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by A. A. Attanasio

  shrewd smile deepened. 'What is good in the land of the Sid is good for the Sid. We are assailed by the Aesir. They ravage our people and steal our land. We have been at war with them many hundreds of years—and we are

  losing. With the collapse of Rome and the loss of our Fauni allies, the Sid have suffered terribly under the sword of the Aesir. But now, you are here! Surely, the birth in our kingdom of so powerful a being as you portends great

  good for us against our enemies.'

  'If it is God's will,' I offered humbly.

  'Bah! God's will embraces all.' Prince Bright Night's smile fell away, and the animal intensity of his green stare chilled me to the pith. 'What is your will, Lailoken? Are you with the Daoine Sid—or against us?'

  I gestured across the crazy quilt-work of forest,

  glade, and meadow to the thorp far below in the hazy

  distance. 'I am with the people.'

  A shadow of his crafty smile returned to the elf-

  prince's slender face. 'A warrior band of the Aesir's people are moving through the forest north of that thorp right now.

  They have come from slaying King Cos, your grandfather.

  Soon that village and everyone in it will be ash. The peasants who brought offerings to your mother will be charred bones, their flayed flesh the drumskins of our enemy.'

  'Is this true?' I asked in a fright.

  'Is this true?' The elf-prince cocked his head with

  mocking mime of my incredulity. 'You insult me, demon.

  Take the Stave of the Storm Tree, and see for yourself.'

  I took the staff from his pale hand, and he vanished.

  Then I tilted the knobby pole toward where he had stood, and he reappeared, grinning lavishly. Indeed, as I held the staff high, I saw that it cast no shadow at all. It weighed nothing, and I half-expected it to float when I let it go. But it fell, heavy as iron. And when I seized it and leaned upon it, it braced my weight sturdily.

  "Show me my grandfather," I beseeched the Stave of the Storm Tree. "Show me the king of Cos."

  *

  The fortress of Cos, a massive timber stockade high

  atop the palisades, pours smoke in turbulent billows, like one of the industrial mills Lailoken sometimes sees in his futuristic visions. Trapped by flames, the fortress defenders have no choice but to throw open their gates and rush out fighting. They wear uniforms—bronze breastplates over blue tunics and helmets fitted with embossed cheek-guards and crowned with horse bristles—and they emerge in

  formation, shield-bearers and lancers running ahead of swordsmen.

  The storm warriors, wild to meet these gaudy

  soldiers and take their shiny trophies, charge uphill at them. At their front are the berserkers: naked, cicatrix-marked warriors who have dedicated their deaths to the Furor. In their strong hands, they wield huge battleaxes that splinter their opponents' wood-and-hide shields like so much paper bark. With ecstatic shrieks, they fling their bodies onto the defenders' lances so that the wave of storm warriors behind them sweeps effortlessly into the terrified ranks of the armored soldiers.

  Through sheets and billows of battle-smoke, the

  king of Cos comes flying on horseback, war-hammer

  swinging. He is a ferocious sight, red cape swollen, gold cuirass and lion-visored casque flashing in the torn

  sunlight. The raiders fall back before him, horrified by the hurtling stallion with its bulging eyes and flaring nostrils.

  Then, a berserker hurls himself directly at this

  monster, and the steed totters and rears back, tossing the king to the ground. The storm warriors swarm over him,

  and suddenly the king's golden head is hoisted skyward on a lance, visor ripped off, exposing a staring, twisted death rictus.

  The hideous visage of their dead king breaks the

  spirit of the Britons, and they scatter madly into the sanctuary of the forest. Eager for war prizes, the raiders pursue, clubbing the soldiers' legs out from under and lancing them through the groin. Viciously, they strip the armor, while the skewered bodies of the slain still writhe in their death throes.

  Other storm warriors rush fearlessly through the

  conflagration, intent on pillaging the fortress, raping the women, and finding slaves among the children. The fire surges with a ravishing heat hotter than the burning

  barricades alone. The royal meadhall, the barracks, and the storehouses spit flames like furnaces.

  The women who have torched these buildings

  gather with their children behind the burning fortress on the bluffs atop the palisades. Clutching each other, they leap in unison, a flutter of robes and veils, their cries so much chaff in the wind.

  *

  In the void between worlds, Lailoken wakes from

  this nightmare. His body lies entranced in Avalon. His mind soars through abstract space.

  Memory and narrative squeeze together behind his

  eyes. He still suffers from his first magic with the Stave of the Storm Tree. The horrifying vision of his grandfather's death curdles to darkness.

  For a moment, the demon Lailoken-the-man forgets

  where he is. Madness intense and fathomless as the

  inward curl of a maelstrom tugs at him, and he cannot break the undertow of the past.

  He remembers his awkward body relying on the

  Stave of the Storm Tree to hurry through the woods to the thorp in the valley below the citadel of Cos. What was I thinking? he questions that sickening memory. That I could save them?

  He had not expected to be tested so soon. After the

  death of Optima, he had thought there would be time to wander, to accustom himself to his life among mortals. His teeth had barely grown in, and his eyesight had not yet cleared. "I am just an old man," he had protested to the elf.

  'What can I do?'

  "With such false modesty, you will never live to be a young man." Prince Bright Night had gestured to the Stave of the Storm Tree. "Use it. Do what you can."

  'How am I to save the thorp?' Lailoken had asked despondently. When the elf-prince did not respond, he waved the staff about. The prince did not appear, and, though Lailoken did not know it then, he would not see that elf again for many years.

  *

  I arrived at the thorp as the storm warriors charged

  out of the woods. The axes of the enemy flew, whirling like the black blur of bats. One ax cleaved open the face of the man to my right, another split the breastbone of the farmer to my left, and in his death convulsions he snatched my arm and hauled me to the ground as if to take me into the afterworld with him. Wounded screams mutilated the blue morning.

  Spears lowered, the barbarians swarmed over us,

  impaling any who stood against them. I saw two women

  run through on one lance. Those who fell to the ground writhed as axes hacked them to pieces. Others had their brains pounded out of them with their own severed limbs.

  The barbarians sang jubilantly while, under their blood-mired sandals, gutted children lay weeping, tangled in their spilled entrails.

  Nothing I could do helped as I thrashed about on the

  ground. Whipstrokes of blood spurted in scarlet streaks and scalded my face. I tottered to my feet, and a thick hand caught me by my long hair and slammed me face-first into the burst ribcage of a felled woman whose throbbing heart beat its last hot spasms against my gagging mouth.

  Blood-masked, I shoved backward, and again a

  strong hand seized me by the hair. 'Behold the terrible might of the Furor!' a warrior screamed in my ear, and I tensed against the bite of his ax.

  It never came.

  The barbarians hauled me around as a plaything, an

  enfeebled old man selected by their berserk rapture for a living death. They dragged me among the ripped-off heads and chopped torsos by my bloodied hair and forced me to watch the flaying of the corpses. I screamed for them to kill me, and the brutal, gore-filthy gang lau
ghed. And the louder I screamed, the more crazed their laughter became.

  At the worst of it, when I lay propped up on a gory

  throne of beheaded carcasses with a mantle of putrid

  viscera draped across my shuddering shoulders and a

  dismembered hand splayed atop my head for a crown, the Furor himself came to me.

  Huge, globe-shouldered, his great beard slathered

  in the blood of the dead Christians, he loomed over me, his

  one good eye silver-blue as an arctic wolf's, the naked socket of his dead eye a skull-hole from which stared a piece of starless night.

  'I came myself when I heard it was you, Lailoken,'

  the king of the Aesir said in his profoundly sonorous and gentle voice. His kindly tone reminded me that he had lost his eye to a troll in exchange for a draught from the well of knowledge. Unlike his blood-mad warriors, he was not an uncivilized brute. 'I had to see for myself that you had taken mortal form. When my magic accidentally slammed a

  demon into the mud, I had no idea it was you, old friend.

  You helped me defeat the Fauni, and I want to help you now. I feel responsible for your predicament, and I want to free you—but clearly your fall has made you crazy. I don't dare let you roam free, not now that you've taken a stance against me. And to think we were comrades once. What

  has become of you?'

  I tried to speak, to tell him how I had changed. My

  stunned flesh could do no more than stammer hoarsely

  what I had been screaming all along. 'Kill - me—'

  His silver eye glittered, amused. 'Lailoken - not even I can kill a demon. As for the mortal garment you wear, I believe your punishment for betraying our old alliance shall be to wear this stinking thing until it falls away of its own decay.'

  With his massive spear, he pointed to the Stave of

  the Storm Tree that his warriors had propped across my chest as a mock scepter. 'You carry a splinter of the Terrible One—a splinter stolen by the sniveling Sid. Keep it. Let it remind you ever of this day when you dared stand against me.'

  I groaned in my misery, and he nodded once. 'Yes,'

  he said in his vibrant voice. 'Mortal life is a miserable thing.

  Why do you bother with it? And, worse, why do you trouble yourself with the Sid and the craven Christians? They are doomed races. Like the Romans and their Fauni that we devoured together, these puny people are marked by

  death. They cannot stand against my might. You know this is true.' He shook his large head sadly. 'Once, you were a magnificent being, Lailoken. How it saddens me to see you so reduced.'

  Then he touched his spear-tip to my brow, and his

  curse entered me as madness. All the death-cries of the butchered children beat their charred wings against the inside of my skull. They beat wildly to find a way out, until it felt as if my head would burst. My eyes swam and strained to the bony limits of my sockets, and my throat swelled, puffed with a strangled scream too huge to cry.

  Chittering insanely, I sat upon the throne of death

  and watched the god of murder stride across the mangled corpse of the world.

  *

  Morgeu does not believe she is possessed. Ethiops

  has convinced her that she commands herself. Even at the height of her overshadowing after her father's gruesome demise, when she sat betranced in her own filth for days on end obviously bewitched, she thought she was using her own sorcery to persist without food or water.

  She believed that she acted as a psychic beacon to

  a score of damaged women living in the far-scattered

  thorps and hamlets of the northern forests. She became convinced that her magical will alone summoned these

  disciples to her fetid cave.

  All along, the demon has patiently been knitting the

  thoughts and moods necessary to convince the young

  woman that this power emerges from her black sorrow.

  The demented mutes, idiots, battered wastrels, and

  widows mad with fury who staggered half-starved out of the forest came at her telepathic beckoning to be healed through vengeance.

  Wandering the countryside with her wild troop of

  harpies, Morgeu believes that nothing survives but evil.

  Good intrudes on reality and cannot endure. Only evil persists. And so to fight evil, she herself must become evil.

  Clairvoyantly endowed by Ethiops, Morgeu led her

  gang of derelicts back to the mountain and river

  settlements where they first had been abused. She found the cruel men who had earlier raped and enslaved her

  followers. One by one, her magic called them out into the desolate places where the frenzied women took their blood payment. From the skin of these corpses, they made

  leather and chewed and stitched it into the wolfish masks of moonbitches sacred to Morrigan.

  By summer's end, Morgeu had convinced herself

  and her troops that they embodied the Y Mamau, conjure-warriors devoted to the black goddess of death and the immemorial passions of bloodlust and destruction—

  Morrigan. The goddess gave them the magic and

  inspiration necessary to arm themselves, steal horses, and kidnap the queen of the Celts.

  Now Ygrane sits imprisoned in a chamber atop the

  tower, barricaded within her own magic. No magic can

  avail against Morrigan, and soon Ygrane herself will be sacrificed.

  In preparation for this solemn event, Morgeu's

  trancework has located a large statue of Morrigan buried in

  a bog. It has been retrieved by the Y Mamau and erected with lavish ceremony in the crypt of this garrison tower on a crag long abandoned by the Romans.

  The dancing figure, naked but for its necklace of

  skulls, looms dire above Morgeu. Sprawled there, with her back against the dark stone shin of the goddess, the dazed young woman gazes into the flickering shadows of the high vault, ensorcelled by Ethiops.

  Unseen, the demon squats over her, busily knitting

  the electric embroidery of her fevered ambitions. He

  painstakingly weaves the microvolts in her brain, and she believes she sees the huge barren eyes of the goddess staring at her out of the high darkness.

  Morgeu's white swollen face appears gaseous, a

  blur of wonder as she listens to Morrigan speak to her in the voice of a dog. The ravening barks and whispering snarls emanate from the whole shimmering crypt.

  The mother of nightmares does not want Ygrane

  killed immediately. A ritual must be devised to steal her magic so that Morgeu can take her place as queen of the Celts.

  This pleases the sorceress, and she smiles, the glee

  in her bloated face slanted and wicked as pigs' eyes.

  Furiously, Ethiops knits, sparking brave hopes in

  Morgeu's avid brain. If he gets this right, he can use her to enter Ygrane. And then, from inside Ygrane, hidden by her considerable magic, he will finally get close enough to Lailoken to tear his head off.

  An inkwash of shadows, the demon fills the whole

  garrison tower as he squats and bends to his needling task. None see him, yet all feel him holding them in the swell of his power. Whether in the kitchen cracking bones for a meal of raw marrow or on the battlements staring through the day's brown sunlight like zombies, the Y

  Mamau feel his ardent presence—and to them, he is the very shadow of Morrigan.

  *

  Through breaks in the clouds, faint stars rattle, and low in the east Venus burns, locked inside its hell.

  Merlinus, disembodied and free-floating, fixes his attention upon the morning star, fighting off the sleep that he knows will return him to his body. He does not want to awake in Avalon just yet—not until he finds the queen.

  Chanting her name in a sleepy mumble, the wizard's

  wraith follows a long river, a black artery, into the mountains
under the sea of clouds. Hundreds of feet high, the stony, barren peaks catch fire.

  As the sun rises, Merlinus slants over this world-long maze of mountains toward a crude rock fastness—a fortress of granite slabs. The rock heap on the ledge glows orange in the Earth's halo.

  Through a slot window, his plasmic self slips into a

  stone tower. Ygrane is there. She crouches in a corner, her knees pulled to her chest. She has lost her tiara, her cheeks are smudged with dirt and tears, and her sad lynx eyes stare remotely.

  "Lady—" Merlinus tries to announce his presence.

  She neither hears nor sees him.

  He reaches out with his heart's brails and listens to a groan like a tiger's sigh. Her knuckles gleam white on the fists locked across her knees. Teeth gritted, breath panting through chafed lips, she centers her attention in the pit of her stomach. She focuses her strength on one shining

  image—the cloven-hooved unicorn.

  "It can't come," Merlinus says, indifferent to her deafness. "Ethiops would feed it to the Dragon. It waits for me in Avalon. Save your strength, Lady. Uther is on his way with the dragon-magus and the elk-king."

  The heavy door bangs open, and Merlinus jumps

  through the ceiling. When he pokes his head back through the granite, he sees four leather-hooded witches enter.

  Their fanged wolfish faces veer toward Ygrane.

  Merlinus' brails still touch the queen, and he jolts to feel the energy in her stomach simultaneously harden and blaze like an ingot of hot iron. She flings this power from her center with a shout, and the Y Mamau fly backward and slam into the wall shrieking.

  A filament of ghost fire flares in the dim shadows,

  and Morgeu appears. "Mother—how long can you keep this up? Sooner or later, you will tire. And when you are utterly defenseless and your incantations and tricks can help you no longer, the Y Mamau will rip out your heart and offer it throbbing to Morrigan. Is that not perfectly just and appropriate?"

  Ygrane half lids her eyes and begins her panting

  again, focusing power in her pith, calling for the unicorn and readying herself for another attack.

  "Do you think I lack the mettle to murder my own mother?" the apparition sneers and then adds with a sudden, queer modulation of her voice, "You know, Mother, it is not murder but mercy I offer. You, too, are a priestess of Morrigan. If I slay your body, your soul flies free. That is the grace I offer you."