Then suddenly it became even more than that—for again Diarmuid scythed in on Uathach’s right side, and again he stabbed upward for the heart of the beast. Once more the urgach blocked the reaching thrust, and once more, exactly as before, his counterstroke descended like an iron tree falling.
Diarmuid absorbed it on his blade. He rocked in the saddle. But this time, letting the momentum work for him, he reared his horse upward and to the right, and sent his shining sword slashing downward to sever the slaug’s nearest leg.
Dave began a startled, wordless cry of joy and then savagely bit it back. Uathach’s mocking laughter seemed to fill the world, and behind him the army of the Dark let loose a raucous, deafening roar of predatory anticipation.
Too great a price, Dave thought, hurting for the man below. For though the slaug had lost a leg, and so was much less of a danger than before, Diarmuid’s left shoulder had been torn through by a ripping thrust of the animal’s horn. In the waning light they could see his blood flowering darkly from a deep, raking wound.
It was too much, Dave thought, truly too inhuman a foe for a man to face. Tore had been right. Dave turned his head away from the terrible ritual being acted out before them, and as he did, he saw Paul Schafer, farther along the ridge, looking back at him.
Paul registered Dave’s glance, and the pain in the big man’s expression, but his own mind was a long way off, along the twisting paths of memory.
A memory of Diarmuid on the first night they’d arrived. A peach! he’d said of Jennifer, as he bent to kiss her hand. And then said it, and did it again, a few moments later, swinging lazily through a high window to confound Gorlaes sardonically.
Another image, another extravagant phrase—I’ve plucked the fairest rose in Shalhassan’s garden—as he rejoined Kevin and Paul and the men of South Keep from within scented Larai Rigal. Extravagance always, the flamboyant gesture masking so many deeper truths. But the truths were there to be seen, if one only knew where to look. Hadn’t he shielded Sharra afterward, the day she’d tried to kill him in Paras Derval? And then on the eve of the voyage to Cader Sedat he had asked her to be his wife.
Using Tegid as his Intercedent.
Always the gesture, the deflecting glitter of style, hiding what he was, at root, behind the last locked doorway of his soul.
Paul remembered, hurting on that windy rise of land, unwilling to look down again, how Diarmuid had relinquished his claim to the throne. How in the moment when fate seemed to have come full circle, when Jaelle had been about to speak for the Goddess and proclaim a High King in Dana’s name, Diarmuid had made the decision himself, flippantly speaking the words he knew to be right. Though Aileron had sworn he was prepared to kill him just moments before.
There was a grinding of metal on metal. Paul turned back. Diarmuid had somehow—the gods only knew what it must be costing him—managed to circle in again close to the monstrous urgach, and again he’d attacked, carrying the battle to his foe. To be beaten back one more with a bone-jarring force that Paul could feel, even up here.
He watched. It seemed necessary to watch: to bear witness and remember.
And one more set of memories came to him then, as Diarmuid’s brave horse pirouetted yet again, just out of reach of slaug horn and urgach sword. Images from Cader Sedat, that place of death at sea. An island in all worlds and none, where the soul lay open, without hiding place. Where Diar’s face, as he looked upon Metran, had shown the full, unshielded passion of his hatred of the Dark. Where he had stood in the Chamber of the Dead beneath the sea, and where—yes, there was a truth in this, a kernel, a clue—he had said to the Warrior, as Arthur prepared to summon Lancelot and so bring the old, three-sided tragedy into the world again: You do not have to do this. It is neither written nor compelled.
And Paul glimpsed then, with a shiver of primal recognition, the thread that led from that moment to this. Because it was for Arthur and Lancelot, and for Guinevere, that Diarmuid, in all the wild anarchy of his nature, had claimed this dance as his own.
It was against the weaving of their long doom that he had defiantly rebelled, and had channeled that rebellion into an act of his own against the Dark. Taking Uathach unto himself, that Arthur and Lancelot, both, might go forward past this day.
The sun was almost gone. Only the last long rays slanted low and red across Andarien. In the twilight the battle seemed to have moved farther away, into a realm of shadows like the past. It was very quiet. Even the loosely spilling, triumphant cries of the svart alfar had ended. There were flecks of blood staining Uathach’s snowy robe. Paul couldn’t tell if they were Diarmuid’s or the urgach’s own. It didn’t seem to matter much: Diar’s horse, fiercely gallant but hopelessly overmatched, was visibly tiring even as they watched.
Diarmuid backed it off a few paces, to try to buy it a moment’s rest, but this was not to be allowed. Not in this battle, with this foe. Uathach, not laughing now, grim death in his black sword, came on, and Diarmuid was forced to cruelly spur his mount to motion again. Amid the silence along the ridge, a single voice spoke.
“There is one chance, only, left for him,” said Lancelot du Lac.
Only one man understood and made reply.
“If you call it a chance,” Aileron said, in a tone not one of them had ever heard him use before.
To the west, out beyond Linden Bay, the sun went down. Paul turned instinctively and saw its last dying light touch the face of the Princess of Cathal. He saw that Kim and Jaelle had moved to either side of her. After a moment he turned back to the figures on the plain. In time to see it end.
It was, on the whole, just a little bit ridiculous. This ugly, hairy monster, oversized even for an urgach, was as quick as he was himself. And it was swinging a sword that Diarmuid doubted he could even have lifted, let along swung in those pounding, ceaseless blows. It was cunning too, unnaturally, viciously intelligent. By Lisen’s river blood, urgach were supposed to be stupid! Where, the Prince thought, absorbing another blow like an avalanche on his sword, where was the sense of proportion in this thing?
He felt like asking the question aloud, but survival had become a matter of meticulous concentration these last few moments, and he had not breath to spare for even halfway witty remarks. A shame. He wondered, hilariously, what Uathach would say to a suggestion that this matter be settled with the gambling dice Diarmuid just happened to have in his—
Gods! Even with a leg gone, the slaug, twice the size of his own tiring horse, was death itself. With a movement of his sword as desperately swift as any he’d ever made, Diarmuid managed to block a thrust of the animal’s ripping horn that would have disemboweled his own mount. Unfortunately that meant—
He resurfaced in the saddle, having passed clean under his horse on one side and up again on the other, with Uathach’s annihilating slash a whistling sound in the darkening air where his own head had been an instant before. He wondered if Ivor of the Dalrei remembered teaching him how to do that so many years ago, when Diarmuid was a boy summering with his brother on the Plain. So many years, but for some reason it felt like yesterday, just now. Funny, how almost everything felt like yesterday.
The sweep of Uathach’s last stroke had swung the urgach, grunting, sideways in his saddle and carried the slaug a few paces away with the shift of weight. Fresh, Diarmuid might have tried to use that to renew some kind of attack, but his horse was sucking air with desperate, heaving motions of its lathered flanks, and his own left arm was gradually growing cold, a weakness spreading from the deep tear of the wound, reaching across his chest.