by Tim Powers
Epiphany stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands with a towel and staring at him worriedly. 'What is it, Brian?' she asked.
'Get some travelling clothes and any cash you've saved
- we're leaving this minute. I'll go saddle a couple of horses.'
Dawning hope put a youthful brightness in her smile. 'You mean it? Really?'
'I do. Hurry up, the little sorcerer may try to stop us.'
He snatched his cloak from a hook and strode through the kitchen to the stableyard. 'Shrub!' he yelled, blinking in the sudden daylight. 'Saddle up my horse, and one for Epiphany. We're going for a ride.'
He took a hurried step toward the stable, and tripped over a charred board; snarling a curse, he put out his hands to catch himself.
His hands and aching head plunged into the dark, icy water, but a moment later soft arms had pulled him back from the gunwale and gently lowered him onto a seat, and the boat soon stopped rocking. Terribly weak, he slumped back onto some kind of cushion, and lay there gasping, staring up at the stars and the moon in the deep black sky. 'Axe you all right, Mr Duffy?' Shrub sounded worried.
The Irishman rolled over on the sun-warmed cobbles and brushed dry ashes out of his face and hair. 'Hm? Yes, Shrub, I'm all right.' Looking past the boy, he could see several of the northmen grinning at him. He got to his feet and rubbed bits of grit out of his abraded palms.
'I'll go saddle your horses, then,' the boy said.
'Uh, no.. .thank you, Shrub, I've.. .changed my mind.' A weighty depression had emptied his heart of everything else: enthusiasm, hope, and even fear. I was out on the lake, he thought, and without a sip of the Dark this time to prompt it. Hell, I can't run off with what's-her-name if I'm going to be dead in a few months, and probably insane long before that. Besides, I can't disobey Merlin, my old teacher. I've known him much longer than I've known this woman. Women are unreliable anyway - didn't Gwenhwyfar run off with my best friend? No, that was Epiphany. . .well, both of them...
Epiphany's voice interrupted his confused thoughts. 'I'm ready, Brian! How's that for hurrying?'
With some effort he turned and stared at the grayhaired woman standing in the back doorway. 'What?'
'I'm ready to go! Are the horses saddled?'
'No. I'm sorry, Piff, I don't seem to be able.. .we can't go. I can't leave. It's impossible to explain.'
She let drop the bundle she'd been holding, and glass broke inside. 'Do you mean we're not going?'
'Yes. That's what I mean.' Enunciating words seemed dreadfully tiresome. 'I'm sorry,' he managed to add.
Her face was stiff. 'Then when will we? You said in a few weeks...' The new tears on her cheeks glistened in the morning sun.
'I can't leave. I'll die in Vienna. Try to understand, Piff,
my will doesn't have enough strength in this, it's like trying to swim clear of a whirlpool.'
He stopped talking then, for she had turned away from him and trudged with heavy footsteps back into the dimness of the kitchen.
When Aurelianus came outside several minutes later, uncharacteristically dressed in a long woolen tunic, black tights and a tall sugar-loaf hat, he found Duffy sitting in the shade of the kitchen wall with his head in his hands. The sorcerer pursed his lips and hefted the half-dozen rattling swords that were cradled awkwardly in the crook of his left arm.
'What, lad?' he said chidingly. 'Moping here, in the early morning when there's work for all of us to be doing? Up! Melancholy is best indulged at night, over wine.
Duffy exhaled sharply, and was surprised to find he'd been holding his breath. He stood up smoothly, without using his hands. 'Not the way the nights have been around here lately,' he said, and smiled bleakly. 'Horror and fear and rage get a lot of indulgence, but melancholy needs more quiet surroundings.' He peered at the old man. 'Why all the swords? Are you going to conjure up an octopus to come with us?'
'I figured we might as well bring your northmen along,' Aurelianus explained, crossing the yard to dump the swords with an echoing clatter into the bed of a large wagon. 'How many of them have their own weapons?'
'I don't know. Most of them.'
'These will be enough to make sure everyone is armed, then. I even brought Calad Bolg for you.'
'If it comes to it, I'll use a plain rapier, thanks,' Duffy said. 'No guns?'
'I'm afraid not, what with the King being involved.'
'He doesn't approve of them?'
'Huh.' Duffy, though leery of the innovative firearms
himself, shook his head wonderingly. 'Well, I hope we don't run up against someone who does approve of them.'
'Why don't you see if you can coax those beery Aesir into the wagon,' the sorcerer suggested, 'while I get the lads to harness up a couple of horses.'
Twenty minutes later the crowded wagon creaked and bounced out of the city through the west gate; once outside, they were soon deserted by the gang of prancing, cheering boys that had accumulated around the vehicle during the ride from the Zimmermann Inn. Guided by Aurelianus, the horses picked their way through the unpaved lanes between the livestock pens and were soon trotting briskly' through open meadows of new spring grass, along the only wide track that led over the near hills and up into the dense Wienerwald, the Vienna woods.
When they had traversed perhaps a mile, the wizard slowed the horses and yanked the reins so that they'd step over the shallow ditch on the right side of the path. Then the wagon lurched and rocked up a patchily shadowed slope, between occasional twisted trees. Twice they got stuck, and both times Duffy and the northmen climbed out, wrestled a wheel free of some entanglement, and laboriously gave the vehicle a gasping, back-wrenching shove to give the horses a little slack in which to get moving. Finally they had crested the first hill and were precariously teetering down the far side; Aurelianus was leaning ineffectually on the back brake, and the wagon would have rolled over the horses and tumbled into the narrow ravine if Duffy hadn't flipped the old wizard over backward into the packed northmen and borne down on the brake himself.
'You just call directions, huh?' the Irishman shouted, angry at having been scared.
Aurelianus stood up in the wagon bed and leaned his
elbows on the back of the driver's bench. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I never brought a wagon here before. That's right, kind of slant it cross the slope. And then take it between those two big oaks.'
'Right.' The northmen bunched up on the uphill side of the wagon and leaned parallel to the slope, while Duffy did some tricky work with the brake and reins.
The wagon's shadow, which had been stretched out in front of it across the damp, grassy earth, abruptly swung around like the boom of a jibing sailboat; in a moment it lay almost directly behind them, and the morning sun was in Duffy's eyes. He gasped and locked the brake. 'What the hell happened?' he exclaimed. 'Did we hit slippery mud? I didn't feel anything.'
'Keep going,' Aurelianus said. 'You're still on course.
Pay no attention to any whirling effects - they're just a
few local direction-confusion and disorientation spells I
laid down a number of years ago.
'Oh.' It occurred to Duffy that this would not only make it difficult to get into the area, but difficult also to get out, especially in a panicky haste. He glanced furtively to both sides, looking for skeletons of any wayfarers who might have blundered into this wall-less labyrinth. He didn't see any bones, but, glancing up, he did see figures circling high in the air - figures he thought were hawks until he looked more steadily and saw the manlike forms between the vast wings. He quickly snapped his gaze back to the landscape ahead, uneasy to think that it was he who had called those things out of their deep retreat.
He sneaked a glance over his shoulder to see how Bugge and his men were taking these outrë phenomena, and was surprised to see no dismay or fear in their faces. Several were watching the fliers, but all seemed tensely cheerful. Bugge grinned at the Irishman and muttered something in Norse, so Duffy grinned back
and raised a clenched fist before returning his attention to the horses. Well, why should I be worried, he thought; nobody else is.
They proceeded for another hour into the wooded hills, and three more times the sun did its trick of shifting about in the sky. The whole adventure had by this time taken on a dreamlike unreality to the Irishman, and if the wagon had rolled up across the side of the sky, swerving between clouds, he would not have thought it incongruous.
Finally the wagon bumped down through a narrow, greenery-roofed tunnel, in which gravity for one awful moment seemed to be pulling upward, and emerged into a small glade.
For a moment Duffy just sat, clutching the edges of the seat and trying to get his bearings - that last bit of sorcery had convinced him that the wagon was going into a forward tumble - then he opened his eyes and saw the cabin.
It was a low, thatch-roofed, stone-walled, one-storey affair, and could credibly have been five years old or five hundred. He glanced questioningly at Aurelianus, who nodded. 'This is the place,' the wizard said.
Duffy bounded over the side onto the grass. 'Let's get him and get the hell out of these woods, then. Bugge! Come in, drag your lads out of there! There's work to be done, old kings to be carried about!'
'This is entirely the wrong spirit,' Aurelianus protested, climbing down beside the Irishman. 'Now listen, there's a question you must ask and one you mustn't, so -'
'Damn it, I'll ask any questions that occur to me, and none that don't. Come on now, lead the way. You're the one that knows him, after all.' He strode toward the cabin with the sorcerer scurrying alongside and the stolid northmen bringing up the rear.
'All this is difficult enough,' Aurelianus complained, 'without you acting like a damned -'What did you think you were going to get, when you.. .placed your order for me? A tame, all-powerful
giant who'd cheerfully jump at your every order? If so, you made a mistake - you didn't want King Arthur, you wanted a village idiot.'
The sorcerer threw up his hands. 'Maybe you've got a point and maybe you haven't,' he said. 'Quiet now, here we are.' He rapped respectfully on the thick oaken door, and a faint voice answered within. Frowning a warning at Duffy, Aurelianus opened the door and led the way inside.
Duffy followed, and was surprised; he had expected to see the same depressing gloom that cloaked Aurelianus' chamber at the inn, and the same sort of ominous and ill-smelling objects scattered carelessly about. Instead he saw a pleasant, sunlit room, aired by two open windows; the only jarring note was several handfuls of mud caked on the foot of the bed. The Irishman didn't look at the man in the bed, but turned to his northmen and, with expressive grunts, began pantomiming the act of lifting the occupant and carrying him outside. It looked as if he were imitating a careless furniture mover.
'Brian,' came a weak but humorous voice from behind him. 'Surely it's Brian Duffy?'
Duffy turned and looked at the King, who was sitting up in the bed. He was clean-shaven, though his white hair hung down around his shoulders, and his face was seamed with what the Irishman thought must have been centuries of experience. Aside from the bandage around his hips, he didn't appear to be in bad shape.
Then Duffy met his gaze, and to his own surprise remembered having met and talked to the. old man, decades ago, while out on a boyhood ramble along the banks of the Liffey. 'Hello, sir,' Duffy said now. 'I thought you lived in Ireland.'
'I live in the west.'
Aurelianus was surprised and annoyed. 'What's this? Why didn't you tell me you'd met him?' he demanded of the King. 'I had to search twenty years for him.'
'Don't get upset, Merlin.' The old monarch smiled. 'You've found him now. In any case, I didn't know then who he was - just that he was something considerably more than the average eight-year-old.'
Duffy relaxed, and glanced around. On a table beside the bed lay an earthenware cup and a rusty lance head, both of archaic and evidently Mediterranean workmanship. He looked up with a grin, and was a little disconcerted to see expressions of anxious suspense on the faces of the King and Aurelianus. 'Uh,' Duffy said uncertainly, gesturing at the cup, 'I was just going to say that that cup will come in handy when it comes time to.. .have your swig of- the beer.' He had the feeling he'd unwittingly touched an awkward subject, but he decided he must have dealt with it correctly, for the two old men broke into reassured smiles; and he guessed, without knowing why, that this was the crucial matter Aurelianus had tried to warn him about as they'd been walking to the cabin. Somehow it was fortunate that he'd referred to the cup rather than the lance.
Bugge and his men grasped what was expected of them, and six of them proceeded gently to lift the Fisher King from the bed and hobble toward the door. Aurelianus halted them long enough to put a hat on the aged King, then waved them to go on.
- 'I don't suppose he can ride?' Duffy asked. 'It's going to be cramped in that wagon.
'No, he can't,' the sorcerer said. 'Even when he's well, he's not permitted to. There are all sorts of restrictions that apply to him - he can't wear a garment with knots in it, or a ring that's an unbroken circle, he can't touch a dead body or be where one is buried.. .he could never, for example, actually go down into the Zimmermann brewing cellar.. .hell, even that mud on the bed there is a requirement.'
Duffy's gray eyebrows were halfway to his hairline 'Huh! That's as bad as all the Old Testament do's and don't's.'
'Same kind of thing,' said Aurelianus, moving toward the door.
The Irishman followed him outside. 'How did you find me?' he asked. 'I gather Venice wasn't the first place you looked.'
The wizard sighed. 'It certainly wasn't. Anyone else I could have located in two hours by thaumaturgical means, but, as I told you, you're a walking blind-spot where those arts are concerned. So I simply had to travel about and look for you. You did leave indications of your passage here and there, which helped, but my real clue was a painting I found two years ago here in Vienna - Michael the Archangel by Gustav Vogel, which you were the model for.'
'That's right,' Duffy said. 'That was in 1512 or 13; he liked my face or something, and I liked his daughter. And I was recuperating from a wound and had nothing much else to do.'
The northmen had got the King to the wagon and were carefully raising him toward the back of it. Aurelianus seemed satisfied, for he didn't rush over to criticize their efforts. 'Yes,' he said reflectively, 'Vogel, in spite of being deeply religious - or because of it, conceivably -apparently recognized what sort of . . .thing. . .you are, and put it so clearly onto the canvas that I recognized you from it. He is allied with the new power in the world, the dawning day, if you prefer, which is blinding all the old magics, and -,
'Do you mean the Church?'
'More or less. And so he could recognize you more easily than I could. He has a real clairvoyant spark - it's too bad he's given up painting.'
'It certainly is,' agreed Duffy, without conviction.
'Look, they've got him in the wagon. Hadn't we better be going?'
'I guess we should,' said the wizard, starting across the grass. 'It's so pleasant out here, though.'
Duffy, who felt more comfortable in crowded, tangled city streets, where, for one thing, gravity was consistent and the sun moved slowly along a predictable course, didn't concur, but said nothing and followed Aurelianus to the wagon. -
The first ten minutes of the return trip passed quietly enough. Duffy again drove, and was almost beginning to get used to the tricks of the enchanted environment. A half-dozen of the northmen got out of the vehicle and paced alongside, kicking stones and branches out of the way of the wheels and giving the Irishman directions by pounding on the wagon's sides. The only disconcerting note was one he should have expected: the high-flying sentinels no longer circled over the cabin, but swung in wide arcs several hundred feet directly overhead. 'Those things are pacing us,' he remarked quietly to Aurelianus.
'You're damned right they are,' the wizard said with a pleased nod.
For several minut
es then neither of them spoke, and the creak and rattle of the wagon, and the chatter of birds, were the only sounds.
Duffy had just wiped his forehead with his sleeve when he saw three of the winged guards stoop like striking falcons out of the sky, plummeting toward a point in the woods not far ahead. 'Look out,' he snapped, sitting up straight, 'I think someone followed us through your web of direction-confusion spells.'
For a while those were the last words he was to speak in German. He turned, and seemed to see Bugge and his men for the first time. 'Viking, rush ten of your men into
the trees ahead,' he barked, using an archaic Norse dialect, 'and have them conceal themselves on both sides of the path. Now!'
Bugge had heard that style of speech used by the very old folk in the Roskilde hills, and understood it well enough to follow the order. He snapped a quick phrase of clarification to his men, took in ten of them with a wave, and leaped over the side of the cart, followed a second later by the men he'd designated. Screams and sword-clangs had begun to sound from the woods ahead.
'You three take the King out of the chariot,' Duffy went on, and three northmen leaped up to obey him. 'Lay him down by the side of the path, out of sight; then race back here.' He turned to Aurelianus and spoke in Dumnoiic Celtic, 'Go, Merlin. Stay with the King.'
'Of course, Sire,' the sorcerer answered in the same tongue. He climbed down and followed the burdened northmen, who sprinted back to the wagon a few moments later.
The Irishman rummaged among the swords piled in the wagon bed as the three men clambered aboard, and sat back up with the heavy hilt of Calad Bolg in his fist. He whirled the long blade once in the air and stung the horses flanks with a snap of the reins. As the wagon surged forward he snarled up into the sky, 'Ride with us, Morrigan, and rend these dogs limb from socket!'
A tight knot of yelling men burst out of the forest just in time for Duffy' s hard-driven wagon to plow into them; at least two went down under the horses' hooves, and then the Irishman and the ten northmen in. the cart vaulted into the męlée, swords swinging, while Bugge and his men charged in from behind the trees on both sides.