Andrew Offutt - The Undying Wizard

At their tug on the rope, Cormac loosed it and let it slide over the edge, into the deep shadow where they waited. Then he followed.

The Gael went slowly, testing each little ledge or rocky projection before giving it his weight. His feet were sea-sure, and he had done more than his share of scaling. Down he went, with but one slip that fingers like cables turned into no more than a delay. A few feet above the upturned faces of the other two men, he dropped and alit like a cat on bent legs. His hands slapped the earth a second after his feet.

“Crom’s eyes,” Lugh said in a gasp, “an I dropped that’ distance I’d be wearing my stones around my knees!”

“An ever-active man learns to keep them bound up tight to his body,” Cormac assured him. “And learns how to fold up when he drops so. Now, Lugh. It’s your bow and skill we depend upon, all. Pluck you forth a good straight shaft with a wicked heavy head, and let us tie this little cord to it.”

Three times Lugh assayed to arc an arrow up and up and over one of the bronze poles standing out like sun’s rays from the castle. On the third try, three delighted men watched the cord-trailing shaft sail up and over its target. It dropped; the cord caught, lying across the pole: the arrow dangled well above their heads.

First Cormac gave the hunter’s shoulder a squeeze of congratulations and thanks. Then he began working the cord up, shaking it, lifting, coaxing…

Jerking and swaying like an erratic pendulum, the arrow descended. Cormac flashed one of his tight almost-smiles as he caught hold of it. He began pulling. Up went the slender cord, followed by the stout ship’s rope knotted to its tail. And over the projection, and down. And then the thick rope was in Cormac’s hand. There was just enough cordage; only one end touched the ground now, and with little to spare.

“Another man’s length and we’d have failed for my lack of planning!” he snapped, while his companions silently wondered at his excellence of forethought. “Now, we haven’t enough rope to tie off. But if you will wind yourself with it, Lugh, and brace your feet against the castle wall, I can climb up-without, hopefully, breaking either of our backs.”

Lugh gazed at him, amazed at the ingeniousness, and he smiled at the joke his leader made, between comrades.

“My back will hold, mac Art!”

The cleverer Bas bobbed his head in one nod, and stepped forward.

“Mac Art would not ask a druid to hold the rope’s end, as he would any other man. I will. Come, Lugh. An we stand side by side, facing the castle, we can draw the rope across our backs and brace it well. It’s a brave man we’re to support and keep safe… and him no boy whose weight might be measured against feathers!”

The two men braced themselves.

By all the gods , Cormac thought, that I should see the day! I entrust my very life to an army composed of a farm-born hunter of hare and boar, and a robed druid whose strength I know not… but would hardly make wager on!

First he tugged at the dangling rope with all his strength. Then he gave it his weight. With no word of apology, he hung from it-and set himself a-swinging. Lugh gasped and Bas grunted openly. The rope held.

“Rest,” Cormac bade them, and prepared for his climb.

His buskins he hung by their laces around his neck. Buckler he fastened to his belt behind, its curve hugging that of his backside. By a thong, he made his sword-scabbard immobile against his thigh.

He looked at the two men who were ready to lean back against the rope, their feet against the base of the wall they faced, while he climbed. He nodded. And he went up.

The two men gasped, and Lugh cursed without heed of the druid beside him. Each held fast, and Cormac’s strength and superb physical condition steaded him well. Hand over hand, not hurriedly so as to avoid jerking Bas and Lugh, he went up, and up.

Lugh’s arrow had had to go far higher than Cormac. He’d snugged the rope in close to the castle itself, and the narrow window he sought was little more than a dozen feet above the ground. The sunray projection held; the rope held; the men below held. Cormac climbed.

When he peered into the gloomy niche, he saw no man within the room. Muscles knotted and strained then, for he could not edge through that air-and-arrow embrasure while wearing his buckler behind. Dangling by one hand, he reached back and untethered it. He eased the targe into the slice in the stone wall, which was thick as the length of his arm.

Cormac glanced down. Then he put out his bare right foot and set it into the niche. In a swift movement then that scraped chainmail on stone, he lunged into the open window.

There he stood a moment, drawing shallow breath, for chest and shoulderblades touched the sides of the embrasure. He was wedged snugly into an opening that was as if designed to accommodate his body-sidewise.

A gliding step rightward, another… and he eased himself silently as a stalking panther down into the room. He stood in one of the several chambers that lined the castle’s pillar-supported second floor-or half-floor, for the vaulted ceiling of the main great hall soared to the roof.

Ancient hangings that surely were once more beauteous than the famed product of Eirrin’s women hung now in tatters and were dust at the base of the walls. Yet two chairs and a low table, brassbound all, somehow remained. Cormac looked upon them, his teeth pressed tightly together; only through some sorcerous means surely could those furnishings have survived the millenia.

The feeling came upon him.

Hair prickled at his nape and cold fingers seemed to trail up his back. He’d been here afore of a certitude… but not in this lifetime. Neither had anyone else: the floor’s thick layer of dust was long undisturbed.

Slowly so as to be more silent than a mouse seeking indoors for sustenance in winter, he picked up his buckler and drew his sword. There was no door; only a doorway, where long ago had hung a curtain or arras. Cormac paced to the portal. His bare feet were silent in the soft dust. No sound stirred the stillness. He peered out. There was no one in the corridor.

Cormac mac Art sat down in the dust and put on his buskins.

Out he went into the dingy hallway, and he turned right toward the castle’s front. All was silent and gloomy; only the single window-niche in each room admitted light, and that but little, so that by the time it found its way out to the hall it was the merest glim. In that upper hallway of the anciently brooding castle, it may as well have been night. On a carpet of dust, in silence, Cormac walked through night at nigh-midday.

He was unable to understand the total lack of sound, unless all the Britons were somewhere outside. In that event, they and his comrades-and Samaire, far more than comrade-might well be at the grim business of death-dealing even now. But he forced himself not to hurry, and paced forward in a semicrouch. He let his soles glide over the dust, so as to make no sound of footfalls.

He moved only as swiftly as he thought he dared, with no more noise than a pacing cat.

Cormac passed the room wherein Wulfhere and Ceann had spent a night, while he had preferred to sleep out under the watchful moon. He passed the room in which Samaire was to have spent that same night. Almost he smiled; she had instead joined him outside, though he had stated clearly that he was exile, and would not return to Eirrin. In the morning, he had announced that he would…

He reached the end of the corridor, and was wary anew.

There was no man in view. There was no sound.

With caution, he moved past the stairway that led down to the narrow cul-de-sac of an entry hail. Here had knelt Norse archers; here was the window from whence they’d sped their whistling shafts at himself and Wulfhere and their approaching band of Danes. Now Cormac obtained the same view those Norgeborn bowmen had. He peered without, and caution eased.