He stabbed. He stabbed the more. His mailed arm flashed up and down like the wing of some giant hummingbird. Steel bit, and drank deep, and serpentish blood oozed and spurted, and splashed-and the last six feet of that body lashed wildly.
“Agonized, pain-crazed, the creature sought to gulp its prey even before it crushed him to the easily-swallowed red pulp it preferred. The head flashed down. Great jaws gaped.
Cormac’s arm, whipping up for another stab, slammed up under the creature’s jaw. The arm and its momentum were powerful enough to knock that fearful head aside, with jarring pain to attacked and attacker. Then attacked became attacker. Twisting his wrist, Cormac drove his dagger up into that lower jaw with such force that the point of the blade ripped bloodily through the upper jaw, between the creature’s eyes.
The son of Art hardly knew what happened, then.
It was as though the world was quake-shaken. Cormac was jerked upward. He lost all equilibrium, all sense of up and down as he was whirled in air. A heavy groaning grunt escaped him when his back was slammed, not against the wall but the ceiling of that tunnel made by man and ruled by reptile. Yet that he’d been able to grunt was a gaining; the serpentine grip had loosened!
Whirled aloft in the massive snake’s throes of pain and desperation, Cormac was released. There was a wind in his ears, and he sought with all his concentration to curl his body as he flew through the air-
Amid pain and clouds of dust, he struck the tunnel’s floor, and he rolled.
The wall stopped him. His bones creaked. His head felt as if it would be snapped off. The world spun and the heaven-lights of a clear winter’s night seemed to dance and race before his eyes. He wallowed on the corridor floor, in the dust, which clung to the reptile’s blood on him.
When he was sure of floor and ceiling, and the lights had gone out before his eyes, the aching Gael set hand to wall and dragged himself to his feet.
He was coughing; the corridor was full of the swirling dust of centuries. Nor would it soon abate, he saw, for the monster reptile was still writhing and hurling itself wildly about. Between its jaws gleamed Cormac’s dagger. The serpent made no sound. Only the heavy thump of its lashing body against the floor and walls of the tunnel sounded its agony and terror-madness.
For a moment Cormac stood staring, blinking, coughing.
Then he saw the glint of steel in the dust, and he went forward. Dodging sidewise to avoid a sweeping rope of arm-sized green that slammed into the wall, he darted into the center of the corridor.
He paused only long enough to crouch, and snatch steel, and then he was running to be out of the way of a death-dealing hurricane in serpent form. He had his sword back, and he was past. He had no care whether the creature died now or later. Its body’s juices were being forced from it by its own violent lashing. At hand was the business of following Cutha Atheldane, and Samaire. Already he’d been too long delayed, and nearly killed for being fool enough to, assume that because A was equal to B, so would C be. Temptress and attacking men had been illusions; the serpent was unconditionally, prodigiously real!
“Fool I, to make such assumption,” he chastised himself. And he ran.
He limped, and he gripped his belt on the right with his left hand, that the aching arm could be kept from swinging. He’d had ribs cracked in his stormy life, and knew that such was not the case this time. Nor were bones broken. The arm would be all right. Heedless of possible traps now, Cormac ran.
The limp went first, and then the left arm began to feel as if it might be worth keeping. He ran.
Ahead were Cutha Atheldane and Samaire, and Cormac had not found her again after twelve years to have his first love, his first woman-though then she’d been but a budding girl-carried off by an illusion-spawning mage from the cold lands of the Vikings!
He plunged along the dark and dusty corridor, strangely twilit now, and odoriferous of a time remotest in the womb of Chronos. He knew he was far beneath the earth. This subterranean burrow must lead to the shore, he thought.
Ahead he saw a wall, and in addition to the eerie lighting of the tunnel itself there was the glimmer of a torch. Cormac’s lips parted in a grim smile of satisfaction. Around that turning then, and he’d be upon them, and it was not as captive he wanted Cutha Atheldane of the northlands!
Three running steps from the turning he heard a scraping, a blow, and a throaty gurgle from a human throat. Then he was there, and swinging leftward again, and he was upon them.
Cutha Atheldane stared at him, but the man made no move to attack or make a gesture of ensorcelment. One hand hung limp. The other scraped along the wall beside him, dragging downward as it tried to support his body. Nails tore and knees cracked as the Druid dropped. Behind him stood Samaire of Leinster, also staring at Cormac. In her hand was a dagger he recognized as the Druid’s. It blade was darkened, and it dripped.
Cutha Atheldane lurched forward and lay still in the dust between the two Gaels.
Bending to snatch up the dropped torch, Cormac let the woman see his smile.
“So, dairlin’ girl, it’s warrior ye’ve become, after twelve years! And robbing me of the pleasure of gaining this Viking slime his death, too.”
She stared at him in silence, looking shocked. Cormac swallowed, knowing she still did not recognize the man the smooth-cheeked boy had become-a man of scarred and sinister face beneath his dented helm.
“A plucky woman indeed. Aye, and a true daughter of Eirrin, whose women have for centuries gone to the warring with their men-folk! But come, dairlin’ girl-it’s a smallish pack of wolves I had with me, and they may well be hard put to account for all our captors!” He sheathed his sword and extended his hand.
“P-Partha? Cormac?”
“Aye, Samaire. Partha and Cormac, both at once, but it’s my own name I’ve used these past few years. Now-”
But she had taken his proffered hand, and the willowy woman with the loosened mane of sunset-coloured hair clamped it tightly enough to let him know it was no weakling had slain Cutha Atheldane.
“Partha!” she cried, and gripped his other arm. “I mean, Cormac-” And she burst into joyous laughter that wavered on the brink of hysteria. “God in heaven, you be so-so-oh Cormac!”
There was woman-scent in her hair, and woman-feel in her, even when it was against his steely mailcoat she pressed herself, with both arms around him.
Cormac stood awkwardly. Twelve years had passed, and no daughter of a king remained unwed-and there was business, elsewhere. Heaving a great sigh, he filled his hand with the softness of her hair… but clenched his teeth. He pulled back.
“It’s later we’ll greet and talk, Samaire,” he told her. “There are my companions…”
She shot him a look from eyes green as a cat’s, and nodded. In a sinuous movement the mannishly-dressed woman scooped up the dropped dagger.
“Aye, then, Cormac! Hurry then, and let’s reap a red harvest among those sneering Norsemen-and call me what you did of old, not Samaire, or it’s this blade I may be tempted to slip betwixt your links!”
Laughing a great laugh, Cormac swung an arm around her, turned, and lofted his torch to light their long way back.
“A king’s daughter,” he called, “and she talking of bloody slaying-and wanting to be called ‘dairlin’ girl’ as a boy of Connacht once called her? Och, it’s a strange world Eirrin’s become since my leaving of it!”
“Faster,” she urged, striding out in leatherclad legs. “And aye, and careful with your tongue, Cormac mac Cuchulain, for it was no boy to whom I gave my girlhood in Carman-on-the-sea, what seems a century ago!”
Laughing, Cormac strode back the way he had come.
Chapter Six: Treachery of a King
My mind is upon Eirrin,
Upon Loch Lene, upon Linny,
Upon the land where the Ulstermen are,
Upon gentle Leinster and upon Meath.
– Ceann Ruadh, the “Minstrel-king”
(from Voyage of the Exi
les)
Their rapid pace and the circuitousness of that subterranean burrow prevented Cormac mac Art and Samaire from exchanging many words. He did learn that the other prisoner was her brother Ceann, and that their father was dead nigh two years.
No inimical serpent awaited them in that dusty and echoic corridor. The vast reptile was dead when they came upon him, though Samaire was frightened enough. Cormac was both surprised and troubled to learn that she had seen no sign of the snake, ere now. Had it erupted from some side passage he had failed to note, then, last survivor of an ages-agone war? Or-had Cutha Atheldane possessed even more power than suspected, and Samaire slain a sorcerer of considerable note?
The snake had thrashed until the lethargy of death overcame it, and left a lake of blood they must walk through. Cormac was more than happy to sweep his “dairlin’ girl” up in his arms and carry her across to dry dust, though she railed at him.
“I be no weak mewling girl who must be sheltered from the hint or sight of harm and carried like a babe across a mere bit of blood!”
“Oh,” he said.
He walked three paces on, into the dust, and dropped her. Dust flew up and she groaned, but he was, already turning back. He retrieved his Saxon dagger from the serpent’s mouth, calmly enough, and he took up his ruined shield too, to show the others he’d had no easy time of it and had not been a-womanizing whilst they faced stern blades against his counsel.
“I suppose,” Saimare of the flaming hair said when he rejoined her, and her standing, “that I am committed and cannot now put bad words on you for having dropped me, and me both a woman and a king’s daughter.”
“I suppose not,” Cormac said.
They went on, ever upward. After a time he glanced at her face in the torchlight, and she looked up at him. They grinned together, and then they laughed.
“Barbarian,” she snapped. “Cu Roi mac Dairi!” There was laughter still, in her voice.
“Warrior-woman,” he retorted, grinning. “Morrigu and Agron all in one, ye are!”
Laughing, they went on. She had named him that god who was master of sorcerers and great traveler; he who had done conquest all over the world, but had never reddened his sword in Eirrin; it was apt enough, saving only that one man Cormac had slain, at the Great Feast twelve years ago. He in his turn had called her by the name of both the goddesses of war and of slaughter. He hoped there was no aptness in her case: a prophetess, Morrigu the Battle Crow was not unknown for treachery done on the sons of men.
At last they re-entered the room where Cutha had sought to bargain with her, and thence they went around and down into the castle’s main chamber.
It was a charnel house.
The reek of gore was in the air, and somewhere Morrigu must have been licking her lips. Blood was splashed everywhere and pooling the floor around the corpses of slain men. A great battle had taken place here, and Cormac and Samaire found but two survivors. Both men dripped blood.
One was a red-bearded giant, tall-as tall as Cormac-and hugely built. He leaned on a great gore-smeared ax, and his fierce eyes gleamed with the joy of battle and having done to death every man of his foes. His thrice-dented helmet lay on the floor, and now it sprouted but one horn.
The other man was built more as Cormac was, lean and lithe and catlike, with a rippling sinuousness. Fire and sunset his hair was, and his face had been smooth-shaven; now it sprouted the gleaming growth of a seven-day or so. He was not so tall as mac Art, and was in truth considerably better looking, without Cormac’s several scars and slitted eyes. Rent bloodsoaked was his once-white shirt, and there was blood too on his chin and many dark spots and lines marked where it had splashed his leather leggings and boots. This man, not yet thirty, sat on the floor with his right hand clamped around his left arm at the elbow, where blood trickled.
“Ceann!” Samaire cried. “You’re hurt!”
“Aye.” He nodded. “It’s the edge of a dagger I caught here, but it’s hardly my death I’ll have from it. The dagger is still clenched in the hand that wielded it-see?”
She followed the direction of his nod. “Ugh,” she said rather than groaned, for the dagger-clenching fist was several feet from any arm. Wulfhere laughed aloud.
“This great warrior had the fellow’s hand apart from his body and his entrails plopping forth with two slashes so swift I could not have swung my ax once in the same space!, It’s a fellow son of Eirrin we’ve liberated from the Norse, Cormac. And by Odin and the blood of Odin, he himself liberated several of their spirits from their bodies in the doing!”
“Cormac!” the young man said, and he stared at the man who had returned with his sister. She had already ripped and slashed a great long strip of cloth from a tumbled bale of purest white, and anointed his arm with wine as though it were plentiful as water. Now she was binding up his wound.
Cormac’s blue eyes met the seated man’s strangely pale, blue-green ones. “Aye, Ceann mogh Ruadh mac Ulad, Cormac, whom you knew as Partha mac Othna.”
“And who my sister knew all too well!”
“Still your body and your tongue, darling brother,” Samaire snapped, “or I’ll pull both ends of this cloth till your arm drops off! He has just followed me miles underground, and him in the dark, and forced to face too the grandfather of all serpents which he slew with so much blood as to redden the Boyne for a week!”
Cormac blinked at the fierceness of Samaire’s tone, and her poetic exaggeration. It was Wulfhere who spoke.
“Ho! So that’s the way of it-methought perhaps you bent your shield so in falling over your own feet, Cormac!”
With a swift, small smile, Cormac hurled the ruined shield at him. Wulfhere batted it away negligently, though in truth another man might have been bowled over.
“So it’s all old friends you Gaels are, then. Ceann Red-hair I have already exchanged names with. And this be his sister, Samaire?” The hulking Dane smiled upon her. “It’s nice heads of hair ye both have-I be partial to red!”
Samaire looked about that great hall. “So,” she said, “I see. There, Ceann, and try to keep yourself quiet a time, that the wound has time to close. Does it hurt, brother?”
“It hurts. Seeing the waste of that good wine hurts the more, though!”
“A warrior indeed!” Wulfhere called out, amid a burst of laughter. “An all the men of Eirrin were as you twain, Cormac and Ceann, it’s straight for Dane-mark I’d set my sail, to avoid getting my death at the hands of such ferocious heroes as ye both be!”
Ceann stood up. “It’s in your debt I remain now, Parth-Cormac mac Art.”
Cormac nodded. “I lay no claim,” he said. “Now suppose we take up a bit of food and enough ale for ten-”
“Twenty, and I’m to have aught!” Wulfhere interrupted.
“-and get ourselves elsewhere, away from the smell and sight of blood. It’s sword-companions Wulfhere and I have lost this night, and a man deep in ale has no memory.”
Immediately, after the manner of Eirrin, Samaire set up a keening. Wulfhere glanced at his comrade.
“She does us honour, keening our dead,” Cormac told him. “It is our-it is the way of Eirrin.”
Wulfhere nodded. He walked to the lamenting young woman, scooping up two leathern sacks of ale as he went. His hand on her shoulder covered it from throat to upper arm.
“With thanks, friend of my friend. But let’s away from this slaughterhouse and shriek in our minds.”
Well laden, the quartet departed the reeking scene of red horror and destruction, and went along the corridor none of them had traversed. There they found two rooms, one after the other, spread with stolen cloths and cloaks-of Gaelic manufacture, Cormac noticed-and tables. The arrangement of cloth and furs showed that the Vikings had slept here. The only four occupants of that palace great enough for a thousand entered, and sat and drank. And Samaire and Ceann told their story.
Ulad Ceannselaigh, king of tribute-laden Leinster, had died of a sudden, and without blood. Natural
ly he left his throne to his firstborn, Liadh. That elder brother of Ceann and Samaire sat the high seat well, and retained most of his father’s advisers, creating his brother Feredach his high minister. Her father had long since wed Samaire to a prince of Osraige, which to everyone but its king was a part of Leinster, along the western border. Aiding the southern Munstermen in resisting a Pictish incursion into their lands, Samaire’s husband took an arrow in the chest. He died even as he was being carried back to Osraige. Childless and in difficulties with her husband’s mother, Samaire returned to Carman in Leinster. She had an honoured place in the household of her kingly brother Liadh, along with Ceann, whose wife had died in the bearing him of their second child.
But Liadh was slain, and him less than a year on the throne.
“There was little secret,” Ceann Ruadh said bitterly, “and no doubt in the minds of many: it was our brother Feredach had him murdered.”
Cormac sighed, but only nodded. It was the way of royalty in all lands. An a king had but one heir, the succession was endangered by but one fragile life. An he had several sons, to insure the continuity of his clan on the throne, each was in danger of the other.
“Feredach Ruadh-lam!” Samaire whispered viciously through clenched teeth, calling her brother the Red-handed.
And so Feredach was crowned in Leinster. Nor was he popular, a mean grasping man who suspected everyone of plotting as he had ever done. Nervous he was of the popularity of his own younger brother Ceann-and Ceann’s confidante, Samaire, four years widowed and returned to the keep of her family.
“We knew it not then,” Ceann said, with ugliness in his pleasant tenor voice. “But our brother thought it was plotting we were, in the time we spent together.”
“Poor fearful Feredachh feared us!” Samaire put in, and Cormac knew that was as incredible as her voice and manner indicated; she and Ceann were not of such a bent.
“I see the light as of dawn,” Wulfhere Skull-splitter said, holding aside his alesack long enough to speak. “Ye two fell into the hands of Viking-raiders, and while you were out for a ride, from the looks of you. This Feredach did treachery on you, I’m thinking.”
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