The Sea Peoples(99)

Pip grinned at him. “No, lover; it just fit the way you described it. But if I was sure, I’d have seen it, and then I’d be dead, now wouldn’t I?”

More soberly: “Though that seems to be a bit less . . . definite, around here.”

? ? ?

“Here, I think,” Deor said, looking over his shoulder. “Where that road meets the water, by the dead oak.”

Pip leaned on the tiller, and they all stroked their oars more slowly. An instant, and the keel of the boat grated on gravel and mud. John brought his oar in with the others—you had to be careful or you could clout someone in the head doing that—and leapt over the side, his feet in the water once again. All of them put their shoulders to the hull and ran the boat up on the shore, more out of reflex than anything else.

Deor stopped as the others spread out on the dirt road that wound uphill from the river’s edge. John looked back as he slung his shield over his back. The front of the boat was intricately carved, in a way that he avoided looking at too closely, but set into the worked wood was the grinning skull of a cat, old bone bleached until there was only a hint of ivory in the white. Green stones had been inset in the eye sockets.

Deor touched it and went silent for a moment. “It spoke to me,” he said.

Pip snorted. “What did it say? Meow?”

Deor looked at her. “No, my lady. In speech without words, said without ceasing . . . Hurts, hurts, make it stop, I am a good cat, hurts, mother, mother, hurts make it stop. There is a spirit trapped in this vessel, and it has been for a very long time.”

Pip glanced away, scowling and swallowing. John put his hand to his sword, but before he could draw Toa lashed out with the steel-shod butt of his spear, quick as the flick of a frog’s tongue after a darting fly, hunting from its lily pad on a summer’s day. The bone exploded into dust. John put his hand to the weathered boards of the boat’s hull. Did it feel different, or was that his imagination?

Well, it’ll feel different when I compose the chanson, he thought.

And then noticed the gaps in the planks. And had they been so frayed and proud-grained before? He put his shoulder to it on impulse, and it felt lighter as it slid out onto the dark river and settled almost immediately, listing as the water gurgled through the gaps in the long low hull.

Up from the river, and then they walked on a featureless dirt road through scrubby countryside; when they had come a little way it was as if the road extended forever in each direction, but now there was a hint of warmth to the air, a rankness of scent.

“It feels like a borderland here,” John said, turning his head but finding nothing to prompt the thought.

“Yes. I see it now,” Deor said. “A silver thread, running with light. We are close, close.”

They walked and walked, or the landscape flowed backward around them. John could sense something himself, a pulling. At times he was walking down a darkened road, with the familiar weight of a sword at his side and his shield upon his back. Then it was more as if he were flying in a dream beside a meadowlark whose song wove around his, and his feathers were black and his heavy beak keen and dark eyes, over a road where a great she-bear shambled and a golden lioness walked and a bush rat skittered through the scrub, all aggression and stretched senses. Then he stumbled, and was on foot again.

“Make yourself feel and walk like a man,” Deor said, staggering himself. “There is always the risk of losing yourself, in this place, I think. It eats at the boundaries of things; between life and death, good and evil, this world and others. And we are sought, sought.”

“Bloody good thing we’re almost home, then,” Pip said.

Thora and Toa laughed, at the same moment and almost in the same tone, though one was a rumbling bass and the other an alto.

“That’s the time you have to be most careful,” Thora said.

“Too right,” Toa agreed. “Let’s push the pace a bit. Walk-trot-walk . . . if you gents weighed down with all the ironmongery can keep up?”

Mist gathered. On a hill in the middle distance a tall fire burned, and figures whirled around it.

“I recognize that,” Pip said. “Oh, and I wish I didn’t.”

“They’re dancing,” John said. “That’s odd music—bagpipes and drums of some sort . . .”

“No!” Deor said sharply. “Don’t listen! And don’t watch that dance; you don’t want to know the meaning of it!”

It was hard to tear his eyes away. The dancers were so tall and the twisting of their twig-like fingers traced such patterns . . . and the other figures bound in the heart of the fire, their cries were—

Alan Thurston grabbed him by the edge of his pauldron and shook him sharply.

“You were starting to leave the road,” he said.

“Thanks!” John said, taking off his helmet to wipe the palm of a gauntlet over his face. “I think you did me a good turn there.”

Alan shrugged, his haunted eyes dark. “You were the first thing I’d seen in a really long time that I didn’t immediately not want to see, Prince,” he said. “I figure I owe you a debt.”

They struggled on. A ruined church . . . possibly a church . . . stood not far from the road, with tumbled gravestones about it. The mist cleared and gave them a better view. Deor grimaced.

“Those are not names on the stones,” he said, jerking his head towards the cemetery. “Those are runes, though not mine. Glyphs of binding and confinement. And that is not a place for the bodies of the dead . . . not as we understand death.”