The World Above the Sky (3 page)

It's a noisy place, the sea, the creature thought.

Intrigued, Eugainia drew near. No words flowed between Eugainia and the Selkie; words were unnecessary. Thought and feeling shot back and forth, fluid as the sea in which they hovered, face to face.

You are a seal but not a seal.

Yes. And I am woman but not a woman.

You are a Selkie, a Spirit Seal, a human woman in sealskin form.

I am. And you are a spirit dislodged from your human body. Which stands wide-eyed and still, gripping the rail of the vessel above.

I am. You've been following My Lord Henry's fleet these last nine months—

No. I've been leading.

I know your kind, but not your name.

Garathia.

Garathia. My human mother.

Yes. Just so.

Heaven's radiance, diffused by clear, cold saltwater, dappled the Spirit Seal's mottled head, and glistened in her eyes. A Selkie's gift to womankind is this: Spirit Seals accommodate another's soul, without displacing or jeopardizing her own. Garathia rolled to her back, exposing the cream yellow hair of her sleek belly. She opened herself to her daughter. Eugainia flowed inside her seal mother where she settled, separate but connected. The old womb-link was re-established. Eugainia felt safe for the first time in years.

With a lift of her chin and tilt of her head Garathia rose, describing an elegant arc. Through Garathia's eyes, Eugainia saw fish stretching in all directions filling three watery dimensions, league upon league. They slipped inside a vast shoal of brown-backed, white-bellied fish, their fat flanks mottled grey, each fish with a single fleshy “whisker,” a barbel, dangling from its lower jaw.

Codfish, Eugainia thought. These are the fabled shoals of northern cod.

A particular delight when I'm in this form, Daughter. Splendid white flesh. Succulent, oily livers....Delicious.

Garathia seized a fat-bellied cod and, with a sharp twist of her head, eviscerated the roe-laden female. The writhing carcass drifted downward trailing curtains of blood and squandered roe. Garathia swallowed the liver whole. Eugainia rode the dizzying burst of energy.

On
Reclamation
, Morgase checked Eugainia's pulse. Strong and regular. The first time the rapture overtook Eugainia, she was twelve months old. Those unschooled in the ways of the Holy Blood diagnosed a kind of infantile catatonia. Morgase and Prince Henry gave thanks: this endlessly questing spirit was the sign they awaited—the mark of the Royal and Holy Blood.

Morgase taught Eugainia to remain alert on her “travels,” to record and remember, to receive, not repel, the unknown. The ecstatic astonishment and the great, great distance were there, as always, when the rapture was upon her. The moment the rapture overtook her, she had suffered the first contraction of labour. Eugainia's pupils were dilated, her torso rigid with pain. Her body stood in stasis, awaiting her spirit's return from its journey in the World Below the Sea.

The swirling mass of cod above Garathia and Eugainia blocked surface light. Enough fish, thought disembodied Eugainia, to feed starving Europe until the end of time.

Garathia and Eugainia sped away. It seemed to Eugainia her mother flew rather than swam toward shore. Eugainia, thrilled, laughed.

What is more bird than bird itself?

A seal in flight, Garathia proposed.

And what, Mother, is the sea but the dreaming mind of the world?

Yes. Just so. Mountain and rock are the earth's bones. The soil is her flesh. Water her blood. Her churning gut is the earth's molten core. Rivers of flowing lava, my dear, forever consume, digest—renew the bone, flesh and blood of us all.

And the air above, still as it is today?

In the end, Garathia supposed, the human spirit, fluid though it may be, is more like breath than water. Wind or calm, cold or warm, it's always the same. The earth's breath unites the dreaming sea and the great dome of heaven—

Where the mysteries are revealed. Heaven and earth united. The human soul undivided—

The Two Made One.

Yes.

Exalting in the knowledge, Garathia sped upward, broke the surface, exhaled and, swift as thought at the top of her arc, filled her lungs with air. There was delight in the smack of her belly on the surface. When she dove and breached again, there was no need to flip, as she did, mid-air—aside from the joy of it. She revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees before slicing the surface without raising a ripple. A diminishing trail of bubbles marked her descent. She resumed her course. Together in one sleek body mother and daughter sped toward shore.

Have you been to the centre of the earth, Mother?

I have.

And…?

It was hot...very hot.

What form did you take?

I went as myself. It was a mistake. Next time, I go as lightning.

Oh?

I'm determined to penetrate the sphere at the core. It pulls me to it with great force.

What is it made of, the earth's core? Eugainia asked.

Nothing I'd encountered before. Neither solid nor liquid. Inconceivably dense. It's polished to prophetic brilliance by this...swirling mass that surrounds it. Radiant heat, as much energy as matter, sears without burning. As does fire. In a dream. It's hot beyond imagination or description.

This core. It's in my dreams too. Why does it haunt us?

Patience, Child. It is only destiny. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.

Garathia rose toward the surface. Her slow, tightening spiral parted the curtain of fish. In the way of all seals, her head broke the surface muzzle first. Clear membranes protecting her eyes against the salt slid up and back. Her nostril slits, inverted commas pinched tight against the depths, flexed then opened. An outward rush of fishy breath rippled the surface. The inhalation was measured. Her sensitive nostrils assessed the air above the sea. Her little ears accustomed themselves to the shocking silence. Garathia slipped below the surface, sped to still shallower water where she braced a vertical stance, her hind flippers splayed, her body tense, her head a glistening sphere mirrored in the still surface.

With her mother's ears, Eugainia heard cries of battle. Through her mother's eyes, she watched a screaming bundle of human flesh clothed in fur tumble down the face of the cliff. The falling man struck out-cropped rocks with thud after bone-cracking thud. Puffins, terns and guillemots took wing, circled and dove, screaming their outrage, their hatchlings crushed by the tumbling body, or knocked to the exposed beach below—most crippled, some mortally wounded.

The man lay splayed, a heap of broken bone and failing flesh. His astonished lungs refused, despite desperate attempts to inhale, ever to inflate again.

Garathia and Eugainia inched closer. Garathia's belly scraped the round grey stones.

The dying man's face, arms and legs were scarlet, not with blood, but with red ochre.

A single word flashed through mother and daughter's shared consciousness: Skreling. One of the ferocious figures of the Old Norse sagas lay broken on the beach. No one knew the Skrelings' origins, though some suspected them to be hybrids born of the worst of the North Atlantic's rape-and-pillage cultures. The peaceful Beothic, native to the newfound land, feared the feral Skreling more than death itself. They had managed to contain the wretched mongrels to the south and eastern shores at great cost.

Black-backed gulls swooped, snatched bewildered chicks from the beach, flapped seaward, the naked hatchlings writhing in their beaks. The more seasoned gulls lit within pecking distance of the greater prize, the broken Skreling's eyes.

Eugainia's soul recoiled. Monstrous in repute and imagination, the dying man on the beach before her was human after all, vulnerable to fear and pain as any. The Skreling's last vision became Garathia's and, thereby, her daughter's. The man's raw terror whetted the gulls' appetites. Their macabre, flap-and-squawk dance astonished the Skreling. How was it he couldn't flap his arms and drive them away? His only defence became a lure: the cold, hard stare of the dying man, directed with all the force he could muster, served only to inflame their dark desire. Their heads cocked, soulless yellow eyes peering, the gulls shuffled nearer, advancing and retreating uncertain when—not where—to jab. Before the light faded from the poor man's eyes, the flesh feast began.

Mother. This cannot be.

What, child?

We came to build our New Arcadia on this grim rock?

This isn't the world you and the Holy Child seek, Eugainia. I'll direct your Lord Protector to Vinland, south and west across the great gulf, past Apekwit, the red isle of summer feasting, to the Smoking Mountain.

I can't bear another day on that stinking, grinding ship.

The passage will be swift. You'll find a gentle welcome among the people there, I promise.

Gunn's mass of red hair blazed in the setting sun. He pushed back his helmet, glanced down the cliff. The seal sculling near the shore caught but couldn't hold his attention. The battered corpse of his most recent victim disappeared amid the squawk and flap below.

Gunn towered, helmet, head and shoulders, above the tallest of his tall men. To the half-sized Skreling awaiting his next move, this was not a man like them, but a savage force of nature, an evil spirit. And a gift from the sea. To a man, they imagined Gunn's throat slit, his body dismembered, his bones burned, his liver fed to their dogs, its power theirs. Skreling technology had advanced over the centuries as the Scots and Viking assaults increased. The wealth of metal skin plied from an invader's body transformed their lives. Death made life easy. His chain mail they'd convert to cooking baskets. His breastplate would be hammered flat, fitted with hide rope to make a sledge their women would load with meat, then haul back to the winter camp. Shoulder and knee flaps and forged codpiece would be pounded and folded, pounded and folded again into spear tips and arrowheads.

Gunn had other plans for his body and its metal shell. He advanced inland, his broadsword a windmill in full gust. His six surviving men scrambled down the cliff face, trailed by Sir Athol, himself pursued by thirty infuriated red-ochred Skrelings.

At the water's edge Eugainia stared through her Selkie mother's eyes at the gull-ravaged corpse. A sharp sting of recognition jolted Eugainia. She felt rage, repulsion, but also great compassion. And fear. A soul untethered—hers—might, in misguided compassion, follow the panicked soul of the Skreling to certain darkness.

Aboard
Reclamation
, Henry and Morgase, one on either side of Eugainia's inert body, were torn between the danger faced by their friends onshore, and their Lady's sudden gasp of distress. One look into her eyes confirmed the worst: Eugainia was in mortal danger. This separation of spirit and body had gone on far too long.

Sir Athol held the gap between two granite rocks at the bottom of the cliff. A wedged boulder restricted passage to one stooping figure at a time. Skrelings poured through the narrow gap. One after the other they came. One after the other they died. The Skreling flood spilled over the boulder. Athol was ignored. The greater prize to Skreling eyes was his metal-skinned men, and the hide-and-pitch boat they dragged to the water's edge. Sir Athol unleashed an ungodly roar. Gunn's last outburst had preceded the death of eight of the Skreling brothers. Two dozen ochred faces turned up on the beach and stared. Sir Athol unbuckled the side-straps of his breastplate, which clanged to the stones on the beach. With one hand, he pulled his chain-mail vest and coarse wool undershirt over his head. He slid both down his sword arm to the blade itself. He whirled the sword in a great circle, slung mail and shirt off its tip toward the Skrelings. One advanced, then retreated, both attracted and repelled by the undershirt's bearish stench. Athol unwrapped his great kilt, wound it around his forearm. Naked but for his great boots he stood, fearless and alone, his barrel chest expanded, its red hair matted with the sweat of battle and unwashed months at sea. His calf and thigh muscles tensed, then relaxed. He circled his head left then right, loosening the muscles of his shoulders and neck. His testicles, with minds of their own, drew snug to his body, less likely targets of stone-flake knives and sharp Skreling teeth. He exhaled. He filled his lungs. The ancient Celtish cry of war rose from a rumble low in his belly and burst forth in deep-throated whoops, bellows and growls.

The Skrelings cocked their heads, like dogs listening to music, intrigued, but unable to make sense of the fantastic sounds.

“Stand where you are. I say, stand where you are, murderous little cutthroats,” he ordered. “Touch one man or that boat and by God above, in the name of His Holy Daughter, whom I love and serve, I will carve you, I say, I will carve you into quarters and feed you to the sea wolves.”

A cry of rage rose among the Skrelings. They flooded the beach. In the manner of naked Celts in the flush of battle, Sir Athol's manhood rose to full menace. Tree-trunk legs pumping, Sir Athol broke into a full, roaring run. His broadsword held aloft mimicked, in angle and intent, its fleshy prototype below.