He rose to one knee. Cregan was looking at him. The leader had passed the night wrapped in his mantle, sleepless and waiting for dawn. All around him Black Leg heard the others stirring. Then they were up. Someone passed around a flask of wine. When it reached him, Black Leg shook his head. Red, standing next to him, shrugged and drank.
Black Leg said “yes” so softly the assent was almost inaudible. But the bird must have understood, because a second later there was a cup in his hand and, without hesitation, Black Leg lifted it and drank.
Wine? Mead? Something utterly unknown to mankind? It was sweet, sharp, and flowed through his veins like fire. In a second, he was fully alert, awake, energized, and ready to fight. He dropped the cup and it vanished before it hit the ground. He saw Cregan jump and realized he must have been watching.
“Ready?” Cregan whispered.
There was a murmur of assent, and they started out. He followed, knowing that Cregan and the experienced warriors had certainly done this before.
Yes, the mist was thick and Lancelot could smell it. Every intake of breath moistened his nose. They were close to the villa and crawling uphill to the palisade when he realized he could see it lying like a faintly glowing shroud over the low fields, forest, and river around the ruined palisade. First light, not dawn yet. They would be able to see their enemies well enough to kill them.
One of the Huns—or at least that’s what he looked like, with almond eyes, black hair, and yellowish skin—lifted his head, possibly alarmed by some sound. Cregan stood and cast the first spear. It took the man in the throat, sending him back, dying, behind the broken timbers.
Black Leg charged with the rest. There was enough of the palisade left to offer some cover. The man next to Black Leg took a spear in the eye and died. Black Leg tried to turn and bring his spear to bear on his attacker and found, to his astonishment, that instead of a spear, he had a sword in his hand—and a very good one.
He drove it into the man’s throat. Then, spinning around, he beheaded another locked in close combat with one of Cregan’s men. He leaped clear, looking for another opponent, and saw the Pict and the remaining living men bolting for the ruined house at the center. He was holding a spear now.
Black Leg needed no lessons in throwing a javelin. His third target died on the fallen stones of the once magnificent entryway.
Four horsemen exploded out of the ruined dwelling, riding hell for leather, all in different directions. Black Leg was holding a sling—one warrior was riding directly toward him, lance down, pointed at his chest. The lead sling stone connected with his opponent’s forehead and tore most of the side of his skull off. Black Leg jumped away. The man he’d just killed was close enough to fall on him and spatter him with blood and brain.
As he landed, Black Leg saw the Pict try to jump a scattering of fallen stone from the foot of the broken palisade. His horse put its foot in a hole. The animal gave a blood-chilling scream of agony as its leg snapped and then it went down. Cregan’s men swarmed him.
That left two, and Lancelot, as wolf, leaped away, flying through the tall grass and nodding weeds after them. He caught the first just as the horse reached the scrub forest at the foot of the hill. He leaped and sank his fangs into the powerful muscles of the animal’s flank. The horse’s rear legs gave way, and it went down on its haunches. The man on its back hadn’t been able to saddle his mount, and he slid off over the tail.
But then the maddened animal got its legs back under it and Lancelot dropped away just in time to avoid a buck that might have broken his neck. He was in the air when he called his human shape and landed on his back at the shoulders, ready to leap up and fight again. He felt the handle of a weapon in his hand and the weight of its head as he salmon-leaped to his feet. He didn’t even know what it was when he swung it at his opponent, who had also gotten his legs under him and was diving for Lancelot, a vicious, single-edged blade sax in his hand.
The mace head connected with his opponent’s chest, crushing eight of the ribs on his left side and puncturing his lung in five places. The man went down, blood pouring from his mouth and nose.
Lancelot—for he was Lancelot now, terrible warrior, never bested in combat—spun around and saw the last escapee halfway across an open field, drawing closer to the forest. It had been many years since the fields near the villa had been plowed, but the ground was still soft and the horse’s hooves were throwing dirt as it tried to make the best speed possible and reach the cover of the trees. Lancelot took out after the last man on the diagonal, trying to cut him off. He succeeded, but only just. The horseman was looming over him as he turned human. This man, one of the Huns, swerved his mount to make a direct hit on the powerful, naked warrior he saw appear before him, seemingly out of nowhere. In a second, he would ride him down.
But he didn’t have that second, because Lancelot held a spear in his hand.
The birds give great weapons, Lancelot thought. The spearhead was narrow, pitted old iron, but the edges glittered razor sharp. It went into and through the Hun’s body like a hot knife through butter.
The horse’s shoulder caught Lancelot and sent him spinning, but he was wolf again and landed at a crouch when he hit the ground. The Huns were famous horsemen, and even dying, the Hun remained in the saddle as his mount gained the shelter of the trees. The wolf was in hot pursuit until he saw the dying man try to duck a low-hanging limb. He didn’t make it, and his face smashed into the thick bark. It swept him over the horse’s tail and down, smashing his nose and driving the bone up into his brain. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Lancelot stopped, his flanks heaving with exertion, surprised at the silence. The horse continued on for a few paces, then stumbled to a halt, her reins dragging in a sunlit clearing just beyond a big old yew tree. Black Leg sat, his tail waving gently. If he turned human, he would be naked, and naked wasn’t comfortable in an early morning forest at a fairly high elevation. The temperature must be in the forties, he reflected as he began to consider how to retrieve his clothing.
In the distance he heard faint shouting and the occasional scream. Cregan’s men were probably mopping up. Then footsteps scrunched in the dead leaves at the edge of the woods. He was on his feet in an instant. He dropped into a crouch among the brush and long grass near the massive old yew.
Cregan stepped into view. He was carrying Lancelot’s clothing. For a long moment, Lancelot remained where he was. The name she had given him was that of the warrior who had been placed among the stars. He was always a warrior in the stories told about him. And like the stars that formed him, he returned from the night sky to his people in the form of a mighty meteor, ablaze against the midnight darkness, to explode and burn out, leaving behind steel.
In fact, it was at the warrior’s forge that steel had been invented and at last given mankind mastery over the earth. He was Lord of the Water and Light. Of course, that was why he had been drawn to the Queen of the Lakes and Fountains.
And for the last time, Black Leg was a boy. He felt the sunlight pass through his flesh, and around him the light woke the dew on the wet grass to a thousand rainbows. A wrenching, hopeless grief flooded his heart, and he knew the name Lancelot was his true one.
He stood to take his clothes from Cregan. The old man gave a start and stared at him in wonder.
“Boy, I believe for a moment I saw the sun shine right through you.” He sounded awed. “So!” Cregan saluted Lancelot. “So! Do the gods return from neverlasting to everlasting when we are in greatest need?”
The second raven exploded out of the yew tree and he went, as his brother had, for Lancelot’s eye. But the wolf was too fast and the bird exploded into powder in the wolf’s jaws. The powder was a stinging mist that burned and blinded the wolf, then coalesced into razor-sharp shards that turned his head into a bloody ruin.
Lancelot felt the quick, astonishing shock of a mortal wound. Slow, the transition was so slow—from wolf to man—in the journey from one to another, he understoo
d at last that he inhabited another world, passed through it as he changed. He could stop . . . the brightness almost blinded him. Never in misty Britain had he seen such raw light; never breathed air so clear.
The ravine he stood in must once have run water, but long ago, because only rills were left in dry sand. The tree he was looking at bore clusters of vivid white and violet flowers and long, trailing green leaves. Rather like a willow, he thought.
But no willow ever had such flowers, glowing long, white, purple-spotted, throated flowers with deep, violet lips.
A man, naked, he dropped to one knee in the light-beige sand and drew, as he had when he called the storm wind, a word of command. Then the tree and the desert faded and he was standing in the clearing, dressed and wearing helmet and sword.
Cregan staggered back; his stomach lurched because he’d seen the wolf die in front of his eyes, then be reborn as a fully armed warrior. Both helmet and sword bore the raven appearance and both had eyes, red ones that gazed at him from the helmet and sword hilt—then slowly closed.
“It’s never easy.” Ure spoke to me in my dreams. I know I must have moved restlessly in my bedding, because Albe said, “Be still, my lady. The Akeru and I will watch. We take turns, even here.”
Then I sank into a deeper sleep. I stood on Ure’s floor under the pines.
“You made me forget,” I said.
“Some of the most important things you will ever know are things you have forgotten. That is where fear comes from. You forget pain, and in the same way the deepest tortures of sorrow. But part of you that cannot be admitted into our so narrow, rational consciousness—that part—remembers the agony of lost love, the searing, bodily pain of injury, and we feel that as fear.”
“Lesson one,” I replied.
“No,” the old man said. “Lesson one was when you called Cymry to life out of compassion for Kyra’s loss long ago, when you were a very small child.”
Then I was in the hut. The wind was shrieking outside and Kyra and I were huddled together for warmth. We had just rescued her and killed the pirates who had murdered her family. The head of their leader hung curing in the smoke above the central hearth. Kyra was sick—one eye gouged out by the criminal whose head hung above the fire. Her dress was stiff with blood, for she had been raped before she was fully recovered from childbirth, and milk dried at her breasts—dried because the child it was intended for was dead.
She went to rise and build up the fire, but I called Cymry, the head, from among the dead and showed her that he was trapped and that I could command him.
Kyra, I thought. My mother in love. My eyes filled with tears.
Ure answered my unspoken question. “She is on the Isle of Women among the Picts. A great teacher, venerated by her people. And you will see her again.”
I felt the dawn breeze on my face, and the mist that hung among the giant trees in Ure’s lair was tattered by even its slight movement. Big drops, condensation from the pines above, splattered on the wooden floor around us. In the distance, I could smell the sea.
“That was the first lesson,” Ure continued. “And it set the pattern of your life.”
“Explain?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “And it is very important that I don’t, because each practitioner of magic is an artist. Each brings something different to their art. You see, that is why I do not kill you, though you threaten the existence of all I love. None of my magics will tell me what you portend. And, for the first time in almost eight hundred years since I sailed from my Etruscan home and came here, I find myself afraid. None of them—earth, air, fire, and water—will speak your meaning to me.”
I glanced at Albe and Wic. They seemed frozen, cups in hand, both gazing at Ure in awe.
“We are alone here,” he said flatly. “Let them be.”
“Such stillness for so long. How can it not harm them?” I asked.
“They are not still. It is we who have left them standing, talking together outside the flow of events you call time. For that is the core of my magic—the thing you call time.”
“What then will be the core of mine?” I asked.
“I cannot say, because your talent is so great that not even I can rule it.”
The very light breeze had dropped, the mist among Ure’s pines had thickened again, and I looked out at the treetops all around us and felt very alone.
“Yes,” Ure said. “Only I and those I bring can come here. Only I and those I keep belong here. Only I and those I keep can find refuge here.”
An incantation, I thought.
A second later, both Wic and Albe were stirring and I was a part of time again. I sat cross-legged on the cushions next to Wic and Albe. They were still drinking; my cup was empty.
“Oh, don’t you need to question the head?” Albe asked.
“I have,” I answered.
I had done so while Ure and I were outside of time.
“Then I must have dozed over my beer.” She sounded unconcerned. “Old man,” she told Ure, “you live in a devil of a place to reach, but once here, I believe it’s worth the trip.”
“I am indeed a noble host,” he said. “And my gifts are beyond compare.”
Suddenly he held a kylix in his hand. I don’t know where it came from. One moment his hands were empty; the next, he was holding it.
The cup is a broad, flat Greek vessel, with two handles. It is glazed in black with pictures on the sides, painted in red. The flowing shapes of ancient Greek pottery are widely admired. No one makes such beautiful pottery any longer. Pottery—the pottery we make—is attractive enough, but utilitarian. No, this pottery dates from a place and time in the world when some genus of beauty inhabited the hearts of those living on the blue Aegean Sea and everything they touched became a hymn to the splendor of human creation. I think it was when we first saw ourselves as the heirs of divinity.
We are not so sure now of our place in the universe, and perhaps never will be again. But the cup was a lovely thing.
He proffered it to Wic. “Fill it at the spring.” He pointed to the water flowing from the rocky prominence that lifted through his flooring. “Then look into the water. If you see therein your heart’s desire, drain the cup and it shall be yours.”
We rose and went to the spring. As instructed, she filled the cup and looked down into it. I saw the shock in her face and gazed into the cup, also. The image that looked back at her was unblemished and clean.
I shivered and glanced at her face, marred by the terrible purple birthmark that spread over one cheek, mouth, and chin. She simply stood silently and tears began pouring down her face.
“It’s a trick,” she whispered at length, and stared at Ure. “You can’t do this. No one can.”
“Drain the cup and see,” he answered. “The choice is yours and yours alone. But remember, if you refuse what the cup offers you, the magic that hangs about this place offers no second opportunity. Decide.”
Still weeping, she drained the cup. The terrible mark vanished from her face, and I realized how beautiful a girl nature had intended her to be. She was springtime, born of the last winter rains, clad in rags, walking barefoot through cold, dew-drenched grass to greet the dawn. Her shabby clothes (we were all a bit battered and worn) covered a body like a young virgin goddess. Her face was the living embodiment of sculpted perfection and her hair a riot of sunlit curls.
I felt as though someone had fisted me in the stomach, but Wic walked into Ure’s embrace and Albe ended up holding the cup. I didn’t see it leave Wic’s hands, but Albe had it and she also walked to the spring and filled the vessel. She seemed to stand for an eternity gazing into the water. She shielded the surface from mine or any prying eyes, and I have never known what she saw. After a time, she looked out at the vast, silent pine forest waiting in the breathless hush before first light.
But then at length, she said, “No! No! Old man, some roads run only one way. Sometimes you can’t go back, even though the deepest desires
of your heart would try to drag you.”
But she didn’t throw out the water. Instead, she gently poured it back into the stream flowing over the boulder that led down to the river.
“Perhaps I will return,” she said.
“Perhaps I will allow you to return,” Ure said.
Then the cup was in my hand. “Her” face was painted red on the black of the inner bowl. She held her distaff in one hand, serpent in the other. The owl looked out from behind her, its wings spread. A shaft of white light blotted out my vision and I woke with the sun in my eyes.
I found when I woke that I could feel the city around me. Perhaps when I spoke to the tree last night, I had established a connection that hadn’t been completely broken. By day it was a hive of activity. Penned up at night, its citizens made up for their solitude by day. Day was in and of itself preparation for night. Marketing was done and dinner parties planned, food bought, much socializing went on. Gossip was exchanged about the ruling families’ constantly shifting alliances: who was married, who murdered (a much more frequent occurrence), what new things had been brought in by the Women of Wager and when would this new clothing, drug, drink, furniture, weapon, food, or sometimes slave be put on sale by the fortunate woman’s family. Quarrels were picked among men, duels were fought, assassinations planned by enemies, assignations were arranged by lovers—licit and illicit lovers. I was not sure of the difference, but cuckoldry and seduction were a sport to these people and there were lots of both kinds.
They worshiped also, praying and sometimes sacrificing to gods, dark and bright. I shivered at the touch of the tree’s mind when it communicated the substance of some worship. Some of the objects of adoration reminded me of those beings huddled in the swamp to whose untender mercies the Saxons had devoted their captives. The tree was calmly indifferent to the vagaries of human nature. It was itself an eternal or nearly eternal thing, knowing humans as only savage, quarrelsome birds and small animals that took advantage of the shelter it offered and nested in its branches.
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