Part 13 (1/2)
”How lucky for you-or is that simply because in winter the sun sets soon after it rises, and it is too dark and cold to go outside?”
”You're a clever one! You saw right through me. Drink more ale. I am not defeated yet. I'll sell you a patch of ice and a bag of gravel to seed it with, before the night is over.”
Pierrette sipped from the mug. The ale was clear and crisp, and rather than dulling her senses like cloying wine, it seemed to sharpen them. Attempting to calculate how far north the storm had blown them, she studied the stars overhead-and one star in particular, that stood slightly over halfway up the northern sky. She also asked many questions about Egil's island home, until she was truly convinced it was not what she sought.
The ale pa.s.sed through her rapidly, and at her body's urging she excused herself, to go among the rocks.
But the Irish boy said, ”I'll join you,” in that offhand yet sociable manner boys affected about such things.
”Actually,” Pierrette replied, ”I think I need a bit of a walk to clear my head. But please don't leave-either of you. I'll be back shortly.” Such bodily functions had always been the greatest threat to her disguise, traveling in a party of men who would stop and pee wherever they were. She had cultivated the air of being a very shy young boy, and that had seemed to suffice-and she had learned great control over her bladder as well.
She found a suitably private spot. When she arose from her task, she was disoriented for a moment.
Which way was the camp? She glanced at the sky, seeking the pole star, but did not immediately spot it.
When she did . . . was it just a tiny bit higher in the sky than she expected it? She then knew what her next question for Egil would be.
When she returned, the big man sat alone. The boy did not come back, with fresh tankards of ale, for quite some time. ”If I were standing in that field you want to sell me, with my sack of gravel in hand, how high overhead would that star be?” She pointed.
He smiled. ”Why should it be higher or lower?”
”I think that if your summers are only a month or two long, and your winter days but an hour or two, that star must stand almost overhead, and all the heavens whirl around it.”
The Norseman's eyes narrowed. ”You look like a boy, but what are you? A shaman? A shapechanger?
A reader of minds?”
It was Pierrette's turn to laugh. ”I am a student of a wise master-and could I have come all the way from the warm southland without noticing that the guide star appeared slightly higher in the sky at the end of each week's travel?”
”You aren't going to tell that to every sailor you run across, are you? It would be very bad for trade, if the master of every leaky southern washtub could read the stars aright, and find his way around thenorthern waters without getting lost.”
”I won't tell anyone. I have no wish for the far places of the world to lose their mystery. But the scholar ibn Saul also knows the stars, and what he knows, so do all those he writes to.”
”Then I should kill him before he leaves this place.”
Pierrette realized her mistake too late. She rushed to repair it. ”It would do you no good. What he knows, the others already know also. And besides, aren't you a Christian? Murder is no light burden to take with you on your final journey.”
Egil sighed. ”I suppose you're right. Even if his relatives never heard of his death, and made no complaint, our priest would see me banished. Everyone takes murder seriously, these days.”
”Don't look so glum. Of all the scholars I know, ibn Saul is the only one who puts his knowledge to practical use. His correspondents are content for him to travel cold seas and wet, and to read of his exploits from the comfort of their sunny terraces.”
He nodded. ”Still, it is a sad thing, that all the mysteries have a way of becoming common knowledge, and the furthest lands become as well known as one's own garden plot.”
”What you say is truer than you can imagine,” said Pierrette, ”and only a little while ago I would have commiserated with you, but now I have come to suspect that for every new sh.o.r.e we explore, a newer one appears somewhere beyond it, and we will never find the end of everything.”
”You are deep, whether you are really a boy or are an old shaman in disguise. But I am not. My head is heavy with new thoughts and ale, and we must depart at first light.” He arose with a popping of knees and a rasp of salt-stiffened clothing.
All the time Egil and Pierrette had conversed, the young Hibernian had remained silent. Now alone with Pierrette, he spoke. ”My father knows of the islands you seek,” he said. ”He once described them to me, exactly as your scholar said: a rim of black rock, broken by several channels, and within, circle upon circle of other channels, with great wharves. In the exact center of that maze is a black peak, flat-topped, upon which stands a palace or a fane, whose columns are red and black.”
Pierrette's heart thudded noisily in her chest. Her breath caught in her throat. The boy truly described Minho's land-concentric circles, the cones of successive volcanic eruptions, the outer ones breached by channels that led inward to the central, newest cone, on whose leveled top stood the sorcerer-king's residence. ”What . . . what else did he say?”
”He was not allowed to stray from the wharf when he docked, but he was paid well for his cargo-furs from the Nors.e.m.e.n's mountains and a chest full of amber.” The boy reached within his clothing, and drew out a small object that gleamed warmly in the fire's light. ”He was paid with gold. This was the smallest morsel, which he gave to me.” He held it out to Pierrette. Her hand trembled as she took the gleaming object from him.
It was a cylinder of gold the size of Pierrette's thumb, sharply incised.
Rolling it across her palm, she envisioned the pattern it would make, pressed into a wax tablet or soft clay: the entwined figures of a dolphin and an octopus. A chill coursed up her ribs. For the very first time, she held an object that had definitely come from the Fortunate Isles, not in Otherworldly hands, but here,in the ordinary world. She had seen similar seals in Minho's library, which was very much like her master Anselm's, but larger-the original, after which Anselm's was modeled. ”It is indeed the land I seek,”
Pierrette whispered. ”Why are you showing this to me?”
His young, soft face turned red and he whispered, ”When you left us to pee, I followed you. I . . . I saw you. You aren't a boy at all.”
Pierrette's mind raced. If her own party discovered they were travelling with a girl, a woman, she did not fear they would suddenly become strangers bent on bedding her-especially not Lovi or Gregorius. But the Nors.e.m.e.n, with the thin Christian finish the Irish priest had painted on their rude, Viking natures, were a different case. ”Why didn't you tell Egil?”
”There is more to my father's tale,” he said. ”All the rest of the gold was shaped into chains, like necklaces. Only the piece you hold was different. When Father gave it to me, he told me what the ruler of that kingdom had said: 'There will come a virgin girl, seeking my kingdom. This I have foreseen. She will dress as a boy, but her eyes will be as old as your grandmother's. This is for her. If you trade it for cattle, they will bloat and die. If you trade it for furs, they will stink and become slimy. A boat purchased with this, however sound, will fall apart when least you expect it. But who does as I bid will live a hundred years, and have forty grandchildren.' ”
Minho! He knew! This was the sign he had promised, and it had been held in his own hand, in this world. He had foreseen this very meeting, on this remote skerry, out of sight of land. ”Why did your father give it to you?”
”What good is gold you can't spend? Father was already wealthier than was good for his soul. When Egil's Nors.e.m.e.n discovered our island and its little community of monks and Christian families, father gave the rest of the gold as peace gifts, impressing them with the generosity of our G.o.d to sailors on the cold sea. Only that small morsel of gold remained ungiven-until now.”
Pierrette rolled the little cylinder back and forth. Dolphin and octopus. Octopus and dolphin. The dolphin's eye glistened as if it were faceted, as if it were a tiny star.
”It was true, what the king said. I am indeed the one this is intended for. But I have nothing to give in return.”
”You need give me nothing. I will have my reward. There is a girl, at home . . . I have hopes that she will be the grandmother of my forty grandchildren.”
”But he gave it to your father, not you.”
”I considered that, and asked Father to repeat the words. 'Who does as I bid,' he said. Not 'ifyou do as I bid.' I think he foresaw that I, not my father, would be the one to give it to you.”
Pierrette also believed that. Later, when she slept for the hour or two that remained before dawn, she dreamed of a white room with paintings of blue dolphins and octopi on its walls, and a bed heaped with pure white furs. The breeze on her naked skin was balmy, not cold, and sunlight's captured heat radiated from the dark floor tiles. She glanced down at herself, wondering placidly where she was, and where her clothes had gone, but she could not see her own body. When she lifted a hand to her face, the magnificent coral and gold of the sunset streamed right through her invisible fingers. ”That is because you are not really here, yet,” said a resonant, masculine, tenor voice. ”Come. Hurry. It is the end of an age, and I have waited a thousand years for you.” She awoke with the little cylinder still clutched in her hand. The impression of the octopus and the starry-eyed dolphin was pressed into the palm of her hand, and did not fade until they were once again at sea, in their own small boat, with their water keg full.
Chapter 22 - Gesocribate.
Much to Pierrette's regret, ibn Saul had reached the same conclusion she had: the stories told around the Thuleans' fire were fascinating, and they a.s.sured him that explorers would not run out of new places to discover, in his lifetime-but the places they described were not the Fortunate Isles.
”These are not a month's sail to the south or far away to the west. They are here.” His fist thumped against the sheer rail. ”They are not far at all-and I will find them.” Gesocribate was their destination now. Consulting with the Vikings, ibn Saul and their boatman determined that the storm winds had driven them about twenty-seven miles north of Sena and a bit west as well. From the green, moss-covered rocks of the skerry, by fresh morning light, they had gazed northwest. Only five miles distant loomed a large island, which the boatman recognized. They could just make out the rocky mainland coast by squinting eastward into the sun's brightness.
With a steady breeze just abaft the beam, they sailed crisply on a course opposite the one they had w.i.l.l.y-nilly arrived on. When the last of the treacherous rocks and shoals between the island and the mainland were behind them, they turned east and north with the wind astern, on a port tack. Gesocribate lay on the north sh.o.r.e of a bay ten miles long whose entrance was only a mile wide. When they cleared that gullet, Pierrette saw a vast expanse of smooth water dotted with brown, yellow, and tan sails, and fringed with fat, green fields. Surely, Vikings had entered the bay, despite the Roman fortifications on both sides of the gullet, whose catapults and stone-throwing slings were still manned, but though they might have burned farmhouses and stolen sheep, the city itself seemed untouched.
Gra.s.s grew in the cracks between the Roman wharf stones, worn by centuries of barefoot sailors, grooved by wagon wheels, polished by the crates, bales, boxes, and barrels that had been pushed across them. Gesocribate was not the busy place it once had been, when Roman s.h.i.+ps had swept Venetii and, later, Saxon, pirates from the sea, but there were s.h.i.+ps in port-and ibn Saul headed for them as soon as his feet touched stone.
Pierrette tagged along with him. It was too much to hope that the masters of those vessels-she counted seven she deemed worthy of being called s.h.i.+ps, not boats-would one and all refuse his commission.
She would have to delay her own search.