by Tim Powers
Hunching around in the saddle, he nodded to the blue patch on the horizon that was the Gulf of Venice. So long, Mediterranean, he thought. It's been a pleasant interlude here, with your sunshine, Madeira wine and dark-eyed girls - but I guess I'm by nature more at home in the colder northern lands. God knows why.
The Irishman tilted back his hat and shook his head bewilderedly. Odd, he thought, how it got so weird there at the end. The Gritti boys try to kill me three-on-one Wednesday night, and then one of them saves my life and directs me to a safe ship next morning. And how did he know I needed a Trieste-bound ship, anyway? The Venetian citizens seem to know more about my business than I do myself.
And what is my business, anyway? I still can't see why that little old black-clad jack-in-the-box - God, I can't even remember his name - gave me all this money. Am I really the only man he's met capable of keeping the peace in his Austrian tavern? And since when do bouncers get this kind of money? It seems to me they're usually doing well if they get mere room and board. Oh, don't question it, old lad, he advised himself. The money's real, that's what counts.
The road wound now through tall evergreens, and the chilly air was spicy with the smell of pine. Duffy filled his lungs and smiled nostalgically. Ah, that's a smell from home, he thought. Austria, I've missed you.
And, he admitted uneasily, I've missed you, too, Epiphany. Good God - Duffy suddenly felt old - she's probably got a child by now. Maybe two of them. Or - he brightened - maybe that gargoyle Hallstadt fell off his horse one day while out hawking, leaving the old girl single and rich. Ho ho. Of course she might not speak to me. Steward, dump chamber-pots on that derelict at the front door. A quick vision of Duffy, befouled and berserk, kicking his way through a dining hail window, the ghastly spectre at the feast.
The thump of unhurried hoof beats interrupted his reverie. He turned and saw, riding lazily fifty yards behind, a sturdy fellow wearing the laced-leather tunic and slung bow of a chamois hunter. Duffy waved politely but, not wanting conversation, didn't slow his pace.
Finally he focused his mind on the idea that was bothering him most. Could it be, he asked himself reluctantly, that I'm becoming a serious drunkard? I've been drinking since I was eleven, but it's never before given me hallucinations and blackouts. Well, you're getting older every day, you know. Can't expect to be able to toss it down the way you did when you were twenty. After this journey I'll stick to beer for a while, he promised himself, and not a lot of that. I certainly don't want to start seeing goat-footed people again.
The way was steeper now. A muddy slope, furred with brown clumps of pine needles, rose at his., left hand, a similar one fell away at his right, and the tall pine trees stood up from every height like bushy green spectators seated in tiers. Bird-screeches echoed through the woods, and squirrels on high branches regarded the horse and man with great interest. Duffy flapped his arms and hooted at them and they fled in astonishment.
He was overtaking another rider, a fat friar on a plodding mule. The man appeared to be asleep, rocking loosely in the saddle and letting his mount navigate. Quite a busy road for this time of year, Duffy reflected.
Suddenly it was quieter. What sound just stopped? he asked himself. Oh, of course - the hoofbeats of the chamois hunter's horse. Duffy turned around again - and abruptly rolled out of the saddle as an iron-headed arrow split the air six inches over his saddle-bow. Somersaulting awkwardly across the path, boots flailing, he dived in a semi-controlled slide down the steep right-hand slope. For thirty feet he cut gouges in the mud and matted pine needles, then his clutching hand caught a tree root and he pulled himself hastily to his feet. He was behind a wide trunk and, he prayed, invisible to anyone on the road above.
He wiped cold mud off his face with a trembling gloved hand and tried to quiet his breathing. A bandit, by God, Duffy thought. I hope he leaves that poor friar alone. This makes three attempts on my life in three days - quite a coincidence. And it is simply a coincidence, he told himself firmly.
'Do you see his body?' asked someone up on the road.
'I tell you, idiot, you missed,' came an answer. 'Your arrow bounced away through the trees. He's hiding down there.'
After a long pause the first speaker, more quietly now, said, 'Well that's great.'
Who's this other man, Duffy wondered. And where's the friar? Or is that the friar? I wish I could see up there.
'Hey,' one of them shouted. 'I know you can hear me. Come up right now and we won't hurt you.'
Is that so, Duffy thought with a mirthless grin. Is that so, indeed?
'You know I've got a bow up here. I can just wait. You've got to come out some time, and I'll put an arrow through your eye when you do.'
Well, if it comes to that, the Irishman reasoned, I can wait until dark and then creep unseen back up the hill and cut your vociferous throat, my friend. Where can my horse and supplies be getting to? Strange breed of bandits you two are, not to have gone after him instead of me.
There was silence from above for several minutes then abruptly the rattle and slither of two men sliding down. 'Careful! Do you see him?' one of them yelled.
'No,' the other one shouted. 'Where are you going? We've got to stay close.'
When he judged that one of them was just about to slide past his tree, Duffy unsheathed his rapier and leaped out into the man's path. It was the fat friar, waving a long sword, and he screeched in terror and blocked Duffy's thrust more by luck than skill. He collided heavily with the Irishman and both of them skidded down the steep, wet incline - the fortes of their blades desperately crossed -unable to check their quickening slide. Duffy, keeping the friar's sword blocked with his own, tried to twist around and see what lay in their path. A blunt tree-branch in my back, he thought grimly, would pretty well conclude this.
The friar's trailing robe caught on a spur of rock, and he was jerked to a stop while the swords disengaged and Duffy slid on. Freed at last from the awkward corps-a-acorps, the Irishman quickly dug in with the toes of his boots, his right hand and his sword pommel, and had soon dragged to a halt, sending a small avalanche of ripped-up dirt tumbling down the slope. Then he worked his boots into the hillside to get a firm footing.
The other bandit was climbing and hopping with panicky haste down the hillside, but he was still well above Duffy and the friar.
Then the fabric tore, and the friar was on his way again. He tried to block Duffy's sword as he'd done before, but this time the Irishman whirled his extended point in a quick feint disengage, and the friar slid directly onto it, taking the sword through his belly. It was Duffy's hilt that stopped the man's downward course, and his face was less than a foot away from the Irishman's. The friar flailed his sword convulsively, but Duffy caught the wrist with his free hand and held it away. The two men stared at each other for a moment.
'You're no real friar,' Duffy panted.
'You.. .go to hell,' the man choked, and then sagged in death.
Propping the corpse up with his right hand, Duffy pulled his sword free, and let the body tumble away down the hill. He looked up. The chamois hunter was braced against a rock and a tree trunk about twenty feet up, unable to descend any further without being at the mercy of Duffy's rapier. The man carried a sword of his own, but didn't seem confident with it. The bow had been left up on the road.
'Come on, weasel,' Duffy gritted. 'Show us a little of that courage you had five minutes ago when you tried to shoot me in the back.'
The man licked sweat off his upper lip and glanced nervously over his shoulder, up the slope. Clearly he was wondering if he could scramble back to the road before the Irishman could catch up with him and run him through.
'Don't think I'll hesitate,' Duffy called, guessing the man's thoughts.
The chamois hunter reached out and scraped the ground with his sword blade, sending pebbles and clumps of leaves pattering down onto the Irishman.
Duffy laughed uproariously, sending echoes ringing through the trees. 'Too late now, my frien
d, to begin tilling the soil! I don't know where you and your fat companion had your swords hidden when you were riding, but you should have left them there.' A fistsized rock bounced painfully off his head. 'Ow! All right, you son of a dog... Duffy began scrambling up the slope in a rage.
The man dropped his sword, turned, and scampered away upward like a startled squirrel. Duffy, being heavier and unwilling to relinquish his own sword, was left behind despite his ferocious efforts to catch up.
It may go badly, he realized, if he gets to the road and has time to draw his bow. Duffy stopped to catch his breath, and dug a stone out of the dirt. He tossed it up and caught it to judge its weight. Not bad. Drawing his left arm back and resting it against a tree limb, he relaxed and waited for a sight of the timorous bandit whose crashing, gasping progress must have been audible a mile away.
Finally he was visible, pausing at the lip of the road, silhouetted against a patch of sky. Duffy's arm lashed forward, flinging the stone upward with all the strength he could muster. A second later the bandit twitched violently and fell backward, out of sight.
Got you, you bastard, Duffy thought as he resumed his upward climb. It took him several minutes to work his way up the hillside, but when he stood at last on the road he'd still heard nothing from the stone-felled bandit. I suppose I hit him in the head and killed him, the Irishman thought glumly.
He brightened, though, when he saw his horse, the supplies still intact, nosing the muddy ground a hundred feet away. 'Hello, horse,' he called, walking up to the beast. The horse lifted its head and regarded its owner without enthusiasm. 'And where were you, beast, when I was being done in down the hill? Hah?' The horse looked away, clearly bored. Duffy shook his head sadly and swung into the saddle. 'Onward, you heartless creature.'
By early afternoon the road had become a wide ledge angling steeply up the sloping face of a rock wall. Well-worn stones were pressed into the ground to serve as pavement, and the precipice side was bordered with a frail, outward-leaning fence of weathered sticks. When the sun hung only a few finger's-breadths above the western peaks Duffy came upon the St James Hospice, a narrow-windowed, slate-roofed building nestled between two vast wings of Alpine granite.
Couldn't have timed it better, the Irishman thought as he led his horse up the path to the hospice. If those two assassins hadn't delayed me this morning, I'd have got here too early, and been tempted to press on for some other, probably not half so nice, shelter for the night. The heavy front door swung open as Duffy dismounted, and two monks strode across the snowy yard.
'Good evening, stranger,' said the taller one. 'Brother Eustace will take your horse around to the stable. Come with me.' Duffy followed the monk inside and took off his hat and cloak as the door was drawn shut. The narrow vestibule was lit by a torch hung on the wall in an iron sconce, and a half dozen swords were stacked in one corner. 'We insist,' said the monk, 'that all of our guests leave their weapons here.'
Duffy grinned as he unsheathed his sword and handed it to the monk. 'Sounds like a good idea, if you get everybody to go along with it.'
'Not difficult,' the monk said, setting Duffy's rapier with the others. 'Any who won't comply spend the night outside.'
After the evening meal, the half-dozen guests sat around the great fireplace and drank brandy. Several sat in wooden chairs, but Duffy lay stretched on the floor, his head pillowed on the flank of a big sleeping dog. The Irishman had allowed himself a cup of brandy, having chosen to regard it as a precaution against the cold.
Tacitly agreeing not to discuss the motives for their travelling, the guests passed the time by telling stories. An Italian told a morbid tale about a well-born girl keeping the severed head of her stable-boy lover in a flowerpot, and watering with her tears the plant that grew from it. The monk who'd let Duffyin related a riotous and obscene story of erotic confusions in a convent, and Duffy told the old Irish story of Saeve, the wife of the hero Finn Mac Cool, and how she was metamorphosed from a faun.
A tubby old gentleman had begun to recite a long poem about the Emperor Maximilian lost in the Alps, when the front door of the hospice banged open. A moment later a burly man in the heavy boots and coat of a guide strode into the room, impatiently brushing snow out of his moustache.
'A cold night, Olaus?' asked the monk, getting up to pour a cup for the newcomer.
'No,' said Olaus, gratefully taking the liquor. 'The winter is packing up and returning north.' He took a long sip. 'But there are monsters out tonight.'
Duffy looked up, interested. 'Monsters?'
The guide nodded as he sat down by the fire. 'Aye. Griffins, snake men, demons of every sort.'
'Did you see them, Olaus?' the monk asked, giving the other guests a broad wink.
Olaus shook his head gravely. 'No. Damn few men see them and live. But today on Montasch I heard them singing choruses in the mountain, and coming here I crossed in the snow several tracks of unnatural feet. I wonder what it is that's got them roused.'
'Oh, I don't know,' the monk said airily. 'It's probably some monster holiday today. They've opened their casks of Spring beer, I'll bet.'
Olaus, aware that he was being ribbed, lapsed into sulky silence.
That reminds me, Duffy thought - I wonder how the Herzwesten Bock beer is coming. I trust this Gambrinus fellow knows his business, and hasn't let it go bad. Duffy yawned. The brandy, on top of the day's exertion, was making him sleepy. He stood up carefully, so as not to wake the dog.
'I believe I'll turn in, brother,' he said. 'Where would I find a bunk?'
The monk turned to the Irishman with a smile Duffy had seen before on the faces of old nuns attending to wounded soldiers - the easy grin of one who has pledged neutrality, and can afford to be courteous to all sides and factions. 'Through that door,' he said, pointing. 'Breakfast is at dawn.'
A little puzzled, Duffy nodded and walked to the indicated door, wondering briefly, and for no reason at all, whether the monk's incredulity at Olaus' statements might have been feigned. It was a pointless thought, and he threw it away.
There were twenty bunks in the next room, mounted in the walls like bookshelves. Duffy left his boots on the floor and climbed up into a high bunk. A blanket lay on the boards, and he stretched out on it, pulling his cloak over himself and using his knapsack for a pillow. In the next room he could hear the low mutter of the other guests saying a prayer. Got out just in time, he thought with a grin. He rolled over and went to sleep, dreaming of a Viennese girl named Epiphany.
It snowed during the night, and when Duffy went out to the stable next morning to saddle his horse, the air was so cold that his teeth hurt when he inhaled. The horse shook his head and snorted indignantly, unable to believe he was expected to work at this hour.
'Wake up, now,' Duffytold him as he climbed into the saddle. 'The sun's up, and it'll burn off this damned mist before ten o'clock. By noon we'll have forgot what this was like.'
The fog hung on with tenacity, though, as if its wispy fingers were curled resolutely around every rock outcropping. Duffy was into the Predil Pass now, and to his right the precipice edge of the path dropped away as sharp and clean as a knife cut, giving the mist the illusion of a glowing wall to complement the dark stone wall at his left. Once, to test the depth of the invisible abyss, he pulled a stone out of the mountain face and tossed it out past the lip of the path. There was no sound of it striking anything.
At what he estimated was midmorning, the path widened as it curled over the broad shoulder of the Martignac ridge. Travellers' shrines, cairns and 'stone men' marked the way clearly, even in the fog, and Duffy sat back comfortably and began to sing.
'Has aught been heard of the Fulgory
Bird in the isles to the west of Man?
For hither the gilded galleys of men
have sailed since the world began.
With painted sails and mariners' songs
We come with trumpets and brazen gongs
To procure that for which His Maje
sty longs,
The remarkable Fulgory Bird.'
Dimly through the vapors, Duffy had been seeing for some time a ridge paralleling his own, and now, glancing at it, he saw riding across it the silhouette of a vast horse and rider. 'God preserve us,' Duffy gasped, snatching instinctively at his hilt. That man is twenty feet tall, at least, he thought. Olaus was right.
The dim giant had reached for his own sword, so Duffy whirled his rapier out and brandished it - and the giant did exactly the same. The Irishman relaxed a little,- skeptically. Then he resheathed his sword. So- did the giant. Duffy now stretched out his arms and flapped them slowly, like a ponderous bird, and the shadowy rider simultaneously performed the same action.
Duffy laughed with relief. 'No need to be scared, horse,' he said. 'It's simply our shadow on the mist.' The horse flapped his lips disgustedly.
The milky brightness of the air was too dazzling and disorienting to stare into, and the Irishman kept his eyes on his hands, the path and the markers that jogged past. When he glanced at the shadow rider again, he was astonished to see a whole parade of silhouettes pacing along. He peered uneasily at the gray forms, and then stiffened with real fear.
One was a bird-headed animal with the body of a huge cat, and folded wings bobbed on its long back as it walked. Behind it trod a thing like a lizard, with the grotesque, wattled head of a rooster. A basilisk, or I'm a father confessor, Duffy thought as sweat began to trickle into the collar of his cloak. There were other figures in the murky, silent procession - dwarfs, monstrous crabs, and things that seemed to be nothing but knots of writhing tentacles. All of the shadows hopped, hobbled or strode along steadily, as if they'd walked for hours and were still leagues short of their destination. And in their midst rode stiffly the mounted figure that was Duffy's own shadow.
Like a child that fears it has seen a white, eyeless face moaning at the window, Duffy scarcely dared to breathe. He slowly turned away from the phantom ridge and stared straight ahead, where, to his horror, he could see a blurry outline in the fog. I suppose I'd see something behind me, too, he thought, but there's no way I'm going to turn around. One part of his mind, which he was trying hard to ignore, was fearfully shrilling over and over again, What do they want? What do they want? His rational side advised him to avoid sudden moves and wait for the fantastic beasts to go away.