When they rose up from the night-dark water to invade the scapha, their bellies were the dead pasty white of fish.
Hideous scaly beasts they were, with the thick-lipped, wide mouths of fish and yet a simultaneous resemblance to frogs. At the same time, their bodies were anthopomorphic, with the two-armed, two-legged bodies and chests of humankind. Rows of gleaming pointed teeth lined open mouths. All was as though man and shark had come somehow together in obscene mating and these monstrosities were their get.
It’s nests of these things there are all over the ridge of the world, Cormac mac Art thought, and knew not how such knowledge was on him. Nor knew he how he was sure these creatures had existed before ever humankind had walked this earth. Everything came once from the water, the seas, all and all of us; and it’s but little change we need to return to our ancient demesne. And he shivered.
Yet were these batrachian fish on their way to becoming human, or men somehow returning to that ancient home in the sea?
Up they came, dripping and shiny-slimy save for the scales on their backs. Huge pallid eyes stared from piscine faces above jaws like ragged bone shears. Like marbles were those eyes, with great black spots set in pearl-white sclera without other colour. And where their fingered paws gripped the deck to pull themselves aboard the coaster, horny claws left deep rents in the wood.
They came, and gasps mingled with the oaths streaming from the lips of frightened men.
Yet these were fighting men, and fearfulness was but a cloak to be hurled from them. Swords and axes moved in stout hands, and swung high. Their steel flashed in the light from the fire on the bone-ship’s deck. Danes and Sueves attacked in their numbers, for such abominations begged to be hacked and slain that men might feel they were indeed men, and clean.
The eyes of the attacking creatures, Cormac noted, never closed, not for so much as a single blink.
Swords and axes whined in the air. Sharp-edged steel struck with shattering impact on creatures spawned in brackish deeps. Demons vomited up by the sea were met by men become blood-mad demons themselves. Fishy skulls shattered and the blood that spurted was red enow. Fish-like heads, flew on wakes of scarlet for men ever loved the satisfaction of the broad beheading stroke. Arms, man-like and yet clawed and scaled above, sought to grapple and were chopped away.
A Sueve whose name Cormac could not call chopped deep into the side of a slime-sheened creature, even as its arms enfolded him and vised tight. Man and monster toppled overboard, nor was either seen again.
“It’s not here they want to fight us!” Cormac bawled, stabbing. “They be wanting. to grapple us and leap into their own demesne, lads! Strike, and strike!”
Men struck and struck. Creatures at once batrachian and piscine and anthropomorphic died and died. Again and again had surprise and horror won for them, so that their leprous home below must be floored with human bones. These men knew horror too-but little surprise. Nor were they taken unarmed and without armour. No bigger than men, the sea-spawn had neither mail nor weapons save claws and teeth and strength beyond the human.
Those who had so long and horribly preyed on men became the prey of men.
A gape-eyed thing reached for Cormac mac Art. So strongly did he hew in his horror that his sword sheared off an arm and was hardly slowed, the way that it cut the other arm to the bone. Baying, the creature came on. The Gael smashed its awful face with his shield. And all about, men cursed and chopped, grunted and hewed.
The sea-get were maimed, disjointed, unlimbed, beheaded. They died and died. Most of the blood that spattered the deck was theirs; the blood that splashed human faces and weapons and mailclad men came not from men. Cormac and his band did slaughter, and right happily. They slew inhuman foe that would have been less repugnant had they been less human.
The coaster bobbed on the waters of night, and the reek of fresh-spilt blood vied with the tang of brine and the stench of unnatural fish-things.
A hand was scratched. A face was raked open by whipping claws. An ax was torn from an arm that had swung not hard enough and a woman was widowed as monster and yelling Sueve plunged into the sea. Horny claws tore the cheek of another, but slipped and skidded over boiled leather bossed with bronze.
Mac Art bore a shield he hardly needed for defense. He used it offensively even more than was his wont, smashing scaly arms and flat ichthyoid faces. He cried out and tried to get to them, but two creatures bore Hugi the Nimble into the sea and they clawed and chewed him even as they bore him down. They returned in scant minutes, and the Gael derived an almost s berserker pleasure in chopping away the head of one and the forearms of the other as they sought to remount the skiff.
Three men had met their weirds, the while more than a score of their attackers died or were so sorely maimed that death was inevitable. The kelp had been worse menace than these creatures that defied nature-yet to sailors unready, these had been death, sure as the jaws and talons of tigers. Here and now, the sea-spawn came on and on, and died and died, and fell hideously maimed back into the sea amid the bedlam of shouting men and hacking blades and stamping feet.
Shrieks rent the salty night air. On the barge, the “sirens” danced in rage and hurled curses in a name Cormac did not know; it was k’Tooloo or something like. What man could know the meaning of such cries as “k’Tooloo fhtagn?”
While their beastly killers were defeated and annihilated, the mist-clad mistresses of dying demons bethought them to flee. They began striving to dislodge the grapnels binding them to the scapha. Three of four they had cast off ere a Dane noticed; so blood-spattered and a-drip was he as to be unrecognizable. Yet no wound was on him.
It was he who shouted and pointed, with dripping sword. He yelled orders without pausing to consider his right to command.
The last four fish-things were being chopped into bits by men on whom the blood-madness still lay, the way that panting men were left foeless on a deck gone slippery with blood. Others were booting hideous corpses back into the sea that had birthed them. Those bloodied men snatched up grapnels. The hooks flashed over, trailing walrus-hide ropes, and the two craft were linked anew.
Barge and skiff wallowed in the swell, six times linked, side by side.
Now was not curses the women yowled down on their attackers, but shrieks for succor in the name of the monster they served. Cthulhu; those lure-sylphs called desperately. Cthulhu! Save your servants who have sacrificed to you for centuries uncounted!
Asleep in R’lyeh, he whom the Philistines knew as Dagon and others called Aegir-without knowing his true nature-stirred not.
And Cormac mac Art bounded onto the white-gleaming barge. His sword stood out before his white-knuckled fist, and it slew even as his boots struck that rocking deck of bone.
Was then ended the illusion of fair, beckoning women like naiads.
A daughter of Ran she was not. No one of the Sirenes of the Hellenes was she either-unless those Greeks of old had never thrust steel into one and seen her change from a willowy beautiful lure-woman to… a horrid amphibious servant of the monster-god Cthulhu who slept in drowned R’lyeh.
Completely loathsome was the thing that slid off Cormac’s spitting sword, part fish and part frog and aye; obscenely, revoltingly: part human as well.
Again, sickened seamen stared. Again they recognized their relationship to such a beast, and were revolted and as if tainted by that knowledge. None could know how old these creatures were, for none of the toad-looking fish-people things died, ever, save by violence. Were they, like some werewolves, born with the amphibian taint that later led to the horrid changelings? Or had they ever been human at all? Or, still yet again, might these barge-creatures include both those groups, as well as some that were victims of curse or spell of ancient origin?
Or, Cormac mac Art wondered, changed and summoned by chants in an old temple to Dagon?
And even then he noted that the false beacon fire on the barge’s deck gave off no heat… O’course not. It’s afire of sorcery th
is be, for cold-blooded creatures from the sea could not otherwise tolerate such a fire so close!
“It’s no lovelies these be, lads,” he called. “See what ’tis I’m after slaying! Come aboard-be ye fighting men or children to stand agape and tremblous?”
And the other women rose up then, to come for Cormac mac Art, and a Sueve from the coaster leaped across to stand at Cormac’s left. And others came. At their leader’s feet lay, twitching, a scaled thing of nightmare. Finned and gilled it was; web-footed and web-fingered it was, razor-toothed and claw-fingered… as the other “lovely women” now became!
As they commenced a hissing, croaking advance, out of the night came bellowing a mighty stentorian voice that might have been Father Odin, save for the words it shouted.
“Look to yourself, ye son of a Gaelic pig-farmer, and drag your hide off that accursed floating boneyard!”
Every man saw the appearance of Raven, drawn by the witchfire on the barge of horror and death. Plowing through the darkness came the ship, as Cormac and Wulfhere had planned-and told no one at all lest the Power behind the false beacon and these “sirens” learn of it. Impelled by all oars good speedy Raven came hurtling, and a great furl of foam billowed back on either side of the pirate vessel’s bow. She plunged through the water toward the barge like an attacking shark, and it starving.
“Back! Back on our scapha, and chop free the grapnel ropes!” Cormac yelled, while Raven bore down on the barge he now knew was builded of human bones and the cement of sea-snails.
He pounced backward from attackers and made of his sword a silvery blur before him, and he saw his men off the bone-barge. One of the nightmarish sea-get pounced. Cormac managed to catch its claws in his buckler even as he chopped into the thing’s neck. Then he had to lop off the arm of that dying obscenity, to free his shield-arm of its hampering weight. So deeply were steely claws imbedded in the painted, steel-braced yew wood. Another dived in low at him. Cormac struck like a madman, missing his own toes by the breadth of but a finger or two. That monster croak-screamed, its paws gone amid gouting blood… and wallowing handless, it strove to get at his booted leg with its teeth. The while, on the scapha, axes fell on walrus-hide ropes.
Cormac wheeled, ran three strides, and leaped out over the widening gap betwixt barge and scapha.
He came down flat-footed on the coaster’s deck, squatting to absorb the fall until his hinderparts nigh touched the planking.
For an instant his balance was in question on the blood-slick deck. Then he was up like a catapult and spinning to hack through the rope holding the last grapnel. The vessel of men and that of monsters were no longer linked.
Hideous baying croaking fouled the air as the servants of the human-hating god saw Raven bearing down on them with the swiftness of a falling meteor.
Raven’s copper-sheathed prow slammed highspeed into the barge of horror.
“UP OARS AND HOLD ’EM HIGH! Brace yoursel-”
The booming shout of Wulfhere Skull-splitter was broken off by impact. With a great snapping splintering of bone cemented by sea-snail, amid stricken croaking, the hell-sent barge was smashed to white splinters. The coaster so nearby was rocked violently and it fell out that a Sueve saved a Dane from going overboard. A flying chunk of splintered white bone, three forearms neatly joined lengthwise, came end-over-ending through the air so that Cormac ducked to save his head. Catapulted, one of the sea-creatures flopped squashily athwart the skiff’s gunwale. Another shard of flying bone brought a yelp from a seasoned pirate of Danemark. Slowed but not halted by the tremendous impact, Raven crunched on, cutting the bone-barge into halves and more. Two flopping helpless sea-spawn tumbled to her decks, and with great joy Wulfhere and Gudfred Hrut’s son chopped them to pieces.
In fragments, the barge sank as though those bones of murdered men were filled with lead.
Dark waters rose over the deck-fire that had lured so many men to their doom. Once again the hair of Sueves and Danes and aye, one Gael among them, stood on end; for the fire remained eerily ablaze for many fathoms as it sank, until the darkness of the nighted water blotted it from ken.
One of the awful amphibians clung to Raven’s dragonhead. A savagely laughing Wulfhere clove it in twain with an incredible sweep of his ax that splashed blood over ten men-who promptly cursed their captain, that now they must clean their armour.
The scapha was wallowing the way that those aboard must brace their legs and set them well apart. Nevertheless Cormac was glaring at the last of the monsters when it turned in the sea to utter a hissing, croaking malediction. With disgust on him rather than fear, Cormac mac Art snatched up a spear and hurled it. So had the men of Eirrin long fought, and the long steel-tipped stave rushed straight to its mark. Cthulhu’s creature and spear vanished together; no man could be certain whether Cormac had struck it well. As for the Gael, he could only hope with fervor that Crom of Eirrin had guided his powerful throw.
The scapha tilted now, and men fell. The craft had suffered some little damage of the creatures, and more of the ramming that had slammed a large section of the barge into its squared stern. Too, a great chunk of bone splintered from the other craft stood forth from the skiff’s hull, just at the waterline. Cormac’s Sword of Lir was dying under his feet, and he wished he’d named it else.
Silent, grim-faced men on Raven aided silent, blood-splashed men from the coaster in transferring to the ship. Her bow plated for ramming, the Dane-built pirate craft was unharmed. Swung upward in instant response to her master’s command, not one of her oars was damaged.
Pirates and Suevic Galicians, almost in silence, swung the ship out and rowed toward the harbour. Behind, the ungainly scapha floundered amid lapping wavelets, a floating marker to the graves of three men, and the monsters of Treachery Bay.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Last Monster
Irnic waited on the dock at Brigantium Harbour, with Zarabdas. The two stood at sea’s edge with cloaks blowing in the salt breeze. They watched while Raven came in. Well behind the king’s cousin and his mage-adviser stood two others, companions or bodyguards of Irnic Break-ax. They held torches whose yellow flames leaned far and danced in the breeze.
The men of Raven came ashore, and none could hurry too much to get to ale and wine. Irnic said naught, but his eyes questioned.
“Done,” Cormac mac Art said. “And your mission?”
“Done,” Irnic said, and they betook themselves in silence from the harbour.
The triumphant seamen, Danes and Suevi as one, entered the encampment set up for Raven’s crew. Waiting women there were, and wine and ale both to quaff, and a story to talk on for hours.
Cormac and Wulfhere, with Irnic and Zarabdas, must confer. Ugly or no, dangerous or no, there were matters of which they still did not wish to apprise Veremund. Therefore they must conceal this conference. This Irnic and the Palmyran had already discussed. They guided their piratical allies to Zarabdas’s spacious and cozy home, which Veremund the King had caused to be raised close by his own keep.
Cormac was surprised to see no old servant tenanting this tapestried, carpeted home of the eastborn mage. No; the servants of the dark and bald man who was so serious of mind and purpose and who advised a king were… most attractive, and far from old. Perhaps five-and-twenty was the sleek-hipped woman whose hair was almost black and whose eyes were kohled, and the blond, milk-skinned lass with the swollen hips and bust must be no older than in her middle teens. Both were passing well-favoured of face and figure, and quiet. They looked adoringly on their black-bearded lord.
An amazing man, this Zarabdas of Palmyra of the sands! Full and full of surprises had he proven, this man Cormac was now sure was far from the plotting inimical magicker he’d at first thought.
Wine was poured by those winsome servants, and Wulfhere and Cormac kept their hands and remarks to themselves.
“Fetch the crock of ale from ’neath the floorboard,” Zarabdas said, and when that had been done: “Become scarce and deaf, Zenobia and
Odainata; we have business and did you hear it you would be in terrible danger.”
The woman and the girl, whose names Zarabdas had surely been pleased to give them himself, made themselves scarce.
“Terrible danger?” Cormac said.
“Only some. We do border on treason, keeping matters from the king whilst we decide what to tell him. But such words, and we being who we are, ensure that my pretty little girls will not try to listen far more than would a closed door.”
“Excellent!” Wulfhere said. “Suberb wine! I’d think ye’d merely put a spell of sleep on them. He eyed the jug of ale.
“I do not spell,” Zarabdas said quietly, “save at my king’s command. I am a man of another people, far from here; of a city smashed into ruin by the Romans two centuries agone so that now it is but a shadow of the Palmyra of Odainath and that great queen Zenobia. Here I am welcome, and well treated, and honoured. An my loyalty and restraint make me a strange mage, so be it. I do not seek to be like other men… any more than do you two, who slay so few on captured ships.”
“The barge-” Irnic prompted.
“Is gone,” Cormac said. “Smashed and sunk. Those who crewed and accompanied it are dead, to number half a hundred.”
“Accompanied-”
“Half a-”
Cormac and Wulfhere told them of their activities this night, with Wulfhere discovering and declaiming the while that Zarabdas’s crock-sealed ale was the best this side of Dane-mark. Irnic and Zarabdas listened closely, and asked questions. Disbelief was neither considered nor possible.
“By Arawn’s horns!” Irnic grunted at last, challenging the Dane for the large glazed pot of ale. “What foulness! And the kelp?”
“Guided by them,” Cormac said. “Sent by them, only to stop the beacon so that theirs could lure men to death… doubtless that barge grew in size with each ship they seized! The seaweed is only seaweed. Without its masters to send it, it is no menace to anyone-but can be excellent in a stewpot with pork!”
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