But he hesitated, I think to get his breath after his struggle with the sea. Then he lifted one powerful, three clawed foot and came at me.
God, he was fast.
I spun around and bolted. I found I’d left the sea behind and was running across a broken, pitted but level surface toward the face of a cliff I could see ahead.
Fear is a wonderful thing; so is youth. I flew along, but I knew it could not last. I was exhausted; the stitch in my side was agony. My lungs were burning. I could hear the steady slap of the three clawed foot on the wet stone behind me.
And then we both ran out of running room. I flew over the edge and into the sea again. I went under. The currents took me at once. The level stone I had been running on looked oddly like the top of a sea wall.
Yes, we build them, or at least the Romans did—though no doubt my people did the heavy lifting. But this was a bigger sea wall than even the Romans could have created. Yet at last the sea breached it and cut a pass through the ruined stone bulwarks to the remnants of something almost unimaginable. At first I thought it a gigantic cave. And indeed it must once have been domed, much as those Roman buildings Maeniel and Dugald told me about. I would not have believed them either, had they not vouched for each other.
But this domed opening was larger than anything the Romans ever dreamed of. It stretched from sea level to the top of the cliffs, a vast, broken arch that ended where the fallen roof made a hole at the top.
Light swept it and seemed to propagate inside along the curving walls, flashing in a wave along them. This light was gray and blue, a mirrored shimmer that reflected the colors of the sea.
The current had me. I didn’t need to be told not to fight it. I no longer had the strength to do anything; and so it swept me into the broken bowl, because that’s what it looked like—a vast egg with a broken shell. The sun came out just then and shone between the clouds, and it was as though someone had struck the strings of a harp that sang in light and color, not sound.
The glow swept over the shattered walls like a moving rainbow. The dominant colors now were yellow gold and glitter white, glitter like the sparkle of uncounted stars or the winter sun on a frozen wood. Then as quickly as the brightness came, it faded. The sun went behind a cloud and a dreaming glow of a thousand blues, purples, amethysts, violets, and even dark reds flowed over the walls and vanished into uncounted shades of silver, and then a storm cloud’s mixture of gray and white.
I knew I had picked an uncommon place to die. Because die I would. The thing had outlasted me and entered the swirling water that formed a pool under that magical dome. True, I had the fairy armor my father had given me. Yes, and a tortoise has its shell. But when an eagle catches one up in his talons and lets it fall to the stony earth, the eagle dines. The tortoise takes longer to die than a rat or rabbit in the bird’s talons, but I doubt if the tortoise is glad of the fact. I would die hard, but in the end, the fangs would prevail and the monster’s raw strength would wrench me limb from limb.
The current swept me around the vast chamber, but once it flooded through the channel it had cut from the sea, it became a gentle swirl, the kind you get in your porridge in the morning as you cool it with a spoon. The light was unaffected by the water. It propagated all along the walls, whether open to the air or submerged. I thought about Treise, for I was minded to breathe water rather than let the monster rend me. But no, I would not do that. Maybe I could finish my work in spite of death. My hand still contained fire. I would punish it even as it destroyed me.
It was close. I could see the yellow eyes, slit pupils, in the burgeoning light from the rainbow temple as its beauty swept along the walls around me. Then something blotted out the light from below. My mind was fuzzy and I was unable to comprehend what could dim such radiance.
The dragon surfaced under the thing. The orca dragon exploded from the ocean like a broaching whale, with the horror clenched in its jaws the way a hunting cat takes a careless mouse. The monster screamed, but the dragon had it across the body, fangs buried in its midsection.
The thing screamed again, the sound echoing under the high splendor of the arching roof. The sun struck again down. The horror was limp in the dragon’s jaws, blood a scarlet flood down its white chest, dripping from the fangs. The light was a blinding whirl—yellow, red, dashed with sheet gold, then green and blue as another cloud drifted over the sun.
The thing went limp. A toss of the dragon’s head threw it back to the rocks, where it lay at the edge of the pool, a torn, red ruin. The dragon ducked his head to wash away blood and bits of flesh, then swam toward me. Swam under my limp body and surfaced with me on his back. Just as well he did. I clung to the row of spines on each side of his neck and gave way to total exhaustion as he scolded me all the way back to land.
“I’ve been tracking you all along the coast. I kept hoping you would see me and lead the hideous thing into deep water. But no. You were so intent on putting distance between yourself and that horror that I could never get you to listen to my calls. I nearly got him when he swam around the headland, but the tide wasn’t fully in and… what!”
That wasn’t what he said, but it’s the best approximation I can make in my human language.
It seemed as though a shadow passed over the shell of light around us, and the broken creature lying on the stone shifted and changed, becoming something smaller and much less menacing. A little brown man.
But as the dragon drew closer, I saw that all that remained of the murderous terror that had haunted the holy well could not be human either. The brown I saw was a pelt, light and soft at the top but more furry than any human ever is. Where the fur extended below the waist, it was long and thick, protectively covering the legs and genitals. The feet were hard, clawed as the monster’s had been, but with more digits. They seemed molded together and had a thick, horny covering like a hoof.
But it was the monster, wounded in the belly by my arrows, charred by the fire, and torn by the dragon’s fangs. It lay in a pool of blood.
“A faun,” the dragon whispered sadly. “A faun. I had not known any still lived. And I have killed it.”
“No,” I said. “This thing needed killing. Don’t reproach yourself, my friend.”
How did a faun, the gentlest of creatures, become the terrible monster I saw? What gave it the skin of the fish eaters that once hunted along these shores? 1 had not heard that fauns could change shape.
The dragon’s murmurs must have awakened consciousness in the dying creature, because it opened its eyes and looked at me. They were soft and brown, the eyes of a deer or some other shy, wild creature like a hare or squirrel.
The dragon had come to the stone edge of the pool. I stood and climbed off its back and approached my fallen adversary.
Yes, it was certainly dying. Too weak to move, it studied me in an almost gentle silence. Just above its forehead, I saw the two horn buds. They just cleared its rather spiky hair. Even though dying, it managed to recoil when I stretched out my hand toward one.
The light around me sang in silver, but it seemed to darken for a second, and I heard a sound as though the blow of an enormous clapper struck the side of a great bell. Suddenly I stood where I had last seen Mother, in the dark forest near the waterfall that glowed in its own light and emptied into a pool of stars at its base. In the intervening years, I had forgotten how beautiful the place was—the cool, peaceful presence of the giant pines around us, the only sound the deep throated sigh of the wind among them and the trickling of the brook formed by the overflow of the basin beside me.
The faun stood in front of me. I could see him clearly in the light borne by the water into the basin and in the occasional flashes of illumination when the wind took the column of falling water, spreading it into a curtain of glowing lace.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Of course,” he answered. “She didn’t tell you. Would it have made any difference?”
“No,” I answered. “Probably not.” But I could feel the tears on my cheeks.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered softly and stretched out one hairy hand toward my face. “Think! It almost went the other way.”
“Yes.” And I wiped away my tears.
Above, the wind brushed the pale column of water, spraying me with a mist. As Maeniel had told me, the whisper of its touch healed my hurts. It also made the fairy armor shimmer with a slight glow.
I was clothed in it. It spiraled around my bare breasts, covered my arms in the meander’s coils and delicate vining traceries of the holy and everlasting union of not simply all life but a universe into which life is woven, one thread among the rest, many and one forever. A mystery my people comprehended and left its paths in their being once, now, and forevermore.
I saw those pathways echoed in the casings of the tiny horns, and I comprehended they were not for defense but sensory organs, allowing us to speak to each other. To bridge the chasm placed between us by time, language, and breeding.
“I’m glad it’s over,” he said. “I have missed myself, my soul so.”
“Your soul?” I asked.
“Yes. You see, that is the one thing you must never barter away. I did, and have regretted it bitterly ever since. I have not had speech with a flower or a butterfly or a star an age agone. But I was jealous and angry that such as
she”
—and I knew of whom he spoke—“had life eternal while we lesser mortal creatures die.”
I understood his sorrow, and, in the course of time, I was sure I would know more.
He continued, “So I bartered away what I was—that is what your soul is—for power and immortality. And I became the creature you saw. You freed me from an eternity of regret. An eternity of sorrow.”
“How will I know if someone demands my soul?” I asked.
“You will know,” he said as he turned toward the fountain.
Then he went to one knee beside it and scooped up the water in one big, furry hand. “She will tell you what to do,” he said. “I may tarry no longer.”
“Wait!” I said. But he was already drinking. And a second later, I stood before her, back in the world I had left in the splendor of the light.
She had a double edged, bronze ax in her hand. She looked down into the sad, brown eyes of the faun.
“My son,” she whispered in tones of deepest grief. “My son. My son.” Then she pressed the double ax into my hand.
“Take his head before he dies,” she commanded.
“No!”
“Fool!” she snapped. “This is not the time to falter. Would you have him be lost? Do you hate him so much?”
I looked down and met my adversary’s gaze.
“She is ever wise,” the dragon said. “Do it.”
I swung the ax. Its edge rang against the stone.
She helped me wrap the head in white linen. Then we put it in a sack.
“I will need to know his name to command him,” I said.
“You will not need to command him,” she said. “And when you awaken him, he will tell you his name. After he has served you for a time, let him go. Give him his freedom. Then be his transgressions forgotten, and he may forget his suffering, have life again, and use it to do good.”
The tide was at the flood, and the sun was resting among the clouds. The half dome was showing me the beauties of gray, white, and, at times when the sun peered through, a golden haze. I cannot describe how wild, strange, and beautiful the place was at the end of the long platform of rock, looking out over the ocean. Where could the time have gone? Had I struggled so long with the monster? It seemed late afternoon.
I shivered and realized I was naked. The last struggle and my transition to the antechamber of death had torn away the last few rags from my body. Only the wild swirls of the green armor clothed me, yet I was modest in a sense, for it covered my sex and breast tips. I had fastened my hair up to keep it out of my way. But the braids had long come undone and, except for the two warrior braids that descended from a part just above my forehead and hung down on either side of my face, my hair floated free down my back.
Kyra taught me how to prepare it when on the hunt. She said the fighting women among her people always wore it thus, to be sure that even when taken by surprise or awakened abruptly from sleep, it wouldn’t get in their faces. I had, you see, after the manner of her people, never cut it. Uncut hair proclaimed my virgin status. A man who interfered with me without my consent would face a dreadful curse. And even my husband might not be so bold as to take my maidenhead. Sometimes a virgin girl was first offered to a powerful lord or a chief, so that any ill luck would be turned aside from her husband. Kyra told me that such a rite was uncommon, but in my case, I would certainly frighten my future in laws and I needed to be prepared to make the best of things if such a proposal was made as part of the marriage contract. To endure the rite with dignity.
I had thought men being what they are, jealous as rutting stags or bulls, that such magic would be highly unlikely, but now…
Given the characteristics of my armor—I touched my belly and the complex curves and meanders leaped out and hardened—how would I ever be able to make love to anyone? Would I, like Gydden’s daughters, need to be forced the first time?
Then I looked down and saw the blood running down my legs. I was puzzled. How had I hurt myself there of all places?
I frowned, then looked up at her.
“You are now a woman,” she said. “I put my hand on you when you cut off the faun’s head.”
I surprised myself by beginning to cry. It had been a long, hard day.
Then a soft haze, wearing the colors of sunset, surrounded her and me. Someone, again I did not see who, gave her clothing—my old tunic and pants, now repaired, and another outfit, a white tunic and leggings. Then she showed me, as Kyra would have, how to wash and pad myself so that the womanly purification would be neat, and told me that I must wash myself and how often during my courses.
I was still trembling and weeping. “The daughters of Gydden,” I said. “The choosers of the slain. I don’t… I won’t…”