by Jules Watson
The sound of surf on the shore was louder now, but the boat was foundering, the water from the rent dragging it low enough for the sea to begin pouring over the sides. There was no more time.
And then they were in the water, and all fears were shattered by freezing, breath-wrenching cold, and the shock of the suffocating water, grasping for their lungs. Then the heaving of the current took hold, and there was desperate pushing up to air, and frantic kicks away from the boat as it fell out from beneath them.
Eremon came up spluttering, twisting around and around, peering frantically at the splashing figures surrounding him.
Rhiann! his heart called.
Rhiann’s first thought was, I am cold. Her second was, Why am I in Eremon’s arms?
Yet an instant later, memory rushed in, and she opened her eyes to a dawn as grey as her heart.
She shivered, remembering the sea sucking at her, and the seething waves pounding her down, filling her nose and eyes with stinging water … the striving for sweet air, before Eremon dragged her up on to a shelf of sand. She remembered struggling to her feet, as Conaire followed with Caitlin in his arms, and holding her sister to her heart, fiercely, until she knew that she breathed, and would live.
And then none of them could do more than collapse on the shingle, flung up like driftwood, utterly spent. Later, they crawled under a rock overhang, shivering through the night as the storm lashed the bay, and the winds drove the sea far up on the sand.
Now that storm too was exhausted, and in the dripping silence, Rhiann was left only with the memory of the other sister, who had not survived the sea. Dala.
Tears started to her eyes, melting the salt crusting her eyelashes, and Eremon stirred as he heard her breathing grow ragged, and his arms around her tightened. She felt the familiar urge to pull away from him, but the need to surrender to his warmth, his safety, was stronger.
‘Rhiann?’
She tilted her head up. ‘I am well, Eremon.’
‘Thank the gods.’ His voice rumbled against her ear, and she fought the surrendering, the sleepiness, and struggled to sit up.
‘Eremon, the men …’
Though she knew they lived, in the shadow of the overhang her eyes again sought for the twin gold heads of Caitlin and Conaire, wrapped together, and Colum’s grey hair, and Fergus’s bright eyes. They were safe, but Eremon would know better than she that damp clothes and cold were dangers unto themselves, and in a moment he had roused everyone to their feet.
They took stock of what had been saved, but it was not much. Most of the food had been emptied out of the barrels, and their weapons and other supplies were gone, except for two bows, the strings unfit for hunting until they dried. And to the Alban men’s amazement, Eremon had saved his sword, despite its weight. ‘It was my father’s sword,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I had no intention of leaving it at the bottom of the sea.’
Warmth was the most important need, and Eremon sent Caitlin and the men to search for any wood that had escaped the rain, while he and Conaire began to break up the barrels. As they did, he glanced at Rhiann, sitting silently on the sand near the water. He told her to rest, and for once, she had obeyed him.
But when he saw her wipe her eyes, and bow her head, he left Conaire and came up behind her. ‘Eremon,’ she said, though she did not turn. ‘The feeling I had was real. I knew there was something wrong with that man. Why did I not see?’
Her voice broke, and he laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘How could you? It was not your fault.’
‘But I should have known!’ she cried, looking back at him. ‘Now I do know, but it is too late, for Dala and Rawden!’
Tendrils of hair were plastered to her face, and he brushed them away. ‘What do you know?’
She turned back to the sea. ‘The pock-marked man came from Maelchon. He wanted to kill us … because I shamed him … because of his obsession …’ She picked at a strand of seaweed. ‘That man had a burden of pain laid on him, I could feel it from the start!’
‘It was the act of a desperate soul,’ Eremon agreed, remembering the man’s last words. ‘He didn’t want to do it, Rhiann, but Maelchon must have had a very strong hold on him.’
‘And Eremon, what about Gelert? He knew this was coming. He must have discovered we were leaving and told Maelchon. He tried to kill us as surely as if he wielded the sword himself.’
Eremon’s mouth tightened. ‘When we return, it will be time to challenge this druid openly.’
Rhiann sighed. ‘Yet we have no proof.’
‘Nothing but the evidence of our own eyes!’
‘We wouldn’t have that if his plan had succeeded.’ She shuddered. ‘Yet I still don’t understand why Maelchon’s man waited so long into the journey to act. Because of that, we did live.’
Eremon squatted down. ‘Maelchon would not want any evidence of us, our deaths, to be attached to him. My guess is that our man had instructions to wait until we were as far from the Orcades as possible. Perhaps the storm changed his plans, perhaps he thought he’d take his chances before we were safe ashore.’ He considered the wild despair in the man’s eyes. ‘I don’t think he was acting rationally, Rhiann, and there Maelchon miscalculated. Fear is not the best way to control people.’
‘Well, it controlled Dala. She almost leaped from my arms when the wave knocked her free. I think … I think she was too hurt to want to live.’
‘Then it wasn’t your fault.’
Just then Caitlin appeared, picking her way over the rocks that bordered the next bay. Her small face was grim beneath her tangled braids. ‘We found Dala,’ she said, her eyes on Rhiann. ‘And her man.’
With a cry, Rhiann leaped up and hurried away over the rocks.
Eremon stopped Caitlin from following. ‘Let her go,’ he said. ‘She needs to grieve alone.’
‘We found the traitor, too,’ Caitlin muttered. ‘Further along. The storm washed everything in.’
Eremon brushed sand from his fingers. ‘He will have a burial the same as the others. They were all victims of the same man.’
The Caledonii captain knew where they had landed. ‘If we cross this cape, we will come across more settlements along the western coast,’ he said that night, around a feeble fire made of barrel staves. The rain had stopped, though the wind was still high, and clouds crowded the sky.
‘Perhaps we can pick up a vessel going south to Dunadd,’ Rhiann added.
Eremon looked at her across the fire. Conducting the burials that afternoon seemed to have calmed her, the ritual restoring strength of body and spirit. The shadow of grief lurked in her eyes, but acceptance was growing there, too. Good, he thought. I need her in her full power if we are to get safely home.
‘The people here are isolated,’ she was explaining to Caitlin, ‘so the blood of the Old Ones runs more truly than elsewhere, and members of the sisterhood are revered as we are not in all parts of Alba. Perhaps it will not be long before we find help.’
Though they were still weak and hungry, Eremon got everyone moving at first light the next day, as faint sun crept through rents in the heavy cloud. He wanted to be back within stout walls soon, and at Dunadd soon after.
Two days of hiking among the barren glens brought them to the Western Sea, and a long sand beach, its dune grasses bent double in the harsh winds. But still they could find no game among the treeless hills behind it, their roots sunk deep in peat, the seams of their gnarled rocks running endlessly with water.
After a sparse meal of limpets, scraped from the shore, they rolled in their damp cloaks in the dunes, huddling close to the dying fire.
‘Tomorrow we must leave the coast so we can find meat,’ Eremon said to Rhiann, as they lay, each wrapped in their own cloak. ‘I cannot let the men get weaker. We may have to defend ourselves soon, and we have no weapons but my own.’
‘You will not be in danger with me here.’ Rhiann turned over to her back.
‘How can you be so sure?’
Before she coul
d answer, there was a cry from Fergus, who had been posted as first watch. All of the men leaped to their feet.
Straining into the darkness, Eremon could not take in what he saw: a circle of small men emerging from the cloak of night, as if they grew from the dark rocks around them, or crept out of hiding from the earth herself. Their clothes seemed to shift and change, patterned in colours of wet sand, seaweed, lichen. Their eyes glowed like those of wolves in the light of the fire.
Then one of the figures came forward, pushing Fergus before him.
‘He shot an arrow into the sand, my lord,’ Fergus gasped out. ‘When I went to investigate the noise he got behind me. He has a spear at my back. I am sorry, I was exhausted, I—’
‘Hush!’ said Eremon sharply. ‘It is too late for that now.’ He raised his own sword so that the light glinted from its surface, unmistakable to their attackers. ‘If you harm this man you will feel the bite of my sword, I promise you!’ he shouted.
The man holding Fergus said something harshly that Eremon could barely understand; he seemed to be using a strange dialect. But Eremon made out the word gael, and then he realized, to his horror, that these people had seen him and his men in the daylight. They knew they did not have the tattoos of the Albans. This made them strangers, raiders. A dangerous position to be in on this isolated coast, with no weapons but his own.
He sensed Rhiann by his side. ‘If this is the only time you listen to me, do it now,’ she said softly. ‘Do not interfere, or we may all die. Each of those men will have an arrow on the string.’
Before Eremon could stop her, she walked towards the man who had spoken, saying something sharply in the same dialect. Eremon made out the words ‘Ban Cré’ and ‘Epidii’.
The man answered her, less boldly now, but still pressing his spear to Fergus’s back. Then Rhiann stopped, and drew herself up, and flung out a hand. When she spoke, her tone was compelling, as it had been when she spoke the litany for the drowned Dala and Rawden, and in the dancing shadows of the flames, her outline seemed to tremble and grow somehow taller, straighter, brighter, as she pulled the priestess glamour around her, just like at Beltaine. Her hair was a nimbus of flame around her head … or was it just the light?
With her words the other small men came to life, stirring and muttering, and the one who had spoken called out to them, harsh as a gull, falling back and releasing Fergus.
As Fergus stumbled back to Eremon, the leader of the newcomers slowly approached Rhiann with his spear laid over his hands, and knelt and placed it at her feet. He remained there, his head bent in apparent submission.
Eremon’s breath whistled out through his teeth. The attack had only taken a matter of moments, but his body was vibrating from the rush of danger. He watched Rhiann put a hand on the man’s head and say something, more softly now, before he again got to his feet.
Eremon could see that he only reached Rhiann’s shoulder, and his hair and eyes gleamed black in the firelight. He was dressed in checked trousers and a sleeveless tunic of that shifting, lichen hue, but despite the night wind, wore no cloak. The answer was slung across his back: a skin quiver, its ornate beading and ochre-dyed arrows, and the polished stone wrist-guard a signal that these people valued the bow highly indeed. A cloak or sleeves might hinder the drawing of the string. Only a band of spotted seal-fur around an upper arm, and a necklace of shells, differentiated him from his men.
Eremon walked slowly to Rhiann, his eyes on the man, who looked back at him frankly, even proudly, though he had to tilt his head up to do so.
‘Remind me to let you walk into danger more often,’ Eremon murmured to Rhiann.
‘Eremon.’ Rhiann gestured towards the leader. ‘This is Nectan, son of Gede, a headman of the Caereni. They are one of the Western tribes we came to meet. He wants to know why I have brought gaels into his territory.’
Now that he was closer, Eremon could see the silver running through his attacker’s dark hair, and realized that the man’s height and litheness belied the wrinkles by his eyes; seams of amusement, and the squinting that comes from sea-wind and sun. ‘Then you’d best tell him who I am.’
After the introductions were complete, Nectan directed a torrent of questions at Rhiann that Eremon could barely follow. Rhiann answered him patiently, and soon he seemed to be satisfied, looking Eremon up and down with an air of speculation, before joining his own men. There, they began to talk among themselves in a cascade of musical voices.
‘Why can’t I understand him?’ Eremon wondered.
‘These people use many of the old words. That is why you can understand part of it, but not all of it. He will be able to speak with you, though, when he chooses.’
‘So what did you say to him that made him surrender?’
Rhiann smiled wryly. ‘He did not surrender. He paid homage to a Ban Cré. Here the worship of the Goddess is stronger than the worship of the sword gods. I spoke sacred words to him. Then he truly believed.’
‘And what did you tell him about me and my men?’
‘That you were my bonded man, here to help me—’
‘Bonded man?’
‘Their meaning for “husband” is slightly different.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Eremon, this is all old lore. All that matters is this is the help we needed. They will take us to their village, and then I will ask them for help to get us home. They respect me, but are wary of you, so you are in my hands in this. There is nothing more to be done.’
He saw the truth of it, and nodded. ‘I will be on my best behaviour. Especially if they give us food; my belly growls like a bear.’
Chapter 70
Nectan came back to Rhiann and instructed that they follow, so long as the ‘man with the sword’ stayed by his side. The rest of his men fanned out to surround the little group, and in this way they were led back into the dunes until they came out on to a narrow trackway that ran south.
The clouds had been blown away by the last of the high winds, and the moon now sailed in the dark sky, sheening the surface of a shallow loch by their path. They splashed through a stream trickling over the sands, before climbing higher ground once more, reaching Nectan’s settlement before the moon had sunk halfway to the horizon.
There a strange sight awaited them. Among the dunes, a scattering of small, pointed roofs rose above the sand, like the helmets of a buried army. Nectan stopped outside a passageway that led into the dune towards one of the roofs. ‘Come, we will eat,’ he said. ‘Then, we will talk.’
Eremon looked up at the tiny cone of thatch poking out of the sand, and down to the narrow doorway. ‘All of us? Surely there are too many to fit in this house?’
‘No.’ Rhiann’s voice smiled in the darkness. ‘Among these people, not all is as it seems.’
They walked down a passage roofed with massive lintel-stones, and then Eremon discovered what Rhiann meant, as they emerged into an enormous house that had been built snugly into a great pit in the dune.
Firelight from the central hearth warmed the outer stone walls, but there was also an inner ring of pillars that held up a flat, corbelled roof. In the centre, where the stone ceiling ended, an opening was capped by the thatched roof they had seen from outside. It was hard to believe such a house could not be seen from above, and yet was safe from the wild winds and rain of the Western Sea.
Eremon turned eyes full of new respect on Nectan, who was watching him, a glint of amusement in his own. ‘Son of Gede, this is an extremely fine house. I have seen none so cunning, even in my own lands.’
Nectan beamed and clapped Eremon on the back, gesturing for him and his men to sit around the hearth. Rhiann he led to his wife, who bowed and kissed her hand fervently, seating her and Caitlin on embroidered cushions nearest to the fire.
Rich smells of leftover mutton and carrageen stew were still curling from the iron cauldron, but as the family had already eaten there was not enough to feed unexpected guests. But Nectan’s wife sent her numerous children scurrying to the other
houses, and soon they returned bearing gifts of porridge and bread and new cheese; enough to bring strength back to their limbs.
They fell to eating, ravenous. Nectan went to a barrel in a storage alcove and returned with a wooden jug of ale, which was just as quickly consumed.
As he ate and drank, Eremon saw the little man gazing at his golden torc; those alert, dark eyes made him uneasy. Rhiann ate more slowly, murmuring all the while to Nectan’s wife, and then to Nectan, who came and sat near her. Soon Rhiann shook her head, her voice raised as if she were striving to explain something. Then Nectan frowned, his mouth stubborn. Caitlin was worried, looking from one to the other.
Rhiann glanced over at Eremon. ‘I told him why we have come – that war with the Romans is near.’
‘What does he say?’
‘That the Goddess smiles on us. All the Caereni and Carnonacae leaders are travelling to the Sacred Isle, over the sea.’ A shadow of pain crossed her face. ‘In less than a week it is Beltaine – a most sacred Beltaine to the island people, for in the moon cycle it only comes around once every eighteen years.’
‘Then it is a god-given opportunity!’
‘Yes.’ She stared at him, unseeing.
‘Cousin.’ Caitlin put a tiny hand on Rhiann’s arm. ‘What is wrong?’
But Rhiann did not answer, and Eremon could see her struggling with some strong emotion.
‘I wish to speak with the Ban Cré alone,’ he said. Nectan bowed his head, signalling to his wife to get sheepskin cloaks for them both.
Outside, they walked in silence on top of the dunes, where the sinking moon turned the sand to bronze.
‘Landing there before these kings with only the cloak on my back is not the most auspicious of entrances.’ Eremon ran his fingers through his salt-tangled hair. ‘Yet, by the Boar, it is too good an opportunity to miss!’
Rhiann said nothing, watching the gleam of light on the sea. Then Eremon took her elbow, and felt the shiver that went through her.