As I watched, the green vines faded from my skin and it returned to its natural, rather pale color.
When I looked up, she was standing there holding Treise and gazing at me in some astonishment.
“In all the years I have tracked that beast and tried to destroy it, I have never seen a champion do it so much damage.”
“It is alive and thus can be killed,” I said. “And I think I can find a way to do that. But I will need your help.”
She helped me to my feet, and I walked to the house. When I entered the door, Treise cried out and held her arms toward me.
I took her and kissed her.
“Make the sacrifices,” my lady told me.
“Come, Treise,” I said to the child. “We must give thanks.” I carried her to the tree that rose just beyond the hearth.
An ancient oak, its roots clutched the ground like claws or thick, knotted fingers. At the center of the house, it enjoyed a space of its own, paved hearth cobbles that looked as if they had been collected from the beach. Above the roots the gigantic trunk rose, as wide at the center as a tall man’s body from head to foot. Between two of the roots, the cobbles formed an offering basin.
The lady brought honey, oil, and mead.
I knelt and seated Treise on one of the roots. I raised my arms in the position of invocation. My body was still shaking. The dress she had given me was torn away at the right shoulder and terrible bruises covered my right shoulder and breast. The teeth of the beast hadn’t penetrated, but they had scratched the skin in a number of places and blood ran down from my shoulder and breast and trickled over my stomach and groin. In places it dripped on the stones.
“I live,” I said, “and for that I am thankful.”
Outside the wind sobbed in the trees, and it was as if I were being answered.
“Now, I must kill it,” I continued, “but I will not call down your blessings on death. Yet you know as well as I that it is sometimes necessary.”
Then I made the offering of mead, honey, and oil at the roots. They are a token, no more than a token, of what we owe, to what the tree represents.
Treise was quiet. She sat still, looking at me with wide, dark eyes.
When I was finished, I picked her up, rose, and faced the woman.
She nodded her approval. As a virgin child I belonged to her, and, in a way, she to me.
“Is there a workshop?” I asked.
“Certainly,” she answered. “Every farm has one. But, remember, you have not much time.”
“How so?” I asked. “And how much?”
“How so?” she mused. “Have you ever seen a sapling bent to make a snare?”
“Yes,” I answered, much mystified.
“Well, that’s something like what I did to the world in order to bring you here. Although the forces involved are much greater, they strain against my grip. Sooner or later they will pull free and, like the bent sapling, spring back and carry you home. How long—a few days at most.”
“Then we must hurry,” I said. “Where is the workshop?”
Treise led me to it.
There must be such a place on all farms. Tools must be repaired, harnesses mended, soap made, osiers dried and cut to useful lengths, logs formed into timber and beams, wood cured for fence posts, hides tanned, nets woven, and fishhooks hammered out—the million and one tasks that arise on a working farm.
The king was a neat man. His tools hung over one bench clean and shining, each one in its place. Along another wall were piled things left over from the butchering and brush cutting that routinely goes on every day on a farm—wood, hides, horns, sinew, bones, jars of rendered fat; odds and ends of wood too good to burn, too small to be made into furniture.
This was just what I wanted.
I described to her the thing I wanted to make.
“Never,” she answered, “have I seen such a weapon.”
“I think there may be none in the world yet. Or if there are, only a few and very far away.”
She nodded. “That’s why I sent for you. I needed fresh ideas.”
We got to work.
There was a lathe. I began to make the first and most important part from an ash butt I found with the other scrap. She began shaping the sinew and horn. Treise sat on the floor and made mud bread.
The ash was hard wood and like stone. I kept having to sharpen the bronze knife. But at length, I got it into the shape I wanted.
She had managed the sinew and horn. I hunched down next to Treise and stacked the parts laid out on the floor, trying to remember exactly how Maeniel put them together.
“I need glue,” I said. “Now I need glue.”
“How is glue made?” Treise asked.
“From the horns, hides, and hooves of animals,” I answered. “Especially the hooves.”
Risderd had quite a large pile of them.
“We will need a pot,” I said.
The lady looked at me in exasperation. I was grimy and perspiring. So was she.
“Now glue,” she said.
“It’s the only way I know how to make it.”
“Then glue it is,” she answered. “But come. We must tend the family.”
Risderd was up walking around. When she saw him near the fire, she repaired my dress and hair.
“I came to find you, Eline,” he said to her. “My wife is very bad and she has a high fever.”
We both went to her sleeping platform immediately. She was tossing and turning, the bandages on her arm and side loose and bloody.
“Be still, now,” my lady said, and rested her hand on the woman’s forehead.
The chief’s wife reached up and took the hand. “You are kind,” she said, “and when you touch me, the fever leaves my body.
“But”—the woman looked up in wonder at her face—“I have no sister.”
“Yes, yes, you do,” she assured her. “But at this time, when the moment of her incarnation came, she did not live long enough to draw breath. But she loves you and has been long your sister and will be again, in due time. She asked me to help you. And it is time. I am engaged in duel with the dark being, Bade. This is his creature.”
“Why does it harry us so?”
“Hush, my sister. Do not trouble your soul.” Then she kissed Aine on the forehead and turned to me.
“Fetch me some soup and fresh water.”
Soup was easy. I had put some on to be ready for supper. Fresh water, I had some trepidation as to that.
I went to the hearth and ladled some of the soup into a bowl. I gave it to Treise, telling her to bring it to her mother, then picked up a wooden bucket.
Risderd was sitting at the low table where the family took its meals.
“I would not go out there, were I you,” he told me. “Something, I cannot say what, is living in the reeds near the pond. It likes fish.”
“We will see,” I said, and strode out into the yard.
I went to the stream, but not to where it flowed past the garden. I dipped the bucket into the water just above the duck pond, then returned to the house. I felt its eyes on me and a cold, guarded intelligence behind them. And indeed the chief was right: the reeds did move as though something watched me from among them.
But perhaps the fish were easier prey. I had hurt him.
I brought water to her, and she washed Aine’s face with it.
She and I prepared a meal for the men. Finn, the elder boy, came out. I noticed the chief blocked the door that looked west to the mountains, where the carrion birds were flying, and I remembered the other son.
“What was his name?” I asked her.
“Ardal. ‘Mighty in Valor.’ And his courage suited his name. For had he not sacrificed himself, none of them would have survived.”
When we served the chief and his son, he rose and bowed to us.
“My lady,” he addressed her, “and also you the helper.” He bowed to me. “I ask that you join us at our supper, in token of gratitude for your assistance to me and my wife.”
She sent Treise away to be with her mother, telling the child to call us if Aine needed anything.
We sat on linen cushions that surrounded the low table.
I had made curd cheese, soup, and bread, and we drank—as was proper at the table of a distinguished man—mead.
Mead, yes—well, mead—there are many kinds. This was the mead of autumn, laced with the flavors of crab apple, cherry, and quince and even some wheat and barley, though there was enough honey to be sure it was not beer. It was a rich, heady brew, more fitted for a festival than a funeral.
The chief complimented our womanly skills. He thanked me for watering the kitchen garden, but did not comment on what happened while 1 was doing so. He must have known my whole right side was covered with bruises. We spoke of the chase. There was in fact a hare in the stew pot. Small game and large to be found hereabout, and how to hunt or trap it. The livestock, he expressed pleasure at, the cow’s new she calf, a valuable addition to his herd.
I had begun to think his troubles had turned his brain. He no longer quite grasped the situation into which he and his family had been plunged.
Yet there was one thing Dugald, the Gray Watcher, and Kyra always agreed on and that was courtesy. One owed it to oneself and others.
He played the genial host—we in turn were the pleased guests. And between us, we kept the conversation both light and amusing until the end of the meal.
When the chief presented us with an assortment of nuts fried with salt, Finn rose to his feet, trembling, strode to the western door, and threw it open and gazed out toward the mountains.
“I propose,” he told his father in a voice that rang out across the room, “I propose to go up there and join him.”
I felt the hairs prickle at the nape of my neck. You see, I knew what he meant. It doesn’t happen often. Dugald had told me it was never very common a custom, more frequent in ancient times. Sometimes a person close to the dead man or woman would not let them journey forth alone but went to the place of passage and joined him. The method I cannot say—usually it was left to the voyager to choose.
I can’t think it mattered, being all one to the crows, the eagles, and flies. The rite is always voluntary, Dugald said. Even in the very oldest accounts he has never heard tell of any coercion being applied.
“No!” the chief said in equally ringing tones. “You know what I must do. And you will obey me in this if you are my true son, because you are all they will have left.”
The hall was flooded by the light of the westering sun. It brought its beauty to light and its strength. The black trunk of its guardian oak, the jeweled colors of the banners and wall hangings, the polished floors and the sparse intricately carved furniture that captures the eternal oneness of life’s web.
Finn walked back toward the table and stood behind us, facing his father, fists clenched. “That thing will kill you.”
Risderd smiled, looking every inch the chieftain he was. “That well may be. In fact, it almost certainly will be, but honor demands I take the mead of springtime and greet my bride. I will have my honor. If death is but a sleep, one wakes from a sleep. If not, why, then the sleeper is forever at peace. Either way, it doesn’t matter.
“As you are my true son, you will obey me in this. As I am your king, you will obey me in this.”
And then he added more softly, “As you love me, you will obey me in this.”
Finn was silent and hung his head. Risderd’s face was a study in power and beauty in the golden light. “When it is done,” he told his son, “you will lead your mother and sister to whatever place my people now live. And you may carry yourself with pride, being the last of such a line. Your mother and sister will marry well. Now go and rest, because tomorrow‘ row we will gather what possessions we might, and the day after, I will begin my journey. If I do not return, you will know what to do.”
Expressions chased one another across Finn’s face. He looked as though he wanted to say a lot of things, but Risderd had caught him in front of, as he saw it, two female guests. The boy was too shy to speak his mind or grieve terribly for—again as we saw it—his father’s pointless death.
She rose; I followed quickly. It doesn’t do to be disrespectful of them.
“My lord, will you require another meal tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. I could tell he was stiff and favored his injured side. “I believe I would like to sleep and save my strength for the morning. I will have much to do… then.”
The sun was pouring through the western doorway now, the light so bright I could not look into it, as it poured from the sky over the crag where his eldest son lay.
“They have almost stopped flying,” he said in a carefully neutral tone.
I knew the boy’s bones must be a red cleaned scatter in the grass.
“We will put him under the hearth,” Finn said.
“No,” Risderd answered. “You”—he emphasized the word—“you and I know he didn’t plan to be there. You will mix them with honey, mead, oil, and the remaining spices—sandalwood and myrrh—pound them to dust and burn them. Then send the ash into the wind from the shore. I would not have him come here past the broken roof and fallen walls and search for us in vain.”
The light streaming through the house began to fail as the sun slowly moved behind a mountain in the distance.
“If you will, my lady, bar the doors against the darkness.”
“I will, my lord.” She curtsied.
I curtsied also, and Risderd departed with his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered.
“I have an idea,” I said.
“Good. It’s about time. I have none. Let’s get the doors and go back to the workshop before this fool kills himself. He’s working on doing it faster than I can save him.”
“I’ve heard of that spring mead. A good long drink of that stuff and that horror won’t have to eat him,” I said. “Besides, I’ve been wondering all day why the thing isn’t in the house with us.”
“It can’t come within the shadow of the tree. The tree is a sacred thing and can’t be defiled, even by Bademagus.”
“It’s night,” I said. “The tree isn’t casting any shadows.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she answered. “Everything the tree shadows at one time or another during the day is safe.”
“Good,” I said. “I’d hate to rely on the doors. They don’t seem that strong.”