The Shadow Isle. Katharine Kerr
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panels lining the walls were as heavily decorated as the Holy Book in Lord Douglas’s chapel. Great swags of carved interlacements, all tangled with animals, flowers, and vines, swooped down from each corner and almost touched the floor before sweeping up again. In among them were little designs that might have been letters or simply odd little fragments of some broken pattern. Berwynna had told him of her sister’s belief that the decorations had some sort of meaning, just as if they’d been a book indeed. Since Dougie couldn’t read a word in any language, it was all a great mystery to him.
‘Think she’ll ever puzzle it out?’ Dougie said to Berwynna.
‘She tells me she’s very close. Tirn’s been a great help to her. He knows what some of the sigils are.’
‘Sigils?’
‘It means marks like those little ones.’ Berwynna shrugged. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘The townsfolk are saying that Tirn’s a demon.’
‘Are you surprised? They think we’re all witches and demons, don’t they?’
‘Well, true enough, the ingrates! And after all the healing your sister’s done for them, too!’
Tirn came in not long after. Like Dougie himself, he was an unusually tall man, and no doubt he’d once been a strong one, too, judging from his broad shoulders and long, heavily muscled arms, but at the moment he was still recovering from whatever accident had burned him so badly. He walked slowly, a little stooped, and held his damaged hands away from his body. Thin cloth, smelling heavily of Marnmara’s herbal medicaments, wrapped his hands and arms up to the elbows. Peeling-pink scars cut into the tattoos on his narrow face and marbled his short brown hair. He nodded Dougie’s way with a weary smile, then sat down across from him at the table.
Angmar asked him a question in the language that the locals took for Cymraeg, and Tirn answered her in the same. Berwynna leaned forward and joined the conversation. Here and there Dougie could pick out a word or phrase – Berwynna had been teaching him a bit of her native tongue – but they spoke too quickly for him to follow. Tirn considered whatever it was she’d said, then smiled and nodded.
‘Mam’s asking him if Marnmara can take another look at this gem he brought with him,’ Berwynna told Dougie. ‘Uncle Mic says it’s a bit of cut firestone. I’ve not seen anything like it before.’
Angmar got up and went round to where Tirn sat. With his burnt hands still so bad, he could touch nothing. She pulled a leather pouch on a chain free of Tirn’s shirt. From the pouch she took out a black glassy gem, shaped into a pyramid about six inches tall. The tip had been lopped off at an angle.
‘I’ve not seen anything like that before, either.’ Dougie shook his head in bafflement. ‘It looks like glass, though.’
‘It’s got no bubbles in it,’ Berwynna said. ‘So Uncle Mic said it can’t be glass. It comes from fire mountains, whatever they are.’
‘Well, he’s the one who’d know.’ Dougie turned to Angmar. ‘Could I have a look at that, my lady? I’m curious, is all.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Angmar said.
When Angmar set the pyramid down in front of him, Dougie picked it up and examined it, turning it around in his fingers. Tirn made a comment, which Angmar translated.
‘Don’t look into it too closely,’ she said. ‘It’s a rather odd thing. You don’t want to stare at it for too long.’
Dougie glanced at it out of the corner of his eye and saw the ordinary daylight in the great hall shining through black crystal. There’s naught to this, he thought, and looked directly down into the black depths through the squared-off tip. He heard Marnmara’s voice, coming nearer, sounding annoyed at something. He wanted to look up and ask her what the matter was, but the stone had trapped his gaze. He simply could not look away. Inside the black glow something appeared, something moved – a man, a strange slender man with pale skin, hair of an impossibly bright yellow, eyes of paint-pot blue, and lips as red as cherries.
The fellow was standing in the kitchen garden of Dougie’s family steading. He seemed to be staring right at Dougie, then turned and walked through the rows of cabbages till he reached the pair of apple trees by the stone wall, but the trees, Dougie realized, were young, barely strong enough to bear a couple of branches of fruit. The strange fellow stopped and pointed with his right hand at the ground between them. Over and over he gestured at the ground, then began to make a digging motion, using both hands like a hound’s front paws.
‘Dougie!’ Marnmara shouted his name. She grabbed his shoulder with one hand and shook him.
The spell broke. He looked up, dazed, unsure of exactly where he might be for a few beats of a heart. Marnmara turned to her mother and Tirn, set her hands on her hips, and began to lecture them in their own tongue. Tirn spoke a few feeble sounding words, then merely listened, staring at the table. Angmar, however, argued right back, waving a maternal finger in her daughter’s face. When Dougie put the pyramid onto the table, Marnmara stopped arguing long enough to snatch up the gem.
‘What did you see in it, Dougie?’ Marnmara said.
‘A strange-looking fellow standing between two apple trees. You might have warned me that the thing could work tricks like that.’
‘I didn’t know it could.’ Marnmara smiled briefly, then spoke to Tirn in their language. He looked utterly surprised and spoke a few words in reply. ‘He says he told you not to look into it.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Dougie said. ‘My apologies.’
Dougie decided that he didn’t like the way everyone was staring at him. He stood up and held out his hand to Berwynna.
‘I’ll be needing to go home soon.’
Together they walked down to the pier. Although he’d never seen the boatmen leave the great hall, there they were, manning the oars, ready to take him back across. Dougie shook his head hard. He felt drunk, but he’d only had half a tankard of Diarmud’s watered ale, and then another half of Angmar’s decent brew – hardly any drink at all.
‘Are you well?’ Berwynna said. ‘You’ve gone pale.’
‘I saw the strangest damned thing in that stone of Tirn’s. It was like a dream, some fellow pointing to the ground over and over. He seemed to think it was important, that bit of earth.’
‘Do you think it was a spirit?’ Berwynna turned thoughtful. ‘They say that spirits know where treasures are buried.’
‘Well, so they do – in old wives’ tales and suchlike. I wouldn’t set your heart on me finding a bucketful of gold.’
She laughed, then raised herself up on tip-toe and kissed him farewell.
The kiss kept Dougie warm during his long walk home, but the memory of his peculiar experience kept the kiss company. After he’d brooded on what he’d seen for a mile or two, the look of the fellow in the vision jogged his memory. He knew something about that fellow, he realized, but he’d forgotten the details.
Domnal Breich’s steading lay in a narrow valley twixt wooded hills. Over the years he’d built his family a rambling stone house and barn, surrounded by kitchen gardens and set off from the fields by a stone wall. The two apple trees of Dougie’s vision stood by the gate, at least twice as high as they’d appeared in the black gem. When he let himself in, he paused for a moment to look at the ground between them – ordinary enough dirt, as far as he could tell, soft from the recent rain and dusted with spring grass.
Domnal himself came out of the barn and hailed him. Although he still walked with a swagger, and his broad work-worn hands were as strong as ever, his dark brown hair sported grey streaks, and his moustache had gone grey as well.
‘Been at the island?’ Domnal said.
‘I have,’ Dougie said. ‘Here, Da, a thing I want to ask you. Do you remember a