The Raven Warrior (13 page)

He wondered if the music he heard went directly into his mind or if it actually resonated in his ears. Then, abruptly, his question was answered by a tone so piercing that it felt as though someone had driven a nail through his eardrum.

“Christ,” Black Leg whispered, and stopped walking.

The pain ebbed. But when he tried to take another step forward, the damning scream jolted his skull again.

He lifted her from around his neck and rested what was left of her body on the canyon floor. She no longer looked even remotely human, but rather reminded him of a boneless, ropy vine slowly shrinking to nothing. Indeed, it was possible now to see the rock whereon she lay through her fading body.

Black Leg endured a moment of dreadful despair as his mind conjured up a future here abandoned and alone, eking out a living on what scraps he could find in this bleak wilderness . . . without her.

The music began again, a sobbing motif, diminishing chords vanishing into nothingness. It seemed to echo his present, leaden despair.

He looked up and saw a pendant cluster of flowers clinging bare root to a ledge above, near the canyon’s rim. The music returned and seemed to soar with delight.

Black Leg began to climb. The going was easy at first. All the years of erosion had softened and pitted the rocks near the bottom, and plant roots dug their way into the stone and offered handholds. As he got higher, though, he found the decreasing vegetation offered fewer places where he could get a good grip.

But centuries of heat and cold fractured the stone, shearing it away to create ledges that allowed him to find secure, if precarious, perches for his fingers and toes. However, the stone was sharp, and he lost a few fingernails and cut his toes badly.

No question of turning wolf to heal those cuts, and for the first time in his life, he endured persistent pain and understood more about human suffering than he ever had before.

He was experiencing a new humility when he heard the music loud in his ears, singing a paean of triumph. He was face-to-face with the flowers.

He knew they must be the female flowers belonging to those she’d worn when they made love near the waterfall. They were also red, with a scarlet lip shaped like a deep cup filled with honeydew. Other delicate spotted yellow petals arched above, protecting the sweet contents of the cup.

Frightened almost to paralysis by the thought of falling, Black Leg let go with his left hand and plucked two. Holding the stems between his teeth, he began to make his way down.

He found his path easily enough by tracking the darkening smears of his own blood that marked the means of his ascent. When he reached the bottom, trembling and gasping with desperate relief, he saw her hand outstretched to take the flowers.

They seemed to vanish into her flesh, and he watched as she returned to life, haggard, pale, and weak but as beautiful and graceful as ever.

“I need more,” was the first thing she said.

Black Leg gave a sigh of acquiescence, limped down to the river, drank deeply, and turned wolf to heal his injuries. Then he returned to human shape and climbed the canyon wall again. And again . . . and again.

She seemed fully restored, her long blond hair almost a garment, her eyes filled with light when she rested her hand on a weary wolf’s neck. And told him the flowers informed her that there was what they called a “garden” ahead and she and Black Leg might find food there.

Black Leg remained wolf, and in a very short time they found what the flowers called the garden. The canyon enclosing the river widened, opening up an area about a half mile across. The swift-flowing stream became a very shallow lake, rich with good things. Some of the plants Black Leg recognized; others were strange to him. Conventional water lilies filled the center of the lake; reeds, sedges, and feathery bog plants grew so thickly in the shallows, they almost obscured the water. Beyond the pool, patches of crop plants grew on terraces that rose tier on tier in a gentle slope up to the canyon walls.

They stepped out of the darkness and found themselves walking on an almost completely overgrown path that ran along the lake at the center. The terrace to one side of them was filled with massed, coiling vines that held what looked like melons. They were in all stages of growth from green balls up to yellow-orange giants beginning to blacken, rot, and scatter their seeds back into the rich, soft, dark earth.

She picked up one that looked perfectly ripe. Something rather like a panpipe hooted softly. Black Leg, still wolf, looked up at her inquiringly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sounded like a warning. Be careful.”

She dropped the melon on the path. It burst open, showing a yellow-green center, moist and filled with rod-shaped seeds. Black Leg was so hungry, his legs felt weak. He shoved his face into the melon.

A second later, he withdrew it, letting fly with as much of a scream as a wolf can give, and bolted hell for leather into the water. He dropped the wolf shape in the shallows and waded in, trying to wash his face, mouth, and eyes all at the same time.

She doubled over laughing and said, when she got herself under control, “Hero you may be, but I think you will never learn caution.”

“Christ!” he shouted. “I might just as well have tried to eat fire!”

Even as a human his face was red, his eyes swollen.

Something like the sound of a cluster of glass bells resounded through the garden. She smiled and cocked her head to one side, listening.

“They talking to you?” he asked.

“Trying to. I told you before it’s been a long time since anyone like me came here. They have missed . . . us. Part of what makes it difficult is they’re all speaking at the same time.”

Black Leg could hear the distant, mingled strains of what sounded like a massive fugue, the musical lines of which merged into a magnificent tapestry of sound. He knew about music; he’d had some education about it from Dugald and Maeniel, who knew the sacred and profane compositions of the Greeks and Romans. He also knew the songs of wild things, birds, wolves, whales, and dragons. He knew music as a high form of communication, sacred, dangerous, and beautiful, capable of inspiring listeners to deeds of valor and incredible self-sacrifice; and also on the darker side, to cruelty, heedless violence, and suicidal despair.

The Greeks sang when they marched into battle, as did the Romans and his people. The music of death bound an army together and took them forward, triumphant over fear to look into the empty eyes of absolute annihilation.

“There are a lot of them here, aren’t there? I mean, the kind you know,” he said, then asked, “It bother the vine that we took the melon?”

“No more than cutting your fingernails or hair bothers you,” was her answer. “Seems the melons aren’t the part we want, though they were a condiment to the people who planted them. Try the flowers.”

She picked one. “Delicious!”

They were,
Black Leg thought after he’d eaten five or six and was beginning to feel better. They were big, yellow, soft, and moist, with a creamy taste. There were a lot of flowers on the terrace occupied by the vines.

They wandered on, tasting, touching, and listening to the manifold melodies and sensual delights offered by the hidden garden. There was a fig that sang and dripped purple, sweet fruit. Another fig that didn’t sing, with greenish-yellow fruit. Twined among its branches was a vine that bore a spherical, black-red fruit with a rich, sweet acid and slightly salty taste.

They were both gorged and relaxed—Black Leg had discovered the greenish-yellow fig had the same effect as a mild alcoholic beverage—when they at last sat down to contemplate their new kingdom.

“If it wasn’t for those birds,” Black Leg said, “I’d think this was paradise.”

“If it wasn’t for those birds,” she repeated, “we wouldn’t have to worry about finding shelter for the night.”

Black Leg glanced around uneasily. “Your friends tell you what’s up top, outside these canyon places?”

“No,” she answered. “They don’t want to talk about it. For some reason, they’re really afraid.”

“Yeah, well, that bothers me,” Black Leg said. “When the first little vine was frightened, we found out he had good reason. This garden . . . or whatever . . . was created. It didn’t just happen accidentally. Someone—or maybe some things—built it. What happens when they come to harvest their crop?”

“No!” she said, her voice dreamy. “No, they are gone . . . long gone. . . .”

She rose, seeming almost in a trance state, and waded out into the lake at the center of the garden. She was only ankle-deep when she dissolved into droplets, which fell into the still water like a small rain shower and vanished.

Black Leg found he was queasy and cold. He wouldn’t admit to himself how frightened he was. This strange, sometimes terrible, place had come close to killing them both. He looked up again at the blue, sun-suffused sky above and saw that it was growing late. Those birds, if birds they were, had come at dusk. When they’d entered the garden, the lake waters had danced with golden light. Now they were dark, the water plants green shadows against an inky tarn.

The canyon must run due south, and the sun must be close to completing its journey into the west. Where, oh where to hide?

He went wolf. The wolf could see better in the gathering dusk, and besides, the chill rising from the glacier meltwater was beginning to fill the air. The dying sun reddened the east canyon wall, and the wolf’s eyes, more attuned to the gradations of light and shadow than any human’s ever could be, picked up the darker slits in the rose-colored stone. They reminded him of the slits made for archers in the fortifications of Hadrian’s Wall. Then there were what looked like holes at the back of the top terraces.

Black Leg sensed night moving swiftly toward them. He remembered that the dark birds had appeared when the sun ceased to shine into the canyon at all. Now the last golden light was moving up the stone as the sun sank deeper and deeper into the west.

He discarded the wolf shape for a moment and ran down to the lake, waded in, and slapped the water, hard, two or three times with his open hand. She rose from the lake like a Venus formed by the waves. The sight of her nearly stopped the breath in his throat, she was so lovely.

This time some sort of water fern was knotted at her hips like a skirt that swept down into dozens of curved-wand ornaments with tiny but vivid lilac flowers. Other finely cut, lacy fronds supported but didn’t conceal her breasts.

“Damn, you’re beautiful!” he said as his eyes devoured the long-limbed, graceful body.

“I won’t be so beautiful long, if I can’t persuade these waters to support my life,” she said. “That was what . . . I was trying to do. I think if I could stay all night . . .”

He glanced back at the narrowing band of golden light nearing the canyon walls.

“The sun is going to set in a few minutes. I don’t think I can do the Weyvern shape again, not without draining your powers. And we used up most of the flowers on that vine, the one that restored you. But I think I might have found us a hiding place up near the canyon wall. I think it’s hollow in places.”

“Goddamn it! I thought I was getting close . . . but . . . come on, let’s try your way. At least take a look. I believe we can probably make it back to the river if we can’t hide. Then, if it has to be, you can turn Weyvern again.”

“Let’s go!”

They both ran up, he dropping into wolf shape on the first stride. They climbed, wolf and woman, up the terraces as though climbing a flight of giant steps to the top near the canyon wall. She peered in through one of the narrow, vertical slits.

“Yes,” she said. “There’s some sort of opening behind these windows.”

The light was visibly fading now. Black Leg ran along the base of the canyon wall, nose down, looking for an entrance. He found one, a hole only big enough to offer entrance for a wolf and a slender woman. He dove through and they found themselves inside a rocky chamber that seemed to run along the base of the canyon wall.

The roof of the chamber wasn’t high enough to allow them to stand. But he, as wolf, and she, kneeling, could look out through the narrow embrasures into the valley below.

“I don’t know if this is a perfect hiding place,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Black Leg said. “How do we block the door?”

She touched the embrasure opening and said, “It’s covered by glass or something close to it. Then there must be a way to close the door.”

The wolf obligingly trotted to the door. Nothing. Only a small, arched hole that opened out onto the highest terrace at the top of the canyon.

He stuck his head out and glanced up at the ribbon of light at the top of the canyon wall. It had narrowed visibly. He looked down at the terrace. This highest terrace, which overlooked the whole valley, was covered with coiling vines.

The wolf slid out and turned human. “Maybe I can block the opening with dirt,” he said.

He grabbed one of the large vines at the root, thinking to pull it up and back the soil beneath it into the opening. The scream that began at the lowest range of wolf hearing, then rose past the highest ultrasonic, seemed to pierce his eardrums like nails, worse, far worse than the attention cry of the dangling flowers at the canyon’s rim.

Black Leg was paralyzed by pain, and the vine coiled around him like a giant serpent and brought him down.

It took us some time to realize we had taken the fortress and destroyed its garrison. Utterly destroyed them. Maeniel was at my side; Ure and Gray stood holding their swords.

The dead were scattered in front of the gates, as were a few of our people. There was still plenty of light, though the catwalks along the walls were only blackened timbers and glowing coals. Around the courtyard, the drinking hall was a seething bonfire at the center. No longer recognizable as a building, it seemed only a pile of burning logs.

There is no more to be said.

I sat wrapped in a salvaged mantle, shivering, while the rest picked the place clean. The cloth stank of smoke and wet mud, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t find it in my heart to care much about anything.