Empire's Legacy- The Complete Trilogy

by Marian L Thorpe

  I picked a good supply of the leaves, spreading them out on a rock to dry a little. The tea had eased the ache. A high-pitched warbling whistle caught my attention; looking up, I saw a flock of birds approaching the gulley. I dropped down behind the bushes, moving slowly to my bow. The birds circled, calling, and landed at the water. Grouse-like, sand-and-black in colour, they bobbed and drank. I shot four, quickly.

  The others scattered, calling shrilly. I picked up the dead ones. Cillian slept on. Back up on the gulley's rim I gutted and plucked the birds, found more firewood. Then I built up the fire again and woke Cillian.

  The sun hung near the top of the mountains; dusk would come soon. When the fire had burned down enough, I made a lattice of green twigs and laid the flattened carcasses on it to grill.

  “Lena!” Cillian hissed from his watch location. “Come here!”

  Standing not far from the gulley, wary and alert, stood the biggest bird I had ever seen. Brown-backed and grey-headed, it stood the height of a small child on thick, pale legs. Long grey whisker-like feathers extended from its beak, sweeping back under its eyes. Nervously it spread its wings: even not fully extended, they were as wide as Cillian was tall. “That would feed a whole village,” Cillian whispered. “Any idea what it is?” I had crouched beside him.

  “No. It's magnificent, though.”

  “It wants water.”

  “We'll be gone soon,” I said. I shifted slightly, and the bird, catching the movement, made a deep grunt and ran away in long strides. I laughed; I had expected it to fly, and the running struck me as incongruous.

  “I am glad to hear you laugh,” Cillian said softly.

  “I...” I shook my head. “I don't know how to explain. There is one level on which I am all right. When I am there, I can laugh at this bird or talk to you about the road. I can function almost normally, I suppose. But on another level, deeper—I am hurt, Cillian, even if there is no wound.” I felt tears welling.

  He put out a hand to me, tentatively. “Do you want to be held?” he asked.

  “Do you want to?” I cried. “Do you want to touch me, now?”

  “Lena, dear one,” he said, “why would I not want to?” He held his arms out to me. I collapsed into them.

  “Because I don't know if I can make love again,” I sobbed. “He hurt me, Cillian. I'm frightened. I think he has spoiled what we had—and I don't want to lose you.”

  “I would be hard to lose, on this plain,” he said. “Or anywhere else, Lena. We were friends before we were lovers, leannan, and we can be just friends again, for as long as you need.”

  Just friends wasn't what I wanted, but I couldn't find the words to explain. “Promise?” I said, like a little child. He didn't reply.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering. “I shouldn't have asked that. Not for a promise.”

  “It is not that,” he answered, “I am not sure what it is you are asking.”

  I tried a smile. “Neither am I. Don't...go away from me, Cillian, even if I am difficult, and complicated, and a burden, right now.”

  “You are none of those things,” he replied. “You are asking me for constancy, I think.”

  “I suppose I am.” I had stopped crying.

  He kissed my hair, very gently. “It was yours without asking,” he said, “but if it helps you to hear it, then, yes, I promise.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured. It did help; I suddenly felt a little less alone. “Come on,” I said. “The little birds should be cooked.”

  The trail remained easy to follow. Other paths began to join ours from both directions. We grew close to the meeting place of the villages, I surmised. I hoped there was water there. Later, I stopped for no good reason, looking up at the sky. The hero lay ahead of us. We were still moving east.

  “Cillian, do you know the story of the hero?” I asked, remembering. “That's him in the sky ahead of us.”

  “Yes. Don't you?”

  “I was told it, but I've forgotten most of it,” I admitted. “Tell me?”

  “Darcail, he's called in our story,” Cillian started. “Son of a god and a mortal woman, born with immense strength. But his father's wife, a goddess, was jealous of him, and drove him mad, and in his madness he killed his wife and daughters. The shame of this drove him into exile.”

  “And? Did he return from exile?”

  “He did,” Cillian said. “But only after doing a series of great deeds to redeem himself, including a descent into the underworld. But he prevailed, and when he died he was admitted to the realm of the gods for his valour, and so he stands there in the sky forever.”

  “Guiding us east,” I said. “Is any of it true?”

  “I doubt it,” Cillian said after a moment, “if you mean was there ever a Darcail who did these things. I don't believe there are gods, or not ones that meddle with human lives. Dagney would tell you it is a story to instruct, to give hope that we can redeem ourselves no matter what we have done, if with great effort.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  He did not reply. We walked towards the hero, fading in the first light of dawn. “I don't know,” Cillian said suddenly, as if continuing a conversation. “I don't know about redemption, Lena, not for living people. Perhaps it is only for gods, and heroes from the past.”

  I finished the thought silently: perhaps it is only a story, like they are.

  As the sun rose I saw a pale structure ahead of us gleaming in the sun. “What do you think that is?” I asked Cillian, but he just shook his head, frowning. As we came closer the indeterminate mass separated into a circle of broken pillars, pale and fluted. Two of the pillars stood taller than the others, with ornate carving at the top and a semicircle of stone connecting them.

  “A circle of stones, Aivar told me,” Cillian said, wonder in his voice. “I thought he meant a circle like the standing stones on the Raske Hoys, just boulders set in a ring, with a few carvings. But this!”

  “It looks—sacred,” I said; it evoked in me the same response as the floor at the White Fort, the sense of something ancient, great.

  Cillian stared up at the pillars. “If the East could build this out here in this empty plain, what must Casil have been?”

  We approached in awe. Closer, we could see the chips and breaks in the pillars, the pieces fallen to the ground, the broken remnants of flagstone in the centre. A firepit had been constructed in the middle, and the land cleared for a wide space around it. The vēsturni would meet here to exchange stories and news, while the people camped and feasted and made marriage agreements around them. But even broken and scarred, the temple—for it must have been—evoked wonder, and veneration.

  We wandered among the stones for some time. I noted the whitewash of bird droppings on several of the pillars: hawks, or maybe falcons, using the height to survey the land. The base of some of the pillars were carved with what I thought were badly worn letters: Cillian, on seeing these, whistled and dropped his pack, searching it for paper. He began to copy the markings. I circled the temple. At the easternmost pillar I saw a small pile of objects at its base: crude beads, little carvings, a strange honey-coloured stone. Offerings.

  Practical matters claimed my interest. I went in search of water, finding a stream some distance from the pillars: with one waterskin given to my tea, we had been running short. There were tracks, huge clawed footprints, in the dried mud at the edge. What were they? I would ask Cillian if he knew. Bear, maybe? They weren't fresh.

  Today, I thought, we should sleep till noon, and then move again. We had food this morning, one bird to share between us. The other had been eaten when we stopped in the night. We needed to hunt again, and we could move faster in the day, as well.

  Nearly an hour after we had stopped Cillian came over to where I sat by the stream. I had had little to do, and the pillars drew my eye, so once the small chores and necessities had been completed, I had simply sat and looked. He sunk to the ground beside me.

  “Look,” he said, opening his book.
He had drawn the letters: RCV, and NVI.

  “What do they say?” I asked.

  “This is only a guess…but I think this one,” he pointed to RCV, “is part of the name the East had for Darcail, or someone very like him. I don't know what the other letters mean. If I'm right, Lena, this was a temple to the hero.”

  “I didn't realize,” I said in wonder, “that the story was that old.”

  “A thread connecting us to the past,” Cillian said. “I wonder what the Kurzemë make of this place?”

  “You would have learned, had we stayed until midsummer.”

  We ate, and then we slept out in the open: there was nothing to shelter us. We had talked before we slept, Cillian telling me a bit more about the hero's tale. I had lain on my side, listening, and at some point after I had laughed at some part of the story, he had reached out a hand to run his fingers along my hair, tentatively. His fingers were light, stroking gently, unthreatening. After a while I laid my head on his chest. It was daylight, which seemed to help. We had fallen asleep like that.

  The dream began as it always did, with gouts of blood and a knife in my hand. In my sleep I fought the image, the boy choking on his own blood on the stable floor, the sound my knife had made as I cut his throat. I tried to move in the dream, to turn away, but I couldn't, and suddenly the dream shifted and Ivor lay on top of me again, his knee in my groin, hurting me, his hands reaching for his sex. I woke, hands flailing, shouting.

  “Lena. Lena!” Cillian said, pushing himself away from my pounding hands. “What's wrong?”

  I lay panting, trying to focus, to return to reality. “A dream,” I said. My hands still flexed. Cillian reached for them, holding them loosely in his. I pulled away. “No. Don't.” I could hear the note of panic in my voice.

  “Forla,” he whispered. I waited for my breathing to steady.

  “Did I hurt you?” I asked.

  “No. Would it help to tell me about it?”

  The ache in my belly had not been just in the dream. “Can you give me my waterskin, with the tea?” I asked. I sat up, took several deep swallows, tried to breathe more calmly.

  “Who were you attacking, before you woke? The boy at Tirvan?”

  “No.” He waited. “Ivor,” I admitted. “The dream began in Tirvan…I tried to turn away from the boy, and I couldn't move, and then Ivor was on top of me again, hurting me…" I fought the tears, but they escaped, running down my cheeks.

  He swore. “We had moved, in sleep, and I had an arm around you when you woke me. That's why you couldn't move. I am sorry, Lena.”

  Of course. I had awoken to that unconscious embrace almost every morning since we had become lovers. I tried to smile. “And my belly hurts, and that became part of my dream.”

  “Lena, I would never hurt you,” he said. “But perhaps I should sleep away from you, for a while?”

  “No!” I said, with an intensity that surprised me. But his words had felt like abandonment. “No,” I said again, more calmly. “If you are willing to take the chance that I might hit you again, in a dream?”

  “I am.”

  I wiped my cheeks. He reached out, touching my hand with his fingertips. I let him take it, linking his fingers between mine. He raised my hand to his lips. The gesture spoke of tenderness. “As long as you don't use the knife,” he added drily.

  Eastward from the temple the path simply disappeared. Nor could we find any trace of the ancient road in the soil of the plain. I kept us as straight easterly as I could using the sun: I would adjust our path as needed when the stars came out.

  Afternoon became early evening. Not too far to the south a clump of bushes appeared on the horizon. I pointed it out to Cillian. “A water source,” I said, “maybe on the road? If so, we haven't strayed far wrong.” Like the first spring, the crumbling remnants of bricks lay in the small depression; at this one, though, the water was little more than a trickle, channeled into a rock bowl chiselled out countless years ago.

  “If you set up camp, I'll look for the road,” Cillian said. “It was easier to see, before, when the sun was low.” He went to look.

  I had begun to fill the waterskins when Cillian's voice, taut and low, called my name. I looked up. He was staring beyond me. Approaching me and the water, a huge brown bear walked steadily across the grass. I froze, crouched. At any moment it would see or smell me.

  I forgot to tell Cillian about the footprints at the stream, I thought. The wind blew across the space between us, but it was a slight breeze, nothing more. “Stand up,” Cillian said calmly. “Stand up, slowly, spread your arms. Don't run.”

  I forced myself up. The bear stopped, rose to its hind legs, its head moving back and forth. Cillian, behind me, kept talking. Very slowly he came to stand beside me, his large bow, nocked and half-drawn, in his hands.

  “There are bears like this in Sorham and Varsland,” he said, keeping his voice conversational. “I have met one or two in my travels. Do what I say and we should be unharmed. It may charge us. Do not run, Lena, your life depends on it. Trust me, käresta.”

  I stared at the bear. It is the size of a hill pony, I thought, feeling myself begin to tremble. I could see the long claws on its front feet. It sniffed the air, opening its mouth to growl, and ran at us.

  “Stay still!” Cillian ordered. I fought the instinct to flee, fear coursing through me. I whimpered, trying not to cower. Beside me Cillian drew the bow, slowly. The bear galloped across the grass, closer, closer—and then it stopped, rearing up again, growling.

  “You do not want us, bear,” Cillian said. “You only want water. We will back away and let you have it.” To me, he said, “slowly. Very slowly. I will keep talking.” He did, addressing the bear, keeping his voice low and unthreatening. I stepped backwards, carefully, deliberately. One step, two, three.

  The bear charged. I heard Cillian swear, sharply. I tried to turn, to—what? Take the bow from him? To run?—and tripped. I fell, covering my head with my hands, utterly terrified, sobbing with fear, waiting for those huge claws to rip into me. I could hear the bear's feet pounding the earth. I tried to push myself into the ground.

  The pounding stopped. A strange sound, somewhere between a snarl and a whine, and then the thud of a heavy body hitting the ground and the thunk of an arrow, hitting flesh, and a second. Then Cillian, crouching beside me, his voice reassuring. “It's dead, Lena. We're safe.”

  I sat up. Very close—far too close—the body of the bear lay on the grass, two arrows in its neck and one in its eye. I hadn't heard the first shot at all. “Did you—the first arrow—in its eye?” I asked, almost incoherent.

  “Yes.” He held out his hand to help me up. I was shaking.

  “Are you sure it's dead?” I asked.

  “Not entirely. But it will be soon, if it isn't now.” A huge pool of blood stained the ground beneath its throat.

  Cillian's arm was around my shoulders. I leaned against his chest. “You just saved my life again. That's three times.” His heartbeat was rapid and his breathing fast. He too must have been terrified, I realized. “That was a skilled shot,” I said. “I doubt I could have done it.”

  “Nor could I have,” he said, “without three days of hunting geese. But even so, luck was most of it.” I looked over at the bear.

  “Do you want a claw, the way I had the jerv's claws?”

  “No. Leave it for the carrion-birds. We should get the waterskins filled, though, before it spoils the water.” It had fallen close to the water's edge. We went about the task, although I kept one eye on the body. But it was clearly dead, now.

  Later, after we had built a fire and eaten, and the first stars sparkled in the darkening sky, I put my arms around him. “I didn't say thank you,” I said, “or tell you how courageous you were. Killing that bear was an act worthy of Darcail.”

  “No bears that I remember in his labours,” he said, smiling.

  “Worthy of, I said,” I protested. “It was very brave,” I added, seriously.

/>   “Is an act brave when there is no choice except to do it or die?” he asked.

  “No philosophy tonight,” I said. “I wish...”

  “Wish what, Lena?”

  “I wish we could make love. I wish I could show you how I feel about what you did today, not try to find inadequate words.” I could hear my own frustration.

  “Telling me that is not inadequate,” he replied. He kissed my hair. “Lie down with me and watch the stars come out.” I stretched out beside him, his hand lightly on my hip. The sky darkened, only the western horizon still glowing, and the stars went from four or five to hundreds, and as the night deepened, to thousands upon thousands glittering above us. “Look north,” Cillian said. “Do you see the lovers?” He pointed to them.

  “What is their story?” I asked. I knew the names of the constellations, but nothing else.

  “Perthèin rescued Dromédē from a monster about to devour her,” he answered, a touch drily.

  I laughed. “I had the wrong hero, then? I should have compared you to Perthèin?”

  “I am no hero, Lena. What else could I have done today?”

  “You didn't panic. You made a very difficult shot, and two more, quickly, and all of them accurate. That makes you a hero in my eyes.”

  “I had you to save, leannan.”

  “And yourself.”

  “That was less important,” he said. He sounded completely serious.

  “It would have been to me,” I said fiercely. I wanted so much to be able to turn to him, but I could not. Not yet. But some day, I thought. Courage comes in many forms, Casyn had told me once. I had seen one of its faces today, for all Cillian dismissed what he had done. I will find my own courage to move beyond my hurt and revulsion, I vowed. Only then will I tell you I love you.

  Part II