Andrew Offutt: The Sword of the Gael

“A spear!” Tigernach cried, dragging it forth as he rose to his feet. “The Druid has an untipped SPEAR beneath his robes!”

The one he exchanged with one of those nine, for this one in my shield, his staff , Cormac thought, now scant yards from the spearmen.

And then one of their number broke and ran.

Those around him were too astonished to react. But the man had only begun to run, while there was another already amove. Seven steps the spearman took, and Cormac eleven in the same space. Cormac’s buckler crashed to earth and the impact dislodged the spear. Its long tapering point of steel shone in the sun for all to see. Two more steps the fleeing man took, and two more his pursuer, through and beyond the other spearmen and the two guards. Then it was with both hands Cormac mac Art drove the tip of his hazel staff into the middle of the man’s back. His body arcing, the fellow was hurled forward.

Seconds later he was on his back, groaning at the pain in its center. Across his throat lay Cormac’s stave; on one end of that slim staff he set his foot. With a feral fire in his dark eyes, the intended victim looked down at him he assumed was the intended assassin.

“The spear ye exchanged for the Druid’s false staff, a war-spear, and none was to know who’d sped the deadly one. But it’s caught ye are, and it’s I who’ll save ye from torture. Speak swiftly who promised you gold for my blood, or it’s both feet I’ll set on this stick, roan, and it’s your adam’s apple ye’ll feel squirting out of your mouth.”

The downed man stared up at him. His face was pale and his eyes wide with the fear on him.

Cormac moved his left leg, and the other caught the movement.

“STOP HIM!” a voice bawled, from behind Cormac. But Cormac was preoccupied. He stared down at the treacherous spearman at his feet.

“B-” the fellow began, and licked his lips. “Bress o-of the Long Arm… spare me!”

Then his eyes went even wider. He was looking past the vengeful man who stood over him, and warrior’s reflexes hurled Cormac aside without his knowing what danger he avoided. The fallen man’s eyes were warning enough.

For the second time the steel-shod spear intended for Cormac mac Art missed him. This time it plunged into the belly of the man on the ground. The Druid who’d snatched it up had intended impaling Cormac from behind, but was unable to stop when his target moved. In and in went the steel point, and scarlet bubbled up around it.

Then Tigernach, racing in the Druid’s wake, arrived, and struck. His sword sundered cloth and flesh and bone. Blood gouted.

The Druid fell across the body of his fellow conspirator, at the feet of the man they had sought to slay. Thus did Mogh, Druid of Leinster, receive his payment for treachery and journey to the realm of Midir, king of the land of the dead.

Chapter Twenty-two:A Free Man of Eirrin

Until the shining sea is surmounted,

Which the gods have created above all else,

No man from north to south shall surpass

CORMAC MAC ART, chief among warriors.

– Cethern of Tara

Bress mac Keth, called Bress of the Long Arm, was nowhere to be found in Tara. Nor did his royal lord profess to know aught of the man’s whereabouts or his plots.

“An he has returned to your demesne, my lord king,” the High-king asked, “will ye send him back under escort to answer queries and charges?”

“Captain Bress is a Leinsterman, my lord king,” Feredach said. “It’s in Leinster and by Leinstermen he’ll be questioned, be assured.”

“He is accused of crime in Tara of Meath-and the man he sought to kill was a ward of the Assembly-of all the kings, and of the High Throne!” Erca told the other, with heat he sought but little to control.

“It is in Leinster,” Feredach pointed out, “that this ward of the High-king is wanted, my lord, on a charge of murder twelve years old.”

Two pair of royal eyes stared each into the other, and Erca Tireach ground his teeth together behind tightpressed lips.

“He is cleared, King of Leinster, by kings assembled and by trials physical as well!”

“It is possible,” Feredach said, leaning a bit forward, “even for a High-king to go beyond himself, to get himself into water too deep for his ability to tread it. Whoever Cormac mac Art is, Partha mac Othna belongs in Leinster! And so, noble Lord, do Leinster’s prince and princess.”

“I can swim,” Erca mac Lugaid said, and the bargain was rejected, the interview ended.

Leinster’s lord left surly and returned to his demesne. Whether Bress accompanied him in concealment or had gone before was not known. But none among those who discussed the matter in Tara thought Bress had fled elsewhere. They pieced it together, the High-king and his close adviser Cethern, with Cormac and Prince Ceann, aye and Princess Samaire too, for in Eirrin women were not chattel chained to cookstove and distaff. Nor did she wear the primrose of Leinster on her.

The former champion of Eirrin had been defeated by a returned exile, and had then put disgrace on himself by attacking the proclaimed victor in berserker rage. And after…

“It’s not friends we were, in the long ago,” Cormac said. “His rage must have been deep as the sea when he learned who it was had put defeat on him!”

“And shortly after that,” Samaire said, “he learned that his king had no reason to love ye, and had himself been defeated and humiliated at Feis Mor.”

“And so Bress, or someone in Bress’s pay, sought to strike you down in the woods,” Ceann said, “with an arrow from ambush.”

“And missed,” Cormac said.

“Because you tripped,” Samaire reminded him. Cormac gave her a look and received a smile that as sweetness itself.

Cethern saw but saw not; he was silent and thoughtful.

Erca Tireach missed their eye-play; he was looking with narrowed eyes at the wall opposite. “And so Bress somehow enlisted the aid of a Druid-a Druid! ” he added with a jerk of his head, for if one could not trust the priests of the ancient religion, and even then with one who acknowledged their faith and not that of the new god, where was there left that in which to place trust?

“Aye,” Prince Ceann said quietly, “a Druid. A man with the power of sorcery, or of influencing men’s minds that their eyes see that which is not there-”

“Where’s the difference?” his sister asked sensibly.

“Or to see nothing at all!” Cormac said, and almost he smiled. For now it was over, and he had both passed the test and survived the death-plot. He’d come far, to sit now in such high company.

“And they in turn found a man who liked the gleam of gold well enough to accept the steel-shod spear, and hurl it for them,” Ceann was saying on. “Unfortunately, both are dead and we cannot question them further.”

“We have it all,” Cormac said. “What further is there to ask?”

The High-king of Eirrin looked at him. “That which it is unseemly to think or say,” he said, in a voice so low as to be but a whisper.

“I will say it,” Samaire told them all. “We might have asked the one or the other what we must now wonder about. Whether Bress acted on his own-or whether he was himself paid to murder… or ordered to do!”

Poet, judge, and adviser, Cethern spoke almost in accusation. “It is of your own brother you speak, my lady, and him king in Leinster as well.”

Samaire met his gaze, looked into the eyes that were said to have melted the knees of men. “Aye,” she said. “So it is.”

That brought a sombre quiet down upon them like the fall of night. They sat in silence, poet and weapon man and royalty, reflecting upon a man who had slain his brother for his crown and sold his sister and younger brother into the hands of the barbarous men of Norge.