“You’re no real friar,” Duffy panted.
“You... go to hell,” the man choked, and then sagged in death.
Propping the corpse up with his right hand, Duffy pulled his sword free, and let the body tumble away down the hill. He looked up. The chamois hunter was braced against a rock and a tree trunk about twenty feet up, unable to descend any further without being at the mercy of Duffy’s rapier. The man carried a sword of his own, but didn’t seem confident with it. The bow had been left up on the road.
“Come on, weasel,” Duffy gritted. “Show us a little of that courage you had five minutes ago when you tried to shoot me in the back.”
The man licked sweat off his upper lip and glanced nervously over his shoulder, up the slope. Clearly he was wondering if he could scramble back to the road before the Irishman could catch up with him and run him through.
“Don’t think I’ll hesitate,” Duffy called, guessing the man’s thoughts.
The chamois hunter reached out and scraped the ground with his sword blade, sending pebbles and clumps of leaves pattering down onto the Irishman.
Duffy laughed uproariously, sending echoes ringing through the trees. “Too late now, my friend, to begin tilling the soil! I don’t know where you and your fat companion had your swords hidden when you were riding, but you should have left them there.” A fist-sized rock bounced painfully off his head. “Ow! All right, you son of a dog...” Duffy began scrambling up the slope in a rage.
The man dropped his sword, turned, and scampered away upward like a startled squirrel. Duffy, being heavier and unwilling to relinquish his own sword, was left behind despite his ferocious efforts to catch up.
It may go badly, he realized, if he gets to the road and has time to draw his bow. Duffy stopped to catch his breath, and dug a stone out of the dirt. He tossed it up and caught it to judge its weight. Not bad. Drawing his left arm back and resting it against a tree limb, he relaxed and waited for a sight of the timorous bandit whose crashing, gasping progress must have been audible a mile away.
Finally he was visible, pausing at the lip of the road, silhouetted against a patch of sky. Duffy’s arm lashed forward, flinging the stone upward with all the strength he could muster. A second later the bandit twitched violently and fell backward, out of sight.
Got you, you bastard, Duffy thought as he resumed his upward climb. It took him several minutes to work his way up the hillside, but when he stood at last on the road he’d still heard nothing from the stone-felled bandit. I suppose I hit him in the head and killed him, the Irishman thought glumly.
He brightened, though, when he saw his horse, the supplies still intact, nosing the muddy ground a hundred feet away. “Hello, horse,” he called, walking up to the beast. The horse lifted its head and regarded its owner without enthusiasm. “And where were you, beast, when I was being done in down the hill? Hah?” The horse looked away, clearly bored. Duffy shook his head sadly and swung into the saddle. “Onward, you heartless creature.”
By early afternoon the road had become a wide ledge angling steeply up the sloping face of a rock wall. Well-worn stones were pressed into the ground to serve as pavement, and the precipice side was bordered with a frail, outward-leaning fence of weathered sticks. When the sun hung only a few finger’s-breadths above the western peaks Duffy came upon the St. James Hospice, a narrow-windowed, slate-roofed building nestled between two vast wings of Alpine granite.
Couldn’t have timed it better, the Irishman thought as he led his horse up the path to the hospice. If those two assassins hadn’t delayed me this morning, I’d have got here too early, and been tempted to press on for some other, probably not half so nice, shelter for the night. The heavy front door swung open as Duffy dismounted, and two monks strode across the snowy yard.
“Good evening, stranger,” said the taller one. “Brother Eustace will take your horse around to the stable. Come with me.” Duffy followed the monk inside and took off his hat and cloak as the door was drawn shut. The narrow vestibule was lit by a torch hung on the wall in an iron sconce, and a half dozen swords were stacked in one corner. “We insist,” said the monk, “that all of our guests leave their weapons here.”
Duffy grinned as he unsheathed his sword and handed it to the monk. “Sounds like a good idea, if you get everybody to go along with it.”
“Not difficult,” the monk said, setting Duffy’s rapier with the others. “Any who won’t comply spend the night outside.”
After the evening meal, the half-dozen guests sat around the great fireplace and drank brandy. Several sat in wooden chairs, but Duffy lay stretched on the floor, his head pillowed on the flank of a big sleeping dog. The Irishman had allowed himself a cup of brandy, having chosen to regard it as a precaution against the cold.
Tacitly agreeing not to discuss the motives for their travelling, the guests passed the time by telling stories. An Italian told a morbid tale about a well-born girl keeping the severed head of her stable-boy lover in a flowerpot, and watering with her tears the plant that grew from it. The monk who’d let Duffy in related a riotous and obscene story of erotic confusions in a convent, and Duffy told the old Irish story of Saeve, the wife of the hero Finn Mac Cool, and how she was metamorphosed from a faun.
A tubby old gentleman had begun to recite a long poem about the Emperor Maximilian lost in the Alps, when the front door of the hospice banged open. A moment later a burly man in the heavy boots and coat of a guide strode into the room, impatiently brushing snow out of his moustache.
“A cold night, Olaus?” asked the monk, getting up to pour a cup for the newcomer.
“No,” said Olaus, gratefully taking the liquor. “The winter is packing up and returning north.” He took a long sip. “But there are monsters out tonight.”
Duffy looked up, interested. “Monsters?”
The guide nodded as he sat down by the fire. “Aye. Griffins, snake men, demons of every sort.”
“Did you see them, Olaus?” the monk asked, giving the other guests a broad wink.
Olaus shook his head gravely. “No. Damn few men see them and live. But today on Montasch I heard them singing choruses in the mountain, and coming here I crossed in the snow several tracks of unnatural feet. I wonder what it is that’s got them roused.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the monk said airily. “It’s probably some monster holiday today. They’ve opened their casks of Spring beer, I’ll bet.”
Olaus, aware that he was being ribbed, lapsed into sulky silence.
That reminds me, Duffy thought—I wonder how the Herzwesten Bock beer is coming. I trust this Gambrinus fellow knows his business, and hasn’t let it go bad. Duffy yawned. The brandy, on top of the day’s exertion, was making him sleepy. He stood up carefully, so as not to wake the dog.
“I believe I’ll turn in, brother,” he said. “Where would I find a bunk?”
The monk turned to the Irishman with a smile Duffy had seen before on the faces of old nuns attending to wounded soldiers—the easy grin of one who has pledged neutrality, and can afford to be courteous to all sides and factions. “Through that door,” he said, pointing. “Breakfast is at dawn.”
A little puzzled, Duffy nodded and walked to the indicated door, wondering briefly, and for no reason at all, whether the monk’s incredulity at Olaus’ statements might have been feigned. It was a pointless thought, and he threw it away.