The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) (20 page)

Zachariah,
with a
whimper of terror, tried to shrink away from the beast, but he was held
fast—paralysed too by the eyes that seemed empty and at the same time
capable of piercing right to the back of his skull. The slack gums curled back
into an evil grin, and the creature snarled.

“The wolfmen will take you back,” it panted. “The
wolfmen will sniff out your tracks. The wolfmen will follow you into the city
and sniff out the Serpentspawn. The wolfmen will tear you apart if you try to
betray them.”

As the wolfman spoke, flecks of saliva scattered
from his jaws and fell onto Zachariah’s face. Zachariah was so afraid he wanted
to die. He became aware of other shapes in the shadows, some man-like, others
four-legged. They shuffled forward into the quavering light flung from a
smoking brazier, and he felt his soul shrink into the depths of his body.

Never had he felt so alone and vulnerable. The
flesh torn by Azrael ceased to torment him as his mind dwelled instead upon all
the horrors these creatures could inflict. A dozen pairs of yellow eyes fixed
him with pupils that reflected neither humanity nor intelligence. They were
black holes let into a deranged brain, where frenzied cruelty was amusement,
and the unspeakable was the only morality.

 
The
wolfman let go of Zachariah’s hair and stepped back off his hand that was numb
with cold and bloody where the monster’s claws had punched holes in it.
Zachariah crouched, nursing his hand, gulping rapidly in an effort to keep back
the tears of fear and humiliation. His shoulder was gripped, and Azrael dragged
him to his feet.

“You will retrace your steps with the wolfmen. They
will pick up your scent and find the entrance to Providence. You will go to the
Danann leader and say that their Queen sends for her daughter. They will bring
her from her hiding place, and the wolfmen will carry her off. The Dananns will
deal with their betrayer themselves.”

Zachariah hung his head, unable to think how he
could prevent this from happening, but determined that whether the Dananns
trusted him or not, he was not going to lead this pack of mad beasts into
Underworld.

“Get up,” the wolfman snarled, drawing himself up
to his full height. Though not quite as tall as Azrael, his shoulders were
broader, knotted and gnarled with muscle. His upper arms and hams were heavy
and powerful, and his skin, covered in sparse, coarse hair, was black and
furrowed with deep scars. Zachariah obeyed, forcing his limbs to stop their
trembling.

“Taste!” The wolfman ripped Zachariah’s shirt from
his back and held it out to the pack. One after the other, the wolfmen took the
bloody shirt and chewed it, absorbing the smell and the taste of his blood and
sweat.

“Now we have your scent, we will go.” The pack
leader’s eyes gleamed, injected with blood and filled with humourless laughter.
Another wolfman moved out of the shadows, a four-legged creature with a
sideways lope and lolling tongue. If the first creature was like a deformed,
bestial man descending to the animal state, this second was more like a
twisted, mutated animal striving toward humanity.

“Get on my back,” he said in a voice thickened by
the animal tongue. “And hold!”

Zachariah grimaced but did as he was told. The
wolfman loped towards the door, broad, clawed paws gripping the sandy floor
like hands, the hard muscles of his back rolling uncomfortably, like a man
walking on all fours. The rest of the pack followed, gathering speed as the end
of the tunnel opened onto the desert. The night seemed blacker than usual and
full of the stench of caged, unwashed animals. They bounded forward in the
direction of the river, and from each throat came a chilling howl that ended in
a snarl and the snapping of jaws.

Jonah gasped
in
amazement as the river broke around the stone piers of the bridge and
flowed beneath its arches, as if it had been doing so for centuries.

“Wow! That was deadly! How did you...? Princess?
Are you okay?”

Deborah lay still, her eyes closed, circled with
dark blue. Shocked by her pallor, Jonah reached for a limp hand and squeezed it
tight.
 

“Princess?”

Fear snatched away his voice leaving a mere
whisper. He shook at the unresponsive hand then tapped her cheek. Harder.

“Princess!”

Only seconds passed, but to Jonah it seemed like
hours before Deborah’s eyelids flickered and opened.
 
She turned her head towards the river and smiled.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” she whispered.

With his heart beating wildly, Jonah wrapped his
arms around her. Deborah sighed, and he felt her whole body relax as she
nestled into his arms. He scarcely dared breathe for fear of breaking the
spell. He studied the face turned up to his, the way the thick lashes lay on
the cheek he knew was scattered with freckles, but in the grey first light
gleamed an unearthly white. There were blue hollows beneath her eyes now,
filled with the last of the night shadows.

Gently he released his right arm and brushed the
hair back from her brow. He drew his finger over her temple and round the curve
of her ear. He ran his finger lightly over the contour of her lips and along
the line of her jaw. His hand ran through her hair then lingered to cup the
upraised chin. Deborah did not open her eyes, but a smile spread across her face,
and she raised her arms to tighten them around Jonah’s neck.

Slowly he lowered his lips to hers, ignoring the
putrid smell of decay that still hung in the air over the bunker.

“Oh, Jonah,” Deborah whispered and let herself melt
into the kiss with the feeling that nothing could hurt her now. Whatever
happened, wherever her destiny led her, Deborah knew Jonah would follow her to
the ends of the earth.

* * * *

Jonah cradled Deborah in his arms as she slept, kneeling in the damp reeds
of the riverbank until the cold gave him cramps in his legs. It was almost more
than he could bear to wake her, but he was growing increasingly
uneasy¬—they ought to cross the bridge before it grew fully light.
Abaddon’s spies might have already reported its appearance, and they had not
yet tested its solidity. What if it turned out to be built of river mists?

“Princess,” he whispered. “Princess, we should be
moving. If you can, of course.”

Deborah’s eyelids fluttered, and she sighed again.
With an effort she opened her eyes and smiled. “Of course I can,” she replied
in a thin voice. “It seems to have drained all my strength that’s all.”

“How did you...?”

“The bridge?” Deborah’s eyes took on a dreamy
expression. “I’m not sure. I saw the memory of it. There must have been a bridge
here before. By concentrating hard, I managed to hold it, not let it fade. It
seems to have worked.” She grinned.

Jonah looked at her with respect as well as
admiration, hiding his emotion with a joke. “Wait till we’ve crossed it before
you start crowing. It might be just a mass hallucination.”

Still looking deathly pale, Deborah pulled herself
into a sitting position. “If you’d rather swim,” she said with mock irritation
in her voice, “feel free. I’ll take the hallucination. See you on the other
side.”

Jonah got stiffly to his feet and offered her his
hand. Together they stood and stared. The mists had cleared from the river and
the far bank was plainly in view. Their eyes followed the meadow that ran back
from the waterside, over the trees, higher, to where the clouds met the
shimmering flanks of mountains. Deborah turned to Jonah, her eyes brilliant in
the early light.

“We did it!”

Jonah saw too, but he had eyes only for Deborah. He
put his arms around her and drew her to him. “We did it,” he murmured and
kissed her lightly on the lips, as if afraid she would break.

Her face aglow with happiness, Deborah pulled away
from him. “Come on! We’re almost there.”

The pups, wagging their tails, trotted towards the
bridge, bouncing up and down as they leapt deep pools, scrambling over one
another across narrow dry places. Jonah followed behind wrapped in his own
thoughts. Princess was no longer a damsel in distress. She was the Queen’s
daughter and a bridge builder! He wondered what other things she could see, things
neither of them understood. What if she didn’t just remember things that were
useful, or good? What if…?

Deborah jolted him out of his reverie, turning to
him with the fierce light of pride in her eyes. “Look,” she pointed excitedly,
“the traces of a road—and it runs up to the bridge.”

They hurried now, as fast as the treacherous
terrain would let them. The mud gave beneath their feet with an evil sucking
sound, and bubbles rising up from its disturbed depths broke to release the
stench of rottenness. The old road gave them a better foothold, and soon the
first of the pups was standing on the parapet of the bridge.

Jonah and Deborah ran the last hundred yards and
stopped, panting, before the great stone road that was to carry them across the
river. They stared in reverent awe at the pillars that marked the beginning of
the bridge. Not columns, but stone trees. One at either side, they rose smooth
and straight, their stone branches, delicately intertwined, met to form an
archway. Stone birds perched among the leaves, and the most perfect stone
apples hung from the branches.

“It’s a sign, Princess,” Jonah whispered, brushing
a stone apple with hesitant fingers. “It can only mean the Garden.”

Deborah took his hand. The hard, rough touch of his
skin comforted her, and she realised she wanted very much to be comforted. She
had not made the bridge, but she had brought it back. Many more things would be
brought back, and the world would be different. It was the uncertainty of this
new world that frightened her.

She thought of the carnage on the riverbank, the
rocket launchers, and the piles of shrivelled bodies in the bunker. Was that
part of her work too? Would she be required to make all that horror live again?
Gingerly, on the tips of her toes, she stepped onto the smooth paved surface of
the road and gave Jonah’s hand a slight squeeze. With Jonah by her side, she
could face whatever lay ahead.

“It’s all right. I think we can cross.”

Hand in hand they walked across the river,
listening to the sound of water curling swiftly around the great stone piers of
the bridge. A vine motif followed them along the parapet, stone grapes grew in
profusion, and a thousand carved birds peeped at them through the broad leaves.
The western sky was still dark when they reached the far side, but they could
feel the change. The darkness was different, not the thick, soupy darkness of
Providence, but soft and clear, and full of a silvery glimmer. They could make
out that the river flowed through a great grassy plain and that the plain ended
in the smudgy darkness of woods.

There was no road where the bridge ended, but they
did not need a road to point the way. Gaily the pups set off at a run for the
low woods. Already the earth was firm beneath their feet, and Deborah looked
about her in wonder at the long grasses crowded with flowers, the first she had
ever seen. She brushed their delicate heads with her fingertips as they passed,
releasing a faint perfume. First, strong bushes appeared, then single trees,
then groves, their pale bark gleaming even in the dark. The land was rising
perceptibly as they encountered the first real woods.

Deborah and Jonah turned and looked back the way
they had come. The morning was on the eastern rim of the sky, and despite the
lingering dust and fumes of the last war, there could be no mistaking the dawn.
As the light increased, the land filled with the tenderest of
colours—pale green splashed with white and yellow of the river plain,
soft browns and greys among the trees, and the sky glowed with pink and mauve
and grey veils.

The river remained obstinately dark and murky, and
beyond lay the desert they had just crossed. It stretched, the indeterminate
colour of corruption, as far as the southern horizon where the sky and sand met
in a thick bank of brown fog that tainted a third of the sky. Providence lay
out of sight, deep in the fog.

Deborah sighed. “Let’s stay here to rest a while.
We surely don’t have to hide all day now we’ve crossed the river. Those things
last night, they don’t come out in daylight, do they? Anyway, the Garden’s just
the other side of the mountains—they wouldn’t dare touch us now.”

Jonah looked doubtful. They were too exposed for
his liking. He was thinking of what might cross the bridge from the desert,
things that were not afraid of the light. And there was something else too,
some vague fear that eluded his grasp but destroyed his pleasure in crossing
the river and reaching the forest.

“I don’t think the kelpies and the worms are
frightened of a bit of daylight. We ought to get a little further from the
river if we can. When the demon king’s spies see the bridge—”

“Oh, Holy Mother! Can’t you stop playing commandos
for five minutes?” Deborah interrupted, tiredness making her peevish. “I’m worn
out and hungry, and I’m not moving another step until I’ve had a rest.” She sat
down where she was and tucked her legs beneath her.

Jonah looked about him anxiously. “Just a bit
further, Princess,” he pleaded. “Just into that little thicket. Then you can
sleep. We’ll catch something to eat too, I promise.”

Grudgingly Deborah got to her feet. She really was
tired, mortally tired. She stared at her feet as she trudged up the hillside,
tripping occasionally on the tussocky grass. When Jonah was satisfied they were
reasonably safe, she let herself drop and gave a low moan as she curled up with
one of the pups for a pillow.

Jonah watched as Deborah drifted into an exhausted
sleep. Anxiously he peered into the unfamiliar woodland, unsure what he
expected to find, but troubled by the way some of the trees seemed to huddle
together in conspiratorial clumps, leaning inwards to form impenetrable
thickets. Others crouched over the path with their branches swaying in an
unfelt breeze, sweeping the ground like dangling limbs. In the growing morning
light, the shadows should have been dispersing, but the trees gathered shadows
about them, and the darkness clustered strangely as though the shadows were not
cast, but existed independently. Jonah peered hard but their depths were black
as pitch, and when he looked away, for an instant, at the edge of his line of
vision, he was convinced he saw them move.

He frowned but there was nothing for it, they had
to eat. Leaving most of the pups to guard the camp, Jonah set off, ill at ease,
through the unsettling woodland to see what game he could find.