"You ask too much, shaman! To flee before the hunters is no shame when one is not sprung from a fighting people. But not to run, or to run in circles, or to cower in a hollow and watch the pack close, ah, but you ask too much!" His antlers were visibly melting and drooping. "Think you because I will not fight that I have no honor? That I forget the ancestors?" The wilted antlers hung over his chest like ropes; and all his pride was shame. He laid his human hands on the window ledge and belled a great note of despair to the starlit night and the sea. "This is what you do to me, shaman! I will have recompense. You will suffer for this."
Castel Capuano! It was Castel Capuano!
"I will suffer," Toby said aloud, and the scene shattered in a cacophony of drums.
He sprawled on the gallery with his arms outspread and the stonework cold under his face. "No!" he said. "No, no, no! I do not remember."
"More, Sorghaghtani!" said the toneless voice of the tutelary. "He will recover and thank you for it, or he will not return to reproach you. Even madness will be better than failure."
Again the drumming swept him up and whirled him into the spirit world.
CHAPTER THREE
A forest at sunset. He stood naked before a huge and ancient oak, staring up at a hole in the trunk and a squirrel that sat on the edge of the hole, gibbering at him as the rumble of the drum faded into the distance like a passing storm.
"Go away, go away!" the squirrel chattered. It was a very red little squirrel, and it wrapped its bushy tail around itself and peered down at him with eyes like angry bright beads. "Go, go, go! Go now! Go away! They are mine."
"I only want to borrow them," Toby said.
"No! No! No! No! They are mine. They are ours, not yours, shaman. Go! Go away! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
"I will bring them back." He reached up to the hole and tried to push the squirrel aside. It bit his finger. He cried out at the pain and snatched his hand away to suck the wound. He could taste the blood.
The squirrel danced in fury now on the edge of the hole, jabbering, "Mine! Mine! Mine!" and "Ours! Ours! Ours!" and sometimes, "Go away! Go away!" It lashed its shiny tail around like a feather duster.
"I need them just for a little while. I will bring them back." He reached up to grab the brute. It ran up the trunk out of reach, clinging to the bark with its claws.
"There is nothing there, shaman. The hole is empty."
"Then you won't mind if I look?" He stretched as high as he could and felt inside the hole with his right hand. The squirrel jumped on his wrist and bit it. As he grabbed for it with his left hand, it dived into the hole, and suddenly he had both hands in the hole and they were caught there. He was trapped. Inevitably, the ground sank away under his toes then, leaving him hanging by his wrists. The tree bark was harsh and spiky against his skin. He knew what was going to happen now. This was Sergeant Mulliez's whipping post again.
The squirrel bit on his fingers a few times, then poked its head out between his hands to smile at him. "You must promise to bring them back!"
"I promise," he said.
The lash crashed across his shoulders and he gasped, but it was not quite a scream. He had made no sound before on the whipping post, and he would not now.
"Promise more faithfully!" sneered the squirrel. It was redder than ever, red as the blood he could feel streaming down his back.
"I promise!"
Crash! This time he had been ready for it.
"You are still lying. Swear, shaman!"
"I swear!"
Crash!
Someone was screaming.
"Stop that, Sorghie!" he said. "You won't get around me that way."
The roughness on his hands and face was stonework again. He was leaning against the wall with his arms over his head, still in his armor and soaked in sweat, not blood. His helmet had fallen off. He dropped his arms and turned around, but he continued to lean against the wall, for his legs were trembling. The shaman sat at his feet, doubled over her drum.
"Will nothing convince you?" she wailed.
"Not this. None of it makes any sense to me."
"Again!" commanded the tutelary. "This must be the last time. No matter what it does to him, leave him there until he stops struggling."
Toby started to say, "I've never admitted defeat in my life," but they didn't give him time to get the words out.
CHAPTER FOUR
He sat in darkness, a warm and cozy darkness smelling of loam and animal fur. He was listening to a tantalizingly familiar voice. It spoke in Italian, but slowly and clearly, a soft voice with steely undertones:
"…problem is trust. After so many centuries of disunity, cooperation is foreign to us. Even when we face a common foe, we cannot combine because no state can ever trust another. Alliances change too fast." The shape emerging from the darkness was not human. Human eyes were closer together and did not glow with that yellow light.
"Trent was a miracle, but it was a very brief miracle. One day's cooperation — yes, even Italians can agree for a single day when the enemy is in sight. But more than that…" The speaker sighed and smiled, animal teeth showing close below the eyes. "As soon as the sun sets we start conspiring again. To let another's army march across your contado is hard. To put your forces under another's command is almost unthinkable. To send them off to guard another city and leave your own vulnerable — that is an impossible concession."
The light creeping into the scene had the bluish tinge of daylight. The speaker was a fox, a very large red fox.
"Then we must plan accordingly," said another voice, one that Toby did not recognize. Nor could he see the speaker. "One day's cooperation, no marching through others' territory, no putting your forces under a stranger's command, no leaving your home city unguarded."
"If you can devise a strategy that satisfies all those conditions, then you are indeed a military genius." The fox was melting, shifting. The cave, too, was changing.
"It may be possible to come close, Your Magnificence."
Il Volpe pricked up his ears. "Indeed? How close?"
"Close enough, because no one makes alliances with the Fiend. You can trust your oldest enemy before you trust him."
"Some have tried." It… he… was becoming human, at least below the neck. The surroundings were beginning to look more like a room than a fox's earth, too, smelling less of loam and musk, more of polish, printer's ink, leather bindings, and wine.
"And lived to repent it, but not much longer. First, territory. Obviously someone will have to make a concession so that the separate states may bring their forces together. But this will not be a problem once the Fiend has already invaded, will it, messer? Any state will welcome its neighbors in if they come to drive Nevil away."
Who was this Unknown? He was using almost exactly the same words Toby himself had used many times. He was certainly no Italian.
The fox sipped from a stemmed goblet. "They may not agree so before it happens, but do continue."
"Command, then. You said yourself, that command can be relinquished for one day. It happened at Trent, it can happen again."
"One day?" The fox smiled. "That might be negotiable."
"Leaving the city unguarded — would you settle for sending your army out as long as it remained between you and the foe?"