Heads came up slowly, all around the room. They stared at him, startled, a little shocked. Then the hunger rose in their faces, and their eyes fastened on him, greedily.
Dirk sang on:
He sang the whole tale—how DeCade had wakened at midnight, hearing the screams of his love, had caught up his staff and bolted from his but to fall on the band of Soldiers who were stealing her away—a huge bear of a man, nearly seven feet tall, three hundred pounds of silent homicidal muscle, with a hardwood quarterstaff as heavy as a bar of iron, laying about him in fury, not counting the tally of dead.
The leader of the party held a knife to the girl’s throat, and DeCade broke the man’s skull and spilled his brains. But the leader was quick—he sliced her throat as he fell—and DeCade stood, numbed, staring at his love, lying dead in a pool of her own blood, all trace of pity and forgiveness pouring out of him as the blood poured out of her. Then, only when she lay emptied before him and only a hollow, frozen void remained within him, did he turn his eyes to the leader, and realize it was the Lord’s son.
So Dirk sang the tale; and Gar looked down, staring at him as though he were insane. Dirk took a breath and took up the ballad again.
DeCade fled to the forest that night and hid for some time, living on poached meat and killing any Lord or Soldier foolish enough to come in under the trees, alone or in company.
And, finally, the outlaws found him and took him for their leader.
Then churls began to escape to the forest—a few at first, then more and more, hundreds, thousands, who never would have thought of escape before, risking their lives to come join the Lordkiller in the forest.
And the Wizard found him, too—some unnamed genius with magical powers, or so the legend said, who had appeared out of nowhere and given DeCade an enchanted staff. With it, DeCade took on a small army that came to clean out the forest—a band of a hundred—and he slew them all, by himself, alone.
The word was brought to the King, in his castle at Albemarle. At last, he realized that a vast churl army lay hidden in the huge forest that was nearly at his doorstep. So he summoned his Lords from the length and breadth of the kingdom and their armies with them, to raze the forest, if they had to, to wipe out the outlaws.
But DeCade didn’t wait for His Majesty. On the Wizard’s advice, he marched out of the forest with a horde at his back, to storm the nearest castle and take it, by surprise and sheer weight of numbers. He armed his men and moved on, his army swelling into the tens of thousands as he marched. He stormed and took castle after castle—until the King moved out of Albermarle.
The King marched out with a hundred thousand well-armed Soldiers at his back, and five thousand Lords with laser rifles to watch the Soldiers. He met DeCade at the field of Blancoeur and raised a clamor that clawed at the sky and brought vultures down; for, at the end of the battle, DeCade retreated, leaving a third of his men dead or dying. The King marched after him and met him again at the foothills of Mont Rouge. DeCade lost half his men before night; but darkness and a heavy overcast saved him, covering his retreat up the mountain to Champmortre, the bone-white, sunbleached plateau high in the mountains near Albemarle. There he stationed his remaining men in a human parapet, armed with spears, bows, and a few captured laser rifles. The King, in a rage, marched up against him, and the churls mowed his army down—till the archers ran out of arrows and the rifle power-packs ran dry.
Then the King scaled the heights and drove DeCade back to the center of the bald plain with his men grouped around him, fighting a last, desperate, doomed battle with no quarter given or asked, knives and swords against swords and lasers, each churl thinking only of how many Soldiers and Lords he could take with him, killing and dying in an orgy of blood-lust and vengeance, till the setting sun threw the long shadow of a ring of dead churls on the plain; and, within the ring only DeCade and the Wizard stood alive, back to back, with a circle of King’s men outside the rampart of dead. Then the King shouted the command, but the Soldiers stood, surly, unwilling to attack DeCade. Laserbolts crackled; the rearmost soldiers fell, screaming, and the rest pressed forward, flowing over the heap of corpses to press in. Then DeCade’s staff whirled, threshing out a crop of death, and hundreds of Soldiers died before they buried him under sheer weight of numbers. Then the Lords broke his neck, broke his back, stripped his body and cut his flesh into ribbons, tore out his entrails to prophesy that the churls would never rise again, broke each separate bone in his body—and took up the golden staff, and broke it in two.
Then, as the shouting and madness subsided, they looked all about the plain, and found it filled only with dead. The Wizard was gone. They searched, but did not find him. They never did.
Sated, the King and his men marched away, leaving DeCade’s corpse to the vultures. But the next day, the King realized that even DeCade’s bones could threaten his peace. A host of churls might rally around them. He sent men to take the bones away and burn them. But they came too late. The giant body was gone, and the golden staff with it, never to be seen by Lordling or Soldier again. Only the churls knew where he lay, beneath a great hollow mountain, the mountain from which the Wizard fled into the sky. But he would return—oh yes. He would return when the churls’ time had come; he would return, to waken DeCade. Then DeCade would ring the bell and march out to challenge the Lords, with new and magical weapons and a churl army behind him. They would crush the Lords then; they would free all the churls …
Dirk took a long, deep breath; then, more loudly, he began to intone the last verse; after a few words, Hugh joined him, his voice a low chant; then Oliver joined, then the Merchants, then more, till all the prisoners together roared out the last lines, shaking the chamber around them:
The echoes faded; the chamber was still. Each churl looked at his fellows, eyes glowing, filled with the fire of a Cause.
Dirk leaned back, drained and satisfied. It was worth the risk.
Then armor jangled in the hall, a harsh voice bawled out, and he suddenly wasn’t so sure.
The guard came into sight on the other side of the bars, carrying an ugly, short-barrelled weapon—a laser pistol. He shoved it through the bars and glared around at the prisoners, eyes probing their faces. “All right. Who started it?”
Fifty-odd pairs of eyes swiveled toward him, chilled holes in hating masks. The room was as quiet as a sepulcher.
Gar straightened, seeming to gather himself, his gaze becoming remote, abstracted. Dirk took notice of it and frowned.
“Somebody talk!” the guard snarled. “Talk, or we’ll pound you flat. Oh, you’ll be able to totter out into the arena tomorrow just barely!”