Bayard, on the other hand, was still in terrible shape. Nevertheless, he raised himself slowly—wearily, I thought—and gave his enormous opponent the time-honored Solamnic salute. Holding his sword in the right hand, his dagger in the left, he stood by the campfire, faced the dark hulk on the horse and folded his arms ceremoniously.
Well, the dark hulk moved not a whit in response. I doubted that was because the big fool had any reverence for Solamnic ceremony, or any reverence at all, for that matter. Instead, he was probably sitting there looking forward to the little armored fellow’s riding within the operating reach of his trident. Agion and I were after Bayard before he rode to meet the ogre, both trying to stop him from tangling with the whirlwind.
“You’re not obliged to fight this fellow, Sir Bayard,” I urged. “Let’s get him to chase us back up the trail and set a snare for him.”
It seemed reasonable, or so I thought. Bayard, on the other hand, tightened a cinch on his greaves, his back to me.
“But if thou contendest,” Agion added, “that our way must lie through this monster in our path, then remember it is our road—mine and Galen’s—too, not simply thine alone.” He stared at the ogre, sizing up the opposition. “And that the fight ahead is our fight as well as thine.”
“But I suppose that if we must go through with this,” I swiftly interjected, shooting Agion a look of pure and blistering hatred, “that I must urge you to remember your own words, that ‘this is a conflict between Knight and opponent.’ As much as Agion and I would like to help, we really can’t unless we kind of undo your principles altogether and as a result, make you kind of unworthy of Solamnic Knighthood.”
“Which is also why I cannot resort to trickery, Galen.”
“I understand, sir,” I equivocated.
This time things began differently. Valorous, remembering no doubt the encounter two nights ago, had passed beyond skittish to lathered and twitchy, evidently having his fill of unequal contests. Weary and sore though he seemed, Bayard calmed the big stallion with one pat of his gloved hand, then turned to us. The look I saw on his face was not that of a doomed man. Tired, yes, and no doubt a little afraid, but beneath the fatigue and the fear was a confidence I had not seen before, had not imagined.
“If I can hold him off a while, hold him off only this night, Galen, I shall defeat him,” Bayard whispered. “Of that I am certain.
“For surely there is a reason that he fights by night alone. I wager that it’s as simple a reason as those that run through the old legends: because he can’t fight by day, because the sunlight weakens him and vexes him. Things of darkness are often like this. Think of the ogre’s cousins, the goblins and the trolls, how they recoil at healthy sunlight.”
Bayard turned Valorous toward the battle, glanced back over his shoulder, and smiled as he shut the visor of the helmet.
“Playing the fox, boy! Playing the fox!” he shouted, as Valorous broke into a canter and, once again under a confident and sure hand, into a gallop, straight toward the dark, imposing figure of the ogre amidst the rocks, off on a dangerous gamble.
I scrambled to a small plateau by the roadside, where I had a vantage point from which to view the evening’s action.
As Bayard approached the mounted ogre, I glanced up at the clear and chilly autumn sky. The spiraling, infinite stars in the constellation of Mishakal, goddess of healing and knowledge, wheeled over me, and if I were a stargazer, such a sign would have given me courage.
Instead I cast the Calantina, there in the light of two moons, in the faintest glow from Agion’s fire a hundred feet away.
Sign of the Mongoose.
I knew of the Snake Dances in farthest Estwilde, where the mongoose is brought in to the last movement of the dance, where with nothing but quickness and brains and sharp teeth it goes up against the deadly ophidian to the music of pipe and drums. And I became a little more hopeful that Bayard’s version of events would somehow come to pass, that we were in a story where the sun would rise, the ogre would scream a withering, bloodcurdling scream, and vanish into smoke or melt away before our eyes.
By the time I had settled in to watch, Bayard had stopped some forty feet from the ogre—twenty feet or so out of the range of the net and the trident, where the rocks drew back from the side of the trail. Where there was room to maneuver.
Bayard stayed where he was on the trail—unmoving, staring down his enemy. The ogre responded in kind, a dark cloud rising as though out of the ground, covering his horse until it seemed that he was borne on the back of a thunder-head. So still were the two combatants that a rabbit hopped silently out of the rocks by the side of the road, stood poised on her haunches between them, and then hopped unhurriedly away, never aware that she had passed through a region that might at any time explode in swordplay and metal and blood. It was that still. When the rabbit had passed, when the trail lay in stillness awhile longer, there was suddenly the slightest of movements. But not from Bayard.
The ogre’s hand moved slowly on the trident. He shifted his gaze to regard Bayard more directly, and as he did, Bayard’s cloak fluttered out like a banner in an icy wind tearing itself from his shoulders and flapping off like a huge, ungainly bird down the trail behind him.
Still Bayard did not move. I thought he had become part of the landscape, that he had seen into the terrible eyes of the ogre and been turned to stone.
Slowly the trident raised, “proffered,” as the old Solamnic term went, pointed like a lance, its three nasty teeth aimed directly at Bayard’s heart.
Still Bayard did not move. Valorous twitched nervously, snorted, but the steadiness of Bayard’s hand calmed him.
Motionless they remained another long while. Agion joined me on the plateau and placed his hand on my shoulder. His strong grip kept me almost as stationary as the combatants we were watching. A raven lit on the ogre’s shoulder. For a minute he looked comical, like a huge, ungainly wizard in a painting. Then the raven ducked beneath its wing, raised its head alertly, and fluttered off. I had dark forebodings.
Then the fury was unleashed. Valorous broke into a charge, and ten feet at most from his waiting enemy, Bayard reined the big beast into a skidding, noisy turn toward the left side of the ogre. Who hadn’t been figuring on that. Who had raised his trident as he had before, like a club or a cudgel, ready to batter senseless whoever or whatever rode past him on his right side.
Before the big fellow could adjust, Bayard was on him, sword descending in a flashing blow that would have severed any limb short of a monster’s. But as Bayard moved to the attack, the ogre dropped the trident and tossed the net into his face, entangling the sword in its downward arc so that even though it sliced readily through the strands of the net, all that slicing slowed it some, until, by the time the blow reached the enemy, it was one he could deflect with his heavily plated forearm.
The sound of metal on metal was a new one, unlike the clang and clatter heard on tournament fields. Instead the ogre’s armor rang clearly, resonantly, like a huge tower bell, startling the birds overhead, making me wonder where I had heard that sound before.
The cloud beneath the ogre took on substance, once more resolving itself into horse and movement. The eyes of the horse glowed red. It shook its tangled black mane, and shivered.
At once the advantage swung once again to the enemy, for Bayard was tottering atop Valorous, half-netted and off balance, while the monster tried to reel him in, and at the same time reached for a dagger. It wasn’t good policy, what I did next, but I had to do it.
As the two of them tugged back and forth with the net, as Bayard leaned farther and farther forward in the saddle, moving inevitably toward the point where he would lose his balance and, soon afterward, his life, I sprang free of Agion, dislodged a hand-sized stone and winged it quickly at the ogre, who, his back to me, didn’t see me, the stone, or anything coming.