Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

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

  Doyle gave a long, slow grin and nodded. "Perhaps that would serve. But... what?”

  "Well, what can you do?” It was not a matter they had ever discussed.

  "Like Wrolf, anything of earth or water.”

  The answer surprised her, both halves of it, and she twisted a strand of hair around one finger thoughtfully. There was something the wolf and the man held in common. "I saw Wrolf turn into an otter. Is that what you mean by water?”

  "It’s one possibility.”

  "Why won’t you give me real answers?” She was tired and irritable, and she had a craving for turkey sandwiches smeared in mayonnaise. The closest turkey was halfway around the world and wouldn’t come to England for several hundred years. And coffee and some cigarettes, she added to her wish list. Everything I want is in America.

  "Because it is more interesting to watch your mind work—and better for you, too.”

  "Sure. Everyone is always doing me favors for my own good!” She twisted another strand of hair almost viciously into a curl.

  "It is not my place to instruct you. I have probably told you more than I should already.”

  "I thought...”

  "You thought you could depend on me, and you were wrong. Never depend on anyone, Eleanor. Or anything. You have to work this out on your own.”

  "Then why are you here?” She smothered the hurt of his words.

  "It’s my destiny, not my task. I am only a player in your tale.”

  "No! I won’t have it! I know you were reluctant to

  begin, and I suppose perhaps you only did it because you wanted the damned sword. Well, you have it. But things are different now, aren’t they?”

  "No. It’s still your tale, not mine.”

  "That really must irk the hell out of you, playing second fiddle to a woman.”

  "’Tisn’t new.”

  "So why don’t you just take the sword and leave? I won’t stop you.” She was livid.

  "Nay. I can use this hunk of metal, but it still belongs to you. The sword only functions properly... well, it needs a woman’s touch.”

  "But I used it.”

  "When you were yet a maiden.”

  Eleanor considered that statement, thinking of Artemis and Diana and Athena and Bridget in their bloody nymph aspects, and understood what he meant. She didn’t want that power back, and yet she admitted she missed it. Until this moment, she’d thought Doyle was a fair trade for her virginity. She was tired of challenges and wished she could curl up in a nice quiet hut somewhere and raise sheep and knit. She reached a hand out to caress the rowan-wood staff, remembering Sam and Sarah and their baby, regretting all the small comforts that had vanished in the fire. Then she shook herself and turned a glare on him.

  "If I had wanted to do this alone, I could have skipped two very wet journeys.”

  "You look a proper Medusa with all those snaky curls round your face, and I’d turn to stone if I knew how.” Irishmen always tease when they want to hide their feelings. Her father’s presence was almost tangible for a second as she recalled those words. So she used her mother’s time-honored method of dealing with Celtic jocularity. She changed the subject.

  "Why can’t you? Stone is of earth, isn’t it?” She noticed that her words and voice mimicked her mother’s, which made her frown, then shrug.

  "I canna’ decide if I care less for yur bark or yur bite, vixen.”

  "Yes, I know you would prefer me to be a die-away miss who never lifted anything heavier than a kerchief. What can’t you turn to stone?”

  "You’d be useless if you were. Stone is not of earth, it is earth. A faint and philosophical distinction but real. I cannot explain it better.”

  She thought about that, then said, "You mean, if you could be a thing of fire, you could be... a phoenix but not a flame?”

  "Yes.”

  "All right. Could you change to a dragon? Your mother is a serpent, after all.”

  "I might, but I still could not fly. Or breathe fire.” "No, I see that. You’d be... more of a great worm.” "If I wasn’t afraid you’d break, I’d beat you.”

  Her green eyes glittered. "No, you wouldn’t. I’d probably enjoy it and spoil all your fun.”

  He smiled slowly. "I think my mother got a daughter-in-law worthy of her. Vixen is too mild for you. Shrew.” Eleanor remembered the terrible beast that had pursued her into Merlin’s Grotto and shook her head. "Try wolverine.”

  "Cooked or raw? Now, tell me, lady, why you would wish me to be... a great worm, to use your infelicitous phrase.”

  "See that tor? The church on it was dedicated to St. Michael, the dragonslayer. My... educated guess is that perhaps that means that there is some energy in the hill that is anti-dragon. I want to wake it up, if it exists, and send it against the Shadow here at Glastonbury. And if there’s nothing there, we will have at least gotten to the top of the hill. Those Shadow folk would assume, I think, that a dragon would be one of their own and give it a wide berth. But somehow we must get to the tor.”

  "An interesting plan. A good plan, if fraught with a number of unknown qualities. If you are right, what will stop this energy you sense from rising up and killing me?” He didn’t sound worried by the possibility, just curious.

  "Your light, I hope. Or turning back into yourself!” "Your mind is like a roebuck pursued by hunters, graceful and swift.”

  Eleanor found her face was hot under this unexpected compliment, and her heart raced unruly in her chest. She forced calm into herself. "Doyle, what day is it? I have lost all track of time.”

  "May Eve.”

  She did not ask how he knew, but thought instead of Beltane, the pagan fire festival the church had turned into May Day or Lady Day, changing whatever goddess was honored to the Virgin Mary. Frazier, she remembered, had commented that it was a time for hunting witches in Germany. Walpurgisnacht. She could not recall if Hieronymus Bosch had ever painted that event in his twisted, hellish vision of the cosmos, but if he had, she was sure the faces in his painting must look like those empty people flooding into Glastonbury in answer to some dreadful summons. Eleanor spent a moment pitying her future victims, then turned her mind to the task at hand.

  XVII

  Doyle made an impressive dragon, she decided, studying the completed change with a director’s eye. He was about a dozen feet long, elephant-high, and covered with a scaled hide of bronzy leather. His jaw was crocodilian, toothed and fanged fearsomely, and only his eyes remained their natural blue. A nightmare creature with six limbs, four walking and two clawed arms at his "shoulders,” and a tail ending in a barbed point. He carried the sword, ensheathed, in one clawed hand, and he was decidedly male.

  Eleanor found herself blushing for the second time in an hour. Then she allowed him to lift her with his other claw and settled onto a sort of natural saddle between his arms and the first set of legs. Wrolf had watched the entire proceeding with lupine superiority, and now he got to his feet with a grin that said he was glad to be moving again. Eleanor clutched her staff and pressed her knees into the leathery hide.

  As they moved down the hill, she found her thoughts drifting to a friend of her father’s, an American writer who lived in Ireland in a farm called Dragonhold, and wondering what she would think of Doyle’s form. She certainly didn’t feel like one of the writer’s dragon riders. She only wished she was as gutsy as Lessa of Pern.

  I don’t care for scrawny redheads.

  The thought startled her, and Eleanor realized it had come from Doyle. "What? Did you... read my mind?”

  How else could 1 speak in this bloody body! I never would have expected such a prim and proper female to have such a shocking imagination.

  Eleanor mastered her sense of personal violation after a few minutes. There was no portion of her body he did not know, so why worry about her mind? Except she

  did. Finally she answered, "Not shocking. Just boringly Freudian.”

  She had the mental sense of a snort, then his thought, He must have
been a sad fellow, if those were his ideas. My, I had no idea you had so much knowledge stuffed into your head. No wonder you wanted to hear all those tales. Would you have gotten renowned in your world, for your knowledge?

  "I don’t think so. I would always have been compared to Daddy.”

  Not thy dame? She seems to have worn her own face.

  "I’m not as strong as my mother.”

  Again the snort. You don’t know how strong you are.

  They reached the bottom of the incline, moved through a stand of blighted apple trees, and out into the sight of the straggling mob. Eleanor leaned forward against the dragon’s back, making herself as flat as possible and praying the Shadow pilgrims wouldn’t look too closely. She could hear uneasy murmurs in the crowd, but apparently there wasn’t much initiative left in the human husks. Despite the coolness of the day, sweat dripped down her sides. Wrolf trotted beside Doyle so-he was hidden from the mob’s view.

  An exhausting hour later, they reached the base of the tor as the crowd veered away toward the remains of the town. The dragon clambered up the fairly steep incline with the wolf loping ahead, and they finally reached the battered stone tower, all that remained of the church of St. Michael. Eleanor slipped off to the ground and found her knees shaking. Without volition, she lay facedown upon the earth and kissed it, though whether she homaged her mother-in-law or some other spirit she could not have said.

  She could hear, as she had at Avebury, the murmurs of earth under the feet of Darkness. There were other sounds as well: the choked rattle of water stifled in its course, and something like the distant rumble of thunder. How long she lay crucifixed upon the ground she never knew, but when she rose, the bloody globe of the solar body was sinking in the west.

  Eleanor leaned on her staff, trying to sort the voices of earth and their tales. She looked around for storm clouds, for the thunder still echoed in her mind, but there was nothing. Still, she had her clues, if she could only interpret them.

  Twilight fell as she thought, and she looked at the faint silhouettes of the many mounds that surrounded the vale. An image forced its way up through the clutter of her mind. The witch-fires of Arnor. For a long time it had no meaning. The starless shadow of the Darkness crept onward.

  Eleanor walked around the base of the tower, and she heard a gabble of shouts from below. Looking down, she saw a pack of shadow people staring up at her. From the positions of their hands, she knew they had been defiling the well at the bottom of the hill with their bodily wastes.

  Something snapped inside her, some cord of kindness and pity. She hated them and what they served. Eleanor lifted her arms and shouted, "Bridget, come to me.” For a second, she was horrified at her abrupt presumption.

  Then the tip of her staff sparked, and she pointed it at a distant mound. The hill burst into cheery flame at its top. Grimly, she continued her circuit of the tower, widdershins, bringing each rounded hill into fiery life.

  She returned to the still draconian Doyle, and Wrolf. Wife, you make a fine bonfire! He had never called her that, and it shocked her and steadied her simultaneously. Now what?

  "I haven’t the faintest idea,” she replied sharply. "I’m making this up as I go.” Eleanor paused. "But I think I wait for moonrise.”

  Yes, you’ll need to draw down the moon.

  Why this old phrase frightened her she did not know, but something was stirring in the bones of the earth that was more pressing. The thunder was closer, a rumbling noise that penetrated the soles of her feet.

  "I think I’m about to make a mess of your mother’s floor,” she commented.

  Serves her right for being so tidy.

  Eleanor would have laughed if the tower had not suddenly sprouted an apparition of eye-searing magnificence. It was blue, the blue of flame, and winged, but it was more harpy than angel—naked, winged and talonged, sad-faced and angry. It rose a hundred feet around the building, dripping globules like molten gold and screaming.

  "Doyle, change!”

  I hate missing a good fight was his answer. He galloped down the tor to swing Bridget’s fiery sword against a mob of Shadow people, who had finally found the impetus to attack. The blue flame-thing seemed to hover above the tower for a second, as if disoriented, then swooped down on the chaos that the dragon and the mob were creating between them. Eleanor was too stunned by the scene to take any action at first, the blue glow of the creature illuminating the players with something not unlike the glare of lightning while the Beltane fires she had raised on the hilltops seemed to gouge at the Shadow-sky with ruddy fingers. The people rushed back and forth, attempting to evade their various adversaries.

  Doyle seemed possessed by an unseemly bloodlust, even for an Irishman, trampling, hacking, and smashing the folk aside with his tail. The angel-thing alternately attacked the dragon and the mob, as if it could not choose between enemies, and Wrolf had apparently decided the whole thing was a frolic, for though he tore out throats of the Shadow folk efficiently enough, he had a playful air about him.

  Eleanor decided his draconian body must have affected Doyle’s mind. The worst part was that there was no way she could conceive to direct the angel, and as she watched, she became afraid that it would damage her spouse as badly as the Shadow people. The golden drops from its body clung and burned to every surface they touched, and the hands seared actinically when they made contact.

  The Shadow folk were not completely ineffectual, if only by their sheer numbers. They hated the light, but it seemed to drive them into frenzies of action, and Eleanor realized that if she didn’t enter into the battle, Doyle and the wolf would almost certainly die. If only she could think of what to do, for she knew that charging into the fray with her staff would only be a little more than no use.

  Draw down the moon. The command rang inside her head, and she stood bewildered. Despite all that had happened, Eleanor felt ignorant and inadequate. And afraid. Studying the activities of the blue angel, she was not confident of her capacity to make independent judgments. Still, she could not just stand there!

  She moved around the tower again until she stood above the well. The cries of the combatants faded as Eleanor searched for the newborn moon above the shadow of Albion. It was difficult, for she was tired, the moon was young, and the mindless malevolence of the Darkness was strong. For a time it seemed impossible.

  There was then in her mind a ripple of silvery green waters, with laughter, and the Lady of the Willows was almost tangible within her. It was at once a lover’s embrace and a mother’s comfort. Eleanor remembered her discussion about the relationship between the symbol and the reality and suddenly knew she did not need the real lunar orb to give her power.

  She felt a flush of affection for Sal and her acerbic sense of humor, turned the face of her rowan staff so the new-moon carving stood away from her, and sent her thoughts down into the earth, to the waters that fed the sacred well of Glastonbury. An argent glow came from the staff, and far away she "heard” a gurgle that rose to a chorus, then became a roar, as if all the waters of the world were rushing to this single point.

  The Chalice Well fountained like a geyser, straight up in a silvery column a hundred feet or more above the earth, scattering the choking debris in its throat all about. The waters fell back to ground like quicksilver, rushing floodlike toward the mass of Shadow people surrounding Doyle. It swept and swirled, rising higher and higher, and a kind of mist enveloped the people, a fireless smoke that coiled from their mouths and eyes in the lightning-blue glow cast by the angel-thing.

  They screamed and slapped at their bodies as if they were being eaten by driver ants. The waters gushed onward, sheeting out around the foot of the tor and inundating the remains of the town. A few Shadow folk tried to outrun the flood, but the argentine stuff stretched out curling tentacles to lay them by the heels and send them howling into cleansing death.

  The silence was as sudden as a shout in the night, and Eleanor stared down at a surface as smooth as the face
of a telescope’s mirror. It reflected the witch fires she had called on the low hills, the anguished countenance of the angel, and a sliver of white that was the moon of her staff. The only sound was a faint paddling sound and an occasional lupine grunt as Wrolf dispatched those few creatures who had survived.

  The angel-thing surveyed the mirror of water for a long moment, then shot up into the sky as if it wished to rend the veil of Darkness and dived back into the tower to vanish. Eleanor blinked and strained her eyes against the sudden absence of blue light and ran down the tor. The waters shimmered for a second, then sank into the earth as if they had never been.

  The mud Eleanor encountered was her only evidence that the waters had been real. She picked her way between the blackened skeletons of the dead, searching for Doyle by the now faint glow of her staff. The bones crumbled to ash around her.

  The flicker of Bridget’s sword drew her to him. His draconian form was gone, and he lay on the muddy earth as still as his slain foes. There were many slashes on his arms and legs, which bled feebly, and bums where the angel had touched him.

  Eleanor knelt beside him and touched his throat, seeking a pulse and suppressing the panic that he might be dead. A faint throb reassured her, and she stroked his broad brow and tried to rouse him.

  "Doyle, Doyle, wake up.” He did not move.

  Wrolf lumbered up, tongue lolling, and giving every evidence of having had a high old time in his fashion. He flopped wetly down beside Doyle’s unconscious form and began grooming his paw pads. Eleanor wished she had his simple confidence. She sat on the sodden earth and pillowed Doyle’s head in her lap, too weary to do more.

  The dim light of dawn found her stiff and aching, and Doyle still unmoving. Eleanor had slept fitfully, and her neck hurt from slumping forward. She rubbed the muscles with icy fingers and tried to ignore a growling stomach, a parched throat, and a full bladder. The latter finally made its demands so strident that she set Doyle’s head down and stepped away to relieve herself.

  She went to the well, now bubbling gently in its course, and cupped a handful of water to her lips. A wooden cup floated up into view, and Eleanor just stared at it blankly for a moment. Then she caught it in chilled fingers and turned it around. It was carved from willow wood and identical, as far as she could tell, to the one that had perished in the fire she had made in Ireland.