The Raven Warrior (69 page)

I sighed and stepped backward, out of the whipping, tearing wind, and closed the panel. It was pitch-dark in the room and achingly silent. I lay down near the wall.

“Can it . . . the thing that’s watching us . . . hear or see me?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s not very close or very smart. What the entity that captured you does is delegate his authority to this thing, whatever it is . . . snake, spider, roach, rat. Yes, it’s a rat, and it’s hungry.”

“Thanks. I needed to know that,” I said.

“Pish posh! For heaven’s sake, the thing is a sentry. It’s not going to eat you. In any case, it will soon be relieved by another sentry and it can go eat. From time to time the important entity drops by its servant’s mind to take a look at you, then it leaves and goes on about its business.”

“Then become a dress and keep me warm.”

“No!!! The rat can see well enough in the dark to spot me.”

I was, to all intents and purposes, naked but for my armor. “It won’t matter if he spots you when I’m dead from the cold!” I snapped.

“Damn! Let me think.
Ummm
. . . the roots of those roses pervade the whole building. Let me see if . . .
yeeeeee!!!
God damn!”

“Christ,” I whispered. “You’ll alert that rat yourself!”

“Stop fidgeting and harping and carping and crapping. You are the only one who can hear me.
Now shut up!
”

Bull’s-eye! A wave of warm air wrapped around me.

My companion spoke in a lofty voice. “Nothing to it. I just made a mistake and tried to be a root. Although I will say, those roses could fry both of us if we get it wrong.”

“If we get out of here, I would definitely stay away from them.”

The dress had some more things to say, but I fell asleep while she was talking. The early morning cold woke me. That, and a
“Hist! HIST!”
from the dress.

“What’s wrong? And will you please! Please provide me with some warm air.”

The warm air arrived and my friend whispered, “The sentry is gone. I hear movements. Something is going to happen.”

Two women opened a door I hadn’t known was there and entered. At first I didn’t realize they were women. Both were hooded and robed. The dogs were tightly held with choke chains.

I staggered to my feet. I managed a bow, but the room was icy cold and I began coughing. One of the dogs glared at me with cold, yellow eyes, laid his ears back and lunged at me. The woman was hard put to hold it.

“I don’t like this,” the other woman said.

“Fine!” the one struggling with the dog said waspishly. “You disobey
him
.”

The thing entered the door. It paused for a moment between the two dog women.

“She must be ruined and no use to him or anyone else,” one of the dog women said.

I didn’t get a very good look at him, and I was just as happy about that. He had cloven hooves and his massive body tapered up to a pair of shoulders that would have done credit to an ox. The face was that of a wild boar, actually a little worse than a wild boar. He had two sets of curved tusks and the usual set of teeth. I know, because they protruded from his jaw sort of like a chisel and a razor combined.

“Let’s get it done,” one of the dog women said, and he advanced on me.

“You got my sword,” I whispered.

“Against that? You just think you’re going to use a sword against that,” my companion said.

“Have you got any better ideas?” I spoke almost silently between gritted teeth.

“Tell me when you want it. A second later, it will be in your hand.”

He—and it was a he—was wearing trousers and a shirt. I could see the clear male bulge between his legs. He had an erection.

I backed away slowly toward the wall. I kicked back with one leg and opened that door. It didn’t lead anywhere, but it gave me some running room.

I saw we had an audience. The corridor was crowded with people and the other balconies were filled. For a moment I was angry, but then I realized they didn’t look happy and they weren’t enjoying the spectacle. Instead, they seemed afraid. I knew I was being used as an object lesson.

So I shouted, “I am a sacred queen! I must go only to one man and come to him a pure woman! All you accomplish here is my death!”

I got no visible reaction, but I knew I had been heard because the room vanished around me. I, the monster, the dog women, and the knot of spectators were all standing on a stone platform at the top of the world.

The thing’s jaws opened. A pig’s snout. A pig’s intelligent but cruel eyes, and a pig’s chisel-and-razor teeth. He snarled out the grunting roar of an angry boar and charged me.

“Sword,” I said.

The thing’s clawed fingers caught my arm. I felt his talons through my armor. But the sword was in my hand. I drove it through his body.

It let go of my arm and jumped back. Then, I think he laughed, if that sound was a laugh. With one hand he jerked the sword out of his midsection and hurled it spinning out over the city. I had given him a gut wound and I was sure he would die sometime soon, but not before it accomplished its objective.

No,
I thought.

I stretched out my hand and called the sword. It came spinning toward me out of the sun and slapped down hard into the palm of my hand.

Yes! I had blessed it in the rainbow chamber, the labyrinth of light and color of the dancing floor of the stars. Now it knew me.

“Wonderful,” my companion said. “Now cut off its legs.”

I crouched, sword in hand, and we circled each other, a stall for time. Then I noticed the wound I’d inflicted in his stomach was closed. The massive muscles that marched up the abdomen toward the gigantic chest were intact. There was only a little blood on his shirt. The click of those cloven hooves on the stone platform and the tearing noise of the endless wind at my ears were the only sounds I could hear.

Those roses surrounded the platform on which we danced this dance of death, and the flowers and leaves were translucent to and part of the light.

“I can’t lose this battle,” I whispered.

“You won’t!” the ring mail said. “Next time he tries to close, cut off a hand, an arm, whatever you can reach.
Whoooeeee.
He stinks.”

He did. He stank enough almost to break my concentration. We were still crouched, circling each other. I shifted my position so the wind was blowing away from me.

“Thanks,” my companion said.

“Don’t mention it,” I said as he leaped forward.

I swung the sword at an arm outstretched to seize me. But one-handed, the sword only bounced off his forearm. The wound healed in a few seconds.

I switched to a two-handed grip and we began circling again. I can’t tell you how frightened I was. The thing—my opponent—represented a problem I couldn’t seem to solve. I was tired already and hadn’t eaten since yesterday. I was not unscathed by the battles I had been in. I had healing wounds in my right arm, my left leg, and now on the face where the thing’s talons scratched me on our last pass. Blood from a cut on my cheek tasted salty on my lips. That bird had broken at least one rib, maybe two, and it hurt to breathe. Moreover, the dress kept herself hidden and I was naked but for my armor. The wind sucked the heat out of my body. My fingers, toes, nose, and ears were already numb.

“Warm me,” I whispered. “Just a little.”

“Very well,” was the sour reply. “But I’m using up what strength you have to do it.”

He got impatient and lunged again. This time I spoke to the sword. It blazed red and when I slashed his hand with it, I cut off three fingers.

The thing raised the injured hand and roared out what was obviously a demand. I didn’t wait for him to be healed. I charged in and threw as much as I could into the sword blade. This time it glowed as though heated at a forge and it sliced off his right hand at the forearm. His blood spurted everywhere.

But he had a long reach, and by coming in so close, I had left myself open to a retaliatory strike. His fist slammed into the right side of my head. My right eye went blind and my left saw flashes of light. My head snapped back, and I went flying. So did my sword . . . in the opposite direction.

I called out to it again and felt it slap into my palm almost in the same second I felt the massive, taloned hand seize my right arm just below the shoulder. It was like being tossed by a bull, or being a mouse in the jaws of a cat. I was jerked toward him, and he hammered the stump of his right arm into my face.

One last try and I was finished. I ordered the sword to my left hand.

It went, my vision cleared for a second, and I saw the stump of his right hand drawn back to smash into my face again, the red, ugly, jagged edges of the bone protruding beyond the ragged skin.

“Give it everything I’ve got!” I shouted to my companion.

I felt the power pour into my left hand from my command of the blade, from my companion’s control over my body. I know I swung. I didn’t remember doing it, but with my left eye, I saw the sword shimmering white, cold as distant starlight, slice not into my opponent’s neck but the savage boar’s head. It sliced the skull in two below the eyes and above the snout.

Still the thing didn’t die. But I was able to hack the thing’s remaining hand free of my arm and jerk away.

I stood, both hands locked on my sword hilt, while the ruined monster circled me, blood spouting in gouts from what remained of the head and right arm until whatever reserves of savage energy kept him going . . . until at last he crashed to the ground and died.

All the human beings in sight fled except the two women with the big dogs. My blood was so chilled by a ringing cry of fury, despair, and suffering that I stood rooted to the spot until the two women reached me. They seized me, one on each arm, and said: “Run!”

Arthur stayed hunkered down in the freezing water while the fire on the bank burned itself out. Then, as if to compound his problems, it began to rain, sheets and sheets of pale autumn rain, dreary as a swamp in winter, cold as a grave. To remain all night in the frigid water was probably death. Likely, he would die of exposure before morning. So he crawled out of the water in a very bad mood and found a wolf waiting for him on the bank.

He still had his boots and a lot of his trousers and leggings, but his mantle was completely gone and his shirt hung in rags. And it goes without saying that it wasn’t helping him stay warm, because it was all soaking wet.

He was tough but freezing cold. It was late in the day and night was coming on. He was not overly impressed by wolves. He knew a lot about them. It was part of the job of any nobleman or chief to keep them under control and prevent them from becoming a danger, or—what was very much more likely—a nuisance to human beings.

They were rather better than human brigands because they had a sense of proportion about their depredations. In other words, they avoided going too far and provoking the wrath of farmers and stock keepers. That, and they helped to control the number of foxes and rodents resident in their pack territory. The fox was a much greater danger to domestic fowl, chickens and geese, than a wolf was, not to mention the young of sheep and goats. And rodents could be a massive danger to both field-grown and stored cereal crops if said rodents were allowed to multiply unchecked.

Besides, wolves were sacred, especially sacred to warriors and to the dead. And this quality of holiness was so ancient that it seemed only barely rooted in rational consciousness. He had been told as a boy by Morgana that from the time the world was created, wolves were there. Long before men entered into existence, the wolf had ruled the ancient forests.

When the Lady of the Beasts brought forth men from her womb, she appointed wolves to be human guardians. And indeed, it was true. As a hunter, he knew that in any unfamiliar territory, it behooved the hunter to find the resident wolf pack. They would lead him to game, showing him how he may survive.

As quickly as he could, Arthur began to search among the charred ruins of his camp for the bow and spear he had made from the yew tree. Meanwhile, the wolf sitting quietly in the rain near a large boulder lifted a hind leg and scratched vigorously behind one ear.

“Greetings,” Arthur said to the wolf. “First I see birds, and they address me courteously. Now a wolf appears. Don’t let me keep you. Say what you have to say and go back wherever it is you came from. For however much I respect your clan, I don’t care to go to sleep in close proximity to a creature with such long, sharp teeth.”

The wolf stopped scratching and sat upright, ears forward. The world around Arthur vanished and he stood in a desert. He found himself in a dry creek bed looking at a tree that wore flowers as blue as the dusk around him. Power. Dusk and dawn represented power. Not day, not night were the doors to eternity, and he knew this doorway was the one the wolf came through.

The last sun was a dying fire on the horizon and the first stars pierced the black abyss above him.

“That’s better,” the wolf said. And it was, because he was no longer a wolf but a fully armed warrior, the winged-helm bird beak resting down like a widow’s peak on his forehead, wings sweeping down to cover his cheeks and the sides of his head, the tail a broad fan protecting his neck. A muscle cuirass, two birds, one looking right, the other left. Below the cuirass he wore the armor he had removed from the dead shape-strong being in the world where he first met the birds. More of the ravens formed his arm and leg protectors and his sword.

“I stand corrected,” Arthur said. “I had no idea.”

“Even if you had no idea, you needn’t have been so sarcastic,” the Raven Warrior said.

“If I failed in courtesy, consider my circumstances.”

For a second the rain ceased because the birds swept in overhead. The ravens circled, spinning almost like a wheel above both men. Then ceasing to hold their formation, they rose higher and higher against the cold, gray sky in a crowd, an amorphous, cawing crowd. Then, as if finding their direction, they swept down to cover the ground surrounding the Raven Warrior.

One stepped toward Arthur. The bird’s head swept down in a bow and the wings opened.