by Wayland Drew
His gaze was drawn away down to the moat by a rumbling on the drawbridge. Hodge emerged, wiping his eyes on his sleeve at one moment and chortling with some irrational merriment the next, leading a mule hitched to a tumbril cart on which, covered with the purple silken cloak he had used for grand occasions, lay Ulrich’s body. Galen watched as the old retainer led the mule down the path to the little lake of Cragganmore, maneuvered the tumbril so that the corpse could be lowered gently into a waiting boat, and rowed out to the islet where, according to Ulrich’s wishes, a funeral pyre had stood waiting these many years.
Behind him, the birds mewed softly—the pigeons, the gyrfalcon, the heron—restless on their perches. One by one Galen released them, letting fall the tiny silver leg bands crafted years before by small folk gone forever. One by one they responded, lifting their legs experimentally and, finding themselves free, spreading their wings and rising silently into the room and through the window. Every day at this time, Ulrich had released them, and so they had soared through the noon and the afternoon to return at dusk, each in accordance with its own agreement with the magus. This time, however, each bird in its turn glided toward the lake of Cragganmore and circled, crying and spiraling ever higher above the corpse of Ulrich. The falcon went last; with one sweep of its great wings it flew through the window and glided across the tarn, and Galen could hear its plaintive, falling cry of farewell as the bird rode higher and higher, became a mere speck at the edge of the cloud, and vanished.
Sighing, Galen turned back into the room. There was nothing to hold him now. Into his knapsack, which he had brought to the conjuring room already packed with his few belongings, he gathered those potions whose use he knew—dried herbs for the curing of simple ailments; unguents and potions for the soothing of skin disorders, vialled substances whose combining produced explosive results—all of these he gathered with increasing misgivings, for he seemed to be weighing himself down. He could see himself becoming one of the odd, ragged old men who roamed the byways selling charms, curatives, and, for Christians, pieces of the True Cross, and he had almost decided to leave all charms and potions to rot in the ruins of Cragganmore, when he opened a drawer in the conjuring table itself, directly beneath the now-still liquid in the stone bowl.
There lay the amulet.
In the shock of Ulrich’s death he had forgotten the stone, but now it lay before him, its center glowing like a small moon at the bottom of a sea. Its gold chain coiled around it, and it was this chain that, after a moment’s reflection, Galen took. Gold! Now there was a good companion for a journey and the means by which many a man had preserved himself; Galen knew that much of the world. But what could he want with the stone itself? Whatever weird power it contained was not his to possess. Besides, it was extremely heavy for its size. He knew that from the one time he had held it, watching the strange vision in the bowl. No, he had enough. He shut the drawer and was turning to leave when he was halted by a high clear sound so like the falcon’s cry that he thought at first the bird had returned. But the sound came from inside the room, not outside, and although it seemed to be in every corner at once, its source seemed to be the alcove where Ulrich had kept his clothes. Puzzled, Galen investigated. There, incredibly suspended amid the robes, hung the amulet! He hurried back to the conjuring table and pulled open the drawer. The stone was gone! Nor was it, he saw, any longer in the wardrobe alcove. Yet the high-pitched ringing continued, centered now on another table at one side of the room, a table covered with various vials and earthenware containers. Unerringly, Galen selected one of these and picked it up. The jug hummed and pulsed between his palms, and it was clear, to Galen’s astonishment, that the amulet was inside, although the neck of the container was much smaller than the stone itself.
Gently he replaced the jug on the table. “All right,” he said. “All right. I understand.” The pot shattered. The amulet lay glowing dimly amid the earthen shards. He reached out and took it; at the touch of his fingers it moved of its own volition in his palm, and the singing ceased. It felt cool and wonderful. Holding it, Galen suddenly knew what he must do, and he knew how Ulrich had planned to help him, despite his incompetence—with the amulet. He would journey to Urland! And he would meet Vermithrax in combat there, and defeat the dragon.
Anticipating that victory, he extended his clenched fist toward the conjuring bowl. “I am Dragonslayer!”
At that the liquid convulsed. It boiled. In seconds it had generated a luminescent cloud of steam that swiftly formed into the image of a massive dragon, gouting pale fire. Galen’s ears filled with its roar, and his nostrils with dragon-stench. Terrified, he shrank back against the wall of the conjuring room, aware that the amulet had begun to pulse against his palm. For an instant he feared that he might suffocate or be vaporized by the dragon’s hot breath. But almost as swiftly as it had formed, the vision vanished, and Galen was left alone with the suddenly emptied bowl and with his racing heart, was left alone with the amulet, which had grown calm once more.
He swallowed hard. “Well,” he said, “at least I’ll try.”
Still shaking, he discarded the gold chain, strung the amulet on a leather thong, and hung it around his neck. Then, with a last look around at the conjuring room where he had spent so many hours of his youth under Ulrich’s patient tutelage, he left. He walked down the stone stairs, through the banquet hall where the old conjurer had died so foolishly, and out into the sun of the courtyard. He did not look back. He crossed the drawbridge and went down to the shore of the lake where Hodge was squatting, staring pensively at Ulrich’s unlit funeral pyre on the little island. “Good, ye be here at last,” the old man said, gesturing toward the island. “Start the fire.”
“But I . . . I don’t know if I can do it.”
Hodge stared up at him, gaping incredulously. “Not do it! But of course you can do it! You’re a conjurer!” And his faith seemed so complete and so simple that Galen could not face the prospect of disappointing him.
“Well,” he said, “all right.” He summoned his concentration and gestured; it was, after all, like the charm that he had used to light the candles that very morning after the Urlander delegation had arrived. “Flammam habeamus,” he said in a very small voice. Deep inside he felt the revolution that told him the charm was correct, had succeeded. They saw a small flame—so small that it seemed at first a mere reflection of sunlight on the water—flicker amidst the tinder in the center of the pyre. Slowly it spread until Ulrich’s body was encircled in a ring of fire.
Galen and old Hodge sat on the bank together and watched.
The pyre burned the rest of the day. It burned with unearthly hues—pinks, and crimsons, and multicolored blues—at a sedate pace, as if Ulrich himself were controlling it, as if it fed on mixtures of gases from the air and the earth that no other fire had savored. The two watched silently, as the day waned and the sky grew darker, and the colors in the tarn deepened and grew ever richer, until it seemed that the fire on the islet and the fire in the lake were one.
“Saved my life, he did,” Hodge said. He laughed his wheezy, coughing laugh, and his laughter seemed so incongruous to Galen that again he wondered whether old Hodge were entirely sane, or whether the tides of time and circumstance had gently eroded his reason. Could it be that in some unfathomable way the distinction between life and death had so blurred for him that pretending to maintain it struck him as profoundly absurd? “Before yer was born,” he went on. “Long before.” He chewed contemplatively on a grass stalk. The funeral pyre glowed but Ulrich’s body did not seem to be contorted or disfigured by the advancing flames; it merely grew increasingly transparent. “Young fella like yerself I was. Come along from Cantware, thinking I knew my way, could get along on my own, didn’t need no help from man nor beast. Out to see the world. Come along the road at dusk, just this time of day. Down the road there halfway to the village, four big fellas come up to me, lit into me. Laughin’, they was. Cudgels. Broke both legs, both arms, did somethin’
funny in my head.” He laughed again. “Just sport it was to them, for I had nothin’ to rob. They woulda killed me, yer know, yes, sir, they woulda. Kill me as easy as squash a bug and think no more of it than that. But Ulrich come along. Come by accident. Drove ’em off.” Hodge chortled with delight, rubbing his arms and legs, remembering Ulrich’s triumph and the pain through which he had witnessed it. “Drove ’em off with fireballs—Bam! Bam!—snappin’ at their heels like big dogs all the way down the road and outa sight. Then he brung me here, to Cragganmore, floated me back somehow, for I felt no more pain than that, and nursed me to health with his own hands, for he had that skill, although he were a lad scarcely older than myself. When I was well he says to me, ‘Hodge, yer can go on yer journey, now, and I’ll give yer a little somethin’ to protect yerself agin the bullies of which the woods is full.’ But I says to him, ‘Ulrich, I owe yer my life, and it will be spent in yer service from this time forth.’ ” The old man gazed into the reflections of the flames on the water. Dusk was falling. Ulrich’s body had vanished. “And so it has been, lad,” he said. “And so it will be.”
“But, Hodge, how can you serve a dead man?”
He laughed. “By keepin’ alive his memory. By doin’ the good he would have done, along the way. And then there are other ways, there are other ways.” Hodge nodded, smiling mysteriously.
After dusk the last of the flames died away, and the embers winked out, cooled, fell to ash. They rose and stretched. Galen shouldered his knapsack and turned toward the road before he realized that Hodge was not with him but was hobbling in the opposite direction down the slope to the water’s edge, pushing the little rowboat out into the darkening lake. “One more little errand,” he called. “Shan’t be long.” The boat vanished in the darkness, and in a moment Galen heard it grounding on the shore of the islet. “Ashes!” came Hodge’s distant mumbling voice, clear over the water. “Maybe a bone or two to make sure.” He said something further in Latin, laughing more.
“Come on, Hodge!” Galen called. “There are things to do!” He had absentmindedly been fingering the amulet, and now he beckoned unthinkingly with the hand in which it was clenched. Instantly the boat skidded up at his feet, bearing a startled Hodge sprawled in its bottom.
“Don’t do that!”
“Sorry, sorry . . . I didn’t . . .”
“Think, lad! A sorcerer ye may be, but all the more reason to take care! Ye can’t do just what ye want, ye know. Got to think of other people.” Awkwardly, the old man regained his feet and clambered out of the boat, folding a bulging leather packet as he did so. “Ulrich always said, he always said, ‘Hodge, if yer a sorcerer, ye cannot cause hurt to them that does not deserve it.’ That’s me, Master Galen, and my backside! It does not need the hurt!” Grumbling still, he stuffed the leather packet in his knapsack. “Only one thing left to do.”
“Wh . . . What’s that, Hodge?”
“Why, destroy Cragganmore, lad! D’ye want to leave it to become a place of thieves and vandals, when it has harbored such as Ulrich?”
“Well, no.”
“Then end it, lad. Cast a charm upon it.” He waited confidently.
Hesitantly, Galen extended the amulet, waited until the moment felt correct, and gave the order: “Cragganmore! Silva te celet!” He felt the amulet twist in his palm, and in the last of the light he could see that his command was being obeyed. Vines swarmed up the walls, covering the battlements with leafy tendrils. Some grew thick trunks, and very quickly, for centuries were compressed into those moments. The walls crumbled, were overgrown, became a tranquil, wooded mound of earth. The Cragganmore that Hodge and Galen knew had vanished utterly.
“Good,” Hodge grunted, shouldering his knapsack. “Come on now, lad. It’s a long journey, where we’re goin’.”
They walked for several minutes through the silent darkness.
“Hodge?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. When I told you to hurry up, when you were in the boat, I really wasn’t thinking,” Galen stared down at the luminescence of the stone in his palm. “It won’t happen again.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Hodge muttered. “Yer young.”
Again there was silence, except for their footfalls in the darkness.
“Hodge?”
“Um.”
“You know, I really miss Gringe. I wish he were going with us.”
Suddenly a white form swooped low above their heads from behind, and a singularly abrasive voice said, “Hodgepodge!”
“There yer are again!” Hodge yanked off his cap and swatted his knee with it. “I wish yer’d think man! Now look what we’re stuck with! Damn saucy bird!”
“Sorry, sorry,” said Galen. But actually he was smiling in the darkness—smiling both at the astonishing glowing object in his hand and at the white spot that was Gringe hovering just ahead, showing them the path through the tunnel of trees.
It was after midnight when they came upon the camp. They saw the fire from a distance, glowing through the trees beside a little brook, and they halted, consulting in whispers, fearing that the campsite might be that of robbers. It was Gringe who scouted and came back saying “Ur . . . Ur . . .” So they proceeded, and soon saw that although some of the Urlanders were asleep in their sheepskin robes—Galen recognized the bulky figures of Xenophobius and Harald Wartooth—most were still up despite the lateness of the hour, and arguing.
“. . . for a funeral!” Greil exclaimed. “All this way, while at home there are seeds unplanted and calves to be born! All because you said the chances would be good.”
“And they were good,” Valerian replied. In the firelight, Galen thought he looked extremely tired and frail.
Greil spat. “A major necromancer! Ha! A chaff-witted dottard who could protect not even himself!”
“Sit, Greil,” Malkin said wearily. “We’ve been over it enough. Leave him alone. We agreed when we set out. Now that nothing can be done, let’s at least have peace.”
Greil scuffed the turf with his heel. “I know. But every time I lie down, every time I look up at the heavens and see the tail of the Great Bear pointing east . . .” He suddenly put a hand to his face.
“It’s the equinox for all of us, Greil,” Mavour said.
“You haven’t all lost a daughter.”
“That’s true.”
“Still, we can be quiet and hope that the gods will help whoever’s daughter perished tonight.”
Galen and Hodge emerged from the forest and into the ring of firelight, the humus cushioning their steps. “Hello.”
The Urlanders’ camp suddenly broke into action at the strange voice. Men rolled away from the fire and into the bushes, fumbling for their weapons; in a moment someone stood behind Galen, ready to strike. Valerian, however, had seemed to recognize his voice and had stood up slowly, smiling, a hand shielding his eyes against the fire.
“Who are you?” Greil demanded. “What d’you mean, creeping up on us?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Greil, can’t you see who it is?”
“Ha! Now I can. What do you want, youngster?”
“I want to help you.”
“How can you help us?”
“I can . . . I can slay Vermithrax.” For a moment the words hung, as if they had been written in fire against the blackness. No one was more surprised than Galen himself, for although they had issued from his mouth, in his voice, he had not really intended to say them, had not intended to commit himself. But neither had he expected the incredulous and bitter laughter of the Urlanders.
“You can, can you?” Greil spoke with such vehemence that a strand of spittle fell across his chin. “What makes you think you can?”
“Because I hold the key to Ulrich’s Craft. I am his heir. I have inherited his . . . power.”
Again the bitter laughter. “And what good is that? What good was that to the old man himself?”
“It’s different! I have something he did not have when he died! I h
ave the . . .” He had wanted to say amulet but could not; nor could he open the hand that contained the stone. He felt a sudden surge of terror, a prisoner within a body which suddenly was no longer his. It was like the dread a small animal must feel when the net falls. But then, as quickly as it had come, the feeling passed.
When Greil said, raising his dagger, “In that case, you won’t mind submitting to the same little test,” he felt almost serene, and had actually moved half a step toward the man, only distantly aware of Valerian’s voice commanding: “There’ll be no more of that, Greil! No more tests!”
“Will there not? And why not, you young snotnose? Do you want to let him come bumbling into Urland? Enrage Vermithrax? Get us all killed? I say no! I say Tyrian has shown us the way! We have the tests here and now, and not when our lives depend on them.” Greil glanced around the circle, and got grim nods of agreement.
“And I say,” Valerian spoke quietly, “that there’ll be no killing here, nor any attempt to kill.”
Greil was beyond listening. His face contorted, he gripped the dagger with both hands and lunged at Galen. The blade never reached its destination. Moving with remarkable speed and agility, Valerian chopped a stick of firewood across Greil’s wrist and, as the dagger went spinning and the big man doubled in agony, delivered a kick to his stomach that sent him collapsing backwards.
“Now come to your senses, all of you!” Valerian still had the club, although after a moment he tossed it into the fire. “What kind of way is this to treat friends who want to share our troubles and to help if possible. Offer food!”
Grudgingly at first, embarrassed, the Urlanders drew Hodge and Galen close to their fire and scraped out the last of the evening’s gruel. Soon even Greil came over to them and, rubbing his wrist, apologized. “It’s a kind of madness,” he said. “A kind of sickness. We all have it in Urland. You’ll see. It comes because there’s no way of fighting back.”