“You just call directions, huh?” the Irishman shouted, angry at having been scared.
Aurelianus stood up in the wagon bed and leaned his elbows on the back of the driver’s bench. “Sorry,” he said. “I never brought a wagon here before. That’s right, kind of slant it across the slope. And then take it between those two big oaks.”
“Right.” The northmen bunched up on the uphill side of the wagon and leaned parallel to the slope, while Duffy did some tricky work with brake and reins.
The wagon’s shadow, which had been stretched out in front of it across the damp, grassy earth, abruptly swung around like the boom of a jibing sailboat; in a moment it lay almost directly behind them, and the morning sun was in Duffy’s eyes. He gasped and locked the brake. “What the hell happened?” he exclaimed. “Did we hit slippery mud? I didn’t feel anything.”
“Keep going,” Aurelianus said. “You’re still on course. Pay no attention to any whirling effects—they’re just a few local direction-confusion and disorientation spells I laid down a number of years ago.”
“Oh.” It occurred to Duffy that this would not only make it difficult to get into the area, but difficult also to get out, especially in a panicky haste. He glanced furtively to both sides, looking for skeletons of any wayfarers who might have blundered into this wall-less labyrinth. He didn’t see any bones, but, glancing up, he did see figures circling high in the air—figures he thought were hawks until he looked more steadily and saw the manlike forms between the vast wings. He quickly snapped his gaze back to the landscape ahead, uneasy to think that it was he who had called those things out of their deep retreat.
He sneaked a glance over his shoulder to see how Bugge and his men were taking these outré phenomena, and was surprised to see no dismay or fear in their faces. Several were watching the fliers, but all seemed tensely cheerful. Bugge grinned at the Irishman and muttered something in Norse, so Duffy grinned back and raised a clenched fist before returning his attention to the horses. Well, why should I be worried, he thought; nobody else is.
They proceeded for another hour into the wooded hills, and three more times the sun did its trick of shifting about in the sky. The whole adventure had by this time taken on a dreamlike unreality to the Irishman, and if the wagon had rolled up across the side of the sky, swerving between clouds, he would not have thought it incongruous.
Finally the wagon bumped down through a narrow, greenery-roofed tunnel, in which gravity for one awful moment seemed to be pulling upward, and emerged into a small glade.
For a moment Duffy just sat, clutching the edges of the seat and trying to get his bearings—that last bit of sorcery had convinced him that the wagon was going into a forward tumble—then he opened his eyes and saw the cabin.
It was a low, thatch-roofed, stone-walled, one-storey affair, and could credibly have been five years old or five hundred. He glanced questioningly at Aurelianus, who nodded. “This is the place,” the wizard said.
Duffy bounded over the side onto the grass. “Let’s get him and get the hell out of these woods, then. Bugge! Come on, drag your lads out of there! There’s work to be done, old kings to be carried about!”
“This is entirely the wrong spirit,” Aurelianus protested, climbing down beside the Irishman. “Now listen, there’s a question you must ask and one you mustn’t, so—”
“Damn it, I’ll ask any questions that occur to me, and none that don’t. Come on, now, lead the way. You’re the one that knows him, after all.” He strode toward the cabin with the sorcerer scurrying alongside and the stolid northmen bringing up the rear.
“All this is difficult enough,” Aurelianus complained, “without you acting like a damned—”
“What did you think you were going to get, when you... placed your order for me? A tame, all-powerful giant who’d cheerfully jump at your every order? If so, you made a mistake—you didn’t want King Arthur, you wanted a village idiot.”
The sorcerer threw up his hands. “Maybe you’ve got a point and maybe you haven’t,” he said. “Quiet now, here we are.” He rapped respectfully on the thick oaken door, and a faint voice answered within. Frowning a warning at Duffy, Aurelianus opened the door and led the way inside.
Duffy followed, and was surprised; he had expected to see the same depressing gloom that cloaked Aurelianus’ chamber at the inn, and the same sort of ominous and ill-smelling objects scattered carelessly about. Instead he saw a pleasant, sunlit room, aired by two open windows; the only jarring note was several handfuls of mud caked on the foot of the bed. The Irishman didn’t look at the man in the bed, but turned to his northmen and, with expressive grunts, began pantomiming the act of lifting the occupant and carrying him outside. It looked as if he were imitating a careless furniture mover.
“Brian,” came a weak but humorous voice from behind him. “Surely it’s Brian Duffy?”
Duffy turned and looked at the King, who was sitting up in the bed. He was clean-shaven, though his white hair hung down around his shoulders, and his face was seamed with what the Irishman thought must have been centuries of experience. Aside from the bandage around his hips, he didn’t appear to be in bad shape.
Then Duffy met his gaze, and to his own surprise remembered having met and talked to the old man, decades ago, while out on a boyhood ramble along the banks of the Liffey. “Hello, sir,” Duffy said now. “I thought you lived in Ireland.”
“I live in the west.”
Aurelianus was surprised and annoyed. “What’s this? Why didn’t you tell me you’d met him?” he demanded of the King. “I had to search twenty years for him.”
“Don’t get upset, Merlin.” The old monarch smiled. “You’ve found him now. In any case, I didn’t know then who he was—just that he was something considerably more than the average eight-year-old.”
Duffy relaxed, and glanced around. On a table beside the bed lay an earthenware cup and a rusty lance head, both of archaic and evidently Mediterranean workmanship. He looked up with a grin, and was a little disconcerted to see expressions of anxious suspense on the faces of the King and Aurelianus. “Uh,” Duffy said uncertainly, gesturing at the cup, “I was just going to say that that cup will come in handy when it comes time to... have your swig of the beer.” He had the feeling he’d unwittingly touched an awkward subject, but he decided he must have dealt with it correctly, for the two old men broke into reassured smiles; and he guessed, without knowing why, that this was the crucial matter Aurelianus had tried to warn him about as they’d been walking to the cabin. Somehow it was fortunate that he’d referred to the cup rather than the lance.
Bugge and his men grasped what was expected of them, and six of them proceeded gently to lift the Fisher King from the bed and hobble toward the door. Aurelianus halted them long enough to put a hat on the aged King, then waved them to go on.
“I don’t suppose he can ride?” Duffy asked. “It’s going to be cramped in that wagon.”
“No, he can’t,” the sorcerer said. “Even when he’s well, he’s not permitted to. There are all sorts of restrictions that apply to him—he can’t wear a garment with knots in it, or a ring that’s an unbroken circle, he can’t touch a dead body or be where one is buried... he could never, for example, actually go down into the Zimmermann brewing cellar... hell, even that mud on the bed there is a requirement.”