by S L Farrell
Séarlait took Kayne’s left hand. Her eyes were moist as she looked up at him. Her da’s ring slipped easily onto his forefinger.
The Draíodóir grunted. “This way, then,” she said.
She led them both to the menhir, placing Séarlait alongside the northern face and Kayne on the southern. “Clasp your hands through the Eye of the stone,” she told them. Kayne slid his hand into the hole in the standing stone and found Séarlait’s hand. They linked fingers as the Draíodóir put her hands on either side of the menhir. The old woman closed her eyes.
“The Mother sees this handfasting and smiles,” she intoned. “Let it be so for a year and day, and more.”
Still holding Séarlait’s hand through the menhir, Kayne looked out at the crowd. Laird O’Blathmhaic and Rodhlann were smiling, as were the clansfolk and the gardai.
It was only Harik who frowned.
30
The Haunted Ship
HAUGHEY STOOD AT the wharf and stared out over the green waves toward the distant ship, wallowing near Oldman Head at the mouth of the harbor.
Haughey: I am bringing something that you won’t believe. Something of great importance to the Thane considering our current troubles. Make sure you meet the ship at the dock.
That’s what the message wrapped around the leg of the white pigeon had said, in Artol Jantsk’s tiny, neat handwriting. The pigeon had arrived four days ago now, and Haughey had started worrying when the ship didn’t arrive in the days following the pigeon’s appearance. Yesterday, a fishing vessel had returned saying that they’d seen the ship approaching, and Haughey had waited most of the day today for it to dock.
Haughey: before the mess of the last several years, that’s all anyone had ever called him. Haughey. Even he had forgotten whether that was his given name or surname. Now he was no longer just Haughey. Now he was the Ionadaí Haughey, His August Thane’s representative in Cairnmor, not that Haughey had been to Concordia to report to the Thane in over three years, not since the blasted Arruk made their most recent push and effectively cut off the western coast of Mid Céile from its capital. Torness, the usual port for ships coming over from the Tuatha and the only large port in Upper Céile, had been overrun by the Arruk in ’64. Before then, Cairnmor had been a slumbering harbor town where trading ships rarely came, the harbor clogged with fishing vessels that seined the banks of the Tween Sea for its abundant fish. Since the fall of Torness, Cairnmor had become the primary harbor for goods moving between Talamh an Ghlas and Céile Mhór, and Haughey had been transformed from a rather minor functionary to Ionadaí for the Thane. Haughey’s position was now far more visible to Concordia and Thane MagWolfagdh.
In Haughey’s mind, this was quite the opposite of an improvement. Haughey had been happy before. In the three years since his promotion, he was beginning to see gray hairs sprout at his temples and on his chin, and there was a constant burning in his stomach.
Among the multitude of new tasks which had been placed in Haughey’s unwilling hands, a secondary function was to serve as the conduit for information regarding the Tuatha. Artol Jantsk was one of the Thane’s multitude of eyes and ears in Talamh an Ghlas, and as such, was also Haughey’s responsibility.
And now Jantsk was coming in bearing “something of great importance to the Thane,” and there was a problem. A fire burned in Haughey’s gut as he stared at the harbor.
“Why aren’t they coming in?” Haughey asked querulously, glancing down again at Jantsk’s cryptic note and wishing the man had been less mysterious about what he had. “It’s after midday already.”
Cairnmor’s harbor master, a thin and harried little man, shook his head at Haughey’s side. The lighthouse on Oldman Head had seen the ship the night before in the glow of the mage-lights, but they’d thought that the captain had decided to wait until morning and better light to avoid the shoals off Oldman Head. The keeper had also claimed that the mage-lights were swirling all around the ship, but everyone in town knew that the Oldman Keeper was a bit daft after too many years alone out on the Head.
“I don’t know, Ionadaí,” the harbor master answered. “We gave them the flag from Oldman Head to enter the harbor, but I’ve been watching them for half a stripe now and they’re not making headway at all—see, the sails are down and the oars are unshipped. It’s only the tide that’s brought her closer, and that’s due to change in the next stripe or so.” The harbor master stroked his bearded chin. “I think you have a problem out there, Haughey.”
Haughey didn’t miss the emphasis on the word “you.” He sighed. He hated problems. Problems meant more work. He stared at the paper the pigeon had brought once again and crumpled the sheet in his hand. He sighed. “Get me a boat,” he said. “I’m going out.”
A stripe and a half later, the currach was close enough to Jantsk’s vessel to see that there was no one on deck at all. The young fisherman who’d been drafted to row Haughey out shivered visibly as he stared at the barnacle-encrusted wood and the ship rocking silently in the waves. “That ship’s been taken by the Black Haunts, Ionadaí,” he said. “Look at it. Canna you feel it?”
Haughey shivered himself at the man’s words. “Hello!” he called loudly. “Jantsk! Are you there? Jantsk!”
There was no answer beyond the slapping of water against wood and the creaking of the masts. “I think we should go back,” the fisherman said. “Only the Mother knows what’s aboard that ship: fever or murder or worse. Let’s leave it, Ionadaí.”
Haughey wanted desperately to do exactly that. He wanted to go back to his house and pretend that the pigeon had never arrived, that Jantsk was still somewhere in Talamh an Ghlas or that the ship had been lost at sea. But he was the Ionadaí, and the Thane wasn’t known to be particularly forgiving of those Ionadaí who failed him. With the current troubles in Céile Mhór, the Thane’s mood was treacherous and foul. Haughey took a breath and tried to ignore the churning in his bowels. “Pull alongside,” he told the man. “There—where that rope’s hanging.”
The fisherman obeyed with little grace, rowing the currach through the swells until it bumped against the side of the trading vessel with a hollow, ominous dhoomp that made both of them shudder. The wind died at the same moment, and they both inhaled the odor at the same moment: the scent of rotten meat, of corruption. The fisherman made a quick, furtive gesture to ward off evil. The burning in Haughey’s gut reached white heat.
Haughey grabbed for the rope, grimacing at the slime-slick braids as he held them steady. He looked at the fisherman, whose eyes were wide enough to show whites entirely around the pupils. “Stay here,” he told the man, afraid that as soon as he went aboard he’d see the currach rowing frantically for home. “Do you understand? You stay here until I get back.” The man nodded, and Haughey grasped the rope and pulled himself up, managing to pull himself over the railing onto the deck.
“Oh, by the Mother . . . !” He wasn’t able to stop the exclamation. He brought up the collar of his léine to cover his mouth and nose.
The ship had carried a crew of eight, including its captain. The deck was a charnel house; Haughey counted five bodies on the deck: one draped over the oaken tiller as if he he’d died at his post; two more huddled near the mast; the remaining two reclining against the overturned rowboat that served as an emergency ship and shuttle for the vessel. From the look of them, all had been dead for several days. The gulls, the sun and the rain had been at them. The rotting flesh had been peeled away in some places to expose the bones. They all wore plain ship’s clothing: crew-men.
The smell of death pervaded the ship, and from the stench Haughey suspected that he’d find the rest of the bodies belowdecks.
The captain was in his cabin, in his bed. Also dead. The other two members of the crew Haughey found in their tiny bunks, their corpses drawn up in fetal positions with expressions of exquisite agony etched on their frozen faces. With his shirt still held over his nose and mouth, Haughey went to the door of the small passenger’s cabin, whic
h would have been Jantsk’s. It was closed and he knocked, even though he knew there’d be no answer. He turned the latch and the door creaked open on rusted hinges. “Jantsk?” he called.
Jantsk didn’t answer. Could never answer, Haughey saw as his eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness. In the light of the cabin’s single, tiny window, he saw Jantsk lying on the bed, the same expression of awful pain distorting the tattoo of the bird on his face, his hands drawn in claws as they clutched the blanket that was half drawn over him. “Jantsk,” he said to the staring body, “what in the name of the Mother happened here?”
A sound nearly made him jump. Haughey skittered backward, nearly falling over Jantsk’s trunk and putting his back to the cabin wall. In the shadows of the corner of the room behind the door, something—someone—moved. “Help me,” a small, high voice said. “Please help me. They’re dead. They’re all . . . dead.”
The form shuffled forward: a boy, Haughey saw. The poor thing was no more than nine or ten years old: thin, scrawny, and dark-haired, with tears mottling his cheeks. “I’m so scared. So scared . . .” The voice had the accent of Talamh an Ghlas.
“I’m the only one left,” the boy said. “The only one . . .”
Haughey’s wife made a fuss over the boy as if he were one of their own sons found alive after he’d been feared lost. She crooned and clucked and mothered him, wrapping the boy in the blanket she’d knitted for their own youngest—just married now after the Festival of Fómhar—and setting more food on the table in front of him than he could have eaten in a week. “Brina, he’s a boy, not a dire wolf.”
Brina put hands on ample hips, standing behind the boy, and fixed a ferocious glare on Haughey, who sat across the table with a large mug of tea in front of him. “The poor thing’s half starved, Haughey, and I won’t have you badg ering him while he eats either. Do you understand me?” She patted the boy’s head. “Pay no attention to him, Connail. You eat all you want, and take your time. If there’s anything else you want, just ask me. I’ll be right back—that scullery maid has broken two dishes in the last week and I have to watch her . . .” With a final glare at her husband, she went back into the kitchen.
Haughey sighed soundlessly, his hands cupped around the warm, slick glaze of his mug. Connail—that was the name the boy had given him: Connail MacVahlg—wolfed down the eggs set in front of him and reached for the slices of boiled ham. Haughey watched him. “Where’d you say you were from, Connail?”
“Tuath Éoganacht, Ionadaí Haughey.” The boy cut a piece of the ham, chewing and swallowing before he continued. “But we traveled a lot. My da; he was a Songmaster and knew all the old songs, and we were always traveling about from one Riocha’s estate to another and from town to town. That’s why we were in Maithcuan.”
Haughey hmmed and let his fingers prowl the strands of his beard thoughtfully. The boy had given him the tale on the trip back to Cairnmor: how he’d been fascinated by the man with a bird on his face, how he’d wandered away from his parents and snuck aboard the trade ship in a bale of finished goods, how he’d been discovered when they were already a day out from Talamh an Ghlas, how the crew had gotten sick and died one at a time until only he and Jantsk were left, with Jantsk finally succumbing the night before. No, he didn’t know anything about what Jantsk was supposedly bringing to Haughey, though he mentioned that Jantsk seemed very secretive and stayed in his cabin during most of the voyage.
Connail’s earnest voice and tears seemed genuine enough, but . . . Something nagged at Haughey. The boy’s accent—his clipped pronunciation and his vocabulary; if not for the blurred drawl of Talamh An Ghlas, he might have come from the Thane’s court at Concordia. And the way he ate—he sat at a table and used his utensils as if he were at a banquet: not like a wandering minstrel’s son, even that of a Songmaster.
Haughey wondered, but his puzzlement was tinged with exhaustion; it had been a long, tiring day.
The harbor master hadn’t wanted the ship in Cairnmor port, not with the chance that it contained some plague. On Haughey’s return to Cairnmor with the boy, both the harbor master and the fisherman who’d rowed him out to the ship stayed as far away from the poor child as possible, glancing at him with rolling eyes. Haughey had also noticed that they kept a judicious distance from him. “Are you sure you want to take the boy to your house?” the harbor master had said. “I mean, after all, Ionadaí, if there’s a sickness . . .”
“Where else should he go?” Haughey had asked the man. “Would you rather I’d left him out there?”
“Everything should be left out there,” the harbor master had replied. “Everything. That ship is cursed, and I want nothing to do with it.”
The harbor master’s opinion had been shared by the rest of Cairnmor. Haughey had been unable to find anyone to take him back out to the ship to search for whatever it was Jantsk had been bringing to him. Only Oldman Keeper, already known to be insane, had been willing to row the Ionadaí back out to the death-ship. Haughey had searched for two stripes or more, first Jantsk’s cabins and possessions and even (with extreme reluctance) the dead man’s pockets, and then the ship’s cargo hold full of pottery, ironwork, and fabrics. There was nothing unusual. Nothing that he could see that was worth the message the man had sent.
The strangest thing aboard, from what Haughey could see, had been Connail, who was only a frightened boy.
With Haughey’s grudging permission, the harbor master had the ship towed out beyond Oldman Head that evening. He’d grounded it on the shoals to the south of the harbor mouth and torched the vessel. By nightfall there remained nothing more than a steaming hulk burned down to the waterline.
“You didn’t by chance see Jantsk get one of the pigeons and send a message to me?” Haughey asked Connail.
“Oh, aye, Ionadaí,” the boy answered. “He kept the birds in his cabin with me. One day, he wrote a message and took one of the birds out, then let it go.”
“When he did that, he wasn’t by chance already sick?”
Connail seemed to ponder that, then brightened, almost smiling. “Aye, Ionadaí. He was terribly sick by that time. He was talking strangely, too, and his skin was hot to touch.”
“Ah, that explains much, then,” Haughey said. Some of the doubt and worry dissolved. So Jantsk’s note may have been—indeed probably was—the product of a fevered dream and not reality. That made the smoldering pile of peat that was Haghey’s stomach subside just a bit. That gave him a reasonable and far safer summation for the report he’d be sending to Concordia. Haughey doubted that his monthly reports to Concordia were ever actually read by Thane MagWolfagdh himself, not with the far greater and immediate threat of the Arruk demanding his attention. No, they were probably scanned by some minor céili giallnai in the court’s employ and filed away. Still, Haughey didn’t want to take any chances that his competence might be examined, especially with what Jantsk had hinted at in the note he’d sent. Haughey was already forming the proper wording for the report in his mind: “I have independent verification that Artol Jantsk was delusional with fever when he composed the message.” He nodded, folding his hands over his stomach. The boy had already gone through the ham and was attacking the bread, slathering it with the fruit jam that Brina had put away after the last harvest. “In a way, that’s a shame. The damned Arruk . . .”
“Where are they?” Connail interrupted. “The Arruk, I mean? I’ve . . . we’ve all heard awful tales about them at home, and my da went . . .” He paused, looking confused momentarily. “Da said that he’d heard they were terrible, savage creatures that drink the blood of the people they kill.”
Haughey chuckled at the obvious terror in the boy’s face. “I don’t know about that,” he said, “but they are terrible and savage, and far too close, if you ask me—no more than a few days’ ride to the east, not far past Lough Bogha.”
For a moment, he thought he saw something almost eager in Connail’s face, then it was gone. “That close?” the boy asked, and shivere
d. He looked around as if he might see one of the Arruk lurking in the corner of the room.
“Not to worry,” Haughey told him. “The Arruk don’t seem to much care for the sea, though I suppose them in Torness believed the same and thought themselves safe. And your Banrion Ard, the Healer—may the Mother bless her and keep her safe—well, she sent help from the Tuatha and with their troops and the Cloch Mór that came with the Banrion Ard’s husband Tiarna Geraghty, we stopped the Arruk and even pushed them back some, even if we couldn’t drive them entirely from our land.”
As Haughey spoke, the boy’s face clouded and seemed almost angry. He put down the bread; his knife clattered onto the table. “The Banrion Ard is dead,” Connail said.
“What?” Haughey sat bolt upright. “Dead? The Healer Ard?”
“Aye,” Connail told him. “And Tiarna Geraghty and her entire family. They’re all dead.”
“No . . .” Haughey realized that his report would now most definitely be seen by the Thane, that in fact he would need to compose it tonight and send it tomorrow by courier pigeon and fast ship both, to be certain that it arrived. “You’re certain of this? It’s not just gossip?”
“Aye, Ionadaí.” The boy nodded solemnly. “It’s all the talk of the Tuatha. They were assa . . . assass . . .” He blinked.
“Assassinated?” Haughey shook his head—if true, then this may have been what Jantsk had that was so important: the news of the Banrion Ard’s death. “From what I’d heard, the Banrion Ard was well-loved by her people, but not necessarily by the Riocha. I suppose I’m not entirely surprised. Who is the Ard now?” Connail shrugged and shook his head at the same time in answer. As he did so, the léine he wore shifted, and Haughey caught the glimpse of a golden chain around the boy’s neck under the cloth. He leaned forward. “What’s that?” he asked. “You have something under there?”
