Cornwall looked quickly about. There was no place to hide. They could burrow into the hay, of course, but not with someone in the loft, armed with a fork, questing in the darkness for hay to be thrown down the chute.
“All at once,” he muttered. “All of us will have to make the break. As soon as he shows above the ladder.”
He turned to the girl. “You understand?” he asked. “As fast as you can, then run.”
She nodded.
Feet scraped on the ladder and Cornwall reached for the hilt of his sword. A flurry of flying hay went past him and out of the corner of his eye he saw Coon, leaping, spread-eagled, at the head that appeared above the opening into the loft. Coon landed on the head and there was a muffled shriek. Cornwall leaped for the ladder, went swarming down it. Halfway down he caught a glimpse of a fork, its handle lodged in the floor below, its tines spearing up at him, and twisted frantically to one side to miss them. At the bottom of the ladder was a whirling fury of wild motion as the man who had been climbing the ladder fought to dislodge Coon, who was using his claws with terrible execution on his victim’s head and face. Even before his feet hit the floor Cornwall snapped out his left hand and, grasping the fork, jerked it free.
Three yelling shapes were charging from the front of the barn at him, metal gleaming as one of them drew a sword. Cornwall’s left arm came back, carrying the fork backward until the metal of its tines scrapped against his jawbone. Then he hurled it, straight at the bellowing shapes that were bearing down on him. Sword held straight before him, he charged to meet them. His shield was still on his back; there had not been the time to transfer it to his arm. And a good thing, too, he thought in a split second of realization. With it on his arm, he never could have grabbed the fork, which, if it had stayed, would have impaled one of the others tumbling down the ladder.
In front of him one of the three shapes was rearing back with a shriek of surprise and pain, clawing at the fork buried in his chest. Cornwall caught the glitter of metal aimed at his head and ducked instinctively, jerking up his sword. He felt his blade bite into flesh, and at the same instant a massive blow on the shoulder that momentarily staggered him. He jerked his sword free and, reeling sidewise, fell against the rump of a horse. The horse lashed out with a foot and caught him a glancing blow in the belly. Doubled up, he went down on his hands and knees and crawled, gasping, the breath knocked out of him.
Someone caught him under the arms and jerked him half erect. He saw, with some surprise, that the sword had not been knocked out of his hand; he still had a grip on it.
“Out of here!” a voice gasped at him. “They’ll all be down on us.”
Still bent over from the belly kick, he made his legs move under him, wobbling toward the door. He stumbled over a prostrate form, regained his feet and ran again. He felt rain lash into his face and knew he was outdoors. Silhouetted against the lighted windows of the inn, he saw men running toward him, and off a little to his right, the kneeling figure of a bowman who, almost unconcernedly, released arrow after arrow. Screams and curses sounded in the darkness and some of the running men were stumbling, fighting to wrench loose the arrows that bristled in their bodies.
“Come on,” said Gib’s voice. “We all are here. Hal will hold them off.”
Gib grabbed his arm, turning him and giving him a push, and he was running again, straightening up, breathing easier, with just a dull pain in his midriff where the horse had kicked him.
“This is far enough,” said Gib. “Let’s pull together now. We can’t get separated. You here, Mary?”
“Yes, I’m here,” said Mary in a frightened voice.
“Oliver?”
“Here,” said Oliver.
“Coon? Coon, where the hell are you?”
Another voice said. “Don’t worry about Old Coon. He’ll hunt us up.”
“That you, Hal?”
“It’s me. They won’t try to follow. They’ve had enough for one night.”
Cornwall suddenly sat down. He felt the wetness of ground soak into his breeches. He struggled to slip the sword back into the scabbard.
“You guys were all right in that barn,” said Hal. “Mark got one of them with a pitchfork and another with the sword. The third Gib took care of with his ax. I never had a chance until we got outside.”
“You were doing well enough when I saw you,” Gib told him.
“And don’t forget Coon,” said Cornwall. “He led the attack and took his man out of the fighting.”
“Will you tell me,” Gib asked plaintively, “exactly how it happened. I’m not a fighting man.…”
“None of us is a fighting man,” said Cornwall. “I never was in a fight before in all my life. A few tavern brawls at the university, but never in a fight. Never where it counted.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Hal. “We have to build some distance, and once we get started, we might as well stay walking. We won’t find a place to stop. Everyone grab hold of hands and don’t let loose. I’ll lead the way, but we have to take it easy. We can’t move too fast. We can’t go falling down a cliff or bumping into trees. If one of you loses hold of hands or falls, yell out and everyone will stop.”
13
Hal crouched in the clump of birches and stared at what the first morning light revealed. The stable and the inn were gone. Where they once had stood lay heaps of embers, smoke tainting the sharp air with an acrid bitterness, rising in thin tendrils.
The rain had stopped and the sky was clear, but water still dripped from the branches of the birches. It would be another splendid autumn day, Hal told himself, but it still was cold. He crossed his arms and put his hands beneath his armpits to warm them.
Not moving, he examined the scene before him, ears tuned for the slightest sound that might spell danger. But the danger now, it seemed, was gone. The men who had done this work had left.
Far off a bluejay screamed and up the hill a squirrel made a skittering sound as it scampered through the fallen leaves. Nothing else made a sound; nothing else was stirring.
His eyes went over the ground inch by inch, looking for the unusual, for something that might be out of place. There seemed to be nothing. The only thing unusual were the ashes where the stable and the inn had stood.
Moving cautiously, he left the birches and scouted up the hill. He stopped behind a huge oak and, shielded by it, peered around its bole. His higher position on the hill now revealed a slope of ground on the opposite side of the inn that had been masked before. On the slope of ground something most unusual was taking place. A huge gray wolf was digging furiously while two others sat leisurely on their haunches, watching as he dug. The wolf was digging in what appeared to be a patch of raw earth and beyond the patch in which he dug were others, slightly mounded.
Hal instinctively lifted his bow and reached over his shoulder for an arrow, then drew back his hand and settled down to watch. There was no point, he mused, in further killing; there had already been killing. And the wolves were engaged in a practice that was quite normal for them. There was meat beneath those mounds and they were digging for it.
He counted the mounds. There were five at least, possibly six; he could not be sure. Three in the stable, he thought, or had there been four? Depending on whether it had been three or four, then his arrows had accounted for one at least, possibly as many as three. He grimaced, thinking of it. The fight had not been that one-sided, he reminded himself; rather, it had been a matter of surprise and simple luck. He wondered, if he and the others had not attacked, would there have been a fight at all? But that was all past and done; no single act could be recalled. The die had been cast when Coon had made his spread-eagled leap at the head of the man who climbed the ladder. Considering the circumstances, they had come out of it far better than could have been expected, with Mark the only one who bore the scars of battle, a sore shoulder, where the flat of a sword had struck him, and a sore belly, where a horse had kicked him.
He squatted beside the tr
ee and watched the wolves. The fact that they were there, he knew, meant that no one else was around.
He rose and stepped around the tree, scuffling in the leaves. The wolves swiveled their heads toward him and leaped to their feet. He scuffled leaves again, and the wolves moved like three gray shadows, disappearing in the woods.
He strode down the hill and circled the two piles of embers. The heat that still radiated from them was wlecome in the chilly morning, and he stood for a moment to soak up some of it.
In the muddy earth he found the tracks of men and horses and wondered about the innkeeper and his wife. The serving wench, he recalled, said that the goodwife had been hiding in the cellar from her drunken lord. Could it be that she’d still been there when the inn was fired? If that were so, her charred body must be down among the embers, for the place would have blazed like tinder, and there’d have been no chance to get out.
He followed the trace left by the men and horses down the hill to where it joined the trail and saw that the company had gone on north and west. He went back up the hill, had a look at the raw wetness of the graves, again circled the piles of embers for some clue, wondering what manner of men could have done such a thing, afraid that he might know.
He stood for a moment, nagged by uneasiness. Then he went back down the hill and followed the trail that the company had taken north and west, keeping well up the hillside from it; his ears cocked for the slightest sound, examining each stretch of trail below him before he moved ahead.
A couple of miles away he found the innkeeper, the man he had glimpsed through the window of the inn the night before, smashing crockery and breaking up the furniture. He swung at the end of a short rope tied to the limb of a massive oak tree that leaned out from the hillside to overhang the trail. His hands were tied behind him and his head was twisted strangely by the pressure of the rope. He twirled back and forth at the faint stirring of the breeze. And he dangled; he dangled horribly. A chickadee was perched on one shoulder, a tiny, innocent mite of a gray-white bird, picking at the blood and froth that had run from the corner of the mouth.
Later on, Hal knew, there would be other birds.
He stood in the mud of the trail and looked up at the dangling, twirling man and felt, gathering in his mind, a vague sense of horror and of melancholy.
Leaving the man and the oak, he scouted up the trail and from the tracks he saw that now the mounted company was in something of a hurry. The hoof marks of the shod horses dug deep into the mud, leaving sharp, incisive tracks. They had been moving at a gallop.
He left the trail and angled back up the hill, studying the conformation of the land, picking up the foggy landmarks he had impressed upon his mind.
So he finally came, slipping through the trees and brush, to the small rock shelter he and his companions had found the night before, after long stumbling through the wet and dark, a few hours before the first hint of dawn.
Oliver, the rafter goblin, and Coon slept far back from the overhang, in the deeper recesses of the shelter, huddled close together for the sake of shared warmth. The other three sat close together toward the front, wrapped in blankets against the chill. He was almost upon them before they saw him.
“So you’re back,” said Gib. “We wondered what had happened. Can we light a fire?”
Hal shook his head. “We travel fast,” he said. “We travel fast and far. We must be out of here.”
“But I went out,” objected Gib, “and got dry fuel, dug from the heart of a fallen tree. It will give little smoke. We are cold and hungry.…”
“No,” said Hal. “The country will be up. The inn and stable burned. No sign of the good wife who was hiding in the cellar, but mine host is hanging from a tree. Someone will find soon what happened, and before they do we must be miles from here.”
“I’ll shake the goblin and Coon awake,” said Gib, “and we’ll be on our way.”
14
It had been a punishing day. They had stopped for nothing, pushing ahead as fast as they could manage. There had been only one habitation, the hut of a woodchopper, that they had had to circle. They had not stopped to eat or rest. Cornwall had worried about the girl, but she had managed to keep up with the rest of them with seemingly little effort and made no complaint.
“You may regret throwing in with us,” Cornwall said once. But she had shaken her head, saying nothing, conserving her breath for the grim business of clambering up and down the hills, racing down the more open ridges.
Finally, they had come to rest, with early darkness closing in. No rock shelter this time, but the dry bed of a little stream, in a recess where, in spring freshets, a waterfall had carved out a bowl that was protected on three sides by high banks, leaving open only the channel through which the stream ran from the little pool beneath the falls.
Through the centuries, the water, plunging over a ledge of hard limestone, had scoured out all earth and softer shale down to the surface of a harder sandstone stratum. In the center of the bowl stood the small pool of water, but around the pool lay the dry surface of the sandstone.
They had built their fire close against the upstream wall, which was overhung for several feet by the limestone ledge. There had been little talk until, famished, they had wolfed down their food, but now they sat around the blaze and began to talk.
“You feel rather certain,” Cornwall asked of Hal, “that the company was that of Beckett?”
“I cannot know, of course,” said Hal, “but who else would it be? The horses were shod and a pack train does not shoe its horses and a train would use mostly mules. There were no mules in this bunch, only horses. And who else, I ask you, would visit such terrible, senseless vengeance upon the innocent?”
“They could not have known they were innocent,” said Cornwall.
“Of course not,” said Hal. “But the point is that they presumed the guilt. They probably tortured the innkeeper and when he could tell them nothing, hanged him. Mine goodwife, more than likely died when they burned the inn with her still in the cellar.”
He looked at Mary, across the fire from him. “I am sorry, miss,” he said.
She put up a hand and ran her fingers through her hair. “There is no need for you to be,” she said. “I mourn for them as I would any human being. It is not good to die in such a manner and I feel sorrow at it, but they, the two of them, meant less than nothing to me. Were it not uncharitable, I could even say they deserved what happened to them. I was afraid of him. There was not a moment of the time I spent at the inn I was not afraid of him. And the woman was no better. With but little cause, other than her bad temper, she’d take a stick of firewood to me. I could show you bruises that still are black and blue.”
“Why, then, did you stay?” asked Gib.
“Because I had nowhere else to go. But when you found me in the loft, I had decided I would go. By morning light I would have been gone. It was by sheer good luck that I found you to travel with.”
“You say that Beckett travels north and west,” Cornwall said to Hal. “What happens if we reach the Bishop of the Tower and find him and his men there ahead of us? Even if he has been there and gone, he will have warned the bishop of us and we’ll find scant welcome if, in fact, we’re not clapped into irons.”
“Mark,” said Hal, “I think there is little danger of it. A few miles north of where mine host was hanged, the trail branches, the left fork leading to the Tower, the right into the Wasteland. Beckett, I am sure, would have taken the right fork. I should have followed the trail to see, but it seemed to me important we should be on our way as soon as we could manage.”
“The Wasteland?” Mary asked. “He is heading for the Wasteland?”
Hal nodded.
She looked around the circle at them. “And you, as well, you go into the Wasteland?”
“Why do you ask?” asked Oliver.
“Because I myself, in my infancy, may have come from the Wasteland.”
“You?”
“I do n
ot know,” she said. “I do not remember. I was so young I have no memory or almost no memory. There are, of course, certain memories. A great sprawling house sitting on a hilltop. People who must have been my parents. Strange playmates. But whether this was the Wasteland, I do not know. My parents—well, not my parents, but the couple that took me in and cared for me, told me how they found me, toddling down a path that came out of the Wasteland. They lived near the Wasteland, two honest old people who were very poor and had never had a child they could call their own. They took me in and kept me, and I loved them as if they had been my parents.”
They sat in silence, staring at her. Finally she spoke again.
“They worked so hard and yet they had so little. There were few neighbors, and those were far away. It was too near the Wasteland. People were not comfortable living so near the Wasteland. Yet it never bothered us. Nothing ever bothered us. We grew some corn and wheat. We raised potatoes and a garden. There was wood for chopping. There was a cow, but the cow died one winter of the murrain and there was no way to get another. We had pigs. My father—I always called him father, even if he wasn’t—would kill a bear or deer and trap other creatures for their furs. He would trade the furs for little pigs—such cute little pigs. We kept them in the house for fear of wolves until they had grown bigger. I can remember my father coming home with a little pig tucked underneath each arm. He had carried them for miles.”
“But you did not stay,” said Cornwall. “Happy, you said, and yet you did not stay.”
“Last winter,” she said, “was cruel. Both snow and cold were deep. And they were old. Old and feeble. They took the coughing sickness and they died. I did what I could, but it was little. She died first and he next day. I built a fire to thaw the ground and chopped out a grave for them, the two of them together. Too shallow, far too shallow, for the ground was hard. After that, I couldn’t stay. You understand, don’t you, that I couldn’t stay?”
Cornwall nodded. “So you went to the inn.”