Dawn of Avalon (9 page)

“Yes, but—”

“I told you, they struck a wall of stone—maybe a hidden spring—under the hill. That’s why they weren’t here. They must have realized the tunnel would have to be re-dug if they were to make an entrance into the fortress. So they’ll have gone back to camp. They must be there now.”

Bron grunted. “All right, maybe so. But that doesn’t mean—”

“How many men has my father with him?”

He shrugged. “A hundred spears? Maybe two dozen or more swordsmen. But the numbers don’t matter.” The moonlight turned his craggy face to a dour mask, but I saw his remaining eye soften. “I’m sorry for the lad as you are. He’s a brave lad, and stood up to Vortigern’s handling as well as any man I’ve seen. But he’s one man, and we’ve got a hundred and more of our men’s lives to weigh against his. Your father and brother and all the rest would be slaughtered in an open attack. You know that. That’s why we started tunneling. But without a way into the fort—”

“It wouldn’t be an open attack.” It was an effort to make myself speak slowly, not to let the words pour in a tumbled rush past the tightness in my throat. “Not as you mean. Do you think Vortigern will not make a spectacle of his prisoner’s death? Not summon all his men to watch as he ensures that the fortress walls will finally stand fast? You know he will—he can’t afford not to. Not with his warriors’ confidence in his rule at such an ebb. He’ll gather them together—and they’ll be distracted long enough for our men to swarm the walls and strike.”

“Right.” Bron huffed an exasperated breath. He had thrown a dark cloak over his druid’s robe, but his grizzled hair was still fixed in the dozens of tiny braids. “That’s if they knew there was a chance to strike. But for that to work, one of us would have to go and—”

He stopped, remaining eye narrowing in his grim, moonlit face. “Oh, no. Don’t even think it, lass. Look you, Vortigern’s not going to sacrifice the lad without me there. Doesn’t make for near the spectacle if he’s not got his tame druid there to kill him by the triple death, like the men were all promised. He’s not even going to get the men gathered together, not until I come back. Which I can’t, because his men will have got back to the fort by now, and they’ll have told him that I … well—”

Bron rubbed his nose with the back of his thumb, and I saw—with a cold lurch that pulled tight in my chest—his tight lips and downcast eyes. “Bron.” I gripped his arm. “That you what? What haven’t you told me? What did you do?”

“That I had to knock two of his guardsmen on the head to get free of them.” Bron’s voice was a mutter. Then he looked up, single eye gleaming rheumy blue and hard in the pale light. “I was a fair way worried about you, lass. Not being able to get away from them like we’d planned. Vortigern had set a pair of his fool guards to watch over me—make sure the doddering old druid didn’t turn an ankle or break a leg out wandering the hillside. Their orders were to stick to me like burrs and see I got back to the fortress safe to perform the ceremony when the lad was recaptured.”

From somewhere deep in the forest, came another cry of an owl, low and mournful like a wailing for the dead that would never return. 

Bron shrugged, mouth still tightened to a grim slash. “So I told them I was having a vision of where the prisoner was. Off to the east, far away from where everyone else was searching.” Just for a moment, a ghost of a smile touched his face. “Followed me like sheep, the pair of them, both thinking they were going to get the glory of dragging Vortigern’s captive back. And then when we were off at a distance, I knocked them both over their fool heads and made off. Didn’t kill ‘em, though.” He grimaced. “No honor in killing a man just for doing his duty and when he’s made no threat to you. And when you reach my age you start to have more of a care for your soul than you did at twenty-odd. Didn’t think it would matter. Thought I’d find you and the lad here, and all the rest of your father’s men. But there’s no going back to the fort. Not when those two guards will have woken up with the devil’s own headaches and gone back to Vortigern, spitting mad and swearing vengeance on the druid who fights like a swordsman.”

Fate can be a freeing thing. If my future were immovable, fixed as one of the wayfarer’s stars, I could not be killed now, tonight. And if I were killed, I would escape the future Gamma had Seen, the one the harpers would one day sing. More than once since that day I had thought that I had now my choice whether to fear everything or nothing at all. And—

I found my fingers had moved almost of their own accord, to cup my wrist where Merlin’s lips had pressed, as if I could hold the warmth of the touch there even a moment more.

If I were to die, tonight was no bad time. Few, of a surety, are allowed to live their one perfect day, much less keep it always as their final memory of this world.

A night breeze had sprung up, whipping my hair back and rustling the branches above. I drew a breath. “You said it yourself, Bron. One of us must go and bring my father and his warriors, tell them that if they are to attack it must be now. And it must be you, since you can’t go back to Vortigern. I will go back to Vortigern’s fort. I’m the one who claimed to have Seen that Mer—that the prisoner was a fatherless child. I can tell him that I know the rituals as well as you, that it’s more fitting I should conduct the rites.”

Bron’s brows drew together. “Are you out of your pig-swiving—” he clenched his teeth over the words. “Are you out of your mind? When you were a chattering little magpie of a four-year-old girl, I drank Uther Pendragon’s ale and kissed his sword and cut the palm of my hand to swear an oath as your guard. If you think I’m going to break that vow—”

Twice, now, tonight, I had heard men speak of vows to guard my life with their own. I had asked for neither, and now, facing Bron in the moonlight, my temper broke.

“You would rather it all be for nothing? The weeks spent digging this tunnel?
Our
weeks of fawning on Vortigern and standing by doing nothing while he tortured an innocent man? You would rather see it all go to waste? You would rather see Vortigern squatting on Britain’s throne while the Saxons rape our lands and burn our fields?” I stopped for breath. “Look me in the eyes, Bron. Look at me and tell me you believe in your heart that my father would not want me to do this—that he would ever chose my life over Britain’s throne.”

For a single brief eternity, we stared at each other, my heart beating hard, while all around the branches swayed and creaked in the night wind. Then, finally, Bron’s gaze fell. “I must be out of my rutting mind,” I heard him mutter.

I let out the long, slow breath I had not known until that moment I held. “Tell my father to come from the north—that’s where the defenses are weakest, the walls are only half-built. Or through the gate, if I can find a way for it to be left without a guard. But—” I stopped myself, trying to force back the cold that now rushed in, biting to the bone. “You know that as well as I do. Just … take care. And”—I swallowed—“thank you, Bron.”

Bron stood a moment, staring at the ground. But then his head lifted, and his remaining eye looked into my own, steady and—I thought—misted over if only for a moment. “Your father might choose the throne. But certain sure I would not.” One gnarled hand came up to my shoulder and squeezed. “You keep yourself safe, lass. Don’t try anything daft.”

I saw his throat muscles bob up and down as he swallowed. And then he turned and was gone, vanishing amongst the deeper shadows of the surrounding trees.

* * *

THERE ARE TALES of travelers who wander into the crystal caves of the Otherworld and have their wits stolen by the Fair Folk so that they may never speak of what they have seen. I thought, after leaving Bron, that whatever gods dwelt beneath Dinas Ffareon might have taken my capacity for fear. All capacity for feeling, really, for in truth I felt nothing, neither fear nor any other emotion besides. Only perhaps impatience and a grim intensity of purpose when I must needs freeze into immobility at a sound—a snap of a twig or a rustle of branches—among the trees.

I had no notion whether the news of the prisoner’s recapture had yet worked its way through the night to recall the men Vortigern had sent to hunt. Stray searchers could still be out, and I could not risk falling into their hands. Not when I had no idea, either, whether word had yet spread of Bron’s attack on his guards.

But the body is a strange thing, as any healer has cause to know. Dying men of a sudden rise from their beds and get well; hale men sicken and wither, and from no cause but despair. And now, as I came within sight of the main gates of Vortigern’s fortress, my mind might still be as though frozen, fixed on a single intent. But the blood thudded in my ears like ocean waves, and my palms were clammy with sweat even so.

Moonlight spilled like silver rain onto the rock and timbered fortress walls. Wind whipped the torches set over the fortress’s main gate to tattered banners of flame. I had stopped in the deepest part of the shadows of scraggy trees that grew from the stony soil, and for a moment, I closed my eyes. Rested my forehead against the trunk of a spindly ash and willed the beat of my heart to slow.

Then I straightened and looked up again, towards the massive gates. 

I could see, beneath the burning torches, the men posted at the fortress gates as sentries; the light picked out with merciless clarity their leather helmets, the blades of their spears and swords. I stood in the deepest part of the shadow on the edge of the trail. They had not seen me yet, nor heard anything amiss.

But I had no hope of getting by them unseen; the instant I stepped out onto the path, I would be challenged, hailed down.

If time had not been so short, I might have tried working my way back around to the northern side of the fort, finding a way up the rocky slope to where Vortigern’s defenses were weakest. That might be safer. Would be, not
might be
. I acknowledged it to whatever fates were governing this night.

But climbing the nearly sheer rock, alone and in the dark, would be harder, far harder a feat than the sliding, slithering descent had been. My muscles were already shaky with exhaustion, and it had taken me far too long already to make my way here from where I had parted with Bron.

I could feel each moment now like a bowstring, pulling ever tighter and tighter in my chest.

I found myself arguing it to the fates. Or perhaps the image of Bron I had carried away with me, to the gruff echo of his voice telling me not to take foolish risks.

Every time I shut my eyes, the remembered vision flickered against the lingering dazzle of torchlight: a man with wheat-colored hair and sea-blue eyes, slashing with his sword and facing his own death with flat, exhausted calm. 

I focused on the helmeted guards, willing all cracks in the grim, icy numbness away. I wore my boy’s tunic and breeches; my face was dirt-streaked and my cropped hair tangled with twigs and flecks of dry leaves. If the guards had not yet learned that Bron was not what he seemed, I might be able to lie my way past, as Bron’s serving boy. Or—

The gate swung open, and a third man stepped through. Another guardsman, wearing the same leather helm. He spoke to the sentries; I caught just the low murmur of their voices, though the night wind snatched away the words. Their gestures were quick, though, jerky and excited.

And then the sentries turned and followed the third man inside the fort at a run, leaving the gate without its guard. 

How long I stood there I have no idea. It might have been the briefest of instants, or considerably longer; time seemed to have frozen along with my body as I stared at the unguarded gate, my heart beating a sickening rhythm in my ears.

And then I ran as the sentries had, all exhaustion fallen away in a moment, up the steep path to the fortress walls. 

What I would have done had they barred the gate from the inside—I have no idea of that, either, truly none. I had no time for plans or even for thought, beyond those of concentrated purpose. But the massive wooden doors were unbarred. One of the doors even hung a little open, still shivering with the guardsmen’s push.

* * *

I HAVE THOUGHT, and often, on how easy it is—too easy by far—to forget the suffering at the heart of so many harpers’ tales. To forget that real men and women once earned the telling of those stories, in grief and pain and tears.

And yet this I will say: that I wish I had a harper’s words to tell of the scene that met my eyes within the fortress walls.

I had glimpsed, in vision, Merlin fighting twenty and more of Vortigern’s guards with a stolen sword. I had relived the memory of it with every beat of my heart on the journey here. And yet no vision could have matched up to the reality before me as I pushed open the gate with all my strength and stepped inside.

He wore still the ragged breeches, but fought bare chested, like some blood and flesh vision sprung from the old warriors’ tales. Bron’s swirling blue whorls and spirals still marked his skin.

He fought on the open square of churned and muddied ground where Vortigern’s warriors daily sparred with spears and swords. The light of surrounding torches turned his loosened hair to a gleam of gold amongst the leather helms of Vortigern’s men, showed the patch of sticky scarlet from a gash in his side.

And I can say that he wielded the sword like harnessed lightning. Or that he fought like a striking eagle, screaming out of the sky. But no words—perhaps not even a harper’s—can match up to the reality of how he spun and slashed and beat back attack after attack from the surrounding men, all the while with his own death plain in his gaze.