No! His mind formed the word, then he said it aloud.
“No!”
Still preternaturally alert, his eyes scanned the brown carpet of oak leaves laid down by the gnarled, twisted old trees all around him. He saw acorns. Where he came from, they fed pigs. But they would feed men, also. He picked one up and smacked it with a rock. The shell broke, and he ate the nut. It was oddly sweet, and he remembered that not all acorns were bitter.
He easily found five or six more and broke them open. He soon was well on his way to a good meal, when the soft muttering of the oak leaves told him the thing was approaching, moving deliberately through the trees, and he must flee.
But he knew then he need not die without a fight.
Twice that day he doubled back into the oak wood to collect more acorns, putting them inside his shirt next to his skin. At dusk, when the thing was quiescent, he made another trip, this time stripping off his shirt to use it as a collection bag. He carried a few pounds back to his bed under the holly bush. Between the acorns and the meat he’d salvaged from the fawn, he went to sleep with a full stomach for the first time in a week.
But he woke in the morning with a vile taste in his mouth and discovered, when he turned to rise, that his hand was swollen again and he couldn’t use it. Water from the pool revived him a little, and he found he could look past the screen of bushes on the other side and into the long aisles of a stand of pines behind. The tall trunks, like earth-colored pillars, stretched away into the gray haze of first light. Nothing moved.
He soaked his hand in the cold water, wary, his eyes searching the forest for the moment of the thing’s first coming. The light brightened, but only a mist moved among the trees. There was a blessed silence. Above the trees, the sky was clouded over.
The blustery wind moved the tallest trees in a continuous, agitated sigh, and big raindrops troubled the surface of the pool. The skulls stared up at him with their usual indifference.
When there is no sun, perhaps it must sleep.
He lay still, resting his cheek against the rocks at the edge of the pool until the shirt covering his back was soaked. Then he went to a nearby pine that offered some shelter from the shower and fell asleep again, with his back against the tiled bark.
He woke near noon, or he was sure it must be noon, since he could just faintly see the orb of the sun, grayed by the fleeing storm clouds moving past above. He began to think, putting his needs in order in his mind.
Then he rose again, refixed the sling to his injured hand, and returned to the deer carcass. He managed to scavenge more hide, sinew, and bone. He went back to the pool.
Something, a badger perhaps, had dug a burrow near the holly bush. A little widening of the entrance made it a safe place to cache the acorns and his other useful objects.
He visited the spot where the rock had exploded and found a good many shards with sharp edges. He fashioned a fish spear from one of the long leg bones of the deer and went hunting.
A half hour later, he was crouched on a fallen tree near the bog, watching the shadows of carp moving over the bottom of the sometimes rain-ruffled pool. It had been two days since his meal of raw deer meat, and he didn’t think the acorns would see him through another day, however many there were. But his very desperation made his hands tremble as he tried to select his target.
Just as one fish moved into position against the green-coated, submerged wood of the tree trunk he knelt on, another flurry of rain troubled the wet forest around him and the water. The silvery light changed, and he saw his own face reflected in the still water against the gray sky. Pale, thin, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, almost as dead looking as the skulls nailed to the trees warding the monster in this lost place of torment.
He felt detached from himself, his struggle.
But then his image wavered as the fish rose from the bottom and approached the surface. He swung his spear down hard. At first, he thought he’d scored a clean miss. But then the fish floated to the top of the pond, gills still working, with a hole punched through its head. He reached out, got it behind the gills, and pulled it in. He reminded himself to put a barb on the fish spear. He knew he would live.
He ate the fish raw, as he had the fawn. He had a lot of work to do.
The acorns, some hazelnuts, and a lot of berries he found ripening on vines near the cliffs completed his meal. Soaking the hand in water this morning and the extra hours of sleep had helped bring the swelling down to manageable proportions. So, with the hand in its sling again, he made a circuit of the plateau.
As he feared, the cliffs were sheer as far down as he could see. But there were some places where natural chimneys occurred. A man could go down a long way using his hands and feet to hold his position against the rocks. But he would need two strong hands to negotiate them. It wasn’t possible right now.
In a few other places, rock falls created fans of scree that broke the sheer rock face into a steep slope. But none were anywhere near the top. If he could make a rope, he might be able to slide down and reach one. From there he could climb down among the broken boulders until he got to the bottom.
The storm clouds stretched from horizon to horizon. But he felt a certain fear that at sunset, light might slip beneath the cloud shield and bring the thing to dangerous, if temporary, life again. He didn’t want to be in the pine wood near the center of the plateau if that happened, so he continued his walk along the rim.
At last he reached the skull grown into the birch tree. As before, he saluted it.
When he did, the light brightened alarmingly, and he noticed that one of the branches hung almost horizontal, pointing into a grove of poplars at the cliff’s edge. He looked more closely at it and noticed that it was in flower.
The birch, willow, oak, ash, and poplar bloom, but many simply don’t notice their curious, nude flowers. They don’t need to make a show of themselves, for they are not pollinated by birds or insects, but they give their generative powder into the spring winds before their own leaves appear or any other flowers push through the wet, mucky earth or snow-filled defiles of the colder lands. They are, in their austere way, the first to recognize the end of winter and the beginning of nature’s period of joy. And often they cast their pollen under gray skies and amid sluicing rains long, long before the orchards bloom. They study to ensure the continuance of life even in the shadows of a killing frost.
But it is summer here, Arthur thought. And no tree should be blooming.
The branch was laden with moisture from the rain. It soaked the catkins of the male flowers, and they glowed like tiny silver wands.
I am Arthur, he thought. But there was nothing else to tie the knowledge to. He couldn’t remember who Arthur was.
I am Arthur, he thought, and I don’t know what that means.
But the branch pointed the way, so he went, wondering as he did if the poplar grove was a trap that would betray him into a treacherous spot where he might lose his footing and fall over the cliff.
But it didn’t. When he was past the first ring of trees, the grove opened out, facing a pile of boulders at the very edge of the abyss. Beyond the barrier of dark stone, he saw the sweep of the misty valley, and beyond, more mountains wrapped in gray cloud.
Through the gauzy cloud, the glowing orb of the sun shimmered darkly, now bright, now hidden by the vast inchoate shapes of moisture. These rocks were blackened, and they looked as though they had endured the unleashed wrath of forces so powerful they were not even dimly comprehensible to the young man gazing at them in amazement.
What could liquefy and twist the very bones of the earth herself?
He could not imagine the terror of such a weapon. The rocks were old, worn, cracked by the water and cold, expanded by the summer heat. The flow of once-liquid stone had begun to crumble. Lichens, part plant, part who knows what, almost as old as life itself, had crusted the surfaces. They were green, black, and rust. And over the centuries, the spring had returned. It flowed from a crack in the roc
k near the apex of the monument.
Arthur knew it was a monument, for the water fanned out over the stone and the letters of a script he’d never seen before stood out, black against the gray.
He’d seen various alphabets—Greek, Latin, runes, and even ogam. He knew this must be another.
But he had little opportunity to speculate, because the trick of the light that made the script visible for a few seconds passed quickly and the letters vanished into an ebony shimmer that marked the passage of water over the shadowed stone.
The water trickled onto more shattered stone at the foot of the spring and vanished as strangely as it had come into an underground passage that must carry it toward the pool at the center of the plateau. He crossed the few last steps to the spring and put his hand, his injured hand, into the silent water pouring down the rock.
She had said once, “Such things heal. That is why they are. I can discern only one reason they exist: to heal us of our grievous wounds.”
The water diverted by the touch of his hand flowed across the back, past and over the puncture wounds and down his forearm to drip to the ground from his bent elbow.
Cold! Cold! he thought. It was like the water dripping from the big icicles that formed at the edge of the roof after a winter storm.
His body jerked as a spasm ran through it. Involuntarily, his fingers spread, pressing his hand against the cold stone and sending an unbroken flow of water over the swollen back of his hand.
Time stopped.
He turned his head to one side and saw her.
I thought, his mind whispered into the silence, I thought you were only an old story.
She was green, gray, black, and russet, the colors of autumn and springtime. Green as the fruiting tree. A thousand shades, textures, and shimmer of gray clouds, storms, falling water, rain. The whisper and throb of the winter sea. Black as the opening of a well, a forest pool over dead leaves, the black lake of bogs, the black north wind, as the eyes of death in an empty skull.
Russet, red with its mixture of gray, green, and black. The dead leaves of autumn, the first new leaves of spring, a coiled fern frond before it unrolls, the red-orange casing of a bud before it unfurls its starburst of beauty. The tips of an another, thick with life-giving pollen, ready to embrace the moist receptive she.
God, she was old. Older than the other brides formed of flowers.
She was the wind, and he felt her caress his cheek with those oh-so-soft fingers. And he knew she had first opened her eyes in a dawn world where mankind was not even an idea, presided over vast forests cropped by monsters, and felt every spring. It is always spring somewhere. The ancient trees gave their souls into the wind and, borne by it, yielded up their life and created the poetry of the forests.
“Drink,” was the only command. And he obeyed, quenching his thirst at the icy spring.
The Flower Bride will make a man a king. He remembered the words, without remembering who spoke them.
When he looked again, she was gone, and far beyond the hazy valley beneath, he saw the shadowed orb of the sun slip behind the lowest ridge of a mountain. Then he turned and walked back toward the birch that partially imprisoned—or was it protected?—the skull.
He was returned into time, and hurried back toward his bed beneath the holly bush. His hand seemed much improved by being bathed in the spring water.
Arthur, he thought. Whatever that means. The past is coming back.
He spoke aloud to himself. “I’m not sure I want it to. But will or nill, it comes.” He paused to look up at the first stars appearing above the forest.
“My hand is healing,” he said. “Soon I can use a bow drill.”
ELEVEN
HE WOKE ME AT DAWN. I WAS STILL VERY weary and looked up at her through matted eyelashes.
She placed her fingers on her lips. “Be quiet. It comes to hunt fish in the pool. You must know your opponent.”
She brought me to the east-facing doors and pointed out to the garden. I was shocked. It was hard to see. Striped from the belly up in yellow and green, it seemed to melt into the sunlit forest beyond.
I will try to tell you what it looked like, but since I have never seen anything like it before or since, this is difficult. It had the three-toed feet, as I had seen the prints of earlier. The hips were slung under the body, not spradled like a lizard’s. It looked like it could run fast. The upright body did most resemble a lizard, with its green and yellow stripes beginning at a line in the center of the torso and curving up over the back. It had two long arms. They were thin but muscular, with four claws where we have fingers and a large, opposable claw where we have a thumb.
The head, neck, and face were a nightmare, very much like a snake’s but you cannot see a snake’s teeth unless it opens its mouth. I know. Maeniel caught one, a poisonous one, an adder, and showed me the fangs and forked tongue. The tongue is a sensory organ, he told me, and can measure heat and cold. The fangs have the poison, and he even showed me where it drips from the fangs before he released the creature.
He said it cursed him in detail as it flowed back into the rocks where he found it. Snakes don’t have much in the way of voices. They communicate by motion and the subtle patterns of their bodies in the dust. They also speak from the scales when the light falls on them in certain ways.
Maeniel doesn’t speak much Snake. But he knows a few words. He said this one ill-wished him and let fly with a string of rhythmic obscenities. Very peculiar obscenities, he said.
I asked him how peculiar. But he wouldn’t tell me, only shook his head and said, “You’re too young.”
I told him I thought it should have appreciated his mercy in letting it go. But he told me mercy was too complex a concept for a reptile. “They see things very much in black and white, kill or be killed, eater and meal, bite or be bitten. Don’t look to them for equivocation. Simply prove you are stronger and move on. Don’t eat them, either. The flesh is vile to all but birds, who savor them.”
This thing’s face resembled a snake’s except that its eyes looked forward and the fangs protruded from the mouth around the jawline. As I watched, one hand and arm dropped into the pond and came out with a wiggling fish, which it immediately popped into a mouth awesomely well furnished with teeth.
The long torso of the thing was a prime target.
“The belly,” I whispered. “Are the ribs where they are on a human? It is upright like one.”
“Yes, they are,” she said.
“The gut is a dangerous spot, but very sure in the end. Almost every deer or horse I ever killed bled to death from there—but sometimes it took days. That’s one reason I became such a good shot. I got tired of running them down. Only in this instance, I will be doing the running and it will be chasing me. I must be sure I see it in time. With those colors, I might have looked directly at it yesterday and not known what I was looking at.”
“It is quite likely that you did,” she answered. “You will need your strength. Not today. Risderd is still too weak. But tomorrow.”
Morgana lived in an old-fashioned ring fort. It was set in the middle of a lake, so close to the coast that its lower environs were sometimes invaded by salt water during the winter storms. It was on a salmon river, and the fish were the staple diet of the people living near her. They took them all year round.
Morgana was as Igrane. Sovereignty of her people, the Silures, was to be found between her legs. But there was no king. Uther was high king, and she initiated the chieftains of the wild, the rulers of it—the warrior societies. They passed through her bed, a sought-after honor. She was known so long as a mighty sorceress that even churchmen were afraid of her curses.
When they reached her estates, that’s what the Saxons would call them, Ena thought. None of these wild people seemed to know anything about cities. Ena was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.
She reflected that she’d only thought she was frightened when she had to face Uther and tell him his son was gone
. She hadn’t known what fear was until they entered this oak forest. Never had she seen such trees. They were monstrous, and the road wove in and out among them for miles. Huge, stark, squat oaks with sprawling branches that blocked the sun.
They had left level ground behind long ago, and the road not only went in and out among the giant trees, it moved up and down disconcertingly. Sometimes they would top a rise and see the massed green shining clouds of treetops and perhaps an emerald and gold water meadow surrounding an azure lake.
Someone always seemed to live on the lakes. Natural and artificial islands abounded, and they held the round houses Cai’s people built. They were much more comfortable within than the Saxons gave them credit for being. But it made her uneasy that they simply incorporated the massive trees that grew hereabouts. And the tree’s well-being was as carefully looked after as that of the livestock. It received, in addition to water and sacrifices, feedings of compost, usually buried among the roots and covered by river cobbles that formed the floors near the roots. The house roofs served as kitchen gardens. Vegetables, herbs, onions, and greens were grown on the still-green turf that covered them.
At the first stop, the king’s oath men began leaving. “Most of their families live nearby,” Cai explained. “And some …” His speech slowed. “I can’t … I’m not sure … how can I tell you?”
“Tell me what?” she asked.
He saw how dilated her pupils were. They were standing just inside the door of the first house, where they planned to spend the night. And he saw her eyes had drifted to the rafters. He took the heads for granted. All established families of every rank had them. But the custom of taking heads was new to her.
“They don’t have any odor,” she said. But he could see she was upset.
“No. They are treated with cedar oil,” he said.
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