The choice to turn south had not been an easy one to make.
The Land of the Young had always been his home. Leaving it behind just felt wrong and the wrongness of that decision was making itself apparent in every withered tree and parched meadow. Salt bubbled up from below ground, the earth itself rancid as if nature had become a plague, a pox on the Goddess's body.
It was as if they had stumbled into an endless winter where the Earth Mother had no chance to recover her strength in spring for a glorious summer, but instead wallowed in the depravity of winter as it sucked her dry.
"It is not like this where I come from."
"So you've said, Sláine, a land of milk and honey where the belly of the earth is the most beautiful thing in all creation, the birds fly backwards and the flowers are always in bloom."
"Stop being stupid, Ukko. This disturbs me. Where are the druids who tend to the land's needs? Where are the farmers who work the land, tending to the Goddess's flesh? This is wrong, dwarf. This is wrong on so many levels. Do these people not know what they are doing?"
"I don't think they have a choice, Sláine," Ukko said seriously. "You've seen them. They aren't like you or me. They live in fear. They are always looking nervously over their shoulders as if they expect someone to punish them for some imagined transgression. Well, maybe they are a little like you, because you are always looking over your shoulder as well."
"Then they should stand up for themselves against these cruel taskmasters, dwarf. No Celt should bow and scrape to another man. We are the Goddess's chosen people. We are proud, noble. We are the fiercest warriors, the most passionate lovers, the fastest friends."
"And you've got the thickest skulls," the dwarf muttered. "Take a look around you, Sláine. Do you think... Scratch that thought, of course you don't, that's why you have me. You saw them in Crag Furlough, Sláine. They're beaten men. They slouch around like empty shells sucked dry of vitality. That last village was a graveyard of the living where a town once stood. The place gave me the creeps."
"These are my people, Ukko. Do you expect me to just accept this... this abuse?"
The dwarf sighed. "No, I expect you to bring down a world of hurt on the oppressor's heads with that bloody great axe of yours."
For the first time in weeks Sláine smiled. "You said you wanted to chronicle the feats of a hero, little man. I'm just giving you something to write about."
"I was rather hoping I'd get to make most of them up, I have to admit," Ukko muttered under his breath.
They saw signs of another village a few miles down the road. The fields had been turned but the crop hadn't matured. A few brittle straws of wheat were broken, their seeds little more than hollowed out shells. White stones and flakes of flint were the only crop now.
"Smoke!" Sláine said, seeing a dirty grey plume rising in the sky. The road skirted the barren field but took them more than a mile out of their way. Eyes fixed on the ribbon of smoke, Sláine started to run. He vaulted over a low stile, cutting across the field.
"Slow down!" Ukko moaned, struggling over the stile. Sláine was already two hundred paces across the field by the time Ukko was on the other side. Ten steps on, his foot crunched down on one of the bigger shards of white rock, only it wasn't rock at all, it was a splinter of skull bone; the curve where the jaw met the head. Rotten teeth were still set in the bone. Sláine saw more and more white stones that weren't stone. He stopped running. He looked around the field taking in all the flecks of white on the churned brown of the earth. There were literally thousands and thousands of them.
He realised sickly what the real crop of this field was: bones.
It was a mass grave. Thousands of people were sewn across the soulless earth. They weren't buried. No effort had been taken to actually cover the dead with earth so that they might nourish Danu. The corpses had been scattered carelessly and left to be picked clean by the birds. The bones were white. This slaughter was not a new thing.
No wonder there was no hint of Danu in this Sourland.
It was a foul place and Ukko had been more right than he could have known when he had called the last village a graveyard. Sláine stood amongst the bones, seething.
Ukko stumbled up beside him.
Sláine held out the broken jawbone for the dwarf to see.
"You see, Ukko? You see what these bastards have done to my people?"
"You don't know that, Sláine. Not for sure. It could have been plague or pox or, or, or..."
"The only plague at work here is manmade," Sláine said, bitterly. "Only man is capable of such evil towards his own."
"You may be right."
Looking at the smoke rising from the village he shook his head. "I know I am, Ukko."
"What can you do? You're only one man. Anything capable of doing this has to be more than one man can stop, surely?"
"I am Sláine Mac Roth, dwarf. Be my enemy one man, one hundred, one hundred thousand, I do not think it too many!"
"Soth! You actually mean that don't you? You're a dangerous man."
"Aye, for once we agree on something, dwarf."
"Well, I was rather meaning you were dangerous for me. I'm beginning to wonder what I've gotten myself into."
Sláine dropped the broken jawbone. "They will pay for this, Ukko," Sláine breathed, barely a whisper, and then louder, "Do you hear me?"
Then he shouted, "I am your death! I am Sláine Mac Roth!"
Finally he bellowed, as he lifted Brain-Biter above his head, "Fear Me!"
The world was reduced to two absolutes: pain and anger.
Sláine felt them both as he charged across the bone field. The smoke taunted him. Houses and people were burning and charring, and he was impotent against it. He roared his anger.
The pain of his people tore at him.
He ran towards the smoke.
You're too late, my love, always too late. The ghost of Danu's taunt came back to him, the merest ripple on the wind. It could have been a memory or a whisper from the dead earth.
"No," he said, "not this time."
It stung his eyes long before he was close enough to feel the flame's heat.
He was crying tears of grief and pain, sadness and rage, even before he set foot in the slaughterhouse that was the burning village.
He heard the screams first.
The villagers weren't done dying.
He saw why immediately.
The longhouse was ablaze and they were trapped inside, burning alive. Faces were pressed up at the windows but there was no way for the panicked villagers to squeeze through the tiny openings. Even if they did, the building was ringed by soldiers.
"You picked the wrong day for your butchery!" Sláine roared.
"You and your big mouth," Ukko huffed, coming up behind him. "Never heard of the advantage of surprise?"
"Oh, I think they are surprised," Sláine said, coldly. "Time to die."
"They don't look very surprised, I have to say," the dwarf said, as the first of the soldiers turned to face them. The warrior wore an ugly mask of hair, making it look like some savage shoggy-beast. The soldier wore a horned helmet, and on his shield, the sinister triskele. His sword had a silver skull for a pommel. "Now you, you look surprised."
Sláine showed no mercy. He threw himself at the skull-sword with all the fury, all the hatred, and all the anger of every last one of the victims of the pestilential warriors. His axe sang a funeral dirge as it cut and chopped, and hewed and split bone and brain, throat and gut. The skull-swords were given no quarter. Anger surged within him but there was no answering charge of earth magic.
"You thrive on terror and intimidate the weak," Sláine rasped, disembowelling a skull-sword with a savage twist of the wrist. "You hold no fear for me. I know what lies behind your beast masks. So think on this: where fear ends, that is the land where my hatred begins." An almighty backhanded blow ripped open the jugular of a second skull-sword, too slow to get out of the way. "You die just as well as any other cowards,
" Sláine mocked, his axe living up to its name.
He was alone in the fight to avenge his people.
He killed twenty-one skull-swords.
Ukko walked through the dead, tallying the numbers. "For your sagas, your warpishness, you understand? Facts? The simple folk like facts. I make that twenty-one skulls and various bits and bobs. A leg bone here, an arm bone there, messy stuff. Let's say thirty-five shall we? It's a good number. It sounds more impressive."
Sláine staggered out of the longhouse, an unconscious woman slung over his shoulder, a slip of a girl under his arm. More survivors emerged, coughing and gasping. "I will not glory in lies, dwarf." He laid the woman on the grass and went back into the burning building to look for more survivors.
"No, no, you shouldn't. I am not saying you should," Ukko called after him.
He plunged into the smoke and flames, blindly, calling out, "Come to me, come to my voice. I will get you out." He heard movements, shuffling feet, coughing. "Come to me," he urged.
Nine more came out of the burning longhouse alive.
"You killed twenty-one. It was incredible to behold, your magnificence," Ukko said, sidling up to the young Sessair, "and you saved all these people."
"I do not think it too many. I do not think it anywhere near enough. There will be more blood when I am through with the demon spawned bullies."
They stayed a day and a night with the survivors.
They were precious few in number but their gratitude more than made up for it. They treated Sláine like the conquering hero he was. Anything they had was his. Ukko took advantage of this mercilessly, collecting trinkets and stuffing them in his sack.
"I could get to like it here, Sláine. They're a generous bunch." He polished a woven silver brooch and fastened it to his tunic. "There, what do you think?"
"You look like a runty little dwarf wearing a fancy silver brooch."
"Just the look I was going for."
They were sharing a small room in one of the newly empty houses. He felt like a parasite living amongst the relics of the dead. He imagined the ghosts of the dead family going about their daily routine, washing, dressing, cleaning, chasing the young ones around to get them organised. It was all too easy to believe that the dead had never left. None of their belongings had been disturbed since the skull-swords had dragged them out of their home. The house - it was a home no longer - would be in mourning for a long time to come.
He moved around the place with respect, not touching anything that he didn't need to.
Ukko, on the other hand, was a thieving magpie by nature. He rummaged through the chests and ferreted out the family's few treasures. He stuffed them into his sack, hoarding anything and everything of any value.
"Don't look at me like that," Ukko grumbled. "I'm just looking to the future, looking after your interests."
"How so?"
"The day's going to come when we need to barter for food or lodging so you can carry on your quest for justice. I'm just making sure you can afford to be a hero."
Sláine closed his eyes. There was no point trying to reason with the dwarf; he had his own unique and flexible set of morals.
There was a timid knock at the door.
Sláine opened the door.
It was Brianna, the old chieftain's wife. Her face was gaunt, haunted; it was little wonder. Sláine knew that not two days since she had seen her man strung up by the guts and left to dangle a miserable agonising death from the hanging tree.
"The tribal council would see you, warrior," the woman said.
"Good," Sláine said, "there are things I would know about this land."
"We will answer what questions we can."
"I look forward to it."
"Misery loves company after all," the dwarf mumbled to himself, licking the palm of his hand and flattening down a stubborn cowlick of hair, making himself presentable.
They joined Brianna and six others in the village roundhouse. It was much the same as Grudnew's hall in Murias. The similarity drove home something that had been nagging away at him since his fight with the skull-swords. This, here, this sour land, this oppression, was what awaited his people if someone did not stand up against the skull-swords.
"Sit, please, warrior." Brianna gestured to the round table where her husband had ruled just two days before. Sláine did as he was asked. "You have our thanks, again, Sláine Mac Roth. We all owe you our lives. It is not easy to be in someone's debt. To this end, we would help you in any small way that we can."
"There is nothing I want, nor need, my lady."
"Now, now, let's not be so hasty, Sláine," Ukko interjected.
"Be quiet, Ukko. The grown-ups are talking."
"I'm just saying..."
"Hush."
"Okay, but I-"
"Hush." Sláine silenced him. He turned to Brianna. "There is something you could be of help with."
The woman nodded.
"I would know more of the skull-swords. They came to my land. They murdered my mother and my friends. I would do to them much worse in return. I would teach them what it means to fear the tribes of the earth goddess, Danu."
"Yours is not an uncommon story, warrior. The skull-swords, as you call them, dance to the tune of the Drunes Drunemeton. It is the Drunes who have done this to the land. It wasn't always as you see it. This was once a good place to live."
"What are these Drunes?" Sláine interrupted. "The word is unfamiliar to me."
"They are the priests of Crom-Cruach, the dark and hungry god," one of the other women said, making the sign of Lugh in front of her mouth as if to cleanse her tongue of the unholy filth she had just spoken.
"Soth!" Ukko spat. "The wyrm god? Sláine what are we doing here? Don't we have to be somewhere on the other side of the Eiru like yesterday?"
"I would hear more," Sláine said softly.
"Well I can't pretend that I particularly want to," Ukko said.
"They are vile priests. They take our young and sacrifice them to the dark god, using the blood to appease the beast. They bleed us dry. They bleed the land dry. Six years ago borders of the sour land stopped as far away as Carnac, but not now. The sickness has a grip of the earth and creeps ever north. Nothing grows here. Our livestock miscarry their foals and calves and lambs. Our wheat rots before it can flourish."
"And this is the doing of these priests? These Drunes?"
"Aye."
"Then they must be stopped."
"There is a simplicity to your words that I like, warrior, but how? How can they be stopped? How can we stop them?"
"You don't have to," Sláine said flatly. "I will."
They told their story.
The Drunes had come from the south, with the bad land, more than twenty-five years ago.
Some few of the survivors remembered a time before the skull-swords and the Drunes, but most had been born into this slavery. It was difficult for Sláine to fully comprehend. He had been born free, lived free, and despite the many tribal wars, had always known he would die free. The notion of being hammered down beneath the yoke of oppression did not sit well with him. He listened, but it was hard not to interrupt and demand how the men could have ever allowed this to happen.
According to Brianna, the skull-swords were the Drune's warriors. They wore their repugnant masks to inspire fear and to pay tribute to one they called the Lord Weird, Slough Feg, but that was not the only reason. Feg was a god amongst them, an incarnation of Carnun himself, they said; part man, part beast. Sláine wrestled with the story, trying to understand how a man could sink so far into dark sorcery that he would willingly shed his own skin - hence the "Slough" of his title, and the need for his swords to wear their masks: to mask the stench of his rotten flesh. Brianna spoke of the Lord Weird in hushed, almost reverent tones.
"He is," she claimed, "thousands of years old, kept alive by dark magic."
The same dark magic that was warping the land here dry, Sláine thought bitterly as the woman explained
.
"That's impossible!" Ukko blurted.
"Not so, little man," Brianna said. "There was great magic in the land once. I remember what it was like during my childhood, before Feg found us. This land was beautiful, Ukko. No fairer place was there south of Lyonesse. I made chains of daisies and wore them in my hair while I waited for my father working the fields." Sláine found himself thinking of the last woman he had met who wore flowers in her hair. "He was a proud man, proud of the crop his labours nurtured. We never went hungry. Fruits, vegetables, succulent meat, there was plenty for everyone. Then Feg found us and it changed. Slowly, but it changed. Ours was a creeping death. It was unnerving at first. The first I ever saw of it was a calf, a stillborn breech. Only it wasn't dead, not fully. The poor animal lived on, this eerie half-life, not alive, not dead. My father put the beast out of its misery eventually. He couldn't bear to look at the animal lying there in the dirt of the stable. He ate the cursed meat that night. Nothing should go to waste, that was his motto. He slipped into this ugly half-death himself over the next week, unable to walk or talk, unable to actually die. My mother put him out of his misery."
"Soth!"
"It was the beginning of what has felt like a long bleak winter. My man used to call it 'the Forgotten Season' because it never ended. Feg demanded the construction of the huge dolmen, in praise of his god of wyrms, Crom, and little by little the sickness has spread ever since."
"This Feg, he is immortal?" Sláine asked, cutting to the question that was burning in his mind.
"I don't know," Brianna admitted. "He is a sick thing, but sick enough to live forever? I don't know."
"Well then, if he can't live forever that means he can die. The only question is when. For your people, for this land, for my people, that day must be soon."
"He's going to beat his chest in a minute. He's good like that, very rousing," Ukko muttered to the young woman beside him. He covered his mouth with his hand and leaned in close. "Hmm, you smell good. Did anyone ever tell you that?"
The Exile Page 21
