The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  When David stepped outside the chapel, Gillapadraig was refastening the thong on his sword-hilt. David grinned. “You thought they would attack me in a holy place, and myself under The ó Flaherty’s protection?”

  Gillapadraig grunted. “My blade wanted whetting, is all.”

  “It might have been interesting if they had,” David mused. “I could have goaded Little Hugh into it. Then ó Flaherty would have had to kill them to save his honor. Would that have been too high a price for peace in Connaught?”

  “Not if you could be sure you had actually purchased so elusive a thing.”

  David laughed. “And what is that foreigner gilly doing over there by the stables?”

  “Oh, him. He’s trying to rewind his headscarf.”

  David clapped him on the shoulder. “Come. Let’s see if he can tell a tale as twisted as his hat.”

  “But we don’t speak The ó Gonklin tongue.”

  “Nor does he.”

  The man saw their approach and watched with calculation. He had obtained somewhere a needle and thread and was mending the long scarf. He studied David’s face, then grunted and pulled the thread through his teeth and bit it off.

  “I hate it when they fawn all over you,” Gillapadraig said. “I suppose it wasn’t much of a life, if that is all the thanks you get for the saving of it.”

  “It was the only one he had.” David stepped to the drinking barrel that the stable-hands used and pulled out a dipperful, which he offered to the Red gilly. “Akwa?” he said, employing an ó Gonklin term he had learned.

  The squat man stared at the dipper for a moment, then raised his eyes to David’s face. “Oka,” he said distinctly. He took the dipper from David’s hands and sipped from it.

  “I’m glad he cleared that up,” Gillapadraig said.

  “He speaks a different tongue than the other Red Foreigners.” Then he squatted on his heels directly before the other and said in his halting Danish, “Who are you?”

  The red man showed surprise for just an instant before his face reverted to impassivity. “Warrior,” he said, in a Danish even more awkward.

  “A warrior servant?”

  Incomprehension was evident. David turned to Gillapadraig. “He understands only a little of the Ice Land tongue. I understand only a little of the Galwegian tongue. Between the two of us, we understand only a little of the little. But I must know what to tell Cormac. I don’t think The ó Flaherty knows as much as he believes, and I don’t think that Tatamaigh fellow will be telling him.” Facing the gilly, David pointed to himself and said, “David mac Nial ó Flynn.” Then he pointed to the gilly.

  After a moment, the gilly slapped his chest and said, “Muiscle ó Tubbaigh.” He put his mending aside and reached inside his robe, to emerge with a small bowl made of briar and carved into the form of a rearing horse. Yet such a horse David had never seen before, with a broader face and shorter muzzle and with shaggy hair almost like a dog’s. The bowl had a long, gracefully curved handle. Into this bowl, the man poured a small measure of powder or ground-up leaves from a cloth pouch he carried and which was tied up with a drawstring around its mouth. Ó Tubbaigh gazed wistfully at this sack. “Tzibatl,” he said. “Tzibatl Aire Bhoach achukma. Much good.” He hefted the sack once or twice as if gauging its weight before returning it to one of the numerous pouches sewn into his robe. Lastly, he lit a straw from the brazier the stable hands used and with it, set fire to the leaves in the bowl.

  The handle was actually a pipe, David now saw, one end of which was fixed to the bowl enabling ó Tubbaigh to suck the acrid smoke of the leaves into his mouth. When Ó Tubbaigh handed the bowl to him, David took it and, following the prompting of the gilly, sucked also.

  The smoke seared his lungs and he coughed convulsively. The foreigner smiled a little, but did not laugh. He made puffing sounds with his mouth, then, with a negative motion of his hand across his mouth, mimed a deep breath. David understood and took the smoke only into his mouth, holding it there for a moment before expelling it. After several puffs, a curious tingling sense of alertness came over him. He could hear the harp playing in ó Flaherty’s hall and the high nasal singing of “The Lament of The ó Flaherties.”

  Clan Murchada of the fortress of hospitality

  Was governed by clan Flaherty of swords,

  Who from the shout of battle would not flee…

  Except that they had fled, westward from the Foreigners to these dreary shores–and the fair, former lands of clan Murchada were governed now by The ó Conners, who had been content to gather up the remnants after the Foreigners’ withdrawal. Ó Tubbaigh, his head cocked, also listened to the faint music and, though he could not have understood the words, a sadness passed momentarily across his face, for he could hear the haunt of loss in the winding notes.

  “Gillapadraig,” said David suddenly, “do you remember how mac Costello took Nial Og prisoner last summer?”

  “And our cattle in the bargain. What of it?”

  “I was only thinking how a warrior might become a servant.”

  David accepted the smoking bowl when ó Tubbaigh offered it again.

  “Smoke friend maketh,” the man said in halting, antique Danish.

  David grunted. “I suppose I can sort those words as I please.” He pointed to himself and Gillapadraig and spoke again in Danish, “We twain, Gaels.” The he pointed at ó Tubbaigh. “You, ó Gonklin?”

  The other man looked first puzzled, then startled, then angry, then finally, contemptuous. He passed his hand back and forth in front of his mouth, then spat in the dirt.

  “What was that all about?” Gillapadraig asked.

  “He does not think highly of his masters,” said David.

  “Small wonder, after they made no move to save him today.”

  David thought about it some more. “I wish I knew how far I could trust the two Danes. The dark one, I think, not at all, if he is one of The ó Gonklin’s vikings and loyal to them. The Galwegian, I am unsure of. He is out-law, but that might be a trifling matter. He may regret having become entangled in this affair. The Ostmen keep to themselves and pray the Normans will overlook them when the time comes. They have forgotten that they were once vikings. But let’s make the most of our time. I doubt The ó Gonklin chief would be pleased to find us sharing the white smoke with his gilly.” David drew ó Tubbaigh’s attention to one of ó Flaherty’s servants emptying slops in the pig sty just outside the keep and near the stables where the three were smoking. “Gilly,” he said, “of ó Flaherty. You. Gilly of Tatamaigh?”

  The Foreigner laughed and settled the turban over his head, adjusting it until it sat right. Then he grabbed himself by the crotch and again waved his hand across his mouth and spat in the direction of the keep.

  “Does he mean that Tatamaigh un-manned him?” Gillapadraig asked in shock.

  “No. He means that The ó Gonklins have no balls.” With a stick, he drew a small circle in the dirt. “Aire land,” he said and patted the earth and pointed around. Then he made another small circle a little distance off. “Ice Land.” He added Green Land, then New-Found Land. Then below the New-Found Land, he drew a much larger circle and said, “Ò Gonklin’s Land.” Finally, he handed the stick to ó Tubbaigh and, indicating the crude map, said, “You. Land. Where?”

  Ò Tubbaigh scowled at the circles for a time and David thought that perhaps he did not understand, so he named the circles once more.

  Slowly the man began to nod. The he reached into the dirt, scooped up a handful, and poured it over the large circle that David had named Ò Gonklin’s Land. David stared at the dirt, then at the man himself, who grinned savagely. But before David could pursue the matter, a woman’s voice called from the keep the name of Muiscle ó Tubbaigh. The grin vanished, replaced by the stone face. The gilly knocked the ashes from the bowl and, swishing it in the water barrel before returning it to his pouch, rose and aired his garments of the smell of the smoke.

  “I suppose he did not underst
and what a map is,” Gilla said when the man had gone.

  “Oh, he knew enough.” David watched the gilly approach the ò Gonklin woman, saw how he stood before her, and saw too in the torchlight the look she gave him, and understood just a little bit more the tangled skein among the New Foreigners.

  “Then why did he pour dirt all over it?” Gillapadraig wanted to know.

  David dropped his eyes to the sketches in the dirt before, with his foot, he obliterated them.

  Olaf Gustaf’s son was morose to the point of suicide, but it was a point in exquisite balance. “I’ll end in a nameless grave,” he confided to David later that same evening when David had found him on the castle wall overlooking the moon-lit lake. “That’s the fate of out-laws.” David had brought him a tankard of ale because words were like fish and when wet swam more freely. “I was an important merchant in Galway Town. I took tin and timber from Cornwall to Bordeaux and to Henaye in the Basque country and brought back La Rochelle wines, Bourgneuf salt, and Spanish wool. Now there’s a price on my head, and I never even had that poor man’s woman. I wouldn’t mind being cut down so much if I’d ever futtered her; but she and I hadn’t closed the bargain yet. Her husband thought otherwise, and so he died for the sake of an error. That don’t seem right.” Olaf sighed. “Still, people will go against me. Me, what’s fought Breton and Basque pirates, and sailed with the Hansards against the wild Prussians.”

  David pointed to the vessel tied up to the wharf on the west side of the island, half visible in flickering torchlight. “Is that The ó Gonklin boat?”

  “Ship,” the Ostman told him. “Not ‘boat.’ Ja, that’s her. Looks a little like a cog, but she’s a poor sailer. Flat-bottomed, no keel. Her master fought his leeway all up Lough Corrib. Used oars, he did, to bring her to dock, so she’s even part galley. No castles, fore or aft, to give archers height over pirates.”

  “May be there are no pirates in her home waters?”

  Olaf spread his hands. “Or may be the pirates win. But she’s got that queer second mast behind the main, which I fancy would harvest a bit more o’ the wind than the usual bonnet sails, so she’d have heels when sailing large. And the strakes are clinkered, d’ye see–but top-over-bottom like the old knorrs, not bottom-over-top like modern ships. If I had to guess… D’ye have any more of The ó Flaherty’s ale? Ah, my thanks t’ye. If I had to guess, I’d say this ó Gonklin fellow never had deep-water ships, just coasters; and what he’s got now, he’s copied off knorrs from the days of Eric the Red. That little hind-mast, though. That’s new. That’s a good idea.” He took a long pull from his tankard. “I’d like to be out on one now. Not on that bastard. I’d not try the Gascon coast without a proper keel beneath me. But I’d like to be out on a proper ship. Out of Aire Land, where every man’s is hand against me.”

  “Mine isn’t.”

  “Ach. That only means ye haven’t heard the price on me yet.”

  David studied the ship again. He had never seen a cog before, let alone something that wasn’t exactly a cog, and Olaf’s explanations were as much a foreign language as that of The ó Gonklins. It astonished him that so large and heavy a thing could float at all. “I don’t think those vessels can bring an army across the Ocean.”

  “Don’t be fooled by her size,” the Ostman said. “There be plenty room in ’er hold.”

  “It isn’t the size I’m after thinking of. You said you wouldn’t take it to the Gascon coast. Would you take it on the Ocean Sea?”

  Olaf considered that. “If Hengist’s family were breathing on my neck, I’d try Ocean in a coracle. If I’m to end in a nameless grave, better a watery one. But…The easting would be simple enough. Put up enough linen, catch the westerlies, and here you are. As for the westing…Well, she’s got oars.”

  “But if a flat-bottomed ship slips sideways…”

  “Leeway, we call it. That’s the problem with her. Ye couldn’t be sure where ye’d raise land. If these Red Foreigners had keeled ships that could hold a bearing, they would have been here long since.”

  “You can’t spin linen from straw,” David agreed.

  “And without those hairy horses of theirs, they’d have to walk everywhere, and how big would their kingdoms be? As big as a thumbnail, I’d wager. No grand cities as Thorfinn’s told of: Manahattan, Lechauweking. That Tatamaigh fellow, when we slipped past Galway Town and her great walls, he turned his nose up and laughed. I’d be offended, if the Galwegians weren’t all trying to kill me. I suppose a folk can be only as great as their tools will let them.” Olaf turned as another man climbed the steps to the rampart and he called to the newcomer in Old Danish. “Hail, Thorfinn, son of the Rafn! How fare ye?”

  The dark Dane said nothing, but he took the jug of ale from Olaf’s hand and drank from it, wiping his mouth afterward with the back of his hand. He looked at David without expression, and did not return the jug. Smiling, and speaking the Gaelic so that the Red Dane would not understand, Olaf turned back to David. “He wouldn’t last a week in Galway Town before he smiled below his chin.”

  “They are afraid. All of them but the gilly.”

  “Then they shouldn’t swagger so.”

  David looked into the night, past Lough Corrib, past Connemara, past the Ocean Sea. “Sometimes a man must push himself forward, if to step back is death.”

  David went off by himself the next morning to watch the sun come up over Cill Clunaigh on the eastern shore of the lough. The breeze, smelling of fish and the damp, whipped his cloak about him and he gathered the edge of it in his hand. A party of horsemen breasted the horizon, paused, and disappeared on the farther slope. Normans–perhaps mac Costello’s men. David spat over the wall into the waters that lapped against the foot of the fortress. Or a party of King Aedh’s men, or even Leyney men sent south by Conner god ó Hara. Outriders? Or were rumors spreading?

  Below, crossing the courtyard, ó Tubbaigh carried slop buckets to the midden. David whistled and the man looked up. For a moment the two locked gazes, then ó Tubbaigh put the slop buckets down and climbed the ladder to the parapet. David mimed smoking the bowl-and-pipe, but when the other drew it out made the negative gesture of passing the hand back and forth across his lips. He pointed to the horse carved into the bowl and said in Danish. “Saga horse sing.” The previous night Thorfinn, through Olaf, had described how the Red Foreigners esteemed the horse above all beasts, and ó Tubbaigh seemed from his bow-leggedness a man who had spent most of his life astride one.

  Ó Tubbaigh thought for a moment and his lips moved, as if he were puzzling from the Danish to his own tongue. Then he shrugged and began to speak in a sing-song voice. David began to walk slowly around the parapet and the Red Foreigner walked beside him, singing in a high nasal whine. David understood not one word of it, but that was not his purpose.

  At one point in the song ó Tubbaigh gnashed his teeth, then rubbed his stomach and pointed to the horse carving. Then he waved his hand before his mouth, by which David understood that at one time his people had eaten horse meat, but did so no longer. The Normans had a similar taboo, and small wonder. Eat all your mounts and what do you ride? A knight in armor would present a less fearsome appearance riding a cow. The miming with which ó Tubbaigh accompanied the song suggested the capture and breaking of horses, but he rode his imaginary steed with a wilder abandon than the Norman kettle-heads, and he mimed the shooting of a bow and not the lowering of a lance.

  At that point, turning the corner of the parapet, they came face to face with The ó Gonklin chief Tatamaigh and his woman about their own morning circuit of the walls. Tatamaigh halted and stared with onyx eyes at David and ó Tubbaigh. The gilly, who had been in the midst of loosing one of his imaginary arrows, smiled and released it directly at the chief’s chest.

  Tatamaigh snatched at his sword-hilt, but the gilly said, “Hahkalo iss’ubah, sachem. Sa taloah himonasi,” and bowed most insolently. Then he grinned and made riding motions, biting imaginary reins in his teeth and loosing a
nother bow shot. The ó Gonklin affected not to listen, but his woman, standing a pace behind him, watched ó Tubbaigh’s rolling hips with her lower lip caught between her teeth.

  Tatamaigh released his sword hilt–and David heard the subtle sound of other swords sheathed a few paces behind him. Gillapadraig, as always, his shadow. But the chief reached out and snatched the smoke-pipe from ó Tubbaigh’s hand.

  Ó Tubbaigh cried out, but Tatamaigh fended him off with a sharp blow that rocked the gilly’s head back. Then, holding out his palm, the chief spoke sharply. David heard ‘tzibatl’ but it sounded no more at home on this man’s tongue than it had earlier on his servant’s. Possibly it was a word of the Aire Bhoach folk, those who grew the leaves. Ó Tubbaigh snarled something that David had little trouble interpreting as a refusal, slapped his chest and said, “Mingo-li billia!”

  The ó Gonklin chief grabbed his sword-hilt again and might have drawn it this time, but that his woman put a hand on his arm and said something soft. Tatamaigh shrugged her off without looking, but nevertheless unhanded the sword. “Tzibatl,” he said again, holding his hand out. Two of his guardsmen had come up behind him and watched the servant with smoldering eyes. David crossed his arms and leaned his back against the parapet, waiting to see how it would play out.

  The moment stretched on.

  Then ó Tubbaigh sighed and reached into his cloak and fetched out the bag of smoking powder. He held it for a moment, and David thought he might throw it over the wall in spite. Then, he handed the pouch to his chief saying something that David thought might translate as I hope you choke on it.

  David noted how both men’s hands trembled while handling the powder and he thought that the white smoke might exert some powerful influence over them, as whiskey did over drunkards. Before he had even departed with his retinue, Tatamaigh had filled the bowl with the powder and had sent one of the guards to fetch a coal to light it with.