The Sword of the Gael cma-5

by Andrew J Offutt

  “REPEAT!” Cormac bellowed.

  The words were repeated, and again from the meadow’s far side: the defendant was not to retreat from the trench; it represented his keep.

  Cormac nodded. He would not retreat.

  He was asked if he were ready.

  He nodded.

  He was asked again, and he bellowed that he was.

  Beware the dark that hovers about ye, son of Celts, when the trumpet sounds.

  Cormac watched the line of spearmen from slitted eyes. At either end of that well-spaced line of nine men stood one of the watchful weapon men, and there too stood Tigernach mac Roig. He stared at the spearmen, not at his friend Cormac whom he had tricked into contending for the championship. Well behind the spearmen waited the priest, and near Tigernach was the Druid. A flutter of white cloth tugged Cormac’s gaze to that man, who was moving both arms, staring at the man in the trench, gesturing. His robe flapped.

  I see no dark hovering about me, Druid.

  Only the sound of a bird, a disapproving jay, broke the absolute silence on that plain of testing. Unconcerned, fluffy white clouds sailed like great ships across the sea-blue sky.

  Tugging his gaze from the Druid, Cormac watched the spearmen. They seemed closer, and he sneered at himself for his apprehension. All at once, he wondered, or one by one? Neither, he decided; they have no one to order a concerted cast, but will not dally about it.

  The trumpet sounded.

  Almost instantly the voice roared out: “THE DARK IS UPON YE, SON OF CELTS!”

  …when the trumpet sounds…

  Cormac blinked, but took not his gaze from the spearmen, who were lifting their arms, balancing their long shafts, staring at him, sighting.

  Suppose they all throw deliberately high or wide, Cormac thought, and then the dark came upon him.

  The spearmen became dark, and darker, and then they were shadows.

  And then they vanished amid the general midnight that Cormac saw swallow the meadow.

  He flared his eyes wide, strained them in his efforts to pierce the deep grey fog. His shield he held close before him, arm doubled behind it, and he crouched, suddenly feeling fear come upon him. He was a helpless target!

  A spear swished through the air over his head. He heard it strike the ground well behind him. Well cast, and with strength.

  Cormac bellowed his desperate words: “I CANNOT SEE! TIGERRRRRNACH-IS IT DARRRRK?”

  Tigernach thought swiftly, for all his confusion and lack of understanding. He answered in seconds.

  “NA-A-AYYY! Cormac! The sun’s bright… DEFEND, DEFEND!”

  ’Blindly, Cormac pushed his shield forward, ducked his head behind it, striving to encase it between his shoulders. He struck out viciously with his hazel staff. At nothing visible, for he could see nothing. He felt the heavy blow against his left arm, heard the loud impacts of two untipped spears on his shield. He felt and heard, too, when the stave he so wildly waved struck one of them-or a third. Enshrouded in blackness, Cormac fought panic. It sought to encase his mind, as the sudden dark did all else.

  “THE DRUID!” Cormac mac Art shouted, and it was nearer a scream than any sound he had hurled from his lips in many years. “Tigernach, the DRUID!”

  A spear whizzed past, curving, and its tail struck him a jarring rap on the left elbow. Had the shield not been a buckler with attached strap, he’d have lost it, for his fingers flexed without his wish and his elbow tingled maddeningly.

  Then up ahead a man cried out, and screamed, and the darkness vanished as swiftly as it had come upon one man of the many on that plain.

  Cormac roared out the loudest, throatiest, most savage battle cry he could tear up from chest and throat, and thus the two men who were just in the act of casting were affected. One spear rushed well over his head; the other, even though it was enough to his left that all he need do was step rightward, he met with a slashing blow of his shield. Already another was rushing at him, a streaking line in the air that seemed to extend its tail all the way back to its hurler, for the eye could not record so swift a rushing movement toward it.

  Cormac swept his shield up before his face. It was hardly there before the spear slammed into it. He was knocked back by the impact. The rearward lip of the trench caught the backs of his knees, and he sat very suddenly. The shield had gone heavy, and he knew the reason even before the shouts of horror and anger rose all about the field of his testing.

  To the side he moved the shield, in order to see, and then Cormac moved faster than ever he had. Two spearmen were casting, simultaneously. In the seconds between their launching and their reaching him, Cormac saw that the rushing javelins would brace him. He could not dodge the one without intersecting the flight of the other.

  Deciding in less than a second, he dodged rightward and swung his right arm with all his might.

  The leftward spear only touched his shield and sped on past, hardly deflected. With a sharp rap of wood on wood like the crack of a sail in a sudden gust, Cormac’s stave smashed into the other spear that sought him. All his eye could see was its tip, approaching directly. Then there was that great crack sound, and the jolt to his arm. And the spear was no longer coming; he had slashed it from him and saved his eye with centimeters to spare.

  For a moment he was still panting, lying back on the sward with his legs in the pit. He quivered with the familiar battle-excitement.

  Then he jerked up into a sitting position, and inspected his shield.

  From it stood a long spear, down-slanting, aye, but deeply enough imbedded to remain there. The bright steel of its tip showed, and in the trench lay one shard of the false wooden tip that had been so painstakingly made to encase that deadly sliver of steel.

  Cormac stayed the hand that would have yanked it forth, and stared with blazing eyes. Surely-the clouds shuddered with the great wave of rising sound from the spectators, but he did not look up to see. Nor did he turn his enraged gaze upon the crowd that ringed him.

  He stared at the spearmen. All had cast. All stared back.

  “Haaa-YAAAARRRRRGHHHHH!” Cormac roared again, and launched himself up from that trench that had nearly been his grave. As though in a red berserker rage, he charged the spearmen.

  They did all he expected. They stared to a man; they glanced at each other, and back at him; they broke. The weapon men, frowning and with hands on hilts, raised their bucklers and looked anxiously to the marshal in his fawn and crimson.

  That burly nobleman was otherwise occupied; he crouched, with Tigernach, beside the Druid the latter had downed-dissipating the encircling darkness of ensorcelment that only Cormac had seen.

  “A spear!” Tigernach cried, dragging it forth as he rose to his feet. “The Druid has an untipped SPEAR beneath his robes!”

  The one he exchanged with one of those nine, for this one in my shield, his staff, Cormac thought, now scant yards from the spearmen.

  And then one of their number broke and ran.

  Those around him were too astonished to react. But the man had only begun to run, while there was another already amove. Seven steps the spearman took, and Cormac eleven in the same space. Cormac’s buckler crashed to earth and the impact dislodged the spear. Its long tapering point of steel shone in the sun for all to see. Two more steps the fleeing man took, and two more his pursuer, through and beyond the other spearmen and the two guards. Then it was with both hands Cormac mac Art drove the tip of his hazel staff into the middle of the man’s back. His body arcing, the fellow was hurled forward.

  Seconds later he was on his back, groaning at the pain in its center. Across his throat lay Cormac’s stave; on one end of that slim staff he set his foot. With a feral fire in his dark eyes, the intended victim looked down at him he assumed was the intended assassin.

  “The spear ye exchanged for the Druid’s false staff, a war-spear, and none was to know who’d sped the deadly one. But it’s caught ye are, and it’s I who’ll save ye from torture. Speak swiftly who promised you g
old for my blood, or it’s both feet I’ll set on this stick, roan, and it’s your adam’s apple ye’ll feel squirting out of your mouth.”

  The downed man stared up at him. His face was pale and his eyes wide with the fear on him.

  Cormac moved his left leg, and the other caught the movement.

  “STOP HIM!” a voice bawled, from behind Cormac. But Cormac was preoccupied. He stared down at the treacherous spearman at his feet.

  “B-” the fellow began, and licked his lips. “Bress o-of the Long Arm… spare me!”

  Then his eyes went even wider. He was looking past the vengeful man who stood over him, and warrior’s reflexes hurled Cormac aside without his knowing what danger he avoided. The fallen man’s eyes were warning enough.

  For the second time the steel-shod spear intended for Cormac mac Art missed him. This time it plunged into the belly of the man on the ground. The Druid who’d snatched it up had intended impaling Cormac from behind, but was unable to stop when his target moved. In and in went the steel point, and scarlet bubbled up around it.

  Then Tigernach, racing in the Druid’s wake, arrived, and struck. His sword sundered cloth and flesh and bone. Blood gouted.

  The Druid fell across the body of his fellow conspirator, at the feet of the man they had sought to slay. Thus did Mogh, Druid of Leinster, receive his payment for treachery and journey to the realm of Midir, king of the land of the dead.

  Chapter Twenty-two: A Free Man of Eirrin

  Until the shining sea is surmounted,

  Which the gods have created above all else,

  No man from north to south shall surpass

  CORMAC MAC ART, chief among warriors.

  – Cethern of Tara

  Bress mac Keth, called Bress of the Long Arm, was nowhere to be found in Tara. Nor did his royal lord profess to know aught of the man’s whereabouts or his plots.

  “An he has returned to your demesne, my lord king,” the High-king asked, “will ye send him back under escort to answer queries and charges?”

  “Captain Bress is a Leinsterman, my lord king,” Feredach said. “It’s in Leinster and by Leinstermen he’ll be questioned, be assured.”

  “He is accused of crime in Tara of Meath-and the man he sought to kill was a ward of the Assembly-of all the kings, and of the High Throne!” Erca told the other, with heat he sought but little to control.

  “It is in Leinster,” Feredach pointed out, “that this ward of the High-king is wanted, my lord, on a charge of murder twelve years old.”

  Two pair of royal eyes stared each into the other, and Erca Tireach ground his teeth together behind tightpressed lips.

  “He is cleared, King of Leinster, by kings assembled and by trials physical as well!”

  “It is possible,” Feredach said, leaning a bit forward, “even for a High-king to go beyond himself, to get himself into water too deep for his ability to tread it. Whoever Cormac mac Art is, Partha mac Othna belongs in Leinster! And so, noble Lord, do Leinster’s prince and princess.”

  “I can swim,” Erca mac Lugaid said, and the bargain was rejected, the interview ended.

  Leinster’s lord left surly and returned to his demesne. Whether Bress accompanied him in concealment or had gone before was not known. But none among those who discussed the matter in Tara thought Bress had fled elsewhere. They pieced it together, the High-king and his close adviser Cethern, with Cormac and Prince Ceann, aye and Princess Samaire too, for in Eirrin women were not chattel chained to cookstove and distaff. Nor did she wear the primrose of Leinster on her.

  The former champion of Eirrin had been defeated by a returned exile, and had then put disgrace on himself by attacking the proclaimed victor in berserker rage. And after…

  “It’s not friends we were, in the long ago,” Cormac said. “His rage must have been deep as the sea when he learned who it was had put defeat on him!”

  “And shortly after that,” Samaire said, “he learned that his king had no reason to love ye, and had himself been defeated and humiliated at Feis Mor.”

  “And so Bress, or someone in Bress’s pay, sought to strike you down in the woods,” Ceann said, “with an arrow from ambush.”

  “And missed,” Cormac said.

  “Because you tripped,” Samaire reminded him. Cormac gave her a look and received a smile that as sweetness itself.

  Cethern saw but saw not; he was silent and thoughtful.

  Erca Tireach missed their eye-play; he was looking with narrowed eyes at the wall opposite. “And so Bress somehow enlisted the aid of a Druid-a Druid!” he added with a jerk of his head, for if one could not trust the priests of the ancient religion, and even then with one who acknowledged their faith and not that of the new god, where was there left that in which to place trust?

  “Aye,” Prince Ceann said quietly, “a Druid. A man with the power of sorcery, or of influencing men’s minds that their eyes see that which is not there-”

  “Where’s the difference?” his sister asked sensibly.

  “Or to see nothing at all!” Cormac said, and almost he smiled. For now it was over, and he had both passed the test and survived the death-plot. He’d come far, to sit now in such high company.

  “And they in turn found a man who liked the gleam of gold well enough to accept the steel-shod spear, and hurl it for them,” Ceann was saying on. “Unfortunately, both are dead and we cannot question them further.”

  “We have it all,” Cormac said. “What further is there to ask?”

  The High-king of Eirrin looked at him. “That which it is unseemly to think or say,” he said, in a voice so low as to be but a whisper.

  “I will say it,” Samaire told them all. “We might have asked the one or the other what we must now wonder about. Whether Bress acted on his own-or whether he was himself paid to murder… or ordered to do!”

  Poet, judge, and adviser, Cethern spoke almost in accusation. “It is of your own brother you speak, my lady, and him king in Leinster as well.”

  Samaire met his gaze, looked into the eyes that were said to have melted the knees of men. “Aye,” she said. “So it is.”

  That brought a sombre quiet down upon them like the fall of night. They sat in silence, poet and weapon man and royalty, reflecting upon a man who had slain his brother for his crown and sold his sister and younger brother into the hands of the barbarous men of Norge.

  Their dark reverie was interrupted by an apologetic page, who advised the Ard-righ that Bas the Druid wished to speak with him.

  “I am occupied with guests,” Erca said.

  “I know of your guests, and their identity,” a new voice said, and all looked up as the robed man entered on feet that made no sound. “It is apology I make, to all, and beg the High-king to hear me in the presence of these others. What I have to tell you is of interest to all here-and particularly to Cormac mac Art.” And the Druid astonished them still further, by bowing his head to the man he named.

  Erca sighed. “Bas, Bas,” he said, shaking his head. “I have allowed you much freedom of movement because of my wife, and endured much from the priests who think it worse than unseemly that I am brother-in-law to a Druid.” Nor was his voice wholly pleasant.

  “With your leave, lord High-king,” Cormac mac Art said, “I congratulate you upon it!”

  Cethern turned away; Ceann and Samaire smiled openly-as did the slim man who was brother to the High-king’s lady, and him born to far more than priesthood in a dying faith.

  Erca sighed. “Speak, Bas.”

  “I shall be swift, my lord. It is simply this: it was a Leinsterman called out that Crom demanded Cormac mac Art’s trial by the twin fires of Behltain. It was a Leinsterman, too, sought his death by means both sorcerous and earthly. Both were Druids, and we stood disgraced. But the High Lord Crom has given us back our respect, for he showed all the right. At the same time, he punished one not worthy of his priesthood. Cormac mac Art was absolved and cleared in the eyes of all men when he passed the tests imposed
on him and proved himself worthy even of the old Fianna. And he was absolved in the eyes of… others, when it was clear that Crom and Behl favored him even over a Druid!”

  “I think I like what you are saying, Bas, but you have promised to be brief and have spoken at length.”

  “Apology, my lord-I was born to a father who held royal ambition for me. My message to you and to Cormac mac Art is that in our eyes the gods have shown clearly their favour, and none of us would dare presume to try him the more. There will be no trial by the fire of Behltain for Cormac mac Art, favoured of the gods themselves.”

  Bas the Druid left the room on soundless feet.

  Samaire gazed at Cormac, and her face seemed afraid to smile, though it wanted to.

  Into the silence the High-king of Eirrin said, “Cormac mac Art, you have been cleared and absolved of all charges by the Feis Mor, by virtue of your enduring the physical trials imposed on you, and now by the Druids themselves. Eirrin born and Eirrin returned, you are a free man of Eirrin… and with honour.”

  Still Cormac was unable to speak-neither, indeed, was either Ceann or Samaire, who looked at him with tears brimming on the green pools of her eyes.

  And the High-king said, “Welcome home, Cormac mac Art.”

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