by Whyte, Jack
I watched Him as he moved away, walking openly into the morning light with my clothes bundled beneath his arm, and then I closed my eyes and luxuriated in the dry, rough warmth of his cloak. Turoc had stripped me naked without remarking on the marks and lesions on my skin, but then I thought of how my sick, fevered body must have looked to him; the dead, whitening areas would have seemed like an effect of the icy chill that had sapped my strength and vitality.
He returned in less time than I had expected, and he brought a thick, heavy clay mug filled to the brim with heated, salty meat broth in which chunks of meat and vegetables floated. I sipped it with great care, expecting my stomach to rebel against the intrusion, but nothing untoward occurred. After the first scent of it, the first clean bite of it against my tongue, I was ravenous, and Turoc had to pull the mug away from me to prevent me from taking too much too soon and making myself sick again. Thereafter, I proceeded with more decorum, sipping the delicious broth slowly and savouring every drop of it, feeling my strength return with every mouthful. At least I felt that I would live again.
Turoc had been watching me closely, and now he indicated the bundle he had brought back with him. "Dry clothes, " he grunted. "Not clean, but dry. Better get them on you now. No telling when we might have company. You still haven't told me why you're here or how you got here. "
I waved a hand towards the slope I had descended. "Came down from up there, and I'm here to find Carthac. Where is he?"
His eyebrows rose, but he answered me straightforwardly, with no more than a grunt of surprise. "He's not here. He went out with a raiding party yesterday, before noon, and hasn't come back. "
This was bitter news, and I had to bite down on my anger and disappointment. "Where did he go, do you know? And how many men did he take with him?"
Turoc made a face and dipped his head to one side. "Took about half a hundred with him, but I don't know where they went. I wasn't in camp at the time. I was up on the cliffs above the northern entrance. What do you want with Carthac? He'll kill you as soon as he sets eyes on you. He's raving mad, the most frightening man I've ever seen. No man's life is safe around him—no one's. Even his closest captains live in fear of him. "
"I know, Turoc. " I sat straighter, grunting as I felt pain rippling up and down my ribs. "But I'm here to kill him, not to be killed. All I want to do is to get close enough to reach him. "
He squatted back on his heels and stared at me, shaking his head, and then his eyes scanned me from head to foot. "You can't even walk. How are you going to kill a man who can't be killed? I've seen him lost among a swarm of twenty men, all of them trying to kill him, and he's come out with barely a scratch on him. "
"Aye, but he has been scratched, has he not?"
"Well of course he has!" I could see him doubt my sanity. "But never badly. The worst injury he's had was a spearhead in the right thigh. "
"Aye. He killed the surgeon who dug it out of him, did he not?"
Now his eyes flew wide. "How did you know that?"
"No matter. " I shook my head. "I merely need to scratch him, that's all. Once scratched, he'll die, I swear to you. "
Turoc shook his head and looked away immediately, trying to hide his confusion and trepidation. There could be no logic, to his mind, in what I was telling him, and I knew that. I reached out, surprised at how difficult it was to make my arm and hand obey me, and gripped him by the forearm.
"Turoc, " I said, fighting to put conviction into my weakened voice. "Trust me in this. I know what I am doing, and I can kill him. Once he is dead, his warriors will melt away like snow in spring. They feed on this... this legend he has spawned, this thing about his immortality. Once he is dead, they'll quickly sicken of his memory. They'll recall the cannibal, not the demigod; the torturer, not the warrior. Get me to a place where I'll be able to see him and reach him, then leave me to do the rest. "
He shook his head again, more vehemently now. "You'll be recognized the moment you go in there, and you'll be killed. What use is there in that?"
"No, you're wrong, man. Look at me! Do I look like Merlyn of Camulod? Look at my beard, my clothes. You almost killed me yourself, not recognizing me, and you've known me for nigh on a score of years. None of these people know me at all, and if they think of Merlyn of Camulod, they think of my brother, Ambrose, who is now become the man that once I was. Get me inside there, Turoc. That's all I require. Take me inside, and then leave me. "
"But they'll know you're not one of them! They are uncouth and wild, Merlyn, but they're not stupid enough to fail to recognize a stranger in their camp!"
"Then I shall be a messenger. Where's Ironhair?"
"Ironhair? God knows! They say he's with the Danes, fighting to the north of here. We haven't seen his face in months. "
"Does he send messages to Carthac?"
"Aye, once in a while. "
"Then I shall be a messenger—a sick messenger, poisoned by Merlyn's Vengeance in a camp that I came through on the way here. My name will be... " I paused, thinking quickly, searching for an ordinary name that would be memorable to us both. "Mod, " I said then, remembering my young Druid friend, whom Carthac had murdered. "Mod is perfect. You'll say you met me as I came up through the southern entrance, and that I was raving with fever. You knew me long ago, and recognized me. I am a... a fisherman, but also a warrior. No explanation of how I avoided the guards above the pass; I was but a man alone and the gods were watching over me. I have messages for Carthac from Ironhair, and while I wait for his return, I'll need to lie beside a fire somewhere, where I can be warm and recover from my sickness, which is internal—poisoned, remember—and not contagious. Can you arrange that?"
His face was still troubled, but he nodded once, and then again, more emphatically. "I can do it, but I don't like it. Besides, you've no weapons. How will you kill Carthac with no weapons? I don't like this at all, Merlyn."
"You don't have to like it, Turoc, you merely have to put me into place. Besides, I have a weapon. My knife there, by my scrip."
"What, this?" His voice dripped scorn as he held up the Varrus dagger in its sheath. "This is your killing weapon?"
Thinking that he was about to draw the blade, and knowing that I had smeared it thickly with the deadly, venomous green paste, I cut him short, stretching out my hand for the knife.
"It's all I need. Now belt it about my waist, and my scrip, too. And if the thought of what I am about to do frightens you, then think upon this instead: think about who I am, and about the strange tales you have heard of me, down through the years. And ask yourself this: why should the death that stalks the Danes and Carthac's other mercenaries out there in Cambria be known as Merlyn's Vengeance? And why, if you find yourself believing in the immortality of such a thing as Carthac, would you doubt the sorcery of Merlyn?"
. He straightened up at that and I saw his hand thrust down behind his back, no doubt making the ancient sign against the evil eye. I waited till he breathed again, then said, "Are we agreed? Because if we are, we should move soon. I'm beginning to feel dizzy in my head again."
He grunted and stood up, leaning forward to take my hand. With his help I struggled to my feet and stood there swaying until he threw one arm about my waist and brought my left arm over his shoulder, gripping me firmly by the wrist.
"Don't be afraid to lean on me, " he told me. "But try to walk, if you can. I've got you firmly, so you won't fall. We're less than a hundred paces from the longhouse, but it might seem like a long way. If anyone stops us, don't try to talk. Just leave it to me. "
We set out then, and my legs felt as though they had no muscle in them at all. The light-headedness had come back and my vision was doing strange things again. I saw several men approach us, then move on after casting strange looks at us. On one occasion, directly challenged as to what was wrong with me, Turoc recited the story I had concocted, and it was accepted, with a muttered curse and a warning to keep the whoreson away.
Some time later, we enter
ed the open doorway of the longhouse. I can remember looking up and seeing that the walls were higher than I had judged from above, and that two tall wooden doors hung limply and drunkenly from sagging rope hinges. We passed into the dim interior, and I saw open patches high above, where great holes in the thatch admitted beams of daylight. I smelled thick woodsmoke, and then I felt myself being lowered to the ground, and the heat of flames radiating against my face.
I opened my eyes again and found myself close by a large fire that had been built beneath a roofless section of the longhouse. Turoc was wrapping the folds of his big cloak tightly about me, and I heard voices all around me, and Turoc's voice repeating yet again the tale of my misfortune. He had known me for years, he swore, and had stumbled upon me this morning by accident and good fortune, since had he not found me, I might have died, and I bore messages for Carthac from Ironhair. I had survived a camp blasted by Merlyn's Vengeance, down on the plain, he told his listeners, and I had purged myself of most of the poison on the way up here from below. Now all I needed was to regain my strength, and since Carthac had not yet returned to camp, the best thing for me to do was sleep until he came. There came a chorus of mutterings, and, wonder of wonders, I slept, lulled by the sounds and the warmth of the fire.
"Carthac! Carthac! Carthac! Carthac! Carthac!"
At first it was the fabric of my dream, but as the volume swelled and grew into a roar of voices chanting in unison, I opened my eyes to find myself surrounded by a forest of legs. The demigod had returned to his worshippers.
Slowly, cautiously, I rose to. my feet, pulling my cloak about me and tugging its hood down over my face. I was caught up in the pandemonium, but my mind was clear enough to know, immediately, that here might be the best chance I would ever have of coming close to my quarry. In the midst of this capering throng of wild, enthusiastic men, I should easily be able to win close enough to him to strike. I knew that I would die immediately thereafter, but I had long since come to terms with that. I had no wish to live on as a leper, and I considered that my life would be well spent in ridding the world of this particular pestilence called Carthac at the same time as I rid it of my own.
Although I had not yet seen him, I knew from the chaos of shouts that he was here, in the longhouse, and as I stood there swaying, looking about me for an avenue to go to him, I saw the fire in front of me, separated from me only by several bodies. There lay the answer to the question of how I might reach him without arousing suspicion by a headlong approach. As soon as I located him, I would throw some of my fire powder into the fire, creating a distraction and, I hoped, some panic. Then, while everyone was disoriented by the noise and smoke, I would strike.
I moved slightly to my right, then, and saw him. He was a gargoyle, hideous and immense, a leering Cyclops, bald on one side of his head above the awful disfigurement that marred him and marked him as inhuman. He had no left eye, and the place where it should have been was a ruined, indented mass of twisted flesh. His head was misshapen, flattened and distorted at his birth, and it bulged enormously at the top on the right side. Then, when he was a boy, a kick from a horse had added diabolical refinements to his lifelong ugliness. The one eye that remained to him, however, was large and bright blue, offering a tragic but fleeting suggestion of how he might have looked had Nature not decided to make sport of him. That single, flashing, bright blue eye was the first thing I saw, before the ruin of the rest of his awful head eclipsed it.
And then I truly saw the size of him. He towered over everyone about him, hulking and huge, his shoulders leviathan and his great, deep, hairless chest unarmoured. He wore only a sleeveless vest, of some kind of animal pelt, long haired and shaggy, and a pair of breeches made from the same skins. Heavy boots covered his feet and lower legs and a broad belt with a golden buckle circled his waist. His arms, as big as many a man's thighs, shone as though oiled, and the biceps were wound in what looked like copper bracelets.
My hands were busy beneath my cloak, opening the drawstring of the leather bag that held the last remnants of my fire powder, perhaps two large handfuls. I reached inside and scooped a generous pinch into my right hand, and then I saw the sword he held in his. He gave a wild laugh and swung it around his head, sending his followers leaping back in fear for their lives, one of them gouting blood from a slash across the chest. Three times he swung the sword, and then he stood alone in the space he had cleared, laughing in a high, thin, chilling voice as though defying anyone to come against him.
The noise in the longhouse died almost completely away as the realization sank slowly home to me that somehow, impossibly, he had come into possession of my sword. I knew it was impossible, because I had left my sword at home, in my little valley, since it would have been too ostentatious for the task I had at hand. Yet there it was, in Carthac's enormous fist.
As I stared at it, incredulous, his insane laugh turned into a defiant, triumphant scream. He raised his left arm and brandished something above his head. I looked at it; I saw it; and my mind refused to accept what I was seeing. He screamed again, this time my name, "Merlyyyn!" and threw the thing. My brother's head. Ambrose's head.
It flew through the air towards me, and I watched it turning as though time had slowed to almost nothing. The fine, blue eyes were wide, staring and glazed in death; the thick, yellow locks were stained with blood. I even saw that he had grown a beard on this campaign, a grizzled beard, just like my own. And then it landed in the fire, thumping heavily among the coals, and I forgot everything in the urge to save my brother from the flames. I lunged forward, a strangled scream knotting in my throat, and my shoulder struck the man in front of me as my foot came down on the inside hem of my cloak, tripping me. As I fell, my outstretched hands released the open bag I had been holding and the fire powder fell into the heart of the fire.
A gigantic ball of flame roared from the pit with a concussive, deafening sound that sucked all the air in the room, it seemed, into its heart, then belched it out again in a terrifying rain of sparks and embers and great, whirling clouds of choking smoke. I had squeezed my eyes tight shut, but the brightness of the fireball seared right through my closed lids as I ripped away my cloak, casting it aside. Keening now with rage, I fumbled to pull my dagger from its sheath and clutched the hilt so hard that it pained my hand. Then, oblivious to the chaos swirling around me, I pushed myself up and ran though the smoke and the fire towards Carthac.
I found him rooted to the spot where I had last seen him, gaping open mouthed at me as I approached, making no effort to avoid me, and before he could my dagger found his breast and plunged between his ribs. He made a strange, mewling sound and his only defence was to thrust me away from him, with both hands, one of which still gripped the sword I now knew was my brother's. Demented with grief and disbelief and hatred, I tore my blade free again and raked it towards his one, blue eye, but he turned his head away before I could plunge the point into his brain and I succeeded only in blinding him, the knife's blade striking against the bone of his eye socket. Then he picked me up easily with one huge hand, and threw me back into the firepit.
I was burning—my left hand, which had plunged elbow deep into a bed of embers, my arms, my feet, my legs— and I scrambled, screaming in agony, until I was free of the pit. I threw myself against the wall and cowered there, striking off the glowing coals that stuck to my cringing flesh and tearing off the smouldering remnants of the tunic that was my only garment. When I was naked and all the coals were off me, I lay there, shuddering in pain, incapable of coherent thought.
After a time, above my own whimpers and cries, I heard Carthac moan, a quavering, disembodied sound of torment that soon swelled into a scream. Once he had begun, he could not stop. Thrusting aside my own pain in the urgency of my need to see him, I pushed myself up with difficulty, pressing my back against the wall, and peered towards the awful sounds. The smoke had begun to clear, and he came into view through its drifting skeins, staggering about at the far end of the long, empty buil
ding, close by the open doors, his hands clutched over his head as he bumped into walls and every obstacle that lay about him. He fell down and struggled to his feet again, screaming and screaming. We were alone in the longhouse, two crippled men, and no one came back to see what was afflicting him.
Slowly, and painfully, but gathering strength and resolve with every movement, I made my way forward, shambling in my nakedness, not taking my eyes from him for a moment. He fell to his knees again, and I saw Ambrose's skystone sword lying on the ground before him. Renewed resolve flared up in me and, barely aware of my burns now, or of any weakness, I walked forward and picked it up with my right hand, "then, cradling my wrist in my burned left hand, I swung the long blade high and struck off his deformed head with one blow that took all of my strength and left me sprawled across his corpse.
I found my brother's head later. It lay lodged in a corner of the building's walls, barely damaged by the fire. I picked it up and sat with it in my arms as I wept for him, remembering all I had loved in him. I felt as though my heart would burst apart with the pain of it, a deep, anguished, all consuming torment that eclipsed all other pains. And presently I found I was weeping for Tressa, too, and for Dedalus and all the friends and loved ones I had ever lost.
And as I wept and mourned my loves in the abandoned darkness of that ruined place, a hailstorm of Pendragon arrows swept down from the hillside above and killed every remaining thing that moved in the valley beyond the stone walls that surrounded me.
Not everyone who was in the longhouse that day died. Many' fled before the Pendragon attack began, in terror of Merlyn the Sorcerer, whose wicked and unholy infamy as a practitioner of the blackest arts soon spread throughout the entire land of Britain. For even though Carthac had killed Merlyn, beheaded him, and borne the severed head back to his camp, when the head was cast into the fire, flames had erupted thunderously amidst a welter of sparks and breath killing smoke, and from the heart of the inferno Merlyn had emerged, springing whole and alive to slay their champion.