p1b6fn7sdh1ln0g4v1pkvkuqim54

by A. A. Attanasio

  witch queen has ready a talisman shaped from a shard of the Silures' pottery. Laced with dripped silver, the design will not be tested tonight, and she tosses it into the tarn.

  Ripples flee, carrying arcs of light into the darkness.

  As though she has broken a spell, hoof-thunder

  throbs out of the night. The gruff cries of Kyner's scouts lob closer as they read the fiana's pony tracks in the duff and call to the pursuing war party.

  The charge of presence thickens in the stillness,

  and the queen signs for her fiana to draw in closer. She arrays them before her, in a vulnerable cluster under the rock ledge where she stands. Their captain, orange-haired Falon, passes a crucial, intelligent look toward her. "Older sister"—he whispers, though he is easily twice her age—

  "we are too vulnerable as a knot. We must disperse. Untie us."

  The child stays him with a small shake of her head.

  Her eyes do not budge from the tree line above them, -

  where the thick silhouettes of the Christian warriors appear. Their tall, powerful warhorses cannot easily

  negotiate the ravine wall, and the soldiers swing out of their saddles with a clatter of weapons. In tunics and leather helmets plumed with hog bristles and horsehair, they

  descend like tattered shades of the Roman legions their ancestors fought for five hundred years.

  Out of the dark, their Celtic traits come clear: tall, pale men with ponderous mustaches and loose hair spilling over the long shoulders of their battered hide cuirasses.

  Swords sing from their scabbards, and they fan out across the ferny holt, closing all routes of escape.

  The fiana reach for the swords across their backs, and the queen softly commands, "No."

  "Ygrane!" a coarse voice drops from above. Deftly hopping down the precarious slope, a burly, helmeted man enters the moonstruck glade and wades toward her

  through the misty bracken.

  "Uncle Kyner," she greets him in a respectful voice, a soft contralto, surprising in a thirteen-year-old, and sweeps her arm regally, gesturing at the soldiers who have squared off in fighting formation, blades poised to strike.

  "Tell your men to sheathe their swords. This insults our household, Uncle. Are we no longer clansfolk?"

  "It's been three years since you lived in my care, child!" Kyner shouts, stepping brusquely out of the fog.

  Moonbeams glint off the brass studs of his rawhide armor and the naked edge of his curved Bulgar saber, Short-Life.

  Three summers earlier, during her girlhood in White Thorn, Kyner's timber fortress, she had twice unsheathed this very weapon surreptitiously—to crack hazelnut shells.

  "Three years since you went off with the crone

  Raglaw," Kyner continues, stepping closer, to within striking length of Falon, who stands unflinching. "Three years since last we shared a meal, and I've heard nothing but sorcery of you. And now I find you defying even the

  Druids. I should be at Hammer's Throw this night, where the Saxons are raiding, not running after some naughty child."

  His graven face, which has been scowling up at

  Ygrane on the rock shelf, jerks to glare at the half-naked warriors before him, as if just noticing them. He surveys the grim fighting men head to foot, and the gnarl of his jowls tightens when he notices the slender gold bands at their throats. "Trust not in false ways, you men. No magic stays this sword that serves God's only begotten."

  "There will be no fighting between us." The child speaks in her low, mesmeric voice. "I am queen of all my people—even followers of the nailed god. My fiana will not spill Celt blood. Sheathe your blades."

  "You are returning with me, then?" The leathery grain of Kyner's brutish features relaxes slightly. "To Venta Silurum?"

  "Uncle—" She pouts, her childish eyes hiding none of her annoyance. "I am your queen. You cannot turn me over to the Romans."

  "They are Britons, Ygrane. The Romans have been

  gone from our lands for seventy years." He squints menacingly at this child-woman before him, both familiar and strange. "You are my queen—and that is why I must take you to Venta Silurum. Have your guard unstrap their weapons."

  Ygrane shakes her head, and a phantom blur of

  blue fire smudges from her pale tresses.

  Kyner backs a pace. "No witchery now, Ygrane!

  Short-Life has a deep thirst for witch blood."

  "You will not strike me, Uncle." She smiles at the thought, steadily, purely, and bends down, offering her young hand. "Come up here now and look at this tarn with me. I have a thing to show you."

  Kyner waves his saber, and it sways like a flame. "I will strike you, Ygrane, if I must. To defend my faith."

  "I have no quarrel with your faith. Come—" Her relentless smile deepens on one side, reminding Kyner that he is the one who taught her the Lord's Prayer, comforting her when she wept for the sorrows of God's son. "You must see this, Uncle."

  The battle-lord flicks a hand signal, and his troops

  put away their short swords but do not budge from their squared stance. Only after Short-Life sighs back into its scabbard do they relax, some crossing their arms, others squatting, all eyeing the seven fiana, gauging the feral warriors' traditional garb each in his own way. Admiration, skepticism, nostalgia, even curious indifference appear among the blatant stares.

  The fiana look back with the weary expression of men who have fought their way out of the afterworld and returned with only part of their souls. Kyner has seen this languid countenance before, on vampyres.

  Often in his twenty years as a soldier of Christ, he

  has been summoned by the bishop to track down unholy

  creatures. Phoenicians and Romans brought to the islands abominations that have survived in the British wilderness for centuries—shapeshifting African weredevils, oriental lamia with viperous poisons, and the too-human vampyres.

  Since his nineteenth winter, when he became the first Christian chief among the Celts, his God-given task to defend the good has made him an intimate of evil.

  Though they wear torques—gold throat bands that

  bind their very souls to the primeval maelstrom of life that the ancients called a goddess—the fiana do not appear evil to Kyner. They seem natural men enthralled by unnatural dreams. To him, they look foolish dressed in the battle style of the great-grandfathers. Such naked bravura

  wasted on a false faith, his pitying look tells them as they step aside before him.

  For all his battle-gear, Kyner bounds spryly atop the rock shelf. Close enough now to see the girl-queen clearly, he recognizes the curious slant of her eyes that had once half convinced him she had elvish blood. "Show me what you will, child; then, we are off to Venta Silurum."

  Ygrane, greeting her uncle happily, takes his mighty

  hands in hers, and a lurid chill runs up his arms with tracings of tiny blue lightning. Instantly, all dread and suspicion flee from him. Greater life pumps into his heart and lungs, and he swells visibly, a chip-toothed smile gleaming through his drooping mustache.

  "Raglaw has taught me a great deal since last you and I shared a meal, Uncle."

  The smile vanishes in Kyner's harsh face. "That

  mad crone! The Druids were wrong to give you to her. I told them then it were better to send you to school in Gaul, make a Christian of you."

  "And what kind of Christian would I make, truly, Uncle—me with my visions and elvish friends? The faerie would never speak to me again. I told you, the nailed god frightens them."

  A laugh guffaws through Kyner despite himself as

  he remembers the child-Ygrane's pert lisp the first time she introduced her invisible companions to him during their forest strolls. "So, it's the faeries I'm to blame for your pagan faith?" He chucks her chin, and a flurry of well-being flushes another laugh from him.

  "Don't treat the faerie so lightly," the girl admonishes

  without losing her crisp smile. "What would w
e share now if not for them?"

  He nods agreeably. Ygrane had been born in a

  remote hill village, and he never would have laid eyes on her had she not been endowed with eldritch powers. The Druids call it the sight, as though the lack of this madness is blindness.

  And it does seem mad to Kyner, these psychic

  glimpses of alien worlds. "You are a woman, a daughter of Eve. The whittled rib removed from Adam. You are just more removed than other women." His smile floats piously behind his whiskers. He feels good—strong, safe, snug as a sea urchin in its spines. "I suppose it is God's will that you have the sight."

  "It is why the Druids say I am queen. They would have me use the sight for urging crops, avoiding storms, and finding wells. And that's all. They do not want a queen who rules."

  "Dominion is for men," Kyner says, hazily, thumbs hooked in his sword belt. "The chiefs rule."

  "And the chiefs are all Druids. All men. While I am but a woman from a family of goatherds going back forever and not a smith or a Druid in my clan. Yet I am queen. I have the sight. And I tell you this, Uncle, I am queen of all my people. By ancient right, I am your queen, as well."

  He accedes with a casual nod. "You are my queen

  only so long as you serve our people. How do you serve them by fleeing from me?"

  "You want to turn me over to the Romans."

  "Britons, Ygrane. The Druids have found you a

  husband among the Britons—a husband worthy of a

  queen. He is of the highest rank: comes litoris Saxonici!"

  Her voice thickens with disgust: "His very title is Roman!"

  "He is commander of the Saxon Coast—of higher

  rank than a dux! What does the language of his title matter?" Leaning closer, he confides with pride, "He is a powerful man, a nobleman from an old family. And his

  palace at Tintagel is spectacular. I have been there

  myself."

  "Uncle, I have no passion for palaces!" Her broad face shimmers with insolence. "The Druids are marrying me to a Roman general for political alliance."

  "Political—" He grimaces sourly. "You say the word as if it were unclean. The clans have been political from the first, from the most ancient times when we would sacrifice our kings to your bloody goddess. That is how queens

  ruled. But you are not being murdered. The chiefs have taken you from a hovel in the hills, educated you, and

  exalted you with the finest treasures and gifts of all the clans. Now we want you to live in a palace, the wife of a great man. What cruelty are we inflicting on you that you run away from us like this?"

  She responds in a smoky tone of mischief: "I would be grateful for this, Uncle, but the faerie will not come with me to Tintagel. The faerie will not live in a Roman palace, even among Britons."

  Kyner stiffens, his military discipline asserting itself against the rapture that flows from the queen, and he curses, "Damn your faerie, then! Don't you understand, child? The invaders outnumber us. We need this alliance with the Britons to save our land, our people."

  She gives him a studious look, searching until she is certain that her rapturous spell is not entirely broken. Then she says in tones light as thistledown, "Uncle, of course I know this. That is why I have run off, because I believe there is a better way." The timewinds twang in her chest, intersecting dangerously, entangling in her perception of Kyner's irate will. This is the delicate moment. The moment that tests her own true will against this warrior's might.

  Imperceptibly, she modulates her breathing, focuses

  on the blissful life flowing in her, from Her the Mother of all, and into Kyner. When she sees his flared nostrils relax, she says, "I have learned a great deal from the crone Raglaw. More than I can tell you now. But heed this: The battlefield shadows a higher world—"

  "The spirit world of the angels," Kyner recognizes, feeling his annoyance subside, knowing the girl is working more deeply at her calming spell and not minding at all.

  She is a child, he reasons, warmed by the gentle kindness he feels near her, yet confident that he can snap free of her enchantment in an instant if necessary.

  "The world of the angels," she echoes in a low voice and with a poise that seems to arise somewhere beyond her gawky, girlish appearance. "It is real, Uncle. I have been there. And I am going again—this night. That is what I want you to see."

  The battle-lord's furry eyebrows wince, perplexed.

  He says nothing and watches with a clenched stare as

  Ygrane's eyes brighten and squint. Out from the pale folds of her raiment, she releases a large white opal as if from inside her body, a vitreous egg oily with moonlight. Vapors of iridescent milt swirl within.

  Staring into those organic densities, Kyner feels the timewinds, the braided currents that knot destiny. He experiences them in an upwelling of calamitous wonder, a terrified love, as he has known many times before in the thick of battle, a calm fury, an intensity perfect as air. He

  reaches for the shining thing, and his blunt fingers pass through it.

  "Hoy! What is this thing?" he shouts with alarm.

  "What illusion have you wrought, witch?"

  "No, Uncle, it is quite real," Ygrane answers, earnestly, balancing the melon of slithery light on the fingertips of her upturned hand, the better for him to behold. "You cannot touch it, because it is made of light.

  This very moonlight. But its power could level mountains."

  "What is it?"

  Features bleached in the brightening glow, the child

  looks fetal and amazed. "It is the Eye of the Furor."

  "I don't understand." With a tang of fright, the warrior peers closer, sees within the opalescent murk fungoid ruffles etched with capillaries of lightning. "The Furor—the sea rovers' god?"

  "Yes! This is his plucked eye." She laughs with fresh surprise and holds the luminous, weightless thing above their heads. "Look at it, Uncle. Even one such as you has the sight in the presence of this glory."

  Foaming seas churn within the Eye, and small,

  shallow-draft boats shoot out of the tumultuous breakers.

  Hackled with spears and helmeted men, the boats hiss to a stop on the glassy sand and spew their lethal riders.

  "What is it you see?" the girl whispers, staring intently at him, intrigued by the widening horror in his glum face.

  Kyner tears his gaze from those scrying depths.

  "Where did you get this?"

  "Not I, Uncle." Ygrane smiles thinly. "Raglaw. She stole it off a troll."

  "A troll?" He jerks with surprise. "Are you mad, child?" He levels a cold stare at her, all remnants of rapture dissolved in the acid fear soaking him. "Trolls are young giants, for God's sake! It will rip us all apart!"

  "Only if it finds us." Ygrane sets the Eye of the Furor gently spinning, and it bobbles and hovers in the dark air.

  Kyner looks about nervously and sees his men

  crouched in blue moonlight gazing in silent awe at the arrant magic before them. "How can it not find us? Trolls have the sight, do they not?"

  "Yes, they do, Uncle. But I've learned ways to blind the sight." With a twist of her wrist, she sends the Eye wobbling higher, and watches him while it floats above them in the windless night. "The troll will not find us right away. There is time—time to escape." She gestures to where the Eye carries its baleful light higher.

  "What are you saying?" Unwilled, his hand is at his sword hilt. The timewinds tighten. The knots of destiny slip

  into their places. Kyner feels this as a mounting certainty that something lethal is about to happen.

  Ygrane's low voice in the new darkness under the

  dwindling star of the Eye is so hushed the battle-lord can hardly hear it above the muffled pounding of his heart.

  "Climb to heaven with me, Uncle. Tonight is a holy time for the gods. Ancestor Night—a night every god honors, the one night we can trespass heaven without fear of their wrath. Come with me!"

&nb
sp; Kyner squints at her, trying to comprehend the

  moment. In a gestalt flash reminiscent of battle-vision, he perceives his surroundings with exquisite precision. He records the position of every soldier and fiana in the leafy shadows.

  Celestial wool gathers directly overhead, a burning

  cloud, aglow with the Eye it has swallowed. The witch-queen—for she is none other to Kyner now—stands before him limp as a mourner, head bowed, face veiled by her long hair.

  "Listen to yourself, child," Kyner commands with bluster. His men sidle nervously through the ferns, gawking up at the luminous cloud cut with swift horizontal rays of stardust.

  The fiana ignore the eerie firestorm, all eyes on their queen.

  "You're talking to a Christian!" Kyner shouts at her, yelling to overcome the cold instinct that wants to cut her down and avert the impending moment. "Jesus has already paid my soul's bond with his sacred blood. Heaven waits for me, and I fear no god but God! Come away from this place now."

  Ygrane peers through the curtain of her hair and

  watches Kyner pry his hand from his sword hilt, finger by finger. He thinks he wills her mercy, because she has dwelled in his house and he is a stalwart Christian. She knows otherwise. She feels the time-strands, the platinum filaments of fate, strumming as he strains against them, wanting to kill her.

  She warns him, "If we go from this place, the troll will find us—and quickly, too."

  "Leave the Eye here for the troll." He takes her wrist in his callused grip, and her flesh feels heatless as wax.

  "We're getting out of this damned place now—"

  A bellow labors in the outer darkness, and a pure

  blue scream goes up from one of the horses. Blood-spray drizzles out of the sky, sets black ripples circling on the tarn and speckles hot pinpoints on the shoulders of the fiana and upturned faces of the soldiers.

  The men shout as one, swords suddenly in their

  hands. Ponies burst through the willows, all wild manes and flashing teeth, and from the top of the ravine, the soldiers' big battle-horses come pounding down the

  embankment, eyes rolling with fear.

  Appalled, Ygrane watches a horse's limb wing

  across the wrinkled face of the moon. The timewinds calm, and the fateful silver knots of her magic turn to quicksilver, draining away in dark shimmers. Now, she realizes, anything can happen.