by David Drake
If the outside of the hull was simple, its interior was almost nonexistent. There were no oar benches or true thwarts, only withies crossing from gunwale to gunwale every yard or so. With luck, that flimsy bracing would keep the wicker frame from opening out at sea like a bud in springtime. There were no oarlocks or even oars; the curragh was paddled like a huge canoe, twisting and snaking across the waves. It was as limber as a sea serpent and as large. In its crew, the vessel carried a venom more lethal than anything with scales could match.
"Well, do as you please," Starkad said as he eyed the Irish who were beginning to load the curragh. It quivered in the surf. "You will, anyway. But I'd rather that if you have to throw yourself in with those fine ambassadors that you'd at least go armed."
"Oh, I'm armed," Mael laughed, tapping the dagger in his belt sheath. It was a serviceable weapon with a twelve-inch blade, unmarked but of good steel. Its thick tang ran the length of the sharkskin grip to the butt cap. The knife was not a toy, but neither was Starkad's concern misplaced. Besides the dagger and the leather scrip balancing it on the other side of his belt, Mael wore only a tunic and breeches of dark wool, his sandals, and a cloak he carried rolled and slung under his arm. His sword and coat of ring mail, his shield and steel cap, all were back in the room he shared with Starkad in the recruits' barracks. "After all," Mael said, "If I'm to be safe where I'm going, I've got to look harmless and Irish. In all my gear, I wouldn't look either."
Dubtach, soaked to the waist, stepped out of the sea and noticed them. "You're going with us?" he demanded. "They told us one. Gets damned crowded on one a' these bitches, though I don't suppose a land-lobster like your king up there'd know."
"I'd know, wouldn't I?" said Mael speaking the liquid Irish of his youth. It was a tongue that already had more of a lilt and a bubble to it than the remainder of the Celtic language stream. "Haven't I raided the coast south of here in a boat no bigger than this and with twice the crew?" And Mael had, of course, twelve years before, in a force led by Cearbhall, the High King's brother. Cearbhall, a few years older than this Dubtach but with the same bright hair, the same muscular chest and arms . . . "The Dane is here only to see me off; I'll be going back with you alone, and you'll have no need to worry for my stomach."
"Irish, are you? I'd taken you for a Briton," said Dubtach. In his eyes was a glint that further increased his resemblance to the Ard Ri's dead brother. Nor had the reference escaped the war chief—there had been few raids in recent years. "And you say you sailed with Cearbhall? He was the last real man Ireland raised so near the throne, Manannan knows. The day of his murder was an ill one for the country."
"He's dead, then?" Mael asked in lying ignorance. The speech and the warriors around him were pulling his mind back to another beach, another curragh, and it was all the same except that now there was no blood. . . .
"Dead?" repeated Dubtach. "Of course he's dead, throat cut in his own tent ten years—say, if you sailed with him, how is it you wouldn't know that?"
Starkad stood a step to Mael's right and a little to the rear, as inconspicuous as a 250-pound axeman could be. The Dane's eyes were measuring the distance to Dubtach. Mael spread his hand, palm backward, as if just stretching the fingers, and told the war chief the first outright lie, the planned lie: "Oh, I didn't come back from the raid, I took a block of stone on the head the night the Britons ambushed us. . . . You've heard about that?"
Dubtach's nod was agreement, and the smile spreading across his horsy teeth was proof that he had heard the rest, too; the payment Cearbhall had drawn from the villagers who had dared defend their goods.
"For seven years I was a slave," Mael continued, "and for five more a freedman. Now the king is letting me go home." And the strangest thing about the lie, Mael realized, was that in a psychic way it was no lie at all. He had not been wounded on the raid, but something of him had stayed behind in the West Country. It had been nailed to the hut-walls like the villagers themselves—men, women, and children. The lucky ones had been dead. Of the rest, some were screaming and some were silent, but all of them screamed when Cearbhall gave the order and his men began thrusting torches into the roofs of the plundered huts. That screaming was a thing to which Mael could have grown hardened in time; he could have come to accept it as a necessity of life, like the shriek of a pig on the butchering ground or the grunt of a warrior who has just taken your point through his rib cage. Even twelve years ago, Mael had known he was no better a man than most of those around him. The shock, the realization of what he had been helping to accomplish, was just too sudden, that was all.
And as the flames rose, Cearbhall had turned so that Mael could see his eyes. There was nothing behind them but arrogance that would not brook the slightest hint of opposition. Mael had collapsed. His fellows thought it was a delayed reaction to a blow, but in reality Mael had been bludgeoned by an insight more damaging than a stone could have been.
Later he had dreamed about the empty eyes, nightmares that at first had ended in sweaty terror. Then, as months and a year went by, Mael woke in red killing rages instead. About two years later, the dreams and Cearbhall had ended together.
Red-haired, scar-chested Dubtach clapped Mael on the shoulder. "Ireland needs more of the old breed," he said. "Come and see me after you've looked about your homeplace long enough to satisfy kinship. Muirchertach's an open-handed man, and he'll have a need for men to follow him soon. Real men."
"Gear's stowed," shouted one of the crewmen standing in the curragh while a dozen others held the hull parallel to the shore and steady. The boat bobbed in the shallows, waiting for the burden of men to fill its mottled sleekness.
"Then start boarding," Dubtach called back. "You too," he said to Mael. He turned to supervise the boarding.
Mael looked at Starkad, then up the slope toward the cataphracts. The sheen of their points and armor would, by Arthur's design, be the last image the Irish carried away from Britain. Mael rapped Starkad in the middle of the chest and said, "See you soon."
The Dane caught the outstretched wrist and squeezed it. "Make sure you come back," he said quietly.
"I wouldn't leave you," replied Mael, hurt that Starkad thought he might abandon his friend to Arthur's whimsy.
Starkad snorted, nodding his head contemptuously toward Arthur and his troops. "Think I care what they'll do to me if you don't show up? Don't worry about that. But I've gotten used to having you around." The big man squeezed Mael's wrist again, then used its leverage to turn the Irishman toward the sea and the waiting curragh.
The vessel was riding thirty yards from the line of wet gravel. Waves staggered Mael twice as he strode outward. The second time the water rose mid-thigh and almost threw Mael down with its purchase on his tunic. Out of practice, he thought, not that he cared. Reaving in skin boats was, like plucking hens, a skill with which Mael had some acquaintance but no desire for proficiency. Besides, half the men trying to restrain the curragh had gone down in the last wave, too.
Most of the crew was aboard by the time Mael gripped the flexible gunwales and let the men to either side of his handhold pull him in. It was not a hard pull since the loaded vessel showed only a foot of freeboard. Last within were the two wolf-hounds who until then had paddled around the curragh in happy circles. The dogs launched themselves out of the water like hairy porpoises, buffeting men aside as they landed. Somehow they managed to avoid impaling themselves on spear points. One hound shook itself and turned around three times before flopping down with its head across Mael's feet. Its tongue lolled. The grizzled paddler beside Mael glanced over and said apologetically, "Blood and old Terror, here, they can't bear for a boat to put out without they're aboard. Even though we aren't raiding."
Mael nodded and grinned back at the rangy dog. He knew why the beasts accompanied raiders. The long, toothy jaws were not to kill but to hold ransomable fugitives. The dogs' masters would do the killing if whim and economics required.
"Stroke, damn you, stroke!" Dubtach was s
houting from the stern. There was no rudder or steering oar on the curragh, but stern or bow were the natural places for the captain to seat himself anyway. Loaded with fifty men and their gear, the vessel drew considerably more water than it had empty. Furious paddling thrust the curragh forward, but the next wave cost all of the gains. The bottom scraped. Every man aboard knew what the shore would do to the oxhide hull if it caught them fully.
Up the slope, Arthur's warhorn sang. Mael looked back, saw the six dark-skinned riders detach themselves from the group around the standard and ride for the beach. Mael saw Starkad, too, his axe-helve slung through the double loops on his back and the ocean hammering his chest with foam from about the curragh's stern. The curved stern-post slipped backward despite all that fifty straining paddlers could do. Then the Dane's great hands blocked it. The supple wood gave a little but Starkad did not, despite the weight surging against him. The sea turned and the curragh shot outward beyond the shelf of the shore. The next swell only lifted it. Starkad turned and the Huns drew up, even before the horn ordered them to recase their bows.
Mael let his breath out very slowly. Dubtach kinked forward again, still shaking his head in amazement. "A strong man, your friend." he said.
"He's that, all right," Mael agreed. "One day he's going to decide he's strong enough to live with a dozen arrows through his chest, though. I'll be sorry for that day." And for the men who kill that foolish blond bear, Mael added bleakly, but that was to himself and unspoken.
Chapter Three
It was a normal voyage by curragh: wet, cramped, and queasy. Without a sail—the vessel was too flimsy for a mast to be stepped, much less to take the strain of a filled sail—the crew had to paddle constantly in shifts to make way. In theory, the men not paddling could have slept. In practice, the chill sea sloshed across the open belly of the craft and made sleep both unlikely and dangerous. Part of the crew bailed at all times. If the water within rose too high, the curragh would sink like a stone. It was lightly built but not of positive buoyancy.
"I had a piece there in Arthur's camp, one of his captains' wives," Dubtach began when they were out of the surf. "So blond she looked white as an old lady. But when she threw her cloak back she hadn't a stitch on under it and there wasn't a wrinkle in her skin. I swear by the MacLir . . ." The rest of the story was a paradigm of the conversation for the whole of the voyage. It was, indeed, the conversation of every group of soldiers since war began. Only the languages change.
Muirchertach's men were a relic of older times, still normal in Ireland. Their shields were light, generally of oxhide strapped with bronze or iron. Almost none of them wore body armor. In the ancient past, battle nudity had been of magical significance, an ultimate sign of faith that the gods would save the man who trusted in them. Now even in Ireland it was more conservatism and braggadocio, acceptable enough on an island whose only contact with other peoples was at the islanders' choice. Niall's reavers, for all their savagery and their king's reputation, would have fared no better arrayed against a legion than had Boudicca's naked warriors three centuries before. But the reavers had proven quite adequate for murdering civilians while Rome's sparse troops marched from the site of one raid to another.
When Mael fled Ireland, he had considered armor and made his own decision about it. If he were to earn his living by war, he would arm himself so that he could fight at the front of any battle on earth. That meant weapons which would cut without breaking or bending, a shield that could last an afternoon of strong men and hard blows—and a good coat of mail, for in the midst of war no man could avoid all blows from his blind side. But now, looking at the naked warriors around him, a fierce surge of freedom shook the exile. He grinned in its throes, and the grin was unpleasant.
The voyage took half a day, lasting from daylight to dusk and then three miserable hours of pitch darkness besides. Dubtach tried to make sense out of the stars. Finally the shore loomed up, richly odorous and—for all its dangers—still home to Mael.
Dubtach and his chiefs held a lengthy, querulous conversation as they tried to decide where the curragh was about to fetch up. Most of the other crewmen joined in. Even the hounds, smelling land and a chance to run, began to whine loudly until a frustrated warrior booted them to whimpers.
"We'll land," Dubtach said finally. "If it's not Muirtaig's reach, it's Eoghan's, and we've no foes so great in the Laigin we need fear to camp on their beach for a night."
They drew in, the men in the stern paddling while those in the bow poised to leap into the grumbling surf at the least tremor from the bottom. To the right was a headland jutting high enough that a clump of three stunted junipers could grow in despite of the salt spray. One of the crewmen called out, pointing to the landmark. Dubtach cawed in triumph, "Who says I can't navigate, hey? Not fifty feet from where we put her in the sea, are we?"
No one contradicted the war chief, least of all Mael. Having listened to Dubtach wrangling about their bearings with men equally ignorant, Mael knew the curragh might as easily have made landfall in the Hebrides.
Mael joined in the quick dash for the beach with the hull of the curragh flexing over his shoulder like a silent drum. Laughing in relief at their safe return, the crew carried the vessel high up on the beach to where the grass displaced the pebbles. The night was warm and friendly, lighted by the silver moon just edging up over the sea. A trio of wattle huts in a palisade were within a hundred yards of the beached curragh. No one came to a door despite the halloos of some of the men. Well, thought Mael, he wouldn't have come out himself to meet such a mob. At least not until dawn or an attack required it. The exile smiled, thinking of the householders tremblingly alert, each with a fish spear or a gutting knife clenched in his hand. This time the residents would be lucky.
"These are Muirchertach's lands?" Mael asked, stretching his arms high to ease the cramped muscles of his back.
"King Muirtaig's," Dubtach corrected him. "He sends his tribute to the Laigin as we do not. But we have no coast, so we borrowed this curragh from Muirtaig against a dozen horses pledged for its return."
"Can you show me the road for Lough Conn?" Mael asked, naming a lake in the shadow of the Ox Mountains, far beyond where he intended to go. He wanted to be clear of Dubtach and his troupe as quickly as possible. With them Mael was an outsider—always dangerous when among armed men. Besides, he was sure to attract comment as "the man from Britain" so long as he accompanied those who had brought him over.
"We'll be heading west tomorrow," Dubtach said. "Travel with us."
"Umm, I'll be back when I've done the business I need to do," Mael replied mildly. "For now—well, I've been gone twelve years, and I'd not add another hour to them for choice."
The war chief shrugged. "I'll point you to the road, then," he said. "It's past the orchard, is all."
They walked together between the rows of apple trees on the high ground west of the shore. The trees were well kept but as gnarled and ingrown as only old fruit trees become. In the flat moonlight they looked more mineral than alive. The air among them was a little warmer, a little sweeter, than that of the shore. The trilling of katydids in the branches washed away the raucous jollity of the warriors below.
"Right there's the track," said Dubtach, pointing to a dirt path bounded on the far side by hedgerows. "Go left here and just follow whichever branch seems western at a fork if you can't get better directions. Now, I think there's a spring here if—umm, hel-lo!"
Figures moved, two horses and a woman standing in the shadow of the hedge to the right. Dubtach shrugged as if to loosen clothing from about his bare torso. Mael touched his tongue to his lips, darting his eyes about the darkness and silently cursing the katydids. Their sound, so welcome a moment before, would cloak the rustle of bandits creeping to attack. The woman's presence made sense only if she were a decoy.
The woman walked closer while the horses stood where they were on their dropped reins. She was not tall, perhaps a little over five feet, nor was she heav
y. Her slim fingers were loosely intertwined in front of her. She wore a gray cloak pinned at the right shoulder. The shift beneath it was of linen, but it was bleached and silver-gilt by the moon so that it showed as a gleaming wedge. Then the woman shrugged her cowl back and Mael could see the shift was no brighter than her hair. Her face was perfect and unlined. Glancing at the contrast, Mael was reminded of Dubtach's tale of his ash-blonde conquest in Britain. Mael was surprised at the sudden hatred for the war chief that boiled through him at the thought.
Dubtach stood, arms akimbo, and said to the woman, "And what would you be doing here, lady?" Mael was behind him, but even there he could feel the tooth-baring smile in Dubtach's voice.
"Waiting for a man," she said, looking at Dubtach and looking away to Mael. Her voice was full without being either deep or loud. "I've found him now."
"That you have!" brayed Dubtach. He reached out his long, thick-muscled arm and drew the woman closer by the shoulder. "Two of us, indeed."
"No." The woman nodded at Mael. "I'm waiting for him." she squirmed, which should have made no difference to Dubtach's heavy grip, but the cloak rippled under his fingers, leaving the woman free and a yard away, staring coolly at the war chief's fury.
Dubtach's left hand toyed with his sword hilt, raising it an inch or two to free the blade in the scabbard before dropping it back. The gesture was unconscious and a suggestive one. Dubtach reached out again with his right hand. Mael touched his elbow. "Wait a minute," the exile said quietly.