Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword of Avalon (10 page)

I know you . . .
said that look,
but you are too young and weak to concern me. We shall meet again when you are grown. . . .

With a snort the crowned head turned, and the stag paced disdainfully away. In moments the antlers had merged with the branches, the red-brown form with the shadows, until Woodpecker wondered if the deer had been there at all.

Where they had been, beams of sunlight moved and flickered as they passed through the trees, for the sun was already sinking toward the west. Tirilan slipped beneath Woodpecker’s outstretched arm and skipped across the grass, lifting her face to the light.

“The spirits are here!” she called. “Cannot you see them? Oh, come and join the dance!”

“What does she mean?” whispered Grebe. “Who is she dancing with?”

For Tiri certainly was dancing, her pale hair lifting, the skirts of her white tunic flaring like the wings of a swan as she dipped and twirled. She stretched out her arms, laughing, and for a moment Woodpecker thought he could see the radiant forms that danced with her. But he stood where he was. He had his vision and she had hers.

He never knew how long he stood watching that strange dance as the sun sank toward the distant sea. But a moment came when the sun’s rays failed and Tirilan stood alone in the clearing, light fading from her eyes as it was beginning to fade from the sky.

Woodpecker went to her. “It’s all right,” he said softly. “But we must go. Powers of Day bless us, but I don’t know about Powers of Night.” As he took her hand he heard from below the voice of the Lady of Avalon, calling them.

 

 

 

ANDERLE SAT IN THE bow of the low barge with her daughter in her arms. Ahead, the pure peak of the Tor rose like the sure center of the world. It would be good to be home. But the more she thought about it, the more disturbed she was by the children’s story of what had happened on the Wild God’s Isle.

“Will we go back to the Lake Village soon?” Tirilan looked up at her.

“Do you wish it?”

Tiri nodded. “Woodpecker is fun.”

Anderle suppressed an impulse to ask how she could consider clambering around in the wilderness all day and driving her mother half mad with worry amusing. She had yelled at them loudly enough the night before when she was not hugging her daughter until she squeaked in protest to assure herself that the girl was really unharmed. Stalker, who was clearly appalled at the danger into which his sons had led the daughter of the Lady of Avalon, had hauled both boys off for a switching and sent them supperless to bed.

“Are you still angry?” asked Tiri, who could read her mother very well. “He was very sorry. I think he was trying to show off for me.”

Anderle wondered. The younger lad had yelled while he was being punished, but Woodpecker had made no sound at all.

“I was very glad when you came to get us,” the girl added reassuringly. “How did you know where to look?”

The girl was priestess born, thought Anderle, and precocious. Perhaps she was old enough to understand.

“You know how each year I renew the wards around the seven sacred isles. I could feel a change in the energy connecting the islands, so I thought we should look there. The closer we got, the more I felt that something was wrong. That’s why I was so upset with you last night—I was afraid.”

“I understand,” Tirilan said wisely. “I was afraid too. Something that did not like us was there. I was chanting all the prayers I could remember.”

“Did you, my darling?” Anderle smiled. “I am glad that you remembered them. Which one were you saying when you heard that clap of thunder? The feeling changed.” It had happened just as they were leaving the open water for the stream—thunder from a clear sky, and in the next moment an overwhelming sense that all would be well.

“Oh, that wasn’t me,” the child replied. “Woodpecker started to say the prayers with me, and when I got to the part about protection from wind and storm, he said a different word, and then we were safe, I could tell.”

“What word?” Anderle whispered. “What did he say?”

“He said”—Tirilan shook her head—“I can hear it, but I can’t say it. It isn’t mine . . .” Anderle shivered as for a moment a much older soul looked out from the girl’s eyes. “It was the Word of Thunder,” Tirilan said then.

I must not let her see that I am surprised,
Anderle thought numbly. Woodpecker
is a child of the Lake Village, but
Mikantor
is the Son of a Hundred Kings. Is it so strange that he should . . . remember?

“What does Woodpecker think happened?”

“Oh, he doesn’t know what he did.” She grinned. “But whatever it was, I know that we’ve done it before. He’s not like the other boys in the Village. I think you should bring him to Avalon.”

“I wish we could—” Anderle’s voice trembled. If the power was already emerging in him, he needed to be trained. It had been some time since she had caught the scent of Galid’s spies. Perhaps she had finally convinced him that the child was lost. If she found other talented children to teach, she could hide Woodpecker among them.

“I would like that.” She gave her daughter a hug. “We shall see.”

FIVE

A
s the first full moon after the Turning of Autumn drew near, the Lady of Avalon traveled to the great henge to honor the ancestors. The paths were already sodden with the approach of winter, the old bracken on the hillsides limp and brown. It was said that this feast had once marked the end of the harvest, but what harvest there was had ended a moon ago. The souls they had come to guide would have a wet journey home.

The great passage graves had been abandoned generations ago, but every seven years, the spirits of the dead still flowed down the river to make their pilgrimage to the Henge, and from there to the Otherworld. In every farmstead and village the oldest woman in the household would preside over the ceremonies for the dead of the family, midwifing their transition into the Otherworld as she assisted at the birthing of each new child of her line. And this year, as in most of the years that Anderle could remember, far too many families would have lost a member to whom they must now bid farewell. But the Sisterhood of the Ti-Sahharin, the seven priestesses who guided the spiritual life of the tribes, had another task. And for this they had called the Lady of Avalon, who served all the tribes but was bound to none of them, to aid.

They passed the crossroads and the line of mounds that Anderle remembered all too well from her flight from Azan-Ylir and came suddenly to the rim of the shallow valley that the Aman, swollen now to a small river instead of its usual gentle stream, had cut through the plain. To their left the storm-stripped branches of the oaks clawed at a cloudy sky. Across the river other travelers were passing the charred timbers that once had guarded the high king’s home. As they drew closer, Anderle recognized the rain capes of tightly woven rushes that the Ai-Giru wore.

“Let us wait here,” she told her men. “If they have trouble with the crossing, they may be glad of our assistance.”

But the fens of the Ai-Giru country were even more extensive than those that surrounded Avalon, and the Lady’s escort managed to ford the stream with a minimum of splashing and swearing. As the newcomers started up the bank, Anderle came alongside the tented wagon in which the priestess was riding.

“Linne—I hope you are well. I will not ask if you have had a pleasant journey,” said Anderle as a thin hand lifted the leather flap and she glimpsed a pale face within.

“Let me see—by pleasant do you mean two lamed horses, and the coughing sickness that hit three of my men so hard they had to be left along the way?”

Anderle nodded. This was the beginning of the dark time, the season that belonged to the powers that dwelt below.

“And this year how have your people fared?”

“My country is like yours—mostly fenland, so we know how to deal with water, although if we truly had webbed feet like the frogs our tribe is named for we would be better off. But now we have to fight off raiders from the Great Land,” Linne went on.

“I suppose that times are bad there as well.”

“I don’t know why they should think that things here are any better,” she said bitterly. “But I questioned the one man we took alive. He told me their land lies so low that when the wind blows from the west it is easy for the sea to rush in. The great City of Circles loses ground every year. So the men without families take to their boats to see what they can find elsewhere.”

“We should not be surprised.” Anderle sighed. “Is it not the same here, as one tribe is forced from its lands and attacks another, and they attack their neighbors in turn. It’s like an avalanche—one little stone falls, and before you know it half the mountain is moving.”

Ahead the ground rose slightly. Now they could see the huddle of tents fashioned of raw wool or oiled leather and booths roofed with rough thatching that had been set up around the entrance to the Processional Way. This gathering was nothing to compare with the vast crowds that in former days had gathered here for the festival, but an impressive turnout all the same. Beyond them lay the pens where the hairy red cattle waited to be slaughtered for the feasting or traded to improve the stock of other tribes.

One of Anderle’s men lifted a horn to his lips and blew three long blasts. People began to emerge from the tents, drawing their mantles over their heads against the fine drizzle that had begun to fall once more. She shivered, only now allowing herself to admit how welcome she would find a bowl of hot soup and the warmth of a fire.

 

 

 

“AT THE TURNING OF Autumn I gazed into the Mother’s pool, but all I could see was the swirl of the water, everything dissolving, everything being swept away. . . .” Kaisa-Zan of the Ai-Utu looked up, firelight gleaming in the water that welled from her eyes. She was the youngest of the priestesses, a sturdy girl with a wealth of auburn hair.

“It takes no seeress to interpret that,” observed Leka, who came of the Ai-Akhsi, the People of the Ram. “You are afraid of floods, so that is what you will see.”

She dipped up another helping of stew, a mixture of mutton and beef and assorted roots and grains, as various as the women who were eating it. The flicker of the fire set their shadows to dancing with the images on the woven hangings that warmed the inner wall of the roundhouse. It was the only permanent building in the encampment, a sturdy structure with a roof of heavy thatch that came down nearly to the ground outside. Over the central hearth, a precious bronze cauldron of stew was simmering, and oat cakes toasted on flat stones at the edge of the fire.

“You can afford to smile,” Kaisa-Zan answered bitterly. “You live in the Dales. But how would you like your hills to become islands? If that happens sheep are all you will be able to raise.”

“Peace,” counseled Linne. “We are here to take counsel for our people—it serves no purpose for us to tear at each other.” She looked around the circle with a quelling glance, firelight lending a fugitive color to her silver hair. Nuya, who was the younger sister of Uldan and Zamara and high priestess of the Ai-Zir, sat as far away as possible from Saarin of the Ai-Ushen. They had not spoken to one another since they arrived. “Have we had any word from Olavi?” she asked.

“They say the roads to the north are already covered in snow,” answered Saarin. “I almost did not come myself,” she added with a glance at Nuya. “You have not made me feel very welcome here. But it is needful. Many of my tribe have died too.”

“All of us have too many to call this year,” said Leka, “but you can hardly blame the rest of us for resenting your king’s way of trying to solve his problems. It is bad enough that Eltan has seized lands in the territory of another tribe. Those he does not kill, he enslaves, and they are grateful to glean the leavings from their own harvests.”

“And his creature Galid is worse,” added Kaisa-Zan. “His men scavenge like wild dogs, attacking farms and destroying what they cannot carry away. Does he think that if he destroys Azan, Zamara will approve him as king?”

“He is like a wild dog that attacks a sheepfold,” said Leka, “rending and slaying for the pleasure of destruction.”

“As does any beast divorced from its true nature,” observed Shizuret, “whether dog or man.”

It was true, thought Anderle, remembering the fallow fields and abandoned farmsteads she had seen as she rode here from Avalon. And over the years she had heard a steady series of tales from refugees. They need not wait for worsening weather to destroy them when they had worse men.

“I think that Galid’s sickness is something deeper, an emptiness that no amount of food, or blood, can fill,” she said then.

“At least when the wolf kills, it is in order to live,” said Saarin. Nuya wrapped her shawl around her as if to protect herself from the other’s contagion. And yet come the morrow they would all make the journey to the Henge, joining their powers for the sake of those they mourned. Anderle gazed around the room, seeking for the common quality that made them what they were.

She and Kaisa were the youngest, the others between them and Linne in age, for in the normal way of things a young woman would assist her predecessor for many years before death or retirement thrust her into the senior role. But of course these were not ordinary times. Leka was in her early thirties, strongly built with curly brown hair and a direct manner that was sometimes interpreted as harsh. It was said that the Ai-Akhsi had been warring with their southern neighbors, and she had received a few dark looks from Shizuret, the priestess of the Ai-Ilif, who was almost as old as Linne, and had had a husband and six children before a plague took them, along with the woman who had been intended to succeed the tribe’s priestess before her. Perhaps the similarity was that air of self-sufficiency, as if having looked upon the Otherworld, they could not be defeated by any tragedy of this one.