The elongated, tangled stems of torn vines plummeted to the ground.
Weirdly contorted branches followed on behind, striking the ground with enough force to send the covering of snow briefly soaring into the air.
The very last of the tent shredded, the cloth fluttering and snapping harshly in the gusts that continued to whirl the snow into a frenzy.
The humbled man was out of his bed and up on his feet before the startled Helen was. He suddenly seemed full of energy, bursting with strength.
He dashed towards the trunk that would lead him up to the hatch in the elephant’s underbelly: a hatch that was now closed, impenetrable. There was no way, Helen realised, that he was going to stop the resurgent elephant from carrying on its way.
It effortlessly tore through the vines that had apparently bound it to the tree. It shrugged off its thick covering of snow as if it were nothing more than a smattering of dust.
It was working again, its cogs unclogged.
What could stop it now?
It was, once again, an irresistible war machine.
*
Arrows clanged uselessly against the elephant’s vast, metallic sides.
They flew through the swirling of snow, coming from somewhere deeper within the copse.
They bounced off the thick armour, dropping silently like dead birds into the soft covering of snow.
One did find its target, did make a kill, however.
It tore into the humbled man’s back, just as he fruitlessly reached out for the hind leg of the elephant inexorably striding away from him.
He coughed up a spurt of blood, a fountain of red droplets that fell like berries upon the sheet of snow.
He jerked, shocked, his body as abruptly rigid as a staff: and then he went completely limp.
He tumbled heavily to the ground, the snow barely cushioning his fall.
Helen should have felt sorry for the man but – she wasn’t quite sure of the reason why – she didn’t. If there was any sense of remorse within her, it was merely of the kind one would feel for the passing of a dying beast.
Despite the constant rain of arrows aimed at its great bulk, the elephant inexorably continued on its way, crushing any bushes in its path, knocking aside even the larger trees if it had to. It was slowly vanishing into the thickly veiling snow.
The goblin must be controlling it, Helen thought miserably.
Using her legs to enable him to reach the controls.
And that meant she had no chance now of ever getting her real legs back.
*
Chapter 34
The archers responsible for the hail of arrows directed at the elephant at last broke cover, kneeling as they let fly with a last, pummelling rain of projectiles.
Some of them glanced Helen’s way, their eyes lighting up in recognition, narrowing in confusion as they caught sight of her stubby legs.
‘My lady,’ one of them said, a man whom she had seen often at her father’s side, ‘you’ve had an accident?’
‘Forgive us my lady,’ another pleaded. ‘We thought you were the crew of another of those infernal machines!’
She shrugged away their apologies with a nonchalantly imperial wave of a hand.
‘My father; is he close?’ she demanded.
The man who had spoken first, Gremir, shook his head.
‘We’re scouts only my lady: sent down this way after we’d heard reports that the Romans have landed again on the south coast, intending to capture the old empress!’
‘We saw them ourselves,’ the other man added, ‘after they’d landed just to the west of here. Their own scouts saw us, chased us over this way far farther than we would have wished; but we never thought they might already be this deeply inland, bringing with them yet another of their cursed war elephants!’
‘What did you say?’ Helen spoke more sternly than intended, fearing that her strange, stunted appearance negated any sense of authority she might once have naturally possessed. ‘The Romans are going to attack the empress?’
‘Under the command, it’s said, of the younger empress herself. Three, maybe four legions at the least.’
‘You’ll never get word to my father in time: is that what you were hoping to do?’
‘The rebellion has been successfully put down, we’d heard. But yes, its many days travel even for a light party like us over such hard ground th–’
His voice stilled, his mouth frozen in mid word.
His whole body was rigid, unmoving.
Helen cast her gaze quickly about her.
All the men were similarly frozen in mid action.
Two of them were preparing to move the dead body of the humbled man.
Another had returned with the horses, leading them all by their straps.
Others were carefully unstringing their bows, cleaning them. Some were collecting the spent arrows, trying to work out what could be salvaged.
Amongst the whirling of the snow, there was a brighter flash, a serpentine flow of the brightest mercury, rushing a foot or so above the ground like a magical, swiftly meandering stream. It coursed through the air, a bolt of lightning slowed to a point where its every action was visible.
It writhed, shuddered, dissolved – and became in an instant a pure white deer that could have been formed from the swirling snow itself.
The deer, unlike the silvery streak, was unhurried.
It silently, leisurely, ambled its way through the snow towards Helen.
By a fallen log that lay amongst an unsullied drift, it shivered once more, dissolving back into the spinning snow as quickly as it had been formed from it.
In its place there was Mary, sitting on the log.
*
Chapter 35
‘Mary?’
Helen was bewildered, unsure what to think, to say.
‘A fourth one?’
‘No: the first,’ Mary replied with an amused smile that almost instantly became an anxious frown. ‘If you believe you have seen other Marys, then it worries me that you may have been visited by those who don’t have your interests at heart.’
‘And…you do?’ Helen asked doubtfully, nervously glancing once again at the petrified men surrounding her.
Mary nodded, smiled: yet Helen caught the smirking around the corners of her mouth.
‘Then why are you trying so hard not to laugh!’ Helen snapped accusingly. ‘Wouldn’t the Devil make a similar claim as you: that he was only here to help?’
‘Yes, he would,’ Mary surprisingly agreed. ‘And no doubt whoever visited you first made a similar claim. As for your dismay that I’m stifling my laughter; well yes, I apologise for that! But I just wasn’t expecting you to – look like this!’
She indicated Helen’s overly short legs.
‘How can someone who means me well laugh at this?’
Helen was furious.
‘This is terrible!’ she continued irately. ‘Just what were you expecting?’
‘Well, I knew you’d be in some hybrid form: but it’s more usually a centaur – half girl, half horse. Quite shocking, of course, when it happens to you: but also strangely exhilarating, and enlightening.’
She studied Helen’s ugly legs thoughtfully.
‘Though I suppose you find this humiliating enough–’
‘Humiliating? Of course it’s humiliating!’
‘Good, good: then you recognise the beast within you. It serves its purpose well enough, for you recognise that you could be something better than this.’
Helen glanced down at her shortened legs.
‘If the goblin were here, I don’t think he’d be too happy about you referring to him as a beast!’
‘But that recognition is also wise, Helen: for despite the way it is formed, it is not truly a beast if it comes under your control. It’s only by denying its existence that it gradually exerts its control over us.’
With a slight movement of her eyes she drew Helen’s attention to the humbled man
lying dead upon the ground.
‘You wanted to kill him, didn’t you? And yet, recognising that, being horrified by it, you stayed your own hand.’
‘Which Mary are you?’
Helen probed Mary’s eyes with her own, demanding a truthful answer.
‘I’m Mary of the Seven Daemons.’
*
Chapter 36
‘Mary Magdalene,’ Helen breathed fearfully. ‘As Christ cast out the seven devils from her: but you’ve as good as admitted that you’re the Mary before Christ’s saving grace!’
‘Daemons, Helen,’ Mary patiently corrected her. ‘Not demons, let alone devils! The meaning has been falsely and deliberately changed, for a daemon is simply another aspect of ourselves. But yes, Christ – rather than expelling our six lower states – can help us swiftly rise up to recognising our higher, angelic self.’
‘Then this–’ Helen opened her arms wide, a means of indicating her stunted form – ‘is just another aspect of me? Another lower state?’
She spoke as if she remained incredulous, as if she regarded all this as some cruel joke.
Mary had to stifle a chuckle once again.
‘It may not seem it, I grant you,’ she admitted. ‘It lacks the grace of a centaur – what happened? Didn’t your horse draw near as it was supposed to whe–’
‘Yes, yes, it did!’ Helen declared angrily, it dawning on her that it was that damned goblin who had shooed her horse away. ‘Is this why I’m like this rather than having the powers of a horse? Because I was near a goblin rather than my horse?’
‘You have the means to change yourself once again…’
‘By “means”, you mean magic?’
‘Magic is merely a name granted to it by those who don’t understand it. It is simply a control of the connections that lie between everything–’
‘Dark matter? The darkest of webs, that can suck you in, and leech you dry!’
‘It’s obvious that someone has been deliberately misinforming you,’ Mary sadly sighed. ‘It’s called dark matter only because it remains unseen to most people: and who, anyway, has decided that darkness is evil? Only those, Helen, who deliberately lied that the daemons within us are devils!’
*
There were cries of shock from the men as Mary abruptly vanished.
Yet they weren’t cries because they had seen her disappear. The men closest to her didn’t even seem aware that they had been briefly frozen.
‘–that mostly remains impassable at this time of year,’ the man who had been speaking obliviously continued.
The yells of surprise came from the men who had been tending to the corpse of the humbled man.
‘He’s gone!’ they shrieked in a mix of surprise and horror. ‘He was dead: I checked myself – yet he’s vanished!’
*
Chapter 37
The footprints the humbled man had made as he’d walked off were still visible in the snow.
Peering through the squalls of whirling snow, Helen thought she caught the brief flicker of an oily, yellowish glow: but it blinked out almost as soon as it had appeared, and Helen had to admit that she couldn’t really be sure that she had even seen it in the first place.
They footprints were being swiftly covered by the constantly falling snow, and there seemed little point in chasing after him.
He was neither one of them nor their prisoner, after all.
‘He must have just been wounded: decided he didn’t want to stay with us,’ Gremir said with a noncommittal shrug.
‘Wounded?’ one of the men who’d checked the man’s body scoffed. ‘If having an arrow all way through your body is “wounding” then we really don’t have much to fear in our next battle, do we?’
‘He’s gone, it doesn’t matter either way,’ Helen pointed out authoritatively.
She had more important things on her mind. They didn’t have any time to waste.
‘I’m going to ride out towards where the empress’s column was last heading: to warn her of the oncoming Legions,’ she decided. ‘You need to carry on the way you were going, to bring father and all his men back here as soon as you can.’
‘We only need one man to get back and bring your father here,’ Gremir pointed out. ‘We should go with you, my lady–’
‘No!’
Helen remembered the empress’s strange warning that more men might only make things worse.
‘I insist, my lady,’ Gremir pronounced more firmly, ‘that at least half of us escort you: for if anything were to befall you, then your father would…well, I’d rather not think about what he would do to us.’
Helen nodded. Gremir was right.
‘Half one way, half the other,’ she agreed.
‘My lady,’ Gremir said more tentatively this time, ‘your father won’t get here in time: you should go with the party heading back to him!’
Helen shook her head.
‘I’m my father’s daughter: if I have to die, so be it.’
As she waved a hand airily about her, dismissing Gremir’s fears for her, she caught a bright sparkle of rainbow colours at her fingertips.
She brought her hand down, studying the fingertips curiously.
There was a grain of sparkling fairy dust caught beneath her fingernail.
The speck that the goblin had carelessly cast aside when they’d heard the knocking of the humbled man and rushed to investigate?
How else could it have got there?
She must have brushed her hand across the table, accidentally picking up the grain of dust.
‘If you had a road, Gremir,’ she asked, ‘one better than even the Roman’s had ever constructed, one wide enough to support the advance of a whole army; then how long would it take your men to alert father and bring him down here to stop the legions advancing on the empress?’
‘Such a road could only exist in the wildest of imaginations, my lady!’ Gremir guffawed richly.
Helen raised her arm, concentrated on what she was wishing for: a road rushing out northwest to the coast, which it would then tightly hug as it raced northwards.
Her eyes glazed over, flickered like flames of red fire, like swirling blue waters.
The land lying directly ahead of her trembled. It rumbled irately, demonstrating its fury that it had been so rudely disturbed.
The land doesn’t bow down easily, not even to magic.
It roared its disapproval.
It groaned agonisingly, as if being tortured.
The earth shrieked. The trees screamed.
The air hissed furiously.
But then all resistance collapsed.
‘For a road – for a road only will I do this!’ the land cursed.
In a perfectly straight line stretching out before Helen, the trees cracked and tumbled, like the Devil cuts down his kindling.
The earth moved, like soil being rapidly turned aside by gigantic yet invisible ploughs.
The rivers and streams spun and whirled, like waters chaotically distressed by the churning of countless oars.
As if caught up in the frantically swirling snow, the broken earth, the shattered trees, the distressed waters, all rose up into the air: where everything danced, like the cavorting of immense flames.
The hills dropped, flattening. The valleys swelled, filling up. The streams and rivers briefly parted, allowing bridges to spring out across them.
And the great road laid itself out before Helen, the King’s Daughter.
*
Chapter 38
The men surrounding her were all on their knees, fearfully crossing their chests again and again.
They looked only at the road stretching out before them, their gaze locked on it, as if too frightened to even glance Helen’s way.
They saw it, Helen realised, as the work of the Devil, not God.
She sensed she was standing taller, straighter, once more. Glancing down, she was relieved and overjoyed to see that they were her own legs rather than the
stumpy ones of the goblin.
That was strange.
It hadn’t been a part of her wish.
She had believed she was already asking too much of the powers of magic. For, despite Mary’s reassurances, she still feared that an overuse of its powers, that demanding too much of it, could only ever result in the destruction of her soul.
She had considered bringing her father and his men here directly. But that would have been fraught with danger, not least because of her own inexperience of utilising these powers: isn’t that how she’d ended up with the goblin’s legs, after all?
She dreaded to think what her father and his men might have ended up looking like if she had attempted to drag them here magically.
At last, Gremir mustered the courage to at least glance her way. He rose unsteadily to his feet, clutched at his sword as if for reassurance: then loudly and gruffly proclaimed, ‘It’s like the parting of the red sea!’
He turned to his men, attempting to rally them.
‘Don’t you see, men? The parting of the Red Sea! That’s what this is like!’
He waved a hand towards the road, drawing their attention to the way it had magically cleaved its way through the earth, parting fields and forests as if they were no more substantial than the butter their maids churned into being.
He strode towards the near edge of the road, stepping onto its paved surface, a demonstration that no one would come to harm.
‘See: it is a road, and nothing else!’
Another man rose to his feet and stepped forward, striding confidently onto the paved area and standing alongside Gremir.
‘If the daughter of our king has created this road,’ he declared resolutely, twisting on his heels to face his still cowering companions, ‘then how can it be in anyway anything to do with the darkness?’
A few of the kneeling men swamped shameful stares.
A third man rose to his feet and stepped towards the road, then a fourth.
By the rising of the seventh man, everyone began to shamefacedly amble towards the edge of the road and step onto its paved stones.
The men left in charge of the horses drew all their gathered mounts closer, handing out the reins, reuniting each beast with its master. Helen noted that some of the men sighed with relief, no doubt reassured that the instincts of their horses didn’t cause them to shy away from this magically formed road.