Black Gold

by Paul Kenyon

  "Here he comes now."

  Fergus sauntered over, followed by a cluster of admirers. He was as big as Skytop, a square-bodied giant of a man with thick, stumpy legs. His kilt was like a horse blanket. Above it he wore only a cotton singlet that left his bare arms and shoulders bulging out like haunches of beef.

  "Weel, now, they tell me you be a red Indian," Fergus said.

  "My friends call me Sandy," Skytop said gravely.

  "Ye're a fine braw lad, Sandy, but ye maun hae Scots blood in ye to toss the caber properly."

  "I'm all Cherokee, but we practice all the time with redwood trees," Skytop said.

  Fergus had eliminated all the other contestants. It was between him and Skytop now. He grinned as Skytop took his place at one end of the pole. "Ye'll never get it off the ground, mon," he said.

  Skytop bent over and reached out with one hand. He picked the end of the tree trunk off the ground easily, then shoved. The audience gasped. The huge log was teetering upright, swaying twenty feet above their heads, its end resting in the ground. Before it had a chance to fall over, Skytop stooped it up with two meaty paws and cradled the shaved end like a baby, balancing it against his shoulder. He ran with it down the length of the field, keeping it balanced miraculously upright. At the end of his run, he heaved. The pole went up in the air, turning against the sky. It came down on its opposite end, twisting in a three-quarters turn, then fell forward. Skytop walked back to the Baroness. The crowd burst into spontaneous cheers, except for the Bane faction.

  Fergus glowered. None of the contestants, including himself, had been able to run more than a few steps with the caber. Penelope could see him breathing deeply, loosening his muscles, gearing himself up for an extra effort. He picked up the end of his caber and walked it to an upright position. A quick snatch, and it was cradled in his arms. He ran with it.

  He would have been all right if he'd been content with making the toss after a step or two. But he was trying to show Skytop up. He kept running, six strides, seven, eight. The pole was swaying off balance. He tried to keep it from falling over, but it was enormously heavy. Desperately he made the toss, trying to save the situation. But the tree trunk was leaning backward now. It went over the wrong way. He twisted and rolled, trying to avoid being swiped by the end of the trunk. The caber fell with a thud, landing in a horizontal position.

  Most of his other tosses were better. He made a half-dozen perfect points. But a couple of times he succumbed to the temptation to grandstand again. Skytop's tosses were all perfect. The last one he tossed one-handed.

  The Bane clan was silent. They'd lost a lot of money on Fergus, and they knew it. There was a lot of grumbling in the spectator ranks. Fergus approached his final toss grimly. He walked up to his pole and got it upright. "Dinna swinkt sae hard!" someone jeered from the crowd.

  It was too much for Fergus. With a bellow of rage, he turned and tossed the caber at Skytop and the Baroness. Both of them dodged out of the way; even a glancing blow would smash a skull. The huge pole just missed Skytop's head. The shaved end buried itself in the ground only an inch from Skytop's foot. With an angry cry he grabbed the pole before it could fall over and hurt someone. A quick change of grip, and he was picking it up by the base and hurling it like a titan's javelin. It went spinning in the air toward Fergus. Fergus stood transfixed, staring with horror at the flying tree. At the last moment he ducked. He didn't duck quite far enough. The tail end struck him a glancing blow on the ribs and knocked him flying. He lay on the ground, groaning. A bunch of Bane clansmen rushed over.

  There would have been a fight, but Sir Angus raised an imperious hand from the judges' stand. He made a point of walking over and shaking Skytop's hand. He scolded Fergus for poor sportsmanship, then saw to it that Fergus was led off to have his ribs attended to by a doctor.

  The dancing platform was cleared, and a group of apple-cheeked young girls took their positions, hands on hips, while a piper warmed up. The crowd drifted over to watch. Sir Angus walked over to Penelope's little group, concern showing on his face.

  "I must apologize for Fergus," he said. "He isn't used to losing."

  "That's very gracious of you, Sir Angus," Penelope said, "especially as you've just lost twenty thousand pounds."

  His Adam's apple worked. "Yes, well…"

  "Would you like a chance to win it back?"

  His face showed interest. "It's not the money, you understand. It's for the honor of the Bane clan."

  "Well, then, would you like a chance to win back your honor?"

  "What do you have in mind?"

  "The swordsmanship competition comes up next, after the dancing, doesn't it?"

  "Oh? Does your man fence, too?"

  "Not Joseph. Tommy Sumo, here." She pulled Sumo forward.

  Sir Angus nodded at him. "Studied fencing, have you?"

  "I'll have to warn you," Penelope said, "Tommy is an expert."

  "Hmm, yes. Well, I'll see what I can do about getting him into a claith veg match. That's the claybeg, the small sword with the basket hilt. Very much like a fencing foil in weight and feel. I'm sure your man can adjust to it. But I'm afraid I must decline the bet."

  "Not the claith veg match," Penelope said. "The claith mhor."

  Sir Angus looked startled. "The claymore? My dear lady, do you know what the classic claymore weighs? Twenty or twenty-five pounds." He cast a glance over Sumo's slight, wiry figure. Sumo's suit hid the compact, iron-hard muscles that snaked across his slight body; with his clothes on, he looked skinny, almost frail.

  "I know," Penelope said.

  "I mean no disrespect," Sir Angus said, "but your man looks as if he'd have difficulty even in lifting the thing up. And it's naked blades, you know. It could be dangerous."

  "I'll take a chance," Sumo said.

  "Double or nothing," Penelope said.

  Sir Angus hemmed and hawed, but the thought of the ten thousand pounds he'd already forfeited was too much for him. "All right," he said, "I'll arrange it."

  It was midafternoon by now. Sumo stood on a level patch of sward, stripped to the waist. He'd rolled up his trousers and taken off his shoes and socks. He hefted the claymore they'd given him. "Heavy," he said. "About the same weight as my samurai swords. I'll have to make it fairly quick, before he wears me down."

  Sawney MacCaig was across the patch of turf, surrounded by well-wishers. He was bare-chested, too. His torso was broad and smooth, banded with rubbery-looking muscle. His movements were quick and controlled. He had a freckled, good-natured face that wasn't so good-natured when you took a careful look at it. Then the amiable grin became a mechanical rictus, the learned response of a clever animal who must live among men. The frank blue eyes under their ginger brows were as cold as cracked ice.

  The Bane people were subdued. They knew something was up. They couldn't have known about Sir Angus' new bet, but they sensed that the match was important.

  But Sawney couldn't lose, could he? He was Highlands champion.

  He picked up his claymore one-handed and slapped its blade against his palm. That one gesture said a lot. It told his opponent that he was facing an absolute master, that it wasn't any use even trying. It was psychological warfare, and it must have given him the necessary edge on many an occasion.

  Sumo took the sword they gave him. He lifted it with two hands in the correct academic posture. The moves were amazingly like those used in samurai combat. When one has a big, two-handed sword over four feet long to handle, the right moves are the right moves, no matter what the culture.

  Penelope watched as the two men moved into position. The crowd was jammed around her. Joe Sky top's huge bulk was at her left. At her right was a rustic-looking lad who was leaning on something that looked like a long-handled sledgehammer. He'd been one of the contestants in the hammer throw. He smiled apologetically as the lumpy-looking head brushed her foot, then moved it a couple of inches. Somebody else was crowding her from behind.

  Sumo and MacCaig were a
t it now, thrust and parry, swing and block, a ritualized duel designed to yield maximum clatter of steel on steel for the benefit of spectators. Penelope watched MacCaig. She caught that fractional moment when MacCaig's body stiffened as he realized, one professional to another, that the man he was facing was as good as he was.

  MacCaig's style abruptly changed. He pressed the attack aggressively. He wasn't kidding. Penelope watched Sumo bring his blade up to parry a swing that would have hacked his arm off. He slid his blade free and made a straight thrust that MacCaig, in the etiquette of the match, should have utilized as an opportunity to demonstrate his own blocking technique. Instead, he let it reach him, knowing that Sumo wasn't going to hurt him, and sliced downward in a cut that would have taken off Sumo's leg at the hip if he hadn't danced ungracefully aside. MacCaig laughed, and a few louts in the audience laughed with him.

  Now Sumo knew that he was fighting to avoid being hurt. MacCaig's tactics were just short of being obvious. With a less skilled opponent, they would have constituted attempted murder. But MacCaig could tell the judges later that Sumo was a man who could take care of himself.

  He was wearing Sumo down. Penelope could see the sweat trickling down Sumo's ribs. If the fight had been a real one, Sumo would have been dead by now. Her eyes narrowed. MacCaig was a formidable opponent, indeed, if he were capable of beating Tom Sumo. Sumo was almost a match for her.

  Ironically, Sumo was slightly ahead on points. MacCaig's very tactics — his contemptuous refusal to demonstrate his parry technique when he had a chance to make Sumo uncomfortable — had insured that.

  MacCaig swung mightily, as if the sword were a baseball bat. It was a blow that couldn't be blocked without getting hurt. Sumo had had enough. MacCaig probably expected Sumo to duck underneath. That would have gotten Sumo an unsportsmanlike rap on the head with the flat of the blade.

  But Sumo jumped straight up in the air — a springy leap adapted from his karate technique. Both legs snapped to the horizontal so that MacCaig's swing wouldn't cut them off. MacCaig's broad flat blade whished under Sumo's buttocks with hardly a hair to spare. MacCaig spun off balance, pulled by his sword's momentum, surprised by the lack of resistance. Sumo whacked MacCaig on the top of the head with the flat of his own sword. He dropped lightly to his feet and danced out of range.

  The judges buzzed at one another. This was a new one. But there was nothing in the rules against it.

  MacCaig's amiable mask slipped, and the animal came through. With a howl of rage, he swung the claymore overhead and let go. It spun straight toward Sumo's head. Sumo's horrified expression told that he saw death. He was off balance himself at the moment, and he wasn't going to be able to dodge the claymore.

  In a blur of motion, the Baroness chopped the wrist of the youth standing next to her and snatched the hammer from him. In the same lightning movement she swung it up with two hands and flung it with deadly accuracy. The hammer pinwheeled through the air. There were actual sparks, plus a clang of metal, as it intercepted MacCaig's claymore. The two weapons dropped from in front of Sumo's drained face to the grass.

  For a moment, nobody realized what had happened. Then there was a rising babble of excitement. Bane clansmen rushed in to surround MacCaig and restrain him. The judges were shouting. There was a surge of people onto the greensward. The lad who owned the hammer was staring at the Baroness, his jaw hanging. Sir Angus Bane turned toward her and gave her a look that would have frozen boiling water.

  "He knows you're no dolly now," Skytop said, standing beside her. "But I guess you had to do it. Tommy's alive."

  From the look of things, the judges were going to declare Sumo the winner. He was ahead on points, after all. And MacCaig's poor sportsmanship would wipe out most of his own points.

  "Don't look so sad, Joseph," the Baroness said. "I've just taken close to a hundred thousand dollars off Sir Angus and disgraced the Banes. That should put the pressure on. I can hardly wait to see what he'll do about it."

  * * *

  "There it is," Duke said grimly, squinting across the gray waters. He was an American, a Vietnam War deserter: a black-bearded, painfully thin young man who had settled in Stockholm and married there.

  "The pigs!" Birgitta said. "Raping the ocean like that!" She was Duke's wife, an ethereal-looking blonde girl wearing an old army shirt, unbuttoned now so she could nurse the baby.

  The others in the small fishing vessel mumbled assent. There was a Dutch couple and two Swedes and an American girl from Brooklyn. They'd assembled at Friends of the Environment headquarters in Stockholm. FOE had assigned them to the part of the ecology fleet that was going to picket the Caledonian oil-drilling platform.

  Inga craned to see the rig. It rose out of the ocean on steel legs, an immense floating construction layered with decks and portholed cabins, extruding cranes and booms and topped by the towering framework of the drilling derrick. A small orange helicopter was just alighting on the landing platform.

  In the mist behind it, Inga could see the shadowy form of a Royal Navy destroyer. A small patrol boat was tied up at one of the columnar legs of the rig.

  "Ga door," the Dutch boy said. "They've called in the whole navy to protect them."

  "Well, we've got a fleet, too," Duke said.

  They all turned instinctively to look at the matchbox flotilla that bobbed in the ocean all around them. Every conceivable sort of craft was there: small sailing vessels, fishing boats, cruisers, and at least one large motor yacht. Several of them were flying the green-and-white-striped ecology flag, with its egg-shaped theta symbol in the corner.

  Inga gripped a stanchion with frozen fingers. Her long blonde hair was limp from the salt spray. They'd been in the North Sea for three days now, sailing to this spot at the boundary of the British and Norwegian sectors, where the oil rigs were thickest. They were going to form a floating picket line, a huge one with thousands of vessels, to keep supplies from being delivered to the platforms and generally to make things as inconvenient as possible. She knew it was a gallant but doomed effort. Most of the men and supplies were ferried by helicopter.

  She glanced again at the British destroyer. "They say the navy is there to protect the oil against sabotage," she said. "They've received threats."

  "Balls!" Duke said. "They're afraid of us. The Establishment will use any excuse to make things tough for us."

  "It wouldn't be a bad idea," the girl from Brooklyn said. Her name was Enid. She was a small, dark, intense girl dressed in jeans that had been cut off raggedly at midthigh and a man's sweatshirt that fell just short of the same point.

  "Yes," said one of the Swedes, an earnest boy named Sven. "Direct action; that's all they understand."

  "That's what we should be doing," Enid said. "Blow up their fucking rigs! Burn the oil and all that shit!"

  Surprisingly, it was Duke who put a stop to it. "Stuff that!" he said. "You know what we agreed to in Stockholm. Violence is out. No crazies. This is the biggest thing that ever happened in the movement. We can't afford to give the fucking power structure any excuse to say we're irresponsible."

  "That's right," Birgitta said. "They're the ones who are irresponsible."

  Inga watched the group narrowly for their reaction. Most of the others nodded in agreement. Sven looked as if he'd been slapped on the wrist; he'd only said what he had because it was part of the rhetoric. Even Enid subsided, though it was obvious she wanted to say more.

  Inga was satisfied that the environmentalists couldn't be behind SPOILER. She'd already radioed her conclusions to the Baroness, but she was sticking with the group just to play out the game. They'd all been thoroughly screened by the FOE people in Stockholm, and the most extreme activists had been eliminated. FOE wasn't taking any chances after all the other demonstrations that had been marred by the crazies. Inga herself had almost been turned down for the protest because she'd put on too good an act.

  "Look!" the Dutch boy said.

  They looked. A cutter was bearing down
on them. It had a shrouded cannon forward and another one aft. It hove to, almost swamping them with its bow wave.

  "Ahoy, you in the fishing vessel!" a man with a megaphone called down to them. "These are restricted waters!"

  In one accord, they all raised their hands and gave him the finger. Even at this distance, they could see his face turn red.

  Birgitta stood up, the baby still at her breast. She opened her shirt wider to give him a view of the other one. Inga had noticed that she was one of those aggressive nursers. "You are polluting our children's world!" she shouted at the naval officer.

  The baby lost its place and began to wail.

  "You people are committing an unlawful act!" the man with the megaphone said. "You'll all be open to prosecution!"

  "These are international waters!" Duke called out, his hands cupped around his mouth.

  The officer made a last try. "We won't be responsible for your safety!" he boomed at them.

  Beside Inga, the Dutch girl said, "I know their tactics. They'll run close to our boats and try to capsize us. They'll harass us by crossing our bows. If anything happens, they'll say it was our fault."

  "The French are worse," Sven said. "They boarded the yacht of a rich American when he sailed into restricted waters off Tahiti to protest one of their atomic tests and beat him so badly he was crippled for life."

  "They won't scare us," Duke said. "We're staying."

  The cutter started up. Its wake almost swamped them again. Duke took the wheel.

  The oil rig loomed closer, a many-legged enormity that dwarfed the toy boats around it. Inga could make out the word CALEDONIAN on a wind sock that fluttered from the helicopter pad on top. Dan Wharton was up there somewhere, working as an oil roughneck. She decided to do a lot of sunbathing to let him know she was down here. Between her and Birgitta, they were bound to get noticed.

  Chapter 11

  "Watch out for kelpies," Fiona said.