The Fellowship of the Talisman Read online

  His Grace nodded solemnly. “Straight at us,” he said.

  “You mean that Standish House …”

  Duncan’s father laughed, a clipped, short laugh that was not quite a laugh. “No need for us to fear them here, son. Not in this ancient castle. For almost a thousand years it has stood against everything that could be hurled against it. But if a party were to attempt to get through to Oxenford, it might be best that they get started soon, before this horde of Harriers is camping on our doorstep.”

  “And you think that I …”

  His father said, “We thought we’d mention it.”

  “I know of no better man to do it,” said His Grace. “But it is your decision. It is a venture that must be weighed most carefully.”

  “I think that if you should decide to go,” Duncan’s father said, “you might have a fair chance of success. If I had not thought so, we would not have brought it up.”

  “He’s well trained in the arts of combat,” said His Grace, speaking to Duncan’s father. “I am told, although I do not know it personally, that this son of yours is the most accomplished swordsman in the north, that he has read widely in the histories of campaigns …”

  “But I’ve never drawn a blade in anger,” protested Duncan. “My knowledge of the sword is little more than fencing. We have been at peace for years. For years there have been no wars.…”

  “You would not be sent out to engage in battle,” his father told him smoothly. “The less you do of that the better. Your job would be to get through the Desolated Land without being seen.”

  “But there’d always be a chance that we’d run into the Harriers. I suppose that somehow I would manage, although it’s not the kind of role in which I’ve ever thought to place myself. My interest, as it has been yours and your father’s before you, lies in this estate, in the people and the land.…”

  “In that you’re not unique,” his father told him. “Many of the Standish men have lived in peace on these very acres, but when the call came, they rode off to battle and there was none who ever shamed us. So you can rest easy on that score. There’s a long warrior line behind you.”

  “Blood will tell,” said His Grace pontifically. “Blood will always tell. The fine old families, like the Standishes, are the bulwark of Britain and Our Lord.”

  “Well,” said Duncan, “since you’ve settled it, since you have picked me to take part in this sally to the south, perhaps you’ll tell me what you know of the Desolated Land.”

  “Only that it’s a cyclic phenomenon,” said the archbishop. “A cycle that strikes at a different place every five centuries or thereabouts. We know that approximately five hundred years ago it came to pass in Iberia. Five hundred years before that in Macedonia. There are indications that before that the same thing happened in Syria. The area is invaded by a swarm of demons and various associated evil spirits. They carry all before them. The inhabitants are slaughtered, all habitations burned. The area is left in utter desolation. This situation exists for an indeterminate number of years—as few as ten, perhaps, usually more than that. After that time it seems the evil forces depart and people begin to filter back, although it may require a century or more to reclaim the land. Various names have been assigned the demons and their cohorts. In this last great invasion they have been termed the Harriers; at times they are spoken of as the Horde. There is a great deal more, of course, that might be told of this phenomenon, but that is the gist of it. Efforts have been made by a number of scholars to puzzle out the reasons and the motives that may be involved. So far there are only rather feeble theories, no real evidence. Of course, no one has actually ever tried to investigate the afflicted area. No on-the-spot investigations. For which I can not blame …”

  “And yet,” said Duncan’s father, “you are suggesting that my son …”

  “I have no suggestion that he investigate. Only that he try to make his way through the afflicted area. Were it not that Bishop Wise at Oxenford is so elderly, I would say that we should wait. But the man is old and, at the last reports, grown very feeble. His sands are running out. If we wait, we may find him gone to his heavenly reward. And he is the only hope we have. I know of no one else who can judge the manuscript.”

  “If the manuscript is lost while being carried to Oxenford, what then?” asked Duncan.

  “That is a chance that must be taken. Although I know you would guard it with your life.”

  “So would anyone,” said Duncan.

  “It’s a precious thing,” said His Grace. “Perhaps the most precious thing in all of Christendom. Upon those few pages may rest the future hope of mankind.”

  “You could send a copy.”

  “No,” said the archbishop, “it must be the original. No matter how carefully it would be copied, and at the abbey we have copyists of great skill, the copyist might miss, without realizing it, certain small characteristics that would be essential in determining if it’s genuine or not. We have made copies, two of them, that will be kept at the abbey under lock and key. So if the original should be lost we still will have the text. But that the original should be lost is a catastrophe that bears no thinking on.”

  “What if Bishop Wise can authenticate the text, but raises a question on the parchment or the ink? Surely he is not also an expert on parchments and on inks.”

  “I doubt,” the archbishop said, “that he’ll raise such questions. With his scholarship, he should know beyond all question if it is genuine from an examination of the writing only. Should he, however, raise those questions, then we must seek another scholar. There must be those who know of parchments and of inks.”

  “Your Grace,” said Duncan’s father, “you say there have been theories advanced about the Desolated Land, about the motive and the reason. Do you, perhaps, have a favorite theory?”

  “It’s hard to choose among them,” the archbishop told him. “They all are ingenious and some of them are tricky, slippery of logic. The one, of all of them, that makes most sense to me is the suggestion that the Desolated Lands are used for the purpose of renewal—that the evil forces of the world at times may need a resting period in which to rededicate their purpose and enrich themselves, recharging their strength. Like a church retreat, perhaps. So they waste an area, turning it to a place of horror and desolation, which serves as a barrier to protect them against interference while they carry out whatever unholy procedures may be necessary to strengthen them for another five centuries of evil doing. The man who propounded this theory sought to show a weakening of the evil done for some years preceding the harrying of a desolated land, and in a few years after that a great increase in evil. But I doubt he made his point. There are not sufficient data for that kind of study.”

  “If this should be true,” said Duncan, “then our little band, if it trod most carefully and avoided any fuss, should have a good chance to pass through the Desolated Land unnoticed. The forces of Evil, convinced they are protected by the desolation, would not be as alert as they might be under other circumstances, and they also would be busy doing all the things they need to do in this retreat of theirs.”

  “You might be right,” his father said.

  The archbishop had been listening silently to what Duncan and his father had been saying. He sat with his hands folded across his paunch, his eyes half closed, as if he were wrestling with some private thought. The three of them sat quietly for a little time until finally His Grace stirred himself and said, “It seems to me that more study, really serious study, should be made of this great force of Evil that has been loose upon the world for uncounted centuries. We have responded to it, all these centuries, with horror, explaining it by thoughtless superstition. Which is not to say there is no basis for some of the tales we hear and the stories that are told. Some of the tales one hears, of course, are true, in some cases even documented. But many of them are false, the tales of stupid peasants who think them up, I am convinced, to pass off idle hours. Ofttimes, other than their rude horseplay a
nd their fornications, they have little else to amuse themselves. So we are engulfed in all sorts of silly stories. And silly stories do no more than obscure the point. What we should be most concerned with is an understanding of this Evil. We have our spells and enchantments with which to cast out devils; we have our stories of men being changed into howling dogs or worse; we believe volcanoes may be the mouths of Hell; not too long ago we had the story of some silly monks who dug a pit and, descending into it, discovered Purgatory. These are not the kinds of things we need. What we need is an understanding of Evil, for only with an understanding of it will we have some grounds upon which to fight against it.

  “Not only should we get ourselves into a position to fight it effectively for our own peace of mind, for some measure of freedom against the indignity, injury and pain Evil inflicts upon us, but for the growth of our civilization. Consider for the moment that for many centuries we have been a stagnant society, making no progress. What is done each day upon this estate, what is done each day throughout the world, does not differ one iota from what was done a thousand years ago. The grains are cut as they always have been harvested, threshed as they always have been threshed, the fields are plowed with the same inefficient plows, the peasants starve as they have always starved.…”

  “On this estate they don’t,” said Duncan’s father. “Here no one starves. We look after our own people. And they look after us. We store food against the bad years and when the bad years come, as they seldom do, the food is there for all of us and …”

  “My lord,” said the archbishop, “you will pardon me. I was speaking quite in general. What I have said is not true on this estate, as I well know, but it is true in general.”

  “Our family,” said Duncan’s father, “has held these lands for close on ten centuries. As holders of the land, we have accepted the implicit responsibility …”

  “Please,” said the archbishop, “I did not mean your house. Now may I go on?”

  “I regret interrupting you,” said Duncan’s father, “but I felt obliged to make it clear that no one goes hungry at Standish House.”

  “Quite so,” the archbishop said. “And now to go on with what I was saying. It is my opinion that this great weight of Evil which has borne down upon our shoulders has worked against any sort of progress. It has not always been so. In the olden days men invented the wheel, made pottery, tamed the animals, domesticated plants, smelted ore, but since that first beginning there has been little done. There have been times when there seemed a spark of hope, if history tells us true. There was a spark of hope in Greece, but Greece went down to nothing. For a moment Rome seemed to hold a certain greatness and some promise, but in the end Rome was in the dust. It would seem that by now, in the twentieth century, there should be some sign of progress. Better carts, perhaps, and better roads for the carts to run on, better plows and a better understanding of how to use the land, better ways of building houses so that peasants need no longer live in noisome huts, better ships to ply the seas. Sometimes, I have speculated on an alternate history, an alternate to our world, where this Evil did not exist. A world where many centuries of progress have opened possibilities we cannot ’even guess. That could have been our world, our twentieth century. But it is only a dream, of course.

  “We know, however, that west of us, across the Atlantic, there are new lands, vast new lands, so we are told. Sailors from the south of Britain and the western coasts of Gaul go there to catch the cod, but few others, for there are few trustworthy ships to go in. And, perhaps, no great desire to go, for we are deficient in our enterprise. We are held in thrall by Evil and until we do something about that Evil, we will continue so.

  “Our society is ill, ill in its lack of progress and in many other ways. I have also often speculated that the Evil may feed upon our misery, grow strong upon our misery, and that to insure good feeding it may actively insure that the misery continues. It seems to me, too, that this great Evil may not always have been with us. In earlier days men did make some progress, doing those few things that have made even such a poor society as we have now possible. There was a time when men did work to make their lives more safe and comfortable, which argues that they were undeterred by this Evil that we suffer or, at least, not as much deterred. And so the question, where did the Evil come from? This is a question, of course, that cannot now be answered. But there is one thing that to me seems certain. The Evil has stopped us in our tracks. What little we have we inherited from our ancient forebears, with a smidgen from the Greeks and a dab from Rome.

  “As I read our histories, it seems to me that I detect a deliberate intent upon the part of this great Evil to block us from development and progress. At the end of the eleventh century our Holy Father Urban launched a crusade against the heathen Turks who were persecuting Christians and desecrating the shrines of Jerusalem. Multitudes gathered to the Standard of the Cross, and given time, undoubtedly would have carved a path to the Holy Land and set Jerusalem free. But this did not come to pass, for it was then that the Evil struck in Macedonia and later spread to much of Central Europe, desolating all the land as this land south of us now is desolated, creating panic among those assembled for the crusade and blocking the way they were to take. So the crusade came to naught and no other crusades were launched, for it took centuries to emerge from the widespread chaos occasioned by this striking of the Evil. Because of this, even to this day, the Holy Land, which is ours by right, still lies in the heathen grip.”

  He put a hand to his face to wipe away the tears that were running down his chubby cheeks. He gulped, and when he spoke again there was a suppressed sobbing in his voice.

  “In failing in the crusade, although in the last analysis it was no failure of ours, we may have lost the last hope of finding any evidence of the factual Jesus, which might have still existed at that time, but now undoubtedly is gone beyond the reach of mortal man. In such a context, surely you must appreciate why we place so great an emphasis upon the manuscript found within these walls.”

  “From time to time,” said Duncan’s father, “there has been talk of other crusades.”

  “That is true,” said His Grace, “but never carried out. That incidence of Evil, the most widespread and most vicious of which our histories tell us, cut out the heart of us. Recovering from its effects, men huddled on their acres, nursing the unspoken fear, perhaps, that another such effort might again call up the Evil in all its fury. The Evil has made us a cowering and ineffectual people with no thought of progress or of betterment.

  “In the fifteenth century, when the Lusitanians evolved a policy calculated to break this torpor by sailing the oceans of the world to discover unknown lands, the Evil erupted once again in the Iberian peninsula and all the plans and policies were abandoned and forgotten as the peninsula was devastated and terror stalked the land. With two such pieces of evidence you cannot help but speculate that the Evil, in its devastations, is acting to keep us as we are, in our misery, so that it can feed and grow strong upon that very misery. We are the Evil’s cattle, penned in our scrubby pastures, offering up to it the misery that it needs and relishes.”

  His Grace raised a hand to wipe his face. “I think of it at nights, before I go to sleep. I agonize upon it. It seems to me that if this keeps on there’ll be an end to everything. It seems to me that the lights are going out. They’re going out all over Europe. I have the feeling that we are plunging back again into the ancient darkness.”

  “Have you talked with others about these opinions of yours?” asked Duncan’s father.

  “A few,” the archbishop said. “They profess to take no stock in any of it. They pooh-pooh what I say.”

  A discreet knock came at the door.

  “Yes,” said Duncan’s father. “Who is it?”

  “It is I,” said Wells’s voice. “I thought, perhaps, some brandy.”

  “Yes, indeed,” exclaimed the archbishop, springing to life, “some brandy would be fine. You have such good brandy
here. Much better than the abbey.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Duncan’s father said, between his teeth, “I shall send you a keg of it.”

  “That,” said the archbishop suavely, “would be most kind of you.”

  “Come on in,” Duncan’s father yelled to Wells.

  The old man carried in a tray on which were balanced glasses and a bottle. Moving quietly in his carpet slippers, he poured out the brandy and handed the glasses around.

  When he was gone the archbishop leaned back in his chair, holding out the glass against the firelight and squinting through it. “Exquisite,” he said. “Such a lovely color.”

  “How large a party did you have in mind?” Duncan asked his father.

  “You mean that you will go?”

  “I’m considering it.”

  “It would be,” said the archbishop, “an adventure in the highest tradition of your family and this house.”

  “Tradition,” said Duncan’s father sharply, “has not a thing to do with it.”

  He said to his son, “I had thought a dozen men or so.”

  “Too many,” Duncan said.

  “Perhaps. How many would you say?”

  “Two. Myself and Conrad.”

  The archbishop choked on the brandy, jerked himself upright in his chair. “Two?” he asked, and then, “Who might this Conrad be?”

  “Conrad,” said Duncan’s father, “is a barnyard worker. He is handy with the hogs.”

  The archbishop sputtered. “But I don’t understand.”

  “Conrad and my son have been close friends since they were boys. When Duncan goes hunting or fishing he takes Conrad with him.”