The horsemen were so close now that he did not dare move his head to look at them. But he could just see them from the corner of his eye.
The Duke gave an order, in Romanian: "Stai! N-auzi ceva?"
The men brought their horses to a halt, the Duke no more than four yards from where Todd and Katya lay on the ground. Had it not been for the fact that the eclipse rendered the light here so deceptive, the pair would surely have been seen, and dispatched: a single blade skewering them both in an instant. But as far as Todd's limited vision could tell, the men were looking further afield for their quarry, scanning the distant landscape rather than the ground yards from their horses' hooves.
There was another exclamation from the Duke, and this time a response from one of his men. Todd had the impression that they were listening for something. He listened along with them. What could he hear? Nothing out of the ordinary. The cry of birds, wheeling overhead; the coarse breathing and snorting of the horses; the slap of the reins against their massive necks. And closer by, the breathing of the woman beneath him; and—a smaller sound still—the rhythmical click of a beetle as it made its clockwork way over the small stones close to his hand. In his mind's eye all of this around the tender place where their bodies met: the bird and the horse and the stones and the beetle, orbiting his pleasure.
He saw her smile beneath him, and with the tiniest contraction of her vulva she brought him to the point of no return. There was a flash of brightness in his head, which momentarily washed everything out. She came back out of the fog to meet him with her eyes half-closed, her pupils so full beneath them that they seemed to edge out the whites. Then her lids fluttered closed completely and he started to spurt into her. He could not have stopped crying out if his life had depended on it. No; it did. And still he let out a sob of relief—
There was a shout. The Duke was issuing an order. It made no sense to Todd, but he looked up anyway, as his body continued its spastic motion, emptying itself into her. The man who'd dismounted was now striding toward them, unleashing his sword.
The Duke spoke again:
"Cine sunt aceşti oameni?"
He obviously wanted to know who the hell these people were, because by way of reply there were shrugs from the other men. The last spasm passed through Todd's body, and with it went the idiot sense of his own inviolability. The bliss was gone. He was empty, and mortal again.
The man with the sword put his boot into Todd's side. It was a hard kick, and threw him off Katya. He rolled over in the dirt, which got a laugh from the youngest of the men, seeing the lovers wetly parted thus.
The Duke was issuing further orders, and in response another of the riders dismounted, his sword drawn. Todd spat out a mouthful of earth, and made an attempt to push his rapidly wilting erection back into his pants before it became a target. Katya was still lying on the ground (though she too had managed to cover her nakedness); the first of the men who'd dismounted was standing over her, his sword dropped so that its point hung no more than two or three inches above her pale, slender neck.
The first word out of Todd's mouth was: "Please.. ."
The nobleman was looking at him with a strange expression on his face: part amusement, part suspicion.
"I don't know if you can understand me," Todd said to him. "But we meant no harm."
He glanced down at Katya, who was staring up at the blade.
"He doesn't know what you're saying," she said. "Let me try." She spoke now in the language of the lord. "Doamne, eu şi prietenul meu suntem vizitatori prin locurile astea. N-am sttut ca este proprietatea domniei tale."
Todd looked and listened, wondering what the hell she was saying. But her explanation, whatever it was, didn't seem to be making any great change in their circumstances. The sword was still at her throat, while the second horseman was now within two or three yards of Todd, waving his own blade around in a highly menacing fashion.
Todd glanced up at the Duke again. The trace of amusement Todd had thought he'd seen there had gone. There was only suspicion now. It crossed Todd's mind that perhaps it had been an error for Katya to speak in the man's tongue; that perhaps she'd only deepened his belief that these lovers were more than over-heated trespassers.
He felt a prick in the middle of his chest. The cold point of the sword was pressed into his skin. A small pool of blood was already coming from the spot, spreading through the weave of his shirt.
Katya had stopped talking for a moment—Todd thought perhaps she realized she was doing more harm than good—but now she began again, making whatever pleas she could.
The man on the braided horse raised his hand.
"Liniste," he said.
He'd obviously told her to shut the hell up, because that was exactly what she did.
There was a sound on the wind; and it instantly had all of the nobleman's attention. Somewhere not so far away a baby was crying: a mournful wail of a sound that—though it was surely human—reminded Todd of the noise the coyotes would make some nights in the Canyon.
After a few moments of listening, the Duke let out a stream of orders: “Lăsaţi-i! Pe cai! Ăla-i copilul!”
The two men who'd been threatening Katya and Todd sheathed their swords and returned to their mounts. The baby's cry seemed to falter for a moment, and Todd feared it would fade completely and the swordsmen would return to their threats, but then the infant seemed to find a new seam of grief to mine, and the wail rose up again, more plaintive than ever.
The men were exchanging more urgent words; and pointing in the direction from which the sound was coming.
"Este acolo! Grăbiţi-va!"
"In padure! Copilul este in padure!"
Katya and Todd were summarily forgotten. The horsemen were by now all re-mounted, and the Duke was already galloping away, leaving his weary company to follow in his dust.
Todd felt a curious sense of betrayal; the kind felt when a story takes an unanticipated turn. That he should have come into this half-eclipsed world and been made to bleed at the point of a sword seemed absolutely apt. That the man who'd threatened him had ridden away to pursue a crying baby did not.
"What the hell is going on?" he said as he bent to help Katya up off the ground.
"They heard Qwaftzefoni, the Devil's child," she said.
"Who?"
She looked back in the direction of the riders. They were already halfway to the line of densely packed trees from which the pitiful summons had seemed to come, receding into the quarter-light as though being steadily erased.
"It's a long story," she said. "I heard it first when I was a child . . . and it used to frighten me . . ."
"Yes?" he said.
"Oh yes."
"Well," Todd said, a little impatiently, "are you going to tell me?"
"I don't know if it'll frighten you."
He wiped the blood from the middle of his chest with the heel of his hand. There was a deep nick in his chest, which instantly welled with blood again.
"Tell me anyway," he said.
TWO
Though it had been Zeffer who'd offered the explanation of what lay down in the guts of the house, Tammy opened the conversation with a question that had been niggling at her since she'd first come into this place. She returned to the kitchen table, where she'd been eating her cherry pie, sat down and said: "What are you afraid of?"
"I told you twice, three times: I shouldn't be in here. She'll be angry."