"Conscience," said the phooka. "I'm told you mortals have it. It seems nuisanceful to me."
And then Dubhain reached out and touched Caith's face with callused fingertips, and there came to him a strength running up from the earth like summer heat, something dark and healing at once, that took his breath.
"Keep your hands from me!" Caith cried, striking the Sidhe-touch away.
"Ah," said Dubhain, "scruples even yet. There is that left to trade."
"That I will not." Caith scrambled to his feet, shuddering at the wellness and the unhuman strength in himself.
"You've dropped your sword," the phooka said, handing it up to him with a grin on his face and the least hint of red glow within his eyes.
Caith snatched it, hooked the sheath to his belt and caught his oiled-wool cloak about him and his tartan as he hit out upon the road.
Dubhain was quickly with him, striding lightly at his side.
And Dun Mhor rose ever nearer as they came past the wild hedges onto the road. The dun lowered as a dark mass of stone in the evening that had fallen while Caith slept in his thicket.
No lights showed from Dun Mhor in this twilight time, not from this side, though some gleamed about the hills. Cattle were home; sheep in their folds; the folk behind the walls of their cottages and of the great keep that was many times the size of rustic Dun Gorm.
I am mad, Caith thought, having seen the size of the place. As well walk into Dun na nGall and try to take it.
But he kept walking with Dubhain beside him. The phooka whistled, as if he had not a care in all the world, and a wind skirled a tiny cloud up in the sky right over Dun Mhor, a blackness in the twilight.
"I think," said the phooka, "it looks like rain. Doesn't it to you?"
"You might do this all," Caith said in anger. "If you can do all these things, why could you not come at this man you hate?"
"Not our way," said Dubhain.
"What is your way—to torment all the land, the innocent with the guilty?"
The eyes glowed in the darkness. "Men seem best at that."
"A curse on you too, my friend."
The phooka laughed. Dun Mhor loomed above them now, and the cloud had grown apace as they walked. Dubhain's hand was on Caith's shoulder, like some old acquaintance as they passed down the last hedgerow on the road, as they left the last field and came up the hill of the dun to the gate. Lightning flashed. The cloud widened still.
"Hello," Caith shouted, "hello the gatekeep. Travelers want in!"
There was a long silence. "Who are you?" a man shouted from up in the darkened tower to the left of the gate. "What business in Dun Mhor?"
"Business with your lord!" Caith shouted back. "Word from Dun na nGall!"
"Wait here," the gatekeep said, and after was silence.
"Perchance they'll let you in," the phooka said.
"Oh, aye, like the raincloud is chance." Caith did not look at Dubhain. He knew how Dubhain would seem—quite common to the eye, whatever shape suited the moment and Dubhain's dark whims. The cloud still built above them. Thunder muttered. "I will tell you, phooka. Hagan—the man who fostered me—might have sent word south when I left him. He knew where I might go and what I might do. He hated me; I know that. Gods know what side of this he serves, but it was never my side. He might well betray me to curry favor with Sliabhin, since Sliabhin is king. I reckon that he might." He had begun to say it only to bait the phooka and diminish Dubhain's arrogance. But the pieces settled in his mind, in sudden jagged array of further questions. "I know nothing. Who fostered me out, how I was gotten from here—the king of Gleatharan never told me. Was it Gaelan or was it Sliabhin, phooka?"
The mad eyes looked up at him, for once seeming sober. "Would you pity Sliabhin if you knew that?"
"Gods, phooka—"
"Perhaps it was." The red gleam was back. "Perhaps was not. They are coming, mac Sliabhin, to open the gates."
"Why have you done this? Why do you need my hands to wield the knife?"
"Why, mac Sliabthin—should we take on our own curse?"
The lesser gate groaned on its hinge. Torchlight fluttered in the wind, in the first cold spats of rain. "Gods, this weather," the gatekeeper cried against the skirling gusts as he led them through a courtyard and to a second door. "Come in, there. What would be your name?"
"Foul, foul," Dubhain chortled, pulling Caith along, beside, beyond, "Huusht, hey!" The lightning cracked. The sky opened in torrents. "O gods, we're soaked."
"A plague on you!" cried Caith, but Dubhain's hand gripped his arm, stronger than any grip ever he had felt. The creature of rivers fled the rain, called on gods younger than himself, jested with the guards. "Curse you, let me go!"
"Never that," the phooka said as they came within the doors of the dun itself. Dubhain stamped his booted feet, shed water in a circle in the torchlight in the hall, as the guards did, Dubhain did and Caith did, made fellows by the storm.
They were in. The stones about them, warm-colored in the light, were the nature, the solidity of his home, the very color and texture that he had imagined them; or the reality drove out the dream in the blink of an eye and deceived him as reality will do with imaginings. Here was the house he had longed for, dreamed of, in the grim walls of his fostering; but here also were rough, scarred men, the smell of oil and stale straw as womenless men had managed things in Hagan's hold up by Dun na nGall. There seemed no happiness in this dim place either, only foreboding, the noise of shouts, of heavyfooted guards, the dull flash of metal in the light and the surety these men would kill and lose no sleep over it.
O father, Sliabthin!—are we not a house that deserves its death?
"One will tell the lord you are in," a guard said. "Bide here, whether he will see you. You are not the first to come tonight."
Caith looked sharply at the guard, whose brute broad face held nothing but raw power and the habit of connivance in the eyes. No, not dull, this one. Huge, and not dull. "Some other messenger?" Caith asked with a sinking of his heart, thinking on Dun na nGall, on his foster-father Hagan, and treachery. "From where?"
"Messenger. Aye." The voice was low, the guard's face kept its secrets. Caith looked round on Dubhain with a touch of fey desperation in the move, even defiance. Save me now, he challenged the Sidhe, meeting Dubhain's eyes, and had the joy of seeing a phooka worried. The thought elated him in a wild, hopeless abandon. He looked upward at the stairs that would lead up, he reckoned, to the king's hall: a man had gone stumping up the steps to a doorway above. I am the Sidhe's own difficulty, Caith thought again, sorry for himself and at the same time sure that his revenge was at hand, whether he would kill or be killed and likely both. Time stretched out like a spill of honey, cloying sweet and golden with light and promising him satiety.
Enough of living. For this I was born, my father's son.
And my mother's.
7
The guard who had gone up came out again from a room near the head of the stair and beckoned to them.
"Come," said the guard by Caith's side.
Caith was very meek going up the steps. He made no protest as they began to prevent Dubhain from going up with him. In truth, he had no great desire of the company, trusting more to his sword. But he heard a commotion behind him, and the phooka joined him at the mid of the stairs, eluding the guards below. Caith heard the grate of drawn steel above and below them at once as Dubhain clutched his arm. "Master," Dubhain said, "I'll not leave ye here."
"Fall to heel," Caith said in humor the match of the phooka's own. "Mind your manners, lad." He looked up at the guard above them. "My servant is frightened of you," he said, holding out his hand in appeal till the guard, satisfied of his own dreadful-ness and well-pleased with it, made a show of threat and waved them both on with his sword drawn.
It might have been a boy outright terrified, this old and evil thing that clutched Caith's arm, that went with him miming terror and staring round-eyed as they passed the guard and his naked blad
e. But the phooka's fingers numbed Caith's hand, reminding him as they went. You cannot shake me, never be rid of me. The touch felt like ice, as if something had set its talons into his heart as well as into the flesh of his arm, so that Caith recovered his good sense, remembering that he was going deeper into this mesh of his own will, and that he still understood less of it than he ought. Doors closed somewhere below, echoing in the depths under the stairs. There were a man's shouts from that direction, sharp and short.
"What's that?" Caith asked, delaying at the door of the corridor, and looking back down the stairs.
It was not his business to know, only the anxious-ness of a man entering where there was no retreat, hearing things amiss behind him. The faces of the guards below stared up at him—distant kin of his, perhaps; or Sliabhin's hirelings: they were nothing he wanted for family: wolf-sharp, both of them, cruel as weasels. "Never you mind," one of them called up, and that one was uglier than all the rest. "There's those will care for that. Keep going."
"Lord," Dubhain said, a shiver in his voice, "lord—"
"Be still," Caith said. There was humor in it all, a fine Sidhe joke in this frightened phooka by his side, grand comedy. Caith played it too, with his life, with the phooka's grip numbing him, owning him and making mock of all Dun Mhor. Caith turned toward the door as they wished him to and came into the hall where they wished him to go, into warmth and firelight and a gathering of men the likeness of the rest, as likely a den of bandits as he had seen anywhere along the road he had traveled to come here.
And one sat among them, on a carven chair over by the fire; the light was on his face, and it was a face without the roughness of the others, a mouth much like Caith's own if bitter years had touched it; and this man's hair and beard were his own pale red, faded with years; and the tartan was Dun Mhor.
This man looked at him, thinking, measuring, so that Caith felt himself stripped naked. The resemblance—in this hall—would surely not elude Sliabhin mac Brian. Or riders from Dun na nGall might have outpaced him down the coast, on a longer road but a swifter. Quite likely his murder was in preparation even now; and his only chance was to move before the man believed he would. But he had got inside. He still had his sword. This much of his plan he had worked, feigning simplicity within deviousness: this was all his plan, to stand this close.
Sliabhin will kill you, he suddenly heard the Sidhe promise him. But never that he might kill Sliabhin. Sliabhin will kill you. It will take seven days for you to die.
"King Sliabhin?" Caith asked, all still and quiet. He weighed all his life in this moment, reckoning how long he had, whether the nearest man would draw and cut at him with steel or simply fall on him barehanded to overpower him: worse for him, if they got him alive. Before that happened he must spring and kill Sliabhin at once, face the others down with their king dead and give these bandits time to think how things had changed. There was Dubhain to reckon with, at his back—if they turned swords on him—
If I come alone— That was how he had made his question to the Sidhe. If I come alone to Dun Mhor. It was as if his hearing and his memory had been dulled in that hour as his eyes had been, glamored and spellbound. He was not alone. He had brought Dubhain. The question was altered; at least one thing in his futures would have changed.
But this man, this man who looked at him with a kinsman's face, in this bandit hall—
"Who are you?" Sliabhin asked.
"Hagan sends," Caith said, "for Caith's sake: he wants the other boy."
Sliabhin got to his feet and stared at him. Caith's heart was pounding in his chest, the cloak about him weighing like a great burden, covering the red tartan that would kill him and the sword that would kill Sliabhin, both beneath its gray roughness. There was no way out. Not from the moment he had passed the door. He felt the phooka's presence against his arm, biding like a curse.
Dubhain. Darkness.
He is one of the Fair Folk. I am the other kind.
"So," said Sliabhin, and walked aside, a halfstep out of reach; looked back at Caith—My father, Caith thought, seeing that resemblance to himself at every angle; and his throat felt tighter, the sweat gathering on his palms. This is what I am heir to, this bandit den, these companions. Beside him the phooka. There would be no gleam in Dubhain's eyes at this moment, nothing to betray what he was.
Sliabhin moved farther to his side. Caith turned to keep him in view as he stood before the door, and an object came into his sight, nailed there above the doorway, dried sprigs of herb; elfshot on a thong; a horseshoe, all wards against the Sidhe.
To make them powerless.
"Hagan wants the boy sent?" Sliabhin said, and Caith set his gaze on Sliabhin and tried to gather his wits back. "I find that passing strange."
"Will you hear the rest," Caith asked, with a motion of his eyes about the room, toward the guards, "—here?"
"Speak on."
"It's the elder son, lord; Caith. So Hagan said to me. Caith has heard rumors—" He let his voice trail off in intimidated silence, playing the messenger of ill news. "Lord—they've had to lock him away for fear he'll break for the south, or do himself some harm. He mourns his brother. He's set some strange idea into his head that he has to see the boy or die. I'm to bring the lad, by your leave, lord, to bring his brother out of his fey mood and set reason in him."
A long time Sliabhin stood staring at him, this elder image of himself, gazing at the truth.
He knows me, he knows me, he knows me, now what will he do? Can he kill his own son?
And if he will not—have I all the truth I think I have?
There was a silence in the room so great the crash of a log in the fireplace was like the crumbling of some wall. Sparks showered and snapped. Caith stood still.
"How does he fare?" Sliabhin asked, in a tone Caith had not expected could come from a mouth so hard and bitter. A soft question. Tender. As if it mattered; and it became like some evil dream—this man, this his true father asking the question he had wanted for all his days to hear a father ask. "Who?" Caith returned, "Hagan?"—missing the point deliberately.
"Caith."
"Sorrowing. I hear." There was a knot in Caith's throat; he fought it. He went on in this oblique argument. "If Caith could see the lad, lord, that he's well—I think it would mend much. It might bring him around to a better way of thinking."
"Would it?" Sliabhin walked away from him. Caith let him go, his wits sorting this way and that, between hope and grief. Then he felt the phooka's hand clench on his arm through the cloak, reminding him of oaths, and he was blinder than he had been when the Sidhe-light dazed him.
This place, this hall, this villainous crew—Was I lied to? Was it Gaelan the villain from the beginning, and this my father—innocent? Confession hovered on his lips, not to strike, to betray the Sidhe beside him for very spite and see what Dubhain would do. But—father—
"It's a long journey," said Sliabhin, "and dangerous, to send a young lad off in the dark with a man I don't know. You'll pardon me—" Sliabhin walked farther still, safe again among his men. "Tell me—messenger. What color Hagan's beard?"
"Bright red, lord. A scar grays it."
Sliabhin nodded slowly. "And how fares my neighbor?"
"Lord?"
"Cinnfhail." Sliabhin's brow darkened. His voice roughened. "You'll have passed through Gleann Gleatharan. How fares Cinnfliail?"
"Well, enough, lord."
Sliabhin snapped his fingers. "Fetch the other," Sliabhin said.
Men left, but not all. Caith and Sliabhin waited there, frozen in their places, and Dubhain waited. Other, other—Caith's mind raced on that refrain. The meshes drew about him and he saw the cords moving, but he did not know the truth yet, not the most basic truth of himself, and his hand would not move to the sword.
There was noise of the guards going down the steps outside; there was shouting that echoed up from the depths; and then the noise began to come louder and nearer—Someone cursed from the echoing lower hall, k
ept cursing as that someone was brought with loud resistance up the stairs. Caith slid his eyes to a point between Sliabhin and that doorway, most to Sliabhin, to the men that stood with him, all confessions stayed upon his lips, his heart beating hard. Dubhain was at his back, laughing inwardly, he thought, at mortal men; at father and son so meshed in must and would not.
Resistance carried into the room, a fair-haired man in a tartan green and blue, a red-blond youth who flung back his head and stared madly at Sliabhin, all bloody that he was.
It was Raghallach in their hands.
"If." said Sliabhin, "you had denied being with Cinnfhail, I would have take it ill. You know this boy—do you not?"
"Yes," said Caith. The warmth had left his hands, the blood had surely left his face. Raghallach strove to look his way and twisted helplessly in the grip of two well-grown and armored men. "Cinnfhail's son. I guested there last night. They sent me on my way in the rain, but they gave me provisions and a horse. He broke his leg in the forest. Lord, let this man go—"
"He rode right up to our doors, messenger. He tells a pretty tale—do you not, boy?"
They had hurt Raghallach already. They hurt him more, the wrench of a wounded arm; Raghallach fought, such as he could, and cried out, half-fainting then, for the sweat broke out and runneled down his waxen face; and Caith thrust himself half a pace forward, Dubhain catching at his arm. "No, lord," Dubhain said, "no, be not rash."
"How you guested there with Cinnfhail, how you were received, what tale you told," said Sliabhin, "all of this he's sung for us."
Raghallach lifted his head. His weeping eyes spoke worlds, denying what Sliabhin said with a desperate move. No. Only that. No.
"There was nothing to tell," said Caith, "but I see that I was followed. Lord, this man—"
"—offends me. What do you say to that?"
The air seemed close. He felt pinned between will and dare not—Sliabhin out of reach behind a hedge of swords. He needed caution, wit, something of answers in this place, and the Sidhe was still holding his arm. Be not rash, be not rash, he heard Dubhain's wicked voice in his mind. And Raghallach bleeding and tortured before him—He will die, Cinnfhail had prophesied of his son; so the Sidhe had said also, that Raghallach would die if he came with him to Dun Mhor. 0 gods. Raghallach—who spoke for me to Cinnfliail—
The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh Page 47