The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (60 page)

Hardly able to sit still, Rhiann nevertheless took great pains with her own appearance, and she and Caitlin bathed in scented water while Eithne and Fola combed and braided their hair. Rhiann considered her dresses carefully, and then chose that which she wore at her binding ceremony, with a new scarlet cloak and the amber necklace that Eremon had given her as a wedding gift. Caitlin wore her own bridal dress, soft blue with golden flowers, and when at last they were ready they looked at each other and burst into nervous laughter.

Then Caitlin sobered, leaning into Rhiann and whispering, All this effort, sister, yet I fear our men will waste no time looking at our finery, but only waiting to take it all off!’

Rhiann blushed. Her smile had hardly left her face these past days, and she felt as light-hearted as a girl, especially after such a long season of barrenness and pain. ‘Perhaps, sister, but they will love us all the more for looking pretty for them.’

‘And making their arrival such an occasion!’ Caitlin beamed, as they pinned on their cloaks and made ready to leave the house. Finan had announced that the warband had at last been sighted on the southern road.

Outside, a blue haze of cook-fires hung over the village, rich with the scents of roasting pig, deer and beef from the baking pits, fresh bread and honey porridge – all the ingredients of the great feast that would follow that night. Baskets of shining salmon had been gutted and spitted on sticks propped over fragrant pinewood fires.

In their bright, patterned clothes, the crowd spilling out of the great gates and lining the walls looked like drifts of new-sprung flowers, their petals edged in gold and bronze. The warriors guarding the dun had polished their helmets, scabbards and spear-tips, even the bronze bosses on their leather shields, and Finan had lined them up along the timber palisade. Beside them, drummers and pipers clustered, ready to announce the army’s arrival with suitable fanfare.

Rhiann and Caitlin positioned themselves directly in front of the village gate, with Aedan to one side, ready to commit the occasion to song, and Gabran in Eithne’s arms to the other. Rori was beside Eithne, unable to take his eyes off her dark beauty, displayed to good effect in a new crimson dress. Behind them, Fola waited in her blue priestess cloak, making secret faces at Gabran to keep him amused.

Now there was a shout from a warrior on the gatetower, and Rhiann raised herself on tiptoe, desperate for the first glimpse of Eremon’s boar helmet coming over the rise, out of the cover of the trees and blue hills. She was trying so hard to be dignified, but within her sleeves her fingers were twisting themselves into knots, and beneath her cloak her feet jiggled on the muddy path. All she yearned for was the freedom to race across the bridge, her heels kicking up, and throw herself into Eremon’s warm arms.

A boar-head trumpet blasted out from above as the first men appeared on the track from the south, marching in muddy ranks. As they came into view, Gabran let out a garbled shout, breaking the tension among those closest to Rhiann. They all laughed, and Caitlin took him from Eithne. ‘Yes, love, that’s your daddy come home now! Home to us!’

The people all around them broke into peals of excited shouting, jumping and stamping, and over Rhiann’s head the warriors lined along the palisade beat their swords on their shields, joined in the din by the pipers and trumpeters, trying to hold a tune over the tumult. The timbers of the gatetower above shivered with the pounding of their feet.

Rhiann’s heart swelled along with the music, and soon the warriors had marched close enough for her to tell them apart. At the front of the columns were the mounted ranks. There rippled the banner of the White Mare, led by Lorn on his stallion, and under the Boar of Dalriada Rhiann glimpsed the flash of Conaire’s blond hair.

She frowned, unable to recognize Eremon’s helmet. For a few breathless moments she studied every man on horseback, sure she would make him out from all the others. But she couldn’t see him. Rhiann’s breath faded away to nothing. She would have run forward, darting among the riders until she found him, but her feet seemed to have melted into the churned ground beneath her. The cheering people were focused on their own loved ones, and the thrill of the occasion, and sensed nothing amiss. Even Caitlin’s face was still shining, her eyes full of her own love as she bounced Gabran, pointing at Conaire.

The front ranks were over the bridge now, and that was when something seemed to communicate itself to the crowd, for the men who came along the road were not cheering back, or waving their spears and shields. They seemed oddly subdued, their shoulders drooping with exhaustion, their heads low. They were dirty and unkempt and bloody, as would be expected, yet it was also obvious many had been wounded, for some limped, and some were held up by their comrades. And so some vivacity seeped away from the crowd in return.

‘Where is Eremon?’ Caitlin asked innocently, but when she looked at Rhiann’s face her own smile withered in shock.

Rhiann was only vaguely conscious that the crowd’s cheering had died away into uncertain mutters and confused murmurs, that the eager music from above was trailing into odd, discordant notes. And then the group on horseback that led the first column parted.

Behind them, a litter appeared, carried by six warriors, and on it lay the man for whom Rhiann had been searching. Further back she glimpsed more litters and more still bodies, but her eyes could see only one.

Lorn’s hand raised now, and all the marching warriors came to a ragged stop, as the litter bearers rested their burdens on the ground. Then Rhiann’s feet at last came to life and she broke into a stumbling run, her vision narrowed to the utterly still figure on the first pallet.

As Rhiann reached the litter, Conaire slid from his horse and caught her, stopping her from throwing herself across Eremon. Rhiann stared up at Conaire wildly, her fingers digging into his forearms, yet his face was barely recognizable with its taut, lined cheeks and hollow eyes.

‘I couldn’t,’ he was saying to her, his voice breaking. ‘I couldn’t send you a message. I had to spare you, give you these last days.’

‘He’s dead?’ she whispered, wondering who was speaking, for the sound came from far away.

Yet Conaire shook his head, and then Rhiann wrenched free of his arms and threw herself to her knees by the litter. There was a thudding as Rori raced up behind her, stifling a curse, held back by Lorn’s arm.

Eremon was unconscious, his hair matted, his face pale under the dirt and blood. And Rhiann realized with a shock that this was the drawn face she had seen in her strange vision moons ago, when Eremon first took his leave to join Calgacus. His shield had been laid over his torso; his helmet resting between his hands. Rhiann tore them both away and let out a guttural sob. Low on Eremon’s left side, just above his hip, the tunic was rent by a long slash. The wool all around it was stuck to him and the rough bandage underneath with a dark, dried stain. In the middle, the bindings were streaked with pale yellow.

Rhiann took Eremon’s burning hand and pressed her face into it, oblivious of the men standing around her. Rori’s breath rasped loudly in the silence, as if he had been running for hours. Conaire knelt by Rhiann now, and in a sudden flare of rage she glared up at him. ‘How could you not send for me?’ she cried. ‘I could have been with him!’

Conaire shrugged helplessly, his eyes red-rimmed. ‘I just knew that I needed to get him home. He needed to come home.’

Lorn spoke over her head gently. ‘It would have taken the same time to send for you as to bring him, Rhiann.’

Rhiann stifled a moan and pressed the heel of her palm into her eyes, trying to contain the panic. She had to find the healer in her, the control. She was dimly aware of Caitlin’s soft steps as she came to stand behind Conaire, and Finan and Aedan arriving, gathering by Colum’s side. After a few gasping breaths, Rhiann managed to look down at Eremon again, touching his forehead. It was taut and dry with heat.

‘How long since the blow?’

‘Four days,’ Conaire whispered. ‘The wound bled a lot, but at first he talked to us and it didn’t seem so bad.’ His mouth twisted, and he dropped his head as Caitlin silently stroked his hair.

Colum cleared his throat. ‘But the bleeding continued, no matter how much we staunched it, and then he got the fever, and slipped away. He hasn’t woken since the night before last.’

Rhiann peered more closely at the wound itself now. She couldn’t see beneath the dirt-encrusted bandages, but when she touched her hand lightly to the area it was hot, and her nose caught a tell-tale whiff of sick sweetness.

‘It’s turning bad,’ she heard herself say, and now it was Conaire who muffled a sob. Slowly, Rhiann got to her feet, blessed numbness flooding her as her mind reasserted itself. ‘I need to get him to a bed. Take him to my house.’

CHAPTER 55

T
he days that followed held no natural rhythm for Rhiann, no sunlight or darkness. The only changes were the peaks and troughs of Eremon’s fever, the periods of chills and shaking, despite the warmth of his skin, followed by the restless tossing off of sheets as he burned.

The fever was agonizing, but Rhiann applied herself to the wound first, laying water-lily leaves over it to draw out infection, and bathing it with yarrow brews and tonics of daisy. Linnet, who came as soon as Caitlin sent for her, moved with Rhiann through her trance, binding on the ivy and groundsel poultices with gentle fingers, and dribbling potions into Eremon’s mouth when Rhiann could be persuaded to rest.

The others hovered close by: Eithne preparing fever brews of golden rod and sorrel; Caitlin mashing and straining meat into nourishing broths. Conaire, who had no practical role, merely sat staring at Eremon as if will alone would bring him back. It was left to Fola to hold the sacred space, chanting the prayers and offering milk and mead to the figure of Sirona, the healer goddess.

To Rhiann, however, her loved ones were merely wraiths. She barely noticed their hands as they passed things to her, or their voices, faintly penetrating her haze. She saw only the minute changes in Eremon’s face – its colour, heat and dampness – and his wound – how crusted with pus, how taut the skin around the ragged rent, whether the dreadful red lines of poison were spreading up towards his heart.

In the awful blank spaces between poultices and potions, Rhiann sponged Eremon endlessly with cool river water and wrapped his burning body in sheets soaked in the Add. Then, her fingers would linger on each white scar that graced his muscles, and she would tell herself that he had survived this wound there, this cut there, and still lived, that he could do it again. Even though she knew he had never received a wound like this one.

After three nights of his delirium, Linnet was the only one to voice the thoughts Rhiann had been avoiding. ‘I have never seen anyone endure such a fever for so long,’ her aunt murmured. ‘The prince truly fights like the warrior he is.’

Rhiann stared down at Eremon then, smoothing one gaunt cheekbone with her finger. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘But …’ She swallowed her words, for they were too painful to say aloud.

But it must break soon or he will die
.

One day later, as despair pressed ever more heavily, Rhiann’s prayers were heard.

She had just collapsed into an exhausted sleep when Caitlin roused her from the bed. ‘Come,’ Caitlin breathed in her ear, her fingers tight on Rhiann’s shoulder. ‘The fever has broken.’

Rhiann rushed to his bed in her shift, her hair tumbling about her face. There Linnet greeted her with a tired smile, a cool cloth in her hand. Eremon was lying quietly for the first time in days, and the sheets underneath him were soaked with sweat, his hair stuck to his forehead in dark tendrils.

‘Praise be to the Goddess,’ Fola whispered from the end of the bed, yet Rhiann could do no more than sink to her knees and hold his hand, her burning eyes pressed into the damp bedclothes.

By the end of that day the drawing poultices did their work, and the wound burst with a foul trickle of pus and clear liquid that stank, making those in the room not used to such things gag. Yet Rhiann and Linnet’s eyes met, for they knew what it meant, and Rhiann would have gladly endured the smell every day for the rest of her life if he would only live.

Now they could clean the wound properly, and pack it with honey, and as Eremon’s temperature continued to fall, Rhiann’s preparations changed from fever brews to potions for strengthening the blood and heart and wasted muscles. She forced herself to spend even more time by his bed, even though she frequently fell asleep over his arm or hand, and woke stiff across her back. For soon, surely, he would wake.

Yet two more days slid by, and it became clear that something was not right.

The wound, though drained, remained an angry red, and the sides would not close no matter how tightly bound. And though Eremon’s sweating abated, he still did not return to a normal temperature, and his skin remained too warm to the touch. Rhiann watched hungrily for a flickering eyelash, a jerk of his arm, any tiny movement of Eremon’s blistered lips. But they never came.

He no longer tossed and turned and murmured – he no longer moved at all. He lay as still as a man on his funeral pyre, and only his rapid, shallow breaths showed her that he still lived.

When Eremon’s condition had remained unchanged for another two days, the watchers around her, by necessity, began to resume normal lives. Clothing must be made, and food stored, for the warm season had now faded, and brown leaves shivered on the trees. As Rhiann sat motionless by Eremon’s bed, Fola and Eithne and Caitlin willingly took over her harvest duties: Fola blessed the grain pits and cattle slaughter; Caitlin supervised the salting and brining; and Eithne replenished their stores of herbs, berries and hazelnuts.

As for Conaire, Caitlin grew so alarmed at his unabating despair that she finally took drastic measures. One day she deposited Gabran in his lap without a word and disappeared, forcing Conaire to remove himself to the King’s Hall with his son in order to leave Rhiann in peace. There, as Caitlin had reasoned, the other men sought to keep his mind busy.