Hob began to be aware that there was a murmur in Irish behind him, growing louder and louder by barely perceptible degrees. Molly had Jack’s goatskin drum, and began tapping her fingernails on the center, a sound like tiny hooves, slowly at first and then faster and faster, suggesting a herd of cattle in full stampede. Without warning, the murmur and the tapping both ceased. He tensed. There was a moment’s sense of hushed imminence, then Molly and Nemain together gave a great shattering cry, a savage animal wail that seemed to pierce the clouds, and then silence.
Hob heard this without turning around; he had expected something similar, although the suddenness, the prodigious din of it, had made him jump. But he was watching those below: the sorcerer’s head came up immediately, and he threw out a long narrow arm and pointed upslope—to Hob it seemed that he pointed to the very tree he hid behind.
The hyenas reacted more slowly, but as one the ghastly heads swiveled toward where Jack and Hob crouched, and those lying full length in the ashes and splitting bones began to come to their feet, a smooth and ominous motion, their eyes never leaving the slopes above them.
Jack seized his bag from the ground and heaved it in a long spill of shining metal down the trail nearest him. Hob did the same, and the caltrops, aided by the slope and the pull of the world on all things, rolled downward for perhaps a third of the way to the bottom.
Some of the hyenas nearest Hob’s slope had reached the rock wall that ran along the bottom border; questing this way and that, one or two had discovered the trails, and had begun to scramble up them, their paws, with their broad pads and blunt claws, giving them traction and stability on the soil of the path.
A low roll of summer thunder came to Hob’s ear. He was watching the first hyenas start up the trail, when he became aware that the majority of the huge pack below had begun to turn away from his slope, and to look toward the pass through which they had entered the valley. Some confused milling began, the two hundred or so animals kicking up the ash from all the bags that had been emptied on the ground. A low cloud of gray powder enveloped their legs, and all the while the thunder grew in volume. The sorcerer gave a great cry, his booming bass bringing the pack around; his lanky outstretched arm, his pointing finger, directed their attention to the entrance to the pass. Hob realized that he was not hearing thunder at all, but the drumming of many hooves.
With an effort he tore his gaze from the throng of monsters: there was a more immediate peril scrambling up the trails toward them. Jack picked up his crow-beak war hammer and set his feet, ready to deal with the first shapeshifter to arrive, and Hob drew his sax, although he had little hope that either weapon would avail against these unnatural beasts. He remembered the Fox, a shapeshifter who, in its Fox form, could not be seriously wounded by steel.
The beasts diverged, one coming up fast toward Hob and two, one following the other, mounting toward Jack. They drove upward in half-leaps with their powerful hind legs, scrabbling for a foothold with their forelegs. Hob, looking at the mad eyes, the jumble of spiky teeth, coming ever closer, decided that he was about to die, and that he would sell his life as dearly as he could, to buy time for the women to complete their task, to protect Nemain as long as he could move his limbs. With the thought came a swift and unexpected peace, a cessation of all fear. He held the sax down at his side, and braced himself with one arm around a young tree, ready for one desperate blow. He did not think he would get a chance for a second stroke, and given their resistance to steel, he knew that he would not kill his attacker; he only hoped to delay it for a while.
Iron might not kill them, but they could be hurt by it, apparently: the hyena coming for Hob, bounding up the path, had reached the patch where lay the caltrops. It sprang forward and three of its legs landed on the bitter points of the twisted iron stars. It shrieked and performed a violent leap up in an effort to avoid coming down fully on the points. Hob watched it twist in midair, a movement like that of a trout bursting free of a river and turning about before landing. But the hyena, in its effort to save its feet, came down on its shoulder, scrabbling wildly at nothing with its paws, and began to roll back down the slope.
Its speed increased, and although one caltrop fell from its flesh, a forefoot and a hind foot were still impaled, and it could not arrest its downward roll—rather, it fell faster, and at last, near the bottom, it bounced over a small embedded boulder and fell the last dozen feet to the valley floor, where it lay stunned.
Jack’s attackers made inexorable progress, by some miracle avoiding the caltrops, of which they seemed to be little aware, and reaching almost to where the burly man-at-arms, hammer at the ready, stood stolidly awaiting the shock of their charge.
But now, almost at the top, the lead hyena’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, and it stepped on a caltrop with one foot and then with another. It tottered about just below Jack Brown, trying to avoid putting weight on its injured feet, until he swung the blunt end of the hammer with all his considerable might, catching the thing in the flank, and it lost balance completely and began to roll back down, sweeping its follower off its feet as well, the two beasts rolling and tumbling in a tangled heap all the way down toward their doom.
Now that Hob was free from immediate threat, he became aware that the drumming of hooves had swelled into a roar, and that the hyena-men below were all trotting back and forth, always facing the portal to the pass, and adding a vast chorus of giggles, barks, and growls, as well as their characteristic arpeggios of laughter, to the overarching sound of thunder. The sorcerer seemed to be exhorting them to take some action, but even his commanding voice was lost in the storm of noise.
One of the squad of Cousins who stood behind him, in human form and hooded and cloaked, was now holding the Arab’s reins; considering what was happening, the horse was still amazingly calm.
Hob took all this in at one glance; he paid special attention to the wizard, for he expected him to guide the others as a general commands his army. Then there was movement at the right edge of his vision. He turned instinctively in that direction; he gasped.
A wide front of white, broad as the tidal bore that had swept up the bay to tread down the swimming hyenas and just as powerful, now burst from the narrow pass and fanned out into a valley-wide wave of thick-based needle-pointed horns and iron-hard hooves, driven by heavy muscle and massive bones. The king bulls and the young bachelor bulls of the North Country had come with rolling eye and foam-flecked mouth, pouring into the flat meadow, the outliers spilling a little way up the slope and running on a slant.
And then they reached the shapeshifters, who were running this way and that and giving the laugh that can signify excitement but also fear, backing and snarling just before the white giants bowled them over, trampled them to ribbons, impaled them on those inswept horns and tossed them back over the sea of heaving pallid shoulders and bunching haunches, so that the horn-stabbed hyenas vanished under the hooves of the following bulls.
To the roiling low cloud of ash was now added clots of mud and wetted ash, thick with blood that was black in the moonlight. The bulls thundered to the far wall of the valley and, as though performing an evolution long practiced, the first rank turned widdershins and the second rank followed, and the whole herd turned as a snake turns its body, and roared back down the field, sweeping up those few hyena-men who had escaped the first charge.
In perhaps a half-dozen places, shapeshifters had succeeded in bringing down a bull, one hyena with its terrible jaws locked in a bull’s throat, impeding its breathing, while four or five, working in concert, tore their victim to pieces, the bull kicking all the while. These few victorious hunt packs looked up, muzzles painted with gore, to see doom thundering down upon them, as the vast herd came back along the valley.
The uproar was deafening, and even here, so far above, Hob felt stunned by the bellows, the snarls, the maniacal laughter, the thunder of heavy bodies bounding at full tilt along the ash-strewn dirt. He shook his head a bit to clear it, and saw,
across the gulf of air separating his slope from the Berber mage’s promontory, the sorcerer mounting his Arab steed, and riding up into the trees on the far side of the valley, his personal squad of bouda trotting behind him.
Back to the valley entrance the huge herd ran, stabbing and stamping at what was left of the Cousins, turning again instead of entering the pass and beginning another traverse of the valley. But now they were slowing, and Hob realized that he could no longer see any sign of the bouda lifting above the curtain of ash that hung knee-high in the meadow.
The giant bulls slowed to a trot and the whole mass moved in a valley-wide oval that tightened as it slowed, slowed, and finally came to a halt. Their heaving sides were dripping foam, rivulets of sweat making patterns in the ash and blood that covered their flanks; their breath came snorting through widened nostrils; they stamped heavy hooves. Some stood with hanging heads, weary from the long trail south and the exertions of running and battle.
Across the moonlit plain, hundreds of the wild white bulls stood, more or less motionless; they shifted in place, but did not move from where they had come to rest, all facing the slope where Molly and her granddaughter had worked their Art. The natural hostility of bull for bull had resulted in a certain distance being maintained, so that the great beasts, all facing the same way and more or less equidistant from one another, resembled an army assembled for review by their general. This was not far from the truth, thought Hob, marveling at the order of the ranks and files set out before him.
The ash cloud kicked up by the slaughter was slowly settling, and, save for the inevitable noises of such a great herd, the valley was quiet. Any night birds in the circle of wooded hills around the meadow were surely cowering in their nests, after that Satanic battle. The scene was now one drawn from some dream, and a dreamlike peace prevailed.
CHAPTER 32
MOLLY AND NEMAIN CAME UP to stand beside their men, and to look out over the valley. Although still there came to their ears the sounds of a great number of large animals breathing, the dull indeterminate hoof-thuds of those big bodies shifting a bit in place, the occasional low groaning call, particularly from the younger bachelor bulls, it seemed almost like silence after the hideous din that had prevailed only moments before. As Molly stood there, the bulls seemed in some way to become aware of her; gradually they shuffled about till all were facing the exact spot where Molly stood.
“It’s down to them Nemain and I must go,” said Molly to the men, “and free them to return to the North Country. You lads stay here the while, for I’d not have you distracting them.”
Hob looked at Jack, who shrugged. Hob felt unwilling to see Nemain clamber down that perilous slope, so to stand amid those hooves, those incurving bitter-pointed horns. Yet the two had summoned these giants in the first place. Hob sighed and nodded, and said only, “Beware the caltrops.”
Molly and Nemain were barefoot, clad only in white linen shifts: when they worked their Art they kept in contact with the soil, the trees, as much as possible. Now Molly leaped down the slope, landing four or five feet down and immediately jumping again, staying just to the side of the trail to avoid the caltrops, checking her fall with a strong white arm slapped against the nearest tree trunk. Nemain jumped off next, planting a foot at the base of a tree and then leaping for a small upjut of rock, so that each bound never turned into an uncontrollable fall.
Once past the zone of caltrops, they hewed to the trail and made better progress, although it was still necessary to snatch at trees to either side to keep their downward course from becoming a headlong tumble.
Finally the women sprang down among the pale giants, and walked through the herd, placing a hand to a bull’s neck here, or patting a sweat-lathered flank there. Hob could not hear them at all, but he could see that they were speaking to each bull they passed, sometimes murmuring in its ear.
Molly had said that this would be necessary, a kind of praise and dismissal of the herd, but he winced to think of what ghastly surface the women walked upon with their bare feet, down there on what was a vast shambles. There was also the matter of the sorcerer’s escape with his personal guard: Where had they gone, and what mischief might they do?
At last the women were done. They went up on the promontory where the wizard had stood, and gradually the wild bulls shifted position till they all faced the grandmother and granddaughter, their backs now to Hob and Jack. There was a rather long pause whose purpose was opaque to Hob, then both women threw up their arms in unison, and in unison gave a piercing cry.
There was an immediate increase in sound from the herd: snorting, a few groaning calls, and the sound of many hooves shuffling in the mudlike mixture of soil and ash and gore that carpeted the valley. The herd began to move toward the pass that constituted the exit from the field, and Hob felt a hard painful grip seize his arm just above the elbow.
“Lurgh!” said Jack: Look!
His mighty arm stretched toward the pass, where the moonlight through the leaves cast a pattern of black and silver just under the trees. For a moment it seemed to Hob as though it might be the shadow of a brawny man of giant stature, crowned with great antlers, and then it collapsed into meaningless patches. But Jack still gazed with a reverence, and perhaps a little fear, into the trees over there beside the valley’s gate.
The bulls at that end of the valley now began to move into the pass, and as they disappeared from sight and room began to open up, the herd moved faster and faster, till they were trotting out at an increasing rate.
Molly and Nemain had recrossed the valley, the bulls that were still moving toward the pass carefully avoiding them, and now they were mounting the slope, bent forward and helping themselves by grasping roots and saplings for handholds. When they came to the caltrops they moved aside into the woods beside the trails, and so eventually won to the top, where Hob seized Nemain and held her for some time. Molly stood with Jack’s arm around her waist and watched until the last bull disappeared into the darkness of the outleading defile.
She took a deep breath. “Sure, now, that’s done. Now we’ve to tell that scheming churchman that we’ve destroyed the king’s unholy army, but their chieftain is still prowling the night. Nemain, we must collect our things.”
She turned and went down the back slope to the declivity where they had set up a temporary altar. She and Nemain soon had the statue of the Horned One and various incenses and amulets packed away in the large leather poke, and Jack’s goatskin drum slung from Nemain’s shoulder. Molly stood up and brushed her hands together in a dusting-off gesture more symbolic than practical.
“Away on!”
Part III
THE MUTTERER
Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers [mekhashphim, “mutterers”], and the Chaldeans, for to shew the king his dreams.
—Daniel 2:2
the necromancers who chirp and mutter
—Isaiah 8:19
CHAPTER 33
A CLOISTER GARTH PLANTED TO flowering shrubs, fragrant grasses, and medicinal herbs, surrounded by the usual columned arcades, had on one side the Benedictine monastery that had given Monsignor Bonacorso da Panzano refuge while the veiled chess game he played against King John drew toward its close. Opposite was the guest house in which he and Sinibaldo were lodged; the other two sides of the cloister were formed by the chapel and the workshops on the north, and on the south a long closed corridor that connected the monastery to the guest house.
Molly and Nemain had gone out to the garth, to pray under the stars. “ ’Tis folly to receive help from Powers such as the Horned Man and not to render formal thanks, for They are prideful and dangerous when slighted.”
Da Panzano had turned white as chalk when she said this, and even the stern and taciturn Sinibaldo crossed himself, drawing a little medal of St. Anthony from beneath his coat and kissing it.
“Daughter, do not invoke these forces of darkness in the house of God,” said da Panzano.
“And any road,” Molly continued, not the least deterred, “this lodge has harbored so many, and they all male, that it will interfere with our prayers; ’twill all go more smoothly out there, the sky over our heads and the earth under our feet and where among growing things and moving things there are females as well as males, not as ’tis with this strange and unnatural tribe of yours.”
Now da Panzano truly was in a rage, although the urbane schemer and diplomat showed it only in the thinness of his lips, the clenching of his hand on his paternoster. But Molly had just by dint of great effort destroyed an army of monsters, and was in no mood to cater to the cleric’s sensibilities.
• • •
HOB AND JACK SAT with the two papal agents at a long table in the guest house, sipping at goblets of wine. This was a communal dining room, paneled in oak from floor to ceiling; the floors were bare oak plank—polished with beeswax rather than laid with rushes. Although this night the papal legate and his bodyguard were the only guests, the monastery’s guest house could accommodate a score of travelers. The guest house had its own lay servants, who had put out wine and bread and cheese, laid fires in the hearths against the unseasonable damp chill of this June night, and retired to the monastery proper for the evening.
When first the women had left for the central garden, passing through an inner door to the arcade that ran around the open square, there remained a certain awkwardness, a tension, in the room. Stolid jovial Jack seemed unaffected, happy with a cup of wine before him, and not inclined to be a respecter of persons other than Molly. Hob, though, was rather at a loss for conversation, and da Panzano spent some moments gnawing at his lower lip and gazing into a corner, while his left hand fidgeted incessantly with the carved-bone beads of his paternoster. Sinibaldo, as always, sat, wary and silent; if there was something to be said, his master would say it.
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