Andrew Offutt - The Sword of the Gael

The ocean and the air round above it were confused, so that waves came rushing and visibly swerved , while the wind howled and changed its direction more swiftly than a bad king’s whims.

The brightness of flame danced on four faces in which the eyes were huge and staring. Never had any of them known the lord of thunder to be so angry, or the god of the sea to be at once so berserk. Now coarse black ash rained into the water in thousands of tiny plops, and Ceann batted away a spinning ball of fire the size of an eyeball.

The flame lowered, while beneath it rasping, grumbling rumbles and deep coughs arose. The wind lessened-

“CORMAC!” Wulfhere bawled.

But Cormac was doing what he knew he must, and that horrorstruck cry of his friend did not deter him or his slicing sword. It fell in a rush driven by iron muscle. Sharp steel edge bit through rope and into the wood of the ship itself.

The sail dropped, its mainline sheared through.

“We’re HELPLESS now!” Wulfhere shouted.

Ahead, the world grumbled and coughed sullenly, and black smoke poured, wildly rolling, through where the gouts of flame had erupted from the sea.

“We were helpless afore,” Cormac snapped back, roughly grasping Samaire’s arm. “Hang on, dairlin girl.” And more loudly: “This way we preserve the sail. An we survive this horror, we’ll need it later! Now-it menaces us more than it aids, for-”

Another tremendous and sky-shattering explosion interrupted him and swallowed his words in its mighty sound. Almost immediately a wave of palpable force came rushing from the new pillar of flame that leaped up from the ocean. Still clinging to Samaire’s arm, Cormac was hurled back against the bulwark-and had he not sought to help the woman and retained his grip on her, he’d have gone over.

The sail flapped, tried to billow this way and that. But now it was no more than an oversized pennon, fluttering loosely from its mast.

The northwest horizon was a curtain of flame and dancing ash and cinders and wheeling, spinning lava missiles that plunged back into the sea from many feet in the air. Ever higher rose the heat. The four seafarers showed sweat on flame-lit faces. Steam hissed and billowed up to join rolling black clouds that fell over on another on their upward climb. There was the odour of rotten eggs in every nostril.

Volcanic eject splashed into the waters. Something pinged sharply off Cormac’s helmet. Seeing it drop into the ship, he moved automatically. Only at the last instant did he remember himself, and use his left hand. Nevertheless he grunted in pain in the second he held that cinder in his wet, hissing hand; he shoveled up the cinder and hurled it into the sea all in one swift motion. Ceann cried out, slapping at his tunic, which smoked.

Then a new shock wave struck, and the mad waves came again. An enormous wave caught them, bore them with it as it raced from the emerging volcano.

The unnamed Viking boat-swung and was driven so swiftly southward that all became a blur to its four helpless passengers. Streaks of golden fire in the night that had seized the sky before sunset, glowing chunks of lava arced. They rained down into the sea-where the ship had wallowed, but seconds before. Black ash blotted the sky and sullied the waves. Cinders were a thick swarm that constantly pocked. the waters as if by a heavy thunderstorm. Behind them the sky glowed like a bloody orange sunrise; all about them was darkness.

On raced the frail boat, borne on a wave sent forth by the cataclysmic vomiting from the deeps. Four people clung with white knuckles to whatever purchase they’d found with scrabbling fingers, and all knew their faces were no less white. All knew, too, that in this gale and rushing wave that bore them along as if they were above the water’s surface, the sail would have been torn in strips like ragged ribbons.

Instead, the sheet Cormac had slashed free streamed out behind them from its mast, a brave striped banner that belied the horror of the fleeing ship’s riders.

Thunder, both a constant rumbling roar and a series of poom -ing explosions, assaulted their ears. They rushed on in a direction opposite their goal, riding a great wave that carried them smoothly as the finest of gaited horses. About them, they felt the air current changing wildly. East- and southward they were hurled, while behind them raged that fiery monster from the floor of the sea.

As if it had not been enough, staring eyes and numbed brains now reported the new menace before them: all beheld the white water about the emergence of some menacing monster of the deeps. Up it came, with water rushing off its back in the four places where that grey and green hide split the sea-and they were swept directly toward it.

“Sea monster!” Ceann muttered, and knew he’d never see Leinster again.

Forty feet separated the first hump from the second, and twenty or thirty from the third. A longship’s length stretched between third and fourth… and Cormac realized of a sudden that it was no living creature he saw.

With cataclysmic convulsions, the ocean’s floor was flinging up more new land!

Up surged those humps of grey rock slimed with green and clumped and shot through with brown and black-and directly toward the emerging island raced the ship. Without sail or workable rudder, it seemed mindlessly bent on smashing splintering destruction.

Closer and closer rushed the first great ridge of new land, and still higher it rose. The distance between it and the second closed swiftly. Frozen with horror as they sped toward doom and sea-graves, not one of the four victims of the sea’s wrath so much as cried out.

But their ship seemed to possess instincts of self-preservation. The vessel shot between the first and second humps, riding high so that there was no rending grate beneath. Four heads swiveled on their necks to see the long new isle, now behind them.

Cormac slouched, his heart surely beating more rapidly than it ever had in battle, and that with the red berserker rage on him. Covered with sweat, he felt weak as a kitten just whelped. His eyes showed him that the others were the same. Even Wulfhere looked like a great doll dropped by some giant’s careless offspring.

The wave that bore them lessened in its power, cut off behind them as emerging land connected the ridges. Now new waves rushed after them. Displaced by the sudden appearance of rocky land, angry foaming water sought new space for itself.

Ahead, they saw the skyglow of sunset, and this time it was the real sunset.

Discovery that their ship was leaking was far from horror; all emotions of that ilk were spent. It was almost jubilantly that they commenced baling with their helmets, for here was a menace that could be met and fended off. Behind them lay power that challenged the gods themselves and made all men less than insects in a hurricane. Sea and wind had threatened and attacked them, and fire and brimstone as well, and then rocky land, so that it was a combined attack by all the elements had been launched against them. And whimsically, by some shrugging natural force or yawning god, they had been spared.

Spared… in a leaking ship… and many many miles off their course.

Chapter Eight: Black Pool of Horror

Monstrum horrendum, infofme, ingens…

– Virgil, Aeneid

Northwest they must go; southward and eastward they had been sent, even after Cormac had struck sail. Now the ship moved on, though not so swiftly, and they baled the long night away. It was just after dawn that they espied the line of islands ahead, so similar to those they had watched rise up behind them. They were all in a line, and closely set, so that they resembled the seven ridges of a great serpent.