“Not exactly right for a Dark Lord,” Derk said, “but I won’t grumble.”
Inside the magic dome on the hill, the battle spells now seemed to be working. The men in black were exercising, doing sword practice, or marching off to the cookhouse, almost as if they were real soldiers. Derk nodded to Barnabas, who nodded cheerfully back.
The main activity, however, was around Kit. Kit was in his element. He had maps, plans, and lists spread out and pinned down with flat stones near the river, and he was surrounded by people, all listening to him attentively. “Your fanatics are lined up here,” Kit was saying to a priest. “Keep them back in the trees until midday.” Blade saw King Luther and Titus and the werewolf among Kit’s listeners, but there were many others he did not know, including some elves, several dwarfs, a sturdy man holding a helmet who was probably a mercenary, a group of strange white-faced people almost as skinny as Old George, and numbers of men in gold earrings wearing a fur draped across one shoulder. Around them, less important people came and went as Kit sent them off on errands. A mercenary came in at a run as Blade watched.
“That stream does run north and south.”
“Damn,” said Kit, and made a note on a map. “Someone—you in the fur—go and find out all the places it can be crossed. I don’t want to waste strength defending fords. The legionaries may have to dig it deeper.”
“They can do that,” said Titus. “But what’s the timing of my attack on the Dark Elves?”
Derk watched with a broad smile. Kit’s eyes were bright, and his neck eagerly arched. “You know,” Derk said to Blade, “I think getting Kit to plan the battles may have been an inspiration. How’s Shona?”
Shona could not have been more of a contrast to Kit. She was still sitting staring at nothing. She did not seem to notice Callette crouching protectively beside her, nor did she look up when Pretty scampered past, showering them both with gravel as he played tag with the dogs. Blade went over to her, but she did not look at him either. He sat down beside Callette.
“Who are the people with the white faces?”
“Vampires,” said Callette. “I don’t like them. They look at your forelegs and say, ‘Juicy wrists.’”
“Whose side are they on?” Blade asked.
“Ours, I think,” said Callette. “They look quite wicked.”
SEVENTEEN
FROM THEN ON IT was all bustle, preparing for the first of the battles. Blade could not understand how his father found time to make drawings and calculations for carrier pigeons in the midst of it all.
“It keeps me sane,” Derk said mildly. Or drives me mad another way, he added secretly. The trouble with pigeons was that they had no brains to speak of and no room to add any. Derk experimented, in between crises, with putting an extra brain somewhere in the middle of the pigeon, but that seemed to mean that the poor creatures would have even more trouble getting airborne than Lydda did. Perhaps they should fly by magic, somewhat in the way dragons did, he thought, as Scales flew in to report that he had moved the purple dragon six miles and one furlong to the southeast, and then took off again to search for dwarfs and missing soldiers.
At dawn, two days before the battle, Talithan revolved abruptly out of his misty doorway, looking pale and distressed, and crunched hurriedly to Derk’s priestly tent. Pretty careered over to him, whinnying with pleasure, but Talithan put him gently aside. “Lord, I have failed you over Chell,” he said as Derk came to the tent flap.
Derk was in the middle of shaving and not wholly awake. “Lost the grape harvest, did you?” he said. “Not to worry.”
“No, no. We saved the grapes. Indeed,” said Talithan, “the city of Chell stands in every way whole and entire, save for its people. That is my failure.”
“Been a massacre, has there?” Derk asked. His heart sank.
“Oh, no, indeed!” Talithan cried out. “There were no people there at all—no citizens, that is, Lord. We found streets, halls, markets, houses all empty, and not one soul to be discovered. Thinking they must be crammed within the castle, we stormed our way thither—setting the illusion of fire on houses as we went, for appearance’s sake—but within the castle were only ten parties of Pilgrims, and the wizard with each party hard pressed to conceal his own group from the rest in all that emptiness. And right angry they were, for their orders are that each party should believe the town besieged for its benefit alone. And upon the urging of these wizards, we stormed our way downward into the bowels of the dungeons, pretending to pursue the tourists. There we found the Duke of Chell locked in a dungeon, but no other soul besides. The wizards are seething angry, Lord.”
“I’d better go and calm them down.” Derk sighed. “Blade! Saddle Beauty for me. Don’t worry, Prince. I consider you did everything you could to retrieve a very peculiar situation. But I’d better find out what happened in Chell. Does the Duke know?”
“He says he found himself seized and imprisoned, but he knew not by whom,” Prince Talithan said. “He had been in the dungeon for days. But where the citizens went, he knew not. Is it true I have not failed you, Lord?”
“It is true,” said Derk. He repeated this that evening when he came back totally mystified. Chell was completely empty, except for the Duke, gloomily sitting in the castle. The townspeople had gone. They had taken all the food and most of their belongings, but they had left no tracks. Derk spent most of the day flying Beauty in wider and wider circles around the city, hoping to locate the people, but there was no sign of them. “I don’t understand it!” he told Prince Talithan. “You wouldn’t think we could mislay several thousand people, but we surely have.”
Beauty was too tired that night for Blade to ride her out on the Wild Hunt. Blade let the geese out of the hamper after they had performed as avians and sat on it beside Shona. He had promised Callette he would look after Shona until the Hunt got back. Shona was still pale and wretched, although she ate a little and even talked sometimes. Blade wished Lydda were here to look after Shona. Everyone else was too busy. Callette was doing her best, but even she was swept up in the mounting bustle and excitement as Kit prepared to stage the battle.
The night before the battle Blade hardly slept. Everyone got up before dawn, and Blade felt sick, empty, and giddy with nerves as he watched other people arriving or getting ready. Kit was galloping from one end of the camp to the other, a huge speeding blackness, squawking orders. Barnabas was hurrying around in the near dark, chinking in black chain mail, putting the final touches to his battle spells on the soldiers.
“These spells won’t last more than twelve hours,” Barnabas said repeatedly to Derk and Kit. “Make sure you call a retreat before they wear off, or I don’t answer for the consequences.”
Around the camp half-seen people kept arriving. Blade saw a band of white-faced vampires, but most of the figures milling about him were entirely strange to him. Some of them had a demonic look.
“Not really. We’re from ordinary villages,” one demonic person told him. “We agreed to look like this. It keeps you out of the way of the tourists.”
When it got lighter, Blade saw that quite a number of the new arrivals had the brown robes and leather satchels of healers. Derk grabbed one of them and told her to stay in the camp to look after Shona. “That girl needs a mind healer, not me!” the healer grumbled. “But I’ll stay, anyway. I detest battles.” Blade wondered how anyone could.
Then came the marvelous moment when the sun came up and Barnabas opened the soldiers’ dome. Drums beat. The soldiers came marching out in ranks with black banners overhead. A pipe played somewhere, and Derk wheeled Beauty to march at the head of his army. Derk was all in black silk. Blade’s clothes were largely black, too, and he marched beside Beauty carrying a black banner with a strange device, invented by Kit. His job was to plant the banner by Derk and then act as a messenger, translocating with Kit’s orders to wherever they were needed. As Kit had pointed out, someone who could be in another place as quick as thought was very useful inde
ed. “And I wish you weren’t going to leave so soon,” Kit said repeatedly.
Don and Callette marched with Derk and Blade. Kit had made Don inky black with red eyes, but Callette had totally refused any alteration. “I want to stay beautiful,” she said.
“Well, you look quite black from underneath,” Kit said at last, forced to give in.
As all the people behind the soldiers got into motion, carts of ammunition creaking, horses protesting, feet rhythmically crunching, Blade gave himself over to the sheer excitement of marching with an army on a crisp autumn morning—it was cold enough that everyone’s breath steamed in rolls above the march—to the sound of drums beating and pipes playing. When they reached the site of the battle, his excitement was boundless.
The place was one of a chain of valleys. “When we wear one valley out, we move on to the next,” Kit had explained. For the moment this first valley looked perfect, with its meadows below, through which wound the little river that had so bothered Kit, and its sides filled with green and gold trees. There, on the opposite wooded hill, the Forces of Good had gathered. They had colored flags, bright uniforms, and trumpets sounding. They looked resplendent. But Derk’s forces were majestic in their own way, too, in their somber blacks, with the dark banners flapping and the drums solemnly beating. There were also at least twice as many of them, because of the tour rule that the Forces of Good should be heavily outnumbered but still win. Blade looked searchingly over at the bright ranks, trying to pick out the Pilgrim Parties. He knew that there should now be at least twenty-one parties embedded in that army, each kept carefully apart from the others by their Wizard Guides, but he simply could not pick them out.
Blade dithered with eagerness. The horses were being led away, and the various divisions of their army were taking up their correct stations. Derk on Beauty was the sole rider there. Derk was looking from side to side with a sort of weary calmness Blade just could not share, seeing that everything was ready. And seeing it was, Derk raised his arm in the signal.
A deep, deep horn bellowed. The soldiers in black began to advance, and as they moved, Kit rose into the air majestically from the rear. There was a gasp, even from his own side. Derk, in these battles, had cheerfully agreed to pretend to be one of his own minions. Kit was Dark Lord. He had made himself twice the size and worked hard on his power of illusion until he was able to make it look as if a huge shadowy figure were riding on his back. The size and power of the figure made the air dark. And Kit could also see everything that went on below in the battle.
“Blade”—his voice sounded more or less in Blade’s ear; Kit had been working on this, too—“Blade, go and see why the Dark Elves aren’t moving with the rest.”
Blade shot himself over to the left wing of the army, but as he got there, Prince Talithan hastily took up his position and the elves began to advance. Kit’s voice said, “That’s all right then. Go and tell the Good Dwarfs that they’re supposed to stay back in the woods.” Blade whirled himself across the valley. While he was arguing with the dwarf captain, the two armies came together in the meadows below with a sound like a great metallic grunt, and thereafter Blade lost all sense of what was going on. He supposed that Kit, grandly circling above, must still know. He had to, because he kept sending Blade to different places. But down in the meadows it was just seething desperation, shouting, clanging, feet braced and sliding in the mud, faces that were resigned, or businesslike, or fierce, arms chopping and hacking, and always mud. Blade saw arrows arcing in the sky, but he did not know whose. The marvel of it was that it made no difference to the excitement. Blade was near screaming with the excitement. There was a place where people were charging forward with spears, and another—or maybe the same place—where spears were planted with points slanting and people seemed to be fighting a last stand. Everything he saw was muddled in the vast, dull, brangling din that filled the valley, and the oily smell of armor mixed with the smell of people sweating. His excitement got muddled in it, too. Down by the river there was a charge through the water, feet laboring and splashing in sheets of water. Blade saw someone slip over, by the far bank, and everybody else go running and climbing over the person’s heaving, muddy body. Then it happened to someone else, as the charge came rushing and howling in the other direction.
In spite of the excitement, Blade wanted to shout at them to be careful.
There were rousing war cries, yells, and grunts, but not much blood or screaming at first. The screaming began when Don and Callette went winging across the valley to drop brown bundles on the Forces of Good. As each bundle hit, it went off with a boom and a ball of rich red flame. And screams. The screaming sounded so much in earnest that Blade found it hard to remember that Don and Callette were dropping the bundles where they would do least damage. He wanted to shout to them to be careful, too. Some of the trees caught fire, and the valley filled with smoke.
Kit sent Blade to Prince Talithan. Blade found him just at the moment when a bearded wizard carefully pushed a sweaty middle-aged man forward and nodded at Talithan. Prince Talithan said, “Forgive me. You are down as expendable.” He batted aside the man’s waving sword and pushed his own sword neatly into the man’s chest. The man thumped down onto the mud just by Blade’s feet. Blade looked into his bluish, twisted face and thought, Funny. The first Pilgrim I’ve seen is a dead one. “Kit wants you to advance now,” he told Talithan, and then whisked away into the woods to tell the fanatics to join the battle.
Another funny thing, he thought as he whisked. I’m hating this battle quite as much as I’m enjoying it.
The fanatics were crouched among the trees, bent over their curved swords, polishing them while they waited. When Blade told them they could attack now, they sprang up with yells of fervor, lofting those swords, and rushed forward in a gaggle. “Anscher, Anscher, Anscher!” they screamed. Their eyes glowed staringly. Their faces were full of devout rage. Blade realized that they truly were fanatics, and the excitement of the battle nearly choked him. The excitement rose and rose as the black-robed crowd raced downhill with the curved swords flashing over their heads and exploded into horror as they entered the battle. The fanatics clearly did not care if they lived or died. They sliced everyone in their way. There was a lot of blood about from then on. Blade saw a line of legionaries trot forward in good order and go down like dominoes as the fanatics met them. He met King Luther wading grimly away from the front line, holding a dripping red cloth to one arm. He met increasing numbers of people who died just as he met them, just like the Pilgrim. None of them died peaceful. They were in undignified sprawls or curled up, and their faces showed the pain of their last moments. Blade hated it. But he also wanted to cheer the fanatics for killing them. He hated the heavy brangling din of the battle, and yet it still excited him enormously. Before long, he was thinking he was being pulled in two by these two different feelings. And he was ashamed of hating the battle almost as much as he was ashamed at being so excited by it.
After the fanatics charged in, it seemed impossible that the Forces of Good could win. But Kit had things well under control. Shortly he sent Blade to Derk, where Derk sat on Beauty at the head of the soldiers in black. Beauty was splashed with mud and blood and not at all happy. Derk was looking incredulous. “These men are survivor types,” he told Blade. “Tell Kit we’ve hardly lost one.”
“Kit says you can start retreating now,” Blade said.
“Oh, ghoodh!” said Beauty.
It took some time for Derk’s men to disengage. By that time Blade felt that the noise and the double feelings were never going to stop. But when the afternoon light was slanting across the valley, there was a gap in the front line where the soldiers had been, and Kit had almost no need to send Blade to tell the various captains to pretend to flee. Most of them were hurriedly withdrawing, anyway, except for the fanatics, and there was almost none of them left. Bundles of dead black robes lay everywhere in the muddy floor of the valley.
Blade watched the Forces of Go
od gather triumphantly under the burned trees. Healers were coming quickly out of the surviving woods and hurrying to those of the people lying around who were still moving. A fresh, neat line of legionaries trotted out after them, carrying spades.
At that Blade could not stand any more and took himself away, back to the camp. Don was standing by the river with his head hanging, golden again, but draggled.
“I hated that!” he said to Blade. “The trouble was, I enjoyed it, too. What’s wrong with me?”
“I felt just the same. I wish there wasn’t another one next week,” Blade said.
They leaned together, exhausted. “And we’ve still got the geese and the Hunt again tonight!” Don groaned.
Shona came out of her tent. She walked down toward them in that strange way she had lately, as if the air were thicker for her than for other people and made walking an effort, but she looked rather better. “Both of you come to my tent,” she said. “The healer’s got some brandy, and we’re cooking steak.”
Don and Blade went gratefully—and quickly, because Kit and Callette were coming in to land and both of them looked almost unbearably cheerful.
After that Blade found he was dreading next week’s battle. He buried himself in the work around the camp and forgot about it as much as he could. But he envied Kit and Callette for their uncomplicated feelings about it. They enjoyed battles, both of them. Then Blade found he envied Don, too. Don had managed to have a heart-to-heart talk with Derk, in which he told Derk all about the double way the battle made him feel, and Derk had said that in that case Don could take charge of the geese and the Wild Hunt and not go to any more of the battles. Blade tried to catch Derk then and say the same, but Derk had left. Prince Talithan had tried to sack a second city and found all the citizens missing from this city, too. Derk was hunting for them.