The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  Hob looked to his right, toward the forest; there was nothing there, nor had he expected anything, only that he wished to leave no quarter unwatched, in case there was some attempt to circle around by any of Sir Tarquin’s men who might win clear of the melee. Then he looked left, to the battle, but there was little to be seen: the women moved their feet slightly now and then, readjusting their balance; Sir Tarquin could barely move for the sorcerous blades that held him trapped. His eyes bulged with rage, and with his silent struggle to break each woman’s will. Every time the blades touched him there was a little blue spark or flamelet, and Hob felt the women were draining him, with the spears, with their resistance to his will.

  To the south Sir Jehan was driving his horse between two of the enchanted knights. He had his iron campaign hand locked on his shield’s bracket, and the reins loosely looped about his right wrist. In his left hand was a flicker of bright metal—the Sieur de Blanchefontaine had indeed recaptured most of the speed of his right hand with his left. Even as Hob watched, one of the knights fell away and slipped dead from the saddle, and Sir Jehan turned his ferocity on the other.

  Beyond him, in the midst of a throng of enemies, Hob could see Sir Balthasar, like Death in Revelation, hacking and smashing an irresistible path through knights and men-at-arms, his horse biting at faces, striking with spike-studded horseshoes at the foot soldiers. The mareschal’s face was dark with suffused blood; his arm rose and fell tirelessly; nothing stood before him. Hob saw him cleave another knight from his collarbone halfway to his heart despite the mail shirt he wore.

  Hob looked left, then right again; he looked back at Jack. All seemed to be quiet nearby, and the melee behind the coach was drifting southward, but the men from Chantemerle and Blanchefontaine were clearly prevailing. He looked to the struggle by the carriage; Molly to the north and Nemain to the south, their backs to him, and Sir Tarquin facing him—Hob avoided looking directly into those eyes, a thing he knew could be perilous with wizards.

  The mage now swiveled his burning eyes to the south; his left hand stretched out in the same direction, its fingers extended. Then his hand closed as on a garment, an unseen garment; slowly he drew the hand toward his side. Hob watched this with fascination and unease. The group remained in a kind of fidgeting stasis: the women would readjust their positions, setting their feet anew, and the wizard would attempt a small movement, flinching from the touch of the golden collar made by the locked blades. But otherwise nothing would have seemed to be happening, were it not for the expressions of intense concentration on the three faces, and a humming in Hob’s bones, a feeling that there was a sound too low for him to hear, as power was matched to power between the women and the magician. It was a strong sense that there was a roaring and a shrieking that was inaudible to him, a feeling he could not begin to explain even to himself.

  But outwardly there was little except the harsh breathing of three people in some sort of extremity. Then came a scrabbling from behind the carriage. The horses drawing the coach, that had stood so stolidly, now shifted and neighed, startled, as around the front of the vehicle came two of the mercenaries Sir Tarquin had assembled, Scots by the look of them and by their dress. They must have escaped the melee to the south by some means and crept along between the road and the sea, heading north, and, seeing their master beleaguered, decided to take a hand. They ran around the horses and toward the trio of adepts, but Jack moved to thwart them, moving at his fast rolling limp and drawing back the war hammer.

  Hob started toward Jack and the Scots, but there was a movement just at the edge of his vision; by reflex his head turned toward the motion, and then he saw what the magus had summoned. The Scots perhaps were as insensitive to his commands as Hob, but the eerie knights, whom he had already compromised in an unholy fashion, were tied to him in some way, and now, unhorsed in the battle, bloodied but essentially whole, striding on long legs toward them, came the lead knight, an enormously tall man, clad in mail and bearing in both hands his claymore, the blade resting back on his shoulder. He was a narrow-built man, but one of those lean narrow men who are all sinew and flat muscle.

  Now he broke into a run toward Nemain; his sword came off his shoulder and he lifted it high. It was one of those huge swords with a bastard grip, the hilt too big for one and too small for two hands, so that the swordsman held it with a hand behind the quillons and stabilized it with the other folded over the pommel and the remainder of the hilt. A powerful knight could sever half a horse’s neck with such a sword, and now the knight plainly meant to strike Nemain with it.

  Hob’s fear for her safety, churning in his stomach all through this unnatural battle with a terrible and uncanny foe, was now brought to a crisis by this new and immediate threat to his betrothed; on the instant, by some alchemy, all this dread ignited into a sudden burning mixture of rage and hatred, and he spun on the spot, leaving Jack to his own devices, and ran full tilt to intercept the giant knight. The knight veered toward him and the claymore came moaning through the air toward Hob; the lad threw up the falchion to block it and the claymore tore it from his hand.

  Smoothly the giant followed through, whirled the sword above his head, and returned the weapon with a whistling horizontal cut. Hob leaned back frantically and felt a line of thin fire run across his chest. The sword circled, went up and around and came back again, this time in a downward stroke that Hob, running backward, eluded by the width of a blade of grass.

  The prodigious stroke buried the blade in the soft ground, but the knight’s long arms immediately began to tug it free. The giant was in a crouch as he pulled his sword from the ground, and Hob, snarling like a badger, reversed himself, and ran at the knight. He leaped at the last moment, planted his left foot on the giant’s bent thigh, and sprang upward, his right hand plucking his new dagger from its sheath at his right hip, the pommel up and the blade projecting from the bottom of his fist. His left hand caught the back of the knight’s neck; the giant began to straighten, unwittingly helping Hob to ascend.

  The long claymore was now useless because the lad was inside it, climbing, climbing, clambering up the knight as though going up a tree, one leg drawn up and the foot scrabbling for purchase in the man’s belt. Hob’s hand drew back, he saw the strangely emotionless eyes of the knight staring at him from either side of the helmet’s nasal, and he drove the dagger into the knight’s left eye until the increasing width of the blade caused it to wedge into the bones of the orbit—was that a blue flame or flash that Hob saw ripple up the blade?—and the knight began to topple backward, as a grandfather pine is felled, rigid, already dead, and Hob went down on top of him, and had to exert all his strength, cursing under his breath and still in a rage, to pull his dagger free, the steel so strongly embedded in bone.

  He rose, breathing like the north wind, and turned. One of the two Scots who had thought to come to Sir Tarquin’s aid was dead at Jack Brown’s feet. The other had closed with Jack while he was disposing of the first man, and gotten inside the range of the war hammer, and now tried to stab Jack with a foot-long dirk, but the silent man, beast-quick, seized the knife wrist with his left hand, dropped the hammer, and gripped the mercenary by the throat.

  As Hob watched, Jack, powerful Jack, held the tall Scot helpless and throttled the life from him. The Scot struck Jack again and again with his free hand, to no apparent effect, and the blows soon became feeble and erratic. After what seemed to the lad a long and unpleasant time, Jack let the body, purple-faced, eyes and tongue protruding, drop like a sack of peat to the ground.

  Hob came to himself, quickly turning in a circle to assess the situation. No enemy threatened the women and Jack was picking up his hammer again. Hob cleaned his dagger on the grass and went to retrieve his falchion, but the impact with the claymore had notched and bent the blade, and Hob threw it down again. He pried the sword from the hand of the first Scot Jack had killed and resumed his post, his back to Jack and his eye alert for any enemies that might yet live.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 27

  KNIGHTS AND MEN-AT-ARMS FROM the two castles began to straggle up from the south: all of Sir Tarquin’s men were now dead. The young Sir Josce came riding up and without checking his horse’s gallop swerved to ride between Sir Tarquin and the carriage. Seeing the mage trapped in the golden noose that the women held so steady, seeing an opportunity for advancement, for glory, the young knight urged his mount onward, steering with his knees, dropping his shield and drawing back his sword for a two-handed stroke.

  The mage rolled his eyes toward the oncoming horse and rider, and flung up his left hand. A pulse of some sort ripped the sword from Sir Josce’s hand, flinging it in an arc, trailing smoke, till it landed in the grass, smoldering. The knight, his hands numb, was carried past Sir Tarquin by his terrified horse. As he passed close behind the wizard, Sir Tarquin’s right hand stretched out backward; his claws sank into the knight’s calf; he gave a mighty wrench and Sir Josce was dragged from his saddle, the horse clattering away.

  The mage’s fingernails, so like claws, now crackled and smoked where they were embedded in Sir Josce’s leg; there was a spark of blue and a report, and faint blue flame played about the mage’s fingertips. To everyone’s horror, the knight aged and withered before their eyes, while Sir Tarquin grew visibly more energetic, and the ring of burnt flesh about his neck partially healed itself.

  Hob saw that the women’s task had become harder, for they staggered a bit more as the renewed vitality of the wizard was felt, a strengthening of the invisible battering that his will was working on them, and that they were resisting—this in addition to the effort of maintaining the position of the golden lance heads. Sir Tarquin, newly robust, even tried once more to wrench free of the trap: he put a palm to a lance shaft again, but again was forced to release it immediately with a hiss of pain.

  Sir Balthasar, furious at the foolish loss of the young knight and even more at the strengthening of the mage, wheeled his mount back and forth before the arriving knights and men-at-arms, directing them to withdraw several yards inland from the sorcerous struggle and settle there, the knights to picket their mounts. He declared, with pungent and even vulgar clarity, what would befall the wretch who disobeyed, and thereafter dismounted, but paced up and down before the growing ranks of men from the two castles, glowering at them.

  Sir Jehan and Sir Odinell, as lords presumably exempt from this prohibition, dismounted and stood to watch closer to the struggle than their men, but no one else. Sir Odinell summoned one of his men-at-arms and gave muttered instructions, and shortly thereafter a party of three men made their way in a wide circle around the struggle and came up to the two white horses, unhitched them, and led them away, again in a roundabout fashion. Now the carriage offered no possibility of escape should the mage defeat the women’s trap.

  Everyone settled in to see what the hours of this terrible night would bring. The women were obviously weary, and yet Hob had been told that they could not triumph before dawn: that the evil magus could not be destroyed before that. The night was more than half-gone, but it was long before the dawn. The men-at-arms’ horses that had been left tethered in the woods were now brought down to the grassy slope, and knights and soldiers saw to their mounts. The men drew wine and barley beer from their saddlebags and settled on the sward to await the workings of destiny, gloomy spectators at this little-understood event.

  Jack, Hob, Sir Balthasar, and the two castle lords stood in a loose line behind the women, preventing any least interference. Some way inland the natural rise of the land, and the tendency of the force to settle with their mounts in a semicircle, gave the impression of an audience on a hillside at a tournament, or a mystery play held outside.

  If the women were weary, so was Sir Tarquin. Even the increased vitality he had stolen from poor Sir Josce was beginning to ebb. As the mage poured more and more of his energy into the struggle, that portion of his life force that he used to sustain the appearance of life was recruited to supply vigor to his limbs and his will, and his person began to suffer a certain degree of deterioration.

  His skin became blotchy, and small lesions appeared on his face, and on his hands, and perhaps other areas hidden beneath his robes. Most perceptible was the odor of corruption: at first just a hint, as of a rodent that had died within castle walls, and then more and more intense.

  At one point Hob turned his back on the static conflict to get a breath of cleaner air. Behind him he saw a silent host of men, sitting, squatting, down on one knee, but all watching, unspeaking, somber, attentive. The horn lanterns on the coach had begun to falter, and Sir Odinell had torches driven into the soft earth and lit, to illuminate the struggle.

  After a while, as more and more torches were placed, the glow revealed the whole area of combatants and their witnesses, and reached a little into the shadow under the trees. There Hob could just make out a branch with the hunched shapes, the large round moon eyes, of two owls, further witnesses—and Hob was sure there were more that he could not see.

  He turned back to the battle. Nothing had changed, but he could hear the tortured breathing of the women, and the wind from the German Sea, though diluting it mightily, brought further indications of Sir Tarquin’s corporal decay. Yet he strove as sturdily, and glowered as terribly at the women, as he had done at the beginning.

  Hob stood there, unable to help at all and in an agony of fear for his betrothed, and also for her grandmother, who had adopted him, or as near as made no difference. And as he stood there, forced to do nothing but brood on the situation, the brute reality of it began to be borne in on him, by the odor coming in wayward gusts to his nostrils, by the small disfigurations and peelings and spots of corrosion on the wizard’s visible flesh, that Molly’s assessment was correct, that what Hob had heard of Sir Tarquin was being made manifest here before him, that the mage’s spirit had managed to persist in this crumbling mansion, this foundering vessel: this body that was long dead.

  CHAPTER 28

  SO THE WEARY NIGHT WORE on. But no night is endless, however it may seem. Beyond the struggle, beyond the carriage, beyond the rock-strewn strand, far out where the German Sea met the sky, a pallor, thin as watered milk, began to seep up from the world’s rim. Hob suddenly tore his eyes from the torchlit, silent battle, where Nemain had begun to shift from foot to foot to gain a moment’s rest for each in turn, a kind of controlled stagger that was alarming in its suggestion of imminent collapse. He looked out to sea; he blinked and looked at the horizon from the side of his eyes; at last he decided that the dawn was struggling to be born.

  Sir Tarquin had his back to the shore, but the women, whose every rasping breath came clearly to Hob above the grumbling of the sea, faced east, and now they saw the paling of the night sky over the waters. They straightened; they seemed in some way enheartened, although plainly very weary. The light grew; the graying sky began to show hints of color; far out over the sea, the underbellies of clouds turned rose and gold.

  Molly said something in a gasping voice to Nemain, who grunted agreement. A moment later the women took a great breath, threw back their heads, and gave a long, wailing call up into the sky, some word in Irish, the low-and-high voices of grandmother and granddaughter making a barbaric harmony, the cry going on and on, echoing from the rising land behind Hob, the fey music of it setting up a shiver along his bones, a stirring of some deep-heart animal self.

  At last it ceased, and all was as before, yet there was a sense that some vast border had been crossed. Sir Tarquin, his now-rotting face a mask of malevolence, his lips drawn back from those disquieting incisors, showed no awareness of a change in circumstances, but Hob could see that the women stood taller, easier, had ceased to stagger in place.

  The first hint of the sun’s rim appeared, sending a path of fire from the horizon along the ridges of the waves, a fuse burning toward the rocks of the headland, the sands of the bays. With the dawn came a stronger breeze from the sea, bringing the odor of corruption from the magus more pungent
ly to Hob. The men of the two castles had spiked perhaps a score of torches near the sorcerous battle. The dawn brought an etiolation of their golden light, and the dawn breeze made the flames flap and roar.

  Hob stood and watched his beloved and her grandmother, and waited for the deliverance Molly had said would come with the daylight. The roaring of the torch flames in the sea wind increased, and increased, and was suddenly joined by a commotion from the troops behind them. Hob turned to see what was happening.

  Above the woods where only last night they had waited in ambush, lit by the first level rays of the rising sun, a dark cloud swirled, and the bustle of its myriad wings was the source of the increased roar: crows and ravens—scores, hundreds; more, and yet more—so many that Hob could not put a number to them. He thought dazedly of Father Athelstan, who had memorized three of the four Gospels, reciting to him the incident of the Gadarene swine—“My name is Legion, for we are many.”

  The birds began to drop from the sky and settle in the trees. The trees grew black with them; the branches drooped with the weight. All the glossy black heads were being cocked this way and that, always to maintain a view of the conflict down there by the side of the road. The sun, catching their eyes, glittered in countless beads of darkest brown. And still birds were dropping into the trees. Every crow and raven south of the Tweed seemed to have come in answer to what Hob now realized was a summons: that cry from Molly and Nemain.

  The men were all turning back and forth, trying to watch both the struggle and the arriving flock, and not a little frightened at the vast somber mob of birds perching, settling; every crow, every raven watching the scene below with curious eagerness, the tiny dark jewels flickering with each eyeblink. As strange as the sight was, stranger still was the utter silence; there was flapping as new birds arrived or as birds kept their balance on the thinner branches, but no call, no caw from the crows, no cronk from the ravens: only silence, tense and greedy attention, a sparkling cloud of miniature eyes returning the rays of the new sun.