“Perish the thought,” I said.
Tuau let fly with another string of honking coughs. He sounded as though he might strangle to death. I hurried toward the basin. Sure enough, there was a dipper. I filled it and brought it to Tuau.
He slurped, not lapped.
“Christ!” Albe exclaimed.
“She” stepped out of the darkness inside the black tower.
“The towers are glass, tinted glass, but if you are close enough to the walls, inside you can be seen,” Cateyrin explained.
She was very beautiful: bejeweled, wearing a headdress, necklace set with glittering violet stones, gold filigree cuffs, and anklets that formed a mass of golden chain dripping with tiny bells. She studied us “women.” I could see her thinking as her eyes rested on Albe and myself. Cateyrin received the same treatment, as did Tuau. Then she saw Meth.
She smiled; it was a bewitching one.
He ogled her and grinned back stupidly.
She lifted her arms to show off pink-tipped, perfect breasts, then turned to one side and bent over. I couldn’t see him, not completely. He was only a shadow through the curved glass. But we all watched, fascinated, as he came up behind her, entered her body, and used one hand to stimulate her and the other to guide her hips back and forth over his organ in such a way as to achieve maximum pleasure for himself.
She turned her head and again smiled at Meth. He moaned, and fell back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes.
Cateyrin spun around and slapped him as hard as she could. He let out a yell.
“What was that for? I didn’t do anything.”
“You were thinking about it,” she said between her teeth.
I glanced away from Meth and back at the glass wall. “She” was gone and her partner with her.
“The show’s over,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Indeed it was growing darker and darker. We had no torches or any form of light with us, and it might be difficult to negotiate the stair.
“Maybe if we give Tuau another drink of water . . .” Meth began.
Cateyrin slapped him again. This time he hit her back. She staggered away, reeling, her nose streaming blood.
I heard Albe’s sword clear the sheath.
“No killing!” I shouted.
“My lady, you’re making life difficult for me. I can’t think which of them is worse: his instant lechery, her frantic jealousy.”
“I be nod aleous!” Cateyrin shouted. I considered the possibility that her nose was broken.
I could barely see now, but this courtyard looked to have only one exit. I pointed toward it.
“Cateyrin! Is this the way to your mother’s house?”
“Yeth.” Cateyrin was blotting her bleeding nose on her shirt.
“Then get going now. March! Move!”
Meth shot a fearful look at Albe. She smiled back—it was not a pleasant one, containing as it did elements of both threat and derision. Then he and Cateyrin obeyed.
“Take point,” I told Tuau.
“Oh, hell. Why can’t . . . ?”
“I’m going to cut the throat of the next person who starts an argument about anything,” Albe said in a quiet, conversational tone.
Tuau obeyed, albeit grumbling under his breath, though not loudly enough to be clearly heard.
The stair spiraled down, and down. At times we had to feel our way through almost pitch darkness. At others, light shone through the semitransparent walls and we could see well. Besides light, I heard talk and laughter and even fancied I heard a word or two I recognized. But we could see nothing clearly, and though I had a sense of being in a densely inhabited place, we encountered no one else during our passage down.
At the bottom, the stair began to widen out. We were all winded and tired. I gave the order to stop. The speed and alacrity with which I was obeyed demonstrated it was a good idea.
Cateyrin’s nose was still bleeding, and Albe moistened a cloth pad.
“My lady,” she said. “May I call on your healing skills?”
I touched Cateyrin’s face. The air filled with the pepper scent of roses.
“Oh, my!” Albe exclaimed. She was sitting on a step a little above Cateyrin. I was bending over them. “Roses. Cateyrin, the air is filled with them. Where did they come from?”
“She’s Danae. Tuatha de Danae,” Tuau purred. He was stroking himself against Albe’s bare legs on the other side.
“Sit,” Albe said.
With a sigh, he complied. “Mean. Mean. All of you, just selfish.”
“You will get yourself overexcited and try to take a bite,” she explained. “Cats are like that.”
“Can I rub my cheeks on you? Oh, please! Please?”
Meth said, “God, she was beautiful.”
“You idiot!” Cateyrin started to stand up.
Albe pushed her back down. “Stop it. You have no claim on him. What he does is his own business.”
“You don’t understand,” she wailed.
My hand had done good work. The swelling around her nose was down.
“Cateyrin!” Meth shouted. “You’re being a jealous bitch. I don’t believe a word of those stories. They’re all made up by skinny little twats like you or old baggy hags like your mother and her . . .”
“You ingrate. Keep your mouth shut about my mother.”
I clapped my hands and brought the screeching to a halt. “Stop!” I commanded. “Cateyrin, what don’t we understand? Take a deep breath and tell me. Slowly and clearly.”
She gave Meth a nasty glance. He returned a sulky glare.
“She’s a Circe! A Fand!”
I knew the names, but wondered what they meant here. Circe turned men into pigs and Fand was . . . well, no one was quite sure what Fand was. She came in sleep to men who were going to be mighty warriors. But some families sacrificed to keep her away, because she sometimes ruined them for real women and they took such chances that they were not long lived. So she was both courted and dreaded.
“Tell me!”
“She makes slaves of the men who come to her as lovers,” Cateyrin continued. “She’s like a drug. They can never get enough of her and they can never escape.”
“Nonsense!” Meth shouted.
“One at a time,” I ordered. “Let Cateyrin talk.”
And talk she did. Seems many, not all, but many, who fell under the spell of a Fand were willing to do anything to remain in her company. They voluntarily allowed some sort of device to be placed around their necks that controlled them, and most of the farmwork was done by the Fir Blog and similarly collared men. The Fand, who started out as a real woman, became stupendously rich, long lived, and beautiful.
There were dreadful stories about men who wore away their lives in a semidream state, toiling in the fields under the sun—lost to their wives, children, friends, and other family members simply to be allowed to sit at the Fand’s feet and adore her and sometimes touch her hand.
“It doesn’t work on everyone,” Meth snapped. “A lot just walk away after a few tumbles.”
“And you believe you are one of those?” Albe asked.
“Yes . . . yes, I do. We could have found refuge with her better than at your mother’s place. It would be the adventure of a lifetime to have a Fand.”
“Why didn’t you warn us?” I asked Cateyrin.
“I didn’t think she’d come out for a party made up mostly of women. She only showed herself once or twice to me when I was young.”
“You are such a grown-up now,” Albe said, laughing.
“Since today, I am.” She did her best to look grim, but with her lower lip sticking out, Cateyrin seemed about eight years old.
“God help us,” Albe whispered. Then she turned to Cateyrin. “Girl, what can we expect when we come out of this stairwell. You and Meth already said the streets aren’t safe at night.”
Meth and Cateyrin glanced at each other. “Well,” she said slowly, “there are the gangs. Every
street has one. In fact . . .” She glanced up the dark stairwell we had just come down. “I’m surprised we didn’t meet one here. I was afraid we might.”
“What do they do?” Albe asked.
“Una . . .” Meth and Cateyrin looked at each other again.
“We’re not sure,” Meth said. “They seem to do whatever they want to. Depends on what they think they can get. We were good children and always home before dark. So I’m not sure.”
“Oh, fine!” Albe said. “Great! Wonderful! Brigands!”
“Maeniel says all cities have them, “I told her.
“We have a lot,” Cateyrin said solemnly.
“Why do I believe you?” Albe rolled her eyes.
Sarcastically, Tuau commented, “We are a well-armed party and you are protected by one of the Akeru.” He threw a defiant glance at Albe. “I’m not to be sneered at.”
A slow grin spread over Albe’s face. Oh, no, I thought. It doesn’t do to break down a warrior’s confidence.
So I interrupted, “We have some food and drink left. Let’s finish it here and get moving.”
When I got up, my legs were stiff, my ankles sore. I’m tired, I thought, surprised. You see, I wasn’t used to fatigue, not this kind. Too much, I thought. My mind was dulled by unexpected and dangerous events. If packs of brigands were awaiting us, I must be alert.
I closed my eyes and summoned my armor. It came and covered me with a vivid intensity I had not heretofore experienced. I glowed, my fair skin pinked by excitement and patterned in the speaking images my people used to express the complexity of life. The knot work and intricate, vining spirals that speak to our souls.
Once we used them on everything. They were carven into leather, wood, and stone, woven into cloth and intricate, colorful braids. When we couldn’t speak each other’s languages, we used these symbols to communicate. Before the ogam alphabet or the Greek were conceived, the wise among the peoples of Europe from the Out Isles to beyond the Rhine could mark the turning of the years, rising and setting of the stars, and even calculate the hours and moments by the shadows cast by the sun as it traversed its long arc across the sky. They are our everlasting prayers to our gods, abstract statements of a belief in the community of life and that of the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. I wore them on my skin and called on them for protection.
I couldn’t see myself except in the eyes of others, but they looked satisfactorily impressed. Tuau’s pupils widened, turning his eyes from emerald to black.
“My, my. I’d only half believed you were Danae. But now . . .”
“Let’s go,” I said.
The stairs widened as we dropped down to the black tunnels that seemed to form the base of the city. The air felt damp and a mist filled the air. The lower we got, the more it thickened, until we were traveling in a gray void.
“Fog, thank God,” Cateyrin whispered to me. “I had hoped for it.”
“Why, girl?” Albe asked. “It makes it easy to ambush us.”
“Hush,” I whispered. “Move as silently as you can. If we can’t see them, they can’t see us, and won’t be expecting an armed party.”
We were no longer single file, but had spread out a bit. About then, we left the stair behind and were traveling in a tight group down the center of a corridor whose roof and walls were lost in the thickening mist.
“Where is the light coming from?” I asked Cateyrin. I was uneasy about it. The fog was illuminated in silver-white, as though by bright moon glow. “Is the moon out?”
She glanced at me as though I had taken leave of my senses. “What’s a moon?”
I placed that question aside. I’ll deal with it later, I decided.
“The light?” I repeated.
“Starlight,” she said. “The roof here catches starlight and makes it brighter. Look.”
She pointed to an opening in the fog above and I saw them. Thousands of tiny hexagonal cells. Like the eyes of an insect, each with another tiny hexagonal cell in the center. The roof was lumpy with them, and they were of all different sizes. The brightest stars had large ones, the dimmer stars small ones.
“There are all sorts of things here that make light,” Cateyrin continued. “Some good, some very bad. This is only one of them.”
I was about to ask what happened by day . . . when a terrible scream sounded not far behind us. Albe and I stopped, turned, and looked back.
“No! No! No!” Cateyrin tugged at my hand. “God, no! Don’t stop! Keep moving!”
Tuau was pressed against Albe’s leg. “It’s a kill,” the cat muttered. “I can smell the blood and torn guts from here.”
Cateyrin pulled frantically at my hand and, though she was white with fear, she didn’t speak above a whisper. I cut my eyes at Meth. He also looked terrified. Albe and I obeyed and hurried along. I found I was shivering. The corridor was dank and cold. It grew perceptibly darker. I looked up and saw the roof was broken here, a big hole above us.
They rushed us just then.
CHAPTER SIX
Making these things must be work, Arthur thought as he watched and listened to the War Song approach him. It was in the meadow lower down yet, and there might be time.
Arthur sprinted toward the broken rock that edged the long drop into the pine forest below. Bax, the dog, followed.
Bad footing, Arthur thought as he reached them.
Bright as moonlight is, it still doesn’t dominate the way daylight does, and the black shadows concealed hollows where a running man might easily break a leg or an ankle. Death—that would be certain death because the War Song would rip his body asunder with the same ferocity it did the trees and brush it encountered crossing the meadow.
Yes, he’d been right. The grass near the edge of the cliff was dry—thick and dry. It would burn. The wind from the glaciers above battered the edges of the meadow, killing the exposed vegetation and keeping it bone-dry.
He’d carried his bow and sinew since he first used them to make fire on the plateau where he’d been imprisoned with the other War Song, and he’d been practicing. Always fast, he had grown greatly skilled at kindling fire. He crouched down among the shattered boulders and stony rubble. Bax howled a warning.
The screaming, wailing, and sobbing intensified as he saw the War Song had reached the slope that led down into his meadow of last refuge. Maliciously, it paused and, digging itself into the slope, hurled shards of broken rock in every direction. Bax yipped and crouched beside Arthur as one slashed his shoulder.
Arthur gritted his teeth and bowed his head to protect his eyes. He felt as though ice touched him on the cheek five or six times, on the arms once, along his ribs, and at his stomach.
“No!” He fought the desire to run. Now or never. This was the best spot, filled with tinder-dry, broken brush and wiry, dead grass. And he could tell why the wind from the glaciers above battered him. It also threatened to blow him and his fire-making materials into the valley below.
“Shush. Be still,” he begged that wind even as one missile bigger than the rest cracked against his forehead and skidded across his scalp. Blood dripped down into his right eye, blinding him as fire blossomed under his hands.
He looked up. The moonlight wavered as the thing came between his eyes and the silver orb. The screaming was deafening. For a moment, the wind did still, giving the grass all around the tiny pile of kindling time to catch, then leap with a roar into thick branches belonging to a winter-killed blackberry vine. They turned to ribbons of fire, carrying flame to the tinder-dry grass all along the edge of the meadow.
Bax fled toward the lake at the far end of the meadow. The War Song made a perfectly hideous sound that pierced Arthur’s brain like a driven nail. The sheer agony in it staggered him. Then the War Song fled toward the thick green grass in the center of the meadow.
Arthur shook off the pain the dreadful yell caused him. He had nothing now. The flames had burned away a lot of his shirt, and when he fled the valley below, he’d brought no weapons
with him except a knife. That and his fire-making materials and his sling were lost in the blaze he’d kindled.
But he reached down and snatched up a clod of earth crowned by a swatch of flaming grass and hurled it at the War Song. A slender column of flame propagated along the outer edge of the whirling mass of debris, flying shadows and darkness that formed the center of the War Song. Arthur ran out of the flames toward the lake at the edge of the dark forest.
Then the flames died and the War Song pursued him again. It had no more rocks to suck up into his whirling, screaming substance, but it battered his body with clods of mud, whipping grass stems, shattered small branches, and stinging pebbles. He threw up his arm to protect his eyes and ran back into the fire. It was hotter now, the flames taking the grass roots filling in damp spots that hadn’t caught at first and igniting the wood of the larger saplings that sprinkled the edge of the cliff. He snatched up another clod of earth, this one bigger than the first, and hurled it at his adversary.
Again, it backed. Again he was battered by the scream. His shirt was gone, his leggings smoldering. A stunted birch sapling near him was a tree of flame.
Ignoring the pain it cost him, he snapped the trunk with his hands and, swinging it two-handed like a club, ran toward the War Song. The flaming grass had done its work. A dozen small fires burned on the thing’s surface, delineating the slender shape reaching up toward the stars.
Not enough! Still not enough!
He was so close he could feel the flailing and battering of the terrible winds it used to wreak its destruction on everything before it. He felt the bare skin of his arms and chest being flayed by their power as he slammed the blazing birch into the shadow thing outlined by the fires.
Perhaps the only thing that saved him was it tried to back up. It did, and then it roared up toward the stars in a screaming, almost infinite column of flame. The blast flung Arthur back and he landed with Bax in the shallow lake at the end of the meadow. Whump!
He staggered to his feet and realized the whole meadow had gone up. The radiant heat of the fire was scorching his face. He lifted an arm to shield his eyes and saw the hairs curl crisp and vanish.
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