This household was headed by a woman with five sons. She was tattooed in the fashion of an owl and wore a silver chain headdress that suggested owl feathers. But it was the richness of the place that impressed Ena. The richness and the rank—to her—barbarity of the inhabitants.
The tables were, as usual, put up around the circular hearth. They were, as at Tintigal, beautifully carved and polished to a high gloss. But then they were covered with a cloth decorated with owl’s wings done in some sort of cut-lace embroidery. The tableware was silver, beautifully trimmed with gold filigree.
The maidens who attended her wore soft, white linen. They poured warm water over her hands and helped her scrub her face. She was seated next to Cai.
She glanced up at the heads in the rafters once or twice, then decided to solve her problem by pretending not to see them. The entire household was seated in two concentric rings around the tables, which in turn surrounded the fire pit. After a few moments, she found herself yawning, so weary was she.
The night after the summer king had been found to be a semblance, they had camped in the forest. It wasn’t quiet, and Uther’s oath men built large fires and kept everyone close to them. Ena woke in the night. Cai’s arms were around her, but she was sure she had heard the scream of a panther.
She nudged Cai with her elbow and he awakened.
“There aren’t any panthers hereabouts, are there?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “There are.”
“I think I heard one scream.”
“It’s very possible that you did,” he said. “Arthur and I have killed them.”
“What will I do when I have to pee? I can’t go all night without … the baby is pressing down.… ” She began to pant.
“Stop that,” Cai said. “Wake me when you have to go.”
She was reassured.
“Then it can eat both of us,” he said.
She tried to slap his face, but couldn’t reach him and only waved her arms.
“Hush. Go to sleep,” he said.
She did, but true to her word, she woke him three times—twice was more usual, but panther screams made her nervous.
Now tonight, after a restless night and a long day in the saddle, she was very tired. Unusually tired, she thought. But then she remembered she had never been pregnant before.
Uther had a slightly higher chair than the rest. The sons of the house came and bowed before him, one asking to become one of his oath men.
To Ena’s surprise, the king asked the owl woman—that was how Ena thought of her—for her permission. She gave it very graciously. Ena felt that everything had probably been arranged beforehand.
The feast went forward. The king received the champion’s portion. He shared it with his new oath man and his more prominent followers, Cai included.
Ena’s eyes roamed the hall. The supper was a quiet one. The drunkenness and boasts Ena was used to in her father’s hall didn’t happen here. What impressed Ena most was the staggering amount of food. There were four kinds of roast meats: pork, mutton, beef, and venison. Fowl were not absent: there were goose, duck, and even swan. There were roast vegetables: leeks with butter and cream, onions, greens of all kinds—cress, a cabbage sort of thing cooked with bacon, and some sort of thistle cleaned of its prickles and steamed with cooked barley. Wine, mead, and beer finished off the list.
A pregnant woman, when she is not vomiting, is an eating machine. After she mopped up the pork with some sort of apple bread and then cleaned the bones of half a duck cooked with preserved quince and started on a large slice of venison with bread and gravy, Cai asked if she was sure there was only one baby in her womb.
She gazed at him, a searing look, and was about to give him a scolding when her hostess appeared in front of her. The owl woman was walking along, offering each of her guests a drink from one of the most impressive vessels Ena had ever seen.
She paused in front of Cai. “My sweet one,” she addressed him very intimately. “Who is your friend?”
“Her name is Ena,” Cai replied.
“A Saxon by her looks,” the owl woman said.
“Yes,” Cai answered.
“She is pregnant with your child?”
“Yes,” Cai said.
Ena blushed. “What are you doing? We’re not married. I disgraced myself.… ”
“Hush,” the owl woman said, looking around quickly. “Be quiet. What you have done is not a disgrace among us. Don’t mark yourself as a foolish foreigner among your beloved’s people by letting your mouth rattle like an empty gourd.”
Ena gulped and glanced at Cai, who was grinning.
“Now,” she said. “Tell Niamh, owl warrior priestess, how you came to lie with the Seal. But first, take a sip from my cup.”
For the first time, Cai looked alarmed. “Niamh, she doesn’t know.… ”
“You hush also. Don’t mark yourself as a fool before your own people! Here, take a sip.”
She presented the cup to Ena. Ena rolled her eyes, then looked at Cai, then back to Niamh.
“It’s not poison, Ena,” Cai said. “Here, I will drink first.” He took the cup from Niamh, sipped, and swallowed, then placed the cup in Ena’s hands.
“Only a sip, mind,” he cautioned as he directed a glare at Niamh.
Ena first touched the liquid with her lips, then licked them. The liquid was fragrant but not unpleasant, rather like strong wine with herbs steeped in it.
Ena sipped and felt the heat spread through her body, followed by a curious relaxation. She could feel the child in her womb. It moved, its first movement—quickening, it is called. And for the first time she sensed it would become another person, a being like her, from her, but not her, with hopes, loves, experiences, loyalties, and finally memories of its own. She felt guilt because it was not conceived in love but out of her own desperate need.
“Now!” Niamh said. “Tell me!”
“We were seven. Ten, if you count the ones who died. Five boys. There was enough for them. My sister had property through my grandmother. No man will look at a woman without property. Not as a wife. I became afraid they would dedicate me to the gods. So I kept my legs crossed tight. They can’t do that to a virgin.”
“Yes,” Niamh said, “they can’t hang a virgin.”
Ena felt an icy cold course through her at the word hang. She shivered.
Niamh handed her the cup again. At the first touch of its contents to her lips, she felt the cold being driven out of her body by something like a warm wind.
“But,” she continued, “they sent me to the queen.”
“Igrane?” Niamh asked.
“Yes. It didn’t take me long to …”
“Fear her?” Niamh asked. “Or hate her?”
“Fear, fear, fear,” Ena said. “I was afraid of her and her lover by day, by night, under the sun, moon, and stars.”
“That bad?” Niamh asked.
“That bad,” Ena echoed.
“And Cai?” Niamh asked.
“No!” the boy said firmly. “No!” He pushed the cup away. “No more! I will not hear it, Niamh. Certainly not here, in front of the guests.”
“Yes,” Niamh said. Then handed the cup to an attendant and clapped her hands.
A lady hurried over to her, and she spoke a few words into her ear. Ena was with her child again, feeling a deep communion no man ever knows. A full awareness of the life within her, a sense of an existence without thought or emotion yet but coming into being. And simple being is pleasure.
I am, I was, I will … I love, Ena thought, in return. Ride my love into the light. Then she opened her eyes and Niamh was placing a chain of golden flowers around her neck. They smelled like linden.
Ena lifted the chain with one finger. “From the tree,” Ena said, “the other tree.”
Everyone within earshot looked mystified, except Niamh. Yes, the hall had the usual tree to the right of the firepit, but there were no others.
“You are aware of the o
ther tree?” Niamh asked.
“Yes,” Ena said.
Niamh nodded. “Good, but say no more about it.”
“No. The chain is very beautiful. Thank you,” Ena said.
Then Niamh passed on to the next guest.
Cai put his arm around Ena. “Ready for bed?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Ena said, or rather sighed.
Cai helped her to her feet and led her away.
The king was seated nearby. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have—” he began.
“And I’m sure they would,” Niamh said. “We expected to find calculation, but not such pain. She’s talented. Dangerously talented. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is. Get her to Morgana as soon as possible. I cannot think how she escaped Igrane, but I suppose all she and her lover felt was fear from the girl. She sensed their evil and it frightened her. You said she touched the semblance of Arthur and it collapsed?”
“Yes,” Uther said.
Niamh nodded. “Power such as hers would dissolve most minor spells. She radiates it. You have her to thank that you did not continue long in ignorance of the true state of affairs. They would, you know, have destroyed the semblance in such a way as to make you think Arthur died. Or at least, that’s what I would have done. That little-regarded girl put a period to their plotting, my king. Watch her closely and keep her safe.”
Uther’s eyes widened in amazement. “I hadn’t thought of that at all.”
“No? I did. So did Gawain. He rode through here last night. The summer king! This is war, my lord! War!”
Ena woke in the night thirsty. Cai was sleeping beside her, one arm thrown protectively over her. She wiggled herself out from under it and rose to her feet.
The sleeping rooms were off the big, ceremonial hall. It was a semicircle, with its own fire. They used the Roman method, a double wall that carried smells and smoke up through a grate set in the first wall, into the hollow created by the second. The floor was warm, covered by clean animal hides.
She rose and walked past the fire, toward a carved lattice that opened into the central hall. She blinked as her hand stretched out to touch it, because the writhing dragons that formed it seemed to bear human faces.
She blinked again, and her vision cleared. She pushed the lattice aside and entered the hall.
Some of Uther’s oath men and a few of the dinner guests who didn’t care to make the trip home had settled for the night on the floor. They all seemed to be sleeping deeply.
She could see well in the dark always, and she threaded her way among the prone sleepers as softly as a vagrant wisp of mist. The central fireplace glowed under its veil of white ash. She circled it, looking for a jug with water and a dipper. No luck.
Outside, she could hear the faint whisper and slap of water on the lake. But there was nothing in here to assuage her thirst.
Then her attention was drawn by the other tree. It stood well beyond the giant oak—at the edge of the building. And it looked as though it might once have been coppiced, that is, the trunk taken and used for timber but the stump allowed to sprout out into multiple trunks. The bark was fair and pale. Not oak, she thought, linden.
So that was where the necklace Niamh had given her drew its odor—the oil recovered from the flowers. It seemed she saw light creeping in among the multiple trunks of the giant tree.
Thinking it must be later than she thought at first, she hurried toward it. And found herself walking on a riverbed, smooth pebbles at the foot of the tree. And then felt a wetness at her toes.
The linden was planted among giant moss-covered rocks, and the water trickled from among them, down into a pool at the foot, deep enough to reflect the star road, the Milky Way, that threw a scarf of light across the night sky. There was a clay cup nearby, resting casually on its side on the gravel near the spring.
She knelt, rinsed the cup in the pool with its silent stars, refilled it and then drank. The bush bore sprays of white flowers. Odd, she thought. I didn’t notice it before. The scent of the tiny flowers filled her nostrils; the petals caressed her cheek.
She set the cup down. God, she thought. Where did it come from? But, of course, that was where it came from—God. Not the terrible, dark, blood-drinking gods her people worshipped, who spoke through the oak, the tree that drew down lightning, or the shadow beings her lover Cai’s people worshipped, enigmatic dreamers who shared not themselves but their dreams with man.
The branch was a hand, the fingers touching her cheek. She clasped it the way one clasps a hand. God, the mother. Not a goddess, who is, after all, only the other gender of godhead.
But god the Mother.
Ena’s eyes opened, and she looked past a V formed by two of the trunks into morning. The clear, golden light of morning slanted through the trees, turning the pale spring grass to shimmering gold. The child in her womb stirred, then seemed to leap.
A second later, a pair of arms like iron bands lifted her away from the spring tree and some eternal morning. And she was back in the dark hall. And the arms around her were Cai’s. He was crushing her against his body, and Niamh was beside him.
Cai’s body was shaking. She could feel the quivering as he carried her toward the fire pit and the ancient oak.
“Thank God,” he whispered. “Thank God. Tell me quickly.”
She was standing in front of him. He was bruising her arms with his grip.
He is tremendously strong, she thought, and liked the idea, even as she had feared that strength when she first met him.
He had asked her to meet him alone, and when he did, she had known what he had in mind. What else? she thought. When she did sneak off to go to him, he wasted no time in exploring her charms, as he put it. Which, she decided, was as poetic as he was ever going to get. In a short time, he had her on her back, with her skirt up.
She began to struggle.
“What’s wrong?”
“My honor.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Like hell! Everyone will know. Besides, they say it hurts.”
“Only if you’re a virgin.”
“I’m a virgin.”
“Well, I’ll take care of that.”
He did.
“There,” he said. “What do you think now?”
She shrugged. “I’m not impressed.”
“Well, try moving a little.”
She did.
“That feels good.”
“It gets better. A lot better.”
It had.
Now he was staring down at her, like she was his most precious possession.
“Tell me. Tell me, did you eat or drink anything while you were there?”
“What are you talking about?” She jerked back away from him. “I didn’t go anywhere. I was here all the time. What did you think? I was sneaking off to meet some man? I wasn’t. I was just thirsty. I took a drink of water. See? The tree.” She spun around and found herself pointing at a blank wall near the door.
She blinked. “It’s gone.”
“That’s because it was never there,” Cai snarled.
“Cai, be quiet,” Niamh said. “You’re frightening her. You drank water and then what?” Niamh asked.
“I felt love.” Ena was still staring at the wall, bewildered. “I looked into the morning.”
Ena turned toward Niamh. The old woman reached up and touched her cheek.
“I think you must have been dreaming,” she said softly. “You weren’t completely awake and you dreamed.”
Ena turned in a circle, looking first at Cai, then Niamh, and then the wall.
“I … I suppose I must have.”
He embraced her. This time it was a comforting one, not the fierce grip of a few moments before. He lifted her from the floor. “Let me take you to bed.”
She sighed, put her arms around his neck, and rested her head on his shoulder like a tired child. Her eyes drifted shut.
Neither of them was prepared for what happened next.
Her head lifted from Cai’s shoulder, her eyes opened, her face changed. To Cai, it was supremely horrible, because the woman in his arms wasn’t Ena. The features changed, formed themselves into a mask of maturity, and firmed with an iron will. The being in Ena glanced at him, dismissed him, and then turned to Niamh.
“Tell Morgana he is in the cage of bones. As am I.” The voice was a man’s, the cadence of its speech, the sound, the expression, were all masculine. The face, seeming almost superimposed over Ena’s softer features, looked at Cai. “Fear not for your love. I—can—not—return.”
TWELVE
HE DAY DAWNED CLOUDY, AND THE wind was from the north. The cold woke me. I was sleeping in a nest in the workshop.
She had made it for me, using wood shavings as a mattress, topped by linen sheets and an old, woolen mantle.
She was already stirring. Up, standing in the doorway, looking out to the sea. The wind was at our backs.
“A last touch of winter,” she said.
“Will it rain?” I asked anxiously.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning away from her view of the outdoors. “Why?”
“The bow,” I said. “The string is sinew. It isn’t tight when it’s damp, and it’s unusable when it’s wet. Warriors who carry such bows always have very fancy bow cases to carry them in, and they try to waterproof them as much as possible. I didn’t have time to make one.”
She nodded.
The bow was on a frame just in front of the fire on the workshop’s small hearth. I lifted it, hoping I had not given it too strong a pull. If I had, I couldn’t even string it.
One must kneel, throw a leg over the bow to hold it while you pull down the top, and set the string over the curved piece at the end. In a few minutes, I was snorting and whispering a few words I wasn’t supposed to know as I tried to accomplish this tolerably difficult process.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This dratted dress, that’s what’s wrong,” I snapped.
She reached out and touched my shoulder. And I found I was dressed in the same clothing I had worn when I was brought to Tintigal—my old tunic, mantle, and breeches reinforced with leather. Only now they were much cleaner than they had been when I was stripped by Igrane’s maids.
The Dragon Queen Page 30