Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

by The Fire Sword (v0. 9) (epub)

  He laughed his rumbling laugh. "No, you are not. It’s the power in you, in all females. Do you think Apollo pursued Daphne because she was a pretty girl?”

  "I suppose. All those Greek gods were always running after mortal women, which I have never understood. I mean, why, when there were all those goddesses? Even the ones like Artemis who were supposedly virgins went around bathing in fountains, renewing themselves, so they must have been... fooling around.” "There is a kind of power that is bom in every woman. Virginity is prized because it is a guarantee that the woman has never shared that power with a man before. A woman who never shares it is as much a traitor as one who gives some to every fellow she meets.”

  "'Hoggamus, pogamus, woman monogamous, Hig-gamus, pigamus, men are polygamous.’”

  "What was that?”

  "A silly poetic form called a double dactyl. Is all this a subtle way of telling me to be faithful, Doyle?”

  "No. Women share their power where they will, and a man must just do the best that he can. It is why fathers guard their daughters while their sons rut with milkmaids.”

  "But, don’t men have power, too?” Eleanor thought for a moment about how effectively Daniel had kept her out of circulation.

  "Certainly. But never enough. It must needs be enhanced.. .by the love of a good woman.”

  "Or several good women?”

  "Umm, yes.”

  "I think this is one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard. It makes me feel like a nuclear power plant or

  something. If I have any power, which I rather doubt, then I can’t transfer it to you or anyone else. It isn’t a bank draft.”

  "No, it isn’t. And a woman never gives it up. Shares, occasionally. But men pursue women in the blind hope that they will find one who will... surrender. They are often fooled by the illusion of surrender, too.”

  "It all sounds very antagonistic, but it does explain Baird’s lunatic determination to possess me. How uncomplimentary. I am not even a sex object, just a power tool.”

  "Don’t be so hard on yourself. And, yes, it is antagonistic—and resentful. The man is angry because he can’t get what he wants, and the woman is furious because she senses she is being used.”

  "It is a good thing women don’t know about this theory, or the race would have died out long ago. Do you really believe what you are saying?”

  "Yes.”

  "Does this mean we are going to fight to a draw every time we have a disagreement? Isn’t there any room for compromise?”

  "There would be, if I would meet you halfway.”

  "And will you?”

  "Perhaps.” He kissed her on the forehead and hugged her against his chest. "Your generosity may shame me into it.” With that, Eleanor chose to be content.

  At nightfall they came to a curious structure, a sort of yurt made by drawing supple lengths of willow together to form a round hut and covering it with bark. Eleanor looked at it with some amusement, for she recognized it as a native American building called a wickiup, used by the Plains Indians for both temporary and more enduring edifices. It had as little business in thirteenth-century Ireland, even this thirteenth-cen-tury Ireland, as she did. She was also wary of anomalies.

  "We sleep here tonight,” Doyle announced, thrusting his shoulders through the narrow opening. Eleanor followed him and found him shaking his great cloak out and hanging it across the doorway to prevent a draft. There was a fire pit with wood laid out, as yet unlit,

  and a fat coney, unskinned but fresh, lying beside it. "Light the fire, will you?”

  Eleanor removed her cloak and hung it on the wall, shook out her damp skirts, and automatically looked around for matches, a cigarette lighter, or even flint and steel. She was about to query her husband if he would have her make bricks without straw as well, for she was cold, wet, tired, and hungry, and inclined to be irritable. Wrolf came in and lolled at her feet, and she could not remain too dour in the face of his lupine good humor.

  Then she remembered her first encounter with Baird and crouched down to see if she could make Bridget’s fire her servant as well as her protector. Eleanor focused her mind on the idea of fire and was rewarded by the pleasant sight of flames dancing on her skin without heat or burn. The fantasy flames even cast shadows on the wall of the hut but remained illusion.

  Grunting, she knelt beside the fire pit and tried a different tack—supplication. The result was entirely unsatisfactory, though Eleanor was not sure if she had not asked correctly or if that was just not the way to go. She rested back on her heels, frowning, and abstractedly watched Doyle begin skinning and cleaning the dead rabbit. She mentally ran through all the poems and incantations she knew from folklore for conjuring fire, and found none to her liking. Magic was harder than it looked.

  Eleanor pursed her lips, thinking now about the nature of combustion, which she understood in only the vaguest way, then extended her hands above the wood. She rubbed them together, and a shower of sparks cascaded down into the pit, a few smoldering among the curls of kindling for a second before fading away.

  "Damn!” Eleanor muttered, clapping her palms together in an angry gesture. A flash that might have been a minor lightning bolt leapt from her hands, ignited the kindling, and almost singed her sleeves in the process. "Yeow!” she cried, snatching her hands back from the now blazing wood.

  Doyle finished cleaning the rabbit, spitted it, and thrust it into the flames. "Why didn’t you ask for help?”

  "Of all the stupid, arrogant... because no one gives me a straight answer! Bridget says go here and do this. You’ve made it very plain you would prefer not to be... under my tutelage. Everyone uses me. But no one ever really explains anything to me. Even Sal.”

  Hot tears pricked her eyes, and she swung around to face the wall, furious with herself for losing control, aching for Sal, who had loved her, and hurting because Doyle would always regard her as simply a means to power. Eleanor had never defined what she wanted for herself, choosing instead to let Daniel make those decisions for her, and now it appeared that the one thing she did want was impossible to attain. After several minutes of fighting off tears and a general feeling of melancholy, she thought about the question posed by Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Courts of Love—"Is love possible after marriage?” The court had never arrived at a satisfactory answer, and Eleanor found a perverse pleasure in the knowledge that everyone else was as confused as she was. Her sense of humor tickled, she turned back to Doyle and the fireplace.

  "I will say this,” he began, "you don’t sulk long, and you don’t carry on much.”

  "I was not sulking; I was thinking.”

  "Thinkin’ you’d like to roast my liver an’ lights.” "No, I was hardly thinking of you at all. I was really thinking about Sal and Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

  "A fitting pair of harpies, I suppose. Consider my withers wrung and my vanity pricked. I keep forgetting you are honest to a fault. How fierce you are when you glare at me. My brother should be grateful you aren’t his, for he’d have a blazing headache all the time, from your eyes.”

  "And you don’t?” Eleanor kept her temper in with great difficulty. She recognized his jocularity as a way of avoiding some subject that upset him, and decided not to be too provoking.

  "No, it gets me more in my guts,” he replied with a droll expression.

  "Wait until you eat my cooking,” she said.

  "I suspected as much, which is why I am burning the coney.”

  "Doyle, who made this... wickiup?”

  "Withyfay, I expect.”

  "Willow fairies? I have never heard of them—not specifically. I hate to say anything about it—”

  "That’s never stopped you before,” he cut in. "Because it sounds like it’s raining worse,” she continued, as if he had not spoken, "but this place feels... wrong, vaguely wrong. Please don’t tell me I am a hysterical female.”

  "To my great regret, it is the one thing you never are.”

  "Why regret? Do you like hyst
erics?”

  "Because if you were, I would never have to take you seriously. Yes, I feel it, too, the wrongness. I can’t put a finger to it, so I think we should take our chances.” Eleanor nodded and rose to sort out their blankets and spread them beside the fire. She found the room warm enough to remove her tunic and go about in her shift.

  "You have beautiful breasts,” Doyle said quietly. "Your nipples are like roses.”

  Eleanor felt her face redden and drew her arms across her chest with reflexive modesty. "No one has ever said anything like that to me before,” she said in a choked voice.

  "I know, and I can’t decide if I am angrier at the waste or gladder at my good fortune. You’ve been ready for bedding for years, I think. Still, I don’t have to exceed the feats of previous men, for which I rejoice. But if I go on looking at you, I’ll bum dinner.”

  Part of Eleanor wanted to say dinner be damned, but it wasn’t that simple. She didn’t know how to be sexually aggressive, and she had no idea how Doyle would react. Coquetry seemed beyond her capacity, and so she was frozen in place, trapped between desire and decorum. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe from her frustration, so she sat beside him and rubbed her head against his shoulder, like a cat demanding attention.

  Doyle turned his dark head and regarded the top of hers with the dispassionate eye of a hunter looking upon his prey. He watched the way her hands clasped her upper arms, noting tension, the careful joining of her knees, so her mysteries were hidden, despite the sheerness of her shift, and cursed himself for a stiffnecked, arrogant fool. They had so little time together that he feared to love her, even a bit, to stem the pain of loss. He added selfish to his catalog of faults, confessing to himself that he liked her well enough for such a brief acquaintance, that she was brave, smart, resourceful, and didn’t whine. He enjoyed her bouts of temper, her flashes of fire, but especially the way her body felt beneath his. No woman, not even his mother, could ever have been so alive before. Of course, he was not besotted by a square jaw with too much mulishness about it for beauty, or a pair of eyes like sunlight through leaves, or even a courageous spirit. No, he was immune to any tender feelings where females were concerned. For which he was grateful, for it meant the lump in his throat must be a bit of a cold from walking in the rain all day.

  Then the wench lifted her head to give him a shy smile, a tentative look like a dog who has been kicked too often, and he felt as if he had been poleaxed, silently cursing his late father-in-law for a brute, that this splendid woman should be grateful for such bits of love as he had grudgingly parceled out. The mouth was so inviting, the gold-flecked eyes so tender, that his heart felt ready to burst in his chest. He bent to kiss the still smiling lips and wondered for the first time in his life where lust ceased and love began.

  "Doyle, please, take me now.” It was a whisper in his mind, like a breeze across water, a siren song, an aching longing that would not be denied.

  He drew the shift up over her head and threw it aside, rabbit and fire forgotten. His tunic and breeches removed hastily, he drew her atop him, setting her riding him, watching the play of firelight across breast and flesh, feeling the wildness rise within her to meet his own, pleasuring in cries of passion that rang around the little hut, and finally shouting his own response; then they lay, still coupled, sweaty and entangled like two battlefield casualties until the hissing of the fire reminded them of dinner.

  "I think you’ve made me ruin our meal,” he said in his deep voice.

  "I’m sorry. I always did prefer dessert to the main course.”

  Doyle roared with laughter, glad that the Fates had dealt him this fierce and lusty creature instead of some milk-and-water maiden. For a moment, he did not care that their time was so short, that when he had left, she would bestow her gifts elsewhere. Or would she? Eleanor possessed a kind of fierce loyalty that might linger past the grave, and he wondered if any would pass this place again without feeling an echo of their sharing. She is worthy of me, but am I worthy of her?

  At this moment, the object of his speculations rolled off him and bent over the fire. Doyle watched the shadow of her body on the wall of the hut, the smooth curve of breast, and the long fall of night-dark hair, bemused and content. Then he sneered at his smugness, knowing that no man has ever truly won a contest on the couch of Venus, though many have lost. He decided they had at least fought to a draw, and sat up.

  "I think it is still edible,” Eleanor said, holding out the charred rabbit.

  "Good.”

  They ate, naked, in companionable silence, tossing Wrolf the bones. Then they curled up together on the blanket, covered with Eleanor’s rather shabby cloak, Eleanor pillowing her head against his shoulder, the fire smoldering in the pit.

  "Doyle, why are you so sad?”

  "Sad?”

  "When we... make love, I always sense a terrible sadness.”

  "Just my nature, I think.”

  "Please, don’t lie to me.”

  "If you wanted a cheerful fellow, you should have taken Baird.” He did not want her to know what lay ahead, as he wished he did not know himself.

  Eleanor sighed. "Someday I’ll get a straight answer out of someone, and the shock will probably kill me.” She touched his shoulder with light fingertips. "I... tried to share my power, Doyle.”

  It was a whiplash across his heart, a simple testament of a love he did not feel he merited, and it somehow hurt almost more than he could bear. "You are a sweet woman, Eleanor,” he said, and kissed her so she would not see the tears that threatened to overflow his cold blue eyes.

  XIV

  Eleanor was drowning in a river of blood. It was boiling, roiling, bubbling across her face, and she clawed her way up to free her aching lungs. Her head broke the waves, and she screamed for air, smelling the iron reek of the liquid as it began to suck her down again.

  There was something on her wrist, something wet and sharp. A mouth! Some dreadful creature that lived in blood. Eleanor struggled to get free, slopping and scratching, until a sound, a remembered and unnamed noise, came to her ears. A growl.

  Wrolf! A word, a picture, then the feel of rough fur under her hand. Eleanor tried to get her eyes open, eyes gummy with some foreign substance, a line of pain across her forehead. It was slow, clumsy work, like swimming in glue, but at least she could breathe. Finally, she peered blurrily around the hut, very dim now as the fire died.

  The floor was covered with something that looked like a flock of thumbs wearing tiny red hats. Eleanor blinked her eyes several times to clear her vision, but the hats on thumbs persisted. There was a sound, too, a kind of high, squeaky hiss, like a castrati teakettle on the boil, which filled the room. She looked around for Doyle and discovered him a few feet away, his lower body being towed underground while the horrible little creatures swarmed across his chest and face. They were dragging her down as well while Wrolf barked and scattered them with great paws, smashing squeaking bodies with a blood-foamed mouth.

  Eleanor struggled to free her legs from the relentless undertow that seemed to be sucking her into the earth, wondering if her mother-in-law felt her movements along the patterns while she tried to think of some way to combat the things. She had something of two elements at her command, fire and water, and little practical capacity to use them yet. As Doyle said, so far her magicks were a function of her temper.

  As fast as she brushed the red caps off her legs, new battalions attacked. The tide of funny hats was a nightmare of every image she had of brownies and leprechauns, and she loathed them helplessly. Doyle seemed dead, and she was afraid. What to do? The sword was useless against the attack unless she amputated a few limbs. The cloak, if she could have reached it, resting in a silky blue heap a few feet away, seemed to have some defensive capacity, for the red hats flowed around it. Doyle was underground almost to his slim hips now, and Wrolf was shaking, sending showers of plump little worms flying through the air to splat disgustingly against wall and floor.

  The
sight of Doyle’s fast-vanishing body infuriated her, and with a great shout, she clapped her hands together in an actinic flash. The red hats seemed to pause. The hiss became more shrill.

  Eleanor raised her hands above her head and cast a fireball the size of a cantaloupe into the walls of the hut. It spread across the dry willow branches like a flaming carpet unrolling down the walls. When it touched the floor, it flowed like blazing honey across the tiny creatures. There was a scream of rage or terror—one voice or many, she could not tell—but her legs were no longer frozen in earth.

  Scrambling up, Eleanor rushed to her husband, grabbing him under the arms and dragging him away from the rising tide of flame. He was heavy, and her strength was barely equal to the task; she coughed and gasped in the acrid willow smoke. He grunted suddenly, opened his eyes, and struggled to his feet. They burst through the doorway of the hut. A moment later, Wrolf appeared, his plumed tail alight, and then the whole structure collapsed in a flaming whoosh, the scream of the red hats rising eerily above the fire.

  They crouched together, Eleanor slapping out the fire on Wrolfs tail with her bare hands, careless of herself. The hut burned merrily as the chill, misty dawn rose. At first they were both too busy coughing to speak, and clinging to one another in wordless affirmation of the other’s continued existence. But as the fire died and the stench of burned flesh warred with the sweet scents of morning, they spoke, or rather croaked, at each other like a pair of jackdaws.

  "So much for a good night’s sleep,” muttered Eleanor. Doyle chuckled a little. "If they cut off your head, will you complain the knife was dull?”

  "Probably. What were those... things?”

  "I do not know. My mother has many strange creatures in her, some I have never seen, and the Shadow too has minions. You’re shivering.”

  He put a strong arm around her shoulders and drew her against his chest. Doyle was warm, almost hot, in the chill of the morning, and he smelled of sweat and blood and smoke.