by David Drake
Mael laughed. He could accept Biarki's story. He could accept as well the Saxons' belief that their god had listened to them and sent an Irish alien to take the place of one of them—or a valuable slave. It just seemed a pity that the best proof Mael had yet found for gods taking interest in the lives of men was about to end with him being eaten by an animate corpse.
The Saxons' destination was only a few minutes further. The ruined villa was a jumble of masonry overgrown with honeysuckle, recently disturbed by the burial party removing stones to heap over their chieftain's grave. Already the leaders of the procession were beginning to scatter the low cairn to open the cistern again. It lay some fifty feet from the other ruins, far enough that rain from the house gutters could be piped into it without being contaminated by surface runoff from the latrine and the stables to the rear.
"Just clear enough stone to lift one timber," Biarki ordered his men. "That's enough room to let him down." It was a low tumulus anyway, less a marker for posterity than an additional burden in case something from inside began to push up. The cistern had been a rectangular prism, six feet by twelve feet, cut into the rock. The original lid had been replaced for Biarki's purposes by a roof of logs. They were then covered with stone. The result was not airtight—the feed pipes would have allowed a prisoner to breathe, anyway—but it would be quite impossible to open from the inside without tools and a platform. The Saxons had left Mael his body armor, but nothing with an edge or a point or even a lip that could be used to dig. Mael greatly doubted that anything useful had been buried with Biargram, either. Grunting with effort, three of the Saxons tugged at the end log to pivot it away from the hole. "Enough?" one of them asked, wiping sweat from his lips with the back of his hand. The Saxons—the whole village was present, nearly two hundred of them—had grown silent. The six men holding Mael tensed for the first time.
Biarki strode to the edge of the cistern, motioning the guards to bring Mael along, too. "He'll fit," Biarki said, measuring the Irishman's chest against the opening. Then, after obvious hesitation, the thegn knelt to peer into his father's grave. Mael, shading his eyes, bent down also to take a first look at the barrow in which he was expected to die.
The walls were deep and sheer. The bar of sunlight through the opening fell across a low bier on which nothing lay. Instead there was a man in the far end of the chamber, slumped over the dim bulk of a horse. The stench of the pit was sickening, but it was not the effluvium of decay.
"You said you put his shield in with him?" Mael remarked, no longer concerned about what his captors would think of his interest.
Biarki nodded, pointing. The heirloom had presumably been leaned at the head of the bier. Now it lay half under the legs of the corpse, a circuit gleaming dimly in the light reflected from the plastered sides of the cistern. Another object on the floor among the disordered grave goods caught Biarki's eye: the head of a large hound, ripped or cut crudely away from its torso. The thegn gagged and turned back from the grave. Mael stared at him in surprise. Swallowing heavily, the Saxon explained, "Thunderer—his dog . . . we tied his feet, but he was alive when we put him in the barrow."
Mael straightened, looking with contempt at Biarki and the white-faced throng of Saxons waiting beyond. "Oh, you're fine brave men to do that to a dog," he said.
Biarki also stood. "Do you want us to kill you first?" he asked without meeting the Irishman's eyes.
Mael shook his head briefly. His limbs were weak with rage and fear. "No," he said, so that no one would think that he had been unable to speak Then he added, half in bravado, "You think you're going to lay a ghost this way. But keep your doors barred, Saxons—because I won't stay down there forever, and I don't think I'll forget you while there's a one of you alive." He glared like a demon at the men holding him. "Now, slack your god-damn ropes so that I can get down in there with your bogie."
One of the guards suddenly began to vomit on the ground. The others backed away, not actually releasing the ropes until Mael had lowered himself to full arms' length into the cistern. He clung to the stone lip for a moment. Just as the Irishman let go, a boot heel clunked down where his fingers had been. The rope ends writhed down into the pit beside him. Only seconds later, the men above had levered the heavy timber back into place. Mael was in darkness allayed only by chinks of light which dimmed as stones were piled back atop. The thud of rock against rock continued for what seemed an impossible length of time. When it ceased, the blackness within the tomb was unrelieved.
Mael sat on the edge of the bier and considered his situation. It was unpleasant and very probably hopeless, but it did not appear to be immediately desperate. The air stank, as was to be expected in an enclosed room fouled with liquescent feces. There was enough ventilation through the old pipes to keep it life-sustaining and, fortunately, his sense of smell was swiftly numbed. Mael had no way of getting himself out, though. By leaping from the top of the bier he could probably touch the roof, but that would not allow him to dislodge the tons of wood and stone above him. If he was to be released, it must be from outside—Starkad, searching for him in a week or a month, or perhaps Veleda, somehow learning of his plight and somehow aiding him. . . .
The thought of Veleda's witchcraft turned Mael's thoughts where he had not wanted them to go, to Ceadwalla's curse and the body with which the Irishman shared the grave. Sighing, Mael got up and shuffled carefully to the rear of the chamber in order to examine his companion.
Biargram Ironhand was as still and cold as any man dead three days could be. The Saxon had been a big man and seemed even bigger in the dark with only touch to guide Mael's judgment. Biarki's description of the corpse's rise had been so circumstantial, his terror so genuine, that Mael had not really doubted the account. Now, confronted with the flesh, the Irishman found death's reality more convincing than words ever could be. Muttering to himself, Mael felt over the grave goods to see if there was anything among them that could be useful to him.
As he had expected from the first, there were no tools or weapons. There was, however, food and a sealed cask of wine or beer. A few mouthfuls torn from a joint of boiled pork satisfied Mael's hunger. The meat was only a texture since his taste buds had been stunned by the fetor of the room, but it was no less nourishing for that. At first Mael could not decide how to open the cask without a point or blade. Finally he smashed in the top with a chunk of stone that had fallen down when the grave was reopened. The ale within was cool and sharp and satisfying.
After that, Mael waited. He had been a prisoner before, but never so thoroughly one or in such solitary fashion. There was probably no human being within a mile of him. For a while, Mael tried to concentrate on Veleda. No message of comfort or succor came to him, and besides, Kesair's thick black hair seemed to wave in front of his vision of the witch. At least, Mael told himself, he could ignore the false fear of Ironhand. It was certainly after sundown, and Biargram was no less a corpse now than he had been when the grave was opened.
Except that Biarki had been talking about moonrise, not sunset, hadn't he?
And then boots scraped in the corner by the dead man.
Had it not been repeated, the sound could have been Mael's fancy. It was followed by a thick, slobbering noise like that of a beast trying to drink with its nostrils under water. Then Biargram managed to tear the gobbet of horse meat loose with his teeth. The chunk was too big for a human throat, so more than a minute of wheezing and grunting followed before a smacking gurgle ended the process. Mael, who had remained as motionless as a fawn who scents the hunter, heard Ironhand pause and the leather of his harness creak as he turned from the horse. The dead Saxon stood up.
It was neither an easy process nor a swift one. Ironhand's fingers scrabbled on the wall for purchase. Mael could hear the nervous patter of bits of plaster falling away under the dead man's grip. From what Biarki had said, Mael had assumed the corpse was at least too discoordinated to move except by crawling. Now, one heavy step at a time, the thing was walking tow
ard Mael. Very quietly, the Irishman eased himself to the far end of the bier. He could hear the breath whistling in and out of Biargram's mouth. Air did not seem to be sucked deeper into the dead man's lungs, however.
The low platform on which the body had been laid was over two feet wide. Mael had risen quietly on one side of it. Ironhand moved past on the other, a step, another step—he was parallel to Mael—thick fingers brushed the Irishman's cheek.
Mael screamed and flung himself back against the wall. The dead man lunged at him, tripped over the bier, and crashed headlong. Mael ran to his right, toward the end in which Biargram had lain. Mael's first stride set his foot on the slimy dog's head and he, too, skidded to the floor. His hands touched the shield which he had come to take. The dead Saxon was trying to regain his footing and was doing so more easily than he had stood the first time. A detached part of Mael's brain searched for a correlation. He remembered that the moon was waxing toward full. If the moon ruled this creature, than he would not reach full strength for another day yet.
But that calculation was almost unconscious. Mael, gripping the shield by the rim, was swinging it edgewise like a great axe blade toward the wheezing sound that marked the monster's face. The impact felt like hitting a statue. The creature toppled, but his flesh did not give the way a man's should have, spattering fluids away from the blow. Even as the corpse fell, his hands closed on the shield. Mael pulled back to save his sole weapon. There was no comparison between his strength and that of Biargram. It was like tugging at a full-grown oak tree, hoping to uproot it. Mael cursed and backed away. The corpse came after him, dropping the shield with a clang.
Those were the first moments. The creature's coordination seemed to improve slightly as the hours drew on, but still he stumbled like a two-year-old. A two-year-old with the strength of Starkad's axe. In one of their circlings, Ironhand snatched at Mael's arm and touched the ale cask instead. In an onset of rage or perhaps emotionless destructiveness, the creature smashed the sturdy container to splinters. He brought the cask down again and again on the stone bier, spraying ale and ruptured oak across the tomb. Then Ironhand began searching again for Mael. The tenor of his shallow, wheezing breaths never changed.
The monster, however slow and clumsy, was indefatigable. He could not see in the dark any better than Mael could, nor did he seem to hear Mael's breathing over the constant rasp of his own. His very motions appeared as mindless as those of a worm crawling back and forth across the bottom of a jewel box. But if the worm is ceaseless, it will cover every inch of the box a thousand times—and Ironhand was ceaseless.
The deep-dug cistern had felt cool when Mael first dropped into it. Now his exertions had heated the chamber into a steamy oven. The Irishman sucked in painful gulps of air through his open mouth. The ale was gone. Even if Mael had somehow saved it, there would have been no time to slurp a drink.
Mael was beginning to stagger as badly as the thing pursuing him. Once he horribly miscalculated in the narrow darkness and ran squarely into the creature's chest. As the Irishman ducked away, Biargram's hand flailed across his cheekbone and seized his right ear. Mael screamed and tore free. The pain was terrible, a dull ache like a hammer blow overlaid with piercing agony, but pain was a proof of life, and the pain would have stopped very suddenly had Mael hesitated in pulling away.
The Irishman's life depended on the bier. It was just wide enough that the monster could not reach across it to the far wall without overbalancing—yet. Had the corpse's motor control been a little better, had Biargram been able to step up onto the two-foot platform, he would have caught Mael at once. Instead, Biargram had to drive his prey into the arms of fatigue.
In all likelihood, another night would give Ironhand that needed agility, even if Mael survived this night.
At the end, Mael was so exhausted that he would have been blind with tears and sweat even had there been light in the tomb. He tripped and fell across the shield, then skidded to the floor again as he tried to rise. Mael lay there sobbing hopelessly for twenty long seconds before he realized he was no longer being pursued. The Irishman could hear the slow scratching of the corpse's fingers on the stone floor, but the breathing sounds had stopped. After a moment, the scratching ceased also.
The moon had set. Mael was to have peace until it rose again.
Mael stood with the metal shield of Achilles in his hands. Using his toes as antennae, he edged his way toward where the last sounds of the corpse had come. Biargram was there. Prodding from Mael's hobnails brought neither motion nor resilience. Mael had thought initially that the corpse was stiffened by rigor mortis; now he realized that the condition was more nearly akin to petrification. He brought the heavy shield edge down three times on the Saxon's skull, arm's-length cuts that would have sawn through a tree trunk.
Biargram was as unmarked after the third blow as before the first. Each hair was in place, and the teeth were still bared in a snarl.
Crying again, Mael dropped the useless shield and threw himself into the corner away from the dead horse. He was utterly wrecked by fatigue, physically and mentally. It was in abdication of his responsibilities, even for his own life, that he slept.
But there was nothing he could have done that would have been of more use that day, or of less.
Chapter Twelve
Mael awakened to a sound. He lashed out with feet and hands in blind panic. He knew in instant terror that he had slept for hours, believed that the clinking against rock was the monster, moon-risen again and reaching for him. The sound came again. It was from above, from outside the tomb. Someone was clearing the stones away.
Mael almost shouted. Instinct strangled the cry in his throat. It might be Starkad, might be Veleda or Gwedda, and any of them would continue with or without Mael's encouragement. Equally, it might be the Saxons returning for reasons of their own. If they thought Mael were dead, they might be relaxed enough to allow him to leap from the bier to the cistern's lip and squirm out. They might cut him apart on the surface, no doubt they would do so—but they would not return him alive to Ironhand's grave.
One of the logs stirred and fell back. The hands above that tried to remove it had proven too few for the job. A voice, harsh though muffled by the timbers, snarled in British, "Quickly, you idiots. We have less than an hour before moonrise, but I swear I'll send you into that pit whether you've got it open before then or not!"
The timbers shifted again, creaking as crowbars were levered under one in the middle. The log was prised upward. Light gleamed briefly through the crack before the same contemptuous voice ordered, "Close the lantern! Or do you want all the Saxons down on us to see what we're doing at their chieftain's barrow?" Metal clicked as the slide of a dark lantern shut again. Grunts and low-voiced curses were the only sounds for some minutes as the men above struggled to manhandle away the roof log.
As Mael listened silently to the grave robbers, his mind turned over the cramped layout of the tomb. There was no perfect hiding place, so he took the best he was offered. As swiftly as he could move without kicking any of the scattered grave goods, Mael stepped to the part-eaten carcass of the horse. He pressed himself against the wall in the angle it formed with the body. It was not truly concealing, but it blurred his outline. Mael did not think the Britons would look farther than Biargram's sprawled corpse at the other end of the chamber, anyway.
The log heaved up into the night, dropping a rain of rock fragments to the floor and bier as it swung away. Mael resisted the instinct to crouch lower. Movement would certainly have betrayed him. The lantern, a candle in a baffled canister with a shutter, thrust down into the opening and fanned light across the chamber. The illumination seemed much brighter to Mael's shrouded eyes than it really was. The quick sweep did not reveal him to the one directing the light. Rather, the lantern focused on the upturned shield, steadied, and winked out. There was muttered conversation above. Ropes slapped wood. A figure, swaying against the vaguely starlit opening, began to descend in a sling
When the Briton had been lowered shoulder-deep in the pit, he slid the lantern open again. The light flashed over the roof timbers. The commanding voice snarled through the opening, "Keep the bloody light down or keep it out!"
"Then keep this bloody rope still!" the man in the sling cried back. He trained his light on Biargram's glaring visage as if it fascinated him—or as if he expected it to move. The hot metal of the lantern stank in a different way from the fetid air of the tomb.
The sling dropped by jerks as the men above handed the rope down. When it touched the surface of the bier the man stepped off it, then down to the floor. The Briton's back was to Mael, his body silhouetted by the circumscribed candlelight. The man bent to pick up the shield. It was heavier than he suspected. He grunted in surprise and his thumb slipped off the slide of the lantern.
Mael swung to his feet at the moment of darkness. Like a dancer to his partner, he stepped to the grave robber just as the other began to stand up. The dim light through the roof was enough for Mael's eyes after their deprivation. He struck with the strength of frustration built up during his long pursuit by the monster.
The Briton's neck broke under the double-handed blow. The shield and the lantern clashed together against the stone. "Conbran!" someone demanded from the surface. "What's wrong?"
Mael tugged the shield out from under Conbran's body. Both the Irishman's hands were numb from the impact. "Just dropped the damn thing," he said hoarsely. He leaped to the top of the bier, holding the shield to mask his face against watchers above. "Pull me up," he ordered.
The rope swung upward more swiftly than it had lowered. The shield rim scraped against the logs. Hands reached to take it from Mael, but the shield was his only chance of survival and his fingers were locked on it. The sling drew Mael waist-high to the lip of the cistern and he stepped up to the ground. There were a dozen men around him, all armed, and a babble of muted questions. Suddenly one man cursed and threw back the velvet curtain shrouding a lighted oil lamp. The light flared across Mael's face.