The Defiler (33 page)

"I am
king
," Ragall said, though in truth it sounded no more assertive than a petulant whine. "I will not be chastised in my own house."

Another voice spoke up, heavy with irony. "Did you feed us this year, oh great Sun King?"

Another, cold, callous: "Did you nourish the fields with your blood? Wasn't that your promise?"

"No," the man Sláine recognised as Ansgar said, rising to his feet, "you went and begged the skull swords for food, you pleaded, unmanning yourself until they offered you a pax - but what kind of peace was it, oh mighty king? A pax my arse. It's a pox!"

And another: "We were warriors, Ragall. Have you forgotten? Our strength
is
our strength. All around us our children starve, our cattle die and our lands are ravaged by blight brought on by this menace from the south. Yet do we ride out? No. Do we take the fight to this creeping death?"

"No we do not!" several voices chorused. Feet stamped. Palms banged on the wooden rails beside the benches.

"No," the Sessair warrior went on, "instead they mock our hunger with their diseased feeding pits filled to overflowing with rotten carcasses and ruined vegetables claimed as taxes, cut the noses from those too poor to pay their tithe, and still the Red Branch sits impotent. We are warriors, man. We should not bend the knee to anyone."

Still Sláine did not move. He watched Kilian Ragall's face as each barb struck home, and then, like the most fearsome of gae bolga, was wrenched free of his body leaving him to writhe beneath the pain of their accusations.

"And yet you refuse my plea, leaving me to play the king, so I play the king for you," Ragall said, lurching to his feet. The fur fell from his shoulder. "This is your choice, council, though I see no wisdom in it. The king and the land are one, the land is dying, I have begged, I have pleaded, I have humiliated myself at the feet of the enemy, and it makes no difference, so let me die with it. Allow me to merge with the Goddess, leave it to a better man to make the sun shine once more. I am tired of this life. I am beaten, everything you say is true."

It was Cathbad who spoke, the old man's frailty belied by the shadows as he moved through them to stand in the light. "No, Kilian Ragall. Your life is not your own. You are Sun King and as such your life belongs to Danu, the Goddess, mother of the earth. You will serve as husband until the time for your death; a time of
her
choosing not yours. You will honour your oath. You will be the mountain, you will be the river. You will lead us and together we will cut out the canker that grows in our midst. You must show your strength. The man before you is a warrior and, now, more than ever, we need warriors. It is in your power,
king
, to end his exile. Welcome the prodigal son of the Sessair home."

Ragall's face twisted in a brutish sneer as he pushed back his throne, toppling it in his anger. "There is a stench in this place, old man. So be it, you want a king? I will be your king!" his voice rose, his face reddening to match his fury. "Listen to my last command! Let the freak's exile be over! He is a fighter so let him fight! Let the freak become our monster! Let him run at the front of the Red Branch driving those tiny mortals away as his body rips itself apart in its wrath. Let him rain down his vengeance upon the bastards that threaten our land! Isn't that what you want? I hear your whispers; you look at him now and think why can't Kilian Ragall be more like that?" Ragall raged, a failed man aware of his inadequacies. His self-loathing was as real as any malady, lurking deep inside him, eating away at him, unseen, unfathomable. His voice rose once more, in a fervour: "I am worthless, but he, he is blessed by the Goddess! So that is my command, look to the freak for leadership! Let the enemy cower before his monstrosity! Hark! I am greatest amongst you! I am the soul of the Sessair! As your king I have spoken, hear my judgement. The exile of Sláine Mac Roth is over. Welcome the bastard back home! It even looks as though he has brought gifts to buy your forgiveness, perhaps they will sooth your consciences into forgetting about Grudnew's shaming," Ragall stepped down from the first row of tiered seats, his face ugly with bitterness. He pushed past Sláine, leaving the circle of light. In the umbra he turned and said coldly, "just keep him away from your women."

"Trouble, trouble, trouble," Ukko muttered to himself as he stood on tip-toes to peer in through the shutters of one of the larger dwellings. "Never a thanks for saving his skin, oh no, treats me like a child, bossing me around. Sit down, shut up, keep your fingers to yourself..."

Ukko sniffed the air, catching the pungent whiff of the piss wafting up from the trenches out beyond the village's perimeter. The repulsive little runt smiled to himself and scurried off in the direction of the latrine pits. Muck clung to muck as often as not, making the latrines interesting places for a curious dwarf to loiter. People liked to gossip; it was, the dwarf understood, a fundamental flaw in human nature. Secrets got spilled and it was amazing the kind of stuff people shared with their pants down around their ankles.

Lurk around long enough and a diamond would bob up among the turds.

He ducked down, making himself small against the side of the wall, and peered around the corner into a narrow alley crammed between the rows of houses. Ropes had been strung from the rooftops across the alleyway, and wet sheets pegged from them snapped in the breeze. Seeing no one, Ukko ducked beneath the trailing sheets and scuttled forwards, following his nose.

At the first crossroads the little dwarf knelt, stirring the dirt with his fingers and then kissing them with his lips superstitiously. He looked in all three directions, craning his head as he listened to the noises carried across the afternoon. A hooded figure moved between the sheets. It moved with uncommon grace, fleet of foot and light of step. Ukko had watched enough women in his life to know when he was looking at one, even with the heavy cloak and hood drawn up to hide her face. Her body was too slight to pass for masculine.

"How much trouble can a woman be?" Ukko mumbled to himself, and set off after her as she disappeared around a tumbledown section of wall. The answer to his question came soon enough: plenty. She looked furtively over her shoulder five times before she made the next turn; as though she sensed someone was there. She didn't call out or challenge him, and not once did she actually fix her gaze within twenty feet of where Ukko lurked. He couldn't help but grin as the thrill of the chase gripped him. He scuttled forwards, ducking down into a doorway as the woman turned, the right side of her face silhouetted against the white sheet in front of her. There was something vaguely familiar about her profile; it niggled at his mind as he followed her down two more narrow alleyways into the communal latrines. He knew her, and what's more he knew he did, but for all that certainty Ukko couldn't place her face. That disturbed him. It was as though some kind of glamour had been laid across it, one that caused the mind to slip and slide around recognition.

But it would come to him.

She entered the latrine pit. He crouched down beside the doorway and waited, vaguely aware that there was something perverse about listening to a woman relieve herself, but he'd promised no mischief, not that he would sit and stare at the walls while his mind slowly crawled up them. "Besides," he muttered to himself, "a bored Ukko's a bad Ukko and a bad Ukko
always
gets into trouble, so I'm only doing what Sláine told me to do," and with that rationalisation, the dwarf slunk closer to the doorway, pressing his ear to the crack where the woman had left it slightly ajar. Instead of grunts and sighs he heard hushed voices. Ukko edged forwards, straining to overhear, but he was too far away to make any sense of the low whispers.

The latrine pits were open to the elements, to allow the rain to soak the lime and slake the stench. Practicality meant that there was no roof over them, which in turn meant that with a little improvisation Ukko could get a glimpse of whatever skulduggery was going down in the latrines.
It's just a look,
he thought to himself,
no one ever got in trouble just looking.
So he leaned back, craning his neck to check the alley behind him, then both left and right, before boosting himself up and scrambling at the wattle as he struggled to heave himself up the pitted wall until his chin was perched on the top and, straining, he could peer over.

The woman had her back to him, the hood pulled down to mask her completely, but she was not alone. A hideously deformed face looked back at him, eyes milky white, raw pink scars criss-crossing the sunken sockets where the man had been brutalised by knives. He wore ill-fitting sackcloth rags, but strapped across his back were twin blades, wickedly curved and honed so sharp they cut the shadows the blind man wreathed himself in.

Ukko tried to sidle along the wall into a position where he could see at least the side of the woman's face. His toe scraped the wattle causing both woman and warrior to turn instinctively towards the sound. He ducked down, fingertips clinging to the top of the wall and counting to forty in his head before he dared poke his head up above the wall again.

When he did the pair of them had huddled in so close their voices barely carried, but Ukko heard enough to wish he hadn't heard anything at all:

"I must visit with the Lord Weird, Balor," the woman said, drawing the cloak about herself, long white fingers playing over her throat where the edges of the cloak met, "see to the preparations; you know the herbs the enchantment requires, all are indigenous to the forest save this." She held out a small pouch which the warrior took and secreted about his person in one smooth motion that belied his blindness. "I will join you in the forest at sunset. See that the channels are open so that I may communicate with our sovereign."

"It shall be done, mistress," the warrior, Balor, said.

"Good. There is much still that remains to be done, the fool Ragall is in with the council even now, begging to be put out of his misery."

"That is most fortunate, mistress."

"Fortune has nothing to do with it, Balor. Careful schemes bring their own rewards, like any game of strategy, you plan ahead, anticipating your opponent's moves. Kilian Ragall plays like a child. Everything about the man is so utterly predictable, even his death."

"Yes, mistress."

"Predictability is good, Balor, never forget that. Better an opponent whose every move you can presuppose than one who is going to surprise you at every turn."

"Yes, mistress, predictability is good, as is fortune, but neither are a match for skill."

"Spoken like a true man."

"I do not deny my sex, mistress." The blind man reached out, his fingertips caressing the woman's face. Her hood fell back, revealing lush long locks of dark hair. "Just as I do not deny yours."

The woman took his hand in hers and lifted it to her lips, kissing each callused fingertip lovingly, then she pushed him away with surprising force. "Do not presume to touch me again, warrior, unless you want your fingers chewed off next time."

Balor laughed, a chillingly mirthless sound coming from the blind man's mouth. Ukko winced. His grip slipped and a heartbeat later he lost his balance, his foot scraping down the wattle before he caught himself, cursing. Balor turned slightly, inclining his head so that his scarred eyes bore into the wall three feet below Ukko's hiding place - level, precisely, with his traitorous feet.

The dwarf held his breath, not daring to move a muscle even though his arms began to burn from the exertion of holding himself up for so long.

"We are not alone," Balor said, his white-blind eyes eerie in the half-sun half-shadow.

"Who is there?" the woman said, turning to follow the direction of his blind stare, and Ukko saw her face full in the light. There was something repulsively familiar about her beauty - and she was beautiful, the lines of her face, the curves and shallows, but she was ugly too, through her eyes into her core - and it was so, so familiar, but after years of drunken whoring she could have been any lover spurned, wench plucked, barmaid seduced and abandoned, cherry plucked, widow entertained or maiden deflowered.

Ukko bit his lip, closed his eyes and slunk lower, inch by inch until his feet were dangling no more than six inches above the dirt. He dropped to the ground, grunting as he landed, and took off on his heels, running even as her shrieks of: "
Kill him, Balor! Gut him on your swords! Rip out his tongue! He cannot be allowed to talk!"
hounded him out of the latrines and back into the warren of alleyways and damp laundry.

Feet slapping harshly against the dusty earth, Ukko threw himself over fences and under hedges, pulled down sheets and knocked over barrels of rainwater to muddy the trail, desperate to put as much distance between himself and the trouble he had found.

And despite the fear coursing through his veins, Ukko grinned fiercely every terrified step of the way; he couldn't help it, he was having fun.

"I bring tokens of appeasement," Sláine said, gesturing to the black metal Cauldron and the oilskin-wrapped book stolen from the Lord Weird.

"So you did hope to buy our forgiveness?" Cathbad said, "Tell us, Sláine son of Roth, how cheap did you think it would be?"

"You offer us a pot to cook in, or is it a pot to piss in?" Ansgar said, chuckling bleakly at his own humour. "There's no food, lad, didn't you look around the fields on your way in? The harvest was blighted. Our bellies are empty, boy."

"Then I would say I am buying your welcome for precisely the right price, Ansgar, and yours druid, all of yours."

"Are you touched, lad? Wandering alone addled your brain? It's understandable, I suppose," Raif of the Bloody Axe told the council.

"Most likely drunk like his old man," Anrai Ardal said gruffly. The man had little liking for Roth, Sláine remembered - and he remembered the cause. Old Anrai had been sweet on his mother, Macha, and had never forgiven her for choosing Bellyshaker over him at the Feis Samain dance twenty-some years ago. It was a jealousy Sláine could understand. He didn't rise to the bait.