Episode 6: Loneliness and Adventure, Chapter 4
Winter turned into spring. Spring into summer. Summer into autumn. As the harvest festival rolled round once more, Galeas found himself stacking peat from the hillside for the first fires of winter. It was one of many small jobs he had acquired within the dun. More and more, William MacLeod, still grieving the sudden death of his youngest son, called on him to advise on clan matters. More and more, the children of the dun would gather round him and listen to his tales of far off lands and mighty monsters. More and more, he would spend the quiet hours of each morning and evening walking along the curtain wall with Flora by his side, watching for lights on the water, and unpicking the pain of years gone by.
"One day more," murmured Flora taking his arm as he turned from the safely stowed fuel store. "One day more and then you are free."
"One day more and the queen's protection wears off," he corrected her. "It's not quite the same."
"The powrie started on your trail long before the queen gave her protection," Flora reminded him. "Its time is spent. It will be long gone by the time you leave."
"That wasn't what I was referring to," he said quietly.
Flora paused and looked round. There was something in his voice that made her wonder. But no. Such things were for the young. They were both far too old to start thinking in such a way.
"You don't have to be alone any more," murmured Galeas quietly. "The work I do, it can be done just as easily from here. Or you could come with me. I have wandered this land, and so many others, for centuries alone. A knight errant on an unending quest. I would welcome the chance to have a companion by my side. Especially one who knows my world so well."
"Especially one your 'quests' would find difficult to kill, you mean," murmured Flora in return. "I cannot leave here, Galeas. I did once, when first I was wed. I left my home for my husband's and remained there until after his death. In that time, disaster after disaster befell my clan. I returned, a widow for the first time and not yet a quarter of the age I am now, and I helped them rebuild from the ruins. I was wed again, and again I left to bide beside my second husband. It was many years more before I returned, widowed once again. Yet within that time even greater ill luck had cursed the land of my birth. They were besieged on all sides by beings and monsters they knew naught of. I alone held the knowledge and power to see those creatures for what they were, and to face them down and defeat them. I alone stood between my people and the ruin of their lives. I have remained with them ever since, guarding my clan and its history, and its treasures. I cannot leave them."
"And I cannot stay," he replied. "At least not permanently. But I can return. Say the word and I will make this place my home too. I must return now to the home of my studies, and the haven of all those relics I have helped collect through the years. But you have seen what magic can do. You have spoken to the Scholar, the guardian of those relics, through the mirror with me. You know that magic can do wonderful things. I believe that I, when I am once again within those walls, can use that magic to build a portal. A link between there and here. Once the queen's protection fades, it should be possible to join the two, the same way the fae themselves build a bridge between their world and ours. With such a link in place, it would be as simple as opening a door and stepping through from there to here. Whenever I return from a mission, I would report to the Scholar and deliver my bounty, then return home here, to you. And if I was needed, the mirror I showed you would always be able to find me. There is another, far more powerful, mirror in the possession of the Scholar, should he need to call me back to him. It could work, Flora."
She looked up at the light of hope in his eyes. They had both lived so long. He far longer than she. And yet, in those eyes, she saw the young man he once had been, and within her breast the heart of the young woman she had left behind so long ago sang with a hope, and a joy, she had not thought to feel again.
"It could work," she nodded. "Yes, it could work."
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It took Galeas some months to make his way south through the highlands and lowlands of the North to the rolling hills of Oxford. He picked his way carefully into the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, climbing the steps up to the small collection of chained books held above the north side of the church. The books sat silently in their aged oak shelves, brought entire from their previous abode in the house of the now late Bishop of Worcester, Thomas Cobham. Slightly newer shelves had been added throughout the three score and ten years the small university library had been there, growing slowly, like the oak trees whose timber now framed the treasured contents. Galeas walked up to the oldest set of shelves. A series of diamond shaped boxes, spanning the breadth of the bookcase at the eye level of an average man of the time, or the chest height of the knight, supported scrolls. Galeas reached out into one of the boxes, the third from the right, and passed his hand between the scrolls. There was a click, the grinding sound of a complex mechanism, and the bookcase swung towards him. A black, empty hole opened up behind it. Lifting a lantern from its hook above the reading desk, and lighting it, he stepped into the darkness. There was a click and the bookcase swung shut behind him. The chains shivered from the movement, and were still.
How far down exactly the stairs went, Galeas could not be sure. He was aware of the change in temperature that usually accompanies any descent below ground level, but he was also aware that the change occurred far faster than it ought. Teething problems, he thought, casting his mind back to the last time the Library anchor had been moved. That had been a much farther move, from the south of Spain, where he had first taken up the quest offered him, to Canterbury, where the charismatic Augustine had begun the building of his abbey. Gradually, over the centuries that had followed, it had become difficult to hide the true extent of the Library from the monks and pilgrims. It had become even more difficult to explain why the quiet, staid place of worship was irregularly interrupted by comings, goings and occasionally outlandish antics of individuals associated neither with laity or clergy. The decision had been made, finally, to move the anchor to the elder of the two great centres of learning in the land. When Bishop Cobham had left the establishment richer by the sum of three great oaken bookcases full of ancient manuscripts and scrolls, and a small reading room was established in the University Church, the Scholar had taken it as a sign and moved the Library there. A university was a centre of knowledge. A university library was a repository of such knowledge. What more eligible place could there be.
"Welcome home, Galeas," said a quiet, elderly voice. Light bloomed, and all around him, stretching out in all four directions, Galeas saw the familiar shelves of the Library. A timeworn old man stood straight and tall in front of him, or as tall as his diminutive height would allow. The wrinkles around his eyes creased as he smiled before speaking again. "Welcome back, then," he corrected himself. "I get the feeling you have a favour to ask."
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The first year went well. None at the dun questioned the sudden appearance and disappearance of the man they had grown used to seeing on a daily basis. Flora remained by the chieftain's side, advising where she could. Where she could not, or when she felt out of her depth, which was not often, she used the mirror Galeas had given her to call to him and ask his aid. If he could, he would postpone his mission and come to her through the portal they had, with the Scholar's help, constructed. If he did not have a mission, she did not have to use a magical mirror to call to him, he was already there.
The second year, in the spring, he sped to her side to help fend off an attack by nucklelavees, those sea dwelling faeries that are the most terrifying and belligerent of all. Five of the clan were lost in the attacks. Three of them were fighting men, who had taken it upon themselves to venture outside the curtain wall to attack the beasts. The other two were the first innocent victims of the creatures' bloodlust, taken on consecutive days as they scoured the beach for driftwood. The tales of those great, foul-smelling, flayed water horses, with grasping, clawed hands and fearsome faerie faces, spread like winter frost throughout the clan. Children were kept indoors. Wives begged their husbands to stay within the confines of the dun. And Flora used her mirror to call for Galeas' help.
Six months later, he helped her clear out an infestation of boggarts. A month after that, he returned to stay a while, keeping watch on the dun and its occupants through the darkest time of the year, and bringing with him a supply of firewood and food to make the cold, dark days easier for all. In all that time since his year long stay at the dun, he had spent every spare moment there, by her side. If he was not there, and she called him, he came. His visits, fleeting or lengthy, became a thing of normality in the clan, and accepted by its people. More importantly, it was now expected that, should Galeas be home at the time, for Dun Bheagain was now considered his home, he would be called on to advise the chieftain in any matter that gave him pause. Thus it was that Galeas found himself celebrating the turn of another year in the frozen north of Scotland, with a winter storm brewing and the icy blast of a sea wind blowing in across the top of the curtain wall.
And thus it was that he found himself standing atop that wall, the wind tangling his shoulder length snow white locks, with Flora by his side.
"I remember my first new year's morn here," he remarked softly, his voice almost lost in the wind.
"It was a colder one than this," nodded Flora.
"I recall reminding myself that it would most likely be the only such time I spent in the company of the MacLeod clan," he continued, "and that, cold or not, I should endeavour to enjoy myself and join in the festivities with a light heart."
"You certainly seemed to do so," mused Flora, a wistful smile playing across her mouth at the memory. "You drunk half the clan under the table and still seemed sober."
"A side effect of my condition," he shrugged. "Ale has almost no effect upon my constitution. It takes a considerably stronger beverage to even begin to make me drunk."
"Ah, so you cheated," Flora decided, her lip curling into a mischievous smile.
"I made the most of my natural talents," Galeas corrected her with dignity. "I did not think I would have the opportunity to do so again."
"And now?" Flora's smile froze in uncertainty.
"Now," he replied, turning to face her and turning her to face him. "Now, I cannot imagine ever being anywhere else, not unless it is with you by my side. I spoke to the Scholar before I left. He agreed with me that they have recruits enough at present, and I can afford to step down. Retire, if you will, to here. The Scholar feels that Dun Bheagain would benefit from my long years of experience and the knowledge I have gathered throughout them. He gave me leave to remain. Indefinitely."
"You are staying?" Flora breathed. "Permanently?"
"At least until he has no option but to call me in," he nodded, "and we have enough allies that such an event is unlikely to happen for years, perhaps centuries."
"I am glad of it," she smiled warmly, taking his hand and covering it with her own.
He covered their clasped hands with his other and held her gaze in the growing light of dawn. "Glad enough to be my wife?"
