Dillen trotted behind her, falling behind as she skimmed over the broken earth that hindered his passage. He rolled himself over a large trunk and fell heavily into the mud on the other side.
“You are clumsy,” she teased.
“I have no wings, but I am glad that I amuse you so.”
“Alas, truly, you are not blessed as I am,” she said with a look of real pity in her large blue eyes. She fluttered her gossamer wings. “It must be a sorrow for you to look upon the birds of the air and the butterflies of the wood and feel your imprisonment upon the ground so keenly.”
“We make do.”
Shaarlyot nodded, a pensive look settling upon her doll-like face. “As you must.”
Dillen followed her for the better part of an hour. He was forced to stop several times to catch his breath. He scolded himself inwardly again and again that he had allowed himself to become so used to riding a horse that his stamina had declined so dramatically. He was grateful to the fairy woman who had become his guide. He had been traversing the forest in almost entirely wrong direction for much of the night and would never have discovered his error before morning.
They came to the mouth of a cave, hidden behind a large boulder and a drapery of vines.
“The Green Lady is within this cave?” Dillen asked, incredulous.
Shaarlyot laughed and her wings rippled along with the peals of her laughter. “No, don’t be silly! This is the way to her. Faster when one of us needs to go afoot. We take the Root Road now.”
“The Root Road?”
“The road beneath the roots of the trees, of course.”
The sylph disappeared through the mouth. Dillen stood, wary of entering the black portal, and then, berating himself for his faintness of heart, strode in, unwilling to be left behind by a mere slip of an airborne girl.
He followed her, along a winding pathway that led ever downward, until he came upon what seemed to be an amphitheater hewn inside the rock. He stood on a ledge; below him was a slender river of swift-flowing water. The walls of the cavern glittered with embedded gems. A faint glow emanated from lamps ensconced along the sides.
“There must be a king’s ransom of gems in here,” Dillen marveled. “This is wealth of a kind I’ve never seen.” He turned to his companion. “And you just leave them all in place?”
“Where else should they be kept?” the sylph countered. “Locked up in a vault where none but their owner can view them?”
“That would make sense. What if someone should try to steal them. . .” but Dillen’s voice faltered as he saw her face cloud with disapproval.
“You think according the rules of your own society, where money buys things, and things are worth more than the wonders of the natural world which birthed us all.” She shook her head and smiled sadly. “You humans understand nothing.”
Chagrined, Dillen kept quiet for a while before he finally spoke. “Do we follow the river?”
Shaarlyot nodded. “Yes. We will take a boat and let the current carry us downriver. Follow me.”
The sylph led him down a narrow staircase cut into the rock of the cavern wall. At the river’s edge, she found a little wickerwork coracle. Inside was a short oar.
“Get in,” she ordered.
Dillen looked uncertainly at the coracle. “Will it hold me? Is it watertight? In my country such things are made of leather.”
Shaarlyot shot him an angry look and snapped her wings imperiously behind her. “Of course they are made of leather in your country! You use the tanned hides of beasts, just like the ones that inhabit the Lady’s Realm. And you have the nerve to call yourself one of the ‘Noble Peoples’! Ha!” The anger soon drained from her face, and she sighed. “It was Keris’s idea to call for your aid. Not mine.” She shrugged her small shoulders. “Come!”
*****
The coracle moved downstream on its own, the force of the current pushing them along through a high and broad tunnel water-cut from the surrounding granite. Dillen paddled a little, hoping to steer the tiny craft, but it seemed to be determined to follow its own course. For an hour, it seemed, they rode the sunless river, their way lit by gemstones seemingly illuminated by their own internal light. Ahead, Dillen spied a sheet of falling water, rippling in the sunshine outside. The coracle plunged through, and he was drenched. Shaarlyot had escaped the boat just beforehand, and she hovered above him, completely dry, her trilling laughter filling his ears.
“You might have warned me,” he said.
This only made her laughter more intense. “Oh, silly fool of a man! Do you think I expected that? I fly around such things. I forgot for a moment that you are not so blessed as am I.” She fluttered her wings for emphasis. “Follow. The Lady is not far.”
Dillen stepped heavily onto the bank and trudged through the mud until he reached level ground. Soon he came upon what he took to be the war camp of the folk of the wood. They stood in an open glade. Morning had come and the sun was out. He recognized, from his study of his bestiary, many of the creatures that were about him. There were centaurs, grim and hostile, standing side-by-side with naiads of lake and stream; as well as what could only be described as sentient, mobile trees. Sprites and sylphs like Shaarlyot flitted above them all. There was a scattering of elves, haughty in demeanor. A few Men there were also. They were attired unlike those of the world outside the wood, but they had in them the manner and bearing of priests. Dillen took them to be druids, overseers of the Green Lady’s cult.
With them were stranger things still to Dillen, if anything could best the former in oddity. A mound of earth, solid and squat with stubby arms and legs, plodded up to the circle that had formed around Dillen. Beside it writhed a pillar of living flame. Over both circled a gale that had taken on a life of its own.
None but Shaarlyot seemed friendly.
“This is what you summoned to help us in our war, Keris?” The voice came from a wizened centaur. “He looks as if he can barely stand.”
Dillen felt as if a thousand eyes were upon him, studying him, and judging him.
The man called Keris, a druid by the look of him, gestured, pleading for forbearance. “There are more of them on the way, but now they need us to help them before they can help us. We have a common enemy. Don’t forget that! To preserve the balance, we must be ready to fight beside others as required.”
Another creature, of man-shape, but diminutive, came forward, and was more pointed in his questioning than the centaur. “These are the people that hunt my kind for sport. But for the Lady’s favor, we gnomes might all be gone. On behalf of the Lady, you and you alone asked them to come here, Keris.” The gnome gestured to the other nonhumans around him. “We, however, did not. I see no reason to risk ourselves for them.”
Keris’s shoulders slumped. “I know what travails you have suffered in the World Without. I am from that world too, and you must trust me when I tell that not all Men are wicked. We can work with some of them against our mutual foe, who even now stands at our border, plotting another assault on our lines. This human’s people have already engaged the enemy and drawn off a portion of their strength. That is why we have felt a slackening of pressure along the front.”
A naiad, looking like nothing so much as the tiny image of her kind in his bestiary come to life, tilted her head disdainfully as she gazed, narrow-eyed, at him. “Perhaps he is not wicked, as you say, Keris. Perhaps too his folk fight the same enemy we do. Yet he wears upon his feet boots made of the skin of once-living creatures. His sword, too, is sheathed in the same. Would you be so forgiving if he came clothed in the skin of one your own kind?”
Keris turned to look at Dillen, who knew that he must cut a pathetic figure. His helmet was dented, his surcoat was filthy, and his armor was encrusted with drying mud. “He does not know,” Keris offered. “He does not know our ways.”
“Then he must be instructed,” said a clear voice, deep and commanding. Emerging from behind the centaurs was a woman, regal in bearing and taller t
han any other person Dillen had ever seen before. The folk of Galahir either knelt or paid homage as they could to their queen. The Green Lady, ethereal and beautiful, came and stood before Dillen. Her pallor was ghostly, and yet she seemed vibrantly alive all the same. The woman, magnificently crowned with long, lustrous hair the color of ripened wheat, towered above the young paladin, who felt like a mere child in her presence. In her face, he saw revealed all of that was uncanny and wondrous in the natural world. The Lady’s face was kind, and then stern and forbidding; it was a visage of a woman in her prime with flashes beneath of a young girl, and then of an old woman. Very soon it had reverted to its former sweetness, and then changed once more. Her’s was the hand that gave freely and the hand that took away. She was the sower of life and the reaper of death. She was abundance and dearth. The glorious bounty of summer and the grim scarcity of winter. She was all these things at once. The Lady personified the endless dance of life and death, that Man, in his naive simplicity, called ‘Nature.’
“This is one of the Men you called to come to our aid, Keris?” She asked, never removing her eyes from Dillen. “This one does not look like much.”
“He has seen better days, Lady,” Keris said. The druid seemed embarrassed by Dillen’s tattered appearance. He must have hoped for the grand paladins of the Golden Horn to stand beside his people against the Abyssal demons. Instead, Keris could only present a bedraggled young knight to his queen.
“I know. I have watched him for some time.” The Lady’s eyes bored into Dillen, as if she was seeing inside him and through him. Dillen, for all of his callow youth, saw now that she was far beyond his own estimation. Why, he had recently puzzled, if she had known of his plight and that of his comrades, had she not send aid to him or them sooner? It was a naive question formed from thin tissue of his own limited understanding. He perceived at once that within her was a primordial essence that defied mortal comprehension. She was a being of the Time Before Time, a Celestian; not merely old, but ageless in a manner that even the elves and the other ancient peoples of the world were not.
There was a hint of a smile at the edges of her perfect mouth. “You are now in need of our help?”
“Yes, Lady. The host I come from has been set upon by the forces of the enemy of both our peoples. We came to help you, but we find ourselves in need of your succor. The creatures of the Abyss threaten to overwhelm us. I have come here to beg your aid.”
She seemed to consider his plea for what seemed an hour. Or perhaps it all happened in an instant. Looking into her face, Dillen felt as if he were gazing into eternity.
She smiled, and her face was radiant with kindness and understanding. “You shall have it,” she said. Dillen felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him.
The Lady smiled again and was silent for a moment, submerged in unfathomable thought. Then she spoke. “There is one price that I ask in return for saving your comrades.”
“Name your price,” Dillen said, without hesitation.
*****
The remnant of the legion of Basilea stood in the center of a clearing, atop a low, treeless hill. They were surrounded by the warriors of the Abyss who outnumbered them many times over. In the dark of the night, the scattered bands of the Basilean army had united to make a final stand. They would stand back to back until the last man fell. The banners of the Shining Ones were still held aloft in proud defiance of the enemy, but these had become torn beneath the barrage of missiles that assailed the Basilean soldiery.
Stevven wondered what was left of the legion. Less than half, that was certain. Among the dead was the dictator, his decapitated corpse respectfully laid in repose in the center of the dwindling host. “Still with me, Arkbald?”
“Still here. No better place to be.” How the boy remained on his feet despite all the blood he had lost amazed Stevven. It seemed that Arkbald must have stood upright out of sheer Sparthan stubbornness.
Brother Bartolomo had been grievously wounded in his left eye. A bloody bandage covered it, but a trickle of blood nevertheless escaped and fell down his cheek. “Missing an eye will make archery a bit more difficult for me,” he groused to Tebald.
“You were never much of an archer anyway. You can always hurl rocks instead,” Tebald consoled. The Hearth Knight pointed with his sword, notched and dulled in the constant fighting, at the foe that hung about the edge of the woods to reform their ranks. “In any event, I don’t think you’re going to have much time to miss your skills. They form for another charge. We can’t take much more. Alas, Dillen has been long gone, nigh a full day. If he had found the Galahirians, they would have come by now. I think instead that he is dead.”
“Have faith please, my good brothers,” Stevven said to them. The Cortrian had been wounded in several places, and blood drenched his surcoat, but he was animated with fiery determination. “Dillen will get through with our plea. We will be saved. We have but to wait.”
“You have much faith in your friend,” Tebald said, unconvinced.
Arkbald limped up to stand beside Stevven. “He’ll be back.”
“Then he’d better return to us soon,” Bartolomo said. “Here they come again, and the one that took the dictator’s head is with them.”
*****
“Onward my comrades!” cried Zelgarag. “Feast upon the flesh and bones of the hateful foe! Avenge yourselves for all of the hurts they have done you! Let them know that we of the Abyss are the true children of the gods! Soon, we will be the lords of this world!” He held the gory head of the enemy general whom he had slain earlier in the day aloft at the end of a cruelly-barbed spear, and showed the sightless eyes of the dead Basilean what was left of his army.
There came a throaty cheer from the assembled warriors around the Abyssal champion. Zelgarag exulted in the triumph that he knew would soon be his. Damathana, by his side, beamed in joyful anticipation of the annihilation of the Basileans. About them stood the surviving wretches of the ferocious battle. They’d lost far more than had the warriors of the Golden Horn, but that was only to be expected. These degenerates were no match, one for one, with the paladins and men-at-arms of Basilea. That had not mattered. In the ambush, with weight of numbers on their side, they had pulverized the enemy army, and herded them into an ever-shrinking ball. The march route, along which Zelgarag’s minions had harried the embattled enemy, was littered with many more bodies of the Abyssal fallen than those of the insufferable Basileans; but that was of no consequence to Damathana. What mattered was that her plan would succeed, and that she would rise with Zelgarag, as his consort, in the ranks of the Hell’s Army.
She watched in awe as Zelgarag raced forward, long muscular legs carrying him crashing into the diminished Basilean ranks. Beside him came his guard, and Damathana herself, who was as eager to spill the last drop of Basilean blood as any other. His sword, black as the darkest pit in the Abyss, struck out in a dark blur, leaving two unlucky Basilean footsoldiers headless. On the return stroke, he severed the arm of a third and then beheaded the same man before his spear had time to fall to the blood-soaked earth.
Damathana’s heart raced. With eyes that did not blink, she watched his masterful performance on the field of battle. Zelgarag was like a god striding amidst mortals, delivering death to all around him. Within a minute of attacking the Basileans, their shieldwall began to falter, and he and his guard stood amongst them, a salient of gory-red death in the wavering white and gold ranks of the host of the Golden Horn. Was there anything that Zelgarag might not accomplish with her at his side?
More Basileans fell, their bodies ripped apart by the crushing blows of his midnight blade. Damathana gave them the credit they were due. They did not cower as this dark angel of death came upon them, and if they felt fear, they did not show it on their faces, which remained fixed with expressions stoic and resolute.
Of the offal that composed the bulk of her own army, she saw only the demented grins and maniac smiles of men warped and twisted almost beyond recogn
ition as human. Their loathsomeness offended her, and she felt no regret as they were cut down in droves by the stabbing spears and swinging swords of the enemy. Once this was all over, and Zelgarag and she were elevated in rank, she would never need to engage so closely with such things again, except to order them to their deaths in the Abyss’s interest. They were serving their purpose, nothing more.
*****
Bartolomo had never been given to worry or foreboding, but now, he was overcome with dread. The general of the Abyssal army, a champion of its kind and the same bestial demon who’d slain Andorset earlier in the day, snarled a challenge to the dwindling band of paladins. Brother Tebald, stalwart and valiant, had proudly accepted. Bartolomo’s admiration for his brother’s courage warred fitfully with fear for his life.
He looked on as Tebald stood toe-to-toe with the terrifying creature. Their blades met in a shower of sparks, as each strove to get past the other’s defense. Tebald aimed a cut at the champion’s neck. It parried easily and knocked Tebald’s sword back, following up with a flurry of blows. Tebald stopped the last slash with his sword just inches from his head and stared into the glowing red eyes of the Abyssal general. They were alive with hate and rage, but also a fierce intelligence. It kicked him in the knee and his leg buckled. Tebald sprawled on the ground, face down in the mud. The champion raised his blood-slick sword high above his head to deliver a blow that would sever Tebald’s head.
Challenge or no, Bartolomo could not fail to intervene. Inches from its target, the black blade’s descent stopped, halted by Bartolomo’s intruding sword. “No you don’t!” the paladin knight bellowed as he knocked back the giant creature’s weapon.
The champion snorted in surprise and stepped back a pace, allowing Tebald time to regain his feet. Bartolomo helped him stand, and together they counterattacked with all the furious skill befitting lord knights of their chapters.
Tales of Mantica Page 32
