Abruptly Molly faced the bay. She looked up at the moon, she bent and squinted out at the distant line of water, the edge of the Irish Sea, six or seven miles distant. She whipped out her ring-pommel dagger and sliced through the coracle’s tether line.
“Jack, Hob! Take a side of this wee boat and carry it. It’s as far and fast as we can that we must run toward yon sea!”
Hob looked out at the expanse of sand, the little pools of seawater scattered at random, and the darker stubs of the skears dotted here and there. They would never make it to the sea; already the devils’ choir behind them was perceptibly nearer.
“But, Mistress, we’ll never make—” he began.
“Go!” said Molly, pointing to the skin boat, and Nemain put a hand to his back and pushed. Two steps took him to the left side of the boat, and Jack took station on the right. Hob grasped the boat’s rim, a roll of skin about a wicker framing rail, and the two men stood with the boat, which was far lighter than it looked. They began to trot, then to run, the women running easily beside them, Nemain beside Jack and Molly beside Hob.
Down the slope of dry sand and coarse marram grass, and onto the flat wet surface of the bay. The outgoing tide had left this soft, unstable surface, which grew alarmingly shifty as they progressed. Hob concentrated on matching stride with Jack, and they fell into a rhythm, not an all-out sprint, for the boat hindered them, but a good steady run. A paddle in the bottom of the craft rattled and rolled with every step. Hob felt the alternating slurp of wet sand and the splash of the shallow tidal pools; once he had to spring up and run on a low rock upcropping, then down again, sinking to the ankle in the viscous sands beyond.
He had to make an effort to free his ankle, and then the run turned to nightmare as the treacherous and clinging surface slowed them to a dreamlike stagger. The moon cast a sheen across the whole waterlogged surface, making distances hard to determine, and once he slipped and lost his hold on the coracle. A wasted moment: getting back into position, picking up speed, and then regaining the rhythm with Jack, the two running like yoked oxen.
All at once there was a change in the chorus behind them. Hob risked a glance over his shoulder. They had covered perhaps a half mile, and he could just make out the hunch-shouldered, misshapen brutes emerging from the forest line, their huge round eyes glinting in the moonlight like Satan’s own pack of hounds.
Hob faced forward and tried to coax more speed from his legs, already aching. Behind him there was a continuous gobbling, a sort of ghastly mewing. The sound broke: there was silence and a rough barking. He looked again, just a snatched peek, and turned back with a picture of the pack lifting paws and shaking them, and trotting back and forth sideways, reluctant to advance into the muck. Seen in profile, some, with heads held high, showed the slant of their bodies down the long neck, to the sloping hindquarters and short hind legs. Others had their heads held low, lending them a ghoulish high-shouldered skulking appearance.
Saint Nicholas, make them fear to follow us, he prayed silently, addressing the saint who was known to save travelers in extremis. But even as he thought this, the eerie shrieking resumed, and a third glance behind showed the monsters venturing out on the sands, their thick pawpads and blunt claws doing surprisingly well with the unstable footing.
He ran on, his legs beginning to burn, his fingers cramping where they clutched the coracle rail. He looked over. Jack ran easily: where physical effort was called for, he had few equals. Molly and Nemain were keeping pace, the women looking back from time to time to judge the distance between themselves and their pursuers.
For a time they stayed ahead, then the advantage in traction and stability of four legs over two began to tell, and besides, the hyenas were not burdened with a boat, however light. Hob wondered again—did Molly think they could reach the sea and float to safety? They had barely covered half the way to the water, or perhaps even less—the moonlight, the struggle for strength and breath, and the shimmering sands made it hard to tell how far ahead their goal was. Perhaps they had come only a couple of miles from the shore.
He looked back again. The pack had halved their lead and were running full out with their rocking gallop, tongues lolling out over their teeth, disturbingly like monstrous human teeth, a wide semicircular grin with huge fangs set in the corners, rows of smaller teeth in the front, and two lines of craggy tearing teeth along the sides. Their heads swung from side to side as they loped; their powerful legs bounded over the sand; their round eyes, sloping down at the outside corners, gave their expressions an odd melancholy that contrasted with their demented smiles. They were creatures sprung from the tales told to frighten children into obedience.
Molly was looking up and down—up at the moon, and quickly down to avoid a misstep. Finally she slowed and stopped, as did Nemain. The men slid to a halt with their burden. Molly looked behind, coolly gauging the oncoming threat, then up again at the moon, then out to sea.
“A wee bit farther,” she said, and set off again. They ran for a few hundred more paces, and then she stopped again and said, “Here!” She made a patting motion at the boat: Put it down. They dropped it with a moist thump.
“Everyone in,” said Molly, stepping into the boat. The others followed suit, and sat when she sat. Hob looked back along the way they had come, somewhat farther than he had thought before, and said a quick and silent paternoster. He did not see how he would live through the next hour. He had the utmost faith in Molly, but they were sitting at ease at ground level while a dogpack from Hell lolloped toward them.
He looked over at Nemain. He said in an anguished voice, “I have led you into this.”
“Hush; you’re after being snared by that geasadόir’s spells, and there’s no blame to you in that,” she said.
Molly was looking up at the moon, and now she said, looking at the hideous creatures running awkwardly but swiftly toward them, “We will come to no harm this night, Hob. Wait and watch.”
Perhaps two breaths later, the hyenas appallingly close, Hob became aware of a hissing rush of sound. He looked over the side of the coracle. Beside the boat was a groove in the waterlogged sand, and now there was water in the groove, and it was flowing like a tiny river, foaming toward the shore. A shushing roar began to rise around them, although he could not place its source. The hide boat shifted a little under him.
He peered at the sands around them. There were patches that now shimmered with a skin of water. The boat began to rise and spin in place: they were afloat! Molly handed Jack the paddle and the dark man attempted to scull with it, heading them away from the land, and from the onrushing pack. The water was still too shallow to paddle in, though, and Jack began to use it as a pole, shoving against the bottom.
Water was filling the empty bay at an astonishing pace. Rushing landward through channels beneath the sand, gouts of water erupted here and there in spouts, and rather than proceeding only inward from the Irish Sea, the tide rose all about them. From the beginning it came in faster than a man could run; now it was pouring in faster than a fast horse could run, rising before and behind and all around the pack, which had halted in consternation.
Already the surface was up to the fur on their underbellies, and almost as one they turned and made for the shore. The water tangled in their legs; the weight of the water slowed and fatigued them. Now they began to leap in bounds toward safety, coming almost free of the water for a moment and then coming down, snorting and choking as their snouts dipped beneath the rippling tidewater.
But the speed and weight of the water, the irregularities of the bay bottom, began to generate whirls and eddies, irresistible currents that swept the pack from their feet and swung them in great circles, exhausting even their unnatural strength. The coracle was spinning as well despite Jack’s efforts to exert control, but the light little craft rode safely over the ripples, secure as a seabird floating on the ocean swells.
There was a deeper note now in the roar of the waters. Hob looked out toward the Irish Sea. A
great wave, stretching from side to side of the broad bay, was thundering toward the shore: the tidal bore, the main edge of the waters dragged upshore by the all-conquering moon. After what seemed a long time, but was not, the wave reached them and loomed over the coracle. Hob had a moment to say another unvoiced prayer to St. Nicholas, patron of sailors, and one to the Blessed Mother, and then the skin boat slid with not a bit of fuss up the ridge of seawater; the crest passed beneath them, smooth as cream, and swept away shoreward.
With the hyenas it was not so kind. Hob saw the heads, like parodies of dogs or bears, bobbing in the swirl of water, and then the wave trod them under, and the surface was clear. They had been pushed under and, caught in the storm of underwater currents, did not resurface.
With the disappearance of the hyenas that had dotted the water, there was no need for Jack to keep fighting to put out to sea and the safety of the deep waters. He turned the boat and began to scull toward shore. The tide pushed them shoreward, increasing their speed; the trees of the forest, at first but a dark mass on the shore, rapidly grew closer with every stroke of Jack’s paddle. In a very short while they were pulling the boat up the strand, the coracle’s leather bottom sliding with a crunching hiss over the damp sand.
Molly had them carry the boat to where its broken tether was still floating in the shallow water about its anchoring stake. They set it down where they had found it, and she retied the severed halves of the tether, her nimble fingers fashioning a stout clever knot.
She stood up, brushing damp sand from her hands. She bent again and gave a hard pull at the tether, satisfying herself that it would hold. “For I’ll not be having a fisherman come down to the bay, and find his livelihood missing,” she said. “Although the ancient laws of Erin say: ‘When fleeing from an enemy you may borrow a horse, a weapon, or a boat without permission of the owner.’ ”
CHAPTER 22
THEY MADE THEIR WAY BACK to the wagons, where Sweetlove, sleeping with Jack—curled on top of Jack, in fact—in the small wagon, had detected Hob’s departure: her acute hearing noticed at once the closing of the middle wagon’s door, the creak of the rope loop, Hob’s fading footsteps. Dogs are averse to unusual occurrences, especially at night, when all the pack should be denned up till sunrise. She had broken out in insistent objection, and Nemain, disturbed, feeling sleepily for Hob and encountering nothing, had come sharply awake, quickly ascertained that Hob was not merely outside relieving himself, and had run for Molly.
Between them they managed to arouse Jack, peacefully snoring through Sweetlove’s din, and set off, following what the two women could barely describe to Hob: a sense that he had brushed this tree, or pushed this shrub aside, a sort of psychic scent left on things he had touched. All the while Nemain was calling to him with her thoughts, along the thin thread of soul that connects husband and wife, useful to such an adept as Nemain was becoming, and so strong had she become in the Art that even Hob, that least fey of men, heard “Hob, Hob, where are you?” as though she were beside him.
Now, arrived back at their wagons behind the inn, they released Sweetlove from the little wagon, and after her usual paroxysms of joy at greeting Jack anew, as though he had been gone for years, they took stock of their next move. It was decided that they were too tired to go on by night, and besides, Molly could not detect any lingering threat in the immediate vicinity. Jack, that old campaigner, insisted on setting a watch, and so he climbed up on the big wagon with some bedding and his war hammer, and then went down and scooped up Sweetlove. He could sleep lightly when he knew it to be necessary, and he had a good vantage point on the rooftop, and it would take enemies a moment to climb up there, at which point they would find Jack and his hammer waiting for them.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, they held a council of war at breakfast. Molly waited till the host’s mother, a silent woman in her middle years, had deposited the creamy Lancashire cheese, dark bread, onion, and jacks of small beer, and had retreated from the common room, disappearing into the kitchen, before she began to speak. “Sure they’re knowing of us now, and trying to lure Hob away by enchantment, and so perhaps to snare him like a coney.”
“But, seanmháthair,” said Nemain, “why seize Hob and not ourselves?”
“ ’Tis no shame to you, lad,” said Molly, “but consider: ’tis that sorcerer who’s setting them on us, and he will know that Nemain and I will be the most powerful to resist his bouda’s spellcraft. And Jack—well, they sense that Jack is more than he seems, and that pilgrim blacksmith calling him ‘Brother,’ and he’s dangerous enough as he is before he changes.”
“If he’s the least dangerous to them among us,” asked Nemain, “why choose to kill him and not us?”
“I am not of a mind that they were to kill him at all, but to take him living, and crush every secret out of him: what we are doing, what it is that we know, and the like. We may have destroyed the war band they sent after us, and be safe for some little while till they realize no one is coming back to report, but we cannot stay still for long. They will come again; early or late, they will come again.”
Hob roused himself from his lassitude, a lingering effect of last night’s horror. “But, Mistress, we are to meet here with Monsignor da Panzano. . . .”
“I will give him one more day,” said Molly, “for he may have news for us, and ’twould be good for him to know my plans, but those plans are laid, and not to be changed, and any road ’twill all come to naught if we are cornered here again, and with no tide to help us. We must call a meeting with the chieftains of the wild cattle. I’ve a hid-away meadow in mind, down a small boreen that runs through the forest, and we must be there soon, for time is running through our fingers like sand, and it may be that we’ll be too late, and here is my appetite near destroyed with fretting.”
Hob was watching her clever fingers building up, on a chunk of bread, a layer of rich cheese and a layer of onion. She lifted the slab to her mouth and took a hearty bite.
She hardly seemed apprehensive; indeed—except, perhaps, for her recent transient doubts about how she might defeat the bouda—she always seemed to know what to do.
This brought Hob to another question. He sat up straighter, frowning. “Mistress, how did you know what would happen, and even to the moment when it was safe to sit down in the boat and run no more?”
“I am after making it a concern of mine, these years past, to learn somewhat of every place I pass through, and this coast is known for its sudden and mortal tides.”
“But to know, to the moment, when that tide would come roaring in—”
Molly looked at Nemain. The young woman took her husband’s hand. “There’s much that we’re not allowed to say to a man and that’s you as well, even you, sweeting. But we are priestesses of Herself, the Mόrrígan, and we . . . feel . . . feel the moon and it pulling on the tides all the while, and we are guided by that, and that’s all I can say to you of it.”
CHAPTER 23
IT WAS THE VERY NEXT day that Monsignor da Panzano arrived with Father Ugwistan and, of course, Sinibaldo. The men seemed weary, and thinner than when last Hob had seen them—even the Berber, whom they had left less than a sennight ago; when they removed their cloaks and hung them to pegs, the garments engendered small clouds of road dust that hung in the air a moment, and slowly settled to the floor. They sat down wearily—Sinibaldo, as always, with his back to the wall—around Molly’s table, eyeing the earthenware jug of barley beer with its beads and trickles of condensation.
“I am most pleased to see you, madam,” said da Panzano. “From what I am hearing from Father Ugwistan—he is telling me this so-troubling tale, and we are rushing to come here, he is gasping as we are going along the roads—I am thinking, we will find them dead or taken.”
The host himself, almost as silent as his mother, appeared and, unbidden, set mugs before the newcomers, and withdrew to the kitchen. Jack reached over, effortlessly lifted the heavy jug, and poured for the thr
ee.
Molly said, “ ’Tis a fine place for food, and we about to eat, and you looking thin as a blind wolf. Will you be having a wee bit o’ scran before we speak?”
“You do not comprehend me fully, madam. We all must away within the hour. A mug of this wretched beer, and—I will let Father Ugwistan tell you, that I may hear it twice, and note what I may have missed.”
He sipped at his beer; Sinibaldo had not even touched his. The Berber priest, on the other hand, drank off half the mug, set his elbows on the table, and began. “The first and most urgent thing I must say, madam, is that the accursed Yattuy has set a group of these bouda on your trail; they are to kill or capture you.”
Molly sat up straight and put both hands on the table. “And how large is this group, and when will they arrive?”
“I am walking in the outer . . . bailey, and I am telling my beads, and I hear three speaking together, one is beating iron flat on the anvil, so I miss a word here and there, but—”
“Swiftly, Father, swiftly!” hissed da Panzano.
“Ah, yes, yes. I have told you this part before, madam, when I warned you to flee the castle: the bouda are suspicious of you and your granddaughter. These three are saying that they heard that—I don’t get the name, the forge is banging—one of the bouda is working and the two women from the wagons have come by, and looked at them immodestly, and touched their tools, and”—he nodded at Nemain—“the young one touched his hand, and he feels a shock, the feel of witchcraft, and then he sees them for the witches they are—they burned the tools you touched, you know—and he tells Yattuy, as I said he would. The Cousins are monsters, but Yattuy, he frightens me more. He sends a, a, squad, there are two twelves—four and twenty—and a leader; they are to find where you have gone, and to learn what you know, and who you have told. And then—well, then to do what they must.
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