Wolfking The Omnibus: Books 1-4

by Sarah Rayne

  “Has it — has it gone?” said Joanna, thinking how strange her voice sounded. But the cave was empty — yes, there were only the two of them in it now. “What was it?” said Joanna at length.

  “One of the nightmares. You invoked the power of the cloak against me.” A rueful smile. “I do not blame you. Forgive me, Human Child, for being what I cannot always help.”

  “One of Dierdriu’s dreams?”

  “A nightmare.”

  “Is that what will happen if I use the cloak again? Will that — that thing, those eyes — will they come back?’

  “I don’t know,” said Cormac. “Dierdriu must have dreamed many dreams and many nightmares. Some of the creatures of the cloak may be twice as terrible.”

  “Oh,” said Joanna in rather a small voice, but she thought: well, after all, it is only a nightmare. Not real. Even if it comes again, I could banish it. All I had to do was ask to wake up … nothing so very terrible about it at all when you think.

  “It was more than just a nightmare, Joanna,” Cormac said. “I do not know a very great deal about the Ancient Ireland — our bards, the filid, would tell you more eloquently than I ever could, but I know a little for it is every High King’s birthright. I know, as my ancestors knew, of the dread sorcerers of the North.”

  “The Erl-King.”

  “And his servants. Dierdriu would have known them, for at the very beginning, the Erl-King and his minions were forever waging battle on Tara. There were many wars — oh, the filid could tell you tales for a year and still not have told the whole. The battles of Mag Tuired; the magical Fomoire led by the Son of Goll the One-Eyed and by the Son of Garb. The Crusade Wars of the followers of Crom Croich — the god-idol who is a being of pure gold, and who eats the living hearts of his victims and must have a hundred sacrifices on the night of Samain. And of course, the famous Battle for the Trees, which was won by neither side, but where the sorcery was so powerful that it sent the Trees into a slumber from which they will probably never awake. Dreadful battles, Joanna.

  “Dierdriu would have known many of them, for the Erl-King sent out his dark servants to Tara for countless years, and it fell to Dierdriu to turn them back …” He paused, and his eyes were far away. “They tell, our poets and our music makers, of how she rode out at the head of her armies, her hair so long it was like a black curtain falling to her knees. She rode a black stallion, a Barbary brought from the East by the people of Tarshish, and she never went into battle without wearing the sidh’s Nightcloak about her shoulders.”

  And the man with black-fringed, blue eyes was at her side …

  “She defeated the Erl-King and his minions,” said Cormac, “and they were banished to their mountain halls. But the sight of them must have been a terrible one, for it is said that the Erl-King himself rode at the head of his armies in the final battle, and it is certain that Dierdriu saw him face to face.

  “She saw his servants as well. The Giant Miller of Muileann who grinds human bones in his mill to make bread for the Erl-King’s banqueting table. And the Morrigna, the sinister and destructive trio of women who have always served the Erl-King, and who haunt battlefields. She defeated them all, but she would not have been able to forget them, Joanna. They would have lived on in her dreams. They would have become part of the Nightcloak.”

  It brought Dierdriu suddenly and startlingly close to think that she had been haunted by the faces of her vanquished enemies. It softened the image of the strong and mighty Queen, so that for the first time, Joanna saw Dierdriu as a real person. Someone who could be victorious, but who could suffer nightmares afterwards.

  “The thing we saw tonight … the eyes …”

  Cormac hesitated. “She was one of the Morrigna. The dread trio who scavenge the earth for their master. Their leader is Morrigan — that is Queen of Phantoms. She is the strongest, and she is one of the most powerful sorceresses to come out of the Dark Ireland. She is the seductress of the three; she lures her victims into a web, by presenting herself to them in the light best calculated to soothe and lull. They say she is possessed of a voracious and perverted sexual appetite and that she will have women, as well as men, in her bed. Like the Erl-King, she eats human flesh and bathes in human blood, and it is said that the two of them dine in his Citadel by firelight in an immense stone banqueting hall, and that their banquet is human meat and their entertainment is to bring up from the dungeons the poor wretches they have imprisoned. They have cages and pincers and red-hot needles, and there is no torture too cruel for them, and no perversion too warped for them.

  “The middle one of the trio is Macha, who is bald and ugly and who is called the Mother of Monsters. She has a great army of misshapen creatures at her command, and they will tear a man to shreds. She can call up the hags and the harpies and the crones and the banshees and she is formidable in battle for that reason.

  “But it is the third one that we saw tonight, Badb, which translates as Scald-Crow. She is a shape-changer, and she is a being of many forms, which she can don at an instant, each one more terrible than the last … She can swallow up whole armies with her Eyes or her Mouths.” He looked at Joanna. “What we saw, was Dierdriu’s last memory of Scald-Crow,” he said. “Dreadful.

  “But pray to whatever gods you hold dear that we never have to face the Morrigna in the flesh, Joanna.”

  *

  “Who are your gods?” said Cormac, as they rode through the waking day, the Cruithin and the Wolves padding behind them.

  “There were very few,” said Joanna, relaxing a little now, enjoying the warm sun on her face, liking the scents of the countryside all around them. Ahead lay the Forest of Sleeping Trees. Cormac had said she would like that. “It is very beautiful,” he had said. “And it is a place for renewal.”

  “There was never much time for gods,” said Joanna who was finding, truth to tell, the preoccupation of Cormac’s people with gods a bit unusual. In Tugaim you did not think very much about gods. As her father had always said, gods did not help you a great deal when the harvest had to be gathered or the well ran dry in the drought. Gods were all very well in their place, said John Grady, but their place was in the fairytale nonsense of the Letheans. In real life you concentrated on the tasks you had to do, and there was not very much time to spare for gods. Whatever gods might be anyway.

  “You see,” said Joanna carefully, “there was always so much to do.” And then, because this might have sounded a bit disrespectful, “For quite a long time there was so much to do,” she said, and looked at Cormac to make sure he understood about this.

  But he only smiled at her rather thoughtfully, and said, “Tell me,” and Joanna was heartened.

  “Our world was nearly destroyed,” she said. “Although a great deal of our history was lost to us, we have the accounts of Devastation from those who survived it. And we know that whole cities were burned; we know that people lay dead for years beneath the ruins, rotting and breeding disease. Stories are told of lone survivors eking out existences in tunnels and in cellars. Eating the rats before the rats ate them. Surviving the Apocalypse, but living in total solitude until hunger or thirst or disease killed them anyway. There were people who left diaries,” said Joanna, her face solemn, her eyes far away. “We have them preserved in the People’s Museum in one of our towns. And they tell a truly terrible tale, Cormac. It is something that we have never been able to forget. So much suffering.”

  “But the people who survived the Devastation,” said Cormac, “were they not strong? Warriors?”

  “I don’t think,” said Joanna “that they were, really. I think they were just people who survived, because they were lucky or because they fought a little harder to stay alive. I don’t think it was anything more than that.” And she smiled at Cormac, who was probably visualising great heroes and warriors.

  Cormac said softly, “And even if the people who lived in your world before Devastation had gods, those gods did not help them so very much.”

  B
ut Joanna did not think that the Letheans had had any sort of god. “Theirs was rather a — a greedy world, I think,” she said. “They did not have very much religion. And even if they did, even if they had a god or gods, those gods were not able to hold back the Apocalypse.” She frowned, “Perhaps that is unfair.” And thought that perhaps it was. “There is a belief that our ancestors summoned the Apocalypse and then failed to control it. Perhaps God — their God — allowed Devastation as a punishment.”

  “Gods frequently punish,” said Cormac. “And never quite as one would expect. Had those ancestors — the ones who burned the world — had they forms of worship at all?”

  Joanna hesitated, not because she did not know how to answer, but because just for a moment she had been back in Tugaim, back in the rather small, rather badly lit People’s Museum, turning over the brittle mildewed pages of the famous diaries, left by the survivors, jealously and rigorously guarded. “For posterity,” had said the men and women who ran the Museum. “So that we shall not ever forget,” but Joanna thought that people would never forget Devastation.

  “The stories vary so much,” she said to Cormac. “We know that the Letheans had gods, for the legends tell of them. The diaries mention them. We know that there was a book which was called the Bible, and portions of that have survived. It is quite strange that that survived when so much else was lost. But the parts that we had, did not tell us a great deal, because it was all a jumble of stories and people, and is, was, all so — so unconnected, that no one ever made any sense of it. I think it was old before the Letheans’ time anyway.”

  “Tell me about the Letheans,” said Cormac, and Joanna looked quickly at him, in case he was only being polite. But he laughed, and said, “I am never polite and rarely diplomatic.”

  He took her hand. “I want to know about you,” he said. “I want to know about your world, Joanna,” and Joanna smiled rather warily, because when he said her name like that, when he turned his voice into a caress — and really, it was truly remarkable the caress that Cormac could get into his voice when he wanted to — the delight ran all over her, and she had to look away in case her expression gave her away.

  “Their worship — if that is what it was — was not at all selfless,” said Joanna. “The fragments of their Bible warn against the adoration of graven images — that is, carved reproductions. But the legends all suggest that the Letheans did worship those things. There were objects, possessions, they must all have. It is there, in the diaries. How they must always own better machines than their neighbours; how they must never be seen to own inferior ones. They travelled about in machines, you see,” explained Joanna. “The secret has been lost, but we know that they never walked, or not very often.

  “And there are descriptions of the houses that were destroyed by the Apocalypse. Rich furnishings and complicated machinery for cooking. The diaries sometimes refer to them, and describe what was lost. They liked their comfort, the Letheans,” said Joanna, and then hoped she had not sounded bitter.

  “Had they festivals?” asked Cormac. “Feastings?” and Joanna remembered the rather scrappy drawings preserved with the diaries.

  “There were huge halls,” she said, “vast high-ceilinged buildings with rows of seats and a raised platform at one end. But I do not know the purpose of the halls, although they could seat hundreds of people.

  “And there are references to centres where food could be bought. They flocked there, the entire family, and bought the food, in greater quantities than you or I could imagine. After I read about those centres in the diaries,” said Joanna, “I used to dream about it. And it was a — rather a disturbing dream. Great brightly lit places with rows upon rows of food; meat and fruit — oh, everything! Bread already baked — think of it. You just picked it up and carried it away. In the dream it is always very noisy — the Letheans were a noisy people I think. And the light so glaring. In the dream, the Letheans are running up and down, rather like squirrels, gathering up all they want-gathering up more than they need — and then taking it to their homes. It’s rather an unpleasant dream,” said Joanna. “There is always such a greed and such a complacency in the faces. And there is surely laziness as well, for all they have to do to be fed is stretch out a hand and take what they want.”

  “Greed and complacency are the most self-destructive of all the faults,” said Cormac. He smiled at her. “Perhaps their god allowed the Apocalypse to teach them to be less selfish.”

  “It was a hard lesson,” said Joanna.

  *

  The Forest of Sleeping Trees was as beautiful as Cormac had said. Joanna, rested now, refreshed by a breakfast of lake fish and wild honey prepared and served by the Cruithin, thought she had never seen anywhere so perfect in her life.

  “Yes, it is one of our hallowed places,” said Cormac.

  The Sleeping Trees grew close together — “for company,” said Cormac quite seriously — and the great velvet-skinned berries hung down in clusters.

  “Shall we be able to ride in between the trees?” asked Joanna, lowering her voice to a whisper.

  “Yes. There is a path. But we must not stray far from it. To be lost here would be to be lost forever. You would sink deeper and deeper into slumber until you could not be roused.”

  There was a soft golden light among the trees, and Joanna could not decide where it came from. She thought it came from the sky, but that did not seem quite right, and then she thought it came from the trees themselves. “But I never really discovered,” she said afterwards.

  The light moved with them, like reflected water-light rippling against old stone walls. There was a rich warm scent, and a faint drowsy hum.

  They gathered the berries cautiously, reaching up to the laden branches, bringing down armfuls. “Be careful not to break open any of the berries,” said Cormac, “for we should be overcome at once.”

  But Joanna could not resist burying her head in the velvet-skinned fruit, feeling the warm dark folds of sleep reach out for her, so that she backed away at once, and shook her head to clear it.

  None of them wanted to leave the calm forest. “Although we shall come back,” said Cormac.

  “Shall we?”

  “When the battle is won,” he said. “This is a place for renewal. My people have always come here after a war has been fought. It cleanses the mind of horrors, and sometimes it eases the pain of wounds. But its air is strong, and one has to take only small draughts of it. But we will come back, Joanna; we will lie beneath the trees, and sleep and wake, and be whole again.

  “‘Unknown is wailing and treachery

  In the familiar cultivated land:

  There is nothing rough or harsh

  But sweet music striking in the ear.

  Without grief, without sorrow, without death.

  Without sickness, without debility.’”

  He stood looking down at her, his eyes gentle, and Joanna thought: how could I ever have been afraid of him?

  “You could and you will again, Human Child, for I cannot be other than I am. It is only here, where the air is filled with peace and with enchanted slumber that you trust me completely. But we are beginning to understand one another, I think.” He gave himself a shake and turned to the waiting Cruithin. “Have we the berries?”

  “Yes Sire,” said one of them. “Purple berries for the Deep Slumber, red berries for the Slumber of Life, and golden berries for the Slumber of Love.”

  Cormac said, “I see black berries.”

  “Yes Sire. The berries of Death.”

  “Then gather them also.”

  The man regarded him. “That would be against the ancient code of Your Majesty’s ancestors,” he said, and Joanna noticed that although he spoke quite politely, there was no trace of subservience in his voice.

  “Do it,” said Cormac rather sharply.

  “No,” said the man, still quite respectfully. “For if you use the Death Berries without the permission or knowledge of the Sleeping Trees, you viola
te the code of all the High Kings, ever since Dierdriu … Sire,” he added as an apparent afterthought. “Your Majesty knows that, of course.” Joanna thought he did not say any of this as if he was threatening Cormac, or even as if he was annoyed with him, or worried; he said it as one stating a plain fact. “Your Majesty has surely not forgotten the Law,” said the man, whose name was Gormgall.

  Cormac frowned and his eyes glinted. “Remind me of it,” he said, the hint of a growl in his tone.

  “Certainly Sire,” said Gormgall, who had served Cormac and Cormac’s father, and who was not in the least bit intimidated by black frowns and growls. “But Your Majesty knows it well enough.” He paused, and then said, in a singsong voice, “No enchantment, magic, sorcery, spell or beguilement of any kind whatsoever, may be used in times of war, battle or peace, in any manner whatsoever without the full knowledge and consent of the one who created the enchantment, magic, sorcery, spell, or beguilement.” He eyed Cormac. “But Your Majesty remembers very well the oath he took when ascending to the High Throne.” He put his head on one side and waited, and Joanna thought he was treating Cormac a bit like a wayward child.

  Cormac said, “You are right, of course,” and frowned again, because no one, and certainly no one who has once occupied a throne, likes to be corrected.

  “We may take the berries of Sleep,” said Gormgall. “They will not keep for very long, of course, but we can take them because they are not really magical. They will put guards and sentries to sleep, but they are no more than a kind of herb. But the berries of Death are a powerful magic, and unless Your Majesty likes to consider waking one of the Sleeping Trees to ask permission —”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Cormac crossly. “The Trees have not been woken for centuries. Nobody knows how to.”

  “No,” said Gormgall gravely. “And I cannot think of anything more annoying than to be woken up to ask if an enchantment could be borrowed for a week or so. The tree you chose would very likely not be best pleased, Sire, even if you were to choose a holly, who are reputed to be particularly good natured.”