Fred Saberhagen - Merlin's Bones

VIP免费
2024-12-04 0 0 725.98KB 155 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Merlin’s Bones
By Fred Saberhagen
Version 1.0
ONE
Amby
It was midnight, cold and wet, when a friend came running, staggering breathless into our shabby little
camp, to gasp out the terrifying news that we were being hunted by Comorre the Cursed and his whole
army. The name of the runner who thus saved our lives was unknown to us at the time, but the sincerity of
the warning was unmistakable.
Looking back, I am still impressed by the courage we displayed, poor outcasts that we were, all seven of
us who had been camped together. We all had some idea of what Comorre was like-an evaluation based
only on hearsay, though it was to prove terribly accurate-and we could readily imagine what the Cursed
One might decree as punishment for poor fools who had held him up to ridicule. And yet, despite our
terror, none of us collapsed in hysterics, and we all remained together.
Even now, remembering those days after a truly remarkable length of time-and, I hope, some gain in
wisdom-even now I wonder that most of us did not panic and scatter wildly in our flight. In that case the
luckier ones might have drowned individually in bogs and streams, or fallen over cliffs, while the unlucky
would have been rounded up by our pursuers. I doubt that any of us would have survived for more than a
day or two. Possibly we were constrained to stay together by some strand of magic, too subtle for me to
detect at the time. If so, the question of whose magic it might have been is a profound one.
Some of us could certainly have traveled faster on foot than our old wagon could roll behind our two lame
oxen-but no, we took the time to break camp in an organized way, not abandoning our belongings.
Through all the late hours of the night we plodded willingly along beside the wagon. Bran's young wife
Jandree was the only one who rode the whole way, along with whoever happened to be driving.
Sometimes Maud was in the wagon too, to care for her.
Young Jandree lay wrapped in ragged blankets, swaying and jolting with the bumps in the road, clutching
her swollen belly and praying semiconsciously to all the gods whose names she could remember. She was
full nine months pregnant at the time, actually going into labor, and therefore had no choice regarding
means of transportation. Bran, her husband, was fiercely determined to stay with his wife in her time of
trial, and the rest of us had come to depend heavily on Bran. No doubt much of our apparent courage
could be explained by the fact that each of us was mortally afraid of being left alone.
As I have said, we all were poor outcasts, each in his or her own way. Each had been brought into Bran's
company by some unique chain of accidents. As a group we had been together most of the winter,
traveling more or less at random up and down the land. Some of us, Flagon-dry and Maud and Ivald, had,
like the oxen, seen better days. Jandree and Vivian were young adults, by the standards of the time, Bran
on the verge of middle age. I was only ten years old and had not seen very many days at all.
We were a troupe, and for the most part we worked well together. I have since been witness to many
performances much worse than ours, some of them on fine elaborate stages. In some ways we were
genuinely talented. Among us we played the roles of mountebanks and jugglers, singers and horn-tootlers,
drum-beaters and dancers, storytellers and fortune-tellers and would-be magicians. We had been stopping
and starting and dawdling our way back and forth across the countryside, earning enough in food and coin
to keep ourselves going, depending for the most part on Bran to tell us what was going to happen next and
tell us what we ought to do-and then suddenly, one midnight just past the end of winter, after being roused
out of our camp at the edge of a poor village, we were all fighting to control our panic, and fleeing for our
lives.
At least the weather was no worse than wet and blustery, not the fierce, deadly cold it might have been.
The one small advantage we thought we possessed over our pursuers-and, with the stories about Comorre
in mind, we did not doubt that there would be pursuit-was that the land would probably be unfamiliar to
them. Comorre the Cursed and most of his soldiers came from Brittany across the sea, from whence they
had been drawn, like other tyrants and would-be conquerors, by the news of Arthur's death. Comorre was
already calling himself a king, and his hope was to carve out and hold a kingdom for himself.
Jandree, I think, must have been twenty years old that spring, give or take no more than a year. She was
fair-haired, as were most of our crew, with wide blue eyes that more often than not made her look a little
frightened, and a generous womanly body. There was something out of the ordinary, truly beautiful, about
her. Her singing voice was lovely. Looking back as best I can through the eyes of my ten-year-old self, I
remember her as a good companion when she was not in pain. Jandree of course was the chief reason why
Bran insisted so fiercely on keeping the wagon and the oxen. Though he would have been stubborn about
giving up the wagon in any case; it would also be vitally useful again when we had got far enough away
from Comorre to think of stopping to put on a show.
Bran was a sturdily built, middle-sized man who looked to be thirty or perhaps a little less. His fair hair
and beard both had a tendency to curl. At some point in the past his nose had been broken, but
notwithstanding that, his face could be whatever kind of face he was required to present at the moment.
He was a juggler and singer and storyteller who had seen the little band accumulate around him, while he,
effortlessly and even somewhat reluctantly, became its leader. He was generally quick with a clever word-
sometimes, as with his little jokes about Comorre's watery eyes and bad teeth, too quick for his own good.
Next let me mention spare-bodied, one-handed Ivald. Ivald had come, by what precise route I never
learned, from somewhere in the wave-pounded, cold-bitten land of the Northmen. He spoke our language
with a notable accent and blamed the loss of his left hand and wrist on an encounter in his homeland with
a berserker-a warrior maddened by the worship of Wodan. Whatever the details of that encounter years
ago-I never learned them all-it had left Ivald almost dead, permanently maimed, and his family wiped out.
Ivald's face and body were eroded with the scar tissue of many wounds, his eyes were a washed-out blue,
his hair and scraggly beard as gray as ice at the end of winter, though he was really only a few years older
than Bran.
In the months and days before the midnight warning that sent us fleeing for our lives, Ivald contributed to
our common cause chiefly by doing a comic juggling act, that of a one-handed man perpetually surprised
that he could never juggle more than two balls or cups or knives at best, and kept perpetually dropping
things. A large segment of our audiences never failed to be enormously amused. Ivald also had a way with
oxen and other animals, and had trained a dog to take part in his act, counting numbers with barks and
head nods. When the dog died he started trying to teach one of the oxen.
Let Maud be number four in my roll call of our party. She had been with Bran and Jandree longer than
almost any of the rest of us. Stocky and graying, almost toothless but still energetic, she was a mother
figure to the rest of us. She sewed up our shoes and clothing, told our fortunes, and cooked our food. She
concocted medicines when necessary, and on the night we were forced to flee she rode part of the time in
the wagon with Jandree, expecting soon to preside at the delivery of an infant.
Then there was Vivian. Let me assign her number five-at ten I was somewhat too young to appreciate her
properly. That spring Vivian was fifteen, tall among the women of those times, her hair an intriguing
reddish blond, eyes green, her body thin but not too thin to display a woman's curves. Vivian did erotic
dances-more or less erotic, depending on the audience-and helped out when we tried to introduce an
element of magic into the proceedings. She could go into an actual trance on short notice-sometimes. At
other times she only pretended to do so, or thought she was doing so, and was easily induced to behave
hysterically. The dream of her young life was to become a real enchantress, and indeed she had some
talent along those lines, but needed a good teacher, which she had never had. Viv was the newest member
of the troupe, having joined about a month after I was brought aboard. Before that, she said, she had been
a postulant at one of the earliest Christian convents in the land. This I supposed gave her a certain kinship
with my mother, who had had some similar experience in a nunnery, though it seemed unlikely that the
two had ever met.
Let number six be Flagon-dry, a potbellied hulk of a man who from time to time, when we were trying to
entertain an audience, performed feats of strength. Flagon-dry (his name had come to him in early
manhood, he said, from his determination to leave no liquid in the bottom of a cup or drinking horn) was
large and dark, and physically strong-but, looking back, I think not all that strong. Many of his feats he
accomplished by trickery, such as substituting a horseshoe of lead or tin for one of iron, before he strained
and grunted and bent the metal in his bare hands. He had exotic tattoos over most of his body. He was
about Maud's age or slightly older, going bald and with his remaining hair twisted into a single pigtail in
the back. Like Maud he was missing a number of teeth. When Flagon-dry let his gray beard grow, as he
usually did, it gave him a certain air of massive authority and sometimes helped him convince the
credulous that he was a wizard-which he certainly was not. He claimed to have spent part of his youth
enrolled in a Roman legion, before the last of them had taken ship for other lands.
I cannot very well get on much further in this tale without saying a little about myself-I have been putting
off the attempt, for reasons having very little to do with modesty, and that is why I now appear as number
seven.
Bran and his people all called me Amby, which may have been short for Ambrose or Ambrosius. The
diminutive was what my mother had called me, and was doubtless the only name I was able to give them
when they first took me in from near-starvation at the roadside. My height was average and, despite my
brush with serious hunger, I was solidly built and rather muscular for a ten-year-old. In my rare early
confrontations with a mirror I beheld blue eyes, dark hair with a tendency to curl. A fatherless boy was I-
at least my mother had frequently called me so, in tones of pity. By the time I was ten I could remember
my dead mother only vaguely. Whatever combination of fate and accident had brought me into existence
had blessed me with quick hands, quick wits-and certain other gifts, of which more later. At the same
time, fate had given me less fear of the world than was good for my chances of survival. In return for
being rescued from the roadside, I served Bran and his group by routinely doing a hundred chores and
errands, helping the juggler and the would-be magicians; and once or twice, when a sufficient crowd had
gathered for a performance, I had functioned effectively as a self-taught pickpocket. This enterprising
theft did not become a habit, for when I thought to share the results, Bran did not appear particularly
pleased.
At the time of our flight from Comorre, much about my own origins remained mysterious to me. Vague
and undigested in the back of my mind lay the knowledge that at some time before my memories began,
my mother had been expelled from a Christian convent, for some reason I had never been told. Later in
life I heard stories of how she had supposedly been visited in the convent by a mysterious, handsome
lover. There was no doubt about the fact that my mother had given me a crucifix to wear, hung it around
my neck on a leather thong when I was an infant, and for some reason I had it fixed in my mind that she
had had that image from my father. The crucifix was of Roman or African origin (it was hard to determine
which), carved from some unidentifiable kind of horn, and when it was hung around my neck was already
polished by wear, in a way suggesting it was very old.
* * *
During the months since I had joined Bran's minstrel troupe, our wandering trail had crisscrossed the land
over a distance of several hundred miles. Then came the ill-starred night when in one of our performances
in a small village Bran had started to make fun of Comorre-of that murderer's bad teeth and watery, teary
eyes and deceptive air of general debility. We had thought the tyrant-invader a safe distance away, but
unluckily for us there had been a witness who, according to our guardian angel, thought to curry favor
with Comorre by reporting our transgression. Offenses seemingly milder than ours had in the past been
more than enough to arouse his deadly anger.
Nothing was easier on that first night of our flight than for us to lose our way in darkness, and that was
exactly what we did. Nevertheless we pushed on desperately. If we kept moving, there was at least a
chance of our putting a safe distance between ourselves and our pursuers before dawn. Once a well-placed
flash of distant lightning revealed to us his mounted men, who at the time were still hundreds of yards
away, and fortunately just in the act of taking the wrong road. But our two old oxen with their broken
hooves, and our ramshackle wagon with its wobbling wheels, left a distinctive trail, and we could not
expect that the hunters would stay with their wrong turning very far.
It was some time after midnight when the road we had been following took an unexpected angle, and we
found the direction in which we had been expecting to go completely blocked. We had come in the
darkness to the top of a cliff overlooking the unseen sea-a high cliff to judge by the sound of the surf
below. Bran and Ivald debated briefly and uselessly as to how we might have lost our way.
We had had no intention or expectation of being as close to the sea as this-but here we were. Our despair
became almost paralyzing when we realized that we had managed to get ourselves boxed in on a
peninsula, no more than half a mile long and extremely narrow. An occasional lightning flash confirmed
the terrible fact: we were indeed quite thoroughly trapped, with arms of the ocean to our right and to our
left, and Comorre's people somewhere behind us. But with the stars all well hidden by thick clouds,
finding directions had become a guessing game, and we must have taken a wrong turn a long way back.
There was only the one road to be seen, the scant track we were already following, and I do not think
anyone even suggested that we should turn back. We knew with a nightmarish certainty that Comorre's
people were behind us, that by now they must have found their way back to the proper road, and that they
were certain to be coming after us at dawn, when they would again be able to read the tracks of our two
oxen and the wagon.
It is a measure of our desperation that the next thing we began to hope for was to find a boat. The wind
and intermittent rain- unfortunately not yet enough rain to wash away tracks-indicated that the ocean when
we reached it would be dangerously rough. Still, it would be better to drown than to be captured. The
stories of what Comorre did to those who offended him were not easily forgotten.
Exhausted, we pushed on. But our efforts brought us to no beach or boats, but only back to the rough edge
of a cliff-and then, when the winding of the road turned us away from that, we almost at once skimmed
the brink of another cliff no more than a stone's throw from the first. Our peninsula was narrowing with an
ugly swiftness that suggested that its extremity could not be far ahead.
And now, when we peered in that direction, lightning began to show us what appeared to be some kind of
fortified outpost. Here was a small complex of buildings standing with the tip of the peninsula at their
back, behind an outer wall thrown clear across our little tongue of land.
Roman construction, Flagon-dry muttered, as if he were trying to sound normal and matter-of-fact: a
casual traveler commenting on the sights. Bran, disputing out of habit and without much force, argued that
it did not look all that Roman.
Again came lightning, like the smiting together of gargantuan flint and steel by playful gods. This time the
explosion in the atmosphere fell on our landward side, the quick glare washing over us to reveal a stark
landscape of rock and sea-and giving us a better look at the outpost and its wall. There, just ahead across
the narrowest neck of the peninsula, where the land was no more than thirty yards or so in width, stretched
a stone barrier some ten or twelve feet high-very smoothly, professionally built, out of keeping with the
rough landscape. In front of the wall a shallow ditch had been somehow dug and broken out of the rocky
ground, adding three feet or so to the height.
Lightning played again, and the appearance of the stonework altered drastically in the abrupt alternation of
light and shadow from one flash to the next. In fact the change in perception was quite mundane and
natural-as mundane as lightning ever can be-yet somehow it keyed in my mother's old warnings against
the witchcraft and enchantment in the world. From her I had picked up the attitude that magic was a tricky
and fascinating business, sometimes irresistible though deadly dangerous for the unwary.
At these repeated revelations of that wall I underwent a stabbing conviction, irrational but sharp and
certain, that it was only the outward indication of some vitally important boundary, otherwise invisible.
Who or what might be waiting for us-for me in particular- beyond that border, I could not imagine. But
whatever was there could not wholly belong to the same world in which I had lived my short years to date.
TWO
Interlude
An intermittent rain came pelting almost horizontally onto the speeding windshield, the wet streaks adding
a liquid tremor to the green glowing symbols of the satnav screen so conveniently reflected on the glass.
The single occupant of the old car was observing that display with intense interest, without for a moment
taking his eyes from the road. The rapidly changing numbers of the satnav informed the driver of the
precise moment-to-moment location of his vehicle, a reading accurate to within less than a second of
latitude and longitude.
The driver's face, faintly visible in the glow of instruments, and now and then sharply illuminated by
passing headlights, had a somewhat haggard and ascetic look. There were moments when he looked thirty
years of age, longer intervals when he appeared to be over forty. He was dressed in a dark business suit,
shielded by a transparent raincoat, with a dark hat beside him on the right front seat.
He had reached the last leg of a long journey, begun at short notice and in haste. He had expected to
encounter few helpful signs on this winding two-lane road, and this prediction had proved well founded.
The Antrobus Foundation did not encourage casual visitors; an understandable attitude, the driver thought.
They must be chronically besieged by crackpots.
Even before beginning his long journey through this alien countryside, the lone traveler had been
reasonably sure that it would be concluded in the dark. Still, the hour was not quite as late as he had
feared; the embers of an early December sunset, spectacular a few minutes ago, were fading rapidly in rain
but not quite gone.
His mind absorbed in matters of life and death, the man in the car was speeding to confront a woman he
had never seen or spoken to, and who was certainly going to believe him mad when he revealed the true
purpose of his visit... unless, of course, she had by then been subjected to other encounters of a nature to
prove beyond all doubt that the world was much more complex than she had believed.
Tonight such evidence would very likely be provided.
The narrow concrete, cracked in many places, gleaming and slippery with drizzle, did not appear to have
been resurfaced since the 1990s. The automobile's safety systems, doubtless taking the state of the
roadway into account, considered the driver's speed excessive and occasionally admonished him with
electronic beeps.
Pressured by his sense of urgency, the driver for the third time in the last ten kilometers attempted to
telephone the woman he was so eager to encounter. He had to talk to Dr. Elaine Brusen, though he would
not be able to tell her the truth, or anything near the truth-not at first. But it was necessary to begin-the
sooner the better-to prepare her for revelations now sure to come.
The driver's hands were both firmly on the wheel when he began to hear the distant, repeated ringing. On
this fourth attempt the phone was (at last!) answered by a living human. The distant chiming abruptly
ceased, and an unfamiliar female voice-he had no way to be sure that it was Dr. Brusen's- sounded in the
cabin of the speeding car.
"Hello?" The voice conveyed the impression of a person habitually pleasant, but just now afflicted by both
surprise and irritation.
"Hello, Dr. Brusen?"
"Yes, who's this? I'm very busy."
"I appreciate that, Doctor. My name is Fisher, and I've been trying for several hours to reach you on a
matter of great importance. We need to talk about some of the special problems that must be interfering
seriously with your work tonight."
"I'm sorry, I don't have time now." There was a puzzled pause. "What do you know about my problems?"
"I know something of their causes."
A longer pause, in which the speeding tires inexorably hummed. Puzzlement had quickly devolved into
suspicion. "How did you get this number?"
"I realize that it's the private line inside your laboratory, Doctor. In fact your security, electronic and
otherwise, is one of the things I most need to talk to you about. I really must see you in person. I'm on my
way now, and I'll be in the parking lot outside your lab in about ten minutes." As he spoke, Fisher juggled
the wheel dexterously, negotiating slippery curves. And he continued to watch the shifting, reflected
satnav numbers, counting down.
"Impossible! You can't get in here. Who did you say you were?"
"My name is Fisher," the caller repeated patiently. He spelled it, slowly, in his precise and colorless
English. "I know that doesn't mean anything to you yet. I promise a full explanation when I see you."
He paused, listening to humming silence. At least she had not yet hung up on him. Before she should
decide to do so, he pressed on: "Meanwhile, if you should have any trouble-if any new difficulty should
arise, particularly if it seems threatening-return my call, at this number, right away. I assume your phone
has a caller ID turned on?"
Her breath puffed in a sigh of exasperation. "I tell you I can't be bothered with all this! Good night."
And the connection was broken.
Silence, but for the faint noise of speeding tires on degraded pavement. The automobile, like so many of
those built after the first decade of the twenty-first century, ran whisperingly quiet, on an engine that
burned no fossil fuels, and a drivetrain and tires of designed materials.
* * *
Fisher was not surprised at being cut off on the phone. Poor Elaine! He felt he knew the woman well
enough to talk to her on a first-name basis. He had to keep reminding himself that really she was almost a
stranger to him-and he, of course, a total stranger to her. But even had he not known her at all he would
have felt sorry for her.
She must be having a difficult night of it already, finding herself unexpectedly isolated from the rest of the
world, actually alone in the building now, her equipment probably behaving erratically from time to time-
naturally such difficulties would be enough to upset her. Because as yet she could have no idea of the real
problems that were going to descend on her in the next few hours.
At last his headlights picked up, on the right, an unmarked side road that Fisher judged must be the one he
wanted; satnav had predicted the moment of its appearance almost to the second. A few yards down the
turnoff was a sign:
ANTROBUS FOUNDATION
20 KM/HR VISITORS MUST STOP AT GATE
And there was the laboratory ahead.
Fisher had not been near this building, nor even in this part of the world, for a long time. Still, the shape of
the massive stone edifice, marked with a few lighted windows and now faintly visible in the backwash of
lights from its grounds and parking lot, awoke old chords of memory. It was so familiar that he had to
steel himself against a pang of some soft and inappropriate emotion. As he continued up the winding
drive, he did a hasty mental review of the various means he might employ to approach the true goal of his
visit.
Sixty or seventy meters along the drive, halfway between the highway and the looming converted
mansion, a three-meter metal fence loomed up, and the road split to pass on both sides of a small central
gatehouse. The gate was raised, and the little building was lighted, with bright exterior lamps over the stop
sign where the visitor was supposed to halt. Fisher slowed almost to a stop, gazing into the bright interior.
Obviously this checkpoint was supposed to be manned. The absence of any guard strongly suggested that
things had progressed further in the wrong direction than the visitor had hoped.
As Fisher drove slowly in through the unattended gate, he raised his gaze to the scattering of lighted
windows high in the dark stone wall. She would be up there, behind one of those.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
That clothe the wold and meet the sky
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many tower'd Camelot. . .
Someone's idea of a joke, thought Elaine Brusen sourly, studying the verse that had just popped up on her
computer screen. Either one of the in-house programmers was carrying his or her idea of humor much too
far, or a virus had sneaked in past all the defenses. Like most of the lab's computers, the machine before
her at the moment was tied into a net. That, of course, did not mean it should be possible for crackpot
humor to come through at some joker's whim, interfering with business.
Yet there were the words, black as dark ink against the subtle ivory of the glowing screen.
Here in the laboratory, things tonight had been going quietly, if not very successfully, for Elaine Brusen.
Her day's work, begun at about nine in the morning, had prolonged itself into an unscheduled night shift;
but that in itself was almost routine. Several peculiarities in the behavior of both hardware and software
had appeared today. None had been particularly noteworthy in itself, but taken together they hinted that
something out of the ordinary might be going on.
The chiming of the phone on her private line, a rare event in these days when she had deliberately tried to
arrange seclusion, had contributed to her growing sense of the unusual. And only minutes after she had
hung up on the unknown man calling himself Fisher, she had been forced to admit to herself that, strange
as it seemed, it was quite possible that for the rest of the night she was going to be entirely alone in the
whole building. The people normally present in the stockroom and in test lab (maybe someone from down
there could at least end this absurd poetry crosstalk) were no more to be found than those in Security or
Communications. Calls to their personal phone numbers went mysteriously unanswered.
She might have worried more than she did, had not her work almost continuously demanded her attention.
In the other room, her private net of big parallel processors, forming most of the hypostator's vital organs,
had things moving forward swiftly on the holostage. Another iteration or two, and the product would be
something more than a mere image.
Yet Elaine was unable to focus entirely on the job. When, in response to some faint, perhaps imaginary,
sound from outside, she put her face right against the glass of one of the lab windows, she could see the
gate, and almost all the parking lot. Though she could not see the whole interior of the little booth at the
entrance to the lot, she had the impression that no guard was on duty there.
As she moved away from the window there crowded in upon her the memories of other strange events and
discrepancies, each minor in itself, that had popped up, in desultory fashion, over the past week. She could
no longer explain the total of them as mere coincidence. It was as if someone else were interfering deliber-
ately with her work. All right, she admitted to herself, a paranoid idea; but there it was.
The newly arrived visitor, running his gaze over the building before him, observed that it had lasted well.
It had been built around the time when the nineteenth century rolled over into the twentieth as the private
home of the eccentric multimillionaire John Antrobus. The converted mansion was almost entirely dark.
Only here and there a few windows glowed, random and indirect signs of life.
Then, before disappearing for good on an African expedition that seemed ill-advised, the builder had
endowed the Antrobus Foundation, and bequeathed to it his strange mansion. His intent, codified in the
exacting provisions of his will, had been that the chief business of the foundation, by which he evidently
meant its key research, would be conducted at the site.
The parking lot held spaces for almost a hundred vehicles, and at this hour of this night almost all of them
were empty. A discreet small spotlight now appeared focused on one visitor's space, automatically
selected for him by the lab's security system. Doubtless the same system, if still functioning normally, had
already recorded his car's license, and despite the many spaces empty wanted to exercise precise control
over what space the newcomer was to occupy.
Well, the security system was no doubt ingenious, state-of-the-art for the second decade of the twenty-first
century. But tonight it was certain to be overmatched.
Two other vehicles were already in the lot. One of these was a small new auto that he judged must belong
to Elaine Brusen. As Fisher eased his car to a stop, he stared, with no great surprise but with a certain
sense of doom, at the other machine. This was a large ambulance, a looming converted van, last year's or
possibly this year's model. It was parked, lightless and unmoving, straddling three of the spaces nearest the
building, those normally reserved for handicapped or privileged folk. The van had backed in and stood
facing the exit, the closed rear doors toward the building, as if expecting to receive or deposit a patient
here, then make a quick departure.
Fisher hardly took his eyes from the ambulance as he parked his own car some twenty yards away and
slowly dismounted. Standing, he leaned on a cane-the implement was curved, particularly at the upper
end, but certainly not a conventional crutch. It did not look as if it would be comfortable in the armpit.
Actually it looked more like a kind of hiking stick, tough unvarnished oak.
Standing at his full height, Elaine's visitor was wiry and moderately tall. An air of energy made him look
somewhat younger than he had while slouched in the driver's seat. Black eyes and black unruly hair stood
out against skin that had once been very fair but now looked unfashionably and unhealthily weathered.
Rain still fell, thinly and relentlessly. Fisher delayed putting on his dark hat long enough to look up at a
region in the northwestern sky where a few stars were visible. Stars were impressive, as always, no matter
from what time or place one looked at them. He would have liked to look at tonight's moon as well, before
proceeding with his business, but clouds allowed no chance of that. Still, his face indicated that he found
some reassurance in what he saw in the sky.
After absentmindedly making sure that his car was locked, he limped steadily, neither hurrying nor
hesitating, straight toward the ambulance. At each step he leaned on his stick, whose appearance
sometimes changed suddenly when it fell into shadow from the glaring lamps illuminating the parking lot.
There were moments when, seen in starlight only, it might have been a broken staff, or perhaps the shaft,
now bladeless, of a bent and broken spear.
The windows of the silent van were quite opaque with wet and darkness, and Fisher could not be sure at
first that there was anyone inside. These days it was difficult to tell by simply listening whether a vehicle's
engine was running or not. But at the moment the condition of the engine probably did not matter.
Without hesitation he raised the curved end of his ambiguous but useful stick and rapped sharply on the
driver's glass.
Immediately the window was rolled down the breadth of a hand, and the shadowy image of a woman's
head, topped by dark, smooth hair, became visible in the interior darkness. A suggestion of jewelry,
gleaming darkly red, was visible, as well as a high collar at her throat.
"How is he?" Fisher asked, in a language very different from the modem English he had used on the
phone. He stretched his neck a bit and squinted, doing what he could to look inside the vehicle. In the rear
compartment of the ambulance he thought he could just make out a human form stretched at full length,
attended by shadowy figures. He thought he recognized one or two of those figures also, and nodded a
silent greeting that was not returned.
"He is as expected." The voice of the woman in the driver's seat was low and soft-it was not always so.
Still it carried a sense of great smoldering anger and great purpose.
"I wish him well," Fisher said.
"I think you do not."
"Truly, I pray for his recovery."
"Meanwhile doing your best to prevent it. You pray for a miracle, then."
He let it pass. With a small motion of eyes and head, he indicated the dark wall above them, with its
lighted windows. "The woman in the building is still alone?"
"I would like her to remain that way a little longer. Until I am quite ready to go in."
"I'm going in there now." It was a firm declaration. "I intend to talk to her, if possible before you do."
The voice from inside the ambulance was thin and icy and remote. "I have told you what I would like.
You have been warned."
Making a stubborn effort to repress an involuntary shiver, Fisher thought that he succeeded. He shook his
head. "I am not your enemy. One who is your enemy is doubtless speeding on his way here now-but you
must know that as well as I do."
Receiving no response, the man began to turn away, and then swung back. "Have you communicated with
her?" He raised his eyes toward a lighted window.
"Not yet."
"Does she know this vehicle is sitting here, marked as an ambulance?"
No answer.
"If she does know it's here in her parking lot, what do you suppose she thinks it's doing?"
"You will have to ask her about that-if you are really going in."
"I will ask."
* * *
At last the limping visitor did turn, and moved away as steadily and unevenly as he had approached,
leaning on his stick.
He was distracted, as he approached the front door of the building, by an improbable vision caught in the
corner of his eye, the swift and sinuous movement of something large as a human being, but traveling on
all fours.
Pivoting on his cane, Fisher whirled briefly to look back, not at the spot where the creature had vanished,
but at the darkened ambulance.
As he turned quickly, he caught another glimpse of some great beast capering between him and the rainy
sky, sliding over a high concrete wall, vanishing behind the slab-sided bulk of a trash collector.
But the wounded, limping Fisher had the power to cope quite well with events on that level of strangeness.
In a moment he had faced away from the van again and was going on about his business.
He reached the main doorway, surrounded by cheerful exterior lighting that struck him as incongruous.
Disregarding the several notices in large print, all demonstrating a lack of hospitality, he pushed a button
beside the door, applying in the most mundane way for admittance.
He had to push the button four more times, and was leaning on it almost continuously before the irritated
voice of Elaine Brusen at last responded on the building's intercom.
"Fisher here, Dr. Brusen. I repeat that I must see you."
Her voice rasped louder at him through the speaker. "Go away! Kindly stop bothering me. Good night!"
Silence again. Fisher faced the fact that it was going to be necessary for him to do something to several
locks, and probably more than one alarm, to gain admission. He took a moment to gather himself
mentally, then managed what had to be done with a single, sharp rap of his oaken stick against the metal
door, accompanied by a commanding phrase. At once locks sprang obediently open, while alarms
remained silent-all accomplished at the cost of a certain drain of psychic energy, and a wave of weariness.
Shaking his head in an effort to overcome the latter, the visitor pulled open the door and stalked in, the
sounds of his entrance echoing back through dark and empty corridors. Eschewing elevators despite the
difficulty with his leg, he hobbled ahead through deep gloom. Up the curve of a broad marble stair, obvi-
ously a relic of the days when this had been a private mansion and old Antrobus himself had been in
residence. Yes, good old Antrobus. Several things about the place, echoes and memories, gave the visitor
an eerie feeling.
One floor up, he left the familiar stairway, limping away down a broad corridor. Here, with a little light
coming out from under doors, it was easier to see where he was going.
In one of those lighted rooms ahead, Dr. Elaine Brusen was alone, doubtless still grappling doggedly with
her job. Probably she had not realized that she and her laboratory were being ruthlessly cut off from the
rest of her familiar world. She would not be expecting him; he could only hope she wouldn't scream when
he appeared.
Well, whether he intruded on the hardworking scientist or not, she would not be alone for long.
THREE
Amby
In a state of utter misery our little band maintained a stumbling progress through the darkness and the rain.
We measured our gains in painful yards along the wretched road, all mud between its jutting rocks. The
voice of Bran, who was leading the oxen, monotonously rose and fell, delivering curses against the
impulse that had caused him-he freely admitted that he was more at fault than anyone else, and had
already asked our pardon-to make sport of Comorre and thus arouse the tyrant's deadly anger.
The rest of us were mostly silent, except for the helpless cries of Jandree, sounding in time with the jolting
of the wagon. We had all forgiven Bran, and could not have imagined doing otherwise. Our fear,
compounded by exhaustion, had degenerated into something like despair when the smell of the sea,
brought to us by the wind in our faces, suddenly grew stronger. And at the same time the road, seeming as
confused as we were but like us doing its best to keep from plunging over a cliff, turned abruptly to our
left.
Bran and Flagon-dry and Maud-who stuck her head out of the covered wagon for the purpose-started
arguing fiercely with each other, shouting above the wind, elaborating their slightly different ideas
concerning our one remaining hope: maybe, if we could somehow find our way down to the water, there
would be a boat, even one large enough to hold us all. Possibly we could find two craft tied up together
somewhere. And it was true that sometimes people kept boats hidden in the most unexpected places along
a riverbank or coast. It was even conceivable that if we found a boat the wind and waves would let us use
it. The strength of the wind, and the ominous sound made by the waves on the invisible rocks below,
indicated that tonight the ocean would be dangerously rough at best, but I am sure we were all in silent
agreement that it would be better to drown than to fall, alive, into the hands of the Cursed One.
Exhausted, pushing on in frantic slowness along the dangerous cliff-top road, more than one of us
stumbled and came near tottering over the edge. But we could see no road or even path that might lead
down to the possibility of beach and boats. The road we were on-by now it had degenerated to a mere
track, obviously seldom used-was bringing us ever closer to the small cluster of unfinished-looking
buildings ahead. But first we had to face the uncompromising wall that cut in front of them, all the way
across the narrow peninsula. In my perception that barrier had now settled down to look more or less solid
and ordinary-it was, after all, only made of stones. Behind the outer wall loomed a large house, or manor,
surmounted by the beginnings of a watch-tower that in its nascent stage reached a ragged half-story above
the level where the roof of the main building seemed likely to take shape-if the structure was ever going to
be given a proper roof. The uneven top of the tower, like that of the wall, showed signs that construction
had been suspended for the winter-at the edges could be discerned the plastered covering of straw and
dung, hardened by time and cold, meant to protect against the penetration of water.
The more closely we approached this half-built wall (stones and straw and a little horse manure on top,
nothing mystical at all), the higher it rose in our perspective, and the less we could see of the buildings and
whatever else lay beyond.
In that direction, the peninsula rose even farther as it continued to narrow, ending at last, some forty or
fifty yards beyond the visible construction, in a sharp, rocky promontory. This extremity of land was only
very dimly visible even in the lightning, which had now moved farther off. Whatever might be up there at
the termination of solid earth, whether there were more buildings or only more rocks, it was impossible to
tell.
Obviously someone had seen in this rocky tongue of land a good site for a fortified outpost, braced against
assault with the sea at its back.
Bran interrupted his cursing long enough to repeat: "Not Roman construction. Blocks seem of the wrong
size for that." At first that seemed a safe enough opinion; many years had passed since the Romans
constructed anything in our land.
"It is, though. Roman." Flagon-dry was not reluctant to contradict our leader. None of us was, when we
thought we knew what we were talking about. "Look at the way those stones are cut and fitted."
Really it seemed unlikely that any of us could see clearly any details of those stones. But Bran at the
摘要：

Merlin’sBonesByFredSaberhagenVersion1.0ONEAmbyItwasmidnight,coldandwet,whenafriendcamerunning,staggeringbreathlessintoourshabbylittlecamp,togaspouttheterrifyingnewsthatwewerebeinghuntedbyComorretheCursedandhiswholearmy.Thenameoftherunnerwhothussavedourliveswasunknowntousatthetime,butthesincerityofth...

展开>> 收起<<
Fred Saberhagen - Merlin's Bones.pdf

共155页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：155 页 大小：725.98KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-04

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 155
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注