A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  Étaín crossed herself … and stood. She emerged from the undergrowth and edged forward into the light, the bone fetishes on Grimnir’s satchel clacking with each step. The men stared, disbelieving. She could see in their eyes that they expected something rough and fearsome to step forth from the night. But this thin wisp of a thing? She was no different from their daughters back home—save for a worn-hilted seax that hung at her hip. Étaín kept her hand clear of the blade as she moved to closer to their fire.

  “Bleedin’ Christ!” This from the pox-scarred man. “She ain’t your feckin’ wolf-man, is she, Bran?”

  “Nay,” muttered the one called Bran, the silver-bearded elder. He scowled, shook his head, and looked past Étaín as though the true threat yet lurked in the red-streaked shadows.

  The pox-scarred man stared at her, sizing her up. “What are you doing out here all alone, girl? Lost your way?”

  “I’m not lost,” Étaín replied; she looked to Bran. “Are you King Brian’s men?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  She noticed, then, that the Irishman with the mutilated ears—who bore more than a passing similarity to the scarred man—had crept nearer. Étaín shivered. He had the same look of base lust in his eyes that she’d seen on the face of the crooked-back dvergr, Náli. He licked his lips, muttered something in Gaelic that brought a snarl of anger to Bran’s lips.

  “Enough!”

  “Enough, yourself, old man!” he spat. “Your balls might be shriveled up and useless, but mine ain’t! All’s fair, eh, Da?”

  Étaín drew herself up; though fear gibbered through her brain, filling her mind with scenes of brutality and rape, she nevertheless stood her ground and made herself meet each man’s gaze. Her eyes were the cold blue of a winter sky. When she spoke, she heard the scrape of flint in her voice. “I am no man’s property, and if you think to take me … well, you’d best make your peace with the Almighty.” She let her hand rest lightly on the hilt of Grimnir’s seax. The blade drew their attention—as did the rolled-up shirt of iron rings, the yellowed finger bones, and the long-haired scalps decorating the battered satchel she carried. She saw uncertainty stamped on Bran’s face, saw it mirrored in the gray eyes of the pox-scarred man. But that third Gael, with the cropped ears, responded by holding his hands apart in mock surrender.

  “A good speech, girl,” he said. “But you’d best give me that pigsticker. Wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself with it.”

  He took a step toward Étaín, then another. With the third step, a malicious smile twisted his lips …

  And became a rictus of fear as a deep and thunderous howl reverberated beneath the canopy of trees. He had time enough to grasp the hilt of his sword before the wolfhound, Conán, sprang from the darkness and dragged him down. Man and hound skidded across the weed-choked clearing in one snarling, screaming knot. And with an echoing cry of alarm, the pox-scarred man lunged for his spear … but never completed the movement.

  The ash shaft slipped from fingers suddenly bereft of will and clattered on the ground; he stared, eyes wide and goggling, at the rune-etched length of cold iron which Étaín pressed expertly to his throat—though she did not recall drawing it. The one called Bran held himself aloof, watching.

  “Conán,” she said, her voice betraying none of the emotion coursing through her body. Even her hand held itself steady. Where was the whimpering woman who had pleaded for God’s intervention barely a fortnight before, in a cave on the road to Roskilde? Gone, she hoped. “Don’t kill him, you great hairy heathen.”

  Conán backed off the fallen man, who spat curses and clawed for his sword hilt, tangled now in his cloak. It mattered nothing to him that he was largely unharmed; his pride bled, and only blood spilled in return could stanch such a wound.

  “Bleedin’ Christ! Filthy whore! Someone kill that feckin’ beast! Bran! Hold her! I—”

  Before he could finish, before he could so much as free his hilt from the offending folds of linen, Bran stepped in and delivered a vicious kick to the side of the young Irishman’s head; not enough to hurt him but more than enough to leave him senseless. And the murderous look in the old man’s eyes warned Étaín, as well, not to do something foolish.

  “He is your son?” Étaín said. The pox-scarred man nodded, careful not to slice his own throat. “I told you I mean you no harm. And I mean that still. But if he tries to touch me again, I swear he will not live long enough to regret it. Do you understand?”

  “I … I h-hear you, girl,” the pox-scarred man replied.

  “Aye, none here will touch you,” Bran said. “An’ you have my word on it.”

  Étaín backed away; carefully, she sheathed Grimnir’s seax. Conán came and sat at her side, tongue lolling. Though she ran her fingers through the wolfhound’s scruff, her eyes never left those of the silver-bearded elder. “Your name is Bran?”

  He nodded. “Bran of the Uí Garrchon,” he said. “Aye. Once an oath-man of Maelmorda, but no longer. That’s Ruadh Mór of the Ua Feghaile, there, and the sorry bastard with the axe-trimmed ears, yonder, is Dunlaing mac Ruadh.”

  “I am Étaín,” she replied. “And I need your help, Bran of the Uí Garrchon.”

  15

  Incense spewed from copper censers; through the coiling smoke, Kormlada watched Bjarki from her vantage in the shadowed gallery. Unaware of her scrutiny, Half-Dane sat hunched over a scrying table, as still as a cenotaph carved from whalebone and gristle. He had sat there since sunset, murmuring ritual phrases over and again in a guttural tongue, while he focused the whole of his ferocious intellect on a rune-etched dish brimming with black water drawn from the Liffey. She watched as the hours crept by; watched as the costly smoke wove a tracery of hypnotic shapes above his bowed head—a phantom landscape of serrated peaks dominated by a single windswept precipice …

  And with a start, she realized she could put a name to it: Carraig Dubh.

  “Nothing!” Bjarki rose suddenly and flung the scrying table aside. The bowl—ancient fire-blackened alabaster—struck the floor and shattered like glass. The sound drew Draugen from hiding, fell-eyed and axe in hand.

  “I cannot find him!” Bjarki roared. “Something hides him from my art! The runes, the entrails, the seiðhjallr … all useless!”

  Draugen only shrugged. “And so? Why waste yourself with this witchery?”

  Half-Dane looked askance at his grim thegn, as though the man had gone softheaded. “Why? Because he is a thorn that festers beneath my skin, that’s why!” Bjarki kicked the ruin of the scrying table; cursing, he ground the fragments of the dish beneath his heel as he paced back and forth like a caged lion. After a moment, he regained a measure of calm. “The Romans told a tale about a fearsome warrior whose hide was made proof against blade or blow when his mother dipped him into the river of the underworld—all save for a single spot on his heel, no bigger than the bitch’s thumb. The warrior’s name came to rival Death, itself. And he would have risen higher still had some jealous godling not revealed his weakness to his enemies. A poisoned arrow ended the warrior’s ambitions.” Bjarki stopped and made a savage gesture. “That bastard, out there—that wretched, conniving little niðingr who has snuffled at my shadow since the days of Hróarr—he is a poisoned arrow shot by the Sly One, himself! But, you are right. When art fails, let craft take its turn at the oar. His kind cleaves to the wild places. Send riders up into the moors of Cualu. Have them search as far as the deep hollows of Ranelagh—”

  “No,” Draugen said—and Kormlada reckoned him the only man alive who could gainsay Half-Dane. “Do nothing. Weave your plots and lay your snares for the day when the spear-shattering brings Mac Cennétig’s crown into your reach.”

  “Wait for the arrow to strike? Wait to feel the bite of its venom?”

  “No, sharpen your steel and bide. The skrælingr will come to you. And unlike this warrior your Romans boast of, you will have a shield ready to take the arrow before it can strike.”

  Half-Dane gave a de
risive snort. “Be your bait, you mean! That goes down ill with me, Draugen. Besides, what if the men of Munster have him? He could be a potent ally…”

  Kormlada had heard enough. She withdrew from the gallery, ascending the stairs to the pinnacle of Cuarán’s Tower. The hem of her brocaded nightdress whispered on the cold stone.

  Carraig Dubh. Her brows furrowed. She hadn’t been to that place since she was a girl—since that bloody night when her mother had initiated her into the cult of the Mórrígan, the goddess all the women of her line had given their oaths to—but she recalled it down to the last detail. Bjarki could not see that wind-scoured spike of rock, so plainly drawn in the drifting smoke; for all his art, he was blind to it. Carraig Dubh, where Nechtan makes his lair. The Tuatha must have him, that’s why the fomórach was beyond Bjarki’s sight …

  The Witch of Dubhlinn stopped at the center of her opulent chambers, one arm outstretched. From the sill of the open window, the raven Cruach gave a crake of greeting. The bird flexed his wings; talons scraped stone as he lifted into the air to settle lightly upon her proffered arm. He cocked his head. In their black depths, the raven’s eyes glittered with an ancient and inscrutable light.

  “Cruach, my love, take me to Nechtan,” she said. “Take me to Carraig Dubh. I must speak with him in person. I must see this creature with my own eyes.”

  The giant raven stared at her for a moment; in that gaze, Kormlada felt a curious sense of judgment, like that of a gatekeeper pondering whether or not to let some shoeless vagabond into his demesne. Then, in answer, Cruach gave forth a weird and lilting sound, like a flute tuned by no human hand. It drifted out the window. Before the echo of it died, a dozen smaller black shapes darted through the casement. Lesser ravens mixed with rooks, carrion crows, and magpies; dozens became hundreds, and the croak and caw of their harsh voices created a cacophony of discordant sound. Cruach took flight, the breeze from his heavy wings ruffling her hair.

  The birds circled her—a black wall of feathers, swirling darkness; closer they came, until her chambers vanished behind a veil shorn from the fabric of night. The Witch of Dubhlinn closed her eyes …

  … And felt her perceptions shift. Gone were the familiar scents of precious incense and tallow, warm wood and beeswax, damp stone and dust; in their place she could smell bracken and heather, rotting sedge grass and peat … and something else, something rank and musky like the stench of a cornered beast. Gone were the carpets underfoot and the sense of being enclosed. Kormlada opened her eyes as the veil of darkness around her dissipated, and found herself at the edge of the precipice of Carraig Dubh. Stars wheeled overhead; stretching out beneath her, through serried ranks of pine and oak soughing in the faint breeze, she could see the plain of Dubhlinn as far as the peninsula of Howth. But even as she made to turn, to look upon that ancient standing stone known as the Rock of Brule, a pale hand snaked from the darkness and seized her by the neck. It exerted no pressure but simply held her there, where the slightest nudge might propel her over the edge and to her doom.

  Such was the steel in Kormlada’s spine that she did not flinch.

  “Daughter of Murchada,” a solemn voice whispered in her ear. “Why do you intrude? Did I summon you? Speak not too loudly.”

  “No, Nechtan,” she whispered in reply. “I come of my own free will.” The hand that grasped her by the neck spun her about so she might see her captor.

  Nechtan stood a head taller than she but was thin to the point of emaciation; he wore a hauberk of overlapping silver scales, each one masterfully wrought in the shape of a raven’s feather. Beneath it he sported frayed silken brocades in every shade of moonlight. In Nechtan’s translucent skin, in his pale hair and hollowed cheeks, Kormlada could see the kinship with her mother, for they were born of the same womb. But where her mother’s eyes were as dark as the space between the stars, Nechtan’s were a deep and ancient green—veined like the leaf of an oak, and shining with the alien light of the Otherworld.

  Those eyes transfixed her. In their emerald depths she saw her own death writ plain, should she answer with anything less than the unvarnished truth. “And why have you come?”

  “The fomórach,” she said.

  “What of it?”

  “I wish to see it for myself.”

  Nechtan chuckled, a sound as soft as a knife’s edge on stone. “Do you, daughter of Murchada. Then, by all means.” With exaggerated care, Nechtan moved aside; his long fingers remained curled around the nape of her neck—which, Kormlada realized, made her part of a glamour he had woven.

  “He will see us as nothing,” Nechtan said in answer to her unspoken question. “A patch of deeper night. Our voices, nothing more than the rustle of insects. Look there, in the shadow of the Brule Stone.”

  Kormlada saw a figure crouched there, murky and indistinct. “Can we move closer?”

  Nechtan obliged her. Slowly, they approached the stone.

  “Where did it come from, this beast?”

  “Who can say? When the world was young, their kind came from the north in black-prowed wolf ships. Some said the Northern gods drove them out, but I believe they came simply to loot and burn. They cannot create, you see, only destroy, and they are not content save when they breathe the fume and wrack of war.”

  “But our people defeated them, did they not?”

  Nechtan stopped; Kormlada felt his mind wander back through the centuries. When he spoke again, his voice was distant and tinged with deep melancholy. “Not at first. Peace had made us complacent. The fomóraig came upon us at unawares, protected by a fog called forth by their vile chieftain, Balor of the Eye. Only after he and his wretched followers had laid waste to the green vales beneath the Hill of Slane did we of the Tuatha gird our loins for war. Lugh of the Long Arms, my kinsman, led the chase—the fomóraig were laden with booty and slaves and eager to get back to their ships. But we caught up with them on the plain of Mag Tuiredh, and slew them by the thousands. Lugh himself killed their accursed chieftain and cast his head into the sea.”

  “So, this one has returned for…?”

  “My amusement,” Nechtan said. “Behold, daughter of Murchada … the enemy of our people.”

  Kormlada saw the crouching figure more clearly, now—a figure as hard and savage as Nechtan was ethereal. Naked to the waist and clad in a grimy kilt, it cradled a broom in its knotted arms, no doubt ensorcelled to look like a spear; eyes like sullen embers glared out through a curtain of stringy black hair, rife with fetishes of bone and silver. Some dark thought crossed its mind, causing the hard line of its lips to skin back in a serrated snarl. Like a wolf, she thought, baring its fangs at an enemy. It muttered something in a tongue she did not understand.

  “It looks … familiar,” Kormlada said, her disquiet at its appearance growing.

  A flicker of amusement crossed Nechtan’s pale brow. “I doubt it not. It is in the structure of his cheekbones, you see? In the sharpness of his nose. Give this wretch a beard like a thatch of tarry weeds and the familial resemblance would only increase.”

  Kormlada took an involuntary step back, nearly breaking Nechtan’s glamour. She gasped as though the creature had raised its hand against her. “Bjarki! It looks like Bjarki! But … h-how? How is that possible?”

  “I imagine a Danish whore spread her thighs for silver, not caring if the thing that left its seed in her was man or fomórach. Your Half-Dane’s blood is so diluted not even the mná sidhe take note of him. But this … this is a hate of the Elder World, a spawn of Balor, himself … not some half-thing who plays games with Ériu’s mortal thrones.”

  Kormlada stirred, sloughing off the shock of recognition. “What will you do with it?”

  “What does the cat do with the mouse?”

  “Must you kill it?” Kormlada held up a hand to forestall the suspicions brewing in the Tuatha’s eerie gaze. “Long have I sought some bit of leverage over Bjarki, and ever have I come up empty-handed. Until now. He fears this one, though I do not know precise
ly why. The war with that old fool Mac Cennétig will soon end and Bjarki will triumph. After that, he will be impossible to dislodge. My son and my idiot brother will be his puppets and he will rule Ériu.”

  “And if Mac Cennétig wins this war of yours?”

  She gave Nechtan a hard look. “Fall fair or fall foul, his naked rabble of Gaels will break themselves on the iron spears of the Norse. No, it is only a question of who will rule in the aftermath, Bjarki Half-Dane or—”

  “Or Kormlada,” Nechtan finished for her.

  She acknowledged his recognition of her ambitions with a slight bow. “Here is the weapon I have long desired. I understand your need to slay it, but could you not put an enchantment on it, instead? Something more than a simple glamour. A geis, perhaps?”

  “The last of the fomóraig, enslaved for eternity,” Nechtan said, brows drawing together in thought. “The notion has some appeal, I admit. But such an enchantment … it will not be easy.”

  “But can it be done?”

  Nechtan’s otherworldly eyes narrowed; a malicious smile spread across his bone-gaunt face as he gathered the shadows about him. “Oh, it can be done … especially if the fomórach is dead.”

  16

  As the night waned and the stars overhead paled with the coming dawn, the three Irishmen left their camp—with Étaín in tow—and ascended the south flank of Carraig Dubh. They left their ponies hobbled and tied, their fire banked, their goods protected by the snoring bulk of the wolfhound, Conán. He would be gone ere they returned, or so Étaín had said; for Dunlaing, who yet nursed ribs and ego equally bruised, it was good riddance. The dour young Irishman walked point, picking his way carefully through the thinning forest, the stony ground underfoot becoming steeper and more treacherous as they neared the summit. None of the Irishmen had proper war gear—neither hauberks nor helms nor the round wood-and-leather shields favored by the Gael—but they moved in silence, and stealth was likely their greatest asset.