Of Chiefs and Champions Page 4

  "I recall from when I was a boy of how the bishops throughout all Eireann pressed all the kings and clans for troops and ships, then sailed their force to the Isle of Aran to, they said, catch and burn the last of the druids. But their campaign was a failure, of course; they found not even one druid, only simple fishers and herders and tillers of the rocky soil. They did find a stone-built complex of plain buildings, that which now is become a consecrated Christian monastery, and therein certain signs that many said were druidical."

  "These zealots were told by the inhabitants of the isle that those who had dwelt within the complex had lived there for hundreds of years and had been gentle, withdrawn men of simple ways. They added that a few came or departed at odd times and that, three months before the bishops and their men-at-arms came, the dwellers in the stone buildings all had boarded a ship that had come for them and set sail to the westward and no man had since seen aught of them."

  "So the bishops had their troops fell the thick-boled and ancient oak tree—the only one of the isle—that grew in the center of the complex. They tried to burn it too, it was told, but the wind kept blowing out the flames or drowning them with the salt spray it bore. That night, a mighty tempest arose without warning and drove many of their ships onto the rocks, killing and drowning seamen, troops, and clerics. Many another ship was blown far out to sea, and three were never again seen, though some bodies later washed ashore. Seven of the bishops and a goodly number of other men died when the ancient roof of one of the larger buildings in which they had taken shelter from the storm collapsed and crushed them, then took fire and burned alive those who then still lived among the rubble."

  "The islanders later said that sections of old wicker latticework that had been part of the ceiling of that building had fallen in such way that it blocked every opening to the outside as if with grids of iron, trapping all within until the flames could reach them; not even the axes of would-be rescuers were able to hack through the wickerwork in time. The islanders averred that the screams of those roasting men could be heard all over the island that fell night, even above the roaring of the tempest and the crashings of the towering seas."

  "That ill-omened place sat vacant for years. It was not until early in my own reign that a party of monks from somewhere in France . . . or was it Flanders? . . . sailed to the isle and settled in the old buildings. But I've not heard word of any difficulties they might've experienced there."

  "The islanders have been heard to say that a young tree sprang from out the stump or the roots of the old and that these foreign monks care for it tenderly. Nonetheless, they are assuredly good Christians, for they all wear brown robes, not white, and their order is well known over the continent of Europe, it is said."

  "No, if druids still walk this earth, I would imagine that they are all sagaciously fled to Magna Eireann or, still more sagaciously, to the lands to the west. Men who have been there say that beyond the mountains, that continent is but an endless stretch of dark, gloomy forests inhabited sparsely by skraelings, wild beasts, and savage monsters. Tales are told of how druids could actually talk to beasts and monsters and convince them to live in peace with mankind; be this truth rather than hoary legend, then that far-western land might well be the perfect homeland for those few who still openly reverence the Old Ones, for surely men so wise as they were said to be have learned by now that Christian clerics and more than a few laymen will never grant them any tolerance and any other peace save the peace of death."

  "Would that I had had but a scant measure of such vaunted sagacity, pagan or nay. Six scant weeks agone, Sir Bass and his condotta set out for the lands of my cousins, in the north. Two weeks and a day later came a galloper bearing news of a battle impending. Then, silence, not one word heard of any nature until yesterday when another galloper arrived at Lagore Palace to bring me letters from Sir Bass and others."

  "The Englishman's letter was brief and to the point. He has the Striped Bull of Ui Neill, but he also has the Magical Jewel of the Kingdom of Breifne, the Nail and the Blood, and I had thought that that one would be so difficult to obtain that I had just about decided to forgo it . . . or at least save it until I had all the rest."

  "But it's those other letters, the reading of which took my appetite clean away and spoiled my sleep, all of last night and this one, as well, so far. The letter from Righ Tadg of Breifne, had it been alone, the only other one, now, I might've chuckled over and forgotten; everyone knows Tadg is mad as a March hare and shot through and through with so fierce a degree of religious fanaticism that he never even has sired a bastard, they say, much less having decently wed and provided for the continuance of his house and his dynasty. Celibate he is, having never known another human being, lest he pollute his soul with lust. Such a royal ninny might be expected to pen any manner of nonsense."

  "But the other letter, now? Righ Colman IX of Ui Neill is every bit as sane as I and holds no more stock in religion than does any other modern, rational, educated man. And when a man like him starts in writing to me of wondrous miracles, old prophecies, and fanciful maunderings, I begin to really worry. Could Righ Tadg's madness be contagious? Or is Cousin Arthur's great captain up to something here in my Eireann, and if he is, then for whom does he scheme, for himself or for my dear royal English cousin? Have agents of Connachta gotten to him, bought him, perhaps? Or are those two devious di Bolgias implicated in this business? Those brothers are well and aptly surnamed. Bolgia can mean either 'chaos' or 'hellfire' in the Italian tongue, dependent upon the dialect. They surely have wrought the one in Eireann, and in a just world they both would be writhing and sizzling in the other, damn the upstart bastards!"

  "But what have they got to offer that might've tempted this Duke of Norfolk? Talk is that he's already rich as Croesus off his pirating and raiding, his combined landholdings in England alone are somewhat bigger than my own Kingdom of Mide, and he holds title to a county in the eastern marches of the Empire, as well. Maybe he just hungers for power, though he doesn't seem at all that sort of man; I should know, I've got that hunger myself, and I can almost always recognize the symptoms in others who harbor it. So, perhaps I misjudge Sir Bass, then?"

  "All right, if he does not seek Eireann for himself, then for whom? Arthur? Hardly—he still has years of hard work ahead of him in reordering England and Wales, and if the two kingdoms merge, as seems more and more likely, he'll be stuck with helping his co-ruler, James of Scotland, put down his always fractious lairds and chiefs."

  "Who? Who? WHO? Damn him, anyway, and damn mad Righ Tadg and my cousin Righ Colman, too! I'd thought I could come into this my own secret hideaway and play with my pretties and put this maddening business from out my poor, aching head for a few hours, but it pads close behind me like a paid assassin; there's simply no forgetting of any of it for long. I'll not sleep this night, either."

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  "Foster?" It came as a hoarse, harsh whisper of sound that penetrated even the condition of exhausted slumber into which Bass Foster had slipped the moment his muddy bootsoles had landed in the few inches of half-frozen slush at the bottom of the new-dug foxhole. After four days and nights without any meaningful amounts of sleep, plus the stress, the constant fear, little food—and that cold and greasy or cold and dry, and only a few, precious drops of water that reeked of a Lyster bag with which to wash it down—and unending exertion, he and the ragged remnant of a rifle company tended to instinctively dive into sleep, regardless of the numbing, murderous cold, the cutting wind, no matter whether they were prone, sitting, squatting, or just standing still.

  "Foster? Goddam your fuckin' ass, Foster, wake up!" It required a real, a very difficult effort to force his gummy eyelids apart, but he managed it, finally. Slowly turning his head to the direction from which the whispers came, he saw a man approaching at a steady belly crawl along the track marked by previous crawlers in the snow that hid the rocky ground more than a foot beneath the present surface.

  Straining his s
leepy eyes in the wan light from the sun that was setting somewhere beyond the multiple banks of gray clouds, he could see the weapon cradled in the crawler's arms and thus identify him as Master Sergeant Pomerance Humphries even before the lumpy, long-unshaven face with its red crooked nose came close enough to be seen.

  Sergeant Humphries—"Hump" to the company officers and the other first-three-graders (most of both categories now dead somewhere back along the route of the "strategic withdrawal"—was a regular and strictly speaking too old to be actively soldiering in this, the third war of his career—belly-sliding through the filthy snow of a chunk of icy hell called Korea.

  It had been in his first war, now more than thirty years past, that he had fallen in love with the Springfield M1903 rifle, which had been supplanted by the M-l Garand rifle before some of the "men" of what was left of the company had been born. When the company commander, now deceased, had insisted that Hump must carry a weapon of carbine length, the old soldier had obliged, somehow managing to acquire a Springfield cavalry carbine, and when the officers had become aware that Hump could fire the piece just about as fast as a more modern semiauto and with far more accuracy, they had let him be with his short bolt-action rifle and his overlong M1920 bayonet.

  Sliding to the edge of the hole, the senior noncom growled, "I been a gook, Foster, you'd been dead meat, you know that, boy?"

  "Sarge, I just can't seem to stay awake," he replied dully.

  "Shit you can't," snorted the sergeant. "Hellfire, boy, we all of us sleepy, but you 'spect to be breathin' this time tomorrer, you gotta stay alert t'night. You hear me, boy? How much ammo you got?"

  Foster shook his head, hard, trying desperately to dispel some of the clinging cobwebs that seemed to fill it. "Uhh . . . five . . . no, six rounds in my rifle and . . ." He fumbled at his belt and added, "Two full clips."

  "Hm, twenny-two rounds." The sergeant nodded. "Wai, I ain't got no more for you, neither. All I can 'vise you is, don't squeeze nary a one off till you got a clear, justified target. And you fix your bay'nit right now, too, hear?"

  "Sarge," asked Foster hesitantly, "is there any water, at least?"

  "Naw, son, nary a drop," replied the noncom, furiously clawing with black nails at a louse bite on his chin beneath the burgeoning black beard. "But you go lappin' at that there snow, boy, you gone come down with the bloody shits, even if you don't get the cholera, and I find out, I'm gone kick your ass around the clock. Hear me? You wait just a minit, here."

  After a long, thorough exploration of his bulging breast pocket, the grizzled noncom brought out a single battered stick of gum, so dirty-gray that the label was illegible. Breaking it in two, he shoved one at the man in the hole, saying, "It's the bestest I can do for you, son—it'll keep your mouth wet, anyhow."

  "Now, goddam you, Foster!" While he had been ferreting out the gum, within those few seconds of elapsed time, the man in the hole had gone back to sleep. The sergeant brutally shook him until he seemed to be again conscious.

  Laying his carbine carefully in the snow, the older man pulled the bag he had been dragging closer, delved into it, and brought out an olive-drab fragmentation hand grenade. "Foster!" he barked in a no-nonsense tone. "Hold this grenade in your hand. Hold it tight, you fucker!"

  When he had been obeyed, he said, "Now, watch this, Foster, you watch what I'm doin'!" Slipping a grimy, filth-encrusted forefinger through the ring, he jerked the safety pin from the explosive.

  At the sight, Foster came more fully aware and awake than he had been for days. Reflexively, he clenched his chilblained hand even more tightly around the icy metal, knowing that now only the lever held in compression by his fingers was preventing the deadly little bomb from becoming fully armed.

  "How many seconds is the fuse on it, Sarge?"

  Humphries shrugged. "Hell, I dunno, Foster. That's out'n one them cases of WWII retreads. Could be five, could be three, and could be none, boom. So you better bust your balls staying awake, boy. I hears a big bang from over here, I'll know one way or t'other, thishere position's either under attack or ain't manned no more."

  Foster woke up with a strangled cry, jerked his tight-clenched fist up to where he could see it, then, now more fully awake, lay back down. He nestled back into the deep, soft warmth of his fine goose-down camp bed, shuddering despite himself, still shaken from the remembered terrors of the nightmare.

  One of the manservants, only a lawn shirt flapping about his thighs, carrying a small bull's-eye lanthorn, with sincere concern in both his eyes and his voice, slipped into the chamber.

  "Your Grace? Your Grace is unwell?"

  Foster sighed. "Go back to sleep, Will. No, I'm not ill, I but had a bad dream, a dream of battle, when I was a young man."

  The middle-aged servant nodded, turned, and padded unshod back into the anteroom, softly reclosing the door. Hardly had he set the lanthorn down, however, when the younger of the two Kalmyks who also served His Grace of Norfolk entered through the door that led in from the hallway, a wheel-lock dag in one hand and a kindjal in the other, his yellow-brown face expressionless, but his eyes slitted.

  Will waved a hand. "Ha' done, ha' done, friend Yueh. Our master was but astride a nightmare, he says. Reliving a fearsome great crashing battle of his youth. Nae fear, he be alane, not sae much as ane single rat bides wi' him."

  At a table in the large, open space through which the staircase made its way, one level below the suite of Sir Bass Foster, Duke of Norfolk, his herald, Sir Ali, one of his noble bodyguards, Don Diego, and his friend and mentor, Baron Melchoro, sat, dicing desultorily, swapping yarns—for all three had been free-swords and had soldiered in many corners of the known world as well as many pockets of it that were less well known—and sipping at tiny cuplets of a black, thick, bitter decoction that Sir Ali prepared afresh now and then in a long-handled brass pot over the glowing coals of a brazier.

  Spitting out the dregs of his cuplet, the Baron swore blasphemously, "By the well-plowed cunt of Mary Magdalene, sir knight, ahwah is bad enough, but ahwah sahda is just more than flesh and bones can bear."

  "Your servant grieves, my lord Baròn" the Arabian knight said solemnly, only the flash in his black eyes revealing a note of levity, "but these Irish barbarians own no sweetener save honey. For real ahwah we just must have the patience to wait until your most humble and most contrite servant can buy more sukarr from the illustrious Walid Pasha or the most valiant Captain Fahrook, in Dublin."

  "Where the hell does Walid Pasha get his aqucar and his cafe, for that matter, in this benighted land on the edge of civilization?" asked Baron Melchoro. "Prize them from off captured ships?"

  The slender, black-haired and -bearded, hook-nosed knight shrugged. "How should this unworthy and humble one know such matter, my just and awesome lord Baron! To answer, I would if only I could, mighty one. I prostrate myself." He did just that. "I kiss your feet." He made as if to do so.

  The Portuguese nobleman spun half about on the stool, jerking his feet from proximity to the hands and face of the prone Arabian.

  "Fagh!" He switched to accented Arabic. "Thou outcome of a diseased camel's colic, go slobber on the boots of yon Spaniard, not on mine!" Switching languages once more, this time to the English that all three spoke after an individual fashion, he said, "Sir knight, you are extremely insolent to my noble dignity. Were you one of my retainers, I should have you flogged."

  Don Diego shook his head of close-cut red hair. "Not so, my lord Baron, such a degree of repeated insolence deserves more than a mere laying on of a lash. Flog him, yes, but also put a bodkin through his intemperate tongue, crop his ears, and . . . whaaghuuff."

  Lashing out with a booted foot, the Arabian knight jerked the wobbly stool from beneath the Spaniard, flopping him onto the hard, uncarpeted stones of the floor.

  The Spaniard sprang to his feet, grasped the heavy, hand-carven, oaken stool by one of its three legs, and hefted it like a mace, glaring at Sir Ali for a moment. But it was only a brief mom
ent. He grinned crookedly, righted the stool, and stood rubbing at the hip on which he had landed. Then he walked toward the staircase.

  "I've had all I can stomach of your foul desert witch's brew. I'm going belowstairs and fetch back up some wine . . . or at least some ale."

  The Portuguese said, "While you're down there, Diego, see if Nugai is back from his herb-hunting yet. This that we do here this night is really his responsibility."

  After the Spaniard was gone, the Baron spoke to Sir Ali. "We really should take turns sleeping, old friend, else we'll all be dozing and reeling in the saddle like so many drunkards for half of tomorrow's march. So we'd all better drink some goodly measure of whatever Diego scrounges up, down there, to nullify the effects of that ahwah."

  "If Nugai return soon," remarked Sir Ali, "we will none of us need alcohol, my lord, That Kalmyk brews a pleasant-tasting herbal draught that would, upon my honor, put to sleep a stone statue. Why, I recall when I was wounded at the Battle of Bloody Rye . . ."

  And so the tale-swapping went on, farther into the night.

  The Elder once again was met with the Younger at a seldom-visited spot on the Northumbrian moors. A pale moon, riding high in the night sky, flickered in and out of banks of clouds, and but rarely could the pinprick light of a star be seen.

  A single horse cropped vegetation a little distance away from the two dark figures. It had been upon his back that the Younger had arrived for this meeting.