“Make way! Make way!” bellowed this wight. “Clear the gate for the Royal Goimr Commandos!”
The soldiers manning the Dreary Gate shooed all civilians to one side and opened the portal. In the event, their bustling energy was wasted, for it took the Commandos a full ten minutes to saddle up and ride off. A good bit of this time was consumed by the actual difficulty of attaining their seats on the high perches of the saddles, being, as they were, utterly drunken. But most of the delay was caused by the captain’s command to “blacken their faces.” This act, the blacking of commandos’ faces to ensure stealth in the night, seemed somewhat inappropriate for horsemen in broad daylight. But the commandos clearly prized this cherished privilege of their status, and they set about blacking their faces with a vigor. The martial effect, however, was ruined by their childish levity in smearing each other with the greasepaint.
“Goimr is not, I am beginning to deduce, one of the military behemoths of Grotum,” was my whispered comment to Wolfgang.
He even managed a ventriloquist snort.
Eventually, the Commandos assembled into a ragged file, their horses looking gloomier by the minute. The captain whipped his plumed hat off his head (the bright ostrich feather clashed, I thought, with the logic of the blackened face) and waved it about.
“Citizens of Goimr!” he cried, addressing the small crowd which was gazing upon the Commandos. “Your noble Commandos are off to capture the renegade Zulkeh—the sorcerer satanic!—the—” Here he fell off his horse. When he clambered back on, he made to resume his speech, but his now-surly horse would have none of it, and charged through the gate. The rest of the Commandos lunged off in pursuit.
The guards at the gate drew their swords in a ragged salute.
“Hail the noble Royal Commandos!” cried the sergeant.
“Hail the nobleroilcomdos,” muttered the guards in response.
“Death to the satanic sorcerer Zulkeh!” cried the sergeant.
“Death to the s’tancsorcerZully,” muttered the guards apathetically.
These duties performed, the sergeant and the guards resumed their inspection of the papers of those seeking passage through the gate. My hopes of success in deceiving these vigilant men of war, let me say, were now quite high.
Soon enough, it was our turn. My papers were examined cursorily. The sergeant essayed a squaring of the shoulders in respect of Gerard’s signature, failed miserably, resumed his slouch, and waved us through.
Since he seemed harmless enough, I decided to satisfy my curiosity.
“Who is this sorcerer the Commandos are pursuing?” I asked.
I got back in reply a garbled and not very coherent account of the misdeeds of the wizard Zulkeh, in which the kernel of driving the King mad was intermingling with a bouillabaisse of other crimes. I particularly enjoyed the charge of “public urination.”
Then, we were delayed by the soldiers gawking at Wolfgang.
“Ay, an’ is he the great icon, or what, lads?” demanded one of the guards. His fellows indicated, with none-too-convincing expressions of piety, their agreement with his awed opinion.
“St. Athelbert, idn’t he?” asked the devout guard.
I frowned fiercely. “Ignorant dolt! ‘Tis the spitting image of St. Abblerede—patron saint of lunatics and criminals!”
The fellow looked properly abashed, and with no further ado I cracked the whip and ordered Gwendolyn to move smartly, d’ye hear? I suspected, from the hunch of her shoulders and the tightening of her jaws, that I would pay for it later.
Once we were beyond earshot of the gate, now on a dirt road leading into the countryside, Wolfgang spoke in a more normal tone of voice.
“There is no patron saint of lunatics,” he cackled. “Plenty for criminals, of course, but we raving types have been read out of the state of Holy Grace. Quite absurd, really, when you consider that almost all saints were obviously demented. How they get sanctified, you know? Going off and irritating all sorts of aborigines who boil them in oil or shoot them full of arrows or whatnot. I ask you, who but a madman would do such things?”
I interrupted what, with my growing experience, I could detect as a new round of witless babble.