The Drawing of the Dark

Page 4

Duffy knew he should try to snap out of this wine fog. I'm an idiot, he thought, to get drunk in an unknown tavern in a foreign city.
The young man who'd served him was standing on a table, playing a flute, and most of the people in the place were whirling in a mad dance, singing a refrain in a language Duffy couldn't place. The old bearded host, too drunk now even to stand unaided, was being led around the room by a gang of laughing boys. The poor old wino, Duffy thought dizzily - mocked by children. They're probably the ones that tied those ridiculous vine leaves in his hair, too.
Duffy could hear the mill-wheel rumble again, deeper and more resonant than before, like the pulse of the earth. The high, wild intricacies of the flute music, he now perceived, were woven around that slow, deep rhythm.
Suddenly he was afraid. A dim but incalculably powerful thought, or idea, or memory was rising through the murky depths of his mind, and he wanted above all to avoid facing it. He lurched to his feet, knocking his wine cup to the floor. 'I'm...' he stammered. My name is...' but at the moment he couldn't remember. A hundred names occurred to him.
The bearded man next to him had picked up the cup, refilled it with the glowing wine, and proffered it to the Irishman. Looking down, Duffy noticed for the first time that the man was naked, and that his legs were covered with short, bristly fur, and were jointed oddly, and terminated in little cloven hooves. With a yell Duffy ran toward the door, but his own legs weren't working correctly, and he made slow progress. Then he must have fallen, for he blacked out and dropped away through hundreds of disturbing dreams.. .he was a child crying with fear in a dark stone room; he was an old, dishonored king, bleeding to death in the rain, watched over by one loyal retainer; he stood with two women beside a fire on a midnight moor, staring into the black sky with a desperate hope; in a narrow boat he drifted on a vast, still lake; he sat across a table from a shockingly ancient man, who stared at him with pity and said, 'Much has been lost, and there is much yet to lose.' The dreams became dim and incomprehensible after that, like a parade dwindling in the distance, leaving him finally alone in a land so dark and cold it could never have known the sun.
Several kicks in the ribs woke him. He rolled over in the chilly mud and brushed the wet gray hair out of his face.
'Damn my soul,' he croaked. 'Where in hell am I?'
'I want you to leave this city,' came a man's voice. Duffy sat up. He was in an empty, puddled lot between two houses. The rain had stopped, and the blue sky shone behind the crumbling storm clouds. He looked up into the angry and worried face of a priest. 'You're...' Duffy muttered, 'you're the priest who was in that first place I went last night. Where they turned me away.'
'That's right. I see you found.. .another host, though. When are you leaving Trieste?'
'Damn soon, I can tell you.' Pressing both hands into the mud, he struggled to his feet. 'Ohh.' He rubbed his hip gingerly. 'I haven't slept in the rain since I was eighteen years old. We middle-aged types would do well to avoid it,' he told the priest.
'I didn't sleep in the rain,' the priest said impatiently
'Oh. That's right. I did. I knew one of us did.'
'Uh...' The priest frowned deeply. 'Do you need any money?'
'No, actually - wait a moment.' His hand darted to his doublet, and he was a little surprised to find the hard bulge of the money bag still there. 'Huh! No, I'm flush at the moment, thank you.'
'All right. Be out of town today, then - or I'll tell eight of the biggest men in my parish to get sticks and beat the daylights out of you and throw you into the ocean.
Duffy blinked. 'What? I - listen, I haven't done any -you little cur, I'll rip the livers out of your eight farmers.' He took a step toward the priest, but lost his balance and had to right himself with two lateral hops. This jolted him so that he had to drop onto his hands and knees to be violently sick on the ground. When he got up again, pale and weak-kneed, the priest had left.
I wonder who he thinks I am, Duffy thought. I hate misunderstandings of this sort.
Cautiously he now asked himself, What did happen last night?
Very simple, spoke up the rational part of his mind hastily; you were stupid enough to get falling-down-drunk in a foreign bar, and they' beat you up and dumped you in this lot, and you're lucky you look so seedy that no sane man would think of lifting your purse. Those dreams and hallucinations were of no significance. None at all.
His teeth were chattering and he shivered like a wet cat. I've got to get moving, he thought; got to find a friendly inn where I can pull myself together, clean up a bit. Buy some supplies. And then get the hell out of Trieste.
Taking a deep breath, he plodded unsteadily back down the Via Dolores.
Two hours later he was stepping out of a steaming tub and rubbing his head vigorously with a towel. 'How's my breakfast coming?' he called. When there was no answer he padded to the door and opened it. 'How's my breakfast coming?' he bawled down the hail.
'It's on the table waiting for you, sir.'
'Good. I'll be there in a minute.' Duffy took his newly dried woolen trousers from a chair by the fireplace and pulled them on. He'd got them in Britain many years ago; and though they now consisted more of patches than of British wool, and the Italians laughed at the garment and called him an ourang outan, he'd become accustomed to wearing them. And in a late winter Alpine crossing I'll be glad I've got them, he nodded to himself. He flapped into his twice-holed leather doublet, jerked on his boots and tramped out to breakfast.
The innkeeper had laid out a bowl of some kind of mush with eggs beaten into it, black bread with cheese, and a mug of hot ale; 'Looks great,' Duffy said, dropping into a chair and setting to.
Four other guests sat nibbling toast at the other end of the table, and peered curiously at the burly, gray-haired Irishman. One of them, a thin man in a baggy velvet hat and silk tights, cleared his throat.
'We hear you are crossing the Julian Alps, sir,' he said.
Duffy frowned, as he was wont to do when strangers expressed interest in his plans. 'That's right,' he growled.
'It's awfully early in the season,' the man observed.
Duffy shrugged. 'Too early for some, perhaps.'
The innkeeper leaned in from the kitchen and nodded to Duffy. The boy says he's got all the rust out of your mail shirt,' he said.
'Tell him to shake it in the sand a hundred more times just for luck,' said Duffy.
'Aren't you afraid of the Turks?' spoke up a woman, apparently Baggy-hat's wife.
'No, lady. The Turks couldn't be this far north this early in the year.' And I wish I could say the same about bandits, lie thought. Duffy busied himself with his food,
and the other guests, though whispering among themselves; asked him no more questions.
They're right about one thing, he admitted to himself; it is early. But hell, I'll be prepared, the weather's good, and the Predil Pass is certain to be clear. It'll be an easy crossing - not like the last one, coming south in September and October of 1526, half-starved and with my head bandaged up like a turban. He grinned reminiscently into his ale. That's probably how I-made it alive through the Turk-infested wastes of Hungary - Suleiman's boys, if they saw me, must have seen that bandage and figured I was one of their own.
The innkeeper leaned in again. 'The boy says if he gives it a hundred more shakes it'll come apart.'
Duffy nodded wearily. 'He's probably right. Okay, have him beat the sand out of it, gently, and oil it.' He stood up, nodded civilly to his fellow guests, and walked to his room.
His rapier lay on the bed and he picked it up, sliding his hand into the swept-hilt guard. The worn leather grip had become contoured to his fingers, and drawing the blade from the scabbard was like pulling his arm out of a coat sleeve. He had buffed the old sword and oiled it, and the blade gleamed shiny black as he sighted along it and then flexed it a bit to get rid of an annoying recurrent curve. He whished it through the air once or twice. Take that, Turkish infidel.
A knock sounded at the door. 'Your hauberk, sir.'
'Ah. Thank you.' Duffy took the dispirited-looking garment and stared at it judicially. Why, he thought, it doesn't look that bad. Some of the iron links had broken away here and there and been replaced with knotted wire, and the sleeves were uneven and ragged at the wrists, but on the whole it was still a valuable piece of armor.
A little wooden box lay on a chair, and Duffy opened it and looked at the collection of threads, dust, lint, feathers and shredded wood. He poked his finger in it -good and dry, he noted approvingly. Under it all was a small, round piece of glass, which he made sure was not broken. He closed the box and slipped it into the inside pocket of his doublet.
Time to go, he told himself. He took off the doublet, put on two rust-stained cotton undershirts and pulled the hauberk over them, ignoring the rattle of a couple of links falling to the floor. He shouldered on his doublet, belted on his rapier and dagger, and, picking up his fur cloak and hat, left the room.
'Landlord! Here.' He dropped several coins into the innkeeper's palm. 'By the way, where can I buy a horse?'
'A horse?'
'That's what I said. A horse. Equus. You know.'
'I guess I could sell you one.'
A hardy beast? Able to carry me over the Alps?'
'Certainly, if you treat him right.'
'He'd better make it. Or I'll come back here and do something awful.'
Duffy concluded his examination of the horse with a long stare into its eyes. 'How much for him?'
'Oh...' The innkeeper pursed his lips. 'Sixty ducats?'
'Forty it is.' Duffy gave the man some more coins. 'I'm not kidding when I say I'll be back here, angry, if he drops dead.'
'He's a good horse,' the innkeeper protested. 'I've cared for him since he was born. Assisted at his birth.'
'Good heavens. I don't want to hear about it. Listen, I'll need some food, too. Uh. . .four, no, five long loaves of bread, five thick sticks of hard salami, a week's worth of whatever kind of grain the horse likes, two gallons of dry red wine, a bottle of really potent brandy.. .and a sack of onions, a handful of garlic cloves and two pounds of white
cheese. Put all that in four sacks and tell me how much it adds to my bill.'
'Yes, sir,' the innkeeper turned and started back toward the building.
'And I mean potent brandy,' Duffy called after him. 'flare to give me watered-down stuff and I'll be back here even if the damned horse can fly.'
* * *
Chapter Three
The sun still lingered in the morning side of the sky when Duffy left Trieste, riding east, angling up through the foothills toward the white teeth of the Julian Alps. He'd stopped once more before leaving the city, to buy a pair of leather breeches and a knapsack, and he was wearing both items now. The bright sun sparkled at him from the new brooks that ran down through the hills, but he could still see the white steam of his breath, and he was glad he'd picked up a good pair of gloves during his stay in Venice.
Hunching around in the saddle, he nodded to the blue patch on the horizon that was the Gulf of Venice. So long, Mediterranean, he thought. It's been a pleasant interlude here, with your sunshine, Madeira wine and dark-eyed girls - but I guess I'm by nature more at home in the colder northern lands. God knows why.
The Irishman tilted back his hat and shook his head bewilderedly. Odd, he thought, how it got so weird there at the end. The Gritti boys try to kill me three-on-one Wednesday night, and then one of them saves my life and directs me to a safe ship next morning. And how did he know I needed a Trieste-bound ship, anyway? The Venetian citizens seem to know more about my business than I do myself.
And what is my business, anyway? I still can't see why that little old black-clad jack-in-the-box - God, I can't even remember his name - gave me all this money. Am I really the only man he's met capable of keeping the peace in his Austrian tavern? And since when do bouncers get this kind of money? It seems to me they're usually doing well if they get mere room and board. Oh, don't question it, old lad, he advised himself. The money's real, that's what counts.
The road wound now through tall evergreens, and the chilly air was spicy with the smell of pine. Duffy filled his lungs and smiled nostalgically. Ah, that's a smell from home, he thought. Austria, I've missed you.
And, he admitted uneasily, I've missed you, too, Epiphany. Good God - Duffy suddenly felt old - she's probably got a child by now. Maybe two of them. Or - he brightened - maybe that gargoyle Hallstadt fell off his horse one day while out hawking, leaving the old girl single and rich. Ho ho. Of course she might not speak to me. Steward, dump chamber-pots on that derelict at the front door. A quick vision of Duffy, befouled and berserk, kicking his way through a dining hail window, the ghastly spectre at the feast.
The thump of unhurried hoof beats interrupted his reverie. He turned and saw, riding lazily fifty yards behind, a sturdy fellow wearing the laced-leather tunic and slung bow of a chamois hunter. Duffy waved politely but, not wanting conversation, didn't slow his pace.
Finally he focused his mind on the idea that was bothering him most. Could it be, he asked himself reluctantly, that I'm becoming a serious drunkard? I've been drinking since I was eleven, but it's never before given me hallucinations and blackouts. Well, you're getting older every day, you know. Can't expect to be able to toss it down the way you did when you were twenty. After this journey I'll stick to beer for a while, he promised himself, and not a lot of that. I certainly don't want to start seeing goat-footed people again.