The Gods of War

by Christopher Stasheff

  "Jamie, lad, are ye payin' attention?" Mathilda said softly. "I'll have no arguments from ye now. Go an' rest. I'll do what's needful, if they should come."

  Come they did, hardly half an hour later: four and twenty belted knights riding o'er the Leathen two by two on tall, blooded horses, all brisk and impressive in their trews and leather jerkins and the muted green and blue plaids of clan Graeme. Basket-hilted broadswords gleamed at every side, and most of them carried spears as well. Mathilda watched their approach from a window in the laird's solar, hoping against hope that they would bypass Marr and keep on riding, but they clattered through the village and up to the castle gates without hesitation, though only a handful actually entered the yard. When she spotted the bright red hair of her brother John among the blue bonnets sprigged with laurel splurge, she knew there was nothing for it but to go down.

  "Have ye seen Sir James the Rose, the young heir of Loch Laggan?" one of the older knights was asking the steward and the yard in general, as Mathilda stepped cautiously into the doorway at the top of the forestair and paused to watch and listen.

  The steward flicked just a ghost of a glance up at her, his seamed face expressionless, then folded his arms across his chest and looked the knight up and down. "Th' Laird an' Leddy are nae at hame. Who wants tae know?" he said.

  "Sir John Graeme, Summoner of the Clan Graeme," said the man whose presence had drawn Mathilda to the stair. His red hair gleamed in the early morning sun as he kneed his horse past the steward to pause below the stairs and gaze up at his sister. "He's killed a squire, Mathilda, and we're sent out to take him."

  Stiff and defiant, Mathilda moved out onto the landing. "Four and twenty knights to take one poor, frightened boy? Why, he's hardly more than a squire himself."

  Graeme eyed her shrewdly. "Aye, that may be, but the man he killed was hardly any ordinary squire. Is he here?"

  Something in his expression suddenly suggested just who the squire might have been, and the realization sent Mathilda hurrying down. Her brother had dismounted as she came, and was waiting for her at the bottom, bonnet in hand. Taking his arm, she led him into the little chapel, instinctively drawing him to the Lady's shrine, over against the north wall. This early, so soon after morning prayers, the chapel was deserted, but it already was far too warm for comfort. Not a breath of air stirred, even the candle flames standing still and unflickering in the altar lamp and before the wooden effigy of Madonna and Child.

  "It was Angus, wasn't it?" Mathilda managed to whisper, fixing her gaze on the feet of the carved Lady, standing between the horns of a crescent moon. "Not just a squire. It had to be the carline."

  When he aid not answer, she bowed her head, pressing her clasped hands briefly to her lips in silent prayer that somehow it was all some terrible mistake.

  "He said it was an accident—that they'd quarreled over some stupid remark he made about a village girl. It wasn't anything to get killed over."

  "No."

  His one word unleashed all her growing despair. Chilled despite the closeness of the room, and blinking back unbidden tears, she lifted her unseeing gaze to the halo of stars above the head of the wooden Madonna, still unable to look at him.

  "Must he die, then?" she whispered.

  He sighed and glanced at the tiled floor, at the toes of his dusty boots, at the spurs gleaming on his heels, wrists resting on the basket hilt of his broadsword while his gloved hands toyed with his bonnet.

  "If it were only the retribution for murder," he said slowly, "I might be persuaded to turn a blind eye for the sake of my little sister—say he'd eluded us, fled to England. It wasn't intentional, after all, and I know what the boy means to you. But the gods demand their compensation as well. Your Jamie has cheated them out of their own. He's the only one who can repay that debt in valid coin."

  She gave a bleak, despairing nod as he finished speaking, not yet able to look directly at him. "He trusts me," she whispered. "He went upon his knee and begged for me to hide him. He told me what he'd done. How can I betray him?"

  "Unless you prefer to betray them, I'm afraid you have no choice," the Graeme said softly. "Where is he, Mathilda? Here in the house?"

  She shook her head.

  "Where, then?"

  Raising her eyes to those of the wooden Madonna, Mathilda de Bohun, nee Graeme, crossed her arms on her breast and took a deep breath.

  "You'll seek the bank above the mill. You'll find him there, sleeping in his brechan. I—told him it was sanctuary."

  Graeme nodded. "Aye, it is that, I suppose. But sanctuaries are sanctuaries because of what happens there. Unfortunately, yon Jamie is about to learn far more about a sanctuary's principal function than any of us would have wished."

  "Is there no other way?"

  "I really wish there were, but—" He glanced at his boots again and sighed. "Look, Mathilda. He's a sensible lad, if you'd chosen him. I'll try to explain—"

  "Try to explain why I've betrayed him?" she refused. "No! You mustn't frighten him, or even wake him. Just pierce him through the heart and be done with it!"

  "I can't do that, lass. You know I can't. But I will try to make him understand why he must die. And I'll make it as quick as I can."

  She would have argued with a lesser man, but she knew that in this case there was no appeal. At least at the hands of John Graeme, death would be quick. Under the circumstances, she could ask for no more than that. Nor could James. She let her brother give her the ritual kiss of peace, but she could not bear to watch him go. As his steel-shod footsteps retreated from the little chapel, she crumpled to her knees before the wooden Madonna, tears welling in her eyes so that the votive light at the statue's feet swam and shimmered in her sight. After a few seconds, she wiped at her eyes with one hand, then touched her tear-damp fingertips to the statue's bare feet in offering.

  "Forgive me my tears, Mother," she whispered, recalling her role as priestess as well as lover to the one she mourned. "He is Yours, as I am, and You may take him when and how You will, but I wish—I wish he might have served You in other ways. Still, let him serve You well in this, if such must be. . . ."

  Outside, the Graeme's men sat waiting quietly on their blooded horses, half a dozen in the castle yard and the rest outside the barmkin wall. Hugh, the knight who first had made inquiries about Sir James, had dismounted to hold Graeme's mount, and came to attention as Graeme emerged from the chapel doorway. Not looking at any of them, Graeme went to his horse and took a longish, cloth-wrapped bundle out of the near saddlebag, tucking it deep inside the folds of his shirt and brechan.

  "We'll leave the horses here," he said briskly. "He's somewhere up on the bank above the mill. Fan out and move very quietly. We must take him alive."

  Steel slithered from four and twenty scabbards as the Graeme and his knights started up the hill. They sought the bank above the mill in the lowlands of Loch Laggan, and there they found Sir James the Rose sleeping in his brechan. Hugh was the first to spot him, and silently deployed the men in a double ring of twelve. Slowly and cautiously he and Graeme closed the inner ring of knights until they were hardly a blade-length away from the deeply sleeping James.

  Their quarry lay with his head pillowed on his targe, one arm bent across his forehead to shut out the sun and the other outflung across his broadsword, oblivious to their presence. Carefully Graeme sheathed his own sword before bending to slowly ease James' weapon free of its scabbard, one boot ready to pin the wrist if James should wake before the deed was done. When he had straightened, he gathered his men's attention with a glance and then set the blade to the boy's unprotected breast. At his nodded signal, Sir Hugh yanked the targe from under the sleeper's head.

  James came awake with a start and only just avoided impaling himself on the blade Graeme held, crying out as Graeme's boot stayed his wrist from reaching for a weapon that was no longer there.

  "Hold, or you die now!" someone shouted.

  James froze at the command, for at the same inst
ant the full import had registered of the glittering sword ring surrounding him—and the identity of the man at the other end of the sword pressed to his breast. With sinking hopes and empty hands outflung, James fell back on his brechan, still absurdly calculating his chances.

  "Steady, lad," the Graeme said impassively. "This can be quick and painless or very unpleasant, indeed. You killed the wrong man. You killed the very wrong man."

  Now, what did the Graeme mean by that? New suspicion made James' throat go dry as dust as his gaze darted anxiously from face to face, irrational justifications flashing through his mind. How had they found him? They knew what he had done, and now they were going to kill him! But he was barely eighteen. Surely they could not really mean for him to die!

  "It was an accident, I swear it!" he managed to croak. "I didna mean to kill him. I dinna even know who he was."

  "Shall I tell you who he was?" Graeme replied softly. "His name was Angus Graeme, which makes him kinsman of every other man here besides yourself. But more important than that, he was the carline, the intended Substitute for the Ceann's next seven-year cycle. His time was not yet come, but you killed him: wrong time, wrong place, wrong way. Do you understand what that means?"

  Starting to tremble now, James opened his mouth several times like a beached fish, suddenly understanding all too well.

  It means that you have a choice in how you die," Graeme went on relentlessly. "That you will die is a foregone conclusion, since you murdered a man. The blood debt is owed to Clan Graeme. Your life is forfeit.

  "But you can redeem your deed, in part. Your life still is forfeit, but you can make it mean something." Graeme glanced up at the sky, at the sun climbing higher in a bright, clear morning, then looked back at James, shifting the point of the broadsword down to rest against the captive's breast.

  "What's it to be, then, lad? Do we hang you, like the common murderer you are, or will you choose the nobler way, and pay your blood debt to us and to the gods with your own blood?"

  Appalled, James closed his eyes and tried to think—made himself think about it slowly and carefully. He knew vaguely what Graeme was talking about, but he had never really thought much about it. Oh, there had been speculation around the hearthfires late at night with other young men who also did not know, especially during the long winters—something about a great sacrifice that marked the seven-years, somehow tied in with the potency of the chiefs and the prosperity of their clans.

  He had never been witness to any of it, of course. That was reserved to the clan elders, a mystery only for the initiated. February and August seemed to be the favored months for speculation—Candlemas and Lammastide, when even the Church hailed the Mother of God in her broader aspect as Queen of Heaven and paid homage to the Sun, the primal god-force behind the first fruits of the harvest, somehow separate and different from Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Intellectually, James even knew that those were the times when the clan elders were said to make actual sacrifice to the old gods, ensuring the fertility of the land, the fecundity of the sheep and cattle and horses, the potency of the Ceann and of the clan itself—though somehow he had always thought of such sacrifices as symbolic, like the Mass. He supposed he realized that animals sometimes were sacrificed, but it had never really registered that human life sometimes was required. Not really. Not literally.

  Yet ancient tradition insisted that it did happen, at least in time of great need, or when the chief was growing old. Christian though the highlands might be, everyone knew that the veneer wore thin at the great quarter festivals of the year. All through the year's turning, a variety of ancient practices continued openly in the Highlands, side by side with the rites of the White Christ.

  James knew many of the more harmless ones at firsthand. Some of his earliest memories were of welcoming in the May, twirling and weaving to the skirl of the pipes and the beat of the drum as he and the other children danced around the Maypole. From the age of seven, he had leaped over the Beltane bonfires with the others. Familiar, too, was the kindling of the needfire at the Winter Solstice, and the gathering of the sacred mistletoe.

  And on the night of the first full moon following his fifteenth birthday, a rite far older than any ritual of the White Christ. . . .

  The memory conjured an almost overwhelming image of Mathilda—no, a woman who looked like Mathilda—red-haired and glorious, but also mantled with a majesty of power he almost could see, as She came to him in the moonlight, but a little way from here, and—

  Mathilda! She had told them where to find him!

  As the realization came, James opened his eyes and started to jerk upright, but the sword in the Graeme's hand still pressed unyielding against his breast. Suddenly the Graeme's red hair and pale eyes connected with hers, and James subsided at once, letting out a long, despairing sigh.

  "She's yer sister, isn't she?" he said softly, searching the Graeme's eyes.

  Puzzled, Graeme nodded. "Mathilda? Aye. I thought you knew. She is a de Bohun by marriage with Lady Marr's brother, but she was born a Graeme."

  "An' what else is she?" James insisted. "What was she when she came to me that night? Ye know about that, don't ye?"

  With a sigh, Graeme stepped back a pace and stuck James' sword into the earth beside him, signaling his men to back off as he crouched down to look at his captive, one hand resting on the basket hilt. He did not object as James cautiously sat up.

  "I think you know what else she is, Jamie," Graeme said in a low voice. "And if you have any understanding of that office at all, then you'll also understand why she told me where to find you. She could do nothing else, given what you'd done."

  "Then, she wants me to die?"

  Wearily, Graeme shook his head. "Nay, lad. She'd chosen you to be her consort. In time, you might have become for your clan what I am for Clan Graeme—the Summoner, the guardian of the old ways, the keeper of the mysteries."

  "And the sacred executioner?" James said.

  "When required," Graeme conceded. "But no more often than once every seven years—less often when the Ceann is young and vigorous. Your clan's chief is not yet thirty, but mine is fifty-three. Six years ago, when he was forty-nine, a Graeme offered himself as a willing substitute for the Ceann. At that time, divination was performed to determine the carline, the substitute victim for the next seven-year. Angus Graeme drew the black bannock and accepted his lot, thereby taking on all the destiny—and protection—of his sacred status. For you to kill him as you did was sacrilege as well as murder."

  "I didna know who he was," James whispered, dizzily trying to take it all in. "God help me, I didna know. Must—must I take his place, then?"

  "Not must, but may," Graeme replied, "but only in a sense and only if you choose it. Because his blood is on your hands, you owe a life to the clan. But if you choose to offer up that life to the gods, in expiation for your sacrilege as well as for murder, then the debt is paid, the balance restored." He glanced up at the sun, climbing inexorably toward its zenith. 'You haven't much time, I'm afraid. Hanging a murderer requires no preparation, but the—other is best done before noon."

  Noon! As James squinted up at the sun in horror, he realized he had less than an hour. And Graeme was crouching there, calmly talking about killing him! Nor was there any possibility of escape; that had been clear from the moment he awoke. Graeme really was asking him whether he would rather hang or—

  "How—" James' voice broke and he had to start again. "How would—the other happen?" he managed to whisper.

  With a deep sigh, whether of relief or regret, James could not tell, Graeme looked him in the eyes. "I'd rather not frighten you with details," he murmured, "but I promise you, it will be quick. Far better than dangling at the end of a rope—for you and for the clan. You will feel very little pain."

  "But—"

  But there really was no choice. He had killed a man of Clan Graeme, and he owed the clan a life. If he could cancel out at least a part of his guilt. . . .

  J
ames knew what he must do. Fighting down the queasy fear that was building in his belly, he made himself swallow, somehow managing to keep his voice steady. "I understand. What's next, then?"

  Without ceremony, Graeme got to his feet and pulled James' broadsword out of the ground, laying it flat across both palms and presenting it before its owner.

  "This is your own blade, Sir James the Rose," the Graeme said formally. "Have I your oath upon it that you will see this endeavor to the end, and that you will not try to escape the destiny you have freely chosen?"

  Before he could think about what he was doing, James scrambled to both knees and set his hands flat on the blade between Graeme's. "I swear it."

  "No, repeat the entire oath," Graeme insisted. "You must say the words yourself."

  Drawing a deep breath, James closed his eyes briefly and then repeated the words he knew Graeme had to hear.

  "I swear upon my ane sword that I shall see this endeavor to the end, an' that—I willna try to escape the destiny I have freely chosen. So help me, God."

  "So mote it be," Graeme murmured, as James bent to kiss the blade. Even as James straightened, Graeme was thrusting the blade into the ground again, gesturing for James to stand and offering a hand to help him up. James declined the offer, preferring to get to his feet without any help, but he found he did not resent that the offer had been made. Nor could he even conjure up any animosity toward the man who soon would take his life. He was a little surprised to find that his legs were quite steady under him as he stood up.

  "We're going to the mill pond to bathe," Graeme said to Hugh, who had been waiting in the background all the while. "We'll join you very shortly."

  Pointedly, but not unkindly, Hugh glanced up at the sun, fast approaching its zenith, then saluted both of them with his sword and turned on his heel. As he started up the hill, the others fell in two by two behind him, the blades of their broadswords gleaming in the sunlight. James watched them go, seeing in his mind's eye the mound atop the hill, with its circle of standing stones, only stirring from his reverie when Graeme touched him lightly on the elbow.