CHAPTER 20

The first that Va and Elenya saw of An Rinn was a boy up a tree. The boy disappeared down behind the leeside of the hill and was lost to sight.

‘We can expect a welcome, if not news.’ Va strode out with renewed vigour, leaving Elenya in his wake.

‘This Kenyan–this rumour of a Kenyan–has led us halfway across the world, and six months later we’re in Aeire, the arse-end of nowhere. But it’s all the same to you, isn’t it?’

Va declined to reply.

She shouted: ‘You’re a bigger gossipmonger than the whores at court!’

‘We’re closer now than we’ve ever been,’ he called back.

A stone skittered past him, kicked by Elenya. It fell into the roadside ditch. He stopped and waited for her, his black habit flapping and snapping in the wind as she adjusted her small pack.

He, of course, had nothing. Poverty was one of his vows.

‘God has led us here,’ he said when she had caught up.

‘You’ve led us here, and don’t pretend otherwise.’

When they crested the hill, they could see the rough huts and natural harbour that made up An Rinn. The wind blew in their faces, and they caught hints of wood smoke and cured fish, seaweed and soil. On the flank of the hill towards the headland was a stone church–a single nave with a tower, as was the style in these lands.

‘Look,’ said Va. ‘There, at the end of those houses.’

Four sails processed round above the turfed roofs.

Va picked up the hem of his habit and started to run down the dirt track. The machine slowly revealed itself between walls and trees and the folds in the ground until it was laid bare before him. He stood at the foot of one of its huge supporting beams and looked up at it, amazed and appalled in equal measure.

Under the machine was a woman with a sack of grain, feeding it a handful at a time into the ever-turning millstone. She had her back to him, until the boy they had seen climb down from the tree slipped out from behind a building and gestured to her.

She frowned at him, said something in her barbarian language that sounded like a scold, but the boy just waved more frantically. Eventually, with a long-suffering shrug of her shoulders, she glanced behind her.

She stopped. She put the sack down. She stood and wiped floury hands on her dress.

Va finally noticed that he was being stared at, but all he could think about was the soft swoosh of the sails and the low clatter of the wheel as it turned over his head.

‘What manner of abomination is this?’ he muttered. ‘This has to be the Kenyan’s doing.’ He shook himself violently to break the spell, and the woman jumped back with a shriek.

She shouted at him; tried to shoo him away as if he was a chicken.

‘Who built this?’ he raved. ‘How can you bear to have it here?’

Neither could understand the other. Va was demanding answers, the woman was barking questions, and soon they were surrounded by the villagers, who had no idea what to make of any of it.

‘Out of the way, get out of the way, will you? Nice going, your holiness.’ Elenya pushed into the circle. She looked up at the windmill and patted one of the uprights. ‘This is new.’

‘The Kenyan, I swear it.’

‘I’ll ask.’ She pulled back her hood and cleared her throat. Her beauty commanded silence. ‘I bring greetings from Mother Russia,’ she said in their language.

The woman who had been having the pointless argument with Va sniffed. ‘Who’s she? And who are you? And who, in the Good God’s name, is this rough thing? If he’s supposed to be a monk, he’s like none I’ve ever seen before. What sort of cross is that? What’s he saying? Is he mad, or drunk?’ She leaned closer to smell his breath, forcing Va to step back against the crowd.

He was pushed from behind to the accompaniment of jeering and hooting.

‘I apologize for Brother Va’s rude and abrupt manner.’ Elenya kicked him to get him to stand still, but she succeeded only in making him dance away from the blow. ‘Yes, he is mad, though he’s harmless enough. Mother Russia is a land far to the south and west, across the sea and beyond the Franks.’

The locals looked at one another: naFraince marked the edge of their knowledge.

‘We’re looking for a man–a man who stole something from the brother. This device tells us that he’s been here.’

‘You mean Solomon Akisi,’ said the woman.

Va was listening carefully. Now his enemy had a name.

‘Is he a Kenyan?’ asked Elenya.

‘Sent from the mighty Kenyan empire, as he was fond of saying. Gave us greeting in the name of his king–emperor–whatever he called him.’

‘Good woman, we need to speak to him.’

‘He’s not here,’ she snapped. ‘The King of Coirc has him, and good riddance, I say.’

‘Why, what did he do?’

‘Filled our heads with dreams and foolishness, that’s what he did, him and his natural philosophy. I said no good would come of it, and I was right. These simpletons were too easily deceived, but—’

‘Rose naMoira, it was you who took him in!’ said an outraged voice.

‘That was common courtesy, macFinn, and I won’t have you saying otherwise.’ Rose singled out a man in the front row and jabbed him in the chest. ‘You’re never one for sharing in the good times, but as soon as something goes wrong, you’re hanging around your neighbours’ thresholds complaining and bellyaching until they give you what you want just to make you go away.’ macFinn snorted like a pig. ‘How dare you, you harpy, you morrigan! I keep a well-stocked house and don’t you forget it.’

‘Silence! In Patrick’s name, silence!’

The crowd parted, and a man in a skirt stalked forward.

‘Rory, you’re back.’

‘Well now, Mici, so I am.’ The man’s face was pinched and white. He stopped, looked at Va and Elenya, and almost turned away. Then he looked back. ‘Who are these people?’

‘They’ve come for Akisi,’ said Rose.

‘Don’t mention that name in my presence again. I won’t have it, you hear?’ He bowed his head and rubbed at his beard. His hand came away as a clenched fist. ‘I went to Kilkenny, asked the abbot there if they’d seen Father Padroig. They had too. He spent a week with the brothers at the abbey, and then they sent him on his way, back to us. I asked in the villages on the Kilkenny road if they remembered seeing a white-haired priest pass through, and they all did.’ macFinn interrupted. ‘Where is he then, macShiel?’

‘He’s dead, man! He’s dead. I found his body in the ditch, half eaten by crows, less than a day’s walk from here.’ Rory macShiel’s voice caught in his throat and he crouched down, letting fat tears fall into the dirt.

A dark-haired woman squeezed through. She touched macShiel on the arm, and he clung to her as if she was life itself.

‘It was Akisi, damn him to hell!’

Elenya pulled Va to one side and whispered to him in Rus: ‘We’ve arrived at a very bad time. The Kenyan seems to have killed this village’s priest some time in the past. Now he’s with the local king, in some place called Coirc.’

‘We’ll have to find out where this Coirc is,’ said Va. No one was paying them any attention. ‘So he’s a murderer as well as a thief.’

‘We don’t know that. We don’t even know if it was him who took the books from you.’

Va growled in frustration. ‘We’re so close. I can smell it on the wind.’

‘That’s just shit and fish guts.’ Elenya examined the mill as the crowd gyred away along the main street, macShiel at its centre. A few of the men glanced back at her before being pulled away. A boy hung back, the same boy who’d spotted them earlier. ‘Young man, come here a moment. What’s your name?’

‘Brendan macFinn, if it please you, mistress.’

‘We’re both very sorry for the loss of your priest, Brendan. We’d very much like to help in any way we can.’

Brendan macFinn alternated between looking at the ground and staring into Elenya’s eyes. ‘Yes, mistress. I don’t know. I could ask my father.’

‘In a minute, perhaps. Who’s the man who went to look for the priest?’

‘Rory macShiel. He builds boats, and he built this too. He and Master Akisi worked together.’

‘Master Akisi?’ Elenya arched an eyebrow, but smiled as well.

Young macFinn clutched at his heart as if he could feel it melting. ‘I was apprenticed to him for a while. He had secrets, mistress. All sorts of secrets. He could make and bend light, design machines, and he had this book, a big silver book. I sneaked a peek inside once. The pictures moved!’

‘Thank you, Brendan.’

‘But then it all went wrong. There was a battle at An Cobh, and Master Akisi chose the wrong side, and I got captured, and the king’s men came for him, and he killed one of them, and they took him away.’ He gasped for breath. ‘And now I’ve found out he killed Father Padroig, and I don’t know what to think any more.’

‘It’ll be all right.’ She held him at arm’s length, a hand on each shoulder.

Brendan macFinn couldn’t quite believe that such a beautiful creature was actually touching him, speaking kindly to him. ‘Yes, mistress.’

‘Now off you go. Thank you.’

The boy reeled away as if stunned, and Elenya turned to a sour-faced Va.

‘You do the child no favours,’ he said.

‘Just because you’re immune to my charm doesn’t mean I haven’t still got it. Akisi has a book–the boy says he saw one volume. One, mind; not all twelve.’

‘He’ll know where the others are.’

‘If he’s still alive. He could have been executed by now. He killed a king’s man when they came to claim him.’

Va bit at his hand. ‘I pray it isn’t so.’

‘Do you think your prayers are going to be more use than these people’s? They’ve lost their priest to this man, and they’ll be calling down bloody vengeance on his head.’ Elenya shook her head. ‘Why should God listen to you and not to them?’

‘Because if he’s dead, the trail goes cold and I can’t get all the books back, and it’s God’s will that I do.’ Va slammed the palm of his hand hard against the wood of the mill, causing the whole structure to sing. ‘Anything else is just wrong.’

‘So what will you do?’

‘Wait until these savages have come to their senses. Where’s bread? Where’s salt? It’s not like this in Mother Russia.’ Va stormed down to the harbour and sat down heavily on a creel.

The little fishing boats bobbed in time with the waves, and his eye was inevitably drawn to one in particular that had something strange hanging from the mast. The last time he’d seen something similar, it had been on a Caliphate warship.

He’d burned them all, and everyone on board.

At the back of his mind the whispering accusations began, and grew as the tide came in until it filled his head with noise.

He had no hair to tear out. Instead, he threw himself down on the stony beach and battered the cobbles with his fists.

‘Va? Va, you have to stop. The man macShiel is here.’

He looked up from his supine position, panting. The tide had crept in and he was wet with sea and sand. macShiel asked Elenya a question, but indicated Va.

‘He wants to know what you were doing. A reply that doesn’t make him question your sanity any more than he does already would be welcome.’

‘Penance. Tell him my sins are many and great.’

She repeated the answer, and the kilted man seemed satisfied.

‘Ask him about that boat.’ Va pointed. ‘Is that the Kenyan’s doing?’ macShiel nodded. ‘It’s how they build them in his land. I have to admit, it is better: faster, more manoeuvrable. You can do things in it you can’t with a square sail.’

‘Tell it to naFraince. The leaky bucket we came here on wasn’t fit for a river.’ macShiel laughed, then remembered the dead priest. ‘He stole something from you.’

‘A book, one of a set. We know he has it–the boy’s seen it. It belongs to the patriarch of All Russia, and it’s my holy duty to take it back.’

‘Good luck then. The word I hear is that King Ardhal has paid the blood-price to the family of the man he killed here. If he now works for the king, you might have trouble.’

‘Did he really kill your priest?’ macShiel sucked air and blew out his cheeks. ‘Who else? Adding up the days, Father Padroig and Akisi’–he turned and spat–‘were on the road together. One of them didn’t arrive.’

Elenya interrupted herself. ‘All this talk is thirsty work.’ She gazed out to sea and said nothing more.

‘These are bad times, mistress, and we forget ourselves. We lose our manners as well as our self-respect. I can’t even raise men to get the father’s body.’

‘What did he say?’ said Va, and when Elenya finally told him, he got up. ‘I’ll go with him. I’ll have seen worse, smelled worse, done worse.’

‘That’s true enough, Va,’ she murmured. She relayed his offer. macShiel was genuinely moved that a stranger would help where his kinsmen would not. ‘Come and eat with me, and we’ll do what needs to be done later.’

They followed him through the village, past the curious, fearful and sometimes lustful stares. None of them said anything though, because it was all too different and no one was certain of anything any more.