Altan glimpsed two of his sub-commanders, their cuirasses spattered with gore, one of them missing his helmet. “There!” he said to Lucian, pointing, and Lucian called to Bella and Ardis. They galloped up to the officers, mud and sand spattering from their hoofs and the metal-shod wheels. Altan pointed at the hill and the retreating Cateni. “Ilkur,” he shouted to the helmetless one, whose disheveled brown hair glistened with oil and blood. “Take these men here, and give chase to the Cateni. This battle’s not over. You, Musa,” he said to the other. “Gather your cohort. Take the left flank, and get behind the Cateni. Don’t let them get to their embankments. Put them between the horns of the bull, and keep them engaged. The draoi will be reluctant to send their spells if it means killing their own. Move! Both of you!” The officers saluted and began shouting orders, and Altan gripped Lucian’s shoulder. “Lucian, take us back down to the beach to our engineers. I want the siege engines assembled and ready and the barrage started now. We need to give the damned draoi something to worry about.”
“Sir!” Lucian nodded. He yanked hard on the warhorses’ reins, and they moved down the slope through a landscape of dead and wounded soldiers, discarded and broken weapons, and torn earth.
Altan pushed his engineers even as the battle raged a few hundred strides upslope. Within a half turn of the glass, two of the half dozen ballistae had been assembled and moved midway up the hill, close enough that their skein-driven springs could hurl boulders into the stone walls of the Cateni fort. Altan had the artillery experts concentrate their barrage on one point in the wall, each subsequent boulder opening the hole wider.
At the same time, protected by a full cohort of soldiers, a siege tower was trundling toward the earthen ramparts around the fort, drawn by eight armored packhorses and bristling with archers, with drawbridges to cross over the embankments. Altan had Lucian drive his chariot forward again, exhorting the men and occasionally charging into the fray to relieve wounded and pressed foot soldiers. Other officers in their own chariots swept up the slope with them, driving back the Cateni’s own charioteers, few as they were.
For what seemed forever but was likely only a turn of the glass, the battle raged, with the Mundoa moving slowly forward until the siege tower was nearly touching the wall the ballistae had breached.
It seemed they would take the field this day, and that made Altan scowl suspiciously. The draoi should have recovered by now. At any moment, he expected to hear the mages begin shrieking their mad spells, for fire and lightning to descend on them, followed by another wave of Cateni warriors. But instead, from the hill-forts to the right and left, white fire hissed and fumed, visible even in the daylight. In response to the signal, the remaining Cateni turned their chariots and horses as one and fled the field, their warriors on foot hurrying after them. Though Altan expected arrows and spells to come from the fort, nothing at all harried them as they continued to advance, faster now, in pursuit of the Cateni, who were vanishing into the folded hills to either side of the fort.
“Take the fort,” Altan shouted to his officers, to his men. From the chariot, now parked alongside the siege tower while Bella and Ardis stamped impatiently, Altan watched as a cohort led by Ilkur flooded through the breached wall and into the fortifications. Several minutes later, Ilkur appeared at the summit of the wall nearest to Altan.
“Commander Savas, they’ve abandoned the fort,” he shouted down. “There’s none left but the dead.”
A cheer went up from the soldiers gathered around, and they clashed weapons on shields in triumph and celebration, the shouting slowly moving down the slope to the beach. Altan, looking downslope, could see men waving banners on the boats still anchored in the small bay.
“Why aren’t you smiling?” Lucian asked Altan in the midst of the clamor. “We’ve won this battle. We’re standing on Onglse and have taken the first fort.”
Altan shook his head. “This doesn’t feel right. This isn’t how the Cateni have fought before. Greum Red-Hand knows we intended to take Onglse. I’d hoped to catch him sleeping, but …”
“You have caught him napping. This proves it.”
“Perhaps,” Altan sighed. “Let’s go in and see what it is we’ve won.”
Altan continued to shake his head as he looked around the courtyard of the hill-fort. Had he been the commander here, he wouldn’t have abandoned this place so quickly. Yes, the outer wall had been breached, but he could have held the stronghold long enough with the resources inside for help to arrive from the nearest forts: archers on the walls, men working to repair the breach, draoi (not the useless sihirki he had) to cast spells, enough charioteers and warriors to harry and perhaps destroy the siege towers the enemy might bring forward. The inner walls were still intact, and the inland gates were untouched and available to allow reinforcements to enter …
No, he would not have retreated, which meant they shouldn’t have retreated.
Something was wrong …
The day had gone gloomy. Altan looked up at the clouds. They were dark, swirling, and unnatural, gathering directly above the newly taken fort. He felt the chariot move under his feet, and Bella stamped hard on the grass of the courtyard, both of the warhorses’ eyes wide and nostrils flared. A strange smell pervaded the area, causing Altan’s nose to wrinkle. He felt his stomach lurch with sudden fear. All around them, his soldiers were crowded into the area.
“Sorry, sir,” he heard Lucian say. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them.”
Altan paid no attention. He could feel the hair on his arms standing on end and a prickling on the back of his neck. There was a tension in the very air, and a terrible premonition came to him. He imagined he could hear a chorus of draoi chanting distantly.
“We have to get everyone out of—” That was all Altan managed to say before a cold wind rushed over the hilltop and the sky became as dark as any night he had ever seen.
He was never certain afterward exactly what had happened next. There was a flash, a simultaneous roar of thunder, and a sensation like falling from the edge of a tall cliff, an impact that tore a scream of pain from him, then …
Nothing.
As Altan slowly regained consciousness, he first heard the screams of his men. Through the fluttering screen of his eyelashes, he saw smoke rising from a black hole torn in the earth at the center of the courtyard, and around it, broken wood and stone. And broken men as well, some of them struggling to rise but too many of them still and silent on the ground. “Lucian!” he called as he tried to stand and found that he could not; his left leg dangled strangely, broken, and with the realization, nausea and pain washed over him, leaving him sweating. “Lucian!”
He saw Bella and Ardis then—or what had once been the warhorses, lashed into the harness of the chariot. The broken remains of his chariot were to one side, and in the midst of the shattered wooden planks, unmoving …
“Lucian!” he called again, but not far from Ardis’ savaged corpse, he could see Lucian’s open eyes, the terrible wound that had ripped through mail, bone, and flesh. His lover’s arms and legs dangled at impossible angles from his torso, and he knew that Lucian would never again answer.
The scream Altan gave then was not one of pain, but one of loss.
11
Recovery and Lessons
THE MOON HAD GONE from crescent to full and back to crescent again.
For Voada, the moon-cycle had been full of pain as her body slowly healed under Ceiteag’s ministrations; of horrible, wracking grief at her loss of Meir, the abduction of her children, and the sacking of her home; of searing guilt at her own survival and the fact that she didn’t know what had happened to Orla and Hakan; and most strangely, of calm wonder as Ceiteag began to teach her what her own mother had refused to (or perhaps simply couldn’t) teach her. She was slowly learning what it meant to be draoi and beginning to understand what the call of Elia might mean to her.
All that left her simultaneously exhilarated, repelled, and even more guilt-ridden.
If I’d known these things, could I have saved my family? Could I have prevented it all from happening?
She would never know.
“Again,” Ceiteag said, forcing Voada to concentrate once more on the spell she was learning. Her left arm, still healing from the break, was tired and sore and was refusing to cooperate with the movements it was supposed to make.
“I can’t, Menach Ceiteag. My arm, and I’m still tired from the last …”
The old woman looked as if she’d tasted a worm in an apple. “It’s not your arm, Voada; it’s your mind. It’s not your energy you need, but that of your anamacha. Draw from them. Again …”
Voada sighed. She knew from her short time with Ceiteag that the woman would not relent. She would push her and push her until she’d done what Ceiteag wanted. Voada opened her arms and closed her eyes, and her anamacha—invisible in the sunlight but standing close to her, as it always did—responded to her gesture, sliding into her as it had on that awful final day in the temple at Pencraig. As Ceiteag had taught her to do here.
As the anamacha entered her body, Voada found herself immersed in the Otherworld of the dead draoi—not Tirnanog, where the souls of dead Cateni waited to be returned to new bodies, but Magh da Chèo, as Ceiteag called it. That place swept around Voada and overlaid her own vision. Magh da Chèo was a dark, grim landscape, a storm-swept bitter plain that had terrified her the first time she’d seen it. It still frightened her, knowing that this was where the souls of the draoi lived, where she would one day dwell herself as part of the anamacha that had chosen her. Inside the anamacha, she would become one of the many voices going back long generations: a collective of those who had been draoi.
Voada opened herself to the voices.
You must be very careful. You’re not ready yet to meld completely with your anamacha, Ceiteag had told her when they’d first started this study. The draoi inside can consume you if you’re not strong enough, and you must push them away. Above all, don’t call them forward individually; some of those inside the anamacha are too powerful and dangerous, and you won’t be able to control them. Stay away from them, or they’ll send you into madness or death. Don’t listen to them if they call you; don’t let them approach you in Magh da Chèo. Listen to the anamacha only when it speaks with multiple voices …
As Ceiteag had taught her, she flung the spell away from her as the chant ended, stifling the whimper that the motion threatened to cause.
Across the glade in which they stood, not far from the Cateni village and close enough to the river to hear the water, a stroke of lightning arced from the clouds above them to the fallen maple tree that Voada had been told was her target. Thunder cracked, and Voada’s vision blurred with the purple afterimages of the flash. She saw shredded bark fly away and the trunk start to smolder, a puff of smoke rising from it.
The exhaustion that followed the casting of spells hit her then, threatening to buckle her knees. Her anamacha left her, and Voada forced herself to stand erect, trying to show nothing. Smoke curled away from the maple’s trunk and vanished, leaving behind a small, insignificant blackened circle touched at the edges with white ash.
She heard Ceiteag sigh and thought she also heard an echo of internal laughter from both her own anamacha and Ceiteag’s. “Well,” Ceiteag said, “this time you hit your target, at least. That’s progress.”
“I’m sorry, Menach Ceiteag.”
The woman’s face softened then, and a faint smile wiped over her dry, thin lips. “If you’d come to me two or three hands of years ago, when you should have had a mentor guiding you, when you would have been sent to Bàn Cill for the ceanndraoi to evaluate you, because …” Ceiteag seemed to bite off what she might have said. She shrugged instead. “But you didn’t, and yet this anamacha still managed to choose you. That’s something. We should get back. You’re strong enough to walk?”
Ceiteag didn’t give Voada a chance to answer. The old woman turned and strode toward the village with her walking staff, Voada trailing after her. As soon as they entered the clearing, several of the villagers came running up to Ceiteag. “The Mundoa, Menach!” A dozen voices seemed to speak at once, so that Voada had to untangle the threads of their words to understand them.
“Have you heard … ?”
“They’ve attacked Onglse …”
“A battle’s been fought …”
“Hands upon hands dead …”
“Greum Red-Hand wants all draoi who can come …”
“… calling for the clans to send those warriors to fight …”
“Enough!” Ceiteag pointed to Seor, the older man who had first found Voada. “You. What is all this uproar?”
Seor ran a hand through his thin graying hair, as if that might stimulate his memory. “A rider came while you and Voada were away, bearing Greum Red-Hand’s seal. He said he was going to each of the villages, to all the clans. The Mundoan boats we saw on the river hands of days ago, the army marching on the far side—they were on their way to Onglse. The rider said that there’s been one battle already and that the Mundoa are on the island. Greum Red-Hand calls for all draoi to come to him with as many warriors as the clans will send so that he can push the Mundoa back into the sea.” Seor could not quite keep the stern grin from his face. “It’s war in Albann Bràghad again, Menach, and it’s Onglse itself that we’re called on to save this time. I’ll go, and my son, and many others …”
“You should do as you feel you must,” Ceiteag told him. Then her gaze swept over the others. “All of you should.”
“And you, Menach? Will you go?”
Voada saw Ceiteag nod slowly, and she felt her own stomach knot in response, uncertain of what this might mean for her. “I will. At dawn tomorrow. For now, go and make whatever preparations you need, and let me do the same.”
With that, she started to walk slowly toward the temple, and the others in the village began to disperse, talking loudly among themselves as they went to their own houses.
“What are you waiting for?” Ceiteag had stopped, looking back over her shoulder at Voada.
“I … I don’t know …” The confusion roiled in Voada’s head. She could hear her anamacha’s voices as well, but they were all a muddle.
“No, you don’t know nearly enough yet,” Ceiteag answered. “And that’s the problem. Come with me. You can help me get ready.” With a final sniff, Ceiteag continued on.
After a moment, Voada followed.
“What is it that you want?” Ceiteag asked Voada.
Darkness had fallen outside, and a brief supper had been eaten. Ceiteag had said nothing about Greum Red-Hand’s summons; Voada wondered if the woman had forgotten it or if she’d decided to ignore it. Now, across the small table near the bed, Ceiteag gnawed on the end of a loaf of brown bread and regarded Voada. The menach’s eyes glittered in the light of the fire in the hearth, which also shivered the walls of the temple around them. Ceiteag’s anamacha stood near her, as Voada’s did with her; she’d almost become used to the ghost’s constant presence at her side and its shifting, uncertain visage.
“Menach, what do you mean?”
The lines of the woman’s face fell into a familiar scowl. “What is it that you want more than anything else? What kept you alive when you might have died? What drove you to come here?”
That was easy enough to answer. Voada thought of the response to that question every day, and often. “Thinking of my children kept me alive,” she said firmly. “I want them back, and I want to pay the Mundoa back twentyfold for every pain they’ve inflicted on them.” She couldn’t look at Ceiteag as she said the words. The rage filled her. She could feel fury burning on her face
as the bitter taste filled her mouth and her hands curled into fists. The memory of that awful day in what had been her house danced before her eyes: Meir’s taibhse leaving her, Orla’s terror, Hakan’s pain, Una’s and Fermac’s bodies. A helpless tear tracked down her cheek, and she rubbed it away angrily.
“So you want revenge.”
That brought her attention back to the moment. In the dim firelight, Voada couldn’t read the woman’s face. “If that’s how you wish to phrase it.”
“And how are you going to gain revenge? You, one small person, against all of those who did this?”
Voada wanted to shout at Ceiteag for her mockery, but she forced herself to remain calm and shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But my own injuries are mostly healed—I will always be grateful to you for that, Menach—and if you’re going to leave for Onglse, then I suppose I’ll go back across the river to Pencraig.”
“You’re not much of a draoi, and you’re a worse warrior. You’ll die if you do that.”
“You asked what I wanted, Menach, and nothing you can say will make me change my mind. Anyway, I don’t care what might happen. You don’t understand … What they did to them, to me … I have to try to get my children back. I have to.”
A slow nod. “A draoi with her full power might not die. Might even succeed. Your anamacha—it’s a strong one.”
“Then teach me how to fully use my anamacha, and I’ll try to be a good student.”
Voada heard Ceiteag sigh before she had even finished speaking. “I wish I could. But I’m only a very minor draoi with a weak anamacha, which means that I’m a poor teacher for you. My calling is more to be a menach, and you’re not interested in serving Elia that way. As much as I wish I could, I can’t teach you what you need to know.” She pushed herself away from the table and rose to her feet with a groan. “And I’m to bed. You should do the same.” Ceiteag lifted her hand before Voada could protest. “No. You’ve nothing to say that can’t wait until morning. May Elia bless you with dreams of your children tonight.”
A Fading Sun Page 11