Dark Moon of Avalon

by Anna Elliott

She’d discovered nothing of real value to them, but she’d found herself wondering about whoever had built this place and lived here. The god killers, as her grandmother would have called them. And standing in the remains of what must once have been the kitchen and looking at a huge clay bread oven—or finding in the garden a cracked marble urn, with a circle of marble dancing girls supporting the central bowl—Isolde wondered what the men and women who had eaten the bread from the oven or planted flowers in the urn had thought about this wild, wet, mist-filled landscape. Had they been certain that they’d conquered it, with their heavy marble buildings and arches built in stone? Or had they been frightened sometimes by the power of the gods they’d driven away—the small, nameless gods of the rocks and trees and streams?

  Now, sitting once again beside Hereric, Isolde rubbed the stiff muscles at the base of her neck, then took up the spoon and bowl of broth, beginning yet another tale in a low, soothing murmur.

  “Cuchulain replied shortly that he was worn and harassed with war, and had no mind to bother with women, beautiful or no. Then it shall go hard with thee, the maiden said. And I shall be about thy feet as an eel in the bottom of the ford. Then she vanished from sight, and he saw but a crow sitting on a branch of a tree. And Cuchulain knew that it was the Morrigan he had seen.”

  And then Isolde stopped short, hearing her own words and realizing that she’d unconsciously begun the story of Cuchulain and the death maiden once more. She gritted her teeth together so hard her jaw ached. Then, deliberately, she drew in her breath and began again, this time a silly, comic tale about a pair of dimwitted brother giants, Idris and Bronwen, who lived so far away from each other—one in the south, and one in the north—that they decided to build towers from which they could stand and shout at each other across the miles. Isolde could dimly remember laughing at the story when she was very small. And childish or no, it was better than beginning a tale of curses and doomed foretellings yet again.

  Hereric’s head only lolled back, though, when she touched the spoon to his mouth, the broth dribbling uselessly out and down his chin. After a dozen or more tries, Isolde let out her breath and sat back again, tears of frustration pricking her eyes. Out of habit, though, she kept on with the tale, even as she watched the labored rise and fall of Hereric’s chest and tried to think what next to do.

  “It happened, though, that the giant brothers had only one hammer to use in building their towers. They would throw it across the mountains between them, taking turns in the work.”

  And then she stopped dead, her skin prickling, wondering if she’d only imagined what she’d just felt. She drew in her breath and started again, keeping her eyes fixed on Hereric’s brow.

  “And since Bronwen was a selfish giant—and slow witted, as all giants are—he would call for the hammer back as soon as he’d thrown it to Idris, his brother.”

  Isolde broke off again. She had felt it—she was sure of it this time. Just a faint, a very faint stirring, like a spring plant pushing its way up through the winter-hardened soil. Isolde remembered what she’d told Trystan. That Hereric was in pain and didn’t know why. That he knew he wasn’t alone, but was afraid to wake.

  Since the Sight had flooded back to her, she’d used it to feel pain, to read thoughts if it might help her understand where an injury lay. She’d never tried to speak to any of the men in her care that way. Now, though, she took Hereric’s hand and closed her eyes. Since he’d seemed to respond to the story, she went on, her voice a low murmur as she tried to reach out in her mind towards that faint stirring she’d felt from Hereric.

  At first she met with only blackness, blackness and the crushing pain. But then she felt it again. A soft, pitiful cry in the dark, like the call of a motherless lamb lost on the moor. Isolde tightened her grasp on Hereric’s hand, as though that might help her hold on to the spiderweb-fine strand of connection between them.

  Isolde drew in her breath, keeping her eyes still closed and blocking out everything else—the sobbing sound of the wind outside, the patter of rain on the roof, Cabal’s soft breathing from the blanket she’d laid out for his bed, the musty smell of damp leaves and smoke from the fire. With every part of her concentration, she focused on reaching out towards Hereric’s faint, stirring cry, feeling as though she tried to catch mist in her clenched hands. Sweat prickled on her ribs and back under her gown, but she kept on, stretching out a hand towards Hereric in her mind, focusing every scrap of her energy on twining into her outstretched thoughts what she would tell Hereric if he could hear. I know there’s pain, but you are brave and strong. Take a step towards me, I know you can.

  Without any conscious decision, she went on with the tale, working to pour into her spoken voice what she wanted Hereric to hear. The message made an odd counterpoint to the comic words of the tale, but she kept speaking.

  “Finally, Idris lost his temper, and threw the hammer back at his brother with all his strength.”

  Be brave.

  “And where it landed, you can still see a scar in the earth, called Pant y cawr, the giant’s hollow.”

  This is not your time to die.

  “And without a hammer, the two foolish giants couldn’t go on with the building, and so in fits of temper, kicked down the two towers they’d begun.”

  Here, take my hand.

  “And all that’s left now are two heaps of boulders, one in the south, and one in the north.”

  Isolde spoke the final words, and then a shock went through her, like a sudden gust of wind or the beat of a mighty drum that echoed through her every nerve. She gasped and opened her eyes. And found that Hereric’s eyes were open as well, bleary and pain-dulled, still, but fixed on her face. For a long moment, their eyes held, and Isolde sat absolutely still, not even letting herself breathe. And then, very slowly, a spreading smile curved Hereric’s mouth and he let out a sigh like a tired, contented child.

  ISOLDE SAT IN THE OPEN DOORWAY, looking out at the rain-wet, overgrown garden. The sky had cleared, and the moon and stars were out, silvering the tangled vines and the branches of the trees. I ought to be thankful, she thought. And she was, if cautiously so—thankful and grateful, both, as well as so bone tired she could hardly make her eyes focus.

  Bit by bit and with her help, Hereric had drunk a cupful of the broth and kept it down, had taken wine mixed with poppy and fallen asleep. The danger wasn’t yet entirely passed. His face was still flushed with fever, the bones protruding sharply through the skin after all the flesh he’d lost in the last weeks. But for the first time since they’d taken the broken arm off, Isolde felt hope, at least, that she’d made the right choice.

  Now, though, with Cabal and Hereric both asleep inside, Isolde felt a cold, hard weight pressing into her chest. Two days, Trystan had said when he left, or three at the most, and he would return. This, though, was the end of the fourth day, and still he’d not come back. And with part of her fear for Hereric lifted, the knowledge that Trystan might well never return at all was growing harder to ignore.

  Isolde leaned her head against the door frame, watching a pair of black-winged bats swooping and fluttering just above the trees. She drew in a breath, let it out, then rose and walked to where a pool of rainwater had collected atop one of the garden’s broken paving stones.

  She hadn’t told Trystan about Marche before he’d gone—hadn’t warned him that his father was seeking him throughout the land. Remembrance of her recurring nightmare had slithered over her and stopped her tongue every time she’d so much as thought of mentioning Marche’s name. Or rather, remembrance of what Trystan would surely despise her for if he knew.

  He might be sorry for her—because of his own memories. Because of who his mother was. But however much against her will, she’d given herself to Marche. To save her life, had lain with him for one horrible night. She wouldn’t blame Trystan if he saw that as a betrayal of every part of their friendship from years before. But she’d been coward enough not to want to see his face if he did.


  Now, though—

  Now, tonight, her conscience gripped her by the back of the neck and asked whether she wished to bear the blame for Trystan’s capture and death because she’d been too much a coward to use the one weapon she possessed that might have helped him escape.

  Isolde knelt by the shallow puddle, feeling the damp from the ground start to seep into her skirts. She closed her eyes and drew in another breath of the night air, scented with the smell of wet earth and the burgeoning plants all around. Then she looked into the pool.

  The surface looked almost black, glimmering in the moonlight and reflecting back a patch of the star-studded sky above. Isolde saw her own face …and nothing else. She steadied and slowed her breathing, focused her thoughts. From somewhere nearby, she heard the mournful call of an owl, the sound brushing like cold fingertips against her skin. The owl’s call was an omen of death, so the tales said. Ever since the faithless, beautiful Blodeuwedd murdered her husband for love of another man and was turned into an owl for her crime.

  Isolde wondered fleetingly whether she was too exhausted from her efforts with Hereric for a vision to come to her tonight. But then an image flashed across the surface with the suddenness of a sparking hammer strike on forged steel. Two men, seated at a wooden table in a fire-lit banqueting hall. Marche, his harsh, blunt-featured face so haggard that Isolde wondered with the part of her mind still her own whether he was wounded or ill. And another man, one Isolde didn’t know. A Saxon, broad-shouldered and taller than Marche by half a head and more, and wearing a heavy necklace of gold and a silvery wolf’s pelt for a cloak.

  The Saxon man had a broad brow, a nose that had been broken and inexpertly set, and a mouth full of broken teeth. His blue eyes were so pale as to be almost colorless, and his full blond beard and the long flaxen hair that fell past his shoulders were threaded with gray. Beneath the beard, his lips looked tight, and his colorless eyes were cold.

  “I ride south at dawn. Meet Cerdic. I hope for your sake, he agrees.” The man spoke with a thick, guttural accent so heavy Isolde could scarcely make out the words. All fear, all thoughts were gone now, save for the images appearing on the surface of the pool. She let her breathing slow further, further. Imagined herself drifting closer and ever closer to the water, as though the glimmering moonlit surface was only a fine filament of a barrier between herself and the two men. Closer …closer …until she felt—

  Rage. Rage filled every part of her. Stabbed through her stomach like a red-hot skewer. Stuck like burning embers in her throat. Because she couldn’t draw a knife from the table and carve the sneering threat off Octa of Kent’s face. Because Cerdic, the crawling worm, might refuse. She felt rage because—

  Because he, Marche, was coldly, deadly afraid.

  And then, with another lightning-swift flash, the image on the water was gone, and Isolde was left shivering as the cold sweat dried on her skin and drawing in breath after shuddering breath of the cool, clean night air.

  “IS SHE PRETTY, THIS SISTER OF YOURS?”

  Trystan glanced round the circle of men grouped about the campfire. Darkness had fallen, and someone had brought out a skin of wine, even viler than the stuff he’d been drinking. Even the fumes would have felled an ox. The man who’d spoken was Ossac. A bull-chested lump of a man with gooseberry-pale eyes and a slack, wet mouth. Trystan had the unpleasant sense of a swarm of insects crawling down his spine. Son of a goat, he had to be out of his mind. He didn’t move, though, and he kept his voice easy and pleasant as he answered. “Pretty? Very. And at least as good with a knife as I am.”

  He shifted, leaning back on one elbow, and then with a quick flick of his wrist sent his own knife flying. The blade flashed silver in the firelight, struck the earth with a thud, and came to rest, hilt quivering, in the patch of ground above Ossac’s inner thigh.

  A gasp went round the group, followed by laughter and several raucous shouts. Trystan saw Ossac pale, and then a wash of angry color crept up his thickly muscled neck. He started to speak, but Trystan cut him off, letting his gaze travel slowly around the circle of men.

  “That,” he said, still speaking pleasantly, “was purely showing off. It doesn’t even begin to cover what I’ll do to the first man who so much as looks at her with an expression I don’t like in his eyes.”

  ON THE MORNING OF THE SIXTH day, Isolde left Hereric asleep and went out into the sunlit garden, Cabal following close on her heels. Hereric was growing stronger. She no longer had any doubt that he would live. He was still thin, wasted from the fever and too weak even to sit up on his own. But he was drinking broth and the herbal draughts she gave him, and the fever had broken at last the night before. This morning, when she’d laid a hand on his brow before coming outside, his head felt damp and cool to the touch, and the stump of his arm was healing cleanly and well. She could safely leave him while she went to the garden stream to bathe.

  The sun was shining this morning, and for the first time the breeze felt warm with the promise of spring. Isolde let her fingers brush against the dew-wet branches of shrubs and trees as she made her way back from washing in the stream. The pain from the adder’s bite was nearly gone, the cuts on her ankle scabbed over to thin red lines, and she stopped at the cracked remains of an old sundial, half obscured by grass and a covering of dead leaves. There was a motto carved in Latin around the edge of the sundial’s face. In the rain, she’d not been able to make it out, but now, with the sun out, Isolde could just read the words: Fert Omnia Aetas. Time bears all away.

  She’d washed her hair in the stream, and now she wrung the water out of the end of her wet braid, thinking of the sword blade, green and rusty with age, that she’d glimpsed at the bottom of one of the deepest pools. The sword of a dead warrior, maybe, gifted to the waters so that he might bear it again in the Otherworld. Or a man’s sacrifice of his most valued treasure, that the gods of the stream might hear his prayer. This place might have been the home of a water and forest god, once. Before a Roman noble had built his great villa here. Maybe the Old Ones had carved their swirling signs into the rocks and trees or thrown the severed heads of their enemies into the rippling stream.

  Isolde looked out into the shadows of the trees all around and found herself counting the days ahead. How many days until Hereric might be able to stand, to walk on his own. How many days—she flinched away from the thought but grimly made herself finish—how many days they should wait here for Trystan before finally admitting that he would likely never return.

  Then, beside her, Cabal growled deep in his throat and bared his teeth, the fur on his neck bristling as he stared, as Isolde did, into the surrounding trees. Isolde felt a cold prickle all along her neck and arms as her mind flashed through the possibilities. A raiding Saxon war party. A band of masterless men. One of Marche or Octa’s patrols. She put one hand on Cabal’s collar, holding him at her side, her free hand going to the hilt of the knife she carried in the pocket of her gown.

  Not, she thought, that it will do me the slightest good if there is more than one man.

  And then, as though the very thought had conjured them out of the trees and stones, men began to appear, stepping out of the forest to form a loose half circle around her. Isolde’s heart was pounding, and her gaze went rapidly over them, taking in their bearded faces, their matted hair, their clothing stitched from tattered patchworks of animal hides. All were armed, with bone-handled swords or knives or axes at their belts, or with bows and feather-fletched arrows strapped to their backs.

  Isolde took an instinctive step backwards, towards the ruined villa. Then one of the men detached himself from the group and spoke.

  “You are Trystan’s sister?”

  He was a tall man, dressed in a cloak of what looked like an oiled bear’s pelt with the skins of a dozen or more other animals stitched over top, gray and brown and deep black furs glossy in the morning sun. He had a lean, almost cadaverous face, his skin transparently pale and with hollows under his cheekbones and dee
ply set eyes. His nose was hooked, his mouth narrow and tight, giving his features a predatory cast, and he might, Isolde thought, be somewhere about thirty or thirty-five. His eyes were of a curiously light brown, and his hair and beard were likewise brown, and as matted as the other men’s. Above the beard, though, he bore the swirling blue tattoos of the Pict countries on the crest of each cheek.

  His voice when he’d spoken had been clipped and hard, and Isolde thought she now caught a flash of hostility in the leaf-brown eyes as his gaze met hers. This was something she’d not thought to ask Trystan before he left: what story he planned to give the band of broken men when he found them again.

  She steadied her breathing, though, and answered the question with barely a perceptible pause. “Yes, that’s right. You are—” She cast her memory back for the name Trystan had used. “You are Fidach?”

  The man gave a short nod of acknowledgment. “I am. And these”—he jerked his head at the circle of men behind him—“are my men.”

  Isolde looked from Fidach to the men at his back. There were, she saw, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, watching her with tight and watchful faces, the same shadow of hostility she’d sensed from Fidach in their eyes. Cabal, too, must have sensed antagonism or at the least ill feeling, for he bared his teeth in another rumbling growl, the fur on his neck still bristling.

  Fidach’s gaze dropped to the big dog, and something in his look made a cold slither run down Isolde’s spine. She put a hand on Cabal’s neck. “It’s all right, Cabal. Good fellow.” Then, from the man before her, she asked, “Where is Trystan now?”

  Fidach had already half turned away, but at the question he gestured curtly towards the surrounding trees. “South. Not far. He sent us to fetch you.”

  No reason, Isolde thought, to trust that he spoke the truth. Even still, Isolde felt a wash of relief, as though a knot inside her had suddenly slipped free. The men behind Fidach, though, had been shifting uneasily and muttering amongst themselves as their leader spoke, and now one of them stepped forward. He was an older man, forty or forty-five, with a head of matted reddish hair, a sloping forehead, and one eye inflamed, red, and oozing a yellowish discharge.