Dylan unfolded his cloak—it was chill already—and put it around his shoulders, then began sorting out dried meat, cheese, and hard bread for an evening meal. His pack was a jumble and he set it in order, hanging his extra hose from a convenient limb to air out. They were still a bit damp and smelled of salt water from his brief walk to the shore. His fussing over his belongings made him think of his mother, who had the most unlikely notions about cleanliness, and he smiled to himself. Prince Geoffrey often teased him. “How many baths have you had this year, Dylan?” he would ask. At the moment, itchy with sweat and dried salt, he would have enjoyed one of his mother’s fragrant tubs—or even a dip in Sal’s sacred well, as his mother was supposed to have done. Icy water from a spring or stream might wash away his grime, but it would not ease aching muscles or comfort him. With a slight pang Dylan realized he was homesick and even a little frightened. These unmanly emotions piqued his pride, and he promptly banished them to a darkened comer of his mind. He munched meat and stale cheese and tried not to think of one of Eleanor’s savory stews, accompanied by his sister’s warm loaves and fresh butter. He was so successful in this endeavor that his food tasted like boot soles and he quite lost his appetite in mid mouthful.
A soft giggle startled him. Dylan looked around into the darkness. The licome was a silvery glimmer on one side of the grove, and he was sure the sound had not issued from that noble throat. He turned around completely. Something soft and green shimmered at the base of a large birch tree.
“Humans are so amusing. I had almost forgot.” It was a girl’s voice, a very young voice; the shimmer solidified into a pretty maid with pale hair and snowy skin. Huge green eyes dominated a heart-shaped face. The laughing mouth was small and generous with a hint of cruelty about it. The girl’s body was unclothed, and it was almost a child’s body, with tiny immature breasts and a skimpy fuzz of pubic hair. Embarrassed, Dylan averted his eyes.
“Oh, do you not find me pleasing?” The voice was sulky.
“You are very fair, milady, but isn’t it a bit chilly to be out in your birthing clothes?”
“But—I am never cold. Oh, very well. I never would have thought you such a prude. There. Now I am as proper as a lady at court.”
Dylan looked again and found she wore a shift of green and silver leaves. It was almost transparent and enhanced rather than disguised her nakedness, but he decided to accept the thought for the deed. He knew enough of feminine fashions to realize that any of his sisters would have starved for a length of the stuff. In a gown of it, his sister Rowena would have been quite irresistible to Prince Geoffrey.
“Very pretty. Are you a . . . dryad?” He had to hunt for the word.
“Oh, no. If you had ever met one, you wouldn’t make such an error. They are quite droopy and have no conversation whatever. Well, most of them. Those of the holly are rather prickly.” She mused for a moment. “And impatient,” she added.
“Pray forgive my ignorance. We seem to have very few dryads in Albion.”
“Nonsense. That island is fairly crawling with them. But they are somewhat shy, you see. The trouble with you, Dylan, is that you think the magic went out of the world when you were breeched. Even my sister Sal is but a dream of a dream to you.”
Dylan reddened. Her words were true and precise and they stung him like a whiplash. It felt like the birch switch his mother used upon him on those rare occasions when his childish wickedness merited such attentions. That memory, plus the girl calling Sal her sister gave him a clue to her identity—the Lady of the Birches—but he hesitated to name her. This pretty girl frightened him as the ancient dragon Melusine had not. The great green eyes seemed like mirrors, and he could see his hidden fears and rages— those things he had kept locked away in his mind. He found he didn’t like it one bit and tried to turn his gaze away.
“No, no, my cautious poppet. You cannot evade me so easily. Ah! That dame of yours! She has so much to answer for, but all parents do. That is why they come to me to exorcise the wickedness they themselves have made in their precious offspring.”
“I bow to your greater wisdom, my lady Chastisement,” he said quietly.
She chuckled. “Save your charming gallantries for someone who cares for such things. You do not bow to anyone, like your father before you. And you do not know yourself.” “No doubt you will enlighten me.” Dylan kept an iron grip on the fear that fluttered within him.
“No. I will not.”
“You won’t?” He was surprised.
“That is something you will have to do for yourself.” She giggled again, and now it sounded like the cackle of some mad beldame. He was cold with more than the chill of night. “You mortals all expect such miracles. I do not do revelations. The answers lie within you, if you will but seek them. ’ ’
“Milady, I do not even know the questions.”
“Yes, you do, you silly boy. You simply do not wish to ask them, since the answers might not please you. It is the way of your kind, to sweep dirt under the floor reeds and pretend it does not exist because you can no longer see it. Why are you afraid?”
Dylan plunged into the wells of her eyes, into swirling memories of his childhood. Everywhere he looked he saw his mother, strong and vital and tall, holding her rowan staff with the four faces of the moon upon it. He sheltered in the wild folds of her robe. For the first time he saw that Eleanor’s bravery was a disguise for her terror that some terrible, unknown fate would take him from her; and he loved her for her love and hated her for the shackles of weakness it made within him. The revulsion and his dinner rose as one from his stomach and he spewed them out onto the patient earth.
Dylan wept.
Cool fingers brushed his cheeks. “There, there, mon brave. ’Tis but a fever. ’Twill pass, as all things pass.” She stroked his tousled head against her shoulder. They were a mother’s gentle words to chase away the nightmare, and Dylan knew that if he lived for a thousand years, he would always bear within him a tiny scar to mark that clutching, obsessive fear that had been Eleanor’s first gift to him.
Abruptly, he pulled himself free of the lady’s embrace and glared at her with tear-reddened eyes. “I do not require any comfort. ’ ’
She laughed, a silver sound in the darkness. “Oh, no. Of course you do not. Foolish man. We all need comfort— even I. When my ancient sister Demeter lost her beloved daughter, Persephone, all the gods wished to ease her grief, but she would have none of it. She masked her rage in a veil of sorrow and punished all the living for her loss. The earth was dry and barren in her mourning. She died a little, all because she was too proud to accept a little comfort. That is a cold and bitter place you have within you, Dylan—a child’s sulky petulance when he is forced to eat his porridge before he gets his cakes.”
“I did not ask to be bom into such terror.”
“I did not ask to be the Mistress of Punishments, to have my supple limbs used to whip the wickedness out of the generations. The world is not fair. It is full of mindless cruelty and carelessness. But, too, it is full of unexpected joy and kindness. Your mother did the best she could.” “It was not enough.”
“It never is.” She smiled a little. “Wait until you have your own children. ’ ’
“Perhaps I shall become a monk.”
“Oh, Dylan,” she trilled.
He found himself laughing at the idea in spite of himself. “I was not cut out to be a servant of God, was I?” “Well, not that jumped-up little dunghill cock that the Pope fancies. You must discover the God within you—as all men must. I can tell you this much. He is no tidy, distant fellow in some celestial palace with sexless angels singing hallelujahs in his ears.”
“No. He’s a wild man, like my father. Why, when I think of him, do I only see my mother?”
“She stands between you, a doorway to his past, and your future. Do you have the courage to pass through her womb a second time, as he did?”
“I am not certain.”
“A very sensible answ
er. Your mother would have said yes in a moment and regretted it later. She has, in a way, protected you from her own impetuousness. In that moment, years ago, when Bridget told her that her children would continue her task, she set her face against the Fates. She is stubborn, that one. An odd mixture—but all mortals are a motley, a bit of this and a dab of that.”
“Unlike yourself.”
“I am that I am.”
Dylan discovered he was shocked to hear her use the words out of the burning bush. “And what is that?”
She looked into his eyes, and he knew a terror and a joy beyond any words. She was the bravest of the brave, the first tree to set leaf in the dead of the year, and the most fragile as well. Her gaze promised rebirth, but also death. Beside her, his mother’s womanliness was but a memory of a shadow of the thing itself. He dropped his eyes and found he was trembling.
“Do not think less of your mother for her fear, nor of your father for not crashing through her fortress and rescuing you from her eternal womb. They did not ask to have their lives become a poet’s lay, nor to bear a child of such dimensions. They did their tasks as best they could—and very well at that.”
“But what am I?”
“Not ‘who’?”
“I am Dylan, the Son of the Wave.” The grove vanished at his words, and he could hear the roar of the sea crashing against the shore. In Eleanor’s womb he had ridden the cold ocean and seen the weedy tresses and solemn face of the Mother of Waters. He had longed for her embrace and chilly comfort. For an instant he saw the fair woman of his dreams, now made of pearls and coral, resting in the bosom of the sea, and he knew only her touch would ease his ache and release his loneliness. He had a moment’s panic, for she seemed so still, so dead. Where was she? Asleep in the deep or perished in some dreadful cavern?
The vision faded, and he looked at himself seated before the Lady of the Birches, as if he rode the night breezes like an owl. He saw his skin flayed away and saw his anger and his fear, both black as pitch like molten rock oozing from the tortured earth, concealing the light within. His face changed. It became a snarling wolf, slavering fiery spittle, a boar with bloodstained tusks, a ravening bear with yawning maw, and finally an eagle screaming its challenge.
He was a beast, a fearsome, mindless creature, full of blind hungers and lusts. He defiled the earth with his rages. Once again his form altered. He was a stag, noble and brave, his seven-tined antiers pulsing with the green light of the birches. The eyes shone like the moon, and he knew himself for both the jailor and prisoner; that within the bear, the boar, the wolf, and eagle lived both the fiercest and gentlest of the beasts. He saw the licome as himself, and he felt a mild chagrin at what a bone-wracking and uncomfortable ride he had had. We were not intended to be ridden, he thought.
The light of the stag’s eyes and antlers mingled, and the grove brightened so that he could see each leaf upon the birch trees and each hair of the lady’s tresses. He studied each leaf in turn, marvelling at their perfection, their promise of life and death. And for a moment he loved her as he had loved no other. His mother, his sisters, even the dream woman faded into insignificance beside her serene strength.
“My lady! Beth!” He cried her name and tumbled head first into her soft lap. He pillowed his head upon her thighs and breathed deeply the sweet green scent of her womanhood. She coiled supple fingers into his curling hair and he heard the murmur of earth in her song. Dylan slept.
Mornings, he decided, were for the birds. Indeed, every avian in Franconia seemed to have journeyed to this spot to herald the new day with every note they had within them. He groaned and sat up.
The birch grove was rainbowed by the colors of their feathers. He saw the red of robins, the brown of wrens, the gold of finches, the white and taupe of cooing doves, the bright azure of bluebirds, and the glossy black of ravens, plus a dozen sorts he knew no name for. They were all caroling, honking, cawing, and tweeting. The result was quite awful.
“Be quiet!” he bellowed, and his head throbbed.
They went still and silent, eyeing him with brilliant orbs. A plumb dove waddled over to him and climbed onto his knee, tilting her head to one side. She gave a soft coo.
Dylan found he was holding his breath. He released it slowly, and lifted a finger to stroke the soft plumage. Stuck to his palm was a birch leaf. It was green on one side, silver on the other, but it had never grown on any earthly tree. It must have dropped from the lady’s gown, though it was no cloth he had ever seen before. What had happened was more than a dream.
For a moment he experienced a sense of disloyalty to that other goddess, Sal, Lady of the Willows, who had in some sense sent him upon this adventure. He almost heard her rare, rippling laughter in his mind. Sal was his mother’s mentor, and perhaps his sisters’. Beth of the Birches was his own, and he would wear her single leaf upon his sleeve, his lady’s favor, no matter what claims any mortal woman put upon him. He had dreamt upon her lap and found within the dream the courage to endure the winter of his fears.
For the moment, he tucked the wondrous leaf into his belt pouch and then noticed that the glade was occupied by more than birds. A solemn badger peered at him from under a tree, while a dozen squirrels raced up and down a trunk. Ferrets and field mice were plundering his dried bread and hard cheese, and a vixen and two kits sat calmly near a pair of rabbits. Within the dappled shadows of the trees he saw a fawn, and behind it a doe, still as statues. The birds began to chatter again as one of the ferrets climbed onto the leg not occupied by the dove. It swarmed up his chest and stood on his shoulder, nuzzling his ears with a wet nose.
It tickled and Dylan laughed, which made his head throb. He lifted a hand to his forehead, and above the brow he found two spots which were tender to the touch, as if the stag’s antlers were about to grow out of his head. He looked at his hands and arms, but they were still quite human, and he was silently relieved. Dazed and dazzled in the pale sunlight, he watched the consumption of his food by ferrets, mice, squirrels, and rabbits with almost complete disinterest. He was not hungry, and he wondered dispassionately if he would ever eat flesh again. He was Lord of the Forest, and any of these beasts would die for him, but the sense of command made him uneasy. For the first time he understood his mother’s reluctance to accept her own powers and magics and her unwillingness to do more than minor domestic conjurings^
Were it not for the leaf in his pouch and the animals gathered around him in unnatural harmony, he would have thought the whole thing a pleasant dream. Not pleasant, entirely, he amended, rubbing his forehead. Dylan could not understand why he felt as if he were about to sprout horns. For that matter, he wondered what he had done to attract the interest of the Lady of the Birches. Some rough ancient god like wild Pan seemed more likely than pretty Beth. Then he chuckled, for Pan was a master of music, and he had no gift for that. It was not a problem to be solved in the pale light of morning, or ever, perhaps. The powers of the world were simply not ruled by any logic he could perceive.
“Who said I would not regret my choices,” he asked a raven that had flown down to investigate a bit of meat the rabbits were ignoring. The bird gave him a look and a shrug of wings and went back to his breakfast. “Well, I will never get to Paris, sitting here. Be off, little friends. The audience is ended.” The birds rose in a flutter of color, darting off to the four winds, and the beasts hopped, ran, and scurried into the shadows. In a minute all that remained was a collection of discarded feathers and the droppings of mice and hares. The licorne appeared from the trees, and Dylan rose to greet it, stroking the soft nose and the strong neck. Then he gathered his belongings and prepared to set out once again.
VII
Aenor dreamed, smiling. She saw a forest glade dappled in golden sunlight. Little purple flowers poked out around the roots of slender trees. If only she could recall their names. But she could not. A woman sat at the base of a tree a little larger than the rest. Her hair was almost white, and her gown was palest green, like
the first leaves of springtide. The face of the woman was sweet and gentle and she looked at Aenor with eyes the same pale green as her gown.
“Good day, daughter.” The voice was low and honeyed.
“Greetings, mother.” She saw herself sit down at the woman’s feet, ashamed of her ragged gown and dirty face. She rubbed a sleeve across her cheek, careless of the scratchy remnants of metal embroidery, but it did no good. Still, she was content to be with the strange lady.
“You are troubled, child.”
“Yes. I am weary of my captivity. Why cannot I just give these folk this accursed jewel and return to the sunlight?’ ’
“You gave your word.” The sunlight seemed a bit less golden with these words.
“I did, but to whom, and for what purpose? I cannot remember. ’ ’
“Keep your word, and you will reap a great reward. Falter, and you will never see the sun or the sea again.”
The sea. The word brought a rush of memory, of other dreams perhaps, and Aenor saw huge waves and white horses cresting upon them. There were other beasts as well, great sleek creatures who leapt from wave to wave and uttered sharp shouts in the sparkling air. One shot straight up in a huge spray and sped towards the shore. It touched the sands and became a man. He swept the strand with grey eyes and shook the sparkling droplets out of his curly black hair. He held a long object in his hands, brightly colored and covered in strange patterns.
The dream of a dream faded and she was back beside the pale lady. “Mother, I am weary. I am hungry and thirsty and dirty and cold all the time.”
“I know. But you do not have to be. A song will cure thy ills.”
“A . . . song?”
“Your song, Alianora.” The lady gave a tiny chuckle. “You can make beauty, more beauty than even your captors can imagine. They will be sick with envy. Just remember the sea and the sun, the moon and the sound of licome hooves upon the bosom of earth, the smell of apples and roses. Sing that.”
Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 02] Page 7
