The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

music and, though he could not have understood the words, a sadness passed momentarily across his face, for he could hear the haunt of loss in the winding notes.

“Gillapadraig,” said David suddenly, “do you remember how mac Costello took Nial Og prisoner last summer?”

“And our cattle in the bargain. What of it?”

“I was only thinking how a warrior might become a servant.”

David accepted the smoking bowl when o Tubbaigh offered it again.

“Smoke friend maketh,” the man said in halting, antique Danish.

David grunted. “I suppose I can sort those words as I please.” He pointed to himself and Gillapadraig and spoke again in Danish, “We twain, Gaels.” The he pointed at o Tubbaigh. “You, o Gonklin?”

The other man looked first puzzled, then startled, then angry, then finally, contemptuous. He passed his hand back and forth in front of his mouth, then spat in the dirt.

“What was that all about?” Gillapadraig asked.

“He does not think highly of his masters,” said David.

“Small wonder, after they made no move to save him today.”

David thought about it some more. “I wish I knew how far I could trust the two Danes. The dark one, I think, not at all, if he is one of the o Gonklin’s vikings and loyal to them. The Galwegian, I am unsure of. He is out- law, but that might be a trifling matter. He may regret having become entangled in this affair. The Ostmen keep to themselves and pray the Normans will overlook them when the time comes. They have forgotten that they were once vikings. But let’s make the most of our time. I doubt the o Gonklin chief would be pleased to find us sharing the white smoke with his gilly.” David drew o Tubbaigh’s attention to one of o Flaherty’s servants emptying slops in the pigsty just outside the keep and near the stables where the three were smoking. “Gilly,” he said, “of o Flaherty. You. Gilly of Tatamaigh?”

The Foreigner laughed and settled the turban over his head, adjusting it until it sat right. Then he grabbed himself by the crotch and again waved his hand across his mouth and spat in the direction of the keep.

“Does he mean that Tatamaigh unmanned him?” Gillapadraig asked in shock.

“No. He means that the o Gonklins have no balls.” With a stick, he drew a small circle in the dirt. “Aire Land,” he said and patted the earth and pointed around. Then he made another small circle a little distance off. “Ice Land.” He added Green Land, then New-Found Land. Then below the New-Found Land, he drew a much larger circle and said, “O Gonklin’s Land.” Finally, he handed the stick to o Tubbaigh and, indicating the crude map, said, “You. Land. Where?”

O Tubbaigh scowled at the circles for a time and David thought that perhaps he did not understand, so he named the circles once more.

Slowly the man began to nod. The he reached into the dirt, scooped up a handful, and poured it over the large circle that David had named O Gonklin’s Land. David stared at the dirt, then at the man himself, who grinned savagely. But before David could pursue the matter, a woman’s voice called from the keep the name of Muiscle o Tubbaigh. The grin vanished, replaced by the stone face. The gilly knocked the ashes from the bowl and, swishing it in the water barrel before returning it to his pouch, rose and aired his garments of the smell of the smoke.

“I suppose he did not understand what a map is,” Gillapadraig said when the man had gone.

“Oh, he knew enough.” David watched the gilly approach the o Gonklin woman, saw how he stood before her, and saw too in the torchlight the look she gave him, and understood just a little bit more the tangled skein among the New Foreigners.

“Then why did he pour dirt all over it?” Gillapadraig wanted to know.

David dropped his eyes to the sketches in the dirt before, with his foot, he obliterated them.

* * *

Olaf Gustaf’s son was morose to the point of suicide, but it was a point in exquisite balance. “I’ll end in a nameless grave,” he confided to David later that same evening when David had found him on the castle wall overlooking the moonlit lake. “That’s the fate of out-laws.” David had brought him a tankard of ale because words were like fish and when wet swam more freely. “I was an important merchant in Galway Town. I took tin and timber from Cornwall to Bordeaux and to Henaye in the Basque country and brought back LaRochelle wines, Bourgneuf salt, and Spanish wool. Now there’s a price on my head, and I never even had that poor man’s woman. I wouldn’t mind being cut down so much if I’d ever futtered her; but she and I hadn’t closed the bargain yet. Her husband thought otherwise, and so he died for the sake of an error. That don’t seem right.” Olaf sighed. “Still, people will go against me. Me, what’s fought Breton and Basque pirates, and sailed with the Hansards against the wild Prussians.”

David pointed to the vessel tied up to the wharf on the west side of the island, half visible in flickering torchlight. “Is that the o Gonklin boat?”

“Ship,” the Ostman told him. “Not ‘boat.’ Ja, that’s her. Looks a little like a cog, but she’s a poor sailer. Flat-bottomed, no keel. Her master fought his leeway all up Lough Corrib. Used oars, he did, to bring her to dock, so she’s even part galley. No castles, fore or aft, to give archers height over pirates.”

“May be there are no pirates in her home waters?”

Olaf spread his hands. “Or may be the pirates win. But she’s got that queer second mast behind the main, which I fancy would harvest a bit more o’ the wind than the usual bonnet sails, so she’d have heels when sailing large. And the strakes are clinkered, d’ye see—but top-over-bottom like the old knorrs, not bottom-over-top like modern ships. If I had to guess… D’ye have any more of The o Flaherty’s ale? Ah, my thanks t’ye. If I had to guess, I’d say this o Gonklin fellow never had deep-water ships, just coasters; and what he’s got now, he’s copied off knorrs from the days of Eric the Red. That little hind-mast, though. That’s new. That’s a good idea.” He took a long pull from his tankard. “I’d like to be out on one now. Not on that bastard. I’d not try the Gascon coast without a proper keel beneath me. But I’d like to be out on a proper ship. Out of Aire Land, where every man’s hand against me.”

“Mine isn’t.”

“Ach. That only means ye haven’t heard the price on me yet.”

David studied the ship again. He had never seen a cog before, let alone something that wasn’t exactly a cog, and Olaf’s explanations were as much a foreign language as that of the o Gonklins. It astonished him that so large and heavy a thing could float at all. “I don’t think those vessels can bring an army across the Ocean.”

“Don’t be fooled by her size,” the Ostman said. “There be plenty room in ’er hold.”

“It isn’t the size I’m after thinking of. You said you wouldn’t take it to the Gascon coast. Would you take it on the Ocean Sea?”

Olaf considered that. “If Hengist’s family were breathing on my neck, I’d try Ocean in a coracle. If I’m to end in a nameless grave, better a watery one. But… The easting would be simple enough. Put up enough linen, catch the westerlies, and here you are. As for the westing… Well, she’s got oars…”

“But if a flat-bottomed ship slips sideways…”

“Leeway, we call it. That’s the problem with her. Ye couldn’t be sure where ye’d raise land. If these Red Foreigners had keeled ships that could hold a bearing, they would have been here long since.”

“You can’t spin linen from straw,” David agreed.

“And without those hairy horses of theirs, they’d have to walk everywhere, and how big would their kingdoms be? As big as a thumbnail, I’d wager. No grand cities as Thorfinn’s told of: Manahattan, Lechauweking. That Tatamaigh fellow, when we slipped past Galway Town and her great walls, he turned his nose up and laughed. I’d be offended, if the Galwegians weren’t all trying to kill me. I suppose a folk can be only as great as their tools will let them.” Olaf turned as another man climbed the steps to the rampart and he called to the newcomer in Old Danish. “Hails, Thorfinn, son of the Rafn! How fare ye?”

The dark Dane said nothing, but he took the jug of ale from Olaf’s hand and drank from it, wiping his mouth afterward with the back of his hand. He looked at David without expression, and did not return the jug. Smiling, and speaking the Gaelic so that the Red Dane would not understand, Olaf turned back to David. “He wouldn’t last a week in Galway Town before he smiled below his chin.”

“They are afraid. All of them but the gilly.”

“Then they shouldn’t swagger so.”

David looked into the night, past Lough Corrib, past Connemara, past the Ocean Sea. “Sometimes a man