Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  A sallow sun poured its sickly light onto the road. Avenahar heard morning stirrings in the village: the serious ring of hammering, children’s shrieks of raw joy, the uncomfortable moans of milk-swollen cows, the clunking of a bucket bumping down into a well.

  Now she smelled them, in the village. Her quarry. Their peculiar man-sweat was mingled with the sweeter fragrance of horses, the dead smell of tanned leather. She had no words for their sour tang; she knew only that it was distinct from her tribespeople’s smell. She heard the soft burble of the villagers’ voices, overlaid by the pushing, jarring talk of the Four—their words made small wounds in the air.

  A tired-looking woman bearing a babe in a sling appeared at the village gate; her dirty linen dress dragged in the mud as she slowly pushed it open. The four cavalrymen rode out in a single file, their mounts moving at a brisk walk. The short but formidable parade was a brutish reminder of where power lay on earth. Their heavy lances were angled forward, the evil leaf-bladed heads like ships’ prows. The bronze nose pieces of the horses’ harness and the flexible mail hamata encasing the men’s torsos glinted darkly in the sun. On their left arms the men bore oblong, iron-bound shields; on their near side, the pommels of swords projected warningly from their sheaths. Their garish colors were jarring against the soft green landscape—red martingales with gilt fringe, studded with glittering Medusa heads; four-horned saddles of crimson leather double-cinched over saddlecloths of harsh blue. The horses’ forelocks were tightly plaited so that they stood upright, like a single horn. Those horses were proportioned to heroes. The heroes astride them, however, seemed bored by their own invincibility.

  One rider led a shaggy pony on a long lead; with its shorter legs, the smaller animal was forced to a hurried trot to keep apace. Astride was a reedy girl of perhaps ten summers. She slumped forward; fawn-colored hair fell into her face. Once she straightened, and Avenahar saw her ashen lips. Her hands were bound before her with cord.

  Avenahar watched with golden eyes. Her senses existed only for her quarry. The Four were a single disjointed, sixteen-legged beast, a creature both awkward, with its detachable armored parts, and exceedingly dangerous, with its four terrible talons—their swords. The segmented beast ambled loosely onward with its ridiculous sixteen-legged walk, a creature all sourness, sloppy inattention, and soft underbelly.

  She felt no fear.

  Her mind was empty of plans. Wolf wisdom would flow in, moment by moment. She waited patiently while they passed. Then she eased down from her place.

  In a slinky trot, on four long, strong legs, she moved out onto the beautiful meadow where the Choosers lived.

  The tired woman by the gate jerked awake. Who was that running at a crouch, falling in behind the Four—a youth slight of form, a maid? The woman watched Avenahar’s progress with sharp interest. She said nothing to warn the Four, for this was her quarry, too.

  Avenahar let herself be pulled into the cavalrymen’s wake while staying off the road, mingling herself with the grasses. The horses did not catch her scent; she was protected by the direction of the wind.

  The Four passed by Hagbard, concealed in his tree. The horses knew he was there; they questioned Hagbard with head-tosses and snorts, and tried hard to inform their riders—it was all so clear to Avenahar. But the cavalrymen paid no mind to the urgent horse talk.

  Now Avenahar could see the trefoil design on the shield carried by the last man in the file. As she quietly closed the distance, she groped for the horse she would take. The last horse was a dispirited roan whose head sagged too close to the path. This beast was not hers; he was too resigned. She darted into the skull of the next one; this horse thought only of biting the horse ahead of him. It was unpleasant being inside this one so she leapfrogged into the skull of the handsome bay lead horse. This was a sensible, fair animal that liked his fellows, but wanted to outrun them. He pulled hard against the bit, annoying his rider, straining for freedom. This was the horse she would take.

  But the lead horse’s rider was the most stoutly-made man of the party. Bear-shoulders sloped down to scarred upper arms, lumpy with muscle like a wrestler in the palaestra, and on to hairy red hands clamped onto the reins. He swayed a bit; he was too large for the horse. Still, she felt no fear. Great was the frenzy-root. Unconquerable was the Lady of the Forest.

  She broke into an easy lope, flowing close to the trailing horse and rider; the Wolf caused her to seize this horse’s tail. She held to it, working hard to calm the beast with her mind, to let it know she meant it no harm. She pulled herself forward, and then, moving with great silence, she arced so smoothly, so easily onto this horse’s haunches that she felt she was falling.

  This was glorious.

  A shriek escaped her lips. It was no wolf howl, but a shout in the Chattian tongue—Vengeance.

  There came a turmoil of turning horses, barking men. The segmented beast was one creature no more; it splintered into four parts, each spinning in chaos. The highly-trained cavalry mounts lurched beyond their riders’ control, skittering backward, eyes wild with too much white. They thought a living wolf had dropped into their midst. Avenahar hadn’t considered the terror that might be wrought by the musky reek of a wolf pelt, dampened in the rain.

  All played out with great swiftness, but to Avenahar, it was broken into slow, deliberate parts. She braced herself by grasping the rear horns of the saddle, jammed a foot beneath the cavalryman’s right knee, then drew her leg sharply upward. It was so unexpected, it succeeded; the startled man was pitched leftward. Pulled by the weight of his shield, he toppled awkwardly to the hard-packed ground. It was not a good fall. That one moved no more. Avenahar scrambled into the saddle, then retrieved and tautened the reins. She was a ravening beast.

  “Halt! Beware! Attack!” Only now did she hear their shouts scoring the air like trumpet blasts. Their maddened horses were a tangled skein that rapidly grew more so; the pony’s lead line broke and the unconcerned beast merrily trotted off, bearing the captive girl down the roadway ahead. Amidst the tumultuous storm of agitated horses one cavalryman managed to unsheathe his sword and position his mount for a strike. He drew back his arm for a crosscut that would have embedded the blade in Avenahar’s spine.

  Avenahar never knew. Her mount twisted upward, forehooves scrambling in air; the finely honed steel sunk harmlessly into the thick cushioning of the saddle. She let herself fall from the beast’s vertical back, onto the broad rump of her attacker’s mount; before she’d settled in place, she was already slashing furiously at him with her small flint knife. She was many wolves, snapping exuberantly, borne aloft on the rapture of the hunt.

  “Seize him!” They were flustered dogs trying to outbark each other.

  “It’s a maid,” she heard one shout, the stress on the word expressing disappointment, contempt—and ever-new surprise. Though an occasional battle maid was a common enough sight in rogue warbands, it never seemed to impress well upon soldiers’ memories; she supposed it was because a man in a strange land sees what he expects to see.

  “Hades—get the she-beast off me!” The man with whom Avenahar had hitched a ride wrenched himself about in the saddle, sword arm lifted, but he wasn’t properly positioned to strike. Avenahar’s dagger was a ravening claw, catching on the iron mail of his hamata, snaring itself in the thick wool of a military cloak, biting deep into the exposed back of a neck.

  Spewing curses, he threw himself from the saddle to escape this stinging Fury, this gadfly in the shape of a maid. As he dropped to the ground, Avenahar, with a whip-fast movement, got a grip on his sword arm just below the elbow. The force of his fall pulled his arm in a direction it wasn’t meant to go. He yelped eloquently. His grip on the sword slackened. She cut herself on the blade as she fumbled for the pommel of the cavalry sword—then it was hers.

  Sheer madness won it for her. Now they faced a Fury with a sword.

  The hexagonal grip was still warm; it seemed to melt into her hand. Her wolf frenzy married muscle an
d mind and she adjusted at once to the sword’s weight, its balance. She executed a downward cut for the joy of it. The fine blade jumped sensitively through air, moving with a curious unpredictability, as though it had its own ghost. The stoutly made cavalryman launched his mount toward her, his own blade raised like a scythe. Some part of her was astonished to find herself responding with the casualness of a veteran, snaking her sword up beneath his. Their blades met in air with a bell-clear clang. Sparks showered down. From behind her came frenzied shouts, as at a horse race near the finish—the villagers, she realized. They’d massed at the gate to urge her on to victory.

  Without a break in motion, she looped the blade downward—it moved beautifully, as though she ran a fine quill over glass—and severed the bay stallion’s right rein. The horse rolled back on its haunches and spun leftward, following the pressure of the remaining rein. The cavalryman raked his sword in air. The man she’d just unseated rushed at her then, meaning to seize her by the leg. She drove him back with a mule kick to the face.

  At the same instant, the bay stallion collided with her mount, shoulder to shoulder. Avenahar tore off the wolf pelt, caught the bay by the remaining rein and flung the pelt at her chosen stallion, some part of her apologizing to the poor beast as she did so. The pelt settled onto the bay stallion’s fiercely bowed neck.

  The bay erupted into a mad, blind horse dance, bucking erratically as oil droplets popping on a hot griddle. Somehow through this, Avenahar managed to keep her grip on the long rein. The wolf pelt dropped off. A final spasm in air—and the cavalryman flew over the bay’s head. Avenahar drew the stallion close, caught one of the saddle horns, and pulled herself aboard.

  She had her horse! Sitting on the throne of Jupiter couldn’t have been more dizzying.

  The fourth and only uninjured man of the party had dropped from his uncontrollable mount. Calmly, steadily, he took aim at Avenahar with his lance.

  Look behind!—the villagers cried out in warning.

  But Avenahar’s stallion was paying no heed to her attempts to guide it with a single rein; it continued performing a slightly less energetic version of its wolf-pelt dance. The cavalryman’s arm snapped forward; the heavy missile shot forth, fast and straight as an arrow from a bow.

  The bay bolted. One of the villagers had struck its haunches with a well-aimed stone.

  Avenahar clung to the plaited mane as her nervous prize hurtled down the road. The cavalryman’s lance whipped over the stallion’s hindquarters, skipped off an outcropping of rock, and skidded into the long grasses.

  Good sense might have prompted her to keep on going, but the Wolf madness knew nothing of good sense. Pulling and jerking on the remaining rein, Avenahar forced the protesting bay stallion around in a great arc that took her into the meadow. With much frustrated head-tossing the stallion yielded, slowing to a back-jolting canter punctuated by random kicks of rage. When her horse was aligned with her quarry, she urged the stallion to full gallop. The cavalrymen became, then, Rome and all its crimes. They’d wrested her from her mother, as a babe. She would scour the land of them forever.

  Two of the party lay unmoving on the roadway. The two still fit for battle stood together, braced against her, shields to the fore. Spirit-terror had undermined them; this madwoman called up tales of death-dealing swan-maids who could take any shape. No mere maid could have brought such destruction to four professional soldiers.

  Avenahar’s stallion barreled toward them to the accompaniment of a rhythmic, driving victory chant. She stole a glance in the direction of the gate. The village’s full population of forty or so shook fists in the air, urging her on.

  The cry, Vengeance, shot from her throat; her blade was a hawk descending, all swift grace. An iron-bound shield whipped upward to meet her sword. The mighty impact almost tore the weapon from her grip. The force of her horse’s motion knocked the cavalryman from his feet; he sprawled onto his back.

  This shattered the courage of the last man standing, who had no taste for battling this maddened spectre while injured and alone. He threw down his shield and began to jog-trot dazedly toward the wood. His comrade crawled from beneath his own shield and followed after, limping rapidly on a sprained foot; together they scrambled up the embankment.

  Avenahar gave chase for a time, but when they broke into the forest, she let them go.

  She was victor. As soon as she knew it, her will to do battle deflated all at once, like some billowing banner when the wind dies.

  There came a quiet suffused with gold.

  It was filled suddenly with the villagers’ clamorous shouts. She felt she was clad in shining garments. This was the finest of days.

  I am my mother. Glories will be mine.

  The bay stallion shied from the severed rein, lifting its knees as though it walked through a field of spikes. Avenahar dropped from its back. She felt like a snapped lyre string. Exhaustion dragged her toward the earth; she wanted to curl up and rest in the arms of the warm, mothering sun.

  But she had matters to attend to. She examined the first man who’d fallen. There was no help for him—he lay in an odd posture; she suspected his neck was broken. She moved to inspect the wounds of the second man, who was propelling himself along with his arms, seeking the side of the road, oozing onward in caterpillar fashion.

  Hagbard dropped from his tree, laughing so hard he swaggered as he walked. He clamped his hands about her shoulders. “Avenahar, you were a wolf with wings. I’ve never seen the like. None will believe this!”

  “We’ll have to let one horse go,” Avenahar said, nodding toward the cavalrymen’s horses, peacefully pulling at grass in the meadow as if nothing of importance had happened, “to carry the wounded man back to their fort.” Her people did not keep prisoners. And here was one more man to spread the tale of her marvelous deed. Hagbard nodded gamely at her, grinning.

  Then he turned about, and vomited on the side of the road.

  “Hagbard?!”

  “It is nothing, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look as if you’ve had a bit of the wolf medicine yourself. The wrong dose.”

  “It really is nothing. I’ll go chase down the maid, I don’t think the pony went far. Avenahar, I’m fine, stop looking at me.”

  “All right then . . . we’ll arrange for the maid to be returned to her home village, and then we must—”

  The villagers flooded through the gate. They came down the path in a boisterous herd, jostling one another.

  Victory was hers, and they had seen! She swelled with love for them, and imagined their adoration of her. She decided she would award one of these fine horses to them, as well as half the captured treasure.

  If only her mother were here to witness.

  As they jogged closer in a disorderly mass, the Lady of the Forest still drenched all in beauty. Avenahar did not see the murder-lust in their eyes.

  And Hagbard saw nothing at all, for he had doubled over again, emptying everything he’d eaten yesterday into the ditch.

  The wan-faced woman’s expression was eager and alive.

  They come to do me homage. Avenahar would celebrate with them tonight, before she returned to camp.

  She was momentarily puzzled when villagers trotted straight past her. Some brandished stone axes.

  Too late, she realized their purpose.

  “No! You curse yourselves! No!”

  The villagers swarmed over the wounded man like wasps. Avenahar sprinted after them, crying out at Hagbard to help her. Axes were lifted against the sky. They struck blows she couldn’t see, but her mind’s images were bright, searing, horrible; she felt her own skin being split like cloth. She seized a woman by the arm, pulled hard at a man’s shoulders, and managed, finally, to drag a child away from the feeding—yes, it was a feeding, she thought.

  It was no use.

  She circled them, imprecating, entreating, as her voice became hoarse. But they were feasters after a winter famine.

  Behind
the terrible noise they made, the sound of her own pleas, Avenahar heard a crackling fire and unhallowed laughter that seemed to seep up from the ground. The portals opened by the raven’s bread were still thrown wide; things of night swarmed into the day. The land darkened under the cloud-shadow of an Ancestress. She sensed her great-grandmother Hertha standing over her, tall as the firs, hair unfurling in gusting flames. Her voice was wind rushing through an abandoned house. Vengeance is holy, it gives life to the clan.

  She lives and she rejoices. I have released her into the world.

  THE WOLF COATS watched in silence as the unlikely parade moved quietly into camp—Avenahar, astride a war horse spirited of eye, heavy of bone, leading two mounts of equally grand proportions. Long cavalrymen’s shields were lashed to their saddles; their trappings, glowing with embossed bronze fittings, were glorious as a field of evening stars. The sight caused some to break into laughter, as though at a fiendishly clever jest. And then came Hagbard, no longer able to sit upright on a horse; he slumped forward along the neck of the docile dun. None knew what to make of it.

  Then three elders from the Raven’s Nest solemnly recounted Avenahar’s deed.

  In the joyous pandemonium that followed, Avenahar was a captive; they dragged her from her horse and carried her to Witgern’s tent, then handed her from fire to fire, forcing her to tell the tale again and again. The Four’s weapons and armor were heaped in the center of camp, and the Wolf Coats studied them as though they were volumes in a library, running hands over the beautifully crafted saddles, mumbling words of amazement over the complicated strapping of the harness, playfully hoisting the iron-bound shields to their shoulders and practice-sparring with their fellows. One cavalry mount Avenahar had gifted already to the villagers. The resigned roan she presented to Ragnhild, to carry her burdens. Witgern claimed the slender chestnut stallion, so his messengers could ride swiftly. But the formidable bay was her own. Witgern insisted that it could not be otherwise; a holy madness had won this horse for her, and their spirits were already joined.