by Tom Deitz
But even more troubling was that both sections of Track led beneath rough stone arches twice as tall as him and his horse together. Like the trilithons at Stonehenge, they were: massive fingers of glimmering granite set among the pines. But if both Tracks were still disturbingly red, there was something even stranger about the one on the right. It seemed to shimmer and waver, as though it were not wholly…there, but perhaps a reflection of the other mirrored in murky air. Abruptly, he looked away—trying to force it into focus was making him queasy as hell—but as soon as he did, the image clarified in the corner of his eye.
“Closing them might serve better,” the Morrigu advised, “at least until you pass beneath the gate.”
“What…is this place?” David asked shakily. “I’ve never seen anything like this on the Tracks. It makes me feel…weird.”
“Better ask when is this place,” the Morrigu retorted. “As for the rest, the Track on the right is the one you must take, but it only takes a form we can access on this one night of the year, and any business we have upon it must be concluded that same night or we are all lost—even me.”
And with that she reined her horse to a halt and turned full around to face him. “This is your quest, David Sullivan,” she intoned formally. “You determine where and when this gate leads; you must be first to pass through.”
David stared at the dark archway dubiously. The eager pines grew close to either side: onyx and indigo; the upright stones gleamed gray and silver; the Track was the color of blood, but beyond was only blackness marked by one thin line of scarlet. He swallowed hard, paced his horse forward a step, then paused uncertainly, filled with deep foreboding. Suppose the Morrigu was lying. Suppose nothing lay beyond these rocks but death. Suppose all that fine talk about trifold sisters and madness and sanity had been a fabrication and this woman who styled herself the Morrigu was as mad as both her twins. Suppose he was already as beguiled as that poor bitter soldier had been, who’d veiled irrational jealous hatred with hashish.
“You will not know until you go,” the Morrigu stated flatly. “And either way, you will have cause to rejoice and cause to regret.”
“Yeah,” David snorted. “I know!”
And before he had time to consider further, he kicked his horse in the flanks and surged ahead.
For an instant he knew cold past his nightmares of freezing, then heat washed up at him from the Track, which seemed wrought of sparkling embers: an endless road of dying fire. His horse’s hooves crunched there, which had made no sound on the Track he’d abandoned. More crunchings behind spoke of his friends joining him, as he was not certain they had either courage or leave to do.
“This is your quest,” the Morrigu repeated, her voice riding a rising wind. “You must lead. And whatever happens, you must not look back.”
David didn’t even nod, simply rode and let the stallion set its own pace. There was nothing to see: no whorling briars, no pines, no fantastic landscapes, merely an empty plain stretching endlessly to an absent sky. Lines of fire laced it like whip scars lashed into the earth, but there was no other color.
And on he rode.
Eventually a second gate appeared: another trilithon, beyond which he glimpsed a blur of nighted landscape: mountains that did not extend past that opening to either side. And he likewise felt a brush of air that carried the scent of life.
He kicked his horse to a trot.
The gate reared up.
He passed beyond…
…And almost cried out, for what he gazed upon was all too familiar.
He’d spent the first eighteen years of his life there!
Sullivan Cove. Enotah County. Georgia. Land his folks had dwelt on for nigh on two hundred years. Land that once had belonged to the Cherokee.
Somehow he was there again! A hundred miles north of Athens, riding down the logging road that snaked up to Lookout Rock, and not a hundred yards farther on became his parents’ drive. Already he could see the barn roof to the right, the hilly pasture where his pa kept his rangy cows easing into view to the left.
A ridge loomed beyond: backdrop to the Sullivan Cove Road that ran past his pa’s land through Great-uncle Dale’s and thence to the lake that embraced Bloody Bald, where Lugh the Many-skilled hid his stronghold behind walls of glamour.
But…something was wrong! The barn was visible now, and other outbuildings, and the house itself; yet while the shape, size, and location were correct, all the details had altered to those of an earlier place and time, so that spirals and curves now danced along the heavy corner posts, while attenuated beasts battled upon steel-strapped doors. The tin roofs were now wrought of wooden shakes, and carved beams crossed at the gables, while the extensions that saluted the air had been shaped into knotwork dragons.
“Not your dream,” the Morrigu whispered, “but his. This is Sullivan Cove, but you are in his World now.”
“…Whose?” David ventured faultingly.
“You know whose.”
“My uncle’s?”
“If that is whom you seek.”
“Where…do I find him?”
“Where you saw him last.”
“Not in the house?”
“He dwells in a darker house now.”
David nodded grimly and swallowed again, ignoring a stomach that seemed intent on spoiling all this eerie solemnity by growling, and rode on down the drive, passing the house on the right to turn left along a wider road, along which he continued for roughly a quarter mile before turning left again, uphill. He paused there, saw the mountains lifting higher than they ought above a barren knoll, on the brow of which rose a mound that absolutely should not have been present. Torches flickered and smoked at intervals around it. It looked, he realized, like a Viking burial mound—or the rath of an Irish King.
“He whom you seek is within,” the Morrigu murmured at his shoulder. He wanted to turn, to look at her, to gaze on Liz and Alec to see if they truly still rode with him or were themselves now wraiths and shadows. “You must continue afoot,” she went on. “And when you arrive, you must relinquish what the dead desire most.”
David swallowed again—and was suddenly very light-headed. It was all too strange: he felt removed from himself: drunk, stoned, dreaming—maybe even dead. He had no past anymore, no future beyond what rose atop that hill. There was only present. The eternal now.
And still he hesitated.
“Not even the kings of Faerie can raise the mortal dead,” came the Morrigu’s insidious whisper, bearing threat, knowledge, and sympathy: all three. “The souls of your kind linger but briefly when their bodies die, then occupy fresh-born flesh—unless other Powers intercede. There was no way to raise the kinsman you loved—not in your World; you, therefore, must meet him in his: in that moment between death and…what comes after, when his dreams of his own past deeds are most alive.”
“So we’ve…traveled through time?”
“And beyond mortal space as well. We are neither in the Mortal World nor Faerie.”
Again David swallowed. “And my uncle…?”
“He sleeps. He dreams. He awaits. He will have as much life as you are willing to grant him.”
But still David hesitated.
“You’ve gotta do it,” came another voice from behind: Liz, this time. Calm, but with an edge that spoke of deep control or raving terror.
“You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t,” Alec added, his voice trailing into a sob.
“And the sooner I finish, the sooner it’ll be over for all of us,” David sighed. Whereupon he slid off his horse and onto familiar yet alien ground.
The turf was cold beneath his feet—his bare feet, he realized. Looking down, he saw that the rest of him was bare as well, save for rough woolen trousers that bagged low on his hips. His hair tickled his shoulders, brushed by the same nervous wind that whipped the torches. A horse whickered. Someone—Alec, probably—inhaled sharply.
Taking a deep breath of his own, he squared his should
ers and strode up that impossible hill.
His legs had started to tighten when he reached the summit, where a barrow rose higher than his head in the space that in his own time, place, and World would’ve been the family cemetery.
Of earth it was, overgrown with grass, with a ring of level ground around it and, facing east, two stone pillars that supported a lintel above another slab of stone that was surely a door. More carving showed there: snakes and leaves twining and reveling with each other, and over the center a boar was carved; and it came to him then that a boar rode the Sullivan coat of arms, yet this was older. In an alcove to the right, exactly at chest level, a vertical glitter of metal proved to be a short sword of the sort he’d seen in books about the Vikings. Its hilt likewise bore the incised likeness of a boar.
So what did he do now? Wait? Go up and knock? Summon He-Who-Lay-Within to parley in the frosty air?
He will have as much life as you grant him, the Morrigu had said. You must relinquish what the dead desire most.
And what was that?
Life, of course! The Morrigu had answered her own riddle.
Only…how did he do that? Obviously he was not supposed to die so that the dead could rise. But what was he to do?
And what was the cost of wrong choice?
All at once his courage abandoned him, puddling away like water from a punctured bag, leaving him nervous and cold and scarcely able to breathe. Impulsively, he stepped forward and rapped on the white stone door.
A hollow ringing answered—or was that the roar of the nearest torch as the wind whipped its flame toward him? His knuckles hurt, though he was surprised to find them abraded and gleaming with blood.
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
Not daring to think beyond the instant, but reacting to the image that had suddenly appeared in his mind, he reached for the sword by the door and closed his fingers around the hilt. It resisted. He yanked harder. It came free.
And then he lay down on the doorstep of his uncle’s barrow—stretched himself out like he imagined a king or warrior or prince of the Keltoi would lie—seized that sword in both hands, and laid it along the length of his body from throat to thigh. The metal felt like ice against his bare flesh, but he didn’t shift it; rather, he clamped his fingers around the blade midway down. And then he shut his eyes and squeezed with all his might.
It felt less like pain than cold, when the steel—or was it copper or bronze?—bit his flesh. And then fire awoke in his hands; and the distant warmth of blood puddling out across his chest and belly was a comfort against the chill air and the frigid stone beneath his back.
For a very long time he lay there, vaguely aware of his life ebbing out with that liquid. He wondered blearily how he would stop it—if he even could—and why it hadn’t already, when it probably ought to have, given that there were no big veins or arteries in the hands. Could one bleed to death from hand wounds? Or was this the price? His own life? Was it a price worth paying? Would he for whom he made this sacrifice approve? Or would he call him fool—as more than once he had? Or even coward for refusing to let the past go? He didn’t know.
The only certainties were the stinging in his palms: the incessant flow of warm wet stickiness across his torso; the tang of iron in the air that had not been present earlier; heat and cold at war across his skin. And drowsiness.
Drowsiness…
Sleep…
Freezing to death was supposed to be like going to sleep, wasn’t it? So maybe bleeding to death was like that as well, which was why so many people slashed their wrists in the tub: so that death would steal upon them unawares.
But he didn’t want to die!
Yet he couldn’t live either, not if he rose and bound his wounds on strips torn from his trousers and left what he’d come for undone.
But it’d feel so good just to…stop, to let it all go, to end the trials of this life and choose another in which he didn’t have to deal with all this terrible knowledge that reality was not at all what most folks believed.
But that would also be a world without Liz and Alec—and Aikin and Calvin—and the Gang. Without his brother and his parents and Uncle Dale. And, he admitted, without the wonder of Faerie. He wasn’t ready to face such a world.
So when would the bleeding stop? He was in control, something told him. Only he would know how much life he was willing to forsake.
All of it, something else supplied. All but the very last drop; for if I die, the best remaining part of David-the-Elder dies with me.
But there was still no movement in the barrow, and surely he would’ve sensed one now, with his soul already straining at whatever bound it to his clay.
And then he recalled something the elder David had read him when he was too young to know what it was: long before he’d discovered the Sidhe in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men.
A poem: a Viking poem the elder David had studied at Governor’s Honors the summer before his junior year in high school. A poem whose form this experience emulated.
“The Waking of Angentyr,” it was called, of which he remembered little save that it was eerie as hell and concerned a woman who sought a magic sword from the tomb of her ancestor, Angentyr. His uncle had read it to him first in the original Old Norse, and he’d understood not a word of the sound, and little of the sense. But one phrase he did recall, that had stayed with him from that day: the words of summoning.
“Vaku, Angentyr,—Vaku!”
“Wake-you, Angentyr,—Wake-you!”
And with consciousness starting to fade, and his body awash with blood, he took a deep breath and shouted to the torchlit sky.
“Vaku, David Thomas Sullivan—Vaku!”
And then he released the sword and fell back senseless.
*
He awakened into warmth. Clean skin and breeches. A dull throb in his palms that was pain veiled by something smeared there to banish it. There was a closeness to the air, too, that spoke of indoors, and with it the smell of leather, woodsmoke, and spices, under which hung the stench of mildew.
He opened his eyes and saw carved stone walls bearing spirals across which fire washed tints of orange, gold, and red, from a tiny hearth to his right.
He saw a stone table in the center of a domed room: a table draped in thick black fur. A table that might also have been an altar and a bed and a funeral slab.
And he saw who sat cross-legged upon it.
Almost he didn’t recognize him: that fair-haired youth who grinned at him perplexedly, one dark brow veiled by a forelock so yellow-white it might’ve been his own.
Certainly the blue eyes were the same, and the dimpled cheeks, and the merry red lips above a smooth-angled chin.
But surely the bare-chested body was too slight, the limbs too slender for him to whom they should’ve belonged.
And he was certainly too young: David’s own age, in fact, or just a tad older. He had no beard to speak of.
“However much I’ve changed, you’ve changed more,” that one observed, his voice edged with a mountain twang David didn’t recall, that seemed all at odds with their surroundings.
“Not…what I expected,” David agreed, rising.
“Nor I,” The Elder laughed, unfolding himself and sliding off the waist-high stone.
Suddenly they were facing each other a yard apart. “You’ve grown,” one said.
“You’ve shrunk,” the other countered.
“You’re almost as old as I am.”
“And you’re fixin’ to be a whole lot younger.”
“So they tell me.”
They embraced: uncle and nephew, dead and living. Brother—almost—and brother. Hero and protégé.
“I’m not worth it,” one whispered scarcely louder than the thudding of his heart.
“I’m not either,” the other replied.
“I live in you, you know.”
“And me in thee—”
An eyebrow lifted, askance. The embrace weakened. “
Thee?”
“It rhymed better.”
One giggled. It didn’t matter which. They were too much alike.
“So what ’cha been up to?” the Elder asked eventually.
“Besides the obvious?”
“I wasn’t surprised to see you, if that’s what you’re wonderin’.”
“You weren’t?”
“If anyone could transcend death for someone he loved, it’d be you.”
“What’s it like? Bein’ dead, I mean?”
“It’s an instant in time. This instant in time, in fact. Dying’s no great shakes, but then it’s over.”
“So how long have we got?”
“As long as you need, I guess.”
A stomach growled. “Long time since I ate,” the Younger sighed.
“I got wine—mead, actually.”
“I’ve never tasted mead, actually.”
“Nor I. But this is how I dreamed bein’ dead would be, how I’d have made the time after if I’d had my druthers, and so it is.”
“Not bad,” the Younger grinned, relaxing as he found a salt-glazed cup full of something hot and sweet-smelling thrust into his hands. He sank down on a pile of furs. “Didn’t expect you to be a Viking, though.”
“Didn’t know enough about the Celts. You’ve surpassed me there, I guess.”
“You don’t know?”
The Elder shook his head and joined him. “You’ve got the advantage. You know everything after…then. I don’t know anything past now—’cause it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Do you wanta know?”
“If you feel like tellin’ me. Mostly I wanta know if you’re happy. If you’re still hangin’ ’round with Alec—now there’s a true friend for you. If you ever woke up and looked at that red-haired girl. What’s up with my asshole brother.”
“Pa?”
“Hard to think of ’im that way: as my bro and your dad. You’re more my son than my nephew, and more my brother than either.”
“Too bad you never had one—a son, I mean.”
An eyebrow lifted. “How do you know?”
A chuckle. “You’re kiddin’!”
A chuckle echoed. “I didn’t die a virgin.”
“I won’t either.”
