Chelle broke into laughter, and as if in response the distant beast laughed with her, and Borel’s guffaws joined them.
Finally Chelle sobered and said, “King’s hierophant steps out four. He’ll bring religion to you, my prince, with a bloody club, I add.”
“Oh ho, with a club, you say. Well then, my queen’s hierophant’s spearman steps forward one.”
Many were the moves and countermoves, her game no less reckless than his, and, with heroic spearmen butchered, hierophants brutally murdered, towers awreck, and kings taking flight but a pace at a time, at the end of these many moves, black and white pieces were lying slain beyond the borders of the board.
“It seems we are evenly matched, my love,” said Borel.
“Not any more,” said Chelle, and with a low throaty laugh she took Borel’s remaining tower with her remaining hierophant.
“Ah, so you fell for my trap,” said Borel, chuckling, and his sole chevalier cruelly took her now-unprotected sole tower in return. “Check.”
“Oh ho, so you think you’ve got me. Well, my arrogant prince, here-”
Of a sudden, Chelle raised her head in alarm. “Ssst!” she shushed. Then she whispered, “ ’Ware, Borel, peril is nigh.”
Borel raised his own head and listened. Beyond the thorn grove stealthy paws padded. He reached for his bow and said, “Chelle, you must leave.”
“No, I will stay.”
Borel growled, but set arrow to bowstring, and then faced out into the dark. And there he saw three pairs of smoldering red eyes above bared fangs adrip.
And beside him Chelle cried, “Wake up, my love, wake up!” and Borel — awakened to see in the dim glow of his low-burning fire the peril of his dream had come, for there in the shadows three pairs of eyes glowed crimson above slavering jaws as three dark-blotched creatures pushed through the thorns and toward his small encampment.
38
Borel leapt to his feet and kicked up the fire. He grabbed a sputtering brand and waved it in the air, and flames burst out anew.
But still the three large doglike creatures came onward. They had big heads and lengthy necks and long, muscular forelegs and short hind legs, and they stood some three feet at the shoulder; formidable teeth filled powerful jaws that could easily crush bones. And the brutes shifted this way and that as they eased past long, sharp thorns on their way inward, their glowing red eyes reflecting firelight, their gazes never leaving their intended prey.
“Yahhh!” cried Borel, and he lunged forward, thrusting the flames at them.
Startled awake, Flic leapt up, epee in hand.
Even as Flic took to wing, his silver weapon glittering in the torchlight, “Yahhh!” cried Borel again, snatching up another brand, and with fire in each hand, once more he leapt forward, but this time he also snarled a word enwrapped in a growl.
Faced with an alert foe wielding flames, a foe who spoke in a tongue akin to that of the wild dog packs of the savanna, the spotted beasts turned and fled, crying out in agony as thorns pierced their flesh in the haste to get away.
Flic flew up and over the acacia grove and waved his sword and shouted at the creatures even as they ran, then returned to camp. As he sheathed his epee he said, “Well, I guess we put the rout to them, now didn’t we?”
An eyebrow arched, Borel looked at Flic.
“What?” said the Sprite.
In that moment, in the predawn dark, there came the sound of insane giggling from afar.
Borel broke into laughter and threw more branches into the fire.
“Goodness,” said Flic, his gaze turned toward the veldt, “who’s the madman out there running about?”
Still smiling, Borel shrugged and took up his waterskin. “Perhaps it’s one of those spotted beasts we routed, eh, Flic? — Drink?”
Flic turned and said, “Indeed. All this fighting makes me thirsty.”
Neither Flic nor Borel felt the least bit sleepy, and in the nearing dawn they sat quietly by the fire. After a moment Flic said, “Say, I thought I saw you playing echecs with someone in a mask, or mayhap I merely dreamed it.”
“I did play echecs in my own dream,” said Borel. “Yet it is strange that you would see it as well.”
“The one in the mask was Chelle?”
Borel nodded. “But it was not a mask you saw; rather it’s some strange shadow across her eyes.”
They sat without speaking for a while, and then Borel said, “There is more to Chelle’s dreaming than we suspect, for I am able to share that dream, and now it seems you are able to share it, too.”
“Not until this night,” said Flic. “Even then it’s as if I were asleep on my leaf and only awakened a bit to see you two at play.”
“Oh,” said Borel, his eyes widening. “Perhaps it’s because I brought Chelle here to the thorn grove for our echecs game, and I imagined this place just as it was when I last saw it, with you and Buzzer asleep yon and the fire burning brightly. It might be that those I involve in our shared dream become involved as well.”
“I think Chelle is in a magique sleep,” said Flic. “And the magie affects all who share it.”
“Yes!” said Borel, clenching a fist. “That is what I’ve been missing all along. You must be right, Flic. Rhensibe is a sorciere, and Chelle is held prisoner in a sleep of enchantement.” Borel looked at the Sprite. “Thank you, my friend, for your keen insight.”
Flic frowned a moment, for his thoughts had not run that way at all, but then he straightened up and threw out his chest and said, “Think nothing of it, my lord.”
They sat quietly for long moments, long enough for Flic to slump back down, and then the Sprite said, “But from what you have told me, my lord, she does not know she sleeps and dreams.”
Borel shook his head. “Flic, just as she did when I was in the Troll dungeon, and now here in the thorn grove, she cried for me to wake up, hence on some level she knows it is a shared dream and she is one of the dreamers.”
Flic slowly nodded then said, “Perhaps, my lord, it is only when peril comes that she realizes such.”
Dawn came, and the trio broke fast. Borel then asked Flic to find the nearest water, and when the Sprite returned and said there was a shallow lakelet nearby, Borel drowned his fire and packed away his goods and strapped his rucksack to his back. With his bow strung and his quiver at hand, he worked his way out from the thorn grove.
When Borel’s waterskin had been replenished, Buzzer spiralled up and took a bearing, then flew away, heading for the place where the sun would set that day, and Borel, with Flic atop the tricorn, loped after.
Long did he run throughout the morn, occasionally passing through herds of tan grazers and those of dark brown, and now and again seeing dark-maned hunters and that very swift spotted cat. He saw a small pack of round-eared, doglike animals, and a few of the heavy-boned creatures of the kind that had tried to invade the camp.
On he ran and on, pausing occasionally for a drink of water, offering some to Buzzer and Flic as well. As for Buzzer, she had finally learned how fast-or rather how slow-Borel loped, and so she flew but a twenty-five or so of his paces in the lead, and she seemed less impatient with him.
As was their wont, they stopped in the noontide to take a meal, and they sat in the shade of a strange tree, with a fat trunk that narrowed the higher it went, with no limbs up its length except at the very top, and that’s where all of the branches were, and they spread out in a flat, circular manner, rather like the roots of an oak, only these were where leaves grew.
“In shape, it looks somewhat upside down,” said Flic, licking honey from his finger, then dipping it again into the bit Borel had dribbled into the jar lid. “Rather like a carrot, roots and all, turned on its head,” added Flic.
Borel laughed around his mouthful of jerky and glanced at the tree above. “I agree, Flic: upside down it is.”