by Sarah Rayne
“But Lugh makes quite rousing speeches,” put in another soldier, rather hastily. “And it’s all quite friendly.”
“It isn’t so friendly out here,” said the first soldier with a shiver. “It’s downright sinister. We’re far too close to a lot of nasty things.”
“What sort of nasty things?”
“Medoc’s sentries. Medoc’s spies. The Twelve Dark Lords.”
“Oh, these woods have seen far worse than Medoc and the Twelve Lords,” said Lugh airily, who happened to be listening to this. “Much worse,” he said wisely, but Cathbad said that nothing could be worse than Medoc.
“Medoc comes from the most ancient line of necromancers,” said the soldier who had asked why Tara’s brightness had been quenched. “The ancient unbroken line; the evil sorcerers who command the Dark Ireland.”
Somebody asked, a bit hesitantly, how you would define the Dark Ireland, and Dorrainge, who felt he had been left out of this conversation for too long, said it was rather difficult. “Because nobody has ever seen the Dark Ireland, and nobody has ever visited it,” he said. “But it’s believed to be a kind of dark mirror-image of this world. The creatures who inhabit it are cold and greedy and evil and corrupt. Perhaps they are distorted and warped. Certainly they are forever trying to find a chink between their world and this. They would devour us if they could, and rule the land until the skies were dark with blood and the river ran with gore.
“The Dark Ireland is ruled by the powerful wicked enchanters of the North,” said Dorrainge. “Beings such as Medoc and the old Erl-King, although the Erl-King was vanquished by Cormac in the last century.”
The first soldier remembered that Medoc had always been called the dark, evil, beautiful one, and Dorrainge said, “Oh, yes, he is all of that,” and several people looked thoughtful.
One of the soldiers wanted to know if it was true that Medoc was preparing for the birth into the world of the monster god-idol Crom Croich, and an argument sprang up as to whether Medoc and Crom Croich were the most evil and most powerful forces ever to come out of the Dark Ireland, or whether the Erl-King had been worse.
“The Erl-King ate the children,” remembered one of the soldiers softly, and Cathbad shuddered, and wished people would not remember this sort of thing.
“But if Medoc does summon Crom Croich,” said another soldier, “he’ll send out the Conablaiche to tear people’s hearts from their bodies, and that’s just as bad as the Erl-King.”
“But the Erl-King didn’t —”
“And then he’ll offer the hearts to Crom Croich.”
“I still don’t think —”
“On a silver platter,” said the soldier obstinately.
Several people said you could not get anything nastier than a warm and dripping heart on a silver platter.
“And then Crom Croich eats the hearts,” said the soldier, and Cathbad, who had been very busy all afternoon supervising the skinning and jointing of an ox and had been planning to serve braised ox heart for tomorrow’s midday meal, turned quite green and tried to remember if they had any salted pig left.
Lugh said with amused tolerance that these were all fairy tales, but some of the soldiers said, were they indeed. Didn’t they all know about the terrible appearance of the Conablaiche last time, and how it had prowled the country, snatching sleeping children from their beds and tearing out their hearts for its Dark Master.
“And they say that after the Conablaiche would come the Lad of the Skins,” said the soldier, and a sudden silence fell, because everyone knew about the Lad of the Skins and the Knife of Light, and how, if you fell into the Lad’s clutches, he would take your soul and you would be thrown for ever into the Prison of Hostages.
“They do say,” said Cathbad, “that if you ever found your way to the Prison of Hostages, you would find all the children whose hearts were given to the Conablaiche during that time, and whose souls were taken by the Lad. The Lost Children, they call them.”
Several people said wasn’t that the most heart-rending story you’d ever hear, and had they finished all of the mead yet? The mead was passed, and the mugs were refilled, and the fires burned a bit lower.
Lugh, who had listened to all this with tolerance (because of being a good leader), thought that now was probably as good a time as any to slip away and take a real look at Tara. It was not everyone who would have relished going off into the dark forest; Lugh did not relish it at all, in fact. But he would be quite safe because he would keep a sharp look-out for anything and everything, and he would not be captured because no Longhand ever had been captured.
He moved warily through the forest, making very little sound. He was not really so very far from the camp either. He could hear the men beginning the old bawdy “Thousand and One Nights of the Wolfking,” which had been written about Cormac, and which Lugh did not care for overmuch, because even if you discounted half the things it said, you were still left with a patently exaggerated tale.
The trees were thinning now, and he was drawing farther away from the camp. Moonlight was pouring over the valley, black and silver, and presently Lugh was standing at the edge of the forest, looking down into the shallow dip that sheltered the great Manor of Tara.
Tara. The Shining Palace, the bright centre of all Ireland. The heart and the core and the living, breathing pulse. The place that the High Kings and Queens had called Medchuarta.
Seen like this, across the valley, seen by thin moonlight and mists, it was a place of shadows; it was a dark, rather forbidding fortress of night enchantments and of black sorcery. Lugh knew, as they all knew, that Tara’s light had been quenched by Medoc, because Medoc was a necromancer, a dark enchanter of such power that no light could live in his vicinity. If Tara’s brilliance, if the radiance that had once shone for Ireland’s High Kings was ever to be kindled again, Medoc must be driven out and destroyed. Lugh was the man to do this, of course.
He stood, fascinated, watching Tara. He was not a fanciful man (the Longhands did not believe in fancies), but he felt as if it was a miasma rising from a swamp, a sickness and a corruption.
Because the Dark Ireland is waking …
He thought he could hear voices now; silvery, gentle voices, dark voices, that made you think you might be being watched. He remembered the ancient legends of the Guardians, the Brotherhood of Sorcerers who would serve any master if they were paid enough, and who would guard anything in the world if someone would employ them sufficiently profitably; he remembered as well that the Conablaiche and the Lad of the Skins were abroad in the world again.
What might be watching him from the shadows?
The thin light was casting curious shadows everywhere now, and Lugh blinked and rubbed his eyes, because just for a moment it had seemed that figures were appearing through the mists ahead of him. The swirling greyness shifted again, and the shadows flooded nearer, but after all there was nothing to see. Or was there? Had that been a silent watching figure just over there? Something dark and anonymous? Something that wore black armour and had a visored face, and who would not materialise unless a dark and terrible enchantment was spun … Were the Twelve Dark Lords close by?
And then the shadows moved again, and Lugh could see that there was nothing there at all, and that he was nearer now to Tara than he had thought, and after all it had only been a trick of the light.
He remembered that he was being extremely clever and extraordinarily subtle about all of this, and that it would be subtlety that would win this war. Ah, they would all of them be astonished at how well Lugh of the Longhand had done tonight. He would go very quietly now, and he would go very stealthily, and he would slink inside Tara, and he would find out quite a lot about Medoc.
And there was nothing at all to be afraid of.
CHAPTER NINE
Fergus had not been aware of the precise moment when the Lad of the Skins drew his soul from his body with the Knife of Light, but he had known a great coldness, and a sense of desolation, and an ab
andonment so complete that it had overwhelmed him, and for a time he had scarcely been aware of what was happening.
He had wanted to wrap his arms about his body for warmth, but he had not been able to move, and his vision had been blurred. He had tried to cry out, but something had smothered his cries, and he had wanted to reach out and clutch on to everything that was dear and familiar and real and safe.
But Calatin’s banqueting hall and the house in the forest had wavered and grown dim — As if I am seeing it through water, thought Fergus — and there had been a great heaviness within him so that it was difficult to breathe. He thought he was dying, and panic seized him. And then he remembered the piercing coldness of the Knife of Light slicing deep into his body, and the Lad’s evil greedy eyes and grinning mouth, and he knew that he was not dying, that this could be worse than death, for he was to suffer the soulless existence of all who become victims of the Knife of Light.
I shall never die and I shall never be released, and hence-forth I shall wander alone in the eternal light …
Black despair engulfed him, and a loneliness so absolute closed over his head that he felt himself drowning in it. Forever alone … From now on, I shall be forever alone …
The cold was within his heart now, and he knew it for the heartcold of the truly bereft. I shall never see my own world again, he thought. I shall never see Grainne.
The house was becoming smaller now and distant, and he had the impression that he was being drawn away from it, and drawn away from the living warm world he had known. For a breathspace he saw his own body; he thought that Taliesin and Fribble had carried it to a settle beneath a window, and he wanted to grasp at them, for they had been dear, good friends, and the knowledge that he would never see them again was scarcely to be borne. But the pull on his soulless mind was too strong now, and he felt himself being drawn up and up into a vast emptiness, and into the endless skies of infinity. He knew that he was being sucked into the Prison of Hostages, for it is to that great and aweful dwelling that is not quite in the world of Men but not quite out of it that all soulless ones must go. Panic threatened to engulf him again, and the terrible desolate coldness was like an icy vise about his heart, and he knew he had never been so completely alone.
There was the sensation of immense speed now; he thought the skies were rushing past him, and there was a whirling, dizzying feeling, as if he might be at the centre of a maelstrom. He remembered how the travellers and the seafarers who came to Tara had always told that at the centre of every whirlpool, at the heart of every tempest, is a great tranquillity, and he caught and held on to this thought.
He glimpsed the Gates then — Ornate and tipped with something that catches the light and gleams, he thought. And saw, within the Gates, glinting points of colour … the Gates of Paradise, studded with chalcedony and jasper, inlaid with firestones and cedarwood, rimmed with turquoise and moonstones … But these are not those Gates, thought Fergus, these are the Gates of a place reserved for those who are denied admittance to Paradise.
But the Gates were opening, and he could see that they were more beautiful and more majestic than anything he had ever seen or dreamed.
Sea-washed, sunset Gates … the Gates of Light, unbarred and ajar …
And then he was passing beneath the huge, towering Gates, and he saw how they stretched above him into infinity, and he felt the timelessness of the great Prison descend on him like a huge, unseen weight.
The ceaseless light closed all about him.
*
Forever in the light. Forever open and vulnerable to the never-ending light of the skies.
There had been some kind of vast domed hall as he passed through the Gates; he thought there had been colours within the light then, and he had received a dim impression of a far-off vaulted ceiling. From somewhere deep within his mind, he remembered the whispers of the great and terrible Hall of Light, through which the soulless one must journey before being allotted a resting place here. But the Hall of Light faded, and the impression of great elegance and immense silence and a drifting unfamiliar scent faded, and he was falling forward and there was some kind of cell waiting for him, and this was surely the end of everything, and this was surely all he could ever expect anywhere in the entire world …
He thought that he lost his hold on sanity for a time then; he knew, later, that the black despair and the agony of loneliness had closed about him fully, and for an unmeasurable time while his reason spun wildly out of control.
But the training that had been such a part of his life, the long hours of studying the Twelve Books of Honour for entry into the Fiana at the age of eleven, the days and the weeks spent schooling his mind so that all situations could be calmly appraised, came to his aid and, at length, exhausted and drained, Fergus began to look about him and assess this strange, out-of-the-world fortress.
He had thought, insofar as he had thought about it at all, that all prisons must be akin; that there must be stone cells, barred windows, grilles, gaolers, other prisoners close by.
But although he could see areas of hewn stonework that seemed to close him in, and although he could certainly see barred windows through which light streamed, there were no gaolers, and there were no other prisoners. There was only himself and the vast, endless mansion of the skies, and Fergus, used all of his life to human companionship, thought that this solitude would be more than he could bear. And then he remembered that it had to be borne, that there was no other choice, and that there would be no escape from this place.
Would there? Fergus knew the stories; he knew how it was whispered that once inside the Prison of Hostages no one ever returned to the world of Men, but to Fergus, who had led the Fiana from the age of eighteen, and who knew the secrets and the devices and the weaknesses of half the ancient fortresses in Ireland, no prison was ever sealed so utterly and so completely that there was not a way out of it.
He began to study this idea, and he was to think later (“When I could think sanely again,” he said) that this was one of the things that saved his reason.
There is no prison from which an initiate of the Fiana cannot escape.
It was not quite one of the codes of the Fiana, but it was very nearly so. Fergus, who had stormed castles and laid siege to fortresses and who knew the arts of infiltration as well as he knew the Twelve Books of Honour, found himself summoning every shred and every tag-end of legend and myth and lore ever whispered or recounted or imagined about the Prison.
For if there is the smallest hope of escape … if there is the merest chance that I could return to the world and to Grainne, I would tear this place down stone by stone.
He knew that escape would not be made by force, but, even so, his mind returned again and again to the grains and snippets of stories that had somehow (how?) permeated into the world of Men.
The Great Hall of Light through which the soulless one must first pass — yes, I came through that, thought Fergus. Great pouring swathes of golden light, and the far-off glint of blue and silver, as if there might after all be something solid and man-made within the Prison. And some kind of early judgment had there been? Yes! thought Fergus. Yes, as if I was being assessed for a place, a level, a grading here. This was unexpectedly encouraging, because it was familiar. Within every structured society, certainly at Tara and very definitely within the Fiana, there were strata, tiers, sections and subsections. So there’s a structured society here, is there? thought Fergus, and felt at once warmer and less alone.
And then, because it was inherent in his nature to question and appraise and assess, he continued his exploration of the threads of knowledge he possessed about the Prison.
The Twelve Chambers of the Blameless and the Praiseless — which is to say fools and idiots, thought Fergus caustically. Yes, that certainly comes next. I suppose that is where I am.
And there were others, places with exotic, sometimes meaningless names … the Vale of Mists … the Hall of Golden Columns … Yes, I know these, I have
heard them. He was concentrating furiously now, for, he thought, if I know of these places, then surely it must be because people have been able to talk of them. It must be because people have come out.
People have come out.
The knowledge gave him renewed confidence, and now the strange bizarre names came to him more easily. The Cage of Stars, the Lake of Darkness. The River of Souls which flowed nine times round the Prison. Was there a way out there? If I could find the River, I could ford it somehow, thought Fergus, his mind tumbling now with ideas and plans, and with half-forgotten memories. And there was the Star of the Poets, and surely there was —
Oh yes, thought Fergus, how could I have forgotten?
The Stone Hall of Judgment.
It was that through which he must pass next. But he did not know how long he would have to wait to do so.
It was this last that gave him pause, for, he was to say, “Although I had no knowledge of it — that place where the Twelve Judges sit — I believed that I had long since dreamed it, and I knew it for a place of great finality and immense power. Once inside the Stone Hall of Judgement, once subjected to the decision of the Twelve Stone Judges who pronounce on all Mortal creatures, I believed I should be beyond all hope of escape.”
And once that happened, Ireland was lost to him, for although he supposed Taliesin and Fael-Inis would continue the fight, he would never know its outcome. He would never see the world again. Far beyond and far above that, Grainne was lost to him. A bitter smile touched his lips at that, for hadn’t Grainne long since been lost? Hadn’t she been lost seven years ago, in the misty dawns and the drowsy afternoons? Hadn’t she been lost to him before even he had seen her.
Seven years. He had been the newly appointed Head of the Fiana, eighteen years old, heady with the power of it.
He had been the youngest ever to head the ancient, honourable Fiana; there had been seven years within its ranks only, and he had been intoxicated with the knowledge. Perhaps he had been arrogant, and certainly he had been imperious. But after all, he thought, after all, I was very young.
