Dawn of Avalon (4 page)

Now, though— 

I heard the prisoner’s indrawn breath, a sharp gasp as of anguish or fear. But the prison walls, the prisoner himself, even, were gone, blotted out by the wash of red-tinted vision that filled my gaze.

I saw stone towers shaking, crumbling to the ground. I saw … myself. Wearing a dress of apple green, while all about me warriors drank and shouted victory and clapped my brother Arthur on the back.

I nearly gasped at that, for this vision I had Seen already, in Gamma’s scrying waters, and I knew the ending of it all too well. But then, even as I bit my lip and tasted blood, the image was gone in a wash of darkness, and another took its place: Vortigern, screaming aloud in agony and beating at flames that licked his fur-trimmed robes as all about him a timbered building burned.

And then there was nothing, nothing but the dirty straw and the whitewashed earthen walls of the prison cell—and the nameless prisoner, staring at me with his eyes dilated almost to black, his lean features set and utterly blank, blank as a carving in stone. 

I felt sick, still, and cold almost to my bones, and I had another of those moments when I could—almost—imagine Gamma standing beside me and asking why I did not simply take the prisoner by the shoulders and shake him and demand that he take me at my word.

But I had no time to speak, truly I had none, even had I recovered my breath the instant the vision had gone. 

The cell door flew open with a crash that make my heart jerk again inside my chest, and two of Vortigern’s guards burst into the room. Burly, mustached men, both of them, in helmets and leather armor, both carrying swords

I realized, in that instant, that it was not only in the vision I had shared with the prisoner that the earth had shook as building stones crashed to the ground. Outside, Vortigern’s part-completed tower had fallen once more. And already the two guards were hauling the prisoner up between them, shouldering me aside to drag him to his feet.

“You say he’s the one whose blood will allow the towers to stand.” That was the older guard, a broad-shouldered man with fingers like blood sausages and a face scarred by some childhood pox. “Vortigern says he dies now. Today.”

I
WOULD BEAR my brother Arthur a son, who would ride with him into battle and fight beside him, for a time. Would, with Arthur, succeed in turning back the Saxon tide. But then one day, our son would turn traitor, whether for greed or anger or love I did not yet know. But the son I would one day bear would one day turn on his father, and bring ruin on Arthur’s reign.

That was my future, the one Gamma had shown me in the scrying waters before she died. A destiny written in my blood and Arthur’s stars, a fate lying both within me and without, as all fate does.

But if my path forward lay in darkness, I had still this night, now. 

On either side of me, a leather-armored guard lay snoring, slumped on the floor. Dana, great Goddess Mother, I prayed through gritted teeth, let them sleep on. Let the draught I had added to their evening ale keep them witless and unconscious at least until dawn.

I could not be caught, nor seen. I wore my boy’s garb of rough tunic and breeches. But I had a dark traveling cloak thrown over my shoulders. And beneath the cloak, I carried a traveler’s pack of my healer’s kit, a change of clothes, and enough bread and dried venison to last at least two days. I had, too, the bow and linen arrow-bag that I had trained on with Bron.

None of these could be explained away if I were seen by one of Vortigern’s guardsmen. 

I had already lifted the heavy crossbar from across the door. Now as I pushed, the age-blackened panel swung open with a shriek that sounded like the scream of Llud’s warring dragons. I froze, fear a wash of cold edged with grit over my skin. But the guards on either side of the door slept on.

Swiftly, then, my heart pounding hard in my ears, I slipped inside the darkened room where Vortigern’s prisoner now lay. Not the cramped and filthy prison cell where he had been kept these last days; that had been deemed by Bron—and accepted grudgingly by Vortigern—as no fit place for a man to sojourn before gifting the gods with his life’s blood.

Bron had, and I thanked the Goddess for it, kept his head when Vortigern’s men would have dragged the prisoner out and slit his throat without delay. He had declared that the prisoner’s spirit was to be chained as guardian of the fortress here. And that therefore the prisoner must be bathed and purified, as the druid princes who made the Great Gift had been of old.

He must, Bron said, be painted with the warriors’ marks, and fed the last meal of oat cakes charred by an open flame. 

Where a crabbed and rough-tongued warrior of sixty-odd had heard of the ancient rituals attending a Prince of the Land, I had no idea; the triple death was one of those practices leeched of their power by the legions of Rome. Perhaps Gamma had told Bron stories. I had sometimes suspected he had been more to her than my trusted bodyguard. Though that Bron had known the rites—and that Vortigern believed in them—was all I could find it in me to care of, then or now.

After the flare of torchlight in the hallway outside, my eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room within. I was alone; Bron’s part was to attend the ceremony of wine and ale sharing in Vortigern’s half-completed fire hall.

The prisoner had been housed in the roughly built timbered dwelling where Vortigern and the chiefs of his warriors slept. The room was windowless, the only light the rays of torchlight slanting in through the open doorway behind me. I could only just make out the shadowy shapes of the room’s furnishings: a table, a crudely made wooden chair, a few skins flung down for rugs on the floor and an equally crude bed.

Vortigern had been fleeing for his life when he had come here, to this remote hill fort in the Gwynedd hills; his wealth, his fine furnishings, his chased silver drinking cups and cushioned chairs, all these he had been forced to leave behind. And as I stepped inside, I did not know, truly, whether the prisoner would trample over me in a wild bid for freedom or try once again to strangle me on sight.

But he did neither. The prisoner lay on the bed, his body a long, lean shadow edged with gold where the light struck. Naked, as befitted a Prince of the Land, save for an arm band of fox’s fur.

They had bound him. Vortigern might bow to the rites of the old ones, but neither was he a fool; the prisoner’s wrists and ankles were tied to the four posts of the bed’s frame. Though there was, at least, enough slack in the ropes for him to turn on his side if he chose, and the loops of rope about his wrists were padded so as not to chafe overmuch at his bare skin.

And he was asleep. Utterly, deeply so, I could hear it in the steady rhythm of his breathing, see the slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Any may doubt me who like, but it was not until I had crossed the room as quickly and silently as I could did I realize that I had made no plan for what I would say to the man before me when he woke. 

All this long day since I had first spoken to the prisoner in his cramped, airless cell, I had been strung up with the tension of planning out the
how
of our escape: drugging the guards, Bron’s keeping Vortigern occupied and out of the way. If I had considered the prisoner at all, it was only with a quick, hot flash of anger that he had carelessly included me in his lying answers to Vortigern, had shattered the tenuous tolerance—if not trust—it had taken me weeks to build in Vortigern’s mind.

And now I simply stood and stared down at the man before me. 

My one true, clear memory of my mother is of her saying fiercely to someone—to Gamma, I think it was—
Women have no honor. We have those we love, and those we hate, and that is all.

Perhaps it is true. I had chosen to be here, for Britain’s honor, for the salvation of Britain’s throne. And yet it was now a taste bitter as bile on my tongue that the cost of so doing had been to sit idly by while this man was beaten and lashed and burned with a red-hot brand again and again.

That I had had to grit my teeth or bite my lips until blood came to do it was scarcely recompense to the prisoner now. Still less a likely way of persuading him to put his fate in my hands and accompany me into the night.

I could have left him. Even if he woke, he could do nothing to prevent my simply turning and walking from the room.

But I had brought this man here, to this bed where he lay bound hand and foot and awaiting death. Vortigern would have killed him eventually in any case, of that I had no doubt. But if he died like this, it lay on my hands, not Vortigern’s. And I knew I could not walk away now, not unless I woke him and attempted to persuade him—somehow—to make his bid for freedom along with mine.

The prisoner’s head turned restlessly, a spasm crossed his face, as of pain, and he muttered something too low and indistinct for me to make out the words. And without thinking, I laid a hand across his forehead, as I would have done with any other wounded man in my care.

Both blessing and curse, I have heard the Sight called, and surely it had been so to me before that night. But just then, at that moment, I was willing to count it blessing entire. The moment I touched the prisoner’s brow, a feeling, huge and powerful raced through me, as though something inside me were falling, falling into a space where I heard the echoing heartbeat of the earth itself.

The captive man was fevered, still; his skin was hot against my palm.

And for a moment, I Saw only the memory of how he had lain here, hour upon hour, before sleep had claimed him: I saw the rigid, still-muscled control in the taut line of his shoulders, felt how he had been galled almost past endurance by being tied here thus, naked and helpless in the dark. And yet had held himself absolutely, utterly immobile, because if he allowed himself even a moment’s slackening of control he would fall to struggling like a wild, frantic bird beating against the bars of a cage.

I should perhaps have been cautious of reaching out with the Sight, after what had happened before in the prison cell. But the liquid fire feeling was still racing through me, echoed by the a circling current, a deep chiming voice that seemed to say,
Yes. Go on.

And then … then, as I reached towards him along the lines of the Sight, I felt it: a swelling, a blossoming of that jagged inner darkness I had sensed before. 

His whole body went rigid, and his eyes went wide and blind, though along that echoing channel that had opened between us I could catch snatches of what he Saw: swords clashing, horses screaming, wounded men crying as they crawled through churned earth and leaked their life’s blood from a dozen and more wounds. 

He would not be as like to call this a blessing. But it meant that after the first moment of breathless shock, I was able to draw the bone-handled knife I had brought and cut the ropes that bound him. And through all, he lay mute, rigid, and staring blindly at whatever ghosts I had conjured with the moment’s touch.

I thought at first I would not be able to shift him, even after I had cut him free. But I tugged and pulled at his arms, and finally, after a furiously hissed order from me he did lurch upright, and even allowed me to propel him in a kind of jerky, stumbling rush out the door, past the two guards who still slept the sleep of the profoundly drunk and drugged.

* * *

THE PRISONER RELIVED in dream the days before his capture and imprisonment here, of that I was almost sure. I caught occasional flashes from him, enough to know that he had been plunged into a waking version of the same nightmare he’d been trapped in before I came. A dream memory of a battle’s fearful aftermath, of fighting his way through a field of the dead and dying. Buzzing flies, ravens pecking at dead, staring eyes, and the awful, throat-clogging reek of blood.

I closed my mind to it as much as I could as we made our way across Vortigern’s camp, weaving a path through the pitched tents of the warriors, past the reeking pens where the livestock were corralled.

Vortigern’s warriors had not, you may be sure, foregone to carry their slave girls and army harlots along to this remote place. Vortigern allowed it, since without it many of them would not have stayed, might even have turned on him to overthrow his rule. He had even, in the last weeks, taken to doling out measures of his own expensive wine. On nights after the tower walls had fallen yet again, I had watched his warriors drink themselves into an angry, sullen stupor—or drag their slave girls off and use them hard enough to make them scream.