The Exile (12 page)

There would be a reckoning, Sláine promised them all, watching the vigilantes as they moved around, catching glimpses enough to know exactly who had come to do him harm. He promised himself that he would remember their faces until they had breathed their last, and then he would forget them completely and utterly.

His mother's cry tore at the very fabric of the night.

Macha stumbled towards one of the men. From a distance it looked as if she was pleading with a friend, someone she knew, most certainly, but the man's hand came up and down, hard, and she went sprawling in the dirt, her nightshift gathered high around her waist, mud spattering up the soft white flesh of her thighs.

The vigilante stood over her and spat, a wad of phlegm hitting her in the face.

Sláine felt something inside him snap. It was a powerful thing, like the unfettering of a restraint that had otherwise held him in check. Suddenly it was gone. He rose to his feet and bellowed, a tribal war cry, beating his fist off his bare chest to incite this primal anger. Backlit by the dancing flame he looked like some demon from the Underworld come to wreak pandemonium. He held his father's axe above his head and leapt down from the roof. As his feet came into contact with the earth, a huge surge of energy shocked through his system from his feet, rising up through his legs to his body and seeming to burst like black fire out of his skull.

He demanded retribution in blood, and there was nothing the vigilantes or anyone else, including his parents, could do except watch in horror as he gave himself over to blind fury and claimed what was rightfully his.

He killed all seven that night. Seven. It was bloody and brutal, and savage: a dance of death as naked in its savagery as any battlefield had witnessed. They came at him as one, but in his berserker rage Sláine relished it, goading them into their own deaths. Seven fell to his axe.

He did not think it too many.

Spent, he lay on his back looking up at the heavens.

The dead lay around him.

The fire burned on, his home reduced to ash and smoke.

Grudnew knelt beside him, his face troubled.

"What happened, lad?"

The last ripples of power drained from his fingertips back into the earth.

"They came in the night, seven of them. They burned down the house. They would have burned me alive. You said it ended here, today, and you were right, it does. They are dead. They won't come looking for vengeance again."

"Because they are dead," the king said, understanding his meaning well enough.

"Exactly," Sláine agreed.

"You're a hard man, Sláine Mac Roth."

"I am not the one who sought death this night, sire. I merely helped those who were looking for it, to find it."

Seven

Lies Drip From Dead Tongues

Sláine was in a black mood. He had been ever since Gorian laid out the battle plans for the upcoming raid and learned that his task was to steal cows. It was humiliating. Stealing cows. He was being treated like a boy despite the fact that he was every bit as strong as any of the others - and if he went into a berserker rage, more so than all of them. He should have been in the thick of the fighting, not skulking around on the fringe trying to sneak into the cattle pens to liberate a bunch of milkers.

He knew it was because they feared him. Feared what might happen if he surrendered to the warping power of the earth and could no longer tell friend from foe in the battle frenzy.

So, they had him sneaking around the battle like a damned thief and tried to placate him by telling him how vital it was that he succeed, that their winter supplies depended upon him.

All he wanted was to be treated like one of them, to be a man, an equal.

The fighting was ferocious.

The Red Branch came sweeping out of the hills in two broad phalanxes that swept away all before them. Ten chariots, thirty horsemen, and fifty naked warriors daubed in the blue woad they used to drive the fear of the daemonic underworld into their foes. The thunder of hooves and war chariots was lost below the whooping and hollering of the warriors as they fell upon the town.

It was slaughter.

The men of the town barely managed a token defence, but that almost certainly saved their lives. The Red Branch warriors were not murderers. They were warriors, the very best the Sessair had. They killed as the need dictated, not senselessly. They killed today for food, to ensure their own survival during the harsh winter that Cathbad had predicted.

Gorian's scheme was executed to perfection.

They came at dawn, sweeping down out of the hills and breaking right and left around the town like a huge mouth waiting to snap shut. As the men emerged, food still stuck in their beards from the nightly feed, the mouth of the trap sprang - and it had iron teeth.

Screams of terror followed blood. Women watched their menfolk cut down even as they reached for weapons. It was harsh. The heat of the battle inspired the blue-painted warriors to feats bordering on evil. They tore the tongues out of the dead, cut out their eyes, and maimed their faces so that they would bear their injuries into the otherworld. Their sex granted the women no immunity from the suffering. They threw themselves at the painted men, gouging at faces and eyes with hooked fingers, clawing up bloody runnels only to be beaten back, silenced with a knife across the throat.

In all, it took less than an hour's quarter to subdue the town.

The place would never be the same.

Ghosts owned the town.

Even with the dying still unfinished, the place was smothered in blood and pain, and it stuck to the heart in a way that prevented those left behind from breathing. It would die now, just as the men had. If they wanted to live on the women would be reduced to the humiliation of begging, although some would seek out the temple of Danu and offer their bodies for food and shelter. Others would end their own lives that night, mourning. In the days to come grief would prove a killer to match the iron of the Red Branch.

Sláine skirted the slaughter. He watched it, with mute fascination. The Red Branch was awesome, irresistible. He ducked beneath a hedge, and crawled on his hands and knees to the tethers binding the heifers and the older milkers. The animals were skittish, frightened by the sounds and smells of the battle.

He used a rope to gather up ten of the animals and drew them away from the smell of blood.

He slapped the lead cow's rump and moved her on. The others followed. Sláine cast a backwards glance to be sure he hadn't left any stragglers, and was surprised to see the blue woad-smeared Gobhan Mac Tadg pressed up against the side wall of a roundhouse. The warrior clutched a sack in one grubby hand and a knife in the other. Sláine watched, horrified, as Gobhan picked his way through the dead, tilting back their heads and opening their mouths to see if their tongues had been claimed. If he found one that hadn't he reached into the corpse's mouth and cut it out. There was no honour to the man. He scavenged the kills of better men and in doing so avoided the fiercest of the fighting, marking him out as a coward as well.

Sláine turned his back on the man.

After the passion of the fight the men returned to their Dun and sated themselves in a glut of food, ale, and a very different kind of passion.

They gathered in Grudnew's new round hall, only recently completed, where all were seated equally at the king's enormous round table. Sláine saw the irony in the druid's chair, placed as it was over the exact spot where Dian and the others had buried the fake tablets. The king most certainly had a sense of humour. The walls of the new hall were adorned with the skulls of some of the Sessair's greatest foes. It was more than merely a decorative touch. By using the skulls, they denied their foes a place in the Summerland, turning them into restless dead. It was the ultimate price to be paid for standing against the Red Branch.

Food over-spilled the tabletop, dripping with grease and steaming in the fat of its own juices. A huge wild boar had been spitted and roasted over an open fire, its skin crackling and its fat spitting in the flames.

Gorian held the silvered skull of Paidrag the Fair to his lips and drank deeply of the red wine before passing it on to the warrior on his right. The old king, Calum, had had Bluth plate Paidrag's skull so that they might drink in his humiliation over and over in every victory the Red Branch toasted. Today was no exception. It had been a rousing success. Not a single warrior had fallen and the winter famine the druid had warned of was staved off.

The warriors drank their fill, passing the silver skull around the table. Sláine, having not blooded himself in the fighting, was the last to drink.

Grudnew stood up and leaned forwards, pressing his fists onto the table. "Who here claims the hero's portion from today's battle? Who today is the mightiest of us all? Let us take a count, shall we?"

Warriors spilled the contents of their sacks onto the tabletop, heads rolled across the floor. Gorian claimed fifteen heads. Murdo nineteen. Sláine watched as Gobhan Mac Tadg waited until all of the others had made their claim, and then stood up and emptied two sacks onto the table, one of heads and another of tongues.

The warriors took in his number with something approaching awe. He had delivered easily fifty heads and tongues, more than double any other man.

"Thirsty work today, eh boys?" Gobhan smirked. "I killed fifty today and I didn't think it too many. I claim the hero's portion as bravest of them all, but lads, it is no shame to be bettered by Gobhan Mac Tadg."

"That's a mighty count indeed, Gobhan," Grudnew said. "It's with great honour that I proclaim you hero and invite you to claim your portion."

Gobhan rose and tore an entire leg off the spitted boar and tore at it with his teeth.

"Good stuff, lads, tuck in, even you, young Sláine. There's no shame in not blooding yourself in battle, lad."

"And you should know," Sláine said without thinking. "You're a fire without smoke, Gobshite."

"Watch your tongue boy, or I'll add it to my pile." Gobhan chewed loudly, licking the dripping juices from his lips.

"Well, it'll be the first you've won today," Sláine sneered.

"You want to die, pup? It can be arranged, here and now if you are in a hurry."

"Go easy, Gobhan," Murdo said, laying a restraining hand on the older man.

"Take your hands off me. I'll have this out with the boy. I want an apology, and I want him salting meat with the women in the kitchens all winter."

"Apologise to a coward? I don't think so, Gobshite. I saw you scavenging the battlefield, cutting out the tongues of other warrior's kills. You're craven. You don't deserve the honour of the hero's portion. You don't deserve to sit at the same table as these men. You disgust me."

"Lies!" Gobhan roared, leaping over the table, sword drawn. "You want to challenge me? Face my wrath, boy. Taste my iron."

"Leave him be, Gobhan," Murdo said, his chair scraping back as he pushed himself to his feet.

"Oh no, I will not be dishonoured. I killed these men."

"Did you hell," Sláine mocked. "Did anyone actually see you kill a single man, Gobshite?" He looked at the assembled warriors, challenging them to defend the liar. "Well, did you? Any of you? Surely someone must have seen your heroics? It's hard to kill fifty men without anyone seeing you do it."

"You talk too much," Gobhan said, and swung. Sláine reacted instinctively and snatched up a huge carving knife from the table, burying it in Gobhan's chest even as the warrior swung for his head. He ducked under the sword and stepped sharply to the left, planting his elbow on the back of Gobhan's neck as he stumbled forwards, and pushing him down into the fire pit. His face began to crackle and burn but the warrior didn't make a sound. He was already dead.

Silence engulfed the round hall. Sláine stood over the dead man.

"He..." Sláine started, trying to defend himself.

"It's all right, lad," Gorian said, standing beside him. "The man's reaction betrayed him for the braggart he was. Had he claimed nineteen no one would have doubted him, but fifty... It is as you said, to kill fifty unseen is impossible, even in the heat of battle. You did well here, Sláine, you kept your head standing up for what was true and honourable. You've proven yourself as one of us."

"Aye, that he has," King Grudnew echoed the warlord. "And in doing so, you blooded yourself. Take the liar's tongue, boy. It's only fitting."

Eight

Skull-Swords

Rumours of raiders came to Murias that winter: creatures out of the Fir Domain.

The descriptions were unreliable, exaggerated by fear and made almost mythic in monstrosity as word moved from mouth to mouth, becoming more and more horrific. Inevitably that didn't matter. What did was the headcount. People were dying, too many people: people under Grudnew's protection, people who looked to Murias for leadership. They paid tribute and tithe for both.

Grudnew bore the burden with difficulty.

All his life he had been taught that life was sacred.

What Grudnew heard was that fell beasts were plundering deep into all of Eiru, unafraid. That alone did not auger well. For one, it did not instil confidence in the fringe borderland territories. Fear had them dispatching riders to Murias, the second leaving before the first could possibly have arrived, so desperate were they to impress their urgency upon the king. They begged Grudnew to unleash the Red Branch and drive the creatures back into the hell that had spawned them.

Tensions ran high in the capital, and tempers flared.

Word of the increasingly audacious raids came with unerring regularity. Over the course of a month the creatures hit many of the villages close to Murias.

Initially, Grudnew held back from the expected swift strike in retribution.

He counselled caution. If there was one thing he knew it was that a reckless king costs lives.

Instead he chose prudence, watching, listening to the riders as they reported on the raids, and building a more thorough picture of the invaders and their motivations.