The Complete Compleat Enchanter (67 page)

“It will not save him,” said Nera. “Come and be killed, Gael.” He swung up his sword.

Shea just barely parried the downstroke. The man was strong as a horse, and had a good deal of skill in the use of his clumsy weapon. For several panting minutes the weapons clanged; Shea had to step back, and back again, and there were appreciative murmurs from the audience.

Finally, Nera, showing a certain shortness of breath and visibly growing restive, shouted: “You juggling Greek!” took a step backward and wound up for a two-handed overhead cut, intended to beat down his opponent’s blade by sheer power. Instantly Shea executed the maneuver known as an advance-thrust—dangerous against a fencer, but hardly a barbarian like this. He hopped forward, right foot first, and shot his arm out straight. The point went right into Nera’s chest.

Shea’s intention was to jerk the blade loose with a twist to one side to avoid the downcoming slash. But the point stuck between his enemy’s ribs, and, in the instant it failed to yield, Nera’s blade, weakened and wavering, came down on Shea’s left shoulder. He felt the sting of steel and in the same moment the sword came loose as Nera folded up wordlessly.

“You’re hurt!” cried Belphebe. “Let me loose!”

“Just a flesh wound,” said Shea. “Do I win, King Briun?”

“Loose the woman,” said the fairy king, and tugged at his beard. “Indeed, and you do. A great bar you may be, but you are also a hero and champion, and it is our rule that you take his place. You will be wanting his head for the pillars of the house you will have.”

“Listen, King,” said Shea. “I don’t want to be a champion, and I’m not a liar. I can prove it. And I’ve got obligations. I really come from a land as far from the land of the Gaels as it is from Tir na n-Og and, if I don’t get back there soon, I’m going to be in trouble.”

“Miach!” called the King. “Is it the truth he is telling?”

The druid stepped forward, said, “Fetch me a bowl of water,” and when it was brought, instructed Shea to dip a finger in it. Then he made a few finger passes, murmuring to himself, and looked up.

“It’s of the opinion I am,” he said, “that this Mac Shea has obligations elsewhere, and if he fails to fulfil them, a most unfavorable geas would come upon him.”

“We may as well be comfortable over a mug of beer in deciding these questions,” said the King. “We command you to follow us.”

Belphebe had been dabbing at Shea’s shoulder. Now she caught his hand and they went in together. The big sword was awkward, and they had taken his scabbard as well, but he clung to it anyway. When they were inside, and King Briun had seated himself again, he said, “This is a hard case, and requires thinking, but before we give judgment, we must know what there is to know. Now, what is this of a new magic?”

“It’s called sympathetic magic,” said Shea. “I can show Miach how to do it, but I don’t know the old tongue, so he’ll have to help me. You see—I’ve been trying to get back to my own place, and I can’t do it because of that.” He went on to explain about the court of Maev and Ailill, and the necessity of rescuing Pete and getting back with him. “Now,” he said, “if someone will give me a little clay or wax, I’ll show you how sympathetic magic is done.”

Miach came forward and leaned over with interest, as someone brought a handful of damp clay to Shea, who placed it on a piece of wood and formed it into a rather crude and shapeless likeness of the seated King. “I’m going to do a spell to make him rise,” said Shea, “and I’m afraid the effect will be too heavy if you don’t chant. So when I start moving with my hands, you sing.”

“It shall be done,” said Miach.

A verse or two of Shelley ought to make a good rising spell. Shea went over it in his head, then bent down and took hold of the piece of wood with one hand, while he murmured the words and with the other began to make the passes. He lifted the piece of wood. Miach’s chant rose.

So did a shriek from the audience. Simultaneously an intolerable weight developed on Shea’s arm, a crack zigzagged across the floor, and he half-turned his head in time to see that the royal palace and all its contents were going up like an elevator, already past the lower branches of the trees, with one of the spectators clinging desperately to the doorsill by his fingertips.

Shea stopped his passes and hastily began repeating the last line backward, lowering his piece of wood. The palace came down with a jar that sent things tumbling from the walls and piled the audience in a yelling heap. Miach looked dazed.

“I’m sorry,” began Shea. “I . . .”

Patting his crown back into position, King Briun said, “Is it ruining us entirely you would be?”

Miach said: “O King, it is my opinion that this Mac Shea has done no more than was asked, and that this is a very beautiful and powerful magic.”

“And you could remove the geas on this woman and return the pair to their own place?”

“On the wings of the wild swan.”

“Then hear our judgment.” King Briun stretched forth a hand. “It is the command of the gods on all of us to help others fulfill their obligations, and this we will do. Yet it is equally true that a doing should be met with a doing in return, and this we cannot escape. Now, Mac Shea has killed our champion, and does not wish to take his place. There must be a balance against this, and we set it that it shall be this wonder-working bow of his wife’s which if it is as good as his magic, will surely shoot holes through the walls of the mountains.”

He paused and Shea nodded. The man could be quite reasonable after all.

“Secondly,” Briun went on, “there is the matter of removing his wife’s geas. Against this we will place the teaching of this new magic to our druid. Now respecting the transfer of these two to their own country, there is no counterweight, and it is our judgment that is should be paid for by having Mac Shea undertake to rid us of the sinech, since it is so troublesome a monster and he is so great a champion and magician.”

“Just a minute,” said Shea. “That doesn’t help us find Pete or get him back, and we’ll be in trouble if we don’t. And we really ought to do something for Cuchulainn. Maev is going through with her plan against him.”

“We would most willingly help you in this matter, but you have no other prices to pay.”

Miach said, “Yet there is a way to accomplish all they ask, save the matter of the man Pete, in the finding of whom I have no power.”

Briun said, “You will be telling us about it, then.”

“Touching the geas,” said Miach. “Since it is one that was imposed, and not a thing natural, it can be lifted at the place and in the presence of the druid who laid it, and it will be needful for me to accompany these two to the place where it was put on. Touching the sinech, it is so dreadful a monster than even Mac Shea will be hard put against it by his own strength. Therefore let us lend him the great invincible sword of Nuada, which is forbidden to us by its geas, but which he will be able to handle without trouble, at all. Then he can lend it to this hero Cuchulainn, who will make a mighty slaughter of the Connachta we detest, and as I will be with the sword and Mac Shea, I can see that it is returned.”

The King leaned his chin on one hand and frowned for a minute. Then he said, “It is our command that this be done as you advise.”

Nine

Miach was an apt pupil. At the third try he succeeded in making a man he did not like break out in a series of beautiful yellow splotches, and he was so delighted with the result that he promised Shea for the hunting of the sinech not only the sword of Nuada, but the enchanted shoes of Iubdan, that would enable him to walk on water. He explained that the reason for the overcharge in Shea’s magic was that the spells were in the wrong tongue; but, as the magic wouldn’t work at all without a spell of some kind and Shea didn’t have time to learn another language, this was not much help.

About the sinech itself he was more encouraging. He did a series of divinations with bowls of water and blackthorn twigs. Although Shea himself did not know enough of the magic of this continuum to make out anything but a confused and cloudy movement below the clear surface of the bowl, Miach assured him that in coming to this world of legendary Ireland, he had himself acquired a geas that would not allow his release until he had accomplished something that would alter the pattern of the continuum itself.

“Now tell me, Mac Shea,” he said, “was it not so in the other lands you visited? For I see by my divinations that you have visited many.”

Shea, thinking of how he had helped break up the chapter of magicians in Faerie and rescued his wife from the Saracens of the
Orlando Furioso,
was forced to agree.

“It is just as I am telling you, for sure,” said Miach. “And I am thinking that this geas has been with you since the day you were born without your ever knowing it. We all of us have them, we do, just as I have one that keeps me from eating pig’s liver, and a good man it is that does not have trouble with his geas.”

Belphebe looked up from the arrow she was shaping. Her bow was a success, but finding seasoned material from which to build shafts was a problem. “Still, master druid,” she said, “it is no less than a problem to us that we may return to our own place late, and without our friend Pete. For this would place us deeply in trouble.”

“Now I would not be worrying about that at all, at all,” said Miach. “For the nature of a geas is that once it is accomplished, it gives you no more trouble at all. And the time you are spending in the country of the Sidhe will be no more than a minute in the time of your own land, so that you need not be troubling until you are back among the Gaels.”

“That’s a break,” said Shea. “Only I wish I could do something about Pete.”

“Unless I can see him, my divination will not work on him at all,” said Miach. “And now I am thinking it is time for you to try the shoes. King Fergus of Rury was eat up by this same sinech because he did not know how to use them, or another pair like them.”

He accompanied Shea to one of the smaller lakes, not haunted by sinechs, and the latter stepped out cautiously from the shore. The shoes sank a little, forming a meniscus around them, but they seemed to give the lakewater beneath a jellylike consistency just strong enough to support him. A regular walking motion foiled to yield good results. He found he had to skate along and he knew that, if he tripped over a wave, the result would be unfortunate. The shoes would not keep the rest of him from breaking through the surface and, once submerged, would keep his head down. But he found he could work up quite a good speed and practiced making hairpin turns until night put an end to the operation.

###

Next morning they went out in a procession to Loch Gara, the haunt of the monster, with King Briun, Belphebe, and the assorted warriors of the Tuatha De Danaan. The latter had spears, but they did not look as though they would be much help. Two or three of them fell out and sat under trees to compose poems, and the rest were a dreamy-eyed lot.

Miach murmured a druid spell, unwrapped the sword of Nuada, and handed it to Shea. It was better balanced than his own broadsword, coming down to a beautiful laurel-leaf point. As Shea swung it appreciatively, the blade began to ripple with light, as though there were some source of it within the steel itself.

He looked around. “Look, King,” he said. “I’m going to try to do this smart. If you’ll cut down that small tree there, then hitch a rope to the top of that other tree beside it. We’ll bend down the second tree . . .”

Under his direction the Tuatha did away with one tree and bent the other down by a rope running to the stump of the first. This rope continued on, Shea holding the rest of it in a coil. “Ready?” he called.

“We are that,” said King Briun. Belphebe took up her shooting stance, with a row of arrows in the ground beside her.

Shea skated well out in the lake, paying out the rope, which dragged in the water behind him. The monster seemed in no hurry to put in an appearance.

“Hey!” called Shea. “Where are you, sinech? Come on out, Loch Ness!”

As if in answer, the still surface of the lake broke like a shattered mirror some fifty yards away. Through the surface there appeared something black and rubbery, which vanished and appeared again, much closer. The sinech was moving towards him at a speed which did credit to its muscles.

Shea gripped the rope with both hands and shouted, “Let her go!”

The little figures on shore moved around, and there was a tremendous tug on the rope. The men had untied the tackle, so that the bent tree sprang upright. The pull on the rope sent Shea skidding shoreward as though he were water skiing behind a motorboat. An arrow went past him and then another. Shea began to slow down, then picked up again as a squad of King Briun’s soldiers took hold of the rope and ran inland with it as fast as they could. His theory was that the sinech would ground, and in that condition could be dispatched by a combination of himself, the soldiers with spears, and Belphebe’s arrows.

But the soldiers on the rope did not yank hard enough to take up all the slack before Shea slowed down almost to a stop. Still twenty yards from shore, he could see the sandy bottom below him, looking a mere yard down.

Behind him he heard the water boiling and swishing under the urge of the sinech’s progress. Shea risked a glance over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of a creature somewhat like a mosasaur, with flippers along its sides. Just behind the pointed, lizardlike head that reared from the water, a pair of arrows projected. Another had driven into its cheekbone, evidently aimed for the eye.

The instant of looking back brought Shea’s foot into contact with a boulder that lay with perhaps an inch projecting from the surface. Over it and down he went, head first into the water of the marge. The sinech’s jaws snapped like a closing bank-vault door on empty air, while Shea’s head drove down until his face ploughed into the sand of the bottom. His eyes open under the water, he could see nothing but clouds of sand stirred up by the animal’s passage. The water swished around him as the sinech came in contact with solid ground and threshed frantically in its efforts to make progress.