He got to his feet. The Vale of Avalon lay before him, a marvelously variegated tapestry of marsh and meadow and woodland that, like the stones, seemed lit from within. He could see the seven sacred islands clearly, though from here they seemed no more than radiant green hills in a landscape whose proportion of land to water was far greater than he remembered.
How long had he slept? He could not see the sun, but perhaps it had just gone down, for the sky had that soft radiance that held the memory of light. But as he turned, his skin chilled, for the light to the east and to the west was the same. Where was he? When was he? He had heard tales of folk who wandered into the Hidden Land and when they returned found everyone they loved long dead and themselves no more than a distant memory.
He should have known better than to fall asleep in the circle. He should—He turned again and sighed with relief, for the shiny lady was standing there. He stifled a laugh, realizing how long it had been since he had thought of Anderle by that name. And then the Lady smiled, and he realized that although she too was small and dark-haired and beautiful, she did not look like the Lady of Avalon at all.
“Be welcome to my country, child of the ancient line—” Her voice held the ripple of water and the lilt of birdsong.
Without intending it he found that he had fallen to his knees. He could see now that instead of priestess-blue she was wearing a garment of pale doeskin, and her waving hair was crowned with summer flowers.
“Will you give me your name?” Once more she smiled.
He blinked, aware that like eating the food of the Otherworld, giving out that information might mean more than it appeared. But just now he did not care. “The Lady of Avalon called me Mikantor.”
“And what do you call yourself?”
“I do not know.”
“Then I will call you Osinarmen, for that was your true name when I knew you long ago.”
He realized that he was gaping and shut his mouth. If he could say nothing sensible, at least he could avoid sounding like a fool.
“You were older then, grieving because you thought that your only child was dead and your line would fail.” She shook her head. “You children of earth have such strange fears. In my realm we never die, but you who do may still return again. Do you not remember?”
“I am not Osinarmen—” he stammered.
“His blood flows in your veins. You carry his soul.”
And the Word that brought the thunder . . . he thought with an inner tremor.
“Anderle doesn’t want me to be a priest,” he replied, although another part of his mind was telling him that this whole conversation belonged to some feverish dream. “She wants me to be a warrior-king.”
“And what do you want to do?”
“In this life?” he challenged. This was getting easier, so long as he didn’t think of it as real. He could even allow himself to answer her question. “Keep my people safe, . . .” he said, remembering some of the stories he had heard. “And I suppose it’s my duty to get back at Galid for what he did to my . . . parents.”
“That seems an appropriate ambition for a warrior-king.”
From her tone, he could not tell whether she approved. “Do I have a choice?”
“There is always a choice,” she said gently. “To act as your nature impels you or to refuse the challenge. To stay here with me, or to go back down the hill to embrace your destiny. Be warned, the path I see before you may take you to places you cannot imagine, but if you are true to yourself, you will achieve your goal.”
Now, she did sound like Lady Anderle. And with that realization, a longing awoke in him for the honest warmth of a hearth fire and the sight of familiar faces. If she had offered him food, he might have been tempted, even knowing the dangers, but she stood silent, watching him with that same tender smile.
He shrugged. Compared with all the other revelations, to realize that he was a year younger than he had thought was a minor adjustment. Hard as it was to accept that he was the son of King Uldan of the Ai-Zir, to think of himself as the priest Micail who had sung the stones of the great henge into position was stranger still.
“I will go back,” he answered finally. “I don’t believe half of what you have said to me, but I won’t desert the people I love.”
“Then you have my blessing,” she said gently, moving toward him. She scarcely had to bend to kiss his forehead. “And my farewell.”
And then she was gone. Gone too was the strange light that had surrounded them. Woodpecker who was Mikantor stood alone atop the Tor. It was getting dark, but her kiss still burned upon his brow.
SEVEN
Look! A sea eagle!”
Woodpecker turned as Tiri touched his arm. Through the fringe of budding willows they could see the bird circling, black and white feathers flickering as they caught the sun. They hunkered down among the twisting trunks, more to stay hidden from any watching eyes on the Tor than from the osprey, whose attention was on the patch of lake gleaming in the watery spring sunlight. As they watched, that keen gaze fixed on a ripple, and then the spread wings tilted and the long glide became a lightning stoop that struck the water in a flurry of spray. A few mighty wing-strokes launched the osprey upward once more, clutching a wriggling stickleback in her talons, and she beat across the marsh toward the Oak Tree Isle.
“We’ll miss our breakfast if we don’t go back soon!” muttered the boy. His belly was beginning to remind him how long ago last night’s dinner had been. “I don’t understand why your mother won’t let us have any free time together. We’ve been slogging away at all those extra lessons she added last summer, and we are doing well.”
“I still think you should tell her about the queen of the Hidden Realm,” said Tirilan. As she turned her head, a little wind stirred the branches and let a dappling of sunlight through to play on her amber hair. After his encounter with the Otherworldly Lady, Woodpecker’s standards for “shiny” had been considerably raised, but he saw some of that light in Anderle when she put on her robes to conduct a ritual, and sometimes he sensed the same glimmer around Tirilan.
“She rules every other part of my life,” he said mutinously, stabbing a piece of broken branch into the muddy ground. “She told the priests she had a vision that I should get special training. I’ve heard them congratulating her on my improvement. If I tell her what the queen said, she’ll try to turn me into a priest or make me learn the genealogies of the Sea Kings as well as those of the Ai-Zir. Don’t you tell—”
“I’ve sworn a solemn oath to keep your secret, Mikantor . . .” she reproved.
“Don’t call me that.”
“It is your name—”
“A dangerous name, until I am old enough to defend it,” he replied.
“I know, but if you never think about it, you’ll never grow into it. That other name she said—that was another life, another man. You have to find your own path. My mother is determined to make me a priestess, but I think your task is more important, and I will help you any way I can.”
He dropped the stick and met her steady, searching gaze. Nothing that had been said to him by Lady Anderle, or even by the queen of the Hidden Realm, had shaken him like this simple declaration.
“If you believe in me . . . that much, I swear to do my best to be . . . a king.” Suddenly self-conscious, he looked away. “But I can’t do anything if I starve,” he added brightly. “Let’s get back before the porridge is all gone!”
ANDERLE TOOK A DEEP breath as Badger dug the long pole into the lake bed and propelled the narrow dugout across the water. It was one of those days that in recent years had come even in summer, when the morning mist clung to the reeds until past noon, veiling the distinctions between air and water and solid ground until crossing the Lake felt like a visionary journey through the Otherworld. She had forgotten how much she enjoyed the stately rhythm of this progress. Behind her, old Kiri, who did not enjoy being on the water, gripped the boat’s sides. It would be pleasant to spend a whole afte
rnoon simply sliding across the smooth water, but she only had the opportunity when she was on her way somewhere, usually worrying about whatever she would have to do when she got there.
Badger’s face gave her no reassurance that this trip would be any different. He had come to the Tor that morning with the news that Willow Woman was sick with some illness they had never seen before. Kiri had argued that she was the community’s most experienced healer, and there was no need for the Lady of Avalon to leave her duties on the isle. But Anderle, remembering the many times Willow Woman had helped her, knew that she must go, especially if this sickness proved to be beyond Kiri’s skill.
“How long has your mother been ill?”
“Three days now,” came Badger’s reply. “When the moon was new, a man comes up from the coast with cloth to trade, says people sick down there ever since traders came from the Middle Sea. He was fine when he comes, a little fevered when he goes away. Willow Woman told him stay till he’s better—likely he’s dead in the marshes somewhere by now. Guess he didn’t go soon enough—a few days after, my mother starts feeling tired, has a fever, can’t swallow food.”
“Has anyone else fallen ill?” Kiri asked.
“Beaver, Sallow’s son—he was always hanging around the stranger, asking questions. He throws up a lot, and now his neck swells like a bull.”
It was a contagion, then, thought Anderle with a sinking of the heart, not some nameless illness that attacked the old. The raised platforms that supported the houses of the Village were looming up out of the mist. Soon they would know. The dugout rocked and she held on to the side as Badger brought it alongside the ladder and made it fast.
The look on Badger’s face as they gathered around the sick woman’s bed told the priestess that Willow Woman must have gotten worse even in the time he had been gone. The sound of her breathing was loud in the quiet room.
“She fades in and out—” said Badger’s wife. “Says it’s hard to move.”
The headman nodded. “Mother—here’s the Lady of Avalon. Won’t you say hello?”
Willow Woman had always been active, out in all weather and brown as a nut with exposure to wind and sun. Now she was deathly pale. Anderle knelt beside the bed and grasped the thin hand, her apprehension increasing as she felt the pulse in the woman’s wrist racing like the heart of a frightened bird.
“The blessing of the Goddess be with you, my dear one,” she said softly.
Willow Woman’s eyelids fluttered open and her lips twitched in what might have been a smile. “Night Lady . . . takes me . . . soon. . . .” she got out between labored breaths. “Watch over . . . the . . . boy. . . .”
“Kiri, she is in pain! Is there something you can do?”
The older priestess gripped Anderle’s shoulders and moved her aside. “Let me see to her now. Go out and purify yourself. There are evil spirits here.”
“You have seen this before?” Anderle got to her feet, blinking back tears.
“I have.” Kiri’s face was grim. She had always been a big woman. Now,as she interposed herself between the high priestess and the dying woman, she seemed to have the enduring solidity of one of the great standing stones. “The throat swells and becomes like leather until the sufferer cannot breathe. Unless she has great strength to resist, she will not survive, and she will not be the only one.”
WOODPECKER STOOD WITH THE other students in the Hall of the Sun, trying to ignore the apprehension that coiled in his gut. This plague that had struck the Lake Village was like some terror in a nightmare, the faceless, voiceless kind that could be resisted neither by strength nor by magic. Willow Woman had died from it, and his old playmate Beaver, and then Redfern, whom Woodpecker had thought of as his mother until a year ago. Even old Kiri’s legendary strength had failed. She had sickened and died, and Vole, who had been her student in healing, had succumbed as well.
He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that Tirilan was still healthy, and Lady Anderle must be all right, for she had ordered them to meet her here, and she would not have done so if she were sickening. But the early summer sunshine that filtered in through the openings between the lower part of the roof and the upper canopy that let out the smoke from the central hearth had little power to dispel the fear that chilled his soul.
Had someone else died? Since Vole fell ill, the students had been kept isolated from the rest of the community. Waiting to see if anyone else was going to get sick, the boy thought dismally. Each morning, food had been left for them at the dormitory doors. Perhaps the danger is over, and she will assign us roles in some great ceremony to mourn those who are gone.
But he knew this was not how such news would have been given. And Anderle’s face, when she appeared in the doorway, was gaunt and grim. Woodpecker saw with shock the first threads of silver glinting in her dark hair.
“I am happy to see you all in good health,” she said as she took her seat in the carved chair, and as Woodpecker and the others made the formal obeisance, they knew the sentiment was no empty formality. “This disease seems to strike first at the young and the old. Belkacem has died, and Damarr is stricken.” Without giving them a chance to respond to the loss of a teacher who, if not beloved, had seemed as eternal as the distant hills, she went on.
“But we have lost only one of you children, and we mean to keep it that way. Avalon is no longer a safe haven. To continue to expose you to this danger would be to betray the trust of those who sent you here. I am sending you all back to your tribes.”
“On foot?” asked Rouikhed.
“Alone?” echoed Analina. “What if the plague is at Belerion too?”
“So far the illness seems confined to the south coast.” Lady Anderle answered the last question first. “I have gone out upon the spirit roads and spoken with the Ti-Sahharin. You will follow the old trackway through the marshes to the east until you come to the hill of the Winding One’s spring. Some of you, at least, know how to follow the flow of power that goes that way, even if you lose the path. Your tribes will send men to meet you there and take you home.”
Woodpecker reached out to grip Grebe’s shoulder as the others began to ask questions. The Lake Village was the only home they had ever known.
“Tirilan, you will go to Nuya at Carn Ava,” the high priestess said then. “Woodpecker and Grebe, you will be taken westward to dwell with the shepherds on the high moors.”
Woodpecker let go of his foster brother and took a step toward Tirilan. Why couldn’t Anderle have sent them off together? But a look at the Lady’s face told him that it would be useless to protest. He did not think he had ever seen anyone who looked so desperately tired. She probably had not even been trying to separate him from her daughter, only to find safe nests for all the chicks she had gathered here.
Will I ever see you again? his gaze asked Tirilan.
I will not forget you— hers replied.
SUMMER PASSED INTO FALL, and the plague ran its course. A messenger was sent to take Grebe back to the Lake Village, but Woodpecker was given a new name and ordered to spend the winter with Lady Leka in the Dales instead of returning to Avalon. As spring approached he saw swans flying eastward and wished he was seeing them on the marshes once more, descending in such numbers their white backs covered the pools. But when the priest Larel came to the Ai-Akhsi lands, it was to escort him to stay for a time with the family of Analina, in a coastal village in Belerion.
“I don’t understand,” the boy said as they made their way southward. “The Lady talked so much about all the training I must have, but the plague is over, and still I am being herded from one place to another like a one-horned goat that nobody wants in his herd. Is Tirilan back at Avalon?”
Has she changed? He bit back the question. Have I? He knew that he was growing when his tunic sleeves got too short and tight across the shoulders, and he, who had always been graceful, found himself stumbling over feet suddenly too large and legs too long. He supposed that was to be expected now that he wa
s fifteen. A glimpse of his face in a woodland pool showed him serious brown eyes and a beak of a nose beneath a shock of dark red hair.
They were crossing a long valley between two lines of rolling downs. On the slope to the south someone had cut the stylized figure of a horse into the chalk. Every year the people of the Vale scoured the encroaching grass from its outlines as part of a great festival. As they followed the shaded land across the valley, the image of the horse appeared and disappeared through the trees.
Larel laughed. “The Lady said that you would ask. Tiri came home again at Midwinter, and we all wish that you could be there as well. I am to tell you that there are two reasons for keeping you away. The first is that a leader needs to understand the lives of his people. By living in different regions you will learn things that cannot be taught on Avalon.”
Woodpecker sighed. It was true that the windswept rocky moors of the northern Ai-Utu were a world away from the close marshes that protected the Tor. For the first few moons he had been dreadfully homesick, but in time he had learned to love the great sweep of open sky and the way the green turf clung to the bones of the land.
“And the second reason?” he asked then.
“It would appear that your secret has not been kept as well as we believed. One of the other students, no doubt quite innocently, must have said something about the bronze-haired boy who was so good at games, and set your enemies to wondering. Galid has been making inquiries. He fears that if you live to manhood, one day you will come after him.”
And if I live, I will. He will be right to fear. . . . “Are you moving me now because they know I was in the Dales?” he said aloud.