He turned to his crew. “Fetch your things,” he ordered. “We can still catch the tide.”
Behind him Áebell made fending signs against his curse. Niall reached over and touched her. She calmed immediately and smiled at the man she loved.
IV
1
Publius Flavius Drusus, old soldier, came in from his farm and took over as taskmaster in making wall and ditch for the new settlement. Work went fast, once the marines and the refugee laborers who presently joined them had gotten the knack.
“No, no,” he explained to a man who had brought a turf; the spade wielders were beginning predictably to cut standard thirty-pound pieces out of the topsoil. “You lay it grass side down. That holds better, and we can smooth and level the dirt for the next course.”
Amreth, who knew some Latin, translated for him and asked why the wall wasn’t being raised more than breast high. A deeper or broader fosse would provide the material, together with added protection.
“We’re doing this like an old-time legion setting up camp,” Drusus answered. “We don’t need anything else, at least not right away. Only two sides; we’ve got the rivers for the other two. The idea is simply to slow down an attack enough that men will have time to rouse, arm themselves, and take their stations. You see, meanwhile they’ll have gotten their sleep, because they won’t have needed but a few on sentry-go. They’ll be fresh, ready for combat.”
“What when the colony gets too big?”
“Well, we can lengthen this work. If the growth still keeps on, we’ll build a proper wall, high, with timbers and stones in it. But first start begetting some youngsters, eh?”
Drusus’s jape drew no smiles from those who heard and understood. Most had lost all but their own lives, mere days ago.
It was nevertheless fortunate that he could spare the time, as busy as Gratillonius became with shepherding people from the Ysan hinterland. At the outset he billeted them in Aquilo. When all free spaces there were filled, he must find shelter round about in the countryside.
After the first time he did this, he stopped at the confluence to inquire how things were progressing. Time pressed. Before long, trade goods would start arriving up the Odita and overland, and their conductors require those roofs in town that now covered his folk.
He found the defenses completed. They enclosed tents for workers and guards Houses were going up, the wood for them taken from the nearby forest. They were rude Celtic shielings, but quickly built, sufficient to keep off the weather until something better was ready. Rustics should do well enough in them; Gratillonius wondered how survivors from the city would fare.
Somehow the labor had spared a stand of cornel between the wall and a brook that came from the north to meet the Odita. It was in bloom. He saw, and the frail whiteness stabbed him through. Tonight the moon would be full, as it had last been over the death of Ys.
He left at sundown, knowing he could not sleep, flinching from the thought of a room that would feel as black and narrow as the grave. First he should stable Favonius—No, a day’s faring around did not seem to have worn the stallion out, given a while to rest and crop. “Would you like a ramble, old friend?” Gratillonius murmured. “Tomorrow you can take your ease in a pasture.” He crushed the wish that he himself might someday enjoy the same peace. A man should not whine at the Fates.
They crossed the road and followed the river road east. Ultimately it would join the highway from Darioritum Venetorum, but that ran north of here on its way to Vorgium and Gesocribate. The great hill bulked darkling on his right; for a time gold lingered on the crowns of its uppermost trees, then died as the sky deepened and the first western stars blinked forth. He left it behind. The river turned north and the road went off more or less parallel to the Jecta stream though at a little distance from it and gradually climbing. High forest hid the tributary but the view south ran widely. Parts remained under cultivation—light gleamed yellow from a cluster of huts—while woods that were reclaiming the rest had not yet grown tall. Cornel, abundant in these parts, stood especially thick along the wayside. Sweetness breathed from it out of the shadows. There was hardly a sound but the clop of hoofs, occasional creak of leather, breath and heartbeat.
The moon rose, enormous at first, smaller and colder as it mounted. When Gratillonius looked at its ashen face his eyes were briefly dazzled. The light washed over the world like a sea. White blossoms caught it and shone like Dahut’s hair, like her outreaching hands.
Something moved afar. Gratillonius strained to see. Another rider, hitherbound from the east. Welcome, whoever you are. Bring my soul back from the flowers and the moon. He clucked to Favonius. The stallion broke into a trot.
Nearing, he saw that the other horse was exhausted. Its man must have forced it unmercifully. Of course, you couldn’t gallop all the time, and now the pace was down to a shambling walk, but—
Moonlight dappled a lean form, sharp features, fork beard that might have been snipped out of the night. Could it be? It was. “Rufinus!” yelled Gratillonius.
“Cernunnos! Is that you?” croaked the remembered voice. “Oh, at last.”
Both sprang from their saddles. Favonius would not stray and Rufinus’s poor beast could not. The men cast arms about each other.
“How did you know?” Gratillonius babbled. “How could you get here so soon?”
He felt Rufinus tremble and clutch him more tightly. That was distasteful, much though you had to allow for weariness and grief. Gratillonius disengaged himself and took a step backward. Rufinus stood for an instant alone before he mastered his shivering and teeth glinted in the old crooked grin.
“Word came to Mediolanum by special courier,” he said. “Stilicho granted me postal privileges for my return. He didn’t know I’d arrive at each relay point with my mount ready to drop and commandeer the next. In Venetorum I learned where you’d gone to. I didn’t expect to meet you already, though. Don’t tell me you had a vision or cast a horoscope.”
“No, I was restless. Gods, man, how did you hold to that speed? You can’t have slept more than half of any night.”
Rufinus shrugged. “I was in a hurry.”
His coolness broke apart. “O master, King, Ys is gone!” he cried. Moonlight runneled through tears. He stretched out his arms. “Who lives? Bodilis, the other Queens, your daughters, our friends, who’s left?”
Gratillonius’s words fell like thuds of a sledge hammer. “Two of my daughters and a grandchild of Bodilis. Maybe three hundred fugitives, nearly all rural. Otherwise none. Nothing.”
“How did it happen? How could the Gods let it happen? Why?”
“Nobody knows, unless it be Corentinus, and he won’t answer my question. I’m certain it was the work of an enemy. The Key was missing from my breast when Corentinus woke me that night—worst storm ever known—and the gate stood unlocked to the sea.”
A wildcat might have screamed. “We’ll find him! We’ll get you your revenge! I will, I swear it!” Rufinus sank to his knees and embraced Gratillonius’s. His sobs, raw and unpracticed, shook him as a hound shakes a fox it has caught. “Tell me how I can serve you, master. Only tell me.”
2
Beneath wolf-gray heaven, wrack flew. The north wind drove it, clamoring shrill, fanged with cold. Spindrift hazed the waves. They roared in their wrinkled hordes, green-black where foam did not swirl, until they burst and fountained on rocks or against mainland cliffs. All birds were gone from sight. The skerries were empty of seals.
Osprey rolled, pitched, yawed, wallowed along on oars. Often the rowers missed a stroke. They kept looking shoreward. Nobody could tell if the salt that stung and blinded them was of scud or tears.
Maeloch stood in the bows, hunched into his leather jacket, legs braced wide. Now and then he signalled Usun, who had the helm. These waters were as ravenous of ships as always. Yet he too must glance over and over at the land, a league off. Within the hood, his face might have been cast in iron. The white-shot beard might have b
een too, as drenched as it hung.
Ys was gone. Naught but wreckage remained, snags of wall and pillar around which billows ramped. As he watched, a piece gave way. The splash when it fell was lost in surf. Even above highwater mark, where King and Queens and the wealthy had dwelt, ruin littered a naked strand. He could see beyond to a few blackened spires; fire had consumed the royal grove. Mansions still clung to the hills, tiny at their distance, but surely their folk were dead or fled. The Gods of Ys had ended the Pact of Brennilis, and with it her city.
Out to Sena itself—He and his crew had descried a heap of stones at the eastern end of that island. There he had left Bodilis, dearest of the Queens since little Dahilis died so long ago. There, maybe, her bones abided. He had not risked putting in to search.
But how could it be that the pharos on Cape Rach was also broken, barely half of it left? Could Lir reach that high, or had Taranis cast His hammer in the hour of the whelming?
Maeloch knew he could not sanely seek answers today. He must go on to some unharmed haven, Audiarna or mayhap the Odita mouth and upriver to Aquilo. King Grallon had had friends in Aquilo.
Osprey struggled on south. Once she rounded the headland, wind and seas ought to be less wild. Maybe he could raise sail and let the men rest. If not, he’d have to pull far out and heave to, because they couldn’t keep on like this much longer.
Easement or no, Maeloch dreaded that part of the passage. It would go by the place under the cliffs where Scot’s Landing had been. And there would be emptiness. More than once, lesser storms than the one that drowned Ys had destroyed the fisher hamlet. But its dwellers had first taken refuge in the city and afterward returned to rebuild. Not ever again.
Faint through the wind, a shout came to him. He turned, saw a crewman point from his bench, bent his own gaze to the port quarter and squinted.
Well he knew that reef and the rocks around it. Waves crashed across them, fell back in monstrous whirls and rips, whitened the wind with spray through which death grinned black. Usun was steering well clear. What was it that lay on the back of stone, entangled with weed torn from the bottom, not yet altogether broken and strewn? A splintered curve rose across the sullenness of Cape Rach, up into the wind: the prow of a wreck. No man could live whose craft went yonder. Well, this was a cruel ground, where none but the mariners of Ys had ever been at home.
“Nay!” tore from Maeloch’s throat. “’Tis Betha!”
He knew that high stempost, carved at the top into a Celtic spiral. Red paint still clung to clinker-laid strakes. It had been a fine, unusually shaped boat he bought while Osprey rested under repair on the Dumnoniic shore, and named for his wife, and sent off with four of his men to bring to Ys the tale of what he had learned in the Islands of Crows. Now the sea had reaved away both Betha and Betha.
“How?” he groaned. “Ye were bonny sailors, all o’ ye. Why, Norom, ye were my own crewman. How often did I give ye the helm, Norom, aye, on crossings when we ferried the dead to Sena? How could ye go astray like this?” The wind snatched his words from him and scattered them over Ocean.
A sudden flaw of the air? But any Ysan pilot would give himself plenty of room. Did a gale threaten, too quickly for him to make harbor, he would beat out as far as he was able and cast a sea anchor. Fogs did sometimes rise to blind men. Maeloch himself had been thus trapped in the past, and once would have come to grief were it not for a certain seal. However, you could hear from afar where these rocks were, the brawling and hissing and grunting of the waters. Wherever else they blundered to, it should not have been here that a skilled crew perished.
They had come without warning upon the remnants of Ys. Had grief so greatly dazed them? Maeloch felt it rise anew in himself. He thought he had done with weeping, that night ashore in Hivernia on the way back; he and his men had howled like hounds. And mayhap that had been all the tears he would ever shed. What he felt now was the end of hope. There came to him dimly a memory of what Queen Bodilis had chanced to tell him one day, how the folk of distant Egypt used to ready their dead for the tomb before they were Christian. It seemed to him as though someone had lifted the heart and entrails out of him too. Hollow, he would soon blow away on the wind. Would it ever let go of him?
Something stirred on the reef by the wreck. He heard men cry aloud, they saw it themselves. White it glimmered amidst the spindrift. No seal sacred to Belisama—it stood upright, sweetly curved, clad in naught but fair hair that tossed banner-free around its beckoning to him.
“Thunder me down, ’tis a woman!”
A survivor? How? Or a spirit, or the Goddess Herself, Our Lady of Mercy, calling Her sailors to Her? Come, come and be comforted, you who are weary and weighted. So had voices sung through dreams, such dreams as bring a man awake laughing in sunrise. She sang, she called, she promised and summoned.
Oh, you who must wander the wind-way and never May rest by the woman who once was your bride, Be gladdened by knowing it is not forever. To you shall come peace with the turn of the tide. You are not forsaken, but all that was taken From you on the earth shall wing homeward to me. Beloved and lonely, fear not. Here is only An end to your sorrow, the gift of the sea. The men bent to their sweeps. Usun put the helm over. And Maeloch saw past her beauty to Ys that was dead, and back to the skerry whereon she stood with the waters furious at her feet; and he cast forth the joy that had begun to warm him within his breast. “Ha’ done!” he shouted. “Would ye steer into yon rocks?”
Still the crew rowed, and Usun stood staring before him.
Maeloch whirled, bounded the length of the deck, smote fist into his mate’s belly. Usun whoofed out his breath, doubled over, sagged to the planks. Maeloch seized the tiller. Usun scrabbled at his ankles and started to rise. Maeloch kicked him in the ribs. Osprey came around.
The rowers could have overridden the steering oar, but they were lost in their dream. “Stroke, stroke, stroke!” Maeloch bellowed, and, mindless, they heeded. A wave swept over the rail, cold dashed into their faces. Surf snarled close by. It fell aft as the vessel clawed off. Maeloch thought he heard a scream, as of a beast that had missed its prey. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw no more than tumbling waters, the reef and the wreck.
Usun clambered to his feet. “What got into me?” he choked. “Skipper, if ’twasn’t for ye—”
The crewmen were likewise back in the mortal world. Bewildered, terrified, they rowed like lubbers; but they were safe for this while, till they got their full wits again. Osprey plowed on by the headland.
“A mermaid, who’d lure us to our deaths.” Usun shuddered. “I’ve heard o’ such, but off the shores o’ witchy lands afar. I never thought to meet one.”
“Ys stood guard athwart the gates of the Otherworld too,” Maeloch said starkly.
“How did ye hold out, skipper? What gave ye the strength?”
“I know nay. Unless—unless ’twas remembering that we do yet have much to live for—if naught else, avenging Ys, and our kin, and poor little Dahut.”
3
Seventeen persons crowded the atrium of the Apuleius home. They sat on what stools could be found, or on the floor, or stood. All stared toward Corentinus. Clad as ever in shabby robe and wayworn sandals, he loomed against the wall whereon was painted the Chi Rho. The symbol seemed to obscure delicate floral patterns elsewhere, as if giving back the darkness of a rainy day which filled the windows; and yet it was traced in gold.
“Thank you for coming,” the chorepiscopus began in Ysan. “Well do I know what a hard time this is for you. Natheless we’ve reached a need that your folk consider their morrows; and I think you whom I asked hither are their natural leaders.”
His look ranged across them. Most were men. Two women—no, a woman and a girl—sat in front: Runa, priestess at the Nymphaeum when Ys perished, and the vestal Julia, daughter of Gratillonius and Queen Lanarvilis. The King’s other daughter, Nemeta, by Forsquilis, had seemingly chosen to spurn the invitation. Well, she was a strange one, like her mo
ther before her.
The rest of the vestals no longer had any special status. The sole additional person from the sanctuary was Amreth Taniti, captain of its small guard of marines. He stood behind Runa and Julia, arms folded, face dour.
Three more women were on hand. Two were widows of Suffete family who had been managing their late husbands’ acres in the hinterland. The third, Tera, stout and sunburned, was a commoner and unwed, though she had had many lovers and commanded a certain awe among herdsmen; for she had been—not quite a priestess—ritemistress to their heathen God Cernunnos and His consorts.
The others were male: a few rich landholders, several small but once prosperous yeomen, some merchants and skippers, three who had belonged to the Council of Suffetes: Bomatin Kusuri for the mariners, Ramas Tyri for the artisans, Hilketh Eliuni for the overland transporters. They had all chanced to be in the countryside or, in four cases, to have escaped when Ys went under. Though he had no official standing, Maeloch should have been present too, once a Ferrier of the Dead—crucial to the old religion—and still surely a spokesman for his kind; also, he had just arrived from Hivernia and must have much to tell. But he and Gratillonius had gone off together, heedless of anyone or anything else.
Most here were drably or raggedly clad. A few bore a salvaged robe or jewel. Gone was the splendor of Ys. The pride lived on, though, in nearly every countenance that regarded him. Arrogant had Ys always been, sinful, worldly, until at last God gave her into the hands of those demons she had served for so long. Yet Corentinus could not but mourn for her and humbly offer his love to such of her children as remained.
Again and again the Suffete face met his eyes, the lean high-boned mask of lost Phoenicia. It had been uncommon in the city; too much blood of Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, above all Celt had flowed in throughout her centuries. But it had been a sign of her being, as much as the towers agleam above clouds or the sea gate opened and shut by Ocean itself. Soon it must vanish, drowned in foreignness. Maybe once or twice in generations hence it would be reborn, and parents wonder what had given an alien look to their offspring; but that would happen seldom, and finally never.
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