The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

emptied his bowl and tossed it to the table, where it clattered and spun.

“You haven’t mentioned Cormac,” he observed. “The Marshall of the Host may have some little say in the matter, whether the Four Chiefs forswear themselves or not.”

“You’re his officer,” o Flaherty said. “He listens to your advice.”

“The McDermot has the most marvelous sort of ear. What goes into it is only what he permits.”

Turlough struck the table. “The white rod is mine,” he insisted. “My father was High King!”

“And what came of that,” said David, “but that the Foreigners came into Ireland? And there is the pebble over which all your plots will stumble. If I do come over, and if I do bring The McDermot with me, Aedh will turn to them, with their shirts of iron. They’ve already castled Meath and Leinster. Would you hand them Connaught, as well?” With a growl of disgust, he turned away.

The o Flaherty spoke quietly, and a little smugly. “The sons of Cathal are not the only party with iron-shirted friends.”

* * *

The o Flaherty’s briugaid brought them into the room, the very strangers that David had noted earlier. With them came the two Danes and David suddenly realized, seeing them all together, that the shorter Dane was a half-breed: Danish blood mixed with these strangers.

He studied these new Foreigners with great care, for he knew that o Flaherty planned some devious trick involving them and he did not yet know what that trick would be. Nor, by all appearances, did the Foreigners, for they cast sidelong glances at their host, and all but one, despite their outward arrogance, displayed signs of wariness.

Four he knew immediately for men-of-trust. Two entered first and two entered last and they stood to either side of the little group. Their clothing was a soft leather with fringes along the arms and leggings. From their belts hung short swords. On top of all, they wore iron shirts, not of mail as the Normans wore, but of metal sheets that had been shaped to their torso and wonderfully engraved with the likenesses of birds and wild plants. Two wore helmets, differently shaped than the Norman sort and topped with the brilliant plumage of an unknown bird.

The three men who had attended the banquet with their women were obviously chiefs. They were tall, but they held their heads a little back, as if they sought to look down at the world from as great a height as possible. They wore the same soft leather garments as their bodyguards, but theirs had been inlaid with colorful beads and shells, and across their shoulders had been flung cloaks woven of a smooth fiber dyed in intricate patterns. Black hair, knotted behind their heads, was pierced by feathers. The man in the center wore in addition a circlet of silver: an eagle whose wings swept forward around his temples to hold between their tips over his brow a sun of hammered gold.

And yet, confronted by this arrogant finery, David’s eye was caught by the last man, who hovered in the back of the group with the women—the only man who showed no wariness. He was shorter, wider, and darker than the others and his dress was a roughly-woven jacket, sashed in the front like a robe, which he wore over a kilt of a plain color. His head was wrapped in a towel so that David at first thought him injured. Then he thought him perhaps a priest of the Mohammedans. Later, he was told that the man was a servant, but his flat, unblinking eyes were like no gilly’s that David had ever seen. Had I a servant like that, he told himself as he stared into those arrogant eyes, I’d have him thrashed for his insolence.

SUANTRAI

“The o Flaherty’s gone mad,” David announced that evening while he and his men were preparing for sleep.

“Has he, now.” Gillapadraig took David’s cloak and draped it over his arm.

“Pure Sweeney. I expected him to float off toward the roofbeams at any moment.”

“Because of the New Iron Shirts?”

“Because of the New Iron Shirts.” David pulled his knife from its sheath and threw it at the door, where it sank half a thumb into the wood. “Kevin, you sleep across the door tonight. Anyone who tries to enter, give him my welcome.” The clansman nodded and laid his cloak upon the rushes by the doorway. He pried David’s knife loose and placed it beside his pallet.

Gillapadraig had been watching. “You expect the king to violate his hospitality?”

David shrugged. “The o Flaherty’s a fox, for all that he is mad. He won’t act dishonorably, but Turlough gave no pledge for my safety. The o Flaherty is perfectly capable of closing his eyes, then expressing outrage afterward. There is a game being played here, and I don’t know which of them is playing the other, Turlough or The o Flaherty. Both, maybe. If I’m dead, Fiachra is chief of the Sil Maelruain. Perhaps they think they can move my son more easily than me.”

“They can move the Rock of Cruachan more easily than you. Why do you think your son might…?”

“Because Fiachra is friendly with Donn Oc McGarrity and the other young men—and Donn Oc has gone over to Turlough. Aedh is too close to the Foreigners for their taste, so they have all given their pledges to Turlough. They talk big about driving the Foreigners out of Aire Land, but I mind a fable about bells and cats.”

“But, if The o Flaherty has brought in men the equal of the Foreigners…”

“Then he is mad, as I’ve said. Remember how in the Holy Bible the Jews called on the Romans to help them against the Greeks—and then could not rid themselves of the Romans? So the king in Leinster called on the Foreigners to help him in his war against Rory and today Strongbow’s son is king there in all but name. Now The o Flaherty would be calling on these new Foreigners for help against the old ones? That woman has a lot to answer for.”

Gillapadraig paused before drawing off his own tunic. “Which woman would that be?”

“The o Rourke’s wife. It was because she slept with Rory that o Rourke called for the Leinstermen’s aid in the first place.”

Gillapadraig grunted. “It always comes down to a woman in the end. I’ll hang our clothing in the garderobe to kill the lice. Tell us about these New Foreigners. What are they like? Are they fighting men?”

“They brought their women with them, so they are no war party. But the men look no strangers to battle, either. They were in a fight, and lately at that.”

“Where do they come from?” Gillapadraig’s voice came from the small necessary. The dung pile that lay below the open grating provided the fumes that killed the lice.

David shrugged. “I can tell you only what The o Flaherty told me and I don’t know how much truth the story holds. The strangers spoke some unknown tongue. The dark Dane translated that into the Danish they speak in the Ice Land and the Galway Dane rendered that into Gaelic, but how much of the sense of it made it through that bramble, who can say? I follow the Danish a little, and…”

There was a knock at the door. Two raps, followed by a pause, then another rap. “It’s Donnchad,” said Kevin. He unlatched the door and Donnchad o Mulmoy slipped in. The clan na Mulmoy had been allied with the clan na Fhlainn since time unremembered and David had given Donnchad the command of the footmen in his party.

“The men are all settled,” the newcomer told them, “and I’ve set watches. I do not trust these western men.”

“Did you see any of those New Foreigners about?” David asked him.

“The red-skins? Two of their men-of-trust stood guard outside The o Flaherty’s hall, so I take it that they are bedded down within. To me, they would not answer hail or farewell, so they might have been cast from copper for all I could tell you. The other one, the one with the rag on his head, was about on some errand, but he only glowered at me when I hailed him.”

“A friendly folk,” Gillapadraig said.

“They are uneasy about something,” David told him. “And they sense that we may not be with them.”

“What did you tell The o Flaherty?”

“I told him that I did not think that seven warriors, six women, and a gilly would drive William the Marshal into the sea.”

“How did he answer?”

“About as you may expect. That these are but an embassy and their warriors over the Western Sea are as