Authors: Alice Borchardt
I sat with them on the grass beside the mound that once held the signal tower and we waited. The wind from the ocean continued to blow the stench of the dead away from us. There was still some wine left from the supply we had taken from the Saxons. Ure and Gray shared it out among the rest of us, though I declined.
They held me, the dead. I knew, because Ure asked me a question. He got an answer. One of them spoke to him. Yes, the voice issued from my mouth, tongue, and throat, but I didn’t say the words, nor were they in a language I understood.
For a second he looked startled. Then he met my eyes with an expression of cold comprehension. And I knew he understood, somehow understood where I had been and what I had been doing. Then, features impassive, he strolled away behind me toward where Gray and the Wolf Lord, Maeniel, were standing. I didn’t follow him with my eyes. They were still under my control.
The two spirits within me were still fixed on vengeance and their minds, such as they were, remained directed at the fortress, a shadow against a horizon of gray clouds. As night closed in, sometimes it rained passing spatters or even brief, drenching downpours. After sunset there were lights at the fortress and some on a beach nearby.
It must have been near midnight when Ure whispered, “Everybody up and into the boats. ’Tis now or never.”
We rose as one. I couldn’t tell if any of us felt fear or not. Maybe it didn’t matter what we felt. Once a decision is made, the flow of events carries you on, the way a river in flood sweeps a fallen leaf onward toward an unguessable destination.
I had one consolation amidst the hatred and desolation that was battering my soul. I had summoned the most dangerous of the dead and could do no more.
The boats moved out over water invisible to our eyes. I am told that near cities it is easier to see at night because the light from the human dwellings reflects back from the clouds. But we were near no city or even any modest village or town. The marsh lay in utter Cimmerian blackness, relieved only by the brief apparitions of the quarter moon through occasional openings in the clouds. The water between ourselves and the fortress was a shallow, brackish lake dotted with islands of reeds and saw grass. Fireflies collected over the grassy hummocks, and we steered our boats between what looked like clusters of stars.
We knew we were close to the fortress when we felt the pull created by the river current as it flowed swiftly past the broken walls. We plied the oars with a will, crossed in spite of the current, and landed below the spot where the fortress stood. The Romans had located it on the highest ground for many miles, but even so, it was none too safe. The gates that once opened to face the river were gone, and the walls that once surrounded them were a high, unstable jumble of fallen masonry, fully as forbidding as the intact walls on the other three sides.
The hunger in my heart for vengeance pulled me hard, at a run. A run that began as soon as I left the boat.
Why not?
I thought. Gray, Maeniel, and Ure would know where to mass our forces.
Long ago the Romans moved the gates to one side of the fortress, the one that faced upriver. They would go there and wait. Wait for me to play my part. That was crucial. I must burn the pirates out.
“She,” the one who was drowned in the mud . . . or had she been buried alive? I wasn’t sure. “She” took my hand. I felt her fleshless fingers twine with mine. “She” played here as a child and under the water at the foot of the ruined wall was a quay where ships once docked. I could walk along its stones and reach the lowest point of the wall. True, the quay was now underwater, but even with the spring river in flood it wasn’t so deep that an approach couldn’t be made.
“She” tugged at my hand and I followed. Just then the moon shone briefly and I saw that where I felt the pull on my fingers there was nothing to be seen, even though the flesh on my hand crimped at her grip. A chill brushed me, and I knew it came from the cold water at the bottom of the channel that tumbled her bones. I felt a sickening sense of grief for her. She hadn’t been very smart and had been a person of few attainments, but she had loved her own and she wanted to live. I have never known anyone who truly wanted to die—but instead of life, she received cruelty, pain, madness, and, finally, darkness.
So I followed her touch down into the fetid water. Fetid because those inside used the broken wall as a latrine and garbage dump. The stones of the drowned quay were slimy and the water was at best most of the time up above my knees. But she pulled me along with a power greater than that of the river current that battered me and tried to suck me away into deeper water until at length I reached a point where I could begin to scramble up a sloping pile of stone to the top. From there I could look down into the fortress.
It wasn’t an easy climb, and the next day I found a myriad of cuts and bruises on my hands, feet, arms, and legs caused by the vile detritus I had crawled through. But just then I felt none of them, only a sense of unholy triumph that belonged not only to my two unseen companions but to me as well. I cannot say if they had infected me with their hate or if it arose from what I had seen these vicious expert predators do to my own Picts, the Painted People. There was a lot of wood in that fortress, and would it ever burn?
The Saxons had repaired the Roman walkways around the parapet. Beneath them were shacks where their loot, human and otherwise, was stored. The whole center of the fortress was taken up by a drinking hall, the all-purpose gathering place of the war band.
Then the moon returned, summoned, I think, when the eternal denizen of the marsh called out to his patroness. And in the cold light that flickered as the density of the moving clouds changed, I saw my path down from the wall top to where each post supporting the walkways was lodged. I smelled the stench created by the slaves crowded together in the squalid quarters beneath them, and my stomach cramped at the aroma of roast meat and spilled ale in the drinking hall.
Now something that was created by myself and my three companions, an utterly different entity than any one of the three of us, cried out, “Burn it, Priestess! Burn it now!”
So I did.
I never remembered how I got down from that wall top. The next thing I can remember clearly is pressing my right hand against the first post. Fury raged in my brain—it wouldn’t catch but hissed like a nest of serpents and sent out billows of scalding steam and thick, fire-damp smoke. Someone or something gave a yell of rage and fire raced away from my fingers up the post, streaking like an arrow to the top, where the planks that formed the walkway exploded into flame. I knew I could do it, that in fact it was as good as done, I thought as I raced to the next. They were the devil to ignite, those posts, but I knew the devil rode with me.
I went from one to the other as quickly as possible. I can’t think I had a plan, but in the back of my mind I knew the posts supporting the installation at the parapet would be the most difficult to deal with. I had to get to them first and make it impossible for any surviving pirates to defend the fortress.
I was at the eighth post when the screams began. Above, the walkways were crumbling, raining down flaming embers and burning brands on the slaves inside. My whole soul thrilled with horror when I realized they were chained inside. I turned, stumbling back toward the first shed.
But “they” stopped me, sending me down into the mud around the drinking hall. I fought them.
“No!” Ure said, jerking me to my feet with one long, powerful arm.
I gaped at him, wondering how he’d gotten inside and why he was here.
“There is no time!” he roared, spinning me around and slamming my body against the wattle-and-daub walls of the drinking hall. “They are doomed. Burn the hall—now—or I’ll kill you myself.”
The screams of terror, pain, and helplessness ringing in my ears, I slammed both arms palm down against the timbers and threw my whole life and soul into the effort. I created a . . . pyre.
Wattle and daub is wonderful stuff for burning. But this was beyond imagining. The structure went up with a roar, walls, roof, and timber supports all blazing. Smoke was burning my eyes and setting my nose and lungs on fire.
“The gate!” Ure shouted. “Now! It’s time! Burn the gate!”
“Where is the gate?” I shouted as I began retching. It was no longer possible for me to see. The inside of the fortress had become a sea of smoke illuminated by bursts of flame.
Ure was going down, gasping, suffocating. “Close your eyes. ‘They’ will show you.”
Then he was gone, because oil and wine had been stored in the hall and gouts of flame were spurting through the broken walls. I twisted, trying to get away from them, my clothes, such as they had been, gone. I could feel and see my faery armor glowing in a green network all over my flesh, holding back the fire but beginning to sear my flesh with its heat. Yet I did as Ure told me and closed my eyes.
Even through the roaring blaze around me I felt the chill of their presence. The gates were dead ahead. I fell to my knees, unable to bear the airless, smoke-laced heat, and crawled toward them.
When I escaped the inferno that had been the drinking hall, I was able to get to my feet again. But there were armed men between me and the tall wooden portals. They hesitated and indeed I must have been a figure of terror: naked, hairless, glowing with the gold-green of my armor. But one bolder than the rest appeared in front of me, sword in hand.
I was past thought, well into battle madness and still dangerous because I was not without weapons. I felt the sword crash into my left arm, numbing it. But I kept coming, knowing no way back. The palm of my fire hand slammed into his chest. It burned through his cuirass, steel plates sewn to a leather backing, through the quilted padding beneath. His flesh melted like soft butter in my fire and his bones burned. He had not even time to scream. His skeleton glowed ruby-red through skin that melted away like running wax or a ruined garment. He fell, jerking, charring, turning to powdered ash even as he died, almost before he died.
The rest fled. Even the blazing murk around them seemed less terrible than this.
My body crashed against the iron-bound oak doors. I was fire and nothing but fire by then. It almost seemed the ancient black oak that had sealed the fortress time out of mind welcomed an end to its living death as an object of human use. The great doors vanished in a blast of light, heat, and powdered, blowing ash.
I fell, and from where I lay in the mud, I watched the surviving Saxon garrison charge right into our slingers. Even above the fire I could hear the dreadful squishing thuds as lead shot met flesh, blood, muscle, and bone and they died around my prone body like a breaking sea that thunders, rushes, and then is silent.
They had me—the two evil things I had invited into my soul. I had a second of consciousness, sight, and thought before they seized my mind, my twisting limbs, my consciousness, eyes, and tongue. And in that moment I saw Ure striding toward me, hair gone, skin blackened by burns and smoke, clothing in rags . . . his eyes yellow, glaring, pitiless as a striking eagle’s.
Ure grabbed me by the neck. The things reacted first with astonishment, then rage that anything would dare challenge them. I had no power over my arms and legs, but I did see his face, blurred and distorted by my tearing eyes. His eyes were cloudy-green stone, his teeth bared. He laughed again, the laughter of one who raises a sword to strike his fallen enemy down forever.
On the field behind us, my untried boys and girls were meeting the disorganized and terrorized pirates and finding out how easy it was to kill. The fortress was a roaring pyre and the slaves chained were still screaming. Those screams were almost inhuman now. So terrible were they that they sounded like some force of nature, a storm wind from the sea, keening and wailing among broken rocks on a barren shore. But I heard it all only distantly and dimly as Ure seized me by the neck, twisted my clawing right hand behind my back, and dragged me into the water.
He shook me the way a wolf shakes a hare to snap its neck and end its struggles. Then he plunged my head beneath the surface.
God! I wake even now from nightmares remembering and thinking:
Is that what it’s like to drown?
My lungs burned my throat as I sucked in water trying to breathe. It’s a good thing you can’t remember pain, because the agony of drowning was so all-encompassing.
I did not feel pain. I
was
pain as every part of my body spasmed at the icy rush of water filling my mouth, nose, throat, and lungs. Dirty water, too. It tasted of mud, slime, blood, and cold, dank death. So terrible was it that for a second I broke free of Ure. Up I rose, out into the air again. But I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing and retching too badly.
Then Ure had me by the neck and was twisting my arm up, and the dark water, dancing with the orange highlights of the burning fortress, was rushing toward my face again. A second later, I was under it and I sensed my struggles were weakening.
This time I’d managed to get a little air, but when it was gone, Ure held me down and I knew in a few seconds I must suck in the evil, cold mixture of silt, slime, and water around me. Then I would drown. By then, between my horror at what I had done, the sick anguish of possession, and the raw pain in my body, I was almost ready to welcome the end.
It was too much for her. Too much like the death she died before. I felt her let go and drift away, back to her bones, rolling along a shallow channel of brackish water near the sea. For a timeless time, I was with her as the ebbing tide sucked at her bones, half-buried in the ooze at the bottom. Through the empty eye sockets of her skull, I could look up at the dazzling arch of stars blazing a bridge over the ocean. And I sensed that not only the tide tried to pull her free.
Go,
I thought.
Go. You have your revenge—not that it matters.
He burned, and the terror of my hand, the hissing stench as it went through a living being and vaporized his heart, shook my mind.