Samaire emitted a startled “oh” on discovering the sheer drop at her feet, and clutched at the edge of that doorway that oped upon plummeting death.
“The sea,” the woman said. “The endless ocean I see, and awful rocks like teeth directly below. Ugh! Far below.”
O ye gods my ancestors swore by and found solace… “Look… look ye to the left along those rocks!” he commanded with a sudden desperate urgency. He could not look.
She did, and he watched her head turn both to the left and then rightward. “Cormac… the sea. Water. And more rocks. Stones and great rearing boulders. A spot of sand here and there. And it’s not happy I am looking down on such; it puts a dizziness on me. Cormac? What-love, what am I to see?”
But Cormac lay shuddering, holding his breath, clenching fingers into palms until the nails deeply dented even that calloused skin. He nerved himself. With a sudden lurch, he twisted onto his side. And he looked down.
He remembered the words of Osbrit the Briton. O ye gods, he’d babbled in his horror, and Behl show mercy, and the most poignant, man reduced to boy by horror and the unknown: Gods! O mother…
“Behl help!” Cormac exclaimed, and his voice broke as it teetered on hysteria’s brink.
Wulfhere’s body was no longer there.
Cormac fell back. He stared at the lowering sky. Wulfhere was dead, he told himself. Wulfhere was dead. He knew it. The man had not dragged his broken body off those rocks and crawled or walked anywhere. Cormac had seen him fall; Cormac had long stared down. Nor had there been the merest whit of movement.
A feeling of the eerie crept over him like palpable fog.
The Gael moved now, though not voluntarily; he was so tense that he shivered. His heart slammed at his chest like a great fist within him and the pulse was thunder in his temples. He was cold and hot both at once. Dusk-shot and darkly streaked, the sky seemed to glower above a world peopled with slavering fangs and dead-who-walked and unknowable evil and a lurking black abyss of unconsciousness and madness.
Cormac wrestled with his own mind. Desperately he sought logic, some sane explanation.
Wulfhere had landed on the jaggedly rearing rocks below, and was dead. He had seen that. Yet Samaire said the Dane was in the castle a mile distant, drunk and foolishly challenging a power that hacked at Cormac’s horror-distorted mind as with a blade steeped in some numbing, insanity producing toxin. Wulfhere lay dead… Wulfhere was in the castle… Wulfhere’s corpse had vanished. At one and the same time Wulfhere had been here, and fallen to his death, and lain there-and had not been here at all; he had fallen/stood roaring out defiance; he had died, burst and shredded on rearing rocks like gigantic fangs/he was merely, predictably and characteristically, drunk…
No!
No. Fight! Fight to regain control of a mind staggering like a man with an adder’s venom turning his blood to consuming fire. Cormac shuddered-and was hot. He became aware that pain was on his fingers. So tightly did he clutch the edge of the precipice that his knuckles had gone white as the sea’s foam on the rocks so far below. The Gael was hanging onto the solid tangible rock for fear of flying off into a redshot void of black horror and insanity.
He heard her voice. He began breathing deeply, pushing out his stomach as he filled his lungs to bursting before expelling that air to the last flutter and dragging in more. She was begging, she was tearful in her fear for him.
“Samaire!” He spoke to the sky. “Step back. Into the tunnel and out of the way with ye, lustful woman!” he said, trying to cover his staggered mind with lightness. “It’s down I’m coming.”
“Ohh… I’d hoped to come up, love. Oh my love-let me hold you… the tunnel is so dusty, Cormac…”
“Oh. Aye. Of… course.”
Pretending all was aright, she was, that strong magnificent woman he called dairlin girl. Almost, he smiled.
“Is that the very top, Cormac? Cormac?”
She’s fearful as I and needs the sound of my voice constantly-and she has even less knowledge of the why! Which of us be the worse off; I who know and yet know nothing, or she who-
“Aye,” he answered, “Lugh’s ‘Roof of the World.’”
”Won’t you be giving me a hand up, then, love,” she said, too rapidly, and he knew she was covering, too. “I want to see.”
“All… all right,” Cormac said, and steeled himself anew.
Rolling over once more, he gazed down at her wan face. Was that a sparkle of tears? The Gael lowered a hand, and she stretched up hers. But he had to rise and squat, to draw her up with her feet “walking” up the rock. With ease then he handed her up, and fell back as he drew her over the edge and onto the mesa. She fell upon him as he lay there at the edge of that sprawling flatland of stone.
“Oh love,” she murmured, so close he could feel her lips move against his face, “it’s cold you are!”
He was; there was nothing he could think of to say; he said nothing.
He felt a transfer of warmth, hers to him as ‘ the loving woman lay over him, holding him, though he wore mail and she her byrnie of boiled leather.
Tremulously, seeking the comforting texture of reality, his hands slipped up into the richness of her hair while she pressed her warm mouth down on his. Her lips seemed hot, which told him that his own were cold. Soft was her hair against his hands, soft as he’d known it in her cousin’s manse on Tara Hill. Strange, after their days asea and her long wearing of a leather helm under a sun that boiled forth sweat, and them with no extra water for such as the washing of hair. But he had other things to think of now.
Marvelous soft was her hair to his weapon-man’s calloused hands, and her weight on him, too, was good. The needs that rose in him were not of the sort that brooked thought or enhanced the reasoning process.
The sun chilled as it grew distant. It deepened in colour to a gold that shaded into orange and seemed to set Samaire’s tresses aflame. Still the two at the very top of Samaire-heim lay together, moving but a little. Hands and mouths moved restlessly and were not satisfied. Coats of steel chain and leather were discarded with weapon belts, with neither ceremony nor sensible orderliness.
Her large eyes seemed to smoulder and yet at once to deepen into pools for the falling into. His blood was wine coursing in his veins, hot and strong. Restless womanly hands transferred their warmth and their insistence to the very core of him. They moved as his did, tracing out every line and hollow and curve of his hard body as though she were determined to commit all to memory.
God of my father, he marveled as he had before, how at once soft and firm, slim and rounded, is this woman who calls me love!
Though his throat was dry and there was a strong hunger for her on him, he teased, “Companions…”
She did not smile, but stared hungrily as she panted, and she pulled at him with hands that at once begged and demanded, the princess of the landless warrior.
Prim and discreet, the sun hid its face in a great final glow of orange and blood that hurled blotting shadows across the sky. But the shameless moon rode up to stare down at the couple so totally alone on a great seabound chunk of rock like a desert surrounded by ocean. The moon had seen such, millions of times over the eons, hundreds of millions. It took no note but remained cold of light and face. Warmthless light bathed them when they’d shared and transferred their warmth and lay still and lazy while their breathing returned to normal.
Then a shamelessly naked Samaire, her skin all snow and coal in moonlight and shadow, knelt up over the supine man. She smiled down on Cormac mac Art, and lazily he smiled in return. Fear and horror were far from his mind.
And then he saw the glint of steel in her hand, and the skin fell from her face all in an instant so that it was a ghastly apparition he stared up at, his eyes dilated and his hair striving to leave his head.
A faceless fleshless skull grinned down upon him as long bony fingers curled into a fist around the dagger’s hilt, and raised it and drove it down at Cormac’s bare chest, a
nd with a wild cry of horror and soul-deep torment he moved convulsively and hurled, not Samaire, but Thulsa Doom over the cliff to hurtle down as had the other of the only two Cormac mac Art loved on the ridge of the world.
And a shuddering, madness-tinged Cormac mac Art… wept.
Chapter Thirteen:
To Die Twice
Cormac awoke to physical discomfort, as mental agony had tormented him for hours ere he’d sunk into sleep.
A stabbing brightness struck through his eyelids so that he saw blazing yellow without opening his eyes. Realizing that he lay on his back in the open and that the sun of morning was swinging up over him, he kept his lids fast shut until he rolled over onto his side. That brought lancing twinges of pain and a grunt, which was followed by a curse at his own stupidity.
For any person to sleep lying on his back on solid stone was stupid. For a weapon-man to do so, and in his armour with the dampness of sea-breeze on him; that was worse than stupid. It was a sin.
On hands and knees, near the edge of the precipice overlooking the sea, Cormac mac Art was assaulted by memory.
Oh gods and blood of the gods! Wulfhere and then Samaire-even Samaire! O gods, how-
Unworthy!
The Gael set his strength against the horror and despair that were a pall over his mind, as if they were a binding chain on his sanity. By superior strength and a complete exertion of a will more powerful than sorcerous mental chains, he snapped them.
Cormac rose from hands and knees to his feet. He ignored his stiffness of back and limbs and the complaining twinges from every area of his body-including his empty belly. Back went his mailclad shoulders. It was a weapon-man of Eirrin who stood stalwart and proud-and angry.
The sun of early morning flashed off his coat of linked chain as he turned all about; flashed even more blindingly from the broad long blade of the sword he brandished aloft. Atop the mesa that was Samaire-heim high above the sea, he waved his sword high at the end of a stiff-held arm. But it was not the gods to whom Cormac mac Art issued shouted challenge.
He bellowed it forth, and his voice raced like the wind out over the sea and the sprawling mesa.
“Thulsa Doom! Twice have ye sought my blood, man out of time! Twice, Thulsa Doom, and in the most cowardly possible manner!” Deliberately he repeated that fearsome name, that by shouting it out again and again he might tear its thrumming repetition from his mind.
“As my best friend ye’ve come, Thulsa Doom, and as my-as Samaire ye’ve come to do death on me, Thulsa Doom-scum of ancient Valusia! It is as Bas ye’ll come death-seeking on me next, Thulsa Doom who should be dead? Come Yourself, sea-slime, cowardly mage, in your own form, and face me direct! Cormac despises you, Thulsa Doom! It’s Cormac calls you, Thulsa Doom… COME!”
But Thulsa Doom came not, though Cormac waited long. His only reply was a rumbling growl from his empty stomach.
Samaire of Leinster knew fear and horror and pain, and she knew not why.
Long had she waited for Cormac’s return, and then it had come upon her where he must have gone, though for what reason she could not fathom. Then it was long and long she waited for the others to fall into sleep. At last all had done, or so she supposed, and she had crept through the dark castle of Atlantis with an unlighted torch in her hand. Not until she was in the passageway of sorcery that lurked behind a small room’s wall did she pause and use her strike-a-light to ignite her torch.
With it held high in her left hand and her sword naked in her right, Samaire had trod that ever-turning passage in quest of Cormac mac Art.
She was well past the remains of the slain monster serpent when, though she felt no breath of wind, her torch made a windswept, snarling noise-and went out.
Instantly clutching cold hands fell upon her.
She fought. Back she jammed her feet and elbows, and she attempted to cut behind her at him who held her in the darkness. Yet she succeeded not in slashing him. The blows of her elbows and heels he took without letting go, and in silence. An arm came over her “shoulder and across her neck, where it pressed and steadily forced up the chin she strove to clamp down in protection of her throat. Another arm enwrapped her at the waist, and a powerful hand clamped viciously.
As if her silent assailant knew her thoughts, that hand leaped away when, with care for herself, she brought her sword down to slice at it. With a jolt as of a bar of steel the hand slammed into her wrist, and clamped. She moaned. The sword fell into the dust. Then the hard-chested man behind her had inveigled his arm under her chin, and it continued to clamp.
Long she held her breath and struggled without panting to free herself. At last the air had to be expelled from her seemingly bursting lungs-and the arm across her throat prevented her drawing another breath.
She knew that she made hideous sounds. Her head grew enormous. Pain like ice grew until it owned her chest. Her ears reported a roaring that she knew was not there, and a redness seemed to grow in the darkness, and Samaire knew that she was beginning to die.
Samaire began to shiver, almost violently.
Not to be able to speak, even to cry out or know her killer or the reason for her death! She felt tears ooze from her eyes. The trickles were first warm, then cool on her cheeks. Her eyes were huge, her staring gaze like claws scratching at the dark in an effort to tear it away. Growing weaker and weaker, she writhed helplessly and strove to cry out.
She heard her own sounds; tiny hints of voice emerged from her gaping mouth, pitiful sick-chicken noises. Her skin goosefleshed.
The darkness was gone. There was only the deep glowing red that seemed to undulate and pulse like visible heat before her staring, aching eyes. She shivered again. Her intestines seemed to knot themselves.
Desperately, ridiculously, she tried to fight death from powerful hands that could not be fought.
The breathless woman felt herself go absolutely limp throughout her body; felt the tickly trickle of perspiration down the insides of her arms and her flanks; felt the oozing dampness on her forehead and between her breasts. She felt the numbness coming.
I… die.
The thought made her angry. She was dying, dying at the hands of a grimly silent and unknown coward who would not face even a woman, but somehow took away her light and then seized upon her in the dark, from behind, and continued strangling her thus until there was no longer any need.
More anger than fear Samaire of Leinster knew, and then she knew nothing.
Consciousness, full of throbbing pain, seeped back to her. There was an ache in her head, which felt enormously swollen, a dull throbbing that increased in tempo and volume when she moved it. She strove now to dispel the confusion within that aching head, to think. Surely this was not death. Surely pain ended with death.
He but choked me into unconsciousness, then ceased, and I began to breathe again. Another thought followed close: How long ago? How long have I… slept?
She was aware of a pressure against her forehead. She could not account for it. Am I lying face down? No… no… I stand…
Slowly, finding it an effort, she peeled open her eyes.
Before her was a wall of stone. She stood leaning against it. Her head scraped the smooth surface as she turned it to left and to right. Gone was the darkness; no less than two torches burned. The flickering flame sent dancing ghost-shadows about her, upon her. Her body ached. Her chest hurt and breathing came hard. She tried to think about that, seeking the cause with a mind that refused to work properly but oozed along the thought process like honey poured in January.
Her body was constricted. She was not lying down. Yet-an she had been unconscious, asleep, how was it that she was standing? Each limb ached and quivered. Blinking again and again, she looked at herself in the flickering yellow light of the two gums. Her cheek rubbed smooth stone as she turned her head this way and that.
Samaire saw that both her modesty and her freedom were gone.
She was both bound and naked.
Though she was har
dly in possession of the full awareness and reasoning powers choked away from her, the confused captive was aware that she was still in the passageway beneath the castle. Somehow… yes: she was bound to the very wall itself. How… how possible… Spikes, driven into the stone?
She had no idea. She could not see her wrists. But she was bound, and she was in worse than discomfort.
Her ribs felt crushed by the tautness of her body, stretched and flattened, the skin drawn tight over each several rib because her arms were drawn up and out and made fast. Her breasts pressed against the stone worse than uncomfortably; they were naked and vulnerable and the stone was cold. She felt her heart pounding, felt the ache in her limbs, and she felt the fluttering in her bare stomach with her laborious breathing.
Awareness increased. Pain sharpened her senses, hastened her return from near-death to full consciousness. Nevertheless, thinking remained an effort of conscious will.
She took stock of her situation, like a barely-competent steward tallying the master’s holdings. And she would again be master of her own body and brain…
She was bound facing the wall, standing close against it with her arms dragged out at worse than right angles to her body, so that she formed a living Y. Almost rigid were her arms; the binding at the wrists she could not see were almost without slack. Relief came from the simple completed chore of discovering how it was she had stood while unconscious. To such had she been reduced, a heady appreciation of the simplest realization.
Samaire Ceannselaigh wondered how long ago she had been secured thus. How long had she stood sagging against the unyielding wall in a way that in creased the terrible strain on her arms and shoulders? -and back, she realized, and chest, and tautened stomach…
Slim, smooth-muscled thighs quivered. Realizing only now that they were braced wide apart and that her knees were pressed against the cavern wall, Samaire thought on that. No intuitive leap aided her; she was forced to labour through the entire thinking process.
Aye. Her wide-braced legs lowered her posture, and thus added to the burden of her arms. She willed aching muscles to serve her. They complained. She winced and a little groan escaped her when she straightened, bringing her legs together. Gods be thanked, they were not bound!
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