“GWAED feast on their blood! Cernunnos drag them by their balls into the Underworld!” Nimuë shouted to the midnight wind. Nothing else stirred among the barren hills outside Venta Belgarum, Ardh Rhi Uther’s capital. Little starlight penetrated the cloud cover on this night of the dark of the moon. “May every one of them contract a burning rash that eats away at their cocks.” She raised a clean knife, blade up, and made symbolic slashes across the night sky.
Tears of frustration blurred her vision and her gestures wobbled. She muttered several foul words she wasn’t supposed to know. She knew enough about magic to realize she’d have to repeat the original curse and the gesture. She hoped she wouldn’t have to clean the knife again as well.
Four years had passed since she’d left Avalon. Very little magic had gone right for her since.
She’d used a quartet of fertility spells this past Beltane. She’d taken four different lovers in the fields outside her father’s ancestral keep. But none of the randy youths had managed to get a child on her. She had even gone down on her hands and knees for them, letting them prove their manhood by using her like an animal. A fortnight later her moon blood flowed freely.
Carradoc of Caer Tair Cigfran, her father, wouldn’t allow her to marry until she conceived. He claimed he held to the old tradition. Mostly he invented traditions to suit his convenience. He had reasons to keep Nimuë unmarried and close by his side.
“I’ll break your control over me yet, Carradoc,” she vowed. This time a faint light of power followed the sigil she carved in the air with her knife. Her hand and arm tingled with the energy of her impromptu spell. She smiled and narrowed her eyes in speculation. “At last something works right.”
She continued her clandestine journey across the hills, using a shielded oil lamp to guide her steps. Her legs grew tired from the unaccustomed exercise. She’d rather have worked within the privacy of the women’s solar at the palace. But Queen Ygraina’s pleasantness invaded the very stones of the palace. Curses needed a different atmosphere.
Eventually she wound down from a hilltop into a hidden copse. The cloud cover thickened and the night grew darker. Nimuë shivered in the sudden chill. Rain would soak the hills again before dawn. She intended to be tucked safely into her bed by then. She yawned and considered retracing her steps.
First she had to finish what she started. The Ladies of Avalon had managed to teach her that much. Nimuë hadn’t pried much else out of them in the two years she’d lived on Avalon.
At the bottom of the hill, the trees closed around her. Years ago the sacred spring at the heart of the copse had been kept clear of brush. Neglected and nearly abandoned now, the brush had grown into a small forest. Her lamplight didn’t penetrate more than one step ahead of her.
A creaking sound off to the right made her jump. Her heart thudded in her chest, and her skin felt cold and clammy. Then an owl hooted in another direction.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. She didn’t really believe in demons. She’d never seen one and certainly hadn’t been able to raise one when she’d tried. The spells had fatigued her before she’d half begun, and so she skipped parts of the ritual. But that was the fault of the old hag who’d sold her the spell. The woman wasn’t truly a witch, had overcharged the daughter of a lord, and put too many steps in the ritual.
“I’ll have her killed next time Carradoc allows me to go home,” Nimuë promised herself.
Carefully she edged forward, feeling for the path with her toes. Two dozen small steps later, she sensed the trees opening around her. She’d reached the small clear space around the spring. A little more light penetrated the clouds. Ahead of her the semi-phallic shape of a single sacred stone appeared a darker black against the black backdrop of trees. The top of the stone reached only a little taller than Nimuë. In daylight a double spiral carved into the surface of the stone showed clearly.
If she made a sacrifice of blood and food here tonight, the gods trapped within the stone should grant her wish for the means to gain her freedom from Carradoc. A husband and child were only a means to that end.
“So you, too, seek power tonight with the old ones,” a voice whispered from the direction of the stone.
Nimuë jumped back, hand to her throat. She clenched her fist, extending her little and pointing fingers, a ward against the horned god of the Underworld, in the direction of the voice.
“You need not fear me sister.” Someone moved as if standing up in front of the stone.
“I fear no one.” Nimuë straightened her shoulders and stared levelly at the cloaked and hooded figure. Surreptitiously she kept her right hand behind her back still clenched in the ward against the evil eye.
“If you fear no one, then why have you come here on the dark of the moon, on the night of powerful dark magic?”
“I... I came to make sacrifices to the powers that truly rule us.” Nimuë stalled for time. Curiosity burned within her now that her initial fears had subsided. Something about this figure’s educated accent sounded familiar. Surely she’d found another practitioner of the dark arts who resided in Uther’s palace.
Wouldn’t Archbishop Dyfrig have a fit and fall down in a faint if he found out? She almost giggled at the image of the tall man tumbling onto his scrawny backside while his miter and crosier rolled away from his grasping, clawlike fingers.
The self-righteous prig reminded her too much of The Merlin, another crotchety old man who refused her manipulation.
“Sacrifices are good. Are you prepared to give all to the dark ones who will beg to do your bidding for a taste of your blood?” The figure held up a knife. The lantern light glinted faintly on the keen edge. A small dark stain dripped from the point.
“You... you cut yourself.”
“Of course. Demons don’t like secondhand blood. And they only respect those who are willing to endure pain. Are you prepared to do this?”
“I... I brought this.” Nimuë fumbled in her pocket for the stained rag she’d used earlier in the day to soak up her moon blood.
The figure laughed long and loud.
Nimuë looked around her, fearful that someone, something might hear and come to investigate.
“A sacrifice indeed, my young acolyte. But not enough.” The figure grabbed Nimbuë with strong fingers and slashed at her inner arm.
At first Nimbuë didn’t feel anything but the coldness of the sharp blade against her skin. Then a dark line welled up from the invisible cut and hot pain spread rapidly from the finger-length wound up her arm to her shoulder. Her face burned, and her skin felt cold. The darkness whirled around her, confusing her senses.
“Now you can leave real blood for the powers of darkness. Now we can be allies against those who would control us.”
“Allies,” Nimuë whispered, uncertain if she liked this idea or not. But she knew this person now and smiled at the power that knowledge gave her.
“I will teach you what you need. But no one, NO ONE, must ever suspect that we work together. Your death, horrible and painful, will follow if anyone suspects us of conspiring with those who would see Uther Pendragon dead.”
o0o
“Andraste is drowning Britain,” I told Da the day after the Autumnal Equinox.
My knees wobbled and I almost dropped to the soggy verge beside the old Roman road. A fluttering sound inside my head told me more than I wanted to know.
“The Morrigan is dead,” Da said. He lifted his face to the dense rain and moaned.
A vast emptiness opened in me as if my soul chased hers into the next world. The Morrigan had indeed died. I barely felt my hot tears in the cold rain that pelted us.
In a few moments, my sense of balance returned, and I knew that The Morrigan had passed into her next incarnation.
The rain had begun in earnest that morning after several weeks of heavy showers followed by annoying drizzle. We hadn’t seen the sun in many, many days. Now large drops penetrated our heavily oiled woolen cloaks and stung our unprotected skin. A high wind chilled our wet bodies.
“Come,” Da said after several moments of silence. “We must keep moving. Life continues though one of our number has died.” He started trudging down the Roman road we usually disdained for more secret pathways.
Everything smelled of mold and damp rot.
I pulled my winter cloak closer around me to combat the chill that ran up and down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck continued standing on end. Something more than an autumnal rainstorm plagued Britain today.
I searched with all of my senses but saw little beyond the waves of rain and my own grief.
The Morrigan was dead. Avalon was no more. I still had not learned the great healing magic from either Da or The Morrigan.
“Foot rot will infest the sheep with all this rain,” Da grumbled beneath his hood that all but covered his face.
His prematurely gray hair and beard were nearly all white now, making him look older than I knew him to be. But his step was still firm, and no traces of the bone fever twisted his knuckles.
Though we’d spent the summer together — a very wet and dismal summer — I still found myself examining him minutely, cherishing every look, every gesture, every curl in his beard. After a joyous reunion last spring we’d fallen into our old routines easily. We had walked nearly the length and breadth of Britain, renewing old acquaintances and making new ones.
But I suspected we’d be separated again before I was ready. My dreams of late had been most specific. I stood on one side of a great chasm. Da stood on the other. Sometimes I tried desperately to jump the gap, or climb down into the bottomless canyons and climb up the other side. Sometimes I turned my back and ignored Da’s attempts to reach me. Never did we touch hands before I woke up.
I scanned the puddles that grew into small lakes. Even the Roman road retained ankle-high water in the broken spots.
What few crops grew this summer had been beaten to the ground by the rain and wind. Black fields stretched to the horizon and beyond on our trek north toward Deva and Lord Ector’s caer. Why weren’t sheep grazing in the sodden pastures? Birds sulked quietly in the trees, their feathers fluffed against the unseasonable cold. Strange smells came to me from the rotten vegetation. I expected to hear carrion crows screeching at us as a meager sign of life amid the devastation. An unnatural silence hung as heavily as the wet air.
This deluge was so fierce and so long-lasting, I hadn’t caught sight of a single faery or sprite most of the summer.
The pattern of life unraveled before my eyes. I sensed my separation from Da coming closer, yet I couldn’t do anything to prevent it. My throat swelled and made my breathing ragged. The Morrigan was dead. And now I knew I would lose my Da as well.
How? How much time? I asked the wind.
I heard no answer.
Da stopped and sniffed the air, turning his head quickly right and left. His hand burrowed beneath the folds of his cloak to touch his torc. “Fire ruined these crops.”
Then I noticed the difference between rotten fields beaten flat and scorched grain burned to the ground, then drenched by rain.
No wonder the faeries had deserted this part of Britain. Fire was bane to them, much like iron.
“Pirates?” I asked. The coast was riddled with inlets for them to beach their boats.
I didn’t want to think about murderers lurking behind every shrub and boulder. Shudders ran up and down my spine — from the cold and from my thoughts.
A jumble of mud huts crouched on the horizon. The thatched roofs sagged from burning, then they had rotted in the heavy rains. A few scrawny pigs rooted in the barren mud for absent roots. We hurried forward, alert and wary of lurking predators — humans as well as wolves.
“Irish pirates take what they can throw into their boats and leave quickly,” Da said quietly. I could see his thought spinning behind his eyes. “Pirates kill any who stand in their way. But they leave fields, houses, and survivors behind to provide new fodder for the next raid. This is the work of the Saxons and their bloodthirsty gods. They destroy everything in their path to make way for the flood of their relatives who follow them, needing land to settle for themselves.”
Saxons!
My heart raced with childhood terrors. I’d seen burned fields and slaughtered villages before. I’d watched from hiding places while tall warriors with clean chins and long drooping mustaches hacked at their victims with axes, dismembering them as they died. All in the name of their god of war. The isolation of Avalon had buried those memories. Saxons had fallen into the category of monsters under the bed to make children behave. Now I faced those monsters for real.
Saxons! They shredded every life pattern of past, present, and future, with their bloody axes.
Da gripped his torc fiercely, eyes closed. A deep grief passed over his face.
“The Saxons have grown bold. They are no longer content to press us from the South and East — the lands ceded to them by Vortigen thirty years ago. Now they raid from the Irish Sea and the Northern inlets as well.” Da stared at the destruction that marched to the horizon in all directions.
“But the Ardh Rhi... His army... Curyll!” Deva, with her Roman fortress, was but two days’ walk to the east of us. Lord Ector’s home another day beyond. Who would protect Lady Glynnis and her younger children while Lord Ector’s warband guarded the Southern coast, fighting more swarms of the invaders?
At our words, one of the pigs stood up. Not a rooting animal. A filthy child. Boy or girl, I couldn’t tell. Tangled locks streaked with mud covered the face. A tattered smock, more mud than cloth, clung to a too-thin body. No other garment protected the child from the chill wind and rain. I guessed the child female. I don’t know why. She stared at us, eyes too big for her pinched face and her belly distended with hunger. Then she darted into the closest hut in a hunched-over walk, hands nearly touching the ground.
Da pulled a hunk of bread from his pack. The last of our supplies and meant to be our supper. “Come, child, we won’t hurt you.” He offered it to the wild-eyed child, holding it out before him. Step by step he followed in her footsteps. “I have food for you,” he coaxed.
Two eyes reflected a little light in the gloom of the ruined hut. The child peered at us, eyes wide with fear and desperate hunger.
I stilled my mind and body, blending with the landscape. Da did the same.
My eyes separated one shadow from another. The outline of the child’s body emerged. Tempted by food. Cautious of the giver.
“Bread, child,” Da continued his offer. “We won’t hurt you. Come. Eat.”
The child shifted her body forward, onto her toes, ready to run. Her hand reached out. Then she dashed forward. Swift as a rabbit, she snatched the bread out of Da’s hand and ran past him.
Da moved faster. Druid-trained, he’d anticipated her movements and grabbed the stinking, rotting remnants of her shirt. She strained against the cloth outlining her emaciated body. I’d guessed correctly. Female. Young, just barely budding into puberty.
She screeched and clawed Da’s arm, dropping the precious bread rather than be captured. Cloth tore and she ran, forsaking food for freedom.
I dashed after her. She needed help. She needed us. But she was thin and barefoot. I was taller, heavier, and wore my thick winter boots. Her feet slid through the mud at the surface. Mine sank deeper with every step. She disappeared into the ditches and hedges before I had gone three steps.
“We have to catch her,” I cried. “She’ll die. We have to help her.”
Many times in my life, as Da and I tramped the length and breadth of Britain, I’d known hunger and cold. We often slept on the ground with only our cloaks for warmth. I’d always known that the cold and hunger would last only as long as it took us to walk to the next fortress or village. And I’d always had my Da to protect me in the shelter of his arms.
“She is a survivor, Wren. She had the wits to evade the Saxons. She had the instincts to survive a month or more since the raid. Unless her mind heals from the horrors she has witnessed, we cannot get close enough to help her. All we can do is pass news of her to anyone left alive. She is one of the wild ones now.” He hung his head in sadness. I saw his lips move in a silent prayer, but I heard no words.
I mimicked his actions, imploring Dana to care for one of her own. The child had gone feral, as wild as the wolves and the deer of the forest. She belonged to the Goddess now.
I had never met any of the wild ones who haunted the forest. But I’d heard legends of them. This girl would become one of them. Villagers would leave offerings for her, supporting her, respecting her need to avoid human contact.
“We have obligations, Wren,” Da reminded me. “We must make sure we give the dead proper rest. ’Tis a promise we make to the living and to the Goddess.”
“There is no wood for a funeral pyre. It is too wet to light a fire.” I said through chattering teeth. “We can’t honor that promise.” I could light a fire very easily, but without fuel, Tanio would not continue to burn. It would resent my lack of a gift of wood or coal or grass; it might not come the next time I called it.
“Then we must bury the dead as the Christians do. Tanio or Pridd, it matters not how they return to the Goddess. ’Tis our respect and prayers that give their deaths meaning.” He set the harp down on a stone slab near the well. We’d need her music to send the souls of the dead on their next journey.
First we checked the huts. Burned thatch had covered several of the dead — those more afraid of the Saxons than the fire. Not much was left of them, bits of bone, an arm, a foot. A woman’s skull with half a face and burned hair.
A birthmark on her remaining cheek sent a shock recoiling through me. I knew this woman. She had offered me sweet cakes and fresh bread when Da and I came here many years ago. The best bread I had ever tasted — my appetite sharpened because I was hungry. I’d slept in this hut with the children of the household. We’d laughed and told stories long into the night and finally slept in a tangle of arms and legs.
Was the wild girl one of those children who had given me a portion of her meal and her bed?
Deep, racking sobs overtook me. How could Dana let this happen? I knew these people!
Shakily I gritted my teeth and set about the task of righting the outflung limbs and closing the woman’s one eye that stared at me in reproach.
I prayed her next life was easier than the death she had endured here.
My shoulders heaved with my sobs as I knelt beside the corpse. I knew Death in many forms and had prepared the victims of illness and accident for the pyre. Only when Saxons invaded had I encountered such wanton disregard for the gift of life from the Goddess.
I couldn’t even consign these victims to the fire that would liberate their spirits from their bodies.
“Come, Wren. I need help with the digging,” Da said from the doorway of the ruined hut. He had found two spades and held them like staffs, one in each hand. His unnaturally pale skin stretched over his facial bones with strain. I scurried to obey before his anger at the Saxons erupted and found only me as a target. The one time I had seen Da lose control of his temper, he’d shape-changed into an awesome being beyond reason, beyond my love.
Was his anger the cause of the separation I foresaw?
Three more bodies awaited us in the village common. Untouched by the fire, their terrible wounds revealed the viciousness of their murderers. Agony still distorted their faces.
I couldn’t look too closely or think about the pain these people had endured before the Goddess mercifully took their spirits. I felt each knife thrust, hatchet slash, and arrow point in my mind.
“Wh... where were they, Da?”
“I found two in the field beyond. This one, I fished from the well.” He pointed with his foot to a pale, bloated body.
We both gagged. I turned my back so that he wouldn’t see my weakness if I lost control of my stomach.
“We’ll have to mark the well, so no one drinks the tainted water.” He stalked to the stone wall that ringed the water supply. He touched his torc in his habitual manner and worked his fingers in a complicated summoning. A piece of light-colored rock sprang to his hand from some nearby rubble. With the magically charged tool he scratched a warning into the stones. Power burned from his hand, through the markings. For a brief moment the sigil of poison flared, then burned into the wall. By the time the sigil faded, the well would have had many years to sweeten.
I dropped some dried betony into the water to hurry the process.
All that day and into the long twilight we toiled to dig a grave. The mud slid back into the hole almost as fast as we slung it out. At last we returned the dead to the Pridd, marked the grave with a cairn, and sang our prayers.
Occasionally I caught glimpses of the feral girl. A movement in the shadows, or a flash of lighter-colored mud. I hoped she understood our actions and would heal. I dared not hope that she would join us in our grim task.
A chill wind scattered the rain clouds as the moon rose. I looked around for a suitable camp. My stomach recoiled from sleeping anywhere near this village.
“We walk tonight, Wren. Perhaps by morning we will be able to put this behind us.”
“I retrieved the bread and cleaned it as best I could,” I said. “We’ll leave it for the child. She needs it more than we.” I looked about one last time for signs of the girl. “I couldn’t eat tonight, Da.”
He nodded in agreement. We set our feet back on the slippery stones of the Roman road that led to Deva and then on to Lord Ector’s fortress.