The Celtic Mirror

by Louis Phillippi

  Another crate appeared. “Get some help, Ian. I don’t have much clout with the Cunneda crowd.” He heaved the crate through.

  After three solid hours of unrelenting work, the tunnel walls were lined with stacks of M-16s, grenade launchers, claymore mines, ammunition—the paraphernalia of war, ready to be broken down still further into piles designated for each clan group, based upon the size of each potential unit.

  Morgan wearily turned to lift another crate over the oak frame, and when it did not appear, he stood, waiting, numbly. He was not prepared for the next item shipped from Reged.

  Castillo looked fresh and unrumpled in his black uniform as he stepped jauntily through the deadly screen.

  “Navarchus Castillo reporting sir,” he said, executing a spirited salute.

  Morgan straightened and looked carefully at the naval officer. Not a crease in his uniform was out of place; not a detail in the man’s face was altered. Still, Morgan waited for Tony Castillo to drop to the floor in terrible death agonies. He did nothing of the kind, however.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  Connach took his executive officer by the arms and shook him. “By the Eyes of Belenus, Tony, you know enough not to risk transport by Mirror.”

  “The need was greater than any risk,” Castillo answered firmly, but Morgan could have sworn that he saw the corners of Castillo’s mouth twitch as if fighting a smile.

  “If you’ll permit me, I’d like to get on with the rest of the shipment.”

  Castillo turned to the shining rectangle and flipped a silver coin into the warp that joined the Reged Council of Ten with Cunneda’s rebels.

  Morgan leaned toward the vortex, prepared to wrestle another crate of weapons over the oak frame. He was not prepared...even by Castillo’s presence...for Reged’s final shipment.

  They marched through in a column of twos, the beautiful young men and women of Reged. They were grim-lipped and armed with the weapons of Morgan’s world. They filed past the stunned Morgan and Connach and assembled along the tunnel shaft under the direction of a young a female officer. Not one of the fighters dropped in agony onto the floor and died, gasping for air with lungs that had cruelly changed. The young officer quickly inspected her troops and spun around, M-16 held in salute.

  Morgan staggered, his senses a wild mixture of exultation and despair. The officer was Brigid Connach, but her eyes, as they swept across Morgan’s face, were as expressionless as black stones. His hopes sank further when she spoke.

  “Hail to the High Chief of Reged, my brother. And hail to the High Chief of Dumnonia, my betrothed. The people of Reged are now prepared to join with you in force against the enemies of our people. We are but the vanguard; the main units are to join with you on the eve of the general uprising.

  Cunneda moved to Brigid’s side, and he embraced her, fixing Morgan all the while with a look of gleeful triumph.

  To cover his confusion, Morgan sought Castillo out. “How did you manage all this?” he asked, looking past Castillo at Brigid. She was holding Cunneda’s hands.

  “It was easy once I got access to the Master Transporter through the Lady Brigid. “After speaking with that worthy gentleman and his filid, the problem with the Mirror was narrowed down to its erratic power source, on a supernatural level, you understand.” He paused as if embarrassed at having stated as fact, such an obvious idiocy.

  Morgan knew how erratic that power source could prove to be and nodded, clenching his ring-hand into a fist, willing Aiofe’s help. There was nothing.

  “Damn too erratic,” he said quietly.

  Castillo raised his eyebrows. “You believe in all this shit?”

  Morgan nodded. “You should try to accept the anomalies of this place without fighting them so much.”

  Castillo’s face flushed red. “I do try, Kerry, but I’m a graduate engineer. Hard facts and known truths are the keystones of my education.”

  “You should do as Kerry suggests.” Connach had joined them.

  Brigid and Martin Cunneda stood a little apart from the others; she was laughing at something Cunneda said.

  Morgan’s eyes lingered over her tea-rose beauty and detected a faint scent of cloves upon the stale air in the tunnel. It was only with a major effort that he wrenched his attention back to Castillo and his tale of a break-through on the island state.

  “Say what you want, Ian. I still find it difficult to accept the principles that govern your world.” Castillo smiled but his face was still flushed. “Your Master Transporter was a lot more gracious than I am. He was prepared to accept the value of our technology and helped me create a monster that shouldn’t work, partly out of pieces of the Global Positioning Systems his filids salvaged from Mako and Idyll. The damned thing is a cross between computer and crystal ball and is powered by God knows what. The result is ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure transmission via Mirror. No more failures. Call it techno-magic, if you have to give it a name. A whole new concept for you folks.”

  The dead will no longer lie on the decks of their shanghaied boats, Morgan reflected with relief.

  “You have at last solved the problem of human transport through the Mirror.” Connach stated with a look of near rapture on his face.

  “Yes,” Castillo answered. “And on the other side of that frame are fifty thousand recruits under training. They will soon be ready to join you on your command.”

  “How can there be so many willing to fight?”

  “My Lord, the biggest problem is finding enough cadres to train the volunteers. Those fifty thousand are only the tip of the iceberg. The Council had to establish waiting lists.”

  “Looks like Nero’s Book has been scrapped in Reged as well,” Morgan said.

  “That appears true. But what woke them up? What loosened to the Brotherhood’s death grip on Reged’s moral life?”

  “Ian! The biggest converts to your cause are from the Brotherhood itself. There’s a lot you don’t know yet.”

  “It sounds like it. Go on, Tony.”

  “It was Maelgwynn....”

  “Maelgwynn? That sonofabitch? May his soul inhabit the farthest regions of the Dark Kingdom.”

  “His soul is resting somewhere, but I can’t vouch for its exact location.”

  Connach’s eyebrows rose questioningly.

  “Don’t be surprised if you find a statute to Maelgwynn erected in Verulamium when you return,” Castillo stated flatly. “He’s big stuff, currently.” The naval officer hurried on. “He and that priest, Celtillus, got to Caerwent, just as we suspected. As a matter of fact, they actually managed an audience with the Governor-General. Thorkell thought they were too funny for words and had them turned over to his specialists. Well, Maelgwynn denied Thorkell much pleasure. His heart gave out almost as soon as the torture began. The other priest got worked over pretty well, though.

  “What nobody seems to understand is how he managed to escape.”

  Morgan knew. “That guard, Ian. Remember?”

  “Yes,” Connach said. “That had to be the one.”

  “I don’t know what you two are talking about, but Celtillus made his way back to Reged with the help of some rebel fishermen and began demanding some pretty militant things. He called a meeting of the Brotherhood and described, in great detail, the mercy the Celts would receive from the hands of the benevolent Mercians.

  “Celtillus is a very persuasive speaker. His unhealed wounds were even more persuasive. The Brotherhood has called for a war of liberation in the name of the martyred Maelgwynn.”

  Connach shook his head. Morgan had never seen him look so bewildered. “I never thought the Druid priesthood would ever ally itself with me. Not in my wildest imaginings.”

  “Their version says that you are allied with them in their crusade against the evil Mercians.” Castillo smiled like a child delivering a Christmas package.

  Connach laughed. “Let them have their version. What matters is that we have an army at last
.” Then a worried frown replaced his smile of pleasure. “I hope the Council has worked out the problem of getting the army here, Tony. With this single Mirror, it would take weeks to get them across and dispersed. We don’t have weeks.”

  “You won’t need weeks,” Castillo replied. He dug into a pocket sewn into his combat rig and extracted a bulky packet. He handed it to Connach, who took it and broke the wax seal with a fingernail. He skimmed rapidly through the contents of the first page then stopped abruptly in the middle of the second.

  “Kerry. Martin. Listened to this. The Council has raised and refitted four of the sunken boats. Mirrors have already been delivered by sea to the originally designated sites.” Tears welled in the corner of Connach’s eyes and spilled, unheeded, down his face as he read further. “By star-rise of the date preceding the uprising, each city will be sent additional Mirrors which will be placed in locations for the transmission of battle-ready troops.” He swallowed hard, overcome with emotion, and handed the documents silently to Morgan.

  The Californian struggled with the runic script, gave up, then handed the entire Council message to Cunneda.

  Cunneda, still holding Brigid’s hand, accepted it with a mere grunt and a smirk that reawaked Morgan’s anger.

  Carefully controlling his outward reactions, Morgan turned his back on the nobleman and his betrothed—his lost lover—and, shaken, contemplated the implications of the Council’s new war-like decisions.

  What he had painfully attempted to read could mark the end of Mercian domination on the hemisphere. The Free nations of the planes: Arapaho, Kiowa, Dakotas—The list of potential allies contained the names of at least fifteen diverse peoples—the Plankashaw, Shawnee, Yuchi, Creeks, Choctaws, had pledged to rise to deny the Mercians and Suevians in the captive Free States any contact with their homelands across the vastness of the continent. Communications, supplies, and outposts would be destroyed. The Viks were to be confined to their original footholds on the former eastern seaboard, but only on the sufferance of the native nations.

  All that was to take place, Morgan realized, if—If the Viks were clearly defeated in Dumnonia. It went without saying that the recovery of the remainder of the Free States would be left entirely to the Celts. That was too big an if to make Morgan comfortable. The native nations had carefully trod the knife-edge path that lay between active alliance and self-interest. Would the native nations really deliver, he wondered, or would they leave the embattled Celts to fight and die on their own? That was the biggest if of all.

  It was obvious that Cunneda and Connach did not seem worried by that possibility. Morgan turned to watch them reacting to the news, easily, not reading any Celtic deaths into the plan. Both noblemen were pumping each other on the back, laughing and crying simultaneously.

  The soldiers and clansman, not understanding the reasons for their leaders’ frivolity, either imitated the infectious hilarity or gathered together in puzzled knots, inventing rumors, Morgan conjectured wryly. Glivas, he saw, had gathered the Dumnonian fighters and was briefing them quietly. He too had seen the contents of the Council message. Brigid, he noticed, had left Cunneda and had rejoined her own troops.

  It would be his only chance.

  He reached her in three purposeful strides and took her by an arm, using more force than he had intended. He turned her to face him. Her free hand arced toward his eyes, fingers extended into claws. He caught her by the other wrist and pinioned the hand to her side. Her eyes were no longer expressionless as they had been the moment she had recognized him beside the Mirror. They flashed with an emotion he could only interpret as hatred. He reached the realization that her feelings for him had not died, but had morphed into a loathing that appeared as strong as had her love been for him only a short time before. In the grip of the deepest depression he had felt since he had left Verulamium, he shook her desperately so that her field cap fell to the floor.

  “Why have you come here?” He whispered harshly. “This is no place for you.”

  Her eyes underwent their transformation back into stone, and she looked steadily at him without expression. “Do not touch me, foreigner,” she answered coldly.

  Morgan’s hopes fell even farther.

  “I am the intended bride of Dumnonia’s High Chief and can be touched by no other man.”

  He mechanically took his hands from her wrists and stooped, with ice water in his intestines, to retrieve her cap. He straightened jerkily and faced her cold stare, twisting the cap in his hands without thinking. Over her shoulder, he noticed Glivas looking at him. The Celt’s face held a strange reptilian appearance as he stared from them to where his master stood next to Connach. The clan leader flicked his tongue across his thin lips and looked long at Brigid and then to Morgan.

  Brigid turned her head slightly. When she faced Morgan again, her eyes had changed expression slightly.

  “Glivas?”

  When Morgan nodded, she said, “That one frightens me more than Thorkell, sometimes. They say that he consorts with the Dark Ones. All I know for certain is that he is Martin’s closest friend. That terrifies me.” As if she realized that she had said too much, had been too familiar, she lowered her gaze and fell into silence.

  Morgan looked for Glivas, but the man was nowhere in sight. He did not feel relieved.

  “Are Glivas and Cunneda lovers?” He asked carefully, noticing how the Celtic Chief stood with his hands effeminately on his hips when he was not touching Connach. There had been other things, Morgan recalled, that he had dismissed as aspects of Dumnonian culture that he did not understand. Were Glivas and Cunneda actually lovers? If true, Glivas would be as dangerous to Brigid as to himself.

  “I am no longer obligated to answer your questions, Kerry,” she said, returning to a stiff formality, placing no emphasis upon his name. “Yet I will reply to your first. I have come here, as I stated, to fight our enemies and to be with my intended husband. I decided to become a soldier as soon as your airship had left me on the field...alone. I decided to discover for myself what there is about war that makes men forsake their women.

  “I wanted to find out what ecstasy there is in killing others that surpasses the pleasure of our once shared bed!” She began raising her voice then, and several curious faces turned in their direction.

  “And now, thanks to your Shadow World weapons, a woman can kill the enemy as easily as can the great Kerry Morgan, slayer of men!”

  Morgan shrank from the fury that erupted volcanically from her. “You could be killed,” he argued lamely.

  “Yes,” She spat. “People do get killed in wars. I could be killed just as easily at home during another Vik air attack! In fact, I began dying as soon you decided to leave me in Verulamium! This way is quicker, cleaner. Shall my people lie dying in battle while the Lady of the House Connach dallies at home?”

  Morgan was shaken. He flinched from the passionate truths she had spoken and by the realization that his own crude attempt at protecting her from danger had been the catalyst that had changed her love for him into cold indifference. He had actually propelled her into the danger he had wished to avert.

  “In the name of the love you once felt for me,” he cried, “listen to what I have to say!”

  “It is finished...changed, forever.”

  Connach had quietly joined them, touched Morgan’s shoulder and nodded. “Martin lives, and she has accepted him. The agreement you and I once had is finished.” He stepped between them and gave Morgan a hard look. “Don’t blow things any further, Kerry. Right now I want you find Tony. He’s got something to show you.”

  As Morgan stumbled away from the aristocratic brother and sister, an overpowering feeling of loss and anguish swept through him again. He clenched his ring hand, making his nails draw blood from his palm.

  “Aiofe,” he groaned aloud, “please help me!”

  He thought he heard a gasp behind him, and when he turned, he could have sworn that he saw a glint of tears in Brigid’s eyes as her brother
gently pushed her toward Martin Cunneda.

  “What d’ you think of this little surprise for the Viks, Kerry?” Castillo pried the lid from a case with the point of the bayonet.

  Morgan got onto his knees to look into the box and pulled aside a handful of sweet smelling wood shavings and dropped everything on the Cunneda tiles with a pleasure that did little to ease his tormented soul. He selected one of the small, innocent oblongs he had uncovered and lifted it out for inspection.

  “I thought you would appreciate this, having been on the receiving end in your former service with Uncle,” Castillo said like a proud parent.

  The block was featureless and soft, looking like a block of child’s modeling clay. But what a block of clay it was!

  “C-4?” He asked unnecessarily. “I was on the giving end, too, you know.”

  “Yup,” Castillo answered brightly, rolling a second slab into a sphere roughly the size of a regulation baseball. “Good old plastique.”

  Morgan’s eyes roamed over the crate of sleeping explosives. “You’ve got enough here to level the House of Cunneda...and half of Caerwent.” He grinned without humor at Castillo. “Mind if I take a little home with me tonight?”

  Castillo’s expression sobered. “Under any other circumstances, Kerry, I might have slipped a couple of bars into your pack. That bastard doesn’t have much to recommend him, does he?”

  “He has less today than usual.” Morgan squeezed the plastic explosive he was holding with ferocity that he did not allow to touch his eyes. Then he began molding the bar carefully, using his knife to smooth out the modeling, adding small details. When he was finished, he handed the lump of explosive to Castillo.

  “If the bastards used steam radiators over here, I’d make a little substitution in Cunneda’s study. Radiator knobs were an OAS favorite, I’m told…or doorknobs. Me, I just let it push pellets out of a Claymore mine. Heated some coffee with it. Blew the shit out of trees when I needed to clear a fire lane.” He looked carefully it Castillo. “Now I want to clear a fire lane through Cunneda. Simple, if you’d let me.”