by Ken Hood
"Yes, Master. I'll make them dead for you."
That was something he could do. That would be more fun than trying to talk with men who curled their lips at his accent or dancing with ladies who showed that gap between their breasts.
Ludwig came in carrying Master's fur-lined cloak across his outstretched arms. Ludwig was the baron's valet, a blond, sullen, square-faced man. He never spoke to Toby at all. He laid the precious thing over a chair and turned to the baron, who waved a plump hand at Toby in a flash of jewels.
"Toby, Ludwig will help you. You have to strip for this. You need freedom of movement."
Toby jumped up and submitted in silence, letting Ludwig remove his jerkin and doublet, leaving only him his cap and shirt and hose. His hose were very well tailored, snug around his waist, so he wasn't afraid that they would fall off, but his awful codpiece showed even more than before. He took off his shirt as well. "I can keep my hose on, can't I, Master?"
The baron smiled. "Yes. You are a very impressive-looking executioner, Toby! Hit as hard as you can, so you cut off their heads with one stroke."
"Yes, Master! I'm strong!" Toby grinned and bulged the muscle in his arm. "Bang! No head!"
"That's the way! Show that muscle to the ladies tonight—in your chamber, though, not in the dining room. One of these men is named Hamish Campbell, Toby."
Hamish Campbell? Hamish? Campbell? He ought to know that name! His memory was very patchy. He could remember some things clearly, and others not at all. He knew exactly how to load and prime a musket, but one night someone had asked him if he had any brothers or sisters and he was still wondering about that. One day he would ask the baron if he knew the answer.
Ludwig wrapped a cloak around him and laced cork-soled shoes over his buskins, then did the same for the baron. Toby hurried to the door so he could open it for Master.
Captain Diaz and an honor guard were waiting in the corridor. Not knowing where to go, Toby stayed close to Ludwig, and that seemed to be what was expected of him. The innumerable servants and flunkies who infested the palace cleared a path, bowing low as the viceroy and his escort marched down the stairs and across the hallway.
Then they were out in the courtyard with a flunky holding an umbrella over the baron. Ludwig tapped Toby's shoulder to stop him, beckoned him to a corner, and took away his cap, putting a black hood on him instead. Toby adjusted it until he could see through the eye holes. The cloak was lifted from his shoulders, letting cold rain beat down on his skin.
The world had shrunk to a keyhole framed in darkness. He scanned the court awkwardly, wondering where he was supposed to go. Master was already installed on a chair under a canopy, attended by a crowd of dignitaries, but his place must be on the platform, because he could see an ax waiting there. Pleased to have worked that out for himself, he stalked across to it and mounted the steps with care, aware of lots of eyes watching him. Everyone would laugh if the executioner tripped and fell flat on his face.
The block was a massive knee-high chunk of timber. He took up the great curved-blade ax, wishing Master had told him about this job sooner, so he could have tried a few practice strokes. It was a very heavy ax and necks must be easier to cut than trees. He stood it upright on its blade, rested his forearms on the end of the long handle, and smiled at Master to say he was ready. But of course his head was covered, so Master wouldn't see his smile.
Those must be his victims there, standing in a circle of guards with their heads raised defiantly—two boys stripped to their doublets and hose, feet shackled and arms bound behind them. A gowned acolyte stood with them, giving last-minute comfort. From their bedraggled appearance it seemed they had all been standing in the rain for some time. They both looked familiar.
The first one was led forward, clanking up the steps with the soldiers behind him and shuffled forward to stand before the block. Why, it was Don Ramon! Toby smiled at him, pleased to have remembered his name.
The don stared back at him with a disdainful expression, but he didn't speak. He couldn't, because his mouth was held wide open by a wooden gag. That must be very uncomfortable. Poor don! His auburn hair had been hacked off short to expose his neck. The ginger mustache that used to curve up in twisted points hung limply over his mouth.
Why wasn't he putting his head down for Toby to chop? A clerk began reading out a long thing about Don Ramon de Nuñez y Pardo being a Castilian spy. Toby fingered the ax impatiently. The rain was cold on his bare chest.
Poor, mad Don Ramon, with his fancy airs! He didn't look frightened. His face had always been pale and was no paler now, while the startlingly blue eyes were as haughty and contemptuous as ever. When the clerk's drone ended, he shrugged scornfully and sank to his knees. He laid his shoulders on the block, turning his head sideways, away from the headsman. Good!
Quickly Toby took a step backward and raised the ax. Master wanted one stroke, one stroke it would be. He brought his foot forward and his arms down with all the power he could summon. He felt the impact as much through his feet as in his hands. Don Ramon's head hit the planks with a thud and rolled. One stroke it was! Master would be pleased with him.
The explosion of blood took him by surprise, although he should have remembered how pigs bled when their throats were cut. At first it sprayed out against the ax in a red fan, but as the corpse slid back it hosed from the severed neck in high jets—two, three, and a weak fourth before the heart stopped beating. Ax, block, and scaffold were drenched. Nasty! He must remember to wash it off his arms and chest before he undressed with the pretty ladies tonight. He worked the ax blade free of the wood, a soldier picked up the head, and two more dragged away the body. The redness was seeringly bright in the drabness of the day.
The next one must be Hamish Campbell. His face was sort of familiar. Toby smiled at him, but he couldn't smile back because of the gag. He clattered forward in his fetters less proudly than Don Ramon had, but not slowly enough to make the soldiers push him. His eyes were as wide as his gaping mouth.
The clerk began reading about spying again. The Hamish boy just kept staring at Toby and shaking his head wildly. What did that mean? Was he doing something wrong? Was his hood not on straight?
When the clerk fell silent, the prisoner did not seem to notice. A guard laid a hand on his shoulder. He squirmed away. Two men grabbed him and pushed him down to his knees. Still he struggled, making protesting animal noises in his throat—poor, foolish fellow! He might make Toby miss if he didn't stop doing that, or miss partly and have to hit again. But Master had told him not to speak, so he couldn't warn him.
Two more soldiers lifted the victim's feet. With four of them holding him level, his chest resting on the block, he could do nothing except twist his head around and wail. Squirreling like a worm on a hook was still not going to make things easy. Toby began to lift the ax and then put it down again.
The soldiers were unhappy, too, waiting for that whistling blade and the shower of blood. Fortunately Captain Diaz was nearby. "Keep still, you fool!" he roared. "You want him to botch this? You want to be hacked in pieces?"
The prisoner went rigid. Toby raised and swung, and again the scaffold trembled under the impact. The head jumped free. One stroke again! Master would be pleased. This time the body could not fall back, so the hot blood squirted in all directions off the ax blade, soaking even Toby's hood. That really was not nice. Some of the soldiers gagged and coughed, and they had gotten off much lighter than he had.
Duty done, he pulled the ax free and leaned it against the block, where he had found it. He turned his head for a glance at Master who smiled and nodded a welcome approval. Glad to have done a good job, Toby headed for the steps. A quick bath to clean off the blood, then back into his fine clothes and he would be ready for the dinner and the well-preserved ladies. He just hoped he could do as well for them as he had for the two spies, so Master would be pleased with him.
CHAPTER TWO
The wind was a restless silence in the night, quiete
r than the whisper of the sentry's tread on dry grass and rubbly soil. The first glimmerings of daylight were creeping in over the stony hills, not even bright enough yet to mark a horizon or distinguish a white thread from a black thread, which was how the Moors defined morning. Although he was wrapped in both his blanket and his cloak, the sentry shivered as he paced back and forth, forcing himself to stay awake. His legs ached already, and they must walk a weary way before sunset. More than anything in the world he wished he could just lie down and catch a few more hours' sleep, because three half-nights in a row had left him permanently bleary-eyed and yawning. No, more than anything else, he would like to be smelling the peaty scents of home and watching the sun come up on Ben More...
When the scream burst forth almost at his toes, he jumped a foot in the air. It was diabolical, bestial scream, louder than a cannon barrage. Echoes answered from the steepness on the far side of the valley, and a couple of heartbeats later came a wild barking of dogs at the distant casa. Gracia wakened with shrills of alarm. By that time Toby had leaped from his bedding with his sword in his hand and was peering around to see where the noise had come from.
It had come from him.
Hamish said, "What's wrong?"
The big man dropped the sword with a clatter and grabbed him in a bear hug that seemed likely to crush his ribs. "Hamish, Hamish! You're all right! You're alive!" His hand pawed at Hamish's throat.
He fought back. "I was! Let me go, you maniac. What happened?"
Longdirk groaned and released him. "Demons!" he muttered. "Oh, spirits!" He flopped back down on the ground and put his head in his hands.
The dogs were falling silent and did not seem to be coming closer. Gracia was twittering questions.
"Senor Longdirk had a bad dream," Hamish explained. He knelt down. Toby was sobbing, heaving dry, soundless gasps of grief. He? Sooner would Ben More weep. "What's wrong? Another vision?"
"Umph." That sounded like agreement. He nodded and gulped through his tortured breathing.
Hamish put arms around him, but awkwardly, because it was the sort of thing an excitable, demonstrative Spaniard would do—Scotsmen never hugged each other. "You're all right, though? Not injured?"
"Not me, no. Hamish, I cut your head off!"
"You did?" That ought to be funny and wasn't. Nasty shivers ran down his back. "Well, it didn't work. I mean, I'm glad it's you who comes back hurt from these things and not me. Are you sure this one wasn't just a dream?"
"It is very impolite of the senores to talk so I cannot comprehend." Gracia had begun the morning ritual of combing out her long black hair, sitting with her back to the two crazy foreigners.
Toby shuddered and seemed to realize that he was being held like a child. Instead of trying to break free, he wrapped a thick arm around Hamish and squeezed. He was still shaking. "No, it was no dream. Oreste had me. He'd hexed me, enslaved me with gramarye, and he made me chop your head off, and another man's—ax and block and black hood and everything. Oh, Hamish, I did it! I didn't even protest. I was eager to do it, just to please him!"
Gooseflesh! "I'm sure you were. Anyone can be hexed—remember King Fergan... anyone. It wouldn't be your fault. But it could still have been a dream, Toby. You're worried about the baron and you remember the time Valda hexed you. The two got mixed up in a dream. Happens all the time."
"You had an awful lot of blood in you, friend!"
"What was this terrible dream, senor?" Gracia demanded, piqued as a child at being excluded. "I am very good at telling the meaning of dreams."
"The dream told," Toby said in his butchered Castilian, "that I was royal executioner in Barcelona and I cut off Senor Diego's head."
"How tragic! Why?"
"Because he had been flirting with you and I was jealous."
Gracia squealed at this outrage to her honor, barely managing to conceal her delight.
Hamish shivered and broke free. "We may as well be on our way." The skyline had come into view. "You're all right? You weren't tortured again?"
"No. In fact..." He peered at his wrists. "All better. No bruises, see? Not a hair out of place. When I took hold of the ax my arms were bare, and I'm sure there were no marks on my wrists."
"So Oreste cured you? After he'd tortured you and then hexed you."
"Must have done. Must be going to. Hamish, this is insane!" Toby's voice quavered, and that was not like him. None of this was like him. His eyes were round as birds' eggs in the gloom. "It wasn't just a dream!"
"No, it wasn't," Hamish said nervously. "Because where did your beard go? You had it on when you went to bed."
Of course Toby put a hand to his chin then, and of course Senora de Gomez noticed the absence of the beard. She squealed in astonishment and came hurrying over to see, and then she noticed his wrists also—she had joked about their purple and yellow colors at supper. It should have been funny to listen to him trying to convince her that he had shaved in the night and was a very quick healer. It wasn't.
Hamish left the two of them in heated conversation and wandered off to attend to necessary morning functions. As far as Gracia was concerned, he did not exist. To her he was merely the boy, although he was older than she was. He kept telling himself that it didn't matter because he would never let himself become involved with her even if she begged him. She was crazy. She collected wraiths in a bottle and heard voices. Oh, she was pretty enough with her dark Spanish eyes, and when she unbound her thick black hair it hung to her hips like a sable cloak, but she would flutter her lashes at Toby till the stars fell before he responded.
Toby had been attracting women's attention since he topped six feet, when he was about thirteen. It was well known back in Tyndrum that some of them had done everything short of stripping naked and crawling into his bed, and even that would probably not have met with any success. Toby never even noticed. He was oblivious to every hint or signal. If he ever did fall in love, then it would be a lifetime commitment, never a passing fancy, because he could not forgive what the Sassenach soldiers had done to his mother, although that was how he had been conceived. Hamish was quite certain that the big lad was just as much a virgin as he was, alas! The only girl who had ever won his interest had been Jeanne, last spring, in Mezquiriz. Yes, he had shown some reaction to her, and he had wept copiously when she died in the tragedy. Of course his lack of interest just made him more interesting to women. Unfortunately, it also made any other man in his vicinity even less interesting. With a sigh at the unfairness of things, the boy unlaced his codpiece and irrigated the desert.
—|—
By the time the sun flamed on the horizon, the three of them were on their way, heading down the narrow little valley, which must lead to the coast. Its sides were stony and rough, and the stream bed was dry as tinder, without a single tree in sight. Mostly there was nothing to see except the next bend, but almost certainly the travelers were being watched from afar.
The hills had been a mistake. There were no roads and few crops. The rebels had not ravaged this wild, barren landscape because there was nothing to loot except goats and sheep, but multitudes of refugees had swarmed through the area and made the inhabitants distinctly inhospitable. Every casa had become a fortress and every outsider a target. Fortunately none of the shots fired at them had been loud enough to rouse the hob, and the dogs had never come within tooth range.
At sunset they had all agreed that they must return to the coast, even Toby, who had hitherto led the way across country with his usual bull stubbornness, storming up and down those bare-bone hills, bent under three times the load Hamish could manage. Gracia with her grand airs carried only her precious bottle and expected her two henchmen to take care of everything else. Now that their food was running low, they had agreed that they must go back to the plain.
By the time Gracia had finished chattering about famous dreams in her family, Hamish had decided that Barcelona was the city of dreams. He secretly dreamed of boarding a ship home to Scotland there, althoug
h he knew he could never abandon Toby. Gracia's dreams of delivering a bottleful of wraiths to Montserrat were as crazy as Toby's nightmares of Oreste. But it seemed that they would have to pass very close by Barcelona, if not go right to it.
From the scrunch of his brows, Toby was doing some thinking of his own, and he suddenly said, "Hamish?"
"Hmm?"
"How close would a hexer have to be to hex me like this?"
"Depends on his demons, how strong they are, how well trained, whether they're immured or incarnate. Depends what the hexer's trying to do. Giving you dreams might not take much power, I suppose, but to rip skin off your wrists and then put it back again, or shave off your beard without you knowing it..." His voice withered under Longdirk's glare. "I don't know." Books were always maddeningly vague about such things.
"Maybe it's Oreste doing this to me!"
"I still think it's the hob. Oreste would try to lure you to him, not scare you away." Except that Toby was the most bullheaded man alive. Flash a threat at him and he put down his bull head and charged—in Bordeaux only violent objections from Hamish had stopped him trying to go after Oreste with a crossbow. Could Oreste have guessed that about him, or learned it from his demons?
"It has to be the hob, Toby. I know you don't think it's smart enough, but suppose it's learned to read your dreams, or fears, or thoughts? It could be reflecting them back at you like a mirror..." Mirror... shaving... A fit of nervous laughter took him unaware. Toby's puzzled scowl only made it worse. He howled.
"What is the boy laughing about?" Gracia demanded angrily.
"He suffers from a looseness of the wits."
Hamish coughed himself back to self-control and wiped away tears. "I just thought—if your next attack of augury brings your beard back again, we'll know for certain that it's the hob doing it."
Toby looked startled, then his big mouth twisted into a smile. "Yes, I'd have to agree with you on that."