Bard I (26 page)

A woman came by with a pot of steaming sausage. She handled it easily, heavy though it was. Plenty of men were eager to help themselves to the contents, and sample the bearer too. She evaded some of their slaps and grabs and fended off others, in spite of her clumsy burden. When one warrior groped her too boldly she cracked his nose with her ladle, her braided yellow hair swinging.

‘You mannerless swine!’ she snapped. ‘You don’t belong in the hall of a king! Get someone else to serve you food. I will not.’

She passed. The man growled angrily, and would have lunged after her. Others murmured their approval of the woman’s action, held him back and filled his ear with counsels of moderation.

Coming to Felimid’s place, the woman threw a big savoury serving before the bard as if she’d rather have knifed him. Quite seriously he held up his hands. palms outward, and placed them flat on the board. ‘I’m aware it’s the sausage you are giving out to one and all,’ he said. He smiled. Felimid’s smile could charm a brigand intent on murder.

She smiled back. ‘That is fine. How do you behave with ale in you? I’ll bide until I’ve seen that before I go praising you.’

‘It might be best. And if I’m fortunate, it will be you who brings me the ale. Felimid of Erin am I. What is your name?’

‘Eldrida.’ Her mouth wall full and warm as her body.

A small puckered scar showed where the skin stretched over her cheekbone. She had narrow grey-green eyes, with tawny flecks in them and a thin tawny edge to each iris.

No kitchen girl was she; her manner was too confident and her clothes too fine, even for Cerdic’s hall.

Felimid guessed her to be one of the women attendant upon Vivayn.

As Eldrida moved on, the bard looked anew at Cerdic. The man was an acknowledged son of King Oisc of Kent; there was thus some danger in entering Cerdic’s hall. Sadly, the bard could see no way to avoid it. He had to have a quick road across the sea. This was the nearest place to find one. April was beginning. Cerdic or his son would soon be off raiding distant shores, and Felimid might go with him if he won favor. lie relied on his harp and his tongue for that.

In the event. it wasn’t his harp or his tongue that did it. A short figure came stumping by on crutches. The sight of him startled the bard-but four feet high, he was almost a yard wide, with massively heavy bones and Limbs. Although his swart scalp gleamed with baldness and sweat, harsh dense hair made a thicket of his face. That beard might have covered his chest in a bigger, more splendid fan than the king’s, if the scorching fire he worked with had not constantly barbered him. The hair had been burned from his brawny hands and forearms as well. They were seared and calloused by the trade of the smith. Another?

Three smiths had proved violent omens for the bard;

surely three was enough. Three completed the sequence.

Such things did not go by fours. It denied symmetry.

A warrior thrust out his leg and sent the smith tumbling. One crutch flew clattering away. A foot pressed on the cripple’s squat chest and a derisive grin loomed above him like a rising planet, malefic in aspect.

‘Ho, little iron-hammerer!’ guffawed the man. ‘Confess the truth that your breed sprang from the maggots in a slain giant’s rotting flesh! Say it, and I’ll let you crawl off!’

The cripple snarled, wordlessly. His thick-fingered hands moved. With bone-hurting power, one gripped the front of Ills tormentor’s foot, the other the heel. He wrenched the imprisoning foot around. His tormentor was forced to spin on his other foot to save that ankle. Losing balance, he fell on his face.

The cripple did not release him. He wriggled after, grimly gripping and twisting. Ugly sounds of tearing cartilage carried to nearby ears. The warrior kicked backwards, into the cripple’s face, and tore his foot free.

Lurching upright, he fell against a table after two clumsy hops. He held it for support, his face grey and sweaty.

‘My foot!’ he raved. ‘This maggot’s grandson has broken my foot! Grab him, you there! Teach him some respect!’

A couple did, and at once found themselves in need of help. The smith was solid and durable as stone. It took four to hold him down. The first man watched with his face twisted by fury and pain. ‘The hearth with him!’ he snarled. ‘Hold his head over the fire until his chestnut of a brain roasts!’ The four thought that these were merry instructions, and began to carry them out.

Felimid had seen and heard it all with distaste. Now distaste became outrage. His rearing had taught him that honor was due smiths and poets and all makers.

He went over the table like a hunting marten. The pair of heroes who held the lame smith’s legs he shamelessly took from behind, clouting their heads together with all his strength in an honest effort to make the heads change places. They rebounded instead, through no fault of his. Their owners’ eyes rolled up. They sagged to the rushes, done for the night.

A third man had begun to rise from his task when Felimid kicked him enthusiastically in the belly. The man bent double, staggered backwards, fell into the firetrench and rose out of it blazing. Some of the feasters threw ale or mead over him, but most of it missed because the throwers were laughing so hard.

Since he was beginning to burn briskly, and might have fired the hall itself the way he was dancing about, two hefty fellows ran him down to the table’s end where a big cask of barley beer had been opened. They quenched him by shoving him in head-first. Then they debated over his kicking shoes whether to leave him in for flavor. At last they decided they had better drag him out before he drank it all.

The fourth of the smith’s assailants snatched a short iron spit from the hearth and tried to brain Felimid with it. The bard dodged his full-arm swing. Deft long­fingered hands seized the man’s head and jerked it down to meet a rising knee. That one also fell unconscious.

He who’d begun it all was truly out of the fight. The crippled smith had dragged him down, choked him senseless, and was now hitting him about the head and shoulders with his crutch as though trying to drive in nails.

‘Enough,’ Felimid said.

The smith ignored him. Felimid seized him from behind, meaning to heave him into the air. He barely succeeded in getting him upright. With a grunt of surprise at the short fellow’s stony heaviness, Felimid thrust him down on a bench in time to save tearing his guts with effort. Then be found the other crutch, returned it to the smith and poured him a horn of mead.

‘I’m thinking,’ he said,‘that you must be of the race the Jutes do call dwarves.’ He panted as he spoke.

‘I am a dwarf,’ answered the smith in a voice deep as a cavern.

‘And have you a name? Mine is Felimid.’

‘I am Glinthi.’

‘The king’s smith, J do not doubt? Maker of battle gear and all this rare beauty of wrought iron around us?”

Glinthi nodded.

‘Tell me,’ Felimid said, as his breathing slackened to a more normal pace, ‘has some god restricted you to a dole of seven words in a day and a night? I’m not asking assonance and rhyme of you, or cadence and alliteration either, but—’

He was interrupted before he could take the subject of Glinthi’s miserliness with words any further. The king’s cup-bearer stood by his side. ‘Scop? My master the King will talk with you.’

And so much for symmetry, Felimid thought. He caught up the harp Golden Singer. ‘Will he so? I hasten.’ Cerdic looked less magnificent at two yards’ distance. Pouches of reddened skin hung under his bloodshot eyes, and a network of little broken veins had spread across his cheeks. Although he couldn’t see it, Felimid guessed that the lion’s waist had thickened more than forty years made necessary. It didn’t astonish him. He’d never imagined that a pirate become king by the power of his sword-arm would live moderately.

And Cerdic was still an impressive man. He’d be that on his death-bed. The dark, penetrating eyes, the heavy shoulders and arms. and above all his ruthless, vital presence. shouted aloud of force, the power to command. h wasn’t a thing that had ever interested Felimid in the slightest, but he recognised it when he met it.

King Cerdic smiled through his flowing beard. ‘I saw you fight, stranger. A brisk enough little altercation, and you handled it well. If those drunken fools had damaged Glinthi. they would surely have paid for it– as I’ll make clear to them when they’ve recovered. He’s a thrall I value. though a dour little scut. Once he ran away. do you know? Had the use of his legs then. When he was brought back, I made sure that he wouldn’t run again. Haw haw! I’ll wager he gave you no thanks for what you did.’

‘He’ not what any would call talkative. lord.’

‘And what brings you to Westri?’

Felimid repeated the fulsome words he’d used before.

Cerdic ran fingers through his voluminous beard and chuckled. The fingers of his other hand absently rubbed the grim cup he held. as if feeling it gave him pleasure.

‘Good, then,’ he said. ‘We will hear you later. If you make music and poetry as well as you quell drunkards bare-handed, you will not find me stingy.’

Felimid bowed and spoke his thanks, but did not grovel. Looking directly into the king’s eyes, he noticed something. They were grey-green, with tawny flecks and a thin tawny edge, like Eldrida’s—or rather, Eldrida’s eye were like his. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Cerdic had fathered her. and probably half a hundred others. The bard shifted his glance to Cynric the atheling, and then to his wife Vivayn, speaking a polite word or two to each. Yes. Cynric had similar eyes. When he stood to give a health, he proved to be Felimid’s height, but broader-bodied and thicker-limbed. For all that, he moved with lithe ease. He reminded the bard of a large golden lynx.

The Lady Vivayn bad no rival for beauty in the hall;

her oval face had an exquisite precision of bone structure, and was fine-skinned as a child’s. But she was no child. Meeting her clear grey eyes just once would convince any but the thickest fool oft hat. Her lips, a darker red than Eldrida’s, were not so full. They curved upward ever so slightly at the corners, as if she were forever about to smile at some secret. That unchanging never­ quite-smile made Felimid feel uneasy.

She wore a russet gown, and over it a soft blue tunic of unborn lamb’s wool. The tunic was made simply, from two oblong pieces of stuff, one before and one behind, fastened together on her shoulders by golden brooches, and at the waist by a rich girdle. A mass of curling hair the colour of bronze fell down to her very feet so that she needed no mantle. It was held back from her face by a fillet of gold.

The bard wondered what lay behind that look of detached, half-amused content, and whether, if he were to find out, he would like what be discovered.

Three smiles that are worse than grief; the smile of snow melting, the smile of a leaping dog, and the smile of your wife to you after sleeping with another man.

Irish Triad

A
WANDERING
BARD
MUST
HAVE
A
FOX
’
S
EAR
FOR
GOSSIP
. Having heard it, he must be able to sift it for the truth it will possibly contain, and the lies it is bound to contain.Then he must judge which to repeat, and to whom. That night, Felimid made no slips. He knew Cerdic of Westri’s alleged descent, and his trained memory allowed him to recite it in detail. He traced Cerdic’ s line from Wotan, Victory-Giver, God of the Ravens, through Wihtgils, Hengist and Oisc, extolling the kingly and warlike virtues of each. At last he came to Cerdic himself, and really let his imagination take wing.

He made a virtue of the king’s obscure birth by giving him a captured British princess for a mother and having him reared in hiding because of cruel enemies. (Nine heroes in ten seemed to spend their youth in that way.)

The story gathered power. Cerdic grew to be a warrior, then a chieftain and father. Along the way he slew monsters and berserks and won a worthy bride. Felimid rather slighted the bride in the telling, for he knew nothing of Cerdic’s wife, now a dozen years dead, and he didn’t care to risk fabricating things about her. None of the warriors minded that she received small mention.

The bard told how Cerdic fared west from Kent with his wife and boy, to take Vectis with five ships. He told of voyaging and looting in the years that followed, and of Cynric’s growth to young manhood, sharing his father’s trade. He described magnificently how they had invaded the mainland together, taken Hamo’s Port and later given battle to Natanleod the Briton, slaying him at Charford with one thousand of his men.

Carried away, Cerdic thundered, ‘It was five thousand!’

The bard stuck his tongue in his cheek and so amended it. He knew that even one thousand exaggerated wildly. There couldn’t have been that many fighting on the British side, much less killed fighting. For that matter there probably hadn’t been a thousand on both sides together.

He thought fleetingly, This will be hard on the Lady Vivayn. Yet she betrayed no pain at hearing the battle described. Her cryptic slight smile seemed to broaden for a moment, as though the exaggerations tickled her.

Felimid sang of softer matters, of the love that grew between daughter of the vanquished and son of the victor. Cynric looked irritated and uncomfortable, but be couldn’t well object. All present knew that his father had ordered the marriage. Inside himself, the bard was grinning like a cat, and by the way her clear gaze rested on him, Vivayn perceived it.

Last of all he described Cerdic’s battle with the sea-dragon. It had ravened along the coast, spewing venom and breaking ships, until Cerdic had gone out to rid his people of the terror. Three war-boats went to the hunting, and two were smashed by the monster’s tail, their brave men all drowned but three, these three being aided on the long swim to shore, when their strength began to fail, by the mighty strength and endurance of their noble atheling, Cynric. So Felimid told it. He barely paused for breath, and made it sound as though Cynric hadn’t done so, either.