Lion's Blood
By Steven Barnes
WARNER ASPECT
Copyright © 2002
Steven Barnes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-446-52668-1
Chapter One
15 Shawwal 1279 Higira
(April 4, 1863 Anno Domini)
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the Prophets.
MATTHEW 7:12
Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you; and reject
for others what you would reject for yourselves.
THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD
SPRING'S FIRST DAY WAS A WARM SWEET SONG, a time of companionable
silences and comfortably shared labor in Mahon O'Dere's coracle. The
boat's round woven sides bobbed gently in the Lady's arms. Aidan
O'Dere, eleven years old and the crannog's best swimmer, leaned
against the coracle's side, reveling in the river's timeless flow.
He studied the dark darting shadows of the fish as if they held the
secrets of the universe, his mind alternately racing and utterly
still.
Just now, his thoughts were of his father, Mahon, a lean, strong man
weathered brown by sun and wind. He pulled the nets all day without
tiring, best fisherman and fighter in the village bearing Aidan's
great-grandfather's name. Father and son were sculpted from the same
clay: blazing golden hair, crystal blue eyes, clean angled profiles.
His father stood a head and a half taller and twice as broad across
the shoulders, all of it good useful muscle and well-proportioned
bone.
The sun was a molten eye, gazing down from the heavens without
malice or mercy, unfettered by clouds. It baked against Aidan's
skin. In a few minutes he would dip beneath the Lady's waves again,
seeking the shelter of her embrace.
Mahon lifted his flute to his lips and coaxed it softly, gently, as
if afraid of scaring away the fish. His eyes glowed with humor.
"What have you, boyo?" his father asked, taking his pipe from his
lips. Aidan leaned farther out, pressing his thin arms against the
coracle's rim. He peered more carefully now, straining to see
through the chop. "Something shining in the water, Da."
The Lute River, usually referred to as the Lady, was clear as glass
here. Upstream a bit, clouds of silt from an inland mudslide
darkened her depths. Here, fed by a thousand eastern tributaries,
the waters had healed themselves, as if loathing the idea of gifting
the distant ocean with less than her best. The Lady's blue ribbon
had fed and nurtured the O'Deres for three hundred years.
Mahon gazed up at the sky, shielding his eyes with one broad hand.
"Well, it's a hot one. Maybe time for another dip?" Aidan needed no
further encouragement. He slipped off his rough wool shirt and
clambered over the side, careful not to tip the boat.
The water parted to receive him then closed over his head, sealing
away the music of air and bird and flute, replacing them with the
Lady's eternal rushing murmur. She was cool and bracing.
Aidan was a strong swimmer-half eel and half boy, his mother
Claimed-and oriented himself quickly in the water. Avoiding the nets
was easy if you kept your eyes open. It would be humiliating to be
caught in them; his father might be forced to draw him up and free
him by knife, possibly endangering the day's catch.
This didn't happen. It was the work of moments to locate the source
of the glittering he had glimpsed from above.
Aidan's heart quickened as his hands closed around his prize. For a
moment he floated there, suspended like some strange river creature,
the Lady's strong arms tugging at him, his bare feet clinging to a
rock for ballast.
The object that had caught his attention was a knife. Not just any
knife, though. Not some fisherman's blade tumbled overboard, but
something wholly alien to his experience.
It was gold, wreathed with gems about its handle, its two-hand
length of blade as gently curved as a shark's tooth. Young Aidan
found it so beautiful that he almost forgot the need for breath.
His aching lungs would no longer be denied. Gripping his prize
tightly, Aidan released the rock and kicked back toward the sun.
Sound and scent and taste inundated him as he held the blade high.
His father's strong arm clasped his, lifting Aidan from the river
with effortless ease. "What have you, boy?"
Aidan panted. His breathlessness owed more to excitement than lack
of air. "A knife, Da." He smoothed his fingers over its surface,
tracing every knob and etching. "A golden knife!"
Shadows flitted over Mahon O'Dere's face. The expression was darker
than mere curiosity, but before Aidan could put a name to the shade
it was gone. His father stretched out his arm. Reluctantly, Aidan
placed the blade in Mahon's calloused hand.
Mahon examined it, grunting. His mouth smiled, but his eyes remained
cautious. As his father wielded the blade with practiced grace,
Aidan was awed by the steel's formidable size, its graceful arc.
This was a knife forged for killing.
"Jewels, Da? And gold?" The dagger was a strange thing, a great
thing, and if it was genuine, then it would add to his family's
wealth, would increase their standing, could be traded for coin and
tools and cattle.
"I know this blade," his father said. Mahon's words seemed burdened
by an unusual weight and chill.
Disappointment was a sharper edge than the blade's own. "Then you
know who owns it?" Never had Aidan seen such a knife, not in the
crannog, nor in the villages upriver to the east. But his father had
traveled far, knew many things, and certainly if any man would
recognize such an oddity, it was Mahon O'Dere. But still his father
did not speak.
Etched along the blade's curved edge were squiggles and curlicues,
and things resembling the runes he had seen druids scratch in the
dirt at Festival. "What are the markings?" Aidan said. "Can I keep
it?"
Mahon thrust the knife under his leather belt and swatted playfully
at his son, forcing the boy to duck. "Unhitch the nets like I told
you," he said, "and we'll see."
Aidan grinned and jumped back overboard, swimming down to the
bottom, finding the anchor rocks they had heaved over the side some
five hours earlier. He pulled the slipknot then swam back as the net
began to rise. Dozens of silvery fish were caught in its web, fish
that would quiet grumbling bellies, or be traded for eggs, or straw
for thatched roofs.
The Lady's currents cooled his eyes as he watched the net rise
toward the light, drawn up by his father's strong arms. Aidan gazed
up at the coracle, and deep within him, in a place that lived beyond
ordinary thought and emotion, he had another vision of the knife.
It was held in a hand that was not his father's. It gleamed by
reflected firelight. And its edge was stained with crimson.
It was early evening by the time they returned to the crannog, their
island home. A stranger would find it hard to locate, hidden as it
was by reeds and carefully draped moss. The O'Dere crannog was set
at the edge of the lake, connected to the mainland by a gated bridge
of wood and earth. There the land was cultivated in corn and
carrots, with rectangular pens for cattle and sheep. The crannog
itself held a dozen houses with woven wooden walls and thatched
roofs. Great-grandfather Angus O'Dere and his brothers had built
this hidden place. They carried rocks from the forest out to the
lake, building the crannog up from the lake bed with rock and gravel
and clay. Here they raised their families. Here, for generations,
they had lived and loved and died.
The other boats were drifting in as well. Although the shadows were
lengthening, he could see that the faces were happy: the day's
fishing had been good. The sun was setting in the dense emerald
forest west of the crannog, tinting the sky copper.
His father hailed the other fishermen, sharing a jest here, a barbed
comment there. Most of the other boats were river craft, circular or
tub-shaped. Pulled tight at the dock were also several canoe-shaped
boats, oceangoing vessels, always an exciting sight. Aidan knew that
the ocean lay a day's journey west. He had been enthralled by
stories of it since boyhood but had never seen its endless rolling
surf. Soon, his father promised, they would take a trip downriver.
Aidan couldn't wait.
The fishermen were broad-chested and thick-armed, with yellow beards
and faces cracked by sun and long years of grueling work. Aidan's
own small face was still smooth as a girl's. He doubted he would
ever grow into such splendid manhood. When he expressed those
concerns to his father and mother they merely smiled and told him
stories of their own distant childhoods, of streams swum with
tireless strokes and green valleys run on youthful legs.
We, too, were children, they had told him in countless loving ways.
Childhood was long, and sweet. But childhood ends.
And while a certain wistful sadness lingered in that last thought,
there was joy as well. For it was only in the final days of
childhood that Mahon and Deirdre first glimpsed each other at Spring
Festival. Gentle Christian girl she had been, smitten by the wild
river lad, heir to the Chieftain's seat at his crannog's council.
Introductions had been made, families negotiating bride price and
reciprocal obligations.
And when Mahon and Deirdre finished with their reminiscence, they
would take hands one with the other, and share their secret smiles
with their only son. "You will grow," his mother often said. "And
faster than you would ever believe."
Still, watching his father work the oars, it was hard for Aidan to
imagine that he would ever be so wide and tall. When would the first
tiny hairs appear on his face? All that grew there was now a fine,
almost invisible down, no more than might be felt on his sister's
cheeks. He longed for the first sign of his awakening maturity, for
the day that he might take out his own coracle, weave his own net,
return triumphant with his own catch to an admiring village.
To the day, distant but quite real, that he himself might take the
Chieftain's seat.
Aidan's mother, Dierdre, stood on the dock, waiting for them. She
was strong herself, and beautiful-more beautiful, Aidan thought,
than any other woman in the
tuath.
"Deirdre," Mahon called up to her. "A spot of help with the line."
He threw the rope up to her, and she plucked it almost casually from
the air, her eyes never leaving him.
Something simmered in her gaze that made Aidan happy and a bit
uneasy at the same time. He slept in the same room with his parents
and had awakened more than once to hear low laughter and blankets
rustling in a steady, quickening rhythm. He was almost ready to ask
them just what they were doing. Almost, but not quite. He imagined
it had something to do with what he had seen dogs and sheep doing,
except that his parents had been face-to-face. There was something
worth knowing here. Something that he knew would make an eternal
difference in his life, something he sometimes suspected some of the
girls in the tuath already understood.
Without a wasted motion, his mother tied up the line, then extended
a hand to Mahon, who jumped up on the dock and gathered her in his
arms for a lusty kiss. "Fire's waiting for you," she said when they
came up for air.
"Good, woman," Mahon said happily. "My feet are cold." She tilted
her head sideways. "Is that all need's warming?" She said this last
part with her voice dropping, huskiness flowing into it like warm
honey. Aiden hopped up on the pier and tied up his own line,
carefully ignoring the exchange.
Or appearing to. He peeked around under his arm as Mahon placed one
fond hand on Deirdre's stomach. "Not enough to have one in the
oven?" he asked.
Her voice dropped even further, but Aidan could still make it out.
"Thought that you might want to poke her a bit, see if she's done."
"Did you, now?" He rubbed his nose against hers, slowly, then turned
back briskly to his son. "Get the catch in, lad."
"Yes, Da," he replied. His twin sister Nessa ran up behind him,
cotton smock almost impossibly clean, as if the dust and the dirt
never quite managed to touch her. Once Aidan and Nessa had been
exactly alike, but time and the eternal variance of male and female
were beginning to mold them. Aidan was browner, muscle just
beginning to tauten his arms. Nessa's hair was almost strawberry,
and she stood a thumb taller, but his father told him not to worry,
the coming summer would probably see an end to that.
Their spiritual upbringing had been a compromise. They had been
weaned on stories of both Jesus and the forest folk, the Tuatha de
Danann and the Nativity, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and that of
Ana, mother of the Irish gods. Nessa tended more toward the ways of
the Druids, Aidan more toward Christianity-it made for fine, fierce
family arguments.
But however much the siblings quarreled and bickered, the two shared
secrets that no other living creature would ever know: Where Aidan
hid the Druid stones won last Festival (since his mother wouldn't
let them in the house). Who had given Nessa her first kiss (Geirig,
the stonecutter's son). What bend in the Lady held the fattest
frogs, the ones who fairly jumped upon the nearest spear.
Nessa helped him heave the net up onto the dock and into their
wheeled cart. "Looks like a good pull," she said.
"Good weight in it," he said, strutting a bit. Together they could
just manage the load their father had drawn up with seemingly little
effort.
Every cook and carpenter seemed to be chattering as they pushed
their way toward the squat, thatched shape of the communal
smokehouse. "Thought you weren't coming back tonight," Nessa said.
"You'd miss the dancing and the games." She dropped her voice a bit.
"I think that Morgan would have cried."
"Go on, now." His voice mocked her, but beneath that facade lay
interest. Morgan ran faster than any of the other girls in the
crannog, her bare feet seeming almost to float above the ground. But
she ran just a little faster whenever Aidan chased her, and many of
the adults nodded and chuckled when they saw how he never caught
her, which frustrated him all the more. And more than once Mahon had
suggested that one day, Morgan might let him catch her after all.
He caught a glimpse of her as they trundled the net to the smoke
hut. She was in the midst of some chasing game, elusive and
feathery-swift as always. Heart-faced and red-haired, slender as
some forest creature, she hid behind a low peat wall, but he spied
her. She knew that he saw her, and raised a slender finger to her
lips, begging silence. His face grew long and stern, as if
considering whether or not to give her her wish. As the clutch of
pursuing boys and girls ran by he said nothing to betray her
position, and her thankful smile was radiant.
No words were said, but he was suddenly certain, and unexpectedly
pleased at the thought, that one day soon Morgan would indeed let
him catch her.
And then ...?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lion's Blood
by Steven Barnes
Copyright © 2002 by Steven Barnes.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.