The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  "Rash," said the Sidhe, and light struck him in the face and a blow flung him back short of it. "The horse is mine. For the rest—"

  "Sidhe!" Caith cried, for he was blinded in the light, as if the moon had burned out his eyes. All the world swam in tears and pain. He groped still after his sword among the leaves and as the hilt met his fingers, he seized it and staggered to his feet. "Sidhe!" he shouted, and swung the blade about him in his blindness.

  He heard the beat of hooves. A horse's shoulder struck him and flung him down again; this time he held to the sword and rolled to his feet.

  But blind, blind—there was only the shadow of branches before a blur of light in a world gone gray at the mid of the night, a taunting, moving shape like a will-o'-the-wisp before his eyes.

  "Sidhe!" he cried in his anger and his helplessness.

  It drifted on. Laughter pealed like silver bells, faint and far and mocking.

  5

  There was no sight but that fey light, no sound but that chill laughter, pure as winter bells. Caith followed it, sobbing after breath, followed it for hours because it was all the light he had in his gray blindness and if he turned from it he was lost indeed. He tore himself on brush and thorns, slipped down a streambank and sprawled in water, clawed his way up the other side. "Sidhe!" he cried again and again. But the light was always there, just beyond his reach in a world of gray mist, until he went down to his bruised knees and on his face in the leaves and lost all sense of direction.

  He got up again in terror, turning this way and that.

  "Sidhe!" His voice was a hoarse, wild sound, unlike himself. "Sidhe!"

  A horse sneezed before him. The will-'o-the-wisp hovered in his sight, near at hand. It became Dathuil and on his back the tall fair Sidhe, against a haze of trees, of moon-silvered trunks.

  "Will you ride?" the phooka asked, at his other side, and Caith turned, staggering, and caught his breath in. Red eyes gleamed in the shadow. "Will you ride?" the phooka asked again. "I will bear you on my back."

  Caith's eyes cleared. It was a black horse that stood there. Its eyes shone with fire. Suddenly it swept close by him, too quick for his sword, too quick for the thought of a sword.

  "If you had kept the white horse," said the will-o'-the-wisp on his other side, "even the phooka could not have caught you. Now any creature can."

  "Sliabhin hunted in these woods," said the phooka-voice, from somewhere in the trees. "Now we hunt them too."

  "Go back," said the will-o'-the-wisp, and horse and rider shimmered away before him without a sound. Caith caught after breath and stumbled after, exhausted, wincing at the thorns that caught his cloak back and tore his skin.

  "Go back," said the voice. "Go back."

  But Caith followed through thicker and thicker brush, no longer knowing any other way. His sight had cleared, but in all this woods there was no path, no hope but to lay hands on the Sidhe and compel them or to wander here till he was mad. A pain had begun in his side. It grew and grew, until he walked bent, and sprawled at last on the slick, wet leaves.

  "You cannot take us," said the Sidhe, and was there astride Dathuil, paler and brighter than the newborn day. A frown was on the Sidhe's face. "I have given you your answers. Are you so anxious then to die? Or are you looking for another bargain?"

  Caith caught his breath, holding his side. It was all that he could do to gain his feet, but stand he did, with his sword in his hand.

  "Ah," said the Sidhe. "Proud like your father."

  "Which father? I've had three."

  "You have but one, mac Sliabhin. The house at Dun Mhor has but one lord. And a curse rests on it and all beneath that roof. Hunters in our woods, slayers of our deer—for your line there is neither luck nor hope. But for the gift of Dathuil and for my own pleasure, I will give you once what you ask of me. And pitying mortal wits I will tell you what you should ask—if you ask me that advice."

  "That would use up the one request, would it not?"

  The Sidhe smiled then as a cat might smile. "Well," he said, "if you are that quick with your wits you may know what you should ask."

  "Take the curse off Dun Mhor."

  The smile vanished. The Sidhe went cold and dreadful. "It is done. And now it is to bestow again. I give it to you."

  Caith stared at the Sidhe in bleak defeat, and then took a deeper breath. "Sidhe! One more bargain!"

  "And what would that be, mac Sliabhin, and what have you left to trade?"

  "It's Dun Mhor you hate. I'll work this out with you. There's a young boy, my brother, inside Dun Mhor. Brian is his name."

  "We know this."

  "I want to take him out and free of Sliabhin. Help me get him out and safe away and I will kill Sliabhin for you; and take Dun Mhor; and so you can have it all. Me. Dun Mhor. My brother is the price of my killing your enemy."

  The Sidhe considered him slowly, from toe to head. "Shall I tell you what you have left out?"

  "Have I left something out?"

  "Nothing that would matter." The Sidhe reined Oathuil aside. "I take your bargain."

  Caith had his sword still in hand. He rammed it into his sheath and felt all his aches and hurts. He looked up again at the Sidhe, cold at heart. "What did I leave out, curse you? What did I forget?"

  "You are not apt to such bargaining," said the phooka, there in young man's shape, leaning naked against a tree at his right hand. "I will tell you, mac Sliabhin. You forgot to ask your life."

  "Oh," Caith said. "But I didn't forget."

  "How is that?" said the fair Sidhe.

  "If you want some use out of your curse, you can't kill me too soon, now can you? It would rob you of your revenge."

  The phooka laughed, wild laughter, a mirth that stirred the leaves. "O mac Sliabhin, Caith, fosterling of murderers and thieves, I love thee. Come, come with me. I will bear you on my back. We will see this Dun Mhor."

  "And drown me, would you? Not I. I know what you are."

  But the black horse took shape between blinks of his eyes and stood pawing the ground before him. Its red eyes glowed like balefire beneath its mane.

  "Trust the phooka," said the tall Sidhe with the least gleam of mirth in his eyes. "What have you left to risk?"

  Caith glowered at the Sidhe and then, shifting his sword from the way, roughly grasped the phooka's mane and swung up to his bare back.

  It was the wind he mounted, a dark and baneful wind. It was power, the night itself in horse-shape; and beside them raced the day, that was Dathuil with the Sidhe upon his back.

  Caith heard laughter. Whence it came he guessed.

  The forest road stretched before the men from Dun Gorm in the dawning, and the sun searched the trees with fingers of light. It was the green shade before them, the green deep heart of the Sidhe-wood.

  "No farther," Conn said, "young lord, no farther."

  Raghallach thought on Conn's advice as he rode beside the man. His father had given him into Conn's hands when he was small, and never yet had he put his own judgment ahead of Conn's and profited by it.

  But the years turned. It was after all Conn, his father's watchdog, who had tutored him, cracked his head, bruised his bones, taught him what he knew, and Conn, he reckoned, who had orders from his father to protect him now, against all hazard.

  "There is one captain over a band," Raghallach said to this man he loved next to his own father. "And it is not lessons today, now, is it, master Conn?"

  "Life is lessons," Conn muttered to the moving of the horses. They went not at a gallop; they kept their strength for need. "Some masters are rougher than others, lad, and experience is a very bitch."

  "That man you sent to scout ahead of us; Feargal. We're of an age, he and I—do you always call him lad, Conn?"

  "Ah," said Conn, and cast a wary look back, to see whether the men were in earshot of it all. The sound of the hooves covered low voices at such distance. "Ah, but, me lad, you are young. Yet. And will not get older by risking honest men who put their li
ves into your hand. Do not be a fool, son of my old friend; I did not teach a fool."

  Anger smouldered in Raghallach. He drove his heels into his horse's sides and then recalled good sense. Raghallach grew a great deal, in that moment; he reined back, confusing the horse which threw its head and jumped.

  Arrows flew from ambush. A man cried out; a horse screamed.

  Raghallach flung his shield up in thunderstruck alarm. Arrows thumped and shocked against it; he reined aside, knowing nothing now to do but run into the teeth of ambush, not turn his shieldless back to the arrows or delay while some shot found his horse or legs. The good horse leapt beneath his heels, surefooted in the undergrowth, heedless of the breast-high thicket: "Ware," Conn yelled, as the horse's hindquarters sank under a sudden impact: Conn hewed a man from off Raghallach's back that had flung himself down from the trees.

  Next was a confusion of blows, of curses howled, of blades and blood, the scream of horses and the crack of brush.

  Then came silence, deep silence, after so much din, horses crashing slowly back through brush, blowing and snorting as riders sought the clear road and regrouped, a man fewer than before.

  "Feargal," Raghallach said of the body they found there on the trail. A red-fletched arrow had taken him in the throat. Gleann Fiach marking.

  "Think," said Conn, fierce at his side. Conn's brow ran blood. "Think and do it, boy! They have come into the Sidhe-wood. They are forewarned, they've made ambush against us and this Caith mac Sliabhin. Hagan mac Dealbhan has warned them!"

  "He's dead," said Feargal's brother Faolan, who had gotten down to see and knelt by his brother. Faolan hovered somewhere lost in the horror, not touching the arrow that had felled his brother, only frozen there.

  "Boy," Conn said; the word cursed them all. "What will you do?"

  "Get him home," Raghallach said gently to Faolan, and jerked his horse's head about in the direction opposite to home, using his heels to send him down the road after the fleeing enemy. Others followed. Conn was one, drawing close beside him.

  Raghallach looked at Conn as they rode.

  "Not I, boy," said Conn. "I have not a word."

  The road opened out before them, obscured in leaves and green.

  "It wants answer," said Raghallach. "This death of ours wants an answer."

  "On whom," asked Conn. "Gleann Fiach cattle? Where will we stop? We know they hold the woods. Those that ran will regroup; meanwhile they'll have a man sent to Sliabhin to get help up here. It's war, lad; it begins. Blood is on the Sidhe-wood and our own hands have shed it too."

  A hollow lay before them, a small clearing in the wood, which was one of their own Gley's fords. It was a place for ambushes; the air here all was wrong, sang with unease, in the leaves, the water-song.

  They thundered into it. The newborn light grew strange, the beats of the hooves dimmer and dimmer.

  The peace, a voice said, the peace is broken, son of Dun Gorm. No farther, come no farther.

  Panic took Raghallach suddenly, a fear not of arrows. He was Cinnfhail's son: he Saw, for the first time in his life, he Saw. "Conn!" he cried. "Stop!" He reined in his horse. His face was hot with shame and self-reproach, that even to this moment he had led from fear and pride, not sense. He had ridden on for pride's sake, blown this way and that by what everyone would think instead of regarding what was wise. Fool, Conn had said. A shadow came on them, and about them, and into them, horse and rider, all, darkening their sight.

  It was the forest, managing its own defense.

  6

  The phooka stopped, having leapt the stream, and Caith went sprawling over his neck, rolling in the leaves, bruised and battered.

  The phooka stood in man-form on the bank, naked and laughing at him, grinning from ear to ear and leaning on his knees.

  "You bastard," Caith said, gathering himself up.

  "I thought," said the phooka, "that it was yourself were the bastard, Caith mac Sliabhin."

  Caigh caught up his sheathed sword and all but hurled it; mastered his temper instead. "Of course it is," he said, at which the phooka laughed the more, and overtook him as he went stamping up the bank. The phooka clapped him on the shoulder and hooted with laughter. Caith hurled off the hand, whirled and looked at the Sidhe, the sword still in his hand.

  "O come," said the phooka, grinning. His teeth were white and the frontmost were uncommon square and sturdy, in a long beardless jaw. His eyes were black and merry, and red lights danced in them even by daylight. "Do you not like a joke?"

  "It will be a great joke when you drown me. Of that I'm sure."

  The phooka grinned. "O I like you well, mac Sliabhin. I missed the water with you, did I not?"

  Caith said nothing. He limped onward, flung off the hand again as they walked along the streamside, picking up the road. The phooka walked by him as if he had only started out a moment ago, fresh and easy as youth itself.

  "Where is the other?" Caith asked, after some little walking. "Where has he gotten to?" For the bright Sidhe had been with them until that leap across the stream.

  "Oh, well, that one. He's not far. Never far."

  "Watching us."

  "He might be." The phooka kicked a stone. "He has no liking for roads, that one. Nuallan is his name. He's one of the Fair Folk." An engaging, square-toothed grin. "I'm the other kind."

  "What do you call yourself?"

  The phooka laughed again. "Call myself indeed. Now you know we'd not hand you all our names. Dubhain. Dubhain am I. Would you ride again?"

  "Not yet, phooka."

  "Dubhain," the phooka reminded him. It was the wickedest laugh ever Caith had heard. There were dark nights in it, and cold depths where phookas lived, deep in rivers, haunting fords and luring travelers to die beneath the waters. Darkness, his name was. "So we walk together." The phooka looked up. His eyes gleamed like live coals beneath the mop of black hair. "We are in Gleann Fiach now, mac Sliabhin. Do you not find it fair?"

  The road took them farther and farther from the woods. The deep glen showed itself bright with sun, its hilly walls different from Gleann Gleatharan, un-tilled, unhedged. Gorse grew wild up the hillsides, from what had once been hedges, and grass grew uncropped. It was a fair land, but there was something wrong in that fairness, for it was empty. Un-tenanted. Waste, even in its green pastures.

  And coming over a gentle rise, Caith could see the dun itself at this great distance, a towered mass, a threat lowering amid its few tilled fields. Now indeed Caith saw pasturages up on the hillsides; but they were few for so great a place, and all near the dun. The most of the tillage closely surrounded the dun itself, gathered to its skirts like some pathwork order struggling to exist in the chaos of the land. Gleann Fiach was wide. There was promise in the land, but it was all blighted promise.

  Caith had stopped walking. "Come on," the phooka said with a sidelong glance that mocked all Caith's fears and doubts. Caith set out again with Dubhain at his side, the two of them no more than a pair of dusty travelers, himself fair, his companion dark.

  Caith was weary of the miles, the flight, the restless night; his companion had strength to spare. Like some lawless bare-skinned boy Dubhain gathered stones as he came on them and skipped them down the road.

  "There," he would say, "did you see that one, man?"

  "Oh, aye," Caith would answer, angry at the first, and then bemazed, that a thing so wicked could be so blithe, whether it was utterest evil or blindest innocence, like storm, like destroying flood. The phooka grinned up at him, less than his stature, and for a moment the eyes were like coals again, reminding him of death.

  "A wager, man?"

  "Not with you," he said.'

  "What have you to lose?" And the phooka laughed, all wickedness.

  "You would find something," he said.

  The grin widened. The phooka hurled another stone. No man could match that cast, that sped and sped far beyond any natural limit.

  "I thought so," said Caith, and the phooka looked smu
g and pleased.

  "Cannot match it."

  "No."

  The phooka shape-shifted, became again the horse, again the youth, and broke a stem of grass, sucking on it as he went, like any country lad. Dubhain winked. He was more disreputable than he had been, a ragged wayfarer. A moment ago he had been bare as he was born, dusky-skinned. Now he went in clothes, ragged and dusty, ruined finery with a bordering of tinsel gold.

  "It is a glamor," the phooka said. "Can you see through it?"

  "No."

  "If you had the amulet you might."

  "I don't."

  Another grin.

  "You will help me," asked Caith, "inside the walls—or just stand by?"

  "Oh, assuredly I shall help."

  "—me."

  "O Caith, o merry friend, of course, how could you doubt?"

  Caith looked askance at Dubhain, uneasy in all his thoughts now. The Sidhe would both trick him if they could, if he gave them the least chance. He thought through the compact he had made a hundred times as they walked the sunlit dust, as they came down farther and farther into the glen. Of what lay before him in Dun Mhor he wished not to think at all, but his thoughts drifted that way constantly, darker and more terrible, and the phooka beside him was constant in his gibes.

  Sliabhin's son. And Moralach's. All his life seemed lived beneath some deceiving glamor. He had conjured loyalty to Gaelan, to a dream that never was. He came to avenge Gaelan, and his own father was the murderer.

  But the stones before them were real and no illusion. There was truth about to happen. It must be truth, finally, after a life of lies and falseness.

  The day and distance dwindled in the crossing of the glen. Caith rested little, except at the last, taking the chance to sleep a bit, in the cover of a thicket, at the edge of the dun's few tilled fields and scant pastures, before he should commit himself to all that he had come to do.

  And quickly there was a nightmare, a dream of murder, of Moralach the queen hanging from the rooftree of Dun Mhor.

  "You," Caith said to the phooka when he waked sweating and trembling to find him crouching near. "Is it some prank of yours, to give me bad dreams?"