Across the sea Cormac escorted Ceann and Samaire, and across a third of Eirrin; through Picts and a lustful Munsterish soldier and an honour-less Munsterish king-and his honourable son. Through highwaymen in the Wood of Brosna and into Meath Cormac escorted them, and to Tara Hill and the palace of the High-king. Nor was the relationship of Cormac and Samaire less than one of friendship and companionry-nor still was it limited so, for they were man and woman. Each had been, long ago, the other’s first lover.
Now a protected ward of the Ard-righ, Ceann remained in Eirrin but durst not go into his own Leinster. He was saying and doing the things that princes without crowns say and do when they’d have the throne of their fathers, but will not resort to murder. Such activities had much need of financing. And so Cormac had come back here, to a lonely, uncharted isle of rock and its castle peopled by ghosts and the crimsoned corpses of slain men. For here was the price of many cattle, and Ceann and Samaire needed such in their endeavours.
With Cormac had come Samaire, for she’d not stay behind. And they’d met the grimmest and most horrible of powerful enemies, who sought dark vengeance on Cormac mac Art, though for nothing done by Cormac mac Art. And if the subterrene corridor were his haunt and den-Cormac walked now its dusty floor, alone.
In that smooth-walled hallway of earth and stone, the thoughtful Cormac of Connacht came again upon the remains of the awesome serpent he’d slain. Called back by sight and smell from his thoughts to the present, he paused, staring.
Then he went on, for this was not his goal.
He came to that place where had lain Cutha Atheldane, and he paused. Thulsa Doom, Doom…
Cormac gave his head a jerk to clear it of the drum-thrum and went on. On both the previous occasions of his being here-the second but a few hours past-there had been reason not to go on, but swiftly to return. Now there was no such reason. He would see what lay ahead, toward what Cutha Atheldane had fled. He walked on, through untrod dust, dust that had lain here without stirring for… what man could know how long? Dust rose in little clouds at each step, so that he was able to see his feet only when one lifted in a step.
Thulsa Doom, Doom…
The torchlight flickered off smooth, close-set walls and floor smooth and soft with its layer of dust. The tunnel ran straight now, without the constant leftthen-right baffles.
Though he was not able to see ahead more than a few body-lengths, Cormac knew by the sensation in legs and broad back that he had begun to ascend. He was surprised. He had assumed the tunnel ran on down, to the sea. Instead, it leveled at about the place where Cutha Atheldane had died… and risen again… and then it began to elevate once more, though at a most gentle incline.
Cormac walked on, ascending.
Was the tunnel turning, bending? He could not be sure; he was unable to see far enough ahead to make such a determination. It seemed so; he felt that he was both ascending and rounding a long gentle bend.
He walked on. Dust puffed up about his legs. The name walked with him, grimly stalking the hallways of his mind. Thulsa Doom, Doom…
Now he saw clearly a curve up ahead, for it was somehow illumined. The tremulous light from the glim he carried rayed out not so far, but by some other light he could see that curving wall, could see the tunnel disappear to the left. A feeling of the eerie eddied about him with the dust. It strove to settle between his shoulder blades and chill his back, a nervousness and foreboding that had no name and could not be explained.
Cormac shrugged and twitched his shoulders as if to free them of something palpable.
He had reached across his lean, mailcoated belly to set hand to his sword pommel, shaped for enwrapping fingers. His fingers enwrapped it. He felt well-shaped, heat-hardened wood and the cool touch of insets of bronze and silver, tooled and chiseled. He drew the long sword slowly; there was only the faintest of sounds as steel blade slid from leather-covered, bronze encircled scabbard. Dust hissing and eddying about his feet and lower legs, he paced watchfully forward.
Cormac began rounding the long curve in the tunnel, and two facts made themselves known to his senses. The light came not from the walls, but from ahead. It grew brighter. And the air was better, far less stagnant, imbued with less of that unpleasant mephitic odour.
Tunnel’s end at last, he thought, and stopped.
First he checked his strike-a-light. Then, snuffing the torch in thick dust, he placed it against the wall of the corridor. He gripped his shield; while he had carried the torch, he had but “worn” the targe, with his arm through its straps. Above, over his shoulders, was the coil of rope.
Sword and shield at ready, he advanced along the curving hall, of earth and stone. The light grew and the air became sweeter still. He felt the stir of a faint breeze.
Then he saw daylight. A patch of fleece-decorated cerulean sky formed the very top of a slender oval opening; below the sky reared shadowed rock of grey and black. Unmenaced but silent and ready, he went forward. The patch of sky grew. He saw that the aperture through which he must pass was little more than the width of his shoulders. Clean air wafted in, bearing with it the familiar saline tang of the sea.
Cormac mac Art emerged from the subterrene escape-route from the Castle of Atlantis, and he drew in great lungsful of clear clean air, which he released in long suspirations. He looked about.
Above him: the sky of autumn, in late afternoon. To his left, a stony wall, slightly convex, so that a man standing above might well look down into the shadowy slice in the rock without seeing the niche that was the tunnel’s mouth. Directly ahead: the same dark stone. Behind him: the niche; a doorway opening into the tunnel. And to his right: another niche, also slender and framed all in sky. The tunnel emerged through a cleft into another, then, a sort of roofless vestibule.
After a few moments, Cormac left it. The coiled rope on his shoulder brushed the stone on his left.
First he saw the sea, far below. At nearly the same time, he both saw and felt the existence of another natural phenomenon, a sinister one. Cormac stopped, very suddenly indeed. Simultaneously he did his best to lean backward.
He was on the brink of death.
Once, a long granitic slope had perhaps swept down to the dark sea. Surely only if that were true would the tunnel have been brought to its terminus here. But inconceivable time had passed, and wrought its changes. Now an escape tunnel ending at this place was no less than insanity. Over the thousands of years, wind and sea had done their work. The slope had been chewed up and swallowed, the ocean moving in as a predator on its quarry.
Yet Cormac knew how great rearing formations of solid granite could break; he remembered the “earth”-quake he himself had experienced so recently at sea, not far from here. Perhaps there had been no slow relentless chewing away at all. Perhaps the slope’s death had not been the result of weathering, but had taken place all in a day-or within seconds.
Whatever the cause, the Gael was now on the brink of a cliff.
He stood on a short narrow shelf atop a sheer beetling precipice that could have been laid with a plumb-line. The basaltic butte dropped from his feet straight to a jumble of jagged rocks against which the restless sea lapped. It was a nigh-straight wall, as though he stood atop an unusually high watch tower of one of those Roman forts in Britain, or a Cromlech raised to the glory of Crom by an army of devoted giants.
He stood as if on a natural balcony above the abyss.
How far below were those ominous crags and uprearing rocks and lapping waters he could not know; there was no measurement available, no frame of reference. The vertical distance was many times his own height: many.
Nor yet was he at the very summit of this wall of rock that frowned down upon the hungry sea as though erected as a bulwark against it. Granite and anciently piled ejecta rose behind him a spear-length more.
Cormac stood gazing out over the ocean. It was dark from this height, not blue but a vast lonely plain of opaque, dark green glass. Well out-probably a day’s journey away,
were one able to walk that porphyritic plain-the water shone where the sun’s slanting rays turned it into an opalescent mirror. On and on, out and out the ocean ran uninterrupted, until it met a sky going deep blue; the sun was behind Cormac.
Here was the nearest to any concept of eternity, Cormac mac Art mused, that living man could approach in his limited mind: Timeless sea becoming sky across untold distance, seen from many spearlengths above.
That thought brought taunting horror and menace swooping back into his brain like hungering vultures. Their wings thrummed… Any living man. But Cutha Atheldane; was he a living man? This Thulsa Doom who had lived and practiced his evil sorceries so long ago, so incredibly long ago-was he a living man?
By some unholy and totally arcane means Thulsa Doom seemed to have survived the enormous span of years separating Cormac’s time from that of Kull. The wizard must have a more knowledgeable concept of inconceivable eternity than any man on the ridge of the world, whether living or dead… or Undead.
Cormac jerked his head as if he’d been struck on the helm and sought to clear his brain of the awful sound-from-within known to many warriors.
Turning, he squinted to look upward. Then he lowered his head to peer within the sheltered crevice into which the tunnel debouched. Aye… that was a handhold sure, and that little eruption of basaltic rock would bear his foot, and that depression would accept two fingers…
He stood high up, but it were possible to stand higher still. The call to ascend to the summit was irresistible. Entering the little alcove of rock once more, so that a fall would not mean automatic death, he ascended.
A few minutes later Cormac mac Art stood atop what a swift sweep of his slitted eyes assured him was the highest point on the isle Wulfhere had named Samaire-heim.
Samaire-heim possessed neither the beauty nor warmth of its namesake. From Cormac sloped away a lifeless plain of granite and igneous rock. The sprawling desolate plateau showed the wearing of relentless time only by the dark shadows of pockmarks and small eruptions of harder stone that had resisted the weathering.
A desert of rock it was, and it mocked him with a taunting dead silence.
Glints in the rays of the lowering sun fixed the castle’s location for him. He knew those glittery reflections marked the bronze projections set high up on the walls of the keep. From his feet this broad mesa sloped down to that point and flanked the valley that sliced through it. Studying, he tried to calculate. The distance between himself and the castle, he judged, might be just under that measurement the Romans had named after their own marching legionaires: a mile.
The roof of the world, Lugh Man-hunter had said. Lonely and desolate that roof, a bleak plain unmarked by the green of life.
Aye, Lugh, Cormac mused, and if so, this spot marks the edge of the world! And it’s nigh flat the top of the world is, and the world no more than two of those Roman miles long and perhaps one and a half across. And surrounded by water! Aye, and with but one valley, like a slice out of the middle of a loaf of bread.
Almost he smiled. It was an interesting concept, but one for poets and philosophers. He heard the call of a wild goose and saw it flapping over the “roof of the world.” Behind him, a soaring waterfowl screeked as if in reply.
Another sound from behind and below attracted his attention. He forgot the birds. Cormac spun, sword scraping out, and looked down. But he saw nothing, and had to step to the very edge of the cleft in order to peer down into the little rocky alcove.
Below, obviously having just emerged from the tunnel, a huge red-bearded man was looking up at him.
“Wulfhere! What-why be ye here, man?” “Seeking a hand up,” Wulfhere said, stretching up a brawny arm.
Chapter Eleven:
When Friend becomes Foe
First passing up ax and shield, a helmeted and mailcoated Wulfhere took the hand of his old comrade. With a few grunts on both sides, two and a half hundred pounds of Danish giant joined Cormac on the island’s very summit.
“Now why came you here, Wulf, other than to strain my arms?”
Wulfhere bent to pick up his buckler and slide it onto his arm, then he fetched up the great ax. Its thick helve matched the length of his arm; its head was nearly twice the size of his hand.
“Not the ax ye took from our Briton friend on the strand,” Cormac observed, “nor yet the one ye plucked up from the floor in the castle. It’s fickle ye grow in your declining years, O drinker of overmuch Briton ale!”
Cormac’s scarred, dark face had just commenced to form one of his almost-smiles. It died there as he called on battle-born reflexes to hurl himself away from the edge of the giddy precipice-and away from the rushing ax of his friend.
Cormac hit the ground and rolled. Without terminating the rolling movement, he came to his feet as smoothly as flowing water. And somehow, nearly exceeding the possible, his sword was in his hand. He much regretted having slipped his shield off his arm to aid Wulfhere’s climb.
“Wulfhere! Has all sense of humour fled ye too, man?”
The Dane’s only reply was in the form of motion. Already charging after the other man, he was bringing his ax back across in a new sweep to cleave Cormac in twain.
Too late for Cormac to adopt a favourite tactic and lunge forward within the sweep of the whizzing ax. Too late to parry or duck; he drove down with his right leg to hurl himself in the same direction as the ax’s swing. He heard death whish through the air as it rushed past his head. Cormac kept moving. Swinging back, squatting and rising all in a single fluid movement while his gaze remained on the big man, he snatched up his shield.
“I put down this shield to aid up my best friend, man! Wulfhere! STOP! What are ye DOING, man?”
Cormac’s voice slapped hollowly out across bare rock mesa and the darkling flatness of the sea. It seemed to echo from the thick broad form of Wulfhere Hausakluifr too; certainly voice and words had no other effect. Even while he brought his ax from its rightward-terminating backswing, the Dane was rushing forward to crush and overwhelm his chosen foe with silent ferocity.
Cormac backed, watching, thinking rapidly.
Cormac mac Art had never fought this man. He had battled beside Wulfhere, though, for several years. Each had saved the life of the other far more than once, directly and indirectly in the swift-moving matter of immeasurable seconds, split instants.
Lean and wiry, Cormac fought with swiftness-and brain. He observed even those who were his allies. He knew Wulfhere’s fighting methods. He knew the mighty ax-swing that must be arrested by the arm that guided it, knew the almost inevitable looping backswing, lower, curving upward, during which the outsized man covered himself with heavy buckler. Occasionally he exerted some little offensive efforts with that buckler; seldom were they more than reflexive, defensive movements of his left arm until his right could launch its attack anew. He had seen, too, the way Wulfhere closed with opponents; seen him bowl them over with the momentum of his bullish charges. Backed by gigantic height, great bulk, and tremendous strength, those closing charges were irresistible.
Wulfhere fought as he was constructed. Wulfhere Skull-splitter of Dane-mark was not a thinker; he was animal, he was brute strength, he was nigh onto indefatigable and thus undefeatable.
But not, Cormac hoped, irresistible and undefeatable by a man who knew how he fought!
Though unusually tall, Cormac was a lean man whose musculature did not bulge, but flowed sinuously to knot here and there in stress. Like steel wire his muscles were, and yet, at the same time, fluid. Cormac’s strength was great, shocking, because he knew how to use it.
The Gael’s way was to hew and stab, aye, but not to seek to overwhelm. He pounced and struck, and was away and back again in seconds, like the gaunt wolf that was his namesake. There was no way his size could overwhelm a foeman, save in his reach; he fought viciously, and that overwhelmed. Nor could Cormac be bothered with what some called “civilized fighting.” Battling for one’s life could not, to him, be bounded about
with rules. Thus with wooden sword and light buckler he had shocked his opponents in contests in Eirrin, and thus defeated them to become champion, but a month gone by.
He was a man who battled with sword or dagger or ax… and shield, and knee and foot and rush. Strike and sweep and thrust, smash and delicately stab and withdraw; all were within his unwritten book of combat. He was the consummate fighter, in whom a barbarian leapt to the fore when he faced a death-bringing antagonist. On more than one occasion Wulfhere had avowed that his Gaelic friend had no specific style at which to point.
And Cormac was intelligent.
If he had a rule, it was a simple one: learn swiftly from successes and from errors, so as never to make the same mistake twice. He had become, in this the year the Christians were calling four-hundred eighty-eight or ninety, or ninety-one or -two, the most terrible of warriors: an intellect-backed barbarian of great strength, shocking swiftness, and few scruples; in combat, he had none.
These attributes Cormac mac Art was now forced to pit against the brutish strength and attack of his friend and longtime fellow reaver. With awful silent ferocity, Wulfhere charged him.
High above the lapping dark sea, the wolf fought the bear.
Cormac waited until the last possible moment as that great bulk rushed upon him, like a thick grappling bear.
Then the Gael dodged to his left with a speed Wulfhere could not match-and as Cormac made that gliding sideward motion, his sword leaped out like a striking snake. The point just touched, with a tiny ting sound, Wulfhere’s coat of scalemail.
“Stop this, Wulfhere! Three killing strokes I’ve avoided-and could have slain ye, then. Stop it, man!”
Still the Dane said nothing. He lashed out with the edge of his shield at Cormac’s sword. A blur of silvery steel, that brand flicked away to spoil, with its flickering serpentine readiness and speed, the short ax-cut Wulfhere made. That tactic, too, Cormac knew.
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