Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

by The Fire Sword (v0. 9) (epub)

  What would I have wished to do with my life if I had had a free choice? she asked herself. Write, paint, dance, philosophize? I can’t remember ever wanting to be a nurse or a ballerina. The only thing I’ve ever cared about is horses. I’m too big to be a jockey, and I would hate being a vet. God, what a useless soul I am. And a barbarian. My mother can carry on an intelligent conversation with anyone, a physicist or a theologian. She really knows about music and history and art. Oh, Mother. I never appreciated you, and now you are too far away. No wonder you were almost relieved when he died. He didn’t leave you any room for yourself. Well, I hope you can be happy now. You’re well shut of both of us.

  If I ever get back, I’ll try to love you, Mother. I hope you’re not worried about me. I hope that whatever brought me here made things tidy. Maybe you got the real Alianora. I wonder what happened to her?

  Enough maundering. Back to business. This Albion. Where magic is rather commonplace, I think. The book Ambrosius sent might have been cribbed from any number of old tales. Briget of Hibernia is no more a saint than I am. She’s a goddess, pure and simple.

  What does that make me, a student heroine? I don’t even know why I was picked, except that I was pretty useless where I was. I do like the out-of-doors. Even the snow. I respect nature, I suppose, and I think I still believe in dryads and fairies. Maybe I’ve always been a little pagan.

  Now I’m about twenty miles from Bath, which I should avoid. In order to get to Ireland, I have to get to the sea. So I’ll go west another day, then swing a little south and head for where Bristol will be someday. A boat? I know from nothing about sailing, and besides, the craft of this time are pretty primitive. I can just see me persuading some sailors to cross the Irish Channel in midwinter. But, at least I know Ireland. That’s a comfort. I wonder if they have tried to conquer it this time?

  She drifted into a light sleep. Sometime later, she heard Wrolf give a low growl. Eleanor sat up instantly and looked around.

  There was something outside the circle of stones that was blacker than night. It was a heavy, oppressive presence, like a thundercloud on the ground. She peered at it and saw little specks of red, like eyes.

  A sound reached her ears over the singing of the stones. It was a low moaning, like something in pain. There was also a deep rumbling, almost like an animal breathing, and a dragging, shuffling noise. The blackness crept closer to the circle.

  With icy fingers, Eleanor undid the blue cloak from around the sword. She put her hand on the grip a little tentatively, remembering her experience the night before, and felt the shock race up her arm again. But it was less violent this time, and she found she could hold it. She stood up, drawing the sword from the folds of the cloak, shaking and wondering what she was doing. Again, she felt a sense of correctness, shrugged, and waited.

  Pale fire coursed along the blade. She held it awkwardly and thought, Let there be light. The stones around her swelled their glow until each was a great beacon.

  The blackness beyond the circle took on a shape. It seemed to be a great snake with many eyes on stalks. There were legs of a sort, large misshapen limbs. The breath of the thing was dark, and she could feel a cold from that breath that was like death itself.

  Wrolf stood beside her, bristling and growling. Eleanor put her left hand on his thick mane and saw him become a beast of flame, with great gouts of fire dripping from his jaws. She had a sense of deja vu, then realized Wrolf looked like a poster for the The Hound of the Baskervilles. She turned her attention back to the thing.

  "Begone, thou worm of death,” she shouted at the blackness. Her words sounded small and pitiful in the night.

  It made no reply but shuffled onward. One of its large legs seemed to snake out and come to rest a few feet in front of her. The nearby stone made a screaming cry.

  Eleanor released her hold on Wrolf and stepped forward. She took the sword in both hands and brought it down on the leg with all her strength. She felt the sword cut into the noisome flesh. The beast gave a terrible shriek and yanked back at the leg. She hacked again, and a foot fell off at her feet. A spurt of some liquid gushed out of the severed limb, and then the foot burst into white fire.

  Making a horrible, gurgling scream, the animal thrust its head into the circle. The glowing light cast by the stones revealed something like a crocodile with many eyes. Eleanor stepped away from the long jaw and terrible breath while Wrolf circled and snapped at the eyestalks. The thing moved with painful slowness, but its dark breath almost froze Eleanor where she stood.

  She moved to one side of the giant head and hacked at the eyes. The beast began to turn its head back toward her, and a horrid foreleg groped at her. Eleanor chopped at the leg until it retreated, then brought the sword down between two prominent bones behind the head. The sword flamed brighter and brighter until she was almost blinded by the light it gave. She hacked at the vertebrae until her arms were numb, the beast screaming and trying to reach her. Its long tail lashed the ground beside her and finally swept her aside.

  Eleanor lay breathless on the cold ground for a second, the skirts of her garments pressing wetly against her hose-shod feet. The half-severed head began to inch toward her. She gulped a deep breath and dragged herself to her feet. She staggered around the head, giving the beast’s breath a wide berth, as fast as her legs would move.

  Wrolf leaped over the huge beast in a glow of light. He closed his jaw on the tip of the lashing tail. Fire dripped from his mouth, and the tail seemed to flame up. Eleanor waded in and went back to work on the thing’s neck. After a time, she lost all consciousness of anything but bringing the sword up and down, up and down. Twice she was knocked aside by tail or leg, and twice she struggled up and returned to her grim decapitation. Wrolf’s light was here and there, and the terrible keening of the beast mingled with the howls of the wolf in a dreadful cacophony.

  Finally, the beast stopped screaming, and a moment later, head and body parted company in a sickening gush of dark fluids. Eleanor stepped back, almost tripping over her skirts in her eagerness to avoid contact with whatever the beast had pumped through its veins.

  Then flames raced along the body in both directions, going from red to white, and Eleanor had to turn her head away to shield it from the actinic light.

  She sat down on the bare ground with a thump, her legs quivering and her hands shaking. She noticed in a dispassionate way that her bootless feet hurt and that her hose were torn, her feet cut and bruised by small stones. The sword lay across her lap, flickering faintly. Wrolf sat nearby, licking his paws, once again a large black wolf. If it had not been for the burning body of the beast, she might have thought the whole thing a very nasty dream.

  As she sat, Eleanor heard the odd moaning continue, and realized it came from the ground under her. She patted the earth affectionately and watched the white fire continue to consume the beast, the leathery skin melting away, then the muscles beneath it, and finally the huge skeleton. The cold crept into her bones, and she got up and went over to her tumbled pallet. She slumped in the middle of her bed, dazed and exhausted, until a slight lightening in the grayness to the east told her that dawn, such as it was, was rising.

  Eleanor looked down at the sword beside her. There were dark smears on it, and she dragged it down to the snow and scrubbed the blade until her hands were aching with cold. When it was clean, she rose with soaking knees and carried it back. She dried it carefully with her blanket and wrapped it up again.

  She rubbed her hands together vigorously, then shuddering a little, she stripped off her robe and shift, casting them a distance away onto a small patch of snow, then pulled on her other clothes. She slipped out of the ruined hose and put on the first set she had worn, still a little damp from their washing the previous day but clean. She struggled into the boots, bruised feet protesting, then huddled in her cloak and damp blanket against the warmish ground beside the stone.

  Eleanor opened the leather bag and took out the bread and cheese. She ate witho
ut tasting and would cheerfully have killed for a good cup of hot coffee. Her thoughts were aimless and pointless, and she only stopped eating when she realized she had consumed half the remaining food. She sighed and tucked the rest away. Then she opened the bottle of mead and took a swallow. The smell of honey seemed to linger after she had capped the jar, and she realized that she could still smell the beast.

  The offending hose lay nearby. She picked them up and carried them a distance away. She picked up the smeared robe and shift and looked at them. The shift was beyond recall, but the tunic was mainly dirty along the hem. After a moment, she took out the little knife and hacked the bottom off the garment. She shook it out vigorously and took it back to her little pile of stuff. She put on one petticoat, which, in her haste to dress, she had not donned, and packed the other into the leather bag with the food and the book.

  She looked at her meager possessions gravely. "Wrolf, you don’t happen to know a nice horse with an urge for travel, do you? I’d settle for a donkey. I wish I didn’t have such modem notions about cleanliness, or that I could go to Bath and use the hot springs. 1 also wish I had a needle and thread. Skirts are pure hell to fight in, not that I want to do any more fighting, you understand, but I have to expect it. I just hope I don’t meet anyone who knows how to use a sword. I sure don’t. I hate to ask, but why me?”

  The stones hummed their endless tune as Eleanor began to gather her belongings and arrange them about her person. Her back protested as she slung the sword into position, and she could feel that she was chafed across the shoulder blade from the day before. She slipped the bag over her shoulder, clasped the cape around her throat, and started to leave.

  Wrolf whined and danced around her, blocking her movement each time she started to leave the stone under which she had slept.

  "What is it?”

  He barked and bounced over to a dark patch where the beast’s blood had touched the earth. Wrolf scrabbled frantically at the patch, sending bits of dirt flying into the air. Then he charged back to her.

  "What? I didn’t have time to file an environmental impact report. I should clean up the mess, right? Yes, I can hear the earth moaning, too. How in the name of...?”

  Eleanor removed her cloak and slipped the bag off her shoulder. She took out the bottle of holy water from the pouch and stared at it. Wrolf gave a tiny growl. She put it back and took the mead from the bag at her feet. She stood thinking for several minutes.

  She could see her father, bristling with vitality, speaking on ritual, magic, and religion. "All ritual was spontaneous once,” he had roared. "It was a matter of necessity. A shaman did something, said some words, and if they worked, they got codified and repeated. So, when you study a ritual, remember it is a mire of traditions, but it began life as pure, dumb luck.” Her father had never been very romantic about his work.

  "Oh, Mother Earth,” she began slowly. "I sorrow for this desecration of your holy body. I hear the pain you suffer. I do not know how to heal the hurt, but perhaps if together we remember sunlight and flowers and honeyladen breezes, the pain will diminish.” Eleanor walked over to the largest patch and poured a splash of mead on it. "Dear Gea, take this in token of happier times and be renewed.” She repeated her prayer at each place where the beast’s blood had fallen and gave each a drop of mead.

  The music of the stones changed subtly. Its tempo quickened slightly. When Eleanor turned back to get her cloak and bag, the first patch she had treated was rich with grass. It seemed to flow out like an unrolling carpet of merry green. A few brave crocuses pushed their heads out of the ground and waved their gold and purple banners. Eleanor stood and stared at the ground around the stone.

  "My mother always said crocuses were a small miracle,” she told Wrolf as she picked up her things, "but I never thought to see anything like this. No wonder Ambrosius was eager to get rid of me.” Then she shouldered her burdens and cut across the circle to the south.

  V

  As Eleanor came to the two smaller circles of stones that stood in the middle of Avebury, she paused. In her time, the tiny village of Avebury stood right in the middle of the circle, its church, museum, and houses all crowded together in the midst of the remaining stones. There was no village here, but only a kind of blinding whiteness in the air, like a shimmering snow cloud.

  The two center rings made a different music than the sarsen stones of the outer circle. It was a higher, sweeter song, and she thought she could almost make out the words, though they seemed to be in no language that she knew. She could see nothing beyond the brightness. Even the solid blue of Silbury Hill was invisible.

  After a moment, she swung to the right, planning to go around the western ring. She stumbled forward a few steps and ran smack into the face of a stone.

  "Huh! Pardon me,” she said reflexively. "Wrolf, where are you?” She groped out, blinded. A cold nose touched her hand. "Can you see?” There was a bark she could not interpret. "I do wish they had offered Wolf and Stone in the language department,” she grumbled, moving cautiously, and banging into another stone. After she had repeated this experience twice more, Eleanor was convinced that the stones were moving. She was beginning to sweat despite the chill of the day.

  "Okay, fellows, enough is enough. I see you have a good sense of humor, but I don’t want to play Blind Man’s Bluff. I sure don’t want to be It.” The music sounded like laughter or a stream bubbling over rocks. "What do you want from me?” she screamed in frustration.

  A voice inside her said, "Why, to dance, of course,” as clearly as if it were written. The whiteness blinding her faded, and she could see the stones vibrating in their places. Eleanor could hear the joyous laughter in the music as she stepped inside the circle and bowed to the first stone. "Waltz or minuet?” she asked.

  Eleanor was not much interested in folk dancing and had regarded square dancing as some form of major penance. In addition, she was clumsy in skirts touching the ground. But she decided that she was going to do it wholeheartedly. So she bowed, skipped, lifting her skirts awkwardly, and do-si-doed around each stone in the circle until she was breathless and warm. She flopped down against the nearest stone, wiped a slight film of sweat off her face, and grinned. She had to admit she felt better. She glanced around and found Wrolf lounging in the middle of the circle, observing her antics with an air of lupine superiority.

  A great feeling of warmth and happiness filled her. "Thank you for the dance, folks,” she said, patting the stone beside her in a friendly way. "We must do it again sometime.” Only the laughter answered her.

  Eleanor wiped her face again and moved out of the ring toward the south edge of the outer circle. The snow seemed less thick under her boots and the air was positively warm, but she attributed this to her recent exercise. She found herself humming "Skip to My Lou” under her breath and chuckled.

  At the southwest edge of the circle was a long, double row of stones called the Kennet Avenue by the archaeologists of her time. Eleanor remembered this from her yisit the previous fall. It began with an enormous single stone called the Devil’s Chair. When she reached this, she was surprised to find a building, or rather the remains of one, pressed against the side of the stone. The building had been constructed of stones cut into oblongs and mortared together. The floor had been flat stones, but it had the appearance of something exploding from beneath it. The walls and floor were flung outward.

  She stepped closer to the destruction. There was a dark pit in the middle of the mess. A stench, sickening and familiar, rose to her nostrils. It was the beast’s lair. Eleanor gagged and stepped back.

  Something rustled under her foot and she jumped.

  It was a page from a book. She picked it up gingerly and tried to make out the words. It looked to be from a Bible or missal. She sat down on a fallen stone and smoothed the page across her lap. The hand that had copied the words was terribly ornate, so that each word was almost a picture. After a while she gave up trying to read it.

  She g
ot up and picked up a few more pages scattered in the litter of blown leaves and broken branches. Books were her great love, from her shabby use-worn Oz books to the signed copies of her parents’ works, and she felt she could not bear to just ignore these rumpled remnants of what had probably been the only volume in the village.

  One of the pages was a calendar of some kind, pillars dividing the sheet into four parts with the name of the month at the top of each pillar. Eleanor suddenly realized that she had to keep track of time, which, without writing implements, defeated her for a while. The page in her hand was for June to September, the days marked off by saints’ feasts.

  Overturned amongst the debris was a large stone bowl with carvings on it. She squatted down and looked at it. There were stylized cups on stems, which might be flowers, and an interlace of arches, like rainbows, leading from one cup to another, two away. These were almost undamaged. There was the figure of a man on one side, standing on his head from her point of view, holding a long thing in one hand, which might have been a spear or a sword. Where the long thing rested near the man’s foot, it crushed the neck of a serpentine figure Eleanor had no trouble identifying. The man had been hacked at with something, and his figure was a broken mess.

  "This was some kind of church, Wrolf—St. George’s, maybe—and the beast was trapped underneath once, but it got out. I don’t think I can make this right. But a little mead couldn’t hurt. Ugh! The smell.” She took a deep breath, pinched her nose, and went over to the pit. She poured a generous dollop into the earth, praying silently, then backed away.