For King and Country

by Robert Asprin

  A column of stone had been cut away to form a standing pedestal on which rested a massive iron anvil. Leather bellows hung above the coals, held in place by iron brackets in a neighboring flowstone column. A path of stepping stones had been laid across the lake, a pathway which would, if previous experience were any indication, soon be underwater, given the amount of rain falling above. At times, the entire island was underwater. Her timing tonight was, as ever, flawless. Her tools stood ready, waiting only her hand and Myrddin's unwitting cooperation.

  "I wanted to show you everything," she murmured, slipping her hand into his. "I lit the fires and brought down all the tools I would need to finish forging a dagger blade I'm making just for you. Help me operate the bellows?"

  He laughed in open delight. "It would be the greatest honor of my life, dear heart."

  She kissed him, then led the way quickly across the stepping stones. She had already poured wine into two silver goblets. A full wineskin stood nearby. "A toast," she smiled, lifting them and handing the drugged goblet to Myrddin. "To victory."

  He touched rims with hers, then drank deeply. "Show me what to do."

  She sipped, then demonstrated how to operate the bellows. "Yes, that's perfect," she nodded as the coals hissed and flared brilliantly gold in the center.

  She lifted a nearly finished dagger, which needed only a final touchup with the hammer before tempering the blade. She used heavy tongs to slide it into the coals, watching the color of the metal with a critical, practiced eye. The moment it was ready, she slid it out, laid it against the anvil, and snatched up the hammer, striking sparks and quickly working up a sweat.

  "More wine?" Myrddin asked, gulping the last of his as he pumped the bellows. That was hard work in itself.

  She shook her head. "No, I'll not pause a moment until it's done. Pour another for yourself, you can leave the bellows a moment while I hammer."

  He drank, then worked the bellows again at her direction, sending gusts of air across the coals. He made a hefty dent in the wineskin as she evened out the blade along its length, working more for show than because the knife needed more shaping. She was nearing the point of completion when the drugged wine began to tell on her victim. He was blinking more often and he lifted his arms with increasing difficulty when directed to operate the bellows. When he started to stagger, nearly going to his knees, Covianna flashed him a bright smile. " 'Tis hard work, operating the bellows. Even young apprentices find it exhausting."

  He muttered something into his beard and made an effort to hold onto the big wooden handles. She smiled to herself and waited a bit longer, putting the finishing touches on the weapon of his destruction. It didn't take long. He slid to the ground, blinking in confusion.

  "Almost done," she said cheerfully. "All it needs now is the quenching."

  Lifting the glowing dagger in her tongs, gripping with the strength she had gained over many years at the forge, Covianna turned and knelt. She smiled down into Myrddin's eyes—and slid the blade deep into the old man's belly.

  He screamed, eyes flying wide in shock and pain.

  She ruffled his hair. "Poor old fool. Don't you remember the secret of Damascus? You taught it to me, yourself."

  The blade hissed and steamed in his wine-laden belly while blood poured across the haft and dripped off the end of the tongs. His mouth worked. One hand came up to grip her arm weakly.

  "Why?"

  She brushed his cheek with her fingertips. "You should never," she murmured, kissing his mouth softly, "have urged Artorius to murder Marguase. She was my first mentor and a far better alchemist than you could ever hope to be. My poor, gullible little fool." She pulled the blade out and blood gushed from the wound. He collapsed backwards, ashen from blood loss and shock.

  "Don't worry, love. You won't be long in dying. Even if you managed to stop the bleeding, the water is rising."

  As she spoke, she bound his wrists and ankles, tying him firmly to the base of the nearest flowstone column, dragging him across the stone floor in a long smear of blood. He cried out weakly in pain, unable to do more than shudder. She bound him with his head down, toward the water lapping at the rim of the island, less than six inches below his face.

  "It'll be over your head soon," she smiled. "If you're still alive when it reaches your mouth and nose. Oh, before I forget—and just in case you're wondering—this is precisely how I forged Caliburn. Artorius' young cousin was as great a fool as you. Don't worry, darling. Once you're nicely dead, I'll come cut up the pieces and let the Goddess sweep them away, as I did with that little idiot. You deserve no less than he, after all. And who knows? Perhaps I'll give birth to your brat and send it to the afterlife to join you."

  She gave him a last kiss, piled her tools and newly forged weapon into her satchel, and left him to die, laughing gaily all the way home.

  * * *

  Morgana and Brenna McEgan were roused from sleep perhaps an hour short of dawn by an urgent pounding on the door of the cottage where they, along with Riona Damhnait, had arranged to spend the night. The fisherman who owned the cottage, the same man who had captained the sloop which had ferried Medraut and Lailoken to Dalriada, answered the summons with alacrity, while Morgana and Riona both stumbled out of bed to see what the alarm might be.

  "A thousand pardons," a young voice gasped from beyond the open door, "but I must see Queen Morgana immediately!"

  It was Cleary, the young cleric who had recorded the marriage and treaty arrangements.

  Morgana exchanged a worried look with the Irish Druidess before stepping into the light of the fisherman's oil lamp.

  "What is it, Cleary?" she asked quietly, images of multitudinous possible disasters running through her mind.

  "Father Auliffe sent me," the lad explained, voice shaking. "There's trouble, Queen Morgana, perhaps very bad trouble. I was to room with Lailoken, your new minstrel, and I thought it peculiar when he slipped away in the middle of the night. Saddled his horse, put his belongings on a packhorse, and left very fast indeed, down the coast road toward Caerleul. I might not have thought anything amiss, but a rider has come from across the border with Strathclyde, bringing dreadful news from Dalriada. Oh, Queen Morgana, I can hardly bear to tell you what's happened." The boy's eyes swam with tears and his hands shook.

  She rested a hand on his arm. "Tell me."

  "It was a boy, Queen Morgana, a young Briton taken into slavery across the border between Strathclyde and Dalriada. He and his whole family were taken, sold to a farmhold just outside Fortress Dunadd. He said they woke this morning to the sight of carrion crows, thousands of them, and the wind carried a sickly stench. His master rode into Dunadd and found..." Cleary gulped, voice trembling. "The whole town was dying, everyone. People in convulsions, vomiting, paralyzed, a terrible plague or... or..." he cast a mortified glance at Riona Damhnait, who had gone ashen in the lamplight, "or perhaps some terrible poison. Everyone, Queen Morgana, from the royal household at the fortress to the lowest fisherman's hovel.

  "The boy's master promised him not only his freedom but the freedom of his whole family if he could ride overland through Briton territory and carry a message in time to King Dallan mac Dalriada." Cleary was openly weeping, now. "The abbot, Father Auliffe, fears treachery, Saxon treachery. And none of us know Lailoken so very well. Why should he ride away so quickly in the middle of the night, just before news of this disaster at Dunadd could reach us? The abbot sent me to fetch you and Riona Damhnait, while he brings King Medraut and Queen Keelin."

  Morgana felt faint with shock, compounded infinitely by Brenna McEgan's utter horror. The look in Riona's eyes was one Brenna had seen only too often, a look of sanity strained by news so dreadful, by betrayal so deep, the mind could not properly take in the scope of disaster.

  "Has King Dallan already sailed?" Morgana whispered, praying that he had not.

  "He has. I ran to the shore first, hoping to stop him and deliver the warning. He had already said his good-byes to Queen Keeli
n, saying he did not want to wait longer and miss the tide."

  Brenna's memory flashed to a sharp image, of Lailoken handing a wine cask to the Irish king, of the look in the minstrel's eyes when Father Auliffe had insisted they share the communion wine, instead. The wine had been poisoned, she could see it clearly, now, when it was too late. Lailoken must be hosting Cedric Banning, there could be no other explanation for his swift departure—or the mass destruction of the entire Dalriadan capital. How had he accomplished it? Weapons of mass destruction were a terrorist's stock in trade—Brenna knew that only too well—but what weapon could Banning have concocted in the sixth century? Nerve agents or even something as ordinary as mustard gas required chemistry far beyond the reach of anything Banning could possibly have access to, here and now. She tried to focus on the symptoms, to deduce what kind of poison he might have used. Morgana, at least, knew something of poisons.

  Witch's bane? she wondered grimly. It's potent, but how could he have acquired such an immense supply and delivered it?

  "Oh, dear God," Brenna moaned, making a sudden connection between the cask of wine, the bottles she'd glimpsed in Lailoken's "peddlar's" pack, and the most toxic poison in the world—easily grown inside sealed bottles of rotten food. In the time he'd been here already, Cedric Banning could have grown more than enough to poison a whole town, and then some. "He's grown botulism!"

  "What is this word, botulism?" Riona demanded in a hard, cold voice.

  Morgana had pressed hands to her cheeks, which felt clammy and cold, even to her own fingers. Brenna had to answer, as Morgana knew nothing of it, either. "If one allows food to rot inside a sealed container, a potent poison grows in it. He must have mixed dirt in with it, to ensure the botulism would grow and produce the toxins." Morgana, grasping desperately at some explanation that would prevent further disaster to Brythonic-Irish relations, added in a shaking voice, "If Lailoken is a Saxon agent, dear God, he must be a Saxon agent, they've already shown themselves capable of the worst kinds of slaughter. A man who could order infants hacked into pieces could order anything. And I was a fool and trusted Lailoken, sent him to the very people I wanted to make peace with."

  She lifted ravaged eyes to meet Riona's gaze. "We must sail after Dallan mac Dalriada at once. I have to stop him or anyone else who might drink from that wine cask. Pray God he has not already tasted it. And riders must be sent after Lailoken. I want him found and brought back to me, alive and in chains." She turned to the fisherman and his family, who watched silently, eyes wide in naked horror. "Can you take us out tonight? Is your boat fast enough to catch the Irish king?"

  "God will lend us wings," he choked out, "for catch him we must." He hurried away, shouting orders and sending runners to rouse his crew for immediate departure.

  Morgana turned to the Irish Druidess, dreading what must be said next. Riona Damhnait held her gaze for a long, ugly moment, gauging Morgana's words and the genuineness of the emotion behind them. After a long and dangerous moment beneath a shuttered, thoroughly reptilian stare, something softened behind the other woman's eyes. Tears came, for the first time.

  "I do believe you know nothing of this."

  Morgana could only shake her head. "Would I be willing to sail after Dallan mac Dalriada myself, otherwise?"

  "The Saxons truly are such barbarians, they would slaughter a whole town of innocents?"

  Morgana wiped wetness from her cheeks. "To sow dissention between our people, to ensure we are busy fighting in the north, so they have free rein in the south? Oh, yes, I believe they would stoop to anything to destroy us. All of us."

  "Then they must be stopped," she said, with such utter coldness, Morgana shivered.

  Brenna recognized that sound. It was the sound of an Irish soul roused to vengeance. God help them, it was something bred into the Irish, bred into their Irish bones and blood, centuries of cold-hearted rage at wrongs committed, determination to strike back at an enemy, whatever the cost. Had Brenna inadvertently tried to prevent the birth of one set of Irish hatreds only to help spawn another? Would the mass murder of an entire Irish colony, which should have been destined to hold power in the Scottish Lowlands for centuries to come, change history sufficiently to destroy everything Brenna had known, everyone Brenna had loved? Had Banning already succeeded in carrying out his mission?

  The worst of it was, Brenna realized she might never know.

  Even if the Irish didn't kill her in retribution—and she held no illusions about Dallan mac Dalriada's reaction, regardless of what his Druidess might now believe—even if she survived the Irish, who could say whether time had fractured sufficiently to trap her in Morgana's mind forever? It occurred to Brenna McEgan that she might never reach home again. And in the same moment, she realized she was no longer sure what—or where—home might be.

  Belfast and Londonderry?

  The shot-up, bombed-out ghettoes that she herself had fled from years previously, trying to forget the killing and her own, monstrous part in it? She had tried to start over once, already, in a place that was, although just as virulently Irish, at least not involved in a perpetual self-massacre of the type which had gripped Northern Ireland for centuries. Dublin was the home she'd known for more than ten years now, but what sort of home was it, for a Londonderry girl? She'd been living in exile for more than a decade, trying to run away from the troubles of her own countrymen. And just look at where that had landed her.

  Running away from a society gone mad was no answer to the madness.

  It only left the madmen that much freer to spill their insanity into more innocent lives.

  The lesson had come late. Perhaps too late. Once learned, there was only one way in which to answer it. Immediate, drastic action was needed to prevent the lesson being taught to other wide-eyed fools like herself. There was no answer for the Northern Ireland she had fled, not short of separating the children born to both sides from their parents, from their uncles and cousins, and from one another, putting them into public creches to be raised for the next three or four generations, in some last-ditch effort to give the hatred and the blood feuds a chance to die out and let something healthier grow in its place. Either that, or they'd all wake up one fine morning to discover each side had slaughtered the other in its sleep and they'd all arrived at hell's gates together, to spend eternity snarling and blaming one another for the hell they'd all built. The devil must laugh each time another Irish fool with a bomb blew up some poor baby in his pram.

  Northern Ireland wasn't dying, it was already dead, soul-deep and rotted out. And the only people who hadn't figured it out, yet, were the Northern Irish.

  A small knot of people came running up the strand, even as fishermen appeared from cottages up and down the little stretch of Lochmaben coast. Medraut, his face grey as dirty ice in the moonlight, skidded to a stop in front of his aunt. Her spirits lifted, however briefly, at the way young Keelin clutched his hand, holding onto what little security she had left. It touched Morgana deeply that the child could still trust them. Would to God it remained so.

  "You've heard the news from Father Auliffe?" Morgana asked quietly. "We depart the moment the fishermen hoist sail, to try and catch Dallan mac Dalriada's ship. My poor child," she turned to Keelin, whose eyes were reddened from weeping. "Would to God I could undo what the Saxons have done, and me the gullible idiot who let them in to do it."

  Keelin struggled for a moment to keep up a brave front, then spotted Riona Damhnait and collapsed into her kinswoman's arms, sobbing. Medraut hovered helplessly, wanting to comfort her, afraid she would reject the offer, wanting to strike at something, anything, to undo this monstrous damage. He turned finally to Morgana, anger seething through him like storm-slashed lightning. "Send me after that bastard Lailoken, Aunt! I'll rip out his heart with these hands" he held up curved claws, fingers rigid with rage, "and feed it as he deserves to my grieving bride!"

  "Nay, Medraut. He will be brought to us alive and unharmed."

  "But—"
>
  "The Irish, lad, will want him."

  Unholy glee shone abruptly in the boy's eyes, reminding her sickeningly of his mother, Marguase, the late and unlamented, she who had almost been queen of Ynys Manaw, had the darkness not taken her soul. Morgana determined to do all that was possible to keep that darkness from consuming Medraut, as well. "Lailoken will be found, Medraut. Found and returned to stand trial under Brythonic law and then handed over for trial by Irish law. He will pay for what he has unleashed. Never doubt that. But your task, nephew, and mine is another matter altogether."

  She had his attention now, at least. The ragged pacing and hyperactive, supercharged energy flooding out of him came to a brief standstill. "What is our task, Aunt? I don't know enough to rule Galwyddel at a time like this."

  "There is no better time, lad, with war threatening from the south and now an almost certainty from the north. There is but one thing we can do, Medraut. We sail after Dallan mac Dalriada and try to persuade him that we, too, are deeply betrayed by a Saxon spy we did not suspect until far too late."

  She saw it pass through his eyes, the realization that they were honor-bound to warn the Irish king, that he would probably order them killed in a hideous, slow manner befitting the crime, saw him look that death square in the eye and accept it. He nodded slowly. "Yes. It is the only honorable thing to do."

  Her throat tightened, seeing that. If Dallan mac Dalriada allowed them to live, Medraut would make a fine king, indeed. She rested a hand on his arm, unable to speak. He nodded again, not needing her words. Then he turned to his sobbing bride and gently gathered her close, stroking her hair. "We sail to catch your father and deliver the warning. You must be strong, my love, for the agony will strike his heart far more deeply, even, than yours, for he will feel the whole responsibility for failing them."