The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  With a bellow for Bartholomew to attend them, Ansel began scrambling over the smouldering debris of the fallen timbers, accepting a leg up from Damon as he climbed. He reached a point where he could swing up on the portcullis, using its wooden crossbars as a ladder; but as he drew nearer to what he had seen from the ground, he almost faltered in his climb.

  Vaguely he was aware of Damon and Bartholomew watching from below, of Evaine joining them, her face upturned in dumb amazement, but he dared pay them no more attention than that, for there was life above him, tenuously held, but there.

  The marauders had crucified Camlin MacLean, Adrian’s son. Ansel might not have recognized him, had he not known the boy so well from summers spent at the same family retreats. They had nailed him to the portcullis, hammering heavy spikes through the slim wrists and into the dense timber backing of the portcullis grid, before hoisting it aloft and setting the gatehouse afire. And of course, before that, they had stripped and beaten him and perhaps committed other atrocities upon his young body that Ansel could not see, though he could guess at what might have been done.

  There the marauders had left him to die, barely standing on tiptoe on one crossbar of the portcullis until fatigue should force his legs to give way and the full weight of his body hang suspended from his arms, gradually to collapse the chest and suffocate him.

  But they had not reckoned on the action of the fire in the gatehouse above, sending the timbers crashing down around their victim, and they had not reckoned on young MacLean’s massive will to live. For somehow the boy had managed to swing his left leg up and over one of the fallen beams, to support the bulk of his weight there instead of on his arms, and to brace the other knee against a second beam. The pain must have been excruciating, for he would have had to dangle with his full weight on his arms until he could work up enough swing to gain the support of the fallen beams, and every tiny movement would have been agony.

  There would have been danger of burning, too, though the fire did not seem to have gotten terribly near. In fact, the warmth from the fire was probably what had thus far saved the boy from dying of exposure. What a miracle of coincidences seemed to have conspired to save at least this one young life amid the other carnage!

  Ansel gained the boy’s side and touched the bruised forehead, probed, felt the answering, groggy response of dim awareness. With a few orders snapped to the men waiting below, he sent Bartholomew to find tools for somehow removing the nails from the boy’s wrists, while Damon came aloft to locate the portcullis mechanism and slowly begin lowering the grille to the ground. Working quickly, Ansel cleared away as much as he could of the debris that might interfere with the smooth descent of the portcullis, finally hooking one arm through the grillework and supporting the boy’s body with the other.

  The boy moaned and passed out fully as his weight was shifted, but Ansel knew that it was for the best. It took nearly a quarter hour to free him, once the portcullis reached ground level. By the time they had wrapped him in Damon’s cloak and Bartholomew had carried him into the lee of a wall, out of the wind, he had begun to regain feverish consciousness. Evaine had torn strips from the edge of her under-shift while they worked to get him down, and had bandaged the mutilated wrists, but blood was soaking through. While Bartholomew stripped down to his tunic and held the cold little body close against his chest for warmth, Ansel and Damon began rubbing the boy’s legs and upper arms in an attempt to restore circulation. Evaine knelt beside them and gently touched the boy’s brow, but he tossed his head and nearly threw off her hands.

  “Can you help him?” Ansel asked, laying another cloak over the boy’s bruised and blood-streaked torso.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “He has a great will to live, but I’m not a Healer. Camlin, can you hear me? Camlin, listen to me,” she insisted, as the swollen eyelids flickered open and then were closed almost immediately with the pain of returning consciousness.

  Damon unstoppered a water flask and held it up, and she nodded.

  “Just a little for now, Camlin,” she whispered, bracing herself to reach out with her mind and take hold of the pain as the boy managed several tortured swallows.

  Camlin gave a few pathetic whimpers, but slowly he began to relax under Evaine’s touch and she knew that she was getting through, that there still remained a will to help, as well as a will to live. More forcefully, she reached out and intensified her hold on the edges of his mind, nodding a little in confirmation as his shields slipped a little further and he responded.

  “Camlin, can you hear me?” she whispered. “Is the pain a little less?”

  Slowly, painfully, the boy opened his eyes—eyes so like Aidan’s—his breathing ragged and tentative from the strain of overtaxed chest muscles, but apparently with his discomfort at least a little controlled.

  “Aunt Evaine,” he managed to croak. “Can you make it stop hurting? Is Uncle Rhys here?”

  With a pang of grief, Evaine shook her head slightly. “No, he can’t be here right now, Camlin. I’ll do what I can for you, though. Do you think you can go a little deeper into trance for me? We’ve got to clean your wounds, and it’s going to hurt much more unless you can really let me take control. Will you let me do that?”

  As the boy gave a little nod and closed his eyes, she pushed her link with him, feeling his shields yield and drop in obedience to her touch. Gently she eased him into deep, painless sleep, such as any skilled non-Healer might command with the patient’s assent, then slowly began unwrapping the wounded wrist nearest her.

  Bartholomew, who still held the boy in his lap, turned his head away as blood began to flow again.

  Ansel had gotten the little medical kit from his saddle and was opening a small flask of the pungent green fluid which Rhys used to clean wounds. He shook his head as he handed her a square of linen saturated with the fluid.

  “Is it really any use?” he asked despairingly. “Can he possibly live, other than as a useless cripple? Look at the angle of his hand. Those nails just tore him up.”

  Biting her lip, and not wanting to accept that he was probably right, Evaine began swabbing out the wounded wrist, probing with cautious fingertips into the wounds themselves, where fresh blood pulsed from both openings faster than her cloths could blot it up. It was not until she had changed blood-soaked bandages several times, and had about decided that she could do little else than that to help his wrist, when she became aware of what was almost a ghost-brush of a presence. She glanced aside to see three-year-old Tieg peering owlishly at Camlin over her right shoulder.

  “Tieg! Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re supposed to be asleep!”

  As she glanced at Damon, who was still chafing Camlin’s cold feet and legs, she sighed and pressed her fingers firmly over the wounds on either side of Camlin’s wrist, ignoring the blood which continued to stream down her own hands.

  “Damon, take him back to the litter, please. He’s too young for this.”

  “No! Not too young!” Tieg protested, clutching his mother’s arm and clinging even more doggedly when Damon started trying to dislodge him. “No! Tieg help!”

  Again, Evaine felt that odd prickling at the edge of her mind, a presence like Rhys’s, but not his.

  Tieg?

  Startled, she shook her head for Damon to let go, then looked at little Tieg more intently. The boy stopped squirming and immediately slipped his chubby arms around his mother’s neck, delivering a moist kiss to her cheek.

  “Tieg help Mummy,” he informed her gravely, hazel eyes meeting her blue ones in a forthright gaze. “We fix Camlin, huh, Mummy? We fix, like Daddy does.” The surge of accompanying Healer’s energy, unfocused and untrained but nonetheless present, almost made her think they could.

  Was it truly possible?

  She realized she had been holding her breath, and she let it out slowly. It was worth a try.

  “All right, darling. You can help Mummy. You hug Mummy’s arm tight and watch Camlin and think about helping him. Al
l right?”

  “I do it,” he said simply, shifting around to peer over her shoulder, chin settling dreamily against her upper arm.

  Against all logic, she quested for the Healing paths and found them, drew her son into ever deepening rapport, felt out the same kind of link she had forged so often with Rhys in his Healing work. Against all logic, she felt the Healing energies stir in response to her touch!

  The sensation was like what she had felt a thousand times, over the years, as she worked with Rhys. Only this was her direction and Tieg’s power; she was a conduit of control and guidance through which the Healing energies were ready to flow. They could do it!

  She knew that Ansel and the servants were staring at her, but she paid them no mind. She shifted Camlin’s wrist in her hands and boldly pressed her fingertip into the bloody entry wound, while her son looked on in confident fascination. She felt the increased flow of blood around her fingertip, hot and vital with life; the hard reality of the bones of wrist and arm; the ligaments and tendons torn by the nail which had rent the flesh and forced the bones apart—and Tieg’s amazed observation of all of this, clinical, but with all a child’s naïveté and trust in the ability of his mother to make everything right. She shifted a portion of her mind and felt Tieg’s energy flowing through her fingertip and into the wound—Healing energy, of the same kind which had been Rhys’s and was now their son’s.

  She moved the wrist with her other hand and felt the bones shift back into place, sensed the flesh and sinews mending under her very touch as she slowly drew her fingertip out of the wound and it closed behind her retreat. She turned the wrist and drew her fingertip through the exit wound on the back of the forearm, and it, too, closed. Some faint scarring he would have to remind him of his ordeal, besides the scarring of mind which would take other Healing, for she had not the skill to Heal him as cleanly as Rhys could have done, but at least the bones were knit, the angry wounds closing.

  Ansel had watched her and Tieg in amazement during the first part of the operation, but as he realized what they were doing, he unwrapped the other wrist and swabbed it as clean as he could for their next attention. Now she touched those wounds and Healed them, too; laid her bloody hands on the striped and stretched chest to ease the strain of muscles pulled almost to the point of collapse; erased the marks of the scourge.

  The demand on her concentration was becoming very intense, and she was aware of the drain on Tieg’s energy, as well; but when she bade Bartholomew shift the unconscious Camlin in his arms so that she might assess the damage to his other side, and would have let it Heal on its own, Tieg gave her a deeply reproachful look.

  Smiling despite her fatigue, Evaine eased the weals on Camlin’s back and buttocks, on the lean, well-muscled legs, then washed his blood from her hands and reached out with what little strength remained to touch his memory, blurring the details of what had happened until he should reach a time and place in which he might deal with them. When she had finished, her patient slept more easily, wrapped in the warmth of several cloaks. Tieg was curled up at her side, also asleep once the physical Healing was done, with a thumb in his pink mouth and a beatific expression on his freckled face. Gently she disengaged from her son’s mind, gathering him in her arms to hold him in mindless gratitude before giving him over to Damon to return to the litter. As Bartholomew took the now peacefully slumbering Camlin, Evaine sat back on her heels with a sigh, easing the small of her back with both hands. As she relaxed her own controls, she felt a little shudder in her womb, and then a quick but strong cramp. She tensed, but the pain was almost too quickly gone.

  “Are you all right?” Ansel asked, taking her arm in alarm as he saw the pain flash across her face.

  Quickly she assessed her condition, then nodded tentatively.

  “Seem to be. I think my other Healer-child was protesting the strain on her mother. She’s done that before. When Tavis lost his hand, I was only a few months pregnant, but I had to leave the room where Tavis was. I guess she didn’t like his disharmony.”

  Ansel signalled Thomas and Arik to come in with the litter, then sent Damon and Bartholomew to search for any other survivors in the keep while he scouted the rest of the yard.

  After a while, Bartholomew and Damon returned with an armful of heavy cloaks and blankets and the body of a thin, white-haired old woman, simply but richly clad. There was no mark upon her; she might have died in her sleep, so composed was the expression on her face. As Damon laid her on one of the blankets which Bartholomew spread, Evaine came and stood beside her.

  “Aunt Aislinn, my father’s sister,” she said in a low voice. “Where did you find her, Damon?”

  “In the solar at the top of the keep, my lady. The room had been breached, but they never touched her. I can only think she must have died from the smoke, before they broke in.”

  “Or else her heart just stopped,” Evaine murmured. “She could have chosen that way, knowing death was near, and the form it might take.”

  She shook her head and drew a fold of blanket across the old woman’s face. “She was the Dowager Countess of Kierney, Damon—grandmother to the castle’s lord and a very great lady. Are you sure you found no trace of any other noble ladies? Lord Adrian’s wife and sister should have been here, since Aislinn and the children were.”

  “We’ve found nothing yet, my lady. Do you want me to keep looking?”

  She did, but before she could tell him so, she glanced around the yard to see whether Ansel needed him. Ansel was checking on the litter, which had been drawn up in an angle of the inner wall that would afford no view of the carnage if the children woke and sneaked a look between the curtains. Arik, Bartholomew, and Thomas were piling up unburned timbers and other combustibles in the center of the yard. She stared at them for several seconds before their intention registered.

  “Ansel, what are they going to do?” she gasped, running to his side as fast as she could in her condition and grabbing his arm.

  “I told them to do it, Evaine. We can’t take our dead with us, we can’t bury them in the frozen earth, and we can’t just leave them here for the wolves and the elements. It’s cleanest this way, under the circumstances.”

  She knew he was right, but she could not keep the tears from starting again. Blindly she stumbled to where her firstborn’s body lay still wrapped in Ansel’s cloak, knelt and uncovered the still-beautiful face to stroke the fair hair off the smooth, untroubled brow. Like this, with his tortured body hidden from her sight and only the angelic face to meet her gaze, she could almost believe that he had died at peace like Aislinn.

  She clasped her hands and tried to pray, longing for the presence of father or brother to add their prayers to hers to speed Aidan on his way, and wishing that there could be something more than a funeral pyre to mark the passage of all these victims of senseless brutality, but she knew that was not possible. This time, her blessing must suffice—and who better to give her son farewell than the one who had borne him, nursed him, taught him, loved him, and now must let him go? She could not even begrudge the fact that young Camlin lived, while her son had died—for anyone who had survived what Camlin had, deserved his life.

  She prayed then, and bade him Godspeed, and by the time Ansel came to take the boy and lay him on the pyre, she could stand aside and watch dry-eyed as her nephew lifted the small, blanket-wrapped form, knowing that it was but a broken shell, that Aidan was not there.

  They laid Adrian and Aislinn on either side of him—MacRorie kin all, although of different names—and then she joined her hand and mind with Ansel’s to start the cleansing blaze.

  She thought herself well in control until another cramp rippled up her abdomen and she felt the warm, familiar rush of her water breaking. The snow beneath her feet took on a pinkish hue.

  She gasped with the surprise of it, though she knew well what it was; and now a frightened human urgency began to supplant the cool Deryni sorceress. The baby would be born within a few hours, almost a full mo
nth early, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. They were stranded in this ruin of death and torture now until she could deliver. And for this birth, she would have no gentle Rhys to ease her labor and Heal her pains, nor even a midwife to attend her. She wondered whether Ansel or any of the other men had ever even seen a baby born.

  The men lost no time in finding her shelter. She would not go into what was left of the stable, with Adrian’s blood still frozen on the snow outside, and they would not let her stay within sight of the funeral pyre still sending its greasy column of smoke upward on the morning breeze. They finally compromised on an alcove underneath the kitchen stair, which could be curtained off with blankets and made reasonably secure from the cold, for snow had begun to fall again.

  A small fire was built, and the litter unhitched from the horses and brought inside, but Rhysel was awake and hungry, impatient to be allowed out. Evaine could not permit that, of course, but she did visit with her daughter while she ate breakfast, and had Ansel wake Camlin and Tieg long enough for them to eat a little, too, before sending all three children back to sleep inside the litter.

  Evaine settled down to the business of labor then, losing track of the time as her pains grew closer together and the morning wore on. Ansel stayed with her most of the time, trying to absorb a little background on basic child delivery between her pains. The guards continued the grisly business of bringing the rest of the dead to the pyre. All through the morning Evaine could hear the crackle of the flames as they consumed each new offering.

  It was near noon when the guards’ voices took on a different note, and then Arik came bursting into the enclosure without even pausing to ask permission.

  “My lady, my lady, look what we’ve found! They were hiding in the middens!”