From a High Tower

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Place?” Giselle had said, quizzically.

  “You’ll understand when you see it,” was all Rosamund would say.

  The journey started off without a single hitch. There was none of the fuss there had been before getting the buffalo into their two carts. Rosamund turned up, and the huge beasts walked right up the ramps and into the carts with no trouble.

  So now the caravan was making its way down another road that wound among the great dark trees of the Schwarzwald. This was very thickly forested territory; the trees grew right up to the edge of the road, and canopy overhung it, blotting out the sky. They traveled in a dim, green light, the very hoofbeats muffled by decades, if not centuries, of fallen leaves.

  Giselle found it . . . a little unsettling. And a little stifling. It wasn’t hot beneath these branches, the opposite, in fact. It was chill and damp, and there was the scent of wet earth and moss and old leaves. But she had to keep reminding herself that she could breathe, and that the trees were not somehow closing in. Rosamund probably loves this, she thought, wondering how close it was to noon, when they would all stop for lunch and to water and feed the cattle and horses. The buffalo, precious cargo that they were, had buckets of water and mangers of hay in their carts, but both would probably need refilling by that time. Of course Rosamund would love this, she was an Earth Master, and this deep, dense forest was the perfect home for her. Giselle wanted sky, and lots of it.

  This forest felt haunted as well. The only time she glimpsed Air Elementals, they were furtive and shy, and darted off the moment she spied them. And she didn’t know why, because they weren’t staying to tell her.

  Finally Leading Fox, who had been somewhere behind her, rode his horse up the verge of the path to pace beside her. “This is a very little like the Pawnee’s real home,” he said, wistfully. “This is not unlike land we will buy, when we return with white man’s money.”

  “Really?” she said.

  He nodded. “The trees are not so tall, but they are old. There are more meadows among them. But my people are lovers of river and forest, and we do not love the dry land we have been sent to.” He had the magpie on his shoulder again, instead of the owl, and it cheered her a little to see at least one Air Elemental that was not fleeing. “We have spoken of this, before I left. We will buy many acres, we will maybe cut our hair and wear white man’s clothing, and build homes like the white men, farm like the white men. If people ask if we are Indian, I think that we will lie. The Pawnee are used to disguising themselves as others. We will be white on the outside, and Pawnee in our hearts. In our homes, in our hearts, we will keep the traditions. Our children will not be taken from us, to be sent away to school to learn to be white all the way through.”

  She blinked at him, shocked. “Is that what is happening?”

  He nodded. “It is why we decided to do this. We have heard of it happening to many tribes. When the white man comes to take the children of my clan, we will not be there. We will be gone, into the wind, and the white man will not find us.”

  “Say you are Italian,” she suggested, after a long pause.

  “Eh?” Fox turned, finally, to look at her.

  “Say that you’re Italian. You can get the language from Kellermann, he speaks it. Or, for all I know, Rosamund speaks it. I expect no one in the middle of where you are going has ever seen an Italian. If you say that’s what you are, and you speak something they don’t recognize, they’ll probably believe you.” She watched as Fox considered that, and slowly nodded.

  “Italians do have black hair,” he agreed. “I will speak to the others. This has great merit.” He rode along in silence for a mile or more; she was used to long silences from him by now.

  “Rosamund has said these forests are dangerous,” he said, finally.

  “They feel dangerous to me,” she admitted. “Not like back where we were camped. It feels like there are things out there that don’t like being disturbed.”

  “Even so,” he agreed. “My little friend does not wish to fly in there.” He looked over at her again. “I hope that there is a meadow to camp in ahead.”

  I hope so too. But the animals didn’t seem at all uneasy, and it seemed to her that their instincts could be trusted. Her horses and Fox’s just plodded along with apparent contentment, and if the buffalo, which were extremely skittish creatures, had not liked the surroundings, they would certainly have made their unease known long ago.

  Just as she was beginning to wonder if there was going to be any end to these woods, she saw golden sunlight beaming down on the road ahead, literally like light at the end of a tunnel, and the nearer they got to it, the more there was to see. There was a big meadow ahead, and once she and Fox actually reached it, she saw it was a water meadow with a stream cutting along one side of it. Some of the animals were already being watered there, and their handlers were holding others. Her horses smelled the water and it took no urging to get them off the road and into the long grass, even though it was rough going for them. She pulled up beside Rosamund’s vardo, hopped down off the front of her vardo, where she drove from the open door, and slipped their bridles off so they could drink and crop grass for a while. Fox led his own brown-and-white horse to drink.

  “I have food!” Rosamund said, waving from the door of her vardo. “I have enough for the three of us.”

  “Good, thank you,” Giselle replied. The cooks were distributing food to everyone from the back of what the Americans called the “chuck wagon,” and Giselle presumed Rosamund had gotten it there.

  It wasn’t fancy: bread and butter, cold beef and spicy mustard, but Giselle was famished suddenly, perhaps because the open sky of the meadow had relieved some of that feeling of being closed in too tightly. She raised her eyebrow at the spicy mustard, however; she’d never seen that on the tables of the Americans so far.

  Rosamund smirked. “I realized I was going to have to supply a few things for myself if I wanted them,” she said, as Fox took his portion with thanks. “I’ve got a nice crock of sauerkraut, another of pickles, and pots of mustard. They don’t take up much room.”

  “I should have thought of that,” Giselle told her with chagrin.

  “You are not used to traveling,” Rosamund pointed out. “Now, I want to talk with you two. I don’t much care for the spot we’re supposed to camp in tonight, but it’s just about the only option. But I want you both to be alert. We might even want to think about keeping a watch.”

  “What are we watching for?” Giselle asked, stopping before she bit into her bread and meat.

  “I don’t know,” Rosamund admitted. “But it’s an abandoned mill and a little village, and there are four Elemental Magicians among us. That could attract . . . things. Things we’d rather not attract.”

  Fox nodded. Today, for the sake of traveling, he was not in his finery. He wore faded canvas trousers and an old shirt, like the rest of the men wore, and his hair was braided tightly going down his back. Giselle was in her split canvas skirt and a soft shirt, and she had rebraided her hair this morning and wound it around her head. Rosamund was in her hunting gear.

  “There are too many of us to attract bears or wolves, even if they are tempted by the cattle,” Rosamund continued. “But . . . I don’t know why this village was abandoned, nor how long ago. It might have been plague. It might have been that the people just died off or left. Or it might have been something . . . else.” She shrugged. “The worst that happens is that each of us loses a couple of hours of sleep.”

  “Are you going to warn Captain Cody?” Giselle asked. Rosamund nodded, but her mouth twisted up into a wry expression. “Not that I expect him to pay any attention to me. He’s too used to America, where the hazards are purely physical.”

  “But this is the Schwarzwald,” Giselle agreed, somberly.

  “I am not sure we need lose sleep,” Fox said thoughtfully. “I know that my spirit creatu
res will stand watch. Will yours?”

  Giselle and Rosamund exchanged a look. “Maybe,” Giselle said. “The ones around here seem shy.”

  “Possibly. Probably. We can try. It’s a good idea though, and I have more than enough cream to bribe mine.” She smiled.

  Giselle laughed. “I remember Mother doing just that! Cream and anything baked. . . .”

  “The domestic ones like brownies can bake for themselves, but the wild ones are mad for the taste of anything baked, butter, cream and honey,” Rosamund told Fox, who was looking at both of them as if he suspected they had lost their minds. “You’ll see, when I call them. Cheese too, they are mad for cheese.” She cocked her head at Giselle. “Do you think you can convince something to come out of hiding and stand watch?”

  “I can try,” Giselle said. “I don’t like to coerce them.”

  “Neither do I. That’s a slippery slope to go down.” Rosamund gazed at her with approval, which made her feel better about not ever forcing one of her sylphs to do anything. “All right then, when we camp for the night, we’ll do a little walking about, see what we are dealing with, then see about getting our Elementals to take a night watch for us. Captain Cody, too. And I might be overreacting. Just because we’re feeling that something is watching us doesn’t mean it might not lose interest and go away before we camp.”

  “Oh, I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one feeling that!” Giselle blurted with relief.

  “You are not,” Rosamund and Fox said at almost the same time. They looked at each other. Rosamund laughed, and Fox smiled a little.

  “Even the trees have the potential to be . . . alive in more than the usual sense, here,” Rosamund said, and turned to Giselle. “That reminds me. The book. Or more accurately, it’s a sort of guidebook to the Schwarzwald that everyone in the Brotherhood gets. I’ll give you my copy, I can get another.” She finished her lunch, hopped up into her vardo, and came back out with a book bound in soft brown leather, like a handmade journal. “Here you are,” she said, handing it to Giselle. “I’d be careful about reading it before you sleep. It can make for nightmares.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Giselle replied, untying the thongs that held it closed, and leafing through it, gingerly. It looked to be handwritten, with many, many illustrations. She closed it when she came to Vampir, with a little shiver. But she didn’t give it back. “I can probably read it while I drive. Or look at it, at least.”

  At just that moment, one of the “trail bosses,” riders that had been assigned to get and keep the wagons, riders and herds organized and moving, rode up. “Time to bridle back up and mosey along to the road, ladies, Fox,” he said, with a pull on the front of his hat. “We got us a good campground ’bout four-five hours off. Thet’ll give us a couple hours t’set up and get water afore dark.”

  “No rehearsal or practice tonight?” Giselle asked in surprise.

  “Not ’nuff room.” Without another word he rode off, to pass the word. Giselle interrupted Lebkuchen and Polly, the Quadrille horse, and coaxed them back into their bridles. They snorted, but they’d been happily cropping the lush grass and clover of the meadow for some time, so they didn’t object too very much.

  Once everyone was back in line, and the trek continued, Giselle reached into the capacious pocket of her skirt for the book and began perusing it in earnest.

  Rosamund is right. This is the stuff of nightmares.

  She didn’t stop reading, however. This wasn’t just going to apply to this trip through the Schwarzwald with the show. This was going to apply to the land around the abbey as well. Mother had managed to protect her from what lay out beyond the safe area around the abbey, but Mother wasn’t here anymore, and she was going to have to learn how to deal with these things herself.

  She read very slowly, and carefully—rereading passages often, to make sure she had the information set in her mind. There was no actual organization to the book, it was, more or less, just a catalogue of the creatures of the Schwarzwald, listed randomly, perhaps as they had been discovered by the Brotherhood. There was no particular differentiation between things that were just plain monsters and things that could be Elementals gone to the bad, except notes saying that “some are good, but when they are bad, this is how they behave.” Some, she was already familiar with. Kobolds, for instance, which were purely bad Earth Elementals; she’d actually run some of those off when they tried to invade the abbey cellars. Then there was the neck, the brook-horse, a purely bad Water Elemental, which appeared as a handsome white horse that would try to coax you onto its back and once it had you, carry you into the nearest body of water to drown. There was one of those near the abbey, and she knew to carry a horseshoe nail with her to throw at it so that it would run away.

  But others, well, she only knew from stories, or had never heard of. Dwarves . . . they could be both good and evil, and the evil ones, it seemed, were very evil indeed. She had heard of the Water Elementals, the nixe, but had not known they could be female and male, nor that they could appear as handsome humans, gray horses (like the neck) or as wizened little green-skinned creatures. And the Weisse Frau—dressed all in white, she posed as a washerwoman. If you were lost, she would help you find your way. If you were a child, she would protect you, and her kiss would make you almost indestructible. But if you had ever harmed a child . . . she would lure you near, then grab you and drag you into the water to drown. The Hayfrau, however, was entirely evil, as evil as she was beautiful. The book said that the lorelei was one of these creatures who loved to sit on dangerous rocks in rivers and lakes and on the ocean and lure the unwary to their doom.

  Each of the creatures described came with at least one, and sometimes several, drawings, and a detailed depiction of its habits and how, at need, to combat it. The writing was beautiful, quite clear and easy to read. The drawings, well, she was no expert, but they looked as if they had been done by quite a fine artist. And Rosamund had mentioned getting another copy! How on earth could one person make so many duplicates?

  But then she got a notion, and leafed further in. And the writing, and the style of the drawings changed, subtly. So it hadn’t been made by one person, but probably many people over a long time. And if all of the copies were the same . . . someone was duplicating them. And that was when she realized how copies were made: by magic, of course. She had watched Mother make copies of old books that way, so that she could give some in her library to Joachim. You touched the book to the blank book, you set the spell in motion, you supplied the ink, and the pages of the original would be duplicated onto the blank. That was why the book looked handmade. It was! It would have to be handmade in order to set it up for the spell. Possibly even the paper was handmade!

  A lot of work, but how else to keep the lore of the Brotherhood up to date? Likely there were blank pages at the end . . .

  She leafed to the end, and sure enough, there were. So if someone from the Brotherhood encountered a new creature, he would detail it all on one or more of the blank pages, and every member of the Brotherhood he met after that would duplicate the new pages into his own book by the same method. When you ran out of blank pages, you sewed in a new set, and the cycle continued.

  “Oh, clever,” she said aloud, and Lebkuchen flicked an ear back at her. “I need to learn that spell.”

  It was evident from the thickness of the book that she had a great deal to study. The creatures of the Air she knew, from the malevolent Rubezahl to the Four Winds . . . but of the other Elements, or the things that were not Elemental creatures, not so much. And it was becoming increasingly clear that as long as she and the show were traversing the Schwarzwald, she was going to need to be able to recognize hazards when she saw them.

  So she kept her nose in the book and one eye on the road, until midafternoon, when she could see ahead that the others were turning off the road and up onto the verge and beyond. And that there was a break i
n the trees up there, though how much of a break it wasn’t possible to say from where she was. But the line had slowed from a brisk walk to a halting plod, so evidently there wasn’t an easy way to reach where they were overnighting.

  When her vardo got closer, it was possible to see exactly what was going on. This was a cleared space forming a half circle in front of a ruin that the forest had encroached on. Had it been a village? There was more than one building. But it had been in ruins for a very long time. The roofs were long gone, the walls were breaking down, and the ruins themselves were overgrown. There was going to be just enough room for them to all camp overnight, and it would be very tight quarters indeed. Kellermann was directing people where to put their wagons, and the buffalo and the cattle had already been penned inside one of the ruined buildings. “No tents!” he was saying. “If you aren’t sleeping in a wagon, sleep under it! Set your brakes or use wheel-blocks! Tether your horses to the forest side of the wagon! We’ll bring fodder and water along for them!” He waved her along and pointed where she was to go: right alongside Rosamund’s vardo. Rosamund already had her horses unhitched, the harness draped over the wheels to dry, the horses tethered to the shaft, which was pointing to the forest. Giselle pulled up alongside as closely as she could and still allow movement between the wagons, and one of the tent wagons pulled up beside her vardo. She jumped down and got her horses unharnessed, rubbed down, and tethered and went around to the back of the vardo to see what Rosamund was doing.

  Rosamund was staring at the ruins with a slight frown on her face.

  “What’s the matter?” Giselle asked.

  “That’s not a village,” Rosamund said, shortly. “I need to go look at those ruins.”

  She started off for the ruins. Giselle scrambled after her. “Why?” she asked, when she had caught up.