Fellowship of the Talisman

8

The church was not large, but it was a more impressive structure than would have been expected in such a village.

Over the centuries pious villagers had labored to erect it, quarrying and dressing the stone, hoisting it into place, laying the heavy slabs that made up the floor, carving the pews and altar and all the other furniture out of native oak, weaving the tapestries to decorate its walls. There was about it, Duncan told himself, a rude simplicity that made for a charm too seldom found in other much larger and more elaborate buildings.

The tapestries had been pulled down from the walls and lay on the flagstones, crumpled and trampled. Some of them had been set afire, but had failed to burn. The pews and other furniture had been smashed, the altar demolished.

Diane and the griffin were not there, although there were signs that once they had been. Griffin dung spotted the stones of the floor; they found the chapel that the woman had used as a sleeping room — sheepskins upon the floor to make a bed, a small, rudely built cooking pit fashioned of stone, and half a dozen cooking utensils.

In the second chapel stood a long table, miraculously still intact. Upon it were spread piles of parchment sheets.

An inkpot and a quill pen, fixed to its stand, stood among the litter.

Duncan picked up one of the parchments. It crinkled at his touch. The writing was crabbed, the words misspelled, bordering on the illiterate. Someone had been born, someone had died, a couple had been married, a mysterious murrain had killed a dozen sheep, the wolves had been bad that year, an early frost had shriveled the gardens, but snow had held off almost until Christmas.

He picked up other sheets. They were all the same. The records of years of village nothingness. Births, deaths, marriages, minor local catastrophes. The gossip of old wives, the small fears, the small triumphs — an eclipse of the moon and the terror in its wake, the time of falling stars and the wonder of it, the early bloom of forest flowers, the violent summer thunderstorm, the feasts and their celebrations, the good crops and the bad — all the local historical trivia, the records of a village pastor so immersed in village happenings that he had no other interests.

“She searched all these records,” Duncan said to Andrew. “She was looking for some mention of Wulfert, some clue as to where a trace of him might be found. Apparently she found nothing.”

“But she must have known that by this time he would be dead.”

“Not him,” said Duncan. “Not the man himself. That was not what she was looking for. The relic, don’t you understand. To her the relic — or, if you insist, the infernal machine — was what was important.”

“But I do not understand.”

“You are blinded,” Duncan said, “by your candle flame, by all your piety. Or was it piety?”

“I do not know,” said Andrew. “I had always thought so. My lord, I am a sincere hermit, or I try to be.”

“You cannot see beyond your own nose,” Duncan told him. “You cannot accept that what you call an infernal machine may have validity and value. You will not give a wizard his due. There are many lands, as Christian as this one, where wizards, however uncomfortable the thought of them may be, are held in high regard.”

“There is about them the stink of paganism.”

“Old truths,” said Duncan. “Old ideas, old solutions, old methods and procedures. You cannot afford to reject them because they antecede Christianity. My lady wanted what the wizard had.”

“There is one thing you do not realize,” said Andrew, speaking softly. “One thing you have not thought about.

She herself may be a wizard.”

“An enchantress, you mean. A sophisticated witch.”

“I suppose so,” Andrew said. “But whatever the correct designation, you had never thought of that.”

“I had not thought of it,” said Duncan. “It may well be true.”

Shafts of late afternoon sunlight came through the tall, narrow windows, looking very much like those shafts of glory that biblical artists delighted in depicting as shining upon saints. The windows were of tinted glass — those that still had glass in them, for many had been broken by thrown rocks. Looking at the few remaining tinted windows, Duncan wondered how the village, in all its piety and devotion, could have afforded that much tinted glass. Perhaps the few affluent residents, of which there certainly would have been very few, had banded together to pay for its fabrication and installation, thereby buying themselves certain dispensations or absolutions, buttressing their certainty of Heaven.

Tiny motes of dust danced in the shining shafts of light, lending them a sense of life, of motion and of being, that simple light in itself could never have. And in back of the living light shafts something moved.

Duncan reached out to grasp Andrew’s arm.

“There’s something here,” he said. “Back there in the corner.”

He pointed with a finger, and the hermit peered in the direction that he pointed, squinting his eyes to get a better focus. Then he chuckled to himself, visibly relaxing.

“It’s only Snoopy,” he said.

“Snoopy? Who the hell is Snoopy?”

“That’s what I call him. Because he’s always snooping around. Always watching out for something that he can turn to his own advantage. He’s a little busybody. He has another name, of course. A name you cannot get your tongue around. He doesn’t seem to mind that I call him Snoopy.”

“Someday that long-windedness of yours will be the death of you,” said Duncan. “This is all well and good, but will you tell me, who is…”

“Why, I thought you knew,” said Andrew. “I thought I had mentioned him. Snoopy is a goblin. One of the local boys. He pesters me a lot and I have no great love of him, but he’s really not a bad sort.”

By this time the goblin had walked through the distorting shafts of window-light and was coming toward them. He was a little fellow; he might have reached to a grown man’s waist. He was dressed in nut-colored brown: a peaked cap that had lost its stiffening and flopped over at the top, a jerkin, a pair of trousers fitted tight around his spindly legs, shoes that curled up ridiculously at the toe. His ears were oversize and pointed, and his face had a foxy look.

Without preamble, Snoopy spoke to Andrew. “This place is livable now,” he said. “It has lost some of its phony smell of sanctity, which was something that neither I nor any of my brethren could abide. The stabling of the griffin perhaps had much to do with it. There is nothing like the smell of griffin dung to fumigate and offset the odor of sanctity.”

Andrew stiffened. “You’re being impertinent again,” he said.

“In that case,” said Snoopy, “I shall turn about and leave. You will pardon me. I was only trying to be neighborly.”

“No,” said Duncan. “Wait a minute, please. Overlook the sharp tongue of this good hermit. His outlook has been warped by trying to be a holy man and, perhaps, not going about it in quite the proper way.”

Snoopy looked at Duncan. “You think so?” he asked.

“It’s a possibility,” said Duncan. “He tells me he wasted a lot of time staring at a candle flame, and I’m not sure, in my own mind, whether that is the way to go about it if one should feel the compulsion to be holy. Although, you understand, I’m not an expert at this sort of thing.”

“You seem to be a more reasonable person than this dried-up apple of a hermit,” said the goblin. “If you give me your word that you’ll hold him off me and will prevail upon him to keep his foul mouth shut, I shall proceed upon what I came to do.”

“I shall do all that I am able to restrain him,” Duncan said. “So how about you telling me what you came to do.”

“I came in the thought that I might be of some small assistance to you.”

“Pay no attention to him,” counseled Andrew. “Any assistance you may get from him would turn out to be equivalent to a swift punch in the nose.”

“Please,” said Duncan, “let me handle this. What harm can it do to listen to what he has to say?”

“There you see,” said Snoopy. “That’s the way it goes. The man has no sense of decency.”

“Let’s not belabor the past differences between the two of you,” said Duncan. “If you have information we would be glad to hear it. It seems to me we stand in some need of it. But there is one thing that troubles me and you’ll have to satisfy us on that point.”

“What is this thing that troubles you?”

“I presume you know that we intend to travel farther into the Desolated Land, which at the moment is held by the Harriers.”

“That I do know,” said Snoopy, “and that is why I’m here. I can acquaint you with what would be the best route and what you should be watching for.”

“That, precisely, is what troubles me,” said Duncan. “Why should you be willing to assist us against the Harriers?

It would seem to me that you might feel more kinship toward them than you feel toward us.”

“In some ways you may be correct in your assumption,” said Snoopy, “but your reasoning is not too astute, perhaps because you are not fully acquainted with the situation. We have no grounds to love the humans. My people — those folk you so insultingly speak of as the Little People — were residents of this land, of the entire world, for that matter, long before you humans came, thrusting your way so unfeelingly among us, not even deigning to recognize us, looking upon us as no more than vermin to be swept aside. You did not look upon us as a legitimate intelligent life form, you ignored our rights, you accorded us no courtesy or understanding. You cut down our sacred woods, you violated our sacred places. We had a willingness to accommodate our way of life with your way, to live in harmony among you. We held this willingness even when you came among us as arrogant invaders. We had powers we would have been willing to share with you, perhaps in an exchange that would have given something of value to us. But you had a reluctance to stoop, as you felt, to the point of communicating with us. You thrust yourself upon us, you kicked us out of the way, you forced us to live in hidden places. So, at long last, we turned against you, but because of your ferocity and unfeeling violence, there was little that we could do against you; we have never been a match for you. I could go on for a much longer length of time cataloguing our grievances against you, but that, in summary, my dear sir, is why we cannot love you.”

“You present a good case,” said Duncan, “and, without admitting it to be the truth in all regards, which I am in no position to do and would not do in any case, I must admit that there is some merit in the words you’ve spoken. Which proves my point, exactly. Hating us as you must, why are you willing to offer us assistance? Knowing your feelings about us, how can we reconcile ourselves to trusting you?”

“Because we hate the Harriers more than we hate you,” said Snoopy. “While you may think so, in your human folly, the Harriers are not our people. We and they stand very much apart. There are several reasons for this. They are pure evil and we are not. They live for evil alone and we do not. But since you humans lump us in with them, through the centuries they have given us a bad name. Much that they do is blamed on us. There are certain areas in which we might have arrived at an accommodation with humans, but the Harriers have foreclosed these avenues to us because their actions and your fuddle-headedness has made us seem as bad as they. When you condemn them, you condemn us equally with them. There are some more intelligent and compassionate humans who, having taken the trouble to know us better, do not join in this condemnation but, sadly, the most of you do, and the voices of the few compassionates are lost in the flurry of hatred that is directed against us. In this invasion of the Harriers, we have suffered with the humans, perhaps not as much as you humans, for we have our small magics that have been some protection for us, magics that you humans could have shared with us had you been willing to accept us. So, in balance, we hate the Harriers more than we do the humans, and that is why we are willing to help you.”

“Given such an attitude,” Andrew said to Duncan, “you would be insane to trust him completely. He might lead you straight into an ambush. I take no great stock in his professed hatred of the Harriers, even though he warned me once against them. I tell you, there is no assurance of truth in his kind.”

Duncan disregarded Andrew. He said to Snoopy, “You say the Harriers are not your people, that you are in no way related to them. Where, then, did they come from? What is their origin?”

“They first appeared,” said Snoopy, “some twenty thousand years ago, perhaps longer ago than that. Our legends say this and our people take great care that the legends should run true, unchanged, from generation to generation. At first there were only a few of them, but as the centuries went on, their numbers increased. During that time when there were only a few of them, we had the opportunity to learn what kind of folk they were. Once we learned in all truth the evil that was in them, we were able, in a measure, to protect ourselves. I suppose the same thing happened to the primitive humans who existed in those early days, but the humans, without magic, could do little to protect themselves.

Sadly, only a few of those humans, perhaps because they were so primitive, could learn to accept us. Many made no distinction between us and these others whom you now call the Harriers, but who have been known by many other names throughout the ages.”

“They first appeared, you tell me, two hundred centuries ago. How did they appear?”

“They just were here, was all.”

“But where did they come from?”

“There are those who say they came from the sky. There are others who say they came from deep underground, where they had been penned, but that they either broke loose or overcame the force that penned them there, or, perhaps, that their penance extended over only a certain period of time and that the time-term had expired.”

“But they can’t be of any one race. I am told they come in all shapes and sizes.”

“That is true,” said Snoopy. “They are not a race. They are a swarm.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A swarm,” Snoopy said impatiently. “A swarm. Don’t you know a swarm?”

“He’s talking in a lingo of his own,” said Andrew. “He has many such words and concepts that cannot be understood by humans.”

“Well, we’ll let it go at that,” said Duncan. “What is important now is what he has to tell us.”

“You don’t mean you are about to trust him?”

“I’m inclined to. At least we need what he can tell us.”

“I can show you the route that may be the safest for you to take,” said Snoopy. “I can draw a map for you. There is ink and parchment in one of the chapels.”

“Yes, we know,” said Duncan.

“A room,” said Snoopy, “where a long line of dithering priests sat writing down the inconsequential inanities of irrelevant lives and events.”

“I just now,” said Duncan, “was reading through some of them.” Snoopy led the way toward the chapel, followed by Duncan, with Andrew clumping crustily in the rear. Conrad hurried to take his place alongside Duncan.

Reaching the chapel, Snoopy climbed upon the table and pawed with his splayed fingers among the documents until he found one that had some white space remaining on it. Carefully he spread it out on the tabletop. Picking up the quill, he dipped it in the ink and made an X on the parchment.

“We are here,” he said, pointing to the X. “This way is north.” He made a slash to indicate the direction. “You go straight south from here, down the valley, south and a little west. You’ll be moving in good cover. There may be watchers on the hilltops. Keep an eye out for them. They probably won’t cause you any trouble. More than likely, they’ll not attack; they’ll just report back on you. Forty miles or so from here the stream flows into a fen — marshy ground, pools of water, heavy growth…”

“I do not like the looks of it,” said Conrad.

“You turn off,” said Snoopy, “keeping to the left bank of the fen. There are high cliffs to your left, leaving a narrow strip between the fen and the cliffs.”

“They could drive us into the marsh,” said Conrad. “There would be no place to stand.”

“They won’t come at you through the fen,” said Snoopy. “The cliffs are high and unscalable. You can’t climb them, certainly, but neither can someone on the top climb down.”

“There might be dragons, harpies, other flying things.”

Snoopy shrugged. “Not many. And you could fight them off. If they make a ground sally at you, it has to be either front or back and on a narrow front. They can’t get around to flank you.”

“I’m not fond of it either,” said Duncan. “Master Goblin, is there no other way?”

“Many more miles to travel,” Snoopy told him, “and even then no farther on your way. Hard traveling. Uphill, downhill. Easy to get lost.”

“But this has danger in it.”

“Dangerous, perhaps, but bold. A route they’d not expect you to take. If you moved at night, keeping well under cover…”

Duncan shook his head.

“There is no place safe,” said the goblin. “Not in the Desolated Land.”

“If you traveled,” asked Conrad, “would you travel as you tell us?”

“I accept the danger,” said Snoopy. “I shall travel with you. It’s my neck as well as yours.”

“Christ save us now,” said Duncan. “A hermit, a ghost, a goblin. We grow into an army.”

“In going,” said Snoopy, “I only show my faith.”

“All right,” said Duncan. “I take your word for it.”

“Down this strand between the fen and cliff you come to a chasm, a gap, a break in the cliffs that cuts through the hills. A short distance only, five miles or so.”

“It’s a trap,” said Conrad. “I can smell a trap.”

“But once you leave the gap, you are in what seems fair and open country. But in it sits a castle.”

“I shall tread beside you closely,” said Conrad. “If a trap this turns out to be, I shall simply cut your throat.”

The goblin shrugged.

“You shrug,” said Conrad. “Perhaps you want to have it cut.” Snoopy flung down the quill in exasperation.

Spatters of ink splotched the parchment.

“What is hard for me to understand,” said Duncan, “is that at first you say you will draw a map for us and then you say you will go with us. Why bother with a map? Why not simply say, to start with, that you will go with us and show the way?”

“At first,” said the goblin, “I had not meant to go with you. I had simply thought the map. Then, when you questioned my sincerity, I decided that I must go with you, that otherwise you’d have no belief in me.”

“What we ask is truth,” said Conrad. “We do not ask belief.”

“The one,” said Snoopy, “cannot go without the other.”

“Okay,” said Duncan. “Carry on. You said there was a castle.”

“An old castle. Moldering away. Falling down. The battlements tumbled. It stinks of great age. I warn you of the castle. You give it wide berth. You do not approach it. On no account go inside of it. It also is evil. Not the Evil of the Harriers. A different kind of evil.”

“Wipe all this from your mind,” the hermit said. “He is about to get us killed, or worse. Never for a moment can you trust him.”

“You make up your mind,” said Snoopy. “I’ve told you all I have to tell. I have tried to be of help and for that you’ve given me the back of your hand. If in the morning you want to set out, you will find me here.”

He jumped down off the table and stalked out of the chapel.

Tiny came pertly into the chapel, walking carefully and alertly on tiptoe. He came up to Conrad and leaned companionably against his leg. Out in the church Daniel was snorting gently and pawing at the flagstone floor.

“Well?” asked Andrew.

“I don’t know,” said Duncan. “We have to think about it. We must do something. We can’t just stay here.”

He said to Conrad, “I’m surprised at you. I thought that of all of us, you would have been the one to trust him. Back home you have much traffic with the Little Folk. As you walk through the woods they come popping out to talk with you. It seemed to me that you had an understanding with them. Just the other day you were upset that we had not seen them here. You were worried that the Harriers might have wiped them out.”

“What you say is true,” said Conrad. “I have a liking for them. I have many friends with them. But of this one we must be sure.”

“So you warn him that you’ll cut his throat should he lead us astray.”

“It’s the only way. He must understand.”

“Well, then, what do you really think?”

“I think, m’lord, that we can trust him. I only wanted to make sure. I wanted him to understand this was serious and no place for playing games. Little Folk, no matter how nice they may be, are always playing tricks. Even on their friends. I wanted to make sure this one plays no tricks.”

“In a situation such as this he’d not be playing foolish tricks.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Andrew. “They’re always up to tricks, some of them just this side of vicious. I shall keep an eye on him as well. If Conrad does not cut his throat, should need be, I’ll brain him with my staff.”