by Chris Tookey
Eventually, the expedition, which was virtually a small army, came to a valley that afforded a clear view of the sea to the north. A party of this size had nothing to fear from pirates, so they wasted no time in crossing the exposed grassland towards the river that wound through the valley. Wyrd noticed no anxiety on Osprey’s face this time, as he shielded his eyes and looked out to sea.
When they reached the river, Artorus signalled for the army to stop. As the horses dropped their heads to drink, the prince waited for his goblin scouts to ride up.
“Any sign of Puca?” he demanded.
The goblins all shook their heads.
“Where do you think they are?” Artorus asked Osprey.
“When we were here before,” said Osprey, “we discovered them in the woodlands. Or rather they discovered us.”
“You say they shot at you?” asked Artorus.
“Repeatedly,” said Osprey with feeling. “I still have the scars.”
“Very well,” said Artorus. “These Puca need to be taught a lesson. Would you say the wind is in an easterly direction?”
“Yes,” said Osprey. “Our scent is being carried towards them even now, so they will be waiting for us. But what have you in mind?”
“That is no concern of yours,” said the prince, stiffly. “I am Artorus, future King of all Albion, am I not?”
“Your mother believes so,” said Osprey.
“And you do not?” asked Artorus, sharply.
“I would not presume to doubt it, sire,” said the wizard.
“Good,” remarked Artorus. “In that case, you will obey my commands.”
“Yes, sire,” said Osprey. “Of course, sire.”
“Sir Ector! Fetch me firebrands! Ten of them!” ordered Artorus.
“Right away, Your Majesty,” replied Sir Ector.
Sir Ector was one of the older and less fit knights, with a red face and a handlebar moustache of which he was inordinately proud. He had a reputation as a stickler for discipline and was a devout supporter of King Otto. Wyrd wondered if he had quite the same high opinion of Prince Artorus as he had of his father, but Sir Ector was far too careful a career soldier for any trace of doubt or mistrust ever to flash across his face. Wyrd did notice, however, that when an order was given to him that he did not fully understand he had a tendency to chew his lower lip. He was doing that now.
Sir Ector barked his orders, and before long ten knights rode up with unlit firebrands.
“You will light the torches, Osprey,” commanded Artorus.
“I have brought no matches,” said Osprey.
“You are a magician, are you not?” asked Artorus, in a voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Of course, my lord,” replied Osprey.
“Make yourself useful, then,” ordered Artorus.
The wizard muttered an imprecation and all ten of the brands began to blaze.
“Spread out!” commanded the prince. “And set fire to the woods!”
The ten knights rode off to fulfil his bidding.
“But, sire,” said Wyrd, “the Puca won’t stand a chance. The fire will be upon them before they know it.”
“Precisely,” said Artorus. “And we will have defeated them without losing a single member of our party.”
“But it seems so… I don’t know,” replied Wyrd, “unfair.”
“Fairness does not come into it. Do you think they know anything of fairness? They have one rule: eat or be eaten. Am I not right, Osprey?”
“It is true, they have no higher feelings,” assented Osprey. “No belief in God, so far as we know.”
“They do not even recognise my father as King of Atlantis, or me as his heir,” said Artorus. “It is time they were treated as an example to others.”
“And so you are willing to exterminate them?” asked Wyrd.
“If that is their fate, they have brought it upon themselves,” replied the prince.
By now the knights were within a few yards of the woods, and the prince turned to his other men.
“Prepare for glory!” he ordered, unsheathing his sword. “Approach the woods!”
Wyrd never forgot the scenes that followed. The woods were soon ablaze, and the air was loud with the crackle and snap of burning branches and the crash of falling trees. Many of the Puca in the woods could be heard wailing, their cries of terror fading as they fled away from the inferno. A few Puca near the edge of the woodland ran or flew out into the valley, where Prince Artorus and his men slashed them to pieces with their swords. Wyrd noticed that most of those who died were unarmed and many were females or children. But whenever Prince Artorus noticed any of his men hesitating to kill, he cried, “Give them no quarter!” and another defenceless Puca was slashed to death.
Wyrd saw that Osprey was wielding his own sword with enthusiasm, hacking and chopping at every Puca that flew at him. Wyrd tried not to join in the carnage and hesitated when he saw one small Puca flying straight at him. The lapse of concentration nearly cost him an eye. But he just managed to dodge the tiny arrow as it flew towards his head, and he angrily lashed out at the Puca who had dispatched the missile. He knocked the Puca to the ground, and his horse stamped on it.
“Good work!” cried Prince Artorus, seeing Wyrd’s first kill. “I knew you’d see things my way!”
But the truth was that Wyrd still had doubts. He wondered if the Puca really deserved to have their habitat destroyed, their homes burned, their lives ended, purely on the whim of a dictatorial human.
Wyrd remembered that Osprey had taught him in class that the Puca had once been one of the ruling races of Albion. Their power had shrunk as men had advanced into their woodlands, so perhaps their decline had been inevitable; yet Wyrd felt sad that man had been quite so ruthless in ordering their destruction. Perhaps the two races might have learned to live together – in tolerance, if not in harmony. But now, he suspected, no one would ever know. If Osprey was right, and this was one of the last places for Puca to exist, their entire race might shortly be extinct.
It was with a shiver that Wyrd recalled the middle verse of the Oracle’s prophecy:
When the purple blood of Atlantis
Meets the crimson blood of the Hun,
The races that ruled over Albion
Will find that their course has been run.
The Puca’s course had been run, all right. And from the high-pitched screams in the forest, he guessed that not one of the Puca had been able to run or fly fast enough to escape the conflagration.
In a matter of minutes, the one-sided battle was over. The prince surveyed his troops. One goblin had died, with a Puca arrow in his forehead, and the other goblins insisted on burying him before they moved on.
“Very well,” said the prince, “we shall stay here for the night. Tomorrow we ride through what remains of the woodland and risk the northern moors.”
“Could we not ride on through the night?” asked Sir Ector. “The Villa Honoria is not so many miles away.”
“By the time these goblins have finished burying their comrade, it will be near nightfall. I would prefer not to risk the ghouls and vampires,” replied the prince. “They are skilled at attacking by night. And I, for one, prefer to have enemies that I can see.”
“But if we ride by day, do we not risk the bears and the harpies?” inquired Sir Ector.
“We do,” said the prince, “but no bear will attack an army of this size. And harpies are slow of wit and easy to see. How many did you count when you were last here, Uther?”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Wyrd. “I was galloping away from them at the time. Maybe twenty or thirty.”
“I shall outwit them,” said Artorus.
Wyrd found himself exchanging wry glances with Osprey. Outwit them? Had the news that Artorus was soon to become ruler of Albion gone to his head? He sou
nded more conceited than ever.
“No harpy shall stand between me and my marriage to the fair Morgana,” said Artorus.
“Dark Morgana,” said Wyrd, without thinking.
“What did you just say?” asked the prince.
“She’s dark, rather than fair,” said Wyrd. “Though I suppose when you use the word ‘fair’, you may just be meaning ‘beautiful’. So in that sense you might well say Morgana’s fair and dark, at the same time.”
The prince tried to grasp this complexity of information but gave up.
“Uther, shut up,” he said.
“Yes, my lord,” said Wyrd.
“When I require your opinion, I shall ask for it,” said Artorus.
“Of course, my lord,” said Wyrd.
“And when you come to write this battle up,” said Artorus. “I think it may be as well to emphasise that the Puca attacked us, not we them.”
“They did?” asked Wyrd.
“They did,” said Artorus.
Wyrd turned away, not trusting his face to conceal his feelings, but he still overheard the following exchange.
“Breakfast is at sunrise,” said Artorus to Sir Ector. “And my special ale is to go to the goblins.”
“Special ale?” asked Sir Ector.
“Yes, Sir Ector,” replied the prince. “The special ale.”
“Are you sure, my lord?”
Sir Ector’s voice was matter-of-fact, but something in his voice managed to suggest incredulity.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Artorus.
“Very good, my lord,” said Sir Ector.
Wyrd wondered why, when Sir Ector turned away from the prince and rode past Wyrd on his way to the stores wagon, he had such a troubled expression on his face. But Wyrd knew that Sir Ector was far too good a soldier to tell him.
***
Wyrd rose the next morning to the smell of bacon and sizzling sausages. The eight remaining goblins ate a little way off from the others, and Wyrd noticed that their voices were louder than the other troops. It was clear that not only were they eating a hearty breakfast; they were imbibing copious amounts of the prince’s special ale. Wyrd asked Osprey whether it was wise for the prince to send drunken goblins out on reconnaissance. Might they not be better off sober?
“Doubtless the prince has his reasons,” said Osprey, mysteriously.
Wyrd never forgot the ride through the smoking wood. Not a single tree had survived the fire. Most had crashed down. A few stood up defiantly, but scorched, bare and without a sign of leaf. Charred corpses of Puca lay everywhere, their gossamer wings crinkled and black like burnt leaves. As Wyrd reached the far side of the forest, it became apparent to him that the fire had indeed spread too fast for any of the Puca to have escaped alive.
Just before the troops left the little shelter that the dead woods still afforded, the prince halted them and sent the goblins ahead, on to the northern moors.
“What’s he doing?” asked Wyrd.
“Fishing, I think,” said Osprey.
“What do you mean?”
“I suspect that the prince is using the goblins as bait,” replied the wizard. “It’s an unconventional approach, and one that is unlikely to endear Artorus to the goblins’ next of kin, but I fear… or rather I think… that that is what he is doing.”
Wyrd was soon to observe the truth of Osprey’s insight. The goblins had not moved more than a hundred yards on to the moors when a coarse shrieking could be heard. A flock of harpies descended upon the goblins, pecking and biting them until they fell off their ponies. The frightened ponies managed to run away, but the harpies seemed much more interested in their riders. Wyrd averted his eyes as the bird-women bit off the goblins’ heads and buried their beaks in the headless corpses.
“Should we not help them?” Wyrd demanded of Osprey.
“The prince evidently thinks not,” murmured Osprey.
Over to the right, on horseback at the head of his troops, Prince Artorus stood next to Sir Ector. The prince held his hand in the air, warning his troops not to advance. A few of the troops were grumbling at not being able to go to the goblins’ rescue, but no one dared to disobey the prince. Everyone remembered the ruthlessness with which he had disposed of the Puca only a day before. No one believed that ignoring orders would result in anything other than a summary sentence of death.
Wyrd began to understand Artorus’s strategy when the harpies had finished their banquet of dwarf meat. Instead of flying off, they tottered unsteadily around, shrieking loudly and flapping their wings. Occasionally, they threw back their heads and crowed, like cockerels that were over-eager to announce their presence. One or two fell over.
“They’re drunk!” said Wyrd.
“Precisely,” said Osprey. “The prince was fishing for them with poisoned bait.”
“You mean he poisoned the goblins?”
“Effectively. He got them drunk and then fed them to the harpies. And harpies have no head for alcohol.”
“How did Artorus know that?” asked Wyrd. “He never seemed to be paying attention in biology.”
“You’re right,” said Osprey. “I must say it’s a pleasant surprise that anything I taught him found its way into that thick skull of his, but I did once tell him something that must have stuck in his mind: that humans have the greatest ability to cope with alcohol, second only to trolls, while goblins require only a couple of tankards to become dangerously drunk, and for harpies the merest whiff of alcohol renders them incompetent.”
“Charge!” ordered Prince Artorus.
“Charge!” ordered Sir Ector.
Wyrd and Osprey watched as the troops rode into the midst of the harpies, slashing and hacking at the tipsy creatures.
“Oh well, there goes another species,” observed Wyrd, with a levity he did not feel.
“How did you know that?” asked Osprey.
“How did I know what?”
“That they are the last of their species,” said the wizard.
“You mean, they really are?” said Wyrd, shocked.
“Were,” Osprey corrected him, as they surveyed the death throes of the last few screeching bird-women. “King Otto raised them all from eggs and released them into the wild.”
“Won’t the King mind that his son is destroying them all?”
“They were doomed anyway,” said Osprey. “Haven’t you noticed, there are no male harpies?”
“I’ve never even heard of a male harpy.”
“That shows you how rare they are. Or were. The King’s eggs all turned out to be female. So really the prince is only hurrying along their inevitable extinction.”
“That’s two species he’s killed off in two days,” said Wyrd. “Not bad going. At this rate, he’ll manage to kill off all the ancient races within a year.”
“Perhaps the prophecy is right,” said Osprey. “Perhaps Prince Artorus really is the one king to rule all Albion. If he is, heaven help the rest of the ancient races.”
“What do you care about the ancient races?” asked Wyrd.
“Oh, I’m not sentimental about them,” said Osprey, “unlike Buzzard. All the same…”
“You don’t like to see them killed off, do you?” asked Wyrd.
“No,” said Osprey after a lengthy pause. “As his teacher, I did try to educate Prince Artorus to respect the differences between the races.”
At this point, the prince cut the head off one of the biggest harpies and twirled it around his head, laughing.
“Whoooooo!” screamed the prince, as the harpy’s blood spattered over his demonically grinning face.
“However, it would seem,” remarked the wizard drily, “that I failed.”
26
Return to the Villa Honoria
In which Wyrd discovers how much has changed
After the harpy bloodbath, the troops rode on, unchallenged by any other moorland creatures. Wyrd saw one bear in the distance, but at the sight of so many troops it sensibly lumbered away.
Before long, Wyrd was looking down at the same Villa Honoria that he had only left a few weeks before. And yet something about it was not quite the same. It looked strangely silent, uncared for.
At the front gate, the prince called his name and waited for entry. But nothing happened for a few minutes, and when the gate did open they were confronted not by the lizard-man who had greeted Wyrd’s party before but by one of the Empress’s dwarves.
“What do you want?” he asked.
His voice was surly and unfriendly. Wyrd recognised him as Fortunatus, or Lucky, but he seemed a much dourer, darker dwarf than he had been before. He shifted from leg to leg and occasionally glanced over his shoulder, as though anxious that something might be in view that ought not to be.
“He’s nervy,” murmured Osprey to Wyrd.
“Actually, I think he’s Lucky,” replied Wyrd. “That’s Nervy over there.”
Sollicitus, or Nervy, was indeed peering at them from the door of the luxurious latrines. Wyrd’s first impression that the villa looked less well cared for was compounded by the sight and smell of the latrine building. The stink emanating from it was enough to make any gorge rise, and spiders’ webs hung across the top half of the doorways. As soon as Nervy caught sight of Prince Artorus and his troops, he scuttled away to the main part of the villa and shut the door behind him.
“I want to see the Empress Honoria,” announced Prince Artorus.
“The Empress is indisposed,” replied Fortunatus.
“Tell her that Prince Artorus of Atlantis is here, to request an audience.”
“You can request an audience all you like,” said the dwarf, “but the Empress is resting. She won’t see anyone until nightfall.”
“I hope she is not seriously ill?” asked the prince.
“I wouldn’t say she’s ill, exactly,” replied the dwarf. “Like I said, she’s indisposed.”
“Very well, we shall wait for her to wake up,” said the prince. “Perhaps I may be permitted to see the Princess Morgana?”