The Raven Warrior Read online

  About then the wind changed, and we smelled them.

  Gray stopped. “Christ! What’s that?”

  Ure laughed very softly. “The Saxons,” he said.

  “Uncle?” Gray said. “Do you never explain?”

  “No,” Ure said, and he continued on. But Gray balked mutinously.

  Maeniel sighed. What we were smelling now he had probably been aware of for some time. But the wind early in the morning had been at our backs. Now, as the road however tortuously moved inland, we were catching a land breeze, and it reeked, the stench so strong it made your eyes tear.

  Ure, seeing the rest of us frozen where we stood, paused again.

  “The Saxons,” Maeniel said quietly, “devote every tenth captive to their gods.”

  “Especially the weak, the old, the sickly, and the rebellious,” Ure said.

  We rounded the next bend in the road and saw them dangling in the trees. Even before the road had been built there must have been a considerable island of dry land, because there were many trees, even those that won’t grow on flooded land. They were festooned with the dead in all stages of decomposition.

  To the right of the forested island, I saw a thicket of pilings projecting from the water where a village must once have stood. The pilings were half rotted by damp, but the tops were charred and blackened by fire.

  We stood stock-still where we were as the rest came up behind us and looked over our shoulders at the terrible sight. Someone began to cry. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl. I only know Ure’s eyes swept the whole group of us with a look of icy contempt and the weeping was silenced.

  “Well, now you know,” he said. “Make your choice. Run or fight. Which is it?”

  Gray was on his knees vomiting at the side of the road. Maeniel wore his wolf look—the gaze he turns on the yearling cubs when it comes time to loose them toward their first kill. I stood paralyzed, feeling both my knees and my guts turning to water.

  “Must we pass this way?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered. “But I thought it was as well you did. These are not deer you hunt, but men, killers of other men.”

  I looked around at the others. Everyone was silent. The girls were bunched behind me, but the equally pale and frightened faces of the boys were indistinguishable from theirs.

  Next to me, Albe’s eyes were empty. “I will not go living into their hands again,” she said.

  Next to her, Wic, the girl with the ugly birthmark distorting her features, shrugged and said, “No worse than my village when it was filled with carrion crows after the attack.”

  One of the boys whispered, “My master beat me every day. Think on it. None but the queen has anything to go back to.”

  “The queen,” I said, “is not going back. We will abide the dead.”

  To this day, I don’t know how I did it. Part of it was pride, I’m sure. I couldn’t let this band of outcasts show more courage than the descendent of the Iceni queen. But the other part was, I knew how important our little voyage was.

  The Painted People and the kingdoms of the Out Isles were hard-pressed by the Saxon pirates. Hand in glove with their brethren that guarded the coast, they formed a pincer movement that, in the end, threatened the independence of the rest of the free people of Alba. Uther would soon be hard-pressed to maintain his position in Wales, and the Painted People deprived of their alliance with the Veneti. And without control over the North Sea fisheries and the resources of the Out Islands, they would fall like ripe plums into the hands of the southern Saxon conquerors, led by Merlin.

  If no one did anything to stop these raids, the command of the seas would fall to the Saxons. And, make no mistake, whoever rules the sea here also controls the land.

  I danced the dance, stretched out my hands, and took the power offered by my seat on the Dragon Throne. Maeniel warned me the night before the dance there would be no going back, and there wasn’t. So I did as a chief should do; I took the first step forward. The rest, without further question, followed. Even Ure.

  The view of the small forest on the island didn’t improve as we drew closer. But we continued on. The crows were at them, and at first we thought we frightened the birds, because, with a cry and a rush of black wings, they flew up and away from the things in the trees.

  “I didn’t think we were close enough to startle them away from their dinner,” Ure said.

  But then we heard voices.

  Igrane felt the power fade and withdraw from her body. No longer attached to the symbol on the floor, she rolled to her side, then crawled away, whimpering with relief. He had been going to kill her; she knew it. This time he had really been going to kill her.

  She had always been sure he hated her power over him, and this time he had intended to be rid of her. To burn her away as a sacrifice to whatever earthly, demonic power resided in this strange place.

  She had been to his dwelling before, but never here to this part. Above, the sea roared and the room with its high, domed ceiling grew darker and darker as the light faded from the symbol on the floor. Fearfully, she thought about his two servants. God! She didn’t want to meet them.

  She came to her knees. Her eyes searched the room in the growing gloom. She saw what remained of them.

  Whatever powers took Merlin, it had dealt with them first. All that remained of them were bags of human hide, full of shattered, dark bone. It looked as though they had simply been crumpled as a bit of discarded paper might be by the fist of a giant hand.

  She gave a gasp. Whatever took him must have awesome power. Merlin was the strongest being she had ever met; the creature that could destroy him didn’t bear thinking about.

  The light was very dim now, the big room deeply shadowed. She found herself shivering with cold. Something, a robe of sorts, was draped over a sofa nearby. She seized it and wrapped it around her body. It was silk, heavy, raw silk.

  It must be his, she thought. He had prepared it so that he could relax when he was finished destroying her. He would have been replete, sated with food, sex, and bloated with the staggeringly rich draft he sucked from her loins, while she lay spent, twisted, and dead on the white symbol below.

  The robe hung over her shoulders. It moved of its own volition and wrapped itself around her. Sleeves lifted over her arms and a hood covered her head, then the two halves closed in front of her.

  She staggered with fear. Clothing that dressed her, the fabric wrapping itself around her as though driven by a command, was another new and terrifying experience. But the gown was warm and caressed her skin with a thousand gentle fingers.

  She was standing near the sofa from which she had taken the robe. It seemed her knees didn’t want to hold her up any longer. They folded. She sat, then drew up her feet and slid to her side and lay down.

  Darkness rolled over her like a wave.

  “A wolf!” a voice screeched. “A wolf! They promised me a wolf!”

  Black Leg found himself lifted and gripped in the embrace of a pair of powerful arms. Almost paralyzed by terror, Black Leg gave vent to a most unwolflike screech.

  “Yiiiieee!” It ended on a high note, and he turned human, the better to grapple with his attacker.

  When the owner of the formidable pair of arms realized he was clutching another human male, he backed away, hunched down, and began weeping.

  “No. No. No,” it moaned. “You are not he—they promised me a companion wolf, but you are no wolf but a man.”

  For the first time, Black Leg got a good look at his attacker. Got a good whiff of him, too. He seemed old and was filthy. His hair, nails, and beard looked as though they hadn’t been cut in months, maybe years. The dirt under his nails was black, his hair a tangled mass that hung down on either side of his face. And the beard was long, filled with dead leaves, twigs, and bits of whatever the creature had been eating, substances Black Leg didn’t care to speculate about. It was hunkered down on its heels, sobbing, nose running in two mucous streams down the uncombed mustache
into its beard.

  “No, no, no! I will despair and die. You cannot be the one,” it sobbed. “The voices said nothing about such powers. Where? Where is the wolf? My wolf, my friend, the promised protector?”

  Black Leg was shaken, filled with a mixture of pity and fear. He had never seen a human being in so wretched a condition.

  The thing began to crawl away through the shallows, toward the boggy shore. Its mouth opened and Black Leg saw that its teeth were those of a young man, white, even, with strong, pink gums.

  Black Leg shuddered, looked down at his own nude body, and realized he had been smeared with filth by the thing’s arms and hands. He waded deeper into the lake to clean himself. He was afraid to turn wolf again, lest he bring on another assault by the fearful being. He sighed with pleasure when he was out far enough to be in up to his neck. True, the water was cold, but only briskly so. Only cold enough to bring up the reflex that heats the blood in the young and can make a swim even in icy water a profound pleasure.

  In the first light of morning, the water was murky and he felt the long fronds of waterweeds stroke his calves, knees, and thighs. He was walking on a velvet carpet of vegetation a few feet below the surface. A floor soft and yielding but at the same time crisp and somehow protective of his feet.

  Nice. Nice, he thought. But then he noticed the weeds seemed to have a lot of prurient curiosity. He was being fondled and caressed by something that felt finned, scaly, and yet almost slimy like a fresh-caught fish. The touch explored him so gently that at first he was disarmed by an intense rush of pleasure. Then he realized he was being felt up by a . . . fish!

  “Yeeeee!” He wasn’t proud of the screech he gave while setting a record back to land. It sounded a bit feminine, at least to his ears.

  But when he reached solid ground, he was nervous enough to become wolf again without thinking about his first encounter. But he was reminded immediately.

  “Thank God. Thank whatever gods may be. He has returned. Let me embrace you!”

  Black Leg became human again. “No!” he shouted. “You stay away from me!”

  The old man on the shore began weeping. And something else reared up out of the water. It was heavily draped in waterweed, but Black Leg could see enough to note that it had fins, scales, and hands with webbed fingers.

  “Holy Christ!” he yelled.

  “What’s the matter?” the thing in the water said. “You didn’t like it?”

  The old man on the shore drew himself up, pointed one long-nailed, grimy finger and thundered, “It is the Lorelei. Begone, for being you wolf and man, flee ere she begins her seductive song and calls you to your doom!”

  “You old fool!” the thing in the water shouted back at him. “That’s saltwater . . . I’m fresh. At least get your evil supernatural beings straight. You have been sorcerer. And while you’re at it, get away from my lake.”

  The old man on the shore flung a sphere of fire at the fishy-looking thing. But a waterspout leaped up in front of it and put the fire out.

  The old man on the shore sank down, moaning, his head in his hands. “Weak, I’m so weak. Hunger and cold have sapped my strength. I am no longer fit for battle. Soon, soon, if the wolf, my guardian and protector, doesn’t come, I will die.”

  Black Leg felt a sharp pang of guilt. “Maybe . . . I am the wolf,” he said quietly. “I don’t know. I started off thinking there was something I had to do . . . and . . .”

  “You half-wit,” the thing in the water snapped. “You turn me down and you’re gonna pick him up? What’s with you? You don’t like girls, I can see that. But taking up with this rickety old wreck. What is in your empty head?”

  “You don’t look like any girl I ever saw,” Black Leg snapped.

  “Oh, shit! I forgot!” she said, then sank back into the water, vanishing without a ripple. A second later, she reemerged.

  Black Leg goggled at her. She was beautiful in a very strange sort of way. Tall, slender, blond, with deep-blue eyes, long arms and probably legs. He couldn’t tell because she was dressed in a gown that seemed made of small green and burgundy lily pads dotted with tiny white flowers. They fitted her, forming a drape over one shoulder and clinging to breast, hip, and thigh. She radiated a delicate beauty; her straight nose and curving, sensuous lips were parted in a half smile and the rising sun made a golden aureole of her fine, fair hair.

  “What do you think,” she said, turning sideways to give him a sultry glance and a good look at her jutting, pointed breasts.

  “I’m a shape-strong, too,” she said, batting her eyelashes at him.

  “So I see,” he said. He began wading out into the water toward her.

  “No! No!” the old man moaned. “Don’t be fooled . . . don’t be drawn. See her pale face, white skin, her clinging dress, part of the lake itself? She cannot hide her true nature. Her grace is that of the swimming serpent. See the length of arms, legs, waist . . . a serpent is what she is and she will lap you in her coils, crush your bones in her embrace, empty the air from your lungs with her lethal caress, and carry you away to drown.”

  Black Leg studied her carefully. “You do look sort of snakeish. . . .”

  “Snakeish! You—shitass—snakeish—I’ll give you snakeish!”

  The glob of mud, slime, and any other unpleasant things she could find on such short notice landed—plop—in the middle of Black Leg’s face. Another double handful of filth landed on the old man’s head. He promptly ran screaming into the forest.

  Black Leg backed away, clearing his eyes, and was relieved when he looked out over the still, misty water and realized she was gone. He went wolf, found a clean, shallow stream, and washed.

  Kyra had been strict about washing when he was a cub, so he tended to be even more hygienic than the average human. True, he had rebelled often, but Maeniel (who, by the way, took a bath only when he wanted to) gave him scant sympathy and even held him down for Kyra to complete a scrubbing. Mother ignored his discomfort and said, “Kyra is pack. When you share a life with someone, you had best humor their crotchets.”

  And after a time, Black Leg became resigned to cleanliness, and though he would never have admitted it, even began to like it.

  When he was finished, he shook himself dry and went hunting. He got a young hare and, putting aside his own hunger, went to find the old man. He located him sleeping on a bed of bracken in a hollow near the stream.

  Black Leg dropped the hare near his hand and went to look for a stick he could use as a fire drill. When he returned, he found the old man had awakened, eaten the hare—raw—and then gone back to sleep.

  Black Leg sighed, settled down, and managed with a great deal of effort to get a fire going. He wanted fire, because truth to tell, he was frightened of whatever was living in that lake. Then he went wolf again, curled up, nose covered by his tail, and went to sleep.

  Something woke him, a wolf sense, not part of his humanity. The stars told him it was late, the night sliding into the deep trough of silence when all things sleep—even the predators replete with full bellies or resigned to hunger as he was. A few days on short rations are nothing to a wolf.

  What? He didn’t move and no observer would have noticed anything different about him. The old man was very still on his bed of fern.

  Well breathed, Black Leg thought. His snores were soft buzzes. He curled on his side, and the new uncoiling fronds moved slightly with each inhalation and exhalation of his breath.

  No! Not him.

  Black Leg’s eyes searched the stream bank, then he saw her. The Lady of the Lake. She was seated on a mossy stone. She was silvered by moonlight and was dabbling her feet in the cold, clear water.

  We went to ground without the slightest need of a signal from anyone. Both sides of the road we marched along were hemmed in by brushy cattails, reeds, small and large, and thick growths of sedge stretching far out into the shallows. Yes! They, the people of the burned village, would have made sure that the materials for matting baskets
and even house walls were growing close by. It provided a lot of cover, much of it snagged and tangled among the osier willows that bordered the path.

  Albe and the girl named Wic lay next to me, and across the weed-grown track, I saw Ure looking at me between the reed stems. The voices grew louder, and a few moments later, we saw two armed men emerge from the corpse-laden grove of trees. They were pointing and laughing at the things hanging there. I knew they must be from the pirate camp further up along the river.

  We lay silent; no one made a sound. We were deep in the marsh, and the spaces around the island and the road were filled by open water. The sun came and went, now sparkling on the mirrorlike waters, now plunging it into steely gloom as the dark clouds flew past above. The wind blew not at our backs or faces, but from the sea at our sides, carrying the stench of decay away from us, toward and also away from the two sightseers on the island.

  They approached the corpses in the trees more closely. And I could hear their words, though since they were spoken in another language, I couldn’t understand most of them. I spoke enough Frankish and Saxon, for those were the languages they were using, to comprehend the gist of their conversation. They were speaking about the dead, how they died, not the method but how they behaved when they knew they were to be sacrificed. Who fought, who pleaded and begged, and from time to time, they spoke in praise of those who went courageously steadfast to their doom.

  The sacrifices had been performed in a variety of ways. Some hanged, a few hung by their feet, head in the water to drown. And I knew from disturbed earth in places that some had probably been buried alive. The worst, I think, were those impaled on trimmed saplings. They had been driven onto the stakes up through the genitals, and from the expressions frozen on the faces of some and the twisted rigor in the bodies of others, it must have taken some of them quite a while to die.

  This was what awaited us if we failed. The cold in the earth I lay on seemed to seep up and fill the marrow of my bones. It was as though I could feel the others, feel their fear, the need to run and not stop until they were far away, where they could breathe clean air again.