The Raven Warrior (39 page)

But she was not the queen bee his instincts warned him about, and he found himself pleasantly relaxed, resting on her firm, young body when at last the fire faded to a scattering of coals. He eased off her breasts and cradling thighs and lay quiet beside her.

High above, clouds drifted past the sun, and the warm, golden light came and went. She cuddled against him and slept for a time. He knew he must have dozed also, because when he opened his eyes again, the shadow of the sentinel harp was longer, stretching far enough to touch their still-intertwined legs.

He sat up and ran his hand through his still-thick, graying hair and scratched the stubble on his cheek.
I must shave,
he thought idly,
or I will soon have a beard again.

He glanced down at her and saw her eyes were open. They both rose and dressed, then walked hand in hand to the edge of the meadow, to the forest. When they reached it, Uther saw that the trees were very old and scattered in groves over an open parkland. They were all oaks, and rich producers of acorns. The ground under the trees cracked with each footstep. It was bright under the long, low-spreading oak branches, and there should have been more brush and undergrowth beneath the trees. But then he saw in the low damp places the multiple cloven tracks of deer and elk and knew they must find a rich grazing ground here.

Beyond this grove, he looked into another meadow and another grove, and beyond that, at the long, smooth-sloping fall of a riverbank. His eye caught the glint of sun on water.

His blood remembered places like this kindly—his blood, his soul remembered their richness, their beauty. In the spring the river was filled with salmon; through the summer, other kinds of fish. The winter acorn/hazelnut crop was dried, and the acorns leached of their bitterness by flowing water were sufficient to make bread and porridge. In the autumn the boar fattened on acorns, feasted the people. Come winter, deer and elk and, to a lesser extent, her wild cattle, the aroches, were a year-round meat resource to be taken when needed.

“Look!” She pointed to the left, and he saw the barrow.

It was on high ground, near the river, and it looked out over the flowing freshets of living green land toward the more savage and ancient salt sea beyond. But the stars that rose over the river and the sea were the same.

The mouth of the barrow was pointed away from them, and they couldn’t see if any of the dead lay at the entrance waiting for the dark of the moon, waiting for the wheeling stars to claim them.

“Time—outside of time,” he said softly. “Does this still go on?”

They were standing hand in hand, gazing out over the golden countryside, breathing air so pure it seemed permeated by the light that sparkled from the flaxen grass, the shimmering tree leaves, and the glittering river, both of them filled brimming with absolute peace. He heard the whisper, the sound of scales sliding in the dry grass stems, and smelled the noxious reptile reek.

He spun around and saw it was already between him and the harp.

Aife turned when he did. She gasped and screamed. It was the biggest snake he’d ever seen and it was flowing in a diagonal, across the clearing to crowd him away from the musical instrument resting on its case near the mantle he had thrown down when they made love.

Very deliberately, he pushed Aife away and moved back, so as to direct the snake’s head toward him and allow her to flee toward the harp.

“No!” she gasped, and stretched out her hand toward him.

“No!” he answered. “No! There is a child!”

She looked down and touched her belly. By now the dreadful thing was between them. The stink was overpowering.

Thirty feet,
Uther thought,
if it’s an inch. And it’s dead. God! It’s dead!

It was dead, a golem of a serpent, skin stretched over the long, curving spin with its bone arches, the same skin covering an empty-eyed skull with what looked like hundreds of long, sharp, recurved teeth.

“Take the harp.” He motioned her toward the instrument. “It will protect you.”

Indeed, the sense of cold and dark was closing around him, but the graceful instrument stood in the now seemingly distant afternoon sun. She ran toward the instrument.

Then the meadow was gone, dissolving into a silver wave that darkened as it arced over him, white foam at the top, green glass slowly melting into a shiny obsidian black at the bottom. He threw his arm up against the sledgehammer blow of the breaking sea, but it slammed him down—not into choking black water, but against unyielding stone. The force of the blow drove the breath from his body and his vision shattered into shards of light.

He heard someone laughing and knew the voice: Igrane!

When his vision cleared, he found the meadow was gone and he lay on a stone floor, looking up at the wrath of a boiling sea as it pounded a crystal dome above his head. To one side of him, he saw light. It emanated from a source on the floor near him.

Igrane laughed again. He looked up at her. She stood three shallow steps above him. She was wrapped in a red velvet robe lined with silk. He could see the lining at the neck and sleeves, black against the bloodred.

He sat up, glad the serpent thing was gone. He was thinking,
Why? Why doesn’t she just kill me?

Above, the waves sucked and pounded at the transparent roof, and a swirl of green seawater would darken the glass and the room beneath. Then the stormy tide would ebb, and the sun would shine down into the domed chamber.

“He is a prime source of power,” someone said, “could you but wring it out of his body.”

“And then I would be Merlin,” Igrane said.

“Yes,” was the answer.

It took Uther a moment to make out the speaker, black-robed as she was in the darkness of the vast hall. The first thing he saw was the twin sparks that formed her eyes. Then he found he could make out the face with the papery, mummified skin stretched tightly over the bones and the permanent, lipless grin of the teeth below.

“My lord husband,” Igrane said mockingly. “Meet my friend, Ustane. It was her little pet who trapped you.”

“He can see me,” Ustane said. “I’m surprised.”

“Yes, I see you only too well,” he said. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”

“To all intents and purposes,” Ustane answered.

Igrane stamped her foot, a look of pique on her face. “Enough of this jabbering. The less he knows, the better. I’m not looking forward to this either. Summon your servants, Ustane.”

The corpse in her black robe made neither sound nor gesture, but two figures appeared, one on either side of her. He could see enough of their faces to know they were as dead as she was.

“My lord,” Ustane said. “Please remove your clothing.”

“Yes, get naked, darling,” Igrane said.

The king rolled over, then got to his feet. From a standing position, he could see the light source much better: an X, or rather two crossed lines glowing and flush with the floor. A Saint Andrew’s cross.

The king knew the Romans sometimes crucified their victims that way as opposed to placing them on the upright Christian cross, as they had Christ. He’d heard once that there was some argument among the
carnifices
(professional slave drivers and executioners) about the two methods, the X as opposed to a simple crossbeam. Many of them felt that the X method allowed the victim to linger and suffer far longer than those suspended from a simple crossbeam, who usually perished from suffocation in a matter of hours. Whereas those on the X-shaped cross were pinned to the wood and must wait for hunger and thirst or extreme heat and cold to do their deadly work. Usually that took days, allowing for long survival periods, especially if the weather was good. A few hardy souls might last for a week or more.

The king suddenly found himself physically ill. He felt dizzy; his vision blurred as he fully grasped the implications of his predicament.

“If you please, my lord!” Ustane repeated. “Undress, or my servants will strip you. And I promise, they won’t be gentle.”

He glanced up at Ustane’s servants and saw they seemed to be more sinewy and more greasy than Ustane was.

“They are capable of manhandling you, never doubt it, my lord,” Ustane warned him. “They are constructed for strength. After I died, I was boiled and dried. But the sinew, muscle, and fat were stripped from their bones. Then the long, white fibers that make living things able to move were replaced, then packed in boiled muscle and corpse tallow before the skin was sewn back over their bones. They feel no pain, and are a wonder where strength is concerned.”

“I’m sure they are,” Uther agreed politely. He began to undress.

When he was finished, the two came down the steps and placed him on what he considered the Saint Andrew’s cross. He adhered the same way Igrane had. He found he couldn’t move. He closed his eyes and understood that he lay on the vortex of immense powers.

But what they were and how they were structured, he couldn’t possibly imagine. He felt as he had when he first encountered a giant storm at sea.

He had been going to France to bring back his brother’s bones and was on the channel when the blow began. The Veneti captain had no chance even to get the sail down; the wind carried it away moments after the storm began.

The Veneti lashed themselves to the ship. Because he was a prince, the captain tied him to the mast. The last thing the man screamed in his ear was, “There is nothing else to do but hang on and pray!” He’d screamed the words over the shrieking of the wind.

The captain hadn’t been fast enough about tying himself down, because the next breaking sea, a monster high as a mountain, dragged him fighting and clawing overboard into an ocean boiling with the fully unleashed fury of the wind.

Uther opened his eyes and saw Igrane standing at his feet. She was still wearing the robe. As he watched, she let it—or commanded it to—fall open, and her nude body glowed against the black silk.

“You see, my darling,” she purred. “All you need do is make love to me. It’s very easy. No chore at all. Consider how easily you pleasured that little sweetmeat sister of Lord Severius.”

She shrugged, and the robe dropped to the floor.

Lord! Lord! Yes! She was beautiful, more beautiful than when he had first possessed her on their wedding night. She had never met the standard of pale, blond beauty that seemed to be most admired by the present generation. She was tall, long-waisted, with a mass of straight, blue-black hair that hung down to her waist, a perfumed, silken curtain. Her long legs made other women’s look short and stubby. The beautifully formed breasts and buttocks came as a surprise on her slender frame.

She smiled languorously at him, seductively, as though she were the one at his mercy, not he at hers. Her sex was shaved clean, a pale, plump mound between her thighs. She reached down and parted those ivory labia, exhibiting the scarlet, moist paradise within.

“I’m ready. My juices are a fountain. See how ready I am?”

She began to walk up between his spread legs. His body was responding; he felt it draw energy from the floor where he lay. Again he thought of the queen bee’s marriage. Did the drone—soft, relaxed, lazy but always quiveringly ready to accommodate the (to him) immortal queen—did he know that his first union would be his last? Did he guess his pleasure would end in agony as he was castrated and disemboweled?

But perhaps it didn’t matter. The urge was so massive, so powerful, so intense, it couldn’t and wouldn’t be denied—by the insect, by the man.

His buttocks were tightened, and he knew he was getting the erection of a lifetime. He closed his eyes. He was throbbing with desire now. Even with his eyes closed he could see the light emanating from the X-shaped cross. It shone through the thin skin of his eyelids and came up and went in time to the beating of his heart.

The touch of her hand on his thigh electrified him, and he realized she must be on her knees between his thighs. His eyes opened, and he found he was looking up, watching the waves breaking over the dome above. The effect was almost hypnotic. The water swirled deep green, frothed out at the edges, then withdrew, draining away and letting in the light.

He knew with a cold certainty that he would die here. But he didn’t want to die handing Igrane something she obviously thought would gratify her intensely.

Both of her hands rested on his upper thighs now, and he knew in a few seconds she would slide his penis into her body. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling, knowing that if he looked at Igrane’s impossibly beautiful body, whatever will he had left would be dissolved and he would yield to the burning need that seemed to control his body.

The dome above was a mosaic of triangles. In his youth, he’d studied the mathematical philosophies, and he saw, as he heard in music, the subtle workings of a mathematical order that could not be expressed in words, in the form of arching structure that seemed almost dynamically to leap over him, heading out to sea.

As he watched, it splintered into a thousand triangular windows, each with its own individual view of the green, lacy water sweeping over the top. And it was borne upon him that, though the picture in each triangle was the same, the view was slightly different in each, as though he gazed at one picture through thousands of different eyes and no two of those thousand eyes saw quite the same thing.

Then, as it had been for Igrane, the dome became a myriad of mirrors, each showing him her unearthly beauty as she knelt straddling his hips. Her fingers closed around his erect member, and she guided it toward the scarlet oval between her pale, nude labia.

He understood the trap was closing now. His eyes closed again, and the darkness behind his lids reminded him of the tomb. His eyes opened one last time in the tomb, and he studied the harp case in the light of the lamp. One lamp they left burning until the oil was exhausted and the spirit of the dead man departed, setting out over the sea of eternity to other shores. They hoped.

But did it? Or was this last, lonely essence that huddled beside the withered mortal flesh that had been its dwelling all that remained of what had been a complex individual human being, who, self-aware, thought, loved, hated, and with his fingers on the harp strings, cheated the magic of musical sound? Was this why they left the lamp, so that this scrap of soul could know his closest companions, the love of his life, accompanied him into eternal silence and darkness?