The Raven Warrior (38 page)

They rushed us just then.

                  CHAPTER SIX

Making these things must be work, Arthur thought as he watched and listened to the War Song approach him. It was in the meadow lower down yet, and there might be time.

Arthur sprinted toward the broken rock that edged the long drop into the pine forest below. Bax, the dog, followed.

Bad footing,
Arthur thought as he reached them.

Bright as moonlight is, it still doesn’t dominate the way daylight does, and the black shadows concealed hollows where a running man might easily break a leg or an ankle. Death—that would be certain death because the War Song would rip his body asunder with the same ferocity it did the trees and brush it encountered crossing the meadow.

Yes, he’d been right. The grass near the edge of the cliff was dry—thick and dry. It would burn. The wind from the glaciers above battered the edges of the meadow, killing the exposed vegetation and keeping it bone-dry.

He’d carried his bow and sinew since he first used them to make fire on the plateau where he’d been imprisoned with the other War Song, and he’d been practicing. Always fast, he had grown greatly skilled at kindling fire. He crouched down among the shattered boulders and stony rubble. Bax howled a warning.

The screaming, wailing, and sobbing intensified as he saw the War Song had reached the slope that led down into his meadow of last refuge. Maliciously, it paused and, digging itself into the slope, hurled shards of broken rock in every direction. Bax yipped and crouched beside Arthur as one slashed his shoulder.

Arthur gritted his teeth and bowed his head to protect his eyes. He felt as though ice touched him on the cheek five or six times, on the arms once, along his ribs, and at his stomach.

“No!” He fought the desire to run. Now or never. This was the best spot, filled with tinder-dry, broken brush and wiry, dead grass. And he could tell why the wind from the glaciers above battered him. It also threatened to blow him and his fire-making materials into the valley below.

“Shush. Be still,” he begged that wind even as one missile bigger than the rest cracked against his forehead and skidded across his scalp. Blood dripped down into his right eye, blinding him as fire blossomed under his hands.

He looked up. The moonlight wavered as the thing came between his eyes and the silver orb. The screaming was deafening. For a moment, the wind did still, giving the grass all around the tiny pile of kindling time to catch, then leap with a roar into thick branches belonging to a winter-killed blackberry vine. They turned to ribbons of fire, carrying flame to the tinder-dry grass all along the edge of the meadow.

Bax fled toward the lake at the far end of the meadow. The War Song made a perfectly hideous sound that pierced Arthur’s brain like a driven nail. The sheer agony in it staggered him. Then the War Song fled toward the thick green grass in the center of the meadow.

Arthur shook off the pain the dreadful yell caused him. He had nothing now. The flames had burned away a lot of his shirt, and when he fled the valley below, he’d brought no weapons with him except a knife. That and his fire-making materials and his sling were lost in the blaze he’d kindled.

But he reached down and snatched up a clod of earth crowned by a swatch of flaming grass and hurled it at the War Song. A slender column of flame propagated along the outer edge of the whirling mass of debris, flying shadows and darkness that formed the center of the War Song. Arthur ran out of the flames toward the lake at the edge of the dark forest.

Then the flames died and the War Song pursued him again. It had no more rocks to suck up into his whirling, screaming substance, but it battered his body with clods of mud, whipping grass stems, shattered small branches, and stinging pebbles. He threw up his arm to protect his eyes and ran back into the fire. It was hotter now, the flames taking the grass roots filling in damp spots that hadn’t caught at first and igniting the wood of the larger saplings that sprinkled the edge of the cliff. He snatched up another clod of earth, this one bigger than the first, and hurled it at his adversary.

Again, it backed. Again he was battered by the scream. His shirt was gone, his leggings smoldering. A stunted birch sapling near him was a tree of flame.

Ignoring the pain it cost him, he snapped the trunk with his hands and, swinging it two-handed like a club, ran toward the War Song. The flaming grass had done its work. A dozen small fires burned on the thing’s surface, delineating the slender shape reaching up toward the stars.

Not enough! Still not enough!

He was so close he could feel the flailing and battering of the terrible winds it used to wreak its destruction on everything before it. He felt the bare skin of his arms and chest being flayed by their power as he slammed the blazing birch into the shadow thing outlined by the fires.

Perhaps the only thing that saved him was it tried to back up. It did, and then it roared up toward the stars in a screaming, almost infinite column of flame. The blast flung Arthur back and he landed with Bax in the shallow lake at the end of the meadow.
Whump!

He staggered to his feet and realized the whole meadow had gone up. The radiant heat of the fire was scorching his face. He lifted an arm to shield his eyes and saw the hairs curl crisp and vanish.

He and the dog struggled into deeper water, toward the dark wood.

Deep,
he thought.
But not deep enough.

No normal grass fire could burn so hot as the plume of the flame that had been the War Song. Even in its death throes the thing was forcing him toward his doom.

He and Bax stood among the cattails near the thick, twisted oaks that formed the fatal forest. The small lake was a mirror of scarlet-yellow, twisting flame. The opposite edge was bubbling.

Bax whined softly. The water was warm. Arthur reached down with one battered hand and touched it. Not warm now. Hot.

The radiant heat was appalling. His face, chest, and arms burned. He and Bax turned, pushed their way through the thick stand of cattails and into the cool shadows of the forest.

There is a moment when desire rises so strongly in your body and that of your lover. And at that moment the only thought in both of your minds is,
Oh, God, where can we hide?

In one leap, Uther reached that moment when her hand touched his. His body shivered with the force of his own need. How long had it been? He found he wasn’t sure. After Igrane, there were only a few dim pictures of aging, lowborn women who were pathetically grateful for a king’s attentions and the rich presents and increase in family status those attentions brought with them. And, indeed, he had been generous with the ladies and their families, if for no other reason than to salve his conscience about his uncaring use of their bodies.

But this girl . . .

Just then, the light faded from her eyes and she looked frightened. Aife returned.

“Yes,” Aife whispered, voicing his unspoken thought. “Where can we hide?”

The dining hall was empty. He drew her toward him.

“Don’t! Don’t!” She spoke very softy. “We will be on the floor. She has come! I see now the first time was only an imitation of what ‘She’ meant for me. ‘She’ sealed my womb for you. But tell me. Will it hurt? I was so afraid when I met the Horned One, afraid of the pain. But the drink wiped out my consciousness. Must I mix another?”

Uther’s mouth was dry; he was only just barely able to speak. “No.” But even as he answered, he found himself certain he was right and wondered how he could be so sure.

The vast hall was silent now. Sunbeams from the glazed windows high along the wall crisscrossed one another, a lattice of sunlight that formed a barrier to the monstrous forms, the knots of serpents, the fanged, clawed, winged, and scaled beings that populated the ceiling and the wall paintings that covered every flat surface in the room.

“This is an evil and unclean place.” As she spoke, he realized she was staring at the snake pit.

“No!” He unslung the harp from his back. “No,” he repeated, opening the case and lifting the instrument from its scarlet brocade nest. “Evil is a shadow, or so say the old ones, and that mad Greek Socrates. Evil is human folly, misunderstanding, misdirected good.”

“I wish I could believe you,” she said.

His fingers found the harp strings. “This is my magic,” he said. “A magic I abandoned for the sword so many years ago. I yielded to duty and forsook lore. But it returned to claim me. Hush and think only of the music.”

His hands caressed the strings. The great hall around them seemed to dissolve, leaving them standing alone in a sunlit meadow ringed by virgin forest.

“It is said,” she spoke, as if in a dream, “that there is a place where lovers alone can go. A bright kingdom formed of air and light where none may intrude on their bliss.”

“Can we ask for more, beloved?” he asked. “Tell me what you hear in the music.”

“The sounds of insects in the grass.” Her eyes closed. “The sun on my face. It glows through my eyelids. The breeze on my skin. It cools and caresses me. The smell of air perfumed by meadow and deep, virgin forest. And from time to time, the sharp, distant tang from the sea. I hear also the forest sounds: a bird trill, the soft, whispered benediction as the trees answer the wind and the silence. When you have lived among others without respite, silence has a sound. A sound you long for, as I have longed for this. We’re really here, aren’t we? Somewhere else.”

He nodded and continued to play.

“Somewhere no one can touch us?”

“Yes.” And the music of the strings drifted into a simple melody, fair and ephemeral as a flower, fraught with the mystery of a beauty that changes forever and never stands still. The melody rose, arcing higher and higher, and finally vanished, glittering in the light.

He set the harp on the ground on top of its flat case.

“Keep watch,” he ordered the instrument as he unwound his mantle and threw it on the ground. Severius had given him a fine one, and it was lined with red velvet. It formed a scarlet splotch in the grass.

“You have seen me naked,” he said. “Now I want to see you.”

She turned, her eyes closed, and stood silent and compliant before him.

Overtunic, like a man’s, off over her head. Blouse, like a woman’s, easy—she hadn’t bothered to lace it to the neck—also off over her head. No shift; she wore no dress. Only the tightly wound
strophium
concealed her upper body, her breasts. It floated away.

Her breasts were virginal, but she was not flat-chested, as she had seemed. He knelt before her, because the boots and leggings had to come off before the trousers and drawers. When he looked up, her body blocked the sun. Her hair was an aureole, a cloud of gold. Her blue eyes were open, and she was gazing down at his face, her hands rested on his shoulders.

When the leggings were gone and the boot laces undone, she stepped out of them. The drawstring that held up her knee britches simply snapped in his hand. A second later, they were down at her ankles. She wore only the loincloth, and it floated away the way the
strophium
had.

He touched her very carefully, touched the red-gold fur at the junction of her thighs, and found it moist.

“Afraid?” he asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “Only wondering if I will feel your seed hot and thick spill against my womb.”

He wasn’t sure where his own clothing went, but when he was naked, he put one arm around her shoulders, the other around her knees, lifted her very slight, light body, and placed it on his spread mantle. Red and gold, her body glowed against the velvet cloth.

“Possess me!” Her eyes were still wide. “If the one-eyed stag in rut failed to do his work well, I would put the pain behind me.”

He took a deep breath, remembering her story about yielding herself to the ancient Horned One. As she said, the one-eyed Lord of the Wild had the tools to open a woman. But was such an experience a dream or reality?

He knelt and spread her legs open with one knee. They parted without resistance. He supported himself on his arms and entered her slowly, ready to withdraw if necessary. But except for a widening of her eyes, she seemed to have no reaction at all to his filling her.

She was warm inside, warm the way the sun is warm or porridge in the morning fills the body with its heat. Warm the way a fur mantle is during the winter. Her arms wrapped around his back, drawing him down on top of her. Her hips rose as she arched her back to pull him into her body as deeply as possible.

“Oh! What a delight,” she breathed.

The queen welcomes you,
he thought, remembering the indifferent queen bee disemboweling and castrating the male to suck into her body every possible drop of his seed. If she did not feel some sadness at her consort’s fate, he knew she would shrug and answer,
What would you have me do? He was born to die in just such a way. Of pleasure, of love.

Her legs were wound around his hips; he could not escape their joining, even if he would. The pleasure seemed to spread from the center of his being, out and out, each wave claiming more and more of his body, until he was caught in a spasm of absolute lust and his seed almost seemed wrenched away to splash hot, silent, moist, against her womb.