Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

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

  The boar was fast for all its size, but Doyle was quicker, and one side of the beast was a mass of wounds. The ground was red with blood, and Doyle’s legs were spattered as well. There was a scream from the boar, and Doyle slipped in the muck. A huge tusk gored his body.

  Eleanor watched the great head rise with her husband impaled on it. Doyle’s huge arms lifted and drove Bridget’s sword deep into a piggy eye. The boar quivered all over, tossed its head to free itself, and sent Doyle’s body flying to earth. The stubby legs splayed out under the porcine body, and it sank into twitching death throes.

  She ran to Doyle and found his face as pain-free and untroubled as she had seen it in sleep. The hole where his belly had been leaked fluids, but he looked so tranquil that for a moment she was not frightened. She reached out to heal the dreadful wound and found his strong hand over hers.

  "No, beloved.”

  "Doyle, I can—”

  "No. My time is done. It is the way of these things.”

  "Don’t leave me! Let me—”

  "Sweet, sweet Eleanor. The light of my life. I did not think it would be this hard to leave you. I never said how much I loved you—because there are no words for it.” He smiled. "I do. But you must go on without me. You can, you know. You always could. Farewell.” The blue eyes closed, and he was still.

  The ground shivered and began to open beneath his body. Eleanor watched a fleshy gullet engulf him, a serpent’s mouth, and then he was gone, and all that remained was the bright sheath and smeared sword. She was too stunned to move, to even weep, for a long moment.

  Then, with chilled fingers, she clawed the ground where he had lain and screamed. She tore away, mindless of ripping fingernails and palms cut by sharpened stones. She cried words, cursing the goddess in her many guises, until the tears fell and her rage was swept away in grief.

  A hand touched her shoulder, a warm, real human hand. She felt herself dragged up from where she had lain pressing herself to earth, and was leaned against a narrow chest. There was a voice, too, speaking gentle words, though their meaning was incomprehensible. Long, spatulate fingers brushed her cheek.

  Eleanor looked up into the rather homely countenance of the Heir of Albion, a boy’s face on a man’s body as yet unmarred by cruel experience. For this I lost my Doyle. Then she felt a slight stirring in her womb, the first real sign of the new life she carried within her, and drew away from this comforting stranger’s embrace.

  "I am Eleanor,” she said. The light of my life.

  XXII

  Arthur searched her face, seeking some clue to her identity beyond her name. "That is a good name,” he said finally, "but surely you are not my grandmother made young once more by some great sorcery. She was dark like you in her youth, though her hair was argented when I knew her. And my sister was quite fair, though—”

  "No, no. I am no relation of yours—at least, I don’t believe I am. None of my people ever claimed to have come down from the Conqueror. No, I am just Eleanor who... came to rescue you. It’s rather complicated.” She slipped out of the light grasp he still had about her shoulders and stood up. Her legs trembled, but she tottered across the bloody arena and clambered up the carcass of the boar to pull the sword from where it still stuck out of a dead eye. Ichorous fluids gushed out and flooded her boots and the hem of her gown.

  The young man waited to assist her down from the gruesome corpse. Eleanor held the sword aloft and glared at its unmarred blade. "I wish you had never been forged,” she whispered. Then she retrieved the sheath and joined them, trying not to think how she would never again unsheath the sword of love within her.

  "’Tis a fair weapon, lady,” Arthur said, extending his hand toward the grip.

  "I would not touch it if I were—”

  There was a flash of white light, and he snatched his hand back and yelled. Then he stared in amazement at the palm, where no mark showed. Eleanor sighed and shook her head. "I see you are as headstrong and impetuous as the rest of your family.” She suddenly felt very old, though their ages were about the same. "Come on. Let’s get out of this charnel pit.”

  2<7

  She looked at the meager bundle of Doyle’s gear— tattered cloak, weary spare tunic, and a set of snares all wrapped in the blanket—and decided that she did not have the energy to be sentimental. "You carry that.” Then she got her staff and her bundle and led him away until they found a sluggish brook.

  Eleanor stopped, too weary to progress a step farther, knelt down, and washed the ruin of her hands and a face smeared with dirt, blood, and tears. Then she sat on a rock and dangled her boots and lowered her gown in the water until they were free of the filth.

  "Gather some wood for a fire,” she told him, quite forgetting that he was Arthur of Brittany, Heir of Albion. Then she bit her lower lip and fought back a fresh flood of tears. Wrolf, who had shadowed them on their walk, appeared and put a huge head across her lap, whining. She patted him between the ears, and a hot tear rolled down her cheek despite her effort to resist it. "I guess it’s just the two of us again, old friend.” The wolf gave her a glance of such infinite compassion, Eleanor was certain her heart would break in two.

  Arthur came noisily back, his arms loaded with branches of twisted heather, some dead and some still lavender with blossoms. He piled it clumsily on the ground, and Eleanor wondered how she was going to survive with such an inept woodsman. Still, he seemed willing and cheerful, and she decided to settle for that.

  She rose wearily, sorted out the deadwood, and created a fire. Arthur watched her with a kind of wary astonishment as she removed her boots to dry beside it, then folded her cloak to sit on. Wrolf curled up beside her, pressing his warmth against her thigh, and the young man sat across the fire from them, nervously pleating the hem of his knee-length tunic.

  Finally she pulled the pot out of the bundle and held it out. "Will you get some water, please.” She sat stiff and still while he did her bidding, trying to order her thoughts. "No, not on the fire. Give it to me.”

  If ever a woman deserved the pleasure of a good Irish wake, it is me. With that thought, she set about making the contents of her cooking pot as alcoholic as possible. The result, to her surprise, was a passable Calvados, the wonderful apple brandy of Northern France. The act heartened her in some strange fashion she could not discern, and she muttered, "Eat your heart out, Harold O’Shea.” Then she filled her willow cup and, taking the Queen’s advice to Alice, began at the beginning of her tale. Instinctively, she used the storyteller’s mode, the roll and rhythm of country folk since time began. And, like the storyteller, she omitted a great deal of rain, cold, and hunger.

  The day was fading before she was done, and the level of the liquor in the pot considerably diminished, until she was in that muzzy, anesthetized state where the true toper goes to forget her sorrows. Like her mother, Eleanor was a cheerful drunk.

  "A most amazing tale, Lady Eleanor. One I could not believe but for the evidence of that terrible sword and that strange wine you have made. I remember nothing but a great banquet to celebrate my birthday and the end of my regency. I drank wine my cousin John poured for me and awoke by the carcass of that dead boar. No troubadour ever sang such a song as this. And I’m very sorry about your man, Doyle.”

  "I am, too. I should have remembered my folklore better. Then I should have known his days were numbered.” She swallowed convulsively. "He was both a man and something besides. But I have been loved. And for the moment, that will have to do.”

  "But you are young, and surely—”

  "No, Doyle was my life-mate.” She ruffled Wrolfs mane. "Anyone else would suffer by comparison.”

  The twilight of midsummer covered them, and Arthur laid a still green bough of heather on the fire. The sparks rose up in a cheerful column. It seemed to thicken into a pillar of fire, and Bridget materialized in its midst with her Si’monetta half-smile and her starry cloak mirroring the sky.

  "You have done well, daughter.”


  Eleanor glared at the vision. "Yes, I’m a good little girl.”

  "Do not be angry.”

  "Angry? Me? Why, of course not, you meddling anachronism. You drag me out of my life and tell me to do six impossible things before breakfast. Go here, go there. Do this, do that. Love a man and watch him die. Why me?”

  "It is your task, child.”

  "Perhaps. But Sal is twice the goddess you are, and I’d cheerfully swap you both for my mother-in-law.” Eleanor found her throat parched and gulped a little more brandy. "All right, Lady, now what?”

  Bridget shook her lovely head slowly. "The only mortals worthy to be our hands are spirited, so I shall overlook that disrespect. You have served us well and faithfully, and I know you grieve for your beloved. And I shall ignore the strange use you have made of my sacred apples.”

  "Gracious of you.”

  "The Harp lies where you cannot see Hibernia any longer. The Pipes sing upon Lothean’s Plain. Find them and go to London City. Drive out the Darkness, Daughter of Great Light. I am always with you, though you rebuke me in your anguish and will again. But by the moon’s sweet light, you will always have a guide. And you will be well rewarded for your efforts.”

  "I don’t want any reward. I want Doyle back.” Eleanor spoke to empty air, for Bridget had vanished. "Orphiana said she was flighty. Rotten sense of humor, too.” Her eyelids sagged. She pulled her cloak out from under her clumsily and wrapped it around her. "Good night, sweet prince,” she muttered, pillowing her head on her elbow, and drifted off into a dream of Doyle crowned in light.

  "I wonder if sorcery cures a hangover,” Eleanor said, as Arthur arrived with a fresh load of firewood. "Her sacred apples, indeed. Conceited bitch. I wonder if goddesses have annual conventions, like Elks. Aphrodite will set her straight.” She dragged herself to her feet and tottered to the brackish stream to gulp down water and bathe her face. Her headache subsided to a dull roar.

  Arthur was huddled in Doyle’s worn cloak, looking pinched and anxious. "I tried to find something to eat, but—”

  "Not much around, unless you’re Wrolf. And he never shares. Well, lets see if I can do something besides rot-gut in my pot.” Eleanor washed it out in the stream, then tried for porridge. She was rewarded with a gluey, tasteless mess that filled her stomach but nothing more. "I wish I had paid more attention in the kitchen,” she said.

  Arthur gave her a wobbly smile. "I wish I knew what was happening. I mean, I think I saw you speak to a woman in the fire last night, but I might have been dreaming. She looked so like my sister, Eleanor, I almost thought I was mad. But I cannot recall her owning such a cloak. I wonder how she is.”

  "No one knows. She vanished off the earth. At least, as I know her story. Perhaps it is different here.” She spoke in response to the undisguised anguish of his bony face. With his sharp cheekbones and long nose, he resembled a very young Charlton Heston. "What is she like?”

  The lopsided grin again. "She is wonderful. Full of song and light. And very gentle. Not like grandmother at all, though they share the same name. She would go into the courtyard at Anjou and lift her voice, and birds would flutter in and sit on her arms and on the sunlit stones at her feet. And like my grandmother did in her youth, she called the unicorns from the forest. Perhaps she, too, is trapped in some sorcery by my cousin John.”

  Eleanor didn’t have the heart to dash his hope and nodded. Her longing for Doyle’s bearlike presence was almost a physical ache, and she knew her grief was less than a breath away, if she let it come. But there was no time for that luxury, as there had been when her father had died. So she swallowed and tried to make some plan.

  The Harp must be her next task. Bridget’s clue was clear enough to her—Iona, the island where the arrogant and contentious St. Columba had exiled himself after some disagreement, which, being Irish, was both religious and political. Her father’s folk never seemed to have discovered any way to separate the two. She thought of the war-wracked Belfast of her own time and shook her head. Columba had sailed east until he could no longer see Ireland and made a monastery where beautiful illuminations sprang up in sharp contrast to the barren bit of land the establishment stood on.

  The first problem was to cross the North Sea and get back to Scotland. She could shape-change and so could Wrolf, but Arthur was another matter. Doyle had not instructed her in the transformation of others, and with his ruddy coloring, the young prince seemed like a lion cub to her. That would hardly answer. Could she bear him on her back?

  The idea was a mistake, for it brought back memories of her last day with Doyle. Tears welled in her green eyes and rolled down her face until she brushed them away angrily. She wiped her sleeve across her face and forced herself to be calm again. I wonder if I can conjure a cabin cruiser, she thought irrelevantly, and found that the foolishness of her idea lessened her sense of despair. 1 need a boat, for certain. A shame they don’t grow on trees.

  For a long time, she stared off at a sky so blue it was almost painful, until her mind recalled those lessons of Doyle’s around the fire. Essence of boat. What the devil was that? Her abysmal ignorance of what constituted a seaworthy vessel depressed her momentarily, and her head was full of images of the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker in their famous tub. Instead, she searched her memory for every scrap of information she possessed about the art of ship building. A raft she and Arthur could build if they could find some wood on the island, but she dismissed that quickly. The North Sea, even in its gentle summer guise, was no place for a flatboat.

  Eleanor rose, took her willow cup, and went to the stream. She drank several cups of water and found the pounding of her headache subsiding. Then she looked at the cup for a long time, turning it in her hands, and finally nodding to herself.

  "I think we should get going, young Arthur.” "Certainly, my lady. But where?”

  "Back to Scotland, if the winds are kind. Gather the gear. And remind me never to touch Calvados again.” In her head, she heard a faint laugh, and she felt the cool affection of the Lady of the Willows. For an instant, she was paralyzed with longing for Sal. But the memory was like a benediction that strengthened and reassured her.

  * * *

  The wind was running from the west when they came to the rocky shore, and the waves that rose and fell seemed huge. Eleanor felt her confidence evaporate. Suddenly, she was tired, weary of struggling to reach goals that never turned out to be quite worthwhile, somehow. She would not dare that sea in anything less than the QEII, and certainly not a willow cup. Her shoulders sagged under the weight of her burden, and the unaccustomed rigidity of the sword seemed to cut into them. She felt tempted to fly away, as Doyle had often assured her she could, and leave Arthur to fend for himself, except she could not think where she would fly to. Somehow, as sure as she was of the love of the goddess, to return to Sal with the job unfinished seemed wrong. Then she felt the faint stirring of the life within her, and she took a deep breath and straighened her body. It was all she had left of Doyle, but it was worth fighting for.

  The sea went flat when I commanded it to.

  I didn’t think to ask for more.

  The quote floated to the surface of her mind, and for a moment she was puzzled as to its source. Then she realized it was from The Lion In Winter, words spoken by another Eleanor, a more redoubtable woman than herselfi and she turned to young Arthur.

  "Could your grandmother really command the sea to her bidding?”

  "I never heard of it, but she was a powerful woman, so I should not be surprised. Why?”

  "Curious, just curious. You said she could call unicorns, which I had never heard before. I thought only virgins had that talent.”

  "No—at least I don’t think so. My aunt Johanna could do it when her sons were grown to manhood. It is a gift of the daughters of my house, I think.” He seemed amused by the question.

  "This is not getting us anywhere. I don’t suppose you have any idea how to tack across the wind, do you?” "N
o. I do not know what you mean.”

  "I don’t either, except it’s a seaman's trick for getting where he wants to go when the wind is against him.” She took out the willow cup and turned it in her hands awhile. A fragile craft.

  Eleanor knelt on the rocky beach and put the cup before her. The strange, undigested information she had gotten during her journey beside Hadrian’s Wall bobbled in her mind like flotsam. Finally, she decided it was simply a problem in shape-changing. If a five-foot-seven-inch woman could become a fifteen-foot cobra, then a cup could become a boat. She "told” the vessel to change.

  It expanded with alarming rapidity, the lip catching Eleanor across the chest, sending her reeling, and leaving her breathless, weak, and ravenous. She lay on the beach gasping for several minutes, her head spinning. Then she staggered up to study her handiwork.

  The cup had retained its round shape but was now large enough to contain two people and a wolf, if they were friendly. It was thick wood, seamless and sturdy, and while she had misgivings about its seaworthiness, she was pretty sure it would float. She wondered if she could alter its shape into something less tublike and realized she lacked the energy to try.

  "We’ll leave tomorrow. See if you can get something for a fire. I must rest.” With those words, she curled up on the tepid beach and fell into a deep sleep.

  When she awoke, the sun was sinking into the sea, and the tide had crept up almost to the boat. Arthur had piled driftwood and dried heather in a heap and was studying a dead coney. She sat up.

  "Where did you get that?”

  "It came up to me when I was getting wood, and I hit it over the head with a stick.”

  "Good for you. Here, give it to me.” She skinned and gutted the animal, started the fire, spitted the meat, and began cooking it. Wrolf was not visible, so she assumed he was off hunting his own supper. The smell of roasting meat was tantalizing, and Eleanor has hard-pressed to keep from eating it half-raw. They ate in silence in the long twilight.