The Medievals 1, page 20
part #1 of The Medievals Series
Snap.
A twig breaks somewhere in the night, pulling Richard’s attention from the starry sky. His eyes search the forest cloaked in shadows, but he sees nothing. For a moment, he thinks perhaps the thief has tried his luck at absconding again. But Loxley, Ivanhoe, and El Cid sleep unstirred.
Slowly and quietly, Richard reaches for his sword, then stands.
With the light of the dying fire playing in his periphery, Richard decides to move deeper into woods, where he can see more clearly. He grips his sword tightly, his blade guiding him. He moves twenty paces outside of the camp in the direction of where the twig snapped. His eyes adjust to the darkness as he goes.
He sees nothing but trees and vines silhouetted by the moonlight.
Voosh!
A hoverfly startles Richard as it alights from one of the trees, its deep hum vibrating in the air around him. The giant, many-hued insect wings its way higher up into the canopy, perhaps disturbed by Richard’s presence.
Richard scans the surrounding darkness once more and, seeing nothing, he turns to head back to camp. And as he does, he finds Ivanhoe standing there between him and the fading fire.
“Sword-fighting with the shadows?” Ivanhoe asks, eyeing Richard’s sword.
“I thought I heard something. Or someone,” Richard responds.
Ivanhoe steps deeper into the dark, moving closer to Richard, and the tracker sniffs the air.
“There’s an unfamiliar scent. But it is weak. If someone or something was here, they are gone now,” Ivanhoe asserts.
Richard remembers the figure of the woman, dressed in black, a blindfold over her eyes. He has spotted her twice now, stalking them. Could it have been her?
“Master Cheng’s tutelage has slackened as he has aged,” Ivanhoe says.
Richard gives Ivanhoe a look of confusion. Then, Ivanhoe points to Richard’s hold on the sword.
“Your grip is too tight,” the erstwhile knight instructs. “Master Cheng would have surely reprimanded me for such a thing. ‘You must trust yourself to the sword,’ he would say.”
Richard can hear the echo of Master Cheng’s words: If you grab water, you sink. If you trust yourself to the water, you float.
“Come,” Ivanhoe says to Richard. “You need your rest. It is nearly time for my shift anyhow.”
Ivanhoe turns back to the camp, and Richard follows, his eyes searching the darkness a final time.
◆◆◆
The bright eye of day blinks through the trees and clouds. The air has warmed as morning has shaken hands with the afternoon, and conversation among the search party has flagged. While Ivanhoe has warned that he can smell a coming rain in the air, it is nice to have a dry, warm trek through the awe-inspiring Eternal Forest, which truly has proven to seem never-ending.
With Ivanhoe ahead of him, the brooding man once again absorbed in his silent intensity, Richard is keeping pace with Loxley and El Cid. Over the course of their many days and a week together, the exile and the thief have settled into a bickering cadence, and Richard is amused by it. What Richard once took as antagonism from Loxley, barbed remarks aimed at his fellow travellers, is now revealed as his charm. There is a wink in everything he says. And when the thief smiles, there are dimples that cut into his darkly complected cheeks.
Back at the castle, people around Richard always spoke with a respectful tone, and their interactions were stilted by decorum. But in Loxley, there is an irreverence; and while it was jarring at first, Richard now finds it refreshing.
As Richard walks beside El Cid, the sun suddenly catches the metal of the Spaniard’s ornate scabbard at his side, and Richard must shield his eyes from the glare.
As the canopy blocks the sun once more, Richard’s focus remains on the long, golden scabbard. The gold is inlaid with jewels that sparkle in the light. It reminds him of his father’s own scabbard, although this one is much larger in order to accommodate the magical sword.
“Where does one get a flaming sword?” Richard wonders aloud.
Loxley shakes his head. “Really, Young Blood?”
Richard shrugs. “What?”
“Must you encourage it to speak?” Loxley asks.
But El Cid does not allow Loxley’s words to fetter his response.
“After the heothuks murdered El Cid’s mother and father and five brothers and his one sister, he set sail for the mainland,” the Spaniard recounts. “El Cid was between Lamora and Espana when a great wind picked up El Cid’s boat and carried him to an island where he found an extranjero.”
“Extranjero?” asks Richard, stumbling through the pronunciation.
“A very strange man,” the Spaniard translates. “And this strange man, he was dying of thirst. Surrounded by an ocean of water, but he could not drink it. It is the worst way for a man to die.”
“Knock wood,” quips Loxley, eyeing the deep forest around them. “I’d bet all the ale in the pub there are beasties in these parts that would love to prove you wrong on that.”
Richard also searches the woods, wondering what hungry creatures are waiting for them in the shadows.
El Cid continues: “El Cid, known everywhere as a man of noble acts, gave the extranjero the last drops of his own water. In return for saving his life, this strange man gave El Cid a gift: Tizona.”
El Cid draws the sword from its scabbard as he says its name.
“She is a thing of beauty, this Tizona,” El Cid gushes over his sword. “And with her in his hand, El Cid would travel the ocean to Espana, where he would become the greatest warrior ever to walk the land.”
“Yeah, so you’ve told us. Many times. You’re a legend in your own mind,” Loxley mocks. “And yet, somehow you still landed in the King’s Dungeon, an ocean away.”
Richard notices El Cid’s shoulders seem to sink slightly with his spirits.
“This story, the story of El Cid’s exile, is a story that El Cid does not like to recount,” El Cid says, replacing his cross-hilted sword in its bejeweled scabbard.
“Oodilolly,” the thief says with relief, thinking the Spaniard is retreating from conversation. “I suppose we’ll just have to walk in silence then.”
“But El Cid will tell you the story, as much as it pains him,” he says, and Loxley rolls his eyes with annoyance. “When El Cid served the King of Espana, he and Tizona fought many men in the name of the King. One such man was Don Arturo Gomez, a man of great evil that desired the throne for himself. El Cid travelled to the city of Zamora, where he and Tizona battled through a hundred soldiers to reach Don Arturo Gomez. And with one swing of his powerful sword, El Cid killed the evil Don Arturo Gomez."
Here, El Cid swings his sword heroically as he reenacts the scene in his mind.
"But as El Cid pulled the sword from the belly of the man, he saw the daughter of Don Arturo Gomez. She was the most beautiful woman ever to be touched by the light of the sun.”
On the mention of the woman, Loxley interrupts: “Finally, it gets interesting. This girl got a name?”
“Dona Ximena,” El Cid says, emotion filling his voice.
Richard looks to El Cid’s eyes, which hold a mixture of desire and regret. His expression is a break from his unwavering confidence thus far on the journey.
“El Cid has loved many women in his life. But he has never loved a woman more than he loved Dona Ximena,” he says dolefully.
“You fell for a woman after you sliced up her father? Everybody in Spain as dumb as you?” Loxley asks.
El Cid shrugs. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
Richard is moved by El Cid’s words, and he is sympathetic to the giant’s blinding romanticism.
“Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?” Loxley goads.
“El Cid courted the beautiful Dona Ximena. For a time, they were in love. Nobody had ever been more in love than El Cid and Dona Ximena. Then, one day, Dona Ximena let slip a sleeping potion into El Cid’s wine, and El Cid awoke chained to his ship, destined for the Realm, where he was captured and put into a dungeon.”
Loxley and Richard are surprised by this turn of events. But before they can question El Cid further about the beautiful woman, Ivanhoe stops ahead of them, looking back.
“Do you hear that?” Ivanhoe asks them.
Breaking through the silence of the forest, Richard can just make out a deep rumbling ahead of them.
“El Cid hears the rumbling of los toros,” the Spaniard says.
“Speak English, Spaniard” Loxley orders.
“How you say -- bulls? Hundreds of bulls.”
El Cid is right. The rumbling sounds like a stampede of very large animals. Or beasts.
But as Loxley bends his ear toward the noise, he shakes his head, recognizing whatever he hears. “Those aren’t bulls.”
While Richard expects Loxley to retreat, the thief instead moves ahead of them toward the sound, leading the way through the trees. Richard, El Cid and Ivanhoe follow, wondering what Loxley believes the source of the rumbling to be.
And as they pass beyond one of the wide, towering trees, Richard can see a massive shower of water rushing over the side of a great rocky wall ahead of them.
“This is Thundering Falls, my friends,” Loxley announces. “We’ve made it to the other side of the Eternal Forest.”
Richard looks around, noticing that they have indeed reached the edge of the forest. The trees seem to part and the woods open up, the soft ground giving way to rockier terrain, where Richard finds that he and the team are on the middle tier of two giant waterfalls: one that comes from above, and the other that splashes down into a pool below. At the bottom of the lower falls, the tail of the river carves its way west through the valley.
The steep rock formation ahead of them is perhaps half the size of Mount Saurian in height, but appears twice as treacherous. It stretches across the horizon, with a dense crown of clouds at the top hiding what lies on the other side of the rocky expanse.
“Beyond those falls is the Cloudlands,” Loxley says.
Richard gazes at the thick clouds, thinking back to the moment on Mount Saurian when he looked across the valleys and mountains of the Realm, then the Eternal Forest, and to the Cloudlands beyond. What a great distance he has travelled. Perhaps, if he makes it back to the kingdom alive, people will no longer whisper about a Poet Prince of words and no actions.
Of course, the key to that daydream is actually returning to the kingdom alive.
“We have to climb that rock face?” Richard asks.
“No, we go through it,” Loxley says. And off of the team’s confusion: “Behind the falls, there’s a passage that leads to the surface beyond the rock.”
“How does the thief know this?” El Cid asks.
“Any outlaw worth the bounty on his head always knows the shortest route anywhere,” Loxley asserts.
“Come then,” Ivanhoe says. “We must hurry if we are to beat the rain to the rock.”
As they cross to the Thundering Falls, Richard’s eyes remain on the darkening sky above, the clouds uttering their intentions with a low growl. Every so often, a knife of lightning cuts through the clouds.
When they reach the falls, Loxley leads them across the slippery ledge that leads behind the falling water. As Richard moves with his back against the rock, the soles of his boots perilously slide on the ledge, which is slick from the spattering of the falls.
Richard makes the mistake of peering over the rocky lip, seeing the heavy current far below; and he becomes suddenly dizzy, with Loxley grabbing his arm just before he slips off the ledge.
“Careful,” Loxley cautions. “You go over that ledge you’ll break every bone you ever knew you had, and even some you didn’t know you had. Good news is, you’ll be dead, so you won’t care so much.”
Richard gulps at just how narrowly he escaped a death-dealing fall. Then, he regains his balance and moves carefully the rest of the way across. Together, they all reach the mouth of the passageway, a dark yawn of a cave hidden behind the falling water.
“Tizona will lead the way,” El Cid says with pride, pulling his sword from its scabbard, the blade flaming to life, creating a torch to guide them through the dark.
“That really is a handy sword,” remarks Loxley.
As they make their way deeper into the darkness, Tizona’s light touches the grayish walls, and Richard eyes paintings on their surface. The paintings are ancient, crude pictures of stick figures and tools faded with time.
Richard feels like the damp cave is delivering a message from the past. There are stick figures that are long and thin, painted in white. And they seem to be defending against stick figures painted in red. The red figures have bulbous heads, which remind Richard of the Runic warriors he saw at his Triumph Day performance.
“Is this the Endless War?” Richard asks.
Ivanhoe examines the cave paintings.
“No,” he asserts. “These are from long before the Endless War. The Cloudlands used to be home to the Pales. If I had to guess, I would say this passage was dug by them.”
Richard knows of only one Pale: Vladeen, the bloodless man with pink eyes that serves on the King’s Council. Richard remembers the aged Pale’s dire warning as he argued with the White Hairs: “We must find this girl before she reveals where the staff is hidden, or we may be facing an evil that will have the power to turn the entire Realm into an empty husk.”
“What happened to the Pales?” Richard inquires.
“The Runes happened,” Ivanhoe says ominously. Then gives a chin-nod toward the darkness: “Come. We must meet the other end of this passage before sundown.”
Richard pulls his eyes from the cave paintings and continues on with the others.
Suddenly, El Cid trips on something unseen. And as he falls, Tizona flies free of his hand, leaving them in pitch black. And in the darkness, Richard thinks he hears what sounds like a low purr.
“What was that?” Richard asks.
El Cid’s sword fires back to life as he reclaims the fallen Tizona. The light casts onto the ground, where a large bone can be seen.
“El Cid is okay. It was only a bone,” the Spaniard assures them.
“There was a noise. Like a purring sound,” Richard says.
Loxley shrugs. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Richard looks to Ivanhoe, who seems more concerned about the bone on the ground.
“That bone is the size of a broadsword,” Ivanhoe says.
“What’s it matter to us, Red?” Loxley asks. “Whatever it was, it’s dead now.”
“Yes, but what killed it?” Ivanhoe asks, his question a spark that lights a fire in Richard’s imagination.
Ivanhoe is right: whatever beast killed the erstwhile owner of this bone must be fearsome.
El Cid moves Tizona around the wide passage, his sword finding the shadows as they all search for possible predators. The light lands on something long and dark -- perhaps a cloak.
Ivanhoe picks it up, holding it out for all to examine. And now Richard can see that it is not a cloak but a very large feather.
“El Cid has never seen a bird of this size,” he exclaims.
Ivanhoe sniffs the damp air and then turns to Loxley: “You fool, you have led us right into a gryphon’s den.”
“What?” Loxley asks. “No, this is--”
RAAAAAHHH-EEEEEE!
Suddenly, a massive yellow beak stabs from the shadows and a hellish noise is unleashed: a piercing sound that mixes a bird’s shriek with a beast’s roar.
As El Cid swings his sword toward the hooked beak, Tizona’s light shapes the creature in full.
It is, indeed, a gryphon: a huge beast with the head and forelegs of an eagle, and the hindquarters and tail of a lion. Richard is captivated by the beauty of the feathered creature, even as it seems intent on eating them. Its plumage is brown at the back and then turns a glistening blue moving to the tips of the wings. Its chest is white. And its eyes are a piercing gray.
The gryphon’s sickle-shaped beak snaps at Loxley, as well as El Cid, who swings his sword at the bird-beast. At the same time, the gryphon’s forelegs claw in the direction of Ivanhoe and Richard, its talons like knives. As the gryphon spins, defending against all-comers, his leonine tail whips at Loxley, sending the thief hurling into the rock wall.
El Cid swings his flaming sword, and it sends the light swirling, the gryphon disappearing and reappearing in the moving shadows.
In the giant man’s swing, Richard can now see the image of the hero that El Cid describes himself as. The Spaniard is fearless as he attacks and defends against the gryphon.
Meanwhile, Ivanhoe uses his axe to deflect the talons that swipe at him. When Richard finally shakes his mind free of the spellbinding creature, he pulls his own sword and wields it against the lashing claws.
Suddenly, the gryphon takes a well-aimed stab at Ivanhoe, its sharp beak biting into the man’s chest.
“Gahh!” Ivanhoe cries in pain, his flesh torn.
As Ivanhoe pulls away, the beak catches the horn around Ivanhoe’s neck. The gryphon sends the horn flying as it redirects its ire back on El Cid and Loxley. Ivanhoe watches as the horn clatters off the cave wall and lands behind the feline haunches of the gryphon.
RAAAAAHHH-EEEEEE!
The bird-beast shrieks again as Ivanhoe’s axe digs into one of its legs. But the gryphon is not slowed by his injury.
Loxley shouts: “We’ll never get past this beast! We must turn back!”
But Ivanhoe’s eyes don’t leave the stray horn.
“Do you have a deathwish!?” Loxley yells at Ivanhoe, trying to shake the man from his focus. “We must leave!”
“Go! I will follow behind!” Ivanhoe shouts back at Loxley, unwilling to leave the mysterious horn. Then, Ivanhoe looks to Richard: “You too, Prince! Run!”
Richard obeys the command, turning back in the direction of the cave’s opening. Loxley pulls Richard along, the two of them moving through the dark toward the hole of light at the end. As the hole of light grows larger and larger, Richard can hear the rushing of the falls growing louder.
Finally, they reach the mouth of the cave, and Loxley instructs “Time to jump!” and Richard’s feet follow the order even before his mind processes what he’s about to do.
A twig breaks somewhere in the night, pulling Richard’s attention from the starry sky. His eyes search the forest cloaked in shadows, but he sees nothing. For a moment, he thinks perhaps the thief has tried his luck at absconding again. But Loxley, Ivanhoe, and El Cid sleep unstirred.
Slowly and quietly, Richard reaches for his sword, then stands.
With the light of the dying fire playing in his periphery, Richard decides to move deeper into woods, where he can see more clearly. He grips his sword tightly, his blade guiding him. He moves twenty paces outside of the camp in the direction of where the twig snapped. His eyes adjust to the darkness as he goes.
He sees nothing but trees and vines silhouetted by the moonlight.
Voosh!
A hoverfly startles Richard as it alights from one of the trees, its deep hum vibrating in the air around him. The giant, many-hued insect wings its way higher up into the canopy, perhaps disturbed by Richard’s presence.
Richard scans the surrounding darkness once more and, seeing nothing, he turns to head back to camp. And as he does, he finds Ivanhoe standing there between him and the fading fire.
“Sword-fighting with the shadows?” Ivanhoe asks, eyeing Richard’s sword.
“I thought I heard something. Or someone,” Richard responds.
Ivanhoe steps deeper into the dark, moving closer to Richard, and the tracker sniffs the air.
“There’s an unfamiliar scent. But it is weak. If someone or something was here, they are gone now,” Ivanhoe asserts.
Richard remembers the figure of the woman, dressed in black, a blindfold over her eyes. He has spotted her twice now, stalking them. Could it have been her?
“Master Cheng’s tutelage has slackened as he has aged,” Ivanhoe says.
Richard gives Ivanhoe a look of confusion. Then, Ivanhoe points to Richard’s hold on the sword.
“Your grip is too tight,” the erstwhile knight instructs. “Master Cheng would have surely reprimanded me for such a thing. ‘You must trust yourself to the sword,’ he would say.”
Richard can hear the echo of Master Cheng’s words: If you grab water, you sink. If you trust yourself to the water, you float.
“Come,” Ivanhoe says to Richard. “You need your rest. It is nearly time for my shift anyhow.”
Ivanhoe turns back to the camp, and Richard follows, his eyes searching the darkness a final time.
◆◆◆
The bright eye of day blinks through the trees and clouds. The air has warmed as morning has shaken hands with the afternoon, and conversation among the search party has flagged. While Ivanhoe has warned that he can smell a coming rain in the air, it is nice to have a dry, warm trek through the awe-inspiring Eternal Forest, which truly has proven to seem never-ending.
With Ivanhoe ahead of him, the brooding man once again absorbed in his silent intensity, Richard is keeping pace with Loxley and El Cid. Over the course of their many days and a week together, the exile and the thief have settled into a bickering cadence, and Richard is amused by it. What Richard once took as antagonism from Loxley, barbed remarks aimed at his fellow travellers, is now revealed as his charm. There is a wink in everything he says. And when the thief smiles, there are dimples that cut into his darkly complected cheeks.
Back at the castle, people around Richard always spoke with a respectful tone, and their interactions were stilted by decorum. But in Loxley, there is an irreverence; and while it was jarring at first, Richard now finds it refreshing.
As Richard walks beside El Cid, the sun suddenly catches the metal of the Spaniard’s ornate scabbard at his side, and Richard must shield his eyes from the glare.
As the canopy blocks the sun once more, Richard’s focus remains on the long, golden scabbard. The gold is inlaid with jewels that sparkle in the light. It reminds him of his father’s own scabbard, although this one is much larger in order to accommodate the magical sword.
“Where does one get a flaming sword?” Richard wonders aloud.
Loxley shakes his head. “Really, Young Blood?”
Richard shrugs. “What?”
“Must you encourage it to speak?” Loxley asks.
But El Cid does not allow Loxley’s words to fetter his response.
“After the heothuks murdered El Cid’s mother and father and five brothers and his one sister, he set sail for the mainland,” the Spaniard recounts. “El Cid was between Lamora and Espana when a great wind picked up El Cid’s boat and carried him to an island where he found an extranjero.”
“Extranjero?” asks Richard, stumbling through the pronunciation.
“A very strange man,” the Spaniard translates. “And this strange man, he was dying of thirst. Surrounded by an ocean of water, but he could not drink it. It is the worst way for a man to die.”
“Knock wood,” quips Loxley, eyeing the deep forest around them. “I’d bet all the ale in the pub there are beasties in these parts that would love to prove you wrong on that.”
Richard also searches the woods, wondering what hungry creatures are waiting for them in the shadows.
El Cid continues: “El Cid, known everywhere as a man of noble acts, gave the extranjero the last drops of his own water. In return for saving his life, this strange man gave El Cid a gift: Tizona.”
El Cid draws the sword from its scabbard as he says its name.
“She is a thing of beauty, this Tizona,” El Cid gushes over his sword. “And with her in his hand, El Cid would travel the ocean to Espana, where he would become the greatest warrior ever to walk the land.”
“Yeah, so you’ve told us. Many times. You’re a legend in your own mind,” Loxley mocks. “And yet, somehow you still landed in the King’s Dungeon, an ocean away.”
Richard notices El Cid’s shoulders seem to sink slightly with his spirits.
“This story, the story of El Cid’s exile, is a story that El Cid does not like to recount,” El Cid says, replacing his cross-hilted sword in its bejeweled scabbard.
“Oodilolly,” the thief says with relief, thinking the Spaniard is retreating from conversation. “I suppose we’ll just have to walk in silence then.”
“But El Cid will tell you the story, as much as it pains him,” he says, and Loxley rolls his eyes with annoyance. “When El Cid served the King of Espana, he and Tizona fought many men in the name of the King. One such man was Don Arturo Gomez, a man of great evil that desired the throne for himself. El Cid travelled to the city of Zamora, where he and Tizona battled through a hundred soldiers to reach Don Arturo Gomez. And with one swing of his powerful sword, El Cid killed the evil Don Arturo Gomez."
Here, El Cid swings his sword heroically as he reenacts the scene in his mind.
"But as El Cid pulled the sword from the belly of the man, he saw the daughter of Don Arturo Gomez. She was the most beautiful woman ever to be touched by the light of the sun.”
On the mention of the woman, Loxley interrupts: “Finally, it gets interesting. This girl got a name?”
“Dona Ximena,” El Cid says, emotion filling his voice.
Richard looks to El Cid’s eyes, which hold a mixture of desire and regret. His expression is a break from his unwavering confidence thus far on the journey.
“El Cid has loved many women in his life. But he has never loved a woman more than he loved Dona Ximena,” he says dolefully.
“You fell for a woman after you sliced up her father? Everybody in Spain as dumb as you?” Loxley asks.
El Cid shrugs. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
Richard is moved by El Cid’s words, and he is sympathetic to the giant’s blinding romanticism.
“Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?” Loxley goads.
“El Cid courted the beautiful Dona Ximena. For a time, they were in love. Nobody had ever been more in love than El Cid and Dona Ximena. Then, one day, Dona Ximena let slip a sleeping potion into El Cid’s wine, and El Cid awoke chained to his ship, destined for the Realm, where he was captured and put into a dungeon.”
Loxley and Richard are surprised by this turn of events. But before they can question El Cid further about the beautiful woman, Ivanhoe stops ahead of them, looking back.
“Do you hear that?” Ivanhoe asks them.
Breaking through the silence of the forest, Richard can just make out a deep rumbling ahead of them.
“El Cid hears the rumbling of los toros,” the Spaniard says.
“Speak English, Spaniard” Loxley orders.
“How you say -- bulls? Hundreds of bulls.”
El Cid is right. The rumbling sounds like a stampede of very large animals. Or beasts.
But as Loxley bends his ear toward the noise, he shakes his head, recognizing whatever he hears. “Those aren’t bulls.”
While Richard expects Loxley to retreat, the thief instead moves ahead of them toward the sound, leading the way through the trees. Richard, El Cid and Ivanhoe follow, wondering what Loxley believes the source of the rumbling to be.
And as they pass beyond one of the wide, towering trees, Richard can see a massive shower of water rushing over the side of a great rocky wall ahead of them.
“This is Thundering Falls, my friends,” Loxley announces. “We’ve made it to the other side of the Eternal Forest.”
Richard looks around, noticing that they have indeed reached the edge of the forest. The trees seem to part and the woods open up, the soft ground giving way to rockier terrain, where Richard finds that he and the team are on the middle tier of two giant waterfalls: one that comes from above, and the other that splashes down into a pool below. At the bottom of the lower falls, the tail of the river carves its way west through the valley.
The steep rock formation ahead of them is perhaps half the size of Mount Saurian in height, but appears twice as treacherous. It stretches across the horizon, with a dense crown of clouds at the top hiding what lies on the other side of the rocky expanse.
“Beyond those falls is the Cloudlands,” Loxley says.
Richard gazes at the thick clouds, thinking back to the moment on Mount Saurian when he looked across the valleys and mountains of the Realm, then the Eternal Forest, and to the Cloudlands beyond. What a great distance he has travelled. Perhaps, if he makes it back to the kingdom alive, people will no longer whisper about a Poet Prince of words and no actions.
Of course, the key to that daydream is actually returning to the kingdom alive.
“We have to climb that rock face?” Richard asks.
“No, we go through it,” Loxley says. And off of the team’s confusion: “Behind the falls, there’s a passage that leads to the surface beyond the rock.”
“How does the thief know this?” El Cid asks.
“Any outlaw worth the bounty on his head always knows the shortest route anywhere,” Loxley asserts.
“Come then,” Ivanhoe says. “We must hurry if we are to beat the rain to the rock.”
As they cross to the Thundering Falls, Richard’s eyes remain on the darkening sky above, the clouds uttering their intentions with a low growl. Every so often, a knife of lightning cuts through the clouds.
When they reach the falls, Loxley leads them across the slippery ledge that leads behind the falling water. As Richard moves with his back against the rock, the soles of his boots perilously slide on the ledge, which is slick from the spattering of the falls.
Richard makes the mistake of peering over the rocky lip, seeing the heavy current far below; and he becomes suddenly dizzy, with Loxley grabbing his arm just before he slips off the ledge.
“Careful,” Loxley cautions. “You go over that ledge you’ll break every bone you ever knew you had, and even some you didn’t know you had. Good news is, you’ll be dead, so you won’t care so much.”
Richard gulps at just how narrowly he escaped a death-dealing fall. Then, he regains his balance and moves carefully the rest of the way across. Together, they all reach the mouth of the passageway, a dark yawn of a cave hidden behind the falling water.
“Tizona will lead the way,” El Cid says with pride, pulling his sword from its scabbard, the blade flaming to life, creating a torch to guide them through the dark.
“That really is a handy sword,” remarks Loxley.
As they make their way deeper into the darkness, Tizona’s light touches the grayish walls, and Richard eyes paintings on their surface. The paintings are ancient, crude pictures of stick figures and tools faded with time.
Richard feels like the damp cave is delivering a message from the past. There are stick figures that are long and thin, painted in white. And they seem to be defending against stick figures painted in red. The red figures have bulbous heads, which remind Richard of the Runic warriors he saw at his Triumph Day performance.
“Is this the Endless War?” Richard asks.
Ivanhoe examines the cave paintings.
“No,” he asserts. “These are from long before the Endless War. The Cloudlands used to be home to the Pales. If I had to guess, I would say this passage was dug by them.”
Richard knows of only one Pale: Vladeen, the bloodless man with pink eyes that serves on the King’s Council. Richard remembers the aged Pale’s dire warning as he argued with the White Hairs: “We must find this girl before she reveals where the staff is hidden, or we may be facing an evil that will have the power to turn the entire Realm into an empty husk.”
“What happened to the Pales?” Richard inquires.
“The Runes happened,” Ivanhoe says ominously. Then gives a chin-nod toward the darkness: “Come. We must meet the other end of this passage before sundown.”
Richard pulls his eyes from the cave paintings and continues on with the others.
Suddenly, El Cid trips on something unseen. And as he falls, Tizona flies free of his hand, leaving them in pitch black. And in the darkness, Richard thinks he hears what sounds like a low purr.
“What was that?” Richard asks.
El Cid’s sword fires back to life as he reclaims the fallen Tizona. The light casts onto the ground, where a large bone can be seen.
“El Cid is okay. It was only a bone,” the Spaniard assures them.
“There was a noise. Like a purring sound,” Richard says.
Loxley shrugs. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Richard looks to Ivanhoe, who seems more concerned about the bone on the ground.
“That bone is the size of a broadsword,” Ivanhoe says.
“What’s it matter to us, Red?” Loxley asks. “Whatever it was, it’s dead now.”
“Yes, but what killed it?” Ivanhoe asks, his question a spark that lights a fire in Richard’s imagination.
Ivanhoe is right: whatever beast killed the erstwhile owner of this bone must be fearsome.
El Cid moves Tizona around the wide passage, his sword finding the shadows as they all search for possible predators. The light lands on something long and dark -- perhaps a cloak.
Ivanhoe picks it up, holding it out for all to examine. And now Richard can see that it is not a cloak but a very large feather.
“El Cid has never seen a bird of this size,” he exclaims.
Ivanhoe sniffs the damp air and then turns to Loxley: “You fool, you have led us right into a gryphon’s den.”
“What?” Loxley asks. “No, this is--”
RAAAAAHHH-EEEEEE!
Suddenly, a massive yellow beak stabs from the shadows and a hellish noise is unleashed: a piercing sound that mixes a bird’s shriek with a beast’s roar.
As El Cid swings his sword toward the hooked beak, Tizona’s light shapes the creature in full.
It is, indeed, a gryphon: a huge beast with the head and forelegs of an eagle, and the hindquarters and tail of a lion. Richard is captivated by the beauty of the feathered creature, even as it seems intent on eating them. Its plumage is brown at the back and then turns a glistening blue moving to the tips of the wings. Its chest is white. And its eyes are a piercing gray.
The gryphon’s sickle-shaped beak snaps at Loxley, as well as El Cid, who swings his sword at the bird-beast. At the same time, the gryphon’s forelegs claw in the direction of Ivanhoe and Richard, its talons like knives. As the gryphon spins, defending against all-comers, his leonine tail whips at Loxley, sending the thief hurling into the rock wall.
El Cid swings his flaming sword, and it sends the light swirling, the gryphon disappearing and reappearing in the moving shadows.
In the giant man’s swing, Richard can now see the image of the hero that El Cid describes himself as. The Spaniard is fearless as he attacks and defends against the gryphon.
Meanwhile, Ivanhoe uses his axe to deflect the talons that swipe at him. When Richard finally shakes his mind free of the spellbinding creature, he pulls his own sword and wields it against the lashing claws.
Suddenly, the gryphon takes a well-aimed stab at Ivanhoe, its sharp beak biting into the man’s chest.
“Gahh!” Ivanhoe cries in pain, his flesh torn.
As Ivanhoe pulls away, the beak catches the horn around Ivanhoe’s neck. The gryphon sends the horn flying as it redirects its ire back on El Cid and Loxley. Ivanhoe watches as the horn clatters off the cave wall and lands behind the feline haunches of the gryphon.
RAAAAAHHH-EEEEEE!
The bird-beast shrieks again as Ivanhoe’s axe digs into one of its legs. But the gryphon is not slowed by his injury.
Loxley shouts: “We’ll never get past this beast! We must turn back!”
But Ivanhoe’s eyes don’t leave the stray horn.
“Do you have a deathwish!?” Loxley yells at Ivanhoe, trying to shake the man from his focus. “We must leave!”
“Go! I will follow behind!” Ivanhoe shouts back at Loxley, unwilling to leave the mysterious horn. Then, Ivanhoe looks to Richard: “You too, Prince! Run!”
Richard obeys the command, turning back in the direction of the cave’s opening. Loxley pulls Richard along, the two of them moving through the dark toward the hole of light at the end. As the hole of light grows larger and larger, Richard can hear the rushing of the falls growing louder.
Finally, they reach the mouth of the cave, and Loxley instructs “Time to jump!” and Richard’s feet follow the order even before his mind processes what he’s about to do.
