Enchanted Pilgrimage

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.

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 crevasses 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.