Enchanted Pilgrimage (12 page)

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 his 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.”

“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.