Chapter 8

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. Feathers on the two arrows in Oleg’s back! Thomas heard the wonderer’s breath bursting out with heavy screaming, moaned helplessly. A giant! No, a titan, as even a giant would have fallen before!

“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 smooth gleaming backs stick out, polished by the water. If he falls, he’ll crumble to pieces with fear before he gets down!

The wonderer’s breath was backbreaking, blood streamed down his back. Evidently, he was holding with his last strength, his fingers about to weaken, to come off the even rocky wall, and the two of them to start a long fall, as long as their lives!

Carefully, Thomas tried to slip off Oleg’s shoulder: he resolved to fall alone, let his brave friend survive… If the Virgin lets it too. He got afraid, but the more terror crept into his soul, the more diligence he put into his moves off the steep shoulder, seeking a way to slip down that would spare the wonderer.

Suddenly he felt the wonderer’s arm, up to the shoulder, passing under his chain. Now we’ll fall both! So Thomas, gnawing his teeth and cursing the selflessness of the northern barbarian of Scythia, tried to move his body closer to his neck to distribute the weight among both shoulders. “Angels damn you,” he hissed, like an angry snake, in Oleg’s ear, “and your nobility! We knights can die with no cry…”

The wonderer started to groan hoarsely through gritted teeth. Thomas closed his eyes tight, feeling with each his vein the creepy teeth of protruding rocks on the bottom of the gorge. He resolved not to open eyes. If we fall, we fall. He’d died of terror hundred times, what could be more?

A knock on his back, and he was pressed on the hard. The waterfall roared in his ears, that sound all but drowned the thundering breath of Oleg, the rattling and screaming in his chest. A dense water spray came all over them. Thomas opened his eyes hastily. In the moonlight, he saw the wonderer’s face distorted with pain, his lips bloodless, his nose sharp. They lingered on a tiny stone ledge, in just fifteen or twenty feet over the water. The waves lapped and thundered against the rocks, the air was filled with water mist. The wonderer staggered at the very brink, his eyes screwed up bus his arm stretched out over the edge, lest Thomas fall into the seething stream.

Suddenly Oleg’s eyes started to close. He sobbed, dropped to his knees, then fell on the side. Hastily, Thomas snatched the hem of the wolfskin with his fettered hands, kept Oleg on the stone ledge. The wonderer turned with a moan. With his eyes closed, he groped and slapped around. Thomas froze when the wonderer tore a dark wisp of grass out of a crack and put into his mouth. He hurried to seize Oleg’s hand, but the wonderer was already chewing with effort, then swallowing. Thomas saw Adam’s apple struggling up his throat.

Suddenly a furious shout rang out far above. Some noisy thing flew past them, hit the stones below. Thomas tossed his head but could only see the overhanging rocky cover.

The wonderer was crawling at his feet, grabbing something with both hands and filling his pocket, his jaws moving constantly, his eyes goggled as a mad man’s, his lips dripping with saliva. “Sir wonderer…” Thomas called. His voice gave a quaver.

Oleg shook his head, as he kept slapping on the rocky wall, searching the dark cracks. Finally, Thomas saw what the wonderer was snatching: the grass that grew in slits among stones. Hairy, loathsome, and disgusting like the back of a drowned rat.

Heavy rocks rushed down past them, the columns of splashes reached their ledge. Oleg got up, clinging at the wall, clasped Thomas silently around the middle of his body, squat to shoulder him.

Thomas screamed in terror. “Sir wonderer! If you have any strength left… save yourself! Off chance, as you put it, a miracle happens and you will survive. And I’m to be saved by no one.”

Oleg walked on the ledge, scratching the rock with Thomas, until the ledge got so narrow that the wonderer clung to the stone surface again and crawled down, clutching at the smallest unevenness. Thomas had died hundred times before, but when the splashes reached his legs he stiffened, tried instinctively to tuck his feet up, but made himself relax again, hang like a sack of sand, as the wonderer groaned of his squirms. Shamed, Thomas bit his lip until it bled: he felt the wonderer’s back sticky and soaked, but not with the waterfall splashes!

Suddenly Oleg slipped off a stone. Thomas’s blood ran cold. The roaring water stream poured them over, wisps of foam got stuck in the wonderer’s red hair.

For some long, agonizing moments Thomas waited for death to come, but the water rushed by. At last, he saw the wonderer was stuck between two boulders. He did not fell but jumped down on his own will. The water was knee-deep, but splashes and foam flew overhead. Thomas moaned, craving for a beautiful death again. He forgot he was not galloping into knightly attack on his warhorse and a beautiful death could hardly be achieved by the one tied up, hand and foot.

Holding the knight as a log on his shoulder, Oleg struggled on a smooth stone, measured the distance by eye, jumped. Thomas opened his eyes wide involuntarily, as he saw foaming streams among the rocks that protruded from water across the mountain river. The roar made his ears crack, the icy foam stuck up his eyes and mouth like glue… And the wonderer, with his fatal wound, leapt heavily from one wet rock to another, slipped on those wet giant eggs, but some miracle kept him from falling off, he leapt again, his rattling more terrible with every jump, his fingers getting weaker. Thomas saw a gap between rapids where the wonderer, utterly exhausted, would probably drop his unbearable load and fall down, his life burnt to ashes during those terrible hours!

Oleg collapsed heavily, face first, on the bank. Thomas rolled down from his back, glanced around in bewilderment. They’d left the scary water stream behind!

Thomas touched Oleg’s shoulder, the wonderer did not move. Thomas’s heart sank, he turned his friend’s head, removed the dirt and river rubbish from his face to prevent choking. The wonderer’s eyes were open but his stare stony dead.

“Forgive me, friend,” Thomas said heavily. He sobbed with burning shame of his being alive and chained, while the wonderer died to save him.

Suddenly Oleg’s eyelashes flickered, his face gave a twitch. The wonderer took a deep breath, fingers of his right hand clenched convulsively. Thomas jumped up, his chains rang. “Sir wonderer!” he cried. “Sir Oleg! Tell me: what to do? Never mind the cup. I’ll go to your Scytho-Rus’, just tell what to say of you! I’ll give the rest of our money to your family, don’t worry!”

“Pocket…” Oleg croaked.

“What?” Thomas didn’t get it.

“In… po… cket…”

Hastily, Thomas put his fingers into the wonderer’s pocket, then into another. It was difficult with fettered hands. The familiar disgusting grass stuck to his fingers.

“Give…”

Thomas obeyed, though with a shudder: put several nasty grass blades into the wonderer’s stiffening mouth. They were so small and entwined that seemed no grass but some frozen fibers of whitish slime. Oleg tried to chew but could not move his jaws, tried to swallow but his throat emitted dry heat that burned Thomas’s fingers. The knight hurried to scoop some water. It was spilled at once, but several drops got into the wonderer’s mouth. He licked his lips slowly, made a forced swallowing move.

“Sir wonderer? Do you have a family?.. Please tell me! I’ll tell them of your… of you!”

“And your Britain?” Oleg whispered softly.

“I’ll get there later. From your Russo-Scythia!”

“And Krizhina?”

Thomas felt as though stabbed in heart. With the eyes of his mind, he saw valiant Roland who died while covering the retreat of the force of his sovereign, Charles the Great. Roland loved beautiful Alda, she waited for him. As a true knight, he preferred friendship to love: dying, he said farewell not to Alda but to Durendal, his spatha-sword… “I’ll go to your Rus’,” he said firmly. “Or Ross. Wherever you like. You are a Pagan… Please tell me how to bury you.”

“Da… da…”

“What?” Thomas cried. “Oh, daemonic rite! With sacrifice and dancing? And singing, yeah? What songs would you like?”

Oleg did not move. Suddenly he seemed dead to Thomas. Through the roar of close waterfall, he could not hear Oleg’s heavy breath, and the moon had found, by some miracle, a cloud in the night sky and hid behind it. Thomas, frightened but hopeless, shook his friend, clapped on his cheeks.

Suddenly the wonderer turned to him slowly his pale face, which had turned gaunt at once, his eyes sunken. “How are the arrows?”

Thomas clenched his jaws, examined the wonderer’s back quickly. The dagger wound was not bleeding anymore but the blood did not dry either: Oleg was soaked with water splashes from head to feet, as well as Thomas. The second wound, on his side, was only bleeding a bit. As if all the blood had gone out before. Two tiny twigs stuck out under the shoulder blade. Thomas gave a dull groan as he grasped that he’d been touching them constantly while dangling, like a bag of stones, on the wonderer’s back. “If only we reach a healer!” he said with sudden hope. “Sir wonderer, we still have a chance…”

“Pull them out,” the wonderer said in a lifeless voice. He lay prone, his arms outstretched, as though he fell down from a great height. “The arrowheads are not deep in, I feel…”

“Sir wonderer!” Thomas cried in terror. “I can’t!”

“Then I’ll die,” the wonderer said plainly.

Thomas sobbed, gripped the broken fragment of arrow with his trembling fingers, but it, wet and soaked with blood, slipped out of his weakened hands at once. The muscle on the wonderer’s back, where the iron was stuck, gave a twitch. Thomas bit his lip, with an ardent desire to die straight off but the wonderer to become healthy instead.

“Pull slower,” Oleg croaked. “Do it very slow!.. Or the heads slip off.”

Thomas joined his fettered hands, dug his nails into the wooden twig, started a long agonizing way above. Blood gushed out at once, ran down the back!

When the skin started to swell (which was a sign of the iron arrowhead approaching) Thomas stopped: the wooden twig was coming out too quick. It slipped out of the iron! Holding the broken blooded twig to see the arrowhead bulging under skin, Thomas pressed his mouth to, tried to get the lump moving with his tooth, but the wonderer’s skin was too hard, tanned. Thomas closed his eyes desperately, not to see the blood, pressed the lump with teeth, holding it by the twig at the same time, started biting through that sturdy, unyielding skin.

Blood filled his mouth, he gulped it down. His head was giddy and dizzy, as if he were losing blood quickly himself. His teeth grinded against the iron, he pulled the twig with caution. A shapeless bloody lump came out of the wound: the iron arrowhead caked in clots of blood. He heard mountains collapse, horses neigh, and swords ring in his ears. Through all that noise, a distant voice came, “Now you are my brother by blood. Set to another…”

“You will bleed!”

“The water from glacier… Splash it over… To set…”

With the arrowhead clenched in his teeth, Thomas opened the second wound by cutting the live flesh, took the arrow out, then, at once, started to scoop the icy water and splash it on the blooded back. In the light of the breaking day, red streams ran back into the mountain river. They were growing lighter swiftly.

“E…nough!” the wonderer said with his teeth clanging. “My wounds shut… Of fear, it seems… and cold…”

Thomas could not bend his fingers, frozen like icicles. He could not feel his forearms, even his arms. The wonderer turned with great effort, sat up, resting hands against the ground. Yellow like a dead man, he became emaciated for that only night, the features of his face sharp. He looked again like the pilgrim whom Thomas had met beyond the walls of Jerusalem.

“We must go,” Oleg said in a constrained voice. “Thomas… you may jump like a bird or crawl like a snake, but we have to get away. There must be a bridge or a ferry somewhere. Soon they’ll cross.”

“I see no bridge,” Thomas muttered exhaustedly.

“This small river is no Dardanelles. And men even cross oceans!” He got up, leaning on the stones, then risked to take his hands off, stood for a while, staggering slightly. With fear and amazement, Thomas looked in his gloomy strained face. Oleg stopped swaying, turned his head. “Let’s go. They are coming. You can lean on me…”

Breaking himself, Thomas started to rise from the cold ground, thinking, with fear and perplexity, of the strange things in life. The forty wonderers turned out to be the heroes whose unheard-of might could shake kingdoms, and his wonderful companion, friend, and his sworn brother too, as Thomas tasted his blood… Who are they? What do they consider a true feat if they neglect their present deeds? They sing of knights who slew dragons, but these men killed the Hell’s monsters with all but bare hands – and forgot it at once, as if those were flies they drove away… And the wonderer does not see at all that each his step now is a feat!

He jumped after Oleg, his short chain rang, bangles made his ankles sore. The wonderer glanced back often, and Thomas saw with terror that his friend suffered more for him than for himself.

He felt a strange fury for the wonderer boil up in his soul. One good turn deserves another, and Thomas would never be able to pay back with a similar deed. Suffering for others is a thing of wild Paganism that fell under the victorious blows of Christ’s faith. True, Christ suffered for others Himself, but He was still a sinner at that time…

He felt a current of hot air, went jumping faster, fell down, rolled over, tried to proceed on his fours, but the bloody chain was too short: he would have to bend his back like a worm crawling along a stick… Thomas moaned through gritted teeth but did not slow down, as he saw the wonderer suffering more. He took my sin on his shoulders. Damned Pagan who behaves like the ascetic of Nazareth…

The wonderer stretched out his hand. “Lean,” he said in a dull voice. “Easier to jump.”

“What?” Thomas snapped with insult. “You lean!”

The wonderer still staggered but his feet did not miss anymore. His pace grew steady, and Thomas, to his shame and fear, fell the strength coming back to Oleg with every moment.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 558