Éire’s Captive Moon (38 page)

“Yes, I must regain my strength to train with the warriors. Tuirgeis will want strong men to accompany him.”

The door to the longhouse was open, welcoming the sun and wind of the afternoon. Birds were calling, and there would be green grass growing where snow had covered the ground not long before. He could not think of green, growing things without thinking of Eir. She consumed him. He had slain her husbands; she had done her best to kill him. They were even.

I will find her,
he vowed only to himself.
And I will keep her.

“He said that the city of Bremen is right up the inlet,” Cowan informed Charis. They were in the land of the Frisians, a Saxon land. Charis could make no sense out of the throat-clogging speech of these people, but Cowan seemed to have spoken their tongue all his life. He had been able to find someone with whom to speak everywhere they went.

“There is a bishopric at Bremen,” Cowan went on. “We can get supplies there.”

Charis shook her head without even giving the man time to draw a breath. “I’ll not spend a night in a house of monks!”

Cowan rolled his eyes at her, but she cared little if he were exasperated or not. He knew how she felt on the matter. “I can find us food. I can mend our clothes. I will not go to the monks,” she reminded him.

He sighed again, long and hard, for a moment sounding much as Achan had used to sound when she had been young. Her heart wrenched inside her chest. But she would not stay with the monks, sigh though he might. “All right, lass,” he said after a moment. He turned to the man they found when they had come ashore on this land, and spoke some more.

Charis moved from him and let him converse freely. She saw green. Faint touches of it, here near the sea. The sea itself was becoming more familiar to her, and less frightening. It was their road, their pathway, their landmark. Here, on the coast of the Saxons, there were rocks. Dark, great stones of a forbidding nature. She knew that they were just part of a great land. A huge land. One that went on, Cowan had said, beyond the knowledge of men.

But her heart called her to just one land. A smaller one, but large enough for her
rath
, her people, and the children she had left behind.

The children. Aislinn’s face was always before Charis. She had been so young, perhaps ten summers, but the oldest of those who were not fighting. Had she kept the younger ones safe in the tunnels? Had she remembered to stay out of sight until the Northmen had gone from the shores? All winter, Charis had been able to stave off the pounding need to return to see if she had saved anyone. All winter, she had waited and prepared. But now, even a day’s delay seemed too long, so she had learned to row and learned to work the small boat so they could travel while Cowan took needed rest.

“I have to get home,” she whispered to the rocks and waves of the Frisian land.

The moon had completed one full cycle since she had left the village of Balestrand.

It was dark and close as they approached the shore. High clouds were backlit from the moon, making the spring evening seem almost like early morning. Ships caught the light as well. Ships with furled sails, drunken men on watch, and candles lit against the night. Beyond the ships was a town, larger than any Charis had ever seen in her life. It made her own
rath
shrink in her mind’s eye. A babe next to a full-grown warrior.

Charis watched as Cowan angled their small skiff through the boats waiting in harbor. “Where are we?” she whispered to him, for they had not yet braved a much-occupied shore. It had been difficult enough when there were few to greet them on rocky landings.

“This is Flanders, Charis,” Cowan said through gritted teeth. “A major port of trade. We’ll need to get a new boat and supplies before we go braving the ocean again.”

Odors swept over the land. Smells that Charis didn’t recognize, for they were the product of a wealthy trading center. “What is that?” she wondered aloud. “That sharp smell?”

Cowan was distracted and left off his rowing for a moment. “Oh! A tannery. And I smell,” he went on, glancing at her, “a lot of people.”

“Ohhh,” she said, wrinkling her nose. Body wastes. It was not like the same smells in a smaller village; this was an entirely different odor. Corrupted, like a wound that would not heal.

In her distaste, she shifted her body. At the same moment, a larger boat called that they were leaving their harborage, and they skimmed by, leaving a wake large enough to push the small fishing boat up and over.

Charis gasped, falling shoulder-first into cold salt water.

“Help!” she squeaked, just before her head went under.

Dark, surrounded by dark. Wet. I’ve fallen in the ocean!
Charis couldn’t make her limbs move. She felt herself sink like a rock that little boys toss into the water to make ripples. Down, down, swathed in much-patched cloth. The bards would write a poem. A woman of Éire who couldn’t swim . . . 

Though she had been fearful of the ocean all her life, Charis was not afraid of it now, as she was sure to die there. It was as if the water was now her home and she would be there always; why fight it?

But there was a pressure. A need for air. To breathe. Her lungs told her arms and legs to move, but they could not comply. Her mouth, though, could and did, and Charis did not fight it. She opened her mouth, knowing that the sea would be her death, and her lungs started to pull in anything that might have air—

“Ouch!” she coughed out instead, as a sharp tug stopped the struggle for a heartbeat as water entered her body.
My hair! Someone is pulling me up!

As if her limbs had been freed from some magic binding, Charis was able to move quickly, following her own hair. Lungs burning, she followed herself up and up until there was no more hair to follow and she doubled over coughing, clinging to something. Wooden? Human? She had no sense of it; her body’s only concern was air.

Gasping, choking, she eventually cleared herself of the seawater and was able to smell the person holding her. She pushed away and looked immediately for Cowan. Where was he? “Cowan?”

A thump on the ground next to her got her attention. It was the red-bearded son of Branieucc, also still catching his breath. “Here, lass.”

The man who had supported her laughed and spoke in syllables that Charis didn’t understand. She stared at his face, trying to get a sense of his words in his nearly toothless smile. The moonlit crags and creases of his expression moved and shifted as he spoke, but Charis just shook her head.

“Thank you,” she said, in her own tongue.

The man nodded, pointing to Cowan, who laughed breathlessly. “Oh, fine, yes. You thank him when I’m the one as pulled you up and out of the harbor.”

“Oh, and I’m to thank you,” she said, creeping next to him to examine him, “for pulling the hair from my scalp?”

“Of course,” he said, with a lolling nod as he tried to lift himself to his elbows. “And I’ll thank you for falling out of the boat before it crashed.”

She parted his hair, wet and pale in the moonlight, and checked his head for bumps and bleeding. On his words, though, she froze and rocked back on her heels to study his face. “Our boat’s crashed?” she whispered, panic fluttering in her middle.

He sighed the long and liquid sigh of a man from Éire. “Aye, Charis, it did. God be thanked that we’re at a trading port and can seek passage to Canterbury, across the water in the land of the Anglo-Saxons.”

Charis followed his outstretched hand as he pointed west, over the water. “Is it far?” Her jaw tightened.

“Much closer, don’t worry. What you do need to worry about,” he cautioned, “is that empty pouch you’ve got around your waist.”

Concerns about another ocean crossing vanished as Charis reached for her herbs. “They’re gone!” The loss of her medicines left Charis feeling naked and alone, on a shore far from home, without any ties to her people.

Cowan sat up and pulled her next to him. “Well, don’t worry overmuch, Charis.”

Her stomach roiled. “Don’t worry?” she cried. “Don’t worry?” She felt sick. Naked. Alone. “They’re my life, Cowan! They’re your life!”

“
Na, na
, lass, they’re your
tools.
And tools can be replaced. So we’ll gain passage on a ship and cross the water. Trust me, Healer.”

Feeling empty, she searched his face in the flat light of the moon while the man from the shore rose to his feet and nattered something to Cowan.

He replied in the new language and she nodded. Yes, he had brought her this far. She would trust him.

Chapter 28

“You, there!”

Cowan turned toward the accusatory shout as he and Charis stepped around and over mooring lines in Flanders harbor. “Who’s that?” he asked the toothless man who had rescued him.

“He is a leader of the town guard, Monsieur Alfonse,” the man, Geralt, informed Cowan. “He patrols the harbor at night to keep the captains from stealing from one another.”

Cowan sighed and caught Charis’s wet arm in his grasp. “Just a moment, lass. We might have trouble.”

As the sounds of waves brushing the sides of boats continued behind, Monsieur Alfonse strode heavily toward Cowan, clumsy boots making a slight flapping noise on the hard-packed ground. “You, yes, Northman.”

“What did he say?” Charis demanded quietly, for once not struggling with him. “Why have we stopped?”

“Best have that one be still,” Geralt advised in a rasp.

Cowan passed that along, adding, “It appears this other man thinks I’m a Northman, since we are both dressed like Agnarr’s people. Be quiet and let me see if I can get us out of trouble!”

Trust me
, he’d told her. Cowan snorted to himself as he waited for the harbor’s guard to join them.
Sure, and am I not a man worth trusting?

A knife caught the light of the moon, and Cowan abandoned his whimsical introspection. Weapons made him serious. “Can I answer any questions?” he asked the man in the language of the Franks.

The man planted his feet shoulder-width apart and leaned forward menacingly. He smelled of fish oil and salt. Not unpleasant, but not inviting. “Why are you here?”

“I fished them from the harbor, Alfonse,” Geralt volunteered with a self-deprecating bow. “They were in a fishing skiff. It capsized and sank.”

Monsieur Alfonse grunted and the tip of his knife wavered a bit. He glanced briefly at Charis. “The Northmen do not bring women with them,” he remarked, the knife lowering a bit more. “Yet you have yours,” he challenged.

Cowan drew Charis more closely against himself, trying to look as harmless as possible. “We are not Northmen, but we did winter with them,” he said. So far, his words were true. But then he had to create some falsehoods. “This is my wife. We are just trying to get home to the kingdom of Ulaid, on the Green Isle.” It was a good thing, he realized, that Charis did not speak Frankish.

“You are not spies?”

Cowan spread his free arm expansively and smiled. “We have nothing with which to be spies, I assure you. We are just weary and wish to be home before summer.” He thought he would try something that might prove beneficial. “Our boat has disappeared, as Geralt has told you. Can we seek passage with one of the sturdy vessels here?”

“You have gold?”

Cowan allowed his worry about this show on his face as his shoulders slumped. “No. Only our skills. My wife is a gifted surgeon. I speak all the trade languages from
Nordweg
to the Califate.”

Strangely enough, the guardsman put his knife away and smiled broadly. “Well, then. Come with me. I might be able to help you.”

Untrusting, Cowan didn’t see any choice in the matter, so he cautiously followed Monsieur Alfonse as he made for a wide, stone-paved road that led to the walled city of Flanders.

The Northmen had raided this harbor. It was evident in the heavy fortifications and watchmen who kept an eye on the coast. Surely that was how Alfonse knew to come before they were well and truly on their feet after their dunking. Along the walls, made of rock and wood, there were torches sending acrid smoke to the sky. These were a justifiably suspicious people, and the Franks were known for their clannishness.

Geralt stopped at the gate, bowing and scraping to Alfonse, who tossed the toothless man a few coins. The older man melted into the shadows near the wall and Cowan felt a bit lost as the rest of them went through the gate.