by Segoy Sands
As she kissed him, a tingling began at his feet and climbed into his lower spine, traveling warmly up into his pelvis, navel, abdomen, and into his heart, a pleasant warmth, a soft explosion in his arms. The right arm was red, the path of the sun, the vital force, the Arru. The left was silver, the path of the moon, the mental energy, the Urra. In his right hand was something dense, dark, hot, sharp and weightless, nether. In his left was something dense, bright, cool, sharp and weightless, aether. His life-infused arms held her firmly between the two kilas, as the ambrosial intermixture of the flows of nether and aether rose into his throat and brow and head. Bliss raised him out of the gross world of the senses in the music and the peace that was the release from self-isolated consciousness. He could see her as she really was, squirming in his arms, coiling around him with vise-like force to crush his ribs, a serpent thing with baleful, panicked eyes, its forked tongue violently hissing even as it continued to mimic a frightened girl.
Burnt and Merb were both looking at him in outrage and horror as she wailed plaintively. “You’re hurting me!” she screamed. “Let go! You’re hurting me! Help!” She wriggled in his arms with otherworldly strength, but the current flowing up through his feet removed him from the disturbances of the grosser winds. “It sings!” the rusalka screamed, coiling still tighter around him, its snake-like mouth hovering inches above him, wide, with white strands of baleful saliva dripping from the long curved fangs. At the back of his mind he desired her bite, but the current surged yet stronger, an aureole bursting from his seven centers, a sphere of interwoven sounds that stunned the she-fiend even as it stunned both Burnt and Merb, clearing their minds. Nimbly, without hesitation, Merb stepped in, hacking with wicked steel that could not cut through the scales, even at such close quarters. Lightning quick, the rusalka twisted and spat the poison, yet Merb was still faster, avoiding the vitriol that burned a hundred bubbling holes in the rock floor.
“What’s this?” it hissed, eyes narrowing to examine the old man.
Cole felt her coils loosening, and sensed her impulse to escape. Still filled with a rush of clarity and energy, he seized her and pulled her to the ledge floor, where she squirmed, striking venomously but biting only air, with shrieks so violent they pained his ears. Merb’s decisive hands pulled him back and threw him toward the far wall, as Uilliam, overcoming his fear and burning with anger, rushed in with a small black axe, his first blow bouncing from her harmlessly, and his second blow never falling because suddenly he looked into her eyes and could not strike. As his eyes widened, as if horrified by what he had been about to do, she reached up a hand, grabbed him by the face, and shoved him backwards, off the ledge to his death. But, quick as she had been, she left herself open to Burn, who roared in, swinging his hammer, again, again, again, with a terrible clangor. For some reason, as he struck, he bellowed, wracked by sobs that brought him to his knees over the broken body.
When Cole came near, he saw neither the girl nor the rusalka but an unfamiliar woman in a pool of blood. She had black hair, full breasts, and a gentle face. The red mane, sign of the Rhiannon, marked her left shoulder. Her dead eyes were looking at Burnt, hurt and surprised. Merb came near and put his hand on Cole’s shoulder. Cole understood, and stepped away. Probably, as a final defense mechanism, the creature took the form of the person one loved most. When Burnt was swinging the hammer, he was breaking his own heart.
Dawn was quietly working its slow change on the world, veil after veil, layer after layer. The rusalka didn’t hold the form of the woman for very long. With each shift of the light, it shifted closer to its actual form, a mottled, mangled serpentine thing twisted in a pool of ichor. Burnt breathed a ragged sigh, and said, “Damn, damn, damn.”
Merb sniffed, then said, “I hope I never live through anything like that again.” He clapped Cole lightly on the back. “Poor cnuching Uilliam. You alright, Cole? That’s done now, eh?”
“The face she took, the one she took for me,” Cole said, haunted, “I’ve never seen it.”
“Well, let’s hope you never do,” Burnt nodded, using his hammer to scrape the remains over the edge. Cole watched it fall and rebound against the cliff face in the weak morning light, a silvery, dry husk. Merb bent and examined the finger deep holes in the soft rock where her venom had hit.
Exhausted, they sat in a row with their legs over the ledge and watched the slow-working dye of a new day pour itself like a series of libations over the hills, from violet to rose to pink to blue. Under his breath, Burnt began to hum the simple refrain of an old drinking song, “Lovely ladies, Lovely ladies.” Cole could not help but join in, “Every day, in ways, both sacred and profane, I give thanks and praise, for the lovely ladies.”
There was nothing more to say after such a close call with death. Day grew bright around them. The climb down looked longer and nastier than it had any right to be. They voted for climbing back up. The way the ledge was angled, they’d have to climb a short way down first, not a pleasant prospect, but for the moment they still didn’t have to choose. For the moment, they could sit and feel whatever they needed to feel.
15 The black face
She didn’t want to remember the war years. Many believed she could heal them, even if they were wounded in battle, and even as they breathed their last in her arms. The Traveler was with her, blessing her every step, but she was as mad and terrible as she seemed. Sometimes she rode into battle stark naked, wielding a flowering branch, filled with sarcasm, laughing at the way they feared her and how violently they wished her dead, for time itself sprang from her hands, hoar and wrath. Men saw their brief allotted span ripen and wither in moments. For a moment, they might feel a rush of invulnerability, like the tree in early summer, only for premature autumn to come upon them, and vicious winter; their hair grew grey, their faces gaunt, their limbs agued, their bones cold to the marrow. They threw down their weapons and cursed, or wept, or begged for mercy.
So they called her the soul-thief, white witch, she-worm, and such was their terror that they fled their posts at the sight of her riders. She was fear to them. And she grieved for them, each one some woman’s son. A man must watch old age growing on him slowly if he was not to go mad. Time was cruel enough, a dark buzzing swarm, devouring its own compositions. No man could compensate his loss to time, the lover. Eventually every man came to understand the union of life and death. She made them understand that too quickly.
They said her death was a necessity, for she was an absolute evil. To kill her was to save the world. No one could know peace knowing that she existed. She was nonexistence. Negation. It didn’t matter that tears streamed from her beautiful face. She was the foul drinker of souls.
If Rufus had foreseen these things, he would not have insisted on leaving her safe at Serle’s, a symbol of the Lady, a rallying cry for his men, who came to kneel at the spring before it ceased to bubble. Many knelt there and drank, believing themselves protected. They came to ask her to bless the icons of the Lady they wore near their hearts. They said her face was peace and her heart was war.
In her name, they started the Sei Sí Rebellion. At first, they were lucky. When the tide turned against them, and many were trapped at Lodestone, the women began to curse her. Even Serle grew haggard, sunken-eyed, and silent. Her anger and mirth, industry and sociability, dried up. The farm seemed a barren place. The men were backed into cave warrens that belonged to the Fiáin. Other branches of the Cora had tried to break the siege, ragged bands of frightened boys and arthritic men. When the Graelish caught them, they sang insolent drinking songs and rolled their heads like hurly balls into the cave mouths. When Teodor from Loch Logan risked his band on a strike at the army’s flank, the besieged men had seized their one desperate chance, bursting from the caves. The Graelish archers made pin cushions of them. Teodor, they strung from a tree, his eyes filled with maggoty flies, his body a long bloody flag.
That was when Ailil came to Tookham, a hand or so over six feet tall, sandy-haired, unbeautifu
l, her face flat like a catfish, heavy-armed, rough, foul-mouthed, and laughing. She rode a large grey-speckled white horse, with more than fifty women after her, on war horses and plough horses and every manner of mount. With her went a slender red-haired woman, said to be her lover, Saoirse. It was no secret they were moving across the countryside toward Lodestone, gathering women to fight. Serle gave a feast, which was also a careless farewell to her farm, slaughtering goats and sheep, and turning loose the milk cow, so that the women drank and danced round a great bonfire in her fields, making contests of bow and spear the pick of Serle’s horses, though she kept the two best for herself and Lorca. No one spoke of their old lives when they threw in their lot with the Rhiannon and dedicated themselves to Rionma, three eyed, riding a sow or mare, a sceptre in one hand, a beggar’s bowl of blood in the other, the fierce protectress of Aina Livia.
At first, Lorca made the same mistake that Renard made, thinking that the women were riding to save their besieged men. Rionma did not care about the men. Ailil, her earthly representative, rode wide of Lodestone, just when it seemed certain she would strike there, to hit a series weak points east of the border. Surprise was her weapon. Ferocity was her weapon. But the greatest of her weapons was Saoirse. Spiral sisters were forbidden to enter the war, but Saoirse was from Paidrin, raised in a forbidden spiral, and taught the form of bíseach called the warmth. Such mischief stirred from her hands that Renard left the “fox hunt” to ride to the White Tower, the Spiral’s legation in Rune. Few things would have persuaded him to abandon the high sport of flushing Orroch men out of hiding, with the smoke of volatile sodium salts and alum, only to exchange politic words with the legate, or Ymecla, of the Spiral. Receiving him, she gave him assurances that a parley had already been arranged, on condition that Renard withdraw from Lodestone. Taller than the king, with a circlet of pearls on her head, she persuaded him of the unwisdom of attempting to deal with Saoirse by any means other than guile.
“The wind she weaves,” she explained, long-necked and stately, with silken gray hair, “is called the warmth. And yet it is not warm. One feels, at most, a tingling. You are familiar with its effects? Burns, sores, lacerations. Dizziness. The bowels fail. There is bleeding from the orifices. The teeth and nails loosen and the hair falls out precipitously. A day, a week, a month later, one dies.”
“I’ve had reports,” Renard scowled. “I’m here for your advice on how to kill her.”
“You neither know the red spiral,” the Ymecla soothed him, “nor fathom the incitement her death would constitute. Withdraw your armies.” She held his hard, entitled eyes. “Or, feel free to subdue her yourself.”
She had not offered him a seat, nor allowed him his guards, treating him as a common supplicant. Patient and cool, in his blue silk coat, finely worked at the edges with miniature gray owls, he watched her. “Weren’t there,” he asked, knitting his brow and stroking his fine-trimmed beard, “if I’m not mistaken, seven Suleviae?” He pursed his lips. “Yellow, Green, Blue, Orange, Red, White” he counted on his fingers, finishing with a satisfied click of the tongue, “and Black.”
She corrected him. “White and Black, no.”
“But… Red?” he said, tapping his cheek speculatively. “Of course, there were five, only five, and the fifth was Red. Bedes will sometimes count seven, but that’s what happens over the centuries. Facts change. Regardless, five means the Red belong to the Spiral.”
“Our history in Aina Livia is longer than yours.” She sat. “And one simplifies history at one’s own risk.”
“Put down this sect quickly,” Renard advised, “or I fear for what may happen to your sisterhood when the Ellenic priests press their claim.”
“Put them down?” the Ymecla echoed bemusedly. “If mothers and wives and sisters, bereft of husbands and sons and brothers, offer prayers day and night to the Lady in her most destructive forms, then who is to blame? Who put a golden crown on his head and expected obedience?” She bent her head to indicate the audience was over.
*
In a meadow strewn with wildflowers - inclusive, at least in Serle’s breezy litany, of such varieties as milkweed, shotweed, aster, cosmos, firetail, yarrow, celandine, foxglove, beardtongue, vervain, rue, paintbrush, and goldenrod - the Rhiannon camped, waiting for the legation, spending the long pellucid summer days by the lazy banks of the Turquoise, which was perpetually blue-green as its name, nursed by minerals from the high scree, and so wide across in that valley that a strong swimmer might despair of the far shore. Ailil seemed to feel the beauty neither of place nor season. Sour, sledge-faced, she put the river’s white sand banks to hard use, training sisters in the short-staff. Few matched her in size, and none in speed and strength, not even Caila, who in her days as a fishwife had slain a monster eel, alone on the high seas.
Everyone knew the tale. Caila had been out further than she should have been, later than she should have been, off Maroon, following a school of merfins, when the eel appeared, leering over her with its flattened wedge-shaped head, long white teeth, and wicked eye. Four or five times the length of her boat, it was merely middle-sized and middle-aged. With the slightest effort, it could have capsized her, or broken her boards like twigs, but instead it reared magisterially out of the starlit water, so motionless that only the smooth rolling waves, and her boat upon them, appeared to move. Its elegant, purple-black neck hovered like a dark extension of the waters, and its wise old predatory gaze seemed to be the sea’s.
A creature like that could sink a galley, but Caila had remembered the seafarer’s maxim that an eel never strikes from above, and that the chance for a kill came when it dove. For long minutes, the sea monster’s narrow, knowing eye fixed on her, and then, swifter than reflex, it slipped under the waves, circling her boat with a dread roiling crest. The metallic sides of the tens of thousands of streaming merfins below the eel’s black coils were so eerily beautiful that she was certain the moment of her death had come. An instinct told her to thrust the spear, and so she did, only to be cast by the violent thrashing of the outraged sea-serpent into the churning, bloodied sea.
That might be, but she was hard-pressed this afternoon by Ailil, who was driving her back into the river with quick hard blows that drew the eyes of most everyone in camp, which was why no one noticed the Spiral sisters riding over the eastern rise, least of all Lorca, lost in the deep canals of blue between the shift and flow of cumulus clouds.
“Cachu,” Serle said. “Here they come.”
Lorca propped herself up on an elbow and followed the direction of Serle’s expletive. She counted thirteen of them, three from each spiral - blue, yellow, green, and orange - and a regal, grey-haired woman at their head. A ways behind them, at the top of the softly swelling hill, a smaller group with several horses was putting up a tent embroidered with the insignia of the Ymecla.
By then Ailil had spotted them too, having knocked Caila into the water and turned back up the bank, her pendulous freckled breasts and dirty blonde hair dripping water, her face a fine grotesque. She sent Amani and Cheyen to bring horses, then spoke a few words to Thera, who ran to the seven-starred pavilion, where Saoirse sat in absorption on the Lady. Amani and Cheyen promptly returned, mounted and leading a white horse between them. Without a word, Ailil launched into the saddle and rode, with Amani and Cheyen, to meet the Ymecla, who sent three of their group ahead to join conversation with Ailil.
“Ailil’s a cachu negotiator,” Serle noted.
“Why are we meeting the Spiral?” Lorca’s eyes had returned to the warp and weft of clouds.
“We’re stupid.”
“Is it bad to be stupid?”
“Yes. It’s bad,” her sultry eyes gleamed.
“She loves Saoirse.”
Serle shrugged. “Love is a worldly god that demands stupid sacrifices.”
“The Spiral is not worldly.”
Serle plucked a stalk of grass and chewed the tender part. “No?”
“La Teine is part of the
Spiral, even if the institution excludes the red sisters.”
“And how would you know that?”
“My mother taught me.”
Serle’s ears pricked up. “You have a mother?”
Half way between the camp and the spot where the Ymecla was waiting, under the banner of a five pointed silver flower, Ailil and her riders met with the three yemes, all of the green. From that distance, Lorca could hear none of what was spoken, except the occasional clear, angry peal of Ailil’s laughter. They talked longer than she expected.
“Did you think we’d end up riding in the Sei Sí, Lorca?” Serle’s voice was soft as the wind over the meadow.
A slanted line of wild ducks flew overhead, their dark wings cutting the air with a whooshing sound. No one dared shoot during negotiations, so the clever ducks flaunted their impunity.
Ailil and her riders were riding back to camp, and the yemes were returning to the Ymecla. As Ailil neared, sisters crowded round her, but she rode straight to the seven-starred pavilion, dismounted, and shut the tent flap behind her.
The next day, more or less the same thing happened. Ailil rode out, with Amani and Cheyen, to parley with three Spiral sisters, this time an orange group. They talked for almost an hour, as the sun set, then both sides went back to their respective camps. The word going round was that the Ymecla had given Saoirse until the following night, the new moon, to surrender herself, in return for which the Grael would withdraw all troops back across the river. She guaranteed that no harm would come to Saoirse, and that she would be treated as a guest of the Spiral. Apparently, Ailil had demanded, at both meetings, that the Ymecla deign to speak to her in person, and in return the negotiators had pointed out that Saoirse had yet to emerge from her tent. The camp stirred the next morning, expectant about the third meeting, set for that evening, when Saoirse might come out to meet the Ymecla, and perhaps surrender herself.
