She was awakened by a scream.
The echo of it lingered in her ears as she sat up, cold and stiff and disoriented. It was not so much a sound as the sleep-distorted memory of a sound. She was not quite sure that she had not dreamt it. All around her people lay on the ground, wrapped in their cloaks or in coarse blankets like the one Branwen had given her, huddled together for warmth. She saw many familiar faces: Old Ned, with his big black dog lying beside him, and the baker and the blacksmith and the weaver-woman. Not all the monks and villagers were here, however; it seemed that one group had gone on ahead of this one. Nearby, Cordelia was snuggled between her parents, and Thomas lay not far off, his long brown hair covering half his face. Guilt filled her. Had the Ryans delayed their departure because of her? Would they have got safely away with the first group had they not waited for Maeve to return?
Aengus—no, not Aengus, she remembered—was also awake, standing apart from the slumbering villagers, an erect dark figure gazing pensively at the sky. Had he slept at all? She rose, wrapping the blanket about her like a cloak, and approached him shyly.
"Prince Arawn—I mean, Your Majesty..." she stumbled when she realized he must now be king.
He turned to her, and she saw the noble lines of his face, firm and well-defined, the steady gaze of the grey eyes. It was not hard, now, to imagine a circlet of gold on his dark hair. From now on, whenever she read Hamlet, she would always see this man's face and his brooding dark-clad figure. Melancholy hung about him like smoke over a banked fire, but she felt that anger might yet flash through it, quick as flame.
He had not always been thus, she knew. This man had been young Gwalchmai, the merry huntsman beloved of his people, the man he himself now bitterly derided. She had glimpsed that man briefly at the village ceilidh—so long ago now, it seemed. All that gentleness and mirth had been stripped from him. It was like erosion, she thought. Suffering cut away the soft parts and left only what was hard and durable. Arawn looked as though he had been carved down to a solid core of strength and endurance. Did he feel guilty for being alive when all his loved ones were dead? Guilty that he had not been there to defend them?
"There are no titles any more, young Maeve," he said in his quiet voice. "Can there be a king without a kingdom?"
How could he be so calm when he was so close to death? Even she knew the fate of heirs to a throne when the land is invaded.
"I'm sorry," she burst out miserably, and then fell silent, feeling the pitiful inadequacy of the words.
He spoke softy, as if to himself. "My grandsire and grandmother loved each other deeply, so much so that I was filled with dread at the thought of one dying before the other. The grief of the one left behind would have been hard to see. That they should perish together, then, and know no separation, is perhaps not such a dreadful thing as you might think. And they had led long, happy lives. But my father and mother are another matter. Many long years they had ahead of them still, and their blood demands justice." Again, as in the tower room, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.
He's so brave, she thought with a pang. So noble. It's not fair. "Isn't there anything we can do? Aren't there any allies who can help?" she asked desperately. "That big island, Tir Tairngiri..."
"Tir Tairngiri has but few people in it," he told her. "A people called the Skraelings once dwelt there, but they suffered greatly from the assaults of the Lochlannach in your grandmother's day and I doubt there are many of them left. The only other inhabitants of that land are the Daoine Sidhe, and they will care little what becomes of us common mortals."
"But not all the fairies hate humans, do they? In my grandmother's book there were some who were good to people."
"Those Sidhe departed Avalon and Tir Tairngiri many years ago. They no longer hold their courts here."
"Oh. Then is there any way we could make peace with these people?" she asked hopelessly.
She jumped when a man's voice answered from behind her, speaking rough English. "There will never be peace between our peoples," it said sternly.
She turned, saw that a small group of the pagan Celts had emerged from their low, round houses to stare at the captives. The latter were now stirring, sitting upright in blinking confusion as she herself had done, looking about them.
"It is your own fault. When your Christian faith came to our lands," declared the man who had spoken, "the powers of the earth faded. The people turned from the old gods and no longer made the sacrifices that fed the earth. The bonds of the great magic were weakened and broken."
"You wear the airbacc Giunnae, the fence cut through the hair, like our Druids," said another man to one of the monks, pointing to his odd tonsure. "Why is that, if you are holy men of the Christian faith?"
The abbot stepped forward. "We are Druids of a sort," he replied. "We preserve old knowledge and pass it on. We lead the community in the rituals of our faith. Priests and Druids were not always at enmity. In elder days, we learnt much from one another."
"Your rulers in the Shadow-Rome would not have had it so," said the man who had first spoken. "Was not your church governed by the men of that otherworldly city?"
"Once that was so, before the two worlds were so deeply divided. But we live beyond the Shadow now. We are far removed from that Rome of which you speak; and follow our own traditions. It is our own abbots, not bishops sent by a pope, who are the leaders of the church in Avalon."
A woman now stepped forward, looking at them curiously. "Your ways are very strange to us. Why do you never marry? Our Druids do, and the priestesses may take what men they please. And is it true that even a man who is not ordained must have only one wife, and a woman only one husband? But what if you should come to love another?"
The abbot replied, "I think what you are calling love is what we call lust. It is not love but only a kind of hunger, which is quickly sated and fades from the mind."
"Yes," put in Branwen in her soft voice. "To us, you see, love is a thing that grows slowly between two people. Only after many years—" She broke off with a little shriek as Padraig pounced on her from behind and lifted her bodily, whirling her around.
"This is my lady!" he roared. "My queen, my heart's desire! And I'll have no other, though I live a hundred years! Let any man take her from me who dares!" He put on an expression of pretended ferocity and some of the watching men actually stepped back.
Branwen's face was flushed with laughter. She looked, with her hair wisping down around her face, almost like a girl. "Oh, Padraig, put me down!" she exclaimed breathlessly.
Thomas turned away, as he always did when his parents became embarrassing. "Come, Maeve," he said, walking over to her. "Let us go apart for a while. Such talk is hard for you to hear, I know."
"Why?" she asked..
"Well, because of your own father and mother. What you say is happening between them."
Maeve looked at him blankly. "My father and mother... It's funny, Tom, but I haven't thought of them much. They seem so distant somehow."
He stared at her. "They were a great trouble to you once."
"Not any longer. It doesn't seem to matter any more."
He gave a little exclamation, pointing to her sweater. "Maeve! Your grandmother's brooch—it's gone."
"Oh, yes. Morgana took it," she said vaguely.
He looked at her more closely. "Maeve, is all well with you?" he asked worriedly.
She shrugged. "As well as can be expected, I guess."
The two of them walked apart, away from the buildings. Beyond the houses, goats, cattle and horses grazed the green sweep of turf. All Celts, Duncan had told her, loved horses and valued them highly. Cattle too were important. Here a man's worth, his "honour price," was reckoned in kine. The more beasts one owned, the greater one's prestige.
"I asked Prince—King—Arawn what he thought we should do," Maeve said presently, "but he doesn't seem to have, any ideas. Tom, I'm scared. I don't see any way out of this."
"Can you not return to your own world?"
Again Maeve strove to visualize her own world, but it all seemed blurred and faint and far away. "I don't know, and anyway, what about the rest of you? How could I just go off and leave you?"
"There is nothing at all you can do. Arawn is a king and Dugall a great lord, and even they can do little against Morgana."
"Dugall? Who's he?"
"The man we called Duncan. He is really Dugall, thane of Dalriada in the south. Arawn fostered with him as a boy, as is the royal custom. They are close friends, as dear as brothers. The prince was staying with Dugall at his castle when the Fomori attacked. The two of them had decided that it would be amusing to rove about the countryside in the garb of simple huntsmen and dwell among us village folk for a time."
Maeve suddenly gave a little gasp and stood still. A horse lay sprawled on the earth a few metres away, its dull dark eye turned up sightlessly towards the sky. Blood pooled beneath its neck, which was scored with gaping wounds.
"I thought I heard a scream," said Maeve, her voice shaking.
"A sacrifice," came Arawn's voice behind them, "to their gods."
Maeve was appalled. "I thought all the Celts loved horses!"
"They do, so this must be a very important sacrifice to them. Morgana seeks the aid of her gods."
More of the captive villagers were wandering in the same direction, including Thomas's family. When Cordelia caught sight of the horse's carcass, she stopped in her tracks. Her lower lip trembled, then she burst into a loud wail.
"Stop it, Brat!" hissed Thomas. He looked anxiously towards the tower. Morgana and the Druid had emerged from its dark entrance and were also walking towards them. "This is no time for bellowing!"
The Druid threw a sharp glance at the little girl, but where another child might have quailed, Cordelia cried determinedly on. The pagan villagers stirred uneasily; something in the child's laments seemed to unsettle them. A woman with a small child clinging to her own skirts seemed particularly upset. She went to one of the houses and returned with something in her hand—a sweetmeat, perhaps—which she held out awkwardly to the girl, but Cordelia took no notice.
Then Morgana approached, her pale face stern. Cordelia fell silent at once and ran to Branwen's arms. Her mother seemed small and drab and frail next to the towering queen, but she looked up with the eyes of a lioness. For the space of a heartbeat, Morgana and Branwen stood silently confronting one another; then the dark queen walked on, to join the Druid in contemplating the sacrifice.
Maeve expelled a long breath. So might some huge and fearsome predator pause before a small animal standing desperate guard over its young—pause, briefly consider and turn aside, not in fear, but from a kind of instinctive respect. Morgana might be contemptuous of weakness, but courage apparently did not anger her. That might be useful to know, should she demand that Maeve be brought before her again.
As the day progressed, the captives and the pagan people drew apart, the latter retreating into their houses or caring for their livestock in the field. These people, Maeve learned, were apparently the descendants—the children and grandchildren—of the Fianna guards and priestesses who had dwelt with Morgana in Grandma's day. In Jean's book, Maeve now recalled, the queen's warriors and the original eight priestesses had chosen to join their evil ruler in exile. Their offspring now carried on their traditions, awaiting the time when the queen would be freed from confinement.
For all the ferocity of their appearance, the Fianna were not savages; they had their own code of honour, Arawn told her, rather like the knights of the Round Table. In olden days, such men had been held in awe by the common people— minstrels and cup-bearers had waited on them as if on great lords. The founder of the Fianna, he said, was none other than the great Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhail. Like him, the Fianna feared no threat, natural or supernatural, and many a Fianna warrior of old had even dared to wed a fairy bride.
The Druid puzzled her a little. Among the characters in Grandma's book there had been a great Druid, but he had had exceptional powers: he was able to alter his shape at will and control the elements. Arawn explained to her that only a few Druids could command such magical powers. All Druids had great knowledge, for they began their training by studying under a master for twenty years; but they learned for the most part about astronomy and herbal lore, religious rituals and the Gaelic laws. They might invoke the gods before a battle, or read the future in the entrails of a beast, but they were regarded as learned men, teachers and magistrates, rather than sorcerers.
"Morgana would have no need of a Druid with magical powers," Arawn said. "Her own are great enough to defeat any foe."
"She couldn't leave the Rath, though," Maeve pointed out.
"That is true. A wall of fairy power surrounds it on all sides. But years have passed and the ones who cast that spell have left the land. Its power is weakening, and she will soon be able to break free."
At midday the prisoners were given a meal of plain bread and water. When they were finished eating, a company of Fianna warriors herded them like cattle into long double lines. None of them dared ask where they were being led—their captors' grim faces, as much as their spears and swords, discouraged questions.
Out of the inner ring of the Rath they were led, on through the plain of dancing stones. The sky had cleared and was now full of scudding clouds. Presently they heard the sound of hoofs behind them, and turned to see many riders leaving the enclosure at a gallop. At their head rode Morgana.
Her mount was a large stallion, midnight black save for a white star upon its forehead, and she rode astride it rather than sidesaddle; her cloak and her cloud of black hair streamed out behind her. Her gown today was green, the fairy colour; it matched her eyes, which shone intensely bright. No longer did she seem like a cold and lifeless statue. The wind had stung a wild rose colour into her cheeks, and her features were fiercely alive.
"Macha herself!" murmured Dugall.
"Who is Macha?" asked Maeve.
"The goddess of war in the old legends of the Gaels. There are three goddesses: Macha and Badb and Nemain. Sometimes they are spoken of as a single goddess, the Morrigan. Macha- Morrigan is a great horsewoman, so they say."
"It's a magnificent horse," said Thomas enviously.
Arawn nodded. "That is one of the fairy steeds whose ancestors were bred in the land of Eire long ago by the Tuatha de Danaan, the half-fairy race whom we now call the Daoine Sidhe. Their horses are like no others: they can run faster than the wind, and there is magic in their blood. They were bred to bear the Sidhe in their fairy rides."
Morgana had spied Arawn and pulled the stallion out of his gallop with superb control, directing the snorting and prancing beast close to the line of villagers. "So, Prince, who is the victor now?" she called. "Your grandsire robbed me of my rule and penned me within the Rath, but see, I ride free again! The walls of air that hemmed me in have now fallen before a greater power. I shall call up all the spirits of the land: boggart and banshee, urisk and glaistig shall again walk its earth. You grew careless over the years, you and all your house. Did you think I slept in my tower all that time?"
Arawn made no answer, but continued to march with his eyes fixed ahead of him.
"I told Diarmait and Gwenlian that the Sacred Isle would be mine again to rule," said Morgana. She tossed her head, black hair flying, and her eyes were as wild as the stallion's. "You see now I spoke true! Avalon is given to those you called enemy—the children of the gods and the lords from the deep!"
She urged the horse forward, the mounted Fianna and priestesses following after her.
"So," muttered Dugall, "it is the Fomori we go to meet."
"Do they really live in the sea?" Maeve asked.
"So it is said. Their magic arts allow them, like the Marrows, to dwell in the deep like sea creatures, needing neither light nor air. They have a city that lies beneath the waves— Lochlan, it is called. It sits upon a crag above a great abyss, in whose depths their goddess is said to dwell. The sea- raiders whom our grandsires fought also gave their allegiance to that city and its deity, and so they were called the Lochlannach. But they worshipped many gods. The Fomori bow only to one: Domnu of the Deep is their ruler."
"And she is a cruel one," said Arawn grimly.
"Will Tethra seek Temair, and be crowned at the Stone?" asked Dugall.
"I think he does not care for any sign of approval, from the Lia Fail or from any living being," said Arawn. "Temair is nothing to him but a fortress to be stormed, and the land a thing to be conquered."
Thomas looked puzzled. "If the Fomori come from the sea, why do they ride overland to Temair? Why would they not attack the coast?"
Maeve remembered her trip to St. John's with her aunt and uncle, remembered how they had gone up to the top of Signal Hill and seen the water of the harbour far below. Ancient cannons had stood upon the stone fortifications there, and on the far side of the harbour was Fort Amherst, built in the Second World War. She remembered her uncle telling her that the steep-sided Narrows made a natural barrier against forces attacking from the sea. "My uncle told me that the French forces used to come ashore at Mary's Bay and try to march overland to St. John's because they could never get at the city from the harbour. It had too many defences."
"Aye, and the harbour of Temair is also well-guarded, with a fortress and many men-at-arms," confirmed Arawn.
Presently they glimpsed another great host approaching them across the boulder-strewn barrens: many men, both mounted and on foot, with shields and mail. There were also figures in black hooded robes, like those Maeve had seen surrounding the house—the memory seemed curiously faint now, but it still sent a shiver through her. At the head of the army, on a large grey horse, rode one who could only be their king: a huge man, broad of chest and shoulder, with long black hair and a flowing beard. His eyes were dark, almost black, and his face whiter than Morgana's, as white as a drowned man's.
The sight of him filled Maeve with foreboding; even Morgana seemed taken aback for an instant. She pulled her horse to a halt, and her eyes were suddenly wary. Maeve thought of two cats sizing one another up, the fur on their backs bristling.
The Fomori king now spoke to Morgana. His voice was deep, as might be suspected of so large a man, but was curiously flat and expressionless. He spoke in the Gaelic tongue first, then in English for all to hear.
"We are come to take this land at last, to rule it as it ought to be ruled. No more will we linger at the edge of the Black Abyss, in the dark places of the sea. We will live in the light and the air again, as we did long ago. It is the mortals who will be driven into the deep."
Morgana nodded. "The powers of Avalon will be reawakened now. Already I hear that the Cwn Annwn have arisen to hunt their prey again, and that the spirits of the wood stir in their leafy halls. The true gods shall be revered again, and shall receive the sacrifices to which they are entitled."
"Aye, and to Domnu her sacrifices also. It is to her power that this victory is owed. Henceforth she must be honoured above all other gods in Avalon."
Morgana eyed the cowled figures. "The Black Druids of the Fomori perform human sacrifices, is that not so?"
"It is. And that is why you will be permitted to retain some of the mortals who serve you—so that Domnu may be honoured upon her holy festivals as is fitting. It has been long since she received the proper offerings."
The flame was kindled again in Morgana's eyes. "They are my people!" she flashed. "My tuath. I will not have them sacrificed. Sate your goddess with the blood of others!"
"I shall," said Tethra. "Beginning with some of those you hold here. And there is one mortal in particular whom I seek."
At that, Maeve felt her blood run cold, and she could not look at Arawn.
"I hunt a hawk," said Tethra. "One of a brood that escaped me. If it remains free, it shall raise up another brood to be a trouble to me in days to come. I seek the Prince Arawn, called Gwalchmai. Is he among those whom you hold?"
There was a small eternity of silence, then Morgana answered in a neutral tone. "That may well be," she said.
So Morgana had no intention of giving away her revenge to another. Maeve shot a glance at the queen, then hurriedly looked down at her feet again. She must not look at Arawn...
"Then see that he is delivered to me. I shall make an end of that royal line, once and for all. And I shall not suffer any of his subjects to remain on this isle. In future, it must be peopled by those of the old faith only."
The horse of the Fomori king suddenly stretched out its dull lead-coloured neck, snapping at Morgana's mount as she rode past. The Sidhe stallion bared his teeth in turn, and the queen pulled his head around, letting the horse wheel and dance out his anger on the turf.
"You ... shall not suffer..." she said. "Is it you, then, who shall rule this isle alone? You forget, Tethra, Avalon has a queen." Her eyes blazed now, and the Fianna moved, quietly and unobtrusively, to flank her.
"And you forget, daughter of Morfessa, to whom you owe this triumph. Your gods have not delivered you, for all your prayers. Had you offered them human lives instead of pigs and chickens, they might have heard you. Domnu has made me ard-righ, high king over all this land. You shall keep your Rath, but look not to reign over this isle again."
A stillness seemed to have come over Morgana. The fierce wild animation had gone from her, the colour in her cheeks had ebbed. The flame in her eyes was extinguished; they were stone-cold once more. "Very well," she said, and her words fell into the silence like chips broken off a block of ice. "I shall return now to my tower and consider all you have said to me this day."
"Consider then, well and wisely—and not for too long." He made a gesture of dismissal, but Morgana had already turned her back on him and spurred her horse away.
"Ahh, she didn't care for that!" said Arawn softly.
"Will she dare to defy him?" murmured Dugall.
"I would not be surprised."
"Then Morgana has made a bad enemy this day."
"So, I think, has he," said Arawn, looking thoughtfully after the departing queen.