Andrew Offutt - The Undying Wizard

Wulfhere did not so much as twitch.

“Ah, Wulfhere,” Cormac muttered, and his voice caught in his throat. “Damn ye, man… why? ”

Chapter Twelve:

When Companion becomes Lover

Cormac mac Art slumped, lying on his side and breathing through his open mouth.

He stared down and down at the moveless, broken body of him who had been his best friend. But the Gael’s dark, stricken eyes hardly saw that smashed, twisted form that lay over a hundred feet below.

What he saw was behind his eyes. Wulfhere was dead. Cormac remembered all the years with Wulfhere…

There had been the time on dreary little Iona, off Alba’s rocky westward coast. He had been climbing, foolishly and rashly as it fell out. And fell was the word. Tumbling and rolling and flailing, Cormac fell-and Wulfhere Skullsplitter moved his bulk with astonishing swiftness. He broke the Gael’s fall with his own huge body, not without a sore bruising to both men.

“It’s wolf ye are, not goat,” the Dane had said with equanimity, once they were again on their feet. “And do shout out next time ye be of a mind to try such a leap , Gaelic madman… this time I barely moved fast enow!”

Madman , Cormac thought now, and he heaved a sigh. Surely he had just been attacked by a madman.

Why?

Cormac recalled those several occasions on which he had, according to the battle-loving Dane, “cheated” him of his beloved ax-hewing.

“Selfish son of an Irish pig-farmer!” Aye, Cormac could hear the huge man’s grumble even now, chiding him for such as having “slain more than his share,” or silently, savagely striking down foemen ere Wulfhere had reached the scene of sword-reddening combat.

“This world holds no place for a lone wolf, Wolf,” Wulfhere had told him once, off the Isles of Orkney. Aye, and it was a team they’d become.

Cormac remembered a daring raid on Saxon shores. He shook his black-maned head, remembering…

Wulfhere, slipping in a glittering sheet of blood to fall with heels high, had been fair game for a grinning Saxon wielding an ax that rivaled the weight of Wulfhere’s own. In his desperate rush to be there in time, Cormac had been forced to set foot on the fallen Dane’s broad chest in order to drive his blade straight up through the Saxon’s intestines. The man died with his triumphant grin replaced by a look of great surprise. His own momentum bore him down on the Gael’s blade so that its point appeared reddripping at his back. In toppling, the Saxon downed his slayer. Onto Wulfhere both fell. Beneath the two bodies, one quick and one stare-eyed dead, Wulfhere Hausakluifr had groaned.

“Get ye off me, black-eyed Gaelic hog! Think ye that ye be without weight?”

Cormac shoved away the corpse and scrambled off his friend. “It’s your worthless life I’m after saving,” he grumbled, dragging himself to his feet to find none remaining afoot but Danes; he and Wulfhere and their company had triumphed once more.

“HA!” Wulfhere bellowed, grunting his way to his feet. “I merely lay taking my rest, in wait for him! Wouldn’t he have been surprised when I caught his ax in both hands and gelded him with it! And ye had to spoil it, and walk all over me withal! Think ye I be a carpet, Cormac, damn ye?”

“Nay, Wulfhere, only the greatest liar abroad on the Narrow Seas!”

The two battle-reddened men had looked at each other, and about them their crew, men of Wulfhere’s Dane-mark, awaited their countryman’s reaction to that insufferable word.

The tension lasted not long.

Dark, cleanshaven Gael and huge red-bearded Dane were soon both laughing, with the bigger man clapping a ham-like hand to each of the other’s shoulders with force enow to stagger him.

“Liar am I, eh?” Wulfhere Hausakluifr roared. “Blood brother!”

“Blood brother!” Cormac called, and all about them gore-shining blades rose in a delighted Danish hail.

Blood brothers, the dark Eirrin-born Gael and the red-bearded ruddy-cheeked northerner.

Remembering, Cormac bit into his lower lip and sighed again, heavily. He recalled the depth of their relationship, their way of working together… For gold, the two reavers had undertaken to contract their crew to a mission for an unlikely employer: Gerinth, one of the Britonish kings. With care and shrewdness the Gael had worked out his plan. It was beyond Wulfhere’s understanding.

“I am done seeking to reason out your actions,” Wulfhere had growled. And he had acquiesced to Cormac’s plan, which led to battle after gore-smeared battle. A fine scheme it had been-and that fine scheme might well have come to naught without the giant Dane and his flailing ax.

Aye , Cormac thought now. Wulfhere had said the same afore that time, and after. And always he had followed Cormac’s stratagems natheless. But… what mad reason was there now for this action of Wulfhere… his last action?

Cormac stared down twenty times the length of his body at the corpse of the best fighting man, the best companion he had ever known. Misery and despair fell on mac Art. They added their burden to that of foreboding, the menace of resistless vengeance from an unknown sorcerer for reasons no better understood.

Why, Blood-brother?

Cormac turned away, blinking.

Lying there at cliff’s edge, he touched his coil of rope. He considered the ridiculous: to make it fast and clamber down, back-walking the sheer seawall. To what purpose? To twist the blade of self-torturing remorse in himself by looking upon a dead friend?-he felt it sharply enow already. To see the bright too-familiar scarlet of Wulfhere’s life all over those rocks? To look into staring eyes and force himself to tears? To see the face of a dead blood-brother whose blood had all run out? To ask of an unhearing corpse his torturing question… why?

He shook his head. No. Let Bas demand answers of raised corpses. Cormac would not-nor would Wulfhere be rising.

Yet… to let him lie asprawl there so, a huge robust hearty giant of a man now hanging like a bit of sail-cloth caught over stones to dry…

Cormac mac Art ground his teeth. Last night , he thought, I saved him from the sea. Today he tried to slay me. Now it’s back at the sea’s edge he is, and dusk comes soon, and then the tide. From the sea I saved him; on the sea he chose to live; let the sea have him in death.

“Return to the sea, Wulfhere,” he said, aloud, though without looking down again at the Dane. Cormac would look on him no more.

“Cormac?”

Blood of the gods! So distrait was Cormac that he started violently, an unworthy reaction in a man who’d let a Briton serpent wriggle across his prone body not once but twice, on that dusky day when he’d lain in wait for a Saxon raiding party.

He felt himself quiver, and knew what a pitiful state he’d let himself get to, over a friend who had betrayed and attacked him and whose death was none of Cormac’s doing, but the same as suicide-with justice for his last acts.

The voice came again. “Cormac?”

He turned over to peer down into the little alcove of rock that was tunnel’s end. It was darker now, with the sun lower and the sky starting to frown at its leavetaking. He could just see her face, a pale oval as she gazed up at him.

“Cormac!” Samaire repeated, not merely questioning now but in fearful anxiety. “What’s amiss-did I startle you?”

He forced himself to make reply. “A-aye. You… startled me.”

“It’s sorry I am. I heard you speak…”

He frowned. “No, I said nothing.”

“It sounded like, uh, ‘Turn to the sea, Wulfhere.’”

“Oh.” Cormac strove to clear his brain, to adjust to this intrusion on his anguish and to speak normally. “Oh. Spoke I aloud?”