Home to Avalon by Arthur H. Landis

Author:Arthur H. Landis [Landis, Arthur H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: DAW Books
Published: 1982-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

At the time of the questioning we’d taken over the inn of a small village named Persifalls, causing our own Sir Percy to check its lineage with two of the elders against the background of his own questionable roots—and this despite the fact that Percy was not his surname… . There were the five knights, Sir Percy, Sir Quigley, Shan, myself and Hulok. The vicar was taking notes.

“We will do this in an organized way,” Shan Duglass led off. ‘I've prepared a number of questions. Allow me, therefore to ask them first. Then, if any of you have more, feel free to ask them… Everyone muttered assent, or kept his silence.

The two sadans were blond, blue-eyed look-alikes, even to the visible fact that their hair was falling out, that they bad ulcerous sores on their faces, and that the palsied trembling that had seized on both their bodies at the hour of their capture had never left them. Their filthy clothes were the gaudiest of rough weaves; their boots and belts of untanned leather and poor workmanship. Small mirrors dangled from their earlobes; each had a double necklace of uncut stones, some obviously precious, others, just stones. Their hauberks (taken from them), were of the simplest kind, metal rings sewn to leather as opposed to the human well-knit links. They were slender, muscular, and terminal. This last in the sense that their very nervousness suggested a physical deterioration which, if not taken in hand, would bring their deaths in months, if not weeks.

I’d asked before about their open sores; found that they were apparently something new. But disease in Lothellian was simply taken for granted, with one plague following another; with whole communities of moodans wiped out, rebuilt—and hit again by some loathsome new epidemic. The moodans were immune to nothing; nor were the sadans. Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to check things out further, to aid them if I could. But now was not the time____

Shan began a calm, almost friendly interrogation. A thing unheard of to the others, for according to the new scriptures, reflecting the thoughts and commands of Father Abram, his son, Og, and his wife, the Lady Eostre, one “should not allow a sadan or moodan to live!” Indeed, the very phrase was the Twelfth Commandment!

“Where in Lothellian do you come from?” he asked, pointing to first one and then the other.

They were two knights of Jarkbund Castle, they replied between curses, hissings and attempts to spit in the faces of their captors. A knife-prick to the throat of each by Hulok calmed them somewhat. They served the Lord Wulsping, whom we’d killed at Hools.

“Where is Jarkbund?”

“On the Kiel River to the east of the Dark Mountains.”

“What of the sixty sadans we slew? Where did they come from?”

“Also from Jarkbund.”

“How then.” Shan probed softly, “did your company traverse the almost eight hundred miles from Jarkbund to Hools, in Sierwood? Morel Why Hools? Why did your Lord Wulsping take you to Hools?”

Their answer was to

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