The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  “Now her!”

  Leaning precariously over the side, he managed to haul Aleswina up and into the boat with Annwr lifting from below. As she flopped in, the boat rocked back and forth, its pitching efforts made worse by her frenzied effort to pull away from him.

  “Hold still!”

  Despite saying it clearly in English, his order had no effect, in fact seemed only to add to her thrashing panic. Before she could spill both of them, along with their supplies, into the river, he wrestled her down onto the prow of the boat where she wrapped her arms around Annwr’s pack, clinging to it like a drowning man to a rock in the river.

  “You stay there and don’t move!” He spoke more sharply than he would have if the boat weren’t still tossing and pitching out of control. Once he’d gotten hold of a piling and steadied it, he added in a calmer but still firm tone of voice, “And be quiet!” Seeing nothing in the girl’s dazed expression to show that she heard or understood his command, he repeated, “You must not move or make a sound! No matter what happens, you must not speak a single word—not a peep, not a whisper—until I say so.”

  He climbed back onto the dock, went to the workbench, found a small, sharp hatchet, and made his way around the outer deck to the piled-up tangle of brush. He hacked off as much as he could carry, then brought the armload of branches and twigs back to the boat and piled them around Aleswina and the packs. In another three trips, he’d covered the boat over well enough that in the darkness and from a distance it could easily be taken for a drift of river refuse. As he stepped back for a moment to admire his handiwork, he heard Annwr mutter, “It’s lovely. Now to get me up and into the boat before I grow gills!”

  “Gills would be just the thing for what comes next, so if you’d teach me how to grow my own, I’d be grateful.” He snapped off a twig from the brush covering the boat and squatted down, close to where Annwr was standing, glowering at him.

  “Now we must have a plan for getting past the village of savage Saxons hunting her”—he nodded towards the pile of brush covering Aleswina—“and happy to catch us in the bargain.” Drawing lines in the green slime that coated the deck to illustrate what he was saying, he went on, “Here, then, is the river, and here we are, and here is the village. We will keep to the far side and in the shadow of the bank. I will swim in front, guiding the boat, and you will swim at the back, keeping it straight. We will go just with the current and no faster, since even Saxons may have sense enough to wonder at drifting brush that swims on its own accord.”

  Before Annwr could argue about who was to swim in front, he picked up the hatchet, inspecting it carefully while watching her out of the corner of his eye. “Now, about what this boatman owes you for all the good care you have given him in his times of need, perhaps it would include this excellent little axe as well as the boat and oars?”

  Annwr’s expression remained stern. “I have said he owed me a boat, which of necessity includes the oars. I will not take more than I am owed, nor rob a man while he is passed out from drinking.”

  Caelym suppressed a sigh. He was standing up to put the hatchet back where he found it when she said in a softer tone (not as soft as the tone she used with Aleswina, but softer than any she’d ever used with him), “Now, if your heart is set on having that axe, you may reach down on the right side of your pack and you’ll find a flask of fresh mead. I . . .” Here she hesitated, cleared her throat, and went on. “I brought it along for you, as I never gave you any gift for becoming either priest or physician. If you choose, you may leave it in exchange for the axe. Were the old man here now, he would take the drink and be glad of it.”

  Caelym found the flask, took a long swallow from it to be sure of its quality, and made the trade. Warmed and encouraged by the drink, he lowered himself back into the water and, together with Annwr, eased the boat out into the current.

  Chapter 24

  The First Rapids

  The village of Fenwick was awake. Drifting past with their noses just above water, Caelym and Annwr could see men carrying torches rushing around with packs of hounds. The light from the flames, however, darkened the night around them, and neither men nor dogs took any notice of the brush-filled boat as they floated past on the far side of the river.

  Still, they kept their heads down and stayed even with the current around another three bends before they risked landing the boat and climbing out. After shaking off like a wet dog, Caelym pulled off the tangle of twigs and branches and hoisted the packs onto the shore, leaving Aleswina to Annwr.

  It was, as he’d advised them both, better to have dry clothes to get into after spending a cool night in the water. Dressed again, and with the coarse monk’s robe a welcome shield against the breeze, he climbed back into the boat, set the oars into their braces, and settled himself on the seat and took some experimental strokes through the air.

  “Have you taken a boat down a river before?” Annwr asked, skeptical as ever.

  Of course, I have, a thousand times or more! is what he would have answered if only it were the truth. Instead, he barked back, “I have not, but how hard can it be if a drunken Saxon can do it?”

  “It may have helped that he learned how when he was sober.”

  Unable to think of a suitably scathing rebuttal, Caelym took himself off into the bushes, both for personal reasons and to escape having to respond.

  Glad to have him out from underfoot, Annwr coaxed Aleswina out of the boat and into dry clothes. While she did as she was told, it worried Annwr that Aleswina kept shivering after she should have been warm, and that she didn’t answer when Annwr spoke to her.

  Coming out of the thicket to see that Annwr still hovered over the dim-witted girl, Caelym weighed Annwr’s indulgence of the stupid little Saxon princess against the harsh abuse and neglect he felt himself to be suffering. His sense of being wronged increased as he got close enough to hear Annwr telling Aleswina that she should “pay no attention to Caelym’s antics, because he was always one to put on a show for the pleasure of being noticed and no doubt will be making up poetry about his own silly escapades before they’re half over.”

  That there was some truth to this only added to Caelym’s mounting resentment as he pushed the boat back into the water.

  It took him a while to get the feel for rowing in the strong current and keeping the boat in a relatively straight path. Once he felt in control, he snapped “It might be better if you spent less time telling the girl that I’m a fool. As we journey together, fleeing from one danger to face another, there may be a time that I will need to tell her what she must do, and instead of doing it maybe she’ll be looking at you to see if she should, and maybe by the time you tell her, it will be too late.”

  To Caelym’s surprise, Annwr said that he was right and that she was sorry.

  Another several bends of the river slipped past in oddly companionable silence, with no more than the slap and surge of the oars and the rustle of water against the sides of the boat.

  It was almost dawn when a change in the sound of the river caught their attention. Looking downstream, in the faint beginning of daylight, they couldn’t see anything except a few rocks and some V-shaped ripples, but the sound increased to a thundering roar as the current picked up, carrying the boat faster than Caelym was rowing.

  Aleswina sat up to look just as the boat came to the verge of the rapids. It teetered there for half a dozen heartbeats, held in place by Caelym’s desperate backstrokes. Then it dropped its prow and plunged downwards. The two women clutched whatever there was to hold on to while Caelym heaved one oar then the other to fend off rocks or bring the boat around straight before the waves swamped it.

  They were all soaked, and their packs were washing back and forth in a small lake of water in the bottom of the boat when they came out, just as suddenly, into a swift, smooth current that gave no hint of what they had just been through.

  Caelym brought the boat around to look back at the cascade of water crashing behind them, his f
ace glowing in exaltation. Even Annwr’s sharp warning to look ahead or he’d be drowning them all could not dampen the triumph of that moment or keep his heart from filling with a deep and lasting love for boats and rivers.

  Chapter 25

  Whatever Dangers Lay Ahead

  As they traveled on, passing out of inhabited lands and into steep-walled canyons, Caelym’s spirits rose. Whatever sorrows lay behind him, whatever dangers lay ahead, he was, for the moment, riding on the crest of the river’s current, challenging and conquering one wild rapid after another.

  Kneeling in the front of the boat, Annwr gripped the rail with one hand and clutched Aleswina with the other to keep her from being pitched overboard as they careened off boulders, plunging from one roiling death trap to the next.

  “Look out—”

  A wave crashed over the prow of the boat, cutting off her cry. Coughing and choking, she managed to spit the water out of her mouth, but instead of finishing, “for the cliff!” she gasped out her mother’s name.

  Caelym could see the sheer wall of rock rising straight ahead of them perfectly well without Annwr yelling at him about it. Hauling back on his left oar and thrusting forward on the right, he brought the boat around. As it spun sideways, he brought the two oars up together and threw all his weight into his next stroke, sending the boat flying up and onto the sandy shore of an island—set there, he assumed, by the Goddess to give weary travelers a place to rest.

  Annwr’s first impulse, once she was able to steady her shaking limbs and climb out of the beached boat, was to curse Caelym and all of his male ancestry going back to the Sun God Himself. She settled for snapping at him that if he was done showing off just how close he could come to drowning them all without actually doing it, maybe he could make himself useful for a change.

  “Get the packs! We need to hide the boat out of sight and find some shelter where we can dry off and get warm!”

  Stiffening her shoulders, she surveyed the bleak, wind-swept island. A swath of grasses and brush separated the rocky shore from a scraggly stand of pine trees. It wasn’t the sacred island of Cwddwaellwn, but there’d be wood for a fire and hopefully some place out of sight where they could dry their things and cook the hot meal they all needed—especially Aleswina, who was sitting motionless in her drenched clothes, her hands gripping the side rails as if she didn’t realize that they’d stopped moving.

  Annwr forced herself to smile as she said, “Come on, Dear Heart, you can get up now. We’re landed safe and sound and need to look for somewhere to have breakfast.”

  Although her eyes were open, Aleswina didn’t look at Annwr or loosen her grip on the side of the boat.

  “Aleswina!” Annwr used her real name and said it sharply.

  Aleswina blinked but made no other move.

  “Caelym! Help me get her out!”

  After all he’d done getting them away from the Saxons and hounds, past a dozen raging rapids, and now safely landed on a lovely tree-covered island, Caelym felt he had a right to expect at least a word or two of praise from Annwr, and he would have said so if he could have gotten a word in between her carping and complaints. As it was, he helped her pry Aleswina’s hands loose from the boat rails. Together, they pulled her out of the boat and stood her on the ground, where she managed, barely, to stay upright on her own two feet. Leaving Annwr prattling to Aleswina in an irritating, high-pitched voice about how they’d gotten to this nice island all safe and sound (without so much as a mention of his part in getting them there!), he dragged the boat up the bank and hid it in the brush. Picking up the packs, he pushed his way back through the undergrowth and into the thicket.

  It wasn’t a large grove and it didn’t take long to reach the center: a sandy basin nestled into a bank of protective grass and shrubs. Bathed in the morning sunlight and protected from the wind, it was a cozy, welcoming spot, a place so perfect it was almost surely a trap set by local sprites to snare unwary intruders.

  Caelym was not unwary but knew from experience that, with the right cajoling, even the most malevolent of wood spirits could be bargained with. Stepping to the edge of the clearing, he spoke out in a strong and resonant voice, announcing that they would stop here for just as long as they needed to eat and rest, would take no more than a little dry kindling for a fire, and would leave nothing behind except for the portion of their provisions they’d gladly share with all things who made this place their home.

  With that (and no more acknowledgment of his foresight and caution from Annwr than he expected, which was none at all), he set off to explore the island.

  A part of Annwr’s mind grumbled, Just like a man to go off in a fit of pique when he might be of some use, while another part chided her for not giving Caelym any thanks for saving them from Gilberth’s guards. But Caelym wasn’t her worry just then, Aleswina was.

  She managed to get Aleswina through the tangle of undergrowth by holding her up and urging her along, but once she let go, the girl sank to her knees on the edge of the bank, her hands folded in her lap, a vacant, faraway look in her eyes, as if her spirit were on the verge of leaving her body to wander lost and alone, uncertain to which afterlife it belonged.

  The first thing was to get her warm and dry. Annwr dug through the packs, pulling out flints and tinder, blankets and cloaks, pots and provisions, a flask of ale, and a rope. In almost no time at all, she had Aleswina stripped out of her wet clothes and wrapped in the least damp of the blankets, arranged stones into a serviceable hearth, had a fire burning, and had put a pot of mulled ale to heat.

  Even though the deathly chill fell away and Aleswina’s color (pale but pinkish) had returned, she remained mute despite all of Annwr’s efforts to coax a word out of her. As much to calm herself as to comfort Aleswina, Annwr kept up her patter of baby talk, unconsciously slipping back into Celt.

  “See, we’ve got our nice warm fire going and will make some good broth as soon as the coals are ready. Now you just watch while I tie up this rope like our clothesline at home and hang up our blankets and cloaks to keep the heat around us, and then we’ll be as snug and warm as mice in their nest. Now let’s just have another sip of sweet, spiced ale to give you back your strength . . .”

  She was spooning the drink between Aleswina’s chattering teeth when Caelym finally returned, no doubt wanting to see if his breakfast was cooked and waiting for him.

  Unwilling to stand around being ignored while Annwr babbled and cooed to her stupid princess, Caelym had set out to scout for any sign of bears or Saxons. Finding no large tracks but their own, he’d made his way back to the upper end of the island where the river split into two unequal halves. The larger part crashed straight into the cliffs, curling back on itself in a churning confusion of waves with crests the height of a rearing horse, while the smaller stream threaded its way along a shallow channel between the island and a shrub-covered bank.

  Taking the boat down the main branch would be the thrill of his life, but even as he thought about it, he could hear Annwr’s nagging voice saying, “The last thrill of your life!” so he trudged back up to where the boat was hidden, pulled it out, and dragged it behind him down the bank and along the smaller stream—a piddling little trickle of water barely ankle deep—to the lower end of the island. After pulling the boat up onto the shore and into the brush, he walked down the point to where the two streams came back together to form a broad expanse of smooth, swiftly flowing water.

  Muttering, “I could have done it” to himself, he picked up a flat, smooth stone, threw it, and watched as it skipped four, five, six times before coming down with a dismal plunk and sinking out of sight. Then he turned and went back to the clearing where he’d left Annwr and Aleswina.

  He had, of course, assumed that Annwr would have set out their promised tribute before doing anything else. And while he had not specifically warned her that hanging her laundry up to dry was certain to offend the local sprites and require twice the remunerations they’d have to dole out, it seeme
d to him to go without saying!

  Dodging between the blanket flaps he was appalled to realize that Annwr had yet to offer so much as a single crust of bread to their hosts, but before he could remonstrate, she ordered him off again to get more wood for the fire and a pot of water for soup.

  Determined to show that he, at least, knew how to behave in someone else’s home, he set out a carefully counted share of bread and apples under each of the proper trees, murmuring his apologies to whatever irritated beings were rustling in the leaves overhead. That done, he hauled two armloads of wood, and fetched Annwr her pot of water before sitting down to his own well-deserved meal (one he had to assemble himself, since Annwr was too busy fawning over her Saxon darling to put a plate out for him).

  He filled his own cup and drained it three times—first for his triumph over the river, next for forgoing the glory of challenging the greatest of all the rapids, and finally, for . . . for . . .

  As his thoughts began to drift, Annwr’s babbling to Aleswina ceased to annoy him. Instead it was like listening to his childhood nurse, if his nurse had sounded so much like Feywn, or listening to Feywn, if Feywn had ever said such childish nonsense to him. He drew his legs up, leaned back into the soft sand, and slipped into a dream that his nurse and Feywn were blended together in one woman and she was singing him to sleep.

  Chapter 26

  I Will Compose A Song

  It took two cups of broth and another of mulled ale, but Aleswina had finally stopped trembling. Now, wrapped in a warm blanket, she was curled up with her head on Annwr’s lap, breathing slow, easy breaths.

  Annwr should have been tired enough to sleep on a bed of nettles but instead she felt fidgety, bothered by something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.