Bard I (29 page)

In the barn. Tosti hefted his axe. Almost as naked as the man he faced, he chopped and cut, handling the heavy weapon lightly as a switch. The bard made no attempt to fight him. He circled and retreated only, while the king’s fortress came awake in a swelling commotion. To Felimid, the sounds were beautiful.

‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘Here, swiftly, but take care! Tosti Fenrir’s-get is on the rampage!’

Yelling insanely, Tosti attacked with utter abandon. His scheme had failed. The sword moved like a dazzle of white fire before his eyes. His axehead became a thunderbolt, striking and striking, head, hip, ribs, leg, a berserker onslaught without pattern or predictability; but Felimid was never there to be sundered. He backed before the storm of hurtling iron. Kincaid darted, seeking flesh, but reach was lacking.

Little Felimid cared. Fighting at night in a murky stable was a fool’s game anyhow. The king’s household was aroused (unless every man in it was stone deaf) and all Felimid needed was time. Glinthi had lurched to the half-open door and unceasingly bellowed alarms. Vivayn (in calculation, not in panic) was producing ever more ear-splitting screams. All in all, there was small likelihood that events in the barn would go unnoticed. The axe leaped. Felimid, weightless on his ever-shifting feet, slashed at the axe-handle. Kincaid slewed from one of the iron rings bracing the fire-hardened wood, and caught between the axe’s helve and down-curving metal beard. An ordinary sword would have snapped at once. This was Kincaid, forged of old from the metal of a fallen star by Goibniu the magician-smith.

His sworder’s training possessed Felimid. With the leverage this freakish chance had given him, he exerted a full half-turn on the hurtling axe-head before it grated clear of the sword and chopped into the earth, wide of its intended mark.

Tosti staggered, off balance. Instantly, Felimid thrust to kill.

Tosti had already begun a convulsive leap backwards. He gave no consideration at all to keeping hold of his axe, to landing gracefully or even safely, or to anything but putting himself beyond the length of that hateful silver-inlaid sword.

Even such single-minded action barely succeeded. Kincaid left a thin slash on his thigh. Tosti’s shoulders struck the ground, and be tumbled through two quick backward rolls before gaining his feet, springy as a wolf despite his size. With Felimid close on his heels, he burst from the barn, hurling aside like leaves any who got in his way. Fleeing into black shadow, he vanished.

‘He will keep,’ Felimid thought, remembering other matters. He returned at a run to the barn.

‘Vivayn!’ he said urgently.

She came to him, and said low, ‘Not that name!’ He’d forgotten, briefly. The ludicrous but deadly mess Tosti had made had shaken him. None seemed to have heard. All was confusion still, with many bawled queries, and orders, and much rushing back and forth. But Glinthi the dwarf had heard, and hearing he knew what the name signified. There was hardly a secret from him in the whole of King Cerdic’s burg. His legs were crippled, not his eyes or ears. Nor was his tongue crippled, despite his extreme niggardliness with words. He cleaned his heavy hammer with straw and pretended the name had escaped him.

‘Ha!’ he grunted. ‘The earls with Tosti were two o’ those we fought last night. None of the others can walk yet. Yon great madman found ‘em ready tools for his use.’

‘Then we’ll weep no tears for them,’ Felimid said.

‘How did you come here at such an opportune time, Glinthi?’

‘I knew,’ the dwarf said simply. ‘I heard ‘em plotting.

I came, for I owed you a debt.’ He shrugged. ‘Better than cadence and alliteration, ha?’

For a moment the bard did not know what he meant, and then be remembered. ‘Far better,’ he agreed. ‘Now we had best make our explanations to the king.’

Long, weary explanations were not demanded. One treacherous earl had been destroyed by the dragon’s skull. To Cerdic, that sufficed as evidence that the fellow had deserved to die. When his gesiths and earls searched each building and yard of ground within the palisade for Tosti, and Tosti was not to be found, it confirmed his guilt.

None regretted not finding him.

While the search went on, a group of women came from the bower. What seemed to be another Vivayn led them, night-robed and mantled. Felimid’s bardic sight pared the false appearance from her and showed him Eldrida, with her full mouth and wide cheekbones. Even the small scar above the left one, little more than a puckering of wrongly-textured skin, showed in the brilliant moonlight. When he saw her so plainly, it was difficult to keep in mind that everyone else was deceived. The false Vivayn approached Cynric the atheling, unhesitatingly, as of right. ‘Are we attacked, my lord?’ she asked. The very voice was Vivayn’s. ‘May I be needed?’ Felimid wanted to make love to her then and there for her sheer, brazen, invincible gall.

‘No,’ Cynric answered. ‘Tosti Fenrir’s-get has been guilty of an outrage. It’s nothing unusual, but he’ll be wise not to come here again. Best you return to your bower. my lady. You. Eldrida; go along. As a favor. Felimid, put on some clothes. I’ll never get these women to leave else.’

He smiled with sardonic good humor at Vivayo’s attendants. Most were indeed looking boldly at the bard, and some whispered comments to each other behind their hands.

King’s son, Felimid thought,
you’d cease to smile right quickly if you knew how I spent this night.

Before she left, Felimid whispered in Vivayn’s ear: ‘For a woman drugged insensible, that one feigns consciousness mighty well.’

Vivayn chuckled. ‘I lied, obviously. She’s my friend and confidante in all things. Her name means “wise friend”, did you know? But why should I have told you? Nor you may not complain that we made a fool of you. God did that.’ She laughed again. ‘Good night.’

Vivayn and Eldrida. How many lovers had they shared? How often had they traded appearances as if trading clothes? And he very likely the first to know of it! Dangerous knowledge. Vivayn had made such casual mention of agonising poison. As for Cynric, were he to learn, he’d have no need of resorting to poison.

There was also the dwarf. Most certainly, there was the dwarf. If he knew, and something in his voice and manner made Felimid suspect so, then he was another danger. He hated Cerdic for the best of reasons. He now owed Felimid nothing, by his lights; he’d paid his debt. The dwarves by repute were surely and grasping, but they did pay their debts, scrupulously for good and unrelentingly for ill. Might Glinthi not wish help in gaining his vengeance, and try to extort it from Felimid or Vivayn, or both of them? Only a seeress could predict what Vivayn might do, in that event.

The Jutish ships wouldn’t sail for another nine-night yet. In that long a time, there was scope for some fascinating varieties of hell to brew.

Felimid thought of the dragon’s jaws. After tumbling Vivayn, he did not care to step between them again. Vivayn and Eldrida seemed immune to their death-dealing judgement, but then Vivayn was a witch, able to ward herself and those she cared about. Although Felimid had powers of his own, he did not trust them to protect him from dismemberment. His luck had turned sour in this burg.

He decided that he’d sooner take his chances with Tosti’s open hatred.

‘My lord,’ he said to Cerdic, ‘I have business with Tosti that my honor demands I settle, if I’m to be worthy to sail with you. Twice now, he’s tried in under­handed ways to murder me, and directly, too. From this moment I make it my first concern to seek him out and slay him. If I succeed, and live, I’ll return to your hall; but that may be long delayed. It rests with Wyrd.’

‘You are a man,’ Cerdic said. ‘I’d do the same in your place. Go, then. I promise you royal guesting when you come back, though my father Oisc will doubtless complain. Let him! I never have liked Tosti much.’

I’ll be riding away as fast as my horse can bear me, Felimid thought, and if fortune is kind, I’ll never see Tosti Fenrir’s-get again!

‘My lord!’ It was a shaking earl with a brand held aloft. ‘My lord Cerdic, we have found-not Tosti, but some sign of him-if you will look—’

Cerdic told him shortly to stop yammering and lead the way. Felimid went along, curious as to what could turn the unimaginative earl so pale.

The alleged signs were footprints in the muddy ground by the palisade. They ended abruptly, in a way that could only be explained by a single leap to the log ramparts, and another thence over the wall to the ground outside; and that was amazing enough. The footprints were those of a tremendous wolf, own brother to Fenris, with its right forepaw lame for the lack of several toes.

BURIED SILVER

Anno Domini 418: In this year the Romans collected all the treasures which were in Britain, and hid some in the earth so that no-one afterwards could find them, and some they took with them into Gaul.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

A
N
ENORMOUS
WOLF
PADDED
THROUGH
THE
DARK
,
HUNTING
. Its color was white as a thick frost. Hate and purpose filled its mind. It limped on the right forepaw.

Ten mounted men slept with feral lightness by their ponies, under the sky. Nine of them had taken oaths to serve the other with their lives. They would kill at his command, or on a whim of the moment if he did not restrain them. Mercy was not in their way of thinking.

By chance, another band of ten horsemen was camped some miles away. They too were hardened by battle and fighting, but native to Britain, unlike the others. Neither group knew the other existed.

That would change.

The man who would change it was happily ignorant of them all. Felimid had come as a stranger to the Kentish village in which he was staying, a welcome guest. Its people were British, not Saxon or Jutish; he’d satisfied himself of that before he entered the place.

The night was Beltaine Eve. All across Britain and Ireland the fires kindled, live orange glitters in the dark. With the blue dawn, the people drove their cattle out to pasture through the fires, waving leafy branches and yelling. The beasts lowed wildly, trailing a reek of singed hair from their legs, kicking and plunging, horns shedding sparks. The people cried praises to their Lord the Sun. They danced about the fires and washed ecstatically in the dew.

Felimid moved among them. He wore a soft brown doeskin kilt, and his body by contrast gleamed white as birch in its first exposure since the autumn. His harp’s golden strings made a woof for finely loomed sound in their ancient frame; his fingers ran across them like live shuttles. He sang for the season.

‘Life returns with my Lord the Sun as the tender May winds blow,

As a thousand rills and mountain streams run white with melting snow,

And the bear revives from his winter death with motions dazed and slow

In a forest wild with odors of things beginning to grow–

Of the trees reviving with him as pale saps quicken and flow–

But he cannot see what the Druids see, or know what the Droids know.

‘The grim insatiable Romans, whose way was to crush and grind,

Who sucked the good from their conquests till nothing was left bur a rind,

Observed how the Druids fought them, and murdered all they could find.

They said, “The cult is finished,” in reports they sanded and signed,

(Transfix the morning-mist with a spear-describe the dawn to the blind!)

But the Eagles have flown from Britain and left the Druids behind.

‘Life returns with my Lord the Sun at the fairest time of year,

Life returns and laughter, to banish a long-held fear,

As the blood runs hot, exulting, and passion is tenfold dear,

And through the nights of April the piles of kindling rear

In every village and steading as Beltaine Eve draws near.

The Druids wait for an ancient Word which only Druids can hear.’

Baskets of oatcakes were carried among the dancers. The village women each took one, blindly. One cake had been charred black. Whoever received it was the carline. and the folk shunned her for three days. the watered form of a darker rite. Once. she would have been sacrificed to the Sun. but the Romans had come and gone since then, as the Cross-worshippers had come . . . and decidedly not gone. for their strength was growing. So the carline’s part had been reduced to that of a kind of scapegoat. here in the east. Far in Britain’s west and north. the old customs were still adhered to.

The carline this year was a young girl with a hand­sized purple blotch disfiguring her face. An accursed thing. When he saw it, Felimid guessed the lot had not been as fair as it looked; the black cake had been forced on her in some way.

She was driven counter-sunwise around a tire, and made to leap it, skirts whirling. The bard felt a pang of sympathy for the girl as she ran from the village in a hail of sticks, bones and clods. In three days, she might come back. How she lived in the meantime was up to her. She couldn’t hear, but Felimid sang her encouragement none the less.

‘Freedom comes with my Lord the Sun to those who dare be free,

As the cold grey grip of winter slackens from earth and tree:

They must freeze or starve no longer, who lack for company!

The pack’s constraint is broken, the wolf runs solitary,

No more to her sleepy cluster clings torpid the amber bee—

Must men continue to huddle? And must it be so for thee?’

His mouth formed a wry shape. He recognised a certain fatuity in the question. For most souls, its answer was yes. Himself included. Although he had more choice than most about where he huddled, and with whom, his trade was scarcely one that went with a recluse’s habits. Why did he linger here, if not for company?