about before Spurrier caught it and held it over the chalice as firmly as he could. In the deathly silence of the Circle, the blood trickled audibly into the chalice.
Like acolytes, two of the faun-boys came up, looking pale. One bore a brass jar and the other a torch. After rendering an unseemly backward-facing obeisance with evident gusto, the lad with the jar emptied part of its contents into the chalice and part onto the headless cock. It was rum, as Hoare knew from its odor, and powerful rum at that.
Taking the torch from the second boy, Spurrier thrust it onto the rum-soaked flapping cock. A puff of bluish flame, and the pungent, acrid reek of burnt feathers drifted into Hoare's nose. He must struggle against a coughing spell. Spurrier resumed his unintelligible chant. 'Gaah,' said the Duke, and backed away with a disgusted look to join the two bare-breasted ladies.
Perhaps Spurrier sensed that his royal auditor was becoming discontented, for, using plain English now, he called into the darkness, 'The sacrifice has been accepted. Draw nigh, ye worshipers, and receive your token of our sacrifice; then go ye hence, to foregather at the Hall of Feasting!'
With this, Spurrier plucked a branch of heather and dipped it into the mixture of cock's blood and rum that filled the chalice. Selene Prettyman took one of the Duke's arms and Lydia Frobisher the other and led him to the altar, where Spurrier stood ready to dash the branch across the three clenched faces.
The Duke shook himself free.
'That will be enough, Spurrier. Call this a rite?' he grated. 'Why, it's the most farcical piece of fustian I've ever had to witness. You had the gall to bring me all the way from Plymouth for this? Compared to Dashwood and his crowd, you're a choirboy. And if you call this a 'pagan orgy,' you can call me an abbess. By the time I was fourteen, I'd seen more, and done more, than you could dream up in a hundred opium dreams. Be damned to you, indeed.'
He spun to address Selene Prettyman.
'And as for you, madam, I shall have words with you at my later convenience.'
The lady sank into the deepest of curtseys; the Frobisher woman followed suit with far less grace.
The Duke marched off into the dark in the direction from which he had come. The ladies lifted up their heavy skirts and followed. After an embarrassed pause, Spurrier resumed his summoning of the congregation.
In response, the common folk approached timidly to receive their aspersion, then drifted away as silently as they had arrived, leaving the celebrant to stand alone, facing his altar and his stinking headless bird as if rendering a closing prayer. Perhaps, Hoare thought, Spurrier would now dodge round to the entrance of the Stone Circle as if by magic, like the vicar at Sunday service, to greet his parting flock and be congratulated on his powerful sermon.
At Hoare's side, Leese stirred restlessly and gave his Commander an inquiring look. Call it off? he mouthed.
Hoare put out a hand and pressed it onto the Sergeant's shoulder. Wait, his gesture said.
Spurrier still brooded at the altar, cope and all. As Selene Prettyman returned into the ring of megaliths, he looked up, visibly hauling himself back to the mundane world from whatever bourne he had been sojourning in.
'What are you doing here now?' Spurrier asked. 'You're supposed to be shepherding Cumberland back to Dorchester.'
Spurrier sounded depressed, it seemed to Hoare, as well he might, considering that his ceremony had been a fiasco and that he had just lost one powerful backer.
'Don't worry, Spurrier,' she said. 'I gave him into the protection of the Frobisher children, who have him under their wings. I kissed him good-bye. Perhaps he'll linger at those odd quarters of yours. If so, you can make your excuses to him yourself.'
'That's all very well. But you have no business here now,' Spurrier said.
'You should know by now that I go where I choose to go,' Selene Prettyman said briskly. 'Now be about your own business, for if I'm not mistaken, your business is about to come to you.' As she shrugged, her breasts bounced. Under other circumstances, Hoare thought, their motion would have been enticing.
'Very well,' Spurrier said. 'Keep out of my way, then, d'ye hear? Now then, let's be about it.'
He bent, retrieved a torch, struck fire to it, and waved it in an unmistakable signal. There was a scuffle outside the Circle.
'Come along, you,' came a hoarse voice from the dark. 'Don't give us no trouble, now.'
Two captives were half-hauled, half-carried into the torchlight, each gripped by a pair of hard-looking men. The prisoners were hoodwinked, their arms bound, their shoeless legs hobbled.
'Take off their hoods, you men. We'll start with the little one,' Spurrier said.
Hoare suppressed a grunt of dismay. The prisoners were Hoare's own men, Rabbett and Thoday.
It must have long been obvious to Spurrier, Hoare could see now, that Hoare's two aides were on his trail. What, then, since they were lonely intruders into his territory, could have been simpler or more logical than to ensnare them and dispatch them like a brace of hares? By making them his true sacrifice, the one that the death of the cock had merely simulated, Spurrier would be accomplishing three things at once. He would clear his own trail, he would add to the Royal Navy's alarm and despondency, and, if his worship was genuine-a possibility that, after the proceedings just ended, Hoare could not dismiss- make a sacrifice to his deity or deities compared to which that of the big black cock was petty. Again Hoare pressed Leese's shoulder. He must make ready to signal the rest of the hidden landing party.
The leather gags across their mouths kept the two captives from uttering more than half-smothered mumbles. But it was obvious that they could see and they could struggle, which they did as best they could. A blow to the belly doubled Rabbett up.
'Over here,' Spurrier ordered. 'Stretch him over the stone, now. No, you idiots, face up. There. Now hold him. Yes, just like that.'
'Are you sure you want to go through with this, Spurrier?' Selene Prettyman asked in a cool voice.
'Be silent, woman.'
Spurrier took a firm hold of the odd, impractical-looking knife once again, raised it into the foggy night air, and looked fixedly at the moon. Then he leaned over Rabbett.
At Hoare's piercing whistle, he froze.
Leese at his heels, Hoare threw himself across the few feet toward the altar. The rest of his party sprang from their hiding places and grappled with the guards. Dropping their prisoner, Rabbett's guards turned to defend themselves.
Spurrier leaped for the gap between two menhirs, the cope flying behind him, the drawknife in his hand. Hoare fell headlong over the clerk, reached out for Spurrier, clutched the fleeing foot, twisted, and began clawing up the other's leg. Spurrier dropped his weapon but gripped Hoare by the hair.
In no time, Hoare had both hands on Spurrier's leg and was almost within reach of his privities. Hoare would grip them as soon as he could and crush them in his fist till Spurrier surrendered.
'Take him from behind, woman!' Spurrier shouted.
Hoare looked over his shoulder. Selene Prettyman, raven hair flying as wild as any maenad's, lunged toward him, the hook of Spurrier's blade in her hand. She flipped it deftly end for end, catching hold of the hilt. Hoare winced and awaited the blow that would finish him. Instead, flinging herself full-length across Hoare's prone body, Selene Prettyman swung the flat of the weapon squarely into Spurrier's upturned face, and the man went sprawling.
In a single series of smooth, practiced-looking motions, Selene Prettyman cut the fastenings of Spurrier's cope, pulled it from his shoulders, and modestly draped it over her own.
'That's better,' she said. Her palm was bleeding where it had clutched Spurrier's blade. She ripped a length from the hem of the cope, looked at it, gave an ach! of disgust, wrapped the silk around her hand, and knotted it with the other hand and her even white teeth.
Two of the landing party made to seize her.
'Let the lady go,' Hoare said. 'She's a friend of the Crown.'
'Good for you, Captain Hoare,' she said. 'This affair has gone quite far enough, I think.' She drew the cope more closely about her.
Rabbett had collapsed to the ground but now propped himself against the altar. His eyes, strangely small without their accustomed spectacles, looked up at Hoare in entreaty. Hoare bent down and cut away Rabbett's gag
