“We think he is,” Hal said.
“We have had years of peace,” the bishop said. “Years ago the military was withdrawn from this outpost because there seemed no need of it. For decades there had been no trouble, and there has been no trouble since the soldiers were withdrawn. But now I do not know. Now I fear the worst. A spark is all that’s needed to touch the Borderland to flame and Beckett may be that very spark. Let me tell you with all the force at my command that with Beckett loose now is not the time to venture in the Wasteland.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gib, “we’re going.”
“I suppose so,” said the bishop. “You all are addlepated and it’s a waste of honest breath to try to talk with you. A few years younger and I’d join you to protect you from your folly. But since age and occupation bar me from it, I still shall do my part. It is not meet that you should go walking to your deaths. There shall be horses for you and whatever otherwise you need.”
17
The noses of Sniveley and Oliver were greatly out of joint. They had been dealt a grave injustice and had been the victims of heartless discrimination; they had to share a horse.
“Look at me,” said Hal. “I am sharing mine with Coon.”
“But Coon’s your pet,” said Oliver.
“No, he’s not,” said Hal. “He is my friend. The two of us together own a tree back home. We live there together. We share and share alike.”
“You only took him up,” said Sniveley, “so he wouldn’t get wet when we crossed the river. He won’t ride with you all the time. He doesn’t even like to ride.”
“The horse,” said Hal, “is his as much as mine.”
“I do not think,” said Gib, “the horse shares in that opinion. He looks skittish to me. He’s never been ridden by a coon.”
They had crossed the river ford, the old historic ford once guarded by the tower. But as they wheeled about once the river had been crossed, the tower and wall that flanked it on either side seemed rather puny structures, no longer guarding anything, no longer military, with all the formidability gone out of them, age-encrusted ruins that were no more man an echo of the time when they had stood foursquare against invasion from the Wasteland. Here and there trees grew atop the wall, while the massive stones of the tower were masked and softened by the clinging vines that had gained footholds in the masonry.
Tiny figures, unrecognizable at that distance, grouped together on one section of the ruined wall, raised matchstick arms to them in a gesture of farewell.
“There still is time,” Cornwall said to Mary, “to turn back and cross the river. This is no place for you. There may be rough days ahead.”
She shook her head stubbornly. “What do you think would happen to me back there? A scullery wench again? I’ll not be a scullery wench again.”
Cornwall wheeled his horse around, and it plodded slowly along the faint path that angled up the low hill that rose above the river. Once the river had been crossed, the character of the land had changed. South of the river, thick forests crawled up the flanks of massive bluffs, gashed by steep ravines. Here the hills were lower, and the forest, while it still remained, was not so heavy. There were groves of trees covering many acres, but there were open spaces here and there and, looking to the east, Cornwall could see that some of the bluffs on this northern side were bald.
He could have wished, he told himself, that there might have been a map—any sort of map, even a poor one with many errors in it, that might have given some idea of where they might be going. He had talked with the bishop about it, but so far as the bishop knew there was no map and had never been. The soldiery that through the years had guarded the ford had done no more than guard. They had never made so much as a single foray across the river. Any forays that occurred had been made by the people of the Wasteland and these, apparently, had been very few. Duty at the tower had been dreary duty, unbroken, for the most part, by any kind of action. The only people, it seemed, who had ever ventured into the Wasteland had been occasional travelers, like Taylor, who had written the account that now lay in Wyalusing. But whether any of the few accounts written by such travelers had been true was very much a question. Cornwall wrinkled his brow at the thought. There was nothing, he realized, that would argue the Taylor account as any more factual than the rest of them. The man had not actually visited the Old Ones but had only heard of them; and he need not have even traveled to the Wasteland to have heard of them. The ancient fist ax, carried by Gib, was better evidence that they existed than had been Taylor’s words. It was strange, he reminded himself, that the bishop had instantly recognized the ax as belonging to the Old Ones. He realized that he should have talked further with the bishop about the matter, but there had been little time and much else to talk about.
It was a matchless autumn day. They had made a late start and the sun already had climbed far into the sky. There were no clouds and the weather was rather warm and as they climbed the hill, the panorama of the river valley spread out below them like a canvas painted by a man mad with the sense of color.
“There is something up there on the ridge,” said Mary. “Something watching us.”
He raised his head, scanning the horizon.
“I don’t see a thing,” he said.
“I saw it only for a moment,” she said. “Maybe not really seeing it. Maybe just the movement of it. That might have been all. Not really seeing anything, but seeing it move.”
“We’ll be watched,” said Sniveley, who along with Oliver had forced their horse toward the head of the column. “We can count on that. There’ll never be a moment we’ll be out of their sight. They’ll know everything we do.”
“They?” asked Cornwall.
Sniveley shrugged. “How is one to know? There are so many different kinds of us. Goblins, gnomes, banshees. Maybe even brownies and fairies, for respectable as such folk may be considered by you humans, they still are a part of all this. And other things as well. Many other things, far less respectable and well intentioned.”
“We’ll give them no offense,” said Cornwall. “We’ll not lift a hand against them.”
“Be that as it may,” said Sniveley, “we are still intruders.”
“Even you?” asked Mary.
“Even we,” said Sniveley. “Even Oliver and I. We are outlanders, too. Traitors, perhaps deserters. For we or our forefathers deserted the homeland and went to live in the Borderland with their enemies.”
“We shall see,” said Cornwall.
The horses plodded up the path and finally reached the ridge. Before them spread, not a plateau, as might have been suspected, but a succession of other ridges, each one higher as they spread out horizonward, like regularly spaced and frozen waves.
The path angled down a barren slope covered with browning grass. At the lower edge of the slope, a dense forest covered the span that lay between the hills. There was not a living thing in sight, not even birds. An eerie feeling of loneliness closed in about them, and yet in all that loneliness Cornwall had an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades.
Moving slowly, as if unwilling to go farther, the horse went down the trail, which twisted to one side to bypass a giant white oak tree that stood alone in the sweep of grass. It was a tall, yet squatty tree, with a huge bole and widely spreading branches, the first of which thrust out from the trunk not more than twelve feet above the ground.
Cornwall saw that something apparently had been driven deeply into the hard wood of the trunk. He reined in his horse and stared at it. About two feet of it extended out beyond the wood. It was a couple of inches in diameter, an ivory white and twisted.
Behind him Sniveley involuntarily sucked in his breath.
“What is it?” Mary asked.
“The horn of a unicorn,” said Sniveley. “There are not many of the creatures left, and I have never heard of one that left his horn impaled in a tree.”
“It is a sign,” Oliver said solemnly.
Cornwall nudged h
is horse closer and reached down to grasp the horn. He pulled and it did not budge. He pulled again and he might as well have tried to pull a branch from the tree.
“We’ll have to chop it out,” he said.
“Let me try,” said Mary.
She reached down and grasped the horn. It came free with a single tug. It measured three feet or so in length, tapering down to a needle point. It was undamaged and unbroken.
They all gazed at it in awe.
“I never saw a thing like this before,” said Mary. “Old tales, of course, told in the Borderland, but …”
“It is an excellent omen,” said Sniveley. “It is a good beginning.”
18
They camped just before dark in a glade at the head of one of the ravines that ran between the hills. A spring gushed out from the hillside, giving rise to a tiny stream that went gurgling down its bed. Gib chopped firewood from a down pine that lay above the campsite. The day had remained a perfect one and in the west a lemon sky, painted by the setting sun, slowly turned to green. There was grass for the horses, and they were sheltered from the wind by a dense forest growth that closed in on the glade from every side.
Hal said, “They’re all around us. We’re knee-deep in them. They are out there watching.”
“How can you tell?” asked Mary.
“I can tell,” said Hal. “Coon can tell. See him over there, huddled by the fire. He doesn’t seem to be listening, but he is. Quiet as they may be, he still can hear them. Smell them, likely, too.”
“We pay no attention to them,” Sniveley said. “We act as if they aren’t there. We must get used to it; we can’t get our wind up. This is the way that it will be. They’ll dog our footsteps every minute, watching, always watching. There’s nothing to be afraid of yet. There are nothing but the little ones out there now—the elves, the trolls, the brownies. Nothing dangerous. Nothing really mean. Nothing really big.”
Cornwall raked coals out of the fire, pushed them together, set a skillet of cornbread dough on them. “And what happens,” he asked, “when something really mean and big shows up?”
Sniveley shrugged. He squatted across the coals from Cornwall. “I don’t know,” he said. “We play it by ear—what is it you say, by hunch? It’s all that we can do. We have a few things going for us. The unicorn horn, for one. That’s powerful medicine. The story of it will spread. In another day or two, all the Wasteland will know about the horn. And there’s the magic sword you wear.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” said Cornwall. “I had meant to ask you. I’ve been wondering why you gave it to Gib. Surely, he told you for whom it was intended. You made a slip there, Master Gnome. You should have checked my credentials. If you had, you would have known that, search the world over, you could have found no swordsman more inept than I. I wore a sword, of course, but, then, a lot of men wear swords. Mine was an old blade and dull, a family heirloom, not too valuable, even in a sentimental sense. From one year’s end to another, I never drew it forth.”
“Yet,” said Sniveley, grinning, “I am told you acquitted yourself quite nobly in the stable affair.”
Cornwall snorted in disgust. “I fell against the hind end of a horse and the horse promptly kicked me in the gut, and that was the end of it for me. Gib, with his trusty ax, and Hal, with his bow, were the heroes of that fight.”
“Still, I am told that you killed your man.”
“An accident, I can assure you, no more than an accident. The stupid lout ran on the blade.”
“Well,” said Sniveley, “I don’t suppose it matters too much how it came about. The point is that you managed it.”
“Clumsily,” said Cornwall, “and with no glory in it.”
“It sometimes seems to me,” said Sniveley, “that much of the glory attributed to great deeds may derive overmuch from hindsight. A simple job of butchery in aftertimes somehow becomes translated into a chivalrous encounter.”
Coon came around the fire, reared up, and put his forefeet on Cornwall’s knee. He pointed his nose at the skillet of cornbread and his whiskers twitched.
“In just a little while,” Cornwall told him. “It’ll take a little longer. I promise there’ll be a piece for you.”
“I often wonder,” Sniveley said, “how much he understands. An intelligent animal. Hal talks to him all the time. Claims he answers back.”
“I would have no doubt he does,” said Cornwall.
“There is a strong bond between the two of them,” said Sniveley. “As if they might be brothers. Coon was chased by dogs one night. He was scarcely more than a pup. Hal rescued him and took him home. They’ve been together ever since. Now, with the size of him and the smartness of him, no dog in its right mind would want to tangle with him.”
Mary said, “The dogs must know him well. Hal says there is a moonshiner out hunting coons almost every night, come fall. The dogs never follow on Coon’s track. Even when he’s out, the dogs don’t bother him. In the excitement of the hunt, they may come upon his track and trail him for a time, but then they break it off.”
“Oh, the dogs are smart enough,” said Hal. “The only thing that’s smarter is Old Coon himself.”
Gib said, “They’re still out there. You can see one every now and then, moving in the dark.”
“They’ve been with us,” said Sniveley, “from the moment that we crossed the river. We didn’t see them, of course, but they were there and watching.”
Something plucked at Mary’s sleeve, and when she turned her head, she saw the little creature with a face that seemed wrinkled up with worry.
“Here is one of them right now,” she said. “Come out into the open. Don’t make any sudden moves or you will scare him off.”
The little creature said, “I am Bromeley, the troll. Don’t you remember me?”
“I’m not sure I do,” she said, then hesitated. “Are you one of them I used to play with?”
“You were a little girl,” said Bromeley. “No bigger than any one of us. There was me and the brownie, Fiddlefingers, and at times a stray fairy or an elf that happened to come by. You never thought that we were different. You were not big enough to know. We made mud pies down by the creek, and while neither myself nor Fiddlefingers regarded mud-pie making as a worthwhile enterprise, we humored you. If you wanted to make mud pies, we went and made them with you.”
“I remember now,” said Mary. “You lived underneath a bridge, and I always thought that under a bridge was the strangest place to live.”
“You should know by now,” said Bromeley, with a touch of haughtiness, “that all proper trolls must reside beneath a bridge. There is no other place that is acceptable.”
“Yes, of course,” said Mary, “I know about troll bridges.”
“We used to go and pester the ogre,” Bromeley said. “We’d toss pebbles and clods and pieces of wood and other things down into his den, and then we’d run as fast as we could manage so he wouldn’t catch us. Thinking of it since, I doubt very much the ogre knew about our misbehavior. We were timid characters prone to be scared of shadows. Nothing like the fairies, though. The fairies were really scaredy-cats.”
Cornwall started to speak, but Mary shook her head at him. “What are all the other folk doing, watching us?” she asked. “Why don’t they come out? We could build up the fire and all of us sit around it talking. We could even dance. There might be something we could eat. We could cook up more cornbread. Enough for all of us.”
“They won’t come,” said Bromeley. “Not even for cornbread. They were against my coming. They even tried to stop me. But I had to come. I remembered you from very long ago. You’ve been in the Borderland?”
“I was taken there,” said Mary.
“I came and hunted for you and I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand why you would want to leave. Except for the mud pies, which were boring and terribly messy work, we had good times together.”
“Where is Fiddlefingers now?”
; “I do not know,” said the troll. “He dropped out of sight. Brownies are wanderers. They are always on the move. We trolls stay in one place. We find a bridge we like and settle down and live there all our—”
Suddenly there was a piping, although later, when they thought of it, they realized it had not come so suddenly as it seemed. It had been there for some time while the troll had talked with Mary, but little more than an insect noise, as if some cricket in the grass or underbrush had been doing some quiet chirping. But now the piping welled up into a quavery warbling, then swelled into a wailing that throbbed and beat upon the air, not stopping after a moment, but going on and on, a wild and terrible music, part lament, part war cry, part gibbering of a madman.
Mary, startled, came to her feet, and so did Cornwall, his quick movement upsetting the skillet of cornbread. The horses, lunging at their picket ropes, neighed in terror. Sniveley was trying to scream, but with a voice that was no more than a squeak. “The Dark Piper,” he squeaked and kept on saying it over and over again. “The Dark Piper, the Dark Piper, the Dark Piper …”
Something round and sodden came rolling down the steep incline that sloped above the camp. It rolled and bounced, and its bouncing made hollow thumps when it struck the ground. It rolled to the edge of the campfire and stopped and lay there, leering back at them with a mouth that was twisted to a leer.
It was a severed human head.
19
On the afternoon of the next day they found the place the severed head had come from. The head itself lay buried, with scant ceremony and a hastily muttered prayer, at the foot of a great granite boulder at the first night’s camp, with a crude cross thrust into the ground to mark its resting place.
Oliver protested the erecting of the cross. “They are leaving us alone,” he said. “Why wave an insult at them? Your silly two sticks crossed are anathema to them.”
But Cornwall stood firm. “A cross is not an insult,” he said. “And how about this business of heaving human heads at us? That’s not leaving us alone. This head belonged to a human and presumably a Christian. We owe the owner of the head at least a prayer and cross, and we’ll give him both.”
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