Then, tangled by its matted hair amid the branches, the ogre’s head began to speak. Speaking with a deep mellifluous voice that by this time I should have expected, for was it not the Scorpion?
I could not look at the severed head, but not for fear and disgust. I could not take my eyes from Agion. But I could hear the thing speaking. Oh, yes, I could hear it, as it raced through past and present and things to come with a coldness and menace and lifelessness that hurtled to the heart of me like a trident. I remember what it said, to the very word.
“I shall take leave of you now, Bayard Brightblade. And may you find the road . . . as clear as you would like into the heartland of Solamnia. May there be safe traveling and bird song to accompany you.
“For I have done my part. The deeds on this day have assured that you will not attend the tournament at Castle di Caela.”
“We still have time!” Bayard protested, taking one uncertain step toward the speaking head.
“Perhaps. If you leave your big friend to the raptori. To the vultures and the kites. But the tournament will soon be over. Sir Robert di Caela will have an heir, the Lady Enid a husband. And it is all my doing, for my power ranges far. Blame not the satyrs in the swamp, though their trivial menace slowed you for a night or so; not your traitorous squire, who is no real master of delay . . .”
I could not look up.
“Nor, Sir Bayard, this very ogre, from whose long-dead lips I prophesy and bode. Indeed, if there is a villain, call it your lack of resolution, your passion for delay. Call it what you will. But remember: I am that delay.”
Bayard lunged at the gloating thing in the branches. With a deft swipe of his foot, he sent the head tumbling into the undergrowth off of the trail.
I looked back at Agion. Who seemed even younger than he had before. Why, in the way centaurs reckon things, he was no older than I.
I looked up into Bayard’s eyes.
Where indeed there was nothing but pain. A pain past anger, past tears.
“‘Your traitorous squire’?” he asked. Then he knelt by Agion.
For an hour he knelt in silence, oblivious to my summons. Once, when I tried to grab his arm, to shake him out of whatever stupor he had fallen into, he shrugged my hand away as though I had set a scorpion on his shoulder.
Not twenty feet from us, the head of the ogre steamed and stained the ground on which it lay.
After his hour of silence, Bayard arose and turned to Agion.
“I am sorry, Agion. I am dreadfully sorry. Tomorrow I shall continue to Castle di Caela, and when we get there I shall do what I have to do. Then I shall return to the Coastlund Swamp, there to answer Archala and the elders as best I can. But I am going to sleep now for a while. Keep watch while I do, good centaur, if you will. Keep watch this last time.”
Then turning to me, he stared above my head as though he were watching for stars (even though it was not yet midday), as though I sat huddled on the cold steps of some building far from this time and far from this country.
“Do what you will, Weasel,” he said. “I have nothing to say to you. No need of you.”
Chapter Twelve
The next day, we broke camp and, taking the ogre’s horse along, joined the narrow trail of the pass once more, beginning our descent of the mountains through a steep, embanked region where the plants had frozen the night before. The dead branches glittered with ice and with the ascending sunlight. Bayard rode ahead, lost in thought.
No matter how beautiful the branches, they were still dead. And images of death and of loss were quick to the eye this morning, for all the previous day and night had been taken up with the long sad rite of Agion’s makeshift funeral.
It was an awkward time after Bayard had rested. For tearfully we cleaned the centaur’s body, and tearfully we searched for a place of burial. But we were in the mountains, and the ground was rocky—too hard for digging.
We were forced to let Agion lie in the spot where he had fallen—where he had taken the sharp blade intended for Sir Bayard. We stacked stones upon the still form of our companion, forming by sundown a rough cairn of sorts above the body.
Bayard stood above our handiwork, his tunic and long hair dusty. My hands and shoulders ached from the carrying and the lifting. An owl piped from somewhere amid the concealing thick branches of a nearby cedar.
“This, too, is awkward,” Bayard said reflectively.
“Sir?”
“I know nothing of the centaur way in this matter,” he continued, speaking softly as though I were not there.
“There is, however, the way of the Order. And though he was no Solamnic, I do not see why these words cannot apply, cannot . . . enlarge to contain him.”
Strangely the night birds grew still as Bayard stood beside the mound of stones, chanting the ancient prayer:
As we descended into the foothills, the weather grew warmer and warmer, the temperature rising from numbing cold to what you might call “crisp.” Eventually we found ourselves in country that resembled nothing so much as early autumn. The glazed branches gave way to living things, as the trail wound itself through vallenwoods, pear trees, and maples, the leaves of which were turning reds and yellows and oranges against the bright blue of the Solamnic sky.
We were in Solamnia proper, home of the legends. Almost every story I had heard at my father’s knee had its beginning and usually its ending in this historic country.
But it seemed that on this side of the mountains, Bayard’s mood was even more restless. You could see that Castle di Caela could not be near enough for his liking. He hastened. For the first time he took the spurs to Valorous, and the big stallion kicked, snorted, then did what his rider wished. It was a pace I found uncomfortable, but after four hours or so it had really started to tell on the horses, who, don’t forget, were doing the running. It wasn’t but an hour or two until the pack mare began to sweat and lather and snort and smell bad, and by the time we had reached land that was altogether level, I was having visions of the mare falling over in midstride, her heart having given out. Bayard would go on alone. Bayard showed no signs of mercy or of exhaustion. In fact, he no longer seemed affected by any of the hardships of the journey. That morning and that afternoon he urged on a flagging Valorous, moving through ragged countryside as though we were cavalry—or worse, scouts for a band of nomadic raiders. The occasional farmer or traveler we saw shied away from us, no doubt thinking, True, there are only two of them, but judging from their faces, they’re the advance party for a terrible bunch of freebooters. We went on like this into the night, when our relentless passage ceased, and Bayard, alighting from Valorous as though he were rushing also to rest, said simply, “Here.”
Then he tied the reins to the low fork of an apple tree and, leaning against the trunk, fell into a sudden and deep sleep.
I sat up on my blanket. For a moment I thought I was back at the moat house, subject to some punishment, but my thoughts cleared and the surroundings tumbled back into place—the rolling Solamnic countryside, the stars of Gilean the Book glittering directly overhead, a huge armed man standing beside my blanket, saying something unclear at first, but then . . .