The Raven Warrior (54 page)

The horse he was riding became only a horse, not a killing machine, and he recovered from the battle and seemed content to have the man on his back. Uther found he could guide the stallion with his posture and his knees. He was one of the finest horses Uther had even been on, and within a few moments of beginning his cool-off, the wild blowing ceased and the animal got his breath back. The crowd surrounded the corral three-deep, waving their hands through the bars or climbing the crosspieces, trying to touch the man or horse and cheering wildly. Entertainment was only rarely a part of their lives, and what they had seen today was the stuff of legends.

Even the Roman emperors had been afraid of the mob at the arena, and most often had not dared to cross them. Severius and his glittering guests in the viewing stand looked intimidated. Severius was sitting upright on his couch, his arm around Igrane, her hand resting on his thigh. He was white with fury.

When the cheering died down and he could be heard, he bellowed, “Loose the black!!!”

He was answered by wild cheers from the crowd. They tore away from the corral, back toward their positions on the sloping sides and top of the arena. Then Severius turned and spoke in an undertone to one of the Saxon mercenaries near him, a big, powerful man wearing a golden helmet and carrying the long shield of a true cavalryman.

The big mercenary began rounding up his compatriots and positioning them around the viewing stand to protect Severius and his guests. Uther reflected that Severius’s people had no reason to love him, and his latest atrocity—murdering the young man who dared marry without his permission—had not endeared him to them. No, not at all. In fact, it might have been the final straw.

He turned the horse and brought him to the center of the corral. The horse stood quiet, breathing evenly. Even though his coat was still lathered, the perspiration was drying now, and since Uther was riding bareback, he could feel that the temperature of the big body between his legs was cooler. The horse’s breathing had slowed dramatically. He was recovering from the exertions imposed on him by Merlin’s turbulent spirit.

God!
Uther thought at the stallion.
I love you and even if this struggle ends in my death, it has been an honor to bestride so magnificent a creature.

From beyond the arena, Uther heard a wild challenge of another stallion. He backed the horse to the part of the corral facing the entrance to the horseshoe-shaped arena and they stood facing the opening. Uther glanced at the viewing stands from the corner of his eye. The Saxon mercenaries were gathered three-deep around them, but people were slipping away. The mercenaries might prevent anyone from entering, but those leaving were another matter. A lot of them, it seemed, didn’t care for what they were seeing. They had seen one of Severius’s servants murdered by the mob in less time than it took to blink an eye, then another shoved into the corral to be pounded to death by the horse.

There was obviously no love lost between Severius and his people. Some of them probably recognized Uther, and they told the rest. They suspected this day might not go well for all concerned, and they didn’t want to be here when the riot started.

Then his attention was pulled away by the sound of another challenge from the gateway to the arena. The black horse reared against the sky. He was held by two grooms on each side. The ropes were attached to his headstall, but he reared, plunged, and fought his handlers every inch of the way.

Conversely, the gray, with Uther on his back, stood quiet. He only blew through his nostrils, stamped his forefeet, and arched his neck.

Uther knew how such fights went. They would lead the black to the fence and allow the two males to get their blood up. Then, since there was no gate and the crossbars were tied into position with only rawhide, they would drop enough of the crossbars on one side for the challenger to jump the remainder and pen the two stallions together in a fight to the death. This would never happen in nature. There, the loser could retreat or flee.

No, Uther decided. It was not going to happen that way . . . not today. The gray stallion had already fought a battle royal with him. The black was fresh and ferocious.

Uther leaped from the stallion’s back. The corpse of the man who had thrown the rocks at Uther was still lying on its face . . . certainly he had a knife. Uther ran toward him, kicked the shattered corpse over on its back.

Sure enough! A sax crossways through the soldier’s belt, blade bare, as some carried them, held by a stud at the belt line. Uther snatched it away from the corpse and ran toward the fence.

At the sight of the black stallion, the few remaining spectators had fled to better viewing points on the sides of the basin. The soldiers who had been around the corral were guarding Severius. Now he needed protection more than he needed Uther held captive.

A few knife slashes freed three of the cross-poles. Uther ran toward the stallion and gave him a terrific slap on the rump. The stallion galloped across the corral, gaining speed with every bound, leaped the two remaining cross-poles, and thundered toward the black.

The black’s handlers pulled off his headstall and ran for their lives. A second later, the two stallions crashed together, breast to breast. A tremendous shout rose from the crowd and those still remaining in the viewing stands.

The black was no weakling. The gray bore him back on his haunches, but he did not fall. The gray was larger; his flying forehooves pounded the black’s chest and neck. But the black could bite and did, sinking his teeth deep into the gray’s shoulder until blood poured over the gray’s chest and forelegs.

Both animals seemed glad to break and circle each other, tails high-bannered, looking for an opening. The black charged again, neck snaking down, trying for one of the gray’s forelegs. But the gray spun around and lashed out with his heels. The black dodged a skull-crushing kick in the face, but took a thunderous blow to the ribs that staggered him for a second.

Then the two began circling each other again. Again they slammed together, chest to chest, rearing, slamming at each other with their forefeet. The gray lost his balance and went over backward, screaming, mane and tail flying. The black charged in, forehooves slamming down on the gray’s face, neck, and chest.

But the gray was rolling as he landed, and a second later, he was on his feet. He looked dazed and was bleeding from a half dozen wounds inflicted by the black’s hooves on his face and chest. Uther expected him to flee as the black pressed the attack. The gray’s face and chest were sprayed with scarlet and blood was trickling from his nostrils. But he met the black’s lunge and returned blow for blow with his forehooves.

The black backed, and both horses circled again. Both animals were bleeding seriously, big, scarlet drops splattering into the dust at their feet. To Uther’s surprise, he saw that the black, fresh in the beginning, was now breathing harder than the gray. Less stamina, or had the gray’s kick broken a rib? But Uther didn’t know if the gray had another charge in him.

Then both animals backed away and stood stock-still. Aife appeared just outside the opening to the arena. She was leading the mare.

The gray reared, a magnificent sight even with his coat flocked with bloody lather and his mane and tail a wild tangle. He screamed, a cry of both possession and ferocity, and charged again.

The black turned tail and ran, thundering past Aife and the mare at the entrance and away, out across the fields springing green. Aife loosed the mare and Uther did the most dangerous thing he’d ever done in his life. He ran toward the stallion, seized the mane, and vaulted onto his back. He drove in his heels and the stallion, accompanied by the mare, began a circuit of the horseshoe-shaped arena.

Once—the stallion flew around the viewing stands, past the wildly cheering people on the sloping sides of the arena, around the empty drinking hall, over the ruins of the pavilion where Severius and his friends had gathered earlier in the day to feast and drink.

Twice—around the arena. Uther, from the stallion’s back, saw most of the well-wishers Severius had gathered were gone, fled like the losing horse.

A third time and this time he bellowed above the shouts of the crowd, above the thunder of the stallion’s hooves in the dust, “The horse is a king horse, and only a king may ride him! I am a king. Thrice-crowned King Uther of the House of Pendragon! High King of Alba, my native land!”

Then the stallion stopped and the mare presented her tail to him. He mounted her, Uther still mounted on his back. The king had a moment’s fear that his kick might have injured the stallion in an important place. But he felt giant loins beneath him bunch and relax as the stallion penetrated the mare, then bunch and relax again and yet again as his powerful thrusts sank deep into her body.

All around him the arena went insane. Severius’s unhappy tenants charged the drinking hall and the viewing stands. Just before they collapsed, Uther saw the Saxon mercenaries surround Severius and Igrane and rush them away. The mob streamed out of the arena in pursuit.

The mare cried out, then the stallion, and Uther felt the stallion’s spasms of completion shake the beast’s powerful body like a minor earthquake. Then he dropped back and the mare pranced away. A second later, Aife had the mare and was pulling on her headstall. A second after that, she was on her back.

The two horses and the man and woman mounted on them ran from the arena enclosure, turned away from the villa and its surrounding fields and, breaking into a gallop, fled away into the golden afternoon.

                  CHAPTER EIGHT

She was sitting in a grotto filled with maidenhair fern. On one wall of the grotto, across from where she sat, a waterfall flowed down into a rock basin at her feet. The maidenhair ferns were lush drifts of deep green on wiry black stems. No human knew about this place, and she was more happy about that than not. Humans were destructive animals, and she wanted to hear the lost maidenhair sing for as long as they could survive.

The maidenhair, wild splotches of pale green on the black stems, sang of the fern world long before when conifers, cicadas, and flowering plants had not yet appeared and their cool, green, gentle darkness dominated the earth. They sang the balletic minuet of four cooperating stages that, perfectly realized in the dance with rain, gave rise to more gentle green life and they covered the rocky earth.

The ferns sang of a world even before her time, when tree ferns of types unimaginable to modern creatures formed vast forests where they and dozens of varieties of moss fruited and sent their spores into the winds and the whole earth was nourished by their touch. Lichens, those symbiotic algae of a dozen—no, a hundred—kinds splashed every bare rock surface: red, gray, green-gray, orange, ruffled and flat pink, and black, their colors shining in the almost endless warm rain.

She closed her eyes to pick out the colorful threads of the ferns’ music, then opened them to look into her mirror. She widened her eyes, making them larger. No. Might work in a painting, but not with real eyes. They took up too much of her face.

She studied the fingernails on her right hand. She wished them longer, and they grew. Stained with henna, they became talons a bird of prey might envy. She sighed. No, they would probably frighten him and, if not, he would laugh. She changed the colors to blue, then black. Corpselike. She studied the mirror and made her lips blue. God! No! She looked dead, a drowning victim.

Still, it might give him a perverse pleasure to couple with a corpse. She could lie very still. No, that was not her idea of fun. Nor his either, she suspected.

“Shit!” She put the mirror in her lap and spoke to the ferns. “I’m bored. I just hope he’s becoming the warrior he wants to be.”

She studied the mirror, its back gold, gracefully curved in a classic, very utilitarian design, an oval rimmed with leaves rather like a wreath, overlapping one another. The leaf pattern was so subtle they seemed less leaves than the suggestion of leaves. The face was highly polished silver. It had no handle, but was held between the thumb and second finger.

Where had she gotten it? She tried to remember. At a town. It considered itself a city, but it would be a small town to any city worthy of the name now. Near the Dardanelles. What was the name? Ah, yes, Troy.

She haunted a pool, an oracular pool at a temple near the house occupied by the chief priest of the city. The priest’s house looked down across a low wall, on a beach where the traders pulled their shallow-draft vessels up on the sand and haggled with the chief’s men and rulers of the city. They needed to come here, those traders. There was no other place along the coast where they could stop and take on food and water for the long journey across the blue Aegean to reach the cites and towns that were rising everywhere near rivers and springs. Growing wheat, not gathering it, and heady with their new riches, pastures filled with sheep, flocks of goats, and even the dangerous aroches, tamed wild cattle.

These people felt the wealth of the world; amber, gold, and loose nuggets of raw silver belonged to them, and they possessed the wealth in butter, new-made cheese, and, strangest and most visionary of all, beverages, wine—enough to buy what they wanted. The traders who provisioned themselves below the walls of Troy were ready and willing to sell them all they could gather on their voyages.

She closed her eyes and saw it as it had been then: the white, close-set houses spilling down the sandy slopes; the wall, whitewashed also. The traders and townspeople haggling on the beach. The priestesses stood on the walls, not bold enough to go among the traders. There were stories of girls carried off by merchantmen and never seen again. But the priestesses would cluster on the wall, and some of them would catch the eyes of bearded, dark, curly-haired men, and those men would make their way into the city by night to the temple.

The goddess stood as the lady, for she had no other name even then except The Lady. She stood at the end of a long—it seemed long—pillared hall. The image was of wood; her flounced skirts were decorated with ivory and she wore a mantle of Egyptian linen. She held a snake in one hand and a distaff in the other. All along the walls were cubicles where the priestesses waited. An offering was made at the high altar, then a priestess directed the man to one of the cubicles. In each, a girl lay. The bed was alder wood with a leather strap webbing and only a single linen sheet between the waiting girl and the night’s cold. Whoever, whatever the man might be, the girl embraced him, opening her arms and legs.

She knew these humans were accomplishing remarkable things, but when the girls came to make offerings to the pool beyond “Her” statue, their eyes were always so sad. But the high priest grew rich and the city grew rich, and even some of the girls were able to earn a dowry and marry. Not the one who devoted the mirror, though. It had belonged to a female lover, one of the other priestesses.

Disease didn’t spare these women; they, most of them, died young, as this priestess’s companion had. The girl was somber when she brought the mirror and a pair of filigree earrings to the pool. The earrings drifted away into darkness; the girl’s eyes had widened in surprise when a hand reached out of the shadowed depths and grasped the mirror.

But it didn’t do to let these humans know too much. They were so sad.

She looked into the mirror at her face again. It hadn’t changed, but then, she didn’t expect it to. Sentient beings were not her call, and the ones who would have understood, nurtured, and protected them were long gone. The last of them died when the world cracked. She had been only a child when the horrific destruction had been visited on the planet.

As she told Lancelot, her kind were tough, but not immortal, and many had died, swept away in the devastation. Others, seeing the beauty they had devoted their lives to preserving melting away in the crucible of heaven, had given up, yielded their lives to the chaos around them, and were destroyed.

The survivors fought back. Child or not, she had, joining the dragons and the few remaining Fauns in a battle to salvage what could be rescued from the ancient order now forever disrupted and lost. But then, who knows?

She closed her eyes and listened to the fern song. She ached to walk through those lost, silent forests that burgeoned when green growing things escaped the first seas and slowly began their spread across the barren continents. They filled the seacoast, then spread rapidly along the river systems. Tall thickets of horsetails, spreading water fern, growing on the surface of every pond and river. Vining creatures not fern nor water plant could cover rocks or grow across mud flats or sometimes rear up high as trees. Fern trees; how many kinds had there been? Some with long fronds that drooped like willows; others with tall trunks and fronds curled like fists. These rose on long, whiplike stems and managed to tower over the rest so high they were able to capture the sun on the darkest day, and when dry times came, recover the moisture of low-lying clouds.

These were forests of silence. There were no insects. The slow creatures of the seas, rivers, and pools had not yet learned to escape the water dominion, and birds were yet far in the future. The only sounds were wind strumming the forests as though they were some primordial musical instruments and water gurgling, rushing, drumming as rain, splattering and at last whispering on its way to the eternal sea.

Fern dreams. She had come to them during the centuries of struggle when she and her kind fought to keep life strong, complex, and resilient on this world, circling its tiny sun. She and her kind had won, and the fruits of her victory resonated in her blood and bone to this day. Yet when they had won and reached back, looking for the ancient knowledge that had created them . . . they found it was gone. All that was left to do was hope that when intelligent life emerged again from among their charges, it would begin again, the adventure of thought and knowledge that had brought them into being at the beginning.

She wondered what Cregan would teach him, and was afraid her boy of water and light might find out from the embittered old warrior the folly and senselessness of it all. And that was too bad, if he did, because she herself, regardless of the immense amount of time she had lived, hadn’t found life meaningless ever. In many ways, simply living was its own reason for existence. Each day brought some new surprise, some new beauty to be appreciated, some new piece of knowledge to be assimilated. Sometimes a new friend, as it had been the day he appeared at her lake; whatever happened, a red-letter day in her calendar forever.

She smiled into the mirror. Yes, her face was fine this way.

“I’m brooding,” she told the ferns.

“We noticed,” was the answer.

“We” was the proper term. They were all one organism and, like the water lily, were self-aware.

“I don’t usually brood, and I can’t think why I am now.”

A hummingbird, green and gold, a living jewel, dropped down into the grotto.

“There are no flowers here,” the ferns whispered to him.

“Water,” was the bird’s reply. He flew in and out of the spray from the waterfall, then perched on a fern frond and rested. Hummingbirds do this more frequently than most humans realize. Their way of life is very strenuous.

“Love?” she asked the ferns.

“We think not,” was the reply. “You have been in love often and never has it affected you this way. ‘Perturbation.’ ”

“Perturbation?” she repeated.

“That’s all we know, but we feel it everywhere, and it is centered around your lover, born of water and light.”

“The sorcerer! The old sorcerer at the lake?” She gasped. “I had forgotten, ladies. All I could think of was him, my need to capture him and begin a new affair of the heart. Besides, I despise these scavengers, each hell-bent on outdoing the other and grabbing hold of fragments of a past they don’t even try to comprehend. Seeking only for the power they gain from controlling things that are shards of a transcendent whole, now lost. Lost forever.”

She became a swift cloud of mist, then rain, cascading into the basin at the foot of the falls. She barely heard the maidenhair fern’s soft, “My sister, good-bye.”

Lancelot slept through the day, or most of it. When he woke, he found the ravens covered the ground around him. In the afternoon, the clouds had moved in and now the sunset was a wash of vivid scarlet across gray cushions stretching out as far as the eye could see.

Night,
he thought.

The Hun’s body was nailed to the fence. His head was gone.

Lancelot stood. His mantle was hanging over a tree limb and the helmet and sword were hanging from a branch nearby. The ravens on the ground stared at him with red, unblinking eyes. Nothing of what he had seen in the morning was visible now when he looked down, only red-dappled clouds as far as the eye could see. Between the rolling fog and the overcast above and the covered stars above, he seemed caught between heaven and earth, isolated and alone.

The helm became a bird, took wing and perched on the top rail beside the Hun’s headless body. Lancelot studied the bird. Something itched when he reached up and touched his face. He felt the dried blood on his cheeks and then when he ran his fingers through his hair, he found crusted blood there, too. The wolf nose smelled it.

“What would you do, O Lord of the Water and Light?” the bird asked.

The red orb of the sun was caught in the clouds and his eyes could look directly into it.

“Prepare myself for the responsibilities of battle,” he said. “What have you to offer me?”

“Ourselves. Our souls,” the bird answered. “Long ago, to achieve victory over our enemies, we yielded up our souls to eternal savagery and damnation in order to obtain victory. We achieved it. Our enemies were wiped out. But to destroy them, we doomed ourselves. So we haunted the valleys where you traveled and we had no peace. But you killed me, and now I am iron and carbon, and when I leave you, I shall sleep. So will my brother, who is your sword. The rest here ask the same gift of you.”

“Carbon and iron are steel,” Lancelot said. “Or so my father, Maeniel, tells me.”

“And in the end, an inert thing that halts all enchantment, even one so wicked as ours,” the bird said.

The ravens studied him with their unblinking eyes. They were silent, crowded on the ground, the trees, the bushes, and even on the fence between the withering trophies of Cregan and his men. From where he stood, Lancelot could look down the fence and count fifteen corpses, all in various stages of decay. Then the fence, the trophy fence, disappeared into the dead forest.

“It won’t work. Even if I had the strength to kill each one of you, you would still be trapped by the cold iron,” he said.