment, they’re in through that bedroom window and gobbing all over the bedspread like there was no tomorrow.”
“Old George?” said Shona. “Mum! I thought you had Old George over at Aunt’s
house to be your wasted lover.”
“That was just a joke,” Mara said irritably. “He’s here for the animals while Derk’s ill. Now I really must go and look at that dragon.” She handed Shona her reins and hurried away to the side valley. Shona looked exasperated.
“Wasted lover indeed!” Fran said, following them up the drive in the crowd of pigs. “Don’t you let Old George hear you say that. It’s bad enough being like a stick person without people passing rude remarks. We’re only like this to oblige your father, Shona.”
“I know, I know,” Shona said hurriedly. “I apologize. It was Mum’s joke.”
Everyone was in a hurry to see how Derk was. Blade handed the horses over to Old George and dashed upstairs after the others. Even Kit and Callette made the journey to Derk’s bedroom, cautiously crawling up one side of the creaking magic-supported stairs and squeezing through the doorway to stare down at Derk’s bed. Derk still looked terrible. His breathing rattled as he slept. It was most discouraging.
“And Mum hasn’t even been to look!” Shona said. “She’s gone to look at the dragon instead.” She was angry enough to ask, sweetly and dangerously, over supper, “And how is the poor dear dragon, Mother?”
“Oh, I think he’s going to be all right,” Mara said, quite failing to notice Shona’s sarcasm. “He’s just slept himself nearly dead, poor creature. The healer stitched the worst of his wings and told him to rest and eat once a day for the next few weeks, and I can see she was right. He’s a better color already.”
“More than Dad is,” Blade said.
“Lucky your father met that dragon when it was half dead, I say,” said Fran. “If it had been able to breathe fire, he’d be a crisp by now. They say the fire gets into your lungs and burns you up from inside. You can go about for weeks and then suddenly drop dead.”
“Wonderful!” said Lydda, sitting with her beak poised over a plate of stew which she had, for a wonder, scarcely touched. But then the stew had been cooked by Fran and was far from godlike.
“Dragons are wonderful,” Old George observed. “They can will you into being dead. Did you know that?”
“Or they can see into your mind and twist it,” added Fran. “It worries me that your poor father may have looked it in the eye. If he did, then there’s no knowing what it might have done to him.”
“Sometimes they can take up a wizard’s own magic and use it against him,” Old George said, ladling himself a third bowlful of stew. His skeletal condition made him very hungry.
“They do that by singing, you know,” Fran put in. “You didn’t let this dragon sing to your father at all, did you?”
“There wasn’t much any of us could stop it doing,” Don said.
“None of this was in the dragonlore I learned at the University,” Mara said firmly.
But this failed to stop Fran and Old George remembering a host of other things that were not in University dragonlore either. Most of it suggested Derk was as good as dead, and it upset Elda badly. After supper she raced upstairs and opened all the bedroom windows. The pigs flew eagerly in, followed by the owls. Elda spent the night huddled on Derk’s bedroom carpet among the entire herd, anxiously listening to Derk’s difficult breathing, while the owls sat in a row on Derk’s bedhead.
Blade had a miserable night, too. When he was not dreaming, over and over, of the dragon blasting smoke at Derk—which Blade knew how to stop, except that in the dream he had forgotten how—he was dreaming of being inside the magical camp full of men in shiny black. Everyone in there was trying to kill everyone else. When Blade tried to stop them, they came for him with their swords. For once, he was quite grateful when Shona woke him early and told him to exercise the dogs.
Later that morning Kit called a council in his shed. Kit had been very busy. Strewn on the cushions of his bed were the pink pamphlet, the green one, the yellow one, the tour map, Derk’s black book, Blade’s black book, and piles and piles of Derk’s untidy, hectic notes. On the floor was spread a large map of the continent with the routes of the various Pilgrim Parties carefully marked on it, and pinned on the wall was an even bigger timetable, in seven colors. Kit had done the map and the timetable himself in that beautiful clear penmanship which only griffins seemed to be capable of. Blade thought Kit must have worked most of the night.
“I wondered where that was!” Blade said, spotting his black book.
Shona arrived last, meaningly carrying her violin. “What’s all this about?”
Kit’s tail slashed. He was crouched in a vast black hump in the corner beyond his map. “I’ve been trying to work out what we ought to be doing,” he said, “and who needs to be where, and when. We’ve got to reckon on Dad being laid up for at least two weeks, and not too well for a month after that. It would be nice if we could have everything running smoothly for him when he’s better. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” Shona said, looking soberly down at the map. “I do.”
Everyone else sighed with relief. Confrontations between Kit and Shona could be terrible. Lydda quietly helped herself to a pen and some of the stack of paper Derk had made for Kit, ready to take notes.
“Right,” said Kit. “Three Pilgrim Parties come through today, three tomorrow, and three the next day, and so on for the next six weeks. They each have their first confrontation with the Forces of Dark five days later—”
“Leathery-winged avians,” Elda said, checking the timetable with one careful talon.
“That’s right,” said Kit. “And the Wild Hunt three days after that. They pick up their first clue a day later. Does anyone know whether Dad planted the clues?”
Faces and beaks turned anxiously this way and that, mostly toward Elda, who usually knew what Derk was doing. “He did some,” said Elda, “but I don’t think he’d finished.”
“He hasn’t finished,” said Callette. “He said my gizmos needed a different set of clues for each one, and he was going to rack his brains.”
“We’d better check on that,” Kit said.
While Lydda wrote it down in large and beautiful script: “Clues. 126 × 10,” Don looked over her wing and exclaimed, “But that’s one thousand, two hundred, and sixty clues! That’s an awful job!”
“In thirty different places,” said Callette. “I’ll do it.”
“Then I’ll invent clues,” said Shona. “It seems a proper bardic activity. What else is urgent, Kit?”
“Most of it. We’re going to be really busy,” Kit said somberly. “At three tours a day, by the end of three weeks there are going to be sixty-two parties of offworlders—”
“Sixty-three,” Don corrected him.
“Sixty-three then,” said Kit, “spread out over most of the continent, all needing to have adventures with the Dark Lord at least once a week, and a week after that, some of them might even be coming up for their Final Encounters. We may find ourselves having to provide a Dark Lord for the first ones to kill, depending on how Dad is. But the two most urgent things to work out are: How are we going to provide all the right adventures on time? and How do we get Derkholm converted into a Citadel? There’s no way Dad’s going to be fit enough to transform the house.”
“Yeeps!” Don said.
“Can’t Barnabas do the house?” Blade asked.
“Yes, if you want him to know Dad can’t,” Shona said crushingly. “Kit, Mum can change the house. She’s been loving converting Aunt’s house. We should have asked her before she went back there.”
“She’d only have time if she did it right now,” Kit pointed out. “Look at the timetable. She gets a party through her Lair every day after this first week. Lydda, make a note to fetch her back.”
“She won’t come,” Callette said.
“She’ll have to,” Kit insisted. “Even if Blade or I could do it, we’d be trying to be in three places at once while we do. Can anyone see how we can get to all the places the adventures are supposed to be or do things like the Wild Hunt without Dad’s magic? I can’t.”
&n
bsp; Shona giggled. “Only if we dash across the country chasing Pilgrims with the dogs and the Friendly Cows!”
It was an obvious joke. Kit snapped his beak angrily at Shona. Then his beak came open again, and his head swiveled to stare at the map. “I think you’ve got it!” he said. “If we arrange to have the dogs and the Cows somewhere central, not at Derkholm, so that we can keep crossing the paths of the tours—”
“Hang on,” said Lydda. “That means us camping out somewhere. I’m going to stay here.”
Kit’s head swiveled at Lydda. “You are not. We need everyone. And if Callette’s going to be flying about planting clues—”
“I’ll commute,” Callette said, entirely disregarding the fact that half the clues were over on the east coast, hundreds of miles away. Everyone except Lydda and Kit looked at the map and wondered how Callette thought she could do it.
Lydda raised her beak at Kit’s swiveled glare. Most unusually, the crest on her head came up too, golden and fierce. “Dad needs a proper nurse,” she said, “not stupid Fran. I’m going to look after him. I want to be a healer, anyway.”
She and Kit glared at one another, and the crest on Kit’s head slowly rose to match Lydda’s, black and spiky and twice the size. Elda gobbled and said timidly, “I want to stay here, too.”
“After the other night,” Shona said, “no one’s going to let you camp out, Elda.”
Blade had gone on staring across the map, ignoring the rest of them. It seemed to him that Kit had not mentioned the one thing that seemed most important. “I know what we need to do most,” he said, “and that’s get those soldiers along to the base camp in Umru’s country, now, before they kill one another or anyone else. Dad’s not going to be well enough to get them there before the first battle anyway. Can’t we do that as well?”