"A friendly sort, then," Ukko said, appearing from behind Sláine. "Don't tell me, he's just misunderstood, right? What I want to know is why these ancient relics are never guarded by sweet little old ladies who want to smother you with gummy kisses and bake you a nice cake because they are happy to see you? They're always the fiercest most miserable cusses who want to rip you limb from limb soon as look at you. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of fighting monsters and being heroic. It's dull. I want to bury my face in a big buxom pair of tits and not come up for air for a week."
Ignoring the dwarf, the Morrigan continued: "I do not for a heartbeat believe he will surrender the shard lightly, but I will have my son returned to me, Sláine."
Through the fading whispers of the ghosts and the raucous caws of the crows came another sound, slow, rich and rhythmic. Sláine was drawn to the furthest edge of Magh Tuiredh by the ringing of hammer on anvil, though without knowing the great smith was there he would never have discerned the sound amid the chaos of memories and hungry birds.
Sláine was weary, footsore and voraciously hungry. He walked through the path of stones observing the patterns the birds flew in above him and the omens the thick dark cloud promised.
You cannot save Tir-Nan-Og one soul at a time, champion.
The words haunted him still, though in truth he had never heard them spoken. The Morrigan had reached out a feathered hand, her touch lingering on his cheek, and in his mind, a parting gift, the words came unbidden. It was witchery, of that there was no doubt. The Crone had reached into his mind and left the thought like damnation for him to dwell on.
"Is that what I am trying to do?" he said aloud. Ukko looked at him strangely. No, he wasn't looking at him, he was looking
beyond
him. Sláine turned to see seven stone statues, three times his own height, gruesomely ugly in their craftsmanship, brutish gnarled faces overhung by a thick atavistic brow and vacant eye sockets chiselled deep into the stone. Fat cracked lips and tombstone teeth jutted out beneath bulbous noses. The sculptor had worked tangled hanks of hair into the granite, giving each trollish beast an uncomfortably lifelike mien. Sláine moved closer, marvelling at the sheer bulk of the statues and the workmanship of them. The wrist of the first stone troll was thicker than his neck. He moved down the line. Save one they were all turned to face the stones of Magh Tuiredh, merging with the pattern of the rune-carved standing stones. One had a drum at its feet, another had a pile of stones carved like bones. The exception faced due west, towards the steady clangour of the smith's hammer. Sláine moved around the statue. Its face was unlike the others; the troll had no nose. In its place there was a wickedly curved beak, like that of a crow. The statue had a bull-neck, deep crevices weathering into the stone, opening its throat. Malformed arms hung low, knuckles dragging on the grass.
He walked around it again, slowly.
"This is one pig-ugly effigy," Ukko said, staring up into the gaping black of the statue's enormous nostril. He reached out, resting a hand on the stature's pendulous gut, and nodded up at the sagging pectorals. "Kind of reminds me of you, your warpishness. Maybe it's a throwback? What do you think Myrrdin?"
"The Sisters of Magh Tuiredh are quite beautiful, I think," the druid said. "Each in her own way. Not that Sláine doesn't have his moments, of course."
"Sisters?" Ukko said, his face puckering up as though punched. "You mean to say this thing is
female
? You know what I said about burying my face in a big pair of tits? If these are them I take it back."
Myrrdin chuckled indulgently. "You, my lascivious little friend, frequently remind us how much you appreciate the fuller figure. The Sisters are renditions of the divine, raised of the earth just as she is, bountiful and generous in their endowments-"
"Fat," Ukko put in.
"-just as she is. It is fair to say that the sisters were primitive man's attempts to capture the essence of the Earth Mother, to give their faith flesh."
"Ooh, they gave it plenty of flesh all right."
Sláine stopped, realising that the last note of the smith's hammer had faded into silence. He craned his head, listening but slowly, sound by sound, the quiet was distilled. The smith did not take up his hammer again.
"He knows we are here," said Myrrdin. "No doubt the sisters told him."
"They're stone," Ukko said, rolling his eyes, "unlike the bloody great flock of birds circling around our heads. Now, if you'd care to wager: your talking stone against my squawking crows, I'd be more than happy to take your coin off you."
"And here I was thinking you slow-witted, friend Ukko."
"I didn't spend my life herding sheep or mincing around the woods whispering to trees like some people."
"Be that as it may, we shall have to find ourselves another wager on another day. For now, this is where our journey together ends, my friends," said Myrrdin, grasping Sláine's forearm. "The smith's forge lies beyond the crest of this hill, in the shadow of the Sister's beaked nose; it leads the way for the curious. My presence with the smith will only hinder you, and as there is much I must yet do, I think it best we make this our parting of the ways."
Sláine studied Myrrdin's face silently. There was something in the old man's expression that silenced any objection. He drew the druid into an embrace and slapped him on the back. "I will miss your company."
"You have the dwarf to keep you honest."
"As I said, I will miss you."
"The Morrigan did not lie; the smith will not surrender the final piece willingly, and if we are together perhaps not at all. He has reason to hate the Crone and her son, and my hands are far from bloodless in his tragedy. It would not do to provoke his anger, or remind him of her betrayal. The Goddess's speed to you," he turned to Ukko, "and to you, little man."
"Just as I was beginning to like you, you have to go and leave."
"You mean just as you were beginning to delight in the imagined riches my purse had to offer?"
"Like I said," Ukko grinned, "friendship's a funny thing but the best kind of friendship is one where you both get what you want out of it."
"I'm not certain what worries me more," the druid said to Sláine, "that he actually thinks this way, or that we have been together so long the way he thinks is actually beginning to make sense to me?"
"That's the enigma of me," said Ukko, bowing with a flourish.
"I think I might actually miss you, dwarf."
"How about you give me your coin so I have something to remember you by then? I'll take good care of it, I promise."
"I don't doubt it for a moment but I think we should bid our farewells before the ineluctable laws of stupidity and avarice collide, don't you?"
Ukko peered at him, not bothering to hide his confusion. "I have got no idea what you are talking about, druid."
"I believe that was the first law making itself known," Myrrdin said with a grin. "We'd best be quick with our farewells lest the second law take one of us unawares."
"Why do I get the feeling I'm the butt of what passes for mirth around here?" Ukko said.
Sláine and Ukko followed the thin shadow cast by the Sister's beak, scrambling across the ride of shallow mounds, while Myrrdin turned his back on the seven stone Sisters and trudged, bone-weary, back across the battlefield.
They left the Knucker feeding on a goat carcass it had found.
The declivity beyond the last hill was sharp, the bottom of the slope deceptively far below. The shadow was blunted by a ring of stones and charred wood: the remnants of a cooking fire.
There were low bushes and overhanging trees, ash and oak and rowan, hawthorn and sycamore, trees that once would have been at the heart of a great wood now enclosed the fire, giving it the air of seclusion. And while there was no beaten track the ragweed around the fire pit had obviously been tramped flat by huge lumbering feet, as had much of the grasses leading back into the side of the hill almost directly beneath their feet. Sláine assumed they stood above some sort of entrance, which meant that it wasn't a hill they were standing on. The secrets of the earth lay beneath the surface. A mine perhaps, where the smith gathered his ore to fashion miraculous things fit for the demi-gods who he used to serve? On either side of the mound thorns intertwined with briarwood and poison oak to form a natural wall.
There was no sign of the smith.
Sláine stumbled, reaching out for a handful of scree to stall his slide. His boots kicked up chips of stone as he scrambled for purchase, tripping over his own feet as he finally lost his footing and fell, tumbling to the base of the hill. Only it wasn't a hill, or a mine, Sláine realised, it was a burial mound. The entrance was cut deep into the hill, the stonework around the arch carved with the same craftsmanship and eye to detail as the Sisters had been, the lintel deeply scored with Ogham:
"Do not mourn, I am not here," Ukko said, reading the inscription.
The words were vaguely familiar. It took him a moment to place them: the song of mourning the harpist, Siothrún, had played for Caoilfhionn the Weatherwitch. Similar but not the same. Not exactly.
But too close to be coincidental.
There was a link between the harpist and the smith, Finvarra, the dead witch, the druid and the Crone. Myrrdin had said the smith was half-Sidhe; that the blood of the fey folk flowed in his veins. Caoilfhionn had come to him that first night out of Dardun and her words had led him across worlds on his journey home, binding him to the Crone and her quest for her lost child. The Wounded King was Sidhe, his home a palace of glass where death had no dominion. In the eyes of the world he was dead, and had been for centuries, and yet he lived.
"Only a fool would mourn the living," said Sláine, finally beginning to see something of the tangled web they had woven around him. The strands were beginning to work loose, revealing their secrets, and what secrets they were. The harpist's song couldn't have been for the witch, unless... unless... Caoilfhionn was bound to the fallen king, unable to join her love in death for he was not truly dead. The notion sent a thrill of excitement through Sláine. The harpist was not mourning the woman, he was mourning the king they were condemning to death.
That night, when Sláine had dreamed of the Weatherwitch and she had told him hope lay with the Skinless Man, the hope she spoke of was the damnation of her beloved Finvarra, nothing more, nothing less. He knew the dead woman now; Caoilfhionn, the queen of the fey, beloved of Finvarra in this world and the next. Her words set his feet on a journey, but one masked from even his own understanding. She fired his blood with thoughts of going home, manipulating him into the Morrigan's quest as much if not more than the Crone ever had, but this manoeuvring was nothing more than misdirection. Everything had been about Sláine breaking the geas on Ynys Afallach and in doing so ending the curse that kept two lovers apart and a world from mourning.
"What are you talking about?" Ukko said, picking himself up from where he had landed, sprawled in the trampled grass.
"Do not mourn, I am not here. This is Finvarra's tomb, only he was never buried here because of Myrrdin and the Morrigan. He wasn't allowed to die. Who else wouldn't be in their own tomb? The song of mourning we sang with the harpist was for the Wounded King's wife, or rather the king himself, soon to be joined in eternity with Caoilfhionn once again."
"You're a romantic soul, Sláine. Soft in the head, but there's no denying the romance in your soul."
The harpist emerged from the darkness of the tomb, only now he was stripped to the waist and sheened in the sweat of exertion, his muscles hard. He held a ruby-encrusted goblet fashioned from human bone. His hair was pulled back from his face in a neat braid, his brow smeared with the soot of the fire. Half in and half out of the sunlight, the glow gave his skin more colour than the last time they had seen the man, but it was still impossibly pale and pitted with pox scars. He looked different though, more human. His wispish body belied the immense power bound within his rigid muscles.
"You have a passing fair voice for a blacksmith, Siothrún," Sláine said, "or should I call you Weyland?"
The smith inclined his head, accepting the compliment. "There is a difference between a gift and a craft, warrior. You may be an artist with a brush and a butcher with an axe. One tool does not demark the man, rather a man can be many things."
"Indeed."
"You have me at a disadvantage, I must admit. I did not expect to see you again, and yet you have found your way back to me and barely a season has passed. I underestimated you, a mistake I will not make again in a hurry." He set the bone goblet aside. "I assume you know this place?"
"The barrow of kings," said Sláine, nodding. "Or one king, Finvarra."
The smith smiled. "Perhaps my queen was right about you after all, Sláine Mac Roth."
"We all make mistakes, I was sure this dance was the Crone's doing. I did not look past the obvious. Instead I was content to believe this was her tune, the saga all about her child."
"Oh, but it was," the smith said, reaching behind his head to loosen the tie holding his hair back. He shook it loose. "And more to the point, it still is. You have the shards of the old Cú Roi of Goibniu?"
Sláine nodded.
"Which means the geas Myrrdin and the Morrigan placed on the Isle of Glass must have been broken and Finvarra released from his torment. Soon I will journey to what remains of the isle to reclaim his corpse and lay him to rest here, beside his beloved. This place was once the home of the Sidhe, did you know that? Tir-Nan-Og, Land of the Young. Who did you think the 'young' were? It is only fitting that in death absolute, the king is brought home. But you have more pressing needs, no? You want the final part of the Cauldron, and if I am any judge, you're about to go down on your knees and beg me to reforge the relic, are you not?"
"I beg no man," said Sláine.
"A pity, for I am in no mood to be generous. You need it to return home, as my queen foretold, and your bleak Goddess needs it to free her get; without my aid now you are both thwarted. You see, we counted on her arrogance and your ignorance. I look at you now and I see failure and doubt eating away at you. The protector of the Cú Roi must be resolute for the Cauldron is the womb of the Goddess, the source of all things, of life and death and rebirth. It can feed, give drink, heal, nay restore life, soothe raging spears. Its waters contain wisdom - more, it joins the firmament, the primordial soup that was the place of creation. The Cú Roi is more than a mere treasure to be traded; it nurtures the Goddess, it feeds the land."