The old man shook his head. His almost black eyes swiveled their gaze on Sinshi, who had come to stand close beside the Gael-and to cling to his arm. “No. And yourself?”
“It’s Cormac I am, son of Art of Connacht, in Eirrin-a Gael.”
“Eiru? With that hair and skin? But ye be no Celt-ah! It’s our blood ye bear! I do have knowledge on me of your kind. A Gael-the dark Celts.”
Cormac showed the oldster a wintry almost-smile. He thought of the fair-haired, fair-skinned Celts of Eirrin as pale Gaels.
“Aye,” Cormac said, for it was politick. What meant the oldster, “our blood”? Too, it was disturbing that it was his right arm to which the girl clung, for what knew these naif, unmenaced people of a weapon-man’s discomfort when his sword-arm was not free?
“Cormac?”
Her voice was soft and tiny, gentle as a spring zephyr that hardly riffles the new leaves. He looked down into her upturned face, and thought anew that she was less a child than he’d first thought. Those clever, womanish eyes… calculating? She handed him goat’s milk, in a beautifully wrought and intricately carved goblet of smoothly polished wood. The symbols with which it was indited were not familiar to him.
“With thanks, Sinshi-and it’s begging you I am not to hang on my… drinking arm.”
“Oh!”
With a contrite look, she released him-and immediately transferred her small self and her grasp to his left forearm. Cormac curbed his sigh and accepted what had become the inevitable and unavoidable. But now he would not drink, in the presence of so respected a man as the bald oldster with the plaited beard and lively eyes dark as peat-bogs.
Cormac returned full attention to the old man, who was staring at him. There was much quickness. and intelligence in those old eyes; they seemed to sparkle with life.
“These Norsemen, Gael of Eirrin. What sought they?”
“That which they will seek here, in far greater quantity. It is their way. They sought Consaer’s life and Sinshi’s body.”
The words were brittle and ugly, and so Cormac intended them. Someone had to be shocked into belief, into fear or anger or both, and this man was manifestly a respected leader-a priest, likely.
“They carry axes,” Cormac said into the silence. “They are short of haft and slim of blade, for they are not for the chopping of wood, but of flesh and bone. They carry swords, and they wear metal as I do, or leather with padding beneath and the leather itself hardened as armour against blades. Like those,” he said indicating the Norse blades he’d brought, “and this.”
With his left hand he plucked a Norse dagger from his belt, showed it to the leaf-robed man. The latter only glanced at it.
“And their hair is pale!” Sinshi put in, as though that were all that was different about those who’d sought her rape.
“Not a flensing blade,” Cormac said desperately. “Not a skinning blade, or one for the scraping of vegetable skins or animal hide either. This is for killing, for murder.”
The man of Danu looked more doubtful than affrighted. “Ah. Never have I seen such men. But… my mentor passed on to me a story of such. I had nigh forgot: there’s been no need to remember. Such men came here once, pale-haired men wearing tunics that clinked and carrying axes not for the chopping of wood. They slew. Aye-they slew even goats, my mentor told me.” He shook his head. “For no reason.”
“But Daneira is here,” Cormac said swiftly. “The Norse were repulsed then, driven off. You-may I be knowing your name, father?”
“I am Cathbadh.”
That was all; this man stood high, Cormac knew, and needed no other. Too old and too well known on his own reputation was Cathbadh to bother appending the name of his father to his own.
“It is Cathbadh who makes thanks to ye, Cormac, for the saving of Consaer and this nubile girl, so valuable to our people. And now-”
Cormac interrupted in growing frustration. “Cathbadh! Cathbadh, servant of Danu whom Eirrin’s all but forgot-it’s responsibility ye have here. Ye must prepare! Daneira has not so much even as a wall-Daneira must prepare. The Norsemen-”
From outside, a shriek arose in interruption, and then other cries.
The Norsemen had come to Daneira.
More cries rose from the other end of the sprawling lovely village of complacence, and they spread. Shrieks and screams and yells of warning and horror seemed to move closer. Grey eyes flashing like a lightning-lit sky, Cormac seized Cathbadh by both shoulders. His sudden movement hurled Sinshi’s hand from his arm, and the fine goblet of polished wood went rolling over a sheepskin rug tinted a deep red. Rich yellow milk splashed.
“Cathbadh! They are come! They will rape, and slay and slay, and it’s your homes they’ll be burning. Believe me man, I know! Your men who hew trees in the forest must come with their axes, and those who spear fish, if there are such here. I cannot defeat a shipload of Norsemen alone!”
Releasing the man, Cormac whirled to the door and stepped outside. From there, hardly aware of the small hand that almost instantly closed on his arm-his left arm-he stared the length of Daneira, at the invaders.
Not a mere score was their number, but nigh onto twice as many.
They were tall, grimly warlike men of frostbit Norge, who paused just within the village perimeter, staring about at the strangeness of its buildings and its people. Axes and shield-bosses glinted with sinister flashes. Cormac saw a blooded ax, another. Aye, and already there were captives, a girl squirming by her hair in that man’s big red-furred paw, her clothing torn to the waist, a young boy tugging at the grip around his wrist, the grip of a captor who hardly noted his struggles. A child of eleven or twelve squealed for her mother, for she too was held by the hair and tugged this way and that to keep her off-balance. A woman ran toward her, dark hair streaming and arms outstretched, and was struck easily away by a negligently flicked shield. One Norseman broke from the group to rush a house on the outskirts, and returned grinning, dragging a shrieking young woman by the ankle.
Cormac’s teeth gritted and he snarled. He was but one; they were nigh twoscore. What could he possibly do? And these Daneirans-he had found the complacently peaceful, childlike refugees from old Eirrin just in time to witness their removal from the earth-and to share it.
A bony hand fell on his shoulder, and he felt its strength through his mail.
“Do not move or speak, Cormac,” Cathbadh’s voice said, with a surprising firmness.
He moved past the Gael, out into the village. Trembling like a leashed hound, Cormac watched the old man in his weird robe, enameled leaves flashing, as he paced a few steps toward the invaders. Still they remained paused, poised, staring, unable to believe that none fled or came banding with arms. Cathbadh’s staff with its golden three-quarter moon bobbed along, carried in his right hand and pacing his left foot.
He stopped. His voice carried well. Every gaze was on him, Norse and Daneiran-and the single set of grey Gaelic eyes.
“I am Cathbadh, servant of Danu and protector of Daneira. Why have ye come to Daneira?”
The Norsemen looked at each other. One stepped forward, spoke to their leader. Cormac wondered; had Thorleif been their leader afore? This new man, his beard the colour of cheese, gave listen to his companion, and then he laughed. Laughing, he pointed at the old man who stood alone in the center of the village’s main open area. He bawled out words, in his own language.
“He sneers,” Cormac muttered. “He says that-”
But the man beside the Norse leader was interpreting, grinning, yelling out the words in staggering Gaelic.
“Protector? A spindly man with beard like the mountaintop snows? We spit on you, protector of Danererr. We spit on Danu, whatever that be! The Norsemen have come to you, Protector of Danererr, the men of Thorleif and Snorri.”
He gestured at the cheesebeard beside him, and that man braced his legs well apart and planted both hands on his hips. He looked upon Cathbadh as only a powerful and self-sure young weapon-man with no resp
ect on him can stare at the old and helpless.
“We have eyes,” Cathbadh called back. “We see the men of… Shorleaf and Snoaree. We beg you to beware Danu-and we ask what it is you would have of us?”
A swift brief conference, and Snorri’s Gaelic-speaking lieutenant bawled back a single word.
“Everything!”
Snorri spoke more; the other man shouted his bad Gaelic. “We would have of Danererr all its gold and jewels, and its best food, and all its arms-and all its WOMEN-N-N!”
At that last bellowed word, the men of Thorleif and Snorri called out their echoes and their ayes, waving their axes and beating upon their shields. He who had fetched the blue-tunicked young woman from her very home hauled her to him by her ankle, rested his ax-haft against his calf whilst he grasped her between the legs. She cried out. From her home, a child screamed. Then a man came running, yelling hoarsely, his unbound hair streaming out behind. He waved both arms; in one hand was a quarterstaff. Two men he passed at the run on his way to his wife or sister, and the second swung his ax after him so that he bent in an impossible way ere he slid from the steel and lay on the ground. He did not so much as jerk with his back and vertebral tree and every nerve destroyed, but lay absolutely still.
Now it was Cathbadh who roared out one word, while he held his staff braced horizontally before him with both hands.
“GO!”
“Blood of the gods! Cormac gritted, through clenched teeth. “Crom’s beard-a city of children with a madman as father! Let-go-me, girl, it’s my buckler I must have on this arm-ah gods, the filthy bloodhanded bastard!”
The invaders’ shock at Cathbadh’s incredible command, the roar of a wolf without teeth, lasted but a few seconds. As Cormac jerked at Sinshi, who gripped his arm now with both hands, the man who held the child by her hair lifted her until her little feet left the ground and her eyes bulged. In one perfectly calculated sweep then he sheared her head from her body. His ax swept through, clear, hardly blooded by the swiftness of its slicing. The girl’s head remained dangling by its black sheaf of hair from his fist, enormous eyes staring: the pitiful little corpse dropped to the ground with blood fountaining from between headless shoulders.
Sinshi clung, weeping… Cormac started forward, dragging out his sword, lifting his unshielded left arm to hurl the girl from him… Cathbadh cried out and raised his face and staff to the sky, calling out words in a language Cormac had never heard…
And a streak of flame leaped up from the ground, all at once in a line across the village just before the Norse.
Even as they cried out and drew back, the yellow fire sprang up into a wall of dancing red and gold and orange… and extended itself, racing along the ground like two serpents that swept about either flank of the massed invaders. As that line rushed to encircle them, it grew swiftly up to form a wall, whipping around to encompass the yelling Norsemen as if it were a sentient creature, a live creature with a brain and purpose, an encircling serpent of living dancing licking flame-that made no sound.
The flame closed its circle. The Norsemen were prisoners within a ring of fire that danced up to twice the height of a man. It became an inferno.
Cormac stood trembling and staring, Sinshi hugging him, her face averted and pressed to him. Within the ring of awful flame there were shouts and shrieks, ghastly cries of horror and panic and suffering. A Norseman burst through, a falsetto-shrieking apparition with flaming hair and legs. Delirious in a frenzy of pain, he ran staggering, blinded, up the center of the village toward Cathbadh. The protector of Daneira stood unseeing; he stared at the sky, a seeming statue with uplifted staff. The gold Moonbow at its end flashed like fire.
Heedless of her falling, Cormac wrenched free of Sinshi. He ran straight at Cathbadh’s back, and past that living statue, at a dead run. He did not hear his cry; did not feel his arm when it drove his sword forward. A few feet in front of the wizard, Cormac took considerable pleasure in putting the fiery Norseman out of the misery no man should have to endure.
Like all others then, Cormac stared at the awful circle of fire.
The flames roared now, bellowed, and sprang higher, tall as the trees of the forest. The cries from within lessened in number and volume. The nauseous odour of burning cloth and meat drifted over Daneira, and Cormac heard wretching. His own belly heaved and rumbled and he was glad he’d had no time to partake of food.
The flames leaped, trembled, seemed to execute a ghastly dance of death, appeared to flow like some horrid liquid in halfscore everchanging hues. The constant roar of well-fed inferno rose to the sound of booming surf, of steady thunder closeby. Now no cries came from within the fiery circle. Silent too was the grim statue that was Cathbadh, his robe of enameled autumn leaves no longer ludicrous, but a symbol both of life and of death-dealing flame.
The old man stood silently, rigidly, and Cormac saw that he quivered all over in his stiffness. Not even his so-pale pupils showed now in their sockets; the eyes of Cathbadh the protector of Daneira were rolled back so that he had become something from which children would flee.
The protector of Daneira was Protector indeed. The wolf was far from toothless.
Sorcerous flames lapsed. The wall of dancing fire lowered. For the first time as he turned again to stare at the doom-fire of Snorri’s band, Cormac realized that he had felt but little heat. Yet it was fire. The man at his feet was burned; the ring looked like fire and sounded like fire, and beyond the lowering flames the Gael could see how treetops seemed to shimmer. Billowing gouts of black smoke boiled up-and up, lofting into the air without rolling over Daneira.
The sorcerous inferno died.
Cormac mac Art stared, paced forward, stared.
The Norsemen were gone. In the space of a few minutes, close onto twoscore men had been consumed. More, they’d been turned into ash-and the puddles of hideous bubbling smoking slag that Cormac realized with a chill horripilation of every limb was formed of melted axes, and swords, and the armour boiled from living men as their skin and hair and even bones burned away to ash.
Cormac turned slowly, to gaze at Cathbadh.
The stiffly upraised arms lowered. The staff fell to the ground. Slowly Cathbadh’s head came down, and for a moment his eyes focused, or seemed to focus, on the horror he had wrought in protection of his city of children. Then the man crumpled and fell to lie as if dead.
Only the Gael was close enough to see that Cathbadh’s chest rose and fell, and he knew that the wizard had utterly exhausted himself in the saving of Daneira.
Chapter Four:
The King of Daneira
It was the stranger to Daneira who carried the unconscious wizard to his own bed.
Amid the uproar of the people, a passing thin man had come to Cormac and the fallen Cathbadh. A long robe of plain homespun was upon him, undyed, and girt with a belt to which had been fastened lacquered oak leaves, all green. By this and the fact that he carried a staff surmounted by the three-quarter moonsign of Danu, though it was of yellow-painted wood rather than gold, Cormac took him to be another servant of the goddess. He bent at once to take Cathbadh’s hand and place an ear to his chest.
“He lives,” Cormac said. “You are a fellow servant of Danu?”
The man, perhaps in the third decade of his life, looked up. “I am his apprentice. He bade me stay behind when word came of your presence. Now he has exhausted himself.” He too stared, at the strange colour of Cormac’s eyes.
“Ah. Show me where to bear him, then, for this man must receive care, and live forever!”
The apprentice gazed at the tall man for a time, then nodded. He rose and watched while Cormac easily lifted the wizard-priest, whose strange robe clacked.
“I am Flaen. Follow.”
Cormac followed Flaen-and by the time they reached their destination Sinshi was with them, followed by a crowd of excited people. At the door of a house set apart and decorated only with a three-quarter moon on the lintel, Flaen stepped aside, motioned Cormac withi
n, and stepped before the doorway.
“This day has Danu saved us all, and through the power of Cathbadh. Now he is but exhausted; he lives. Go and mourn the dead-and see about the business of… cleaning up. The metal can be of value to us.”
They dispersed, while within a dim, unlit room Cormac laid Cathbadh on a long cot set against a wall, though he noted it bore only a spread, cloth worked with moon-signs, and no padding or cushions. Wondering whether to cover the man or even to think about undressing such a one, he glanced at the doorway. Flaen entered, with two others.
One was Sinshi. She rushed to Cormac, and took his arm-the left. He patted her hand without looking at her.
The other wore a robe of fine white wool, girt with gold. Around his muscular neck he wore a golden chain, which suspended the sign of Danu on his chest. He was the first person Cormac had seen who was armed; the fellow wore a sheathed dagger slung from his belt of gold cloth. A symbol of office, or power? His hair was a deep brown, and so too his eyes; mustache and beard were auburn. No small man was he, in build, though he would be only average outside of these short, slight people.
His name was Uaisaer, and he was king over the Daneirans. Again Cormac noted the emphasis on woodworking; the king’s name meant Noble Wright, Noble Carpenter. And he was the ninth of that name to rule as king over these people. With no strong hand and no pomp, Cormac decided, noting that the king was dressed relatively simply-and barefoot-and came with no guard or retinue or even adviser. Further, he introduced himself, for Flaen went straight to his master.
The room held one chair, nicely wrought but unornamented, and a table and a bench, and naught else but shelving and things of strangeness hanging upon the walls. An undoored doorway led to another room, but Cormac had the feeling that Cathbadh had few possessions. He wondered about the barefoot king.
On all the ridge of the world, surely there were no people so strange and different as these of Daneira!
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