The Celtic Mirror Read online

  In the not too distant past, Morgan realized, ships had stopped there, unloading cargo, taking on fuel, perhaps bringing exotic treasures to the people of Connach’s unseen city. He could easily identify the broken remains of crumbled warehouses and shattered docks. Gigantic iron rings rusted in granite walls, and an interrupted road traced its way from the broken stone wharves to the cliff tops. Everything was in ruin, scattered, demolished as if blasted by warring gods. Even though the destruction was not recent and much of the warehouse area obscured under jungle growth, Morgan could still discern blackened traces of fire above vacuous windows.

  “All of this happened just after my birth,” Connach told him. “My father was the commander of the Nomas. His ship was anchored near this spot when the great Vik raid struck. Those who survived the day say that the heat from the burning was so great, that the water actually boiled, cooking the fish living in the harbor.” He paused, looking intently over the stern rail into the dark waters below. “Beneath us lies the Nomas with my father still in command. She is permanently joined with the Vik P-Boat she rammed in her final moment.

  “Verulamium was once a great trading city, but incessant war and the final collapse of the mainland Free States ended all that.” He slammed his fist down on the cockpit coaming. “But we are far from finished!” he shouted hotly, answered only by echoes that yelled back from vacant ruins. “Far from finished!” he shrieked again, startling gulls into flight. He stretched his arms wide to include the entire PacSail flotilla of six, Mirror-transfigured, yachtsmen’s toys. “We will extract a heavy payment for what they’ve done to my people.” Connach’s eyes were muddy with hatred, and Morgan felt definite stirrings of alarm. Then, a sudden, unnatural calm smoothed Connach’s face.

  “Don’t think me mad, Kerry. I’ve had to be satisfied with planning for our counterstroke for too long. Now I’m almost ready to put it into effect.”

  Realizing that he was part of Connach’s master plan for revenge—an unasked part – Morgan grew angry again. “What the hell is going on here?” the man Connach had betrayed asked reasonably.

  Connach’s eyes slipped away from Morgan’s. “I want you to go to war again, to help me liberate my brothers on the Mainland and keep Reged free. I’m asking you to offer your life for another people’s freedom.”

  “Oh, no, Ian! I already had that bullshit offer from the Great White Father in Washington once before. I didn’t care for the working conditions then or his “no win” policy. I think I’ll pass on your kind offer today.” What does Ian think war is, anyway: good, clean, heroic fun where only the bad guys get hurt? He decided to say no more, and he shook his head at Connach who seemed deflated by Morgan’s rapid rejection. A movement overhead caught his eye and he turned forward.

  A hook was carefully lowered from a long metal cable that reached down from the rocky heights. Controlled by two horse-drawn vehicles on opposing sides, the cable with its oscillating attachment had been positioned over Tanaris’ bow.

  Connach’s face registered relief. “The hook will take us home, my friend. There, you can reflect upon my request without pressure. What you see in Verulamium might well be more persuasive than anything I can say to you right now.”

  Morgan nodded agreement, knowing that nothing Connach could say to him would convince him to become a hired gunman for any government again. With the orcas, it had been a simple case of self-defense. No volunteering, he told himself. Never again.

  One of Connach’s seamen captured the swinging crescent with a practiced hand and snapped it into a heavy line already secured around a Samson post and rove under the bow roller. Seconds later, Tanaris surged gently forward, towed by the two land-bound tugs far above her.

  “This channel is too treacherous for sailing craft from this point inland. It’s also one of our other defenses. The Vik bastards would have finished us long ago if this wasn’t an impossible channel.”

  Morgan had to admit that Connach had told the truth about the dangers posed by the fjord. As the boat was pulled through the narrow walls, strong surges sucked at the hull, and screaming winds blasted Tanaris from deep, shadowed canyons, strong enough to knock her down. Yet, as if charmed against Nature’s demons, the braided cable held the embattled boat to the center of the channel and out of danger.

  “If this cable ever broke,” Connach gestured over his head, “or if one of the two operators was drunk, we’d be so much junk, washed out to sea by the next tide.” The lightly spoken words fell like stones on Morgan’s soul.

  Unexpectedly, the fjord twisted through a severe right angle and the boat was coaxed through gargantuan steel doors than were bolted into the rock walls. They were taller than Tanaris’s fifty-foot tall mast and were thicker than a weight lifter’s thigh. Morgan stared questioningly at Connach.

  “Another major defense,” the Celt explained, sounding like a half-bored tour guide. Morgan could tell, however, that his reaction was being carefully analyzed. He tried hard not to appear interested, and failed.

  “Isn’t that a rather drastic way of keeping your enemies out? Wouldn’t another set of submerged cables work as effectively?”

  “Sure, if the Viks were our only problems. These gates were constructed long before the recent wars began. It would be a blessing for my people if we could protect both our outer and inner harbors with gates alone.”

  No longer pretending indifference, Morgan chaffed at the crumb-scattering way Connach offered information. “For once, you bastard, level with me completely. If you aren’t keeping a human enemy out with your version of the China Wall, why was it built?”

  “Tsunamis,” Connach answered, apparently seriously.

  Morgan snorted derisively, growing very tired of Connach and the disaster movie set that passed for his corner of the universe. “You mention tsunamis as if they come as regularly as the rainy season. You must think I’m a little simple, Ian.”

  “On your world, the giant waves are not all that common,” he admitted, “but here, they pose a very real and frequent danger to this world and this city.”

  Morgan tiredly shook his head in disbelief. One of us is crazy, but no matter which one of us it is, I’m in deep shit, now.

  “Once, after the Disasters, a tsunami almost obliterated Verulamium. There had been sufficient warning from the Watchers for the city to be evacuated, but the shipping caught in mid-channel was entirely destroyed. Only those vessels which had been able to clear harbor and gain the open seas were saved.”

  “Sure, I can see that happening once or twice in a lifetime in any coastal city close to seismic activity. But gates?”

  It was Connach’s turn to shake his head. “Kerry,” he said patiently. “You don’t understand yet. Soon you will.”

  I had damned well better understand soon, Morgan thought. Very soon.

  Fifteen minutes later, the boat passed through a second set of massive gates and the channel widened. Verulamium spread out before Morgan’s astonished gaze as magnificent and as exotic as any place that he had seen in the years he had spent beating about his own world.

  A city of columns and of triumphal arches, of statues and of red-tiled roofs filled a bowl-shaped basin from the water’s edge to the foothills of a surrounding mountain range. Morgan’s mind flashed with images of Pompeii, Timgad. No! He rejected the comparison. In Verulamium, flags flew, babies cried, trees reached above three-story buildings, and the air was filled with the pealing of bells...alive, alive!

  The boat that bore him to the city of Connach’s imagination was guided into one of two channels that ran between long stone quays. On shore, every available space was packed with people. Some were bearing garlands of bright flowers; some struggled with stone jugs and jars; some were playing musical instruments, beating on drums. After being so long at sea, Morgan’s head swam at the sensory impact.

  They were the most beautiful people he had ever seen.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They were very tall. Most of the men approached on
e hundred eighty centimeters or more in height, and the women were nearly as tall as their men. The majority were slender and the color of burnished oak. Here and there Morgan sighted a blond or a redhead like Ian, glowing embers on a dark branch, but most were raven-haired and darkly complected. Except for the half-naked dockworkers, most of the men wore plaid cloaks caught at the right shoulder with gold, silver, or enameled pins. A handful carried the cinglium and dagger.

  The young women were staggeringly beautiful in Morgan’s opinion and bore themselves with a natural dignity and grace that transcended the fleeting veneer of physical comeliness. Old and young adopted a mode of dress which was gathered at the breast by braided cinglia, fastened at the waist by metal clips, and which lay open at the sides, revealing agonizing glimpses of soft breast and velvet thigh to the dazzled sailor.

  Mooring lines, tossed fore and aft by the Tanaris’ crewmen, were caught and snubbed by ready hands, male and female. Tanaris strained against the cleated lines, and then eased back. She was home. The crowd hovered: colorful, noisy, expectant.

  It was then that Morgan detected a significant movement in the mass of humanity at the shore end of the quay. Someone of importance apparently approached the docks. As the falling back and flowing together of spectators neared his position, he was able to watch the personages cutting through the clamorous gathering like intruders through a flock of sheep. One was a shepherd: the other, a wolf.

  The one Morgan dubbed the “shepherd” was taller than most of the spectators on the dock by half a head, not angular and awkward, but broad-shouldered and powerful with the look of a seasoned fighter about him. Despite his silvered hair and beard, the old man’s arms argued for a still-youthful strength. His eyes, deep-set in a bronzed face, blazed forth, incongruously ice blue, and were fixed steadily upon the moored vessel. He, too, wore the cinglium, but one fashioned entirely of a gold fabric and with a buckle even more elaborate than Connach’s.

  Morgan disliked the “wolf” on sight. The man thrust a hostile and cadaverous face through a cowl which shaded his head and covered his shoulders. A full beard half-buried a pectoral, four-spoked wheel, which hung from the man’s neck. The man’s outer garment was a bone white tunic, which swept to the ground, dirtying the hem. He carried a wooden staff which resembled a Roman standard but which was surmounted by the Celtic wheel instead of the eagle of the Caesars.

  Morgan instinctively recognized the angry man to be a holy man or priest of some kind but could take no comfort from it. The priest’s face radiated a savagery that made Morgan want to withdraw to the lee of the cabin to escape a building holy wind. Then the priest began to spit unmistakable curses at Tanaris like bullets—attempting to sink her with words. The short hairs rose on the back of Morgan’s neck as he sensed a large portion of the attack directed at him personally, feeling an actual threat with the primitive portion of his brain that rarely failed him. Then, as precipitously as he had begun, the white-clad predator halted his assault and turned his back on Morgan and the boat, standing as if chiseled from granite. Tanaris, to Morgan’s great relief, remained afloat and rolled gently between the docks, evidently favored by the gods called upon to scuttle her; however, the people nearest the priest had fallen back and formed an uncomfortable pocket of quiet in the babble that filled the waterfront.

  Connach and the older man continued their unabashed embrace and pointedly ignored the seething divine. Ian Connach looked more genuinely happy than Morgan had ever seen him, and the older man he hugged matched Connach’s happiness grin for grin.

  When the two men separated, Connach waved excitedly to Morgan. “Come ashore, Kerry! I want you to meet my grandfather!”

  Laughing more with the release of tension than with joy, Morgan jumped to the dock as the old one moved vigorously forward to meet him, right hand raised, palm turned outward. Morgan imitated the gesture to the ancient’s obvious delight then touched his callused palm to the other’s as he had seen happening between men on the docks. Connach stood close by, nodding his approval.

  “Welcome to our city,” the old man’s resonant voice boomed, and then hesitated for a brief moment, “Mister Morcant.”

  “That’s all the English he knows, Kerry. So just touch his palm again, smile, and look respectful. He commands and expects respect in this tormented land.”

  Connach moved to the prepossessing elder’s side and crinkled his eyes in amusement at Morgan’s automatic obedience. He then ignored Morgan again and resumed an animated conversation with his grandfather, and Morgan, forgotten for the moment, turned his own back on Connach to watch Tanaris plucked from the water in the four-armed grasp of a track-guided retrieval carriage. Fascinated, Morgan followed her dripping and graceless progress onto land until she was swallowed by a lofty stone structure—keel, extended mast and all. He speculated that the remaining boats would be similarly dry-docked, rolling up the incline like cars in a mechanized wash—one of the unmourned victims of the recent Resource Conservation edicts.

  Verulamium was a paradox to him with horse-drawn vehicles on the cliff-tops and highly sophisticated machinery at dockside. The master of the futuristic Mirror and Le Fay’s electronic marvels stood near him, dressed like a Gaelic warrior readied to battle Imperial legions. Prepared for further mystery, Morgan studied the assembly closely, trying to unravel the tangled skein which Connach had thrown about him and had used to draw him here. Involuntarily, his eyes were drawn as if by a sort of magic to a single figure, which was singular in the maelstrom of humanity.

  The young woman waited at the shore end of the quay, garbed in a similar fashion as the malevolent priest but with her robe tied under the breast in the manner apparently favored by the women of Verulamium. Those who had come to celebrate the little fleet’s safe return swirled around her, hurrying from the city to greet old friends or to glimpse the stranger, surging upstream and through those already departing. She endured the ebb and flow without visible emotion or expression, and it was only when she at last discerned Connach that she moved at all. It was a small movement. She smiled. Morgan felt his chest constrict in response to that smile; his heart pounded uncontrollably. The puerile rush of desire for a woman he had never seen before seen and whose features he could even then barely discern stunned him. He was unable to reason the sensations away and was certain that Connach would note the adolescent tremors that shook his middle-aged body. Morgan never considered himself one of West Harbor’s Lotharios, but with Kendra he had been no celibate either.

  He tried breathing through his nose and exhaling through his mouth. It had calmed him on jungle patrols; it failed him now.

  When Connach and his grandfather moved shoreward, Morgan followed woodenly, selfconsciously. After half a hundred steps he could not remember taking, he stood before her and watched—hot, unreasoning jealousy burning up his neck and face—as her sleeves slid back and softly-muscled arms encircled Connach’s own neck, and full, unpainted lips crushed against the Captain’s. Nothing was said for a few suspended moments, but Morgan flinched inwardly as the dignified elder smiled benevolently at the two beautiful children who embraced and shed tears without shame.

  Morgan despaired.

  Then the man who had once been counted as Morgan’s friend grinned and took the sailor by the arm. Morgan was pulled to face the hooded female whose eyes were nearly level with his, dark and wide with excitement. Apart from that small sign, her face was carefully expressionless, like that of a player on stage. Another actor in this damned theater, he thought.

  “Kerry,” Connach said, beaming a bridegroom grin, unmindful of Morgan’s patently agitated emotional state. “I’d like you to meet the only other English-speaking native of this world, Brigid, my sister.”

  Morgan’s unrestrained feelings again rocketed off on a euphoric roller coaster ride as if he were a green adolescent. Never had he felt that way over a woman at any time in his life—not with Kendra, not even at the beginning of their affair. Powerful washes of raw feeling were re
ndering him vulnerable, bewildered; yet in her steady answering gaze he could detect no response or acknowledgment of his certainly obvious admiration. The smile she gave to him was merely polite and contained no encouragement at all. Even that lack had no dampening effect upon him. Like a wounded bull in an arena, he had been overwhelmed and did not understand how.

  Through a muffled rush of blood in his ears he could hear fragments only of the conversation around him. “...Better take him to the bachelors’ quarters and get him set up.”

  He felt Pierson move to his side as Dreamer II rolled up the incline, shedding water like blood.

  “Bunk him in Castillo’s quarters for tonight,” Connach ordered quietly, evidently still not noting Morgan’s confused state. How strange, Morgan thought. I’ve just experienced an explosive, one-sided relationship with my former best friend’s sister and no one sees—Ian, the old man, not even her. He drew a ragged, resigned breath. The air smelled suggestively of flowers grown in secret places, and he knew it was the scent that she wore. He also knew that he had gone utterly mad, and after little more than a week at sea! He then understood clearly why nineteenth-century whalers had become notorious for rape and mayhem after six months and more between landfalls.

  “Snap out of it, Kerry!” Connach exposed his big, even teeth in a smile. “Pierson will lead you to your temporary quarters now. You can rest up and soak some of that salt out of your pores. I’ll send a man to you in a few hours. He’ll bring you to the House of Connach, my grandfather’s home, for the evening meal.”

  Morgan could only dumbly nod acceptance; Dale Pierson and his petite Korean wife, Kim, pulled him from the known hazards of the sea into the mysterious depths of the alien city.