Bard I (14 page)

Brych, Gavrus’s younger son, with his bony face that always made Felimid think it must have been broken in half lengthwise and then fitted together again the least bit awry, shook his head. ‘We’re going to hear some rare lies tonight! I ken the signs. Let me guess. You charmed the bloody sea-wolves into returning across the sea, every last bitch’s cub of them, and they’re departing with the first sign of spring?’

‘Ah, no. Those are your wishes speaking. If I’d thought of it, now-but they gave me too much else to think of. Mind, I did bring someone away with me, because it was very much her wish. Regan’s as British as you are, and risked a hundred deaths to come to a British kingdom.’

Regan stammered, feeling awkward. She’d longed for this, been prepared to risk a hundred deaths, as Felimid said, rather than bide a slave among heathen sea-wolves, or to meet death by her own hand and be damned. Yet now she was painfully shy.

Gavrus’s wife Muriela bustled in from the kitchen, a round outspoken woman whose tongue raced ahead of her thoughts. Her two younger daughters came with her.

‘It’s you!’ she said incredulously. ‘I heard your name, and then your voice, but I couldn’t believe—Felimid, are you mad? You must know what will happen to you if you’re caught in the town!’

‘I’ve an inkling, yes. Your King’s charming heir will see me skinned, eviscerated, basted, and strung aloft for exhibition. He’d batter down your door in the night if he knew I was here, and it’s poor evidence of friendship I’ve shown by coming to you. But nobody knows, Muriela. I’ll be out of town with the dawn, and nobody but you the wiser. It’s to beg shelter and help for Regan that I came. She’s been in bondage among the sea­wolves until this winter.’

‘Oh! Sit down, and you too, Felimid. You look weary. I’d better feed you both before you faint.’ She put an arm around Regan’s shoulders in a brief hug. ‘You are more than welcome.’

Regan found herself sitting next to Veronica, a woman about six years older than she, taller and lighter of build, with a plain, good face.

‘I’m the firstborn,’ she said. ‘If you’re not sure of it yet, those two rogues are my brothers, Sigurnus and Brych; Linnet, and Rosgran over there, are my sisters; and those are my daughters howling for stories and riddles from Felimid. Saints! I’ll have trouble making them hold their tongues about his being here.’ She added, ‘I have no man. I’m widowed; the sea-wolves.’

‘So was [, and the same way,’ Regan answered.

‘Damn them!’

‘Listen now, for we had better do some swift talking and deciding,’ the bard said. ‘A new face in this town is bound to be noticed, and I had some small trouble with the gate-keepers. They may decide to say nothing of it. When two armed men are routed by a man and woman using their naked hands, it’s mighty humiliating, and a thing most wouldn’t wish to repeat.’

‘You did that?’

‘It wasn’t over-difficult. Clumsy as cows in a morass, they were. Regan, you’re a distant cousin of Vernoica’s from the north, beyond the downs, and of Felimid mac Fal you have never heard. Or if you have, it’s because the name was spoken in this house. You have never seen me, for your own sake.’

‘Welcome, cousin,’ Veronica said, smiling.

Regan smiled back. To Felimid she said, ‘Yes. You’ve warned me before this, but why? All I know is that you have enemies in the town. I glean that it’s the king’s heir. . .’

‘The king’s heir,’ Gavrus repeated. ‘That’s so, lass.

Prince Justin is worth ten in time of war, and he’s unbearable when there’s peace. You know the kind. A breakneck carouser, which I’d have nothing against if it wasn’t other folk’s necks he goes around breaking, and he’s turned a nunnery into a brothel for himself and his friends. He’s ready to kill anybody who crosses him.’

‘As Felimid did,’ Sigurnus put in.

‘He insulted me grossly. One shouldn’t do that to

bards,’ Felimid said mildly. ‘I satirized him to his face. A hundred were listening, his father and the bishop among them, and I was given to understand that I’d better leave Calleva swiftly and not return, bardic privilege or none.’

‘I see,’ Regan sighed. ‘Much as it was with Tosti. Tell me, how many other high-and-mighty folk have you offended?’

‘Offended!’ Felimid said in surprise. ‘I didn’t offend either of them. They offended me.’

‘And so you are to leave this town in the morning? Like that?’

‘Just like that,’ he agreed. ‘It’s as much as my life’s worth to stay. Maybe I’ll leave with a horse, if Kyle will give me one of his own, and maybe not.’ Regan did not ask who Kyle was. She was thinking that Felimid would go with the wind in one more night, and she would never see him again. ‘I’ll tell you what I wish even more for the present, Muriela; a bath, hot and copious, if I may. I’d wallow and bubble and scrub before a crackling fire, and beg clean garments of you, Sigurnus. What I’m wearing now belongs on a midden.’

‘I’ll set a cauldron to boil,’ Muriela promised. ‘I can’t promise you over-much space for wallowing in our wooden tub, but you can get clean.’

Felimid sighed. He’d grown fond of the luxurious Roman bathing practices in his four years in Britain; one reason, at any rate, to grieve the Empire’s fall.

‘Where will you go?’ Regan asked, concerned. ‘You’ve given me life by bringing me here. But you . . . will you go your way, blowing like a vagrant wind, not caring where you rest?’

‘Tomorrow, yes. I fancy that’s just what I’ll do. Don’t look stricken; it’s not dreadful!’

‘It is,’ Regan said, and, to her horror, wept.

Felimid was baffled. Did she want to cling to him? But why should she? She was Christian, and he a pagan, descended of Druids and the Tuatha de Danann. That had always troubled her, even in Kent where pagans surrounded her. Now that she was among Christians again, she had what she wanted, surely?

Rare and enchanted treasures the Tuatha de Danann possessed,

Gone long since with their makers into the dreaming West;

The club and cauldron of Dagda, the blazing spear of Lugh.

Manannan mac Lir’s white horses and the chariot they drew,

But three they left behind them in the lands of mortal men–

A harp, a sword and a shouting stone, like gems in a dreary fen.

Felimid mac Fal,
The Tuatha de Danann

W
HORING
,
IT
IS
SAID
,
IS
THE
OLDEST
PROFESSION
, but theft is at least as old. Whether it is more or less honorable is an open question.

Calleva had a few town whores, and as Gavrus the saddler remarked, the king’s heir had turned a nearby nunnery into a brothel. Professional thieves had a harder time of it. The town’s lack of size kept them from practising their trade for long in secret, and as soon as a thief was known he was briskly hanged. Some petty pilfering went on, but no more.

The thief who robbed Felimid that night had come surreptitiously into Calleva, and crept ratlike out when his work was done.

Bathed, shaved, washed, combed and trimmed, the bard lay deep asleep. With a choice between sharing a bed with Sigurnus and Brych, or taking a pallet by the hearth, he’d opted for the hearth. Regan was sleeping upstairs, with Veronica and her daughters. He half expected her to fumble her way down to him in the night. The other half of him expected to be awakened by Prince Justin and his hangers-on, firing the thatch. He didn’t think they could learn of his presence in the town; however, they might. For that reason, the sword Kincaid hung conveniently to his hand. He slept lightly, as a rule. He’d have said that a moth could not land on his face unfelt, and at first perhaps it was true. At first. . . at first. . .

He vagabonded it through that strange country just below the thin surface of waking. He knew a sense of confinement, of endless futile seeking in a maze. There were encounters and pursuits and escapes that seemed to last years, of which he kept only slight remembrance later. He knew in a vague way that he slept, and yet his dreams held him.

The smell fetched him back. Rankling faint but vile in his sleeping nose, it stung his brain to wakefulness. Waking, though. with other senses at work again, all more demanding and obviously useful than scent, it slipped from his notice. He lay feeling that all was not right.

Some robber or more personal foe? He detected no presence, but-be fumbled at nothing– the absence of a certain long bright sword of the gods! He bit hard on the beginnings of an outraged yell, stifling it. Gone! Kincaid was gone!

He reached down, a new dread rising in his heart. That at least was not founded; he touched the harp Golden Singer in her worn bag. She hadn’t been stolen. He slid his feet into shoes and his dagger out of its sheath. Pacing softly through the room and passing through the door, he consciously whiffed for the first time the reek spread on the air like blood cloudily tainting fair water. His throat contracted.

He moved cautiously, treading now and again on boards that squealed like rats. How had the thief failed to rouse him? The stench grew stronger, until Felimid wondered what on mundane earth or beyond it the source might be. Corpses and burning offal couldn’t have been fouler.

Half the lower storey of the saddler’s house was taken by his workshop. Felimid wondered if the thief could have had business there, and come upon the sword by happenstance. Perhaps, but he didn’t believe it. He turned to the kitchen, dining-room, pantry, and the smell became an abomination.

A foot fell soft behind him.

He spun, crouching, knife blade upward in his hand. It was Veronica, fetching in her shift, brown hair unbound, holding a lighted candle. She made an exasperated noise.

‘Felimid? Why are you prowling the house at this hour? And what’s that filthy reek? Oh!’ She ceased scolding, and pointed a finger at something. Her voice rose. ‘What, what is that?’

Well might she wonder. In appearance it was a burnt-out candle, but no such wholesome taper as she held. It was thick, a foul dingy yellow with streaks of grey in it, held by a severed black-nailed hand apparently cured with salt and herbs, clenched about the stub. Fat had trickled over the knuckles and thumb, congealing. From the stink it was a candle of corpse-fat.

Felimid’s stomach writhed under his ribs. Of all the obscene, sickening things . . .

‘God’s love!’ Veronica whispered. ‘Did you put it there? No. Of course you did not.’

‘Not I, on my oath as a bard. by my Lord the Sun! I don’t practise such tricks. But someone did. The same that entered the house and stole Kincaid from my side. He’s gone.’

‘Your sword? That is terrible!’ She hadn’t a notion how terrible.

Kincaid was ancient, one of the treasures of the Tuatha de Danann, children of Earth-Mother Danu. He was reputed to be the first weapon made from iron in the island of Erin. The smith Goibniu had come by him in the form of a fallen star, brought up from the depths of an enchanted lake. Goibniu had not known how to work the metal. None had, in those days. In fasting and visions, Goibniu had learned the secret, lying alone on a raft anchored in the midst of the lake.

He’d built a forge for this one work. He’d broken and reworked the metal nine times before he was satisfied, to hammered and chanted rhythms of lasting power, and quenched it in water from the sacred spring of wisdom at the source of Boann’s river.

Ogma the champion had carried the brand in war against the Milesians. It had been stolen at last by a crafty treacher. Ogma, bound by an oath, had gone armed with bronze in single fight against an opponent armed with Kincaid, and died.

He’d found time and strength to curse the thief who had robbed him, and all those not of the Danann blood who might carry the sword for all time to come. The curse was simple: death not long delayed. So had Ogma pronounced the curse, with his valiant life-blood darkening on the blade to give it power.

Find the thief Felimid must. And there was no clue but a foul candle whose purpose he did not know. Veronica stared at it with morbid fascination.

‘I’ll get rid of the filthy thing,’ she said. ‘You bad better put some clothes on, before you die of cold.’

‘Ever practical.’

‘Go back to the hearth and get warm!’

‘I will, I will. But don’t be throwing the hand away, Veronica. Some kind of charm it must be. It didn’t come from nowhere, and I may trace who left it.’

‘I had horrible dreams,’ she said. ‘I was locked in a deep dungeon with corpses chained about me. No, not locked either, walled up alive. I’m thinking the hand there caused them.’

Felimid thought of his own dream. Shifting fading fancy mixed with real memories, or premonition, he wasn’t sure which, but like her he’d dreamed a round of capture and confinement and endless efforts to escape. Maybe it signified.

‘Coming alone to see who made the noises was something foolish.’

‘I sent Regan to wake you and the brothers. Finding you gone, and guessing it must have been you I heard, I suppose she didn’t trouble.’

‘I did, though,’ Regan said from behind them. ‘I wakened Sigurnus and Brych first. Hard they were to rouse, too.’

‘We prang out of bed at her first whisper,’ Brych claimed. ‘Pah, what a stink!’

‘Sprang out of bed at the first whisper!’ Regan echoed with merry scorn. ‘You tried to drag me in!’

‘Not he. I was the one had the good taste to try it. But I wasn’t fully awake, mind, and thought at first I was somewhere else, with a different woman.’

This was probably true. Sigumus was not of the same stamp as the gate-keepers, and Regan was a guest in his father’s house.

They had the queries and explanations again, but for a wonder they did get back to their beds without waking anybody else. Sigurnus had a thought about the severed hand.

‘A leader of roving Bacaudae was hanged here a nine-night past. His body was stolen from the gibbet while two men guarded it. I’m thinking the hand must be his. I don’t know who would steal a corpse to render for candles, and before God I don’t want to know; but Festus the hangman will if no other does. Ask him, Felimid.’