by David Drake
"You can read, Irishman," Merlin snarled, "but don't think you can teach me sorcery because of that! You know nothing. Nothing!" To Arthur the wizard added quickly, "Leader, in a few weeks you'll march beneath a power that no prince has ever equaled."
Arthur sheathed his sword. For a moment he watched first Mael, then the wyvern, askance. Then he said, "Explain the dragon to me, wizard. If I have to feed it to full size, I'll need to make plans."
"Oh, it won't need to eat at all," Merlin said, with a return of his giggly good humor. He began bustling about his paraphernalia, readying it to leave. "Not in this world at least. You see, what you think is a dragon, what looks like a dragon, is really thousands and thousands and uncounted thousands of dragons. Each of them for—well, not even an eyeblink. It's nowhere near that long a time. When the dragon seems to move—" he pointed with his wand. The wyvern reacted by screeching and throwing itself forward, to rebound again from the invisible wall—"it is really a series of dragons. A whole row of them moving each for an instant into this universe from one in which wyverns can exist."
"One exists right there," Arthur said irritably, pointing at the tiny creature. It was again swooping about its prison.
"But only because of my magic," Merlin replied, "and only for the briefest moment. Then it's back in the cosmos I drew it from and another—from a wholly separate existence—is there in its place for another hairsbreadth of time. Now, that's what others have done as well, yes, the ones who knew the path, the essence of power. But I—instead of having the same wyvern repeat itself from myriads of identical universes—I added a time gradient as well. This way each of the creatures is a little older, a little larger than the one before. And so on, forever, as long as I wish."
"As I wish, wizard," the king reminded him in no pleasant voice.
"As you wish, Leader," Merlin agreed obsequiously.
"If that's true," Mael interjected, "and I won't say that it can't be, I'm no sorcerer as you say . . . but why does the beast snap at you here in this world? You say it's only the moment's wraith from a world in which you aren't there to snap at."
"Yes, that's right," Merlin said, bobbing his head with enthusiasm at having an intelligent audience to display himself before. "But something's there, don't you see? There isn't any end of worlds, worlds with wyverns leaping and squalling and spitting flame. It's my control that chooses which world is plucked of which wyvern . . . that and a sort of . . ." The wizard frowned and sobered for the first time since Arthur had lowered his sword. "Well, a sort of inertia that the process itself gives it. I can't be ordering the creature to breathe or telling it which muscles to tense so that it can take a step. That sort of thing just—" he shrugged—"goes on. And with nothing else appearing, the . . . simulacrum . . . made from thousands of wyverns . . . will act by itself as though it were one real wyvern, here and now."
"And wyverns have nasty tempers," Mael concluded aloud. As if in response, the little creature sent another jet of flame toward the men. Mael's skin prickled even at a distance. He noticed that the fire crossed the wall of the pentagram easily, though the wyvern itself could not.
Arthur walked closer and stared at the details of the beast that leaped and scrabbled vainly to get at him. The king prodded at it with his sheathed sword, chuckling at the fury with which the wyvern's fangs and tiny claws attacked. Merlin tensed. The king tugged back his sword, stripping the dragon from it at the inscribed line. Still chuckling, Arthur twisted the scabbard on the baldric from which it hung. He saw the leather shredded where the beast had clawed it.
Then the king stopped laughing. With a muffled curse, he dropped the sheath and slid the blade free to examine it. The yellow light gleamed on deep scorings in the steel itself. Arthur grunted and shot the sword home again. "Stronger than I had thought," he said to Merlin in a neutral voice.
"They're not at all like things of this world," the wizard agreed. "They couldn't even breathe if they were here, if they had to stay. Things weigh much more in their worlds and the air is much thicker, besides being different. That's how they can fly, even though they're huge when they grow. They're like whales in the waves of our seas. And they're very strong, yes. . . ."
Merlin closed and thonged shut the case of scrolls. He fastened the chest of chemicals as well. Taking the books and his wand under his left arm, the wizard walked toward the cave mouth. Pausing to transfer the arthame to his free hand, he scribed a single line between the gateposts. He added symbols on the outer side of the line while he muttered the same half-sensed sounds he had used when drawing the pentacle. Finished, Merlin swung the door open. Cei, standing close beyond it, turned around with hope and concern limned on his face by the lamps still burning inside.
"Leader," Merlin directed, "if you'll pick up the lantern—the stand can stay here, I think."
Arthur nodded and obeyed. Mael picked up the chest of chemicals without being asked and started to follow the king toward the gate.
"Don't touch the line or the words," Merlin warned. "Just step over them." To Mael he added, as if an afterthought, "Oh, Irishman—would you just smudge a side of the pentacle before we leave? There's no problem with the barrier drawn here."
Mael frowned. From the darkness behind the waiting seneschal came Veleda's shout of warning: "Mael! Use the silver!"
Mael reacted before rage had time to flush across the wizard's face, darting his hand out to pluck the arthame from the older man. Warrior and sorcerer stared at each other without speaking or needing to. Beyond stood Arthur, amused the way a certain type of dog owner can be as he watches a pair of his animals about to mix lethally. Cei's sword was drawn. The seneschal stood ready to slaughter both men if his Leader allowed him to. Cei did not understand the silent quarrel, but he abominated both participants.
Mael flipped the arthame so that he held it by the grip. He spat deliberately on the ground between him and Merlin; then he walked back to the pentacle. Under his left arm the Irishman still carried the box of chemicals. The angry wyvern watched his approach and redoubled its efforts to claw through the barrier. Mael slashed the air in front of it with the arthame. Screeching, the beast threw itself backwards. It rolled over as it tangled its tail and legs in its haste.
Mael knelt, eyeing the little monster. He drew the tip of the arthame through the inscribed pentagram. The wyvern spat fire in his direction but remained at a distance, curling and hunching itself. Mael straightened and backed away with quick, fluid steps. When the Irishman was halfway between the gate and the marred pentacle, the wyvern launched itself at his face like a bolt from a ballista.
The box of chemicals Mael held saved his left arm, for it was pure reflex that threw it up to block the sudden attack. The dragon's speed was beyond anything its swoops and caracoles within the pentagram had led Mael to expect. As it clung to the sturdy box, the wyvern lanced blue fire which danced over the edges of the wood. It seared Mael's forearm. The Irishman cut blindly with the arthame, the instantaneous sweeping reaction of a man who has felt a spider leap to the back of his neck.
The silver arthame caught the wyvern squarely and slapped the beast away. The creature bounced on the cave floor, knocking the lampstand over. The oil burst up in a flood of yellow light and a rush of heat. The dragon sat in the middle of the conflagration and yowled angrily. A long, red streak swelled where silver had touched the ebon scales. The wyvern bent and licked at the wound, oblivious of the pool of blazing oil surrounding it. Mael took two sliding steps and leaped the barrier drawn at the gate. The other three men gave back swiftly at his movement. The dragon, catching a peripheral glimpse of the motion, threw itself suddenly after Mael. The beast was an instant too slow, rebounding from the line just after the Irishman had crossed it. The creature sent a spiteful stylus of flame out into the night behind its intended victim.
Arthur still held the lantern. Mael turned the chest of chemicals to the light. The wood was blackened in a circle the size of a dinner plate. In the center, the panel was pi
erced by a hole large enough to pass a man's thumb. The ceramic jar of copper salts within had shattered. The fumes stank of hellfire. The flame had sprayed Mael's forearm with half-burned splinters blasted from the box and raised several blisters. Mael dropped the chemicals without a word. The chest jounced, breaking several of the containers from the sound it made when it hit. The Irishman flung the arthame to the ground at Merlin's feet. Its point sank several inches into the soil, making the metal ring with the shock. "Your beast has bad manners," Mael said. "It could be that I should've fed him the poker sideways, I am thinking. Or fed it to you, wizard."
If Merlin intended a retort, he swallowed it. From his other side, Veleda spoke. Her hair slithered as if in harmony with her words. "You're a man who rolls a rock down a mountainside and expects to run with it, Merlin. You can't control a landslide just because you had the power to begin it. There are no fools in the world so great as the ones who think themselves knowing."
Merlin snarled with the same frustrated rage that wracked the thing he had summoned. He turned and stalked to his horse, still holding the container of books. Arthur laughed. "You know, Irishman," he said, "I'm beginning to think you could be a credit to my Companions—if you lived long enough."
Mael still shook with anger and the shock of his near death at the wyvern's claws. "Maybe I don't shit well enough on command," he spat.
"Neither do my Huns," Arthur replied mildly. "Sometimes . . . but I think we've seen and done all we care to, here tonight. Yes . . . You'd better get to your billet. Tomorrow's a day of training, you know."
Mael laughed. He bowed to the king, then followed Veleda to the horses. Behind him he could faintly hear the dragon hiss and squall.
* * *
Mael and Veleda slid from their mounts and unsaddled in front of the recruit lines. They lashed the beasts to the rail placed there, even though the recruits had not yet been issued horses. At the door to his and Starkad's dwelling, Mael paused and said to the woman, "Just a second. My friend sleeps light, and he tends to—react when he's suddenly—" Mael broke off because the door flew open. Starkad's huge right hand caught the Irishman by the throat.
"Wait a minute!" Mael gurgled, choked as much by his laughter as by the Dane's fingers. Starkad broke his grip and the two men began to hug and pummel each other's backs.
"Figured a dumb turd like you'd get back when any decent man'd be asleep!" the Dane thundered, while Mael was shouting, "You know, I met somebody even bigger than you in Ireland? And may the Dagda club me dead if he wasn't stupider, too!"
"Hey, quiet the hell down!" grumbled a voice in Gothic German from the billet beside them.
Starkad's face smoothed, his mouth dropping into a half grin. He loosed Mael and walked to the door of the other room. He was barefoot and wore only a tunic that fell midway on his hairy thighs. The Dane kicked flatfooted, his right heel catching the hinge side of the door and flinging the whole panel into the room. "Come on out," he invited pleasantly. No one stirred inside. Starkad walked back to Mael and Veleda. "And they say that Goths are tough," he muttered.
"Look," said Mael, "much as I'd like to help you mop up this whole army, I'm just about dead on my feet. I was, even before you started pounding on me. Suppose you can let me rack out and keep the damned cadre away when they come around in the morning?"
"Later in the morning," the Dane corrected him. "Yes, I think I can do that thing."
"Oh," Mael said. "Ah . . . this is Veleda." Starkad's expression changed, not exactly in the fashion Mael had expected. The Irishman misinterpreted the look of appraisal, none the less. He licked his lips and said, "Ah, Starkad, I know . . .Look, tomorrow they can issue me another room—"
"No problem," the Dane said, bursting into a smile again. "We've shared by threes and fours before. And you needn't worry, I like my women with a little more meat on their bones, you know." He clapped Mael on the shoulder. "Come on, get some sleep so you can wake up and tell me what's been going on."
Chapter Eight
From the angle of the sun, it was afternoon when Mael awakened. With his eyes still slitted the Irishman groaned and said, "Starkad, if I'd known how I was going to ache when I got up, I'd have just asked you to slit my throat in the dark."
"Up?" Starkad laughed, twitching the sheet down and slapping Mael's rump.
Mael swore and swung his legs over the side of the bed. "How'd I get in your bunk?" he asked.
"I picked you up and put you there when I saw you really weren't going to share the other one with your lady friend, that's how. You needed a mattress worse than I did."
"Oh," Mael said. Veleda's bed was empty. "Ah, where did she—"
"Out to the jakes," the Dane answered before the question was complete. Even as he spoke, the door opened to readmit Veleda. She was beautiful and perfect in the sunlight.
"There're a lot of women in the camp," she said as she entered. She grinned brightly. "Families, I mean—I'd expected women around an army, but not wives."
"Yes, when we showed up, Cei—he took our names—told us it was fine to bring our families," Starkad said. "Of course, Mael and me were each other's family."
"It's useful to Arthur," Mael explained cynically, "for control. People think again about changing sides in a tight spot if they know it means their son gets used for a lance target."
"I need to find a place to, well . . . listen again," Veleda said in an abrupt change of subject. "I don't really understand what's happening—oh, not in the levels I see, that's obvious, but in the ones I feel. And things are moving, weaving, there at a rate that—that I don't like at all. There's a grove on the hill just north of here that should do for my purpose. I'll come back from there as soon as I can."
Starkad raised an eyebrow at the sober-faced woman, but it was to Mael that he spoke. "She going to be all right, wandering around alone?"
Mael hid his wince in a brief stiffness around his eyes. "She'll be all right," he said, turning to Veleda, "but I'd like to come anyway."
"No," she said with a smile. "This I really have to be alone to do. I'll be back soon."
She swung the door closed behind her. After a moment, Starkad threw it open to pass more of the sunlight into the room. "Well," he prodded, "what happened?"
"We got the skull at the shrine where I'd remembered it," Mael said simply. "Had to kill a couple people, but we got out all right. And we came back on a ship from mBeal Liathain."
"Right," Starkad agreed. "We."
Mael looked up into the blue eyes of his friend. His own hands clenched, then reopened deliberately. "She met me in Ireland. She knew I'd be coming somehow," he said. "Starkad, she's a witch, and she scares me; scares me like nothing ever has. And dear god, I think I love her." Mael stretched out his hands toward his friend like a captive pleading. "What am I going to do?" he begged.
The Dane chuckled without particular humor. "I'd heard her name before," he said. "So she's a witch. So what?"
Haltingly, but with the fullness of detail he had denied before, Mael reported the events of the voyage from Ireland. "I'd thought she was so helpless," he concluded miserably, "but she killed them with her hands when I wouldn't have had a chance alone. And then when she touched me, I . . . What am I going to do, Starkad?"
Starkad remained silent for a moment after the Irishman had finished. The Dane's beard and moustache flowed back across his face to join the hair of his head. It was tangled and rudely cut, but fairly clean despite that. The individual hairs were golden and very fine, surprisingly fine on a man so gross in other respects. Starkad suddenly leaned forward and took each of Mael's hands, now lowered, in one of his. The Irishman's skin was in dark contrast to the Dane's. Mael's fingers were long and sinewed, but they were utterly dwarfed within the huge fists that held them.
Starkad squeezed gently. "You've touched my hands before, haven't you?" he asked.
Mael nodded, frowning. He tried to pull free and found that he could not.
"And once was at Massilia," the
Dane continued inexorably. "I carried you out of a crib after the pimp had decked you with an iron bar. Do you remember what I did to the pimp first?"
"Starkad, that wasn't the—"
"Your bloody ass it wasn't the same!" Starkad roared. His face was inches away from the Irishman's. "I took his neck in one hand and an elbow in the other, and I pulled on the bastard until his arm came out of his shoulder. That's what I did to him. And if you're going to get all hateful about people saving your life, you can damned well start with me!" He let go of Mael and sat back, arms crossed against his chest.
"Yes, well . . ." Mael said. He tried a wan smile. "Guess I never thought I had to protect you and . . . all."
The Dane's black scowl softened. "Look," he said, "did she ever tell you she needed to be coddled like a nice glass trinket?"
"No."
"Then don't hold it against her that you're a lousy judge of people. Treat her like a woman and not a—a—I don't know what." Starkad paused. With a fleeting return of his previous seriousness, he added, "It doesn't sound like she—does what she did for fun. Remember, we've all of us done things we had to do but we'd rather not remember now. All of us."
"Except for you, Starkad," Mael said with more bitterness than he intended.
The Dane laughed. "You think I'm so wide open about everything I do that I couldn't be hiding anything? Sure I could. One thing."
Mael caught the tension underlying his friend's light words. "Hey," he said falsely, "if something's eating at you, I don't want to hear it. I've got problems enough of my own." He was taut with fear that Starkad would blurt a secret and regret it immediately, shattering a decade's friendship.