The Phantom Queen Awakes (29 page)

A woman knelt at the downstream side of the
ford, washing clothes. Something about the redness of her hair in
the morning sunlight caught my attention.

“You are about your work early today,” I said
by way of an introduction.

With elaborate slowness, she sat up and turned
slowly towards me. I gasped. She was the most beautiful thing I had
ever seen, that glorious hair, complexion as white as milk but
radiant, green eyes that looked straight through me, lips that made
me dream of winter nights where the only warmth to be found away
from the fire was in the arms of a woman.

Then I recognized the clothes she was washing,
and I could have been no colder had I been encased in
ice.

“Is there anything of mine there?” I wheezed,
certain there could not be, because I had neither undressed nor
unpacked my bags since arriving at that doomed farmstead, but
wondering all the same.

My stomach fell as fast as my gorge rose as I
recognized the five shirts she laid out, plain except for the
embroidery at the throat and wrists, the entwined snakes that
proclaimed their wearers’ allegiance. That was how I knew there was
nothing of mine in her wash. I never wasted my coin on fripperies
to impress others ― there was no-one I wished to stir. I had lived
long enough to have had the vanity knocked out of me, and needed no
badges to remind me of my worth. I was Tuathan’s man. That was all
I, or anyone else, needed to know.

She looked at me and smiled. I felt fear that
was more hot and intense than anything I had ever experienced
before. How else should I feel when a goddess focused on
me?

She got to her feet and walked towards me. If
I was asked to swear for my life whether her bare feet touched the
dewy ground I could not answer. She lightly caressed Rowan’s
nuzzle, and I felt all the tension melt out of the animal in less
time than it took to blink. I found myself staring into a face,
into eyes that went beyond anything a man might call beautiful,
such was their sweetness, their awful power, their dreadful, cold
ineffability. Her hand moved to mine, feeling like the hand of an
ordinary woman, soft and warm and pliant.

“This is not your day,” she said in a voice
like the rush of wind over a heather moor in high summer, just
before the fire came.

What could any man say to the Morrigan when
she told him the clothes she washed belonged to his
comrades?

Then she was gone, in a flutter of wings, the
sound of which was overlaid by the pounding hooves of the five
horses riding towards me.

“Why are you waiting?” called Corbelathan. “I
thought you said we should hurry.”

The five of them kicked across the ford,
splashing, laughing as their heads cleared of the miasma their
excesses had caused. If they saw the clothes of theirs the Morrigan
had left on the ground, they gave no sign. I rode on after them, my
heart so heavy I was surprised Rowan had the strength to carry
me.

****

They found us less than half a mile from the
cairn marking the boundary between the lands. We rode hard all
morning, not spelling the horses, until Padhraig’s stumbled and
broke its leg. Corbelathan, to give him his due, dismissed
Padhraig’s plea to leave him behind. Corbelathan was enough of a
prince to lift the man behind him on his own horse. Our progress
after that was considerably slower, although we neither saw nor
heard any sign of pursuit behind us all day. We emerged from the
trees at the base of the gentle, grassy rise towards the cairn,
grinning at each other. We had made it.

Which was exactly when twenty horsemen
appeared at the crest of the rise, halting there, leaning forward
over their horses’ ears, staring down at us with hard eyes. The
afternoon sun shone on the white and ochre clay daubed on their
faces and torsos, their hair twisted into stiffened spikes. We did
not need to see their freshly sharpened blades to understand there
could only be one outcome to this confrontation.

One of the horsemen kicked on down the hill,
approaching us at a walk. As I moved Rowan towards him, I
recognized him as Dar Elias, Cu Cumundi’s right hand. By reputation
he was wily as a fox, and as dangerous. As he rode, he stroked the
head of a pigeon he held to his chest.

“Your fame precedes you,” he said after
reining in and ostentatiously not dismounting before Corbelathan,
as courtesy demanded. “Or should I say, your infamy.” With that, he
lifted the bird to his lips, whispered to it and then tossed it
into the air, where it quickly flew back the way we had come. It
was rumored that Cu Cumundi could converse with the creatures of
his kingdom as easily as with its men.

“Give me the murderer and the rest of you can
go on your way,” Dar Elias said, his voice deep and rolling with
contempt. His only reply was the hiss of swords. Mine was not the
last to appear.

Dar Elias looked from each of us to the next
in line, and then nodded. “I should have expected no less from
you.” He lifted his left hand, and the rest of his war band came
trotting down the slope towards us. As they approached we all
dismounted and pushed our horses to the rear. There were men,
somewhere, who fought on horseback, but none of them were
here.

The heaviness that had oppressed me since the
morning lifted, leaving me feeling light on my feet and clear
sighted. The prospect of imminent, violent death concentrates a
man’s mind on what makes life worth living; the colors and scents
of the country; the gruff, wary voices of his brothers-in-arms; the
memories of past times, of glory and tenderness, of terror and
elation.

I had known from the moment I gave my fealty
to Tuathan that I should likely die for him. I had the scars to
demonstrate how often I had put myself in harm’s way to protect his
body and his honor. It had been a good life, and while I should
have preferred it to go on until I slipped away in my sleep, a
toothless old man who bored the tribe spitless with his incessant
tales of the older, better days, I was content for it to end here,
today. To be sure, I would have preferred a better reason than
protecting a sot and a rapist and a murderer, but Corbelathan was
my king’s son, and my honor required me to give my life just as
readily for him. My blood might belong to another man’s sword, but
my honor would always be my own and nobody was ever going to take
it away from me.

While Dar Elias’ band dismounted, we grasped
each other’s arms and wished ourselves the fortunes of war, which
would be a swift cut to the front from another man of honor, which
Cu Cumundi’s men were. They were another tribe, differently
accented, wearing their hair differently, with different patterns
drawn in clay on their torsos than we would have drawn, but they
were our brothers just the same. There was no enmity in this
battle, no hatred, just resolution.

Dar Elias stepped forward again, thrusting his
sword point into the earth between his feet. The gesture was not
lost on us, as the rest of his men followed his lead.

“I give you one last chance,” he said,
striking the pose of a leader of men, chest puffed out like that
pigeon he had just sent home, chin high, clear eye fixed on
Corbelathan. “Give up the despoiler of our hospitality to my lord’s
mercy and the rest of you may return to your homes without a stain
on your honor.”

If there was a darker or more pungent stain
than the knowledge I had walked in the other direction while my
lord’s son was taken, I could not imagine it. I could not bear that
burden. Its weight would drive me, living, into the
earth.

We roared back at him. “Tuathan!” we bellowed
and shook our swords in his face, promising him his blood would
stain this sweet grass red in a moment or so. He smiled took his
sword from the ground and raised it to his lips in salute. His men
did the same as they lined up in front of us, making a curved line
that would loop and surround us soon enough. There would be no
testing of champions today, no stories to be embellished before the
fire on long winter nights. This was to be butchery, and we were
the cattle.

Any man who gives you a blow by blow
description of a battle he has fought is a liar. From that moment
when your opponent first raises his weapon in your face to the time
you stand, gazing around yourself at the dead and dying, astonished
you have survived, battle is a blur of confusion and terror. It is
not a man who strikes at you, but an enemy, at once both less and
more than a man. He has no face or name. He is only his desire to
kill you.

Swords came at us from all sides, and we
struck back as the world shrank to a tiny space, fenced in by the
clash of swords, the screams of men. My sword sliced into the
shoulder of the man in front of me, scarlet blood spouting onto his
clay patterns. I think I saw Padhraig take a cut above his eyes and
another to his throat. Then I felt the fiercest pain I had ever
felt, on the back of my legs, and I collapsed into a heap, the
battle continuing above me, anger erupting through my agony. Some
son of a whore had hamstrung me! I groped for my sword where I had
dropped it, ready to ward off the killing blow, and suddenly there
was only silence, broken only by the distant singing of
birds.

So this was what death was like. I smiled. In
a while I would hear the song of the approaching heroes.

Then I realized I was still in pain from the
cuts to my legs, but from no other wound, as I was lifted and
carried to one side where my leggings were cut off. Skilled hands
began to dress the wound.

“Morrigan told you today was not your day to
die,” Dar Elias said, squatting beside me on the grass.

“How could you know about that?” I whispered,
my teeth grinding together to keep from whimpering at the very much
lesser pain of my cuts being stitched.

Dar Elias looked over to where the corpses
lay. I counted seven, hardly a good accounting for ourselves, but I
suppose there could have been more I could not see.

“Have no fear for your sword brothers. We
shall do them all the honors we shall give our own men.”

“Why have you spared me?”

“Your duty is not yet done, old man,” he said
as I was lifted up and set astride Rowan. When they tied my feet
together with a length of twine strung beneath Rowan’s belly, I
ground my teeth together trying not to scream. I think I whined
instead, an even less dignified and less manly sound. I had been
cut before and I had never hurt so fiercely. To divert myself, I
wondered how they could have known which horse was mine ― the one
that could be guaranteed to bear me home with the minimum of
guidance from me, not thinking that, of course, they had seen me
ride to the battlefield upon her.

Then I saw a figure on horseback by the cairn,
gazing calmly down at the scene beneath him, and the sight made me
forget my own misery entirely.

It was Cu Cumundi himself.

Dar Elias led Rowan up the hill by her bridle.
I could feel the king’s eyes on me every step of the way, and the
chill that went through me froze the pains in my legs. I bowed as
best I could when Dar Elias halted beside him. “My lord,” I said,
affecting my best diplomatic manner.

The king was tall, elderly, with gray hair
tied back from a face weathered and scarred by the passing of the
years of his life. Despite the warmth of the day, he had a wolf
skin cloak tied at the throat with a golden brooch. His blue eyes
were those of a much younger man.

“She was his wife,” he said, nodding towards
Dar Elias.

I bowed my head, wondering again why I was
still alive and whether it would be better to be dead.

“And you had no part in it,” he went on. I
looked up, about to protest he could not possibly know that, but
kept silence as he shook his head to deny me. “Ask not how a king
knows what happens in his kingdom.”

How could I have been so stupid as to imagine
anything else? Of course he had watched us. He could have prevented
Corbelathan’s idiocy at any time. That he had not done so bespoke
schemes of which I knew nothing. Did he intend to provoke a war
between us?

As if he had heard my thoughts, he shook his
head. “Be on your way. Let us all go about the business of
mourning.”

He urged his horse past me then, clapping his
hand on my shoulder as he passed in what might have been a gesture
of friendship had it not been so vigorous it was like to have
knocked me to the ground had I not been tied to my horse. Dar Elias
stepped nimbly out of his lord’s way. His men stood as he
approached, greeting him at once respectfully and familiarly, as a
man might greet his wife’s father, their reverence for the man
obvious.

A flutter of wings by the row of corpses
caught my attention, white wings, and when I looked directly at the
bird I expected to see a dove. Instead, I saw a large crow on
Corbelathan’s chest, a white crow. Cu Cumundi and his men moved
aside as, for a moment, the bird turned in my direction. I felt it
look directly into my eyes, and through them, out of the back of my
skull and beyond. A question formed itself in the very farthest
reaches of my mind ― since when did crows have green eyes? Once,
twice the beak darted forward. Each time the head came up there was
something white and bloody in her beak that she quickly tossed into
the air and swallowed. Once done with the prince, she fluttered
onto the chest of my sword brother next in line and executed her
office on him, and then the next, and the next and then the last.
All of us watched her pluck out the eyes of each of my sword
brothers, before she hesitated to move to our dead enemies. She
stared up at Cu Cumundi, who shook his head a little, bowing it at
the same time. She went on staring up at him for what felt like a
man’s lifetime, before she quickly dipped her head and then took to
the air.