Enchanted Pilgrimage

33

Tomorrow, Cornwall thought, they'd go on toward the mountains, where they'd seek out, or try to seek out, the Old Ones. And after they had found the Old Ones, or had failed to find them, what would they do then? Surely they would not want to turn about and come back across the Blasted Plain, without horses and more than likely with Hellhounds in wait for their return. One could not be sure, he knew, that the Hellhounds would be waiting, but the possibility that they might be was not something that could be ignored.

He sat on a sandy slope of ground that ran down to the stream, leaning back against a boulder. Off to his left the campfire gleamed through the dark, and he could see the silhouettes of the rest of the party sitting around it. He hoped that for a while they would not miss him and come looking for him. For some reason that he could not completely understand, he'd wanted to be off by himself. To think, perhaps, although he realized that the time for thinking was past. The thinking should have been done much earlier, before they had gone plunging off on this incredible adventure. If there had been some thought put to it, he knew, they might not have set out on it. It had all been done on the impulse of the moment. He had fled the university once he learned that his filching the page of manuscript was known. Although, come to think of it, there had been no real need to flee. There were a hundred places on the campus or in the town where he could have holed up and hidden out. The imagined need to flee had been no more than an excuse to go off on a hunt to find the Old Ones. And from that point onward the expedition had grown by a chain of unlikely circumstances and by the same emotional response to them as he, himself, had experienced—re- sponses that were illogical on the face of them. An unknowing fleeing perhaps, from the sameness of the ordinary life that Oliver and Hal had talked about just a few hours before.

At the sound of a soft rustling behind him, he leaped to his feet. It was Mary.

"I wondered where you were," she said. "I came looking for you. I hope you don't mind."

"I've been saving a place for you," he said. He reached out a hand to guide her to a seat against the boulder, then sat down beside her.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked.

"Thinking," he said. "Wondering. I wonder if we were right to come, what we should do now. Go on, of course, and try to find the Old Ones. But after that, what? And what if we don't find the Old Ones? Will we still go on, stumbling from adventure to adventure, simply going on for the sake of going, for the sake of new things found? A course like that could get us killed. We've been lucky so far."

"We'll be all right," she said. "You've never felt this way before. We will find the Old Ones, and Gib will give them the ax, and everything will work out the way it should."

"We're a long way from home," he said, "and maybe no way back. Or at least no easy way. For myself I don't mind so much. I never had a home except the university, and that wasn't really home. A university is never more than a stopping place. Although for Oliver, I suppose it might be. He lived up in the rafters of the library and had been there for years. But Gib had his marsh, and Hal and Coon had their hollow tree. Even Sniveley had his mine and metal-working shop. And you…"

"I had no home," she said, "after my foster parents died. It makes no difference to me now where I am."

"It was a thing of impulse," he said, "a sort of harebrained plan that rose out of nothing. I had been interested in the Old Ones— perhaps no more than an academic interest, but somehow it seemed very real. I can't tell you why. I don't know where their attraction lies. I had studied their language, or what purported to be their language. No one, in fact, seemed sure there were such things as Old Ones. Then I ran across the manuscript in which an ancient traveler…"

"And you had to go and see," said Mary. "I can't see there's so much wrong with that."

"Nothing wrong with it if only myself were involved. If only the

Hermit hadn't died and left the ax in Gib's keeping, if Gib had not saved me from the wolves, if Hal hadn't been a woodsman and a friend of Gib's, if Sniveley had not forged the magic sword—if these things hadn't happened, none of this would be happening now…»

"But it did happen," said Mary, "and no matter about the rest of it, it brought the two of us together. You have no right to shoulder guilt because there is no guilt, and when you try to conjure it up and carry it, you're doing nothing more than belittle the rest of us. There are none of us here against our will. There are none of us who have regrets."

"Sniveley."

"You mean his complaining. That is just his way. That's the way he lives." She laid her head against his shoulder. "Forget it, Mark," she said. "We'll go on and find the Old Ones, and it will be all right in the end. We may even find my parents or some trace of them."

"There's been no trace of them so far," he said. "We should have asked at the castle, but there were so many other things that we never even asked. I blame myself for that. I should have thought to ask."

"I did ask," said Mary. "I asked that dirty little creature with the foxy face."

"And?"

"They stopped at the castle. They stayed for several days to rest. There were Hellhounds all about, there always were Hellhounds hanging around the castle, but they didn't bother them. Think of it, Mark, they walked in peace through the Blasted Plain, they walked in peace through packs of Hellhounds. They're somewhere up ahead, and that is another reason for us to go on."

"You hadn't mentioned that you asked."

"As you said, there were so many other things."

"They walked in peace," said Cornwall. "They must be wonderful. What is there about them—Mary, how well do you remember them?"

"Hardly at all," she said. "Just beauty—beauty for my mother, beauty and comfort. Her face I can remember just a little. A glow with a face imprinted on it. My father, I can't remember him. I love them, of course, but I can't remember why I do. Just the beauty and the comfort, that is all."

"And now you're here," said Cornwall. "A long march behind you, a long march ahead. Food almost gone and one garment to your name."

"I'm where I want to be," she said. She lifted her head, and he cupped her face in his two hands and kissed her tenderly.

"The horn of the unicorn worked," he said. "Oliver, damn his hide, was right."

"You thought of that?" she asked.

"Yes, I did think of that. You still have the horn. How about mislaying it or losing it or something?"

She settled down against him. "We'll see," she said in a happy voice.