Most threw off their cloaks as they ran and I saw the gleam of armour beneath their dark tunics, steel breastplates and full hauberk, chain mail from scrawny neck to knees. They were all around us and we were three people only, but if we had been a hundred and three it would not have mattered because there was Lilith. Already I believed she’d killed more than twenty in the storm, an appetiser perhaps, a war dance to excite her own anticipation. Injured by the Seal of Thoth but with her avarice for pain not yet assuaged, she stormed up to the clouds and covered the moon, pitching us into total dark.
Vespasian stood central, his sword in one hand, the long knife pulled again from his boot in the other. Although he was bleeding from huge wounds, he showed no obvious exhaustion or pain. Beside him stood Gerald. I heard Gerald’s breath like a kettle boiling but it seemed that Vespasian did not breathe at all. He was searching for Arthur in the shadows. He would destroy Arthur before they killed him. Unleashed now, he sliced the head from the first man who approached, a swing so vigorous it pulled him quite around and the decapitated head spurted blood and bounced and tumbled on the grass, spitting teeth. Vespasian fought with dagger and sword, with feet and shoulder, elbow and knee, and with the speed and balance of his spring. His blades flashed in the gloom. As he lunged with the long sword, so his dagger maimed another. At first Gerald covered his back and they fought in rhythm. I watched Vespasian’s concentration, his focus on each enemy’s eyes, interpreting the direction of the man’s intention, the stab or the feint, always reacting first so that every attack against him was met, repulsed and failed.
It seemed, even now, the trees fought as our allies. Within the strange waving shadows, I could not see if men were taken or killed. But the trees moved in, creating avenues and barriers so that no crush of more than a few adversaries could approach together. Then Gerald was grappling with a short, stocky creature, and took the man’s knife in his cheek. Vespasian swung back to help him, and was taken almost at once by four, two on each side, who lunged and broke him to the ground. I saw one man’s sword go through Vespasian’s arm and come out the other side, clots of bloody flesh in the light of Lilith’s watching eyes. His arm hanging stiff but not useless and still wielding the knife, Vespasian bent low and ricocheted the attacker over his shoulders, twisted both boots into the slip of the mud and was back on top. A worm of torn muscle hung from the wound, but wrenched from its owner’s grasp, he pulled the short sword from the weeping hole. He twisted, and buried it to the hilt in the other man’s heart.
Within the staggering confusion, I thought I saw a branch, a huge oak arm as gnarled as dragon jaws, heave down on one man’s head, caving it into smashed and oozing fragments. Then the whole trunk stepped forwards, blocking other paths, rattling its acorns in a rolling giant’s gait.
But Arthur’s people were on top of Vespasian like fleas, swarming over him, scurrying out from the trees towards him. Though Vespasian threw them off with fists and sword and knife and five were dead before they got him down, he was pushed steadily under. Gerald was half beneath him, just still alive.
Arthur looked down on Vespasian and said, “So, it was not so hard in the end,” and kicked him hard between the legs.
I had not done a thing. I had not resisted my enemies, nor been attacked, not hurt nor even winded. I was standing beside the silver pool with my arms behind me, deep under my mother’s spell. My feet were so rooted to the ground that I expected to grow leaf and the birds to nest in my armpits. I was utterly removed and completely impotent. But I could hear and see and speak.
Though doubled with pain, Vespasian rolled and sprang, but I watched as he was hurled to the ground a third time. I stood, still as a pillar all marbled and cold, begging my mother, absurdly, to let me go and help. I watched as Vespasian, with his knife thrust in one man’s heel and his sword through another’s calf, struggled upright once again, and spinning away from Arthur’s thrust, grabbed Joanna, first by the edges of her cloak, then her arm, and finally her throat. Then he held her as recently he had held me except that his hand was squeezing around her neck, and his knife was half buried in her breast above her heart.
Joanna squeaked and wheezed, kicking back against him, but she hooked herself deeper onto his knife point and his fingers were so tightly pinned into her creamy little neck that her flailing feet were raised from the earth and she floundered there, swinging a little, while he strangled the life slowly from her. “Will you do nothing then, to save her?” asked Vespasian while Arthur stood before him, mouth open, and for the first time Vespasian was breathless and gasping between words. But Arthur, in the moment of reaching out for both his wife and his enemy, was caught by Gerald from the ground, and stabbed sword point to young fingers on the hilt, up through the groin to the pelvis and belly.
A restless, churning reluctance battered the rest of Arthur’s clan, fearful of losing both their leaders, they stood, sword arms hanging limp, leaning over to catch their breath and their wits, peering through the swirling mists and pounding branches.
Arthur fell heavily, pumping hot gore from the top of his thigh. The great slick of blood mixed with the scarlet sticky grass in the rising dew. He was slipping forward, unable to keep his balance. He had fallen on Richard’s burial mound. Gerald shouted, still little more than a child’s voice desperate to be heard above the heavy groans and the hoarse breathing. “In barter for taking my friend’s life, for ruining that of my step-father, and most of all for murdering my mother, I demand your death.”
Arthur was in spasms of pain, twisted on the ground, his sword lost amongst the dark shadows of the longer grass, trying to stifle the shame of his own screaming. He looked up into Vespasian’s eyes, and Vespasian smiled.
“Kill him,” murmured Vespasian. Gerald stood, just one moment of pause, not for pity but for pride. He watched his step-grandfather quiver in pain as his life slipped slowly away through the pumping blood from his thigh and groin. Then Gerald swung his sword slanted across Arthur’s head so that the face split in two down the nose and through one eye, and the snarl was the last movement the mouth made before it fell apart. His brains rushed out like gruel on the grass.
Vespasian waited until Joanna had seen her husband’s face cut through and his tongue loll from the gaping hole, and then snapped her neck with a quick twist and the tightening of his fingers, like a chicken in the farmyard, ready for the pot. He threw her down and her body slumped across Arthur’s still twitching legs.
Then Gerald and Vespasian turned to face the rest.
Many, twenty perhaps, now crept away. Gone quickly between the far trees, silently disappearing back into the world of men. But others remained, some eager and defiant, some cautious. Vespasian swung his sword, already black with blood and lung and flesh, and many of them died. Gerald killed one from behind with a thrust through the gut while Vespasian brought his own knife up between the same man’s ribs and I heard them crack.
The noise came in waves, the shouting and the screams and all the great clashes of sword on sword and sword on bone. Then, because I was able to count almost as if detached, there were just eleven of her followers left when Lilith finally regained her power, recovered her strength and decided to move.
Vespasian was bleeding heavily from the deep gash below his left elbow where the sword had pierced him, sliced between ulna and radius, smashing muscle but missing bone. His forehead was cut and there was dark blood in his eyes, his jaw deeply grazed, his neck slashed by Lilith’s claws and both hands pitted and cut through his gloves to the bare knuckles within. Gerald bent almost double, heaving, breath finished, his pretty blue clothes so bloodstained that it was impossible to see which was his own, and which from his enemies. They stood together and looked up at Lilith’s face looming over them, her mouth gloating. She had watched and enjoyed the spectacle of death. The pain and destruction of her own followers still delighted her. But forced apart and made impotent by Thoth’s seal, she had needed time to rearrange her powers. Now she walked forwar
d and the earth vibrated.
Of the eleven remaining, six, already exhausted and wounded, turned and ran, dropping their swords, more terrified of their own goddess than their enemies. The crunch of their escape was muffled by the dark mist. Of those few remaining, five summoned courage and grouped at Lilith’s knees, eyes shining with pride and exhilaration. The first was Malcolm. Beside him was a woman. The other three were tall men, strong in age and shoulder. Against terrible odds, Gerald and Vespasian had been almost victorious. With skill, with courage, and with magic, they had almost tasted success. Now they waited, accepting the final failure. They did not expect to master Lilith.
I had seen Malcolm enter the glade some hours back and I had seen his thin legs tremble with the effort of passing the tree thick boundary. Now he was all swagger, though his long bladed sword was clean. I didn’t recognise the dark haired woman at his side, but I knew one of the men. I remembered him from Vespasian’s castle, the sweated excitement of sadism clear in the candle light. “Will you continue with the girl today?” he had asked Arthur, panting for my torture to begin. “Will you still prepare the sacrifice?” I had smelled his lust and hunger.
From within my mother’s hypnotic trance, I remained without pulse or breath or any power of movement. My eyes could not blink and my throat could not swallow but my brain was still my own. I stared at the man I remembered and the words of his delight in my agony echoed in my memory. I still stared as he cuddled back to Lilith’s fat toad legs and their fluid, chameleon leathered hide. I watched him swing out with his sword. I concentrated and I found my own answer to the question my mother had refused to answer. The gatekeeper had a force I was beginning at last to understand.
I killed the man with the short sword who had wanted to watch me tortured and who had pleaded with Arthur to prepare me as the sacrifice. From a distance of many feet and without moving, I killed him. The wife of Janus smiled and exercised her vengeance.
With a squawk of sudden pain, the man gasped, fell to his knees and clutched his chest, throwing down his sword. He wore chain mail and a thick black tunic, but through it all his lungs exploded, gushing white and red and yellow with the stench of rotting and corrupted bile. The man died slowly as Vespasian and Gerald stared. Then Vespasian looked across at me. He knew, and I was ashamed.
It was then I realised I had killed Uta too. Unaware and undirected, I had caused the death of many during the battle. The storm that had maimed and killed had not been Lilith’s. It had been mine. More than twenty had been ripped apart by gale and ice. And when Vespasian and Gerald fought, I had, from my trance, been there beside them. I had killed without sword, but with devastation. Vespasian had always warned me of the danger of the gatekeeper.
Malcolm leapt away from the man dying at his side, while Lilith looked down and licked her lipless mouth.
“Four left,” I said silently in my mind, and my mother answered, also in my thoughts, “At last. You are waking up.”
The odds now stood four against two, one little more than an inexperienced child though learning fast, while Vespasian, ignoring the overpowering threat of Lilith’s presence, rushed immediately on Malcolm. Their swords met in brilliance, steel on steel, reflecting moon light in flashes of storm. Then Malcolm’s blade shattered in shivering, buckling shards. He stared back for a second at Vespasian’s, his weapon in his face, and at the man inexplicably dead at his side. Then dropping the broken hilt from limp fingers, Malcolm turned abruptly and ran. Vespasian sighed.
He turned and thrust his sword through the next man’s heart, but when his blade turned aside, scraping as it glanced sideways against the metal breast plate, Vespasian slung the sword and grabbed the man with both hands, thumbs pressing up beneath the jaw and against the larynx, quickly breaking his neck.
Gerald held the dark haired woman against a tree, sword pressed to her throat. She gasped, begging for her life. Gerald stood in terrible uncertainty, unable to complete the kill. Vespasian killed the last man, though took longer, the other man’s knife slashing down Vespasian’s cheek before he threw him off. Knocking him down with the blunt weight of his sword hilt, Vespasian ran him through the ear with the full length of his knife.
Only the woman remained. Vespasian bent down and wiped both his sword and his knife blade clean on the wet grass near the rise of his wife’s grave. The woman facing Gerald was hysterical. “Kill her,” said Vespasian, looking up briefly. “You only prolong her pain.”
“I can’t do it,” said Gerald though he held his sword still poised.
“I said you must obey me this night,” said Vespasian, standing again, and sheathing his own sword. “Now, kill her.”
Gerald tightened his grip but couldn’t press home the blade. “I can’t,” he muttered. “I can’t kill - a woman - like this.”
“You only make her suffer more,” said Vespasian, impatient. He strode to Gerald’s side, again removed the long thin knife from his boot, and in one quick movement, slit the woman’s throat. As her blood spilled, she slid down the tree trunk and curled at its roots. Vespasian bent once more to clean his blade. “It’s finished,” he said. “Now we discover what Lilith has planned for us all.”
Chapter Fifty Two
My mother let me go. I melted from the nose down in fluid ripples of painful release. Each muscle accepted back its life with grateful, and throbbing, humility. I stumbled but didn’t fall. I didn’t look back. I went at once to join Vespasian.
Gerald was bouncing. Through the desperate tiredness and all the blood, the adrenalin and pride still spun. Impossibly, they had won. “You were under a spell, weren’t you,” Gerald said. “Like being tied up in a sort of web. You were practically hidden. I bet you wished you could fight too. But we won anyway. We didn’t need any help after all.”
“You did not see her, but she fought too,” said Vespasian softly. He put his hand on my shoulder, as if taking me back into his possession. “And her help was – invaluable.” I was sorry that he understood so well. The vengeance of the path keeper had been so ugly.
“Well, it was magic of course,” grinned Gerald. “I’ll never, ever believe all this once we’re out of it. It’ll always seem like just a dream.”
“But it is a dream,” spat Lilith from above us. “Did you think this was anything as mundane as reality? This is truth and truth is as far beyond your concept of reality as is my power beyond yours.”
Gerald shrank, losing his golden grin and paling to grey in the moonlight. No one had forgotten Lilith but, clutching the wound in her throat and wallowing in the resentment of injury, she had been forced from the battle, weak and strangely impartial. She had still gloated over the agony. Perhaps it was the welter of death that had renewed her strength.
“Let us go,” Gerald said, peering up into the tower of her shadows, with as much courage as his youth allowed him. “We won the battle. Now let us go.”
“I may allow you life a while longer,” Lilith answered him, “for you do not interest me at all. I am here for hotter blood.” Without touching him, Lilith waved her claws and Gerald fell, immediately unconscious, into the mud. Vespasian took my hand. He did not look at me nor I at him.
Midnight had passed but it would be some time until dawn. My mother came quietly to stand by Lilith, unchanged as she had been throughout. But Lilith was a giantess, monstrously swollen with her head in the clouds and the moon beneath her shoulder blades. I couldn’t know if Lilith had ever expected Vespasian to succeed against so many, though perhaps, understanding the precarious balance of good against evil, she had. Now she wanted Vespasian for herself.
The veleda said, “The sacrament and the altar are ready but you know the risks.”
Lilith lunged downwards, squatting back onto her haunches. “I always take risks,” she said. “This is my food and my water and my sleep and my breath. If I must be refused all these, then all my existence becomes shadow. He will not refuse me these two. I have been patient. He cannot refuse me now.”
“They did not take the cards you wanted,” said the veleda calmly. “Their destinies are not in your hands. They fought your acolytes and won. By all the laws of nature, they are free. They are no longer your rightful sacrifice. They belong to Him.”
I wanted to run away. I wanted to run like Malcolm had run, but Vespasian stood quite still, with my hand clasped in his, his sword and knife sheathed and his back straight. He knew, I believe, that he faced death and certain torture but his face was passive and almost serene. He’d achieved all and more than he’d hoped. I knew he was right and escape would be impossible. Lilith could stamp me out with one flick of her toes, but it was standing and waiting that made me ill.
“I still have a claim,” hissed Lilith, “which even He cannot deny. I call on past dues. This is a creature which once swore me his life, and now has the temerity to strike me. Will you fight for your door stop?”
My mother stared back at Lilith with her milky pale eyes, the pupil barely visible, like a shallow black scar just caught in the centre. There was no expression in her face at all. “No,” she said. “But I doubt you can take her. As you have seen, she holds powers of her own.”
“I shall suck them up,” snapped Lilith. “Power spices flesh.”
My mother shrugged. “You are breaking the rules.”
“My existence is an eternal challenge to Him,” Lilith muttered, for the first time subdued. “And I will challenge again, and again. He must look to His rules, and I to mine. And my rule is clear, for no prick-filth human can flout me – can profit from my power and teaching and then turn against me – can swear an oath on my altar and then renounce that oath without suffering my revenge. I will have him, and I will reach him through your own pitiful creation.”
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