TWENTY-FOUR
Simon was fifteen years old when he stumbled away from Vivian and her stone table, and started back down the bluff, blindly following the trail. After taking only about twenty steps—or so it seemed to him—he was thirty years old again. He began to remember that he was only reliving events that had happened to him years ago.
Only?
He slowed to a stop, looking round him and trying to orient himself. Yes, he was in the same woods, outside the castle. Though he tried to shake it, the vision of his experience in the past persisted strongly. In one part of his mind he was still just fifteen. He was going to swim and wade his way back across the river, letting it do what it could to cleanse him of the dirt and sweat of the day just past. When he got back to his aunt’s and uncle’s house, the adults wouldn’t be back from their meeting yet, and he’d go right upstairs to his small room and fall into his narrow bed. He knew that the image of Vivian was coming with him as never before, and that it would draw him back again and again to the deserted grotto, where he would never have to worry about Gregory appearing in the bright daytime. Where, on the stone table, Vivian’s shape could be brought bursting out of Simon’s imagination with intensity never before realized, to be made to do exactly what he wanted her to do…
At last it faded, his vision of that exhausted fifteen-year-old walking through the twilight. Simon was thirty, and though he stood in the same woods it was now dawn not twilight, and he was no longer on the trail that wound so familiarly down the bluff. He raised a hand to his face, assuring himself of beard-stubble on his cheeks. He was dressed in the pseudo-magician’s costume he’d put on for the night before—
Ah, yes. The night before. The last thing Simon could remember before the strangely realistic memory-flashback was himself in the castle, entering the hidden tunnel again at Vivian’s urging. It could lead him, she had said, to many places, many times. It had looped him back into his own memory, and then… somehow it had delivered him here outside the castle? Through the grotto again, he supposed. He couldn’t remember.
Vivian had ordered him to find an object. She’d called it simply the Sword, without explanation, as if there were no possibility of his not understanding. And on some deep level of his mind he did understand what he was commanded to look for. He hadn’t found it yet, just because it was hidden with superlative magic. But he would find it in time, if he kept on looking. He knew that the power existed in him to see, find, anything.
Unconsciously he had slowly started walking again, slowly shuffling rather, through the woods. And now he halted once more, trying to orient himself. Just where was he? Somewhere not far from the castle, certainly. The wooded land was quite limited in extent.
Gradually increasing light assured Simon that the day was coming, if it was not already here behind the clouds. During the night it had rained heavily, and the air was still full of mist. Last year’s dead leaves made a thick sodden carpet on the ground, else he’d probably be ankle deep in mud. Every leaf and twig in sight seemed to be dripping steadily. But the sky no longer really threatened, and innumerable birds were up and being cheerful. The show must go on. Oh God. At least he’d tried his best, last night, to give a good performance. That was something that they could carve on his tombstone.
The sky was solid with light cloud or high fog, pearly gray and almost featureless. Simon was standing at the top of a deep, tree-grown slope. Of course it had to be the familiar bluff, though now with the odd light and the surface fog the decline appeared somewhat too gradual. Downslope, where the fog naturally was even thicker, the river remained completely invisible. Somewhere on the far shore a heavy truck was negotiating the highway; one moment the sound came very clearly, and the next it had been completely cut off. An effect of curves and hills, maybe, or some trick of foggy atmosphere. The truck made Simon think of all the lucky people over there, including most of the population of the world, who’d never heard of Vivian.
He wanted to simply walk away from her, and keep on walking. He would, as soon as he’d found Margie. Something told him that would not be easy, but he’d do it, and then the two of them would walk away. At the moment he felt capable of rebelling against Vivian’s orders—of course he hadn’t really tried as yet. It couldn’t possibly be as easy as it felt right now. She wouldn’t let him go. His special powers—and he could no longer doubt he had them—made him far too valuable for that.
A small bird flew close to him, in a half circle. There was something odd about its wing movements; could it have been a bat? Now it was gone again.
Leaning against a tree, Simon reached out with his free hand in the motion of a man trying to catch some fog. This was the world, the existence of psychic powers demonstrated, such stuff as dreams are made on. How did that whole passage go, in Shakespeare? Something about the fabric of a dream. But it would be too much, if the whole world-dream turned out to be a nightmare.
The bluff here was really not that steep, he thought. If the slope had been just a little more moderate, someone would probably have made a pasture out of it. Simon’s knees were trembling. He gave a grunt of near-exhaustion, as if Vivian had really made him reenact that whole day of fifteen years ago, and sat down on the darkened stump where someone had long ago cut down a tree.
And almost jumped up again, when he thought he heard a broken cry, in a child’s voice, or a woman’s. It told of terror, but it was gone again in a moment, leaving no sense of the direction or distance that it had come from. And now, for just a moment as he peered through the fog, Simon thought he caught a glimpse of a ruined tower, broken and jumbled masonry, set a little back from the edge of the bluff not far ahead of him. Simultaneously he was aware of silent horror and pain, human anguish preserved as if by some arcane method of recording. Could the building have something to do with the old artists’ colony? It had seemed too large for that. In the next moment Simon was unsure that the tower had been there physically at all. The sense of recorded suffering persisted, though.
Now for the first time he saw the rays of the morning sun, only momentarily visible through clouds. And when they were gone the figure of a lean man dressed in black was moving slowly toward him along the edge of the bluff, through wreaths of morning mist.
Simon stood up. But he could sense nothing about the approaching figure that demanded flight or a defensive confrontation. There was potential danger, but it was not overriding. There was potential benefit as well; and there was strangeness.
The man, as he approached, looked at least equally puzzled as to what he should make of Simon. He offered a deep-voiced greeting in French. Simon was surprised but managed to reply in the same language. The man gave a little shake of his head and switched to modern English. “I think you are a sojourner here, even as I am.”
“Here?” Simon didn’t know at first how to interpret that. “On the south bank of the Sauk, you mean?”
The man’s dark eyes gazed at him with interest. “Is that where you think you are?”
“I’ve been—wandering.”
“Indeed.” The other smiled faintly; he had an engaging way about him. “I also. I have been touring castles. My name is Talisman, by the way. And I think you must be Simon Hill, professional conjurer. Sent here by the woman you know as Vivian Littlewood.”
“Are you working for her? What name do you know her by?”
“I certainly am not. Another name for her, a much older one, is Nimue.”
Simon had the impression of hearing that name before somewhere. Now, somewhere in the fogbound middle distance, a man’s voice had started singing. The language again was French, to Simon’s ears oddly accented. The melody had to be nothing other than some simple old folk song; but Simon felt a chill.
He asked: “If I’m not on the Sauk, where am I?”
Talisman was watching him closely. “At the moment, on the border of Brittany.”
Many places, many times. “And… that river down there?” The more the mist cleared and the light g
rew, the stranger the world looked. For example, there was a structure in the distance—farther than the broken tower he’d glimpsed earlier—that looked very much like an old factory chimney.
“The river is the Sevre,” said Talisman, in the tones of one cautiously giving guidance. He turned his head and nodded in the other direction, away from the edge of the bluff. “And if we were to walk a few paces that way, we will find ourselves standing on the bank of a moat.”
“A moat.”
“I told you that I have been touring castles. Not of my own volition, unfortunately. I nave even revisited, briefly, my own former residence.” Talisman sighed. “And, before that, the house of evil that is now reconstructed on the Sauk. I saw it in its original location, where the earliest stones were set in place by men named Comorr and Falerin—ah, you have heard of those names, at least. From Nimue, I take it.”
“I’ve heard of them.” Simon moistened his lips. “I don’t want anything to do with them, or Nimue either. What now?”
Talisman gestured in the direction of the ruined tower, now once more partially visible through mists. “Now this. This was once part of a great domain—the Chateau Tiffauges. Does that name convey anything to you?”
“The name? No.” But ancient horror, preserved in time, still drifted with the mist.
“It should, perhaps.” Behind Talisman, as the morning fog dissipated further, the broken tower was once more to be seen. It was immense, like the stump of some bombed office building. “But we are obviously too late to see this establishment at the peak of its fame—if fame is the proper word. I deduce, from various considerations, that we are now standing sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century.”
Simon didn’t doubt it. Many place, many times. Looking away from the river now, he could see the regular depression in the land that Talisman had called a moat; it was deeper and wider than Simon had imagined moats to be. Great trees growing on the bottom of it had their crowns at his eye level. Beyond it he could just make out the vague shape of the keep, more than half ruined, not quite deserted. In one exposed interior corner a thatched hut had been built, and the voice of the singing peasant seemed to come from there.
A picture of something silvery, utterly beautiful, came and went in Simon’s mind. Almost he managed to grasp where it was. But before he could quite do that it was gone again. He turned toward the ruined chateau, stretching out one hand and letting it fall. “The Sword,” he murmured.
Talisman came a step closer to him. “Yes, that is what we are both seeking, are we not? We have both been sent here for that purpose, even if the one who sent me did not do so consciously. At first I was surprised by the idea that the Sword might be here—of all places.”
The last three words contained an emphasis that made Simon look more closely at the speaker. “I don’t understand. What is this place?”
“If Joan the Maid,” said Talisman, “once truly had the Sword in her hand—as I have come to believe she did—then what more natural than for her to leave it to one of her trusted lieutenants, a powerful man who could be expected to survive the English wars? On the other hand, it might have been stolen from her by such a man, who really saw in it no more than magic to be turned to his own advantage. And once it was in his hands, by gift or theft, he might well have brought it here, to the seat of his power, his personal dominion.” Falcon paused. “He was a Marshal of France, and his name was Gilles de Rais.”
TWENTY-FIVE
During the long hike Margie had formed a more or less definite mental picture of the Strong Fort. In her mind she saw it as something like a miniature castle. The reality was quite different: a broad and gentle hilltop, fortified by two concentric earth-and-timber walls, each higher than a man. Lush grass covered the lower portion of the hill, and still grew in patches between the broad paths and roads and barren spots that had been worn over most of the upper portion by feet and hooves and wagon wheels. The area surrounded by the inner wall was several acres in extent and contained two deep wells, plus enough simple buildings to qualify the place as a small town.
When Artos and his party arrived, escorting Margie and the Ladies, tents were already going up between and beside the permanent buildings, to help shelter the burgeoning population. The place was badly crowded, but Margie gathered that no one expected that to last for more than a few days. A big, decisive battle was expected soon, one in which Artos would of course thrash the invaders, among them his own traitorous bastard son Medraut. There was also low-voiced gossip about Artos’ wife, whom Margie had not yet seen. Her infidelity was an open secret.
Margie had not yet finished helping the Ladies get settled in their temporary House—the usual occupants had been moved into tents for the duration—when a man came with word that Artos wanted to see her at once. She found the leader dismounted, surrounded by people wanting to make reports and/or ask favors. But his business with Margie had evidently a high priority in his own mind. As soon as he saw her he raised his voice, putting off the others, and came to take her by the arm. His first words were: “I’ve not seen him yet, have you?”
She had no doubt of who Artos meant. “No, I’ve no idea where he is.”
“I’ve managed to find out that much, at least.”
Artos led her to the main street of the miniature town, a rutted road going straight out through the main gate of the inner wall; after that they walked a quarter-circle between walls, then out through the main gate of the outer defense. Despite his relatively short legs, Artos set a pace that was hard to match. He paused twice on the way to shout orders to workmen about defenses. He and Margie dodged incoming wagons laden with what Margie supposed must be food to sustain a siege, or military supplies of some sort. When they had got outside the outer wall, the scene still bustled with activity. More tents had been put up out here, as Margie had noted on her way in; she realized now that these must be temporary storage facilities for non-essentials, and housing of a sort for various hangers-on.
On the outer rim of this suburb, a number of men were gathered around a small lean-to tent, one side of it supported by a wagon; from the sour smells wafting from the direction of the tent. Margie realized that it must be the establishment of an itinerant wineseller. When some of the men saw Artos approaching, the little crowd dispersed like morning mist.
But for once the leader showed no interest in what his troops might be doing. There was an aged and mellowed dungheap not far from the wineseller’s tent, and a crumpled figure in clothing once fine, now badly stained, was taking advantage of its softness. Artos marched straight to the figure and turned it over. To Margie the face of the old man, dozing and drooling, looked definitely familiar; though he was younger now than the last time she’d seen him, his hair and beard not so far gone in moldy whiteness, indeed still containing broad streaks of black. It was borne in on her that once even this man had been truly young; and somehow that was one of the most eerie thoughts of all.
“Wake up,” said Artos, gently cuffing the old man’s face.
Ambrosius woke up. He looked at Artos, whether with comprehension or not would have been hard to say.
Artos said: “People tell me that you have some plan of going to Londinium.”
The old man grunted. He hardly glanced at Margie. His red-rimmed eyes were still the color of storm-cleared skies, but not yet deeply hooded by age-carved lids.
Artos told him: “The roads are far from safe. And I can spare no escort for you. You understand that?”
“Understand that, of course I understand that.” Margie could recognize the voice at once. “But I do you no good by staying here. Not any more. And no one’s going to bother me on the road.”
“How do you…” Artos let it trail off. There was a little silence. Then he gripped the old man again, and raised him a little, helping him settle into a more comfortable sitting position. The old manure he sat on was as soft and dry as dust.
Artos remained squatting by the elder’s side. “Father,” he s
aid quietly, and Margie understood that the word used did not denote true parentage. “Father, I want you to speak seriously with me for a little now. Then do whatever you must do.”
Ambrosius either didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand. “Go ‘way. I gotta get some rest, then it’ll be time for me to leave.”
“No, hear me first. I won’t try any more to keep you confined. I won’t try to take away your drink. I see now that those efforts did no good.”
“Speakin’ of drink…”
“First, tell me something about this young woman you see before you.”
Those remarkable eyes turned to regard Margie. She felt a nervous shudder, that ceased as abruptly as it had come. It was followed by the strangest sensation, as if some gentle bird the size of a small aircraft, as silent as it was invisible, had just flown over her head, almost brushing her hair with its unseen wingtips.
“Pretty thing,” said Ambrosius, regarding Margie tenderly. He spoke now in some tongue far older than the one in common use here, but she still understood him perfectly.
“What’s that?” said Artos, who hadn’t understood. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
The elder ignored him for the moment. “Little one, do I know you? Lately I’ve been forgetting things.”
Margie would have bristled at being called “little one” by any man of her own world that she had ever met. But when the appellation came from Ambrosius, and in the particular ancient tongue that he had chosen—well, she would have felt guilty of bad manners, if not worse, if she’d objected. She replied only with a gesture, one she knew would signify agreement to any speaker of that ancient tongue.
Ambrosius was momentarily intrigued. “How is it you can understand me, one or your tender years? No, forget I asked that. It’s often wiser not to know… tell me one thing only, are you from Nimue?”
Artos sighed; probably he had caught the name at the end. Margie said: “No, grandfather.” The honorific title came quite naturally.
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