Calgaich the Swordsman Read online

  ''Fian!” the Pict shouted.

  Calgaich turned quickly. It is in my heart that they know you are aboard, fian, the slave woman had prophesied. Then it was true! A cold feeling came over Calgaich, not because of the nearness of the Picts, but because the woman had prophesied this very thing and in so doing had made it plain to Calgaich that someone did not want him in Caledonia—someone who had most likely made a deal with these bloody Picts to stop Calgaich from landing there.

  "Fian!” the Pict repeated. He quickly tapped the edge of his naked sword against the small, square, blue-painted shield he carried. "Let us come alongside or you will all die!"

  "For the love of all the gods, fian," Cuill pleaded through his bloody, broken mouth, "do as he says." He cringed at the wolf's look in Calgaich's eyes.

  Calgaich eye-gauged the oncoming vessel. "Now!" he commanded, throwing his weight against the tiller bar to force over the steering oar. The birlinn shuddered and creaked. Cuill swiftly drove his crewmen to their work. The sails lost wind and fluttered madly, with the wet lines beating a drum tattoo against the canvas. The birlinn slowly heeled until the wind caught her, filling her sails with a powerful blast. She plunged deeply, as though intent on diving down to meet Nodons in his dark lair beneath the sea.

  The Picts yelled wildly. Their boat lost speed as the birlinn cloaked the wind from them. For an instant the Pictish vessel wallowed with little way on her, and then the lean prow of the birlinn poked closer as Calgaich leaned full on the tiller bar. He bent his head as a spear flashed toward him. The blade swept through his hair and its shaft rapped his shoulders as it sped past into the chest of one of the crewmen. His mouth squared. He coughed thickly as blood poured from his mouth. He fell backward over the side of the vessel with the spear still sticking from his chest like some strange leafless growth.

  The prow of the birlinn struck the bow oar on the larboard side of the other craft and snapped it like a twig, lifting the rower helplessly from the bench. The handle of the oar drove up into his chest, and hurled him upward and then over the side of the boat.

  One after another the long oars were snapped off or smashed back against the side of the vessel as the birlinn surged close alongside it. Screaming, cursing Picts were caught by the handles of the oars and flung about within the craft. As the stem of the birlinn neared the stem of the other vessel a trio of Picts who had been standing near their helmsman beat their swords against their wooden shields to avert evil and readied themselves to leap aboard the slow-moving Hibernian boat.

  “Cuill!” Calgaich shouted. He leaped to the side of the birlinn as Cuill took over the tiller bar. A Pict jumped the narrow gap between the two vessels. Swiftly the tip of Calgaich’s spear met the oncoming Pict to brush aside his shield. The keen iron struck deep into the man’s chest. His momentum still drove him on. Calgaich braced his legs and swung with the impetus of the Pict to lift him high into the air, squirming like a live hare on a spit. He pitch-forked him clear over the far side of the birlinn.

  A second Pict leaped the gap between the boats. He drove in hard under the downcoming spear with his shield close up under his chin while he probed eagerly for Calgaich's guts with his sword blade. An instant before the Pict’s sword tip could plunge into Calgaich’s belly, Calgaich brought the bronze balancing ball at the end of his spear shaft down in a smashing blow atop the Pict’s battered helmet and drove it down over his eyes. He staggered blindly toward the far side of the birlinn. Calgaich whirled. He set himself and drove his bloody leaf-shaped spear blade into the Pict’s back. The Pict shrieked just once as he plunged over the side. Calgaich drew back, letting the weight of the dying Pict withdraw the spear blade.

  Lines with barbed grappling hooks were thrown over from the enemy craft. They sank into the deck of the birlinn. The two vessels swung close together. Three Picts readied themselves to leap as the grapnels caught fast.

  Calgaich dropped his war spear and whipped out his long sword. The iron blade hissed as it cleared the bronze sheath. Calgaich swung his shield from his left shoulder to his left arm and thrust his forearm through the loops. He cut through the nearest of the grapnel lines. A Pict jumped onto the deck of the birlinn. He slashed wildly at Calgaich's grinning face. Calgaich’s shield struck the shield of the Pict with a grinding of the metal bosses. The reiver was staggered. The sword tip flicked in once, hardly a few inches, and the Pict was dead before he hit the deck. He rolled against Calgaich’s legs. Calgaich leaped high over the fallen Pict and met another reiver with a downsweep of his sword. At the same time he raised the metal edge of his shield under the chin of the Pict. The man died instantly between the two surfaces.

  Calgaich jumped back. He screamed above the rising fury of the storm wind. “Abu! Abu! To victory! To victory!” He leaped to the low railing while thrusting once into the thigh of a charging Pict. He reversed his blow and slashed the man's contorted face open from temple to chin.

  Calgaich then leaped like a cat across to the pitching afterdeck of the Pictish craft. He met the determined rush of half a dozen tattooed killers. His great sword blade whirled high and came down like a flash of solid lightning, again and again, battering on shields and helmets, striking musically from the blades of the Picts, darting and hissing like a thing alive and drawing blood at almost every stroke, spattering the droplets in a reddish haze about the knot of fighting, cursing men.

  “Do you hear the wild fowl calling?” Calgaich the Swordsman chanted. He was fey, with the mystical battle madness of the Celt. “The ravens gather for your flesh! Come to the sword welcoming, Cruithne! A red welcome for a feast of sea-wolves! Do not stand back, you who come unbidden! Is my welcome to you the doorway to sudden death?” He laughed wildly.

  “He is fey! The battle madness is on him!” Cuill screamed hysterically to the crew. “He cares not whether he lives or dies just so he can keep on killing! Cut loose the lines, Usnect! Let the mad fian die!”

  Cairenn could remain still no more. Overcoming her fear, she ran along the full length of the deck. She snatched up Calgaich’s war spear, the bloodied weapon, the mighty laigen. It felt strange in her hands, heavy, wet with blood, but she had to learn its use now. She leaned the tip of the blade lightly against Cuill's chest so as to draw a little of the red, just a very little. Her stomach heaved, but she must not falter. “Do not move, Cuill.” The words grated between her even white teeth. Her emerald eyes never left his face. “If you move, I will do thus.” She leaned on the spear, and Cuill shrieked in pain and hysteria far greater than her own. The crewmen slowly backed away from the lines, hypnotized by Cairenn’s threats and the sight of a woman armed.

  Calgaich’s shield was splintered from top to boss; blood splattered its whitewashed surface. A Pict went down screaming and struck up at Calgaich’s crotch with a broken-bladed sword. Calgaich caught him full in the face with a smashing heel, and then he leaped back to parry a vicious sword blow from another burly Pict. He calmly swept his sword sideways to shear through the tough wooden shield of the Pict. The man’s sight was destroyed in the red jelly left in the blade’s deadly track. Calgaich slammed his shield into that of the blinded man and drove him back against three of his cursing mates who called hysterically for a sword stroke or two at this stinging gadfly who had landed in their midst.

  Calgaich retreated to the railing of the Picts’ vessel, holding them in check with reddened sword. He swiftly looked back over his shoulder at the pitching birlinn just yards away. “Cut loose,” he shouted.

  Cairenn hesitated, slightly lessening her pressure on the war spear piercing Cuill's chest.

  “He tells us to cut loose himself,” Cuill wailed. “We must obey.”

  But Cairenn shook her head. The wind whipped her long dark hair back from her face. “Not without you, fian,” she called to Calgaich above the wrath of the waves.

  “Now!” Calgaich roared at her again.

  But again Cairenn held firm, allowing Cuill to feel her weight behind the bloody spear. The cr
ewmen remained motionless, caught in time between two forces they did not understand.

  Calgaich thrust hard and missed. He then recovered and slashed his blade into a Pict’s unprotected crotch to emasculate him. The man reeled back against his screaming mates. Calgaich then hurled his blood-dripping sword like a javelin across the widening gap between the boats and leaped across to catch up the sword as the tip of it struck quivering into the deck. Whirling about he thrust out the sword just as a last Pict, blood-maddened and heedless of sudden death, jumped after him. The sword point darted into the Pict's chest and was withdrawn as the Pict fell backward into the water between the two vessels.

  Cuill, released from the point of the war spear, worked frantically to free the lines. Gradually the birlinn fell away. It wallowed in the vicious crosswaves, wind filling the mainsail. Light throwing spears, the deadly slegs, arced across the widening gap between the two boats. Calgaich laughed as he swung his sword in rhythm, first to one side and then to the other, striking the light slegs and spinning them away into the whitecapped waters.

  Cuill stared at Calgaich. “He is not human,” he muttered. Cairenn, too, gazed in wonder at Calgaich as she wiped her hands on her wet woolen cloak, as if to wipe away all memory of the bloody war spear that she had held only moments before. She had disobeyed him—for a warrior in battle the punishment was certain death. Yet she would do it again.

  Finally, as the birlinn left the reiving craft behind, Calgaich caught one of the light spears in a show of strength and threw it back to find the heart of one last Pict. He stood at the rail in a solemn moment of triumph before he came aft to where Cuill had once again taken over the tiller bar. He looked sternly at Cairenn, as if he were about to speak, but then strode past her to the steering oar. Resting his sword tip on the deck beside Cuill, he spoke. “Sail for the coast,” he ordered. The wildness of bloody battle had left him. He was no longer fey. Once again he was the calm and confident fian.

  This time there was no denial from Cuill.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hours after the battle, fear came down from the low overcast sky and settled silently on the deck of the pitching birlinn. It had come to stay.

  “Fian!” Cuill screamed from the afterdeck. “We must turn back to the open sea. We can try for the coast when the weather changes; we are too far north of your landing place now. It is two days' sail to the south. If we don't turn back, we'll lose my birlinn and our lives as well."

  Calgaich did not answer him. Instead, he untwisted his left arm torque of gold and tossed it the full length of the vessel so that it clattered on the deck at the feet of Cuill, who scooped it up despite his paralyzing fear of the dangerous coast in the mist somewhere ahead of them. It had been King Crann's gift to one of his favorite fianna, as the woman, Cairenn, had been. Crann paid his warriors well. The arm torque could keep Cuill in comfort for many years to come. He slid it inside his tunic.

  Cairenn looked up into the face of her master. “Cuill’s right. The gods do not mean to let you return home."

  “Quiet!" Calgaich snapped. “The sea will hear you!"

  As though the sea had indeed heard, it began to work itself into an increased white-maned fury. The timbers of the birlinn creaked and groaned in the powerful grip of the waves. Despite the beating of the wind the mist had not dissipated. It was almost as though it were semisolid in content. Perhaps the gods had placed it there to prevent the birlinn from making a landfall.

  Calgaich pointed with his spear. “There! Nodons shows his teeth!"

  Black-fanged rocks wreathed in foaming white rivulets that streamed back into the dark waves had appeared

  on both sides of the vessel. Beyond them were more rocks in serried ranks, as though Nodons had ringed the birlinn with sharpened stakes that could pierce her wooden sides as easily as a bone needle pierces cloth.

  “Turn back! Turn back!” the crewmen screamed in unison.

  It was too late.

  No vessel in the known world could have turned within the scope of those grinning rock teeth and won free to the open sea. Nodons was playing his bitter game to the death well. He would win as he almost always had won. The rock jaws seemed to close in on the birlinn. A pointed needle of a rock ripped into the thin bottom planking and raked its way from stem to stern with a sickening crunching sound. The sound passed into the very souls of the humans aboard the birlinn.

  There was one exception to the fear that seemed to paralyze all the others—the tall warrior. He peered eagerly into the wreathing mist. His nostrils were drawn wide like those of a questing hound. He could smell the land. "There she looms!” Calgaich cried in an exultant voice. He pointed with his spear. “Albu! Albu!” he shouted. There was great longing in his voice.

  Cairenn, forgetting her own fear for a moment, looked with wonder at Calgaich. His face was drawn as though he were in great pain, and yet it was alive with the same eagerness she had noticed on his face when he had fought fey, like a madman, on the deck of the Pictish reiving craft. It was almost as if Calgaich spoke of a woman he had known and loved well and for whom he had hungered during the long years he had been outlawed from Caledonia. It was the desperate, longing cry of the exiled Celt.

  A dark headland showed through the mist. Another sound more terrible than the incessant whine of the wind came to the people on the doomed birlinn. It was the _ grinding of the surf boiling against the rocks and shale of the shore and the great dragging withdrawals of the waves that battered at the coast. Rocks stabbed at the slowly sinking hull of the vessel. The driving waves savagely worried at her like unsated hounds at their meat. Suddenly the birlinn struck hard, tilting wearily to one side like a stricken thing seeking its last resting place. She began to settle. Waves swept freely over the weather rail and carried some of the screaming crewmen over the lee side. The mast tilted and then cracked at the deck line to collapse over the side.

  Cairenn watched in horror as Calgaich threw off his tartan cloak, unbuckled his belt and dropped it and the heavy-sheathed sword to the deck. He withdrew his dirk from its sheath and thrust it inside his tunic. He poised the magnificent war spear and cast it toward the beach. It flashed through the tatters of mist and struck into the dark sands to quiver there like a living thing.

  The birlinn was breaking up. Waves flowed knee-deep over the deck. All of the crewmen had vanished into the sea. Cairenn waited for the sea to claim her next. Only Cuill clung to the useless tiller, while staring ahead to see his own death approaching, unable to save himself while his beloved birlinn died first, broken beneath his feet.

  Calgaich undid his thick gold neck torque. He hurled it into the sea. “Nodons!” he cried. “Take this as an offering for a safe passage to shore for myself and the woman!”

  He slid over the prow into the sea. For a moment his hard gray eyes held the emerald-hued eyes of Cairenn. In that moment she was almost sure he meant to leave her to drown. It was his right. His own life came first. She was only a cumal, a chattel to be dealt with like any other piece of property.

  “Can you swim, woman?” he shouted.

  She nodded. “I can, fian”

  “Then strip and get into the bath.” He grinned.

  She hesitated. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Now!” he snapped. “Or, by the gods, Nodons shall have a tasty morsel this night in his black cavern beneath the sea.”

  She had no choice. She stripped off her cloak, long tunic and undergown to reveal full young breasts budded with pink, fine hips and shapely thighs, and the soft curling mat of darkness where her long legs met the flatness of her belly. She stood there naked to the biting teeth of the wind and the icy pelting of the sea spray.

  Calgaich's admiring gaze shifted. He ripped a plank loose from the disintegrating hull and beckoned to her. She let herself down into the cold water and felt his hard hands pass along her body to help her straddle the rough plank. Calgaich struck out for the shore while he guided the plank with his left hand. Waves flowed over Cairenn’s
shivering nakedness and it seemed as though she could never get enough air into her lungs to breathe. Twice Calgaich went fully under, only to emerge with his long hair plastered across his face. The second time he came up his temple skin was split and there was a faint pink tint of blood in the wetness on his features.

  Rocks seemed to drift past. Then the surf took charge of them, changing momentarily from a frothing maelstrom into a gentle surging that swung them safely past the rocks and then tumbled them over and over again in a melee of water and churning sand to carry them to the beach.

  Cairenn opened her eyes. She lay on the hard wet shingle covered by Calgaich’s cloak. His spear was still thrust into the sand close beside her. Spindrift blew horizontally from the sea toward the gloomy shoreline, where Calgaich stood knee-deep in the surf looking out to sea. There was no sign of the birlinn.

  Calgaich turned toward her as he wiped the blood from his face. He could not resist smiling at her. She was enveloped in the tartan cloak with just her pale face and those great green eyes of hers looking up at him like a frightened hare peering from its hole.

  “Nodons threw me back my cloak,” Calgaich said. “Perhaps it was a wager between us. Nodons lost.”

  “Not by much, fian” She shivered a little.

  “But still a victory.”

  “Must there always be victories for you?”

  He studied her. She had a way of disarming him from his trained viewpoint of life. “There is glory and honor in good battle.”

  “And in death?”

  He shrugged. “What is there to lose? There is a better life hereafter in Tir na n’Og for a warrior such as myself.” She smiled faintly. “The Beautiful Land of Youth, where there is no pain, disease or death. Where a warrior may feast and drink, fornicate and fight to his heart's content throughout eternity.”