Chapter Nineteen

Reinmar wanted nothing more than to rush forward, swinging his staff with deadly force, but he forced himself to be still for a few moments longer. He knew that Vaedecker was right, and that he had to wait until the caresses of the loathsome flower had brought Marcilla all the way back to life—but he also knew that he must not wait an instant too long, lest everything be lost. He had to discover that precious moment when she would be best capable of conscious thought and movement, but had not yet suffered the final act of pollution which would lead inexorably to her destruction. He waited, tense and taut with the agony of uncertainty as to how long he could safely delay.

In the meantime, the worm in the flower’s mouth, which seemed to grow pinker with every moment that went by, continued its measured dance upon the floor of Marcilla’s tender flesh, exploring her contours and teasing her with the revivifying effects of its touch.

She was now able to reach out towards it, as if she were trying to catch it as it passed, but she was still sightless and slow, while the worm-thing was quick and clever. It evaded her groping fingers.

Reinmar watched and waited, although the tension in his heart and limbs was becoming unbearable.

Marcilla began to writhe more urgently, and there was no question that her limbs had regained the greater part of their strength—but still she could not open her eyes. She was lost in her dream, without the least inkling of where she was or what was happening to her. Perhaps, Reinmar thought, she imagined herself still safe on the hearth of the farmhouse, slyly pleasured by the hallucinatory power of the sweet wine that she had quaffed before sleeping.

Then, just for an instant, the style paused in its writhing and drew back a little. The tip parted, to expose a deeper structure within: the stigma, which presumably bore the spores of destruction. The stigma was golden yellow in colour, like the summer sun of the world above, and it glistened with mucus.

The tissues of the style parted, like eyelids at the moment of awakening.

Marcilla parted her own eyelids at long last, and looked up into the great black hood of the flower which hovered over her, and into the sightless daemonic eye which threatened her. She opened her mouth uncertainly, as if she did not know whether to scream or to cry with glad delight—but no sound came from her trembling lips.

Reinmar, as certain as any man could be that it must be now or never, did not bother to look to Matthias Vaedecker for permission. He let out a howl of fiendish glee as he bounded forward, with the raven-headed staff raised up high, to snatch his beloved away from the cruel attentions of his dreadful rival.

The five monks who still had their backs to him began to turn in alarm as soon as they heard his war-cry, but in their confusion they bumped into one another, their limbs becoming entangled as they raised their arms to defend themselves. The only one exempt from this confusion was the sorcerer-in-chief, who had been officiating at the rite.

As soon as he moved, Reinmar felt the gaze of the chief monk’s unnaturally radiant eyes upon him, and he knew that however stunned the others might be, the man who had invoked the attentions of the black flower was dangerous. To meet this challenge before it was properly laid down, Reinmar changed his grip upon the staff, holding it as if it were a spear, with the ornamented end directed forwards. He charged into the other five celebrants, knocking them sideways without making any attempt to ensure that they stayed down once they had fallen. He made straight for the worst of his enemies.

The wooden beak of the raven’s head was angled thirty degrees and more from the line of the shaft, and it had not been sharpened, but the weapon was still spear enough to strike through the coarse cloth of the spellcaster’s robe and carve a bloody wound upon his breast as it rebounded from his ribs.

The stricken man fell backwards, letting loose a pathetically faint cry of anguish as the force of the blow drove the breath from his lungs.

Reinmar’s left hand was free to seize the vermiform style of the flower, and this he reached out to do. Had it begun to recoil into its bell he would not have been able to reach it, but the flower made no defensive response at all. If anything, it actually moved its gaping mouth towards him, extending its wormlike tongue in his direction as if it were curious to touch and taste the attacker who had sprung so unexpectedly from the ranks of its worshippers.

The golden stigma seemed more like a staring eye than ever, but it was entirely blind to Reinmar’s purpose.

Reinmar’s mind had become suddenly clear as he discharged his pent-up tension in furious action. Perhaps, he thought, the plant was entirely innocent of the ways of the upper world. Perhaps it knew nothing of nature red in tooth and claw, of violence and predation, or of anger and jealousy. Perhaps, having been lovingly tended by the patient priests in this deep, secret and nightless cave, it had no experience of any kind of attack whatsoever. Or perhaps, after all, it was only a flower, devoid of any intelligence or reflex, helpless in its vegetable impotence.

For whatever reason, the tip of the style was still there to be seized and held when Reinmar reached out, and seize it he did.

He had expected it to be sticky and cold, but it was silky and warm. There was the slightest of thrills to the touch, as if it were trying to renew the life even in him, who had never suffered any simulation of death.

Reinmar pulled, as hard as he could, in order to draw as much of the length of the thing from the maw of the flower as might be drawn, and to make it as taut as he could. Then he shouted to Matthias Vaedecker, who was hurrying to his side. “Strike!” he yelled. “Sever the thing from its root!”

Vaedecker seemed to be angry, and was certainly cursing volubly, but he hacked at the style, slashing at it from a height, determined to sever the cord with a single blow. The strike was almost too successful. Stretched as it was, the plant’s peculiar organ was already under considerable tension, and its soft flesh offered little resistance to the sharp blade. It snapped so suddenly that Reinmar nearly fell backwards, with the piece which he had severed coiled about his hand.

He stumbled so badly that his knee struck the ground, and only then remembered that there were enemies all around him, eager to grab him and pull him down. Luckily, they were still confused and he had a firm grip on the staff. Reinmar tried to swing the staff from side to side, as Sigurd would have done, but he had nothing like Sigurd’s strength, and the staff had insufficient momentum to knock anyone down. He was fortunate that no one snatched it from his grasp, or struck him while his knee was on the ground.

The flower, which could never have known injury before, recoiled from the shock spasmodically. Reinmar saw that its great stalk, which had moved with such stately grace before, shuddered briefly before erupting with a titanic convulsion, whose whiplash effect caught a couple of the priests as they exclaimed in horror, and sent them tumbling like ninepins.

The part of the style that was left for Reinmar to clutch writhed in a similar fashion, but it could not contrive to grip his hand. He gladly let it fall into the crevice beside Marcilla’s body, where it continued to squirm. It shed no blood or ichor, but the flesh which had been cut across showed red and raw within its paler sheath, and the blind golden eye that had so briefly opened was tightly closed again.

Marcilla was certainly awake. She screamed, with far greater effect than Reinmar or the priest he had struck down with his makeshift spear.

As the scream cut through his confusion, dispelling a little of his wild anger, Reinmar became suddenly aware that Matthias Vaedecker’s sword was red with blood. The soldier was holding it in both hands, hacking first to the left and then to the right with brutal efficiency.

Reinmar saw one man’s face cleaved in two from temple to jaw, so that the features came away like a mask. He saw another with his throat slashed, clutching both hands to his neck as if he might somehow seal his carotid arteries and secure his windpipe. He saw another lurch back clutching his belly, though he had too few fingers to stem the flow of his uncoiling intestines as they slid through a great gaping wound. He became belatedly aware of the fact that Vaedecker was calling him a fool, and howling at him to run—and he saw that other priests were approaching from three different directions. They were coming in ones and twos, but they were not bumping into one another in alarm and confusion, and they were armed with iron-bladed spades, sharp-tined forks and huge wooden staves. If he and Vaedecker waited for them to gather in full force, they would be considerably outnumbered.

Reinmar was neither shocked nor sickened by the sight of so much blood; he still had a plan to execute. Marcilla’s newly-opened eyes had been dazzled by the white light and she had thrown up a hand to protect them, but she was evidently well aware of the fact that she had woken into a frightful nightmare. Her distress seemed boundless. Reinmar, still staggering from his temporary loss of balance, caught the girl’s right wrist in his left hand, and tried to drag her to her feet. For one hideous moment he thought that she could not rise—that there was insufficient life in her to allow her to stand up, let alone to run—but the fervent insistence of his grip ultimately proved irresistible.

“It is Reinmar, come to save you!” he shouted at her, although her scream had died by now and he did not need to yell in order to be heard. “We must run for our lives!” So saying, he began to run himself, keeping such a tight hold of her wrist that she had to follow him or fall.

Immediately there formed in front of him a ragged rank of three newly-arrived priests, but he held the staff before him like a spear. He was eager to thrust and slash at them. Had they been fighting men of any kind—soldiers, or common ruffians, or even careful tradesmen—he would not have stood a chance, for their makeshift weapons, which amounted to two massive clubs and a rusty cleaver, would have been worth far more than his slim wooden shaft, but these were not fighting-men at all, and the violence which they had already seen must have seemed to them to be the most outrageous sacrilege imaginable. It was not that they did not wish to impede and capture him—indeed, they probably wished it as avidly as they could—but they did not know how to act in concert to achieve that end. None of the three, it seemed, could quite grasp the fact that he was part of a potentially powerful company; each and every one of them displayed in his eyes the consciousness of being face-to-face with an armed madman, and each one was caught up by hesitation and uncertainty.

Reinmar crashed through them boldly and recklessly, swinging his puny weapon as bravely and boldly as if it were Sigmar’s mighty warhammer. Not a hand was laid on him as he went past, bringing the bedazzled Marcilla behind him. Once he was past them, however, they were quick to turn and eager to make up for their failure to check his charge. Reinmar could not help but howl out his exultation when he realised that he and Marcilla were free of immediate danger, but it was only exultation and not triumph. He knew that the priests would pursue him and harry all the more determinedly because they had failed to stop him when they had the chance.

He turned sideways, and with a single fluid motion swept Marcilla up on to his left shoulder—and such was the fever of his excitement that she seemed to weigh no more than any of the ordinary burdens which he hoisted thus a dozen times in every working day. Then he set off, moving away from the enemies who were still clustered about Matthias Vaedecker, trying to dodge his busy sword.

As he ran in what seemed to be the safest direction, Reinmar was only vaguely aware that the path he had taken was not the one that had brought him to the spot where Marcilla’s violation was taking place. It was not one of the two branches of the fork that would have taken him deeper into the underworld, but he knew it would not take him directly back to the entrance. Given the way it was angled, though, he felt sure that it would take him back to the wall of the cavern, so that he and Vaedecker could make their way along it and could make a stand against it if they had to. In the meantime, Reinmar raced along the meandering and uncertain path as fast as his legs would carry him, hurdling one encroaching root-ridge after another as a hunted stag might bound through a forest’s leafy glades.

He was so completely absorbed by the necessity to put distance between himself and the pursuing priests that he must have taken a hundred expansive paces before he realised that Vaedecker was not running after them. He realised too that, burdened as he was, he had no hope of outstaying his pursuers for more than a few fleeting minutes.

As soon as Reinmar realised that they had been separated he shouted Matthias Vaedecker’s name, but the three priests who were pursuing him had set up a clamour of their own, and the echoes of more distant cries were resounding from the bright-lit ceiling in such awful confusion that Reinmar could not tell whether he would be heard or not. He dared not hesitate, and was quick to convince himself that the best thing to do was to follow the path until he reached the boundary of the cavern and then to turn to his right, working his way along the wall until he came to the tunnel that led to the spiral stair. Vaedecker would surely make his own way back to the same place.

Reinmar did not doubt that he could outfight his pursuers if he did not exhaust himself too soon. He was young, well-nourished and thoroughly used to hard work. Although his principal duty was to man a counter, he had moved more than his fair share of casks up and down the steps to his father’s cellar. He had also been schooled in fighting. These priests, whose god of death and dreams was known to them in the flowers of this horrid field of unnatural death, were much older men than he, and their thinness was obvious to the most cursory glance. The two who carried oversized clubs—which must surely be pestles, normally used to crush and pound vegetable pulp in a mortar—seemed barely able to lift them, and certainly would not be able to wield them as if they were cudgels. The three undoubtedly toiled as other men toiled, but their strength had been sapped by the austerity of their vocation. The most dangerous man, Reinmar decided, was the one armed with a cleaver. When he reached the wall and had to turn, he decided, that must be the one he put out of action first.

For a further fifty strides Reinmar managed to maintain the distance he had put between himself and his pursuers, but then, in spite of their obvious tiredness, they began to gain on him. His own legs were beginning to grow leaden, and he knew that they would buckle soon. He tried again to cry out for Vaedecker, but he could not do it; his breath was too desperately needed to sustain his flight. Remembering that he was only a man after all, with a man’s limitations, he began to feel the true weight of the burden that he carried on his shoulder, and the true strain upon his aching legs.

Had he not reached the cavern’s boundary at that moment he would have been forced to make his stand on the path, with the heads of the dreadful flowers nodding all around him, but he saw the wall looming up ahead. Even better than that, he saw a gap in the wall: a shadowy covert whose interior was not illuminated by the appalling white light of the underworld but by ordinary yellow candlelight.

Reinmar’s first thought was that the covert must be a way out, even though it was not the entrance through which he had come. His second was that if it offered a way out it must also offer a way in, where more enemies might be lying in wait for him. For that reason, he did not make directly for it, but decided instead to make his stand with a solid glowing wall at his back.

He laid Marcilla down beside the wall, telling her to be still, and immediately turned to face the three monks. He saw the expression of triumph in their weirdly-glowing eyes as they converged upon him, but he knew that it was premature.