The Raven Warrior (3 page)

Abruptly, light blossomed all around her and the mirrors returned to the glass dome above her. She saw herself reflected everywhere. She glowed with beauty in the flow of brightness from beneath the floor, naked, her sex shaved clean, skin tawny, her hair a flood of black silk cradling her pale, fair face. Helpless, because she found the X-shaped medallion held her tightly to the floor.

Desire grew and she saw her labia part slightly to reveal the swollen, hot passage that seemed the center of her being. Her image darkened as he covered her with his body, and she found she looked up not at the mirrored ceiling but at his face, teeth bared, a mask of desire.

She groaned with both outrage and pleasure as he entered her body.

“Oh. Oh, my sweet, hot, tight, soft. My darling, my rich course of all joy. I am enfolded in moist, red velvet.”

Not a good sign,
the last clear-thinking corner of her brain informed her. He never spoke tenderly to her, no matter how hotly he desired her.

But the light from the cross-shaped symbol blazed around both of them and her whole body exploded into orgasm. But then, what seemed a tidal wave of pleasure burned away into incredible pain. She threw back her head, almost blinded by its intensity. Even childbirth, the worst pain she could remember, hadn’t hurt so much.

The first sight she had as she lay gasping as the pain at last ebbed away was his face grinning down at her, and the first sound his triumphant laughter. Their bodies were separated, but something like a steel rod parted her female portions. He was trying to enter her again.

“No! No! No!” she screamed.

He laughed again. “I wonder how many times you will be able to survive it. The best, the very best I ever had, only lasted through five thrusts. He was a strong man—most women only make three. Come now, my sweet, my angel, my beauty. Be nice. Let me in again. You will, you know. In the end you will. They all do. Best get it over quickly. Struggling only prolongs my pleasure and your suffering.”

His next thrust was like being battered by a stone phallus, but somehow, even though her body was glued to the floor like iron filings to a magnet, she managed to twist away.

She had often wondered but never wanted to know how he came by his vast powers. Now she knew. He was able to use this room, this place, to call them up from the earth, call them up into his body and spirit by using those he desired as a sort of intermediary. He took the strength they pulled from this wonder she lay on, but they experienced the concomitant price of such a transfer of power: the pain.

In the thousand mirrors above, she could see him kneeling between her legs, but she was beginning to glow with the excitement of the building fire beneath her. He reached around, palms cupping buttocks, fingers reaching then catching the soft lips of the innermost portal, drawing it open to his rigid member. She threw her head back, trying to knock herself out against the stone floor. Her vision splintered into a thousand lights, but even so, she could feel him entering her again.

When her eyes cleared, she found she couldn’t see the mirrors above. She couldn’t tell if she was half unconscious or if indeed something was happening above him. It was as though she looked up through the meshes of a net, the only difference being these meshes writhed. They moved closer, further down, toward him.

A moment of crystal clarity followed while she weighed her choices.

She could warn him.

No. Never.

It might kill her, too.

Better to die that way than this. Even if, as she saw now, the meshes of this net were snakes, white ones with black eyes and tongues and a faint green line down their slender backs.

An instant later, they enfolded him. She felt the hard, muscular strength of the narrow bones as they wrapped themselves around him. They moved like no snakes she had ever seen, in a completely coordinated fashion.

It was his turn to scream and scream as he rolled away from her prone body across the floor. Then he was silent as he concentrated his entire intellect and will on the struggle.

He tried to kick free, and for a few moments, it looked as though he might succeed. But they wrapped themselves around his legs, immobilizing him from ankle to hip.

He pulled one arm free, but when he tried to claw the other loose, a half dozen coils lapped around the free arm, pinning it to his body.

The struggle ended when one coiled around his throat and deprived him of breath whenever he tried to move. At length, he lay still.

The voice came out of nowhere. “Dung fly maggot. Filthy pile of stinking carrion. I’ve been waiting to corner you for some time now. Such vicious games as you play leave you vulnerable, you crawling louse.

“You told me the boy Arthur was harmless. You told me he would never learn to elude the watcher I set over him. You lied about both matters, and now she is gone. They are all gone. All those caught in the antechamber. Those whose souls I trapped for companionship in an eternity of loneliness. She escaped me. She whom I loved, she who was my only consolation—has set out across the sea of eternity alone without me.”

Then the voice slipped into another language, one Igrane didn’t understand. But it must have been an incantation, because the snakes began to strike. They buried their fangs in his chest and throat, and—she smiled to see it—his groin, just at the spot where the penis joins the body.

His back arched, his mouth opened, but she could hear nothing. The snakes were now lines of light and they sucked his substance away into their bodies, and then very simply, without leaving a trace behind, they were gone.

We picked up the boats and carried them into the marsh. We didn’t want to leave a trail. Or at least, that’s what Ure said, telling the rest of us that a trail by land in a swamp left far less disturbance.

And, oddly enough, I found he was right. The track was muddy or grass-covered; the mud oozed back to fill in footprints and they simply didn’t take on the damp turf. Had we forced our way through the rushes and cattails, we would have left clear evidence of our passage.

It took me a little time to realize I was walking along a road. It wound in and out among trees, past ponds thick with water weed, cress, and lily pads. Or along the edge of more open water, filled with fish. We moved quietly and I saw the fish rise, making circles on the water as they took insects on the surface.

Twice, tree trunks were visible, laid in parallel rows to bridge low spots where we waded up to our ankles.

“Is this a road?” I said to Ure.

“Yes.”

“There are people living here?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Not now.”

Knowing his lack of affection for chatter, I forbore to question him anymore.

What I most remember about the marsh was its silence. I was brought up on a seacoast, where the sound of wind and wave was a constant background to all human activities. Even in the barley fields, we heard the sea’s roar and the wind swept the heading crops into a bowing, rippling mass, which gleamed in the sun just as the sea waves did before its unending breath.

But here was true silence, broken only by the flop, pop of a leaping frog or fish, or the distant cries of ducks and geese as they fed among the long grasses and sedges that bordered this strange and, I think, ancient, winding road.

“Snakes,” someone else, I think Albe, said nervously.

“Too cold yet,” Ure answered. “Later, when it grows warmer, I would fear to walk here without a stout stick, but we are safe enough now.”

After that, we trudged on quietly, the silence seeming to enter us the way water is poured into a bowl and lies motionless, forming a mirror of sorts for anything above it.

Maeniel, Gray, Ure, and I took the lead; the rest followed behind. Those who had been sleeping took up the boats, automatically leaving the rowers to walk unencumbered. But none of us were really what you would call fresh, not after ten days at sea. And I wondered how much strength any of us would have to call upon when we faced battle.

I was frightened. I might not have the strength in my right hand to make the buildings in the fortress burn, even if I poured my strength, my life, my whole soul into the task. Would it be enough?

About then the wind changed, and we smelled them.

Gray stopped. “Christ! What’s that?”

Ure laughed very softly. “The Saxons,” he said.

“Uncle?” Gray said. “Do you never explain?”

“No,” Ure said, and he continued on. But Gray balked mutinously.

Maeniel sighed. What we were smelling now he had probably been aware of for some time. But the wind early in the morning had been at our backs. Now, as the road however tortuously moved inland, we were catching a land breeze, and it reeked, the stench so strong it made your eyes tear.

Ure, seeing the rest of us frozen where we stood, paused again.

“The Saxons,” Maeniel said quietly, “devote every tenth captive to their gods.”

“Especially the weak, the old, the sickly, and the rebellious,” Ure said.

We rounded the next bend in the road and saw them dangling in the trees. Even before the road had been built there must have been a considerable island of dry land, because there were many trees, even those that won’t grow on flooded land. They were festooned with the dead in all stages of decomposition.

To the right of the forested island, I saw a thicket of pilings projecting from the water where a village must once have stood. The pilings were half rotted by damp, but the tops were charred and blackened by fire.

We stood stock-still where we were as the rest came up behind us and looked over our shoulders at the terrible sight. Someone began to cry. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl. I only know Ure’s eyes swept the whole group of us with a look of icy contempt and the weeping was silenced.

“Well, now you know,” he said. “Make your choice. Run or fight. Which is it?”

Gray was on his knees vomiting at the side of the road. Maeniel wore his wolf look—the gaze he turns on the yearling cubs when it comes time to loose them toward their first kill. I stood paralyzed, feeling both my knees and my guts turning to water.

“Must we pass this way?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “But I thought it was as well you did. These are not deer you hunt, but men, killers of other men.”

I looked around at the others. Everyone was silent. The girls were bunched behind me, but the equally pale and frightened faces of the boys were indistinguishable from theirs.

Next to me, Albe’s eyes were empty. “I will not go living into their hands again,” she said.

Next to her, Wic, the girl with the ugly birthmark distorting her features, shrugged and said, “No worse than my village when it was filled with carrion crows after the attack.”

One of the boys whispered, “My master beat me every day. Think on it. None but the queen has anything to go back to.”

“The queen,” I said, “is not going back. We will abide the dead.”

To this day, I don’t know how I did it. Part of it was pride, I’m sure. I couldn’t let this band of outcasts show more courage than the descendent of the Iceni queen. But the other part was, I knew how important our little voyage was.

The Painted People and the kingdoms of the Out Isles were hard-pressed by the Saxon pirates. Hand in glove with their brethren that guarded the coast, they formed a pincer movement that, in the end, threatened the independence of the rest of the free people of Alba. Uther would soon be hard-pressed to maintain his position in Wales, and the Painted People deprived of their alliance with the Veneti. And without control over the North Sea fisheries and the resources of the Out Islands, they would fall like ripe plums into the hands of the southern Saxon conquerors, led by Merlin.

If no one did anything to stop these raids, the command of the seas would fall to the Saxons. And, make no mistake, whoever rules the sea here also controls the land.

I danced the dance, stretched out my hands, and took the power offered by my seat on the Dragon Throne. Maeniel warned me the night before the dance there would be no going back, and there wasn’t. So I did as a chief should do; I took the first step forward. The rest, without further question, followed. Even Ure.

The view of the small forest on the island didn’t improve as we drew closer. But we continued on. The crows were at them, and at first we thought we frightened the birds, because, with a cry and a rush of black wings, they flew up and away from the things in the trees.

“I didn’t think we were close enough to startle them away from their dinner,” Ure said.

But then we heard voices.

Igrane felt the power fade and withdraw from her body. No longer attached to the symbol on the floor, she rolled to her side, then crawled away, whimpering with relief. He had been going to kill her; she knew it. This time he had really been going to kill her.

She had always been sure he hated her power over him, and this time he had intended to be rid of her. To burn her away as a sacrifice to whatever earthly, demonic power resided in this strange place.

She had been to his dwelling before, but never here to this part. Above, the sea roared and the room with its high, domed ceiling grew darker and darker as the light faded from the symbol on the floor. Fearfully, she thought about his two servants. God! She didn’t want to meet them.

She came to her knees. Her eyes searched the room in the growing gloom. She saw what remained of them.

Whatever powers took Merlin, it had dealt with them first. All that remained of them were bags of human hide, full of shattered, dark bone. It looked as though they had simply been crumpled as a bit of discarded paper might be by the fist of a giant hand.

She gave a gasp. Whatever took him must have awesome power. Merlin was the strongest being she had ever met; the creature that could destroy him didn’t bear thinking about.

The light was very dim now, the big room deeply shadowed. She found herself shivering with cold. Something, a robe of sorts, was draped over a sofa nearby. She seized it and wrapped it around her body. It was silk, heavy, raw silk.

It must be his,
she thought. He had prepared it so that he could relax when he was finished destroying her. He would have been replete, sated with food, sex, and bloated with the staggeringly rich draft he sucked from her loins, while she lay spent, twisted, and dead on the white symbol below.