Sláine stood over the dead.
A detached part of his brain knew that he was responsible, that these lives had ended because of him, but that part seemed so far away, dislocated from him in a way he couldn't begin to explain.
There was blood on his hands. His arm hung limply at his side. Trying to move his arm sent a wave of nausea through him.
"What have I done?" he barely breathed the words.
He realised that Murdo was talking to him. He had no idea what the warrior was saying. It didn't matter, his voice was soothing.
Warriors gathered around him. A babble of voices demanded justice. Conn's kin argued for his head. Sláine felt his anger rising quickly. He knew that he could kill them all. It would not be too many.
Six
Prophecies of the Druid
Two Red Branch warriors dragged Sláine between them. Murdo walked in front of them.
The atmosphere in the town was tense.
Conn's kin were demanding their right to retribution and they wouldn't be satisfied until Sláine was pinned down on to the headsman's block and his skull was rattling around in the basket.
He was thrown at the feet of Grudnew.
Word spread quickly. Women came running from their homes, wringing hands on washcloths and pulling up skirts as they rushed, desperate not to miss a thing. Men marched down from the high fields and the plains of Airghialla. The druids came from the nemeton - all but Cathbad and Dian who were tasked with caring for the dead.
Grudnew waited in silence, his face impassive.
Sláine did not say a word.
When Conn's brother, Raif, read the charge they expected the youngster to beg for his life. He didn't. He didn't move. He didn't even look up.
Grudnew stared down at him.
"Well, lad, what do you have to say for yourself?"
"He's a warped one, sire. Got no control of himself. He killed my nephew and my brother, cut them down in cold blood."
"I wasn't talking to you, Raif of the Bloody Axe. Your time to speak will come." Grudnew surveyed the faces around him. "Would anyone speak for the boy?"
Murdo stepped forwards. "I would."
"Go on."
"As my eyes are my witness, Conn's lad, Cullen, betrayed his friend on the training field. I was too far away to prevent it. Cullen threw a gáe bolga at young Sláine's back and when it failed to bring him down, he hurled himself at an unarmed man with a sword."
"Is this the truth?" Grudnew asked Sláine - who still hadn't moved. He nodded slightly. "Go on, Murdo."
"The spear lodged in the lad's arm. He had no weapon save that so he tore it out of his own flesh and used the assassin's own tool to cut him down. It was a righteous killing, sire. The lad was defending himself. He did nothing to incite Wide Mouth's anger."
"Lies!" Raif snarled, coming forward. "He cut down the lad in cold blood! He's a monster touched by the warp! You saw it, Murdo! Why protect the beast? I'll whet my axe in his thick head and then you can feed his meat to the damned pigs for all I care!"
"Silence!" Grudnew bellowed, wheeling round on Raif. "You will talk when I tell you to, not before. Now, Murdo, finish your account."
"Not much more to tell, sire. Wide Mouth's father, Conn of a Hundred Battles came blustering up demanding his blood right, and again attacked the lad, forcing Sláine to defend himself or perish. He was in the blood rage when he dispatched Conn but it wasn't unjust."
Grudnew nodded thoughtfully. "Anyone else here see a different version of events? And before you open your mouth, Raif, I mean see as in with your own eyes." He waited but no one spoke up. "So this is how it is, both speakers claim the lad Sláine was in the grip of an almighty warp-spasm when he did the killing. That means the spirit of the Goddess was inside him and he was not in his own mind. Who am I to punish an act favoured by Danu herself? My beloved lady knows her own mind far better than I do, but I know well enough not to question her. This is my judgement: Sláine will face the tests of the druids. If he truly is favoured of Danu he shall walk away from the testing as a blooded warrior of the Red Branch and there will be no recriminations. Should he fail the druid's test, he dies. Do I make myself clear?"
"Abundantly," Raif of the Bloody Axe grumbled. "You are a coward, not a king. Calum would never have sheltered the murderer of an innocent man. He was better than that."
"Hold your tongue, Raif, before you say something you don't live long enough to regret. Your kin started this, but it ends here, now. Go against me and I'll have no qualms about cutting your tongue out and wearing it on my belt. Understood?"
"Understood," Raif sniffed, and then hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat into the dirt by Sláine's feet. He craned his head and rolled it around his neck slowly, cracking the bones in his neck. He turned his back and left.
Grudnew shook his head. Everything about that last little show promised that it was far from over. He was going to have to deal with Raif, and more likely than not, the rest of his nasty little clan.
"Up you get," the king said, not unkindly. He offered Sláine his hand and hauled the youngster to his feet. "Your fate's in Cathbad's hands, better hope he doesn't hold too much of a grudge after that prank you boys pulled with those supposedly ancient tablets. Could have been worse - you could have smeared his loincloths with poison oak."
Gobhan and Searlas pushed and prodded Sláine towards the Great Cairn.
Murdo walked behind them, talking quietly to himself.
The fact that the druid had chosen to try Sláine in the Great Cairn was ominous. Of all the places he could have selected, Cathbad had decided upon the most sacred place in all of Eiru - the place where the Goddess began her work of creation. To the unknowing eye it was little more than a grassy hillock with a huge cairn of flat stones stacked on its summit. A huge stone served as a door to the immense burial chamber beneath the hill, and there were whispers of other darker places in the deeps below the ancient crypt.
It was a place of power, a place worthy of fear.
The wound in Sláine's arm had opened up again and was bleeding freely by the time they had walked beyond the nemeton to the huge burial mound.
Cathbad stood beside the huge stone doorway, waiting for them. Several other druids gathered around him, ready to serve in Sláine's trial, including Dian. "The druids'll see to you, lad," Murdo said, inspecting the tear. White lines of fat surrounded the bare meat of his upper arm. "It ain't pretty but you might get lucky. All depends how good their healing skills are."
Sláine nodded.
That strange feeling of dislocation persisted.
He knew where he was and what was happening, but it was as if it was happening to someone else and he was watching from a distance ever so slightly removed.
"Thank you, Murdo."
"Don't thank me, lad. Go prove me right. Anything else is a waste of more life."
"What's going to happen to me?"
"Haven't got a clue, but judging by the look on your friend's face, nothing good."
Dian looked ill. His skin was ashen and he was shaking. Sláine tried not to read anything in to it but it was difficult not to. They had made Cathbad look like a fool, exposing him as a charlatan in front of the king. Now his life lay in the hands of the old man. It was a perfect bitter circle of irony - perfect enough for Sláine to appreciate it even though he found himself caught in the heart of it.
"You, boy, are to be judged by the dead," Cathbad said gravely. His wizened knuckles whitened around the rowan staff he leaned on. Malice burned in his eyes. "They will not be lied to. The king may fall for pretty words and the promises they hold, but the dead know the darkness of a man's soul for that is the world they live in. They will examine you and if they find you wanting they will take you. There is no glory of the Summerland for a murderer, Sláine Mac Roth. If the dead find you guilty your afterlife will be one condemned to eternal torment and suffering.
"You will be chained within the darkness of the Great Cairn for three days and three nights without sustenance, until sunrise on the fourth day, Midsummer's dawn. The door will be sealed. You will not be allowed to emerge before the trial is complete. If you are innocent Danu herself will care for you, as your defender claimed. You will know it is done when a single branch of red morning sunlight falls on your face. You will be alone - although the bones of heroes past will sit vigil on your trial - if you are innocent you will leave the Great Cairn alone. If you are guilty the spirits of the dead will drag your soul kicking and screaming into the Underworld, such is your doom, Sláine Mac Roth."
Sláine nodded, he had expected no less. "My arm?"
Unmoved, the druid said: "It seems your trial has already begun. You will receive no healing until your innocence is established."
"That's outrageous!" Murdo objected, rounding on Cathbad. He made to grab the druid by the scruff but Cathbad's rowan staff came rapping down on his hands, hard.
"That is Danu's law. The Earth Mother will care for him or she will damn him. It was you, was it not, that pleaded his case, claiming the intervention of the Goddess in the slaughter?" Cathbad leered at the warrior. "You only have yourself to blame. Now, take him inside. I grow weary of explaining myself to heathens."
Sláine was thrown into the darkness. He staggered but refused to fall. He held his head high as Dian entered the tomb.
"I am to be your gaoler," his friend said, steering him towards a set of rusted manacles set into the far wall. "Forgive me."
"What is there to forgive?" Sláine asked as Dian secured the first cuff. There was a lock mechanism of some sort. It held firm as he tugged on it. Dian secured the second cuff, jerking his wounded arm upwards in the process. The agony was exquisite. The cuffs were set high, so that the prisoner was forced to stand, adding an extra level of pain to the trial.
"What happened? I mean-"
Sláine hung his head. He couldn't look his old friend in the eye. "Wide Mouth tried to murder me in cold blood. He threw a gáe bolga at my back." He nodded at the bloody wound in his arm. "Something happened to me, Dian. I lost control of myself. I killed him but it wasn't me. I felt myself disappear and some beast rise to the surface, warping my skin and bone as it claimed my flesh. Am I a monster? Is that what I have become?"
"Lug, so it is true what Murdo said? You're a warped one?" There was a peculiar reverence in the way he said it.
"I don't know. Carnun's balls, I just don't know. I'm frightened, Dian. I lost control of myself there. It's happened before, but not like that. Not so that I lost myself so completely."
"You better pray to Danu you are, my friend, otherwise there is no way you are walking out of here alive."
The young initiate took hold of Sláine's arm and pressed around the wound, causing it to open up again. Blood ran between his fingers. "There's little I can do," he muttered, more to himself than Sláine as he pulled a metal torc from his own arm and secured it on Sláine's, above the wound. He tightened it as best he could, staunching much of the blood. It wasn't perfect but it would slow the bleeding enough to at least give him a chance of not bleeding to death.
He watched Dian clamber up onto the side of a tomb and release a single crystal from its setting in the ceiling. A weak chink of light picked out a cobweb on the far wall. It revealed more than Sláine wanted to see. The floor was strewn with bones.
"When the light blinds you, then its time to come out. Don't die, eh? I've buried one friend already this week. It wasn't exactly fun."
"I'll do my best," Sláine said wryly.
"No food, no water, can't even sit down. You know this is because of what we did, don't you? He wants to break you."
"Then I shall have to do my best to disappoint the old goat."
"Come on, boy!" Cathbad called from outside the cairn. "We'll seal you in there with him if you don't hurry!"
"Sorry... I've got to go." Dian backed away. "Coming, your holiness. Coming."
They rolled the stone across the doorway and sealed him in the darkness with the ghosts of the dead and the rats.
He lost all sense of time in the darkness.
At first he was strong.
At first he was stubborn.
At first he believed he would survive.
But all that changed as the darkness brought his ghosts back to haunt him. There would be no respite.
Sounds drifted up to him, rats chittering, and darker, fuller sounds that his imagination painted as the dead coming to drag him down to the Underworld. He closed his eyes but it made no difference to the sounds, they haunted him just as completely. At times he heard a longer dragging sound and a deep grumbling moan. At other times voices incapable of forming words, left to rasp guttural and incomplete sounds of pain and despair. He imagined it was Cullen down there, trapped somewhere between the Summerland and the Underworld, cursing him for condemning him to that vile limbo. In his head those sounds took on the more desperate edge of humanity. His mind swelled with the torments of that exile, his victim denied both heaven and hell.
The voices were his, he realised at some point. He haunted himself, accused himself, betrayed himself.
He tried to think of his friends, picture their faces in his mind, but he couldn't see them. He saw only Cullen and his dead father.
Madness lurked in the darkness of the burial chamber.
He couldn't find it in himself to feel angry.
He was surrendering, giving up.
He had killed both men. He deserved his fate.
Oh yes you do, warped one. Vile thing. Monster. You deserve death. You deserve suffering. You deserve your pain. Nothing more. Nothing less.
He knew that the voices of the dead spoke the truth. He deserved nothing more than pain.
So he gave himself to it.
Smells reached him too: dank must, rot, decay, and occasionally, like a ghost in the all-consuming dark, the pestilent reek of disease.
He suspected then what lurked in the depths beneath the Great Cairn.