by Sarah Zettel
The black horse began to eat. It moved like thought, like a dream. Where it had been, the grain was gone, leaving only stubble behind.
The villagers watched open mouthed in horror. Two of the grey men, the ones horned like demons, dismounted from their horses.
“So very hungry,” said the dwarf again.
The grey horses joined the black, tearing up great chunks of grain, swallowing them down, each move clear, and yet devouring all with a speed that no mortal steed could have matched.
Nor was that the end, the two grey men in full helmets marched swiftly, smoothly into the village, to the sacks and barrels and piles of food that lay left from the offering Geraint and Elen had refused. They leaned their spears against the chestnut tree, and they too began to eat. They ate like famine made flesh. They ate like the dreams of gluttony. They swallowed apples, cheeses, loaves of bread whole, they lifted barrels of beer as if they were wooden cups and drank them down.
“No,” whispered Adev. “No. The king … we cannot pay …”
Their fellows in the half-helms stood beside their master, their arms folded across their chests, and they laughed.
It was enough. It was too much. It was beyond cruelty. And still the creatures ate and ate and their companions laughed.
Calonnau screamed from her place at the top of the tree, and below her Elen cried out. “Stop this! They did nothing! They gave us nothing!”
“But they would have,” said the dwarf quietly, folding his own arms in satisfaction. “Oh yes, my lord is most displeased.”
Geraint looked from the dwarf and his mirthful guard, to the villagers in their huddle, to Elen. She thought she understood the calculations passing swiftly through his mind. He saw the spears on the ground and the swords in their sheaths. He saw those used to torturing the cowed and broken, who had forgotten what man stood beside them now.
“Stop this,” he said. “Or I will stop it.”
The dwarf turned to him with raised black brows and mocking smile on his lips. Geraint gave him no warning. In a single deadly move, he whipped the shaft of his spear around and brought it crashing down on the dwarf’s whip hand. Elen ducked in and caught up the whip as if fell. The people screamed and they scattered. The dwarf screamed, but already Geraint had his arm around the other’s thick neck, dragging him backwards and off his feet, his spear up and ready.
“Stop!” Geraint roared. “Or your captain dies!”
The two men, the half-helmed ones closest, jumped back, hands reaching for swords. Around them men and women fled their homes, crying, screaming, weeping to the gods to save them, save them, save them!
“One more move and he dies,” said Geraint in his certain, steady voice. “One more.”
The demons froze in place, curved over their thieving feast still, watching him with their hidden eyes. Elen would not have believed living men could stand so still. They ignored the panic all around them, and stood still as stones.
In Geraint’s arms the dwarf hung with his feet dangling, menace gone, for a moment looking nothing but small and ridiculous caught up but the much larger man.
“You think we are an enemy to fight like any other?” his voice was merry, almost gleeful. “Show him!”
Elen went cold. Slowly, making certain Geraint saw every move, the first of the demon-helmed men reached up. He plucked off his helmet, and he cast it aside. For a moment, Elen’s bewildered eyes thought his head was bald, or grey haired. Then she saw it was the bare and mottled bone of his skull. There was only flesh left withered and wrinkled around his jaw, and his teeth bared by his withered lips were ragged and yellow. His eyes were rheumy and clouded with death that should have laid him down long ago. Yet he stood. He too was marked as his living counterpart hand been. The brand had burned into the bone.
Terror sent Elen reeling backward. The dwarf laughed, shaking hard in Geraint’s embrace. “Do you think any of us care for your spear? Take him!”
The nearest man clapped hand to sword, and Geraint threw his spear, but the man dodged, and the weapon struck the earth harmlessly. The other raised his sword, but Geraint had twisted and drawn his own with the same motion that threw the spear, and now held his blade to the dwarf’s throat. The touch of the steel seemed to make the creature go limp as a babe and no more orders came from him.
Perhaps you should fear us after all, thought Elen wildly.
Half Helm was frozen where he was, but behind him, the one still in his demon helmet lifted his head and gave a shrill whistle. Hoofbeats sounded from behind. The horses were coming in from the ravaged fields.
Elen recovered herself and reached out with her will. Calonnau screamed and she fought, and she hungered, and she dove.
The creatures were enchanted but they were horse enough to fear for their eyes. Calonnau dove again and again, deviling them, making them rear and strike out uselessly with their hooves and fall back as she wheeled overhead. Elen felt the wild beauty of the dive, of the strike, and her soul sang with the power of it. She took her knife into her curled hand and stood ready, ready for blood, ready for the strike and the feasting …
Half Helm dragged the spear from the ground. More hooves sounded, this time from their right, and Elen jerked her head around in time to see two horses, one brown and one grey run from around the white store house, and Adev peer from the corner.
Adev had fled with the others. Adev had freed Donatus.
Geraint slammed the dwarf down to the ground where the creature lay stunned and broken, and he mounted the tall grey. He rode at once into the demons, bowling them both down, swinging his sword. It caught one on the helm, spinning him around, sending him slamming into the ground. But he picked himself up at once, as Geraint wheeled around, and Geraint froze at the sight, and Elen did too. Such a blow should have broken him, if not killed him.
Beside Geraint, the other demon grabbed hold of his spear, and the stillness was over. Geraint swung Donatus around to dodge the coming blow. Half Helm had his sword out, and he dove for Elen. She swung the dwarf’s whip, but it glanced off the helm and he sliced down at her side, but the blow caught only her cloak and she pulled herself away from the blow, stabbing up with her knife into his sword arm. She caught the space between corslet and guard, and living or dead, he had blood enough.
A blow slammed against her from behind and Elen slammed into the earth, the world suddenly blackness and sparks of bright light. Her knife skittered from her hand. Geraint screamed, Calonnau screamed. Awash in pain, Elen could not move. Thunder roared in her ears. It seemed the ground shook. There were voices, the grinding of steel and wood.
Before she could move again, the red-capped creature was beside her, a knife at her throat.
“She dies!” he thundered. “You like this game of hostages now, mighty lord? You strike one blow more and it is she who dies!”
Geraint wheeled the horse around, and froze. There were still sounds. Hooves and wheels and shouts and more shouts and they dizzied her head and made her stagger. All that was clear was the knife and the dwarf, and the bare-skulled grey man who lifted his spear. Elen cast out all her strength of will, and called Calonnau down. The hawk screamed and dove down, talon’s extended, but the dwarf ducked sideways, and the hawk missed him narrowly, swooping up just before reaching the ground and fighting to climb again. Geraint tried to charge forward in that moment, but the Grey Man blocked him. The dwarf bared his teeth, and drove the knife into her.
Pain tore through her. Geraint cried out to shake the heavens. Calonnau’s scream mixed with his. Elen heard the sounds of battle, heard shouts, too many and not Geraint’s voice. Dead? No. There …. She could not see properly, and yet, and yet … she reached up with one hand, and pulled the knife from the dwarf’s hand, and sat up.
There was no blood. Pain, but no weakness, and she held the knife.
“Do you think any of us care for your spear?” she croaked.
The dwarf bared his teeth at her and scrambled backwards. Elen stood slowly
, the knife in her hand. Its blade was clean, she noted. Of course. There was no blood to flow. She stalked forward. He had tried to kill her, he had tried to cause Geraint’s death. Pain sang through her and drove her forward. She would not let him leave this.
“Help me,” croaked the dwarf. “Help me, lord king!”
A stranger. A stranger on horseback, a spear in his hand and a black cloak billowing from his shoulders. The dwarf looked in terror at the stranger, and the stranger cast his spear, and the dwarf fell, impaled on the weapon for an instant, and then the spear was gone and there was only the body at Elen’s feet.
“Elen!” Geraint threw himself from his horse to run forward and grasp her shoulders. “How …”
With a shaking hand, she touched the clean edge of her bloodless wound. Revulsion gathered in the pit of her stomach. What am I become? Am I a corpse? Like the Grey Men? I cannot die because I am already dead?
But Geraint only drew her to him. She closed her eyes. She could not look at him. She could not return his warm, living embrace.
What am I?
“We must go!” shouted the stranger. “Now!”
Geraint released her, and pulled her toward her horse. He boosted her into the saddle. She should have been dead, at least unconscious from the blow, but she was only cold. Deathly cold. Corpse cold. Elen recovered enough of herself to call down Calonnau, but her hands were shaking too badly to hold the reins. Geraint saw this at once and snatched them up. The stranger, his spear once again in his hand, turned his horse’s head due west and urged the animal into a full gallop. Geraint dug his heels into Donatus’s sides, and Elen kicked at her reluctant brown, feeling the daze wearing off her.
The horses ran into the deepening night. Elen hung on grimly to the saddle bow and the hawk’s jesses. It was all she could do. Her breath was harsh and ragged. She still hurt. Her throat burned, her wrist throbbed beneath the bandage. Every jolt of the horse’s hooves sent fire through her. The countryside passed in a blur of shadows. Geraint did not even look back at her. All his concentration was in keeping with their rescuer.
At last, the stranger slowed his pace for a moment. He raised his spear and shook it, calling out something Elen could not understand. Ahead of them, the world seemed to twist, blur and change as in a dream, and time grew long and then short, and she could not see for a time, and then she could see that on the hill rising from the darkening night, there was a fortress wall.
She could not even find it in her to be surprised. Of course they rode forward, threading the earthworks, their rescuer hollering up at the gates. Of course the gates stood open to reveal a dusty yard. A sprawling house of stone stood against the night sky. Calonnau cried out in fear and beat her wings. Elen’s vision wavered. She saw shadows, she saw bones where there should have been timbers.
“Help me, lord king!” cried the dwarf as she advanced with his knife in her hand.
Where’s the knife? She thought stupidly. Where am I?
Then, she felt herself falling, and she could do nothing about it.
Chapter Fifteen
When Elen woke, she found herself lying on a narrow bed in the midst of a forest grove. Calonnau stood on a sturdy perch beside the bed, flapping and crying in frustration. Geraint was just rising from a plain stool to cross to her. The ground beneath him was flagstone and rushes. She blinked hard, then, she saw the trees were only painted on the high walls around her.
She stared at all these things, trying to reconcile them with where she had been a brief moment before.
“Elen?” Geraint took her hand and sank onto the bed beside her. “Are you well?”
She was, she realized, for all that pain lingered in her throat. She felt the clean touch of cloth that told her someone had wrapped a bandage about her neck to match the one binding her arm. She did not touch it.
“How long have I slept?” Her voice was harsher than it should have been. She did not want to think about the cause of that.
Geraint laid a hand on her cheek, checking after fever, or perhaps just reassuring himself she was still flesh. “Not long, and much of the time you were in a natural sleep. It is morning of the day after we were brought here.”
Her wits had cleared enough she could look past Geraint to see something of this place now. The trees were masterfully made on lime-whitened walls. A little watery sunlight and a breath of air trickled in from a narrow slit up by the ceiling. A brass brazier gave off some warmth as well as charcoal smoke. A table waited beside the stool Geraint had abandoned, and a plain wooden chest stood beside that with some clothes neatly folded on its lid.
But it was the trees that drew her eye. She had never seen such decoration in any place. They were more marvellous to her than any tapestry would have been.
Geraint followed her gaze. “Beautiful, is it not? Wait until you see the corridors outside. I have only heard stories of such places. Uncle Kai spoke of paintings like these when he told us tales of Rome, but he said that much of their art had been lost, even there.”
“Where are we?” she asked, marvelling still. The trees were caught at the height of spring. They seemed to grow out of rich and mossy ground. She could even see a bird’s nest in one, and a fox’s face peeping out from behind another.
“We are in the home of Gwiffert pen Lleied, also called the Little King.” Elen stiffened immediately, and Geraint laid a hand on her shoulder, pressing her back against the featherbed. “It was he who rescued us, Elen.”
Without thinking, she looked to Calonnau on her perch. The bird was, as always, frustrated at being leashed and confined but her heart beat steady and strong. If there was immediate danger, neither the hawk nor the knight felt it. The fears brought by waking in so strange a place began to ebb and she was able to tell herself they were brought on by the walls being so close about her.
“How came the Little King to rescue us?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Geraint, leaning his elbows on his thighs. He looked toward the door, which had been painted cunningly to become the trunk of a great oak spreading its branches over the smaller trees. It reminded Elen of the Lady’s door with its decoration of apple trees in fruit and flower. “I have so many questions I cannot number them, but what is plain is that all is very different from what I first thought.” Geraint smiled thinly and she pressed the hand that held hers. “Are you well enough to stand? The king our host sent word that he would be breaking his fast in his hall at this time, and should you wake, we were to join him there.” More softly he added. “I would know what you see in him.”
Elen searched her husband’s face for a moment. “What do you suspect?”
Geraint’s smile grew tight. “In a place where men vanish into thin air and die without making a sound, everything.”
Elen could not fault this. Instead of answering, she pushed back the furs that covered her and eased her legs over the side of the bed. She stood, as relieved as Geraint to find her legs steady underneath her.
The clothes that had been laid out for her were simple but well-made — a brown dress of good wool trimmed with a border of oak leaves, as seemed fitting for the grove she had lain in. There was also a linen under dress and good shoes to replace the battered slippers that had carried her this far. What there was not was any woman to help her. So Geraint, with many a wry smile, undid her belt and helped divest her of her torn and filthy finery. She laid the old clothes carefully on the chest. Perhaps they could yet be cleaned and mended. She could not bring herself to easily part with anything from her home.
Geraint also had new clothes — a long tunic of rich blue and fine grey trousers and cross-laced sandals. He had washed face, hands and hair, but he had not been shaved, and his beard was rapidly becoming full and black to match his waving hair.
The clean clothes felt wonderful. A wooden comb allowed her to work the worst of the tangles from her hair and re-braid the plaits that hung on either side of her head. With her belt, necklace and rings all in their proper places, sh
e felt ready to be seen. She did not come as a suppliant, but as a daughter of chiefs, worthy of respect, and hearing, even in this magnificent place.
Geraint nodded his approval and reassurance, and held out his hand for hers. At that moment, Calonnau shifted restlessly, and cried once. Elen suddenly did not want to leave the hawk behind. She put the gauntlet on her hand, and lifted the bird from her perch. Geraint made no remark at this. Elen was glad. She was not certain she could have explained.
Gwiffert’s fortress was a far different place from the high house in which Elen had been raised. Rather than one great hall, it held a warren of narrow corridors lined with more doors than Elen had ever seen, all of them closed. As Geraint had said, the walls here were painted over with decorations far more fabulous than her little grove. Whole orchards of trees grew floor to ceiling, followed by fields of ripe grain. Herds of cattle grazed in green meadows. Ancient kings rode in chariots of bronze pulled by white horses.
Geraint seemed to navigate the place easily enough, and she was glad of his touch against her arm. The stone seemed to lean against Elen, and the still eyes of the paintings watched her far too closely. The pain in her wrist and throat throbbed in time to her heart’s insistent beat, as far away as that was in Calonnau’s breast, and she found herself near desperate for a glimpse of true sky or a breath of wind.
Where are the people? Someone must live in this warren. Where are they?
At last, they rounded a corner and walked under a soaring archway that opened onto a great hall. The hall looked as if it could have held her house and had room for a dozen cottages. Fires roared in four man-high hearths, filling the chill stone room with a warmth even Elen could feel. Spitted meats roasted over the flames, and the sizzle was as appetising as the scent.
Here were the people Elen had missed. Men in leather jerkins sat at long tables with dogs lolling about their feet. A cluster of women sat in a corner, distaffs and carding combs busy. Children turned the spits and stirred the pots under the eye of a stout and stern woman with her grey hair plaited and bundled tightly behind her ears. Still more people flitted back and forth on their own errands. The hall was as full of their voices as it was of the scents of cooking food. They were better dressed than the folk Adev’s village, and better fed. They worked or ate briskly, busily, as people will when they have steady, true purpose.