Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

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

  "I did not bargain for being mother-naked in an Irish spring morn,” she snapped, and coughed again. "The next time a goddess tells me to save the world, I am going to say no.” She coughed so hard she bent over double, gasping for air and clinging to his strong hand.

  "You wouldn’t, you know.” Doyle stoked her long black hair. "Like me, you’re much too duty-bound.” "Then I’ll demand an instruction manual. Doyle, I could have killed us. I don’t know how to handle my powers... and who is going to teach me?” She sighed. "I liked that hut. It made me think of Sal.”

  "What a pass to come to. My only rival is a droopy creature of wells and moonlight. Why do you love her so much? I should have thought bright Bridget would be more to your taste, my spitfire.”

  Eleanor did not answer for a long time, thinking of his words, sensing the seriousness beneath the faint teasing. Why did she love the cool lady of the willows, who reminded her in curious ways of a mother she had never cared for? There was no answer in her, except a kind of music, the sweet sound of rushing water across rock, two voices raised in wordless song. "Maybe because she cared enough to come down off her high seat and tell me things instead of speaking in riddles.”

  "Do you think that was love? Goddesses rarely give gifts without... attachments.”

  "It’s more than I’ve gotten from anyone else. You won’t even tell me how we’re going to return to Albion.” "You mean she didn’t show you how to walk on water?”

  Several replies rose to her lips, but she only said, "Teasing Irishmen are a dead bore.”

  "Ouch! Next you’ll be boxing my ears.”

  "Maybe. I’ve already singed your beard,” she answered, tugging at a few crisped wisps. "Everything is burned up, isn’t it?”

  "Not the sword, for it was made in fire.”

  "Damn the sword! I wonder you bother to sleep with me when you love it so much!”

  "Nay, I wouldn’t. Think of my manhood.”

  Eleanor giggled. "I can hardly think of anything else when it’s staring me in the face.”

  "Lusty wench! For a lass who was a maiden not long ago, you’re remarkably... healthy.”

  "I don’t know any other way to be. Should I act embarrassed or shy?”

  "No. It’s just a bit unexpected, though why I should imagine I could predict a woman, I don’t know. One second you’re a sulking termagant, the next a nymph. And here comes some Irish weather to make our day perfect.”

  The overcast sky released its burden of moisture in a drenching downpour, which soaked them and made the dying fire hiss and steam. In ten minutes it stopped, or passed over them to some other place, and they rose to explore the ashes of the hut.

  As Doyle had predicted, the sword and its scabbard were unharmed, the interlace patterns still bright with color. Bridget’s cloak, too, was intact, and to Eleanor’s surprise, her rowan-wood staff with the quarters of the moon carved in the top was unmarred. Everything else was destroyed, and she had a pang for the precious impedimentia of her journey, the knitting pins and yam, the cup and bowl from Sal, the clothes, and the beautiful book of Bridget that Brother Ambrosius had given her.

  Eleanor clasped the blue cloak around her throat, and it fluttered and billowed slightly in the faint breeze. She looked at her staff, unaware that she appeared to Doyle a bright figure garbed in starry night, for a moment displaying the unnamed deity of which she was a reflection, a servant, and an aspect. The staff was a rod of power, tying earth and sky together an instant.

  Doyle was awed, shriveled by the limitations of himself, man and nearly immortal, giant and yet dwarfed by a mere slip of a girl. For a second, she was the most beautiful and terrible of women, a thing to make a worm of his mother, and then she was just a naked girl with sooty feet and smears of ashes on her face. He shrugged and remembered that in the end they were only mortals and that the gods within them were less important than the fragile, tenuous partnership they had begun. She did not know her power yet, might never know it completely, but he was sure that if he told her, she would probably laugh and call him foolish. The strength was not diminished by being unacknowledged, but it would not be enhanced by premature disclosure.

  For the first time in his very long existence, Doyle was aware of the briefness of what remained. Soon he must surrender to his ritual fate, a fate long delayed by the needs of time itself, and he found a deep regret. The earth he had taken for granted would swallow him up soon, and he wished it might be different, though once he took a wife and left his mother’s house, the die was cast. He wanted to see her come into her own, her full glory, and there was no time. Then she spoke, and he let loose of the heaviness in his heart, wishing now to make their time together sweetly memorable.

  "Doyle, why didn’t the staff bum, too? It isn’t magic— at least no more than rowan is. But Sam told me it was carved by human hands, and I seem to remember rowan burns well, not the reverse.”

  "Because you’ve put some of your own power in it.”

  "How?” Her eyes were bright with interest.

  "There you stand, turning blue with cold and begging for instruction. Come along. Let’s move to get warm, and I will tell you what little I know.”

  They reached a small cove in midafternoon. Eleanor’s bare feet were bruised and cut with stones, her calves scratched with brambles, and she was cold, for a brisk wind blew up from the chilly sea. She was hungry as well, for their midday meal had been some nuts and bitter windfall from a crab apple tree. But she was well content, for Doyle had spoken of magic and power, and she had learned something of the possibilities, if not her own capacities.

  Naked, Doyle was even more bearlike than clothed, and he seemed unaffected by the cold or hunger. But he, too, seemed pleased with their talking. And Wrolf padded beside them, occasionally racing off through the underbrush to strike terror into the hearts of rabbits and squirrels, though his actions appeared more playful than serious.

  They climbed down a path of sorts, to the cove, and Eleanor glanced around, half expecting a coracle to float in on the foam-flecked waves. There was nothing but sea and sky. She drew the starry cloak closer around her and regarded Doyle hopefully.

  "Are we going to fly?”

  "You might but not me. And I fear you will not like the mode of transport I have in mind.”

  Eleanor looked out at the choppy sea. "Unless it’s the Queen Mary, you’re probably right. Could I really fly?”

  "Yes, but not yet. We must go out to the end of that spit.” He pointed to a rocky projection on the left.

  "Oh, my aching feet.” But she trudged beside him through the gravelly sand, onto lichen-covered rocks, and out to the point. The water curled against battered stones. There was nothing else. "Doyle, I’m not a strong swimmer.”

  He did not answer but bent over the churning sea and made a sound like a scream. Then he sat dotfn and folded his arms over his knees to wait. Eleanor shrugged and sat next to him.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, a spout of water broke the sea, followed by a sleek, dark head with gaping teeth. Eleanor stared in horror at the grinning monster, then at two. They cried a sharp note and capered in the waves.

  "Doyle,” she whispered, "those are killer whales.”

  "Yes, I know.” He rose and walked to the water. "Come along.”

  "You’re right. I don’t like it at all. How does one... ride... mount... hold on?”

  Doyle had stepped into the sea and vanished, for it was very deep beyond the rocks. His dark head broke the water a few feet offshore, and he stroked strongly toward one of the orcas. Wrolf barked and leapt into the ocean, and Eleanor took a deep breath, said a mental prayer to the capricious lady who had gotten her into the mess, and followed suit, clutching her staff awkwardly in one hand.

  The icy waters closed over her head, and she almost panicked, remembering Sal’s iron hands holding her down in the bath. She kicked hard and felt herself rise until she came to the surface, coughing. The salt stung her cuts and scratches, and the cold seem
ed to freeze her lungs, but she put her arms forward, holding the staff with both hands, and flutter-kicked away from the rocks. Something sleek and smooth slid under her belly and lifted her above the waves. The great intelligent eye of a killer whale regarded her curiously as she choked and gasped. Something rough brushed her knuckles, and she saw there was a kind of harness, a thing of silvery stuff, around its shoulders. Eleanor grabbed it with her right hand, held the staff in her left, and clenched her jaws to keep them from chattering.

  A rough head broke the water beside her, and large brown eyes looked at her. It was Wrolf, but a Wrolf so changed, she would never have known him but for the now familiar aura of light that glowed from the silvery pelt. A seal? she wondered, then saw the webbed paws and realized that her companion was now, somehow, an otter, the biggest otter, perhaps, the world had ever known.

  Doyle, atop the other whale, gave his strange cry, and they raced off into the Irish Sea. The journey was a nightmare of cold and eye-stinging spray, of aching hands and cramped muscles, of screaming lungs when the beast submerged and gasping breath when it came up. Eleanor discovered after a time that she could gauge when the whale was about to go down, and it took all her concentration to manage that.

  The world darkened as the sun set, and the dreadful trip continued. Twice she was sure she was going to drown in the chilly waters when it seemed the orca would never come up, and once she was certain she had seen the kelp-crowned lady of the deep, whose face she found more terrible than Sal’s or Bridget’s or any other she might imagine, for the face smiled and beckoned, the bony hands reached out and clutched. But the orca sped past, and there was air and starlight, and finally the faint, warm, earthy scent of vegetation that meant land.

  The orca ceased its headlong rush, and Eleanor released her death grip in the harness, slipping into the waters as the beast swam away. She forced her legs to move, a bicycling movement that got her head above the sea, then dog-paddled with one hand and two cramped legs until her chilled toes struck bottom. She half waded, half crawled onto the shore and crouched there, retching and coughing with the sodden cloak across her.

  Doyle picked her up and carried her up across the rocky beach and into some sandy dunes that lay beyond. There was some sweet-smelling stuff growing crouched across the dunes, and he laid her down on it. Wrolf sprawled nearby, his normal wolfish self, and set about grooming his paw pads. Eleanor huddled and tried to think warm, dry thoughts, but the chatter of her teeth distracted her. Doyle chafed her hands with his, rubbing screaming muscles with strong fingers, until she began to feel the tingle of blood in them.

  Eleanor looked up and saw that the sky was starless now. Albion still lay under the terrible Darkness, and she wondered how, even with Doyle, she could defeat such a presence. Then she slipped into a fitful doze that blotted out cold and hunger and a task she was too tired to contemplate.

  XV

  She woke pillowed against his bare shoulder, with Wrolf pressed against her other side. It was a warm nest of flesh and fur, with the sky cloak lying lightly across her body. Eleanor ignored a call of nature, reluctant to move, aching in every bone and muscle, hungry, thirsty, yet filled with a sense of serenity that even the grim morning of Albion could not depress. Then Wrolf stirred and padded off in search of breakfast, and she dragged herself up and some distance away, rather surprised her body had any fluids to remove.

  When she came back, Doyle was sitting up, his black hair snarled and matted with salt, looking more beast than man. He gave her a partial smile, for his lips were cracked and bleeding, giving his friendly gesture an ogrelike flavor.

  "Next time, let’s walk,” she croaked.

  "Or fly.” His voice was a creaky hinge. "Let’s find some water.”

  Eleanor wrapped the cloak around her, took up the staff, and they went inland until they found a trickling stream. She thought no liquid had ever tasted so sweet. When her thirst was quenched, she splashed the chilly stuff on her salt-rimed face, shivering and flinching at the stings, suppressing visions of steaming baths, scented soaps, and odorous oils. Then she dabbled her feet in the icy waters and wiggled them in the air to dry.

  "I’m hungry,” she said with the air of making a great revelation.

  Doyle, rinsing his black mane in the stream, chuckled. "What, no fit of fury over our journey? Has the sea damped my spitfire?”

  "After I eat.”

  "A practical woman.”

  "Doyle, can you call animals like you called the whales?”

  "I can, but I won’t. When I hunt, I am as other men.”

  "Oops. Sorry. It’s hard to think when I’m hungry. Where are we?”

  "In the country of the Cymry, I believe.”

  "Wales!” She was dismayed for a moment, thinking of her torn feet and the miles to Glastonbury. Then her sense of the ridiculous bubbled up like a spring. "Why should I be surprised? Where else could they have brought us?”

  Wrolf bounded up, gave his follow-me bark, and leapt away. They got up and went in the direction he indicated, and came eventually to a drousing farmstead with a pen of sheep complaining in ovine voices, and chickens scratching at the ground for grain or worms. Three largish dogs lolled in the shadow of the house, but they leapt to their feet when they saw the strangers, barking furiously and bounding forward. Wrolf growled and raised his hackles, and two of the canines paused in their attack. The third, a younger and less experienced animal, flew at Wrolf’s throat, but the wolf just swung his great head, knocked the dog onto its flank, and it fled, yelping.

  A man emerged from the shadow of the doorway and stood gaping at them. The other dogs decided discretion was the better part of valor and continued barking from a distance until Doyle said a single word, at which point they groveled and whimpered. The man eyed them cautiously, clearly unsure what to make of two naked people in his farmyard, and Eleanor wondered where she had misplaced her modesty.

  "Good day!” Doyle shouted.

  The farmer considered this a moment. "Aye, but fairin’ up fur rayne.”

  "Could we get some breakfast?” It was such a foolish request from such a savage-looking man.

  "Porridge,” answered the farmer, as if wild men and women were an everyday occurrence on his doorstep. "Come in.”

  Doyle had to crouch his head to get under the lintel, and Eleanor’s brow was a mere inch from it. Inside, they found a large room, low and claustrophobic for them, warmed by a huge fireplace and reeking of cooking, sweat, animals, and damp babies. Two toddlers staggered around their mother’s skirts, and several older children regarded the intruders with round eyes. They were all small and dark but neatly dressed in homespun wool, if the loom in one corner was any indication. The trestle table was scrubbed and clean, set with wooden bowls and spoons.

  The farmer’s wife turned from her stirring, saw Doyle, and gave a shriek. Eleanor didn’t blame her in the least and hoped sincerely that Wrolf would stay outside. Then the wolf stuffed his head through the door and lolled his rosy tongue at the solemn youngsters. One little fellow burst into tears, but the others were too bemused to respond.

  The farmer was clearly well out of his social depth, and Doyle oblivious to the overwhelming effect of his size and manhood, so Eleanor stepped discreetly in front of him, shielding her own body with the cloak, and forced a sincere smile across her face. "Good morning.”

  Apparently relieved by this simple greeting, the wife nodded and bobbled a curtsy of sorts. "More bowls,” she said to one of the older children, a pretty girl about twelve. They were clearly not a very gabby family.

  The young girl goggled at Eleanor, mouth open, and refused to turn her eyes away as she took bowls off a clumsy shelf and dusted them out with the sleeve of her shift. The wife clanked the pot of porridge down on the wooden table and began serving. The children held out their bowls, and Doyle and Eleanor sat down, Eleanor excising her mind to think of some garment for her companion. Even if the farmer had any extra clothing, it would hardly fit her large hus
band, who clearly had no modesty at all and wore clothing only for warmth.

  They ate the rather sticky cereal, unsweetened but nutty-flavored, in the silence that seemed to suit the family. The children gave Eleanor an occasional shy smile but eyed Doyle with some awe. The meal was done before a quarter of an hour had passed, and Eleanor was pleasantly warmed by the fire and a full belly.

  She turned on the bench and saw two of the children, the girl and a slightly younger brother, shielding their siblings from Wrolf s benign interest. Eleanor reflected that none of the males in her life ever seemed aware of their impact on the world, including her father, in this mild criticism. "He will not hurt you. He likes children.”

  The girl gave her a look, as if to say, "raw or cooked?” Then she asked a question that clearly had been trying her mind during breakfast: "Art thou merry merry?”

  Eleanor nearly said she was happy but not that happy, then realized that the child was saying Mary mare, a common epithet of the Virgin for those who lived near the sea, as well as being an easy pun in tongues derived from Latin. She shook her head and smiled, then chose a name in Welsh, which had the same context as her own, though a slightly different meaning: "Guinevere.” She knew she was safe with these simple folk, but she could not overcome her reluctance to reveal her own name, knowing that the innocent could serve the Darkness as well as the committed.

  The girl’s mouth made an O, and Eleanor immediately wondered whether she was being mistaken for Arthur’s wife or the local goddess of the same name who predated him. The scholar in her stirred, and she wished she could just be a simple folklorist, collecting adventures instead of having them. He wistful reverie was broken by a sound like brazen trumpets outside.

  Eleanor rose in a flutter of cloak and said, "Silver Heels!”

  Doyle gripped her arm and yanked her back so hard, her neck snapped. "Not yet,” he hissed.