Dahut

by Poul Anderson

  The door to Gratillonius’s room stood open. Thence came the radiance of seven candles in a brass holder on a table at his bedside. He had been reading; a book lay on the blankets. She knew not whether her spell had ended that or he had earlier fallen into a sleep which she made profound. Between his grief at learning of her conduct—he must have heard, with Tambilis waiting meddlesome in the palace—and the tumult this day, he could have had scant rest or none until now.

  Dahut stalked to the bedside and regarded him. She recognized his book. Bodilis had forced her to study it: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in Latin translation. An arm and both shoulders were bare outside the King’s blankets. Doubtless he was naked, as he had been the night she came here to deceive him into making her his.

  She sighed.

  He did not appear helpless as most sleepers do. His features were too rugged. The mouth had not softened, nor the brow eased. But how weary he seemed, weary beyond uttering, furrows plowed deep, gray sprinkled over the ruddiness of his hair and streaked down his beard.

  His neck remained a column smooth and thick, firmly rooted in heavy shoulders and barrel chest. Around it sparkled a fine golden chain. Blankets hid the lower part.

  Dahut’s breath quickened. She clenched fists and teeth.

  Resolution returned. She bent above the King. Gently as a mother with a babe, she slipped a hand beneath his head and raised it off the pillow. Her other hand went under the covers, over the rising and falling shagginess to the iron shank. She slid the Key forth into her sight. The chain she passed above his head until it encircled her supporting arm. She lowered him back onto the pillow and waited tensely.

  His eyes moved beneath the lids. His lips formed a whisper. He mumbled and stirred. Dahut waved her free hand over him. He quieted. She saw him breathe, but the wind smothered the sound.

  She gave him a brief archaic smile and departed.

  Through the hall she went, with a gait that grew confident until it was a stride. She passed out the door and shut it behind her as if she struck down an enemy. Niall backed off, startled in the gloom. She pursued, swung the Key, made it ring against his sword.

  “You have it?” he asked hoarsely. “Let’s away.”

  They stopped when they got to the road and could see better. The moon threw harried light upon them and the thing she reached to hang around his neck. Her arms followed.

  He made her end the kiss. “Back we go, at once,” he declared.

  Dahut’s laughter pealed. “Aye. Make haste. I’m afire!”

  —In her bed, after their first fierce passage of love, she asked, “Tomorrow morning will you challenge him?”

  “That might be shrewd,” Niall said into the warmth and silkiness and musk of her.

  “Catch him amazed, uncertain.” She squirmed and burrowed against him. “Tomorrow night will be our wedding night.”

  “Grant me some hours of rest first,” he requested with a leer.

  “Not yet,” she purred. Her lips and fingers moved greedily. “I want your weight on me again. I want to feel the Key cold between my breasts while you are a torch between my thighs. Oh, Niall, death itself cannot quench my wanting of you.”

  The wind keened, the sea rumbled.

  4

  Corentinus woke.

  For a moment he lay motionless. His room was savagely cold. Through a smokehole knocked out of the wall under the ceiling for his cookfire, he heard the storm. A nightlight, tallow candle in a wooden holder, guttered and stank. He did not ordinarily keep such a thing, but at a time when woe might fall on his people without warning, he must be ready. It barely revealed his few rough articles of furniture. The depths of the chamber were lost in night. Once the temple treasury, it was much too big for a servant of Christ.

  Corentinus’s eyes bulged upward. Air went jagged between his teeth. It came back out in an animal moan.

  “O dear God, no!” he begged. “Mercy, mercy! Let this be a nightmare. Let it be only Satan’s work.”

  Decision came. He tossed off his one blanket and rose from his pallet on the floor. Snatching a robe from a peg, he pulled it over his lanky frame. Without pausing to bind on sandals, he took the candle, tucked his staff under an arm, and left.

  The hallway led to the vestibule. Another small flame showed it crowded. Folk sprawled asleep, refugees from outside the city. Corentinus had admitted any who could not find better quarters, without inquiring as to their beliefs, and arranged for food and water and chamber pots. He made his way among the bodies to the inner door, opened it, and entered the sanctuary.

  When he closed it off, he found himself in still more of an emptiness than his room. This section occupied a good half of what had been the temple of Mars, before Roman pressure brought conversion to the sole church in Ys. Little was in it other than the canopied altar block and a couple of seats. The cross on the altar glimmered athwart shadows. The pagan reliefs along the walls were lost to sight.

  Corentinus lowered candle and staff, raised his arms before the cross, and chanted the Lord’s prayer. It echoed hollowly. He laid himself prostrate on the floor. “Almighty God,” he said against its hardness, “forgive a thick-headed old sailor man. I wouldn’t question Your word. Never. But was that dream from You? It was so terrible. And so darkling. I don’t understand it, I honestly don’t.”

  Here within the stone, silence abided.

  Corentinus climbed back onto his feet. He lifted his arms anew. “Well, maybe You’ll tell me more when I’ve obeyed Your first order,” he said. “If it did come from You. A dunderhead like me can’t be sure. But I’ll do what the angel bade me, supposing it was a true angel. Doesn’t seem too likely it was a devil like the one that tried to trick Bishop Martinus, because I don’t see any real harm in this deed. Forgive me my wonderment, Lord. I’ll do my best.”

  He gathered staff and candle. As he reached the door, he shuddered. With an effort, he opened it and re-entered the vestibule.

  A woman had roused to nurse her infant. She saw the tall form and called softly, anxiously, “Is aught wrong, master?”

  Corentinus halted.

  “Please tell me, master,” the woman said. “We don’t serve your God, but we are in His house and ours are wrathful.”

  Thoughts tumbled through him. He could wake these people and bring them, at least, with him. But no. It wasn’t that they were heathen, his small flock being scattered about the city. They were nonetheless God’s wayward children. But they were the merest handful among unreachable thousands. Worse, he did not know what it was that would stalk them this night.

  “Peace, my daughter,” he said. “Calm your fears. You are the guest of Christ.”

  He blew his candle out. The wind would immediately have killed it. As poor as his congregation was, he economized wherever he could. He went out the main door, over the portico, down the stairs, across the Forum.

  Wind still howled and smote. Air was still bitter with salt and cold. The gale had, though, dwindled enough that the crashing of the sea against the city wall came louder. Clouds flew low, blackening heaven, hooding towertops. The moon streamed just above western roofs. By its flickery pallor Corentinus hastened, up Lir Way toward High Gate and the Wood of the King.

  5

  After Dahut was sunken in sleep, Niall left her bed. Cautiously he put on the warm clothes he had worn earlier and flung aside when he and she returned here. The sword he hung across his back. At his left hip he belted a purse of coins, thinking wryly that it balanced the dagger on the right in more ways than one. Gesocribate was about two days distant for an active man afoot. Could he not buy food along the way he’d arrive hungry, unless he came upon a sheep or something like that and butchered it. However, if need be he could turn a deaf ear to the growls in his belly. There would be celebration at journey’s end!

  Or would there? His scheme might fail; he might himself perish—if the Gods of Ys were, in truth, less than death-angry with Their worshippers.

  Niall bared teeth. Wha
tever came, his Gods would know he had ventured that which Cú Culanni might not have dared.

  On an impulse he stepped to the bedside and looked down. Candlelight lost itself in the amber of Dahut’s tousled hair. She lay on her back, arms widespread. A young breast rose out of the blankets. From the rosiness at its peak a vein ran blue, spiderweb-fine, down an ivory curve marred by a beginning bruise where he had caressed it too strongly. Wild, she had never noticed. Now the pulse at the base of her throat beat slow and gentle. Her lips were slightly parted. How long were the lashes reaching toward those high cheekbones. When he bent low, he sensed warmth radiating from her. She smelled of sweat and sweetness. The crescent of the Goddess glowed.

  Almost, he kissed her. A stirring went through his loins. He pulled himself back barely in time, straightened, but did not go at once.

  Gazing at her, he said very low in the tongue of Ériu:

  “It’s sad I am to be leaving you, my darling, for darling you were, a woman like none other, and you loved me as never I was loved before nor hope ever to be again. I think you will haunt me until I join you in death.

  “But it must be, Dahut. I came here sworn to vengeance. I may not break my oath, nor would I; for Ys killed the son that Ethniu gave me, long and long ago. Yet sad I am that your Gods chose you for the instrument.

  “How could you believe I would make myself King of Ys? Oh, it’s mad with love you were, to believe that. I am the King at Temir, and I will go home to my own.

  “Should I bind myself to this city I hate? Sure, and I would first have slain Grallon. But he was not alone in bringing doom on my good men. All Ys did, foremost its nine witch-Queens.

  “Let me become its King, and I doubt such a chance as is mine tonight would ever wing its way back. In the end I too would fall, not grandly among my warriors, but alone in the Wood of slaughter; and From my blood Ys would suck new life. It shall not happen, not to me nor ever again to anyone else.

  “I too will seek Grallon, where he lies in the slumber you cast upon him. I stayed my hand then, for you might have screamed. My first duty is against Ys. Afterward, if the Gods spare me—oh, it will go hard to kill a man in his sleep. I thought of waking him. But that would make a challenge fight, and though Ys be gone, what hold might its Gods yet keep on me? Let me go free.

  “You wish to be my wife, Dahut. It’s glorious you are; but so in her youth was Mongfind. Should I take for wife a woman who plotted the death of her father?

  “As for the rest, two are also comely, though second and third behind you. But the second would bear a horror of me; when I embraced her, she would lie like a corpse and send her soul afar. The third is a sorceress who helped bring death to dear Breccan. Should I take to me the murderess of my son? So are the rest, apart from the cripple; and they are crones.

  “Let them die, let the Sign come on fresh maidens, and still the Nine would be the only women I could have; and not a one of them would be giving me another son.

  “Your Ys, all Ys is the enemy I am vowed to destroy. This night, the lady at my side is the Mórrigu.

  “Farewell, Dahut.”

  He lifted the Key that hung on his breast and kissed its iron.

  He departed.

  Wind struck him with blades that sang. Seen from the doorway, the city was a well of blackness out of which lifted barely glimpsed spears, its towers. The horns of land hunched brutal. Beyond ramped the sea, white under the sinking, cloud-hunted moon.

  When he loped downward, houses soon blocked that sight from him. He was a tracker, though, who had quickly learned every trail he wanted and had scant need of light.

  The streets twisted to Lir Way. Crossing the empty Forum, he saw the Fire Fountain brimful of shivery water, flung off waves whose hammering resounded louder for each pace he took. He threw a gibe at the stately buildings of the Romans, at the church of Christ.

  When he left the avenue, the streets grew more narrow and mazed than those where the wealthy dwelt. He was in Lowtown, ancestral Ys which Brennilis had saved. Behind the sheerness of a tower—clouds raced moon-tinged, making it seem to topple on him—he found the moldering houses of the Fishtail. The life that throbbed in them had drawn into itself, the quarter lay lightless, none save he and the wind ran through its lanes. He glimpsed a cat in a doorway. Its baleful gaze followed him out of sight.

  Nearing the rampart, he entered a quarter likewise ancient and poor, but a place for working folk. Among these dwellings he came by the Shrine of Ishtar. Awed in spite of himself, he stopped for an instant and lifted the Key before the dolmenlike mass. Let Her within see that he went to wreak justice.

  A little farther, he had the Cornmarket on his right. Its paving sheened wet. On his left a row of warehouses fronted on the harbor. Between them he spied the basin. Ahead reared the city wall. Self-shadowed, the monstrous bulk stood like a piece cut out of heaven. Over and over, sheets of foam spurted to limn its battlements. The rush and crash trampled the sounds of gale.

  Niall advanced. At the inside edge of the pomoerium stood the Temple of Lir, small, dark, deserted, but the rudeness and mass of its stones bespeaking a strength implacable. Again Niall halted and raised the Key. “Though this house of Yours fall, You will abide,” he said into the roaring. “Come seek me in Ériu. You shall have Your honors in overflowing measure, blood, fire, wine, gold, praise; for we are kindred, You and I.”

  Just the same, he dared not enter the unlocked fane. Besides, he should hasten. Dawn was not far off.

  Drawing his sword, knife in his left hand, he slipped up the staircase to the wall top. The Gull Tower reared ahead. Moonlight came and went over its battlements and the parapet beneath. Each time a wave broke against the rampart, spray sleeted; and the impact was deafening.

  This was a guard point. Was a sentry outside, or did the whole watch shelter within the turret? Niall crouched low and padded forward.

  Light shone from slit windows. The door was shut. In front of it did stand an Ysan marine. While the tower blocked off wind and water, he was drenched, chilled, miserable. He stood hunched into his cloak, helmeted head lowered, stiffened fingers of both hands clutching his pikeshaft.

  He must die unbeknownst to his comrades.

  Niall squatted under a merlon. The next great wave struck and flung its cloud. He leaped with it, out of the whiteness, and hewed.

  Himself half blinded, he misgauged. His sword clanged and glided off the helmet. The young man whirled about. Before he could utter more than a croak, Niall was at him. The Scotian had let his sword fall. His right arm went under the guard’s chin and snapped the head back. His left drove dagger into throat and slashed.

  The pike clattered loose. Blood spouted. Niall shoved. The sentry toppled over the inner parapet, down to the basin. Night hid the splash. His armor would sink him.

  Niall retrieved his sword. Had the rest heard?

  They had not.

  He wiped dagger on kilt, sheathed both weapons, and trotted onward. The sea showered him, washing away blood.

  Above the northern edge of the gate, he stopped and looked. As if to aid him, for that instant the surf was lower and clouds parted from before the moon.

  On his left gleamed, faintly, the arc of the harbor. Its water was troubled; he saw vessels chafe at their moorings along the wharf. Yet wall and gate kept it safe, as they had done these past four centuries. Behind reached Ys, mostly a cave of night but its towers proud in the moonlight. Cape Rach, Point Vanis, the inland vale were dream-dim.

  On his right heaved Ocean. Wind, still a howl and a spear, had in the fullness of its violence piled up seas which would not damp out for days; and as Niall stood above, the spring tide was at its height. Skerries lay drowned underneath, until time should resurrect them to destroy more ships. A few rocks thrust above the relentlessness out of the west. Each time a wave smote them, they vanished in chaos.

  The sea was not black but white, white as the breasts of Dahut. A billow afar growled like the drums of an oncoming army. As
it drew closer, gathered speed, lifted and lifted its smoking crest, the breaker’s voice became such thunder as rolls across the vault of heaven. When it struck and shattered, the sound was as of doomsday.

  Niall shaded his eyes and squinted. He sought for the floats that on ebb tide drew open the doors. There, he had found the nearer of them. It dashed to and fro at the end of its chain, often hurled against the wall. Had that battered the sphere out of shape? He could not tell in the tricky light, through the flying spindrift. But neither one had cracked open and filled. They were too stoutly made.

  Now and then the sea recoiled on itself. Suddenly emptiness was underneath the floats. They dropped. Chains rattled over blocks in sculptured cat’s heads till they snapped the great balls to a halt. It was a wonder they had not broken; but they likewise were well wrought of old. The waves climbed anew and again the globes whirled upon them.

  Niall smiled. All was as it should be.

  He started down the inner stair. Below the wall there was shielding against wind and water, save for what flew across. However, the stone was slippery and the moon hidden. He kept a hand on the rail and felt his way most carefully.

  The stairs ended at a ledge. In the dark he stumbled against the capstan there and cursed. He should have remembered. He had kept every sense whetted when Dahut showed him the system, as her father once showed her.

  Well, the machine had naught to do with him. It was for forcing the gate shut if need arose at low tide. He groped past a huge jamb to the walk that ran across this door.

  Copper sheathing was cold and slick beneath his right hand. His left felt along the rail that kept him from falling into the chop of the basin. Whenever the surf hit, the door trembled and he heard a groaning beneath the crash. But it held, it held.

  Distance between rail and metal suddenly widened. He was past the walk, onto the platform at the inner edge of the door. He turned to the right. His fingers touched iron, a tremendous bracket, and inside it the roughness of the beam that latched the gate.