The Endless Knot (28 page)

For a moment he merely stared at me as if he did not understand. Then he came to himself and said, “I saw . . . a shadow, lord . . . only a shadow.”

I shivered at the words but, to steady my own trembling hand, bent down, picked up the sentry's fallen spear, and gave it to him. “Bring Tegid at once.”

Roused by the commotion, others had gathered around. Some murmured uneasily, but most looked on in silence. Cynan appeared, took one look and cursed under his breath. Turning to me, he said, “Who found it?”

“One of your men. I sent him to fetch Tegid.”

Cynan stooped. He reached out his hand, thought better of it and pulled back. “
Mo anam!
” he muttered. “It is an unchancy thing.”

Tegid joined us then. Without a word, he stepped to the fore. Scatha followed on his heels.

“What has happened?” asked Scatha, taking her place beside me. “What . . .” She took in the sight before her and fell silent.

The bard spent a long moment studying the misshapen heap before him, prodding it with the butt of his staff. Turning away abruptly, he came to where Bran, Cynan, and I stood. “Have you counted the horses?” he inquired.

“No,” I said. “We did not think to—”

“Count them now,” Tegid commanded.

I turned and nodded to two men behind me; they disappeared at once. “What happened? What could . . .” I strained for words. “What could do this?”

Before he could answer, someone shouted from the hillside below. We hurried at once to the place and found a second display just like the first: the body of a horse. Though, like the first, it scarcely resembled a horse anymore.

The dead animal's hide was wet, as if covered with dew, the hair all bunched and spiky. An oddly colorless eye bulged from its socket, and a pale, puffy tongue protruded through the open mouth. But the remains were those of a creature starved to death whose corpse has collapsed inward upon itself—little more than skin stretched across a jumble of sharp-jutting bone.

The horse's ribs, shoulder blades, and haunches stood out starkly. Every tendon and sinew could be traced with ease. If we had starved the hapless beast and left it exposed on the hilltop all winter the sight would have been no more stark. Yet, as I knelt and placed my hand against the animal's bony throat, the sensation was so uncanny my hand jerked back as if my fingers had been burned.

“The carcass is still warm,” I said. “It is freshly killed.”

“But I see no blood,” Scatha observed, pulling her cloak high around her throat.

“Och, there is not a drop of blood left in the beast,” Cynan pointed out.

Appalled by the wizened appearance of the animals, it had not occurred to me to wonder why they looked that way. I considered it now. “It looks as though the blood has been drained from the carcass,” I said.

“Not blood only, I think,” Bran mused, answering my own thought. So saying, he lifted the point of his spear and sliced into the belly of the dead horse. There was no blood—no bodily fluid of any kind. The organs and muscle tissue were dry, with a stiff, woody appearance.

“
Saeth du,
” Cynan grunted, rubbing his neck. “Dry as dust.”

Tegid nodded grimly and glanced around the long slope of hillside as if he expected to see a mysterious assailant escaping through the trees. There was little to be seen in the thin, early-morning light; the mist-draped trunks of trees and a thick hoarfrost covering grass and limbs and branches bled the color from the land until it looked like . . . like the stiff and bloodless carcass before us.

The horse lay where it had fallen. Aside from a few strange, sticklike tracks around the head of the carcass, I could see no prints in the frosty grass. Nor were there any tracks leading away from the kill.

“Could an eagle do this?” I wondered aloud, knowing the notion was absurd even as the words left my lips. But nothing else suggested itself to me.

“No natural-born creature,” Bran said; he held his chin close to his chest. A good many others were unconsciously protecting their throats.

“Well?” I asked, looking to Tegid for an answer.

“Bran is right,” the bard replied slowly. “It was no natural creature.”

“What then?” demanded Cynan. “
Mo anam,
man! Will you tell us?”

Tegid frowned and lowered his head. “It was a
siabur
.” He uttered the word cautiously, as if it might hurt his tongue. I could tell by the way he gripped his staff that he was badly shaken.

The men returned from counting the horses. “Two tens and eight,” was their census.

“Thirty-three men,” I remarked, adding, “and now we have horses for twenty-eight. Great. Just great.”

“This siabur,” Scatha wanted to know, “what manner of creature is it?”

Tegid grimaced. “It is one of the
sluagh,
” he told us reluctantly. He did not like speaking the name aloud.

Ghost? Demon? I tried to work out the meaning of the word, but could get no further than that.

“The Learned call them siabur. They are an order of spirit beings that derive their sustenance from the lifeblood of the living.”

“Blood-sucking spirits?” Cynan blustered, his tone forced and his voice overloud. He was holding fear at bay the best way he knew, and only half succeeding. “What is this you are telling us?”

“I am telling you the truth.” Tegid jerked his head around defiantly, as if daring anyone to gainsay him.

“Tell us more, brother,” Bran urged. “We will hear you.”

“Very well,” the bard relented, flicking a cautionary glance in Cynan's direction. “The siabur are predatory spirits—as you have seen with your own eyes. Upon finding their prey, they take to themselves a body with which to make their attack, devouring the very blood as it flows.”

I did not blame Cynan for his disbelief; Tegid's description was incredible. But for the two dead horses, sucked dry and cast aside like withered husks, I would have dismissed it as little more than whimsy. Clearly, there was nothing remotely fanciful about it. And Tegid stood before us solemn and severe.

“Nothing like this is known in Albion,” said Scatha. “Nothing like this . . .”

“That is because the Island of the Mighty remains under the protection of the Swift Sure Hand,” Tegid said. “It is not so in Tir Aflan.”

“What can be done?” I wondered aloud.

“Light is their enemy,” the bard explained. “Fire is light—they do not like fire.”

“Then tonight we will bring the horses within the circle of the campfire,” Cynan suggested.

“Better than that,” I replied. “We will build a circle of fire around the entire camp.”

Tegid approved. “That will serve. But more must be done. We must burn the carcasses of the horses, and the ashes must be scattered in moving water before the sun sets.”

“Will that free us from the siabur?”

“Free us?” Tegid shook his head slowly. “It will prevent them from inhabiting the bodies of the dead. But we will not be free until we set foot in Albion once more.”

No one was willing to touch the dead horses, and I had not the heart to compel any man to do what I myself abhorred. So we heaped a mound of firewood over the unfortunate beasts and burned them where they lay. The carcasses gave off an excess of thick, oily black smoke with the same rancid cheese smell I had marked earlier.

Tegid made certain that every scrap of hide and bone was burned, and then raked the coals and gathered the ashes in two leather bags. After that we turned our attention to finding a stream or river into which we could strew the ashes.

This proved more difficult than anyone imagined.

Tegid considered the turgid seepage in the ravine unacceptable for our purposes, and we were forced to look elsewhere. Leaving Bran in charge of the camp, Tegid, Scatha, Cynan, and I set off in the bright light of a dour, windswept morning in search of a stream or brook. We soon discovered that the hilltop we were camped upon was not a natural hill at all.

Scatha first tumbled to the fact that the plain on which we stood was strikingly flat for a natural plateau, and furthered this observation by remarking on the peculiar regularity in the curve of the horizon. We rode a fair portion of the circumference just to make certain, and found as we expected that the rim of the plateau formed a perfect circle.

Despite this evidence, Tegid remained hesitant and withheld judgment until he had examined the center. It took considerable effort just to
find
it; it was no simple matter to quarter a circle that large. But Tegid lined out a course and we followed it. After a lengthy survey we found what we were looking for: the broken stub of a massive pillar stone.

So immense was the thing, we had failed to recognize the hill for what it was: a gigantic mound, ancient beyond reckoning, raised by human hands. Sheer size obscured its true nature. But the presence of the pillar stone removed all remaining doubt. The mound was the
omphalos
, the symbolic center of Tir Aflan. Judging by the size of the circular plateau, it was something in the order of twenty to thirty times larger than the sacred mound of Albion on Ynys Bàinail.

Tegid was thunderstruck. He knelt in the long grass with his hands resting on his thighs, staring blankly at the bare hump of weatherworn rock protruding from the ground. Cynan used his sword to hack away some of the turf while Scatha and I looked on. The wind gusted fitfully around us and the horses whickered uneasily. I noticed that though the grass was long and green, the horses refused to eat more than a few mouthfuls.

Cynan sliced with the edge of his sword and rolled away grass and earth in a thick mat. Then he dug with his hands. When he had finished, a portion of gray stone lay exposed to view. The flat, smooth surface of the stone was incised with lines deep-cut and even—the remains of the saining symbols originally carved into the pillar stone.

We all stared at the peculiar marks and struggled to imagine how the great standing stone would have appeared to those who had built the mound and raised it. A relic of the remote past, before the Fair Land declined, the broken stone seemed to defy understanding even as it commanded veneration. It was as if we were confronted by a presence that both overwhelmed and beguiled. No one spoke. We just stood looking on . . .

Tegid was first to shake off the unnatural fascination. Rising slowly, he staggered and made an arc in the air with his staff. “Enough!” he said, his voice thick and sluggish. “Let us leave this place.”

As he spoke, I felt a sudden and virulent resentment at his suggestion. I wanted only to be allowed to remain as I was, quietly contemplating the broken pillar stone. Tegid's voice reached me as a grating annoyance.

“Llew! Cynan! Scatha!” he shouted. “We must flee this place at once.”

Into my mind came an image of Tegid lying on the ground bleeding from his nose and mouth; I could feel his staff in my hands. I was seized by an urge to strike the bard down with his own staff. I wanted to punish him for disturbing me. I wanted to make him bleed and die.

“Llew! Come, we must—”

His face swam before me, concern creasing his brow. I felt his hands, grasping, clawing . . .

“Llew!”

I do not remember moving—nor raising my silver hand at all. I saw a shimmering blaze out of the corner of my eye and felt a jolt in my shoulder. And then Tegid—lurching, falling, hands clutching his head . . .

Bright red blood on green grass, and Tegid's staff in my hands . . .

. . . and then Cynan's arms were around me and I was struggling in his grasp as he lifted my feet off the ground.

“Llew! Let be!” Cynan's voice was loud in my ear. “Peace, brother. Peace!”

“Cynan?” I said and felt myself returning as if from a great distance, or emerging from a waking dream. “Release me. Put me down.”

He still held me above the ground, but I felt his grip loosen somewhat. “It is over, brother,” I reassured him earnestly. “Please, put me down.”

Cynan released me and together we knelt over Tegid, who was lying dazed on the ground, bleeding from a nasty gash over his temple.

“Tegid?” I said. His eyes rolled in his head and came to rest on me.

He moaned. “I am sorry,” I told him. “I do not know what happened to me. Can you stand?”

“Ahhh, I think so. Help me.” Cynan and I raised him between us and held him until he was steady on his feet. “That metal hand of yours is harder than it looks—and quicker,” he said. “I will be better prepared next time.”

“I am sorry, Tegid. I do not know what came over me. It was . . . uh, I am sorry.”

“Come,” he replied, shaking off the assault. “We will speak no more of it now. We must leave here at once.”

Cynan handed Tegid his staff and threw me a wary glance. “The horses have strayed. I will bring them,” he said, but seemed reluctant to leave.

“Go,” I said. “I will not attack Tegid again.” Still, he hesitated. “Truly, Cynan. Go.”

As Cynan indicated, the horses had strayed. Indeed, they had wandered far across the plain and were now some distance from us. “They must have bolted,” I observed, watching Cynan stride away. “But I do not remember it.”

Wiping blood from his face with the edge of his cloak, Tegid squinted up at the sky and announced, “We have lingered here longer than we knew.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, following his gaze skyward. I tried to gauge the position of the sun, but the bright morning had faded and thick clouds now gathered overhead. How long had we stood there?

“The day has passed us,” the bard declared. “It will be dark soon.”

“But that cannot be,” I objected. “We dismounted only a few moments ago.”

He shook his head gravely. “No,” he insisted, “the day is spent. We must make haste if we are to reach camp before dark.” He called Scatha and started off after Cynan.