“You can’t frighten us,” said Conrad.
“Perhaps we should be frightened,” said Duncan. “Perhaps if we had good sense we would be.”
“That is right,” said Meg. “You should be.”
“But you came along with us. You did not protest when we…”
“Where else is an old and crippled witch to go?”
“You could have flown off on your broomstick,” said Conrad.
“I never had a broomstick. Nor did any other witch. That is only one of the many stupid stories…”
“We can’t move until we get some rest,” said Duncan. “Conrad and I could go on, but the witch is feeble and Andrew has walked the livelong day. He is worn out.”
“I had the strength to kill a werewolf,” the hermit pointed out.
“You mean it, don’t you?” Conrad said to Snoopy. “You’re not just shoving us around.”
“He means it,” said Nan, the banshee.
“We could put Andrew up on Daniel,” Conrad said. “Let Beauty carry Meg. She weighs no more than a feather. The packs we could carry. Beauty, even with a sore leg, could carry Meg.”
“Then,” said Snoopy, “let us be about it.”
“I plead with you,” said Ghost. “Please do. If you stay here you’ll join me in death by morning. And you might not have the good fortune that I had to become a ghost.”
13
After a time Duncan’s eyes became acclimated to the darkness and he found that, after a fashion, he could see. That is, he could distinguish trees sufficiently not to run head-on into them. But there was no way to know the character of the ground underfoot. Time after time he tripped over a fallen branch or fell when he stepped into a hole. Rather than walking, it was like floundering. By keeping his eyes on Conrad’s broad back and the whiteness of the pack that Conrad carried, he did not wander off. Had it not been for Conrad and the pack, he was sure he would have.
Snoopy led the way, with Ghost sailing along just above him, serving as a sort of beacon they could follow. Daniel followed Snoopy and Ghost, and Beauty trailed along behind her comrade, Daniel. Conrad and Duncan brought up the rear. Nan flew about somewhere above them, but she wasn’t too much help. The rags she wore were either black or drab and could not be seen, and she had the disconcerting habit of letting loose upon occasion with dolorous wails.
Andrew had objected to riding Daniel, but when Conrad picked him up and heaved him into the saddle, he did not try to get off. He rode slumped over, his head nodding. Half the time, thought Duncan, the man’s asleep. Meg lay lengthwise on the little burro, clinging like a leech, her arms around Beauty’s neck. There was no saddle for Beauty, and her rotund little barrel of a body was not ridden easily.
Time stretched out. The moon slid slowly down the western sky. Occasionally night birds cried out, probably in answer to Nan’s wailing. Duncan wished she would shut up, but there was, he knew, no way to make her do it, and besides, he didn’t have the breath to shout at her. The walking was punishment. It was all up and down hills. Duncan had the impression that they were going in the same direction from which they had come, but he couldn’t be sure about it.
He was all mixed up. Thinking of it, it seemed to him that they had been mixed up for some time now.
If it had not been for the enchantment, they could have continued to the fen and down the strand. By this time, more than likely, they would be getting close to the fair and open land Snoopy had told them of, free at last of these tortured hills.
It was strange, he thought. The Harriers had made three attempts to stop them or turn them aside: the encounter in the garden near the church, the enchantment of the day before, the attack of the werewolves. But each attack had been feebler than he would have expected. The hairless ones had broken off the encounter in the garden without making too great an effort. The enchantment had failed–or maybe it had succeeded. Maybe all it had been intended to do was to get them off the trail they had been following. And back at the chapel, undoubtedly if all the werewolves had made a concerted attack, they could have wiped out the little band of humans. Before that could happen, however, they had turned tail and run, called off by the voice that cried out of the darkness.
There was something wrong, he told himself. None of it made sense. The Harriers had swept through this land, killing off the inhabitants, burning villages and farmsteads, making the area into a desolated land. Surely a band as small as theirs should not have been able to stand before them.
Except for the frog-mouth full of teeth that had stared out of the darkness at them, there had been no sign of the Harriers. He had no way of knowing, he admitted to himself, that frog-face had been a Harrier, although, since it resembled nothing else he had ever heard of, he supposed it was.
Did he and his band, he wondered, travel under some powerful protection? Perhaps the hand of God extended over them, although even as he thought it, he knew it to be a foolish thought. It was not often that God operated in such a manner.
It must be, he told himself, only half believing it, the amulet he had taken from Wulfert’s tomb–a bauble, Conrad had called it. But it might be more than a bauble. It might be a powerful instrument of magic. Andrew had called it an infernal machine. Thinking of it as a machine, he had naturally thought that there must be some way to turn it on and make it operate. But if it were magic, as it might be, it would need no turning on. It would be operative whenever the occasion demanded that it should be. He had dropped it into the pouch in which he carried the manuscript and had scarcely thought of it since. But he could recognize the possibility that it was the magic that had protected them from the full wrath of the Harriers.
No Harriers, he had told himself. And yet, might not the hairless ones be Harriers, or at least one arm of the Harriers? Harold, the Reaver, had mentioned them as among those that had attacked the manor. It was entirely possible, Duncan told himself, that they were the fighting arm of the Harriers–the shock troops designed to protect the true Harriers while they gathered to participate in those mysterious rites of rejuvenation. If that, in fact, was what they were doing. He could not even be sure of that, he told himself. It was one of the theories that His Grace had mentioned.
Christ, he thought, if I could only know one thing for certain. If I could be sure of only one aspect of this tangled mess.
Wulfert–he was not even sure of him. Regarded by the village where he’d come to live as a holy man, not correcting the error that the villagers had fallen into. Not correcting it because it gave him safety. A wizard who was hiding out. Why should a wizard be hiding out? And, when one came to think of it, how about Diane? She had known that Wulfert was a wizard, had come seeking word of him. But when she gained the word, she had not followed up on it, but had gone flying off. Where was she now? If he could only talk to her, she might be able to explain some of what had been happening.
The moon by now was well down toward the western horizon, but there was still no hint of morning light. Were they ever going to stop? They’d been laboring through these hills for hours, and there was no indication that they were about to stop. How much distance did they need to put between themselves and the Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills to be safe from the jealous evil that protected it?
For some time now Nan had desisted from her wailing. They had emerged from the forest to come on one of the occasional clear spots they had found on the summit of some of the hills. The backbone of the hill reared up in a mass of rocky outcrops.
Looking up, Duncan saw Nan, a black bat of a woman, flying through the sky, outlined by the faintness of the moonlight.
What little wind there had been had died down, a signal of the coming dawn. A heavy silence reigned over everything. The only sound was the occasional ringing of Daniel’s or Beauty’s iron-shod hoofs as they came in contact with a stone.