Hal was still at this when one of the walkers left the circle. He was a younger man with close-cut reddish hair and reddish beard. He had been walking with all the appearance of normality, but after taking several steps away from the circle, he stumbled and his feet dragged, like those of someone exhausted, but still driving himself to move. One of those waiting was almost immediately at his side and helping him toward one of the nearer of the two dormitory buildings. "In you go, Hal," said Amid. "I'm waiting for Old Man to come around," said Hal. "I'd like to walk behind him." "If you like," said Amid.
Old Man came around and Hal stepped in behind him. The next walker in the circle fell back a little distance to give room. Hal followed Old Man and, opening his mouth, began to repeat the Law:
"The transient and the eternal are the same ."
Almost immediately the rhythm of the walking and the intoned phrase took him over. It was as if he had stepped on to the back of some powerful bird, which now took off with him. The words were like a living thing that lifted him and carried him away. The beating of his heart was in synchrony with the heartbeat of the bird, and a pressure he had not been conscious of feeling, but which had pressed down on him before, was suddenly released, so that he felt light and free.
He ascended within himself on the wings of the feeling that bore him, that had been outside him to begin with but which was now working itself inward on him, staining into him. He felt the words resonating in his throat and all through his body. He could not say what they meant, any more than he had understood more than their ordinary, everyday meaning before. But he felt something additional in them now, even though he could not reach through to something of deeper import yet - like a vast mountain in the distance, somewhere beyond him.
It was as Amid had said. He did not lose sight of, or touch with, his surroundings. He saw Amid and Amanda still standing, watching him for a little while before they turned and went off together, leaving only the small group of those who waited their turn in the circle. He saw and felt all that he ordinarily would have seen and felt, but it was irrelevant to what he was experiencing with his own movement and the repetition of the words.
The bird carrying him was his image and he let himself go with it. He felt the softness and warmth of the back feathers under him, felt the vibrations through them of the powerfully pumping wings, saw far distant on the horizon the triangular, mist-white shape of the Grandfathers of Dawn mountains that was his destination. The clean, thin air of the heights drew deep down into his lungs, searching out their very bottom crannies and corridors. And, without warning, he understood.
He understood that the weight that had dropped away temporarily from him as he stepped into the circle had been the weight of defeat. It had accumulated, layer by layer, day by day this last year, surrounding him, but held off from closing in on and crushing him by his strength of will, which grew and toughened like muscle in response to the demand placed upon it. So that his lack of success and his strength of will had increased together - until at last the limits even of his will were approached, and he had begun to give under the weight.
So despondency had finally begun to touch him. He had fought well and won, fought and won, again and again - and again and again victory had left him with the decisive encounter yet to be. Fear and its stepchildren, self-doubt and self-hatred, still tore and destroyed in the innermost parts of all human beings. He had conquered one wall only to find another, and another after that, and after that another, with his foe still alive and protected... until there seemed no end to the walls, and he felt the beginnings of an end to his strength.
He was aware that others had taken up this challenge in times before him, and all had failed in the end. But like each of those who had gone before, he had said, "we have come so far. We have won this much. Now, finally, we ought to be ready to reach the final battleground, and put an end to what plagues us."
Donal had won... and the final battle had turned out yet to be fought. Paul Formain had won... and the final battle still awaited. Hal Mayne had saved what must be saved of the human race, safe for a little while until the final battle could be fought - and the final battle was still beyond the horizon, still out of reach. There must be an end, as there must have been a beginning. For the first time he wondered about the moment of beginning of the historical forces that had brought him and the human race to this moment. He had used the Creative Universe for the first time, as Donal, to go back to where he thought he could set up the forces that would bring about a final encounter. As Paul Formain he had found them in the twenty-first century. But neither then nor now had he ever thought of trying to reach back and find the absolute beginning of that last battle in which he would be a solitary warrior.
He reached out, mentally, now, to find that moment of beginning, and it led him to a place and a time, to a scene in which he became an Englishman in armor at the lowest point of his own life's long battle. It was a day of victory for the Black Prince of England, the battle of Poitiers, and its sights, its sounds, its feel came to Hal not only through this knight who had been his unconscious forerunner in this centuries-long contest, but also from a dying soldier of the other side. Hal was both men, and looked through the eyes of each to see the face of the other.
...Sir John Hawkwood had fought the long day's fight, and fought well - but none of rank or worth on his own side had been there where he had fought the best of the other side, to note what he did. He had taken a prisoner, but it was a prisoner who was a French knight of small holding, and the ransom would not make Sir John rich. As ransoms had made rich Sir Robert Knolles, and the notice of the Black Prince had made famous Sir John Chandos. He was weary and the anesthesia of the wine from the night before, and of the early morning before the battle, had long since worn off, leaving him weary and wasted inside. Aimlessly, on a battlefield on which the main action was over, he rode up one side of a little rise over the top of which, on the Jarther downslope, lay the tanner's son.
The tanner's son lay dying in the bright September sunlight. About him was the odor of crushed grass and the stink of the blood and the intestines of a horse who had been disemboweled and lay nearby. The tanner's son was a crossbowman from Lombardy. He wore leather hose and a leather smock of sorts to which chain links had been sewn. He was tall and lean, with a swarthy face and straight black hair. He was in his early twenties and still had most of his teeth. His mouth was wide and mobile. He had an English arrow completely through his right side under the ribs, and he had worn the feathers completely off its shaft, since he had gone out of his head unsuccessfully trying to draw it out the way it had entered. He had bled a great deal, but in spite of that he continued to lie supporting himself on one elbow with such a wild look on his face that none of the English archers or men at arms had paused to cut his throat. Besides, he lay off to one side himself where there were no wounded French knights or such worth taking prisoner, and the battle had gone away from him.
His eyes no longer focused on the field. Occasionally he would cry out weakly in the dialect of his native Genoa, forgetting he was now in the foreign fields of France. "Help! Help for the tanner's son!"
Beyond him, at some little distance, the bearded, blooddaubed English archers and other foot-soldiers hurried by, rooting among the dying and the dead for a prisoner worthy of ransom. There were slim pickings here, for the more adventurous of their fellows had already covered the ground, cutting throats with quick boarlike jerks of their knives, when a candidate proved worthless or too wounded to promise to live. The wild, calling crossbowman, with the lank black hair falling half over his face, they had passed by out of a sort of instinct-two or three had even crossed themselves in passing. For, by a trick if its entering angle, the arrow appeared to anyone from a distance to have driven squarely through the crossbowman's heart. It seemed that he must already be dead, but still propped up and calling, whereas he was actually only dying, like all the rest.