Dragons Over England, page 16
She landed with a fusillade of scratches in a tuft of heather, the mad, red eyes of her enemy bearing down on her, no coins left to hand and no time or strength anyway to call another spell. Muriel waited for death.
The boar charged, its rank smell overpowering, its fetid breath fogging the wet air as it came — whfff! and the tearing thud of bronze-tipped wood driven powerfully into flesh.
Blood foamed in the gaping jaws.
The boar took four more strides, stumbled, then cartwheeled over its own shoulder as its heart pumped and the blood ran out of its veins. Its rough hind leg kicked limply into her ankle. Then it was still.
The echo of its hoofs resolved into the drumming of a horse's gait. Looking up, still numb, the Lieutenant glimpsed a familiar Ayslish uniform.
"Muriel! Lieutenant .. Are you hurt?"
Mentally, Muriel felt the sag of relief. Not only was she, herself, saved, but the question she had not dared to form, that of her lover's health, was blessedly answered as well. Pether was alive!
He had survived, and won through to her side across the hideous beasts and the chaos of the battlefield. Joy dizzied her. She drew in great gulps of air, finally remembered to answer his question. "I'm still breathing."
"Hop up, then, there's more chasing this way." He offered his arm, and she gripped it, set her foot atop his, and swung up onto the horse behind him.
"My mare."
"We'll see if we can catch her."
The Lieutenant look back over her shoulder. The heather was trampled and broken so that she could see the boars that came after them now. They could outrun the beasts, but they were alone. The Company was scattered. She held on tightly to her rescuer's waist.
"Have you seen the Captain?" she yelled at the back of his head, over the pounding of her heart and the horse's hooves.
"Aye, not long past. I think we're on his trail."
Muriel felt the tension of battle drain from her, to be replaced by the huge weight of loss. Pether guided the horse by whatever instincts and knowledge he had, and she did not notice their passage.
Instead, her mind replayed the events, like movies, on the black screen of her closed lids. Why had she not recognized the moorscape of her earlier nightmares? What use was a seer who could not read her own prophecies? Bitterly, Muriel wished that Tolwyn of Tancred had not assigned her to the Company at all, but had left her in Glasgow to rot.
The trapped soldier's death scream echoed in her head. Her fault, his death was. Her fault all their deaths.
They had been more than 100 strong, and now they were two.
"Don't moan, sweetling. You should know we Ayslish aren't so easily vanquished," Pether tried to cheer her. "Your first ambush, is it?"
"I killed them all."
"Nay, they've just scattered into the hills. Look there, a broken stem, and there. That cobble's recently turned. The Captain passed this way. We'll find him."
"And then?" she asked, her tone dull with hopelessness.
"Well, were it me, I'd head back to that last decent town, and wait for the stragglers to come out of this blasted heath. There are a lot of clever men in the Company — they'll figure it out. And we won't be so feckled uncomfortable, skulking in this raw brush."
"I wish I had never come."
He squeezed her hand against his waist for a moment. "Sweet, 'tis not your fault. Turn your mind from blaming, and put your thoughts to work on what we might have for supplies tonight, once we've got your mare and the Captain on hand."
Muriel tried to do as he suggested. But her thoughts, turned resolutely from the battle, wandered to the question of their future progress. Should they retreat and regroup, as Pether suggested? They were ordered to clear the remnants of Aysle-outer from this sector of Scotland. Surely that was a needed task.
But if she were to choose for herself, Muriel would rather head south and east. There were tales of a Soviet psychic working in the lowlands. Such a one might ken a way to help her cope with or damp her visions. She would give anything to stop the dreams.
This last thought occupied her mind until at last the two soldiers caught up with their commander. The Captain had glad words for them, along with—joy! — Muriel's mare and all her gear that had been tied to the animal. Muriel's spirits would have lifted further had he not insisted that they three return to the ambush field, and try to puzzle out the location of the rest of the Company.
Tracking was hopeless. Indeed, just being in the same location as the attack gave Muriel the creeps. She felt eyes watching her. She felt spells crawling on her skin. The Captain looked at her expectantly.
"All right, I'll try your seeing for you. But it does not always come ..." And I cannot always interpret when it does, she finished silently.
Standing on the edge of the slough, Muriel emptied her mind of all the images she'd caught during the day. She'd learned this at least, when she was apprenticed: every image a photograph, carefully tucked behind the glassy sheets of acetate, and clipped into the three-ring binder of her mind's eye. When all the fragments of her memory had been neatly catalogued and filed, she had a clean, blank room. No distractions.
She let her breathing settle, too, pulling air from deep in her belly, pushing it back out in slow, measured counts. She detached herself from the act, bottling up her fear, tamping her anxieties as smooth as the hard earth floor of a shepherd's winter hut. It was all defense.
She was deeply, bone-achingly afraid of the nightmares she'd always had. But her Captain had ordered her to See what she would see. She could not refuse an order.
So she layered over her fear with the calm techniques of her apprenticeship, and waited, trembling, for the Sight to come.
The wind whipped rawly at her hair. She smelled the rank rot of peat bog and spilled blood, and the wet weight of clouds before a storm. A wee bit of rain, they'd be getting — Muriel cursed her wandering attention. She stood so long, waiting, that her feet grew numb, and her balance shifted.
But no vision came.
Taking a step forward at last on pins and needles, the Lieutenant's just-opening eyes met Pether's concerned gaze, then the Captain's.
"Nothing. I —"
"You tried, Lieutenant." His words were kindly, his manner thoughtful. His gaze swept the blasted moor, and the lowering clouds, and came back to the three of them. "We head north, as we were, and hope that the lads have the good sense to remember their march and their orders. Mount up."
He turned to his own saddle, laying hands on the pommel with surprising determination. Muriel watched him fling himself onto his gelding's back before she remembered that she was heading out, too. She had failed to gain a vision, as she had failed often in this patchwork land. It just proved to her again how useless was this "gift," this curse, really, called the Second Sight.
As they rode, heads into the wind, The Lieutenant recalled the first time she had seen the future. Gran had been telling tales of the old feuds Clan Gunn (the English spelling of Guinne) had fought with Clan Keith in the fifteenth century — tales of pride and treachery culminating that night in the murder of the Gunn and many of his men while they were at prayer. Big-eyed, Muriel and her sisters Sorcha and Morag had begged for more. But Gran had been firm — they were not to hear the resolution till the morrow. Now they were away to bed.
How many times had she wished that her nightmares were simply the result of bloody Highland histories and an overactive little girl's imagination! But Muriel knew better now.
Then, she had only had terror. In the close darkness of the thatched cottage attic where she and her sisters slept, Muriel dreamed of battles. Dark armies thundered down from the hills. Dragons flew over Dornoch Firth, belching not fire but frost, and stinging icy winds. Calum — her brother Calum with the jumping biceps — took eight-times-great granfa's claymore from the ceiling beam it had been nailed to all these years . and tried to defend the cottage.
Even now, Muriel's eyes filled, remembering the image of her strong brother run through and bleeding. She had awoken shrieking her wee head off. And gran had come to soothe her, and hold her to her breast, and ask what had frightened her so.
"'Tis the Sight you have, bonnie lass. Ye ken more than your sisters," she'd explained when Muriel had at last poured out the details of the dreadful dream.
"Make it go away," she'd demanded.
"I can't, bairn. 'Tis a gift ye're given."
Of course, her mother had scoffed at gran's nonsense. Dragons were a fantasy. No one in the 20th century would come down from the hills raiding, certainly not sword in hand.
But the nightmares hadn't stopped. Her mother had forbidden tales of the Highlands, and gran had died several years later without Muriel's getting any closer to stopping the ugly scenes. After that, Muriel had suffered the occasional sleepless night in dread and silence, hoping that if she ignored the visions, they'd go away.
Instead, they came horribly true.
Calum was killed with a broadsword when the Ayslish invaders came. Muriel saw her two little sisters spitted like so many lambs. How she escaped ... well, it was the Sight that saved her then. A sorcerer among the invaders saw the curse in her somehow, and claimed her for his own.
Against all odds, Muriel later remembered, he was a just man. He taught her the language of the invaders. He taught her their customs. At times Muriel thought she'd come near to time traveling, so backwards were their notions of things.
Most importantly, he'd taught her magic. She had a skill, he said, for divination, but Muriel refused to use that skill. Hadn't it killed her brother? Hadn't it brought her pain without ending? For in the newly conquered lands, Muriel discovered that the dreams were more frequent, more vivid. They almost always involved someone around her, someone close. Seven times out of ten, they foretold such bad things — injury, despair, ill luck — that she was loath to put them into speech.
Her dreams foretold, but there was nothing she could do to prevent their occurrence. The transformed Scotswoman was sure she could do without.
Instead of pressing the matter, as was his right, her sorcerer taught her an alternate skill that he called apportation, and she, telekinesis. He taught her to move objects with her mind. He'd showed her a spell he called "bullet," that let him throw small metal pellets at the rabbits in the heath where they were camping. He told her she could do the same.
For several hours, Muriel had been stumped, cold, and resigned to failure. She had come back into the sorcerer's cave, ready to admit defeat. Then one of her visions came.
Desperate to dispel the horrible scene, Muriel lashed out. Almost unconsciously, she had wound her arm in the great circles she'd used in childhood to propel her brother's slingshot. There was a tingle like fire along her nape, and the seven-sided 20p piece in her left hand heated like a train-track just run. Startled by the sudden change in the metal, Muriel let go. The coin whined through the cave air, ricocheted off the far wall, and buried itself in a bundle of furs.
There was silence in the cave for over a minute. Muriel refused to look up, sure her teacher had decided on her death.
"Guess you've learned that," was all he said. Footsteps receded; Muriel looked up to see him, almost too casually, lean over the furs. "And tonight we'll see how you do at mending beds. But for now, I think a light spell."
He wasn't going to acknowledge the error. Muriel remembered to breathe again.
It was not long after that the Lady Ardinay made court at Oxford, and declared the usurper's minions outlawed. Muriel's apprenticeship to the sorcerer was traded for her Lieutenancy — for the greater good of Aysle. There were times she wished she still toiled in that cave.
***
The night came black as pitch, black as death ... black as a witch's heart. Even the wet fog, hanging like a vast swath of cashmere in their way — with none of the roil and swirl of most fogs — seemed black in the star-hidden night. It was a wonder they could see at all. The Lieutenant spoke a soft word, and the three reined to a stop.
"I don't like the looks of this," Muriel said. Her voice —normally fluid and lovely, soft yet resonant—dulled to sad echoes in the fog-entombed night. "This is an unnatural fog. It doesn't move."
"I can't see a bleeding thing," growled the Captain. "I'll trust your Second Sight, Lieutenant. If you want to go around, lead the way."
"That's just it," she piped. "I have no visions that might guide us. The fog extends as far as I can see in both directions. It might take hours to go around."
"Damn!" The Captain stirred within his cloak, and his horse stepped skittishly sideways, then forward. "We've been separated from the Company for hours. Why didn't the bleeders regroup and wait for us, as per orders?"
"Perhaps they think we're dead, Captain," said Pether.
"Fools!" spat the Captain. "But you may be right." He turned. "Lieutenant, it's time to gamble. Give a hail, and we'll see if we're lucky."
The Lieutenant nodded, and then said "Aye," when she realized the Captain could not see her in the velvety night. She moved with easy grace, drawing a silvery horn from a scabbard at her side as she dismounted. The horn's sides were inlaid with sworls of silver and bright gold that the eye could barely follow. It's a dwarven thing, she would say to those who asked. I got it when I apprenticed to a sorcerer for a time. Would you like to touch it?
Slowly, she raised the horn to her lips and blew a long, sweet note that echoed resoundingly, even in the dead night air. Its tone was high and pure and joyous, and they felt their hearts uplifted by its song.
"Well sounded, sweetling," said Pether, "but will it be of use?"
The question hung in the air along with the vast echoes of the horn, and the Captain began a sigh of despair like the hundred others he had uttered that night. But this one he did not finish — for sweet and loud and piercing, the sound of another horn came boiling through the fog, and the sighs of despair turned into shouts of joy from three throats.
"Hai!" cried the Lieutenant, and "Bloody good!" shouted the Captain. "Tallyho!" called Pether, his voice filled with a heartbreaking hope.
Perhaps the others were waiting just over the next hill.
And again the horn-sound came from out the fog, high and clear and alive, summoning them to battle, to life, to aid. The Lieutenant winded her own horn, then sprang to the back of her horse, and cried, "Follow me! This way!" before galloping, almost madly, directly into the heavy, ominous mists.
***
The fogs had closed around them like the fist of a giant, and the Lieutenant reflected that perhaps such an infernal denseness could play tricks with ears as easily as it had with eyes. They had been riding for nigh unto half an hour since hearing the horn-blast, and she would have guessed the sound to have come from half a mile away at the very farthest. But still there was no sign of the Company, and further horn-calls yielded no answer.
Her misgivings grew stronger as she studied the path they were taking, winding cold through the mysteries of the moor. At first it had been an easy route, chosen mostly by the horse, in the general direction she wanted to go. Then it narrowed, seemed almost to be a dry stream bed frozen into the harsh earth. Then it began to branch and twist as gorse and heather pressed close around them. Soon it was a single track winding through a damp and musty bramble. The horses' hoof-beats grew ragged, beating out an irregular tattoo as they fell into line more by instinct than guidance.
"Let's try a light, Captain," said the Lieutenant. "The ground has flattened, and I feel there are no more boars about." Her misgivings about their trail had turned into confusion and dread as she felt the path twist and turn under her, until she could not tell what was around her. Also, the ground was getting stonier, and her horse's footing was not as sure. She drew rein and, as Pether struck sparks with flint and steel, Muriel dug out her chip of mirror to catch and expand the light. This spell, too, pained her, with a dull aching behind her eyes. Magic always hurt, when Muriel used it. The sorcerer had had no cure for her pains. But the results, now, justified the discomfort.
Light! It had probably not come to this isolated glen, here in the midst of Scotland, since the invasion. Light! It glowed gently from the mirror's surface, grainy and thick, and Muriel had to remind herself that the fog was almost gone here, that the pearly volume of light that surrounded the three soldiers and their mounts was all her own doing. Light! It filled the air around them, illuminating bush and horse and house and .
"By all the Gods," breathed the Captain. "Where in the name of Love-Lara are we?"
It was indeed a house, small and black as the night had been, nestled crookedly into the cleft of the hill. Ragged, inward-leaning stone walls rose no more than two meters, and were capped in a steep, soot-blackened thatch. The front door sunk almost into a small patch of bog, and from the middle of the thatch, a thin spiral of smoke (black, of course) puffed away into the night. There were no windows, nor any sign of life within, save for the smoke.
Beyond the crofter's cottage, at the grainy edges of the magelight glow, huddled a similarly mean building — from the position and the mucky yard, it must have served as a stable.
The Lieutenant noted obstacles, angles — and dropped the mirror from her palm back into her pouch. The light winked out.
Pether's voice broached the darkness. "A hermit!"
Muriel opened her mouth to supply the term "crofter" but found her throat would not work. Fear closed it tight as a fist within her, a stronger fear than when the boars had set upon them with their slavering tusks. At least then she had taken comfort in her eyes, her sword. Now, though it was only her own feelings and not a true Seeing, she felt that nothing she did could save them from an awful fate. Her hand tightened on Pether's, crushingly.
He spared her a swift grin, his eyes bright glints in the blackness. "He'll offer us shelter or feel the edge of our blades!"
The Captain snorted at such bravado. "Not under my command, he'll not. Lieutenant, what say you of this dwelling?"
