Ides of the May (Children of the May 2 - updates weekly)

Chapter Twenty-Six: Strange Cargo

When I had finished telling her the truth Palomina left the room without speaking. We all gathered in the main room of the apartments, where Neave said a crisp farewell to us, and Brunor also took his leave. He did not say where was going, but I assumed the boy in the ill-fitting coat would be joining the absent Mordred on the journey to Andalus and Castillo Orgulloso. I had thought someone would suggest that the younger ones should stay behind on Orkney, but though he was green-faced at the thought of going to sea once more, Alisander was coming with us, dragged along, possibly quite forcefully, by Aglinda.

Shortly before dawn Gaheris entered to wish his brother good luck. Although he had been anxious to help win vengeance for his mother, the one-handed Prince of Orkney had been ordered to remain behind as his father’s regent. The two gave each other a white-faced embrace, neither lad yet quite comprehending that their mother was truly gone.

‘Kill them all, Aggers,’ said Gaheris, thumping his brother on the shoulder with his hook. ‘Kill them all.’

‘I will,’ said Agravaine. ‘And if I see Gawain and Gareth you can bet I’m going to give them a piece of my mind.’

‘Aye,’ said Gaheris. ‘Make sure you bring our brothers back here; I’d like to do the same.’ They clasped each other once more, and Gaheris told us that our ferry was loaded and ready to row us out to Palomina’s ship.

‘It is my brother Sagwarides’ ship,’ said Palomina quietly, ‘though I am its captain.’

‘How long will it be?’ said Alisander.

‘Seven days, if this weather holds,’ said Palomina.

* * *

But the weather did not hold. King Lot made the decision to sail his fleet of one-hundred-and-five ships down the east coast of Britain, past the kingdoms of Northumbria and Gore, and then through the narrow channel that separates Britain from Gaul. His argument was that being largely enclosed by land on both sides and containing fewer islands, the journey down the east coast was less risky than that down the west, where the fleet would have to navigate both the islands of Caledonia and the wild seas around Erin. I do not know if the journey would have been any more pleasant down the west coast, but the one we took was bad. Not as bad as the storm that wrecked us on Avalon, but bad enough. It began on the second day, when the rain began to lash down and the winds turned against us. Though some ships in the fleet were nimble enough to tack into the wind, others were old and cumbersome, and by the third day the fleet had become so scattered that King Lot’s flagship ordered the leading ships to drop anchor and wait for the others to catch up.

The atmosphere on Sagwarides’ ship was not helped by us being thrown together at such close quarters. Sagwarides himself was a huge, hulking presence with a very severe face, more severe even than Safeer. I got the impression that he was very protective of his younger sister, and that he did not much care for me, so I mostly kept to our cabin studying Epicene’s papers, even on the rare occasions we were allowed out on deck.

I was frustrated in my studies by the difficulties of the languages in which the texts were written, though within the Egyptian scroll, which was surprisingly easy to translate, I found a little more about the nature of the Fiery Mountain, and its relationship to sources of world magic like the Cave of the Dragon. They were, in a very real sense, the same place, though scattered all over the earth. They each released the same pure magic, which, after the disappearance of the old gods, was the world’s only source of magic. The different kinds of magic only arose when that pure magic was breathed in or otherwise absorbed by a living creature – the scroll did not specify that the creature had to be human. This was all very interesting, and I enjoyed the achievement of arriving at these conclusions, but the insights seemed of little practical value.