by David Drake
Mael made a choice that was no choice. The pier was narrow and uneven, giving him even less room for maneuver than the path had done. But to either side quaked the mire of the slough margin where reeds replaced rhododendrons. To dodge to the side meant to be held in gluey muck while Fergus pounded his body into something of similar consistency. Cursing, Mael backed onto the flimsy boards.
Splinters tore at him. In another minute or two he might be able to stand or even strike back—if he could avoid the sweep of the mace until then. Mael did not even consider throwing his knife. It was the only thing that kept Fergus at a distance. The giant did not need a weapon to kill a man Mael's size. Once the threat of the dagger was gone—even if it were buried in Fergus' heart and inexorably bleeding his life away—Mael was dead. The giant would seize him barehanded and pluck his limbs off one by one, like a boy with a cricket.
The pier swayed as Fergus stepped onto it. He halted. In chillingly normal tones he said, "Father, you never wanted me to walk here."
"This once we'll go together," Diarmid said softly. "Be very careful now, Fergus. I'm right behind you." The older man paused, then added, "When I tell you, I want you to swing your club sideways."
The giant slid his right foot forward, the bare toes gliding over the irregularities of plank edged against plank. There was nothing clumsy about his advance. The pier showed no signs of imminent collapse but it creaked and sagged with the strain. Fergus was too big—and too much of his bulk was muscle—for Mael even to guess at his weight.
The pier had been constructed by driving double lines of posts into the mud of the slough, then pegging stringers to the inner face of each line. The plank flooring was attached to the stringers by leather thongs tied through holes in the wood. Where the leather had rotted away, the planks were loose and ready to spill a man who stepped on the edge. Diarmid's gentle touch kept his son centered safely and lethally.
Mael slashed quickly across the thongs holding three planks to the right-hand stringer. He twisted stiffly, ignoring the fanged splinters as he reached for the ties on the other side. If he could rip a big enough gap in the boards, he would be safe. Blind Fergus could never jump an opening. If the giant tried, his weight would carry him through into the water. He would hit the boards on the far side like a battering ram hitting the wall of a woodshed.
"Step, " Diarmid ordered, then, "Now! " and the mace whistled out toward Mael's flattening body. The edge, blunt as it was, stripped away Mael's breeches with both the skin and the underskin fat of his left buttock. At the other side of its arc the mace clipped a post. The post was four-inch oak, a recent replacement for one that had rotted away. Where the anchor stone struck it, the wood sheared off as cleanly as if sawn. Transmitted impact was still great enough to skew the remainder of the piling in the bottom muck and pull it loose from the stringer. The flooring sagged slightly to the side.
Mael was dazed and weeping with pain. He crawled backward more from instinct than from conscious volition.
The priest said, "Hold your mace in your left hand, Fergus. . . . That's right. Now, put your right hand on this post. Keep very close to the side . . . now, step, step . . . let go the post and slide your right hand—right hand—that's right, hold the post and wait for me, yes. . . . Now you don't have to hold the post any longer. We're past the bad section. Step, step. . . ."
The weakened portion of the pier had cried under the giant's weight, but it had held. Now Mael had nothing around him on three sides but water. On the fourth, the soapstone mace was rising for a final blow.
Mael was unable to swim in his present condition. He would sink like a stone in the water. If he clung to a piling, if he even tried to flutter toward the coracle floating ten feet away at the end of its tether, Diarmid himself would throw the mace down on top of him.
"Step," said the priest. "Now—sideways, Fergus!"
Mael threw himself outward, catching the end piling in the crook of his good arm. The mace arced straight down to where Mael had lain an instant before. The pine planks exploded upward without slowing the weapon in the least. The mace plunged on into the slough like the anchor it was meant for. Fergus followed it, his bald skull caroming off the post to which Mael clung. The giant's hands still gripped the shaft of the mace as the water sprayed up at his impact. Not even a bubble returned to the surface.
Diarmid stared at the shattered pier and the roiling water. The disturbance was the only marker his son would ever have. Mael was wrapped around the lone piling like a monkey on a stick. His left hand still lacked strength, but he had managed to bend its flesh onto the wood in a semblance of gripping. The priest moaned deep in his throat. He turned.
Veleda leaped down from her horse at the other end of the pier. "Mael!" she cried. She had a knife in her hand.
Without hesitation, Diarmid flung himself and the reliquary into the lough. When he surfaced, he began kicking toward the boat. The casket floated. Diarmid pushed it in front of him, making headway despite the drag of his billowing robe.
Mael cursed. He squirmed to bring his right foot onto the stringer so that he could stand instead of hanging by one arm. Veleda was pattering down the pier toward him, but she would be too late to stop Diarmid from reaching the coracle and casting off. The monster's skull would be gone and the priest would be free to raise a posse to avenge the desecration. Under the circumstances, Mael would be lucky if they burned him alive.
The coracle bumped before Diarmid reached it. The priest's vision was blocked by the reliquary so he did not notice the boat move. Then the black water humped as something opaque and equally black rose through it, spilling the coracle to the side. Diarmid screamed. A head lifted in front of him on a five-foot neck, a column as thick as a man's torso. Only in comparison to the swollen bulk of the body did the monster's neck appear slender. A stiff fringe like a ruff of coral fronds sprouted from behind the creature's skull. They were the gills of a huge, neotenous salamander which never needed to surface in order to breathe. It was not at the flaring gills that Diarmid screamed. It was at the mouthful of needle teeth lowering on him. The priest continued to scream until the jaws closed on his head and pulled him under. This time there were bubbles. They would have been red in better light.
The coracle had overturned and sunk. The reliquary casket rotated alone in little eddies as the water slowly calmed.
Mael looked across the four-foot gap between his piling and the rest of the pier. The stringer, still festooned with the stubs of shattered planks, connected them. "Veleda, I'll fall if I try to get across," Mael said.
"Of course you won't," the woman replied sharply. Her knife disappeared into her scrip. She held out both hands to Mael. "Your left leg will hold you. It's just one step. Now, walk."
Like Diarmid and Fergus, Mael thought, and look what it got them. But the black joke settled the terror that had paralyzed him for a moment after the real danger was past. He stepped onto the stringer, then to the planking. Veleda was right. His leg did hold.
Mael clutched her to him like the only buoy in an angry sea. "There, there," she murmured as her fingers brushed over his wounds. She winced more than Mael did at his left hip where the skin still curled in tendrils that had dried to his trousers. "We'll have to do something about that," Veleda said. Her touch brought a quick flash like that of cautery. Mael was not sure whether it seemed hot or cold. Then, though feeling returned, the pains were less than those of the hard ride from the seacoast.
At last Mael broke away. The reliquary floated a body's length from the pier. To Mael's surprise, he was still holding his dagger. He sheathed it, then unlaced his sandals and kicked them off with his trousers. His tunic, ripped all the way down the front, slipped off without needing to be lifted over his head. "Next time, I strip naked first and grease myself," he said ruefully. "At least that'll leave me decent clothes to be buried in." He set his dagger between his teeth, careful not to gash his lips with the edges, and crouched to lower himself into the water.
"No," said Veleda. "Leave the knife."
"Umm?" Mael took the blade out of his mouth and stared at his companion in surprise. "Didn't you see that thing that—got—Diarmid?" he asked.
"I've seen them. That one I called to us. There are very few left."
"Oh." Mael lowered his eyes to consider. "Well, if you called it—" and he did not like that idea in the least, but that could not show in his voice—"then it won't hurt me, I suppose. . . ."
"I can't promise that," Veleda said flatly. "I don't rule those old ones—or any other living creature. I can only talk to them, sometimes. But there aren't so many of us who follow the old truths, Mael, that we should plan to slaughter each other when we meet."
"I don't follow any gods, old or new," Mael said. Veleda met his gaze but made no reply. He grunted, then laid his dagger on a dry plank He slid into the lough. Nothing touched him but the cold water, and that was further balm to his wounds.
Mael handed the chest up to Veleda and followed it awkwardly. "I should poultice your cuts," she said to the battered man as he began drawing on his clothing.
Mael shook his head. "I want to be at least ten miles away before we stop," he said. "I don't look forward to the ride, but they'll flay the rest of me if anybody catches us here."
Still he took the pad she handed him, linen folded over layers of herbs, and rode with it between his torn hip and the saddle. The casket was tied to Mael's pillion after they had checked it to make sure the skull within was undamaged. Mael found he liked the look of the rows of teeth even less after he had seen similar ones in use.
"We'll ride south to mBeal Liathain," he said. "There's enough trade through the port that I'll be able to buy passage back to Britain. Besides, I don't want to go back the way we came."
Veleda mounted without replying. Mael looked at her in brief doubt, then mounted as well with only a spurt of agony. Except for brief comments where the trail forked, they rode for two hours in silence. At last Mael said, "If this isn't far enough, nothing is. We've put half a dozen farms between us and the shrine."
"There's a grove of pines at the top of the next hill," said Veleda. "The ground there is smooth. The horses can be out of sight, and there's a spring there, too."
The grove was just as she said it would be. There was no altar within it, but in the recent past the ground beneath the big trees had been swept clean of twigs and needles by someone for some reason. Veleda soaked another cloth in the spring. Using it and her little knife, she cleaned Mael's buttock while he bent against a tree, digging his fingers into the coarse scales of the bark.
"I, ah . . ." he began. Carefully formal, he tried again. "When I held you there on the pier, it was because I was, ah, frightened. I didn't mean anything by it. Didn't mean to offend you, that is."
"You didn't." Veleda looked as helpless as a rabbit in a ferret's den, soft and warm and gentle. She laid the cloth down and bound another poultice over the wound. Her touch made Mael's whole body shiver. "There," she said. "It'll be weeks before it really clears up, but you'll be able to ride. Ride further."
They spread their cloaks on the ground. Mael set his saddle at the head of his cloak for a pillow. He lay down on his back, staring at the starburst pattern of pine branches against the moonlit sky.
"When I use my saddle like that," Veleda said from very close beside him, "I wake up in the morning with an aching neck. It's a little too high."
Mael turned his head. Veleda was facing him leaning back on her left elbow. Her hair shimmered about her arm and pooled on the cloak beneath her. He stretched his arm out, under her head. After a moment's hesitation, he curved his hand around her neck and pulled her to him.
"I told you I was a woman," she said before she answered his kiss.
And she was, but like no woman he had ever known before. The last thing Mael remembered as he finally fell asleep was the thrill of her slim, white fingers as they urged him to heights he had not dreamed a man could reach.
* * *
In the morning, Mael rode bare-chested until they reached a farmhouse. There he traded a copper bracelet for baggy trousers and a tunic of gray homespun. Britons had minted coins before the Romans came, but it would be another four centuries until an Irish king did the same. The remnants of Mael's old tunic were wrapped around the reliquary to hide its unique decoration. Mael whistled a good deal as he and Veleda cantered southward. Occasionally he broke into song.
"Ruadh, but it's been a long time!" he said suddenly, turning toward Veleda with a dazzling smile.
Veleda smiled back. She had thrown off her hood so that the fresh sunlight exploded in her hair. "Since you last had a woman?" she asked, as naturally as another man might have done. The question was incongruous from someone so feminine, but Mael found that it did not bother him.
"I would have said, 'Since I've been in love,' " he explained. "But there's a little of the other, too, since I . . . since a woman last mattered to me more than a few minutes." He was remembering things now which pain had kept him from willingly recalling before. "Ten years," he said. "Ten years."
"She left you?" asked Veleda, not really a question, only an offer to let someone who mattered drain off a part of what had been eating away his soul for a decade.
"She died," said Mael. His voice was normal, but his eyes were now fixed on the road instead of meeting Veleda's. "Or rather, she got killed, but the end was before that, that just resulted . . ." He took a deep breath and, still without turning his head, said, "Her name was Kesair. She had black hair and she was just the same height as me for all our lives. We—grew up together, you see.
"At fourteen I was sent off to train with the Ard Ri's Guard. When I came home on leave—and after the first six months that was frequent enough—it was just the same as it had always been between us. There was never another woman for me until now, until you." Mael looked at Veleda. She reached out and touched the back of his hand with her cool, perfect fingers.
"You didn't marry," she said.
"No, we didn't do that," Mael agreed grimly. "But neither of us married, not for a long time. Then, ah, her father—her father was an important man"—and Mael's whole body was cold, trembling with the recollection of what he had almost said, but not quite, not quite—"a king in fact, though a client himself of the Ulaid. Every third man's a king in Ireland, doesn't it seem? Her father was a king, as I say. When the High King needed a wife for his brother Cearbhall, to make an alliance an edge more secure, where should he look but to Kesair, my lovely, black-haired Kesair?"
Veleda's fingers squeezed Mael's. He bent in his saddle to kiss her hand before continuing. "There were two years of that. I talked with Cearbhall, ate with Cearbhall—even fought at his side, if you can believe that. And I never once touched Kesair, never." Mael looked straight at Veleda. "And when we saw that it wasn't going to work, we . . . met again. And it was just as good as it ever had been. Only Cearbhall walked in when he was supposed to be a hundred miles away.
"He had his shield and a drawn sword. I suppose some of the servants had guessed and told him. But he didn't bring anybody else with him, either. He didn't want that talk in the barracks, and I guess he figured he could handle the matter himself. Which maybe he would have, except that Kesair threw herself onto his sword point before he could get it into me. And then I beat him to death with a bronze candlestick." Mael grinned like a skull. "No, I didn't put it through his helmet; but it was hard to live in a steel drum, and anyway, the helmet slipped off after a time . . . ."
Mael wrapped his fingers around Veleda's, letting them writhe in active contact for the first time since he had begun speaking. "See," he said with a false smile, "that's the kind of person you're running with."
Veleda leaned over and kissed him, startling a shepherd watching the travelers from the shade of a wayside oak. "It won't happen that way again," she said. "I promise. And I'm a witch, you know."
Chapter Six
mBeal Liathain was considerably farther from Lough Ree than
Mael's landfall in Leinster had been. Despite that and the battering Mael had taken, he and Veleda rode the distance in the same three days. Both fear of pursuit and a desire to finish a task thus far successful drove them. mBeal Liathain was a fortified village nestled on an inlet, a port and as near to a city as Ireland had at the time save for Cashel and the High King's seat at Tara. There was even a true wharf, though many of the round-bottomed vessels were simply beached to avoid the toll. Men from Gaul and Spain traded on the waterfront. In the market square you might find a blond-bearded Geat bartering with a Phoenician through an interpreter. The pelt of a great white ice bear for silk brocades woven in war-torn China . . . This was the funnel through which Ireland moved her exports: horses and fine woolens, linen and metalwork the like of nothing cast elsewhere west of the Scythian steppes. But mBeal Liathain was more than that as well. The little village in Munster provided a stable freeport for much of the North Sea and the Atlantic, where migration and the dissolution of the Empire had left very little stability.
Mael and Veleda found a suitable ship at once. The vessel was a beamy, shallow horse transport about fifty feet long. She had been beached parallel to the shore, not only to save the wharfage fee but also because that was the only practical way to load her cargo. Sandbags cocked the shoreward gunwale down. Planks made a ramp up the side along half the boat's length. The six horses of her cargo would be walked aboard without difficulty. There they could be harnessed between the thwarts before they realized they were no longer on dry land. The crew had already started loading when Mael, after a whispered discussion with his companion, dismounted and walked over to them.
"Who's your captain?" the exile called.
The burliest of the six sailors, a black-bearded man whose forearms and legs looked as curlingly hairy as his face, turned from the horse he was prodding forward with the butt end of his quirt. "Who the hell wants to know?" he demanded.