Va jerked Akisi upright, and Elenya stood in front, ready for when macShiel struggled harder and broke free.
‘Who else but a stranger would kill a priest? No one on this holy island would even think about such a heinous act.’ He jabbed his finger at Akisi in lieu of his harpoon, which he’d lost in the melee. ‘I accuse him of murder. All the time he was here, he knew what he’d done. He even took over the church. He planned it all from the start, damn his cold heart.’
‘You can’t have him, Rory.’ Elenya stepped aside, and for the first time macShiel realized that Akisi’s hands were already tied. ‘He has to come with us.’
‘What is this? What else has this murderer done?’ The hands that held him fell away, and he stepped forward.
‘We told you we were looking for books stolen from a monastery. We found one.’ She asked Va to bring out the book from under its cover.
Brendan macFinn, at the back of the crowd, jumped up and down. ‘That’s it. That’s what I found in Master Solomon’s trunk. See?’
‘He knows where the others are. He might be able to help us get them back. We need him alive. For the moment.’ Elenya patted macShiel’s arm. ‘Sorry, Rory, but this is important. Va thinks that the world will end if we don’t take them all back to the patriarch.’
macShiel’s shoulders slumped, the fight suddenly gone out of him. ‘Will it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Willing to risk it?’
‘But what about Father Padi?’
‘Akisi stole two volumes of the book from the emperor of Kenya. I imagine he’ll get what’s coming to him. He’s also complicit in the murder of forty monks, so we could always take him back to the tsar when we’re finished with him.’ She linked arms with macShiel and walked him away, leaving Va holding Akisi by the scruff of the neck.
Va had understood little of the exchange between macShiel and Elenya, but he knew this for certain: if the people of An Rinn wanted to hang Akisi, there was little he could do to stop it.
But it must not happen. He needed to know what he’d done with the second book. He pulled the cover over the one he had managed to retrieve and wondered what had happened to the wolf fur that had previously wrapped it.
Rose naMoira barged her way through. Akisi appealed to her, and she deliberately turned her head away, shunning him with tight-lipped disappointment. She spoke directly to Va; Elenya was still talking to macShiel. He was on his own.
‘I don’t understand you. Little words and slower, please,’ he asked.
‘You must go from An Rinn. Now.’
‘We will. But why?’
Rose struggled with the problem of reducing her speech down to the level of a child. ‘We are cursed.’
‘Cursed?’ Va wasn’t sure he’d heard right.
‘This man, his book, that woman, you. All cursed. Bad things happen here now. You go, and God smiles on us again.’ She stamped her feet and strode through the crowd of villagers.
Then macFinn stepped forward. ‘What will you do with him?’
‘Only he can say what he has done with the book. He will tell us and we will get it.’
‘He’ll lie and cheat all the time.’
‘I know lying and cheating,’ said Va. ‘Listen, King Ardhal is Akisi’s friend. We stole Akisi. Ardhal will want him.’
macFinn snorted. ‘After what he’s done? A priest killer?’
‘No. Please hear me. You know of High King Cormac? His army is gone. Gone, dead.’ He didn’t know the word for scattered, but he tried the next best thing. ‘Broken, like glass. This man and this book did it for Ardhal. Ardhal loves Akisi. They are as brothers.’
He clasped his hands together tightly to show the bond between the king and the Kenyan. macFinn grew acutely uncomfortable.
‘We can’t openly defy our king. But we can’t let him escape his punishment either. What do we do?’
‘Give him to me. I will be his—’ Va’s words finally failed him. He carried on Russian, hoping that macFinn would get the sense of it. ‘I’ll be his tormentor, his constant reminder that he’s a thief and a murderer and a liar and the cheat. That he values the User book more than he values life. I’ll be on his back from the moment he wakes to the moment he collapses from exhaustion. And when he gets up again, I’ll be there, picking up where I left off. He will grow to be the sorriest man you have ever seen. As God is my witness, he will pay.’
macFinn backed away from the sudden outburst of passionate, unintelligible words. He looked behind him for support, but the people were determined to keep their distance from this wild foreigner.
‘macFinn!’ shouted a woman. ‘Come away, man. The brother is touched, either by God or the Devil.’
‘Damn your heathen tongue, can’t you understand one word of honest Rus? I’m trying to stop a disaster worse than the Reversal, and for the want of a translator, the whole world goes to hell. Elenya? Tell these people I’m trying to save them.’
‘What do you think I’m trying to do? There are complications.’ She was with macShiel, and the woman Rose, and macShiel’s shy wife. Looking at them, Va realized she was Rose’s daughter.
‘What could be more important than saving the world?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
He gave up with macFinn, and pushed Akisi every step of the way over to where the others stood. ‘Why is there a problem?’
‘Mainly because they don’t see why it is their problem. We brought it with us; we can just go and take it away again.’
‘That’s what we’re trying to do. Don’t they understand?’
‘Va, you’ve got to calm down. Shouting at people in Rus just makes them think you’re demented,’ said Elenya. ‘I’m not used to thinking in nearly three different languages at once and I’m getting a headache. To put it simply: we need macShiel and his boat to take the three of us and the book to the mainland. However, macShiel wants to hang Akisi for killing the priest and doesn’t see why he should go anywhere with him.’
‘But Ardhal won’t want Akisi to die because he’s too useful,’ said Va.
‘I’ve explained that. They’re torn. On one hand they won’t let him go because they want him to face justice. But if he stays, Ardhal will let him live. So they do nothing but quarrel with us and each other, and those horsemen we saw will soon be here and it’ll be too late to make any sort of decision.’ She sucked air in between her clenched teeth. ‘If you’re going to do something, I’d do it now.’
Akisi fidgeted nervously between them. ‘I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I can tell what’s going on. I don’t want to go with you, and I like the idea of a rope around my neck even less. Just turn me over to Ardhal and I’ll take my chances with him.’
Elenya clattered him around the head with her hand. ‘You shut up. You’re coming with us, whether you or they like it or not. There’ll be no going back to making killing machines for Ardhal or anyone, and my knife will be sticking out of your eye-socket the second I see one of Ardhal’s men coming down that road. Do you understand me?’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’ He squared his shoulders and smiled for the first time in a day.
‘Va, you have to make them give you a boat and Akisi. How you do it is up to you, but time is running out.’
Va turned away, beads of sweat springing up on his forehead. He could do it: grab macShiel by the neck, hold him in such a way that if he moved, he’d die. He could force him to his boat, compel the others to push it into the waves. They’d be away. Easier still to put a knife to Eithne’s breast, threaten to kill her instead.
‘No!’ he screamed. He knelt on the cold, wet ground, clasped his cross so tightly that the edges cut his hands and squeezed out fat drops of bright blood. He choked on a prayer, and it turned into a sob.
He blinked back the tears of shame and rage, and staggered to his feet. At last everyone was quiet, watching him with a mixture of fear and pity. A baby was crying in the distance, inside one of the houses, and there was the persistent creaking and squeaking of the millwheel, turned round by the wind in its sails.