Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

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

Wrolf turned around and crouched across the door, growling. Eleanor turned to Doyle. "I know his whinny.”

  "He has a new rider,” Doyle answered.

  Eleanor felt ill, the mush suddenly lead in her middle. What could have captured her marvelous steed? The possibilities were not pleasant to contemplate.

  Wrolf’s growl increased, and the children huddled back. Eleanor rose and walked to the door, taking the rowan staff from where she had leaned it against the wall. She turned and looked at Doyle, whose blue eyes seemed almost black now. "This fight is yours alone,” he said.

  Eleanor knew the sword of Bridget lay between them again, for it was no longer hers to wield. The power that had been hers had passed to him on their first bedding, at least where the sword was concerned. But Doyle’s instruction had not been in vain. She experienced a moment’s pause, that he might let her die to gain complete control over that blasted bit of magic metal, then shrugged. "Come watch.”

  Doyle stared at her, concealing from Eleanor his overwhelming fear that she might die, and his rage at the Lords of Destiny that he was forced to stand by impotent. They had very little time left together, unless she won all the way through, but until this moment, he had not realized that he might survive her. He silently cursed all swords, all women, especially his mother and Bridget, and the patterns of the fates. Then he forced a grin and said "Surely,” as if it were no more than a cockfight. The only aid he could give her was not to let her see his worry.

  They stepped into the murky sunlight, and she suppressed a gasp of horror. The horse still carried the saddle she had gotten from the Lady Iseult at Nunnally Castle, and by that and that alone she knew him. The aura had diminished to a sooty miasma, but worse, the steed was now a thing of rotting flesh and exposed bone that stank all the way across the compound. The eyes once fiery with light were smoldering coals.

  Eleanor had a moment of pity for her horse, a tiny sorrow that even this gift of Sal’s was no more, and a fountain of rage at the force that could pervert the living into the travesty before her. Something indistinct slouched in the moldering saddle, a shadow, or was it the shadow of a shadow?

  At first it appeared to be a smutty sack, slung like a bag of spuds across the seat, but as she studied it, she saw a faint head with bulging eyes above a triangular jaw. The head seemed covered with a shiny black substance like melted glass or some odd black jewel, the horrible eyes like dark opals. The body was a squat, lumpy shape with long, floppy feet dangling above the decaying stirrups.

  The opaline eyes focused on her, and something like a smile seemed to flicker on the strange face. It shifted its body in the saddle with supreme confidence and urged the horse forward. Wrolf growled but gave ground. The Thing gave a clucking noise and said, "Mine.”

  Eleanor felt herself moving forward, as if her feet belonged to someone else. She resisted, but they stepped forward. Her body felt cold, colder than it had the night before, except her hand around the rowan staff. That was flame, and painful. She wanted to drop the staff, but she couldn’t do that.

  A long tongue flickered out from the triangular jaw of the thing on the horse. It brushed the tips of her pubic hair before it snapped back into the horrible mouth. "Mine,” it repeated.

  A wave of utter cold seemed to grow in her loins. Eleanor, helpless and outraged, moved one step closer, understanding something of the obscene rider. Then she froze in place, watching in horror as the tongue flipped out again to continue its rape.

  With a great effort, she moved her still hot hand an inch. Eleanor ignored the strange sensations in her genitals and swung the rowan staff around to smash it down upon the half-bare skull of the horse. She could not speak to cry for help, but she thought of flame and cleansing fire. A blinding flash sparked against the bone and raced across decaying flesh.

  Silver Heels began to burn, one foreleg falling off at the shoulder. The stench was awful, and Eleanor gagged as the steed collapsed, spilling its misshapen burden to the ground. The beast rolled over, landed on its floppy feet, and shot its tongue out again.

  Eleanor hated the sensation in her body, and like a spear, she brought the head of her staff down on the dripping member. It flickered into the gaping mouth with a tiny spark creeping along the unwholesome flesh. The beast gave her a look of near astonishment with his bulging eyes, and exploded. The black, shiny skull burst into sharp, glassy fragments, one of which flew past her eye so close she flinched and fell backward onto the ground.

  The cold in her body vanished to be replaced by a nausea so violent she could hardly breathe. Breakfast departed in a noisome mess, and she crouched on the earth, retching and choking while the rowan fire con

  sumed the white bones of her horse and the black substance of its rider.

  Eleanor crawled away from battle, cutting knees and palms on bits of black glass until strong hands hauled her up. She stared unrecognizingly into blue eyes and tried to pull away.

  "Don’t touch me!”

  He clutched her by the wrists until they hurt. "It’s over!”

  For a second, the great, dark man seemed to be a part of the black thing she had destroyed. Then she knew him again. Recognition brought no lessening of her repulsion. No one would ever touch her again! "No! Dirty hands away!”

  The wolf pushed his great head in between them, and she could feel his warm, moist breath against her ribs. A cold nose touched her stomach, and she felt the earth murmur under her bare feet. The green voices of hidden waters swelled, and she turned her head to find their source.

  The household well was perhaps fifty feet away, but it seemed to Eleanor to be a distance farther than the stars. She was too dirty, too soiled. All the waters of the world were insufficient to cleanse her. She felt frozen in an agony of yearning and disgust.

  Somehow she was free of the great hands, and she took a step toward the battered wooden structure. Each forward movement was a wrenching torment, and she fell and crept, whimpering and crying out a word she did not understand. "Sal! Sal! Sal!” It echoed in her mind, meaningless and wonderful at once. Finally, she crouched against the splintery well housing, clawing to get upright and reach the green-and-golden music that seemed just beyond her grasp.

  Then she looked into a silvery mirror and saw a ghastly face that wept red tears. The long, weedy hair was the color of starless night, the skin as white as the moon’s face, eyes like green glass and thin mouth with lips as red as blood. Eleanor found the reflection terrifying and inviting all at once.

  She bent toward the mirror, closer and closer, until the tips of the noses almost met. There was a scent she could not name, a pleasant smell full of vague remembrance. Then she plunged her face into the mirror, which shattered into icy liquid and covered her. The voices seemed to grow more intense, and her still open eyes saw golden lights within the waters.

  Eleanor reached for the lights and the music and found they eluded her grasp. Then she was being hauled up, sputtering, to see Doyle’s dark face above hers, his expression almost unreadable except that it might contain concern. She coughed and knew who she was and what she was again. There was a second’s longing for the Lady of Willows, then it was gone. "I feel awful,” she muttered.

  Doyle put an arm over her shoulders, still encloaked, and hugged her to his chest. "I am sure you do.” He wiped moisture off her forehead with one hand. "You are very brave.”

  "Was I? I don’t feel brave, just tired. Poor Silver Heels. How did he get caught?”

  "We are all vulnerable.”

  Eleanor looked at the smoldering remains of steed and rider. The ground around the beast was a scatter of black glass, so clearly obsidian that she almost grinned. Some future geologist was going to have a fit. "Even you?”

  "Yes.”

  His answer gave Eleanor a chill that had nothing to do with her exhaustion or her unclothed state. She leaned closer to him as if she could dispel her fear by simple contact. Then she said, "I’m still hungry.”

  Beltane

  XVI
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  It was all very well, Eleanor reflected, for Bridget to say, "Go here or there and do this or that,” and a great deal more difficult to actually implement her instructions. It must have been simpler in archetypal times, when goddesses popped in and out of people’s lives like jack-in-the-boxes, and no one was troubled by selfdoubts. Ulysses didn’t say to Athena, "What do you think I am, a bloody carpenter?” Hercules hadn’t said, "To hell with my labors; I’d rather get drunk with the centaurs.” And Psyche hadn’t told her mother-in-law, "Take your tasks and your son and shove off.”

  Since her encounter with the toad thing and what had once been her horse, Eleanor had been morose and fearful. If Wrolf was gone overlong on his foraging, she was gripped with icy panic until he returned with messy, blood-spattered chops and the heavy scent of carnivore breath. If Doyle was hidden from view by underbrush or trees, she had to choke back whimpers, and when he went hunting, she cut moon-shaped scratches in her palms with chipped nails.

  And she was never warm anymore. They had found clothing of sorts in a shattered keep four days’ walking from their landfall, a battered leather jerkin big enough to cover Doyle’s shoulders and broad chest, and a red wool gown that had been a rich garment before the moths had feasted upon it. Doyle had cobbled them footwear out of odd bits of leather, and she’d asked him if he’d studied with the leprechauns. He had only replied that shoemaking was something he’d always known, and she remembered the tale of how Gwydion tricked Arianrhod into giving a name to her son with some shoes of fine cordovan leather. But the land they passed through was rich in those tales, and where they found folk huddled in careful solitude like the farmer’s family, they were friendly enough after the initial suspicion had passed, and she occasionally heard unrecorded variants to make her scholar’s heart glad. It was about her only comfort.

  Eleanor knew it wasn’t the tiny holes in her gown that made her cold but only fear. Even Doyle’s touch could not warm her, and that, too, she suffered uneasily, always terrified it might be the last time. It gave an ardor to their loving, a dreadful grasping eagerness, which was anything but tender, as if he, too, were infected by the possibility of loss.

  For five weeks they had wandered south toward Glastonbury, each growing more silent until sometimes a day passed with hardly a word. The Shadow had touched her, but it seemed to Eleanor that somehow it had touched him as well. Often she would have curled up by the side of the trail and waited for starvation to take her but for her sense of responsibility. Instead, she nurtured harsh thoughts of Bridget and forced one foot to follow another.

  Albion struggled into a sickly spring, and Eleanor reflected that this was one April old Robert Browning would cheerfully have missed. Each day was gray with frequent rain squalls that stung and dried the skin. The few wild flowers that pushed their heads above the ground looked as if they wished they hadn’t, and she grew to hate the sight of leprous daffodils dropping amid the weedy remains of scabrous Queen Anne’s lace and skeletal nettle. Each night was starless and chill, and the moon made no impact on the darkness except a ghostly nimbus at its full.

  Twice they encountered small packs of Shadow folk, tattered, lightless people like the victims of some hideous disease. At these times, Eleanor woke to life, casting off her despondency and wading in with her rowan staff with a fury worthy of some Nordic berserker. It did not cross her mind that she was being foolhardy. She just knew she wanted to rid the earth of them. And afterward, she always spewed up the contents of her stomach until she was empty. She felt faintly queasy most of the time anyhow but blamed it on the dreary landscape and her depression.

  Well before nightfall, they were encamped, if a wolf, a man, a woman, no fire, and no shelter could be termed a camp. Actually, Eleanor knew they were hiding, that Doyle had chosen this stony shelf both for its vantage over the vale and to keep them out of the Shadow traffic, which was arriving in increasing numbers.

  Eleanor crouched under the still unmarred perfection of Bridget’s cloak and watched the churning gutter of beings pouring into the valley like a dark flood. They all came from the west, from Bath or Bristol, and they were a silent mob. Their quiet disturbed her, for all her experience said that many people together should be singing or gossiping or something! She guessed it was a group of between five and six thousand, and she wondered what call drew them here. And why none came from the south or the east.

  She spoke that question aloud. Doyle, sucking a stem of grass, considered it a long time. Then he said, "Something prevents them.” He pointed southwest. "There’s a...channel from down that way I get glimpses of, and if we were still in my mother’s house, we could see it plainer. It’s fair straight, and it goes away that direction,” he continued, hooking a thumb northeast. "I been miy.7,I in’ over it, trying to remember the pattern, but it’s right hard because I’ve never paid much mind to the old snake’s business except not to muck it up too much.”

  Eleanor stared south where he had pointed, trying to penetrate the distance with her mind. Finally, her memory responded, and she said, "The Old, Straight Track.”

  "What?”

  "No, that’s not right either. Something about a dragon. And St. Michael. Got it!”

  She felt pleased with herself out of all proportion to the meager bit of information her tired mind had given her, because it had been so long since she had really been able to think of more than setting one foot before the other. And it wasn’t even real information, just the half-baked theory of some mystical amateur named Ley. Eleanor still carried the academic’s contempt for the uncredentialed around with her. Still, it amused her that there might be some substance in the farfetched notions of the crackpots of her own century.

  She gave a slight smile. Doyle reached out a hand and traced her mouth with broad, square fingers. "I was almost afraid you had forgotten how to do that.” "What?”

  "Smile. You have been as solemn as a bear for days.” "Oh. Are bears... solemn?”

  "Very serious fellows, always trundling on their business and never stopping to chat.”

  Eleanor’s experience with ursine animals was from zoos and circuses, and she had difficulty reconciling either the bored and listless inhabitants of a zoo, or the memory of a ball-tossing Asian bear with his picture. "They dance very well,” she said.

  "Dance?” Doyle sounded scandalized. "It would be beneath his dignity.”

  Eleanor couldn’t help laughing at the expression of horror on her spouse’s face. She laughed until tears dripped from her eyes and until the laughter died and she wept against his chest, silent, sobless crying. Doyle stroked her hair and said nothing until she was done. Eleanor rubbed her face with the rough sleeve of her garment and snuffled noisily. She would cheerfully have gone hungry for a box of tissues.

  "Doyle, what are we going to do about that?” She pointed at the straggling column of Shadow folk. "There are so many.”

  "Kill them.”

  "How?”

  "I do not know.”

  She suppressed an angry retort and stared at the sullen skyline. Glastonbury Tor, topped with its old stone church, seemed to beckon her. She noticed that the Shadow folk gave it a wide berth and that the line of them swerved away to what had been the town.

  It didn’t much look like Arthur’s Avalon, for the many apple trees in the vale had been hacked and burned. A few tormented branches still put forth fragile leaves and blossoms, as if to rebuke their passing tormentors. There was, she reflected, no spot in all England so legend-laden as this place, from Joseph of Arimathea bringing the thornbush, the chalice of the

  Last Supper, and the Veil of Veronica there in a miraculous seven-day passage from the Holy Land, to the monks’ perhaps spurious discovery of an oaken coffin containing the mortal remains of the fabled hero Arthur and his wife Guinevere. This, in spite of the contradictory tale that the unfaithful spouse had entered a convent after Arthur’s death. The chalice had become the Holy Grail, the thombush mysteriously flowered at Christmas, and only the veil h
ad disappeared without a trace. No doubt that touch had been added by some troubadour who knew that magical things travel in threes for companionship. The well, the Chalice Well, hard by the foot of the tor, had reputed healing powers even in Eleanor’s technology-stricken world.

  It suddenly struck her as odd that there were two churches so close together, since the construction of a stone building was no small undertaking. The one on the tor was older, she recalled, and dedicated to that ever-popular flaming angel, St. Michael, dragon slayer and all-around superhero. She recalled the Beast of Avebury she had fought what seemed like a lifetime before and reflected that he must have missed a few.

  But there was something niggling at her, something about St. Michael and dragons, about the well, which eluded her. Until Avebury she had rather liked dragons, at least the benevolent Eastern ones who were always chasing after mystic pearls. Their Western cousins were a slothful, greedy race except in heraldry, always gobbling up the sun during eclipses and eating virgins in between. Odd dietary habit, she thought, leaning back onto the chilly ground to stare at the leaden sky.

  She searched for the sun, for it was just past midday, and found the vague amber orb that gave little light and less warmth here. High places, like the tor, were usually sacred to the sun, and St. Michael certainly fit the mold of a solar figure. Why was that important? She wanted to smash away the shadowy sky and let the sun touch her. Too much legend and not enough light, she decided.

  Eleanor sat up abruptly and studied the tor again. The sun and the moon, for wells and water were always part of the lunar cycle, were married on this spot, as she and Doyle were, though it was difficult to cast her dark husband in the role. Baird, his brother, looked the part better.

  "Doyle, can we get up on the tor?”

  "I been wondering that myself. If we could fly or were invisible, ’twould be simple. You might but not me.” "You keep telling me I can fly, but I can’t... yet.” She pursed her lips. "Shape change.” The words came out without any conscious formation.