The wonderer rushed to them with his arms outstretched, grabbed as many villains as he could, hit them against each other. Only Kite and Stelmah escaped him: the beastly intuition of Kite made him jump aside at the very last moment, and Stelmah was standing aside.
There were shrieks. Gorvel wheezed, as the bodies of Peter and Paul pressed him down. The wonderer rose from the top of the heap of bodies. At once, Kite jumped from behind, stabbed Oleg on his back, while Stelmah rolled into the shrubs, jumped up there, seized his bow with both hands.
A strong fist hit Kite’s face with a crunch, as though a heavy stone fell on a nest of eggs. Silently, Kite vanished in the night. Oleg seized Thomas by chained hands, shouldered him with effort. As Kite fell, a dagger slipped off his hand, Thomas caught it involuntarily in the air, then his belly hit against something solid, the grey ground went rushing before his eyes, sliding away swiftly. He grasped he lay on the shoulder of the wounded Oleg running into the night. Thomas heard a swish nearby, then a scary dull smack, and again, but got no meaning of it, dangling on the running wonderer’s shoulder, like a sack of sand, his chained arms and legs ringing.
There was a furious shout behind. The wonderer crashed into dark hazel shrubs, turned abruptly, ran down a crack, turned again. Twigs scratched Thomas’s face painfully, he heard yells, shrieks, snapping of branches behind. Soon that was joined by abrupt clatter of hooves. Gorvel’s voice came from the left, and Stelmah replied from the right. He was chasing ahorse: felt the way or had the best eyesight to find in the dark the way among trees and thick bushes.
The wonderer stopped. Through his heavy rattling breath, Thomas heard the shouts of pursuers, shrill and shrieking. Gorvel, evidently with his iron helmet off, bellowed, promised any sum of money, any treasures to the one who comes up with runaways and kills them. Frightened Stelmah screamed back they should have done it straight away, with none of that noble clowning that cost them three men with broken backs and then Kite with smashed skull…
“Leave me, sir wonderer,” Thomas said hoarsely.
The wonderer ran again, jumping over logs, slipping on smooth stones covered with night dew, climbing over rocky heaps. Thomas on his shoulder heard Stelmah crying they were just about to come upon, as the knight’s hands and feet were fettered by indestructible iron and his foolish servant shed the ground with blood as he ran, with not only a wound of Kite’s dagger on his back but also two arrows in it.
Thomas turned his head in terror. Before his very eyes, in the moonlight, some light feathers bristled angrily at the wind.
“Leave me,” Thomas whispered angrily, “or we’ll die both! Heal you wounds, then return and kill them!”
The wonderer’s breath burst from his chest, roaring like a forest fire. Being jerked up with each his convulsive sigh, Thomas cursed own weight, in a fervent desire to become as small and light as the warrior monks of that southern monastery.
The wonderer broke into some new shrubs, darted across a moonlit open space, turned, rushed again, like an elk, across a big glade, trampling on white caps of mushrooms. Suddenly it got pitch-dark around: the thick tree branches screened off the starry sky and the shiny disk of the moon.
The wonderer reeled, fell down to his knees. Thomas slipped off his shoulder, fell on the stones. The trample was dying away. Next to him, the wonderer breathed in scary rattles. A narrow moon ray fell on his raised dead face. His lips were blue, his palms leaned against the rocky wall. Two thick arrows stuck out almost in the middle of his back, under shoulder blades. The wonderer’s rattling was going quieter, his head coming down in jerks.
In two steps, there was a tinkle of water. Thomas got up to his knees, crawled there, scooped the water with fettered hands — the thick bangles and the chain prevented cupping them — and brought it to Oleg, half of it spilled on his short and hard way. The wonderer had slipped off the boulder, fell down prone. Thomas spilled the last drops on the wonderer’s neck, gritted his teeth in silent despair: his friend was dying before his very eyes!
With effort, he broke the arrows, leaving their ends stuck in the back, turned the wonderer on his side. Oleg rattled, his eyes rolled up, his face cramped, then his chest stiffened and raised scarily. Sinews in his thick neck bulged in a frightful way, about to tear. His body flinched, then started to relax.
Weeping and not ashamed of tears, Thomas jumped to the stream on his fettered feet, brought a handful of water, wrenched his palms. The drops fell into Oleg’s open mouth. His pale lips twitched, jaws came together slowly, with a creepy grind of teeth. Then his Adam’s apple jerked up, with great effort, as if the wonderer bit off and swallowed a piece of hard air.
Shedding tears, Thomas brought water once more, poured it into Oleg’s mouth. The water all but hissed as it fell into his hot throat, a small cloud of steam flew up. The wonderer gulped down, his overstretched sinews, almost at a point of breaking, started to sink slowly, to subside under his dead skin. His face, distorted by a cramp, remained scary. His lips moved, Thomas heard a croak. “Where… they?”
“Alive,” Thomas whispered, hearing the songs of Heaven’s angels. “Hold on, don’t die… I saw men who didn’t die of an arrow. Even of two…” He said nothing about the wound of dagger: blood still trickling out of it, while falling in rare heavy drops from under the arrows.
“Alive still…” the wonderer croaked a bit quieter. “Off chance we keep…”
“Off chance, off chance,” Thomas agreed hastily. “I’ll crawl away, and you hide. If they find me, keep silent. Probably even Pagan gods will do to save your life. I adjure you: if you survive, take the Holy Grail to my England. But not old England, the one on the continent — to the new one on isles!”
“The Land of White Wolves…”
“Britain,” Thomas corrected. “There you’ll become a honorable… Probably, you’ll even get a noble rank. Though not knight’s…”
There were shouts far away. Judging by the voices, the grove was combed by a long human chain. Thomas shook his fettered hands angrily, tugged the iron off his feet The wide bangles dug into bare flesh, the scratches went bleeding. “We’re caught!” he hissed in despair. “Now they don’t bustle about like angry dogs who lost hare’s tracks!”
The wonderer got up to his knees with a moan, his face twisted with pain. The tendons in his neck bulged, threatening to break the skin.
“You way is down the stream,” Thomas said hastily. “A steep wall there, but with a pass made by waterfall! They won’t hear you in its roar.”
He sounded hopeless: the wonderer was dying, and getting down a steep wall was a difficult thing indeed, even for a strong, healthy highlander… at daytime, not in the moonlight when one can’t see own hands. And then he would have to force the roaring torrent of icy water that jumps, like an animal, over rocks, carries dead trunks, dead animals, drags huge boulders!
The wonderer struggled up to his feet, lurched. His voice was broken with pain. “Yes… Here they can find us…”
He stepped past Thomas. A huge hand, which seemed to come down from the starry sky, seized the knight roughly by belt. Flying up into the air, he cried, his body hit against a hard surface, which gave a swing. The stones in the wall went floating past Thomas. Finally, he realized lying not on rock but on the wonderer’s shoulder. “Mad man,” Thomas cried in a whisper, “you won’t climb down!”
Oleg’s breath went faster, more backbreaking. Thomas tried to relax, lest he bounce that high on the hard hot shoulder. The wonderer kept picking up speed, in a hurry to leave the moonlit space behind.
The roar of the waterfall grew louder, more menacing. On the edge of the rocky steep, the wonderer dropped to his knees, Thomas slipped silently on the ground. His head banged against a stone, he gritted his teeth, lacking his steel helmet. The incessant roar and thunder, a blow of cold and cloaking water spray were coming from below.
The wonderer crawled over the edge, hung on his hands, raised a bit as he found a foothold, reached for Thomas. The knight tried to move away but the strong hand shouldered him, and Thomas froze, like a worm in cocoon, in fear that a careless move would push both himself and Oleg off into the abyss.
The moon came out from behind a tiny cloud, the night grew lighter. Thomas shot a glance down and all but wrenched out with fear. The wonderer climbs down a steep wall, like a fly, finding by miracle the smallest ledges and cracks to set feet and hands. Thomas hangs, looking into the abyss, at the height of a ten-floored palace. Far below, a mighty water stream rushes among sharp stones, spits foam, drags huge boulders with a thunder, their