• • •
ONE DAY MOLLY ANNOUNCED, “ ’Twill be tonight.” She told the troupe to bring the draft animals in from where they grazed. She had them hitched up, and then directed the rearrangement of the wagons, so that they formed a rough triangle near the great boulder. Unhitched again, the beasts were tethered tightly within the space defined by the chocked wagons.
“For aren’t they all king bulls, and used to their own lordship, and inclined to attack any other such, and yet under the Horned Man’s command to come and go in peace. Each of them will be like a haystack in a dry summer—ready to burn at a spark, and I’m not wanting poor Milo or one of the others to be in their path when they’re milling about.”
They ate early, and the women made preparations, setting up the small stone with the statue of the Lord of the Beasts, warning the men to stay by the wagons and say nothing. Sweetlove was put into the large wagon, Jack urging her by signs, in their private and wordless language, that he wished her to be silent. Most of the time she comprehended his intent; most of the time she was obedient.
The night fell; the half-moon rose, huge against the horizon of treetops. The green meadow showed as a colorless carpet. Hob and Jack sat on the ground with their backs against a wagon wheel. Molly and Nemain stood a few paces into the meadow, hazel staves in hand. Nothing happened for what seemed to Hob a very long time; there was no sound except for the random calls of night birds. Then he became aware that even that had stopped. In the blackness beneath the trees there was movement: something pale, something big.
Then he saw it clearly. Out from the rampart of trees, out from the pool of shadow, came a huge white bull, its horns rising up and outward and then recurving toward each other. It walked slowly into the open, its coat gleaming as the moonlight struck it. The bull broke into a trot, coming at Molly and Nemain, its great musculature moving it lightly over the ground, gaining speed; the cruel points of the horns could now be easily discerned as it drew nearer and nearer to the two women, and Hob involuntarily came to his feet—he felt the need to be nearer Nemain, to protect her in some way, although he had no idea what he would do. But Jack seized his arm and pulled him back down. The man-at-arms just shook his head, then put a finger to his lips.
The great beast stamped to a halt before Molly and Nemain, and lowered its neck. Molly came forward and embraced its head, and stroked its nose, and spoke into its ear, too softly for Hob to hear. The king bull stood in place, as docile as Milo, and now Nemain came and caressed its neck, and spoke to it also.
Hob’s attention was drawn away to the circling wall of trees: there was movement on all sides, pale shapes that appeared and then disappeared as they moved around the perimeter. And now the bulls entered, from this side and that, pouring into the meadow, snorting, ripping up the soft earth with their sharp hooves, their massive bulk, as they trotted across the moonlit grass: ghost-white animals, courant, on a dream-gray field.
They milled in a circle that slowed, and then stopped. They were all facing the women, the small stone, the statue of the Horned Man. Save for the snorts of exertion, they made no sound, no lowing, no bellowing. They stood, each with a little space about it.
Now Molly and Nemain began to move among them, patting them, murmuring in their ears. In this way they moved all through the throng. You could not call it a herd, thought Hob, each one a separate chieftain, and untamed, unherded, by any human man. Yet the women moved among them, speaking to them, speaking to them, telling them what they must do. In what language, thought Hob, in what language? Perhaps two hundred bulls were facing him, patient as so many soldiers, and far across the meadow, his wife and her grandmother were telling them things in a way he could not understand. All at once the strangeness, the silence except for the breathing of many large animals, the moonlight, washed over him, and he shivered. The hair rose on his neck, and he crossed himself. He looked at Jack, and the soldier, sensing something of his distress, patted his shoulder.
Hob became angry with himself. That he should doubt these two good women, one that he respected completely and one that he loved and had sworn to, and they working their Art with the purest of motives—it felt like a betrayal on his part, and he shook off all doubts. The women were returning, and there was movement here and there among the great white shapes. Slowly the herd began to circle, and here and there individual animals slipped off into the woods on this side and that, the great herd at the half-trot, circling and circling the meadow, and bleeding off, one by one, into the forest.
Jack went to the large wagon, put a foot in the rope loop that hung from the back platform, and pulled open the door. He fought his way inside past the determined efforts of Sweetlove to leap up and lick his face, his hand, anywhere she could get at him. Finally he caressed her a few times, and then pointed at her and at the wagon floor; she sat immediately, but with her tail wagging furiously, brushing the floor in a tiny arc. Hob could hear Jack rummaging about and then here he came, a crockery jug that he held by the neck in his left hand; four pewter mugs were strung by their handles on his left thumb; he grasped the rope handhold with his right hand and swung down easily to the ground.
There was the slightest, most discreet whimper of protest from the wagon and without looking around, the man-at-arms made a “come-along” gesture with his free hand. Sweetlove shot out the door and landed behind him in what seemed one continuous arc; she hit the ground with a thud and trotted behind him, and here came Molly and Nemain, in time to be handed a mug, into which Jack poured a generous draft of the uisce beatha. He handed a mug to Hob and filled it partway, and then served himself.
The women were plainly very tired, and the strong drink was welcome, but there was underlying their fatigue every appearance of satisfaction. They sat side by side on a log that Jack and Hob had dragged from the forest when first they camped. Hob sat down beside his wife and put his arm around her, while Jack went back and forth to the wagon, bringing hunches of bread and a cured ham and a cloth to spread on the grass. The women were almost too tired to eat, but Jack urged them to do so with gestures and grunts, and Hob cut dainty slices and fed them to Nemain, and finally Jack sat down on Molly’s other side, and bit happily into a piece of ham.
Sweetlove was running back and forth, nose to the ground, a few yards away, on the torn-up field, a jumble of clods of soil and ripped-up clumps of bent. She was plainly reading the tale of vast bodies and sharp hooves from the all-pervading scent of the wild white monarchs of the North. She began to drift away toward the center of the field and Jack clucked twice at her. At once she spun about and trotted over to him; a quick leap and she was on the log beside him and curled into a circle, her back pressed against his thigh.
“She’s a good little dog,” said Molly in a dreamy voice, a voice half-drunk with fatigue. She leaned against Jack’s shoulder.
Hob, relieved that the strange night was drawing to a close, but as always intensely curious about the hidden powers of these two women he loved above all else, said, “Mistress, how is it that these beasts can take direction from you? How can they understand Irish when I cannot?” Nemain had been teaching him Irish, and although Hob was a quick study, keenly intelligent and with a remarkable aural memory, he found Irish to be a subtle and difficult tongue to master. He made progress, but it was arduous.
“ ’Tis not that they understand Irish,” began Molly, “but that, that—och, ’tis like telling of the sunset to one blind from birth! Nemain, is there an understanding you can bring to him? For it’s destroyed I am with fatigue and barely able to chew for wanting to sleep.” She drank from the mug of fiery liquor. Jack bent and cut a large chunk from the ham and handed it to her, and she bit a good-sized piece from it and sighed with pleasure.
“If you paid half as much attention as yon cattle, you’d be the great bard of Erin by now,” said Nemain in the mock-severe tone Hob remembered from when they were both children—she a teasing little girl and practically his sister. “We tell them what they shou
ld do in Irish, for ’tis the language of our Art, but they’re not understanding the words. ’Tis that the words are fixing our thoughts on what we want them to know, and us touching them and petting them the while, and . . . and . . . passing our understanding from our thoughts to theirs, which are very different thoughts, sure, but understanding can be passed from one to the other. They know that they must come to us, and we tell them when by the moon—they can see the moon wherever they are, and they are linked now to my grandmother through the Horned Man—they will know from Him where she is, and will come near her in the sennight before, and will come to her on the very night they are needed.”
Hob drew breath to ask how the Horned Man would know where Molly was, thought better of it, crossed himself unobtrusively, and subsided.
Sweetlove, curled happily next to Jack, her nostrils full of the rich scent of the king bulls, belatedly became aware of the ham and, sitting up, put one paw to Jack’s thigh, and looked in his face with an expression that could only be interpreted as a plea. He began feeding her morsels of ham interspersed with dark bread, and so all sat, quiet and fairly content, until Molly roused herself and said, “Sure it’s time we were all abed,” and that got them all up, stretching and yawning. Hob watered the three tethered beasts, and soon all were safe in their various wagons, and the camp was quiet, save for Jack’s heroic snores.
CHAPTER 31
A WAY UP THE SLOPE that formed one wall of the valley that Father Ugwistan had marked on his map, Molly and her little family crouched among the trees, and looked down on a small meadow: a flat oval, floored with grasses, ringed with wooded chines. The wagons, the draft animals, and Sweetlove were three miles away, in the Benedictine monastery where Monsignor da Panzano awaited them, hoping to hear of the destruction of Yattuy’s hyena-men; the four horses the legate had supplied Molly with were tethered far down the backslope, out of earshot.
The moon was just peeping over the rim of the opposite ridge, when a confused murmur arose; it swelled; it became more distinct. From the narrow pass at one end that gave ingress to the meadow, the tramp of feet, the rumble of many voices, came drifting upslope to Hob’s ears. More light spilled onto the grass as the rising moon, a day past the full, began to win free of the hillside. The valley stood revealed, almost as clearly as in daylight, and a company of Poitevin mercenaries came marching in from the mouth of the pass, their officers ahead of them on horseback.
Behind them came a disordered mass of the bouda, walking with heads down, sacks on their shoulders, all wearing hooded cloaks that seemed gray, though this might have been a trick of the moonlight. In their midst, swathed in a striped cloak, seated on one of the beautiful large-eyed arch-necked horses of the desert-dwellers, rode the sorcerer; the bouda who were nearest him walked with a hand to his boot, his cloak edges, the tassels that depended from his saddlecloth, as though to draw strength or some other blessing from contact with him.
Behind the mass of bouda came another band of routiers: the rearguard. The swarthy men spread out across the meadow till they were more or less equidistant from one another. They dropped their sacks where they stood, and turned to watch the sorcerer as he rode to a little prominence on the far side of the meadow from where Hob watched. A squad of ten or so bouda, presumably the sorcerer’s inner circle, climbed up the hill and stood behind him.
The mounted officers of the Poitevins began to set up a perimeter guard, and soon there was a loose ring of mercenaries facing outward, ready to guard against any interruptions.
The sorcerer dismounted, came to the lip of the little rise he stood upon, and raised his arms. All the bouda, save the group that stood behind him, at once went to one knee. The sorcerer’s voice rang out over the crouching throng, but came faintly to Molly’s folk on the hillside. In any event, thought Hob, they could not have understood the strange language.
Hob and Jack stood behind stout tree trunks, peering cautiously down at the bizarre scene. There was little chance that any of the Poitevin pickets, looking up into the blackness beneath the trees, could see them, but Molly had warned that the sorcerer, and the shapeshifters as well, might have unexpected powers. Jack had his war hammer with him, propped head down against the tree. Longswords were awkward in heavy woodland, and so Hob was armed only with a sax, one of the old-fashioned single-edged heavy knives, a cubit long and sheathed horizontally at his belt, as well as the war dagger Sir Balthasar had given him.
Each of them, on instruction from Molly, had a sack filled with the caltrops Hob had gleaned from the road. The slope down to the valley was steep enough, but for the last twenty yards or so it fell sheer to the valley floor. There were only two ways up from where the Poitevin picket line faced outward to their position here amid the ridgetop trees: deer trails that led up more gradually through clefts in the rock face at the valley floor. Jack pointed to the trail that ran up past Hob’s tree, and to one perhaps fifteen feet to Hob’s right; then he indicated Hob, and the trail near him; then himself, and the trail to the right. Hob nodded, and opened the bag of caltrops by his feet. They did not dare throw them now, but the time for that was near.
Now Hob became aware that Molly and Nemain had moved back a few yards, where a small declivity open to the moonlight gave them light while shielding them from the eyes of those below. The women were quietly setting up the figure of the Horned Man, and arranging stones and twigs in odd little patterns. They were working with a combination of care and urgency, Molly placing things here and there and murmuring prayers in Irish, Nemain drawing little sealed pots and bottles from a poke slung by a strap over her shoulder.
A shout drew his attention back to the meadow. The sorcerer was leading the bouda in a kind of call-and-response, the mage’s powerful bass echoing from the ridges around, then a deep-throated staccato roar from the gray-cloaked men. The Poitevins, facing outward, seeking any sign of exterior threat, kept turning around to see what was happening, and even at this distance Hob thought to detect uneasiness in their demeanor. The officers’ horses were less ambiguous, fidgeting and stamping and turning in place, tossing their heads; the Poitevin captains were pulling harshly at the reins, trying to keep them facing outward. Only the sorcerer’s Arab was unaffected: it stood quietly where he had left it with the richly embroidered reins, twined with ribbons and tassels, tossed over its head and trailing to the ground, a signal that it was to remain there.
Now the calls grew more frenzied, the responses more savage, and all at once they ceased. Hob was startled by the immediate silence, which stretched on for several heartbeats, the only sound the snorting of the routiers’ horses, or the occasional click as a hoof struck against a bit of rock, the mounts dancing beneath their riders.
At a bellowed command from the wizard, every bouda emptied his cloth bag at his own feet: ashes from their forges, an essential part of their sorcery. A knee-high cloud of ash roiled up into the moonglow as some of the ash rebounded, further enhancing the dreamlike atmosphere in the meadow. Off came the cloaks; beneath them the men were naked.
They dropped to the ground and began to roll in the ashes, as some dogs will roll in carrion. Hob stared, transfixed: in the low ashy cloud, the forms of men rolling about began to alter, subtly at first and then with increasing clarity. The straight limbs of the bouda became crooked, and thickened; their jaws lengthened; smooth skin developed a coarse pelt. Here and there began to stand up the nightmare forms of hyenas, shaking themselves like dogs coming out of the water, lifting broad black muzzles and dark round eyes to the moon. A cacophony arose, yipping and howling and the characteristic blood-freezing titter, multiplied tenscore, the demonic forms milling around in the ashy cloud, the routiers turned about and gaping at the spectacle, their horses frantic with horror, till Hob thought: This is what the floor of Hell must be.
Gradually the shapeshifters fell silent, settled down, turned, and faced the sorcerer. He gave one last call, but faced with beasts incapable of speech, there was no response. Instead they turned as o
ne and fell upon the Poitevins, an explosion of savagery that in one burst swept those hardened soldiers under, only the horses able to scream once, twice at most, before being torn asunder. The powerful jaws and strong necks of the hyenas now came into play, two or more beasts at each side of a corpse, whether of man or horse, tugging, growling, ripping limbs from sockets and stripping great hunks of flesh away from the bone, rib cages left glinting like ghastly harps in the silver light.
Suddenly Nemain was beside him, her hand on his arm, her breath in his ear. She spoke so quietly he could barely hear her. “Herself is nigh to beginning, and it may be that they’ll become aware of us when she does. Be ready to flee—or fight.”
He turned to her. “They are killing their own guards down there,” he murmured.
“When they change, they need their meat, and while they’ll eat horse, ’tis human meat and blood they must have, like all shapeshifters.” She spoke very softly, and glanced at Jack, to reassure herself that he was out of earshot, for such talk was troubling to him. “ ’Tis not till tomorrow that they are to kill the barons, and eat of them, and so I’m thinking yon draíodόir has asked the king for a sacrifice, and yon hireling swords were what he gave them, and they thinking they were guards of these monsters.”
She slipped across to Jack and whispered in his ear, presumably the same warning she’d given her husband, and then went back to Molly.
Below, the unnatural hyenas were stretched out like so many dogs before a fireplace; they were working at cracking open the bones with their terrible jaws. Here and there was a sharp snapping noise as bones broke beneath their teeth; there was an undertone of grumbling and growling, an indication of their savage pleasure; and now and then, a peal of eerie, hackle-raising laughter would ring out over the blood-soaked field. It was such an evil sight, that Satanic feast, that Hob crossed himself. Almost it seemed a sin just to watch two companies of men and horses being devoured in contentment by these devils.
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