The Raven Warrior (47 page)

I shivered and glanced at her face, marred by the terrible purple birthmark that spread over one cheek, mouth, and chin. She simply stood silently and tears began pouring down her face.

“It’s a trick,” she whispered at length, and stared at Ure. “You can’t do this. No one can.”

“Drain the cup and see,” he answered. “The choice is yours and yours alone. But remember, if you refuse what the cup offers you, the magic that hangs about this place offers no second opportunity. Decide.”

Still weeping, she drained the cup. The terrible mark vanished from her face, and I realized how beautiful a girl nature had intended her to be. She was springtime, born of the last winter rains, clad in rags, walking barefoot through cold, dew-drenched grass to greet the dawn. Her shabby clothes (we were all a bit battered and worn) covered a body like a young virgin goddess. Her face was the living embodiment of sculpted perfection and her hair a riot of sunlit curls.

I felt as though someone had fisted me in the stomach, but Wic walked into Ure’s embrace and Albe ended up holding the cup. I didn’t see it leave Wic’s hands, but Albe had it and she also walked to the spring and filled the vessel. She seemed to stand for an eternity gazing into the water. She shielded the surface from mine or any prying eyes, and I have never known what she saw. After a time, she looked out at the vast, silent pine forest waiting in the breathless hush before first light.

But then at length, she said, “No! No! Old man, some roads run only one way. Sometimes you can’t go back, even though the deepest desires of your heart would try to drag you.”

But she didn’t throw out the water. Instead, she gently poured it back into the stream flowing over the boulder that led down to the river.

“Perhaps I will return,” she said.

“Perhaps I will allow you to return,” Ure said.

Then the cup was in my hand. “Her” face was painted red on the black of the inner bowl. She held her distaff in one hand, serpent in the other. The owl looked out from behind her, its wings spread. A shaft of white light blotted out my vision and I woke with the sun in my eyes.

I found when I woke that I could feel the city around me. Perhaps when I spoke to the tree last night, I had established a connection that hadn’t been completely broken. By day it was a hive of activity. Penned up at night, its citizens made up for their solitude by day. Day was in and of itself preparation for night. Marketing was done and dinner parties planned, food bought, much socializing went on. Gossip was exchanged about the ruling families’ constantly shifting alliances: who was married, who murdered (a much more frequent occurrence), what new things had been brought in by the Women of Wager and when would this new clothing, drug, drink, furniture, weapon, food, or sometimes slave be put on sale by the fortunate woman’s family. Quarrels were picked among men, duels were fought, assassinations planned by enemies, assignations were arranged by lovers—licit and illicit lovers. I was not sure of the difference, but cuckoldry and seduction were a sport to these people and there were lots of both kinds.

They worshiped also, praying and sometimes sacrificing to gods, dark and bright. I shivered at the touch of the tree’s mind when it communicated the substance of some worship. Some of the objects of adoration reminded me of those beings huddled in the swamp to whose untender mercies the Saxons had devoted their captives. The tree was calmly indifferent to the vagaries of human nature. It was itself an eternal or nearly eternal thing, knowing humans as only savage, quarrelsome birds and small animals that took advantage of the shelter it offered and nested in its branches.

At best they were a source of nutrients and occasional entertainment; at worst, destructive pests whose more dangerous impulses had to be circumvented. Just how we were controlled wasn’t clear to me, but there was a sense of vast power that lay just out of my reach. The tree might not exert its strength more than once in a thousand years, but when it did, I was very certain it was able to find a satisfactory solution to its problems. Satisfactory to the tree, that is. As far as the offending humans were concerned, I was not so sure.

“Awake, my lady?” Albe asked.

“Yes.”

We had been a long time at arms practice last night. Ilona knew a great many tricks that I, and I’m sure, my teacher, Maeniel, never heard of. They ranged from hand-to-hand combat tactics to maneuvers with sword, shield, or spear.

I was good—my armor helps a lot. It’s a surprise to opponents when it covers my skin. But Albe was best. She learned, and quickly, everything Ilona had to teach, and she needed no second chances. Ilona might put her down the first time she demonstrated one of her special holds, but never the second.

And when a completely unarmed Albe took her sword and “killed” her with a neck-breaking hold, Ilona owned Albe the best student she ever taught and told her that she could choose the man she wished to wed. Whoever that man was, Albe would probably gift him with the chance to become the total ruler of the city.

Albe smiled at that, and I saw in her eyes the same bleak sadness I had seen when she spoke about how she had scarred her face to prevent the pirate who captured her from selling her at a fat profit.

The sadness came—went—and her face showed the cold indifference of a killer.

My friend,
I thought,
you do not care and the death of your enemies is only a way to keep score in the game that is all that is left of your life and your love.

But now she was sitting up beside me, eating some soft, yellow fruit the like of which I had never seen before and smacking her lips at its sweetness.

“I’ve been up for a time,” she said between juicy bites. “But you were up so late, I thought I’d best let you sleep. Ilona and I put out the roots for the food seller. He left these for us to try. They are a novelty, newly found by a dreaming woman belonging to Meth’s tribe and family. Here. Have a taste. Spit out the peel. It’s tough.”

I did. “Nice!” I said. “Sort of like a custard. Very sweet.”

Albe was busy chewing. She nodded and indicated a bowl with more of the yellow fruit and other more conventional items, like grapes, apples, strawberries, and plums. I selected a bunch of grapes. They were red-brown and so plump they squirted juice into my mouth when I bit down.

Cateyrin brought us some bread, cold meat, and curd cheese.

“The longer I’m here, “Albe said, “the more I like this strange city. They have all manner of odd but new, pleasant things to enjoy.”

She cut a slice of meat with her knife. It was dense gray-brown and looked as though it might have been larded before it was cooked. I tried some. It tasted like slow-roasted, fire-cooked beef rubbed with spices and garlic.

“See? Have you ever tasted anything like that?” Albe asked.

“Yes, but only in the few chiefly houses I’ve visited.”

“We’ve nothing like it. Not on our islands. Whale, seal, fish, shellfish, and the occasional stringy old sheep and goat are all we get.”

“It’s beef,” I said.

“Ha!” Albe replied. Her mouth was full. She was pairing the beef with bread and fruit and eating it. “Cows are too valuable to eat. We get milk and cheese from them.”

“I don’t imagine they eat them often here, either. Likely this is guest food.”

“Yes. We must earn our keep,” Albe said. “Generosity requires generosity.”

When we were finished, we went to wash. I found myself speaking again to the tree while standing under a sun-warmed waterfall on rocks covered by soft moss. A mass of roots filled the room, growing all along the walls and down into deep pools in a tortuous passage that led away into the distance.

“Does this belong to your house?” I asked Cateyrin.

“No.” Cateyrin looked around in an uneasy manner. “This passage extends the length of the city, from the top of the mountain until it drains into the vast caverns at the bottom of the valley. Many come here to bathe and relieve themselves. The water carries all pollutants away and the tree cleans the water when it runs through mats of roots growing all along the river bottom. But it is a place of truce and anyone who misbehaves here is punished by death. We . . . we don’t . . . know how the tree does it, but they always die.”

I heard shouts and laughter from downstream. The voices were male and Cateyrin jumped out of the water and ran into the thick growth of cattails and water plants that bordered the stream.

“If they always die, why are you afraid?” Albe asked.

Cateyrin turned and blushed pink all over her creamy skin.

“I’m not afraid, but shy. The men and boys come here to look for pretty girls, and while they might honor the river here, that wouldn’t stop them from waylaying me elsewhere. This is where I met Meth and . . . I don’t want to form another connection so . . . soon. Besides, the game is to see them first and decide which ones you want to let catch sight of you. I like to know what I’m getting into.”

Albe laughed. “Or what’s getting into you!”

Cateyrin giggled, blushed furiously, and vanished into the tangled undergrowth.

I held up my arms, closed my eyes, and let the water flow over my face. One of the dragonfly’s eyes shone down on me, concentrating the light. I didn’t hear the voices any longer, only the sound of rushing water and snatches of a distant, wordless song that I knew originated with the tree.

I pondered my next more, not knowing that my path had already been chosen for me by forces I could neither understand nor control. I thought about “Her,” seeing Her face in Ure’s cup, and found I couldn’t remember anything after that moment. I had come to myself when Albe and I fled Ure’s strange steading. He had tampered with my mind after I spoke with the Faun’s head, but I couldn’t remember how or why.

Maybe he had tried to kill me. But I was sworn to Her service and just possibly he hadn’t been able to accomplish my death. “She” was a powerful protectress.

Or just possibly She had not wanted him to make a trial of my courage. After all, She had already done that.

But I could remember nothing more. No, that was wrong. There had been a flicker of memory in the last few seconds before Albe and I took the footpath down the mountain. I looked back. Looking back in some instances is a very bad idea. They say the great warrior heard some sound, looked back, and saw the dread hag washing his bloody winding sheet at the ford. And when you leave a loved one, you should not look back lest you see the mark of death—a bloody smear on their forehead.

I had looked back and seen that Wic, who believed herself healed, remained as disfigured as she ever had been, the purple birthmark swelling on her cheek and half covering her mouth, and I wondered if the powers Ure ruled were real or simply illusion.

Yes, but who can say if the illusion of great beauty is not as powerful as the reality.

Then Cateyrin came running back, shouting, “Guinevere!!! Albe! The Fand! The Fand has come! Help!”

I called my armor and didn’t bother to stop and dress. I did grab my sword when I reached the riverbank. The armor is in and of itself a form of clothing. It presents a hard, metallic surface at my breast tips and the junction of my thighs, and the rest of my body is covered by a woven filigree of twining, coiling motifs, beautiful in their own ways, as are the illuminations of the magnificent mass books the Irish make and dramatic as the carvings on the great, monastic crosses of the church. For we knew the cross of old before the Romans debased it into an instrument of torture, and it symbolized the earth’s four directions and the divine center.

Let my flesh be bare to the earth and sky, and call the powers,
I thought as I ran through the central room of the house toward the portcullis where Ilona stood alone, defying the Fand.

The Fand was just as beautiful as she had been last night, and she wasn’t wearing much more: a gold, mesh dress dripping with what looked like diamonds. It draped her slender body, emphasizing her curvaceous form and concealing just enough to create a more intriguing invitation to seduction. She was accompanied by a glassy-eyed Meth and four of the massively powerful men Cateyrin called Fir Blog. These were dark with black eyes and a thick growth of downy, almost silken-looking, brown hair on their arms and thighs.

Humans don’t have much of a hair pattern, not like a deer, a fox, or a wolf has, but these men did. The hair was thick on the outside of their arms and less thin, almost absent, on the inner aspect of their arms, legs, and chests. I couldn’t see more than that, because they wore simple green tunics woven all of one piece with holes for the head and arms.

They wore chains around their necks, as did Meth, chains that seemed welded together, not clasped and much too small to be pulled off over their heads.

“Oh, Meth!” Cateyrin cried, and tried to push her arms through the grating to touch him.

I saw the Fand’s eyes narrow slightly. That was all the warning we got. But Albe was fast, and she jerked Cateyrin back just in time to keep a three-foot gold scythe from cutting both her arms off. There was no hiding place in the corridor, and I felt a long, slow chill, because I could not see any possible way the Fand could have wielded it.

“Get back!” Albe ordered in so commanding a voice that everyone, including myself, retreated.

The Fand simply looked disappointed.

Tuau challenged her with a savage cat wail that lifted the hair on the back of my neck. The Fand glanced at him once, then dismissed him.

“Open the gate,” she commanded. “I want the rest of the mariglobes and these two women.” She pointed at Albe and me.

“No!” Ilona said. Then she did an odd thing: she lifted a veil and gazed at the Fand through the meshes. “I cast the omens last night. You will not enter here, Creature of Darkness. That much I saw.”

The Fand did not look impressed. “You will do as I command. They all do . . . in the end. But I will give you one more chance.”

She stretched out one hand—her nails were an inch and a half long—and gently caressed Meth’s cheek. “Do you like this creature?”

Cateyrin started forward again. Albe and Ilona yanked her back. The edges of the Fand’s nails glittered and threw back the light. Then she used the nail on her forefinger to cut an opening into the big vein on the side of his neck. The dark scarlet of blood was a shock against his pale throat. He didn’t react or appear to know he’d been injured. One of the Fir Blog stepped forward with a cup and placed it where the stream of blood flowed into it.