Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 02]

by The Crystal Sword (v0. 9) (epub)

  There was a well at one end of the courtyard and he looked down into its argent surface and saw his face. It was a stranger’s face, with its black beard, and yet familiar. It was, he realized, his father’s face, for Doyle had never surrendered to fashion and gone clean-shaven. He leaned forward to scoop some water up with his hands and stopped in midmovement.

  Dylan saw the stag’s antlers above his broad brow, and between them a crown of stars, like jewels in the water. He touched his forehead, but it was smooth, then he leaned his hands against the edge of the well and stared at the stag-man who looked back at him. His eyes were amber or gold, and there was a grandeur, a nobility in them he had never felt about himself. He was just the son of the heroes of Albion, a minor noble. At the time of his birth, his mother could have asked for half the kingdom, and Arthur would have gifted her with it. Instead, she had rejected titles and honors and retreated to the backwater of Avebury to be close to her Lady of the Willows and to keep her offspring safely away from the perils of the halls of power. She had somewhat grudgingly permitted his friendship with Prince Geoffrey and his entrance into the chivalry of Albion.

  Dylan saw himself and his father in the silvered mirror of water, and knew better his remoter parent. The stag-man was part of his nature, and he had always had the shape-changer within him. He remembered the dolphin’s call and swore that one day he would indeed join them in I heir endless play. Then the pain of his wound blurred his vision, and his own face returned with blue eyes and a lip caught between strong teeth to hold back a groan.

  He scooped chill water onto his shoulder, then scrubbed his hairy arms until they stung with friction. He washed his face and rinsed his mouth, until the foul taste of blood and vomit faded. His fingernails emerged from the gore, and he studied them a minute, for they were no longer quite pink and white. There was a slight silvery cast to them, as if a little of the strange metal claws had adhered to their surface. They seemed harder than before as well, but he could not be sure if that were just his imagination.

  Satisfied he was as clean as he could be without soap and hot water, and now so chilled his teeth chattered, he hurried back into the hall and rubbed himself dry on his cloak. The hall reeked of charred flesh, and he was sorry he had been so hasty in disposing of the wolves.

  Dylan glanced over at the fire. It had consumed the hides and meat of the beasts, and was now attacking the skeletons. One skull grinned at him, and it was not a wolf, but a human form. They had been shape-shifters too. It struck him that he might become like them if he was not very careful, and he shuddered.

  Dylan rucked out his packs, looking for the bag of comforts his mother and sisters had sent with him. There was willow bark, which when boiled and drunk eased fever and headache, and dried parsley to brew into tea for bladder flux. There was poppy, bitter and acrid, to ease pain and bring sleep, and king’s powder, basilicum, to sprinkle into wounds. This last he used awkwardly because of the position of his wound, and yelped at the sting of it upon the injured flesh.

  He gathered his gear and quit the warmth of the hall for the cold but sweet-smelling floor of the stable. A mouthful of poppy brought him painless sleep and dreadful dreams of utter darkness and talking toads.

  Morning was dreadful. His shoulder screamed at the slightest movement and he had a pounding headache. Dylan gritted his teeth and turned his head to see the wound. The edges were pussy and it stank.

  Dylan washed it again and put on more basilicum, then gave the empty keep a cursory exploration. As he had suspected, there was no sign of the scabbard. Pers Morel had simply sent him here to die, and he had stupidly played right into the trap. With a sort of grim stubbornness, he resaddled the horse and started back towards Paris. Pers Morel was going to wish he had died in his mother’s womb.

  XII

  By nightfall Dylan was almost falling from the saddle. His left arm was swollen and puffy and the world was lost in a haze of endless pain. He was hungry and nauseated and so weak he could not unsaddle the horse. He made camp and somehow got a meagre fire ablaze. But the effort to fetch some water and boil it was too much. He simply collapsed on the ground and lay there, staring up at the interlacing branches of the trees overhead and the twilight beyond them. He was fevered and parched.

  Thirst finally moved Dylan to the brook, and he thrust his great head under the water, then lifted it out and sucked and lapped like a beast. Runnels of icy water cascaded from his curly hair down his cheeks and into his beard. He thrust his burning arm into the water too. It felt cool and wonderful. Weakly he splashed water into the wound itself.

  Dylan crawled back to the fire and got the little bronze pot he carried, then rested for a long while before he could fill it with water and set it to heat. He was sweating and cold at the same time, so he pulled his cloak up under the left arm and over the right shoulder, and huddled in misery. When the water began to steam, he put willow bark into it and removed the pot from the fire. He drank the bitter liquid and thought of Sal, Lady of the Willows, and his mother, who blended into one in his fevered mind. His stomach complained and belched in rebellion, but he kept the tea down somehow.

  Sweat drenched his body, pouring out of him like rain, and he was wracked with cramps. With an enormous effort he got more water, draining the pot once before he refilled it again and set it on the fire once more. He shoved a few more pieces of wood into the coals, then curled up on his right side and lay with his knees bent against his chest. His body burned and froze simultaneously, and Dylan had a vain wish that he had not returned to the world of the senses.

  Some while later the sweating stopped and the cramp in his limbs eased. Dylan sat up very slowly and made more willow tea, and drank it. He washed the gaping wound with some of the tea, startling the many forest creatures, who had crept to the edge of the firelight to see him, into flight with the violence of his howling. The wound superated messily, and with grim purpose Dylan fetched more water for another laving. He boiled willow bark this time, instead of infusing it as he had before, and let it cool no more than he had to. There were several fine linen cloths in his medicine collection, intended to be used for bandages, though his mother had often told him that to bind a wound was often more dangerous than to leave it open, so long as it was kept clean, and he dipped one into the hot willow water, then pressed it awkwardly into the sore. The injured tissue protested, and he cried out, but the pain eased after a minute.

  Dylan set the bloody, puss-smeared cloth aside and took another. He wished the wolf had bitten him somewhere less difficult to see, for turning his head to look was both painful and frustrating. He used the second cloth and realized with some faint stirring of humor that his bare bottom had been hanging out all during the fight. He grunted with pain and continued cleansing the wound until he had used all the cloths.

  The wound hurt less, and the puffiness was gone from

  his arm. Dylan flexed his left hand, then bent his elbow cautiously. He sprinkled basilicum in the sore, rinsed the bandages out in the stream, then boiled them in the pot and hung them on a nearby bush to dry. It was exhausting, but lie might need those cloths again, and if he did, they must Ik- clean. He had seen enough friends sicken for weeks and months from toumey hurts, and he believed Eleanor was probably wise in her almost fanatical cleanliness.

  The pain was still fairly bad, but Dylan decided against another dose of poppy. The aftereffects were too nasty. He hanked the fire and put a pot of water close by him before he settled down to get some sleep. For a while he stared at the bush with the cloths on it, thinking it must look like lairy laundry, and finally slipped into a light doze. The lever returned, and with it, dreams.

  The green and silver birch leaves crept out of his belt pouch like strange caterpillars. They humped across his hack and settled on the wound like green leeches. They swelled and grew to twice, then thrice their original size, then fell to the ground.

  Beth walked toward him through the moon-struck trees. Her face was sad, so very sad. Dy
lan wanted to comfort her, but he could not speak.

  "I cannot help if I am not asked.”

  Dylan was ashamed, an ungrateful lout, an ill-mannered yokel unfit to bear the birch-leaf favor of such a great and gracious lady. He wanted to beg her forgiveness, but he was mute. He lifted a hand towards her.

  Beth moved closer, a glorious shimmer of verte and urgent. “You must follow your quest by yourself, but you do not have to do it alone.” He wished she would not speak in riddles.

  Dylan moved his lips to form her name. She bent towards him, lithe and supple, and her wonderful hair fell around them. Beth’s lips touched his, her fair hand rested on the wounded shoulder. Her breath filled his nostrils. It was a green smell, cool, tender, and invigorating; and it

  flowed into his body, curling into his heart and lungs, into his limbs and finally into his manhood. She gave a little laugh and caressed his cheek with her other hand.

  He felt marvelously alive, and lustful in a quiet way. His vitality needed no outward expression, and he drew it into himself so it seemed to ascend from his loins into his spine and fountain up into his skull, then cascade out into the stag antlers and across the glade, a golden green aurora ' which banished the darkness. Beth smiled and kissed him lightly as a leaf touch, and was gone. And he dreamt that he slept.

  Dylan opened his eyes and peered at the morning. It peered back, a mist-fouled grey beginning of another day.

  He moved cautiously and found no pain, just a slight stiffness. He craned his head and looked at the wound. It was closed, healed into a ridgy white scar that might have been several months old. He touched it tentatively, but it was not sore at all.

  Dylan sat up, ignoring the presence of various woodland creatures, and found the two birch leaves plus another on : the ground, exactly where they had fallen in his dream. He | picked them up and turned them over in his hand. The colors on the two leaves were darker than on the third, as if the silver were a little tarnished or stained. It had not been a dream. He put the leaves in his pouch and prepared to get underway once more.

  Halfway through collecting his gear, Dylan was overwhelmed by an enormous feeling of listlessness. He had not, he realized, eaten anything solid for more than two days, and while he did not feel particularly hungry, he knew he should eat. He eyed a nearby rabbit speculatively, but found the idea made him faintly queasy. That left only the loathsome barley in his pouch to be boiled up for gruel.

  Dylan made a fresh fire, unsaddled the patient horse while he boiled yet another pot of water, and finally cast a

  modest handful of grain into it. When he ate it, it was gluey and flavorless, but filling. The lethargy increased.

  Dylan leaned back against a convenient tree and stared at nothing in particular. In just a moment, he was sure, he would leap up with his customary vigor and get going. Sometime later he discovered himself with a lap full of fox kits, a squirrel on one shoulder and a dove on the other, while a coney sat beside one knee and preened its whiskers. The pale sun was past the midpoint and sliding into the west. He tried to stir, but found himself fondling the soft bellies of the foxes instead.

  This inertia disturbed him, for Dylan had never been much for sitting still like some old broody hen. In fact, he rather despised the occasional men he had met who wished to speculate on the nature of creation and other matters metaphysical. I am just a down-to-earth fellow, a practical man, and I leave such nonsense to the priests and philosophers, he thought.

  Then he laughed and startled the squirrel, who leapt from his shoulder onto the tree trunk, tickling Dylan’s ear with his fluffy tail. The kits pricked their ears and regarded him with sharp little eyes, apparently awaiting some explanation of the joke. The coney went right on with its grooming, too serene or too stupid to be alarmed, and the dove cooed. “A practical man who talks to toads,” he told the foxes. Two of them promptly attacked a third in mock fury, endangering his manhood with their sharp little claws, and he dumped them unceremoniously onto the ground.

  The effort exhausted him, and he sank back into his contemplations. Paris was a vague, misty dream, and the lair woman he had set out to find a phantasm. Even the treachery of Pers Morel aroused no spark within him. It was all too complicated, too twisted with unexpected events. The clear, simple world was lost in a mire of new experience that had been gifted unto him unasked for.

  Dylan remembered all the times he had longed for some heroic deed that would give him distinction to rival his mother in some fashion, and wished he had been content to remain a simple country knight. No one had warned him how he would change, so that he would barely know himself. Storytellers, he decided, even his mother, related only the events which were the least part of the tale. Those were the bones, and pretty bare ones at that. The flesh and blood was in the horror and joy, and that could not be told.

  His mother had once fought a terrible beast just outside the Avebury stones, and always, when she could be moved to speak of it, he would ask, “But were you not afraid?”

  Eleanor’s face would go very still, her grey eyes narrow to pinpricks for a moment. “Yes. I was afraid,” she would reply. And then she would relate the way she used the Fire Sword, the cold breath of the beast, the charnel stink of its body, the moan of the suffering earth beneath its feet, the spattering of its blood where the sword cut it. Dylan would shiver a little as she spoke, but with excitement, not fear. He could not feel her terror.

  The rabbit claimed his lap and he stroked the long tender ears and the soft coat. Only I can know my own fear, my own joy, and, in truth, I would rather not. He quietly envied all the many people who were not part beast, who took no foolish quests, no great adventures. At the same time, Dylan realized that they were a little beastly, that they quested for gold or fame or just power over others. The thought comforted him a little, that he had not completely lost his humanity.

  With something of a start, he realized that he almost wished he could. That part of him that the animals adored wished to be unfettered, to run free in the primordial realm of the forest. It was newborn, but full grown, and it warred with the Dylan of cities and clothing. The points of his temples throbbed. Just surrender and be free, it whispered.

  Free? Of what, he wondered. Free of evil people with their terrible desires and twisted yearnings. Beasts were neither good nor evil. They did not possess souls. But I have a soul, for good or ill, and / cannot wish it away, or run from it like a rabbit. I am a man—a beast of a man, but a man, nonetheless.

  When Dylan set out the following morning, he discovered that he had not the faintest idea where he was. During his feverish ride, he had wandered off the trail and was quite lost. He tried to remember what he had done, and realized he had kept the sun to his back because it hurt his eyes. He must have gone west for half a day, then east, though probably not in a straight line, so that he might be either north or south of his starting point.

  He struck south through the forest, seeking a path or trail, but found only more trees. By nightfall he had not reached any recognizable landmark, and he made camp rather dejectedly. He was lonely, and it was an emptiness no congregation of forest creatures could allay.

  The forest was very quiet as the darkness increased. The moon was past the full and its light was pale and sickly. A faint breeze rustled the leaves, and made a sort of music with the ripple of the small stream nearby. It seemed to increase as the night advanced, and he knuckled his eyes to prevent sleep. His skin seemed to glow with life, and the beast struggled to join in the forest song.

  One moment he was watching the flames of his tiny fire, and the next he was a stag. He shivered inside the smooth skin and tossed his antlers in silent challenge. With a leap, he was off between the trees, running as if the hounds of hell were after him. Faintly he heard their belling overhead, and he paused a moment to listen.

  They poured out of the sky as if the air were a broad avenue, twelve huge white hounds with bloodred ears, and one bitch leading the pack. Their eyes were great and
luminous, and their teeth shone with an unearthly light. They charged him with slavering jaws, giving their strange cries, then circled him fawning.

  The bitch lolled her tongue out and flicked her flashing eyes, then turned her rump towards him. The scent of her heat crept into his nostrils, enflaming him, so his stag’s body began to alter. The hooves became great paws with silver claws, the smooth coat roughened and thickened, the antlers vanished, and he was wolf. She raised her tail in open provocation.

  Lust filled him, until it seemed to ooze from his skin, but he did not move. The bitch whined. The woman tempted me.

  The words formed unbidden in his mind, and rage filled him. He snarled, and the bitch yelped in terror. The stink of her was revolting. It was alien, a false freedom. Mindless coupling was for beasts.

  Dylan felt himself change again, and saw the world with the piggy vision of the boar. The hellhounds tore around him and darted to and fro in confusion. He grunted, then bellowed, and they backed away. With a last look of longing, the bitch belled a command, and the pack charged into the empty air and loped away towards the north. His boar self snorted, and Dylan stared into the dying embers of the fire.

  Another dream. Then he looked at his hands. The nails shone silver in the firelight. I am a man, but what sort of man am I? He curled into his cloak and let sleep take him.

  By midday he had struck a river he believed was the Seine, and he followed it west until he could see the faint grey smoke of the city upon the horizon. Dylan was relieved. He was not certain he could survive another night in the forest.