Their presence discomfited her. The ship was a strange place, peopled by stranger people. More than ever she was becoming aware of how small her world had been. It had been one thing to deal with traders not unlike these on her own terms, in her own territory; it was quite another to be thrown in among them. On the one hand she recognised them as folk like any other – they breathed, ate, drank, shat, fucked and had the same needs and wants; on the other hand she found so little similarity between how they acted and how her own people behaved that she struggled to find any common ground. Even Teardrop seemed less bizarre than the Carthaginians. All of this, along with her new capabilities, hungers, feelings and the dreams that haunted her sleep, left Britha wondering if she hadn’t somehow walked into the Otherworld.
It was obvious the experience was strange to Fachtna and Teardrop as well, but if they didn’t have any more experience of life aboard a Carthaginian ship then they certainly seemed to have more knowledge. Both of the visitors from the Otherworld seemed to be enjoying the experience regardless of how strange it was for them.
Britha was annoyed by the presence of the god-slaves on board. She was sure they hadn’t paid as much as Fachtna had for their passage. She also thought Hanno had since had cause to regret the deal as all they did was pray. It seemed they required little sleep. Their prayers sounded like nonsense even with her new-found understanding of languages. Teardrop said that they tried to talk in a tongue that their mouths were not made for. What she did understand sounded like appeals for secrets or knowledge or madness or death, perhaps all at the same time.
They had exhorted the crew to join in their worship but the sailors thought them all northern madmen, believing that the cold air had driven them insane. This was a belief held particularly strongly by Germelqart, the quiet navigator. A life at sea meant that he understood bits of many languages, but Britha only ever heard him speak the language of Carthage, which she now found herself able to understand. When he spoke it was tersely, his voice carrying to give orders to the two banks of thirty rowers. The rowers were all free men with massive upper bodies, from all over the known southern world. The colour of their skin went from light brown to almost black like Kush. Hanno said that free men cost just as much to feed but were more likely to outrun pirates if they had a share of the cargo.
Germelqart had made it clear that he felt the god-slaves were a curse, that he felt it was madness to invite onto the boat those who wished only destruction for themselves. Britha agreed with the navigator, whose magic was to direct them from one place to the next even though the next was far and out of sight. It was strong magic that to Britha’s mind required a great deal of skill, Hanno’s sacrifices to their god, Dagon, notwithstanding. Britha knew that the god-slaves’ prayers to their Dark Man in the south would interfere with Germelquart’s own workings.
Even if they hadn’t seen what they had seen as they left the harbour, she still would not have wished to travel with them. Her last glimpse of the field of the dead haunted her. She could see them dressed in white or naked, swaying backwards and forwards like barley in the wind, while one of their number, once a warrior judging by his size, walked among them cutting throats. Harvesting them. Leaving them slumped together, their life’s blood turning the sea red at the edge of the shore. She could not conceive of why, harsh as it was, people would not want to cling to life for all they were worth, as beyond this life they were at the mercy of gods who only cared for themselves.
They had been at sea for weeks now, hugging the coast. They had seen river mouths and massive inlets. Britha thought they had been travelling for so long that they must have reached another land, but Hanno, laughing, had assured her that it was still the same island that she had grown up on.
They had passed cliffs. On some of them they had seen beacon fires burning, warning of their passing. On others they had seen henges, some of stone, more of wood. There had been other wooden henges, half submerged, on some of the beaches they had passed.
Much of the land was heavily wooded, a lot of it very flat and nearly always marshy near inlets or the mouths of rivers that rivalled the size of the Tatha or the Black River. What few villages they passed were either abandoned or destroyed. The black curraghs were so far ahead of them now that the remains were not even still smouldering.
All but the most inaccessible of the clifftop forts had suffered the same fate. They had either been abandoned by their shrewd, if cowardly – in Britha and Fachtna’s eyes – defenders, or they too had been destroyed, their walls pulled down, presumably by the giants.
At the larger settlements Hanno, Kush and some of the oarsmen went ashore for supplies and goods to trade back in their homeland. Britha was not happy with this and had told Hanno that this was not a good way to behave. Hanno had told her that had the people been there they would have traded, but they were not and he would be ruined if he returned with nothing to show for his voyage. Not to mention they needed supplies if they wanted to eat. He scoffed at the idea of leaving goods as payment. Sometimes Fachtna would go with them. Not to loot but to get a feel for the land.
They saw people very occasionally. Here and there they would see a warrior on horseback. The southrons were a tall, well-made people with no beards to speak of, but their dark hair was long, as were their moustaches, which they braided. Their mail and weapons looked fine from a distance, and their horses were much larger than the ponies they used in the north. Britha understood that their appearances were a futile show of force. These were chiefs, princes and champions who had come too late to save their people from Bress’s depredations. It looked like a rich land but in the wake of the black curraghs the land seemed almost dead, populated mainly by ghosts.
At other times Britha had the sense that there were people keeping pace with the Carthaginian ship beyond a coastal treeline or hidden in the marshes. They were most likely a warband shadowing them in case they were raiders. She was sure that Teardrop sensed this too.
Fachtna was restless. It was all happening too slowly for him. He wanted, needed, to confront Bress. Britha wondered how much of that was fear of Bress and wanting to get it over and done with. He spent most of the time standing by the prow of the ship, getting soaked as the ram prow ploughed through wave after wave as sail and oar carried them south. Whenever he had the chance, he went ashore. Britha was sure that the nonsense of the god-slaves bothered him as well.
Britha had thought Teardrop ill. He had seemed in pain. She had seen him mouthing words in what she thought were the clipped syllables of his own language. At first, with disdain, she had thought him praying in a servile manner to his gods – it looked a little too much like begging. Then she had started to get the feeling that he was talking to someone that she couldn’t see. This disconcerting feeling grew.
Fachtna had told her that pain was the price of Teardrop’s power. This she could believe: it looked like the strange man was being tormented. Teardrop became colder, more distant, as if he was resigned to something. She was not sure if she was imagining things, but it looked to her like the veins in his head were bulging more. More than once she had thought something was moving under his skin. The flecks of silver in his eyes were not of her imagining. When she focused she saw that each one looked like a tiny shard of frozen quicksilver. The god-slaves were the least of Teardrop’s worries.
The ship was eighty feet long by ten feet wide. They slept on deck with those rowers who did not sleep below, all of them crushed together, sweating, farting and, in the god-slaves’ case, puking when the wave sickness was upon them. The wave sickness did not bother Britha, Teardrop or Fachtna.