Celtic Tales 2 the Sea

By Jill Whalen

Celtic sea people come in as many varieties as there are people. Some are born to the sea; it is in their blood, like the Vikings. Some have the seafaring life cast upon them, like the men who are pressed into service with a hit on the back of the head. Others are running from life on the land, or cast into the sea through no fault of their own. There are merchants, pirates, privateers, and raiders.

They trade if they can, but take what they want.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 27, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595757329

Jill Whalen

I am a Celtic mother of eight who is writing about family stories that have been handed down by word of mouth. I live in the beautiful Missouri Ozarks, am a graduate of Millikin University, and a member of Mensa.

Book preview

CELTIC TALES 2

THE SEA

Image297.PNG

Jill Whalen

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Celtic Tales 2 The Sea

All Rights Reserved © 2004 by Brenda Jill Whalen

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the

publisher.

iUniverse

For information address:

iUniverse,

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 0-595-75732-4

ISBN: 978-0-5957-5732-9 (eBook)

Contents

Tale 1: Poulan The Viking

Tale 2: Duel

Tale 3: Grace O’malley

Tale 4: Hagar

Tale 5: Morgan

Tale 6: Josiah Smith

Tale 7: Ned

Tale 8: Scarabrae

Tale 9: Ulsavagen The Viking

Tale 10: Asceree

Tale 11: Rick The Durea

Tale 12: Yanoff

Tale 1: Poulan the Viking

I am Poulan Duhore Maco. My great grandfather was Maco. He had thousands of hunter ships under his charge. My mother said I should not use my title except on formal occasions, but formality is a thing of the past. My place now is a hole with rocks stacked up in front of it. I put clay on the outside and stuffed in the cracks with lichens, so people can’t tell where it is. It cuts down on the amount of wind howling through. I like to stay alive.

Some people killed everybody in my home last month, everybody except me. All my kith and kin are dead. Those people may have gone away by now. I don’t know. They came in the night. My mother woke my sister and me. She gave us each a bundle, shoved us out a side door, and said to run for our lives.

My sister only ran a little way, then stopped. I tried to pull her, but she wouldn’t come. I kept after her. She pulled away from me, tossed me her bundle, and ran back to the house. She was over twice my age, but not a grown up. She was so high and mighty at eleven years to my four. I took my bundle to the edge of the rocks and went back for hers. I stuck both bundles out of sight and crawled back near the edge of the house. I saw my sister darting from the stables to someone on the ground. A man came riding on his horse swinging something. I wanted to yell, then I saw it connect. My sister’s head went flying in pieces splattered up near the fire. He had a stick with a chain and a ball with points on it. He shouted something out. I saw that, and knew there was no way I was going to take on men with horses, armor, and swords. Don’t think me a coward. I’d like to grow a few more years. I’d fight anybody, but I’m nobody’s fool.

My knife is the length of my arm and my hand. The handle fits pretty good. It has a reddish jewel that my sister said was a cheap garnet.

My uncle said to her, That is true, girl, but you judge a man by his deeds and a knife by its blade.

I had to promise before he gave it to me that I would never pull the blade unless the life of me, or family, or something was threatened, and to not let others see it unless I killed them. My blade is a very dark color and thin. When you look at it end on, it looks like a diamond shape. I have found nothing that will dull it or break it, but I am very careful with it.

I would fight any man, but my sister is dead. I knew who it had to be on the ground that my sister was going to. She would only go to my mother. If my mother was dead, then my father and uncles were too, along with my father’s men. They would die before letting my mother be in harm’s way.

I said to myself, The whole damn place is burning. There is nobody left alive, or they would be fighting, and no one is fighting.

I wasn’t going to fight.

You might say, Boy, there could still be people alive out there.

There could be, but a boy can’t go out and get them. I might try, if I was ten, but first I want to have a good horse and a sword, or at least a bow and arrows. I’ve been using a sling. My mother would have a fit if she knew that, but I figured she wouldn’t mind so much now. I’m no good with it, but I’ve been using it.

Last year, old Joseph made some fish traps and showed me how to open them and get fish out. I get fish out regular now.

I am not sure what I will do in the future, but right now I will stay here and stay alive.

My sister’s bundle had a stout dress, a pair of hiking boots, two very nice silk blankets, my mother’s signet, two pieces of jewelry, a small purse with ten large gold pieces, a knife, a little bit of food, and a flask of water. My bundle had two wool blankets, sturdy pants, a jerkin top, shoes, a small purse with a silver piece in it, a little bit of food, and a flask of water. I always had my emergency pack ready, but I could not get at it then. It was in one of the old outbuildings far down the hill. They didn’t burn that building, so later I went back and got my pack. It had fish hooks, sinew, some sharp flakes of flint, and an old fire starter. My mother never thought of fire starters. I had fixed an old one that someone had thrown away. It is hard to start, but it works.

The prize, of course, was the bag. One of my uncles made it for me when he was at sea. It was made out of the skin of a manta. Men make sword handle covers and such out of manta. My bag has a double seam, so that the stuff inside is watertight if you close it right. I put the food, coins, and such inside. I started to throw my sister’s clothes away, but then I thought about it. There is not a lot of difference between her dress and my jerkin. I cut the dress up and used sinew to make leggings, gloves, and a snood. A snood is a separate piece that goes over your head like a hood, but it is separate.

I put my blankets down on a bed of moss and cover up with my sister’s silk blankets. It is warm even with no fire.

I smoke fish below the high water mark on rainy days. I build a cover of bark and bring it all back up here, rack and all. When I’m done, I eat fish and dry it. I have a small pack of dried fish done up in bark that I made. Most of the fish I catch, I eat. I ate the food my mother packed in two days and then I went down to the fish camp. It was a stormy night. I had been gathering firewood when it was nice. I ate good on that stormy night. I was hungry. I caught two white fish and one big nasty red, that bit me. I fixed it; I ate it that night and the next day. The white fish I smoked in my cave. It was a nasty dreary day.

I think the people who killed my family are gone. I don’t see anyone when I go back to scout, but I don’t go down to look for tracks. If you look for tracks, you leave tracks. If you don’t leave tracks, it’s as if you don’t exist. A month ago I would have complained about stuff, but now I am just glad to have warmth and food.

Image304.JPG

I lived in that cave above the beach through that first winter, carrying wood, and getting enough fish to stay alive. Fish aren’t that good for staying alive, but I got better with the sling, so I began getting squirrels and rabbits. Even during the hungry gap in the spring, the sea just kept right on bringing fish in. After the hungry gap, I had plants to eat. I found out that our gardens, fields, and orchards produced without us. That year I gathered without leaving tracks.

The next year a man came with a group of people. He took the stones of our tumbled place and tried to move them, but found he couldn’t. He finally had to clear the beams away. He used the lesser stone on top of the foundations and made himself a tower, then built of wood around the rest of the place. Where the front doors had been, he put a gate. He put another gate where the back doors had been. He had stables then for his horses and such. He and the people who came with him lived there that first winter. The next year five men rebuilt the frame of the barn, and then everybody spent two days putting siding and topping on. They gathered hay and straw. People went down on the beach. One wise old man found my fish trap. There went my way of living.

I went down to the cove where my uncle had hidden his ship. I hadn’t thought of it before. The ship was still there. It was a small one mast ship, mostly covered over. It was rigged for one man to sail. I cut the anchor rope which was almost worn through anyway. I dropped the sails and got that ship out of there. I turned north. The food in there was spoiled, so I tossed it overboard. The bedding was better than mine. I washed everything on board including the bedding, clothes, and everything down below deck. I had it nice and clean. My sail was not of good cloth anymore, it had set too long fallow. My ropes were old and worn, but the ship was beautiful.

I sailed it through the channel passage out and back around. When I thought I had gone far enough, I turned to try to go around the tip into the north sea. My thinking was that some of the Celtic clans came through the frozen hell of the north, so surely family was up there somewhere. I came down into a choked passage with many islands. Fleets of dark ships came pouring out after me. I couldn’t change the sails; all I could do was steer. Sometimes it was perilously close to rocks and such. The other ships fell away.

The word went out that there was a new skipper in the northlands. One man handled the boat. He steered closer to rocks and in shallows than anyone had ever even heard of. He was a master steersman, going faster and cutting it closer than any of the locals would try.

I came down out of that place and turned east for the better part of the day. That night I turned north. The next morning I saw myself coming in-between low islands. There was a village in the distance. I navigated that ship up river. When I got far enough up the river, I put the blade hard over and looped it shut. I went up and cut the rope for the mast. It fell, dipped in the water, and anchored me. I slammed into the upper part of their pier. There were men there getting ropes over.

Those men were speaking a language that was harsh to my tongue. I couldn’t quite figure out what they were saying. I started speaking my own language. They grinned and a couple of them changed their case a little. It made a bit of sense. They wanted to know where the grownups were. I told them that there were none. They finally got a man who spoke the old languages well. He translated for me. They questioned me over and over again about how I’d come.

They kept looking at me. One man reached out curiously to look at my manta skin pouch. I jerked it away grabbing at my knife handle. They laughed at that, for to them, my knife was just a little slender toy fit for a boy. I told the men that I had come searching for warriors and a crew.

There was a shipbuilder there who offered to take me in as an apprentice. He offered to pay me five hundred large gold pieces for the ship and the right

to examine her. He said he might have to take some pieces off, but he could put them back on. I told him I wasn’t interested. A family said they would take me in fostering for the five hundred gold pieces I got for the ship. The shipbuilder objected.

He said, You don’t foster. You don’t have a cast or a trade.

They talked about how much fostering cost. The fact that I had no family to trade back again was discussed.

A fierce looking man came. The others stepped back to give him way. He wanted to know what was going on. The shipbuilder explained. The fierce man went and looked at the ship.

He came back and said, You have no family, boy?

I said, No, raiders killed them all in the night two years ago.

The men described what I had told them about my passage.

One man said, He couldn’t possibly have sailed the ship that far.

Another man said, How else do you think he got here? We have no ships like this in our waters, none we ever even heard of.

Those men came to be angry about the whole thing. I don’t know why.

The fierce man looked at me and said, I’ll not foster you, because you have no family for fostering, and that would be a false thing. But come live with me as my son. Do my family honor proud. One such as you should not have to pay a family to take them. It is a fair bargain the ship master makes, five hundred gold pieces to look at the ship. He usually gives two hundred to apprentice, so he will owe you seven hundred pieces of gold. He may take a few pieces off, but if he messes it up and can’t fix it, he’ll owe you another one thousand gold pieces. With that, you can buy two or three of our finest ships, ships that you will need when you go back home.

Others said that they had never heard of such a place as I described as home.

The fierce man said, Damn straight you haven’t! We stay away from it. They are family. You go poking your nose around that place, they will slice it off and hand it to you toasted for supper. You don’t want to go raiding family no how.

With that he vaulted up on that horse like it was naught. The horse took his weight and the weight of his weapons and mail. He reached down, grasped me by the arm, lifted me up, and put me in front of him. Two other men that I hadn’t noticed before grabbed my bundles and had them up with them on their horses. Seven of us rode out, eight if you’re counting me.

That man, my new father, was one of the finest captains in the area and a doughty fighting man. When we got to where we were going, he turned me over to the women, like the coward he was. They scrubbed me, scrubbed my clothes, and dressed me in strange clothes. The clothes didn’t fit right, so when my clothes were dry, I put them back on. They fed me and put me up with their children, as if I were one of them.

Over the years I learned to use weapons, ride, sail, and navigate. I was more serious than most. The ladies worried that I didn’t have fun. I had fun when I was holding a sword on the practice field; I had fun when I was teeth into a storm; I had fun when I was riding to battle, and we did ride into battle. They were good people.

I went raiding for the first time four years after that man took me in as his son. Some might say that that is a bit young, but I killed my first man in front of them that summer. It was a fair fight, as fair as there ever is one. I won my first sword that way. I gutted him with my knife blade and took his sword. I killed three other men that day with that sword.

We had looked all over that lord’s place and he didn’t seem to have much. There were a few jewels, some minor gold pieces, a few weapons and some silk scarves. I could tell the men weren’t too happy about our load. They had already attacked some people called the Brits the year before and come home with not much in their boat. I had seen neighbors like that back home. Some of them kept their treasure in the loose tiles of the main chimney. We checked that with no luck. Others used to keep their treasure in the well. The men lowered me into the well at my insistence. I found the loose brick. They sent me a basket on a rope. I filled basket after basket of treasure. It wasn’t a great fortune, but it was fourteen baskets of gold and a little bit of silver.

They had lots of grains: wheat, oats and barley. There comes a Norseman’s decision: wheat for bread, or ale if you wish it; oats for the horses, or to roll and eat; or barley which nobody is ever going to eat, so you’ll use it all for whiskey. I was just kidding, because wheat is by far and away the most valuable. We finished our loading with fourteen good sized cheeses and a couple of hams. The hams were bad looking. We tried to eat them on the way home, but finally used them for fish bait. That didn’t work either.

I told them below Amorika, on the main coast down south, living goes up to Kirk Island, or Notre Dame as the locals call it. Down south of that they have great abundance. That is where you get the mountains that come right down and swoosh into the sea. Get around that and you come to ancient Tarsus, which for a long time has been a silver capital. If you sail on past that, you

sail into the warm seas. There you are in the soft underbelly of the rich people of the continent.

A few years later my stepfather said to me, This summer I think you are ready to visit your family.

He had made sure that I had gone raiding with the right people over the years. Some of the best men owed me their lives. They all knew my story, and now they were ready to become part of the legend. It felt odd to have become a legend, but I did sail a ship quite a distance at a very young age. At the time it seemed a bit of a stretch. It is like Emerick the teller says, heroic. It doesn’t matter if the hero is four or forty.

My friends and I went south. They were men who owed my stepfather, men who owed me, or just men who would sail with me. It was no promise of gold this time; it was blood. I would come out of this owing them.

We went down to my uncle’s cove, landed, and then de-boated. The boats couldn’t all fit in there, so they took turns. Enough men were left on each ship to get it out of harm’s way or bad weather. There we were, four hundred eighty three men strong, wolves of the north.

The gentleman at the first place we hit had been in on the raid that killed my family. It just took a hot sword to get him to tell us all he knew. One of our men had fallen coming up the cliff. He was afraid something was broken in his leg, so we fixed him up with a cart and peasants to haul him around. He was organizing what they had that we would want to take with us down the cliff when we were ready to leave. They had eighteen horses. We took them all. We younger men jogged; the older men who were doing good to fight and carry their armor, we put on horseback. I’m not making fun of those men. There were some who shouldn’t have been jogging across land. We gave them the prestige due to them.

We came down that road with the setting sun, right on up and over their low walls, in the forecourt, and in their very gate. We killed most of them. It took me three days to get it all out. By that time, we had stripped the place and all of the surrounding countryside of grain, dried fruit, and anything else of possible value. They didn’t have much. They had treated the women they had captured from the surrounding countryside very badly for years. We let the women go. I paid them each a silver out of my own purse, that they might have something.

Uonka and Beard said to me, This is a poor raiding when you pay out instead of take in.

They laughed and slapped me on the back.

Locals came to me and begged quite nicely that their women not be raped. I told them that was no problem. Then they asked that we leave them enough food to last them through the winter. I asked if they had enough food for the winter now, and they did.

I said, After this hog in the castle got through, you’d be better off with us. They allowed that was true. I said, By the same token, if you have excess, give it over now. If my boy’s find out about it, you’re dead.

They found all kinds of grain that hadn’t been around before. We got all the boats loaded with grain, fruit, dried fruit, and such like that.

We turned for home. Part way there we ran across some merchants headed up our home way with partial loads. They had brought stuff down to Drimo in payment and couldn’t find a full load back. We loaded them up with all we had. Three of our ships went back with them and the rest of us turned south.

One man said, What’s this about Tarsus and silver?

I said, I’ve got a better idea. How about we go straight to the land of the soft women and gold chalices.

We went that way, but we never got to that. We came instead to a brown robe kirk. We hit that place and raided it. We damn near sunk our boats with the gold, silver, and jeweled treasures.

I told my men we could have wine aboard, but anybody who drank and got drunk was a dead man. They knew I wasn’t joking. Anybody who drank and got surly, or caused a change in the ships atmosphere, or worse yet got into a fight, I’d kill with my own hand.

When we got home, there were seven men who wanted to challenge me to fight over what I had said. They didn’t want to interrupt the ship’s efficiency at the time, but they had taken offense and would fight me now. I told them I’d just as soon not. They had done me a favor; I had made them money. It was a good relationship for a man to have. They allowed as much as that was true. Three others insisted on fighting. One of them was one of the most dangerous fighters of our time.

By the time the sun was down that day, I was known as a dour fighter. I had bled a great deal and was lightheaded. One of their sisters came to me livid. She slapped my face and called me an ingrate, because her brother had gone with me when I had a need. The other men spoke up and told her how it was, that I had eaten shit to try to back down. She looked at me.

I said, He was a fine man. I loved him and hated to kill him, but I’ll not die just to make your brother happy.

She didn’t know what to do. She was beautiful with fire, so I asked her there if she would be my wedded wife.

She blinked at me and said, Sir, this day you have killed my favorite brother. Have you no decency?

I said, Not before radiant beauty such as yours.

I can’t even remember what all I said. A change came upon her. She hardened her back. Her mouth lost its rage and grew very serious looking. I thought I had messed up.

She stepped forward, threw her arms around me, kissed me a huge moist passionate kiss and said, Yes, I’ll marry you right now.

So, I was married that day. They pushed me off to my bridal bed, and told her not to kill me, because I had lost a lot of blood that day. She came to the bridal bed brought by two of her sisters. Her mother wouldn’t talk to her. They unwrapped her like a present for me. She was more beautiful than ever, I thought, and I told her so. Then I did go to sleep, or pass out or something. She said at first she thought I was joking, then she grew very angry. She began looking at my wounds. I had come very near death that day. I was very embarrassed the next day.

She woke up and saw me looking at her. She smiled, hugged and kissed me. I could hardly move. She washed me down. I was raging with fever. She got food and drink for us and then I collapsed on the bed again. I was like that for eight days, then we consummated the marriage. We were both very glad of that.

I never had much truck with