The Raven Warrior

by Alice Borchardt

  To be the Cat Sith was to know these things, and what had been Morgana did. But she loved the man sleeping beside her. She rose to her feet. Even in sleep Uther’s hand rested on his sword hilt. She licked the hand one swipe with a rough tongue.

  Uther stirred, muttered and moaned in his sleep. All that was left of day was a blue ribbon on the horizon. The cat’s eyes expanded, and Morgana, the cat, saw clearly the two figures standing at the entrance of the barrow tomb.

  She knew, powerful as the Cat Sith was, she couldn’t help him. At least, not yet. She was too much the solitary. Love was a burden, and if he failed, the Cat Sith’s heart would break and she would die.

  No, Morgana must surrender him to other guardians, and they waited at the door to the tomb. To the Cat Sith, there remained only the night.

  The flames that enveloped Black Leg’s body reduced his attackers—whatever they had been—to dust. And in addition, burned off a lot of his fur. He saw the Weyvern leap toward him. Her claws closed over his seared body, and they went down in the river below.

  Half blind in the dark water, his wits dissolved into mad panic, Black Leg struggled to free himself from her. This was no refuge for him, his mind screamed at her. In less than a moment, he would breathe water and drown.

  He was stunned when she screamed back at him; he heard her as clearly as if she had spoken.

  “Damn you for a stubborn fool! Cooperate with me, idiot, or you’ll drown!” The last word was a shriek.

  Caught between her claws, the narrow scaled body wrapped around his and, sinking into the deepening gloom of the pool at the bottom of the falls, Black Leg cooperated. He yielded—let go. The horror of the fate the dark bird described to him rang in his mind. This quick silencing of his voice was infinitely better than the slow decay the bird promised.

  For the first time he acutely felt his divided nature. The man rebelled, but the wolf opened his mouth, breathed water, and . . . did not drown! A few seconds later, both Weyverns landed among the rocks amidst the whirling currents generated by the cataract above.

  Now—how in the hell did she do that? Black Leg thought.

  True, he was a much smaller Weyvern than she was. But . . . he possessed a sinuous, muscular body, opened and closed powerful webbed claws, and erected a formidable array of dorsal spines.

  Hey, this isn’t half bad, was his thought. I could get to like it.

  Quit muttering. The thought was directed at him. If you want to talk this way, you have got to put together clear, declarative phrases.

  Black Leg did. “What were those things?” The spines on his back rose and every scale on his body tightened.

  “Hell if I know,” was the answer. She managed even as a Weyvern to look annoyed.

  “Think I could learn to do this myself?” Black Leg found himself enunciating very clearly.

  “Hell if I know that either,” was the aggrieved reply. Then she continued, “At least I know why the little vine was afraid. Poor thing had good reason. And be careful of how you use oxygen. Gill breathers aren’t very efficient—was one of the few weaknesses these creatures had. They were better off on the surface, but I don’t think we should try to go up now.”

  “Feel how cold it is,” Black Leg said. He saw emphatic agreement in the other Weyvern’s expression.

  “Snowmelt river,” came back to him. “Like it or not, though, I think we should wait util dark.”

  She must have seen the emphatic agreement in his expression, because she said no more.

  The catch to this situation was that everything took effort: maintaining the Weyvern form, combating the cold, steadying their minds against the pull of Weyvern nature and the mortal terror the ravens inspired in them both.

  He was dozing, claws clenched in the rocks, when he felt a pressure wave and knew she must be moving her tail. Black Leg understood that once these creatures must have used movement to draw attention to their wishes, because every other Weyvern in the area would know what certain movements meant. This one was a simple tap on the shoulder.

  “Up now?” he asked.

  “You’re getting good at this,” was the reply.

  Black Leg was so pleased by the compliment he would have blushed, had he been human. As it was, all the Weyvern could do was crack its knuckles modestly. She wasn’t free with compliments, at least not about anything but his sexual prowess.

  “Cold’s going to finish us if we don’t,” he said.

  “All right. On three. One. Two. Up.”

  They suited the action to the words. The river currents were warmer aloft. When they stuck their heads out of the water, they found the ravens gone and a vast, almost icy moon shining down on them. As one, they swam toward shore.

  “I never saw a moon like that,” Black Leg said.

  “Yeah, I know,” she answered. “And it’s one of the things that worries me about this place.”

  They were human again and speaking normally. Neither of them wanted to go ashore, so they found a shallow grotto hollowed out by spring floods just above the water and crawled in. Black Leg went wolf and was relieved to find himself completely healed. She tucked herself into the curve of his furry body and they both dropped like rocks into a sleep of exhaustion.

  He woke to the morning light and the knowledge that he was in the worst trouble of his life. He didn’t move and didn’t turn human because he didn’t want to wake her. He studied her face in the colorless early dawn light and decided she didn’t look good. Her face seemed to have aged overnight; her skin was pale and she had dark circles under her eyes. But worst of all was the condition of one of her hands. The arm terminated in a hand-shaped puddle of water.

  He found it frightening evidence that she was being reclaimed by her primal element. Then he was startled by her voice.

  “You see that?” she asked.

  “Yes. Can you?”

  “No, but I can feel it. Let me concentrate.” She did and the water molded itself into a hand again. He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed it.

  “I am an idiot,” he said.

  “No recriminations,” she said. “They’re a waste of energy, and I don’t have much.”

  He nodded. “What would help you?”

  “I draw my life from the well of my native waters. Somehow we have to find a gate and get back.”

  He looked up at the towering falls, a vast plume blown by the morning wind.

  “No, I don’t think so. You would have to climb the rocks beside the cataract and a fall might kill you if you couldn’t change fast enough after you landed. Besides, even if you got to the top, where would you find a rope . . . and then those birds . . .”

  “Yes, those birds,” he echoed as he gave a slight shiver. “Look at me. Oh, yes, I’m going to become a mighty warrior and here I am with my guts turning to water when I think about them.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble. We’re going to have to try our luck downriver.” She dove in and he followed.

  At first the river began to widen out, and they were swept past sandbar banks on either side. But then a strange thing began to happen. The water level began inexplicably to drop and the canyon walls to close in until they were walking in a sunless, narrow gorge beside a trickle of water that had once been a raging torrent.

  “This is bad,” he said. “Have you got any idea what’s happening?”

  “Not even the beginning of one,” was the answer.

  “What got the water?”

  She replied with a truly hostile glare.

  The walls of the canyon were so close together and so high that they let in very little light. The Weyverns trudged along through misty gloom, over a smooth road of waterworn stone.

  “Strange,” she said. “It’s almost cold here.”

  He wasn’t cold, even if he was wearing only his skin. And he gave her a startled look—his skin crawled!

  She was old.

  The breasts he had so admired hung like empty bags. Her skin was dry and wrinkled. On her hands,
the skin had drawn back from the nails, leaving them claws. Her face was wizened, deeply lined, eyes sunken and lusterless, lips slightly drawn back from her teeth the way a drying head leaves the teeth bared in a final, evil smile.

  He turned his eyes away as quickly as possible.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m dying.”

  Black Leg felt as though someone had dug a fist hard into his stomach. They continued walking.

  “How? Why?”

  “How? I am cut off from the waters whence I draw my life. Why? At least in part because I used considerable of my remaining power to turn you into a Weyvern so we could escape the birds.”

  “No ‘we’ about it,” he said. “You could have gotten away easily. But . . . I was . . . if you hadn’t done your best trick, those ravens would be picking my bones now. This is my fault.”

  “No!” The word was a whisper, as though it were an effort now for her to talk. “I hate dying, but I hate worse that there are so many things I didn’t live to teach you—one is that nothing is purely anybody’s fault. Blaming is the most futile thing you humans do to each other.

  “No, if anyone is culpable, I am. I should have warned you before we entered the tunnel. Told you to be careful. But I was so hot to take you to my place that I didn’t think to warn you about the transit. And just what I didn’t want to happen—did.”

  “What is the tunnel?” he asked.

  “No one knows, and I mean no one. Not even ‘Her.’ ”

  Black Leg made as if to stop.

  “No,” she told him. “Keep moving, whatever may happen to me, little wolf. You have to find shelter before dark.”

  He obeyed.

  She continued, “The tunnel is . . . old. No one knows how old. But consider this. I’ve been around so long that your people don’t even have the mathematical concepts to discuss my age.”

  Black Leg remembered a conversation he’d had with his father about time. His father had no use for the current theories about the age of the earth, though he did say Dugald’s people had a better grip on the idea than most Christians did.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” he replied.

  “Very well. Then look at it this way. The tunnel was very old before I was born. And trust me on this. That’s an awesome amount of time. There are supposed to be directions written into the walls about where to go, but no one knows how to read them any longer. I travel in it—when I do travel in it—by God and by guess.”

  By then Black Leg was feeling a little cold. He glanced up at the towering walls on either side of him.

  “We may never get back,” he whispered.

  “That’s a real possibility,” she answered. “Now shut up, because it’s taking everything I’ve got just to keep up.”

  He didn’t trust her and kept glancing back to make sure she was still following. He knew when she went down and didn’t get up.

  He didn’t need anyone to tell him what to do then. He walked back, picked her up, threw her over his shoulders like a scarf, and went on walking.

  He wondered as he did if he could eat any of the sparse vegetation growing on the canyon walls. Most of the stuff within reach was lichens and moss. Here and there some ferns clung in thick crevasses where dense clumps of moss flourished. They had big, crunchy fiddleheads. He broke them off and began eating them.

  Not bad. Sort of a celery-cucumber taste. But when he tried to feed them to her, she simply turned her face away and wouldn’t let him put them in her mouth. That movement was the only way he knew she was alive.

  She seemed too weak to speak. She didn’t even look old any longer, but was rather more like a plant cut off from its roots, slowly withering away in the sun. She was limp, very light and soft.

  He heard the singing a long way off. It reminded him of the red-flowered vine she’d worn when they last made love. But this melody was much, much more complex.

  As he moved along, it grew louder and louder. This puzzled him. He remembered her saying that the females of the red-flowered vine lived further downstream.

  He knew not all plants sang. The ferns, for instance, did nothing at all when he snapped off a frond. The ones she favored were different.

  There was a lot of dampness in the canyon. Black Leg knew about fog. Fog is what happens when cold, moist air hits heat. The water in the thin but steady stream in the center of the canyon was cold. By night, the hot, dry air above probably blew down into the canyon, meeting the cold, moist air at the bottom. Clouds of damp mist formed, drenching the canyon walls. And the narrow gorge became a cloud forest.

  Ferns, mosses, and lichens lived at the bottom, where there was little light. But higher up, large flowering plants and even small trees flourished. Black Leg could see they created a balanced system. At the bottom, the plant life was thick because though there was less light, more moisture was present. Above, where the sun was brilliant, the light lovers were sparse because of the lack of moisture.

  I can live here, he thought, breaking off a few more fern fronds.

  He wondered if the music he heard went directly into his mind or if it actually resonated in his ears. Then, abruptly, his question was answered by a tone so piercing that it felt as though someone had driven a nail through his eardrum.

  “Christ,” Black Leg whispered, and stopped walking.

  The pain ebbed. But when he tried to take another step forward, the damning scream jolted his skull again.

  He lifted her from around his neck and rested what was left of her body on the canyon floor. She no longer looked even remotely human, but rather reminded him of a boneless, ropy vine slowly shrinking to nothing. Indeed, it was possible now to see the rock whereon she lay through her fading body.

  Black Leg endured a moment of dreadful despair as his mind conjured up a future here abandoned and alone, eking out a living on what scraps he could find in this bleak wilderness . . . without her.

  The music began again, a sobbing motif, diminishing chords vanishing into nothingness. It seemed to echo his present, leaden despair.

  He looked up and saw a pendant cluster of flowers clinging bare root to a ledge above, near the canyon’s rim. The music returned and seemed to soar with delight.

  Black Leg began to climb. The going was easy at first. All the years of erosion had softened and pitted the rocks near the bottom, and plant roots dug their way into the stone and offered handholds. As he got higher, though, he found the decreasing vegetation offered fewer places where he could get a good grip.

  But centuries of heat and cold fractured the stone, shearing it away to create ledges that allowed him to find secure, if precarious, perches for his fingers and toes. However, the stone was sharp, and he lost a few fingernails and cut his toes badly.

  No question of turning wolf to heal those cuts, and for the first time in his life, he endured persistent pain and understood more about human suffering than he ever had before.

  He was experiencing a new humility when he heard the music loud in his ears, singing a paean of triumph. He was face-to-face with the flowers.

  He knew they must be the female flowers belonging to those she’d worn when they made love near the waterfall. They were also red, with a scarlet lip shaped like a deep cup filled with honeydew. Other delicate spotted yellow petals arched above, protecting the sweet contents of the cup.

  Frightened almost to paralysis by the thought of falling, Black Leg let go with his left hand and plucked two. Holding the stems between his teeth, he began to make his way down.

  He found his path easily enough by tracking the darkening smears of his own blood that marked the means of his ascent. When he reached the bottom, trembling and gasping with desperate relief, he saw her hand outstretched to take the flowers.

  They seemed to vanish into her flesh, and he watched as she returned to life, haggard, pale, and weak but as beautiful and graceful as ever.

  “I need more,” was the first thing she said.

  Black Leg gave a sigh of acquiescence, limped down
to the river, drank deeply, and turned wolf to heal his injuries. Then he returned to human shape and climbed the canyon wall again. And again . . . and again.

  She seemed fully restored, her long blond hair almost a garment, her eyes filled with light when she rested her hand on a weary wolf’s neck. And told him the flowers informed her that there was what they called a “garden” ahead and she and Black Leg might find food there.

  Black Leg remained wolf, and in a very short time they found what the flowers called the garden. The canyon enclosing the river widened, opening up an area about a half mile across. The swift-flowing stream became a very shallow lake, rich with good things. Some of the plants Black Leg recognized; others were strange to him. Conventional water lilies filled the center of the lake; reeds, sedges, and feathery bog plants grew so thickly in the shallows, they almost obscured the water. Beyond the pool, patches of crop plants grew on terraces that rose tier on tier in a gentle slope up to the canyon walls.

  They stepped out of the darkness and found themselves walking on an almost completely overgrown path that ran along the lake at the center. The terrace to one side of them was filled with massed, coiling vines that held what looked like melons. They were in all stages of growth from green balls up to yellow-orange giants beginning to blacken, rot, and scatter their seeds back into the rich, soft, dark earth.

  She picked up one that looked perfectly ripe. Something rather like a panpipe hooted softly. Black Leg, still wolf, looked up at her inquiringly.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Sounded like a warning. Be careful.”

  She dropped the melon on the path. It burst open, showing a yellow-green center, moist and filled with rod-shaped seeds. Black Leg was so hungry, his legs felt weak. He shoved his face into the melon.

  A second later, he withdrew it, letting fly with as much of a scream as a wolf can give, and bolted hell for leather into the water. He dropped the wolf shape in the shallows and waded in, trying to wash his face, mouth, and eyes all at the same time.