He could see that the very hard stones that formed the shell of the tower were worn, pitted by wind and rain. But the crusted lichens, fern, vine, and trees kept faith with its builders, more powerful than stone in their everlasting mortality and perpetual self renewal. When even the stones returned to dust, the skeleton of trees that formed the tower would still stand.
He was growing both thirsty and weary, wondering if he was doomed to climb forever. He had a number of worries about this place. There are a lot of ways to kill a man, but if the ruler of this stronghold wanted to destroy him, a mind that could conceive the ground plan of a structure like this would have no difficulty in disposing of him.
He could feel places; it was one of his gifts. He’d felt the malice of the plateau and the thing it kept imprisoned along with him. He’d felt the innocence at the farm. Her innocence. Her honor. And Balin’s.
He felt nothing wrong here—only the same strange sense of peace. Still feeling it, he reached the top of the stair.
There he saw how the waterfall was involved with the tower. There was more than one fall. The water entered from the river at the top of the slope and fell into a pool at the base. It drained down from there into the tower. Long, feeding roots from the trees hung like so many strings of a curtain into the falling water that slipped from ledge to ledge, filling basin after rock basin, all thick with roots.
The vines that formed the base grew up the walls, flowering in wild profusion—red, purple, gold, emerald, amethyst, carnelian, white— hanging in tufts, spikes, chains, ribbons, and spiraling, filling the air with fragrance. Immortal, indeed, growing forever, self renewing, always changing yet immutable in their endless variation. Trees hung over the pool at the first falls, and it was as though whatever ruled the tower heard his unspoken concerns.
The pond at the base of the falls was green with saganella and water weed. Horsetails filled the shallows, growing thick as reeds. Arthur walked across, away from the tree staircase to the mossy verge of the pool, and drank. The water was clear, sweet, and good, reminding him of the Flower Bride’s well at the top of the plateau.
This is not a place of death,
he thought,
but of life.
The paradox was borne upon him. There would be no life without death. No sapling could live without the humus contributed by a fallen tree. Nothing could be born without another dying.
Something walked through the glade, past the waterfall, around the trunk of a tree fern, and into the shadows beyond. He sat on his heels, considering. Did they come here to look upon what gave way to them, or what rooted itself in their sundered flesh?
He heard voices talking, arguing in a language he didn’t understand. Then they passed him again, only footsteps bending grass and sound, no sight, troubled his eyes.
He became aware that the trees whose roots crowded the edge of the pool were laden with fruit. Was it fruit, or something stranger that he had never encountered? Near his face a leaf clasped a chain of cherries. He picked one and put it in his mouth. The taste was a shock of pleasure. It had a big seed, though. He spat it out into the pool.
He was hungry. He finished the rest. The seeds floated and were carried away by the water as it emptied into the core of the tower.
The tree was pleased. That was a shock, a profound shock. He had never thought of a tree feeling anything, much less pleasure.
The other trees around the pool had fruit. Some were like large berries, roseate shading to black, blue shading into purple, beige outlined in scarlet. He made a meal of them. The blues were so sweet he could only eat a few, the red, apple lemon, the beige almost like some spicy cheese.
Then he turned toward the path where he had heard the ghost pass. He followed it into a dark, strange forest. Tree ferns, all sizes; massive trees with leaves small, wet, and green as moss; paper thin ferns that grew covering the trees’ fronds, hanging down but so fragile they presented no barrier to a casual passerby. They were as easily brushed aside as cobwebs.
It was dark but not threatening. A green darkness, moist and almost unbelievably quiet, until he heard the sound of the sea.
My thought was that kyra had picked wrong again. Mondig, with Merlin’s men backing him, didn’t look to let us surrender.
Talorcan, in boar form next to me, shifted, then snorted. “I come for someone,” he said in his grating pig voice. “If it is you, lady, I will escort you into darkness with an honor guard.”
The wolf snarled next to me, his voice thick with menace.
Kyra leaned against one of the carved roof posts, her face hidden as though she didn’t want to watch my end. Dugald stood next to a white faced Dunnel. He tried to seize the initiative and save us.
“Wait!” Dunnel shouted. “Don’t let this go any further. I will give sureties for their behavior. Let this be the last of the killing.”
“Bah!” Mondig spat. “You haven’t a tithe of the honor price of any of the dead.”
It was true. Dunnel was a poor man, chief though he was.
“Merlin’s men!” I yelled back. “What! Are the Painted People ruled by the archdruid?”
“No, girl!” someone shouted back. “But only a fool shoves his head into a bear’s den.” There was a murmur of assent.
“There’s more to be gained by being wary of the powerful than by provoking them,” Mondig said.
The fire was at my back, the armor glowing on my skin, but I felt a wave of cold and I knew. I knew.
“Kyra!” I shouted. “The head. The head.”
She looked up, her eyes wild.
Heads are oracles. This is why they are taken and questioned.
“Wait,” I said. “Before you spend your blood to end our lives, best you find out about Mondig’s motives.”
Kyra had Cymry in a sack. Inside the sack, he was confined in a net bag, so he could be suspended. I pulled the head out of the sack.
With my cracked ribs searing, I ran up the nearest house post, using the carvings to climb. I
should be ashamed,
I thought. The armor set off my bare body the way an enameled setting displays a rare jewel. Even the blood streaming from the gashes Merlin’s champion inflicted were part of the grim beauty of my flesh. I knew the eyes of every man, and not a few of the women, were fixed on me, and that fear alone hadn’t saved my life.
I was the embodiment of desire! And the crowd felt it. To the people in the hall, I was Eros made flesh.
I slung Cymry’s head from the highest rafters. It thumped heavily, just a few feet in front of the fire pit. They sacrificed to it, you know— both the Greeks and Romans—this Eros. And I, for the first time, knew why. And why the chief to be a chief and the king to be a king must lie with the Flower Bride at the flowing well, and why among Farry’s people, kings and chieftains wed the sea.
Desire is the fountainhead of creation, everlasting renewal the only immortality. Mother and Father both, combined to make me what I am, the living symbol of both, creation and immortality. Imprinted on my soul at this moment was that knowledge, and I would bear it forever, even as I would bear on my body the symbols of that eternal knowledge my people saw time out of mind.
When I was finished fastening the head, I jumped, somersaulting in the air, and landed lightly on my feet near the fire pit, close to the head. I glanced at Mondig. He looked sick, my signal to proceed boldly.
Merlin’s men gathered around Mondig protectively. It’s the oldest game in the world I saw being played out before me. Would you capture a whole people? Take them into bondage without difficulty? Simply pick your candidate. He must be eligible to be chief—king, consul, chief magistrate, whatever he is called. You send your army to put him in power. Once he is seated in his position to rule, your army keeps him there, and he does your bidding. He knows that if you abandon him, he dies at the hands of his own subjects. He dares not disobey.
This is the trick that Merlin used to keep the Painted People quiescent. Mondig was his man, and the chieftains knew it. But Merlin did them no harm, and they were thankful to be left in peace. So they tolerated the alliance.
I was about to try to change all that, and it might cost me dear if I failed.
“Cymry,” I commanded. “Come answer me. It is I, your mistress, who summons you!”
For a moment, I held my breath, and then I saw life creep into the face. The eyes opened, lips came down over the teeth bared in the rictus of death. I heard a whisper as a gasp of awe rolled through the hall.
“Wine!” Cymry whimpered.
I caught up a cup and tossed it into the flames. They flared around Cymry’s face, and he cried out in pleasure and laughed.
“Drunken pig!” Kyra snarled. “Don’t give him any more until he answers your questions.”
Cymry whimpered and then sobbed. “Isn’t it enough for you, bitch, that I suffer the torments of this dreadful slavery?”
“No!” Kyra screamed. “No! You murderer! Nothing, nothing you suffer will ever be enough!”
“Cymry,” I said, “how did you find out when and how to attack the stronghold where Kyra dwelled with her husband and children?”
Cymry sighed and moaned, “More wine. Please. Please, more wine.”
“No!” I said. “Answer! I command you!”
Cymry’s eyes closed. I sensed he was trying to slip away. I had let him do so before when I was satisfied. But not
this time,
I thought vengefully.
I caught him by his long, dark hair and shoved the head into the fire. I was still armored, and I knew the armor would protect my arm for at least a short time.
Cymry screamed as he always did when threatened with fire. The meshes of the net bag were burned away by the flames.
“Nononononononono, noaaa!” he screeched.
“I want the truth, and I want it now. Don’t try to play with me, you vile heap of shit! Give me an answer, or I will put you on the coals and let them slowly, ever so slowly, consume you!”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, God have mercy, yes!” Then he sobbed and begged for more wine.
I was still holding him in my left hand, my fingers fixed in his hair. I lifted the cup to his lips with my right. I gave him only a sip, enough to wet his throat. My mind laughed at the thought, and I knew I was close to madness. I wondered if it would trickle from the stump of his neck.
But it didn’t. His sudden, sinful death had trapped his spirit in the parchment flesh covered skull. It could absorb any amount of wine.
I raised the head and held it high, showing its dreadful life to every person in the hall. “Now! Answer!” I said.
Cymry let out a sobbing ululation of almost mad grief. “Mondig told me! Mondig sold me his brother, his brother’s wife, and the women of the household. They were rich. The storage souterrains beneath the chief’s hall were filled with oil, sealskins, walrus ivory, wool, dried cod enough to keep a whole city fed! It was the richest prize I had ever taken.”
“And you got greedy on the way home,” Kyra whispered. She lifted another cup from the table. “Wine! I’ll give you wine!”
She dashed the wine in Cymry’s face and lit it with a wax light from the table. I put the screaming, sobbing thing on the floor. The briefly flaming wine wouldn’t kill him, or I should say, drive the spirit from the head. She had done it before, for the same reason—to torment him. In minutes whatever virtue in wine that burns would flare away, and he would sink into the shadowy chambers of his living death.
Then she summoned the women. They took Mondig, coming down from where they sat with their men and children. They didn’t kill Merlin’s soldiers; they balled them. Maeniel told me bees do this to a queen they do not want; they crowd in around her until she dies of suffocation.
Most carried weapons, and they had shields. They surrounded Mondig’s guard, pushing in closer and closer. In a short time, Merlin’s men couldn’t move, not even to draw their weapons. Then they began to peel them off one by one, passing them on to their menfolk, who disarmed and bound them. A man, even a strong man, is pretty helpless when seven or eight women have hold of him. It was a losing and, for the most part, silent struggle. At the end, Mondig stood alone.
The women took care not to hurt him, pushing him along with shields, sword hilts, spear butts, and mace handles.
Until he reached the center of the hall facing the Death Pig.
Talorcan’s small red eyes were fixed on him. I pointed toward Cymry. The thing was on the floor, babbling to itself. “Did you come for him?”
“No!” Talorcan’s stone on stone voice answered.
I pointed to Mondig.
“Yes!”
“I thought you only came for heroes,” I said.
“He might have been a hero, had he so chosen.”
The women had taken care not to hurt Mondig at all. But there was a lot of loose rock in the room. I said they’d chopped the hall out of the hillside. It was the men who stoned him.
The next day, Kyra got me up before dawn. She braided my hair in four plaits. She and I used the sweathouse to clean ourselves.
“I’m ashamed of last night,” I told her.
She looked surprised.
“After we returned to the tent,” I said.
She laughed a little—a harsh, soft laugh.
“I broke down,” I said.
And I had. Broken down completely, once I no longer had to control myself. I threw myself on Kyra’s neck and cried hysterically to go home.
Issa dragged Gray away. “Let her people settle it among themselves,” she told him.
Dugald was in a fury. “What is this nonsense?” he roared.
“And just as well I did, too!” I screamed back at him. “That scheming traitor would have found a way to kill all of us!” I gasped out. “But the way… the way they killed him… I can’t, I… don’t want to be among these people.”
“Nonsense,” Dugald roared back. “A salutary lesson to those who would take his place.”
Mondig didn’t die with dignity. He tried to run—and did—around the fire pit. That was the problem; in an arena there is nowhere to go. As I said, the men threw the stones. They had strong arms and a good aim. Most of the stones hit him, but he kept running until he was a battered rag of flesh and couldn’t run any longer. Then he staggered, and at the last, crawled, leaving a trail of blood and slime. Around and around, until I persuaded Talorcan to use his tusks and end it.