“You think,” Gib asked, “it could be one of Beckett’s men?”
“It could be,” Cornwall said. “Since the inn, we’ve had no word of Beckett. We don’t know if he’s crossed the border yet, but if there were a human here, it could be one of Beckett’s men. He lagged behind the line of march or went wandering and fell afoul of someone who has no love of humans.”
“You oversimplify,” said Sniveley. “There is no one in the Wasteland who has any love of humans.”
“Except for the thrown head,” said Cornwall, “they’ve made no move against us.”
“Give them time,” said Sniveley.
“You must consider, too,” said Oliver, “that you’re the only human here. They may have no great regard for any of us, but you …”
“There is Mary,” said Hal.
“Mary, sure, but as a child she lived here, and on top of that there is the matter of that horn some addlepated unicorn left sticking in a tree.”
“We do not come as an invading army,” said Gib. “We are a simple band of innocents—pilgrims, if you will. There is no reason for them to have any fear of us.”
“It is not fear with which we are here concerned,” said Sniveley. “Rather, it is hate. A hatred that runs through untold centuries, a hatred deeply rooted.”
Cornwall got little sleep. Each time that he dropped off he was assailed by a recurring dream that never quite got finished, in which he saw once again the head, or rather a distortion of the head, a weird caricature of the head, twisted out of all reality, but with a screaming horror of its own. Starting up in his blanket, he’d awake in a sweat of fright. Then, when he had fought down the fear and settled back, he’d recall the head once more, not the dream-distortion of it, but as he remembered it, lying by the fire, so close to the fire that little jumping sparks flying from the burning wood set the hair and beard ablaze, and the hair would fry and sizzle, shriveling up, leaving little blobs of expanded, burned material at the end of every strand. The eyes were open and staring, and they had the look of marbles rather than of eyes. The mouth and face were twisted as if someone had taken the head in two strong and hairy hands and bent it to one side. The bared teeth gleamed in the campfire light, and a drool of spittle had run out of one corner of the twisted mouth and lay dried and flaking in the beard.
Finally, toward morning, he fell into a sleep so exhausted that even the dream of the head could not return to taunt him. Breakfast was ready when Oliver finally woke him. He ate, trying very hard, but not succeeding too well, to keep from looking at the cross that stood, canted at an angle, at the foot of the boulder. There was little talk by anyone, and they saddled hurriedly and moved off.
The path they had been following remained a path; it never broadened out to become a road. The terrain grew rougher and wilder, a somehow haunted landscape, deep defiles and gorges, down which the trail wound to reach narrow, rock-rimmed valleys, with the path then climbing tortuously through heavy pines and towering cliffs to reach a hilltop, then plunging down into another gorge. In these places one held his peace, scarcely daring to speak above a whisper, not knowing whether it was the sound of his own voice that he feared or the making of any kind of sound that might alert a lurking something to his presence. There were no habitations, no clearings, no sign that anyone, at any time, had ever lived within these fastnesses.
By common, unspoken consent, they did not halt for a noonday meal.
It was shortly after noon that Hal forced his horse past the others on the trail to come up with Cornwall, who was riding in the lead.
“Look up there,” said Hal, pointing upward toward the narrow strip of sky that showed between the massive trees that crowded close on either side.
Cornwall looked. “I don’t see anything. A speck or two is all. Birds flying.”
“I’ve been watching them,” said Hal. “They’ve kept coming in. There have been a lot of them. Buzzards. Something’s dead.”
“A cow, perhaps.”
“There aren’t any cows. There are no farms.”
“A deer, then. A moose, perhaps.”
“More than one deer,” said Hal. “More than a single moose. That many buzzards, there is a lot of death.”
Cornwall reined up. “What are you getting at?” he asked.
“The head,” said Hal. “It had to come from somewhere. The path goes down into another gorge. A perfect ambush. Trapped in there, no one would get out.”
“But we are fairly sure Beckett didn’t come this way,” said Cornwall. “He didn’t cross at the tower. We’ve seen no sign. No hoof prints. No old campfires. If there had been an ambush …”
“I don’t know about all that,” said Hal. “But I do know about buzzards, and there are too many of them.”
Oliver and Sniveley came up behind Hal. “What is going on?” asked Oliver. “Is there something wrong?”
“Buzzards,” said Hal.
“I don’t see any buzzards.”
“The specks up in the sky.”
“Never mind,” said Cornwall. “They are there, all right. There is something dead. Sniveley, I want to talk with you. Last night, just before someone tossed the head, there was all this piping …”
“The Dark Piper,” said Sniveley. “I told you who it was.”
“I remember now. You told me. But there was so much else happening. Who is the Dark Piper?”
“No one knows,” said Sniveley, shivering just a little. “No one has ever seen him. Heard him, is all. Not too often. Sometimes not for many years. He’s the harbinger of ill omen. He plays only when there are dark happenings.…”
“Cut out the riddles. What kind of dark happenings?”
“The head was a dark happening,” said Hal.
“Not the head,” protested Sniveley. “Something worse than that.”
“Dark happenings to whom?” asked Cornwall.
“I do not know,” said Sniveley. “No one ever knows.”
“There was something about the piping,” said Oliver, “that sounded familiar to me. I thought it at the time, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. It was so terrifying that I suppose I was scared out of my wits. But riding along today, I did remember. Just a part of it. A phrase or two of it. It’s part of an ancient song. I found the music of it in an ancient scroll at Wyalusing. There was that phrase or two. Passed down, the scroll said, from at least a hundred centuries ago. Perhaps the oldest song on Earth. I don’t know how the man who wrote that ancient scroll could know …”
Cornwall grunted and urged his horse ahead. Hal fell in behind him. The trail dipped abruptly down, seeming to sink into the very earth, with great walls of jagged rocks rearing up on either side. Little streams of moisture ran down the face of the rocks, where scraggly ferns and mosses clung with precarious rootholds. Out of the rocky cravasses sprang sprawling cedar trees that seemed to have lost their balance and were about to fall at any moment. Cut off from the sun, the gorge grew increasingly darker as they descended it.
A gust of wind came puffing up between the rocky walls, powered by some atmospheric vagary, and with it came a stench, not an overpowering stench, but a whiff of stench, sweet, greenish and sickening—a smell, a presence that settled in the throat and would not go away, that rankled at the guts and turned one slightly sick.
“I was right,” said Hal. “There is death down there.”
Ahead of them loomed a sharp turn and as they came around it, the gorge came to an end and out in front of them was a rocky amphitheater, a circle closed in by towering cliffs. Ahead of them was the frightening whir of laboring wings as a flock of great black birds launched themselves off the things on which they had been feeding. A few of the ugly birds, too sluggish with their feasting to take off, hopped angrily about in an awkward fashion.
The stench rose up and struck them like a blow across the face.
“Good God!” said Cornwall, gagging at the sight of what lay on the pebbled shore of the little stream that wandered down across the
amphitheater.
Out beyond the sodden mass of ragged flesh and protruding bone that bore slight resemblance to a man lay other shapeless lumps—some of them horses, bloated, with their legs extending stiffly; others of the lumps were human or had once been human. There were skulls grinning in the grass; rib cages starkly revealed, with the soft belly ripped away for easy eating; grotesque buttocks thrusting up. Scraps of clothing blew about, fluttering where they had been caught in the thorny branches of low-growing shrubs. A spear, its point buried in the ground, stood stark, a drunken exclamation point. Weak sunlight glittered on fallen shields and swords.
In among the scattered human dead and the bloated horses, other dead things lay—black-furred, grinning with great fangs frozen forever in the grin, short bushy tails, great, heavy shoulders, slender waists, huge hands (hands, not paws) armed with curving claws.
“Over there,” said Gib. “There is the way that Beckett came.”
At the far end of the amphitheater, a road (not a path such as they had been following, but a rutted road) came snaking out of the wall of rock surrounding the cuplike bowl in which they found themselves. The road continued across the far end of the bowl to plunge into another gorge that rose into the hills.
Cornwall rose in his stirrups and looked back. The others in the band set their horses stiffly, their faces blank with horror.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Gib. “We had better ride on through.”
“A Christian word,” said Cornwall. “Something to speed them on their way, to give them peace and …”
“There are no words,” Gib said, harshly, “that can do that for them now. There is no peace. Not here, there isn’t any peace.”
Cornwall nodded, kicked his horse into a trot, heading for the road, with the others following. On every side, wings beat as the carrion birds, interrupted at their meat, fought to become airborne. A fox ran frantically across the trail, its tail dragging. Little animals went darting.
When they pulled up on the road, they had left the carnage behind them. There were no bodies by the road. A flock of small gray birds hopped from branch to branch in a tiny thicket, chirping as they hopped. Out on the battlefield the larger, blacker birds were settling down again.
20
The man was waiting for them when they reached the top of the ridge that rose above the cuplike amphitheater, where they had found the aftermath of battle. It was quite apparent that he had been waiting for them. He was sitting comfortably at the foot of a great oak tree, leaning back against the trunk, and watching them with interest as they came clopping up the wagon road. Just beyond the tree stood a curious contraption. It was colored red and white, and it stood on two wheels, as if balancing itself without any particular difficulty. The wheels were very strange, for the rims of them were made of neither wood nor iron, but of some black substance, and they were not flat, as any proper rim should be, but somehow rounded. There were far too many spokes in the wheels and the spokes were not made of wood, but of many rounded, tiny strips of what seemed to be gleaming metal, and anyone in his right mind would have known that spokes so slender and so fragile would have no strength at all.
As they neared him, the man stood up and dusted off his seat, brushing away the leaves and dirt his breeches had picked up from sitting on the ground. The breeches were white and tight-fitting, and he wore a shirt of some red material and over that a vest that was also white. His boots were neatly made.
“So you made it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
Cornwall made a motion backward with his head. “You mean down there?”
“Exactly,” said the man. “The country’s all stirred up. It was just two days ago. You must enjoy running your head into a noose.”
“We knew nothing of it,” said Cornwall. “We came up from the tower. The men down there took a different route.”
“Well,” said the man, “you got through safely, and this is the thing that counts. I had been pulling for you.”
“You knew that we were coming?”
“I had word of you yesterday. A motley band, they told me. And I see that they were right.”
“They?”
“Oh, assorted little friends I have. Skippers-through-the-thickets. Runners-in-the-grass. All eyes and ears. There is not much they miss. I know about the horn and about the head that came rolling to the campfire, and I have been waiting most impatiently to greet you.”
“You know, then, who we are?”
“Only your names. And I beg your pardon. I am Alexander Jones. I have a place prepared for you.”
Mary said, “Master Jones, I do not like the sound of that. We are entirely capable—”
“I am sorry, Mistress Mary, if I have offended you. All I meant to offer was hospitality. Shelter from the coming night, a good fire, hot food, a place to sleep.”
“All of which,” said Oliver, “so far as I am concerned, would be most welcome. Perhaps a measure of wine or a mug of beer as well. The stench back there is still clogging up my throat. Something is needed to wash it all away.”
“Beer, of course, “said Jones. “A full barrel of it is laid in against your coming. Do you agree, Sir Mark?”
“Yes,” said Cornwall, “I do agree. I see no harm in it and perhaps some good. But do not call me sir; I am no more than a scholar.”
“Then,” said Jones, “pray, hold your horses well. For this mount of mine is a noisy beast.”
He strode toward the contraption standing on two wheels. He threw one leg over it and settled on what became apparent was the contraption’s seat. He reached out and grasped the two handlelike projections extending above and backward of the forward wheel.
“Hold a moment, there,” said Gib. “There is one thing you have not told us. With all the dead men lying down there, how come you are still alive? You are human, are you not?”
“I like to think I am,” said Jones, “and the answer to your question is an extremely simple one. Folk hereabouts believe I am a wizard, which, of course, I’m not.”
He balanced on one foot and kicked with the other. The two-wheeled contraption came alive with an angry roar, breathing out a cloud of smoke. The horses reared in fright. Oliver, who was riding behind Sniveley, fell off and scrambled rapidly on all fours to get out of the way of the lashing hooves.
The two-wheeled monster quit its roaring, settled into a rumbling, throaty purr.
“I am sorry,” Jones shouted to Oliver. “I warned you to watch yourselves.”
“It’s a dragon,” said Sniveley. “A two-wheeled dragon, although I did not know that dragons came with wheels. What else but a dragon would make that sort of roar and breathe out fire and brimstone?” He reached down a hand to Oliver and helped him scramble up.
Jones urged the dragon into motion, heading down the road.
“I guess,” said Hal, “all we can do is follow him. Hot food, he said. I could do with some.”
“I do not like it,” Sniveley complained. “I like it not one bit. I am not one to mess around with dragons, even if they be domesticated ones, broken to the saddle.”
The dragon speeded up, and they had to force their horses into a rapid trot to keep up with it. The road was not as deeply rutted as it had been coming up the gorge. Now it followed a plateau, running straight between stands of pine and birch, with only an occasional oak tree rearing up above the lesser forest. Then the road dipped down, not sharply, but rather gradually, into a pleasant valley, and there on the valley floor they saw the collection of three tents, all of them gaily striped and with pennons flying from their tops.
The dragon pulled up before the largest tent, and Jones dismounted. To one side was a table made of rough boards and beyond it cooking fires, with spits set above the fires and a huge beer barrel mounted on a pair of sawhorses, with a spigot already driven in the bung. Tending the fires and spits was a ragamuffin crew of brownies, trolls, and goblins, who were going about their work with a tremendous clanging of pans.
Some of them dropped their work and ran to take charge of the horses.
“Come,” said Jones, “let us sit and talk. I know there must be a deal to talk about.”
A half-dozen of the trolls were busy at the beer barrel, filling great mugs from the spigot and bearing them to the table.
“Now, this is fine,” said Jones. “We can have a drink or two before the food is ready. For, of course, it is never ready when it is supposed to be. These little friends of mine are willing workers, but most disorganized. Take whatever seat you wish and let’s begin our talk.”
Oliver scurried to the table and grabbed a mug of beer, dipping his muzzle into it and drinking heartily. Desisting, he wiped the foam from his whiskers. “This is proper brew,” he said. “Not like the swill they serve in Wyalusing inns.”
“Sniveley calls your mount a dragon,” Hal said to Jones, “and while it breathes fire and smoke and bellows most convincingly, I know it is no dragon. I have never seen a dragon, but I’ve heard stories of them, and the descriptions in the stories are nothing like this creature that you ride. It has no head or wings and a dragon has both head and wings and, I believe, a tail as well.”
“You are quite right,” said Jones, delighted. “It is not a dragon, although many others than Sniveley have guessed it to be one. It is not a creature at all, but a machine, and it is called a trail bike.”
“A trail bike,” said Gib. “I’ve never heard of one.”
“Of course you’ve not heard of one,” said Jones. “This is the only one in this entire world.”
“You say it is a machine,” said Cornwall, “and we have machines, of course, but nothing like this. There are machines of war, the siege machines that are used to hurl great stones or flights of arrows or flaming material against a beleaguered city.”
“Or a mill wheel,” said Gib. “A mill wheel would be a machine.”
“I suppose it is,” said Hal.
“But a mill wheel runs by the force of flowing water,” Mary said, “and the engines of war by the winding up of ropes. Can you tell us how this machine of yours runs?”
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