Andrew Offutt - The Mists of Doom

The fortress called Redrock was a small one, though ringed about with walls of earth and mud so thick that a chariot could have been driven atop them. Within was little more than garrison, stables and barracks, with a well and granary and a few other outbuildings round about the space for assembly and exercise. Forgall was greeted with great cheer, and Cormac knew the man was well liked by those he commanded. They entered, dismounted and swung their horse-weary legs while the big chestnut was led away to be stabled and fed. And Forgall led Cormac in to be housed and fed.

Forgall mac Aed was unstinting in telling the garrison of the heroics of the tall youth beside him, “Partha mac Othna”. Partha was immediately accepted as companion. Smiling, friendly Leinstermen offered food and ale to a fellow weapon-man, and one who indeed had saved their chief. The new comer’s apparent youth was marked and remarked upon; Cormac said little, and laughed when he was called “Parthog,” one of his new comrades attaching the word “youth” to his supposed name. He noted that there were those here but a couple of years older than he, and yet smaller than he. He would pass, a man in deed and a boy in age, among men some of whom were but boys in deeds.

Forgall’s second came to him. This was a not-unhandsome, chesty man with reddish cheeks and huge hands at the ends of long, long arms. Bress mac Keth his name, Bress Lamfhada , Long-arm, his sobriquet. (Cormac learned only later that Bress was called Huge-feet, though not to his broad, reddish, and yet slightly equin face.) Mighty Bress the Warrior was not yet twenty. He wore his red brows in two horizontal arcs that ever gave him a perpetual look of superciliousness and disdain, as though all were less than he and it was condescension to speak of them.

“And how is it ye turn up so deep in Leinster, an Ulsterman none knows? Ah-pardon… an Ulsterboy none knows.” And Bress let his face rearrange itself just slightly into a sort of smile.

“I have told the captain,” Cormac said, and repeated his story with brevity. He forbore to comment on the use of the word “boy.” Bress knew what he’d done this day, and Cormac thought he must be in a testing process. Bress was not a fellow-soldier; he was after all Forgall’s second, and due some respect. And… unhappy?

“Ah. And what does your father up in Ulster, third son of Othna whose brother took his sweetheart?”

“He is the lord Othna, commander of the rath near the borders of Airgialla and Dal Ariada.”

“Ah-is that near Armagh, then?”

“Less than a day north-by-west, afoot,” Cormac said. He was not being tested as a man or a weaponman; Bress was treating him as if he might be some sort of spy! Cormac stood erect. Though longer of arm and thus of sword-reach, Bress was an inch or two shorter than the young man he braced.

“Ah. And ye come claiming to be a noble’s son of Ulster, do ye?” ’

The barracks room had gone silent. Cormac’s jaw tightened. He bethought him of Sualtim and his good advice, and he forced himself to draw and expel a deep breath through his nose. His gaze he kept on Bress’s bluish green eyes.

“I come claiming to be naught but a weapon-man proven, Bress mac Keth, with hunger and thirst on him, and a need of oil for his swordsheath.”

Around them men laughed in a break of tension; Bress did not so much as show his imitation of a smile.

“It is a good answer,” Forgall’s voice called, and he came forward through his men after having conferred with sentries outside. “Nor need Partha mac Othna say more. I vouch for Partha mac Othna, who saved my life. Enough. Arbenn-chatha; no more questions. Our new man is proven and this very day, on the field of battle, not on that of practice.” Forgall arrived at the side of the stiffly standing Bress. “The time is past for us to be abed-we’ve a long trek on the morrow, and daily training after that. Enough talk.”

Bress gave Cormac a look that seemed to promise he thought it not enough.

Cormac wondered if Arbenn-chatha were Bress’s military title. Or had his chief called him “Chieftain of battle” as a chide, since the big redhead seemed bent on picking a fight with the new recruit, or at least challenging him strongly?

What a little man he is , Cormac thought, despite his few years, to be jealous unto truculence of his commander’s attentions to a new recruit!

A man whose name Cormac did not catch led him to a sleeping bench. He spoke quietly.

“Best ye be staying clear of Bress, Partha. It’s a fine fighter the man is, with or without weapons.”

“He does well with his mouth, indeed.” But Cormac spoke just as quietly.

“-with a temper on him as mean as his sorrelhorse hair.”

“An odd choice for Forgall’s second in command,” Cormac observed, wishing there were time to go over his mail-links once more.

“It is possible that Forgall be too easy-going,” the other man said. “Bress is our tempering. He is not well-loved by any I know-but it’s a fighting man he is, who has slain no less than ten times!”

Without comment on his own tally-all in Picts-Cormac nodded. He accepted both information and advice with a nod of thanks, and reclined for sleep.

He was so weary that, once his muscles had relaxed, not even the chorus of snores from his new companions or the ache in his shield-arm kept him long awake.

Chapter Seven:

Mesca and Mocci

The soldiers and new recruits of Forgall mac Aed entered Carman of Leinster under a pearl-hued sky lightened by a waning afternoon sun.

Though Carman was on Leinster’s southern border and the stronghold of Redrock up near the northern, Meathish border, Forgall’s company had spent but one night under the stars. The distance from Leinster’s northernmost point to its most southerly was but forty miles. The kingdom was smaller than Munster, which sprawled to its west and south; smaller than Connacht, smaller even than Mide or Meath, which had been created of parts from the other kingdoms, as an expansion of territory around Tara of the Kings.

Carman was the greatest center of population that fortess-raised Cormac had ever experienced, and he saw little while trying to see everything.

To him the human throng was enormous and exotic. Merchants and close-crowding buildings; well-dressed nobles in pearl-sewn mantles, and yapping dogs; slouching rag-tags and bustling hawkers of this and that merchandise; all merely formed a backdrop. The Connachtish youth’s eyes swerved this way and that to pick out women, and girls, more females in twenty paces than he’d seen in all his life. With fine clothes on them, and clean, curled hair, and paint or dyes to enhance eyes and lips!

The men tramped; Cormac tramped; Cormac stared. An occasional pair of bold eyes stared in return, and girls there were who imparted more swing to their hips, once they’d become aware of the big tall youth’s grey-eyed gaze. Entranced and enchanted, he heard not the babble of a hundred conversations, nor noted the words of the loud-voiced hawkers of goods. He had seen cod and white haddock before, and pig’s and badger-meat, and prawns and scallops and herring, and sloke and dulse, mace and honey, and fragrant little juniper berries his people used for flavouring and seasoning. He had not seen before so many fine-looking members of the opposite sex, and the Conachtish youth was at an age when his interest in females was passing high.

At the permanent military encampment outside the city-a bit too close, Cormac thought, to the city’s main refuse dump into the Slaigne-forsaw to the entry of “Partha” into King Ulad’s service, and to his outfitting. Yes, he could wear his own fine chaincoat in combat, when and if that became necessary. Otherwise, and for dress, the new recruit would wear the same sleeveless coat of boiled leather as his fellows, over their Leinsterish tunics of speedwell blue.