Cursefell (9 page)

CURSEFELL

CHAPTER NINE

     That night I had trouble putting aside all I had learned, and all that I still did not know.  I opened the shutters over my borrowed room's window, lifting the pane of glass to let the crisp night air in to relax me.  Gazing out as I lay down, glimpsing moonlight lancing through the trees, my lids finally slid over my eyes.  I slept for a few minutes or maybe hours, I'm not really sure, before the whispering words of that other voice weaved a dreamy vision that I could not escape...

*    

     Brilliant light filtered through swaying canopies laced in softly yellowed leaves.  The breeze wound around trees blanched white as marbled stone.  Wispy dandelions flittered in a storm of false snowflakes.  The wind was warm and fragrant, holding the promised hope of spring.  The grass twinkled with dewy green prisms chuting life even as a pair of bared soles whisked across their blades.
     The naked feet of the woman landed lightly with each step along the lane formed by double rowed trees.  They were delicate brushes that hardly bent the stalks over which they glided.  She held her petite frame in crimson cloth draped across an olive toned shoulder, the fabric flowing in ripples with each ghostly step.  She was the flaming rise of summer lurking just below the white and golden halls called home to springtime.
     The naturally formed avenue ran long but not endless, eventually opening to a path laid in finely cut stone steps held between sentinel fields of brightly colored sunflowers.  Four feet tall and half a foot wide, the flowers stood just short of the woman's shoulders.  Their golden petals winked open and closed with each passing touch her fingertips bestowed upon them.
     She walked for an immeasurable time before reaching the last standing sunflower at the path's end.  She plucked it gingerly from its living stalk.  Cupping the bloom in a palm, she slowly crushed it in her small hand.  Gentle breathe blew through the funnel the fingers had created, expelling glittering dust to the four winds like motes in a swirling sand.  The winds sprinkled the floral crush throughout the barren glade the path had led her to, flashing and fading flecks floating and landing as they may.
     While each grain planted itself in an oily plop and splash in virgin soil, stone and structure and life sprouted full grown on the formerly stark landscape's stage.  A brook holding clear cool water bubbled up from beneath the upraised root belonging to an oak behemoth.  Thick grass unfurled from seedlings to carpet the glade, untouched save for the cracked blocks from discarded masonry dotting the natural circle and the trampling dance in which three young women engaged.
     Three pair sandaled feet spun in circles, skipping and stomping as they reeled to the music of their own airy laughter, the gentle tune carried on a cool breeze.  Alike in many ways, differing in others, it was simple to guess that these women were certainly all sisters.  Similar, but not the same.  They were alternately dark and fair and earthy.
     They spun round and round, gossamer togas fluttering, holding hands with fingers locked together and tightly bound.  Their voices rang loud and light, free from care and worry, rising to the heavens.  Their silly steps did not diminish even as the woman stood outside the circle watching them in the stillness of her silence.
     The woman resumed her silent journey when the simmering sun began to dip its burnished gold crowned head in the west.  Skirting the new grown glade with its sisters, she entered a forest formed by densely packed reads towering well above her head.  They stood strong and sturdy, hollowed tubes that barely bent as she slid between them, clearing a way with hands and elbows.  The downy fibers coating the reeds left no marks on her skin save short lived patches of goose flesh where it tickled.  They creaked when she pushed harder at them the deeper she went, their sharp cracking moans eventually completely replacing the sisters' playful laughter she had left behind.
     The light of day had been replaced by night when she finally picked her way free of the dense reeds.  The way opened up to a cliffside view above the sea.  Hard cracked earth sprouted tufts of brittle grass from the parched micro-chasms crisscrossing the patch of land.  The woman was careful to keep to the shadows, skirting the warmth and light a well stoked bonfire offered.
     Three times three men stood in a semi-circular ring between spitting logs and the jutting stone lip above the thundering seas.  Boiled leather armor, called cuir bouilli in a barely remembered time, covered the sculpted torsos of those nine warriors.  The likeness of a dragon, broad winged and long fanged and ferocious as in legend, laid scorched across their chests as a symbol, as it did upon the white sails on the ships bobbing in the wide bay below.  They stood together, sentries over the three women kneeling in the dirt beside the fire.
     The women cast frightened looks about them.  Three pairs of green shaded eyes wildly panicked from beneath fair brows.  They were arranged in a line, eldest to youngest, though there was little enough distance between their ages.  The middle woman stayed close to her younger sibling.  They were the sisters the woman had seen before, but now they did not dance and their laughter was lapsed into silence.
     The crackling logs snapped, collapsing on themselves, sending smoke spiraling high into the moonlit night.  The lurking woman observing the scene wrung the fabric of her gown when she saw another form enter the circle of light near the sisters.  Dark velvet covered the figure, devouring the warmth the fire gave and the illumination cast by the flames.  The cloak the newcomer wore shimmered as it moved.  The hood was crafted wide and deep to create a cavernous hollow no gaze could penetrate.  The woman who had thus far journeyed in silence released a soft mournful sigh.
     That sigh formed a moaning gale that blew along the cliff.  The warriors teetered, grim faces flailed by long locked hair, hands tightening over sheathed swords and bronze tipped spears.  A flurry of fiery embers flashed up and out from the fire, a mini maelstrom that forced the sisters to duck their head and protect their sight.  Even the mysterious cloaked figure was assailed by the wind, digging in the rounded end of a staff to hold in place.  The hood fell away under the increasing buffet to reveal a woman's face.  Well, not just a woman.
     Her thick hair flew straight back in the wind looking no less than pure veined silver mined from an under-earth cave.  She turned her timeless face slowly until it found the spot where the crimson lady was standing.  Her shocking yellow irises, set above the jutting pale cheekbones and a swirling vibrant blue tattoo, searched for something they could not find.  Tugging on a delicately pointed ear, the woman who was not just a woman brought her focus back to the sisters.  She gestured something and the sudden gust died down to the caress of an Aegean breeze.
     From within the fold of her cloak she produced a short, pointed blade.  The dagger glowed with the flame's reflected light as she circled the kneeling women.  Her deep voice passed sentence over the three.
     "Oath breakers.  Fell friends." She stood behind the eldest of the three.  "Stheno."
     The dagger drew a line of blood along Stheno's arm.  It welled up on the broken skin and the woman was quick to collect it on the flat end of the blade.
     She stepped behind the middle sister.  "Euryale."
     The dagger made a shallow cut across Euryale's thigh.  The woman mixed her blood with her sister's before turning hungry eyes upon the last in line.
     "Medusa."
     She yanked the youngest girl's head back.  The dagger was held above her head.  The tip slowly descended toward her eye as she trembled, but said nothing.  She refused to blink or look away, even as her lips pressed firmly together and stretched in a grimace.  As close as the dagger came it was a wonder that it did not give final judgment through choice or happenstance.  But the woman was careful with the condemned girl.  At the last the pointed end pricked the skin just below her eye.  A dark red bubble sprang up from the mark to be quickly added with the sibling mixture.
     "You wield innocence like an arrow.  With your golden hair spitting beautiful venom to blind even my destined, even me.  How could I blame him?  But you, it is your nature I think.  You embolden happy fools to hopefulness, but shield them not with the truth for restraint.  From you will the first be made," she condemned Medusa.  "For you extol the hidden beauty in this world, but harbor a secret fear for its passing.  From you will flow a fear yet unfathomed by mortal minds."
     The woman smeared the sisters' mixed samples in a curling strand of Medusa's hair.  Satisfied, she sawed through the silky lock, separating it from her head and balling it in a fist.  The assembled men shifted, feet shuffling, hands clinching tightly over their weapons, in fear or anticipation or misgiving it was impossible to say.
     "From far distant shores we came with hearts as open as our arms.  With pure intentions we offered a bounty of gifts freely.  I have trusted and have been betrayed.  My trust was treated too lightly by three.  I have been called many things in more lands than you know exist.  Fae on the isle of boggy clansmen.  Alfar in lands of ice and sea.  Aos Si on the green shored island.  Elf-kin in realms of rugged mountain and deep rooted tree."
     "Wait!" rang out a man's voice.
     One of the nine men took a step forward, breaking the half circle they formed.  His cuir biolli bore the marks, oiled and smoothed patches but still visible, of one who was still learning his trade.  The eyes staring out from behind his helmet were soft but resolved as they held the silver haired woman's gaze.
     "We can not do this.  They have done nothing that deserves punishment," he told her.
     The woman gave him a cold little smile.  She looked over those assembled, still holding the lock of hair under a tight fist.
     "Perhaps your heart tells you so.  But it purely feels without reason, I see.  A condition that will be chipped away with time."
     "If they are to be judged..."
     "I have judged them!  Are there any others here that would disagree with me?" she asked, staring at each armed man in turn.  At last she nodded to the assemblage and the man and two others were seized by their brothers in arms.  The woman turned Medusa by the chin so she was forced to look at them, telling her, "It is easy to read someone, to see the truth in their heart.  Maybe I will give you that gift before we are done.  Then you will know what is truly beautiful and what is not."
     The men struggled, but their strength failed to free them under the combined strength of the others.  The woman sneered, then continued with her enchantment.
     "I curse you now.  Stheno.  Euryale.  Medusa, first and most of all.  Bound now and throughout ages yet dreamed.  In my three turned names I call the thrice cursed power, bind the sisters three."
     She tossed the blood streaked hair into the bonfire.  The flames shot higher into the night, the rough edges sparking deep purple as the spell took hold.  The woman dressed in crimson was already moving away from the clearing when the youngest sister began to scream.
     The wandering woman walked as if she followed a trail, even though no markers could be seen.  Earth turned to ash under her unshod feet in little grey puffs.  Torn dried husks from some unknown source floated lazily in air.  Pillars of steam vented at random points as clouds filtered the sky to a ruddy light.  No birds filled the morning with their gleeful chirping.  No animal ventured out to forage.  It was a dying land devoid of the glow of life or love or lightness.  Even the beauty found in life's challenges were missing.
     The woman halted her steps between two towering black marble towers set deep into a ground of ash.  She ran a light hand along the red painted runes carved expertly in their face.  Her shoulders slumped forward when she hung her head with resignation.  The woman ignored the husks that were stiff and white and translucence, growing in number until they fell with the intensity of a sudden storm, drawing bare legs together to shrug off her crimson shift.  It puddled at her feet, but as she tried to step from its circle her legs collapsed, dropping her into a bed of ash.  With a grunt made loud by the deathly silence she clawed her way forward, digging nails deep into the sooty soil and dragging legs that were fused together, deeper into the bleak landscape and the blinding windless storm.
     The trail she left as the storm swallowed her from sight was lined by five pointed holes on either side of the rough rut her legs created.  The path slowly smoothed out, the last pair of holes deeper and wider than the rest, the rut deeper packed ashes and evenly formed, continuing on in a serpentine pattern.  She had gone on that way for a short distance before all trace was lost to an uneven stone island jutting out from beneath the ashen sea.  The woman had made it that far at least.
     The island was formed by slabs of rock and tumbled boulders.  The stones bled warmth from some underneath source, perhaps the pulsing azure held deep in the dozens of small fissures running throughout the solidness.  Shiny onyx spires that could cut with the barest touch reached like barren trees into the sky.  About the island several figures stood in various poses.  They were carved from marble, some greying with ashy residue, others blanched in newness.  The statue of a man in a top hat and formal attire stood next to a woman with a raised bow.  A dwarf holding what looked like carved coins and a bushy beard was placed next to a Greek warrior holding something high above his head.  Petticoats and feathered caps, swords and kilts, assorted stone figures from across the ages watched over the island.
     Living representations, but not life.  That distinction was held by another.  A man, crouched and crab-walking among the boulders, keeping to their shadows, moved quietly over the rocks.  He took care not to hit the naked blade of his sword against the stones or tangle it in his jacket or the flare at the bottom of his jeans.  There was something familiar in the way he moved and the poses he took up before moving along.  His head was constantly scanning, searching for something, except when he would pause and tilt his head to listen for some sound he was not hearing.
     As he drew closer to the center of the island, his boot caught on a fissure, dislodging a small pebble.  It rolled down a slight grade, bouncing off slabs and boulders before wedging in another crack between the stones.  The noise was not much, but to the man it was as loud as thunder.  Several seconds passed before he relaxed.  Just as he scrabbled towards a particularly thick onyx column, a sharp hiss rolled across the barren land.