The Phantom Queen Awakes (6 page)

He had misunderstood her words, and it
enflamed her. She fell upon him in a passionate fury. Their limbs
entwined. A hand removed the pins that held her garments. The
sweet, sad struggle resumed and continued until the moon was
sinking in the west. They rested in each other’s arms.

From her fallen garments she took a golden
torc. Like plaited rose stems it was, and when she placed it around
his neck, the thorns drew blood. On his brow she placed a hawthorn
crown.

“A bride of blood, I birth in pain the nation
given you. I can never forgive you for making me love you. Pray
that we never meet again.”

She collapsed into the blood-soaked soil. A
dark shape passed over the setting moon and a tremor shook him. He
felt for the crown and laughed as he touched naught but his hair.
Then he rubbed at his neck and pricked his finger on the golden
torc that rested there. His clan won the battle that day and soon
made him their chief. But try as he might, he could never bring
himself to pray the prayer she asked of him.

****

Morrigan

The old man did not sleep much anymore. His
hands trembled and his eyes were dim and he knew they plotted to
take the clan away from him. He did not care. The night before, she
had come to him in his sleep and he knew happiness, if only the
happiness of dreams.

That evening he sat on a chair in the garden
under a waning moon. He smiled at the apple trees his long-dead
wife had planted. She had been a good woman, but she was not her.
No one was. A god or mortal, he knew not. He only knew she had been
his one and only love. He would give his life for one more moment
with her.

And there she was, perched in the branches of
the apple. She had not aged since last he had seen her, she was
more beautiful than ever, and dark passion smoldered in her
eyes.

“I have come for you a last time, my love.”
She slid down to the ground, walked to him like a she-wolf stalking
her prey. “Would that I had slain you the first night we
met.”

She removed her garments and laid him upon the
soft grass; they made love under the stars. He had not been with a
woman in years; tonight it was like he was a young man again. Their
love was a gentle and beautiful thing. And yet he wished for the
wild maiden he had loved on the river bank.

When they had finished, she stroked the scars
on his cheek. Her touch still burned. He kissed her fingers.
“Please, my love. Tell me your name.”

Her smile held the sadness of the grave. “I am
called by many names. Those whom I love may call me
Anann.”

He stroked her long black hair. “I have known
no other like you, Anann.”

She kissed his cheek. “A boon you may ask of
me, Mabon mac Lugh, as I love you.”

He spoke without reflection, in an instant,
the words spilling out of his mouth. “Make me as I was when we
first met. Let me never taste death. If such is in your power to
grant, this is what I wish.”

A wailing cry escaped her chest. She shook
with silent sobs, tears falling like rain. “Please, ask for
something else.”

She pushed herself away from him, but he clung
to her. With all his strength, the old man held her to himself. “If
you can do this, you must grant me this boon. As you love
me...”

Her fury blazed in her eyes once more. “I can
never forgive you for making me love you. You will regret such a
gift. I pray you, ask for something else.”

He shook his head. “Eternal youth, nothing
else.”

She pulled her garments about her, raising the
hood of her cloak over her head. From her garments she drew forth a
chalice. At her command, it filled with a wine that smelled of
wormwood and apple blossoms. She held it out to him. Her tears fell
into the chalice.

“Do not weep.” He took the cup from her and
drank deep. “Now we can be together forever.”

As he spoke, the bloom of youth had already
returned to him, his white hair turning brown, his week limbs
growing strong, vigor coursing throughout his body. He smiled
triumphantly, only to have his heart break as she ran from
him.

“For you!” He chased after her, arms
outstretched. “I live only for you!”

Her face stopped his chase. “You fool. You
lovable, insufferable fool. How could you have asked for eternal
youth? Had you died, I would have been yours forever. But I am
Death. Now you are immortal, and never can we meet
again.”

The youth sank to his knees and let out a
wordless, bestial cry that found its echo in the croaking of the
raven that flew off into the night. Flew off, never to be seen by
him again. Tears fell to the earth as he cursed himself and wished
he had prayed the prayer she enjoined on him the first night they
had met...

****

Afterword

‘Gifts of the Morrigan’ is a meditation on
what sort of man might fall in love with the triple goddess. The
three scenes show the male counterparts to the three aspects of the
goddess: youth, warrior, old man. If the Morrigan was ever fated to
love a mortal man, what could she give but herself? Love, success
in battle, death. And being a goddess, she would also know how a
mortal man would respond to such gifts...

****

Biography

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt grew up in western
Michigan and now lives in central Arkansas with his wife and dog.
His short fiction has previously appeared in a number of print and
online venues including
SpaceWesterns.com
,
Renard’s
Menagerie
,
ChiZine
, and the anthologies
In Bad
Dreams
,
Malpractice
, and
Cinema Spec
.

****

C.E. Murphy

Cairn Dancer

Moonlight flowed down the river like ice,
turning the water to a smooth, unbroken promise of power and
danger. Even as a child, Mairaed had broken from other tasks to
wander to the water’s edge, there to stand silent and unmoving
until someone came to fetch her. Shouting her name was not enough:
she couldn’t hear her parents, she once explained; not over the
voices that sang down the river.

They exchanged glances, then, her mother and
her father, and after that it was always one of the wise women or
the old men of the village who took her gently from the river’s
side.

The night her first woman’s blood came as a
stuttering black smear on her thighs, Aine, the eldest of the wise
women, visited their small stone home. She dressed Mairaed in the
druid’s white she herself wore, and took her away. Mairaed, too
blurry with sleep for excitement, stumbled in Aine’s wake until
they reached the river, then came alive with a shock that still
took her breath, even in memory. The water that cold night felt
peppered with vitality, as though living blood prickled under its
wet skin. Need coursed through her, stronger than even that which
had sent her to the river’s edge so many times.

It came as music; as a lament, an ancient tune
whose words were lost to time. Only sweet harrowing notes remained,
rising from within her and bursting toward the sky. She stood
ankle-deep in the river, face turned upward as she sang with all
her heart, and without a sound.

“So it’s in you indeed. A blessing and a
tragedy both,” Aine murmured, drawing Mairaed’s gaze to her. She
was aged sixty summers or more, and Mairaed only a woman that night
but for a heartbeat, it seemed the silver-haired elder was the
girl, and Mairaed herself an ancient crone. In that brief window,
Mairaed saw who Aine had been: the child, the wife, the mother, all
long before Mairaed’s birth.

She saw, too, a darkness in Aine’s breast, and
saw the first thinness of strain come over the woman as a promise
of hardship yet to come. A season: no more, and Aine would be gone
from this earth, and from the brief spasm on the older woman’s
face, Mairaed saw that she knew it. Knew, too, that Mairaed herself
had seen it, and the woman’s hand was gentle on her hair for an
instant. “A blessing and a tragedy both. Your eyes will see too
much, for now and ever. Come, girl. The river is waiting for
you.”

****

It was not, in the end, the river which
waited, not at all. It was instead the cairns, rough tall stone
piles which housed the dead, and honored them. It was their song
calling her down the length of the river, inviting her to their
sacred place.

“I didn’t know,” she said, that first night
amongst the tall stone cairns. “I didn’t know they sang to
us.”

“Most don’t. It’s easier to let them go if you
don’t know,” Aine replied. “Easier to think the spirit goes on,
joins the world again, when almost no one hears the song. I don’t,”
she added, and Mairaed turned from the cairns in surprise. “My aunt
did, and when no one in my generation heard the call, she taught me
the dances so they might not be lost. My own daughter knows them
for the same reasons, but it’s yourself they’re meant
for.”

A fist made itself known around Mairaed’s
heart: a squeeze that took her breath and sent an ache through her
body. Her palms cramped; the soles of her feet shuddered, and she
sipped barely enough air to whisper, “The dances.”

There was a need in her body, an answer to a
question not yet spoken. Something crossed Aine’s face, not regret
and not envy, but some cousin to them both, and a deep-set
gratitude besides. Mairaed glimpsed understanding even as she
looked back to the cairns: power called her here, a heady and
exciting gift. Perhaps she could master it, but even so, she would
always be its thrall. Her feet were moving already, called to the
steps of an ancient dance she had never learned, and she kept only
half an eye on Aine as the older woman moved ahead of her, showing
her what her heart already knew.

Like the music, it was a thing of more freedom
and more constraint: it was what the wind might be, if it could be
trapped in a box and followed. Moonlight made a path to dance on,
leading her from one tall pile of stone to another, certain as the
stars. Runes burned from the hearts of stone where she brushed
them, the names and shapes of the dead carved into the earth’s
bones, for all that no man had ever laid down any such markers.
Each new step brought a howling from both within her and without,
though neither had a voice she could hear, nor did she have breath
to sing with even if she wished. There was only the lament, and the
dance, and the dead.

There had been no cairn dancer for a
generation and more: no woman or man to take flight from mortal
senses and guide the dead beyond their earthly flesh. They had
waited patiently; they knew nothing of time or restlessness. The
fever growing in Mairaed was a thing of her own, a need to
discharge a duty that had gnawed at her since childhood. Her steps
came quicker, her hair sticking to her cheeks as sweat dampened her
against the cold night, and her chest ached with the icy air she
drew in through her mouth, too hungry for it to warm in her
nose.

When the dance ended, it ripped the sky
asunder.

Starlight spilled from the darkness, and
moonlight made shadows and shapes in scattered clouds. A
black-haired woman with ravens on her shoulders stepped forth, with
her two sisters identical in all ways only a breath behind her.
They wore gowns of spun midnight, their seams glittering with light
as white as the sun, and they gathered the eager dead in their
arms. The lament was ended, replaced instead by warbling coughs and
curious hollow pops from the ravens, who left their mistresses’
shoulders to herd souls along the starlight path.

Only when they were gone, ravens and souls
alike, did one sister turn away from the others, and come down
amongst the cairns to tilt Mairaed’s chin up with a fingertip. She
studied her with bright black eyes, then pressed a soft, cool kiss
to Mairaed’s lips. Mairaed made a sound in her throat, as curious
and startled as the ravens. The woman paused as she withdrew, then
smiled a bladed smile that named her no friend to the living, and
drew Mairaed close again.

The kiss this time was deeper, hungry mouth
parting to explore and taste and claim. Mairaed’s woolen shift was
no barrier to the icy hand creeping within, curving the weight of
her breast in its palm and closing scalding cold fingers over her
nipple. It burned straight to her heart, faltering its steady
rhythm, and the heat that spilled between her thighs had nothing to
do with the blood that had come that night.

The woman withdrew again, her sharp smile
filled now with possessive certainty. She turned and walked away,
joining her sisters, and starlight folded up to leave darkness
behind.

Mairaed, without looking, without ever wanting
to look, knew a handprint red and strong as a birthmark lay on her
breast.

****

That night had passed a dozen years ago, and
never once in the years since had the transition been so intense,
so intimate, so sweet. Reasons upon reasons answered as to why: the
dead she had given passage to that night had been strangers to her,
nearly all of them, with no recent loss or sorrow to temper the
power of the dance. There had been so many of them, too: a
generation of villagers all at once, and the worst loss Mairaed had
danced since then had been four children struck down together by
illness.