Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"No, Kerry suits me well. I sometimes fail to answer to Caerlyle, it's been so long since any but my mother called me that." This man was charming, full of self-confidence and strength, his face open and bereft of guile. Why then, I asked myself, were all my internal warning systems vibrating? And whence came this unsettling familiarity I felt with him? I held his hand, gazing directly into his eyes.

"We've never met before, have we?"

His eyes flared with surprise. "No," he said, laughing at the strangeness of the question. "How could we? I have never been away from here and this is your first visit to Eire. Where could we have met?"

I shook my head. "You look amazingly familiar. It must be that you remind me of someone else, someone from long ago." I smiled. "I find that as I grow older I see more and more resemblances with people I have met long since. It disconcerts me sometimes."

King Athol spoke from beside me, his hand on my elbow steering me gently towards the next man in line. "You will find, my friend, that the phenomenon you describe grows even stronger as you approach my age. People tend to fall into types. Meet my good-brother, Liam. I was once wed to his mother's sister."

Liam was a hunchback, small and wiry-looking, with large eyes and a liquid, lilting voice of surprising resonance and beauty. "Twistback, they call me," he said, grinning. "No imagination, some of these people." I grinned back at him, liking him instantly, and turned to the next man in line.

The basilisk stare of utter dislike from this one's eyes caused me to blink at him in astonishment before I could stop myself. Even King Athol, who was on the point of introducing us, hesitated visibly, evidently as nonplussed as I.

"Fingael?" I distinctly heard the note of uncertainty and surprise in the old man's voice. "Fingael, what ails you?"

"Nothing. I'm fine, Father." The man's eyes never left my own as he spoke the words from one corner of his mouth in a whispery voice that was sibilant and ominous. Apart from that response, he made no move either to recognize my presence or greet me in any way. His father cleared his throat, in embarrassment, I thought, and spoke again, this time with iron in his tone.

"Then perhaps you will greet our guest as befits his rank and status, rather than leaving him to suspect that we have lax rules of hospitality in this, my kingdom!"

"His rank and status?" The words came out like a challenge to combat, their insulting tone clear for anyone and everyone to hear. "He is Brother Donuil's friend and jailer. There are those of us who don't make friends that easily or that dishonourably."

I saw Athol stiffen on one side of me and sensed Donuil gathering his strength to move forward angrily in his own defence. I forestalled both of them with raised hands, pressing the back of my right hand against Donuil's breast, restraining him gently. He subsided, although I could feel his unwillingness, and I addressed myself to his uncivil brother.

"You must excuse my uncertainty, but do you and I have some unsettled difference between us of which I'm unaware?"

He sneered at me. "No. We have nothing between us. I don't like you, and that's all there is to it."

"Damn you, Finn, you pig-headed dolt!" Donuil moved forward again, and again I stopped him, this time facing him and stilling him with my eyes and tone.

"Donuil, my friend, this is my concern." I turned back to Fingael. "I can see that you dislike me. Everyone can." I kept my voice level and forced myself to pause, having no wish to add to the damage this lout was attempting to do. "Dislike might even be too mild a word." I paused, looking him straight in the eye and allowing my silence to stretch until I saw him start to say something more. Before he could, I spoke again. "Well, doubtless you have your reasons, sufficient for your own mind at least. But your dislike has the air of long usage, and until we came face to face I had no awareness of your existence. You form your judgments quickly, it would appear."

"Quickly enough." He had ignored Donuil completely and the sneer was still pasted to his face. I resisted the urge to wipe it away. He was a big man, but not as big as I, and younger, and beneath his present scowl he would be, I saw, pleasant-faced, clean-shaven, with bright red hair and green eyes that blazed from a stark white face that was sunburned on nose and brows. His bearing radiated challenge and I knew I could not yet walk away; this man would assume from that a victory of some kind.

"How old are you, Fingael, son of Athol?" I asked him, seeing his eyes widen in surprise at my level tone.

"Old enough to know my mind."

"Aye, but not to trust it, eh?"

"What?" The sneer vanished. He had no idea of my meaning. Neither had I, but I had retained the initiative.

"I would guess you to be two years, perhaps three, older than Donuil. Twenty-six or -seven I'm thirty-two. Do you understand my point?"

He frowned ferociously, indicating that he did not. I continued speaking. "I had lived for more than half a decade before you were born, young Finn. To this point, I have lived throughout your entire lifetime without seeing you or hearing of you until this, our first meeting. I would happily forgo a second meeting for the remainder of it in equal ignorance."

Someone caught his breath in surprise and then there came a shout of laughter in which everyone joined save me, Fingael, Donuil and their father King Athol. While it was ringing, I turning casually away from him, dismissing him as I moved towards the next man in line. Athol the King stalked beside me, rigid with fury at the insult offered me, yet saying nothing that might add to an incendiary situation. I know I greeted the man but have no memory of it. My mind was awash with other, far more serious matters: anger at Fingael's insults and confusion over my strange, unshared recognition of Caerlyle. And so I progressed until I faced the last of Athol's counselors, his son Connor. Here, at least, I found interest and pleasure in his welcome and in the open frankness with which he hugged his brother Donuil.

"You impressed my brother Finn, Yellow Head," he said to me eventually, when he and Donuil had finished belabouring each other's back and shoulders. "He has not met many who can best him either in words or a fight. I must warn you, he makes a bad enemy and cares not for losing."

"Hmm. He's lucky never to have met my cousin Uther."

He smiled at me. "Two of a kind, are they?"

"Aye, you might say they're similar, in much the same way that certain lambs are similar to bears—both may be born black." I turned to look back towards Fingael, but he was nowhere to be seen. "Where did he go?"

"My father marched him off as soon as you had moved away. I imagine the king is speaking to him now of hospitality and the rules of Eirish courtesy."

"Is he always as pleasant with strangers?"

He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. "Who, my father? Or Finn?"

"Fingael."

"He's a boar, with a boar's manners," Donuil muttered.

Connor's gaze, still amused, went to Donuil and then back to me. "In truth, he is not. Neither a boar nor generally unpleasant without reason. I've never seen him quite that way before today. But Finn is. . . difficult at times. He has his own ways. My father, who is no more patient than most kings, has yet great patience in some little things. For twenty years now he has been trying to teach Finn to school himself, but without much success." He threw an arm around my shoulders and I caught a whiff of the remembered smell of him, leather and light, clean sweat and a tang of some wild perfume in his hair. "Come, let's drink some ale before I die of thirst. I have a vat long cooled beneath the ground. And I have a babby in my house you might wish to see. And if we are to speak of boars, I'd rather hear the tale of the one you killed in the south than of the one you bested here today." He led the way down from the rostrum and directly to his hut, walking with the familiar, rolling gait I recalled so clearly. The cordon of guards that had lined the rostrum had long since disbanded and my own men had disappeared, back to the camp we had established beyond the walls. Only a few of Athol's people paid us any attention as we crossed the now-empty central space.