The Fellowship of the Talisman (10 page)

“Now, however, I have a chance to be a real soldier of the Lord. Craven I may be, and with no more strength than a reed, but with my staff I trust that I can strike a lusty blow or two if need be. I'll do my best not to run away, as I did today when danger threatened.”

“You were not the only one today to run away,” Duncan said sourly. “The Lady Diane, battle axe and all, also ran away.”

“But not until it all was over,” Conrad said.

“I thought you told me …”

“You misunderstood my words,” said Conrad. “When the battle started, she was dismounted, but she mounted again and she and the griffin fought. She with her axe, the griffin with his claws and beak. Only when the hairless ones broke and ran did she fly away.”

“That makes me feel better,” Duncan said. “She had not seemed to be one who would run away. I was the only shirker, then.”

“You caught an unlucky throw of a club,” said Conrad. “I stood over you to fight off those who came at you. Most of the damage done to the hairless ones was by my lady and the dragon.”

“Griffin,” Duncan said.

“That is right, m'lord. A griffin. I confuse the two.”

Duncan stood up.

“We should go to the church,” he said, “and see if we can find the lady. There still is daylight left.”

“How is your head?” asked Conrad.

“It has an outsize goose egg on it, and it hurts. But I am all right.”

8

The church was not large, but it was a more impressive structure than would have been expected in such a village. Over the centuries pious villagers had labored to erect it, quarrying and dressing the stone, hoisting it into place, laying the heavy slabs that made up the floor, carving the pews and altar and all the other furniture out of native oak, weaving the tapestries to decorate its walls. There was about it, Duncan told himself, a rude simplicity that made for a charm too seldom found in other much larger and more elaborate buildings.

The tapestries had been pulled down from the walls and lay on the flagstones, crumpled and trampled. Some of them had been set afire, but had failed to burn. The pews and other furniture had been smashed, the altar demolished.

Diane and the griffin were not there, although there were signs that once they had been. Griffin dung spotted the stones of the floor; they found the chapel that the woman had used as a sleeping room—sheepskins upon the floor to make a bed, a small, rudely built cooking pit fashioned of stone, and half a dozen cooking utensils.

In the second chapel stood a long table, miraculously still intact. Upon it were spread piles of parchment sheets. An inkpot and a quill pen, fixed to its stand, stood among the litter.

Duncan picked up one of the parchments. It crinkled at his touch. The writing was crabbed, the words misspelled, bordering on the illiterate. Someone had been born, someone had died, a couple had been married, a mysterious murrain had killed a dozen sheep, the wolves had been bad that year, an early frost had shriveled the gardens, but snow had held off almost until Christmas.

He picked up other sheets. They were all the same. The records of years of village nothingness. Births, deaths, marriages, minor local catastrophes. The gossip of old wives, the small fears, the small triumphs—an eclipse of the moon and the terror in its wake, the time of falling stars and the wonder of it, the early bloom of forest flowers, the violent summer thunderstorm, the feasts and their celebrations, the good crops and the bad—all the local historical trivia, the records of a village pastor so immersed in village happenings that he had no other interests.

“She searched all these records,” Duncan said to Andrew. “She was looking for some mention of Wulfert, some clue as to where a trace of him might be found. Apparently she found nothing.”

“But she must have known that by this time he would be dead.”

“Not him,” said Duncan. “Not the man himself. That was not what she was looking for. The relic, don't you understand. To her the relic—or, if you insist, the infernal machine—was what was important.”

“But I do not understand.”

“You are blinded,” Duncan said, “by your candle flame, by all your piety. Or was it piety?”

“I do not know,” said Andrew. “I had always thought so. My lord, I am a sincere hermit, or I try to be.”

“You cannot see beyond your own nose,” Duncan told him. “You cannot accept that what you call an infernal machine may have validity and value. You will not give a wizard his due. There are many lands, as Christian as this one, where wizards, however uncomfortable the thought of them may be, are held in high regard.”

“There is about them the stink of paganism.”

“Old truths,” said Duncan. “Old ideas, old solutions, old methods and procedures. You cannot afford to reject them because they antecede Christianity. My lady wanted what the wizard had.”

“There is one thing you do not realize,” said Andrew, speaking softly. “One thing you have not thought about. She herself may be a wizard.”

“An enchantress, you mean. A sophisticated witch.”

“I suppose so,” Andrew said. “But whatever the correct designation, you had never thought of that.”

“I had not thought of it,” said Duncan. “It may well be true.”

Shafts of late afternoon sunlight came through the tall, narrow windows, looking very much like those shafts of glory that biblical artists delighted in depicting as shining upon saints. The windows were of tinted glass—those that still had glass in them, for many had been broken by thrown rocks. Looking at the few remaining tinted windows, Duncan wondered how the village, in all its piety and devotion, could have afforded that much tinted glass. Perhaps the few affluent residents, of which there certainly would have been very few, had banded together to pay for its fabrication and installation, thereby buying themselves certain dispensations or absolutions, buttressing their certainty of Heaven.

Tiny motes of dust danced in the shining shafts of light, lending them a sense of life, of motion and of being, that simple light in itself could never have. And in back of the living light shafts something moved.

Duncan reached out to grasp Andrew's arm.

“There's something here,” he said. “Back there in the corner.”

He pointed with a finger, and the hermit peered in the direction that he pointed, squinting his eyes to get a better focus. Then he chuckled to himself, visibly relaxing.

“It's only Snoopy,” he said.

“Snoopy? Who the hell is Snoopy?”

“That's what I call him. Because he's always snooping around. Always watching out for something that he can turn to his own advantage. He's a little busybody. He has another name, of course. A name you cannot get your tongue around. He doesn't seem to mind that I call him Snoopy.”

“Someday that long-windedness of yours will be the death of you,” said Duncan. “This is all well and good, but will you tell me, who is …”

“Why, I thought you knew,” said Andrew. “I thought I had mentioned him. Snoopy is a goblin. One of the local boys. He pesters me a lot and I have no great love of him, but he's really not a bad sort.”

By this time the goblin had walked through the distorting shafts of window-light and was coming toward them. He was a little fellow; he might have reached to a grown man's waist. He was dressed in nut-colored brown: a peaked cap that had lost its stiffening and flopped over at the top, a jerkin, a pair of trousers fitted tight around his spindly legs, shoes that curled up ridiculously at the toe. His ears were oversize and pointed, and his face had a foxy look.

Without preamble, Snoopy spoke to Andrew. “This place is livable now,” he said. “It has lost some of its phony smell of sanctity, which was something that neither I nor any of my brethren could abide. The stabling of the griffin perhaps had much to do with it. There is nothing like the smell of griffin dung to fumigate and offset the odor of sanctity.”

Andrew stiffened. “You're being impertinent again,” he said.

“In that case,” said Snoopy, “I shall turn about and leave. You will pardon me. I was only trying to be neighborly.”

“No,” said Duncan. “Wait a minute, please. Overlook the sharp tongue of this good hermit. His outlook has been warped by trying to be a holy man and, perhaps, not going about it in quite the proper way.”

Snoopy looked at Duncan. “You think so?” he asked.

“It's a possibility,” said Duncan. “He tells me he wasted a lot of time staring at a candle flame, and I'm not sure, in my own mind, whether that is the way to go about it if one should feel the compulsion to be holy. Although, you understand, I'm not an expert at this sort of thing.”

“You seem to be a more reasonable person than this dried-up apple of a hermit,” said the goblin. “If you give me your word that you'll hold him off me and will prevail upon him to keep his foul mouth shut, I shall proceed upon what I came to do.”

“I shall do all that I am able to restrain him,” Duncan said. “So how about you telling me what you came to do.”

“I came in the thought that I might be of some small assistance to you.”

“Pay no attention to him,” counseled Andrew. “Any assistance you may get from him would turn out to be equivalent to a swift punch in the nose.”

“Please,” said Duncan, “let me handle this. What harm can it do to listen to what he has to say?”

“There you see,” said Snoopy. “That's the way it goes. The man has no sense of decency.”

“Let's not belabor the past differences between the two of you,” said Duncan. “If you have information we would be glad to hear it. It seems to me we stand in some need of it. But there is one thing that troubles me and you'll have to satisfy us on that point.”

“What is this thing that troubles you?”

“I presume you know that we intend to travel farther into the Desolated Land, which at the moment is held by the Harriers.”

“That I do know,” said Snoopy, “and that is why I'm here. I can acquaint you with what would be the best route and what you should be watching for.”

“That, precisely, is what troubles me,” said Duncan. “Why should you be willing to assist us against the Harriers? It would seem to me that you might feel more kinship toward them than you feel toward us.”

“In some ways you may be correct in your assumption,” said Snoopy, “but your reasoning is not too astute, perhaps because you are not fully acquainted with the situation. We have no grounds to love the humans. My people—those folk you so insultingly speak of as the Little People—were residents of this land, of the entire world, for that matter, long before you humans came, thrusting your way so unfeelingly among us, not even deigning to recognize us, looking upon us as no more than vermin to be swept aside. You did not look upon us as a legitimate intelligent life form, you ignored our rights, you accorded us no courtesy or understanding. You cut down our sacred woods, you violated our sacred places. We had a willingness to accommodate our way of life with your way, to live in harmony among you. We held this willingness even when you came among us as arrogant invaders. We had powers we would have been willing to share with you, perhaps in an exchange that would have given us something of value to us. But you had a reluctance to stoop, as you felt, to the point of communicating with us. You thrust yourself upon us, you kicked us out of the way, you forced us to live in hidden places. So, at long last, we turned against you, but because of your ferocity and unfeeling violence, there was little that we could do against you; we have never been a match for you. I could go on for a much longer length of time cataloguing our grievances against you, but that, in summary, my dear sir, is why we cannot love you.”

“You present a good case,” said Duncan, “and, without admitting it to be the truth in all regards, which I am in no position to do and would not do in any case, I must admit that there is some merit in the words you've spoken. Which proves my point, exactly. Hating us as you must, why are you willing to offer us assistance? Knowing your feelings about us, how can we reconcile ourselves to trusting you?”

“Because we hate the Harriers more than we hate you,” said Snoopy. “While you may think so, in your human folly, the Harriers are not our people. We and they stand very much apart. There are several reasons for this. They are pure evil and we are not. They live for evil alone and we do not. But since you humans lump us in with them, through the centuries they have given us a bad name. Much that they do is blamed on us. There are certain areas in which we might have arrived at an accommodation with humans, but the Harriers have foreclosed these avenues to us because their actions and your fuddle-headedness has made us seem as bad as they. When you condemn them, you condemn us equally with them. There are some more intelligent and compassionate humans who, having taken the trouble to know us better, do not join in this condemnation but, sadly, the most of you do, and the voices of the few compassionates are lost in the flurry of hatred that is directed against us. In this invasion of the Harriers, we have suffered with the humans, perhaps not as much as you humans, for we have our small magics that have been some protection for us, magics that you humans could have shared with us had you been willing to accept us. So, in balance, we hate the Harriers more than we do the humans, and that is why we are willing to help you.”

“Given such an attitude,” Andrew said to Duncan, “you would be insane to trust him completely. He might lead you straight into an ambush. I take no great stock in his professed hatred of the Harriers, even though he warned me once against them. I tell you, there is no assurance of truth in his kind.”

Duncan disregarded Andrew. He said to Snoopy, “You say the Harriers are not your people, that you are in no way related to them. Where, then, did they come from? What is their origin?”