Dark Lord of Derkholm

by Diana Wynne Jones

“Oh, gods! More stupid suggestions!” Kit screamed.

  “It makes sense, you know, Kit,” Don said, leaning over the map. “We can’t be in sixty-three places at once. But if we take the army and the animals and keep going north from here, we’ll be able to devastate the country and cut across the paths of the tours to do their adventures from wherever we happen to be.”

  “That’s right!” said Shona, rather surprised about it.

  “Trust Don to find the lazy way,” Kit snarled. But his beak turned toward the map, and his crest slowly lowered as he saw that the idea could actually work. “I’d been wondering what Dad meant to do about the soldiers,” he confessed. “And this could be how he planned to work it.”

  “And I promise to fly out to you from here,” Lydda put in, “whenever you really need me.”

  “Huh!” said Kit. “I can just see you! Emergency on King Luther’s borders, we send for Lydda, Lydda sets out. We cope with the emergency. Three days later here comes Lydda, smack, plomp, exhausted, useless. Too late, anyway. You’d better start getting some flying practice for once.”

  “Leave her alone, can’t you!” said Callette.

  Everyone relaxed. The difficulty seemed to be over, and Kit was squabbling normally.

  TEN

  FIVE DAYS LATER EVERYONE was wishing that the dragon had never been born, or that it had fallen out of the sky on its way to Derkholm, or that there had been some other way to help Derk.

  “Like sending a message to Mr. Chesney to say the tours were canceled this year,” Don suggested, irritably ruffling his neck feathers against the rain. “He couldn’t have killed us, after all, and this might.”

  Their great straggling procession had only got halfway to the base camp, a whole day behind Kit’s schedule, and they had had every kind of difficulty on the way. Barnabas had set up the camps for the soldiers what he considered a day’s march apart. Blade and Don were still wondering how anyone made men—even men who wanted to—walk that fast. They had been many miles short of the camp the first night anyway, because of setting off late in the morning after Kit’s council, and had to park the horde of soldiers in a bare field near a large village. But the villagers were not helpful. They barricaded themselves into their houses and refused to let Blade have more than one cartload of bread, and they demanded cash for it. Luckily Shona had brought every scrap of money she could find in the house. The villagers took all of it, on the fairly reasonable grounds that the soldiers had trampled over their fields, and claimed that Blade and Shona owed them for the bread. It took all Shona’s bardic powers of persuasion to make them let Blade enter the debt on his machine with buttons.

  “And now we simply have to get to the next camp tomorrow,” Shona said as they returned to the field with Nancy Cobber harnessed to the cart.

  Kit meanwhile had worked away with what he hoped was the correct magic to keep the soldiers safely confined in the field. Probably, as Kit ruefully admitted the next morning, he was more successful with the sixty or so large campfires he had made to keep the men warm. At any rate, they had to leave the lot still burning merrily when they set off again, and there seemed no reason why the fires would ever go out. But the worst of it was that they had not bothered to count the soldiers the night before. They were doing that all the time now. That first morning it was clear that nearly a quarter of the men were gone. Blade kept guiltily thinking of all the horrible things those missing men were probably doing now, but they had no one to spare to go and look for them. They just had to keep slogging on with the rest of the horrible mob. They had the tour schedule to keep to.

  The soldiers were even more horrible than Blade had thought. They were inventively, jeeringly, mutinously, murderously horrible. It was probably only because the drugs took time to wear off that Blade, Shona, and the two griffins got them as far as the next camp on the second day. They did not want to walk. They made this plain on the third day by all willingly leaving the camp and then just sitting down in the mud outside. Some of the soldiers now had quite severe scratches and gashes where Kit and Don had flown at them and pecked them to make them move. Those with the scratches, as far as Blade could see, boasted about them for the next two days. Pecking had not shifted one of them. Kit in his exasperation remembered the campfires and, deciding this was one thing he might be good at, flew down and enveloped the sitting men in an illusion of fire. It looked a bit pale and ghostly, but it got most of the men on their feet. It did not get them moving. “It ain’t real!” they called out, and started to sit down again. It was only when Shona, in sheer fury, turned the carnivorous sheep among them that they moved. They ran, some of them with charming little white sheep attached to their legs or backsides and the rest shouting about monsters.

  This was the one time that the sheep had proved in the least useful. For the rest of the time they were almost as much trouble as the soldiers. They ate everything meaty—rabbits, mice, voles, birds—and would not walk while they were eating. They had to be carefully penned up at night or they tried to eat the dogs. In the end Shona drove them along in the same kind of magical reins that Kit and Blade had had to invent for the soldiers.

  The reins were long pieces of thread unraveled from Shona’s bardic robes, and they were Shona’s own idea. The magic was mostly Kit’s, though Blade had helped. By that third day Shona hated the soldiers even more than Blade or Don did. They called remarks at Shona all the time. Some of the remarks could have been flattering, but even those were remarks about what Shona was like under her clothes and what ought to be done with her. The other suggestions were horrible. Luckily Shona was riding Beauty, and Beauty still refused to go within more than a hundred yards of the soldiers, so Shona was spared hearing most of the remarks clearly. But she heard enough. On the third evening she made the mistake of trying to practice her violin where the soldiers in the camp could hear her. They instantly put rude words to the music and sang them at her, very badly. The next day their remarks were even lewder.

  It was in the dawn of that day that Shona screamed that she was going home unless someone thought of a way to march those men until they were too tired to talk.

  “You think of a way,” Don told her irritably. None of them was getting enough sleep. “You’re the bard. You’re supposed to have ideas.”

  So Shona thought of the reins, and to everyone’s relief, they worked—or they worked if they were strung across the opening in the camp where the soldiers had no choice but to walk into the reins as they left it, and if Don or Kit flew ahead, dragging.

  Even so, that fourth day, the soldiers contrived to set fire to a field of grain, a hillside, and a wood as they passed through. No one knew how.

  “Who cares?” said Kit. “They’re supposed to be ravaging the place.”

  Blade looked back regretfully at fine slender living trees curling and cracking in the rolls of smoke, and he felt for that wood. He could feel the trees hurting. That surprised him, because he had not realized that his magic was that much like Derk’s.

  To add to their troubles, most of the animals, not only the sheep, were causing concern in different ways. They lost Big Hen the first night. Everyone glumly assumed that the missing soldiers had taken her with them to eat. “I hate to think how Dad will feel!” each of them said at intervals the second day.

  Then, that evening, when they had just, at last, succeeded in getting the soldiers into the proper camp they should have reached the day before, there was a whupping of powerful wings overhead. Everyone looked up, expecting Callette. “How are the clues going?” Kit screamed up into the darkening sky.

  “It’s not Callette, it’s me,” Lydda answered, gliding in a circle overhead. “I daren’t land. I’d never launch again. I just came to tell you that Big Hen got home this afternoon. Do you want her back with you for eggs or not? Mum says she’ll translocate her if you do.”

  “Leave her. I hate eggs,” Kit called.

  “But I like them,” Don said piteously.

  He was overruled
, which was not unusual. “Keep her now she’s back,” Shona shouted upward. “Is Mum at home then?”

  “She dropped in to see the dragon,” Lydda called back. “I’m supposed to tell her where you are. I’ll tell her you haven’t got too far yet.”

  She circled away, and her wingbeats died into distance amid a strong silence.

  “I don’t think she meant to be rude,” Blade said.

  “We’ll keep to schedule after this if it kills us!” Kit vowed.

  So they struggled on, trying to go faster, dragging the reluctant soldiers across fields and pastures, and the third day they were delayed by having to bury one of the dogs and to tow the corpse of a Friendly Cow behind two of the horses. The soldiers had killed them both, for being too friendly. Briney, the dog, had simply gone up to one of the soldiers on the outside of the mob, wagging his tail and trying to get acquainted. That soldier had calmly drawn his sword and cut Briney’s head off. One of the cows had followed Briney to see what was going on and run into a wall of slashing swords. Blade was nearly in tears.

  “Never mind,” Shona said to Kit. “You and Don will get plenty of meat tonight.”

  “We can’t possibly eat all that before it goes bad,” Kit squawked. If griffins could cry, Kit would have been near tears, too.

  “We can try,” Don said.

  After that they had to keep the cows well to the rear of the ungainly procession—which was not difficult—and keep a stern eye on the other dogs—which was not so easy. The dogs had brains, because that was how Derk had bred them to be. They knew what had happened to Briney, and they now hated the soldiers even more than Blade or Shona did. They were planning to tear out throats. Blade had to keep them leashed on more bespelled threads from Shona’s robes.

  That night they roasted lumps of Friendly Cow over a large fire, while the soldiers in the camp beyond chanted, “We want roast beef, we want roast beef!”

  “I’m not giving them a shred!” Shona said. “I know it sounds mean, but they’ve got their own supplies in there, and I don’t care!”

  They made you mean, these soldiers, that was the trouble. By the fourth day, when the soldiers still chanted that they wanted roast beef, mixed in with whistles and jeers whenever they saw Shona, Blade realized that being alongside so many nasty people had a bad effect on you. Don, he discovered, felt the same.

  “I don’t know what does it,” Don confided to him, “but they make me feel weak and depressed and vicious all the time. I don’t know how Kit stands it. They really hate him!”

  This was true. By now the soldiers had realized that Blade and Don were only young. Shona was female, so they called remarks at her. But they could not believe that four young people, one of them a girl, could control several hundreds of them. Kit was enormous. He looked savage—and behaved savagely when they did not do what he told them—and he was sinisterly black beside the golden Don. The soldiers decided that Kit must be a powerful full-grown magician of a truly evil kind who had them all enslaved. And they hated him for it. They hated Kit with such ferocious unspoken hatred that Blade could feel it, like acid on his skin, whenever he and Kit chanced to be near the soldiers together.

  He felt he should warn Kit. “I can tell they’re thinking up horrible things to do to you if they ever get loose,” he said. “Can’t you feel it at all?”

  Kit answered with an open-beaked gurgle of laughter. “Perfectly well. I rather like making people afraid of me.”

  “It’s a bit more than that,” Blade said anxiously.

  He would have said more, but this was the point where Pretty disappeared completely, and they never got back to the subject again.

  They had had to bring Pretty. Beauty, when she discovered that they would be away for weeks, refused to let Shona or anyone else ride her unless Pretty came, too. Since Pretty could now flutter into the air quite well, whirling his dizzying black and white wings—which grew stronger every day—and he could graze and eat oats in a messy, inexpert way, nobody thought he needed his mother that much and they had wanted to leave him with Old George. But Beauty insisted Pretty needed her. Pretty himself was sure he needed nothing. He was having a wonderful time frisking from side to side of the procession, teasing the dogs, chasing cows, and, every so often, alarming Beauty thoroughly by just disappearing. Every time Beauty lost sight of him, she was convinced the soldiers had killed Pretty, too. Since the one piece of good sense that Pretty ever showed was in never going near the soldiers, nobody took Beauty’s panics very seriously, but they always caused a long delay.

  This time when Pretty vanished while Blade was trying to warn Kit, he really was nowhere to be seen. Beauty soared into the air, with Shona on her back. “Sohldiers! Bhad sohldiers goht Prhetthy!”

  “No, they haven’t!” Shona said, exasperated. The reins holding the sheep were cutting her fingers, she had lost a stirrup, and she had nearly fallen off. “You know he never goes near them. Go down!”

  “Fhind Prhetthy!” Beauty trumpeted, circling higher and stretching the reins almost to snapping point.

  “Oh, really!” Shona was leaning off one side, hanging on to the twenty feet of thread and scrabbling for her iron. “It’s lucky I’m a good rider, Beauty, or you’d have lost me by now. Do go down.”

  But Beauty tried to go up again, neighing for Pretty, rearing in midair in her anxiety. Shona looked so likely to come off that Don took to the air with a clap in order to catch her, and the noise he made—maybe—disguised the approach of the people who had found Pretty. At any rate, Pretty suddenly reappeared only a few feet from Kit and Blade and the dogs, mincing joyously among the long legs of six tall fair-haired men in green.

  There was a long rumble of awe from the watching soldiers.

  The reason for this was that all six men, and Pretty, were surrounded in a green-blue haze of magic. The tallest man had a golden circlet on his white-fair hair. This one bowed gravely to Blade and Kit. “I come to return this small wonder horse to the Dark Lord, our master,” he said. “Can you lead me to him, if you please?”

  “Er—” Blade began, but was interrupted by Beauty descending as suddenly as she had gone up. Pretty dashed to her side, at a prudent distance from the sheep, and feverishly represented himself as a poor, lost, lonely, bewildered, stolen little colt.

  “No, you aren’t,” said Shona. “You’re just a nuisance.” Then she looked up and saw the tall man with the circlet. Her eyes went wide and black, and she stared. Don landed beside her, staring, too.

  “I’m afraid Derk’s not here at the moment,” Kit said with great politeness, bending down toward the magic haze. “But we all thank you for returning Pretty. Can we assist you by taking a message to Derk?”

  “I thank you,” replied the man with the golden circlet. “Inform him that I must in courtesy speak with him myself. I am Talithan, eldest son of Talian Elfking.”

  Even Kit’s confidence was shaken. This man was a very important elf indeed. Kit’s throat bobbed, and he answered even more politely, “My father, Derk—ah—found himself a little unwell and was forced to stay at home today.” The elf prince’s smooth forehead gathered into a frown at this. Kit added hurriedly, “But of course I can fly home with all speed—”

  “No need,” said the elf prince, to Blade’s acute relief. He wanted to kick Kit. How on earth could anyone tell Derk anything when he was in a healing coma? Blade glanced up at Shona, hoping she would interrupt to stop Kit making complete fools of them all, and was exasperated to see her sitting on Beauty like a statue, staring at Talithan. Oh, no! he thought. He was going to have to point out to Shona that if Talithan was who he said he was (and he must be, because elves never lied), then he was at least five hundred years old and married already.

  “I will wait upon the Dark Lord myself,” Talithan was saying. “Know that I am, only this very day, appointed to fight on his side, and these my friends with me, as captains of his Dark Elves. This suddenness, as we must hasten to assure him, was not intended as discou
rtesy. Another high elf had been chosen, but is now removed, by reason of my own rash fault.”

  “Indeed?” Kit said, rather helplessly.

  “I had the misfortune to offend my honored father by uttering a scoffing prophecy,” Talithan explained, “and for this I must regard the Dark Lord as my master for a year and a day. For this reason must I hasten to Derkholm.”

  “Perhaps you’d better wait for a week, Your Highness,” Blade blurted out. Kit’s head swiveled angrily at him.

  “Your Highness,” Don put in, “Dad’s got no end of urgent business—” Don’s beak snapped shut as Kit’s head swiveled at him, and Kit’s tail slashed. Don knew Kit had a point here. You did not suggest to the heir of the Elfking that anything could be more important than he was. Except—“With Mr. Chesney,” Don added, out of pure inspiration. Kit’s tail hit the ground like a whip.

  “Then I will wait on his pleasure for a week,” Talithan said graciously. “I do not,” he said, and his chin went up disdainfully, “associate with the man Chesney, who holds my brother hostage and forces my race to do his will. But see the Dark Lord I must, if only to ask a favor of him.” He half turned. It looked as if he was going, but he turned back and looked up at Kit. “Forgive me if I ask impertinently, but how do two members of your race call the Dark Lord Father?”

  “Because he is,” Kit said, rather astonished. “He bred us from eggs.”

  Talithan smiled. “That explains my puzzle. I had not thought there were any griffins this side of the ocean, but if you were fetched over in the egg, the reason is clear.” He bowed to the astonished Kit, to Don, to Blade and the still-staring Shona. “Farewell. I must no longer interrupt your herding of this unpleasant soldiery.” That left Blade almost as surprised as Kit. None of the elves had so much as glanced at the goggling crowd of soldiers.

  All six elves turned as if they were about to walk away. The magic haze turned with them, like an open door shutting, and the grassy place where they had been standing was empty. Every one of the horses, including Pretty and Beauty, surged forward after them and stopped, seeing the elves were gone. Elves often had that effect on horses. Beauty’s sudden stop jerked Shona out of her saddle, to land with a rush, a stagger, and a snatch at the reins around the sheep. It seemed to jerk Shona out of her daze, too.