Reigner Four took a last, pleasurable look around at the bright crowd on the green field, the banners flying, the white castle and the huddled embroideries of the king’s bed. While he did so, he was also taking in, very keenly, the Champion making his way down the meadow. He rode a rangy brown horse and carried a red shield with a curious device of gold with many right-angles. The word circuitry popped into Reigner Four’s mind at the sight of that device. But he dismissed the strange word and went on appraising Sir Harrisoun. The armour was blackish but adequate, and the Champion himself had a strutting, self-confident look – if a person could be said to strut in the saddle – but the Champions actual seat on his horse looked distinctly shaky. Reigner Four grinned inside the bars of his helmet, as he sent his horse clumping sedately over the rest of the bridge and wheeled to face the Champion. He could tell this Sir Harrisoun was no good.
When the herald gave the signal, Reigner Four clapped his heels to his horse and ground his weight down on his saddle. He was sitting rock-steady as he pounded up to the Champion galloping towards him. His lance took Sir Harrisoun firmly in the chest, lifting him off the rangy horse and into the air. Sir Harrisoun fell with a jarring clang, and lay where he had fallen. Reigner Four wheeled back to the other end of the meadow, while conversation buzzed in the crowd and people ran to catch the startled horse and haul Sir Harrisoun away.
“The second Champion of King Ambitas, the Right Reverend Sir Bors!” yelled the herald.
“And I hope there’s a bit more to him than the first,” Four remarked inside his helmet.
Sir Bors’s arms were a blue key on a white ground and his horse was white. Reigner Four could sense a grim determination in Sir Bors, overlaying a queer lack of confidence. It was as if Sir Bors were saying to himself Help! What am I doing here? But he was determined to make a go of it all the same. He came on at a great gallop, rattling from side to side as he came.
Reigner Four waited, spurred on at the right moment, and wiped Sir Bors out of his saddle as easily as Sir Harrisoun. The crowd above gave out a long “O-o-oh!” Sir Bors lay where he had fallen. Reigner Four saluted the ladies merrily with his lance – there was one lady, standing beside the queen, blonde and beautiful, that he had his eye on particularly – while he rode back to wait for the third Champion.
“The king’s third Champion, Sir Bedefer!” boomed the herald.
Sir Bedefer, Reigner Four knew at once, was another thing again. He was sturdily built and he sat his horse as securely as Reigner Four himself. Four squinted down the length of his lance at Sir Bedefer’s approaching shield – argent with a cross gules – and knew this was the tough one.
It was. The two met with the crack of lances squarely in the middle of two shields, and Reigner Four, to his acute astonishment, came off his horse. He landed on his feet, but his armour was so heavy that his legs folded under him and sent him to his knees. Frantically, he saved himself from further collapse by digging the edge of his shield into the turf, and lumbered quickly to his feet, sure that the Champion would be riding him down the next instant. But both horses were down near the water. A few yards away, Sir Bedefer was also floundering on to his legs.
Reigner Four grinned and drew his sword with a mighty slithering clang. Sir Bedefer heard it and spun round, hauling his own sword out as he turned. The two ran upon one another. For the next minute or so they hacked and clanged at one another with a will. The shouts of the watching folk came dimly to Reigner Four through the belling of steel on steel, but shortly they were drowned by the rasping of his own breath. This Champion was as hard to beat on foot as he was on horseback. Sweat trickled into Four’s eyes. His breath made the bars of his helmet unpleasantly wet. His sword-arm and his legs began to ache and labour in a way they had not done for years. He began to be seriously afraid he would lose the fight. Unheard of! Pride and panic sent him forward again, dealing smashing blows. The Champion seemed to collect himself. He replied with a similar onslaught. And a lucky blow from Four’s sword happened to connect with Sir Bedefer’s mailed knuckles, knocking the Champions sword from his fist.
“Yield!” yelled Four while the sword was still in the air. He made haste to get his heavy foot on the weapon as soon as it clanged to the turf. “Give in,” he shouted, standing on the sword with all his weight. “You’re disarmed!”
The Champion pushed up his visor, showing a red and irritated face. “All right. I yield, drat you! But that was pure luck.”
Reigner Four could now afford to be generous. He pushed up his own clammy visor and smiled. “It was. I admit it. No hard feelings?”
“A few – I’m struggling with them,” said Sir Bedefer.
Here Reigner Four became aware of cheering from the crowd and the herald at his elbow, waiting to present him to the king. The herald, at close quarters, proved to be a shrewd-looking weatherbeaten man – rather an underbred type for a herald, to Reigner Four’s mind. He allowed himself to be led up the hill to shouts of “New Champion! New Champion!” where he clanked gracefully to one knee in front of the king’s bed.
“Your Majesty,” he said, “I crave admittance to your castle.”
“Certainly,” said the king. “We admit you to our castle and also to our service. Are you willing to swear fealty to me as your lord?”
Something in the way the king’s unwell-sounding voice lifted on the last word struck Reigner Four as familiar. He turned his face up and looked at the king for the first time. An elegant golden coronet surrounded the thinning hair of Ambitas’s head. His face, in spite of whatever sickness he had, was plump and lined and pink. Reigner Four had a strong feeling he had seen that face before. A name, or rather, a tide, flitted through his mind – Reigner Two. But, when he considered, it meant nothing to him. Perhaps Ambitas simply reminded him of someone. “Very willing, sire,” he said. “But I ride on a quest and cannot be certain to stay here long.”
“What is your quest?” asked King Ambitas.
“I seek the Bannus,” said Reigner Four, because he still knew that this was what he was doing here.
“You have found it,” said Ambitas. “It is in this castle and we are all its guardians. Tell me, what is your name?”
“I am called Sir Fors,” said Reigner Four, because this seemed to him to be his name.
“Then arise, Sir Fors,” King Ambitas said weakly, but smiling. “Enter this castle as the new Champion of the Bannus.”
Then Reigner Four was conducted into the castle with great honour, where he spent his days in joy and minstrelsy and feasting. He led the Royal Hunt. He had seldom enjoyed himself so much. The one flaw in his enjoyment was that the beautiful blonde he had had his eye on always seemed just out of reach. At feasts, she was always down the other end of the high table. If he entered a room in search of her, she had always just left by the other door.
Yam’s joints were frozen. Mordion had propped him up against the wall of the house, where Yam continued to protest. His voicebox was, unfortunately, still working. “This is not right. You are taking advantage of my immobility to indulge in hocus-pocus.”
“I’m not indulging.” Mordion looked at Hume’s bright face as Hume squatted in the centre of the pentagram, bundled in furs. Hume was quite contented – that was the important thing. “Besides,” Mordion told Yam, “if you’d taken my advice and stood by the firepit last night, you’d have been mobile now and able to stop me exercising my black arts.”
“I was not expecting so many degrees of frost,” Yam said glumly.
Mordion grimaced, because he could not remember ever being so cold. The frost, combined with lack of food, was producing a curious light-headed clarity of mind in him – probably the ideal state for working magic. But Hume was well fed. Mordion had cheerfully stinted himself for Hume’s sake. It was all for Hume’s sake, this magic. He had been studying how to do this all autumn. Beside him on the frost-dry earth, carefully wrapped in spare tegument from the robot-repair kit, was a stack of leather books he had asked the Ba
nnus for. Cheating, he had told Ann, in a good cause.
Mordion smiled. Ann had told him he was obsessed. “You think you’re worrying about Hume,” she had told him. “Can’t you realise that you like Hume? And you do magic because you love doing it!”
She was probably right, Mordion thought. At the time she had said it, he had told her crossly to go and play with Hume. His crossness had mostly been frustration with the old books. They were full of irrelevant magics, like charming bees or removing chills from lungs. He had had to work out for himself what rules lay behind these spells – and where the books did discuss theory, they were maddeningly obscure and mystical and incomplete. But now, with this frostborn clarity of mind, Mordion saw exactly what he would do and how. With nine herbs, and seven herbs, and five, he would separate the theta-space around Hume and wrap it round Hume’s body in a permanent cocoon. Hume could then take it with him wherever he went and be safe to go outside the field of the Bannus, perhaps to the village for a proper upbringing. Mordion himself would not leave the wood. There was peace here, as well as beauty – two things Mordion knew he wanted above anything else.
“Ready, Hume?” he asked.
“Yes, but hurry up,” said Hume. “I’m getting cramp.”
Mordion banged his hands together in their rabbit-skin mittens to get the blood going and then took off the mittens. Frost bit at his knuckles. He took up his polished staff and dipped it carefully in the first pot of herbs. He approached Hume with the blob of green mixture on the end of the staff and blue light playing up and down the length of it. He anointed Hume’s head, hands and feet. As he turned to dip into the second pot, the corner of his eye caught sight of Ann coming round the end of the house. He saw her stare first at his flickering staff, then at Hume, and then at the icicles hanging from the thatch above Yam. She shivered and wrapped her anorak round her.
Mordion smiled at her. The Bannus tended to send Ann along at important moments. This confirmed his feeling that he had got this magic right. But he did not let it distract him from the anointing. He put the second set of herbs on Hume and turned towards the final pot.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ann whispered to Yam.
“Frozen lubricant,” Yam intoned.
Ann watched Mordion’s breath smoke as he touched the flickering staff to Hume’s forehead. “That’s magic, he’s doing. What’s it for?”
“He is attempting to realify Hume.” Yam’s voice was much louder than it need have been. Mordion knew Yam was trying to put him off and did not let it distract him. He stood back from the anointing ready to recite the charm.
“Where did you get the fur Hume’s wearing?” Ann whispered to Yam.
“Wolfskin,” Yam boomed. “We were attacked by wolves. Mordion killed two.”
Mordion continued firmly reciting the charm, even though he found his mind slipping off to that furious battle with the wolves. Just at dusk it had been. The beasts had been too hungry to wait for full dark. As Hume and Mordion finished what little food they had for supper, they were suddenly beset by dark dog-like shapes, pouring in upon them, quite silently. Yam, being unable to feel, had snatched a burning branch from the firepit. Mordion and Hume had defended themselves with sticks from the woodpile. The place was full of animal eyes shining green in the light from Yam’s branch. Hume kept shouting, “Use your wand, Mordion! Use your wand!”
Mordion knew he could have driven the wolves off by magic, or even killed them all with it, but he had deliberately chosen to kill two by normal means. He was astonished at the coolness with which he had singled out the biggest pair and beaten one aside with his stick for the brief instant it took to run his knife left-handed into the other; and then drop both the knife and stick and break the neck of the other as it sprang. He found himself mentally excusing himself – probably to Ann – for that. Hume had been very cold that winter. They needed those skins. Though it seemed vile to kill a hungry animal, it had been a fair fight. Those wolves had been pitilessly, mindlessly determined to eat the two humans, and there were eight or so wolves. He could still see their yellow, savage, shallow eyes. They were cunning too. They saw Yam with his flames as their chief danger and four of them went for Yam and brought him down. When the battle was over, Yam climbed to his feet with three-cornered tears all over his silver skin.
The charm was finished. Mordion pointed his staff at Hume. Raised his will. For a short second, Hume glowed all over in a greenish network of fire. It had worked! Then—
Mordion and everyone else watched in perplexity the glowing network float free of Hume and rise into the air. It climbed until it met the frosty boughs of the overhanging pine tree. There it vanished, in a strange confusion. The whitened needles surged. Objects rained down. Hume put his arms over his head and fled, giggling, from under a tumbling iron kettle, which landed with a clang inside the pentagram where Hume had been sitting. Mordion dodged a big feather duvet and was hit on the head by a rolled sleeping bag. Two rubber hot-water bottles slapped down on the roof of the house. A fur coat settled slowly across the firepit, where it began to give out sharp black smoke.
Mordion sat on the nearest boulder and screamed with laughter.
Ann rushed across and dragged the fur coat clear. Her foot turned on a bottle as she backed, towing the smoking fur. She looked down. The label on the bottle said Cough Linctus. “That didn’t go quite right, did it?” she said. Her voice quavered. Hume was in helpless giggles. She looked at Mordion on the boulder with his head in his hands and his back shaking. “Mordion! Are you all right?”
Mordion lifted his face. “Just laughing. I let my mind wander.”
Ann was shocked at how thin his face was. His eyes, wet with laughter, were in deep bluish hollows. “My God! You look half starved!” she said.
“Food has been very short,” Yam boomed. “He fed Hume but not himself”
“Oh shut up, Yam,” said Mordion. “You distracted me on purpose.”
Ann hauled the duvet off the ground and wrapped it round Mordion. His shoulders felt all bones under her hands. He had unstrapped the blanket-like thing he usually wore rolled over one shoulder and was wearing it as a cloak, but she could feel bones even through that. “Here,” she said. “Make use of this duvet now you’ve got it. No wonder that spell went wrong. You look too weak to think straight. can’t you treat yourself with a bit more consideration?”
“Why should I?” Mordion said, hugging the duvet round himself.
“Because you’re a person, of course!” Ann snapped at him. “One person ought to treat another person properly, even if the persons himself.”
“What a strange ideal” Mordion said. He was suddenly weary to the point of shaking. He suspected it was because Ann had once more put her finger on something he did not want to think about.
Ann was in one of her angers by then. “It’s not strange, it’s common sense! I wish I’d known you were starving. When I think of Wood Street full of shops full of food, I could kick myself! Ask the Bannus for some food. Now!”
“I did,” said Hume, “but none came.”
“I’ll go shopping in the village when I’ve had a rest,” Mordion said to him. “I should have thought of it before.”
Ann realised that this was when Mordion had got the idea of going shopping in Wood Street. But he had already been, hours ago, this morning. Really, the way the Bannus mixed up time was beyond a joke!
“Let’s go and play, Ann,” said Hume, pulling her arm.
He was quite small again, about ten years old. More mixing up! Ann was not sure whether she was glad or sorry. She gave him a friendly smile and they went off, leaving Mordion sitting on the stone, wrapped in the duvet.
“Mordion’s not really bad,” Hume told her defensively as they went downriver and through the copse where Mordion – or maybe Yam – had hopefully set out snares for rabbits.
“He’s too good if you ask me!” Ann answered crossly.
Her crossness vanished when they reached the wider wood
s beyond. It was true winter here. The trees stood like black drawings against snow. Real snow! In spite of the deep cold, Ann followed Hume in a rush for the open glades where the snow seemed to have drifted. Hume was the size when Ann could still run as fast as he could, but only just. The frozen snow cracked under their flying feet and their breath came in clouds. And they ran and ran, leaving mashed blue holes behind them, until Hume found deep snow beyond a bramble thicket by going into it up to his knees.
“There’s masses!” he squealed, and flung a stinging floury ball of it into Ann’s face.
“You little – beast!” Ann stooped and scooped and flung, and missed.
They snowballed furiously for a while, until their hair was in frosty spikes and their hands bright blue-red. Ann’s anorak was crusted with snow all down the back. Hume’s wolfskin jacket was a crazy paving of melting white lumps clinging to the fur. They had both reached the stage where neither wanted to admit they were too hot, too frozen and too tired to go on, when Hume noticed a crowd of rooks rising cawing from the trees in the distance. He swung round that way.
“Oh look!”
Ann looked. Only for an instant. All she saw was movement and an outline, but in that same space something – instinct, intuition – had her dragging Hume by the back of his jacket as fast as she could, out of the blue trampled shadows of the snowball ground and into cover behind the bramble thicket. “Down!” she said, throwing herself to her knees and pulling Hume with her.
“But what—?” he said.
“Quiet! Keep still!” Ann hung on to Hume’s arm to make sure of him, and together they peered out among the thorny loops of bramble, at a man in armour riding a heavy war horse across the snowy glades. He was only going at a jog trot, so it took him quite a long time to pass, but they never saw him clearly. He was always teasingly beyond black trees, or the low winter sun caught and dazzled on his armour, making them both wink back tears. And then he would be beyond trees again. The clear air carried the crunch of the horses great hooves and the faint clink and rattle of tack and armour. Mostly all that Ann saw was the great azure shadow of horse and rider, or glimpses of billowing green cloak, but at one point he was near enough for her to feel the ground shake with his weight under her frozen knees. She kept tight hold of Hume then, praying the rider would not notice the blue shadow where they had snowballed and come to investigate. She thought of the man Martin had seen climbing the gate this morning. And her breath went sticky in her throat with real dread.