Andrew J. Offutt - Cormac 06 - The Undying Wizard

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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. 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 have died and returned scores

of times. And now... at last I will have my vengeance, after a hundred and eighty centuries...

THE UNDYING WIZARD

The Cormac mac Art Series

THE MISTS OF DOOM by Andrew J. Offutt

THE TOWER OF DEATH by Andrew J. Offutt & Keith Taylor

WHEN DEATH BIRDS FLY by Andrew J. Offutt & Keith Taylor

TIGERS OF THE SEA by Robert E. Howard

THE SWORD OF THE GAEL by Andrew J. Offutt

THE UNDYING WIZARD by Andrew J. Offutt

THE SIGN OF THE MOONBOW by Andrew J. Offutt & Keith Taylor

War of the Gods on Earth Series by Andrew J. Offutt

THE IRON LORDS

SHADOW OUT OF HELL

THE LADY OF THE SNOWMIST

THE UNDYING WIZARD

If any man has earned peace, the man should be Cormac

mac Art, exiled son of an Irish king, freed after years of

outlawry from the shame of a crime falsely laid at his feet,

exonerated by the High King of Eirrin.

But Cormac’s troubles have only begun, as he finds himself

stalked by an evil sorcerer from the dim past, an occult

nightmare who has sworn revenge.

ROBERT E. HOWARD’S

OTHER GREAT HERO

CORMAC MAC ART

Jodie of the Erin-born

until further notice

THE UNDYING WIZARD

An Ace Fantasy Book / published by arrangement with

the author and Glenn Lord, agent for the Estate of Robert E. Howard

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace edition / February 1982

Fourth printing / June 1984

agent for the Estate of Robert E. Howard

Cover art by Romas

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10016

ISBN: 0-441-84516-9

Ace Fantasy Books are published by the Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10016

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

Prologue

Eight-and-Twenty Picts

Warrior and Priest

Death-Tide

The Castle-of Atlantis

The Living Dead

The Throne of Kull

Pacts

Footprints

Memories

The Roof of the World

When Friend Becomes Foe

When Companion Becomes Lover

To Die Twice

The Undying Wizard

The Wizard’s Challenge

The Wizard’s Power

The Wizard Strides

Steel Against Sorcery

Doom-heim

The Undying Wizard

Andrew J. Offutt

ACE FANTASY BOOKS

NEW YORK

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express thanks to Robert Adams and Chuck Holst and others who helped with

information and books (including the authors of 131 books and encyclopedic articles); and Kirby; and, for

letting him see and feel what it’s really like:

HRM Albert Von Dreckenveldt,

Baron Wurm Wald, MK, KSCA, OL

Sir Polidor Haraldsson, KSCA, OL, OGW

—and others of the Middle Kingdom

Prologue

The enormous reptile lay in a cavern passage, eerily lit by some means surely preternatural; sorcerous,

perhaps. Walls and ceiling glowed. The strange illumination was dim, pearly, hardly akin to that of torch or

lamp, much less the sun—which could not pierce the cavern’s ceil of earth and rock beneath the man-made

pile of masonry that capped the thick natural layer. The pale light emanated from the very walls of the

world-old tunnel itself.

In this weird luminous emanation from a source not visible the great reptile lay, a green monster twisted as a

vine on rocky soil.

Several times the length of a man the creature was, and nigh as thick. It lay motionless in a great lake of

red-brown cruor. The blood had thickened and crusted over in coagulation, so that it shone as if glowing,

reflecting the wall-light. The serpent was still. Its eyes, the colour of new flax and large as a man’s eyes, were

filmed over.

Yet it gave off no stench, nor was it bloated. There was no sign of putrefaction. Nevertheless, the monster

was dead. Its great twisted tree-trunk of a body bore the many wounds that had ended its life. It had been

stabbed and hacked, sliced and chopped. No juices remained in that prodigious corpse; the number of

wounds and its own volcanically violent death throes had seen to that.

It was fearsome, even in death. No ordinary man had brought red death upon this haunter of subterrene

passageways.

In a somber cavern beneath the earth beneath a towering castle of extraordinary antiquity, the reptile that

appeared to be the father of all snakes lay dead.

And... it moved.

Only the hint of a shudder was that movement—but no, it was a shimmer, giving but the weird illusion of

motion. A Something stirred within the corpse. Some... thing was struggling to gain freedom from its prison of

death.

In the whelming silence of a tomb, the air stirred about the great snout. Slowly, above the moribund shell of

the reptile, a haze formed. It spread, lengthened, billowed only slightly, and rose. Tenuous, wavering creepers

of mist shuddered on the stale air of the cavern. Luminous walls were clearly visible through the gossamer

floating haze. It was blue-grey, that ever-shifting amorphous cloudlet; the colour of human death.

Yet about it there was nothing human.

For just a moment among the fleeting motes of time, the necrotic haze seemed to coalesce, as if attempting

to form a shape: rounded at the top, pierced below by two holes, narrow and latticed below—a death’s head.

But that was gone in an instant, nor were there living eyes present to have seen.

The mist floated up, free of the serpentine corpse that had spawned it. It moved, and surely there was

purpose in the flowing movement of that faint cloud of haze along the subterranean corridor.

The passage bent and twisted again and again, as though formed by a restless reptile—or by long-dead men

who had sought to confuse and slow possible pursuit. For though the mist-thing moved away from it, the

tunnel gave off a concealed passage in the centuries-old castle above.

The mist-thing drifted along above a dusty, ever-descending floor of packed earth. Around convoluted turnings

and twistings writhed the wraithy haze, and it touched nothing but air, this form of life from death that trailed

in eerie silence through the soundless channel beneath the earth.

Then it paused, writhing in air. It hovered above... another corpse.

The body was that of a man. Old he had been, aged enough to have died of natural causes. But there was

visible evidence to the contrary. He who had been tall and unusually thin wore a cowled robe, dark as night.

Cloth covered his reed-thin body from head to instep. He lay belly down, and in the center of the robe’s back

a darker stain spread. Dried trails of it led over the fabric to the corridor’s floor of packed, dust-piled earth. The

splotch and its coagulated runnels were a reddish brown, like old rust. The robed man had been stabbed from

behind and had got his death thereby.

Grey and white, forming silver, were his beard and the hair that straggled limp as corn tassels from his head

over his cheek. Grey too were his eyes, nearly white in the paleness. Though open, they saw nothing. Bony

hands with fingers like claws had not even torn at the tunnel floor; he had been dead even as he fell. Open too

was his mouth in a rictus that had been a gasp or cry.

The hovering mist lowered. Wraithy tendrils of transparent blue-grey touched the corpse, as though the

amorphous haze-thing was putting forth exploratory pseudopods.

One of them entered the open mouth of the dead man.

Swiftly then, like smoke somehow filtering into a bottle, the haze entered the corpse.

Then all was quiet and still, and none was there to measure the passage of time. Minutes, or hours, or days,

or weeks or months... they were as nothing to the dead-and to the mist-thing.

The seagreen serpent lay dead, and it began to rot. Well away along the twisting corridor beneath the earth,

the robed man lay dead. And the mist had vanished, as silently and hazily as it had appeared, from one

corpse and into another.

The body of the robed man did not swell, or rot.

Then, in that silence and motionlessness of death, there was movement.

It was fingers that twitched; the fingers of the right hand of the dead man.

They curled, clawing inward and leaving trails in the dust of the ancient cavern. Hardly more than bone, these

fingers straightened again. And curled once more.

A ripple flowed through night-dark fabric as the dead man’s left leg moved, only a twitch like the rigour after

death—but he had been dead far too long for that.

Both arms bent. Both bone-lean hands moved back toward the body. They planted themselves, palms down,

at the shoulders. The head moved. Lank silver hair stirred. The hands pressed down. Buskin-shod feet

scraped.

The corpse pushed itself up from the dusty floor.

On its feet, the dead man who was not dead wavered, tottered on long-still legs. A hand swung out to slap

the earthen wall, as a brace for a body that had long lain prone. A long moaning sound issued from the thin

slash of a mouth. All through the tall form, a great shudder ran. Then, as though just remembering, the mouth

closed.

The head turned on its thin neck with another stirring of shoulder-length hair like lifeless silver thread. One

hand, the right, rose before the face. It turned there, like a specimen the dead eyes studied, while the robe’s

dolmen sleeve slid down. Revealed was a wrist that was only skin drawn over bone like hide tedded for its

tanning.

The skin was not tan, but nearly white, like new linen.

The hand slapped the chest, moved over the face. It traced out the high forehead, the deep crag-surmounted

sockets of the pale, pale eyes, that thin nose with its porcelain-like nostrils, the gaunt cheeks, the mouth

that was little more than a horizontal gash between mustache and ashy beard.

The resurrected corpse, alone beneath the earth... spoke.

“Thin, O Great Serpent, this body—merely skin over bone like the fine parchment of Vanara stretched over

stone to dry!” The voice that issued from the corpse was soft, almost a whisper. “A lean body, far from young.

A priest, a seer, a mage—a Druid, it is called. From a land called Norge, where the ice remains long and

snow falls and lies ever atop the craggy peaks, and wind howls cold to cut like a chariot-wheel’s scythe.”

Up leaped robe-swathed arms, to raise clenched fists on high.

“ALIVE! Alive and in the form of a man once more, with hands, aye and feet to walk the earth again! Cutha

Atheldane. That was the name of the life-force that quickened this body before mine animated it anew.”

The Undead man laughed aloud and turned quite around in its jubilation.

“ALIVE! One is grateful for having been snatched from eternal exile in that other dimension that would have

been like mortal death, from the life-sucking sword. Yet... to have lain here, waiting, handless and voiceless

in the body of a son of the Great Serpent... for eighteen thousand years! Ah!”

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?”

The blond at the prow turned to stare at the speaker. He was a great burly giant of a man with a red mane

and full bushy beard.

“Ye talk foolishly free for a man bound to a ship’s mast, Dane! Be ye so anxious to be oped up for the sun to

bake your drunkard’s gizzard?”

The bound man grinned. He wore only a dirty tunic that had been red before its dyes succumbed to wear and

sun and salt water and sweat. Now, but for the soil, it was lighter in colour than his full beard.

“It were better than having to list to your stupidity, Briton.”

Bedwyr of Britain cheated his captive, who was bound so that he must remain standing and stare straight

ahead, like a strange bow ornament moved back amidships. The blond Briton only grinned, and turned away.

“Row. An they see us, they all be far too busy—and about to be busier still—to trouble us. Nor need we have

worry of them.”

The oarsmen rowed. The ship of Britons—and captive Dane—swept on to the south and east, well east of the

Eirrinish craft “leaguered about by wolves.”

Aboard that beleaguered ship from the land of Eirrin, caught by the same calm and now by the swift boats of

its harriers, a man watched the vessel from Britain. A tall, rangily built man he was, deep-chested and

manifestly strong, his eyes deeply planted and slitted, grey as steel or ice. The distance was too great for

faces to be seen; had there been aught of the crew of the other craft he knew, he’d not have recognized him.

The hair of the ax-man at the prow seemed sunwhite from this vantage.

“They go on.”

The words came from the warrior beside the tall and rangy man; this one was both short and slight, and

wearing a bronze-studded leathern cap that covered brow and cheeks, ears and nape.

“Aye. Ours be no business of theirs. It’s a broad sea, and it bears up many peoples. Those be neither Gaul

nor Pict, and if it’s Celts they are—not likely—it’s not from Eirrin but Britain they sail.”

“Britain!” called up one of the men at the oars. “The Britons be no seafarers!”

“Some fare asea.”

The small beardless warrior spoke nervously: “Could... might their destination be the same as ours?”

“No no, dairlin’ girl,” the tall man said. He too was beardless, his narrow-slitted eyes giving him a peculiarly

sinister aspect. Though he was of Eirrin, his squarecut hair was black as the shaggy mops of the men in their

hideboats round about them. He wore neither beard nor jewellery.

He went on, “How could they be knowing of it? Samaire-heim be not known in their land—nor any other, save

wherever it is Wulfhere may be. Nay, they be reavers as I was, though Crom and Manannan only know what

they do so far south—HA!”

His shout was elicited by the arcing up of an arrow from one of the little hideboats that sought to encircle his

vessel of fourteen oars; the flint tipped shaft fell short.

“HA!” the tall man barked out again. “Try on, Picts—once one of ye comes close enough to bounce one of

your puny sticks off this ship, I’ll huff and puff until I blow over your snailshell!”

A cry of rage was the reply from the archer; the dark, squat men of Pictdom were not known for sense of

humour.

In the Irish craft, a man called. “A fine threat, Cormac. But... what do we do? There be fourteen of these

‘snail-shells’ as ye’re after styling them, and us between them like a man running the Behlfires!”

The dark man named Cormac looked about.

Two Pictish boats trailed the little ship he commanded. Six paced it on either side. They might have been an

escort, save that the Picts were friend to none in the world but themselves. Cormac knew that an ancestor of

his had been friend and fighting companion to the last great Pictish king, Bran Mak Morn, years ago. That

meant nothing now, either to the squat swarthy men or to the current bearer of the name Cormac mac Art of

Connacht in Eirrin.

Small were the Pictish boats, of well-scraped hide rubbed with butter so that they were as if faced with glass

that sparkled in the sun flashing on the placid waters. In each were two Picts, armed with spear and

knife—and oar. A few had bows and arrows. The two-man craft were light and swift-gliding. Full a hand’s

breadth had the sun moved in the sky since the little flotilla had intersected the ship’s course. Nor did the

barrel-chested rowers seem in the least winded, nor minded to abandon their odd, paralleling chase.

“Ah for a wind,” Cormac said with anger and longing, “a wind, that we might leave behind these apish scum

from Time’s dawn who seek our very hearts!”

He glowered ferociously about at the ringing skinboats, de curucis or curraghs: caracks. All remained just

outside the distance to which any sensible man would seek to speed a spear. And few used the bow, which

was a hunting tool, rather than a weapon of war.

Cormac snapped, “A-port!”

The steersman responded at once. Swiftly his craft began to move away from the caracks on their right.

Nearly as swiftly, the Pictish boats to port swung away, nimble little craft rowed by experts.

In his anger and desperation Cormac himself snatched up arrow and bow of yew and sent a shaft at that

skinboat which seemed nearest. The Picts howled in derision; Cormac mac Art was an indifferent archer at

best.

“What do we do?”

Cormac looked at the short, leather-capped warrior at his side. “Row,” he said, in a snarl. “Go on. And hope

for wind!” He glanced half the length of the ship at the druid.

The man in the robe of forest green either did not notice, or affected not to feel the accusing gaze. But he

made answer, staring straight before him as though talking to himself.

“Behl and Crom,” he said, “cede power asea to Manannan mac Lyr and the Morrigu of the waves. And

Manannan, as all seafarers know, is deaf from the roar of the surf.”

Cormac blinked. “In all my years asea,” he muttered, “I never heard that.”

The warrior beside him smiled, but wisely kept silent.

“CORMAC!”

The Gael spun at the alarmed shout of his name. Seeing the pointing finger, he wheeled. The Pictish boats to

starboard, all six, were closing on his ship. Cormac’s reaction was not understood by those possessed of

more patience and less experience and warlike joy than this Gael among Celts: Cormac grinned.

“Lugh!” he snapped. “Ferdiad!”

With grunts Lugh and Ferdiad shipped their oars, Ferdiad the first to starboard, Lugh the last. So had Cormac

placed them, after giving both careful instructions and some small rehearsal. These two were better archers

than their comrades along that side, and they knew their duties. Each man snatched up bow and clapped on

helmet; each wore a jerkin of well-boiled leather, and long bracers on both arms.

Lugh and Ferdiad moved quickly into position at the starboard hull’s bulwark, looked, ducked, nocked, pulled

string, rose, released, ducked again. The shafts may perhaps have taught some small respect; otherwise

they were ineffective.

Cormac’s grin faltered not. He’d trained these two hunters well. No sooner were they again hunkered below

the top of the bulwark than four arrows whished over their heads. The Pictish shafts passed completely over

the ship. One persuaded a portside oarsman to helmet himself.

“HARD A-PORT!” Cormac bawled.

At the same time, he pounced like a panther to Ferdiad’s oar. A mighty pull he gave that foremost oar, so

that the men behind him felt the sudden ease in their own pulling. Their lean captain’s strength was

astonishing. The steersman had responded, and Cormac’s impulsive move added to the ship’s sharp swerve.

Ferdiad sprawled; Lugh again straightened and launched an arrow. Like all others thus far, it found no fleshy

home.

The ship’s stern was more effective. It crushed a carack in its swing. With a cry, one nearly naked Pict went

flying to splash, thrown twice the length of his own body. The other man of that boat was surely more

fortunate than brilliant; with a warrior’s reflexes he was able to grasp the tiller even as his boat, spear, oar and

bow were lost to him.

Like most of his kind he was a short, dark man with long arms slung from prodigiously broad, meaty

shoulders. He clung fast to the tiller. The ship lurched. The steersman cursed. Cormac’s voice rose too,

cursing magnificently in two, then three languages.

“The fatherless dog clings to the tiller!” the steersman cried.

“Shake him off!” Cormac wrestled with his oar. “Up oars and sweep: One... Two... Ferdiad! No!”

“It’s shaking him off I’ll be,” the hunter had muttered, and he rose to hurry sternward and put an arrow into the

clinging enemy.

Even as Cormac shouted his warning, Ferdiad’s right cheek sprouted a gout of blood and a flint arrowhead.

The shaft had entered his other cheek to smash through his mouth and pass completely through his. face.

Ferdiad was choking on his own blood even as he fell—onto the third starboard oar. Both that oarsman’s

curse and his look of horror were purely reflexive. Again Cormac too cursed; already chaos threatened, rising

and shaking its shoulders like a grim spectre over his ship.

Shouts arose both within the Irish vessel and on both sides now, and the ship wheeled insanely. Its oars

whipped back and forth less than a meter above water level.

To a god looking down from the dual vantage points of height and immortal lack of concern, the scene might

have been amusing.

The Irish ship was like a mighty horse, beset by a swarm of rabid cats. Already it had kicked one—and been

scratched. Those to port had started to close just after their comrades on the far side, and then suddenly

their prey had swung about, like a mindlessly bucking stallion. It bore down upon them to divide their number

yet again or crush one of them under its hard hooves. Next it was bucking like an unbroken colt under its first

rider, swinging this way and that, oars lashing out like flying deadly hooves, while one tenacious attacker

clung to the hoof that was its tiller.

And now the ship lost momentum. Pictish yells rose triumphant on both sides. They howled like wolves now,

not cats.

“Stupid,” Cormac muttered, to none save himself. “Had I known these men to be seasoned competents, and

Samaire not aboard, I’d have ordered all oars shipped and allowed this attack, long ago!”

Now battle had been forced upon him, nor was he unhappy.

Jerking in his oar, he bellowed the order for the other rowers to do the same. Then the mail-coated Gael was

on his feet and snatching up spear and buckler. The sword at his side was a fine weapon—once the enemy

had pressed in too close for good spear-work.

“The mad-dogs want to board!” he bawled. “The worse for them... EIR-R-R-R-RINN-N-N-NNNN!”

It was merely the first rallying shout that sprang into his mind; long a weapon man and a sea-roving reaver as

well, Cormac well knew the value to men of a battle cry—any battle cry. It was one more aid to the heating of

the blood.

Naturally the shout was instantly taken up by those about him, as would have been any but the most

ridiculous. The fire-eyed screamers included the short warrior in the studded leathern cap and strange high

boots who’d stood beside him... Samaire that warrior’s name. Samaire of Leinster of Eirrin.

Weighted ropes flew. Some ended in grappling hooks. Others were knotted about stones, one of which sent a

son of Eirrin to his knees, clutching his arm. Then Cormac was beside him, his eyes terrible. Without

releasing either spear or buckler, the Gael boosted the jagged stone up with his bronze-bossed shield, lifted,

and hurled it back over the side.

And ten more came over the bulwarks of the hull, on either side.

The Picts kept up their awful wolf-howling as they attacked, for this was their battle cry both to spur and

excite themselves and to shake the enemy. Frail skin-boats rocked as squat men stood in them, tugging at

their grapple-ropes. Men from time’s dawn they were, avatars. out of place in this age—and knowing it.

Deagad mac Damain, who’d kissed his plump Dairine farewell and vowed they’d demand her hand of her

father on his return, a hero, thrust with his good spear at a burly dark man who stood below, in his boat. The

nearly naked Pict deflected the spearpoint with a twisting movement of his shield that turned the jab into a

scraping carom accompanied by a grating ear-assaulting noise. At the same time, he miraculously kept his

footing in the rocking carack. Without pause the black-haired man drove the tip of his own spear, a jagged

wedge of flint the length of his hand, straight up into young Deagad’s eye. It ran deep, destroying eye and

pricking brain. Deagad lurched backward with a moan rather than a cry. The Pict, whipping back his spear,

cocked his arm and launched the death-tipped stave at another man who leaned over his ship’s bulwark

fifteen feet away, engaged in a thrust-and-parry spear-duel with another attacker.

Deagad’s killer looked astonished when a dark, scarred son of Eirrin appeared and, swifter than any man

should have moved, bashed the spear away, only inches from its intended victim.

“Take MY spear, Pict!” Cormac yelled.

His hurled spear burst into the chest of Deagad’s slayer with such force that it tore out of his back to the

length of a tall man’s foot. Pict and boat went over; only the shining skinboat remained on the surface of the

water. Its surface darkened suddenly as with red dye.

Cormac’s crew were not seasoned seamen, nor had any save one so much as seen a Pict before. While they

howled like the dread wolves of the forests they loved, the little apelike men the Romans had called

Pictii—the very old ones, or aborigines—fought like bulls. They charged, heedless of defense against them.

Mothers of Eirrin frightened their children with tales of the awful Picts, with long greasy black hair and

woad-daubed faces. It was said too, and often, that a Pict was harder to reduce to that final twitchless death

than a cat.

With a battle-mad, blood-loving ferocity and overwhelming momentum, several had gained the ship. It was not

that those who should have kept them away were terrified; they were worse: disconcerted, and caught up in

memories of old and horrid tales.

Nevertheless Cormac brought death of wound or water on three, and one pouncing man of Pictdom drove his

head straight onto the point of Samaire’s spear, which was wrenched from her hands as he dropped into the

water. Her arm whipped across her belly under her loose mailcoat and dragged out her sword; Picts were

aboard and sons of Eirrin were down.

Hand in hand with the grim god of war, red chaos, the oldest god of all, seized the rocking ship.

Steel flashed in the sunlight like behlfire.

Men—and a woman—shouted and screamed and iron clangour rose loudly. Spears jabbed, knives and

swords and two axes flashed and swept. Men reeled on hard-braced feet. Blood spattered and flowed.

A slashing sword taken from the corpse of a slain Irish struck blue sparks from the helm of another son of

Eirrin. Beside him another sword struck through hide-armour and flesh and muscle and into bone, and

whipped back trailing a flying wake of blood that spattered and smeared ship and woundless men.

Dark eyes blazed with animal blood-lust while whistling blades clanged on shields, skittered skirling over mail

byrnies, found vulnerable flesh. Even though the short-hafted ax that struck his shield nigh broke that arm

against his own body, Ros mac Dairb of far Dun Dalgan remembered their captain’s counsel to thrust, not

slash. He thrust, and was rather surprised at feel of resistance at his point, then a lessening as it went on, as

though into a good haunch of meat. Surprising too was the sudden flare of the dark eyes of the stock man

before him, and his guttural gasp. Ros of Dun Dalgan remembered to yank back his blade, and saw the

bubble of blood over the Pict’s lips even as he stuck him again, though it were unnecessary.

A Pictish head with a gaping mouth flew from one side of the ship to the other in a shower of blood. The man

who had swung that decapitating blow so dear to the heart of a weapon-man set his lips and teeth in a grim,

ugly grin. For beside him was the former exile from Eirrin’s shores, the former reaver of several coasts, the

reigning Champion of Eirrin, Cormac mac Art an Cliuin-and Cormac said “Beautifully done, Connla!” and

Connla glowed, and struck with sword and parried with buckler, and he died not that day but emerged

scatheless as though god-protected.

There were few duels in that howling, clangourous melee. A man parrying the stroke of a second while

slashing or stabbing at a third was often wounded or, given his death by a fourth, and sometimes by accident.

Bright red dotted the air and gleamed on helm and mailcoat, jerkin and blade and skin. And on the deck,

where footing grew precarious with flowing scarlet and moveless corpses.

“Och, I love to fight!” Brian of Killevy enthused, and hewed away an arm.

Men died, or were sore wounded, or were wounded and got their deaths from another’s hand, almost

negligently, or took wounds that slew them later rather than at once. A hacked calf guaranteed a Pict a limp

the rest of his days—had not the boss of Cormac mac Art’s shield smashed his face and, in crushing his

nose, driven splinters of its bone into his brain.

Some who fell or reeled had eyes of blue or grey; others’ were black as the bracelets of polished coal they

wore on their thick dark arms.

It was a princess of Eirrin’s Leinster who took a swordcut on the helm that made her head ring and formless

grey dance before her eyes, and who drove a booted foot into the crotch of him who had landed that blow

turned by her bronze-bossed helmet, then spitted the enemy’s mouth and nose and most of his chin on her

sword. The Pict died without even knowing it was a woman had sped his soul. Samaire took a cut on the

hand too, and was pinked in the right forearm, but managed to crush that attacker’s face with her buckler’s

boss even as his sword dropped.

Sons of Eirrin fought the better for her presence among them, for she was like unto Agron goddess of

slaughter that day, or Scathach, the war goddess whose tutoring had made invincible the hero Cuchulain of

Muirthemne.

It was she who ferociously out-shouted the Picts, and was hoarse three days after, while limping from the

thwack of a shield-edge against her leathershod shin.

And then the ship was clear of living Picts.

So too was the sea all about, save for one. He had plunged overside and, gaining a carack, began paddling

madly away. A hard-flung spear missed him but brast through the bottom of his boat, so that he was forced

to leave it there, a strange sail-less mast, lest by withdrawing the point he was reduced to floating while he

baled.

Yet there could be no immediate rest for the victors, each of whom was ghoulishly blood-spattered, for it had

fountained on that weltering ship this day and those without scathe were bloody as their wounded comrades.

There was the gory, twice-unpleasant business of pitching overside Pictish corpses—and pieces, including

three limbs, a grimacing head, and a ghastly long coil of pink sausage from a sundered belly.

Even then none could sink down gasping to rest; there were the wounded to see to, and the dying to comfort,

and the dead to be buried in the only available grave, that great endless tomb of the sea. Too, the tyrant who

commanded them insisted that every inch of blade and mail be wiped of blood and gore, then greased against

salt spray.

“Ye fought well,” he told them, “and these weapons served us well. It may be we’ll be having need of them

another day—and rust, lads, is the weapon-man’s worst enemy!” He grinned. “Aye, and were some of ye

hardly weapon-men this morning—so ye be all now!”

The final words assured willing compliance with the unwelcome command.

Then the sun died, as bloody-red on the horizon as the many battles it had witnessed, and eleven men and a

woman sank down to the sleep of exhaustion, while the ship wallowed.

Chapter Two:

Warrior and Priest

The wind was hardly worthy of the name. A gentle breeze, it was just enough to fill the sails. Laeg mac

Senain was well chosen, and Cormac was grateful to have the man aboard. Laeg the navigator made the

most of even this pallid stir of air, with hardly a limp nor complaint whatever of the cut he’d taken in his right

thigh. It was as much Laeg’s skill that made the vessel skim over the water, oarless, as the breeze that

others might have thought too little.

The Cormacanacht—so were the men happy to call themselves, men of the Champion of Eirrin who’d bested

even Bress Long-hand of Leinster at the great Feis of Tara—took their ease. They lounged, or exercised, or

talked idly and looked about, though there was only water to see. Not so glassily flat as on the battle-day

afore, Manannan mac Lyr’s bluegreen demesne was nevertheless quiet. The breeze turned only little ripples

that gleamed in the sun like twinkling gems.

At the prow, Cormac son of Art of Connacht leaned on the bulwark, gazing ahead.

Beside him was the short, slight warrior. The strange high boots still sheathed her legs above midthigh.

Overlarge for those slim firm thighs, the rare boots she loved were held up by thongs she’d fastened to the

belt of her tunic, under her coat of good mail. The yellow tunic covered her legs to the knees. Of linked steel

in the Irish fashion, her mailcoat fell almost as far, and covered her upper body to the throat.

Discarded this day was her bronze-studded cap of leather. Her hair, which was of a light golden red that

might be called orange, blew this way and that, caught by the wind of their passage and by the wind that

pushed them so gently.

They’d launched the light Irish longboat with its single sail from the baile or town called Atha Cliath, which

some called Darkpool, or Dubh-linn. The vessel skimmed along east by south. Well behind them now was the

Pictish attack, and the bodies of good sons of Eirrin that nurtured the ever-hungry sea. They were mourned,

though none aboard Quester was of the New Faith, whose adherents believed in an eerie bodily afterlife not of

this earth, but cluttered all together in a sky-place called coelis or heaven. There they lived eternally, with

their god Iosa Chriost. They did naught, so far as Cormac mac Art had been able to ascertain; he held no

discourse with the dark-robed priests that had followed Padraigh to Eirrin.

A venerated Druid rode this ship of men of the old beliefs. None had failed to note that he lifted no weapon

against the Picts, nor was he menaced by them... which would hardly have been the case, had he been a

priest of the new god from the East—and Rome. The Druid’s robe remained green. All aboard were of his

belief, for Cormac mac Art had no Christians about him. These men knew that their slain comrades would

return to tread this earth, though with different visages and names.

“Cormac,” the orange-haired warrior said, “is’t true what that man of Baile Atha Cliath said, that once he

sailed with you?”

“Aye. Tiobraide lost his arm with me, Samaire, in a battle with the men of Norge up north of Britain.”

“He called you Wolf.”

“So did they all. It was Cormac an-cliuin I was then; Captain Wolf.”

“How came you by that name?”

“Men are fanciful, Samaire.”

“And ye be evasive, dairlin’ boy. Come—how came you by that fierce name?”

Cormac continued to look ahead, on the sea. “I earned it.”

Samaire daughter of Ulad Ceannselaigh heard, and heard more than his spare words. She queried no further

into that matter.

“He said too that it was your wont ever to counsel that one should kill only when necessary.”

Staring ahead, the one-time wolf of the sea said nothing.

“Cormac?”

“Aye.”

“Be it true?”

“Aye. Often I said it,” he said, with a catch in his voice that was not quite a sigh.

“And... but... was it meaning that, ye were?”

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NonetherearetobelievehowlongIhavelived,orhowlongIhavewaited,whileuncountedmillionsoflittlemortalmenhavestruttedtheearth,andbredlikethepigstheyare,andslewandslew.SomuchoftheOldKnowledgewaslostthatwhatremains—inthehandsofthese“Druids”—isbuttheghostoftheshadowoftheshadowofwhatIknow!ButIhavelived;Ihaver...

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Andrew J. Offutt - Cormac 06 - The Undying Wizard

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