Shoving himself up onto his feet, Cormac drew his sword, pointed inland, and waved sword and buckler.
Cormac turned and plunged down the long green hill, sure his companions had understood his silent message.
He ran as best he could, avoiding trees and berrybushes and entanglements of viny plants. Once he fell, instinctively flailing, wide his sword-arm so that he did not come to grief on his own blade. He rolled and slid, grunting. Getting his body turned crosswise to the slope, he stopped himself, lunged cursing to his feet, and hurried on. Behind him the sound of downrushing water dwindled. Now there were only the calls of birds and the wind of his own swift passage.
He heard the girl cry out, for girl he had decided she was, and her so tiny.
A shout from him would cause her attackers to turn from her to face him. Aye… and to be thus well prepared for him. Suffer a bit, girl, and it’s of more value I’ll be against unarmed men wearing tall horns!
He ran on in silence, hearing the sound of male laughter and shredding cloth.
So rapt and enwrapt were they in their own lust, laughing and calling encouragement to him who now had their prey down, that none heard either the passage of a rushing man between rustling bushes nor the jingling clink of his mailcoat.
Then the dark man was bursting from the forest into the glade, and one tow-bearded reveler turned in time to see his own coming weird before it was on him in a swift sword-slash that shivered the air and opened his throat and windpipe in a moment. Blood leaped from a severed caratid. The Norseman staggered, his eyes huge, his hand rising ineffectually to his throat. Already his knees were loosening; already his silent rushing attacker was half whirling to thrust at a second of the pale-haired men of Norge, the one with the dragon knife-etched and red-outlined on his round shield.
Driven by an experienced arm backed by rangy though unusually powerful muscles, the sword of the Gael split apart scalemail links and drove them before his point into the man’s belly, nigh the length of a hand. That raider, so far asea on the Viking trail, stopped short, shuddering. His mouth was wide as his eyes. Moving sidewise without interrupting his initial action, Cormac gave his sword a strong twist and a swift tug. It came free, scraping on destroyed scales of steel and followed by a spate of scarlet.
There had been four men of far cold Norge. Now two lay dying quietly, if not silently. There was a moment for Cormac mac Art to scan about, rather than attack as he had, slashing one man blindly and reacting to the movement of the second with the reflexes of a longtime weapon-man.
The slender girl with the long, midnight hair lay on her back, and her skin was much exposed and dark as Cormac’s own. Between her thrashing legs, mailcoat and all, lay a man from under whose helmet escaped a single thick braid that was almost yellow. Though she was kicking, writhing, flailing, he was getting his way with weight and strength. Nor could Cormac end that man’s efforts and his life; the fourth raider, buckler on right arm, had snatched up ax, and was lunging at the Gael. At the same time, he called a warning.
Cormac mac Art had oft avowed that he killed only when necessary. Challenged on the matter of the bloody wake of his past, he admitted that it was often necessary… it was necessary now. Where there were four raiders from the sea, there were others. None of these must go free to warn their fellows, wherever on this small tree-grown island they lurked.
A left-handed foe could be difficult. His disadvantages were his advantages. His shield was on Cormac’s shield side, his ax aligned with Cormac’s sword. Interpose a shield quickly across the body at his slash, and strike back at-what? Yet there was no time for difficulties and normal circle-and-feint this day. Cormac swung in a way that appeared wild. Nordic eyes gleamed at the invitation, and ax came arushing. The Gael was not there to stop its edge, either with buckler or flesh. He dodged and moved in, swinging his shield over and up to smash the wrist just back of the ax-wielding fist. Then he was past without waiting to watch the ax waver, lower, drop from fingers that flexed open.
The Norseman whirled. Cormac’s sword was a streak of silver that lifted the hem of a leathern coat of armour and plunged upward from groin into intestines and the floor of the man’s stomach. With the ugly noise of a sick rooster, the raider clutched at himself, bending, bloodying his hand on the skewering blade. The Norseman fell backward off Cormac’s point, still staring.
The Gael turned to face the fourth man-their leader of course, as he’d got first turn with the captive. He was up. He had his buckler, and his sword. And he was no small man, crouching so expertly with sword held just so and buckler at the precisely proper height and distance from his body.
Over their shields, the two men stared at each other, the scarred, black-stubbled Gael of Eirrin and the fully bearded blond of Norge.
“Cormac! It’s Cormac the Wolf-again! And here, both of us far from familiar haunts! Well, Cormac, well… it’s here you meet your weird, Skraeling of Eirrin! It’s here I do death on you at last, as I slew your fellow sea-thief Wulfhere of the Danes years ago!”
“Thorleif, “Cormac said, and he gasped the name.
O gods, would it never end? This was Thorleif Hordi’s son, whom Wulfhere had slain years agone, on the isle of Kaldjorn when he and Cormac had been at the matter of regaining the kidnaped sister of Gerinth of Britain.*
* See Tigers of the Sea, Ace Fantasy.
“Wulfhere slew you, Norseman! Must I spend my life facing dead men risen to challenge me anew?”
A frown darkened the wind-etched face of Hordi’s son of Norge.
“It’s madness on you in your declining years and last moments of life, Wolf,” he said. In a crouch, he twisted his buckler and waggled the powerful wrist of his sword-arm.
Blood of the gods! Cormac’s brain lurched. First it was those illusory men Cutha Atheldane of Norge set against me, in the passage beneath Kull’s castle-all men I myself had done death on in years past. Then a fullscore and more dead men, Danes and Norse alike, enemies and former comrades raised by Thulsa Doom’s’ horrid arts in that same castle less than a fortnight agone, and them not to be slain by mere steel. And now it’s Thorleif I face-whom Wulfhere slew!
Will steel prevail this time? Is this some trick of Thulsa Doom who is somehow also Cutha Atheldane? Can I put darkness of death on Thorleif’s eyes-again, with point and edge? Or need I mistletoe and holy oak to lay this life-like lich?
Or-is it mere illusion?
Thorleif lunged; Cormac dodged and cat-stepped aside without trying a counter-blow. If this were illusion, only the face was; the ringing blow on his shield and the jolt to that arm were real enow!
Thorleif turned, a big man light on his feet, to keep his eyes ever focused on his foe.
“You want this skinny little wench with the darkness of your own hide on her, Skaeling? Take her then-you have only to come through me!”
“I wear no horn for her, mad dog-but it’s two I’ll have, once I’ve sliced yours off!”
With an enraged cry Thorleif swung; Cormac’s buckler took the blow and his point leaped-to thud into the other man’s shield and be turned aside with a hideous scraping sound. Prepared to strike again, the Norseman saw his foe’s readiness and glittering eyes and thought better of it.
It was then that a slender leg whipped up from the leaf-strewn sward and a bare foot struck flat, hard-driven, into the back of Thorleif’s left knee.
The Norse raider lurched, staggered, sagging to leftward, and Cormac stabbed past his shield into Thorleif’s armpit. Thorleif gasped loudly, vocally. Gone suddenly all shivery, he tried an offensive swing of his buckler. Cormac was better at it; shield smashed the other man’s face and he showed his mercy by ending the Norseman’s misery: the point of his glaive leaped through blond beard into throat.