Andrew Offutt - The Sword of the Gael

Cormac knew them all. His sweeping sword had parted Sigrel’s head from his shoulders, and that a year ago; and into Arslaf’s throat had bloodily plunged Cormac’s point but a few months gone, to send the man to his people’s Valhalla; as for the short, dark Pict, Cormac knew not his name but recognized the stocky man by the Roman belt he wore-and had worn nigh two years ago, when Cormac had sliced away his sword-hand and sundered the Pict’s heart with his dagger.

They… are all dead! These be dead men, to have their second chance with me!

Cormac’s skin prickled anew, and his black mane stirred as his nape writhed; for a moment his bones sought to become unbaked dough. But he shook it off with a jerk of his head and a hunch and twist of his shoulders. Up came his sword.

“Ha, Sigrel! Long since we met, son of a wanderlust mother, and how is it you have set your head again on your craven shoulders?”

Sigrel did not answer the challenge with words, but laughed hollowly-and rushed the Gael, sword swinging aloft.

Rather than stand his ground to await that ferocious charge, Cormac rushed forward to meet it. His sword he held extended, rather than broad-cutting. Its point plunged, with a grating of its flat on the buckle of the man’s broad belt, into Sigrel’s belly. At the same moment Cormac’s left hand rushed up. The edge of his shield caught the other man’s swift-descending wrist with bone-cracking impact.

With his sword wrist broken and more than a hand’s length of steel in his belly, Sigrel was brought to a halt. But again he vented that hollow laugh that sounded as though it came from the pits of the Hel of his people.

It did, Cormac realized, and he knew then that the purpose of the woman had been to slow him; so too, was the attack of these three. For they were all dead men, and what he saw were only Cutha Atheldane’s illusions, sent to terrify or, failing that, to slow his pursuer.

Cormac laughed. “Och! Get hence and back to the land of eternal shade, all of ye-I have business beyond you!” And he charged, to and through and past them.

Nor did he glance back to see them vanish.

Dust flew and the slap of his footsteps resounded from those walls hewn from stone time out of mind, as he raced down that dreary hallway. Whence came its twilight he did not know. Nor did the insouciant Gael question that there was light, however dim. He knew the power of the Druids, and he was no sneering “civilized” Roman to scoff at the preternatural. He knew of its existence.

Where was mighty Rome now, but beneath the heels that followed those of its Gothic sacker, Alaric?

The appearance of the huge green serpent slowed him, even brought him up short. But it struck no terror to his heart, though its size was prodigious. Its jaws, when it opened them to emit a hiss that was like that of a green log on a hot fire, gaped wide enough to encompass his head. Far behind, its tail twitched.

“By the blood of the gods! Another one!”

It angered the Gael that he felt sweat in his palm, and he flipped his sword to his shield-hand. Wiping his right hand on his trews, he returned the gaze of eyes that were black slits set vertically in gleaming pupils like new flax.

“So now it’s a serpent the length of three Cormacs and thick as his arm, is it!” he called, and the sound of his voice was good. Sweat and gooseflesh evaporated together. “Well, shade-creature, illusion born… get hence! It’s your master I’ve business with!”

The snake was ahead and leftward. Cormac strode forward, breaking into a run, past the outsized reptile on its right.

Thus did Cormac lose his iron-bossed shield, and very nearly the arm that held it.

As it was, that arm was wrenched and sore-bruised. It jerked up with the automatic response of a fighting man, when the serpent moved. It lunged at him, a streak of sleek seagreen hide. The whipping, whirling loop of its body it threw to envelop the man slammed against his interposed shield, and with more force than a man-swung ax.

The shield was ruined, badly bent. Its owner was hurled against a wall of earth hardened by centuries to the consistency of stone. His shield-strap had badly gouged his arm, which quivered violently and sent pain-messages on crimson trails to his brain.

Another message, too, his brain registered: this time his foe was no illusion!

A second sweeping loop of that very real attacker’s body came flipping sinuously at him, with rushing speed. Wallowing in the floor’s dust against the wall, Cormac again whipped up his shield. A groan was torn from his throat as the stout buckler was wrested from him-and the leathern strap tried to slice through his arm. Then the leather gave, and tore. The shield went flying with a clatter.

An instant later, Cormac’s sword-arm was pressed close to his body by a tubular coil of reptilian muscle that looped around arm and chest. The coil was thick as the man’s upper arm, and just as powerfully muscled. But it was prehensile as well, a great curling crushing rope of flexible steel. It tightened. Another loop took his right leg when he tried to kick. It tightened.

Just as the woman-illusion had said, Art of Connacht was about to be joined by his son Cormac in the afterworld-and that but seconds hence..

There was no time for thinking. It was warrior’s reflexes that forced Cormac’s lungs full of air and expanded his chest many inches; that strained his right arm away from his body with all his might-though it moved not a centimeter; that sent his left hand rushing to his hip. There hung his dagger, a seax-knife he had of a dead Saxon.

In less than a half-minute, the desperate man drove his dagger seventeen times into the column of muscle that was the serpent’s body. Its blood spurted over him, and it was cold to his skin. Since the days of the serpent-men that preceded Kull’s reign over Atlantis and sought his red death, the warm-blooded rulers of the earth had abhorred snakes and all their ilk. No exception were the men of Eirrin, where no serpent had ever wriggled. Cormac’s shudder was completely involuntary, an ancient atavistic reaction. He stabbed.

The tightening coils forcing his arm into his body and the air from his lungs, Cormac mac Art began to die.

Even then, weirdly, he wondered why the sons of men ever said that one attacked or slew or died in cold blood. For only here, in this abhorrent thing that had owned the earth before was spawned the race of man, only in its monster body did the blood run ever cold.

He stabbed. He stabbed the more. His mailed arm flashed up and down like the wing of some giant hummingbird. Steel bit, and drank deep, and serpentish blood oozed and spurted, and splashed-and the last six feet of that body lashed wildly.

“Agonized, pain-crazed, the creature sought to gulp its prey even before it crushed him to the easily-swallowed red pulp it preferred. The head flashed down. Great jaws gaped.

Cormac’s arm, whipping up for another stab, slammed up under the creature’s jaw. The arm and its momentum were powerful enough to knock that fearful head aside, with jarring pain to attacked and attacker. Then attacked became attacker. Twisting his wrist, Cormac drove his dagger up into that lower jaw with such force that the point of the blade ripped bloodily through the upper jaw, between the creature’s eyes.

The son of Art hardly knew what happened, then.

It was as though the world was quake-shaken. Cormac was jerked upward. He lost all equilibrium, all sense of up and down as he was whirled in air. A heavy groaning grunt escaped him when his back was slammed, not against the wall but the ceiling of that tunnel made by man and ruled by reptile. Yet that he’d been able to grunt was a gaining; the serpentine grip had loosened!