Foxmask

  The boat on which Somerled had made this journey was a tiny curragh like the ones Tadhg and his brothers sometimes rowed across to the mainland. Beside the Sea Dove, such a vessel would be like a duckling to an albatross. The imagination could scarcely encompass how it would be to travel thus. A terrible truth crept into Thorvald’s mind. Somerled could not have survived. Following that thought, another, starker still: We’re going to die, all three of us. Oh, for a faith like that of Brother Tadhg, simple and sure, the unshakeable belief in your god’s eternal mercy. Had not the brothers, too, come this way, guarded by the hand of that selfsame god? Somerled had had no such faith; how could an evil man expect the favor of any deity? If Somerled had completed this journey, it was something else that had given him the will to do it. Hatred? Pride? Ambition? Yet he had never returned; never come home to confront the friend who had sent him into this nightmare.

  Sam was maintaining his vise-like grip on the steering oar, the muscles of his arms bulging with effort. His face was white in the faint predawn light. He was shouting something, but Thorvald could not hear the words in the howl of the wind. Creidhe’s hair streamed in the gale like a flag of gold; she clung, tight-knuckled, to a rib. The sail, Sam seemed to be telling him. Lower the sail. For the mast was flexing dangerously, the pressure too great, and they must give up any effort to control their path lest they lose their rigging entirely and render the boat unable to make a course for land even in calmer weather. Thorvald lurched forward, his sodden boots like lead weights, his fingers numb with cold as he fought to unfasten one rope, then another from the iron hooks that held them. The Sea Dove shuddered; a mountain of dark water arose before them.

  “Hold on!” someone screamed, and an instant later the wave crashed over them. Thorvald’s nose and mouth, his eyes and ears were full of water; the sea lifted him in a fierce, chill embrace and he felt pain scythe through his arms as he strained to keep his grip on the rope, clutching as a terrified child clutches its mother in the face of the fearful unknown. Long moments passed; he held his breath until his chest was fit to burst, until the agony could surely be borne no longer, until he knew he was as close to death as he had ever been, and then with a sound like the groan of a wounded animal the Sea Dove righted herself again, and there was blessed air to breathe, and as the light of a new day crept cautiously into the stormy sky Thorvald dared open his eyes once more.

  The mast was snapped to a splintery stump, the sail gone. Creidhe lay sprawled on the deck, gasping and choking, a tangle of rope across her bedraggled form. Between the falling timber and the rush of the water, it was a miracle she had survived. Sam. Where was Sam? The boat rocked violently, her erratic course no more than the ocean’s whim; the steering oar swung uncontrolled. Thorvald’s heart went cold. Not this, he prayed, though he had never set much store in gods. This is not right, maybe I wanted a challenge, but not this, please. . .

  “Sam!” Creidhe shrieked, leaping to her feet and lurching across the hold toward the stern. The Sea Dove pitched; Creidhe fell to her knees and scrambled up again, clambering to the aft deck. Now she was crouching down; the steering oar jerked and shuddered, swinging free not far from her head. “Don’t just stand there!” she yelled over her shoulder. “He’s out cold, and bleeding! Don’t you know how to sail this thing?”

  Goaded out of his shock, Thorvald now saw Sam’s bulky form slumped on the deck, looking more dead than alive. The bright stream of blood moving down cheek and neck, soaking shirt and tunic, made a note of vibrant color in a dawn storm-dark, ocean-green, shadow-gray. Thorvald edged aft and seized the steering oar, knowing his puny efforts to maintain control were useless against the malign force of the elements, but understanding the need to try. A fight to the death, this was, man against nature; he must hang on and hope some higher power, if there were such a thing, would eventually grow tired of toying with them. He’d sought a challenge and he’d got one: the hardest game he’d ever played.

  Creidhe was tearing something up, she was wrapping a bandage around Sam’s head and pressing on the wound with her hand. Her mouth was set very tight; the rays of dawn light creeping between the heavy clouds showed her even paler than before, as if she, too, would lapse into unconsciousness any moment. Now she was trying to move Sam away, just enough to give Thorvald room to maneuver in his desperate efforts to keep the Sea Dove under some kind of control, though indeed, without the use of oars or sail, the best he could hope to do was keep her from being swamped. Creidhe subsided onto the decking with Sam’s head in her lap; he was too heavy for her to shift, and now she held one hand over his crudely bandaged injury and hooked her other arm around the nearest timber as the sky rumbled above them and the water surged and retreated, rose and fell, determined to dislodge them. A stain of blood already marked the linen—Creidhe’s shift?—that circled Sam’s head. Creidhe looked up at Thorvald where he strained against the shuddering pull of the steering oar. Strands of wet hair were plastered across her face, and her eyes were full of shadows.

  “Sorry,” she said. Whether it was for the plight they were in, or simply for being in the way, there was no telling.

  “Me too,” said Thorvald.

  The Sea Dove fled through another lowering day, another chill night in which Sam lay groaning under the two blankets. Thorvald and Creidhe stared into the darkness, numb with exhaustion but still doggedly maintaining their watch, one over the injured man, the other on the water, the stars, the movement of the battered craft. They did not talk much. Creidhe wiped Sam’s brow, fed him sips of water, helped him roll from one side to the other. He seemed to be improving just a little. Thorvald did his best to keep some control over their course, though it seemed to him the boat was not responding as it should. He thought the steering oar was damaged, but he did not mention this to Creidhe.

  They sighted no land on the second day after losing the mast. The wind died down, the seas became calmer, and the chill crept deep into their bones. They covered Sam with all the warm clothing they could find, for in his weakened state it was important that he not surrender to the cold and give up altogether. The fisherman was sleeping a lot, but when he woke he was talking sense now, and trying to make helpful suggestions, which was a good sign. The next night, Thorvald heard Creidhe muttering from time to time, and wondered if she was losing her mind; that would surely be the last straw. But after a while it came to him that she was praying, or something very like it, though she spoke in the old tongue of the islands and he was not fluent in that language. He remembered that Creidhe’s sister was a priestess; that her mother, too, was skilled in the ancient ways of their faith, which had to do with earth and ocean, the ancestral lore of standing stones, the paths of moon and sun. Creidhe chanted with her eyes closed. There was no telling whom she addressed, nor what she asked them.

  If it made her feel a little better, Thorvald thought grimly as the sky paled toward another dawn, fine. As for himself, it was becoming rapidly apparent to him that he could not hold on much longer. The ache in his arms was intolerable, his palms were raw with blisters and, worst of all, his head was throbbing with a fierce, insistent pain that came close to blinding him. This happened from time to time at home, and he knew the only cure was to lie down in darkness and wait for it to pass. The sun was coming up; its pale light transformed the headache into a vise closing on his temples. It made his gorge rise and spots dance before his eyes.

  “Thorvald?” Creidhe’s voice pierced his skull. “Thorvald!”

  He closed his eyes; Just hold on, he told himself, just hold on, just keep going. . .

  “Thorvald!” Creidhe’s voice was so loud, his head was fit to split asunder with the pain of it. “Land!” she yelled. “I see land!”

  His eyes snapped open. Creidhe was half standing beside him on the aft deck, cautious still, and gesturing, pointing to the north, where—yes, it was true—islands rose in the distance, islands of daunting steepness, grouped close like a ring of fortress towers set in defiance of this inhospitabl
e sea. Something welled in his heart, something kindled in his spirit: an improbable hope.

  “Wha—?” Sam was trying to get up; he fought to his knees, his hands grasping a line for purchase.

  “Land,” Creidhe told him reassuringly. “Islands. Not far off at all. There’ll be shelter, food, help.” She turned back to Thorvald. “You can get us there, can’t you?” she asked.

  Bitter laughter rose to his lips; he suppressed it. An easterly wind, no mast, no sail, a steering oar that was only half working, and himself fit for nothing with his screaming headache and worn-out arms? Get them there? Those mist-shrouded isles were no more a reality for them than some fabled land of story, which retreated even as a mariner approached its shore. The silence drew out.

  “I know we can’t sail,” Creidhe said in a small voice. “But I did think maybe we could row.” There was another pause. “We could try, anyway.”

  Sam was struggling up again, a hand to his head. “Oars,” he mumbled, gesturing to the forward racks where they were stowed. “Come on . . .”

  Thorvald looked at Creidhe, and she gazed solemnly back. There was no way she could handle an oar; in these conditions he wasn’t sure he could himself. And who would steer?

  “Here.” Sam had lurched across the open hold, unsteady on his feet but with a seaman’s instinctive sense of balance. He lifted one long oar from the rack by the forward deck and set it in place. On this craft two men must stand side by side to row. Sam’s massive arms gripped the pine shaft at chest height. He jerked his head toward the other oar, and rolled his eyes in Thorvald’s direction. “Steady does it. Creidhe . . . steering oar. Wind’s easing up. Got . . . chance. Damned if I lose . . . Sea Dove. . .”

  It was a source of amazement to Thorvald later that he managed to go on. Friends, he thought, were both curse and blessing. Perhaps all that had spurred him was the desire to seem no weaker than wounded Sam or exhausted Creidhe, each of whom set to with gritted teeth and eyes ablaze with new hope. He rowed, and Sam rowed, and Creidhe wrestled with the steering oar, her eyes narrowed as she sought to keep their course in line with the distant points of land. The wind died down; the sun glanced between scudding clouds. Birds circled the boat and flew off again with derisive cries. Nobody asked if they were getting any closer. The grip of damaged hands, the pull of aching arms were all that existed, those and the steady movement of the sun across the sky. After a very long time there were skerries to be seen eastward and westward, and a few seals hauled up on them. After a longer time an island loomed close, and for a while they pulled hard toward it, but there was a persistent current tugging them offshore. In a moment of grinding despair, they stilled the oars and stood in silence, watching the green-clad slopes recede to impossibility. There were tears in Creidhe’s eyes. She blinked them back, speaking very firmly.

  “Drink some water, rest a moment, then we’ll go on. We’re a little west of that main group now, but there seems to be another to the north of us. We’ll aim for that. It’s not far at all. You’re doing very well.”

  Sam looked at Thorvald, and Thorvald looked at Sam. Through the sheen of sweat, the pain of bone-weariness, each managed to stretch cracked lips in a feeble grin.

  “Stop laughing at me,” commanded Creidhe. “Now come on, put your backs into it. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” If there was a slight tremor under the commendable briskness of her tone, both men chose to ignore it.

  They passed to the west of other isles, bigger ones, smaller ones, farther off a tiny one with monstrous cliffs all around, rising to a desolate plateau where, improbably, sheep could be seen grazing. They struggled against the current; the thing had a mind of its own. At times the surface of the ocean showed a strange margin, farther off silver-green, closer at hand the natural darkness of deep water. It was westward across that divide that the current sought to draw them, and it took all their flagging strength to resist its will. Perhaps they had moved somewhat closer to that northern isle; they were too tired to tell. Thorvald thought there were cottages, but he could not be sure. It seemed unlikely folk would choose to settle in so stark a spot, where there was hardly a level scrap of land to be found, and the waves pounded the rocky shore as if to split the very stones asunder. Who would be stupid enough to put out to sea here? he thought sourly as he pulled and pulled, and the Sea Dove plowed her sluggish way through the choppy waters. Who would come here at all save an exile or a fool?

  In the end there was a bay, and a small beach, and a current that carried them forward. At last they began to believe that they would not die after all, not today. It was not Creidhe’s fault that the Sea Dove scraped her hull on rocks coming in and began instantly to list alarmingly. The waters were turbid and the undersea reefs invisible. Nonetheless, Thorvald scowled at her as he hauled on his oar. Creidhe appeared to be working hard to keep tears from falling. As for Sam, when he heard the unmistakable, sickening crunch of the boat’s timbers cracking on the reef, he flinched as if he himself had received a mortal wound. He put his back into rowing, snarling at Thorvald to pull harder, for if they could beach the Sea Dove before she sank, he had at least some chance of patching her up. The landscape was bleak; these islands seemed no richer in trees than the Light Isles, and a great deal less hospitable. No doubt, as at home, logs washed in from time to time, a gift from the sea more precious than any fine-wrought gold or silver. They had nothing to bargain with save the Sea Dove herself. Still, they were alive, and now, by dint of a last desperate effort with the oars, they felt the boat’s hull slide onto sand, and Sam, less than his usual buoyant self, clambered over the side to secure ropes to two massive boulders perhaps set there for just such a purpose. There was no jetty, but other craft were beached farther away, small, ungainly vessels that seemed ill suited to these capricious waters. Beyond the sheltered bay rose forbidding, rock-layered hills. There was nobody about. Further back, tucked into a fold of the land, there seemed to be buildings of some kind; smoke drifted above their turf roofs.

  It was, in fact, beyond their energy to go there, to seek help. Sam inspected the damage to his beloved boat, his livelihood and treasure; he shook his bandaged head, but it was clear he was working out how soon he might fix the great rent in her hull, replace the mast and be on his way again. The jagged rocks had pierced both garboard and second strakes near the stem; where might one find oak in these tree-poor isles? He ran his hand over the planks, muttering to himself.

  Creidhe could scarcely walk. The instant she set foot on land, her knees buckled, and she stumbled through the shallow water to collapse, white-faced, onto the fine shingle of the beach. Thorvald felt little better himself. His arms and shoulders throbbed as if branded; as for his hands, he would not look at those, for fear the sight would sicken him. He knew they were raw and bleeding; he had seen Sam’s. One must hope the people here were friendly, and had healers. He sprawled on the shore beside Creidhe, his eyes closed.

  “Are you all right, Thorvald?” Despite all, her small voice was desperately polite.

  “Mmm,” he grunted. “You?”

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered. “Now the Sea Dove’s smashed and we can’t go home.”

  “Nobody’s fault but the sea’s,” Sam said calmly, coming up beside them. “I can mend it, given time and the right bit of wood. Means we’ll be here longer, though. Need to look for shelter. And I could handle a roasted mutton shank or two, I can tell you. Looks like some kind of settlement up yonder, though the folk don’t seem in a hurry to come out and welcome us. Shall we try?”

  Thorvald sat up abruptly. “Just one thing,” he said.

  The others looked at him.

  “You know why I’m here, to find him, to find Somerled. I have to believe he could have reached this place, otherwise it’s all been for nothing. I know it’s a slender chance, but it’s not impossible. Maybe he’s right there, in one of those cottages, maybe not. I want you to keep quiet about that. It’s my search and mine alone, and I’ve my own way of going about it.
Do you understand?”

  “What do you mean?” Creidhe asked, putting her head in her hands as if she were simply too tired to think. “Not tell him you’re his son?”

  “Exactly. And not tell anyone the real reason I’ve come here. If Somerled is on these islands, I want to observe him, to weigh him up before I tell him the truth. I can’t do that if someone blurts out who I am and what I’m looking for the moment we clap eyes on the locals.”

  “Probably not even the right islands . . .” Creidhe murmured.

  “Never mind that,” Thorvald snapped. This was taking too long, and his head was throbbing. “This could be the place. How likely is it there are two such groups of isles in these parts? Now, do the two of you understand me or not?”

  “I understand all right. You expect us to lie for you,” said Sam flatly. His face was ghastly pale under the stained bandage, and his eyes bore a disapproving look.

  “You don’t have to lie. Just don’t mention Somerled. That should be easy enough even for you, Creidhe.” Thorvald saw her flinch, and instantly regretted this barb. But why were they taking so long to comprehend what was blindingly obvious? The gods protect him from friends.

  “Listen, Thorvald,” Sam said wearily, “I’ve got a sore head and a broken boat, and Creidhe’s close to fainting from exhaustion. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and neither of us cares right now about your little games. Just tell us what our story is, so these folk won’t think we’re crazy, then let’s try to find some help.”