Andrew Offutt - The Sign of the Moonbow

Releasing the man, Cormac whirled to the door and stepped outside. From there, hardly aware of the small hand that almost instantly closed on his arm-his left arm-he stared the length of Daneira, at the invaders.

Not a mere score was their number, but nigh onto twice as many.

They were tall, grimly warlike men of frostbit Norge, who paused just within the village perimeter, staring about at the strangeness of its buildings and its people. Axes and shield-bosses glinted with sinister flashes. Cormac saw a blooded ax, another. Aye, and already there were captives, a girl squirming by her hair in that man’s big red-furred paw, her clothing torn to the waist, a young boy tugging at the grip around his wrist, the grip of a captor who hardly noted his struggles. A child of eleven or twelve squealed for her mother, for she too was held by the hair and tugged this way and that to keep her off-balance. A woman ran toward her, dark hair streaming and arms outstretched, and was struck easily away by a negligently flicked shield. One Norseman broke from the group to rush a house on the outskirts, and returned grinning, dragging a shrieking young woman by the ankle.

Cormac’s teeth gritted and he snarled. He was but one; they were nigh twoscore. What could he possibly do? And these Daneirans-he had found the complacently peaceful, childlike refugees from old Eirrin just in time to witness their removal from the earth-and to share it.

A bony hand fell on his shoulder, and he felt its strength through his mail.

“Do not move or speak, Cormac,” Cathbadh’s voice said, with a surprising firmness.

He moved past the Gael, out into the village. Trembling like a leashed hound, Cormac watched the old man in his weird robe, enameled leaves flashing, as he paced a few steps toward the invaders. Still they remained paused, poised, staring, unable to believe that none fled or came banding with arms. Cathbadh’s staff with its golden three-quarter moon bobbed along, carried in his right hand and pacing his left foot.

He stopped. His voice carried well. Every gaze was on him, Norse and Daneiran-and the single set of grey Gaelic eyes.

“I am Cathbadh, servant of Danu and protector of Daneira. Why have ye come to Daneira?”

The Norsemen looked at each other. One stepped forward, spoke to their leader. Cormac wondered; had Thorleif been their leader afore? This new man, his beard the colour of cheese, gave listen to his companion, and then he laughed. Laughing, he pointed at the old man who stood alone in the center of the village’s main open area. He bawled out words, in his own language.

“He sneers,” Cormac muttered. “He says that-”

But the man beside the Norse leader was interpreting, grinning, yelling out the words in staggering Gaelic.

“Protector? A spindly man with beard like the mountaintop snows? We spit on you, protector of Danererr. We spit on Danu, whatever that be! The Norsemen have come to you, Protector of Danererr, the men of Thorleif and Snorri.”

He gestured at the cheesebeard beside him, and that man braced his legs well apart and planted both hands on his hips. He looked upon Cathbadh as only a powerful and self-sure young weapon-man with no respect on him can stare at the old and helpless.

“We have eyes,” Cathbadh called back. “We see the men of… Shorleaf and Snoaree. We beg you to beware Danu-and we ask what it is you would have of us?”

A swift brief conference, and Snorri’s Gaelic-speaking lieutenant bawled back a single word.

“Everything!”

Snorri spoke more; the other man shouted his bad Gaelic. “We would have of Danererr all its gold and jewels, and its best food, and all its arms-and all its WOMEN-N-N!”

At that last bellowed word, the men of Thorleif and Snorri called out their echoes and their ayes, waving their axes and beating upon their shields. He who had fetched the blue-tunicked young woman from her very home hauled her to him by her ankle, rested his ax-haft against his calf whilst he grasped her between the legs. She cried out. From her home, a child screamed. Then a man came running, yelling hoarsely, his unbound hair streaming out behind. He waved both arms; in one hand was a quarterstaff. Two men he passed at the run on his way to his wife or sister, and the second swung his ax after him so that he bent in an impossible way ere he slid from the steel and lay on the ground. He did not so much as jerk with his back and vertebral tree and every nerve destroyed, but lay absolutely still.

Now it was Cathbadh who roared out one word, while he held his staff braced horizontally before him with both hands.

“GO!”

“Blood of the gods! Cormac gritted, through clenched teeth. “Crom’s beard-a city of children with a madman as father! Let-go-me, girl, it’s my buckler I must have on this arm-ah gods, the filthy bloodhanded bastard!”

The invaders’ shock at Cathbadh’s incredible command, the roar of a wolf without teeth, lasted but a few seconds. As Cormac jerked at Sinshi, who gripped his arm now with both hands, the man who held the child by her hair lifted her until her little feet left the ground and her eyes bulged. In one perfectly calculated sweep then he sheared her head from her body. His ax swept through, clear, hardly blooded by the swiftness of its slicing. The girl’s head remained dangling by its black sheaf of hair from his fist, enormous eyes staring: the pitiful little corpse dropped to the ground with blood fountaining from between headless shoulders.

Sinshi clung, weeping… Cormac started forward, dragging out his sword, lifting his unshielded left arm to hurl the girl from him… Cathbadh cried out and raised his face and staff to the sky, calling out words in a language Cormac had never heard…

And a streak of flame leaped up from the ground, all at once in a line across the village just before the Norse.

Even as they cried out and drew back, the yellow fire sprang up into a wall of dancing red and gold and orange… and extended itself , racing along the ground like two serpents that swept about either flank of the massed invaders. As that line rushed to encircle them, it grew swiftly up to form a wall, whipping around to encompass the yelling Norsemen as if it were a sentient creature, a live creature with a brain and purpose, an encircling serpent of living dancing licking flame-that made no sound.

The flame closed its circle. The Norsemen were prisoners within a ring of fire that danced up to twice the height of a man. It became an inferno.

Cormac stood trembling and staring, Sinshi hugging him, her face averted and pressed to him. Within the ring of awful flame there were shouts and shrieks, ghastly cries of horror and panic and suffering. A Norseman burst through, a falsetto-shrieking apparition with flaming hair and legs. Delirious in a frenzy of pain, he ran staggering, blinded, up the center of the village toward Cathbadh. The protector of Daneira stood unseeing; he stared at the sky, a seeming statue with uplifted staff. The gold Moonbow at its end flashed like fire.

Heedless of her falling, Cormac wrenched free of Sinshi. He ran straight at Cathbadh’s back, and past that living statue, at a dead run. He did not hear his cry; did not feel his arm when it drove his sword forward. A few feet in front of the wizard, Cormac took considerable pleasure in putting the fiery Norseman out of the misery no man should have to endure.

Like all others then, Cormac stared at the awful circle of fire.

The flames roared now, bellowed, and sprang higher, tall as the trees of the forest. The cries from within lessened in number and volume. The nauseous odour of burning cloth and meat drifted over Daneira, and Cormac heard wretching. His own belly heaved and rumbled and he was glad he’d had no time to partake of food.