The Phantom Queen Awakes (8 page)

“Lust,” the Morrigan whispered, and the word
ran like knives through their touch. Two held Mairaed’s arms, and
she ached where they grasped, pain rushing from her chest to her
fingers until numbness was left behind. The third, the one who
bled, slipped open Mairaed’s robes and put her hand against the
scar she’d left a lifetime before. Sticky blood warmed against the
mark, and the Morrigan brushed her mouth against Mairaed’s. “Lust
for blood.”

“Lust for death,” her sisters murmured. “Lust
for war.”

Mairaed, trembling, whispered, “Lust for
life.”

The razor smile came again, this time more
felt than seen. “Lust for us,” the Morrigan said. “Take us in to
you, cairn dancer, and we will give you the dance you need.” Her
lips turned hungry against Mairaed’s, her hands cold and quick and
searching, and where they touched they left behind heat that
brought Mairaed’s heartbeat to a roaring throb. Frantic for air,
Mairaed threw her head back, and another sister covered her mouth
with a deepening kiss. Lips and curious tongues tasted her breasts
as knowing fingers parted her thighs and swept upward, inward,
waking a need that had gone unanswered for a lifetime. Her heart
would burst with it, would surely fail from the Morrigan’s
all-encompassing touch; from the desire for the three-fold goddess
who was all, all, all that Mairaed could ever want.

And then in the moment of ecstasy the goddess
was gone, leaving Mairaed white and spent and numb on a starlight
stair.

****

Ravens guided her to the earth, stood
clattering and clacking on the cairns, and giving the blade that
lay between them bright-eyed glances of avarice. Mairaed crouched
and lifted it: not the same one she had dropped, but one of far
finer make, light and deadly sharp. Even as she wished it might be
a weapon she knew better, it became one: a bladed staff, fast and
easy to manipulate in her hands.

Her hands: her hands, too, were her own and
were not. A glimmer of unknown strength lay in them; lay in the
shape of her arms and in the length of her stride when she saw dawn
was near, and that war would be upon her village with daylight. Her
clothes were not her own, and neither were they the Morrigan’s: she
wore armor of silver and white, making her a banner in the coming
light. It was the armor, the weapon, the stride of a hero; of a man
out of legend, and not of a single young woman whose fate was bound
to the river of death.

Bright-eyed corvids alighted on her shoulders,
their wings half spread and black beaks open to cry go, go! Only
when she began to run did they take wing again, the two who’d urged
her on and an unkindness more besides, beating their way through
winter air to keep promises, to meet destiny.

To make battle at the river’s edge.

Blood spattered, crimson in the dawn’s light.
A thin line opened on Mairaed’s cheek, but no pain rose with it.
The sword came again, metal dull with viscera that mocked the
rising sun. She countered this time, elegant: she had never learned
the steps to this dance, but she knew them from within, as she had
once known the cairn dances as though they’d been imprinted on her
soul. Her hands were easy with her bladed staff’s weight, swinging
it, twisting it, smashing men aside with it, and each blow felling
her enemy with more certainty than she might have hoped.

Each time one of the
Fir Bolg
fell, she
crowed triumph, and her ravens spun in the sky around her,
black-winged harbingers of death.

All around her — behind her, following her
lead — came the people of her village; came Sion O’Connail, came
Aine’s daughter, came faces she knew and had once loved; faces for
whom she had called the goddess Morrigan, so that they might live
and fight another day. She saw in their eyes how they needed what
she was, and so she plunged deeper into battle, turning the
Fir
Bolg’s
red cloaks to ribbons; breaking their small dark forms
in half on her staff, cutting them to pieces with her blade. Her
heart screamed with joy, every beat a thing of pain: no mortal form
was meant to hold such battle lust, and the goddess of war hungered
for more.

She was bloodless, unmarked amongst the
soldiers, a slim creature of white and silver at the heart of the
enemy, and even when their blades scored they drew no cry, drew no
streak of red anger across her skin. Only their blood marred her
armor, streaks and spatters that steamed in the cold morning light,
and blackened as the day wore on.

Her people were weary: she could feel that in
them as a remote and meaningless detail. They followed her still,
but their strength waned, and she could not hold the field alone.
Not alone, not even with the ravens, whom her people had feared
until they saw the birds fed only on the eyes of the
Fir
Bolg
.

“Hold!” Her voice was not her own: it was the
serrated thing the Morrigan spoke with, but tempered by a mortal
throat. “Hold until night, Sion! Hold until night, and then the
land is mine!” She looked back as she called the rally, and saw new
things in her peoples’ eyes. Belief, yes, but worse than that, oh
so much worse was the fear, for that was the price of calling a
goddess to battle.

“Hold,” she whispered again, and turned back
to make war on her enemy.

****

At dawn the ravens feasted, gorging themselves
on the slaughtered
Fir Bolg
and splashing red melted river
water over their sleek black feathers. They clucked and gurgled
over the dead villagers, but left them untasted, and one by one
those bodies were gathered, and brought to the cairns.

Sion O’Connail was the first to see the broken
body fallen amongst the tall stone piles. The first, and perhaps
the least surprised: it was he who knelt by Mairaed’s figure, who
tested her skin for suppleness and found it frozen through and
through. Dead a day, at least, and the spattered blood foamed at
her mouth said perhaps her heart had burst. Her eyes were open,
staring sightlessly toward the sky; her body was arched as though
caught in a moment of rapture, and her skull and frame were
cracked, as if she had fallen a terrible distance, when there was
no high place at all that she might have tumbled from.

It was not easy, closing those staring eyes,
and no one said him nay as he lifted her frozen body and took it
some little way away from the other cairns and there began to shift
the stones that would cover their dancer, and mark her place of
rest as a spot of especial honor.

“No more cairn dancers,” he said when her body
was hidden, and because he was their voice of wisdom, the villagers
listened. “No more,” he said again. “Mortals are not meant to call
on the gods. We have won the day, but we’ve asked too terrible a
thing. This will not happen again.”

Murmurs of agreement rose, the memory of
Mairaed’s twisted form too fresh to deny, and one by one the people
of her village turned away to do mortal honor to the fallen dead,
and to bury them properly. No more dancers, they said to one
another, and when the last of the cairns were built, they slipped
away, never to bury the dead in this place again.

And so no one saw a boy slip forth amongst the
tall stone graves, and begin to dance.

****

Afterword

‘Cairn Dancer’ was inspired by a watercolor
painting I own of the same title. It's a wonderful, vivid painting
of a beautiful woman swaying in front of stone cairns, and beyond
that there's no resemblance whatsoever between story and painting.
The painting's woman is quite modern; Mairaed's story was never
imagined as such. But the woman in the painting did beg the
question of why she danced at the cairns. Mark and Amanda's
invitation to write a story for
The Phantom Queen Awakes
gave me an opportunity to explore the answer to that question, and
I have to say I rather like it. Now, I can suppose my painting is
Mairaed's spiritual, if not physical, descendant, still dancing for
the souls of the dead after all these years.

****

Biography

C.E. Murphy is a fantasy novelist who makes
occasional forays into short stories, comics and photography. Born
and raised in Alaska, she now lives in her ancestral homeland of
Ireland. More information about CE Murphy and her career can be
found at
http://www.cemurphy.net
.

****

Jennifer
Lawrence

Washerwoman

Perhaps because the wind was uncommonly bitter
that morn, or because she could still hear the angry words
Aoibheann had whispered to her husband, Treasa’s son, in the
darkness last night, Treasa spent ten minutes scrubbing at the
laundry down by the stream before she realized that she did not
know the other old woman washing her clothes on the opposite
bank.

Treasa had long known her son’s wife did not
like her, wanted her gone so she could run the household in the
manner she preferred, but it had still been a shock to lay there on
her bed in the darkness and listen to Aoibheann whisper to Dallán
about the tales she had heard from the last bard who passed
through. About how the man had spoken of far lands where customs
were different, and where, when a man or woman became too old to
help the family any longer, they were led out into the wilderness
in winter and abandoned to die.

Dallán had hushed his wife, but the damage was
done. Treasa was thrifty with the house’s resources, strict when it
came to directing the work that had to be done ― and there was
always so much of it, cleaning and cooking and spinning and
watching the children ― but she had not thought that Aoibheann
wanted to see her dead.

Little wonder, then, that her thoughts were
elsewhere this morning as the cold curled round her shoulders,
sharp enough to cut tough meat. Spring it might be, and the ewes in
the fields with their lambs a full two months ago, but even the
flowers in the meadow nodded their heads low and shivered as if
they were chill.

“Rare frosty day,” she said at last to the
crone bent down over the clear water on the other side of the
brook. The woman nodded and Treasa continued politely, hoping the
conversation would take her mind off last night’s shock. “Here’s a
prayer that the cold will keep the Northmen up in their own lands,
where they belong.”

“‘
Twill warm before an hour has
passed,” the woman croaked, her sticklike fingers scrubbing
ceaselessly at a rusty stain on the length of an old, ill-mended
green skirt.

“Good to hear,” Treasa murmured, squeezing the
water out of one of Dallán’s tunics. She peered at the woman,
belatedly realizing that the voice was not familiar. The hair under
the woman’s shawl was black as raven’s feathers, with threads of
white at the temples. “I don’t know you. Are you Fearchair’s kin,
from his house over the hill?”

The woman was silent for a moment, wringing
the water from the skirt, and then shaking the garment out to peer
at it. It hung in wet folds, embroidered in black at the hem, and
Treasa dropped the tunic in her hands. The skirt the woman held was
identical to the one she wore, save for the vicious rent through
the fabric over the hips, and the red stain around the
tear.

That...cannot be what I think it is...But I’d
know my own skirt anywhere. And that means she is...oh, Danu
protect me.

“I am kin to all,” the woman finally said. She
tilted her head to listen and turned to look toward the east. “They
are coming.”

“Coming...who?” The basket at her side tipped
over into the brook, and the clothes slowly floated downstream. The
woman reached into her own basket and lifted out another garment,
the swaddling clothes of a babe. There was a fresh stain of milk
and oats on one corner, a stain matching the one on the identical
wrapping that Treasa had gathered up this morning. Laoghaire spat
up his gruel this morning, his belly would not settle...is he going
to die? Am I? Seeing the washer at the ford is an
omen...

A roar reached her ears from the beach to the
east, and Treasa paled. She had heard the harsh, guttural sounds of
the language of the Viking raiders only once before as a child. She
had run and hidden then, burying herself in a hole in the ground in
the forest, while the men of her father’s village fought the
Northmen and lost. She had been the only one to survive that raid,
and still heard their voices in her nightmares.

She recognized it now.

“You could run, away from the coast, away from
your home ― west, into the woods,” the woman across the stream said
to her flatly. “You could hide, as you did once, and they would not
find you. Your daughter-in-law would die. You would
survive.”

Treasa closed her eyes as the warming wind
from the east swirled around her. “Aoibheann would die, yes. And so
would my son, and his children, and the others in the
village.”

There was no answer, so she opened her eyes.
The woman and her basket were gone. Only the bloodied, rent green
skirt lay there, draped across the rocks, next to the babe’s
swaddling. Laoghaire...Maolán...Órlaith...Easnadh. She could see it
in her mind’s eye, those tiny bodies hacked and pierced by the
Northmen’s axes and swords.