Calgaich the Swordsman (15 page)

Maelchon stared stupidly at Calgaich. "It was not Aengus of the Broad Spear who was paid to meet your
birlinn
off the coast.”

Calgaich glanced at his uncle. "So? Then who
was
sent to meet my
birlinn?”

"Silence!” Bruidge shouted. He stood up and reached for his battle-axe.

A broad-shouldered, redheaded Celt stood up and placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. "He has to die, Bruidge,” he said. "He knows too much now.”

"Aye,” another Celt agreed. "Finglas is right. Your hold on the Novantae is not secure enough yet. If the tribe learns that the
galanas
was paid more than a year ago and that you sent those Picts to ambush Calgaich at sea, there will be red work within this very hall.”

“I give the orders here!” Bruidge cried.

The Saxons looked at Calgaich like hungry wolves eyeing helpless prey.

It was very quiet. Calgaich walked slowly toward the end of the table and stood with his back to a wall. He heard a door bar fall into its supports on the other side of the entryway.

"Lay down your weapons, outlaw,” Maelchon demanded.

"Come and take them, Pict,” Calgaich invited.

Maelchon looked at Bruidge.

Bruidge wiped his mustache both ways. He opened and closed his hands. He coughed and spat on the floor. "Murder and hospitality cannot lodge under a chieftain's roof,” he repeated stupidly.

"Then leave,” Maelchon suggested harshly. "What you can't see can then be no concern of yours.”

"Yes, Uncle,” Calgaich agreed sweetly. "Take your orders from yonder tattooed Pict in your own hall, as you call it. I see now who holds you on the chieftain's seat. Leave the hall, but if it is
I
who comes to tell you of the results here you had better have your battle-axe at hand,”

Bruidge looked at his mercenaries. He nodded.

One of the Celts laughed and drew his sword. "Lulach mac Ronan of the Damnonii will try you, Novantae.”

"One man only,” Bruidge warned the others.

Lulach walked toward Calgaich. He rested his blade tip on the floor. His eyes held those of Calgaich. "One man against another, Calgaich mac Lellan. Surely this is not murder under the roof of a chieftain?”

Calgaich shrugged. "One at a time or all together,” he boasted loudly. "It is all the same to me.”

"Then draw!” Lulach snapped.

Calgaich drew his sword. The firelight danced along the blade. Bruidge straightened up in his seat. "By the gods,” he murmured. He shook his head in puzzlement. He knew not of the magnificent Sword of Evicatos other than the description of it he had heard many times from his father.

Lulach tested Calgaich’s sword by tapping the sword with his blade. The metal rang musically. They circled in the pool of bright firelight, their feet crackling among the rushes. Lulach rushed in to carry the fight. Calgaich stepped aside and hammered down Lulach’s eager blade, and he leaped back to meet the next flashing attack. Again and again Lulach came on. He was unable to strike one telling blow at the smiling man who so easily fended him off without once attempting a counterstroke.

"Stand still, you leaping hare!” Lulach roared.

"Like this?” Calgaich asked. He planted his feet wide apart and waited for the attack.

Lulach grinned crookedly. He began to flail at Calgaich’s sword like a smith at his anvil, but Calgaich did not move his feet. He merely swayed his body from side to side, forward and backward, always out of reach of the Damnonii’s sword. All the while his own sword met every cut and thrust of the Celt’s with astonishing ease.

Lulach stepped back at last. Sweat streamed down his flushed face. His chest rose and fell with the rapidity of his breathing.

"I don’t want to kill you, Lulach,” Calgaich warned the Damnonii.

"Damn you! You haven’t touched me once!”

Calgaich knew the man’s honor was touched. Lulach would rather die than admit he was being mastered. Calgaich stepped back and raised his sword. "Once more,” he said quietly. "This sword knows only how to kill.”

Lulach rushed in to the attack. The end came so swiftly that Lulach died with a yell of expected triumph on his lips.

Calgaich leaned on his sword. "I didn’t want to kill him.” It was as if he were speaking only to himself.

Finglas looked at Bruidge. "Lulach was blood kin to me,” he said.

Bruidge looked at the corpse. "Would you join him there on the rushes?” he asked. There was almost a note of pride in his voice. After all, he himself had taught Calgaich the fundamentals of swordsmanship, but nothing like this exhibition of pure skill and sudden death.

Finglas was a fencer, a deft craftsman with none of the hurly-burly and rushing attack of Lulach. The blades met and rang together, parted, weaved in and out in swift and deadly patterns. Again and again the two opponents circled, feeling each other out, both of them wary and cautious. Finglas became eager. He knew he could not kill this man by fencing with him and yet he was sure he was the master. He struck hard but Calgaich was not there. He struck hard and sure again, but once more Calgaich was not there. Finglas retreated and then charged in again to meet the hypnotizing effect and deadly flickering of Calgaich's sword point. Finglas missed a stroke. The keen tip of Calgaich’s sword slid in easily under Finglas’s left ribs, was withdrawn and then drove in over the Celt’s blade to sink a hand’s span into his jugular. Finglas fell backward over the body of Lulach.

"Who is next?” Calgaich challenged. It was madness. The sweat streamed from his scarred face. "You? Maelchon, the Pict?” He laughed. "An
Fear Mor!
The Big Man!” It was not a compliment.

The two crop-haired Romans at the end of the table had stood up, drinking horns in hand, to watch the combating.

"Will you join the sallow skins, these stiffening corpses on the rushes, Pict?” Calgaich demanded.

"Two dead! That is enough!” Bruidge cried. “Your honor has been upheld!”

"Come on, all of you!” the madman with the bloody sword challenged them. "Come to the raven's feast! Or have you all lost your way in the haze from the drinking horns?”

It was Cathal, of the Selgovae, who could not stand the whiplash of scorn in Calgaich’s voice. He rushed at Calgaich. They met between the two fireplaces with a hell's hammering of sword blades. Behind them stood Maelchon and Finn, one of the broken men who served Bruidge. The Saxons still stood with their backs against the wall in the shadows.

Calgaich played with Cathal. He was tired of killing, and he realized that it had been the liquor that had made him act so madly. A hard, twisting thrust disarmed the cursing Celt, and the sword pommel was driven up under his chin. He was unconscious before he hit the rushes.

Calgaich stepped back warily. He watched Maelchon and Finn. They, too, were wary now. Their fiery sense of honor had been replaced by a temporary caution of this mad swordsman.

“By Zeus!” one of the Romans vowed. “Never have I seen such swordplay, even in the Flavian Amphitheatre!”

Bruidge nodded as he lifted his drinking horn. “He is the greatest of them all, Ulpius Claudius,” he admitted. He seemed to have no concern about the two dead Celts lying on the floor. Bruidge then looked at the two Saxons. He pointed to Lulach and Finglas. “Get rid of them,” he ordered.

The Roman shook his head. “By all the gods! What a sensation he would be at the Games in Rome! It might help to get me a passage home from this accursed island.”

Maelchon and Finn glanced sideways at Bruidge. Bruidge studied his nephew. After all, Calgaich had challenged everyone in the hall. “I don't want him killed,” he said at last. “He is my nephew. Blood him a little. No more, mind you!”

Maelchon and Finn moved toward Calgaich, warily and with intense respect for his flashing, bloodied blade. They tried to play with Calgaich, staying back, attacking from opposite sides, forcing Calgaich ever backward. Calgaich moved swiftly. His blade tip slit Finn's sword arm. Maelchon staggered back from a flat-bladed blow atop his head. Blood ran down his tattooed face as he fought to keep his senses. Now it was Calgaich who was playing with them, weaving in and out, attacking, retreating, striking enough to wound lightly, but not to kill.

Ulpius Claudius looked at his companion. “You think you could best him, Decrius Montanas?” he asked slyly.

Montanas scowled a little. He placed his hand on the hilt of a short, wide-bladed Roman
gladius
that hung at his right side. “I'd like to try, Tribune,” he replied.

The tribune shook his head. “You'd die out there on the rushes, Centurion.”

“I am the best swordsman in the Twentieth Legion,” the Roman boasted.

Ulpius nodded. “In the front line of battle, behind your shield, Montanas, I've never seen a better man, but this is something else—single combat such as neither of us has ever seen anywhere in the Roman world.”

Maelchon was driven down on one knee. Calgaich could have killed him but instead he whirled to meet Finn’s slowing attack. He drove the Celt back toward the great table until Finn’s heels struck the edge of the raised dais, and he fell backward. His sword clattered from his hand.

Calgaich whirled. Maelchon charged. Calgaich sidestepped, thrust hard, disarmed the sweating Pict, and then shouldered him aside so that he sat down and planted his rump in the thick bed of embers in one of the fireplaces. He shrieked in agony.

Bruidge looked beyond Calgaich. He nodded to Cenwulf, the Saxon who stood by the door. Cenwulf nodded in return. He withdrew a throwing axe, a well-balanced
francesca,
from beneath his wolfskin coat. He hefted it from one hand to the other and then cast it overhand with a sharp, sideways turn of the wrist. The keen blade flashed in the firelight, but it was the butt end of the shaft that struck Calgaich behind the left ear and felled him, semiconscious, to the rushes. His bloody sword flew from his hand. He tried to force himself up onto his feet with his hands placed flat on the floor. Maelchon and Finn drew their dirks and moved in for die kill.

Bruidge rose from his chair with surprising quickness for one of his bulk. "Step back, damn you!” he roared at Maelchon and Finn. "Kill him face to face if you can and not like butchers slaughtering a hog! That is, if you are men enough!”

Bruidge lumbered toward Calgaich. He raised a foot and kicked Calgaich alongside the head to drop him unconscious on-the rushes. "I have long owed you that, Nephew,” he said. He turned. "Cenwulf! Ottar! Ulf! Bruni! Get rid of those two carrion lying there! Into the river with them!”

Ulpius Claudius came forward into the firelight. He hooked a foot under Calgaich’s body and flipped him over onto his back. He peered at the scarred features. "By Mithras!” he said wonderingly. "Who
is
this man? I have seen him somewhere before.”

"You know who he is. He bragged about it loudly enough. Calgaich mac Lellan, he cries, as though he were a god and the son of a god,” Bruidge snarled.

Ulpius shook his head. "That I know. But who else has he been in his life?”

Bruidge was puzzled. “He has just returned from his exile in Hibernia. He served as a mercenary for King Crann of the Five Hostages.”

The centurion Decrius Montanas came forward, and looked down at Calgaich. He nodded. “I remember him now, Tribune. He was in a legion auxiliary. The Auxiliary Ulpia Torquata—the Double Battalion of Britons. They were stationed along the Rhine among the Teutons.”

Bruidge nodded. “Oh, that! He was a youngster then during the time when we Novantae had a temporary peace with you Romans. His mother was the daughter of a Roman tribune and a chieftain's daughter of the Selgovae.” Bruidge raised his eyes and seemed to look beyond the smoky hall into the past. “Lydia,” he murmured. He passed a hand across his eyes.

“Bruidge?” The tribune looked at him curiously.

Bruidge seemed startled out of his reverie. “Calgaich enlisted in the Ulpia Torquata through the persuasion of his Roman grandfather. It was felt that it would show good will upon the part of the Novantae and the Selgovae. The boy did not want to go, but he knew it would be for the best.” His voice died away.

“Go on, Bruidge,” the tribune urged.

“Look at his back, Ulpius.”

The centurion took the collar of the faded tunic in his hands and ripped the material down die back. Ulpius whistled softly as he saw the crisscross marks of the cat on Calgaich's back.

“He was stationed in the country of the Teutons,” Bruidge explained. “Word came to him that his mother was very ill. He requested a furlough. He was refused. He deserted and somehow made his way across the channel to Britannia. He traveled to the north right through Roman Britannia and almost reached here before he was caught. They took him back. He escaped from them and returned here. A few years later he murdered my only son over a woman. She was Morar, daughter of Cuno.”

Calgaich stirred. Bruidge beckoned to his Saxons. “Bind and gag him,” he ordered. “Lock him up! Mind, I want no harm to come to him here!”

“I remember the story now,” Ulpius said. “I was serving in Gaul at the time. The Ulpia Torquata was stationed along the Rhine. There were no better fighters. By Mithras, they were almost of legion quality!”

Bruidge walked back to his chair and raised his drinking horn. "What would you Romans do with such a man if he were in your hands?”

"If he had been a deserter once, he would have been flogged and never again allowed to serve on combat duty. He would have served as a clerk, or perhaps a cook, or in the transport, but never as a fighting man.”

"Calgaich?” Even Bruidge could smile at that thought.

"But a second desertion? Once in Gaul we hung twelve such deserters noosed to a ship’s cable, strung between two large trees, which was then drawn up tightly by a capstan. It was quite a sight. They were Britons, by the way.” He did not notice the cold sideways look of hate cast at him by Bruidge.

"So he would be executed,” Bruidge mused.

"Yes. That is Roman law. However…”

"Go on,” Bruidge urged.

"Who was his Roman grandfather? You said he was a tribune. Was he a man of consequence? Is he still alive?”