He responded by spurring his mount down the south road. What the hell was this? I even started to turn east before I realized what he’d done.
I caught up. “Why south?”
Kind of hitting it sideways, he told me, “Croaker was always an understanding kind of guy. And forgiving.”
The son of a bitch was crazy.
Or maybe he’d suddenly gone sane and didn’t need to whimper over Darling anymore.
XII
The three-legged beast carried the head to the heart of the Great Forest, to the altar at the center of a ring of standing stones that had been in place for several thousand years. It could barely squeeze through the picket of ancient oaks surrounding that greatest of the holy places of the pitifully diminished forest savages.
The monster deposited the head and hobbled back into the dappled woods.
One by one the beast hunted down the shamans of the woodland tribes and compelled them to go to the head. In their terror those petty old witch doctors threw themselves upon their faces before it and worshiped it as a god. They swore oaths of fealty for fear of the jaws of the beast. Then they began tending to the head’s needs.
Not once, to any, did it occur to take advantage of its powerlessness to destroy it. The fear of it was impressed too deeply into their kind. They could not imagine resistance.
And, always, there was that slavering monster to overawe them.
They went away from the holy place to collect willow withes, mystical herbs, rope grasses, leather both raw and tanned, blessed feathers, and stones known to possess magical properties. They gathered small animals appropriate for sacrifices, and even brought in a thief who was to be killed anyway. The man screamed and begged to be dispatched in the usual way, fearing the perpetual bondage and torment of a soul dedicated to a god.
Most of the stuff collected was junk. Most of the shamans’ magic was mummery, but it proceeded from a deeper truth, from a fountain of genuine power. Power that was real enough to serve the head’s immediate purpose.
In that oldest and most sacred of their holy places the shamans wove and built themselves a wicker man of willow and rope grasses and rawhide. They burned their herbs and slaughtered their sacrifices, christening and anointing the wicker man with blood. Their chanting invocations possessed the ring of stone for days.
Much of the chant was nonsense, but forgotten or only partly understood words of power lingered in its rhythms. Words enough to do.
When those old men finished the rite, they set the head on the wicker man’s neck. Its eyes blinked three times.
One wooden hand snatched a staff from a shaman. The old man fell. Tottering, the amalgam moved to a patch of bare earth. With the foot of the staff it scratched out crude block letters.
Slowly the thing gave the old men their orders. They hurried off. In a week they were ready to make improvements on their handiwork.
The rites this time were more bloody and bizarre. They included the sacrifice of two men snatched from the ruined town beside the Barrowland. Those two were a long time dying.
When the rites were finished the wicker man and its corrupt burden possessed more freedom of movement, though no one would mistake the construct for a human body. The head could now speak in a soft, gravelly whisper.
It ordered, “Collect your fifty best warriors.”
The old men balked. They had done their part. They had no taste for adventures.
The thing they had created whispered a chant in which there were no waste words. Three old men died screaming, devoured by worms that ate them from within.
“Gather your fifty best warriors.”
The survivors did as they were told.
When the warriors came they hoisted the wicker man onto the back of the crippled monster. No woodland pony or ox would allow the amalgam to mount it. He then led the band down to the wreck of the town at the Barrowland. “Kill them all,” he whispered.
As the massacre began the wicker man moved past, his ruined face fixed southward. His eyes smoldered with a poisonous, insane hatred.
XIII
Timmy came flying into camp moments after the racket started. He was so scared he could hardly talk. “We got to get out of here,” he choked out, in one-word gasps. “That monster is back. Something is riding it. Some savages are killing them in the village.”
Old Man Fish nodded once and dumped water on the fire. “Before it remembers us. Just like we rehearsed it.”
“Oh, come on,” Tully snarled. “Jimmy’s probably seeing things...”
The tree cut loose with the granddaddy of all blue bolts. It filled the forest with its glow and banged like heavenly lightning.
“Holy shit,” Tully whispered. He took off like a stampeded bear.
The others were not too far behind.
Smeds was thoughtful as he trotted along, his arms filled with gear. Fish’s precautions had paid off. Maybe. Like the old boy said, they weren’t out nothing getting away for a while.
From behind came a flare in a rosy peach shade answered by another blast of blue. Something yowled like the lost soul of a great cat.
Tully claimed Fish thought too much. But here was Fish turning out to do more and more of the leading while Tully eased into Smeds’s old place as shirker and complainer. Timmy wasn’t changing, though. He was still the handy runt with the thousand stories.
Fish and Timmy were putting more into this than Tully. Smeds didn’t think he could cut them. Especially not if the payoff was as big as Tully expected. No need to be bloody greedy then.
Smeds squatted beside his log, placed his stuff in the nest of branches left to hold it. Tully was on the river already, splashing away. “Sshh!” Fish said. Everybody froze, except Tully out there, splashing away.
Old Man Fish listened.
All Smeds heard was a lot of silence. Nor was there any lightning anymore.
Fish relaxed. “Nothing moving. We got time to strip.”
Smeds took the old man’s word but he didn’t waste any time getting naked and shoving off.
Lying on his chest on a log in the middle of a river in the middle of the night, Smeds felt the first nibbles of panic. He could not see the island for which they were headed, though Fish said there was no way they could miss it from where they had left the bank. The current would carry them right to it.
That was no reassurance. He could not swim. If he missed the island he would drift maybe all the way to the sea.
A sudden barrage of blue flares illuminated the river. He was surprised to see that Fish and Timmy were nearby. And for all his furious splashing Tully was only a hundred feet ahead.
He felt an urge to say something, anything, just to draw courage from the act of communication. But he had nothing to say. And silence was imperative. No point asking for trouble.
During the coming hour he relived every moment of fear he’d ever known, every instance of misfortune and disaster. He was very ragged when he spied the darker loom of the island dead ahead.
It wasn’t much of an island. It was maybe thirty feet wide and two hundred yards long, a nail paring of a
