The Raven Warrior

by Alice Borchardt

  “Why are you running, Guinevere?” Albe asked.

  I realized I had been running, almost running, at least. So I slowed and let her catch up to me. The little road wasn’t very wide, but it easily held two walking abreast. Indeed, it would have been wide enough for a wagon or a war chariot.

  “Why are you running?” she asked me again.

  “Because I’m frightened,” I told her. “This is a very strange place, and I cannot imagine what my journey through here portends.”

  Just as well I slowed, because we had come to a ravine. The hexagonal road pavers tilted themselves as they descended to form a shallow stair to the bottom. Here we were a bit sheltered from the wind, and I felt the flush a brisk wind raises in my exposed skin.

  “What did the Faun tell you besides what you have said already?” Albe asked.

  She didn’t seem even a little bit disturbed by the fact that I had in one morning led her into another world and then asked her to kill me. But then, we both knew the rules. As I had taken and enslaved Cymry, so could I be taken and enslaved; and before death, my body used to open the gates of power to another man besides Arthur. Albe was to see that didn’t happen.

  All the great queens and kings have a follower sworn to kill them, take the head to return it to their followers so the king’s wisdom, power, and magic cannot be used against his or her own people. Because if the king is a priest, the lady who cradles him between her thighs is an even more sacred queen.

  I had not bothered about it before, because Dugald, Ure, and the Gray Watcher knew well enough what I was, and so would have done their duty by me, had I fallen in battle. In truth, I thought that’s what Ure was doing when the evil spirits overpowered me after we destroyed the pirates. It was a very near thing, but Ure had been able to bluff them out. So I was alive.

  But defeat or rape were not events I should be allowed to survive. If no one else was there to ensure I died uncontrolled and unpolluted, I must see to matters myself. So I brought Albe. As I said, she knew these things as well as I did.

  We stood for a moment looking down into the dead sea bottoms. The ravine had once been a river, and it had shaped a delta, an estuary that led down and down. Somewhere underground there must have been water flowing, for the long downward-leaning sandbank was fertile still. Scattered bushes, grass, and trees flourished on the slopes, each large clump of grass, bush, or small trees protected, surrounded on all sides by the omnipresent, thorn-covered vines. The air was cool and dry.

  I was a little surprised at the dryness, but then, I thought, a world without oceans must perforce be dry.

  “I kill easily,” Albe said.

  “I know. I saw you kill the two Saxons when they emerged from the swamp. Then the eyeless woman impaled on a post.”

  “I didn’t once. I can barely remember. It hurts too much to remember how it was before . . . the pirates came.”

  “Your face?” I asked. “How . . . ?”

  “We were huddled in the scuppers of the ship, the other girls and I. I twisted out of the ropes he had me tied with. I found a shard, piece of an oil flask broken long ago. I used it on my face. He wasn’t bad to me. That was worse—he wasn’t bad. I remember the shock of pain and pleasure. I should have had it on my wedding night. He took my wedding from me. That was worse. The life I should have had, he stole it.

  “He said I was ewe lamb and I should be his comfort through the voyage. He would care for me, then sell me to a rich merchant, because being well-fed and only used by one man, I would keep my looks. The broken piece of clay wasn’t sharp, so I broke it again. Then it had an edge. I used it on my face. That turd, that filthy turd, he had no profit of me.

  “They threw me into the sea. That’s the next thing I remember, almost the first thing I remember: the pain when the salt sea scoured the places where I had sliced my cheeks to the bone, because I have forgotten the rest. But yes, since that day, I kill easily.”

  I stretched out my hand to her. She took it, then I clasped it with my other hand, so hers was between my palms. Her hand was warm.

  “Shouldn’t I kneel?” she asked.

  “No. Why bother? You . . . your hands found that broken oil jug. If it hadn’t been there, you would have used your nails. You meant it, then as now. That’s all I ask.”

  “I swear,” she said.

  I tightened my grip, then let go.

  “I have it on your oath.”

  “My oath is to you and no other. I have no man, no child to hang on my sleeve.”

  “Well and good. For that is where kings get their oath men, and queens must have them, too.”

  Just at the moment, I saw something crossing the sky gleam. A flash in the sun.

  “Did you see?” I asked.

  “I cannot say,” Albe answered. “I never saw anything like it before. A bird?”

  “Do birds reflect the light?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” Albe said.

  I wasn’t convinced, but whatever it was, was far away and very high up. So we couldn’t tell.

  Below us, the river delta flowed away, a green snake down and down into a canyon so deep, the bottom was only a green shadow in the distance.

  “How can people live here?” Albe asked.

  I was mystified. “I know no more about this place than you do,” I answered.

  You see, we were both only too used to the lush green place where we were born. There was always something to eat there. The tidal flats teemed with life, shellfish of all kinds. The rivers were filled with fish, especially salmon, as was the sea. True, some years we had to subsist on acorns and hazelnuts, but we only occasionally went hungry. And even then, there were birds and bird eggs.

  But here? I studied the ravine, thinking I should see animal tracks. But there were none, and no bird nested in the rocky cliffs along the sides of the ravine that stretched up and away from us into the rugged mountains that overlooked the shore.

  “A barren place,” Albe said. “Do you think we will starve?”

  “There is a road, and where there is a road, there must be people. People eat.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Albe frowned, looking at the road that snaked up and down, around rocks, and through low places on the river bottom where we stood. “That road, those stones, are very old. They might have been here for a long time.”

  I thought about the great wall that crosses the downs. I saw it once when Maeniel took Black Leg and me to hunt horses. There are a lot of them in certain places, especially where the wall runs through open country.

  Maeniel says the Romans kept them to haul supplies. After the wall was abandoned, not long after the Romans left, they could be found running wild in great numbers. Maeniel took some to eat, and at times we rounded up others and sold them. Black Leg and I played on the wall and in the ditch that ran in front of it. He always got to be a Roman and tried throwing javelins at me. But I was a slinger. I’m not as good with the weapon as Albe. To be that good, you have to practice for most of your childhood. But I can use one credibly in a pinch.

  Black Leg smacked me in the forehead with his spear as I came scrambling up from the ditch. He used the butt as the Romans sometimes did. For complex reasons, that made me angry. You see, no one uses the wrong end of a spear on a respected warrior.

  I ran back from the wall, snatched up a stone, and gave him a black eye. Then he got mad, threw away the spear, went wolf, and dropped down into the ditch. I ran in again, toward the wall, and as he lunged up out of the ditch, I got the sling around his neck.

  Maeniel and Kyra arrived about then and separated us. But after that, there were no more play tussles. Maeniel told us both, “You’re getting too dangerous.”

  I thought about Black Leg, wondered how he was and what he was doing. And I hoped he would become the great warrior he wanted to be.

  “Come back!” Albe said.

  I turned and looked at her, surprised.

  “Come back?” I repeated.

 
“From wherever you just went,” she said.

  “I was thinking of a friend,” I answered. “I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.”

  Albe glanced back at the road. “There’s no one back there I would think about with that look on my face.”

  “What look?”

  “A loving, regretful sort of look.”

  I was intrigued. “Really?”

  “Really.” She nodded. “Really, really. He must have been something.”

  “My foster brother,” I said.

  “Ha!” she answered, and looked skeptical.

  I changed the subject, because she was right. I missed him and didn’t realize how much he meant to me until he was gone.

  “I was thinking about the Roman wall, too. And you’re right. The people who built this road may have abandoned it long ago.”

  “An uncomfortable thought,” she said.

  “Yes,” I answered, then looked around. On one side, the mountains—barren mountains—towered. On the other, the empty sea bottom stretched away and down, only desolate, dry undulating hills leading into unguessable and quite possibly uninhabited deep canyons.

  “The road it is—the road it must be,” I said.

  We had a time climbing up the other side. It was higher than the one we had come down. Beyond the ravine that had once been a river, the going got harder. The strange stones were never level under our feet. The mountains here drew close to the shore, and steep slopes and high cliffs blocked our view ahead and behind. The sun rose higher in the sky.

  “I’m not hungry yet,” Albe told me. “But I’m beginning to feel some thirst.”

  Ahead of us, the road topped a ridge that must once have been the talon of a mountain claw sunk in the seabed. In the dead river, there was green.

  “Where there is green, there must be water,” I said. “Beyond this ridge, there may be a low place.”

  When we topped the ridge, we saw that another stream must have flowed out of the mountains at its foot, because a sandy wash with steep walls exited toward the barren sea bottom. Even from where we stood, Albe and I could tell it was covered by green plants.

  One method of raising water in barren country is to dig a hole in a low spot and let it fill. I asked Albe about it.

  “We can try,” she said.

  But she was preoccupied, gazing off into the distance at the maze of canyons that had once been an ocean.

  “I’m thirsty,” she told me, shading her eyes with her hand. “But thirsty or not, this is a wondrous place. Look. You can tell a lot more about what’s out there from our perch. We haven’t been this high before.”

  She was right. From here, I could look down into the bottom of the vast, broken lands below, and I saw many of the deepest rills were thickly clad in green. Not on the steep slopes leading down into them, but at the bottom. And in places, we looked down on clouds that gathered over the profoundest valleys and rained on the deepest gorges.

  “How beautiful,” I whispered.

  I saw the gleam of tears in Albe’s eyes.

  “I could leave my heart here,” she whispered. “The light is so strange.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  As though high up, a haze cut off some of the sunlight and muted the harsh colors of sand and barren rock until they were washed out a bit. Rather like hanks of wool dyed but then thrown out into the sun to draw out the edged brightness in the colors. The colors in such wool mix well and seem to dissolve into one another, but above all, they wear well and are difficult to see against shifting shades of forest, field, sea, or shore. One wearing them seems to go, at times, almost invisible.

  This place, and the air, were fragile. I thought I could stretch out a hand and tear the fabric of time and space, laying bare some reality beyond.

  Albe drew in a deep breath and whispered, “After the pirates, I dreamed of escape to some shadowed realm where I could wander untouched by memories that drove themselves into my soul like knives. Not the memories of bad things—we all must endure in one or another kind of suffering—but the good things, the loves, now forever lost to me. I believe I have found that place, the one I so longed for.”

  “I hope you have,” I answered, wondering at the pain that drove such a heart’s desire. “But me, I’m homesick already for the sea and sand, rock and shallows. The dialogue with the seething water and the ringing shouts of quarreling gulls. I only wonder how I will ever find my way home.”

  But then I thought: Mother would have nipped me on the rear for such meandering. “Go get water,” she would say. “You’ll feel better.”

  She could do that, you know. Give a sharp nip to a troublesome whelp—and one that stung but never left a mark except, as Black Leg said, on the memory.

  So I added, “Let’s not think on it too much. God, my mouth is dry.”

  The slope was fairly steep, but the stones dug themselves into the rocks and occasionally formed small switchbacks that helped along the steepest parts. It didn’t take long for us to reach the bottom. Another ravine like the river bottom we had crossed before, but this one was very narrow and led away tortuously into the mountains.

  The sandy bottom of the ravine was crowded with plants. Albe stepped in among them, looking for a clear spot to dig . . . and . . . screamed!

  I think Talorcan’s shoes saved her, because she didn’t fall among them but stumbled as though pulled along by her shoes. Back in the road, she fell, writhing and moaning, clutching at her ankles and feet.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God!” she sobbed.

  I dropped to my knees beside her, mystified and worried at the same time. I didn’t realize the low-growing weeds were the culprits until I felt the sting of attack on my wrist and arm. The plants were armed with thorns at the tip of each leaf and could strike out with them.

  I slashed back with my suddenly armored hand, and the plants screamed and bled. I pulled Albe toward the center of the road, knelt next to her, and checked her ankles. I could see clearly that there were four red, swollen areas, two on each ankle and foot. She was no longer screaming, but shivering as though chilled, and curled on her side, watching the plants I’d damaged.

  One died, stem broken, bleeding its substance into a scarlet puddle that turned hard and black, then dissolved into ash. The other, not so badly injured, the stem remaining unbroken, ceased keening as the damaged leaves curled tightly in on themselves, withered, and fell to the ground.

  “What are they?” Albe whispered.

  “I don’t know and don’t care to speculate,” I told her. “Girl, you look like death.”

  “I feel like it, too,” she answered. “Something evil is in me.”

  I was beside her. I crawled quickly to her feet and, kneeling, placed my left hand on the swelling above the ankle. I could feel the heat in my palm. This foot and leg were swelling fast, now almost twice their normal size.

  I’d seen that happen with broken bones and sprains, and I found myself very frightened not just of what might happen to my new friend, but for myself should I be forced to face this strange new world alone. Selfish, I thought, selfish. And I looked into Mother’s face. Her tongue lolled, and she laughed at me the way she often did when I was a young child.

  “One is the other.”

  This is a saying among wolves, the greeting one pack member gives another who has been absent. My heart felt filled with joy. Mother and I were alone in a cool mist, surrounded by the ever-blooming white roses of faery. The perfume drenched the air.

  “Love,” I said.

  “Love,” was her reply in the midst of wolf laughter. Then she was gone, and I was kneeling at Albe’s feet.

  “Ah, God,” she whispered. “Your hands draw out the pain.”

  I found I was holding both of her ankles; the swelling was leaving them even as I watched. But someone else was saying, “The penalty for what you have just done is death!!!”

  “God, I’m not surprised he tried to kill you,” Ustane told Igrane. “Your whining is worse than a
baby’s.”

  Igrane gave the corpse woman a look that should have ignited her clothing, but Ustane just laughed.

  “My lady, save your energy,” Ustane said. “The worst event that can befall a mortal has already happened to me. And if you don’t pay heed to my warnings, and somehow that dangerous sorcerer breaks free of the Lord of Death, this is the first place to which he will return in his quest for vengeance. He will find you here, and doubtless, in his desire for power, make you his—”

  “Stop! Stop! Goddamn you, stop!”

  “Curse in vain.” Ustane laughed again at Igrane. “He already has damned me.”

  Then they were both distracted as a wave broke so hard against the rock platform supporting the bedroom that Igrane could feel the salt spray dampen her skin. They both remained there in Merlin’s crystal, mounted fortress. Igrane remembered Ustane’s words as she looked out at the lurid colors of the sunset blazing over the surging green water.

  He did not create this place; it created him. And to rule it, she must stand on that symbol on the floor. The one that, with savage agony, almost drained the life from her body. Well, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t place herself in a position of such terrible risk. Ustane had been clear about the matter. Even Merlin couldn’t draw power from the fiery heart of this magic place, not without suffering horribly, just as she had.

  That was why he used an “intermediary.” She had not been the first. Nor had Ustane. There had been others, many others. They occupied the vast vault where Ustane slept when she was not wanted, each resting under their own effigy.

  Ustane had been beautiful. Igrane had felt an almost wild jealousy when she first saw her. But a glance at what remained of Ustane wiped that away. And she had gotten used to Ustane’s help. Food, clothing, other amenities such as perfumed baths and books must be summoned from somewhere, and Ustane knew how to call them up.

  Igrane stared out at the fiery sunset, feeling the sea breeze on her skin. The bedroom held only a bed and not much else. It stood on a platform in the center of the room. The coiled shell of ammonite, brilliant in opalescent mother-of-pearl and mounted in gold filigree, towered over Igrane. The bed was formed by the massive shell’s last chamber, where the tentacled predator of the open ocean once lived. Sleeping on it was like lying on air. The massive, deep mattress and comforter were filled with fragrant down. The sheets and pillowcases were a rich, dark-blue silk.