The Dog and the Wolf (64 page)

There were words to speak, praise, encouragement, condolence, shared prayer. Finally there were words to exchange with the enemy. Those maimed lay still, knife-stuck; but a dozen or so had been captured, hale enough to seem worth binding. They sat on the trampled grass near the stream, hobbled, wrists lashed behind backs, in a dumb defiance. Equally weary, their keepers leaned on spears whose heads glimmered in the dying light. The hull of
Brennilis
made a cliff blocking off the sea.

Salomon approached with Evirion, who understood the Scotic language. “I don’t know what information, if any, we can get out of them,” the prince explained, “nor what use, if any, it may be. However, Gratillonius believes in gathering all the intelligence he can.”

Hardly had the skipper begun to say that this was their conqueror who had come, than one among them crawled to his feet. He was aged for a warfarer, the gray hair sparse on his head, beard nearly white. Scars won long ago intertwined with gashes and clotted smears from today. His tunic hung a rag on the gaunt body. Yet gold shone on neck and arms, and his look made Salomon think of a hawk newly taken from the wild.

“Sure and is it himself you’ve brought?” he said in Latin. Hivernian lilt and turn of phrase made music of it. “I’ll met, your honor.” He smiled around the teeth left to him. “But ’twas a grand fight you gave us. No shame in defeat at hands like yours.”

Astonished, Salomon blurted, “Who are you?”

The seamed visage registered offense. “It is unworthy to mock a man in his grief. The Gods mislike that.”

Verania had said barbarians were more than witless animals. Someday such as these might be brought to Christ. “I’m sorry,” Salomon replied. “You’ve worn me out, and I forgot myself.”

The man laughed, a clear sound, like a boy. His friends raised their heads to behold him athwart the sky. “Ah, that’s better. I am Uail maqq Carbri of Tuath Caelchon in Mide, and fortunate
you
are, for I it was who led this journeying from Ériu.’

“What?” Incredible luck, maybe. No, likely not; his people would never disgrace him by offering ransom. Just the same—“I command the Armoricans here, Salomon, son of Apuleius. Our lord, uh, our lord Gratillonius is away or he would have met you himself.”

“I knew that,” said Uail. “It was a reason why we came. We did not await the young wolf fighting as stoutly as the old, saving your honor.”

“You knew? How, in God’s name—by what sorcery?”

Uail’s smile grew sly. “Ah, that would be telling.”

“Tell you will!” Evirion snarled.

Uail gave him look for look and said quietly, “Your Roman tortures would only close our mouths the harder.” To Salomon: “But you and I might strike a bargain, chieftain with chieftain.”

His face was blurring as dusk closed in. “Go on,” Salomon urged, and felt how suddenly the eventide was chilling off.

“I will answer your questions, so be it they touch not my honor or the honor of my King, until—” Uail glanced east. “Until seven stars are in the sky. That is generous of me, for the moon will make the little ones slow tonight. Then you will strike the heads off us you have bound.”

“Are you mad?” Or a barbarian.

“I am not, and I know I speak on behalf of these lads with me, young though they are while I am long past my time, I who outlived my King. You will make slaves of us otherwise, will you not? You will put us to digging in your fields and turning your millstones. Because our owners will fear us, they may first blind us—or geld, and we may be so unlucky as not to die of that. I bid you my answers in return for our freedom. We shall swear to it by each his Gods and his honor. Is this not fair?”

“Make the deal,” Evirion whispered in Salomon’s ear. “It’s the best we can do. But don’t let him blather on till the time’s run out.”

Salomon swallowed a lump of dryness. His pulse
thuttered. “It is fair, Uail,” he said. “I swear by Christ Jesus, my hope of salvation, and, and my honor.”

“And I by the heads of my forefathers, the threefold Mdrrigu, and my honor, the which is the honor of my King Niall.”

“Niall!” exclaimed Salomon.

Uail’s voice rang. “I was his handfast man these many years. He was my King, my father, my dearest brother. It was for the avenging of him that I called the young men to sail with me: not for plunder or fame, though that lured them, but for vengeance upon his murderers. Ochón, that we failed! Ochón for the dead! Ochón for the righting of the wrong, now when none abide who remember Niall as does this old head soon to fall! But we gave him a pretty booty of newly uprooted souls, did we not?”

“But Niall died—south of us—at the hand of another Scotian.”

Hatred flickered. “Ah, you would be knowing of that, wouldn’t you?” After a breath, Uail spoke half amicably. “Well, I do not believe you, Salomon, with your honest face and all, had any part in that work of infamy. Nor quite did your King Grallon, though the Gods know he had much of his own to avenge and I do not think he forbade—”

“How did you reach us like this?” Evirion interrupted. “Nobody saw you before dawn.”

“Ah, we stepped masts and sailed straight across,” Uail said blandly. “By day and by night the wind was fair for us, the waves gentle, and we unafraid though everywhere around us was only Lir’s Ocean. I knew that our course held true, and from me the lads took courage—”

“None of your damned talking the time away!” Evirion broke in again. “Where did you make landfall?’

“Why, just where we wished, at the headlands of Ys. In among the rocks we threaded, cat-sure, never endangered, and there we took the first small part of Niall’s revenge for him. Men were at work ashore, breaking what still stood. We put in and ran them down, like foxes after hares, and laughed as we slew them. You may go find their bones and the bones of their oxen above Ys. The oxen we roasted and ate; the gulls will have feasted on the men.”

Salomon remembered sickly that despite the terror that misted yonder bay, bold scavengers made forays yet. The gold and gems were gone, but dressed stones remained. They called to need more than greed. Folk built houses, often where raiders had destroyed wooden ones; they decked paths against winter’s mire; they raised shrines or chapels—Gesocribate required much building material to repair and heighten its shattered defenses—

“Then you rowed by moonlight to Audiarna,” Evirion was saying. “What would you have done if you’d taken it?”

“Why, looted, killed, and left a waste, a memorial pyre to Niall,” Uail said. “After that, ah, well, that would have been as the Gods willed, and a fickle lot They are, as every sailor and warrior well knows. We bore hopes of going on upstream, not this river but your Odita, as I understand you call it, to seize Grallon’s very rath, and him returning to no more than what Niall found at Emain Macha. We might not have chosen this attempt, for I am not as rash as you may be thinking, but if not, then we would have raged up and down your coast until—”

“Hold!” Salomon cried. Twilight deepened. Moonlight tinged the grass and the dead. The cold was within himself, he knew, and shuddered with it. “Who told you Gratillonius was away?”

“She did,” Uail answered. “She rose from the sea and sang to me while I walked by night mourning for my King. That was where the Ruirthech flows into its great bight, and across it the land of the Lagini to whom he gave so much sorrow, but who in the end—”

Salomon seized the ripped tunic in both fists. His knuckles knocked on the breast behind. “Who is she?” he yelled.

“The White One,” Uail said, “she who swam before our prows to guide us and—” He looked over his shoulder at the night-blue east, beyond the moon, and finished triumphant: “And now, your honor, behold the seven stars.”

1

There was a man named Catto who was a fisher at Whalestrand, a hamlet clinging to the shore near the eastern edge of the territory that belonged to Ys. After the city foundered, the Whalestrand folk allied themselves with the nearest clan of Osismii and brought their catches to Audiarna. There Catto, embittered at the Gods of Ys, soon learned to call on Christ.

He saved what he could, and was at last able to get a small vessel of his own, which he named the
Tern
and worked with his grown sons Esun and Surach. Their affairs prospered in the meager fashion of their kind. They were ashamed when they learned the Scotic raiders had gotten past their watchfulness, though that was at night; but first they had rejoiced to see currachs full of wild men fleeing scattered back oversea.

Once sure that the danger was past, Catto hoisted sail and left home behind him again. The season grew late; fishers must toil until storms and vast nights put an end to it, if they were to have enough to last them through the winter.
Tern
was not a boat for venturing out far and staying long, but her sailors knew the shoals around Sena. There the nets often gathered richly, and few others cared to go near that haunted island.

The vessel had just passed Cape Rach when a fog bank to the south rolled on a suddenly changing wind over her—whereupon the wind died away and left her becalmed. For hours she floated blind. The gray swirled and smoked so her crew could barely see past the rail to slow, oily-looking swells that rocked her before them with hardly a whisper. The sound of water dripping off yard and stays
was almost the loudest in the world. Cold and dankness seeped through to men’s bones.

Then, blurred by faintness but ever stronger as time crawled along, came the rush and boom of surf. “We’re in a bad way, lads,” Catto told his sons. “The Race of Sena is bearing us where it will, but never did I know it to flow just like this.” He peered out of his hood, forward from the steering oars whose useless tiller he gripped, into the brume. “Pray God—nay, He’ll ha’ no ear for the likes of us—ask holy Martinus if he’ll bring us in safe, for ’tis out of our hands now.”

“Can he see us where we are, or walk over the water to us?” Surach wondered.

“There’s them that could,” Esun said, and shivered.

Darkness thickened, but they made out a reef that they passed, a lean black length around which the waves grunted and sucked.

“I’ll give the Powers whatever they want for our lives,” Catto said.

He thought those might be unlucky words, and fumbled after better. All at once a breeze sprang up, sharp and salt on his lips. The mist streamed away before it, lightening around the boat though low and murkful yet overhead. To starboard and port the noise of breakers deepened but also steadied. Among the vapors, dim and mighty shapes began to appear. Closer by, lesser ones lifted jagged, turbulence afoam at their feet.

“Christ ha’ mercy, ’tis the bay of Ys,” Catto cried. “We’ve drifted this far and the wind’s blowing us in.”

“What’ll we do?” Esun called back through the roiled gray. Surach clutched an amulet of seal bone hung from his neck and mouthed half-remembered spells.

“Steer on,” Catto answered grimly. “Stand by to fend off, ye twain.”

Both younger men fell to. Soaked and heavy, airs slight to belly it out, the sail gave
Tern
little more than steerage way, about the same as Esun and Surach had they been at the sweeps. Thus they could wield boathooks when she was about to collide or scrape, while their father kept the helm. Here the rocks were not natural, but remnants of what human hands once wrought. Several years had brought
most low and eroded the sandstone of what still reached above water. Nonetheless they could tell what tower yonder snag had been, see a piece of wall below which they used to walk, glimpse a broken pillar drunkenly leaning, stare into a sculptured face trapped in a skerry of tumbled marble blocks. Not labor alone made the breath sob in their throats.

The tide was in flood, close to full, but this evening its violence was at the cliffs and it went up the beach almost gently. Ground grated under forefoot and keel. “Heave anchor!” Catto ordered. His shout was muffled in the emptiness around.

“We’ll camp ashore,” he told his sons. “There’ll be another high in the morning to float her.” They were glad of that. Here a night aboard would have been cheerless indeed. The three waded up through the shallows carrying food, gear, and a line for making their craft doubly secure and aiding them back.

Wind strengthened. It shredded fog and drove clouds over the headlands that gloomed right and left. Westward past the ruins and the rising restlessness beyond, sunset glowered sullen red and went out. Eastward the valley filled with a night which had already engulfed the hills at its end. The wind whined and flung briny cold at the men. “‘Tis swinging north,” Catto said. “If it stays like that, Point Vanis ’ull break it for us tomorrow and we can row till we’re clear and then catch it for a run to our fishing grounds. Thank ye, holy Martinus.”

“If’twas him,” Surach muttered.

They ventured not to whatever shelter the partly demolished amphitheater afforded. Ghosts might house within. However, while some brown light lingered they sought among the grasses and bits of pavement that way, and made a find. Bones of oxen lay strewn about ashes of the fires that had cooked them. The wagons those animals drew had mostly been hacked up for burning, but fragments were left.

“Scotic work,” Catto thought aloud. “I suppose Prince Salomon sent a party to fetch the slain drivers for rightful burial. Well, poor fellows, they’ll nay grudge us what warmth we get from this.” He and his sons filled their
arms with the wood and carried it back to the beach, where they had hitched their line to a rock above high-water mark. Such nearness to their boat gave a little comfort. By the last of the dusk, Catto used flint, steel, and tinder on what Esun and Surach split for him. Flames licked up to flap yellow on the wind.

The men spread their bedrolls and hunkered by the fire with hardtack, cheese, dried fish, water jug. Its light brought leathery faces flickery into sight. Night prowled, whistled, mumbled close around. “Aye, an eldritch haven,” Catto said, “but we’ll gi’ thanks for it natheless, and tomorrow ’ull see us where we ought to’ve been.”

Laughter sang in the dark. The food dropped from their hands. They leaped to their feet and stared outward. The high, sweet music jeered: