The Tower of Death

CHAPTER THREE: The Bay of Treachery

Grey.

Grey sea under grey sky.

And Raven pressed betwixt the two on a surging horizon while the sky grumbled and now and again bellowed like a beast jealous of its territory.

The ocean swells grew out of Ran’s breathing belly like monsters prowling the grey world. Slowly they gathered, rising, rolling. To those who watched from the little ship tiny on the sea as a fruit-fly at an imperial banquet, it was as if they had the leisure of all time to watch them form. Then the swells were fulfilled. They peaked like wet mountains beneath the keel, the sun striking lights from them like mica in granite. For a stricken heartbeat the crew of Raven looked down a glassy tilt of forever.

And then they slid down it. Faster the ship went, and faster still, tobogganing insanely-to the next wet mountain that bulked up even as a grey colossus. Should the steersman fail to keep her head aright, Raven would wallow and do her best to gulp in half the Bay called Treachery-and go swiftly to the bottom.

Ordlaf held her. He plied the weighty steering-oar with neither panic nor hesitancy. Even so, Raven took water. Men were kept bailing all the while, and all the while more water sluiced over the deck and into the bailing well. No; was hardly the best of jobs. But then neither was Ordlaf’s: Nor was Wulfhere’s, for he was master of Raven and thus responsible.

All this, while the weather stayed fair.

The girl from Nantes attached herself to the end of one oar-bench, as a limpet to its rock. She quickly became abominably seasick. Her lovely complexion went all greenish and she suffered the humiliation of retching and chucking until there was naught left in her stomach. After she loosed the first spasm inboard, someone seized her by the neck and flung her to the wale like a puppy not yet trained.

“The fish want it,” she heard the Danish pirate say. “We do not.” And the callous dog had himself a feel of her while he was at it.

Much later, she crawled back to her old position. She was still miserable, and now there was no relief. Her stomach was empty, and sureness wasn’t on her that she had not vomited up her guts as well.

Then the weather worsened.

The men from the fjord-sliced north had it that Thor created thunder by hurling his hammer “Miller,” which struck with a shower of sparks that was lightning; indeed his keep was called Bilskirnir, Lightning; and that sleepy Aegir was lord of the sea below. But Aegir mostly slumbered. Not so his wife Ran, who had the temperament of a she-cat in heat and no toms about. The Tyrannis of Cormac’s people was probably the same as the nordic Thor. Not so Lir, who was the sea, and his son Manannan. And was Manannan MacLir ruled the waters of salt. It mattered not who was right; the Saints or “Christians” said the father of their Dead God ruled land and sea on all the ridge of the world, the pompous jackals, and the Romans of the old way had it that Neptune did.

Perhaps they were all right, aye and the Greeks too with their Poseidonis. Whatever the case and Whoever ruled: He or She was restless.

Now restlessness became anger.

The wind that gave Treachery Bay its name began it, in roaring gusts. It blew at random from eight several directions and all at once. Forty feet tall, the mast creaked and its foot-thickness began to seem frail. The sail cracked and boomed with the winds’ unpredictable shifts. At first, Wulfhere tried trimming it accordingly, but his orders were useless ere they could be carried out; a new wind pre-empted. Judging from the darkening sky, worse was accusing.

Wulfhere dolorously bade his men lower sail.

Wind-roughened water seethed about, complicating the ocean-swell. The longship bucked and slammed. Raven was become the sea’s prisoner. Clodia lost her grip, lurched three paces and fell, banging her hip that was wide and wide for childbearing. She whimpered, knowing she’d bear a colourful bruise. The girl who’d never afore been asea sought some new haven, any place to anchor herself, and again she missed hold. Clodia tumbled across the foredeck with a noise that sounded more like exasperated protest than aught else-though it broke on a note of despair. As if to add insult to injury, the wind screamed angrily at her and hurled a great splash of cold water over the merchant’s daughter.

Impatient hands, big hands and leathery-rough of palm and calloused fingers, seized on her and Clodia first squeaked, then made a grateful noise.

It was Cormac mac Art who tucked her under a battle-hardened arm, and paused to seek and be sure of his balance. Clodia hung there, a dazed, dead weight. In a plosion of long swift strides, Cormac gained the mast. He hugged its solid thickness with his one free arm, again pausing.

Wind blew so hard as to bang him with his own sword-scabbard. Setting his feet on the X of crossed beams that were braced within Raven’s sides to support the mast, he lashed Clodia thereto. This task he performed impersonally as he might have seen to a loose bit of cargo.

She’d be safe now from plunging overboard or disrupting working men, and no nuisance in her landhugger’s clumsiness.

Cormac remembered something.

Without ceremony, he plunged a hand between Clodia’s excellently blooming breasts. Astonished, the young woman knew the fleeting thought that this was scarcely the time, but she made no objection. She instead smiled, and lifted her wet face.

Cormac’s groping hand found the Egyptian sigil, all that was left of his hard-won loot. He plucked it forth.

“Doubtless it’s keeping it warm for me ye were, just,” he said with flat-voiced cynicism. “Thanks. If drown I must, it’s as a man of property I’ll be going down to visit the son of Lir.”

“You great swaggering boar!” she screamed out, eagerly hitting upon an object for her misery and wrath. “You-you fathom of scars and ill manners! You with your mailshirt cleaving to ye like a second skin with the crusted sweat and blood and stink of the five years you haven’t had it off! I know now why your enemies run away in droves! The sole reason your friends do not the same-”

She railed on. It was not true, but he said nothing. She added several imaginative hypotheses about his friends. Cormac had ship’s matters to attend to, wherefore he paused but long enow to drop the winged serpent about his own neck, beneath the battle-gear and cloth. Then he turned away, and Clodia knew with rage that she was already forgot. Hardly comforting; she knew well that she was a savoury, ripe morsel for male lust. And this one couldn’t even be bothered bidding her hush, or denying her allegations, or so much as slapping her.

Little cause had she to feel hurt. He’d made her safe, assuming Raven survived.

The weather remained foul and the wind continued to veer wildly and shriek like the Ban-Sidhe or Banshee of Cormac’s own homeland. Men broke their backs rowing and bailing, and snatched what rest they might between turns. Ordlaf Skel’s son manned the steering-oar until he was nigh dropping, and Wulfhere relieved him then, to stand braced like the Colossus of that southern isle called Rhodes.

Again and again the wind shifted direction and tried to creep up behind them like a hungering hyena, or blow Raven onto her side.

A howling squawl hit them like a hammer of Thor. It tossed the ship about as if she’d been a chip in rapids, and none slept while that lasted. Had Raven turned broadside-on to those maniacal seas, she must have capsized in a moment-as she almost did in any case.

Minutes of high excitement became hours of anguish.

After midnight, they enjoyed a spell of clear weather. Men sagged and breathed through open mouths while with dull eyes they stared at wet boards.

Cormac, passing the mast on his way to rest, was put in mind of Clodia. Hours had passed. He paused to free the sodden bundle with stringing hair gone dark with wet and frost-flecked with brine. The knots binding her to the mast were soaked stiff and salty, hard as lumpy iron nodules out of a cold forge. Annoyance that had driven another man to shrug and forget it made the Gael persist, while a sailor’s respect for good cord kept him from simply cutting it. His tough fingers opened the knots at last.

Clodia virtually fell away from her support.

“Thank you, Cormac,” she gasped, and she meant it. Conviction had come on her that, left there longer, her limbs had begun to rot off. A like thought had occurred to Cormac. Yet necessity was on them to raise sail, and Clodia had been in the way.

“Cormac…”

His face remained impassive despite the piteous appeal of her voice and face. “Ye live, Clodia. And it’s not as my guest ye be aboard.” And he went from her.

By scanning the stars through wind-shredded gaps in cloud, and by Behl the sun as he shook off the dark and reigned anew, they discovered that they were far off course. Now Clodia of Nantes knew the reason that men of the sea ever equivocated with words such as should and with luck and good fortune when they answered the simple question: “How long will it take?” For none could ever be sure. A journey by sea might take two days or ten-or three months, an a ship, was blown so far off her course and then afflicted with calm.

Erelong, those aboard Raven had contrary winds to fight again. These rose to such a patch that not sail only, but mast as well had to be lowered, else both had gone by the board. The wind shrieked like mad hags babbling inanities and lightning lit the sky with lurid flashes, followed by the crash of thunder.

Thor was angry.

Aegir was awake, and angry.

Ran was angry. And what care had the son of Lir for a girl of Nantes, and boys and men of Dane-mark, and one long exile from Eirrin?

It went on that way for five days.

Save for two other such respites that were all too brief, their time on the Bay of Treachery was consistently as bad as the first day, or worse.

They were fighting a sea that deserved all its fell repute, that hated humans and drowned whales while tearing down cliffs. Its bottom must be crowded with ships and bones, assuming that many had been foolish enough to come abroad here. A lesser ship than Raven and her crew had not been seen again save as fragments of axhoned wood torn by wind, and sodden corpses washed up on far beaches. With weaker leaders, even that crew might have given up from weariness and let themselves rest-in the nets of Ran.

Two of the wounded men died.

Two others, able-bodied companions, were lost in the hell of the sea for a moment’s missed footing; in truth, Ubbi was gone because he’d released his grip on his oar long enough to pick his nose.

Four deaths, and they received no comment aside from muttered oaths and a fare-thee-well. There was not even time to think good thoughts of those men. The Danes could mourn their comrades later, so long as they did not join them. And so long as former comrades returned not as liches; Those Who Walk after Death.

During one of the respites, idly talking men decided that Aegir and Ran had naught to do with this awful stretch of water, and the skalds must merely have failed to make mention that here reigned Loki and his ugly get, Hela who ruled the underworld. Clodia was willing to think them right, as she had already decided they were the coldest, meanest, bravest and most competent men under heaven.

On the fifth day the winds steadied, and fell.

Raven rocked gently on the water become glassy plain, and weary survivors of wrathful, treacherous winds basked in the gentleness as in sweet bed-linen. Men sagged, or merely crumpled and slept, or rose and stretched-and then slumped. Up went the sail, and it was hardly less relaxed than the men beneath.

In twilight, they espied a dark coastline. After the cloudy sundown a land-breeze roved out to bring the welcome scents of earth and forest. Yet was too soon to rejoice; as leaders, the Gael and the huge Dane had to decide what landfall might portend. Nor was thinking easy for them, with fatigue on their bodies and brains like thrice-filtered poison.

They spoke with great deliberation and exaggerated care and what, in fresher state, they’d have deemed thick simplicity, the Gael in particular.

“Yon be Hispania,” Wulfhere said. “Must be.”

“Hispania,” Cormac agreed. “And the northern part. Most likely the north-west. Galicia. That is the name they call it by. Galicia.” He paused to ponder, and that ponderously. “Have we enemies here?”

“I think not. Ye’ll not believe me, Wolf, but this is one coast where I’ve never done business. Farther south, aye. Never here.”

“Nor I.”

“Strange.”

“Umm.” Cormac was bethinking him of former days, when he’d led a band of Eirrin’s reivers and men had named him the greatest such sea-wolf since Niall of the Nine Hostages.

Aye, Cormac an-Cliuin had plundered farther south than this too, all the way to Africa’s sparkling shores and within the very blue, blue Mediterranean. Yet it chanced that he had never put in at Galician shores, not even for naught so harmless as to lift a few cattle for fresh eating. He’d taken nary a drop of Galician booty off a ship, to his knowledge. There could be naught against him here, in this northwest corner of Hispania… save his reputation, o’course, should he chance to meet with narrow, finicking men.

He raked through his tired memory for what he knew of this land.

The people here were an insular lot, he seemed to recall, not the sort to care what he and Wulfhere had done in other places, to other peoples. The Galicians were just as separated from other men as the sea-roving tigers of Raven. Some German tribe held the mastery here, didn’t it? Aye-what was it they were called, now. An amalgam of tribes, an old group united in-

“Sueves!” the Gael said aloud.

“Slaves?”

“Na, redbeard: Sueves. The Suevi. The people who rule this land.” He slapped his knee, on which the watered, salted leather had gone dry and hard as old bark. “Fine, then! They’ll not be hanging us unless on principle, and-”

“Principle?” Wulfhere’s tone was truculent.

“We are pirates, Wulf! We can make ourselves understood by them. It’s a German people they are, or were. I had their king’s name, once.”

“Ah! One Veremund the Tall. That his height is what a Dane would reckon ‘tall’ I misdoubt, though. Umm… the name’s all I know of him.”

“Veremund. Verem-aye! A king with ideas, I’m told. It’s trouble with the Goths he and his people are after having. It ought not harm our credit an we let him know the Goths are after having trouble with us… and he’ll be knowing that anyhow.”

“How much trouble,” Wulfhere asked, “and how bad?” After a moment he added, “The Sueves with the Goths, I mean.”

That Cormac knew, but he also knew his own brain was working little better.

“There is the meat of it, Cormac. And be they at odds still, or at peace? For all we know, they now be Gothic vassals.”

Cormac, silent, laboured at remembering. The conquests and dispossessions that had boiled across the known world in the last hundred years were beyond any man’s power to keep straight in his head. The writhe and surge of humanity in this that the “Saints” called the fifth century in the reign of their Lord had been like unto the winds of Treachery Bay. Those in Britain, that Cormac was more familiar with, were complicated enow.

The Gael stalked through his own mind, sorting. Blood of the gods, how many places he’d been, how much he knew of the world! And to think that but eight years agone he’d been but a provincial boy who’d thought he had the world because he’d slain a bear of Connacht, alone and with a dagger!

He said at last, “No, it’s no Gothic vassals these people are. The Sueves came down into Spain with the Vandals and the Alans, a long lifetime agone. The Sueves remain, though they were squeezed westward; the Vandals and the Alianis have crossed into Africa and become one people. The Goths, I was hearing, did subdue these Suevi three or so times, on behalf of the Romans. The first time and the second, the Goths have the lesson and then returned to those lands ceded them over in Gaul. Hmp! Roman diplomacy at work, I’m not doubting, and them with no desire to see the Goths grow too powerful.”

Cormac squinted darkly at the sky, reflecting.

“The last time matters fell out differently. The Sueves were waxing fierce once again, under a king named Remismund; they had taken Lisbon, this one Germanic tribe! It was that city’s own Roman governor himself who oped the gates to them! By then Euric had just become king over the Visigoths, and he marched them over the mountains once more, to rout the Sueves.”

“I know about Euric,” Wulfhere rumbled. “Ha! All know about Euric. He did well, that one.”

Aye; by the wild standards of his day, Euric the Visigoth had done well. Remismund the Sueve, knowing himself threatened, was so daring as to make appeal to the Emperor himself in Constantinople. He was ignored. In the mean time, Euric’s Goths conquered southeastern Hispania right handily, and occupied Lusitania with swaggering men of ever-shifting eyes. They swiftly tore loose the Suevic hold on Lisbon and enforced Suevic submission, even to making them accept the creed of the Arian Church. Euric the Goth, “terrible by the fame of his courage and his sword,” ruled from the Atlantic to the Rhone, from the Mediterranean to the Loire. Nor had he recognized even nominal bonds with the Empire, as had his predecessors. A proud fire-eyed man, Euric, who ruled in no name but his own-and made the world to know it.

And he sired Alaric, Count Guntram’s unbeloved liege.

“He did well,” Cormac mac Art said nodding. “Sorrow’s on him he had no heir worthy of him. King Alaric the Second! Huh! Alaric the Timid is closer to the truth, and that previous Alaric who conquered even Rome itself must be turning in his grave with shame! It’s quiet the Sueves remained while Euric lived-but he’s two years with the heroes, and the Sueves know well what this King Alaric is. And by repute their king is all that Alaric is not.”

Wulfhere slipped fingers into his beard to scratch briny encrustations. “I make water on repute, Cormac! Oft it means naught more than a rumour here, a boast there. Ye sound like Veremund’s housepet. Have ye certain knowledge of aught he’s done for this repute of his?”

The dark-visaged Gael smiled grimly. “Well, it’s no great battles Veremund of the Sueves has fought, nor has he taken cities-the which is only wisdom, as he’s not ready. Yet all the shrewder Goth lords in Hispania can see him working towards it. The man’s after taking pains to deal fairly with the Roman land-owners, Wulfhere, as the Goths do seldom. Veremund even speaks decent Latin; better than mine, and mine is none so bad. It signs to me that he wishes to rule a kingdom, not an enclave of conquerors who stand less than steadily on the necks of a subject people… who’d still be there after the conquerors vanished. That he has a golden welcome for skilled smiths and armourers is no rumour, but fact. Stand on it. Always I try to know where such men are going, and-by Behl’s burning eye!-so do the merchants. The last time we were in Lisbon, I had it from the governor himself-”

“What?”

“-the governor’s daughter herself, late one night, that it’s Veremund who’s behind the incursions of river pirates on the Duera. Petty stuff, and they but petty rogues who’ve never sniffed the open sea. Methinks it’s meant for a first trial of how far he can go. King Veremund affects to know naught of them, and promises to hang any he catches.”

Wulfhere chuckled.

“No certainty’s on me of this, Skull-splitter, and ye can be making water on it for wine-shop babble if ye like: But Veremund has sent envoys to the Cantanabrian Mountains over eastward, to sound the people there. He’s not like to be receiving firm answers this early in the game, even if such be true. Still, it says something of this Suevi king, that such a story can be told and believed.”

“The Goths must be spineless or mad, to sit on their saddle-galled backsides and do naught! I’d have this Veremund’s hall in ashes and himself in pieces!”

“As would I. As would full many of the Goths. But they and we are not kings. Their ill luck it is that their king remains far away with his Egyptian whores, and will not be putting his armies into motion. Worse that the very landscape, with mountains sprawled across it like dragons, makes campaigning so hard.”

Behind them somewhere, Clodia squealed and a man laughed; Cormac and Wulfhere did not so much as turn.

“Surely aught of unity will never prevail in this land, Wulfhere, as it does in Eirrin-almost-with our-its peoples united under council and High-king-almost. Aye,” Cormac said softly, almost wistfully, “and with all the learned men and artisans moving freely where they will in the practice of their crafts… and them sacrosanct, by law and ancient usage.”

Wulfhere was silent, leaning against the inner hull and picking his fingernails with his teeth. Aye, he knew his battle-brother Cormac for one of the prideful Eirrin-born, and such men never forgot. Not like us Danes, Wulfhere thought, who know other men are equal to us… except the Norse, and the Swedes, and the Romans o’course, and those damned namby Britons, and of course the idiot Germans who…

“Was Strabo,” Cormac was saying on, “who likened Hispania to an oxhide outspread, not only in shape but in hue and relief, all dried and cracked and puckered. Other great differences there are, even where the terrain is flat. The weather for one, and the peoples. These Sueves-they are a fierce independent lot. The Basques are the same. They should be! It’s the same stock they are as the Caledonia Picts, when all’s said and done-or Eirrin’s Firbholgs. Only the Tuatha de Danaan by their sorceries were able to prise loose the Firbholgs’ hold on Eirrin. And it was no easy time my ancestors had, in winning Eirrin from the Danan breed!”

Wulfhere noted how his comrade had availed himself of the opportunity to point out the superiority of the people who had exiled him, but the Dane said naught. Were all Gaels of Eirrin such as his shipmate and battle-brother Cormac mac Art, the Eirrish would surely own half the world and statues of Crom and Behl would stand in Rome.

Cormac fell into withdrawn silence. Wulfhere moved aftward. Cormac but gazed at the nearing coast as if that clotted extent of darkness fascinated him.

It did not. It was one more foreign and likely hostile shore. He’d seen many such. Not the least intimation came to him of rare events waiting, or any high promise. At present he was, after all, a very weary man.

From behind him a slap resounded, along with an angry exclamation in a woman’s offended voice. The sounds mingled with Wulfhere’s belly-deep chuckle and the gentle slap of water along Raven’s hull. The Gael sighed. After coming so far at cost of such immense labour and peril, all gods defend them, they had to arrive with a woman aboard! Where did Wulfhere find the inclination?

“Quiet,” he bade them, not deigning to turn.

Clodia made complaint, none the less. “But this huge man-mountain persists in-”

“Quiet.”

“And for why?” Wulfhere demanded. “It’s little we have to fear of Veremund’s Galicians here asea. River barges and fishing boats manned by native Spaniards are not going to trouble Raven, would ye say? Has Veremund warships? I never heard of it. Nor did yourself.”

“So. I did not,” Cormac made admission. He yawned. “I’m needing quiet while I think-remember that? Thinking? I’ll admit Veremund’s being shipless is a thought that will mayhap bear following out-another time. The Sueves’ fathers knew all they knew of the sea from travellers’ tales, as did the Vandals once… but the Vandals learned seamanship.”

“Of a sort,” put in Ordlaf. If Ordlaf of Dane-mark knew of a better helmsman than himself on all the seas, no one was likely to learn it from the lips of any aboard Raven.

Ivarr snorted. “These Sueves be dirt-farmers, lorded over by horsemen. High-nosed fools! Five years after they’re born, they can never bring their knees within hailing distance again. They’d dine from the saddle if they could.”

Men laughed, and encouraged Ivarr added, “Can’t bring their knees together, those men. And their women come to the same state not much older.”

Wulfhere roared and smacked Ivarr’s shoulder-and Clodia’s backside, simultaneously. Tight-lipped, Clodia moved out of the big Dane’s reach. Coming to Cormac, she clutched his arm and renewed her appeal.

“Please make him-”

“Belay that. Look!”

Fire, shoreward.

A dancing bright wisp of flame it was, that swiftly grew. In minutes it was a large yellow glow bright enow to be visible for miles of a clear night.

“Signal,” Wulfhere muttered, thinking aloud. “That, or beacon.”

“Or a rite of some kind,” Ivarr added. “Some chieftain’s obsequies? I’m not sure yon fire does not burn on the sea itself.”

“Wreckers,” was Ordlaf’s suggestion, and a world of loathing he packed into the word.

The others shared that loathing, and contempt. No seaman who had sailed the tricky coasts of Armorica, now known to many as Lesser Britain for the Cornish and Cymric folk who had settled there, went unmoved by the word wrecker. The name was an epithet. Wulfhere snarled in his bristling crimson beard.

“If such they be, let’s find and kill them!”

“If such they be, old Splitter of skulls,” Cormac said, “we will.” His tone was abstracted but not a whit less deadly for it. “We will, aye… but suppose that be a simple harbour-light. It’s no less mad we’d be to let it be drawing us in. Belike we’d be finding ourselves greeted with a royal claim on Raven and all she contains.”

“Aye, Captain.” Ordlaf spoke quietly. “Best go wide of it now, whate’er it may be. Make investigation by daylight.”

“For that we’d all fall asleep arowing,” Cormac mac Art added, “an we attempt it now.”

Raven turned southward upon water like shimmering silk. Men pulled their oars, and pulled again, with no strength in their arms. They had used the last of it, and still they rowed. The shore they neared was wild and shaggy, with no signs of cultivation.

“Put in yonder,” Wulfhere said, thrusting his massive head forward like a hound spotting birds. In truth he was squinting into the night.

The sanctuary he had chosen was a wood-fringed cove scarce so large that it could be flattered as a bay. The longship nosed in slowly. Cormac, at the bow, probed ahead for rocks. The cove seemed innocent of such, excepting the seaworn mass at its southern end, which bore a goodly frost of bird droppings.

They backed oars and anchored. No man would go ashore. The ship’s fire had been drenched out, days agone, but victuals remained, with an added odour of the sea from their sealskin wrapping. They ate lightly, without benefit of fire. Wulfhere, like his crew, was undismayed by cold food-but he did hark back lugubriously to the wine casks they’d heaved over-side. Cormac groaned. He knew there’d be complaints on that score at random intervals over the next several years. Such obscene waste had gone painfully to the Dane’s heart, or more aptly to his throat and stomach, the more susceptible parts of him.

“Still ye remind me of something, guzzler,” Cormac said. “That business at Garonne-mouth; would ye not be saying it was too like what happened after, at Nantes? At both places we found traps, and them well laid, wouldn’t ye say?”

Wulfhere shrugged and yawned. The matter was too far away and too long agone to concern him now. “Ye may have the right of it, Wolf. Does it signify? It’s never news, is it, that men of the law don’t like us. Mayhap we will take it up wi’ that fop Sigebert and his lord another day, though it’s from one ear only Sigebert’ll be giving listen! I’d surely like a word with that one-eared bastard when he lacks a score of weapon-men about him, were it only for Thorfinn’s sake. But these be Galician shores, and our concerns be here.”

Cormac grunted, “Aye,” and said no more.

They stretched the lowered sail for an awning, lest it rain. Blissful it was to lie down for a night’s sleep on tranquil water! Cormac made no objection when Clodia lay beside him and pressed close; indeed, he hardly noticed. After five unresting days on a crazy sea, he’d rather have had oblivious slumber than the embrace of Fand herself.

Clodia was, though, in proud fleshy bloom and ripe, and someone found interest and impulse to stoop and fondle her boldly as he passed. That resulted in a yelp and spasm that made Cormac sit up, hurling aside his covering cloak. A sharp, icy irritability weighed on him.

“Will ye horny sons of mares be still!” he snarled. “You too, wench! By Midhir and Morrighu, the next man who troubles my rest will sleep ashore or in the water where I’ll right briskly hurl him. And yourself, Clodia. Be that understood?”

There were soft hootings, and comments of a scurrilous nature emerged from the shrouding dark. Mac Art paid those no mind.

Once more he wrapped his cloak about him and composed himself to sleep, and this time with success. Clodia curled against his back, pleased he’d at least called her by name. She passed an arm about his waist, and clung. She did not intend that any “horny sons of mares” should drag her away from him for amusement betwixt the rowing-benches, an someone awoke in the night and decided he was sufficiently rested to be up to it.

CHAPTER FOUR: The Horror in the Lighthouse

Dawn provided colour and detail for a coast that might until then have been Hel or the Hesperides. Sunrise proved it to be neither. Both Cormac and his Danish shipmates stared, silently thoughtful, for this land bore haunting similarities to their home shores.

For Cormac mac Art, the one man of his race aboard Raven, and more irrevocably an exile, the similarities roused memories. And they were bitter.

Gossamer morning-mists had already begun to ravel away in the sun. Estuaries, deep and wind-swept like the northern fjords, sliced into a fertile land. Deep, blueshaded woods of beech and oak stretched broadly. Beyond loomed the greenest mist-shrouded hills Cormac had seen since he’d departed Eirrin the Emerald of the Sea.

Was said the Eirrin-born never forgot, or found true happiness elsewhere on all the ridge of the world. Homesickness took him by the throat like an enemy; homesickness roiled in his stomach. Though Raven’s deck was now the one true home he had, it was suddenly hateful to him. The land drew him like a sorcerer’s spell of summoning.

“I’ll be returning soon,” he said thickly.

“Your shield,” Wulfhere said.

Cormac slung it along his arm. With a splash and a stumble, he dropped from Raven’s thwarts. He waded forward, his eyes fixed on this land as if he were one possessed. He was vaguely aware of Clodia, who was following him close. He did not glance around. He waded ashore.

It might have been worse. At least she’d not bleated any Cormac, wait for me’s after him, for the crew to guffaw over. She was even tagging a few paces behind and keeping her mouth shut… which, had he seen his own face, would not have surprised the Gael so deep in his memories.

Then he ignored and even forgot her.

Eirrin. Love of the greater gods, Eirrin.

It’s liquid music the name was. A name that called up, that meant, the world’s bravest and fairest men and women, thick-maned horses, red and brindle cattle, rivers like molten silver with gold shining in their beds, and great shadeful forests old as time. Poets and craftsmen Eirrin produced, whose work vied with that of nature; learned men and druids of supernal wisdom and power. Splendour, and wealth, and delights. Eirrin. All barred to him.

All Eirrin barred to him. Because of the treachery of kings, and a deliberately provoked quarrel.

Cormac mac Art of Connacht had been meant to die of that provocation and ensuing duel. Instead, he had slain. Considering when and where he had done death on another Gael of Eirrin, his slaying had been well-nigh as bad as him slain, or as disastrous to the boy he’d been. He who provoked did so during the Great Fair; Cormac slew him during the High King’s peace, which was inviolate. For such a crime the laws did not award other punishment than death.

Cormac had fled away, in misery, ere he could be taken and executed. By then he knew treachery had been done on him by a rival, and by a king-and surely too the High-king himself. Crossing the plain of the sea to Dalriada in Alba up in the north of Britain, he left behind him a girl most beloved-and half his belief in the justice of kings. And too he left behind the sword of his father, for in his hand it had slain a Gael in Eirrin. The sea had it, now.

How young he’d been then, this scarred, slit-eyed pirate of Raven!

In Dalriada, he sought obscurity and low employment. In the employ of peasants, he worked the land like a peasant for nigh onto a year. Close and silent he’d been, and unknown to any he had remained. Partha he’d called himself; Partha of Ulahd, a name he had used aforetime to cloak his own.

Yet Dalriada, founded long before by Gaels of Eirrin some called Scoti, was menaced ever by Picts from the Caledonian heather. Was not a place where a born fighter could remain forever obscure. Forever? In truth, that better part of a year was remarkably long. He toiled, and one day there came a Pictish attack on his master’s lands. Heart and hand and weapon-man’s training flashed awake in the peasant labourer. He did destruction on the shock-headed dark men with a reckless ferocity even they lacked power to match, and he emerged blooded but alive-perhaps because he hardly cared whether he died. The Pictish survivors fled, a thing seldom known. Picts were wont to slay to the last, or die in like fashion.

And so distinction in combat came again upon Cormac mac Art, now Partha mac Othna. Gol, King over Dalriada, had invited him into his service, and good service had the youth given…

Good, however brief. It happened that the king’s own daughter of Dalriada took undue interest in this Partha Pictslayer, mighty and envied weapon-man who had swiftly shown himself the best among her father’s warriors. The king had eyes to see it. Now a king must and will protect his own and marry them well, and so it was arranged that Partha fell into the hands of the Picts.

For others this fate befell, the invariable result was death not long delayed. For this Partha Pictslayer-who had earned the name-the stocky, short men had plans more ornate.

They played with him right gently at first, whilst they argued the merits of all the contradictory, irreconcilable ends they wished to give him. Their prisoner even kept all limbs and members, so tender with him were his captors-though he was not left unmarked. At last they settled on slow starvation, with exposure and beatings at times.

They chose awrong. The lengthy process gave Cormac opportunity to escape. He was free again-and unwelcome in still another land. But there was the sea. From captive he became outlaw, nursed by bitterness. He gathered a band about him and took to the sea on a lifted curragh. And he came to know who had betrayed him into Pictish hands, and why.

On the wild coasts of Dalriada he left what had remained of his belief in kingly honour. His youth he left there as well, and him then not yet twenty. Nor did he meet with difficulty in making the men he led believe him older.

In vengeance and bitterness and hatred did the reiver Cormac savage the shores of Gol’s kingdom. Mothers frightened miscreant youngsters with stories of Captain Partha, Captain Wolf, the scarred raider with eyes grey and cold and glittering as the metal of his sword. Cormac an-Cliuin he was: Cormac the Wolf.

Came the time when he must quit those waters, for they had grown too scalding even for him, and his crew was quivering on the edge of mutiny. Came then a long voyage down the coasts of Britain, and Gallia and Hispania. Those Gaelic reivers had reached even Africa, where they made themselves known too well to the Vandals. Yet return to the western isles he had, lest Gol forget the man on whom he’d done a king’s treachery.

Time came when civil strife in Eirrin resulted in the sundering of Cormac’s crew. Time came when he was captured again, and tossed into prison quarters colder and more filthy than even the Picts had given him. Here he awaited execution. Another prisoner in the same plight languished there, for company. Wulfhere Hausakliufr his name, and he admired the genius of the darker man who used their meagre victuals as food for the prison’s rats, who provided nourishment for the two prisoners…

“Cormac.”

The sound of his name returned him to the immediate now. She had been saying his name for some time, to no result; he’d been deep in the past, surrounded by this Eirrin-like land. Though he eased his abstracted walking, he did not turn to look at Clodia. She spoke his name again, on a falling note, and fell silent.

The young woman behind him bit her lip. By no means was it subtly that he conveyed to her that she was unwanted! Yet she durst not return to the ship and all those men. Not without Cormac. That fearful crew of fiery-headed pirates, and those genially brazen hands of Wulfhere who was big enow to wrestle bulls for pastime!

Clodia nerved herself. Whate’er it was gnawed within this reiver made this the wrong time entirely, and not being a fool the auburn-haired girl knew it. Yet there might not be other times. Besides, she felt a touch of anger. With a ship and forty swords at his back, what had the great dark man to gloom so about?

That a ship and forty swords could be appallingly little on occasion, she did not consider.

“Cormac,” Clodia said hesitantly. “What-what do you mean to do with me?” She bit her lip, swallowed, and then rushed on, finding that she feared an answer.

“This land is strange to me as to you. We have been friends, Cormac. That I’d have liked to be more in the old days, you know.” Already they had become the old days to her, distant and dim. “That you ofttimes desired me, I know. Then what is it turns you so hard? You know how a woman fares with barbarian war-bands, an she lacks one single protector. Can you not bear the thought of being my protector, Cormac?” And then, her voice rising to shrillness, “Look at me!”

Cormac turned, and looked. Clodia’s strong and high-breasted body was bared to him, her skirt and bodice a crumpled heap on the alien sand. Shame, desire and desperation commingled to heat the blood that darkened her face. He was astonished to see how far from the ship they had wandered along the strand, whilst thoughts had enveloped him to no purpose.

She came swaying, smiling, seducing…

Anger seethed in him, cold and sudden and inexplicable. The last simpering resort: her body. And see the tavern-girl trying to look the temptress! She reached him then, smiling-and of a sudden he caught her hard and clasped her hard.

Clodia yelped in shock. His arms tightened and the links of his mail pressed into her skin, hurting, marking her. She arched her back and set her palms in urgency against his steel-clad chest, pushing hard and then harder. Cormac lifted her off her feet, swung her around. Her struggles grew wilder. She cried out. Her lower body stretched out at right angles to his as he swung-

Cormac let her go.

There was a wild waving of white limbs in the morning sun, and a resounding splash that drowned a high-pitched squeal. Clodia was no swimmer, as her frantic paddlings testified. Nor did Cormac mean to drown her; the water was shallow, he saw, and the strand very near. When her feet touched bottom it would occur to the wench that she might stand and wade ashore.

Cormac left her to do so. He made his way back to Raven. This is Galicia. This is now. Eirrin is the past. Eirrin is but a word. The past is dead as last year’s leaves.

“Now that was no long absence!” Wulfhere greeted him. “And where be the vine that clings to the wolf?”

“Swimming.”

Laughter rose, but the Gael’s tone and expression made short work of it. “Now tell me, what have we found?”

“We, do ye say?” Wulfhere lifted red thickets of brow. “Hmm. While yourself and the lassie strayed, Ivarr mounted yon rise for a vantage view. He has seen a great high tower that looks to be the source o’ yester-night’s beacon light.”

“Does it so?” Cormac drummed fingers on the oarloom before him, cogitating. “Sure and we can bear the risk of looking into that.”

“So think I. It’s certain we’ve naught better to do.”

They were preparing to push off when Clodia appeared. She scrambled aboard with downcast eyes. Huddled as small as she could make herself, she spoke not a word.

Raven’s crew rowed north again.

Cormac, rubbing a blackly stubbled chin that itched him, was made mindful as the brilliantly blue sunflecked water slid by that he’d not shaved in well-nigh a week. Though he was not wont to adorn himself, he was of Eirrin: he was mindful of such matters as cleanliness and his hair and aye, shaving-when circumstances allowed. Indeed he kept a razor of finest eastern steel in his belt-pouch rather than make do with a honed knife. He was little twitted, though the Danes agreed that never had they heard of a more amazing habit.

Nah, Wulfhere said; was only because the poor Gael couldn’t raise a beautiful red beard that he kept it scraped…

Without benefit of oil or grease, he kept at the miserable task. Lip and cheeks, jaw and chin and finally throat he scraped clean. He rubbed with his fingertips to ensure thoroughness. Well that his skin had weathered hard over the years. As for the facial scars that lent him a sinister aspect, he’d memorized them.

They had some time since left the tiny cove with its point of land and the rise from which Ivarr had scanned about. Now they came with abruptness to a triple bay, miles across and miles deep. At its southwestern tip rose the tower reported by the sharpest-eyed among them. Now they saw it closer, and what lay beyond: the sunwashed stones of a Roman city, falling into neglect and abandon like many another in the west.

The men of Raven stared, cursed and invoked supernatural protection, for Northerners were superstitious about the engineering feats of Rome the once-mighty.

“’Tis the work of giants!” Knud the Swift declared.

“And I’m Idun,” Cormac told him, “who has the apples of immortality.”

Back he tilted his dark head, and back, looking up. He squinted. The great white tower soared forty men high and more; there was no assessing. Its builders had reared it in several tiers, each smaller in crosswise measure than the one immediately below. The lowermost was shapen cuboid, the topmost a smooth cylindrical shaft against the pure Spanish sky. A sort of roofed cupola topped it off, around which ran a stone balcony.

“I should ha’ known,” Cormac said. “It’s the Romans raised that lighthouse here. The greatest in the western world, I’ve heard say. It’s the Pharos of Alexandria it had for a model. Yonder will be the harbour of Brigantium.”

“And a fair harbour, too,” Wulfhere said, with enthusiasm. “A fleet could lie here-nay, exercise here! Although there’s little sea traffic it looks to receive nowadays. Who be manning the lighthouse, and why?”

Ivarr narrowed his keen eyes. “No one, Captain. From here it looks deserted. An it be not-why’s nobody at the top, looking down upon us and giving alarums? Have we gone so harmless in appearance since yesterday?”

Cormac turned decisive. “It’s finding out we’d best be,” he said, staring at the immense tower as at some inscrutable foe. The Gael seemed to snuff the air like the wolf whose name he bore. “Do you see to the ship, Wulfhere. I’ll be taking three men into yon lighthouse to see what I can find. Hrut Bear-slayer, come and climb stairs with me.”

The enormous, brain-addled strong man had all but usurped the place of Cormac’s shadow. His comrades had exerted their best ribald efforts to stay him from lumbering after Cormac and Clodia when they went off together. Mightily hurt he’d have been, had Cormac ignored him now.

“You too, Hrolf,” the Gael went on, “aye, and yourself, Knud. I’m thinking we can handle any bogies we may meet.”

“Ha! Listen to him!” The protest was Wulfhere’s, uttered loud. “And ye’re not jesting so much as ye’d have us believe! I now ye, Crmac, and by the gods I know that look. Ye can sniff out battle and death and unholiness even as a ranging hound sniffs out boars in the brush, ye rangy hound of Errin!”

“Repitition. And over-stating of the truth, what’s more. It’s but that I was born suspicious and have since grown more so. We’ll be after returning ere ye know we have gone.”

“So ye will,” the Dane agreed, stubborn as a rooted tree, “for the rest of us be coming along. Who commands here, I’m asking?”

“ir and Manannan macLir!”

The oath aside, Cormac made no difficulty. When Wulfhere invoked his captaincy there was no budging him and mac Art did not fight stone walls. Thus all trooped ashore, save Clodia and those few men chosen to remain aboard ship as watch.

Slipping and sliding over weed-covered rocks, they reached the base of the lighthouse. Kittiwakes screamed at them, wheeling grey-cloaked and white-breasted about the tower. A huge bronze-bound door, closed and barred, greeted them blankly. Surely naught but a ram would be capable of gaining entry here-and handling one on the rocky shore was impossible. When Wulfhere looked of a mind to attack it with his ax, Cormac stayed him.

“I’ve a smoother way,” h said. “Are ye after bringing the grapnel and line, Knud?”

“Aye.”

The Gael took it, whirled it, and tossed the grapnel neatly through one of the slitted windows above their heads. The rope paid out, running up; the prongs caught and held.

“They designed their embrasures ill,” was his comment. “It ought not to be so simple. Tcha, well. It’s not meant for a fortress this tower was.”

Mac Art swarmed up the rope with a sailor’s agility, mail, sword, and all; their weight was part of him, of long accustoming. A lithe bend and twist took him through the window.

Standing in a reeky dimness, he waited while his sight adapted. Little there was to see; stucco walls, rafters, a door leaning drunkenly from its hinges, and a deal of dust. Crmac frowned. The latter had been laid by a curious, bad-smelling dampness with no taint of age or mildew. Recent for sure, he mused. A rainstorm in the past day or so?

Yet never had rain combined with dust in an old house smelled quite this way… Not even this near the sea. For a moment his teeth were in his lip, whilt he considered.

With a shrug he made his way down the angled flights of stairs and opened the door. Wulfhere Skull-splitter’s armoured bulk filled the space instanter.

“You cannot come in,” the Gael said sardonically. “The place is a mess.”

Wulfhere disputed him. Cormac argued and cursed with the ability of long practice. At length he pursuaded his blood-brother to remain outside, whiles he made search with the three men he had chosen. Not happily, Wulfhere made way for Knud and Hrolf, and Knut.

Ascending, the four found that little that Cormac had not seen previously, save ruined furniture. The stench of brine and kelp pervaded, and was somehow wrong. Cormac saw Knud and Hrolf wrinkle their noses, though he made no comment.

They reached the topmost storey of the great edifice. Here was merely a hollow shaft of whitewashed brick, with a stair spiralling around it internally. They climbed, fighting dizziness.

“Mayhap those Romans sought to reach the sky, and gave up a ladder’s length short,” Knud suggested.

They reached the top. Pulleys and ropes were there, and a heavy capstan, for the raising of supplies; lamp-oil chiefly, Cormac hazarded. The big lamp the Romans had used was fifty years missing though, as were the mirrors employed to magnify its light and reflect it many miles seaward. Now there was a large iron brazier, and faggots of oil-soaked wood.

The tower’s human occupants were present as well.

They numbered four, and all were dead.

“CORMA-A-A-AC!” Wulfhere’s bellow.

Save the mark, Cormac thought. Worse this is than being married.

He trod to the circling balcony and leaned on the balustraded verge. “Damn your bull-roar mouth!” he shouted through cupped hands. “No danger is here, though something befell during the night. It’s four corpses we’re looking at.”

“And them unmarked,” Knud the Swift added; he was examining the bodies. “Save for old scars. These were weapon-men, or I know not the breed, and equipped for action. Now why should such be manning a lighthouse?”

“We be looking at another, down here!” Wulfhere thundered. “Found him tangled in kelp at the water’s edge. Smashed out of shape till his mother couldn’t know him. Hurled from the tower, he must have been. An he’d simply fallen, he’d be nearer the base.”

“Or else he… jumped,” Cormac muttered, half to himself.

Thoughtful, and thorough as always, he made examination of the beacon chamber. Lastly he looked at the corpses. Two gripped bare weapons with the tenacious rigor of death, yet they were unblooded.

Hrut Bear-slayer, huge, looming and rarely with a word to say, showed no comprehension of events. He waited, like an outsized hunting hound ready to track and slay on command. The blow that had left him with a grisly great dent in his forehead-and that by all reasonable chances should have left him stark dead-had rendered him ever silent and presumably thoughtless. His bulk and weapon-skills he had retained, however. Not even Wulfhere was stronger.

“Cormac,” Hrolf Halfgarsson said. “This one clutches something.”

The third corpse did. It was naught uncommon, save that they were a few hundred feet in the air; merely a length of dark brown seaweed. Its round, flexible stem sprouted long leaves like wrinkled streamers. These erupted bulges like air-bladders, or what appeared to be such. Each swelling was the size of a fat acorn.

Or grapes, Cormac mused, for they were tight-skinned as the latter in a vineyard of Gaul.

Interested, the Gael bent to touch the sea-plant.

With a coil and rustle it whipped about his forearm in serpentine constriction. Something round and sucking gripped the pale inner skin like a leech’s mouth. Cormac, with a longtime horror of snakes or aught that resembled them, tore the thing away. He hurled it down and stamped upon it.

Two of the bladders burst like erupting seedpods-

– and spurted streamers of scarlet over the floor.

“Blood,” Hrut said unbelievingly, and it was.

Comprehension of a sort came into that high chamber, and with it entered too the sombre spectre of the unnatural, the preternatural. The pervading odour of kelp, which had assaulted their nostrils all along, seemed to grow stronger. Now, in seconds, that smell had taken on sinister meaning.

The four men living looked at each other in silence. The four dead men stared on.

After a moment, a frowning Cormac thought to examine the beacon itself.

Its fire had been smothered out by what appeared to be a mass of kelp, though it was so completely charred to ash that he could not be certain. Buried beneath the ash was the beacon’s legitimate fuel, choked and smothered by wet seaweed ere it could be consumed naturally. Yet he saw that first it had burned for some time. Now it was absolutely cold. He turned, still frowning in thought.

“This cannot be the fire we beheld on yester-night,” Cormac said. “Else it were warm yet. That other fire burned too bright and it was too late; this was dead by then. Seaweed did this,” and his voice indicated disbelief of his own words, gruesome and horrendous in their full implication. And-impossible.

With a jerk of his head as if to clear it of foreboding, he got on with what had to be said. “Some overwhelming mass of kelp with power of movement… and… hunger for blood? Aye. Be we mad, would ye be saying? Kelp smothered and soaked out the beaconlight. Kelp destroyed four strong men… by sucking… draining them pale and bloodless… and the fifth mindlessly sought escape by hurling himself from this window. And can any tell me how such things can be?”

They had no answers, but after a time Hrolf had another question.

“What was the luring fire we saw then?”

“I cannot say. Yet and well for us that we ignored it, for it’s not from this tower that light glowed!”

The four men of Raven stood suspended betwixt sky, and sea, and with them lurked the glooming preternatural, and all was unreal.