Dugald was dressed in a robe Maeniel had never seen. It was a caftan, dyed brown and woven with black ogam symbols at the neck and hem and bordering the long, flowing sleeves. Maeniel, who could read the sticklike ogam, saw that these were blessings intended to protect the wearer. The blessings of Christ, his mother, and the whole heavenly choir were invoked. What was written on the hem made Maeniel smile.
The “heroes” weren’t neglected, either. Ah yes, the “heroes,” who would never be forgotten. Emissaries from Rome had a tendency to frown at the cult of the heroes, and it was rumored that a few who became abusive had been subjected to the test of the sea. Maeniel wasn’t sure how this was handled, but the ocean was dark, cold, and very deep, and the people doing the testing could make sure one either passed or failed. So most of the legates were discreet. One might be glad these wild people called themselves Christians, even if a few additional beliefs snuck in under the blanket. It did trouble him that Dugald had been invoking magic, as the clothing indicated. What could be wrong?
Dugald reached him. Seeing how he was dressed, others made room for him quickly. Maeniel drove his knife into the section of oak trunk that he was using as a table and turned toward him.
“She is gone. She, Black Leg, and Gray. Gray’s wife told me he has rabbit snares near the lake. When he didn’t return last night, she came to me and asked if Black Leg and Guinevere had seen him. I told her no, I hadn’t seen them and you told me you sent them hunting near the lake before you left on the boat. I have been searching since, in my own way. They are not near. I would have found them.” His face was sick and sunken, filled with fear.
“Old man, old man, what have you done?” Kyra spat. “You are hollow-bellied and mad-eyed with guilt.”
“It’s true,” Dugald whispered. “I am. The bird, that thrice-cursed bird, that’s the cause of it all.”
Maeniel snapped his fingers hard. Magetsky left off feeding on fish guts with the other ravens and flew to the stump, landing next to Maeniel’s knife. She gave a strident kugh and made kissy noises at Dugald, as if to tell him she was none the worse for her adventures.
“I put a curse on her,” Dugald said. “She made me so angry, I called a black wind and launched the devil’s arrow at her. I have not engaged in such noisy sorcery in many years. I’m afraid I may have awakened something, perhaps something terrible.”
“She wouldn’t be easy to take,” Maeniel said. “She is innocent, and that’s why I called down protection for her from the Lords and Ladies of the sunlit heavens. She is Guinevere, one filled with light.”
He turned to Magetsky and addressed her in angry Second Raven. She fixed one onyx eye on him and made a sound like water bubbling out of a jug or possibly someone’s gut in the throws of diarrhea. Maeniel made a sound like an angry wolf, so low a rumbling that it was almost below the range of human hearing. Kyra and Dugald knew she could probably hear it better, but even to human ears it carried a heavy freight of dark menace. Magetsky wasted no more time. She flew off toward the valley.
“She will begin her search. She can go places even I cannot.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Kyra upbraided Dugald. “I thought you had forsworn magic?”
“I had, woman, I had. But that bird so filled me with fury that I lost my temper. My foot slipped. It’s been so long. We have been hidden here, and comfortably so, that I didn’t think—oh, Christ—I am ridden with guilt and terror. The magic of the ancients was nothing but a curse. It delivered us into the hands of the Romans. Now it sells our souls and bodies to the Saxons in the form of Merlin. Relying on it cut down Bodiccia and my order, the thinkers and dreamers on the isle of Mona. What have I, in my stupid anger, done?”
He shook his fist in Maeniel’s face. “There are people … who … who … call on the … the ‘heroes’ and they are answered. She is one, such a one. By birth, by breeding, by nature, such a one, and I have taught her nothing of what she needs to know to protect herself.”
“Why? I thought after she warned us about the ship and compelled Cymry to speak, you promised you would make her your pupil,” Kyra shouted.
“Keep your voice down,” Maeniel snapped. “See how people are looking at us? Things are difficult enough here. Think how quickly the tale of a sorcerer’s ill wish might spread. And, Dugald, you are no help, appearing in that robe today. Magic made me a man,” Maeniel said.
Dugald snorted. Maeniel looked at him through his eyelashes. Dugald’s return glance was a challenge.
“It was spring,” Maeniel said. “The older women brought the younger ones to the grove. Some wept, some didn’t. They knew they were to be sacrifices. The old women made sure they were all fit.”
“All virgin,” Kyra said.
Maeniel nodded. “They gave the women drink. Some finished what was in the golden bowls, some didn’t. One bowl lay on the grass in the shadow of the trees. The girls danced around the fire. That was what drew me in the first place. The heavy scent of smoke and perfumes rising from the fire. It was intoxicating. But by then, I drank in the powerful fragrance given off by their naked bodies. The priestesses watched the moon rise.
“Honey mead was in the bowl. All—even the beast, even the wolf—love sweetness. I drank. The bowl held other things besides mead. The madness of springtime took me, and then I looked up. She walked toward me, and though she seemed solid as you, not one blade of grass bent beneath her feet. She was not just beautiful; there was nothing about her that was not beautiful. I cannot say if she was clothed or naked. She wore her loveliness like a garment of light.
“I knew her. We all know her. We are her people, and when she journeys on the earth, we protect her. So it was when she was Leto and carried her son filled with light to the navel of the world at Delphi. We traveled with her and hunted for her until she, with a sad travail, gave birth to the son of the stars. When I saw her walk toward me, I was filled with an astonished joy.
“ ‘Flee,’ she said, ‘or yield up your surrender, wolf.’ I yielded up my soul, oh, so gladly. Oh, so gladly. She touched my forehead. I might have turned away, turned and run away and not let her fingers rest on my head. She would not have pursued me. She pursues no one. But I was still and let her make of me what she would. And then her hand fell back. I knelt before her on the grass as a man. She smiled and became even more beautiful. ‘Why, you are fair,’ she said. ‘You are my Niall.’ For I was dark, my hair curled around my face.”
“She is madness,” Dugald said. “She is an agony of madness.”
“Yes,” Maeniel said, “and in her dreams we see all of our desires.” He stuck the knife in the oak trunk.
“Magic is not good in war. It betrayed Bodiccia; it betrayed them at the isle of Mona.”
“Nonsense,” Maeniel said. “One flaw of your people is that they will quarrel with each other simply to entertain themselves on a rainy evening. The other is a strength and a weakness. They have a breadth of vision that sees the splendors of this world and the one beyond. But that very breadth of vision causes disorganization. And I tell you, war is not valor, courage, or even dark things like anger, rage, or killing. War is organization—and the discipline that goes with a high level of organization. The Romans understood this, and to them everything others find precious, lovable, joyous, interesting, admirable was simply a heathcomb to be offered on the altar of the gods of war. They had the victory of this understanding, and they also bore the everlasting oblivion of its final, inexorable defeat.
“If Bodiccia, Guinevere’s great ancestress, fell, it was not because of her magic but because she didn’t have enough time to put together an organization strong enough to defeat her enemies. We will—you, I, Kyra—give this girl time!” Maeniel pulled the knife out of the wood, then stabbed it down again to the hilt. He turned and a moment later he was in the trees near the beach, then he was gone.
We woke to a gray morning. Fog covered the sea and the fire we’d built on the rocks was burned to coals. Black Leg’s head was on my
lap, and Gray was stretched out with his face and arms near the fire, as though he’d fallen asleep tending it—as he must have. I couldn’t see the boar, because I couldn’t see the beach, but I could hear his snuffling near the rocks. I lay and watched the sun grow brighter as it tried to burn through the mist.
“What will we do?” Black Leg asked.
Gray awakened just then and looked up at me. He rolled to his side and glanced down at his ankle. Only a few red marks remained of his injuries. His narrowed eyes returned to me. “How did you do that?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask, because I don’t know,” I said.
He nodded. Then he sat up. I still had the bow and three arrows, but Black Leg’s clothes were all gone. He was barefoot and wearing only Gray’s shirt. I’d lost my shoes sometime during the flight along the beach. I still had my other clothes. Gray had only his britches and was barefoot.
“A fine bunch we are,” he said. “I’m cold and would do murder for a drink of water, and the pair of you are as ragged as any I have ever seen. What is that creature? I spent the night, most of it, shoving every piece of driftwood I could find into the fire in mortal terror that something in the dark might find a way to climb up here.”
“Maeniel—Father, that is—says such things are more powerful at night,” Black Leg spoke fearfully.
I had unstrung the bow and placed the string in its leather pouch under my shirt. It felt dry now. “When the fog clears, I might try to kill it,” I said.
“You sure you can do that?” Black Leg asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m not, but I have no better ideas.” My neck was stiff and my shoulder was in a cramp. I wasn’t feeling good-tempered.
“I do,” Black Leg said. “I smell green.”
I said, “Yes,” hopefully.
Gray pawed at his hair. “How do you smell green?”
“He means,” I told him, “there is an opening in these rocks into—I don’t know—a glade, some way out.”
Following his nose, Black Leg began to crawl around the big boulder that blocked our way up. The passage we found was choked with driftwood, deadfalls, living brush, and blackberry and wild rose canes, coils and coils of them. Some of the vines were thicker around than my wrist. It led into a streambed with a trickle of water in the center. We all sighed with pleasure and relief when we lay on the stones in the stream and drank. For a time it seemed we couldn’t get enough. I looked past the high banks and saw a forest—pine, oak, ash—clustered at the stream, willow turning green, yellow, and every mixture of color between, in the morning sun.
We had to follow the stream a good way. It was deeply cut. The tree branches were laced together above us, and the thorny briar and rose vines twined among the willows that clustered in the cut blocked any escape into the forest. They did have a few berries on them, and even rose hips, and we were so famished we gathered and ate them. The wild roses were everywhere. The air near the stream was heavy with the perfume, though there were no flowers to be seen.
“I don’t like this,” Black Leg said when we had been walking for a time.
“Nor do I,” Gray said apprehensively. “We must have come a long way in the evening, running from the boar, because I have hunted over most of this land all my life and I remember nothing like this place.”
“And the roses,” I said. “They are all around us.”
The stream broadened, the banks getting lower and lower. We came to a lake surrounded by forest. A path, not a very well-marked one, ran along the margins. We were very hungry now and very tired, so we turned onto it. On one side the lake spread out. How far, I couldn’t see, because a fog bank drifted across the water. Beyond it I saw mountain peaks rising out of a low-rolling mist, bright, fair as gauze drapery in the new sun. The black dragon lifted its head above the water.
I heard Gray gasp.
Black Leg, feeling threatened, went wolf. I was attracted. I didn’t think it would hurt me. After all, the first one hadn’t. On one side, the trail ran close to the water along a black rocky scarp that projected into the lake.
“Stop!” Gray cried, because if I took that path, I would be trapped between the rock and the water.
But then I knew the dragon would want to feel secure, too, and it wouldn’t come into the shallows among the trees and water lilies where Gray and Black Leg were standing. I wanted to see it more clearly, because I had never seen a black-skinned one before. When I entered the path, it swam toward me, rather the way a swan would—seeming to glide—pushed along by flippers on the squat body until it was close to shore. Then the head looked down at me.
At first I thought it looked like a snake, but then decided it didn’t, because no snake ever had eyes like that. They were large and glowed like magnificent black opals, taking up most of the face. The skin looked not like plates or scales but silk, shining black, soft silk. This one was not vegetarian, because I could see dark fangs projecting down from the mouth and curving as they rested on the outside of the lower jaw. In addition, it had two long whiskers, one on each side, extending from its nose just below the nostrils. They were like the nostrils of the first dragon I’d seen in that they could be closed when the creature dove into deep water. Its neck bent like a swan’s as it studied me.
For a time we were very still. I looked beyond the dragon at the lake and basked in its beauty. The water was very still, only a light breeze ruffled the surface. In the distance the moving mist draped the shoreline and the rocky promontories that thrust out into the still water. In other places I could see trees that extended down to the shore; and in yet others I saw wetlands where water lilies, sedges, reeds, cattails, and white and yellow cress were clustered in shallows that must have extended for many miles. The broad, still surface reflected the tranquil, cloud-filled sky.
I drew a breath. Even the air was filled with loveliness and peace. “Of all the fair places I have ever seen, this is the best,” I whispered.
“Yes,” the dragon agreed. “It is, and it is a very rich place, also, filled with fish, frogs, snakes, birds, herons, kingfishers, ducks, geese. And the woods on its margins have deer, elk, hare, rabbits, grouse, and pheasant, not to mention many doves and even quail. But I am prolix, and yet I have not told you a tithe of the wonders and beauties to be found here.”
The yellow iris was springing up from the rocks at my feet, sharp, leafy spears with flowers the color of sunrise. “Do you mean me harm?” I asked.
“No, how would I harm you? I am a hunter of the great abyss. The creatures there are mostly small; squid, jellyfish.”
And then I saw its prey, grotesque fish that swam in darkness and carried lights on their bodies like jewels. They swam through the trenches of ocean, being very little more than stomachs, lures, and eyes. Herds of shrimp moved up and down according to the cycles of the sun, bodies transparent as fine crystal, sleeping in the depths by day, rising to the surface at night to spread their starlike lights across the waves, be fed on, and breed.
Jellyfish wandered among drowned mountains like phosphorescent bells, tentacles drifting sometimes for miles into the darkness. Huge schools of squid feeding on the drifting detritus of life were able to fly by, shooting water through their bodies and leaping from wave top to wave top when the dragons pursued them. But, best of all, deep fissures in the depths flared from beneath the earth’s mantle, warming and lighting the frigid darkness of the deepest sea.
The warmth of earth’s crust fed whole colonies of tube worms and anemones, splendored star bursts of color, oddly living where no light ever shines. Many different fish and crustaceans—shrimp and crabs that danced on stilts, starfish with arms like snakes, and a dozen different kinds of shellfish—clustered at the vents. All living, loving, dying in a world without light or sound on the edge of a universe of darkness.
“I dove to the deep,” the dragon said. “And I remained too long. I tried to help another of my kind, trapped by a mud slide in a cave in a canyon that has not seen the light since the
first torrents of rain fell and made seas of earth. I loved this one. I failed. We failed. I have rested and filled my eyes with light to ease my almost mortal grief. So, you see, even if I would—which I would not—I could do you no harm. But, have a care. Others here might not be so willing to allow you to pass.”
With that the dragon turned and swam out toward deeper water, and then was gone. Gray and Black Leg joined me on the path.
“It spoke to me,” I said, “and told me of its origins and its life.”
“Some teeth on that thing,” Gray said. “I have never seen a black one.”
“It lives deep and feeds on squid and strange fish,” I told Gray. “It warned me.”
“I need no warning about this place,” Gray answered.
“It is very beautiful here,” Black Leg said. “I would not mind if we stayed. Wolves are not ambitious the way men are. So long as we have game, who cares?”
I heard a snort.
“No!” I cried, because I knew what it was before I looked. The boar. Again, we all ran.
SIX
E FLEW PAST THE ROCK. I WAS DISGUSTED. I doubled back. The big boulder next to the lake was steep and had trees on top. I ran up the side. A big willow on top had roots and branches that hung over the lake. The trunk rose at an angle. I was barefoot and small. I ran up the trunk like a squirrel.
Gray and Black Leg took refuge in a nearby tree, an oak with low branches. I had my bow and still had three arrows. The string was in its pouch inside my shirt. When I was safely in the tree, I lost no time in stringing the bow. I could hear the boar snuffling and panting, trying to find a way up the rock into the trees. I knew the rock wasn’t as steep as the pile we’d climbed last night and he probably could. “Hs-s-s-t, make noise,” I said to the others. Just then the boar made it. Black Leg let out a howl. He can do it when he’s human, too. The boar arrived at the foot of the tree he and Gray were in. It paused, swung its head back and forth as though puzzled, snorting and pawing the ground. I studied the thing and took aim at one of the beast’s little eyes and let fly.
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