The Tower of Death cma-2

by Andrew J Offutt

  Back he tilted his dark head, and back, looking up. He squinted. The great white tower soared forty men high and more; there was no assessing. Its builders had reared it in several tiers, each smaller in crosswise measure than the one immediately below. The lowermost was shapen cuboid, the topmost a smooth cylindrical shaft against the pure Spanish sky. A sort of roofed cupola topped it off, around which ran a stone balcony.

  “I should ha’ known,” Cormac said. “It’s the Romans raised that lighthouse here. The greatest in the western world, I’ve heard say. It’s the Pharos of Alexandria it had for a model. Yonder will be the harbour of Brigantium.”

  “And a fair harbour, too,” Wulfhere said, with enthusiasm. “A fleet could lie here-nay, exercise here! Although there’s little sea traffic it looks to receive nowadays. Who be manning the lighthouse, and why?”

  Ivarr narrowed his keen eyes. “No one, Captain. From here it looks deserted. An it be not-why’s nobody at the top, looking down upon us and giving alarums? Have we gone so harmless in appearance since yesterday?”

  Cormac turned decisive. “It’s finding out we’d best be,” he said, staring at the immense tower as at some inscrutable foe. The Gael seemed to snuff the air like the wolf whose name he bore. “Do you see to the ship, Wulfhere. I’ll be taking three men into yon lighthouse to see what I can find. Hrut Bear-slayer, come and climb stairs with me.”

  The enormous, brain-addled strong man had all but usurped the place of Cormac’s shadow. His comrades had exerted their best ribald efforts to stay him from lumbering after Cormac and Clodia when they went off together. Mightily hurt he’d have been, had Cormac ignored him now.

  “You too, Hrolf,” the Gael went on, “aye, and yourself, Knud. I’m thinking we can handle any bogies we may meet.”

  “Ha! Listen to him!” The protest was Wulfhere’s, uttered loud. “And ye’re not jesting so much as ye’d have us believe! I now ye, Crmac, and by the gods I know that look. Ye can sniff out battle and death and unholiness even as a ranging hound sniffs out boars in the brush, ye rangy hound of Errin!”

  “Repitition. And over-stating of the truth, what’s more. It’s but that I was born suspicious and have since grown more so. We’ll be after returning ere ye know we have gone.”

  “So ye will,” the Dane agreed, stubborn as a rooted tree, “for the rest of us be coming along. Who commands here, I’m asking?”

  “ir and Manannan macLir!”

  The oath aside, Cormac made no difficulty. When Wulfhere invoked his captaincy there was no budging him and mac Art did not fight stone walls. Thus all trooped ashore, save Clodia and those few men chosen to remain aboard ship as watch.

  Slipping and sliding over weed-covered rocks, they reached the base of the lighthouse. Kittiwakes screamed at them, wheeling grey-cloaked and white-breasted about the tower. A huge bronze-bound door, closed and barred, greeted them blankly. Surely naught but a ram would be capable of gaining entry here-and handling one on the rocky shore was impossible. When Wulfhere looked of a mind to attack it with his ax, Cormac stayed him.

  “I’ve a smoother way,” h said. “Are ye after bringing the grapnel and line, Knud?”

  “Aye.”

  The Gael took it, whirled it, and tossed the grapnel neatly through one of the slitted windows above their heads. The rope paid out, running up; the prongs caught and held.

  “They designed their embrasures ill,” was his comment. “It ought not to be so simple. Tcha, well. It’s not meant for a fortress this tower was.”

  Mac Art swarmed up the rope with a sailor’s agility, mail, sword, and all; their weight was part of him, of long accustoming. A lithe bend and twist took him through the window.

  Standing in a reeky dimness, he waited while his sight adapted. Little there was to see; stucco walls, rafters, a door leaning drunkenly from its hinges, and a deal of dust. Crmac frowned. The latter had been laid by a curious, bad-smelling dampness with no taint of age or mildew. Recent for sure, he mused. A rainstorm in the past day or so?

  Yet never had rain combined with dust in an old house smelled quite this way… Not even this near the sea. For a moment his teeth were in his lip, whilt he considered.

  With a shrug he made his way down the angled flights of stairs and opened the door. Wulfhere Skull-splitter’s armoured bulk filled the space instanter.

  “You cannot come in,” the Gael said sardonically. “The place is a mess.”

  Wulfhere disputed him. Cormac argued and cursed with the ability of long practice. At length he pursuaded his blood-brother to remain outside, whiles he made search with the three men he had chosen. Not happily, Wulfhere made way for Knud and Hrolf, and Knut.

  Ascending, the four found that little that Cormac had not seen previously, save ruined furniture. The stench of brine and kelp pervaded, and was somehow wrong. Cormac saw Knud and Hrolf wrinkle their noses, though he made no comment.

  They reached the topmost storey of the great edifice. Here was merely a hollow shaft of whitewashed brick, with a stair spiralling around it internally. They climbed, fighting dizziness.

  “Mayhap those Romans sought to reach the sky, and gave up a ladder’s length short,” Knud suggested.

  They reached the top. Pulleys and ropes were there, and a heavy capstan, for the raising of supplies; lamp-oil chiefly, Cormac hazarded. The big lamp the Romans had used was fifty years missing though, as were the mirrors employed to magnify its light and reflect it many miles seaward. Now there was a large iron brazier, and faggots of oil-soaked wood.

  The tower’s human occupants were present as well.

  They numbered four, and all were dead.

  “CORMA-A-A-AC!” Wulfhere’s bellow.

  Save the mark, Cormac thought. Worse this is than being married.

  He trod to the circling balcony and leaned on the balustraded verge. “Damn your bull-roar mouth!” he shouted through cupped hands. “No danger is here, though something befell during the night. It’s four corpses we’re looking at.”

  “And them unmarked,” Knud the Swift added; he was examining the bodies. “Save for old scars. These were weapon-men, or I know not the breed, and equipped for action. Now why should such be manning a lighthouse?”

  “We be looking at another, down here!” Wulfhere thundered. “Found him tangled in kelp at the water’s edge. Smashed out of shape till his mother couldn’t know him. Hurled from the tower, he must have been. An he’d simply fallen, he’d be nearer the base.”

  “Or else he… jumped,” Cormac muttered, half to himself.

  Thoughtful, and thorough as always, he made examination of the beacon chamber. Lastly he looked at the corpses. Two gripped bare weapons with the tenacious rigor of death, yet they were unblooded.

  Hrut Bear-slayer, huge, looming and rarely with a word to say, showed no comprehension of events. He waited, like an outsized hunting hound ready to track and slay on command. The blow that had left him with a grisly great dent in his forehead-and that by all reasonable chances should have left him stark dead-had rendered him ever silent and presumably thoughtless. His bulk and weapon-skills he had retained, however. Not even Wulfhere was stronger.

  “Cormac,” Hrolf Halfgarsson said. “This one clutches something.”

  The third corpse did. It was naught uncommon, save that they were a few hundred feet in the air; merely a length of dark brown seaweed. Its round, flexible stem sprouted long leaves like wrinkled streamers. These erupted bulges like air-bladders, or what appeared to be such. Each swelling was the size of a fat acorn.

  Or grapes, Cormac mused, for they were tight-skinned as the latter in a vineyard of Gaul.

  Interested, the Gael bent to touch the sea-plant.

  With a coil and rustle it whipped about his forearm in serpentine constriction. Something round and sucking gripped the pale inner skin like a leech’s mouth. Cormac, with a longtime horror of snakes or aught that resembled them, tore the thing away. He hurled it down and stamped upon it.

  Two of th
e bladders burst like erupting seedpods-

  – and spurted streamers of scarlet over the floor.

  “Blood,” Hrut said unbelievingly, and it was.

  Comprehension of a sort came into that high chamber, and with it entered too the sombre spectre of the unnatural, the preternatural. The pervading odour of kelp, which had assaulted their nostrils all along, seemed to grow stronger. Now, in seconds, that smell had taken on sinister meaning.

  The four men living looked at each other in silence. The four dead men stared on.

  After a moment, a frowning Cormac thought to examine the beacon itself.

  Its fire had been smothered out by what appeared to be a mass of kelp, though it was so completely charred to ash that he could not be certain. Buried beneath the ash was the beacon’s legitimate fuel, choked and smothered by wet seaweed ere it could be consumed naturally. Yet he saw that first it had burned for some time. Now it was absolutely cold. He turned, still frowning in thought.

  “This cannot be the fire we beheld on yester-night,” Cormac said. “Else it were warm yet. That other fire burned too bright and it was too late; this was dead by then. Seaweed did this,” and his voice indicated disbelief of his own words, gruesome and horrendous in their full implication. And-impossible.

  With a jerk of his head as if to clear it of foreboding, he got on with what had to be said. “Some overwhelming mass of kelp with power of movement… and… hunger for blood? Aye. Be we mad, would ye be saying? Kelp smothered and soaked out the beaconlight. Kelp destroyed four strong men… by sucking… draining them pale and bloodless… and the fifth mindlessly sought escape by hurling himself from this window. And can any tell me how such things can be?”

  They had no answers, but after a time Hrolf had another question.

  “What was the luring fire we saw then?”

  “I cannot say. Yet and well for us that we ignored it, for it’s not from this tower that light glowed!”

  The four men of Raven stood suspended betwixt sky, and sea, and with them lurked the glooming preternatural, and all was unreal.

  CHAPTER FIVE: Irnic Break-ax

  As the four men of Raven stood in that tower of the impossible and the unreal that was real, Knud broke the benumbed silence.

  “Horsemen, Cormac! A goodly troop of them, leaving the city and coming down the quayside. Men of arms. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  Cormac joined Knud at the tower’s rim, looked, and saw that the Dane was correct. Too, he saw that his four were without hope of descending to the ground again ere the troop of horse-soldiers arrived. Be it so; they must meet the strangers openly, then. Cormac considered, he who’d earned a name for guile.

  It did not follow that Wulfhere and all the crew must reveal themselves. Cormac liked having surprises in reserve when he dealt with strangers-particularly on their territory.

  “WULFHERE!” he roared. The stentor voice he used had done credit to the Danish giant himself. “Riders will be upon us directly! They needn’t know of all of us. Be getting half the men aboard Raven, sharp, ready to defend her or take to sea if need be. Do you and the others hide yourselves in yon patch of woodland! HIDE, I said! Be not arguing, man: hurry!”

  And to those with him the Gael snapped, “Come.”

  While they made the swiftest descent they might, stamping and pounding down the tower’s innumerable steps, Cormac mac Art was still thinking and inferring.

  Predatory kelp that climbed a twice-lofty tower to take its human victims… that smothered out beaconfires with great thoroughness and then went away… this argued intelligence to direct it. Its own? Seaweed? Was it belike a mindless vegetable mass in itself, whilst its master laired elsewhere, observing, directing-perhaps in the very city of Brigantium?

  They reached the base of the tower and poured through the ironbound door.

  Emerging from the tower of death, Cormac and his three faced a band of brightly-appareled Teutons who galloped down to the shore and hauled up with arrogantly superb horsemanship, to range themselves before the reivers. Staring. Waiting. Plainly these men were tense, and plainly it would take next to nothing to start them in to killing the strangers on their shore. As plainly, they were Sueves.

  Moving toward them from the tower with deliberate slowness, Cormac studied the men of Galicia.

  All were young, and warrior-nobles. Each bestrode a big Gothic destrier, dun or chestnut, whose harness flashed gems on leather well cared for by men in love with horses. A flame-red mantle was fastened upon their leader’s thick, broad shoulder by a golden brooch large as his hand, jewelled with garnets like shining droplets of dried blood. The tunics of him and his followers were of various hues, all bright; short of sleeve they were and hardly descending to the wearers’ bare knees. The borders of their green cloaks were crimson. Several wore shorter capes of wolf or fox fur as well. The sword each carried was a gift of his sovereign, mac Art knew, and could not be taken from these fiercely proud horse-warriors while they lived.

  The hilts of those good swords thrust up from leather-covered wooden scabbards slung from baldrics and belted close on their hips; bright were those pommels, with decor of bronze and silver and gold. Sheathed at his belt each man wore a fighting knife as well; straight and heavy the vicious things were, and sharp enough along one edge for comfortable shaving. In the right hand every Sueve grasped an ax or nastily barbed spear. Shields with rims and bosses of gilded iron warded their left sides; these horses were trained to respond to voice and pressure of knee and heel.

  Each man’s brown or yellow hair was coiled atop his bare head in a thick figure-eight knot that Cormac noted made all appear even taller than they were-though probably no whit fiercer.

  They stared at the strangers in their land, having come from their tower.

  In the last possible instant ere the silence must have been destroyed violently, the leader spoke.

  “Who are you? Whence come you, and what do you here, strangers?”

  The language on his tongue was a German dialect. Cormac, fluent in one such and with experience of others, was able to make answer.

  “Cormac mac Art of Eirrin. It’s wind-driven I came here, in the ship you see yonder. As to what I do here-at present naught, save hope for a peaceful reception.”

  Had Cormac been a praying man, surely he’d have prayed then, for Wulfhere to remain hidden and not launch one of the howling shield-charges that were his favourite tactic on land. These riders bristled suspicion as they did weapons, but the Gael had them talking.

  “Is it right I am in thinking this land must be Galicia?”

  The noble who led the horse-warriors laughed, showing big square teeth framed by tawny moustaches. A weapon-man he was in truth; this, Cormac could see in confirmation of his instincts.

  “Aye! Galicia is it, and you must surely be from far away. You talk to Irnic Break-ax, cousin to King Veremund. I lead his comitatus.”

  Cormac nodded. He was familiar with the word. A Latin borrowing, it was now common usage among the German nations, who applied it to an institution of their own; the king’s band of sworn companions. They ate with him, hunted with him, rode to war with him, and if Fate so required, died with him. There could be no greater disgrace upon a comes-companion than to save his own life from the fight wherein his lord had fallen. In return they received rich gifts and honour and the chance of an unforgotten name.

  Irnic Break-ax spoke more: “Yet when I put question, what do you here? I did mean here, before this tower. Strangers may come to Brigantium in ships and be welcome. Strangers poking about the lighthouse be another matter.”

  “Aye,” growled one of the comites. “None would do that for any good purpose.”

  Others raised a mutter of agreement, and sounding through it came tones of unease and even fear.

  Cormac asked bluntly, “Why?”

  Irnic looked at him hard, obviously considering putting the sea-stained rogue in his place. Yet Cormac impressed as one who did not require
to have this pointed out. Salt-crusted armour, faded nondescript cloak and all, he was a man who commanded other men. Irnic was such a man himself; he recognized the breed.

  “Because,” he said, “the tower has of late become haunted and accursed.”

  Cormac believed him.

  “My lord Irnic, I never set eyes upon it erenow. Nor had I heard of it, save as a famous feat of building.”

  “Mayhap. We will make investigation of that. Gisivald, look after our guests and see they do not grow lonely. No harm is to befall them.” Irnic’s unspoken “yet” hung in the air like a hanged felon, and yielded about as much comfort. “They are not, though, to go aboard their ship, nor is the ship to leave.”

  Dismounting, he chose four men and led them into the tower of death. Cormac, Hrut, Hrolf and Knud stood well aside, in plain view of the score or so seafighters aboard Raven, the band of Suevic horsemen-and, so they judged and hoped, of Wulfhere and his small force within the nearby wood. The situation balanced on an ax-edge. Fortunate it was that all involved were used to such.

  “Ahoy, Cormac!” Ivarr yelled from Raven’s low waist. “Ye bear weapons still, I see. Be ye needing help, or shall we bide as we are?”

  The Danish words baffled Gisivald. “What said he?” the Sueve demanded.

  “He’s asking if need is with us for rescue. Shall I answer him?”

  “Aye-carefully.”

  “Remain aboard, Ivarr! It’s none so bad our chances are, of seeing out the day with our weapons dry.” His words were uttered as much for Wulfhere as Ivarr of the sharp eyes. “It’s king’s men these be. I’m thinking when they leave we will have to go with them. Nor have I objection to that. Ah-should they be ordering ye to come ashore unweaponed, or to surrender Raven, ye know what answer to give, the very moment ye’re able to stop laughing.”

  “That suffices,” Gisivald said sharply. Too prolix an exchange in a language he could not understand was not to his liking, and his voice and tone showed it plain.

  In time, Irnic Break-ax’s head appeared over the tower’s rim, tiny as a fly against the shining blue above him. After shouting intelligence that Cormac possessed already, the Sueve made descent and emerged. Question and answer were bandied.