The Darkest Road (37 page)

He said, “I thought as much! Then let me say one thing more to all the brave ones on that hill. I have a message from my lord.” The voice changed; it became colder, less rough, more frightening. “A year ago and a little more, Rakoth took pleasure in a woman of your company. He would do so again. She offered rare, willing sport. Black Avaia is with me now, to bear her back to Starkadh at his bidding. Is there one among you who will contest against my blade Rakoth’s claim to her naked flesh?”

A sickness rose within Paul, of revulsion and of premonition.

“My lord High King,” said Arthur Pendragon, as Uathach’s laughter, and the howls of the svart alfar behind him, rose and fell, “would you tell me the name of this place.”

Paul saw Aileron turn to the Warrior.

But it was Loren Silvercloak who answered, a knowing sorrow in his voice. “This plain was green and fertile a thousand years ago,” he said. “And in those days it was called Camlann.”

“I thought it might be,” Arthur replied very quietly. Without speaking again he began checking the fit of his sword belt and the tilt of the King Spear in his saddle rest.

Paul turned to Jennifer—to Guinevere. What he saw in her face then, as she looked at the Warrior’s quiet preparations, went straight to his heart.

“My lord Arthur,” said Aileron, “I must ask you to defer to
me. The leader of their army should fight the leader of our own. This is my battle, and I lay claim to it.”

Arthur didn’t even look up from his preparations. “Not so,” he said, “and you know it is not. You are needed on the morrow more than any other man here. I told you all a long time ago, on the eve of the voyage to Cader Sedat, that I am never allowed to see the end of things when I am summoned. And the name Loren spoke has made things clear: there has been a Camlann waiting for me in every world. This is what I was brought here for, High King.”

Beside him, Cavall made a sound, more whimper than growl. The red sun was low, casting a strange light upon all their faces. Below them, the laughter had ended.

“Arthur, no!” said Kimberly, with passion. “You are here for more than this. You must not go down there. We need all of you too much. Can’t you see what he is? None of you can fight him! Jennifer, tell them it is foolishness. You
must
tell them!”

But Jennifer, looking at the Warrior, said nothing at all.

Arthur had finished his preparations. He looked up then, straight at Kimberly, who had summoned him. Who had brought him to this place by the binding of his name. And to her he made reply, in words Paul knew he would never forget.

“How can we
not
fight him, Seer? How can we claim to carry our swords in the name of Light, if we are cowards when we stand before the Dark? This challenge goes further back than any of us. Further back, even, than I. What are we if we deny the dance?”

Aileron was nodding slowly, and Levon, and Ra-Tenniel’s eyes
were bright with his agreement. Within his own heart Paul felt some deep eons-old force behind the Warrior’s words, and as he accepted them, grieving, he felt another thing: the pulsebeat of the God. It was true. It was a dance that was not to be denied. And it seemed that it was Arthur’s, after all.

“
No
,” said Guinevere.

Every eye went to her. In the windswept silence of that desolate place her beauty seemed to burn like some evening star brought among men, almost too fierce to look upon.

Motionless astride her horse, her hands twisted in its mane, she said, “Arthur, I will not lose you again like this. I could not bear it. Single combat is not why you were summoned, my love, it cannot be why. Camlann or no, this must not be your battle.”

His face, under the greying hair, had gone still. He said, “We are caught in a woven doom of no escape. You know I must go down to him.”

There were tears welling in her eyes. She did not speak, but slowly she shook her head back and forth in denial.

“Whose place is it, then, if not mine?” he asked, scarcely more than a whisper.

She lowered her head. Her hands moved in a little helpless, trapped gesture of despair.

And then, without looking up, she said, with sudden, terrible formality, “In this place and before these many people my name has been besmirched. I have need of one who will take this challenge upon himself and unmake it with his sword.”

And now she lifted her head, and now she turned. To the one
who had been sitting quietly upon his horse, not speaking, not moving, waiting patiently for what he seemed to have known was coming. And Guinevere said: “Wilt thou, who hast been my champion so many times before, be so yet again? Wilt thou take this challenge in my name, my lord Lancelot?”

“Lady, I will,” he said.

“You can’t!” Paul exclaimed, his voice crashing into the stillness, unable to stop himself. “Jennifer, he’s wounded! Look at his palm—he can’t even hold a sword!” Beside him someone made a curious, breathless sound.

The three figures in the centre of the circle ignored him. Completely. It was as if he hadn’t even spoken. There was another silence, laden with unsaid things, with so many layers of time. A stir of wind blew Jennifer’s hair back from her face.

Arthur said, “My lady, I have known too many things for too long to ever deny Lancelot’s claim to be your champion. Or that, healthy, he is far more worthy than I to face this foe. Even so, I will not allow it now. Not this time, my love. You have asked him, sorely wounded, to take this upon himself, not for your sake, or his, but for mine. You have not asked him in love.”

Guinevere’s head snapped back. Her green eyes went wide and then they blazed with a naked, dazzling anger. She shook her head, so fiercely that the tears flew off her face, and in the voice of a Queen, a voice that froze and bound them into the power of the grief it carried, she cried aloud, “
Have I not, my lord?
And shall
you
tell me so? Would you tear open my flesh that all men here might probe into my heart as Maugrim did?”

Arthur flinched, as if stunned by a blow, but she was not done. With icy, relentless fury she said, “What man, even you, my lord,
dares
in my presence to say whether I have spoken in love or no?”

“Guinevere—” Lancelot began, but quailed in his turn as her burning glance swung to him.

“Not a word!” she snapped. “Not from you or anyone else!”

Arthur had slipped down from his horse. He knelt before her, pain raw as a wound in his face. He opened his mouth to speak.

And in that moment, precisely then, Paul became aware of an absence and he remembered the slight, breathless sound at his elbow a moment before, a sound he’d ignored.

But there was no one beside him anymore.

He turned, his heart lurching, and looked north, along the downward-sloping path to where Uathach waited on the stony plain.

He saw. And then he heard, they all heard, as a ringing cry rose up, echoing in the twilight air between the armies of Light and Dark:

“
For the Black Boar!
” he heard. They all heard. “
For the honour of the Black Boar!
”

And thus did Diarmuid dan Ailell take Uathach’s challenge upon himself, riding forth alone on the horse his brother had brought for him, his sword uplifted high, his fair hair lit by the sunset, as he raced towards the dance his bright soul would not deny.

He was a master, Dave knew. Having fought beside Diarmuid at the winter skirmish by the Latham and then at the wolf hunt in
Leinanwood, he had reason to know what Aileron’s brother could do. And Dave’s heart—halfway to his own battle fury—leaped to see Diarmuid’s first swiftly angled engagement of the urgach.

And then, an instant later, battle frenzy gave way to chilled grief. Because he remembered Uathach, too, from the bloody banks of the Adein in the first battle of Kevin’s spring. And in his mind, replayed more vividly than such a memory should ever have been, he saw Maugrim’s whiteclad urgach swing his colossal sword in one scything blow from the slaug’s saddle that had cleaved through Barth and Navon, both: the babies in the wood.

He remembered Uathach, and now he saw him again, and the memory, however grim, was less than the reality, far less. By the light of the setting sun, in that wasteland between armies, Diarmuid and his quick, clever horse, met, with a thunder of hooves and a grinding shock of blades, a foe that was too much more than mortal for a mortal man to face.

The urgach was too large, too uncannily swift despite his massive bulk. And he was shrewder than any such creature could ever have been had it not been altered in some way within the confines of Starkadh. Beyond all this, the slaug was a deadly terror in and of itself. Constantly ripping with its curved horn, seeking the flesh of Diarmuid’s horse, running on four legs and lashing out with the other two, it was too dangerous for Diarmuid to do much more than evade, for fear that his own mount would be gored or trampled, leaving him helpless on the barren ground. And because he couldn’t work in close, his slim
blade could scarcely reach Uathach—though Diarmuid was a perilously easy target for the urgach’s huge black sword.

Beside Dave, Levon dan Ivor’s face was white with affliction as he watched the drama below. Dave knew how desperately Levon had wanted the death of this creature, and how adamant Torc—who feared nothing else that Dave knew—had been in binding Levon by oath not to fight Uathach alone.

Not to do what Diarmuid was doing now.

And doing, despite the horror of what he faced, with a seemingly effortless grace that somehow had, woven within its movements, the unpredictable, scintillant wit of the man. So sudden were his stops and starts, his reversals of direction—the horse seeming an extension of his mind—that twice, within moments of each other, he managed to veer around the slaug’s horn to launch brilliant slashing blows at Uathach.

Who parried with a brutal indifference that almost broke the heart to see. And each time, his pounding counterstroke sent Diarmuid reeling in the saddle with the jarring impact of parrying it. Dave knew about that: he remembered his own first urgach battle, in the dark of Faelinn Grove. He had barely been able to lift his arm for two days after blocking one of those blows. And the beast he’d faced had been to Uathach as sleep was to death.

But Diarmuid was still in the saddle, still probing for an opening with his sword, wheeling his gallant mount—so small beside the slaug—in arcs and half-circles, random and disorienting, calculated to the hairsbreadth edge of sword or destroying horn, seeking an angle, a way in, a gap to penetrate in the name of Light.

“Gods, he can ride!” Levon whispered, and Dave knew that there were no words of higher, more holy praise that a Dalrei could ever speak. And it was true, it was dazzlingly true; they were watching an exercise in glory as the sun sank into the west.

Then suddenly it became even more than that—for again Diarmuid scythed in on Uathach’s right side, and again he stabbed upwards for the heart of the beast. Once more the urgach blocked the reaching thrust, and once more, exactly as before, his counterstroke descended like an iron tree falling.

Diarmuid absorbed it on his blade. He rocked in the saddle. But this time, letting the momentum work for him, he reared his horse upwards and to the right, and sent his shining sword slashing downwards to sever the slaug’s nearest leg.

Dave began a startled, wordless cry of joy and then savagely bit it back. Uathach’s mocking laughter seemed to fill the world, and behind him the army of the Dark let loose a raucous, deafening roar of predatory anticipation.

Too great a price, Dave thought, hurting for the man below. For though the slaug had lost a leg, and so was much less of a danger than before, Diarmuid’s left shoulder had been torn through by a ripping thrust of the animal’s horn. In the waning light they could see his blood flowering darkly from a deep, raking wound.

It was too much, Dave thought, truly too inhuman a foe for a man to face. Torc had been right. Dave turned his head away from the terrible ritual being acted out before them, and as he did, he saw Paul Schafer, farther along the ridge, looking back at him.

Paul registered Dave’s glance, and the pain in the big man’s expression, but his own mind was a long way off, along the twisting paths of memory.

A memory of Diarmuid on the first night they’d arrived.
A
peach!
he’d said of Jennifer, as he bent to kiss her hand And then said it, and did it again, a few moments later, swinging lazily through a high window to confound Gorlaes sardonically.

Another image, another extravagant phrase—
I’ve plucked the fairest rose in Shalhassan’s garden
—as he rejoined Kevin and Paul and the men of South Keep from within scented Larai Rigal. Extravagance always, the flamboyant gesture masking so many deeper truths. But the truths were there to be seen, if one only knew where to look. Hadn’t he shielded Sharra afterwards, the day she’d tried to kill him in Paras Derval? And then on the eve of the voyage to Cader Sedat he had asked her to be his wife.

Using Tegid as his Intercedent.

Always the gesture, the deflecting glitter of style, hiding what he was, at root, behind the last locked doorway of his soul.

Paul remembered, hurting on that windy rise of land, unwilling to look down again, how Diarmuid had relinquished his claim to the throne. How in the moment when fate seemed to have come full circle, when Jaelle had been about to speak for the Goddess and proclaim a High King in Dana’s name, Diarmuid had made the decision himself, flippantly speaking the words he knew to be right. Though Aileron had sworn he was prepared to kill him just moments before.

There was a grinding of metal on metal. Paul turned back.
Diarmuid had somehow—the gods only knew what it must be costing him—managed to circle in again close to the monstrous urgach, and again he’d attacked, carrying the battle to his foe. To be beaten back once more with a bone-jarring force that Paul could feel, even up here.

He watched. It seemed necessary to watch: to bear witness and remember.

And one more set of memories came to him then, as Diarmuid’s brave horse pirouetted yet again, just out of reach of slaug horn and urgach sword. Images from Cader Sedat, that place of death at sea. An island in all worlds and none, where the soul lay open, without hiding place. Where Diar’s face, as he looked upon Metran, had shown the full unshielded passion of his hatred of the Dark. Where he had stood in the Chamber of the Dead beneath the sea, and where—yes, there
was
a truth in this, a kernel, a clue—he had said to the Warrior, as Arthur prepared to summon Lancelot and so bring the old, three-sided tragedy into the world again:
You do not have to do this. It is neither written nor compelled
.