My legs would not support me when I reached the path above, and Benedict had to untie the rope about my chest. Donuil had returned to kneel over Shelagh, who was propped against the wall of the cliff face, her eyes open but staring vacantly. I asked if she was well, and he nodded, his eyes huge and wide. I looked about me then. Benedict and Marco were close by and I could see two other men working with the horses some distance above.
"Where's Tress?" Even as I asked, I knew the answer, and Benedict lowered his head.
"She's gone, Cay. Her horse took her over the edge."
I felt nothing, except an enormous lassitude that settled over me like a cloud of fog.
"What happened, Ben?"
He drew a long, deep breath. "It was a wildcat."
"What?"
"A wildcat, or some such animal. It must have been crazed by the storm. I saw it leaping from the cliff face above us, and then it landed on a horse's neck and all the world went mad. I saw it happen and there was nothing I could do. The animal it landed on spun around screaming, rearing and kicking the horse behind it, which tried to do the same but fell and slid back down the hill into the animals behind. Once that had begun, it was chaos. I saw Tressa's mount rearing and circling on its hind legs while she stood in the stirrups trying to pull it down, and then one ' of its hooves slipped off the edge and they went over. My own horse fell sideways, the other way, pinning me against the wall, and I was stuck there until it got to its feet again.
Donuil leaped off his horse and managed to avoid being crushed. Marco and Rufus went down, too, but they were fortunate and landed between horses. Bello, who's working with Rufus, fared similarly. Shelagh was thrown safely, though she took a hard, hard fall, and you went over the edge. I didn't see you go. I thought you were dead with the others. Thank God we looked for you. "
I remembered the moans I had heard coming from beneath me. "Someone's alive down there, " I said.
"Aye, we know. We heard him, but we can't see where he is. "
"It might be her—it might be Tress, Ben. "
He grimaced. "I doubt it, Cay. Tress went over with her horse, much farther up the track, and the sounds I heard were made by a man, I think. "
I struggled to rise to my feet and fell back. "We have to look. We have ropes. We'll climb down. "
"Merlyn, we can't. It's too dark now, too dangerous. There are only seven of us left, and we're all frozen and exhausted. If we go clambering down there in the darkness, we could all be killed. We'll have to wait till morning. "
"By morning they might all be dead. "
"I know. But there's no other possibility. "
Again I gathered myself and attempted to rise, and this time I made it to my feet, but when I took my first step my right leg, the one from which I had hung for so long, folded uselessly beneath me and Benedict barely managed to catch me as I fell headlong. My face hit his cuirass, then all the world went black.
SIXTEEN
Madness can take many forms. Mine took the form of Peter Ironhair, and because of it, a year was to elapse before I would truly mourn my Tressa. My first great love, Cassandra, had been two years dead before I mourned for her, but then I had been ill, incapable of understanding my loss since my wits were scattered and my past life hidden from my mind. Tressa, the only other woman who could claim my soul, having mastered my heart, had to wait a conscious year while I, with all my faculties apparently intact, went through the madness of vengeance. I was aware of loss through all that time—aware that grief boiled, unspilt, filling me totally; aware of yawning emptiness in all my world aware that all the joys I had ever known were gone from me—and yet I wilfully refused to think of those things of countenance what ailed me. I had been set one task to complete before I died, a task forged and hammered into being in the emptiness of my souclass="underline" the personal destruction of an enemy and the excision of his living heart.
In sleeping and in waking dreams Ironhair's face was never absent from my mind for longer than it took me to complete one minor task and turn towards another. I would discuss some strategy or other with my officers—for I had no friends at that time, and dealt with people strictly on the dictates and requirements of the moment—and then would turn to walk or ride away, and there would be Ironhair, the creator of my despair, grinning at me in my mind. I saw him always as he had been in Camulod, before we threw him out: an open faced, attractive, smiling man with the suggestion of goodwill and fellowship ever about him. His face, clearly recalled in every detail, came to be more familiar to me than my own, which I saw but seldom in those days. Even in sleep he was with me, and he was everyone I dreamed of. Each solitary night I was startled awake as his face appeared on Tressa's, Ded's and even Arthur's shoulders. Lucanus came to me in dreams, to talk, but even he never failed to become Ironhair, mocking me with his smile.
I have said that in those days I had no friends; that is both true and false. My friends stood by me—Donuil and Shelagh, Benedict and Falvo, Philip and faithful Rufio—but I abjured them and avoided them, cutting them cruelly with coldness and indifference whenever they sought my company and treating them as mere subordinates when I had to deal with them in government or war. They bore it stoically, knowing whence it came, but nowadays, when I think back to how I was, I sense their pain and loss, which must have seemed to them as bitter and unwelcome as my own.
It passed, in time, that dreadful misery, but I was never able to recapture the easy intimacy I had known with all of them; I had progressed by then from being simple Merlyn, trusted companion, brother-in-arms and laughing friend, to being Merlyn the predator, the avenger and the sorcerer.
A year, lost to me save for minor, insubstantial memories, as surely as the two years when I lived as someone else; and a lifetime, forfeited in payment for a dream of vengeance.
It began on that steep path above the gulf that swallow: Tress.
The morning sun rose in a cloudless sky that revealed no trace of the killing storm and found us huddled still in sleep, seven chilled and agued bodies shuddering in soaked clothes and huddled together for warmth in a single mast like nested spoons in a field kitchen case. Someone, I guessed Benedict, since he lay on the outside, had covered} the sleeping mass of us with cloaks and bedroll blankets and layered leather tents in an attempt to conserve our body; heat. Shelagh lay pressed against my back when I awoke,; her arms about my waist hugging me tightly, and I, in turn, was clutching the trooper Rufus. When the first of us awoke the others followed, and I remember feeling every ache and pain of all my forty plus years as I rolled free of our makeshift bedding, shivering from the chill of the morning and the dragging dankness of my cold, wet clothing.
We broke our fast briefly and in silence, eating without awareness from the rations left in one of the remaining saddlebags, and then we began searching for our friends. The abyss that had seemed so deep and dark in the storm; the previous night turned out to be nothing so enormous. At its deepest point, it was less than a score of paces, vertically, from the path above. Its bottom, however, was littered with loose boulders that had long since fallen from the cliff face and were now hidden by scrub and bushes. The sapling from which I had hung—my greave was still in place, lodged in the dirt at its base—had suspended me no more than my own height again above the ground, sufficient to have killed me, had I fallen down head first, but nothing resembling the depth I had imagined to be under me as I swung there. There, too, below and to the left, his lower body twisted in a shallow pit and his torso partially hidden by a tree trunk, we found Bedwyr, unconscious but alive, his left leg broken beneath him, a splintered length of bone protruding from his thigh. We left Rufus and Marco, the medical orderly attached to our troop, to straighten and splint the broken limb while Bedwyr was still unconscious and then to extract him from the pit in which he lay. The rest of us went looking for the others who had fallen.