The Raven Warrior (7 page)

“It would be a . . . solution. Of sorts,” she said.

“A solution, a savage crime. A nightmare from which our people might never recover,” Uther said. “If we move now, the big estates, the Saxons guarding the shores, will never be able to muster an opposing force. And make no mistake. If I die, I die the last high king of the Britons. There will likely never be another. So, Morgana, if I fall, carry out my orders. I have spent my life as you have, building this army. Use it to do as I ask.”

Morgana sat on her horse, feeling the chill in her bones. In her heart she knew Uther was right. Her people would never be able to muster an army like this again.

While she watched, the young men came straggling back, laughing, from the grove. Someone had surprised a sleeping deer. She and her fawn were slung over the saddle of the priestess, while the woman walked, leading her mount.

She grinned at Morgana. “We have a good start on supper,” she said, poking the empty-eyed doe.

An arrow protruded from the neck of the doe. She’d been field-dressed and was still dripping blood on the ground.

Morgana bowed her head down to her horse’s mane and clenched her fist in the long, coarse hair.

“Are you ill, my lady?” the war priestess asked.

Morgana pulled herself upright. “No. No. Merely tired. It’s been a hard ride.”

“Well,” the priestess said. “We can camp here safely. I got the deer and saw the tracks of wild cattle. But no trace of humans, though there is a ruin there.” The woman made a sign against the evil eye. “It’s near the spring. Someone worshiped there . . . once. There is a pillar and a tree with a face in the wood. But nothing more.”

Then she continued on, leaving Morgana and Uther standing there.

The rest of the army was catching up. Some were exploring the grove, others preparing to light cooking fires. A few shouts and whoops in the distance suggested the soldiers had located the wild cattle.

The two leaders sat side by side. Morgana was working out the logistics.

Invest the hill-forts. She could easily take them by surprise. Few, if any, were adequately defended.

Then she could use them as a base to raid the farms and villas all summer. No, she couldn’t take the fortified places, but she could lay waste the countryside. Like Bodiccia, she would run wild for a few months.

But then! Retreat back into the heavily wooded countryside of Wales and Dumnonia. Uther was right; it would take years for the south to recover. If she were sufficiently remorseless, two generations or more.

She shivered. To accomplish that, she would have to do as the Romans had done after the Iceni revolt: slaughter the men, sell the women and children into slavery. There would be buyers aplenty; the slave trade was booming.

“I want you to give me your word that you will do as I ask,” Uther said.

Morgana swallowed. She really had no choice; he was her king and she was sworn to obey him to the death.

“I’m not sure I can,” she whispered.

“Your word, Morgana,” he demanded. “I want your word, as you are my chief consular. Promise me you will do as I ask. Harden your heart and do as I command.”

All around them the army swirled, lighting fires, unsaddling horses, setting up pickets for the pack animals, a cheerful babble of noise as they laid out their encampment. The two still sat alone together, mounted, speaking in low voices.

“Very well. I promise. But in return, I want your promise you will take Gwain and Cai with you when you ride to London. They are the best of the best. You can have no nobler companions.”

Uther nodded. “I will. Send them to me at sunset.”

“So soon?” Morgana said.

“The quicker the better. If anything is to be done, I must get to the powers that be in London before their minds are made up. Your promise, my lady.”

Morgana said, “Yes, I give you my word. Not even grass will grow where this army passes when the war horns blow retreat.”

What I was doing, or rather going to do, was dangerous. I didn’t know how dangerous. But even if I had clearly grasped the perils of calling up the dead, I don’t think I would have been turned aside by the risk. Because it was nothing to the physical risk we were running. All of us. If I couldn’t burn that fortress, we would likely die, if not in battle, then in that grove with the rest of the unfortunates the Saxon pirates devoted to their gods.

Those spirits weren’t loving, merciful, or compassionate. The Saxons primarily asked them for luck, and they drove a hard bargain. If the pirates got it, the spirits expected to claim their share of the spoils. And that included the prisoners and slaves.

Now the things crouching in the grove were glutted with blood and cries of terror and pain, and pale maggots crusted rotting flesh. So perhaps they would sleep while I worked my wiles. I hoped they would deem the two—no, three—we killed as simply another offering.

When I reached the village, or rather the posts that once held houses, I tried not to look to my right where the things hung in the trees. It gave me chills to think that my summoning the dead might make one of the bodies swinging from a rotted rope break free and try to seize me. But when I turned toward the house posts, I found the wind was to my face. I couldn’t smell them, and I could feel only an emptiness where they were.

And I understood whatever might happen, their spirits were free and gone up among the stars to follow what paths they would. Yes, even the woman Albe slew out of mercy for her plight.

Death by murderous sacrifice had sent them into the winds of heaven. I felt the peace, a strange peace that is the end of pain. A sense of absolute release.

But not on the side of the road by the village. Both water and air were unnaturally still, and I was sure some lingered.

Life is a fire. We all burn. That is the meaning of my fire hand.

But we burn slowly. You can feel the heat rising from the young newborns in their cradles, toddlers at their mothers’ breasts. How and why we burn I don’t know. And I wonder if our kind will ever know. But we do. And even in the old—the very old—you can see the darkening coals still glowing in the ashes.

I knelt facing the house posts. They were carven and some of the carvings survived even the fire that destroyed the houses. They twisted with things belonging to the marshland, serpents, serpentine long-necked waterbirds, sedges, cattails, pickerelweed, and wild water lilies, eels and fish, frogs, toads. And crowning the posts where the tops remained, the sea eagles, hooked beaks agape, talons clenched in birds, fish, frogs, or snakes, rearing proudly to cry defiance at the sky.

The birds are Her creatures and the priestesses who gather the clean bones of the dead wear bird masks. And the sea eagle is the most ancient guardian of the dead.

I put my hands, both hands, palms up, into the water and looked out over the still, silent mire beyond where the houses once stood. Not even a breath of breeze ruffled the perfectly calm surface. It mirrored the sky, scattered sprinkles of sunlight that touched the water. But the clouds were more like soot now and it looked to rain before nightfall, so the sparkles came and went. And I looked beyond time into eternity.

The first face that formed between the palms of my hands was a child’s. He—for it was a boy—looked up at me with the beautiful incomprehension that is absolute innocence.

He died, but didn’t know how or why and didn’t even resent that he had. All he knew was that one moment he had been warm, sleeping snugly between his parents with his brothers and sisters. And the next, a confused impression of shouts, the stench of thick smoke, and then the knowledge that he was part of the dark, cloudy water and would be for some indefinite time.

I drew my mind back and let him go. I had a brief impression of dark hair and eyes looking up into mine, then the eyes faded to hollows in a small skull. Then it also vanished away and again I was looking down into my own reflection.

Then she came. Finger bones clutched my right hand. I could see them glowing whiter than flesh, wrapped around my hand. The nails bit into my skin, I think drawing blood.

Rage was all that remained of her. She didn’t think or know who or what she was. She knew she had been murdered, drowned not in water but mud, after she had been used by the attackers. Used in a variety of painful and ugly ways.

She wanted her man and her children, but couldn’t find them. She rode the sea tides daily, tumbled along the bottom in the green gloom. Boundless rage and despair soaked into my mind the way water sinks into dry earth, seeming to vanish but changing the nature of the soil as it saturates it.

I felt weak and ill, and I wanted to vomit. I was full of that vile wine that Gray, Maeniel, and Ure practically forced down my throat. It clouded my mind and weakened me.

So I didn’t pull my hand out quickly enough. But let’s be fair. Even had I been capable of considered reflection and clear thinking, I might have welcomed him, because I needed help desperately and I wasn’t sure what it might take to burn that fortress and the men inside of it. If you are going to do evil, you can’t cry off just because the means to your end turns your stomach.

But I did vomit when the snake coiled around my wrist. When my stomach emptied itself, I tried to be careful not to let the spasms alarm the reptile. I saw the triangular head through the water and knew if it cared to strike, I was doomed, because it was one of the poisonous ones.

The musculature of a snake is wonderful, tight, hard, and almost infinitely flexible, yet cold and menacing at the same time.

I go back and forth about whether he ever was completely human. I have never been able to really decide. But on balance, I think he was.

I do know how he died, though. The rite is an ancient one, but once so widespread that even the Romans knew about it, though their favorite way of propitiating the gods directly is burial alive. When victims were intended to be placed in the divine presence intact, not used for entertainment the way condemned criminals are, fed to beasts or forced to fight as gladiators do, the Romans buried them alive and left them to suffocate in stone chambers underground.

But we preferred to shoot them to death with arrows. The man—and it is always a man—is hung up, then the archers fire arrows into his body, taking care not to kill him because the longer the offering lasts, the better the oracle is and the more the dark powers are pleased.

He died this way twice, when the people who built the village came to settle here, his blood running into the water as a life stream hallowed their efforts. And at the end, when the Saxons stormed and burned the houses, they gave him to their gods.

But I don’t think they could take him. He was too much part of the fens. I felt them in him, the deep channels where the water is clouded and green and silt drifts along the bottom pulled back and forth by the tide. Not water, not land, a shadowed ooze that nurtures the creatures of both land and sea. Fish, shrimp, crab, and crayfish, a hundred kinds of ducks and geese fed on the abundant crustacean life and pale-green waterweed that filled the pools, canals, ponds, and ditches. Bog plants flourished, purple-flowered spikes of pickerelweed, broad green leaves lifting from the water to spread cooling shade in the shallows. Abundant yellow-flowered cress choked the freshwater canals, and fed the geese that settled like pale clouds on the water and nested among the hard stems of horsetail and reed.

He had power, the thing that flowed up my arm from the coiled serpent. Power bought and paid for in pain, blood, sorrow, and death. The way all real power is bought. They had been his people, and at dawn he climbed the house posts, using the carvings as a serpent ladder, and coiled on the matting at first light, near the fire. And awaited his offerings of live mice, milk, and honey.

And always he received them.

The serpent fell away from my wrist toward the dark depths, though I could tell it was loath to leave, for their kind burns lower than ours do and they love our fire. He obeyed the command of his “possessor.” And I understood more of hate, love, anger, and revenge than I had wanted to. My mind was drenched with all four, and I knew I could burn that fortress down.

Black Leg wasn’t prepared for the sick fear that gripped him when he saw the blood in the water. He had never experienced a major life-threatening injury before. But thanks to a fairly large number of minor ones, he knew what to do.

The worst being when he and Guinevere had been detected by a pair of lovers they were sneaking up on. A rock thrown by the strong arm of an adult male can cause a fearsome injury. The first stone clipped her over the ear. He didn’t feel the second crack into the back of his head. They both were already in full flight, running away as fast as they could.

When they slowed and came to a stop about two miles away, she told him, “You have blood running down your neck, staining your collar.”

He reached back, felt the warm, sticky trickle, tasted it to be sure . . . then plunged into the wolf. He was a boy again before he hit the ground, still wearing his clothes but rolling on the turf, the injury healed. When he got his footing, he saw she’d been hurt, too, and the blood was pouring down over and around her left ear.

“No!” he said, then realized she couldn’t do the same thing he had.

She gave him a strange look, the sort of look she had given him when she sent him away. Only then he hadn’t understood what it meant. Not then. But later, after she told him they could never be lovers, that look became clear to him.

His blood was staining the rapids red. Black Leg knew he had to chance the falls.

He went wolf.

He heard the water spirit scream, “No!”

Then he shot into space.

“Fall. . . .” He heard his father speaking. “Curl your body in on itself.”

Black Leg did, pulling his tail up between his hind legs, arching his neck to push his head down between his forelegs. Beauty, terror, detachment; all lived in his mind simultaneously.

Beauty because the falls was a breathtaking thing of beauty, the water a wavering, golden curtain in the afternoon sun, limned with rainbows as the light struck down into the mist. Above, he saw the water spirit come down. At the ledge, she elongated, dissolved, becoming one with water, light, and mist.