As Brian had promised, the telling as he told it could be done, and was done, shortly enough.
"I understand now," said QB when he finished. "You are not of the common sort of visitor to Lyonesse; and I crave pardon for having misjudged you. But these matters, nobly as you and your friends handled them, were not so great a thing as a threat to Lyonesse. I cannot believe it will be with Worms, ogres, or stolen princes that these Powers will try to wrest from us our land; and necessarily overcome the forests, the earth, and the Old Magic, itself."
"No." Jim shook his head. "And we don't either. I was just hoping you might have some idea of how they'd have to go about it."
"I do not. Nor does any I know, except perhaps Merlin; and for centuries now he has remained silent and apart from all that happens. But you say the Dark Powers must work through living men or other beings?"
"They might be able to do damage by themselves; but They're forces, not flesh. They could help people or things conquer those here in Lyonesse, but it would do Them no good unless They could hold and use it; and They could never hope to do that without living bodies to occupy it. Look at all History and its greatest conquerors. Rome only held its greatest size some hundred of years, before its power was gone."
For a moment Jim had forgotten he was in a magical land in a strange world of a different universe. He was back in Riveroak, in his own future time, striding deep into an argument at an academic get-together.
"Rome wanted tribute from Arthur, but he refused them," the QB said.
"Quite right!" added Brian. "Any Englishman worthy of the name would do the same. Nerve of those Romans! Tribute! You'd think they didn't know where they were!"
"This is Lyonesse, of course," said the QB delicately.
"Arthur was an English King!"
"In any case," said Jim, to head off any discussion that might be brewing, "what you just told us about the Witch Queens—their not having any private armies of their own to act for the Dark Powers—raises the problem of how they're going to be helping the enemy after all. Also, there's that question of what Morgan le Fay stands to gain by doing it. Probably the first thing we ought to find out is if all of the Witch Queens are involved with the Dark Powers, and what they stand to gain by helping."
He looked directly at the QB.
"Which of the other, lesser, Witch Queens would you suggest we check on first? Who'd be the easiest to get to? Hopefully without letting her know why we're doing it?"
"The Queen of Northgales, most surely. But I would not advise that you call her a lesser Witch Queen, at least where she may hear you."
"I'll watch it," said Jim. "But let's head toward wherever she is, then."
"I can carry you there in moments," offered the QB.
He did so. Once more, after they seemed to have covered no more than a hundred yards of forest distance, they emerged into a scrub-grassy, cleared circle around another castle, this one built entirely of a hard-looking, dull white stone, rising into many towers topped by heavy battlements.
It was all but windowless and lacked even as many arrow slits as might have been expected. It had a heartless, touch-me-not look about it. A steady moan of small, cold breezes circulated among the embrasures—the openings between the cops, as the raised sections of the battlements were called—reaching down to chill Jim and Brian even in their armor.
"In faith!" said Brian, "there seems little welcome here. We had best hammer on their gates, even to let them know we are come."
But there was no need of that—nor need for Jim to display his shield with the arms upon it. They had barely entered into the cleared area, when one of the gates opened and a powerful figure in full armor rode out on a horse of the size to bear him, heading straight for them.
This was no Sir Boy. Just the opposite. He was the largest man Jim had seen so far in Lyonesse, fully as big as Sir Herrac de Mer, the Northumbrian knight who was the father of Sir Giles de Mer, Jim's friend and Brian's. But where Sir Herrac, though stern, had been kindly enough—unless his wrath was stirred—there was no kindness to be seen in the man now riding toward them.
Under his helm with its single nasal projecting down to protect his face, the expression of this man was as bleak and remote as the castle from which he had come. He had no beard; but both his eyebrows and the narrow trimmed mustache above his upper lip mixed white hairs with black. His eyes were also black as the stone of the castle where shadow fell across it. Their unyielding gaze and his straight mouth brought no light to the weather-darkened face, curving shieldlike down to a square jaw.
"James!" said Brian in a low voice, but urgently, riding Blanchard to close on Jim. "This man must be mine!"
Jim would have given a great deal to agree. The man riding toward him looked more like death approaching on horseback than anyone he could ever have imagined. But it was at him the man was looking; and he was the one who had suggested they come here.
It was foolish; but he found himself being operated on by the standards of the world he had come to live in, rather than by the common sense he had grown up with.
"I can't—"
"James," said Brian, understanding perfectly. "I beg this grace as a gift from you. I must wash from my mind the taste of my defeat by that Bright Boy, back at the last place we were."
Jim hesitated. The excuse was a good one; but the trouble was, both he and Brian knew it was an excuse to save him. He shook his head. "Brian, I'm sorry, but you know—"
However, the knight was now almost upon them. Brian, taking matters into his own hands, rode ahead to meet him.
"Hold!" he said, reining Blanchard sideways like a barrier across the other knight's path. "Before you speak to Sir James, you must answer to me, Sir!"
The large knight halted. His expression did not change; but he looked down—a long, long way down—at Brian.
"You are young," he said; "later, you will learn that you will have enough of fighting without seeking beyond your own causes. I will pass, by you or through you."
"Sir, I challenge you to break a spear with me, since you lightly me in that fashion."
"So be it," said the knight. He turned his horse and began riding back toward the castle, far enough so that he and Brian would have time to bring their horses up to full gallop before they crossed lances.
"How dare you!" cried a shrill, high-pitched little voice.
The large knight checked his horse, looked back over his shoulder, and stared. He turned the animal and rode back toward Brian, pointing at a small, sharp-featured face that had now lifted up the edge of the rain cover over the goods on the sumpter horse and was staring at him.
"What is that?" he asked.
"That?" said Brian, hesitating and looking at Jim.
"It's all right," said Jim hastily. "It's just my hobgoblin—"
"Goblin!" The large knight stiffened in his saddle. "Here in Lyonesse?"
"Hobgoblin!" Hob thrust his face farther out from under the rain cover. His eyes were blazing and his tiny jaw was set. "Rash knight, dare not to speak of we of the Hob in the same breath with whatever Goblin-called creatures you may know!"
He erupted completely out from under the rain cover, to stand tall at his full fourteen inches of height; and he stamped one small foot noiselessly on the neck of the sumpter horse, who turned her head to look at him in mild surprise.
"You have not answered me!" he shouted. He was clearly beside himself with anger—the first time Jim had ever seen him so. His voice had gone up a good three notes, and rang with a strange, artificial rhythm.
"How dare you," Hob continued, "threaten Sir James and bar his entrance to the castle of the Queen of Northgales, when he has come this great distance to talk to her? Lo, he is no mere knight like yourself; but a great Magickian, come to speak privily with your Queen. How dare such as you offer to fight him—the most manly man in armor to abide—and scorn Sir Brian, the Paladin who rides with him? I pray you, show him some of your terrible magick, my Lord, that his ignorance
may be informed!"
It was a very peculiar speech to come from Hob; and it threatened to put Jim on the spot. Happily, however, he had been through this sort of thing before—a well-meaning ally, without warning, demanding a demonstration of Jim's powers. There was always one trick available because of his first appearance in this world having taken place in the body of a presently living dragon.
It was the bit of instinctive magic that had been, effectively, a gift to him, completely apart from all else he had learned since he met Carolinus. It could be used without breaking his ward, and he could turn it on or off. But otherwise he had no control over it. It was exactly the same as the innate magic of Naturals, such as the troll-light of the trolls, and Hob's ability to ride a waft of smoke to other places halfway around this world.
He swung down from his saddle—and turned himself into a dragon.
The large knight was evidently not given to making noises, jumping, or otherwise showing alarm; but he became very still where he sat on his horse, lance in hand; and remained that way without sound or movement for so long that Jim was beginning to get concerned—when the man abruptly broke into movement, wheeling his horse brutally around and galloping for the gate to the castle.
It opened for him and immediately shut behind him.
Jim turned himself back into his human form, armor and all.
"Hob—" he began sternly, turning to the hobgoblin. But Hob, still standing on the neck of the horse, thin shoulders squared and arms folded adamantly, interrupted.
"Damme, m'Lord!" he said, looking down at Jim from the height of his own stand on the back of the sumpter horse, "are we to brook such insults from any man in armor, who has not even the courtesy to name himself before offering battle to you, who are so far above him? I say NO!"
Jim stared. Off to the side, he could see Brian staring also. Hob's language had suddenly become as extravagant and ornate as could be imagined even among the actual knights of this time in the land above. These words and phrases were more than high fashion; they were an exaggeration and burlesque.
That last thought brought a possible explanation for this startling change in his hobgoblin.
"Hob," he said, "has someone been telling you stories?"
"One has, my Lord, indeed," Hob said, with a graceful bow. But then he relaxed and his voice became natural again—and confidential. "The ballad singer who came to the castle has been giving me lessons on how to speak with the gentry."
"What ballad singer?"
"You remember, m'Lord. The ballad singer who came to Malencontri at the time we were just about to bring the summer in. He gives me a lesson twice a week, and m'Lady has been teaching me things, too. I can sign my name—'H-O-B'—just like that… no other Hob in all the land can do the things that I can do. Not only do I understand the way to polish swords—"
The light of complete understanding broke in on Jim. In his last sentence, Hob had begun to misquote The Knight Whose Armor Didn't Squeak, a poem by E. E. Milne, the writer of the Pooh stories—a poem that no ballad maker in the fourteenth century could possibly know. Hob had to have learned that from Angie. What had gotten into her?
But Hob was already explaining that.
"—M'Lady said I could tell the children stories, now, to keep them quiet at banquets, instead of making faces, twisting myself about and standing on my head, getting them all excited the way I did at the great feast after Mage Carolinus was rescued."
Well, there was the explanation for Angie's involvement. He could hardly say anything to Hob about that. But the other influence was still not as it should be.
"Are you telling me that ballad singer who came at midsummer's stayed with us at Malencontri ever since then?" He glared at Hob, who was maintaining his pose on the sumpter horse's back. "How could he have been in the castle all this time—"
Jim broke off. He did not need an answer to that. The castle servants, if they wanted—and when they all wanted something, they went after it as effectively as the most powerful labor union—they could keep an elephant in the castle for years and he would never see or hear anything to suggest it was there. For the first time he wondered what else they had hiding down in their ground-level servants' quarters.
A sound of trumpets took his eyes and his thoughts back to the castle. Both the great doors in its curtain wall not only opened but were thrown back, now. The large knight on his large horse came back outside, with all his arms and armor, but did not approach them. He sat his horse to one side of the gate, while a half-dozen figures in white-and-gray livery laid out a black carpet from inside the curtain wall out over the drawbridge.
"We are all at once honored guests, James," murmured Brian. He had ridden back to sit Blanchard side by side with Gorp, turned toward the castle.
"Yes," said Jim, and remounted; and began to feel a touch of uneasiness. What would the Queen of Northgales expect of him, after this kind of a welcome? But he was forgetting Hob.
"Hob," he said, without turning his head.
"Yes, m'Lord?"
"You evidently said just the right thing at just the right time."
"I kiss your feet in gratitude, my Lord."
"No you don't," said Jim. "Not now or ever. Forget everything that ballad maker's been teaching you—for the moment, anyway. Just talk like yourself. Besides, from here on in I'll do the talking."
"Yes, m'Lord." There was a moment of silence, and then a very meek voice. "Are you angry with me, m'Lord?"
"No," said Jim. "It's just that you were lucky once, but we don't want to stretch that luck too far."
"Oh."
"Yes."
"I won't say anything unless you tell me to, m'Lord—my Lord."
"Good."
The carpet was laid now and the knight was riding toward them, no slower or faster than he had come out originally, but with a certain stiffness in the way he sat his saddle that signaled a formal rather than a punitive approach.
"My Lady the Queen of Northgales requires your presence. Messires, would you of your grace follow me? I will lead you to the presence of our Queen."
Jim nodded. Neither he nor Brian said a word. Formality was catching. The knight turned back toward the castle and they followed him, Jim pondering whether his quick acceptance of this invitation would help or hinder him with Northgales.
Beyond the great doors, there was the expected courtyard, with more fire-prone wooden utility buildings—cookhouse, blacksmith shop, and the like—than would have been trusted in the fourteenth-century lands above Lyonesse. He thought there was a certain slovenliness about not only the buildings and the courtyard but the people, all clad as if for deep winter, who could be seen standing or lounging about. Jim suddenly became conscious that the QB was once more no longer with them.
Jim looked at the knight. That armored figure was half a dozen horse-strides ahead of them.
"Hob," Jim said, out of the corner of his mouth, in a low voice, "when did the QB leave us?"
There was a slight pause before the answer came, also in a hushed voice.
"Forgive me, m'Lord, I didn't notice when he went. I didn't miss him until you mentioned him just now."
"Probably didn't want to go with us inside this castle," Jim muttered to himself. For a moment he found himself wondering if the QB was like Aargh in not wanting to be enclosed. But Jim was becoming adjusted to the QB's abrupt coming and going. After all, he was the only one of his kind in existence, and had undoubtedly ended up making his own rules of conduct. No doubt he would be showing up again before long.
Even as Jim thought these things, the large knight led them through the arched stone entrance to the castle proper; and this was as clean and high-ceilinged as the courtyard with its service buildings and staring servants had been slovenly. But there was something about it that was as chilled, bleak, and unwelcoming as the outer walls of the castle had appeared from the outside.
Chapter Seventeen
Jim's first thought was that the place was unusuall
y cold. But he was used to cold castles now. They were all cold, unless you were standing less than ten feet from a fire in a fireplace in midsummer.
But it was not that. This was a different kind of cold; as if the very spirit, the identity of the place, had no warmth.
Now on foot and leading their horses, they had stepped directly into what seemed to be a large formal hall, furnished not with tables—or the trestles that could be covered with boards and tablecloths to set up as tables—but merely a few great torches that burned with unnatural white flames and lit up the arching stone walls that came to a meeting far overhead. Only, in that torchlight, there could be seen a dais at the far end of the chamber, with a tall throne on it that looked as if it had been carved out of a single block of ice.
"You will wait here, my Lord, Messire," said the knight, also leading his horse and having brought them to the edge of the platform. He turned away. He and his horse literally vanished.
"James…" said Brian, in a low, but troubled voice.
"It's all right," said Jim, making no effort to keep his own voice down; and his words came back to him, repeated out of order and all tangled with each other, from different reflecting areas of the upcurving walls. "I think I'm supposed to be impressed."
He turned himself once more into a dragon. The echoes all stopped suddenly, as if they were part of a public address system which had just been switched off.
Jim turned back into a knight again. In the stone wall behind the throne a small door that had not been visible before opened suddenly; and a tall young woman, not unlike the one who had run out to question them at the castle of the Bright Knight, emerged and curtsied.
"If you will follow me, my Lords?"
She led them through the door from which she had come. This was high and wide enough to let them tow the horses through also. They did so, following her into a room that, by contrast with the one they were leaving, was bright with illumination. But that illumination turned out to be nothing more than the brightness of Lyonesse's outdoors. It was the room itself that was startling.