Again he turned about, he who had been Cutha Atheldane, Druid of Norway and was now… someone else, some Thing else. His movements were quick and more sure now, animated by one of the strongest life-forces that had ever existed, one that had lived and trod the earth before Atlantis rose from the deeps, let alone sank.
“Cutha Atheldane am I, then!” And he laughed. Exultant, was the new Cutha Atheldane. He moved, he cried out his joy.
But he did not breathe.
“One hundred eighty centuries! Ah, Chaos that existed before all and will reign again, a hundred and eighty times a hundred years! But, a moment in eternity, aye-but what an eternity to have been held here by both stone and spell… and in a body with neither voice nor hands! And liberated…”
Cutha Atheldane, who was not Cutha Atheldane, broke off in a short laugh that would have raised the hackles of a dog and sent birds aflying.
“Ah I knew him, I recognized him at once, ere even he came floundering like a barbarian puppet down into my prison… to release me by slaying the serpent’s body that incarcerated me! I know ye for who ye were, not who ye are now! In any incarnation would I know thee, ancient enemy, barbarian king on a throne of fiery gems-a throne you usurped after slaying the noble lord who sat it!”
The voice trailed off like whispering leaves when the wind dies. When it commenced anew it was much lower, quiet now, and full of menace and deadly purpose.
“None there are to believe how long I have lived, or how long I have waited, while uncounted millions of little mortal men have strutted the earth, and bred like the pigs they are, and slew and slew, and so much of the Old Knowledge was lost that what remains-in the hands of these ‘Druids’-is but the ghost of the shadow of the shadow of what I know! But I have LIVED, I have remained on this earth in this dimension, whilst others died and returned scores of times. And now… at last I will have my vengeance, after a hundred and eighty centuries.”
The risen dead man looked about, ruminating. “First I must be invited to leave this isle, for still I am bound here by the old spell. But… I shall come to thee, you who men know now as Cormac mac Art of Connacht in Eirrin! I… will… have… my… VENGEANCE!”
And as the tall and cadaverous figure in the night-dark robe hurled aloft both arms amid a flapping of full tapering sleeves, the eyes and lips of his visage seemed to waver and vanish, to be replaced for an instant by a ghastly, grinning, chalk-white skull!
The most powerful and dedicatedly evil sorcerer in the world’s history was loose again on the face of the earth.
Chapter One:
Eight-and-twenty Picts
Sped by strong hands at its ten banks of oars, the hide-covered ship-or long boat-clove the water as though with good wind behind. Yet its blue sail was furled, for no air stirred the sea that basked so lazily in the sun betwixt Britain and Eirrin. Only where the ship passed was the blue-green water disturbed; it foamed cloud-white along the little ship and for a short distance in its wake.
The men at the oars had set aside their helmets, some of which sprouted horns, while one was decorated with feathers and still another trailed a horsehair plume after the Roman fashion. Long was the hair of these men, plaited or caught back by a thong, and there was but one among the crew of that lone vessel whose locks were more dark than the colour of new copper. Some of the oarsmen were daubed on face and arms with blue paint or dye. Others wore no such paint, though the face of one huge-armed fellow was etched with a scar so fierce it might have been mistaken for a red dye, only slightly faded.
Three men were aboard who rowed not.
One stood well forward; another manned the tiller. Wargirt they both were, and brawny.
He at the prow wore no helm, but he had chosen to crown his dark yellow hair with a cap made of catskins. From that barred cap sprouted a little plume of seven eagle feathers. Bronze were the bracers on his arms, one blade-etched from some past time when it had saved his shield-hand. His tunic was blue; over it he wore an excellent leathern jerkin that covered him from collarbones to his thighs just below his genitals. The cordwain belt slung at his hips supported a dagger on either side. He wore no sword. This man’s weapon, with a broad thong forming a loop where it had been stoutly wet-tied in a groove ringing the haft, was an ax. Its head was invisible, covered with an oiled cowhide bag against the salt spray.
The ax-man’s feet and ankles were laced into what were unmistakably caligulae, the short boots of the Roman legionaries who had for so long ruled his land… and protected it from those many who now came from oversea to carve it up among themselves; Saxons and Angles, Jutes and Frisians, Irish and Danes; aye, and from the north over the old wall, Picts and the Scoti of Alba that the Romans had called Caledonia.
The blond ax-man at the prow looked asea.
The man at the stern wore a sword, long at his left hip and down his leg. Though he stood the deck of a hide-covered longboat and with his light auburn hair plaited behind each ear to fall down his back, the sword had surely belonged to a darker man more at home astride a horse; it was a spatha, a Roman cavalryman’s sword. No adornment relieved his helmet, which was composed of four bands of dull grey metal laid onto a soft leathern caul. He too wore a jerkin of boiled leather, over a tunic of grey wool. The score or more steel rings fixed to the front of that plain lorica were as much reinforcing protection as decoration. This man’s full drooping mustachioes contained more bronze-red than his braids.
Oars creaked and thumped. Men grunted; water gurgled and swished, and the twenty-oared boat seemed to scud on the very surface of the sea as it swept forward, with unusual smoothness. Its heading was southerly.
The man at the bow was gazing southwestward, ahead and to starboard. Gazing that way as well were the auburn-haired man at the tiller and the third of those who did not row.
The blond ax-man at the prow moved his left arm out from his side, almost stiffly. It was fisted but for the forefinger, which pointed. With a nod, though no eyes were turned his way, the man at the stern changed the pressure of his tanned hands on the tiller. The ship, which was little more than fifty feet in length, did not veer, but angled to port; eastward, on its southerly bearing.
The blond at the bow glanced back. His nose had once been broken and was askew, nor did he quite close his mouth, ever.
“Irish,” he grunted, just loud enough to be heard by three-and-twenty men.
An oarsman to port asked, “Reavers?”
“I think not. Cynwas?”
“I think not,” the steersman said, just as quietly. “They’d be fighting else, Bedwyr, not suffering that… harassment.”
“Leaguered about by wolves,” Bedwyr the blond ax-man said, and there was amusement in his voice. “They’ll not see this sun set, though it’s soon crimson they’ll see!”
“Wolves?” This from another oar-plier, a man with a break in his beard from an old slash of sword or knife; surely no ax could have sliced him so without wrecking his jaw.
Bedwyr said, “Aye.”
“Picts,” Cynwas said from the stern.
“This far south? What be Picts doing this far south of their damned heather?”
“Or this far east,” Bedwyr said. “Mayhap they be Picts from far side Hibernia.”
Silent had been the third man who was not rowing, and him nigh-naked. Now he spoke.
“Eirrin, ye corn-headed ass. Eirrin! Ye talk like a Roman… miss ye your masters so much, ye Briton molester of ewes?”