Chapter 22 #3
Cleve watched Varrick reach out one hand, the long pale fingers so slender, so finely carved as if by a Rune master, no callouses, no sign of any labor, nothing but the purity of white flesh.
“Nearly eighteen years,” he said. “It’s a long time, Argana, a very long time.
Athol is sixteen, as you said, nearly a man grown.
He will revere his brother, Cleve, who has come back to us magically, as if transported by the netherworld gods.
Cleve will follow me now, not Athol. You understand that, do you not, Argana? ”
“Actually,” Cleve said to Varrick, “my escape and rescue was far more practical. The netherworld gods would have spat upon the dullness of it.” Aye, this man was his father, looking at him was like looking at his own image, and it surprised him deep inside, and was also frightening.
“By the winter solstice,” Varrick said, “your escape from Kiev with Lord Merrik and his lady, Laren, will reach even the limits of a skald’s talents. Tell me, Cleve, why did you not try to return here the moment you were free?”
“I’d forgotten everything until the dreams came to me.
Finally I remembered almost everything. I remember now that I was riding my pony when a man stopped me.
I was speaking to him when someone struck me hard on the head and left me for dead on the eastern side of Loch Ness.
A trader found me, nursed me back to health, named me Cleve, and sold me.
I remembered nothing of this life until the dreams began three years ago. ”
“Fetch me porridge, Argana,” Varrick said. “Mayhap I sent the dreams to you, Cleve. I have that power and it comes to me when I am not even aware of it.”
“If it pleases you to believe so, then why not?”
Argana gave Cleve a look that clearly told him to be careful, but she said nothing, merely nodded and walked to the huge fire pit whose flames burned sluggishly in the summer morning. The iron pot was huge, much larger than those on Hawkfell Island or at Malverne.
“How many people live at Kinloch?”
“There are nearly one hundred. My men produced many children after I married your mother. Aye, I can see it in your eyes. You are my son, yet you remember the man you believed was your father, an animal of a man, a man of little reason, really, something of a warrior, but without the brains to keep himself safe. I forced your mother, Cleve, forced her because I wanted her and she was bathing in the loch and I took her and you were the result. Since your father didn’t know of me, he saw your different colored eyes as a gift from the Dalriada god.
Ah, my porridge. Come and sit with me, Cleve.
We have much to discuss. I wish to hear all about the dreams.
Cleve looked toward Chessa, who was playing with Kiri, tossing her a small leather ball. Laren was speaking with Cayman, Merrik with Varrick’s soldiers who were working on their axes and swords.
Suddenly, with no warning, there was the sound of a great wind.
The huge wooden fortress actually shuddered with the force of the wind.
There was utter silence amongst the forty-odd men, women, and children in the great hall.
No one screamed, no one moved. All stood still as stones, as silent as the immense iron pot suspended from its chains.
Then there was the sound of churning water, so much water twisting and roiling, crashing against rocks and spuming surely hundreds of feet into the air, all that water bulging upward to surge over the fortress, which was surely wrong since the fortress sat high on a promontory.
Varrick rose from his beautifully carved oak chair, its arm posts serpents, but not the sea serpents of the stems of Viking warships.
These serpents were like none Cleve had ever seen before.
They were magical serpents, knowing serpents who seemed to stare back at the men who beheld them.
Varrick stepped up to the raised wooden dais and walked to the huge shuttered windows.
He flung them open. Cleve saw that he held some sort of odd-looking wooden stick in his hands, that now he was thrusting it upward, toward the open window.
What was that stick? How long had Varrick been holding it?
It was early morning, the sun had been bright one moment, the light mist burned off, yet now, it was black.
The light inside the fortress seemed to be sucked out through those shutters into that deep, forbidding blackness.
The wind was so powerful that Varrick had to hold onto the clawed post carved into the base of the shutters.
Cleve would swear that he saw huge sprays of water rise up before the darkness outside, then heave downward, splashing loudly, spuming outward.
Varrick turned his back to the open shutters and that eerie blackness. He raised his arms. The full sleeves of his black tunic billowed outward. He said, “I have called to Caldon. I must see what has happened. All will be well. Have no fear. Remain within. No one is to venture outside.”
He stepped off the dais, strode to the great front doors, and flung them open. He looked like a man of Cleve’s years, Chessa thought, watching him, certainly not a man twice Cleve’s age, certainly not the man who had fathered Cleve. He looked young and strong and agile as a goat.
Kiri pressed her face against Chessa’s neck, and whispered against her ear, “Varrick is very strange, Papa. What’s a Caldon?”
“Aye,” Chessa said slowly, “very strange. He likes it, Kiri, else he wouldn’t do it. I think Caldon is the name he’s given to the monster that lives in the loch.”
“But it’s morning, Papa. Why is it dark?”
“That,” Chessa said, “is something I can’t explain. Now, sweeting, let’s give your first papa some porridge. Surely all this will cease soon enough. Don’t be frightened.”
“You’re not afraid. Why?”
Chessa was thoughtful. “I’m not sure, but you’re right, sweeting, I’m not.
I think it’s all a fine performance, like the ones your aunt Laren gives when she tells us tales of monsters and heroes who become real to us when she weaves her magic.
And then her tales are over and the magic with them. It is the same with Varrick.”
“All right,” Kiri said. “I’m hungry again, Papa.”