There was silence from above for several minutes then abruptly the rattle and slither of two men sliding down. 'Careful! Do you see him?' one of them yelled.
'No,' the other one shouted. 'Where are you going? We've got to stay close.'
When he judged that one of them was just about to slide past his tree, Duffy unsheathed his rapier and leaped out into the man's path. It was the fat friar, waving a long sword, and he screeched in terror and blocked Duffy's thrust more by luck than skill. He collided heavily with the Irishman and both of them skidded down the steep, wet incline - the fortes of their blades desperately crossed -unable to check their quickening slide. Duffy, keeping the friar's sword blocked with his own, tried to twist around and see what lay in their path. A blunt tree-branch in my back, he thought grimly, would pretty well conclude this.
The friar's trailing robe caught on a spur of rock, and he was jerked to a stop while the swords disengaged and Duffy slid on. Freed at last from the awkward corps-a-acorps, the Irishman quickly dug in with the toes of his boots, his right hand and his sword pommel, and had soon dragged to a halt, sending a small avalanche of ripped-up dirt tumbling down the slope. Then he worked his boots into the hillside to get a firm footing.
The other bandit was climbing and hopping with panicky haste down the hillside, but he was still well above Duffy and the friar.
Then the fabric tore, and the friar was on his way again. He tried to block Duffy's sword as he'd done before, but this time the Irishman whirled his extended point in a quick feint disengage, and the friar slid directly onto it, taking the sword through his belly. It was Duffy's hilt that stopped the man's downward course, and his face was less than a foot away from the Irishman's. The friar flailed his sword convulsively, but Duffy caught the wrist with his free hand and held it away. The two men stared at each other for a moment.
'You're no real friar,' Duffy panted.
'You.. .go to hell,' the man choked, and then sagged in death.
Propping the corpse up with his right hand, Duffy pulled his sword free, and let the body tumble away down the hill. He looked up. The chamois hunter was braced against a rock and a tree trunk about twenty feet up, unable to descend any further without being at the mercy of Duffy's rapier. The man carried a sword of his own, but didn't seem confident with it. The bow had been left up on the road.
'Come on, weasel,' Duffy gritted. 'Show us a little of that courage you had five minutes ago when you tried to shoot me in the back.'
The man licked sweat off his upper lip and glanced nervously over his shoulder, up the slope. Clearly he was wondering if he could scramble back to the road before the Irishman could catch up with him and run him through.
'Don't think I'll hesitate,' Duffy called, guessing the man's thoughts.
The chamois hunter reached out and scraped the ground with his sword blade, sending pebbles and clumps of leaves pattering down onto the Irishman.
Duffy laughed uproariously, sending echoes ringing through the trees. 'Too late now, my friend, to begin tilling the soil! I don't know where you and your fat companion had your swords hidden when you were riding, but you should have left them there.' A fistsized rock bounced painfully off his head. 'Ow! All right, you son of a dog... Duffy began scrambling up the slope in a rage.
The man dropped his sword, turned, and scampered away upward like a startled squirrel. Duffy, being heavier and unwilling to relinquish his own sword, was left behind despite his ferocious efforts to catch up.
It may go badly, he realized, if he gets to the road and has time to draw his bow. Duffy stopped to catch his breath, and dug a stone out of the dirt. He tossed it up and caught it to judge its weight. Not bad. Drawing his left arm back and resting it against a tree limb, he relaxed and waited for a sight of the timorous bandit whose crashing, gasping progress must have been audible a mile away.
Finally he was visible, pausing at the lip of the road, silhouetted against a patch of sky. Duffy's arm lashed forward, flinging the stone upward with all the strength he could muster. A second later the bandit twitched violently and fell backward, out of sight.
Got you, you bastard, Duffy thought as he resumed his upward climb. It took him several minutes to work his way up the hillside, but when he stood at last on the road he'd still heard nothing from the stone-felled bandit. I suppose I hit him in the head and killed him, the Irishman thought glumly.
He brightened, though, when he saw his horse, the supplies still intact, nosing the muddy ground a hundred feet away. 'Hello, horse,' he called, walking up to the beast. The horse lifted its head and regarded its owner without enthusiasm. 'And where were you, beast, when I was being done in down the hill? Hah?' The horse looked away, clearly bored. Duffy shook his head sadly and swung into the saddle. 'Onward, you heartless creature.'
By early afternoon the road had become a wide ledge angling steeply up the sloping face of a rock wall. Well-worn stones were pressed into the ground to serve as pavement, and the precipice side was bordered with a frail, outward-leaning fence of weathered sticks. When the sun hung only a few finger's-breadths above the western peaks Duffy came upon the St James Hospice, a narrow-windowed, slate-roofed building nestled between two vast wings of Alpine granite.
Couldn't have timed it better, the Irishman thought as he led his horse up the path to the hospice. If those two assassins hadn't delayed me this morning, I'd have got here too early, and been tempted to press on for some other, probably not half so nice, shelter for the night. The heavy front door swung open as Duffy dismounted, and two monks strode across the snowy yard.
'Good evening, stranger,' said the taller one. 'Brother Eustace will take your horse around to the stable. Come with me.' Duffy followed the monk inside and took off his hat and cloak as the door was drawn shut. The narrow vestibule was lit by a torch hung on the wall in an iron sconce, and a half dozen swords were stacked in one corner. 'We insist,' said the monk, 'that all of our guests leave their weapons here.'
Duffy grinned as he unsheathed his sword and handed it to the monk. 'Sounds like a good idea, if you get everybody to go along with it.'
'Not difficult,' the monk said, setting Duffy's rapier with the others. 'Any who won't comply spend the night outside.'
After the evening meal, the half-dozen guests sat around the great fireplace and drank brandy. Several sat in wooden chairs, but Duffy lay stretched on the floor, his head pillowed on the flank of a big sleeping dog. The Irishman had allowed himself a cup of brandy, having chosen to regard it as a precaution against the cold.
Tacitly agreeing not to discuss the motives for their travelling, the guests passed the time by telling stories. An Italian told a morbid tale about a well-born girl keeping the severed head of her stable-boy lover in a flowerpot, and watering with her tears the plant that grew from it. The monk who'd let Duffyin related a riotous and obscene story of erotic confusions in a convent, and Duffy told the old Irish story of Saeve, the wife of the hero Finn Mac Cool, and how she was metamorphosed from a faun.
A tubby old gentleman had begun to recite a long poem about the Emperor Maximilian lost in the Alps, when the front door of the hospice banged open. A moment later a burly man in the heavy boots and coat of a guide strode into the room, impatiently brushing snow out of his moustache.
'A cold night, Olaus?' asked the monk, getting up to pour a cup for the newcomer.
'No,' said Olaus, gratefully taking the liquor. 'The winter is packing up and returning north.' He took a long sip. 'But there are monsters out tonight.'
Duffy looked up, interested. 'Monsters?'