The Sea Peoples(21)

“And me—” growled Toa. “I don’t let her go alone.”

“Have you done this before?”

“Close enough,” Toa grimaced. “Not something I went looking for then, or now.”

His eyes went inward for a long moment. “Her mum saved more than my life, once,” he said. “And I promised her I’d look after Pip.”

“Very well.”

Deor looked down at Prince John. It was one of the moments when the prince’s wanderings had brought his spirit nearer. His face creased with an echo of suffering, like one of the shadow plays they were so fond of here, where puppets lit from behind cast silhouettes upon a screen.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “Time is . . . different, where we’re going, but it won’t be a matter of seconds.”

He paced around the room, pausing at each corner to reach out to the house-spirits and pour a little arrack on the floor.

“Wights of this steading,” he murmured, “hail to you. Bless and ward our work today.”

“Is this another of your Norse magics?” asked Pip when he had done; her head turned a little to one side in lively curiosity.

Well, John wouldn’t be that attracted simply by a pretty face, Deor thought. Not for long, anyway. Though she’s very comely.

Women didn’t arouse him, but he could appreciate beauty in the female form, as he might in a hawk or horse. Pip was striking by the canons of his folk, who prized that fairness and regularity of feature; their tales and poetry had praised it since their most ancient days. After all, she was of the old blood, the Saxon and Norman kindreds whose ways his father Godulf had followed in the Society for Creative Anachronism and had drawn on to found Mist Hills afterwards. Like a golden cat who’d wandered far from the home-ground of their folk to find a new place in these sunlit seas. She moved well, too; like a dancer and warrior both, and with an inner confidence.

There’s a mind there, a shrewd one that’s always observing, and a strong will. And a ruthlessness in getting what she wants . . . but then, John was always attracted by strong women. Thora for one! Considering who his mother is, and her mother, no surprise there. High Queen Mathilda is strong; Lady Sandra was terrifying.

“Norse?” Deor shook his head, and wasn’t going to waste time making fine distinctions among Heathen. “I learned this skill from the Mackenzies.”

From his chair in a corner where he’d be watching over them, Ruan spoke: “I thought I recognized some of it. I never went deep into the Mysteries myself. No knack for it, but all my clansfolk learn a little.”

Deor nodded: “My folk at Mist Hills had none who’d gone deeply into the lore before the Change—apart from a little runecraft and such—and I fumbled at it untaught, until Lady Juniper took me as apprentice. I learned still more in Norrheim on the Sunrise sea, where they did have those deep into seidh, and then in Iceland, but Dun Juniper was the core and beginning of it for me.”

Involuntarily he smiled, remembering the flicker of sunlight filtering through fir branches and Lady Juniper’s murmur as she led him out of the world. He had been strung taut as a bow with mingled excitement and fear, wondering if he would fail, or more frightening still, succeed.

“Lady Juniper taught me to journey by seeking a part of myself lost when my father died.”

Memories surged—the darkness in Duke Morgruen’s torture chamber, the vivid crimson of blood, and the wrenching grief as his father fell.

Godulf died for me! That was all I could see at first.

What Lady Juniper had brought back for him was his father’s ring, the same ring Deor’s brother had passed on to him before he and Thora left for Montival.

I wore it, he thought, remembering, but I did not think I deserved it. It healed my heart, to hear her tell me what she had found. How better for a man to die, than for his son? His duty was the core of him.

“After that,” he said aloud, “I learned to journey for others.”

“But this is different.” Thora still looked troubled.

Deor nodded. “This time we have to bring back the whole man. He is neither dead nor alive now, body and spirit sundered, and we must make him whole.”

He looked at Ruan. “Be careful, my heart, and take no action unless you are very certain that there is no choice. If a body is woken while the spirit lingers elsewhere . . . what comes back may lack parts left behind. Or it may be . . . partly something else.”

He tried a few taps on the hand drum he had bought in the bazaar of Baru Denpasar. It was made of a ring of coconut wood and the skin was from a goat; it throbbed with a staccato beat that sank into bone and blood as his skilled fingers evoked the rhythms at the heart of life.

“Then let us get on with it!” snapped Thora.

“You sure you want to use that?” Toa nodded towards the drum. “We might get ’em suspicious about the Prince.”

“They already know I’m a spirit-walker,” said Deor. “They will only think I work to heal.”

I hope, he thought.

The bedframe creaked as Pip sat down on the bed and then swung her bare feet up onto the sheet that covered John’s body. Most would have said she was calm, with even a slight smile on her curved lips.

She’s strung as tight as a Mackenzie bow.

Toa settled himself on the floor by her side and they clasped hands.