He must have looked lost, then, because after he’d stood near the fire for a few minutes warming himself the stew-makers began helpfully pointing in the direction that all the other people were migrating. This happened to be generally uphill, which was the way Jack planned to travel anyhow (either it would take him to the Doctor’s tower, or to a height-of-land whence he could see the tower come morning) and so off he hobbled.
The next time he was really aware of anything (he seemed to be walking and sleeping at the same time, though everything had a dreamlike quality now, so the whole thing might be a dream) he had evidently covered a couple of miles uphill, judging from that it was much colder and the wind was blowing so hard that he could hear trees being struck down all over, like reports of guns in a battle. Clouds stampeded across the face of a full moon. Occasionally something would rip through the branches overhead and shower him with twigs and brush. Looking up, he saw it was broken-off tree branches, or maybe even small uprooted trees, propelled through the air by the hurricanoe. He was working his way uphill, though not sure why anymore. Others were all around him. The forest was very tall skinny black trees closely packed together like the massed pikes of a military formation, the eruptions of moonlight between fleeing clouds like the bursting of bombs, and Jack heard, or dreamed, the tramping of feet and blowing of trumpets. Forgetting why his leg was splinted, he supposed he must have been wounded in action (possibly in the head as well as the leg) and the wound dressed by a barber. For a while he was almost certain he was still fighting Turks in Vienna and all of the Eliza stuff just a long, elaborate, cruel dream.
But then he was back in the woods above Bockboden. Branches and heavier things were still ripping through space above his head like cannonballs. He looked up at the moon trying to see them, and with the torn clouds streaming by, it was difficult to make out their shapes, but he was fairly certain now that people were riding on those branches, as Winged Hussars rode on chargers. They were charging the hilltop! Jack finally stumbled out onto a path that wound up the mountain, and was nearly run over by the infantry part of the charge: a river of people with cut branches, and other ornaments, such as the forks farmers used to shovel manure. Forgetting about the splinted leg, Jack wheeled and tried to run with them, but fell, and took a while getting up.
He reached the collection of outcroppings that was the mountain-top somewhat after the main group, but in time to see them chasing away half a dozen musketeers who had apparently been posted there, and who were not welcome. None of them fired his weapon, as they had no desire to kill a few people only to be surrounded by hundreds of their stick-brandishing friends. As this occurred, people farther from the action were shouting threats and offering sour comments in much the same vein as the spectators at the witch-burning had earlier, except that they were using the word Wacher, which (Jack’s murderously overtaxed mind guessing wildly here) perhaps meant “Watchers.”
Battle won, the Hexen (no point in denying it any more) quickly lit up the whole mountain-top with fires (many people had carried faggots on their backs), which burnt with white heat in the continuing wind-blast. Jack hobbled around and looked. He could see that many ages ago a tall stone column had risen from the top of the mountain, bifurcated at the top into what might have been shaped like a pair of goat’s horns. It might’ve looked something like a crossbow standing up on end. But it had been toppled so long ago that it was now covered in moss and dirt. A couple of dozen standing-stones had ringed it; most of them had been toppled as well. The Hexen had led a black goat up onto the ruin of the high column and leashed him there to look out over the whole fiery prospect.
People, frequently naked, danced around those bonfires. Many spring flowers had been brought up and used to decorate rocks, or people. A certain amount of fucking went on, as one would expect, but at least some of it seemed to be ceremonial fucking-the participants, actors in a sort of immorality play-the woman always bedecked with garlands of spring wildflowers and the man always donning an eye-patch. Certain small animals might have died unnatural deaths. There was chanting and singing in a language that wasn’t exactly German.
Of course, presiding over the entire thing was Satan the Prince of Darkness, or so Jack assumed-as what else would you call a jet-black figure, horned and bearded, maybe a hundred feet high, dancing in the boiling, smoky, cloudy sky just above the summit, sometimes visible and sometimes not, occasionally seen in profile as he lifted his bearded chin to howl, or laugh, at the moon. Jack fully believed this, and knew beyond doubt that every word the preachers had ever said about Lucifer was true. He decided that running away wasn’t a bad idea. Choosing the direction he happened to be pointed in at the moment he panicked, he ran. The moon came out a few moments later and showed him he had one or two strides left on rock before he would find himself running in midair-a fantastical gorge plunged straight down for farther than could be seen by moonlight. Jack stopped and turned around, having no other choices, and with a forced and none too sincere calmness, looked at the entire panorama of fire and shadow hoping to find a route that wouldn’t take him too near Satan-or actually any of the several Satans of different sizes who seemed to be huddling in council around the mountain-top.
His eye was caught by a tiny black silhouette outlined in a brilliant hairy fringe, elevated above the whole scene: the black goat, tilting its head back to bray. One of the vast Satans duplicated the move precisely. Jack understood that he had been running from shadows of the goat cast against clouds and smoke by the light of the fire.
He sat down at the point where he’d almost hurled himself into the gorge, laughed, and tried to clear his head, and to get his bearings. The cliff, and the somewhat lower bluff across from it, were craggy, with great big shards and flakes of rock angling crazily into the air-and (by the way) exploding the Doctor’s idea of how these rocks had been formed, because the grain of these rocks ran straight up and down. Obviously it was the remains of a giant, killed in some antediluvian rock fight, who’d died on his back with his bony fingers thrust up into the air.
Jack drew nearer to a fire, partly because he was cold and partly because he wanted a closer look at one particular naked girl who was dancing around it-somewhat on the fleshy side and clearly destined to become another broom-wielding hag in the long run, but the least columnar German female Jack had recently seen. By the time he got close enough to have a good look at her, the fire was uncomfortably hot, which should have warned him that the light was very bright, on his face. But he did not consider this important fact at all until he heard the fatal word Wache! Turning towards the voice he saw, almost close enough to touch, one of those women who had woken him up earlier in the evening, down below, when he’d been sleeping by his little fire with his sword in view. His sword was exactly what she was looking for, now that she’d gained everyone’s attention by uttering their least favorite word. Concealing the weapon in a leg-splint had worked when it was dark, and people were not specifically looking for a sword, but here and now it did not work at all-the woman hardly needed do more than glance at Jack before screaming, in a voice that could probably be heard in Leipzig, “Er ist eine Wache! Er hat ein Schwert!”