Andrew Offutt: The Sword of the Gael

He was a man apart in other ways, his armour different and his hair a swatch of the midnight sky. Grim, stolid with the insouciance of a fighting man who expects neither reward nor punishment but takes what may come from gods and men, his mouth was tightpressed and his scarred face almost impassive. He had nailed himself to the dying craft with his own great sword.

Full two inches into the ship’s wood just aft of the dragon headed prow he had driven that oft-gored blade. Around its hilt he had secured his swordbelt, and to belt and gunwale he clung, with hands like the vises in a smith’s smoky domain.

This man’s slitted eyes were grey as the steel of the blade by which he bound himself aboard. In those eyes there was no fear, no horror-nor yet acceptance, either. Only a certain sadness as his Danish companions died for nought but god-whim, and a waiting. He remained alert and ready to release his iron handed grips and hurl himself into those waves like walls, should the craft break or be driven down into airless realms.

Between two craggy little isles no bigger than the dun-keeps of rich men the frail craft was swept.

Rocky walls rushed by. Instantly the force of the dread gale was quartered by intervening granite. Ten men, left of nineteen, heaved sighs of relief-

But Wolfsail’s mindless speed was great. She burst from that rock-shadowed lee into the open waters once more. Again the angry wind attacked as with a scarlet battle fury. The vessel lurched twenty feet to starboard as if shoved by the hand of a callous giant.

“Ah, NO!” a man cried out, and his nails dug into the ship’s seasoned timber so that the fingers bled. “Pray to your people’s sea-god, Gael! It’s in his domain we’re wind-captured, sure, not the All-father’s!”

The grey-eyed man regarded him without change in his set features. He recalled the seagod of the blue-hilled land he’d long since left, a fugitive. His lips formed that ancient name, though not in prayer, for this descendant of Milesian Celts begged of neither human nor immortal.

“Manannan MacLir,” he murmured.

And then his teeth clamped, hard, for the ship was dashed against the offshore rocks of another isle and wind-rammed up an unknown beach, and Wolfsail had her death therefrom, in a terrible scraping and tearing and splintering of wood.

Strong men flew like dolls clad in glittering steel onto that nameless shore, and were still.

The wind relented and returned to whatever dark lair housed it between the times it drove howling forth to express contempt and hatred for the sons of men.

Like new gold a summer sun burst its cloud-bonds. Sand sparkled on the strand of an unknown island well off the southwestern coast of abandoned Britain. Wind-driven water vanished in vapourous shimmers and the sand paled as it dried. The airy shimmer hovered, too, above the forms of nine prostrate men. Prone or supine or pitifully curled, they lay strewn along the shore where they’d been flung.

The scales and links of battle-scarred armour dried, and heated in the sun. Prostrate men sent back a steely scintillance.

Nine men, lying still.

All were flaxen or red of hair, save the one whose dark mane tumbled from beneath his scarred helmet. All wore armour of good scale mail, save only that one, whose chainmail was forged and linked in the way of Eirrin and Alba to the northeast. All were believers in and followers of One-eyed Odin and his hammer-wielding son Thor or Thunor-save only that one, whose superstitions lay with those of the Druids: The Sidhe of green-cloaked Eirrin, and Agron and Scathach, Grannus and Morrigu the Battle Crow and cu Roi mac Dairi, and Behl of the sun for whom burned the Behl-fires… and great Crom, god of an Eirrin older even that Behl’s power.

All, too, were of the cold land of the Danes, save only that one, and he of Eirrin-and an exile.

It was he who first awoke.

The Gael wakened to the familiar salt scent of the sea. A gull screeked. Lying still, the black-haired man twitched his nostrils in the manner of a wary wolf. He scented nothing of that which was all too familiar-raw, blood. Blinking against the flaming sun and the lingering grogginess of unconsciousness, he squinted open his eyes.

“Blood of the gods,” he muttered. “This be no afterworld, surely-I live!”

Slowly, alert to the flashing pain of broken limb or back or neck, he sat up. There was no flash, but only twinges from a body badly used by the wind. He was whole. Those twinges might have brought moans and lamentations and supine confinement to other men. To him, they were but the boon companions of weapon-men. He was whole; it was enough.

He looked about.

Strewn around him were his companions, lying as they had fallen along a stretch of beach that would have enclosed the house of one of those self-proclaimed “kings” of Britain since the Romans left. A tiny smile tugged at his mouth when he saw the rise and fall of the great barrel that was the chest of Wulfhere Skull-splitter. The giant lived also. Slitted eyes roved; assured their owner that so did all breathe-though there were but seven others.

Before the gale, they had been one and twenty.

He swallowed. There was thirst on him. With a grunt he rose, saw the gleam of his sword, and retrieved it. He wiped it again and again on his sun-hot trews before returning it to the sand; a watery sheath was no more trustworthy than a crowned man.

As he unbuckled belt with pendent sheaths, he looked around himself the more.

Of their ship there was no sign. Dragged back by the wind , he mused grimly, and chased on to be buried in the sea. We are stranded here, then. And… where is “here”?

The sweet sandy shore was a lie. This was a barren and inhospitable speck on the waters, and it would offer little comfort to man or beast. Only the fowls could come and go at will, for aye there were ugly-voiced gulls, and he heard the honk of wild ducks or geese.

And all around: stone. Granite and basalt, igneous rock like petrified sponge, and the sand to which some of it had been worn, by wind and sea with the aid of uncaring time.

He saw how the beach ran up bare and desolate, strewn with drifts and gravel and fragments of rock. Then rose, towering, steep and gloomy ramparts of natural rock, deep-hued basalt. Its somberness was cut here and there with veins of paler lipartite and studded with twinkling quartz, set like jewels against the dark and brooding background.

The Gael compressed his lips. The island was like a great rock wall or giant’s castle, surrounded by shore and a coast that was mostly rocky and precipitous, and then by an enormous protective moat: the domain of Manannan MacLir, the unending sea.

Then a voice rumbled up from a massy chest. “There’s a great drouth in my throat. If this be Valhalla, where be the cup-bearers?”

The Gael was forced to chuckle. He turned to look at the big man, Wulfhere Hausakliufr, who was in the act of sitting up. Already he scratched in his beard:

“I see no cup-bearers, and a Valkyrie I am not, bush-face.”

Wulfhere looked at him. “Cormac! We live!”

The Gael nodded. “We do. And all others breathe.”

Even as he spoke, another stirred. Like Wulfhere, he scratched at the salt encrusting his chin deep within his vermilion beard. “Where are we?”

Wulfhere’s reply was a snort. “Ask the gulls, Ivarr.”

The Gael named Cormac said, “Where are we? Here.”

Ivarr sighed, twisted, shoved himself erect with a palm against the sand. He gazed around himself.

“Ugh and och! Here , is it? I’d rather be there .”

“Ahh… methinks my arm be broke.”

“You are lying on it, Guthrum,” Cormac told that waking Dane. “Stir yourself. It’s a nice sleep we’ve had: the little death. An we find not water, and that soon, it will be the big sleep on us all.”