The Irishman thought about it, then shrugged. 'I'm afraid I'm on the side of the randomness. The idea of predestination, lack of free will, disgusts me. Astrology, in fact, has always disgusted me. And I think you picked the wrong picture to illustrate your point - it doesn't sound to me like a man's vision dimming as night approaches, so much as an owl's when the sun rises.'

Aurelianus' face slowly wrinkled itself into a wry smile. 'I'm afraid,' he admitted, 'your analogy is better. Ibrahim and I, and Bacchus, and your mountain guides, and your winged adversaries of the other night, are creatures of the long, brutal night of the world. You and the Fisher King are creatures of the coming day, and you can't really feel at home in this pre-dawn dimness. In any case, to return to my point, though the prescient arts are deteriorating, they've still got a clear century or two of effectiveness left. I, in common with a lot of other beings, am accustomed to relying on them as you do on your eyes and ears. But in this conflict, this problem of Vienna and the beer and Arthur and Suleiman, they're completely in the dark, blinded.'

Duffy raised his eyebrows. 'And what is so bright about any light here that it should so dazzle all you cellar-denizens?'

Aurelianus was getting annoyed. Don't run it into the ground,' he snapped; 'It's because you are or will be centrally involved in it all. You're an anomaly, a phenomenon not allowed for by the natural laws, and therefore you and your actions are unreadable ciphers to the old natural magics.'

At this the Irishman brightened. 'Really? Then you don't have any idea of what I'm going to do?'

'Well, I do have clues,' Aurelianus allowed. 'Indications. But in the main, no - I can't see you or the things you affect.'

Duffy reached across a table and with two fingers snagged the bottle he'd opened earlier. He took a liberal sip from the neck and put it back. 'Good enough. I'll be downstairs whenever you want to leave.' He picked his way around the ornate obstacles and again left the room.

* * *

Chapter Fourteen

'Epiphany!' he yelled when he reached the dining room. 'Damn it, Epiphany!' There's no reason for me to obey that old monkey, he thought. Why should I trust him? He's never had my genuine interests at heart; he's always just used me like a chess-piece in his filthy. wizardly schemes. Trusting Merlin is like giving a migrant scorpion a lift inside your hat.

Epiphany stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands with a towel and staring at him worriedly. 'What is it, Brian?' she asked.

'Get some travelling clothes and any cash you've saved

- we're leaving this minute. I'll go saddle a couple of horses.'

Dawning hope put a youthful brightness in her smile. 'You mean it? Really?'

'I do. Hurry up, the little sorcerer may try to stop us.'

He snatched his cloak from a hook and strode through the kitchen to the stableyard. 'Shrub!' he yelled, blinking in the sudden daylight. 'Saddle up my horse, and one for Epiphany. We're going for a ride.'

He took a hurried step toward the stable, and tripped over a charred board; snarling a curse, he put out his hands to catch himself.

His hands and aching head plunged into the dark, icy water, but a moment later soft arms had pulled him back from the gunwale and gently lowered him onto a seat, and the boat soon stopped rocking. Terribly weak, he slumped back onto some kind of cushion, and lay there gasping, staring up at the stars and the moon in the deep black sky. 'Axe you all right, Mr Duffy?' Shrub sounded worried.

The Irishman rolled over on the sun-warmed cobbles and brushed dry ashes out of his face and hair. 'Hm? Yes, Shrub, I'm all right.' Looking past the boy, he could see several of the northmen grinning at him. He got to his feet and rubbed bits of grit out of his abraded palms.

'I'll go saddle your horses, then,' the boy said.

'Uh, no.. .thank you, Shrub, I've.. .changed my mind.' A weighty depression had emptied his heart of everything else: enthusiasm, hope, and even fear. I was out on the lake, he thought, and without a sip of the Dark this time to prompt it. Hell, I can't run off with what's-her-name if I'm going to be dead in a few months, and probably insane long before that. Besides, I can't disobey Merlin, my old teacher. I've known him much longer than I've known this woman. Women are unreliable anyway - didn't Gwenhwyfar run off with my best friend? No, that was Epiphany. . .well, both of them...

Epiphany's voice interrupted his confused thoughts. 'I'm ready, Brian! How's that for hurrying?'

With some effort he turned and stared at the grayhaired woman standing in the back doorway. 'What?'

'I'm ready to go! Are the horses saddled?'

'No. I'm sorry, Piff, I don't seem to be able.. .we can't go. I can't leave. It's impossible to explain.'

She let drop the bundle she'd been holding, and glass broke inside. 'Do you mean we're not going?'

'Yes. That's what I mean.' Enunciating words seemed dreadfully tiresome. 'I'm sorry,' he managed to add.

Her face was stiff. 'Then when will we? You said in a few weeks...' The new tears on her cheeks glistened in the morning sun.

'I can't leave. I'll die in Vienna. Try to understand, Piff,

my will doesn't have enough strength in this, it's like trying to swim clear of a whirlpool.'

He stopped talking then, for she had turned away from him and trudged with heavy footsteps back into the dimness of the kitchen.

When Aurelianus came outside several minutes later, uncharacteristically dressed in a long woolen tunic, black tights and a tall sugar-loaf hat, he found Duffy sitting in the shade of the kitchen wall with his head in his hands. The sorcerer pursed his lips and hefted the half-dozen rattling swords that were cradled awkwardly in the crook of his left arm.

'What, lad?' he said chidingly. 'Moping here, in the early morning when there's work for all of us to be doing? Up! Melancholy is best indulged at night, over wine.

Duffy exhaled sharply, and was surprised to find he'd been holding his breath. He stood up smoothly, without using his hands. 'Not the way the nights have been around here lately,' he said, and smiled bleakly. 'Horror and fear and rage get a lot of indulgence, but melancholy needs more quiet surroundings.' He peered at the old man. 'Why all the swords? Are you going to conjure up an octopus to come with us?'

'I figured we might as well bring your northmen along,' Aurelianus explained, crossing the yard to dump the swords with an echoing clatter into the bed of a large wagon. 'How many of them have their own weapons?'

'I don't know. Most of them.'

'These will be enough to make sure everyone is armed, then. I even brought Calad Bolg for you.'

'If it comes to it, I'll use a plain rapier, thanks,' Duffy said. 'No guns?'

'I'm afraid not, what with the King being involved.'

'He doesn't approve of them?'

'Huh.' Duffy, though leery of the innovative firearms

himself, shook his head wonderingly. 'Well, I hope we don't run up against someone who does approve of them.'

'Why don't you see if you can coax those beery Aesir into the wagon,' the sorcerer suggested, 'while I get the lads to harness up a couple of horses.'

Twenty minutes later the crowded wagon creaked and bounced out of the city through the west gate; once outside, they were soon deserted by the gang of prancing, cheering boys that had accumulated around the vehicle during the ride from the Zimmermann Inn. Guided by Aurelianus, the horses picked their way through the unpaved lanes between the livestock pens and were soon trotting briskly' through open meadows of new spring grass, along the only wide track that led over the near hills and up into the dense Wienerwald, the Vienna woods.

When they had traversed perhaps a mile, the wizard slowed the horses and yanked the reins so that they'd step over the shallow ditch on the right side of the path. Then the wagon lurched and rocked up a patchily shadowed slope, between occasional twisted trees. Twice they got stuck, and both times Duffy and the northmen climbed out, wrestled a wheel free of some entanglement, and laboriously gave the vehicle a gasping, back-wrenching shove to give the horses a little slack in which to get moving. Finally they had crested the first hill and were precariously teetering down the far side; Aurelianus was leaning ineffectually on the back brake, and the wagon would have rolled over the horses and tumbled into the narrow ravine if Duffy hadn't flipped the old wizard over backward into the packed northmen and borne down on the brake himself.

'You just call directions, huh?' the Irishman shouted, angry at having been scared.

Aurelianus stood up in the wagon bed and leaned his

elbows on the back of the driver's bench. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I never brought a wagon here before. That's right, kind of slant it cross the slope. And then take it between those two big oaks.'

'Right.' The northmen bunched up on the uphill side of the wagon and leaned parallel to the slope, while Duffy did some tricky work with the brake and reins.

The wagon's shadow, which had been stretched out in front of it across the damp, grassy earth, abruptly swung around like the boom of a jibing sailboat; in a moment it lay almost directly behind them, and the morning sun was in Duffy's eyes. He gasped and locked the brake. 'What the hell happened?' he exclaimed. 'Did we hit slippery mud? I didn't feel anything.'

'Keep going,' Aurelianus said. 'You're still on course.

Pay no attention to any whirling effects - they're just a

few local direction-confusion and disorientation spells I

laid down a number of years ago.

'Oh.' It occurred to Duffy that this would not only make it difficult to get into the area, but difficult also to get out, especially in a panicky haste. He glanced furtively to both sides, looking for skeletons of any wayfarers who might have blundered into this wall-less labyrinth. He didn't see any bones, but, glancing up, he did see figures circling high in the air - figures he thought were hawks until he looked more steadily and saw the manlike forms between the vast wings. He quickly snapped his gaze back to the landscape ahead, uneasy to think that it was he who had called those things out of their deep retreat.

He sneaked a glance over his shoulder to see how Bugge and his men were taking these outre phenomena, and was surprised to see no dismay or fear in their faces. Several were watching the fliers, but all seemed tensely cheerful. Bugge grinned at the Irishman and muttered something in Norse, so Duffy grinned back and raised a clenched fist before returning his attention to the horses. Well, why should I be worried, he thought; nobody else is.

They proceeded for another hour into the wooded hills, and three more times the sun did its trick of shifting about in the sky. The whole adventure had by this time taken on a dreamlike unreality to the Irishman, and if the wagon had rolled up across the side of the sky, swerving between clouds, he would not have thought it incongruous.

Finally the wagon bumped down through a narrow, greenery-roofed tunnel, in which gravity for one awful moment seemed to be pulling upward, and emerged into a small glade.

For a moment Duffy just sat, clutching the edges of the seat and trying to get his bearings - that last bit of sorcery had convinced him that the wagon was going into a forward tumble - then he opened his eyes and saw the cabin.

It was a low, thatch-roofed, stone-walled, one-storey affair, and could credibly have been five years old or five hundred. He glanced questioningly at Aurelianus, who nodded. 'This is the place,' the wizard said.

Duffy bounded over the side onto the grass. 'Let's get him and get the hell out of these woods, then. Bugge! Come in, drag your lads out of there! There's work to be done, old kings to be carried about!'

'This is entirely the wrong spirit,' Aurelianus protested, climbing down beside the Irishman. 'Now listen, there's a question you must ask and one you mustn't, so -'

'Damn it, I'll ask any questions that occur to me, and none that don't. Come on now, lead the way. You're the one that knows him, after all.' He strode toward the cabin with the sorcerer scurrying alongside and the stolid northmen bringing up the rear.

'All this is difficult enough,' Aurelianus complained, 'without you acting like a damned -'What did you think you were going to get, when you.. .placed your order for me? A tame, all-powerful

giant who'd cheerfully jump at your every order? If so, you made a mistake - you didn't want King Arthur, you wanted a village idiot.'

The sorcerer threw up his hands. 'Maybe you've got a point and maybe you haven't,' he said. 'Quiet now, here we are.' He rapped respectfully on the thick oaken door, and a faint voice answered within. Frowning a warning at Duffy, Aurelianus opened the door and led the way inside.

Duffy followed, and was surprised; he had expected to see the same depressing gloom that cloaked Aurelianus' chamber at the inn, and the same sort of ominous and ill-smelling objects scattered carelessly about. Instead he saw a pleasant, sunlit room, aired by two open windows; the only jarring note was several handfuls of mud caked on the foot of the bed. The Irishman didn't look at the man in the bed, but turned to his northmen and, with expressive grunts, began pantomiming the act of lifting the occupant and carrying him outside. It looked as if he were imitating a careless furniture mover.

'Brian,' came a weak but humorous voice from behind him. 'Surely it's Brian Duffy?'

Duffy turned and looked at the King, who was sitting up in the bed. He was clean-shaven, though his white hair hung down around his shoulders, and his face was seamed with what the Irishman thought must have been centuries of experience. Aside from the bandage around his hips, he didn't appear to be in bad shape.