The Sword of the Gael cma-5

by Andrew J Offutt

  “Of course, the man says, as though speaking to a child. Cormac-I know these waters, I’ve been here before, and I know not that isle of stone!”

  Cormac squinted, staring at the bristly cone that rose above the deep blue of the sea, and he said, “Ummm.”

  “A fine comment from a man who’s spent a halfscore years asea!” Wulfhere snapped in exasperation. “Look here-I swear by all the gods of the Danes and aye, those of your people too: that overgrown chimney was not here when last I sailed these precincts!”

  Cormac blinked. “But-we must be off-course, or you remember awrong. Islands don’t just… appear.”

  Wulfhere snorted. He was certain of himself, but not of the new land. For many minutes, as they drew abreast and then passed the rough-hewn and totally forbidding cone, they were sore confused. It defied them, brooding sullenly and trailing its sinister smoke. It was Ceann, then, who provided the beginning of the answer.

  “The water… it’s hot.”

  “Be that a storm ahead?” his sister asked nervously.

  On their course well ahead was indeed a great darkness on the sea, with no cerulean sky visible. And when Cormac leaned out and down, he discovered that Ceann was right; the sea was unnaturally warm. He and Wulfhere exchanged frowning glances.

  Ahead, there was the sound of thunder. The sea raised waves, which grew and billowed. The sail commenced to flap.

  “The heat, Cormac-that land we just passed is new-risen, and so recently it is still earth-heart hot!”

  The Gael was wrestling with cordage and the tiller. “The sea is angry about it-and glad I am we came not upon that pile of stone when it was a-rising from the keep of Mannanan macLir!”

  Then the sun vanished.

  There was darkness in the hours of day. The sea ahead erupted in fire and black clouds and great billows of hissing steam. Their slim, one-sailed craft was rocked as waves came rolling to meet them. Abruptly they were all down and groaning, for with a loud crack of sail, the ship lurched to port.

  The sea rolled high. Waves rushed and spray was flung high aloft by an angry wind with no mind as to which way it would blow.

  Cursing and ready to admit fear, Cormac mac Art struggled over their cargo-well lashed down, thank all the gods-to the sail.

  “The sail! We’ve got to get it down!” he yelled. Whistling wind flung his words heedlessly aside-and sent him rolling as well. The small ship swung half about and raced a hundred yards eastward before starting to swing again.

  Then there was the ear-splitting crack and roar of a thousand thunders. From the very sea ahead a blazing hell erupted. Orange flame shot skyward to singe the clouds themselves. A mighty torch lit the sky, greater than all the Behl-fires of Eirrin put together. In its glow danced thousands of black dots and spinning, whirling, sky-flying chunks of rock the colour of flame. Oust and black cinders blotted the sky. In an instant night was upon them-lit by that groaning, billowing column of flame ahead. There was a counterpoint sound: a deep-voiced hissing, as molten stone from the sea’s floor and the earth’s entrails struck the water. Steam boiled up in mile-high columns of boiling billowing grey-white.

  A great lava missile, surely equaling Wulfhere’s weight, came end-over-ending from the very sky to strike the water with a splash and a hiss not twenty feet off the starboard side no, the port side, for that swiftly the ship heeled and spun almost completely about.

  The ocean and the air round above it were confused, so that waves came rushing and visibly swerved, while the wind howled and changed its direction more swiftly than a bad king’s whims.

  The brightness of flame danced on four faces in which the eyes were huge and staring. Never had any of them known the lord of thunder to be so angry, or the god of the sea to be at once so berserk. Now coarse black ash rained into the water in thousands of tiny plops, and Ceann batted away a spinning ball of fire the size of an eyeball.

  The flame lowered, while beneath it rasping, grumbling rumbles and deep coughs arose. The wind lessened-

  “CORMAC!” Wulfhere bawled.

  But Cormac was doing what he knew he must, and that horrorstruck cry of his friend did not deter him or his slicing sword. It fell in a rush driven by iron muscle. Sharp steel edge bit through rope and into the wood of the ship itself.

  The sail dropped, its mainline sheared through.

  “We’re HELPLESS now!” Wulfhere shouted.

  Ahead, the world grumbled and coughed sullenly, and black smoke poured, wildly rolling, through where the gouts of flame had erupted from the sea.

  “We were helpless afore,” Cormac snapped back, roughly grasping Samaire’s arm. “Hang on, dairlin girl.” And more loudly: “This way we preserve the sail. An we survive this horror, we’ll need it later! Now-it menaces us more than it aids, for-”

  Another tremendous and sky-shattering explosion interrupted him and swallowed his words in its mighty sound. Almost immediately a wave of palpable force came rushing from the new pillar of flame that leaped up from the ocean. Still clinging to Samaire’s arm, Cormac was hurled back against the bulwark-and had he not sought to help the woman and retained his grip on her, he’d have gone over.

  The sail flapped, tried to billow this way and that. But now it was no more than an oversized pennon, fluttering loosely from its mast.

  The northwest horizon was a curtain of flame and dancing ash and cinders and wheeling, spinning lava missiles that plunged back into the sea from many feet in the air. Ever higher rose the heat. The four seafarers showed sweat on flame-lit faces. Steam hissed and billowed up to join rolling black clouds that fell over on another on their upward climb. There was the odour of rotten eggs in every nostril.

  Volcanic eject splashed into the waters. Something pinged sharply off Cormac’s helmet. Seeing it drop into the ship, he moved automatically. Only at the last instant did he remember himself, and use his left hand. Nevertheless he grunted in pain in the second he held that cinder in his wet, hissing hand; he shoveled up the cinder and hurled it into the sea all in one swift motion. Ceann cried out, slapping at his tunic, which smoked.

  Then a new shock wave struck, and the mad waves came again. An enormous wave caught them, bore them with it as it raced from the emerging volcano.

  The unnamed Viking boat-swung and was driven so swiftly southward that all became a blur to its four helpless passengers. Streaks of golden fire in the night that had seized the sky before sunset, glowing chunks of lava arced. They rained down into the sea-where the ship had wallowed, but seconds before. Black ash blotted the sky and sullied the waves. Cinders were a thick swarm that constantly pocked. the waters as if by a heavy thunderstorm. Behind them the sky glowed like a bloody orange sunrise; all about them was darkness.

  On raced the frail boat, borne on a wave sent forth by the cataclysmic vomiting from the deeps. Four people clung with white knuckles to whatever purchase they’d found with scrabbling fingers, and all knew their faces were no less white. All knew, too, that in this gale and rushing wave that bore them along as if they were above the water’s surface, the sail would have been torn in strips like ragged ribbons.

  Instead, the sheet Cormac had slashed free streamed out behind them from its mast, a brave striped banner that belied the horror of the fleeing ship’s riders.

  Thunder, both a constant rumbling roar and a series of poom-ing explosions, assaulted their ears. They rushed on in a direction opposite their goal, riding a great wave that carried them smoothly as the finest of gaited horses. About them, they felt the air current changing wildly. East- and southward they were hurled, while behind them raged that fiery monster from the floor of the sea.

  As if it had not been enough, staring eyes and numbed brains now reported the new menace before them: all beheld the white water about the emergence of some menacing monster of the deeps. Up it came, with water rushing off its back in the four places where that grey and green hide split the sea-and they were swept directly toward it.

  “Sea monster!” Ceann mutt
ered, and knew he’d never see Leinster again.

  Forty feet separated the first hump from the second, and twenty or thirty from the third. A longship’s length stretched between third and fourth… and Cormac realized of a sudden that it was no living creature he saw.

  With cataclysmic convulsions, the ocean’s floor was flinging up more new land!

  Up surged those humps of grey rock slimed with green and clumped and shot through with brown and black-and directly toward the emerging island raced the ship. Without sail or workable rudder, it seemed mindlessly bent on smashing splintering destruction.

  Closer and closer rushed the first great ridge of new land, and still higher it rose. The distance between it and the second closed swiftly. Frozen with horror as they sped toward doom and sea-graves, not one of the four victims of the sea’s wrath so much as cried out.

  But their ship seemed to possess instincts of self-preservation. The vessel shot between the first and second humps, riding high so that there was no rending grate beneath. Four heads swiveled on their necks to see the long new isle, now behind them.

  Cormac slouched, his heart surely beating more rapidly than it ever had in battle, and that with the red berserker rage on him. Covered with sweat, he felt weak as a kitten just whelped. His eyes showed him that the others were the same. Even Wulfhere looked like a great doll dropped by some giant’s careless offspring.

  The wave that bore them lessened in its power, cut off behind them as emerging land connected the ridges. Now new waves rushed after them. Displaced by the sudden appearance of rocky land, angry foaming water sought new space for itself.

  Ahead, they saw the skyglow of sunset, and this time it was the real sunset.

  Discovery that their ship was leaking was far from horror; all emotions of that ilk were spent. It was almost jubilantly that they commenced baling with their helmets, for here was a menace that could be met and fended off. Behind them lay power that challenged the gods themselves and made all men less than insects in a hurricane. Sea and wind had threatened and attacked them, and fire and brimstone as well, and then rocky land, so that it was a combined attack by all the elements had been launched against them. And whimsically, by some shrugging natural force or yawning god, they had been spared.

  Spared… in a leaking ship… and many many miles off their course.

  Chapter Eight: Black Pool of Horror

  Monstrum horrendum, infofme, ingens…

  – Virgil, Aeneid

  Northwest they must go; southward and eastward they had been sent, even after Cormac had struck sail. Now the ship moved on, though not so swiftly, and they baled the long night away. It was just after dawn that they espied the line of islands ahead, so similar to those they had watched rise up behind them. They were all in a line, and closely set, so that they resembled the seven ridges of a great serpent.

  Yesterday they’d have had no thought but of putting into one link of that chain for rest and repairs. So shaken had been their world and their minds, though, that the four travelers stared long at that little island group. It was a strange feeling and it chafed Cormac, this business of staring at islands to be certain that they did not move.

  They did not, and the quartet fixed their sail. Baling, they made for the largest of the seven. They were rocky, like so many of the tiny isles in this sea south of Britain, and only the hardiest of vegetation lifted scraggly heads above igneous stone. The weary four furled sail, brought their ship in, and spent an agonizing hour wrestling it up a beach hardly worthy of the name.

  There were no woods here, not so much as a single tree that could be seen, so that they were forced, nervously lest it splinter, to use the mast itself to careen the ship.

  The hole in her keel was not much, but-how to repair it?

  “We trouble our heads over it later,” the prince of Leinster said, asserting himself now that he had a solid and motionless surface beneath his feet. “For now, let us sit on that which moves not, and eat-and it’s some of the ale, not pallid water, that I’d be washing it down with.”

  Wulfhere beamed at him. Stripping off their armour, they sat or squatted in the shade of the sideturned ship. Sea-watered rations were a feast, and the good ale they quaffed had in it none of the salt of the ocean. Wulfhere did not drink that much, he was exhausted: he slept. Ceann regarded him, and yawned. With a small smile, the young Leinsterman also lay back.

  Cormac and Samaire looked at each other. They too were weary. But… there was no opportunity for embraces asea, with the four of them clustered in the boat. Rising without a word, they left the two sleeping men and walked inland, over ground that was hard and pocked: solidified lava and magma. He left armour and helmet, but took his weapons.

  When they topped a rise and found themselves staring with both incredulity and delight at a small pool of water that was surely not of the sea, the man and woman seemed renewed in energy. They hurried down to the pond, which was merely a shallow bowl formed naturally in the cooling rock. It contained a few feet of rain-water.

  Samaire turned to look at the man beside her, and he drew her against him to surround and cherish her lips with his. She pressed close and her hand moved up so that her fingers slipped into the hair at his nape.

  “An we reach Eirrin after all,” he said huskily, “all will be different between us.”

  She met his eyes directly with her green gaze. “And why?”

  “It will. You are the widow of a prince of Osraige and daughter of and sister to kings of Leinster.”

  “Not,” she told him, “until someone recognizes me, and it’s not straight into Leinster we’ll be going, my over-thoughtful love.” His mouth opened to speak, and she pressed a finger to his lips. “The others will not sleep forever, and we’ll be needing our rest, too. Must I force myself upon you?”

  It was not necessary, and after a time Cormac and Samaire fell asleep there beside the tiny pool of saltless water.

  Upon awakening, Wulfhere made two discoveries: the couple by the little pond, asleep and their clothes disarrayed-and a broad stretch of black, near the shore. The substance was not hard. Using the helmet of a Viking who had no further need of it and shouldn’t mind its debasement in good cause, Dane and Gael dipped the pitch. Repairing the ship then was a simple matter, and the two smeared most of the craft’s keel with the smelly tarry stuff.

  “Ho,” Wulfhere called when he saw Cormac and Samaire approaching, nor did he miss the hands they so quickly disengaged. “And where have you been, whilst the work was done?”

  “Slaying twenty Picts, three monsters,” Cormac replied equably, “and a huge Dane who had in him neither civil tongue nor the restraint to avoid stupid questions.”

  Wulfhere shook his head. Then he glanced skyward. “The sun has completed over half its day’s journey, and the pitch not dry. It’s here we’ll rest this night.”

  Samaire chuckled. “Good! Suppose we take a bit of food and a sack of something to wet the throat, then, and explore our new harbour.”

  “Explore!” Wulfhere snorted. “This giant’s dinner-trencher of solid rock?” He gazed about at the small island that boasted neither animals nor insects and here and there but the fewest tender shoots of new grass from wind-borne seeds. “Cormac-note you the makeup of this land?”

  Cormac nodded. “Risen from the deeps. And that recently, judging from the tiny bit of greenery.”

  Wulfhere stamped his foot as if testing the crust. “I hope it does not decide to return whence it came, and us upon it!”

  Ceann’s frown demanded why the Dane had felt constrained to voice such a thought

  “And it’s such words,” Samaire said snippily as she knelt beside their stores, “you may keep to yourself, splitter of shields and skulls.”

  Cormac was astonished; Wulfhere looked apologetic. The giant developed an abiding interest in scratching under his beard and in gazing out to sea. Ceann watched Cormac lift a gurgling sack while Samaire appropriated a discreetly small amount of food; seawater
little harmed salt meat.

  “Wulfhere and I,” he said, “will remain to this hand of the island’s center.” He waved his right arm and received a sunny smile of gratitude from his sister.

  “You remain the best of men and brothers, Ceann,” she told him, and looked at Cormac.

  Together, they walked away, rounded the rearing and jagged teeth of stone upward of the beach, and were out of sight.

  Like lovers on a picnic without care, they wandered, stopping to look fondly on lonely little sprigs of green that struggled up from the hardened lava here and there. The couple shot each other constant looks and secret smiles.

  Though narrow, the island was long, and they walked far. Samaire fell once, and twisted her wrist in catching herself against harsh pumice. The man who squatted swiftly to draw her up was more solicitous than she had thought him capable. She looked almost wonderingly upon his scarred face.

  They remained just where they were for a long while, holding each other, thinking their separate thoughts in silence. The land around them became less ugly.

  A tall column of rough-hewn stone towered over their heads, like a stony sentinel watching over the island and brooding on its ugly barrenness. They walked past it, and found the strangeness of the skeletons of fish. Since they lay atop the stone and were not scorched or a part of it, Samaire pointed out, this island must have been formed first beneath the sea, and then risen already cool.

  “It is pleasant to keep company with a brilliant person, and her, a woman besides,” Cormac said.

  The statement was so formal and serious that she laughed aloud in delight. They walked on, laughing together.

  The wide hole they came to was like a well, nigh filled with dark and brackish water that had the smell of the sea about it. There was no way of knowing the depth of the natural cistern, whose diameter was twice Cormac’s height. On a whim Samaire suggested, then urged, that they sit and pass the ale-sack.

  They sat at the edge of the pool. When Cormac bent and pushed his sword into the water, the blade palled almost to invisibility a few inches down.