The World Above the Sky (25 page)

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, no stranger to human evil, took her hand. “I begin to understand what you fled. Even our worst enemies won't burn our bones. They are an ocean away, these monsters who would harm you.”

“I came. They'll come. They will find me.”

“Moon Woman. Look at me. This will never happen. This is why you journeyed to Lnu'k, The People.”

“I swear, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, on the Royal and Holy Blood in my veins, the Ancient and Honourable blood in yours. I did not wish this. Nor did I foresee it...”

“What you can't foresee need not happen.”

“What if it does?”

“We'll fight.”

“I'm weary with strife. There comes a time in the great cycle of heaven and earth when the Goddess needs humankind, not to worship, but to resurrect her. I came to find a safe place where I might sleep awhile. Gather Power.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk drew her near. “These last six moons, I'd have sworn you were wide awake.”

“Awake, but only half alive. You have no idea of the power of the seventh world. My world. The world of Europe's kings and their pope at Rome. Nor can I conjure for you the magnitude of the evil that stalks us.”

“Tell me.”

“Many years in the past, three times the number of moons a man may live, our people—Henry's people—fled across the sea to this New World—”

“This Ancient World,” Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk corrected. “Yes.”

“They came with a precious object; a bowl carved of star-stone, stone so ancient it no longer spoke. They built the Great Stone House of Death and dug a well at the edge of the sea. The Holy Grail and a sacred spear were hidden in this ancient world of yours, the world of L'nuk, The People, one hundred years ago by French Knights of the inner Temple.”

“By the ancestors of Henry Orkney.”

“Our ancestors placed the star-stone grail inside a brazen head called Baphomet, a ferocious hollow bust of bronze with sapphire eyes and hair of burnished copper. One half its face is agony. One looks and sees the deaths of all the martyrs. The other side is the great prophet Moses, facing God in his fury. ”

“It sounds a wondrous thing, this head of Baphomet.”

“Baphomet's is a face that even we as God and Goddess will shudder to behold. It contains strong medicine. It contains the Holy Grail.”

“There was strong medicine in the ruins of Great Stone House of Death.”

“The Grail Castle, yes. They believed we'd know to the end of the Christ time. When he was Lord alone. All humankind would be re-imagined. The God and Goddess time would come: The time of the Two Made One. And so it has. Now at last the Stone Grail has awakened. It feels that I'm near, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk. It feels your presence too. It pulls power from the stars, the stars from which it fell. It calls to us from the Well of Baphomet in the World Below the Sea.”

“I feel nothing, nor do I hear the voice of your speaking stone. Perhaps we're not the ones...”

“The spear you carry, Tooth of Wolverine, was found by the father of your father's father in the Grail Castle, was it not?”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk rolled to his back, reached for Wolverine which stood, as always, close to hand. The spearhead's black facets, polished by time to lustrous brilliance, reflected embers rising from the sudden slump of the fire. “It was. The tales tell that grandfather's father prized it for its beauty. Its weight. Balance. You say this spear, found by my grandfather's father, belongs to your people?”

“It did. It belongs to us now. You and I.”

“Wolverine, fine as it is, is just a spear, like any other.”

“Its head was split from the same star-stone as the Holy Grail. The Spear of Destiny—Tooth of Wolverine—pierced the side of the Christ in his ecstasy and agony upon the Roman cross. The Grail collected the Holy Blood pouring from his wound. When the Grail is filled and charged with the Power, the
Kji-kinap
of Wolverine, this spear will fly from your hands as if by its own will. It will pierce the heart of those who would harm you or the Goddess.”

“Whatever medicine it had is gone.”

“I tell you: its medicine will be restored.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk pondered the razor-edged stone. “A shooting star has great power in the Six Worlds. A man or woman who finds one becomes a great Shaman. Cures The People of many ills.”

Eugainia threw back the beaver robe. She sat upright, cross-legged, her back straight, her upper body tense, her tone urgent.

“Only certain people can bear to gaze upon the Holy Grail, such is its power. Only those whose veins contain the Royal and Holy Blood may even dare to touch it. The Stone Grail pulls me in its silence, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, to the Well of Baphomet in the World Below the Sea. It calls and will not be resisted. The Grail and the Spear of Destiny united will infuse our blood with unimaginable power. The trumpets shall sound. The dead shall awake. The wounds of all mankind, living and dead, will be healed. God and Goddess will live again as one. Humankind shall be redeemed.”

Eugainia extracted the pilfered quadrant of the Templar map from the pouch at her waist. “This map shows the Stone Grail's hiding place. Look. The Well of Baphomet.”

“At the edge of the ocean. Yes. The Island of the Twelve Standing Trees.”

“You know it?”

“Of course.”

“Will you guide me—?”

“No.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk snatched the map. He rose, a coiled spring released. He impaled Eugainia's great hope, the map to the Well of Baphomet, on the black glinting tip of Wolverine.

“I will not help you find this stone.”

He held the map over the flames.

“Mimktaw—”

The parchment flared, swirled up in a gust of flame. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's voice was flat, cryptic as the mask his face had become.

“You'll find this stone. You will find this stone and leave me.”

“Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, no—”

“You will leave me.”

She reached for his hand. He pulled away.

“None shall have me if I don't find this stone,” Eugainia persisted. “We must drink its power or I will die.”

“You will not die, Woman Who Fell in Love with the Moon. Look at your eyes, shining like stars. Feel the strength in your arms. The strong heart beating in your breast. The power in your thighs and belly. When we are joined, when we are one, I call out to you. You answer in a high, sweet song. Such is the power of your pleasure. No, beloved. No. I have seen it. You will not die.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk laid a finger on her lips.

“Hush. While I live, you will not die.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk crouched just beyond the fringe of the bivouac overhang, urging new flame from the glowing mass of embers. Fire burst with a snap from a cache of pine oil trapped in a rock-hard knot. Flame outlined his broad shoulders. Sparks glinted crimson, then flickered, their ascent reflected in his long mane of blue black hair.

Eugania complied with her lover's call for silence, thinking it wise to bide her time. Certainty, its cuffs frayed, its hem spattered, was a dishevelled robe she no longer wore with ease. She knew all would change. Soon they would return to The People. And to her people. When they did, their lives would never be the same.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk felt her anxiety. “Never mind, Pine Tree Woman. Woods Woman. Woman Who Walks with Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk. Woman Who Fell in Love with the Moon. Now we rest, far from all, in the safety and comfort of this night. We'll sleep. Gather Power. Before Grandfather Sun wakes, we'll rise and harvest the sky.”

Eugainia had never been held so close in her life. Or so tightly. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's need for comfort alarmed her. Her distance troubled him. If their bodies had melted into one governed by a single will, their Power that of a single beating heart, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk would have rested easier.

Eugainia drifted to sleep, her last image that of a round-bellied coracle cast from its moorings, adrift in a gathering mist on the falling tide. A great ship strained at her anchors at the mouth of an unknown harbour, ready to transport Eugainia, and Henry's hopes for a New Arcadia, to an unknown destiny.

• • •

In the dark of the sweat lodge, in the steady light of the seal-oil wick, Sir Athol Gunn radiated well-being. Not so Prince Henry Sinclair. Though no longer ghost-person pale, Henry retained the universal look of the thin man wanting. Perspiration beaded and ran, tracing thin lines down gaunt cheeks and sunken temples.

“It's said to be next to godliness, Athol. But like everything, this newfound devotion of yours to cleanliness can be taken to extreme.”

“Keswalqw likes me clean from stem to stern, stem to—”

“Yes, yes. I take your meaning,” Henry interrupted.

“A good scrub wouldn't go amiss on that much-neglected frame of yours, cousin,” Athol advised.

“I appreciate Keswalqw's diligence in many things, including the improvement of your personal hygiene, but as you know, Sir William had a word about excess—”

“Och, I remember,” Athol interrupted. “‘Ye must learn the difference, lads, between scratching your ass and tearing the skin off.'”

“Always a man for a telling turn of phrase, my father—”

“Aye. That he was. ”

“The phrase more telling of the man than the moral he wished to impress.”

“He wasn't known as Old Itchy Arse for nothing.”

“Yes, well that's all well and good.” Henry bristled. “But your mother had her own reasons for disliking my father.”

“Aye.”

“He was a hard man drunk but a worse one sober.”

“She never did forgive him for ‘pawning her off—' her words, ‘pawning her off on that all-brawn, no-brain pack of miscreant villains called Gunn.'”

“Mind you. They never did get on, even as children, your mother and my father.”

“Rare to see a brother and sister so naturally opposed.”

“One couldn't open his or her mouth without the other jumping in fist-first.”

“They were a hard crew, the folk of our parents' generation.”

“Men and women alike.”

“Aye. That they were.”

“Say what you will. We wouldn't be where we are today but for the strength of the women left alone to fend for themselves. Two great crusades. Families torn apart. Plague piled upon pestilence. War upon crippling war. The Holy Roman terror. Twice.”

“A hundred years, yes, and more. Generations of dark.”

“Your grandmother. Mine. Morgase and her kind. Hundreds of women whose names we'll never know. Running estates. Scraping bare existence from overplanted soil. Unnatural weather. Crops frozen in the field in August month. Scrawny children and a few half-mad old men the only labour. They held Rosslyn together these past hundred years, these womenfolk of ours.”

“All this while managing the guilds to levels of prosperity never known before. Or since.”

“The dark time behind us would have set the pattern for the future had it not been for the tenacity of our mothers.”

“Aye. True enough.”

The walls of the sweat lodge stirred. The roof-hides lifted, sighed slightly, settled back as the breeze passed and then lifted again. Little heat was lost, though both men felt the slight inrush of fresh air. Henry steadied himself against what his memory mistook to be a blast of winter cold. The last of the ice in my soul, he thought. Melting, finally.

“I'd be dead if not for Keswalqw.”

“That you would. The strength of her! Steady-handed. Fair. Firm. I stand amazed, I say I stand amazed anyone survived the winter.”

“Plenty and hardship shared by all in equal measure.”

“Speaking of which, I'll be happier when we get some meat back on your bones, Henry Sinclair. You take too little nourishment.”

“I know, I know. I try to eat. Everything tastes like sawdust or ash.”

“Keswalqw says she's done what she can. The rest is up to you.”

Henry gazed down at his chest and thighs. In the low light, he imagined the return of a ruddy glow. It was a trick of the light playing off blood lured by the heat to the surface of his body. Not so much as a pick of fat remained. Vein and tendon still roped beneath parchment skin. His sex, thin-veined and limp, lay like the dead upon desiccated testes compressed between sarcophagi thighs. A few fine wisps of hair, all that remained of luxuriance destroyed by want, caught the flickering light. Such terrible desolation in so short a time, he thought. His heart, muscle of rock it had always been, fell prey to erratic rhythms. Whether these alarming, intermittent failures of consciousness were linked he could not say. He resisted the enfeebling notion that Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk stole his spirit when Eugainia broke his heart. I'll be back in the jaws of Jipijka'maq if I indulge these thoughts, he told himself.

“Athol, what progress with the castle?” he asked.

“The keep is strong. Our Lady's chamber's all but secure. We're months away from restoring either of the great halls. And as for the chambers of Our Lady's court—the rooms for your lady wife, the upper servants when they arrive, those of Eugainia's protector and the Shepherd of the Grail, well all the other suites and anterooms, really. Working with such reduced forces, I can hardly say—”

“But her bed and antechambers are secure?”

“Aye.”

“Defensible and impenetrable?”

“Secure. Yes.”

“Secure is not the same as impenetrable.” Henry flicked perspiration from brow to hot stone. “The chapel?”

“The walls are sound. The slates are cut. So roof tile can soon be laid. The carpenters will have the roof beams in place today. Tomorrow at the latest we'll be boarded in.”

“The glazing?”

“Poor Will has worked a little miracle. There's a great cache of proper sand not far down the coast to the east. He's managed good clear glass. Formulated a convincing red.”

“There's no end of red and yellow ochre hereabout.”

“Aye. There'll be no blue, of course.”

“No. For lack of cobalt. So. It sounds to me we're far enough along with the Grail Castle to return our attention to the second most pressing matter.”

“The boats. Aye.”

Athol laced the sweat-stones with the last quarter-pail of water. Sufficient heat remained to produce a useful cloud of steam. Silence fell as the hiss subsided.

Henry wiped sweat from his eyes. “I'm concerned about deck nails,” he said after a time.

“Excellent progress on that front. There's no end of coal hereabout. A mountain of it, so to speak. We've rendered a grand pile of charcoal. All this hardwood hereabout. Aeowald salvaged every scrap of metal from the ruins—I say, every superfluous hinge, every bolt and cotter. The barrel hoops, the pots, pikes and such we snatched from
Reclamation
before Zeno set sail are all reforged. There'll be a respectable quantity of nails.”

“We were wise to settle on two longboats rather than one caravel.”

“Aye. We've never enough iron—I say, never enough to forge the quantity of the two-pronged clasp nails a caravel hull requires. No. We're better off overlapping longboat hull-planks, I say, overlapping and using deck nails like rivets, pounding both ends flat once they're through the planks, in the Old Norse fashion.”

“Good. And there's no end of tar for caulking.”

“No. Mind, we lack the long wiry hair of our good Scottish cattle to mix with it.”

“Bear fur mixed with the tar will do the same job better. When do you return to the castle?”

“I thought tomorrow.”

“Good. Send what carpenters you can spare. I want both ships seaworthy first week July month. That'll give us half May and all of June to float the hulls and let their timbers swell.”

“And Our Lady?”

“If I don't find Eugainia by early July we say farewell to her and New Arcadia for the foreseeable future.”

Henry pushed the hide flap aside, doused himself with the bucket of cold sea water set outside for that purpose. He dried his frame with wadded moss. The scent of woodland root and fibre rose to his nostrils. He inhaled deeply, grateful his sense of smell was returning. When dressed, he regarded his headquarters across the high meadow. His field tent, with its view of his jerry-rigged shipyard on the beach below, seemed strange to him, foreign, inadequate, and in some way he couldn't determine, faintly ridiculous. Stripes and pendants. Box-cut fringe. Ropes and tassels. Frivolity, and the excess of another time and place. Hide and bark were normal now. Hide and bark had sheltered him through the starving time. Hide and bark had saved his life when wool and linen and canvas failed.

Henry paused at the meadow's edge. Claw of Spirit Bird Bay's estuary and beaches were long since free of ice. Late-spring snow clung in ragged patches to the upper flanks of the Smoking Mountain. Henry cast his glance to the northeast. Only Apekwit seemed reluctant to let go her mantle of snow. The Red Island rose from what he mistook on first glance to be banks of white fog, then low-lying cloud. Ice, he was told, was known to cling to her shores well into April.

Henry surveyed the work in the shipyard below. He'd directed two deep trenches be dug in the sand where the keels of the two ships, each carved from the trunk of a single massive oak, rested. Each keel was salt-cured twice daily with the rise and fall of the tides. After six weeks, Henry caused rock, sand and brush dams to be erected on the seaward end of each trench to hold back the sea. The keels soon dryed, exposed to sun and wind. When the last of the nails were forged, the overlapping hull planks would be laid. Once caulked, the hull would receive its oaken ribs, fanned out at present on the beach one either side of the trenches like the sand-flayed ribs of a storm-felled gull. By the end of the coming week, the dams would be breached, the sea let in, the riveted timbers would soon swell into tight, seaworthy hulls.

Henry settled in the field tent. Athol tied back the flap, stooped to enter and sat opposite. Spread before them were three sets of plans; one for each of the longboats, the third a thick sheaf containing detailed restoration renderings of the Grail Castle. Henry removed the top pages of the castle drawings, those detailing the refurbished chapel and His Lady's chambers. These he kept within reach, slipping them below the plans for the ships. He rolled the remaining castle drawings, the bulk of the plans, and slid them into their leather carrying case. He handed the case to Athol.

“Her chambers and the chapel are a fair start. Put these somewhere safe. We've no need of them this voyage.”

“Aye, sire,” Athol responded, slipping automatically into formal address, a courtesy marking the boundary between their personal and professional association. “We'll return soon enough with a full compliment of builders.”

“Aye. If we find her, she'll not run off again.”

“We can never take her back to Scotland.”

“No.”

“Presuming she still, I say—”

“What are your thoughts regarding the masts?”

“None better than the white pines of Apekwit, sir. Soon as the ice is cleared, we'll make the trip across. Mind there's no rush. We've six weeks away from footing the masts.”

“And the decking?”

“The local mountain oak, I think. There's great lengths of it to be had for the central beam. Good stout timbers for the cross beams.”

“A good solid oak deck gives lateral stability.”

“Aye. Tight as they are, there's great flexibility in the hulls of these vessels. Nothing like a longboat to dampen the bow-to-stern twist and turn of a heavy sea.”

“Then oak it is.”

“I was amazed to find the stands of our English Oak. Groves at least a hundred years old.”

“Groves, Sir Athol?”

“Yes, Lord Henry. At the mouth of the Castle River. On the western shore of Turned Up Whale Belly Bay—”

“Yes, yes. I know that grove. There's another?”

“On the seaward side of the great peninsula. A small island of well established oak, in appearance at least a hundred years—”

”You saw this island when?”

“On my first expedition. Last fall...”

Henry's tone was flat, his gaze steady. “Last fall.”

“It didn't signify as important at the time. I thought it random chance—”

“Random chance? These oaks are not native here. This oak is quite a different species. Hand me what we've mapped of the southeast.”

Athol unrolled and laid the new chart beside its ancient counterpart. Henry scanned both.

“Note the location of the English oaks on the first; the basin isle in Whale Belly Bay.” Henry withdrew his rule, square and protractor from their leather pouch. “Draw a line to the Grail Castle. Measure carefully. Nine times nine. If I repeat a line of the exact length eastward.” Henry's line ran off the edge of the southwest quadrant, ending exactly at the centre of the remapped segment. “Does it or does it not end precisely on the ocean side, at the heart of your second island of oak?”