Horns of the Hunter: Tales of Luah Fáil Book 1

by Frank Dorrian

  ‘Heart big enough for a hundred of you though, boy,’ Luw sniffed, as the bundle vanished. Every handful of earth felt lined with razors, scraping at the soul beneath the flesh. He sat back on his haunches and drew a breath, staring up at the canopy. The early sun played among the foliage, gold against green, the promise of a radiant day. It seemed fitting to bury him between the roots of the hagnut tree he’d first found him beneath. ‘No arseholes here to bother you this time,’ Luw muttered, patting the broken earth. ‘Just a nice long rest.’

  He hoped. It was said that men buried without their heads couldn’t find their way across the bridge of blades to the Otherworld. Instead, they rose from their graves, cursed to stumble blindly in search of their lost heads, until the flesh ran like liquid from their bones. They became hateful spirits then, the kind of horrors drawn to battlefields after the slaughter was done and the carrion birds came for their tithe of flesh. Luw had no idea whether that was true, nor if the same curse waited for dogs who had suffered such a burial, only that Náith had worked his vengeance true and cruel.

  There is an insidiousness to uncertainty that cannot be denied, that is worse than any measure of knowledge. It dissolves self-worth, suckles at the artery of one’s confidence, until even the most surefooted wither beneath it. It stayed Luw’s shaking hands, and he fell to hollow weeping once more, as Bann’s grave sat half-filled.

  Few men understand what it is like to lose an animal that makes the heart its home. Words alone paint so trivial a thing of the wounds left by their deaths, of the sadness that echoes down through years of memory. A piece of him lay in that grave beneath the hagnut tree. A fragment torn from Luw’s soul. A lifetime of memory and brotherhood. All ripped away in an instant, leaving a husk to be buried.

  Luw pressed a hand to the cold earth atop Bann’s body, closed his burning eyes against the grief and the guilt. ‘I’m sorry, boy. Goodbye.’ He scraped more earth atop it and filled the grave before the sorrow robbed him of his strength.

  Bann had deserved better than this. Better than him.

  Síle’s home rose beyond the forest’s edge, humble yet verdant as ever upon its hill, her gardens blazing a thousand colours beneath the afternoon sun. She strolled among the rows, walking softly between flower, frond, and fruit. Her hands alighted here and there, tender as she worked her magicks upon the things that grew around her. Life blazed in her presence.

  It felt so strange to look upon her without feeling Bann’s tail kicking up a little storm at his side. Dopey old mutt had always had a soft spot for her, and she’d always made such a fuss over him. Beautiful, watching the two of them together. Something that would never be again. A weary weight nestled itself in Luw like a burrowing parasite. It had been some weeks since he’d last seen her, that day he’d smelled Náith all over her skin. The scent’s memory still put the flame to his anger.

  She should know, Luw told himself, letting go. She would want to know. He rose from the cover of a twisted beech, and dropped down into Síle’s garden.

  She caught sight of him instantly, watched his careful approach. The breeze caught in her hair and set it streaming out to the side, dark and lovely as it refused the sun. A halo of bees drifted about her head, buzzing fat and lazy along their slow orbits. Life was so very much brighter around her, and yet the coldness of her stare made Luw pause and sniff at the air like some timid fawn that had scented wolves. He shook himself, padding toward her again, but Síle’s voice threw a wall between them.

  ‘I’ve enough strays sniffing around here seeking my comfort.’ Her eyes hardened. ‘What do you want, Hunter? You’ll find no quarry here.’

  Luw’s mouth worked sorely for a moment, every little partially-healed cut both inside and out splitting open as he forced his words through an aching throat. ‘Root of my soul… I…’

  ‘Have been fighting with Náith again,’ Síle snapped, ‘you’ve still got blood on you.’

  Luw glanced down at himself. Tunic and leggings, both were covered with brown stains, black earth and fuck knew what else. He didn’t want to know what state his face was in after so wretched a beating. He could still feel the blood crusted in his beard, cracking every time his mouth moved.

  ‘Yes… I’ve been fighting Náith again.’

  Síle’s lip curled, a knowing sneer. ‘And I suppose you want me to fix you up again? Cluck my tongue and clean your wounds then take you to my bed?’

  Stale guilt, leftover from the way they’d last parted, came crawling back up Luw’s aching spine. ‘My heartflower…’ He took a step toward Síle. She swept away from his hand with a face cut with cold fury.

  ‘Spare me your apology.’ She stood away from him, the air darkening around her, bending the light so that for one horrifying instant she seemed utterly monstrous – a ravening thing of black blades and ripping teeth. Luw cowered, drew back from her with a hiss, blinking as he found the illusion gone and Síle stood proud with fists upon her hips.

  ‘What…’

  ‘I belong to no man,’ she snapped, ‘I am no one’s bed-warmer, and I will not play nurse and mother to a pair of squabbling children who think I am bound to them for the sake of a few nights of passion.’

  ‘The fight couldn’t be helped, my love,’ Luw uttered, his eyes falling to the ground.

  ‘Don’t insult me, Hunter,’ Síle snarled, ‘it has always been a choice. Do you think I do not know what you did to Náith? That you killed that Fomonán creature and left him an exile? Shame on you, Luw!’

  Luw’s head snapped up. ‘What –’

  ‘I am no fool. You know the earth speaks well to those who listen, just as the trees whisper their secrets to those with the wit to hear.’

  Luw rubbed his blood-crusted face, ground his palms into stinging eyes. ‘He killed Bann, Síle.’

  A moment’s pause. ‘Did he?’

  Luw pulled his palms from his eyes. What was that look on her face? Curiosity? Whatever it was, it was not what Luw had expected. Not what she should have felt. What he hoped she’d feel. The callousness, the coldness, the way she’d twisted the shadows about her so horridly… surely this couldn’t be the woman he’d shared so very much of his heart with? A heartbeat of numb shock passed, and a sick little maggot of disgust twisted in Luw’s belly, anger creeping through him. How could Bann have meant so little to her? He licked his lips, spoke his next words with care. ‘He did.’

  She turned quickly away. ‘A shame for you to drag your hound into a children’s feud. That poor thing didn’t deserve to die for your pride. But still, I’ve no pity in me for you to leech from. Be gone, Hunter.’

  Luw stared dumbstruck at the side of her head. ‘Bann… he loved you, Síle… you should come see his grave, maybe plant some –’

  ‘I am done here,’ Síle snarled, hair whipping as she rounded on him, teeth bared. ‘With this. With you. I am done, Luw!’

  Luw’s head lowered, dead weight upon his neck. The shadows of his antlers cast their grey web across Síle’s feet. He noticed, then, how the tiny flowers that always sprouted around her feet were gone, and dark, thorny things grew and withered in their place.

  ‘Leave!’ Síle screamed, her voice falling thunder. Luw flinched back from her, a sudden unconquerable fear ran him through, sent him scurrying toward the forest upon its earthen peak, scrabbling up it on all fours like a beast. He threw himself behind a tree, pressed himself into it, listening to the battering ram in his chest slow its pounding.

  Breath shuddering, he finally crept about the edge of the trunk, daring to peer back down into Síle’s garden. She was gone, and the sun had fled with her, a grey sky churning over the thatched roof of her home, muting the beauty of her lands.

  Luw frowned, cold snakes slithering through his guts. Aodhamar had given him a warning that day, as he was cast from his golden court. That flower-sniffing nymph you lay with. Bitter are the seeds that one plants. Stay away from her. She is not worth blood.

  He shuddered, a rotten chill setting go
osepimples in his flesh. The Enkindled King’s stolen power of Sight ran deeper than Luw could have imagined. She was not the woman he had left behind that day he had smelled Náith’s stink on her – it was a mask, either donned or lifted. He couldn’t tell, didn’t want to know. But her coldness at the news of Bann’s death… that clung to his heart, plunging its knives to the hilt.

  Bann, his hound – his only family – dead and headless in the mud. And now his love – gone, with nothing left but a twisted shade of what she had once been. There was no end to it. No end to what that despoiling bastard, Náith, would destroy. The warrior’s very existence was a curse, a plague, a harrowing sickness rotting all that breathed the same air, that walked beneath the same sun. It would not end – it would never end. Not until Náith was but dry, crow-pecked bones. And what use was there in hoping for that, for one so weak as him? He couldn’t even save the life of his dog.

  A fresh cloak of grief about his shoulders, Luw turned his back on Síle’s home and stepped into the shadows of the forest.

  Chapter 12

  Magótha Glen

  A cold wind was blowing through the glen by the time the pot was boiling. Náith got to his feet, taking a burning slug from the jar he clutched. Pauper’s gutrot, base-brewed hooch that shredded the stomach even better than it dulled the senses. It was all his name would buy him these days. Shite that could strip the paint from a shield and bread harder than a rock hewn from the crags of the Sisters.

  Náith wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, sauntering over to the raggedy little shelter he’d cobbled together against one of the valley crags. A far cry from the modest warrior’s hall he’d called home. It had been a smoking ruin when he’d returned to collect his scant few possessions. A spear had been thrust before it, the red rag that snapped beneath its point daubed with a whorled eye. Aodhamar’s mark. Or at least his men’s. That all-seeing fucking eye of his.

  No matter. The most treasured thing Náith had ever owned was in the sack slumped against his shelter’s rickety, piss-stained wall. He dropped the jar, swatted aside a halo of flies as he approached the sack. He hefted it at arm’s length, carrying it to the pot. The stink hit him the moment the laces were undone, and a cloud of fat, black flies smacked Náith in the face before he could turn away and gag.

  Náith chucked up the grog he’d just downed. He turned toward the sack, a tuft of dark, slime-ridden fur jutting from the opening, circled by a vortex of ravenous flies. Holding his breath, he reached in, gripped a handful of slick fur and sloughing skin, and pulled Bann’s rotting head from the sack.

  Náith forced himself to look at it, at the grey-filmed eyes, the bloated, maggot-crawling tongue and liquefying flesh. He held a shudder in check as his nails bit through the mutt’s skin and squelched in the rot beneath, a horde of plump, hairy flies converging upon his fingers to sup at it. He wanted to spew again, cast the thing away and plunge his hand into that boiling pot to scald the stink from his fingers.

  Instead he carried it to the pot, held it over its frothing mouth so that the steam veiled head and hand both, made them grey as phantoms in a southern mire. The rising steam carried some of the stink off with it, but did nothing to dissuade the gorging flies as they suckled upon their bounty of rot. Náith forced himself to breathe, forced his mouth into a rictus grin, and dropped it – flies, maggots and all – into the hissing water.

  There is something to be said for the stench of rotting flesh as it cooks. Righteously disgusting, a malign twist on the scent of cooking meat that seems to hit every sense at once and offend them all. Náith stumbled away from the pot as the stench hit him, humid as a flooded grave. He made his way down through the rocky valley toward the brook, past the spattering of tents and shitty little dwellings that clung to this place like clinkers to an unclean arse.

  Addicts. Criminals. Exiles. This was the place where the scum came when no town nor village would have them. Magótha Glen. Few places had so earned the right to be called a shithole, Náith thought, as he stepped over a stinking, sleeping body at the brookside.

  He washed his hands in that greasy little stream a dozen times but couldn’t get the reek from under his nails, so he went back to his wretched little shelter and its stinking, boiling pot. He planted himself before it, supping on a half-drunk jar of grog he’d snatched from the arms of a sleeping drunkard, and watched as Bann’s head turned to rot soup.

  Well-played, Aodhamar, thought Náith. It was a miserable way to end his legacy, here, exiled from Ardas Machad. Too many enemies in the south, made subjugating the southern slave-kings at the Enkindled’s side. Not a wet fart’s hope in a bag of sand he’d ever find a place in their warbands that wasn’t on the end of a spear or two. Now spurned by Síle for his disgrace, to top it all off. ‘And so ends Náith,’ he muttered, taking a swig from the jar, wincing at the spirit’s burn and the pot’s growing reek. He offered a toast to it. ‘May the day shine bright on your woe, Luw,’ he declared, ‘and may your prick ever go limp in my woman.’ He drank.

  It often felt as though the world had spared him solely so he could suffer, as though its days turned fixedly upon his torment. A living feast for all its cruelty. Náith would have wept like some skirt-clutching fanny-boy, had he not had strong drink in his belly and the head of his enemy’s beloved hound stewing over the fire. Instead, he danced, singing the old War Song of Nuan, and he drank as the night fell thick upon Magótha Glen. He threw dry branches to the fire beneath the pot and kept it boiling beneath the moon, capering about the billowing sparks in the rot-stinking air and laughing at the memory of Luw’s tears.

  When the morning finally came and the drink was long gone, Náith sat and stared, growing sober as he watched the pot cool. As the edges of excess began to finally bite, he stood and thrust his hand into the grey, fur-skin soup, pulling the hound’s skull from its depths. Boiled clean and bleached, steam curled from its edges and belched from its hollows. Náith found himself laughing.

  Síle had to see this.

  What a day it had been to meet one such as her. Síle, the Maid of Mael Tulla. He’d been duelling near her home, trading blows with some bloated gas bag named Gral, while the sky disgorged every cold, stinging dreg it could upon them. He’d caught her watching through the rain, a grey ghost standing on that rocky little outcrop on the southern edge of her lands. Náith had thought her his Báin Searain, the lurking spirit come to claim his warrior’s soul – an omen of his death – until his sword had chopped through Gral’s shoulder and split the bastard to his bollocks.

  He’d gone to her, climbing the crags to stand over her, dripping rain and blood, sword still in his hand. He could still see the smile she’d given him, the way her teeth teased her lips, her fingers as they traced the ragged edge of the cut spanning his chest. He could see it all, clear as day.

  ‘What’s your name, warrior?’ she’d asked. Her chin ran with rain, hair clinging to her face, dress to her body. He’d offered her his own smile, lopsided and bloodstained, one he would keep for her and her alone.

  ‘Náith.’

  She took him by the hand, led him toward a night of passion, a night that had made him feel a king, and still did, as the memory turned upon its filament. Sweating skin, warm breaths and biting nails, the urgency of their lust fulfilled while the moon stood witness. Síle’s teasing touches had given way to tenderness beneath the rising sun, her skilled hands turned to treating Náith’s wounds, to easing the aches left in the wake of a good duel.

  Those had been golden days. Days of joy, each one rolling endlessly into the next while the seasons ground and ebbed through their colours, and countless nights were spent breathless and collapsed atop each other. The baring of souls, the wilful offering of vulnerability that forges the bonds between hearts.

  Happiness though, is ever an elusive thing. Ephemeral, always just over the next hill, past the next dawn. A thing men only know is theirs once it is gone. Only when they stop and think of what came after, do they look back an
d understand what happiness truly looked like.

  Aodhamar, like always, had called for warriors in the spring, and, as always, Náith had answered. With his lust for fame and treasure in his heart, those days with Síle ended as suddenly as they began. Now, all that was left were the fading shades of better times, the autumnal colours of bitter longing. But a spark of hope had awakened in Magótha Glen as he had pulled that skull from the boiled ruin of its rotting flesh.

  Náith would have them back.

  Chapter 13

  Cu Náith

  The late summer rains were pounding the earth, cold as the touch of Ancu, and yet Náith smiled all the same as he bludgeoned his way through them. He cradled Bann’s skull as he ran, the world passing in a grey blur. Síle’s home rose from the earth before him.

  Náith could see her, dancing in the rain once again on the western slope of her garden, spinning her dainty circles among the flowers and the fruits. He hurdled the stone wall and skidded side-on up the path, mud and muck fountaining behind him. Síle watched him draw to a halt, once more a grey ghost through the rain. Náith planted his feet, fist pressed to his hip, Bann’s skull nestled beneath his other arm, positioned so she could see. This time, this time, he would not move, he would not go to her shrouded in weakness. He turned his face to the pouring sky, and let the rain cleanse him.

  ‘Is that…’

  Síle was stood before him when Náith squinted through the downpour, black hair hanging in rat tails about her face. Her mouth hung open as she gazed at the hound skull he carried. Náith smirked, hefted it between them. ‘The skull of Luw’s hound,’ he declared.

  ‘Bann…’

  Síle stepped closer, laying a hand upon the skull. Her fingers followed every fold and ridge, slid across the points of tooth and fang. Her eyes twitched, a look of sorrow ghosting through them. Náith’s heart flickered for an instant, his certainty suddenly in shreds, but her sadness faded back beneath awe, taking a lump of his doubt with it. ‘So strong a beast, yet so gentle a hound. A shame it had to die.’ Náith felt a twinge of jealous annoyance at that. ‘But death is where all our roads lead. Sooner or later, Ancu’s claw closes about all of us.’