Chapter Five #4
But sometimes, breakfast was not enough. This day, he would strike with sword, not sausage. Monsters were embodiments of chaos. Irruptions of unnatural energies, according to the prologue of the bestiary.
He wiped egg grease from his hands, then turned the bestiary towards the peasants. “Perhaps you can identify some of the other monsters. Do these woodcuts look familiar to you?”
The assembled worthies of the village examined the book, turning the pages gingerly, as if too hasty a flip could free a monster from its woodcut prison. Sir Rudyard steepled his fingers and tried to exude an aura of calm as the villagers argued about what they had or hadn’t seen in the night.
“It was one of those,” said one villager, pointing with complete confidence at an illustration of a salamander.
Sir Rudyard solemnly perused the text associated with the entry. “Those are forty feet long,” he said at last, “and live in volcanoes. And, according to learned sages, blaze with the heat of a raging inferno at all times. Are you certain?”
The villager muttered that it had been drizzling that night, so the raging inferno might have been dampened. Or, possibly, he was mistaken – but there was something in the woods. On that point, everyone in the village agreed.
So, for that matter, did Sir Rudyard. In the heartlands, sensible men might dismiss talk of magic and monsters as old superstitions, but these were the border marches.
He had seen enough to know that the forces of chaos were very real.
Rudyard would certainly have preferred that someone more actively courageous and heroic was leading the forces of Law in this particular cosmic skirmish – why, only a few years previously he’d had the honour of hosting the renowned Sir Peledon, who had passed this way on some urgent quest. The knight had stayed at Sir Rudyard’s castle overnight, but had left at daybreak, and privately Rudyard suspected that a lack of a proper breakfast contributed to the knight’s subsequent disappearance.
Sir Peledon had been a man to singlehandedly battle the horrors of the Dungeon, but the lesser Sir Rudyard had instead brought along a host of huntsmen, dog-handlers, spear-carriers and other hirelings, as well as several other knights and men-at-arms. Now he waited with all the patience he could muster for the eyewitnesses to identify the quarry.
“No, it’s not one of those either,” said Sir Rudyard. “The clue is in the name ‘oceanic behemoth’.”
After some time, consensus developed that they were under siege by some variety of wood-hag or wood-wose.
The bestiary spoke of dark enchantments, of how such creatures twisted the forest around them into a living nightmare of cruel thorns and fetid fungal blooms, and how they poisoned the roots of the trees from below.
The malign rot of the Dungeon was everywhere.
Anything and everything could be undermined by chaos.
Law needed its champions. Even absurd ones like Sir Rudyard.
He rose and sounded his silver horn. “The hunt begins!”
The horn call stirred Bait from sleep.
The baying of dogs brought her instantly to terrified wakefulness – and confusion.
The sound of barking called up old memories of her life before the Dungeon.
There had been dogs in the castle; barking was a spell that conjured the smell of wet fur, the feel of burying your face in the neck folds of a hound.
She lay there in the dark, caught between her buried past and her subterranean present, and it nearly cost her any future, above or below.
Had she fled immediately, then maybe she could have escaped.
But she waited too long, and the pleasant memories of the castle dogs melted into the present danger of the hounds slavering and clawing at the entrance to the badger sett. Above, she heard shouts, the voices of men – then smoke filled her nose, her lungs, burning her eyes.
Panic. Clawing at the earth. Tugging on dead roots.
Hands scrabbling on stone. But whatever else she was, Bait was a Denizen of the Dungeon, and there are very few dead ends in the labyrinth.
There’s always another way in or out, a narrow shaft or a secret door – or a back exit, narrow even for a boneless goblin, but driven by desperation and smoke inhalation, Bait wriggled out into merciless winter sunlight.
“There! It’s there!” cried one of the hunters.
She ran, for all the good it did her.
She dodged through the trees, scrambled up the slopes, running for the Dungeon Door and the sanctuary of the Dungeon.
Certainly, I’d have welcomed her back, but the gargoyle guardians who watch over the Entrance Hall would have given more practical assistance.
She was a Denizen of the Dungeon, so they would have let her in, even with a host of hunters on her heels.
But the Dungeon was many miles away, and the hunt was very close.
Hounds snarling and howling just behind her.
Riders crashing through the woods at either side, encircling her, cutting her off.
She saw it, I think, as one great monster like the adventuring parties the goblins told stories about.
A single creature with a hundred dog-shaped claws, with teeth of spears, arrow-spitting, its voice the discordant blare of hunting horns.
No shadows to hide in, no traps to spring, no tunnels to crawl in, no minotaur to come to her rescue with a roar.
Nothing except the chase, nothing except hot breath on the back of her legs, the pain in her lungs, the terror of the bright surface, the horn calls ever louder.
She climbed a tree, not like other children might climb, but as a child of the Dungeon climbs, fingers gripping the rough bark like cracks in a rock face, lizard-fashion.
The dogs leapt and clawed at her feet, but she snatched herself out of reach.
The hunt-monster with its sinuous body of horse riders, its long tail of footmen coiled around the tree, dog claws scraping at the bark, its horn voices blaring in triumph even as other mouths howled frustration.
It spat arrows at her, and she closed her eyes, believing she was about to die.
Then part of the hunt-monster broke away – Neb pulled himself from his mother’s grip – and called out: “Don’t hurt her!”
Strong hands grabbed Bait and dragged her down from the tree. They carried her to the head of the monster, who looked at her curiously.
“Who are you, child?” asked Sir Rudyard.
She sought for words, but only found one.
“Human.”
The hunt continued for the rest of the day.
The hunters swept through the hills, and found no other horrors out of Sir Rudyard’s bestiary.
Scouts climbed up to the Dungeon Door, although of course they did not dare pass that dreadful threshold (only a lunatic or an adventurer goes into a dungeon without good cause).
They did report that the Dungeon Door was open.
Clearly, the wood-hag had fled back into the darkness of the underworld, driven away by the timely action of Sir Rudyard and his companions.
Sir Rudyard took this as an endorsement of his philosophy – chaos could be thwarted not only by valiant heroes with bright swords, but also by sensible organisation and delegation.
Behold, he might have muttered over breakfast, the fruits of Law!
All that remained was to deal with the few loose ends.
The gold coins, for example – obviously, such a fortune could not be left in the hands of a lowly peasant, and the coins were possibly cursed anyway, given their provenance.
They were donated to the church, where any lingering touch of chaos could be washed away.
Their temporary owner, Neb’s father, was rewarded for his diligence – Sir Rudyard appointed him village reeve and tax collector.
Order had prevailed. Everything was in its appointed place, neat as eggs in egg cups.
The child was more troublesome. Sir Rudyard’s preferred solution would be to return the child to her parents.
Enquiries were made in the village – surely someone had mislaid a girl-child of about nine or ten years old?
But no one claimed the creature. (Privately, Sir Rudyard suspected the parents were all too happy to offload a troublesome child onto the charity of the king’s representative.) Questioning the child was equally fruitless; she claimed to be a lost princess, so she was clearly delusional, a fabulist, or – and here Sir Rudyard betrayed his soft-hearted nature – so discombobulated by her kidnapping at the hands of some horrific dungeon-hag that she had latched on to the tale as a talisman against evil.
No doubt, once she was restored to an orderly environment, she would remember her proper place. “We shall put her to work in the castle kitchens,” he decided, “until she’s claimed. And we can’t call her Bait. That’s not a fitting name for a child.”
Sir Rudyard dubbed her Ealdufrida, after his late mother, which was almost as burdensome a name as Valourentius.
But in her heart she remained Bait, and Neb remained Neb, through the year that followed.