Three Queens in Erin, page 19
“Oh, but, but, then—” She stumbled to a halt. “ ’Twas Banríon Nemain, ’twas! Her face, her voice, her walk—by She Whom I swear by, I did not know, I could not—”
“Hush, hush. That demon has put on her aspect; you cannot be blamed for it, woman—they have powers, and we are as children before them.” He turned to Daire. “That hag”—cailleach was the word he used—“has her.”
The Irishman nodded once. His face had paled, and the freckles stood forth on his forehead, and he twisted one of his two braids—it had a crow-skull weight on the end, the hair threaded through the eye sockets and tied off, and now he was turning the bone around and around, unconscious of what he did, blue eyes far away, a growing horror seeping into his expression.
Hob put a hand on his shoulder to bring him back. “Daire—you know this land from your childhood.” The kern had been in exile for years, but all his life before that had been lived here.
“Och, aye?” Daire looked as if he knew what Hob would say and yet hoped he would not say it.
“Bring me to her cave,” said Hob. It was not a request.
Daire nodded; he walked around his horse and mounted, and turned it without another word: a man riding to the gallows.
Hob mounted Iarann. To Damnat he said, “Find the fastest rider here and send him to my lady wife; tell her and her grandmother as well that I’ve gone to Banríon Nathaira’s cave, that she has Macha Redmane, and to come there with all haste. With the other riders and guards, get the children into the wains and down to the rath: this place is no longer safe from that witch.”
He turned the massive gray head about, and by the pressure of his knees, told Iarann what he wanted: the destrier bunched his hindquarters and leaped into a gallop. Daire gave a shout to his rouncey and they shot off after Hob’s receding back. Once through the defile and back on the sheep track he passed Hob. Halfway down the mountain he veered off into a meadow, heading north, heading toward the Cave of Cats, Nathaira’s lair: the mouth of Hell.
CHAPTER 29
DAIRE PULLED UP AT THE foot of the hill. The clifftop road Hob and Daire were on had a drop to the ocean on his left; in front Nathaira’s cliff rose further still, climbing toward the sky. A low hill, an apron of dusty soil, seeded with rocks small and large—a plowman’s nightmare—ran up to the cave mouth. The front of the cliff plunged into the Western Ocean. Here on its southern side the cave opening showed as a semicircle of ink against the sheer sandstone wall.
They rode up the slight slope to the cliff face. The cave entrance showed nothing; the shadow within was intensely black. It looked like a natural cave—it might have been a bear’s den, or a den of wolves—but for the crude wood fence that marked off a patch of land in front. A simple gate, with a simple latch, gave access.
He and Daire dismounted. Daire took Iarann’s reins from Hob and stood pulling at his drooping moustaches.
“Can ye not wait for the women, Sir Robert? For ’tis fey work, and ’tisna the province of menfolk, and your sword will be of no more use than a twig of heather, and—’Tis that I’m Queen Maeve’s man, you ken, but, but, I darena . . .” He was twisting the reins of both horses about his knuckles; he was breathing heavily, and a sheen of sweat glistened upon his forehead.
Hob looked at him. “There is no shame to you in this. But my daughter is in there, and I am going to enter in to her and, Jesus aid me, to bring her out. Stay you here, friend Daire, and tell my lady wife and her grandmother where I’ve gone, and that Redmane is within, taken by that witch of perdition, and tell them to come aid me, or to come avenge me.”
He loosened his sword in its scabbard, and strode up to the gate. It seemed to be a simple enclosure, as one that a cottage would put about its vegetable garden, yet he feared a trap, and could not tell if he sensed a dire energy to it, or if he but imagined it. He hesitated a moment, then shook his head angrily and reached out his gauntlet and lifted the latch. It moved easily, and he stepped through. Nothing happened. He left it open, and walked into the cave entrance, so like a gaping mouth, hungry, menacing.
He passed into darkness, but after a moment his eyes adjusted, and the daylight outside, diffused though it was, gave a wan illumination to the passage. He went forward, and a bend in the rock effectively cut off all help from the sun.
He was now in a short narrow tunnel, perhaps ten feet in length, spurs of the rough-hewn stone projecting now from the walls, now from the ceiling, so that he had to duck or swerve as he went. This section was unlit, but the room beyond had torches fixed in the walls, and enough light spilled out into the entrance passage to enable him to avoid the obstacles.
He emerged into a room perhaps a third the size of Blanchefontaine’s hall, a handful of torches in sconces fixed to the rough stone walls, the ceilings soaring into shadow where the torchlight could not reach, the floor seething with cats.
There must have been a hundred of them: they curled up on woven-grass mats; they drank from stone bowls; they rubbed against the rock walls; they mated in the dark recesses. Over all was the pungent eye-watering ammoniac smell of cat urine.
Gradually they became aware of him. One by one they turned and sat facing him, ears flattened, fangs glinting in the torchlight: they gave every evidence of hostility, and he put a hand to his sword hilt. He wondered if they were only cats, or something more; he felt as though a cold hand had been placed upon his spine. He had a strange reluctance to draw his sword, as though that might precipitate an attack, or the sound alert the Crone.
He put a foot into the space between two of the cats, and took a step, and then another, the cats shifting in place so that he was always the cynosure of a ring of cats, their countenances somehow conveying a more-than-animal expression of personal hatred. But he kept moving: somewhere ahead was his daughter, and nothing would interrupt his progress, if he had to hack his way through a thousand cats.
At last he was through the main group of animals. At the far side of the chamber was another round entryway, another short dark tunnel. He passed through, moving more and more warily, and entered a smallish room, and stopped short.
Torches here lit a waist-high block of stone, as long as a tall man, and perhaps a yard wide, the surface sunk a few inches, so that there was left a raised border all around. Grooves cut in the stone ran from every corner and from the sides to a central basin-shaped depression. Hob stared at it; the altar, if that was what it was, gave off a dark radiance; it almost shouted its purpose. It was so fashioned that a bleeding body lying upon it would fill the central basin, the blood coursing down the channels, with no least drop lost over the side. Hob could see it so vividly that for a moment he stood as one stunned.
There was a movement in the shadows at the far side of the chamber. Now he saw Nathaira coming into the torchlight, her black hair wildly tangled, her gray eyes, underlined with dark semicircles, fixed on his face with a savage pleasure. Her face was harshly handsome; her shift left bare her arms, knotted with long low woman’s muscle; her sinewy hands moved over one another in a washing motion. On every finger of her right hand were what looked to be brass thimbles. He looked more closely—they ended in curved needle-sharp claws. She took a stone dish from a recess in the wall and placed it at the head of the stone table, and it made a small clink, and he saw that it was filled with an amber liquid, and a little curl of bitter smoke drifted on the surface. As he watched, she dipped half the length of the brazen claws in the sinister brew. Mary Mother, he thought, has she found some way to milk that centipede of its venom?
There were cats here and there in this room as well, though never so many as in the antechamber. A cat leaped up on the stone table and licked delicately at one of the grooves.
“Robert the Englishman,” she murmured in a rasping contralto. “Is it that you’re a wise man, or is it that you’re a fortunate man, you coming in as you are, and you empty-handed? Had you entered with a drawn weapon, the guardian spells I left would have torn you like a rabbit among wolves.”
She pointed to a stone bench along the wall. “Sit! Be my guest this night! You are here in good time to see me feed your daughter’s heart to my little ones, to see me bathe my brow in her blood.”
And now he looked beyond her, into the dim alcove from which she had emerged—there was Macha Redmane, her small hands grasping the bars of a wicker cage, just big enough for her to stand erect. Her eyes were fixed on him.
“Macha,” he croaked.
She turned toward Nathaira. “My father has come here to kill you. I told you he would, but you would not listen.”
The Crone looked at her with a flat hostile countenance: the look a snake might direct at a bird within its striking distance. Then she turned back to Hob, and began to sing.
Hob understood at once that he had waited too long to act. The song she sang, in the Gaelic of the Scots, in the dialect of the Western Isles, was beyond his ability to decipher, even with his knowledge of Irish, but its effects were unmistakable. The rough-edged contralto seemed to echo in the hollows of his bones; a sudden weakness seized his limbs and a dull ache began at the backs of his hands, his wrists. It was like falling ill between one breath and another, or aging half a lifetime in a moment.
His daughter said something about a cat, but sound was receding, swamped beneath the roaring in his ears. His vision seemed to fade at the edges of the room. He bit his lip; the pain brought him back to himself, and he said within himself, I am Robert the Englishman, I am Robert the Englishman, I have come to kill you, I am—and then who he was was drowned in the roaring, the gray ice, the gray eyes with the fan of fine lines radiating from their corners, the blackness that swept in from the corners of his eyes. Her black hair blew across his eyes, her song rang in his ears; he could no longer see the cage in the corner, he could barely hear his daughter’s voice. Cat, she said, or he thought she said.
Roaring in his ears, his hand leaning on the stone altar, his legs feeling like stone; the Crone rasped and hissed her song, the hiss mixing with the roar and somehow chilling his limbs; he leaned against her will as though against the winter wind. He thought he heard a child’s voice, so faint, so faint—it was Redmane’s voice, and she said—no, he must have fallen partway, because he was clinging to the lip of the table.
He heaved himself upright in a panic and took a step, moving his leg from the hip because his knee would not bend, and then another step but more slowly, and then he could not take the next step. He could feel the ice creep up his legs, stiffening them, he could hear nothing but a hiss and a roar, he could see nothing but Nathaira’s gray eyes, boring into him from under her handsome crow-dark brows.
He felt tears on his cheek, but could not spare a moment to wipe them away. Nathaira seemed to be obscured by a red mist; he blinked feverishly, and the sorceress grew clear, but a moment later she was hazed in red again, and the warm tears fell and fell on his cheeks. Robert the Englishman: his eyes were filling with blood.
Was his daughter calling to him? He was not sure—it might have been the witch queen: Their voices were very similar, were they not? Something warm and liquid ran from his ears and down his neck. Cat, said Nathaira or Redmane. He was down at the foot of the table, and the Crone was at the head, and he had been here for a very long time, watching her dusk-gray eyes, watching her raise her clawed hand toward him, flexing the fingers that dripped amber liquid upon the table. Where the drops struck they smoked upon the stone. She was killing him where he stood; yet should he reach her where she stood, she would claw poison into his flesh.
Something concerning a cat, he thought. One or the other was saying it, and he thought it was an interesting question, to determine who it was; it might pass the time while he waited here, so far down the long, long stone table that was a blood-grooved altar, waiting for the ice to reach his heart and lock it shut between one beat and the next.
“Cat,” said his daughter again, or was there an echo from the cave’s crude stone walls, or was there an echo in his mind? No, Nathaira had said it, surely, or had sung it. She was a handsome woman, her eyes, with their delicate crow’s-feet, gray as evening, her hair black as night, and her low pleasant rasp of a voice singing, singing in his blood-drenched ears.
“Cat,” said his daughter, and he thought that, that she, he closed his eyes and he thought that she . . .
“Cat!” said Redmane, and holding to the table with his right hand and barely awake and without a thought in the stunned silence of his mind he swept out his hard left hand and scooped the cat up and tossed it underhand at Nathaira’s handsome face.
The cat landed in a whirl of limbs, partly on the Crone’s head and partly on her shoulder, struggling for balance and purchase. A flailing paw caught the witch queen’s eye, scratching it closed, and Nathaira gave a loud cry and batted at the animal with her brass-nailed right hand, her other clapped over the wounded eye, her Crone strength sending the animal tumbling across the little room, the cat dead from the poison before it hit the cave wall.
Nathaira stared, one-eyed, appalled: she had broken her geis.
Hob felt the cessation of pressure. His blood running hot once again, his legs obeying him, his breath sweeping into opened lungs, Robert the Englishman began to come around the altar-table, gathering speed, Hob moving freely again, Sir Robert sweeping his sword out smoothly from its scabbard, the blade a gold gleam in the torchlight. And now Nathaira made an attempt to rally, her right hand drawn back, the fingers curled, the amber poison coating half the brazen nail-guards and dripping from the tips, but Robert the Englishman, in a red vengeful fury, his sword coming back from the drawing-out in a curl of golden light, struck her hand off at the wrist, smoothly altered the direction of his blade, and swept her head from her shoulders, her body dropping straight down like a puppet from the morality plays and her head rolling across the rock floor to fetch up against the wall, upright, staring at him. For a terrible moment he thought her head lived, so directly did she look at him with eyes wide, but then he moved to the side and her eyes did not follow.
A cat came in; it was a cat, but he thought it might also be more than a cat, and he watched it narrowly. It settled by Nathaira’s body and began to lap at the blood from her neck.
He sheathed the sword and strode briskly to the cage. “Step back, sweeting,” he said, and when Macha backed up he put a heavy foot through the wicker of the cage side. He pulled loose the fragments and she ducked through the hole and then he had her up in his arms, hugging her and kissing her cheek, her eye, her temple. Yet he kept watch on the cat: in this terrible place, one could not slack one’s vigilance.
“I tried to warn her,” said Redmane in a small voice. She put her face into his neck, her eyes shut tight. “I told her you were coming and that you would kill her if she did not let me go, but she thought I was just trying to frighten her, and she laughed.”
“Let us go out into the air,” he said, and he walked carefully back through the rooms. The cats in the outer room looked at him as he passed, but already they seemed less focused, less demonic, more catlike.
They came outside, and the breezes from the Western Ocean cooled his face; gulls drifted up over the cliff walls, crying one to another; the sea air washed him clean of the scent of cat. But he did not stop till he had passed through the little garden gate in the fence around the foreyard of Nathaira’s cave. It seemed a symbolic boundary, and he knew from Molly and Nemain that a symbol in the hands of a mage is as much a weapon as an ax in the hands of a gallowglass.
Just outside the gate, Daire stood, still holding the two horses. Hob stepped through the gate, and Daire went to one knee. He regarded Hob with a kind of awe mixed with a little fear: Who was this man who went into a demon’s lair and came out unscathed? The Irishman stood again, and now Hob could see that his face streamed with tears. Hob himself felt that he could not speak just then. He patted Daire’s shoulder as he passed, and carried Redmane over to a wide boulder near the cliff edge, and sat, the child still clinging to his neck, and looked out over the ocean, and was quiet for a time. Daire hung back, leaving the two to themselves: a man of delicate instincts.
Then Daire’s horse whickered. Someone was coming.
CHAPTER 30
A TROOP OF RIDERS, LOOSELY strung out along the trail, was coming full tilt toward the cave, the horses lathered and panting, toiling up the slope. Behind the two lead riders, a length or two ahead of the pack, floated long banners of silver hair, red hair: Molly and Nemain. After them could now be discerned a score of Irish riders, and toward the back, Jack galloping along with them, sitting a sturdy horse in his graceless style.
“Mommy is coming,” he told Macha Redmane, and the child lifted her head and looked down along the trail.
They thundered up, Molly and Nemain flinging themselves off and the other riders slowing, the horses milling in a rough circle, winding down to a halt. Fergus dropped off his horse and caught the reins of the two queens’ mounts.
Nemain ran to them and snatched Redmane up and crushed her into a hug, burying her face in the child’s hair, her eyes shut tight, her body taut as a drumhead. Molly rapidly ascertained that Macha was unharmed, then strode to her horse and ripped a hazel staff from a loop on her saddle. She started toward the cave, her face the mask of a lioness, an expression of implacable ferocity.
“She is quite dead, Grandmother,” said Hob.
Molly halted at the gate, but did not look at Hob.
“I would look upon her,” she said, and started forward again. She disappeared into the cave. Moments passed, and she emerged slowly and walked back through the gate, and carefully closed and latched it, and came over to Hob. She held to the staff with one hand, bent to him, and turned his face toward her with her other hand. She kissed one eye, then the other, and then his forehead. Then she straightened and went to Nemain, kissed the child, and kissed Nemain as well.
Behind him Hob could hear Daire murmuring, recounting to Fergus and his squad what he knew of what had happened. A heavy hand fell upon Hob’s shoulder, thumped him gently. He looked up: Jack, beaming at him.
