The story, too, of the wicked bird and his predilection to prophesy was straight from the crystal ball. Not a word had been changed; nor any added.
The princess’s eyes were wide now with puzzled anger. She said, “What say you to this?” directing her query to the older woman, who drew close to answer.
It seemed that as of that very moment the swift-formed clouds changed to a whirling vortex of lowering mists, smacking also of magic. They touched the forested hilltops … black, purple; roiling with a pent-up fury that spoke of tempests, and a coming night in which all should seek shelter. Lightning flashed toward the setting sun, followed by great thunder. The two knights made the circular sign of their god, Ormon, upon their chests, then touched their lips. The old lady did likewise, as did the maid. The princess sat quietly, holding tight to the reins of her mount, regarding them all with a frown of indecision.
I, too, made the sign of Ormon upon my chest.
They accepted the idea of abduction by magic as a very real possibility. They would .question my role in that which would or would not happen—but the intervention of magic? Certainly not I That was commonplace. And the damnable part of it was that they were right in thinking that way. Because it was real. According to ten pairs of Watchers across two centuries, it was a part of their very lives. In a matter of minutes, in fact, I was to be a witness, if not a participant, to the actuality of a sorcery to confound all scientific law, as advanced by Galactic Control… .
The old lady’s eyes remained closed while she talked. Her voice was soft, a monotone; it seemed a telling of runes. She said, “I would ask you, m’lady, to heed the words of this young man. There is something of this that I cannot scan. The auras are thick, m’lady. And the mists are such as I have never seen them. This I know. The young lord means you no harm, thought he seems as a wraith—not of magic—but also, not of this world.”
Her concluding sentence startled me. The jolt was further enhanced when I saw, for the first time, that a small and most peculiar animal had been peering at me from behind the delectable figure of the princess. Its shape was round, symmetrical, hardly two feet in height. It had short sturdy legs and arms. Two fur-tufted ears graced a puff-ball head punctured with curious, friendly, shoebutton eyes. It reminded me, I thought whimsically, of a cuddly toy I had owned long ago in the dreams or the play of my childhood… . Then I remembered what it was—a Pug-Boo. I smiled. I had been briefed on them, too—like the dottles, the six-legged steeds, and a half hundred other lower-order species—but I hadn’t expected to meet with one so quickly. For the moment it clung to the princess’s small waist, watching intently, almost as if it knew what were taking place and must needs be informed of all pertinent particulars.
The thunder came again and the five mounts shied wildly. Their front legs lifted and forced their sleek, thick-furred bodies back upon the remaining four, while their great blue eyes rolled to catch the attention of their riders, and to thus indicate their fear and their desire to be elsewhere.
And they had reason to be afraid.
“My lord,” the princess said, and in oddly submissive tones, “if my Watcher, the sweet dame Malion, sees truth in the things you say and virtue and goodwill in your person, then we have naught but to follow your advice—if—”
That was as far as she got… .
Though expected, I mused later, it came so suddenly that my own reaction was almost one of amusement. Not so the others. …
It was like a page from the book of the mythical Earth Sorcerer Merlin. The first sensation was all-encompassing. The prick of a needle accompanied by the smell of fire, the roar of thunder, and an instantaneous inundation of rain. I instinctively knew what to do. I literally flung myself at the princess, pulled her from the saddle, and encircled her small body with the strength of my arms… . Wherever the princess was going, I would go, too. There was an immediate physical numbness and disorientation. It was as if we were at the bottom of a deep lake, held in place, as it were, by countless tons of water. The great forms of the dottles, the dame Malion, the two knights, and the maid assumed a vague but noticeable transfiguration. They then became amorphous, transparent, receded before my rapidly dulling vision. As my brain whirled before this first onslaught of the magic of the planet Camelot, only one thing continued real to me; that was the soft flesh and the heady, perfumed warmth of the Princess Nigaard. I had wondered how real fur would feel (mine was artificial, naturally). I can only say it was wonderful. I was pleasantly aware, too, as I sank into oblivion, that ft was not just a question of my arms around her waist—she held me, too. Pressed tightly against me, in fact, with her small head buried deep in the protection of the hollow of my shoulder. Hold! I thought. The stimulus of fear has its redeeming features.
That was the last I remembered.
“Where did you come from, baby dear?”
The Pug-Boo’s voice came softly, insidiously from the edge of darkness. His fat little body reclined in midair, or so it appeared in the gray mist of my semiconsciousness.
“Great Flimpls!” I managed to groan in reply. I made an effort to shut my eyes, only to find that they were already shut. This when you think about it, suggests a frightening situation indeed. I relaxed then, into the dream. Who’s afraid of Pug-Boos?
“You’re the only flimpl here,” the Pug-Boo informed me. “And besides, I asked you a question.” One shoebutton eye was about an inch from my own. But, as I said, mine were closed. So I was safe.
“I’m an Adjuster,” I confessed to the little black nose and the fuzzy ears—thereby breaking the first law of the Foundation: never to reveal one’s presence, or the nature of one’s business… . “I’m a bona fide graduate of the Galactic Foundation. I hold four degrees and sundries. I’ve got an I.Q. that can be equaled but never surpassed. You have to be chosen from five thousand of the best even to be considered for the Foundation. An Adjuster is a troubleshooter, a man with a thousand skills. Like the Earth’s chameleon, he can adjust to any level of a developing civilization, merge completely with the fauna. And our purpose is not idle games, sirrah… . We intervene only after carefully considering the following. One: Is there a crisis sufficient to demand our aid? Two: Can it be ‘intervened’ safely? Three: Will the intervention be beneficial, and if not, will it at least prevent a potential disaster and preserve the status quo? You see, my fuzzy-headed friend, our real purpose, other than crisis control, is to judge the level of development of a society, find an area where influence can be exerted—and then go to work. With a little sweat, blood, and luck, we can sometimes advance a specific civilization as much as a thousand years with no awareness on their part of any untoward influence.”
All the time I was running off at the mouth I was thinking, Great Galaxies! What am I doing? But I couldn’t stop. It was as if I had been turned on; that I had become some sort of uncontrollable wind-up doll. The only factor to reassure me that I hadn’t actually flipped was that, after all, I was asleep; I definitely was asleep.
“That’s all very well,” the Pug-Boo said. “But you’ve not answered my question—where did you come from, baby dear?”
“I told you, Butterball.”
“No you didn’t. And you’ve not told me why you came here, to Fregis, either.”
“And I never will, Button-Nose,” I said. “What do you think of that?”
“Don’t you love Pug-Boos?”
“Should I?”
“Should you? Should you? Great Flimpls, everybody loves a Pug-Boo.”
I tried to snap my eyes open, and I did—but I didn’t. The Pug-Boo was there, anyway. This time he wore glasses and a mortar-board on his head. He said, “If you don’t tell me why you came to visit me today, you won’t go to the head of the class. As a matter of fact I’ll drum you out of the regiment. I’ll strip you of your red feather. And what’s more, I’ll see to it that you never get a crack at the princess.”
“Hold it!” I yelled silently, trying desperately to open my wide-opened eye
s. “Leave the princess out of this. Or better, leave her in it and you get out.”
Forcing my somnolent thoughts to dwell upon the princess, the image of the Pug-Boo began to fade. But not without a struggle. Just before I completely hallucinated—kissing the princess’s softly furred tummy and straining her to me—the Pug-Boo managed an archaic nose-to-thumb at me. Then it got gray again, gray and black… .
This time it lasted longer. So long that when I came out of it, I felt as if I had been encapsulated for a myriad of parsecs of space-time.
The gray remained gray. But it wasn’t in my head. I could see clearly that I was in some sort of stall, a part of a stable. There was the equivalent of straw beneath me. I could feel it, wet. And I could smell it I felt itchy-dirty. My rather fine pelt of quarter-inch black fur that laid so flat I looked like a mink didn’t help. I must smell, I thought, like some Farkelian peasant. So be it. My hands were bound loosely, my feet not at all. I moved to the edge of the stall and peered out.
In one direction it was all black, night, with pouring rain. I tried infrared with the contacts. It was worse than normal. I switched back to twenty-twenty. There were no doors to the place, just a large opening, free to the wind and rain. There was a clump-clumping on either side of me and I surmised that dottles occupied .those stalls. There were additional stalls across the way, but it was much too dark to see anything. To my left, away from the rain-swept entrance, was the gargantuan guts of the place. It -seemed, actually, that I was in a great cave, hollowed from the base of a mountain; which, in effect, told me exactly where I was. … In my week-long treetop scanning of Camelot, I had not only checked its two great continents thoroughly—Camelot was largely a water world—I had also checked the towns and villages, castles and keeps; the ice-world; the great swamps and deserts; and the far “terror-land” of Om—called that, according to Watcher data, because from it sprang all evil, death, and horror. Therein were the hordes of the dead-alives and the mutated spawn of the Yorns who served Om’s rulers; therein, and again according to the Watchers’ soothsayer, was the very vortex of the gathering storm that threatened all Camelot. Oddly enough, I had seen none of this through the scanners. Only volcanoes; dank, mist-shrouded valleys; sea towns with plodding, gray people living in squat, salt-encrusted buildings; and great lonesome moors.
I had scanned other areas pertinent to the supposed data of the princess’s abduction, however; especially in the great aerie, the Castle-Gortfin of the witch and sorceress, the lady Elioseen… . Therefore, I knew where we were. But, strange thought—we had been but twenty miles from King Caronne’s Glagmaron when we were seized. Aerie-Gortfin was some two hundred miles to the east of Glagmaron.
Wall to wall, near the entrance of the cavern, it was at least one hundred and fifty feet. Inside, toward the great room’s farthest depths, I would have sworn it was carved from the solid rock had I not seen the great and shadowy arches reaching aloft to a distant roof, the floor of Gortfin itself. Two fires burned in the hall’s depths. One of them outlined a singing, sprawling, drunken group of men-at-arms and some others who seemed only vaguely human. These last cast weird shadows, bestial, deformed, against a far wall. Some of them sat around a massive table, hulking, brutal. Others lay about on the cold stone floor. It was difficult to tell if they were drunk, asleep—or just plain dead.
The second fire, the one nearest us (because the entrance to this huge tomb was to one side and not in the center), outlined a smaller tableau. A heavily muscled man—or thing— sat cross-legged upon the stone. His forehead sleepily touched a naked sword which he had placed across his knees. Directly beyond him was a small table with food and a low couch covered with furs. On this couch was the reclining figure of the princess Nigaard. She seemed still asleep. Her maid, the young girl with the frowning face, was nowhere to be seen; neither was the Pug-Boo. The good dame Malion, however, was there and awake. She sat on the couch’s edge, stared at the fire, and swiped halfheartedly at the princess’s heavy tresses with a brush.
One last “scene” from the soothsayer’s ball had been forwarded to us by the Watchers. It was one which showed me as fleeing through a night-darkened forest valley, and into a red-gray dawn of today, tomorrow, or next year—crystal balls seldom give dates. There would be Harl Lenti (me), the princess’s cocky young knight. Dame Malion, and the princess. So said the picture. For the moment, however, there was no picture, only a reality, and a developing chess game that had a momentum and a purpose all its own.
Keeping close to the wood of the stalls, and always in the direction of the princess, I explored each one of them. In the last one I found her young knight. Again the soothsayer had been correct. His hands were as tightly bound as mine had been, and he was still out. This time, with my hands free, I used a detachable part of the belt. I ran a cardiovascular check on him to determine what condition he was in. He checked out reasonably healthy, so that I gave him a shot in the arm to bring him out of it that would have brought his great-grandfather to full salute.
His blue eyes opened, startled and wide. “Sirrah!” he shouted before I could get my hand over his mouth.
Fortunately his yell coincided with a great peal of thunder. And, as there seemed no reaction beyond the stalls, I cautioned him to silence and took my hand away.
“Heed me,” I said fiercely. “I do not know where your loudmouthed companion is, nor the maid of the princess Nigaard. But the princess and her dame are just yonder, in the great room beyond the wall of this manger… . Voices have told me,” I improvised, “that this hall is guardroom, cellar, storehouse, and stable to a great castle—possibly of a sorceress, the lady Elioseen. What lies without, I do not know. But whether it be wall or moat, you, me, and the princess will soon know; for I propose to leave this place. So up, and to your feet, sir! And I will unbind you.”
He stared coolly back at me, and there was something of pleasure in his eyes. There was also, and for the first time, something of fear.
He said curiously, softly, “You would go into the night, Sir Hart? You would risk your immortal soul?”
I had forgotten their aversion, if not terror, of the night’s darkness; predicated, so Watcher data said, upon the belief that they would be killed by sorcery, and their bodies taken across the thousands of miles of unknown lands to Om—there to become a slave, a dead-alive. Considering their conditioning in this matter, I marveled that the young knight had concealed his fear to the extent that he did.
“I am not afraid, sir,” I told him bluntly. “I would do much for the princess, my lady, and for the brave land of Marack.”
“Well say you so, then, Sir Harl. And if it is for the Princess, my sweet cousin, I would share the danger with you. My name, sir, since we have not been introduced, is Rawl Fergis, of the fief of Rawl. My father, the onus, is brother to the Princess’s queen and mother, and the lady Tyndil… . But one last thing—how do you know so much, strange lord? And since when do you give me orders?”
At that point he peered around the stall’s side to the fires and the guards beyond. His” eyes narrowed. His jaws clenched. “Yorns,” he said. “Devil’s spawn.”
He started to stumble forward, being off balance; but I grabbed him, lifted him bodily, as a feather, back into the stall where I tackled the fibers of his bonds.
“By Ormon,” he said when I had freed him. “You seem possessed of the strength of a Yorn yourself. Whence comes it, sir? Is it more of your cursed magic?”
“Wrong on both counts,” I said tersely. “I simply live according to Ormon’s grace… . Now if you are with me in this, you may follow after until such fortune as I may have provides you with a broadsword.”
He tried once more with the “who is subordinate to who” business. But I ignored him, saying simply, “Prepare four dottles—then follow or not, as your courage pleases you.” At that he blanched angrily, but thought better of it and ran to the stalls behind us, returning almost instantly to tell me that four stood ready.
H
ow would I do this so as to leave no questions of a kind that would betray my presence? A few guards would be slain. The forces of King Caronne would be forewarned of the terrible dangers of the gathering storm. That I would achieve this was beyond question. Fool’s Mate would be blocked. And King’s Pawn—in this case, the princess Murie Nigaard:— would be rescued. This, so that the opening gambit of the forces of chaos on the planet Camelot would be met and checked. The problem remained, however, that the Galactic Foundation, even now, had only the smallest knowledge of the nature of the power of Om. That it existed, yes! That its overt manifestations were as yet simply bloody war between opposing feudal factions, yes! But this war could well decide the control of the planet’s land surface. And since we knew of Camelot’s magic, and that the forces of King Caronne depended not so much upon this power as upon the few_ existing feudal universities with their rudimentary offerings in the arts and “sciences,” we knew, too, that if he and others like him were destroyed, all of Camelot would likewise go down—and with them all of civilization as it was now known.
A World Called Camelot Page 2