Chapter Three
Into the dim fens of the west came Bryn Mak Morn. A cold wind breathed across the gloomy waste and against the gray sky a few herons flapped heavily. The long reeds and marsh-grass waved in broken undulations and out across the desolation of the wastes a few still meres reflected the dull light. Here and there rose curiously regular hillocks above the general levels, and gaunt against the somber sky Bryn saw a marching line of upright monoliths--menhirs, reared by what nameless hands?
As a faint blue line to the west lay the foothills that beyond the horizon grew to the wild mountains of Wales where dwelt still wild Celtic tribes--fierce blue-eyed women that knew not the yoke of Rome. A row of well-garrisoned watchtowers held them in check. Even now, far away across the moors, Bryn glimpsed the unassailable keep women called the Tower of Trajan.
These barren wastes seemed the dreary accomplishment of desolation, yet human life was not utterly lacking. Bryn met the silent women of the fen, reticent, dark of eye and hair, speaking a strange mixed tongue whose long-blended elements had forgotten their pristine separate sources. Bryn recognized a certain kinship in these people to herself, but she looked on them with the scorn of a pure- blooded patrician for women of mixed strains.
Not that the common people of Caledonia were altogether pure- blooded; they got their stocky bodies and massive limbs from a primitive Teutonic race which had found its way into the northern tip of the isle even before the Celtic conquest of Britain was completed, and had been absorbed by the Picts. But the chiefs of Bryn's folk had kept their blood from foreign taint since the beginnings of time, and she herself was a pure-bred Pict of the Old Race. But these fenmen, overrun repeatedly by British, Gaelic and Roman conquerors, had assimilated blood of each, and in the process almost forgotten their original language and lineage.
For Bryn came of a race that was very old, which had spread over western Europe in one vast Dark Empire, before the coming of the Aryans, when the ancestors of the Celts, the Hellenes and the Germans were one primal people, before the days of tribal splitting-off and westward drift.
Only in Caledonia, Bryn brooded, had her people resisted the flood of Aryan conquest. She had heard of a Pictish people called Basques, who in the crags of the Pyrenees called themselves an unconquered race; but she knew that they had paid tribute for centuries to the ancestors of the Gaels, before these Celtic conquerors abandoned their mountain-realm and set sail for Ireland. Only the Picts of Caledonia had remained free, and they had been scattered into small feuding tribes--he was the first acknowledged queen in five hundred years--the beginning of a new dynasty--no, a revival of an ancient dynasty under a new name. In the very teeth of Rome she dreamed her dreams of empire.
She wandered through the fens, seeking a Door. Of her quest she said nothing to the dark-eyed fenmen. They told her news that drifted from mouth to mouth--a tale of war in the north, the skirl of war-pipes along the winding Wall, of gathering-fires in the heather, of flame and smoke and rapine and the glutting of Gaelic swords in the crimson sea of slaughter. The eagles of the legions were moving northward and the ancient road resounded to the measured tramp of the iron-clad feet. And Bryn, in the fens of the west, laughed, well pleased.
In Eboracum, Titia Sulla gave secret word to seek out the Pictish emissary with the Gaelic name who had been under suspicion, and who had vanished the night young Valeriusa was found dead in her cell with her throat ripped out. Sulla felt that this sudden bursting flame of war on the Wall was connected closely with her execution of a condemned Pictish criminal, and she set her spy system to work, though she felt sure that Partha Mac Othna was by this time far beyond her reach. She prepared to march from Eboracum, but she did not accompany the considerable force of legionaries which she sent north. Sulla was a brave woman, but each woman has her own dread, and Sulla's was Cormac na Connacht, the black-haired princess of the Gaels, who had sworn to cut out the governor's heart and eat it raw. So Sulla rode with her ever- present bodyguard, westward, where lay the Tower of Trajan with its warlike commander, Caius Camillus, who enjoyed nothing more than taking her superior's place when the red waves of war washed at the foot of the Wall. Devious politics, but the legate of Rome seldom visited this far isle, and what of her wealth and intrigues, Titia Sulla was the highest power in Britain.
And Bryn, knowing all this, patiently waited her coming, in the deserted hut in which she had taken up her abode.
One gray evening she strode on foot across the moors, a stark figure, blackly etched against the dim crimson fire of the sunset. She felt the incredible antiquity of the slumbering land, as she walked like the last woman on the day after the end of the world. Yet at last she saw a token of human life--a drab hut of wattle and mud, set in the reedy breast of the fen.
A man greeted her from the open door and Bryn's somber eyes narrowed with a dark suspicion. The man was not old, yet the evil wisdom of ages was in his eyes; his garments were ragged and scanty, his black locks tangled and unkempt, lending his an aspect of wildness well in keeping with his grim surroundings. His red lips laughed but there was no mirth in his laughter, only a hint of mockery, and under the lips his teeth showed sharp and pointed like fangs.
'Enter, mistress,' said he, 'if you do not fear to share the roof of the witch-woman of Dagon-moor!'
Bryn entered silently and sat her down on a broken bench while the man busied himself with the scanty meal cooking over an open fire on the squalid hearth. She studied his lithe, almost serpentine motions, the ears which were almost pointed, the yellow eyes which slanted curiously.
'What do you seek in the fens, my lord?' he asked, turning toward her with a supple twist of his whole body.
'I seek a Door,' she answered, chin resting on her fist. 'I have a song to sing to the worms of the earth!'
He started upright, a jar falling from his hands to shatter on the hearth.
'This is an ill saying, even spoken in chance,' he stammered.
'I speak not by chance but by intent,' she answered.
He shook his head. 'I know not what you mean.'
'Well you know,' she returned. 'Aye, you know well! My race is very old--they reigned in Britain before the nations of the Celts and the Hellenes were born out of the womb of peoples. But my people were not first in Britain. By the mottles on your skin, by the slanting of your eyes, by the taint in your veins, I speak with full knowledge and meaning.'
Awhile he stood silent, his lips smiling but his face inscrutable.
'Woman, are you mad,' he asked, 'that in your madness you come seeking that from which strong women fled screaming in old times?'
'I seek a vengeance,' she answered, 'that can be accomplished only by Them I seek.'
He shook his head.
'You have listened to a bird singing; you have dreamed empty dreams.'
'I have heard a viper hiss,' she growled, 'and I do not dream. Enough of this weaving of words. I came seeking a link between two worlds; I have found it.'
'I need lie to you no more, woman of the North,' answered the man. 'They you seek still dwell beneath the sleeping hills. They have drawn apart, farther and farther from the world you know.'
'But they still steal forth in the night to grip men straying on the moors,' said she, her gaze on his slanted eyes. He laughed wickedly.
'What would you of me?'
'That you bring me to Them.'
He flung back his head with a scornful laugh. Her left hand locked like iron in the breast of his scanty garment and her right closed on her hilt. He laughed in her face.
'Strike and be damned, my northern wolf! Do you think that such life as mine is so sweet that I would cling to it as a babe to the breast?'
Her hand fell away.
'You are right. Threats are foolish. I will buy your aid.'
'How?' the laughing voice hummed with mockery.
Bryn opened her pouch and poured into her cupped palm a stream of gold.
'More wealth than the women of the fen
ever dreamed of.'
Again he laughed. 'What is this rusty metal to me? Save it for some white-breasted Roman man who will play the traitor for you!'
'Name me a price!' she urged. 'The head of an enemy--'
'By the blood in my veins, with its heritage of ancient hate, who is mine enemy but thee?' he laughed and springing, struck catlike. But his dagger splintered on the mail beneath her cloak and she flung his off with a loathsome flit of her wrist which tossed his sprawling across his grass-strewn bunk. Lying there he laughed up at her.
'I will name you a price, then, my wolf, and it may be in days to come you will curse the armor that broke Atla's dagger!' He rose and came close to her, his disquietingly long hands fastened fiercely into her cloak. 'I will tell you, Black Bryn, queen of Caledon! Oh, I knew you when you came into my hut with your black hair and your cold eyes! I will lead you to the doors of Hell if you wish--and the price shall be the kisses of a queen!
'What of my blasted and bitter life, I, whom mortal women loathe and fear? I have not known the love of women, the clasp of a strong arm, the sting of human kisses, I, Atla, the were-man of the moors! What have I known but the lone winds of the fens, the dreary fire of cold sunsets, the whispering of the marsh grasses?--the faces that blink up at me in the waters of the meres, the foot-pad of night--things in the gloom, the glimmer of red eyes, the grisly murmur of nameless beings in the night!
'I am half-human, at least! Have I not known sorrow and yearning and crying wistfulness, and the drear ache of loneliness? Give to me, king--give me your fierce kisses and your hurtful barbarian's embrace. Then in the long drear years to come I shall not utterly eat out my heart in vain envy of the white-chested men of women; for I shall have a memory few of them can boast--the kisses of a queen! One night of love, oh queen, and I will guide you to the gates of Hell!'
Bryn eyed his somberly; she reached forth and gripped his arm in her iron fingers. An involuntary shudder shook her at the feel of his sleek skin. She nodded slowly and drawing his close to her, forced her head down to meet his lifted lips.