He did, and I parried it at the last instant. I do not like to think about how close he came that time. Then I began to yield once more, giving ground, backing out of the grove. Parrying and retreating, I moved past the spot where Ganelon lay. I fell back another fifteen feet or so, fighting defensively, conservatively.
Then I gave Benedict another opening.
He drove in, as he had before, and I managed to stop him again. He pressed the attack even harder after that, pushing me back to the edge of the black road.
There, I stopped and held my ground, shifting my position to the spot I had chosen. I would have to hold him just a few moments longer, to set him up…
They were very rough moments, but I fought furiously and readied myself.
Then I gave him the same opening again.
I knew he would come in the same as before, and my right leg was across and back behind my left, then straightening, as he did. I gave his blade but the barest beat to the side as I sprang backward onto the black road, immediately extending my arm full length to discourage a balaestra.
Then he did what I had hoped. He beat at my blade and advanced normally when I dropped it into quarte…
… causing him to step into the patch of black grasses over which I had leaped.
I dared not look down at first. I simply stood my ground and gave the flora a chance.
It only took a few moments. Benedict became aware of it the next time that he tried to move. I saw the puzzled expression flash across his face, then the strain. It had him, I knew.
I doubted, though, that it could hold him very long, so I moved immediately.
I danced to the right, out of range of his blade, rushed forward and sprang across the grasses, off the black road once again. He tried to turn, but they had twined themselves about his legs all the way up to his knees. He swayed for a moment, but retained his balance.
I passed behind him and to his right. One easy thrust and he was a dead man, but of course there was no reason to do it now.
He swung his arm back behind his neck and turned his head, pointing the blade at me. He began pulling his left leg free.
But I feinted toward his right, and when he moved to parry it I slapped him across the back of the neck with the flat of Grayswandir.
It stunned him, and I was able to move in and punch him in the kidney with my left hand. He bent slightly and I blocked his sword arm and struck him in the back of the neck again, this time with my fist, hard. He fell, unconscious, and I removed his blade from his hand and cast it aside. The blood from his left ear lobe trailed down his neck like some exotic earring.
I put Grayswandir aside, seized Benedict under the armpits, and dragged him back from the black road. The grasses resisted mightily, but I strained against them and finally had him free.
Ganelon had gotten to his feet by then. He limped up and stood beside me, looking down at Benedict.
“What a fellow he is,” he said. “What a fellow he is… What are we going to do with him?”
I picked him up in a fireman’s carry and stood.
“Take him back toward the wagon right now,” I said. “Will you bring the blades?”
“All right.”
I headed up the road and Benedict remained unconscious — which was good, because I did not want to have to hit him again if I could help it. I deposited him at the base of a sturdy tree beside the road near the wagon.
I resheathed our blades when Ganelon came up, and set him to stripping ropes from several of the cases. While he did this, I searched Benedict and found what I was looking for.
I bound him to the tree then, while Ganelon fetched his horse. We tethered it to a nearby bush, upon which I also hung his blade.
Then I mounted to the driver’s seat of the wagon and Ganelon came up alongside.
“Are you just going to leave him there?” he asked.
“For now,” I said.
We moved on up the road. I did not look back, but Ganelon did.
“He hasn’t moved yet,” he reported. Then, “Nobody ever just took me and threw me like that. With one hand yet.”
“That’s why I told you to wait with the wagon, and not to fight with him if I lost.”
“What is to become of him now?”
“I will see that he is taken care of, soon.”
“He will be all right, though?”
I nodded.
“Good.”
We continued on for perhaps two miles and I halted the horses. I climbed down.
“Don’t be upset by anything that happens,” I said. “I am going to make arrangements for Benedict now.” I moved off the road and stood in the shade, taking out the deck of Trumps Benedict had been carrying. I riffled through them, located Gerard, and removed him from the pack. The rest I returned to the silk-lined, wooden case, inlaid with bone, in which Benedict had carried them.
I held Gerard’s Trump before me and regarded it.
After a time, it grew warm, real, seemed to stir. I felt Gerard’s actual presence. He was in Amber. He was walking down a street that I recognized. He looks a lot like me, only larger, heavier. I saw that he still wore his beard.
He halted and stared.
“Corwin!”
“Yes, Gerard. You are looking well.”
“Your eyes! You can see?”
“Yes, I can see again.”
“Where are you?”
“Come to me now and I will show you.” His gaze tightened.
“I am not certain that I can do that, Corwin. I am very involved just now.”
“It is Benedict,” I said. “You are the only one I can trust to help him.”
“Benedict? He is in trouble?”
“Yes.”
“Then why does he not summon me himself?”
“He is unable to. He is restrained.”
“Why? How?”
“It is too long and involved to go into now. Believe me, he needs your help, right away.”
He raked his beard with his upper teeth. “And you cannot handle it yourself?”
“Absolutely not.”
“And you think I can?”
“I know you can.”
He loosened his blade in its scabbard.
“I would not like to think this is some sort of trick, Corwin.”
“I assure you it is not. With all the time I have had to think, I would have come up with something a little more subtle.”
He sighed. Then he nodded. “All right. I’m coming to you.”
“Come ahead.”
He stood for a moment, then took a step forward.
He stood beside me. He reached out and clasped my shoulder. He smiled.
“Corwin,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve your eyes back.”
I looked away.
“So am I. So am I.”
“Who is that in the wagon?”
“A friend. His name is Ganelon.”
“Where is Benedict? What is the problem?” I gestured.
“Back there,” I said. “About two miles down the road. He is bound to a tree. His horse is tethered near by.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I am fleeing.”
“From what?”
“Benedict. I’m the one who bound him.”
He wrinkled his brow. “I do not understand…”
I shook my head.
“There is a misunderstanding between us. I could not reason with him and we fought. I knocked him unconscious and I tied him up. I cannot free him, or he would attack me again. Neither can I leave him as he is. He may come to some harm before he can free himself. So I summoned you. Please go to him, release him, and see him home.”
“What will you be doing the while?”
“Getting the hell out of here, losing myself in Shadow. You will be doing both of us a favor to keep him from trying to follow me again. I do not want to have to fight him a second time.”
“I see. Now will you tell me what happened?”
“
I am not certain. He called me a murderer. I give you my word I slew no one the whole time I was in Avalon. Please tell him I said that. I have no reason to lie to you, and I swear that it is true. There is another matter which may have disturbed him somewhat. If he mentions it, tell him that he will have to rely on Dara’s explanation.”
“And what is it?”
I shrugged.
“You will know if he mentions it. If he does not, forget it.”
“Dara, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, I shall do as you have asked… Now, will you tell me how you managed your escape from Amber?”
I smiled.
“Academic interest? Or do you feel you might have need of the route yourself one day?”
He chuckled.
“It strikes me as a handy piece of information to have.”
“I regret, dear brother, that the world is not yet ready for this knowledge. If I had to tell anyone, I would tell you — but there is no way it could benefit you, whereas its secrecy may serve me in the future.”
“In other words, you have a private way into and out of Amber. What are you planning, Corwin?”
“What do you think?”
“The answer is obvious. But my feelings on the matter are mixed.”
“Care to tell me about them?”
He gestured toward a section of the black road that was visible from where we stood.
“That thing,” he said. “It runs to the foot of Kolvir now. A variety of menaces travel it to attack Amber. We defend, we are always victorious. But the attacks grow stronger and they come more frequently. Now would not be a good time for you to move, Corwin.”
“Or it might be the perfect time,” I said.
“For you then, but not necessarily for Amber.”
“How has Eric been handling the situation?”
“Adequately. As I said, we are always victorious.”
“I do not mean the attacks. I mean the entire problem — its cause.”
“I have traveled the black road myself, going a great distance along it.”
“And?”
“I was unable to go the entire distance. You know how the shadows grow wilder and stranger the farther you get from Amber?”
“Yes.”
“…Until the mind itself is twisted and turned toward madness?”
“Yes.”
“…And somewhere beyond this lie the Courts of Chaos. The road goes on, Corwin. I am convinced that it runs the entire distance.”
“Then it is as I feared,” I said.
“That is why, whether I sympathize with you or not, I do not recommend the present time for your efforts. The security of Amber must come before all else.”
“I see. Then there is nothing more to be said just now.”
“And your plans?”
“Since you do not know what they are, it is meaningless to tell you that they are unchanged. But they are unchanged.”
“I do not know whether to wish you luck, but I wish you well. I am glad that you have your sight back.” He clasped my hand. “I had best get on to Benedict now. I take it he is not badly hurt?”
“Not by me. I only hit him a few times. Do not forget to give him my message.”
“I won’t.”
“And take him back to Avalon.”
“I will try.”
“Then good-by for now, Gerard.”
“Good-by, Corwin.”
He turned then and walked on down the road. I watched until he was out of sight before I returned to the wagon. Then I replaced his Trump in the deck and continued on my way to Antwerp.
Chapter 8
I stood on the hilltop and looked down at the house. There was shrubbery all about me, so I was not especially obtrusive.
I do not really know what I expected to see. A burned-out shell? A car in the driveway? A family scattered about the redwood patio furniture? Armed guards?
I saw that the roof could use some new slate, that the lawn had long ago returned to a natural condition. I was surprised that I could see only one broken window there in the rear.
So the place was supposed to look deserted. I wondered.
I spread my jacket on the ground and seated myself on it. I lit a cigarette. There were no other houses for quite a distance.
I had gotten close to seven hundred thousand dollars for the diamonds. It had taken me a week and a half to make the deal. From Antwerp we had traveled to Brussels, spending several evenings at a club on the Rue de Char et Pain before the man I wanted found me.
Arthur was quite puzzled by the arrangement. A slight, white-haired man with a neat mustache, ex-RAF officer, Oxonian, he had begun shaking his head after the first two minutes and kept interrupting me with questions about delivery. While he was no Sir Basil Zaharoff, he became genuinely concerned when a client’s ideas sounded too half-baked. It troubled him if something went sour too soon after delivery. He seemed to think it reflected back on him in some way. For this reason, he was often more helpful than the others when it came to shipment. He was concerned about my plans for transportation because I did not seem to have any.
What one generally requires in an arrangement of this sort is an end-use certificate. What it is, basically, is a document affirming that country X has ordered the weapons in question. You need the thing in order to get an export permit from the manufacturer’s country. This keeps them looking honest, even if the shipment should be reconsigned to country Y once it has crossed their border. The customary thing to do is to buy the assistance of an ambassadorial representative of country X — preferably one with relatives or friends connected with the Defense Department back home — in order to get the papers. They come high, and I believe Arthur had a list of all the going rates in his head.
“But how are you going to ship them?” he had kept asking. “How will you get them where you want them?”
“That,” I said, “will be my problem. Let me worry about it.” But he kept shaking his head.
“It is no good trying to cut corners that way, Colonel,” he said. (I had been a colonel to him since we had first met, some dozen years before. Why, I am not certain.) “No good at all. Try to save a few dollars that way and you might lose the whole shipment and wind up in real trouble. Now I can fix you up through one of these young African nations quite reasonably —”
“No. Just fix me up with the weapons.”
During our talk, Ganelon just sat there drinking beer, as red-bearded and sinister-looking as ever, and nodding to everything that I said. As he spoke no English, he had no idea as to the state of negotiations. Nor, for that matter, did he really care. He followed my instructions, though, and spoke to me periodically in Thari and we would chat briefly in that language about nothing in particular. Sheer perversity. Poor old Arthur was a good linguist and he wanted to know the destination of the pieces. I could feel him straining to identify the language each time that we spoke. Finally, he began nodding as though he had.
After some more discussion, he stuck his neck out and said, “I read the newspapers. I am certain his crowd can afford the insurance.” That was almost worth the price of admission to me.
But, “No,” I said. “Believe me, when I take possession of those automatic rifles, they are going to vanish off the face of the Earth.”
“Neat trick, that,” he said, “considering I don’t even know where we will be picking them up yet.”
“It does not matter.”
“Confidence is a fine thing. Then there is foolhardiness…” He shrugged. “Have it as you say then — your problem.”
Then I told him about the ammo and he must have been convinced as to my mental deterioration. He just stared at me for a long while, not even shaking his head this time. It was a good ten minutes before I could even get him to look at the specifications. It was then that he began shaking his head and mumbling about silver bullets and inert primers.
The ultimate arbiter, cash, convinced him we would do it my w
ay, however. There was no trouble on the rifles or the trucks, but persuading an arms factory to produce my ammo was going to be expensive, he told me. He was not even certain he could find one that would be willing. When I told him that the cost was no object, it seemed to upset him even more. If I could afford to indulge in weird, experimental ammo, an end-use certificate would not come to that much — No. I told him no. My way, I reminded him.
He sighed and tugged at the fringe of his mustache. Then he nodded. Very well, we would do it my way.
He overcharged me, of course. Since I was rational in all other matters, the alternative to psychosis would be that I was party to an expensive boondoggle. While the ramifications must have intrigued him, he apparently decided not to look too far into such a sticky-seeming enterprise. He was willing to seize every opportunity I extended for dissociating himself from the project. Once he found the ammo people — a Swiss outfit as it turned out — he was quite willing to put me into contact with them and wash his hands of everything but the money.
Ganelon and I went to Switzerland on fake papers. He was a German and I was Portuguese. I did not especially care what my papers showed, so long as the forgery was of good quality, but I had settled on German as the best language for Ganelon to learn, since he had to learn one and German tourists have always seemed to be all over the place. He picked it up quite rapidly. I had told him to tell any real Germans and any Swiss who asked that he had been raised in Finland.
We spent three weeks in Switzerland before I was satisfied with the quality controls on my ammo. As I had suspected, the stuff was totally inert in this shadow. I had worked out the formula, though, which was all that really mattered at that point. The silver came high, of course. Perhaps I was being over-cautious. Still, there are some things about Amber that are best dispatched with that metal, and I could afford it. For that matter, what better bullet — short of gold — for a king? Should I wind up shooting Eric, there would be no lese-majeste involved. Indulge me, brothers.
Then I left Ganelon to shift for himself for a time, since he had thrown himself into his tourist role in a true Stanislavskian fashion. I saw him off to Italy, camera about his neck and a faraway look in his eyes, and I flew back to the States.
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