by Diane Carey
Kirk looked up and let silence ask his question before he barked it out.
Getting the message, McCoy held one hand over the piles of hair and leaves and bits. "All these things filled the doll. It's not just stuffing. You could throw this in a pot and make soup. Here you've got bits of hair, fingernails—not from the same person—buttons, something that might be a kind of bullet, pulverized nutshells, candle wax, caraway seeds, dried rosebuds, berry leaves, various worts, cloves, spider's web, and over here is the dried heart of some kind of small animal. And these things didn't all come from the same planet." The doctor looked up at him and meaningfully said, "I think this is a chronologue of this creature's life. They're relics of his experiences. If I didn't have the body, I could even roughly guess his age from just this mannequin. It's a facsimile of that very person over there."
"Yes," Kirk murmured, glancing back. "Zennor's has little antlers, a crescent brooch, bands on its wrists, and it wears his clothing. If it gets filled gradually, over a lifetime, older beings would have more items inside their doll than younger beings." He paced around the table again, thinking. "So Garamanus is older than Zennor."
Seeming satisfied that he was getting his analysis across, McCoy sighed and nodded. "Very likely so."
"What was that other word you used?"
"Poppet. I was getting to that. It's a medieval practice that came out of witchcraft and sorcery, which basically was the first practice of medicine. Poppets were one method of mixing mysticism with herbal medicine, invoking sympathetic magic."
"But that's Earth. It's trillions of miles away from where these people come from. What're you getting at?"
"That's what I'm getting at." McCoy leaned over the table. "I'm talking about Earth. That other one—they introduced him as Garamanus Drovid, right?"
"Yes. So?"
"I did a little skipping around in my medical-history files and there's a match. The word 'drovid' has roots in Old English, and that was where I found the references to poppets and midwives and sympathetic medicine."
"Bones, make your point before I stuff this mess back in the doll and stuff it down your throat."
"First ask me where the other two wise men are."
The doctor stood back a step, pointed at the piles of herbs and bits, then swept his hand toward the corpse on the table in the next chamber.
"Drovid," he said. "The drovids. The 'infernal of our past, the sinister, the banished'? Jim, don't you hear it? These people are druids!"
Chapter Thirteen
"THAT'S THE WILDEST leap of logic I've ever heard," Kirk accused. "As near as we can calculate, it's a leap across two galactic quadrants."
"I agree." With typical sleepless diligence, Spock scanned the information McCoy had handed over for analysis.
Druids?
Every time Kirk heard the word in his head, he squinted as if looking through a fog. How many times in his career had he been faced with the inconceivable and asked his crew to believe? Now he couldn't seem to give himself that much cooperation.
He rubbed his sweaty palms and waited for Spock to do the dirty work.
Spock's hands and eyes moved as he keyed information into the monitor mounted over his head. The screens rolled with gory pictures of ancient myths that bore startling resemblances to Zennor's crew.
"With uncharacteristic efficiency," the Vulcan barbed, "the good doctor has stumbled upon some interesting data."
"I do not 'stumble,' sir," McCoy aggrandized. "I am a superior scholar in my field. I know my poppets."
Abandoning what may have been an effort to ease pressure on the captain, Spock became suddenly clinical and looked at Kirk with disclosed sympathy. "Lieutenant Uhura is still working on some of the nomenclature and linguistics using Dr. McCoy's theory, focusing on the crossover between the old woodland religions of western Europe and the encroachment of Christianity. The simple folk of those times easily believed in both."
"Old religions die hard," Kirk said. "Zennor's people are living proof. They're hanging on to theirs and looking for scientific data to back it up."
"Real scientists do not form a theory first and look for data second, Captain," Spock said. "However, I would be deluding myself to deny the surprising similarities between Zennor's race and the pantheon of Celtic folklore."
"Specifically?"
Spock hesitated, as if walking on thin ice, but offered his typical straightforwardness. "Specifically, the Horned God, ruling deity of winter and the hunt. It was a beastly vehicle, usually portrayed in stag form, with horns."
"And Zennor … sure has horns," Kirk said. "But some of those beings have wings. Doesn't make them angels."
"No, of course not," the doctor agreed, "but I think this is the key to a peck of trouble. You've been going about this all wrong, Mr. Spock, looking at arrangements of stars and searching for archaeological evidence. These beings look a lot like common archetypes in humanoid culture, but not just any archetypes. Specifically archetypes of evil. Antlers, horns, snakes, skulls—they'll find so much that looks like them that they'll say, 'See? We're from here.' People who are this much into their myths will be very convinced by ours. Jim, you'd better disprove this, because if I were them, all this Celtic stuff would bother me."
"Celtic," Spock said unsparingly.
McCoy looked at him. "Pardon me?"
"You said 'Seltic,' Doctor. The work is 'Keltic.' The 'C' had a hard sound in the ancient Gaelic language. It is often mispronounced by the ignorant."
"Now wait a minute, Mahatma. Didn't there used to be a baseball team called the Boston 'Seltics'?"
"Basketball," Kirk corrected, and was instantly mad at himself for bothering.
Keenly Spock raised one punctuating brow. "An ideal case in point."
McCoy's squarish features deployed a barrage, but he didn't say anything.
Tilting a scowl at an innocent wall, Kirk squeezed back a headache and reached for the nearest comm. "Kirk to engineering."
"Engineering, Hadley, sir."
"Request Mr. Scott join me in the sickbay right away."
"Yes, sir, I'll find him."
Impatient, Kirk paced a few steps away, as if to distance his officers from the stain of his responsibility and the tilt of this conversation. Myths … gods of this and that … poppets and witchcraft … he didn't like any of it as a basis for any decision.
"Zennor's people seem very fierce, but tolerant of each other, as races go. They've had to live together and work toward this common cause, and as such they've had to believe in it, proven or not. It forced them to respect each other's various cultural habits. They're actually better at tolerance than the Federation, except for this one clubfoot. This group-space idea. Zennor is smart enough to realize the holes in all that."
"Who did they have this war with?" McCoy asked. "Do we have the foggiest idea?"
"It was five thousand years ago," Kirk mourned. "Maybe more than that."
"Could it have been one of the early Klingon cultures, and maybe that's why it seems to fulfill a legend of Chaos?"
"Havoc," Spock adjusted. "I doubt that. The Klingons had no spacefaring capabilities in their sectors that long ago. I suspect it was some advanced race, now long gone."
"Or still there, in some other part of the galaxy," Kirk pointed out. "Don't make their mistake and assume this is the right place. Zennor said their archeologists pretty much proved they didn't evolve on their planets. They were all transplants. After all this time, there's no way even to know whether they were persecuted, or if they lost a legitimate war."
"Legends become distorted over five thousand years," Spock said. "The people writing them tend to skew them in their favor. Havoc, heresy … all these are inventions of those who wish to maintain control through threat of supernatural punishment. In fact, the word 'heresy' is from the Greek. It means 'free choice.'"
"Well, they're exercising free choice right now, that's for sure."
Kirk scuffed his boot heel on the deck and anchore
d himself to the sound, the hard sensation of his ship around him. The hollow ache of having lost crewmen, especially young Brown, ate at him. And what was he going to do with that headless body in there?
"Spock, what about their ship? What exactly are we up against?"
"I have done extensive sweeps, but there is much sensor masking. The ship remains essentially an unknown. I do believe they have the raw power to push back the Enterprise, but could they push back all of the Klingon squadron and us as well? I have no conclusions."
"Neither do I," Kirk told him, "and I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about his ship that Zennor's not telling."
"Intuition, Captain?"
"If necessary."
The Vulcan frowned into his monitor screens. "I am also questioning Garamanus's astronomical data regarding the Klingon solar system as seen from the other side of the galaxy, given the distortive nature of the galactic core. It can not even be seen through. To send out a probe of any effect would take hundreds of—"
He moved one arm to tap an order to his computers, and apparently moved too much. He suddenly stopped speaking, choked silent by a spasm somewhere in his injured body. Kirk covered the space to the bedside in one step, but somehow McCoy got there first and hurriedly adjusted the antigravs to take some pressure off. So much for pain being a thing of the mind.
"Are you all right?" Kirk asked.
"Well enough, Captain." The voice was a scratch now, still twisted with effort, and more seconds passed before the pinch left Spock's narrow eyes and his hands began to relax again on the fingerpads.
As they waited, the outer door parted and Chief Engineer Scott thumped in, looking untidy and frustrated with the day's tensions. His emblematic red shirt was rumpled and bore the burns of a splatter of sparks. He clearly didn't want to be here.
"You wanted me, sir?" He reached up to check the mountings on the monitor. "All right with this, Mr. Spock?"
Kirk squared off behind him. "Scotty, what do you know about Celtic mythology?"
Scott twisted around, one hand still poised overhead. "Celtic what, sir?"
"Druidic myths of supernatural beings," Spock filled in, burying his effort. "The primary deity of hunting and survival. The Horned God."
"Me?" The engineer looked from each to the other. "Not much. Where'd you ever come up with all that, sir?"
"We just wondered if all this meant anything to you," Kirk told him, keeping his tone even, not wanting to hedge his bet.
"Because I'm Scottish?"
"Any port in a storm."
"Oh …" Scott's expression turned pained. "Sir … you're barking up the wrong kilt. That Celtic druid stuff, that's a lot of hooey!"
"That hooey may be the key to our situation. You have druid ruins in Scotland, don't you?"
"Have we. We hang our laundry from 'em. That'n postcards is about all they're good for."
Kirk simmered. "You don't know anything at all about that folklore."
Glancing with a pathetic face, Scott's round eyes bobbed in a shrug and he looked like a street urchin being asked where the neighborhood hiding place was. "Well … give or take Tam O'Shanter, not a blessed thing."
"What's that?"
"Everybody's heard the story of Tam O'Shanter's ride."
"Give me the high points."
"Oh … well, it's a Robert Burns poem about a fellow who takes a look inside a haunted kirk—oh, sorry, sir—a haunted church." Uneasy at relating folklore instead of phase inversion ratios, Scott struggled to scrape the dust out of his memory. He made a disapproving sound in his throat and forced himself to speak. "Inside are demons and unconsecrated dead dancing about, and perched in the window is the devil, shaped like a beast, wheezing his pipes for all he's worth. I saw a reenactment of it once, right there near the actual kirk in Alloway—"
"Wait a minute!" McCoy cut in. "The devil plays bagpipes?"
The engineer screwed a glare at him. "Welcome to heaven, here's your harp, welcome to hell, here're your bagpipes."
"Oh, fine."
"Can I go now, sir?"
"No," Kirk snapped. "What other details are there?"
Scott shifted his feet. "I don't rightly recall, sir. . . . I'm sure it's in Mr. Spock's computer someplace. This Tam has to get away from the demons, and there's something about how demons can't cross running water, so he makes for the bridge."
"Logical," Spock fed in.
McCoy shook his head. "Logical!"
"Scotty," Kirk pressed, "why can't demons cross running water?"
"I wouldn't have a clue, sir."
"Is there a point to it happening in the ruins of a church?"
Desperate, Scott shrugged. "Why does Hamlet happen in a castle, sir?"
McCoy leaned forward. "Why's the devil in the shape of a beast?"
"Doctor," the engineer groaned, "you're not talking to a man who thinks there's a monster in the loch."
Unsatisfied, Kirk let his brow crimp. "Very well, Scotty, dismissed."
"Aye, sir!" Flushed with relief, Scott vectored for the door, then abruptly looked back. "It's all got to do with that lot we beamed over, doesn't it? If ever a bunch needed a ruined kirk about 'em, those are the ones."
Before anyone could stop him, he dodged for freedom and the sickbay door hissed shut on empty air.
"Well, there's one generalization gone up in smoke," McCoy commented.
Kirk paced, embarrassed. "I shouldn't have disturbed him."
"Gentlemen," Spock said with an anchoring tone, "this is interesting information, but it is entirely anecdotal. Still only folklore."
"But dangerous information, Mr. Spock," the doctor insisted. "Sometimes myth can be much more explosive than fact."
Kirk turned to Spock and waved his hand. "McCoy's right. You and I need hard evidence, but Zennor's crew may well be satisfied with anecdotal evidence. We can't take that chance. All this will become a moot point if we can get to this Klingon solar system and find no proof that it's their home system. That's my intention. We are not having a war. We're not having these people warring against the Klingons, the Klingons against them, and the Federation scrambling in the middle. I'm not having it. I want both of you to—"
"Red alert. This is the bridge. All hands, red alert."
Suddenly angry that his aggravation was being interrupted, he assaulted the comm. "Kirk here."
Sulu's voice came through, sounding tight. "The Klingon squadron, sir, they're moving into attack position and swinging under us toward the other ship."
"On my way. Contact Security and have them bring Captain Zennor to the bridge. Kirk out. McCoy, Spock, you two keep on this line of research. And hurry it up. If this is legitimate, I want to know it. If it's not, I want something concrete that I can put in front of Zennor and Garamanus to show them that it's not."
"Yes, sir."
"We'll do our best, Jim."
"Status, Mr. Sulu?"
"The Klingon squadron swung around us to attack the visitor's ship, sir. They've opened fire several times, but seem to be only making glancing blows. They may be looking for weak points. Impulse power's on-line and helm is answering."
"Mr. Donnier?"
"Phaser batteries on standby, sir. Photon torpedoes powering up."
Hardly had the tube cleared when it opened again and Zennor came out into the shadowed area beside the glossy red doors. Kirk glanced at him.
As the Klingon squadron separated into a new attack formation on the forward screen.
Kirk dropped to the recessed deck and gripped his command chair, but didn't sit. He couldn't quite make himself do that, not with Zennor haunting the upper deck's turbolift vestibule, looking quite zombieish with the soft bridge lights teasing his bony features, sulfurous eyes, and twisted horns and glinting off all that carved jewelry.
"Sensors full capacity. Come full about starboard, impulse one-quarter. Intercept course. Gentlemen, I thought I ordered change of watch. What are you all still doing here?"
Don
nier swung around as if he'd committed a crime, but his mouth hung open without making a sound.
Sulu turned too, but didn't take his hands from the helm. "The order just came up, sir. We were waiting for our relief to show up. I think the lower decks have all changed over."
Kirk glanced over his shoulder. "Vergo Zennor, I assume you'll want to return to your ship to confront this action."
Zennor's horns caught the bridge lights and played with them. "My ship is strong, Vergokirk."
"As you prefer," Kirk said, a little irritated. He'd want to be here, and suddenly that seemed like a sign of weakness. He trusted his crew, but this was his responsibility, not theirs.
Strange, though, to be so completely unconcerned … as if a bunch of delinquent children were hitting his ship with sticks. Zennor was either very confident in his ship's technology or he was putting on a hell of a show.
Grudgingly Kirk accepted the first divisions between himself and Zennor that weren't physical.
The turbolift door gushed open and an engineer came out, but didn't go to the port side. Instead, the short and thickly built fellow stepped down to the helm and looked at Sulu, then at Kirk.
"Lieutenant Byers, sir, relieving the helm."
"Not now."
"Sir?"
"Not in the middle of action. Stand by."
"Aye, sir." Byers blinked at him self-consciously, then at the screen. He was new to the bridge and Kirk guessed that a department head somewhere below was pushing him. Happened sometimes. Sooner or later the lowliest technician got a hitch at the wheel, just to see what it felt like, not to mention in case of some catastrophe that blistered the whole crew and left one confused yeoman to steer. That happened sometimes too. Usually those were historical accounts, but one could never tell.
Byers rubbed his wide hands on his thighs and shifted from foot to foot, not knowing whether to vacate the bridge and wait to be called, or take a position on the upper deck and wait there, doing nothing.
"Up there." Kirk pointed sharply to the engineering systems station. He couldn't keep the irritation out of his voice, nor did he want to take the time to explain that the lift tube should be kept as clear as possible during action, especially not to someone who should know it.
