There was silence.

He emptied his pipe. He refilled it. He relit it. He puffed it.

There was more silence.

Then, “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d stab a man in the back for a pair of shoes, if he had them and I needed them to keep my feet from freezing. I once did, that’s how I know. But… this is different. This is a thing hurting everybody, and I’m the only one who can do the job. God damn it! I know they’re going to bury me here one day, along with all the rest of them. But I can’t pull out. I’ve got to hold that thing back as long as I can.”

My head was cleared by the cold night air, which gave my consciousness a second wind, so to speak, though my body felt mildly anesthetized about me.

“Couldn’t Lance lead them?” I asked.

“I’d say so. He’s a good man. But there is another reason. I think that goat-thing, whatever it was, on the altar, is a bit afraid of me. I had gone in there and it had told me I’d never make it back out again, but I did. I lived through the sickness that followed after. It knows it’s me that has been fighting it all along. We won that great bloody engagement on the night Uther died, and I met the thing again in a different form and it knew me. Maybe this is a part of what is holding it back now.”

“What form?”

“A thing with a manlike shape, but with goat horns and red eyes. It was mounted on a piebald stallion. We fought for a time, but the tide of the battle swept us apart. Which was a good thing, too, for it was winning. It spoke again, as we swaggered swords, and I knew that head-filling voice. It called me a fool and told me I could never hope to win. But when morning came, the field was ours and we drove them back to the Circle, slaying them as they fled. The rider of the piebald escaped. There have been other sallyings forth since then, but none such as that night’s. If I were to leave this land, another such army — one that is readying even now — would come forth.