And it was both.
The power flowed through his fingers and down his arm, infusing every nerve and fibre as it searched to earth itself through him. His body bucked beneath the onslaught. His heart strained in his chest. His blood sang in his veins.
He had forgotten what it felt like to connect with the earth but here, in this most sacred place, he was reminded - and that reminder was brutal in the extreme.
His cries were terrible. He felt the monster rising inside him, felt the sudden and forceful surge of base instincts, to rut, to hunt, to kill, to feed, swelling up inside him like a siren from below - the call irresistible.
Sláine surrendered to it, and it was good.
A connection grew, slowly at first but he felt it building.
He felt the tie between his flesh, his spirit, and the earth itself. He felt Danu's strength flooding into his veins, and it refused to be tethered. It was power capable of shaping mountains, mere ropes could never hope to harness it. He pulled at the heavy iron chains binding him, testing their limits as well as his own. His arms trembled though not with weakness. It surpassed anger. He became the mountain, resolute, indomitable, and indefatigable. He became the river, decisive, driven, a torrent that refused to be quelled. He sacrificed himself to the power of the Goddess as it swarmed through him.
In a momentary lapse of reason he saw visions of who he might yet be if he walked from this tomb. They danced before his eyes, hallucinatory bursts of light and sound as his head swam with the earth sense. He saw the health of the land, and encroaching on it, the sickness of the Sourlands eating away at the lush pastures and rolling hills, devouring the very body of the Goddess - and it sickened him.
It sickened him enough that he knew it could not be allowed to happen, not while he lived and breathed. The earth power was inside him, a part of him, as much as his blood was. He was a child of the Goddess. Sláine thought of that ghostly maiden he had seen two summers gone, leading the dead king into the trees. He would not fail her.
He held his head high and leaned into the chains, all of the power in his shoulders and upper arms braced by his legs for one final massive push.
He felt the anchor pins straining. The sound of iron grating on rock betrayed their weakness.
It was surrendering, but it needed more.
His arms spasmed uncontrollably, the pressure so intense it came close to buckling his joints.
Raging, Sláine summoned every last ounce of strength and surged away from the wall. It was done. The sheer power of his final press was enough to rip the anchor pins out of the limestone wall.
The chains clattered about his feet. He staggered forwards, the shaft of sunlight finding his face, and as he breathed in he felt the fears of the mortal world fade away. He was the land. He was the mountain. He was the river. He was eternal.
He broke the ropes, banging his wrists together until the hasps shattered and the locks sprung open, and left them on the floor with the bones.
He knew, without needing to see, which of the stones was actually the door. He picked his way through the bones, breaking them underfoot in his urgency to be out.
"Lug be praised!" Dian cried, seeing the huge door-stone brushed aside as if it wasn't there.
Cathbad squinted and scowled at Sláine as he emerged, triumphant, from his trial.
The young Sessair warrior was changed by his ordeal.
He stood taller, his muscles more prominent, but wrong. His entire musculature was deformed.
"So it's true," the surly old druid muttered. "Sláine Mac Roth really is blessed of Danu." He shook his head in disbelief.
Others seemed less surprised by the young man's survival. King Grudnew appeared to be particularly happy with this latest turn of events. He turned to his warlord. "I'd say he's proven himself worthy, wouldn't you, my old friend?"
"Without doubt, the Goddess touches him, sire. That makes him more than worthy."
"Druid," Grudnew commanded, watching Sláine discard the door-stone. "The trial is satisfied, wouldn't you agree?"
"The boy is alive."
"No, druid, the man is alive. He has lived through your barbaric ritual and proven the right of Murdo's claims, that he is indeed gifted with the warp-spasm just as the greatest warriors of the Red Branch ever were. Right proven by your own trial absolves him of the deaths of Cullen Mac Conn, and his father Conn of a Hundred Battles. All shall know his innocence - and there shall be no hint of retribution lest the speaker would face my wrath. Am I understood?"
"Indeed, sire. It is clearly and plainly, and in all other ways, understood."
"Good, druid. I sense that great things await young Sláine Mac Roth. I would have you read him and divine what you may from the remnants of the earth power still surging within him. Gorian, I think it wise you escort Cathbad over to young Sláine and then see Bluth about fitting Sláine with a hero harness - if the old wisdom has not been forgotten."
"As you wish, Grudnew." Gorian turned to the druid and, leaning in close, slipped an arm around the old man's shoulder. "Come then, old man," his voice dropped to barely more than a whisper, "let's listen to you spin some lies in an attempt to sound portentous and impress our king. I trust you will make them good. No doubt you'll try to implicate the lad in some unknown future ill. Once a killer always a killer, eh?"
"Get your hands off me, warrior," Cathbad hissed, pulling free of Gorian's embrace.
"Not denying it then?"
"I revere all life, warrior. I serve Danu with my every breath. She has seen something in this lout. I pray that she reveals it to me so that I might know her purpose and help steer the boy. That is all. There is nothing to deny."
Gorian didn't believe a word of it. A fool could see the disappointment on Cathbad's mottled face as Sláine emerged from the tomb. He had wanted the lad to fail or at least emerge humbled and begging for mercy so that the druid could claim back some of his lost pride. He had been an idiot to proclaim Dian's drawings the wisdom of the ancients and vainglorious to pretended to be able to read them. There was no doubting that the old man still harboured a grudge. In Gorian's experience a petty man with power was a dangerous man, and for all that the druid tended to the spiritual wellbeing of the tribe, his was still a position of power, power that commanded respect. He had long ago proven himself petty enough for his dislike of young Sláine to cause the warlord concern.
The last of the empowering warp-spasm still flowed through the young warrior's veins. Gorian stood beside him. "Come, Sláine. You have proven your innocence. Walk into the sun where you belong."
"Aye," the druid decreed. "The innocence of Mac Roth is not in doubt. Danu herself has taken a hand in his affairs. He is judged worthy. Now come to me, Sláine Mac Roth. I would consult with Danu over your destiny, come to me boy."
"I am a man," Sláine said stubbornly.
"That you are," the old druid said placating. "Forgive me."
Sláine emerged fully into the dawn's early light, and walked up to the druid. Cathbad laid a wizened old hand on his forehead and lapsed into a curious muttering, half-words slipping from his mouth. A moment later the druid threw his head back and cried, "I see a hero swinging a crimson axe, I see red-mouthed screams, I see huge mounds of fallen, I see smashed shields, I see ravens gnawing at enemy necks on the field of slaughter... I see a... a curious rat-like dwarf? I see pain. I see a world of hurt." The druid lapsed into silence. When his eyes met Sláine's there were tears in them.
"A promising future, lad." Gorian said.
But of course there were repercussions.
Grudnew's claim that it all ended there, that morning, was nothing more than wishful thinking. Seven of Cullen's kin came out of the night, torches in hand. They circled his home in silence. With a nod from one, they touched their flames to the wattle and daub walls and the thatched roof, and the place went up in smoke. They moved back beyond the ring of fire and the flame's punishing kiss.
Macha came out first, in her night shift with
a fur pulled over her head. She looked small, frightened, as she slumped against the wall of the neighbouring house and coughed up great lungfuls of smoke and phlegm. Bellyshaker staggered out behind her, his face flushed with the red sting of ale. He lurched around in almost comical circles, flapping his arms ineffectually at the flames as if he hoped to wave them away.
The cordon of the seven vigilantes closed around the burning hut.
One delivered a heavy blow to his father's temple with the butt of an axe, sending the old man sprawling in the dirt. The vigilante knelt to check if Bellyshaker was breathing. Evidently he was.
Sláine watched the scene play out.
He knew they had no intention of letting him leave.
They held him responsible for the lives of their kin. They would extract a blood price in retribution, as was their right - or as would have been their right, if Grudnew hadn't snatched it away from them.
Sláine found it hard to believe they would be willing to watch him burn to death. That was a barbaric fate if ever there was one. Of course if they hadn't been so stupid they might have realised that his mother wasn't screaming hysterically and trying to get back into the burning house to save him, which she would have done if she had thought he was in there.
He watched it all from the roof of a neighbouring house.
He had known they would come. They were cut from the same cloth as Cullen of the Wide Mouth. There was no way they could allow the deaths to go unanswered. It would be akin to accepting that their blood was wrong, that Cullen was a treacherous backstabbing weasel and Conn was just too stupid to admit it. To do so was to admit that the same flaws were inherent in their blood. It would never happen.
There would be a reckoning, Sláine promised them all, watching the vigilantes as they moved around, catching glimpses enough to know exactly who had come to do him harm. He promised himself that he would remember their faces until they had breathed their last, and then he would forget them completely and utterly.
His mother's cry tore at the very fabric of the night.
Macha stumbled towards one of the men. From a distance it looked as if she was pleading with a friend, someone she knew, most certainly, but the man's hand came up and down, hard, and she went sprawling in the dirt, her nightshift gathered high around her waist, mud spattering up the soft white flesh of her thighs.
The vigilante stood over her and spat, a wad of phlegm hitting her in the face.
Sláine felt something inside him snap. It was a powerful thing, like the unfettering of a restraint that had otherwise held him in check. Suddenly it was gone. He rose to his feet and bellowed, a tribal war cry, beating his fist off his bare chest to incite this primal anger. Backlit by the dancing flame he looked like some demon from the Underworld come to wreak pandemonium. He held his father's axe above his head and leapt down from the roof. As his feet came into contact with the earth, a huge surge of energy shocked through his system from his feet, rising up through his legs to his body and seeming to burst like black fire out of his skull.
He demanded retribution in blood, and there was nothing the vigilantes or anyone else, including his parents, could do except watch in horror as he gave himself over to blind fury and claimed what was rightfully his.
He killed all seven that night. Seven. It was bloody and brutal, and savage: a dance of death as naked in its savagery as any battlefield had witnessed. They came at him as one, but in his berserker rage Sláine relished it, goading them into their own deaths. Seven fell to his axe.
He did not think it too many.
Spent, he lay on his back looking up at the heavens.
The dead lay around him.
The fire burned on, his home reduced to ash and smoke.
Grudnew knelt beside him, his face troubled.
"What happened, lad?"
The last ripples of power drained from his fingertips back into the earth.
"They came in the night, seven of them. They burned down the house. They would have burned me alive. You said it ended here, today, and you were right, it does. They are dead. They won't come looking for vengeance again."
"Because they are dead," the king said, understanding his meaning well enough.
"Exactly," Sláine agreed.
"You're a hard man, Sláine Mac Roth."
"I am not the one who sought death this night, sire. I merely helped those who were looking for it, to find it."
Seven
Lies Drip From Dead Tongues
Sláine was in a black mood. He had been ever since Gorian laid out the battle plans for the upcoming raid and learned that his task was to steal cows. It was humiliating. Stealing cows. He was being treated like a boy despite the fact that he was every bit as strong as any of the others - and if he went into a berserker rage, more so than all of them. He should have been in the thick of the fighting, not skulking around on the fringe trying to sneak into the cattle pens to liberate a bunch of milkers.
He knew it was because they feared him. Feared what might happen if he surrendered to the warping power of the earth and could no longer tell friend from foe in the battle frenzy.
So, they had him sneaking around the battle like a damned thief and tried to placate him by telling him how vital it was that he succeed, that their winter supplies depended upon him.
All he wanted was to be treated like one of them, to be a man, an equal.
The fighting was ferocious.
The Red Branch came sweeping out of the hills in two broad phalanxes that swept away all before them. Ten chariots, thirty horsemen, and fifty naked warriors daubed in the blue woad they used to drive the fear of the daemonic underworld into their foes. The thunder of hooves and war chariots was lost below the whooping and hollering of the warriors as they fell upon the town.
It was slaughter.
The men of the town barely managed a token defence, but that almost certainly saved their lives. The Red Branch warriors were not murderers. They were warriors, the very best the Sessair had. They killed as the need dictated, not senselessly. They killed today for food, to ensure their own survival during the harsh winter that Cathbad had predicted.
Gorian's scheme was executed to perfection.
They came at dawn, sweeping down out of the hills and breaking right and left around the town like a huge mouth waiting to snap shut. As the men emerged, food still stuck in their beards from the nightly feed, the mouth of the trap sprang - and it had iron teeth.
Screams of terror followed blood. Women watched their menfolk cut down even as they reached for weapons. It was harsh. The heat of the battle inspired the blue-painted warriors to feats bordering on evil. They tore the tongues out of the dead, cut out their eyes, and maimed their faces so that they would bear their injuries into the otherworld. Their sex granted the women no immunity from the suffering. They threw themselves at the painted men, gouging at faces and eyes with hooked fingers, clawing up bloody runnels only to be beaten back, silenced with a knife across the throat.
In all, it took less than an hour's quarter to subdue the town.
The place would never be the same.
Ghosts owned the town.
Even with the dying still unfinished, the place was smothered in blood and pain, and it stuck to the heart in a way that prevented those left behind from breathing. It would die now, just as the men had. If they wanted to live on the women would be reduced to the humiliation of begging, although some would seek out the temple of Danu and offer their bodies for food and shelter. Others would end their own lives that night, mourning. In the days to come grief would prove a killer to match the iron of the Red Branch.
Sláine skirted the slaughter. He watched it, with mute fascination. The Red Branch was awesome, irresistible. He ducked beneath a hedge, and crawled on his hands and knees to the tethers binding the heifers and the older milkers. The animals were skittish, frightened by the sounds and smells of the battle.
He used a rope to gather up ten of the animals and drew them away
from the smell of blood.
He slapped the lead cow's rump and moved her on. The others followed. Sláine cast a backwards glance to be sure he hadn't left any stragglers, and was surprised to see the blue woad-smeared Gobhan Mac Tadg pressed up against the side wall of a roundhouse. The warrior clutched a sack in one grubby hand and a knife in the other. Sláine watched, horrified, as Gobhan picked his way through the dead, tilting back their heads and opening their mouths to see if their tongues had been claimed. If he found one that hadn't he reached into the corpse's mouth and cut it out. There was no honour to the man. He scavenged the kills of better men and in doing so avoided the fiercest of the fighting, marking him out as a coward as well.
Sláine turned his back on the man.
After the passion of the fight the men returned to their Dun and sated themselves in a glut of food, ale, and a very different kind of passion.
They gathered in Grudnew's new round hall, only recently completed, where all were seated equally at the king's enormous round table. Sláine saw the irony in the druid's chair, placed as it was over the exact spot where Dian and the others had buried the fake tablets. The king most certainly had a sense of humour. The walls of the new hall were adorned with the skulls of some of the Sessair's greatest foes. It was more than merely a decorative touch. By using the skulls, they denied their foes a place in the Summerland, turning them into restless dead. It was the ultimate price to be paid for standing against the Red Branch.
Food over-spilled the tabletop, dripping with grease and steaming in the fat of its own juices. A huge wild boar had been spitted and roasted over an open fire, its skin crackling and its fat spitting in the flames.
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