The Year of the Dead Rose

by Rachel Parsons

Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
appear in this issue.

conclusion

Rhiannon’s steed walked across the battlefield. She was steeling herself. The snow came down on the bodies, and on her shoulders, but she did not shiver. She was beyond shivering. She knew what she had to do, and it frightened her. The fear was her whole being. She was the fear. And the fear was her.

The battlefield was a plain, grassy, with patches of snow all over it. As far as the eye to see, her valiant men lay still. The barons had raised an army of twenty thousand. The burghers, twenty thousand more. There must be at least fifteen thousand of them here after the first battle.

The offworlders had plowed on past the dead toward Arbeth Dactyl; their machines carrying on faster than any horse, although, oddly, their power was measured in what the offworlders called horsepower. Their blunderbusses had done their job: as the archers drew their bows, the crossbowmen their bolts, and the swordsmen, their swords, they were all felled by the tiny projectiles. Alcippe must be laughing her head off.

She wouldn’t be laughing soon.

Rhiannon stopped in the middle of the killing field, if judged by the spread of bodies. She drew Eligor. She recited the words just the way her mother had written them down.

“As above, so here below,” she began.

As she sang the words, they rose. One by one, they rose. Those who had no legs, rose. Those with no arms, rose. Heads rolled toward her. Body parts did a dance. Intestines knotted and unknotted themselves, as kidneys spurted urine and hearts, blood.

Off in the distance, the barge of the dead shone. It wavered, as a mirage on the desert, as if made of thirst. It was made of thirst: a terrible thirst awakened by her humiliation in her and in the men of New Fairy.

She became aware of the golden-haired goddesses who were picking up the dead. They stopped what they were doing. They went back to the barge. Rhiannon’s body writhed rhythmically, as soul after soul was brought back to earth.

“Thou knowest the enemy,” she said in a whisper. “For you to go to Valhalla, to earn your reward, you must go to them. You must devour them. I make of them a hearty meal for you. Eat! Eat!” Some of the Valkyries overhearing her thought she sounded just like her mother at that moment.

And then Rhiannon collapsed. Her own soul became poised between heaven and earth. She watched, paralyzed as if she had been turned to stone as the wall between the living and the dead opened. If the rift were opened for too long, then all the dead, from the distant past to this day of infamy, from the farthest world circling the farthest star to this world, would come back. The dead would overwhelm the living. Her mother, in the scroll, had warned her of this, but also advised that this is the case in all wars.

The dead followed the tracks of the machines. They were relentless. Death always comes for the living. It is unstoppable. So were the legions of the dead. They could not be killed, as they were already dead. They could be blown to bits, but the bits, unless scattered to far places, would come back together.

The men of Earth saw them, fired their weapons, but the Dead kept coming. They hunkered in place, but the Dead kept coming. They found that the more they killed, the more dead there were.

And they kept coming. And coming. And coming.

As their offworlder allies deserted them, the men of New Dyved retreated. It was in March, on Rhiannon’s birthday, on the birthday of all the Rhiannons that had ever been, on every world there ever was, that her men rode and tramped through the streets of New Dyved’s Capital City. The women of the City had been told to wear white; little girls threw garlands at the troops; men sang, as they, too, did as they were told. Women made notes to themselves to ask Rhiannon how she had gotten their husbands to be so obedient.

Several of Rhiannon’s generals had stripped to their pantaloons and painted themselves with wode, to show solidarity with their princess. The generals and the men all strode into Ferrell’s palace, a conglomeration of medieval, modern and offworlder architecture moving from stone to marble to something the Terrans called ‘plastic,’ a horrible substance worse than brimstone and gives off a stench, when burned, that even the cowled man would avoid.

As Rhiannon watched, the noblemen of her hated rival were slaughtered and the noblewomen were stripped to the waist, hoisted so they would be dangling in the great hall, and their throats were slit. Then their bosoms were cut off and sewed on so they seemed to be sucking on them. Alcippe had pride of place among them.

It gave Rhiannon an immense satisfaction to see the woman who had taken her place in Ferrell’s heart, who had taken advantage of her curse to humiliate her, and who had become such an object of hatred to Rhiannon that she had nearly become a gorgon, humiliated and executed.¹

The prophecy had been fulfilled. The world belonged to the people again.

And the rift between the living and the dead was resealed.

Epilogue

It had been a week after the last Earthman had run screaming through the portal. The snow gods must have been pleased at the result, for the snow had melted, and the temperature was a good twenty degrees above the freezing point of water. The suns seemed brighter. It had been a week since Alcippe and the other noblewomen of New Dyved had been killed, trussed up in their palace. Thus, Graymulkin’s weird prophecy had come true, as if she had known beforehand what would happen.

People were beginning to call Rhiannon ‘Boudicca,’ after the warrior who had fought the Terrans lo those many years ago, when they had called themselves Romans. Ferrell, “the well beloved,” was now universally despised as a puppet of the offworlders and not revered as ‘high king.’

There was a ground swelling to acclaim Rhiannon ‘high queen,’ although no one knew exactly how one becomes the high one. Priestesses of the five goddesses openly walked the streets of the Capital City, and the few pockets of resistance, men who thought the machines were the way toward progress, were getting fewer and fewer. For a week, Ferrell’s body, which had been dug up from the Grave of the Generals, lay in a public square, and people walked by and spat on it.

Rhiannon’s new name had become Rhiannon the Nude and she was the subject of a children’s song:

“She isn’t lewd
But she is no prude.
We owe our freedom
To Rhiannon the Nude.”

The skies were no longer poisoned by the strange smoke from the distilleries of the offworlders, and although cotton, that outré weed from the stars, was killing off the native kudzu, it was proving a blessing when controlled by the yeomen.

Unicorn and griffon sightings augured well for those species that had been hunted down and destroyed by offworlders for their sport. Shifters were seen loping through the streets of the cities of the five kingdoms at night. People began battening their windows, locking their doors, and putting out saucers of milk for them, as they had in times gone by.

Firebreathers once again flew the skies in swarms and in pride, and not hidden from view.

The Lady swam in the lake and all was well.

The cowled man rested his heels by a pond. He noticed the skippers flying across the water; ignored the tiny ice flows. He had no need of illusion anymore, and was happily in his own form. He was in his green pantaloons, chain mail vest, leather boots, and vestments. He looked like a doll that a boy might have. A soldier doll, complete with a tiny sword. His steed, a mighty mouse, was resting by a tree, nuzzling an enormous dodecahedron cheese ball.

“I thought you would be here.”

He had been inhaling dead roses, but dropped them when he had turned at the voice of the spirit. A tall, dark-haired woman, with deep brown eyes, floated toward him. Only her float, and the fact that you could see through her revealed she was a spirit, as she seemed very solid. The cowled man sighed; just once he would like to see through her dress and not her entire image. Nipples and twat pressed against a translucent gown, yes. Knots on the tree behind her, no.

“I’m surprised Queen Freya would let you return. Once you are in her realm, you never leave. Not even Arthur made his way back. ‘Once and future king’. Hah!’” He spat into a spittoon that suddenly appeared.

The mouse looked up, momentarily distracted from its treat, and then went back to work. He was a messy eater; little cheese bits were flying in all directions.

“You would know about Arthur, I’m sure,” sniffed the spirit in a half-formed insult to a creature she considered half-formed. “I’m only on earth for a while. The rift is still resealing. I must leave for Valhalla before too long, or I will become an earthbound spirit.

I thought I would thank you for your part. Without you, she would never have acquired the scroll. It was ingenious to get both the prime minister of New Prydain and Mark Stone after it. Not to mention the king of thieves. It almost assured that someone in a position to reveal its secret would do so. Pelbin would have sold it to Rhiannon, Stone would give it to her out of lust, and even James Connell would eventually have left it for Branwen to see. And she would have given it to my daughter.”

“Quite a risk, though. It might not have turned out the way you intended.”

“That’s where I knew you would come in, Raoul. You would get it to her somehow, even though you, oh Goblin King, are by the great charter forbidden to meddle in the affairs of gods, and the gods wanted this scroll suppressed. They did not want the feminine to rise again, as it will through Rhiannon.”

“Of course I would intervene. She is my goddaughter, after all,” the King of the Goblins said. “Glad to do my part. Besides, the offworlders and I are not good friends, and I knew this would end badly for them. Even after I went through the portal, for centuries they were blaming me for crop failures, marriages gone wrong, business mistakes, election disasters, humiliations. Some even thought my gremlins were responsible for their planes’ malfunctions.”

“Wouldn’t have to do with killer bees you left behind,” Modron said.

“Well, aye, there was that.”

“And the manufacture of Whoopee Cushions, to which you still hold the rights.”

“Aye, that too.”

“And you did send the gremlins, after all. And wasn’t it you who sneaked back and made people punch the wrong holes in one ill-fated election?”

“Come, come, you can’t prove that.”

The spirit of Rhiannon’s mother rolled her eyes. “I am as certain of that as that you are positioning your death sword so you can see up my dress.”

It was Raoul’s turn to roll his eyes. He had ceased looking up Modron’s dress when she had died. Besides, her daughter was almost her spitting image, but much younger, and had no dress to look up. And if he came to her in her sleep, he could pinch her nipples or pat her butt without her knowing. Modron would know and would beat him, if he tried that with her.

“So tell me, Lord Puck, is it you who are poisoning Heveydd? I know you infiltrate the palace when ever it suits you. Your steed leaves its droppings everywhere.”

Raoul chose not to answer her. Instead, he said, “It was some plan you had, Modron. I give you credit for it. Having Graymulkin humiliate your daughter-”

“She deserved it,” Modron sniffed.

“Aye, aye, I’m sure she did.”

“But you disapprove.”

“Disapprove? I’m too in love with her knockers for that.”

“Knockers? I never understand you, Lord Puck.”

“Never you mind about understanding me. I don’t wish to be understood — or haunted.”

“The goddesses will not soon forget your part in their resurgence. You won’t be haunted, Lord Puck.”

“Aye, I should be so fortunate. Still, having Graymulkin curse her to nakedness was a master stroke.” He began to have a master stroke himself at the thought. “What did you promise her?”

“As soon as she knows it-”

“You will know it. I know. I know. And being opposed to Rhiannon’s marriage to Ferrell in the first place, thus ensuring that she would become engaged to the worst possible person just to spite you. Someone who would abandon her as soon as she was cursed to nakedness. How do you come up with these ideas?”

“It was a sure bet,” Modron said. “My daughter always did the opposite of what I told her to do. If the marriage was on, then New Fairy and New Dyved would be united. I would then work on a liaison between Branwen and Rhiannon; thus she would emerge eventually as the unifying force between the three great kingdoms.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.”

“True, but that was even more fortunate. By her humiliation, war was inevitable. The war would mean the emergence of New Fairy as the dominant power, and bring the offworlders to their knees. Rhiannon will find she has no choice but to dominate New Prydain and be regent of New Dyved. And when she finds out her sister’s horror-”

“Aye, aye. All well and good.”

“The rise of the feminine will be assured by the rise of Rhiannon. No more male gods.”

“Not even the Man-God?”

“He and Arthur will learn what it truly means to be defeated by his half-sister, the goddess Morgan.”

“But this puts a great burden on your girl-child, Modron.” Raoul stuck his fingers in a pile of excrement left by a little, yellow, evil canary, and then licked them.

Modron shuddered in disgust and announced: “That is your problem now, Raoul. I am dead, so her guardianship passes to you.” Modron reached over, kissed the dwarf. Fare-thee-well, and have a good life.”

“And to you, a good death.” He finished maneuvering his death sword, which can even “kill” a spirit. He didn’t want Modron around, manipulating Rhiannon from the Far Shore. He was the girl’s godfather, after all.

But Modron had already vanished.

¹ As told in “The Gorgon,” Deathbus # 2, and in an unpublished manuscript.