The World Above the Sky (2 page)

The three full-bellied, oak-decked, single-masted caravels stood ready behind the galleys. The caravels sat low in the water, laden with food, tools and supplies. At the lateral edges of the fleet, abaft the caravels, sculled two sleek Viking ships of war and four broad-beamed open-decked Viking freighters—bows and sterns swept up to a point. Each bow's pinnacle held the gilded head of a bare-fanged dragon. Their oaken tongues lashed scarlet flame upon the morning air, calling forth the sun. Each vessel showed a dozen portals to starboard and to port. Oars were manned—two men per oar—by rotating shifts of forty-eight men, twenty-four to port, twenty-four to starboard. Girls and women supplied a continuous round of rough-grain breads, fat salt-meat and honeyed barley water. Elder women skilled in domestic and medical arts, along with mature artisans marked by age and toil, completed the one hundred fifty-person compliment of each Viking vessel. Boys manipulated hide shelters angled to protect the oarsmen from salt spume, which blistered already rough skin raw. Unattached young men stood by, ready to replace injured or exhausted oarsmen.

Nothing stood between man and God on the open sea but the hide and fur layered upon the their backs. Laminated keels footed a single square-shouldered mast, set with a broad sail of tightly woven wool. Lacking the shelter provided by the wooden decks of the galleys and caravels, the sail would be lowered in a full-blown torrent and snugged to the gunwales. Only the salt-lashed ironman tethered at the starboard-stern tiller remained exposed to fight the ocean's vindictive immortals, ancient Norse deities frequently confused these days with the three-personed god of the ubiquitous Christians. When old religions fail to answer, faith is quick to shift its shape. God the Father was simply the Norse God Woden redressed—lightly clad in desert garb, relieved of the grim wool and fur, the damp and cold, the
Sturm und Drang
of hard-scrabble northern winters. The irrepressible Son—the benevolent, recycled Fisher of Men—was a welcome relief from the thundering Gods of Ragnarok and Götterdämmerung. The youthful Christ, perennially at the peak of his powers, was a benign soul with a kind heart and a mind of steel. It was he, not horn-headed breast-plated Valkyrie, who beckoned the dead toward the new but familiar eternally shining world. The third and most elusive expression of the tri-person Godhead, Christianity's preternatural shape-shifter, the Holy Ghost, became desperately popular, blunting as it did the unsettling, age-old uncertainties. Death, no matter its camouflage, troubles all with the same soul-stinging intensity. The Holy Ghost tore holes in the veil through which the shades of the blessed flock might pass. The doors to Valhalla, the exclusive purview of fallen heroes with its endless feasting and vigorous contests for delights of the flesh, were flung open. Asgard's majestic hall became a house of many mansions with room for all. God and His Son waited smiling at the refurbished gates of the more decorous Christian heaven, calm and welcoming, extending the balm of full bellies, sated desire and eternal, bliss-filled peace.

Under constant pressure from a stiffening southeast breeze, anchors were weighed. At Prince Henry's command, twelve hundred souls, with their Goddess at the helm, left the Old World forever. The Great Fleet New Arcadia vanished into the rising sun. Its golden light flared in Morgase's eyes.

She looked back, longing for one day more in Kirkwall. A promontory rose, obscuring her heart's desire, the village nestled in a safe harbour beyond the range of worn hills where she had been born. Eugainia laid a gentle hand on the small of her companion's back. Too soon for both women, the last of the Shetlands, the outer Skerries, Fetlar and Unst faded from view.

In the days and weeks and months that followed, the lumbering convoy with its overburdened fat-bellied vessels sailed a cautious route north to Kristiansand in southern Norway, where they took shelter—the first of many rest and provisioning layovers. They gained then left the archipelago Frislandia in their wake. They sailed north and west to Eslanda, where molten lava boiled at the edge of the frozen sea. Steaming vents sent plumes of vapour up from underground fires through churning waters high into the air where it froze and fell as snow on the upturned faces of Eugainia and her band of New World pilgrims. The fleet pushed westward past uninhabited Engronelanda's walls of glacier-capped rock. Tonnes of the ancient ice—hard as granite and as grey with age—slid slowly seaward. Massive slabs thundered down, split on basalt pinnacles honed keen as lances by grinding ice and pounding seas.

In the final weeks of New Arcadia's long passage, near the end of the eighth month, the warm surface stream flowing up from the south then curling east lost its stalling grip. The iceberg-laden current from the north shot them south and west, then due south.

In the ninth month, on June 21, 1398, they made landfall off Estotiland, lately known as the newe found lande, though it had been found and lost time and time again. Its inclination to disappear in fog then reappear in less cranky weather made it something of a chimera. This island of rock, relieved by bog and marsh, was a troublesome place. Its once-gentle tribes—the ochre-reddened Beothic—lost battle after battle, first to waves of savage Vikings, then to the merciless Thules. In the face of ceaseless assault the coastal Beothic had, according to the Mi'kmaq—their gentler cousins to the south and west—become surly, hard-bitten and cruel.

Sails hung loose. The fleet lay in crimson silhouette, immobilized, Henry supposed, by the sudden loss of the easterlies. The outsized sun, increased fourfold in the cool north Atlantic air, touched the northwest horizon.

Henry stood at
Reclamation
's bow, Eugainia at his side, less than a mile from the newfound land's southeast shore. The weeks ashore scheduled to purge the vessels and sustain Eugainia had the opposite effect. The Lady of the Grail had begun to fail. Her fair skin had roughened. Dark hollows marked her cheeks and shadows circled her eyes.

“Set me ashore. If only for an hour.” Her voice was tight with impatience. “I'm sickened by this foul vessel.”

Henry called across the short distance between
Reclamation
and
Speranza
to his kinsman, friend and strong right hand. At Henry's signal Sir Athol Gunn, a great-kilted, flame-haired hulk of a man, ordered a curragh lowered. His eight-man landing crew clambered down the side sticks, boarded the elongated tar-and-skin boat, the clatter of armour and arms sharp in the evening's calm. With four men to starboard and four to port, and Athol sculling at the stern, they made for shore where they'd seek a safe place—a sheltered grove, a defensible cave or grotto, perhaps—where Eugainia might rest and, if The Almighty so ordained, bear The Holy Child.

As one adores a wife, reveres a daughter, and shields his kin, Henry adored, revered and championed Eugainia St. Clair Delacroix. At the age of majority, Prince Henry, like all Sinclair males before him, had knelt—the Templar cross in his right hand, the sword of submission in his left—and spoken his clan's sacred pledge: Commit Thy Work to God. His was the devotion a true Knight of the Grail bore his Lady. He knew his duty: nurture and protect. She was, from birth, Henry Sinclair's chief reason for living.

Eugainia filled her lungs. She brightened at the thought of clean air, green and heavy with the scent of pine and fir. She could only guess at Henry's thoughts, so intense was his concentration on Athol Gunn's progress. The mutual regard she and Henry felt for each other was easy and comfortable as that of any loving father and daughter, though their bloodlines had diverged generations ago. Traces of the Royal and Holy Blood flowed in Henry's veins, diluted beyond privilege. No Sinclair male would perpetuate the ancient line.

Athol Gunn's landing party ran the curragh up the round-stone beach. These were formidable, robust men, these Highland Scot and Norse defenders of The Lady of the Grail. Each was selected for his prowess in battle and his demonstrated loyalty. Scarred and battered, each exceeded two metres in height, weighed more than sixteen stone. They climbed the cliff with an agility belied by their chain-mailed, breast-plated bulk. They disappeared into the salt-wind tangle of stunted conifers.

A slight breeze stirred. Yet nothing moved. Henry scanned the horizon. As far as the eye could see densely packed shoals of fish vast beyond comprehension rose to churn the dead-calm surface of the sea. It would take more than a stiff breeze to remobilize the Great Fleet New Arcadia; they were mired in fathoms of fish.

Henry and Eugainia stared, fascinated by the swirl of fins roiling the calm surface.

“Are these fish your first miracle in the New World?” Henry asked.

“God and Goddess sanctify us, no,” Eugainia replied. “Fish were my progenitor's symbol, as you well know.”

Henry dropped his glance, bowed slightly from the waist. His pale skin flushed.

“My Lady. I presume too much.”

Eugainia softened her tone. “I'm moved by your faith, Henry. Each manifestation of God and Goddess on this earth builds upon the last. The Christ, Lord Pisces, was both the fisher and, as it turned out, the fish. Mine is a different time. When Christ was Lord the faith strained to grow; now we strive merely to survive. Compared to Christ's humble twelve, we're a vast army, but one weak and scattered. We've found our purpose but lost our way. The church serves the very merchants the Son of God and I would drive from the temple. No, Lord Henry. I'm akin to the fishes themselves, but also to something greater...the
milieu
in which they swim. I'm Aquarius, the bearer of life, at once the chalice and
l'eau de vie
. I'm sent to flood the world with Grace. The time of the solitary Christ nailed in sorrow to the Roman tree is passed: Aquarius is the time of the Two Made One. None will see the face of God Almighty without acknowledging the ascent of the Goddess and her God, with whom she shall reign upon the earth as his equal until the next great turn of the wheel. I cross the sea to meet my earthborn God who is, I know—I have seen it—awake and waiting. I pray a time of peace awaits us, He and I. It will be good to be together, gather strength in a secret place where mortal sorrows howl unheard beyond the highest range of hills.”

Henry held his tongue. There was one husband for Eugainia, and he had been found. There would be none other than Lord Ard. Henry fixed his attention on the boiling surface of the sea.

Eugainia gripped the rail and quietly, very quietly, she moaned.

“God help me. Call Morg—”

“Morgase!” Prince Henry called. “Come. See to Eugainia!”

Morgase dozed in
Reclamation
's aft-castle. Despite the weight of years, the volume of muscle and flesh, she rose swift and certain. She cast off the cowhide cover. She was at her Lady's side in an instant. She slipped an arm around Eugainia's waist, laid her square hand gently on the great, round belly.

Eugainia's chin fell to her chest. Her eyes fluttered and rolled. She threw back her head. A rattling gasp expanded her chest. Her breath, held too long, broke in a visceral wail.

In a luminous mist, Eugainia's soul departed her body. Her essence resolved in the clear air above
Reclamation
, formed a spectral likeness of the body of the young Goddess Queen, from which it had emerged. The vision—robed in blue, golden hair floating—hung above her mortal flesh as though lost, taking its bearings. Eugainia's airborne image wavered, elongated, traced the arc of a spear in flight, shot high above the fleet, shimmered, pulsed, then plunged in a bright bolt of scarlet flame below the fish-rippled surface of the sea.

Eugainia's body remained extremely vulnerable in her altered state. “A soul lightly tethered to its body drifts beyond the ends of the earth, forever irretrievable, if the golden cord tying soul to body snaps, or is cut,” she once told Morgase and Henry. “When my soul departs you must protect my body with nothing less than your lives. Time simply dissolves when the rapture comes upon me. You must be patient and wait, firm in the belief that I will return. This world loses shape and rhythm, but somehow gains meaning. I—my soul—rises from my body. Then shoots up and away. In what seems an instant to you, I've gone to the ends of the earth and lived a dozen lives. I don't intend to be vague or mysterious. It's the only way I can describe these...travels that come upon me.”

Eugainia stood firm. Her hands remained fixed on the rail. Morgase searched her face. The Lady of the Grail stared, in thrall to the infinite, her body rigid as death.

Eugainia's airborne spirit sensed no threat as it plunged below the surface of this pristine sea. Quite the opposite: the bright sea world into which her soul had plunged seethed with a jubilation of sound and motion. Seabirds fractured the crimson surface with a snap and swam like fish; thunder boomed from whales, thousands of leagues' distant—echoing and re-echoing from the far side of the world. Others of their kind answered nearby in high, thin song. Seal and walrus chattered and clacked. Shoals of silver herring, pursued by silver-bellied, black-backed mackerel—themselves pursued by their great, nimble tuna cousins—twisted and swooped. Curtains of liquid silk seemed to rustle in what Eugainia, her hearing distorted but still acute, imagined to be an undersea wind.

A luminous round-eyed creature materialized from the shimmer and hung suspended in the water before and above her.