Faery Moon Page 9

  He pitched a stone then to strike Caith’s back.

  Caith whirled. His hand lit on his sword hilt and his eyes burned. “Damn you!” he cried, footsore from the descent and unhappy with the place they had come to. “I weary of you!”

  “Oh-ho,” said Dubhain. “Do ye now, mac Sliabhin?”

  And Dubhain flung up a ragged arm and whirled his way down the rocks like a wisp of wind, like an evil thought sped on its mischief. He landed on two bare feet amongst the leaves, hands on thighs. “But perhaps ye’d play tag, man?”

  “Damn you,” Caith said again, despairing. “Damn your roads and your mischief and your skipping about! This place is fouler and fouler!”

  “Does it nae suit ye? I hae thought ’t would.”

  Caith waved a furious arm, without the sword. “Be gone from me! Leave me in peace!”

  “Oh-ho, oh-ho!” Dubhain whirled again and skipped up onto the rocks, skipped and spun and landed on two feet, tottering precariously. “That’s the way, man! That’s the way!” He pointed toward the dark of the forest ahead. “Go, ye need me not, is that the way of it? Ye wish’t me harm? Go to, go to, hae joy of the road or find your own! I’ll not stay ye, not I, not Dubhain!” A further skip carried him up and up to the very crest of the rocks, a flash of bare legs and ragged dark kilt. “Wish me harm, do ye? Wish for me again and wish three times, man, and cry me sweet mercy, afore I come and go where ye wish me most! Once in dread, once in pain, once in bitter anguish ye’ll wish me back, man, aye, ye will, before this doom is done!”

  “A plague on your wishes!” Caith cried in despair, for now he suspected Dubhain had led him this long weary trek for one of his damnable pranks. “Faithless wretch!”

  “My merry friend, my sweet companion, my darling murderer, goto!”

  It was only Dubhain’s voice that lingered, echoing down the glen. Dubhain was gone, spun off the rock as if the darkling air had swallowed him. Caith scrambled for that vantage in a fit of temper, barked his shin on the rock as his foot slipped on wet stone and slid halfway down again.

  Fey laughter sounded at his side, and then behind him, echoing among the rocks. Another stone sped and hit him full in the chest as he turned to see. This was no pebble. He winced and caught for balance, seeing the wisp of white shirt flit through the brush and fly away.

  “Dubhain!”

  “That’s once!” the voice taunted him.

  * * *

  The path came and went in the woods, wove to the stream-side and left it and returned, random and reasonless. The wind rattled the black, ragged branches as the sun sneaked shame-faced behind the hills and lost its last light in grey clouds.

  The spatter of rain and the peal of thunder that heralded the storm was injury upon insult. Caith looked to that quarter of the sky, with nothing to see above him but bare branches and dark clouds scudding above them, low and heavy with rain. He cursed his luck and asked himself why he did not abandon this ill-chosen direction and go back to Teile. But so little grace he had with the powers of the Sidhe, he feared he might lose Dubhain forever if he failed to make amends.

  So he kept going as he had been going, telling himself again and again it was no more than one of Dubhain’s cursed jokes, and that sooner or later Dubhain would come back to enjoy it.

  Then a wind bitter as the heart of winter roared down the deep glen, tearing the last of the autumn leaves from the branches and ruffling the dark waters, and with a gasp and an indignant curse, Caith wrapped his grey cloak about himself and held on to it, shaken by the blast.

  This was too much. The miles he had walked in his exile lay heavier and heavier on him, and his wounding was as much in his dreams as in the flesh, and as much in his trust as in his body.

  Good sense told him to seek shelter in the rocks and pull leaves up against his cloak, against the rain he knew would come, except that Dubhain had left him, and he dared not lie down in such a place and risk falling asleep.

  If he did so, his dreams, he had all faith in them, would be surpassing fair. That was his torment. The dark spilling down with the clouds was his enemy, the sleep which urged at him was his nightly bane, his erstwhile companion was his appointed tormentor, and, as he loved and loathed Dubhain with all the confusion of his damned soul, he called to him and kept going, desperate in the cold and the coming dark. “Dubhain!” he shouted into the storm; and, Dubhain, said the rain on the leaves beneath his feet. Dubhain, the leaves overhead whispered; Dubhain, the vile waters bubbled— but the darkening air did not give him up again.

  Dubhain was Sidhe, one of the dark kind, a power who served other powers; but Dubhain was, in the interludes of his appointed punishment, his truest and only friend, and Caith knew of an increasing certainty that Dubhain had spoken to him from his Sightedness, and that the three callings of him must be, Dubhain had said it, each in misery more acute than the last. That was Dubhain’s geas: to See a thing and then recklessly to bring it on them both— never to their good.

  For having the Sight, Dubhain had told him once, having the Sight, man, is no’ a great blessing. Such merry, merry sights I See, and what may I do, hey, but make sport on ’t?

  That is the worth of it all, a jest, a jape, a merriment. So laugh, man! Ye laugh not oft enough...

  Thunder cracked. The rain came blasting down, stinging his face. Having prepared no shelter, Caith knew well enough the choice a man caught out had before him: walk or freeze to death in the autumn night— but he knew as surely that he had no power, even willfully, to sit down to rest in spite of the Sidhe. The bright lords would not abide it’they were not done with their plans, and his humbling this evening had not sufficed: Dubhain had not even returned to mock him. Therefore the parting was something not to Dubhain’s pleasure. Therefore it was some Power’s working, and therefore Dubhain had goaded him and left him— in Dubhain’s own most twisted humor, making him deserve what a more mindful fate had forced upon him.

  And well away Dubhain would stay until the issue of it: Dubhain was frequently many things, even loyal, but Dubhain had no taste for suffering with him.

  Once in dread, once in pain, once in bitter anguish...

  Plague take the Sidhe! he thought, and immediately a harder spate of rain spattered through the leaves, pattered noisily onto the forest mold and pocked Guagach’s black water. He shook his head, wrapped his cloak about himself and kept walking, in patience such as he could summon— put his hand on an overgrown stone to steady himself in stepping over a deadfall, and saw stone eyes and a domed head.

  He drew back his hand from it. It was that startling, the old stone image. Most were gone. But one found them now and again in dark places, the banished gods, the lords of hell— the lord of the wheel, this one was, the wheel mostly weathered away, the god staring into the vines and the dark, powerless, now. Farmers built such as this into walls, for the welfare of their crops and cattle. Or dug them out of older walls, to patch a gap in the sheep-fences. He brushed by the god, offering it nothing, equally destitute, and more concerned with the powers of the heavens than of hell tonight, violence that bade fare to soak him to the skin and force him to some shivering cover before the dawn, if ever he could find a nook in the rocks. But the encounter troubled him, in the way things could, that touched the Sight he had, nothing to warn a man of anything reasonable, only a feeling of unease in the sight, a sign of lurking power, it might be, or of ruin and overthrow in the night.

  Damn the wretch that deserted him, all for a merry prank, and left him to slog ankle deep through tributary streams, all active with the downpour, to fight his way through bracken clumps, and guess where the water’s edge was. He was wet through and through, the lightnings made him anxious for more reason than old gods, and he was in no good humor for Dubhain’s jokes, not his vanishings, nor his excuses, nor his light-minded good humor.

  But on a gust came another scent besides the smell of peat-water and stone— a faint, rain-washed waft of smoke, carried from somewhere hereabouts.

/>   He paused and turned his face to that wind, troubled by the sudden evidence of human presence and suspecting that the makers of that fire were either a danger to him or in mortal danger from him, if only by the fact that he had arrived in this glen.

  The autumn boughs about him were all a-toss on the wind, the light that penetrated this deep rift between the hills was fast-fading into starless night, and the wind that carried that scent of smoke gusted out of the west and down off the braes of Gleann Fiain. He blinked rain from his eyes, turned his back sullenly to the wind and the scent it carried, and held his cloak close against the numbing cold, deliberately setting himself to walk again in the direction he had been going, refusing the temptation of a fire and shelter, and hoping to avoid the inhabitants of this place entirely, if somehow the Sidhe had no need of his troubling them.

  But he could not put Dubhain’s warning out of his mind, now.

  Dread from the woods or dread from the heights, might it be? He had been wet many a time and cold many a night, and long as the morning might be in coming, he was strong enough, he was well-used to the road and the weather, and far too canny to make the mistakes that killed a man. Granted, he would go hungry, this night. They had eaten the last of the meal yesterday, and he had lost the flask in the falls— but hunger was no great novelty, and thirst he could hardly complain of. Water in abundance was pouring down his neck and soaking his shoes, with no hope of better until the sun rose tomorrow.

  So the streamside course was what he chose, picking his way along the water’s edge as the black waters muttered and chuckled in cynic laughter beneath the splash of the rain. Guagach grew swollen as the new-born brooks came spilling down from the heights to their corrupting, while the sun slipped away behind the rain-drowned walls of the glen, forcing a man to watch his step and mind the slick rocks.

  In that uncertain light, as he waded a stream that fed Guagach’s black strength, he saw, just beyond the reeds, a powerful swirling and dimpling of Guagach’s rain-pocked surface, as if some powerful stroke had troubled it. The bottom near him sighed up bubbles which burst in the rain, yielding up an unexpected fetid air and an intimation of chill nether depths.

  He did not like that.

  He liked it less when he saw the black surface wrinkle with another unexpected current where a rock sheltered it from the driving rain— a curious thing to see, here in the near dark, and the loneliness of this glen. It was a great fish, perhaps, or an underwater spring.

  The branches above him rattled, wind-tossed, an ill-omened, cold sound, as if the very trees shivered. With a twitch of his shoulders, he put himself briskly on his way, careful on the tumble of rocks that made the banks here, that turned too readily and clattered underfoot. He made the crossing of another rill by holding to the branches of an old willow that overhung the place.

  And with that hasty passage over the unsteady stones, he reached the bank of Guagach again, where other willows, bare-branched with oncoming winter, came between him and the dark water.

  He felt somehow safer then, knee-deep in dead, rain-wet bracken and walking on solid ground, though the shadows were thicker. That brink to him seemed unaccountably perilous and he was glad to leave it.

  Then behind him two stones clattered, as if a foot had disturbed them. He spun about, hand on the hilt of his sword, looking through a veil of willow-branches.

  He waited. Nothing stirred further. He walked on with an ear to his backtrail, the bracken whispering against his legs and cracking underfoot. The wind went roaring through the woods, and the water of the hills babbled and laughed beneath the gale.

  Then he heard a sharp, fierce clatter of stones at his back.

  He spun around again, but the willows and the night obscured the source of the sound that had been at once so plain and so abruptly ended.

  He did not like that. He did not like that at all. He had the feeling he had in a throng of people, when he heard a move at his back and met a sudden universal innocence. He had all too often been the victim of that game. But this was no village bully he shared the woods with. This had no sound of a human prank. It might be Dubhain— but he had no confidence it was anything so friendly.

  Another rattle, then a rolling clatter that did not stop, a sound as if the very stones of the river-bottom had risen up in frenzied pursuit of him. A scent of rot rode the wind that blasted at his back, and hearing that rattling come closer, he cast a glance over his shoulder as he walked, trying, as one might with the dark Sidhe, to pass as respectfully and rapidly as he could out of its territory. That glance spied movement in the blowing willow-strands, the clattering redoubled, and then horror rose up in him, making him doubt whether it was wiser to walk, rather than to run.

  He compromised and walked a little faster, seeking not to disrespect it, but not to give it his attention again either, at which such things might grow dangerously bolder. He tried to make no sound louder than the natural wind, but that was no use. It came clattering and rattling with louder force, and as much as he feared to run and acknowledge a Sidhe presence, only a fool could pretend he was alone in this woods— a woods, he began to be sure, old and utterly merciless itself, giving him no help at all and promising him no safety. Branches tore at his cloak and raked his face and his knees. He snatched the coarse, rain-soaked wool close about him and set his other hand on his sword to keep it from banging about his side. He dared not draw it against the creature that moved behind him— iron having no power over the very oldest things and the very darkest.

  Older than the bright Sidhe. Darker than Dubhain. Of the earth and immune to iron, so that a man risked more with a weapon than without it.

  Worse, it was gaining slightly, as best he could judge, and such a creature, once a man began to run, would run too, until human strength gave out— which his would quickly, hungry and weary as he was. The cold had already numbed his feet beyond sensibility and the lightning that lit the forest turned it to a creature of a thousand reaching arms and claws, all shaking in the wind.

  He averted his face from the rake of a limb, forged ahead with his arms shielding his eyes and found his path ahead hindered by branches he had no time to go around. He tore desperately through thorny brush, his heart hammering in the clatter of that nameless thing that pursued. His breath rasped, but nothing so loud as that creature breathing at his back, whose rattle was the rattle of ill-joined bones, the clack and clatter of stones in the spate.

  Thunder boomed out and panic jolted him. Abandoning the cautionary hold on his sword-hilt and his resolve to walk quietly through this threat, he leapt to the top of a deadfall and over, plunged uphill along what might still be a trail, or only a deception of the forest, thinking now that his only safety might lie uphill, away from the water this thing haunted. The elfshot stone leapt and thumped at his neck and face as he bolted across an open space with the rattling closer and closer behind him. He dived through a thicket to the peril of his eyes, fending branches with his hands and tearing his shoulders and his legs and his cloak through the snags.

  Run and run again, along a leaf-slick slope which ran white with a rain-fed rill: he leaped over that clean water, which might barrier some things, but he no longer believed that running water would give this haunt any pause.

  In his desperation, then, he recalled the smoke he had smelled on the wind, and drove upslope and back again as his last resort, while his heart beat to bursting and he heard the rattle of drowned bones close behind him, between the peals of thunder.

  He crested a rise, tore through brush he had not seen in the dark and found himself snagged in a deeper thornbrake, gripped by a fear so smothering his throat could find no breath for Dubhain’s name. Panicked as a child in the dark, he tore a way through the thorns by main strength, raking his arms and his legs and his face. His cloak snagged fast. He turned desperately to free himself, pulling with both his hands as the clattering came up the slope at him. He caught a glimpse of a shadow that lurched with every rattling, a glistening shape th
at broke the brush under it and kept coming, immune to the thorns.

  Terror gripped him. He ripped the cloth free and ran, dodging and ducking beneath low limbs on the slope, overleaping deadfalls and rocks and slogging through boggy ground, up and up the steep, forced to hands and knees at last on the rain-slick leaves and the mire, while the rattling thing came up behind him, the clack and clatter of bones and horror all misgathered. Something struck heavily at his heel, raked his leg and thudded against the earth with a wet and slippery suck of mud and flesh.

  “Dubhain!” The name broke free at that hurting touch, the cry cracked his throat, was sob and gasp for wind in two desperate heaves that caught a stitch in his side. In the strength of sheer terror he scrambled ahead of the creature, stumbled through a sudden thinning of the trees and in among clumps of whin on a steep, unwooded hillside.

  “Dubhain!” He pressed a hand to the stitch in his side, running uphill with everything he had left— fell once and a second time to his knees on wet grass and in blind horror scrambled up again and kept running, weaving among the scattered clumps of gorse.

  A lightning-stroke lit the way between two bushes— lit a white-shirted, kilted shape so suddenly in his path that he skidded and sprawled on his aching side, one glance to the dark-haired villain who loomed above him and another, full of horror, to the slope below and its humped shapes of lightning-lit gorse.

  He scrambled up again, caught Dubhain’s arm and dragged him along in uphill flight, on the very dregs of the breath he had in him.

  “Och, now!” Dubhain cried, plucking away his hand. “Let be, let be, man! Whence this dreadsome haste?”

  The slope was sparse grass above, gorse and shattered stone below; and when, Dubhain balking, Caith cast a second look back— nothing at all showed in pursuit of them.

  “Hoosht, hey,” said Dubhain, all awash in the driving rain, his hair streaming in the lightning-flicker, as he leaned on his knees and drew a quick breath. His square-toothed grin was quite merry when he lifted his head. “And will that be your first calling? — D’ ye beg me? Is it ‘Damn you, Dubhain?’ or is it, ‘Fair, kind Dubhain, my friend Dubhain, my sweet Dubhain’?”