The Raven Warrior

by Alice Borchardt

  The pleasure startled his body in the same secret, sudden way while he was sleeping in the loft of Balin’s barn, and he yielded to its flood of exquisite joy before he had time to understand what was happening to him. He opened his eyes to the dank rafters stretching over his head and knew She had summoned him as She had when he was still a boy.

  Dea Arto. She was honored with honey berries and wine, autumn fruits, yet it was spring in the Summer Country. He rose and came down the ladder to where the horses were stabled. They were awake in their stalls, heads up, ears pricked as though listening for something. One stamped a foot softly; the other backed and tugged hard at the rope that held his bridle.

  The stalls had no doors. The only thing that kept the horses there was the tethers attached to the wall. Arthur’s clothing was hung on a nail driven into the center post of the barn.

  Still watching the horses, he whispered, “Presently,” and dressed as quickly as possible.

  The horses were mare and stallion. The stallion backed so hard against the lead rope that Arthur slipped the makeshift rope bridle over his head. But unwilling to leave the mare, he stood stamping his feet and whickering a warning, softly, desperately.

  Arthur ran to the mare and cut the bridle off. She and the stallion tore out of the barn silently, terrified of . . . something. But there wasn’t anything.

  Arthur followed them cautiously. The night greeted him. There was a shadow glow on the horizon. Moonrise? The breeze fanned his face; insects churred in the grass.

  The house where Balin slept with his wife and child was dark and silent, door and windows barred against the night and its perils. These were wild lands.

  What? Arthur thought. Cat? Bear?

  The lords of the mountains, the bears, her children, weren’t the tamest of creatures. They had been known to break into stables after horse meat, smokehouses, and even the occasional human dwelling.

  Yes, moonrise. The light on the high clouds was increasing even if he couldn’t yet see the silver face. The two horses stood like statues in the center of the meadow that sloped down to the river, the faint silver light gleaming on their smooth coats, heads raised, looking toward the wild, toward the plateau where he first had been exiled to this strange, lovely land. Toward where the moon was rising. Their heads up, ears pricked as if listening . . . to what?

  And then Arthur heard the distant cries, the wailing and sobbing, screaming and cursing.

  It had hunted him before, and now somehow it had slipped past the wards on the plateau, its ancient prison, and was hunting him again.

  The horses spun around and fled. Inside the house, Arthur heard the dog, Bax, his roaring alarm bark rousing the family. Arthur ran toward the house and even before he got there, the family was in the doorway, Balin in his nightclothes, Eline, his wife, wearing a dark caftan and holding the baby in her arms.

  Bax leaped past them and ran to Arthur, sniffed him once, then looked in the direction of the rising moon and snarled.

  “Oh, my God,” Eline said. “A War Song!”

  “Is that what you call it? I was imprisoned on the plateau with one,” Arthur said.

  The muttering, sobbing, moaning, and screaming was growing louder and louder as was a sound made by the Thing’s winds in the trees.

  “The Thing on the plateau could only track me by day.”

  “The king makes them special for his enemies. Usually enemies he thinks more of than us.” She gave Arthur a look of profound respect.

  “I’m sensible of the honor, I’m sure,” Arthur said. “But in a few minutes, the horrible Thing is going to charge out of the woods and join us. Any suggestions?”

  “Run!” Eline said. “That’s the only thing I know. They don’t move very fast. Since this is a night one, it can’t hunt by day and . . .”

  Bax gave a snarl that was almost a roar, . . . and it burst from the forest, trailing its sounds of grief, terror, and pain and spewing a cloud of leaves, bark, branches, and pieces of brush.

  “I’ll try to lead it away,” Arthur said. “Up toward the plateau, into the wilderness.”

  “Take Bax.” She pointed to Arthur. “Bax! Protect! Obey!”

  Dogs are smart, but Bax was the most intelligent dog Arthur had ever met. He shoved his nose into Arthur’s hand, then ran down the meadow toward the river. Arthur gave his sword to Balin, kept his knife, then followed Bax.

  They ran together along the edge of the wood, until they got close to the river. Then Arthur turned, Bax by his side. He watched as the dreadful being turned, swarming along the edge of the forest to follow him. As on the plateau, everything that could, fled. Things that couldn’t—trees, shrubs, the woodpile for the smokehouse—exploded into flying, splintering debris when the Thing’s noxious substance touched them. The woodpile splintered into lethal shards, and Arthur began his run when he saw a wedge of oak driven a foot and a half into a pine tree.

  Pine wood is soft, but not that soft, he thought, during his headlong flight under the trees. Bax led the way, and Arthur was surprised how expertly the dog picked a path. First along the river, willow, beech, water oak, then deeper into the glades of deciduous forest, ash, elm, and broad-branched black oak and here and there tall, fragrant linden, pale ash, and hickory. The ground was damp; his feet pounded along a soft carpet of loam, newly renewed each autumn by the falling leaves. The moonlight was bright now, and lay in pools of silver, brightness broken by dense black shadows. Shadows so dark it almost seemed to him that if he leaped into their velvet vortex, he might vanish and elude his dreadful pursuer forever.

  He had been through so many strange things since his exile here, he half believed it might be possible.

  He noticed Bax, running just ahead of him, kept to the light, so he followed the dog, being unwilling to try that strange exit. He had duties here to his people.

  He was also glad they were not running toward the tower. It might shelter him from the fearful Thing he could hear grumbling, cursing, breathing behind him, but then he had never seen the tower do anything negative, harm any creature that entered it. Weeds and grasses grew unobstructed between its stones, flowered or fruited at will, and had their seeds borne away by the wind. Birds, butterflies, large, sometimes beautiful, sometimes drab (or were they simply more subtly beautiful?), moths moved through the dusty shadows as night approached.

  The birds built their nests, made bird love, quick sharp, exciting bird love, raised their young, and were preyed on by nothing but the hawks and eagles, who made their nests among the rocks near the falls. And in this he could see no harm, but only the powerful continuity of an ancient pattern.

  No, this terror might be able to destroy the tower or him. In some deep way he felt the tower’s marvelous beauty was something he would willingly sacrifice his life to protect.

  The ground was rising, and the slope growing steeper. More and more the trees he ran among were pines, and here and there clearings existed, where some forest giant had been felled by lightning in the storms that rolled down the mountains over the valley. The clearings were filled by crab apple, medlar, quince, wild plum, cherry, and blackthorn. It was spring; some were still in bloom and their flowers glowed like the vast drift of stars that arched above, visible faintly through the circle of moonlight. Their scent was thick in the air around him.

  But then he was through the clearing and among the pines again. The slope grew steeper, though the footing was good. Too good. He didn’t want to try to make a stand here. The big pines above him had shed needles that were three- to five-feet deep on the forest floor, and they would burn like tinder.

  Once from the valley he’d stood with his people watching a storm sliding down from the snowcapped mountains beyond, across the green tree-covered slopes below. Lightning from above set the dry pine forest ablaze, and they and he watched from the common land where they grazed their cattle near the tower as the fire, moving ahead of the storm’s updrafts, scorched the slopes above, tree after giant tree becoming a tower of f
lame. Coughing as the wind-driven smoke and ash settled into the hardwood forest near the river.

  “Has it been known to reach the valley?” he had asked Balin.

  Balin nodded, white-lipped. “If the lowland woods catch . . . yes. They are dry right now. Ones who have been here longer than I tell of it. ‘We all had to run,’ one told me. Another man spoke up that ‘that year we lost half of our cattle, all our crops, and in the spring, so many were hungry the king simply sent his men to round up the survivors and drive them back to his stronghold.’ ”

  Eline had looked away from Balin. “One of them was his father,” she explained.

  And Arthur saw the tears were tracking down his cheeks.

  “I was lucky,” he said. “I was old enough to work, so they made me a field hand.” Balin hesitated. “I never saw my parents again.”

  Arthur said, “There is no fear of such a thing happening now. I control the tower. It and the vessel within would sustain us however dire the famine.”

  Arthur saw that the people around him looked heartened. Far less frightened, Eline smiled at the rest and said, “We have a king!”

  Arthur was uneasy, but a lifetime of training kept his face a mask of certainty. Yet he didn’t know if he had been telling the truth or not. He’d never had to put the tower and vessel to the test.

  The storm was moving at a run, the fire only at a walk. The rolling clouds overtook the blaze, the flame vanished into a haze of rain, and all that remained was a temporary dark spot, like a smudge against the green.

  No, he didn’t dare light a fire among the towering trees, even though exhaustion was tugging at him. He had been running uphill for a matter of fifteen miles and wasn’t sure how much longer he could last, when Bax led him out of the forest. He hadn’t known this place was here. From the valley, it couldn’t be seen: a series of low, bowl-shaped mountain meadows that led down and around the peak he had been climbing, then down and around the slopes of the next peak, into a terrifyingly dark forest below.

  True, he could run through the first of the chain of meadows and up the next slopes that climbed steeply, first to a tree line, then up barren rock and moss, toward a glacier that flowed between the high passes and frowned down on the tiny glens below. But there was no place of refuge beyond the meadows. On the open, exposed slopes, the thing would catch and destroy him.

  No choice. He must make a stand here or nowhere.

  He plunged forward, down to the meadow below. It was a place of unearthly beauty in the moonlight. A spring that probably originated in the glacier above dropped a thread of a waterfall into a rock basin at one end of the open space where it broke into dozens of streams, tumbling over dark, thick, moss-covered rocks into a string of pools all along the center of the meadow.

  He ran downhill toward the water, through long, pale, shimmering grass that dampened his trousers and leggings. He had to rest—get some of the water before he could fight.

  But he stopped, because Bax was not following him. Instead, the dog was standing stock-still, looking toward the multiple low falls and pools near the high end of the meadow.

  Arthur straightened up and saw them. At first, he took “them” for a pack of wolves, the largest pack he had ever seen. Then he knew they couldn’t be real wolves, even though they had the slanted eyes, rangy build, and moon-polished coats of their living kin. No, these had to be something else. Why?

  Yes! Real wolves’ eyes would glow like polished fire, opal, in the moonlight this bright. These beings had only thick, black darkness behind their slanted openings where their eyes should be.

  Thump!

  Arthur spun around. Near Bax a stag leaped the ridgeline and ran down into the meadow. Silently the wolves gave chase.

  Arthur drew back to let them pass. Tarnished silver shimmers flowed past him in mad pursuit of that massive-antlered being that floated over the rippling, long grass that for a moment mirrored a wind-driven sea.

  Cold, Arthur thought. Cold the wind that seemed to spur the silver hunters and the dark prey.

  For a second they vanished from sight. Then they reappeared in a lower meadow . . . and another, until they vanished into the awesomely dark forest beyond.

  Bax joined them.

  After the fire, Arthur had asked Eline why Balin’s parents had returned to slavery so tamely. She told him that the longer they wandered this wild land, the more inexplicable and frightening the things they encountered. He had been dissatisfied with this explanation at the time; he was less so now.

  He reached the water and scooped up some in his joined palms, but stopped when two of the symbols from within the cup flared in his palms and the water vanished. He was on his feet and backing away from the pool in less than an eye blink.

  There was magic here, as there had been in the tower. Magic he couldn’t understand.

  In the distance, he heard the ugly mutter of the War Song. Bax woofed softly.

  Arthur’s mouth was dry, but he didn’t try to drink again. The dog took out running toward the next meadow down. Suddenly Arthur was climbing through slippery moss-covered rocks and stumbling through water-filled pools, till he reached the grass below.

  This meadow was bigger than the one above. He was trapped here. The moon was right above him and the light bright as day.

  There was nowhere else to go.

  The meadow ended in a shallow lake, and beyond the lake stood the dark forest. He was sure it must be trackless. In fact, the moon shining down into it showed clearly how dense it was. Wilderness was part of his life, but only in dark midnight tales had he ever heard of such a place. But his blood remembered.

  The branches were matted above, the trunks of the ancient oaks so close together that one must struggle through them. Men caught in the toils of a curse wandered here. By day the light was almost shut out by the hard evergreen leaves, and the direction for the sun could only be guessed at. By night, mist and moonlight strangled the fixed star guides. There was water enough only to torment, food enough to stave off death for a few months of horror and struggle over and around the knotted roots that covered every level place. A lethal, pathless waste. The fate of men lost in this wood was to at last yield up all hope, lie down, despair, and die.

  A sheer cliff rose on one side of the meadow, and another fell away on the other. The wood beckoned him away to madness. He wondered how many men’s bones moldered within it.

  Behind him, the War Song blocked the road back.

  “I would destroy you.” The voice was everywhere and nowhere.

  “Don’t waste either breath or energy on maledictions,” Arthur said. “I know.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cregan woke before daybreak. Yes, this would be the first day of the full moon. He’d better fix up something for her and take it to the well.

  He sighed. He could smell himself . . . or was it the men’s feasting hall? No women lived here. None were even supposed to approach it. Right now, no one would approach it at all, not from downwind at least.

  He scratched the hair on his chest and studied the hawks standing on their perches in a ring around the outer edge of the circular structure. He knew that by spring the place usually got a little ripe. But last night’s comments by the heads of the village in the valley were unkind, to say the least, and the statement of the seeress, Magda, that he burn the whole thing down and start over was a bit extreme. He didn’t care for taking orders from the women, and he’d told her that.

  Ha! was the reply. She went on to tell him that since he’d made a serious attempt to cut the throat of the last man to give him unwelcome advice, he’d best grow used to her opinions, since most men were since then wary of offending him. And someone must of necessity acquaint him with unpalatable truths.

  The fact was that he was afraid of her. No one knew all the things she could do, one of the least of which was to declare a man impotent and keep him that way for as long as she liked. This unpleasant reputation dated from the time o
f her first marriage. Her husband struck her, not an uncommon thing, but she took it amiss and told him if he raised his hand to her again, she would make his balls crawl back up in his body. He had (hit her). They did (crawl up in his body) and would not come down. Nor had they resumed their function when the poor man had a fatal encounter with the business end of a spear.

  She had inherited all his property and pursued a comfortable state of widowhood ever since. And moreover, Cregan found no man, however courageous, was ever completely relaxed in her presence. He reluctantly included himself in that company.

  He rose to his feet naked, stretched, and listened to the shouts in the distance. It was a cold morning, but the bathhouse was enjoying an unseasonable amount of popularity. He concluded that the impression made by her remarks yesterday might account for this.

  “I’ll probably have to burn it down,” he whispered, then went to join the warriors in the long, narrow sweathouse.

  A little later, he sought out Magda. She had six sons. Before she took a fatal dislike to her husband, the man had done his duty by her. So her grandchildren and daughters-in-law did most of the household chores. She was weaving on a warp-weighted loom in her dooryard, keeping an eye on her hardworking kin. The men were in the fields or readying the flocks to begin the journey to the high pastures. Her daughters-in-law were toiling industriously, spinning, dying hanks of wool, grinding grain for the weekly bread making.

  And indeed they had best work hard. Anyone in her household who didn’t ran some rather strange risks, and two of her sons were veterans of rather acrimonious divorces occasioned by the young ladies’ unwillingness to meet Magda’s high standards. The rest kept their noses clean and obeyed her orders.

  Cregan came up behind her, pausing to study the fabric on her loom. It was a textured miracle of silk, linen, and wool tapestry, showing the four worlds as seen from above. They looked like concentric circles, each sporting their proper colors, the outer and bottom circle, a mixture of brown, black, scarlet, orange, and sienna, a convocation of autumn. The first inner was green and brown, the greens of a midsummer forest tangled with brown, black, rock darkness, yet shimmering with touches of sun on water or on the leaves on the topmost trees in the forest. Pastels ruled the last two circles, and they were marked with brightness and the subtle shifts that rule the kingdom of light.