Three Queens in Erin, page 18
“Sure I’d heard you had an ox like a dog, Sir Robert, but I’ve never seen the like,” said Daire, and Rogan put a hand out and stroked the side of Milo’s broad neck.
Hob was not yet at ease enough before the two Ó Cearbhaill warriors to speak nonsense to the ox as he usually did; he contented himself with feeding him several apples, one of Milo’s particular enthusiasms. From far across the meadow, Tapaigh and Mavourneen, noticing the group by the fence, were making their way toward them, and in due course they had their treats as well.
After a while Hob shouldered the bag again. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “on we go to the east pasture. I must pay my respects to my destrier, and then perhaps we may see if there’s strong drink to be had at the hall—unless you’d prefer an apple or two?”
* * *
BEHIND THE CIRCLE of Molly’s rath the hill dropped sheer away to the next valley, the drop itself an effective wall. There near the edge of the slope, just inside the palisade of the rath, was a small outbuilding that Molly and Nemain used as a place of refuge and privacy to work their Art. No men were allowed within, and of women only those adept in the Art, or the young maidens of the clan who served as aides to their queens in these matters.
A steady stream of these girls, some of whom would go on to become practitioners of the Art, others who would not, but would remember this time in their lives with wonder, came and went from this little house of sorcery with demands from Nemain or Molly: bundles of hazel withes, lengths of leather thongs, neat’s-foot oil, a small box of garnets from Nemain’s bedchamber.
Hob and Jack, excluded, waited nearby, seated on benches in the grassy bailey, sharpening weapons, drinking a bit, bantering with the gateway guards. The afternoon wore on, slowly. At the evening meal, the two queens were absent; with the removal of the children to the shieling, the hall was unusually quiet; a glum mood prevailed.
Evening fell, and the clan by twos and threes went to their dwellings for the night. The young women and girls assisting Molly and Nemain were dismissed, but still the two queens worked on, the light of oil lamps and candles showing glimmers beneath the door and at the joins where the shutters did not close completely over the windows. Hob and Jack spread blankets on the grass in front of the workshop, and slept under the stars.
At dawn the men roused, and after a brief breakfast continued their vigil. Some of the young acolytes assembled by the door, in case they were needed, but none of the girls dared knock—who knew what delicate process they might interrupt?
Jack produced a pair of dice and the two men sat on the grass and threw dice without any enthusiasm. They were playing for straws, and Hob was losing: Jack had a little pile of fifteen or twenty straws in front of him.
The sun was halfway to its zenith when the door opened and Nemain, bleary-eyed, came out and sat down on the grass between Hob and Jack. She beckoned one of the girls and had her run to the kitchens; the girl returned with a wooden bowl of goat’s milk, which she offered shyly to her young queen. Nemain thanked her in a voice low with fatigue, and the girl went back to her colleagues by the door.
“ ’Tis done, or mostly done—Herself is finishing the eyes.”
Jack gave a glance of inquiry at Hob.
“The eyes?” said Hob.
“Och, aye; we’re using the garnets.”
Hob could see there was not much of use to learn from Nemain, so very tired was she. He settled in to wait patiently.
At last Molly appeared in the doorway. For all the difference in their ages, she seemed less fatigued than her granddaughter. All the same, she was subdued. “Nemain,” she said, and went back inside. The young queen put a hand on Hob and a hand on Jack and heaved herself up to her feet. She disappeared within and a moment later the two women came out, carefully carrying between them a withy construction the size of an Irish wolfhound.
Hob and Jack got up and went over to it, wondering. It was an image of—what? It had wings, but it was not a bird: it had too many legs. A dragon? Hob could not make it out; he could not make it out; he could—then he had it.
The long narrow head, the javelin-slim body: it was a wasp, the limbs of hazel withe knotted with leather thongs, the knots curiously similar to the ones the Beekeeper had used to assemble the skeletons of her enemies. The framework of the wings was hazel twig, but the wings themselves were gray silk; the eyes were clusters of garnets, fixed with some glue to the sides of the withy face. Between the back legs the abdomen terminated in a long, downcurving hollow reed, painted black.
Within the head itself was a small cage, and in that cage was a box, with wool, and embedded in the wool was the Beekeeper’s gift: a wasp of the type the withy wasp represented, embedded in a small chunk of amber, perfectly preserved, the insect more jewellike than the garnets.
“ ’Tis the natural enemy of such as the centipede, and we will convince the centipede that ’tis real—it will be real, for a time—and it will do what it must do, according to its nature, though we will quicken the process, so that what takes time will happen almost at once,” said Nemain.
He bent to peer at the amber tomb of the original wasp.
“ ’Twas drowned in that amber, very long ago; perhaps before there were men in Erin,” said Molly. “Even, perhaps, before there were gods in Erin.”
Hob looked at the construction. It was an elegant object, but it was like a statue of hazel withe, inert, and delicate, even fragile.
“It will kill that monster that we saw? That huge thing?” asked Hob. He did not wish to offend his beloved or her grandmother, but he could not keep the disbelief from his voice.
Molly spoke, quiet, weary: “Hob, my pulse, step in front of it.”
He did as Molly asked; he looked at it. It was a withy statue of a wasp.
Molly spoke two words in antique Irish, too arcane for Hob to understand, and the creature stirred. The wings vibrated, they fluttered, and now Hob could see that they were of transparent stuff shot with dainty veins, and the wasp moved toward him, the red compound eyes seeming to fix on him with menace, with hunger.
The whole wolfhound-sized insect, with its armored yellow legs, its glossy black head and shoulders, and its hard red abdomen, coursed with vibrant life, and he snatched at his dagger, all thought swept away by a primitive terror, the hair prickling up on the back of his head, and Molly said something else, and there was a lifeless withy image before him, and himself hunched over in a tense-muscled defensive crouch. He straightened, slowly, feeling foolish. He slid the war dagger, the big iron-pommeled gift from Sir Balthasar, back in its sheath, and let out a long breath.
“I believe ’twill serve,” he said in a voice that was not as steady as he would have liked.
CHAPTER 27
THEY CAME AGAIN TO THE destroyed village, Jack driving a wain with the hazel-withe wasp and a few barrels of other material, Daire and his picked squad of cavalry riding escort. Molly had the Irishmen wait a short distance away, out of sight over a hill, for she did not want them to distract her and her granddaughter at their conjuring, and also she feared their reaction to what would occur. Jack and Hob were under no such prohibition, and indeed were to help with the heavier work. The family’s mounts, and the horses that had drawn the wain, were led away by Daire’s men, for no horse would stand quietly near such a monster as the centipede.
Molly and Nemain set up the wasp facing the cliff, and Jack wrestled a tub of beef blood and offal to the edge of the rock and splashed it, part on the cliffside ground and part over the cliff edge, running down the rock.
For a time nothing happened. The waves broke with a muted roar, far below, and a small cloud of seagulls appeared, alighting to peck at the bits of beef, squabbling among themselves, hovering out a bit from the rock, suspended over the drop on their long narrow wings. The air filled with their piercing raucous cries; they maneuvered and landed and took flight again.
Molly and Nemain, who had not slept at all, kept up a low running chant, a song of summoning. The afternoon wore on. Suddenly the gulls, almost as one, leaped into the air and stood off from the cliff, hovering perhaps a score of yards out over the ocean, uttering cries of alarm. Under the circumstances, there could hardly have been a more sinister occurrence: something was coming.
The air filled with the spicy, not-quite-pleasant alien scent of the centipede, and the drumming footfalls were heard as it clawed its way up the rock. There was a moment when silence fell, and Hob and Jack looked at each other, wondering—could it have sensed its danger, and retreated? But they would have heard its retreating footsteps. What, then, was it doing? Hob often thought that one could tell what Sweetlove was thinking—“You’re not Jack; where’s my Jack?” and the like. But this monster—did thoughts form in that alien head?
Then some strange decision was reached, and the creature flowed with frightening speed up over the lip of the cliff and toward them, its thick sharp-pointed poison claws clacking together, its compound ocelli staring at them, its antennae questing.
At once Molly and Nemain began a full-throated chant, and the withy wasp vibrated, and before Hob’s eyes was once again a real wasp, a giant emissary from the horror-haunted little world of the insects.
The centipede stopped its rippling advance toward them with that abruptness that characterizes insect movement. The wasp had fixed its attention on the centipede, and the centipede, for its part, had turned its head so that the ocelli on one side had the wasp in its view. For such an opaque and inhuman countenance, Hob thought, it did, with its targeting of the wasp, manage to convey dismay, even fear, although he was not sure if he had just imagined this.
The wasp stirred, quivered; a low vicious buzzing sound came from it and it lifted, it soared. At once the centipede’s front segments came off the ground and it reared, reared, reaching for the wasp, now rising at a sharp angle, its wingbeats too rapid to see, and the centipede’s poison claws closed sharply on air, just below the wasp. The wasp flew briskly out over the ocean, turned about and came in behind the centipede.
It landed squarely on the midmost segment of the creature; the long tube that trailed behind its abdomen now plunged into the monster’s back. The centipede at first curled back upon itself, trying to reach its tormentor, but it could not quite bend that much. The wasp quivered, its abdomen pulsing, the tube pushing deeper and deeper into the centipede. There came an explosion of activity from the many legs, the repetitive segments, of the monster, and Molly’s family retreated hastily. Clouds of dust and small stones were thrown into the air; the monster bucked and heaved, but the wasp clung and pumped poison and eggs into its flesh.
The thrashing slowed, as paralysis overtook the centipede, and at last it lay rigid, assuming a stonelike aspect, and the ocelli became glassy; the transparent membrane began to slide over the eyelike structure, but came up only halfway and stopped. The enormous beast lay utterly motionless.
Molly called out sharply, and the wasp pulled free its ovipositor and rose into the air. Once again it flew out over the ocean, curved about and flew back in over the immobile monster, to settle at Molly’s feet. She reached in and removed the little box with the wool and the chunk of amber, within which was the preserved wasp body, and once again Hob was looking at a statue formed from hazel withe, motionless, almost flimsy.
He looked at the centipede. “Is it dead, then?”
Nemain said, “Well, no. The wasp paralyzes its victims, and lays its eggs, and the eggs hatch and the young feed on the victim’s body.”
“Merciful Christ!” said Hob. “And now we must wait for all that, and then we will have—more wasps?”
“Nay, we have oil and torches in the wain—we will burn it now, and so destroy it utterly.”
“And will that destroy the eggs as well?” asked Hob, who could not but worry about a plague of wolfhound-sized wasps descending upon them.
“Hob,” said Molly gently, “there are no eggs. ’Tis but a withy wasp. It has no eggs. It believed itself to have eggs, and it believed itself to have paralyzing poison, and the centipede believed it as well, and so ’tis paralyzed, and so it might as well have been true for them, but there are no eggs.”
Hob looked at Jack. “The centipede believed . . . Well, let us get the oil, Jack. Let me face a Norse Gael with an ax—’tis almost soothing beside these horrors.”
They went to the wain, and he vaulted up and rolled the barrel of poppy oil to the tailboard, and Jack muscled it down to the ground, and they rolled it over to the monster.
The body of the centipede proved combustible in itself, and with the aid of the oil, was reduced to ash in a remarkably short time. Molly took the withy wasp in one hand and walked to the wain and without ceremony tossed it in.
“There,” she said, in a voice weary unto death, “sure, that’s done. Tomorrow, we’ll have to hunt that witch down, but we can do no more tonight. I’d not want to face her now, with her Crone power, and ourselves so tired.”
CHAPTER 28
EXHAUSTED, DRAINED BOTH PHYSically and of that force which is the will to live life, to be interested and open to the world around, Molly and Nemain sat on a ledge of stone, slumped against one another. Molly’s arm was wrapped tight about Nemain’s shoulders.
Hob squatted before them, a cup in each hand. Jack poured uisce beatha from a jug into each cup, and Hob urged each woman to drink. He had never seen them so tired, not even after the long night’s struggle with Sir Tarquin, years ago. Of course, he thought, the years themselves added weight to any difficulty; he looked at his wife, the dark circles that had come to rest beneath her eyes over these past weeks, the slack expression at the corners of her mouth, and he felt a tenderness welling up in him, strong and sweet, fueled by his concern for her.
Molly took a cup from him and drank, hardly seeming to know what she did, and when she’d finished she just held it till Jack sat beside her and gently took the empty vessel from her hand. Hob held the cup to Nemain’s lips; she looked at him blankly over the rim. Then, as if just that moment grasping what he wanted her to do, sipped at the fiery stuff; sipped again.
She drew a deep breath. She looked around. “Where’s my baby? Hob, where’s my baby?”
“She’s up at the shieling, treasure of my heart, with the other children. You know that, surely?”
“Oh,” she said. She looked away inland, up the slopes toward the hills. “The shieling, yes.”
Molly, though much older than Nemain, was strong as a bear. Already her voice was almost steady. “ ’Tis safer for them now to be back at the hall. Hob, send someone to bring the children back.”
“You go, Hob,” said Nemain fretfully. “Go yourself, husband; bring me my baby.” Her eyes were closing, opening, closing again; she was fighting to stay awake.
“I’ll go,” said Hob. “Rest, now; rest.”
Nemain’s eyes closed and she leaned against Molly, who was in turn braced against Jack. Jack was immovable as a boulder, and with one hand the dark man made a reassuring motion and then indicated that Hob should go.
Hob rose and went to where Daire stood near Iarann. He shed his mail hauberk and his gambeson and left them in the wain; it was a relief to be free of the weight and the heat. He tossed the reins back over the destrier’s head and prepared to mount. Hob told Daire, “Have the women helped into the wain and escorted back to the rath; they are too weary to ride. You yourself pick five men and come with me. We’re going to bring the children back, and an escort would not be amiss. I no longer trust peaceful appearances.” Still, he did not expect real trouble, or he would have kept the mail on, heat or no heat.
They rode up the winding track the shepherds and goat-boys used to bring their charges up to the mountain grazing in spring and down to the valley in the fall. The track wound up and up, the slopes of the mountain covered with ling, a sea of tiny pale purple bells.
A turn around an outcrop led to a narrow defile, and from there they debouched into a bowl-shaped upland valley, protected from the winds by the ring of rock walls around it.
There was the shieling, a cluster of small stone huts for the shepherds, with a wood fence that enclosed a pen for the livestock at night, and the meadow for grazing, a brook winding through it. Sheep and goats dotted the meadow, with herd-boys among them.
Large gray shapes came streaming toward them from the nearest hut: wolfhounds. As they came near, the dogs recognized them, and what had begun as an attack turned into a leaping, away-and-back, running-in-circles greeting, all to the accompaniment of the deep harsh barking typical of the breed.
They came up to the shieling and dismounted, the dogs eddying about them, and now children ran out and added to the din. The guards Molly had assigned to the children stood back till some of the excitement had abated, then there were eager requests for news—how had it gone against the centipede, were any slain, and so forth. Damnat, the woman in charge of the children, came up to them.
“Greeting, Sir Robert, how fares it below?”
“Greeting, Mistress Damnat. I am glad to say that we have prevailed: the dragon-beast is dead. You may get the children ready and into the wains; Daire here will escort you down. But I will carry Macha Redmane down with me now. Her mother is weary from the battle; she is fretful; I think seeing the child will soothe her.”
For a long moment Damnat said nothing, and Hob felt a hand begin to close on his heart.
“Banríon Nemain, she, she, brought the child away, a little while since—did she not tell you, Sir Robert?”
They were looking at each other, with mirrored expressions of sick surprise. Both knew what had happened; each hoped the other would say something that would offer an innocent explanation.
Hob said, in a flat dead voice, “My lady wife sent me here direct, to collect the child.”
