Authors: Alice Borchardt
Cateyrin was already making for a side street at a dead run. It was more like a tunnel than a street. The towers and the bridges between them darkened it into deep shadow.
“They know where we’ll make for. Move!” Meth shouted.
We reached a stair, a narrow one that led up, curving away among the black towers. From a walkway that bridged the street, a man looked down at us with idle, indifferent curiosity. A woman peered down from a balcony; she wore gold and black brocade. Then there were no more bridges, and the narrow stair was walled by the towers. We had to move along one at a time.
Cateyrin slowed. “I don’t think they will try to follow us here. One determined person can hold the street.”
“An eerie place, this city,” I said, remembering the broad plaza at the gate, the glittering shops, the translucent towers. The ones the stair ran among were obsidian black, with such a high polish that they reflected the blue-gold clouds of the evening sky.
“Probably they won’t bother with this street at all,” Meth said. “They’ll go around and try to catch you at your mother’s house.”
“It’s longer that way. It will take them time to—”
“No more arguments,” I ordered. “We’re committed to this route. Save your breath.”
We needed it. The stair wound up and up, until we came to a garden. Yes, a garden in the sky. The beds, like the rafts that floated on the lake, were made of wood and matting, and gigantic urns held trees.
Meth stopped dead still at the entrance to the garden.
“Here,”
he hissed at Cateyrin. “Here. You brought us
here
!”
“Yes. It’s the only way I could think of,” Cateyrin said.
Meth moaned. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no, what?” I asked.
He didn’t get a chance to answer. She appeared in front of me and roared.
Everybody ducked behind me. Tuau rumbled, “Aunt Louise!”
“That,” I told the cat in front of me, “is the best set of teeth I’ve ever seen.”
She was one of the Akeru, and a lot bigger than our young friend, Tuau.
“What are you doing here, runt?” she hissed at Tuau.
“She’s Danae,” Tuau said. “Don’t mess with her.”
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound dangerous. “I am.”
“Liar!” she spat. “You and your friends get out of here!”
“How did they capture you, Aunt Louise?” Tuau said.
She gave vent to a vicious snarl. “I’m working contract mercenary, runt. And I have my orders. Get out of here.”
“We don’t want to harm the garden,” I said. “Just pass through.”
“Aunt Louise,
pleeeeease,
” Tuau moaned.
“You tiresome brat! How come you get into everything?”
She paced back and forth in front of the archway where we stood. I think she probably outweighed me by twenty pounds, a pale, white-coated, rangy figure.
Maeniel told me about cheetahs. I admit, I didn’t believe him, but he had given me close descriptions of cheetahs, lions, tigers, and leopards, wildcats and lynx. And yes, there were still some panther-sized cats roaming Europe. I had seen them at a distance.
Her face was oddly sensitive, with large, sad eyes. She ceased pacing, sat, and threw me a cold look.
“I get to eat the intruders I catch. I’ll have one of you. The rest can pass me by. Let’s see.” She eyed Meth. “Too much armor. Be like eating a turtle. You, girl,” she told Cateyrin. “Scrawny, no meat on your bones. You.” She gazed at me. “He says you’re Danae, and while I don’t believe it, I don’t care for any surprises. That leaves you, Nephew.”
Tuau was leaning against my leg. I felt him trembling, and looking into Aunt Louise’s green gaze, gold eyes, I could understand why.
“But,” she continued, “it’s against my principles to eat family, so I’ll take the ugly one.”
“Oh, you will, will you?” Albe said.
Fine,
I thought. I was still holding my sword, and I reversed the handle and brought it up hard under her chin.
“Go!” I shouted.
The blow lifted her forefeet off the ground as Cateyrin charged past me, closely followed by Meth, with Tuau bringing up the rear at first. But soon he pulled into the lead.
She was fast, Aunt Louise. I’ll give her that. She was away from me, backing even though I was sure she wasn’t fully conscious, and blood was foaming at her jaws. She gave a long, loud, wavering scream, and another of her kind charged out from among the flowers. He—and he was definitely he, balls dangling between his back legs—was even bigger than she was. He didn’t hesitate for a second.
Behind me, I heard Albe laugh. I raised my sword as he bounded into a leap to fall on me and take me down. I raised the sword without much hope. He was so big, even if I got the sword into him, his teeth and claws might finish me in spite of my armor.
But at the last second, Albe jerked me clear. The cat missed, coming down on all fours beside me.
“Yiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee!!!!”
It was without doubt the most ghastly scream I have ever heard an animal give, as the big male curled in on himself and began frantically to lick an important (to him) part of his anatomy.
Albe knew where to land that lead shot.
“Get out of my way, my lady,” Albe said. “I’ll finish them.”
The male decided discretion was the better part of valor. He fled without delay and without shame.
But Aunt Louise faced us down. “Think you’re good, don’t you? You better not miss.”
“I never miss,” Albe said.
“No! We don’t want this to be a killing fray. Back off and let us pass. Albe, watch out, there may be more of them.”
Aunt Louise didn’t move, but she didn’t advance, either. Behind us, a balustrade separated us from a drop into the lake below. I was shocked to see how high we were as we ran along it toward a narrow stair where the rest waited.
We passed a clean, red scatter of bones among the flower beds. The bones weren’t recognizably human, but the two skulls that accompanied them were.
“Trespassers, I suppose,” Albe said.
We reached the other stair and found it led right up and out over nothingness. The treads were attached to the outside of a tower.
Attached
is a bad word; they flowed out of the ribbed stone of one of the black and red ones. They were at broadest about ten inches wide. That’s not a lot when you’re looking at a four-hundred-foot drop. It goes almost without saying that there was no sort of a rail.
Meth went first, followed by Cateyrin, me, Albe, and Tuau. He muttered under his breath, “She always was a hard-assed bitch. Think of it. Wouldn’t even cut one of the Danae a little slack. What’s the world coming to when the old gods are not honored?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up,” I said. “I don’t need you distracting me.”
Albe laughed. We were making the best speed possible, edging our way along, backs to the tower behind us, taking the steps one by one, feeling for each next step and getting a solid stance before we went on.
“Look,” Albe said.
“Look at what?”
I was busy glancing back to see if Aunt Louise might be trying to follow and watching those ahead inching their way along to be sure they were safe. Silly, as I think about it now. What could I have done in either eventuality? Aunt Louise would be in the same precarious situation we were in. Worse, because she was a large animal that had to go on all fours, and this stair had been built to accommodate human feet.
And if one of us fell, what would the rest do? Catch him or her? Laughable. The rescuer would go down with the victim.
Yet Albe was holding my wrist.
“Don’t,” I said.
She let go, being also a woman of common sense.
“Look,” she told me. “Is it not beautiful?”
To be worried about beauty at a time like this! Yet she was right. All of one side of the valley could be seen from our perch. The sun, sinking into the misty horizon, burned a bright path over the water on the lake below and reflected in hues of copper, gold, and molten metal on the polished sides of the towers. The land below was posed in that green-gold shimmer that signals the approach of night.
“Yes,” I answered. “Albe, it is. And dangerous, also. The sun is going down and the rocks will give back their heat into the winds.”
Already they were rising and gusts tugged at us.
Meth gave a low croon of distress. Armored, he was the most vulnerable of us all.
Cateyrin encouraged him, “Keep going. It’s not far. The first time I came here, I was terrified, but after that, I came here every day. Well, almost every day. And it was easy. Believe me, you haven’t far to go.”
But Meth was proceeding ever slower, until finally, he froze where he was. I looked back at Able and Tuau. She was cool, her face calm as she looked out toward the sun, its light reflected by the shimmering walls of a distant gorge as it sank in the distance. The wind was growing wilder and wilder. It tugged at my body, whipped at my hair, and at times numbed my face with its force. Cateyrin was weeping openly, begging Meth to keep moving.
I edged toward her until I stood next to her, my body pressed against hers. I knew what I had to do. Coldly, I nudged her along until we were very close to Meth.
“Please! Please!” she cried. “It’s only a little way now. I promise . . .”
“Be quiet!” I said. “Meth!” I didn’t know I could sound like that. “Meth!”
He turned a terror-filled face toward me. The wind hit again, and his eyes closed against its force. We felt dust and debris blown up and carried on it blind us for a second.
“Meth! Get moving!” I shouted. I still held the sword in my right hand. I had not sheathed it. “Meth, if you stay there, I’m going to take my blade and drive it through your throat. If you freeze where you are, we will all die. Hear me! Get moving!”
I was looking at Meth across Cateyrin’s face. Her eyes were closed, tears running silently down her cheeks.
The wind hit again. The glow was fading from the towers around us. I knew we had not much time, and I might perish along with Meth if swinging the sword overbalanced me. But I knew I had no choice. By the time night fell, the winds would be fierce, and standing on the narrow stair, we would never be able to withstand them. They, and the cold I suspected would go along with them. We would hang on for a time, but in the end, we would perish, one by one, falling into the dark lake below.
I readied myself for the stroke.
Arthur did the things a king did for his people in the Summer Land. It was reflex with him, and he now knew that even in his mother’s womb he had been a king. While dreaming, he knew the burdens of leadership, because that’s what a king was in his world: a man who chooses to confront the difficulties the small, segmented societies faced in their settlement of this corner of the planet.
There were no people who did not know the forms and the fulfillment of this template as it was applied to reality. The Greeks had kings; they became too overbearing, and so their political authority was withdrawn. The Romans were instructed about kings by the Etruscans, and for the same reasons had also dispensed with them. But when they founded their great city, Rome, it took a king to lay its boundaries.
The Saxons knew of kings, and law, and the earth queens who were needed to create kings, as had the Gauls and the Germans from beyond the Rhine. They all knew, and however they might flout the ancient code, they understood that in the end, it must prevail.
A king must be able to do three things: fight, enforce the law, and love to maintain the life of his people. Arthur had not loved, not yet known a woman. Only Dea Arto, who had summoned him to the Bear Society. She had come to him during the week after he woke a man. The pleasure had stolen upon him during that calm, silent interval between sleep and waking, and he spent it among the linen and fur that covered him in the place where he slept with the other boys in a stone chamber at Morgana’s stronghold. He woke with a memory of pleasure so piercingly powerful that it engendered an almost instant guilt.
And after he came completely to his senses, he was ironically aware that fear and guilt both were the proper reaction, since he could no longer remain among the innocents who shared the chamber with him. He had, as best he could, hidden the evidence of his adulthood, and then rose and went to find his father.
The pleasure startled his body in the same secret, sudden way while he was sleeping in the loft of Balin’s barn, and he yielded to its flood of exquisite joy before he had time to understand what was happening to him. He opened his eyes to the dank rafters stretching over his head and knew She had summoned him as She had when he was still a boy.
Dea Arto. She was honored with honey berries and wine, autumn fruits, yet it was spring in the Summer Country. He rose and came down the ladder to where the horses were stabled. They were awake in their stalls, heads up, ears pricked as though listening for something. One stamped a foot softly; the other backed and tugged hard at the rope that held his bridle.
The stalls had no doors. The only thing that kept the horses there was the tethers attached to the wall. Arthur’s clothing was hung on a nail driven into the center post of the barn.
Still watching the horses, he whispered, “Presently,” and dressed as quickly as possible.
The horses were mare and stallion. The stallion backed so hard against the lead rope that Arthur slipped the makeshift rope bridle over his head. But unwilling to leave the mare, he stood stamping his feet and whickering a warning, softly, desperately.
Arthur ran to the mare and cut the bridle off. She and the stallion tore out of the barn silently, terrified of . . . something. But there wasn’t anything.
Arthur followed them cautiously. The night greeted him. There was a shadow glow on the horizon. Moonrise? The breeze fanned his face; insects churred in the grass.
The house where Balin slept with his wife and child was dark and silent, door and windows barred against the night and its perils. These were wild lands.
What?
Arthur thought.
Cat? Bear?
The lords of the mountains, the bears, her children, weren’t the tamest of creatures. They had been known to break into stables after horse meat, smokehouses, and even the occasional human dwelling.