they were paraded around in public and Lisa was hailed as a queen, he might not have done very much. But when Blanche had the audacity to marry her daughter to the suzerain and name England as her dowry… even a demon can only stand so much.'
CHAPTER TWO
It was almost dawn. Horizon showed all around the world, the stars were folding their tents, birds flitted over the rooftops of Florence, and roosters screeched in the yards far below him. Chabi sat contentedly on his left shoulder. He could see the incarnation clearly now — wrinkles and wisps of white hair dangling from under her headcloth, the back humped by a lifetime of toil. On his other side cryptic little Sorghaghtani sat cross-legged on the platform, all muffled in draperies, beads, and tufts of herbs. The camps of the foe were too far off for him to discern, but the bugles must be sounding there.
'What is to be done?' Sorghaghtani demanded angrily. 'Can we not help him break the binding?'
'We must try,' the tutelary answered. 'For him to fail at the last minute would be tragedy for all Italy. But the dangers are extreme.'
'Is he not a strong man, able to withstand what must break most others?'
'Undoubtedly, but even for him the shock may be mortal.'
'Will you two stop that!' Toby roared, glaring from one to the other. 'If you are going to put me to death, Holiness, then go ahead and do it. Otherwise, throw me in a cell where I can get some sleep. Or, best of all, let me go down there and die beside the men who trusted me, the men I have betrayed. But stop discussing me as if I'm a colicky horse!'
They ignored him.
'Great Spirit, will you not explain his error to him?'
'He cannot believe us, and there is no time. The forces are poised, and the word must be given before the sun rises. Sorghaghtani, daughter, bid Chabi take him to the spirit world and show him the truth.'
The little shaman uttered a cry as shrill as a bat's. 'Nay, Holiness, do you know what you ask? Is he not untrained? What has he done that you would destroy him so horribly?'
'Tobias, if you could save the city by laying down your life, what would be your choice?'
His knuckles were white on the railing. 'Do you have to ask?'
'You have to answer.'
'Take my life, then. Will it be quick?'
'No, and it may be a shameful death, but we have no more time. Send him, Sorghaghtani, send him.'
The shaman's fingers awoke a gentle rumble from the drum on her lap.
'No!' Toby protested. 'The hob! Do not rouse the hob!'
'It is time to rouse the hob,' said the tutelary.
The beat became a muffled thunder, and then a roar of blood in his ears. A weight of worlds crushed him down. He folded to his knees and bowed even smaller, feeling as if he were shrinking under a merciless load — tiny and smaller still, no larger than Chabi. He spread his arms, for he could move nothing else, and his arms raised him. He soared, and Chabi went with him, together borne on the imperative of the drumming. The dome rocked and spun and vanished away in the wind. Like an autumn leaf he rode the tempest, spinning through shapes and shades of madness, lights, and colors no mortal eye could see. Chabi was with him.
At last he sank. The rushing slowed and tumult faded, leaving him in the stillness of a moonlit glade. The drumming was a distant background, a pulse in the world, a voice chanting far off. Deer slept in the long grass and thorny shrubs, does mostly prone, fawns curled small. The stag was on his feet, antlers held proud aloft as he stared at the newcomer, although if he could see Toby, it was more than Toby could. He had no sense of being there, neither in his own body nor any other. But the stag knew him and saw him, and there was sorrow in the great liquid eyes.
'You call from afar, shaman,' the stag said, 'very far from the worlds of the ancestors.' He twitched his black nose inquiringly, seeking the missing scent. 'We are not a fighting people. The wolf drives us in winter, and we must run.'
Toby could not speak, but drumming spoke for him, and the stag seemed not to mind. It turned its magnificent head to look eastward. 'Many have cried in distress to the fathers, but always they wanted us to fight for them, and we are not a fighting people. Thus say the ancestors to us: 'You shall not enter their battles. They must turn the pack themselves.''
The beat lamented, then changed, growing more agitated, urgent. Forest shifted and blurred and reformed as walls of stone. Moonlight puddled silver on floorboards under narrow windows, its reflected rays sketching in the inner darkness a massive bed of finely carved woods and thick brocade. Through a gap in the draperies showed the slender whiteness of a girl asleep.
The herd had gone, leaving only the stag, and he looked to the west, sinews straining in his mighty neck as he supported the weight of his rack. 'Your song is different. You ask us not to fight, but to run, and this we can do. Behold, I answer your call! I will go before the pack and run for you, shaman.'
The drum's pulse rose in triumph, and the stag himself changed — fur melting, flesh flowing — until what stood before the moonlit windows was a young man, stocky and muscular, and yet his thick shoulders still bore the stag's head and antlers. A cloth tied loosely around his now-human loins was probably not normal wear but something taken up in a hurry. He looked to the north. 'Show me the way. I am yours to command.'
Still Toby could not reply, and again the voice of the drum answered for him, its beat slowing to a somber throb, a dirge, a funeral march, full of menace. The stag-man understood, for his shoulders sagged. He turned to the south, and his voice rose in complaint, a voice growing more and more familiar, just as the walls and the windows were aching at the edges of memory.
'You ask too much, shaman! To flee before the hunters is no shame when one is not sprung from a fighting people. But not to run, or to run in circles, or to cower in a hollow and watch the pack close, ah, but you ask too much!' His antlers were visibly melting and drooping. 'Think you because I will not fight that I have no honor? That I forget the ancestors?' The wilted antlers hung over his chest like ropes; and all his pride was shame. He laid his human hands on the window ledge and belled a great note of despair to the starlit night and the sea. 'This is what you do to me, shaman! I will have recompense. You will suffer for this.'
'I will suffer,' Toby said aloud, and the scene shattered in a cacophony of drums.
He sprawled on the gallery with his arms outspread and the stonework cold under his face. 'No!' he said. 'No, no, no! I do not remember.'
'More, Sorghaghtani!' said the toneless voice of the tutelary. 'He will recover and thank you for it, or he will not return to reproach you. Even madness will be better than failure.'
Again the drumming swept him up and whirled him into the spirit world.
CHAPTER THREE
A forest at sunset. He stood naked before a huge and ancient oak, staring up at a hole in the trunk and a squirrel that sat on the edge of the hole, gibbering at him as the rumble of the drum faded into the distance like a passing storm.
'Go away, go away!' the squirrel chattered. It was a very red little squirrel, and it wrapped its bushy tail around itself and peered down at him with eyes like angry bright beads. 'Go, go, go! Go now! Go away! They are mine.'
'I only want to borrow them,' Toby said.
'No! No! No! No! They are mine. They are ours, not yours, shaman. Go! Go away! Mine! Mine! Mine!'
'I will bring them back.' He reached up to the hole and tried to push the squirrel aside. It bit his finger. He
