“Rupert, Rupert!” Jennifer screamed after part of a minute. “Why comes he not forth? I’ll to him—” She tore at her clothes.
“Nay, hoald. Behoald,” Will said. “There!” (Rupert’s head appeared from underneath the barrel. ) Sudden dismay: “ ’A zeems… death-paele… Be’a movin’?—Measter, canst grip this?” He snatched a boathook and held it over the side.
Rupert caught it feebly with his free hand. The other clasped to his side a huge volume bound in brass and scaly leather. Will drew him close, leaned out, let go the staff, and held him by the hair.
“Get that book ere he loses it,” Jennifer snapped.”’Tis what he was hurt for.” She herself was the one who did. Meanwhile Will and, after profane orders, Caliban hauled Rupert aboard.
The prince lay doubled over in the bilge. “Pain, pain in every limb,” he groaned. “I scarce can stir—”
Ariel darted to land beside him and pass quick fingers across the contorted body. “Aye, too much air within,” the elf said. “He rose too fast. I blame myself that I did not foresee. A miracle of strength that he could move enough to save himself. There’s fate in him.”
At once, flashing a smile to Jennifer, who knelt frantic: “Nay, be at ease. A spirit of the air knows how to charm these humors out of him and mend whatever ruptures they have caused. Thereafter he’ll need but a few days’ rest to raise anew the tempest of his health. Now draw aside and let me sing my spell.”
In awe, she and the others went astern. Will took her right hand, Caliban her left, and the three of them waited.
XXI
A gibbous moon hung above its cliff, turning hoar the treetops. Otherwise they stood black against a sky of hurried thin clouds and flickering stars. The earth below was a well of night, save where a fire burned at the cave mouth. Wind rushed cold and noisy. Sometimes an owl hooted.
The flames leaped, streamed, whirled off in red and yellow rags. Whenever a dry stick popped, sparks torrented. That light picked five uneasily out of shadow. Rupert stood sword at hip, holding the book; furrows gouged his mouth and brows. Beside him Jennifer held a staff taller than she was, its broken halves spliced together by withes tied in an intricate knot. Phosphorescence from the capital, which was carved into a lotus, fell across her widened eyes, half-parted lips, the teeth behind and the pallor around. Ariel poised on a boulder, fingers dug into its moss, wings folded but fluttered at the edges by the wind. Caliban hunkered, a lump; Will Fairweather reared above him, a scaffold; neither could down every sign of dread.
Rupert spoke slowly: “Now we have said our prayers, to ask that God bestow His blessing on the deeds we do and keep our usage lawful of these powers that we have gained from reading gramarie.”
“An’ please doan’t let’em run away from us,” Will added. To his chieftain: “Prince, art thou altogether sure’tis wiase? Thou’st oanly had zome days, a week or two, however long’tis been, to zearch them words.
Oald taeles agree that magic’s liake a stallion,’twill throw his riader, be’a ne’er zo pious, unless’a know just what tha hell’a’s doin’.”
“Hell,” Caliban shuddered, “hu, hu, what’s chillier than hell?”
Rupert frowned at his man. “How often must I tell thee, I well know how little I have learned in this short while of poring over text arcane, complex, beset with ancient words and secret signs? By that same token, I cannot do much in those few spells deciphered—raise clairvoyance, call forth the simple spirits of a land, transport us quickly—that is all I know, if I know even that. Well, who can guess if he has read aright, unless he try? Tonight’s our first attempt, a minor one which, if done wrongly, should at least prove harmless. Ask Ariel. He’s helped me in my work, whilst Jennifer sustained me, and thou boused.”
“He’s right,” said the elf. “But hurry. We must have the moonlight.”
Rupert opened the book. Jennifer shivered. “My darling, art thou frightened?” he asked.
She raised her chin. “Not near thee.”
“Then hold the staff aloft while I read forth, and give it to me when I reach for it.”
Rupert began chanting: “Ye beings quick and unseen, yet as bright as this our fire of oak and ash and thorn, by smoke of herbs and mushrumps rising thence, wherein ye do delight, be drawn to me, and by these words inscribed in pentacle upon the dust from which my flesh has sprung, be bound to strict obedience, under God.” Jennifer passed him the staff. He wrote with its bronze ferrule while voicing: “Adam Te Dageram, Amrtet Algar Algastna—”
The conjuration took a few minutes. At their end, Rupert closed the book, gave it to Jennifer, and called: “This is the task I lay on you: three visions, clear to our sight and hearing, as commanded. First show us in an overview that field in England, from which Ariel lately came to say a battle had begun there. Aleph.”
The fire roared and lifted, became a tree-tall column, split into a ring wildly spinning through lurid reds and blues. Within its vast circle, as if through a window, appeared a scene.
It was the same night, beneath the same moon; perhaps even the wind was the same which drove clouds and whistled over acres. Water gleamed across the darkness of the land, canals, ponds, a river that lapped three sides of a conical height, tiered and skewed by nature, crowned by man with a tower now ruined, which rose sharply above neighbor hills and the flats beyond. Nearby bulked walls, roofs, steeples of a minor town. A few windows still glowed lonely.
Brighter were the camp-fires of an army, two or three miles outside. There guns could be seen, wagons, animals, tents of officers, gleams which must be off the pikes and armor of sentries.
“Oh, Glastonbury!” Will cried. “Oh, naught but Glastonbury! Aye, look: tha elven-haunted Tor—tha abbey—Wearyall Hill, where grows tha thorn o’ Joseph—Mine own hoame lies off yonderwards—my Nell—My Nell an’ every kid of ours, my loves, has war come by, an’ me not there for help?” He sank to his knees, buried face in knobbly hands, and wept like a barking seal.
The view swept nearer, as if the watchers swooped. Over ravaged leagues the revelation flew. Now it drew close to linger a moment, now fled from what it found.
Jennifer bit her fist, not to whimper with the agony of those sights, and huddled inside Rupert’s free arm.
Caliban squatted slack-jawed, sometimes lifting a paw as if to poke, never quite venturing it. Ariel escaped aloft and fluttered bat-fashion in the blast.
A heap of dead stiffened ashen under the moon. A drummer boy lay by himself in his own tangled entrails; the wind ruffled his fair locks, while ants marched over his eyeballs to his tongue. A horse kept screaming, the remnant of a man kept begging for water that there was none to give; neither could die. A cannon yawned uselessly, spiked; among the balls it had never fired was a shorn-off human head. Someone’s Bible lay in the mud, open but covered with blood and vomit. A cripple crawled along, trailing a shattered leg he had rudely bound up; the cold had gotten to him, his teeth clapped and frost was in his beard. The wind and the wounded sang Miserere.
“What has man done,” Ariel asked heaven, “that he deserves himself?”
“ ’Tis war, thus cruel,” Rupert told Jennifer, “though one can die worse, or live worse yet, a slave—Hold on! What’s here? The image closes on an army, camped—”
Several men sat around a fire, perhaps on call, perhaps too exhausted for sleep. Grimy, unshaven, a couple of them bandaged, they held palms toward coals and exchanged low words. They were outfitted in buff coats and heads were close-cropped. “They’re Parliament,” Rupert said starkly. “Our foe then holds the field.”