The Drawing of the Dark

“... Age to age succeeds,

Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,

A dust of systems and of creeds.”

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Chapter Six

WHEN DUFFY AWOKE, his pillow was littered with debris from his dream. He had seen this before, this apparent survival into daylight of a few dream-images, and he patiently patted the sheet where the things seemed to lie until they dissolved away like patterns of smoke. He swung his legs out of bed and rumpled his hair tiredly, as a startled cat leaped from the bed to the windowsill. What kind of dream could that have been, he wondered, to leave such uninteresting rubbish—a few rusty links of chain mail and Epiphany’s old coin purse?

He stood up unsteadily, groaning, wondering what time it was and what he had to do today. To his intense disgust he noticed that he smelled of stale beer. Christ, he thought; in these past three weeks as the Zimmermann bouncer I think I’ve consumed more beer than any three patrons—four, probably, if you count what I spill on myself. He dragged on his trousers and shirt and went to see about having a bath.

Downstairs, the back kitchen door squeaked open and the innkeeper strode into the servant’s hall, his square-toed shoes thumping impressively on the stone floor. He was elegantly dressed, looking almost cubical in a broad burgundy-velvet tunic slashed and paned with blue silk.

Anna leaned in from the kitchen. “And where have you been all night, Werner?” she asked.

Werner cocked an eyebrow at her. “It happens,” he replied, “I was the guest of Johann Kretchmer. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him.”

Anna thought about it. “Not the cobbler over on the Griechengasse?”

The innkeeper cast his eyes to the ceiling. “A different Kretchmer, you idiot. The one I’m talking about is a famous poet.”

“Ah. I’m not familiar with the famous poets, I’m afraid.”

“Obviously. He’s published books, and has been personally complimented by King Charles himself!” He sat down on a hamper. “Draw me a glass of the burgundy, will you?”

“Coming up.” Anna disappeared for a moment, and came back with a glass of red wine which she handed to him. “So what are you to this poet?”

Werner pouted his lips and shrugged deprecatingly. “Well... a colleague, actually. It seems he somehow got hold of some bits I wrote when I was a younger man—adolescent stuff mainly, not a patch on what I’ve done more recently—and he said... I’m quoting him now, mind you... that it showed a lyric grace the world hasn’t known the like of since Petrarch.”

“Since when?”

“God damn it, Petrarch was a poet. What do I hire such ignorant girls for?”

Duffy, newly scrubbed and feeling much less like an illustration of the Wages of Sin, trotted down the stairs and stepped into the hall, where the smell of hot stew still hung in the air. “Anna!” he called. “What are the chances of getting some breakfast, hey?”

Werner got to his feet. “We’ve packed up breakfast,” he snapped. “You’ll have to wait until dinner.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Duffy said with an airy wave, “I’ll just sneak into the kitchen and see if I can’t dig something up.” He peered more closely at the innkeeper. “My, my! Aren’t we adorned! Going to sit for a portrait?”

“He’s been visiting somebody who admires his poetry,” Anna explained. “Some old bird named Petrarch, I believe.”

“Yes, he would be getting old these days,” Duffy assented. “Poetry, eh, Werner? Some time you’ll have to put a funny hat on and strap a pair of cymbals to your knees and recite me some of it. You got any dirty ones?” The Irishman winked hugely.

The bells in the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral rang while Duffy was speaking, and Werner pointed vaguely in their southward direction. “It’s ten o’clock you sleep until, eh? Well, enjoy sleeping late while you still can.”

Duffy knew Werner was expecting him to ask what he meant, so he turned back to Anna. “Seen Piff around? I’m supposed to—”

“It may interest you to know,” the innkeeper interrupted coldly, “that I’m having three bunks set up in your room. Four, maybe! Every day more soldiers are arriving in town, you know, and it’s our duty to see that they’re lodged. You don’t object, I trust?”

Duffy grinned. “Not a bit. I’m an old campaigner myself.”

Werner gave the Irishman a hard stare, then turned and walked away toward the stairs, his ostrich-plumed hat bobbing behind his neck on a string like a bird on a difficult perch.

When he had disappeared Anna shook her head at Duffy. “Why can’t you ever be civil to him? You’re only going to lose a good job.”

He sighed and reached for the dining room door-latch. “It’s a terrible job, Anna. I felt more worthwhile cleaning stables when I was twelve.” He swung the door open and grinned back at her. “As for Werner, he strikes me as the sort of person who ought to be annoyed. Hah. Poetry, for God’s sake.” He shook his head. “Say, I think Piff left a package in the kitchen—food and stuff, could you look? I’m supposed to visit her father this morning and give it to him. And serve me a cup of the morning medicine in the dining room, hmm?”

She rolled her eyes and started for the kitchen. “If the Turks weren’t sure to kill us all before Christmas, Brian, I’d worry about you.”

In the sunlit dining room Duffy crossed to his habitual table and sat down. There were other patrons present, beering away the hours between breakfast and dinner, and Duffy looked around at them curiously. The half dozen at the largest table were mercenary soldiers from the troop of Swiss landsknechten that had arrived in town a week ago, hired, it had turned out, by Aurelianus; and in the corner behind them sat a tall black man in a conical red hat. Good God, a blackamoor, thought Duffy. What purpose can have brought him here?

Unprecedented numbers of people had been entering the city during the past weeks, and the Irishman had noticed that they tended to fall into three groups: most were either European soldiers of one sort and another, or the wagon-roving, small-time merchants that thrive on the economy of war; but there was a third type, odd, silent individuals, often evidently from the barbarous ends of the earth, who seemed content to look worried and stare intently at passersby. And the first and last groups, Duffy reflected, seemed to cluster thickest in the Zimmermann dining room.

“Ho there, steward!” bawled one of the landsknechten, a burly fellow with a gray-streaked beard. “Trot out another round for us, hey?”

Duffy was leaning back now, staring at the friezes painted on the ceiling, but desisted when a wooden mug ricocheted off his shin.

“Wake up,” the mercenary shouted at him. “Didn’t you hear me call for beer?”

The Irishman smiled and got to his feet. He reached out sideways and, taking a firm grip on an iron candle-cresset bolted to the wall, wrenched it right out of the wood with one powerful heave. Clumping heavily across to the mercenaries’ table, he hefted the splinter-edged piece of metal. “Who was it asked for beer?” he inquired pleasantly.

The landsknecht stood up with a puzzled curse, dragging his dagger. “You’re hard on the furniture, steward,” he said.

“No problem,” Duffy assured him. “I’ll hang your skull up there instead, and no one will notice the difference. Have to use a smaller candle, of course.”

The other man relaxed a little and cocked his head. “My God... is it Brian Duffy?”

“Well...” Duffy stepped back, “more or less. You know me?”

“Of course I do.” The man slapped his dagger back in the sheath and pulled his baggy sleeve up past the elbow, revealing a wide scar knotted across his hairy forearm. “You’ve got the other half of that scar on your shoulder.”

After a moment Duffy grinned and tossed the cresset clattering away. “That’s right. On the field of Villalar in ’twenty-one, when we kicked the stuffings out of the Communeros. And a four-pound ball shattered off a rock as we charged, and sprayed four or five of us with metal and stone.”

“Damn right! But did that stop us?”

Duffy scratched his chin. “Seems to me it did.”

“No! Slowed us down a trifle, perhaps.”

The Irishman proffered his hand as the other mercenaries relaxed and turned back to their beer. “The name’s Eilif, isn’t it?”

“It is. Sit down, lad, tell me what troop you’re with. Sorry I took you for a steward.”

“You weren’t far from the mark, really,” Duffy admitted, dragging up a bench and straddling it. “Ah, bless your heart, Anna,” he added as she arrived with mugs and a pitcher and the bundle for Epiphany’s father. “Actually I’m not with any troop. I’m the bouncer at this inn.”

Eilif snorted as he poured foaming beer into two mugs. “Christ, Duff, that’s little better than being the man that sweeps off the doorstep in the morning. No, it won’t do. Won’t do! But fortunately you are in the right place at the right time.”

“Oh?” Duffy had been having his doubts.

“Well, certainly. I ask you: is Suleiman planning to come up the Danube straight toward where we’re sitting, and bring along every mad-dog Turk from Constantinople? He is indeed! And will there be battles, forced marches, panics, exodi, sackings of towns? Unless I’m much mistaken! And who best reaps from such grim sowings?”

The Irishman grinned reminiscently. “The mercenaries. The landsknechten.”

“Correct! Not the knights, locked up in their hundred pounds of plate armor oven, as noisy and unwieldy as a tinker’s cart, and not the bishops and kings, who have a stake in the land and can’t scamper off to a better position; and God knows it isn’t the citizens, with their homes getting burned, their daughters raped and their very ribs sticking out from starvation. No, lad, it’s us—the professionals, who fight for the highest bidder and know the situation firsthand and can look out for ourselves with no one’s help.”

“Well, yes,” Duffy acknowledged. “But I can remember times the landsknechten caught hell along with everyone else.”

“Oh yes. It’s to be expected any time, and you always take your chances. But give me a war over peace any day. Things are clear in a war, people fall in line and don’t argue or talk back. Women do what’s expected of them without you having to go through all the preliminary miming they usually expect. Money becomes less important than horseshoe nails, and everything is free. I say thank God for Luther, and King Francis, and Karlstadt, and Suleiman, and trouble-makers everywhere. Hell, when the big boys keep tossing the whole chessboard to the ground after every couple of moves, even a pawn can keep from being cornered if he’s clever.”

A slow smile deepened the lines of Duffy’s cheeks as he savored the memories Eilif’s words woke in him: visions of mad, sweaty charges under smoke-streaked skies, of looking out over shattered battlements at the patterns of soldiers’ campfires that provided the only pinpoints of light in the night of raped cities, of wild, torchlit revels in overthrown halls, and of refilling his cup from a spouting, axed brandy cask.

“Yes, Duff,” Eilif went on, “you’ll have to get in on it all. Now the Imperial troops are expected any day, but you’re too dire an old wolf to march rank-and-file with that lot of sanctimonious youngsters.” The Irishman grinned at Eilif’s typical mercenary’s contempt for regular soldiers. “Fortunately there are a dozen independent companies of landsknechten in town that would take you on this very minute, with the credentials you’ve piled up over the years; even one or two you’ve served with, probably. After all, lad, it’s what you know best, and it’s a seller’s market right now.”

Before Duffy could reply, the street door swung open and a man in a long green robe swept into the room, the almond eyes in his high-cheekboned golden face darting about to scan the others present.

“What the hell is that?” demanded Eilif in an outraged tone of voice.

“Our mandarino,” Duffy told him. “No morning here is complete without a visit from him.”

The Oriental looked anxiously across the room at Anna. “Is there yet any word of Aurelianus?” he called.

The silent black man in the corner looked up, his eyes alight.

“No,” replied Anna patiently. “But he is, as I’ve said, expected daily.”

“I think I know what it is, captain,” piped up one of Eilif’s companions. “I believe it’s a snake waiting for the old wizard to smoke him.”

Amid the general hilarity that followed this, the robed man glanced scornfully at their table. “The livestock certainly are noisy in Vienna.”

“What? Oh, livestock, is it?” roared the Swiss who’d spoken, suddenly enraged. He stood up so violently that the bench fell over behind him, spilling two of his companions onto the oak floorboards. “Get out of here right now, monkey, or I’ll make cattle feed out of you.”

The Oriental frowned, then his narrow lips curled up at the corners. “Why, I think I’ll stay.”

After a moment’s pause Eilif threw two coins down on the table. “Two Venetian ducats on our boy Bobo.”

“Covered,” said Duffy, producing two coins. The rest of the landsknechten began shouting and making bets of their own, and the Irishman kept track of the money.

Bobo kicked a few benches aside and cautiously circled the slender Oriental, who just revolved on a heel and watched impassively. Finally the Swiss leaped forward, lashing out at the other man’s head with a heavy fist—but the robed man simply crouched under the rush and then instantly bounced up again with a whirl of arms that sent Bobo somersaulting through five feet of air into, and finally through, one of the lead-paned front windows. The abrupt percussive crash died away into the clink and rattle of individual pieces of glass on the cobblestones outside, and after a few moments Duffy could hear Bobo’s gasping groans wafting in with the cold breeze that now swept through the hole.

“If there is no one else interested in discussing the price of cattle feed,” said the victor politely, “I think I’ll leave you after all.” There were no takers, so he bowed and walked out of the room. Duffy gathered in the coins on the table top and began doling them out among himself and the two others who’d bet against Bobo.

There was a quick thumping down the stairs, and then the innkeeper’s voice screeched, “What the hell’s going on? Duffy, why aren’t you preventing this?”

“He’s taking bets on it,” growled one of the losers.

“Oh, of course!” said Werner with an exaggerated nod. “What else would a bouncer do? Listen to me, you old wreck: when Aurelianus gets back here—pray God it’s soon!—you are going to be unemployed. Do you follow me?”

The Irishman pocketed his share and picked up Epiphany’s bundle. “I do.” After bowing to the company he crossed to the door and stepped outside. The air still had a bite of morning chill in it, but the sun was well up in the cloudless sky and steam was curling from the shingles of nearby roofs.

Bobo had got up on his hands and knees and was crawling toward the door. Duffy dropped several coins where he’d be sure to come across them, and then strode off, whistling.

Under the gaiety, the Irishman had been obscurely depressed all morning, as he always was when he intended to look in on Epiphany’s invalid father. What is it, he asked himself now, that upsets me about the old artist? I guess it’s mainly the smell of doom that clings to him. He’s so clearly on the downward side of Fortune’s wheel—studied under Castagno in his youth, was praised by Dürer himself ten years ago, and now he’s a drunkard going blind, drawing on the walls of his tawdry Schottengasse room.

As Duffy turned down the Wallnerstrasse a couple of mongrels smelled the food in the cloth-wrapped package he was carrying, and pranced around him as he walked. The street became wider as it neared the northwest face of the city wall, and the Irishman made his way right down the middle of it, following the gutter, weaving around vegetable carts and knots of yelling children. Where is it, he thought, craning his neck; I’m always afraid I’ve passed it. Ah, right here. He shook his free arm menacingly. “Off with you, dogs, this is where we part company.”

Edging his way out of the traffic flow and pushing open the creaking boarding house door, the Irishman stepped reluctantly out of the morning sunlight and into the stale-smelling dimness of the entryway. Maybe, he thought, what bothers me is the possibility that I’ll be like this myself soon, living in a crummy hole and mumbling jumbled memories to people who aren’t listening anyway.

He crossed the dusty entry, stepped through the stairway door—and froze.

In front of him, beyond a narrow beach, stretched away to the horizon a vast, listless lake or sea, reflecting with nearly no distortion the full moon that hung in the deep night sky.

Duffy’s stunned mind scrabbled for an explanation like an atheist at the Second Coming. I was slugged from behind, he thought, and brought here (Where’s here? There’s no body of water this size within a hundred miles of Vienna) and I’ve been unconscious for hours. I just now came to, and I’m trying to get away.

He took two paces toward the lake and tripped painfully over the bottom steps of an old wooden stairway. Leaping to his feet, he stared around him bewilderedly at the close walls and the stairs. He ran back through the entry hall to the street, stared hard at the front of the building, the crowded sunlit street and the blue sky, and then slowly walked back inside.

He winced when he stepped again into the stairwell, but the old, peeling walls remained solid, almost sneering at him in their mundanity. He clumped hurriedly up to the second floor and knocked on the door of Vogel’s room. Then he knocked again.

A full minute after his third and loudest series of knocks, a chain rattled and the door swung inward, revealing the cluttered mess of blankets, books, bottles and paper-rolls that Duffy had always seen there.

“Who is it?” rasped the ancient, scruffy-bearded man who now poked his head around the edge of the door.

“It’s Brian Duffy, Gustav. I’ve brought you food and ink.”

“Ah, good, good! Come in, son. Did you bring any...?” He did a pantomime of sucking at the neck of a bottle.

“I’m afraid not. Just ink.” He held up the ink pot. “This is ink. Don’t drink it this time, eh?”

“Of course, of course,” Vogel said absently. “I’m glad you happened to drop by today. I want to show you how The Death of Archangel Michael is coming along.” Duffy recalled visiting the old artist two weeks ago, for the first time in three years, and being greeted with the same casual “Glad you happened to drop by today.”

“Come on,” the old man wheezed. “Tell me what you think of it.”

The Irishman allowed himself to be led to the far wall, which was fitfully illuminated by two candles. Filling the wall entirely, from floor to ceiling and corner to corner, drawn with painstaking care on the plaster in a near-infinity of fine, close-knit penstrokes, was a vast picture.

Duffy gave a polite glance to the maelstrom of churning figures. When he had first seen the picture, possibly seven years ago, he’d had to look close to see the faint outlines of the shapes on the white plaster; and when he left Vienna in ’twenty-six the wall was a finely shaded drawing, crowded and vague in subject but faultless in execution. Now it was much darker, for every day the artist added hundreds of strokes, deepening shadows and, very gradually, blacking out some peripheral figures altogether. Three years ago the scene pictured seemed to be occurring at noon; now the tortured figures writhed and gestured in the shade of deep twilight.

“It’s coming along wonderfully, Gustav,” Duffy said.

“You think so? Good! Naturally your opinion counts in this,” the old man chittered eagerly. “I’ve invited Albrecht to come and see it, but lately he hasn’t even been answering my letters. I’m nearly finished, you see. I’ve got to complete the thing before I lose my sight entirely.”

“Couldn’t you call it finished now?”

“Oh no! You don’t know about these things, young man. No, it needs a good deal of work yet.”

“If you say so. Here, I’ll stash this food in your pantry. Don’t forget it’s there, either!” Still looking at the old man, Duffy pulled open the door of the narrow pantry; a gust of fresh, cold air, carrying a smell like the sea, ruffled his hair from behind, and he closed the door without turning around. “On second thought,” he said, a little unsteadily, “I’ll let you put it away.”

Epiphany’s father, intent on touching up the shading of a cloud, wasn’t even listening. Duffy ran a hand nervously through his hair, then laid a small stack of coins on a box that seemed to be serving as a table, and left the room. Descending the stairs he was careful to stare straight ahead, and he won his way to the street without being subjected to any more visions.

He strode unhappily back toward the Zimmermann Inn. What, he asked himself, almost ready to cry, is going on? Until today I hadn’t seen any outré things in nearly a month. I’d hoped I was through with all that. And at least those satyrs, griffins and unseen night-fliers last month were, I think, real, since other people saw or were affected by them. But what about this damnable lake? Would another person have seen that? Maybe I’m crazy and haunted. That’s it. Epiphany, will you take an insane husband to match your father?

From the walls came echoing the boom of cannons as Bluto and his crew of assistants tested the city’s artillery for range. I wonder, Duffy thought, not for the first time, if the Turks really will try for Vienna this year. I suppose they will. And what with the shape the old Holy Roman Empire’s in, they’ll probably sweep right through and be in Ireland in two years. I should take Eilif’s advice—just throw myself into the tide of warfare and keep too busy to go mad.

The soldiers were rowdy downstairs, shouting for the casks of bock to be opened just two days early, and the clamor eventually helped rouse the Irishman from his unusually deep and prolonged afternoon nap. He stared at the ceiling for a few moments and tried to remember what dream it was that had left him with such an oppressive, though unfocused, sense of dread.

There came a rapping at his door. “Mr. Duffy,” called Shrub, the stable boy. “Werner says come down or be evicted tonight.”

“Coming, Shrub.” He was glad of even this annoying interruption, for it was a summons to rejoin the world, and for a moment the world had seemed on the point of going to bits like a scene painted on shredding canvas. “I’m coming.” He put on his boots and sword and left the room.

At the door to the dining hall he paused to run his hands through his gray hair and shake his head a couple of times. Odd, he thought—I feel as if I’m still half asleep... as if that damned dream, the one I can’t remember, is still going on, and is in some way more real than my perceptions of this old door, my hands, and the smell of cooking beef in the warm air.

“Don’t hang back,” came Anna’s cheerfully exasperated voice from behind him. “Push on.”

He obediently stepped through into the wide hall and moved aside for her to pass with her tray of pitchers. All the candles were lit in the cressets and wooden chandeliers, and the long room was packed with customers of every sort, from foreign mercenaries with odd accents to middle-aged merchants sweating under the weight of many-pocketed display coats. Probably a third of the company had upturned their empty or nearly-empty mugs, and Anna and two other women were kept busy refilling them. Several dogs who had got in somehow were growling and bickering for scraps under the tables.

It struck Duffy that a touch of hysteria had sharpened the good-fellowship tonight, as if the night wind whistling under the eaves carried some pollen of impermanence, making everyone nostalgic for things they hadn’t lost yet.

A tableful of young students near the bar had struck up a song, a cheery sounding number with lyrics in Latin:

“Feror ego veluti

Sine nauta navis,

Ut per vias aeris

Vaga fertur avis;

Non me tenent vincula,

Non me tenet clavis,

Quero mihi similes

Et adjungor pravis!”

Calling on his rusty seminary skill, the Irishman was a little appalled when he translated it in his head:

I am carried violently off

Like a captainless ship,

Just as down the highways of the sky

A vagrant bird is driven.

I am not held by any fetters

Or secured by any key.

I look for others like me,

And my companions are distorted outcasts.

He frowned, and abandoned as hopeless the notion of finding an uncrowded bench. He decided to sit in the kitchen and just listen for sounds of major unrest.

Catching the eye of one of the serving women as she was sidling past, the Irishman called over the din, “Do you know if Epiphany’s in the kitchen?”

A drink-ruddied face looked up from beside Duffy’s elbow. “No, she’s not,” the man put in merrily. “She was under the table here a minute ago...” With a helpful air he peered around his feet. “Gone! Run off with Werner’s mastiff, I expect, and there’ll be another litter of pups about the place before long. Now a leash would—”

The Irishman’s hand shot out and seized the knot of the man’s wool scarf. With a rolling heave of his shoulders Duffy hauled the choking man right up out of his place, held him briefly overhead as he re-planted his feet, and then pitched the whimpering figure twisting through the air to violently sweep the beer mugs off a nearby table before crashing to the floor, which resounded like a great drum.

The roar of conversation halted abruptly, then resumed much louder. Casting his glance defiantly over the crowd, the Irishman happened to catch the narrowed eyes of the Oriental who’d dealt with Bobo that morning. Yes, Duffy thought, what with the mandarino and myself there have been a lot of people flying through the air around here lately. Then, catching a glint of speculation in the sardonic gaze, the Irishman suddenly realized something. Whatever it is, he thought, that’s got me so keyed up—this frustration or anticipation or foreboding—that man shares it.

Werner was beginning to voice hysterical protestations on the far side of the hall, so Duffy turned and strode through the steamy kitchen and out the back door into the stable yard.

That was a damn fool thing to do, he reflected. Flying into a boyfriend-rage like some teenager. Where’s my self control these days?

He breathed deeply the chilly air of evening, staring west over the high roof of the city hall toward the diming-to-black tiers of the sunset. In some land over there it’s broad daylight, he told himself. Night rushing up behind me and day so distant in front.

Was that the scuff of a footstep? He turned and noticed a wooden bucket rocking where it hung on the brewery door. Ah, he thought, just a delivery. Probably the butter Anna’s been expecting, hung on the wrong door by mistake. Well, Shrub can carry it in tomorrow morning, I don’t want to be meeting anyone just at the moment.

Glancing up, he was reassured to see the thickening cloud cover. Best not to stand under the open sky in times like these, he thought. Pull all available covers right up over your head.

A breeze flitted through the yard, and the tang of gunpowder smoke stung his nostrils. Instinctively he spun and glanced about, then leaped to the bucket on the door. A fuse was poking out of it from under the hammered-down wooden lid, and quickly disappeared inside, sputtering like a grease-fire, even as the Irishman let out a yell and lifted the bucket off the hook. Though it weighed a good thirty pounds, Duffy pitched the thing one-handed across the yard, letting the momentum of the throw fling him face down onto the cobblestones.

A flash and deafening crack split the night, and splinters, spinning boards and bits of stone rebounded from the inn walls and clattered down into the yard as the explosion’s roar echoed away through the dark streets. Duffy sat up, coughing in the dust-and-smoke-choked air, and blood spilled down his cheek from a gash a flying bit of wood had laid open in his forehead. He lurched to his feet and drew his sword, half expecting a rush of hostile figures from out of the darkness. The only rush, though, was from the kitchen door behind him, as a knot of serving girls and customers elbowed their way outside to see what had happened.

One voice, Werner’s cut through the babble. He pushed several people aside and stepped to the front. “God damn you, Duffy!” he shouted. “What have you done now? It wasn’t enough to break my windows this morning, now you have to blow up half my stable? Get out of my house, you lazy, drunken son of a bitch!” By way of punctuation he punched the Irishman in his broad chest.

“Ho!” called someone in the crowd. “Werner’s got a savage side!”

Duffy barely felt the blow, but something seemed to burst in his head. “City-bred dog!” he roared, all thoughts of explanation flown. “Will you lay hands on me? On me? Run, vermin, and rejoice I won’t foul my sword with your whore’s-spit blood!”

The spectators had automatically stepped back at the new, harsh authority in Duffy’s voice, and he now gave the innkeeper a stinging slap with the flat of his blade. “Run,” ordered the Irishman, “or by Manannan and Llyr, I’ll cave in your head with the pommel!” Werner’s nerve broke, and he bolted around the corner of the building. “And hear, this, servant!” Duffy shouted after him. “You haven’t the competence to order me out of your master’s house. Aurelianus governs here, not you.”

Whirling to face the throng of uprooted diners, the Irishman stabbed a finger at two of the Swiss mercenaries he’d gambled with that morning. “You two,” he pronounced, “will sleep out here in the yard tonight to make certain this doesn’t recur. You may build a fire, and I’ll see to it that blankets are sent out to you. Keep your swords ready to hand. Understood?”

The bewildered landsknechten gulped, looked helplessly at each other, and nodded.

“Fine.” The crowd parted for him as he strode back inside through the kitchen door. After a few moments Shrub fetched a bucket of water and timidly set about extinguishing the several small fires the explosion had started, while two of the older stable boys began calming down the surviving horses. Cheated of an explanation, the chattering knot of people slowly filed back inside, concocting wild theories of their own to account for the blast, leaving behind the two mercenaries who began unhappily gathering up shattered pieces of wood for a fire.

An hour later Duffy hung his clothes on a chair and got into bed. He blew out the candle with, it seemed to him, his last bit of strength.

He was still a little awed by his spectacular rage earlier. I must be wound even tighter than I thought, he told himself. I’ve never before lost my temper so completely. It was as if I were someone else for a moment. He shook his head. I guess I’ll put off until morning the question of who would want to blow up the brewery and bury poor old Gambrinus in his cellar.

His eyes snapped open then, for the thought of the cellar had recalled to him completely the hitherto-forgotten afternoon dream. He had been, he remembered now, pottering comfortably about in the old Irish cottage in which he’d spent his boyhood, but had after a while found one thing that didn’t fit with his memories of the place: a trap door in the flags of the floor, still half-hidden by a rug someone had kicked aside. For some reason the sight of it filled him with fear, but he worked up the nerve to grasp its ring and lift it on its grating hinges. Climbing down into the cellar this revealed, he found himself in an archaically opulent chamber. His attention, though, was drawn to a stone bier on which lay the body of a man; a king, or a god even, to judge by the tragic dignity expressed in every line of the strong, sorrow-creased face. Duffy stood over the body—and then had recoiled all the way into wakefulness, glad of Shrub’s knock at the door.

Duffy now shook his head, trying to shake from it the memory of the last few seconds of the dream; for, though the figure on the bier was not alive, it had opened its eyes and stared at him... and for a moment Duffy had been looking up at himself, through the dead king’s eyes.

Chapter Seven

BLUTO PUSHED the wind-blown hair out of his face and squinted along the barrel of the iron cannon. “Give her a shove left,” he said. Two sweating, shirtless men seized the gun’s trunnions and, groaning with the effort, pulled the barrel an inch or two to the left. “Good,” said the hunchback, hopping up, “I reckon she’s in line. Give the ball a last tap with the rammer in case we’ve joggled it loose.”

Duffy leaned back and watched as one of the burly men snatched up the rammer and shoved it into the muzzle. I’m damned glad it’s not me wrestling these guns around in the dawn mist, the Irishman thought.

“What are you shooting at this time, Bluto?” he asked.

The hunchback leaned out over the parapet and pointed. “Notice that white square, about half a mile away? Can’t see it too well in this light, but that’s as it should be. It’s a wood frame with cloth tacked over it. I had these boys build it and run out there and set it up. We’re pretending it’s Suleiman’s tent.” His assistants grinned enthusiastically.

These poor crazy bastards enjoy this, Duffy realized. It’s play to them, not work.

Bluto hobbled to the breech and shook black powder into the vent hole. “Where’s my linstock, damn it?” he yelled. One of the gunnery men stepped forward proudly and handed him the stick with the smoldering cord coiled around it. “Deus vult,” the hunchback grinned, and, standing well to the side, leaned over and touched the glowing cord-end to the cannon vent.

With a booming crack that numbed Duffy’s abused eardrums and echoed from the distant trees, the gun lurched backward, gushing an afterburn of nearly transparent flame. Blinking through the great veil of acrid smoke that now churned over the parapet, Duffy saw a spurt of dust and bracken kicked into the air a dozen feet to the left of “Suleiman’s tent.”

“Ha ha!” crowed Bluto. “Very respectable, for a first try! You there—yes, you—give the barrel a kick from your side, will you? Then sponge her out and get ready to re-load.” He turned to Duffy. “I’m finally getting this city’s artillery in order. In the first two weeks we were in town, all I did was scrape rust out of the bores. These idiots left the guns uncovered during the rains; didn’t even put the tompions in the muzzles. I believe the council looks on these things as some sort of... iron demons, able to fend for themselves.”

“Bluto,” the Irishman said quietly, “you more or less have charge of Vienna’s arsenal until the Imperial troops arrive, don’t you? Right. Well, listen—have you noticed any thefts of powder?”

The hunchback shrugged. “I haven’t checked the quantities. Why?”

Duffy gave him a succinct version of the previous night’s events. “It blew out two stalls in the stable,” he concluded. “Killed two horses and scared the hell out of every man and beast within three blocks.”

“Good Lord, a petard,” Bluto said in surprise. “Hung on the brewery door?”

“That’s right. I’m beginning to wonder whether, weird as it sounds, some rival brewery might be trying to put us out of business.”

“But Herzwesten doesn’t have any rivals,” Bluto pointed out. “The nearest commercial brewery is in Bavaria.”

“That’s right,” admitted Duffy. “Well, I don’t know—a rival inn, a resentful monk...” He shrugged.

Bluto shook his head in puzzlement. “I’ll run an inventory of the whole arsenal. Maybe powder isn’t the only thing someone’s been stealing.”

“She’s ready to load, sir,” panted one of the gunnery men.

“Very well, out of the way.” The hunchback picked up the long ladle-pole and dipped it like a shovel into the powder cask. He hefted it once or twice. “That’s three pounds,” he judged, and slid it into the bore; when it clicked against the breech he turned it over and pulled the empty ladle out. Then he rammed the wad in, followed by the six-pound ball. “Now then, gang,” he said with a grin, “let’s see if we can knock Zapolya’s hat off. Give me the linstock.”

“I thought you said it was Suleiman,” Duffy said, a little sourly. A year had gone by since the Hungarian governor had defected to the Turks, but Duffy had known the man long ago, and it still galled him to hear Zapolya and Suleiman equated as enemies of the west.

“We figure they’re both in there, playing chess,” Bluto explained.

The hunchback touched off the charge, and again the cannon roared and heaved and coughed forth a great gout of smoke to hang over the battlements. A couple of seconds later a tree to the left of the target abruptly collapsed, slapping up another cloud of dust.

“Closer still,” Bluto said. “You—give her another kick.”

Duffy got to his feet. “I can’t linger here all morning,” he said. “We broach the bock tomorrow, and I’ve got things to do in the meantime.”

“See you later, then,” Bluto said, preoccupied with the gun. “I’ll drop by for a mug or two if it’s on the house.”

“Why should it be on the house?” the Irishman demanded testily.

“Hmm?” Bluto reluctantly turned away from watching his men sponge out the bore. “Well, for God’s sake, I saved your life, didn’t I?”

“When?”

“You forgetful bastard. A month ago, when you were attacked in the forest.”

“You nearly killed me,” Duffy said. “And it was you being attacked, not me.”

“Here, what are you apes doing?” the hunchback shouted at his assistants. “Give me that.” He pushed the gunnery men away from the cannon and seized the sponge-pole himself. “Three turns left and three right,” he told them. “Or maybe you want a stray spark still in there when you put in the new powder, eh? Idiots.” His assistants grinned apologetically and shuffled their feet.

Duffy shook his head and strode to the stairway that would take him down to the street. Truly a single-minded hunchback, he thought.

When he reached the pavement and looked up from his boots, he groaned inwardly. Oh hell, he thought, it’s the Englishman, Lothario Mothertongue. Can I duck out? No, damn it, he’s seen me. “Hello, Lothario,” he said tiredly to the tall blond man who was walking toward the stairs.

“Hello, Duffy,” boomed Mothertongue energetically. “I’ve come to inspect the artillery. Give yon hunchback a bit of advice on the placement of the guns.”

Duffy nodded. “I’m sure he’ll be grateful.” Mothertongue had been “inspecting the artillery” daily ever since his arrival in town a week ago, and Bluto had twice had to be restrained from shoving the man off the wall.

“I’ll tell you something, Duffy, in strictest confidence,” Mothertongue said more quietly, laying his hand on the Irishman’s shoulder and glancing up and down the street. Duffy knew what he was going to say; he’d been saying it for days, in strictest confidence, to anyone who’d listen to him, and Duffy himself had heard it twice already. “Certain authorities...” He winked mysteriously. “... have called me back from quite a distance to defeat these Turks, and I intend to do it!”

“Good, Lothario, you do that. I’d like to stick around and talk, but I’ve got an appointment.” He performed a smile and walked past.

“Quite all right. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”

Yes, Duffy thought glumly, I suppose you will. The damned bock is drawing everybody like a lighted window in a storm. Well, he told himself, see it through two more nights and you’ll be square with old Aurelianus—you promised to be here Easter, and that’s tomorrow. After that you can honorably decamp; take Epiphany and leave the city before they lock all the gates against the Turks.

Children were skipping past him, shouting, “Vikings! We’re going to fight the Vikings!”

Give ’em a boot in the backside for me, kids, Duffy thought wearily.

When he stepped into the warmth of the dining hall a white-haired old man stood up from one of the tables. “Mr. Duffy!” he said cheerily. “You made it here alive, I observe.”

The Irishman stared at him. “Why, it’s Aurelianus!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t recognize you behind the eye-patch. How did that happen?”

Aurelianus fluttered his pale hands. “It’s nothing. I didn’t lose the eye, just injured it during a scuffle in Athens, two days... I mean two weeks ago. Yes. I’ll be able to throw away the patch before long.” He waved at his table. “But join me! We’ve much to discuss.”

Duffy sat down. A few moments later Anna had set two capacious mugs of beer on the table, and he sipped his gratefully.

“Oh, sir,” Anna remarked to Aurelianus, “there have been some very weird gentlemen asking for you lately. A tall man who appears to be from Cathay or somewhere, several black Ethiopians, a copper-skinned man dressed all in feathers,—”

The old man frowned, then laughed softly. “Ah, the Dark Birds are here already, eh? I’m afraid I shall have to disappoint them this time around. Steer them away from me if you can, will you lass?”

“Aye aye.” Before returning to the kitchen she rolled her eyes at Duffy behind Aurelianus’ back.

“The girl tells me Werner isn’t here,” said the old man. “He’s off somewhere, the guest of... did she say a poet?”

“Yes,” assented the Irishman almost apologetically. “It seems our innkeeper can whip out the verses like nobody on earth since Petrarch. I haven’t read any of it, thank God.”

“Poetry-writing.” Aurelianus sighed. “At his age.” He took a long sip of the beer and thumped the mug down on the table. “In any case,” he said, turning to the Irishman with a comfortable, if twitchy, grin, “I trust your trip here was easy and pleasant?”

Duffy thought about it. “Neither one, I’m afraid.”

“Oh? Oh!” Aurelianus nodded understanding. “You glimpsed, perhaps, some creatures of a sort one doesn’t usually run into? Or heard odd sounds in the night that couldn’t be attributed to wolves or owls? I thought of warning you about that possibility, but decided—”

The Irishman was annoyed. “I’m not talking about glimpses or night-sounds. In Trieste I met a man with goat’s legs. I was escorted through the Alps by a whole damned parade of unnatural beasts. Dwarfs saved my life. Flying things that called to each other in Arabic, or something, destroyed a caravan I was travelling with.” He shook his head and had another sip of beer. “And I won’t bore you with an account of all the plain, everyday men that tried to put arrows and swords through me.”

Aurelianus’ good humor was whisked away like a veil, leaving him pale and agitated. “Good heavens,” he muttered, half to himself, “things are moving faster than I thought. Tell me, first, about this goat-footed man.”

Duffy described the nameless tavern in which he’d taken shelter on that rainy night, told him about the wine and finally, about his oddly built table-mate.

“Was there,” Aurelianus asked, “the sound of a mill?”

“There was. You’ve been to the place?”

“Yes, but not in Trieste. Any street of any Mediterranean city could have brought you to that place. You were... attuned to it, so you saw it.” He rubbed his forehead. “Tell me about these Arabian fliers.”

“Well, I was sleeping in a tree and heard them circling in the sky, speaking some eastern lingo to each other. Then they swooped across a lake and kicked the stuffings out of the caravan of a poor hides-merchant who’d given me a ride earlier.”

The old man shook his head, almost panicking. “They’ve been watching me for years, of course,” he said, “and I guess I inadvertently put them on to you. Ibrahim is stepping up the pace, that’s clear.” He looked imploringly at Duffy. “Was there, I hope, some manifestation afterward? Those creatures don’t belong here, and the very land knows it. Were there earthquakes, a flood...”

Duffy shook his head. “No, nothing like—wait! There was a tremendous wind next morning.”

“Blowing which way?”

“From the west.”

Aurelianus sighed. “Thank the stars for that, anyway. Things haven’t gone too far.”

“What things?” Duffy demanded. “Leave off this mystery talk. What’s really going on? And what have you really hired me for?”

“In due time,” Aurelianus quavered.

“In due time you can find yourself another down-at-heels vagrant to be your bouncer!” Duffy shouted. “I’m taking Epiphany and going back to Ireland.”

“You can’t, she owes me a lot of money.” He quickly held up his hand to prevent another outburst from the Irishman. “But! Very well, I’ll explain.” He got to his feet. “Come with me to the brewery.”

“Why can’t you explain right here?”

“The brewery is the whole heart of the matter. Come on.”

Duffy shrugged and followed the old man through the servants’ hall to the cellar stairs.

“What do you know about Herzwesten?” Aurelianus asked abruptly, as they carefully felt their way down the steps.

“I know it’s old,” Duffy answered. “The monastery was built on the ruins of a Roman fort, and the beer was being made even back then.”

The old man laughed softly, started to speak and then thought better of it. “Gambrinus!” he called. “It’s me, Aurelianus!” Duffy thought the old man unduly emphasized the name; might Gambrinus otherwise have greeted him by another?

The white-maned brewmaster appeared below. “When did you get back?” he asked.

“This morning. Hah,” he laughed, turning to the Irishman, “they didn’t think I’d make it by Easter. Well, Gambrinus, I have to cut things close sometimes, I admit, but I haven’t outright failed yet. Not significantly. Have you got three chairs? Our friend here feels he’s entitled to some information.”

Soon the three of them were seated on empty casks around a table on which stood a single flickering candle, and each of them held a cup of new-drawn bock beer. Aurelianus waved his brimming cup and grinned. “The bock isn’t officially broached until tomorrow night, but I guess the three of us deserve a preview.”

“Now then,” Duffy said, more comfortably, “what’s the real story here? Are you a sorcerer or something? And even if you are, I don’t see how that would explain things like the lit petard I found on the brewery door last night. So fill me in.”

Aurelianus had gone pale again. “You found a petard on the brewery door? Yesterday? That was the first day of Passover,” he said, turning to the old brewmaster.

“I was the blood of the lamb, then,” Duffy remarked. “I flung the thing away, so it just wrecked part of the stable.”

“Things, you see, are much more accelerated than we’d supposed,” Aurelianus said to Gambrinus. More softly, he added, “Mr. Duffy saw Bacchus’s tavern—even drank the wine!—and reported afrits looking for him at night. Ibrahim isn’t holding back; there can be no further doubt that what he’s preparing is a shot to the very heart, and it’s cracking open the secret places of the world. Things are awake, and stepping out into the daylight, that used to do no more than occasionally mutter in their sleep.”

“Hold it, now,” said Duffy irritably. “That’s the kind of thing I mean. Who’s this Ibrahim? Do you mean Suleiman’s Grand Vizir?”

“Yes,” said Aurelianus. “He is the chief of our enemies.”

“Whose enemies? The brewery’s?” The whole affair was making less and less sense to Duffy.

“The west’s,” Aurelianus said with a nod.

“Oh.” Duffy shrugged. “You mean the Turks. Well, yes. I’d call Suleiman the actual chief, though.”

“I wouldn’t,” Aurelianus said. “Neither would Suleiman, I think. How much do you know about Ibrahim?”

Duffy resolved to hold his temper until he got some coherent answers. “Well,” he said, “I know Suleiman appointed him as his Grand Vizir six years ago, when old Piri Pasha was tossed out, even though everybody thought the post ought to go to Ahmed Pasha. Ahmed was pretty angry about it—raised a revolt in Egypt and got beheaded for his trouble, as I recall.” He sipped his bock, wondering absently what its taste reminded him of. “Oh, and I’ve heard it said that Ibrahim’s a eunuch.”

Aurelianus looked shocked and Gambrinus laughed.

“Talk of that sort is neither here nor there,” Aurelianus said sternly. “But to move on: what have you heard about his... lineage, his nativity?”

The Irishman shook his head. “Nothing. Though I have the impression he’s of low birth.”

Aurelianus laughed this time, humorlessly. “Lower than you know. He was born in Parga, on the Ionian Sea, and they’ll tell you his father was a sailor; that may in a sense be true, but he was not a sailor of earthly seas.”

“What?” Damn this wizardly gibberish, Duffy thought impatiently.

“His real father was an air demon that visited his mother one night in the semblance of her husband.”

The Irishman started to protest, then remembered some of the creatures he’d seen lately. Keep your mouth shut, Duffy, he told himself. Who are you to say there aren’t air demons? “Go on,” he said.

“Such conceptions do occur,” Aurelianus said. “Uh, Merlin, to choose the... handiest example, was such a hybrid. They have great, albeit tainted, spiritual power, and usually drift into black magic and similar unfortunate areas of endeavor. A few resist or are prevented from this course. Merlin, you’ll recall, was baptized. Ibrahim embraced the Islamic faith.” Aurelianus frowned at Duffy. “The powers of such half-human, half-demon people, though, are seriously depleted by sexual intercourse, and so they learn to shun attractive members of the opposite sex. That, you see—to do our enemy justice—is doubtless the basis of that libellous rumor you referred to a moment ago.”

“Oh,” said Duffy uncertainly. “Sorry.” Good Lord, he thought; I’m not even allowed to insult Turks? “And you say this halfbreed is telling Suleiman what to do?”

“That’s right. Ibrahim is subject only to the will of the Eastern King.”

“Damn it all,” Duffy burst out, “make sense, will you? If he’s subject to Suleiman—”

“Suleiman is not the Eastern King. There are always higher levels. Charles is not the Western King.”

“He’s not, huh?” Duffy was amused now. Aurelianus had gone too far. “Who is? You?”

“No. But the man is living just outside Vienna.” Seeing the Irishman’s skepticism, he went on, more harshly, “You think, perhaps, that the only orders and authorities—and wars—are the ones you can see from your front doorstep? I had hoped a man of your experience would have outgrown such country village ways of thinking.”

After a moment Duffy nodded, genuinely abashed. “You’re right,” he admitted. “Certainly I can’t claim to know what is or isn’t possible.”

“You of all people,” Aurelianus agreed.

“I’ll grant you, then,” Duffy said, counting off the points on his fingers, “that this East versus West struggle may be a higher—or deeper—thing than simply a dispute between Charles V and Suleiman about the ownership of some land. Also, I can’t rule out the possibility that the weapons of war include magic. Fine! But what have I, or this brewery, got to do with it? Why was I so fiercely hounded—and peculiarly aided—on my way here?”

Aurelianus leaned back, pressing his fingertips together. “I must phrase this carefully,” he said. “Uh... just as in swordplay it is more efficient to thrust for the heart than to pick away forever at the man’s arm and fingers—”

“That isn’t always true, by any means,” Duffy pointed out.

“It’s just an analogy. Be quiet. So a general can save time and trouble by striking directly at the heart of his enemy’s kingdom.” He sipped the heavy bock. “Did it ever occur to you to reflect on this brewery’s name?”

“Herzwesten,” Duffy said thoughtfully. “West-heart.” He frowned. “Are you trying to say—”

“Stop talking and find out Yes; this brewery is one of the main—there aren’t words—focuses, hearts, pillars, of the West. The East, of course, has similar centers, but at present the East is on the offensive.”

Duffy was grinning in spite of himself. “But why a brewery? have thought... oh, a cathedral, a library...”

“Oh, no doubt,” said Aurelianus. “I know. Those things seem older, more dignified, more characteristic of our culture. But they’re not. Listen, three thousand years before Christ was born, a people came out of Spain and spread across Europe. They were nomads, strangers wherever they went, but respected—nearly worshipped—because they brought with them the secret of beer-making. They spread the art of brewing with a missionary zeal—you can find their decorated beakers in graves from Sicily to the northern tip of Scotland. The fermented gift they brought to Europe is the basis of more beliefs than I dare tell you right now; but I will tell you that in the very oldest versions of the story, it was beer, not fire, that Prometheus stole from the gods and brought to man.”

Duffy blinked, impressed by the old man’s speech. “And that’s why the Herzwesten is one of the most important centers, eh?”

“Possibly the most important.” Aurelianus peered at the Irishman, as if gauging how much revelation he could take at one sitting. “Being Irish,” he said slowly, “you’ve doubtless heard of Finn Mac Cool.”

Duffy nodded.

“There actually was such a man,” Aurelianus said. “He was the High King of these people I was speaking of, the nomadic beaker people—call them Celts if you like, it’s not entirely inaccurate—and he died here.” He pointed at the floor.

Duffy automatically peeked under the table. “Here?”

“He’s actually buried under this building,” Aurelianus told him. “You mentioned the old Roman fort that used to stand here; it was built around this brewing cellar, which had been producing beer for two thousand years when the first Roman saw the place. The brewery was built thirty-five centuries ago, to be a marker over Finn’s grave.” He paused. “You don’t know the derivation of the name Vienna, do you?”

“No.”

“It was originally called Vindobona—the city, you see, is even named after Finn.”

This is all very interesting, Duffy thought, but a trifle beside the point. He spread his hands. “So?”

Aurelianus sagged like a dancer stepping offstage. “So... you’ve had a history lesson,” he said tiredly. “Anyway, all this is doubtless why you were attacked coming here: word must have reached Zapolya—Suleiman’s man in Hungary—that you’d been hired to defend Herzwesten, and he sent assassins out to prevent you. Evidently you were aided by some of the old, secret folk; you’re fortunate that they’re loyal to the west, and recognized you.”

The Irishman nodded, but frowned inwardly. There’s a lot you’re not telling me, little man, he thought. All this was just a glimpse at one or two of the many cards you’re holding. Am I one of the cards? Or a coin in the pot? Your answers have only raised more questions.

“What is all this to you, anyway?” Duffy asked. “Why have you hired Bluto and me, and God knows how many others?”

“I’m not exactly a free agent. None of us is.”

“Ah,” Duffy said, “you’re ‘subject to the will’ of this Western King.”

Aurelianus’ voice was barely audible. “All of us are.”

“He’s living near Vienna, you say? I’d like to meet him sometime.”

The old man blinked out of his reverie. “Hm? Oh, you’ll meet him, never fear. He’s not well, though. He’s injured, can’t travel. But you’ll be introduced to him.”

A few moments of silence passed, then Duffy stood up. “Well, gentlemen, if that’s that, I’ll see you later. There’ll be a big crowd tomorrow, and I’ve got to rearrange the tables and take down the more fragile wall hangings.” He drained his cup of beer, and realized at last why it seemed so familiar to his tongue—it had something, a hint, of the deep, aromatic taste of the wine he’d drunk in the phantom tavern in Trieste.

Chapter Eight

THE LAST THING Duffy hoisted down from the dining room walls was a heavily framed painting of the wedding at Cana, and he peered dubiously at the smoke-darkened canvas as he carried it to the closet where he’d stashed the rest of the paintings, crucifixes and tapestries. Odd, he thought—this is the first time I ever saw the miraculous wine portrayed as a white. I’m not sure they had white wine in Palestine then. But in spite of the dimness of the scene, that’s clearly a yellow stream they’re pouring into Jesus’ cup.

The Oriental had arrived, and was sitting at his usual table, sipping beer and occasionally turning on the Irishman a reptilian eye. Duffy had considered, and discarded, the idea of going down to the cellar to warn Aurelianus of the “Dark Bird’s” presence. After all, he thought now, he didn’t caution me at all about my journey here—why should I do him any favors?

Duffy was noisily dragging the tables around into a more regimented formation—much the way the monks used to have the room arranged, he reflected—when Aurelianus opened the hall door and strode into the room.

“Aurelianus!” spoke up the Oriental, springing to his feet and bowing. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

The old sorcerer started, then after giving the Irishman a reproachful glance bowed in turn. “It is likewise a pleasure to see you, Antoku Ten-no. It has been a long time since our last meeting.”

Antoku smiled. “What are a few years between old friends?” He waved at the other bench at his table. “Do me the honor of joining me.”

“Very well.” Aurelianus slowly crossed to the table and sat down.

And why, Duffy wondered idly as he slammed another table into place, the term “Dark Birds”? I could understand calling the blackamoor dark, or the feathered man a bird—but how, for example, does old Pitch-’em-out-the-window Antoku qualify?

Finally the last table—aside from the one at which the two men were talking in lowered but intense tones—was in place, and Duffy was turning to leave when a bench rutched sharply as Antoku stood up. “Are you trying to haggle with me?” he demanded of Aurelianus. “If so, simply name your price and dispense with the usurer’s tricks.”

“I’m being honest,” Aurelianus replied sternly. “I can’t help you this time... at any price.”

“I’m not asking for much—”

“I can’t help you at all.”

“Do you know,” there was fear in the Oriental’s voice now, “do you know what you condemn me to? The flickering half-life of a phantom, a will-of-the-wisp oni-bi wandering forever on the shore at Dan-no-ura?”

“I don’t condemn you to that,” Aurelianus shot back strongly. “The Minamoto clan did, eight hundred years ago. I simply gave you a reprieve once... one which I can’t now renew. I’m sorry.”

The two men stared tensely at each other for several seconds. “I do not yet resign,” said Antoku. He started for the door.

“Don’t think of fighting me,” Aurelianus said in a soft but carrying voice. “You may be as powerful as a shark, but I am a sun that can dry up your whole sea.”

Antoku stopped in the vestibule. “A very old, red sun,” he said, “in a darkening sky.” A moment later he had gone.

Duffy’s joking remark died on his lips when he glanced at Aurelianus and saw the lines of weariness that seemed chiselled into the stony face. The old sorcerer was staring down at his hands, and Duffy, after a moment’s hesitation, left the room silently.

In the kitchen the Irishman drew a chair up to the open brick oven and began meditatively picking and nibbling at a half loaf of bread that lay on the bricks to one side.

There seem to be a few teeth left in the old wizard’s head, he reflected. He wasn’t mincing any words with Antoku in denying him whatever it was that he was after—filthy opium, it sounded like. I wonder why he’s always so apologetic and hinting and equivocal with me. I wish he wouldn’t be—knowledge is better than wonder, as my old mother always said.

Shrub leaned in the back door. “Uh... sir?”

“What is it, Shrub?”

“Aren’t you going to come fight the Vikings?”

Duffy sighed. “Don’t bother me with these kid games you’ve somehow failed to outgrow.”

“Kid games? Have you been asleep? A dragon-prowed Viking ship sailed down the Donau Canal early this morning, and stopped under the Taborstrasse bridge.” Shrub’s voice rang with conviction.

Duffy stared at him. “It’s some carnival gimmick,” he said finally. “Or a travelling show. There haven’t been real Vikings for four hundred years. What are they selling?”

“They look real to me,” Shrub said, and scampered out into the yard.

The Irishman shook his head. I’m not, he told himself firmly, going to leave this warm room to go see a troupe of puppeteers or pickpockets or whatever they are. I’m at least old enough not to be tempted by cheap thrills. But good Lord, whispered another part of his mind... a Viking ship.

“Oh, very well,” he snarled after a few minutes, eliciting a surprised stare from a passing cook. The Irishman got impatiently to his feet and strode outside.

The first thing that struck the roof-crowding, street-choking spectators—after the wonder of the painted sail and the high, rearing dragon figurehead had worn off—was the age and disspirited look of these Vikings. They were all big men, their chests sheathed most impressively in scale mail; but the hair and beards under the shiny steel caps were shot with gray, and the northmen eyed the thronged canal-banks with a mixture of apathy and disappointment.

Sitting in the ship’s stern, by the steering oar, Rickard Bugge pulled his weary gaze from the Vienna crowd when his lieutenant edged his way aft between the rowing benches and knelt in front of him.

“Well,” Bugge said impatiently, “what?”

“Gunnar says we’re caught fast, captain, in the canal-weed. He thinks we’d better wade in with swords and cut our hull free.”

Bugge spat disgustedly over the rail. “Does he know where we are? This isn’t the Danube, I believe.”

“He is of the opinion that this is Vienna, captain. We apparently turned into this canal last night without realizing we were leaving the river.”

“Vienna? We overshot Tulln, then. It’s those damned west winds this past month.” He shook his head. “If only Gunnar could navigate. He’s lucky a river is all he’s got to contend with—what if we were at sea?”

“Listen,” the lieutenant said, a little reproachfully, “Gunnar’s got problems.”

“So I should smile when he pilots us into a smelly ditch, to be laughed at by beggars and children?” He pointed expressively at the crowd. “Well, go on, then. Get them over the side and chopping the water lilies.”

Bugge slumped back, trying to scratch his stomach under the sun-heated mail. But it’s no good, he thought. We may as well go home. We’ll never find Sigmund or the barrow now, even if they do, as Gardvord swore, exist.

The grizzled captain cast his mind back, nostalgically now, to the low-roofed, candle-lit room in which he and thirty other retired soldiers of the Hundested parish had sat at a table and cursed in astonishment and outrage at the tale told to them by old Gardvord, while the bitter wind whooped at them from the darkness outside and fumbled at the shutter-latches.

“I know many of you heard the untraceable voice from the Ise fjord yesterday,” Gardvord had hissed in that meeting five and a half weeks ago, “a voice that called, over and over for a full hour yesterday morning, ‘The hour is come, but not the man.’” The old wizard had spread his wrinkled hands. “It troubled me. I therefore spent most of last night laboriously questioning the senile and reclusive huldre-folk about that prodigy—and it’s grim news I got for my trouble.”

“What was it?” Bugge had asked, impatient with the old hedge-magician’s narrative style.

With a have-it-then glare, Gardvord turned to him. “Surter, the king of Muspelheim in the distant south, is leading an army north to capture and destroy the funeral barrow of the god Balder.”

Several of the assembled men had actually gasped at that, for the old legends agreed that when Surter of Muspelheim marched north, Ragnarok, the end of the world, was not far off; a couple of the men had spasmodically blessed themselves, scared by their old pagan heritage into taking cover under the newer Christianity; and one old fellow, gibbering the beginning of a Pater Noster, had even attempted to crawl under the table.

“Odin look away,” Gardvord had sneered. “The men of the north aren’t all they used to be.”

Ashamed by the timorousness of his fellows, Bugge had pounded the table with his fist. “We will, of course, organize an army to repel Surter.” This statement put a little heart back into the other old soldiers, and they had nodded with a tardy show of determination.

“Unless,” one nervously grinning man had quavered, “this is all a fantasy, like the graveyard stories children invent to scare themselves, and wind up half-believing.”

“Idiot!” Gardvord had shouted. “You heard the fjord voice yesterday! And the misty huldre-folk were more lucid last night than I’ve ever known them.” The old man frowned around the table. “This is no mere guess-work, my stout warriors.”

Bugge had leaned forward then. “Who’s the man?” he asked. “The one who hasn’t come, though the hour has?”

“It is the man who will lead you. Listen to me now, you complacent fathers and householders, and don’t make up your twopenny minds that what I’m saying is necessarily a fable. Do you recall the stories of Sigmund, who drew out Odin’s sword easily from the Branstock Oak when no other man in the Volsung’s hall could budge it with his best efforts?”

“Certainly,” Bugge had nodded. “And I also recall what became of that sword when the one-eyed god inexplicably turned on him. Odin shattered it in battle, and Sigmund, left unarmed, was killed by Lyngi’s spearmen.”

The magician had nodded. “That’s true. Now listen. Odin has allowed—ordered, rather—Sigmund himself to return to the flesh, to lead you in pushing back Muspelheim’s hordes.”

The men around the table had been skeptical, but afraid to let Gardvord see it. “How will we meet him?” piped up one of them.

“You must sail up the Elbe, through various tributaries and overland crossings, and finally down the Danube. When you have reached the city that is built around Balder’s barrow, you’ll know it, because,” he paused impressively, “Sigmund will actually rise from the water to greet you. I suspect the barrow is near the city of Tulln, but I can’t be sure. You’ll know the spot, in any case, by Sigmund’s watery resurrection.”

It proved impossible to raise an army, and so Bugge and twenty comrades, all unmarried or notably restless, had set off by themselves on the difficult land and sea journey. And here, he thought sadly now, our ill-considered quest ingloriously ends. Run aground on a clump of sewer weed in a Viennese canal, hailed by the citizens, who seem to think we’re a company of jugglers or clowns. So much for our bid to thwart Surter and Muspelheim, and postpone doomsday.

Bugge shook his head disgustedly as he watched several of his men lower themselves into the canal, gasping and hooting at the chill of the water. We were mad to listen to the old fool, he told himself. It’s obvious to me now that the whole tale was just a third-rate wizard’s beery dream.

Duffy’s scabbarded rapier knocked awkwardly against the back of his right thigh as he sprinted past St. Ruprecht’s Church. He had to slow then, for the street below the north wall was packed with a collection of festive citizens. Housemaids called lewd speculations to each other, young men crouched and flexed their sword arms with a just-in-case air, and children and dogs scampered about in a frenzy of unspecific excitement. The wall-top was just as crowded, and Duffy wondered how many people would fall off it before the day was over. A little fearful of seeing the moonlit lake again, he was consciously making himself pay exclusive attention to this Viking spectacle.

And how am I to see what’s going on? he asked himself, annoyed by the density of spectators.

He saw Bluto among the mob on the battlements, trying to keep children from uncovering the cannons. “Bluto!” the Irishman called in his most booming voice. “Damn it, Bluto!” The hunchback turned and frowned at the throng below, then saw Duffy and waved. “Throw me a rope!” Duffy shouted. Bluto looked exasperated, but nodded and disappeared behind the rim. The Irishman shoved, slipped and apologized his way to the base of the wall. I hope I can climb a rope these days, he thought. It would never do to reach the halfway point and come sliding clumsily back down, in front of what must be just about the entire population of Vienna.

After several minutes a rope came tumbling down the wall, and Duffy seized it before two other view-seekers could. Then, bracing his legs from time to time on the old stones of the wall, he began wrenching himself upward. Below him, in spite of the gasping breaths that roared in his head, he could hear people remarking on him. “Who’s the old beggar climbing the rope?” “Watch him drop dead after ten feet.”

Oh indeed? thought Duffy angrily, putting a little more vigor into each hoist of the arm. Soon he saw the hunchback’s worried face peering down at him from the lip of the catwalk, and it grew closer with every desperate pull on the rope. Finally he hooked one hand over the coping and Bluto was helping to drag him up onto the warming flagstones, where he lay gasping for a while.

“You’re too old to climb ropes,” Bluto panted as he hauled the snaky length in.

“As I... just demonstrated,” the Irishman agreed. He sat up. “I want to see... these famous Vikings.”

“Well, step over here. Actually, they’re kind of a disappointment. A few are in the canal now, chopping clumps of algae, but the rest just sit around looking wilted.”

Duffy got to his feet and slumped in one of the north-facing crenels. Fifty feet below him was the Donau Canal, and a ship lay in the water under the Taborstrasse bridge, its red and white striped sail flapping listlessly.

“Are they real Vikings?” Duffy asked. “What are they doing here, anyway?”

Bluto just shrugged.

“I’m going to get a closer look,” Duffy decided. “Tie that rope around the merlon here and throw it down the outside of the wall. Or no free beer tomorrow night,” he added, seeing the hunchback’s annoyed look. The Irishman pulled his gloves out from under his belt and put them on as Bluto dealt with the rope; then he stepped up on the crenellations—to the awe of several little boys—and slipped the rope behind his right thigh and over his left shoulder. “See you later,” he said, and leaned away from the wall, sliding down the rope and braking with the grip of his right hand. Within a minute he was standing on the pavement next to the canal bank as Bluto pulled the rope up once again.

There were even people out here, elbowing each other and calling sarcastic questions to the dour mariners. Muttering impatient curses under his breath, Duffy walked west along the bank to a cluster of wooden duck-cages that formed a sort of pier jutting out into the green-scummed water. He cautiously got up on top of the first one—and it held his weight, though the ducks within set up a squawking, splashing clamor. “Shut up, ducks,” he growled as he crawled out along the cage-pier, for their racket was drawing the amused attention of the canal bank crowd.

When he reached the outmost cage he sat down on it, and was rewarded for all his efforts with a clear view of the grounded but graceful ship. The oars, several of which were broken off short, had been drawn in and stuck upright in holes by the oarlocks, and nearly formed a fence around the deck. Duffy was trying hard to be impressed by the sight, and imagine himself as one of his own ancestors facing such northern barbarians in Dublin Bay or on the plain of Clontarf, but these weary old men languidly hacking at the canal weed put a damper on his imagination. These must be the very last of the breed, he decided, devoting their remaining years to a search for a fitting place to die.

A sharp crack sounded under him, and his perch sagged abruptly. Holy God, he thought, I’ll be dumped in the canal if I don’t move fast. He shifted back onto another board, which gave way entirely, leaving him hanging by his knees and one hand, nearly upside-down. There were roars of laughter from the bank. His rapier slid half out of its scabbard; he risked a grab for it, the last plank buckled, and he was plunged into the icy water in a tangle of boards and hysterical ducks. He rolled thrashingly over, trying to swim before his mail shirt could drag him down, and his sword caught against one of the floating planks and snapped in half. “God damn it!” he roared, snatching the hilt before it sank.

He swam clear of the wreckage, and found the meagre current carrying him downstream, toward the Viking ship and the rippling sheets of green canal scum. None of the northmen had noticed him yet, though the citizens on the wall and the bank were absolutely convulsed with merriment.

Still clutching his broken sword, Duffy dived and swam a distance under the surface—he’d discovered his mail-shirt to be a bearable encumbrance—hoping to avoid the worst of the scum and mockery. It’s just possible no one recognized me, he thought as he frog-kicked his way through the cold water.

Bugge looked up when he heard splashing by the larboard gunwale, and at first he thought some Viennese had fallen into the canal and was trying to climb aboard. Then, the blood draining from his wide-eyed face, he saw two slimy green arms appear at the rail, followed a moment later by their owner, a tall, grim-looking man covered with canal scum and clutching a broken sword. In a moment this ominous newcomer had clambered aboard and was standing in a puddle of water between the rowers’ benches.

Bugge dropped to his knees, and the rest of the Vikings on board followed his example. “Sigmund!” he gasped. “My men and I greet you and await your orders.”

Duffy didn’t understand Norse, but he understood that these Vikings had somehow mistaken him for someone—and who could that be? He simply stood there and looked stern, hoping some solution would present itself.

There was a commotion on the bridge above; several people shouted quit shoving! and then Aurelianus leaned out over the rail. “What is this?” he called anxiously. “I missed the beginning.”

Duffy waved at the kneeling northmen. “They seem to think I’m somebody else.”

Bugge glanced timidly up, saw Aurelianus’ white-fringed, eye-patched face peering down at him, and simply pitched forward onto the deck. “Odin!” he howled. The other mariners also dropped flat, and the ones in the water, peeking now through the oarlocks, whimpered in the clutch of real awe.

“This is very odd,” Aurelianus observed. “Did they say who they believe you are?”

“Uh... Sigmund,” said the Irishman. “Unless that means ‘who the hell are you.’”

“Ah!” said Aurelianus after a moment, nodding respectfully. “We’re dealing with the real thing here, beyond a doubt!”

“What the devil do you mean? Get me out of here. I’m a laughingstock—covered with filth and carrying a broken sword.”

“Hang onto the sword. I’ll explain later.” With more agility than Duffy would have expected, the eternally black-clad old man vaulted the bridge rail and landed in a relaxed crouch on the ship’s central catwalk. Then, to the Irishman’s further surprise, Aurelianus strode confidently to the prostrate captain, touched him on the shoulder and began to speak to him in Norse.

Duffy simply stood by, feeling like a clown, as the Viking captain and his crew got reverently to their feet. Bugge answered several questions Aurelianus put to him, and then crossed to where the Irishman stood and knelt before him.

“Touch his shoulder with your sword,” Aurelianus told him. “Do it!”

Duffy did it, with as much dignity as he could muster.

“Very good,” Aurelianus said with a nod. “Ho!” he called to the interested gawkers on the shore. “Bring some sturdy planks here, quick! Captain Bugge and his men are ready to disembark.”

It was a bizarre parade that Epiphany saw marching up the street, heralded by the wild barking of dogs. She stood in the Zimmermann’s doorway and gaped at these twenty-one armed Vikings being led by what appeared to be a revivified drowned man. Then, paling, she recognized him.

“Oh, Brian!” she wailed. “They’ve killed you again!”

Immediately Aurelianus was behind her shoulder, having somehow got into the building unnoticed. “Shut up,” he hissed. “He’s in fine health, just fell in the canal. He can tell you all about it later. Right now get back to work.”

Duffy led his gray warriors around back to the stables, and said hello to Werner, who was fastidiously picking up some lettuce leaves that had fallen out of a garbage bin.

“What’s this?” the innkeeper demanded. “Who are these boys?”

Duffy answered as he’d been told to. “They’re twenty-one Danish mercenaries Aurelianus has hired to help defend the city against the Turks.”

“What Turks? I don’t see any Turks—just a crowd of old vagabonds who’ll drink up my beer. And what did somebody dip you in? This is too foolish. Get them out of here.”

The Irishman shook his head. “Aurelianus is in the dining room,” he said. “You’d better go talk to him.”

Werner wavered. “You won’t do anything out here while I’m gone... ?”

“Well... he told me to turn the horses out of the stables so these gentlemen can sleep there. He said it’s a mild Spring, and the horses ought to be able to survive the night air, and during any cold spells they could spend the night in the kitchen.”

“Horses in my kitchen? Vikings in my stable? You’re out of your mind, Duffy. I’ll—”

“Go talk to Aurelianus,” the Irishman told him again. The Vikings regarded the ranting innkeeper with great curiosity, and one of them asked him something in Norse.

“Silence from you, lout!” Werner barked. “Very well, I’ll go ask him about this. I’ll tell him to get rid of the whole gang of you—including you, Duffy! My opinion carries weight with him, or perhaps you didn’t know!”

“Good!” Duffy grinned. “Go acquaint him with it.” And he gave Werner a hearty slap on the back that propelled him half the distance to the kitchen door. Actually, though, the Irishman thought as he turned to the stable, Werner is the only one that makes sense anymore. Why in hell should we take in these decrepit Danes? They’re sure to be always either rowdy-drunk or morose; and either way we’ll get no work out of them.

“Now then, lads!” the Irishman called, clapping his hands to get their attention. “We movee horsies out of stable into yard, eh?”

The northmen all grinned and nodded, and even helped out once they saw what he was doing. “Hey, Shrub!” Duffy shouted when all the horses stood looking puzzled on the cobbles. “Bring us some beer!”

The boy peered around the kitchen door jamb. “Are those friendly Vikings?” he queried.

“The friendliest,” Duffy assured him. “Get the beer.”

“My men are not to be served alcoholic beverages,” came a solemn voice from behind him. The Irishman turned, and sighed unhappily to see Lothario Mother-tongue frowning regally at him.

“Oh, they’re your men, are they, Lothario?”

“Indeed. It’s been several lifetimes since we last met, but I recognize the souls behind their eyes. Bedivere!” he cried, attempting to embrace Bugge. “Ow, damn it,” he added, for Bugge had elbowed him in the stomach. “Ah, I see. Your true memories are still veiled. That will doubtless be remedied when Ambrosius arrives.” He turned to the Irishman now. “You may even be somebody yourself, Duffy.”

“That’d be nice.”

“It carries responsibilities, though. Heavy ones. When you’re a martyr, as I am, you must count your life a trifle.”

“I’m sure you’re quite correct there,” Duffy told him. “But surely there’s a dragon or something that needs killing somewhere? I don’t want to detain you.”

Mothertongue frowned at Duffy’s tone. “There are matters awaiting my decisions,” he admitted. “But you’re not to give these men alcohol; they’re clean-living Christians... underneath it all.”

“Of course they are.”

A cask of beer was carried out a minute or so after Mothertongue’s exit, and Duffy filled twenty-two mugs. “Drink up, now, you clean-living Christians,” he told the northmen, unneccessarily.

Chapter Nine

BY LATE AFTERNOON the northmen were snoring in the hay, exhausted by their journey and made drowsy by the three kegs of beer they’d emptied. Duffy, nearly asleep himself, sat at his customary table in the dining room and watched the serving women ply brooms, mops and damp cloths about the walls and floor.

Presently listless footsteps dragged up to the front door and Bluto slouched in through the vestibule. He saw Duffy and started laughing. “Poseidon! You’ve taken a bath, I perceive, but you still smell like the canal.”

The Irishman smiled sourly. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said. “Those northmen think I’m God or somebody.” He waved in grudging invitation toward the other chair at the table. “How was your day?”

“Oh, not good.” Bluto sat down heavily. “Beer here, someone! A kid stuck his head in one of my best culverins and threw up.”

“That’ll surprise the Turks,” Duffy observed.

“No doubt. Listen, Duff, do you really think it’s likely Suleiman will be coming here? It’s awful far north, in Turkish terms.”

Duffy shrugged. “Unless Suleiman dies—and is replaced by a pacifist Sultan, which is nearly a contradiction in terms—I’d say certainly, the Turks will try to take Vienna. After all, why should they stop now? They’ve been moving steadily up the Danube: Belgrade in ’twenty-one, Mohács, Buda and Pest in ’twenty-six... and it’s not as if Suleiman will be meeting a terribly organized front. Charles is too busy fighting the French king, Francis, to send us any troops, and Ferdinand alone won’t be able to do much. Pope Clement has sent the customary good wishes, and little else. And then we’ve got good old Martin Luther wandering around saying idiot things like ‘to fight against the Turks is to resist the Lord, who visits our sins with such rods’. Two years ago I’d have said Zapolya was our firmest hope against them, and now of course he’s signed up as Suleiman’s lackey. Actually, the Holy Roman Empire, the whole West, has never been so ripe for overthrow.”

Bluto shook his head worriedly. “Right, then, so they come. Do you think we can turn them back?”

“I don’t know. You’re the gunnery man. But I think if we do rout them it’ll be mainly because natural circumstances have weakened them—the weather, overstretched supply lines, things like that. They’ll be far from home, after all.”

“Yes.” The hunchback’s beer was delivered, and he sipped it moodily. “Duff, as my closest friend, will you—”

“Hell,” the Irishman interrupted, “you’ve only known me a month.”

“I’m aware of that, of course,” Bluto went on stiffly, making Duffy wish he hadn’t spoken. “As my closest friend, I’m asking you to do a favor for me.”

“Well, of course,” said Duffy, embarrassed as he always was by any manifestation of sentiment.

“If I should happen to be killed... will you see to it that my body is cremated?”

“Cremated? Very well,” Duffy said slowly. “The priests wouldn’t like it, but I guess there’d be no reason for them to hear about it. You might outlive me, of course. Why do you want to be cremated?”

Bluto looked uncomfortable. “I guess if you accept the charge you deserve the explanation. Uh... my father was a hunchback, like myself. The whole line may have been, for all I know. He died when I was two years old. A cousin told me the following story, late one night; he was drunk, but swore it was true, that he’d been there.”

“For God’s sake,” said Duffy. “Been where?”

“To my father’s wake. Be quiet and listen. My father committed suicide, and the local priest said everybody’s ancestors would be dishonored if my father was to be buried in consecrated soil. It was just as well—I don’t think the old man would have wanted it anyway. So a bunch of his friends carted his body to an old pagan burial ground a few miles outside of town.” He had another pull at his beer and continued. “There was a little house there, with a table, so they dug a grave right out front, broke out the liquor and laid the corpse out on the table. But he was a hunchback, as I’ve said, and he wouldn’t lie flat. It wouldn’t do to celebrate the wake with him face down, either—bad luck or something—so they found a rope somewhere, ran it over Dad’s chest, and tied it under the table so tightly that he was actually pressed flat. So, now that the guest of honor was properly reclining, they hit the liquor. By nightfall a lot of other people had shown up; they were all crying and singing, and one of them was embracing the corpse... and he noticed the bowstring-taut rope.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Right. Nobody was watching him, so he sneaked out his knife and sawed through the rope. My father’s corpse, with all that spring-tension suddenly released, catapulted right out the window. It scared the devil out of the mourners until the knife-wielder explained what he’d done. They went outside to bring the body back in, and saw that it had landed just a few feet to one side of the grave they’d dug. So they dragged him back inside, tied him down again, moved the table a little, made a few bets, and cut him loose again. Boing. Out he went. On the fourth shot he landed in the grave, and they filled it in and went home.”

“Good holy Christ!” Duffy exclaimed. “I think your cousin was lying to you.”

“Maybe. But I want to be burned.”

“Look, just because something like that happened to your father—”

“Burned, Duff.”

“Oh, very well. I’ll see to it, if I survive you.” They shook hands on it.

Looking over the Irishman’s shoulder, Bluto remarked in a more casual tone, “Hm! The mandarino is giving one of us the fish-eye.”

Duffy shifted around in his chair, and found himself once again meeting the cold stare of Antoku Ten-no. “You’re right,” he said, repressing a shudder as he turned back to Bluto. “An unpleasant customer, beyond doubt.”

“Speaking of your customers,” said the hunchback, “at what hour will you actually broach the bock tomorrow?”

“Can’t get your mind off that, can you? Oh, tomorrow evening about five, I guess. I’ll see you then, I assume.”

“Me and everybody else in Vienna.”

In the lamplit dimness of the kitchen hall several hours later Duffy strode up and down on the creaking boards, and hefted a sword with a dissatisfied air. “Well,” he told Eilif, who sat on a barrel nearby, “I’ll be grateful for the loan of it until I can get a sword made for me, but I wouldn’t want to stay with this one.”

The Swiss mercenary scratched his gray-shot beard. “Why not?”

“Look,” said the Irishman, now rocking the rapier back and forth on his right palm, “the balance is wrong. All the weight’s in the blade. I’d need a ten-pound pommel, and then it’d be too heavy to feint with.”

“What do you want to feint for? Hit ’em hard straight off, and keep hitting ‘em hard.”

“I feel safer with the option. Also, look at that guard—it’s just a loop of steel. Do you think a man couldn’t get his point in under that, and clip off all my fingers with one poke?”

“God’s hooks, Brian, why do you worry so much about the point? It’s only effeminate Spaniards and Italians that use it—mainly because they don’t have the strength or courage for a good chop.” He swung an imaginary sword in a mighty arc. “Hah! Parry that, you Estebans and Julios!”

Duffy grinned. “For your sake, Eilif, I hope you never run into Esteban or Julio. He’ll have you looking like St. Sebastian after they pulled out all the arrows.”

“Is that so? I believe you spent too much time in Venice, Duff, that’s all.”

“No doubt. Well in any case, thank you. With this I can certainly deal with such swordsmen as are in Vienna. Uh, except, possibly, for a few of the lands-knechten,” he added, seeing Eilif’s quick frown.

“Possibly a few,” the Swiss agreed judiciously. “It sounds like the dining room’s filling up,” he observed, cocking a thumb at the double door. “Hadn’t you better be getting in there?”

“No. I’m ditching it tonight,” the Irishman told him. “Aurelianus suggested I give the innkeeper a respite from my abrasive personality for a bit—every time the man speaks to me he gets so angry he has to go unwind at that poet Kretchmer’s house, where he’s apparently something of a lapdog. Spent last night there after I allegedly tried to blow up the stables.” Duffy sheathed the new sword and strapped it to his belt. “Drink up my share, though, will you?”

“Rely on me.”

Duffy left the building through the kitchen, thrusting his hands deeply into the pockets of his cloak as the chilly wind found him. Patchy clouds hurried across the face of the just-past-full moon, and the gothic and medieval rooftops showed up dimly frosted against the sky’s deep black. Feeling like a goblin of shadows, Duffy made his way silently past several oases of warm light and music, on a course that would lead him to the wide Rotenturmstrasse and, after a left turn, to the north gate of the city. Aurelianus had paid some of the local lads to keep a watchman’s vigil on the Viking ship, and he had suggested that tonight Duffy earn his keep by checking up on them.

The west wind was sluicing down the street like water down a channel, and to stop his cloak from flapping around his ankles the Irishman turned left into an alley that would take him to the north gate by way of St. Ruprecht’s Church.

He was aware of comforting domestic smells now, seeping out from under doors and around window-shutters: hot bread, and cabbage, and wood burning in fireplaces. It was on just such a night as this, he reflected, about fifteen years ago, that I first met Epiphany Vogel. She was about twenty-five, a slim—well, skinny, to be precise—dark-haired girl who somehow managed, as some people can think in a foreign language, actually to think in whimsy and endearing nonsense; forever depressed or elated over incomprehensible trifles, and supporting her statements with misquoted snatches of poetry and Scripture.

I was sitting, Duffy recalled, for a portrait by her father, who was then still a respected painter. It was supposed to be a picture of John the Baptist or somebody, and he had accosted me in a tavern, telling me I possessed exactly the visage he required. The painting, which come to think of it was called St. Michael the Archangel, had taken several weeks to finish, and by the end of that time I was hopelessly in love with his daughter.

And here the year 1529 finds us: Vogel is a mad, blind old drunkard, Epiphany is a gray drudge with nearly all the spice pounded out of her, and I’m a scarred old tomcat with a poor attitude and no prospects, and all of us sitting dumbly in the path of the vigorous Turkish onslaught. The Irishman laughed and did a few capering jig steps; for it seemed to him that, though that was unarguably how it would look to an outsider, and even to himself, it still wasn’t quite the whole story.

He was crossing a small square that ringed a dormant fountain when a flapping from above made him glance up, and his quiet thoughts scattered like startled sparrows—for two black, man-shaped creatures were spiralling down toward him out of the sky. The moonlight gleamed on their billowing wings, curved scabbards and—a puzzling note—their high-soled clog shoes.

Horrified, Duffy reflexively snatched at his sword, but his darting left hand never reached the hilt.

He was abruptly seized, not externally but from within, as if a hitherto-unsuspected fellow-driver had shoved him away and taken the reins. In a helpless panic he watched his own left hand draw his dagger instead, and then deeply plough its razor edge across his right palm, so that blood was spilling out even before the blade was clear.

Hold off, devils, he thought hysterically. Give me two minutes and I’ll evidently chop myself to bits, and save you the trouble. With all the strength of his mind he struggled to regain control of his body, but it seemed that the more he tried to resist his present state, the more complete it became.

His slashed right hand drew the sword now, and held it down, so that the point scraped on the flagstones; blood trickled through his fingers and ran under the looped guard onto the blade. His left hand hefted the shell-hilted dagger—as the tall creatures folded their wings and touched down, their stilted shoes knocking on the flags—and extended it in a cautious en guarde.

Seen at this distance of only a dozen feet, the things did not really look very human. Their eyes were far too big, and their foreheads sloped back parallel with their long, many-fronded ears; their shoulders were broad but hunched, and a fixed, wolflike grin curled under their muzzles. Even as Duffy gathered these first impressions one of them raised to its lips a tiny pipe and began to play a shrill, wild melody.

Duffy growled a curse in a language he didn’t understand and, painfully dragging his sword behind him on the pavement, made a long hop toward the piper and slashed at its head with the dagger.

The thing leaped back out of distance, blinking and confused. Its companion chittered in obvious disappointment and pointed at the Irishman’s sword, down the channel of which his blood had already run all the way to the tip—then the creature drew a long scimitar and, poised tense as an insect, advanced on Duffy while the piper stepped back and resumed its eerie playing.

The scimitar lashed out in a lightning cut at the Irishman’s neck, and Duffy knocked the blow away with the guard of his dagger... resisting the impulse to riposte, though, for his weapon didn’t have nearly enough reach. Even so, he laughed with relief, for the move had been his own—he had regained control of his actions.

Another slash followed quickly, and as he parried it, low, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that, at the moment of dagger-and-scimitar contact, sparks flew from his pavement-scraping sword point; and suddenly he knew, with an unexplainable conviction, that to lift the sword from the ground would mean his own death.

The devil attacked fiercely now, and fending off the licking scimitar with only the dagger required every bit of skill and agility the Irishman could muster. The piping became louder and faster, and blue fire snapped and glowed around Duffy’s trailing sword point as he hopped about in a desperately complicated dance of advance and retreat.

“Help!” he bellowed hoarsely. “Fetch the army, someone! Fetch a priest!” The pipe-music seemed to muffle his voice, though, and he couldn’t even raise an echo.

The creature was inhumanly quick, darting now at Duffy’s leg, an instant later at his face, then jabbing at his arm. Flailing the dagger in wild parries, Duffy managed to keep the long blade away from his vital parts, though he was soon bleeding from a dozen minor cuts. The Irishman was panting heavily, and already the rainbow glitter of exhaustion flickered at the edges of his vision.

Then he parried a thrust low and outside, and inhaled a grating sob as the scimitar edge rasped across the bones of his knuckles instead of the steel guard. In an instant the guard was full of blood, and his grip was perilously slippery.

His adversary launched a fast jab at Duffy’s eye, and he heaved the dagger up to block it—but it was only a feint, and the sword edge flipped in mid-lunge toward his unprotected left side. Instinctively Duffy whirled his sword up and caught the blow on the forte... but the moment his point was lifted from the flagstones, the shrieking music extinguished all his strength, and he pitched limply forward onto the pavement.

Still clutched in his left hand, the dagger—now streaked with his own blood—stuck firmly in a crack as he collapsed on it; instantly warmth seemed to rush up the blade from the earth, lending the nearly unconscious Irishman just enough power to roll over and raise the heavy sword in a clumsy stop-thrust as the monster leaped forward to bestow the last stab. The thing lunged directly onto the extended blade, and its own impetus drove it forward so that the point sprang a foot out of its back.

The piping abruptly ceased, and the spitted creature, lurching backward off the Irishman’s sword, let out a ululating death yell that echoed back unmuffled from every wall. With a convulsive shudder it threw its scimitar away, loudly shattering some window, and then slumped forward, curling as it fell to land with a crack on its head.

The piper ignored the prostrate, gasping form of the Irishman and rushed to its slain fellow, lifted the corpse, and flapped heavily away up into the night sky.

Duffy lay where he was, panting like a dog as his drying blood glued his hilts to his ravaged hands, and followed the flier with his eyes until the thing disappeared over the roofs.

“With all due modesty,” Werner was saying, raising his voice to be heard over the usual dining room din, “here I have been hiding my light under a bushel basket. Burying the talents I was entrusted with, instead of going out and investing them.”

Aurelianus smiled. “You must let me see some of your verses before you go, Werner.”

The innkeeper wrinkled his forehead. “Well, I’m not certain you’d get much out of them. They’re pretty esoteric—full of obscure allusions to the classical philosophers; and I don’t confine my muse to the pasture of any one language. I write, frankly, for the ultra-sophisticated... the literati... the initiates.” He took a sip of his burgundy. “It’s a lonely craft, fully appreciated only by others like myself. Why, Johann was telling me—that’s Johann Kretchmer, you know—he was saying that when he read his Observatii ab Supra Velare to the Emperor Charles himself, Charles clearly missed half the references. As a matter of fact, he even missed a very derogatory reference to himself, so couched was the passage in oriental imagery!” Werner dissolved in giggles at the very idea, shaking his head pityingly.

“Think of that,” sympathized Aurelianus. “Well, we’ll miss you. About Christmas, you think?”

“Yes. Johann and I plan to tour Greece and Italy, bask in the auras left by the great minds of the past.”

“A trifle cold for a long journey, won’t it be? Mid-winter?”

Werner looked around, then leaned forward. “Not necessarily. Johann has read the works of Radzivilius, Sacroboscus and Laurentius, and he has solved the mystery of radical heat and moisture.”

“I’ll be damned. In that case, then, I guess you—what is it, Anna?”

The serving girl’s face was cross, scared and impatient. “It’s Brian. He just came back and he’s—”

“—Got into another drunken brawl, evidently,” finished Werner, looking past Anna at Duffy’s unsteadily approaching figure. “I don’t like to be mundane, Aurelianus, but that man is one of the reasons for my planning to leave. In the grossest manner he has—”

Aurelianus was staring at Duffy, who now stood beside the table. “Leave us, Werner,” he rasped. “No, not another word! Off!”

Duffy collapsed onto the bench Werner vacated. “A cup of beer, Anna,” he whispered.

“Go to the cellar, Anna,” Aurelianus said. “Tell Gambrinus I said to draw a tall tankard of the bock for Duffy.” She nodded and hurried away. “What has happened?”

The Irishman laughed weakly. “Oh, nothing much. Two black devils came out of the sky and tried to make a shish-kebabby out of me.” He reached across the table and tapped the old sorcerer’s chest with a blood-browned finger. “And I want answers to some questions, clear and quick.”

“Of course, of course. Black devils, you say? Flying ones? Great God. When Anna gets back we’ll go... I don’t know... into the kitchen, and you can tell me the whole story. Yes, yes, and I’ll tell you what I know.” He looked up. “Jock! Jock, lad! Get over here.”

A tall, rangy young man loped across the room to the table. That’s a familiar face, the Irishman thought. Where do I know you from, Jock?

Aurelianus’ fingers clutched the baggy green satin of the man’s sleeve. “Go to the King,” the old sorcerer whispered hoarsely, “all four of you, and guard him—with much more than your lives! An expected danger has shown up at an unexpected hour. Stay with him through the night, and come back when it’s full dawn. I’ll have made some sort of arrangements by then, I trust. Go!”

Jock nodded and sprinted to the servants’ hall without ever having looked at Duffy. The old man was snapping his fingers impatiently. “Where the hell—oh, here she is. Grab your beer and follow me.”

“Somebody’s got to bind up his cuts,” Anna protested,” or his hands will mortify.”

“Hush, girl,” said Aurelianus, flapping his hands at her. “I was patching up wounded men long before you were born. Come along, uh... Brian.”

Duffy obediently took hold of the tankard, carrying it carefully in both mangled hands, and followed the old man through the ancient stone arch of the kitchen doorway. Aurelianus dragged two stools up beside the coping-stones of the open fire and shoved away several soot-and-grease-crusted iron poles; wrapping his hands first in an old towel, he carefully lifted down a pot of boiling water from a chain over the fire. He then fumbled about under his gown and at last produced a metal box and two small pouches. “Give me your hands,” he snapped.

Duffy extended them, and Aurelianus dipped the towel in the scalding water, shook it out gingerly and then wiped the blood off the Irishman’s hands. Duffy winced and was about to voice a complaint when the old man loosed the drawstring of one of the pouches and sprinkled green powder over the lacerations; a sharp coldness spread into Duffy’s hands through the cuts, and the hot, throbbing pain went out like a snuffed candle flame.

“Well!” he said. “Thanks.” He started to draw back.

“Not so fast, we’re not through.” Aurelianus was untangling a spool and needle from a lot of other litter in the metal box. “Look somewhere else, now, and tell me about these devils.”

Staring a little nervously at the uneven stones of the ceiling, Duffy told him about the evening’s bizarre, musically accompanied duel. “But I was certain I was a dead man, right at the start there,” he said when he’d finished. “I just watched helplessly while my body performed actions I never willed. And, and somehow the harder I tried to shake off enchantments and let my real self take control, the stronger this... other control became.”

“Yes, I can imagine. Look, I don’t know how to tell you this gently, but there’s an errand you and I have to run tonight before we can totter off to our beds. It shouldn’t be too—”

“God damn it, no!” Duffy exploded. “You’re insane! Tonight? I’m not even going to listen—”

“Silence!” Aurelianus thundered. “You will listen to me, and that respectfully, you ignorant, brawling fool. I wish I could give all this to you slowly, with lots of explanation, and time to assimilate it and ask questions, but if our situation was good enough to allow for all that, neither of us would have to be here in the first place.” Aurelianus was angry, but in spite of his words Duffy suspected that the anger was not really aimed at him. “Do you want to know what happened to you tonight? Hah? Oh, you do? Then pay attention—those two creatures were... scouts, shall we say, advance riders of the Eastern Empire. God knows what they were doing here already—Suleiman hasn’t even left Constantinople yet, and I didn’t expect this kind of thing to appear until he was well up the Danube.” He shook his head unhappily. “But one makes the best preparations one can, and then deals with difficulties as they arise.” He was working busily over Duffy’s hands, but vague pressures and tugging were all the Irishman felt. “The fact that these things focused on you, rather than the city in general, or the brewery, is particularly worrying. It indicates that they weren’t just blindly sent north by Ibrahim, but rather were summoned and instructed by someone here. I’d give a lot to know who that would be.”

“So would I,” Duffy growled. “But you haven’t said yet what this errand is.”

“We’re going to summon equivalent guards.”

“And another thing—” Duffy paused. “Did you say equivalent?”

“Yes. What other thing?”

“Oh. Uh... yes. What did exactly happen during that fight? What was that when my body started acting on its own, and cut my hand and went on guard with only my dagger? If you say you don’t know, I won’t believe you,” he added.

“Very well. I think I can tell you that.” He gathered up his things. “Do you have a pair of gloves? Well, here. Shake some of this powder into them before we start tonight. It’ll kill the pain and keep the cuts clean.” He sat back and smiled coldly. “This will of necessity sound a trifle mystical to you. I hope you don’t object.”

“I can’t object, if it’s true.”

“That’s right. Doubtless you’ve heard of reincarnation?”

“Yes. To have been an Egyptian princess in some previous life.” Duffy picked up his tankard and took a long draught. “Why is it always Egyptian princesses that they were?”

“Because most people weren’t anything at all, and they make up something that sounds glamorous to lend a bit of color to the only life they’ll ever have. But I’m not talking about those fools. A few people really have lived previous lives, and you are one of them. When—”

“Who was I?”

Aurelianus blinked. “Hm? Oh, it’s... hard to say. Anyway, when those two sky-creatures attacked you this evening, an earlier version of you obviously took over.”

“And nearly got me killed,” Duffy muttered.

“Oh, don’t be an idiot. He had to take over. What would you have done if he hadn’t? Just rushed at the things waving your sword and dagger, right?”

Duffy shrugged and nodded.

“Right. You have no experience in these matters, but your earlier self did. He knew that the monsters were on profoundly alien ground, and didn’t dare touch the earth—hence those odd, stilted shoes. He knew, too, that the only way to resist the hypnotic, will-sapping magic of the pipe-music was to have an anchor, establish a connection in blood and steel with the earth of the west; very like Antaeus, you’ll recall, who could out-fight anyone as long as he was in contact with the ground. When you lifted the sword from the pavement, and broke the contact, your strength left you—and thank Finn Mac Cool you happened to fall holding your dagger point-forward, so that the connection was immediately re-established.”

The Irishman took another long sip, as two cooks came in and fussily hung the pot back up on the chain. “Well,” he said finally, “that does seem to cover the facts.”

The old sorcerer smiled. “Good! I’m glad your mind still has some stretch left in it. Finish that beer and come on. With any luck we’ll be back by midnight.” He stood up.

Duffy didn’t. “I’m injured. Go summon your own guards.”

“I can’t do it alone,” Aurelianus said quietly.

“That shouldn’t be any problem. The city’s—hell, this inn is full of husky swordsmen who’d do anything for five kronen and a mug of beer. Get one of them.” The Irishman sipped his bock and watched the old man cautiously.

“It has to be you,” Aurelianus said levelly, “and it will be. I’d rather have you come along of your own free will, but I don’t insist on it.”

Duffy glared at him. “Meaning?”

“Meaning I can, if necessary, tell you certain things, show you things, remind you of things, that will bring back up to the surface the archaic personality that’s dormant in you. Your body will come along in any case; it’s up to you whether it’s you at the tiller or...” He spread his hands. “Or him.”

It required some effort for Duffy to conceal his sudden panic. He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack... crack... crack of it was the only sound in the universe. Just like at Bacchus’ place in Trieste, he thought nervously; I am tremendously afraid of remembering something... and I emphatically don’t want to know why, thank you. He raised the still half-full tankard, but paused and then put it down. At that moment the beer seemed to be a part of what was threatening him.

Slowly he looked up and met the sorceror’s eyes. “I... will go,” he almost whispered. “As I guess you knew all along.” He stood up wearily. “In my life I’ve sometimes had to make men do things they didn’t want to—but I’ve never soiled my hands with such a lever as that.”

“I’m sorry,” Aurelianus said. “I wish the situation didn’t necessitate it.”

“I’ll get my doublet.” He sighed and rubbed his face gingerly. “Is this to be a full dress sword-and-hauberk affair?”

“Dagger and hauberk. There won’t be room to swing a sword.”

Duffy raised his eyebrows. “I see. Going to fight dust-mice under the beds, eh? Give me a few minutes.” He walked out of the kitchen, consciously putting a bit of spring into his step.

The old man smiled sadly at the empty doorway. “You always did need some prodding,” he muttered, “and I never have played fair. But you’ve always been the only piece solid enough to stand in the breach.”

Chapter Ten

AURELIANUS LED THE WAY down several halls, of varying age and architecture, to the side of the rambling old building farthest from the brewing cellar. The low ceiling of the last corridor was black and greasy from centuries of candle smoke, and the oil-lamp in Aurelianus’ bony hand sent up its own infinitesimal deposit.

“Where the hell are we going?” Duffy demanded, in a whisper so as not to awaken any tenants in the rooms on either side.

“The old chapel.”

At the end of the hall stood two tall iron doors set in a Romanesque arch, and Aurelianus fished a ring of keys from under his gown and turned one of them in the lock. The doors swung open easily and the two men stepped through.

The moon lit the stained-glass windows in shades of luminous gray, and Duffy was able to see without the aid of Aurelianus’ smoky lamp. The high, domed ceiling, the pulpit, and the pews and kneelers clearly identified the room as a chapel, in spite of the dust-covers pulled over the statues and crucifix, and the piles of boxes, buckets and ladders beside the doors.

Duffy waved at a stacked arsenal of mops and brooms. “All you use this room for is one huge maid’s closet?”

The old man shrugged. “No one would hear of putting it to so low a use as an auxiliary dining room,” he said, “and I can’t use it as a chapel because the Archbishop forbade Mass ever to be said here again when I took over.” He closed and re-locked the doors.

Chuckling softly, the Irishman followed him up the center aisle to the communion rail. Aurelianus unhooked a dusty velvet rope and let the free end’s hook clank on the marble step. “Come on,” he said, striding up to the altar.

Duffy did, and was amused to find himself uneasy at not genuflecting. His right hand even twitched in the reflex to bless himself. I know what previous self that is, he thought. It’s ten-year-old Brian the altar boy.

Aurelianus stepped around to the right side of the high altar and then edged his way into the narrow gap between it and the wall. Though not pleased about it, Duffy followed. In that confined, shadowy space Aurelianus’ lamp seemed bright again, and the Irishman was surprised to see painted shapes on the wall four inches away from his face. A fresco, by God, he thought, completely hidden by the altar. He was pressed too close to it to see what its subject was, but he did shuffle past one clearly visible detail: a procession of naked women carrying sheaves of grain to a mill. Ho ho, he thought. Those rapscallious old monks.

“There’s a step here,” said Aurelianus over his shoulder.

“Up?” inquired Duffy.

“Down.” Aurelianus peered back at him with a cold smile. “Down and out.”

Duffy carefully set both booted feet onto the stone step before trying for the next. When he’d taken a dozen of them he was below the level of the floor, and he found himself in a claustrophobically tight and low-roofed spiral stairwell, hunching and groping his way by the reflected light from Aurelianus’ lamp. The old sorcerer was about half a spiral below him, and though the Irishman could clearly hear his scuffling steps and his breathing, he couldn’t see him.

“Damn it, wizard!” exclaimed Duffy, lowering his voice in mid-word as he noticed how the tight-curled stone tube amplified sounds. “Slow up, will you? This stairway was obviously built for gnomes.”

Aurelianus’ head poked into view around the bricks of the curved inward wall. “I must insist on complete silence from here onward,” he hissed, and withdrew below.

The Irishman rolled his eyes and continued his awkward descent, bent-kneed and crouching to keep from bumping his head on the stone roof. The steps were rounded as if by millenia of use, but every time his boots slipped on one it was easy to catch himself by bracing his hands against the close walls. No sir, he thought, this isn’t a stairway in which you’d have to worry about taking a tumble. Though, he reflected uneasily, if you did fall, and got jammed head-downward in here, somebody would have to come with hammers and break your bones to get you unwedged. He took a few deep breaths and forced the thought out of his mind.

The corkscrew shaft didn’t go straight down; it seemed to Duffy that it slanted slightly north. By now we must be about thirty feet under the cobblestones of the Malkenstrasse, he thought. Maybe if we go deep enough we’ll be outside the city altogether.

By the dim light he had noticed words scratched roughly in the bricks, and he paused to puzzle out a couple of the inscriptions. PROPTER NOS DILATAVIT INFERNUS OS SUUM, he read, and, a few steps later, DETESTOR OMNES, HORREO, FUGIO, EXECROR. Hm, he thought; the first graffiti was a comment on how eagerly the mouth of Hell awaits us, and the second is just somebody expressing a lot of hatred for “all of them.” Evidently the foreman of this tunnel-digging job failed to keep the workmen happy. Well-educated workmen they were, too, to be scrawling in Latin instead of German.

“Hey,” Duffy whispered. “Why are these inscriptions in Latin?”

The sorceror didn’t even peer back. “This was a Roman fort once, remember?” came his whisper from below. “Romans spoke Latin. Now be quiet.”

Yes, the Irishman thought, but Romans didn’t have chapels, at least not Christian ones. What sort of chamber did this damned stair once lead down from?

His continually hunched posture was beginning to give him knee-twitches and a throbbing headache, but when after a half-hour’s steady descent they came to a wide landing and Aurelianus proposed a brief rest, the headache went away but the throbbing did not; a deep reverberation, like a slow drum-beat, was coming from below, vibrating through the stone, to be felt in the bones rather than heard. For one panicky moment Duffy thought something ponderous was walking slowly up the stairs, but after a few more seconds he decided the source was stationary.

As he sat panting and massaging his right leg he noticed more scratches on the walls, and lifted the sorceror’s lamp to see what the sentiments were at this level. Instead of Latin words, though, he saw a number of horizontal lines hatched by short vertical and diagonal strokes. Well I’m damned, he thought—these inscriptions are in Ogham! I didn’t think you could find this primordial script except in a few Celtic ruins in Ireland. I wish I could read them.

Then he had hastily clanked the lamp back down beside Aurelianus and said, “Let’s push on, shall we?”—for it had seemed to him that he could have read them, if he’d really tried. And no one since the druids had ever been able to.

Aurelianus stared at him curiously, but shrugged and got to his feet. “Right.” He padded to the end of the level stretch, where the stair resumed, and continued the downward course.

This deeper set of stairs was a long, steep ramp rather than a spiral, but Duffy had by now lost all sense of direction, and he had no idea of their position in relation to the city that lay somewhere above. The walls were still close, but the stone ceiling was a good deal higher in this section, and the Irishman was able to stand up straight.

Here too the stairs were worn down to low ridges, but the incline wasn’t quite steep enough to make it dangerous. The arched mouths of side-tunnels yawned in the walls at intervals, and the deep drum-beat throbbed a little more noticeably each time the two wayfarers shuffled past one. It seemed to Duffy that the going was warmer on this stretch, as if the draft sighing out of the black tunnels was a long exhalation from the lungs of the earth, and the slow drum the beating of its molten heart.

Passing one of the openings he head a soft, slithering rustle, and he started convulsively, his hand leaping to his dagger hilt.

Aurelianus jumped too, then after glancing round-about turned to Duffy with his white eyebrows raised in annoyed inquiry.

“What sort of things live down here?” the Irishman asked, remembering to whisper. “Snakes? Trolls?”

“I suppose there may be snakes,” the sorcerer answered impatiently. “No trolls. And no man has entered these tunnels since the Church took over the brewery, in the twelfth century. All right?”

“All right!” snapped Duffy, irritable now himself. After all, he thought, it wasn’t my idea to go for a romp in a rat warren. They plodded on in silence.

After perhaps a hundred more yards the Irishman noticed something ahead—a hammocklike bundle slung from the ceiling, dimly visible in the flickering yellow light. Aurelianus nodded to show he saw it too, but didn’t slacken his pace.

My God, Duffy thought as they drew closer, it’s a mummy, wearing a sword, hung sitting in a sling. A poor idea of a joke, especially in a setting like this.

Then the thing opened its eyes, which brightly reflected the lamplight. Its pupils were vertical slits, like a cat’s. Duffy yelped and jumped a full yard backward, fell, and regained the ground in a sitting slide. The sorcerer just eyed the sitter speculatively.

Its mouth spread open in a glittering yellow grin, making its face seem to be nothing but eyes and teeth. “Halt,” it said in an echoing whisper, “for the toll.”

Aurelianus stepped forward, holding the lantern low, as Duffy got back to his feet. “What price for passage?” the old man asked.

The thing spread long-fingered hands. “Nothing exorbitant.” It hopped down from its sling, agile as a monkey, and caressed the hilt of its short sword. “There are two of you... I’ll take the life of one.”

Duffy had wearily dragged his dagger out now—dreading the exertion of hacking this unwholesome creature to death—but Aurelianus just raised the lamp so that his seamed, craggy face was clearly visible. “Do you think you could digest my life, if you took it?” His voice was flat with contempt.

The thing shuddered with recognition and bowed, casting its ropy colorless hair over its face. “No, Ambrosius. Your pardon—I didn’t know you at first.” A glowing eye looked up from under the hair. “But I will have your companion.”

Aurelianus smiled, and raised the lantern to show Duffy’s face in sharp chiaroscuro. “Will you?” he asked softly.

The creature—which, a part of Duffy’s mind had time to reflect, had probably once been a man—stared for a full minute, then whimpered and abased itself full length on the stones of the tunnel floor.

Aurelianus turned to the Irishman and, waving a hand forward, stepped around the would-be toll-taker. Duffy followed, and heard the degraded thing mutter, as he edged past, “Pardon, Lord.”

For the next dozen yards they could hear it whimpering behind them, and Duffy shot the old man a venomously interrogative look. Aurelianus just shrugged helplessly.

When the stairs finally came to an end, widening out into a chamber whose walls and roof the lamp was powerless to illuminate, Duffy thought it must be dawn in Vienna, or even noon. And, he told himself grimly, there’s about a mile of tangled tunnels between you and your bed.

Aurelianus was striding forward across the chamber floor, so Duffy wearily followed, and saw ahead of them the coping of a well wide enough to drop a small cottage into. The old sorcerer halted at the edge, fumbling under his gown. Duffy peered down over the stone lip, wrinkling his nose at a faint smell that was either spice or clay. He could see nothing, but the deep pounding seemed to emanate upward out of the well.

Aurelianus had produced a little knife, with which he was carefully cutting a gash in his own left forefinger. Reaching forward, he shook the quick drops of blood into the abyss for a few moments, then drew his hand back and wrapped the finger in a bit of cloth. He smiled reassuringly at Duffy and folded his arms, waiting.

Minutes went past. The Irishman had again begun to confuse his own pulse with the barely audible bass vibration, and so his stomach went cold when it abruptly ceased.

The lean hand of the sorcerer clamped on his shoulder. “Now listen,” he breathed into Duffy’s ear, “I am going to recite some sentences to you, quietly, a phrase at a time, and I want you to shout them into the well after me. Do you understand?”

“No,” returned the Irishman. “If you’re the one that knows the words, you shout them. I’ll stand by.”

The warm draft from out of the well was stronger now, as if something that nearly filled the shaft was silently ascending.

“Do as I say, you damned idiot,” Aurelianus whispered quickly, his fingers digging into Duffy’s shoulder. “They’ll recognize your voice—and obey it, too, if our luck hasn’t completely flown.”

The well-draft slowed to what it had been before. Duffy got the impression of something poised and attentive. He kept his mouth resolutely shut as long as he could bear it—perhaps thirty seconds. Then, “Very well,” he breathed weakly. “Go ahead.”

The words Aurelianus whispered to him, Duffy realized as he called them out after him in a strong voice, were in archaic Welsh, and after a few moments he recognized them. They were lines from the hopelessly enigmatic Cad Goddeu, the Battle of the Trees, which his grandmother used to recite to him when he was a child. He began to translate the lines in his head as he pronounced them:

“I know the light whose name is Splendor,

And the number of the ruling lights

That scatter rays of fire

High above the deep.

Long and white are my fingers,

It is long since I was a herdsman.

I have travelled over the earth,

I know the star-knowledge

Of stars before the earth was made,

Whence I was born,

How many worlds there are.

I have travelled, I have made a circuit,

I have slept in a hundred islands;

I have dwelt in a hundred cities.

Prophesy ye of Arthur?

Or is it me they celebrate?”

At this point Aurelianus began giving him syllables that carried no meaning for him, and weren’t in Welsh. Duffy guessed that the part he’d understood had been a stylized greeeting. He stopped trying to follow it and just called out the incomprehensible words as they were muttered to him.

Aurelianus’ relayed monologue went on for many minutes, and the Irishman was getting sleepy. He wondered if it would be all right if he sat down, and decided regretfully that it probably wouldn’t.

At one point his heavy-lidded eyes snapped fully open in panic. Had he missed a phrase? But Aurelianus was calmly droning the next one, and a moment later Duffy was instinctively repeating it in a loud voice. I guess I haven’t missed any, he thought. I must have one of those household spirits crouched on my shoulder, the ones that breathe for you all night while you’re asleep, and it’s maintaining my half of this bizarre address while I doze.

With that reflection he really did stop paying attention to the words his mouth called out, and he even let his eyes close completely. An old campaigner, he was not incapable of falling asleep standing up.

Finally Aurelianus’ promptings began to take on a tone of conclusion, and there came at last a phrase which, by its inflection, was obviously the last. A pause followed, and then Duffy called one more sentence into the abyss, in apparently the same language but a more jocular tone. Only after the echoes had died away down the well and up the stairs did the Irishman come fully awake and realize that the sorcerer hadn’t fed him that one. Fearful of having ruined everything, he glanced at Aurelianus.

The old man, though, was smiling and nodding. “A nice touch, that last,” he whispered to Duffy. “I’d forgotten their peculiar sense of humor.”

And I recalled it, eh? the Irishman thought unhappily, too weary to let this new piece of evidence really upset him. I’ll worry about all this in the morning. “Fine,” he sighed. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“In a moment. Hush now.”

For another minute or two they stood staring at the coping stones in the unsteady lamp light. There were age-blurred carvings on them, but Duffy was sick of deciphering things. He wanted only to get back up to the surface—he was beginning to fancy he could actually feel the weight of all the dirt and rock overhead.

Then a voice spoke out of the well—a deep voice that carried more than a lifetime’s worth of strength and sadness—and it said, “Yes, Sire. We will be honored to stand one more time with you.” The sound seemed to press outward against the walls and ceiling, uncomfortably constricted by the subterranean chamber.

Duffy was startled, but after a pause collected his wits and said “Thank you.”

The old wizard stepped back now and waved the lamp toward the stairs. Duffy thought he looked cautiously pleased, like a chess player who manages to castle advantageously. Without a word they began the long ascent.

Before long they came to the sling, hung from two hooks wedged between stones in the ceiling, where the peculiarly devolved being had accosted them. There was no sign of it now. Duffy had paused to look around, but Aurelianus urged him on with a curt wave. The lamp still shone as brightly as ever, but the old man shook it worriedly and turned the wick lower, cursing softly as he burned his fingers.

When the steps levelled out at the short landing Duffy took a deep breath and ran his gloved fingers through his hair. The last stretch now, he told himself. Or the last cramp, I should say.

“Come no further, topsiders,” fluted a weirdly whistling voice from the darkness ahead. The Irishman leaped back and landed in a crouch, his dagger out, and Aurelianus nearly dropped the lamp in his haste to turn the wick up again. The glassed-in flame brightened, and glittered on the patchy white fur of three man-tall creatures that Duffy took at first for spiders.

Then he decided that this species, too, might have been human once, though much longer ago than that of the grinner in the sling. Their ears had grown wider than spread hands, at the evident expense of their eyes, which were completely buried under thick fur. Their limbs were grotesquely long and twisted, and the Irishman suspected that when the things crawled their knees and elbows would be above their heads.

“Put out the light,” one of them said, and Duffy saw why the voice was so odd—their cheeks had retracted, leaving their mandibles projecting nakedly under their wide-nostrilled noses.

“Get out of our way, vermin,” Duffy growled, “or we’ll put out your lights.”

The thing extended a hand tipped with five long claws, and waved them in the air like the legs of an overturned bug. “I don’t think you can,” it lisped.

“Dung beetles!” shouted Aurelianus angrily. “Listen to my voice, Listen to his. Can it be you don’t know who you’re confronting?”

The thing laughed softly, an odd sound like dice shaken in a cup. “Of course we know, man.”

The wizard stepped back. “Someone’s bought away their loyalty,” he whispered. “I knew there were dangers down here born of atrophy and neglect, but I didn’t expect outright treason.”

Bought with what? Duffy wondered. Before he could ask, all three of the things hopped forward at once as if yanked by the same string. One landed on top of Duffy and bore him to the floor, trying to claw in under his upflung arm at his eyes while the Irishman hacked at it with his dagger. Aurelianus dropped the lamp, but it rolled, still burning and unbroken, into a corner.

Another of the things was at Duffy now, digging at his stomach but foiled for the moment by the chain-mail hauberk under the leather tunic. Though Duffy’s flailing dagger seemed to be sinking into soft abdomen as often as it skidded off bone, the one on top of him kept dragging its claws across his forehead and cheeks. He could feel his own hot blood running into his ears, and other blood was sliming his dagger-gripping fingers and running down his wrist. All he could smell was goaty fur and all he could hear were his own involuntary screams.

Then something collided, hard, with the thing crouched on his chest. The Irishman rolled out from under and slammed his dagger to the hilt into the face of his other attacker, roughly where its eye would have been, and it rolled over backward so convulsively that the dagger was wrenched out of his hand.

Scrambling up into a crouch he turned to face the first one—and saw only two motionless bodies sprawled on the floor. He spun to see how Aurelianus was faring, and saw the old wizard pushing aside a limp form to go pick up the lantern.

Duffy straightened up and relaxed; then his knees buckled and he allowed himself to sit down heavily. “I thought... there were only... three of them,” he panted. “Oh. I see.” Aurelianus had approached with the light, and Duffy now noticed that the fourth creature, which had knocked the thing with claws off his chest, was different. He rolled it over with his foot, and saw again the slit-pupilled eyes and wide grin, now lifeless. Its throat had been sheared right across by the spider-thing’s claws, but the hilt of its short sword stood up from the bristly white chest of its slayer. Which was nearly my slayer too, Duffy reflected.

“It seems he decided to pay the toll himself,” Aurelianus remarked lightly. “Grab your dagger—and the little sword if you like, though I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble—and let’s go. This lamp won’t light us all the way to the top as it is.”

Duffy resented Aurelianus’ airy tone. “A brave thing died here,” he said gruffly.

“Hm? Oh, the beastie with the big eyes. True. The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too. The common penny, the coin of the realm. Stop to mourn for every good man that’s died for us and you’d never get from bed to the chamber-pot. Come on.”

The Irishman braced himself on his numb hands, got his legs under him and shakily stood up. His vision was flickering, and he had to lean against the wall and stare at the floor, breathing deeply, to keep from fainting.

“Your bed is waiting for you up there,” said the old man. “Onward and upward.”

The light did wink out while they were on the tightly twisting stairwell, but they groped their way to the top with no further incidents. Duffy was nearly unconscious, and no more aware of his situation than if he’d been dreaming. None of his injuries actually hurt, though he felt hot and swollen and throbbing all over. After a long period of stair-shuffling, a change in the air-temperature made him open his eyes and look around. They were in the dark, unused chapel again, faintly lit by the as-yet tenuous dawn.

“Why...” the Irishman croaked, “why should they have... recognized me or my voice? Any of them?”

“You need a drink,” the sorcerer said, kindly.

“Yes,” he agreed, after some thought, “but if I have one I’ll be sick.”

Aurelianus reached under his robe. “Here,” he said, handing Duffy a straight, dried snake. “Smoke this.”

The Irishman held it up and peered at its silhouette against the window, rolling it between his fingers. “Is it like that tobacco plant from the Evening Isles?”

“Not much. Can you get to your room all right?”

“Yes.”

“Take this too,” Aurelianus said, handing him a little leather bag sealed with a twist of wire. “It’s an ointment to prevent flesh from becoming infected. Wash your face before you go to bed and then rub this into those cuts. With any luck they won’t even leave scars.”

“God. What do I care about scars.” He plodded toward the door, opened it, and turned. “Why did they all speak contemporary Austrian, if no one’s been down there for so long?”

He couldn’t clearly see the old wizard’s expression, but Duffy thought he was smiling a little sadly. “There was no Austrian spoken down there tonight, except for a couple of your whispers to me. All the conversations between us and those tunnel-rats was in an archaic Boiic dialect seasoned with corrupt Latin; and the thing in the well spoke a secret, nameless language that reputedly antedates mankind.”

Duffy shook his head absently. “Then how did I understand...” He shrugged. “Why not? Very well. I’ll be talking to badgers in finger-language next, I don’t doubt. Yes. And what could I possibly have to say to them? Good night.”

“Good night.”

Dufiy lurched away along the creaking boards of the corridor. Aurelianus stepped to the doorway and watched his unsteady progress; he saw the Irishman lean toward one of the still-burning wall cressets, puff the snake alight, and plod on, trailing clouds of white smoke.

Chapter Eleven

IT WAS EASTER MORNING, and the bells of St. Stephen’s rang solemnly joyful carillons out across the sunlit roofs of the city; another winter had been survived, and the several churches were filled with citizens celebrating the Vernal Equinox, the resurrection of the young God. At midnight all candles had been put out—even the tabernacle lights—and a new flame had been struck from the flint and steel in the cathedral vestibule and carried by altar boys to the other churches, in order to begin the new liturgical year with a renewed light.

On the secular levels, too, it was a big day. Sausage vendors had set up little grill-carts at every corner, and sent spicy, luring smoke whirling away through every street; children, dressed up for Mass in their finest doublets and dresses, scampered about St. Stephen’s square afterward, begging their parents for pennies to buy Easter cakes with; and the sellers of relics and sacred gifts had people waiting in line to buy holy cards, rosaries and bones of various saints—it was later estimated that six entire beatified skeletons changed hands that day. These branches of commerce enjoyed an ecclesiastical dispensation from the rule against working on Sunday, but other small businessmen had taken advantage of the obscuring crowds to peddle their own, unsanctified goods furtively. One of these, a self-styled troop outfitter, had parked his cart at a corner of the Tuchlauben and folded down its wooden sides, revealing racked assortments of swords, hauberks, halberds, helmets and boots, some of them in fact old enough to be plausibly offered as relics.

He had done a fair amount of business this morning, and brightened still more when he saw a battered-looking old warrior come weaving through the crowd, his gray head standing a full foot above the tide of passersby.

“Ah, you there, sir,” piped the merchant, hopping nimbly down from the cart’s seat to land on the pavement in front of Brian Duffy. “Do you call those boots?” He pointed at the Irishman’s feet, and several people paused to look. “I won’t say what I’d call ’em, since I suspect you’d swipe my head off, heh heh. But do you think you can defend Vienna in those, charging—God forbid!—over the jagged rubble of our city’s walls, as like as not? Say no more, sir, I can see you hadn’t given it any thought, and now that you have, you agree with me. I happen to have a pair here that were made for Archbishop Tomori, but never worn because he was killed by the Turks before delivery. I see you and that courageous soldier of God have the same size feet, so why don’t you just—”

“Save Tomori’s boots for somebody with as little sense as he had,” Duffy advised gruffly. “I might, though,” he added, remembering the sword he’d broken in his canal-fall the day before, “be able to use a new sword.”

“It’s the right man you’ve come to! This two-handed thing, now—”

“Might conceivably make some Jannisaries laugh themselves to death. Be quiet. I want a rapier, with a left-handed grip, a full bell-guard and quillons, heavy but with the balance point about two inches forward of the guard. Made of Spanish steel. A narrow blade with—”

He stopped, for someone had grabbed his arm and pulled him back. Turning irritably, he saw Aurelianus’ crumpled-parchment face framed by a black hood. “Damn it, wizard,” Duffy snapped, “what’s the matter now?”

“You don’t need to buy a sword,” Aurelianus said. “I’ve got a good one you can have.”

There were a few hoots from the crowd, and Duffy stalkingly dragged the sorcerer several paces down the street. When it no longer seemed that everyone was paying attention to them, he stopped and turned to the old man. “Now, what are you saying?”

“Why do you walk so fast? I’ve been following you for blocks. I said I have a sword you can use. You don’t have to buy one.”

“Oh. Well thanks, I’ll take a look at it,” the Irishman said, trying to be reasonable, “but I’m damned particular about my weapons—I wasn’t really expecting to get one from that fellow. Hell, I usually have to have my swords made to my own specifications. And I am left-handed, you know.”

“I think you’ll like this one,” Aurelianus insisted. “You’ve, uh, liked it before.”

“What do you mean? Is it an old one of mine you’ve magicked from the bottom of some ravine or bay?”

“Never mind. Come back to the inn and take it.” Aurelianus took a step back the way they’d come.

Duffy didn’t move. “You mean right now? No. I’m off to the barracks to visit some friends. I’ll look at it later.”

“These are dangerous times. I really wish you’d come get it now,” Aurelianus pressed.

“Well, what’s wrong with this?” Duffy asked, slapping the scabbard of the sword he’d borrowed from Eilif. “I’m beginning to feel moderately at home with it.”

“Why do you—” A child dashed past, yelling and waving a whirling firework on a stick. “Damn it, why do you have to be so difficult? Certainly, that sword will do against a pickpocket or a drunken bravo, but you’re just as likely to run into other things, and the blade I’m offering you has special properties that make it deadly to them. Listen, guess who didn’t show up at the inn for his morning beer today, for the first time in months?”

Duffy rolled his eyes impatiently. “Methuselah.”

“Almost right. Antoku Ten-no, the bad-tempered Oriental. And I’m now fairly sure it was he who called those two devils last night and set them onto you.”

Duffy sighed. That morning he had, to his own delighted surprise, awakened from four hours of sleep clear-eyed and energetic; he remembered opening his casement to let the cold, diamond-crisp air flap at his night shirt, and remembered filling his lungs and expelling the breath in a shout of laughter that had echoed away up the street as an escort for the melody of the bells, and drawn the startled glances of several boys on the pavement below. Aurelianus now seemed bent on deflating that exhilaration.

“Why me?” he almost yelled. “You’re the one that wouldn’t give him his opium or whatever the hell it was he wanted. Why didn’t he send his winged musicians to you? I don’t believe you know nearly as much about all this as you pretend to. Why don’t you just leave me alone, understand?—and all your sorcerous cronies, too!”

The Irishman strode angrily away through the crowd, followed by wondering stares. An elderly, well-dressed man sidled up to the wizard and inquired as to the price of opium. “Shut up, you fool,” Aurelianus told him, elbowing him aside and returning the way he’d come.

Six hours later the low sun was casting a rust-colored light in through the three west-facing windows of the Zimmermann dining room. There was the usual pre-dinner clatter and laughter from the kitchen, but aside from the weary Aurelianus there was no one in the dining room. The table candles and wall cressets would not be lit for another hour or so, and shadows were proliferating in the corners and under the chairs.

The old sorcerer looked furtively around, then laid his fingers on the glass cup in which sat his table’s candle. He lowered his head and frowned. After a minute he raised his eyes to the wick, which was still a curl of lifeless black; his eyebrows went up in uneasy surprise, and he bent his head again, frowning more deeply. Several minutes went by while wizard and candle were as unmoving as a painting—then a solid yellow flame shot with a rushing roar out the top of the cup, which cracked into several pieces, spilling steaming wax out onto the table top.

The front door had just opened, and Brian Duffy stood in the vestibule doorway, staring skeptically at Aurelianus. “Was there some purpose in that, or are you just clowning around?”

The sorcerer fanned at the cloud of smoke. “A little of both. How was your day?”

Duffy crossed to Aurelianus’ table and sat down. “Not bad. Drank up a lot of French wine and traded reminiscences with the landsknechten. No devils of any note approached me. Did I miss anything around here?”

“Not much. I broke the news to Werner that you’re still an employee here, and he shouted for ten minutes and then stormed out. Tells me he’s going to celebrate the vanquishing of winter in more edifying company—which I take to mean he’s going to spend the night reciting poetry at Johann Kretchmer’s place again. Oh, and the Brothers of St. Christopher set up their usual puppet show in the yard, as they do every Easter, but your crew of Vikings thought the puppets were homunculi—they smashed up the box and chased the monks away. The kids were all crying, so I had to go out there and do juggling tricks to restore order.”

Duffy nodded with a satisfied air. “All emergencies kept well in hand, eh? Good work.”

Aurelianus smiled. “And I did have a long talk with old Werner, before he made his exit.”

“Oh? That seems a waste of time.”

The old man reached behind him and picked up a candle from another table. “Not completely. He tells me you are a perfectly disastrous bouncer—says you encourage fights when they start and start ’em when they don’t.”

Duffy rocked his head judiciously. “Well... a case could be made for that point of view.”

“No doubt. At any rate, as your employer, I have a proposal to present to you. I’d like to double your salary and promote you out of the bouncer position.”

“To what position?”

Aurelianus shrugged and spread his hands. “Bodyguard, shall we say?”

“Whose body? Yours?” He watched as the sorcerer produced a tinder box from under his robe, opened it, and took out flint, steel and a handful of tinder.

“No, mine can take of itself. I mean the King.”

Duffy laughed. “Oh, certainly. Hell, I can’t imagine how Charles has got along until now without—no; I see. You mean this other king of yours.” Aurelianus nodded, watching the Irishman closely. “The one living outside Vienna,” Duffy went on, “who outranks Charles, though nobody’s ever heard of him.”

“A lot of people have heard of him,” corrected Aurelianus, striking sparks into the tinder; “damn few know he actually exists.”

“Very well, what’s his name?”

“He doesn’t really have a name. He’s known as the Fisher King.” The tinder was alight, and he held a sputtering straw to the wick of the new candle. It caught, and in a moment was burning brightly.

Duffy abruptly had the feeling that this conversation had occurred before, perhaps in a dream. The sensation puzzled and obscurely frightened him. “And he’s in danger, is he?” The Irishman’s voice was gruff.

“Potentially. Some time during the next couple of days we’ll have to go fetch him, bring him inside the city walls. He hates the confinement, you see, of streets and gates and masonry—especially in his sick, wounded condition—and he’d prefer to stay out in the woods until the last possible day. He is safe now, what with a dozen of our pit-summoned defenders circling over his cabin, and Suleiman an easy three months away, but Antoku’s tricks have me worried—I’d sooner not take any chances. We’ll bring him inside within the week.”

A sick hermit living in the woods, Duffy thought. I’ve never heard of him, but he’s a greater king than the Emperor, Charles V, eh? No doubt, no doubt! Hah. Just another sad old phony, like those British shopkeepers who claim to be druids, and dance, rather self-consciously, at Stonehenge every midsummer’s eve.

Duffy sighed. “Yes, for double my salary I’ll watch over this old king of yours—just so these... what? ‘Pit-summoned defenders’?... keep their distance.”

“They’re on your side.”

“Still, I don’t want to meet any. And what do you mean, Suleiman three months away? He’s further off than that.”

“Not much further. His advance scouts left Constantinople today. He won’t be more than a month behind.”

“Today? How can you know already?”

Aurelianus smiled tiredly. “You know me better than that, Brian.”

The street door rattled and creaked open, and the hunchbacked figure of Bluto bulked against the late afternoon glow. “Damn,” exclaimed the Swiss bombardier, “I thought I’d be the first in line. I might have known you two would be here before anyone else.”

Aurelianus pushed back his bench and got to his feet. “I was just chatting with Brian. I’m not much of a beer drinker, actually—my share of the bock is all yours.” He bowed and walked quietly out of the room.

Bluto crossed to Duffy’s table and pulled up the bench at which Aurelianus had been sitting. “Speaking of beer...”

Duffy grinned. “Yes. Anna or Piff is in the kitchen. Why don’t you have them pour us a last pitcher of the schenk beer, eh?”

“Good idea. My God, what happened to your face?”

“I was attacked in my sleep by mice. Go get the beer.”

Bluto did, and for twenty minutes the two of them sipped cool beer and discussed the possible Turkish lines of attack, the weak points in the city wall, and various defense arrangements.

“Charles has got to send reinforcements,” Bluto said worriedly. “Pope Clement, too. Can it be they don’t see the danger? Hell, Belgrade and Mohács were costly defeats, yes. They were the stepping-stones to the Holy Roman Empire. But Vienna is the damned front door. If the Turks take this place, the next spot to hold the line will be the English Channel.”

Duffy shrugged. “What can I say? You’re right.” He poured the last of the beer into Bluto’s cup.

Shrub and a couple of the other yard boys had come in with ladders and were hanging cagelike grilles over the wall cressets. The hunchback watched them. “Really expecting a wild crowd tonight, aren’t you?”

“Evidently,” Duffy agreed. “Back when this place was a monastery they used to drag kegs out and have the bock festival in the street. It got pretty berserk sometimes. Easter, the bock beer, and Spring are all the same thing in everybody’s mind, and they really dive into it head first after a hard winter.”

Bluto drained his glass and stood. “Say, Duff, it must be half past four now. When should I make sure to be here, to be at least among the first in line?”

“I don’t know. Supper time, I guess.” He too stood up and stretched, yawning like a cat. “Maybe I’ll trot downstairs and ask Gambrinus. See you later.” He ambled off toward the cellar stairs, secretly hoping to get another advance taste of the Spring beer.

Duffy could hear someone moving about in the darkness below as he descended the stairs. “Gambrinus!” he called, but there was no answer. Remembering the petard he’d found on the brewery door, he closed his fingers around his dagger hilt and took the remaining steps as quietly as possible.

When he stood at last on the damp paving stones, he peered cautiously around the dim cellar, but didn’t see anyone. Maybe I’m now having auditory hallucinations to complement my moonlit-lake visual ones, he thought unhappily. Wait a moment! Who’s that?

A tall figure had stepped out of the shadows behind the brick chimney, and now crossed to a door set in the wall next to the high-set copper tubs; in a moment he had opened the door and stepped through into the blackness beyond. The Irishman had caught only a quick glimpse of the stranger, but had noticed that he was blond or red-haired, and wore a loose cloak fastened at the throat by one metal button.

Duffy had his dagger out and strode to the door. “Come out of there,” he barked.

There was only silence from the dark room beyond, and an intensification of the steamy malt smell.

Duffy retreated to the fireplace, picked up a coal with the tongs and held it to the wick of Gambrinus’ lantern. Armed now with the light, he returned to the doorway and peered warily into the stone-walled room revealed within. He couldn’t see anyone, and, assuming the intruder was hiding to one side of the door, leaped through with a whirl of the lantern and an intimidating yell.

The room was empty. “Enough now, what is this?” the Irishman snarled. Setting down the lantern, he examined the walls for evidence of a secret door, but found none. The floor was simply moist earth, and the high-ceilinged room contained nothing but a monstrous wooden vat, taller by half than Duffy, the broad slats of its sides green with the moss of decades, perhaps centuries.

Duffy was about to go back to the dining room and worry about this new symptom of madness when he noticed three big, discolored wooden spigots set in the side of the vat, one at chest level, one at knee level, and one only a dozen inches above the dirt floor. Tarnished brass plates were nailed above the spigots, and he looked closely at them. The top one read LIGHT; the middle one BOCK; and the bottom one was so scaled with verdigris that it was indecipherable, and he had to scrape at it with the edge of his dagger. After a minute he had got it fairly clean, and could read its single word: DARK.

Now what the hell, he thought, forgetting the elusive intruder in his immediate puzzlement. He glanced up and saw a number of pipes emerging from the cellar wall and entering the vat at the top. Can this thing, he wondered queasily, be substituting for the tun tubs of a normal brewery? Does the fermentation of all Herzwesten beer take place, as it appears to do, in this great moldy vat? I wonder if they ever clean it.

After extinguishing the lantern he made his way thoughtfully back up the stairs. Maybe, he speculated, that fair-haired man, whoever he was, led me into that room intentionally; wanted me to see that enigmatic vat.

He paused at the top of the stairs. I’ve frequently tasted Herzwesten Light, he thought, and every Spring I can have the Bock. What, though, is Herzwesten Dark, and why have I never heard of it?

Bluto had wandered off, and the only person, in the dining room besides Shrub and his helpers was Epiphany. She had wiped down the tables and washed and stacked the serving-boards for dinner, and was now slumped at the traditional employees’ table, wearily slurping small beer.

“Piff, my love,” the Irishman exclaimed. “Where have you been hiding?”

Epiphany started when he spoke, then smiled worriedly. “You’re the one that’s been hiding, Brian,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you all day. Anna tells me you were in a sword-fight last night. Good God!” she gasped as he approached her table, “How did your face get all scratched?”

“Oh, the usual monsters have been giving me a rough time. But I give them a rough time, too. Are you working dinner?”

“No, thank God.” She brushed a damp strand of gray hair back from her forehead. “I guess it’ll be a real madhouse.”

“It’s a madhouse anyway. I believe our employer is insane.” He reached across the table, picked up her beer and drank it off. “Let’s go up to your room. I’ve got a few things to tell you.”

She eyed him cautiously. “Brian, you look like an old tomcat: this season’s cuts crossing last year’s scars.” After a moment she grinned and stood up. “My room? This way.” Duffy followed her up the stairs, reflecting that it might still be possible to talk some of the old woman out of the girl.

Epiphany’s room, a narrow one overlooking the stables, was neat, but not intimidatingly so. Framed paintings leaned out from every wall, mostly religious canvasses of her father’s; though Duffy thought he recognized one as the work of Domenico Veneziano. A bird twittered manically in a cage that hung over a chessboard, the pieces of which stood unmoved in their four basic ranks. Duffy absently moved the white king’s knight to the third row, over the ridge of the pawns.

“Sit down, Brian,” Epiphany said. Duffy dragged a chair up from beside the dresser and sat down on it while she perched on the bed.

“Let’s see,” the Irishman said. “I don’t know where to start, Piff. Well. Do you know why Aurelianus lured me here from Venice?”

“To keep peace in the dining room... which you really—”

“Never mind. No. That was the story, yes, but he’s dropped hints that that’s not what he wanted me for at all. He thinks the Turks are coming to Vienna just to wreck this brewery, and he thinks—equally insane—that I can prevent them. Me, a stranger he just encountered at random hundreds of miles from here. And listen, that isn’t all, he’s got a madman’s explanation for everything. You think Suleiman is the head man of the Ottoman Empire? Not according to Aurelianus! No, it’s Ibrahim, the Grand Vizir, who also happens to be the son of an air-demon or something. And maybe you imagined Emperor Charles counted for something here in the West? Hell, no! There’s an old fisherman in the forests outside town that’s the real king.” Duffy kicked the bed post, secretly irritated to find some of his scornful incredulity feigned.

“It is all a lot of senile fantasies on Aurelianus’ part,” he went on, trying to convince himself almost as much as Epiphany. “Certainly, the old fellow can work magic tricks and conjure spirits out of holes in the ground... but, Christ, we’re dealing with modern warfare here: cannons, troops, swords and mines. How can I save the damned brewery if the Hapsburg and Vatican armies fail to save Vienna? And if they do save the city, what point will there be in me standing vigilantly in front of the brewery flexing my sword-hand? Hell—Aurelianus might have been something once, but he surely doesn’t know what’s going on now. The fact is that Suleiman wants the empire of Charles V, and is coming to break the eastern wall of it—and Aurelianus thinks the whole affair revolves around me, Herzwesten beer, and some old hermit in the woods who imagines he’s a king!”

He had stood up in order to gesture more effectively during this speech, and now he sat down beside Epiphany on the bed. Her face was lit by the reflected, curtain-scrimmed orange light from the west, and for the first time since his return to Vienna she really looked familiar to him. This was Epiphany Vogel at last, beginning to shed the gray, acquired personality of Epiphany Hallstadt.

“Listen, Piff. I’ve done my share of killing Turks, and I don’t see how my presence in Vienna could affect the coming battle one way or the other. Now I happen to have saved some money, and on top of that for some reason they’re paying me a princely salary. I figure in a few weeks, early May, let’s say, we’ll have enough... that is, if it sounds as good to you as it does to me... what I mean is, what would you think of hoofing it to Ireland with me, before they lock Vienna’s gates? We could get married—finally!—and live in a real slate-roofed cottage and, I don’t know, raise goats or something. Don’t tell anybody, though.”

“Oh, Brian, it sounds wonderful!” She blotted a tear with a beer-damp sleeve. “I’d given up ideas like that till you came back from the dead. But can’t I tell Anna?”

“Nobody. Aurelianus could legally prevent you from leaving, because you owe him money.”

She scratched her head. “Do I?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember? He bought up all the debts and bad accounts that were your legacy from that worm-gut son of a bitch Hallstadt, may he be turning on a spit this minute in hell.”

Epiphany was shocked. “Brian! Max was your best friend once. You shouldn’t hate him.”

“It’s because he was my best friend that I do—did—hate him. I wouldn’t have minded so much if a stranger had taken you from me.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t dwell on all the stuff that’s behind us. We can still spend our twilight years together.”

“Twilight years? I don’t know about you, lady, but I’m as nimble and sharp as I was at twenty-five, which wasn’t all that long ago.”

“Very well,” she said with an indulgent smile. “Our... early afternoon years. Oh, God... do you really think it’s a possibility, after all this time?”

“After all this time,” Duffy asserted, “it’s an inevitability.”

He leaned forward and gave her a kiss, and it lingered past the point of being perfunctory. Gently transported by the dimness, and the brain-fumes of an afternoon’s wine-drinking, he was at last in the arms of Gustav Vogel’s impossibly attractive daughter; and he had, unnoticed, become again the Brian Duffy of 1512, whose glossy black hair did not yet have to be grown long in the back to cover a knotted white scar.

They fell back across the bed with the ponderousness, and something of the sound, of an old stone wall collapsing, and Epiphany pulled her mouth free and gasped, “You’re on duty tonight, aren’t you? And dinner is probably being served this minute.”

“Damn duty and dinner,” the Irishman muttered thickly; then, “Oh, hell, you’re right,” he said. “Easter evening, the drawing of the bock, is what Aurelianus specifically hired me to watch over. For the money he’s been paying me I guess I owe this much to him.”

He stood up reluctantly and looked down at Epiphany, who in the diminishing light was an indistinct figure stretched across the bed. “I’ll be back sometime,” he said.

“I hope so,” she answered in a small voice.

Chapter Twelve

CROWDED INTO A SHADOWY CORNER, Duffy and Aurelianus watched three beer-crazed shepherds jigging on one of the tables while nearly everyone in that quarter of the dining room sang and clapped in accompaniment.

“Don’t you think you should get those men down from there?” Aurelianus asked anxiously.

Duffy shook his head. “No. The celebration spirit would only break out in some other activity, like maybe pitching beer mugs through the window. They’re just enjoying themselves, and they’re paying you for the beer. Why interfere?”

“Well... all right. You’re the chucker-out, after all.” The old man leaned against, the wall, apparently a little bewildered by the rowdiness of the bock celebration. “Are you quite up to all this?” he asked. “Have you rested up at all since our underground enterprise last night?”

“What? I can’t hear you in this pandemonium.” Aurelianus repeated his last sentence, louder. “Oh! Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. These days it takes more than a few hobgoblins to disorder me.”

“Good. It’s a wise tolerance to cultivate.”

“It’s what? I didn’t—God help us.” Duffy shoved several people aside, spilling their beer in all directions, and, taking a flying hop over a table, bowled off their feet two mercenaries who had begun trading knife-thrusts. Before they could roll to their feet the Irishman had unsheathed his own dagger and cut, with two quick flicks of the blade, their belts, so that their hands now had to be occupied with holding their clothing together. They left the room, red-faced, accompanied by howls of laughter.

“Mr. Duffy!” Shrub cried, waving from atop the bar.

“In a minute, Shrub,” Duffy called, for on the other side of the room a suddenly irate merchant was slapping his wife and calling her vile names. Muttering a quick apology, the Irishman snatched up a brimming mug from a table he passed, and then dashed its foaming contents forcefully into the face of the misogynist shopkeeper; the man had just been filling his lungs for another burst of abuse, and was choking now on a couple of ounces of beer he’d inadvertently inhaled. Duffy lifted him from his chair by a handful of hair and gave him a resounding slap on the back, then slammed him back down into his seat. “There y’are, sir,” said the Irishman cheerfully. “We don’t want any of our patrons choking to death, eh?” He leaned down and said more sharply but in a whisper, “Or getting their ribs kicked in, which will happen to you if you touch that lady again or say any more insulting things to her. Do I make myself clear? Hah? Good.”

“Mr. Duffy!” Shrub called again. “There’s a man to see you—”

The table on which the shepherds were dancing collapsed then, spilling the three fuddled jiggers against the bar, which fell over against the wall with a multiple crash. Shrub leaped clear, but landed in a dish of roast pork on another table, and had to flee from the wrathful diners.

A little while later Duffy saw Bluto edge through the front door, and waved. The Irishman opened his mouth to shout that he’d squared it with the serving girls about Bluto’s free beer, then decided that such a statement, shouted across the dangerously crowded room, could only cause a riot. I’ll tell him when I can whisper it to him, Duffy decided. I wonder who this man is that Shrub tried to tell me about.

A youth with black curly hair was slouched against the wall, and pulled his hat down over his eyes as Duffy sidled past. That’s what’s-his-name, the Irishman thought, Jock, the lad Aurelianus sent out last night to keep an eye on that precious king of his. I’d swear I’ve seen him somewhere outside Vienna. Where?

Duffy tried to pursue the memory but was distracted by the necessity of rescuing one of the serving women from an old priest turned amorous by the evening’s heady brew. After encouraging the clergyman to recall the dignity he owed the cloth, Duffy lifted a mug from a passing tray and drained it in two long swallows.

“Here, here! Pay for that, sir!” came a voice from behind him. He turned and Bluto grinned at him.

“Hello, Bluto,” Duffy said. “I’ve told the girls you’re to get free bock till ten.”

“Till ten? What happens at ten?”

“You start paying for it.”

“I’d better get busy then. Oh,” Bluto spoke more quietly, “I finished checking the stores this afternoon. There’s about a hundred pounds of black powder missing.”

The Irishman nodded. “Nothing else?”

“No. Oh, maybe. One of the old forty-pounder siege bombards seems to be missing, but the armorer probably miscounted them when he made the list back in ’twenty-four. I mean, how could anyone carry away a gun like that?”

Duffy frowned. “I don’t know. But I’ll keep my eyes open. You haven’t seen Shrub around, have you?”

“Yes. He’s in the kitchen. I saw him peeking in here a minute ago, looking scared. Where are your Vikings?”

“In the stable, drinking and singing. I’m hoping that if I keep sending beer out to them they’ll stay there, and not try to join the party in here. Oh no, what are those shepherds doing to that guy over there?”

“Baptizing him with beer, it looks like.”

“Excuse me.”

Twenty minutes later Duffy sank exhausted onto a bench in the corner and signalled to Anna for a pitcher. He had put down so many uprisings in the still noisy room that people within earshot of him—not a great distance, to be sure—kept a wary eye on him; the rowdier drunkards were shaken and, in some cases, pulled down from chandeliers or out from under tables and told to stop it by their more sober friends.

Shrub edged his way nervously through the crowd, leading a tall, dark-faced man who wore a heavy cloak and a wide-brimmed hat. “Mr. Duffy,” the boy said before darting out of the room, “this gentleman wanted to see you. He’s a Spaniard.”

He looks more like a pirate than a gentleman, the Irishman thought, but I may as well be civil. “Yes, sir?”

“Can I sit with you?”

Duffy’s pitcher arrived then, giving him a more tolerant outlook. “Very well,” he said, “pull up a bench. Have you got a mug to drink from?”

The Spaniard swiped an empty one from the nearest table. “Yes.”

“Then have some beer.” Duffy filled both their mugs. “How can I be of service to you? Uh, the boy was mistaken, I assume, in describing you as a Spaniard.”

“Eh? Why do you say that?”

“Well, you’re stretching your vowels, but your accent’s Hungarian. Or so it seems to my possibly beer-dulled ears.”

“No, damn you, you’re correct. I’m Hungarian. But I think it’s your eyes that are beer-dulled if you don’t recognize me.”

The Irishman sighed, and with some effort focused his attention on the man’s shadowed face, expecting to recognize some old comrade-in-arms who would probably want to borrow money.

Then his stomach went cold, and he suddenly felt much more sober; it was a face he had last seen on that awful morning in the late summer of 1526 when Duffy, wounded and exhausted, had breasted the broad tide of the Danube and dragged himself onto the north bank. The Turkish banners had been flying over the conquered town of Mohács behind him, and sixty thousand slain Hungarian soldiers were being buried on the battle-furrowed plain. That morning, on the river’s north side, he had met the army of John Zapolya, for whom Archbishop Tomori and King Louis, both at that moment being laid unmourned in unmarked graves, had not waited. The battered Irishman had described to Zapolya the disastrous battle and rout of the previous afternoon, and Zapolya, shocked and angry, had within the hour led his army away westward. Duffy had rested in the woods for another day and then beaten a furtive, solitary retreat to the south, over the Alps to Venice. Years later he heard of Zapolya’s subsequent defection to the Turkish side.

“By God,” he breathed now, “how do you dare come here? After you sold your homeland to Suleiman I never thought I’d see you again... except perhaps over a gun-barrel or sword-point.”

John Zapolya’s eyes narrowed, but his sardonic smile didn’t falter. “My loyalty is and has always been to Hungary, and it has been for her welfare that I have done everything... even this tonight.”

Duffy was still appalled at the man’s very presence. “What are you doing here tonight?” he asked. “And why do you evidently suppose that I won’t shout to this roomful of people the fact that this ‘Spaniard’ is the man they’ve practically come to equate with Satan?”

“Well, lad, first because I’ve got a short-barrel monk’s gun levelled at your stomach under the table. Yes, I’m afraid it’s true. And second, there are four of my men in the alley out back, in what appears to be a haywagon.”

Duffy sighed wearily. “And what is it really, John?”

Zapolya sipped his beer, keeping his eyes on Duffy and his right hand under the table. “Oh, it’s a haywagon, but it holds more than hay.”

“Damn it, John, can’t you—”

“Very well, take it easy. There’s a siege bombard in it, loaded with a forty-pound ball of iron. Its barrel is laid horizontal, pointing at this building, and my men are carrying slowmatches.”

“If you’ll pardon my saying so, John, none of this makes any sense. Why should you risk your life sneaking into Vienna, and then settle for just killing me and blowing up this inn?” Keep him talking, Duffy told himself; play for time and maybe some drunk will lurch into him, spoil his aim for one precious second.

“Don’t play ignorant with me, old Duff,” said Zapolya with an easy smile. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know what this place is, and who you are.”

“Why must everyone speak to me in riddles?” Duffy complained. “What is it you want? Why are you sitting in here if you’ve got a damned siege-gun levelled at the back door?”

“Keep your voice down. I’m sitting here because I’m a dispensible piece in this game, a rook they’re willing to sacrifice for a solid checkmate. I’ve been sent here—at great personal risk, as you’ve noted—by my master, Ibrahim, to offer you a very high, very powerful position in the Eastern Empire.”

The amorous priest reeled by behind Zapolya’s chair in pursuit of one of the serving women, but earned a mental curse from the Irishman for failing to collide with the traitorous Hungarian’s chair. “Position?” Duffy sighed. “What sort of position?”

Zapolya stared at him with something like envy. “A higher one than mine. If you play this game right, you could replace Suleiman himself.”

Duffy laughed derisively and gulped some beer, using the motion to let his hand fall nearer his dagger. “I hate to be the first to tell you you’re crazy, John. If I am.” He strove to keep his tone light while trying to guess the position of the other man’s gun. “Why should Ibrahim want me to replace the Sultan? The greatest Sultan the Ottomans have ever had! This really is madness. And I can just imagine the delight the Turks would exhibit at being led by an Irishman. Ho ho.”

“Much the same, I imagine, as their delight at having an orphan from Parga appointed Grand Vizir over Ahmed Pasha, who’d deserved the post for years. These things do happen, and the next step is always unimaginable until it’s occurred.”

Can I flip this table over before he can pull the spark rasp of his gun? Duffy wondered. Probably not. “Why me, John?” he stalled. “Why Brian Duffy from Dingle? You haven’t explained that yet.”

Zapolya, for the first time during the conversation, looked disconcerted. “Brian... honestly, don’t you know who... what... you are?”

A wrenching thunderclap sounded from the rear of the building, and the windows rattled furiously. Ladies screamed, serving women dropped laden trays, and Zapolya instinctively half-turned in his chair. Duffy leaped to his feet, overturning the table on the Hungarian, whose pinned gun sent a lead ball splintering into the floor between Duffy’s boots.

There were screams and sword clangs from the back alley, and a fog of gunpowder smoke blew through the kitchen into the dining room, where the beer-fuddled crowd had united in a desperate, shouting rush for the front door. Duffy was knocked sprawling by a fat lady who was bulling her way through the press, and he lost sight of Zapolya.

“Bluto!” Duffy yelled. “Aurelianus, anyone! Grab that Spaniard! He’s Zapolya!”

No one heard him, and by the time he’d kicked and cursed his way clear of the shouting crowd, the Hungarian was nowhere to be seen. The Irishman gritted an oath and ran through the smoke-fogged kitchen.

The stableyard beyond was all aglare, lit by a furiously burning haywagon that sat on its collapsed axles in the middle of the yard. A great gap had been torn in the back fence, and through it he could see flames licking about among a scattered rubble-heap that had been a leather shop that afternoon. Bugge’s Vikings fingered the grips of their bared swords and kept wary eyes on the shadows; and after a moment the Irishman noticed three bodies sprawled on the paving stones.

“Aurelianus!” he called. “Bluto! Damn it, we can still catch him!”

“Who?” asked Aurelianus, who had followed him through the kitchen and now stood wringing his hands behind Duffy.

“Zapolya! He was here. Take a horse and race to the north gate. I’ll take the Carinthian gate. Have them close it and let no one out.” Duffy had seized a wild-eyed horse as he spoke, and now scrambled up onto its bare back. “Go!” Not pausing to see if the trembling old man obeyed him, Duffy put his heels to his mount’s ribs and galloped out of the red-lit yard.

Bluto cut another notch in the candle’s rim and watched the hot wax spill down the side. “Anna,” he said. “Another cup of bock.”

“It’s after ten, you know.”

“I know.” The hunchback looked around the dining room. Most of the revellers had trickled back, but the room’s warmth had been let out, and the chilly air reeked of gunpowder—it was a more subdued crowd gulping the beer now.

At the same moment, Duffy strode in from the kitchen and Aurelianus pushed open the street door. Both men looked tired and less than pleased. Without looking at each other they pulled up a chair and a bench at Bluto’s table.

“Uh, make that a pitcher, and two more cups, Anna,” the hunchback called. Duffy and Aurelianus nodded agreement.

“Did he leave through the Carinthian gate?” the old man asked after a minute of breath-catching. “I’ve got the north one closed and triply guarded.”

Duffy nodded. “He did. Three minutes before I got there. I followed him south for a half mile, but even in this moonlight I lost his tracks.”

Aurelianus sighed. “Are you sure it was him?”

“Yes. I used to know him, remember? He came to entice me over to the Turkish side, and to blow this place up. By the way, Bluto, I believe the missing siege mortar is in the middle of that bonfire out back.”

“It is,” Bluto confirmed. “You can see it through the flames.”

“I wonder,” Duffy sighed, filling a cup with the newly arrived beer, “why they aimed the thing the wrong way. Was it all a bluff? But why bring the gun at all if that was the case?”

“It wasn’t a bluff,” Bluto told him. “When your northmen saw those four men roll the wagon into the yard, they told them, in Norse and sign-language, to get it the hell out of there. Zapolya’s men told them to shut up, so the Vikings turned the wagon around themselves, intending to shove it back out into the street. That started a fistfight, and apparently these haywagon boys were carrying firepots or slowmatches. One of them was knocked unconscious and fell into the hay. A minute later the wagon was in flames, and a minute after that the mortar let go, taking out the fence and two buildings on the next street. Your Vikings figured this was an unfair weapon, so they unsheathed their swords and killed the remaining three intruders immediately.”

Duffy laughed grimly. “And I thought they’d never earn their keep.”

“He tried to entice you, you say?” Aurelianus asked, leaning forward. “By what persuasions?”

“Crazy things. He talked like you frequently do, as a matter of fact. That stranger-things-are-possible-than-you-know sort of nonsense.” Duffy refilled his mug. “He said if I went along and signed up, that Ibrahim would make me Sultan—and just depose old Suleiman, I guess.” He shook his head and sighed with genuine regret. “Poor old John. I remember him before he lost his mind.”

Aurelianus was deep in thought. “Yes,” he said finally, “I can see what Ibrahim must have had in mind. A wild gambit indeed! Zapolya’s mission was to buy you over or, failing that, to kill you. And to blow up this inn in any case.”

“Ibrahim could have sent a better messenger,” Duffy observed. “John never got around to mentioning money.”

Aurelianus stared at him. “Money? He offered you the third highest position in the Eastern Empire!” He shook his head. “Oh hell. I don’t know; maybe it’s a good thing you persist in regarding these matters in such a mundane light. Maybe that’s your strength.”

“Ibrahim wants Duffy here for a sultan?” Bluto snickered. “I thought sultans were supposed to be tee-totallers.”

The Irishman wasn’t listening. “He did seem a little... at a loss, right at the end, like a man offering gold coins to a savage whose tribe barters only hides and fish. He said, ‘Do you honestly not know who you are?’ and then that gun went off.” He turned hesitantly to Aurelianus. “Do you think... you don’t think... Ibrahim really sent him? To offer me... that?”

Aurelianus looked away. “I can’t be sure,” he said, but Duffy got the impression that the old man’s uncertainty was feigned.

“Who am I, then? What did he mean by all that?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” Aurelianus said pleadingly. “This is the sort of thing it’s no use telling you about until you’ve more than half figured it out already. If I explained everything now, you’d laugh and say I was crazy. Have patience.”

Duffy was tired, or he might have pursued the point. As it was, he just shrugged. “Let it lie, then. I’m fast losing interest in all this anyway.” His decision, to flee with Epiphany had given him a pleasant sense of dissociation with all of Aurelianus’ schemes and theories. “More beer here, Anna! This pitcher’s suddenly empty. Oh, by the way, Aurelianus, when do they draw the Herzwesten Dark?”

Aurelianus blinked. “Who in hell have you been talking to? Bluto, would you leave us for a moment? This is a private business.”

“Certainly, certainly!” Bluto stood up and went to another table, intercepting, to the Irishman’s chagrin, the new pitcher.

“Who,” Aurelianus asked earnestly, “told you about the Dark?”

“Nobody told me. I heard a noise in the cellar and found some red-haired fellow wandering around down there. I followed him through the door in the wall, and saw that huge vat. Is all Herzwesten beer drawn from that?”

“Yes. Do you... have any idea who he was?” The old man’s voice quivered with supressed excitement.

“Me? No. He disappeared in the vat room. I looked all over for a secret door, but couldn’t find one.” Duffy laughed. “I figured he must have been a ghost.”

“He was. Did he speak?”

“No. You’ve seen him yourself?” Duffy didn’t relish the ghost idea, and wanted to establish the intruder’s identity.

“I’m afraid I haven’t. I’ve only heard him described by those who have.”

“Who,” Duffy asked, “is he?”

Aurelianus sat back. “I’ll tell you that. But first let me mention that the vat you saw has been in operation ever since this brewery was started three and a half thousand years ago. Parts of it have been replaced, and it’s been enlarged twice, but we... they... always kept the beer that was in there. It’s a lot like the solera method of blending sherry. We pour the new wort in at the top and draw the beer out further down, so there’s always a blending and aging process going on. In fact, there are probably still traces of the first season’s barley in there, thirty-five hundred years old.”

Duffy nodded civilly, reflecting, though, that the surest way to get Aurelianus to talk about chickens was to ask him about cheese.

“Ordinarily,” Aurelianus went on, “such a vat would have to be cleaned annually. We’ve avoided that necessity by leaving out the bottom boards entirely, so that the staves, and the beer, rest directly on the naked earth.”

Duffy gagged and set down his cup. “You mean the beer is mixed right in with the mud? God help us, I never thought—”

“Relax, will you? The beer seeps down into the dirt, yes, but the dirt doesn’t rise. We don’t stir it. We just gently drain off the beer at various levels, and the mud isn’t riled. Have you ever tasted better beer?”

“Well, no.”

“Then stop acting like a kid who just learned what tripes are.” The old man squinted critically at Duffy. “I hope you’re ready for all this. You ask questions and then get all upset at the beginnings of an answer.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Duffy promised.

“Good enough. The man you saw was a ghost. Sorry. When you saw him he was returning to his grave.” He leaned forward again. “By Llyr, I’m going to give it to you direct—it was the ghost of Finn Mac Cool, returning to whatever remains today of his earthly dust. Finn is buried, you see, six feet directly below that fermenting vat.”

Duffy blinked. “And there’s no bottom to it? He must be absolutely dissolved in beer.”

“Right. And the beer upward is saturated with his... essence and strength, the lower levels most strongly.”

“Then this Dark, being the lowest, must be nearly Finn-broth.”

“Spiritually speaking, that’s right,” Aurelianus agreed. “Though physically it’s just unusually heavy, superaged beer. Don’t get the idea that it clots, or that we get bones and teeth clogging the spigot.”

“Oh no!” Duffy said airily, though privately resolving never to drink any of it. “So when is it drawn? I’ve never heard even a hint of it.”

“That’s because the last time the Dark was drawn was in the year 829; when the sons of poor Emperor Louis were turning against him, as I recall. We’ll draw it again on the thirty-first of October of this year. That’s right, we let every drop of Dark age seven hundred years.”

“But good Lord,” Duffy exclaimed, “beer can’t age that long. Brandy or claret couldn’t age that long.”

“Well,” Aurelianus admitted, “you can’t really call the stuff beer after all that time, that’s true. It becomes something else. Something similar in many ways to the wine you drank in Bacchus’ tavern, in Trieste. And you noticed, I assume, that the Dark spigot was only a few inches above the dirt floor? Only the next three or four inches above that are drawn at a time, so the Dark is always a terribly limited quantity.”

“Is there much demand for it?” Duffy asked, certain that there couldn’t possibly be.

“Yes... but not from beer drinkers. Because of its, ah, source, the Dark is very potent stuff, psychically, spiritually... magically. Physically too, as a matter of fact—it often shows levels of alcohol content theoretically impossible from a natural fermentation process. Anyway, yes, much more demand than the meagre supply can accommodate. It, in fact, is what Antoku wanted from me—a cupful of it to maintain the life he should have given up a thousand years ago. He was killed as an infant in a Japanese sea-battle, you see. I did let him have a cupful last time—” He halted and glared defensively at Duffy; then smiled awkwardly, coughed and went on. “In any case, he thinks it is now his right. He is, I’m afraid, incorrect. And all the other Dark Birds, the Ethiopian, the several Hindus, the New World aborigine and the rest of them, they too hope for a sip of it, and some of their cases are nearly as desperate as Antoku’s. But they won’t get any, either.”

“Who will you give it to?” Duffy asked, beginning in spite of himself to get curious about the brew. After all, he thought, that wine in Trieste was very nice.

“Antoku evidently thinks I intend to give it to you,” said Aurelianus, “since he set those afrits onto you. Or maybe that was supposed to be a warning to me that he could kill someone even more vital.”

“Uh huh. So who does get it?” Evasion is this man’s second nature, the Irishman reflected.

“This time? Our King—the Fisher King. I told you, didn’t I, that he’s ill? And so is the West. Which way the connection works I’m still not certain, but the connection unarguably exists; when the King is well, the West is well.”

“And this beer will cure him?” asked Duffy, trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

“Yes. Our King is weakened, injured, his strength dissipated—and there’s the strength and character of Finn, the first King, in the Dark. He’ll be able to put his lands in order again.”

“And you’ll draw the stuff in October? Can’t you do it a bit early? After all, when you’re talking about seven centuries, a few months one way or the other...”

“No,” said Aurelianus. “It can’t be hurried. The cycle has to come round completely, and there are stars and tides and births to be taken into account as much as fermentation and beercraft. On October thirty-first we’ll draw the Dark, and not a day before.” He raised worried eyes to Duffy. “Perhaps you can see now why Ibrahim is so anxious to destroy the brewery before then.”

At two in the morning the remainder of the crowd was sent home, and the lights were put out as the employees, having decided the clean-up could wait until the next morning, stumbled off to bed. Duffy took a walk out back, but all fires had been put out, his north-men snored peacefully in the stable and there was no evidence of smoldering bombs, so he went back inside.

Somehow he wasn’t sleepy, in spite of having slept only four hours the night before, and all the drinking and running around of this evening. He sat down at his table in the dark dining room. As usual, he thought, Aurelianus managed to duck the question I most wanted an answer to, which is: Who or what am I in this vast scheme? Why has everyone from Ibrahim to Bacchus taken an interest in me?

He silently lifted his chair further back into the shadows then, for he heard two low voices in the kitchen conversing in Italian.

“Is there any word from Clement?” asked one.

“As a matter of fact,” replied the other, “it looks like he will send troops this time. He’s even trying for some kind of temporary truce with Luther so that the West can unreservedly unite against the Ottoman Empire.”

The two speakers emerged from the kitchen and started up the stairs without noticing Duffy. One was Aurelianus and the other was the swarthy, curly-haired young man, Jock, who’d pulled his hat down over his face when Duffy had passed him earlier in the evening.

Huh! the Irishman thought; didn’t Aurelianus tell me in Venice that he didn’t speak Italian? And speaking of Venice, it was there I first saw this Jock fellow, who introduced himself, that Ash Wednesday evening, as Giacomo Gritti. What connections are these?

The sorcerer and the young man ascended the stairs, and their whispering voices died away above. Those two are working together, then? Duffy mused. That would explain why young Gritti saved my life and directed me to a safe ship, that morning on the Venice docks, though it certainly doesn’t shed any light on the ambush he and his brothers sprang on me the night before. Unless that fight was somehow staged... ?

One thing is sure—I’ve been lied to a number of times, and can’t even guess why. I don’t like it when strangers pry into my affairs, but I absolutely can’t bear it when they know more about my affairs than I do myself.

He stood up and walked to the servants’ hall, picking up an empty beer mug on the way.

He placed his feet carefully on the cellar stairs as he descended them so as not to awaken the sleeping Gambrinus, and then padded cautiously across the stone floor to the door the ghost had gone through that afternoon. The hinges must have been recently oiled, for they didn’t squeak when the Irishman slowly drew the door open. He groped his way to the huge vat in the pitchy blackness, and then felt for the lowest of the three spigots. It turned grittily when he exerted some strength; then when he judged he’d drawn half a cup he shut the valve and, closing the vat-room behind him, hurried up the stairs to the dining room.

He lit the candle at his table and peered suspiciously at the few ounces of thick black liquid that swirled in the bottom of the mug. Looks pretty vile, he thought. Then he sat down, and even without bringing the cup to his nose he smelled the heady, heavily aromatic bouquet. God bless us, he thought rapturously, this is the nectar of which even the finest, rarest bock in the world is only the vaguest hint. In one long, slow, savoring swallow he emptied the cup.

His first thought was: Sneak downstairs, Duffy lad, and fill the cup this time. He got to his feet—or tried to, rather, and was only able to shift slightly in his chair. What’s this? he thought apprehensively; I recover from a lifetime’s worth of dire wounds only to be paralyzed by a mouthful of beer? He attempted again to heave himself out of the chair, and this time didn’t move at all.

Then he was moving—no, being carried. He was exhausted, and a frigid wind hacked savagely through the joints in his plate armor. He rolled over, moaning with the pain in his head.

“Lie still, my King,” came a tense, worried voice. “You’ll only open your wound again if you thrash about so.”

He groped chilly fingers to his head, and felt the great gash in his temple, rough with dried, clotted blood. “Who... who has done this?” he gasped.

“Your son, King. But rest easy—you slew him even as he dealt you the blow.”

I’m glad of that, anyway, he thought. “It’s frightful cold,” he said. “My feet are as numb as if they belonged to someone else.”

“We’ll rest soon,” came the voice of the attendant. “When we reach the bank of yonder lake.”

He painfully raised his head from the pallet on which he was being carried, and saw ahead a vast, still lake reflecting the full moon. After a while he was set down by his two panting companions, and he could hear water splashing gently among rocks and weeds, and could smell the cold, briny breath of the lake.

“My sword!” he whispered. “Where is it? Did I—”

“Here it is.” A heavy hilt was laid in his hand.

“Ah. I’m too weak—one of you must throw it into the lake. It’s my last order,” he added when they began to protest. Grudgingly, one of them took the sword and strode away through the shadowy underbrush.

He lay on the ground, breathing carefully, wishing his heart wouldn’t pound so. My rushing blood is sure to force the wound open again, he thought, and I’ll die soon enough even without that.

The attendant came back. “I’ve done as you said, Sire.”

Like hell, he thought. “Oh? And what did you see when you threw it in?”

“See? A splash. And then just ripples.”

“Go back, and this time do as I said.”

The man shambled away again, confused and embarrassed. It’s the jewels in the hilt, the dying man thought. He can’t bear to think of them at the bottom of the lake.

The attendant looked subdued and scared when he returned this time. “I did it, Sire.”

“What did you see?”

“A hand and arm rose out of the water and caught the sword by the grip, before it could splash, whirled the sword three times in the air, and then withdrew below the surface.”

“Ah.” He relaxed at last. “Thank you. I want to leave no debts.”

A boat rocked at the edge of the water now, and a woman in muddy shoes leaned worriedly over him.

“Our son has killed me,” he told her, controlling his chattering teeth long enough to speak the sentence.

“Put him aboard my boat,” she said. “He’s not long for this world.’

He awoke frightened, on a hardwood floor, not daring to move for fear of attracting the notice of something he couldn’t name. It was dark, and he didn’t want to rouse his memory. Whatever has happened, he thought, whatever this place is, whatever is the name of my enemy—and myself—I’m better off ignorant of them. If I know nothing, admit nothing, acknowledge nothing, perhaps they’ll leave me alone at last, and let me sleep. He drifted again into treasured oblivion.

Chapter Thirteen

“INSENSIBLY DRUNK! I expected it, of course. And on my beer, which I daresay you neglected to pay for, eh?”

Duffy opened his eyes and blinked up at Werner. He tried to speak, but produced only a grating moan; which was just as well, since he’d intended to voice only reflexive abuse. The Irishman loathed waking up on the floor, for one couldn’t, in that situation, pull the covers up and postpone arising. One had immediately to get up and begin dealing with things.

Getting to his feet proved a little easier than he’d expected. “Shut up, Werner,” he said quietly. “Don’t mess about in things that don’t concern you. And tell one of the girls to bring me a big breakfast.” Werner just stared at him, anger growing in his face like a spark on a fur cloak. “Did you even hear,” Duffy went on, “about the siege gun somebody tried to blow this place up with last night? If it hadn’t been for those Vikings in the stable, you and the rest of the city’s dogs would right now be scavenging through a rubble pile on this spot.” Werner looked only bewildered now. “Your beer,” Duffy added contemptuously, shambling to his table and collapsing into a chair.

Like a man beaten by bandits who sits up in the ditch later and feels for broken teeth or ribs, the Irishman gingerly prodded his memories. I’m Brian Duffy, he thought with cautious satisfaction, and I’m in love with Epiphany Vogel and employed by Aurelianus. It’s the day after Easter, 1529. I’m Brian Duffy, and no one else.

His breakfast and Lothario Mothertongue arrived simultaneously. Duffy concentrated on the former.

“Brian,” Mothertongue said, tossing his cloak across a bench and rubbing his chilly hands together, “the time draws nigh. I am gathering my knights about me once more. And,” he smiled graciously, “there is a place for you at my new round table. I heard of your courageous behavior last night.” He turned a speculative eye on the Irishman. “Tell me, do you feel anything, any long-lost echoes, when I say the name... Tristan?”

Duffy, his mouth full, shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Mothertongue went on, his voice tight with an intensity of emotion. “Tristan! Tristan!” He leaned forward and shouted in the Irishman’s face, “Can your hear me, Tristan?”

Duffy seized a bowl of milk from the table and flung it into Mothertongue’s face. “Snap out of it, Lothario,” he said.

Mothertongue got to his feet, outraged and dripping. “I was wrong,” he hissed. “There’s no place in Camelot for you. I don’t know who you may once have been, but your soul is now polluted and corrupt, a swamp wherein crawl mind-adders.”

Duffy wanted to be angry, but was laughing too hard. “By God,” he gasped finally, “it was looking like a gloomy day till you showed up, Lothario! Mind-adders, hey? Ho ho.” Mothertongue turned and stalked out of the room.

Shrub came dashing in as Duffy was polishing off the last of his black bread. “Mr. Duffy,” he said. “Was there really a swordfight in here last night?”

“No. Not while I was sober enough to notice, anyway.”

“There was a Turkish bomb out back, though, wasn’t there?”

“I guess you could say so. How does the yard look this morning?”

“Like a battlefield. That burned-up wagon is sitting right in the middle like a black whale-skeleton, and there’s dried blood on the cobblestones, and Mr. Wendell’s leather shop and warehouse are kicked to bits. He’s real mad. Says Aurelianus is going to pay through the nose.” The image obviously impressed Shrub.

“Ah. No other damages, I trust?”

“No. Well, some kids were up on the roof, I think. Messing around.”

“Kids? Did you see them?”

“No, but there’s little faces carved all over the roof, and stars and crosses and Latin words written in chalk on the walls.”

“Well, get a couple of the other boys, fill some buckets and climb up there and wash as much of it off as you can, will you? I suppose—”

“No, don’t, Shrub,” interrupted Aurelianus, who had padded up behind Duffy’s chair. “Leave those markings alone, and don’t let anyone try to clean them off.”

“Yes, sir,” Shrub nodded, and darted through the kitchen door, eager to leave with the easier order.

Duffy looked up as Aurelianus pulled out the bench Mothertongue had vacated; the old man was paler than usual, but his eyes glittered with extraordinary vitality, and his black clothes seemed to fit his narrow frame better today. “May I sit down?” he asked.

“Of course. Why leave those drawings on the walls?”

“Why leave your armor on in a fight?” He let out a bark of laughter. “After all the trouble you and I went to, down below, to summon guards, do you want to erase their warding marks? Be satisfied with human adversaries—you wouldn’t want to take on the... creatures that are repelled by those runes and cantrips and faces.”

“Oh.” The Irishman scowled. “Well, for matter of that, I don’t feel like taking anybody on, these days.”

Aurelianus laughed again, as if Duffy had made a joke. “Eat up, there,” he said. “I figure you and I can ride out this morning and bring the King inside.”

“An interesting idea,” said the Irishman, “but no, I’m afraid not this morning. I don’t feel well, and I’m supposed to visit Epiphany’s crazy old father.” Actually he had no plans for the morning, and would have preferred nearly any activity to calling on the old painter—especially after having suffered those lake-hallucinations at his boarding house three days ago—but he wanted to test Aurelianus, see how much latitude and freedom his new position was to allow him.

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter too much,” said the old sorcerer with a shrug.

Duffy was pleased. I’m my own man at last, he thought.

“That’s Gustav Vogel, isn’t it?” Aurelianus asked suddenly. “I remember him. He did me quite a service at one time—it’s one reason I’m helping his poor daughter. Is he doing any paintings these days?”

Duffy thought about it. He couldn’t remember the old artist working on anything but that pen-and-ink wall drawing. “No...” he began.

“I didn’t think so,” interrupted Aurelianus, who seemed to have no patience with slow speech this morning. “But this is beside the point. I told you I’ve got a sword to replace the one you broke two days ago; come up to my room now and take a look at it.”

“You can’t bring it down here?”

Aurelianus was already on his feet. “No,” he said cheerfully.

Duffy stood and began unsteadily to follow the old man up the stairs. The action reminded him of having seen Aurelianus with Giacomo Gritti the night before, and he halted. “Didn’t you tell me in Venice that you can’t speak Italian?” he asked suspiciously.

“Why are you stopping? I don’t know; I may have. Why?”

“What’s your connection with Giacomo Gritti? Or Jock, as you call him now? I saw you chatting with him last night. You had better tell me the truth this time, too.”

“Oh, you saw us? He’s been in my employ for years. His name’s not really Gritti, by the way. It’s Tobbia. I have to have a lot of agents in that area—Venice, the Vatican. And I do speak Italian. If I told you I didn’t, though, I’m sure I had some good reason.” He took another step up.

“Not so fast. If he works for you, why did he and his ‘brothers’ try to kill me the night I met you?”

“Honestly, Brian, can’t you trust me? I told them to provoke a fight with you so that I’d have an excuse to speak to you and offer you the job you now have. And they weren’t really trying to kill you. I’d instructed them to make the skirmish look convincing, but to deliver no real, damaging blows. Besides, I knew you could take care of yourself. Now come on.”

He got three steps higher before the Irishman’s hand on his shoulder stopped him again. “What if I’d delivered a real, damaging blow to one of them? And what do you—”

“If you’d killed one of them,” Aurelianus interrupted impatiently, “I’d simply have phrased my proposal to you differently. Instead of praising your tolerant restraint in a fight, I’d have complimented you on your decisive, no-nonsense reactions. It doesn’t matter. There are much more important—”

“It matters to me. And what do you mean, you knew I could take care of myself? I thought that evening was the first time you’d seen or heard of me. Why did you go to so much trouble to get me here, when there must have been a dozen guys in Vienna alone that could do the job better than I can? Damn it, I want some explanations that don’t raise a hundred more questions. I—”

Aurelianus sighed. “I will,” he said, “explain all when we get to my room.”

Duffy squinted suspiciously at him. “All?”

The old man looked vaguely offended as they resumed their ascent of the stairs. “I’m a man of my word, Brian.”

Aurelianus’ room at the Zimmermann Inn looked very like his room in Venice. It was a clutter of tapestries, books, scrolls, jewelled daggers, colored liquids in glass jars, odd sextant-like devices, and a cabinet of good wines. The curtains were drawn against the morning brightness, and the chamber was inefficiently lit by a half-dozen candles. The air was close and musty.

“Sit down,” he said, waving Duffy to the only chair free of piled clothing. Aurelianus lifted from a small box another of his dried snakes, bit the end of the tail off and lit the thing in a candle flame. Soon he was seated on the floor, leaning against a bookcase and puffing smoke contentedly.

“I’ll try to start from some sort of beginning,” he said. “I’ve mentioned that this brewery is, in a sense, the heart of the West, and the tomb of an ancient king whom your Vikings are not entirely incorrect in calling Balder. Suleiman is the spearhead of the eastern half of the world, which is trying to strike at us now, while we’re in a state of discord and weakness.”

“Which is because the Western King isn’t well... ?” Duffy hazarded.

“Right. Or else he’s not well because his kingdom is unsteady. It’s the same thing, really. Cure one and you’ve cured the other. And he’ll be strengthened and renewed in six months, come the drawing of the Dark. Suleiman, knowing that, is going to try to destroy this brewery, and take Vienna into the bargain, before then. Before long Ibrahim will make some efforts, I expect, to send supernatural combatants down on us, but the elf-signs and faces on the walls should guard us from that. See that Shrub keeps those markings from being cleaned off.

“Anyway, this is a... dire pass we’ve come to. The East has flexed her sword-arm against a number of our eastern outposts, and is now limbering up for a lunge directly toward the heart, while the west languishes in defenseless chaos. Observing the seeds of this situation many years ago, our Fisher King made a tremendous request of the gods. God, if you prefer the singular.” He took a long, popping draw on the snake, and puffed out a startling succession of smoke-rings.

Duffy pressed his lips together and shifted in his seat. “What request?”

“To return, for a while, the greatest leader the West ever had. To loan us one hero from the domains of death long enough to parry this eastern threat. The request was granted... and the man was born again, dressed in flesh once more.”

“Uh,” Duffy said hesitantly, “who is he?”

“He’s remembered by a number of names. The one you’d know best is Arthur. King Arthur.”

“Oh no!” Duffy burst out. “Wait a moment—are you trying to tell me there’s truth in Lothario Mothertongue’s babblings? All this round-table-and-Camelot stuff he’s always spouting? Listen, if he’s King Arthur, the one these fool gods have sent to save us, the Turks will have taken Vienna by the end of next week.”

“There is some truth in his babbling,” Aurelianus said. “But no, relax, he’s not Arthur. He must be a powerfully sensitive clairvoyant, though, to have grasped the situation unaided and come directly to Vienna. It’s very sad, really.” He shrugged. “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

Suddenly Duffy suspected where all this was leading. Well, he thought, let the old bastard say it. “So who is Arthur?” he asked carelessly. “You?”

“Good heavens, no.” The old man laughed and took another long pull on the snake, making the head glow nearly white. “I’m coming to it; let me unravel the story in order. It was my job to find this reincarnated Arthur, for I knew—by certain signs and meteorological phenomena—when he was born, but not where. I began searching the western lands for him about twenty years ago, when he’d have been in his mid-twenties. I found traces, psychic footprints, of him in a number of countries, but the long years passed—”

“Did you find him?” Duffy asked.

“Well, yes, to omit a lengthy but fascinating tale.”

“And,” said Duffy tiredly, feeling like a participant in some ritual dialogue, “where is he?”

Aurelianus puffed on the snake and stared curiously at the Irishman. “Sitting in the chair across from me.”

“You mean me?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

The Irishman started snickering, and it built up to a laughing fit that lasted half a minute, at the end of which time his eyes were wet with tears and he’d begun to twist the straw plug out of a bottle of Spanish red wine. “This is certainly my week,” he observed, a little hysterically. “First those northmen decide I’m Sigmund, and now you tell me I’m Arthur.”

“They’re two names for the same person. Didn’t you ever even wonder about the parallel between Arthur demonstrating his right to the throne by being the only man able to pull the sword from the stone, and Sigmund proving his by being the only one who could pull Odin’s sword out of the Branstock Oak?” He nodded. “Obviously there’s another true clairvoyant in Denmark somewhere, who sent Bugge and his men here so unerringly.”

“God help us,” Duffy said, adding with some sarcasm, “Were they correct also, then, in assuming you’re Odin?”

Aurelianus narrowed his eyes mysteriously, then relaxed and grinned. “Well, no. That was an excess of religious enthusiasm on their part. Helpful, though.”

Duffy felt vaguely nauseated, and blamed it on the snake fumes. He’d got the plug out of the bottle, but now couldn’t imagine drinking any of the wine. I don’t care if I was Arthur in that lake-dream last night, he thought, I’m Brian Duffy now and I’ll not have my identity usurped by some old dead king. He looked at the litter surrounding him in the artificially dimmed room. I’m not a part of this morbid, dusty, sorcerous world, he told himself insistently.

“That, of course,” Aurelianus was saying, “is why the dwarfs and mountain creatures protected you—they knew who you were, even though you didn’t yourself. And that’s why Ibrahim tried to prevent your arrival here by sending winged afrits, and having his lackey Zapolya send conventional assassins, to intercept you. When he failed to kill you he tried to bribe you over to the eastern side. The offer of the sultanate, I believe, was genuine.”

The little black-clad man hopped to his feet, opened a cabinet and groped in its dark interior. “Here,” he said softly, lifting out a long, straight sword and handing it to the Irishman. Duffy stared at it; it was longer and heavier than the swords he was used to, and the hilt, above a grip long enough for two hands, was a simple crosspiece.

Memories now rushed vehemently through his mind, uncontrollable. Calad Bolg, he thought, the sword remembered in the legends as Excalibur. He recognized it also from his dream—it was the sword he’d ordered his attendant to throw into the lake—and from other dreams he’d had during his life, all of which he’d forgotten upon awakening, but which came back to him now. I’ve killed quite a few men with this, he thought, many long years ago. I killed Mordred, my son, with it.

“You recognize it.” There was only a hint of a question-mark at the end of Aurelianus’ sentence.

“Of course,” Duffy nodded sadly. “But what about Brian Duffy?”

“You’re still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you’re Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.”

“I suppose so.” He hefted the sword and tried a ponderous cut-and-thrust, chopping a notch in the cabinet. “It’s awful heavy,” he said, “and I like a fuller guard. Swordplay has changed since the days when this was forged. They... we... wore heavy armor then, and swords weren’t used for defense.”

“It’s a good sword,” Aurelianus protested.

“Certainly, to hang on a wall or chop trees down with. But if I were going to use this in combat, I’d want the blade narrowed and shortened by at least a foot, the grip shortened by five inches, and a solid bell-guard welded around this crosspiece.”

“Are you out of your mind? That’s the finest sword ever made. I don’t think you could shorten the blade—that isn’t everyday steel, you know.”

“I remember how well it hews armor. But we never parried in those days, just traded axe-type blows until one guy’s armor gave way. I’d take a swing at someone now with this, and he’d disengage and put his point in my nose before I’d even begun to swing mine back in line. I think I’d be more comfortable with a regular rapier, thanks. Save this for scything wheat.”

Aurelianus was outraged. “This is the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard. It’s Calad Bolg, damn it! Show some respect.”

Duffy nodded, acknowledging the reproach. “Sorry. I’ll take it out back and try a few passes at a fence post.”

“Fine. In about an hour we’ll ride out for the King.”

Duffy nodded and turned to leave, then halted and spun to face Aurelianus again. “You... wore your hair longer then. And you had a beard.”

The old man laughed softly and nodded. “Your memory is clearing, Arthur.”

“Yes.” At the door Duffy paused, and said over his shoulder, “You used to be a much calmer man, Merlin.”

“Times were simpler then,” Aurelianus nodded sadly.

The Irishman slowly picked his way back down the stairs. He felt as if the walls and roofs of his mind were being shaken, and falling away here and there to reveal an older landscape. But those walls and hallways are what’s Brian Duffy, he thought mournfully. And now that I can remember both lives, I can see I’ve had much more enjoyment and relaxation as Duffy than I did as Arthur.

At the bottom of the stairs he stopped. I may be... this primordial king, he thought, but by God I’ll live in the crumbling personality that is Brian Duffy. And I won’t carry this sword; the very sight and feel of it are impacts against those poor mind-walls.

He bounded back up the stairs and rapped on Aurelianus’ door with the sword’s pommel. The sorcerer pulled the door open, surprised to see him back so soon. “What is it?” he asked.

“I... I don’t want this sword. I’ll get another somewhere. Here.” Aurelianus just stared at him. “Look,” Duffy insisted, almost tearfully, “You’d better take it, or I’ll pitch it into the canal—or that moonlit lake next time I come across it,” he added, half to himself.

At that Aurelianus paled and reeled back. “What? What moonlit lake? Llyr help us, it’s only April! Tell me.”

The Irishman was surprised by this response. “Don’t get excited,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I think it’s probably just an alcohol-hallucination. I’m sure it’s nothing to—”

“Tell me.”

“—get upset about... Oh, very well. Twice on, uh, Friday, in the middle of the day, I saw very clearly—even felt the cold wind of it—a wide lake under a full moon. And then—”

“Who were you with?” Aurelianus snapped. “You must have been with some doomed or dying person, for whom death’s door was already ajar.”

Duffy was impressed and uneasy. “Yes, I was. Epiphany’s father, as a matter of fact.”

The sorcerer looked a little relieved. “I hoped it was something like that. What you were seeing in these... visions?... was—”

“It was where King Arthur died,” Duffy said.

“How did you know that?” exclaimed the sorcerer, upset again.

“Because last night I saw it again, much clearer and for a longer time. I was a wounded, dying king being carried to the marge of this lake. I had one of my few remaining retainers throw my sword—this sword—into the water, and he said a hand rose from the water to catch it. Then there was a boat I was being lifted into, and my sister was in it, and I told her our son—our son?—had killed me.”

The wizard was gaping at him in dismay. “Even having remembered Arthur’s life, you shouldn’t yet be able to see the end of it. Where were you when you saw this one, and who were you with?”

Duffy didn’t want to admit having stolen a cupful of the Dark, so he just shrugged and said, “I was alone. In the dining room after everyone went to bed.”

Aurelianus fell into the one uncluttered chair. “This is terrible,” he muttered. “Something is fast approaching, something your mind can recognize only in terms of that lakeside memory. The last time this thing came, you see, that’s the form it took.” He looked up. “In other words, the spirit that is Arthur will shortly be returning to... death, Avalon, the afterlife.”

Duffy raised his eyebrows. “Where does that leave me?”

“I don’t know, damn it. Probably dead, since of course when you die his spirit would automatically be forced to go.”

“Great. Couldn’t Arthur make his exit and leave me alive?”

“Choose to leave, you mean, without being evicted from your body by your death? I suppose so. Though you’d probably die anyway, of psychic shock from the mental amputation.”

The Irishman was not as frightened as he would have been if he didn’t know that last night’s vision had been prompted more by the cup of Dark than the imminency of death, Arthur’s or his own or both; but this was still far from reassuring news. “Well, why the hell don’t you know any of this?” he demanded angrily. “You’re a sorcerer, aren’t you, a wizard, a witch-doctor, a scrutinizer of chicken entrails? Fine! Haul out your crystal ball and take a look! See if I survive all this.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could,” Aurelianus said, in quiet contrast to Duffy’s shouting. “The fact, though, is that all auguries and portents are blind to our current situation and the coming battle. I don’t like it at all—it appalls me to think that Zapolya could have been so near and so well-informed without my having any indication of it; and to realize that he could be anywhere right now with, not impossibly, a force of armed men at his disposal. You can see why we’ve got to get the King safely inside immediately.”

The wizard shook his head, staring at the old sword. “For fifteen hundred years all the precognitive arts have been gradually dimming out, like vision as twilight falls; they’re all based, you see,’ on the old Chaldean principles of astrology, which relied on the existence of predictable courses, a predetermined world history. And they did work well for thousands of years. But in the last fifteen centuries the equations of predestination have been increasingly fouled by an element of... randomness, or something I can only perceive as randomness...” His voice trailed off. His eyes were on the sword, but his gaze had turned inward.

The Irishman thought about it, then shrugged. “I’m afraid I’m on the side of the randomness. The idea of predestination, lack of free will, disgusts me. Astrology, in fact, has always disgusted me. And I think you picked the wrong picture to illustrate your point—it doesn’t sound to me like a man’s vision dimming as night approaches, so much as an owl’s when the sun rises.”

Aurelianus’ face slowly wrinkled itself into a wry smile. “I’m afraid,” he admitted, “your analogy is better. Ibrahim and I, and Bacchus, and your mountain guides, and your winged adversaries of the other night, are creatures of the long, brutal night of the world. You and the Fisher King are creatures of the coming day, and you can’t really feel at home in this pre-dawn dimness. In any case, to return to my point, though the prescient arts are deteriorating, they’ve still got a clear century or two of effectiveness left. I, in common with a lot of other beings, am accustomed to relying on them as you do on your eyes and ears. But in this conflict, this problem of Vienna and the beer and Arthur and Suleiman, they’re completely in the dark, blinded.”

Duffy raised his eyebrows. “And what is so bright about any light here that it should so dazzle all you cellar-denizens?”

Aurelianus was getting annoyed. “Don’t run it into the ground,” he snapped. “It’s because you are or will be centrally involved in it all. You’re an anomaly, a phenomenon not allowed for by the natural laws, and therefore you and your actions are unreadable ciphers to the old natural magics.”

At this the Irishman brightened. “Really? Then you don’t have any idea of what I’m going to do?”

“Well, I do have clues,” Aurelianus allowed. “Indications. But in the main, no—I can’t see you or the things you affect.”

Duffy reached across a table and with two fingers snagged the bottle he’d opened earlier. He took a liberal sip from the neck and put it back. “Good enough. I’ll be downstairs whenever you want to leave.” He picked his way around the ornate obstacles and again left the room.

Chapter Fourteen

“EPIPHANY!” he yelled when he reached the dining room. “Damn it, Epiphany!” There’s no reason for me to obey that old monkey, he thought. Why should I trust him? He’s never had my genuine interests at heart; he’s always just used me like a chess-piece in his filthy wizardly schemes. Trusting Merlin is like giving a migrant scorpion a lift inside your hat.

Epiphany stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands with a towel and staring at him worriedly. “What is it, Brian?” she asked.

“Get some travelling clothes and any cash you’ve saved—we’re leaving this minute. I’ll go saddle a couple of horses.”

Dawning hope put a youthful brightness in her smile. “You mean it? Really?”

“I do. Hurry up, the little sorcerer may try to stop us.”

He snatched his cloak from a hook and strode through the kitchen to the stableyard. “Shrub!” he yelled, blinking in the sudden daylight. “Saddle up my horse, and one for Epiphany. We’re going for a ride.”

He took a hurried step toward the stable, and tripped over a charred board; snarling a curse, he put out his hands to catch himself.

His hands and aching head plunged into the dark, icy water, but a moment later soft arms had pulled him back from the gunwale and gently lowered him onto a seat, and the boat soon stopped rocking. Terribly weak, he slumped back onto some kind of cushion, and lay there gasping, staring up at the stars and the moon in the deep black sky.

“Are you all right, Mr. Duffy?” Shrub sounded worried.

The Irishman rolled over on the sun-warmed cobbles and brushed dry ashes out of his face and hair. “Hm? Yes, Shrub, I’m all right.” Looking past the boy, he could see several of the northmen grinning at him. He got to his feet and rubbed bits of grit out of his abraded palms.

“I’ll go saddle your horses, then,” the boy said.

“Uh, no... thank you, Shrub, I’ve... changed my mind.” A weighty depression had emptied his heart of everything else: enthusiasm, hope, and even fear. I was out on the lake, he thought, and without a sip of the Dark this time to prompt it. Hell, I can’t run off with what’s-her-name if I’m going to be dead in a few months, and probably insane long before that. Besides, I can’t disobey Merlin, my old teacher. I’ve known him much longer than I’ve known this woman. Women are unreliable anyway—didn’t Gwenhwyfar run off with my best friend? No, that was Epiphany... well, both of them...

Epiphany’s voice interrupted his confused thoughts. “I’m ready, Brian! How’s that for hurrying?”

With some effort he turned and stared at the gray-haired woman standing in the back doorway. “What?”

“I’m ready to go! Are the horses saddled?”

“No. I’m sorry, piff, I don’t seem to be able... we can’t go. I can’t leave. It’s impossible to explain.”

She let drop the bundle she’d been holding, and glass broke inside. “Do you mean we’re not going?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.” Enunciating words seemed dreadfully tiresome. “I’m sorry,” he managed to add.

Her face was stiff. “Then when will we? You said in a few weeks...” The new tears on her cheeks glistened in the morning sun.

“I can’t leave. I’ll die in Vienna. Try to understand, Piff, my will doesn’t have enough strength in this, it’s like trying to swim clear of a whirlpool.”

He stopped talking then, for she had turned away from him and trudged with heavy footsteps back into the dimness of the kitchen.

When Aurelianus came outside several minutes later, uncharacteristically dressed in a long woolen tunic, black tights and a tall sugar-loaf hat, he found Duffy sitting in the shade of the kitchen wall with his head in his hands. The sorcerer pursed his lips and hefted the half-dozen rattling swords that were cradled awkwardly in the crook of his left arm.

“What, lad?” he said chidingly. “Moping here, in the early morning when there’s work for all of us to be doing? Up! Melancholy is best indulged at night, over wine.”

Duffy exhaled sharply, and was surprised to find he’d been holding his breath. He stood up smoothly, without using his hands. “Not the way the nights have been around here lately,” he said, and smiled bleakly. “Horror and fear and rage get a lot of indulgence, but melancholy needs more quiet surroundings.” He peered at the old man. “Why all the swords? Are you going to conjure up an octopus to come with us?”

“I figured we might as well bring your northmen along,” Aurelianus explained, crossing the yard to dump the swords with an echoing clatter into the bed of a large wagon. “How many of them have their own weapons?”

“I don’t know. Most of them.”

“These will be enough to make sure everyone is armed, then. I even brought Calad Bolg for you.”

“If it comes to it, I’ll use a plain rapier, thanks,” Duffy said. “No guns?”

“I’m afraid not, what with the King being involved.”

“He doesn’t approve of them?”

“No.”

“Huh.” Duffy, though leery of the innovative firearms himself, shook his head wonderingly. “Well, I hope we don’t run up against someone who does approve of them.”

“Why don’t you see if you can coax those beery Aesir into the wagon,” the sorcerer suggested, “while I get the lads to harness up a couple of horses.”

Twenty minutes later the crowded wagon creaked and bounced out of the city through the west gate; once outside, they were soon deserted by the gang of prancing, cheering boys that had accumulated around the vehicle during the ride from the Zimmermann Inn. Guided by Aurelianus, the horses picked their way through the unpaved lanes between the livestock pens and were soon trotting briskly through open meadows of new spring grass, along the only wide track that led over the near hills and up into the dense Wienerwald, the Vienna woods.

When they had traversed perhaps a mile, the wizard slowed the horses and yanked the reins so that they’d step over the shallow ditch on the right side of the path. Then the wagon lurched and rocked up a patchily shadowed slope, between occasional twisted trees. Twice they got stuck, and both times Duffy and the northmen climbed out, wrestled a wheel free of some entanglement, and laboriously gave the vehicle a gasping, back-wrenching shove to give the horses a little slack in which to get moving. Finally they had crested the first hill and were precariously teetering down the far side; Aurelianus was leaning ineffectually on the back brake, and the wagon would have rolled over the horses and tumbled into the narrow ravine if Duffy hadn’t flipped the old wizard over backward into the packed northmen and borne down on the brake himself.

“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.”

Duffy’s gray eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. “Huh! That’s as bad as all the Old Testament do’s and don’t’s.”

“Same kind of thing,” said Aurelianus, moving toward the door.

The Irishman followed him outside. “How did you find me?” he asked. “I gather Venice wasn’t the first place you looked.”

The wizard sighed. “It certainly wasn’t. Anyone else I could have located in two hours by thaumaturgical means, but, as I told you, you’re a walking blind-spot where those arts are concerned. So I simply had to travel about and look for you. You did leave indications of your passage here and there, which helped, but my real clue was a painting I found two years ago here in Vienna—Michael the Archangel by Gustav Vogel, which you were the model for.”

“That’s right,” Duffy said. “That was in 1512 or 13; he liked my face or something, and I liked his daughter. And I was recuperating from a wound and had nothing much else to do.”

The northmen had got the King to the wagon and were carefully raising him toward the back of it. Aurelianus seemed satisfied, for he didn’t rush over to criticize their efforts. “Yes,” he said reflectively, “Vogel, in spite of being deeply religious—or because of it, conceivably—apparently recognized what sort of... thing... you are, and put it so clearly onto the canvas that I recognized you from it. He is allied with the new power in the world, the dawning day, if you prefer, which is blinding all the old magics, and—”

“Do you mean the Church?”

“More or less. And so he could recognize you more easily than I could. He has a real clairvoyant spark—it’s too bad he’s given up painting.”

“It certainly is,” agreed Duffy, without conviction. “Look, they’ve got him in the wagon. Hadn’t we better be going?”

“I guess we should,” said the wizard, starting across the grass. “It’s so pleasant out here, though.”

Duffy, who felt more comfortable in crowded, tangled city streets, where, for one thing, gravity was consistent and the sun moved slowly along a predictable course, didn’t concur, but said nothing and followed Aurelianus to the wagon.

The first ten minutes of the return trip passed quietly enough. Duffy again drove, and was almost beginning to get used to the tricks of the enchanted environment. A half-dozen of the northmen got out of the vehicle and paced alongside, kicking stones and branches out of the way of the wheels and giving the Irishman directions by pounding on the wagon’s sides. The only disconcerting note was one he should have expected: the high-flying sentinels no longer circled over the cabin, but swung in wide arcs several hundred feet directly overhead. “Those things are pacing us,” he remarked quietly to Aurelianus.

“You’re damned right they are,” the wizard said with a pleased nod.

For several minutes then neither of them spoke, and the creak and rattle of the wagon, and the chatter of birds, were the only sounds.

Duffy had just wiped his forehead with his sleeve when he saw three of the winged guards stoop like striking falcons out of the sky, plummeting toward a point in the woods not far ahead. “Look out,” he snapped, sitting up straight, “I think someone followed us through your web of direction-confusion spells.”

For a while those were the last words he was to speak in German. He turned, and seemed to see Bugge and his men for the first time. “Viking, rush ten of your men into the trees ahead,” he barked, using an archaic Norse dialect, “and have them conceal themselves on both sides of the path. Now!”

Bugge had heard that style of speech used by the very old folk in the Roskilde hills, and understood it well enough to follow the order. He snapped a quick phrase of clarification to his men, took in ten of them with a wave, and leaped over the side of the cart, followed a second later by the men he’d designated. Screams and sword-clangs had begun to sound from the woods ahead.

“You three take the King out of the chariot,” Duffy went on, and three northmen leaped up to obey him. “Lay him down by the side of the path, out of sight; then race back here.” He turned to Aurelianus and spoke in Dumnoiic Celtic, “Go, Merlin. Stay with the King.”

“Of course, Sire,” the sorcerer answered in the same tongue. He climbed down and followed the burdened northmen, who sprinted back to the wagon a few moments later.

The Irishman rummaged among the swords piled in the wagon bed as the three men clambered aboard, and sat back up with the heavy hilt of Calad Bolg in his fist. He whirled the long blade once in the air and stung the horses’ flanks with a snap of the reins. As the wagon surged forward he snarled up into the sky, “Ride with us, Morrigan, and rend these dogs limb from socket!”

A tight knot of yelling men burst out of the forest just in time for Duffy’s hard-driven wagon to plow into them; at least two went down under the horses’ hooves, and then the Irishman and the ten northmen in the cart vaulted into the mêlée, swords swinging, while Bugge and his men charged in from behind the trees on both sides.

Landing on his feet, Duffy swept several extended swords out of line with a momentous flail of Calad Bolg, and his shoulder-straining return stroke cut one man nearly in half; the others fell back, frightened, for the real use of the longsword had been a lost art for at least a century. The Irishman, though, waded in with the thing, whirling it in deft parries and devastating ripostes as if he’d used one all his life.

A furious crashing and snapping sounded in the tree branches above, and Duffy’s force was joined by five of the winged sentinels. Appalling when seen at close range with their long, tusked muzzles and fishlike eyes, they flapped heavily to and fro in the clearing, tearing at the heads of the opposite force, and twice lifted a man a dozen yards in the air to tear at him with tooth and claw before releasing the mangled body to fall back into the press.

John Zapolya, loitering toward the rear, deflected with his dagger the sword of one of the northmen, and put his own rapier-point into the man’s neck. As the body fell away he stepped back and looked quickly around him. This was a disaster. He’d have to flee if reinforcements didn’t arrive within seconds—

Then, as he looked over the warriors’ heads toward the northeast, a hard smile narrowed his eyes. “Hang on, men!” he shouted to his panicky band of renegade Hungarians. “Here come some of our own!”

Duffy turned around just in time to parry a scimitar wielded by a swooping creature of the same species, though of obviously different allegiance, as the things that were decimating the Hungarians. It blocked his riposte, but the force of the blow flung the creature flat on the ground, and it thrashed once and then went limp in death; and before the next one came at him he had a second to notice the stilt-soled sandals on the thing’s misshapen feet.

The battle was joined in deadly earnest now, and retreat was no one’s option any longer. An unholy racket compounded of shouts, sword-clangs, inhuman screeches and the flapping of heavy wings crashed away through the trees, as the two forces surged in tangled eddies back and forth, and the airborne warriors tore at each other overhead; sorcerous blue fire snapped and leaped from the spot where Aurelianus defended the King against three of the afrits. Noticing this last development, Duffy chopped and hewed his way back through the chaos of struggling bodies toward the King. With the longsword he was wreaking tremendous damage on the Hungarians, who, on the uneven and crowded ground, could not bring into play the natural advantages of their newer, lighter rapiers.

Another figure was angling through the press toward Aurelianus’ position, and Antoku Ten-no was cutting nearly as wide a swath as Duffy. The Oriental wielded a long, two-handed sword of alien design and was, like the Irishman, managing to keep out of any close, corps-à-corps confrontations that would put him at the mercy of a short dagger. And when Duffy caught the blade of one of the Hungarians low and split his skull with the answering stroke, it was Antoku alone who stood between him and the embattled Aurelianus.

The eyes of the Oriental lit with recognition, though Duffy’s registered no more than one competent warrior’s quick appraisal of another. “Ah, now, darling of the west,” hissed Antoku, “what—ahh!” He hopped backward and managed to catch a jarring cut on his hilt, and a moment later to deflect over his head a backhanded remise.

Evidently angry at not being listened to, he swung in with a roundhouse chop at Duffy’s ribs. Duffy yanked his hilt down to belt level and let the Oriental’s sword rebound ringingly from the upright blade, and then he lunged forward.

Antoku’s face had one instant to gape in horror before the fiercely driven edge sheared half of it away. As the body crumpled, the Irishman paused only long enough to strike off the maimed head before running forward toward Aurelianus and the King.

The crouching sorcerer was desperately flinging his arms about, directing the bolts of blue light that were jumping, ever more weakly, from the ground up toward the three hovering, flapping devils, whose claws and scimitars licked hungrily down at him. The magical lightning appeared to be doing no more now than jolting the creatures, and they were beginning to close in.

“Merlin!” the Irishman shouted hoarsely. “Use it all up in one flash!” He stopped and turned, staring back at the fight.

Falling to his knees, the exhausted sorcerer threw both arms toward the closest afrit, and with a thundering crack a man-thick blast of sunfire arced up from the soil and punched the thing out of the sky.

Duffy turned and leaped even as the first echoes were booming in the trees and Aurelianus was toppling forward onto the ground. Calad Bolg, swung overhead at the apex of the leap, clanked through the spinal column of one of the blinded devils. The thing screeched and thrashed heavily to earth as the Irishman landed bent-kneed and spun away toward the remaining one, which was flapping sightlessly upward, chittering in panic and becoming entangled in the branches. It was out of Duffy’s reach, but two of the King’s winged guards noticed its plight and, arrowing across the clearing, made short work of the creature.

Leaning on his sword and panting like a bellows, Duffy surveyed the scene: the Hungarian force was routed, and being pursued south toward the Wiener-wald track by several of the remaining northmen; the wagon stood where he’d left it, though surrounded now by sprawled corpses, and one of the horses slumped dead in the harness; and Rikard Bugge sat on the grass, humming a tune and knotting a length of blood-spotted cloth around his thigh. Duffy glanced toward the prostrate Fisher King, who smiled wanly and held up two crossed fingers.

Aurelianus got shakily to his feet and leaned against a tree trunk. “That was... close to the bone,” he gasped, speaking contemporary Austrian again. “You’re all right, Brian?”

All right? Duffy thought irritably. Why shouldn’t I be all right? Then the sword slipped from his numb fingers and he looked quickly around, suddenly conscious of great fatigue.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked, trying to keep the shrillness of sudden fright out of his voice.

Aurelianus, staring at the battle-debris down the slope, nodded almost absently. “You don’t remember.”

“No, damn it—the last thing I remember is... seeing the flying sentries stoop from the sky.”

The sorcerer nodded. “I thought so. It was Arthur who fought here.”

Duffy turned, punching a finger toward the magician. “It was not,” he shouted. “I’ll remember in a moment—I’ve often seen people temporarily lose the memory of something rough, some violent action.” Savagely he kicked the hideous foot of the dead afrit, and added, in a whisper, “Which this evidently was.” He paced back and forth, pursing his lips as he stepped around the wide burned spot in the grass. “Very well,” he snapped finally, pointing down the slope, “who are those men?”

“Hungarian, mostly,” answered Aurelianus calmly. “I have hopes, though not much confidence, of finding Zapolya’s corpse among them. The one halfway up here is Antoku. You apparently killed him.”

“Who? Oh, the mandarino? Oh.” Duffy shrugged. “I guess that’s good.”

“Yes.”

“What the hell went wrong, anyway, with all your turn-’em-around and get-’em-lost spells?”

The wizard frowned defensively, with a furtive glance down at the King. “Nothing. These lads didn’t have the sorcerous talents to penetrate my magical camouflage... but I guess they had enough skill in forest-craft to follow someone who did.” He had got his breath back now, and stepped briskly away from the trunk. “Round up those of our lads who can stand,” he told Duffy, “and get them to carry the King to the wagon. I’d counsel you to jettison the dead horse, too. I’ll see to the wounded.” To the King he added, “Excuse me, Sire,” then he started down the slope.

Duffy stooped to pick up his dropped sword, and noticed which one it was. “Hey,” he called after the wizard. “Why was I using this? I thought... he and I... agreed it was outmoded.”

Aurelianus half-turned. “That was when you and he were kind of talking in unison,” he called. “I guess when it’s him alone, he still prefers it. Good thing I thought to bring it along.” He strode onward a few paces, then stooped to examine one of the wounded northmen.

“Take it easy, lad,” said the Fisher King to Brian, softly. “I know it’s hard. But if it were easy, they’d have got somebody else to do it.”

Duffy stared after Aurelianus and shrugged helplessly. “Then it must be easy,” he said, “because it certainly looks like they’ve got somebody else to do it.”