“You are open at this instant, Wulfhere!”
But the Dane made no reply.
Instead that grim silent killing machine lashed back with the ax in a cut so much more vicious that Cormac dared not meet it with his buckler. With a skillful twist of his arm he used the targe to bash away the heavy steel blade. Impact and crashing clang were enormous. At the same time he sought to give Wulfhere a bash in the side with his sword, a stroke that would hurt and leave a bruise without cutting the scales of steel mail. For still Cormac mac Art could not bring himself to launch a killing attack on his friend.
That gentler stroke the giant with the bushy red beard avoided with a writhing movement. Around came his shield, and Cormac’s only just caught the blow. The two bucklers slammed together with a terrific crash and clanging thud, and Cormac was hurled backward.
Still the Dane came.
His friend flailed, backing precipitately inland along the sloping mesa of stone-until his foot came down on a fist-sized upcrop of rock.
Cormac felt himself falling back and knew that he was going to stretch his length. It was not instinct but self-control and the result of long experience that prevented him from windmilling his arms.
Before his buttocks struck unyielding ophitic rock, Cormac’s sword-arm was before him, and not only to protect elbow and grip. His wrist was amove, his swordblade weaving a silvery net of defense and steel menace before him. And then above him, for with a grunt and jingle of steel links and a jarring impact that clashed his teeth, he struck the rocky mesa. His eyes saw lightning-shot darkness as he sprawled full length on his back.
His head continued to buzz; his eyes he cleared.
Wulfhere came on, still in morbid silence that was more blood-chilling than the man’s usual battle-cries, curses, and fabulous threats. The battle-light was in his eyes, and Cormac knew horror. He knew, finally, that this was no joke, no game.
Wulfhere Hausakluifr meant to kill his best friend.
Already the Dane’s shield was in position as protective barrier against the fallen man’s sword. Wulfhere’s other arm was rising. The lowering sun flashed off the broad steel blade. In seconds it would descend to hurtle down in a totally irresistible chop that would drive the terrible blade through the body of his longtime piratic comrade until it rang off the rock beneath him.
Perhaps Cormac could roll and escape, then in a swift movement chop into the back of the man’s legs. But… cripple Wulfhere forever? No, better to slay him-if he could. Once that swift thought and decision had formed in his mind, it was too late to roll, and no sensible man would attempt to brace a shield against such a blow.
Cormac drove both feet straight up under the short skirt of the other man’s tunic and coat of scale mail.
Wulfhere’s eyes went spherical and bulged as he was jolted to a halt. His ax descended, but weakly and erratically. The Gael was able to turn that blow with his shield, though it split.
Wulfhere was busy trying very hard to breathe, and to see past the tears that filled his eyes, as though his crotch and his lachrymal glands were directly connected.
Cormac’s body catapulted upward; his sword crashed against the Dane’s helmet with a frightful ringing clang. The blade he was willing to sacrifice, if he could knock the man unconscious so as to hear what he had to say while bound and with dagger at his throat.
The blade did not break; Wulfhere remained conscious. Momentum, the weakness the other man’s kick had sent into his legs, and the blow to his helmeted head drove him to his knees. Cormac pounced away behind him. Wedge-shaped sword-point touched scales of steel where they lay between muscle-layered shoulder blades.
“Release the ax, Wulfhere. It’s no wish I have to lean on this sword-and remember that I could have chopped or stabbed ye already.”
Wulfhere swept back his right hand. Cormac had the barest instant in which to decide: drive with his blade into the big man’s back, or get his legs out of reach of the ax Wulfhere sent blindly around and back to shorten him.
Cormac did both. Pressure on his point did not send it through the Dane’s scalemail, but provided Cormac the leverage and pivot-point he needed to spring into the air. The ax missed his legs; his weight on his own sword drove Wulfhere forward and down.
The Gael alighted. He stepped back, unwinded and unscathed, and ran his tongue over his lips. He waited.
Wulfhere rolled over and glowered up at him.
“I had rather talk about whatever it be that’s driving ye to attack me thus, my friend,” Cormac said. “Twice I have had the opportunity to slay; twice I have not, for my last wish is to kill Wulfhere Skullsplitter! Now what means this maniacal attack on me your friend, man-and this silence that becomes ye not?”
Without a word, Wulfhere rose. He hefted ax and buckler. Looked at the other man. And bent his knees in warrior’s combative crouch. Nor was there friendship in his eyes.
Still without a word, the towering Dane put up his shield before him, holding it like a battering ram, and came rushing. The mighty ax swung on high even as he charged-maintaining his eerie silence.
“DAMN ye, man!” Cormac bellowed in his horror and frustration.
He stood his ground. To the left he let his dark eyes flicker, a telltale act to a man of Wulfhere’s experience and expertise. At the last possible instant in the face of the other’s rushing charge, Cormac hurled himself to his right.
Wulfhere’s stroke had already commenced, and the adjustment of his aim to his own right was begun, for the Dane knew when he saw an opponent’s eyes picking out the direction of his evasive dodge!
But that sideward glance had been a sophisticated feint on Cormac’s part. Nor was Wulfhere swift enough now to halt his charge and ax-swing… nor, disconcerted by his chosen enemy’s leaping in the direction opposite the expected, to avoid tripping over the leg Cormac left stretched behind.
Wulfhere must have felt triumphant to see that his foeman had inadvertently got his back to the cliff and could no longer give ground with such facility. Cormac had given no thought to the cliff but indeed had backed to within arm’s length of it without knowing, so overwhelmed was his mind by this inexplicable attack.
Without so much as a cry of any sort, Wulfhere Skullsplitter flew out into cavernous space and rushed down through the depthy void that separated cliff from sea.
“NO!” Cormac roared, and jerked himself up into a squat, twisting half about to stare… down.
Now he had his frame of reference for measuring distance from cliff’s edge to tide-washed rocks. Now he had a point of comparison that enabled a man with a seaman’s eye to judge distance.
The twisted, mailed body that lay on the ragged rocks below could be concealed by his uplifted index finger. Now Cormac could assume that the distance separating him from the broken, stone-pierced corpse of his former comrade and friend was more than twenty times the length of his own body.
Wulfhere did not so much as twitch.
“Ah, Wulfhere,” Cormac muttered, and his voice caught in his throat. “Damn ye, man… why?”
Chapter Twelve:
When Companion becomes Lover
Cormac mac Art slumped, lying on his side and breathing through his open mouth.
He stared down and down at the moveless, broken body of him who had been his best friend. But the Gael’s dark, stricken eyes hardly saw that smashed, twisted form that lay over a hundred feet below.
What he saw was behind his eyes. Wulfhere was dead. Cormac remembered all the years with Wulfhere…
There had been the time on dreary little Iona, off Alba’s rocky westward coast. He had been climbing, foolishly and rashly as it fell out. And fell was the word. Tumbling and rolling and flailing, Cormac fell-and Wulfhere Skullsplitter moved his bulk with astonishing swiftness. He broke the Gael’s fall with his own huge body, not without a sore bruising to both men.
“It’s wolf ye are, not goat,” the Dane had said with equanimity, once they were again on their feet. “And do shout o
ut next time ye be of a mind to try such a leap, Gaelic madman… this time I barely moved fast enow!”
Madman, Cormac thought now, and he heaved a sigh. Surely he had just been attacked by a madman.
Why?
Cormac recalled those several occasions on which he had, according to the battle-loving Dane, “cheated” him of his beloved ax-hewing.
“Selfish son of an Irish pig-farmer!” Aye, Cormac could hear the huge man’s grumble even now, chiding him for such as having “slain more than his share,” or silently, savagely striking down foemen ere Wulfhere had reached the scene of sword-reddening combat.
“This world holds no place for a lone wolf, Wolf,” Wulfhere had told him once, off the Isles of Orkney. Aye, and it was a team they’d become.
Cormac remembered a daring raid on Saxon shores. He shook his black-maned head, remembering…
Wulfhere, slipping in a glittering sheet of blood to fall with heels high, had been fair game for a grinning Saxon wielding an ax that rivaled the weight of Wulfhere’s own. In his desperate rush to be there in time, Cormac had been forced to set foot on the fallen Dane’s broad chest in order to drive his blade straight up through the Saxon’s intestines. The man died with his triumphant grin replaced by a look of great surprise. His own momentum bore him down on the Gael’s blade so that its point appeared reddripping at his back. In toppling, the Saxon downed his slayer. Onto Wulfhere both fell. Beneath the two bodies, one quick and one stare-eyed dead, Wulfhere Hausakluifr had groaned.
“Get ye off me, black-eyed Gaelic hog! Think ye that ye be without weight?”
Cormac shoved away the corpse and scrambled off his friend. “It’s your worthless life I’m after saving,” he grumbled, dragging himself to his feet to find none remaining afoot but Danes; he and Wulfhere and their company had triumphed once more.
“HA!” Wulfhere bellowed, grunting his way to his feet. “I merely lay taking my rest, in wait for him! Wouldn’t he have been surprised when I caught his ax in both hands and gelded him with it! And ye had to spoil it, and walk all over me withal! Think ye I be a carpet, Cormac, damn ye?”
“Nay, Wulfhere, only the greatest liar abroad on the Narrow Seas!”
The two battle-reddened men had looked at each other, and about them their crew, men of Wulfhere’s Dane-mark, awaited their countryman’s reaction to that insufferable word.
The tension lasted not long.
Dark, cleanshaven Gael and huge red-bearded Dane were soon both laughing, with the bigger man clapping a ham-like hand to each of the other’s shoulders with force enow to stagger him.
“Liar am I, eh?” Wulfhere Hausakluifr roared. “Blood brother!”
“Blood brother!” Cormac called, and all about them gore-shining blades rose in a delighted Danish hail.
Blood brothers, the dark Eirrin-born Gael and the red-bearded ruddy-cheeked northerner.
Remembering, Cormac bit into his lower lip and sighed again, heavily. He recalled the depth of their relationship, their way of working together… For gold, the two reavers had undertaken to contract their crew to a mission for an unlikely employer: Gerinth, one of the Britonish kings. With care and shrewdness the Gael had worked out his plan. It was beyond Wulfhere’s understanding.
“I am done seeking to reason out your actions,” Wulfhere had growled. And he had acquiesced to Cormac’s plan, which led to battle after gore-smeared battle. A fine scheme it had been-and that fine scheme might well have come to naught without the giant Dane and his flailing ax.
Aye, Cormac thought now. Wulfhere had said the same afore that time, and after. And always he had followed Cormac’s stratagems natheless. But… what mad reason was there now for this action of Wulfhere… his last action?
Cormac stared down twenty times the length of his body at the corpse of the best fighting man, the best companion he had ever known. Misery and despair fell on mac Art. They added their burden to that of foreboding, the menace of resistless vengeance from an unknown sorcerer for reasons no better understood.
Why, Blood-brother?
Cormac turned away, blinking.
Lying there at cliff’s edge, he touched his coil of rope. He considered the ridiculous: to make it fast and clamber down, back-walking the sheer seawall. To what purpose? To twist the blade of self-torturing remorse in himself by looking upon a dead friend?-he felt it sharply enow already. To see the bright too-familiar scarlet of Wulfhere’s life all over those rocks? To look into staring eyes and force himself to tears? To see the face of a dead blood-brother whose blood had all run out? To ask of an unhearing corpse his torturing question… why?
He shook his head. No. Let Bas demand answers of raised corpses. Cormac would not-nor would Wulfhere be rising.
Yet… to let him lie asprawl there so, a huge robust hearty giant of a man now hanging like a bit of sail-cloth caught over stones to dry…
Cormac mac Art ground his teeth. Last night, he thought, I saved him from the sea. Today he tried to slay me. Now it’s back at the sea’s edge he is, and dusk comes soon, and then the tide. From the sea I saved him; on the sea he chose to live; let the sea have him in death.
“Return to the sea, Wulfhere,” he said, aloud, though without looking down again at the Dane. Cormac would look on him no more.
“Cormac?”
Blood of the gods! So distrait was Cormac that he started violently, an unworthy reaction in a man who’d let a Briton serpent wriggle across his prone body not once but twice, on that dusky day when he’d lain in wait for a Saxon raiding party.
He felt himself quiver, and knew what a pitiful state he’d let himself get to, over a friend who had betrayed and attacked him and whose death was none of Cormac’s doing, but the same as suicide-with justice for his last acts.
The voice came again. “Cormac?”
He turned over to peer down into the little alcove of rock that was tunnel’s end. It was darker now, with the sun lower and the sky starting to frown at its leavetaking. He could just see her face, a pale oval as she gazed up at him.
“Cormac!” Samaire repeated, not merely questioning now but in fearful anxiety. “What’s amiss-did I startle you?”
He forced himself to make reply. “A-aye. You… startled me.”
“It’s sorry I am. I heard you speak…”
He frowned. “No, I said nothing.”
“It sounded like, uh, ‘Turn to the sea, Wulfhere.’”
“Oh.” Cormac strove to clear his brain, to adjust to this intrusion on his anguish and to speak normally. “Oh. Spoke I aloud?”
“Aye,” she said. She was still frowning. Her knowledge that something was amiss prevented her remarking on their odd position for such converse: she standing below and craning her neck, he asprawl and looking down at her. “But my love… Wulfhere? I just left him, as I came to seek you.”
Cormac’s stomach lurched. He made two attempts before he was able to form words. “You just… what… what did Wulfhere, when ye saw him last?” Gods; it was as if worms crawled about on his body and within his guts.
“Why, it’s back in the castle the overgrown boy is, and half drunk already.” With amusement in her voice: “He was bawling out challenge to all and any from the Other Side of death who’d care to come forth and face his ax, dead foes or live sorcerer!”
Samaire chuckled, for she could not see Cormac’s expression.
“Wulf… but-but Sa… Samaire…”
“Cormac!”
He fought to control himself; be strong, why alarm her so? “He was thus, and ye came directly along the passage, along the tunnel, so that he can… he cannot be aught else but behind you?”
“Aye. O’course. Cormac, methinks-”
“Bear… with me,” he said, more confused and truly fearful than ever before in his life. Resistless sorcery stalked him, loomed grim and threatening, and he could not know B from L or what was white and what black.
“I’m all right… dairlin girl,” he said huskily, striving with all his m
ight to give the semblance of truth to the lie. A thousand ants seemed at the running of footraces over his body, while his arms and back had gone chill under tunic and mailcoat. Seeking sanity, he fled the dread impossible and spoke the mundane. “Why have you followed me?”
Samaire answered with seductive softness, “Why, to be alone with you, love.”
He stared down at her. “You came not to attack me?”
Again she cried out his name, this time more in confused accusation than apprehension. “Cormac!”
Before he could wrestle forth words from his clouded mind and tense lips, Samaire chuckled. It was a rippling throaty sound that he liked much and had so told her.
“Oh!” she said. “Aye then… I came to attack you, king of my heart. I followed you because I want you.”
He knew that he was not responding properly, in words or body, to that frank statement. But he could not, not yet. “Samaire,” he said with a grave seriousness that sent her smile afleeting. He heard his own voice shake. Cormac took control of himself as though he were a nervous but strong-willed rider on a worse than nervous horse. He had to. Else he’d be gibbering, and Cormac mac Art knew it.
“Behind ye,” he said, intoning words in the manner of a druid at his most solemn rites, “is the only way out of that pit, save the tunnel. Have care-one step through and it’s death. But… do you look forth, and down… and tell me what you see.”
He clenched his teeth, angered that he’d let those last several words tumble forth in such a rush.
Samaire raised her hand to her cheek. An extended finger rubbed nervously in her hair, at the ear, where she had the wispiest of golden sideburns. She was frowning and a tremor rode her voice.
“What is it, my love? It’s far from natural you are!”
He heard the pleading note and was moved-but he firmed his jaw. “Please, Samaire. Do you look as I asked.”
After a moment, she did so without a word, and he knew he’d put hurt upon her. From above he gazed at her back, with the thick mass of curling vermillion tresses bright against the dark leather. Her hair appeared recently to have been much-combed.
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