The Sea Thy Mistress (4 page)

The taller of the two seems a man in years, if barely, lean and muscular, dark shoulders gleaming in the afternoon light. Grains of quartz and flecks of mica glitter pale against the rosewood skin of his feet and calves. A sword both like and unlike Svanvitr swings from the belt of his short canvas pants, the hilt sparkling metronomically in the descending sun.

The wolf identifies the blade with a thin-lipped smile.

The other figure, a toddler, outlines his father’s path in a meandering orbit. He plays tag with the waves, splashing in and out of the sea without care.

The man pays no heed to the boy’s game with the ocean. Instead he keeps his own path—following him in an unwavering line along the foam-flecked waterline, never quite crossing over into the sea—until they come to the foot of a high, sandy bluff. There, the man scoops up the child one-handed, balancing him with unconscious strength as they scramble toward a white building perched on the hilltop, overlooking the tossing sea.

The wolf, unobserved—as is his nature—turns away, descends the bluff, and when he knows Cathoair cannot see him calls down his winged, white and patient steed. As the wolf mounts, Kasimir stomps a hoof impatiently.

You could just warn him.

Because he would heed my warning, Bright One?

He would heed Selene’s. And because it would be more decent than this skullduggery.

Heythe must not learn of my survival. Not until it is too late. Not until we have won.

You’re afraid of her,
the valraven says, spreading his wings in the sun, but hesitating. The wolf feels Kasimir’s muscles tense against the insides of his thighs and settles himself for the leap, but it does not come. He waits for Kasimir to call him coward, as he deserves, but instead the stallion leaves it for the wolf to condemn himself.

“Aren’t you?” the wolf says, aloud for the dignity of the dead. And there are so many dead behind him—his dead, and the dead of the wicked goddess. “Aren’t you afraid?”

*   *   *

Cathoair relished the living weight of his son in his arms. Carrying the boy up the narrow trail to the chapel, he cursed himself for an idiot.
Three years you could have had with him,
he thought,
if only you had known. Fool.

He chuckled.
But there’s nothing new there. Besides, if you had been here, Aithne wouldn’t be alive, would she?
And she had been worth saving. He hoped she found some young man who would treat her like a queen forever. A queen with scars, and a tongue like an adder’s.

Climbing, he smiled, and pretended to himself that the thought didn’t sting.

Aethelred, the chapel-keeper, had paved the trail with sea-smoothed stones; this at least saved them from having to fight the sand and scree. It was still a scramble, and the sword Alvitr threatened to trip him every third step.

He gained the summit at last, pulling himself up the last few steps with a grabbed handful of the salt grass that grew thick along the ridge. Resettling his son, Cahey turned to look over the ocean. Light flickered across it like the sparkles on a mirrorball. Down the coast, the arched rib cage of some great sea-creature lay bleached ivory on the sand, echoing the shape of the little chapel.

Cahey glanced down at the boy in his arms. Somewhere along the jouncing trip up the hill, Cathmar had dozed off.

Cahey shook his head ruefully and turned back toward the chapel, walking faster now.
Fool,
he told himself again,
three years lost that you can never have back. Idiot, moron, einherjar.

Synonyms, Aethelred would say.

Aethelred was right a lot of the time.

Cahey crossed the flagstones paving the hilltop. Pausing at the chapel door, suddenly self-conscious as a boy at his date’s front gate, he tried to smooth his wind-snagged hair. Another einherjar—the
only
other einherjar—still wore his hair in the single braid of long-ago custom. The kink in Cahey’s hair demanded a modified style. Though he’d always liked a ponytail, he’d grown it for decades, and now he kept it in small braids wound back into a single larger one, for the sake of tradition. If he admitted it, for the sake of Muire. Or the memory of her. Something like that.

It had all come undone in his climb, and now one of the smaller braids was starting to unwind, too.

The breeze gusted, whipping a ringlet across his mouth and catching strands on his rough, unfaded scar. He reached distractedly with his free hand to brush them away. They eluded him, the braid unraveling further, tangling his fingers and wrist.

The tug brought him back from the edge of distraction. He felt the light spill down his face like tears, a response to something that would not show itself, and turned his gaze back out at the ocean.

He raised an eyebrow at the sea. “I suppose you think that’s pretty funny. Don’t you.”

The waves tossed and hissed, far below. He nodded and bit back a flare of anger—irrational, and all the deeper for it. The remains of the braid stayed tucked, this time, and—like Aithne under her patched covers—he wasn’t sure if the silence was what he wanted, or what he feared.

“I miss you, too,” he said before he turned away and opened the door.

He half-expected his son to wake crying as they walked out of the warm afternoon sunlight into the dim chapel. It was, however, more brightly lit than Cahey had anticipated: whatever white stone formed the cantilevered ceiling was translucent, and the single large rectangular room was bathed in shadowless brilliance.

Cathmar sighed and snuggled closer to his father’s chest, but didn’t wake.

Cahey stood silently for a moment, allowing the quiet of the chapel to soothe him. He wondered if Aethelred had borrowed the design from somewhere, or if one of the refugees from Eiledon who had helped to build it had been an architect.

The center of the chapel stood empty. Long benches were set back a meter or two from each of the walls, each one different, lovingly crafted of reused iron and stone. Panels made of salvaged metal and glass covered three of the four walls: some sheets that must once have been sliding doors or office windows, accented by fragments in a dozen colors, framed and decorated with wire and other bits of copper, brass and steel.

The books hanging in their racks behind those glass doors numbered in the hundreds.

Someday,
Cahey thought,
I really do have to learn to read.
His son yawned and stretched in his arms.

The fourth wall faced the ocean, and held the only window. Three statues stood on a dais in front of it: one pale; one dark; and the one in the center gleaming bronze, backlit by the afternoon.

He avoided looking at that one. Rather, he stood in front of the one carved in pale alabaster with gray swirls running through it like lines of smoke. A woman with the face of a snow leopard, or perhaps a snow leopard with the body of a woman, she crouched as if ready to spring: one hand splayed on the warm rock before her, the other extended and holding up a sword.

A real sword, not a carven one. A sword with a blade of dark crystal, and a hilt like the brass hilt of the blade that hung at Cahey’s hip.

“Hey,” he said to his yawning son. “Look. It’s your auntie Selene. Do you see her?”

Cathmar blinked storm-gray eyes. “Not Auntie Selene,” he said, lisping her name.

Cahey laughed. “No, not really Selene. Just a statue.” He carried the child past the statue in the center again, and over to the one that stood on her right hand.

The angel’s lips pressed together in a frown. The ocean rolled at the bottom of the bluff, hissing against the beach. A woman’s lighthearted voice spoke in his recollection, plain as if in his ear.
I’d like you to model for me sometime.

In the end, he hadn’t needed to. She’d done it from memory.

Flawlessly.

He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the gleam of afternoon sunlight on veined black marble. Then he opened them again and forced himself to regard his own image.

She had captured him standing, but in motion. He balanced with more weight on the left foot than the right, head uplifted and cocked to one side as if a moment from whirling in place. The sword, in this case, was held low in one hand, continuing the incipient movement of the torso.

The statue was impressionistic. He could not say it was idealized, and it was rough-hewn in places as if she had not been able to bear the polishing. But the movement and proportion were striking, and the face was unmistakable.
Is that how she saw me? Is that what she loved?

He saw a caress in every chisel mark, passion in every stroke of the mallet. Somehow, it was worse, not to be able to deny that she had loved him in return.

He turned his face away.

“Da,” said his son, one hand extended toward the statue.

Cahey wiped his nose on the back of his hand and forced a smile. “Yep. That’s me, kiddo.”
Aethelred showed it to him, of course, and he thinks the statue is his father.

Idiot. Moron. Einherjar.

He turned toward the final statue. “C’mon. I have a story to tell you.” He paused and then laughed a strange, choking little laugh. “I’ll tell you all the racy parts first, while you’re still too young to understand what I’m talking about.”

*   *   *

Cahey held his son up to the third and final statue. “That’s your mom,” he said. “Before she was the ocean, she looked like that.”

The sculpture brought less painful memories than he’d expected. She’d been wearing her hair much shorter by the time they met, and she’d never been one to fuss with jewelry or clothes, so the formal robes on the statue made her seem almost foreign.

Cathmar reached out fat toddler fingers and tugged the statue’s outstretched hand. Cahey winced and covered the boy’s hand with his own. The chapel brightened, starlight washing the shadows from the statue’s bowed face. Cahey did not have to raise his hand to his face to feel for moisture. He knew by the sting of his eyes where the light spilled from.

He carried his son outside. The sun was settling, scraping orange light across the wavetops, and Cahey paused to draw Cathmar’s attention. They waited until the spill of color across the horizon had dimmed to shallow gold before descending the bluff in chill twilight shadows. The high points held the light longer.

The world was blue, the ocean invisible under mist, by the time they crossed the sand and the rocky strand to Aethelred’s little stone cottage up among the dunes and the salt grass. Aethelred was locking the blue wooden door when they got there.

Cahey wondered if he’d been waiting for them to come down the hill. Beach plum branches scratched at the walls, bowering a low sod roof dripping with summer flowers. Five-petaled roses the same flushed pink as seashell insides grew low at the foundations, making Cahey hide a smile. He had never imagined the scarred old man as a gardener. Or as a priest, for that matter.

Aethelred turned around and handed Cahey the key.

The einherjar studied Aethelred’s bright eyes and ruined face. “Where are you going?”

Aethelred shrugged and chuckled, swinging his staff and shouldering a pack that had lain half-hidden among the roses. “I’ve still got time to see a little of this new world before I die.”

“Cathmar?” As if attracted by his name, the baby wriggled in Cathoair’s arms.

“Your kid,” Aethelred said, reaching out and smoothing the child’s hair. “You raise him. Keep the house. There’s no food in it, but that won’t trouble either of you. Solar panels work, and the ’screen’s in good shape: you can even raise the city from here. Go ahead and sell the bed. I’ll call once in while. You’ve done enough wandering these last thirty-odd years; twenty in one place won’t kill you.”

“I…” Cahey took a step back. “I don’t know how to be a father.”

“Bullshit, kid.” When Cahey flinched, Aethelred continued in a harsh tone. “You know how
not
to be a father.”

Cahey stood there with his mouth half-open, feeling the sandy pathway rock under his feet.

Aethelred modulated his tone toward kindness. “Just don’t do anything that yours did, and you’ll be all right.”

“Aethelred. I can’t. I can’t be…”
a father to him.

Why didn’t Muire tell me? Why did I have to find out from Selene?

Because you never would have walked away from her if you knew she was pregnant, and she wanted you to go.
“What if I can’t control myself? What if I shake him, hit him?”

Aethelred put a giant, worn hand on the einherjar’s shoulder. Cahey watched his own reflection in the mirrored side of Aethelred’s face, his familiar features unchanging as they reflected from Aethelred’s half-sagging ones.

So old.
Cahey, who had been twenty now for almost forty years, suddenly understood why Muire had always seemed so pensive when she looked him in the eye. Back when
he
was mortal, too.