by Sarah Rayne
“Yes, they’re very tranquil, these mountains,” said Dubhgall in the manner of one humouring a child.
“Calming,” said Joanna firmly.
“Very likely,” agreed Dubhgall. “Of course, it’s as likely to be the magic up here as anything else.”
Cormac, who had been rather quiet since their escape from the Morrigna, said, “But the magic of the Morne Mountains is the purest of all the magics.”
“Well that’s what they say,” said Dubhgall.
“Of course it is.”
“We’ll hope so,” said Dubhgall. “But we all know that there’re sorcerers in these mountains, and they’re a greedy breed, sorcerers. There’s no knowing whose pay they might be in,” said Dubhgall. “Nor there’s no knowing if someone’s got here before us.”
“Who?”
“The Erl-King,” said Dubhgall, and a rather terrible silence fell. Joanna, who was a little ahead of the others, caught sight of three large-winged, very black birds sitting on a jutting rock, and just for a moment, the sun seemed to slip behind a cloud.
Gormgall looked round and said in a whisper, “But that can’t be so.”
Cormac gave himself a little shake and said, “Of course it isn’t so. The Erl-King’s powers have never stretched this far.”
“So they say, Your Majesty. How do we know that isn’t just a rumour put about by the Erl-King himself, just to lull us all into a false sense of security?”
“Well,” said Cormac, “I never heard that the Sorcerers of the Morne Mountains were other than extremely loyal to my family. In fact, it was those very sorcerers who worked harder than any to try to regain the Girdle of Gold for us.”
“Yes, you never heard they were other than loyal, Sire, but that isn’t to say they were,” said Dubhgall, and having thus unburdened himself of this opinion now assumed a more cheerful mien. “It’s my belief,” he said confidingly, “that it’ll be as well for us not to trust anyone we meet in these mountains, human or otherwise. And I never trust sorcerers of any description,” said Dubhgall, chewing reflectively on his portion of stew which Joanna had cooked from the rabbits that Gormgall had snared earlier.
“And anyway, we aren’t going into the mountains yet. We’re going on to Gallan. Goodness gracious me,” said Gormgall rather crossly, “I should hope that His Majesty knows better than to venture into the mountain halls with only the four of us! We need at least half an army before we even think of it,” said Gormgall.
“Armies don’t worry sorcerers,” said Dubhgall.
“No, but Cait Fian can muster a remarkably strong force,” said Gormgall. “And what’s more, he’ll know the gossip. If anyone knows what goes on in this part of the country, it’s Cait Fian. That’s begging Your Majesty’s pardon for seeming to speak ill of his cousin,” added Gormgall, who never, no matter what the occasion, forgot what was due to the High King and his near family. “But Cait Fian always does know what’s afoot,” he added in an aside to Joanna, and Joanna, who had been rather dreading meeting the Mountain sorcerers (meeting any sorcerers) heaved a sigh of relief to think that they were going directly to Gallan.
“Of course,” said Dubhgall, just as everyone was beginning to relax, and Joanna was thinking they might after all reach Gallan, “of course, you don’t need to go into the Mountain Halls to meet the sorcerers. I dare say they’re prowling about all over the mountainside. We shall very likely meet one tomorrow,” he added, and, rather pleased at having imparted this sober note to the party, composed himself for a night’s slumber, and then kept everyone awake by snoring enthusiastically, until Cormac kicked him out of his fur rug.
But in fact nothing occurred to cause any disquiet to the four travellers as they went deeper into the mountains. At times Joanna thought the Nightcloak stirred and whispered, and once or twice they saw the black carrion crows — “Are they following us?” asked Gormgall once.
“Are we following them?” said Dubhgall.
Joanna shivered and said, “Oh don’t.”
“I only meant it could be a trap,” said Dubhgall, but he looked chastened.
“Even so,” said Joanna to Cormac later that night, “I believe the cloak is protecting us.”
“From traps and sorcerers?”
“From something,” said Joanna, and Cormac looked at her.
“One day, Human Child,” he said softly, “one day, I shall take you down to the Sorcery Chambers of Tara; to the great central chamber which is called the Supplicants’ Chamber and I shall show you the rock that Tara stands on. It is called Dierdriu’s Rock, and on it is the great Queen’s likeness, etched in gold by the people who served her who loved her, and who wept for a year and a day when she died.
It has never faded, and it has never weathered.” He paused. “We will see it together, you and I, Joanna, but for you it will be like looking in a mirror.”
Joanna was frightened and delighted. She said, “Am I then so like her?”
“Not to start with,” said Cormac, studying her. “Not when you came into Scáthach, when the Wolves escorted you across the great Bridge to my place of exile. But you are a little more like her each day. You know her thoughts and you speak with her tongue.” He smiled. “Even I have not the old pure Gael that she had,” said Cormac. “But you have it. You challenged Morrigan with it in Muileann. Dierdriu is you and you are her,” and a shiver of the purest excitement spiralled under Joanna’s ribs as he spoke.
But — Yes, of course she is part of me, she thought. The High Queen returned … How else did I know how to challenge Morrigan? And how else did I have the strength to endure the things Morrigan did to me? I shall never be able to forget it, thought Joanna shuddering, but I did endure it. And a cold sickness twisted her stomach at the memory of that night in Morrigan’s chamber, and Cormac took her hand. Joanna thought: he knows what happened up there in that dark evil-smelling room. He will never ask me and I will never tell him, but all the same, he knows.
“Of course I know,” said Cormac. “It is in your eyes and in your heart. I hear the echoes.” He looked at her, suddenly and disconcertingly more wolf than human, certainly more mystical than she had ever seen him. “You will forget it,” said Cormac, his eyes hard and slanting and golden. “Memory is arranged in layers. The topmost layer is vulnerable. It is open to the air. But it is quickly laid over with other memories. You are overlaying it now, Joanna. You are burying the memories of Morrigan and Muileann with new layers. Your pleasure in these mountains. Your anticipation of Gallan.” He smiled suddenly. “Cait Fian will fight me for you,” he said, “but he shall not have you, Joanna.”
Walking on through the purple-misted Morne Mountains, listening to Gormgall and Dubhgall reminiscing about their last visit to Gallan — “The year before the usurper’s rebellion it was.” — “Two years before,” said Dubhgall — Joanna did indeed begin to forget.
“Of course you do,” said Cormac, his eyes golden and slanting, but soft this time, making love to her on the grassy mountainside in the shelter of a half-cave. Joanna had protested; she had said, “Gormgall and Dubhgall are within hearing,” but it only excited Cormac more. Joanna lay back and saw, outside the cave, the sky and the mountain peaks, and vivid splashes of colour from the mountain ash and the gentians. She thought: he is right. I am forgetting.
“Of course you are,” said Cormac and bent over her.
“It’s all very well,” said Joanna at length, “but how am I to face Gormgall and Dubhgall when we rejoin them? They will know what we’ve been doing.”
For answer, Cormac laughed and pushed her back on the grass.
“Again?” said Joanna, half joking, half not. And, “So soon?” she said.
“Girl dear, did you think me a weakling? A rabbit? A beaver? A —”
“Rabbits are extremely virile.”
“So they are. And one of the Beaver line was once my staunchest and truest Councillor,” said Cormac, and Joanna thought: damn! Now I have reminded him of his lost kingdom.
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“I do not need reminding,” said Cormac softly. “It is always with me.” He touched her face. “But one day soon, I shall regain it, and then we will look upon Dierdriu’s likeness, you and I.”
It was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as Joanna had thought, to rejoin Gormgall and Dubhgall after these interludes.
It is true that once Dubhgall said, “I expect you’ll be hungry for your supper now, Sire” and it is true that Gormgall every night paced out a discreet distance between his and Cormac and Joanna’s makeshift beds, but these things could be accepted with a small degree of equanimity.
She thought of the journey — later when she was able to look back on it — as a kind of intermission. She certainly thought of it as a lime of renewal and refreshment.
“My feet often blistered from walking so far each day,” she would say, “for of course, we had had to leave the horses with the Cruithin and the Wolves far beyond Muileann. And I used to worry every day about whether we would hunt down that night’s supper. But I do not recall being other than deeply happy on that journey.”
And blisters could be soothed with Gormgall’s pots of ointments — “All brought along specially, my lady, for I knew how it would be” — and if there was ever a night when they had no supper, Joanna did not remember it.
There was food a-plenty in the mountains; rabbits and hares which they snared and made into savoury stews with handfuls of herbs: wild thyme and sorrel and lemon balm, and the pungent wild garlic that grew on the roadside. And there were leaping fish in the mountain streams that could be caught and grilled over their camp fires and eaten hot and fresh. There were berries of a kind Joanna had never seen.
“Delicious raw,” said Gormgall, picking them, “but even more delicious if we just cook them gently for a few minutes with honey and a drop of His Majesty’s mead. I knew we’d be glad of all these provisions, Sire. I said so at the time.”
“They’re a bit cumbersome to carry,” said Dubhgall, but he had two helpings of the berry and mead concoction which, as Gormgall had promised, was very good indeed.
“It’s a pity we didn’t bring the berries from the Sleeping Trees,” said Gormgall as they sat back replete and rested.
“It’s a pity you threw them away on the Muileann borders,” remembered Dubhgall.
“They went rotten,” said Gormgall.
“Waste of time gathering them then,” said Dubhgall.
Once they managed to kill a wild pig, and Cormac made Joanna retire while he and the others skinned and gutted it.
“For,” said Gormgall, sharpening his knife, “you don’t want to see what it is you’re eating, my lady. Not but what we shan’t all enjoy it, and I’ll gather a few apples and slice them up in the pot. There’s nothing so grand as a touch of apple in with roast pig.”
On the fourth day, as they began to descend the mountain path and Cormac was shading his eyes and peering into the distance, Dubhgall shot with his longbow two pigeons, which he said he would make into a pie.
“Pigeon pie,” he said. “Although I’m bound to say that there isn’t much meat on a pigeon, Your Majesty. You need at least six to make it anything like enough.”
“Enough for a good supper tonight, though,” said Cormac.
Dubhgall said, “Ah, but what about tomorrow, Sire?” and Cormac laughed and pointed.
“Look my friends! The Mountain Palace of Cait Fian! Gallan! Tomorrow night we shall dine in the company of the Wild Panther people!”
And there, towards the east, wreathed in clouds of mist was Gallan and the ice-blue Mountain Palace.
As they started down the mountain path, three carrion crows circled above them …
*
In the darkest, deepest Sorcery Chamber, Bricriu sat again in the Supplicants’ Chair and looked at the sorcerers ranged about the oval table.
“You have done what I asked?”
“We have. The Three Sisters are following the Wolfking and his servants. They are keeping watch on them.”
“Ah.” An expression of the utmost satisfaction passed over Bricriu’s face. Then — “Have they killed them yet?” he asked.
“No.” The sorcerer regarded Bricriu. “That is their price, Son of the Vixen. They will fight on your side against the armies of Cormac, and of Conaire of the Eagles, and Cait Fian of the Wild Panthers. They will use sorcery and necromancy to win … But the Wolfking and his Lady they will keep for their own purposes.”
Bricriu said, “The Morrigna want Cormac?”
“Not for themselves,” said the sorcerer. “For their master.
“They will feed the Wolfking and his Lady to the Erl-King. There is no escape for them.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Brian Muldooney, respectable pig farmer and a person of some standing in Tugaim, was very nearly at a loss. He thought wasn’t it all too bad of John Grady to lead them on this ridiculous wild chase through the night, and he wished, and had been wishing for some time, that he had not come. The girl, Joanna, pretty little dear, was certainly a loss to Muldooney’s farm, but not so much that she could not be replaced. As good fish in the sea as ever came out of it!
And now here they were in the middle of a dark old forest, which might be anywhere at all, but which seemed to lead absolutely nowhere, and there was nothing to help them get out but the cold, eerie music.
Muldooney did not trust the music. He did not, in fact, trust music at all — senseless frivolous stuff. He certainly did not trust this odd tuneless singing that crept nearer and nearer and then backed away. It was all very well for John Grady to put his head up and listen, and say wouldn’t they follow it; Brian Muldooney knew that the music was in some way wrong. He sought for words to explain this to Grady, but he had never been a great one for the explaining, and he failed to find the words. Well, looked at sensibly, there were no words. It was just wrong. It made you think of upsetting things. It made you think of pain … misery … hunger and thirst and dark and loneliness.
Yes, Men of the Desolation, we are hunger and we are thirst …
It made you think of endless dark seas and yawning chasms and bottomless wells where water drip-dripped echoingly for ever …
Oh yes, we are endless, Men of the Desolation, and we are timeless … we are at home in the dark oceans of the world, and in the underground caverns, and in the water caves of our ancestors …
And it was cold. It was so cold that you felt icy lumps form at the pit of your stomach, and you felt your bones ache, and a great solid knot of coldness form behind your breastbone.
Cold we are, Men of the Desolate World … for we have no human blood in us … but once you have seen us, once you have descended to our caves, you will never want human warmth again …
It had seemed very sensible to just stop and take a bit of a rest in the tavern they finally came to. John Grady said, “Ah! A road at last!” and bounded forward, but Muldooney followed more slowly, because he did not trust roads and taverns that appeared so conveniently out of nowhere; very likely it would be a trap of some kind, he said knowledgeably, and John Grady, who was tired of wandering about in the dark with this idiot, and who wanted to get closer to the music, said sharply, “Don’t be absurd, man.” And then, “What sort of a trap?”
Well, as to that, Muldooney would not like to say. He had heard tell of such places, he said darkly; wicked, sinful houses set on lonely roads to trap weary travellers, luring them inside where all manner of decadent practices went on.
John Grady said, “But it’s just a tavern. Look at it!”
Muldooney did look at it, and a poorish sort of place it looked, half set into a rock as it was, and with a kind of greenish growth half obscuring it. He thought that anything might lurk in there, although he did not say this, because of being called absurd again. Muldooney was not a man to invite insults. He said, rather loudly, that the place did appear to be a tavern, to be sure it did, not that he had ever actually been inside such a place. He had too much consideration
for the teachings of the Survivors, he said rather piously; hadn’t they taught how the Letheans’ taverns had been wicked places, full of laxity and greed, and very likely even — fornication. He said this last word in a whisper, because it was not the sort of word a man liked to use, not even to Grady the Landgrabber. Especially not to Grady the Land-grabber. Anyway, he said, if you believed only a quarter of the stories about the Letheans’ drinking places, your toes would curl in your boots. To himself, he thought that the place had the same sort of wrongness about it that the music had. Also, he’d heard tell that you had to spend good money in such places, and that, although he was not of course a mean man, was a great old consideration.
Still, there was Grady, dead set on going in after the music, and Muldooney was not going to be left standing out here at the mercy of the cold dark night. Very likely it would do no harm to just go inside for a rest and a bit of a warm. He was also just the smallest bit curious to see what such a place might look like. And so he agreed that after all they’d just take a look inside, and then they’d be on their way again. He thought privately, that if there was any paying out to do, Grady could do it for the both of them, for wasn’t he known as a well-heeled man in Tugaim, and him an Elder to boot! Plain pig farmers had not the means to be flinging good coins about in taverns. He would tell Grady so if he had to. Muldooney was not the man to jib at speaking his mind.
John Grady, staring at the half-covered, half-cave place, said in an odd, vague voice: “We might meet someone inside who would direct us on our way again,” and Muldooney at once saw the sense of this. What way, he did not quite know, but he had heard that people were apt to be very friendly in taverns. Even so, John Grady hesitated.
The lighted windows of the low dwelling were rather inviting, and the place itself was intriguingly and attractively set into the rock face. There were warm savoury scents and there was an air of welcome. Every fibre of him wanted to step inside and follow the music to its source.