The Raven Warrior

by Alice Borchardt

  He and the dog struggled into deeper water, toward the dark wood.

  Deep, he thought. But not deep enough.

  No normal grass fire could burn so hot as the plume of the flame that had been the War Song. Even in its death throes the thing was forcing him toward his doom.

  He and Bax stood among the cattails near the thick, twisted oaks that formed the fatal forest. The small lake was a mirror of scarlet-yellow, twisting flame. The opposite edge was bubbling.

  Bax whined softly. The water was warm. Arthur reached down with one battered hand and touched it. Not warm now. Hot.

  The radiant heat was appalling. His face, chest, and arms burned. He and Bax turned, pushed their way through the thick stand of cattails and into the cool shadows of the forest.

  There is a moment when desire rises so strongly in your body and that of your lover. And at that moment the only thought in both of your minds is, Oh, God, where can we hide?

  In one leap, Uther reached that moment when her hand touched his. His body shivered with the force of his own need. How long had it been? He found he wasn’t sure. After Igrane, there were only a few dim pictures of aging, lowborn women who were pathetically grateful for a king’s attentions and the rich presents and increase in family status those attentions brought with them. And, indeed, he had been generous with the ladies and their families, if for no other reason than to salve his conscience about his uncaring use of their bodies.

  But this girl . . .

  Just then, the light faded from her eyes and she looked frightened. Aife returned.

  “Yes,” Aife whispered, voicing his unspoken thought. “Where can we hide?”

  The dining hall was empty. He drew her toward him.

  “Don’t! Don’t!” She spoke very softy. “We will be on the floor. She has come! I see now the first time was only an imitation of what ‘She’ meant for me. ‘She’ sealed my womb for you. But tell me. Will it hurt? I was so afraid when I met the Horned One, afraid of the pain. But the drink wiped out my consciousness. Must I mix another?”

  Uther’s mouth was dry; he was only just barely able to speak. “No.” But even as he answered, he found himself certain he was right and wondered how he could be so sure.

  The vast hall was silent now. Sunbeams from the glazed windows high along the wall crisscrossed one another, a lattice of sunlight that formed a barrier to the monstrous forms, the knots of serpents, the fanged, clawed, winged, and scaled beings that populated the ceiling and the wall paintings that covered every flat surface in the room.

  “This is an evil and unclean place.” As she spoke, he realized she was staring at the snake pit.

  “No!” He unslung the harp from his back. “No,” he repeated, opening the case and lifting the instrument from its scarlet brocade nest. “Evil is a shadow, or so say the old ones, and that mad Greek Socrates. Evil is human folly, misunderstanding, misdirected good.”

  “I wish I could believe you,” she said.

  His fingers found the harp strings. “This is my magic,” he said. “A magic I abandoned for the sword so many years ago. I yielded to duty and forsook lore. But it returned to claim me. Hush and think only of the music.”

  His hands caressed the strings. The great hall around them seemed to dissolve, leaving them standing alone in a sunlit meadow ringed by virgin forest.

  “It is said,” she spoke, as if in a dream, “that there is a place where lovers alone can go. A bright kingdom formed of air and light where none may intrude on their bliss.”

  “Can we ask for more, beloved?” he asked. “Tell me what you hear in the music.”

  “The sounds of insects in the grass.” Her eyes closed. “The sun on my face. It glows through my eyelids. The breeze on my skin. It cools and caresses me. The smell of air perfumed by meadow and deep, virgin forest. And from time to time, the sharp, distant tang from the sea. I hear also the forest sounds: a bird trill, the soft, whispered benediction as the trees answer the wind and the silence. When you have lived among others without respite, silence has a sound. A sound you long for, as I have longed for this. We’re really here, aren’t we? Somewhere else.”

  He nodded and continued to play.

  “Somewhere no one can touch us?”

  “Yes.” And the music of the strings drifted into a simple melody, fair and ephemeral as a flower, fraught with the mystery of a beauty that changes forever and never stands still. The melody rose, arcing higher and higher, and finally vanished, glittering in the light.

  He set the harp on the ground on top of its flat case.

  “Keep watch,” he ordered the instrument as he unwound his mantle and threw it on the ground. Severius had given him a fine one, and it was lined with red velvet. It formed a scarlet splotch in the grass.

  “You have seen me naked,” he said. “Now I want to see you.”

  She turned, her eyes closed, and stood silent and compliant before him.

  Overtunic, like a man’s, off over her head. Blouse, like a woman’s, easy—she hadn’t bothered to lace it to the neck—also off over her head. No shift; she wore no dress. Only the tightly wound strophium concealed her upper body, her breasts. It floated away.

  Her breasts were virginal, but she was not flat-chested, as she had seemed. He knelt before her, because the boots and leggings had to come off before the trousers and drawers. When he looked up, her body blocked the sun. Her hair was an aureole, a cloud of gold. Her blue eyes were open, and she was gazing down at his face, her hands rested on his shoulders.

  When the leggings were gone and the boot laces undone, she stepped out of them. The drawstring that held up her knee britches simply snapped in his hand. A second later, they were down at her ankles. She wore only the loincloth, and it floated away the way the strophium had.

  He touched her very carefully, touched the red-gold fur at the junction of her thighs, and found it moist.

  “Afraid?” he asked.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Only wondering if I will feel your seed hot and thick spill against my womb.”

  He wasn’t sure where his own clothing went, but when he was naked, he put one arm around her shoulders, the other around her knees, lifted her very slight, light body, and placed it on his spread mantle. Red and gold, her body glowed against the velvet cloth.

  “Possess me!” Her eyes were still wide. “If the one-eyed stag in rut failed to do his work well, I would put the pain behind me.”

  He took a deep breath, remembering her story about yielding herself to the ancient Horned One. As she said, the one-eyed Lord of the Wild had the tools to open a woman. But was such an experience a dream or reality?

  He knelt and spread her legs open with one knee. They parted without resistance. He supported himself on his arms and entered her slowly, ready to withdraw if necessary. But except for a widening of her eyes, she seemed to have no reaction at all to his filling her.

  She was warm inside, warm the way the sun is warm or porridge in the morning fills the body with its heat. Warm the way a fur mantle is during the winter. Her arms wrapped around his back, drawing him down on top of her. Her hips rose as she arched her back to pull him into her body as deeply as possible.

  “Oh! What a delight,” she breathed.

  The queen welcomes you, he thought, remembering the indifferent queen bee disemboweling and castrating the male to suck into her body every possible drop of his seed. If she did not feel some sadness at her consort’s fate, he knew she would shrug and answer, What would you have me do? He was born to die in just such a way. Of pleasure, of love.

  Her legs were wound around his hips; he could not escape their joining, even if he would. The pleasure seemed to spread from the center of his being, out and out, each wave claiming more and more of his body, until he was caught in a spasm of absolute lust and his seed almost seemed wrenched away to splash hot, silent, moist, against her womb.

  But she was not the queen bee his instincts warned him about, and he found himself pleasantly r
elaxed, resting on her firm, young body when at last the fire faded to a scattering of coals. He eased off her breasts and cradling thighs and lay quiet beside her.

  High above, clouds drifted past the sun, and the warm, golden light came and went. She cuddled against him and slept for a time. He knew he must have dozed also, because when he opened his eyes again, the shadow of the sentinel harp was longer, stretching far enough to touch their still-intertwined legs.

  He sat up and ran his hand through his still-thick, graying hair and scratched the stubble on his cheek. I must shave, he thought idly, or I will soon have a beard again.

  He glanced down at her and saw her eyes were open. They both rose and dressed, then walked hand in hand to the edge of the meadow, to the forest. When they reached it, Uther saw that the trees were very old and scattered in groves over an open parkland. They were all oaks, and rich producers of acorns. The ground under the trees cracked with each footstep. It was bright under the long, low-spreading oak branches, and there should have been more brush and undergrowth beneath the trees. But then he saw in the low damp places the multiple cloven tracks of deer and elk and knew they must find a rich grazing ground here.

  Beyond this grove, he looked into another meadow and another grove, and beyond that, at the long, smooth-sloping fall of a riverbank. His eye caught the glint of sun on water.

  His blood remembered places like this kindly—his blood, his soul remembered their richness, their beauty. In the spring the river was filled with salmon; through the summer, other kinds of fish. The winter acorn/hazelnut crop was dried, and the acorns leached of their bitterness by flowing water were sufficient to make bread and porridge. In the autumn the boar fattened on acorns, feasted the people. Come winter, deer and elk and, to a lesser extent, her wild cattle, the aroches, were a year-round meat resource to be taken when needed.

  “Look!” She pointed to the left, and he saw the barrow.

  It was on high ground, near the river, and it looked out over the flowing freshets of living green land toward the more savage and ancient salt sea beyond. But the stars that rose over the river and the sea were the same.

  The mouth of the barrow was pointed away from them, and they couldn’t see if any of the dead lay at the entrance waiting for the dark of the moon, waiting for the wheeling stars to claim them.

  “Time—outside of time,” he said softly. “Does this still go on?”

  They were standing hand in hand, gazing out over the golden countryside, breathing air so pure it seemed permeated by the light that sparkled from the flaxen grass, the shimmering tree leaves, and the glittering river, both of them filled brimming with absolute peace. He heard the whisper, the sound of scales sliding in the dry grass stems, and smelled the noxious reptile reek.

  He spun around and saw it was already between him and the harp.

  Aife turned when he did. She gasped and screamed. It was the biggest snake he’d ever seen and it was flowing in a diagonal, across the clearing to crowd him away from the musical instrument resting on its case near the mantle he had thrown down when they made love.

  Very deliberately, he pushed Aife away and moved back, so as to direct the snake’s head toward him and allow her to flee toward the harp.

  “No!” she gasped, and stretched out her hand toward him.

  “No!” he answered. “No! There is a child!”

  She looked down and touched her belly. By now the dreadful thing was between them. The stink was overpowering.

  Thirty feet, Uther thought, if it’s an inch. And it’s dead. God! It’s dead!

  It was dead, a golem of a serpent, skin stretched over the long, curving spin with its bone arches, the same skin covering an empty-eyed skull with what looked like hundreds of long, sharp, recurved teeth.

  “Take the harp.” He motioned her toward the instrument. “It will protect you.”

  Indeed, the sense of cold and dark was closing around him, but the graceful instrument stood in the now seemingly distant afternoon sun. She ran toward the instrument.

  Then the meadow was gone, dissolving into a silver wave that darkened as it arced over him, white foam at the top, green glass slowly melting into a shiny obsidian black at the bottom. He threw his arm up against the sledgehammer blow of the breaking sea, but it slammed him down—not into choking black water, but against unyielding stone. The force of the blow drove the breath from his body and his vision shattered into shards of light.

  He heard someone laughing and knew the voice: Igrane!

  When his vision cleared, he found the meadow was gone and he lay on a stone floor, looking up at the wrath of a boiling sea as it pounded a crystal dome above his head. To one side of him, he saw light. It emanated from a source on the floor near him.

  Igrane laughed again. He looked up at her. She stood three shallow steps above him. She was wrapped in a red velvet robe lined with silk. He could see the lining at the neck and sleeves, black against the bloodred.

  He sat up, glad the serpent thing was gone. He was thinking, Why? Why doesn’t she just kill me?

  Above, the waves sucked and pounded at the transparent roof, and a swirl of green seawater would darken the glass and the room beneath. Then the stormy tide would ebb, and the sun would shine down into the domed chamber.

  “He is a prime source of power,” someone said, “could you but wring it out of his body.”

  “And then I would be Merlin,” Igrane said.

  “Yes,” was the answer.

  It took Uther a moment to make out the speaker, black-robed as she was in the darkness of the vast hall. The first thing he saw was the twin sparks that formed her eyes. Then he found he could make out the face with the papery, mummified skin stretched tightly over the bones and the permanent, lipless grin of the teeth below.

  “My lord husband,” Igrane said mockingly. “Meet my friend, Ustane. It was her little pet who trapped you.”

  “He can see me,” Ustane said. “I’m surprised.”

  “Yes, I see you only too well,” he said. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”

  “To all intents and purposes,” Ustane answered.

  Igrane stamped her foot, a look of pique on her face. “Enough of this jabbering. The less he knows, the better. I’m not looking forward to this either. Summon your servants, Ustane.”

  The corpse in her black robe made neither sound nor gesture, but two figures appeared, one on either side of her. He could see enough of their faces to know they were as dead as she was.

  “My lord,” Ustane said. “Please remove your clothing.”

  “Yes, get naked, darling,” Igrane said.

  The king rolled over, then got to his feet. From a standing position, he could see the light source much better: an X, or rather two crossed lines glowing and flush with the floor. A Saint Andrew’s cross.

  The king knew the Romans sometimes crucified their victims that way as opposed to placing them on the upright Christian cross, as they had Christ. He’d heard once that there was some argument among the carnifices (professional slave drivers and executioners) about the two methods, the X as opposed to a simple crossbeam. Many of them felt that the X method allowed the victim to linger and suffer far longer than those suspended from a simple crossbeam, who usually perished from suffocation in a matter of hours. Whereas those on the X-shaped cross were pinned to the wood and must wait for hunger and thirst or extreme heat and cold to do their deadly work. Usually that took days, allowing for long survival periods, especially if the weather was good. A few hardy souls might last for a week or more.

  The king suddenly found himself physically ill. He felt dizzy; his vision blurred as he fully grasped the implications of his predicament.

  “If you please, my lord!” Ustane repeated. “Undress, or my servants will strip you. And I promise, they won’t be gentle.”

  He glanced up at Ustane’s servants and saw they seemed to be more sinewy and more greasy than Ustane was.

  “They are capable of manhandling you, never
doubt it, my lord,” Ustane warned him. “They are constructed for strength. After I died, I was boiled and dried. But the sinew, muscle, and fat were stripped from their bones. Then the long, white fibers that make living things able to move were replaced, then packed in boiled muscle and corpse tallow before the skin was sewn back over their bones. They feel no pain, and are a wonder where strength is concerned.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Uther agreed politely. He began to undress.

  When he was finished, the two came down the steps and placed him on what he considered the Saint Andrew’s cross. He adhered the same way Igrane had. He found he couldn’t move. He closed his eyes and understood that he lay on the vortex of immense powers.

  But what they were and how they were structured, he couldn’t possibly imagine. He felt as he had when he first encountered a giant storm at sea.

  He had been going to France to bring back his brother’s bones and was on the channel when the blow began. The Veneti captain had no chance even to get the sail down; the wind carried it away moments after the storm began.

  The Veneti lashed themselves to the ship. Because he was a prince, the captain tied him to the mast. The last thing the man screamed in his ear was, “There is nothing else to do but hang on and pray!” He’d screamed the words over the shrieking of the wind.

  The captain hadn’t been fast enough about tying himself down, because the next breaking sea, a monster high as a mountain, dragged him fighting and clawing overboard into an ocean boiling with the fully unleashed fury of the wind.

  Uther opened his eyes and saw Igrane standing at his feet. She was still wearing the robe. As he watched, she let it—or commanded it to—fall open, and her nude body glowed against the black silk.

  “You see, my darling,” she purred. “All you need do is make love to me. It’s very easy. No chore at all. Consider how easily you pleasured that little sweetmeat sister of Lord Severius.”

  She shrugged, and the robe dropped to the floor.

  Lord! Lord! Yes! She was beautiful, more beautiful than when he had first possessed her on their wedding night. She had never met the standard of pale, blond beauty that seemed to be most admired by the present generation. She was tall, long-waisted, with a mass of straight, blue-black hair that hung down to her waist, a perfumed, silken curtain. Her long legs made other women’s look short and stubby. The beautifully formed breasts and buttocks came as a surprise on her slender frame.