"Do not mourn, I am not here. This is Finvarra's tomb, only he was never buried here because of Myrrdin and the Morrigan. He wasn't allowed to die. Who else wouldn't be in their own tomb? The song of mourning we sang with the harpist was for the Wounded King's wife, or rather the king himself, soon to be joined in eternity with Caoilfhionn once again."
"You're a romantic soul, Sláine. Soft in the head, but there's no denying the romance in your soul."
The harpist emerged from the darkness of the tomb, only now he was stripped to the waist and sheened in the sweat of exertion, his muscles hard. He held a ruby-encrusted goblet fashioned from human bone. His hair was pulled back from his face in a neat braid, his brow smeared with the soot of the fire. Half in and half out of the sunlight, the glow gave his skin more colour than the last time they had seen the man, but it was still impossibly pale and pitted with pox scars. He looked different though, more human. His wispish body belied the immense power bound within his rigid muscles.
"You have a passing fair voice for a blacksmith, Siothrún," Sláine said, "or should I call you Weyland?"
The smith inclined his head, accepting the compliment. "There is a difference between a gift and a craft, warrior. You may be an artist with a brush and a butcher with an axe. One tool does not demark the man, rather a man can be many things."
"Indeed."
"You have me at a disadvantage, I must admit. I did not expect to see you again, and yet you have found your way back to me and barely a season has passed. I underestimated you, a mistake I will not make again in a hurry." He set the bone goblet aside. "I assume you know this place?"
"The barrow of kings," said Sláine, nodding. "Or one king, Finvarra."
The smith smiled. "Perhaps my queen was right about you after all, Sláine Mac Roth."
"We all make mistakes, I was sure this dance was the Crone's doing. I did not look past the obvious. Instead I was content to believe this was her tune, the saga all about her child."
"Oh, but it was," the smith said, reaching behind his head to loosen the tie holding his hair back. He shook it loose. "And more to the point, it still is. You have the shards of the old Cú Roi of Goibniu?"
Sláine nodded.
"Which means the geas Myrrdin and the Morrigan placed on the Isle of Glass must have been broken and Finvarra released from his torment. Soon I will journey to what remains of the isle to reclaim his corpse and lay him to rest here, beside his beloved. This place was once the home of the Sidhe, did you know that? Tir-Nan-Og, Land of the Young. Who did you think the 'young' were? It is only fitting that in death absolute, the king is brought home. But you have more pressing needs, no? You want the final part of the Cauldron, and if I am any judge, you're about to go down on your knees and beg me to reforge the relic, are you not?"
"I beg no man," said Sláine.
"A pity, for I am in no mood to be generous. You need it to return home, as my queen foretold, and your bleak Goddess needs it to free her get; without my aid now you are both thwarted. You see, we counted on her arrogance and your ignorance. I look at you now and I see failure and doubt eating away at you. The protector of the Cú Roi must be resolute for the Cauldron is the womb of the Goddess, the source of all things, of life and death and rebirth. It can feed, give drink, heal, nay restore life, soothe raging spears. Its waters contain wisdom - more, it joins the firmament, the primordial soup that was the place of creation. The Cú Roi is more than a mere treasure to be traded; it nurtures the Goddess, it feeds the land."
"If this is so, why deprive us of its magic? You have what you want, Finvarra is released, the Isle of Glass shattered to ten thousand thousand shards."
"No, no, no, warrior. I do not have what I want. I have not had what I want for years beyond counting. I had what I wanted, but it was wrenched away from me and I was left bereft. It is a world of trades. I helped my queen fulfil her desires so that I might earn back what I lost."
"Explain yourself, smith. You talk in circles."
"Let me show you, warrior. To see is to understand; words are empty."
They stood beside a small tarn, the water crystal blue, the imperfections of the ripples and the reflected sky adding to its loveliness. A single swan swam in the tarn, its white feathers heavy with water as it glided through the ripples, making more.
"This is what you wanted me to see?"
"Yes," the smith said, melancholy heavy in his voice. He knelt at the water's edge with a handful of seed, trying to entice the bird to him.
"A bird?"
"Sit, let me tell you her story, then perhaps you will understand."
"Tell me, smith. First you say seeing it will make me understand because words are empty, now you want to waste words on me? Which is it?"
"They are rare birds, swans. The female is fiercely loyal to the male. Unlike many species, they are faithful to one another, and mate for life. If the male dies, the female will still resolutely spurn all other loves until she too dies. It is quite remarkable really, one of the beautiful aspects of nature."
"Do you have a point?"
"Besides boring us to death," said Ukko, picking up a flat stone and skimming it across the water. The sudden flurry of movement startled the swan. Its huge wings unfurled, slapping up water as it splashed across the small lake to the other side.
"I do. I do. It is my curse to love the Swan Maiden. She was a gift to me in my loneliness, to be my mate for life."
"She's a bird, you know, flap, flap, flap," Ukko mimed wings, "isn't that a bit sick? I mean I am all for a bit of you know what, but aren't there certain, ah, practicalities, what with her being roughly the same size as your todger?"
"She was made human by Danu so that I might know true love after years of being caught between worlds, neither Sidhe nor human, and she was beautiful, believe me."
"Ahh, well that makes more sense. Even so, she's a bird now, so...?"
"I would have her back, only then am I prepared to help you."
"That is impossible, man. I cannot work magic. Miracles are the realm of the Goddess, not a warrior. I cannot grant such a boon."
"Then you will not leave this place with your treasure, it is as simple as that."
"How can I do it? Tell me? I cannot wave my fingers and make it so," Sláine said bitterly. "Is there an artefact? A quest? What? What can I do?"
The smith shook his head. "There is no treasure that can undo my pain. She is dead to me and dead to this realm."
"Then I don't understand. You hold us to ransom with the impossible?"
A fat crow settled on one of the branches of the briarwood. It craned its neck, beady yellow eyes glaring intently at the smith as it preened its glossy feathers. The intelligence, cold and calculating, betrayed it as the Morrigan's creature long before it spoke. "My sister warned you, smith," the bird cawed, its voice raucous, harsh. "Her gift was pure and heartfelt. You only have yourself to blame for your loneliness now."
Sláine watched as Weyland the Smith clenched his fists, knuckles white, cracking. Anger and guilt tore at the man in equal measure. Sláine understood: he had had happiness and he had thrown it away. The guilt would be impossible to live with.
The bird hopped from branch to branch, mocking the man.
"You would have your vile son released from the hell he is trapped in, Morrigan? Well, I have no love for you, or your damned sisters. What I have is a price: a life for a life. Nature is a constant conflict, a turmoil seeking balance. My price is this: I would have my Swan Maiden returned to me that I might know happiness once more. That is a fair bargain for all: you purchase your son's freedom, the warrior gets his treasure so that he might return home a hero, and I get my wife. Otherwise, let Avagddu rot in a world of rust, let the Sessair return home to face execution, I care not for mortal or immortal concerns."
"You cannot turn back time, smith," the bird cackled, taking momentary flight in a flurry of black wings. It alighted a moment later in the branches of the ash tree. "Burn the feathers, she
said. Burn them all. But arrogant mortals don't listen, oh no, they make mirrors of silver to store a single memory, a feather from the bird that was. Mirrors break, bad luck. For you and for your bride, bad luck for the bird."
"How could I know?" the smith pleaded, and Sláine finally understood. Somehow that single feather the man had kept as a token had broken the enchantment, returning the smith's woman to her avian form.
"You were warned. Promises broken, gifts lost."
The bird took flight once more, flitting across the sky before swooping low in a shimmering blur, the twisted form of the Morrigan emerging from the bird's form as it landed amid the flotsam and jetsam of the lakeside. The Crone shuffled towards them, crook-backed, the weight of the years and the tragedy of so many lifetimes upon her shoulders. She thrust a finger towards the smith accusingly. "You want, you want, you want," she heckled, the raucous braying of the bird still present in her voice as she mocked him. "Blodeuwedd is always too loving, her nature to sweet. You took her gift and cast it aside in your arrogance, smith. You refused to listen to the warning. It was no threat - she does not trade in that currency. She loved you and wanted to please you, but all you could think about was your craft - a perfect silver mirror to reflect the beauty of your precious Swan Maiden. Well, mirrors crack, dreams fail and happiness flees. That is the nature of this mortality. That is what galls the most, is it not? Hate festers within you, hate for me, my sister self, the druid, even fate itself, but you cannot own your guilt. You lash out, blaming everyone and everything, yet it is you who is to blame."
"You took her from me, Morrigan. She was my life."
"And now you want her back. She can never be the same again, you understand that?"
"Did you not overhear my conversation with your champion? We are bonded, mates for life. I need her at my side."
"So be it." She turned to Sláine. "Surrender the fragments of the Cauldron to the smith. The bargain has been struck, the price met. I will give him back his pretty one, a life for a life as he so rightly claims, nature will retain her balance precisely as it is," and to Weyland the Smith she said, "Now go about your craft. What follows is not for your eyes if you would still love your wife. When you emerge with the Cauldron reforged she will be waiting for you."
With the sound of the smith's hammer ringing in the darkness of the barrow, the Morrigan called the bird to her. The Lady of the Feathers had an affinity with the white swan; the bird showed no fear as it glided across the still water to be with her, and appeared quite serene as it laid its head in her callused palm.
"Hush little one, your lover would have you back," the Crone soothed, stroking back the feathers on the swan's head. "It will hurt, it always does," and before Sláine understood what was happening, the Morrigan gripped the bird's neck and wrung it with one brutally sharp twist. The swan's wings flapped on wildly despite the fact that the animal was dead, its nerves crying out as the pain filtered through to its brain for a full minute before they fell still.
Cradling the dead swan in her arms, the Morrigan walked back across to the fire pit, whispered a word and the flames ignited, rising higher and brighter than they reasonably could have from the charred remains that gave them life. The heat emanating from them was intense, fierce enough to drive Sláine and Ukko back a dozen paces to move away from its sting. The Morrigan lifted the dead swan above her head, mouthing a benediction neither of them could hear for the snap and cackle of the flames, and threw the carcass into the hottest part of the fire.
For a moment the fire seemed to wash over the swan without touching it, then the tips of the feathers began to singe, and the dark edge smeared across more of the wings as they charred. Within seconds they were black and shrivelled, the flames eating away at the bird, not merely roasting it. Sláine stared in mute horror as the swan was utterly consumed. It happened so quickly; the carcass succumbed, the meat flensed from the bone, the bones reduced to ash. Within a minute all trace of the swan was eradicated by the fire.
The Morrigan mouthed another word, and as abruptly as it had been born the fire died back to nothing. She knelt amid the ashes, stirring them with her crooked fingers, until she found a single fragment of bone, which she raised to her lips, breathing life onto it. She stepped back, holding the bone chip to her lips. She drew air into her lungs, over the bone. Her breath agitated the ash in the fire pit, causing first one flake to rise, and then another, and two more and more until the air around the bone was full of ash - ash that until a moment before had been the flesh of the swan. The Crone manipulated the bone, stirring the flakes of ash into hypnotic life. And out of the spiral of grey and black, thick and heavy in the air before them, a shape began to take form, limbs gaining substance, face taking on shape.
The intensity of the smith's hammering deepened, the notes of metal on metal taking on a deeper resonance as his task progressed. The barrow dampened the harmonic but there was no mistaking the similarity it bore to the ever-present resonance that had haunted the Wounded King's home. To Sláine it appeared as though the ash danced to the tune of the smith's hammer, not the manipulations of the Crone's fingers.
There was beauty in the ash.
The ash clung to her face, lending it a deathly pallor, the flakes lapping and overlapping like the scales of a lizard to form features: delicate, high cheekbones, the sunken hollows of eyes that could not see, the gentle curve of cracked lips, the cleft dimple of her chin.
The rhythm of Weyland the Smith's hammer blows shifted subtly, matching the movements of the Swan Maiden as she rose from the ashes of flame, gradually recapturing yesterday's glory.
Sláine could do nothing but stare as the Morrigan crushed the bone beneath her seemingly frail fingers, powdering it. As the fine bone-dust fell through her fingers the heaviest of the scales of ash fell from the risen woman, revealing raw pink skin beneath. She was enchanting, truly a thing of beauty, but then she was not real, not fashioned from sweat and sperm and grunts, she was an ideal, her features shaped by the mind of an immortal. It was no wonder that the smith lamented her loss. She was elemental, raw. The fire that had birthed her still burned in her eyes, the wind that fanned the flames surged through her veins, the earth that gave her flesh substance and the water that was her natural home, all of these combined inside the woman to recreate the love that the smith had so carelessly lost.
But it was not her. Sláine knew that. She was a thing, just as a painting on a cave wall was or a crude image scratched in Ogham on vellum was. She was nothing more than a reproduction. The swan was dead, the Morrigan had banished her soul to the Otherworld with a single sharp twist of the wrist. What had risen in her place was nothing more than a doppelganger raised from the ash of her bones to stand in her place. As the last of the ash fell away the Swan Maiden raised a hand to touch her face. Her mouth moved but no sounds issued forth-but then the dead could not speak.
Sláine held out his hand for her, to lead her from the fire pit.
Her flesh was mortally cold.
He led her towards the mouth of the barrow, the insidious cold creeping up within his flesh. Together, they waited beneath the keystone with its enigmatic inscription until the sound of the hammer blows stopped. And longer still they waited, looking into the heart of the darkness while they waited for the smith to emerge carrying the Cú Roi of Goibniu in his hands, whole once more. He dropped the Cauldron and ran, sweeping the dead maiden up in his arms.
"My love, is it you? Is it truly you? I cannot believe... so long have I longed to hear your voice, to know that you forgive my stupidity." He held her, his hands on either side of her face. "Tell me that you love me."
But no words came to sooth his pain or quell the emptiness, no tenderness from her lips even as her hands mirrored the intimacy of his gesture, cradling his face. And he understood the Morrigan's duplicitous promise: the balance of nature shall be preserved, a life for a life. The Swan Maiden's flesh was here, an empty chalice, her essence lost now wherever Avagddu's had been, while A
vagddu was finally released from his prison, able to give voice to his anger and his hungers. The Morrigan had traded the Swan Maiden's spirit, her voice and her mind, in return for the release of her vile offspring. And nature's balance was maintained, a life for a life, a voice for a voice.
Tears stained his cheeks as he turned to face the Morrigan, grief blazing in his eyes.
"It is better than nothing," the smith said. "Now go. Take your damned Cauldron and be gone. I will not wish you well. I do not care what happens to you, only that I never see you again."
TWELVE
There was no triumphant homecoming for Sláine, in no short measure because it was no longer his home. He entered the village on foot, leaving the Knucker tethered to a thick-boled oak almost a mile distant. Still the great wyrm's nearness unnerved the empty-eyed cattle. The milkers congregated around the furthest edges of their paddocks, closest to the imagined sanctuary of the village itself. The home he had known had emptied, the life dislodged by change. It didn't matter that the streets were physically the same, whatever it was that had made them feel like home was gone.
A scarecrow pointed the way to Murias's heart.
Sláine walked slowly, keeping his pace even, refusing to hurry even as he saw a young boy running across the path in front of him, turn, stare and bolt. The lad had strawberry-blond hair that reached almost to his waist. It was braided like a man's. The boy's eyes were cornflower blue, startling in their intensity even from a distance. And his grin was infectious. He took off like a jackrabbit, dashing across the dirt track, dropping to his belly and squirming under the paddock fence. A moment later his back was little more than a speck. Sláine watched him go, kicking up dust and dead grass. It could so easily have been himself, or Cullen or any one of the others he had grown up with.
If he closed his eyes he was sure he would have been able to recall the walk to the square; the path that would lead down to the nemeton, the path to the alehouse, and of course, his own home. But Murias had changed in so many subtle ways. Sickness crept into the soil, staining the tips of the tallest grasses as they began to wither against the encroaching cold. He could smell the dirt, the rot that had set into the weeds and scrub, and the dung dried hard on the field. It was a subtle part of the Death Winter that had fallen upon the northern lands, bringing with it despair and the promise of the scourge. It was, Sláine knew, a precursor for Slough Feg's deluge. Everything he saw stood as testimony to the bitter truth: while they had been away questing for the Crone's relic, the Lord Weird's plans for Ragnarok feasted like a canker on the land.
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