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Authors: Keith Taylor

Bard I (7 page)

BOOK: Bard I
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Here prowled clans of mandrake, the strange gnarled vegetable folk whose lusty matings produced not eggs or live births, but seeds to be planted in the earth, and whose cry could kill, stabbing through the ear to the brain like a murderously driven awl. Here trod the unicorn, with blue vapour curling from nostrils softer than any woman’s breast, with dainty precise hooves lethal as maces, a spiral horn with which he’d gore a man to the heart as readily as look at him, and legs he would trustingly bend to lay his fine head m a virgin’s lap. Here were sacred groves long abandoned, where Druids had once fed the trees with human blood. And stranger things yet.

Felimid the bard might well have been reckoned as one.

With circuitous caution, he returned to the hut he’d built in a tiny glade. By the power of Golden Singer he had made summer there, harped into existence on those magical strings. The trees above rustled green with sheltering leafage, while brush, grass and flowers flourished below. The very air in the glade held summer’s warmth.

The hut had a sunken, stone-lined floor. domed over with a roof of woven branches on an upright central pole. This, and the channels dug about to drain away water, was the ordinary work of Felimid’s hands, done without magic. Not even a bard’s power could stop rain from falling for long. ‘More’s the pity. Felimid thought, as he lifted aside the stagskin flap covering the hut’s entrance.

‘Felimid?’

Regan’s voice was phlegmy with illness. Its first signs had been headache and pain in her joints. She’d had the sense to tell her lover at once. He’d made her a pallet raised on a low frame of sticks to get air beneath her, and kept her warm and dry. Of necessity, he’d left her to seek food. Now she huddled in her grimy blankets, hair black as a raven’s wing tangled about her small face, flushed and streaming at the nose. Her eyes were evilly bright. When he touched her, she felt almost as hot as the stones of their tiny hearth. It was not good at all.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a froggy gulp. ‘I’m too weak to move.’

‘You needn’t. I’m here.’

He tucked the blankets more snugly around her, and built up the fire. After feeding her some heated broth, he accepted the sour truth that he could do little more. They must remain where they were until Regan recovered-if she did, and if Felimid didn’t contract the same sickness.

‘Your hunting went badly?’ the girl asked.

‘I’m empty-handed,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll have to be leaving you again at dawn. We’ll be reduced to boiling my walrus-hide boots for soup if I hang about here; and that’s no fare for the sick, or the hale! I’d be prostrated beside you, groaning, with my feet all bare and frozen.

‘Speaking of which, it’s needful that I find this unshod fellow who’s been spying on us. He’s little and young, or she is, and harmless, maybe-but I must know what he thinks he’s about. I hate to leave you—’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Regan croaked, in a spasm of sick bed irritation. ‘Don’t talk so much!’ After a moment, she added, ‘Luck.’

Felimid grinned. While she could show querulousness, she probably wasn’t dying. Winter could have made an end of her, as it did of many, but courtesy of the bard she had summer. For the same reason, she was safe from beasts. They could sense magic and never liked to approach it.

Felimid went away again at sunrise. He hadn’t far to go to find more of the mysterious, childlike tracks. Some had been left on the game trail he followed, and they hadn’t been there the previous evening. The unknown must have watched their hut during the night hours.

‘Cairbre and Ogma!’ Felimid swore. ‘I should have charmed him asleep with a harp-strain!’

It was in his mind to fetch the harp and carry her with him. Ah, but no. He’d hunting to do, work for steel, not magic. Nor did he know enough of what he was dealing with yet. He left with his sword and a strong boar-spear only.

Twice, he lost the stranger’s tracks. Twice he found them again by casting about in circles through the strangling, accursed brush. Then he lost them a third time. An hour passed before he solved the cunning misdirection his quarry had used in taking to the trees.

Och, what is this? Part human, part rabbit and part squirrel withal?

Felimid was not often baffled. He disliked it now. The faint toeholds and finger-grips he discerned on the mossy bark of a century-old oak argued that the mysterious climber had virtually run up it to gain the branches.

Felimid climbed aloft himself, scanning tiny abrasions on the bark. It seemed to him that the other had jumped to the next tree, indifferent to the long drop below, and doubtless to the next beyond. Being lighter than Felimid, and even more agile, seemingly, he could jump and whirl through high branches that would never sup­ port a man. He’d slipped pursuit fairly. He might now be doubling back to where Regan huddled sick.

Indecision attacked Felimid. Perhaps he ought to turn back himself . . .

Hunger decided him. in the end. They had to have food. He set off along a trail he hadn’t followed before, dreaming of sounders of half-grown swine led by some massive, matriarchal sow.

A half-suffocated cry prompted him to hide. He made himself a shadow among shadows, listening with ears honed sharp by his chancy life. Although the cry was not repeated, it had come from no great distance.

He investigated, sliding among wet undergrowth nigh dense as a wall. He’d learned the trick from the little dark people of the hills. To fight such impediment was to waste strength and stick fast. He eased his way through, not hastening too much.

Felimid wriggled out of the thicket on his belly. Lying flat and still, he squinted through long wet grass. A spider’s web hung close to his face. Raindrops rolled bead-like along the threads, outlining the delicate shape. Another hung beyond it, immediately above. . . so Felimid thought at first.

It was a trick of perspective, and of his mind, which insisted on seeing the sanely expected thing. Then the truth struck, kicking him into an empty chasm of nightmare.

The second web was not close to him at all. Instead, it was rigged between several dark trees, high up, big as a longship’s sail, or a royal tapestry covering one end of a hall. The web’s maker and tenant clung like a shocking eight-pointed star in the centre. Its body was large as a pig’s.

Felimid lay motionless, cold sweat rolling from him. He felt terrified, and sickened. His heart bounded about in the cage of his ribs like a demented frog, croaking at him to get away from this place at once; far away. and then farther yet.

The spider did not move. Felimid stared at it with morbid fascination. Its legs were shorter in proportion than those of a common spider; much shorter, and thicker. It struck Felimid that they looked oddly clumsy. Near a lower corner of the web, something dangled. neatly wrapped and hung on grey cords. Felimid’s stomach turned as he saw that it was human. The mysterious watcher, for a bet; the spider’s newest victim.

So much for him. Felimid didn’t suppose he would ever know now who that one was, or what his motives had been, nor did he greatly care, then; but it had been a more than ordinarily dreadful way to die. Had the poor gomerel blundered into the web, somehow? Unlikely. It didn’t ring true.

Common spiders, now. They lived on such flies as happened to be caught in their webs. Maybe this one caught occasional birds and squirrels thus, but their few juices could never sate its hunger. Did it stalk larger animals, leaping on them from tree-limbs, driving those loathly poison-fangs in? Or . . .

Felimid began to sweat anew. He imagined cunning drop-nets with sleek, invisible trigger-threads, snares fashioned and set with a hangman’s craft, perhaps dead-falls, the least disturbance of any communicated at once to those eight clawed legs, alert on the lines as a fisherman’s fingers.

Traps all about him! Belike scattered all through this part of the forest! What if he’d avoided them by sheerest ignorant luck until now?

Skin rippling cold on his flesh, he began to move, casting continual upward glances to be sure of the spider’s location. It undid him. His foot met sudden,elastic tension, a loop of grey cord whipped around his ankle in a living grip, and he was snatched into the air with a force that almost dislocated his hip. The boar-spear dropped from his hands and was lost in the brush. He hung head down, feeling foolish indeed. Like a swift dream-vision, he remembered dangling above King Oisc’s pit of wolves in the same way . . .

The great spider moved. With ugly deliberation, it crawled along one of its self-spun roads to secure this morsel. The strands sagged and hummed with its weight.

Felimid reached for his sword. Kincaid slid from the sheath with a blue glimmer of steel. The bard writhed, upside down, and cut; the spider’s cord parted,and Felimid fell, twisting like a marten to land on his feet. He dropped among crackling, rain-drenched brambles. and his luck was astonishing in that he didn’t impale himself on his own sword.

He’d injured his foot in the fall-a fire of agony blazed from his heel to the nape of his neck. Red suns rolled across his vision. Tears blurred the red suns. He ignored all these things. Frantically slashing with Kincaid, he cut his way out of the brambles.

The spider had left its web. Legs gathered under it, the horror clasped a centuried tree like prey. Briefly it paused, motionless.

From jaws to anus it was maybe five feet long. Its thick legs, rounded sack-like belly and the twin palps beside the mouth, all sprouted sensory bristles like obscene brown fur. The thorax was also brown, but bare and hard. with thorny serrations of chitin along the back. Set between the palps, black poison-fangs slid in and out of mandibles, vermilion-red like the joints of the eight bent legs.

It scrambled down the trunk.

Felimid’s boar-spear had been lost when the snare took him. With fingers that felt like sausages, he unbuclded the scabbard and let it fall. His eyes quested for the monster now hiding in tangled brush. Fear tasted like iron rust in the bard’s mouth. Was the monster accustomed to stalking? How silently could it move?

The boar-spear’s butt poked up from a hawthorn bush. Felimid breathed thanks, and seized it. With that in his right hand, and the sword Kincaid waiting in his left. he felt better. Once he’d set his back against an enormous tree, he felt better still-for a moment. Then waking nightmares assailed him, of a noose dropped over his head from above, or more than one of the monsters hunting him.

His injured ankle pained ferociously. It wouldn’t bear an ounce of weight. Darkly he thought that it might be broken. That would be wonderful; that would be fine indeed.

The spider came rustling out of the dense bushes. It looked at Felimid with eyes like malevolent red jewels, from thrice its own length away. Then it rushed upon him with terrifying speed.

Felimid had barely time to ground the boar-spear’s butt, and guide the point under the hard thorax. To face those clashing mandibles and deadly eyes with his mind in control and his own eyes wide open was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

The broad spearhead ripped through abdominal hide, tough as ox-leather, and pierced deep, deep, driven by the spider’s own impetus, until it was buried to the cross-piece, which prevented the spider’s charging up the impaling spear-shaft to fang the soft creature hurting it. The spider shrieked, foaming spittle and poison. It couldn’t hear its own ghastly noise; it was completely deaf.

Its forelegs reached out for the bard. He whirled Kincaid right and left in a double loop. Chitin shattered. Two clawed feet were ruined. Two more seized roots, stones, anything, and began to drag the hideous carcass closer “to Felimid in spite of the boar-spear. The butt began to slip, plowing a furrow in the wet earth. Then it lodged firmly between two oak roots. The spider continued to strain.

Pivoting on his good leg, Felimid swung Kincaid over-arm, and split the thorax between those intelligently hating eyes. The spider sank back on its long hind legs, sundered face to the sky. Felimid dodged around the oak. A forty-pound rock he met on the way caused him to stumble, and he pulled it up as if it were a turnip, helped by extreme feelings of terror, revulsion and rage, and finished his circuit of the tree. The spider tried to dislodge the sword with its maimed forelegs, rather as if preening itself. The weapon came out at last. Balancing on one foot, Felimid hurled his rock. It crashed into the spider where two legs joined the thorax. The thing fell down, further maimed.

Felimid wanted to dart forward and seize his weapon, Kincaid; however, with his hurt ankle he wasn’t able to dart, he found he didn’t dare. He sidled back around the tree, unarmed now save for the heavy single-edged Saxon knife at his hip. That was exclusively for close-quarter fighting and he didn’t trouble to draw it. If the spider achieved a body-to-body grapple, Felimid was doomed, nothing surer.

It blundered after him. With three injured legs on its left side, and the boar-spear it trailed constantly catching and sticking, it didn’t do well, despite the bard’s own lameness. At last it gave up. It clambered slowly aloft on the strands of its web, moving very clumsily, weary to death. Suddenly it lost its footing. Toppling, it became enmeshed. Its struggles entangled it the more.

Spiders are not immune to the adhesion of their own webs. They spin sticky threads to trap their food, and clean ones on which to walk, but this one was now too mazed by mortal pain and weakness to tell the difference.

Thus it was lost. It hung between the trees, legs twitching slowly, and dripped green ooze.

Felimid was convulsively sick.

When he felt better. he cleaned the befouled sword in wet black earth, wiped him and buckled him on. Looking up at the gigantic trees. he wondered how long the spider had haunted this place. Surely there could be no others! Belike it had eaten any such, as rivals, long ago . . . its own offspring included.

The bard’s eyes grew wide. The spider’s last victim was twitching in his grey shroud where he dangled aloft. He lived yet. In his amazement, Felimid put weight on his hurt ankle, and promptly hissed in pain. He couldn’t climb to the stranger’s aid. He’d be needing a crutch even to walk.

BOOK: Bard I
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