BVC Announces Remscela by Gregory Frost
Remscela
by Gregory Frost
Cú Chulainn, the defender of Ulster, confronts his own legend as Maeve the Intoxicator draws together dark, grim forces to destroy him.
“I see you all crimson…I see you all red.”
So warned the faery seer of Cruachan in the first volume, Táin. It was a warning that no one in the army of Maeve the Intoxicator heeded as the young demigod, Setanta, called Cú Chulainn, took on all comers.
Now that time is past, and Cú Chulainn, Ulster’s defender, is directionless. In his misery he makes a series of terrible choices that leave him open to enchantments of the beautiful Sidhe, Fand; but also to the evil spells of the Morrigu—the three dark sisters bent on his ruin.
Beware, Cú Chulainn. The faery seer’s warning was meant for you, too.
Second of the duology Táin
REVIEWS
“[A] stark and bloody epic…a classic of heroic fantasy with which all lovers of the genre should be familiar. Thanks to Gregory Frost, one can now enjoy the story in crisp, modern prose. Highly recommended to all readers of epic fantasy and to those interested in Celtic myth!” — Fantasy Review
“Ride into battle with fierce half-gods and doomed warriors…Not only fantasy fans but also readers of historical fiction will want to look out for this Celtic saga!” — Washington Post
“Great high fantasy from the author of Lyrec.” —Xignals
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GREGORY FROST is an Asimov’s Readers’ Award-winning author whose work runs the full fantasy gamut. His novels and stories have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Stoker, Nebula, Hugo, James Tiptree, International Horror Guild and Theodore Sturgeon awards. The RHYMER trilogy (Baen) is his latest work.
Buy Remscela in the BVC bookstore
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1. The Mastew
In the southern province of Leinster lived a renowned minor king named Mac Datho. This man controlled a wide area of land within the province, measuring his moderate wealth by the fifty-four members of his tuath: he was a rí tuaithe, the king of a single tuath, and though this placed him in the class of rulers, the distinction was the least distinguished form of kingship there was. What gave Mac Datho his reputation—a reputation that set him well above the others of his class—was that he maintained a hostel. This honor he shared with only six other people in all of Eriu.
In those days hostelers opened their doors to every traveler: to the poets; to the aristocracy, from other rí tuaithe all the way up to the rí cóicid, the rulers of the five provinces; and especially to the satirists, who constantly wandered the roads in search of gossip to weave their clever lampoons around. Such lampoons made the satirists less than welcome guests in most homes, which was the other reason they comprised most of the hostelers’ clientele.
Inside the circular wooden hostel, Mac Datho ensured that two cooking fires were maintained at all times. Each fire burned beneath one of the holes in the double-peaked thatchwork roof of the wide building, one fire to each side of the large room. The first of the fires kept boiling a black cauldron of beef. The other, a heated pit of coals, slowly cooked a spitted boar. Dozens of long forks hung along the walls between the two fires, in keeping with the ancient traditions of hosteling. The primary rule of all hostels stated that whatever a guest caught on his fork with his first stab, that was to be his meal; Mac Datho let his hungry travelers take their fork and their chances accordingly but, by keeping the cauldron full and the glazed boar turning on the spit, he ensured their success. This was his duty and he performed it well. However, his greatest joy in life did not lie in hosteling. Mac Datho’s joy was his hound, Ailbe.
At the shoulders, Ailbe stood as high as the rim of a chariot wheel. Mac Datho had acquired him from traders across the sea in Alba, where they called such hounds mastews. Ailbe guarded the hostel and all the land around it, and everyone in Leinster had seen or heard of him because, although the hosteler was normally quiet and unassuming, when the subject of hounds entered a discussion, he grew loud and boastful, red in the cheeks and swelled in the chest. He knew full well that no animal on the isle could better his Ailbe. Proof of this lay in Mac Datho’s other prize possession—an enormous wild boar he kept penned beside the hostel. Ailbe had driven that boar out of the woods and into the yard, then held it at bay while the excited hosteler had frantically fabricated a pen around it.
But the danger in having a thing you’re loudly proud of is that others become envious of your good fortune. The danger in being a hosteler while owning such a treasure is that your guests might carry word of it to all the other provinces, where someone might be envious enough to act, someone who needed such a unique symbol of power for her own, and someone who did not concern herself with the cost, whether it was counted in cattle or in lives. The someone was Maeve, the white-haired Queen of Connacht, and she heard the story from a novice satirist one night in the feast hall of the vast twin-ringed fortress called Cruachan.
Seven years earlier, the seductive queen had placed her hopes for supremacy over all of Eriu—including her own husband, Ailell—in the acquiring of the Brown Bull of Ulster. To say that the Ulstermen were less than enthused to part with their infamous bull would have been understating the matter considerably; but Maeve knew of a curse placed on the men of Ulster by their goddess, the horse-woman Macha, that would lay them out for nine days when a major crisis struck. In that way Maeve had eliminated Conchovor and all of his interfering warriors… except for a black-haired, beardless creature called Cú Chulainn, a diminutive hero whose father was no less than the great god Lugh himself. This indestructible ephemeron had slaughtered her amassed armies one by one, besmirched her name, and left her finally with no bull, less warriors than when she had begun the raid, and the unreasonable but ever-present terror that he would one day seek her out and kill her when she least expected it. As a result she kept a ring of warriors around her whenever she went outside the walls of Cruachan and seethed with the desire to breathe vengeance over Ulster province. She had sought for some time for the appropriate prize to flaunt, but she had found nothing so far.
It was a spring night, and a cool breeze danced through the hall, whipping up the fires. Dressed in a tunic of burgundy embellished with woven gold designs, the lovely queen sat amid blankets and a half dozen sleeping terriers and listened to the dwarfish, thick-featured young satirist spin what news he had picked up into the long rhythmic paean he had composed for her. She ate little foods—slices of marinated apples, nuts, and cuts of cheese—at the same time as she idly selected interesting tidbits of fact from the satirist’s long-winded performance. He described the hospitality of Leinster as scant compared to her own beneficence, and interjected a brief comment on the horrible, fierce hound that a hosteler had owned, the most terrifying beast he had ever seen tamed.
Without thinking, Maeve replied, “Then you have never seen the Hound of Culann, have you?”
“No,” replied the satirist, “but I tell you there’s no hound fiercer or cleverer than this man’s. It can circle the whole province of Leinster in a day—he told me. And it captures boars—he had one in a pen that was the size of a tumulus. Of course, their cattle,” he added hastily, “are nowhere near as fine as yours, and, gracious Maeve, cattle are worth so much more than pigs, as anyone would agree.”
Maeve threw down her apple and sat straight up. She tossed a terrier from her lap, leaned forward and grabbed the unsuspecting satirist by the front of his tunic. Her silky white hair closed around him like a web and he thought he would suffocate. It was as if the shining, sweet-smelling strands were alive.
“Repeat everything you have told me about this hound, then tell me all that you know. Every detail.”
He complied in stuttering terror, filling in details about its jaws, its jutting dome, its height and wiry black hair, the skill with which it brought down prey—everything he could recall. The inclosing silvery strands vanished from around him then, and the queen sent for a messenger named MacRoth. While she awaited his arrival, she took a twisted gold bracelet from her wrist and placed it in the satirist’s hand, curling her fingers over his and staring enigmatically into his eyes. She withdrew only when the messenger arrived.
MacRoth was a short, dark and powerful-looking man. In his presence the satirist had to repeat his descriptions of this hound without embroidery. Some unspoken message passed from Maeve to her messenger once the story had ended, because MacRoth gently lifted the man up and walked him out of the feast hall and the circular fort, across the dark yard and into a large cooking house. There the messenger ordered that the satirist was to have anything he wanted—the largest meal he could eat, and a room in the second circular fort for the night, to be spent in the company of the most skilled cumal, the best sexual performer in Cruachan save the queen herself. MacRoth spoke with refinement and no breath of threat, but the satirist understood that these orders were to be carried out to the letter. Then MacRoth left him.
The satirist, knowing a good thing when it hit him in the face, rubbed his hands together, glanced at the loaves of bread and vines of cheese surrounding him, and, smiling broadly, said, “So, what have you got that’s fresh today, hmm?”
The next morning, revived and so satisfied that his stubby knees trembled, the purveyor of satire set off from Cruachan. He had no inkling of why the tale of Ailbe had reaped him so glorious a remuneration, but he figured that what played well in one province should get him a standing ovation in another. Wandering northeast into the hilly lowlands around Lough Boderg, he chose for his next success the province of Ulster. Over the three day journey he polished his act, retelling it every night in the houses of his hosts, all of whom listened courteously out of the fearful respect they had for satirists’ power—even young satirists with little awareness of local politics. Of course, he reminded himself, these people were at best lesser nobility, the highest house belonging to a rí tuath—a king who oversaw a small group of tuatha. Their lack of excitement simply reflected their lack of brains. The king of Ulster now, reputed to be exceedingly generous, would find so elegant a satire worth paying for, and paying for handsomely at that.
Late in the third day, the hill of Emain Macha came into view, with three large houses like huge dolmens or barrows grown out of its side. Like the lumpy back of some crouching terror. The people on the ramparts welcomed him warmly and promised him a fine reception from Conchovor. “The king loves nothing as much as biting satire and good fantasy,” the satirist was assured.
He spent the afternoon watching the traffic inside the cochleate halls of the fortress called Craebruad, the “red house” where Conchovor conducted most of his business and threw his feasts. He watched the diverse people come to the center of law in Ulster for judgments; the bands of white and brown-robed Druids come to study with Conchovor’s father, Cathbad; the countless servants who hauled in sacks of vegetables and grain. A vast plain surrounded Emain Macha on three sides, and recent rains had soaked the fields. The servants were all muddy, smelly, and sour-tempered. They scowled as if daring him to pronounce a satire at them as they trudged toward the cluster of three cooking houses on top of the walled hill. By contrast, he watched warriors who laughed and played like giant children, who stopped to wrestle or argue or compare weaponry and biceps. Nearby he found the charred remains of another fortress and inquired after the story of how a madness had once seized Conchovor and had driven him to acts that tore his province apart, how an internecine war had set in as a result, and how the original fortress, called Ard Macha, had been burned to the ground. Though he had built this much greater fort afterwards, Conchovor had left the ruins standing to remind him of his folly and his mother, who had perished in the fire. Yes, the satirist thought, Emain Macha was rife with good material, if only material to be used in some other province on some other night.
At dinner, he dispensed with all of the other tales and lampoons he had honed and immediately began aggrandizing Mac Datho and his mastew: the dog stood taller than some men and certainly taller than a stunted satirist, smoke steamed from its nostrils because its heart was formed of fire, and it had eyes cast from a ban-sidhe’s cloak—all opalescent green and orange that spangled in the night light of a fire. He described how it had brought down horses and devoured warriors whole. Some of the more credulous listeners gaped at him over their dripping food. He hid his smile as he announced that the only hound greater than this Ailbe was Ulster’s own dogged Cú Chulainn. The warriors bellowed their agreement and pounded the hilts of their knives on the boards.
King Conchovor rested on cushions at the head of the feast table and smiled indulgently. He said, “This fellow Mac Datho must be a great ogre himself to run such a hound as that.”
“No, not really. He’s a good hosteler and a generous one with his food. Your first stab always comes up with enough to feed you.”
“Really. Then I’d think he would want to rid himself of such a monster.”
Here, thought the Satirist, was a golden opportunity to get in a few jabs at Connacht for the Ulstermen’s benefit and, hopefully, his own. “I don’t think he’d care to do that, and I said as much to your neighbor Maeve the witch-queen, but she’s so infernally greedy that she’s already making pointless overtures to acquire the dog. Not surprising, since all she seemed to have were little dogs so small that an Ulsterman would squish them underfoot on his way to relieve himself.”
That was a sure laugh, but the room remained dead quiet, and tension filled it like smoke. The satirist pursed his lips and glanced warily at the king. Conchovor had set down his cup. The twin points of his graying beard seemed to have pulled his mouth into a deep scowl. He turned to a young man at his side and said, “You will please leave the room, Sencha.” The young man got up, an armed escort at his side, and left the hall, but not without a sharp glance back at the teller of tales.
“That’s Sencha, the son of Ailell and Maeve, who is a token of Cruachan’s pact for peace with us. We foster him, but soon enough he’ll be going home and beyond a point I expect no loyalty from him. Now, I’ve shared a fact with you, and you must share the facts surrounding Ailbe and Maeve with us, else I will donate you to my Druids for a Beltain sacrifice.”
The satirist looked around the room but found no friendly faces there. No threat of a satire or a curse would work here—he would be dead before he had finished the first verse. As asked, he stammered out his story, everything he knew about the hound, precisely as he had done for Maeve. He was careful not to use any rhymes or nonce-words that might even vaguely sound like an incantation. They might yet reward him, or at least let him leave alive. He finished by saying, “And when I had told the queen what I just told you, she sent for her personal messenger named MacRoth and I had to tell him. I heard the next morning someone say that he was going to go down to Leinster to the hosteler, gracious Conchovor, with an offer for the dog. I can’t say why all this interest.”
“You needn’t. I can. She intends to pit her hound against ours.”
“You have a hound that can do all those things, too?”
“Of course we have. Cú Chulainn, you idiot.”
“Oh, yes—I knew that.”
“Any competent satirist would.” He got to his feet. “Now, though I must go and pursue this matter, I insist that you finish entertaining my warriors.” He strode out of the hall.
The satirist scrutinized the sea of faces, many of them scarred and feral in the firelight, and not one offering the friendliness they had all shown only minutes earlier. This would require a skillful satire, his best piece, and he knew just what to use—it even involved their goddess. “So,” he said with a deep breath, “anyone here ever heard the story of the horse goddess and the chariot race?” A knife whizzed past his ear and stuck in a post behind his head. This was going to be a tough audience.