The Sign of the Moonbow cma-7

by Andrew J Offutt

  Again Elatha attacked. Swiftly he backed a pace, again strode lunging forward with his sweeping lash, so that the force and strength of his wrestler’s body backed and drove the long whip.

  Twice had Cormac dodged leftward; to the right he moved this time, and in a cat-like pounce. The jingle of mail was followed by the great loud cracking sound of a whip’s snapping empty air. Elatha’s eyes had swerved to follow the Gael with his pale glance, but he’d been unable to change the direction of his powerful whip-stroke.

  For the first time, he spoke. His voice was as emotionless as the eyes of a serpent. “Ye be fast.”

  Cormac said nothing. Having gained the tiniest of psychological advantage, he would now adopt the menacing silence that had been Elatha’s.

  After a moment of silence, Elatha’s face moved in a soundless snarl and he cut again. Once more Cormac waited until the torturemaster’s brawny arm came over, and then he moved. This time he did not dodge, but ran. He could not bear the inactivity of remaining only a defender. Several paces rightward he rushed, and then he charged the torturemaster of Moytura’s dungeon.

  He was within four feet when the swift sideward jerk of Elatha’s wrist brought his whip leaping over like a striking reptile. It curled around his attacker’s buskined right ankle. The whip wrapped but once for it had not been hard-directed, in Elatha’s desperation.

  Cormac stumbled, windmilling arms laden with buckler and brand. His charger was broken. Elatha jerked; the whip came free without yanking Cormac’s legs from under him. As the Gael regained his balance, Elatha paced swiftly backward. His arm was already snapping his length of leather to himself, and behind.

  The whip rushed out. It slapped loudly on leather and wrapped four times about Cormac’s right leg. Then came the bite of its iron fang, and leather legging split just above the Gael’s knee. A gust of air leaped from his lungs, with the sound of voice in it. He strove to prepare himself for what must come next; there was no time. The moment the whip began its encircling, Elatha’s bicep leaped and he yanked.

  Cormac was jerked to the floor with a crash and a grunt.

  Grinning openly, Elatha the Whip transferred his stock to his left hand and spun to wrap the lash once about himself. He was brought thus that much closer-while he drew his short sword of dark iron.

  Trapped a-wallow on the floor with his leg caught and held tautly extended, Cormac used all his strength and will.

  He flopped onto his back; he sent his buckler racing up to meet a downrushing blade of iron that resembled in its shortness those of the Roman legions who’d lately roamed the world they had claimed to own. Iron blade crashed down on ironbound shield of hardened wood while Cormac’s own blade flicked out like a sliver of blued lightning. With a terrible impact like that of hammer on forge, Elatha’s sword struck the metal rim of the other man’s shield. A stone had cracked the wood of that buckler; now sword driven by powerful muscles actually ate into its rim, iron into iron. Despite his braced, cording muscles Cormac’s buckler was driven down nearly to his body; the sword of Elatha was no less notched than the shield-rim.

  The sword of the Gael meanwhile rushed through the whip that stood taut betwixt his leg and Elatha’s waist. Its point missed the Danan’s flesh by less than the breadth of three fingers.

  Great shock showed itself on the face of Elatha the Whip, who Cormac was to learn had never felt pain or known any semblance of defeat or fear; the man was accustomed to plying his whip and the other dread tools of his trade on unarmed victims, and them usually with dark despair already on them. His whip was worse than halved; his sword had failed to find flesh and was both notched and bent; the arm that wielded it was beset by a thousand needles from that terrible impact.

  The burly Danan spun away, and his face bore no longer an expression of mockery, or triumph.

  At the same time Cormac rolled and stood. His leg complained, for blood darkened the leather there where the severed whip dangled. He faced now a man armed with a short whip and a short sword, and it notched, and Cormac mac Art was no longer at the disadvantage.

  The Gael was made overconfident thereby.

  Elatha was hardly in despair or helpless. A master of whip-wielding needed no more than the yard or so of good leather strap he clutched, and he proved it. Gone was the deadly iron fang at the end of his lash, but it struck the wrist of Cormac’s sword arm so forcefully that it wrapped twice just below the leather bracer and snapped the meaty base of his thumb with its very tip.

  The Gael’s arm twitched with a jerk; Elatha yanked; Cormac’s sword flew from his open-flexing fingers to ring skidding across the floor of stone and stone-hard earth.

  Elatha was smiling openly and far from prettily. His short sword leaped beneath his foe’s buckler and its point grated hard against Cormac’s ribs. Only the Gael’s armour of steel chain saved him from death then, or from the wound that would have been the next to last. Still he grunted and was staggered by the blow he felt and the grating pressure on a rib. In truth, iron point slipped between linked chain and pierced through padded tunic to touch the skin over the rib. The blade widened back to the point; a circle of steel held it; the rib did not give.

  Even while his arm was whipping around in a half-circle and his empty sword-hand grasping the short length of whip between himself and the Danan, Cormac’s smallish round shield rushed up and around to slam its ironbound rim into Elatha’s upper arm.

  Another man grunted in pain and another hand flexed open. A second sword clanged to the floor. And another man jerked the whip. Elatha, struck hard in right shoulder and yanked by left arm, was jerked leftward and overbalanced. He staggered sidewise and only now remembered to release the whip-stock.

  It returned to him instantly; Cormac slammed it thudding into the other man’s right cheek and then his gut and then into the center of his leather breechclout. Blood started from Elatha’s cheek and mouth from split skin and a broken molar. At the same time Elatha started to double over, with both hands leaping to his crotch.

  A mailclad forearm crashed into the torturemaster’s mouth and his eyes rolled loosely. Elatha went to his knees, leaning backward now; Elatha toppled sidewise and lay groaning through shredded lips.

  Panting, working his stinging right wrist, Cormac mac Art retrieved and sheathed his sword.

  Elatha’s brand he caught up and crashed violently against a pillar of stone so that the blade bent a quarter way in on itself. Hurling it from him, the Gael turned to the torture table.

  “Elatha… bested and down!” Dithorba said from behind Cormac, in an elated whisper that bespoke his nearness to disbelief.

  “Who be this man?” Cormac asked, having discarded his buckler to pluck at the table-bound man’s cords with both hands.

  “Lughan Senlac, my… my fellow adviser to the queen. Will ye not save time by merely cutting him free, defeater of Elatha?”

  A groan escaped the oldster bound facedown on the table, his soft buttocks-darkly marked by Elatha’s whip.

  “Lord Lughan,” Cormac muttered, “I loosen these knots rather than slice them, for the reason that Elatha the Whipless will soon replace ye on this table.”

  After a moment of silence, Lughan gasped his reply. “Be not concerned… with haste. A tiny space of time more on this… restful bed will not finish me. To the end ye state… I can wait!”

  Chapter Twelve:

  The Guardian

  The prisoners of Cairluh and Tarmur Roag were free of bonds and cells in Moytura’s dungeon; their former torturer lay groaning and sweating on his own fanged table. His weight, his greater development of chest and belly and thighs pressed the ends of the scores of upward driven nails into his flesh more deeply than they had bitten Lughan Senlac. There were no guards in the dungeon; prisoners were weak and helpless, and Elatha was proud and jealous of his reign.

  Cormac mac Art held the shortened whip he had taken from him who had wielded it to such agony, even to the deaths of some. For Cormac and Dithorba had found two
in the cells who need not be freed; they had died of whippings that had torn them open and ruptured internal organs.

  “Dithorba and I have business elsewhere. Here lies him who put sore torment and indecent horror on ye all. Who will take this whip?” He stretched out his hand, the whip lying across it like a napping serpent.

  It was the young man who stepped forward, he who bore the marks of that same strap of leather across his muscled belly and who limped from the wooden splinters that had been forced under his toenails. Dithorba had identified him as an officer in the household staff of Queen Riora, by name Tathill; the young woman bound near him was his sweetheart. Perhaps he would bear no physical scars of this imprisonment; she would, all her life.

  “I will wield that black eel on the creature who made it sting so well,” he said quietly and with strain, “and yield it up to whomever wants it else.”

  “I,” a weak voice said.

  Cormac gazed not with shock but with sadness on the speaker, the older woman in rags, with the marks on her of obscene torments and mockery. Surely, the Gael thought, such as she would not have dreamed of vindictive whip-wielding before she’d been brought to this grey domain of pain and degradation. It hurt him only that he had not put his cloak on again, that he might clothe her in it. Elatha’s foul breechclout he would not offer her. Guards or other keepers would be outside bound doors, though obviously no sound of the battle here had reached their ears. At their dicing most likely, Cormac thought, and turned to look after Dithorba. The old mage was walking back into the dimmer area of the dungeon, his robe flapping and the one he’d brought for his queen hanging over his arm. He paused at the doorway of a wooden enclosure, and looked within. Cormac saw the man stagger as if struck, and heard his gasp.

  And he heard the weak girlish voice: “Stay back!”

  Cormac had taken a perverse pleasure in leaving the freeing of two men until last; they were the strapping, handsome Commander Balan of the Royal Guard and Torna, long Riora’s tutor and now most favored adviser. Now the Gael turned from the still bound pair and strode back past the torture table and light. Dithorba stood in dimness.

  The chamber into which he stared was a square some ten feet on a side; a chamber of royal size for the imprisonment of Moytura’s royalty.

  The slim young queen was within. She wore only a spiked girdle and collar of iron, both drawn tightly and held by cinch-pins. Her straw-coloured hair was dragged back and bound to the cruel girdle behind, so that her neck was constantly strained. Riora of Moytura was bound astride a great stone wheel, like a millwheel, that abraded her inner thighs and displayed her lewdly. Aye, and she’d been marked by Elatha’s whip. The dragging back of her tresses strained her face so that her brows were unnaturally arched and her cheekbones threatened to thrust through taut skin.

  Tinted only by the faintest of tawny hue, her eyes swiveled from Dithorba at Cormac’s arrival. She stared at him.

  When the Gael started forward, Dithorba stayed him.

  “Lady Queen, a Gael from Eiru above, Cormac mac Art his name. He and a companion saved Erris from becoming a toygirl to a squad of six rapacious guards set over me, and slew them all. He freed me, and has just defeated Elatha though he bears wounds of the long fangwhip. All this, lady Queen, in quest of your freedom. The sounds my lady queen now hears are of Elatha’s own whip on his own foul body.”

  “Talk and talk,” the Gael said. “Why stand we here?” Again he started forward.

  “Stand ye back!” the queen bade him, and she winced at the pain the exertion put on her. Her hands were behind her back, her legs bracing the upright millwheel, to which ropes bound her. She softened the command: “-friend of Danu and Moytura-and Riora.”

  “Your pardon for the questioning of a weapon man, lady queen… but why must we stay from yourself?”

  “This I have… borne,” she said in the voice of strain forced upon her by the back-drawn hair. “I can… longer. For ye both, though, there’s death within this chamber… I am bound not only as ye see… but by the sorcery of Tarmur Roag ‘as well. Aye, and guarded… Cor-mac Mackart. There is a… Guardian.”

  Cormac stepped close to the doorway to peer within the large chamber. He saw three walls of stone and one of wood; a chipped bowl of fired clay and a dented iron cup; a length of chain. Another hung from a nail in the wooden wall, as did a short flail with three tails of plaited leather… or rather the hide of some great denizen of the waters, as novas all leather of Moytura. Two crumpled bits of cloth lay forlornly on the floor. He saw naught else, not even a pile of stones.

  “I see naught of menace or Guardian.”

  “I am queen, Cormac… I am not… questioned.”

  He gazed on this naked, whip-marked, painfully bound young woman with wonder and respect. An she could talk so in these straits, she was queen indeed!

  “Ye cannot free me. Cormac. He who comes through that door, save for Elatha, will instantly die. Tarmur Roag… demonstrated. It’s he must be captured and forced to release me; I’ll have no champion such as your huge self slain so, for naught and to no avail.”

  Cormac was hardly huge. He realized, though, that in Moytura he was. Standing beside Dithorba, he made a child of the man, both in height and physique. A thought of hope came on him.

  “Dithorba! Can ye be mind-hurling me to her side, man?

  The succinct reply shattered the Gael’s excitement: “No.”

  Cormac’s face stiffened. After a moment, he asked, “Then… dare ye carry me to her, by your sorcerous means?”

  “No!” the queen cried.

  “In this matter, lady Queen, your commands are second to mine. It is possible for too much nobility to be on a person, even a monarch.”

  Both Riora and Dithorba stared at this tall, darkskinned stranger to their land who dared speak so to a queen. Cormac kept his gaze expectantly on Dithorba, who realized the Gael still awaited his answer.

  “I dare, Cormac mac Art.”

  “No, Dithorba! I forbid it!”

  Cormac saw to himself. Blood oozed no longer from his twice-punctured left arm. His buckler remained serviceable-hopefully. His right wrist bore only a pair of barring lines, with neither wound nor stiffness on him there. The wound to his leg was only to the superficial meat, not into muscle, nor had it had time to stiffen. His Saxon knife was in its sheath and his sword was ready for the drawing on the instant.

  Deliberately he drew Dithorba away from the doorway, out of sight of the piteously imprisoned queen.

  “We go in,” he said quietly. “The moment we alight, release my hand, and return ye here.” When Dithorba nodded, Cormac turned and shouted to those others they’d released. “Free Balan and Torna! Take up chains and Elatha’s dagger; whatever armament there be, and remain ye there-sentries may come.”

  The last was an afterthought, added in hopes their weakness might be forgot in renewed fear that he knew led in some to renewed strength. Such surely would be the case at least with Balan and the young man who was showing his energy in the flogging of Elatha.

  Cormac took Dithorba’s hand. “In.”

  He said it too loudly; from her prison came Queen Riora’s weak shout: “No! It’s your death!”

  Cormac felt Dithorba’s hand quiver and he gripped it the tighter. “My command, Dithorba my friend,” he said softly, “In-and leave me.”

  The familiar unpleasant sensations came immediately, and then Cormac was jolted, stumbling. Even so his hand fled Dithorba’s and leaped to the hilt of his sword. On this third occasion of his transport by means of another man’s mind, the Gael’s brain acid eyes cleared more swiftly.

  His staring eyes saw that Dithorba had already left him, and was peering into the chamber from beyond the doorway. Their sorcerous means of transport had triggered no attack, for they had not passed through the door. Cormac stood in a crouch, feral-eyed and with sword and shield at ready. His slitted eyes swiveled to the side; he saw naught but Riora the Fair and Righteous.

  Awkwa
rdly he caught her hair in his shield-hand, betwixt head and binding; his sword sliced swiftly through the rope that had forced her head up and back. It was allowed to assume a natural position. Her eyes focused-and she cried out. Dithorba’s call of alarm crowded close on hers.

  Her Guardian had appeared in the queen’s prison chamber.

  Cormac had hardly expected to face here a foe of his own height and apparent build, nor had he ever seen a man so helmed and armoured.

  No skin of the Guardian was visible. His scalemail coat fell from neck to knees; beneath it he wore leggings of good mail that vanished into short boots. Mailed gloves covered the hands that clutched sword and six-sided shield; faced with bronze it was and on it a death’s head had been picked out in awl-punched dots filled with black enamel. But once had Cormac seen such an eye-covering helm, on an arrogant Roman commander. From that visored helmet depended a camail of mail, which was connected in front to the nosepiece of the helmet so as to conceal the tall figure’s entire face.

  Cormac faced a grim and silent foe covered all in iron.

  With some nervousness on him though without sinking heart, the Gael remembered to crab-step from the bound queen of Moytura. She must not receive a chance slash.

  “It’s your queen this be, man. Elatha is-no more. I am come here to set her free, and if ye insist I’ll be doing it through yourself. Sheathe sword and stand Ye back to serve your queen, for she will be free.”

  The ironclad Guardian said nothing. Cormac could not see so much as eyes, to read their expression. Stance and ready-lifted buckler, with the upraising of the broad long sword in mailed hand, were indication enow of his reply and intent.

  The man of iron paced forward, not toward Riora but at Cormac.

  “Ye’ll be dying then, for all your armour,’ Cormac said, and moved but the tips of his fingers, ensuring his grip on shaped hilt.

  He would let the other strike first, move while he took the stroke on his shield, and attack instantly and viciously. No such traitor as this, and him stupid besides, deserved to draw breath.