To Carry the Horn

by Karen Myers

  Ives shook his head. “None of them are thinking straight. The hounds would know the killer, his guilt if not his identity. They’d never hunt for him.”

  George cleared his throat and asked Ives to sit and join him.

  “Which hounds will be going out tonight? What’s usual?”

  “All of them, of course, including any youngsters that have seen hunting this season. Except for Aeronwy, she’s still weak from her expedition across the ridge Saturday.”

  “I thought she was improving?”

  “And so she is, but she’d never keep up tonight.”

  “Are they that eager to hunt at night, when they only do it once a year?”

  “You won’t recognize them tonight, not one,” Ives said. “It’ll take all you’ve got to hold ’em back. Just be grateful it’s not the dark of the moon.”

  “Rhodri told me what to expect for tonight’s ceremonies, and warned me people can get lost. Does anyone keep a head count? What should I be bringing?”

  “Let Gwyn worry about the hunters. You’ll need weapons, water, rope…” He thought a moment. “The oliphant, of course. Let the stable know which mount you’ll use, and check the tack yourself.”

  That echoed George’s list. “I’ll warn the staff, too, but would you also check them when they come, to make sure? All but Rhys are new to this.”

  “I will.” As he rose, he looked at George behind his desk. “You should try and get some sleep, lad. You’re going to need it,” he said, and closed the office door behind him suggestively.

  Would if I could, George thought.

  Well, I can leave a message about Mosby at the stable, but otherwise there’s not much for me to do. He checked his pocket watch and thought about lunch. Seeing that crowd will just kill what little appetite I’ve got.

  Maybe a nap here will work better than in my bed. If I kill the lights and draw the curtain, no one will look for me here.

  He darkened the room and stretched out on the old sofa. He was so over-tired, he desperately wanted to sleep and tried to make himself relax enough to drop off.

  Eyes shut. Silence. Hounds stir, far away. Leg throbs. Not bad, hard to ignore. Eyes open and scan the room. Vision pulses dimly, with the leg, with his blood.

  Eyes closed. Hear the mice behind the wall. Smell the nest, the stolen grain, stronger now, head heavier. No, damn it, get back in there and let me sleep.

  Horned man pulls back. All alone in his head. Floating, drifting.

  Quiet.

  A breath.

  Eyes pop open.

  How will I know the quarry deserves this?

  I forgot to ask Rhodri. Do the hounds kill him, or is it me?

  Rhian stood next to the wagon in front of the kennel gates and surveyed the piles of material they had to work with.

  “Let’s start with the evergreen boughs,” she told Isolda, standing in the wagon bed, and began passing them up to her.

  The cloudless afternoon was refreshingly chill, and they started to sing as they wound twine around the branches and tied them to the wagon’s side-rails.

  “Where’s Benitoe?” she asked Isolda, just to see her blush.

  As if summoned, Benitoe and some of his friends appeared from the direction of the stables.

  “Afternoon, ladies,” they said in chorus. Benitoe introduced them to Rhian as part of his club of riding enthusiasts. Most were young, Benitoe’s age or less, but at least two of them were a generation older.

  “We were just deciding who would follow the hunt tonight, riding which horse,” he said. “I’ll only need one myself, and so we have two more than usual. Still not enough, though, so it’s quite the debate.”

  Isolda looked down from the wagon bed. “How about drawing straws?”

  “An excellent idea,” one of the older ones said. He picked up a few pieces of straw from the pile on the ground. Selecting ten pieces, he broke two of them off short, leaving the others at a uniform longer length.

  “Will you hold these for us, my lady?”

  Isolda smilingly accepted, and held them out in her two hands, concealing the ends.

  “And, my lady Rhian, will you kindly make each selection for us, since you can reach our fair arbiter of chance, and we can’t?”

  Rhian composed her face as best she could. As each lutin approached, she privately drew a straw on his behalf, and gave it to him, until all had been served.

  The two with the short straws sighed melodramatically. One of them was the older fellow who had arranged the drawing. “You see how I am served for offering a fair solution. But at least this means I can claim a seat on the wagon next to blind fortune here, in compensation.” He bowed theatrically to Isolda, who giggled and curtsied back.

  They went off laughing, but Benitoe stayed behind and helped them decorate.

  The bundling and placement of the highly-colored autumn leaves went slowly, with pauses for mock hats and beards, and for sly attacks down the back of the neck.

  Brynach walked up, a bit shy. “Can I help?”

  “Of course,” Rhian said. “See those piles of straw? Ever make garlands?”

  Soon she had him waist deep in the middle of the stack, pulling out the longest strands for her, while she showed him how to braid and tie them.

  The two pairs were busy for some time, then Rhian winked at Brynach and said loudly, “What do you suppose they’re up to, over there?” She giggled, as Benitoe and Isolda suddenly realized how soft their conversation had become and how little work was being accomplished.

  They were still at it when Rhys showed up, carrying a small sack of apples. “Move over, everyone. Let an expert show you how it’s done.” He tossed apples all round and started hanging the straw garlands Rhian and Brynach had made.

  Eventually, with the addition of a few ribbons on the edges of the seats to flutter as they drove, it was done. The last of the straw was distributed in the bed of the wagon to ease the bumps for passengers, since the benches along the sides would be overflowing.

  Rhian, Rhys, and Brynach stood a few feet away to admire their handiwork, munching on apples. Benitoe leaned against the side of the wagon, Isolda standing over him and laughing at something Brynach said. As Benitoe looked up at Isolda, Rhian glimpsed his briefly unguarded expression and caught her breath. No, she thought, no more teasing.

  Will someone look at me that way someday?

  “We’re all here,” she said, suddenly solemn. “The start of a new year.”

  “Seems a pity for George to miss this,” Isolda said.

  Rhys said, “But he’ll see it tonight.”

  Benitoe said quietly, “It’s not the wagon she means. It’s all of us.”

  The great hall was draped with greenery and garlands for the end of the year, the crowd within boisterous and noisy.

  George watched them from his seat on the dais and found them remote and distant, like players on a stage. They straggled in, not making much of their light supper, but drinking freely. A steady stream of servants ferried in pitchers, and the noise on the main floor rose to become a solid wall.

  Things were more decorous on the dais, but none of it seemed to penetrate George’s attention. As the evening progressed, he stopped responding to Angharad’s attempts at conversation on his right, and Idris and Gwyn on his left, until now he sat silently, not touching his food or drinking.

  The noise in the main part of the hall began to recede, and he could hear a pulse in the air, languid and low. The lights dimmed in rhythm with it. He tilted his head ponderously trying to hear it better.

  This isn’t so bad, he thought. I just have to live through it, let it take me. Like getting drunk.

  He shook himself. No, I won’t lose myself. I’m in control, I must keep my judgment.

  Something laughed at him, but looking at the faces around him, he realized they hadn’t heard it.

  He looked down at Angharad and saw worry plain on her face.

  “It’ll be alright,” he said with difficul
ty, his tongue thick in his mouth. He wasn’t sure she understood him.

  The pulse was in his body now, and he moved slightly to its rhythm. Gwyn spoke quietly to Edern, looking at him, and his ears twitched, listening.

  No, my human ears. Not your turn yet, he thought.

  He heard Gwyn say, “It never took Iolo this hard.”

  What was he talking about, George wondered absently, as he tracked the pulse of the world.

  George found himself standing at the kennel gates, holding Mosby’s reins. Rhodri, next to him, said something he couldn’t make out. Looking closely at him, Rhodri stopped talking and began to check Mosby’s girth and look over the gear he carried.

  “Up you go,” Rhodri said, and George understood. He mounted Mosby and walked him over to join his hunt staff.

  They looked proper to the occasion, well dressed and solemn. He nodded his head, lowering it heavily, to acknowledge the respect they did to the occasion.

  They looked at him in concern but it meant little to him. The horse would carry him, he thought. All he had to do was stay on and listen. He tilted his head again, moving it to hear better. The slow throbbing was in the air, in the ground, he could feel it through his horse. The heartbeat of the world echoing in his blood and his skin and his gut, slowing ever so slightly, preparing for the year to turn.

  Rhian looked at George, so strange and grim, as if he doesn’t see us at all. She glanced uneasily at Rhys, who looked as disturbed as she felt.

  As she saw her foster-father and grandfather approach, she straightened up and moved next to George, taking her official spot. She might have to take care of him, in this strange mood.

  Rhys came up close behind her, and Benitoe and Brynach on the other side. They spread around the huntsman in support. George didn’t acknowledge them. He seemed to be trying to identify a sound, by the way he turned his head, his movements measured and slow.

  From her position next to him, she noticed his fingers twitching on the reins in a slow rhythmic beat, and a tic on his face kept time. The hair on the back of her neck rose.

  Stretched out all the way to the stables, the field finished assembling and approached the kennel gates, leaving a space free around the hunt staff for the pack. Gwyn walked his horse to the head of the field, nearest the curtain wall.

  There was a pause. George hadn’t asked for the pack, Rhian realized suddenly. He’s lost in there somewhere. She turned to the kennel gates. “Please release the hounds, Master Ives.”

  George roused a bit at the sight of the pack, and relieved her by smiling faintly down at her. She glanced over at Isolda’s wagon waiting to the right of the kennel gates, Ives hastening over to join Isolda on the seat. Isolda gave her a merry smile to lift her heart, and she was herself again.

  The field was quiet behind them. Gwyn called, “Huntsman,” and George led the pack forward through the curtain wall.

  Coming through the village, George was vaguely aware that the number of riders had grown significantly, and more waited for them off to the side of a cleared space in front of the bridge.

  Gwyn cantered ahead of George and the pack, turning his horse to face the field on the ground before the bridge, to the left. He waved George and the pack over to the right. The revelers who would be staying for the party pulled off on either side and along the river banks, out of the way of the riders. Isolda drove her wagon straight past the pack up to Rhian on the right for a ringside seat. Rhian on her horse was level with Isolda on the wagon seat, and they were close enough to talk to each other quietly as they waited for the crowd to settle into silence.

  As the noise diminished, George was again caught by the low, slow pulse around him, slower than before, the air thick. The moon above him, nearly full, throbbed to the same beat.

  Gwyn raised his arm under the torchlight and the moonshine until all the voices had stopped and only the creak of leather, the shuffle of hooves, and the spit of the torches could be heard over the quiet flow of water.

  He gestured toward the center of the bridge and a way opened across the middle. A view of a moon-lit meadow surrounded by woods perched incongruously over the running water. The village’s other celebrants, on the other side of the stream, were blocked from view.

  The open way called to George, but he held himself in check. No, not yet. Soon.

  Gwyn faced the crowd, prepared to give the invocation, but as they watched him, his own eye was caught by a man coming forward from the crowd on the river bank over near Ives’s wagon of lutins. He was the only man moving in the silence.

  His face came fully into the light of one of the torches and Gwyn’s stomach clenched before he could place him. The face reminded him of someone. A sense of cold dread descended.

  Why does his face alarm me? It’s something very bad, something about a father and a son. Nwython! This is his son, the one they call Cyledr Wyllt, who got away. The heart, I made him eat his father’s heart.

  Frozen, he watched him grin and reach inside his coat.

  Gwyn tried to turn his horse to reach him, but he was too far away, and there wasn’t enough time.

  A catch in the pulse of the world startled George to awareness. Swinging his head to the right, he saw Meuric walk out of the crowd by the river before Gwyn could speak. The movement of Meuric’s hand to the inside of his coat clashed with the regular beat George was moving to, and it jarred him. It was wrong.

  Meuric’s hand emerged with a knife. He shouted to Gwyn, before the silenced crowd, “Now I take your heart as you took my father’s.”

  He threw the knife, not at Gwyn, but straight at Rhian, just a few yards away. George and Rhian couldn’t react quickly enough, but Isolda launched herself from her wagon seat into the path of the blade and intercepted it.

  She fell to the ground and didn’t move.

  George stared at her in horror, then watched Meuric turn to the foot of the bridge, and run to the open way. He sprinted through it and the way vanished.

  Wrath, outrage, implacable judgment—with a feel of rushing wind, Cernunnos erupted within George as the fully antlered red deer, and George welcomed him. He smelt Isolda’s death on the air, and turned his head ponderously toward the bridge where Meuric fled, lifting his muzzle and sniffing the air for his scent.

  One ear twitched as Gwyn cried, “He can’t close the way, it’s not possible.”

  The crowd around the huntsman began to fall back as they saw his altered form, until a space was opened up all around him. Only the hunt staff stood their ground gamely, Rhian weeping for her friend, gathered up on the ground into Ives’s arms.

  Gwyn felt the shutting of the way like a physical blow.

  Am I about to lose everything? Rhian lives, but at the cost of another innocent.

  He looked with sorrow at Ives, sitting keening in the dust, stained with blood, Isolda in his lap. This is my fault, too, for the old sin.

  He looked back at the crowd. Why are they all backing away? He looked at Idris, facing him, and followed his gaze to… his huntsman, crowned with antlers that gleamed in the torchlight.

  Rhian thought, Meuric means to kill me. Why?

  No, Isolda, don’t!

  She heard the awful, hollow thud of the blade striking home. She knew with certainty that she’d never be able to forget that sound, that it would haunt her all her life.

  She looked down. Move, please be moving.

  That faint awareness of her friend that Rhian always carried was gone, and she cried out, even as Ives leapt off the wagon to kneel by his daughter and lift her up.

  The movement of the crowd backing away caught her attention. When she looked left she saw George? Cernunnos? beside her, starting to kick his horse forward. He was moving slowly but relentlessly toward the bridge.

  Her skin prickling, she turned to accompany him, taking refuge in her duty. She heard Ives behind her, choking out to Benitoe that he’d take care of Isolda, that he should go on now and help kill him.

  Oh, no—Benitoe. How
horrible.

  Ives was right, Meuric must die. The huntsman will show us how.

  George watched through Cernunnos’s eyes, or it may have been the other way around—it was very confusing. He paused next to Gwyn before setting foot on the bridge and turned his heavy head to him, watching silently through the deer’s brown eyes.

  Gwyn said, abashed, “But the way can’t be reopened now.”

  George pulled the manifestation back to the form of the horned man so that he could speak.

  “It can be opened by me.” The voice was hoarse and deep, and the words were not his own. “Your sins were great, but this,” gesturing at Ives weeping over Isolda, “this was not a sacrifice that justice required.”

  He passed Gwyn and brought the pack forward onto the bridge. He could smell Rhian’s tears, and felt her, anguished and fierce, beside him.

  He reached for the oliphant strung across his back and sounded one long, low note that filled the river valley all around. He felt the pulse of the world slow as the way re-opened.

  The antlered huntsman led the pack through the way, and the field followed in silence, flickering in the torchlight.

  CHAPTER 35

  George fought for control, or at least accommodation, as soon as the pack cleared the way, moving them off to the right to let the field come through. He tried to pull back the horned man, while Cernunnos pushed for his full form. In compromise, they settled for the horned man in form and surface control for George.

  Dazed no longer, George was seized by grim purpose. He could still feel the slowing pulse of the world, but it was in the background now.

  He adjusted his seat to rebalance his top-heavy weight on Mosby, wondering in passing what had happened to his tricorn back at the bridge.

  He looked down at Rhian. “Don’t weep, my dear, that’s for later. We have work to do.” He felt Cernunnos echoing his words.

  All this while the field was still trotting through the way.

  He turned his head slowly and found Gwyn standing by, watching him warily.