The Raven Warrior

by Alice Borchardt

  “The armor. Why dangerous? And how can I get it to cover my tail when I’m wolf?”

  “Come on. Let’s go down to the lake. The sun is out and it’s a beautiful day.”

  She talked as they walked. “The armor is dangerous because the universe has logic.”

  He sighed.

  “It does it like a seed. You plant a seed, and after a while, you get a tree. An acorn, an oak; a hazelnut, a hazelnut bush.”

  “This I know.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  He was silent. “This I don’t know.”

  “My. At last some modesty. The universe is the same. From small beginning it grew into what it is now. Sun, moon, stars, the celestial sphere. And it’s big, very big, bigger than your people can ever possibly imagine. To put it simply, the people who built the tunnel and created the armor understood how the universe started and why it became the way it is. Their language reflects the logic of the universe, and you can’t—and I can’t—understand their language unless we comprehend that logic. That’s why no one has ever been able to understand the tunnel, or read the symbols written in it. The universe is filled with all sorts of beings, and you wouldn’t believe how many of them have tried.”

  He stopped and looked out at the little lake. The sun was high in the sky, and he could look down into the center and see that it was deep and clear. A shape moved in the shadowed gloom of long, spiral waterweed at the bottom.

  “Fish?” he asked.

  “Something,” she replied. “I’m not sure I want to find out. Every time I find out something new about this place, I get more upset. Thanks to you, I don’t need the water any longer. I can feed like a human.”

  They sat down on a flat rock and shared large, red, juicy fruit from a vine coiling over a bush covered with blue berries.

  “So what harm do you think the armor could do to me?” he asked.

  “I think if you put it all the way on, you might find out.”

  “This is too big for me,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered. “And I’m sorry.”

  “I’m still going to put it all the way on. I think it’s our ticket out of here.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s the trouble. All I wanted was a tumble in the hay. Oh, boy, I said. I’ll bet that cute thing is fun and games. What he doesn’t know about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, I can sure teach him. I brought back a hero. You are that thing, you know. When you gave me part of your own being to save my life, I knew it.”

  The garden sang to them. The reeds piped; something sang a distant trill when the wind blew. A waterfall of notes wandered downstream toward them from trees that bent low over the water and trailed long, weeping branches into the stream, rather like willows do. But no willow ever had golden flowers that rained perfume into the slow eddies of the central pool.

  “Are you missing anything? I mean, did human wolfness take anything away?” he asked.

  “No. In fact, the tree is telling me about the fish. They’re old and slow, even older than the plants. They have been here a long time. The tree says, ‘Don’t catch them. There aren’t any more where they came from. These fish are the last.’ ”

  “Look,” he whispered, and pointed to the canyon wall across from them. It had begun to weep, the water seemingly welling out of the porous rock, running down the walls into the plant beds below. They were built in an intricate maze, and as the water filled each one, the soil swelled and the plants turned greener. The guardian vines, like the one she was wearing, became a mound of green fuzz, dotted with white. Next to them, lilies bloomed, or at least that’s what they looked like, blush pink and white, spotted with brown.

  Then something low, gray-green, and furred burst into scarlet blossom. The music swelled as each group sang in thanksgiving for what they felt was rain. The beds were planted in the same shapes as the letters he had seen on the armor and on the walls of the tunnel. An eternal garden surrounded him, created to be a microcosm of the universe, its fragrances, its colors, its life sacred to the beings who shaped it to reflect the beauty of all life everywhere.

  “The fish,” he said. “The tree tells you they are very old. Maybe they can give you more information than the plants can. The trick you did before. The way you turned into rain. Can you still do it?”

  “Trick,” she replied, “is an unhappy description of that particular power of mine.”

  Black Leg answered in the same vein. “There is a certain poverty of description in the language for several of your activities. I do the best I can. No offense intended.”

  She laughed, waded into the lake, and fell into droplets that ringed the calm surface of the water for a few seconds, then were gone.

  He studied the layout of the garden. He felt he might stay here for a thousand years simply contemplating the exquisite care with which the garden had been fitted together. And, of course, that’s what it was: a page like the carpet pages in an illuminated missal from one of the Christian monasteries. And in a flash of insight, he saw what many wiser minds had not seen, how this script must be read. He went back to where his armor lay, thinking about his father.

  They had sat together beside a fire in the hills and discussed human wretchedness while they listened to a pack in the distance plan a hunt. It was cold and already there was a frost on the grass. A high, chill moon illuminated the ice-limned gorse and heather around them. His father quizzed him as to what the pack planned.

  “The elk are moving down from the high pastures. The father and mother of the pack spotted three yearling fawns that look weak. They plan to ambush the bachelor herd about a mile away and take one.”

  His father nodded approvingly. “Very good. Want to join them? Supposed to be three, so we could join the hunt and take one for ourselves.”

  “Why? We killed today, a mare in foal. We have as much meat as we can carry home. If we killed again, we’d have to waste most of it.”

  “Spoken like a true wolf,” Maeniel said.

  “How can you tell? It’s been years since you were a full-time wolf. Do we change so little?”

  “Not at all. Never. I remember things that happened thousands of years ago as though they occurred yesterday. Before—as Dugald tells it—the water rose and drowned the vast plains that were once dry and now are the North Sea. We hunted elk here, and in much the same way as this pack hunts them now. A stealthy tracking of the herd, then the tests to see which ones are strongest. We know each member by their own particular scent and can describe his appearance and behavior to one another.

  “The wolves spoke of one called Blaze. He is strong, but slow, and if they can drive him into broken or boggy ground, they might get him. But then there is One Eye. Been diseased from his birth, but he is wary and very fast. If they can blindside him upwind, he won’t stand a fight. Another has fallen into the habit of kneeling to eat, fishing under cedar breaks and hazel bushes for herbs still green in spite of frost. He’s fat, but has callus pads on his knees. If they ambush him from above, the callus pads limit his agility.

  “We have hunted them time out of mind. When they had a six-foot spread of antlers and hooves like war hammers, it was the same then as it is now, and we went about it in the same way and talked with each other about the same things.”

  Black Leg shivered. He didn’t believe the part about a six-foot spread of antlers. No, that simply wasn’t possible. But he had his own memories. As yet he hadn’t turned those pages in his mind and tested some of the things his father was telling him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. His father had been wild at birth, before his transformation. Black Leg had grown up among humans.

  Maeniel grinned at his son across the fire. Black Leg felt guilty. It was as though his father knew what he was thinking. So he changed the subject.

  “They change, don’t they? The humans, I mean.”

  “They don’t do anything else,” Maeniel said. “And have been ringing in changes since they came into existence. Who can
say what they will one day be.”

  “Dugald says—”

  “Don’t quote Dugald to me. Not if you value your hide.”

  Black Leg gave his father a very nasty but very wolf look. It said as clearly as if he had spoken, “You are my father and pack leader. Therefore, I respect you. But that’s not a good reason to take advantage of another who has not yet reached the fullness of his strength.”

  Maeniel looked away, somewhat abashed. Good manners were important in a wolf pack, and between senior and cub. He had been guilty of a breach of etiquette.

  “Very well. Dugald says . . .” Maeniel stated.

  Black Leg continued, “That you hang around with humans because their strange ways fascinate you.”

  “That’s one reason. Yes.” Maeniel poked at the fire. “This is another. No other creature can do this.”

  “Make a fire?” Black Leg asked.

  “Yes. And this.” Maeniel took a stick and began to write in the dirt: Alpha, Beta . . .”

  “The alphabet.” Black Leg was astounded. “But what’s so special about that?”

  Maeniel broke the stick and met Black Leg’s eyes. “You could teach a wolf the alphabet, my son, but you could never teach him to use it. Yet all of what they are flows from such things, especially that one. They are going somewhere, moving through time. Wolves are as the Stella Polaris pole star. We do not change.”

  Black Leg felt cold, and not entirely from the mountain night. He didn’t like it when his father talked this way. “I would rather be a wolf and think about deer with stomach trouble or weak legs.”

  Now he stood here in the midst of this beautiful garden, almost, but not quite, ready to call the change.

  The garden was almost filled with water now, and it glowed around him like some huge, polished jewel. A symphony of color, light, and, yes, sound, because everything sang, even the things he hadn’t heard sing before, a magnificent chorale that moved from entity to splendid entity. Each soloing, then sinking back into the symphonic whole as the baton of leadership passed to another being.

  He had thought grass surrounded the lake in the center, but as he watched, the grass bloomed with a thousand mauve-tinted white flowers, then the petals fell, white and soft as snowdrifts among the long, green gorse stems. Scarlet berries succeeded the flowers.

  Again she embraced him, the furred creature from the cave, and he felt her mold her hips against his. And for the first time since he entered this wild, wild place, he was conscious that he was naked as his erection throbbed almost painfully at his groin.

  But in a breath, she was gone. Black Leg knelt, plucked a handful of the red berries burgeoning in the grass, and put them in his mouth. He didn’t need to swallow; he felt the effect of whatever they contained fly though his veins, transforming his body into a vessel of pure light.

  The noon sun was high above. He burned with its light, a light that was also pure knowledge. And he understood once and forever that damnation and salvation were one.

  Death! I thought, and jumped to my feet. I was taken completely by surprise and every instinct in me screamed that this was a very dangerous moment.

  I jumped back again. I was no stranger to the hero’s salmon leap. I wanted distance between myself and a man who had said that the punishment for what I had just done was death, even though I wasn’t clear on what I had done. Killing the plant; healing Albe?

  She was lying in the road as though in shock from the pain and the injuries she had received. I had a brief chance to study the warrior who had just spoken. For warrior he was—armored in something that looked like bronze, a helmet of the old Greek type, one that covered his entire head and most of his face. It had a horizontal opening that allowed him to see, and a narrow slit for the nose and mouth. Otherwise, the visor and the long cheek pieces hid his features. The other three men—the fourth was a woman—wore more ornate but somehow cheaper-looking, formed waxed-leather armor, dyed green-brown and dark purple.

  I didn’t have time to notice any more about the three, because the bronze-clad leader gave me a look of lethal indifference and said, “Kill her!!! Let the other one live for a time. She may offer some sport.”

  He glanced at the brown-clad man and jerked his head in my direction.

  My goodness. That was elaborate armor. My opponent wore leather pants with leg and thigh protection, inlaid with dull gold. A gold chain-mail shirt over an inner garment of fitted leather. A muscle cuirass, but it was not formed all of a piece like the Roman ones. Instead it was made of a mosaic of leather plates, each one outlined in the same dull gold. He looked not a man but like some exotic insect sheathed in magnificent, glowing chitin. He was a warrior work of art at the same time. His shield was as beautiful as the rest, leather with a golden boss and rim, inlaid with golden swirls of intricately patterned, fine lines.

  Too bad, I thought. Because he had his sword out and was coming for me, hard and fast.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to get my sword clear of the sheath before he would be on me. So I jumped aside and slammed my right hand into the leather shield. I felt the surge roaring up from my guts and knew I was putting almost too much into it. I might exhaust myself before the battle began.

  The shield exploded into flame. The metal must have been gold; it has a low melting point, and the molten metal sprayed both of us.

  My armor turned it, but he was hit by a droplet in one eye, and he hurled the flaming shield in a broad arc, out over the low-growing plants. It landed among them. He screamed in pain and clapped one mailed glove to his eye—

  Then he saw where his quickly discarded shield had gone.

  This time his scream was even worse. I was trying to free my sword, but the agony in the sound distracted me. His sword dropped from his hand, hitting the ground. With a ringing cry, he fell to his knees, then bent so far over, his forehead touched the stony road. He clutched at his head with both hands and began beating his forehead against the hexagonal pavers, sobbing with horror and despair.

  Meantime, we had all underestimated Albe. She took out one warrior with a sweeping kick while still lying on the ground. He had been incautious enough to stand too close. His feet went flying from under him. He had no chance to break his fall, and his helmeted skull hit the stone road with a clang. He jerked once and lay still.

  How she got the second with a sling stone, I’m not to this day sure. But she did. He was very well armored, but his mouth and lower jaw were exposed. And believe me, that’s all Albe ever needs. He staggered back and went down, bleeding badly from the mouth and nose.

  I’ve never been sure why I did what I did then. I turned, leaped across the road, and went after the shield blazing among what I was sure was an important crop. No one defends a weed patch the way this bunch defended this tiny hunk of dirt.

  I felt the plants strike at my ankles, but my armor turned them. On my second step, the ground gave, and I thought my foot went into mud. But the stench took me; and even as I realized what my foot landed on, I snatched up the flaming shield rim and spun it out across the road, into the barren sea bottoms beyond.

  Then I had to emulate a frightened rabbit and take some long hops—because I was finding out something else about those dangerous weeds: they compensated for resistance. The strikes against my legs were getting harder and harder, and the armor was beginning to give way.

  The one whose shield I’d burned was kneeling upright in the road, gazing at me in rapt astonishment. As for myself, I couldn’t wait. I tore off my sandals and tossed them into the sand, away from those loathsome plants, to clean them.

  We all stood looking at one another.

  “You may go,” the bronze-clad man spoke in a haughty manner. “In the normal course of events, I would call up a team able to deal with you and finish you off. But what I have to do here is too important. . . .”

  The one with the bleeding mouth and nose was on his feet. Albe slipped another stone into her sling.

  “No,” he said. I was a
bit astounded that he could talk. It appeared that, though she had certainly broken something, it wasn’t his lower jaw, since he raised his head in a halt gesture and spoke.

  “Peace. Peace. I yield myself beaten, your prisoner. Whatever you like will be yours.”

  Albe still looked like she might want to finish the job, so I said, “Hear him out. Only let fly if he makes a threatening move.”

  Then he turned to the bronze-clad one. “Amrun, are you mad? We can’t let them go. Did you see how she got that shield and has come to no harm?”

  “Brother, I saw everything. Keep your mouth shut. My lady, your powers are indeed remarkable. But whatever your business here, conclude it as swiftly as possible and leave. You must be from among the jungle kingdoms, and we need none of your evil practices, . . . your disgusting—”

  “Oh, God!” The wounded man moaned. His face was obviously hurting, but I could tell he was also infuriated by his companion. “Shut the fuck up! She can’t be from the jungle.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “The only way I ever heard of a jungle, it was somewhere in Asia, up the Nile River.”

  “What are you then?” the wounded man asked.

  Albe and I looked at each other and shrugged. We weren’t sure how to tell him.

  “Picts,” I said.

  “Your rank,” the bronze-clad Amrun snapped.

  “I am the Dragon Queen,” I told him. “My name is Guinevere. I’m a sacred woman.”

  This seemed to calm both of them down and shut them up. I don’t think they understood a word I said, but they did seem content in their belief that we probably did not come from the dreaded jungle kingdoms.

  The one with the bleeding face sat down. Where his face wasn’t smeared with blood, it looked greenish. He vomited blood and water at the roadside, but he continued talking. “I don’t understand any of that. But, Brother, I believe they are at least respectable and may be invited to the city.”

  Albe had drawn closer to me. “I’m not sure if I should be glad or sorry about that,” I whispered to her.