The Celtic Mirror

by Louis Phillippi

  Morgan watched the Suevians some moments longer then decided to wait only until Connach got Kettleman’s illegal diesel auxiliary started, and then he was going to carry the mortally wounded nobleman aboard. Perhaps, he thought, Aiofe would give the prince a second chance at life once the sloop cleared the tainted Caerwent coast and left its evil gods behind.

  He swallowed thick phlegm and tightened his grip on the rifle stock. A muscle twitched in the corner of his mouth. The Suevian crew was wheeling the big crossbow along the quay and had reached the abandoned armored car. Morgan fired a three-round burst in their direction, scattering the crew, causing them to reconsider their devotion to duty. He prayed that they would continue to exercise such an eager caution; the big bolts they commanded could easily sink the vulnerable Geheimnis.

  “What’s keeping your brother?” He called to Brigid, anxious to leave the blood-washed harbor and its dangers.

  “He said something about air in the...the fuel lines.” She twisted her face awkwardly from his gaze as if it could hurt her. “Did I say that correctly? Fuel lines?” Her eyes would not meet his.

  Morgan flinched inwardly. Her healing could prove to be as difficult as Cunneda’s, perhaps as hopeless, but he was committed to the attempt, to wait the cure out, no matter how long it took.

  “Tell Ian to hurry,” he said, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice, knowing that there was no hurrying an air bubble from a diesel fuel line.

  He alternated his attention between the cowardly yet recovering Suevian sailors and Kettelmann’s boat. From all appearances, the German had accurately guessed what to expect when the 4-D did its acclaimed vanishing act. Kettelmann had, he knew, two very wet “dry runs” to prepare himself for the main event. The boat had been fully fitted: all running and standing rigging was neatly replaced. The sloop carried a segmented mast, consisting of five stacked and bolted-together sections. The mast could have been shortened to fit any boat from the present forty feet down to the original twenty-four. The simplified roller reefing main boom had allowed the thorough Kettelmann to adjust the tall mainsail to any height of the modified mast.

  When it had set sail from West Harbor Marina, Geheimnis had to have been dangerously over-ballasted with Kettelmann’s below-deck chandlery, yet Morgan was forced to admire that singular aspect of the German’s mentality. He glanced approvingly at the array of instruments mounted on the rebuilt bulkhead: depth gauge, speed/distance log, wind speed indicator, two compasses.

  The sudden coughing of the Westerbeke diesel interrupted his visual inspection. Morgan could not even guess how Kettelmann had gotten that past the Energy Enforcement Police with their hydrocarbon sniffers, or how much the bribe must have cost him. But then, Kettelmann had always been devious even in straightforward operations.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Connach climb back on deck, smeared with diesel oil and bilge sludge.

  The filthy prince moved to the controls and played them experimentally to keep the boat stationary in the water. “Kerry! Martin! Get aboard, now!”

  As Morgan moved to obey, he saw the enemy soldiers position a second ballista. That and the giant crossbow could spell a Celtic doom if Geheimnis did not abandon Caerwent harbor right then.

  “It is time, Martin,” he called hoarsely, using Cunneda’s given name for the first time.

  “No,” the city’s dying ruler answered, his voice faint and strained. “My place is here with my people.” He turned away from Morgan and faced Brigid.

  “This is my wedding gift to you. Perhaps the old ways are not the best ways, but you must believe when I tell you that it was not only to knit our two families together that I wanted to make you my consort.” He coughed, and then smiled with blood-flecked lips at Morgan.

  “Treat her well, mercenary.” He was still smiling, but his eyes had the look of death.

  Morgan silently acknowledged the prophecy in Cunneda’s overly bright eyes and tried to smile back. He offered the M-16 to the nobleman.

  “If you are determined to stay, then, at least take this.” He wondered if he was trying to ease his conscience by offering the dying man a useless weapon.

  Cunneda shook his head and drew a bubbling breath. “I would not wish to have such a weapon fall into Mercian hands. They are evil, but they are not too stupid to see the advantage in imitation.” His breath came in shallow, shuddering pants, and a pink froth seeped from the corners of his mouth and dripped from his chin.

  “Give me...something that...will...not leave too much...too much for their artificers to copy.” He reached out both hands to Morgan. “Place one of those little bombs of yours in each of my hands.” His smile became apologetic. “You will have to pull the pins, however. I will need all my strength to face the Horned One.”

  Morgan unclipped one of the grenades from his harness and armed it before handing it to Cunneda. As he repeated the process, he wondered if the nobleman had enough power left in his hands to hold the spoons down and to keep the resistance fighters from becoming just so much more stew meat for the mystic Cauldron. As he stepped aboard the boat, he saw visible tremors shake Cunneda’s body, yet he also saw that Caerwent’s deposed ruler gripped the grenades tightly.

  He touched his forehead with the knuckles of his free hand, saluting Cunneda for the last time in the physical world, he was certain. “May Cernunos honor you at his feast,” he said with a sudden emotion flooding him.

  He held the rail with much more force than necessary to steady himself. “For Christ sake, give it all you’ve got!” he yelled to Connach with his next breath.

  Connach did not respond verbally; instead he jammed the throttle to its stops and pointed the boat’s bow seaward. With an agonizing sluggishness, the sloop gained way and placed a margin of oil-fouled water between herself and the Suevians ashore.

  The Viks here are like the scum that is oozing across the harbor waters, Morgan mused with that portion of his mind still capable of rational thought. They are a scum that covers the fresh and the good in a corrupt quest for power and possession. He watched a persistent oily syrup move into their wake, smothering the green water. He wondered if the day’s raid had been a mere parting of the waters, only to have the Vik blight close them over once again, perhaps for good?

  He crouched at the gunwale with the M-16 resting on the fiberglass. Beside him stood Connach, legs apart and braced, his hand resting upon the tiller. He looked like a Sunday sailor and appeared unconcerned as he steered the sloop straight for the distant breakwater and the open sea beyond without evasive maneuvering.

  In direct contrast, Morgan nursed a hard knot in his gut. Too many things could still go wrong. The enemy was not going to quit and go home because a handful of Celts crashed their party and stole the door prize. He knew better.

  The Suevians on the quay steadily dwindled to stick figures and the sounds of the explosions ashore no longer matched the flashes, making the scene appear surreal, like a badly-threaded film. As he watched, the sailors, obviously gaining courage from Cunneda’s failure to return fire, began to move quickly to the quay’s end. Morgan groaned aloud, knowing that he could not change the inevitable outcome with the weapon he held.

  He looked to see Connach watching him without expression.

  “I can’t take it, Ian, even knowing he wanted it this way.”

  Connach did not answer at once, and Morgan thought the prince found Cunneda’s fate too painful to discuss. He was wrong.

  “Perhaps Martin did not always lead his life with either honor or valor. But he is going to die with both honor and valor attendant.” He drew a ragged breath and expelled it noisily. “And he meant for us to watch so that we would understand, and so that we would tell the story of his death to the bards. To gain that kind of immortality is no small thing for a Celt.”

  He took his right hand from the tiller and pointed in the direction of the quay. “Watch!”

  Morgan turned his gaze back to the scene Martin Cunneda had written for h
imself. The enemy sailors had gathered around something which lay unmoving on the stones. They seemed convinced that the Celt held no more danger to them, and one of them turned the corpse over, undoubtedly to have some sport with Cunneda’s less worn side.

  The explosions, when they came, sounded as a single explosion. Cunneda’s final statement lofted Suevians and fragments of Suevians into the air. Small, obscene hail disappeared into the water, lost to Morgan’s view. Few of the Suevians on the dock still stood, and those who did, staggered in confusion like ants stunned by insect spray.

  “That is Martin’s victory, Ian,” Morgan said thickly. “That is what the bards will sing to our children when they ask to hear the story of the Mercian defeat.”

  A low sobbing from the cabin below reached him and he knew that Brigid was aware of Cunneda’s last gesture even though she refused to remain on deck to watch.

  Something heavy splashed into the harbor a few meters from Geheimnis’s stern, followed by a muffled explosion that lifted dirty spray into the air. Moments later the sloop lurched as an underwater shock wave struck her hull.

  “Damn it!” Morgan yelled, “They’ve got their ballista unlimbered!”

  Connach simply grunted yet held a steady course for the stone breakwater, which lay nearly a kilometer ahead. Morgan’s infantry mind screamed for Connach to take some kind of evasive action, but he understood that with the sloop’s relatively slow hull speed, such safety as could be had lay in presenting the smallest target to the enemy gunner, the boat’s narrow stern.

  Connach remained steady even when the second projectile fell closer, but Morgan was cheered to feel the deck rise and fall to small swells as the boat crept nearer to the open sea and what he hoped would be their escape. The clean smell of unpolluted water tantalized him. Then the ballista gunner’s third attempt drenched all three of them with a filthy spume and streaked them with partly emulsified oil.

  Morgan swiped at his face with a grimy forearm and tried to assess the ballista gunner’s next toss. The catapult, however, remained in its extended possession, and the crew was not even making a pretense at retensioning the arm. He questioned the unexpected reprieve, but only for a moment. The reason for the Suevians’ lack of concern for them was coming into view from a side channel and closing rapidly, cutting a brown/green trail through the dirty slick.

  “P-Boat at six o’clock and gaining on us!”

  The chuffing clatter of her crude power plant grew loud, clearly discernible over the confusion ashore. Morgan watched the low-freeboard craft with a professional detachment. The marine architect inside his warrior’s body scorned the craft as ungainly and potentially dangerous in heavy seas, but the fighting man was impressed with the two big deck-mounted crossbows she carried. They were not yet manned.

  “Looks like her captain might have orders to capture rather than to sink us,” he told Connach.

  The prince laughed without humor. “How well do you think they’d treat this captive bunch of Celts?”

  At that moment, Brigid raised her body through the companionway and shook her head wearily at the men. “Nothing below that we could use for weapons. Just a pair of what Kerry calls flare pistols.” She looked astern, and her already strained face paled even further. “Is this to be the end, Kerry, after everything we have endured and lost today?”

  “We’ll not make it easy for them, Love,” he said and touched her cheek with the outstretched fingers of his free hand. Will this be the last time I feel her skin? He would know the answer to that too soon. The Mercian vessel had gained appreciably on the sloop in the brief moment that the exhausted woman had captured his attention.

  The big boat had the beam and length of a Coast Guard cutter, and its speed was more than adequate for her present task. It closed the intervening distance without strain and cruised parallel to the sloop, cutting her power in half to match their boat’s slower progress.

  Losing hope, Morgan watched sailors swarm on deck to man the big crossbows that were then swiftly trained on the sloop’s waterline. Morgan grimaced and checked to see if the M-16’s selector switch was on semiautomatic. It was. He twisted the knob to ammunition-wasting automatic fire since he knew there was no longer any point in saving for later. If there were to be a “later” he would stock up at the nearest sporting goods store, he promised himself, but without real conviction.

  “Kaapitan of the stolen vessel,” growled a loud voice in accented Pan-Celtic. “Heave to at once! You will be taken under tow back to Kaerwendt!”

  “Bullshit!” Connach’s knuckles whitened on the tiller, and he continued to steer a course that would take them into the open sea, a course that Morgan recognized as a simple but futile gesture of defiance considering the ominous dark hull that paced them unrelentingly. He noted that Connach did not once acknowledge the presence of the P-Boat with his eyes, something Morgan found impossible to do.

  “Kaapitan,” the disembodied voice began again. This time laced with irritation. “We have instructions not to harm you or any of your crew. We only want the property of our empire returned.”

  Morgan was able to look directly onto the low deck of the enemy boat, and he did so with fascination. He did not miss the anticipation that registered on the enemy crewmen’s faces. The P-Boat captain had made a promise he could never keep, and had never meant to.

  “I can take out at least one of their gunners before they fire on us. Maybe the second one if I’m lucky.”

  “In a minute. Then it won’t matter one way or the other. Give your rifle to Brigid and take the helm. I’m going to let the bastards have the boat.”

  “What?” Morgan had fully expected to die with the assault rifle in his hands and with a few more mental notches on its stock.

  “At least ram the assholes,” he said, knowing even as he said it that the P-Boat would not suffer any more damage than a tank would suffer after being pelted with eggs.

  “I’m going to let them take her, after I set her Mirror to destroy itself. With luck, they’ll put a prize crew aboard.” Connach looked at the Mercians for the first time. “It should have been different, though,” he whispered to the enemy craft before ducking below.

  Brigid placed her head on Morgan’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Morgan could feel the wet warmth of her tears as they ran silently along the places where their flesh touched.

  “I wish,” she began.

  “I know.”

  Connach reemerged with a soft Mirror key hung about his neck on a chain. “Here.” He handed Morgan the second key.

  “You can toss it overboard when you cut the power. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “The hell it doesn’t!” Morgan said, reaching for the fuel cutoff. “Don’t lose that sucker because you’re going to need it again. But you’re going to make it tougher for me to hit the bastards with this boat dead in the water.” Nevertheless, he shut the diesel down and felt the sloop quickly lose way in the growing chop.

  The P-boat crew sent a triumphant yell across the water as soon as Geheimnis rolled helplessly alongside. The ugly craft edged closer to the white sloop, idling her big engines.

  Morgan released the tiller and let the unrestrained rudder hammer Geheimnis’s stern. He slowly brought the flash protector of the M-16 over the coaming. He smiled in irony, recognizing that the thought of his own death on Brigid’s alien world no longer bothered him at all.

  “Cernunos, I come.”

  “We come as guests to thy feast, o Horned One.”

  He felt Brigid’s heat against his left side and hesitated a slow moment before bringing the rifle stock to his shoulder.

  “The three of us will eat of our enemies’ flesh at the Great One’s Cauldron,” Connach said, “but before we do, there is one more thing we can do for our Free State brethren.”

  “And what’s that?” The Welshman asked, losing his elusive sight picture.

  “I think we all forgot about Geheimnis’s best weapon.”

  Morgan lowered the
M-16 again and looked at the prince with grim amusement. There was one more blow they could strike for Caerwent’s freedom.

  “You’re right.”

  Connach took the sloop’s VHF radio microphone from its clip and held it in his right hand. The thick coil of wire snaked down the companionway and into Geheimnis’s navigation station.

  “I hope that bastard German thought to connect his antenna after the Crossing,” Connach said.

  “He thought of nearly everything else,” Morgan answered bitterly.

  “Vengeance!” Connach’s index finger pressed the microphone key.

  In places all over Caerwent, in locations known only to members of Cunneda’s underground, hidden repeaters were listening for the wordless message Connach had just sent. Morgan hoped the batteries aboard the boat were fresh enough, that the antenna was, indeed connected, and that Cunneda’s other men proved more reliable than Scatha’s servant. If so, Mercian strongholds would be robbed of power, of water, of vehicles and communications. Bridges would collapse; desks would explode in the faces of Mercian bureaucrats and paper soldiers. Fuel depots and airships would be transformed into fireballs.

  Then he knew. He knew that the martyred dockworker, along with others of Cunneda’s men, had done his job and had done it well.

  The nearest explosion was not loud on the open water. It was as if someone had slammed a door, no more, but as he watched, the steel-hulled P-Boat belched thick smoke from its main hatchway and began to settle into the waters of the fouled harbor. Smoke curled from its every aperture. Crewmen emerged choking from below in fear and confusion. One of them, an officer or petty officer began shouting and pointing at the sloop.