In horror Samaire turned her face from that former shipmate. But yesterday they had heaved side by side at the ship…
She looked among the others just as Wulfhere booted Findbar so violently under the front of his tunic that both the man’s feet left the ground. And a triumphant Wulfhere nearly died then, for incredibly Findbar caught his balance and seemed unharmed by what should have dropped him with his mouth wide in a soundless scream. Not only that, he slashed, and the astounded Dane had to hurl himself sidewise and full length to avoid the opening of his neck.
Samaire saw him sprawl, saw him roll and flounder away, saw him bash aside Findbar’s next sally, saw the Dane rise unharmed and back a bit while he recollected his shock-scattered wits. A lunatic cry caused Samaire to jerk her eyes to stare elsewhere.
With the Pictish battle scream Cormac put his entire body behind a shield-lunge. His and Cet’s bucklers were in line; the Gael struck the other’s with such force that Cet’s brawny arm was smashed back into his face. Blood spurted from his nose, hot on his arm. He was given no time to reflect on his destroyed nose; Cormac thrust the big Meathish ax-man through the belly and was looking about him ere he’d given his blade a twist and yanked it free.
Seeing that ugly wolfish grin contort Cormac’s scarred face, Samaire followed his gaze with her own. Both Brian’s blood-streaming sword and Laig’s head were still in the air. For a moment Laig’s body stood quivering, and then the crimson jet erupted from the stump between his shoulders. Jerking as though in some horrid dance of the dead, the body fell into its own blood.
With others stilled, Wulfhere and Findbar circling, the sound of a single encounter rose loudly now.
Brian and Samaire and Cormac looked in the direction of that constant sound of hammer and hack. They saw Bas well up the beach, backing and backing, his sword not in use as he could only defend against the incessant fierce battering of young Ros of Dun Dalgan.
A thought that was not rational and the more horrible under the circumstances jolted through Cormac mac Art’s weapon-man’s brain: Och, what a beautiful young fighter he is! The magnificent berserker rage has come on him, and him not even one of mine!
He charged after druid and youthful warrior, roaring out a new cry in hopes of disconcerting the fiercely hacking Ros.
But the other hound of Cormac was there before him.
“Ros! Friend, sword-comrade-STOP this!”
Ros turned on Brian. Aye, there was the madness in his eyes, though a deep torment seemed too to haunt them. Brian na Killevy could not believe, as Cormac could not believe Wulfhere’s attack that afternoon on the “Roof of the World”, and it nigh cost him his life. Only a reflexive interposing of his sword saved his entrails from, Ros’s blade-edge. With a screeching ear-torturing crang of steel on steel, Brian’s brand went flying from his hand.
Samaire noted that Ros did not grin in triumph. Later she told the others; there was no victor’s joy on the one youth’s face as he moved confidently to put death on the other.
He was over-confident. A man at death’s-point would either freeze, or accept, or scream and run, or adopt the role of beleaguered wolf-and weaponman-and do all in his power to avoid doom and destroy its bringer. Brian I-love-to-fight, Cormac saw then, was not only a good man, a born weapon-man, but a wolfish Cormac as well.
Viciously and desperately his shield whipped back and forth in a blurring wall of defense that kept Ros’s sword at bay. And Brian braced his left leg, and with the force of rushing adrenalin he kicked his former friend in the calf.
The leg buckled. Ros fell.
“Brian!” he gasped. Staring up, his eyes went bright as though he’d awoken. “Br-got to wake Brian! The wiz-”
Then Brian’s shield-edge smashed down on his nose and drove splintered shards of bone into his brain.
Brian knelt aside the dead man with whom he had found and felt such camaraderie. In his eyes now was the same torment and confusion that had been in Ros’s just before he died.
“Damn you, Ros,” he choked, “you could have bested me!” The pitiful cry was an anguished accusation.
Brian and Bas missed what Cormac saw, then.
With one of those full-circle swings of his terrible ax, Wulfhere took off the head of Findbar of Meath with such perfection that Findbar might have been a stuffed dummy positioned for the stroke. The head, eyes and mouth gaping, rolled on the sand with a grating of its helmet. And… like a stuffed dummy… no blood spurted up from the headless shoulders.
Wulfhere was struck motionless in renewed shock at a foeman who fought on after a crotch-kick that should have ruined him forever, and who now bled not from the loss of his head. In those instants of the Dane’s frozen staring, the arm of the headless man swung. Edge of sword met the rounded side of steel helmet with a great crashing clang. So great was the force of that blow that Wulfhere fell sidewise without a grunt.
The corpse-strewn beach was suddenly horribly silent.
A moment the headless man stood over the fallen Wulfhere Hausakliufr. Then a death’s-head appeared on the shoulders of Findbar, and his body changed, and he stood there in a night-dark robe already rent by sword and arrow. Dark eyesockets gleamed in their depths like rubies and Findbar’s sword whipped high in a fist suddenly become mere skin stretched over knobby bones.
The silence that had closed like a death-shroud over the strand so long chaotically alive with the shouts and clangor of combat was split, seconds after it fell. For the third time that bloody morning the ghastly shrieking cry of a charging Pict clove the air and ululated. The skull of Thulsa Doom jerked sidewise and up, and he was only just able to meet the mad sword-rushing charge of Cormac mac Art.
Blade rang on shield anew. But it had been long and long since Thulsa Doom had entered swordwielding combat; long and long since he and a sorcerous sword had been able to hold off a weakening King Kull for hours.
Three violently slashing strokes bent his shield, split his shield, and then tore it from his arm. The fourth slash Cormac turned into the thrust that he favoured. The long blade of his sword drove into Thulsa Doom as it had that other time, widening the same tear in the robe.
Once again Cormac bore his sorcerous foe back and down, and held him spitted.
The impaled mage groaned, writhed-and struck with his sword. That cut Cormac met with his shield, so that its edge drove into a bony wrist. The fingers flexed open; the sword dropped. Cormac leaned on his own pommel while he shook off his buckler.
“BRIAN! I NEEEED YE!”
Behind him Wulfhere moaned; a score and more feet away Samaire got to her feet. Her face twisting in pain, she began hobbling toward him. Thulsa Doom writhed like a gaffed eel on the impaling sword. Hands cold as a serpent’s hide closed on Cormac’s wrists. He grunted, pressed down. The hilt of his brand ground into the mage’s abdomen. The blade was buried in the beach beneath Thulsa Doom, and Cormac feared the impermanent lack of solidity of sand.
Samaire was staggering laboriously toward him, and he durst not glance back to see if Brian had recovered from his horrified, self-blaming reverie. Then there were crunching footsteps, and Bas was there.
“My buckler, Bas! Lay it there beside him, boss up!”
Bas did as he was bade, without a word. The buckler formed an overturned bowl beside Thulsa Doom, the iron boss gleaming. Cormac’s flesh twitched and raised the million excrescences of horripilation as he thought on the ghastly plan he had devised.
“The blade hurts him and is cold to him,” he grunted through his teeth. “Nor can he vanish or escape whilst he be-uh!-impaled thus!” The mage’s hands were seeking to break his wrist, and those hands were strong. “I dare not let go this sword with either hand-one cannot hold against his sorcerous strength. Here, Bas-LEAN on this brand!”
Almost, while Bas and Cormac exchanged hands on the pommel, Thulsa Doom escaped, for he writhed and strove and his strength was far more than normal. But the maneuver was effected-though Bas gasped in horror when the mage’s fa
ce took on the likeness of the Princess of Leinster.
“Bas! Bas! Oh Druid it hurts… please…”
Cormac had risen to stand over the hideous tableau of druid kneeling over Samaire, pinning her to the earth on the point of a sword.
“Obscene monster, we can both see Samaire, but paces away!” And Cormac entered into what seemed ghoulish madness.
Motion followed swift motion as he seized Bas by the shoulders. By main force he tumbled the druid backward onto the sands. The sword came partway forth, and Samaire became Thulsa Doom once more as the real Samaire reached them. Cormac was still in swift action, executing his desperate plan with as much speed as ever he’d shown in his life. He drew his sword free; it emerged easily. Ere Thulsa Doom could take advantage of his instant of freedom, the vengeful Gael turned him over-on the buckler with its upstanding metal boss, fist thick, over three inches long, and not-quite pointed.
Without pause Cormac’s right fist leaped up and rushed down like a hammer. Thulsa Doom emitted a hideous groan and shuddered when he was struck on the back just above the waist and the metal boss drove into his belly.
With both hands and all his might Cormac mac Art drove his sword into the mage’s back, through his body, and into the shield.
On her knees, Samaire faced him across the spitted body. “Gods,” she murmured, and shivered.
The writhing form of the wizard strove to break the impaling prison. Like claws his hands tore at the sand. Suddenly he changed again, into a whipping lunging serpent, but still he could not break free. Again he resumed man-shape, and put back his hands in an attempt to tear the blade free of his back.
“My next shield,” Cormac muttered, “will have a sharpened boss!” He grunted the words with exertion; With the flat of Wulfhere’s ax he struck his sword’s upstanding pommel. The sword seemed to shorten as its tip drove farther into the buckler. No splintering sound came; the shield held. Again, Cormac struck.
Wulfhere sat up, touching the small trickle of blood that ran down from under the helmet that had skinned his head, even with its shaggy mop of hair, before the unnatural force of Thulsa Doom’s blow.
“Odin and Thor and Woten and Thunor, my he-by all the gods! What are ye about, Wolf?”
“Carpentry.”
Cormac stood over the wizard who was helplessly impaled, face down, betwixt sword-hilt, and stout shield. Bas and Samaire, the one sitting dazedly as Wulfhere and the other on one knee, stared at the constantly moaning, twisting mage.
“Making fast one who cannot be slain,” Cormac said in a sepulchral voice. “Thulsa Doom: You are my prisoner!”
Chapter Nineteen:
Doom-heim
“In times more ancient than we count,” Bas said, “an exile from Atlantis found employment as weaponman in a land called Valusia. Time came when he made challenge to the king, and brought defeat and death on him, and the Atlantean was king over Valusia. His name was Kull. Trusted counsellor to him was a man named Tu; just that: Tu. I am… I was Tu, as I have been others since, in the endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. And Cormac, who has been others as well, is and was Kull.”
Wulfhere Skullsplitter of the Danes gave ear in silence. This talk was alien to that which he had been taught, but others of the beliefs he’d held true had been shaken, more than once. Father Odin… will I not dine and drink with you, but return once more in another body to live another life on this same Midgard?
Brian, too, listened, and Samaire. She believed. She knew; certainty was upon her that she had known Cormac mac Art in a life lived out before this one. Though actual memory was not there, knowledge was. She had not been attracted instantly to him; she had recognized him, as did others who liked or loved at first sight. Whether she had been of Atlantis or Valusia or indeed had known of Kull or no, she did not know. It mattered not; afore now she had known the life-force that had been Kull, and Conan, and Cormac, and others. The when of it was of no import. Now was important. This time, and the time to come. Nor did she assume there had been or would be ease; this life-force to which hers was connected throughout time was a volatile one.
Cormac was most likely Cuchulain himself, Brian mac Dairb thought, and was glad and proud.
“A great enemy and plotter against King Kull,” Bas who had been Tu went on, “was Thulsa Doom. In no less than four several plots did Kull foil the wizard and put defeat on him, though in each wise Thulsa Doom prevailed for a time. On two occasions did the king like to lose his life to this unrelenting enemy. And eventually Kull and Tu and a mage on Kull’s behalf won the final victory-on the isle where we’re just after being.”
At those reminding words all looked back to where Samaire-heim was receding behind their ship-very slowly, in the gentlest and most unsteady of little breezes.
There were but five of them, and their captive, and Quester was both large and well-laden. Not for them was the using of oars. Cormac and Wulfhere did give constant attention to sail and rudder. Bas had promised better winds; they had learned to listen to Bas, and to believe.
The druid spoke on.
“There Thulsa Doom was left, trapped by sorcerous bonds; the bondage of a body without hands or feet or voice. There he existed for eighteen thousand years. Then those forces that control such matters brought Thulsa Doom’s ancient enemy himself to the isle, and another too; Cutha Atheldane from Norge. It fell out that Cormac himself proved the instrument of the wizard’s release, for it was you slew the serpent, son of Art. Thus was liberated the wizard’s life force-and in time he found a home in the body of Cutha Atheldane. With his powers he replaced it with one like his own, of old, though it’s Cutha Atheldane’s robe he wears yet. It was on him then to remain yet, for there was no means of leaving the island.”
“Doom-heim,” Wulfhere muttered, for all had been happy to rename the isle that had eaten so many men.
“He used that time of his further incarceration,” Bas the Druid said, “to practice his dark arts, and raised the dead as his legion. All else we know.”
“Vengeance over eighteen thousand years!” Brian said in a voice quieted by awe.
“Was all that sustained him,” Bas said, with a glance at the wizard. Though it made or kept him less than sane, he mused, while that hideous travesty of a face clashed its lipless teeth in fury.
“And the vanishing?” Samaire asked. “Those several times he vanished whilst we laboured to place the dead aboard Amber Rowan, when we saw only the buckler impaled by Cormac’s sword, and the mage both there and not there?”
Laden with their dead, Amber Rowan wallowed behind them, slowing them the more.
“Of old,” Bas made reply, “Thulsa Doom effected escape into another dimension, a sort of world parallel to this and not unlike it and yet different. There he is invisible to eyes from this world of ours. That explains his disappearings; he sought similar escape from us. But his body holds him. Sword and shield held him fast, pinioned between them in the only way he can be held. Was Cormac saw the key to this, when he pinned him that morn in the corridor beneath the castle of Kull.”
“He will… attempt again?” Brian asked.
“Yessss,” Thulsa Doom hissed in rage, and he vanished from Quester.
“He be still here,” Cormac said grimly.
“During the night he somehow gained control of Findbar,” Samaire began, after their awestruck silence and Cormac’s words of certainty. But Bas shook his head.
“Nay. He was Findbar. Rather he was not; he slew Findbar and assumed his form. Mayhap Findbar rose to fare outside for a natural reason-and such was his mental state by then he paid no mind to our one overweening rule. Or flaunted it.”
“He paid,” Wulfhere said in a rumble.
“Aye. Then did he return-but he was Findbar mac Lirchain no more. One by one, he gained control of the minds of the others-”
“Why not us? Brian demanded.
“Mayhap only we were too determined of purpose,” the druid said.
“Too staunch
,” Cormac mac Art said.
“Too loyal to yourself,” Samaire said, looking at him.
Cormac glanced at Brian, and he thought of Lugh, who had been loyal, and who had been of them, and who was dead for his determination and staunchness and loyalty. Brian’s face had gone dour again, and none doubted but that his thoughts were again on Ros. Brian, Cormac reflected without pride or comfort, was young; he’d not experienced the loss of friends and comrades-at-arms again and again. It never became commonplace and easy; that it was now so readily bearable, Cormac thought, bespoke the existence of as many inner scars as he bore on his body.
“Bas,” he said, “what have ye done? What know ye now that we must needs know?” He glanced aside; Thulsa Doom was there once more, and the eye-spots in the deeply cratered sockets glowed rage-red.
“I was able to protect us all during our waking hours. And Quester and all aboard, for it’s of Eirrin this ship is, and my powers are strongest on our own soil and with those that were born there-human or no. And… there are other things. Let me keep their knowledge; the telling ye of them will avail ye naught and may weaken me-and empower him.”
They looked at the undying wizard.
The ship wallowed slowly along, towing Amber Rowan seaward from the isle of horror and death. Aboard sat its pitifully tiny crew; a druid, a weaponwoman, and three weapon-men-one of them but little past his first beard-growth. The woman suffered of a thigh bearing a large and lurid bruise.
These were Quester’s crew. Quester carried but one passenger.
He stood helpless where Cormac had forced and imprisoned him in ghastly impalement, for only so could Thulsa Doom be held. The picture he presented was monstrous and horrible. The owner of any eyes not cognizant of the situation or of Thulsa Doom’s powers and nature would have been shocked at the seeming cruelty of his captors.
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