He stood in the mud of the trail and looked up at the dangling, twirling man and felt, gathering in his mind, a vague sense of horror and of melancholy.
Leaving the man and the oak, he scouted up the trail and from the tracks he saw that now the mounted company was in something of a hurry. The hoofmarks of the shod horses dug deep into the mud, leaving sharp, incisive tracks. They had been moving at a gallop.
He left the trail and angled back up the hill, studying the conformation of the land, picking up the foggy landmarks he had impressed upon his mind.
So he finally came, slipping through the trees and brush, to the small rock shelter he and his companions had found the night before, after long stumbling through the wet and dark, a few hours before the first hint of dawn.
Oliver, the rafter goblin, and Coon slept far back from the overhang, in the deeper recesses of the shelter, huddled close together for the sake of shared warmth. The other three sat close together toward the front, wrapped in blankets against the chill. He was almost upon them before they saw him.
"So you're back," said Gib. "We wondered what had happened. Can we light a fire?"
Hal shook his head. "We travel fast," he said. "We travel fast and far. We must be out of here."
"But I went out," objected Gib, "and got dry fuel, dug from the heart of a fallen tree. It will give little smoke. We are cold and hungry…»
"No," said Hal. "The country will be up. The inn and stable burned. No sign of the goodwife who was hiding in the cellar, but mine host is hanging from a tree. Someone will find soon what happened, and before they do we must be miles from here."
"I'll shake the goblin and Coon awake," said Gib, "and we'll be on our way."
14
It had been a punishing day. They had stopped for nothing, pushing ahead as fast as they could manage. There had been only one habitation, the hut of a woodchopper, that they had had to circle. They had not stopped to eat or rest. Cornwall had worried about the girl, but she had managed to keep up with the rest of them with seemingly little effort and made no complaint.
"You may regret throwing in with us," Cornwall said once. But she had shaken her head, saying nothing, conserving her breath for the grim business of clambering up and down the hills, racing down the more open ridges.
Finally, they had come to rest, with early darkness closing in. No rock shelter this time, but the dry bed of a little stream, in a recess where, in spring freshets, a waterfall had carved out a bowl that was protected on three sides by high banks, leaving open only the channel through which the stream ran from the little pool beneath the falls.
Through the centuries, the water, plunging over a ledge of hard limestone, had scoured out all earth and softer shale down to the surface of a harder sandstone stratum. In the center of the bowl stood the small pool of water, but around the pool lay the dry surface of the sandstone.
They had built their fire close against the upstream wall, which was overhung for several feet by the limestone ledge. There had been little talk until, famished, they had wolfed down their food, but now they sat around the blaze and began to talk.
"You feel rather certain," Cornwall asked of Hal, "that the company was that of Beckett?"
"I cannot know, of course," said Hal, "but who else would it be? The horses were shod and a pack train does not shoe its horses and a train would use mostly mules. There were no mules in this bunch, only horses. And who else, I ask you, would visit such terrible, senseless vengeance upon the innocent?"
"They could not have known they were innocent," said Cornwall.
"Of course not," said Hal. "But the point is that they presumed the guilt. They probably tortured the innkeeper and when he could tell them nothing, hanged him. Mine goodwife, more than likely died when they burned the inn with her still in the cellar."
He looked at Mary, across the fire from him. "I am sorry, miss," he said.
She put up a hand and ran her fingers through her hair. "There is no need for you to be," she said. "I mourn for them as I would any human being. It is not good to die in such a manner and I feel sorrow at it, but they, the two of them, meant less than nothing to me. Were it not uncharitable, I could even say they deserved what happened to them. I was afraid of him. There was not a moment of the time I spent at the inn I was not afraid of him. And the woman was no better. With but little cause, other than her bad temper, she'd take a stick of firewood to me. I could show you bruises that still are black and blue."
"Why, then, did you stay?" asked Gib.
"Because I had nowhere else to go. But when you found me in the loft, I had decided I would go. By morning light I would have been gone. It was by sheer good luck that I found you to travel with."
"You say that Beckett travels north and west," Cornwall said to Hal. "What happens if we reach the Bishop of the Tower and find him and his men there ahead of us? Even if he has been there and gone, he will have warned the bishop of us and we'll find scant welcome if, in fact, we're not clapped into irons."
"Mark," said Hal, "I think there is little danger of it. A few miles north of where mine host was hanged, the trail branches, the left fork leading to the Tower, the right into the Wasteland. Beckett, I am sure, would have taken the right fork. I should have followed the trail to see, but it seemed to me important we should be on our way as soon as we could manage."
"The Wasteland?" Mary asked. "He is heading for the Wasteland?"
Hal nodded.
She looked around the circle at them. "And you, as well, you go into the Wasteland?"
"Why do you ask?" asked Oliver.
"Because I myself, in my infancy, may have come from the Wasteland."
"You?"
"I do not know," she said. "I do not remember. I was so young I have no memory or almost no memory. There are, of course, certain memories. A great sprawling house sitting on a hilltop. People who must have been my parents. Strange playmates. But whether this was the Wasteland, I do not know. My parents—well, not my parents, but the couple that took me in and cared for me, told me how they found me, toddling down a path that came out of the Wasteland. They lived near the Wasteland, two honest old people who were very poor and had never had a child they could call their own. They took me in and kept me, and I loved them as if they had been my parents."
They sat in silence, staring at her. Finally she spoke again.
"They worked so hard and yet they had so little. There were few neighbors, and those were far away. It was too near the Wasteland. People were not comfortable living so near the Wasteland. Yet it never bothered us. Nothing ever bothered us. We grew some corn and wheat. We raised potatoes and a garden. There was wood for chopping. There was a cow, but the cow died one winter of the murrain and there was no way to get another. We had pigs. My father—I always called him father, even if he wasn't—would kill a bear or deer and trap other creatures for their furs. He would trade the furs for little pigs—such cute little pigs. We kept them in the house for fear of wolves until they had grown bigger. I can remember my father coming home with a little pig tucked underneath each arm. He had carried them for miles."
"But you did not stay," said Cornwall. "Happy, you said, and yet you did not stay."
"Last winter," she said, "was cruel. Both snow and cold were deep.
And they were old. Old and feeble. They took the coughing sickness and they died. I did what I could, but it was little. She died first and he next day. I built a fire to thaw the ground and chopped out a grave for them, the two of them together. Two shallow, far too shallow, for the ground was hard. After that, I couldn't stay. You understand, don't you, that I couldn't stay?"