The Raven Warrior (6 page)

“This feels wonderful,” he whispered. “Wonderful. I don’t think I ever felt anything this good before . . . ever. It is all right to move?”

“Oh, yes. Move all you want. Take your time. We have all night.”

Then they stopped thinking and talking, because both seemed irrelevant to what their bodies were doing for each other, and sank together into bliss.

Later—some time later—she managed to talk him into a midnight swim. She was pleased to find out he was a good swimmer and enjoyed the water.

“My father taught me,” he told her.

“You father? He like you?” she asked.

“Wolf and back? Yes,” Black Leg said. “Maeniel.”

“I know him!” she said.

“He never mentioned you,” Black Leg said.

“No, I don’t mean know him personally,” she said. “But by reputation. He’s got a good reputation. Last I heard, he was shacking with a she-wolf up by the Roman wall.”

“Shacking!” Black Leg said.

“Handfast, jumped over the broom with, keeping company, in tight with. No criticism implied, a secular marriage. Damn few of us go ask the priest to bless us, though it has happened.”

“Won’t a blessing mess you up?” Black Leg asked.

“Shit, no! Doesn’t bother us. Probably would seem unnecessary to a she-wolf, though. But like as not, it wouldn’t bother her either. She might think it a nice touch. Maybe.”

A cloud drifted over the moon and a few drops of rain sprinkled the water. In the sudden darkness, Black Leg heard someone singing a faint but ravishing music that seemed carried on the breeze from some far-off place.

“What?” Black Leg asked.

“She’s . . . she’s singing. Just enjoy it.”

He did, resting on his back, floating in the lake until the song seemed to dwindle away into the vast silence of night and the stars.

“Who?” he asked.

“The blue water lily,” she said. “This is the night of her nights. She spends all year preparing for this—these—nights when her flower glows receptive under the moon. Last year it rained like a son of a bitch, flat poured for five days straight nonstop. She didn’t get anything done, but likely in the next few nights her favorite moth will find its way out over the lake and . . . she will be able to carry on her line.”

Black Leg was slightly shocked. “I didn’t think flowers . . .”

“What the hell did you think flowers are for, you bonehead?”

“Oh . . .”

“She’s dreaming about love, and while she dreams, she sings. And when she sings, I listen. Not too many like her left. She came from another world, one before this one. Being one of a last few is a tremendous responsibility, and she takes it seriously. But they just aren’t well adapted to this place. Believe me, it’s a lot more rough-and-tumble than it used to be. God! What is that awful noise?”

“I’m sorry,” Black Leg said. “It’s my stomach growling. I’m hungry.”

“Cripe, why didn’t you say so? Come on.” She rolled over and dove.

He didn’t follow, and a few minutes later, she surfaced again.

“What’s the matter with you?” She studied his face for a second, then said, “Oh, no! Oh, shit! Are you going to start that stupid stuff about me drowning people again?”

“Well . . .” he said.

“Listen, nitwit. Why do you think you’re floating so nice?”

“I . . .” Black Leg began, then realized he had been floating very easily. The lake held him up rather the way a soft bed might have. “I . . . don’t . . .”

“Yeah, you sure don’t,” she said. “Think at all. The water’s holding you because I’m asking it to. That’s what I meant about those stupid mopes drowning when I wasn’t around. If I had been, I would have dragged them off to shore and told them to pick some less unpleasant way to . . . shuffle off this mortal coil. All I’m doing is inviting you home for dinner.”

“Whose dinner?” he asked.

“Jesus!” Her eyes rolled toward heaven. “Trust me, you jerk-off. I can do better than raw human any day. I got a lot of friends. We water spirits always do. Now, come on!”

This time he followed. She moved in her own light. Then he realized they were in a tunnel. It seemed made of black rock with letters set into the stone. The letters glowed gold, sunlight gold, metallic gold, the soft textured gold of flowers. Some were green, now grass green, verdant green, emerald, the cloudy shadow of the gemstone, orange, scarlet, purple, amethyst-red fire and roses. After a time, he ran out of comparisons for all the colors he saw.

The passage wasn’t filled with water, either. He could surface and take a breath if he wanted to. The first time he did, he found himself floating in a tranquil river under a clear, star-filled sky. In the distance, he could see the firefly lights of a city or a large town.

She surfaced next to him. “Don’t do that,” she said.

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“That tunnel is—” She broke off. “How the hell do I explain? You know what you are?”

They were both up to their necks in the river, dog-paddling, and the water was cold. At least, to him it was.

“No! What?” he snapped back.

“A damn primitive savage!” she yelled.

“A what?” he shouted, outraged. “Hey, lady, you invited me along—”

That was as far as he got. She dove, grabbed his legs, and pulled him down. He went under with a yell of fury that nearly drowned him, because his mouth was still open when he went under.

He tore free of her arms, kicked out to keep her off, and found himself bobbing up like a cork. When he next surfaced, he found himself in yet another place. It was broad daylight, and he was in a high-sided canyon of red stone. The river was high, and the current a millrace. The water was being beaten to a froth of white by the action of the current pounding rocks that seemed to sprout like fangs from the riverbed. His body slammed into one hard on his left side, and his left arm went limp.

The water was cold and very clear. He saw the bone leap through the skin as his upper arm broke.

Then she was beside him. “You goddamn stubborn fool! You unlimited asshole! You . . .”

A tall, thin spire of rock appeared just ahead. She threw her arm around him, pulling him to her breast. The pain hadn’t hit yet, but Black Leg knew it would in a second and the arterial blood, red from his arm, was a long streamer in the roaring water.

A second later, her other arm was around the pylon of rock that lifted from the water. He was facing her and saw her eyes dilate with fear. He looked around and saw the falls directly ahead.

                  CHAPTER TWO

Uther rode toward London. He began the journey from Morgana’s stronghold when he heard the Saxons at the fortress along the coast held the horse fights this year. That meant they would have chosen a war leader, and he knew he’d best move against them before they could feel for a vulnerable spot and jump him.

He was in trouble without his son. More and more in the last three years Uther had associated his son with him in ruling. More and more the youngster had been picking up the slack.

Merlin had well known what he was doing when he exiled the boy. Aside from the drastic emotional blow it dealt him, Arthur’s absence made the king’s job twice as hard.

The High Kingship was the nexus of forces that in the nature of things were diametrically opposed to each other. The system he headed worked well and had done so time out of mind. And in the process made Alba one of the most prosperous places outside of the east where irrigation produced almost unimaginable wealth for some and unspeakable misery for others.

But Alba, the White Isle, had escaped the cruelty of becoming too stratified a society, with a few literally drowning in wealth, the many either broken by the burden of finding shelter, clothing, and enough food to keep body and soul together, the lowest classes serving their masters as domestics, household labor, beasts of burden, shepherds, field hands, and manual laborers, or having to offer up their bodies to gain the right to at least temporary existence as whores or gladiators.

Alba and her people had for a long time escaped this fate. Tradition said the Painted People had created this system and—never conquerors—had been able to peacefully persuade the rest to accept it.

It was vested in their women. Women like Morgana, who could speak for the land goddess and could create a king either by birth or the acceptance of him in sacred marriage.

For this is where we all come from, the dark, moist passage between a woman’s legs. And if the woman will not open her body to us in love or squat down and bring us forth in blood and torment, then we cannot live. And if we cannot warm the earth with a plow or send out beasts to feed on her green mantle, then we would wander over the land that rejects us—and die.

But a woman can be forced and the earth ruined, and both happened when the Romans came. The prosperity of Alba and Gaul drew them like vicious wasps, and they, not ever understanding the great achievements of his people, destroyed it without ever understanding that there was anything to destroy.

Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. And the same might be said for greed, also. The conquering, militaristic Romans had an ample supply of both in their nature.

Before the Romans disrupted this magnificent and ancient system, the high king presided over a balanced realm. The fair south, ruled by its cattle lords, produced a vast quantity of food, more than enough even in the worst years to banish famine forever from the White Isle. His people, the Silures, ruled themselves in accord with the warrior societies. The democracy of the war band drew them together to resist outsiders even as they in the end successfully held off the Romans. They paid a high price for their freedom, but it had been worth the cost. His people were rich in timber, amber, gold and silver, hides, and iron.

The king was usually chosen from among them because he was able to win the support of the powerful war bands. But he in turn usually chose his tanist and successor from among the rich, southern farmers. And that ruler in turn chose his tanist from the Painted People.

So the High Kingship moved from one power base to another. The deep forests of Wales, the southern ring-forts such as Maden Castle or Cadbury, to the high fastness of the oak wood overlooking the North Sea dominated by the Pictish queens—the Dragon People, as they were called.

The Veneti helped tie them together. They were in the beginning a subtribe of the Painted People, but in time they became a sailing and trading society. They helped the Painted People exploit the rich fisheries of the cold, gray sea, where whale, ling, cod, and walrus abounded. But they also sailed south into the blue Aegean, the lands of honey, oil, and wine. They traded with the Egyptians at the Nile Delta, the Minoans at Crete, and the distant city-states on the plain of Sumer at the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and were represented at Sidon and Tyre in the cities of the Phoenician Coast.

Then the Romans came.

They smashed the prosperous southern kingdoms, depriving the high king of his most important power base. After Bodiccia’s revolt, they made war on the people themselves, exterminating without mercy the best farmers in the kingdom and selling the few surviving women and children as slaves.

But the land was still there, and the land was good and rich. Others moved in to fill the vacancy left by the murdered tribesmen, displaced farmers from Italy, legionary veterans too old or crippled for the endless wars the Roman state engendered. Landowners from Gaul, fleeing the chaos created by the brawls among Roman aristocrats, fighting for the now dwindling spoils of conquest, endless brutality, and bottomless greed remaining from the great thieving conquerors of the past.

Then, last but not least, the weary Roman authorities who feared and distrusted the peoples of Alba hired the Saxons to defend the fortifications and estates that controlled the Humber, Wash, and Themis, and were the key to dominating the island’s rich heart. This was an assault on its freedom—a stake through that same heart.

These Saxons were the natural allies of the landowners of the south when, to their boundless horror, they were abandoned by the once seemingly all-powerful Romans. They were fearful of the Picts to the north and the tribal people to the west and the Saxon seafarers trying to dominate the sea lanes.

To their credit, the high kings who had led the long resistance to the Roman Imperium in Wales and the highlands now were willing to include the southern landowners in their kingdom and offer them the protection the Romans had failed to accord them.

But the south felt it had the right to rule the west. Their allies, the Saxons and the archdruid Merlin, were treacherous to the bone. Merlin’s power play led to the murder of High King Vortigen. In the ensuing power struggle, the disparate parts of the kingdom had a lot more strength than Merlin and the Saxons gave them credit for. And after seven years of savage warfare, the Roman-British landlords to the south realized they must yield and allow the High Kingship to be revived if they hoped for even a semblance of peace.

A semblance, that’s what it was. A counterfeit of what had been a fairly smoothly functioning alliance. Brushfire wars flared on the borders of Wales, Saxon pirates harried the coast, and the endless diplomatic meddling of the dying imperium created friction where none was warranted, all of this making the high king’s attempts to keep the peace difficult, and at times, next to impossible.

But the game was not over yet.

Uther had given his life to it and Arthur might successfully return the High Kingship to its primal power and influence. That was why he had been born and trained to rule since he first drew breath. And why Merlin and his bitch paramour had tried to destroy him. Uther shuddered at the memory of the day he had . . .

“My Lord King.”

Uther gave a start. Morgana was riding at his knee.

“Mind your pace, my lord. We are killing the horses,” she told him.

Uther drew rein and slowed his mount to an amble. Then, hearing the beast blowing, to a walk. He looked back and saw his force strung out behind him, not a good formation in potentially hostile country.

“I was . . . preoccupied,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered. “But we left the forest some time ago.”

Uther knew that in the open his force might easily draw an attack. Probably not a serious one, not this early in the game. No, the early stages would likely be a feeling-out contest. To give his opponent—whoever the Saxon lords had chosen as a war leader—an early victory would be a dangerous mistake.

The Saxon lords would still have their doubts about their new leader. If he carried off even a small-scale assault successfully, it would go far to remove those doubts.

Uther could still see the traces his people left on the land. In the distance, the low hummocks of a plowed-down ring-fort, no more than a half-ruined stone circle, and the groves, the sacred groves still planted along the watercourses and around springs. Or in areas where the ground was too broken to yield to the plow. The Romans made up lurid stories about what went on in these groves, not having the slightest understanding of why they existed.

The road went past one ahead. The trees, oak and beech, looked as though they might offer welcome shade and forage for both horses and men. It was a large one, a small forest in reality, and likely included a spring or two, where they could water the horses and replenish their own supplies.

Normally he would give it a wide berth in open country like this. Such woodlots could conceal an ambush, also.

He nodded toward Morgana and pointed. “Get some of the boys.”

She raised one arm and signaled with her fingers. Six young men dashed forward and paced the king. They were drenched with perspiration, as were their lathered horses, but the horses pranced without the encouragement of whip or spur, and the boys looked delighted to be noticed by their king and chief priestess.

“Secure the grove ahead,” Uther directed. “We will rest there, and I don’t want to ride into an ambush.”

The youngsters tore out whooping and yelling, horses racing over the ground toward the trees.

“My God,” Uther whispered. “To be young and foolish again.”

Morgana laughed, but sobered immediately. “Foolish it is,” she said. “If anyone is waiting there, they will certainly draw their fire.”

“That’s the idea,” Uther answered.

One of the dark priestesses reached Uther’s side. She wore the skin of a panther over her helmet, the curved fangs pressed against her forehead, the paws hanging over her shoulders, claws dangling. She was slim, her long, dark hair braided in seven plaits that dangled at her shoulders. Her arms were tattooed and her face bore blue-stained scars like the rake of a cat’s claws.

She grunted her approval of the boys’ tactics, then set off, followed by a dozen older warriors, moving more slowly. Uther knew at least a hundred more of the Cat Society waited in the background to follow up if an ambush should occur.

He really didn’t expect one, but it was safest to check.

Morgana raised her arm again and moved her fingers in a complex pattern. And Uther knew that, should an ambush occur, without his ever giving a command, the remaining warrior societies would encircle the grove and slaughter the attacking troops.

This far out into the hinterlands, they would probably be poorly armed, slingers, archers, and spearmen at best, while his men were heavy cavalry, riding the Celtic saddle that molded itself to the horses’ backs and whose horns bent under weight of a rider and supported his thighs, maintaining him firmly astride his horse. Moreover, they all had boiled leather armor sewn with metal plates, carried good swords and bull hide shields that could deflect the swiftest arrow, the most viciously slung sling missile, and even an iron-headed spear.

“Good exercise for them,” Morgana said. “But no one is going to bother us here. If they’re waiting, it will be further down the road toward London, likely at a river ford. Or in the city itself.”

“Then they will be disappointed,” Uther muttered. “Because I’m not going to London. At least, not as king. When we depart the grove this evening, I will ride to London with a few of my most trusted men. You and the dark ladies will turn and invest Cadbury.”

“Cadbury. The place is a ruin,” Morgana said.

“Doesn’t matter. It can be held even by a small, poorly armed force. And I want you to take and defend any other hill-forts you can.”

“God!” she whispered. “I see your strategy. But the risk. If the Saxons should be in the city already? You could be killed.”

“I know,” he said. “But if I’m not, I will know who is loyal and who isn’t. Move into the hill-forts and consolidate your position. If I am killed—and you will hear of it if I am—attack the city. Show no mercy. Wipe out the Saxon garrison there, disperse the inhabitants, burn it to the ground. It is the dwelling place of the most powerful families in the Themis valley. Then scorch the earth from Cadbury to the wash. Burn every farm and villa from the meanest to the mightiest. Trample the green wheat, girdle the orchards, drive off the livestock, spoil what the army cannot consume. Ignore the cities. They will wither and die without the countryside to sustain them.”

“My lord,” Morgana whispered. “That would be a costly campaign, not only in terms of our own army. But many of those still loyal to the high king will turn their backs on us and go their own way. Besides, think of the horror and devastation. We will strangle our own blood. Not since the Icini revolt have any dared to strike so murderously at our own realm.”

“Yes,” Uther said. “But once the campaign is completed, the south will be no further trouble to the rest of us for a generation or two, and it will give us time to reinvent the High Kingship and rebuild our ancient alliances. When I took the road with the greater part of our warriors, it was my intention to do this. But I can’t bring myself to be the cause of the destruction of so many innocent lives. So much that remains good in our realm. Morgana, I can’t. I must try to find some other solution.”