by Tom Deitz
Did he really have any choice?
When he judged the flame to be brightest, he thrust the scale into it. The fire immediately flashed out to embrace the world with light like a magnesium flare. And at that precise moment, Calvin cried out, his voice not loud, but very very clear, “Hyuntikwala Usunhi!”
Light engulfed him, and he could see nothing but white, and then the light ceased to concern him, and all he felt was the horrible pain of the crossing. It was as if he were being flayed alive, as if his body were being consumed a cell at a time by gleeful lightning. He tried to scream and could not, tried to pass out and was denied.
Abruptly the pain swept away, and Calvin blinked and opened his eyes into daylight so bright he first thought he had been struck blind. The scream he’d held suspended escaped as a gasp.
Eventually his vision began to clear, though the pain came creeping back disguised as heat. He blinked, wiped his brow, wishing he’d brought along the beaded headband that usually bound his long black hair from his eyes. Another blink, and his eyes had adjusted to the unexpected glare.
Before him a waterfall thundered into a mighty gorge. On either side and behind him were the outer fringes of an endless wood—maples here, mostly, and maybe a few beeches. He surveyed them absently—and frowned, for the leaves, which had been greening with springtime when last he’d been here, were now crisped and sere.
And a little ways off to the left a figure was turning around. It was a man—or manlike: well over six feet tall, with the features of Calvin’s people. His skin was not red-brown, though, but almost pure white, and seemed to contain some inner fire. He had long black hair in braids past his waist and was wearing (as he always did) a white deerskin loincloth beaded with patterns of snakes and lightning—the same symbols that decorated the gold bands coiled about his muscular arms and legs.
“Siyu, Edahi,” he said. “I see you have received my summons, though truly I had hoped to see you sooner.”
“Siyu, adawehiru,” Calvin replied. “Sorry, Uki, I’ve been…busy.”
“You will be busier,” Uki told him promptly, his face gone quickly grim. “For there is much you must hear, much we must discover, and then much we must decide.”
Calvin nodded and puffed his cheeks thoughtfully. He glanced up at the glowering sky, thinking, inanely, that blue heat was hotter than red.
“It’s—warm,” he said carefully, by way of breaking the silence.
“That is the reason I have called you,” Uki replied, pointing toward the heart of the heavens.
The sun was wrong: was much closer than it should have been. But worse, it seemed to be slowly pulsing, gradually shifting size.
“Someone is shaking Nunda Igehi,” Uki said, and led the way into the woods.
Chapter VII: Dark Night of the Soul
(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)
War, Froech thought, surveying the mounted host that flanked him beneath fringes of dripping boughs as far as he could see to either side, was a great deal more trouble than it was worth. It was one thing if you were mortal: you charged, you fought, you either lived or died, and that was the end of it. But war among immortals—ah, that called for other rules entirely. There was still fighting, of course; but with the Sidhe even the weapons were different. In Faerie, battle began with trials of Power, because that was the way it had always been and the way the Laws compelled it. But Power was slow to horde and fast to disperse, so those initial forays usually progressed quickly to spears and arrows, then to axes and clubs and swords, and finally to knives, and—more frequently than he liked—to one’s own hands around a foeman’s throat.
But what was the point? One killed—or was killed; one died, and then one day or ten days later (if the wounds were minor) or longer if there was greater hurt—one rejoined soul and body and fought again, and the whole vain cycle was repeated. Oh, aye, it hurt to die; he had already done that once—by a wyvem’s disemboweling claw. But the pain was like anything else: it came, and it vanished, and eventually the memory faded.
Unless one of two things happened. The first was not likely: that was the Death of Iron, which clove body from soul and wounded both alike past hope of easy rejoining. Iron did not exist in Faerie, though, and no one of that World could wield it.
The other bane was if there was no body for the soul to rejoin, though even that problem could be overcome. Generally a man would join his spirit to a babe in the womb and so grow up that way. More rarely a man or woman of great Power would by slow degrees reform a body from the very stuff of Faerie. That could take years, centuries even; but what were a score of either to the immortal Daoine Sidhe of Tir-Nan-Og who were his comrades—or the kindred folk of Erenn, who were his foes?
Yet on such things victory hung. Men fought, men were killed, that was the way of battle. Yet the real conflict sometimes came after in a mad scramble to recover the fallen. Women most often did this, for they were not so strong as men and so more likely to be wounded in war, and also they were the source of wombs in which the dead could be reborn. As soon as a skirmish ended, they were on the field, carrying away the wounded, searching the grasses for slivers of severed flesh to be reattached and thus hasten some warrior’s healing; at times battling the women of the foe for possession of the slain.
The trick, then, was to destroy the bodies of the enemy dead with fire or sorcery; or to rend bodies into such small bits that full healing would take a thousand years. The only victor, Froech knew, was the one who could kill the most of his adversaries and keep them dead the longest.
But at least it was not as easy for the Erennese as it had once been, for they had lost the Cauldron of Rebirth in a conflict with the folk of Annwyn. Affairs should be more equal now.
Except that, somehow, war had been brought to Tir-Nan-Og.
The wind shifted: warm air from the south, whipping his long black hair into his face because he had been too vain to bind it and had thought the intricate cheek guards and equally ornate nasal of his high-domed helm proof enough against random breezes. That breeze brought odors, too: stagnant water (from the fen on whose fringe they met); and well-oiled metal; and the musk of horses that never changed between the Worlds, though they wore horns or feathers or scales. New, however, was the cinnamon-sweet smell of the Watchers who crouched before them in their countless head-high ranks, domed shells ablaze with the pearlescent interlaced spirals lacquered upon them, their heavy, clubbed tails inscribing strange patterns in the mud as they surveyed Finvarra’s host.
They were an innovation in this campaign. Always before Lugh had used them to ward certain of his borders from unwelcome visitors, but using them in war…it remained to be seen if they would work. It had taken almost a month to assemble enough to be useful, and longer than that to imprint their tiny minds with a rage to order. But if it succeeded…there would be few enemy dead indeed, for the beasts ate only freshly killed meat. And what man, Sidhe or otherwise, would rejoin his soul to what churned in the guts of a beast?
Who indeed? The very thought made him shiver.
A lur horn sounded abruptly, and backs stiffened all down the line. Froech glanced left, to his friend Andro, who grinned at him from beneath the fringe of beard that was atypical of Faery men, and patted the salamander on his shield, and then further down to Andro’s lady, Fuiltegerne, who rode beside him, beautiful face grim as the crows stamped on her helm in the mark of the Morrigu’s house. The warrior to his right he did not know, but he spoke to him anyway.
“It would seem we are at last to it, brother. What think you, will we carry the day?”
“The day, I think; the war I doubt,” the soldier said. “For all we fight on our own land, Finvarra’s hosts are greater and his sorceries far stronger.”
“Yet ours hold. His druids have tried and failed, and now must pause to recover their strength.”
“As do our own, an even match.”
“Not so even,” Froech laughed. “For they shall take away few dead.”
“Let us hope not.
And let us hope the Watchers know friend from foe.”
“Lugh says they will.”
“But they are not truly his to command. Even he mistrusts them.”
And then the horns sounded once more: two blasts, then one, sliding silver into the air, but quickly loudening to fill the world. Froech frowned, looked forward, across the brass-scrolled plates that armored his jet-black stallion to the looming bulks of the Watchers. Another set of notes in a certain rhythm ordered the battle: four short calls, which carried with them coded orders.
Arrows, it would be, as he had guessed: arrows to arch across the Watchers as soon as the foe came into range. And come they would, too, for already the Watchers were ambling forward, and would continue if unchecked until they forced the enemy either to fight or fall back before them. The former was most likely, for Finvarra’s men held the less-certain ground: fen in front, and less than a league behind them, ragged cliffs. They had to advance or be lost.
Already the Watchers had covered a half-score paces, but Froech held his ground, bow at ready, eyes half closed as he sought to raise a glamour to confuse whoever of Finvarra’s levies might choose him as his target. He wondered what Finvarra’s troops were thinking, there across the oozing slime in the black-and-scarlet livery that was as out of the place here as his own deep red and gold would have been in the misty glens of Erenn.
And then horns again, from across the way, and Finvarra’s men moved forward, their white horses stepping as one. Arrows flew from that line, but Lugh’s troops had expected them and raised blazing shields to consume them with arcane fire. The second volley was the same, and then it was their turn to shoot, and shoot they did: launching shafts that split as they flew, and turned one to fire, and one to ice, and quenched the shields Finvarra’s men raised against them or set their sable cloaks ablaze.
And still he sat unmoving, while the Watchers drew nearer the foe. Already there were dead there, and the odor of blood strong in the air; and that smell roused the beasts’ tiny minds and drove them on with ever-increasing fury.
Arrows flew again, and spears this time: silver-edged as only Goibniu could make them. But those spears did little harm, for they could barely reach the Sidhe, and slid off the armored heads and shells of the Watchers. One, though, had found its mark and pierced a Watcher in the soft spot between head and shell, and even as the blood gushed out, its fellows were upon it, disrupting the line for nigh ten paces about. And it was into this opening Finvarra’s forces flew: breaching the ranks and thrusting into Lugh’s host with weapons flailing.
Lugh’s men forced them out again in a rout that left corpses strewn across the mud: corpses which the women quickly claimed and hauled away to fuel the bonfires, lest the smell of their blood too much excite the beasts.
The Watchers were halfway across the fen now, and the going was slow, for Lugh had not reckoned on the effect their great weight would have on that shifting, oozing surface. But another note had sounded, and the troops were moving as well, pacing their horses slowly.
And then Finvarra’s men were charging, shields raised, spears braced, diving toward that line of moving flesh—
—And meeting it: bringing hooves down on armored heads, breaking off stubby horns, blinding red eyes, diving between or leaping over to break their ranks and so come to Lugh’s host at last. Few made it, and those that remained behind found their mounts also mired in the muck or pierced by arrows.
But no few of the Watchers died as well, and Froech saw the one directly before him stumble to a halt with a matched pair of spears in its eyes and begin clawing frantically. Its fellows moved on, but Finvarra’s forces were already diving toward the gap, and Froech kicked his own mount forward to meet them, as Andro did likewise at his side.
It was hand to hand then, horses dancing about, maneuvered by mind or heel alone, fen-gasses rising between to choke the air as swords clanged hard against shields and men grunted and sweated and swore. The sun beat down but it was not an ally of Lugh’s, no matter it was his sign, and Froech felt the heat begin to rise in him. He could have banished it, but Power demanded concentration, and he had no time for such, not when he had to keep alive, had to keep his shield up and his sword moving in post and parry. His adversary was larger than he—huge for a man of Faerie—and his charger likewise, and Froech felt himself pressed back—yet not toward the line, not toward his friends, but toward the main body of the Watchers. His horse stumbled as it trod on the dead monster’s tail, and it was all he could do to keep his balance and meet the blow that smashed down at him. Another blow, another backward pace, and the horse was having trouble avoiding the Watcher’s corpse. A sword flashed out again, and he met it—barely. But a second stroke bit through his shield and into his collar bone, and he had no choice but to cast aside his protection lest it too much encumber him. Even as he did that, even as he spun his sword in a maze-dance before him, his foe had discarded his own shield and reached toward him, grabbed a lock of unbound hair and jerked. Froech had only a moment to realize what was happening before a sword ripped toward his throat. The blow missed his neck, but found the arm he raised to protect himself, and then he was falling while all the world went red.
Pain flooded through him when he hit the ground, and his vision cleared. He had just time to see that clouds were forming in the north with unnatural haste and to hear the grim chanting of the druids once more commencing their craft, before cold bronze wrenched his soul from his body.
*
David awoke into darkness. He sat up, glanced around, momentarily disoriented. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could make out the steep angles of the attic ceiling, the narrow bed where he lay uncovered because the tiny room was summer-hot in spite of the open window that blew rain-cooled air across him. That air smelled of dust here, too, not of sweat and fear and battle. But it seemed as if the sounds of warfare still came to him, until he realized it was rain on the roof.
“Jesus,” he whispered, then noticed he was shivering, though not with cold. That had been the worst one yet: so very real…and somebody he had known as well. The whole thing was starting to get to him. It was one thing when you had to deal with rain as a matter of course, as one of the inconveniences of life, and ditto for contention. Then you merely had to watch your step and try a little harder. But when it was your fault, and you couldn’t do anything about it—that was a thousand times worse. It was like that awful sick moment last year when he’d lost control of his car and knew he was about to crash. Everything had gone into slow motion and he’d known absolutely that he was gonna hit, but not how hard or with how much damage. Except that this time the irresistable force was coming at him and he was powerless to avoid it.
Restless, he climbed out of bed, tugged on his gym shorts and threw the robe around his shoulders more from a desire for psychological comfort than any physical need. Barefoot, he padded downstairs, wincing as his tread brought more than one set of creaks from the boards of the narrow stairwell. So much for his ma’s precautions.
Right at the bottom and down the hall; hesitating, but not stopping, by the door of his sanctum, and again to glance in on Little Billy who slept peacefully in his own room. Once in the kitchen he closed the hall door behind him but didn’t latch it, thought of switching on the light, but decided against it. A glance over his shoulder, and he made it to the counter beside the stove, where he knelt and rummaged quietly through the detritus there until he found a bottle of Big Billy’s Jim Beam. That was what he needed, something to deaden his memory, to banish the horrible images.
He grabbed a squatty glass from the dish drainer and opened the freezer compartment at the top of the fridge. Four ice cubes, and the whiskey went over. It took more than he’d intended—Pa would know some was missing—but his was the greater need now. If Big Billy gave him any grief, he’d simply level with him. They’d argue, of course, but he’d get the better eventually.
Thus fortified, he crept out the back door (open, except for the hooked
screen, to let in the night breezes that cooled the house in lieu of air-conditioning), and sat down on the edge of the porch. A long swallow almost made him choke, but he caught it in time and let the cold fluid set fire to his throat, feeling its warmth flood through him. The rain had slackened to a persistent drizzle, and he stared for a while at the patterns it made in the evergrowing puddle at the base of the steps. The steady drips diving off the roof scant inches beyond his feet were a sort of frame: bright silver pillars against a background of gloom-shot gray. Tiberius the tomcat came up to him and curled against his side. He could feel the prickle of water on his toes as drops smashed themselves on the steps and showered them with liquid shrapnel.
To the right, at the limit of vision, he could almost see Bloody Bald. Lightning flared there, a shimmer in the darkness like a flame seen through layers of gauze. War went on there, he knew, war in Faerie. He wondered what had become of his friends among the Sidhe. Lugh, he supposed, was leading the charge. Nuada and Morrigu were Lugh’s lieutenants, so they probably had major roles as well. Oisin, the old human seer, was doubtlessly advising. And the others he knew less well: Froech and Regan, Cormac and Forgoll—how did they fare? It was all pointless, too: a thousand lives altered, the very land changed, all because of him.
Footsteps sounded soft on the bare boards behind him. He did not turn, because he knew them, though he had never heard them just that way. Silently Liz folded herself down beside him, gently displacing the cat. She rested her head on his shoulder. He took a drink, felt the burning in his throat, his head growing muddled—which was precisely what he had intended.
“Something’s wrong.” Not a question.
He nodded and took another swallow. “Another dream, Liz. It was Froech this time.” He shuddered violently, until she slipped an arm around him and drew him close. “More vivid than ever, and…oh, God, Liz; what am I gonna do?”
“Do you always have to do something? This time there isn’t anything you can do.”