The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman)

by Jane Dougherty

  Impulsively she bent over the sleeping boy. He frowned and a wave of tenderness washed over her. Jonah appeared carefree and independent, but she knew he saw the dark side to even the brightest moments. He saw the rotting leaves beneath the flowers; he felt the long shadows of the day’s end at every new dawn. Jonah worried about her safety even in his sleep.

  She brushed his forehead with her lips. He didn’t wake, but a smile flickered across his face. She waited for him to wake so she could see in his eyes if something had changed for him in the course of the night. But he slept on. She wouldn’t wake him; she would use her time to give him a surprise. She knew what it would be—lunch.

  Without Jonah she would never have made it so far. She would have been eaten by Cerberus in the first three minutes after leaving Providence. Now she wanted to share everything with Jonah, learn to be like him and do all the things he could do. She had never killed anything before, but if she wanted to help him provide food for them, it was about time she learned how to hunt. That would astonish him more than any number of bridges out of her memory.

  Twisting her hair into a plait to keep it out of the way, Deborah picked up Jonah’s bow and a handful of arrows and set off into the trees beyond the hollow. The pups watched with pricked ears and whined. A small band detached itself from the pack and trotted silently behind her.

  She moved slowly and awkwardly through the untrodden undergrowth, hoping to find a rabbit. Hoping also that she would have the nerve to kill it. She had watched Jonah practice with his bow, and as far as she could see, there was nothing much to it. The pups seemed to know what she was about and fanned out in front of her. Before they were even out of sight of the hollow, they startled a rabbit, and Deborah aimed at the quick brown shape as it leapt in wild zigzags towards her. But she was far too slow, and the rabbit had careered out of sight into the trees before she let fly a useless arrow that flopped feebly into the bushes ten yards away.

  One of the pups bounded after the spent arrow to fetch it back. It was about to dive into the screen of low shrubs when it stopped dead, its chin almost on the ground, hackles raised. It gave a low menacing growl and crept backwards, its tail standing out in a stiff brush. Deborah froze. The rest of the pups crept close, stiff-legged, all with their ears pricked and their hackles up. At the edge of her line of vision, Deborah thought she saw shadows slip between the trees, but when she looked there was nothing there.

  Suddenly the biggest of the pups snarled and darted forward. Deborah was seized by a cold fear as the undergrowth shivered and branches snapped, and something crashed into the clearing.

  Chapter 24

  By the time they reached the Cleft Rock, Zachariah’s spirits were quite revived. By rights he should be protecting Maeve, but he was coming round to the surprising and quite unconventional idea that she was perfectly capable of looking out for both of them.

  In the centre of the Cleft Rock, a spring bubbled up from the ground at the base of one wall. It ran through a deep channel the short distance across the cleft and disappeared back into the rock wall at the other side. They both drank deeply and splashed the icy water over their faces. Maeve took a sort of bread from her bag, soft and full of tiny, dark fruits, and strips of tough cured meat with a wild, smoky flavour. Zachariah’s mouth watered.

  “I am so hungry—” he said through a mouthful of bread.

  “I know—you could eat a scabby baby.” Maeve laughed. “One of David’s new expressions.”

  “Well, maybe not a scabby one,” Zachariah replied, surprising himself with an uncharacteristic attempt at humour. “Why did you decide to come after me?” he asked suddenly. He knew what answer he wanted to hear, and that too surprised him.

  Maeve tried to settle into a comfortable storytelling position, but anxiety made her squirm and fidget as she explained about the panic they found in Overworld. Some of their neighbours had been arrested, others beaten up; homes had been wrecked. They feared that this was just the beginning, just a practice run for a new, more terrible raid of the Danann’s quarter. While the adults were debating about whether to hide, or run, or fight, Maeve had slipped back down to Underworld, hoping to catch up with Zachariah. But he had been difficult to follow. The desert winds blew away his tracks, and the night was full of dark angels. Zachariah’s eyes opened wide with surprise and admiration at her courage.

  “They all seemed to have forgotten about the Queen,” Maeve said indignantly. “Somebody had to let her know what was happening, didn’t they? What would be the use of you finding the Garden and the great shining host of heroes if you didn’t get them moving to save us right away? Even if there was no host, just the Garden, we could have got everybody out in the night—”

  “Why don’t you just say you didn’t trust me to come back and tell you?” Zachariah’s eyes shone with anger and disappointment, but Maeve took his hand and grinned.

  “I trusted you to come back all right.” The grin faded and her eyes took on a haunted look. “It’s just that finding the Garden had become so…imperative. When you set out, you didn’t know what was at stake. If the Garden isn’t there, we’ll all die. I know it! I couldn’t just sit about waiting. I had to do something, just to know.” The grin almost came back as she went on. “You should have seen the fuss they made when I suggested going after you. Da threatened to knock me out and keep me locked in the apartment bound and gagged.”

  “I can imagine.” Zachariah smiled wryly.

  “Anyway, I had almost caught up with you when the demons snatched you. I didn’t know whether to try and rescue you, or go ahead and find the Queen.”

  “Yes, you did,” Zachariah snorted.

  “Well, okay, I did. And I found part of the Queen’s host! Or rather they found me. The Centaurs told me the Protector has already moved against the Dananns. The evil in thrall to Abaddon is massing outside the gates of Providence, but the warriors of the Queen’s host are gathering. The Protector is afraid the Dananns will open Providence to the Queen’s armies. The time has come to fight, before he kills us all! If it isn’t already too late.”

  Zachariah suddenly felt only seventeen again, a puny boy, weakened through lack of food, traumatised by his treatment at the hands of the demon king and his wolfmen. And they hadn’t even seen the Garden yet. They weren’t even certain it was there.

  “What can we do?” he asked pathetically.

  “We can fight!”

  Zachariah looked startled and amazed at the same time. “Us? How?”

  “With the Queen’s host, that’s how!” And Maeve explained how the Queen had brought back the Old Ones. She was assembling a host of warriors to counter-balance the Iron Horde of the demon Abaddon and mend the broken Pattern.

  Zachariah was confused. “But where are they, these warriors? All I’ve seen so far are demons and wolfmen and that awful thing in the river.”

  Maeve laughed. “That was Tawaret, the river goddess. She was only trying to help by warning you that the winged demons had seen you.”

  “Funny way of helping, I call it,” Zachariah grumbled to himself.

  “And then, while I was wondering how I was going to get across the river, it got light enough to see that a bridge had appeared in the night, and galloping across it were more of the Old Ones.”

  “I can’t imagine that river thing galloping,” Zachariah muttered darkly. “Lumbering maybe, or wallowing, but not galloping.”

  “Not Tawaret,” Maeve snapped in exasperation. “Centaurs! I recognised them from a painting in Underworld. Only the Queen could have brought them back. I just stood there and they found me. They had been sent to watch the bridge for someone from Providence.”

  “But what is a Centaur?” Zachariah was too curious to be ashamed of his ignorance.

  “You’ll find out in a minute. Here they come.”

  With a thunder of hooves, two-dozen creatures, half-man, half-horse, appeared. Two couples held up a wounded brother between them. They were all dusty and blood-streaked,
their glossy horse flanks flecked with foam and dark with sweat. Many of them had ugly gashes across their broad man-chests and teeth marks on their horse-backs from their fight with the wolfmen. All carried long bows, and their great hooves, that seemed to be of iron rather than horn, were red with blood as if they had trampled and waded in the pulped bodies of their enemies. They all wore curling beards, and their faces were solemn and intelligent, but proud too and with a hint of cruelty.

  “The wolf vermin are destroyed except for two that got away. Unfortunately they will warn the Destroyer. We must hurry.”

  The Centaur who spoke was coal black, from the curly hair of his head to the tip of his luxuriant horse’s tail. He turned to Zachariah with an expression that chilled him through, as if he had been caught out in a most dreadful crime.

  “So this is the child for whom so much blood has been spilt?” The harsh accusation in the cold eyes made Zachariah look away. He tried to stammer his apologies, but the Centaur held up a hand for silence. “Two Centaurs are grievously wounded. But it was necessary.”

  “We couldn’t let them carry off Zachariah,” Maeve interjected.

  The Centaur silenced her with a withering look. “The wolfmen must not find their way into Providence. They must not open the gates of Providence to the Destroyer. The gates of Providence must be opened to us.” The Centaur gave Zachariah a look of such chilling disdain that suddenly Tawaret seemed quite endearing. “The time is not yet right. The power of the Green Woman is not complete. But we cannot wait. Evil approaches the gates of Providence and, worse, the evil within is already in motion.”

  At the sight of Maeve’s deathly pallor, Zachariah forgot his own humiliation. His thoughts flew back to Underworld, to Ezekiel and Grania, to their happy, riotous home hidden beneath the sad city of Providence. Maeve had followed him alone through the desert. She had found the Centaurs and helped ambush the wolfmen. Maeve was bold and fearless, much more than he, and she was afraid. Something clutched at his heart and squeezed it, hard. He reached out and took her hand. It was trembling.

  Chapter 25

  The bushes were wrenched aside, and out strode a young woman with long brown hair and clothed entirely in animal skins. She was tall and strong looking, even though one arm was withered and useless, and one foot seemed disproportionately large, giving her a pronounced limp. Her face was disfigured with a deep red mark that ran from her hairline down her left cheek. It covered her left eye, giving the impression that it glared red-rimmed out of an angry wound. The pups growled, but the woman took no notice.

  “For a hunter, you have not much wood craft,” she said.

  “It’s the first time I tried,” Deborah said defensively, backing away from the alarming-looking woman.

  “And the bow is your friend’s.”

  Deborah said nothing. She guessed the woman must be one of Jonah’s desert wanderers, so perhaps she was a friend. Her father’s words, to trust nobody, came back to her, and she scrutinised the disfigured face, trying to decide if it was only the birthmark that made it look evil.

  As if she read her thoughts, the woman said, “You should not judge on appearances alone. Not always, in any case. I know what you are looking for, and I can help you find it.”

  The woman’s eyes were the colour of melted snow, and Deborah felt the chill that glittered in their depths seep through the pupils of her own eyes, freezing her thoughts one by one and locking them in an ice-bound cavern. The woman’s lips twisted into a smile that was more of a sneer, and Deborah felt even her dearest thoughts skittering from her grasp like smooth pebbles across the surface of a frozen lake. A darkness seemed to fill the woman’s eyes, a sinister presence that was not contained, but crept out furtively, slipping like wolf shadows into Deborah’s mind and filling it full of evil thoughts that were not her own.

  The pups whined and wriggled on their bellies, a dozen pairs of eyes narrowed to yellow slits, and fixed the woman in an unblinking stare. Deborah frowned and turned back to look at the still sleeping Jonah. Jonah too knew what she was looking for, but the land beyond the river was as unfamiliar to him as it was to her.

  The woman grinned, and dark, ugly thoughts wriggled into Deborah’s consciousness. A veil fell across her eyes, and as she looked at Jonah, the boy she had let into her most secret places, he became just a sleeping boy. And why was he still sleeping? Was he so worn out by the double march of the previous day? Deborah felt a flush of pride in herself, getting up at first light to hunt game. She could find the way just as easily as Jonah. Easier—she had the Memory to help her. Look at the bridge!

  The woman had settled down at the edge of the screen of bushes and was watching her with a smile on her lips that betrayed just a flicker of irony. She had heard Deborah’s thoughts as clearly as if she had shouted them aloud,

  “You are a very talented young woman. Call me Eve. Trust me.”

  Deborah shook her head in a desperate attempt to regain control of her will, but the woman’s cold eyes held her in their grip. One dragging step after another, Deborah moved closer, and with a sob of frustrated rage, sat down before the strange woman and listened.

  Eve spoke in a low, unmodulated voice about the wonders beyond the mountain, the blue of the sky, the tang of the streams cold and clear as crystal, the winged horses, the song birds, the tall trees, and the soft, lush grass. Deborah found herself caught helplessly in the mesh of words and the strange eyes like splinters of ice that filled her entire vision.

  “The Queen sent me to meet you. She knows you are on your way, but you need a guide.”

  “Jonah—”

  “The dog boy.” Eve snorted scornfully. “The dog boy knows how to scavenge like a jackal in the desert, but he knows nothing of the ways of the forest or the mountain. And,” her voice dropped to a whisper, “he does not know the path to the Garden.”

  Deborah opened her mouth to speak then closed it, unable to summon up any thoughts of her own. The woman smiled hungrily, and Deborah’s desire to defend Jonah squirmed and shrank. In its place, her desire to find her mother grew and swelled, fed by Eve’s insinuations.

  She found herself staring at the imperious stranger. The face, despite the birthmark, was strong and decisive, and she held her head proudly. Her eyes, filled with ice splinters, probed into Deborah’s head, picking over and commanding her thoughts. It had not taken Eve long to find the pride and arrogance Deborah thought she had shrugged off since meeting Jonah, like a snake shedding its skin. Struggling vainly to keep out the invasion, Deborah felt her resistance ebbing away.

  “How can I be sure my mother really sent you?”

  “You can’t.” Eve laughed. “But how can you be sure your precious dog boy is to be trusted?”

  “Of course he is!” It was Deborah’s turn to laugh. She was sure of that much at least. “Jonah saved my life.”

  “So he could hand you over to the Morrigu.”

  The colour drained from Deborah’s face. This was a new attack, and she didn’t know how to defend herself against it. She did not know the name, but the sound of it sent shivers down her spine. The woman pointed to a speck high in the milky whiteness of the sky.

  “There she is, the bringer of death and destruction, the right arm of Abaddon. You have heard of Abaddon, surely? The demon king, god of the desert chaos, the Destroyer?”

  Deborah nodded, confused. “But what’s he got to do with Jonah?”

  Again Eve snorted. “How do you think the dog boy survived in the desert? Because he made a pact with Abaddon. And Abaddon wants to be paid.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Deborah shouted, putting her hands over her ears. But the whispering voices insinuated themselves into her head and told all kinds of evil lies about Jonah. They called him desert jackal and said he was worth less than the dust of Providence she tipped out of her shoes. They hissed that her mother would be ashamed for her.

  Jonah! Wake up! she cried out. But her distress made no sound—the words never left her heart.<
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  The pups crouched waiting, bellies to the ground, ears lying flat against their skulls. They growled and snapped, but dared not approach. Eve tapped Deborah on the arm and bared her teeth in a smile in which there was no warmth.

  “You are a good, trusting girl. But you have been deceived. Believe me.”

  Deborah cast frightened glances at the sky. Fear was all she felt now, fear for Jonah, fear for herself. The speck was larger now, wheeling in great circles, looking for something.

  “Come.” Eve rose and held out her hand. “Before she sees you.”

  Deborah fought against the muddling of her thoughts. “First I want to hear what Jonah has to say—”

  “It’s too late for talking.” Eve took her firmly by the hand. Deborah made a feeble attempt to shake herself loose, but the woman’s grip tightened. “Come into the trees. You will see I am speaking the truth when the Morrigu descends and asks the dog boy for her prey.”

  Deborah’s feet dragged against her will, and she gazed back over her shoulder, her eyes fixed on Jonah. He was stretching. In a minute or two he would be awake. With the fragment of her mind that still belonged to her, Deborah knew Eve was lying. She wanted to run to Jonah and wake him, to bury her face in the hollow of his neck, and let him rock her in the warm strength of his arms. She wanted him to tell the woman to go away. Together they could face up to her, but not Deborah alone. Alone Deborah floundered about in a sticky morass of hopes and lies and loves.

  The steely grip did not slacken, and Deborah’s feet shuffled inexorably in the woman’s wake to the shelter of the trees. She opened her mouth to call out, but again no sound came.