Spear, page 8
Her mother had a brother. Myrddyn. Sorcerer, chief counsellor to Arturus king. “He is young. Younger than my mother.”
“No. He’s older. And now he is bound, stopped forever while the rest of us age.”
Myrddyn. Her mother’s brother. Family. “Who did this?”
Nimuë lifted her chin. “I did.”
* * *
THE LAKE LIVED in its own time as well as its own place. Peretur thought it should at least be late afternoon, but back at the elm table by the hearth in the cottage, the light told another story; it was barely midday.
They sat opposite each other, like enemies at truce.
“I have answered two of your questions. Now answer mine: Who did you reach out to yesterday?”
“My mother. Elen.” The geas is broken.
“Is she still mortal?”
Mortal? Peretur had never thought about it. Elen had magics, like Nimuë, but she aged, she wept, she grew thin. Peretur nodded.
“Where is she?”
“Hidden.”
“Not anymore. Tell me.”
Peretur thought of the mist following the bright arrow’s path. The geas is broken. And she was the one who broke it. “You tell me first, why is Arturus afraid of me?”
“Because Myrddyn warned him that one day a man who was not a man might come to take his sword.”
The king did not know she was not a man. “It is more than that. It’s the sword.”
“Yes. I’ve seen the way he touches it when he says your name.”
“So, what is the sword? It is Myrddyn’s doing, but why? And why did you bind him?”
“For that, I must tell you a story.”
And though her body did not move, Nimuë seemed to distance herself, and began to speak as though of someone else.
Twelve years ago, Myrddyn, following rumours of a witch who spoke to water, found an orphaned girl on the cusp of womanhood, a girl singing and steering springs and streams to water a farmer’s field, or fill a village’s well, just to eat and sleep out of the rain. He praised her, and told her she could do more, so very much more, if only she would let him show her how.
And at first, he did show her. He touched his hand to her temple and entered her mind and showed her how to breathe like this, how to focus on that, and soon she could bend a river and raise a wall; she could heal a broken bone and help a tree flower. More, she said. Show me more. And so he did, though only a little at a time, and after each lesson she was strangely tired. And it was not for five years that she began to suspect that he was not teaching her, but learning alongside her, drawing from her. This was after he brought her to Arturus, who was not yet king. To Arturus and his men, who were not yet Companions of the king, she was Myrddyn’s pretty pupil, kneeling at her master’s feet. And always, in private, he urged her on in the great search, the search of searches: for a treasure, a thing of power. Urging became demanding; he would lay his palm on her cheek and inside her mind drive her on, on, always on.
The day came when the girl was standing in a stream bed, listening to the river, persuading it to flow a little more this way, and he was standing on the bank—how he hated to get wet! Just like a cat—and he told her to stop, there was something more important he needed from her just now. But she was feeling strong, feeling good, and she said, No, this won’t take long. And was shocked by a wave of rage, his thoughts of what he would do to the annoying, ungrateful little bitch when he didn’t need her anymore. She stopped, stock-still with shock, there in midstream, and stared at him. But he did not know anything was amiss, he didn’t feel it. He was smiling a false smile, saying with his voice, Very well. Just this once, pretty bird, have your way. But his heart spoke another story; she could read him like a fish split and spread on a bake stone, and inside he stank of the urge to power—
Nimuë stopped. “He couldn’t get inside me—had never been able to—without touch. But there I was, strides away, reading him. I knew then that I was more powerful than him. Greater. He’d been…” By the set of her face the next words were hard. “In the guise of helping me he had been … drinking me.”
Sipped and drained like a wine cup. Peretur almost reached across the table, but Nimuë had gone away inside again.
—Myrddyn was all the girl knew. He was her only friend, her only family, her teacher. And so for a little while she said nothing, did nothing—but as they looked for the treasure, she looked into him, reaching deeper and deeper …
With a visible wrench Nimuë forced herself to be present.
“But I didn’t want to stop the search. For we were seeking two of the treasures of the Tuath Dé—”
Peretur blinked. “The Tuath Dé are real?”
“The stone is real. As you see. We found it—I found it, when I found my way to the lake—and through me, so did Myrddyn. If only I’d known then what I know now. But I didn’t know. Believe me, Peretur, I didn’t know.”
Her hands were clenching and unclenching on the table. They were small compared to Peretur’s but not soft, not weak. Good hands.
“So, we found the stone, and with it the sword—which the stone hid, as it now hides Myrddyn.”
“Arturus’s sword.”
“Myrddyn led him to it; Artos claimed it and became king. It’s how he remains king. Whoever holds the sword will not be defeated in battle. Whoever holds the sword holds some part of its power. Artos recognises you, Peretur. Perhaps he sees the resemblance to Myrddyn. But perhaps it’s more, Myrddyn’s warning: someone coming for the sword, coming to take his power. And the sword itself recognises you. Why?”
Nimuë was closing herself off, ready to push her away. “Nimuë…”
“Why?”
“It … draws me.”
“You look so like him.” Her hands clenched, unclenched. “But you don’t feel like him.” She took a deep breath, put her shoulders back, and spoke in a deep, formal voice. “Peretur Paladr Hir, do you, like Myrddyn, seek the power of the Tuath Dé?”
“I thought they were a story.” The Tuath Dé. The four treasures. Were they all real, all the stories her mother told her? Nimuë was waiting. “I didn’t even know the sword was here.”
“Yet now you do. So, I will ask once again: Will you take it?”
“No!” Nimuë flinched. “No. I won’t take the sword. I don’t want it.” Peretur felt very tired. The sword both drew her and repelled her. It was not for her, she knew this though she did not know how she knew it. She could not tell if Nimuë believed her. “Why do we fight over this? I don’t want the sword. I have never wanted the sword. They are malicious gods, these Tuath, to make such things to fight over.”
“Gods? What is a god? These treasures are all that remains to the Tuath of the power of their homeland. What power do they have of their own? I don’t know. They fight for these treasures. The Tuath were never many, but now when they lose a treasure, they diminish. Any who may be left have, still, great power lent by the treasures. But when we have hidden all the treasures I believe that power will fade. They will fade from the land, fade from memory, and be gone.”
“You want them gone?”
“I want their treasures gone, where no mortal can find them ever again. When mortals use that power, they are terrible. But to understand that, you need to hear the rest of the story. Will you hear it?”
“I will hear it.”
“Artos took and held the sword, and, through him, Myrddyn began to draw on the power of the Tuath. But that power is not meant for human hands. Even Artos, who has no magic to be corrupted, will pay for it—he does already; the sword eats at his mind. For Myrddyn, a sorcerer open to its power, who used it to grow younger—as I think he once used your mother, as you will see—it began to drive him mad with want.”
Nimuë looked down at the grain in the elm table. Peretur wished she could read her.
Nimuë sighed and looked up. “No. That’s only what is more comfortable for me to believe. It did not begin with the sword. Myrddyn was mad, I think, long before we met. I should have seen, but I didn’t. Or perhaps I did but I didn’t want to know—until that day when I looked deep inside him, and could not unsee what was so plain.”
She folded her hands together on the table, lifted her chin, and looked straight at Peretur.
“I’m afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Of what you will think of me. And, yes, perhaps of you, too, a little.”
“Why?”
“The Tuath can speak to the things of power, and the power can speak in them. They are not gods, but neither are they mortal. The sword speaks to you, and speaks of you, as it never could to Myrddyn, or me, or Artos. The sword was not made by mortals for mortals. And it speaks to you. And you smell of its makers. So the question now, Peretur, is: Are you wholly mortal?”
She did not know.
“And now we’re at the point where words are not enough. I’m human, I can’t help but shade the truth to feel better about myself. For the bare, plain truth we must let each other in, as we did before. But that was brief, a moment, just a touch. This would be … more. And I’m afraid. It is an … unclean thing to have another more powerful inside you.”
Unclean. “You think I’m unclean?” Unclean, while to her Nimuë felt like the lake: cool, wide, deep. Her voice shook. “Did you find me unclean when I was open to you?”
“Inside you is like a forest I have never seen before, with a path that I know goes deep, deep into the unknown. What if I follow that path and at its end find you are like Myrddyn?”
Peretur wanted to trust this woman, trust her own judgement, but twice before she had trusted that she had won herself a place, and twice misjudged. Unclean … She felt herself tearing slowly down the middle. “I could have lost myself in you. I was willing.” Part of her still was. She stood up. “I must go.”
“From Caer Leon?”
Leave. Run away again. Was that what she wanted? To be driven away, again? “Just from here, from the lake, from you.” She turned to the door, then turned back. “It was not an unclean thing!”
Nimuë looked tired and sad. “This is not finished.”
* * *
THE SUN WAS still shining when she came down the path and closed Nimuë’s gate behind her. Despite the sunlight, Caer Leon seemed small and drab, dreary with rough wood and bare dirt. In the byre, Bony and Broc seemed surprised to see her again so soon, and she remembered, again, that time was different by the lake. She patted them, and promised them a ride and a treat later.
In the outer practice yard, on the other side of the inner fort, she heard the clash of weapons, the occasional shout and hoot of laughter. The Companions were training, half on foot, half on horse.
She leaned against the rough wood palisade by the practice spears, arms folded, and watched. How slow they seemed, how foolish in their fine leathers.
“Ho, Pretty Per!” Cei, pulling off his helm. He nodded for his sparring partner to continue with the exercise, and walked over. “Where’ve you been? No point going off sulking just because Artos is in one of his moods. He’ll come around. Meanwhile, the Eingl are massing and I need to see how you fight with others. Go get your sword.”
She looked at him, standing with his muscled legs wide, fair hair stuck to his head, in his tawdry green-and-yellow leathers and suddenly, very much, wanted to hit something. Cei would do.
She pushed herself off the wall, took one of the spears with blunted tips and twirled it in her hands. “I don’t need a sword,” she said.
Cei studied her. Then he turned and shouted over his shoulder at a compact, brown-haired man, “Llywarch! Let’s see how fast our new formation can take down this insolent puppy.”
A few of the Companions on foot stopped to watch. Llywarch beckoned and two of his men, one right-handed, the other left-handed, overlapped their round shields, with Llywarch at the centre holding a pike two-handed, pointing between the shields, and the other two with swords at either side.
“I call it the point,” Cei said. “It’s designed to—”
Peretur knocked them down in three fast sweeps: low to the legs of the man on the left of the point, or her right; when he fell, a whirl and turn and thump on the back of Llywarch’s head; then a vicious stop-thrust against the other’s shield which sent him staggering back at such speed his legs could not keep up and he tangled in the fallen pike and went down. She twirled her spear and smiled, a hard flex of muscle and bone. She would take them all, one at a time, and she would not be gentle.
One of the horsemen kneed his black forward, reached down a hand, and hauled the right-handed man to his feet. Llanza. No one said anything, but Peretur remembered these were not enemies but Companions. She gave a hand to the first man, which after a moment he took. He pulled himself up, then had to hop to the bench by the wall. Cei looked down at Llywarch, who was sitting up trying to get his helm off. “Looks like it’ll need Afan to get that off.” Llywarch didn’t seem to hear him. Cei pointed to two men, then Llywarch, then the armoury, then turned back to Peretur.
“Your point doesn’t work,” she said.
“Not against a lunatic with a spear,” he said. “Go get your sword.”
“The sword is not my weapon.”
“Listen, petal cheeks. The Eingl fight in shield walls, on foot. A horse won’t charge that, and lone champions get killed. In the Companions, there are no lone champions; we fight together. We follow orders. If I say get your sword, you get your sword. Do you want to be a Companion?”
To fight together. To belong. “I’ll get my sword.”
Cei was disgusted when he found her sword still lacked a tip, so he brought two from the armoury: one short, for stabbing, one longer, like Talorcan’s. She started with the short sword, taking the right-hand position in a point, with egg-shaped Geraint on the pike and Cei himself taking the left. Six men armed with shields, spears, and stabbing knives opposed them.
She had never worked with others before. At first she did not understand that she should not take any opening that offered itself—no easy strike to a man with a careless gap between chin and shield rim—but stay, always, in the formation until told. She found it difficult to move at their strange, heavy pace, hard to keep her left shoulder down and in against Geraint, and her right shoulder always turned away a little to give room for her sword against any who attacked from the side. But the first time their shields interleaved, and they stepped forward together at Cei’s barked command, she felt a strange flicker, a doubling of self that was part Cei’s strength, part Geraint’s steadiness—but then they lost their stride and it was just her on one side and Cei on the other, with Geraint holding the long heavy pike in the middle. Then as the six men opposite advanced, Cei called, “Tighter!” and the point’s shields interlocked and held, and then she did not feel Cei, she did not feel Geraint, she did not feel her own boots on the ground; she felt a sliding meld into a third thing that moved with shared purpose. She shivered, as she had the first time she had watched dawn over the duck pond while a blackbird sang. For one brief moment the three of them were one, and they stood against the six attackers almost without effort. They knocked them down—one, two-three-four, five-six—and then it was just the three of them.
Peretur laughed aloud, delighted. “Is it always like that?”
Geraint put the butt of the pike in the dirt and unlaced the chin of his helmet. “It is never like that.”
Cei, for once, was lost for words. Then he blinked. “Again. But this time I watch.”
He put her with other groups; he had her be one of the attackers. He had her try left side, and once with point. Once or twice in other groups, either on the left or the right, she felt a momentary flicker of that shared purpose, and she thought Andros might have, too—he gave her a thoughtful look—but it was not until she worked again with Geraint, this time with Beli on the left, that it flared again, stronger than before, and for longer.
“Good,” said Cei. “Oh, very good. You two”—to Geraint and Beli—“go work with others and help them find it. You”—to Peretur. “Let’s see how those strawberry cheeks look on a horse. I tell you, if you’re even half as good in the saddle as on foot, Artos would be mad to refuse you.”
And while a boy was sent to fetch Broc, she watched the points practicing. It seemed to her that those she had worked with before seemed to do better than the others.
A horse whuffed on her shoulder: Llanza’s black. “This thing you have done.” He was watching the men. “Is it to be trusted?”
Peretur did not know how to answer.
Then Broc was being led across the yard, coat gleaming and neck arched, lifting his hooves high. He danced a little as the boy handed Peretur the reins. “Eager, are you?” She stroked his neck, felt the muscles bursting with life. He was eager, more than eager, and so was she. She swung into the saddle.
Llanza called to Cei, “Weapons?”
“Sword and spear. Held, not thrown. Try not to kill the boy. But test him.”
One on one like champions of old? She called for the second sword, the longer one. Oh, my lovely, she told Broc as she settled the tip of its scabbard behind her, drew the blade partway, and slammed it home, Oh, now we will show them a thing or two.
“Well, Prietu,” Llanza said, patting his black. “Are you ready?” Then to Peretur, “Over there, where there’s room.” And he cantered away. She watched him. She had never seen a man so easy in the saddle; it was his element, like water for a fish. Indeed, as she watched, he looped the reins around the pommel of his saddle, where he had affixed a kind of horn, and—with no more thought than a man sitting before his own fire—leaned one way for his lance, to settle under his arm, and the other for his shield, and at the same time brought Prietu in a smooth curve and stopped dead, with no word, and no other communication than his body.
“Show-off,” she shouted, and even she could hear the eagerness in her voice. Then she thought: I have forgotten my gauntlets. But Llanza wasn’t wearing them, either, and though both spears as they were lowered into position gleamed sharp, both were armed only in scaled leather shirts and helms.
