“Go then,” he shouted, and alive or dead there was much power in that pitiless voice. “Go, all of ye… save… HIM!” The finger was pointed at the lone man in Quester’s bow. “It’s him I seek, it’s with him I have quarrel older than your conception of time! Go in safety, little men, and leave-”
But one among them found voice; and she dared interrupt to shout out her challenge. “Leave Cormac for you to murder, creature of evil? Only him, you without heart? Do you not want me too, monster, whom you called pigeon-chested blowze? Only Cormac? O ye coward who be more at home in the slithering cold body of a crawling serpent than the hide of a man-a dead man!”
“Samaire!” Cormac snapped, turning only his head to look at the woman in the stern.
She lashed at him with angry eyes. “You! You were about to tell us that his quarrel lies only with you, weren’t you? You were about to suggest that we remain behind, to-”
Cormac turned. “No. I was about to suggest that ye all take the Britonish ship, loaded with our gains, and leave me this one. Wulfhere brought a ship to shore alone; so can I!”
“Go your way, melon-butted slut!” Thulsa Doom roared out from the rocky promontory. “I want only him ye know as Cormac mac Art!”
None noted Bas, who had swung wide his left arm and was muttering, not for their ears. His right hand was at his throat, fingers splayed out to touch, simultaneously, the lunula and sun-disk and mistletoe he wore. His eyes stared into the sky, and his words were in the language only druids knew.
“I go nowhere without you, Cormac!” Samaire said, so vehemently it seemed as much fierce challenge as promise made in love.
“It be true he wants only you, Wolf?”
“Aye, Wulfhere. Only me. Now do you take the Briton craft, and-”
Wulfhere bellowed so that his voice might have raised the heads of drowsing dogs in far Eirrin. “I go nowhere without Cormac mac Art!”
A slender young man with flaxen hair brushed past the defiant reaver, and Brian na Killevy took his stance beside his leader. “I move not from the side of Cormac mac Art. Come down here, wizard, that I may show you this steel close to hand!” And he added, waving his sword on high, “Close to HEAD!”
Standing on the high rocks, the challenged enemy withdrew his pointing hand-and thrust back his hood. All gasped, even Wulfhere, at sight of that fleshlessly gleaming skull atop the long dark robe.
“Head?” he sneered. “Strike at this head, little boy?” Thulsa Doom laughed, and the sound was not pleasant.
Only Cormac’s hand stayed the angry Brian from plunging off the boat and charging up the beach at the mage.
“Brian: already ye’ve spoke like a fool; be not twice one by acting so as well!”.
Another shout rose from one aboard Quester: “And what if that ugly skull flies grinning in the air to bounce on the ground, creature of a dead god?” It was Ros mac Dairb who challenged now, and he who shouldered forward to stand beside Cormac.
That which needed to be proved to them all was proven then by Lugh Man-hunter, though not by design. He’d been squatting, busy with something; now he straightened to reveal a strung bow and ready arrow. He aimed, lifted a whit in windless air, and loosed his shaft. The arrow sped lofting above the beach separating them from the wall of granite, and dropped-and all heard the chunk sound as the dart drove into the body of Thulsa Doom.
All saw how the wizard staggered at the impact, saw how half the feather-tipped shaft stood out from him, the width of two fingers above the cincture of his robe. All saw the death’s head tilt forward, dark eyes staring down at the arrow.
But none saw him fall, or so much as stagger the more.
And all saw him seize that slim shaft of death, and pull it from himself, broad steely tip and all, to hold it high above his head-unmarked with blood.
“You poor little fools will soon reduce me to begging for clothing, with the holes you put in this robe,” he called in a triumphant and mocking voice.
The words that rose among the watching men were quite different: “Gods preserve!” and “Behl protect and Crom defend!” and “Fire of Life!” Many too was the hair that strove serpent-like to depart its mooring place on a horripilating scalp.
“Be ye impervious to arrow or no, I stay with Cormac mac Art,” Lugh shouted, though in truth there was a quaver buried deep in his voice.
“I remain!” Ruadan mac Mogcorf called out.
“I stay with Cormac!” Laig mac Senain shouted, and the navigator stepped forward to join the others at the prow.
Others called out the same, and who was to say whether their cries lacked total steadiness or conviction? Osbrit of Britain started forward-
And then a rumble came from the clear sunny sky. A startled Wulfhere first glanced up, then bellowed out his laughter.
“Odin and the Hammerer declare for mac Art!”
But the words that issued from the mouth of the man alone at Quester’s stern were in Cormac’s language, not Wulfhere’s. “…and cast darkness over him,” Bas said, aloud now, “and smite him with the fire from the sky that shrivels even the oak-and turns bone into dust!”
Again the skies grumbled. Clouds, though not dark, billowed wildly in elemental madness.
“Fools, fools all!” the skull-face shouted. “BE fools then, and DIE like fools-for none of ye shall leave this island ALIVE!”
Two phenomena, at once natural and yet not natural, came together. Wulfhere would claim for the One-eyed Allfather the one, while Bas knew whose pleas, to Behl had brought it. As for the other-all knew it was the work of Thulsa Doom, old before sunken Atlantis rose.
Simultaneously, wind came screaming in from seaward to send hair streaming and whipping at shocked, paling faces-and from a dark cloud that suddenly appeared above, a yellow-white bolt of lightning slashed down at Thulsa Doom.
Thulsa Doom vanished, and none knew whether before the bolt arrived or after; whether he had escaped or been riven by the god-fire that sent dust and pebbles and great shards of sundered rock tumbling down onto the beach from where the mage had stood.
Chapter Sixteen:
The Wizard’s Power
Sea and sky went mad.
The wind came shrieking in from the southwest with a force to hurl sand up into swirling clouds like fine dust and to tear the sails of any so foolish as to spread them. Mighty waves rushed viciously in to shore, hissing and roaring as they tumbled over one another in spectacular spumes of spray. Foaming water struck with crashes as of solid matter against the granitic seawalls that towered on either end of the small area of sandy strand. Wind-thrust sea came racing up the beach in a hurtling foaming insanity of angry water. Beached like helpless sea-turtles, the two ships rocked and shuddered with groans of tortured timbers despite their being drawn well ashore.
In that mad melee of motion and ear-battering cacophony of noise, one sound reigned supreme over all others; the wind. The forces of nature ruled, and the wind was High-king.
The wind’s howl transcended the sea’s rushing hiss and roar. It was the wind that drove the sea like an unwilling stallion. The wind was god; the gale from the ocean was prime mover in this savage flaunting of nature’s elemental powers. Its sustained shrieking was as if boasting its awareness of a transcendent supremacy.
Air and water pounded the earth. Behind a grey sky, the sun’s fire was dimmed as though even Behl was powerless.
Farther and farther up the sand the waters made their incursion. And then the water eddied, shivered while it paused as though confused, confounded by a source of enforced movement not of itself. Its anger was more than apparent, yet was not enough. The sea that had swallowed so many lives was powerless. The wind controlled; the sea could only be driven. Now those waters hesitated in their greedy landward lunge. The water shuddered. It began moving along the strand-sidewise.
Westward the bubble-strewn foam moved, now. Proving its insanity or at the least its capricious whimsy, the wind had shifted through many degrees. No longer did
it scream its way from the southwest. Now it was from east by southeast it emanated, still blowing in to shore that no ships might leave, and it howled the while like a thousand banshees of Eirrin come to harry the living with warnings of inexorable death.
Despite its natural, gravity-dictated inclination to slip back from the strand’s upward slope, the water was forced westward by the prodigious force of the gale.
More sea came to shore, sluicing in a defiant flood up the beach, and side by side the long boats from Eirrin and Britain rocked dangerously. For the sea they had been constructed; of the sea they were, more than of man, who had made them to further his pretense of conquering the domain of Manannan mac Lyr; landbound those craft were now, but surrounded by tugging extensions of the sea like foam-shot tentacles lapping and splashing all about them.
With a creaking of stout wood and a constant shifting of cargo, the vessels seemed full striving to resume their natural abode. The wind thrust at them. The water coaxed and tugged.
The craft of Britain was of less heavy construction and more buoyant as well, owing to the fact that Quester alone had been laden from the inland castle’s trove. Dead Bedwyr’s vessel shifted. It slid slightly crabwise with the gale-driven waters that rushed around it and broke over its stern in spectacular leaping gouts of white spray. The ship of Eirrin but rocked, and groaned as though in pain or frustrated desire to join its partially floating comrade.
The gale shouted down the creaking complaints of straining wood.
Nature rampaged in chaotic motion and sound and sky-darkening anger.
But it was not Nature, nor yet again the gods, that provided catalyst and control of this demonstration of enormous elemental force.
No deity was Thulsa Doom of eighteen millenia’s lifespan, nor was he natural, of Nature, the dead man who was not dead. And it was Thulsa Doom who controlled, who conjured and sent wind and challenging sea onto land. Thulsa Doom had not threatened, but promised, and the undying wizard kept his promise. None on the accursed isle of Kull’s abandoned castle thought this horror of natural force with a berserker rage upon it was of else than Thulsa Doom.
It was he sent the wind; it was he held ships and crew landbound; it was by his magicking that the gale shifted so unnaturally in an arrogant show of his powers.
Drenched and miserable, the thirteen with Cormac mac Art could only huddle far up the beach against the wall of rock, and watch. The wind drove sand into their faces and whipped their hair so that it stung their cheeks. Salt spray made sodden their clothing, sluiced off their armour, and sought entry into sheaths and scabbards. Those they protected as best they could.
Thulsa Doom was cursed in thirteen voices, and one of them not male.
Three times had the wind and the sea subsided, and three times had the thirteen men and a woman sought to float their ships and depart the hellish island that Thulsa Doom was determined should hold their common weird. Each time, after long labours in shifting the ships, they had been mocked anew. The lunatic wind had arisen again to whip the sea into ally, willing or unwilling. Nor could the harried knot of humans flee amain. First they must haul their craft back up the strand and, all efforts frustrated, scurry like driven mice up the sands beyond the range of the unnatural tide. The minor tidal waves that hurtled in and up the beach were major threats to frail human bodies.
Was the ban-sidhe indeed, Samaire of Leinster had made plaint; the banshee, those ancient preternatural harridans who were wont to mock the families of Eirrin by warning them of an impending death among those they loved.
Now the darkened sky became darker still. The sun, though visible for hour after hour through the grey only as a steadily westering glow, was setting once more on the mage-damned island. The day had passed. Nor had aught been accomplished by the handful of adventurers suddenly become fugitives from the wrath of the skull-faced thrice-ancient wizard who had challenged and bested them all.
With the suddenness of a blinking eye, the wind dropped.
The sea retreated from the beach, gurgling. Several feet from Quester and turned partially sidewise, the Britonish craft was still.
Cormac straightened and gave his head a shake like a drenched dog. His eyes were fierce.
“It’s another night we’ll be spending here,” he growled, thinking of a dwindling supply of food and fresh water. “Come-we’ll get the ships farther up the shore, and betake ourselves to that damned castle again!”
Weary men groaned, but none demurred. Should the wind arise again during the night, with the sea already tide-swollen, their only means of departure-escape? -might well be floated away. Squelching pitifully, the woebegone company trooped back down the beach.
Bas had responded to nothing for hours, so deep in his praying or conjuring was the druid. Cormac would not interrupt the man in the sodden robe of olive green; instead he laid hold of his upper arms with both hands and paced the druid, like a fear-paralyzed child, out from the seawall. Bas took no note. His eyes remained fast shut and his lips moved; his hand was at his throat where lay the symbols of the gods of Eirrin.
Curbing a shiver, Cormac paced down to join the others. Wulfhere was frowning at him. The Dane glanced past his old reaving-companion to the stationary druid.
“Why did ye that, Wolf?”
Cormac gave him a look; swept the others with it. “None of us will be out of sight of all the others,” he said grimly.
“Gods,” Samaire grumbled, “yet another reminder of that skullhead!”
“We will be reminded of his presence again and again if not every moment,” Cormac told her, taking up a station at Quester’s stern, “until we find a means of dealing with him.”
Wulfhere snarled obscene words in the tongue of his people.
“Think ye we will deal with him?” a man asked; it was Ruadan mac Mogcorf, whose ax-haft mac Art had used against the living dead.
’Aye,” Cormac said shortly, and stopped further nervous comment or questions. “Now lean into it, all, and heave on the count of three.”
“Lean indeed, boys,” Wulfhere growled. He planted his feet, stamped, reset that foot in waterlogged sand. “This wet sand will do its best to hold our ship-ye’ll not be defeated by mere crushed rock, will ye?”
No, and amid groans and grunts and tremendous effort from all, the ship was forced, inch by inch, farther up the beach. Cormac and Wulfhere would not let them stop until Quester’s prow was merely the length of a man from the towering natural wall of granite and basalt. Then all stood gasping and panting-and prideful.
Next the ship from Britain, bearing the name of Amber Rowan for reasons known only to him who had named it-a dead man-had to be forced and boosted farther ashore. To men already wearied from many such exertions this day, it seemed no less heavy than Quester. Nor did Samaire shirk. It was even she who helped up Ros when his foot found softer sand than he’d expected and he fell with a splat.
It was done. All stood heaving their chests, staring balefully at the two well-beached craft in what was now less than twilight.
“The food,” Brian said.
“And ale!” Wulfhere added without necessity of thought.
“Aye, we must take both with us, and what water remains. All of it.”
They stared at Cormac mac Art. “All!”
He nodded. “Lest we discover on the morrow that he had visited here whilst we slept…”
“Gods!” Wulfhere burst out, and his eyes were wide. “Aye! An he spoils our provender…” He broke off, nor did any wish to hear him finish.
Now Osbrit was staring with eyes wide in revelation. “And-the trove! What if he steals and secretes that while we sleep?”
Cormac was boosting Brian aboard Quester. He turned his head only partway in Osbrit’s direction to make reply: “An ye care to bear it all back to the castle, Osbrit, do so. I’ll not.”
“I will remain and keep guard!” Brian volunteered. “And I,” Ros mac Dairb said, though with more resignation than enthusiasm.
Cormac shook his head. “No. All go to the castle. All remain in sight of all others.”
“It’s all this way we’ve come for this load of treasure,” Findbar mac Lirchain said. “Are we to leave it here now, for that… creature to steal from us?”
Cormac turned slowly to face the man from Meath. “Aye, son of Lirchin, we are. Think, man. How many treks made all to fetch it here? It’s the same number will be necessary to carry it back!”
Findbar stood gazing at his leader, and his eyes dropped before the staring challenge. “We… could hide it, bury it in the sand…”
Wulfhere looked about in the deep greyness. “And who’s to say boneface be not looking on the while?”
Samaire touched Cormac’s arm. “Mayhap… we should remain here…”
“It’s of no moment to me,” Cormac told her, and the others as well, for they were gathered close and he raised his voice. “I and Wulfhere have spent many nights sleeping under stars, even in rain and worse, with wood or sand or stone for beds. Is that what ye’d do?”
The voice of Bas, so long absent, made all jump. “Quester will not be touched by Thulsa Doom,” he said. “All will be here when next the sun comes. It’s we who will be in danger.”
All the company stared at the druid who had rejoined them as it were after being so long far distant his mind. None asked whence came his certainty.
They decided to carry all provisions to the castle, and to leave the treasure aboard their ship. In darkness, led by Wulfhere and herded close by Cormac who walked last, they made their way through the narrow and winding corridor in the stone. Onto the castle’s plain they emerged, and across it they marched, and once more they entered the ancient citadel of horror. Chunks of wood from old furniture provided firelight once it had been carved by sword and dagger and rent apart by strong hands. They ate lightly and drank even more sparingly, for their tyrannical leader would allow them little. His reminder that they were growing short of provisions had to be made but once.
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