“Let’s go visit the bushes before . . .”
Just then one of the boys got up, wove toward the fire pit, pulled down his trousers. His organ lifted nicely, and unaided, shot an arcing stream into the flames. He was cheered on raucously by the assembled company.
“He’s proud of it,” Albe said. “Look, no hands!”
Wic grunted and tossed the contents of a wine cup into the fire. It roared up, and the exhibitionist let out a wild yell and fled, pulling his trousers up as he did. He turned, glared at Wic, and called her a couple of interesting things. She answered in the same vein, and two of her more descriptive epithets were new to me and imaginative enough to raise my eyebrows.
Dugald, I thought, would be horrified.
“I don’t think my royal highness has to sit through this nonsense,” I said. “Let’s go check the boats. Most of the wealth we’ve . . . stolen . . . captured . . . is there.”
We eased out into the clean night. Together the three of us walked toward the beach, where the ships were pulled up on the one finger of sand running along the rocky shingle. This close to the sea, it was cold, and drifting billows of mist flowed around us from time to time, moving steadily inland into the pine forests clothing the mountainside.
No human has a nose like a wolf, but what I have was trained by association with my family, and I am conscious of odors others overlook or ignore. When we got close to the beached boats, I smelled Maeniel, wolf, wood smoke, human male perspiration. Wolf is not dog, but a sharper scent of wild with a tinge of blood. It reminded me of Mother. Hers was almost sweet, not so bloody, rather like milk.
I was surprised. I hadn’t seen him leave the hall. But then, knowing Maeniel, I knew I shouldn’t be surprised.
I didn’t speak, but began to rummage in the boat for the shoes Talorcan, the Boar, had given me. I was lacing them on when Maeniel broke cover and joined us.
“Ure left a message for you. He told me to tell you come to his . . . lair, he called it. He has something he wants to discuss with you.”
It’s not an easy place to go, his lair, as he puts it. More fog surged past us, pushed by the sea wind. I could taste it on my lips. I would say, the road to his dwelling is a test in itself.
“The river flows down the mountainside steeply here.” Maeniel pointed up the slope at the end of the inlet, where white water emerged from slopes covered with giant pines into the brackish lake at the head of the fiord.
“The trees have been felled to form a sort of ladder over the river. I don’t know how they did it, because the pines are yet living trees. But each is canted over the rapids from one side or the other, and you must climb from trunk to trunk to get to the top. A dangerous journey.”
“Sounds like something Ure would do,” I said.
Maeniel chuckled. “He is a strange one.”
“He is a sorcerer,” I said.
Maeniel studied my face for a second. “No doubt,” he answered. “For he smells of the trees, even on the sea or after the battle. Filthy, burned, muddy, bloody, he still reeked of rosin and needles, damp bark and mist. Yes, the mist there eddies on the shore and into the forest by night. He is strange. Cold, but not evil, I think. Yes, go climb the mountain, and as you take each step, leave grief behind in your journey to the top.”
“I would I could do that,” Albe said.
“My grief is on my face,” Wic said, speaking of the ugly birthmark that disfigured her. “I can never leave it behind.”
“Why don’t you try?” Albe told her.
She shrugged, but when I walked into the forest, she followed.
It wasn’t an easy climb, but then, I wore the shoes Talorcan gave me. They gave my feet strong purchase on the broad tree trunks that were stretched over the river. It ran through a shallow, steep ravine, down toward the beach. The water was whipped to a froth by the jagged rocks that rose up from the riverbed like so many fangs.
I found the mead I had taken burned out of my body, and the difficulty of climbing from one tree trunk to another held all my attention. Between the spray from the pale rapids and the eddying mist, it was wet on the tree ladder, and I suppose it was cold. But the effort it took to gain each upward step soon had all three of us gasping and sweating.
This was no ladder to be climbed step by step. As we gained each tree trunk, we must walk along the damp, sometimes slippery moss-covered trunk to find the safest spot to cross to the one above it. Below, the river hissed, gushed, and sometimes roared beneath us.
“Would we be killed, I wonder, if we fell?” Albe asked.
I looked down and considered the mess of rock and white-water spume. Yes, there were places where it looked as though the drop wasn’t that great or the grade the water flowed over not that steep.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Depends where you happen to land. But I see areas where the water pools clear of rocks and debris. Yes, the current’s swift, but you could get your footing in the shallows.”
But as we climbed higher and higher, the journey grew more perilous. There was further to fall.
There was no moon and the absolute stillness of a pine forest crept into your soul. The climb required concentration, the way chess does, and it freed the mind, focused consciousness on immediate problems, and slowly silenced the mild undercurrent of worry and self-criticism that forms a background to human consciousness most of the time.
To allow the mind to drift was dangerous. Wic first noticed this and told us of it. The trunk of one tree was angled up higher than the rest, and we must climb it like squirrels to reach the trunk belonging to the next tree in the series. Wic was ahead of Albe and me when the limb she was using to pull herself forward and up snapped with a loud crack, pitching her back toward the two of us.
She slipped or twisted herself to one side; we never knew which. But Albe got her by the seat of the pants. I dropped down and straddled the log so quickly I hurt my tailbone. But I got my arms around Albe’s waist and jerked her back into a seated position on the log.
Wic twisted, threw one leg over the log, got a grip on a branch stub, and sat up, which left them sitting in line, gasping for breath. We all relaxed and just rested for a few moments.
I managed a, “What!”
“The old man has a powerful geis,” Wic answered. “You do not reach his aerie without submitting to it.”
“And what is it?” Albe asked.
“To get to the top, you must . . . must,” she repeated the word for emphasis, “yield up your greatest sorrow. I was rebellious and yielded to the woe of my ruined face. I brooded too long on it as I climbed, and the geis struck at me. As I fell, I knew how precious life is and saw my bones broken on the rocks below, my blood draining away into the water. And I knew I did not care so much about it.”
“The time of thought is nothing,” Albe said.
Then we got to our feet and continued on, reaching our next step in what seemed now a ladder to the sky. The river was far below, but here it broke into big pools that swirled and glowed like the pearly inside of a shell in the starlight. I welcomed being drawn back into the problems of the climb rather than think about what I had done at the first fortress.
The second and third assaults left few traces on my consciousness, though they had both been bloody enough. I think in all three we made a clean sweep of the pirates. To be brief, we killed them all.
Even now I cannot confess to sorrow. That was the way of it then. Mercy for the vanquished is the luxury of those with strength and the power to contemplate the morality of war. In the struggles we faced then, to lose was to die. And make no mistake, we made sure they did.
But innocents get in the way. Innocents always get in the way. And they, too, pay the price of the violence that explodes around them.
After the first battle, I took a walk into the fortress, on the path around the furnace I created in the Saxon drinking hall. As I told you, the slaves had been chained in sheds along the wall. Most still were fettered where they died.
In every case I found the face and looked upon it. Yes, even the children, and there were a great many children, those over seven being a favored commodity of the traders. And in an hour I knew and saw every variation of pain.
Let the rest be silence.
But even in silence the mind’s eye sees each one, and the portrait created and then burned into the memory never fades. And each picture intruded between my eye and the stars, the dark, towering pines, and the glowing river below.
So I, too, slipped before I reached the top.
The last steps up the forest ladder were a tangled mass of large trees and saplings. At one time the river must have undermined the slopes of the hill and brought about a massive collapse of the rocky escarpments near the top. At one time it must have plunged down toward those pools we could see below in the form of a waterfall. But after the boulders rolled, the tree roots tore and the earth shook. The river found a slanting bed, the largest trees died, and in the unaccustomed light, saplings flourished only to be uprooted as each spring flood tore more deeply into the riverbed.
But the other trees, stubborn organisms, did not die but formed a green and brown net walk, which led at last to the top. Wic, Albe, and I went forward with trepidation, knowing we stood the most to lose now. A fall from here probably would kill us, and each step we took changed the stress factors that held the pile in position.
The log I put my foot on rolled. My shoe slipped, and I fell over. Desperately I hooked one knee over a branch and hung swinging over the rocks and plunging water below.
The dead are always with me. With all of us. This is the virtue of my people’s point of view. Life is a continuum of the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. Two I remembered especially: what must have been a woman and her child.
She had turned the small one around, placing her back to the blaze. The tiny corpse was cradled in her arms. The mother’s back was burned through to the bone and the flaking ash bared the curved spinal column and the places where the bone became ribs. She must, I thought, have tried to give the child time to suffocate before the flames took her, since she interposed her own body between her, the child, and the final agony of the devouring flames.
I did this, I thought. I burned this place.
The faces I looked upon yesterday are hazy in my mind, but I can see those two clearly yet. And I will do so until I draw my last breath and beyond.
Where does the responsibility for such a horrible death lie? On the shoulders of the pirates who chained them there? On mine? I, who all-unknowing burned the fortress?
And had I known how many innocents would die there, should I have backed away? Abandoned my resolve to destroy those thieving Saxons who were raiding among my people? Crouched hiding among the mountains of my home and let the marauders work their evil will?
An old conundrum—old, old, old. Older perhaps than the world we stand on. But one that anyone who takes the road of action must face.
Evil is a mystery. One might plumb the depths of knowledge, learn all there is to know of the universe—capture and wield godlike power—and yet not be able to answer the question of why this woman and her child died. I accepted my share of whatever blame might be. And I knew I could not place Ure’s geis between myself and truth.
I gazed down into the ghostly, frothing water below. Must I die? I thought.
Then Wic had me by the hair and Albe by the belt. Together they pulled me up and rolled me onto the trunk of one of the nearly horizontal trees.
I hung there silent, stretched along the length of bark, my arms around the tree’s comforting circumference, legs dangling down on either side.
“That was a near thing,” Albe said.
Pain lashed me, and I knew I must have nearly dislocated my hip. The pain climbed to a shrieking peak, then ebbed away as I clutched the tree trunk desperately.
“Can you climb again?” Albe asked. “I don’t think we have far to go. If not, stay there. I’ll fetch a rope. That Ure . . . that devil . . . he must have a rope. I’ll fetch one. Make a loop and lower you to the ground. Wic and I can do it. We’re strong enough.”
“No. No.” I found I could speak. “Let me rest for a few seconds. Flex my leg.”
I did. There was some pain, but the leg worked and my back wasn’t wrenched. I managed to scramble to my feet, bracing myself against a branch sticking out at a right angle to the pine trunk, and found the pain not enough to keep me from walking or climbing.
Albe pointed up. “Look!”
I did, and saw a walkway cutting through the trees, made of split pine planks with a rope rail on one side. It didn’t take long for us to reach it. When we did, I saw we were at the top and I could look out over the trees below, down to the beach and the sea beyond.
Ure lived on a platform in the trees. The platform was broad, and at least a dozen pines grew up through it. I don’t know how he lived where he did. The broad platform was bare but for two places where rock mountain spurs lifted through the planks. One was a cone that glowed with fire; the other, some distance away, held water. A spring bubbled up from the rocks, flowed into a basin, then down to the river.
Ure was sitting on a sewn leather cushion near the fire. All around us the mist moved ghostlike, trailing veils among the pines. They were wet, and water drops sprinkled the platform when the wind blew.
Something . . . a pinecone . . . dropped to the platform as a somewhat stronger gust of wind caused the trees to sigh more loudly. Otherwise, it was silent here. A living silence that encompassed the pines, the veiling mist, and the sweet smell of green, growing things.
I hailed Ure. He looked up at me and chuckled.
“Get a cup,” he said. “Sit down and we will visit.”
“Cup?” I asked, and then saw three cups near the spring at the other side of the platform.
Amazed, Albe, Wic, and I walked toward the cups, gazing around in astonishment at the level floor of the platform and the tops of the giant pines. Their scent was thick in our nostrils, and the silence moved through our souls the way the wisps of fog drifted among the trees.
When we drew close to the cups, they lifted themselves and came to our hands. These cups were very strange. They were ceramic, the outside black-pitted and rough. But within the glaze was smooth and filled with red-gold rainbows.
I dipped my cup into the water and let it fill. But when I raised it to my lips, the clear water foamed, darkened, and became mead.
Albe gave a cry of delight as hers foamed also. But not into mead—beer.
Wic went last; milk appeared. She gave Ure a shy glance.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s been so long since I had any fresh, sweet milk. I love the taste.”
He nodded, and I saw three more cushions were close to the fire.
“Impressive,” Albe said. “You are a sorcerer.”
“Cheap tricks, that is not the heart of sorcery.”
“What is it then?” I asked.
He shrugged, but didn’t answer. He looked out across the platform at the horizon and the stars sinking into the sea. We went over and sat on the cushions and joined him, near the fire.
Wic drank deeply, but when she set the cup down, it was full again. Albe did the same with her beer. I drained the mead, but when I felt a strange . . . “push” is the only way I can describe it . . . I deflected the intent of the cup and it remained empty.
“I can’t touch you, can I?” Ure said.
“No,” I answered. “It’s a sort of seduction I don’t need. Or want.”
I glanced over at Wic and Albe. They each sat frozen, eyes open but unseeing.
“They aren’t here?” I asked.
“No,” Ure answered, then voiced my unspoken thought. “It’s harmless. A brief spell. And it is we who have left them, not they us. I spoke to Kyra last night.”
I looked around. “She’s here?”
“No,” was the reply. Ure was still a man of few words. “I am against this,” he said.
But then he pointed to a cluster of pines growing up through the platform. Slung from one of the low branches in a net bag was the head. Not Cymry’s, but the Faun. The dark-brown eyes looked into mine, gentle life in them.
“You disapprove?” I asked.
“Yes!”
“Reasons?” His spare speech affected me.
“The omens,” he said. “I cast them.”
“You saw ruin?” I asked.
“No! That’s just it. I saw nothing.”
Nothing. I have heard of this, but it has never happened to me before. And I have asked questions of the powers time out of mind.
Ure spoke softly. “When cities bloomed along the coasts of Italia, there was I born and sailed the wine-dark sea, bringing iron to Gaul. So were the first swords hammered out, forged, and tempered. Iron was born, and the golden age ended. Those spirits that ruled the earth then could not stand against cold iron.”
The mirror I questioned mocked me with a vision of my own face. The thrown sticks fell through the cracks between the planks on the platform, and he pointed toward the spring at the other end of the platform. A pine bough fell into the water, splashed it in my face, blinding me. I called the powers and I received only silence as a reply.
The mist thickened and I found I could barely see Ure and the fire. I could feel the moisture wet my face and the inside of my nose. Albe and Wic were gone. Ure, I, and the fire alone remained.
“You are the queen,” he said. “Sovereignty lies between your legs, girl. That was why after the fight I had to free you or drown you, one or the other. There was no pretense in my assault. If those two demons hadn’t fled, I would have killed you.”
My mouth was dry and I realized why I had been so afraid when he came at me. The fog was a pale haze around us. I couldn’t see into it. I knew even now he was considering whether to kill me or not.
The Raven Warrior Page 12