The Raven Warrior
Page 51
But Uther only nodded and brought him to Morgana, who made arrangements for him to use the mountain house. He wasn’t happy. He was afraid. He didn’t tell his father that. It wasn’t in him to admit fear. He never had, he never would. But this passage was greatly feared by both boys and girls.
The rites girls faced weren’t as painful or lonely as the boys’ were, but she was sequestered in a small, lonely place and shunned for at least part of the time. For two weeks she was not allowed to speak, nor could she let her shadow fall on anyone’s food or weapons, or any newborn child. And, as with the boys, they must partake of the cup.
The priestess mixed the drink and the visions it produced brought knowledge of the future to those engaged in the passage. Girls were—frankly—used by the older women during the rite. Used to foretell the future.
Each night the girl drank from the ceremonial vessel and then was left in isolation until the morning, when she was questioned about what she had seen. Two weeks of this could bring a woman near madness if the revelations were ugly or unpleasant.
The boys faced a shorter, but no less fearful, ordeal. They went to the mountain house where for six days they were not allowed to eat and drank only water. As the bolder girls did, they each night sought the trance and the knowledge it brought. They prayed for a true dream, a guide to their future status.
It was cold, and on the way up, Arthur passed the night with the shepherds just moving their flocks up for summer pasture. He took his last allowable meal with them, porridge with some sweet cow’s milk. The ewes weren’t lactating yet. The flat bread he ate with it was more barley than wheat, but the butter was rich and good. Then he took his leave of them and hiked up to the thatch-covered pavilion called the forest house.
There were no other trees so high up but pines, and a thick mist covered them. The forest house was only four stone posts, a low stone wall between them. The roof was thick with thatch. When he reached it, the low mist had dampened the walls and floor. Water was dripping down from the thatch and making plopping sounds on the brown needle-covered earth around the door. He was tired. The low clouds hovering over the mountaintop reduced visibility to only a few feet.
He made a bed with an extra blanket and slept through most of the day. When he woke, it was evening. The wind had blown the clouds away, and he sat wrapped in his mantle, watching the sun go down in the distant sea. From here he could tell he was on a mountaintop now. As he watched, the scarlet blaze of the dying light painted the trees on the hills that stretched out below him until they met the ocean. The air was clear and cold, and somewhere in his soul he mourned the departing light. He drank the first cup of the journey. Fire was forbidden, and the darkness thick around him until he saw the beauty of the stars.
His spirit soared. They had always been there, those stars, but somehow he had never really seen them. There was always a door to enter, or when sleeping outdoors when they were on the hunt, the fire flared. It needed to be tended and fed. When he was on watch or having the lessons, they taught him how to know them—tell time by their eternal consistency or find his way out on the open sea using them as beacons or do the same on a cross-country march: look for those patterns that would mark the houses and the direction he needed to follow to shelter, or at darker times, an ambush or a killing. The stars were among the tools he had been taught to master.
But now he needed nothing from them, and it was as though he had never seen them before. They cast the network of their splendor over him and greeted him as one of their own. He wrapped himself in his mantle and wandered through the dark, silent forest, watching them, keeping them company as they marked the long, slow passage of the night. Marveling at the beauty and imagination of what/whoever called them from the deeps of eternity and taught the mind of man to love their splendor.
He never remembered how or when he found his bed, but sometime before dawn, he did. He slept deeply and without dreams.
When he woke, the morning was well under way. He rose, washed. A bath in the cold water of a spring nearby caused such spasms in his muscles that he thought he might end in a permanent crouch. He didn’t, but felt much better when his skin glowed with the flush of blood his heart sent to chase away the chill.
He took some time to make a rough broom from a fallen bough and some small pine branches so he could sweep the dusty floor and dispose of his used bedding. Then he remade his bed and sat outside, listening to the endless breeze that troubled his ears with its mild roaring, watching the sun cross the sky.
Near the spring where he bathed, a pair of birds was raising young. Exhausting, he thought. The adults ran themselves ragged trying to keep the four triangular yellow mouths full. The chicks rested between feedings, but as soon as Mother or Father—he couldn’t tell which was which—came in for a landing at the edge of the nest, four heads were up, four mouths open, four sets of lungs screaming for nourishment.
Why did they go to all the trouble? Was it worth it? His mother hadn’t seemed to think so. But there was that frantically working pair of birds.
Birds had no kings, no laws, and no families. What was there in a bird’s world to keep them from dumping the worrisome chicks out of the nest and flying away to eat the tidbits they were so assiduously feeding to their chicks? The birds were hard at it.
He wondered what Igrane would have done with him if she’d been a bird. Probably fed him to the nearest snake. Remembering the years he’d spent with her, he thought perhaps he might have been better off.
When he looked up at the sky, he saw the clouds were moving in from the sea, drowning the golden light in gray shadow. That night, after he emptied the cup, he found himself haunted by the terror of memory. He slept and dreamed of her the way he always remembered her, bending over him (children are so small). The cold anger on her face reaching for him. He would wake himself up screaming, waiting for the pain to begin. Each time he slept, this same dream jolted him awake, shivering with fear, and oddly enough at the same time drenched with the sweat of fear.
He woke in the gray dawn glad the night was over to find the clouds had moved in, wrapping the world in silent gray vapor. He was lean, spare. He carried little or no extra fat. Hunger and the terror of the long night had taken its toll.
He didn’t try to bathe in the spring today. He found that with the drug gone from his blood, he was able to sleep in peace, and he did for the most of the morning and afternoon. When he woke, it was still raining and the sky was lighter. He went down to the spring and bathed. But a look at the clouds flying past up high told him the night would be cold. Weather from the north was pushing them. So he didn’t dare use his spare blanket to dry himself. He did have a clean change of clothing, so he dressed while still damp and then watched the cottony clouds dabbled in blood by the sunset.
He drank the cup, wrapped himself in his blanket and mantle, and tried to stay out of the icy wind while the forest moaned and cried out around him. Between the low clouds and the intermittent gusts of rain, he seemed wrapped in absolute darkness. The pines around him cried out in a thousand voices. A long, whispering rush as the tree limbs thrashed, loud cracks when something, tree or branch, gave way, a long, vast sigh that began as a whisper and gradually grew louder and louder, until its roar seemed to encompass the whole world.
As he looked up, he could see the tall pines bending, whipping in the blast, and the wild clouds, dim shapes above the darker trees, flying past, driven like shadows before the wind. In the dark, something roared. Once—his mind told him—there were no fires, and when the sun set by day or the moon by night, the world was an abyss of darkness. This must have been what it was like. To sit alone in the cold and the fireless dark and hear the creatures of fang, tusk, and claw—those born with all the armaments they needed to survive—yell a warning into the night that they were on the hunt. The roar came again, closer, and it sounded as though something moved among the brush and small trees growing along the narrow trail he had taken to come here. Something big.
He heard the scream of a cat then. It came from near the pool where he bathed. The roars changed to snuffing and woofing. Dog. His disordered mind wished to believe it was a dog, but the sounds were too loud to belong even to a large dog, and the crashing and plunging in the undergrowth bespoke a massive creature.
Then, as if to confirm his worst fears, he heard the sound of claws ripping the bark as the bear reached up and left his mark high on a tree trunk. In the darkness, Arthur heard the cat scream again. The wind slashed at the high forest and moaned and seemed to cry out almost in pain.
Arthur wept. He cried hopelessly and despairingly, because he had not the courage to throw aside his mantle and bedding and walk into almost stygian darkness under the trees to meet his fate. Sometimes men did not return from these journeys, and he knew now he was never meant to return. The powers of the gods of wrath and circumstance. Things he could no more cease to believe in than he could stop breathing. These things had marked him as their own. And the bear had been sent for him.
But Morgana, mouth and tongue of the goddess, could summon the cat, and she paced the dark, sobbing forest, protecting him, even against the will of the cruel forces she commanded. Because in her guise as the cat, she was one of them.
Even in memory the despair and self-loathing he felt that night seemed to rest in his stomach like a stone. But it is the nature of the beast to hope to continue, no matter what. The deepest part of our minds doesn’t believe in death. After a time, when his emotions exhausted him completely, he slept. And then he did dream.
Was it an arena or a dancing floor? The strange symbols on it fitted into each other and would have formed a solid but for the fact that there were black lines between them and each curving, graceful shape was a different color. In fact, they flowed through the spectrum, the colors seemingly formed of pure light, as though they partook somehow of the nature of the rainbow. He understood them to be kin to the symbols that flared in the palms of his hands, or on the bottom of the cauldron that ruled and protected the tower. He had seen inscriptions in languages he didn’t understand, and he was sure that’s what these were: the silent voice of a lost people.
He had a sword and shield. Poor stuff. The shield was the stiff hide of something dead, something that stank, ammonia, a sharp urine stench in his nostrils. The sword was old, the blade dark and pitted with rust, but crudely sharpened with a coarse whetstone to a dangerous edge.
All around him the garden bloomed, a riot of fruit and flowers. They mixed; ripe cherries covered one tree, peach blossoms pink and white on another. Flower beds were scattered everywhere, each holding a different set of blossoms. They were divided by gravel paths or sometimes only stepping-stones, a maze winding in and out between the trees and flowers. The men and women were gathered there, watching him. They were crudely dressed, clothes old and patched. Some of the women had children in their arms or clinging to their skirts. Only a few of them were together with the opposite sex. All . . . all, without exception, had terrible fear in their eyes.
He looked up. Towers loomed above him, towers in the sun. Or were they towers made of sunlight? The latticework of crystal that composed them caught the sun, transforming the warm light into multiple staircases. High-ceilinged rooms filled with art, representational and otherwise, tapestries and floating draperies moved in the wind. There was furniture there, but no piece stirred even the slightest recognition in his mind.
But he knew to move through those half-seen chambers was to experience a perfection of sheer formal beauty as close to the halls of paradise as any mortal being would ever get. To look at them in the distance made his throat ache with longing for a closer and more lasting vision than he would ever be allowed.
He didn’t know how far the towers were until he saw what he knew must be his adversaries emerging from among the towers and racing across a long causeway that wound over the magnificent water garden surrounding the city. Shallow pools filled with water lilies in an unbelievable palate of colors, deeper areas reflecting the blue sky, and here and there and everywhere fountains played, coming and going, crystal water shining in the sunlight.
But “They” were coming fast and They were as ugly as the garden lake and tower were beautiful. They were big and black and tan-colored, black bristles on the neck and shoulders, black face and snout. At the shoulders, bristles, not fur, began to grow lighter, until the back was a light brown, just the color of a lion’s fur and much the same texture and length.
They ran on all fours and had cloven hooves. Each one carried a sword and shield slung over its shoulder. When They reached the end of the causeway ready to meet him on the dazzling arena floor, They paused. And he saw they were shape-strong.
They ceased to be animals but did not become men, though they stood upright. The legs and feet of the creatures changed and became more like those of a bear, covered with hair, long and so muscular they resembled tree trunks. The arms and hands seemed almost human but massive and covered by the same tawny hair that covered the legs, chest, back, and groin. The shoulders were two ax handles broad, the neck massive, but almost nonexistent, and it supported a head that resembled a wild boar more than anything else. The snout was a pig’s, but no boar ever sported six tusks, each curving upward from the snout.
A pig’s teeth are bad enough, yellow bone chisels, very sharp at the points. But these things had fangs, the upper ones fitting into the bone jaw between the upcurved tusks, the lowers short chisels with tips like razors. The whole face was covered by the black bristles, all but the black snout and big, dark eyes.
Studying them, Arthur decided the things could probably see better than he could. The things’ foreheads were high and the eyes wide set. He wondered if they would all come at once. There were five of them, and he probably wouldn’t stand a chance. But one at a time . . .
They looked at one another the way picked warriors will, as though they were saying, “After you, gentlemen.” “Oh, no, no, sir. After you. Please do the honors.”
Behind him Arthur heard the murmur of many voices and he could make out only one word: tiaeloig. This talk came from the humans behind him. Despite their interaction, he couldn’t tell if they said anything or not.
Then one of them stepped forward. “My kill!” the voice grated.
Arthur stepped back. The sword was well enough, but the shield? It was made of wicker and hide. It had only a hand grip. There was no place to put his arm. Such a shield, one that cannot be braced with the arm, is of only slight usefulness in a fight.
His opponent swung his sword in a mighty blow, a roundhouse arc that should have cut both Arthur and the shield in half. He didn’t stay to meet it. He stepped to his opponent’s right and slammed the shield into his sword arm. The blow was hard enough that it would have broken a human’s forearm, probably in at least one place, and perhaps disarmed him.
But this was like hitting a tree—correction, a moving tree. The shield was forced back toward him, and the massive head dropped. Arthur saw the bone-white tusks rip through the shield, and when he felt the grip being torn from his fingers, Arthur let go.
He had his opponent where he wanted him: turning. Free of the shield, Arthur reached for his foe’s left arm and spun him around. Normally he couldn’t have moved so massive a being, but the thing was caught off balance. A second later, his back was to Arthur and he drove the sword in above the kidney, assuming the thing kept its kidneys there. The left side of the blade severed the spinal cord; the point tore through the pericardium, the left lung, and the abdominal aorta.
A second later the thing fell, dying, legs paralyzed, gushing blood from the massive torso wound, the snout, and mouth. As it fell, it ripped the sword from Arthur’s hand and he found himself weaponless, facing four more of these horrors.
He woke rigid, h
eart hammering as though it wanted to leap from his chest, and sick with fear. A dream? He’d never had a dream so vivid, so real, before. Then he thought, no, that wasn’t true. The ones he had about his mother were almost that sharp and clear.
Was that what he had been supposed to see? His tired mind could make no sense of it.
He rose and the icy water in the spring cleared his head. No, Morgana must not be allowed to protect him again, not tonight. No. There was another place up here. It was even more difficult to get to.
The forest house backed up to a ridgeline. At the end of the ridge was a high spur that overlooked a narrow fjord. Nothing lived on those windswept cliffs. No trees, not even seabirds nested on the shattered black rocks that overlooked the fjord. Wind and rain bettered them, and extremes of heat and cold sometimes shattered the ancient Cambrian surfaces, sending sheets of stone peeling away from the cliff to shatter on the shingle by the sea below.
The chamber there was a hole hollowed out by wind and rain, but it was almost entirely open along one side, roofed only by a slab of rock with a rude bed chipped out of stone on the far wall. It took him the best part of the afternoon to reach it. No one went there now. The footing on the ridge was treacherous, and last year a young shepherd who braved the ridge trying to rob a falcon’s nest was killed when the scree that covered the ridgeline collapsed and sent him tumbling down the steep slope into a pile of boulders.
In fact, the whole place had an uncanny reputation, and it was reputed to claim at least one life a year. And sometimes more. He saw why when he got there, his nails worn away, his knees scraped and his hands painfully cut by the jagged flints on the ridge.