‘The Kenyan, I swear it.’
‘I’ll ask.’ She pulled back her hood and cleared her throat. Her beauty commanded silence. ‘I bring greetings from Mother Russia,’ she said in their language.
The woman who had been having the pointless argument with Va sniffed. ‘Who’s she? And who are you? And who, in the Good God’s name, is this rough thing? If he’s supposed to be a monk, he’s like none I’ve ever seen before. What sort of cross is that? What’s he saying? Is he mad, or drunk?’ She leaned closer to smell his breath, forcing Va to step back against the crowd.
He was pushed from behind to the accompaniment of jeering and hooting.
‘I apologize for Brother Va’s rude and abrupt manner.’ Elenya kicked him to get him to stand still, but she succeeded only in making him dance away from the blow. ‘Yes, he is mad, though he’s harmless enough. Mother Russia is a land far to the south and west, across the sea and beyond the Franks.’
The locals looked at one another: naFraince marked the edge of their knowledge.
‘We’re looking for a man – a man who stole something from the brother. This device tells us that he’s been here.’
‘You mean Solomon Akisi,’ said the woman.
Va was listening carefully. Now his enemy had a name.
‘Is he a Kenyan?’ asked Elenya.
‘Sent from the mighty Kenyan empire, as he was fond of saying. Gave us greeting in the name of his king – emperor – whatever he called him.’
‘Good woman, we need to speak to him.’
‘He’s not here,’ she snapped. ‘The King of Coirc has him, and good riddance, I say.’
‘Why, what did he do?’
‘Filled our heads with dreams and foolishness, that’s what he did, him and his natural philosophy. I said no good would come of it, and I was right. These simpletons were too easily deceived, but—’
‘Rose naMoira, it was you who took him in!’ said an outraged voice.
‘That was common courtesy, macFinn, and I won’t have you saying otherwise.’ Rose singled out a man in the front row and jabbed him in the chest. ‘You’re never one for sharing in the good times, but as soon as something goes wrong, you’re hanging around your neighbours’ thresholds complaining and bellyaching until they give you what you want just to make you go away.’
macFinn snorted like a pig. ‘How dare you, you harpy, you morrigan! I keep a well-stocked house and don’t you forget it.’
‘Silence! In Patrick’s name, silence!’
The crowd parted, and a man in a skirt stalked forward.
‘Rory, you’re back.’
‘Well now, Mici, so I am.’ The man’s face was pinched and white. He stopped, looked at Va and Elenya, and almost turned away. Then he looked back. ‘Who are these people?’
‘They’ve come for Akisi,’ said Rose.
‘Don’t mention that name in my presence again. I won’t have it, you hear?’ He bowed his head and rubbed at his beard. His hand came away as a clenched fist. ‘I went to Kilkenny, asked the abbot there if they’d seen Father Padroig. They had too. He spent a week with the brothers at the abbey, and then they sent him on his way, back to us. I asked in the villages on the Kilkenny road if they remembered seeing a white-haired priest pass through, and they all did.’
macFinn interrupted. ‘Where is he then, macShiel?’
‘He’s dead, man! He’s dead. I found his body in the ditch, half eaten by crows, less than a day’s walk from here.’ Rory macShiel’s voice caught in his throat and he crouched down, letting fat tears fall into the dirt.
A dark-haired woman squeezed through. She touched macShiel on the arm, and he clung to her as if she was life itself.
‘It was Akisi, damn him to hell!’
Elenya pulled Va to one side and whispered to him in Rus: ‘We’ve arrived at a very bad time. The Kenyan seems to have killed this village’s priest some time in the past. Now he’s with the local king, in some place called Coirc.’
‘We’ll have to find out where this Coirc is,’ said Va. No one was paying them any attention. ‘So he’s a murderer as well as a thief.’
‘We don’t know that. We don’t even know if it was him who took the books from you.’
Va growled in frustration. ‘We’re so close. I can smell it on the wind.’
‘That’s just shit and fish guts.’ Elenya examined the mill as the crowd gyred away along the main street, macShiel at its centre. A few of the men glanced back at her before being pulled away. A boy hung back, the same boy who’d spotted them earlier. ‘Young man, come here a moment. What’s your name?’
‘Brendan macFinn, if it please you, mistress.’
‘We’re both very sorry for the loss of your priest, Brendan. We’d very much like to help in any way we can.’
Brendan macFinn alternated between looking at the ground and staring into Elenya’s eyes. ‘Yes, mistress. I don’t know. I could ask my father.’
‘In a minute, perhaps. Who’s the man who went to look for the priest?’
‘Rory macShiel. He builds boats, and he built this too. He and Master Akisi worked together.’
‘Master Akisi?’ Elenya arched an eyebrow, but smiled as well.
Young macFinn clutched at his heart as if he could feel it melting. ‘I was apprenticed to him for a while. He had secrets, mistress. All sorts of secrets. He could make and bend light, design machines, and he had this book, a big silver book. I sneaked a peek inside once. The pictures moved!’
‘Thank you, Brendan.’
‘But then it all went wrong. There was a battle at An Cobh, and Master Akisi chose the wrong side, and I got captured, and the king’s men came for him, and he killed one of them, and they took him away.’ He gasped for breath. ‘And now I’ve found out he killed Father Padroig, and I don’t know what to think any more.’
‘It’ll be all right.’ She held him at arm’s length, a hand on each shoulder.
Brendan macFinn couldn’t quite believe that such a beautiful creature was actually touching him, speaking kindly to him. ‘Yes, mistress.’
‘Now off you go. Thank you.’
The boy reeled away as if stunned, and Elenya turned to a sour-faced Va.
‘You do the child no favours,’ he said.
‘Just because you’re immune to my charm doesn’t mean I haven’t still got it. Akisi has a book – the boy says he saw one volume. One, mind; not all twelve.’
‘He’ll know where the others are.’
‘If he’s still alive. He could have been executed by now. He killed a king’s man when they came to claim him.’
Va bit at his hand. ‘I pray it isn’t so.’
‘Do you think your prayers are going to be more use than these people’s? They’ve lost their priest to this man, and they’ll be calling down bloody vengeance on his head.’ Elenya shook her head. ‘Why should God listen to you and not to them?’
‘Because if he’s dead, the trail goes cold and I can’t get all the books back, and it’s God’s will that I do.’ Va slammed the palm of his hand hard against the wood of the mill, causing the whole structure to sing. ‘Anything else is just wrong.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘Wait until these savages have come to their senses. Where’s bread? Where’s salt? It’s not like this in Mother Russia.’ Va stormed down to the harbour and sat down heavily on a creel.
The little fishing boats bobbed in time with the waves, and his eye was inevitably drawn to one in particular that had something strange hanging from the mast. The last time he’d seen something similar, it had been on a Caliphate warship.
He’d burned them all, and everyone on board.
At the back of his mind the whispering accusations began, and grew as the tide came in until it filled his head with noise.
He had no hair to tear out. Instead he threw himself down on the stony beach and battered the cobbles with his fists.