The Fellowship of the Talisman

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.

Then, out of the moonlit sky, it came again, the sounds that Duncan had heard the night before: the sound of hoofbeats in the sky, the distant shouts of men, the distant baying of dogs.

Ahead of him, Conrad came to a halt and he saw that the others had come to a halt as well. Snoopy stood on a small rocky ridge ahead of them and was staring into the sky. Meg sat bolt upright on Beauty and also stared skyward. Andrew remained slumped in the saddle, doubled over, fast asleep.

The shouting became louder, the baying swelled and deepened, and the hoofbeats were like faint thunder rolling down the heavens.

A shadowy tracery of something came over the treetops to the north, and as he watched, Duncan saw that there was only one horseman riding in the sky, standing straight in the saddle, brandishing a hunting horn and shouting to spur on the dogs that ran ahead of him-vicious, bounding hunting dogs that slavered on the trail of an unseen quarry. The great black horse galloped through the empty air with no ground beneath its pounding hoofs.

The horse and rider and the dogs swept toward the group standing on the hilltop and passed over them. There was no way to see the features of the man, the horse, or the dogs, for they all were black, like silhouetted shadows moving across the sky. The hoofbeats pounded so hard that they seemed to raise echoes among the hills, and the baying was a torrent of sound that engulfed them as they stood there. The rider raised the horn to his mouth and blew a single blast that seemed to fill the sky, and then the rider and his pack were gone. They disappeared over the southern tree line, and the sound gradually diminished with the distance until nothing could be heard, although it seemed to Duncan that he still heard the ringing of the hoofs long after the sound of them had gone.

Nan came tumbling out of the sky and landed beside Duncan. She skipped a step or two to gain her balance, stood in front of him, and craned her head upward. She was jigging in excitement.

"Do you know who that was?" she asked.

"No I don't. Do you?"

"That was the Wild Huntsman," she screeched. "I saw him once, years ago. In Germany. That was when I was young and before I settled down. The Wild Huntsman and his hounds."

Meg had slipped off Beauty and was tottering toward them.

"He always was in Germany," she said. "He never was anywhere else. That proves what I've been telling you about all these things of evil gathering with the Harriers."

"Was he looking for us?" asked Conrad.

"I doubt it," said Meg. "He's not really hunting anyone or anything. He just rides the skies. He whoops and hollers and blows that horn of his and his dogs make such a racket they scare you half to death. But he doesn't mean anything by it. That's just the way he is."

"Who is he?" Duncan asked.

"No one knows," said Nan. "His name has been forgotten. He's been riding the skies so long there's no one who remembers."

Snoopy came scuttling down from the ridgetop.

"Let's get moving," he said. "It's just a little farther. We'll be there by first light."

"Where are you taking us?" asked Duncan. "We have a right to know."

"I'm taking you to where you should have been all the time. Back to the strand."

"But that, or just short of there, is where we ran into enchantment. They'll be waiting there for us."

"Not now," said Snoopy. "There's no one there right now. You'll be safe. They would not think that you would come back."

Ghost jiggled in the fading moonlight, just above their heads.

"That is right," he said. "All the blessed day not a sign of anyone at all. I'd say the way was clear."

"We'll have to rest," said Duncan, "before we try the strand. All of us are practically dead upon our feet from loss of sleep."

"Andrew's getting sleep," said Conrad.

"He's the only one of us," said Duncan. "He'll pay for it. When we get there he'll stand guard while the rest of us get some rest."