Andrew Offutt - The Undying Wizard

A few minutes later Cormac mac Art stood atop what a swift sweep of his slitted eyes assured him was the highest point on the isle Wulfhere had named Samaire-heim.

Samaire-heim possessed neither the beauty nor warmth of its namesake. From Cormac sloped away a lifeless plain of granite and igneous rock. The sprawling desolate plateau showed the wearing of relentless time only by the dark shadows of pockmarks and small eruptions of harder stone that had resisted the weathering.

A desert of rock it was, and it mocked him with a taunting dead silence.

Glints in the rays of the lowering sun fixed the castle’s location for him. He knew those glittery reflections marked the bronze projections set high up on the walls of the keep. From his feet this broad mesa sloped down to that point and flanked the valley that sliced through it. Studying, he tried to calculate. The distance between himself and the castle, he judged, might be just under that measurement the Romans had named after their own marching legionaires: a mile .

The roof of the world, Lugh Man-hunter had said. Lonely and desolate that roof, a bleak plain unmarked by the green of life.

Aye, Lugh , Cormac mused, and if so, this spot marks the edge of the world! And it’s nigh flat the top of the world is, and the world no more than two of those Roman miles long and perhaps one and a half across. And surrounded by water! Aye, and with but one valley, like a slice out of the middle of a loaf of bread.

Almost he smiled. It was an interesting concept, but one for poets and philosophers. He heard the call of a wild goose and saw it flapping over the “roof of the world.” Behind him, a soaring waterfowl screeked as if in reply.

Another sound from behind and below attracted his attention. He forgot the birds. Cormac spun, sword scraping out, and looked down. But he saw nothing, and had to step to the very edge of the cleft in order to peer down into the little rocky alcove.

Below, obviously having just emerged from the tunnel, a huge red-bearded man was looking up at him.

“Wulfhere! What-why be ye here, man?” “Seeking a hand up,” Wulfhere said, stretching up a brawny arm.

Chapter Eleven:

When Friend becomes Foe

First passing up ax and shield, a helmeted and mailcoated Wulfhere took the hand of his old comrade. With a few grunts on both sides, two and a half hundred pounds of Danish giant joined Cormac on the island’s very summit.

“Now why came you here, Wulf, other than to strain my arms?”

Wulfhere bent to pick up his buckler and slide it onto his arm, then he fetched up the great ax. Its thick helve matched the length of his arm; its head was nearly twice the size of his hand.

“Not the ax ye took from our Briton friend on the strand,” Cormac observed, “nor yet the one ye plucked up from the floor in the castle. It’s fickle ye grow in your declining years, O drinker of overmuch Briton ale!”

Cormac’s scarred, dark face had just commenced to form one of his almost-smiles. It died there as he called on battle-born reflexes to hurl himself away from the edge of the giddy precipice-and away from the rushing ax of his friend.

Cormac hit the ground and rolled. Without terminating the rolling movement, he came to his feet as smoothly as flowing water. And somehow, nearly exceeding the possible, his sword was in his hand. He much regretted having slipped his shield off his arm to aid Wulfhere’s climb.

“ Wulfhere! Has all sense of humour fled ye too , man?”

The Dane’s only reply was in the form of motion. Already charging after the other man, he was bringing his ax back across in a new sweep to cleave Cormac in twain.

Too late for Cormac to adopt a favourite tactic and lunge forward within the sweep of the whizzing ax. Too late to parry or duck; he drove down with his right leg to hurl himself in the same direction as the ax’s swing. He heard death whish through the air as it rushed past his head. Cormac kept moving. Swinging back, squatting and rising all in a single fluid movement while his gaze remained on the big man, he snatched up his shield.

“I put down this shield to aid up my best friend , man! Wulfhere! STOP! What are ye DOING, man?”

Cormac’s voice slapped hollowly out across bare rock mesa and the darkling flatness of the sea. It seemed to echo from the thick broad form of Wulfhere Hausakluifr too; certainly voice and words had no other effect. Even while he brought his ax from its rightward-terminating backswing, the Dane was rushing forward to crush and overwhelm his chosen foe with silent ferocity.

Cormac backed, watching, thinking rapidly.

Cormac mac Art had never fought this man. He had battled beside Wulfhere, though, for several years. Each had saved the life of the other far more than once, directly and indirectly in the swift-moving matter of immeasurable seconds, split instants.

Lean and wiry, Cormac fought with swiftness-and brain. He observed even those who were his allies. He knew Wulfhere’s fighting methods. He knew the mighty ax-swing that must be arrested by the arm that guided it, knew the almost inevitable looping backswing, lower, curving upward, during which the outsized man covered himself with heavy buckler. Occasionally he exerted some little offensive efforts with that buckler; seldom were they more than reflexive, defensive movements of his left arm until his right could launch its attack anew. He had seen, too, the way Wulfhere closed with opponents; seen him bowl them over with the momentum of his bullish charges. Backed by gigantic height, great bulk, and tremendous strength, those closing charges were irresistible.

Wulfhere fought as he was constructed. Wulfhere Skull-splitter of Dane-mark was not a thinker; he was animal, he was brute strength, he was nigh onto indefatigable and thus undefeatable.

But not, Cormac hoped, irresistible and undefeatable by a man who knew how he fought!

Though unusually tall, Cormac was a lean man whose musculature did not bulge, but flowed sinuously to knot here and there in stress. Like steel wire his muscles were, and yet, at the same time, fluid . Cormac’s strength was great, shocking, because he knew how to use it.

The Gael’s way was to hew and stab, aye, but not to seek to overwhelm. He pounced and struck, and was away and back again in seconds, like the gaunt wolf that was his namesake. There was no way his size could overwhelm a foeman, save in his reach; he fought viciously, and that overwhelmed. Nor could Cormac be bothered with what some called “civilized fighting.” Battling for one’s life could not, to him, be bounded about with rules. Thus with wooden sword and light buckler he had shocked his opponents in contests in Eirrin, and thus defeated them to become champion, but a month gone by.

He was a man who battled with sword or dagger or ax… and shield , and knee and foot and rush. Strike and sweep and thrust, smash and delicately stab and withdraw; all were within his unwritten book of combat. He was the consummate fighter, in whom a barbarian leapt to the fore when he faced a death-bringing antagonist. On more than one occasion Wulfhere had avowed that his Gaelic friend had no specific style at which to point.

And Cormac was intelligent.

If he had a rule, it was a simple one: learn swiftly from successes and from errors, so as never to make the same mistake twice. He had become, in this the year the Christians were calling four-hundred eighty-eight or ninety, or ninety-one or -two, the most terrible of warriors: an intellect-backed barbarian of great strength, shocking swiftness, and few scruples; in combat, he had none.

These attributes Cormac mac Art was now forced to pit against the brutish strength and attack of his friend and longtime fellow reaver. With awful silent ferocity, Wulfhere charged him.