Bard I (3 page)

He must have found it interesting or deeply obscure, for he kept up his drumming all that day. From dawn till dusk he squatted there in a strict fast. Not a drop did he drink; not a bite did he eat; not a word did he say.

* * *

The feasting had barely begun that night, by a Jutish sea-wolfs reckoning, when Kisumola came in. Felimid sat at the foot of the king’s table, the new prestige he’d won by defeating Tosti. It presaged not too badly for a fair answer when the bard asked for Regan as a gift from Hengist’s son. Maybe later this very night, when the flush of Yule cheer was on the king, and Felimid’s songs had worked their magic . . .

That was when Kisumola entered, leaping and prancing in rage. The glare of his eyes was ghastly; he foamed at the mouth. The plumage sewn to his deerskin jacket seemed to ruffle and rise like that of a furious bird. He carried his drum.

One last, awful, epileptic leap he made. Then he stood grotesquely still before the king.

‘Master!’ he almost whispered. ‘My spirits have spoken to me! There is treachery in your hall, and a knife aimed at your back! There is one who cats of your bounty and yet means you harm! Give me leave to find him!’

Oisc looked startled, but gave his permission. The wizard prowled among the tables. Fear walked with him. Some men made protective signs against him, as Regan had done; others were uneasily derisive. Only Felimid looked on with detachment. He wondered who Kisumola would accuse as a traitor, and guessed it would be some enemy of the wizard’s own.

The strange feathered figure paced and whirled. His black eyes shot glances from which tough-handed warriors flinched. He beat the drum with his open hand, an ugly, uneasy pattering that set men’s teeth on edge. After stalking up and down the hall, he came back again to the king’s table. Then he flung up a skinny arm to point at Felimid mac Fal.

‘There!’ he shrieked. ‘That one! He’s a spy for the British kings, a spy! My spirits have told me!’

The bard was too blankly astounded to deny it at once. King Oisc looked at him with eyes like blue ice.

‘What do you say to that, harper?’

‘Say?’ Having found the use of his voice once more, Felimid waxed fluent. ‘Why, lord, I say this is lies and calumny and untruth and false witness from beginning to end! My coming to Kent has no hidden motives; I’m a man of honor! Your servant here has interpreted the message of his spirits wrongly. That, or he wilfully lies.’

Kisumola screeched vituperation and denials.

‘Be silent,’ Oisc told him. Then, to Felimid, he said, ‘Why should he lie?’

‘Och, wizards are more jealous than concubines! I reckon my joke on Tosti has him thinking that one wizard in this burg is enough.’

‘You do not convince me,’ Oisc declared. ‘It’s not your intention to stay past the end of winter, and Kisumola knows that.’ He turned to Kisumola. ‘Listen, you dog of the tundra! I saved your miserable life in the north, and I’ve kept you, fed you, protected you ever since. I’ll have you buried to the neck in sea sand to wait for the tide if you’re telling me lies.’

‘Master, have I lied or been mistaken before? Ever?’

‘No,‘admitted Oisc. He looked hard at Felimid. ‘He’s just such a one as the British kings might send, for a fact.’ The mistrust in his grim stare grew. Although his wits were not especially quick, his suspicion was, and his anger. ‘Take him!’

Men had already hemmed Felimid in, waiting for such an order. They were too slow about performing it. The bard had expected some such command, as well.

He drove his knee between one man’s thighs. Another laid hands on him, to win a broken jaw as a reward for his zeal when Felimid half turned, making sudden, violent use of his elbow. His assailant sat down as if struck with a maul, fouling two more of the king’s gesiths who had pressed close.

Felimid ran.

His sword, Kincaid, did not hang within reach. The Jutes wore no weapons while they ate, and neither did the sons of Erin, as a rule. Still, each wall and pillar was glitteringly hung with weapons. Felimid snatched a spear without pausing in his flight.

A earl, armed in the same way, blocked his path. A spear’s point darted at Felimid’s throat like the beak of a thirsty bird of war. With a clatter of shaft on shaft, Felimid knocked the spear aside. His own point sank into the man’s belly, encountering yielding, heavy softness. A long shining spurt of red followed as Felimid drew back the spear.

One swift glance the length of the hall showed him that there was no way out. Thirty men, forty, had massed between him and the far end. Even if he reached the anteroom he’d be dragged down long before he could unbar the outer door alone.

There didn’t seem much for him to do but die-quickly, if he could contrive it, with all the style and grace such an essentially graceless business could afford. Felimid set his back against the hall’s thick central pillar. Now they should see!

The king shouted, ‘Take him alive!’

‘Alive, is it?’ Felimid laughed. ‘Cairbre and Ogma! High is the price you will pay for that! I’m determined, see you, not to be taken alive! I know what your Jutish amusements are! The next three men who come near me will die, if you hamper them with commands not to slay. Or why don’t you come, Hengist’s son?’

Oisc’s blue eyes glittered as he heard this insolence.

‘I will!’ he said. ‘None of you men attack him! Make two lines with a narrow lane between, so that he cannot move from where he stands without showing his back to some of you. Then leave him to me.’

Felimid was puzzled. Did Oisc himself mean to fight? He held no weapon. Also, Felimid could not guess the purpose of the orders Oisc had given, which made him uneasy.

Oisc then showed why he was a king. Ripping a great shaggy bearskin from the wall, he ran forward between the double line of men. Five paces from Felimid, whirling the skin with all his gigantic strength, he threw it.

The bard couldn’t avoid it, because of the men hemming him in. He was covered, enwrapped, whelmed in smothering fur. It felt weighty and vast as the sea. They gave him no chance to struggle free. They pinned him with his face in the greasy rushes, legs held down, an unrelenting foot in the small of his back. Disarmed, he was dragged upright, to look at Oisc’s grimly laughing face.

‘Bring him to the pit,’ the king commanded.

The bard’s wrists were dragged together behind his back, and lashed. With kicks, cuffs and shoves he was taken to a rough square chamber opening from the main hall, its doorway curtained with hides. In the middle of this chamber, an octagonal rail of logs encircled a pit. A clamour of growls and snarls rose from it as they entered.

Felimid knew then what the king planned for him. His belly shrank to a lumpy cold clot of fear. He fought his captors madly, to no purpose.

‘Give him a look,’ said Oisc. ‘No more; not just yet.’

Torches blazed around the pit’s rim in the hands of grinning men. Below, six wolves tried frenziedly to reach them. Gaunt hairy bodies, drooling red tongues, glinting eager fangs. Eyes like fire-lit emeralds, glaring. Felimid shuddered with horror.

‘Fine beasts, are they not ?’ demanded Oisc. ‘I feed them barely enough to keep them from eating each other. But I won’t have them tear you now. No, by Wotan, I’ll save you for later! Bind his legs and hang him by the feet from that beam! He can watch the wolves for a few hours, and think of what’s to come!’

This they did. One end of a long rope was tied securely about the bard’s ankles. They tossed the free end over a beam that ran directly above the wolf pit. A strong man on the pit’s far side caught it, and with two others to help him he drew in all the unwanted length. They knotted the free end to one of the log railings about the pit.

Swinging back and forth, head downward, Felimid looked upon jeering upturned faces. One, dreadfully scarred, belonged to a man with his left arm in a sling and a wolfskin on his head. He wore a wide grin of satisfaction as well.

Felimid was certain, then, that he knew why Kisumola had lied about him. Tosti had paid the wizard or forced him; it did not matter which. Felimid cursed them both with the most dreadful dooms he could lay tongue to. He didn’t forget Oisc in his maledictions, either.

‘I’ll see that your master learns what became of his spy,’ Oisc mocked. ‘Which British king is he, harper?

Gereint? Cador? The Warlord himself? Pah, don’t answer, then! It doesn’t signify now! Come, companions, our meat will be growing cold.’

For a while, dozens came in to goggle and laugh. However, they didn’t stay. A man hanging like a side of pork is not rewarding to stare at for long, and soon enough he was alone.

The noise of celebration came muffled through the thick hide hangings. In a few hours the king would return to round off his night’s revels by watching Felimid tom limb from limb. Moments of agony worse than fire, and then no more songs forever. He had to escape!

Nor would he concede that it couldn’t be done, though without his harp he was a man doubly unarmed. If he had, he’d have gone stark mad. The wolves stared longingly up at him. They knew what to expect. Cold sweat ran down Felimid’s face into his hair. He knew what to expect, too.

So. With his hands behind him, he could do nothing. Could he somehow get them in front?

He was supple enough, and he could try. A tough leather thong lashed his hands behind his back. The ship’s line binding his ankles together, from which he dangled, was a separate bit of rope entirely. Then–?

With an effort that set his leg muscles shrieking. he drew himself into the curled position of the womb, touching his backside to his heels. As difficult as that was to do while he dangled upside down in the air, it was nothing to what he must still achieve.

Grunting and arching his back like a bow. he strove to force his bound hands past his feet. He had long, almost prehensile feet, to which he partly owed his fame as one of the swiftest runners in Erin, but in that moment he passionately hated every inch of them. And bis heels. What a ridiculous, hampering shape heels were, bulging like mountains, making it impossible to slide his bound wrists over them when he needed to!

He did the impossible.

Then he slid his hands up the arches, bit by excruciating bit. They came, intolerably, to the balls of his feet and the toes. His face had long since purpled from a rush of blood to the head; now it was blackening. His skull threatened to burst. The tendons behind his knees felt like whitely glowing wires about to snap.

Ha!

His bound hands cleared his toes.

Gasping, sweaty, he slid his wrists up the rope by which he hung suspended, until his hands were before his face. At the same time he pushed down hard with his legs. Before long, he stood shakily upright while the blood drained from his head and he almost fainted. At last the hollow, singing blackness went away.

His full weight still bore on his ankles. The difference was that he now stood right way up in his bonds. The long rope ran up from his feet through the circle of his arms, past his face, across the beam and then down to the log.

He hooked an elbow around the rope, got his face to his bound wrists and began to work on the knot there with his teeth. Something would happen, of course. Some fool would amble in to gawk, discover what he was doing . . . and it would all have been for nothing. He worried the knot until it loosened and gave. With his hands free, he climbed the rope to the overhead beam. There he sat and untied his feet. Moving along the beam on hands and knees, he gained a perch above the curtained entrance, where he’d have the advantage of anybody who did come in. Free, he thought, Free! Unbound and able to move, at any rate!

What is to be done now?

If he regained the harp Golden Singer, he could do much. The three enchanted strains she could produce, one for laughter, one for sorrow, and one for sleep, were more powerful weapons in their way than any of edged steel.

A man lurched in. Most probably he wanted to piss, and did not care to seek the privy in the cold. He should have done. His disinclination to walk outside was his death.

The bard fell on him with a force that knocked him to his knees. Felimid caught the Jute’s chin in one hand, the back of his head with the other, set a knee in the hollow of his back and wrenched hard. There was the sound of a green branch breaking, and a sort of snuffling grunt from the man’s throat. No more than that.

The bard shivered slightly as he dropped the corpse. The ease with which it had become one reminded him of the ease with which he too could die. As if he hadn’t had reminders enough! He hated killing, and would always avoid it unless driven by desperation . . . and yet desperation was in him now if it ever had been, making him dangerous.

Felimid stripped the dead man of his dagger-belt. He wore a cylindrical body-belt of shaggy bearskin, almost two feet from top to bottom, held up by studded buckled straps over his shoulders, and stout boots of walrus hide lined and trimmed with fur. Felimid stripped him of those, too. Dead men’s boots were supposed to be bad luck, but so were frostbitten toes.

Then Felimid heaved the corpse into the pit. The wolves snarled and fought.

Thinking quickly, Felimid cut the rope that had been knotted around his ankles, and frayed it to look as if it had parted naturally. The end belayed around the log rail he left where it was. The rest he dropped into the pit. He hoped King Oisc would think it had snapped under the bard’s weight, or frayed over the beam, and that the warrior’s remains were his. The man himself might not be missed until the next day. from what Felimid had seen of Yule feasting among the Jutes.

Now he must get out. A door lay opposite the curtained entrance; when he tried it, he found it barred on the outside. He wasted no time in frustrated curses. Best to climb back among the roof-beams, and begin cutting an egress through the thatch.

Then Felimid heard the sound of the bar being lifted. After one convulsive leap. his heart began to hammer at thrice its normal rate. He crouched against the wall.

The door opened wide enough to let in one person in a long hooded cloak. She saw the dangling rope and ran to the edge of the pit. When she beheld the feasting wolves she fell to her knees.