S. Stirling - The Sword of the Lady

She jerked the lanyard. Tunnnggg. This time there was a splintering crack almost immediately, as the shot caught the other vessel at the waterline. They were gliding southeast through a narrow passage now. A broadside of incendiaries came flying at them as they came about to head directly south and the harbor opened out around them, a broad shallow lagoon. Two globes smashed against the steel shields and hissing fire ran down. Their own replied, and a sail came rattling down on the Gisandu as a stay was severed. Corsairs worked frantically at a deck pump to wash the napalm down and into the sea before it started another fire.

Edain and his picked archers crowded onto the poop deck. He was firing like a machine across the hundred-yard gap, draw-aim-loose nock-draw, chanting under his breath: ' We are the darts that — got you bad, bastard! — Hecate cast!'

Rudi made himself turn. As he did he realized that something had been inhibiting him, something besides his natural desire to keep his eyes on the men trying to kill them all. He blinked and shook his head, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes. It was as if he saw multiple images laid one upon another, like paintings on layers of glass. A festival where men and women danced through snow. Tall-masted ships tied at the docks. Something smooth and silvery and massive that floated above the water, then turned its nose skyward and rose with impossible speed…

Then a very solid dock and roadway, wharfs on barnacle-encrusted tree trunks, what looked like a street of low brick buildings, interspersed with white-trimmed gray shingle shops and leafless winter trees, with church steeples rearing beyond. No dwellers… or was that a band in oilskins with duffel bags over their shoulders' No, they were gone. And the dock was there. 'Brace for impact!' he shouted, as it loomed before their bowsprit, and looped his elbow around a line.

Crack. His feet skidded out from beneath him. A long crunching, grinding sound, and the bow reared up as the huge momentum of the two-hundred-ton vessel ground into timber and stone. Nearly everyone else fell too; Mathilda went sliding past him as the impact pitched her off the gunner's seat of the weapon, and he snagged her with a leg. She clung to his sword belt as the long echoing crash continued and the deck canted more and more steeply beneath them. Their helmets rang together as the foremast broke with a sound like thunder and came down on the shattered dock.

Silence except for snapping wood and the growing burr of the fire beneath them. 'Go, go, go!' Ignatius shouted.

Rudi hauled Mathilda upright as if her solid weight and the armor were nothing. They ran along the side to the buckled rail, up to it, down onto the crazy-quilt mess of the dock where the schooner's weight had struck. His leg went through a broken board and he wrenched it free. Then they were running, up past a dry fountain and onto a stretch of cobbles. His weight pounded down through his boots, but the sound was too deep, as if he were walking on a drumhead. An arrow went past them… but it floated past. His run turned to steps in a dream, one where you floated. He floated, past primeval forests, past a rough hamlet hacked from the woods where folk in rust-colored coats and high-steepled hats and long dresses gaped at him, past the street he'd first seen, but dense with the cars and trucks of the ancient world, past the same with ox carts heaped with fish… 'Here. We'll hold them here!' Ignatius shouted; the stone basin of the fountain blocked part of the street.

Shields locked on either side, and the archers fanned out in two forward-slanting wings from side to side of the roadway. The Bou el-Mogdad was burning like a pillar of fire now, delaying the men the Gisandu carried and making it impossible for her deck engines to shoot. They came staggering out of the smoke anyway, and first was a man in a tattered red robe the color of dried blood. His hands were held out before him like claws, and his eyes were windows into negation. 'Noooooooo!'

The endless wail was as much shriek as word, and less a protest than a single long scream of what he was, or what the thing that wore the man like a glove was. Ignatius raised his sword and brought up his shield, but behind the visor of his helm he shouted for joy as his gaze met those wells of night without end. 'Yes!' he cried.'Eternally, yes!'

Behind him Edain barked:'Let the gray geese fly. Wholly togetherShoot!'

The bows snapped, and men went down in the ragged mob of Bekwa and Sword troopers and corsairs who rushed forward as the arrows sleeted into them, but there were too many, far too many. Three punched into the High Seeker, but his body simply flexed and came on. 'Nooooooo!' 'You shall not pass, Hollow Man!' Ignatius cried.

And then Knight-brother Ignatius snatched at his sword. It wasn't there, nor was his armor and gear. Instead he wore the simple Benedictine robe and cowl; after an instant he was conscious that he sat on a bench. Before him was a cloister, slender white stone columns supporting arches on three sides of a garden and fountain where water played before an image of the Virgin. The shadows within the walk hid tall doors; behind them was a hint of bookcases full of leather-bound volumes. Within the court the sun ran dappled on the water that lifted and fell in its basin, shifting in spots of brightness through the leaves of tall beeches; a few flower beds stood in troughs between walkways of worn brick, shimmering in gold and silver and hyacinth blue.

The day was mild and dry and warm, with scents of rock and wet and warm dust, and somewhere a hint of incense. It was very quiet; the sound of the plashing fountain, a few cu-currrus from doves that stalked past, perhaps very faintly a hint of chanted plainsong in the distance. He smiled. It wasn't Mt. Angel, but it was as if…

As if it is the distilled essence of everything I loved about the abbey, he thought. Peace, beauty, wisdom. God.

Beside him another monk sat; the man threw back his cowl and smiled. Ignatius' eyes went a little wide. It was Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski, but as he'd first seen him as a postulant, the square hard face amused at his earnestness but in a way that was kindly, not mocking. 'Am I… is this…' 'No, you are not, my son,' the abbot answered. 'Then, you-'

Dmwoski laughed; it had been a rare thing on Mt. Angel, but it lit the warrior-cleric's sternness like a candle through the glass shutter of a lantern. 'Not yet, as your life thread is drawn; there I am currently fighting the sin of despair, and grappling with a sea of troubles. Time is different here. Or rather, we're not entirely in time as men understand it.' 'I always thought you would be a saint,' Ignatius blurted.

Dmwoski frowned.'All human souls are, potentially. I… have been allowed to progress.' 'And this is-'

Another chuckle:'And yes, this is where you think it is. Or as much of this… one of the many mansions… as you can currently understand. Think of it as a metaphor, but a true one.' 'Such peace,' Ignatius breathed, wondering.

He drew the air into his lungs, and then glanced behind him. A long table reached into dimness; someone was turning the pages of a text, and the bright colors drew him even through the glass and across the distance. 'Yet…' he said.'It does not feel in the least static.' 'Never. More like an endless high adventure; or rather, what an adventure should be. We cannot fully know Him, yet we can know ever more of Him; and in that is the completion of our natures. Come, walk with me, my son.'

They rose and folded their hands in the sleeves of their robes. A bell rang somewhere as they paced through the cloister and out the gateway, a great bronze throb that seemed to scatter brightness through the air. 'Why am I here, then, Father'' 'Partly as a reward. I flatter myself that I was a good judge of men, and choosing you for the mission to the east was perhaps the best decision I ever made. And you met one who is a far, far better judge; one who laid a charge upon you. Both of us are very pleased with you.'