Warriors of Ethandun (25 page)

Asser guided him past the forge, steaming and sparking and overwhelming Dan's senses with the acrid smell of burning charcoal and hot metal and the copious sweat of the bearded smithy. They passed the carpenter shaving wood so that it fell in pale golden curls on the rush-strewn mud. Everywhere there were signs of a new energy and purpose.

Asser walked through the outer gate of the fortress to a small windowless hut made of rough timber. It stank of pigs, though an effort had been made to clean it out. Dan wrinkled his nose.

‘I need solitude for my work and Aelfred generously allowed me to take this place for my own.'

Dan could not tell if Asser was being ironic or not, so he said nothing. Asser began working on the fire and with commendable speed, and nothing more elaborate than a small tinder box, soon had a reasonable fire going in the hearth. His face in the flames looked skeletal.

‘I wanted to talk to you because Aelfred trusts you. I must say you have done well to get him to face up to his responsibilities. He is a new man since you came and, fond though I was of the old one, we need a stronger, more determined character to win back a kingdom.' He
paused as if waiting for some response from Dan, but Dan merely warmed his hands on the fire and readjusted his weight on the uncomfortable stool: he could not think of anything to say.

‘Dan, I am for all my faults a man of God and a man of prayer and what I see when I look in your eyes disturbs me more than I can say. Here in my private place I'm asking you to confess your sins to me in the full confidence that I will never tell any living person what you tell me as a man of God.'

Dan wondered if he dared. Asser's dark eyes burned with righteous fervour – could he trust him? What would Taliesin say? Taliesin would encourage him to lie. Taliesin's commitment to truth was erratic at best, but that was the thing he liked least about Taliesin. Dan was tired of having to keep the truth from people. Ever since he'd brought Ursula back half dead from Camlann, he knew that he'd felt lost and alone. He was still only sixteen, in spite of all the killing and all the weirdness. He wanted someone to tell him what to do, how to make things right. Dan found that his eyes were filling with tears. He was very afraid that he might break down and sob, like a much younger child. A bit of him just wanted to bawl that it wasn't fair, that everything he'd done he'd done from the best of motives, to keep people safe, to keep people alive – even the killing had been to keep people alive. He didn't say any of that, of course – he wasn't a fool – but he came very close to saying it.

‘Dan,' Asser's voice was soft and earnest. He leaned forward so that Dan could not avoid his intense gaze. ‘You
need to remember that there is nothing that God cannot forgive. God has shown me that your soul is burdened. I would like to help you.' Asser's long talon-like fingers found Dan's hand. He had very big hands that were calloused and harder than Dan would have expected in a monk. ‘Listen to me. You are a brother, you speak the true tongue. I will not betray you.'

Belatedly Dan realised that Asser had spoken in the old language of the Combrogi – one of the tribal languages that reminded him of Macsen and Kai and Ursula as she had been when she was a warrior. Dan wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

‘I don't think I can explain what happened to me,' Dan began, haltingly. ‘It is too strange.'

‘However strange, Dan, it is not beyond the love of God.'

‘What would you say if I told you I could turn into a bear?'

Asser made a clicking sound with his tongue. ‘I would tell you that you had drunk too much of this strong Aenglisc ale, that you had spent too much time in the company of the heathen with all their tales of Odin and that you are a soul in torment.'

‘You don't believe me?'

‘I believe that you believe it, Dan. I know that you fight with all the ferocity of a bear. Is that what you mean?'

‘It was like that to begin with. When I fight … I lose myself, I let my instincts take over and I don't think about what I'm doing. It is almost as if the part of me that is really Dan hides away and the other part, a colder person
who knows how to kill, takes over.'

Asser tightened his grip on Dan's hand. Dan continued, ‘But lately it has become more than that; it is as if I am possessed. I want to kill people.' He turned his head away from Asser's steady gaze. ‘I like killing,' he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, ‘and that has never happened to me before.'

‘Can you show me?' Asser said.

Dan shook his head. ‘I might kill you.'

‘Let me worry about that, my boy. You might think me a foolish ageing monk, more used to ink on his fingers than blood on his hands, but there's not one of us alive now who has not had anger in his heart enough to kill. So many innocent, holy lives were lost in an orgy of killing when the Vikings came ashore and devastated our monasteries. There is such a thing as a just war and Aelfred is embarked upon it. He needs good men to fight in it. God has chosen you as one of his – in the test by water. It is not my job as a mere servant of God to argue with his decision, but it might be up to me to ensure that a good man does not turn bad.'

Dan was not at all sure that he had understood the monk. He spoke the tribal tongue with an unfamiliar accent and the language he used could not easily bear the sense he wanted to convey. Perhaps he was more like Dan's old friend, the monk Frontalis, than he had at first appeared.

‘Come, Dan. We'll walk a little way from the fortress and you can show me what happens to you and I will ask for Our Lord's help in exorcising whatever demon possesses you.'

‘What if the demon is me, Asser?'

‘Well, that's the way with demons – men only welcome in the ones who are most like themselves. These things are mysteries and I do not claim to be an expert, though I have cast out demons before. I shall take a stout stick to fend you off should it all get a bit out of hand.'

Dan was powerless to explain how useless a stick might be against his own brand of wild madness. There was something about Asser that made Dan believe that if anyone could help him, Asser might have that power. He had something of the air of a fanatic, which made Dan uncomfortable, but who besides a fanatic would risk himself in this way? Who but a fanatic would even try to help a monster like Dan?

Ursula stared in astonishment at her former enemy. ‘What are you doing here? I thought we left you in Arturus's world.'

Rhonwen smiled. Ursula wasn't sure that she'd ever seen her smile before. The shadow of Rhonwen's youthful beauty transformed her face.

‘Dan did not tell you I was here?'

Ursula shrugged. ‘If he did, I didn't hear him.'

‘Ah, my poor, brave, lost girl. You are not yourself.' She patted Ursula's cheek with her cool slack-skinned hand.

Ursula was bemused: since when had she been Rhonwen's ‘girl'? They had been enemies for most of their association.

‘I have travelled too many worlds since I left you at Camlann, telling the tale of Arturus and the battle for civilisation. I came here two or three years ago and Taliesin followed soon after.'

Ursula was confused by that. Rhonwen had fought for the Aenglisc, against Ursula and Taliesin and against Arturus, but then she had recanted at the last and changed
sides. Here, both Rhonwen and Taliesin were siding with the Aenglisc: there was no logic to it.

‘I don't understand,' Ursula said. She wasn't sure that she had understood anything since she came through the Veil.

‘You are still so young, I wouldn't expect you to – but in the end I have come to see what is worth fighting for. I have come to believe that order and reason is better than chaos and madness. It isn't a hard choice. Aelfred represents the forces of order.'

Rhonwen looked at her hard, searching her face for something Ursula could not guess. ‘It is so strange to see you still so childlike and beautiful after so long,' she said, wonder in her voice.

‘I last saw you a few weeks ago,' Ursula said. Was that true? She was no longer sure of anything. Rhonwen clucked her tongue.

‘You must find me much changed then.' Her expression was sad. ‘I haven't much power in this world – no real gift of illusion. You see the woman I have become and I see that, for all your beauty, you are in a very poor state.' Rhonwen's hand felt strangely cooling as she tested the temperature of Ursula's head. ‘The magic is still burning you up. How do you feel?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Ursula, I have not been your enemy for a long time – almost a lifetime. You can trust me.'

Ursula could feel Rhonwen's earnestness emanating from her with its own kind of heat. She could not doubt that Rhonwen spoke the truth.

‘I don't feel good. I keep getting pictures – images of other people, thoughts – I can't shut them out. I am so full of power it is taking me over, diluting me, so that in all the magic in me there's barely any Ursula.' She gulped back tears. ‘The Danes, they were going to sacrifice twenty men to me. I'm trying not to use the magic, but it won't let me go.'

‘There, there.' Ursula had never expected to take comfort from Rhonwen. The old woman held Ursula against her thin body and patted her back as if she were a child. ‘You are overwrought as well as overwhelmed. I have something that will help you sleep; you need to rest. To be restored. I believe your sleep will be dreamless. The tincture will not harm you, I promise you that.'

Ursula nodded wordlessly. She did not know when she had last slept. It was hard to tell. Night and day, dreaming and waking: it had all been one to her for too long. Nothing that had happened to her had seemed real.

‘Do you think I can ever be free of it – the magic, I mean?'

Rhonwen sighed. ‘I know what it is to be without it,' she said, pausing in the act of pouring out the tincture. ‘Do you really want to be free of it?'

That was a question Ursula could not easily answer, but she knew that she did not want to feel that it controlled her. She took the tincture from Rhonwen's hands. It didn't smell harmful and she was sure that she would know if it were. ‘I don't know what I want, but I think it would be good to sleep.'

She drank the drink down quickly: it tasted as foul as
the medicines her mother had given her when she was small. It seemed strange to link the sorceress Rhonwen with her mother's homely comfort, but this older Rhonwen, lacking her imperious loveliness, was more motherly than Ursula would have expected. Ursula lay down on the straw-filled pallet and let herself relax and let sleep come.

It was dark when she woke up. She was sitting at the fireside in Guthrum's hall, watching the Danes drink and relate their battle stories. Gunnarr was sitting a little apart, his handsome face clouded. It was clear to Ursula that he was being blamed for her disappearance and that it had gone badly for him since Finna had become so important. Finna! Ursula fled the scene before Finna could appear. She screamed and felt Rhonwen's hand on hers.

‘It is all right, Ursula, come back to me.'

Ursula opened her eyes and saw Rhonwen as she had first seen her, before she had been horribly burned in the fire, before she'd become old. Ursula blinked and it was the old crone Rhonwen who stood over her, offering her clean water from a pottery beaker.

‘How did you sleep?'

‘Well to begin with, but then I saw Guthrum in his hall and I … I was afraid and came back here.'

‘Why are you afraid of Guthrum? He has no power to hurt you, at least not while you are here and he is at Cippenham.'

Ursula only hesitated for an instant. She needed an ally and Dan was not up to much. She would not have chosen Rhonwen, but Taliesin had brought them to this world
under false pretences and no one else understood about the magic. She took a sip of the clean water and cleared her throat.

‘There was a girl with Guthrum. She has no power of her own but she called to mine.' Ursula could not stop her voice from shaking a little as she spoke of Finna. ‘I dare not use magic or she will find me. It was she who made Guthrum make the sacrifice. She had strange power.' Ursula swallowed hard. ‘She has influence now with the Vikings. She acted as my mouthpiece when I was lost to the magic. I could not resist her. She made me prophesy and I don't understand how she could compel me, but I had no choice but to do what she asked. What if she had asked me to do something really bad?'

Rhonwen sat down heavily on the stool beside Ursula. ‘Ah. That is not good news, though it is also not so much of a surprise. I have seen this girl you call Finna in my own dreams and I believe Taliesin knows of her too.' She hesitated. ‘He asked me if I knew anything about the gift of using the power of others. I thought he was being insulting because I called on his power, not my own, to draw him near.' She sighed. ‘One day Taliesin will learn to be more direct. She may have tried to use him too. He has never said.

‘I can sense magic, you see, even though I cannot wield it. Taliesin has some power here, enough for him to be useful to the King.'

‘Do you miss using magic?' Ursula felt less overwhelmed in Rhonwen's cottage with a board floor and a bed between her flesh and the naked earth, but her nerves
still felt raw and exposed, as if her skin was too thin, and even the gentle draught from under the door made her flinch as though from an assault. She knew that the magic was only dormant within her, quiet for a time.

Rhonwen's eyes searched Ursula's face. ‘What do you think?'

‘I hoped that maybe it mattered less …' She hesitated and Rhonwen cackled. ‘You thought it might matter less now that I'm old and ugly?'

‘No – I didn't mean that …' Ursula said hastily, but Rhonwen waved away her objections.

‘Don't deny it. I do still miss it, but not as badly as I once did. It no longer drives me mad with longing. I can do small things – I see glimpses of the future, I can do a bit of healing, some magic detection, and I am gifted in the mixing of sleeping draughts. I have peace here – except when Asser chooses to cause trouble. He has an instinctive understanding of magic if only he'd admit it. He knows exactly when I have used a gift greater than potions.'