The Ardath Mayhar MEGAPACK®

by John Maclay

  “As does a greater Lord, back to the east, over our Lord upon the hill. And above that Lord, the King, far away on the coast. And over the King—why the Deity Himself. Not one is without one greater than himself. And not one of those fine men, puffed up with self-esteem as they are, can do this—”

  He reached down and lifted a bar of metal that waited to be turned into shoes or shafts or bolts. With his two hands, he curved it into a bow. His face was a bit red, though the remainder of the glow from the charcoal in the forge might have been to thank for that.

  Before I could think what to say, he frowned, his brows meeting above his deep, gray-green eyes. “There are many kinds of power, Pell. The power in my hands is one kind. The power upon yonder hill is another. That of the Abbot is still a third. And there is a fourth.”

  My heart thudded in my side. I knew what he meant, though we had never spoken of it. We both knew that there were those who disappeared from their hearths around the time of All-Hallows and Midsummer Eve. We had both heard tales of dark doings that stank of brimstone.

  “But you have never...,” I began.

  He raised his hand. “That is a child’s power, out there among the standing stones. Capering in the night is for those without the wit to seek for true strength of will and of thought. When they sent me from the Abbey, I did not turn from the Light—but I did not turn away from other matters either. There are other magics than those of the Dark, never doubt it. Those I have looked into...a bit.”

  We went home to our supper in silence. The Dame and Lilibet looked questioningly at us both, but what might we have said? Nothing that they would have understood, it was certain. Yet each time my eves met Lilibet’s, a shiver went down me. She was so fair, so sweet in her young innocence. In time, Gillam would petition the Lord to wed her to the miller’s son, and it would be a match that was good for her and for him. Stan, the miller, was in full agreement.

  Yet there in the rushlight, before a board laid with food in plenty and in the company of those I loved and served, I felt a chill of foreboding come over me.

  Would a warning of mine have averted the thing to come? I doubt it. Ranald lost no lime. Less than a sennight later, he abducted Lilibet while Gillam was away dealing with the charcoal burners. Two of his brothers came with the young noble, along with several of the young spurs who tenanted the keep. They struck down the Dame and then laid me low with the flat of a blade.

  When my wits came to me again, I was lying with my head in Dame Marga’s lap, and she was sponging the blood from my face. Tears were tracking her pale face. When I struggled to sit, she pushed me back with a firm hand.

  “Oh, Pell. Lie still until your head is quiet. A clap to the skull such as that can be dangerous if you do not care for it.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, belying the tears that still streamed.

  “Lilibet?’“ I whispered, dreading her answer.

  She bent her head. A tear dropped onto my face from her cheeks.

  Then I sat up. “I shall take Gillam’s staff and go after them,” I cried.

  “They have gone into the keep. You cannot follow there, Pell. Gillam will be here soon—the sun is almost down. Then he will know what is best to do. The Lord has ever dealt justly with us—but. Ranald is his son....”

  I could see that she had scant hope of justice this time. No more than had I.

  Gillam returned before nightfall. When the news was told, he turned terribly pale, even through the ruddy flush set upon his skin by the heat of the forge.

  “I shall go at once to my Lord,” he said. Without another word he did just that. It was midnight when he returned. His thump upon the door brought both of us running to open the latch and slip away the bar.

  He had brought Lilibet. Her slight shape barely weighted his arms at all, and her fair hair trailed in a tousle from the crook of his elbow. For a moment I thought that he had succeeded, that the Lord had granted her return. Then I saw the blood upon her sleeve, the limp way her wrist swung, her lax hand.

  The Dame gave a little moan. “Dead?”

  He nodded, entered, and laid my foster sister upon her narrow couch. Weeping, I barred the door again and turned to face my master.

  “What happened...to her?” I choked, though I greatly feared his answer.

  “They had no time to ravish her, Pell,” he said, and there were tears in his own eyes. “She found a knife in a fruit bowl and used it well.” He sobbed one great, strangling sob, then was silent.

  “I’ll kill them!” I shouted, turning blindly toward the door. His great hand caught me.

  “No. We will do...something else. We will imprison them in fear. We will drown them in their own panic. They will know more than the things they made our little one feel, before they are done. Come with me, Pell. There is much to do before midnight.”

  We set pitch torches about the shop until it blazed with light. While I set the charcoal into the forge and began bringing the heat up, Gillam made a pile of stones that looked something like the new keep that was the Lord’s pride and home. By the time the forge was glowing, he had the model of the great house completed.

  We knew the approach of midnight, as did the animals, by the feel of lateness in the night air, the set of the stars. As iron heated, we felt the time draw near. Gillam drew a long breath. Then he took a lengthy strap of red-hot metal from its fiery bed and laid it upon the anvil.

  “Doom! Doom! Doom!” said the hammer, ringing against the anvil.

  He forged the straps together, setting the lily-crest at the join. He did not make them beautiful, as he had done those others. He made them terribly strong. I could see his lips working as he hammered and shaped the metal, but what words came from him I could not hear above the clangor of his labor. He seemed bigger than before, ­taller, more threatening than I had ever dreamed that he could be. A strange tingle filled the workshop as he tempered the straps in cool water and drew them, still glowing dully, forth again.

  We slipped them, with the aid of tongs, over the modeled keep that filled the space braced by the oaken beams from which we suspended heavy work. As the straps cooled, they tightened until not even a blade could fit between metal and stone.

  I stared, awed. “What magic is this?” I whispered, and Gillam heard.

  He bent upon me a gaze so withdrawn and terrible that I cringed. “Those who practice the Old Religion call it sympathetic magic,” he said. “As fares this small keep, so will the great one. The strength of the very soil and stone will hold it captive!” New words came from his lips as his eyes turned from me, but I stopped my cars and would not listen. By the time the second band was cramped about the keep, I was filled with terror.

  Yet anger kept me going. Whatever Gillam was doing, whatever force, Dark or Light, that he called upon, this was justified. Lilibet had been all that was good and pure. Men who could cause her death in such fashion had no right to be called men, far less virtuous ones. If the Dark One had appeared at that instant and warned that my continued work at the bellows would mean instant translation into Hades, I would have pumped on. But the work was done, at last. The darkness faded from Gillam’s face.

  The old kindly smile shaped his lips. “We have done well, Pell. Dawn is upon us. Come into the yard and look up.”

  The breeze was freshening when we stepped into the open. A hint of dawn glowed in the sky behind the black bulk of the keep. It seemed as usual. The cry of the sentry on the tower came to our cars, dimmed with distance.

  “I can see nothing amiss,” I said, disappointed.

  “We will rest awhile. You will see the result of our labors when the tenants of yonder house begin to stir.” He turned to the house, and when inside, he fell into his bed beside the quietly weeping Dame.

  We woke to screams and curses. I sat, and Gillam sprang to his feet.

  “Pack up the things we must have, Marga,” he said to the wond
ering Dame. “We will leave this place almost immediately, and there will be none to question our going. Pell and I must tend the forge before we go.”

  She asked no question but began bustling about at once. I could see that she had no objection to leaving this spot behind her forever.

  We entered the smithy with the first rays of the sun. Someone hammered upon our door a moment afterward, crying, “Gillam! There is need at the keep! All are trapped there, inside the walls, and none can even so much as leap down from the parapet!”

  Gillam grinned, his face ghastly. “Tell Lord Roderick that I will not come!” he shouted. “And be damned to him.”

  We emptied out the bits of charcoal and packed the forge-bowl into the cart. The anvil strained us both, but it went in too. All the tools, those precious things, were wrapped in leather and placed neatly in a big chest. When we had that in place, and the shop was stripped of everything useful, Gillam backed the old horse that had hauled so many loads of charcoal and metal for us between the cart-shafts. We hitched him, and he drew the cart out into the new sunlight.

  I waited in the now-familiar smithy. In a bit Gillam returned with Lilibet in his arms. Where the anvil had stood, he laid her tenderly upon a sheepskin from her bed. At her head was the banded keep. At her feet he set into the dirt floor an iron cross that he had forged for the gate of the Lord’s chapel.

  Then he showed me where to dig, where to pry. We worked in a frenzy, loosing stones at key points in the structure. The stones began creaking about us.

  He bent and kissed his niece on the forehead. I touched her hand. Then we left her there, went outside, and brought the entire building down over her. No noble Lady ever had a finer tomb. None that would ever dig through that rubble to find her—or that ensorcelled model of the castle above the village. It would remain there, secure and undisturbed, while serfs and freemen struggled to free their Lord from his own house.

  The last of the dust had not settled when we pulled away from our own home, out of the low gateway, into the dusty road. The cries of those trapped in the keep filled all the air. The Dame looked quizzically at her husband.

  “Will they ever escape?” she asked. Her eyes told me that she had a notion of the thing that we had done that night.

  Gillam’s face was as grim as the stone of the crag as he whipped up the horse. “Not until they go forth as ghosts,” he said.

  The Dame reached behind and patted my arm. “Good. Let them rot!” she murmured. The road wound ahead, exciting to me who had never traveled past the fields. There was always work for a smith... and his helper. Wherever we might go. we would prosper, I felt certain. It would have been better if Lilibet had gone, too, bubbling with laughter at everything new, but she was, at least, safe from harm now.

  I looked up at the crag, the castle shining in the morning brightness. No eye could see the spell that bound it round, yet my knowing seemed to visualize the bands of metal centered with lily-crests that imprisoned those within.

  I crossed myself. They were in Fate’s hands now. The Dark One had nothing to do with it.

  WHO ACCUSES THIS WOMAN?

  Did you ever read the Malleus Maleficarum? This was the Inquisitors’ handbook for dealing with witches. Talk about ridiculous. And why did those cretins think that if witchcraft had been real the practitioners wouldn’t have wrought vengeance against those persecuting them?

  Though it was still very muddy from the torrential rains of the night before, Tenacity Cobble was out and about. Others, younger than she by far, kept to their hearthsides on cool, damp mornings like this, but the straight carriage and firm gait of the old woman spoke of an almost supernatural lack of rheumatism.

  Her bead turned back and forth, as she scanned the sides of the pathway with sharp black eyes. The basket on her arm was already half-full of new dande­lions and other herbs, and now and again she would dart aside and dig energetically with her trowel or snip with her small scissors and stow away another treasure.

  All the while, she talked. “There’s Mistress Blakeby hanging out her wash, Aristotle,” she com­mented as they passed that harsh-tongued lady’s house. “I wonder if her goodman came home last night—he’s seeing the chambermaid at the inn, you know.”

  Aristotle grunted noncommittally. He had lived with Tenacity long enough to know that her intuitions outran other folk’s certainties. His yellow eyes were carefully neutral, as he stopped to bite the top out of a thistle. As he munched and waited for his mistress to dig another root from the wayside, he could see Mis­tress Blakeby staring after them. This was another thing that he was used to, though it made him ob­scurely uneasy. Goat though he was, he was fond of his strange companion, and he felt that many of those who stared after the two of them felt far differently. Reaching about for another bite of thistle, he found himself looking down the path at the person who made him more uneasy than any other. The goat raised his head and moved across the path to nudge his mistress with his nose. She looked up and frowned.

  “Oh, perish and drat!” she muttered. “I could lack for Thomas Watley with much resignation, Aris­totle. Forever he’s cajoling me for money, knowing full well that I promised his Uncle Hezekiah, even as he lay dying, that not one penny would I provide to that young scoundrel while breath remained in my body. Hush! Here he comes!”

  Aristotle obediently hushed, though he felt that any comment he might make upon Tenacity’s nephew would be better made with a good butt from his hard head. There was something about Thomas Watley that made his hair feel prickly along his backbone.

  Perhaps it was his attempt to look taller than he was. A short, stocky man cannot appear long and lean, however much he tries to, and the effort gave him a strange air. It might have been the avid look in his watery gray eyes. Then perhaps it was his voice, which alternated between overly-jovial bellows and pleading whines, at least when he approached his uncle’s widow. Aristotle found him crude and offen­sive, and he suspected that his mistress felt likewise, though she was always civil to the young man.

  “Dear Aunt, what a pleasant chance! I had thought to visit you today, but I find you out, bright and cheerful, on this wet morning.” He was bellow­ing, as usual.

  “Dear Thomas, if you were thinking to find me changed, it is as well that you were spared the full journey to my house,” Tenacity answered. “My word, once given, can only be released by him to whom I gave it. Your uncle, may he rest in peace, is beyond asking for such release, so I must regretfully refuse you. It may soothe your feelings to know that I have made a will, since last I saw you. I did not promise your uncle not to bequeath the property and the money to you, and I have decided to do so. Judge Barlow prepared the papers for me a week agone, and I have signed them.”

  Thomas grew red, then pale. “It is a gracious gesture, Aunt,” he said, “but that very Judge Barlow is the cause of my need. He demands payment, or he will foreclose upon my farm. My wife and my children will be left destitute.”

  “If that is so, then bring them to me, and I will shelter them until you can find work. But I cannot break my promise. I have done as best I can with the only thing left to me, Thomas. You will simply have to resign yourself to the loss of your land, or else to arrange otherwise with the judge. I am going into the hills after spring herbs, and unless you are eager for a long walk, you had best go home and consider.”

  Her nephew stepped aside, and the old woman moved past and turned up the steeper track that led to the hill that bastioned the eastward side of the village. Aristotle brushed against the man as he went by, and Thomas found himself staring into those yellow eyes that seemed to know more of his innermost thoughts than was seemly for a beast.

  All the way up the hill, Aristotle kept looking back to watch Thomas. Something troubled the goat, something about Thomas Watley. But the man went down the path steadily, turning into the wider road that led through the village. The only thing that seemed strange
to the watcher was the fact that the man stopped for a long while when he reached the gal­lows that had been raised beside the track.

  The hills were full of burgeoning growth, however, and the two who searched there soon forgot about their encounter. The basket filled rapidly, and Aristotle filled even faster, enjoying the young leaves that were just beginning to appear on the hawthorns and the berry vines. By noon, the old woman and her goat were back at her home, and a batch of dandelion greens was sim­mering in her pot, while bread baked on the hearth­stone.

  Tenacity took her egg basket in hand and went out toward the hen-run, leaving Aristotle dozing on the doorstep. His sleep was interrupted by a step on the flags of the walk, and he opened one wicked yellow eye to see Mistress Cradshaw coming. If Mistress Blakeby was a gossip and a scold, Mistress Cradshaw was the troublemaker who fed her habit. Aristotle knew them both well, both from his own and from Tenacity’s ob­servations. At their last encounter, the woman had fed him a tidbit, pretending friendship. He had trustingly accepted a leaf that had been coated in something that burned his sensitive throat like coals of fire.

  She was burdened with a bundle from which peeped scraps of colored cloth, and Aristotle knew that she was there to ask his mistress to draw her a pattern on the bit of paper she held in her hand. With a sigh of regret for his lost nap, the goat rose to his feet and watched her approach. With the steep, wet path behind her, her hands full, and her mind on other things, she was in his power, at long last.

  The thump of his head into her middle was sheer delight. He stepped back and peered down at his vic­tim, as she sat in a puddle, stunned for a moment. When she rose to flee, he thumped her again, from behind. This sent her into a galloping, staggering run down the path, as she tried to keep her balance without losing her grip on the bundle of precious quilt-scraps. Her voice raised in a cry of mingled rage and terror, the woman fled toward the village, leaving a thin trail of colored bits behind her.