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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. 'Axe 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 grayhaired 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?'
'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
