And that thought brought him back to the Morigunamachamain. Just last night one of the commanders had complained that Margawt was often seen near the wagons carrying the dead, and the humans were beginning to get frightened by the Morigu's odd behavior. Actually it was rare for any to see Margawt. He was always on his own, hunting the creatures of the swamp, and Donal realized that Margawt was in his own way trying to help by clearing the path ahead of any threats. Still he knew what he must do, and holding tight his sword, the Warlord of the Army of Aes Lugh went looking for the Morigunamachamain.
It took most of the day for Donal to finally catch up with Margawt, for the Morigu was not somebody to be found if he didn't want to be. Donal did not try to hide his presence with magic; indeed, he broadcasted his desire to speak with Margawt. And now, at last, the Morigu had allowed Donal to feel his presence within the swamp.
Donal found Margawt by a small pool of scummy water. The area around the pool was oddly hard and broken, like that found in a place where there has been a long drought. A fringe of small trees surrounded the area, but they had branches on only one side, the side facing away from the pool. On the other side the gray bark was disfigured with streaks of a sickly yellow color and an ugly fungus that was white and hair-covered. It was as evil a place as the half-elven had ever encountered.
Margawt sat near the edge of the water and he was covered with the same orange-white scum that choked the pool. The Morigu did not look up, occupying himself by cleaning his sword with a dirty rag.
"I killed it," he said, and something about that place seemed to amplify and echo his voice.
"Killed what?" Donal asked, as he slowly moved to stand near the Morigu. Margawt pointed at the pool.
"It was once one of the spirits of the river, and had in its day been a great king.. .long ago." Margawt sheathed his sword and tucked the rag in his belt. "But it did not run as the others had and paid the price." Margawt reached out and stirred the scummy water. "Twisted and seduced by the dark spirits, it had become that which it had fought and despised for a thousand years." He shrugged. "It's dead now." Donal waited, but Margawt said no more. The warlord squatted down, but he did not touch the Morigu.
"Margawt," he said, but he could say no more. He could think of nothing to say, no way to communicate with this being that sat before him. The silence between the two stretched on for long moments, and still the half-elven could think of nothing to say.
"I should have gone south," Margawt said. His hand still idly played with the diseased pool. "There is no relief for me here, no moment of non-pain." His hand darted into the water. He brought it out, holding what looked to be a gray-white tentacle. Donal could tell by a sluggish turning of the water at the middle of the pool that the tentacle was connected to some vast body. Margawt's hand constricted and the strange limb burst asunder like ripe fruit, covering the Morigu's hand and arm with a yellow pestilence.
"Have you come to offer me help, Longsword?" Margawt whispered, "or to chastise me for some deed I have done?" He slowly stood up and turned to Donal. The half-elven was shaken by the Morigu's face. It was pale and somehow seemed to be disjointed. The skin was tight as if something pulled it from behind the Morigu's head. But his eyes were pure silver--no whites, no pupil, just flashing silver orbs. Small wisps of steam rose from those eyes and Donal turned from the sight of them.
"It burns me, Longsword!" Margawt shouted. "This land burns me like no flame could ever damage any flesh. It seeks my soul, seeks to infect me! It laughs at me and delights in a thousand little torments!" Margawt raised his hands to the sky and a silver nimbus surrounded him and now from his palms smoke rose and he howled his name.
"Margawt!" he cried. "Margawt the Morigunamachamain! Chosen of the goddess, murderer, and assassin! How!" And his words were filled with power and only one such as Donal could make sense of them. "How," Margawt screamed, "how do you kill a land!!!!" And his screams trailed off to a high-pitched wail.
Donal fell back before the immensity of what he was witnessing. Pain, outrage, despair--what were these but words? How could they in any way encompass the totality of the agony of the Morigunamachamain? The warlord was humbled by such a thing, humbled and shamed, and his great frame shook. But he could not say if it was for sorrow at the Morigu's plights or some other thing. It was a complexity he felt was beyond emotion, beyond logic, beyond words, and not knowing what he did, the half-elven added his own shouts of anguish to that of the Morigu.
It was over almost before it began, and Donal found himself again looking into the face of the Morigunamachamain. But Margawt's face was once more as the half-elven had known it, and his eyes as black and savage and sad as ever.
"What, Donal Longsword," Margawt said in his oddly gentle voice, "what would you say to such as I?"
"You." Donal had a hard time finding his voice, and his words came out a hoarse whisper. "You," he gasped, "you Margawt, you know the names of the dead." Margawt sat back, caught off guard by Donal's statement.
"They are there," he answered, "in the wind, in the stones, the trees--all the lives, all the dead." He bit his lip, his eyes trying to solve the mystery of the warrior before him. "They affect all of us."
"All?"
"All, Longsword." Margawt squatted on his toes and leaned closer. "A good person can affect the actions of the living for a thousand years."
"And evil?"
"Gone, lost." Margawt placed his elbows on his knees. "Evil simply repeats itself, always striving to outdo its last outrage, doomed to the same acts of desecration over and over. They are meaningless once dead." He shrugged again. "Kill them and they are gone like a fog before the sun. Useless in life, empty and barren in death. Leaving nothing, but an edge of guilt and shame. And that doesn't even last."
"And you kill them."
"It is all that I am, all the meaning that is mine to claim."
"Why do you tell me"--Donal waved a shaking hand-- "show me this?"
"Because you wanted to know." Margawt stood up. "Because, Donal Longsword, you are the first being I have ever met that I respect, who would have done differently."
"Differently?"
"You feel the wrongness, but it washes over you; it leaves no mark, no stain. Yet, you feel it. I do not know how that could be." Margawt sniffed the wind. "You would not have made the choice I made, yet I do not know if that makes you greater or lesser than I." And with that he was gone.
Donal Longsword, half-elven, once Warlord of Aes Lugh, then of the Empire of Tolath, now of the Army of Aes Lugh, sat on the hard ground like a child who hides from a hurt. His powerful limbs shook, though no tears touched his eyes. His hand grasped the great sword that lent him his name, and the runes on that blade, put there by a god, burned blue in the gray line of the swamps. He lifted the blade, and the light from the magic it held cast his noble face in bright shadows. Of all that he had seen, all that he had heard and felt and learned in this war, in all his life, nothing was as this had been. Now at last he felt he understood the blood price that tore at his friend Mearead, King of the Crystal Falls. Now he understood the insane force that pushed the High Prince Cucullin to his doom. He heard Cainhill's cries. He heard them now on the wind, as the great elven lord drove Kianbearac through the womb of a pregnant woman and moaned.
"No!"
Donal leapt to his feet. The last gift of the Morigu was bitter indeed; to hear the anguish in Cainhill as he fell to the darkness. Lost, a soul's anguish at realizing it was lost for all time. His thoughts turned to his own pain and betrayal. To Arianrood.
And at last he began to understand Arianrood. What was it, he wondered, that began her fall? A small act of pride? An anger overindulged, backed by her near limitless power? One pain too many, as fate kept her alive while so many died? What, he asked himself, does it mean to be the Ead? The eldest of all the world's children? Does it dwindle in time? The meanings? The victories that give hope? Do they become repetitious? Agony in their sameness? Does power become meaningful
only in its constant use?
He understood now what the Morigu was striving to show him. Margawt was not, as he feared, his opposite; it was far worse than that. Donal knew it was Arianrood alone who was his shadow. They were the same, he realized. He was her youth and she the end result of his trials.
And the ability, the thing that was in him to always be young, to be the ever-young--the half-elven died in the face of such a truth. It was easy to be callous, he thought, when you have the strength to survive where most could not. How many, he wondered, how many of the enemy could truly face me? How much magic runs in my veins? How much courage in my heart?
He was the half-elven, and the strengths and weaknesses of two great races were his birthright. He came from a family of heroes, never failing in their long years of loyalty and bravery. His mother was a human archmage, his father great among the warlords of the world. His ancestors strode the pages of history like colossi of a bard's ancient poem. And Margawt knew what Donal had never faced. His ancestors, those heroes of ancient times, had one thing in common: They were all dead.
And Arianrood had cared for them all; shared their lives with them and mourned their deaths.
There was no rational conclusion to draw from all this. No statement to be made. No gesture that could encompass his knowledge, and the changes he must now endure. There was nothing more but a hardening of desire, of the crushing passion of determination. A determination and passion he now shared with Margawt, and Mearead, and Ceallac and a thousand others whose names he would never know.
He left the pool and that moment of time that had changed him. He left it, holding his sword that he had vowed never to sheath till it tasted the blood of a traitor.
"You're going to die, Arianrood," he whispered with voice and magic, "and your master with you."
And even Donal with all his powers could not see that he did not leave that place alone, but surrounded by a thousand shades. And each walked in step with him. And each held a sword. Unsheathed.
C H A P T E R
Ten
"YOU HAVE NO GUIDE." The voice filled Niall. "YOU WILL NEVER HAVE A GUIDE." The words were clear, but the meaning gave only--
"Loneliness." Niall answered with a whisper. "Alone."
The general stood in the midst of a destroyed city that he did not recognize. The great buildings hung drunkenly over the cracked, narrow streets or squatted like huge gray toads among their own ruins. There was no life here, no movement. The only sound, a thin wind that whipped through the empty stone carcass of the once great city. Neither evil nor good was here, life or death. Right and wrong have no meaning in the face of the void. The city carried no memories of the inhabitants that surely must once have bustled through it. It held nothing but blank annihilation.
How such a thing could be, Niall could not say. Where such a land could be found, he had no idea. He had seen many places in the long journey he had taken since putting the ring on, but they were lost to him like half-remembered lines from a long-forgotten poem. He knew there had been beauty and horror, pain and sorrow. He had seen things that brought an almost unbearable joy, and others that made him burst out in laughter at its sheer fun. But it was all lost to him, standing there among the hard ruins of the desolate.
One more thing, too, the vague memory of a giant, a giant crushing the maker as if the arch mage were nothing more than an annoying insect to be shooed away or swatted down. There was that, and the question of the shadows.
"Where are all the women?"
And now there was the voice. Its message was for him, too, but he could not grasp its meaning.
He was, he knew, alone. There were no answers in this empty place, and the questions he brought with him whirled through him like the wind through the ruins. They did not cleanse him or heal him or hurt him, they did not take hold of any part of him, they left him as empty as he was before. If that wind shifted the debris it made no difference, for there were none to care.
Alone.
"YOU HAVE NO GUIDE." And it seemed to Niall that the buildings shook at the sound of that voice. But he knew they didn't really, he just wanted them to. But the city showed no more concern for the voice than it did for anything else.
"Take me from this place," he begged the night sky. But the stars here were harsh and hot. They were not the stars he knew, they were nothing to dream of, to wish to. They seemed to reach down to devour him, to bludgeon him with his own insignificance. If they wanted anything of him, it was to force him into the cracked and broken buildings, to find some corner to hide from their unnatural light.
And this he could not do.
"Dishonor is immortal." The phrase from the creed of the Green Branch knights came unbidden to Niall. He wondered at it. For what is honor's meaning in such a place as this? Here, there would never be any to care what he did or didn't do. Here, there were none to protect or impress or need. What he did, thought, felt would never mark this world one way or another. There was such despair in that thought, that Niall Trollsbane was driven to his knees to cry once more in anguish.
"Take me from this place!" But there was no answer to his plea. Almost then did he truly beg, on his knees, clasped hands raised in supplication. Almost
"Dishonor is immortal."
"Does it matter?" he thought, kneeling there among the ruins. "Does it matter that any know?" He had seen in his long journey a thousand heroes in a thousand triumphs. Who now remembers their names, their deeds? Was it enough to know, to believe, that they had been so? That somewhere, sometime there was a hero who had faced his anguish? Was it necessary to know he won? To know his name, his deeds?
"YOU WILL NEVER HAVE A GUIDE!"
And this time Niall felt only anger.
"I need no guide." He longed to shout, but he could not, instead his voice was a defeated whisper. "I will be my own guide. I am a man. I will carry my own burdens. I will find my own questions.".
"YOU WILL DIE."
"Oh aye, it has happened to better men than I." "YOU WILL BE FORGOTTEN." "Then, in truth, I'll be in good company."
"IT WILL ALL END IN THIS."
And Niall knew the voice meant the city. "To this?" he wondered . . . All the hopes, all the pain and it ends only in this desolation? He shrugged. So what? He stood up and faced the glaring stars.
"Go away, you maddening devil. I'll not be listening to any more of your depressing nonsense."
"YOU KNOW IT TO BE TRUE."
"I know nothing!" Niall shouted back. "Nothing, damn your black soul!"
There was silence then, and somehow Niall knew the voice was gone and would not return. He was trapped here in this empty shell of a world, and none would ever know what he did, or what he felt, or even where he was. But he had the memories of his life, of the war, of the sad little triumphs and tragedies. And whether it was enough was hardly the issue, it simply would have to be.
Niall could not say how long he dwelled in the empty city, for there was no way to mark time. He never felt hunger or thirst, nor did he ever feel the need for sleep. He wandered the harsh ruins, his own imagination his only companion. And in it all he could find no meaning.
He pulled an old, half-burned table into the middle of the main street and there he deposited the pathetic treasures the city offered up. Sad little reminders of the life that once dreamed here, but when that had been, Niall could not guess.
There was a cracked drinking glass, a half-moon gouged in its side. The edge was sharp and more than once the general longed to press that jagged blade into his wrist. But there was never any real point to such an act.
Next to the glass lay a small marble box and Niall amused himself by trying to decide what had once rested in the cool interior of the box.
There was a shirt, or what was left of one. It was made of some material that was unknown to the man, but soft to the touch. One sleeve was half burned away and Niall was glad to see no bloodstains marred the faded blue of the material. He did not doubt that the former owner had died in
some horrific way.
And there was a small wooden leg, tiny really. Once it must have belonged to a child's doll, but now the partially bent limb was unattached. It seemed to Niall to be the saddest thing he had ever seen.
There were other odds and ends, some he knew that had once been dear to somebody. Not all that he found was familiar to him, but even the alien objects held memory, if he could just crack the riddles they presented.
When he knew the city as well as any man could, when he knew the rubble-strewn streets, and the crumbling buildings, and every dark corner of that awful place, he finally went out of the city. He stood on its borders and looked at a landscape that fitted perfectly this place of non-life.
There were mountains not too far away. Or what had once been mountains. In his mind's eye Niall could picture them as once they stood. Proud and bold, so tall the clouds merged with the white snow ever on the mountains' peaks. There would have been determined forest there, the trees lurching from every precarious foothold to make a try at touching the sun. But all that and so much more had been lost long ago.
There were only black shapes of painful crags and sharp hard peaks now. The shadows the once-mountains cast under the awful glare of the dying stars stretched out toward him like some deformed and maniacal beast. The land itself was pitted and cracked like the city it held. There was nothing green, nothing of any color or life. It was a decaying skeleton of the world, all the flesh stripped from it. Not even the maggots left here to gnaw its bones.
And in that sight Niall for the first time knew despair, true despair. A feeling, a knowledge beyond any emotion, any thought. He cried out in a great voice, but he did not know what he said and the sound of it was lost in the ever-present wind anyway. He shook his fist, but at what? There was no target for hatred or anger or outrage. There was nothing here, not even decent memories.
Morigu: Book 02 - The Dead Page 11