The Endless Knot (41 page)

The air grew clearer; and though mists still held us bound and blind by day, nights were often crisp and clear, the stars sharp and bright as spear points in a heaven black as pitch. It was on such a night that Tegid came to me while I slept beside a low-burning fire.

“Llew . . .”

I came awake at the touch of his hand on my shoulder.

“Come with me.”

“Why?”

He made no answer but bade me follow him a little way from camp. A late moon had risen above the horizon, casting a thin light over the land. We climbed to the top of a high hill, and Tegid pointed away to the east. I looked and saw a light burning on a near-distant ridge and, some way beyond it, another. Even as we watched, a third light flickered into existence further off still.

Standing side by side in the night, straining into the darkness, my bard and I waited. The wind prowled over the bare rock of the hilltop, like a hunting animal making low restless noises. In a little while, a fourth fire winked into life like a star alighting on a faraway hill.

I watched the beacons shining in the night and knew that my enemy was near.

“I have seen this in my vision,” Tegid said softly, and I heard again the echo of his voice lifted in song as the storm-frenzied waves hurled our frail boat onto the killing rocks.

The wind growled low, filling the darkness with a dangerous sound. “Alun,” Tegid said deliberately and slow, choosing his words carefully, “was the only one among the Ravens to see Crom Cruach.”

At first I did not catch his implication. “And now Alun is dead,” I replied, supplying the answer to the bard's unspoken question.

“Yes.”

“Then I am next. Is that what you mean?”

“That is my fear.”

“Then your fear is unfounded,” I told him flatly. “Your own vision should tell you as much. Alun and I—we both saw Yellow Coat. And we both fought the serpent. Alun died, yes. But I am alive. That is the end of it.”

Indicating the string of beacons blazing along the eastern horizon, he said, “The end is out there.”

“Let it come. I welcome it.”

The sky was showing pearly gray when we turned to walk back down the hill to the camp. Bran was awake and waiting for us. We told him about the beacons, and he received the news calmly. “We must advance more warily from now on,” he said. “I advise we send scouts to ride before us.”

“Very well,” I concurred. “See to it.”

Bran touched the back of his hand to his forehead and stepped away. A little while later, Emyr and Niall rode out from the camp. I noticed that they did not ride on the hard surface of the road, but in the long grass beside it. They would go less swiftly, but more silently.

So it begins at last
, I thought.

I followed them a short distance from camp and watched the riders disappearing into the pale dawn. “The Swift Sure Hand go with you, brothers!” I called after them; my voice echoed in the barren hills and died away in the heather. The land seemed unsettled by the sound. “The Swift Sure Hand shield us all,” I added and hastened back to camp to face the day's demands.

30
D
EAD
V
OICES

T
he hills grudgingly gave way to an endless expanse of rock waste—all sharp-angled, toppling, sliding, bare but for tough thickets of thorny gorse. The land tilted precariously all around, yet the road held firm and good. Rain and wind battered us; mist blinded us for days without end. But the road held good.

And with each day's march, the cloud-shrouded mountains drew nearer. We watched the wind-carved peaks rise until they crowded the horizon on every side—range upon range, summit upon summit fading into the misty distance. Brooding, fierce, and unwholesome, they were no kindly heights, but loomed stark and threatening over us: white, like splinters of shattered bone or teeth broken in a fight.

Enough grass grew along the roadside to keep the horses fed, and the horses fed us. This meant losing another mount every few days, but the meat kept us going. We drank from mountain runnels and pools, numbing the ache of hunger with cold water.

Gyd, Season of Thaws, drew ever nearer, bringing wet gales to assail us. The snow on the lower slopes began melting and filling the gorges, gullies, and rock canyons with the icy run-off. Day and night, we were battered by the sound of water gushing and smashing, gurgling and splashing, as it rushed to the lowlands now far behind us. Mists rose from deep defiles where waterfalls boomed; clouds hung low over crevices where fast-flowing cataracts clattered and echoed like the clash of battle-crazed war bands.

The bleak monotony of naked rock and the harshness of the wind and crashing water bore constant reminder—if any was needed— that we journeyed through a hostile land. The higher we climbed among the shattered peaks, the greater grew our trepidation. It was not the wind that screamed among the ragged crowns and smashed summits; it was fear, raw and wild. We lay shivering in our cloaks at night and listened to the wind-voices wail. Dawn found us ill-rested and edgy to face the renewed assault.

Twice during each day's trek, we met with the scouts—once at midday, and then again when they returned at dusk. The Ravens took it in turn to carry out the scouting duty, two at a time, rotating the task among their number so that each day saw a fresh pair ride out. One day, Garanaw and Emyr returned as we were making camp for the night beneath a high overhanging cliff.

“There is a better place just beyond the next turn,” Emyr informed us. “It is not far, and it would prove a much better shelter should the wind and rain come up in the night.”

As we had not yet unsaddled the horses or lit the fires, we agreed to move on to the place they suggested. Garanaw led the way and, when we arrived, said, “This is as good a shelter as these bare bones provide.”

Cynan heard this and replied, “Broken bones, you mean. I have seen nothing for days that was not fractured to splinters.”

Thus, the mountains became
Tor Esgyrnau
, the Broken Bones. And what Cynan said was true; through naming them, they became less threatening, less frightening—however slightly. At least, we began looking on them with less apprehension than previously.

“That is the way of things,” Tegid offered when I remarked on this a few days later. “Among the Derwyddi it is taught that to confer a name is to conquer.”

“Then get busy, bard. Find a name with which to conquer Paladyr. And I will shout it from the crown of the highest peak.”

Later, as darkness claimed the heights, I found him standing, peering into the gloom already creeping over the lowlands behind. I stared with him into the distance for a moment, and then asked. “What do you see?”

“I thought I saw something moving on the road down there,” he replied, still scanning the twisted ribbon.

“Where?” I looked hard but could make out nothing in the murk. “I will send someone back to see.”

Tegid declined, saying, “There is no need. It is gone now—if anything
was
there. It might have been a shadow.”

He walked away, but I stayed, staring into the dull twilight, searching the darkness for any sign of movement. We had climbed a fair distance into the mountains and, though the days were slightly warmer now, the nights were still cold, with biting winds sweeping down from the snow-laden peaks above. Often we woke to frost on our cloaks, and the day's melt frozen during the night to make the road treacherous until the sun warmed the stone once more.

For warmth we burned the hard-twisted knots of gorse trunks we hacked from their stony beds with our swords. They burned with a foul smell and gave off an acrid, oily smoke, but the embers remained hot long after the fire had gone.

We reached a high mountain pass and crossed the first threshold of the mountains. I looked back to see the land dull and shapeless behind us; a bleak, treeless, mist-obscured moor, colorless, sodden, and drear. It was good to leave it behind at last. I stood long, looking at the road as it stretched into the distance. Ever since Tegid's suggestion that we might be followed, I had spent a fair amount of time looking back, and this time even managed to convince myself that, yes, there was something, or someone, back there—very faint and far in the distance. Or was it only the fleeting shift of mist or cloud shadow?

Up among the barren peaks, the wind whined and howled, swooping down to tear at our flesh with talons of ice. The gale was unrelenting, save for the chance protection afforded by a rock or wall as the road twisted and wound its tortured way along—sometimes no more than a footpath clawed from the mountainside, little wider than a scar. Everyone walked, for we dared not risk a fall on such a treacherous trail.

Since we could no longer ride, we loaded all the horses with as much hard-scrabble gorse as they could carry. Each animal looked like a walking furze hillock bouncing along. We went more slowly than I would have liked. Still, but for the road, we could not have made the climb at all.

On and on we went, dragging ourselves blue-lipped and shivering from one march to the next, cringing, tears streaming from our eyes as the wind and cold pared us to the bone. We grew hard as leather and sharp as knives. We grew hungry, too, with a fierce and gnawing desire no feast could satisfy. It was a longing to be healed as much as filled, a yearning to return to Albion and allow the sight of its fair hills and glens to salve our ravaged hearts. It was
taithchwant,
the profound hunger for home.

But I could not go home. I would sooner abandon my life than my beloved. My enemy's head would adorn my belt before I turned my steps toward Druim Vran; my wife would stand once more beside me before I turned my face toward Dinas Dwr. My queen would return with me to Albion, or I would not return at all.

At dusk, the first night after crossing the mountain threshold, we sensed a change in the mood of the land. But it was not until two nights later, when we had penetrated deep into the mountain fortress, that the change began to make itself felt. Where the lowland moors had been bleak and broody, the mountains were threatening; where the forest had been forbidding, the mountains were menacing. And it was not merely the threat of plunging from the narrow road to die on the broken rocks below. There was a wary malevolence aprowl among the peaks, a dark power that deemed our presence an invasion and reacted accordingly.

On the third night we finally understood the nature of our adversary. The day's march had gone well; we had made good progress and had found a suitable refuge for the night in a deep divide between two peaks. Solid rock walls rose sheer from the roadside, the surface raked jagged as if the road had been hacked through the mountain with a dagger; the peaktops were lost in cloud above us. Here the wind could not reach us so easily; thus the place provided a welcome respite and made as good a shelter as could be found in those bare crags.

We huddled close to the fires, as always, but that night as the gale rose to its customary shriek, we heard in the wind-wail a new and chilling note. Tegid, ever alert to the subtle shifts and shades of light and sound, was first to perceive it. “Listen!” he hissed.

The talk, low and quiet around the fire, ceased. We listened, but heard nothing—save the icy blast tearing itself on the naked peaks of Tor Esgyrnau.

I leaned close. “What did you hear?”

“Did and do,” Tegid said, cocking his head to one side. “There— again!”

“I hear the wind,” Bran volunteered, “but nothing more.”

“Nor will you if you keep drowning it with your own voice.”

We waited a long while. When the sound did not come again, I asked, “What did it sound like?”

“A voice,” he said, hunching his shoulders more tightly. “I thought I heard a voice. That is all.”

The way he said it—curt and dismissive—made me curious. “Whose voice?”

He poked a loose ember back into the campfire with the tip of his staff, but made no reply.

“Whose voice, Tegid?”

Cynan and Bran, and several others sitting near, looked on with increasing interest. Tegid glanced around, and then back to the fire quickly. “The storm is rising,” he said.

“Answer me, bard. Whose voice did you hear?”

He drew a breath, and said the name I least expected to hear. “Ollathir's,” he replied softly. “I thought I heard Ollathir.”

“Ollathir? He has been dead for years. He is—”

“Well I know it!”

“But—”

“You asked me whose voice I heard,” he replied, speaking angrily and low. “And I am telling you the truth. I thought I heard Ollathir, Chief Bard of Albion, long dead in his grave.”

The words were still hanging in the air when Bran leapt to his feet. “I heard it!” He stood over us, his face in shadow. “There! Do you hear?” He paused. “And again! But it is not your Ollathir—it is Alun Tringad!”

Cynan turned a baleful eye toward me. “There is something uncanny here, I feel.” His voice was a wary whisper, as if he feared being overheard.

The fire creaked and ticked, and the wind cried. Then Cynan himself rose slowly to his feet, placing a finger to his lips. “No . . . no . . .” he said, his voice little more than a sigh, “it is not Alun I hear, it is” —amazement transformed his features in the firelight—“Cynfarch . . . my father!”

Soon the whole camp was in turmoil, as everyone succumbed to the eerie voice of a dead friend or kinsman. Everyone, that is, except me. I heard only the wild wind wail, but that was unnerving enough. For as night wore on the gale raked more fiercely at the unseen peaks and fell shrieking from the heights. We could only cower closer to the fire and hold our hands over our ears.

And then even the fires were taken from us. The wind screamed down between the walls like a rushing waterfall. The campfires flattened, guttered, and went out. Plunged into a chill darkness churning with the gale and the cries of dead friends and loved ones, the men began scrambling for their weapons.