Although never loud, the sounds were distinct and clear. There could be no doubt of it: the wild hoofbeats of a running horse and the baying of hounds, and occasionally (although he could not be sure of this) the shouting of a man or men.
The strange thing about it was that the sound seemed to be coming from the sky. He looked up at the starwashed, moon-drenched sky, and there was nothing there. And yet the sound seemed to come from there.
It lasted only for a few minutes, and then it went away, and the silence of the night closed in.
Duncan, who had risen to make his survey of the sky, sat down again. Beside him, Tiny was growling softly, his muzzle pointed upward. Duncan patted him on the head. “You heard it, too,” he said. Tiny ceased his growling and settled down.
Later on, Duncan rose to his feet and walked down to the stream, carrying a cup to get a drink of water. As he knelt beside the stream, a fish jumped in the pool above him, shattering the stillness. A trout, he wondered. The stream might carry trout. If they had time in the morning, they might try to catch a few of them for breakfast. If they had time; that was, if it didn’t take too long. For there was no time to waste. The more quickly they were on their way, the faster they got through the Desolated Land, the better it would be.
When the moon had dropped appreciably toward the west, he awakened Conrad, who came to his feet, alert, with no sign of sleep left in him.
“Is everything all right, m’lord?”
“Everything is fine,” said Duncan. “There has been nothing stirring.”
He said nothing about the hoofbeats and the baying in the sky. As he formed the words in his mind to tell Conrad, they sounded too silly for the telling, and he did not say them.
“Call me a little early,” he said. “I’ll try to catch some trout for breakfast.”
Duncan rolled up his cloak and used it as a pillow. Stretching out on the hard ground, he pulled the blanket over him. Lying on his back, he stared up at the sky. He pressed his fingers against the soft deerskin pouch and heard the soft crinkling of the manuscript. He pressed his eyes tight shut, trying in this manner to put himself to sleep, but behind the closed eyes he conjured up in his mind, without intending to, quite unwillingly in fact, a scene that he could not understand. But then the realization of what his mind’s eye, in all the activity of his imagination, was showing him came clear. Impatiently he tried to shake it off, but it would not go away. No matter how hard he tried to shake it off, that figment of imagination hung on stubbornly. He turned over on his side and opened his eyes, seeing the campfire, Tiny lying beside it, Conrad looming over him.
Duncan closed his eyes, determined that this time he would go to sleep. But his mind’s vision fastened on a furtive little man who scurried busily about to see and hear all that might be heard or seen among a small band of men who were associated with a tall and saintly figure. These men, all of them, the saintly man as well as his followers, were young, although too somber for their years, too dedicated, with a strange light in their eyes. They were of the people, certainly, for they were clothed in tattered garments, and while some of them wore sandals, others had nothing on their feet. At times the band was alone, at other times there were crowds of people who had gathered to gaze upon the saintly man, straining their ears to hear what he might say.
And always, hovering on the edge of these crowds of people, or dogging the footsteps of the little band when it was alone, was this furtive figure who darted all about, never of the band, but with it, listening so hard that his ears seemed to swivel forward to catch the slightest words, his bright, sharp, almost weasel eyes squinted against the desert sunlight, but watching closely, missing no move that might be made.
And later, crouching against a sheltering boulder or hunkering by a small campfire in the dead of night, writing all he’d seen or heard. Writing small so that his parchment would not run out, using every scrap of whiteness to inscribe his labored words, twisting his face and pursing his tiny mouth in the effort to get down the words exactly as they should be, telling in those words all that he had witnessed.
Duncan tried without success to gain a full view of this furtive man, to look him in the face, so that he might judge what sort of man he was. But he was never able to. The face was always in a shadow or was turned away at that very moment when, finally, he thought he’d see the face. He was a short man, almost a dumpy figure. His feet were bare and there were bruises on them from the desert rocks and pebbles; he was dressed in dusty rags, so tattered that he was continually pulling at them in an effort to cover his scrawny nakedness. His hair was long and unkempt, his straggly beard untrimmed. He was not the sort of man upon whom a casual observer would have wasted a second glance. He was a nonentity. He faded into the crowd. He was an unrecognizable and unimportant human among many other humans, a man so undistinguished that he drew no attention. There was nothing about him that made him stand out among all the others; he was engulfed and absorbed by them.
Duncan followed him, trudging steadily and doggedly to keep pace with his furtiveness, attempting to circle him so that he might come head-on at him and so get to see his face. Always he failed to do so. It was almost as if this furtive man was aware of him and was studiously careful either to keep well away from him or, on his approach, to turn away from him. Yet watching for some sign that this other furtive one was aware of him, he could catch no sign he was.
Then someone was shaking him and hissing him to silence. He fought his eyes open and sat up. Conrad was crouched in front of him. His half-clenched hand was raised to the level of Duncan’s face, and an emphatic outstretched thumb was pointing across the dying campfire toward the ring of darkness that lay beyond the circle of the campfire’s light. There, at the edge of the circle, between the light and dark stood Tiny in a rigid stance, straining forward as if someone held him on a leash, lips curled back to bare his fangs, a low growl rumbling in his throat.
Out of the darkness gleamed two wide-spaced balls of green fire and below them a frog-mouth rimmed by gleaming teeth, and over all of it — the teeth and balls of fire — the impression of a head or face so outrageous in its formation, so chilling in its outline that the mind rejected it, refusing to give credence to there being such a thing. The mouth was froglike, but the face was not. It was all angles and sharp planes and above it rose the suggestion of a crest. And in the instant that Duncan saw it, there was slaver at the corner of the mouth, a drooling hunger that yearned toward the campfire circle but was held from coming out — perhaps by the snarling Tiny, perhaps by something else.
He saw it only for a moment, and then it was blotted out. The balls of fire were gone and so were the sharp and gleaming teeth. For an instant the outline of the face, or the hinted outline of the face, persisted; then it, too, blinked out.
Tiny took a quick step forward, the growl rising in his throat.
“No, Tiny,” Conrad said softly. “No.”
Duncan surged to his feet.
“They’ve been around the last hour or so,” said Conrad. “Prowling in the dark. But this is the first we’ve seen.”
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“No need, m’lord. Tiny and me were watching. They were looking us over only.”
“Many of them? More than this one?”
“More than one, I think. Not many.”