The Raven Warrior (5 page)

The other turned toward us, hand on his sword hilt, eyes panicked.

I was on my feet, knife in hand, ready to close with an underhand thrust, when his forehead caved in. Last to die was the impaled woman; the lead shot shattered her skull and blood and brain dripped into the still water.

When I turned to look, our whole force was in the road, weapons in hand, ready to attack. But Ure was up out of the reeds and giving commands. “Get down, you fools, or I’ll unman every one of you!”

Everyone was a bit afraid of him. They dropped.

“Idiots!” he snarled in a low voice. “How do you know there’s not more of them beyond the trees?”

Gray stood up. “My lady . . . what have . . . ?”

That was as far as he got. Ure pivoted as smoothly and quickly as an angry cat and punched him hard in the stomach. With a gasp, Gray doubled over and fell to his knees.

“You shut up, you fool!” Ure whispered. “Tell me, lack wit, will all your jawing bring them back?”

Still gasping, Gray shook his head. “No.”

“Good. Then shut up and make yourself useful.” He was still whispering. “Take this swift little slinger here—” He indicated Albe. “—and see if there are any more of them.”

Gray glanced at the crowd of corpses dangling from the trees. Ure laughed an ugly, grating laugh. “Boy, the dead are the least of our worries.”

Albe looked at him, her face white, the scars on her cheeks standing out in jagged red lines. “My kill,” she said, pointing to the two bodies.

Ure smiled; a muscle in his cheek jerked. “Fear not. I’ll see you have the stripping of them.”

So it was. She did. And they were a rich pair. A torque, four finger rings, two good swords, three knives, plus metal-studded belts and clothing they had worn. No helmets or armor, but they were alone and had come in a boat and brought food and drink—a lot of drink—aboard. That and what food we had left over from the voyage we parceled out among ourselves.

The island ended in a little hill made of earth dragged up from the marshes by those people who built the village and whose bodies I suspected were the first hung by the Saxons in the grove. The hill looked like it had been one of those fortified watchtowers the Romans built. They probably used it to signal the fortress in the distance if boats were seen entering the river, because when Gray, Ure, and I reached the top, we found worked stone there. But we surmised that it had been abandoned long ago, both it and the fortress, when the marsh began to undermine the walls, and the defenses moved inland.

The Saxon troops that the Romans had left to defend the shore against their brothers on the Continent now allowed them to use the ruin in the distance to launch raids against the Painted People in the north. Saxons fighting Saxons; it raises the eyebrows. But both Dugald and Maeniel taught me that the Romans were more than happy to hire one set of barbarians to cut another set of barbarians’ throats. Or at least that had been the Roman plan at first. But now the Romans were gone and we were left to deal with the results of their miscalculations.

The troops in the fortress knew better than to raid along the Saxon shore, but anyone else was fair game. I must tell you, this went on everywhere, and Dugald and Maeniel attributed the rot that spread on the Continent in the scattered remnants of the old Roman Empire to the custom. The Frankish King Clovis lent money to the Saxons, and every year they doubled his money by raiding the coast of Britain and the Out Islands. As Clovis saw it, what happened to us was no skin off his nose.

He similarly paid the Huns to attack the Burgundians and let them keep whatever they captured from said Burgundians. They all did it, even the pope, or so Maeniel and Dugald told me, who was more than happy to employ them to fight his enemies on Italian soil.

This sort of treachery pervaded all of society. Most local lords were happy to allow brigands to use their lands as a base of operations, provided they raided only his enemies. The emperors in Constantinople paid off barbarians who threatened them, sending these tribes to attack the kingdoms of the west.

And everywhere the ordinary men, the people of the cities, the small farmers in the countryside, suffered the tortures of the damned. The Roman lords extracted taxes from them until they were forced to sell their children into slavery to pay off the tax gatherers. Then, when the barbarians took over—and in the end, they usually did—they collected taxes in kind, cloth, food, draft animals, and such, until the impoverished small artisans and tillers of the soil died of starvation in large numbers.

In the end, many ordinary people took matters into their own hands and formed the Brotherhood of the Bagudae and tried to wrest control of their fate from the hands of their overlords, barbarian and Roman. Maeniel saw the Bagudae as the last hope of what had been the Ancient Imperium. Dugald did not agree, and their arguments filled my mind from the time I can remember anything at all. The pair of them, for better or worse, brought me up to see the larger picture, and one day, to rule.

And that was why I was here sitting on the cold grass at the foot of the muddy hill, eating bread and cheese and swigging really nasty-tasting wine to wash it down.

“I can’t tell this from vinegar,” I told Ure. “Why must I finish this?”

“It’s food,” he said, “and your strength is important. You, your actions, are the key to our plans.”

I looked up and around the circle of faces surrounding me. They were pale, pinch-faced, cold, and gobbling their food just as I was, but every eye was fixed on me.

I had to climb the walls of that fortress and set the defenses and dwellings within on fire, and force the defenders out. We had only five or six good swords among us, about two dozen knives, but everyone without exception carried a sling. And they were all nearly as fast and accurate as Albe was. We carried ten sacks of lead shot, and everyone had pebbles and small stones tucked into their belts.

I had to force the men in that fort out through the gates and into a hail of missiles. If I did, we would win. If I failed, we would lose and die.

I felt a little dizzy.

When I was finished eating, I hunkered down with the rest and we sat huddled together for warmth—and we listened to Ure.

He produced a shears. “I want your hair, all of it, boys and girls.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You know why,” he said.

“Yes, but I don’t think all the others do. You need to explain.”

He nodded. “The men running out of that fortress will be better armed than you are, and the first thing they will do is grab your hair and slice your head off. If you don’t give them a convenient handle, they can’t do that.”

He snapped the shear blades together. “Your hair! All of it.”

He got it. We slicked down what was left of it with mud.

“Next thing you need to know is what to do after ‘he’—” Ure grinned. There was no mirth in it. “—finds he can’t get a grip on you.”

We waited.

“You save your last shot, rock or lead, it doesn’t matter. Put it in the sling and swing it toward his . . .” He paused. “What?” he asked.

“Head,” someone said.

“No.” He bared his teeth again. “You swing it toward his what?” he asked Albe.

“Balls,” she said.

“Yes! There’s a good girl,” he said. “Now, I want everyone to repeat what I just told you back to me.”

The troops looked dismayed.

“You can use your own words, but I want it all.”

The first was mistaken. Ure clouted him so hard he got a nosebleed and began to cry. But Ure made him repeat himself until he got it right.

Ure didn’t speak further to me, so I rose because I had an idea. Gray and Maeniel were standing aside, watching. I walked over to them.

“God! He’s good,” Gray said. “If they stand a chance at all, it will be because of him.”

Maeniel nodded.

I looked up at them. “I’m going back to the village.”

“You mean to the house posts standing in the water,” Gray said. “Why?”

I shifted my gaze to the Gray Watcher. “They were our people,” I said. “They understood we are one people, the dead, the living, the yet unborn.”

“They are gone,” Gray said.

“No,” I said, looking away over the marsh, over the still waters that reflected the sky. “They are not gone, but still there. At least, some of them, waiting. Waiting for me.”

He uncurled himself, became human, and studied her. “What are you doing here?”

She snorted. “I decided not to cut off my nose to spite my face. You’re the best-looking thing I’ve seen in about a thousand years.”

“What do you want?” Black Leg asked.

“God!” she said, raising her fist to the sky. “I sure can pick them. Do you hear? This idiot wants to know what I want. Hear that? He wants to know what I want! Well, Mister Hung-Like-a-Horse, what the hell do you think I want?”

Black Leg felt himself turning red all over. “You sure that’s all you want?” he mumbled.

“I’m sure,” she said grimly.

“You’re not going to drown me?”

She answered slowly, as if speaking to a child or one somewhat intellectually impaired. “No! Why the hell would I want to drown you?”

“To . . . so . . . you could eat me,” Black Leg answered.

“Why the hell would I want to eat you? I know your kind are sometimes not too bright and logic certainly isn’t one of your strong points. But trust me, even I couldn’t figure out a good enough reason to want to kill and eat you. No, the longer you live, the better I like it.

“I know you might not believe this, but from time to time some moron does fall into the water in one of the lakes and springs I frequent. And then, if I’m not around to yank him out and chase him back on shore, the bonehead does drown. Trust me, eating those things is not my first impulse.
Yeech!
It’s not even my last. The sons of bitches stink! And I usually get the unhappy task of dragging the remains to shore and dumping them so their people can find and dispose of them.

“Trust me, fool, you wouldn’t want to hang around a drowned corpse too long, much less eat one. After even a day or two in the water, bloating . . . but Christ, why am I explaining this nonsense? What I want to do is get it on.”

Black Leg stood up and glanced down at the sleeping old man. “Who . . . ?”

She rose and glided toward him. “How the hell should I know?” she answered.

“Why . . . ?” Black Leg asked.

“The shit is a sorcerer, who probably got crossways with another powerful sorcerer. That’s what those big-time magical practitioners spend half their time doing, getting one up on each other. You’d think they could find better things to do.”

She was not as tall as she’d looked standing in the water, but she was a comfortable size for kissing. Black Leg wasn’t used to kissing, but after a few minutes, he got into it.

But when he came up for air, she said, “Damn! Hot damn! You are going to be good. I’m glad I didn’t stay in my palace and sulk. You and that old fool pissed me off.”

But Black Leg was preoccupied. “Sorry,” he said absently. But at the moment he was searching for her breast with his mouth.

She was wearing a dark dress of shiny, greenish purple lily pads. They were shaped like arrowheads and they clung to her, draping themselves over one shoulder. Three blue flowers belonging to the water lily glowed in beams of moonlight that seemed twined in her hair. She was fragrant and smelled like crystal water that somehow harbored the scent of flowers.

He pushed aside one or two of the tiny lily pads with his tongue and found a nipple. He suckled gently.

“Ummmm,” she said. “My, my, aren’t we a darling. Do that again.”

“I’d love to,” Black Leg said. “But this dress gets in the way.”

“Yes. Well, she likes you, too. . . .”

“What?” Black Leg asked.

“The water lily. I’m wearing her.”

“He is an offering to love.” The voice was soft, it seemed only a breath, and Black Leg couldn’t be sure he heard it. “Thank you for letting me share him.”

“Not at all, dear,” she said, stripping off the dress gently. It came away like a gossamer veil, roots, stems, leaves, and the last of the flowers clinging to her hair. Then she dropped it into the stream, where it floated away, pads and flowers on the surface, roots and stems dangling in their element, water.

“Are you here?” Black Leg asked, because now, with the dress gone, it almost seemed he could see the moonlight shining through her.

“Oh, yes. Sometimes I’m translucent, sometimes even transparent. But as long as you see my outline, I’m here. Close your eyes and just use touch.”

Black Leg’s hand slid down over her stomach, down to between her legs. He had some education about what was expected of a male at this type of encounter, and he and his foster sister spent some months one summer spying on lovers. Everything he felt seemed to be in . . . order. Nothing unusual. . . .

He probed delicately. “Is this where it goes?”

“Yes. You’re a good boy,” she replied in a throaty whisper.

“My,” she said, reaching down and exploring his body. “Um . . . you’re not only a good boy, you’re a big boy,” she cooed. “I like that. You’re even bigger than I thought you’d be.”

“Will it fit?” he asked apprehensively.

“Be quiet,” she said as she covered his mouth with hers.

She stretched out a hand toward the old sorcerer. A faint dark haze hovered over him.

“Don’t hurt him,” Black Leg said.

“No. I’m just giving him a little deeper sleep, so he won’t bother us.” She spoke as she drew Black Leg toward a thick, soft patch of fern.

When she sank down into the ferns, Black Leg again had the odd sensation that he could see through her body, see the fern fronds form themselves into a bed for her and clasp her legs, hips, breast, and face as she sank down among them.

“Ah,” she whispered as she lifted one hand and drew him down toward her.

“They seemed to know you,” Black Leg said as he knelt between her legs. “The ferns, I mean.”

“They do, dear, they do. Now, let’s try it out and see if it will fit.”

“It’s tight,” he said.

“That’s the idea,” she told him. “I’m ready. Hell, you don’t know how damn long I’ve been ready.”