The Children of the Company Part 4

He has never done so. For one thing, when one is immortal, there is no point in pa.s.sing on wisdom to the next generation lest it be forgotten, for it cannot be forgotten. Nor would it do, after all, to empower up-and-coming young rivals by letting them in on one's secrets.

And Labienus has no bright subordinate in training, in any case, no youthful immortal he can impress or mentor.

So his desire has never progressed beyond a list of maxims. The first one is, It is not enough to tend one's own garden. One must a.s.siduously sow weeds in one's neighbor's garden, and encourage snails there.

He unlocks a drawer now, and draws forth another paper file. It is bulky, it is clumsy, but hard copy has certain advantages to a conspirator. And there is something so satisfying, really, in holding in one's hands the tangible d.a.m.nation of one's enemies.

The file is labeled simply h.o.m.o UMBRATILIS.

Labienus opens it. The first thing to greet his eye is an image, a straightforward Company identification shot of another Executive Facilitator. His designation is Aegeus, and he looks as benign as the chairman of some philanthropic foundation.

His expression makes Labienus's lip curl in distaste. Hypocrite, he thinks. Their rivalry is an old one.

They were a.s.signed to the same mission once, in the dead ages past when he had been Atrahasis. The job was above and beyond the usual level of Company need-to-know obscurity. They had been sent with troops to an island in the Pacific and told to kill all the mortals they found there. Long before their transport had touched down, Atrahasis had discovered that his partner was no higher in rank than he was, and moreover that Aegeus was pompous, self-important, and crude.

Atrahasis had entertained himself awhile subtly insulting Aegeus with exquisite courtesy. When they finally reached their destination, Aegeus had let him do most of the killing; and this proved to be a complicated affair, for the mortals turned out to be neither the Neanderthal brutes he had expected nor even their cave-painting cousins. And they were rather better at defending themselves than Atrahasis had been advised. Given the hazardous nature of the job, he expected a plum posting as a reward.

So it had annoyed him a great deal when he later learned that Aegeus, rather than he himself, had been appointed the new sector head for Southern Europe.

Labienus has never forgotten the slight.

Both men have built private empires within the Company. Both have made plans to seize power, on that distant day in 2355 when the Company is expected to fall, and both have taken certain drastic and occasionally b.l.o.o.d.y steps to guarantee supremacy then. Only their methods have differed.

Aegeus has gone for show, for extravagance, flaunting his power base. He has committed tremendous resources to long-range plans. In doing so, he has presented his enemies with an immense target. The question, therefore, is simply one of strategy: which arrow to use, and when, for the most satisfying result?

Labienus tilts his head on one side, considering Aegeus's image. Smiling at last, he takes a fine silver pen from his desk and dips it in an inkwell of Bavarian crystal. He sketches a beard and curling mustache on Aegeus's face. Aegeus has his lips closed in the picture, sadly, so Labienus is unable to black out one of his teeth; but he settles for drawing little horns on Aegeus's head, and adding a pair of vampire fangs over his lower lip. He sets the picture aside, chuckling as he reflects that a petty impulse, properly directed, can do one a world of good.

So, with a light heart, he considers the other Company portraits in the file.

Two immortals. One is a drone, a Literature Preservationist designated Lewis. The other is an Executive Cla.s.s Facilitator whose promising career has been oddly derailed. He is designated Victor. Lewis smiles from his portrait. Victor does not.

Lewis is fair-haired, handsome, clean-shaven. There is determination in his features. There is an earnestness that verges on absurdity. There is no doubt he is plucky. Also thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Fool, thinks Labienus.

Victor has white skin, red hair. His neat beard is sharply pointed, his mustaches even more so. His green eyes are as unreadable in their expression as a cat's. He has posed stiffly, formally. He looks reserved. Unapproachable. Labienus smiles at his picture, almost with real affection.

Hitching his chair closer to the desk, he turns his attention to the doc.u.ments. Some appear to be transcripts of testimony. He has compiled them over long years, with terrific patience. A lucky find; a careful decryption of private journal entries; an interview with an ancient mortal that had cost him nothing more than a bottle of good wine and a sympathetic-seeming ear.

The topmost stack looks fabulously old, vellum inscribed in brown ink, uncials decorated here and there with flowers and strange tiny marginalia. It is written in a mixture of sixth-century Gaelic and Latin.

The edges crumble as Labienus reads.

When my name was Eogan, I lived in the community at Malinmhor, having gladly embraced my vows for the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I thought I had the best of the bargain. No heavier tool to lift than a pen cut from the quill of a gray goose, and the beauty of the red and green and yellow and black inks was a pleasure for my eyes, and how smooth were the sheets of fine white calfskin waiting for me! And how sweet to refresh myself with the Gospel that I copied, there in the little scriptorium, when I could still believe in it!

What a world of grace fell away from me when that pagan man came among us, three weeks before Beltane in the five hundred and seventh year since Christ's birth.

But no blame to him, poor man; G.o.d knows he had the worst of it. The truth is the trouble started well beforehand, and I knew nothing of it, happy and alone as I worked. So blinded with the beauty I made by day, that I never noticed the frightened faces when I joined my brothers and sisters for supper in the refectory of evenings.

And we didn't speak aloud much-it was a monastery, after all-nor would I have believed in the trouble, had anyone explained it to me. If our community lay in the shadow of the high bare hill Dun Govaun, what harm in that? No rational Christian had anything to fear from a mound of dead stone. If pagans had feared the place in the past, if they'd told stories of babies carried off or folk seduced by small demons-well, they were pagans, weren't they? At the mercy of darkness, as we brothers and sisters in Christ were not. Though I remember being awakened by the screams of a brother in his nightmares, I do remember that much now; but it signified nothing to me at the time.

When the pagan came, it was neither by day nor night but in the long hour between when the light had not faded, and when we neither fasted nor fed but sat at table with our meal not yet begun, and our brother the Cook had just brought out the oat-kettle, and Liath our Abbess was neither silent nor speaking, for she had just drawn in her breath to lead the grace. The pagans believe such in-between moments make doorways into the next world, you know.

In that unlucky moment the door opened indeed and our brother the Porter led in a young man in very fine clothes, which were perhaps too large for him.

"This is the guest Christ has sent us, who comes requiring meat and shelter for the night," said the Porter, and he withdrew to his duty. The man stood surveying us all with a pleasant face; and from the dust on his rich garments it was plain he'd traveled far, and from the harp he bore, slung in its case on his back, plain his profession of fili, of chronicler after the manner of the heathens. I thought he looked too young to have learned so much lore as those people are required to know.

"A blessing on this table," he said, and our Abbess corrected him: "Christ's blessing on this table, and all here."

"Oh, by all means," he replied mildly, and smiled at the Abbess.

He dined, then, with us, and revealed that his name was Lewis, that he was indeed a pagan well trained in his craft of relating the old histories, and had come to offer us a bargain: he would give us all he carried in his head, the wonder-tales and songs of the old pagan heroes, in return for food and lodging. Our Abbess looked across at me with the eye of a cat after a mouse, for both she and I collected these tales avidly (though we did not believe them at all).

So the bargain was made, with the understanding that the pagan should observe no pagan rites whilst among us, especially on the old feast day that was three weeks off, but attend Ma.s.s daily instead. To which Lewis agreed, readily, without anger. After dining he was shown the bath-house, and then the guest-house, and he took his leave of us for the evening with the urbane manners of a king's son, which we thought he must be.

When it grew light next day he met me in the scriptorium, for the purpose of fulfilling his end of the agreement, and settled himself on a stone seat. He took his harp from its case, and frowned to himself as he tuned it. I will record here that Lewis was small-boned, high-browed, with fine clean-shaven features and fair hair, though it did not curl. His eyes were just the color of the sky in that twilight time in which he had come.

When he had tuned the strings to his satisfaction, he said to me: "Brother Eogan, tell me first what tales you have collected thus far, from other travelers, so I waste no time in repeating them. Have you The Cattle-raid of Cooley?"

"Yes, in good truth, we have."

"Have you The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel?"

"Yes, in good truth, we have."

"Would you mind awfully if we switched to Latin for this?" he inquired in that tongue. "It'll go quicker."

"Fair enough," I replied in the same language, and we conversed in Latin after that.

"What about the Finn MacCool stories? Any of those?"

"Well, we did get a couple of songs about him from an old man who stayed here last winter," I told him, noting that my red ink had sat too long and giving it a shake to mix it. "I don't think his memory was very reliable, though."

"Ah! Well, I've got the complete cycle. Sounds like a good place to begin, wouldn't you say?" He grinned and fished a horn plectrum from the pouch at his belt.

"Let's hear it," I replied, and poised my pen over the lovely white page. Dear G.o.d, how I've missed writing, just the physical act of moving the pen, making the ink flow!

He had hours and hours of material on the Fenians, tales I'd never heard before as well as the two stories the old man had given us (and as I'd suspected, the poor creature had garbled them badly). I myself was born Christian, and since my parents were zealous converts, they'd always frowned on their children listening to the old pagan stories. I knew all about Patrick and Moses and Noah, but I could never hear about Cuchulainn or Deirdre until I became a monk. Ironic, isn't it?

Lewis recounted the whole cycle to me, all about Finn growing up in the forest because evil King Goll had killed his father, so the boy was raised in secret by a pair of druid women, who conjured a wolf-spirit to be his protector. Spellbinding! Lewis was a good storyteller, too. He had a mobile, expressive face, elegant gestures, and a nice light baritone. My pen swept across the page.

We didn't even take a break until I got a paralyzing fit of writer's cramp, just after the part where Finn calls his father's ghost from the Land of the Blessed, and the old chief gives him advice. I got up and walked back and forth in the narrow stone room, swinging my arms, while Lewis took the opportunity to pour himself a cup of watered mead from the pitcher we'd brought.

He sipped and held the cup out to the light. "My goodness, who's your Beekeeper? That's great!"

"A former pagan," I admitted. "n.o.body else quite gets the formula right, I must confess. You see, that's part of the Abbess's plan here-there's so much that's worth preserving in Eire, so much wisdom, such traditions, so much great literature! If only it wasn't pagan, you see. Not that I expect you to agree with me on that point, of course, and no offense intended-"

"No, no." Lewis waved his hand. "Quite all right. I understand perfectly-"

"But these stories, for example. It's absolutely criminal that the druids didn't bother to write any of them down. You must realize that in another generation or two they'll be completely forgotten, don't you? And, though we won't be the poorer for losing our false G.o.ds, it really would be too bad to lose Finn."

"My thoughts exactly." Lewis nodded. "That's one of the reasons I'm here, to tell you the truth. I can see the writing on the wall, and my profession doesn't really encourage me to write on it myself-so to speak-but ..." He set down his harp and leaned forward. "I have rather a daring proposition for you."

I stopped pacing. "It's nothing sinful, I trust."

"Not at all, at least not by your standards. Look, it's simply this: I'm a bit more than a simple bard. I have some religious credentials as well, in my religion I mean. I was trained for certain rituals I'll never be able to perform nowadays, with so few of us left."

"But you're a young man," I said doubtfully. "I thought most of the vates had died off years ago."

"I'm older than I look." Was he evading my gaze, there, for just a second? "In any case: I'm quite resigned to the druids being dead as last year's mutton, but it kills the heart in me to know their more, ah, arcane knowledge will be lost. The sciences. The sacred rites, the ceremonies and all that. Now, I couldn't ever tell you Christians certain things, being sworn to secrecy, but if you happened to overhear me talking to myself-say if we happened to be sitting in the same room at the time-and you happened to write down what you heard, well, it wouldn't be a sin for you, would it?"

"I'm not so sure about that." I sat to consider it. "Preserving heathen history and legends is one thing. Preserving a false faith ... I seem to remember the Blessed Patrick stating quite clearly that druid books ought to be burned, not preserved."

He sighed and had another sip of mead. "I know what you're thinking: what if this is some pagan plot to keep the Old Religion going? I'll tell you what you can do: once you've made my Codex Druidae, you can bury it in a lead casket ten feet below the floor of this room. I'll swear any oath you like that it'll remain there, undisturbed, unseen for a thousand years and more."

"It's a strange request ..." I tugged at my beard. "Still, I know how I'd feel in your position. Couldn't we finish this cycle of stories about Finn MacCool first?"

"Naturally." He brightened up, setting down his mead and reaching for the harp. "How's your cramp? Feel up to some white-knuckle iambic pentameter? I was just about to come to the part where Finn's woman is stolen by demons of darkness ..."

"Finn married?" I grabbed up my pen.

"Not exactly. It was like this ..."

So we went on like that, he and I, and the hours lengthened into days. From sunrise until midday we'd work on the stories of Finn, or the tale of Conchobar's quest for the Four Blind Boys, or other fascinating material, with me copying fast in simple brown ink, leaving margins and capitals to be elaborated on and illuminated later. If the weather was fair we'd move outdoors, where the light was better and Lewis wouldn't have to keep retuning his strings. Sometimes the Abbess would come to us, unable to restrain her desire, and read over my shoulder or listen with her eyes closed, to hear about Fergus and the Seal-Woman. But in the afternoons, when she had gone, we'd go inside and work on the Codex Druidae, the forbidden book. The actual text took no more than a week or so to rough in. I planned to spend more time on the illumination.

I must say, any reservations I had melted away once I actually heard the so-called sacred knowledge of my ancestors. No wonder they'd kept it secret! Most of it was utter nonsense. I remember one absurd formula for producing children out of nature, by combining tiny bits of the parents' flesh in a gla.s.s dish. Some of their astronomy was fairly good, at least. They knew, like Pythagoras, that the Earth was a sphere, but they had this notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun! In fact, they thought-but it's just too stupid to waste the ink in telling over again. I confess I was laughing as I took most of it down. No wonder Lewis had abandoned the priestly caste to be a bard.

And in any case, he was a kindly young man, and I couldn't imagine him shutting unfortunate criminals into wicker cages and burning them alive. Not that he wouldn't have been strong enough; one time he took his turn at serving the evening meal, though as a guest he needn't have, and I saw him hoist the great fish-cauldron on his shoulder and bear it from the kitchen as though it weighed nothing. I watched him mend a set of beads for one of the sisters one evening at table, prizing and closing the bronze links with powerful clever fingers. And his speech was graceful and witty, making us laugh so, it was as if Christ Himself were there telling jokes.

This happy time lasted until Beltane Eve. On that afternoon, Lewis and I were sitting out of doors, and white thorn blossoms were dropping on the calfskin from the bush above me, so I kept having to brush them away as I took down Lewis's account of the Daughter of the King Under the Waves. Suddenly he stopped. A second later the birds, who had been singing delightfully, stopped, too. "Liath is coming," Lewis announced, raising one eyebrow, "and something's wrong-"

When she came into view I saw he was right, for her face was dark with unhappiness. She wasted no time, but came straight to Lewis, and in blunt Gaelic addressed him: "Pagan man, have you any knowledge of the ways of the sidhe?"

His mouth hung open a second in surprise. "I have," he said.

"Good, for we have need of it. Brother Crimthann has been stolen away from us by the sidhe of Dun Govaun, and must be rescued."

If Finn and all his host had suddenly leaped alive from my page, I could not have been more bewildered. Fairy folk? Fairy folk kidnapping one of us? But the sidhe were mere heathen fables, they didn't exist! And I saw that Lewis was no less amazed, though courteously he asked her to explain.

It seemed that Brother Crimthann, who was one of the younger members of our community, had been troubled lately with bad dreams. In his dreams, the sidhe came into the cell where he slept, as easily as if they walked through smoke, and bore him away with them to their palace under Dun Govaun. There he suffered torments of fleshly temptation, but by morning woke in his cell again with no sign of the ordeal of his dreams: not even the guilty emission of a young man so tempted. He had sworn that the sidhe were not beautiful, either, but pale and small and silent.

At this I saw Lewis start forward, like a hound catching a scent. "Now that is a strange thing, truly," he told the Abbess.

"Strange, but not so strange as this: Brother Crimthann did not come to prayers this morning, nor later, nor was he to be found in his cell. But Brother Aidan's hut adjoins his, and Brother Aidan swears that in the third hour of the night the moon shone into his cell, bright enough to flood between the stone c.h.i.n.ks; and as you are a pagan and learned in these things I need not tell you that there was no moon last night." The Abbess looked at him grimly. "Now, this is a pagan matter. The Blessed Patrick gave us prayers against the sidhe, but I never read anywhere that fairy women carried him away from his holy bed. Can you go to them, then, and win our brother back with that fine pagan talk of yours? Bring him alive out of Dun Govaun, and Christ will bless you for it, druid though you are."

"I will," said Lewis, "and gladly, good Mother. Only tell me where to find Dun Govaun, and I'll go there straight."

"Brother Eogan knows," she told him, and gave me a Look of Order. "Eogan, show him the way." "This is really marvelous," Lewis said as we pushed our way through the heather. "Tell me, Eogan, have you ever noticed this sort of thing going on before? Strange lights in the sky, unusual marking in the fields, cattle inexplicably slaughtered in grotesque ways? Any nocturnal goings-on in your cell?"

"Certainly not," I replied stiffly. "I sleep soundly at night, at least since I stopped having to shave my tonsure. I daresay Brother Crimthann will, too, when he's past thirty and not quite so easily tempted by the flesh."

"Cheer up! Baldness looks good on some men. You think that's all it is, then, with Brother Crimthann? He's been sneaking out at night to visit a girl?" Lewis leapt nimbly up on a rock and peered ahead, shading his eyes with his hand. "Ah. That must be the famous Dun Govaun."

"That's it." I regarded it sourly. "The supposed hall of the fairies. Absolutely ridiculous! It's a completely smooth and solid hill. Not even a rabbit hole on it anywhere. As for Brother Crimthann, he's simply run away, if you ask me. That's the trouble with these boys who get all inflamed by the idea of monastic life before they've had a chance to see what sleeping with a woman's like." I bent to untangle a branch of gorse from the leg of my trews. "Chast.i.ty seems like such a wonderful idea until the first time someone actually tempts them, and then they go all to pieces. Hysteria, night sweats, and Satan everywhere they look."

"Not one of the better innovations of Christianity, if you'll pardon my saying so," Lewis remarked as we hurried on. "But let's climb Dun Govaun. I'm eager to see if anything's up there. There are, er ... certain stories amongst my people, of creatures like the ones Brother Crimthann described. We've never been able to verify anything, of course. So what do you think the place is? Not a natural hill, at any rate."

"Nothing more than the burial mound of some heathen king," I said dismissively; but I glanced upward, for by then we had come to the base of the great hill, and I felt my opinion curdle in my heart. Perhaps a giant heathen king.

"There's a place in Britain-" began Lewis, and then he stopped still in his tracks. He seemed to be listening intently to something. His face lit up. He began to laugh.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned," he said, in rather poor taste under the circ.u.mstances, I thought. "They're here, Eogan! There are actually living things inside this hill."

"How do you know?" I was unable to see what should amuse him so.

"Let's say it's druidical wisdom," he replied, chuckling, and began to pace rapidly along the side of the hill. "Yes-there should be a concealed opening, and I'll bet it's just about here-"

"What in Christ's name are you babbling about?" I demanded, running after him until he suddenly vanished before my astounded eyes. I froze, staring at empty gra.s.s and windy sky. To my horror his bright voice went right on.

"Here it is, no doubt about it. Eogan? What's the matter? Oh." His head appeared in midair, a vision no less terrifying. He must have seen how frightened I was, for in a soothing voice he said: "This is only a conjurer's trick, man. There's magic in your Bible, isn't there? Moses and Aaron working spells against the Pharaoh's magicians? And this is less than that, believe me."

"But-" I said, and that was when I felt my faith first s.h.i.+fting under me. All this while, I had believed that Christ's coming had scoured sorcery out of the world, as the sunrise dispels darkness. Though the old stories might be good to tell and listen to, and the days of the heroes sentimentally longed after, no such wonders existed any more, if indeed they ever had.

Yet my logic had been flawed, hadn't it? For the old prophets did work magic, Christ Himself had done so, and where in Scripture did it say that we lived in an orderly and rational world?

Lewis extended a disembodied hand, in a gesture meant to calm me. "Come around here, and I'll show you."

Christ forgive me, I went to see. As I approached, the rest of him appeared whole and sound, and I saw the wavering stripes of shadow he was pointing out so proudly. They were like the blurs that used to dance before my eyes when I'd worked too late by one candle. "Now, watch this," he told me, and closed his eyes. I heard a humming sound and a snap. The mouth of a cave yawned before us, black dark and deep. I made the Sign of the Cross against all evil.

"What did you do?"

"I just-broke the spell. In a manner of speaking. I'll bet Brother Crimthann's in there." Lewis's smile faded as he considered the thing he'd revealed to me. "Good Lord, a real abduction. What should we do now, do you suppose?"

"You-you said you'd rescue him!" I sputtered.

"I did, didn't I?" He looked unhappy. "You wait here, then. I'll be back as soon as I can." To my astonishment, he turned without the least hesitation and proceeded down into the darkness, and I realized he had no weapon with him larger than a penknife. I watched his back dwindling into the shadows a moment before I ran after him, calling on the power of Christ to s.h.i.+eld me.

"Oh-" He half turned as I caught hold of his cloak. "That's all right, you don't have to come. Really, you'll be safer out there. I can see in the dark, had I mentioned that?"

"No," I replied, groping after him. There were strange smells in that darkness, but I didn't want to be thought a coward; and wasn't the power of Christ greater than anything that might be down there? It must be, mustn't it? "I'll bear you company."

"Well, that's thoughtful of you. Be careful, Eogan; the pa.s.sageway's getting narrower, and there's some kind of threshold we're about to cross. Here. Step up with me now-"

Then it was as though lightning had come down from Heaven into that black place, and I was struck and thrown like a spark from a smith's anvil.

Hours and hours later I heard Lewis saying, "Well, that was certainly stupid."

I sat up painfully, feeling as though I'd been beaten. We lay in halfdarkness, in an angle of corridor lined by panes of milk-white gla.s.s that glowed softly. Behind us, set into the floor, was a simple metal grating.

"Eogan," said Lewis, and he sounded almost embarra.s.sed. "Eogan, there are people coming for us, and I'm afraid I have a problem."