Song of the Gargoyle (8 page)

Troff looked puzzled.

“Well, I should think it would be very clear. Unterrike is one of the greatest kingdoms in all the North Countries, and Baron Krodon the most powerful lord. Of course he is not from an ancient and honored line as is King Austern, but Unterrike barons have always supported a large number of knights who were unlanded but known for their skill in warfare. And of course, in the days before the High King united all the North Countries, Unterrike was Austerneve’s greatest enemy. The barons’ armies often attacked Austerneve Castle and laid waste the countryside. The village of Qweasle, at the foot of the tor, was burned and sacked more than once by the forces of Unterrike. But now Baron Krodon has become King Austern’s honored friend, and his son, the baronet Quantor, has come to serve in King Austern’s court.”

Troff was listening attentively now, his head tipped to one side, which always tended to give him a reasonable and intelligent air.

“So you can understand why Sir Hildar was greatly pleased and honored when the baronet agreed to take his son, Lonfar, as squire. And Lonfar was also. He began to spend much of his time serving the baronet, even though he will not be old enough to pledge as his squire for more than a year.”

Tymmon stopped and shrugged and then sighed and shrugged again. “So that was it. It seemed the baronet felt it was not suitable for his future squire to spend so much of his time with a commoner—the son of a jester. And, it seems, Lonfar agreed with him. We have not so much as spoken together in more than a year.”

Troff growled softly and said he did not like that part of the story. Then he rolled over on his side and closed his eyes.

“A song then,” Tymmon said quickly. “I shall sing another song. A lively one. Shall I sing ‘The Knight of the Honorable Name’?”

Troff thumped his tail and opened one eye, so Tymmon jumped to his feet and built up the fire. And when the flames were again leaping as high and bright as did the torches in the great hall when Komus was performing, he began. Just as Komus had always done, he entered with an acrobatic caper that carried him onto the stage in a series of spins and twirls and tumbles and ended with a grand gesture.

“If I may have your attention, most excellent and exquisite lords and ladies, I will now entertain you with a sweet ballad composed by that widely renowned troubadour, Hulf of Mundgross.”

Still holding the pose, he stopped to explain, in case Troff had forgotten. Actually he wrote the song himself. As far as I know there’s no such person as Hulf of Mundgross. And so—lords and ladies, ‘The Knight of the Honorable Name.’ ”

The song had many verses, each of them telling the story of one of the knight’s chivalrous deeds, such as slaying dragons, saving damsels in distress, and helping comrades in arms who had been accused of horrible crimes by killing their accusers in trial by battle. And between each of the verses there was a catchy refrain which Komus had always sung while pacing grandly around the stage in a stately manner, as one might in some great and solemn procession:

Let us sing of a knight of great valor and fame,

Sir Bloodspiller Bergburner, Lord of No Shame.

Let us sing of the glory, of the deeds grand and gory,

Of the Knight of the Honorable Name.

Troff liked the refrain and the procession, but during the verses, which were quite long and wordy, he sometimes lost interest. Lowering his big ugly head onto his paws, he dutifully kept his eyelids partly open and rolled his eyes sleepily in Tymmon’s direction.

At last Tymmon discarded his entertainer’s pose and dropped down in front of his inattentive audience. “You are just not listening carefully,” he said sternly. “The verses are most amusing, if you grasp their meaning. As in the one about the dragon. When the knight and all his squires and pages arrive in the village that is being harassed by the dragon, the villagers have to feed and house their rescuers. And before the dragon is finally killed, the knight and his party have eaten everything and laid waste the countryside, and all the villagers have died of starvation. And then the great knight leaves, so proud of slaying the dragon he doesn’t even notice that the people he came to save have all starved to death. The ending is meant to be a satire, a kind of mockery. Don’t you understand?”

Troff grinned and lolled his tongue and then rolled over on his back and asked Tymmon to scratch his belly. By the time the scratching was finished, Tymmon noticed that the sky had begun to lighten and the strange nighttime noises had given way to the first sleepy chirping of birds.

Tymmon crawled under his blanket. He could sleep now. But before he closed his eyes he found his thoughts returning briefly to what he had just told Troff. “A kind of mockery,” he had said. He had not really thought of it in just that way before. But suddenly it seemed to be true. Seen in a certain way, many of Komus’s songs and stories as well had been a kind of mockery. This sudden realization seemed important, but before he could explore it further it clouded into dreams.

I’ll think on it more tomorrow, he told himself, but when he awakened, the sun was already high in the sky, and there was much to be done. Troff had already gone hunting.

A
S THE DAYS PASSED,
Tymmon thought more and more often of leaving the forest and, in spite of the danger from Black Helmet and his men, returning to the farms and villages of the valley.

“The Sombrous may be all very well for you,” he told Troff. “But human beings need to be with their own kind. It is most necessary for people to be with other people. And then there is the matter of food. I know that lions and other such wild beasts can live on nothing but the flesh of their prey, and I suppose that gargoyles are much the same. But humans need a variety of foods in order to thrive and stay in good health. There is, for instance, bread.”

Bread had, of late, haunted his dreams. Bread in particular but also porridge, cheese, soups and stews, dumplings, puddings, and pies. And now that spring was here and the days warming, there would soon be fresh fruits and vegetables. His hunger for such things filled his dreams with wonderful feasts of the past.

Sleeping, he once more tasted the ripe cherries he and Lonfar had picked in the orchard of a Qweasle farmer. In other dreams he once again enjoyed the delicious things to be found in the castle kitchen, where he and Lonfar had often been treated by the good-natured cooks. Not to mention the wonderful meals he and his father had often eaten late at night after Komus returned from entertaining King Austern’s guests, bringing with him a great basket of strange and wonderful food—leftovers from the king’s banquets. Even the simple porridge he himself often prepared in the three-legged stewpot on their own hearth became a regular feature of his nightly imaginings.

But food was, of course, not the most important reason Tymmon felt driven to move on. There was another constant yearning even more deep and basic than the need for food and human companionship, and that was his need for some word of his father. Even if there was nothing he could do to rescue him, he yearned to discover where he had been taken, and why.

It was an impossible dream, he told himself. Even to dream that he might hear word of Komus was hopeless—and dangerous. Dangerous because the search for news would surely lead back to Austerneve—where Black Helmet and his men would most certainly be lying in wait. But the fantasy persisted—that somehow he might rescue his father or, at least, at some future time, discover the identity of his captors and punish them for their evil deed.

The last was, indeed, a forlorn and hopeless fantasy, but over the weeks in the Sombrous it had begun to mingle with an older flight of imagination that had begun soon after Komus had let slip the truth about his noble birth. A fantastical plan for the future in which Tymmon saw himself one day returning to his birthplace, to the city of Nordencor, where he would reclaim the honorable position that was rightfully his, and then someday return to Austerneve as a knight, famed throughout the North Countries for his valor and skill in battle.

But now that older dream had lengthened to include further scenes in which Tymmon, a knighted nobleman of Nordencor, was going forth with page and squire to find his father’s captors and vanquish them in honorable combat.

It was, indeed, a far and distant dream. Nordencor was many leagues to the south, and certainly Tymmon had not originally planned to make his pilgrimage there at such an early age. But now that he had been forced by fate to leave Austerneve, why should he not head south, in the direction of Nordencor and his birthright?

But there were other matters to consider, among them the problem of Troff. If Tymmon did in fact decide to make his way out of the forest and onto the highroad, what would he do about Troff? It would be wonderful if he were able to take the gargoyle with him. Wonderful, but quite obviously impossible.

Tymmon looked at the gargoyle, who was, at the moment, lying beside him on the riverbank. It was a warm afternoon, almost like summer, and they were resting after a tough and gamy meal of roasted heron. Troff was lying on his back with his feet in the air. With his great round head turned upside down, his floppy jowls fell back, exposing his sharp white teeth. Except for the teeth, which were fairly alarming from whatever angle they happened to be seen, he did not at the moment seem at all intimidating. But still, it was impossible to imagine the effect such a strange creature might have on the inhabitants of farm and village. Simple peasant folk who were, as Komus often said, beset by so many superstitions that every change in the weather was taken as the work of supernatural beings, evil or otherwise.

“Have you ever shown yourself to other human beings?” Tymmon asked.

Troff rolled the one eye that Tymmon could see and said quite clearly that, yes, he had. The one eye rolled again, the tufted tail thumped the ground, and changing the subject, he asked for another scratch.

Tymmon sighed and scratched the furry belly, and Troff, a hind foot twitching, grunted in satisfaction. But Tymmon wasn’t convinced by Troff’s answer. There had not been, as far as he knew, any rumors of living gargoyles invading the North Countries, as there surely would have been if such a creature had been widely seen. It seemed more likely that Troff had not understood the question or didn’t care to answer it honestly. After a few moments Tymmon asked another, and more important, question.

“If I were to leave the forest, and travel southward along the highway, what would you do?”

Troff quickly turned himself right side up and stared at Tymmon from under a furred and furrowed brow.

“It would be impossible, I’m afraid, for you to go with me. If a creature enchanted into life from cold hard stone appeared among the villagers, there would surely be panic in the streets. And I might well be suspected of being the conjurer who brought you to life. And quite possibly burned at the stake as a warlock, or even a disciple of the devil.”

Burned at the stake. Tymmon remembered many tales of witch burnings. He had often heard of one that had occurred in Austerneve many years ago. And in other nearby fiefdoms there had been several such events in the not too distant past. Komus himself had once spoken of how a young woman had fallen under suspicion simply because she loved animals. All animals, even the wild things of the forest, and was beloved by them in return. Tymmon did not know if the young woman had been burned as a witch, because Komus had broken off the telling of the story before it ended and would not return to it.

But the half-told tale had returned to his memory often like the haunting memory of an unfinished dream. And now it occurred to him that if a person could be accused of witchcraft because of friendships with owls and hares, what would be the fate of someone who was the friend of a gargoyle?

“No, I fear that when we leave here we must go our separate ways,” Tymmon said sadly, and Troff crawled forward on his belly, making a pitiful moaning noise deep in his throat.

“Well, never mind,” Tymmon hurried to reassure him. “I’m not going immediately. I’m just thinking about it.” But it was on the very next day that something happened that turned thinking into action. Immediate action.

It was midmorning of the following day and Troff had gone hunting sometime before. Tymmon had washed his doublet and jerkin and spread them out to dry on the riverbank and added a few new reeds to the thatching of the hut’s roof. The gathering of firewood for the coming night would come next, a chore that was daily becoming more difficult.

When Tymmon and Troff had first arrived at this particular camping place, there had seemed to be an endless supply of firewood. But now all the driftwood deposited by past floods, as well as the deadfall at the edge of the forest, had been burned. Scouting again among the tall trees that grew near the river, Tymmon found nothing except a few pieces suitable for kindling. At last he decided that today he would have to do something that he had carefully avoided until that time. He would have to go farther, following one of the trails that wound its way into the depths of the forest.

His knife and ax in his belt, he set out, choosing a pathway at random. He moved slowly, stopping often to mark his trail by bending saplings or cutting blazes into the trunks of trees. And stopping also to look and listen—to stare for long silent moments down the dim leafy corridors, and up into the thick branches overhanging his head.

He continued in that cautious manner for some time before he came upon a lucky find—a large fallen tree with many long thick limbs—enough dry firewood for several nights. Although he remained alert and watchful as he cut and trimmed the branches, he saw and heard nothing unusual, and it was not long before he had collected a neat stack of logs as long and thick as a man’s arm. On the return trip he followed his blazed trail with no difficulty. He was almost back to the riverbank, and congratulating himself on his bravery and skill as a forester, when he heard the voices.

There were two of them. Crouching behind a thicket at the edge of the forest, Tymmon watched as two shaggy-haired men pulled a small boat through the shallows and up onto the bank. As they came closer he could see that they were dressed in dirty and ragged homespun smocks and leggings. The one in the lead was small and wiry with a sharp pointed face and deep-set eyes, while the second was tall and heavily built, but slow-moving and with a blurred, dull-eyed countenance that did not speak highly of his intelligence.