[Celtic Legends 01.0] Twice Upon a Time

by Lisa Ann Verge

  Her passing would be honored like that of a king.

  Conor threw upon the pyre everything within Dún Conor: Spindles, baskets, the bolt of fine blue linen, the bed they’d shared and all its coverings, pails and baskets, and even the loom he’d carved from wood boated over from the mainland. When that was done, he yanked the thatching off the roof with his bare hands until blood stained the hay. That, too, joined the pyre.

  He carried up the cliff the curragh he’d built for her and settled it upon the mound. He climbed up the pyre with her cradled in his arms, and placed her form within it. He covered her with a woolen cloak and tucked it around the edges.

  Gazing upon her face, he thought: May the Christians be right. Let there be peace in death, which we have not in this life.

  When the sun set, he touched his lips to hers. Then he climbed down the wreckage of his life, and set the pyre afire.

  The flames hesitated, then caught, then caught some more, and then blazed with a violent leap to the sky, shooting sparks at the stars. His throat tightened, for the keening came next, the lamentation, the singing of great deeds, but his ears rang with an inner screeching that could not penetrate the dry walls of his throat. Her greatest deed was staying with the man whose folly had caused her so much anguish. Her bravest deed was in surviving so long pretending a joy which could never have touched her broken heart. He watched the flames devour the pyre, basking in the last heat he’d ever feel from his wife.

  In the orange glow, he worked his way down the side of the cliff to where his curragh waited in the lee of a boulder. The blaze of the fire filled the night and the crackling drowned out the sound of the sea and wind. Let the priests on the north island think it a pagan rite. It would make Brigid laugh to think she’d confounded them to the end.

  Conor stood with one foot in the curragh, and the other on the sands of Inishmaan, his head tilted to the pyre, with the heat of tears running down his throat.

  Forgive me, my heart.

  There would never be another who would know who he was and understand. There would never be another heart so open, so brave, and so full.

  Within him, something cracked.

  Good night, my love.

  Good night.

  Part Two

  France, 1249 A.D.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was time for the Fair of St. Jean.

  Dust billowed up from the roads that threaded through the rolling domain of Champagne. Merchant caravans from all over Europe—and even from the distant East—plodded through the forests with archers and pikesmen guarding their flanks. Couriers on swift horses beat tracks into the earth, galloping past castles and monasteries and tilled fields, past carts mired in muddy pools, stopping only to pay tolls on privately held roads and river crossings before racing to one common destination.

  Every morning the enormous gates of the city of Troyes yawned open, welcoming all the riches of the world within the safety of the limestone walls.

  Conor plodded silently amid the lumbering caravans. A haze of dust salted his hair and settled deep into the creases of his face. The merchants welcomed him among the donkeys and the carts and the well-mounted men of their guard. It was rumored that this skilled doctor had followed the caravans from as far as the Holy Land, healing broken bones and foot sores, making a living of a sort as he followed the annual summer migration toward Troyes. Though he spoke little, ate even less, and asked for no more than safe passage among them, behind their silk-covered carts, the merchants wondered what a man of medicine with the bearing of a king and the silence of a monk was doing walking the roads of France, when the weight of his pouch and the fine cloth of his surcoat marked him a man of means.

  Their curiosity went unanswered, for whenever they edged a conversation toward his past, he would gaze at them with eyes as flat as worn silver coins.

  He was a mystery to them, a mystery to men who had voyaged from the sheep-dotted shores of England to the glittering Eastern palaces of infidels. Nothing seemed to affect him, not the frigid cold of the Alpine passes, not the sharp pebbles that penetrated the soles of his boots and left him, at one time, smearing bloody footprints along the dusty earth. He refused all offers of donkeys or horses, accepting only coin in payment for his services, continuing to walk like a pilgrim or a beggar. As the merchants neared Troyes, they celebrated and sang and danced, relieved that brigands had not stolen their shimmering silks, their precious pepper and spices, their wagonloads of rich wool cloth; had not struck them through with crude knives and left them bleeding on a road so far from their homes and families—yet their mysterious companion continued to plod along, straight-backed and mute; his feet in this world, his mind lost in another.

  Conor knew what they were thinking. He felt their sharp, curious gazes, but they affected him no more than the buzzing of flies in the July sun. Seven hundred years of wandering had a way of dulling a man’s senses.

  Yet one singular impression had broken through his thoughtless trudging in the past hours of the journey: The sticky sweet fragrance of ripening grapes had ceded to the gritty stench of smoke, the pungent aroma of tanneries, and the acrid odor of human sweat and urine. They approached Troyes in the height of summer after a rain. His next resting place.

  He jostled his way through the throng funneling through the iron gate. For the first time in a dozen leagues, he lifted his head from his dirty boots to glance at the city he’d not seen in several centuries. Timber post-and-beam houses still stood cheek by jowl, sagging against each other like tired old dogs. Stalls bowed in front of each house, laden with boots, belts, spoons, pots, and paternosters, surrounded by snapping burghers and garrulous housewives in white wimples. Stray dogs rasped against the pulled wool of his hose as they snarled and chased each other through the swarm.

  Aye, this place will do.

  Seeing the merchants distracted, Conor slipped down a shadowed street and melted into the crowd. He’d traveled with those burghers for too long. Something in the country air and the closeness of a shared fire bred a poisonous curiosity. They’d begun to ask too many probing questions, wondering too much about a past he could never divulge. There had been too great a stretch between cities.

  For in a bold, brash city such as Troyes, glittering with burghers’ wealth, stinking of cheese, and stuffed to the rim with transients from all over the world, fighting and screaming and raging in the twisted alleyways—in such a raucous town, a man could live and die—and live again—and no one would know the better of it.

  Moreover, no one would care.

  Conor lurched forward as someone barreled into his legs and nearly knocked his knees out from under him. Swift fingers skidded around his waist and tugged on the sacks slung around his hips. Conor seized a handful of scratchy wool just as the pickpocket wrenched to get away. He heaved the culprit to face him—only to be blasted with breath that stank of rotten fish.

  He thrust the creature away. The thief careened into an ass that brayed and narrowly missed kicking him senseless. Conor snorted the stench from his nostrils and stared at the dwarf splayed in the muck. The man’s eyes were small and bright with fury, his cheeks netted with ruddy veins, his beard slick with grease and speckled with a week’s worth of crumbs. He wore an ancient, food-spattered tunic with a kirtle below, and sleeves cut from a friar’s habit.

  Conor scooped up the man’s abandoned knife. “You’d do better knocking a man out with your stench,” he said as he planted a foot on the thief’s belly, “than knocking him down with your body.”

  “Are ye nothing but a cur,” the pickpocket said as his eyes widened on the knife in Conor’s hand, “to strike at a man in the dirt like a dog.”

  Conor’s gut wrenched like the shock of first food after a five-day fast. The man had a lilt—an Irish lilt. Conor had abandoned the land six hundred years ago. Yet there was no mistaking the distinctive brogue which garbled this man’s French. The sound vibrated through Conor’s head and echoed down through the centuries, riflin
g memories as a gale would scour the smooth surface of a lake—and sending ripples through waters best left untouched.

  “And what are you doing, beating on a poor old man like me?” The thief eyed the gathering crowd. “Fie on ye, stranger. Have you no Christian charity? I was walking about, minding my own affairs when you yanked me around.” He surged up against Conor’s boot, playing for the crowd. “I’m innocent, I am, or may the Good Lord drown me where I lay—”

  “Innocent as Lucifer.” Conor kicked at the leather sack lying clutched in the pickpocket’s hand. Conor’s own sandglass tumbled out. “You’re as bad at thieving as you are at lying.”

  “God’s Nails!” The Irishman frowned at the sandglass. “Devil a ha’penny is there in this.”

  “That’s your bad luck.” Conor tucked the knife in his belt and clanked the alms bag hung beside it. “For if you’d stolen this other sack, what a thundering spree you’d have had this night in Troyes.”

  The thief squinted up at him, a twinkle of speculation lighting his eye. “Is that a wee bit of the Irish I’m hearing coming out of your mouth?”

  With an angry swipe, Conor seized his bag. He’d learned French several centuries ago, but he had not been here long enough to pick it up without the hint of his original accent.

  “Saints preserve me! You are Irish.” The thief revealed a mouth gated with blackened teeth. “If I’d known that, sirrah, I wouldn’t have marked you. It’s a rare thing to be meeting an Irishman so far from home. Myself, I’m a Galway man.”

  “Save your jabbering.” Conor knotted his bag around his waist. “All the Irish in you won’t save you from an afternoon on the pillory.”

  “The pillory?” The thief planted his dirty fists on his hips. “Begob, we’re brothers, we are—”

  “I have no brother.” Or kin, or countrymen, not in this world. He curled his hand into the scruff of the thief’s tunic and hauled him away from the amused spectators. “And I have no liking for thieves.”

  “By the rood, ‘twas naught but a slip of my fingers—aye, aye,” the thief growled, catching the glare of Conor’s eye, “I see I can’t fool you, but you haven’t lost a Provins’ penny. You’ll be moving on, but if you put me on the pillory, I’ll be stinking until All Souls’ Day.”

  “That will be an improvement.”

  “I’ll have ye know that I’m worth more than my weight in gold to the man who knows how to appreciate me.”

  Conor paused in the street and searched the rooftops for a glimpse of a stony spire. In front of a church he’d find a pillory, and thus be rid of the needling of this creature’s brogue.

  The thief followed his gaze. “You’re new in Troyes?”

  “I’ve been here before, I have.” In the reign of Hugh Capet.

  “Then you’ll know that the pillory’s on yonder side of the city.”

  “Do you take me for a fool?”

  “I know this city like I know the scars on my own hands. I know which taverns water their wine and which whores are free of the pox. I know how to rid a straw mattress of bedbugs.” He eyed the tattered blue wool of Conor’s surcoat, the pulled embroidery on the neck and hem, then the dusty, beaten leather of his boots. “Is it a doctor you said you are? You’ll need some fixing up. Your boots could do with some mending. Now I know a cobbler who’ll fix them without asking for more than a penny.”

  Conor dropped his gaze to the moldy straw twisted around the thief’s legs. “If this cobbler’s so good, then you’d best be getting some boots of your own.”

  “I’ve been working on it, you know.” The thief toed a pebble out between the cobblestones. “I’d take a bit of honest work, if there was any to be had.”

  Conor felt it then—the slightest of tugs, a thin thread of connection twisting gently around him. He’d long learned to recognize the seemingly harmless little pull, for he knew if he allowed it, even for a moment, the thread would thicken and grow and then shackle him to the creatures of this world with their short, rude, fragile existences and their endless, wracking pain.

  He couldn’t let that happen again.

  Conor let the man go and dug a coin out of his sack. “Take this and be off with you, then.”

  The thief gaped at the sight of the gleaming gold. “You won’t be putting me on the pillory?”

  Conor shook his head in impatience. The thief’s black eyes glittered on the gold in Conor’s palm, but he made no attempt to snatch the coin away. His face grew ruddy, his eyes blacker, and he sucked in his lower lip until it looked as if he had swallowed half his bristled chin.

  Finally, he shook his head with a jerk. “Nay, you can’t rid yourself of me so easily, sirrah. I’m no beggar. Octavius here can earn his own keep.”

  Conor shook his head at a name that no Irish woman had ever called a son. “Be off with you, then, and find honest work.”

  “Indeed, sirrah, I already have.” The Irishman snapped his heels together with a muffled thud. “It’s my duty to see you settled right, you being an Irishman. You need someone to walk about the fair and gather your meals for a good price, and not let some blaggard steal your coins from you. You need someone to guide poor, sick souls to your side. Preferably rich ones. Do you know how many travelers arrive with festering foot sores and skin burnt scaly from the sun, how many Crusaders return from the Holy Lands with exotic ailments and—”

  “Enough.” The creature’s wretched accent needled him like long-forgotten fairy music. It was sleep he needed—the long, innocent sleep of the weary, the dreamless sleep of the innocent—wasn’t that a fine dream he’d never know. He’d have to settle for a bed and a moment’s uninterrupted rest, for his lids hung as heavy as lead.

  Conor scoured the Irishman’s face anew. “So you wish to be of service to me?”

  “Aye.”

  “Then lead me to an inn.”

  “You’ve no place to stay?” His beard crumpled against his chest. “Where did you think you were coming to? Every room in the city’s been reserved since Candlemas. The innkeepers are charging a king’s ransom just to sleep in the shadow of their doors.”

  Conor turned on his heel and clinked the coin back into his bag. It had been his experience that anything could be found anywhere at any time, as long as a man was willing to pay the price.

  “Now don’t be walking off, sirrah, I didn’t say I couldn’t—”

  Conor ignored the sputtering thief. Sooner or later, the Irishman would find other quarry. So Conor thrust himself into the churning mob, scrutinizing the large signs that hung from the storefronts. Just down an alleyway, he found what he wanted: a hostel with a bright red sign painted with the silhouette of a canopied bed.

  Just as he slipped down the narrow street, Octavius belched out of the crowd and stumbled against Conor’s heels.

  The thief regained his balance and stared at the inn incredulously. “Is it here you’re thinking of asking?”

  “I’ll do better negotiating if I don’t have a thief stinking of fish trailing me in.”

  Octavius leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. “I’ll wait here for the laughter that will follow you out.”

  The innkeeper did laugh, at first. Conor swiftly cut off his merriment by clanking his purse on the table between them. The familiar gleam of greed lit the innkeeper’s eyes. Stammering, he bustled into the back room and returned with a bulky ship of a woman whose face bore the stamp of the Vikings who’d once scoured these lands. Her watery red gaze took in Conor’s gold, clothes, and face with lazy avidity.

  Then the bargaining began, like an old dance. People never changed. The whole of a person’s character could be read with one glance into the eyes. Conor knew, staring into the flat, dun-colored orbs of the innkeeper’s wife, that she was already calculating heady profits. But though she couched her offers in vague language, Conor soon knew that this inn had no bed to offer, and the best he could get from them would be a straw pallet before the kitchen hearth, already crowded with a half-dozen other traveler
s, and at a price that would curl even a moneylender’s hair. Gathering his alms bag, he left the inn to search for another while Octavius clung to his heels.

  After Conor stormed out of the fourth inn in a row, Octavius swiveled into his path and wagged at him the greasy head of a chicken bone. “Are you ready to listen to me now, or are ye after asking every innkeeper in Troyes?”

  Conor seized the chicken bone and sent it flying into the gutter.

  “God’s Nails,” Octavius sputtered, “there was no need to be doing that—”

  “If you’ve something to tell me you’d best say it, or it’ll be your bones I throw into the street next.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Octavius began, “and I know of a burgher, a man as rich as Midas, with a ring for every finger and enough gold about his neck to put a king to shame. He’s in need of a doctor.” The little man edged closer. “He’s got a young daughter, an odd one, they say, fresh out of the convent. She’s sick near to death, and her father distraught, for he just lost a son. He’s full of fear of losing the daughter as well.”

  Conor rested an impatient gaze upon the thief, conveying wordlessly how little some burgher’s daughter’s fate meant to him, when in his endless life, he’d witnessed misery beyond any human’s imagining.

  “Don’t you see? The burgher has used every doctor in Troyes and none have been to his liking. You being a doctor and all, you could make a fine fee—”

  “It’s no fee I seek,” Conor snapped, “and I’ve no stomach to be pandering to some overfed burgher’s daughter with a bellyache.”

  “Aye, but this burgher’s daughter lives in a five-story house on the Grande Rue.” Octavius leaned back against a wall, crossed his arms, and toed one foot across the other. “There’s a soft bed in that palace, I suspect, for the doctor who cares well for the lass.”

  Conor’s eyes narrowed. “How would the likes of you know of the plight of a burgher’s daughter?”

  “I’ve ears, I do. Since the lass returned from the convent, she’s stirred up more than a mite of gossip.” With an odd, almost triumphant cackle, Octavius jerked away from the wall and danced a jig down the street. “Will ye be coming then? Or will you pass on a golden apple dropped in your lap from the skies above?”