Andrew Offutt - The Sword of the Gael

Without another word, Cormac turned and slipped over the side. Samaire was looking back at the Dane, about to say something; Cormac hissed her to silence and Ceann made as if to hand her down. Instead, she swung over the side as Cormac had done, with the splash of one foot. Ceann followed.

They stood there long, watching the moonlit retreat of the Viking craft from the shore, marveling that the one man handled her at all, much less as he did: well and competently. Cord and wood creaked; up went the striped sail. It puffed out in the breeze. The ship scudded northward, to ride as swiftly between Eirrin and Britain as her lone crew could push her.

Ceann sniffed a second before Samaire.

Then the three of them, Eirrin-born, slipped stealthily onto the soil of Eirrin… creeping like thieves in the night onto the sod of their own homeland.

The ocean’s caverns, where armies daren’t go; The mighty cataract of the great Eas Ruadh; The rolling wave of a spring-tide’s flow: Were the meet images of CORMAC’s wrath.

– Ceann Ruadh

It was natural enough that the fisherman and his family were suspicious of a trio that appeared as if from nowhere, and that after dark, and not looking like the fisherfolk that abode along this coast. But Samaire talked persuasively, and Ceann rhymed and played for them. Soon Dond and his family-up late because the day’s catch had been so good-put aside their suspicions. They extended hospitality to the trio; it was the Irish way.

Nevertheless Dond retained some nervousness. Samaire was offered the little shaggy-roofed house for the night. That was all the room there was within, the fisherman said as if reluctantly. The two men were welcome to spend the night in the shed…

Cormac and Ceann accepted with alacrity, understanding Dond’s reluctance to admit them into his home, and it night and them armed.

They watched Samaire enter with Lendabaer, Dond mac Forgall, and his very young but powerfully built son Dondal, and their younger son and daughter, Laeg and Devorgill. The contrast was fantastic, and not just in their colour; Dond and family were of the old dark, black-haired race as was Cormac, while Samaire was red of hair and dusted with freckles. It was not just in her slenderness, either, while Lendabaer had swelled with her birthing five children-two they had lost-and had remained swelled, on a diet of much plentiful seafood and barley-bread and oatmeal and leeks and sallit.

There was the clothing as well, and the bearing Samaire could not disguise. Dond and his son wore the lightest of tunics, the boy’s without sleeves, and lightweight flax-knit leggings or trews that were a thousand wrinkles. Bustling Lendabaer with her rich mass of black hair (bound back with no less than three ribbons, of three several colours) wore a long skirt of dull blue. It flowed from beneath a tunic of unbleached white, with a voluminous apron over that.

Though Samaire was not so tall as five and a half feet, she stood several inches above Lendabaer and was nearly the height of Dond-but hardly that of the early-developing boy of sixteen. Plaited into Samaire’s flaming hair was the ribbon, and a leathern jerkin covered her white tunic. It was belted to drape over the leather leggings she’d worn at the time of her kidnap-and they vanished into the soft, striking boots that rose above her knees and that she had contrived to fasten to her belt with hide thongs.

“She has the look of a warrior about her,” Cormac muttered.

“Every inch,” Ceann said, nodding.

Then the two men saw the family and Samaire disappear into the little house, and they heard the lowering and bracing of the heavy bar across the door. Exchanging a small smile, Cormac and Ceann entered the shed and found places to stretch out.

“Whew,” Ceann commented, and Cormac chuckled.

“Aye, and now ye know, Ceann, why they noted no smell of the sea on us. I’d lay wager that the interior of the house smells no less fishy than this shed!”

Ceann stirred in the darkness. On Irish soil, the two men drifted easily into sleep, despite the hardness of their pallets and the stench of fish and the salt sea.

Cormac awoke. It was still dark. His had not been a life that allowed a man to sleep deeply, and he awoke both easily and swiftly. He sat up. And heard the sound again; a twitching thrashing, accompanied by the faintest of whimpers.

Frowning, he slipped sword noiselessly from sheath and stepped as quietly to the door of the shed. Just outside, he saw the source of the sounds that had, roused him.

It was the dog Flaith, and he twitched and whimpered no longer. From his throat stood a slender wand of wood that had ceased to shudder with his movements. Staring at the arrow, Cormac mac Art needed not step forth to examine it; he knew it was a flint tip that had stolen the dog’s life, and that in moonlit silence.

With the blackness of the shed’s interior behind him, he looked out onto Dond’s moon-splashed land. He saw squat burly figures ghosting silently. They were ringing the silent little house. With an equal lack of sound, Cormac returned into the fisherman’s shed. He crouched beside the sleeping Ceann. He knew not yet what sort of man Ceann was, save that his life had not paralleled his own. Wulfhere said the redhaired prince fought like a warrior born, but-how did he waken?

He was woken this time by two iron hands: one closed on his arm to shake him, the other pressed over his mouth.

The moment he moved, Cormac, bending close, whispered, “It’s Cormac. Be silent. Wake and take up weapons-the house is about to be attacked.”

Ceann tensed, then Cormac felt him nod. He withdrew both hands. Ceann rose quietly. He asked no questions, but bustled. The prince had permanently borrowed himself a scalemail corselet from one of the Vikings on Samaire-heim, as well as a good sword and two daggers, with belt sheaths. The round shield he had worn on his back, like Cormac. Both men, in order to seem less warlike and fearsome, had arrived here wearing tunics and cloaks over their body armour. Nor had they removed aught for sleeping but shields and weapon-belts, and Cormac his helm.

They had just buckled on the broad, sheath-pendent belts and taken up their bucklers when the night air was rent wide by a hellish wolf-yelling that rose from many throats.

“God of my ancestors! What-”

“Picts,” Cormac snapped, brushing past him on his way doorward. “They shriek when they attack. It’s supposed to strike terror to the hearts of their prey, and render them stone-still with fear.”

Ceann saw the other man’s broad shoulders and helmeted head, filling the doorway where it was lined in the moonlight. And amid the din of the banshee-howling Picts arose another battle-yell, a ferocious bellow. The charging Cormac vanished. With a swift jerk of his head to clear it of the awful sounds, Ceann charged after him.

These Picts of the far coast were short and squatty men, powerfully built, with shocks of black hair they often bound with silver fillets. Few wore armour and indeed most had little clothing besides. They were normally armed with flint or bronze; when they bore steel, it was stolen. They attacked in wild beast frenzy, savages that struck and hewed without interest in prisoners or heed for cries for quarter.

Ceann reached the shed door to see them in a dark ring they’d made about the fisherman’s hut, their number surely a dozen. They whirled from their encirclement to meet the man who ran upon them like a flying shadow. His Viking-won shield was up and ready to tip this way or that, and his sword was carried well out to his right side, streaking through the night like a flying ribbon of cloth-of-silver.

The next Pictish cry Ceann Ruadh heard, as he went running after the other man, was not one of those challenges; a shriek of bloody death rose as Cormac’s sword ripped the warrior open. An arrow rang off his helmet and another thudded against his chest just inward from his sword arm. Turned by his good chaincoat, it dropped away-and the nearest of the yelling charging savages fell silently with a death wound under his heart.