by David Drake
Merlin said something aloud and the puddles of ale rejoined with a pop of blue fire.
"Well?" Arthur demanded.
"Perfect," said the wizard. "Exactly what you wanted." The old man looked up at his king "None of my spells kept the two pools apart after I'd given the names of these two. Not women nor wealth—nor fear. They won't abandon each other."
"And duty?" the king asked as if the two mercenaries were not in the room.
"Duty means standing by your friends," Starkad rumbled in German before Merlin answered.
Arthur laughed. "And trust means being sure of what a man will do," he said, "not thinking that he's a friend and so he'll back you. Sit down, Irishman—and you, too, Cruncher, though there's no work for you in this except for waiting here until your friend returns. I'll explain what it is we have in mind. . . ."
* * *
The fishing village—six houses, each owner kin to the other five—had been built at the higher end of the rocky beach. Above, the long, rank grass stretched eastward over the Cambrian hills, furring the spine of the promontory so that there was no one place on which a man could stand and see why it had been named Octapitarum—Eight-headed.
To the inhabitants, the baylet was a separate thing and not merely one facet of the seven of the headland. Indeed, the village was part of the greater world only as it chose—in normal times. About once a month the villagers emptied their drying sheds of the fish stacked there, layered with salt baked from tidal pools by the sun. They loaded the fish on oxcarts which then creaked along rocky paths in an all-day journey to the nearest of the great farms. There the fisherfolk would barter their catch for cloth and metal-work and sometimes ale better than their own sour, salty brew.
Had the villagers wished, the magnates inland would as willingly have come for the fish themselves. The price would have been effectively greater, since then the fishermen need not have kept oxen. But little as they cared to leave their notch in the island's wall, their home, the fishermen cared less to show visitors to it. Thus the arrival of King Muirchertach's embassy had been almost as unpleasant a shock to the villagers as if the fifty strangers were hostile, as they thought at first.
Mael listened to Arthur's account of the landing, grinning broadly. "What did they do?" he asked the king. Like Arthur, the Irishman had remained on his horse when the column halted. Starkad had dismounted as soon as the glittering sea announced they had reached their destination.
"Oh, they sent a boy running to the nearest villa," the king said also smiling. "They don't run very well either, you know. The owner of the villa whipped off a messenger to me and ran along behind with all his household as quick as he could. He thought it was a raid, too, and he knew these hovels—" Arthur nodded to the drystone huts—"weren't going to occupy the murdering Irish long. So . . . I took the half squadron I had on hand, rode thirty of the horses to death or to bonebreak, got lost twice pushing on at night. We got here at dawn, just in time to see these damned fishermen lugging their nets to their boats, pretending there wasn't a curragh pulled up on the shore and fifty men trying to sleep around greenwood fires while the locals ignored them. If we'd been half an hour later I wouldn't have seen the fishing boats. I'd probably have killed everybody on the shore." Arthur looked sidelong at Mael. "And then how would we have gotten you to Ireland, my dragon-snatcher?"
"Oh, you'd have found something," Mael said, his humor chilled at the thought of his mission. They were a huge company for this quiet opening to the sea. The Irish embassy had been loaned mounts for its return to the shore. Arthur accompanied Muirchertach's men with two hundred of his cataphracts, fully equipped as he himself was. The king's mail was silvered and the general sheen picked out by links washed in gold instead. A helmet with a long nose-guard covered his head. The helm had a faceted appearance because it was made of welded steel plates, carefully resilvered after each time dents had to be beaten out of it. To either side flared a gilded wing. Behind Arthur, a bearer raised the ancient war standard to snap and snarl in the wind.
"If this is such a peaceful embassy," Mael remarked, "why does it look like they're being escorted back to the coast by a warband?"
Arthur chuckled. "Oh, just honor due a fellow monarch, perhaps. Muirchertach's more than friendly, yes—to me. It seems there's trouble in Ireland—" and again Arthur's eyes darted unexpectedly at Mael—"and though he's not king of the Laigin yet, Muirchertach has notions for the future. He needs help. For the time, I've sent him one sword as a gift by way of his war chief Dubtach there." Arthur nodded at the burly leader of the embassy. The chieftain's red hair was bound back with a linen fillet and his chest was deliberately bare to display the battle scars on it. "Muirchertach hopes that one day I'll send more swords—and men of my own to carry them."
"You want Ireland, too?" Mael asked bluntly.
"It's part of the world, isn't it?" the king replied, and his words were too offhand to be a joke. Arthur looked out over his accompanying troops. They had formed in a double row as soon as the terrain had opened enough to position a hundred men abreast. To the right, the ground hung in terraced pastures sufficient for the goats and oxen; goats ran loose beyond as well, supplementing the grass with mast from stunted hardwoods. The Irish, with Gawain alone of Arthur's men riding along with them, were filing down the gentler slope toward the houses and the shoreline beyond on foot.
"In the meantime, I thought this would be a good time for a little . . . friendly demonstration," Arthur continued, obviously pleased at a chance to flaunt his abilities in front of a new listener. By now the king had to have heard about Mael's destruction of Lancelot the night before, but he had made no reference to it on the ride to the coast—unless requesting that Mael and Starkad be placed beside him was in itself a comment. "Thanks to you Irish becoming Christians—"
"Some Irish becoming Christians," Mael cut in sharply.
"Most of you Irish becoming Christians," the king went on smoothly, "and Vitalis' daughter marrying your High King . . . and most of all, I suppose, the Plague and the squabbles on your island that seem to have left fewer cutthroats to amuse and more at home to amuse them—" Arthur paused but Mael said nothing, only grinned across at the slender king. Arthur was baiting death as he dreamed of empire—"perhaps there wouldn't have been many raids here even without my Companions to deal with them. But it can't hurt to get word back that the Companions are here—and can deal with raiders—can it?"
Arthur nodded to his cornicine. That tallish Briton raised a coiled bronze horn to his lips and blew a single note. Downslope, close to the nearest outbuilding of the village, Gawain bent to speak briefly to Dubtach. Then the Companion cantered over to a smokehouse built of heavy timber. The building stood a score of yards to the right of the main path. Using the neck strap, Gawain hung from the ridgepole the plain shield he was carrying in place of his usual ornately studded one. He waved up the hill to Arthur, then rejoined the Irish. Dubtach challenged him, though the words of their argument were not intelligible at the distance. The Irish waited, bunched together, while Gawain and their leader spoke. Some of them watched the shield, their hands a little tighter than usual on their own weapons. The low, slate-roofed houses of the village had their shutters latched as if the visitors were a storm, but the boards trembled sideways and eyes within caught the light in stray reflections as the women looked on.
Arthur himself was in conversation with Cei, the two men leaning together so that their shoulders and helmets touched Their hands twitched in gestures that meant nothing except to each other. Starkad tapped Mael lightly on the right knee and used a tiny gesture of his head to indicate on the other side of Arthur the six riders who had moved up when the horn blew. Now they waited, talking among themselves in mild, high-pitched voices. They sounded from a short distance like the sing-song giggling of a girls' school. Their horses had no reins or saddles. The riders held bows with nocked arrows in their hands.
"Oh, yes. . . ." Mael said quietly. He had not noticed these m
en on the march. Perhaps they had been used as outriders, scouting the line. It was the sort of work they gloried in.
"You know them?" Starkad asked.
"I know of them. Huns." Mael stared openly. They were little men with black, coiled hair and flat faces. One was bare-chested. His skin was hairless and almost of a color with his breeches of supple leather tanned from rabbits or other small mammals. Only in size and the ease in which they sat on their mounts, knees high and calves flexed sharply backward, were the Huns uniform. Two more wore leather corselets, black from being hardened in boiling vinegar. The ancient bronze medallions of a dead legionary, traded eastward over the centuries and so polished with age that the reliefs had been worn almost away, glittered against one corselet.
Two of the other Huns wore mail, but while one set was of the highest quality—each ring a double coil that left almost no interstices for a point to enter—the other shirt was of scales of a type almost unknown in the West. They were large, up to three inches across the base, and made of aurochs' horn instead of metal. The scales were translucent gray and they shimmered as if still alive.
The sixth Hun wore no more armor than the first, only a linen tunic over his breeches, but despite the warm sun, he had a cape of marmot furs pinned at his shoulder. Its cowl was thrown back and the lustrous brown fur rippled down behind him.
"I fought them once with Hjalti's army," Starkad said. He ran an index finger along the peen of his axe as he counted silently. "Fourteen, fifteen years ago, that would be. Maybe if I live another hundred years or so, I'll want to fight Huns again."
Gawain shouted to the king from the midst of the Irishmen. The Companion waved his helmet as an all-clear signal.
"Now," said Arthur. His cornicine sucked a chestful of air, then blew a long note. The six Huns fanned forward at a gallop without noticeably directing their horses. The riders were shrieking like files on stone, each a different note and as bloodcurdling as the cries of the wounded when crows alight on their faces. The Huns shot as they rode, reloading in a single, natural motion with the draw and release. Their bows were short but heavy, recurved and stiffened with plates of horn and bone The staves averaged between a hundred and a hundred and twenty pounds of pull, so that only the flicker of points and white fletching was visible as the arrows slapped out at the target.
At the first shout and volley, half a dozen of the Irish dropped flat. But the Huns' target was the shield and the men standing twenty yards from it were as safe as if they were in Ireland. Despite the range and the gallop, none of the Hunnish arrows was more than a hand's breadth off the mark.
The shield wobbled. Arrows hitting it squarely made a double thunk as the shafts penetrated and struck the shed behind. Arrows that missed the shield sank to half their length in the heavy timbers. The target area was suddenly a deadly garden, the feathered ends of the arrows trembling like horizontal flowers in the sunlight.
As the riders yipped and thundered downslope, they opened gaps of about six feet between each man and his neighbor. For those on the ends of the line, the final volley was almost an edge-on shot at the shield as the charge swept around the smoke-house, three men to a side. The last arrows smacked into the target as surely as the first had.
In the gravel yard between two buildings, the Huns drew up and reformed. They cantered back around the shed, laughing and gibing among themselves. They utterly ignored the Irishmen who now clustered around the shield. There were over twenty arrows in or near the target. Dubtach tried to pull one out of the timber and found that the shaft splintered before the barbed head would release. There was awe in the faces of those who looked at the swarthy little men. Two of the Christian Irish surreptitiously crossed themselves.
"What do you think of my demonstration?" Arthur asked.
Mael jumped to realize that the king was again speaking to him. The Irishman smiled. His right hand rested on Starkad's shoulder in an unconscious gesture of affection, and from his saddle he looked across the big Dane's head toward Arthur. "Very nice," he said. "There's not a man down there—" his thumb generally indicated the Irish—"but believes every one of your Companions can ride and shoot like that. At home they'll spread the story and piece fable onto it—though by the Dagda's club, the truth is enough! You'll have an island defended by devils, here, and no place at all for a pirate to think of landing."
"But you aren't fooled," said the king, his lips still curved in what was either good humor or the start of a snarl.
"I've heard of Huns—and I've seen your . . .desire for discipline," Mael replied. "If you could find anybody else to do the job they do, you'd never in hell let these Huns parade like a troupe of buffoons, would you?"
It was a smile. "Yes," Arthur said, "and when they're drunk—which is generally—it is a devil's job to keep them from cutting every throat in reach before raping the warm bodies. But they have their uses, as you say."
The king looked back at the beach where the Irish were gathering about the curragh, preparing to launch it. "Time for you to join your kinsmen," Arthur said. He drummed his fingers, thin and paler than the backs of his hands, on his pommels. "Bring me back what I need, Irishman. Bring me back the skull. . . ."
Mael swung off his borrowed horse. "I'll walk, I think," he said.
Starkad echoed, "We'll walk. To the boat."
Arthur made no response. His eyes were as unfocused as a drugged man's, though his seat on his horse was firm.
Flints in the soil clacked beneath the hobnails in Mael's sandals as the friends trudged toward the sea. Starkad's huge feet were encased in boots sewn from single pieces of cowhide, supple and silent as he walked. They were laced around the outside. In colder weather the boots could be stuffed with rags for insulation and tied with one or two fewer wraps of the thongs.
Gawain rode past on his way back to Arthur, giving Mael a nod and a grin that could have meant anything. When they were beyond him but still long out of earshot of the Irish, Starkad said, "If we both got in the boat, friend, we could be well out to sea before any horsemen reached us. I've always wanted to see Ireland again."
"Umm," Mael said. "You watched that little archery practice just now?"
"They'd kill half the embassy if they started shooting at us in the middle of the boat," Starkad protested, starting to raise his voice.
"That's going to bother Huns?" Mael asked. "Or Arthur?"
The Dane chuckled. He said, "Umm. Yeah, he is mad, isn't he?" Then, "I wish I were leaving with you, friend. I really do wish that."
They were among the houses now, square, one-story buildings. Their east walls, away from the sea and the salt droplets the wind lashed from it during storms, were high and moss-furry. The doors and windows were there, now shuttered but able to be opened to the sun when it rose over the harsh ridge line. The roofs of the houses were slate, black stone frosted with the gray-green lichen despite the salt scouring. They sloped seaward more steeply than the hillside, so that the exposed western walls were only two or three feet high.
Mael glanced back at the seaward lines as they passed. The walls were blank, courses of limestone laid without mortar or even mud to fill the chinks. They were not relieved by windows or openings of any kind. Did the women of these fisher-folk not look up from their evening cooking, the eternal fish stew and bread baked in the coals from bartered flour, to see if their men were returning? To watch for the bobbing coracle that held father or brother or husband—or all three, perhaps, in the same man?
But the walls were as blind as the cliffs from which they were quarried, as expressionless as the sea they faced. And perhaps that was the explanation: the sea would have her way. To search her face for disaster was to multiply that certain disaster by as many days as she, laughing, withheld it. A stoic who ignored fate could be hurt only once—at a time.
"I wonder," Starkad said, wagging the axe on his shoulder just enough to call his friend's attention to it, "why Arthur let me and this so close to him today? Last night it was our lives or
our weapons before he'd let us come near. Does he think I love him now for making me a hostage?"
"I doubt he thinks anyone loves him," Mael said after brief reflection. "Mad, yes, but not stupid. . . . But you've noticed his foot?"
"He was whelped when the clay of his flesh was too wet," the Dane said. "Back home, a brat like that—well, the nights get cold on the kitchen middens, even in the summer. And there's always something hungry prowling there for what might be thrown out of the back doors."
Mael touched his lips in what could have been distaste, but man differed from man, and customs differed among peoples. One individual and another could cross lines of race and tribe to find friendship—but that did not make the differences less real. "On his horse," Mael explained, "Arthur's as steady as any other man with four legs under him. On his own feet, he—fears."
"He was born with more than his foot twisted," muttered Starkad.
The Irish had carried their curragh ashore rather than simply drawing it up on the beach at high tide. The crew had leaped into the surf when the boat grounded and put their shoulders to the hull while their hands found such purchase as they could on the slimy oxhides. When the men heaved upward the whole vessel came, dripping and lurching as the bearers lost their footing on the stones or a wave swept the legs from under several like a soft flail. Shouting and laughing, their steps quicker and more certain as they advanced beyond the slick buffeting of the sea, the Irish had carried their boat up to where the house walls announced safety from the waves of even the fiercest storm. As Mael and Starkad approached, the crew was launching the curragh again as easily by reversing the process.
The curragh was lightly built but not light. Its transport was a function of the fifty strong men beneath it, rather than an absolute lack of burden. There was no true keel or skeleton of ribs, only a wicker lattice anchored in the center to a thirty-foot sapling. The flexible ends of the tree had been bent up to mold the identical stern and prow. Over the framework were stretched oxhides, sewn to the lattice and to each other with linen cord. The seams and thread holes had been carefully tarred, leaving a shiny black pattern superimposed on the brown and black and white blotches of the hides. The seams still leaked, of course, but most of the water that would slap in the vessel's interior would come over the low sides.