The Awakening (6 page)

He sang with a passion that gave the lie to his impassive demeanour and brutish appearance.

He sang from a soul that knew and loved not only the words that he sang, but also the Sea of whom he sang.

He sang of things that Hwenfayre had hardly dared believe could be true as though he knew them to be so.

He sang the words to the song that Hwenfayre had written for herself, those many years before.

As she listened to the song, she knew that these words were the ones she would have written herself, were she but able. The words filled her with a deep longing to see and to experience in every way possible the joys and wonders that they described. She was transported in a way that she never believed possible. She gave herself over totally to the soulful sweep, the gentle flow of Wyn’s singing, and lost herself in a world she hungered for.

Just as she felt she could take no more, as if she would lose herself utterly and never be able to return, Wyn stopped. He stood for a moment, looking at the eastern horizon, where the first rays of the sun were beginning to show, then turned to walk away.

As he did so, he murmured, ‘You do not belong here, Hwenfayre.’

She fled without welcoming the dawn. When she arrived home she slammed the door behind her, bolted it and ran into her bedroom. She threw herself down onto her bed and lay there, still and silent, lost in her thoughts until dusk.

She pondered what she’d felt when Niall had held her, and how she had reacted to Wyn’s quiet words. She had never known such a tangle of emotions. She went through the events of the past two days over and over again in her mind, yet she could not make any sense of what was happening to her.

It was finally hunger that made her move. She roused herself to prepare a meal. It was a simple meal of fruits and raw vegetables. As she picked at her
food, a sudden feeling of unease swept through her. It was the same feeling she had had at the Wall with Niall, the last time the Southern Raiders had attacked. She waited, expecting the feeling to subside, but it did not. Instead it built up alarmingly. There came with it the feeling of wrongness, the feeling that something, somewhere, was not as it should be. This was unnatural; something had tampered with nature. Try as she might, she simply could not put aside these feelings. Almost against her will, she rose from her seat, unbolted the door and went outside.

The feeling of unnaturalness was even worse outside. It became a strong foreboding of disaster, a gnawing fear more than unease that threatened to swamp her, to completely overwhelm her unless she did something. But she could not think of what to do.

To alleviate her growing anxiety, she started walking. She had no aim, no direction; she walked as if in a trance. Around her the streets became nameless, formless. She walked on, seeing neither the streets nor the people who surrounded her with their normal mindless insensitivity. She walked blindly, she walked carelessly. She walked directly to the wall without knowing it.

Her reverie was broken when two strong hands took her by the shoulders and shook her slightly.

‘What are you doing here, Hwenfayre?’ She looked up sharply into Niall’s eyes. He looked troubled, yet concerned. The shaking stopped, but he did not release her shoulders. Instead he drew her close, holding her gently against him. ‘You should not be here,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘It is dangerous. Especially tonight. As you already know.’

‘How do you know it is dangerous tonight?’

‘The same way that you do. I feel it too. It is the same as before. Something is going to happen tonight. We’ll be ready.’ He sounded quietly confident that he would be able to deal with whatever was strange in the night. Hwenfayre was not so sure. In some way it was as if the night’s strangeness seemed to revolve around Niall. She tried to tell him but the words would not come out; instead she found herself enjoying his closeness and taking comfort from his strong arms.

He released her suddenly, spinning around to face the sea. ‘Here they come,’ he breathed. As the words left his lips, there came a cry from the highest part of the wall: ‘Raiders!’

‘Stay out of trouble,’ he told Hwenfayre, without turning around. ‘Better yet, go home. This will be no place for a woman tonight.’ He dashed off along the wall, calling as he ran, leaving Hwenfayre behind.

She stood still and silent, hugging herself tightly. As she did so, she discovered, with surprise, that she held her harp.

Around her the sounds of preparation for battle commenced. Men ran past her, oblivious to her presence in their controlled haste to ready themselves for the defence of their town. Unlike the previous time, when only she and the Coerl had been ready for the onslaught, it seemed that all the soldiers on the wall were ready. Whilst the preparations were fast, they had none of the frenetic feel that had been so evident before. She stepped back into a dark corner, where she hid out of sight, out of the way. It seemed like only a matter of moments before the
cauldrons were filled and hot, the bows were all strung and the posts were all manned. An expectant hush fell over the wall as every eye was trained on the flickering torches that illuminated the black warboats as they drew ever closer.

There was a cry, and the first catapult was loosed. A fiery missile leaped from the boat. It arced high. At the peak of its flight it seemed to pause briefly as if considering its target, before hurtling downwards to the city behind the wall.

‘Watch where it falls!’ The Coerl’s voice pierced the night and battle was joined. A hail of arrows sped down at the Raiders’ boats, answered a moment later by a veritable firestorm of burning missiles fired from the catapults below.

With the first cry of alarm from the lookout, the citizenry of the town had begun their own preparations, and the fires that were started by the flaming missiles were short-lived. Both sides knew that this was only the preliminary bout, the opening gambit. Nonetheless, several people lost treasured possessions, some lost family, in this prologue to battle.

The true fight started when the grappling hooks started to replace the fireballs. With the grappling hooks came ropes, and with the ropes came climbers. Each catapult launched several hooks. As fast as the men on the walls could throw down the hooks that landed and took hold, more were quick to follow. Within minutes there were dozens of ropes connecting the warboats to the top of the wall, and on each of the ropes were several Raiders, climbing as fast as rats.

Hand-to-hand fighting followed quickly. The first wave of Raiders was soon dealt with and sent hurtling to their deaths, either bearing savage wounds from a defender’s sword or simply having been pushed back as they clambered over the ramparts. The cauldrons of boiling oil were poured over the wall onto the attackers, the ropes bursting into flame as the oil flowed down. Men leaped from the ropes, only to be dashed onto the rocks below as the liquid flame raced towards them.

Yet still they came, clambering up ropes that were replaced as quickly as they could be dislodged. Despite their best efforts, the defenders on the wall were unable to stem the flow of attackers. Soon there were dozens of Raiders on the ramparts. The noise of fighting filled Hwenfayre’s ears: the clash of steel on steel, the grunting of men as they strove against each other, the shouts as they ran to meet the next opponent, and over all, more chilling than all the other noises, the cries of the dying.

Hwenfayre stared at the maelstrom of violence, unable to comprehend any of it. In desperation, she summoned to her mind those memories of her life that had somehow sustained her through the pain of living as she had. She saw again the beauty of a sunrise, the majesty of a storm, the power of thundering waves, and above all there seemed to float the gentle eyes of a man whom she loved, yet could not quite recognise. As she lost herself in the magical world of her dreams, the scene before her shifted, merged, floated out of focus as she watched. She felt herself drift, as though she had left her body.

Unthinkingly, she took her harp from under her cloak and strummed it gently in stark counterpoint to the savagery around her. A sense of unreality stayed with her as she watched and played, humming softly. Nothing could touch her; she was safe, wrapped in her music, cocooned in the smoothly rippling notes that gently enfolded her. Even the cries of the dying men seemed distant, muffled. Their pain became dulled, her awareness of it diminished by her increasing detachment from reality. The only thing she was truly aware of was the sound of her song.

It rose and fell in a soothing, gentling melody, guarding her soul from the pain and death around her. It allowed her to watch as if she were outside the violence as the Raiders slowly gained purchase on the top of the wall. The complex interweaving of melody and song lent her the peaceful poise of the truly uncaring, not bothered as men whom she knew spilt their lifeblood on the stones at her feet and split the night with their agonised cries. Even through the all-consuming muse of her own music, her mind cried out in protest that this was wrong, that she did care. It did matter to her that men were dying and suffering. It should hurt her that her home was being invaded, violated, with such malice. Deep within her soul, Hwenfayre cared and suffered pain, but the music had her and would not let her go.

As she stood, eyes unfocused, unmoving except for her hands that caressed the strings of her harp and her lips that sang an unknown song, a struggle for the control of her mind and soul raged within her. A close observer might have noticed her chest heaving, as though from great exertion. Without warning, a
terrible physical pain swept through her. Its sharpness, its awful poignancy, seemed to give her strength. The scene before her was overlaid with another. The two images overlapped, forming a complex vision of destruction and suffering. She struggled to make sense of the conflicting images, but in the one not before her, the one in her mind, she saw a man dying. She blinked her eyes. They focused. They saw.

Somewhere on the wall Niall lay dead. A great cry of angry defiance burst from her lips, cutting across the previously gentle song she had been singing. With a fierce anger burning in her eyes and breast, she took control of herself, driving the stupor from her mind.

A new song rippled from her harp. It was a song of strength, of passion, but above all, of love. With total control over feelings she never knew she possessed, Hwenfayre sang her song, and all around her the world went mad, as from nowhere the storm struck the town.

No longer oblivious, Hwenfayre watched as massive waves pounded the rocks below her, smashing warboats to tinder. The rain fell, a deluge, a flood from above, instantly soaking to the skin all who had not sought shelter. Lightning exploded from the suddenly cloud-filled sky. Each bolt, with unearthly precision, shattered the body of a Raider. Men from the town watched in horror as their erstwhile attackers were systematically destroyed before their very eyes by the savage power of the storm. In terror, the defenders threw down their weapons and fled the maniacal onslaught of the incomprehensible fury that rained death from the skies.

The wind screamed in concert with Hwenfayre’s playing as it whipped about the wall, plucking men as they stood and hurling them to their deaths on the rocks below. It swirled around the white-haired Hwenfayre, causing her cloak to whirl and billow, her hair to stream out, a wild mane framing her face. Her lavender eyes burned with a holy fire as they stared unblinking upon the devastation she was wreaking.

One Raider, stronger than the rest, driven mad by the terror, struggled to his feet and strove towards her, axe held across his chest. Madness gleamed from his bloodshot eyes as he approached. Spittle mixed with blood and dribbled down his chin from a mouth that hung slackly open. Seeing him, Hwenfayre saw one who had brought not only destruction to her home but one of those who had killed a man she might have loved, if given a chance.

She took her hand from the strings of her harp and pointed. As if with its own life, the music continued, the harp still playing as Hwenfayre screamed a word in a language that was harsh even to her own ears. Its force struck the man, shocking him briefly back into sanity. His last sane action was to scream in abject terror as the wind leaped to Hwenfayre’s bidding and plucked the Raider from his feet.

It lifted him high above the wall, holding him there, and he screamed as the last vestiges of his mind were destroyed. Then, with another thought, Hwenfayre commanded lightning from the clouds. It struck the man, illuminating him briefly. His body exploded with a blast that shook the wall to its very foundations.

Abruptly, silence fell. The storm vanished as magically as it had appeared. Hwenfayre stood alone on the wall, surrounded by the wreckage of broken men and shattered weapons. Her harp fell silent, her arms hung limply by her sides. Slowly Hwenfayre turned around, surveying what she had wrought. She stared at the bodies littering the ramparts. The faces were frozen in the snarling rictus of death, eyes wide, as if in the moment of their shocking end the men had seen something that was more terrifying than death itself.

The bodies were all washed clean of blood, and somehow this made them a more disgusting sight. Regarding their clean faces and washed bodies, Hwenfayre felt the weight of every dying moment that she had caused crash down upon her unready soul. With a heart-wrenching cry, she fell to her knees and wept, sobbing as if to wash away the horrible bloodstains that she felt taint her heart deeply.

A hand rested gently on her shoulder.

‘Hwenfayre.’ A strong male voice interrupted her weeping.

She turned her tear-ravaged face towards the voice. Her eyes were blurred from the tears and she could only make out a large, darkly clad man standing behind her.

‘Niall?’ she asked in despairing hope.

‘Wyn,’ came the heavy response.

‘Where’s Niall?’ she asked, hoping that she had been wrong.

‘Dead.’

The pain went through her like a sword. ‘Dead?’ she gasped. ‘How?’

‘Axe.’

The horror, the pain, the brutality that Wyn’s single syllable carried was almost too much for Hwenfayre to bear. She fell face down onto the wet stones, crying out in anguish. In her heart and soul she could feel the savagery of the death blow. During her life Hwenfayre had seen men killed. She had, at times, seen men wounded by arrows, or by falls, or by accidents. But nothing compared with the hideous wounds caused by a sea-Raider’s axe. The image that rose in her mind of Niall, robust and powerful, cut down in such a way, left her reeling, fearing for what was left of her mind.