The Raven Warrior (34 page)

Cregan stepped in, sword glittering like a new icicle. “A foul ends it,” he said. “If none can take him one-on-one, then he has bested you.”

Black Leg stood still. He was a bit mussed, but he wasn’t even breathing hard.

“I am at your disposal for as long as you like,” Black Leg said in a very formal manner.

Cregan gave a nasty laugh, then slapped him on the back. “I can’t afford any more wounded. Come. Let’s eat breakfast.”

They were a hellacious crew. But they showed Black Leg a lot of respect. Even Red, whom it transpired had expected the very trick Black Leg/Lancelot worked, but even armed with foreknowledge hadn’t been able to stop him. Black Leg had simply been too quick and too strong for him.

Breakfast was sausage, bacon, ham, porridge, and bread. Black Leg, having seen and smelled the men’s house, had determined not to sleep in it. He didn’t have to. That very night Cregan sent him out with Red (his arm in a sling) to learn the countryside and reconnoiter.

“They are going to burn it,” Red told him.

“Thank God,” Black Leg said fervently.

Red thought this hilariously funny, and laughed all the way down into a very wild valley dominated by a gorge. Black Leg looked back after they had covered a few miles and noted he could see nothing of the dwellings belonging to Cregan’s people. Not even smoke troubled the sky near the mountains.

“Badugae? Is that what you are called?” Black Leg asked Red.

Red shrugged. “So Cregan says. I don’t know. Like so many of the rest, I’m a runaway
colonus
from the Champagne, a wide, fertile country near the Seine River. The Roman villas there belong to the Franks. Or rather, I should say those are the men my master paid taxes to. Barbarians who call themselves Franks. My master’s daughter married one, a Frank, and now they don’t collect so many taxes from my master.”

Black Leg felt uncomfortable. “What was his name?”

Red grinned. “My master? Or my ex-master, you mean?”

Black Leg blushed. He knew about slaves and the
coloni
bound to the land in the south of England, France, and all over Italy. But he had never met one before and wasn’t sure how to ask him about his life.

“Yes,” Black Leg answered.

“I don’t know, except that he was a great man and his Frankish and Hunnish guards did what they liked to any who offended him. So we feared them greatly. Him, too.”

“What happened that you came here?” Black Leg asked.

Red looked into the distance. They were traveling downhill through a mixed oak and scrub pine forest.

“We are coming to a low place. I have seen pig there.” He handed Black Leg his spear. “If we startle one, I want to know what you can do with this.”

The spear was long, narrow at the tip with pronounced flanges that formed a deadly barb.

“Won’t get it out easily,” Black Leg said.

Red laughed. “That’s the idea.”

“He will turn on you,” Black Leg said.

“Ah, and haven’t I the greatest warrior in the world with me?” Red asked.

Black Leg knew of the pigs before they came to them. The wind was blowing his way. He knew how many: two boars and three sows, one with an almost grown litter. He stretched out his arm to stop Red, then put his finger to his lips. The wallow was just ahead.

He picked up an oak knot fallen from the tree above. He threw it in the direction of the wallow, where it landed with a satisfactory splat. Pigs exploded in every direction, and Black Leg’s arm lofted the spear before he had time to choose. As it flew, Black Leg wondered if the heavy spear would fall before it struck the one (a young boar) he’d managed to pick.

It didn’t, but broke at the precise moment the pig caught up with it, and drove itself through the animal’s body, pinning it to the earth.

Red laughed again. “Young one, you’re a wonder.”

“No,” Black Leg said. “I’ve done a lot of hunting. We’ll eat a good supper tonight.”

The further down the mountain they walked, the more the forest thinned out. They crossed the remnants of a Roman road.

“It used to follow the river to a wooden bridge downstream,” Red explained. “But last year a rock slide wiped out the lower end and the bridge. So it goes nowhere now. Just as well. The thing made Cregan nervous. Those roads, you know, boy, they were built so you could put a legion somewhere fast. Now this road is too broken to follow, even if there were any legions left to travel it.”

A few minutes later, they reached the river gorge and then stood surveying the countryside.

“Nobody knows how long Cregan’s people have lived here. They fought Caesar and he didn’t think it was worth the trouble to dig them out of their hills. Every spring they drive their flocks to the high meadow, and in autumn they come down, slaughter the surplus animals, and live on meat, milk, cheese, butter, and barley the women raise around the farms they cut out of the forest. We try to help our brothers. If they raise the standard of revolt against the Roman landowners and their barbarian troops, we go and fight beside them as long as we can, and we welcome those who have to flee the cruelty of tax gatherers. Or the slavers who buy up the surplus young men and women from the great Roman landlords and ship them to the slave markets in the east.

“There are a lot of us. No one knows how many. We make no promises and take no oath but to assist each other whenever we can and to hang on and outlast the great landowners. The Roman officials, the barbarian mercenaries who murder, enslave, and steal all that is worthwhile in life from the people of the earth. Yes, Bagudae we are, and if enough of us last long enough who remember freedom, we will remake the earth. We can but try. Now, see there are no humans nearby while I build a fire and cook the pig.”

Black Leg’s head was spinning.
Too much, too quickly,
he thought. He left Red at the edge of the bluff over the river.

A few miles downstream, he saw a practical place to ford the river. He went wolf and left his weapons (such as they were) and his clothes in a tree. The river crossing turned out to be only a brief swim. But he had to cover a few more miles before he found a shallow place to climb the bluff.

Then he swung out in a wide circle to investigate the countryside. It was wild and beautiful, but being brought up among farmers, he concluded it wasn’t terribly fertile and the very sedentary Romans hadn’t tried very hard to hang on to it. Yes, these people perforce clung to their old way of life, one the Romans had difficulty profiting from. This had been, in his father’s eyes, the reason for the failure of the empire in the west: the Roman inability to comprehend or assist any other way of life than that revolving around the military. You live by the sword, you die by the sword; and the Romans had remained relentlessly military until the very end.

The tax base had eroded. Barbarians poured in over the frontier; the limes, a chain of forts, that once guaranteed order decayed. Still the whole Roman focus remained on the legions, even if said legions were now composed of inefficient and rapacious barbarians who fought to the death over the empty title of emperor at least once, usually twice, every generation.

Black Leg found some evidence that a Roman villa of considerable size had existed here once. But it was long gone now. Farms belonging to its tenants were piles of weed-covered rubble, and their fields so long overgrown that their boundaries could no longer be traced. He found wolf, bear, boar, and cat sign, but no indication that humans inhabited these scrub forest lands at all.

He trotted out on a rock spur that allowed him a view of the entire countryside. Behind him were the foothills of a mountain range that towered blue-white and fragile-seeming in the distance. To his left, the river gorge flowed out of the mountains, the bluffs falling lower and lower until they were gone and it ran unobstructed along the plain. Ahead the forest thinned out also.

Black Leg sat, lifted one hind leg, and prepared to scratch behind one ear. Then he realized, when his hind foot claws met a hard surface, that he was still wearing his helmet. When he changed shape, it had also changed to conform to the shape of his head.

He uttered the low whine that translated into, “Why?” in wolf.

“I serve you.” The voice sounded within his mind.

Wolflike, he cogitated and did not respond. When she told him her name, the bird had appeared. It wouldn’t go away, despite all his efforts to banish it. And she told him it was part of his geis and he must accept the creature’s service.

Black Leg had not been happy, and was even less happy when she explained some of the various problems inherent in the relationship of a mere mortal like himself and a superior being like herself. They made peace in the usual way, then set out across the beach to find dinner. There was a large, clawed being living in the shallows that resembled a spiny lobster. He collected a half dozen. She somehow found fuel enough for a fire, and they steamed the crustaceans and ate them. The claws being the most desirable parts, the meat was sweet.

After that, they lay in each other’s arms by the dying fire.

“Can’t I persuade you to stay?” she asked. “We lack nothing here. Most people would see our situation as paradise.”

He was looking up, and he noticed the sky held no familiar landmarks. He felt a long, slow chill creep over his body even as his foster sister had when she also had been taken from her own time. Only his disorientation was worse, because the differences between this sky and his were so profound.

“Where are we?” he whispered.

“At the end of time or its beginning. I have never cared to investigate,” was her answer. “I told you before.”

“I didn’t fully comprehend it.” He sounded awed.

Then he began to weep silently, open-eyed. She took his hand and held it while the stars began to fall, streaking out of the blackness, cutting their paths of fire across the still, silent panorama of the universe.

“You know what those are?” she asked.

“Yes.” He nodded. “The garden told me. So many things I didn’t know, so many things I still don’t understand.”

“The days and nights pass here much the same way as the tide rises and then falls. From time to time, a storm lashes the coast, but it passes. Sometimes it’s a big storm; sometimes a small one. But it doesn’t matter any more than the rise and fall of the tides. Nothing changes here; everything remains the same. I put a piece of fruit on the table, a ripe peach, and when I return a hundred years later or even a thousand, it’s still as fresh-ripe and sweet-smelling as it ever was. The same, always the same. I melt into the water and let it brush me against the sand. I melt into the sand and am taken up as vapor and carried high up to where the stars shine even by day, and am a wisp of ice cloud forming a ring around the moon by night, a whisper of brightness across the blue by day. And after I have drifted this way for eons, I return and everything is still the same. The fruit just as ripe, the sea just as blue, the breeze refreshing as it was before I left. Nothing has changed or will change forever. I love you.”

“I know,” he whispered through his tears. “I know. But I can’t stay. It’s not in me. I would die to bring some change here. In the end, I would grow mad or find my way home.”

“Yes,” she answered, soothing him as she might a troubled child. “Yes. Tomorrow I’ll show you the way.”

And she had, but stipulated he must take the helmet with him.

A wolf doesn’t cry, and for a moment he considered changing just to weep. But then he pushed the problem out of his mind. The countryside was beautiful as the declining sunlight brushed the foliage of the trees to a mirrored sheen and drenched the earth with ruddy light. A harsh place with pockets of poor soil that supported only scrub oak and rather tormented, hungry-looking pines. But he thought it might have been better country before the Romans tried to farm it. And beyond the lowland forest, the plain was fertile. There would be people settled beyond the forest.

But not here. There was no one here. No human, that is. The wind blowing at his face would have told him if there were.

He dropped down from the rock and made a wide circle through the tangled forest. He found nothing and was crossing the river when he stopped to watch the water become a miraculous mirror of the changing sunset sky. He paused and dropped his muzzle into the water, then the helmet took wing and settled itself as a bird on a rock surrounded by water—water that mirrored the purple, gold, and red flares that filled the sky.

Black Leg abandoned the wolf.

“It gives you power,” Black Leg told the bird.

“Beauty always does, my lord.”

“My lord,” Black Leg said. “What is this respect?”

“Not respect,” the bird said. “Gratitude. You killed me. Now I can sleep.” The bird’s eyes glowed red against its dense, black plumage. “I’m dead. There is nothing in me but carbon and iron. I return only to ask help for my friends.”

“No!” Black Leg said. “And I can guess who you are. The first. You put out my eye.”

“That I did.” The reply was accompanied by a raucous raven laugh. “But in return, you were kind enough to kill me.”

Black Leg remembered something like a coal powdering between his teeth. “You left a bad taste in my mouth. You still do.”

“Wait. You will encounter a taste of something even more vile. Only . . . it will be in your mind.”

“To hell with you!” Black Leg said. “Or rather, go back to what you were and, geis or not, leave me alone.”

“No geis. Say rather, fate,” were the bird’s last words.

A second later, the helm was on his head and the last light was fading from the water. He could smell the pork cooking in the distance. He donned his clothing and returned to the encampment with Red.

The pig was cooking over a pit of hot stones. They uncovered it and shared out a jug of wine.

“See anyone?” Red asked.

“No,” Black Leg said. “Should I have expected to?”

“Sometimes. Three out of five times, we do. They break down into three categories: brigands, refugees, and soldiers the landowners send up here to try to dig us out.”

“Um.” Black Leg was pulling pork off the carcass and wrapping it in flat bread they had brought along. “And?” he asked.