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People, frequently naked, danced around those bonfires. Many spring flowers had been brought up and used to decorate rocks, or people. A certain amount of fucking went on, as one would expect, but at least some of it seemed to be ceremonial fucking-the participants, actors in a sort of immorality play-the woman always bedecked with garlands of spring wildflowers and the man always do
Of course, presiding over the entire thing was Satan the Prince of Darkness, or so Jack assumed-as what else would you call a jet-black figure, horned and bearded, maybe a hundred feet high, dancing in the boiling, smoky, cloudy sky just above the summit, sometimes visible and sometimes not, occasionally seen in profile as he lifted his bearded chin to howl, or laugh, at the moon. Jack fully believed this, and knew beyond doubt that every word the preachers had ever said about Lucifer was true. He decided that ru
His eye was caught by a tiny black silhouette outlined in a brilliant hairy fringe, elevated above the whole scene: the black goat, tilting its head back to bray. One of the vast Satans duplicated the move precisely. Jack understood that he had been ru
He sat down at the point where he’d almost hurled himself into the gorge, laughed, and tried to clear his head, and to get his bearings. The cliff, and the somewhat lower bluff across from it, were craggy, with great big shards and flakes of rock angling crazily into the air-and (by the way) exploding the Doctor’s idea of how these rocks had been formed, because the grain of these rocks ran straight up and down. Obviously it was the remains of a giant, killed in some antediluvian rock fight, who’d died on his back with his bony fingers thrust up into the air.
Jack drew nearer to a fire, partly because he was cold and partly because he wanted a closer look at one particular naked girl who was dancing around it-somewhat on the fleshy side and clearly destined to become another broom-wielding hag in the long run, but the least columnar German female Jack had recently seen. By the time he got close enough to have a good look at her, the fire was uncomfortably hot, which should have warned him that the light was very bright, on his face. But he did not consider this important fact at all until he heard the fatal word Wache! Turning towards the voice he saw, almost close enough to touch, one of those women who had woken him up earlier in the evening, down below, when he’d been sleeping by his little fire with his sword in view. His sword was exactly what she was looking for, now that she’d gained everyone’s attention by uttering their least favorite word. Concealing the weapon in a leg-splint had worked when it was dark, and people were not specifically looking for a sword, but here and now it did not work at all-the woman hardly needed do more than glance at Jack before screaming, in a voice that could probably be heard in Leipzig, “Er ist eine Wache! Er hat ein Schwert!”
So the party was over for everyone and most of all Jack. Anyone could’ve given him a smart shove and sent him into the fire and that would’ve been the end, or at least an interesting begi
Jack ran.
He hadn’t been ru
Even so, the hunt lasted for perhaps an hour, making its way generally downhill. Jack’s only hope was to get out in front of them and flee through the darkness. But they had torches and they knew their way around, and had spread the alarm down the mountain and so no matter what Jack achieved in the way of ru
Toward the end, he got into situations where he could have escaped, or at least added a few minutes to his life, by killing one or two people. But he didn’t-an act of forbearance he wished could have been observed and noted down by some other sort of Watcher, a lurking mystery with a mirror on a stick, so that news of his noble decisions could be provided to Eliza and everyone else who’d ever looked at him the wrong way. Far from earning him universal admiration, this only led to his being surrounded by some half a dozen men with torches, standing just out of sword-range and darting in to sweep flames past his face when they thought they saw an opening. Jack risked a look back over his shoulder and saw no one behind him, which seemed a poor way to surround someone. He wheeled, ran a couple of steps, and hit a wall. A wall. Turning back around, he saw a torch-flame headed right for his face and reflexively parried the blow. Another came in from another direction and he parried that, and when the third came in from yet another direction he parried it with the edge instead of the flat of his blade, and cut the handle of the torch in two. The burning half spun in the air and he snatched it while slashing blindly in the other direction and hurting someone. Now that he’d drawn blood, the other hunters stepped back, knowing that reinforcements were on their way.*Jack, keeping his back to the building, crept sideways, sword in one hand and torch in the other, occasionally taking advantage of the latter’s light to glance over his shoulder and gain some knowledge of what he’d run into.