The Oathbound Wizard

"How about flying ducks?" Narlh grunted.

Yverne turned a beaming smile on her mount. " 'Tis sweet of you to offer! But I would as lief not be a target, afoot or aloft."

"Flying out of a jam, though," Matt said, "has definite possibilities. So, all in all, our best course of action is to keep going—but carefully."

"I fear so," Fadecourt growled.

"Then forward we go." Matt set off. "At least this way we'll find out whether or not the king really is watching us."

"There must be a better way to get news," Narlh grumbled, but he followed Matt down the road.

In trepidation, they came up to the crest of the hill. Malt's heart thudded so loudly that he was expecting an accompaniment as they passed the top and started down the other side, but no enemies sprang out at them. Still, he didn't breathe easily until they were all the way down, and fifty yards farther along the road. Then Matt relaxed with a sigh, wiping his brow. "Thank Heaven! Maybe the king can't see us, after—"

A horn sounded behind them.

Matt whirled about and saw a man in a robe standing at the crest of the hill road, gesticulating and, presumably, chanting. To either side of him stood men in plate armor, seeming inhuman and certainly impersonal behind their iron helms. As Matt watched, they kicked their horses into motion and started down the slope.

Then Fadecourt shouted, and Matt spun back to the front just in time to see a phalanx of pikemen spilling out of the woods with an armored knight at their head.

"You take the ones in front," Narlh growled to Fadecourt. "I'll cover our backsides."

The cyclops turned, catching up a rock and swinging it. Matt didn't dare take his eyes away from his opposite number, but the crash of stone against steel from behind him was very gratifying.

"Duck down, damsel," Narlh snapped. "You, too, Wizard—get behind me. I've got a tougher hide than you."

Matt nodded. "You take care of the knights—and remember, if you can make their armor hot enough, they'll peel out."

Even as he spoke, the knights began their charge down the hill. Matt took a deep breath and recited,

"The fierce spirit painfully endured hardship for a time,
He who dwelt in darkness...
The grim spirit was called Grendel, a rover of the borders,
One who held the moors, fen and fastness...
There came gliding in the black night the walker in darkness,
From the moor under the mist-hills Grendel came walking,
Wearing God's anger!"

Night thickened around them, and Matt took off, following the crashing Narlh was making. On his third step, he slammed into something hard and furry. A roar resounded around him, and a huge, clawed hand reached down through the darkness. Far above, two little red eyes gleamed...Matt howled, ducked around the giant shin, and ran.

Grendel apparently wasn't about to change course for so small an irritation, because the crashing of boulders being ground into pebbles was going away behind Matt, and he didn't think that was just because he was running so fast. A yell of horror confirmed it, followed by the rattle and clash of suits of armor being jumbled together. Matt slowed and looked back, but all he could see was a black cloud with a horse arcing above it and a sorcerer beyond, sawing the air frantically with his hands. The horse landed on its hooves, by some miracle, and streaked off in a panic—but the sorcerer had to stand his ground and keep trying. Matt didn't think he'd have much luck when he couldn't even tell what the monster was—especially since he didn't think the man knew Old English. Too bad the Dark Age bards hadn't left a few verses with a wider range of applications—but their interests had seemed to be rather narrow.

Wide enough for current purposes, however. Matt noticed that the crashing seemed to have stopped. So did the sorcerer—he was frozen with his arms half-raised, looking uncommonly as though he were surrendering to a Wild West sheriff. Then he whipped about and disappeared back into the pass. The black cloud drifted after him, leaving huge, clawed, vaguely anthropoid footprints.

Not that he cared about the sorcerer, but Matt couldn't leave a scourge like that to prowl the countryside. He tried to remember how the fight finished, decided to be a little more humane, and improvised a different ending:

"Grendel must flee from there, mortally sick,
Seek his joyless home in the fen-slopes.
He knew the more surely that his life's end had come,
The full number of his days."

The black cloud kept moving up toward the pass—but as it moved it thinned, until, by the time it reached the top, it was almost gone. A vague outline hung in the air for a second, huge and gross, like a monstrous parody of the human form—or was it reptilian?—then was gone, so quickly that Matt wondered if he'd really seen it. He sighed and turned away—there had been something heroic about the monster, after all.

Fadecourt was glancing warily up toward the hilltop, then back to the place where his targets had been. There was only a dust cloud there now.

Matt looked at it, surprised. "What did you do—knock them all the way back to the mountains?"

"Nay. They saw that black cloud you raised, and turned tail. They fled, and I came near to fleeing after them."

"Near!" the dracogriff snorted. "If I'd had a clear field, I would've been flying out of here so fast my backwash would have knocked you over!"

Matt looked up at Narlh, frowning. "I thought you hated flying."

"Some things I'm scared of more, Wizard. You found one."

"And you did banish it, also." Fadecourt looked up at Matt, white still showing around his eyes. "Nay, you have certainly cleared our pathway! Have you disbanded them so quickly, then?"

" 'Dismembered' may be more like it," Matt answered. "You'll pardon me if I don't go back to check."

"Aye, certes." Yverne looked out from behind Narlh's back, eyes huge. "How have you routed them so quickly, Lord Matthew? And what monstrous apparition was that which you did raise against them?"

"That's an old story," Matt said, "and a reasonably long one. I'll tell it to you, some time—but right now, I think we'd better get as far away as we can before we run out of daylight and have to camp."

"Surely we may hearken as we speed!"

Matt glanced around and saw that even the dracogriff was looking mildly interested. He relaxed and took a deep breath. "Well...okay. Once, long ago and very far away, a hero named Hrothgar built him a hall, hight Heorot..."

And they set off down the road, eyes growing larger and larger, as they listened to the wondrous tale of the hero Beowulf.

Alisande crested the mountain pass, with her army glancing up nervously behind her. She couldn't blame them—there were a great many boulders up there, poised as though balanced, ready to fall, and she doubted that the presence of such stones was due simply to nature. Still, they had not had the slightest difficulty from the mountain folk—nor the slightest sign of them, either.

"May we not see the enemy from this height, Majesty?" Sauvignon shivered, in spite of the sable-lined cloak wrapped tightly about him. Most of the other horsemen were shivering, too, except for Alisande. She wondered why she felt no colder than on a brisk autumn day. Perhaps for the same reason that the infantry did; they were not shivering, though they had wound mufflers close around their faces. On the other hand, it could be because toiling up the slope had raised their body temperatures.