But suddenly Prydwen lurched violently, first to starboard, then to port. Arthur righted himself, then seized the helm himself to do likewise for his beloved ship. Roric, over at the main bridge, saw what had happened before it dawned on the rest of us, and was already trying to get us out of it. But it was too late: In our concentration on the vast bulk of the enemy fleet, we had spared less attention than we should have done for the actions of the enemy flagship. Now the Marro, while all eyes were on the great scything maneuver, had done some maneuvering of its own, and we were caught up in its jaws.
However, Prydwen was no minnow to be swallowed whole, but a fighting salmon itself; and Elen being still busied with the direction of our own fleet, Arthur took her place at the war-helm and began to use his ship as he would have used his blade in fior-comlainn.
For that is what it now was, between Prydwen and the Marro, between Arthur and the unknown warrior who was master aboard the enemy flagship. Our scythe seemed to have cleared most of the ships like stubble in its path—even as I watched I saw it destroy one of the Coranian frigates, and heard Betwyr say expressionlessly to Arthur, "That was Mordryth’s command ship."
"Pity it was not Marguessan’s," muttered Tanwen, who stood by. She was of the Coldgates vintage amongst the Companions, from that same year that brought me to the Company from my bardic training, and Daronwy from her father’s liegedom of Endellion, and Ferdia from Erinna. Now she was Countess of Dyonas in her own right, having inherited from her mother; yet she had chosen to throw all that to the airts and go with Arthur.
And as I thought that, something in the rhythm of the words caught and tugged at my bardic sense, at that part of me—I know not how to call it—that knows a right phrase or a tune or a title when it hears it, and sits up and pricks its ears and hopes to hear more…
No time now for poems and making: We were still locked mortally with the Marro, and though Mordryth’s ship, with Mordryth aboard it, had been blown to flinders, Marguessan’s vessel had been seen to make a hasty and undoubted withdrawal well before the death-edge of the scythe of ships cut anywhere near her. She would be back, also undoubted; but just now we could not concern ourselves with that.
And then the scythe cut through, and what paltry few ships survived its swing were taking the same line as Marguessan, and racing for home wherever home might be, so long as it was away from Keltia. We raised an exultant glad shout to see this, and bent all our efforts yet again to our own problem.
We had been battered badly by the Marro—and done some battering of our own in return—yet as the minutes became hours and there was no perceptible easing of the choke-hold the Marro had on us, we began to despair. There were not so very many choices, and looking at Arthur I could see that he had measured them out each by each long since… We were badly damaged, but not unto our destruction; not yet. We could remain as we were, holding the Marro off from our throats until help arrived; but there was no guarantee that their help would not arrive timelier than did our own. We could try to flee, as so many of the enemy had done, but there were populated worlds not all that far away and the Marro would not let us go so easily; an escape that dragged the enemy flagship with it into habited Keltia were no escape at all. Or—we could destroy ourselves by our own hand, knowing that we should surely take the Marro with us; the great difficulty with that one was that we would have to go ourselves.
"Well," said Arthur at last, "there be two cross-days each moon when whatever is begun shall never see completion, and this day I feel quite sure is one of those…"
"What shall we do, then?" I asked, humbly—and fearingly, though my fear was not for myself: Sgilti and Anghaud still huddled in a corner of the bridge.
Arthur did not answer straightway, but his dark eyes went to one of the screens on the console before him. I followed his glance, and went cold to my boots; for upon that screen was a view of the Morimaruse, and knowing my fostern as I did, I perceived instantly what he had in mind to do.
"Get me a clear link to the Marro," said the High King of Keltia. "I will speak with whomever commands therein."
The Marro’s captain must have had much the same idea in the same moment, for a transcom link opened up between the two bridges as if by, well, magic. And all of us on Prydwen stopped and stared at the image on the screen.
He was tall, this Coranian; he had golden eyes and golden skin with it, and I was reminded sharply of Majanah. But there the resemblance ended: His hair was the black-black of space outside, his face was strong of bone and pleasant of expression—or would have been were this a mere courtesy call between war-admirals. Behind him, the Marro’s bridge looked much the same as ours: smashed equipment, injured personnel, the uninjured moving with a kind of frantic smoothness to do the work of the fallen. Yet this foreign captain did not look at all defeated or even much daunted, and when he saw Arthur standing there looking back at him he turned a fearsomely intelligent eye on his opposite and smiled.
"King of Kelts," he said correctly, and gave the precisely proper nod due under the circumstances from an admiral to the king of an adversary power in posture of war. I for one found this greatly impressive; but he was speaking.
"I am Jaun-Zuria, Lord of Vidassos on the Imperial Throne-world of Alphor, Master of War to His Majesty Hasparren Lacho, the Cabiri Emperor, captain of the Imperial ship Marro. I salute a worthy opponent."
"And I return that salute," said Arthur, giving a nod in his turn, calibrated with even greater nicety—he was after all a king. "I, Arthur Penarvon ac Pendreic, Ard-righ of Keltia, captain in this ship Prydwen—We seem to be in posture of stall-mate: Neither one of us may break the lock."
The captain Jaun-Zuria looked briefly doubtful, then gave a short unamused laugh. "It would seem so," he admitted, to the obvious shock of his bridge officers, who muttered protest and dissuasional advice behind him. He cut them off with a swift chopping gesture of his hand held low and a warning half-glance to either side, then returned his attention to Arthur.
"We are bound never to yield," he said then, spreading his hands in a gesture as infinitely sad as it was warning. "No more, I think, are you."
He spoke excellent Gaeloch, I noticed suddenly, and found myself surprised that he had chosen not to use the variant of his own Hastaic tongue that was at this time an unofficial galactic common language. Wondered too where he had learned his Gaeloch, and who had been his teacher…
"Nay," agreed Arthur, his own manner every bit as bleak and menacing. "Again, stall-mate."
Jaun-Zuria was silent a moment. "If we both agreed on oath to withdraw and break the lock?" he asked then. "As two fighters do in"—he used a word in his own tongue, which almost certainly meant something like fior-comlainn—"to break off and draw back and begin again…"
Arthur smiled. "A goodly solution," he said. "But oaths in battle are meant for breaking, and we have here no judge of the bout to see that all is observed and done aright."
The Coranian’s golden-skinned face suffused with anger to a dark bronze, even as he nodded wry agreement with Arthur’s observation. "Then what do you suggest, lord?" he asked, and reached out a hand to the transcom button, preparatory to breaking the link.
Arthur’s smile barely grazed the edges of his beard, and I almost fainted where I stood, for I knew that wolf-smile well of old…
"This," said Arthur Pendreic—Penarvon—and sent Prydwen into the overheaven.
To go into hyperspace from a standing (as it were) start is a move beyond foolhardiness; the texts of the Fianna, and those of every other starfleet college in the galaxy, are filled with dire cautionary accounts of the misguided, and invariably late, individuals who thought to try it. It is not by definition perilous to sail the overheaven, but all the same there are certain conventions one must respect if one is to do so safely and live to tell of it after; just as one who would sail a birlinn on Glora must have knowledge of wind and tide and current.
And to achieve the ard-na-speire it is least hard on everyone i
f the ship has a moving start, for any of a dozen different reasons all turning on unbudgeable points of interstellar physics. All of which Arthur had chosen to ignore, here, now…
The jar as Prydwen leaped out of space-normal was indescribable. I do not think a single person on board kept his seat, and many of us were trying, indeed, to keep our gorges where they belonged. But at least we seemed to be all alive, and that alone was starfleet history… When I could see again, past the burst blood-vessels in my eyes and the red-hot sgians poking at my skull from the inside out (sudden entry into hyperspace will do that to you, and often worse), I blinked away the bloody tears and stared out the viewport in disbelief.
Oh, we were in the ard-na-speire, no doubt about it; what was so amazing was that the Marro had come too. Its jaws locked on our flanks as ours upon its own had not lost their grip, and now it tumbled with us over and over, top-for-toe, through the blue fretfire of hyperspace. Well, this was certainly a novel solution to what had been our problem, and as certainly it got the danger of the Marro away from Keltia; but unfortunately it gave us a whole new set of problems, and I had the surest and most terrible feeling that Arthur was not yet done with his solving…
It is no joy always to be right, though I say so in all modesty and only where Arthur is concerned; and nor did it take much cleverness on my part, to read him so closely and correctly. I had known him since we were five years old; and though I could generally predict with a fair degree of certainty what he would or would not think or do in a particular situation, still after all these years I could never predict how; which is why what came next came as a surprise even to me.
What came next has become legend even in the few brief years since it all took place; indeed, I think it leaped into legend even as it was happening, even as we ourselves went into legend along with it… But as Arthur had been speaking fair to Jaun-Zuria, he had also been privily busy coding certain sequences, the first of which had scooped us into the ard-na-speire; and now as we were hurtling toward the place in which his subsequent codings were meant to put us, he was also sending. Arthur was speaking to Keltia, sending a message back to our own people; and what he said now in this moment was simple and tremendous.
First he bid farewell, for himself and for all the rest of us on Prydwen; gave details of the fight at Camlann, lest stray enemy ships turn up in unguarded regions thinking to work harm; placed rule absolute and sole and uncontested into Gweniver’s hands, and Arawn’s after her. He asked that Keltia should not forget us, as we should not forget Keltia so long as memory remained.
And then he said the banner-words, the sword-words, the words imperishable, the words that have never died and never shall, not in the memory of any world.
"I will come back to you. When Keltia has need of me, I shall come again. I have not gone. So say I, Arthur King of Kelts, hear me gods."
That was all! And yet, as I heard those words pronounced on Prydwen’s hushed and war-wrecked bridge, as I felt them in my heart and saw them blaze like the Solas Sidhe on the faces of my comrades and Companions, as they assuredly blazed on the countenances and in the hearts of all aboard this ship and all in Keltia behind us, I knew, somehow, that Arthur spoke truth. He would not be forsworn. He would come again. I did not know how, or when, or to what purpose; but I knew it would be so.
And then his hand moved again, and, responsive as any biddable mettlesome mount, Prydwen gaited down beneath us, and when we burst from the ard-na-speire back into space-normal, we found ourselves in a strange place indeed, the place Arthur had contrived to bring us. We were in the heart of the Morimaruse, and the Marro was there with us.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-seven
Was once that mapmakers whose certain cartographical knowledge ran short or otherwise failed them would make up their lack with the cryptic caution, ‘Here be dragons.’ Well, like anything else, sometimes there were and other times there were not; but the warning served a purpose either way.
There was something of that same here-be-dragons sensibility clung to the Morimaruse. It was not a place we Kelts were strangers to—indeed, it had been one of the final spacemarks by which Brendan knew he was drawing near at last to the home we had been seeking—but we had ever maintained a healthy respect for it and all its little ways. It was not known as a galactic graveyard for naught…
Such places were by no means uncommon in the great interstellar reaches, though few were either so violent or so vast as this one. It was an electromagnetic derangement, an ionized hell twenty light-years across, spinning in the darkness of space like some huge malevolent Corryochren of the stars, its giant rolling clouds of spacedust shot through by fireflaws that could have swallowed suns. Donah had called Corryochren a mouth in the sea; well, the Morimaruse was a maw among the stars, and those whom it gulped down were gone for aye.
And now we were tossed upon its currents, all our systems blinded by the atomic chaos, the stars by which we might have steered hidden from even our direct sight by the roiling flashing clouds. But there was more to the Morimaruse than that, a kind of evil chill; it cared nothing for us or our little problems, never even noticed us at all, so intent was it upon its own business of hell and tumult and birthing stars.
I found that I could not look out the viewports at the thing, not without becoming deathly ill; something there was about this Dead Sea of Space that outraged perceptions and unbalanced inner equilibrium. So I looked at Arthur instead, as he stood there at the helm, and found to my astonishment that he was smiling.
"This is part of your plan, then?" I said snappishly. "We remove ourselves from Camlann and end up here—what difference, a sword through the throat or a spear through the heart? The end is the same either way."
Arthur’s smile vanished, and he was silent a moment, so that I had full leisure to wish I had not spoken at all.
"The end would have been the same in any case," he said quietly, so quietly that none but I heard him. "You knew that, Talyn, from Dun Aengus and otherwhere… It might have come at any time for any or for all of us; but it comes now, and this is how it shall come. At least we have left behind us victory, and glory, and a mystery for the ages. That is not such a bad bargain, surely."
"Nay," I muttered, sorry and chastened. "I know—It is just that we of the Companions have ridden long roads together, and it is one thing for us, and quite another for—others."
"Your grandsons," said Arthur. "And my great-nephews, I remind you… But do not fear for them, Tal-bach. Indeed, do not fear for any of us."
He turned his attention back to the screens as Prydwen rocked under fire from the Marro, and signalled to Elenna that we should return fire as she pleased. It seemed that we had still a battle on our hands, strange as that was to think on: and I attended to my own soldierly duties at my own post.
I was cheered somewhat by the enemy flagship’s apparent condition: We were in bad case, right enough, but they were in worse; and though it seemed all too likely that Prydwen should never come out of the Morimaruse, it was all but certain that the Marro should not do so. We were as two mortally wounded fighters in the fior-comlainn ring; the victory was ours, but we should be as perished as our defeated opponent in the winning of it.
Still, as Artos says, not so bad a bargain… Presently Arthur indicated that I might have my turn of duty-respite off the bridge, and I thankfully took myself away amidships. In the common-room aft which the Companions of the inner, old circle had more or less claimed for their own I found Daronwy and Roric deep in talk with Betwyr, and had scarce sat down to join them when Alannagh and Grehan Aoibhell’s cousin Tarsuinn came in.
Beyond the barest of greeting we did not speak for long and long; so well did we know the tenor of one another’s thought that it seemed but wasted effort to comment upon it. But though the silence was unstrained and companionable as ever, at length Daronwy broke it.
"Not so ill," she said, uncannily echoing Arthur’s own words. "It will sound most high and gallant in th
e history-texts by the time your little bardic friends are done with it, Talynno—how Artos and his Companions came to find their fate, and took the pride of the Coranian fleet with them for escort…"
"You speak as if all were settled," I said, my earlier annoyance suddenly back full force. "Must we give up just yet?"
Daronwy turned that old amused wry look of hers on me. "Have you troubled to look out the ports in the last few hours?" she asked, smiling with a certain pointedness. "If not settled just yet, it is not so far from it; and I for one would like to order my last hours, and my bones, as neatly as I might. Who knows but that someone will not find us here a thousand years from now? And if they do, I would like it to be seen that we did all correctly right to the last."
I deflated suddenly. "Oh, I know… and I am with you on that last, and this is an end I would have chosen—to be with all you, and with Artos, what end could be better found than this? When I think of the many, many times we thought our end was on us, and it turned out other wise—"
"And now it is upon us, and we feel that it is not," said Roric composedly. "Nothing strange there, my brother…" He put his arm round his mate’s shoulders, and Daronwy leaned into his side. "We are all glad to be together in this."
Save for the ones we left behind… But that was the unspoken thought in all hearts, and I forced myself to examine it in mine a little closer. I had never thought to die apart from Morgan, I realized, chagrined; when I had thought on it at all, I had confidently expected to lie down beside her one day and drift off to our next lives together, our arms round each other. Failing that, I had hoped, selfishly, that I might go first, that I would never have to bear the loss of her, the grief of her absence in my life; and now I was, and would not, and was glad. And I was ‘ware of a sudden envy of Roric and Daronwy, who at least were together here and would go out together when the time came…
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