The Eagles' Brood

XXX

Aunt Luceiia remained alone in our valley with Cassandra for a full week. When I returned at the end of that time, I did so in a light, two-wheeled gig that could easily accommodate all three of us plus our baggage and all Cassandra's belongings on the return journey. Quite simply, it had never even occurred to me that my aunt's campaign to win Cassandra back to Camulod might be unsuccessful, since the love and respect they had demonstrated for each other from the outset was total and absolute, and their ability to communicate with each other without words seemed to me little short of magical.

Our entry into Camulod, later that same day, caused a mighty stir. The young woman who sat so calmly erect by my side, between my aunt and me, bore not the remotest resemblance to the half-starved waif who had returned, riding behind Uther, from that distant patrol, and no one recognized her. Nevertheless, the sight of her, the beauty and the strangeness of her, gave rise to an instant seething of speculation and gossip, which neither my aunt nor I relieved in any way. I, for one, had much more on my mind than idle rumours and conjecture.

I had been bracing myself for trouble for two full weeks, ever since I accepted that Cassandra would really be returning to Camulod. Suddenly uncomfortable with my cousin's continuing absence from die fort—a condition that had, until then, been pleasing to me in my ambivalent frame of mind— I had begun willing Uther to return immediately, preparing myself for the inevitable confrontation between him and Cassandra. I was determined to bring them face to face without warning, knowing that only then, in his complete

surprise, could I read Uther's guilt or innocence with conviction. As it turned out, however, that resolution was to remain unattainable. Uther was nowhere near Camulod when I brought Cassandra back. To the best of our knowledge, he had not left his Pendragon lands since returning there after his father's death. There had been no news of him since his departure, nor had anyone had any indication when he might return to Camulod. He might, for all we knew, already be campaigning against Lot, far to the southwest in Cornwall.

Irrespective, however, of my readiness to test Uther's response to the sight of Cassandra, I was totally unprepared for Donuil's reaction.

We had been back in my aunt's house for several hours, and I had shared Cassandra's conducted tour of the establishment, enjoying her pleasure and wonder at the richness of the house and its appointments, seeing it myself through her eyes as though for the first time. She had finally retired, ushered by a gaggle of my aunt's serving women, to bathe and change her clothes, and I was banished from their company. I sent a trooper to find Donuil and tell him I was back and to bring me any work that had to be done.

An hour later, I was hard at work, whispering the words to myself as I fretted over the appalling syntax of a report written by one of our Councillors and dealing with the variety and distribution of the crops being grown throughout the Colony's holdings. It was a dreadful and depressing task, and I was schooling myself to be patient, resisting a growing urge to call the writer of this mess into my presence and excoriate him, when an ungodly clatter made me leap like a faun. Donuil had been perched across from me on a high stool, polishing my parade breastplate. Now he was on his feet, stiff as a board, his face waxen, wide eyes staring at some point behind my head, and my best armour rolling noisily on the floor at his feet. I turned to follow his stricken gaze, and saw Cassandra standing by the open doorway behind me, peering backward over her shoulder at something in the hallway behind her. As I looked, too startled yet to speak, she turned back towards me and her eyes fell on Donuil. Her whole face altered instantly into an expression of astounded disbelief, and then splintered into an instant, joyful smile of recognition.

Donuil continued to stand there as though petrified for several more long moments, and then he lurched toward her, walking stiff-legged, his mouth hanging open, a look of awe mixed with fear on his face. When he reached her, he stopped short of touching her and fell heavily to both knees, reaching out his hands to her. Radiant, she gave him both her hands, and he stooped his head to kiss them, but she was already pulling him to his feet, clasping her arms tightly around his neck and kissing him wildly on the face, the eyes and the forehead.

As I watched this astonishing sequence of events, I was aware of an equally astounding rush of conflicting emotions. In a few brief moments I felt fear, suspicion, jealousy and a sudden rage that blanketed all the other feelings and quickly threatened to overpower me. Then all of these left me as suddenly as they had sprung into being, when big, ferocious Donuil turned to me, his eyes running with tears, and whispered in a choking voice, "Dear dree, Commander, it's dear dree." Then he turned again and fell to his knees a second time, throwing his arms around my beloved's hips and burying his face in her bosom, his shoulders shuddering with sobs.

His words made no sense to me, but his actions, his possessiveness, filled me with a sense of doom. I stood up slowly from my chair and walked towards the two of them, my gaze shifting from Donuil to Cassandra, who was now also in tears. She watched me approach, but made no move to disengage her protective arms from around Donuil's head, hugging him to the soft fullness of her breasts. I felt my anger surging back, stronger than before, but she looked at me and smiled lovingly through her tears, and my flowering rage wilted as my confusion increased.

"Donuil?" I asked, hearing my own voice, low and wondering yet filled with menace, "What is it, Donuil? This dree? What is dear dree? Do you know this woman?" I can remember thinking that I had never heard myself sound so foolish. If there were anything certain on the face of the earth, it was this man's knowledge of this woman.

He turned his head to face me again, peering at me through the cradle of her arms, and his voice came to me muffled by her sleeves. This time, however, I understood every word he said. "It's Deirdre, Commander. We thought she was dead. My sister, Deirdre."

My sister, Deirdre! Shocked beyond credence, I literally pulled the two of them apart from each other, holding them at arm's length as I stared from one face into the other, moving my head rapidly from side to side as I compared his big face with her small one, and seeing the resemblance immediately. Brother and sister! I let fall their arms and walked away to the closest couch, where I collapsed, my heart pounding in my ears.

Cassandra was beside me immediately, her eyes filled now with concern for me, her brother abandoned on his knees in the doorway. I touched her cheek, brushing away her tears, and gently took her in my arms, cradling her and warming her with a sudden overflowing of love that was mixed with guilt over my conflicting reactions to what I had seen. Donuil knelt still, staring at us, incomprehension in his eyes.

It took almost an entire day for us to assemble the story into what had to be its truthful form, mainly because the only two of us who could speak were each having trouble accepting and believing the other's explanation of his involvement. Donuil could not accept that I had known his sister for months before I met him, nor could he believe that he could have been so close to his sister for so long without having any inkling of her existence. For my part, I was simply stunned to be faced with the truth about Cassandra, who was Cassandra no longer. I was also amazed to see her conversing fluently and rapidly with Donuil in a silent language of hand-signals that meant nothing and less than nothing to me, apart from the dumfounding truth that Cassandra was an eloquent and fluent conversationalist!

It was only later that I realized they were conversing in Erse, which explained why Cassandra and I had never been able to communicate. Being deaf and mute, she had never heard my Latin language, and so the movements of my lips, framing the sounds I made, were completely alien to her understanding. I, on the other hand, had presupposed her to be from Britain. It had never crossed my mind she might be Hibernian. How could it have? And what difference would that have made? Finally, however, I accepted the truths that had been thrust upon me and, with them, a new understanding of my beloved Cassandra, who had been Deirdre all her life. And I accepted, with intense excitement, the knowledge that I would be able to learn the hand-language she and Donuil used so expertly. I devoured everything Donuil had to tell me about her, and about her early life.

As a child, he told me, she had been known as Deirdre of the Lilac Eyes, the darling and favourite of her father, Athol, High King of the Scots of Hibernia. Her unformed beauty had even then been legendary because of her colouring, and her suitors had been many and wealthy. Her mane of flowing, red-gold hair, her milk-white skin and her startling, lilac-violet eyes had marked her as one blessed by the gods, and that blessing would pass on to the man who became her husband. Even today, in speaking of his sister's beauty, Donuil's voice was so hushed and awestruck that, in spite of my love for his sister and my longing to learn everything of her, I grew embarrassed for him.

Cassandra had been my love for long, golden months. Donuil's Deirdre, on the other hand, held no sway in my heart. And therein lay the cause of my embarrassment: I could see no commonality between my Cassandra and Donuil's Deirdre. The woman I loved was no flaming, red- golden-haired beauty with violet eyes. Her hair was long and lustrous, but it was fair, and no more than that—not golden, and with no trace of red. Nor were her eyes purple, or violet, or even lilac; they were huge and silvery, granite grey, almost completely colourless in any normal sense, yet changing to the palest of blue in certain lights. Eventually, in a mood of great discomfort, I said as much to Donuil.

He stared at me, wide-eyed, and waited for me to say more, but I had no more to say.

"So," he asked, eventually, "what are you saying, Commander?"

"What am I saying?" I put down my cup and looked at him in amazement, wondering how he could ask me anything so obvious. I pointed to his sister, who sat opposite me, her gaze moving from one to the other of us as we spoke. "Donuil, the girl you are describing from your memories bears no resemblance to this woman sitting here. Not the slightest, can't you see that?" He blinked at me, looking confused, and Deirdre leaned forward intently, looking from him to me. Her fingers began to fly, and he gazed at them, deciphering her meaning, and then his face cleared.

"Deirdre says to tell you about the sickness. But, Commander, you know about that! I've been talking about the way she was before the sickness. It was only after that she changed."

"Sickness? What sickness? And what should I know of it? We've had no talk of sickness, Donuil. You're saying a sickness changed her?" I looked intently at Cassandra, who gazed solemnly back at me from great, pale grey eyes. "A sickness changed the colour of her hair and eyes? Donuil, are you talking about magic again?"

"Aye, Commander Merlyn, I am." He nodded and his gaze was as unblinking as his sister's. "And my sister is the living proof of its existence."

I moved across to share Cassandra's couch, drawing her into the bend of my arm and kissing her temple, looking across the top of her head at her brother. "Tell me," I said.

The story he told me was a strange and wondrous one, and I believed it, word for word. Whether it told of magic or not, however, is something I cannot say, even to this day.

On Midsummer's Day, in the ninth year of little Deirdre's life, through the freakish anger of some Erse god, the light of high summer had been almost completely eclipsed by the darkness of an enormous storm that uprooted trees and blew down buildings and caused rivers to overflow their banks, flooding fields and houses. Scores of people were killed and hundreds injured, and cattle drowned by the dozens. And in the middle of the confusion, young Deirdre of the Lilac Eyes disappeared.

Her father's men searched for her in the aftermath of the great storm, hunting high and low for three days, at the end of which they pronounced her dead. And as they were preparing her funeral rites, she walked into the middle of them, dazed, with eyes staring.

They dried and cleaned her and put her to bed, and her father's finest healers cared for her, feeding her potions to break the fever that racked her. Watched over and protected by the tribal priests, the child tossed and turned for four days and her fever persisted, burning up her tiny body and ravaging her reserves of strength. Then, on the fifth day after her return, the fever receded and she awoke and described, with crystal clarity, the place where she had been during the storm. She told of a rocky cavern, reached by a passage slanting downward from a cave on die side of a hill, and filled with skeletons and treasures. When questioned as to how she had reached this hillside, who had shown her the place and why she had gone, she would not answer, but she described the route she had taken, and the landmarks that marked the way.

Her father Athol sent a group of warriors immediately to seek this place, and they found it without difficulty, although more miles away than they had thought to look. And they found the skeletons, and the treasure—a hoard of ancient weapons made mostly of bronze, and bars of gold, silver and iron, as well as jewellery.

In the meantime, however, even before the searchers had set out, Deirdre's fever returned, more virulent than ever, and the child fell rapidly towards death. The fever rose and rose, beyond the point where any healer had ever known a fever go without causing death, and then it levelled off and stayed at that pitch for days. The flesh fell, almost visibly, from the child's body until nothing was left but bone and sinew. The priests and healers tried everything to keep the child hydrated. They bathed her constantly. They fed her with water sweetened with honey, administered through tubes of animal intestines fed down her throat. And they waited for her to die.

But she did not die. She hovered on the edge of death for six full weeks, and then she began to recover. She regained her weight and her strength and her smile. But her hair had lost its colour and so, to the horror of everyone who saw it, had her eyes. People began to whisper, and then to say aloud that Deirdre of the Lilac Eyes had died, and had been replaced by a changeling. And the only person who might ever have convinced them that the truth was different—the child herself—made no attempt to do so. She came back from her illness to live an alien life among them. She never responded to their voices and she never spoke again.

In spite of the fact that they had all benefited by the child's experiences and been enriched by the treasures of the cavern she had found, her people grew more and more afraid, as people will, of what they saw as her magical experiences. As time passed and the strangeness of the changes in her became more and more widely known, the word was put about that she had been accursed, and that no good would come to anyone associated with her. The treasure, people whispered, was but the god's replacement fee for having abducted the child. It was obvious, they said, that the child had fallen-or been cast down-from being blessed by the gods. From being a child beloved by all, she became a creature feared without cause and shunned by all but those who loved her most dearly—her father Athol, and her favourite brother, Donuil.

In die aftermath of the illness, unable to understand what had happened to her, but convinced that she was still his beloved sister, Donuil had spent long hours and days with the child, learning again, from the beginning, how to communicate with her. He learned that her mind had emerged unscathed from her illness, that her soul, the essence that made her who she was, had remained intact. And, over the next five years, they had developed the hand-language they used between them. At the end Of that time, Deirdre had fallen sick again, although not so seriously. She had developed a fever and had taken to her bed. The following afternoon, while Donuil and his father were hunting, she had disappeared again, unseen by anyone, and this time she had not returned. They had all assumed her dead, until today, five years later. And now I had to sit in silence, seething with impatience, while Donuil learned the story of his sister's disappearance, by watching and translating the messages of her flying fingers.

It was a story that did not take long in the telling, although there were aspects of it that were both confusing and mystifying. In listening to Donuil's translation of what his sister's hands were telling him, I was frustrated by 'my inability to question her directly. There was far more to her story, I felt, than what she was telling us, but I had no way of asking her for more details, not knowing what details there were to be added.

She remembered nothing of her second illness, nothing at all. She had no memory of leaving her bed or her father's hall. She knew only that she had awakened one bright summer morning among complete strangers who, by their familiar treatment of her, were obviously not strangers at all. These people knew her extremely well, although she had no recollection of ever having seen them before. They knew, for example, that she could neither speak nor hear, and they communicated with her by touch and by broad hand-signals, Their treatment of her was rough, but neither intolerant nor unkind, and yet she was treated as a servant, a menial. Knowing who she was, but not how she had come to be where she was, Deirdre had tried to run away from the encampment that night, but she had been caught without difficulty and put directly to work, performing tasks that were strange to her, but to which her body responded with the ease of long practice.

She had noticed her clothes, too. They were alien and coarse, but they clung comfortably to her body with the ease of long wear and they were very obviously hers. Frightened and confused, she suspected that she was no longer in the land her father ruled, but she had no idea where else she might be. She had never travelled beyond her father's lands.

Days later, she came face to face with her own reflection in a bronze mirror and fainted dead away with terror. She did not recognize the face she had seen. It was a woman's face. Hers had been a girl's. A second, fearful look had convinced her that she had not lost her mind and was not insane, but that somehow, by some evil magic, she had lost much of her self; she had lost years of her life, during which she had grown from being a child to being a woman, with no knowledge of the change or the passing years. And now she lived a life of silence among strangers.

She shared the lives of two particular strangers, a man and a woman who fed her and sheltered her. The man was a pedlar, the woman a herbal healer, and they were constantly travelling, selling his wares and her skills throughout the countryside. Deirdre's main job was to help the woman gather her herbs and simples, although sometimes she would help the man with his goods, carrying burdens like a pack animal. And sometimes, when the mood was upon him, the man would come to her bed and use her sexually, without passion, and she permitted this without thought, because she knew, somehow, it had always been thus.

And then one day, without any warning, the man had fallen sick. The woman came down with the same sickness the following day, and Deirdre had nursed them both until they died, within hours of each other. She had been kneeling by their bodies hours later when Uther and I passed by and found her.

I do not know how long I lay awake in camp that night, remembering. I know only that the camp had quieted without my noticing, and only the occasional whickering of a horse broke the silence before I fell asleep.