The Tower of Death

CHAPTER TEN: Night of the Demon-Weed

The day came, and went again, and Cormac and Wulfhere went down to the sea.

Cormac chose his men and Wulfhere his. They disagreed only over Hugi the Nimble, whom they both wanted. With little grace Wulfhere agreed that orange-moustached Hugi was of more use to mac Art than to his shipmaster. The swift beardless Dane, rangy as Cormac though shorter by a hand’s breadth, joined the Gael and those others he’d chosen to accompany him in this night’s vigil and work.

“A fine afternoon for a little rowing!” a man called out.

Though negative sentiments and indeed thoughts were infrequent visitors to his mind, Wulfhere quoted Father Odin Himself: “Praise not the day till evening has come.” He looked at Cormac. “Methinks it will storm.”

Cormac glanced skyward. “The sky is clear enow.”

Wulfhere rubbed his backside. “My butt says otherwise, and you know how dependable this old ham-wound is.”

“Would ye be waiting for another night?”

“No.” And with six-and-twenty men besides himself, the redbearded giant mounted into Raven. He stood dolorously studying the distant sky while his crew took twenty-foot oars from their holding forks and went to their seats. Ashore at the edge of the quay, Cormac watched while each stout wooden oar-blade was threaded into its narrow slot and dropped into the little oar-port.

Wulfhere turned, and he and Cormac stared at each other. Both men nodded. Then Wulfhere signalled, and oars dipped and pushed and lifted, and Raven began easing backward from shore. Her hawkbeak and gunwales rode high in the water, despite the sea-anchors: each rope-bound stone was of such size that two men had carried it aboard, with grunts and a smashed fingertip.

Cormac glanced up along the coast. There stood Zarabdas, in woollen tunic and leggings of plain midbrown, buskins gaitered to the knees, and a cloak of dark blue. It hung still and straight and square-hemmed from the Roman clasp at his shoulder: no breeze stirred. To hand by him were two torches well-oiled, and flint and steel for their lighting. This night the Palmyran would see for himself what befell.

Cormac looked on his four companions.

Hugi the Nimble in his leathern jerkin sewn with armour bosses of whorl-dited bronze that did not quite touch each other, and armed with his short-hafted ax and the sword he had of a Roman cavalry officer who should have stayed ashore; Gudfred Hrut’s son, who with his massy helmet, full beard, and sweeping mustachioes-and small nose-seemed little more than a pair of lake-grey eyes under a black helm and separated from his half-sleeved coat of overlapping steel scales by his russet beard of a thousand curls; burly Edric in his captured Roman helmet with visor all esthetically tooled in blackened silver and the scalemail coat his own mother had years agone enameled with blue; was about half sky-blue and half steel-grey now, from years of serving its purpose. And there was Hakon Snorri’s son, in steel-stripped coat of boiled black leather and unadorned helmet of three steel bands around a cap of leather lined with sponge. He’d a three-inch scar down forehead and cheek, Hakon had, that was white-pink and commemorated a sword-stroke that had missed his eye by less than the breadth of his smallest finger.

Each man bore a good round shield of linden-wood rimmed and bossed with dark iron, arm- and hand-strap within and chipped paint on its face. (Indeed on Gudfred’s shield only chips remained of the scarlet paint that had once covered it, so that his buckler had a blood-flecked look about it.)

Hugi alone wore sheathed sword; the others carried the more common ax with two-pound head and haft just over a foot’s length. Each wore leathern leggings and boots rather than gaiter-strapped buskins. At the hip of each hung a broad-bladed long dagger; the hilts of three curved into dragon-heads while Edric’s was a large, plain knob of night-blue iron. He and Hakon Shorri’s son bore another dagger in addition; Hakon could throw a knife true as a sped arrow. Only Gudfred was not red of hair, for at two-and-thirty he’d gone grey as the cairnstones of his own Dane-mark. All were cloaked, and two of those brooches were of solid gold while the head of’ Hugi’s brooch-pin was capped with a rough-cut sapphire. Piracy were not all unpleasantry.

The four looked back at Cormac mac Art: tall and rangy the Gael was, deceptively strong and beloved for his craftiness; steel-eyed and jet-haired, a man nigh as likely to use his sword daggerishly as to slash and cut. His mailcoat was in the style of Eirrin, not theirs; thousands of quintuply-linked circles of steel formed it and each was separately welded. He wore no decor; the Celtic torc about his strong neck and the bracer on his right wrist could not be considered such. Young was Cormac mac Art though old his eyes and scarred his face, which was darker than any Dane’s and not with their ruddiness. He scraped his face daily, when not asea.

As Wulfhere was the bull capable of smashing through the side of a barn, Cormac was the wolf who craftily plotted and sought out the quieter, less dramatic entry.

Without a word, the wolf turned and walked along the stone-sided quay to the beacon-tower. Without a word, his pack followed.

Their spears they left at the tower’s base, beside its heavy door. And they went in, and up, and up.

Cormac had deemed it wise to man the tower with but the five of them. More men might well hinder each other’s movements. The light-chamber was hardly spacious. He and his companions were hemmed about by a goodly supply of prepared lime in sealskin bags, and two stacks of faggots soaked in animal grease, and the table with flint and steel and closed oil-lamp. And there was the beacon, and its platform against the niche of a window through which it shone.

Doffing their cloaks, five men piled them in a corner.

Peering out, Cormac saw Wulfhere standing out well offshore and his men still pulling their oars. Zarabdas was just visible, standing where on yesterday Cormac had sat. Though now their gazes met, he and the Gael exchanged no sign. Cormac turned back to his men. They went again through his plan, assuming that there would happen that which he expected.

They waited.

Well out on the water, Raven waited. A stout rope ran taut over either side to trail down into the dark water, bound to the huge stone serving as sea-anchor. They waited.

The sky went pink and lavender and grey. Orange suffused the horizon, and darkened. The sun crouched, was halved by world’s edge, and sank from sight. They waited. A breeze stirred. Looking out and below, Cormac watched the formation of sea-clouds: creeping, shifting fog, white shading to pearly grey. It seemed to finger out from the shore, reaching for Raven. Gradually it enshrouded the base of the tower, though to no great height.

The sun was gone. Cormac and Hugi lit the beacon. And they waited.

“My eyes see only grey,” Cormac said, turning from the beacon-window. His pupils were huge from his staring attempts to see aught amiss out there in the fog. “Hakon?”

Hakon took up the watch, and they waited. “See ye nothing, Hakon?”

“The fog shifts and shifts, unfortunately. Only that. Stars twinkle. The moon comes.” Hakon squeezed his eyes shut and knuckled them. “Ah that I had the eyes of Heimdallr!”

“Gudfred,” Cormac said. “Your watch.”

Gudfred took Hakon’s place and they waited, and he watched, and heartbeats thumped away minute after minute.

“We should have brought a game-board,” Edric said, in his voice that was so oddly high for all his burliness.

Outside, the breeze stiffened. It murmured, now. Far off, thunder sounded in a long rumble.

“Listen to Sleipnir gallop!” Edric said, and at the window Gudfred looked up as if to see Odin’s eight-legged mount. Cormac remembered Wulfhere’s boding ham.

“I am thinking of a thing,” Hugi said, beginning a game, “and it is blue and grey.”

“A gull,” Hakon guessed.

“It comes,” Gudfred said.

His voice quivered, and no man thought he meant a gull. The game was stillborn. Bored men came to life. They scrambled.

Like weird slender serpents rising from the sea, all twitching and dripping, that unnatural seaweed came. They saw it slither across the wet rocks in a way to make strong men shudder. Coming, coming to the attack. It appeared and disappeared amid tenuous wisps of fog that was never still. The door below was secured. They waited, while the unearthly kelp explored.

Then, like the natural process of climbing ivy or runner-beans, save that this climbing was incredibly swift, the seaweed came up the side of the tower. It was coming for them, and they crowded together to watch. It clung and ascended by means of its many sucking orifices, while they stood tight-jawed with prickling napes, and listened to its wet vinaceous rustle.

Up the wall came the vampire seaweed, unfazed by the wind that blew now harder.

“It is here,” Cormac said, backing, and then all of them saw the first greenish-brown tendrils, waving at the windowsill like the antennae of some huge insect.

Hugi jerked open the door. Each man of them caught up a bag of quicklime and descended the steps at a trot. At the lower door Hugi set aside his sack and his Roman spatha slipped from its oiled sheath without a sound. Sword ready, he opened the door.

Like a sentry, a runner of finger-thick seaweed lay there on the great flat-cut stone. It reared as if to glare eyelessly at them, and started within.

Though his nostrils quivered and his hair prickled beneath his helm, Hugi pounced over it, curveting like a high-spirited horse. From behind thus, he hewed three feet of kelp from its main trunk. Only sap oozed. Hugi stood with sword ready to do battle for them while his four companions emerged with their burdens. They hurried around the tower to where the eerily mobile seaweed rose up from the ocean and slithered up the stones. Every man squinted against wind and sea-spray.

They poured quicklime all about the base of the tower and over the trembling plant runners there.

The wet kelp sizzled and twitched trembling, then trembled more violently as the quicklime burned, and burned. Fumes rose to ride the fog, and men backpaced. The plant withered, darkening, while Cormac and his men stood well back. They stared, forced to believe the unbelievable.

The kelp fell back from the tower, rustling, and sought refuge in its own habitat. Constantly burning, it plunged back into the water. The wind whistled. The sea lapped high against the rocks and was churned the more by the sorcerous algae, which lashed violently about like spitted serpents.

With ugly little smiles that stemmed from nothing humorous, Cormac and the four Danes re-entered the tower. Hugi paused to empty his bag of quicklime all over the flat stone that formed an outside threshold. Then he followed his companions inside. They closed the thick door of cross-braced oak, and barred it. Back up and up the steps they went, victors without laughter or cheering, though Hakon did bound as he led the way. Cormac made for the beacon and Hakon was there before him, peering forth into the night.

“Ah, surely this is the night of Loki the treacherous,” Hakon said in a small voice. “Wolf: it comes again.”

Cormac shouldered in while the others pressed close. They stared down, blinking and squinting, for the wind was well up and the sky rumbled so that Thor was surely abroad, exercising the brace of goats that drew his chariot.

The quicklime had been diluted and dissipated in the brine. Perhaps, too, algal reinforcements had been called up. The weed did indeed come again from the foaming sea.

This time Cormac waited until it was but an arm’s length below before he opened a bag of quicklime. Squeezing shut both eyes whiles he held his breath, he dumped the bag out the window. He let it go when it was nigh empty, and swung from the window lest the wet wind blow the volatile stuff into his face. They heard only the banshee wind and the thunder, which was closer. The suffering algae did not scream as any natural foe would have done, assailed by searing quicklime.

When Edric looked, he reported that the weed had again withdrawn.

It came a third time. Again they dumped quicklime down upon it, with Cormac cursing the wind and high sea below that swept their volatile armament off the quay.

When the kelp tried to climb in at them for the fourth time, they used nearly the last of the quicklime.

It was then that they heard the terrible creaking and groaning of wood, and the wailing cry of tortured metal…

“Hinges! The door below!”

They whipped open the upper door to peer down the steps-just as the lower door, amid a terrible creaking and splintering, brast from its hinges. The demon-plant had crept under it, forced itself up into cracks that hardly existed, and crawled and grown, swelling. Malignant stems and runners had crushed and splintered the door as the roots of trees split stones-though in an uncanny speeding up of the time required for any such zoological feat.

A herbaceous slithering rustle ascended the stairs.

Cormac snatched up the last bag, only partially filled with quicklime, and flung it. The sack struck the stairwell wall and showered its contents over the enemy. It sizzled on the wet creepers and fumes rose in the narrow stairwell. The kelp lashed and churned so that some tendrils struck the stone walls with the sound of whip-cracks.

The men waited in chill dread, squinting, trying not to breathe because of the pungent, caustic fumes. The seaweed was no longer coming…

It came. In that narrow compass of the stairwell the thick relentless stalks pressing ever up from below forced its swift-slithering second wave past the destruction of the vanguard. Up came the preternatural kelp, for Cormac and his four.

The attack must be met in the doorway. Only two men dared hew in that narrow space, and Edric and Hugi leaped forward. Hugi wielded both sword and dagger. Edric soon saw the wisdom of that, for a buckler was of no avail against this sort of viney attack. That burly Dane shook off his shield and slung it behind him into the lightchamber. He fought then with short-ax and dagger against the ceaseless assault of a half-dozen snaking twitching vines at once.

A probing runner slithered between Hugi’s feet and started to arch up. Cormac sheared through it with his sword, dropped to one knee and sliced off another kelpy tendril that wound about Edric’s ankle.

The assault thickened and more and more the two men struck sparks from the walls with their flailing blades. Indeed, they endangered one another.

“Gudfred-light torches from the beacon!” Cormac yelled, and used dagger and thumb to slice a tendril from around Hugi’s ankle.

Grease-soaked brands leaped aflame; two, then three.

“Back,” Cormac called. “Edric-JUMP back-disengage! Hugi-out of there!”

Hugi bent both knees, sliced away a serpent of horridly living plant, and pounced backward so that Hakon only just avoided being knocked down. Edric tried-and sprawled his length on his back. He’d been tripped up by the thallophytic serpent that whipped twice about his leg. Cormac’s sword bit through the finger-thick algae stem inches from Edric’s foot. He was forced to twist his sword to free it of the wooden flooring. Edric still had to sit up and slit the clinging bit of weed from his leg.

On one knee, Cormac twisted half around and seized a torch from Gudfred.

He swung back and hurled it down the steps in one motion. The brand never reached bottom; Laniinaria clogged the stairwell now like the thick, impossibly living web of an enormous spider. Living plant crackled, for its wetness could not extinguish the burning grease any more than it had the quicklime.

It was even more sinister and eerie, their knowledge that something living and predatory was burning, alive-and without a sound. Only the constant rustle of its violent movements announced the vampire plant’s reaction-awareness?-pain!-to its own burning.

The odour of the sea and its dread get pervaded the tower now. The mephitic vapours of sorcery could have been no more repugnant to the five besieged men. Faceless, eyeless, unseeing and unhearing, mouthless and yet provided with the most ghastly of mouths, the baleful algae came again.

Each man backed against a wall to diminish his danger from the efforts of his fellows. And in the beacon-chamber itself they battled the onslaught from the sea, with sharp steel and grease-soaked brands.

Leafy structures shook and rustled and through the doorway came the many-mouthed enemy, the thickness of its runners ranging from that of a brooch-pin to burly Edric’s thumb-and behind them thrust algaeous branches thick as sword-hilts… and behind them?

The men fought in silence, resisting panic and heeding each the flailing arms of the others. Flames blazed high and yellow. Black smoke boiled so that they coughed. Their eyes streamed tears to mingle with their sweat and slice runnels down through the sooty deposit of smoke on their faces. This man and then that was grasped, so that another must tear and cut him free of the vampire kelp, and sear the base of that grasping runner. Each man fought with brand and dagger. Blood oozed from sucker-wounds. The pods for its storing popped under booted feet.

Cormac mac Art had reason to rue his wearing of mail, for twice seaweed snakes wriggled in betwixt rings and padded hauberk to begin a ghastly lacing of themselves to him.

First his own efforts and Hugi’s, then his own and Edric’s freed him. And then Edric was on one knee with a pommel-thick rope of living brown about his leg and another circling his left arm, and his companions sliced off his preternatural attackers in voiceless, grunting horror, and Gudfred was caught, and he had to be sliced free, and in the doing of that Hakon cried out wordlessly as the runner that had snaked up his back slapped, his throat and applied a sucker…

Gudfred’s hand was burned. Hakon’s neck bled. Cormac’s cheek oozed red from a vampiric sucker he’d torn loose and crushed betwixt fingers and dagger-hilt. A swipe from Edric’s dagger saved Hugi’s leg and slit open his leather legging. Another time Hugi moved too swiftly and Hakon could not twist his blade aside, and now Hugi’s wrist dripped blood from the little cut on its back.

Shuddering in primal horror, the men heard the kelp sucking up the blood from the floor…

Once the hem of Hakon’s russet-hued tunic flamed up from his own brand, and he hurled the torch into the stairwell and slapped out the fire on his clothing himself. Up his boot as he did slithered a ghoulish little horror, so pretty in its brown pigment over green, and Cormac squatted and neatly sliced it away before applying his own torch to the thing’s stem.

And still the rustling pseudopods of the awful weed came in unearthly onslaught.

Minutes had passed; an hour had passed; outside the wind shrieked in primal anger and none of those in the tower so much as heard. Grim death stalked them in awful silence and the wind had naught to do with it.

At last Cormac released a frustrated roar. Barely able to see amid the smoke and rustling lashing tendrils, he stabbed his torch into the cauldron. The great black pot was still partially full of grease. It spat and hissed, swiftly liquefying. Flame leaped up-and instantly melting fat extinguished the brand. Hugi thrust his in and sawed a kelpy serpent from his arm. Even as it died it snapped down and clung to his wrist, so that blood oozed when he tore it free.

Snatching up more brands, Cormac dumped them into the cauldron. Flame leaped to darken the ceiling and plants withdrew from heat that was nigh unbearable to humans within helms, and their tunics, hauberks and mailcoats.

Cormac and thick-thighed Edric set each a foot against the big black pot, and exchanged a glance, and shoved.

The cauldron tumbled through the doorway, spewing hissing grease-fire. It bounded down the steps, clanging, throwing off blobs of unquenchable flame and blazing torches. It tore through the clogging plants it spattered with flaming grease. Resistless, the heavy hemisphere of iron fell and bounded and clanged, rebounding clangourously from stone walls as it came to curves. It smashed and rolled and bounced all the way to the bottom of the steps.

“Chop and chop and chop!” Cormac yelled, putting his strength against the door.

The others did, men with black faces and desperately staring eyes. They cleared the floor before the door. Cormac was able to slam it against a stairwell that was brightly aflicker with lurid flames.

With the cloak he’d taken off on entering this horror-besieged chamber, Gudfred drove the smoke out the beacon-window. Around him his companions crouched and knelt while they daggered serpentine runners of vampire seaweed ranging in size now up to one flopping monster thick as Hugi’s wrist. It sprouted two foot-long fingers, and the men had to mince them to make the awful things cease their attack.

Swiftly as Cormac hurled a dagger-long piece out the window, a sucker fastened and drew blood as it was torn from the back of his hand.

The stairwell crackled with the burning of grease and dry wood and obscenely motile plants. There was no other sound from that quarter; the door was not assaulted.

Men with smoke-darkened faces stared at each other from pale eyes, and all were tinged with horror. They had existed and fought in a sort of mindless hysteria, disbelieving but saving themselves from the impossible. Panting, they leaned together, at once hanging onto one another’s shoulders-and supporting each other. Their legs quivered. Blood dripped and now burns began to beat like little hearts of pain.

Staggering, streaming sweat through the greasy smoke that rendered his face unrecognizable, Cormac mac Art turned and extinguished the beacon.

“Wulfhere and the others!” Hugi gasped. “Tyr’s beard-I’d forgot!”

Cormac had not, for the extinguishing of the beacon was another part of the plan he and Wulfhere had worked out. Outside, thunder stalked the sky like an enraged lion that frightened the wind into screams and howls the while it drove the ocean into restless dunes.

“It is no night for them to be out,” Gudfred panted.

“It’s as if… they knew,” Hakon said, and all wondered who or what “they” might be.

Through set lips Cormac said, “Methinks those who sent the devil-kelp do know.” He considered, frowning. “Now I but hope the unknown master of that killer weed will not think the ghastly attack has… succeeded, and show his… or its!… false beacon!”

“Aye,” Hugi said, rubbing at a smoke-dark face with smoke-dark fingers so that he accomplished naught but the creation of a weird design. “Our comrades are better giving no chase on this sea!”

Cormac stepped past him, and after a pause during which each man sucked in a breath, he threw open the door. More smoke billowed up into the chamber, dark and greasy. Flames crackled, fitful and scattered. The cauldron had rolled over the smashed door, or through it, and though it was charred that great chunk of old oak did not burn. As for the plants; they were consumed, and none more came.

It was a time for the clarions and shouts of the victors, the prancing of steeds and the tossing of flowers ’neath glittering towers whose windows sprouted the smiling faces of children and desirous damsels.

Instead Cormac and his dirty, smudged little company sank weakly down to sit on the floor in exhaustion. Now they became aware of stinging pain from suckers torn from their flesh, and nicks from their own weapons, and two burns from brand or lashing, burning plant. Clothing was ruined and armour would require cleaning, and oiling. Yet their thoughts were as one: of their companions of Raven, asea in a night become a vast total blackness that was vassal to a howling roaring wind.