The dim giant had reached for his own sword, so Duffy whirled his rapier out and brandished it - and the giant did exactly the same. The Irishman relaxed a little,- skeptically. Then he resheathed his sword. So- did the giant. Duffy now stretched out his arms and flapped them slowly, like a ponderous bird, and the shadowy rider simultaneously performed the same action.
Duffy laughed with relief. 'No need to be scared, horse,' he said. 'It's simply our shadow on the mist.' The horse flapped his lips disgustedly.
The milky brightness of the air was too dazzling and disorienting to stare into, and the Irishman kept his eyes on his hands, the path and the markers that jogged past. When he glanced at the shadow rider again, he was astonished to see a whole parade of silhouettes pacing along. He peered uneasily at the gray forms, and then stiffened with real fear.
One was a bird-headed animal with the body of a huge cat, and folded wings bobbed on its long back as it walked. Behind it trod a thing like a lizard, with the grotesque, wattled head of a rooster. A basilisk, or I'm a father confessor, Duffy thought as sweat began to trickle into the collar of his cloak. There were other figures in the murky, silent procession - dwarfs, monstrous crabs, and things that seemed to be nothing but knots of writhing tentacles. All of the shadows hopped, hobbled or strode along steadily, as if they'd walked for hours and were still leagues short of their destination. And in their midst rode stiffly the mounted figure that was Duffy's own shadow.
Like a child that fears it has seen a white, eyeless face moaning at the window, Duffy scarcely dared to breathe. He slowly turned away from the phantom ridge and stared straight ahead, where, to his horror, he could see a blurry outline in the fog. I suppose I'd see something behind me, too, he thought, but there's no way I'm going to turn around. One part of his mind, which he was trying hard to ignore, was fearfully shrilling over and over again, What do they want? What do they want? His rational side advised him to avoid sudden moves and wait for the fantastic beasts to go away.
They didn't. When the glow in the sky began to dim with the approach of evening, Duffy was still being paced by his silent fellow travellers. The hollow chill of fright had, during the long day's ride, given way to a sort of unreal, fatalistic wonder. The horse, though, didn't even seem aware of the creatures.
With the numb calmness of a man in shock, Duffy halted his horse - the fabulous animals halted, too - and set about making camp under a low overhang of rock. I'm obviously either doomed or insane, he thought, but I may as well be warm. He set about collecting kindling, and even walked very near one of the monsters to pick up a particularly good stick; the creature, some sort of dog-faced bird, bowed and hopped back.
The Irishman crawled under the hood of rock and arranged the bits of wood in a pile. He took out his wooden tinder box and laid a few pinches of the carefully hoarded fluff at the base of the wood pile. The fog rendered the magnifying glass useless, so he dampened one corner of the tinder with a few drops of the brandy and then struck sparks from his sword hilt with the pommel of his knife. The clink... clink.., clink was the only sound in the cold silence. Finally a frail brush-stroke of flame danced over the wood, and a minute later the fire had swelled enough to illuminate Duffy' s meagre shelter. Acutely aware of being the only human within a dozen icy miles, he blessed the fluttering-flag sound of the fire because of the way it masked the ominous quiet of the blackness beyond.
He drank a good deal of the brandy, and then curled up in his fur cloak. It was now possible for him to suppose the monsters had been an illusion, an effect of the diffused sun, the mist and the snow. They'll be gone in the morning, he told himself.
They weren't. When he opened his eyes at dawn his heart sank to see a semicircle of tall gargoyle figures a dozen feet away from him; snow piled on their wings and horned heads showed that they had stood thus all through the night, and if it hadn't been for the bright alertness in every eye he would probably have tried to believe they were statues.
When he had roused and fed his unconcerned horse, nibbled a bit of salami and washed it down with cold wine, two of the things stepped back, opening the semicircle. Duffy obediently got into the saddle and rode forward, and the two that had stepped back strode ahead to lead the way as the rest got into motion behind the Irishman.
The sky on this Sunday morning was a clear cobalt blue, against which the mountain peaks might have seemed to be razored out of crumpled white paper if the sense of vast distance and space bad not been so overwhelming. Duffy's steaming breath plumed away behind him in the thin, icy air of these cathedral heights, and he felt that he was treading the very rim of the world, closer to the kingdoms of the sky than to the warm heart of earth.
At one point there was a choice of ways around a towering granite shoulder: a new route, curling down to the left, whose well-maintained shrines and cairns indicated steady traffic, and a route that tacked steeply up, which, though a few old markers showed along it through drifts of snow, had clearly not been in use for at least several seasons; the odd parade wound its way without a pause up over the old path. Duffy frowned, having vaguely hoped to run into some large party of travellers that would chase these fantastic animals away. He turned and peeked at the dozen or so in his train. I suppose it doesn't matter, he reflected hopelessly. It would have had to be a damned large party anyway, and notably stout-hearted.
They shifted again, when the glittering sun was a few degrees past meridian. There were no markers to define this new, cliff-walled path, but a certain evenness and regularity implied that it had, at one time, been meant for traffic.
Duffywas near panic. Where are these things taking me? he almost whimpered aloud. We're still moving roughly east, thank God, but we're now several miles north of where I should be. Can I possibly ditch these beasts? And having done that, could I retrace the way back to the original path?
Their steep road changed direction several more times, and seemed with every league gained to become straighter and more consistent in width and surface. It was late in the afternoon, and Duffy was trying to work up the nerve to nudge his horse out of the procession, when, simultaneously, all of the hitherto-silent creatures joined voices in what might have been called song. It was a number of sustained single notes, like undiminishing reverberations of a dozen gigantic gongs, and the chord they combined in, echoing up and down the rock-walled pass and ringing away into the empty sky, actually filled the Irishman's eyes with tears, so great was the sense it conveyed of inhuman grandeur and loneliness. And as the song swelled, and rose by tremendous steps up some alien scale, the ascending pass levelled out onto an expansive plateau of snow dusted stone.
Despite his profound surprise, Duffy simply closed his eyes for a moment before opening them again to stare. Tremendously old, weather-rounded pillars of uneven height stretched away across the top of the mountain, in two columns separated by nearly half a mile of crumbled pavement. Even the shortest of the pillars presented its eroded top to the sky a dozen feet over Duffy's head, and every one of them was wide enough to have housed a small temple.
The two guides ahead of him stepped aside, and Duffy's horse moved forward unprompted to take the lead. At a stately pace Duffy and his weird retinue proceeded down the center of the vast lane defined by the two ranks of pillars. The red sun hung directly behind, and the Irishman realized that if one were standing at the other end of the plateau, staring this way, the sun would be seen to sink precisely at the western end of the gargantuan, unroofed hail.
By God, said Duffy to himself, I wonder what this place looked like when it did have a roof, however many thousand years ago? Picture hundreds of torches carried by the congregation assembled on the exquisitely worked mosaic pavement; the images painted on the high, arched ceiling; and up front, the marble altar, taller than a man but dwarfed by the towering statue that stood behind it, the statue of a woman looking out over the heads of the faithful, directly into the eye of the setting sun...
Duffy breathed deeply several times, fearing that the rarefied mountain air might be inducing delirium. Take it easy, lad, he pleaded with himself - you were on the verge of losing the distinction between imagining and remembering.
The walk across the plateau face took nearly an hour, and when the Irishman reached the other side his yards long shadow had preceded him by several minutes. A wide square mark lay before him, and looking closely he saw that it was a gap in the crumbled paving, as if someone had carefully ripped up a square section of it.. .or, it occurred to him, as if something had stood there before the floor was put down, but had since been removed. Nervously he glanced left and right, and his heart sank to see two weathered columns of stone that, despite the blurring imparted by the storms of thousands of Alpine winters, were clearly the feet and ankles of a vanished colossus.
Duffy found that he was trembling, and reached around into a saddlebag to fish out the brandy. He unstoppered the bottle, but before he could raise it to his lips the horse carried him across the dozen yards that separated the two stone feet, and his chill abruptly left him. Since it was in his hand, he took a swig of the liquor - warm from having lain next to the horse's flank - but now it was a sip to help savor the beauty of the place, and not a gulp of oblivion to drive it out of his mind.
An old stairway, wind-buffed to a sort of bumpy ramp, led away down the mountain side from the end of the plateau, and Duffy looked at the high peaks still lit by the sun, seeming to see in their outlines the shapes of primeval walls and battlements. He Was in the shadow now, and the Alpine cold was gathering intensity along with the darkness, so he nudged the horse into the shelter of a leeward alcove, dismounted, and set about bedding down for the night. At last he lay wrapped in his cloak, wedged between the blanketed body of the horse and the wall of rock, watching the sky darken behind the stony silhouettes of his guides until all was a uniform black.
Chapter Four
Five days later Johannes Freiburg sat in the taproom of the St Mungo Inn and, putting down his mug of ale, nodded to the wide-eyed old man sitting across the table from him. 'That's what I said. Escorted by every demon in the Alps. It was just at sunset, and I was crossing the Drava bridge with my goats, when I heard all this singing - hundreds of voices, all glass rim high, whirling like birds around this one weird tune - and I figured for a second it was God and all the saints, come for me at last. So I turned around, back toward the mountain, and here comes this tall, gray-haired man on a limping horse, riding down the path with the red sunlight on him like his own personal lantern; and behind him, perched on every ridge and crag, there were ranks and ranks of demons with bird heads, and wiverns, and every damned kind of monster you ever heard of, all singing like a church choir.'
The old man crossed himself and gulped. 'More ale here,' he quavered to the innkeeper. 'So who was he?' he asked his companion. 'Beelzebub?'
'I don't know. I took off pretty quick - didn't want to let him get close enough to bewitch me - but he looked... Oh my God, that's him just walked in the door.'
Duffy didn't even notice the old man who clapped his hands over his face and, squeaking shrilly, bolted out of the room as he entered it. The Irishman crossed to the bar and calmly asked for a cup of beer. His face was haggard and there were new wrinkles around his eyes. When his
beer had been drawn he took it to a back table and sat down to drink it slowly, unaware of Freiburg's intense, awed stare.
Well, thought Duffy, I can't pretend that was delirium tremens - not lasting six days like that. He sighed and shook his head. I really was escorted through the Predil Pass by a crew of fantastic beasts only hinted at even in mythology. They guided me, led me around areas I later saw to be unstable snow, kept me on whatever track that was. They always maintained a respectful distance, too, and bowed when I approached them! It was as if.. .as if I were a revered and long-absent king passing through their district.
He remembered the odd fear he'd felt a week ago in that mad tavern in Trieste - a fear of recognizing or remembering something. That's another thing to worry about, he thought; maybe the goat-footed man was real, not a hallucination at all. Hell, he was an everyday sight compared to the company I've kept during these past six days.
The tavern door swung open and a stout, bearded man clumped in, wearing flared-top boots that came up to his thighs. He glanced angrily around the room. 'Damn it, Freiburg,' he growled, 'have you seen Ludvig? He said he'd be drinking in here.'
Freiburg bobbed his head. 'Yes sir, Mr Yount. He.. .uh. . .just dashed out the back door.'
'Saw me coming, did he? The lazy old monkey - I'll break his jaw for him. He knows we -Freiburg was jiggling in his chair, winking, shaking his head and waving his hands. Yount stared at him in amazement, then caught on that the shepherd had something confidential to whisper to him.
Yount leaned down. 'What the hell is it?'
Don't blame Ludvig' the shepherd whispered. 'He's just scared of demons, which that gray-haired man over there is on intimate terms with.'
Yount glanced across the room at Duffy, who was still staring morosely into his beer. 'Oh, hell,' the bearded man said to Freiburg, 'you damned peasants can't take two steps without finding something to put the fear of the devil into you.'
'Hey, it's true,' protested the shepherd. 'I'm not making it up -'Oh, no doubt. Like last year, when you crucified all the cats in town because they were witches' familiars.'
'Now look, Mr Yount, there were apparitions -Yount made a rude suggestion concerning what stance Freiburg should assume the next time he met an apparition. 'Now where's my whimpering clerk? In here? Good Lord, hiding among the brooms and buckets. Out, Ludvig, you coward. We've got to be on the road, get those hides to Vienna before the rains can rot them.'