The Indigo King - James A. Owen [88]
“I don’t know,” said John, “but I’m going to go with Hugo’s assessment. These slides aren’t redundant. They’ve all been left for a reason. We’ve got Hugo back now, thanks to the last one. Perhaps this one will bring us closer to the finish.”
“I hope so,” Jack said as he stepped through the projection. “I need something to believe in.”
* * *
The tree, Grandfather Oak, was indeed dying, and the rest of the countryside looked no better. It was bleak, stricken, as if it was diseased. A thick odor hung in the air, an odor of death and decay.
“What’s happened?” Hugo exclaimed. “How long have we been away?”
“Years, certainly,” said John. “Decades, perhaps, judging from the size of the tree,” he added, stroking the bark. “A shame we won’t see it again after this.”
“This must be a different timeline,” Chaz said. “Different from yours, I mean. This looks more than familiar t’ me.”
They started walking the same route they had taken before, but other than the topography of the land, nothing was familiar.
There were scattered houses and a number of crumbling and broken walls. There were fires in some of the structures, and a few carcasses of horses and cattle that looked as if the animals had died of consumption rather than in a conflict.
Far off in the distance, they could just make out through the smoke and haze the crenellated towers of a castle.
“Camelot,” John said dully. “Or what’s left of it.”
“Let’s make haste,” Hugo urged, beckoning them on. “We need to get to the bottom of things as quickly as we can. It’s early in the day, from the position of the sun, so we can be there in a few hours if we hurry.”
The companions ran as long as they could, finally slowing to a walk to conserve their strength for any unexpected surprises. The closer they got to the place they had known as Camelot, the more barren the landscape had become. It had been stripped bare of trees, stones, and anything else that could have been useful in a siege. And a siege was exactly what was taking place.
From the hilltop where they were, the companions could see the fields in the shallow valley where the tournament had taken place. Massed along the valley floor were thousands of warriors, many bearing banners they’d seen at the competition. There were battering rams, and trebuchets, and various machines of war that were completely unfamiliar in design, but evident in their use. Destruction was their purpose, and they were being used by warriors willing to smash everything in their path.
The armies were circled around the castle that had been built on the hill where the stone table stood. It was a motte-and-bailey castle of raised earth and wood that had been fortified with stone. The traditional courtyard that enclosed the town below had been obliterated by the invaders, who were now pressing their attack with fire and steel up against the walls of the castle itself.
The castle and its defenders would not last the night.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Jack whispered, awestruck by the spectacle in front of them. “This is the beginning of the Winterland.”
“No,” John replied. “This is just the result. Whatever set things on this path has already happened.”
“But how can we fix this?” Hugo asked, sitting on the ground and clutching his knees. “This is war!”
Hugo had lived through the Great War—but unlike John and Jack, he had never witnessed the kind of savagery that permeated every aspect of a battle that turned on blood and steel. Hand-to-hand combat with spears and swords was a different kind of warfare, and it was frightening Hugo into a stupor.
“Hey, Hugo,” said Chaz, pointing at the Little Whatsit, “give me a hand here, will you? I can’t make sense of some of this.”
John started to remark that Chaz hadn’t had a problem with reading it before, when he glanced at Chaz and Hugo and realized that Chaz still needed no help. He’d asked Hugo to assist him to break the professor’s coma of fear. And it worked. With his attention drawn away from the battlefield before them and focused instead on the unusual academia