The Tower of Death cma-2

by Andrew J Offutt

  Irnic’s eyes were alight and he was smiling as he nodded repeatedly, a soldier hearing a bold tactic he more than approved. It was Zarabdas who spoke.

  “There is the additional danger… The wreckers, or whoever is responsible for the false beacon, may well have this dread seaweed with them. As… armour, and arms as well. It could surely swamp your ship, and drag the crew to the bottom.”

  “I will advise the men of that possibility,” Wulfhere said in an equable tone, “and ask for volunteers only.”

  Veremund said frowning, “Great risks are being taken in this.”

  Wulfhere nodded, and with eyes full on the king he said, “Aye, and the most of it falls on me. Far be it from me to bargain like a Saxon, King Veremund, but my men will hereafter want and deserve wine, not ale, and… female companionship.”

  Irnic but smiled; when his royal cousin glanced at him, the Breaker of axes said in the same equable tone Wulfhere had used, “That is… within my powers.”

  “We will bid our Danes be discreet,” Cormac said, staring at Wulfhere, “and not flaunt their… receipt of this largesse.” He challenged Zarabdas with his gaze, and then with words. “And would my lord Zarabdas care to be joining us weapon-men in the accursed tower?”

  Was Veremund ended the ensuing moments of tension, during which Zarabdas eyed Cormac coolly: “I forbid it,” the king said, and there was an end to that. The five men looked about at each other, all knowing they were pitted against the dangerous unknown. Only Salvian’s scratchings broke the silence. Veremund took up his wine.

  “To our mutual success,” he said, and they drank, with Irnic and Wulfhere first making sure to spill a bit of wine. They parted, and only Zarabdas tarried a moment with the reivers.

  “Ye be brave men,” he said, in his dry almost-whisper. “Be ye well.” And he and his robe ghosted away into the dark deeps of the royal hall.

  “Ah… wolf,” Wulfhere said, laying a hand on his comrade’s shoulder. “I’ve ah, been invited to spend the night elsewhere.”

  “Good,” Cormac said. “Great pleasure will be on me, not to be listening to the Thor’s hammer of your snoring! Do try to get some sleep, Wulfhere.”

  He was standing under a patriarchal chestnut when his peripheral vision reported a swift movement but a few yards away, at the hall. Automatically he eased into the shadow of the tree. He was unpleasantly aware that he wore no sword, for suspicion was on him; the exiled Gael had achieved no renown for a trusting nature. Now he saw a human figure well-muffled in a hooded cloak that was so dark he could not distinguish its hue in the night. It seemed to be a woman or girl, moving furtively. Cormac watched, motionless.

  The cloak had just left the hall, and took care now to skirt moonlit areas as it hurried from the courtyard. The cloak was voluminous, and so dark that it soon disappeared into the night.

  Assignations, Cormac thought, relaxing. Well, it’s no need I have of such, thanks to Clodia’s little visit to my room this afternoon! And he returned through the cool, clear night to the kinghouse.

  “Hivernian!”

  The voice was female, and the single word was spoken scarcely above a whisper. It was the Roman name for his isle of Eirrin; Rome lingered on everywhere. Cormac, turned warily to squint in the darkness. He was able to make out a smallish figure pressed against the hall’s outer wall, on the lee side of the moon’s light. Fabric rustled and a hand, pale and pale-sleeved, emerged from a long cloak. The hand beckoned.

  It is a night for women to be abroad in hooded cloaks the colour of night, he thought with an inward smile. He had to assume, without enthusiasm, that it was the wife of Hermanric Marcellus who sought his company. “My… Lady Plotina?” he asked, as quietly as she had spoken.

  Fabric rustled and a foot stamped. “No, damn ye for a rude foreigner.”

  “Oh.” He glanced about, saw no one. “My lady,” he said, and ambled over to Eurika.

  Her tiny voice said, “Plotina, hmm?”

  “It’s both she and yourself stared at me whilst I ate. She, though, did not look away when our eyes met. I ignored her.”

  “Oh? Why? Be ye a vegetarian?”

  “Because she is another man’s wife,” he said, content not to mention other reasons, including Plotina’s meatiness.

  “Ah. A pirate with morals.”

  Her voice was hardly friendly, but ere he could remind her of that and that he preferred sleep to slurs, the king’s young sister said on.

  “Do you despise me, mac Art?”

  “My gracious lady… I do not.”

  She nodded shortly. “All my life have I dwelt here, Cormac mac Art. Never never have I been allowed beyond even the confines of my brother’s personal demesne, and always with watchful eyes on me. I long to know of the world. You have seen it. Come with me and tell me of that great broad world out there beyond Treachery Bay, Cormac the Bold.”

  “Come with you where?”

  “Why, to my chambers, where we’ll not be interrupted.”

  “My lady, methinks that would be both unseemly and dangerous. It’s happy I’ll be to talk with ye on the morrow. In the sunlight.”

  “Hmp! Cormac the Bold becomes Cormac the Timid, is it?”

  “Aye, lady Princess.” Those words hurt or reduced him not at all; Art’s son of Connacht had to respect a person before he paid heed to his opinion, or hers.

  “Ye-ye say only ‘aye’…” There was wonder in her voice. “Such an admission does not disturb ye in the least, does it? Ye be so sure of yourself?”

  “Aye,” he repeated, “lady Princess.”

  Eurica stared wonderingly with the moonlight sparkling on her large blue eyes, and she sighed, and looked pensively downward. Cormac said “My lady,” and turned away to resume his way.

  “I gave you no leave to go!”

  He looked back at her without turning. “Then for your own pride, lady Princess, do so now, for it’s to my bed I’m going.”

  And he did, and slept well, alone and with no snoring at hand, other than his own.

  Nor, in the sunlight of the morrow, did Princess Eurica trouble herself to seek out the man from “Hivernia.”

  CHAPTER NINE: Zarabdas of Palmyra

  Cormac could not believe it. He searched his room again, both disturbed and greatly surprised. He was one to sleep like a cat and awake at the sound of a busy spider dropping to a ship’s deck from a taut sail. Yet while he had slept this first night in the hall of the King of Galicia, someone had entered the room and taken the Egyptian sigil on its chain!

  He wore the linen under-leggings on which he’d laid it, and was sure it had not been there. At last, convinced that the medallion was indeed gone, he drew on his leathern leggings and tunic. He stood thinking a moment, narrow-eyed. And arranged his mailcoat on the bed, and slipped into its jingling, heavy links. Straightening, he buckled on weapons and pouch.

  When he left the chamber, he took with him everything that was his. Only the buckler he would not carry, so as not to appear the prowling soldier and do insult to Veremund’s hospitality. Near the front door was a place reserved for the shields of weapon-men entering the hall; there Cormac left his own round buckler, made of the yew of Britain and braced and strengthened by bands of steel.

  That day, when their paths happened to cross outside, he learned that Clodia had availed herself of her newfound nobility; she had nighted with none other than the king.

  “Ye can hardly be continuing your masquerade of the highborn lady in his intimate company,” Cormac pointed out.

  “Oh… he knows,” she said, and accompanied the words with an arch look. “Was you claimed I was a lady after all, not I. Once I knew he knew, I told him the truth.”

  ’The truth?”

  “Aye!” The look she gave him this time was appealing. “You’ll not tell him different, will you, Cormac?”

  “Different from what?”

  “That I’m the daughter of a chieftain of the ancient Alani though I dare not name the specific h
ouse, for my father fell out with the Caesar before this one. I was raised by a rich merchant of Nantes.”

  Cormac shook his head, eyebrows up. “No, Clodia, it’s no different tale I’ll be telling the king. In truth, ye lie as well as I. Do let me know, though, an ye change that story.” And he went on his way, his face looking strange wearing a whimsical little smile.

  A mounted Irnic came upon him, and reined in. “Cormac! Why in full armour?”

  Cormac looked mildly up at the Sueve. “It’s a weapon-man I am, Irnic. This is the way I am comfortable. Relieve me of the weight of forty pounds of mail and another dozen of weapons and belt, and I might float!”

  Laughing, Irnic rode on, and the story had spread through all the comites and half the soldiers by nightfall. The peasants would have it by the morrow’s night.

  A short time later, Cormac first saw Lucanor of Antioch. The leech was a portly man in a wine-dark robe who wore his curly, grease-glossy black hair to his shoulders. A gold ring flashed in his left ear. An unhappy look shadowed the fellow’s mouth and brow, which were separated by a thin nose with a bit of a crook. He was emerging from a noble house where he’d presumably been at the plying of his trade, and Cormac saw the gratitude on the face of the woman who saw the physician off.

  He looked like the offspring of a Greek and an Armenian, Cormac thought, though in truth he’d never seen an Armenian.

  It’s prosperous enow the fellow looks, and Rhodoghast never said he wasn’t competent. Just unhappy, for he’s been the king’s physician and is no longer. Well Lucanor, well… we all have our valleys and peaks and cliffs, in this life. Once I was a noble’s son of Connacht in Eirrin, and later a hero of Leinster, and I’ve been lover to a princess and… something similar to another. Are you too an exile who dreams of your homeland, old hawk faced greasehead?

  He visited the heat-shimmering place wherein aproned men sweated and wore heavy gauntlets and boots of leather. There was one wall only. Five men laboured here. Three fed fuel constantly to keep their fire blazing high and hot. The others, with even more care, handled the lime from the Galician hills, calcining it into the more volatile quicklime. It seemed a simple enough process of heavy unpleasant labour, demanding constant exposure to the searing heat and the dangerous dust of the stinging lime, as well as poisonous fumes. Mac Art, who’d been feeling sorry for himself since his thoughts of Eirrin, decided he’d rather be in a battle against double odds than one of these sweating, miserable-looking men with their several lime-burns.

  Later he had himself escorted to the coast. Wulfhere was already asea, with some of his crew along with Sueves: training. Cormac stood for a time, gazing across at the lonely, grim old tower. Restlessly the sea slapped at the jumble of rocks at its base, and Cormac wondered how long that salty assault had gone on.

  The Romans built well, he mused, as he’d thought numerous times afore. And he was glad they had not builded and maintained their empire as well as they had their walls and forts and light-towers, their aqueducts and roads and superb bridges.

  And now… who possessed this grim old pile of stone? Or-what?

  He approached the cylindrical tower, accompanied by two nervous Suevi with their strange back-of-the-head hairknots. They walked all round about it, and once Cormac drew steel and prodded at lank runners of brown algae. The kelp acted like nothing but kelp. The three men ascended to the light-chamber. Here only rusty brown stains now gave evidence of the ugly occurrences here.

  Eight men, he reflected, looking slit-eyed about, slain and sucked dry by… seaweed?

  Was it possible?

  Had it really happened, that viney thing locking onto his flesh and starting in at once to feed on his blood? Those dehiscent pods that had burst like pig’s bladders to spurt blood over a foot across the floor? Could he really hold belief that the seaweed was sentient or nearly, that it had been sent and recalled once its ghastly murders were accomplished?

  Cormac peered out on the sea, thinking, wondering at how much kelp the oceans held, thinking of masses of it crawling like worms in rich soil after a rain. And tiny cold feet seemed to walk up his spine, under mailcoat and padded jacket and tunic, and Cormac mac Art sweated. He turned to stare along the brooding, craggy coast backed by its dark trees.

  “There is adequate fuel lying there, in the woods. I’ll want some dry old rotted wood, and a fine supply of slim sticks, also dry.”

  “It will be done.” Irnic had bade these men accept Cormac’s suggestions as orders and carry out his instructions as if they were royal proclamations.

  “Well. Let’s be going down. It’s naught there is to see now, and we do want that wood gathered.”

  “I don’t envy you your vigil here, Captain Cormac,” the Sueve said as they descended the narrow staircase of stone.

  “Just Cormac will do, Eudo. I’ve not captained my own ship for some years now, and have little use for titles.”

  “Is’t true you and the Dane have sent full a score of ships to the bottom, Cormac?”

  Cormac sighed. “No, it is not true. We have sunk two. Nor have we ever done death on so many as one single man who did not have steel in his hand. Why, I’ve never even raped a woman!”

  “Not one?” Eudo’s companion said disbelievingly, and Eudo chuckled, “How about girls, then?”

  “It’s never been necessary,” Cormac said, without thinking that he was not lessening his legend, but adding another line that would become paragraphs. “Ah, attend me, Eudo; I’m thinking of something else. See that a cauldron of grease is provided us here.”

  “Grease?”

  “Animal, aye, and coagulated. I just want it after it’s been boiled down, so that it will liquefy swiftly, rather than big chunks of fat.”

  “A cauldron.”

  They emerged into the sunlight. “Aye, and I’d not be minding in the least if the pot were not one of those monstrous heavy things. Bronze or iron; makes no difference. And it’s welcome your lads are to carry up the grease in ewers or skinbags, and transfer it into the cauldron up in the light-chamber. I’m not bent on breaking backs!”

  “Aye, Cormac. Very well. It will be done. And where will ye be?”

  Cormac turned to look at the long-faced Sueve, and the Gael’s face was open, almost ingenuous-if a visage so marked by experience was capable of anything approaching a boyish expression. “Why, right here, Eudo. It’s only my life’s at stake, man; I’ll not be wandering off afishing while my little castle is being prepared to withstand siege!”

  Eudo nodded with a chastened little smile, and he and his aide hurried away to see to the gathering of wood.

  Cormac walked along the shore, ascending slowly. He knew would be no easy matter, muscling a huge iron vat of hardened grease up to the light-chamber of yon tower of death. Cauldrons were built to last, and they were not light. Nor was a solid mass of melted and resolidified animal fat. Too, Cormac had never seen a cauldron that was provided with more than two lugs, or handles.

  Better that job than calcining lime, he thought, and tugged off his horsehair-crested helm. The salt-fresh air over the sea stirred but little this afternoon, but each little zephyr was most welcome. He whipped his head back and forth, shaking sweat and kinks from his black mass of hair.

  He entered the woods that ended just above the bluff overlooking the sea, ascended, and emerged to sit in shade and gaze out on the water. From time to time he glanced at the beacon tower, or gazed speculatively at that enigmatic pile of brine-white stone. A sentry and a haven, turned into a trap of horror and a grave. How? By what?

  As the afternoon wore on he twice rose and changed his position, seeking shade in the manner of a lounging dog. But Cormac mac Art was hardly at his ease. While his body rested his brain laboured and winged afar in both space and the misty past, planning, seeking clues to the root of this new menace that had fallen athwart his life-path.

  He could think of no precedent, nothing similar in all his experience asea, and in Eirrin and Alba and Britain.
He stared seaward, thinking, and from time to time Wulfhere went by…

  The Dane was shouting and cursing. His flaming beard bristled as he turned face and supplicating hands up to Asgard. He had taken aboard Raven a score of his own Danish seamen, with half that number of Suevi, for training. Wulfhere had not the patience to train a genius to pick his nose, Cormac reflected, smiling. Back and forth the ship went, up and down the coast, back and forth… and all the while Wulfhere Skull-splitter railed at his tyroes.

  He should have come in earlier. Toward sundown a wind rose up and whipped the sea into prancing choppy waves and breakers that crashed onto the rocks below Cormac’s perch. Wulfhere’s trainees gain their seasoning now, the Gael grinned, hearing the Dane’s bellow even through the wind.

  Raven plunged and beat up and down for a long hour ere the wind eased and they dared swing her swiftly in to gain shore. By then the sun had gone orange and was perching at the edge of the world.

  Cormac rose and hurried down to meet the men from Raven.

  Wulfhere snorted as he watched the half-score Suevi stagger and lurch ashore. Each quivered in every part and the skin of more than one showed a definite green tinge.

  “Och, Cormac! We have a helpless task with these landbound plow-pushers! They’ll never make seamen!”

  But Knud the Swift winked at Cormac, which told him the Sueves had done rather well.

  “And what saw you, Wulf, on your little pleasure cruise?”

  The Dane tried to fry Cormac with a look, then doffed his helm and slammed it at his comrade with a swift tensing thrust of both arms, from the chest. Cormac caught the iron pot in both his hands, and aye, mac Art rocked with the impact. He said nothing of the pain to the middle finger of his left hand, but did toss the helm aside for Wulfhere to pick up.