Faery Moon

by C. J. Cherryh

  Next was a confusion of blows, of curses howled, of blades and blood, the scream of horses and the crack of brush.

  Then came silence, deep silence, after so much din, horses breaking their way slowly back through brush and bracken, blowing and snorting as riders sought the clear road and regrouped, a man fewer than before.

  “Feargal,” Raghallach said of the body they found there on the trail. A red-fletched arrow had taken him in the throat. It was Gleann Mhor marking.

  “Think,” said Conn, fierce at his side. Conn’s brow ran blood. “Think and do it, boy! They have come into the Sidhe-wood. They are forewarned, they hae made ambush against us and this Caith mac Sliabhin. Hagan mac Dealbhan hae forewarned the blackguard!”

  “He’s dead,” said Feargal’s brother Faolan, who had gotten down to see and knelt by his brother. Faolan hovered somewhere lost in the horror, not touching the arrow that had felled his brother, only frozen there.

  “Boy,” Conn said; the word cursed them all. “What will ye do?”

  “Get him home,” Raghallach said gently to Faolan, and pulled his horse’s head about in the direction opposite to home, using his heels to send him down the road after the fleeing enemy.

  Others followed. Conn was one, drawing close beside him. Raghallach looked at Conn as they rode.

  “Not I, boy,” said Conn. “I have not a word for ye now.”

  The forest opened out before them, a way obscured in leaves and green. “It wants answer,” said Raghallach. “This death of ours wants an answer.”

  “On whom,” asked Conn. “Gleann Fiach cattle? Where will we stop? We know they have come into the woods. Those that ran will regroup. Meanwhile they’ll have a man sent to Sliabhin to get help up here. It’s war, lad! It begins! Blood is on the Sidhe-wood and our own hands have shed it, the same as theirs!”

  A hollow lay before them, a small clearing in the wood, which was one of their own Gley’s fords. It was a place for ambushes; the air here all was wrong, sang with unease, in the leaves, the water-song.

  They thundered into it. The newborn light grew strange, the beats f the hooves dimmer and dimmer.

  The peace, a voice said, the peace is broken, son of Dun Gorm. No further, come ye no further.

  Panic took Raghallach suddenly, a fear not of arrows. He was Cinnfhail’s son: he Saw, for the first time in his life, heSaw.

  “Conn!” Raghallach cried. Stop!” He reined in his horse. His face was hot with shame and self- reproach, that even to this moment he had led these men from fear and pride, not sense. He had ridden on for pride’s sake, blown this way and that by fear of what everyone would think instead of regarding what was wise.

  Fool, Conn had said. And now a shadow came on them, and about them, and into them, horse and rider, all, darkening their sight.

  It was the forest itself, managing its own defense.

  Six

  The pooka stopped, having leapt the stream, and Caith went sprawling over his neck, rolling in the leaves, bruised and battered.

  The pooka stood in man-form on the bank, naked and laughing at him, grinning from ear to ear and leaning on his knees.

  “Ye cozenin’ bastard,” Caith said, gathering himself up.

  “I thought,” said the pooka, “that ’t was yourself were the bastard, Caith mac Sliabhin.”

  Caith caught up his sheathed sword and all but hurled it. He mastered his temper instead. “Of course I am,” he said, at which the pooka laughed the more, and overtook him as he went stamping up the bank. The pooka clapped him on the shoulder and hooted with laughter. Caith hurled off the hand, whirled and looked at the Sidhe, the sword still in his hand.

  “Oh, come, man,” said the pooka, grinning. His teeth were white and the frontmost were uncommon square and sturdy, in a long beardless jaw. His eyes were black and merry, and red lights danced in them even by daylight. “D’ ye no like a joke?”

  “It will be a great joke when you drown me. Of that I may be sure.”

  The pooka grinned. “Oh, I like ye well, mac Sliabhin. I missed the water wi’ you, did I not?”

  Caith said nothing. He limped onward, flung off the hand again as they walked along the streamside, picking up the road. The pooka walked by him as if he had only started out a moment ago, fresh and easy as youth itself.

  “Where is the other of ye ?” Caith asked, after some little walking. “Where has he gotten to?”

  For the bright Sidhe had been with them until that leap across the stream.

  “Oh, well, that one,” said the pooka. “He’s nae far. Ne’er far.”

  “Watchin’ us.”

  “He might be.” The pooka kicked a stone. “He hae nae likin’ for roads, that one. Nuallan is his name. He’s one of the Fair Folk.” An engaging, square-toothed grin. “I’m th’ other kind.”

  “What d’ ye call yourself, wight?”

  The pooka laughed again. “Call meself, indeed. Now ye know we’d nae hand you all our names. Dubhain. Dubhain am I. Would ye ride again?”

  “Not yet, pooka.”

  “Dubhain,” the pooka reminded him. It was the wickedest laugh ever Caith had heard. There were dark nights in it, and cold depths where pookas lived, deep in rivers, haunting fords and luring travelers to die beneath the waters. Darkness, his name was.

  “Sae we walk together, Dubhain-lad.”

  The pooka looked up. His eyes gleamed like live coals beneath the mop of black hair. “We’re in Gleann Fiach now, mac Sliabhin. D’ ye nae find it passin’ fair?”

  * * *

  The road took them farther and farther from the woods. The deep glen showed itself bright with sun, its hilly walls different from Gleann Gleatharan, unfilled, unhedged. Gorse grew wild up the hillsides from what had once been hedges, and grass grew uncropped. It was a fair land, but there was something wrong in that fairness: it was empty. Untenanted. Waste, even in its green pastures.

  And coming over a gentle rise, Caith could see the dun itself at this great distance, a towered mass, a threat lowering amid its few tilled fields. Now indeed Caith saw pasturages up on the hillsides; but they were few for so great a place, and all near the dun. The most of the tillage closely surrounded the dun itself, gathered to its skirts in a patchwork order, struggling to exist in the chaos of the land. Gleann Fiach was wide. There was promise in the land, but it was all blighted promise.

  Caith had stopped walking. “Come on,” the pooka said with a sidelong glance that mocked all Caith’s fears and doubts. Caith set out again with Dubhain at his side, the two of them no more than a pair of dusty travelers, himself fair, his companion dark. Caith was weary of the miles, the flight, the restless night. His companion had strength to spare. Like some lawless bare-skinned boy Dubhain gathered stones as he came on them and skipped them down the road.

  “There,” he would crow, “there! did ye see that one, man?”

  “Oh, aye,” Caith would answer, angry at the first, and then bemazed, that a thing so wicked could be so blithe, whether it was utterest evil or blindest innocence, like storm, like destroying flood. The pooka grinned up at him, less than his stature, and for a moment the eyes were like coals again, reminding him of death.

  “A wager, man?”

  “Not with you,” Caith said.

  “What hae ye to lose?” And the pooka laughed, all wickedness.

  “You would find something,” he said.

  The grin widened. The pooka hurled another stone. No man could match that cast, that sped and sped far beyond any natural limit.

  “I thought so,” said Caith, and the pooka looked smug and pleased.

  “Cannae match’t.”

  “No.”

  The pooka shape-shifted, became again the horse, again the youth, and broke a stem of grass, sucking on it as he went, like any bare-arsed country lad.

  Dubhain winked. He was more disreputable than he had been, a ragged wayfarer. A moment ago he had been bare as he was born, dusky-skinned. Now he went in clothes, ragged, ruined finery
with a bordering of tinsel gold.

  “’T is a glamour,” the pooka said. “Can ye see through ’t?”

  “No.”

  “If ye had the amulet, ye might.”

  “But I do not have it.”

  Another grin.

  “You will help me,” asked Caith, “inside the walls, will ye? Or only stand by?”

  “Och, assuredly I shall help, man.”

  “— help me, that is.”

  “O Caith, O me merry friend, o’ course! How could ye doubt ’t?”

  Caith looked askance at Dubhain, uneasy in all his thoughts now. The Sidhe would both trick him if they could, if he gave them the least chance. A hundred times he thought through the compact he had made, as they walked the sunlit land, as they came down farther and farther into the glen. Of what lay before him in Dun Mhor he wished not to think at all, but his thoughts drifted that way constantly, darker and more terrible, and the pooka beside him was constant in his gibes.

  Sliabhin’s son. And Moralach’s. All his life seemed lived beneath some deceiving glamour. He had conjured loyalty to Gaelan, to a dream that never was. He came to avenge Gaelan, and his own father was the murderer.

  But the stones before them were real and no illusion. There was truth about to happen. It must be truth, finally, after a life of lies and falsity.

  * * *

  The day and distance dwindled in their crossing of the glen. Caith rested little, except at the last, taking the chance to sleep a bit in the cover of a thicket, at the edge of the dun’s few tilled fields and scant pastures, before he should commit himself to all that he had come to do.

  And quickly there was a nightmare, a dream of murder, of Moralach the queen hanging from the rooftree of Dun Mhor.

  “You!” Caith said to the pooka when he waked sweating and trembling to find him crouching near. “Is ’t some prank of yours, to gie me bad dreams?”

  “Ah, a conscience,” said the pooka. “I’m told you mortals have it. It seems nuisanceful to me.”

  And then Dubhain reached out and touched Caith’s face with callused fingertips, and there came to him a strength running up from the earth like summer heat, something dark and healing at once, that took his breath.

  “Keep your hands from me!” Caith cried, striking the Sidhe-touch away.

  “Ah,” said Dubhain, “and scruples e’en yet. There is that left to trade.”

  “That I will not!” Caith scrambled to his feet, shuddering at the wellness and the unhuman strength in himself .

  “Ye’ve dropped your sword,” the pooka said, handing it up to him with a grin on his face and the least hint of red glow within his eyes.

  Caith snatched it, hooked the sheath to his belt and caught his oiled- wool cloak about him and his tartan as he hit out upon the road.

  Dubhain was quickly with him, striding lightly at his side.

  And Dun Mhor rose ever nearer as they came past the wild hedges and onto the road. The dun lowered as a dark mass of stone in the evening that had fallen while Caith slept in his thicket.

  No lights showed from Dun Mhor in this twilight time, not from this side, though some gleamed about the hills. Cattle were home; sheep in their folds; the folk behind the walls of their cottages. The great keep was many times the size of rustic Dun Gorm.

  I am mad, Caith thought, having seen the size of the place. As well walk into Dun na nGall and try to take it.

  But he kept walking with Dubhain beside him. The pooka whistled, as if he had not a care in all the world, and a wind skirled a tiny cloud up in the sky right over Dun Mhor, a blackness in the twilight.

  “I think,” said the pooka, “it looks like rain. Doesn’t it to you?”

  “You might do this all,” Caith said in anger. “If you can do all these things, why could you yoursel’ not come at this man ye hate?”

  “’T is nae our way,” said Dubhain.

  “What is your way— to torment all the land, the innocent with the guilty?”

  The eyes glowed in the darkness. “Men do seem best at that.”

  “A curse on you too, my friend.”

  The pooka laughed. Dun Mhor loomed above them now, and the cloud had grown apace as they walked. Dubhain’s hand was on Caith’s shoulder, like some old acquaintance as they passed down the last hedgerow on the road, as they left the last field and came up the hill of the dun to the gate.

  Lightning flashed above them. The cloud widened still.

  “Hello!” Caith shouted. “Hello the gatekeep! Travelers want in!”

  There was a long silence. “Who are you?” a man shouted from up in the darkened tower to the left of the gate, as thunder rolled. “What business in Dun Mhor?”

  “Business with your lord!” Caith shouted back. “Word from Dun na nGall!”

  “Wait here,” the gatekeep said, and after was silence.

  “Perchance they’ll let ye in,” the pooka said.

  “Oh, aye, like the rain cloud is chance.” Caith did not look at Dubhain. He knew how Dubhain would seem— quite common to the eye, whatever shape suited the moment and Dubhain’s dark whims. The cloud still built above them. Thunder muttered. “I will tell you, pooka. Hagan— the man who fostered me— might have sent word south when I left him. He knew where I might go and what I might do. He hated me. I know that. Gods know what side of this he serves, but ’t was never my side. He might well betray me to curry favor with Sliabhin, since Sliabhin is king. I reckon that he might.”

  He had begun to say it only to bait the pooka and diminish Dubhain’s arrogance. But the pieces settled in his mind, in sudden jagged array of further questions.

  “I know nothing. Who fostered me out, how I was gotten from here— the king of Gleatharan never told me. Was it Gaelan who did ’t or was it Sliabhin, pooka?”

  The mad eyes looked up at him, for once seeming sober. “Would ye then pity Sliabhin if ye knew that?”

  “Gods, pooka!”

  “Perhaps ’t was.” The red gleam was back. “Perhaps ’t was not. They are coming, mac Sliabhin, to open the gates.”

  “Why have you done this? Why do you need my hands to wield the knife?”

  “Why, mac Sliabhin— should we Sidhe take on our ain curse? That wad be foolish!”

  The lesser gate groaned on its hinge. Torchlight fluttered in the wind, in the first cold spats of rain. “Gods, this weather,” the gatekeeper cried against the skirling gusts, as he led them through a courtyard and to a second door. “Come in, there! What would be your name?”

  “Foul, foul,” Dubhain chortled, pulling Caith along, beside, beyond. “Huusht, hey!” The lightning cracked. The sky opened in torrents. “O gods, we’re soaked!”

  “A plague on ye!” cried Caith, but Dubhain’s hand gripped his arm, stronger than any grip ever he had felt. The creature of rivers fled the rain, called on gods younger than himself, and jested with the guards. “Curse ye, let me go!”

  “Ne’er that!” the pooka said as they came within the doors of the dun itself. Dubhain stamped his booted feet, shed water in a circle in the torchlight in the hall. As the guards did, Dubhain did and Caith did, made fellows by the sudden storm.

  So they were in. The stones about them, warm-colored in the light, were the nature, the solidity of his home, the very color and texture that he had imagined them; or the reality drove out the dream in the blink of an eye and deceived him, as reality will do to imaginings. Here was the house he had longed for, dreamed of, in the grim walls of his fostering. But here also were rough, scarred men, the smell of oil and stale straw, much as womenless men had managed things in Hagan’s hold up by Dun na nGall. There seemed no happiness in this dim place either, only foreboding, the noise of shouts, of heavy-footed guards, the dull flash of metal in the light . These men would kill and lose no sleep over it.

  O father, Sliabhin!— are we not a house that deserves its death?

  “One will tell the lord ye’re below,” a guard said. “Bide here, whether he will see you. You are
not the first to come tonight.”

  Caith looked sharply at the guard, whose brute broad face held nothing but raw strength and the habit of connivance in the eyes. No, not dull, this one. Huge, and not dull. Not the first, Caith heard with a sinking of his heart, thinking on Dun na nGall, on his foster- father Hagan, and treachery, but there was no other word from the guard. Caith looked round on Dubhain with a touch of fey desperation in the glance, even defiance. Save me now, he challenged the Sidhe, meeting Dubhain’s eyes, and had the joy of seeing a pooka worried.

  The thought elated him in a wild, hopeless abandon. He looked upward at the stairs that would lead up, he reckoned, to the king’s hall. A man from below had gone stumping up the steps to a doorway above, ahead of them.

  I am the Sidhe’s own difficulty, Caith thought again, sorry for himself and at the same time sure that his revenge was at hand, whether he would kill or be killed and likely both. Time stretched out like a spill of honey, cloying sweet and golden with light and promising him satiety.

  Well, enough of living, now. For this I was born, my father’s son.

  And my mother’s.

  Seven

  The guard who had gone up came out again from a room near the head of the stair and beckoned to them.

  “Come,” said the guard by Caith’s side.

  Caith was very meek going up the steps. He made no protest as they began to prevent Dubhain from going up with him. In truth, he had no great desire of the company, trusting more to his sword. But he heard a commotion behind him, and the pooka joined him at the mid of the stairs, eluding the guards below.

  Caith heard the grate of drawn steel above and below them at once as Dubhain clutched his arm. “Master,’ Dubhain said, “I’ll not leave ye here.”

  “Fall to heel,” Caith said in humor the match of the pooka’s. “Mind your manners, lad.” He looked up at the guard above them. “My servant is frightened of you,” he said, holding out his hand in appeal til the guard, satisfied of his own dreadfulness and well-pleased with it, made a show of threat and waved them both on with his sword drawn.