The Defiler (29 page)

The Knucker landed amid the barren stones.

Even now it stank of death. Blood had seeped into the stones, sacrificed in battle to the unforgiving aspect of the war Goddess. Sláine slid down from the Knucker's back, grateful to have the ground beneath his feet once more. The draw of the stones on his blood intensified, like lightning coursing through his veins. It was so like - and yet unlike - Carnac. His flesh responded to the lure of the Earth Serpent, but where there it had drained him, weakening him to the point of collapse, here his blood thrilled to it.

He threw his arms wide, moving between the broken dolmens, touching the grey stones, feeling the echoes of suffering, death and battle resonate back through his fingertips. He felt truly alive for the first time he could remember. Myrrdin and Ukko stood on the edge of the stones, as though fearful of violating their sanctity. Sláine harboured no such reservations. He moved from stone to stone, feeding off the residual energy still bound within them. For a moment it felt as though he could absorb even the trace memories of the rock, bringing to life in his mind all the things they had seen. He turned in a full circle, looking out over Magh Tuiredh, imagining it as the battlefield it had been. He savoured the sadness of the place. He saw bodies piled one atop another, guts unravelled, he saw skulls split in two, throats cut, arms clutching at dropped blades. He saw swords driven through ribcages, crows perched on their pommels, the silver blades thrust deep into the belly of the earth. The rancid stench of death rose up out of the ground to fill his nostrils. The wind rose. Sláine knelt, pressing his fingers into the dirt. It was moist with blood.

He shook his head.

The Sidhe had called him Defiler, a word that bordered on evil, the spoiling of innocence, and yet the slaughter of this place, the blood-soaked earth, the death of families and reason, all defiled the innocence of the earth. Still the place remained sanctified, devoted to Danu, albeit in her aspect as the war Goddess. She was not an innocent Goddess. She was as much the mother of war as she was the maiden of flowers or the old hag of the ravens. She was all stages of the sacred feminine, beautiful in all her incarnations. He was no different from these heroes. Myrrdin had said so himself, there was a link between his flesh and Llew Silverhand and all those other heroes of his people. It was the
riastrad
, the warp spasm. He was the earth itself; he felt the insidious sickness of Slough Feg's tainted sour. His flesh answered the call of theirs across the generations. When his musculature warped, the power of the Earth Serpent thundering through his flesh, he was no longer the man, Sláine, he was the champion of his Goddess, eternal: he was Cúchulainn, he was Bran the Blessed, he was Llew Silverhand. He was Sláine Mac Roth.

Sláine looked to the sky, expecting to see the carrion birds circling, so rich was the illusion his mind painted for him.

"Bring her to me, druid."

Myrrdin nodded. "As you wish, champion. What you see and hear may not be pleasant, but it is necessary. I will invoke the pain of this place, stirring memories in the land best left forgotten. She is woven within these memories. She will answer your call. Remember, all that you see is memory, you cannot change anything, you cannot influence what has been, you cannot save lives that have been lost."

"The past does not frighten me, druid, why should it? It cannot reach out to hurt us. The present is full of threats enough. The land is souring. Feg marches north with his damned skull swords, spreading his blight and scheming for Ragnarok. The Crone has been manipulating our every step for centuries, it seems. I would not be surprised to learn Feg himself dances to her piper's tune. So a few ghosts neither interest nor frighten me. I am only interested in the future of my people."

"Good, my friend. There is wisdom in the single-mindedness of that thought, but do not be blinded by it. Our time together runs short; I can feel the truth of that on the aether. There is much that both of us must accomplish from here. And while our destinies cross, they are separate paths we must walk alone." They clasped hands in farewell. "I urge you to remember who it is you are meeting out there between the stones, Sláine. The Morrigan can speak sweetly and can promise she never speaks false. No lies spill from her lips, but seldom does a single word ring true. She has a way of twisting the truth so that it sounds appealing even when it is vile and murderous. Do not blindly offer promises, do not bargain with her, for no matter how good the bargain seems on the surface, no one ever emerges unscathed from negotiations with the Morrigan. We have what she desires, two pieces of her son's prison. She will attempt to lure you with promises of future glories, listen not to those honeyed words. Go with Danu, Sláine."

Too late, Sláine thought to himself, as he watched the druid walk into the centre of the field. With a chalk stone drawn from within the folds of his cloak, Myrrdin paced the battlefield, drawing intricate symbols, some in Ogham, others in a script Sláine did not recognise, on the cracked and broken dolmens. He had lied, he did fear the unknown. Only a fool wouldn't and he was no fool. The druid marked out twelve standing stones and paced out a circle encompassing the six most distant, then uttering the beginnings of a long summoning ritual, moved from point to point within the circle before kneeling in the centre, equidistant from all points on the outer circle, and from all points on the inner circle. He murmured another strain of the invocation, taking a handful of the dirt from the ground and scattering it to each of the cardinal directions of the wind. The wind blew away his words.

Sláine and Ukko stood silent sentry, watching the ritual unfold as slowly the sounds of battle rose around them. Sláine did not trust his senses fully, believing somehow the earth's magic had flooded his mind and the ghosts of the conquered he saw shimmering into existence all across Magh Tuiredh were no more than figments of his imagination or the melancholy of the land's great regret given substance through the strength of his blood.

"What in the seven els?" Ukko muttered, backing away from the stones.

A ghostly warrior, sky-clad, woad-dyed hair streaming wildly behind him, charged straight through the dwarf, stone axe raised high above his head. The ghostly warrior's death-cry was still on his lips as he faded into the aether. Ukko shuddered, knees buckling. He straightened, face pained, and made the sign of the Gallic cross over his chest. A heartbeat later another warrior, face sallow, aquiline, beneath close-cropped raven-black hair, emerged from Ukko's chest, a short stabbing sword in his hand. The memories of blood streamed over the leather strips of his kilt. His stomach was bare where leather armour had been sliced away; the muscles flapped open, lengths of ropy intestine spilling out between the bloody fingers of his left hand. Ukko couldn't look away as the soldier collapsed to his knees, showing the soles of his leather sandals before lurching sideways and collapsing. The mud of Magh Tuiredh swallowed his flesh, to the earth returned.

He watched in mute horror as all across the battlefield more and more warriors rose, recalled to life by the druid's summons, only to fall, reliving their deaths, the battlefield ringing with their cries of death and suffering.

Ukko gripped his own stomach, feeling the lingering pain of the soldier's death bite within his own muscles.

Behind them the Knucker growled, the sound reverberating deep in the drake's throat, as more and more ethereal warriors gathered substance around it.

Surrounded on all sides by the dead reliving their great sacrifice, Myrrdin Emrys threw back his head, calling on the ancient pain of the place. His body convulsed beneath the ecstasy of the invocation. Spasms of pure physical delight tore through his slight frame, his wooden eyes burning. The wind rose and the sky darkened, the elements responding to his demand as over and over he shrieked the Crone's many names, demanding her presence here amongst the dead she had already claimed, calling upon the ties of the blood their sacrifice had forged.

And out of the storm she came, walking among the dead. She carried the third fragment of the Cauldron.

She reached out with her free hand, touching the spirits. As her fingers lingered on the memories of their flesh and the agonies of battle, they shimmered, losing substance, and failed, fading into the aether. She whispered hushed words as she moved between them, her face bereft of its customary hardness as she released the dead from the torments of remembering one at a time.

The Morrigan stood before the druid, tears in her dark eyes as she lashed out, slapping him across the face. "I will not forget this, druid. Neither will I forgive it. Mark my words, Myrrdin. This is my land. I have walked it for thousands of years. I love it in a way you can never hope to comprehend. I am made of the dirt, the hopes of the people flow through my veins. It is all that I am, just as I am all that remains of it. I love this land. I love my children just as I love my sisters and my sisters love this land and her people, druid. Their pain hurts my sisters and I deeply. You crossed a line here, with this. So many innocent souls forced into reliving the agony and folly of mankind when they should be at peace. Your arrogance is too much but I will see you humbled. And one day your soul will be mine, in my darkest aspect. Never forget that."

"Your threats do not frighten me any longer, old woman," said Myrrdin.

"They should,
old man
. They should," she chittered, the dislike implicit in her tone. "Believe me when I say they are not idle. I have torments in mind that will become legendary amongst the dead, that is my promise to you, Lord of the Trees."

"I have no doubt, witch, but I have nothing to lose now except my life, and this life is not such a good place to be."

"For one who thinks he knows so much your ignorance is staggering, druid. This life is the
only
place to be. Look around you, look at the shades you forced to rise, and tell me you cannot feel their hunger to be back here, in this place where once they loved and lived and died?"

"I feel nothing," said Myrrdin.

"Then you are as good as dead already, and not worthy of my concern." She turned to Sláine, something approaching affection in her face as she smiled and offered up the third piece of the Cauldron to him. Her smile was a physically repugnant thing. His skin crawled. "This is what you want. Return my son to me, warrior."

Sláine took the relic from her, marvelling at the hideous intricacy of the lumpen face embossed in the metal bezel. In places it looked as though the features had melted. There was no nose and part of the creature's left cheek had been eaten away. Huge fangs formed the handle, the distended teeth chipped and broken. This was, he knew, no mere rendition of the face of Avagddu, son of the Goddess, it was the poor demented child, locked in the black iron. He touched the beast's melted face, wondering for a moment if it could feel his fingers.

"This is what it was all for?" Sláine said, without looking up from Avagddu's ravaged visage. "This was why my mother died? Why Wide Mouth died? This was why Finvarra died and all the rest? For this monstrosity?"

The Crone's mask slipped, the affection torn from her face. In its place burned hatred unlike anything Sláine had ever seen, hatred borne of millennia. "Do not goad me, warrior. I did not kill those you loved, nor those you loathed. You did that, you with your stone axe and your damned temper. I did not make you, as much as you would like to excuse your actions, and leave the blame at my feet. You own your actions,
champion
. Those fields of blood are yours. Those broken bodies are yours. Those tattered lives are yours. You would return to your people, to atone for some guilt that no doubt burns within you, I would have my son back, our interests cross for this moment and this moment alone. I did not curse your life, Sláine. You did that all by yourself. I did not make you fall for my pretty sister like a love-sick simpleton. I did not goad you into hurling that gae bolga at Cullen of the Wide Mouth. I did not force you to run with the Red Branch and leave Macha in the care of a drunk. And I most certainly was not the one who rutted with Grufbad's promised maiden. That was your cock you buried in her, your pasty white arse you bared, not mine. You knew what would happen when you were caught, and still you did it, and not once, but again and again, addicted to the danger, wanting to be caught because you were angry at some outrageous sense of betrayal you wanted to believe the old man had done to you, so you cuckolded him. Your exile was your own doing, just as now your return is your own doing. By rights he should have executed you, but the old man had pity. Excuses are easy to find, but a man must own his life, all aspects of it."

Sláine met her hate-filled eyes, unflinching. "You have a clever way of twisting words to suit your need, Morrigan. There is no doubt about that. If I must own
my
actions, I think it is only fair you own yours. It is no coincidence that our 'wants' have crossed. You have fashioned it thus, laying plans that have taken years to come to be."

"Aren't you the clever one, boy? So what if I have served my own purpose? What does it matter to you if my son is returned in the process of you getting what
you
want? You cannot pretend to me that your actions are anything but self-serving, warrior. I have known you and your kind for eternity. Your home was my home long before you were a mote in time's eye, and it will be mine again long after you are dust. I want my son freed; wouldn't any mother want the same? Wouldn't Macha want that for you if the roles were reversed? So save me your self-righteous indignation. Give me my son back and then I will give you the world in return. That is my offer. Take it, champion."

He wanted to say so much, to defend himself, thrust Feg's book in her face until she understood what was at stake, but he forced his anger down, feeling it seethe within his blood. He dropped his sack, opening the drawstring, and put the third fragment inside. When he looked up his face was set, hard.

"Good," the Morrigan said. "There is a cave nearby, where Wayland the Smith shelters. He has the final fragment of the Cauldron, but go lightly, warrior. He is of another time, born of Sidhe blood, last of his kind. He harbours woes of his own that have festered long. In their time, he served as first smith to the Titans, the most skilful of their craftsmen. But he was also a murderous one, tempering his finest blades with the blood of heroes and fashioning gifts for kings from their bones."