Calgaich the Swordsman (13 page)

The moon was still behind the hills to the east when Calgaich grounded the
curragh
on the shore. He dragged the skin boat up into the brush.

A wolf howled in the distance. Another wolf called in brotherly greeting; it was much closer, between Calgaich and the path he must take to reach the higher ground below the
rath
and the
dun.
The area was covered thickly with a large copse of close-set birch trees.

Something moved in the thick bracken. Calgaich leaped backward and whipped out his sword with his right hand and his dirk with his left. A dark, lean shape suddenly cleared the bracken and launched itself at Calgaich. Calgaich jumped to one side and glanced quickly over his left shoulder. Another wolf was moving swiftly toward him. He met the attack of the first of the wolves with a sideways slashing of his sword that struck between the beast's open jaws and severed the top of the skull from the lower jaw. The corpse struck against him and hurled him backwards against a birch tree as the second wolf missed its charge and hurtled past him. The bloody sword struck like a woodsman's axe just behind the wolf's head to sever the spinal column. Blood sprayed back against Calgaich as the writhing beast struck against his legs. Its powerful jaws snapped futilely for the last time.

Calgaich whirled. Three more wolves were plunging through the brush toward him. The first of the snarling trio rose on its hind legs. Calgaich's sword caught it across the throat; his dirk sank to the hilt in its belly. The snarling beast rolled over and over, thrashing its legs in its death agony.

The two remaining wolves broke their charges, one to either hand of Calgaich, and then swung about, returning to the attack; but this time they stalked in rather than charged. Somewhere in the woods a pack of wolves howled in unison. Calgaich backed slowly between the trees toward the bank of the loch. One of the stalking wolves cut in between Calgaich and the
curragh
. A dark shape detached itself from the shadows behind Calgaich and launched its attack. The wolf struck hard at his sword arm, but its Jaws became entangled in the thick wool of his cloak. Calgaich’s forearm was so numbed from the powerful closure of the jaws that he dropped his sword.

Calgaich whirled to meet a second charge from the wolf. He flung out his left arm to raise the entangling cloak between himself and the animal, while he shifted his dirk to his right hand. He drove the dirk up full to the hilt into the belly of the wolf. It fell sideways and wrenched the dirk from Calgaich’s hand.

He staggered toward the water. Suddenly a wolf landed on his back and he went down. He rolled over and gripped the throat of the wolf. The wolf’s hind claws raked at Calgaich's belly and thighs in an effort to disembowel him, but again the thick woolen cloak muffled the attack.

Calgaich and the wolf fought it out on the rough shingle of the loch shore, and strangely enough they were left alone in their death struggle while a furor of the snarling beasts broke out just within the shelter of the birches. The smell of hot blood came to Calgaich on the wind from within die birch copse. He forced the wolf’s head down into the water, and held the powerful beast there with straining muscles until at last the wolf lay still.

Calgaich stood up. His body trembled from exertion. He could feel the blood running down his legs from where the claws of the wolf had raked through his trousers. He dropped his cloak to free himself for swimming out into the loch.

Another huge wolf stood just within the edge of the birches. Its breathing was harsh and irregular. Slowly, ever so slowly, Calgaich bent his knees so that he could feel about on the shingle for his dirk. He did not take his eyes from the great beast. The wolf did not move. Calgaich found his dirk, then extended it toward the wolf to meet a possible charge, while he moved about slowly until one of his feet trod on his sword. He closed his hand on the hilt, and straightened up with ready weapons to face the last and obviously the greatest of the wolves.

Calgaich smiled crookedly. “So, they’ve fled and left their champion,” he said softly. It was a veritable king of wolves. “Come on, brother,” he hissed between set teeth.

The wolf moved just a little. Its yellow eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.

An eerie feeling crept over Calgaich and chilled his sweating body. Maybe it wasn’t a wolf—at least a flesh and blood creature—but rather something of the nether world.

The wolf moved a little closer. He nodded his head up and down and whined softly like a hound. He came closer and then dropped to his belly to creep closer and ever closer to Calgaich.

Calgaich stared incredulously at the beast. He dropped his weapons. He held out his bloodied hands. The beast came to him quickly, whimpering deep within his throat. “Bron,” Calgaich murmured. He dropped to his knees and drew the huge wolfhound close to him. He pressed his head against that of the hound. “Bron, my own wolfhound.” Bron pressed hard against his master.

Little wonder the last of the wolf pack had left Calgaich alone to strangle the wolf that had trapped him at the water’s edge. Bron seemed to have come out of nowhere to fight savagely against some of the pack to save his master. Where the hound had come from and how he had timed the rescue was beyond Calgaich’s understanding.

Calgaich stood up and looked down at Bron. A strange thought crept through his mind. If there had ever been a one-man hound among the Novantae, it had been Bron, but where had the hound been in the years Calgaich served in Eriu?

The answer came on the night wind. A wolf howled from deep within the forest. Bron raised his bloodied muzzle and howled out a response.

Something Guidd had said came back to Calgaich, “I saw Bron sometime after you had left for Eriu. For a long time I did not see him. One year the wolf pack came out of the hills in the winter when food was hard to come by. Your father ordered me to get rid of them. I bad the help of several other woodsmen. We fought a great battle with the wolves.

"One of the other woodsmen put his mark on a great brindle of a wolf and was slain in return. The wolf was sore wounded. I could have killed him, but something held me back. I think he was Bron. I left him there in the dark woods. The next day he was gone. The snow was red with wolf blood. For a long time I thought he was dead. Then one night the pack came down again from the hills. They howled that night. How they howled! Then I heard one of them barking.”

"Bron,” Calgaich said.

The hound barked sharply in response.

Calgaich ran his hands over the thickly pelted body and felt the ridged marks of old scars.

Calgaich wiped his weapons on the pelt of one of the dead wolves, then sheathed the blades and swung his cloak about his shoulders. He walked along the shingle and then turned to look toward Bron.

Bron stood there as though carved from wood. A wolf howled from within the forest. The howling seemed to have an almost plaintive quality about it. Perhaps she was Bron’s mate.

Calgaich turned and entered the birch copse. He did not look back at Bron. In a little while Bron padded up silently beside him.

Calgaich paused at the edge of the forest. No lights could be seen in the
rath,
in the great
dun
on the hill, nor about the gaunt stone Dun of Evicatos. Night was the time of the wolf and the evil ones. No one ventured out of the settlement or the
dun
until the first light of dawn.

Calgaich looked up at the tower that had been his home for most of his life, save for the years of fosterage with his uncle Bruidge. During that time he had lived farther along the coast of the firth. When Bruidge had succeeded Lellan as chief of the Novantae, he had taken over the Dun of Evicatos as his rightful habitation.

“Rightful?”
Calgaich questioned the night.

He looked down at Bron. Bruidge and his men would kill the hound on sight. They would know that Bron had outlawed himself by running with the wolf pack when Calgaich had left for Eriu. "Stay,” he ordered the beast.

Bron looked up toward the dark
dun
and growled deep in his throat. Calgaich raised his left arm and pointed into the forest in the general direction of Guidd's
crannog.
“Guidd,” Calgaich said. “Guidd, Guidd.” Maybe he would remember that Guidd had spared his life the day of the great wolf hunting.

Calgaich did not look back as he climbed the steep slope toward the
dun,
but when he paused outside its door and looked down the slope, Bron was gone. He drew his dirk and hammered the knob of it hard against the rough-hewn planking of the door.

“Who is there?” a suspicious voice called out.

There could be no going back now. “Open the door to Calgaich, the son of Lellan!” Calgaich shouted.

He heard rapid footsteps within the passageway. It was quiet again. He still had time to retreat to the forest.

Minutes passed slowly.

There came the sound of bars being removed inside the doorway. The door grated open on rusty hinges. In the flickering light of a rush torch a man in a bronze helmet and a battered Roman corselet eyed Calgaich suspiciously.

“Are you truly the son of Lellan?” the guard asked.

“Look at me!” Calgaich snapped.

“I did not know him, or you either.”

Calgaich leaned close and held the guard eye to eye. “You know me now! Show me the way to my uncle, Bruidge of the Battle-Axe. It has been a long time since we met.”

The guard closed the door behind Calgaich, then barred and chained it. “The chief is in the great hall, Calgaich mac Lellan,” the guard said. “Follow me.”

They passed through the narrow drystone passage. Calgaich had an uneasy feeling between his shoulder blades. The timbered ceiling had been pierced by a number of “murder” holes through which a spear blade could be suddenly thrust into the back of an unwelcome visitor. Calgaich’s sharp hearing picked up the sound of weight being shifted about on the floor above the ceiling.

He and the guard walked into the antechamber of the main hall of the
dun,
a circular area that had once been roofed, a little over the height of a tall man, but in the time of Evicatos the roof had been raised much higher.

Above it was another circular space sectioned off into bedchambers. Now the great hall was a curious affair that filled the entire southwest side of the
dun
interior. It had been extended beyond the enormously thick double walls of the tower to form a rectangular chamber that overhung a sheer drop of several hundred feet to the roaring river far below.

It had been Evicatos who had originated the idea of extending the tower, but it had been his elder son Lellan who had finished it, as it now stood, in honor of the Selgovae woman he had brought home as his wife. Calgaich's mother had borne the proud Roman name of Lydia, for she had been the daughter of a chieftain's daughter of the proud and ancient tribe of Selgovae, who had married a Roman tribune. Lydia had spent most of her early life living among the Romans in Britannia and had never become quite used to the rude and violent ways of the Novantae. She had given birth to her only child in the great
dun
, he who was to be Calgaich, son of Lellan.

The guard rapped on the inner door. The door was flung open by a spearman in leathern tunic who studied Calgaich with a pair of cold, pale blue eyes. Calgaich pushed past him to enter the great hall of the
dun.

A thick reek of pungent smoke hung in the hall. Two large fireplaces stood at each side of the hall on the huge flagstones that floored it. A servant slowly turned a spit upon which was thrust the carcass of a large boar. The mingled aromas of woodsmoke, dried bracken and rushes, stale food, unwashed humans and dogs, sweat soaked wool and greasy sheepskins, coupled with the smell of oiled leather and of the slops of strong drink, settled itself comfortably about Calgaich with the feeling of an old familiar cloak. It was almost as if he had never been away.

Torches hung in wall brackets and many Roman oil lamps hung by chains from the thick, smoke-blackened rafters. Hides and pelts that were fastened on the walls moved restlessly in the rising heat from the fires and in the cold drafts that forced their way in between the cracks in the drystone walls. The firelight reflected dully from tarnished shields, battered and still bloodstained weapons and helmets, and other grim trophies of Novantae battles with Selgovae, Damnonii, Hibernian sea raiders, Picts and Romans.

Dried rushes and bracken, strewn with large bones cracked by the teeth of hounds, rustled and crackled beneath Calgaich's feet as he walked toward the dais that extended the full width of the hall. A massive table, roughly hewn from timbers, stood on the dais. Nine men were seated about it. At the center with his back toward the wall, sat the man whom Calgaich had come from Eriu to beard in his own den—Bruidge of the Battle-Axe—blood uncle to Calgaich and father of Fergus, whom Calgaich had slain, and for whose death he had been outlawed from the tribe. Three great hounds rose to their feet and stood close to Bruidge as Calgaich approached. Their cold yellow eyes studied him. One of them growled deep in his throat.

In days long past, Bruidge of the Battle-Axe had well earned his name in heroic battles, when he had wielded the fearsome weapon that now hung on the wall close behind his chair. The axe was a crescent of weighty iron, fitted to an oaken shaft as thick as a sapling which was bound about with bronze rings. That axe had been the cause of sudden and bloody death to many enemies of the Novantae. Perhaps the unusual weapon was a clue to the dark soul of Bruidge, for it was not a true Celtic weapon, and it required an unusual mind and body to wield it.

Two men stood on either side of Bruidge. They wore wolfskin cloaks and homed helmets from beneath which depended braided hair as yellow as fresh straw. Their pale blue eyes stared rather stupidly at Calgaich. Saxons in the great hall of Evicatos and Lellan! The thought was that of Calgaich. It was an indication of the situation at Rioghaine since he had been outlawed and his father had been turned over to the Romans.

Calgaich glanced right and left along the table. The immobile tattooed faces of several Picts looked back at him. Most likely they were welcome guests of Bruidge, but in the time of Evicatos or Lellan, the heads of the Picts would have been raised above the battlements of the
dun
with spear shafts for necks.