"Let her go," said Sniveley. "Quit this pestering of her. She goes in goodly company and has every right to go. Perhaps more right than any of the rest of us."
"And you, Sniveley," said Hal, trying to speak lightly. "I imagine it will be old home week for you."
Sniveley snorted. "I could not sleep of nights. Thinking of the hand I had in it, and how destiny had so unerringly guided my hand to take a part in it I forged the sword that the scholar carries. Fate must have foreordained the shaping of that sword. Otherwise, why would there have been this single pocket of the purest ore? Why the pocket of it in a drift that otherwise was acceptable, but of much poorer grade? It was placed there for a purpose, for there is nothing ever done without a purpose. And I could not put out of my mind the feeling that the purpose was the sword."
"If so," said Cornwall, "it was badly placed. I should be wearing no such sword. I am not a swordsman."
Hal said, "You did all right that night back in the stable."
"What is this?" the bishop asked. "What about a stable? You were brawling in a stable?"
Cornwall said, "We had not told you. I think we felt we should not tell you. We fear we have fallen greatly out of favor with a man named Lawrence Beckett. You may have heard of him."
The bishop made a face. "Indeed, I have," he said. "If you had sat down and thought and planned and really put your mind to it in the picking of an enemy, you could have done no better than Beckett. I never have met the man, but his reputation has preceded him. He is a ruthless monster. If you are at cross-purposes with him, perhaps it is just as well you go into the Wasteland."
"But he is going there as well," said Gib.
The bishop heaved himself straight up in his chair. "You had not told me this. Why did you not tell me this?"
"One reason I can think of," said Cornwall, "is that Beckett is of the Inquisition."
"And you thought, perhaps, because this is so, he stands in the high regard of everyone in Holy Mother Church?"
"I suppose we did think so," said Cornwall.
"The Church is far flung," the bishop said, "and in it is the room for many different kinds of men. There is room for so saintly a per- sonality as our late-lamented hermit and room as well, lamentably, for sundry kinds of rascals. We are too big and too widespread to police ourselves as well as might be wished. There are men the Church would be better off without, and one of the chief of these is Beckett. He uses the cloak of the Inquisition for his own bloodthirsty purposes; he has made it a political arm rather than ecclesiastical. And you say that now he is heading for the Wasteland?"
"We think he is," Hal said.
"We have had years of peace," the bishop said. "Years ago the military was withdrawn from this outpost because there seemed no need of it. For decades there had been no trouble, and there has been no trouble since the soldiers were withdrawn. But now I do not know. Now I fear the worst. A spark is all that's needed to touch the Borderland to flame and Beckett may be that very spark. Let me tell you with all the force at my command that with Beckett loose now is not the time to venture in the Wasteland."
"Nevertheless," said Gib, "we're going."
"I suppose so," said the bishop. "You all are addlepated and it's a waste of honest breath to try to talk with you. A few years younger and I'd join you to protect you from your folly. But since age and occupation bar me from it, I still shall do my part. It is not meet that you should go walking to your deaths. There shall be horses for you and whatever otherwise you need."
17
The noses of Sniveley and Oliver were greatly out of joint. They had been dealt a grave injustice and had been the victims of heartless discrimination; they had to share a horse.
"Look at me," said Hal. "I am sharing mine with Coon."
"But Coon's your pet," said Oliver.
"No, he's not," said Hal. "He is my friend. The two of us together own a tree back home. We live there together. We share and share alike."
"You only took him up," said Sniveley, "so he wouldn't get wet when we crossed the river. He won't ride with you all the time. He doesn't even like to ride."
"The horse," said Hal, "is his as much as mine."
"I do not think," said Gib, "the horse shares in that opinion. He looks skittish to me. He's never been ridden by a coon."
They had crossed the river ford, the old historic ford once guarded by the tower. But as they wheeled about once the river had been crossed, the tower and wall that flanked it on either side seemed rather puny structures, no longer guarding anything, no longer military, with all the formidability gone out of them, age-encrusted ruins that were no more than an echo of the time when they had stood foursquare against invasion from the Wasteland. Here and there trees grew atop the wall, while the massive stones of the tower were masked and softened by the clinging vines that had gained footholds in the masonry.
Tiny figures, unrecognizable at that distance, grouped together on one section of the ruined wall, raised matchstick arms to them in a gesture of farewell.
"There still is time," Cornwall said to Mary, "to turn back and cross the river. This is no place for you. There may be rough days ahead."
She shook her head stubbornly. "What do you think would happen to me back there? A scullery wench again? I'll not be a scullery wench again."
Cornwall wheeled his horse around, and it plodded slowly along the faint path that angled up the low hill that rose above the river. Once the river had been crossed, the character of the land had changed. South of the river, thick forests crawled up the flanks of massive bluffs, gashed by steep ravines. Here the hills were lower, and the forest, while it still remained, was not so heavy. There were groves of trees covering many acres, but there were open spaces here and there and, looking to the east, Cornwall could see that some of the bluffs on this northern side were bald.
He could have wished, he told himself, that there might have been a map—any sort of map, even a poor one with many errors in it, that might have given some idea of where they might be going. He had talked with the bishop about it, but so far as the bishop knew there was no map and had never been. The soldiery that through the years had guarded the ford had done no more than guard. They had never made so much as a single foray across the river. Any forays that occurred had been made by the people of the Wasteland and these, apparently, had been very few. Duty at the tower had been dreary duty, unbroken, for the most part, by any kind of action. The only people, it seemed, who had ever ventured into the Wasteland had been occasional travelers, like Taylor, who had written the account that now lay in Wyalusing. But whether any of the few accounts written by such travelers had been true was very much a question. Cornwall wrinkled his brow at the thought. There was nothing, he realized, that would argue the Taylor account as any more factual than the rest of them. The man had not actually visited the Old Ones but had only heard of them; and he need not have even traveled to the Wasteland to have heard of them. The ancient fist ax, carried by Gib, was better evidence that they existed than had been Taylor's words. It was strange, he reminded himself, that the bishop had instantly recognized the ax as belonging to the Old Ones. He realized that he should have talked further with the bishop about the matter, but there had been little time and much else to talk about.
It was a matchless autumn day. They had made a late start and the sun already had climbed far into the sky. There were no clouds and the weather was rather warm and as they climbed the hill, the panorama of the river valley spread out below them like a canvas painted by a man mad with the sense of color.
"There is something up there on the ridge," said Mary. "Something watching us."