Fellowship of the Talisman Read online

  Duncan hurried ahead to catch up with Conrad.

  “This place,” said Conrad, “has an evil smell to it.”

  “Evil or not,” said Duncan, “it is a place to camp. Sheltered from the wind. Probably we’ll find water. There must be a stream somewhere. Better than being caught on some windy hillside.”

  “I thought to catch sight of something ahead,” said Conrad. “A whiteness. Like a church, perhaps.”

  “An odd place for a church,” said Duncan.

  “I could not be sure. In this dark, it is hard to see.”

  As they talked they kept moving ahead. Tiny had fallen back to walk with the two of them.

  Ahead of them Duncan caught a glimpse of whiteness.

  “I think I see it, too,” he said. “Straight ahead of us.”

  As they progressed a little farther they could see that it was a building — for all the world like a tiny church. A thin tall spire pointed toward the sky and the door stood open. In front of it a space had been cleared of underbrush and trees, and they went across this space filled with wonder. For there should not be a church here, even a small one.

  Round about lived no one who would attend it, and yet there it stood, a small building, like a toy church. A chapel, Duncan thought. One of those hidden chapels tucked away, for one obscure reason or another, in places that were off the beaten track.

  Duncan and Conrad came to a halt in front of it, and Andrew came hurrying up to them.

  “Jesus of the Hills,” he said. “The Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills. I had heard of it, but had never seen it. I had no idea how to get to it. It was a thing spoken of half in wonder, half in disbelief.”

  “And here it is,” said Conrad.

  Andrew was visibly shaken. The hand that held the staff was trembling.

  “A holy place,” said Duncan. “A place of pilgrimage, perhaps.”

  “A holy place only recently. Only the last few hundred years,” said Andrew. “It stands on most unholy ground. In earlier times it was a pagan shrine.”

  “There are many holy places that were raised on areas that once were special to the pagans,” Duncan told him. “In the thought, perhaps, that the pagans would more readily accept Christianity if the places of worship were built on familiar ground.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Andrew. “Reading in the Fathers, I ran across some mention of such thoughts. But this one — this was something else.”

  “A pagan shrine, you said. A place of the Druids, most likely.”

  “Not the Druids,” said Andrew. “Not a shrine for humans. A gathering place for evil, where high carnival was held upon certain days.”

  “But if such were the case, why was a chapel built here? It would seem to me this was a place the Church had best avoid, for a time at least.”

  “I do not know,” said Andrew. “Not with any certainty. There were in the olden days certain militant churchmen who perforce must seize evil by the horns, must confront it face to face…”

  “And what happened?”

  “I do not know,” said Andrew. “The legends are unclear. There are many stories, but perhaps no truth to any of them.”

  “But the chapel’s here,” said Conrad. “It was allowed to stand.” Duncan strode forward, went up the three shallow steps that led up to the chapel door, and through the door.

  The place was tiny, a dollhouse sort of place. There was one window on each side made of low-grade colored glass that glinted in the fading light, and six pews, three on each side of the narrow aisle. And above the altar.

  Duncan stared in horror. He gagged and knew the bitterness of gall gushing in his mouth. His stomach knotted at the sight of the crucifix that hung behind the altar. It was carved out of a large oak log, all of it in one piece, the cross and the carven Jesus hanging on the cross.

  The crucifix was upside down. The figure of Christ was standing on His head, as if He had been caught in the midpoint of a somersault. Filth had been smeared upon Him and obscene sentences, written in Latin, were painted on the wood.

  It was, Duncan thought fleetingly, as if someone had struck him hard across the mouth. It was only with an effort that he kept his knees from buckling. And even as he reacted to the profanation and the sacrilege, wondered why he should — he, the mildest of Christians, with no great piety or devotion. And yet a man, he thought, who risked his neck and the necks of others to perform a service to the Church.

  The crucifix was a mockery, a gusty whoop of pagan laughter, a burlesque of the Faith, a hooting, a ridicule, a scoffing, and, perhaps as well, a hatred. If the enemy cannot be conquered, at least he can be ridiculed and laughed at.

  Conrad had pointed out that despite the pagan ground on which it had been built, the chapel had been allowed to stand. And in this observation there was implicit the question of why it had been allowed to stand. And this, the reversed crucifix and the violence that had been done it, was the reason. Years ago a man of Christ had come, a militant man intent on ramming Christianity down a pagan throat, and had built the chapel. And now the joke had been turned upon him and the chapel stood a mockery.

  He heard the gasps behind him as Conrad and Andrew saw the crucifix and caught, for an instant, the impact of the horror.

  Duncan whispered at them, “A mockery. A living mockery. But Our Lord can stand that. He can take a little mockery.”

  The chapel, he saw, was clean and well cared for. There was no sign of the ravages of time. It had been swept but recently. It had been kept in good repair.

  Slowly he began to back out of the door, Conrad and Andrew backing with him. On the steps outside sat a huddled Meg.

  “You saw,” she said to Duncan. “You saw?”

  Dumbly, stricken, he nodded his head.

  “I did not know,” she said. “I did not know we were coming to this place. If I had, I’d have told you, stopped you.”

  “You knew what was here?”

  “I had heard of it. That was all. Heard of it.”

  “And you do not approve of it?”

  “Approve of it? Why should I disapprove of it? I have no quarrel with it. And yet, I would not have had you see it.

  I’ve eaten your food, ridden on your horse, your great dog did not tear hunks of flesh from me, you ran no sword through me, the big one reached out his hand to help me rise, he boosts me onto the horse. Even that sour apple of a hermit gave me cheese. Why should such as I wish any ill for you?”

  Duncan reached down and patted her on the head. “It’s all right, grandmother. We take it in our stride.”

  “Now what do we do?” asked Andrew.

  “We spend the night here,” Duncan said. “We are worn out with our travels of the day. We’re in no shape to go on. We need some food and rest.”

  “Not a bite of food will I be able to swallow,” said Andrew. “Not in such a place.”

  “What do we do then?” asked Duncan. “Go running out into the hills, fighting through the woods in the dark?

  We’d not make a mile.”

  Thinking, even as he said the words, that were it not for Andrew and Meg, he and Conrad could go, leave this pagan place behind them, find a safer camping place. Or keep going all the night, if that were necessary, to put some distance between them and the Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills. But Andrew’s legs were tottery from the punishment they’d taken, and Meg, although she probably would deny it, was near the end of her endurance. Back at the hermit’s cave he’d worried about the volunteers they were taking on, and here was evidence that he’d been right in worrying.

  “I’ll get some wood and start a fire,” said Conrad. “There’s a stream over to the right. I heard running water there.”

  “I’ll go and get some water,” Andrew said. Duncan, watching him, knew the kind of courage it had taken for him to offer to go alone out into the dark.

  Duncan called Daniel and Beauty in, took the saddle off Daniel and the packs off Beauty. Beauty huddled against Daniel, and he seemed quite content to h
ave her there. The two of them, Duncan thought, know as well as we that there is something wrong. Tiny prowled restlessly about, head held high to catch any scent of danger.

  Meg and Conrad did the cooking at the fire that Conrad lighted only a short distance in front of the steps leading up to the chapel. The lights from the flames of the fire washed across the whiteness of the tiny structure.

  Up on the hill to the west a wolf howled and was answered by another from the north.

  “Some of those we saw early in the day,” said Conrad. “They are still around.”

  “The wolves have been bad this year,” said Andrew.

  The glen, as full night came down, held the dank, wet feel of fear, of danger walking on soft pads, moving in on them. Duncan, feeling this, wondered if this sense of apprehension arose from having seen the defamation of the crucifix, or if it would have been present if there had been no chapel and no crucifix.

  “Conrad and I will do double watch tonight,” said Duncan.

  “You’re forgetting me again,” said Andrew, but with something in his voice that sounded to Duncan as if it might be relief.

  “We want you rested,” said Duncan. “The both of you, so that we can put in a long day tomorrow. We’ll start as soon as we can see. Well before full morning light.”

  He stood beside the fire, staring out into the dark. It was hard, he found, not to take alarm at an imagined shape or an imagined noise.

  Twice he thought he saw movement out beyond the campfire circle, but each time decided it was no more than his imagination, sharpened by the fear that he sought to conceal but could not, himself, deny.

  The wolves occasionally howled, not only from the west and north, but from the east and south as well. This country, he told himself, was crawling with the beasts. However, the howls still were from a distance; the wolves did not seem to be moving in. They might come later, Duncan told himself, after they had worked up more courage, and the activity about the campfire had quieted down. Although of wolves, they need have no fear. If they came in, Daniel and Tiny would wreak havoc on them.

  If there were anything to be feared, it would be something other than the wolves. Remembering, once again he saw the frog’s mouth full of teeth, the glowing eyes, the suggestion of a face that was made up of smooth planes and sharp angles — the face that had stared out at them from beyond the campfire of the night before. And the snaky evilness that had surged out of the black pool in the swamp.

  Meg called them in for food and they squatted around the fire, wolfing it down. Andrew, despite his assertion that he would not be able to swallow a single morsel, did full justice to the meal.

  There was little talk, only a sentence now and then and of inconsequential things. No one talked about what they’d found inside the chapel. It was as if all of them were busy in an effort to wipe it from their minds.

  But it was not a thing, Duncan found, that could be wiped away. Never for a moment since he first had seen it had it been more than a short distance from his consciousness. Mockery, he had told himself, and it was that, of course, but it also would be, he thought, more than mockery. Hatred, he had said, almost as an afterthought. But now, having thought on it, he knew that there was in it as much hatred as there was mockery.

  And that was understandable. The pagan gods of ancient days had a right to hate this new faith that had risen something less than two millennia ago. But he chided himself that he should think of the pagan gods as somehow legitimate in their hatred, that he should admit, even parenthetically, that they had existed and did now exist. This was not, he reminded himself, the way a Christian should be thinking. A devout Christian would consign them all to limbo, would deny there ever had been such as they. But this, he knew, was a viewpoint that he could not accept. He must still conceive of them as the ever-present enemy, and this was especially true in this place, the Desolated Land.

  His fingers dropped to the purse suspended from his belt and beneath them he felt the crinkle of the pages that he carried. Here lay his faith, he thought; here, in this place where he sat, lay another faith. Perhaps a mistaken faith, perhaps a faith that should not be accepted, that instead should be opposed with every power at one’s command, but a faith nevertheless — a faith that man, in his ignorance, with no other faith, and yearning toward something that could intercede for him against the vastness of infinity and the cruelty of fate, had embraced despite all its cruelty and horror, thinking perhaps that any fate that was worth embracing must be horrible and cruel, for in those two qualities lay power, and power was something that man needed to protect himself against the outer world.

  Here on this very ground, undoubtedly, had been performed certain hideous and repugnant rites that he had no knowledge of and was glad he had no knowledge of. Here humans may have died as sacrifices. Here blood had been spilled upon the ground, here obscene practices had been acted out, here monstrous entities had trod with evil intent — and not only recently, but extending back into unguessed time, perhaps into that time that anteceded mankind.

  Daniel walked up close to where he was sitting, thrust down his head to nuzzle at his master. Duncan stroked the big horse’s head, and Daniel snorted softly at him.

  From the west a wolf howled, and it seemed that this time the howl was closer.

  Conrad came striding up to stand near the horse and man.

  “We’ll have to keep the fire burning high throughout the night,” he said. “Wolves have a fear of fire.”

  “We have naught to fear of wolves,” said Duncan. “They are not driven by hunger. There is plenty for them to pull down and eat out there in the woods.”

  “They are closing in,” said Conrad. “I have been catching glimpses of their eyes.”

  “They are curious. That is all.”

  Conrad hunkered down beside Duncan. He pushed the head of his club back and forth upon the ground.

  “What do we do tomorrow?”

  “I suppose we go on hunting for Andrew’s trail.”

  “And what if we don’t find the trail?”

  “We’ll find it. There had to be a trail across these hills.”

  “What if enchantment closes the trail to us? Makes us not to see it.”

  “We escaped the enchantment, Conrad.” Although, Duncan reminded himself, he had entertained the thought, earlier in the day, that the enchantment might still be with them.

  “We are lost,” said Conrad. “We don’t know where we are. I don’t think Andrew knows.”

  Out at the edge of the firelight circle two eyes gleamed back at Duncan and then, almost instantly, were gone.

  “I saw one of your wolves just now,” he said to Conrad. “Or at least his eyes.”

  “Tiny has been watching,” Conrad said, “pacing back and forth. He knows they are out there.”

  They were moving in closer now. The darkness at the edge of the campfire circle was rimmed by shining eyes.

  Tiny went walking out toward them. Conrad called him back. “Not yet, Tiny. Not quite yet.”

  Duncan rose to his feet.

  “We’re in for it,” said Conrad quietly. “They are getting set to rush us.”

  Daniel switched around to face the gathering wolves. He tossed his head, snorting in anger. Tiny, coming back, ranged himself by Conrad. His ruff was lifted and a growl gurgled in his throat.

  One of the wolves paced forward. In the firelight his gray fur seemed almost white. He was large and raw-boned, a death’s head of a wolf. He seemed to teeter forward, his great gaunt head thrust out, the lips pulled back from the fangs, his eyes glittering in the reflection of the flames.

  Another wolf came up behind and to one aide of him, stopped with its head at the first wolf’s shoulder.

  Duncan drew his blade. The rasp of drawn metal was harsh in the silence that had fallen on the clearing. The firelight glinted off the shining steel.

  He said to the horse beside him, “Steady, Daniel, steady, boy.”

  At a quick shuffle of feet be
hind him he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that it was Andrew. He held the staff half lifted. The cowl had fallen to his shoulders, and his graying hair was a halo in the firelight.

  From the darkness at the edge of the clearing a voice spoke, loud and clear, but using words that Duncan had never heard before — not English, neither Latin nor Greek, nor with the inflection of the Gaulish tongue. Words that were harsh and guttural and with a snarl in them.

  At the words the wolves came charging in: the big wolf that had first appeared paced by the second one that had come up to stand with him, and others racing out on each side, coming in half crouched, tensed to leap, bursting from the dark at the signal or the command of the one who had spoken from the darkness.

  At Duncan’s side, Daniel reared up, striking out with his front hoofs. Tiny was a streak of unleashed hatred lunging at the beasts. The big wolf rose, soaring effortlessly from the ground, his jaws aimed at Duncan’s throat. The sword licked out and caught his outstretched neck, hurling him to one side with the impact of the thrust.

  The second wolf, running beside him and leaping as he ran, crumpled under Conrad’s club. Out in front of Conrad, Tiny seized a third by the throat and with a powerful toss of the head sent him spinning through the air.

  Another wolf leaped at Duncan, fangs gleaming, mouth wide open for the strike. Even as Duncan lifted the blade, a spearlike stick came thrusting from one side and impaled the beast in its open mouth, ramming deep into its throat. The wolf folded in midair, but the impact of its leap carried it forward, taking the spear with it as it fell.

  Duncan’s foot caught on the falling stick and he was thrown to his knees. A wolf was rushing in at him and he jerked up the blade, but even as he did, Daniel reached out with a driving hoof, catching the animal behind its hunched shoulder blades. The wolf went down with a crunch of snapping bones.

  Duncan surged to his feet, and as he did he saw Tiny on the ground, locked in battle with one of the beasts, and another charging in, with a raging Conrad standing close beside the dog, club lifted and ready for the charging wolf.