by Jack Whyte
The older man scowled, his glance sweeping me up and down dismissively. "Aye, do ye tell me?" he growled. "And what could he know about us that would bother us any more than a midge bite through thick cloth?"
My retort was quick, stung by his disdain. "I know you are honour-bound by the word of your High King to stay far from your stinking ally Lot of Cornwall and far from our shores until the release of your prince, Donuil!"
His eyes widened in shock and his head snapped around to look at Connor, who smiled and spoke to all of them. "He speaks the tongue well, does he not? "T'was Donuil himself, he tells me, who taught him the knack of it, teaching him the Erse out of the crude Gaelic his own people speak. They became friends, rather than captor and captive, it seems, and Donuil earned his freedom."
"And you believe him? Where is Donuil now, then? He never came home." His surprise mastered, Tearlach's scowl returned. The others ignored him, their eyes on Connor, who took his time before answering, swinging his seat back slowly until he faced me.
"Aye," he drawled, finally. "That is true, and it has been five years and more since he was taken. And yet, I think I believe him. Donuil is still here in Britain."
"Dead meat, too, if I'm any judge!"
Tearlach's words went unanswered. Connor sniffed, glancing down at the sleeping babe.
"Here, Sean," he said. "Take the wee boy and place him somewhere where he'll come to no harm."
The navigator moved to take the child and carried it away, disappearing in the direction of the area beneath the deck. Mine were the only eyes that followed him, but a movement from the seated chieftain brought my attention back to him. Slowly, his eyes never leaving me, he reached up and undid the clasp that held his cloak in place, then he reached up above him with both hands and grasped two of the ropes from which his chair was hung. Smoothly, effortlessly, the muscles of his arms bunched and he pulled himself erect, the cloak falling from him unheeded as he moved. When his weight was fully on his left leg, he swung the other and it fell to the deck with a solid thump, revealing a carved, wooden peg that stretched to his knee and was attached there by a large leather socket. The limb was a tapered cylinder, perfectly turned out of some dark, dense wood and polished to a high lustre. Above it he wore a rich, woollen tunic in the Roman style, pale green with a Grecian border in the same deep red as the symbols on his cloak, and the thigh beneath the hem, before it disappeared into the leather socket, was solid and roped with muscle. A breastplate of toughened, polished hide, moulded to his torso in the Roman style, was all the armour that he wore, and from his shoulders hung a crossed pair of belts, one supporting a sword and the other a dagger. I had great difficulty in not staring at the wooden leg, but I judged it wise to ignore it.
Connor stood there, still holding the ropes by which he had pulled himself up, and no one moved or spoke as he dragged his wooden leg back to where it would support his weight. The end of it was capped with several layers of leather, cut and fitted to the shape of the appendage's base. He lodged it firmly and then took time to feel the rhythm of the ship, swaying his body slightly to the motion of it. Finally, when he judged his balance sufficiently secure, he released the ropes and stood unsupported, looking at me.
"I still fall sometimes, but not often and I'm used to it now." He turned and walked to the rail around the deck, crossing the space in four steps, swinging the wooden limb out and around each time he moved it, so that his motion was more of a swagger than a walk. When he reached the rail, he turned back to face me, leaning his buttocks against it and bracing himself with his hands. "Well, Yellow Head, I don't know what to make of you, or what to do with you." He glanced at one of the others. "Padraic, what say you?"
The man addressed hawked loudly and spat over the side without looking at me. "I say Tearlach has the right of it. Donuil did not come home. This one should not go home, either."
The navigator reappeared and joined us, glancing from one to the other of his companions, trying to gauge their temper.
"We are talking still of Donuil and his fate," Connor informed him. " Tearlach and Padraic think this man should die. Do you?"
The navigator shrugged. " The babby's going to die. Donuil has been dead to us all for years. Everybody dies."
"The baby will not die," I interrupted him, addressing myself to Connor. "I told you, I know of a worm—"
"Be silent! You will hold your peace until required to speak." The reprimand was whiplash quick, savage and implacable. I subsided. Connor looked back at the navigator. "Scan?"
The navigator shook his head gently and with finality. "Throw him over the side."
"He can swim, Sean."
Sean sniffed. "Lachie could swim, too, but not after this one clove him with the axe. Could he do any better than Lachie?"
"Diarmid?"
Diarmid was the only one of the four who had so far remained silent, a large, red-faced man with a wild beard and a head of hair to match, judging by the thick, coarse ringlets that hung from beneath his big, horned helmet. Now, addressed directly by his leader, he turned his gaze on me and I saw his eyes, pale blue and cold. "He's an Outlander. Kill'im."
I followed all of this with disbelief, amazed at the change this Connor had undergone in the space of moments. When I had told him of my friendship with his brother, I had thought he believed me. He himself had said as much. What I was witnessing now, however, gave the lie to all of that. He stood, looking down towards his knees, the fingers of his right hand scratching idly in the hair that swept back behind his ears. He finally withdrew his hand, inspecting the tips of his fingers as he rubbed them pensively with his thumb, then made a tutting sound and heaved a quick, sharp sigh.
"Well, Yellow Head," he said. "You hear the verdict of my trusted friends. 'They want you dead." He sucked air reflectively between his teeth. "But the decision is mine. And what do I have to guide me in the making of it? You!" He shot out an arm and pointed a long finger in my face. "You tell me that my brother is alive, and well, and living in Britain as your friend. As proof of that, you offer me words that he could have told you at any time, under any kind of duress, and I have said I do believe that lie is here in Britain." The arm fell back to his side.
"But Tearlach could have the right of it. Donuil might be dead in Britain. How am I to know?
"And what of the child, the starving babby there? Whose child is he? Not yours, for you said you did not know beyond a doubt your cousin killed your wife. Your wife is dead, but had the child been yours and taken by your cousin, then you would know, beyond a doubt, his guilt. And then the 'cousin' that you found was not your cousin, but someone who had killed him and stripped his armour for his own purpose. Did he take the babby, too, for his own use? Or are we to believe you bore the infant with you, into war, new-born just weeks ago, in all your armour?
"So . . . the child's not yours. And yet you value it enough to risk your life to save it, not once, but twice? Whose child is this? And what could be his value to you, to me, to anyone? Here is a mystery, Yellow Head, and too profound for me. If the babby be not yours, and not your cousin's, then whose can it be, for it must belong to someone? And then I mind me that there were women among the slain whom you arrived too late to help. But who were the women? You say Ygraine, my sister, was one of them. I doubt that, Yellow Head, since you yourself have said you did not know my sister, other than by name. You may be lying, although to what end I could not guess, other than to extend your life, which might be good and ample reason."
"Deck, there!" The hail from above brought every eye sweeping up to the two lookouts on the spar above. "There's a body in the water!"
As everyone thronged to the side, I looked towards the shore and recognized the dunes and the rising hills I had descended earlier that day. Connor stood beside me, staring down, searching the water. I nudged him and pointed towards the land. We were close inshore now.
"This is the place. Look, you can see bodies up there on the sand."
He glanced to wher
e I pointed and swung to the navigator. "Take her ashore, as soon as we have secured that body!"
II
The business with the bereaved woman, potential wetnurse for the child, turned out to be quite simply taken care of. Once on shore, escorted by a group of warriors hand-picked by Connor, I had no difficulty finding my horse and my abandoned bow and quiver, after which I retraced my path to the clearing that contained the ruined farmstead and its scattered, pathetic corpses. The woman was still there, although she no longer knelt by her dead baby. Prompted by some motive known to her reeling mind alone, she had moved away and we found her wandering close by, among the bushes surrounding the ruin of her home. She gave no response to our greetings, her maddened, empty eyes betraying no awareness even of our presence, but she responded to the gentle urgings of guiding hands and accompanied us without protest. Only once did she resist, at the point where she was led from the clearing. She tugged her arms free and turned around, staring back, then made as if to return, but she had little fight left in her and quickly submitted to the restraining hands that held her again, after which she went where she was led, in a state of utter, uncaring docility.
Night fell as we made our way back towards Connor's galley, through a war-ravaged landscape that was almost completely alien to me. The moon broke through a gap in the clouds just as we approached the end of the solid, flint-strewn ground, marked by a ragged, eroded edge where the highest of spring tides had penetrated inland. Beyond that edge and less than the height of a tall man below its lip, the domain of the sea began in a flat-bottomed stretch of arid land composed of shale and clay and advancing sand. This barren, pebble-strewn strip, stippled with clumps of hardy grass that fought for life against the saline, briny sourness clogging its roots, extended southward and to the east, its clay and shale quickly giving way to sand and more sand, to where a series of tall, weed-crowned dunes swept up to block all sight or sound of the distant sea.
I drew rein, and my companions stopped with me, grouped around me motionless in that stillness that descends instantly from time to time upon men moving uncertainly in darkness through hostile territory. I ignored them, standing in my stirrups to look about me in the hush of total silence, my ears listening in vain for any sound of waves from the distant shore. Ahead of me and several hundred paces to my right, the first hill began to swell upward, angling southwest to where its steep-soaring might would also be truncated by the hungry sea to become the first of the frowning cliffs that stretched unbroken from there all the way to the farthest tip of the rugged peninsula of Cornwall. The moon was enormous, almost full, and its brightness lit the distant hillside well enough to throw shadows visible from where I sat, but it revealed no glimmer of water, south or east. None of my escort had sought to question mc, or to comment on the route I chose to follow. None could, for they were strangers here, more alien than I to these bleak lands that had belonged to Gulrhys Lot, the self-styled Duke, and later King, of Cornwall.
There were fifteen of us, and I the only one astride a horse. The others stood grouped around me, waist deep and deeper in the sturdy, stunted brush that coated the terrain here in wild, haphazard clumps and thickets separated by skeins of stony, lichen-covered ground too inhospitable to accommodate even these bushes' hardy roots. The biggest of the men, their leader Tearlach, glanced up at me.
"Well? Are we close?"
I considered how to respond. "We must be," I said eventually. "Or we ought to be. Can't see a thing from here." I cleared my throat, forcing myself to speak with an authority I did not possess in my present circumstances.
"They'll have a fire, a beacon light to guide us in, but we can't hope to see it from here, with all those dunes between us and the sea." I gestured upward with my chin to where the moonlit hillside reared above us in the southwest. "I'll ride up there and take a look. Wait for me here."
I swung my horse around and rode off at a canter, following the rim of the broken land adjacent to the beach. My horse Germanicus, the eighth of his name, moved with confidence now, far more secure than he had been before the moon had emerged to light his world, and I glanced up at the sky as I went, pleased to see that the clouds were clearing rapidly and that stars were now visible almost everywhere I looked.
Soon the ground began to shelve upward and we were on the hillside proper, above the invisible line that held back the scrubby whins and bushes, and moments later I saw the moonlight reflecting in a silver band across the waters beyond the dunes that now lay below and to my left. Higher we mounted, and with every stride, it seemed, my horse laid ever widening, moonlit vistas open to my gaze. We had almost reached the summit, however, before I saw the glow of distant firelight on the beach, miles to the east. I knew the fire must be a large one, but to my eyes it seemed the merest spark, so distant was it from my present perch, but it was a spark ignited and fed by an enemy, the brother of a friend, and he had in his keeping something more precious to me than life itself. When last I saw him, he had held my honour and my duty, carelessly but unknowingly, in the crook of his bent elbow.
A pounding in my chest told me I had been holding my breath, and I released it in a sibilant gust, sniffing thereafter and shaking my head briefly to clear it of unwelcome thoughts, before reining my mount around again and retracing my path downward to where my escort waited with the woman.
I found it in no way strange that they should have permitted me to ride off thus, alone. Mine was the only mount, and yet they had no fear I might attempt to flee. They knew—at least their leader knew—that I would do what I had set out to do. They had good reason to know how greatly I valued what they held of mine.
They could never have imagined how short of the truth their knowledge fell.
The moon held, lighting our way for the remainder of our journey, but it took us almost three more hours to make our way through the dunes and along the narrow strand to where the fire blazed, and Tearlach strode ahead of me for the last half mile, making better progress over the loose sand than my mount. The tide was far out when we arrived, and the great galley lay high and dry on the beach not far beyond the firelight, lolling on its side, for all the world like some giant sea beast.
One of the men on guard heard or saw our approach while we were still far distant and raised the alarm, but big Tearlach pulled a bull's horn from inside his scrip and blew a long, winding note that informed them who we were. When we arrived at the firelight's edge some time later, I dismounted and walked the last short distance with the others, dropping the ends of my horse's reins on the ground, confident in the training that would keep him standing there until I returned to him.
The galley's entire crew stood silent in the leaping light of the enormous fire, watching our arrival with great interest, ranged in a broad arc behind their commander. He stood alone, slightly ahead of his lieutenants, shadowed by the flickering of the flames beyond his left shoulder, bareheaded and with his arms crossed on his chest beneath his great, ground-sweeping cloak. Only the sound of our feet in the sand, the roaring of the pyre and the thin, incongruous wailing of a child broke the hush that lasted until Connor and I stood face to face beside the great fire. He gazed at me for long moments, his lips pursed beneath the swooping lines of his full moustache, and then his eyes moved to where the woman stood unmoving between two of his men, each of them holding her loosely by one elbow.
"So," he grunted eventually. "You found her. Did you have difficulty?"
"No, none at all. She had hardly moved from where I saw her last."
"Hmm. What tongue does she speak?" His gaze remained fixed on the woman.
I shook my head. "None that I know of. She has made no sound since we picked her up."
He looked at me then, surprise showing in the speed with which his eyes sought mine. "Is she mute?"
"I doubt it. She is demented, unhinged by grief."
"Aye." His eyes swung back to the woman. "Well, we may be able to cure that." He nodded his head in a brief, sideways jerk, and one of his
lieutenants, who had been watching him more closely than the others, moved forward immediately and signalled to the men holding the woman's arms. He strode off and they followed him, leading the woman between them. Connor looked back to me.
"Well, Caius Merlyn," he said. "It would appear you have some truthfulness in you, at least. My tent is yonder, and I have some mead. Come you."
I ignored the implied insult and hesitated, torn by a strong desire to follow the woman and her escort, but resigned myself to following him to a smaller fire that burned outside the only tent on the beach, wondering as I went at the easy confidence of his swaying gait as he swung the carved wooden peg that had replaced his right leg. By the fire he waved me towards a wooden stool and disappeared into the tent to reappear moments later carrying a stoppered flask and two horn cups. He seated himself on a second stool and stretched his real leg out towards the fire, then pulled the stopper from the flask and filled a cup, passing it to me before pouring his own.
I sat without speaking, waiting until he had finished, gripping the flask securely between his knees and stoppering it one-handed before allowing it to fall by his feet. He gazed at me then with a trace of ironic amusement, then he raised his cup to his lips. I drank with him, feeling the fiery sweetness of the honeyed mead fill my mouth with a sudden, flowering burst of warmth and flavour, starting the saliva flowing strongly before sliding down my gullet to spread its liquid, energizing heat through my body, which I only now realized was deep chilled by the cold night air.
I shuddered with pleasure, feeling the fire's warmth reach out, as though suddenly to caress me. He drank more deeply than had I, and when he lowered his cup with a satisfied sigh I knew it was empty. And then he was standing again, looming above me.
"Stay here," he said. "Enjoy the fire. I'll be back presently."