SECTION 18
I awaken to the sounds of drumming. Stretching out in the dark as far as I can see, a field of brown mud holds the silhouettes of hundreds of armed men. Some bear swords, others spears, some axes, others bows, and all are on their feet, obviously eager to march. Over the horizon I see the beginnings of dawn, the dawn of a cloudless, hot day. I feel exposed and vulnerable with the approach of daylight.
Shaking the haze from my eyes, I lie on my stomach and look around me for the others. A few feet away I see Tom, Verdi, and Nichol, and the shapes of Goate, Brando, and Simmie show themselves against the lightening sky as they crawl towards me. When Simmie reaches me, I order him to search for the others while we get ourselves out of sight. Dressed as we are, we are thoroughly out of place among the soldiers near us, and before we do anything else, we have to find new clothes.
Together we crawl towards a depression in the ground and drop out of sight. My head once again foggy, I roll onto my back and close my eyes. Goate crawls over to me.
“What’s the problem, boss,” he asks, in an obvious attempt at levity.
“My head,” I whisper. “I can’t seem to clear it. I feel as if I’ve slept for days and can’t wake up.” Seeing his concern, I manage a smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be okay. Just give me a few minutes.”
“I’d like to, Derek,” replies Goate, “but I don’t think we have a few minutes. Light is on its way, and that army looks big. If we’re going to be in a fight, I’d rather take on a smaller group than that armed mob. And hiding, in these clothes at least, is going to be a bit of a chore.”
He’s right, of course, but my head hurts just enough for me not to care. “Look,” I say, “I appreciate your worry. But right now I’m exhausted, and I feel completely drained. I don’t know where we’ve fallen to, but I do know the fall has been a long one, and I’m not ready to start thinking yet. So please,” and here I soften my tone, “please let me rest. Only for a minute.”
“Sure, Derek.” Goate nods, pushing himself away. “But not too long, okay? This may not be the most eventful day of our lives, but it’s going to come awfully close. I’d like to be around to see most of it.” A pause, then he continues, his voice almost apologetic. “Rest, guy. I’ll help the others see what’s up.” He touches my arm as he rises to leave.
I wish I felt differently. I really do. It would be nice if something suggested that I no longer had a soul, or that I had fallen into hell, or something. For all I know, though, except for the archaic armament of the army nearby, this may be just another day in late twentieth-century earth. I have a headache, but apart from that I feel quite normal. What was Faust’s big problem, anyway?
Tom interrupts. “Simmie’s got the others,” he whispers excitedly, “and you should see what else he’s got.” He motions for me to join him, and I roll onto my hands and knees and follow. Mud seeps through my clothes.
When I reach the others, most of them are half-clad in soldier’s dress: trousers of treated skins and leathers, short-sleeved tunics fashioned from the skin of some animal or another, and hard leather boots. A motley but complete collection of swords, spears, and bows lies in a heap to my left, with Simmie and Jonathan already picking them over. As I stare, disbelieving, Darcy McCrimmon arrives carrying three small shields, and after placing them on the ground, he nods for Brando to join him to collect some more. In awe at the resourcefulness of my comrades, and at their obvious talents for grand theft, I sit in the mud and laugh to myself. I can’t help but think of the soldiers who will discover the absence of the equipment we now have. How do you explain stolen clothes?
Branko Verdi walks towards me, carrying a small bundle inside an upside-down shield. “For you, boss,” he says for all to hear. “Without a doubt the classiest duds of the lot. When he places them at my feet I examine them, marveling anew at my group’s ingenuity, and noting as well that the clothes are, in fact, almost new. The pants are fairly loose, a good thing considering the day’s heat, the tunic is untorn and bears only a couple of stains—blood, I assume, since I have no proof that spaghetti sauce is a staple here—and the boots, while a little large, are without cuts in the leather. The shield itself is ornamented only with an abstract carving in the center, and the sword is plain, sturdy, double-edged, and not inordinately heavy.
Dressed at last, my head feels suddenly clear. Maybe the place we’re in, I think with a smile, cannot handle the reality of blue jeans and cloth T-shirts, the clothes I brought with me and which, little to my surprise, are now being buried by three of my men. Where they found shovels I’m not sure I even want to know.
As the sun rises full over the horizon, Tom approaches me and sits on the ground beside me. “Where to now, Derek?” he inquires, and suddenly I am jolted into reality. For the last hour, I have enjoyed being in the background, giving no orders and being asked for no decisions. Now, though, that is all coming to an end. Once again I will have to figure out what to do. Not that I’m going to act unilaterally, though, not with a group around me that’s this talented.
“I’m not sure,” I answer. “I don’t even know where we are. All I know is that I want to get to Amber.” I pause, then ask, “Any ideas?”
“Not yet,” he responds immediately, and I am relieved to find no hint of scorn in his voice at my lack of precision. “But I think the first step is to do a bit of information gathering. Seems we’re a bit short of that.”
Smiling, I say, “True. Little things, like where we are, who these people are, what it’s like to fight without guns.” Then it dawns on me. “Our guns,” I blurt out. “Where are they?”
Pointing behind him, Tom replies, “Branko’s got them in a leather bag. We’ll pass them out in a second. But I don’t think we should use them. Not here, anyway, where swords and bows are the common fighting tools.”
“Agreed,” I say, quite uselessly. “They’re a nice trump card, though.”
Trump card. Amber. My father. Suddenly, I remember why we’ve come, why I’ve hired this little street gang to join me in my search. And just as suddenly, I realize something unusual. How have these people, who had no idea where we were going, been able to accept better than I where we are and what we have to do? They should be lost, furious, unnerved, something. But here they are, taking command of the situation as if they’d planned it, without even a question about what Amber is or why it’s so necessary that we be here. It’s time for me to find out why.
“Tom,” I say, and then pause. “Tom, aren’t you a little uncertain about what we’re doing here?” What an inept question.
Tom laughs gently and shakes his head. “Not really,” he says. “After all,” and here he directs a smile straight at me, “we’ve all been here before.” I sit stunned as he begins to crawl back towards the others, motioning with his right hand for me to follow. Switching from a sit to a crawl, I do precisely that.
By the time I reach the others, Tom has seated himself with them in a circle. A space has been left for me. I enter it and sit cross-legged, a position that invariably puts my legs to sleep within seconds, and wait for one of them to speak. Finally, Dennis Nichol raises the index finger of his right hand to his forehead in a signal for silence.
“None of your poetry, Dennis, all right?” The voice is McCrimmon’s, and the others laugh softly at his demand.
Smiling, Nichol fakes an Oxford accent and says, “It is the bard’s responsibility to provide the wisdom necessary for his civilization to continue. In our case, the wisdom is doubly necessary, as none of us is entirely certain of our course of action.” With that, he lays his head into the palms of his hands.
McCrimmon looks to the sky. “Oh, my God. He’s at it again.” Lying back on the ground, he turns his head towards Stan McManus and says, “Wake me up when he’s finished. And take notes, in case he says anything useful.”
Tom cuts in. “Seriously, folks,” and McCrimmon sits back up, “I think we’ve got a few problems here. First of all, we don’t know exactly where we are. Secondly, we don’t know exactly where we’re going. Lastly, we don’t know exactly what Derek wants us to do.” He pauses and looks at me. “I think we should start by asking Derek to help us with the last one.” Another pause, then, “What are we supposed to be doing?”
Without hesitation, I look straight at Tom and insist, “Find Amber, and find Random. I want to know who killed Eric.” Then, to let them in on something they have no way of knowing, I state, flat out, “Eric was my father.” The time has come, I suspect, for them to know the truth.
A long silence ensues. The men look at one another, then at the ground, then around the circle again. Once more it is Tom who speaks, this time in little over a whisper. “That answers a number of questions, Derek. I wish you’d told me earlier.”
“Why?” I ask. “What difference would it have made?”
“We’d have prepared differently. We knew you wanted us to fight for you, and we knew that we were going to Amber to do it, but we didn’t know what you wanted there. I think we all figured you’d be wanting a fight with Chaos, not with Amber. At least, we’re all inclined that way.” He has said all this so matter-of-factly that I’ve scarcely noticed the enormous assumptions he’s making. He assumes, first of all, that I understand that he knows about Amber, and, in fact, that he knows about Chaos and Eric. More importantly, though, he seems to feel I should just accept the fact that he knows I wanted to come here.
“How did you know, Tom,” I ask, willing my voice not to show its agitation, “that I wanted to get to Amber?”
“Simple,” he answers. “It was told to me.”
“Oh, come on,” I snap. “Don’t give me that fantasy-novel stuff. How did you know it? Beyond ‘inspiration from the gods’ or some such nonsense. I told nobody. Nobody at all.”
Tom contorts his mouth as he sucks at his teeth. “Okay, Derek,” he says at last. “You’ve told us about your father, so I guess it’s only fair we tell you about us.” He looks at the others, some of whom nod while others do not move at all.
“We’re not who you think we are,” he begins in an exaggerated dramatic voice. “In fact,” he smiles, “we’re not even who we think we are.” This brings grins from a few of the others. “What we are,” a pause, “what we are is a collection of soldiers who once fought for Amber. Or, to be more precise”—he looks straight at me—“for Brand.”
“Brand?” I break in. “Eric’s brother Brand? One of the nine princes?”
Tom nods. “The very same. The man Corwin writes into his story as the enemy of Amber, the foil of Corwin the prince. The one who tried to redraw the Pattern in his own image. The would-be God, the would-be ruler. The man who, deep down, was the reason your father died.”
That part, at least, I’ve thought of. There is nothing new in the idea that Brand caused my father’s death. Since he, clandestinely at least, arranged the attack on Amber that killed Dad, it hardly surprised me that he should be considered Eric’s killer. At one level, at least.
But there’s more to it than that. Sure, the battle killed Dad, but that is only the fact of his death, not the cause. What I have to figure out is who takes the blame for the battle itself. Brand, yes, because he was Amber’s enemy. But why was he the enemy? To listen to Corwin’s story, Brand was evil, at least primarily so. But maybe the cause of that evil goes back further than Corwin tells us. Maybe Corwin himself is the ultimate cause of Eric’s death.
I don’t want to tell all of this to my comrades, but I must let them know something. So I begin with a question.
“Maybe,” I reply to Tom’s last point. “But that’s assuming one thing. It’s assuming that Corwin is telling the truth. Personally, I see no reason to make that assumption.”
“But Derek,” Simmie breaks in. “What choice do we have? Corwin is the reason we know as much as we do.”
“Or as little as we do,” I insist. “Look, assuming I believe you were all here before, how important were you? Were you Brand’s confidants? Did you have special knowledge?”
“No,” McCrimmon joins in, a bit hesitantly. “But we knew Brand well enough to agree with Corwin’s descriptions of him and his personality. He was like that, at least by reputation.”
“Reputation? Did you know him personally, or only by reputation?”
“By reputation, of course,” McCrimmon continues, “but the reputation was so universally felt that I don’t think it could have been wrong.”
Again I break in. “Universally felt by who? Sorry, by whom?” The objective case has always annoyed me, but I feel naked if I don’t use is.
“By the rest of the soldiers,” Tom says. “By everyone we heard talk about him. Certainly by his enemies.”
I smile. “But don’t you see, they don’t really know. Even if the reputation is universally felt, it need hardly be true. And what about propaganda? Can’t that establish reputation? What if the princes of Amber simply wanted everyone to think as you are? Given their powers, wouldn’t that be easy?”
They are all silent. Apparently I’ve struck home. “One other thing,” I assert. “How did you know I was coming here?”
“That, my friend,” says Dennis Nichol, “is our secret. Suffice it to say that we knew it, and that’s why we arranged for you to hire us. Beyond that you don’t have to know. Not yet, anyway.”
“Hold it,” I say, raising my voice. “You didn’t arrange it. I did.”
Nichol just smiles. “So you think, Derek. So you think. I wish we’d been able to let you go on thinking that. But you keep asking all these questions.” After a pause, he adds, “What say we forget about all that and get on with what we came for? Surely that’s somewhat more important.”
“Hear, hear,” Tom cuts in. “Look, Derek,” he says as he looks at me, “we can fill you in on the details as we go. For now, I really think we should be making long-range plans. We’re having a nice chat and all, but it’s not going to last long.” He points towards the army. “Those guys over there are getting ready to move.”
“Fine,” I say. “But I want the answers. Soon.”
“You’ll have them,” Tom assures me. “But we need some guidance, Derek. Since you hired us, why not tell us what you want done.”
“I already told you. I want to get to Amber.”
“I know that. But how do we get there? And what do we do once we’ve arrived? Are we supposed to fight our way there, or proceed by stealth? Do you have any maps? Plans? Or are we just winging it?”
Suddenly, I am struck by the enormity of Tom’s words. I have not, in fact, formulated any real plans. I have no maps, no idea of whom we’ll be fighting, no sense of what to do even if we succeed in finding Random. I don’t even know where we’re going. All I have is my final goal, but even that is merely abstract.
Except for one point. What I am on, I now realize, is an information-gathering mission. We are a commando squad about to infiltrate an enemy installation (if Amber can be so called) to get information about what happened to one man. Pared down to that, the exercise seems far from hopeless. We are not here to blow something up, we are not trying to rescue a prisoner, and we are not attempting to plant evidence that would lead to the arrest of a prominent citizen. None of that complicated espionage stuff. All we are doing is finding something out. We need fight, therefore, only as far as we must to get what we want. No more, absolutely no more.
“We’d better start,” I say with sudden confidence, “by finding out where we are. Then we’ll figure out where to go.”
Sure, this is obvious, but the effect on the others is immediate. As one they give me their full attention, listening intently so they miss nothing. Yes, I’ve hired them, and yes, I will direct them. My commands may be wrong, but they will be definite. And that, to judge from their reaction, is precisely what they want.
“Simmie,” I begin my first order. “Take McCrimmon and find out where the army’s headquarters is. Or their general’s train, or the guy in charge, or whatever the hell they have. We need maps and supplies. The only way we’re going to get them is to steal them.
“Brando, you and Nichol can scout out the organization of the army. Find out the size of the marching units. We have to know if we can isolate a squad and take it out without everyone else seeing us.
“The rest of us will wait here. Don’t be longer than a half-hour. And don’t get caught.” I bask in my comrades’ newfound respect as the four men carry out my commands.
Tom approaches quietly. “Derek, perhaps I should tell you something.”
“What now?” I ask, slightly agitated.
“A cute little mouse is crawling up your tunic.”
Leaping to my feet, I dance and jump until the creature falls away. As it scampers off across the field, I turn my back to the others and sit down. My face, I realize from its heat, is a deep, lasting red. True respect, it seems, takes a little longer than I thought.
In less than half an hour, Simmie and McCrimmon return. Excitedly, they tell me that the supply area, as always a little to the rear of the army, is deserted by all but a guard of nine men. Because the army itself is fairly small—no more than two thousand men, they insist—the headquarters is not a separate area but is kept with the supplies. As far as they were able to ascertain, headquarters consists of no more than four men, one of them in ultimate command. Simmie was able to see inside the HQ tent, where these four were poring over maps and diagrams.
As they finish, Brando and Nichol come back as well. The army, as far as they could see, is made up of 100-man units, each under the command of someone with a red shield. Whom he reports to they do not know, but they believe the 100-man unit breaks into six 15-man units and an elite 10-man unit. The elite group reports directly to the 100-man commander; the others have a subcommander of their own.
“The first thing,” I say after weighing the information, “is to find out where we are, then to decide where we want to go. Once we know that, we can, if Brando and Nichol are right, take out one of the 15-man units, preferably when they are fighting anyway, and take their place. We may have to keep one or two of them alive, to take care of little things like the differences in language and training, but it can’t be too hard. Once we’ve done that, we can follow the army for as long as we want, then disappear. The other way, of course, is to go off by ourselves right after studying the maps.”
“Actually,” Tom cuts in, “the plan may be quite easy to carry out. If this army is like any other minor army around here—as I remember them, anyway—the individual soldier is completely unimportant. The guys in charge of the 100-man units, who we used to call hecturions, take a head count, but there’s no such thing as roll call. If someone’s missing, it’s assumed they’re dead. If they do an AWOL, there’s no place for them to go anyway.”
“What we’ll do, then,” I say after a short silence, “is get through the provost guard to the maps. We’ll have to do it, though, when the commanders aren’t around. I don’t feel like taking on all two thousand at once.”
Standing up, I survey the army. They have still not moved forward, but are ready to do so at any time. I see clearly now the hecturions with their red shields, their horses turned to face their subordinates. At this moment, their prime function seems to be to keep everyone still, to stop any advance movement. The HQ is to their rear, but it is still too close to the main army to tackle now. Surrounding it, armed with swords and shields, axes beside some of them and spears beside others, stand the provost guard, their attention riveted to the outlying areas. This isn’t, I realize, going to be easy.
I sit back down and look at my comrades. They are simply waiting for me. I like that. Of course, I’m paying them, so they really have little choice, but I am suddenly struck by the amount of attention they pay to my orders and suggestions. Obviously, I’m better at this than I thought. Or at least I think I am.
“Simmie,” I order, enjoying the confidence I hear in my voice, “take McCrimmon again, and keep your eye on the HQ. As soon as at least two of the commanders leave, tell me immediately. Branko, you and Stan watch for the army to move. When they do, let me know their speed and where they seem to be going. And anything else you see.” The two men leave at once.
“The minute the HQ area is down to one commander, or with luck none at all, we move. We take out the provost guard as quickly and quietly as we can, then we go for the maps, plans, anything we can get our hands on. We bring them all back here and figure out what to do next. We don’t know who’s going to make it through to the tent, so the first one to get the goods lets either Tom or me know about it. We’ll gather the others and head back here. Any questions?”
“Just one, boss,” Nichol says. “What if the provost guard makes noise. Won’t someone hear us? And what if the commanders return while we’re doing this? We could be in considerable trouble.”
He’s right, of course. Damned stupid plan, anyway. Obviously, I’ve forgotten one thing. The army isn’t in battle yet. They won’t be making enough noise to mask our movements. In all likelihood, we’d be better off waiting for a fight, then going in. Why didn’t I think of that before?
Suddenly, the army starts to move. Men shout orders. Others shout more orders. Horses stamp and whinny. Noise reigns. And then, like a giant boulder about to be loosed from its perch on the side of a hill, the weight of two thousand men and four hundred horses begins to move inexorably forward, its momentum carrying it beyond the point at which one man can easily control it. The boulder rolls on south, the dawning day gilding its flank.
Out of the dust that rises on the field, Simmie runs towards us. “It’s happened,” he shouts above the clamor. “Three of the commanders have gone, and the fourth is about to. The guard has put away their weapons for the march, and they’re all facing forward. We could get around the back and take them by surprise.” He stands and waits for my reply.
If Derek orders an assault on the guard in order to look at maps and plans, turn to Section 12.
If Derek decides to follow out of sight alongside the army, to see where it is going, turn to Section 15.