Andrew Offutt - The Sword of the Gael

The creature went wild in agony and fear. Stumps and tentacles waved and jerked like hawsers in a hurricane. Cormac was struck, dashed back against the rocky side of the cylindrical pool. He struck back. Again blood spurted from a sliced tentacle. Suddenly, from less than a foot’s distance, he was staring straight into the horrible eye of the monster from a god’s nightmare. He saw the dreadful beak open, as cold, sucker-equipped arms slithered over him.

The desperate Gael drove his dagger straight into the hideous eye until the hilt brought up against cold flesh. Then, grasping a tentacle near its root, he twisted his dagger.

The pool erupted into a maelstrom of convulsive movements. Again Cormac was slammed away. A cable-like arm snapped around his arm, gripped it, whipped away. Another lashed his belly like a thick whip. A third grasped his leg, and held. He was dragged down by the desperately writhing, flailing creature that was surely in the throes of death.

His chest ached and his eyes stung. But the desperate man doubled himself in the water, and seized on the tentacle that held him, and set the Saxon dagger to it. It whipped away before it was severed. Cormac lashed at the water with both arms and both powerfully muscled legs, and shot straight up like a bow-launched arrow.

Again his head splashed free of the water of death, and this time he remained unthreatened. Treading water, he tried to spring upward the few feet necessary to grasp the edge of the well-like hole, for there was no handhold on its smooth walls.

“Cormac! Oh Cormac! ”

Good , he thought; an she can cry out like that, it’s all right the darling girl is!

His hand encountered something cold and slippery, and with a curse he grasped that severed chunk of tentacle and hurled it up over the lip of the pool.

“Ho! What’s this, greeting us first with a scream and now missiles, is it?”

That was Wulfhere’s voice; he knew when to joke, when a man was alive and valorously fighting to remain so. Hardly so accustomed to horror and battle as to make such instant judgments, Ceann shouted his sister’s name in a voice that was more than alarmed.

Then their two heads were between Cormac and the sky. Ceann and Wulfhere gazed down at him and Samaire.

“I fare well,” Samaire said, before her brother could ask.

Obviously Cormac was too, and Wulfhere shook his head lugubriously. “When ye’ve a mind for a swim, old friend, why not make certain ye can come ashore again before you go plunging in?”

“Wulfhere, I am going to add your severed tongue to that monster’s arm I threw forth-but it’s slowly I’ll be slicing it off ye!”

Wulfhere affected to look extremely shocked. “In that event I’d be a fool to aid ye!” he said, and pushed a huge hand down to Samaire.

She put up her own, which was swallowed in a paw with fingers like ropes of steel. With one hand, and that not with a jerk, the Dane drew her up and out of the pool.

“Why, it’s an octopus ye’ve found,” Wulfhere called down. “Oh Cormac-have ye any idea what marvelous eating they are, man? Here, if you be unharmed and unattacked, then ye’ve killed him-do you dive down and bring him up to us, there’s a good Cormac!”

“Ceann-it’s your hand I’d appreciate the loan of,” Cormac said.

A minute later he was out of the monster’s lair and on rocky land that felt very warm, and more than passing good to the soaked mac Art.

“It’s possible we could make a meal off these,” Wulfhere said conversationally, as though his friend was not spattered with gore and the creature’s black ink of defense, and gasping as well. “But methinks they might be a bit muscular and stringy-”

“Wouldn’t ye consent to go back for it, Cormac? How deep is this black pool of brack, anyhow?”

“Tell me,” Cormac said, swinging both feet against Wulfhere’s legs, “when you come up with our supper.”

With a great splash, the Skull-splitter went flailing into the pool.

Ceann looked horrified, as indeed he had all along, despite the obvious safety of his sister and friend. It was Wulfhere’s attitude had so dismayed this young king’s son; he had participated in little violence and never known the jocular camaraderie of those who’ve faced death together many times.

But Samaire laughed, and once Wulfhere came up spluttering and began launching a volley of highly imaginative curses at them, Ceann Ruadh, too, smiled.

Then Wulfhere dived. Nor did he emerge without the dead beast with its dragging tentacles and stubs. They soon discovered its great weight, once they tried to pull and push it out of buoyant water. With much grumbling, Cormac at last returned to the pool, wherein he and Wulfhere carved up the slain monster and passed up to the others what the Dane insisted on calling steaks .

The creature had been in its deep rocky lair, they decided, when this island had broken loose and been pushed to the surface. As they had surmised, the land on which they stood had not been long above the water. But how had it survived?

“Mayhap there were fish and the like in the, uh, well with it,” Ceann offered, “and they came up along with the beast.”

“Possibly a few,” Wulfhere said, shaking his head. “But we all noted that while Cormac could remember having severed three of its tentacles, the creature had three remaining; two others were missing, and the wounds hardly fresh. My mother’s cousin once had one of these man-arms, which her husband Ivarr brought her. Even though she fed it well-on shellfish, in the main-it ate off three of its own tentacles in less than a year.”

“Poor beast,” Samaire murmured, looking down at the hacked-off pieces of the monster that had sought to make a meal of her. “To exist, it ate of itself-and now we’ve blundered upon it and here it lies, all its efforts for nought.”

“And that’s your feeling, daughter of an addle-pated chicken, it’s leaving ye I’ll be doing next time, and not wetting myself in your rescue.”

She looked at Cormac with a stricken expression, but he was smiling.

It was then that Ceann Ruadh remembered, and pointed out that they had no wood with which to make a fire for the creature’s cooking.

And it was then that Cormac mac Art shoved Wulfhere Skullsplitter back into the pool.

O land of my birth, what a pride, what a

pleasure

To plow the blue sea!

The waves of the fountain of deluge to measure,

Dear Eirrin, to thee.

– Ceann Ruadh, the “Minstrel-king” (from Voyage of the Exiles )

It had been many days since Samaire of Leinster had been kidnapped off her own coast, and that in riding togs. A strip of green ribbon from the Vikings’ spoils held her hair back and was laced among the red-orange tresses. But there had been no other makeup available.

Both the men and the women of Eirrin wore their hair long, and both wore jewelry. Brooches held the clothing together; torcs of gold or silver decorated the neck, seeming to writhe about it. Both sexes spent much time on their hair, braiding, creating spiral curls, in the case of the women, that dangled profusely-or binding up the hair, to be held in place and decorated by gold rings and pins. Women of more leisure buffed their nails and frequently dyed them crimson, while occasionally using dyes of this and that vegetable base to tint their faces. Eyebrows were nearly always dyed black with berry juices, whether the woman was blond or redhead or brunette.

Though they had no octopus “steaks,” Samaire did make use of the inky stuff the creature exuded in its alarm: she darkened her brows. And was advised by two of her companions that she gave off the odour of fish. (Wulfhere’s unexpected and heretofore unknown galantry forbade him to make mention of the fact.)