The next one must be Hamish Campbell. His face was sort of familiar. Toby smiled at him, but he couldn't smile back because of the gag. He clattered forward in his fetters less proudly than Don Ramon had, but not slowly enough to make the soldiers push him. His eyes were as wide as his gaping mouth.
The clerk began reading about spying again. The Hamish boy just kept staring at Toby and shaking his head wildly. What did that mean? Was he doing something wrong? Was his hood not on straight?
When the clerk fell silent, the prisoner did not seem to notice. A guard laid a hand on his shoulder. He squirmed away. Two men grabbed him and pushed him down to his knees. Still he struggled, making protesting animal noises in his throat—poor, foolish fellow! He might make Toby miss if he didn't stop doing that, or miss partly and have to hit again. But Master had told him not to speak, so he couldn't warn him.
Two more soldiers lifted the victim's feet. With four of them holding him level, his chest resting on the block, he could do nothing except twist his head around and wail. Squirreling like a worm on a hook was still not going to make things easy. Toby began to lift the ax and then put it down again.
The soldiers were unhappy, too, waiting for that whistling blade and the shower of blood. Fortunately Captain Diaz was nearby. "Keep still, you fool!" he roared. "You want him to botch this? You want to be hacked in pieces?"
The prisoner went rigid. Toby raised and swung, and again the scaffold trembled under the impact. The head jumped free. One stroke again! Master would be pleased. This time the body could not fall back, so the hot blood squirted in all directions off the ax blade, soaking even Toby's hood. That really was not nice. Some of the soldiers gagged and coughed, and they had gotten off much lighter than he had.
Duty done, he pulled the ax free and leaned it against the block, where he had found it. He turned his head for a glance at Master who smiled and nodded a welcome approval. Glad to have done a good job, Toby headed for the steps. A quick bath to clean off the blood, then back into his fine clothes and he would be ready for the dinner and the well-preserved ladies. He just hoped he could do as well for them as he had for the two spies, so Master would be pleased with him.
CHAPTER TWO
The wind was a restless silence in the night, quieter than the whisper of the sentry's tread on dry grass and rubbly soil. The first glimmerings of daylight were creeping in over the stony hills, not even bright enough yet to mark a horizon or distinguish a white thread from a black thread, which was how the Moors defined morning. Although he was wrapped in both his blanket and his cloak, the sentry shivered as he paced back and forth, forcing himself to stay awake. His legs ached already, and they must walk a weary way before sunset. More than anything in the world he wished he could just lie down and catch a few more hours' sleep, because three half-nights in a row had left him permanently bleary-eyed and yawning. No, more than anything else, he would like to be smelling the peaty scents of home and watching the sun come up on Ben More...
When the scream burst forth almost at his toes, he jumped a foot in the air. It was diabolical, bestial scream, louder than a cannon barrage. Echoes answered from the steepness on the far side of the valley, and a couple of heartbeats later came a wild barking of dogs at the distant casa. Gracia wakened with shrills of alarm. By that time Toby had leaped from his bedding with his sword in his hand and was peering around to see where the noise had come from.
It had come from him.
Hamish said, "What's wrong?"
The big man dropped the sword with a clatter and grabbed him in a bear hug that seemed likely to crush his ribs. "Hamish, Hamish! You're all right! You're alive!" His hand pawed at Hamish's throat.
He fought back. "I was! Let me go, you maniac. What happened?"
Longdirk groaned and released him. "Demons!" he muttered. "Oh, spirits!" He flopped back down on the ground and put his head in his hands.
The dogs were falling silent and did not seem to be coming closer. Gracia was twittering questions.
"Senor Longdirk had a bad dream," Hamish explained. He knelt down. Toby was sobbing, heaving dry, soundless gasps of grief. He? Sooner would Ben More weep. "What's wrong? Another vision?"
"Umph." That sounded like agreement. He nodded and gulped through his tortured breathing.
Hamish put arms around him, but awkwardly, because it was the sort of thing an excitable, demonstrative Spaniard would do—Scotsmen never hugged each other. "You're all right, though? Not injured?"
"Not me, no. Hamish, I cut your head off!"
"You did?" That ought to be funny and wasn't. Nasty shivers ran down his back. "Well, it didn't work. I mean, I'm glad it's you who comes back hurt from these things and not me. Are you sure this one wasn't just a dream?"
"It is very impolite of the senores to talk so I cannot comprehend." Gracia had begun the morning ritual of combing out her long black hair, sitting with her back to the two crazy foreigners.
Toby shuddered and seemed to realize that he was being held like a child. Instead of trying to break free, he wrapped a thick arm around Hamish and squeezed. He was still shaking. "No, it was no dream. Oreste had me. He'd hexed me, enslaved me with gramarye, and he made me chop your head off, and another man's—ax and block and black hood and everything. Oh, Hamish, I did it! I didn't even protest. I was eager to do it, just to please him!"
Gooseflesh! "I'm sure you were. Anyone can be hexed—remember King Fergan... anyone. It wouldn't be your fault. But it could still have been a dream, Toby. You're worried about the baron and you remember the time Valda hexed you. The two got mixed up in a dream. Happens all the time."
"You had an awful lot of blood in you, friend!"
"What was this terrible dream, senor?" Gracia demanded, piqued as a child at being excluded. "I am very good at telling the meaning of dreams."
"The dream told," Toby said in his butchered Castilian, "that I was royal executioner in Barcelona and I cut off Senor Diego's head."
"How tragic! Why?"
"Because he had been flirting with you and I was jealous."
Gracia squealed at this outrage to her honor, barely managing to conceal her delight.
Hamish shivered and broke free. "We may as well be on our way." The skyline had come into view. "You're all right? You weren't tortured again?"
"No. In fact..." He peered at his wrists. "All better. No bruises, see? Not a hair out of place. When I took hold of the ax my arms were bare, and I'm sure there were no marks on my wrists."
"So Oreste cured you? After he'd tortured you and then hexed you."
"Must have done. Must be going to. Hamish, this is insane!" Toby's voice quavered, and that was not like him. None of this was like him. His eyes were round as birds' eggs in the gloom. "It wasn't just a dream!"
"No, it wasn't," Hamish said nervously. "Because where did your beard go? You had it on when you went to bed."
Of course Toby put a hand to his chin then, and of course Senora de Gomez noticed the absence of the beard. She squealed in astonishment and came hurrying over to see, and then she noticed his wrists also—she had joked about their purple and yellow colors at supper. It should have been funny to listen to him trying to convince her that he had shaved in the night and was a very quick healer. It wasn't.