The warmth of earth’s crust fed whole colonies of tube worms and anemones, splendored star bursts of color, oddly living where no light ever shines. Many different fish and crustaceans—shrimp and crabs that danced on stilts, starfish with arms like snakes, and a dozen different kinds of shellfish—clustered at the vents. All living, loving, dying in a world without light or sound on the edge of a universe of darkness.
“I dove to the deep,” the dragon said. “And I remained too long. I tried to help another of my kind, trapped by a mud slide in a cave in a canyon that has not seen the light since the first torrents of rain fell and made seas of earth. I loved this one. I failed. We failed. I have rested and filled my eyes with light to ease my almost mortal grief. So, you see, even if I would—which I would not—I could do you no harm. But, have a care. Others here might not be so willing to allow you to pass.”
With that the dragon turned and swam out toward deeper water, and then was gone. Gray and Black Leg joined me on the path.
“It spoke to me,” I said, “and told me of its origins and its life.”
“Some teeth on that thing,” Gray said. “I have never seen a black one.”
“It lives deep and feeds on squid and strange fish,” I told Gray. “It warned me.”
“I need no warning about this place,” Gray answered.
“It is very beautiful here,” Black Leg said. “I would not mind if we stayed. Wolves are not ambitious the way men are. So long as we have game, who cares?”
I heard a snort.
“No!” I cried, because I knew what it was before I looked. The boar.
Again, we all ran.
He flew past the hock. I was disgusted. I doubled back. The big boulder next to the lake was steep and had trees on top. I ran up the side. A big willow on top had roots and branches that hung over the lake. The trunk rose at an angle. I was barefoot and small. I ran up the trunk like a squirrel.
Gray and Black Leg took refuge in a nearby tree, an oak with low branches. I had my bow and still had three arrows. The string was in its pouch inside my shirt. When I was safely in the tree, I lost no time in stringing the bow. I could hear the boar snuffling and panting, trying to find a way up the rock into the trees. I knew the rock wasn’t as steep as the pile we’d climbed last night and he probably could.
“Hs’s‘s’t, make noise,” I said to the others.
Just then the boar made it. Black Leg let out a howl. He can do it when he’s human, too. The boar arrived at the foot of the tree he and Gray were in. It paused, swung its head back and forth as though puzzled, snorting and pawing the ground. I studied the thing and took aim at one of the beast’s little eyes and let fly.
I was right on target. The boar staggered and gave a grunting squall of pain, then staggered away, its back to me, shaking its head and giving almost human moans. I heard a cheer from Gray and Black Leg.
“You got it. You got it.”
The wind hit then, so hard it nearly dumped me out of the tree. The day had been warm, sunny, and bright; but this wind was cold, like an icy frost that precedes a storm. Above, the sky darkened. I saw that the mist in the distance had moved closer to shore and was drowning the light. As I watched, the boar went down, blood streaming from its nostrils and mouth.
“It’s dying,” Gray said.
But Black Leg was looking up at the sky. He made the sign of the cross, and I knew we were both afraid. This was no natural beast. I could not think it was dead, and I was right. It wasn’t.
The wind blew hard again and the dust rose. And the boar was gone. A warrior stood where he had been. He was wearing only a skin tied at the waist with a thong. He was dead, and his head had been taken, but it had been sewn back on with coarse sinew. There was a hole in his chest where the sword went in. It, too, was sewn shut with sinew.
He looked at me. “Will you come down, or shall I fetch you?” he asked.
The mist glided in among the trees, and it seemed so dark now as to be late in the evening of a gloomy day. The air smelled wet.
“I don’t think I could bear your hands on my body,” I said. “I will come down.”
He turned toward Black Leg and Gray. “I have no orders about you. I don’t want you. Go.”
“No!” they both shouted.
“Yes,” I said. “Get Maeniel.”
“I don’t know if even he can come here,” Black Leg said.
“I’m betting he can,” I answered, “but he won’t unless you fetch him—go!”
“Yes,” Gray said, and shoved Black Leg away. “I will bear my lady company. Do as she says, get Maeniel.”
By now we were both on the ground. I climbed out of the tree, but when the dead man moved toward me, I eased back. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “I have some little power, and if you touch me, I will fight. I don’t know if I can hurt you, but I will try.”
He was very big and dark. He wore the torc below the seam where his head had been sewn back on. He was the largest man I had ever seen, and I also saw he had a sword. He wore it slung on his back in the old fashioned way. Even Gray looked small near him.
Gray asked Black Leg, “Give me back my shirt.”
Black Leg went wolf and ducked out of Gray’s shirt. He shook it out.
“Don’t make flea jokes,” I said.
Black Leg was still there, ears laid back, studying the warrior.
“Trust me,” Gray said. “Flea jokes are the farthest thing from my mind.”
“Kyra makes them and Maeniel ignores them, but Black Leg gets mad,” 1 explained.
The dead man turned and extended his arm, pointed his finger down the path away from the lake, and said, “March.”
Gray and I marched.
The dead man followed. The road led downward, away from the water and light. The wood here was gloomy, filled with ancient oaks, and mist hung like wraiths in the shadow of the spreading branches and kept out the sun. We found our way through the trees with difficulty, because the big, gnarled roots invaded the narrow path. There was no leaving it, because dark water stood in the hollows between the roots. Serpents moved in the water. Both Gray and I were afraid of them. The path wound this way and that between the trees, and we despaired of ever finding our way back, even should we win our freedom.
Yet there was life in this woods. The trees, thick barked and black as they were, wore clusters of oak leaves that shone wetly like dark jade carvings in the murky light the fog let in. Beyond the path, I could hear birds among the branches. They were small finches of gray and green, no bigger than my thumb. Here and there I heard the wild pigs snuffling as they searched for the big acorns the trees dropped. The acorns were big, long, and fair, with brown coverings and deep, well sealed cups.
1 paused to watch one of the tiny birds investigate the meat of one that lay crushed on the path. I felt, rather than saw, the dead man come up behind me. I jumped forward. The bird flew. I turned and looked up at him. He was very close, and I could clearly see the death wound in his chest sewn shut and the other where his neck had been severed to take his head. It was as though I could feel the chill he radiated freezing me.
“Do not despise me, fair one,” he said. “This taking is by no will of mine. I am but a messenger, an emissary, sent by the Lord of the Dead. I was long ago dedicated to his service. It would not have been my choice to be a man of Dis.”
My hair was braided and pinned up at my neck. I brushed it and felt the moisture of the fog that drenched it. “How did you die?” I asked, looking up at his bloodless face.
“Long and long and long ago, my people came here. Before cairns and barrows, houses, cattle, forts, and kings. We looked upon it and knew it would be ours. It was new and the gods danced in the night sky with draperies of light.”
The aurora, the northern lights, I thought.
“Nothing is without price, and the lot fell on me. I was sufficient, they thought. A finer warrior, a greater hunter never lived. You would not give the gods less than the best. So they dug a pit, for I must die three times. Then I was set head down in the pit. When I was in the pit, I admit I was weak. I struggled to breathe. Then they pulled me out. I looked on light for the last time—I never knew how precious it was, for I was vain of my accomplishments—then the spear went through my heart. I dimly felt them take my head. From that time on, I served the Lord of the Dead.”
His tale filled me with sadness. I turned away with tears in my eyes. I could not despise him. No.
The path and its difficulty continued until we reached a tree on a low hummock. It was lightning blasted long ago, only half alive. The other half was hung with the heads of men.
The servant of Dis carried food. Dead limbs littered the ground.
“We must rest,” I told our guide. “We have come a long way and are weary.”
At the base of the tree, flat stones formed a ring around a place that seemed a hearth. I stirred the ashes with my toe. “Fire?” I asked our guide.
“Passersby come here to the wildwood. Some light fires,” he said. Then he went to a hollow log, pulled out coarse meal and a bottle of oil.
It was cold here. The wind from snow covered peaks beyond the lake brushed the hilltop. Looking behind, I could see the lake in the distance, and in places the sun shone on it. Below, the forest was filled with white fog, green leaves, and dark water. To one side, far, very far away, I saw sun and a shining city. Flying buttresses supporting slender towers climbed into the clouds of red, purple, violet, pink, yellow, all with edges shining in the city’s light. The green hills near the city were covered in long grass that seemed to dance with the winds of summer.
“What is that?” I asked our guide.
“The timeless place,” he said. “The heart of light. But we cannot go there. Lady, you are for the dark.”
And, indeed, ahead of us I saw smoke and thick black clouds with lightning among them, long writhing flashes twisted like serpents of brilliance.
“Let us make a fire here before the rain comes upon us,” I said. “If you have flour and oil, I can make bread.”
Gray collected some deadfalls; they littered the ground, fallen from the shattered oak. The dead half of the tree bore its evil fruit. They swung by the hair from its boughs, bleached white by wind and rain. They had the look of men long dead—withered skin, empty sockets that once held eyes and many teeth. When Gray was finished collecting the wood, I seized one long, twisted branch in my hand, and it burst into a blossom of fire.
The warrior stepped back with an exclamation, but most strange were the heads. I heard whispers. They sounded like a room full of people who have seen a wonder and speak of it in low tones among themselves.
“What is this place?” I asked our guide. The fire was blazing now.
“These are those who can go to neither the dark nor the light. These are the false. False to their friends, to those they loved, to all those who did them good, who loved them, who deserved kinder treatment at their hands. Those they betrayed, to the ruin of both body and soul. No one will accept them—neither heaven nor hell, paradise nor desolation, light nor dark, will let them in. Here they remain.”
I knelt and turned my eyes away from them, kneaded the bread and cooked it on a flat rock heated by the fire. Gray and I were ravenous, and we ate every scrap, though it was poor stuff—the flour brown with weevils working in it. They speckled the bread like caraway seeds.
Our captor, guide—who knows what he was—tasted a bit, only a bit, that I gave him. Then I asked him to remember the sun. He almost smiled, and I took his hand with both of mine. I remembered what 1 had thought about last night when I’d healed Gray. We were kneeling in a circle around the dying fire. The wind was blowing, and it was very quiet. All I could hear was its low keening in my ears. I dreamed of forests, endless forests—pine, spruce, fir, drifted deep in snow, white, shining, pale as spindrift blown from the tops of waves. Of people wearing skins, who hunted through the forest, laughing.
I knelt, looking across the fire at a girl. She was as fair as I am fair; it was clear she loved laughter and life. There was a vast sense of primal innocence and peace. Then it ended.
He was dead, and I didn’t expect him to change, but he did; and 1 wondered what I might have done, because, though he looked the same, there was life in the eyes when they looked into mine when there had been none before. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Then we bowed our heads and prayed for a short time. Gray and I made the sign of the cross. We rose and left the tree with its sad, evil fruit and walked on into the darkness.
When we reached the plain, I could smell the fires. The smoke was borne toward us over a wasteland of stone, cold in spite of the flames rising from the fissure in the rock. Both Gray and I were barefoot. I had accepted it now. We—no—1 had been summoned to the darkness by the Lord of the Dead. I cannot think why Gray had accompanied me but that he felt close. We had always been friends, but Maeniel and Dugald had warned me. Death is the fate not just of our kind, but of all living things. Maeniel told me once that a very wise woman told him that if we did not die, we could not live. I have been overjoyed to live. Everything has its price. It was very strange that a boar should come to me, come to summon me. They are the messengers to kings. I am not much. Bodiccia’s line caused it, though; it is an important family, nurtured through the centuries by the noble houses of Ireland.
If death be the last thing I do, why, I pray the gods and heroes of my people that I try to do it as well as I have done more pleasant things. So Gray and I hobbled on, but when our guide saw we were suffering, he stopped and improvised shoes from the hide he wore. It was, he told me, the skin of the aurochs, the great bull of the woods, he wore.
They were crude footwear, made after the manner of ours. The hide is cut to the measure of the foot, a little larger, then holes are cut in the sides to hold the thong that is attached to the ankle and leg. After this, we walked more comfortably. We went hand in hand now. Gray held mine in his. Fire and ice, that was all around us now. Cold, ink black stone with fissures through which flames leaped, heating the nearby air. As we drew away, we felt again the cold wind that swept across the wasteland.