The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  In the courtyard, a ridge of turf had been built up and wooden planks laid atop to create a long table. Upon this a quantity of food had been spread: meats of all sorts: beef, pork, horse, poultry, salted fishes; milsén, wheat cakes and loaves; butter, sweet cream and soured cream, a variety of cheeses; milk—boiled, of course, and with honey added; beans and beets; two or three sorts of apples; and the three condiments: salt, leeks, and seaweed.

  There were some strange foods set out, as well. Kernels of some large yellow grain mixed with a flat, round, pale-green bean. Lumpish brown things that he thought roots of some sort. These looked and smelled not at all toothsome, and their odd aromas hinted that something out of the ordinary awaited.

  Hugh ó Flaherty greeted David in the courtyard, gripping his hand, as was the Irish custom. Hugh squeezed. David waited and Hugh squeezed harder and David waited some more. Finally, The ó Flaherty grunted and released him, then presented him with an arm bracelet as a hospitality-gift. David praised him for his open-handed generosity, all the while wondering was the old fox was up to. The guests, as was customary among the Irish, clapped their hands to show approval.

  Hugh led him to the center of the table, where a linen cloth had been laid across the planks and three high seats placed side by side. David’s standard-bearer already stood behind the rightmost one. On the left sat Naoife, his host’s wife, a rail-thin woman with falcon’s eyes. She welcomed David with a smile intended to be pleasant.

  Once David was seated, gillies hurried about the courtyard, serving out the food. David turned a little to the side and handed the armband to Gillapadraig, who sat beside him. “Have you ever seen the like of it?” he murmured.

  “Cunningly wrought,” his man-of-trust replied, “but the gems are only polished, not cut.”

  “Oh, it’s fine enough work,” David said, taking it back and slipping it onto his arm, where it nestled among twisting tatoos. “But when have you ever seen an eagle outspread and perched upon the sun?” He searched the crowd for what he knew he must find. The ó Flaherty held a platter of roasted boar to him and David took a portion.

  “Serving you with his own hand, is he?” Gillapadraig whispered. “He wants something.”

  “Is not this day full of surprises.”

  The guests were a mix of ó Flahertys and clans allied with them. David noted some rough men from Connemara, the rockiest part of Iar Connaught. Fell fighters, but clearly uncomfortable here among their betters. Their Pictish blood showed in their shorter stature and dark hair, prominent here in a tall sea of Gaelic red and blond. There were two Danes present. Both wore their hair twisted into long braids. The shorter Dane boasted a broad, flattish face, darker in coloring.

  David chewed the meat, savoring the juices. “Excellent boar,” he told his host as he continued to study the assembly.

  “I speared him myself,” ó Flaherty said.

  “Valiantly done.” David had no doubt that the boar was safely dead before ó Flaherty’s men-of-trust had allowed him to approach. Kings were not so plentiful as to waste them on the odd pig or two.

  Gillapadraig leaned close. “What are you looking for?”

  “Turlough and Little Hugh.”

  “Ó Flaherty would not be so bold!”

  “Would he not? He’s all twisted in on himself like those capitals the monks draw in their books. He’ll use the sons of Rory to bring down the sons of Cathal; and he’ll use Cathal’s sons to bring down Rory’s. It’s the use that delights him, not the cause. He brought me here so that I might take some word back to Cormac. What word, I don’t yet know.”

  He spotted them at last. Not the sons of Rory, after all, but at one with the strange foods and the odd eagle motif. Half a dozen men and women huddled in a small group in the back of the courtyard. Their hair was dark like the Connemara men. But Picts, like the Irish, greased their hair and pulled it out into spikes, while these braided their hair like Danes. The strangers shared with the shorter Dane the same flat features, and their skin was colored a dark copper.

  From the corner of his eye, David caught ó Flaherty’s feline smile.

  * * *

  Nothing so pleasures a man who believes himself clever than to succeed at some small trick. Hence, David was not surprised to find Rory’s sons waiting when The ó Flaherty led him into his hall after the banquet. Turlough was standing with his back to the fire, his arms clasped behind him. Little Hugh, his brother, sat at the long table with a bowl of uiscebeatha and not, by the evidence, his first of the evening. They both turned to face the doorway when David entered.

  “So?” Hugh blurted out. “Are you with us?” Turlough reached out and placed a silencing hand on his brother’s shoulder. Ó Flaherty closed the door upon them.

  “I haven’t spoken with him yet,” he told the brothers.

  David went to the board by the wall and found the jar of uiscebeatha and poured a bowl of his own. “I am with you in that we stand together in this room. Whether I am with you in any other fashion depends on where else you may stand.”

  Little Hugh, who had brightened at the first sentence, scowled upon hearing the second. Turlough grimaced. “That wasn’t funny, David.”

  “So. I hadn’t meant it to be.”

  “All the chiefs are with them,” ó Flaherty commented. Having closed the door on the little gathering, he too proceeded to the jug. “They’ve come and given their pledges.”

  “Oh, doubtless there’s been a regular procession through here,” David said. “I can even guess at the names of them. Oaths must have little value these days, if men discard them so lightly.”

  Ó Flaherty had fetched his drink and sat with Turlough and David. “I’ve sworn no oath to the ó Conners of Cruachan,” he said.

  David shrugged. Iar Connaught had never been counted a part of the kingdom. The ó Flaherty had been expelled from Connaught only a few generations earlier—and by the ó Conners of Cruachan. “And the others who have come?”

  Turlough spoke up. “What oaths they gave to my cousin he has forfeited by his feckless and dishonorable behavior.”

  “As an argument, that has its conveniences.”

  Turlough stood and leaned on the table with both fists. “He is ‘no-king.’ We’ve all agreed: ó Taidg, ó Flannigan, McGarrity…”

  David maintained composure. The consent of the four principal chiefs was needed to proclaim a king in Connaught, and Turlough had just named three of them. No wonder ó Flaherty had feasted him and covered him with honeyed words. Win over the ó Flynn and they could raise Turlough up on the very rock at Cruachan! He emptied his bowl and tossed it to the table, where it clattered and spun.

  “You haven’t mentioned Cormac,” he observed. “The Marshall of the Host may have some little say in the matter, whether the Four Chiefs forswear themselves or not.”

  “You’re his officer,” ó Flaherty said. “He listens to your advice.”

  “The McDermot has the most marvelous sort of ear. What goes into it is only what he permits.”

  Turlough struck the table. “The white rod is mine,” he insisted. “My father was High King!”

  “And what came of that,” said David, “but that the Foreigners came into Ireland? And there is the pebble over which all your plots will stumble. If I do come over, and if I do bring The McDermot with me, Aedh will turn to them, with their shirts of iron. They’ve already castled Meath and Leinster. Would you hand them Connaught, as well?” With a growl of disgust, he turned away.

  The ó Flaherty spoke quietly, and a little smugly. “The sons of Cathal are not the only party with iron-shirted friends.”

  * * *

  The ó Flaherty’s briugaid brought them into the room, the very strangers that David had noted earlier. With them came the two Danes and David suddenly realized, seeing them all together, that the shorter Dane was a half-breed: Danish blood mixed with these strangers.

  He studied these new Foreigners with great care, for he knew that ó Flaherty planned some d
evious trick involving them and he did not yet know what that trick would be. Nor, by all appearances, did the Foreigners, for they cast sidelong glances at their host, and all but one, despite their outward arrogance, displayed signs of wariness.

  Four he knew immediately for men-of-trust. Two entered first and two entered last and they stood to either side of the little group. Their clothing was a soft leather with fringes along the arms and leggings. From their belts hung short swords. On top of all, they wore iron shirts, not of mail as the Normans wore, but of metal sheets that had been shaped to their torso and wonderfully engraved with the likenesses of birds and wild plants. Two wore helmets, differently shaped than the Norman sort and topped with the brilliant plumage of an unknown bird.

  The three men who had attended the banquet with their women were obviously chiefs. They were tall, but they held their heads a little back, as if they sought to look down at the world from as great a height as possible. They wore the same soft leather garments as their bodyguards, but theirs had been inlaid with colorful beads and shells, and across their shoulders had been flung cloaks woven of a smooth fiber dyed in intricate patterns. Black hair, knotted behind their heads, was pierced by feathers. The man in the center wore in addition a circlet of silver: an eagle whose wings swept forward around his temples to hold between their tips over his brow a sun of hammered gold.

  And yet, confronted by this arrogant finery, David’s eye was caught by the last man, who hovered in the back of the group with the women—the only man who showed no wariness. He was shorter, wider, and darker than the others and his dress was a roughly-woven jacket, sashed in the front like a robe, which he wore over a kilt of a plain color. His head was wrapped in a towel so that David at first thought him injured. Then he thought him perhaps a priest of the Mohammedans. Later, he was told that the man was a servant, but his flat, unblinking eyes were like no gilly’s that David had ever seen. Had I a servant like that, he told himself as he stared into those arrogant eyes, I’d have him thrashed for his insolence.

  SUANTRAÍ

  “The ó Flaherty’s gone mad,” David announced that evening while he and his men were preparing for sleep.

  “Has he, now.” Gillapadraig took David’s cloak and draped it over his arm.

  “Pure Sweeney. I expected him to float off toward the roofbeams at any moment.”

  “Because of the New Iron Shirts?”

  “Because of the New Iron Shirts.” David pulled his knife from its sheath and threw it at the door, where it sank half a thumb into the wood. “Kevin, you sleep across the door tonight. Anyone who tries to enter, give him my welcome.” The clansman nodded and laid his cloak upon the rushes by the doorway. He pried David’s knife loose and placed it beside his pallet.

  Gillapadraig had been watching. “You expect the king to violate his hospitality?”

  David shrugged. “The ó Flaherty’s a fox, for all that he is mad. He won’t act dishonorably, but Turlough gave no pledge for my safety. The ó Flaherty is perfectly capable of closing his eyes, then expressing outrage afterward. There is a game being played here, and I don’t know which of them is playing the other, Turlough or The ó Flaherty. Both, maybe. If I’m dead, Fiachra is chief of the Sil Maelruain. Perhaps they think they can move my son more easily than me.”

  “They can move the Rock of Cruachan more easily than you. Why do you think your son might…?”

  “Because Fiachra is friendly with Donn Oc McGarrity and the other young men—and Donn Oc has gone over to Turlough. Aedh is too close to the Foreigners for their taste, so they have all given their pledges to Turlough. They talk big about driving the Foreigners out of Aire Land, but I mind a fable about bells and cats.”

  “But, if The ó Flaherty has brought in men the equal of the Foreigners…”

  “Then he is mad, as I’ve said. Remember how in the Holy Bible the Jews called on the Romans to help them against the Greeks—and then could not rid themselves of the Romans? So the king in Leinster called on the Foreigners to help him in his war against Rory and today Strongbow’s son is king there in all but name. Now The ó Flaherty would be calling on these new Foreigners for help against the old ones? That woman has a lot to answer for.”

  Gillapadraig paused before drawing off his own tunic. “Which woman would that be?”

  “The ó Rourke’s wife. It was because she slept with Rory that ó Rourke called for the Leinstermen’s aid in the first place.”

  Gillapadraig grunted. “It always comes down to a woman in the end. I’ll hang our clothing in the garderobe to kill the lice. Tell us about these New Foreigners. What are they like? Are they fighting men?”

  “They brought their women with them, so they are no war party. But the men look no strangers to battle, either. They were in a fight, and lately at that.”

  “Where do they come from?” Gillapadraig’s voice came from the small necessary. The dung pile that lay below the open grating provided the fumes that killed the lice.

  David shrugged. “I can tell you only what The ó Flaherty told me and I don’t know how much truth the story holds. The strangers spoke some unknown tongue. The dark Dane translated that into the Danish they speak in the Ice Land and the Galway Dane rendered that into Gaelic, but how much of the sense of it made it through that bramble, who can say? I follow the Danish a little, and…”

  There was a knock at the door. Two raps, followed by a pause, then another rap. “It’s Donnchad,” said Kevin. He unlatched the door and Donnchad ó Mulmoy slipped in. The clan na Mulmoy had been allied with the clan na Fhlainn since time unremembered and David had given Donnchad the command of the footmen in his party.

  “The men are all settled,” the newcomer told them, “and I’ve set watches. I do not trust these western men.”

  “Did you see any of those New Foreigners about?” David asked him.

  “The red-skins? Two of their men-of-trust stood guard outside The ó Flaherty’s hall, so I take it that they are bedded down within. To me, they would not answer hail or farewell, so they might have been cast from copper for all I could tell you. The other one, the one with the rag on his head, was about on some errand, but he only glowered at me when I hailed him.”

  “A friendly folk,” Gillapadraig said.

  “They are uneasy about something,” David told him. “And they sense that we may not be with them.”

  “What did you tell The ó Flaherty?”

  “I told him that I did not think that seven warriors, six women, and a gilly would drive William the Marshal into the sea.”

  “How did he answer?”

  “About as you may expect. That these are but an embassy and their warriors over the Western Sea are as numerous as the leaves in a forest.”

  “Did the Ice Lander tell you that? They’ve no trees in the Ice Land.”

  “Thorfinn Rafn’s son, he names himself. He is not from the Ice Land, but from some other place farther off. They call it the New-Found Land.”

  “‘New-found,’ is it? St. Brendan the Navigator sailed the shores of Ui Braiseal in the long ago.”

  David shrugged. “Thorfinn said that some of those who went with Eric the Red to the Green Land discovered it. He thinks two hundred years ago. Perhaps they went looking for Irishmen to plunder. It’s what vikings did back then, and ’tis said that a party of monks fled west from the Ice Land when the Danes first came to it.”

  “The Saga of the Lost Danes,” said Kevin. “I’ve heard that tale sung by their skalds down in Galway Town. When Leif went back, he found no trace of the settlement; only some cryptic runes. Then he vanished, too. I never thought it was true; only a saga the Ostmen made up for amusement.”

  “Olaf Gustaf’s son—he’s the tall one, the Galwegian—believed so, too. But he can understand the Danish that Thorfinn speaks. It’s near enough the Ice Land tongue. Olaf says it’s like talking to his grandsire’s grandsire. This Thorfinn claims that Leif’s party in the Vine Land met with savages—skraelings, they called them—
but found them easy enough to overawe. Then one day the skraelings were attacked from the south by an army of the ó Gonklins…”

  “Ó Gonklins, was it?” said Donnchad. “So they were Irish after all?”

  “It sounded like ‘ó Gonklin.’ They came as foot soldiers, like the old Roman legions, but with a troop of cavalry mounted on large, hairy horses. As shaggy as the ponies from Shet Land or Ice Land, yet as large as those the Foreigners ride. The skraelings ran, and Leif’s people saw that there was no fighting such a force. They were taken to the king of the ó Gonklins, who moved them to a city farther west, on the shore of a great inland sea, and that’s why the Green Landers never found them again.”

  “That makes a better saga than the one they sing in Galway,” Kevin admitted.

  “The ó Gonklins were pushing their empire into the plains and so had little interest in the Green Land Danes. They kept a watch on the northern shores and captured any Green Lander vessel that came near thereafter, settling their crews in the new Danish towns on the Inland Sea. That’s why the Green Landers gave up sailing those waters. No one ever came back.”

  “In Galway Town,” Kevin said, “they say there is a maelstrom west of the Green Land that swallows ships whole.”

  David shrugged. “There is probably more to the story. I think the Danes helped The ó Gonklin capture the Grass Lands; and Thorfinn said something about giant hairy cattle and giant hairy elephants, but maybe Olaf misunderstood.”

  “Is it everything in their land that is giant and hairy, saving only the men?” Donnchad asked, and the others laughed.

  “So now their king is wondering where these Danes were after coming from?” guessed Gillapadraig.

  “Once he had pacified the marchlands—Thorfinn called it Thousand Lakes Land—the king thought to look east and sent these emissaries. At least, that was the story I was told. The ó Flaherty said that their ship made landfall out in ó Malley’s Country. Savages the Picts may be, but they know how to separate a man from his head. Yet the Red Foreigners, few as they are, drove them off. The survivors then made their coasting until they found the mouth of Lough Corrib. That’s where they found Olaf.”