The Scourge of God

WESTERN WYOMING, GRAND TETON MOUNTAINS

Rudi Mackenzie dreamed.

In the dream he rose from his sickbed, looking down for a moment at the thin, wasted form. Edain watched by his side; now and then he poked at the low fire that burned with a canted wall of piled rocks behind it to absorb and throw back the heat. The others were dim shapes in the depth of the cave; Epona looked up and whickered at him, and Garbh bristled a bit and whined until Edain absently stroked her head.

He turned from them and walked out through the gap in the pine branches that blocked the entrance, knocking a little snow down on his bonnet. He was whole, and free of pain; looking down he saw that he was dressed in his kilt and jacket and plaid, knee-hose and shoes. His senses were keen, but the blizzard outside was only bracing; he could hear the wind whistle in the Ponderosa pines, and feel the sting of driven snow on his face, smell the dry, mealy smell of it as branches tossed in the thick woods above and below.

But I'm not really cold, somehow, he thought, smiling to hear the moan and creak of the wind's passage.

He walked down the path. An overhung ridge of rock topped with three twisted trees made the trail kink, creating a sheltered nook in the storm. A man stood there, leaning one shoulder against the rock. A brisk fire burned at his feet, throwing smoke up to where the wind caught it above the ridge and tattered it into the blowing whiteness. To one side a tall spear leaned against the cliffside, broader-headed than most horseman's weapons; he thought there were signs graven in the steel. A horse stood some distance off, unsaddled but with several blankets thrown over it and its head down. It was a big beast, but hard to see; the wolflike dog that raised its head as he approached seemed massive as well. Saddle and bedroll and gear lay beside the fire, and a pot steamed over it.

The man was tall too, taller than Rudi but lean. As the Mackenzie came closer he saw that the stranger was old; at least, his shoulder-length hair and cropped beard were iron gray. His dress was that of the Eastern plains and mountains, neckerchief and broad-brimmed hat, sheepskin coat and long thick chaps of the same, homespun pants and fleece-lined leather boots, poncho of crudely woven wool longer at the rear than the front. Closer still, and Rudi could see that the lids of his left eye closed on emptiness; the other was the color of mountain glaciers, and as cold.

"You're welcome to share my fire," the man said, making a gesture towards the pot.

His voice rolled deep, cutting through the muted wind-howl. Rudi nodded, swallowing a prickling sensation as he bent and poured himself a cup-thus making himself a guest. Not everyone felt that to be as sacred as Mackenzies did, but most folk would think three times before falling on someone they'd invited to share their food. The liquid was chicory-what most in the far interior called coffee -hot and strong and bitter, but this somehow also tasted of honey and flowers and a little of hot tar.

The dog growled at him a little, one great paw across a meaty elk thigh bone…

No, Rudi thought suddenly. It's a wolf, not a dog.

The gray man nudged the beast, ruffling its ears as he bent to pour himself a cup from the battered pot of enameled metal.

"Quiet, greedyguts," he said. He glanced up; a raven sat on a branch that jutted over the rock, cocking a thoughtful eye at the wolf's meal, and another sat beside it with head beneath wing. "And you two remember what happened the last time, and think twice."

Then he leaned back against the rock again, blowing on his chicory and waiting, relaxed as the wolf at his feet.

"I'm called Rudi Mackenzie," the young clansman said slowly, as he straightened and met the other's eye; strength flowed into him with the hot drink, easing a weakness he hadn't sensed until that moment. "But I'm thinking the now that I know your name… lord."

The older man's features were jut-boned, bold of chin and nose, scored by age but still strong, as were the long-fingered hands that gripped his own cup.

"Call me Wanderer," he said. He smiled a little. "And I know your father."

"Sir Nigel?" Rudi asked.

"Him too. But I was thinking of your blood-father. You might say he bought a ticket to the table I set out; him and many of his kin, from out of deep time."

Rudi finished the cup and set it aside; the last of his discomfort seemed to vanish with it. He raised his head and met the Other's gaze.

The eye speared him. For a moment he seemed to be looking beyond it, as if the pupil were a window; to a place where everything that was, was smaller than that span across the eye. Then a flash, a searing that was more than light or heat, while being itself flexed and shattered and re-formed in a wild tangle of energies; then a wilderness of empty dark where stars lit, like campfires blossoming. .. and then guttering out as they fled apart, until there was another darkness, one where the stuff of his body itself decayed into nothingness. And in that nothingness, a light that looked at him.

Rudi blinked and swallowed, daunted but not glancing aside. The deep voice went on:

"Shall I show you your fate, boy? Shall I tell you if you die untimely or live long?"

"No, my lord Wanderer," Rudi said softly. "My mother is a weaver, and I know that every thread has its place and is part of the whole. All men die. None die untimely, and no man may live a day longer than he lives. So if you've come to lead me away, I am ready."

He dared a smile. "Though I've heard you send your daughters for that job."

And there's a good deal I'd rather do first… he thought.

Suddenly an image came to him, painfully bright; a room with a bed, and Matti's face exhausted and triumphant as she looked up to him from the red crumpled-looking infant cradled in the crook of her arm, and a shadow of his own exultant joy.

The Wanderer laughed, and though it was a soft chuckle there was an overtone to it like the crackle of lights over the mountains in winter. There was approval there, but by something greater than men or their hopes and sorrows.

"Good! Though you won't be meeting Gondul, as your father did. You've pledged yourself to another, and I'm not inclined to quarrel with Her."

Rudi's mouth quirked. "It seems you've something else in mind then, my lord the Wanderer," he said.

The figure nodded. "But unasked, I will tell you this: you won't die in the straw of sickness, nor of an arrow in the back, even a cursed one. Though you will not live to feel your shoulders bend with age, or see your hair grow gray."

"How, then?"

"You will die by the blade, sword in hand. The King's death, the given sacrifice that goes consenting with open eyes, dying that his folk may live."

"As my father did, whose blood renewed the land. Thank you, then, lord Wanderer. Though I've seldom called on You by name."

The Wanderer flicked away the grounds in his tin cup and tossed it to the damp earth beside the fire. "No?" he said. "But your mother has called on Me, in her grove, when you lay wounded and near to death. And you have as well. Come."

He put his hand on Rudi's shoulder. They took three steps to the edge of the trail to look downward, and his poncho flared in the wind, seeming longer now. A dead leaf flickered out of it as it masked Rudi's face for a moment, and then he sucked in his breath.

I know that path! he thought.

It was nightfall on the roadway that ran westward from the waterfall and mill to the gates of Dun Juniper, where the schoolchildren practiced an hour or two shooting at the mark most evenings. The trees beyond and below were Douglas fir, taller and thicker and closer-set than the pine forests of the Tetons, each dark green branch heavy with its load of snow. It was a softer fall than the blizzard about him, of flakes larger and wetter… the snow of a winter in the western foothills of the Cascades, one that would lay a few days at most, not grip the land like cold iron until the end of May.

Close at hand a column of kilted children were walking through the gathering dark, cased bows and capped quivers over their shoulders, with a few adult warriors among them-one had a lamp slung on a spear over her shoulder, a globe of yellow light in the fog white of the snow.

"That's Aoife Barstow," he said slowly. "She and her lover died fighting for me when the Protector's men came, only a little later.. . I offer at their graves every year."

The children started singing. He recognized one clear high ten-year-old's voice. It was his own.

"Upon his shoulder, ravens

His face like stone, engraven

Astride an eight-hoofed stygian beast

He gathers the fruit of the gallows trees!

Driving legions to victory

The Bringer of War walks tonight!"

"By the name you invoked, by the blood she spilled, by the offering made beneath the tree where she died," the man said softly. "By these you called, and I answer at the appointed time."

"She… named others than you, lord Wanderer. As have I, full often."

Images passed before his eyes; he couldn't be sure if they were shapes formed in the swirling snow, or his own imaginings, or as real as the blood he could feel beating in his throat… because that too might be illusion. A tall charioteer's shape edged and crowned with fire, tossing up a spear that was a streak of gold across the sky and kissing it as he rode laughing to battle as to a bridal feast; a woman vast and sooty and bent, wielding a scythe that reaped men; a raven whose wings beat out the life and death of worlds. His hand went to the scar between his brows, where a real raven's beak had touched him in the sacred wood.

"When I hung nine days from the Tree, I became a god of death," the one-eyed figure said. "When I grasped the runes of wisdom I learned many names."

He looked up. One of the great black birds moved in the skeletal branches above them. It cocked its head and gave a harsh cry and launched itself away, gliding down the slope on broad-stretched wings.

"And Raven and I are old friends."

They turned back to the fire. If this isn't the final journey, then I must be dreaming, Rudi thought, as they crouched by the red flickering warmth, across from each other, sitting easily on their hams.

The gray-haired man reached into a pocket, brought out tobacco and papers, rolled himself a cigarette single-handed, then lit it with an ember he picked out with a twig. He handed it across the fire; the Mackenzie took it, and inhaled the smoke-he'd done the same before, visiting with the Three Tribes. For a flickering instant as he inhaled the harsh bite across his tongue the shape on the other side of the flames had a prick-eared, long-muzzled face, and two braids of hair beside it beneath the hat.

"Are you truly that One men named the Wanderer?" Rudi asked boldly.

He could feel his fear, but it was slightly distant, like the cold of the wind. And well might a man be afraid, to meet Him on a lonely mountainside. He was a god of death; the lord of poetry and craft who'd given the runes to men and established kingship, but also bringer of the red madness of battle, of everything that lifted humankind beyond themselves. His favorites got victory, but they died young, and often by treachery.

A puff of smoke. "What would your mother say?"

She'd answer a question with a question, some distant part of Rudi thought wryly. And if I complain, say that you can only truly learn the truth you find yourself. Aloud:

"That the forms the God wears… or the Goddess… are many.

And that they are true, not mere seemings or masks, but that they're not… not complete. As are the little gods and the spirits of the land, or the Fathers and Mothers of the animal kind. They speak to us as we need them, if we'll but listen. For how can a man tell all his mind to a child, or a god to a man?"

The other nodded. The great wolf raised its head and looked at him, then put its massive muzzle on its paws again.

"A wise woman, Lady Juniper, a very wise woman… and not least in knowing that what she knows isn't everything that is."

"You'll be talking to me in riddles and hints, then, I suppose, lord Wanderer?"

The eye pierced him. For a moment he felt transparent as glass, as if he could suddenly see his entire life-not in memory, but through an infinity of Rudis-stretching back like a great serpent to the moment of his birth… and his conception… and before. As if all time and possibility were an eternal now.

"Look, then," the Wanderer said. "If you can bear it."

For a moment the mountain about him stood stark and bare, only here and there a charred root exposed by the gullies cut by long-gone monsoon floods. Heat lay on it like a blanket, through air gray and clear and thick with the tears of boiling oceans. Then it changed and was green once more… but different, somehow; there was a wrongness to the way the trees were placed, a regularity that held patterns as complex as those you saw in a kaleidoscope, layer within layer. A rabbit hopped by…

… and silvery tendrils looped around it, thinner than the finest wire. The beast gave one long squeal and then froze as they plunged beneath its skin. Then it seemed to blur, as if it were dissolving, until nothing was left but a damp patch on the ground. Involuntarily Rudi looked down at his own feet. The Mother's earth was beneath him, and he expected to feed it with his body and bones someday…

But not like that! he thought.

"Those were evil fates, lord Wanderer," he said. "And true ones, I'm thinking."

"Evil for more than men," came the reply. "Now, tell me, Son of the Bear. What would you do with a little child you saw running with a sharp knife?"

Rudi's mouth quirked. "Take it from her, lord Wanderer. Swat her backside so that she'd remember, if she were too young for words."

"And a child who took a lighter and burned down your mother's Hall and all its treasures, so that many were hurt?"

"The same, perhaps with a bit of a harder swat. And call in the heart-healers to find the source of her hurt, and I'd see that she was watched more carefully, and better taught."

Walker nodded. "You wouldn't kill her? Even if you thought she might do the same again, and all within would die?"

Rudi made a sign. "Lord and Lady bless, no!" he said in revulsion, and then wondered if he'd spoken too quickly. "What a thought! If it was necessary, we… I… would keep her guarded always."

"Some men… and some women… would have that thought. Some would act on it, and kill the child."

The single eye looked out into a world that was once again pines glimpsed through snow.

"And some would have joy in the thought; or inwardly thank the chance that gave them the argument that it was necessary."

"Lord Wanderer, I don't understand."

"You don't need to. Just remember this: the world"-somehow Rudi knew he meant more than merely Earth-"is shaped by mind. And the world in turn shapes the stuff of mind. And now a question for you: what is the symbol of Time itself?"

"An arrow?" Rudi asked.

The tall figure laughed. "A hero's answer, if I ever heard one! And I'm something of a connoisseur of heroes. That's natural enough. You're at the age for it, for war and wild faring. So… watch."

He turned and took up the great spear, its head graven with the same symbols that glowed on the brooch of his blue-lined gray cloak. Then his arm went back, paused, whipped forward with the unstoppable certainty of a catapult. The spear disappeared into the snow in a blurred streak.

"Was that a straight cast?" Wanderer asked.

"Very straight, lord; and I wouldn't like to be in its way."

They paused, in a silence broken only by the whistle of the wind. The single gray eye watched him, a chill amusement in it. Something warned Rudi, perhaps a whistle of cloven air that wasn't part of the storm's music; he turned and jumped backwards with a yell, nearly stepping on the wolf's tail. The spear flashed past, smashing a sapling to splinters as it came, and then there was a deep hard smack as the Wanderer caught it. His long arm swayed back with the impact, and then he grounded the weapon and leaned on it, the head glinting above his head as the dark wind blew flecks of ice past into the night.

"That was a straight cast," Wanderer said. "But the line only seems straight because you can't see its full course. Draw it long enough and it meets itself, like Jormungandr."

"I don't understand!" Rudi said again, baffled.

"You don't need to… yet," the gray one said. "No man can harvest a field till it is ripe, but the seed must be planted. The heroes offer to me for luck and victory. But the Kings… they ask for wisdom, if they have any to begin with."

"I'd be glad of that," Rudi said; he felt like arguing, but… that wouldn't be wise at all.

"Would you? Then know this. Fact becomes history; history becomes legend; legend becomes myth. Myth turns again to the beginning and creates itself. The figure for time isn't an arrow; that is illusion, just as the straight line is. Time is a serpent."

Rudi blinked. He noticed the bracelet around one thick wrist, where the coat rode up; it was in the form of a snake, wrought of gold so finely that the scales were a manifold shiver that seemed to spin away in infinite sets.

Wanderer stepped closer. "Your friends are waiting for you, Artos, son of Bear and Raven," the tall gray-haired figure said. "Go!"

He clapped a hand to Rudi's back. The touch was white fire, and the Mackenzie stiffened as if existence shattered about him.

"I've got it!" he heard a voice say.

Gods and holy men, never a straight answer, he thought as he bit back a groan.

The white fire still ran in his veins; it narrowed down to a patch on his lower back, and he could hear the voice again. It was Father Ignatius.

"Holy Mary and every saint and God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be thanked. That was why!"

Shuddering, Rudi felt the sting as something swabbed at the wound, and a hand dropped a pus-stained bandage into a bucket. He could smell the sweetish odor of it, oily and with a hint of something like vinegar. Then real fire bathed it.

"I'm sorry, Rudi, but it's necessary," the priest's voice soothed.

A hand took his; he knew it was Mathilda's, and tried to remember not to crush her fingers. Then he realized he couldn't, not even if he tried; her hand was carefully gentle on his. His whole body felt like the limp blood-and-matter soaked rag, hot and weak and stiff at the same time, with localized throbbing aches in his shoulder and back. He could speak, but he simply did not wish it. Even lifting his eyelids was too much effort.

"There was a fragment of the arrowhead still in the wound," Ignatius said as he worked. "But this time the probe found it as I was debriding the dead tissue. Praise to the Lord in His infinite mercy! And Praise Him that Rudi was delirious through it. It's far too close to the Great Sciatic."

"Will he heal now?" Mathilda said anxiously.

"That is with God. But there's a better chance."

Another voice: Odard's. "He needs proper food and warmth and a real bed," the Baron said. "So does Mary. My lady, let me take a little food and try to find a settlement. Ingolf, you said-"

"-that they're not all Cutters in this part of the country, south of Yellowstone, yes," the big Easterner said. "But the operative word is not all. And my information's a year out of date-a year ago, Deseret was holding out, too."

"I'm willing to chance it," Odard said.

"Are you willing to not talk, if they do take you?" Ingolf said.

"I… think so," Odard said.

"Thank you, my old friend," Mathilda said softly.

Then a complex whistle came from outside; Ignatius' hands finished fastening the band across Rudi's back, and he heard the soft wheep of a sword leaving a scabbard, and the little rustle of an arrow twitched out of a quiver.

"Gil sila erin lu e-govaded vin!" Ritva's voice, and then in English: "I've found friends!"

Then in a strong ranch-country twang: "Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha, y'all!"

"We've got to move you, Chief," Edain Aylward Mackenzie said gently.

The blue-green eyes opened, more like jewels than ever in the shockingly wasted face, and Rudi smiled at him.

"Good… glad to be… going somewhere," he said.

Edain swallowed. "It's going to hurt."

"Means I'm not dead yet!" Rudi said.

He looks different, Edain thought. Better. But still sort of… like glass.

"Glad to have you back with us, Chief," he said.

The strangers had a stretcher with long poles on the cave floor now, next to the injured man; it could be rigged as a horse litter, and it was padded with sheepskins. Together they eased him onto it; the thin face convulsed a little as they set him down.

"Sorry, Chief!" Edain said.

"Glad… to have you… there, boyo," Rudi said.

"I don't know why," he said suddenly, as if a boil had burst inside him. "I got you wounded! And-"

Rudi opened his eyes again; he looked tired, but more there. "Bullshit," he said crisply.

"What?" Edain rocked backwards, as if slapped on the cheek.

"You were going to say you couldn't save Rebecca. But you did save her, in the fight with the Rovers, remember?"

Edain shook his head. "And killed her later!"

"So you couldn't save her always. You're not going to live forever, boyo. You've saved my life more than once-but I'm not going to live forever either! Someday I'll die whatever you do, or I do. It's not just going on that makes life. That's fear talking; or the fear of losing someone. I've… wrestled Thanatos knee to knee, this last while, and I know. It's when you beat fear every day, that's when you're immortal. And I want you with me."

He reached out and caught Edain's wrist. "You're my friend… you're my comrade of the sword and my brother. My brother doesn't run out on me!"

Edain gulped, and took a deep breath. "Right, Chief. It's just.. ."

"Grief's hard."

"That it is." He straightened his shoulders. "So's the work halfway through harvest, but that never stopped me."

TheScourgeofGod