No hard work for Ceannann, no rough ground, oh, never: Sidhe magic knew better, Sidhe magic never failed the twins nor led them into danger...
“ ’T is why m’ lord lily-white is languishing in the lady’s hall,” he muttered to the empty, fog-chilled air. “Sidhe being so clever and all. Dubhain, Dubhain, Dubhain, ye vain, silly—”
His pole told him there was bog in front of him and he shifted course, came on another arm of it and shifted again, and at last in desperation climbed the bank onto sound earth and knee-deep grass, abandoning at last what he was sure was the twins’ path. He only hoped now to reach the sea when they did, if the beast had not swallowed them whole, and if the selkie was any friend to the bright Sidhe at all.
It did seem to him as he reached the higher bank, that the fog was lighter about him, if not thinner, and the light grew as he walked, until he could at least dimly see the ground beneath his feet.
And slowly the ruddiness of a morning sun came through as he crested a hill, a wan and watery disc all but lost in the haze. He limped along as fast as he dared on the slick grass, until his breaths came with a coppery edge and the ache that had begun in his foot ran up to his knee— Macha, if the witch had an advantage over him, she had not failed to use it, and every step cost him.
“D’ ye hear me?” he panted, climbing the crest of a dew-wet slope. He reached the top, leaning heavily on the boat-pole, and caught a startling sharp pain in the shoulder as he started down the other side. “D’ ye hear me, Dubhain, sweet Dubhain, ye lovely, vain, and fractious wight? Listen to me and forget that silly baggage, her with the tower and the silver cage. If she can cheat, then so can—”
His foot slid out from under him. He slipped on the grass and hit the side of his knee on a rock. That hurt, and the ankle hurt— he had gone down with it sidelong— but the pain in his shoulder was suddenly acute. He swore to himself and rocked and held the injured arm against him, telling himself he must have wrenched it holding to the pole as he fell, but his imagination painted the first and now the second of Dubhain’s healings inexorably unweaving themselves, the way the witch in Dun Glas had unwoven her magic, and soaked her sheets with his blood, to cast him in agony onto the mud of her cellar.
He dragged himself back to his feet, caught his balance, and, finding the pole now painful to lean on, abandoned it— all the while with the copper taste of pain in his mouth and the recollection what pitch that pain could get reach. He did not know if he could bear it— he told himself it all must be Moragacht’s work, not Nuallan’s— that he had only rattled the bars of faery and annoyed the harridan, who was taking it out on him.
So perhaps she neglected other Necessities, all to cause him misery.
But was that not what the Sidhe desired of him? Was that not their great and wise plan, with the witch’s men riding the riverside in hunt of all of them, and himself, he feared, the hindmost? He was to divert them.
Macha grant they were men at all that hunted them. He did so want a cut or two at them if they overtook him— and now he could make no speed at all, and it was as if his body was unravelling. The mist turned to milk and brass in his sight. His heart was like to burst from exhaustion and fear, and his steps reeled like a drunken man’s, but he had struck a rhythm of sorts to his going.
Every time he blinked, now, he saw black branches twined about silver bars.
He began to see, worse, two lovers twined in each others’ arms within that cage, one shadow, one bright as the moon, and that moon passing into eclipse.
He saw bright blood on pale flesh, and a Sidhe lord’s eyes half-shut, half-dreaming, half lost in ecstasy.
Thorns tore his hands and caught at his clothing in that world. He lurched free into this one, slid on the wet, fog hazed grass, and lay there two full breaths before he could summon the will to get up again.
The sword swung across the reach of his good arm, and hampered him in his rising— he thought of flinging the hated thing away at last. That would spite the Sidhe. Like the elfshot stone that thumped about his chest and neck, the cursed thing had never been any good to him. It could not cut through to the truth, or protect him against his fate, and it had brought so much of grief to the wrong people. But he was too busy keeping his balance to deal with it.
“Dubhain!” It was all the breath that would come out of him, and the thumping and banging of the cauldron filled his ears ... that dull hammering in the earth that now seemed imminent and all about him. He found himself face down in the grass, and terror brought him crawling to his feet. He ran through faery or on the earth. He had no clear sense in what realm he moved at any moment, and knew not what choice he had now. He limped, doubled and lurching with the pain of wounds that, for what he could tell, were all bleeding afresh.
Brightness grew in the mist as he climbed, as if the mist and the sky had become the same thing. He staggered, panting, up into a white fog of a brilliance he could not understand, and the hammering of the cauldron had the rhythm now of waves on some unseen shore.
It was beyond him to run, now. He did not know what realm he was in— but he smelled the salt in the air, he felt the clammy damp about him, and his reeling vision held sand between the hazy clumps of grass at his feet.
Perhaps he walked, after all, near the earthly sea.
Perhaps his own legs had carried him, or Nuallan’s wish had, but that power seemed distracted from his danger. The intimacy of the lovers threaded through his pain like a fevered and present dream. The sun rising in his sky, if it was the mortal sun, came up on a confused and mortal man struggling and reeling with every step, a curious kind of sacred dance, he thought, against the sky.
’T is all the great Sea the whore lusts after now, he thought.
And she shall nae have it.
He wove a step or two more, asking himself where he was going, or to what, and wondering whether a step now through faery could land him in her hall. If he could bring his sword with him...
The earth dropped out from under his next step.
He yelled in startlement and flung out his arms, not knowing how far the fall would be, or ending in what realm. He hit sand as he landed on the slant, and that, too, slid out from under him, sprawling him flat on his back in the chill sea wind.
The wind was all but out of him. It was a moment before he could even breathe— and when he did, he took in the scent of wrack along a shore.
And the pain, oh, the pain had his eyes watering, so that it was only slowly he could roll to his elbow and get his knees under him.
He had done it to himself, and felt wholly the fool— for of all the three realms, he had fallen nowhere at all remarkable— only off the edge of the land and onto the edge of the sea, which was a narrow sandy strand dotted with black humps of rock, limited by mist in all directions.
The waves had eaten the shore away where he had walked and he had walked blindly right off a cliff— the golden glory he had seen around him was the sun through the fog, the very sky all but under his feet as he walked that crumbling edge and finally had fallen off it, no wiser than a city-sack drunk.
So here he was, lying on wet sand at the bottom of an undercut cliff. Rocks rose out of the mist beyond the shore like black ghosts. A white curl of incoming waves appeared constantly out the fog, and rolled up on the beach.
But one black rock was moving, the sea curling up white before it.
It came straight toward him, a shadowy low bulk among the rollers washing in on the sand. It came aground, then heaved itself up onto the foggy beach itself, a painful, rippling progress of vast weight.
It was a whale, he thought, that had resolved to swim ashore to die, and he watched it in mingled fascination and distress. It was an ominous creature, almost certainly— and it dawned on his dazed wits it might be the creature he had come to find— the great Selkie itself.
But, he asked himself, despairingly, was it helpless as it seemed?
Or might the witch have overwhelmed its magic as she had to get t
he twins, and turned it to her creature?
Caith reached an awkward elbow back against the stone and sand that made the cliff above his head, and levered himself to his feet, still facing the creature.
It stopped, as if confused, rocking with the incoming waves. It made another great effort as a wave came in, and then the water retreated, leaving it mostly aground, looking more distressed than menacing. Sand crusted its hide, from its rolling and lurching inland. The scars of years and battles with great monsters of the deep scarred its flanks. It blew its bubbling breath out its blowhole, and it stank of wrack and salt.
Another wave rolled in, and with that help it heaved itself further up on the beach. The creature’s determination was pitiable to see, not threatening. It set itself more and more in a place not its element, and Caith watched helplessly, not knowing what to do, whether to drive it back into the sea for its own good, or whether to be an utter fool in the privacy of this shore and wish a dying whale a good morning.
It made a low moan, gusted another breath through its blowhole, and turned its massive head and blinked at him, its great eye, startlingly like a man’s, running tears through the crusted sand on its blunt head. It lay in the wave-washed trough it had begun to make on the sand with the plowing of its flippers and its great body, three and five and more times the size of a man. Its hide, he saw more clearly now, was full of sores and scabs, and criss-crossed with scars. Above it gulls gathered, crying banditry and plunder in the dawn.
It gusted another sigh. And as he chanced to look it full in the eye he was bewildered at his own perception, for it was no whale, as it had seemed from blink to blink of his eyes, but surely a sea lion of prodigious size. Tears ran down the deep channels beside its whiskered muzzle and, dripping down its chest, spotted the sand before its chest. It waved one flipper like a breathless man about to speak, and all its manner spoke of grief and sorrow.
“Man,” it said in a voice as gentle as its gaze, “man, what do you seek of me?”
Could a man be astonished that it would speak, so prodigious and so strange a creature?
And could a man, however desperate, see violence in such sad eyes?
Yet it was fearsome, because of what it was. Ask amiss of the fay, and expect a curse from it, however gentle.
“We came for your help,” he said with all humility. “And your blessing, lord Sidhe.” He felt compelled to add that last, with no idea what moved him, except for that calm, sonorous voice and those eyes that seemed to have the sorrow of ages in them. “You’d be the selkie of Gleann Fiain, would ye not, m’lord?”
“The selkie of Corrigh,” it corrected him gently. And time raveled faster and grew more strange, as a warm wind began to rise from the sea, flattening the grasses on the crest of the denes.
And while that wind rose, this poor, bemused creature lowered its head and scratched at the scabs on its chin with the claw of its flipper.
It said, “But I do know Gleann Fiain, to my lasting sorrow and my earthly regret.”
So this was the hope they had raised after so much effort— a mournful giant helpless on land under its own vast weight. Sand clung in pale patches to the fur of the sea lion as it had to the whale. The place it scratched with its claw bled afresh. It seemed very old, its ancient back crusted with sea growth, and its grey fur gone black-striped with old wounds.
The wind whipped up, driving the incoming rollers, rocking the creature. Droplets and froth flew on the sudden gale, even stinging bits of sand. The power of the sea swirled about it, making a man duck.
Caith shielded his eyes with one arm and made a bow, as best he could. “Lord of Corrigh,” he shouted at it, “the lady of Gleann Fiain bore twins, and every man and woman and child of that land is lost for their sake, because of the witch in Dun Glas. The twins, one of them yours, hae come to you for help, if you will, sea-lord! They be’ant far frae here!”
“The blood,” the selkie said, “the salt in the blood calls to me.”
The wind kicked up in a sudden terrible gust, blowing at cloak and hair and kilts, and Caith raised his other arm to shield his face from the sand it kicked up off the strand—
Then he realized he was using the wounded one— that the pain in his shoulder and his ankle had diminished to a faint ache in the last instant. It was a powerful magic, a kindly, gentle magic bestowed all unasked, and he did not know what to say to it ... or what it might ask of him for the gift.
But as he looked at it to thank it, he saw the gentleness fled from its eyes, and those gone dark, suffused with a wildness different than the malice of Dubhain’s kind.
Mad, the creature seemed now, eyes rolling, body rocking as the wind blew. A man had to fear it, even with no understanding what he feared, except the mystery and the power it raised. It was calling the wind, he was sure, shredding the fog to a thin mist over all the shore, revealing everything.
And as it did, the creature rocked and darted its head this way and that, groaning— no, singing, in harmony with the wind that roared and rushed about the land, scouring up the beach, stinging bare skin, blinding the eyes.
Had he thought the creature harmless or helpless?
The creature heaved itself closer,and loomed up and up, seeming utterly drunken with its power.
The cliff cut off retreat. Caith found himself a prisoner between the wall of sand and the wind. Distance himself from its wildness, he could not. He could not so much as step backward when it heaved toward him, a shadow like a man’s worst nightmare. It moved with the thunder of the great sea waves, that thumped and pounded the shore.
But he did not go down on his knees, quaking though they might be, and he did not draw his sword against it. Years of dealing with faery had made him wiser than that. He felt that advance as a testing of him, a geas on the creature, that it must try the courage of the mortal that faced it— or its simple, natural madness trying to turn away fools and selfish men, for its own defense— for no man with his own life foremost of his wishes would stand to face the shadow it now became. It loomed up and up, its breath cold with ocean depths, its moaning the sound of the ocean storms.
“Sidhe!” he shouted at it, when it seemed about to fall down and crush him. “I am still here! And of frights, I’ve seen grislier, and had far worse! Give over, Sea-lord! Ye hold no terror for me!”
“Death,” it moaned, “death and draiocht, and the end of peace, thou frail and bloody creature! Sae easily ye break! Ye cannot compel me, nay, your kind will never force me again!”
“The witch of Gleann Fiain is your enemy, Lord Sidhe, d’ ye not remember the woman? As for the rightful lady of the glen, the witch’s beast has killed her, and her lord, and all the people of the land, except your own children! They hae called to ye, d’ ye hear me, Lord of Corrigh? Nuallan of the Daoine Sidhe hae sent me! Lord Nuallan is himself a prisoner of the witch ... so mind your manners, ye hulking creature! I take no blame for your troubles, and I’d gladly help you if I could, if a mortal could repay the likes of you, for the grace you’ve shown me!”
Sun dazzled him as the creature above him shrank and fell— until it was a white unicorn whale lying beached before him under a brassy sky, a creature struggling to breathe, its blowhole working. It swung its head, scarring the sand with its spiraling horn, and stringing sandy tears from it sole visible eye.
“Selkie!” Caith cried, as it battered the sand with its head and tail, fearing for it as much as fearing it, now. It could become any manner of creature, at any moment, but the creature it was now bid fair to destroy itself, threshing about like that. “Selkie! Listen to me! Moragacht is the name of her, Firinne and Ceannann are your two children ... ye know their Names, now! Ye can call on them! Ye cannot lie down and die of any geas, ye silly fool! Behave yourself, and take some other shape, more useful against the draiocht, d’ ye hear me, Lord of Corrigh!”
If it heard, it could not answer. It uttered squeals as plaintive and strange as the voice of the creature in the loch. It battered its h
orn against the sand, destroying its own self, bloodying its hide and threatening its nethermost eye.
But the sky, a blaze of milk and brass, abruptly darkened as an iron-hued bank of cloud came scudding in from off the sea, turning the waves to lead. Thunder rumbled aloft. This wind was cold, and smelled of storm. It whistled about the rocks and flattened the grass of the dene above his head.
“Selkie!” Caith shouted, scarcely able to look at the creature, now, because of the sand in the wind. A gust hit his eyes, and he rubbed at them with his arm, fearing what dire shape the thing might take next. “Dubhain! Dubhain, come reason with this fool!”
Lightning flashed and thunder cracked, so close to him he staggered from the blast. Rain followed, spattering him with cold, heavy drops, and through the lightning flash branded across his eyes he saw, in the unicorn’s place, a mass of old nets and weights and floats?
Was that it, he wondered with a sinking heart, fearing that he was made entirely the fool. Was that pile of sea-wrack what he had been pleading with?
Then that mass of rope and net moved and hove upward in the flickering of the lightnings, as if the flotsam of the sea had taken unnatural life. Old nets were its head. Fishing floats were its eyes. Its teeth were splintered wood.
It was indeed a test, then, a bond on the selkie that would not let it go to their help without a trial and would not let him ask it or entreat it as he chose, either.
It was Moragacht’s doing. Moragacht’s magic was working even at this very border of the sea and the land, trying to seize the creature or to confuse it, not letting it ashore.
But by Macha and the Badbh, neither would he let the witch have her way— this lady who smelled of roses and rue, roses he could all but smell in the air, and the sweet, pitying voice he could all but hear whispering beneath the selkie’s wind.
He seized a trailing end of rope as the mass swung its ungainly face toward him. It shook itself then— it roared like the groaning of timbers, and it crashed down in the lightning flashes, all in wreck and ruin.
Faery Moon Page 34