“Oars! Half-sail! Chop!”
Men leaped to their feet and sprang to the oar-racks where their long poles rattled, stowed during the awful wind and plunging waves. Others hauled up the rope bound yard. And as one man Hrut and Thorbrand chopped through the rope. The thick braided lengths, vanished; below, huge boulders dragged them to the seabed. Oars dropped into their locks and stout arms manned the rudder.
“Pull!”
Raven spread her wings. Raven flew.
The wind returned, and men cursed and called on the gods.
“Aegir sleep well!” one said, hoping that underwater lord would not awake and come for them with his giant net.
“Nyrod… in the palm of your hands is Raven your servant!”
“Ran be kind to sons of the sea!”
But that man was stared at; none wished so much as to attract the attention of the goddess of the sea and drowner of those abroad on her bosom.
And Wulfhere muttered the names of Thor and the All-father and Frigg to please Odin, and Freya and her sunny brother and aye, those sea-deities too-and, just in case, he quietly mentioned that Mannanan macLir that Cormac was wont to call upon, for those of Eirrin did insist that it was he lorded it over the sea.
Again the wind whipped the water into white-topped, mobile mountains. They drove like gigantic fists against Raven and the ship rocked with their impact. Rocked, and sped forward. Wulfhere’s commands were constant. Clinging to the side with one hand, the master of Raven made his way slowly, ever watchful, along the narrow planking that ran from bow to stern.
Raven raced through that howling inimical night of dashing leaping waves, and all aboard knew they hurtled toward the doom that was planned for them. Wulfhere’s sea-genius and their own strength could save them-and the gods.
Even as his ship wrestled the ocean and his ruddy face went scarfy with leaping brine, Wulfhere wondered. Did they but chase a phantom, a will-o’-the-wisp that would provide not even a decent battle for axes and swords… but might well give them watery death just the same?
Clinging, he glanced forward. The light loomed larger. When Raven climbed up from a trough to balance a moment on a ridge of water, the staring giant had a flashing glimpse of the wrecker’s craft. Weirdly, he saw no sails and the other vessel looked white. Then his own straining ship plunged down a slope of rushing water and he saw only the walls forming the next trough.
Suddenly he gripped the rail with both hands and stared. “ROCKS!” he bellowed, and hurled himself aft along a foot-wide walkway, not even holding, defiant of the wind. “Steerboard oars up! Pull hard aport! Hard, boys, an ye’d ever be dry this side of Valhalla! Quarter sail to steerboard!”
Then the enormous strength of the Skull-splitter was added to that of Ordlaf. The steersman was a strong man, and muscular; Wulfhere’s upper arms were big as his thighs. The sea tried to take the steering oar away from them. Even with so little sail on, the mast creaked and bowed. Ropes of walrus hide strained and seemed to grunt like men. Raven hurtled. Captain and helmsman bent their backs and the muscles of their calves bulged their leggings.
Wood creaked horribly, the ship fought, and turned, and of a sudden the sail flapped.
“Reef sail! Reef sail!”
“Hela’s cold dugs-look at those teeth!”
“Hela indeed-the old bitch hungers for us and would have us join her in Elvidnit this night!”
This from those men aport who saw the awful rocks that had awaited them, wet jagged teeth that would have received Raven and turned her into driftwood in bare seconds. Only just had they saved themselves, by their captain’s seamanship and main strength… and the strong backs of oarsmen who fought wind and leaping, dashing waters.
Even the wind eased, as if otherworld forces were reconsidering their attack.
Swift as a racing horse, Raven plunged past the rocks aport, showering them with a boiling white wake. The vessel shuddered as she slammed into a wall of water that drenched the crew anew. The world vanished; they were under water! No-they were plowing through that wet dune! Then they were out, through it, gasping, the decks streaming-only to glissade like an uncontrolled sled down a long mountainside of water.
“Up quarter sail! All oars-PULL!”
Water sloshed higher in the bailing well. Wulfhere glanced in. No; no men need yet be detailed to that churl’s job.
Wind and wave struck. A man yelled and an arm was broken. Knocked onto her side, Raven dumped water as she rushed along showing her keel. The steer-oar waved ridiculously in air. Then the ship was up, shaking herself like a great wet dog. Her crew spewed water from noses and mouths and glanced around nervously. All were there; the faces of two writhed in pain and that Knud Left-hand’s arm was broken was all too obvious.
“It’s only the right,” he said, and tried to wave, and passed out. Two of his fellow carles sprang to seize him and lash him down. Raven’s second Knud would not be holding shield or oar again, for a long while.
Mighty arms forced the tiller over and Raven bucked wind and sea. Somehow they dragged her about as a strong man drags a screaming stallion for the breaking. Wind and water buffeted her with a viciousness that seemed sentiently deliberate. Again the ship plunged for the light. It seemed to flee now, definitely amove on a swift-moving deck, its attempt to smash them on the rocks having failed. The wind glibbered obscenely and new thunder snarled with the voices of ten thousand rearing bears.
A bolt of lightning created noonday light, and Wulfhere stared at the craft of the wreckers. It was fleeing-and what a vessel was there!
He and his desperate men were far, far too busy to grapple the supernatural wreckers, for so Wulfhere at least now knew them to be. But he’d seen them, oh Odin’s stones he’d seen them across those mountain ranges of water-ere they and their weird and shuddersome barge vanished away into the windswept night.
Aye, vanished, and the cursing crew of Raven set about getting her in.
Next day-late, after weary men woke on dry land beneath bright Hispanic sun-Wulfhere Skull-splitter told Cormac what he’d beheld, and the Gael stared at him. Already he’d seen what he did not want to believe and had been forced by menace to his very life; must there be more? Logic had become unreasonableness-but with reason that was unreasonable, Cormac mac Art resisted.
“Ye mean-women?”
“I swear,” Wulfhere said, and drew himself up so that he was even more imposing; Wulfhere would have been imposing buried to the knees in mud. “I swear by the All-father’s one entirely sufficient eye and by Thor’s scarlet beard, aye and by the moustache of my dear father’s woman Freydrid-I swear, Wolf: I saw them.”
“Ran’s…”
“Ran’s daughters.”
“Ran’s daughters.”
Wulfhere nodded.
“Women? Sirens?”
“Sirens? What’s that?”
Cormac mac Art waved a hand. “A supposition of the Greeks. Comely women of the seas who entice seafaring men to-”
“Aye!” the Dane nodded emphatically. “Aye! Loki’s eyes and Hela’s dry gourds, Wolf of Eirrin-believe! They were the dread daughters of Ran sure, and afloat on a barge made all of bones.”
“Bones.”
“YES!”
“Bones, asea. In a storm.”
“Bones, son of an Eirrish pig farmer! Nor had any or aught of them an oar in her dainty pale hands, nor was there aught of sail on that barge not of this Midgard!”
And the Splitter of skulls stamped, to assure them both that they still trod the land of mortal-kind. Galicians saw them there outside the king’s hall, and stared, but went on their way. No man wanted aught to do with an argument between those two storied pirates.
“The sea was high, Wulfhere. It’s black the night was as a bear’s cave in winter. It’s glad I am and no man lost asea, old battle-brother. But… how saw ye them in that darkness?”
“Wolf. Ye doubt me yet. Ah Cormac, Cormac-I saw. A fire burned on the deck of-”
“A fire
! On the very deck! In the wind and a sea like mountains on the move!”
“YES, damn ye! A fire burned there on that otherworld barge. I SAW it! Without fuel and blazing high, within a sort of circle, a strange sort of circle that… well, it was all picked out in that… that Romish piece-rock. Ah-mosaic.”
Cormac stared at him, and he’d looked more believing.
Wulfhere stared at the Gael, the man he’d escaped gaol with, sailed and divagated with, these three years.
Cormac stared at the.Dane, whose life he’d saved and who’d saved his; his battle-brother and respected companion.
The Dane said, “Well?”
“I believe you, Wulfhere. If my battle-brother Wulfhere Skull-splitter says he saw it, it was there.”
“Aye! Of course it’s impossible, blood-brother. And it was there. As the moving attacking kelp was. Aye, blood-brother, believe, as I believe all you tell me.”
And the two men gazed at each other in the sunlight of a quiet day the praises of which Galician birds trilled, and Wulfhere beamed and Cormac smiled. With his lips closed and his brows up.
“And you, blood-brother. Tell me what befell yourself and those four men with you in the tower.”
Cormac shrugged. “Well, after Freya stopped in and we all supped on one of the cats who’d pulled her chariot, a hundred and thirty-seven Valkyries flew in, and all tall as yourself. And though ’twas boring and sore hard work, we were stout men and managed to serve them all. After that-”
Wulfhere went crimson and his face worked. With doubled fists, he wheeled and walked off. Stiff or no, the huge Dane would make the ax-target suffer this day.
Cormac stood reflecting for a time, and squatted and drew aimless designs in the grass and the dirt. At last he heaved a great sigh. Then he rose and set off after his battle-brother.
CHAPTER TWELVE: A Lovely Afternoon for a Murder
Ran was wife to Lord Aegir the Bountiful, and no kindly she-goddess was she. Any northborn seaman knew that she spread nets of disaster for ships, and delighted in dragging them and their crews down and down to her airless demesne. There she gave laughter whilst watching the pretty bubbles of those men’s last breaths go dancing up to the sunlight. And, as the skalds were wont to refer to the sea as “the whale’s road,” so they called the rolling waves “Ran’s daughters.”
No skald was Wulfhere Skull-splitter. Like all seafaring men all over the world, he was certain that luring sea-women waited to drown good men in their white arms. And what had he seen? A barge made all of bones and women aboard-and there was no doubt of their enmity and destructive purpose. And… would not the very seaweed obey the daughters of Aegir and Ran?
“I saw them, Wolf!” the Dane insisted. “Eerie, blank-eyed bitches with long hair all pale with brine, and cold choking kisses on their lips for any man they can clasp in their arms, I warrant me! The very daughters of Ran, Cormac!”
And again Cormac mac Art turned away to let his brain wrestle with the ambiguous and the impossible… and seeming impossibilities.
The Daughters of Ran.
Very well. Gods existed of a surety, and their get; a fool and inexperienced was he who averred they did not. Sorcery existed too, as it had since the dim beginnings of humankind; ere Atlantis rose up from the greedy seas, much less sank again long later. Of a sudden mac Art knew that sorcery had existed in Commoria and Valusia and Aquilonia and Brythunia and in dark, jungle-shadowed Stygia, though in truth he was not sure how he knew so certainly. (What places were those?)
He stumbled, frowning. The very air, had seemed to shimmer. No; a glance around showed him that all was normal in sunny Galicia.
Normal! Oh aye, normal… the Daughters of Ran-or the Sirens the Greeks spoke of still-had on their Cleopatran barge an unfueled fire that burned without consuming the craft. Cormac drew in his lips. He sighed. Very well. That seemed plainly impossible. And that meant it was totally inexplicable… by ordinary means.
There was no explanation for motile, seemingly sentient seaweed, or for the fire on that phantom craft.
No natural explanation.
Wandering, thinking, mulling, Cormac hardly took note of a happily chatting couple already causing talk: King Veremund, and Clodia of Nantes. Cormac would report to the king, sometime today; at present he needed to sort out his own thoughts a bit more. For another reason altogether, Veremund hardly seemed ready to discuss last night’s events, either.
Without being fully aware of it, Cormac wandered back to the coast. There he stood gazing upon the endlessly lapping, glassy plain of the sea that was now emerald and now sapphire or lapis lazuli and now pure onyx crowned with ivory and behaving as if demonridden. The sea. Many men plied the sea, and some professed to love it. The sea loved no one. Nor, save now and again, did it seem to hate.
Standing over it, to Cormac’s left reared that white pile, of stone; the accursed tower the Romans had raised for the aid of ships at sea. It was sentry to the land, a brooding watchman over the water.
The sea. It had rolled on and on, Cormac mused, for untold ages, lapping timeless shores that changed only in name and in the peoples that claimed them. Surely the sea had been here forever…
No. Treachery Bay or the Cantanabrian Sea, he suddenly saw, would not be so in future, though his brain held no meaning for the strange word Biscay. And in past…
Again Cormac’s world seemed to shimmer, to stumble.
The sea rolled out green. And grew greener, greener… And then it was gone even as he stared upon it.
Here sprawled rolling plains, and even as he stared, seeing not and yet seeing, he saw how the sun shimmered on burnished mail and silvered cuirasses and gilt-worked helmets. And mac Art was elsewhen; his remembering was upon him.
Horses pranced over grassland and their tails streamed out like fine cloaks. Their proud riders bore lances and swords that had oft dripped with red. Their feet were thrust into leathern boots whose variations of colour he knew derived from having waded rivers of blood like scarlet tides. For so was history made, and he knew then that he was watching history, on the land that had lain there ere the bay swallowed it.
In a neighing shouting jingling leather-creaking squalling chaos that nevertheless bespoke the pride and organization of civilization, steel-clad ranks of gleaming mounted men galloped across that which in the long ago had been well-grassed earth, not sea. And he was looking upon the long, long ago. Guidons and bannerets fluttered like bright butterflies above those mailed men of old.
Before Cormac’s eyes and yet behind them, history rolled back. The intervening centuries were swept away as the fog before the warm sun of morning; as had been whole cities and civilizations swept away in the relentlessness of uncaring time.
And he knew whereon he looked. Names came into his mind, strange names in no language now known, hoary with age and yet all glitteringly exotic.
Asgalun and Amalric and Arenjun, and Shadizar the Wicked had existed, far over there to the east, and Numelia of Nemedia, a place whose name toyed with the tongue. Koth, and Vilayet-what names were these? The bright Road of Kings had wound anciently across this time-forgot land like a sleepy serpent testing the sun of these dreaming kingdoms south of the Hyborian demesnes. Plains rolled verdantly out to a placid river whose name he knew-somehow-was Tybor. Along its bank rose a city whose walls were etched by the sun in fading gold. This was bastioned Shamar, and Cormac knew, just as he knew that once he’d been there, once he’d thefted there, and fought with sharp blade.
Aye, and once too he’d abode in the proud kingdom that sprawled fertile and beautiful just northwest of Shamar.
Aquilonia.
Aye, Aquilonia, by Mitra! I know you well, Aquilonia, lost in the grey clouds of time and space.
Aquilonia, far from sunburned old Turan… and I… I came down from Cimmeria and was king in Aquilonia, once! Tarantis… be that a name? Aye: Tarantia. My name. No-my woman’s? Perhaps one named Tarantia was queen to me, when I wore crown in Aquilonia so far fr
om my native… not Eirrin for it did not exist… my native Cimmeria… But what is my name?
Amra? But no; amra was a Gaelic word, and how could a man be called by that word: “eulogy?”
The thoughts were swept away. Before mac Art the bodeful mists rolled, eddying, coiling, and history rushed along. The northern barbarians came down onto these plains, and met others, dark men, and the struggle raged… and then all was swept away like smoke before the winds of time.
Aquilonia vanished, with the plains of Poitain and the Tybor; drowned in a convulsion of the earth, and that cataclysm sent green-blue waves rolling into swallow all those realms into that of Manannan macLir.
And history swept on, in a rush, where Aquilonia had basked had also stood a city of horror, a city haunted by a horrid ichthyosaurian shadow that was also somehow human… or almost… and now where Aquilonia had lain there rolled the Bay of Treachery, and the dark dense forests of Galicia blotted the sunlit green of the plains of ancient Poitain.
“Mac Art.”
Cormac blinked and twitched his head. What-? What had happened? Was this a vision? Aquilonia and Poitain? What were those? Blood of the gods! It’s the… the Remembering! It’s come on me again!
“Mac Art?”
Aye, that was his name. Not-not whoever he’d been, in those ages tens of centuries agone, when the race of humankind had risen up only to fall… again. Once more Cormac mac Art jerked his head. He stared at the sparkling sea, he who had known from the time of his first Remembering at fourteen that once he’d been that fabled hero of Eirrin, Cuchulain of Muirthemne. And how many others? For he knew that Rome was not ancient. Rome was a child. Cormac mac Art was ancient; this life-force that had returned to tread this earth again and-
“Mac Art!”
Cormac whirled.
A few feet away stood Zarabdas, not robed but in a peasant’s cowled tunic that was a bit longish for the Sueves, falling skirted over leggings and gaitered buskins. The bald old man with the raven’s-wing beard was staring, and Cormac knew he’d been called more than once.
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