The dog comes away limping. The shiv is stuck deep in his shoulder, and try as he might to reach it with his teeth, he cannot. He comes to me and sits expectantly, looking up at me with his bright gold eyes.
Prescott slows, not sure what he is seeing. “Be very careful, sir. You saw what he just did to Tillsby.”
“It's all right, Prescott. I think he understands. Easy, lad,” I say to the gods' deliverer of death, “hold still.” The beast whines whilst I try to work the jagged blade out of his flesh, and a few times, he howls with pain. But he does not snap or bite at me. Once the blade is free, the wound closes itself, and the dog runs into the surf again, uninjured, innocent of what he has just done, as if expecting me to throw the wicked shiv for him to fetch.
I no longer feel pain in my chest, and without looking, I am fairly certain my wound, too, has closed, perhaps a gift of gratitude from the hound of the Afterlife.
I wipe the mingled blood from the blade and look at it. It is a piece of a metal pipe, part of the ship, which he had etched with his own unlettered attempt at writing. The same angry, sharp lines and symbols are scratched into it over and over. I give the blade to Ceridwen, and she takes it to the edge of the water. She prays over it briefly, then throws it deep into the sea, presumably with thanks for our deliverance.
The Alsatian moves abortively as if to fetch it back, but then he throws his head back and howls joyfully. I hear it, but somehow it does not fill me with dread. He comes back onto the beach beside us. Beside me.
“Aeron,” says Ceridwen, approaching our flat-capped friend. She bows before him, to my surprise, and only then do I catch the subtle difference in the way she says his name. Not Aaron, not Moses' brother in the old Hebrew stories. Aeron, the god of war.
The dog. By the gods, I was so worried about the Cŵn Annwn that I did not make the connexion. Black for desolation and death, with gold eyes symbolising the greed that drives men to battle. Cŵn Rhyfel. Aeron's dog of war. His friend, indeed.
I, too, feel compelled to bow, but a wave of shock threatens to overwhelm me, and instead of bowing, I sink to my knees. In the space of a minute, I have thrown myself between a knife-wielding madman and his intended victim, and I have seen the same madman utterly destroyed before my eyes by a dog of war, and not just any dog of war, the dog of war. Aeron's own, the most cunning and ruthless of his kennel. To say nothing of learning that I have been casually passing time of day with a god for the last fortnight.
He bids us both rise. “I told you I hoped your generosity would be repaid. It is my privilege to do so. But now I find I have two debts to repay.”
I look back to see Humbaker and Grafton staring in silence. I have no idea what this must seem to them, but I know I must swear them to secrecy. McNeill does not worry me since he likely will not be able to form the thoughts into any sort of coherency. Besides, he seems more intent on playing with the dog than anything else.
Aeron smiles. “Do not worry about them,” he says to me in Saxon, a language which only I, of our company, can understand. “They will all remember this very differently than you will, Morgetiud ap Aeddan.” He switches neatly to English. “As to your generosity,” he says to Ceridwen. He blows across the palm of his hand, and the sand whirls away from the spot, revealing the skeleton of a shallow ship with a crude dog's head carved upon its prow. I see a chunk cut out of one of the slats on its side. It looks like it was crudely done, likely with an axe, so that the engraving to either side of it is obliterated, but just past the murderous cut, I see the remaining letters, HELFRITH.
My heart pounds in my chest. I have sought her for hundreds of years, and here she is, Harold Godwinson's ship, right before me.
“For saving my life,” he continues, this time to me, “I must offer you something of equal value.”
I shake my head. “I did not save your life, my lord. Even were you not a god, the madman's disease stopped him. And then your dog dispatched him.”
He laughs. “All of these are true, but you knew none of it when you put yourself in the path of his blade to save me. Morgetiud, I know all of what you were willing to sacrifice to save the life of a man most would hold in contempt in your world.” He looks out at the sea. “Such selflessness is worthy of a most extraordinary gift. I know what gift you want most in this world, but sadly, I cannot bestow it. Not yet. You still have much to do. So I bestow another to help you on your way.” Aeron smiles a bit sadly. “Thus are my debts to you repaid, though my gifts may not always bring what you expect or want. Such is the way of war.” He crouches and calls his dog to him. He speaks to him softly and kisses the animal's head. Then he dissipates into nothingness, leaving the dog behind. The dog watches him go, then trots over to stand at my side.
My senses reject this utterly. This cannot be true. I must still be dreaming. Soon we will bring the lifeboat ashore somewhere, and someone will jostle me awake, and this will all be a strange and wonderful dream.
“You get to keep the dog?” McNeill's eyes light up. He picks up a stick and throws it over and over for the Cŵn Rhyfel whilst the rest of us get to work on the Aethelfrith.
“I can't believe we found a Viking ship on a beach!” cries Prescott with delight, as if he did not just see a god vanish into thin air. Then again, perhaps he did not. Aeron did say their memories of this would be different from mine. I cannot help but wonder how the lieutenant's report of finding the Aethelfrith will read. He tests the slats to see if they will hold his weight, then climbs atop it. “It is much broader than I thought it would be!”
“Interesting construction,” says Grafton, studying the ship. “Like they used this, what did you call it, bogwood, to frame it. It's all across the deck but only every other slat up the sides. The others were probably something light to save weight, but over time, they rotted out.” He whistles through his teeth. “What a beauty she must have been.”
“Wish the mast was still intact.” Humbaker touches the notch in the deck where the mast would have been, and the broken supports that would have surrounded it.
For my part, I go straight to the centre of the ship hoping to see the gold casket there, perhaps sealed in a bogwood compartment, but the ship is empty. Only her skeleton remains, with its vandalised name and the hole in her belly where she ran aground.
Disappointment strikes me as hard as my earlier joy. This cannot be. Harold came to Normandie bearing a gold casket full of relics. His plan was to bring the old Breton gods' relics to Normandie, to weaken the Normans and strengthen us against their invasion. He told us of the plan when he took back Wales. He told us of the lost casket when we took the field at Hastings and how he hoped its presence off the Norman coast weakened Guillaume. We rallied to him because of it, believing we could prevail against the invaders. My king would not have lied. “It must be here,” I repeat to myself. “He did not have it when he was captured. It must be here.”
Prescott looks at me strangely, and I realise how mad my words must sound to him. From his point of view, we have had the good fortune to find a Viking ship on the beach in France, but now I speak of searching for something in particular.
“Over so many years,” he says uncertainly, “we cannot be the first to have found this wreck, not buried in some beach sand like this. Whatever you expected to find––”
“What I expected to find was a small gold casket. And it must be here. I have inquired the world over looking for it,” I tell him. “If it were in private hands, my agents would have found it by now.”
Ceridwen stares at the hole in the side of the ship and at the chunk of bogwood in her hand. “Not if those private hands were shipwrecked before they could get home,” she says slowly. She tosses the cut out chunk of bogwood to me and runs back toward the lifeboat. “My darling, we may have already found it.”
Oxford College, Department of Antiquities
Friday, December 29, 1899
The Honourable Professor Sir Edward Barrington, foremost medieval historian, pushes his pince
-nez up and regards the engraving on the gold box, which he holds with white gloves and inspects as if he has not already spent days studying it. “Solid gold, still intact. The design of the lock is decidedly Saxon, and the engraving and lettering are consistent with the expected technology and aesthetic.” He looks at the assembled historians. “I see no gross anomalies that would suggest that this piece could not be from eleventh-century Wessex.”
The hall falls silent whilst the historians in morning dress consider what they have heard thus far. They look between myself and my witnesses, to wit, three uncomfortable sailors, a young army lieutenant, and my wife, all of whom were present when we discovered the casket amongst the salvage in our lifeboat. Iolo, our Alsatian, waits outdoors in the gloom. He has chosen to be white today.
“Very well, Lord Briton,” Sir Edward says after consulting his peers. “You have our permission to open the box.”
I take a deep breath, puzzled at the uncertainty which fills me. Perhaps this is not the right box after all. As Ceridwen said that night long ago, I have been jumping from conclusion to conclusion, and it is but one more to say that just because someone may have cut a chunk from the bow of the ship that he might also have found the casket, and that even if he did, we managed to salvage it from the wreck and that amongst those salvaged, it is this one in particular. Why, the real casket could be one still out there. This one may well contain anything at all. But I know this is irrational. The casket has been verified by experts, and I know in my heart it is genuine.
I find the clasp easily enough, and another thought occurs to me. Whatever may have been inside may have been already removed. If I find the clasp this easily, so might the sailor or officer on the ship who found it. The lock is stuck. I see where someone worked at it with a knife and even some picking tools, but it seems he did not understand how it worked.
In that case, I am unlikely to fare any better, and I wish to say as much to the scholars. Except that, as the learned professor noted, the mechanism is decidedly Saxon, and I see at once how it works. I press my finger against the button and twist the latch, and it clicks open.
I take a deep breath. I lift the lid and look. The inside has remained dry through all these centuries, so that even the fine linen lining is mostly intact.
At its centre, I find no relics. I find only a ring, and beneath the ring, a letter.
Where are the relics, the horse of Rhiannon and the sword of Aeron, to weaken their soldiers and strengthen ours, as he’d promised? This is the wrong casket. It must be.
My heart pounds in my ears. My hands are shaking so hard that I almost drop the sapphire ring bearing the inscription of Edward the Confessor.
Professor Barrington takes the ring from me to authenticate it or perhaps to rescue it.
The letter is not sealed, so I open it, already knowing from rumours and rumours of rumours what I will find there. My tears spill over it, threatening to obscure the lettering after nearly a millennium of protection, but I cannot help myself. Barrington very gently takes it from my hands and reads it aloud to the assembled scholars, the beneficiaries of eight hundred years of Norman rule, and smugly reinforces the Norman lie: my king, the king whose curse damned me to this place and barred me from my rightful afterlife for betrayal, shipwrecked off the Norman coast on his way to offer the throne of England to Guillaume de Normandie, on behalf of Edward the Confessor.
I turn and walk out of the hall.
Ceridwen was right.
The truth can make things worse
Mepa
Russian [MEYH-rah]
(English translation: The Measure)
Not – “How did he die?”
But – “How did he live?”
Not – “What did he gain?”
But – “What did he give?”
These are the units to measure the worth
Of a man as a man, regardless of birth.
(“The Measure of a Man” – Anonymous)
ONE
The massive explosion ripped through the Johann Kruzenshtern’s cavernous engine bay, savagely shaking the Russian experimental spacecraft from stem to stern, shredding machinery and equipment, shattering holographic display panels like brittle china, slamming human bodies against bulkheads and, in one case, into a power buss feed. Metal fragments sprayed thorough the bay like shrapnel. The blast and flying metal instantly dismembered engine design specialist Dr. Timofey Polachev and one of his assistants, as well as killing Chief Engineer Inessa Tarasov and a dozen others of the ship’s engineering staff and crew. Even more personnel, including Dr. Yelena Mironov, were maimed or otherwise seriously injured.
The adjoining control center was not spared either. Colonel Vladimir Ushakov, the ship’s commanding officer, was blown out of his seat and smashed against his own workstation before he was twisted and thrown into the rear of the pilot’s station. The roar of the explosion reverberated through the space like thunder, consoles rattling like kettle drums, the din of noises deafeningly loud.
The arc-flashing of shorting circuits was accompanied by the loss of all normal lighting throughout the ship, plunging every compartment into instant and total darkness. Several seconds later, the red of some of the emergency lights kicked in, casting an eerie patchy glow through the smoke and clouds of drifting debris in zero-gee. The smell of burnt insulation hung heavy in the air.
For a few moments, there was silence as the ship’s gyrations calmed. Then the sounds of moaning and cries of pain began. In near panic, Vladimir struggled to stop his tumbling motion through the air, stretching forth his left hand against a nearby stanchion only to fight to stay conscious as a wave of pain surged up that arm. Apparently, his left arm was broken. Gritting his teeth, he instead used his right hand to grab a bulkhead handhold and jerk himself to a stop.
A deluge of violent emotions momentarily gripped him in a steel-like vice: shock at the sudden unexpected detonation, anguish for the lives of his crew, terror that the ship’s hull might have been breached or at least weakened, horror at the destruction that he could see, fear that there was a lot more damage that he couldn’t see, fear that yet another explosion might occur before he could stop it, scared that he might fail as the ship’s commander and possibly even die at any moment if there were another explosion or if the ship’s hull suddenly failed.
“Fire! Fire!” screamed a panic-stricken voice.
And there was that fear too, suddenly added to the mix.
Through the archway of the engine bay, roaring flames burst into view, burning away at one of the power panels. Two shadowy figures with fire extinguishers in hand propelled themselves through the air, discharging quick bursts of anti-oxidants at the fiery blaze.
He could dimly see others floating nearby begin to stir. He knew that his well-trained crew would soon have the fire out, and without the need of any help from him. He glanced over in the direction of the executive officer’s station where Lieutenant Colonel Fedosia Aptekar, his second in command, had been sitting before the explosion.
The lighting was poor, but he could see that she was crumpled up near the overhead, revolving slowly around her center of mass, blood seeping slowly from the crushed side of her head, making a matted muddled mess in her short blonde hair. He kicked off from his bulkhead, heading in her direction, seizing another handhold near her to halt his flight. Then he let go of the handhold, putting his fingertips against her jugular vein. But there was nothing there. A wave of grief swept through him and he looked away from her sightless eyes. He had known and worked with Fedosia for years and had…used to have a deep abiding respect for her capabilities. She had been a good officer and a good friend. He also knew her mother fairly well. Her death was a blow to his soul. A tear came to his eye and a stiff lump to his throat. But then he clenched his jaw and took a slow deep breath. Yes, her death hit him hard, but he had no choice but to force himself to push the emotions away. Later, he would deal with them. Just like later, he would have to personally break the deva
stating news to her mother. And he did not look forward to either task. Assuming, of course, that he lived through the current emergency.
With a grunt, he glanced around. There were likely other deaths too, in an explosion this bad. And there would be injured to be helped as well. Time to call Lt. Col. Opinchuk on the chase ship Svetlana Savitskaya for assistance.
A touch of his hand to his brow confirmed what he’d already suspected, that his PHUD had been knocked off his head by the explosion. The Personal Heads-Up Display was a highly complex yet light-weight head-band capable of projecting small holographic images in front of the wearer’s eyes, inserting audio into the ear canals and picking up sub-vocal audio from the user’s vocal cords. It could also link with other PHUDs or to any authorized computer network via a digital RF transceiver. It could even, to a very limited degree, respond to mental commands from the wearer. Every civilized person in the Solar System wore one, as it was everyone’s link to the rest of humanity.
He glanced around at all the debris floating in the smoke and semi-darkness before he spotted his PHUD cartwheeling slowly just above the deck plating. A quick push-off and a grab retrieved it and he settled it one-handed back on his head. However, a mental command from him to it failed to open an outside comm channel. Ship communications were obviously down. No surprise there.
“PHUD. Alternate connection: Savitskaya,” he muttered impatiently. “Opinchuk! Can you hear me?”
“Colonel!” shouted the commander of the light cruiser, his five centimeter image popping up in front of Vladimir’s right eye, apprehension and concern nakedly displayed on the other man’s face. “What’s going on over there?! We’ve lost your telemetry and video. Our sensors show your ship is in free fall!”
Vladimir nodded hurriedly. “There’s been an explosion on board!” He glanced around at all the dead monitors in the control center. “Main power is out too. We have a lot of injuries and at least one death. We need your doctor and all the assistance you can send! Hurry!” Then he switched his comm channel to ship-wide broadcast. “Attention all crew. Find the nearest first aid kit and start helping the injured. See to their needs first. Then all department heads report status directly to me!”
Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology Page 20
