She closed her eyes and saw it as it had been then: the white, close-set houses spilling down the sandy slopes; the wall, whitewashed also. The traders and townspeople haggling on the beach. The priestesses stood on the walls, not bold enough to go among the traders. There were stories of girls carried off by merchantmen and never seen again. But the priestesses would cluster on the wall, and some of them would catch the eyes of bearded, dark, curly-haired men, and those men would make their way into the city by night to the temple.
The goddess stood as the lady, for she had no other name even then except The Lady. She stood at the end of a long—it seemed long—pillared hall. The image was of wood; her flounced skirts were decorated with ivory and she wore a mantle of Egyptian linen. She held a snake in one hand and a distaff in the other. All along the walls were cubicles where the priestesses waited. An offering was made at the high altar, then a priestess directed the man to one of the cubicles. In each, a girl lay. The bed was alder wood with a leather strap webbing and only a single linen sheet between the waiting girl and the night’s cold. Whoever, whatever the man might be, the girl embraced him, opening her arms and legs.
She knew these humans were accomplishing remarkable things, but when the girls came to make offerings to the pool beyond “Her” statue, their eyes were always so sad. But the high priest grew rich and the city grew rich, and even some of the girls were able to earn a dowry and marry. Not the one who devoted the mirror, though. It had belonged to a female lover, one of the other priestesses.
Disease didn’t spare these women; they, most of them, died young, as this priestess’s companion had. The girl was somber when she brought the mirror and a pair of filigree earrings to the pool. The earrings drifted away into darkness; the girl’s eyes had widened in surprise when a hand reached out of the shadowed depths and grasped the mirror.
But it didn’t do to let these humans know too much. They were so sad.
She looked into the mirror at her face again. It hadn’t changed, but then, she didn’t expect it to. Sentient beings were not her call, and the ones who would have understood, nurtured, and protected them were long gone. The last of them died when the world cracked. She had been only a child when the horrific destruction had been visited on the planet.
As she told Lancelot, her kind were tough, but not immortal, and many had died, swept away in the devastation. Others, seeing the beauty they had devoted their lives to preserving melting away in the crucible of heaven, had given up, yielded their lives to the chaos around them, and were destroyed.
The survivors fought back. Child or not, she had, joining the dragons and the few remaining Fauns in a battle to salvage what could be rescued from the ancient order now forever disrupted and lost. But then, who knows?
She closed her eyes and listened to the fern song. She ached to walk through those lost, silent forests that burgeoned when green growing things escaped the first seas and slowly began their spread across the barren continents. They filled the seacoast, then spread rapidly along the river systems. Tall thickets of horsetails, spreading water fern, growing on the surface of every pond and river. Vining creatures not fern nor water plant could cover rocks or grow across mud flats or sometimes rear up high as trees. Fern trees; how many kinds had there been? Some with long fronds that drooped like willows; others with tall trunks and fronds curled like fists. These rose on long, whiplike stems and managed to tower over the rest so high they were able to capture the sun on the darkest day, and when dry times came, recover the moisture of low-lying clouds.
These were forests of silence. There were no insects. The slow creatures of the seas, rivers, and pools had not yet learned to escape the water dominion, and birds were yet far in the future. The only sounds were wind strumming the forests as though they were some primordial musical instruments and water gurgling, rushing, drumming as rain, splattering and at last whispering on its way to the eternal sea.
Fern dreams. She had come to them during the centuries of struggle when she and her kind fought to keep life strong, complex, and resilient on this world, circling its tiny sun. She and her kind had won, and the fruits of her victory resonated in her blood and bone to this day. Yet when they had won and reached back, looking for the ancient knowledge that had created them . . . they found it was gone. All that was left to do was hope that when intelligent life emerged again from among their charges, it would begin again, the adventure of thought and knowledge that had brought them into being at the beginning.
She wondered what Cregan would teach him, and was afraid her boy of water and light might find out from the embittered old warrior the folly and senselessness of it all. And that was too bad, if he did, because she herself, regardless of the immense amount of time she had lived, hadn’t found life meaningless ever. In many ways, simply living was its own reason for existence. Each day brought some new surprise, some new beauty to be appreciated, some new piece of knowledge to be assimilated. Sometimes a new friend, as it had been the day he appeared at her lake; whatever happened, a red-letter day in her calendar forever.
She smiled into the mirror. Yes, her face was fine this way.
“I’m brooding,” she told the ferns.
“We noticed,” was the answer.
“We” was the proper term. They were all one organism and, like the water lily, were self-aware.
“I don’t usually brood, and I can’t think why I am now.”
A hummingbird, green and gold, a living jewel, dropped down into the grotto.
“There are no flowers here,” the ferns whispered to him.
“Water,” was the bird’s reply. He flew in and out of the spray from the waterfall, then perched on a fern frond and rested. Hummingbirds do this more frequently than most humans realize. Their way of life is very strenuous.
“Love?” she asked the ferns.
“We think not,” was the reply. “You have been in love often and never has it affected you this way. ‘Perturbation.’ ”
“Perturbation?” she repeated.
“That’s all we know, but we feel it everywhere, and it is centered around your lover, born of water and light.”
“The sorcerer! The old sorcerer at the lake?” She gasped. “I had forgotten, ladies. All I could think of was him, my need to capture him and begin a new affair of the heart. Besides, I despise these scavengers, each hell-bent on outdoing the other and grabbing hold of fragments of a past they don’t even try to comprehend. Seeking only for the power they gain from controlling things that are shards of a transcendent whole, now lost. Lost forever.”
She became a swift cloud of mist, then rain, cascading into the basin at the foot of the falls. She barely heard the maidenhair fern’s soft, “My sister, good-bye.”
Lancelot slept through the day, or most of it. When he woke, he found the ravens covered the ground around him. In the afternoon, the clouds had moved in and now the sunset was a wash of vivid scarlet across gray cushions stretching out as far as the eye could see.
Night, he thought.
The Hun’s body was nailed to the fence. His head was gone.
Lancelot stood. His mantle was hanging over a tree limb and the helmet and sword were hanging from a branch nearby. The ravens on the ground stared at him with red, unblinking eyes. Nothing of what he had seen in the morning was visible now when he looked down, only red-dappled clouds as far as the eye could see. Between the rolling fog and the overcast above and the covered stars above, he seemed caught between heaven and earth, isolated and alone.
The helm became a bird, took wing and perched on the top rail beside the Hun’s headless body. Lancelot studied the bird. Something itched when he reached up and touched his face. He felt the dried blood on his cheeks and then when he ran his fingers through his hair, he found crusted blood there, too. The wolf nose smelled it.
“What would you do, O Lord of the Water and Light?” the bird asked.
The red orb of the sun was caught in the clouds and his eyes could look directl
y into it.
“Prepare myself for the responsibilities of battle,” he said. “What have you to offer me?”
“Ourselves. Our souls,” the bird answered. “Long ago, to achieve victory over our enemies, we yielded up our souls to eternal savagery and damnation in order to obtain victory. We achieved it. Our enemies were wiped out. But to destroy them, we doomed ourselves. So we haunted the valleys where you traveled and we had no peace. But you killed me, and now I am iron and carbon, and when I leave you, I shall sleep. So will my brother, who is your sword. The rest here ask the same gift of you.”
“Carbon and iron are steel,” Lancelot said. “Or so my father, Maeniel, tells me.”
“And in the end, an inert thing that halts all enchantment, even one so wicked as ours,” the bird said.
The ravens studied him with their unblinking eyes. They were silent, crowded on the ground, the trees, the bushes, and even on the fence between the withering trophies of Cregan and his men. From where he stood, Lancelot could look down the fence and count fifteen corpses, all in various stages of decay. Then the fence, the trophy fence, disappeared into the dead forest.
“It won’t work. Even if I had the strength to kill each one of you, you would still be trapped by the cold iron,” he said.
“No!” the bird answered. “You read the garden. They—the ones who planted it—never returned to hear our case, so we are lost. What is the price of peace? You can read the garden. Tell us.”
Lancelot bowed his head and realized the ravens were like children. Nasty, vicious children to be sure, but children with a simplistic outlook on the massive evil involved in their actions. They had bargained with monstrous cruelty for victory and sold their souls.
He studied the sky. The sun was gone; only an opalescent band of greenish blue decorated the horizon where it had been.
I read the garden. And he had, but thinking about it was like trying to fly a dozen kites at one time and trying to keep them from tangling their cords together. He understood now what she meant when she told him the logic of the universe was beyond his powers. It was a maze that he could contemplate from time’s beginning until its end and still not wholly understand.
He stood between two evil things: the birds and the trophy fence—the dead. On either side. But nothing is ever completely evil, and that was the most difficult paradox that the shapes of the garden taught him—and the one that most challenged his understanding. Compared with a discussion of good and evil, most other concepts were child’s play.
He stretched out his hand and the sword flew into it. Then, as he had when he cheated death and raised a storm, he drew the logical path of love. The birds were frozen in their tracks, all but the one on the fence with the Hun.
“Tell me about him?” Lancelot asked.
“He . . . he was not a bad man,” the bird began, and the image of the Hun soldier appeared before the fence, eyes living, face grave.
“Very stoic, I suppose you would describe him,” the bird continued. “He had an unhappy life. I think most men, most beings, do not have very happy lives. But he loved the vast plains where his family roamed. He lived in a hide-covered tent, and they wintered in narrow valleys where they planted a crop. But when summer came, they returned to the plain to pasture their sheep and goats.
“His people were very poor and the only way any family does any better than scratch a bare living is when they raid the villages that cluster in the river valleys near the water. His father went on such a raid and did not return. His mother went back to her family and when he was big enough to ride and fight, they pushed him to sell his services to the great Attila. They said he would get rich . . . but . . . now he dreams only of the endless grass and his little mare. She is long dead now, and so is he. Newly dead. And he wishes he had been a chieftain, so he could have been buried with her and ride out forever across his people’s endless, rolling plains.
“There is such a sorrow in me, I can say no more.”
Lancelot said the incantation that was also a convenant. “Each and both ride with me. A short term of service, and you are free to roam the stars. Each and both remember you were men.”
The raven that had been his sword said, “Remember we were men. Is that the key? We sold our souls to escape mortality. Must we embrace it again?”
It was dark by then. There was no more light in the sky. But Lancelot had wolf’s eyes and the dried, twisted body of the next was near him.
“It is inescapable,” he said. “Speak!”
“You would not have liked this one, O sorcerer of battle.”
Then Lancelot saw a soldier, one who stood and gazed into his eyes with hatred.
“Long ago did I forget that I was ever human,” the bird said. “But his memories sicken even me.”
Then Lancelot went on to the next. The birds followed.
The third raven said, “We accept you, geis.” He flew to the fence.
The shape of the third warrior filled out in the gloom. He was very small; the face appeared beardless.
“Young,” the raven said. “A Frank. There was sickness in his village. All his kin died. He was too young to work his father’s land, too proud to go into another household and be treated like a servant. He joined the first party to cross the Rhine. He didn’t think of death in battle. He didn’t know that he could die.”
“It comes as a surprise to us all, I think,” Lancelot said.
“He is fleshless bones. Even the few rags of skin or cloth are gone. But there is a beautiful newness about his spirit,” the bird said. “And a great peace.”
“A warrior’s heart,” Lancelot said. “A little time with me and you are free, bird. The boy is free now.”
It was dark and they were in the dead forest. The fourth raven flew and landed on the fence near something that consisted of only a few long bones and some scraps of leather and cloth.
“This geis is a thing of terror and pain,” the bird said, “but it is mighty magic.”
“Speak!” Lancelot said.
“He was old,” the bird said, “and felt his life a failure. His village was attacked and his people slaughtered, among them, his wife and child. He rode to avenge them, following his king, Clovis. He never could bear to return and try to take up his life where it left off. He followed his king, but rank and riches eluded him, though he was a fierce warrior.
“He took another woman, but his bitterness drove her away. Killing became a way of life. He is not certain when he died. His life was so like death already. She wasn’t a bad woman, but he could never tell her how much she meant to him. This alone he regrets.”
Lancelot nodded. “Will he come?”
“No,” the bird answered. “He would sleep now.”
“Ride with me, bird,” Lancelot said.
“And I will spread my wings on the star road, O Warrior of Water and Light. It wrenches my heart that I remember now that I, too, would kiss one whose lips are dust. He never learned to feel or love. There is no hope where he is, but there is no pain. To live is to suffer. He denies you.”
“That’s his choice, bird. Only once ride with me, then I yield you to the star road. Remember, you were a man.”
So the night passed. Sometimes there was anger, at others, spite. But most of the dead stepped forth and spoke through the birds, and all of the birds went consenting to their meeting with the dead. Lancelot began to know them, because they had come to him for final disposition and in hope of rest. Few spoke about battle, few about death. They knew, he thought, all they wished to know about that particular thing.
They spoke of women as mothers, wives, and lovers. They remembered meals and celebrations, friendships and always all sorts of love. Loyalties, sorrows, and many losses, cruelty, anger, and betrayal. They spoke with longing of the beauty of the world; how fair life had been and how they didn’t appreciate it while they had it. And also, they longed, almost each and every one, to say “I love you” to someone, somewhere, sometime—and suffered bit
ter regret for having left those words unspoken.
“I never was able to kiss her or him, father, mother, or child, good-bye.”
Lancelot felt as he walked on following the fence down the mountainside that the things he was hearing should blight his life forever. But somehow they did not, for only a few of the dead—the birds—questioned, turned away, and refused to speak about themselves and their lives. Most, almost all, had, however it ended, loved their time in the sun and were one with him in teaching the birds the value of humanity; the humanity the birds had forgotten. In all generosity he offered them back their souls.
“We accept your geis,” each bird said as it took its place beside one of the dead.
The only thing that bowed Lancelot down was the age and seeming endlessness of the struggle. They passed Franks to Romans. Men born under the warm Italian sun came here to die in what to them was a bleak wilderness. They were representatives of Caesar’s legions, then men who enlisted under Marius. And yet other nameless Germanic warriors who rode into these mountains to raid and steal horses and sheep. Hannibal’s men, Iberian Celts with fierce horses and elaborate jewelry. Greek mercenaries, Ionian cavalry, persons in trousers, tribesmen from across the Rhine, raiders from villages high in the mountains, villages set on piling driven into the water of mountain lakes. And last of all, Etruscan pirates to whom Rome was only a squalid village on the Tiber where pigs wallowed in the Valleys of the Seven Hills.
In the end the trophy fence was but a shadow among the trees, and it could be tracked only by calling the dead who moldered deep in the soil and were utterly forgotten. It ended at last when they reached the river. Lancelot stood on the high bank surrounded by his men. They were his men. Forty oath men, forty ghosts, forty ravens. He wore the raven helmet and sword, but the birds had added a breastplate over a chain-mail shirt, arm and shin guards.
The Raven Warrior Page 45
