“What is this place?” he whispered, studying the desolation around him.
“The end is in the beginning,” she said. “As the beginning is in the end. This is the place where our world ended and yours began. I have done my best, but I can offer no better explanation. For what it’s worth, our thought is demonstrated by the tower. Oh, King, let its logic rule you. The greatest thinkers among your people wrote nothing down but taught by the example of their lives. Oh, King, immortal in name and fame but placed beyond all comprehension, fare you well.”
Then they were gone, shooting up to and through the clouds that darkened the midday sky almost unto night. He woke gazing into the beauty of the glowing cup on the floor. He rose and saw it was filled with rich, cool milk. He was hungry and weary. He lifted the cauldron and tasted the milk.
The topmost room of the tower revolved like a kaleidoscope around him. Reality is a guess made by the mind, based on the information imparted by the senses. Here the speculations of reason (not lightly put aside) were suspended. The how of such an accomplishment was incomprehensible to him, and he bowed to the master builders of the tower, acknowledging their skill and intellect.
The why was more clear: movement from location to location.
Beyond the waterfalls, on each side of the throne, he saw a glade, a glen filled with forest, birdsong, and falling water, very green grass, abundant tree growth, bushes laden with fruit and flowers. The pale mist of shallow cataracts hovered, cooling and dampening the emerald parkland shadowed by oak, elder, birch, apple, and sloe.
He lifted the cup and drank again. He saw the sea crashing against barren cliffs, an angry sea, seeming to want to tear out and uproot a palace composed of glass that crouched at the foot of the cliffs. The waves moved over it, pounding, caressing, thundering at the mosaic of windows that formed its roof. The cloud-shadowed sun came and went, illuminating both palace and surging sea. Green, clear, dark, almost black, ever changing, never resting, the waters moved over the transparent domes beneath.
Igrane is there, he thought. No, her journey is her own now. I am no longer a part of it.
Then he passed through a murk fire and darkness. Her blue eyes looked into his, a cruel torment in them. Hurriedly, he lifted the cup to his lips; he wanted to go to her.
You will be my queen, he thought.
But she was swept away. The room revolved more quickly than thought, to a place where he saw his people gathered in a meadow. This time he didn’t think but spoke.
“A king is a high priest!”
The vast kaleidoscope was still. He walked toward them, the vessel between his hands. Balin gawped at him as Arthur strode out of the dawn mist on the river near the bridge.
Arthur saw that in the night the rest of the women had joined the men. The bone fires that sent the dead to rest smoldered, still sending up wisps of white smoke. They had been built along the river. The mist trapped the last evidence of the fire and shared mortality with grass bowed by the weight of dew.
Higher up the banks, some of the men had taken a scythe to the grass and cleared a comfortable campground. It was very near the thorn tree where the silver mask hung. The tree was now in full bloom, and the rose and snow flowers glowed soft as a cloud in the first light.
“You won!” Balin said.
Arthur smiled. “I don’t think she asked a victory of me.”
“What did she want then?” Eline asked.
“My soul,” Arthur answered. “I yielded it up to her.”
No one said anything, but the question was in every eye and rested silent on every tongue. Arthur answered the unspoken words.
“She received it into her hands and did no evil thing to it, but returned it to me, cleansed and filled with peace. If this is a victory, it belongs to us both.”
“No! Then it is us she cursed,” Balin said.
“You have your cattle back,” Arthur said. “How are you cursed?”
“The milk,” Balin said. “The milk from the cows is tainted. Some of it smells of blood. Other cows yield a substance that looks like liquid dung. The rest of the beasts, those with weaned calves, are dry as dust, udders wrinkled and shrunken.”
“We can’t make bread,” Eline said.
“I have some milk here.” Arthur spoke very softly. “Try it.” He offered the vessel to Eline.
She accepted it and drank. When she was finished, she gave a deep sigh. Her eyes met Arthur’s over the cup in her hands.
“Good! But is there enough to make bread for us all?”
“I think you will find it so,” Arthur answered.
Another woman approached with an earthenware bowl in her hand.
“Give me a bit, Eline,” she said. “God knows I can cut it with water and have enough for my man and little ones.”
Eline nodded and filled her bowl. Another approached, then quickly behind her, more came forward. Preoccupied with her task, she filled a dozen before she realized the cup would not empty. In fact, the more bowls Eline filled for the women, the more quickly the milk poured. The gathered women glanced at one another, then Arthur.
“Shush,” he said, lifting his finger to his lips. “The sun’s edge has not touched the rim of the hill. Take your fill of the milk, for it is what she, the Queen of the Dead, intended. Between night and morning, between sunset and dark, are the moments we touch the other world. In a place that is and is not, we find both peril and mercy. Drink! And inherit your world. She yields it to you.”
“You will be our king,” Balin said.
“If you wish, for as long as you wish,” Arthur answered.
The cup made the rounds, the men drinking their fill, the women drinking also and taking enough to make bread for their children. Even Bax took a lap as Eline offered the cup to the dog for a moment as it was passed with unflurried haste from hand to hand.
There is evil in the world, disease, pain, death, terror. The loss of loved ones, intractable human problems that destroy individuals and whole families. Drunkenness and folly. There is evil in humankind, anger, baseless envy, hate, greed, and a shadowed streak of destructive cruelty that seeks out the means to give pain to others, and at times ourselves. To take an evil delight in wreaking havoc on the natural world simply to prove we are its masters.
But there are moments when we escape the burdens of our common humanity and transcend the evils the flesh is heir to. Arthur understood this was one of those moments when humans stand hand in hand before nature and form a circle of peace. We carry away from these rites the strength to live, to labor, to love. This was one of those moments, sent by the divine thought of the universe to sustain us. And Arthur knew he was king leader and high priest to these people. And if need be, their first and most important sacrifice.
He drank last, again from the cup, and as the new sun gilded the silver mask hanging from the high branch of the flowering tree, he drained the last of the milk and found the cup empty.
I don’t remember getting back to the rest where they waited looking, gazing at the fortress across the water. But I did.
I sat with them on the grass beside the mound that once held the signal tower and we waited. The wind from the ocean continued to blow the stench of the dead away from us. There was still some wine left from the supply we had taken from the Saxons. Ure and Gray shared it out among the rest of us, though I declined.
They held me, the dead. I knew, because Ure asked me a question. He got an answer. One of them spoke to him. Yes, the voice issued from my mouth, tongue, and throat, but I didn’t say the words, nor were they in a language I understood.
For a second he looked startled. Then he met my eyes with an expression of cold comprehension. And I knew he understood, somehow understood where I had been and what I had been doing. Then, features impassive, he strolled away behind me toward where Gray and the Wolf Lord, Maeniel, were standing. I didn’t follow him with my eyes. They were still under my control.
The two spirits within me were still fixed on vengean
ce and their minds, such as they were, remained directed at the fortress, a shadow against a horizon of gray clouds. As night closed in, sometimes it rained passing spatters or even brief, drenching downpours. After sunset there were lights at the fortress and some on a beach nearby.
It must have been near midnight when Ure whispered, “Everybody up and into the boats. ’Tis now or never.”
We rose as one. I couldn’t tell if any of us felt fear or not. Maybe it didn’t matter what we felt. Once a decision is made, the flow of events carries you on, the way a river in flood sweeps a fallen leaf onward toward an unguessable destination.
I had one consolation amidst the hatred and desolation that was battering my soul. I had summoned the most dangerous of the dead and could do no more.
The boats moved out over water invisible to our eyes. I am told that near cities it is easier to see at night because the light from the human dwellings reflects back from the clouds. But we were near no city or even any modest village or town. The marsh lay in utter Cimmerian blackness, relieved only by the brief apparitions of the quarter moon through occasional openings in the clouds. The water between ourselves and the fortress was a shallow, brackish lake dotted with islands of reeds and saw grass. Fireflies collected over the grassy hummocks, and we steered our boats between what looked like clusters of stars.
We knew we were close to the fortress when we felt the pull created by the river current as it flowed swiftly past the broken walls. We plied the oars with a will, crossed in spite of the current, and landed below the spot where the fortress stood. The Romans had located it on the highest ground for many miles, but even so, it was none too safe. The gates that once opened to face the river were gone, and the walls that once surrounded them were a high, unstable jumble of fallen masonry, fully as forbidding as the intact walls on the other three sides.
The hunger in my heart for vengeance pulled me hard, at a run. A run that began as soon as I left the boat.
Why not? I thought. Gray, Maeniel, and Ure would know where to mass our forces.
Long ago the Romans moved the gates to one side of the fortress, the one that faced upriver. They would go there and wait. Wait for me to play my part. That was crucial. I must burn the pirates out.
“She,” the one who was drowned in the mud . . . or had she been buried alive? I wasn’t sure. “She” took my hand. I felt her fleshless fingers twine with mine. “She” played here as a child and under the water at the foot of the ruined wall was a quay where ships once docked. I could walk along its stones and reach the lowest point of the wall. True, the quay was now underwater, but even with the spring river in flood it wasn’t so deep that an approach couldn’t be made.
“She” tugged at my hand and I followed. Just then the moon shone briefly and I saw that where I felt the pull on my fingers there was nothing to be seen, even though the flesh on my hand crimped at her grip. A chill brushed me, and I knew it came from the cold water at the bottom of the channel that tumbled her bones. I felt a sickening sense of grief for her. She hadn’t been very smart and had been a person of few attainments, but she had loved her own and she wanted to live. I have never known anyone who truly wanted to die—but instead of life, she received cruelty, pain, madness, and, finally, darkness.
So I followed her touch down into the fetid water. Fetid because those inside used the broken wall as a latrine and garbage dump. The stones of the drowned quay were slimy and the water was at best most of the time up above my knees. But she pulled me along with a power greater than that of the river current that battered me and tried to suck me away into deeper water until at length I reached a point where I could begin to scramble up a sloping pile of stone to the top. From there I could look down into the fortress.
It wasn’t an easy climb, and the next day I found a myriad of cuts and bruises on my hands, feet, arms, and legs caused by the vile detritus I had crawled through. But just then I felt none of them, only a sense of unholy triumph that belonged not only to my two unseen companions but to me as well. I cannot say if they had infected me with their hate or if it arose from what I had seen these vicious expert predators do to my own Picts, the Painted People. There was a lot of wood in that fortress, and would it ever burn?
The Saxons had repaired the Roman walkways around the parapet. Beneath them were shacks where their loot, human and otherwise, was stored. The whole center of the fortress was taken up by a drinking hall, the all-purpose gathering place of the war band.
Then the moon returned, summoned, I think, when the eternal denizen of the marsh called out to his patroness. And in the cold light that flickered as the density of the moving clouds changed, I saw my path down from the wall top to where each post supporting the walkways was lodged. I smelled the stench created by the slaves crowded together in the squalid quarters beneath them, and my stomach cramped at the aroma of roast meat and spilled ale in the drinking hall.
Now something that was created by myself and my three companions, an utterly different entity than any one of the three of us, cried out, “Burn it, Priestess! Burn it now!”
So I did.
I never remembered how I got down from that wall top. The next thing I can remember clearly is pressing my right hand against the first post. Fury raged in my brain—it wouldn’t catch but hissed like a nest of serpents and sent out billows of scalding steam and thick, fire-damp smoke. Someone or something gave a yell of rage and fire raced away from my fingers up the post, streaking like an arrow to the top, where the planks that formed the walkway exploded into flame. I knew I could do it, that in fact it was as good as done, I thought as I raced to the next. They were the devil to ignite, those posts, but I knew the devil rode with me.
I went from one to the other as quickly as possible. I can’t think I had a plan, but in the back of my mind I knew the posts supporting the installation at the parapet would be the most difficult to deal with. I had to get to them first and make it impossible for any surviving pirates to defend the fortress.
I was at the eighth post when the screams began. Above, the walkways were crumbling, raining down flaming embers and burning brands on the slaves inside. My whole soul thrilled with horror when I realized they were chained inside. I turned, stumbling back toward the first shed.
But “they” stopped me, sending me down into the mud around the drinking hall. I fought them.
“No!” Ure said, jerking me to my feet with one long, powerful arm.
I gaped at him, wondering how he’d gotten inside and why he was here.
“There is no time!” he roared, spinning me around and slamming my body against the wattle-and-daub walls of the drinking hall. “They are doomed. Burn the hall—now—or I’ll kill you myself.”
The screams of terror, pain, and helplessness ringing in my ears, I slammed both arms palm down against the timbers and threw my whole life and soul into the effort. I created a . . . pyre.
Wattle and daub is wonderful stuff for burning. But this was beyond imagining. The structure went up with a roar, walls, roof, and timber supports all blazing. Smoke was burning my eyes and setting my nose and lungs on fire.
“The gate!” Ure shouted. “Now! It’s time! Burn the gate!”
“Where is the gate?” I shouted as I began retching. It was no longer possible for me to see. The inside of the fortress had become a sea of smoke illuminated by bursts of flame.
Ure was going down, gasping, suffocating. “Close your eyes. ‘They’ will show you.”
Then he was gone, because oil and wine had been stored in the hall and gouts of flame were spurting through the broken walls. I twisted, trying to get away from them, my clothes, such as they had been, gone. I could feel and see my faery armor glowing in a green network all over my flesh, holding back the fire but beginning to sear my flesh with its heat. Yet I did as Ure told me and closed my eyes.
Even through the roaring blaze around me I felt the chill of their presence. The gates were dead ahead. I fell to my knees, unable to bear the
airless, smoke-laced heat, and crawled toward them.
When I escaped the inferno that had been the drinking hall, I was able to get to my feet again. But there were armed men between me and the tall wooden portals. They hesitated and indeed I must have been a figure of terror: naked, hairless, glowing with the gold-green of my armor. But one bolder than the rest appeared in front of me, sword in hand.
I was past thought, well into battle madness and still dangerous because I was not without weapons. I felt the sword crash into my left arm, numbing it. But I kept coming, knowing no way back. The palm of my fire hand slammed into his chest. It burned through his cuirass, steel plates sewn to a leather backing, through the quilted padding beneath. His flesh melted like soft butter in my fire and his bones burned. He had not even time to scream. His skeleton glowed ruby-red through skin that melted away like running wax or a ruined garment. He fell, jerking, charring, turning to powdered ash even as he died, almost before he died.
The rest fled. Even the blazing murk around them seemed less terrible than this.
My body crashed against the iron-bound oak doors. I was fire and nothing but fire by then. It almost seemed the ancient black oak that had sealed the fortress time out of mind welcomed an end to its living death as an object of human use. The great doors vanished in a blast of light, heat, and powdered, blowing ash.
I fell, and from where I lay in the mud, I watched the surviving Saxon garrison charge right into our slingers. Even above the fire I could hear the dreadful squishing thuds as lead shot met flesh, blood, muscle, and bone and they died around my prone body like a breaking sea that thunders, rushes, and then is silent.
They had me—the two evil things I had invited into my soul. I had a second of consciousness, sight, and thought before they seized my mind, my twisting limbs, my consciousness, eyes, and tongue. And in that moment I saw Ure striding toward me, hair gone, skin blackened by burns and smoke, clothing in rags . . . his eyes yellow, glaring, pitiless as a striking eagle’s.
The Raven Warrior Page 8