Demon Rider

The wind was a restless silence in the night, quieter than the whisper of the sentry's tread on dry grass and rubbly soil. The first glimmerings of daylight were creeping in over the stony hills, not even bright enough yet to mark a horizon or distinguish a white thread from a black thread, which was how the Moors defined morning. Although he was wrapped in both his blanket and his cloak, the sentry shivered as he paced back and forth, forcing himself to stay awake. His legs ached already, and they must walk a weary way before sunset. More than anything in the world he wished he could just lie down and catch a few more hours' sleep, because three half-nights in a row had left him permanently bleary-eyed and yawning. No, more than anything else, he would like to be smelling the peaty scents of home and watching the sun come up on Ben More…

When the scream burst forth almost at his toes, he jumped a foot in the air. It was diabolical, bestial scream, louder than a cannon barrage. Echoes answered from the steepness on the far side of the valley, and a couple of heartbeats later came a wild barking of dogs at the distant casa. Gracia wakened with shrills of alarm. By that time Toby had leaped from his bedding with his sword in his hand and was peering around to see where the noise had come from.

It had come from him.

Hamish said, 'What's wrong?'

The big man dropped the sword with a clatter and grabbed him in a bear hug that seemed likely to crush his ribs. 'Hamish, Hamish! You're all right! You're alive!' His hand pawed at Hamish's throat.

He fought back. 'I was! Let me go, you maniac. What happened?'

Longdirk groaned and released him. 'Demons!' he muttered. 'Oh, spirits!' He flopped back down on the ground and put his head in his hands.

The dogs were falling silent and did not seem to be coming closer. Gracia was twittering questions.

'Senor Longdirk had a bad dream,' Hamish explained. He knelt down. Toby was sobbing, heaving dry, soundless gasps of grief. He? Sooner would Ben More weep. 'What's wrong? Another vision?'

'Umph.' That sounded like agreement. He nodded and gulped through his tortured breathing.

Hamish put arms around him, but awkwardly, because it was the sort of thing an excitable, demonstrative Spaniard would do — Scotsmen never hugged each other. 'You're all right, though? Not injured?'

'Not me, no. Hamish, I cut your head off!'

'You did?' That ought to be funny and wasn't. Nasty shivers ran down his back. 'Well, it didn't work. I mean, I'm glad it's you who comes back hurt from these things and not me. Are you sure this one wasn't just a dream?'

'It is very impolite of the senores to talk so I cannot comprehend.' Gracia had begun the morning ritual of combing out her long black hair, sitting with her back to the two crazy foreigners.

Toby shuddered and seemed to realize that he was being held like a child. Instead of trying to break free, he wrapped a thick arm around Hamish and squeezed. He was still shaking. 'No, it was no dream. Oreste had me. He'd hexed me, enslaved me with gramarye, and he made me chop your head off, and another man's — ax and block and black hood and everything. Oh, Hamish, I did it! I didn't even protest. I was eager to do it, just to please him!'

Gooseflesh! 'I'm sure you were. Anyone can be hexed — remember King Fergan… anyone. It wouldn't be your fault. But it could still have been a dream, Toby. You're worried about the baron and you remember the time Valda hexed you. The two got mixed up in a dream. Happens all the time.'

'You had an awful lot of blood in you, friend!'

'What was this terrible dream, senor?' Gracia demanded, piqued as a child at being excluded. 'I am very good at telling the meaning of dreams.'

'The dream told,' Toby said in his butchered Castilian, 'that I was royal executioner in Barcelona and I cut off Senor Diego's head.'

'How tragic! Why?'

'Because he had been flirting with you and I was jealous.'

Gracia squealed at this outrage to her honor, barely managing to conceal her delight.

Hamish shivered and broke free. 'We may as well be on our way.' The skyline had come into view. 'You're all right? You weren't tortured again?'

'No. In fact…' He peered at his wrists. 'All better. No bruises, see? Not a hair out of place. When I took hold of the ax my arms were bare, and I'm sure there were no marks on my wrists.'

'So Oreste cured you? After he'd tortured you and then hexed you.'

'Must have done. Must be going to. Hamish, this is insane!' Toby's voice quavered, and that was not like him. None of this was like him. His eyes were round as birds' eggs in the gloom. 'It wasn't just a dream!'

'No, it wasn't,' Hamish said nervously. 'Because where did your beard go? You had it on when you went to bed.'

Of course Toby put a hand to his chin then, and of course Senora de Gomez noticed the absence of the beard. She squealed in astonishment and came hurrying over to see, and then she noticed his wrists also — she had joked about their purple and yellow colors at supper. It should have been funny to listen to him trying to convince her that he had shaved in the night and was a very quick healer. It wasn't.

Hamish left the two of them in heated conversation and wandered off to attend to necessary morning functions. As far as Gracia was concerned, he did not exist. To her he was merely the boy, although he was older than she was. He kept telling himself that it didn't matter because he would never let himself become involved with her even if she begged him. She was crazy. She collected wraiths in a bottle and heard voices. Oh, she was pretty enough with her dark Spanish eyes, and when she unbound her thick black hair it hung to her hips like a sable cloak, but she would flutter her lashes at Toby till the stars fell before he responded.

Toby had been attracting women's attention since he topped six feet, when he was about thirteen. It was well known back in Tyndrum that some of them had done everything short of stripping naked and crawling into his bed, and even that would probably not have met with any success. Toby never even noticed. He was oblivious to every hint or signal. If he ever did fall in love, then it would be a lifetime commitment, never a passing fancy, because he could not forgive what the Sassenach soldiers had done to his mother, although that was how he had been conceived. Hamish was quite certain that the big lad was just as much a virgin as he was, alas! The only girl who had ever won his interest had been Jeanne, last spring, in Mezquiriz. Yes, he had shown some reaction to her, and he had wept copiously when she died in the tragedy. Of course his lack of interest just made him more interesting to women. Unfortunately, it also made any other man in his vicinity even less interesting. With a sigh at the unfairness of things, the boy unlaced his codpiece and irrigated the desert.

* * *

By the time the sun flamed on the horizon, the three of them were on their way, heading down the narrow little valley, which must lead to the coast. Its sides were stony and rough, and the stream bed was dry as tinder, without a single tree in sight. Mostly there was nothing to see except the next bend, but almost certainly the travelers were being watched from afar.

The hills had been a mistake. There were no roads and few crops. The rebels had not ravaged this wild, barren landscape because there was nothing to loot except goats and sheep, but multitudes of refugees had swarmed through the area and made the inhabitants distinctly inhospitable. Every casa had become a fortress and every outsider a target. Fortunately none of the shots fired at them had been loud enough to rouse the hob, and the dogs had never come within tooth range.

At sunset they had all agreed that they must return to the coast, even Toby, who had hitherto led the way across country with his usual bull stubbornness, storming up and down those bare-bone hills, bent under three times the load Hamish could manage. Gracia with her grand airs carried only her precious bottle and expected her two henchmen to take care of everything else. Now that their food was running low, they had agreed that they must go back to the plain.

By the time Gracia had finished chattering about famous dreams in her family, Hamish had decided that Barcelona was the city of dreams. He secretly dreamed of boarding a ship home to Scotland there, although he knew he could never abandon Toby. Gracia's dreams of delivering a bottleful of wraiths to Montserrat were as crazy as Toby's nightmares of Oreste. But it seemed that they would have to pass very close by Barcelona, if not go right to it.