Calgaich the Swordsman (5 page)

"And the sword?" she asked, bringing him back to his story.

He looked down at the fine weapon, a masterpiece of the swordsmith's craft. "A master smith came to the country of the Novantae when Evicatos was first chief of the clan. The fame of Evicatos had spread far and wide even then. This smith asked only to forge weapons for my grandfather. He wanted nothing but his food, a woman to cook for him and to sleep with him, and a place to work. He wanted no payment until he could finish his work. Then he would ask for what he wanted. My grandfather promised him that he could have anything he desired.

"That long winter the smith worked steadily, letting no one see him at his work. Night after night the people saw the flame of his forge within his shelter and heard the ringing of the metal as he worked. At times he would leave the
rath
and vanish into the dense woods to the north where he would be gone for many days. When he would return he told no one of where he had been.

"In the spring his work was done. Both weapons were magnificent. They were masterpieces of the metal smith’s craft. None had ever been seen like them. They would help Evicatos become an even greater warrior than he already was.” Calgaich's voice died away.

"What price did he want for his work?” Cairenn asked.

"My grandfather’s betrothed. Muirgheal was her name. Muirgheal the Beautiful. That was who he wanted.”

It was very quiet. Cairenn dared not speak.

Calgaich looked into the flames. "My grandfather was a man of honor.”

"And the smith took his betrothed?”

Calgaich nodded, staring into the flames.

"But how did the sword of Evicatos, if it
is
the same sword, come to be in this evil place so far from your country?”

"It
is
the same sword,” Calgaich said harshly. "Although my grandfather kept his word, the smith did not. He stole from the
rath
at night with the woman and the sword. My grandfather's two younger brothers trailed the smith to the north against the wishes of my grandfather. They reached the land of the Picts. Before the snow fell, the younger brother returned with the woman. His brother had paid the death price.”

"What happened to the smith?”

"He was never seen again. Some say the Picts slew him. Others say he fled from Albu. Some think he was not a human at all, but rather a demon smith.”

Cairenn looked quickly back over her shoulders.

"My grandfather took Muirgheal to wife.”

The fire was crackling low. Shadows crept back into the chamber from the galleries where they had been lurking. The slow dripping of the water seeping through the roof of the barrow could be plainly heard.

"She bore my grandfather's first son more than a month early,” Calgaich continued quietly.

"Your father?”

Calgaich nodded. He placed the sword on the altar and then stripped off his tunic and trousers. He stood there naked except for a thin breechclout that concealed his strong and full manhood. Her eyes narrowed as she saw the crisscross whitish welts on his back. At one time in his life he had been lashed to within a hair's breadth of death. Calgaich hung his trousers and tunic on the edge of the altar to dry. She could see welts and scars beneath the mat of curling, reddish-golden hair on his chest, and she knew these did not come from the bite of the many-tailed cat. Her eyes widened as she noted the bluish tattooing in a curious interwoven pattern on his chest and upper arms.

“You've never seen the warrior patterns?" he asked with a slow smile. He moved closer to the firelight and tapped the designs with his fingertips. “I received my first solid food from the tip of my father's dirk. When I was two years old, they needle-pricked the warrior patterns on my chest and arms and then rubbed in the blue woad. When I was nine years old, I started my fosterage under my father's younger brother, Bruidge of the Battle-Axe. I started my warrior training then. We threw the
sleg,
the light spear, at first against straw targets daubed in different colors. Our spear teacher was Felim of the Long Arm. There was none better.” His voice rose in
a
chanting lilt and he seemed again to look far beyond the barrow and beyond the mist-shrouded hills and grim, wolf-fanged mountains to his homeland. “We threw the
sleg
with all our young strength at the straw targets as Felim called out their particular colors. To hit the wrong target was shameful. To miss altogether a disgrace! For six years we cubs ran with our own pack, hunting under the guidance of Guidd One-Eye, who was like a wolf himself in the forest. We handled the hounds and rode the shaggy ponies. We learned to handle the light chariots over the roughest ground. We learned swordsmanship and the infighting of the dirk. We hurled the
sleg
, and the heavier
gae,
until we could handle the great
laigen,
the hand lance, until we had no peers in the work! There were none better! And Calgaich mac Lellan was the greatest of them all!”

Cairenn fed the fire. She was used to the boasting of her own Ordovician kinsmen and more so to that of the mad Hibernians. All those of Celtic blood were alike, great boasters and fighters, quarrelsome and touchy. Their honor, such as it was, was not easily satisfied, except by payment of blood.

Calgaich wiped the sweat from his face. The mystical light died in his gray eyes. He stared at her as though suddenly realizing she was there.

"The scars on your chest,
fian?”
she asked. He seemed to want to talk.

"The bite of the blade; the slashing of wolf fangs.”

She gathered her courage. "And those on your back?”

His face became set and dark with the congested blood beneath the skin. For a moment she thought he was going to strike her. Her questions had finally proved too many for him. At last he turned away from her and picked up his clothing. He held the clothing out to her. "Dry them, woman!” he ordered harshly. He reached for his spear. "Give me the cloak,” he added.

"It is all I have,” she protested, pulling it more closely around herself.

"Give it to me!”

She stood up and tried to give him eye for eye, but it was of no use. He reached out and stripped the cloak from her nakedness. He did not even look at her as he flung the cloak about his own shoulders and walked into the passageway that led to the outer world. She heard the dull clashing of the bronze bosses on the hide door as he passed out into the dusk.

She shivered as she passed her tapered hands down her body, feeling her outthrust breasts and her nipples hardened by the cold instead of the heat of passion. Calgaich was a strange man. The thought of him possessing her gave her a curious intermingling of images. She had a delicious scared feeling of having him overpower her to slake his hunger in her young, virginal body, and a wanton desire to throw herself at him so that she, too, might slake the fire she felt deep within her bowels.

Her eyes flicked about the gloomy chamber. Evidently no one had been here for many years. Dust was thick where the water did not drip. Soon ruin would overtake the barrow. The Damnonii or whoever had worshipped here after the time of the Little Dark People would hardly come back now. They had left something behind, however, in addition to the votive offerings of the polished greenstone axe heads and the broken bronze axe heads. They had left behind them a feeling of intense and indescribable evil.

Cairenn gathered up Calgaich’s tunic and trousers from the altar and began to dry the garments. It was better to keep busy than to think of past memories, which she had held at bay till now. Of her parents and brother murdered in the bloody raid by the Scotti as they swept down the Ordovician coast. Of her betrothed felled by one of the last flying spears as he bade his men flee before him. And better yet not to dwell on what the future might hold for her beyond the first nights of Calgaich's lust, before he tired of her. She did not dare to look beyond the flickering circle of firelight for fear of what she might see, and yet it was the lurking unseen that put the fear of the unknown, so rank in that place of horror, into the very marrow of her shapely bones.

Calgaich walked across the lichened courtyard flagging toward the nearby hill-slope. The cold rain slanted down in a fine misty drizzle. The fitful wind had died away and the sea boomed faintly in the distance. Calgaich worked his way up the hill-slope to a great outcropping of rock like the dislocated bones of a giant skeleton, until he found a series of shallow caves formed by overhanging slabs of rock. The bottoms of the caves were thickly layered with comparatively dry bracken. He nodded in satisfaction and started back up the hill until he reached the crest.

The wind started in again, switchtailing back and forth as though uncertain about which way to blow. Calgaich stopped short with distended nostrils. The faint, bittersweet smell of woodsmoke came to him on a shifting of the wind. He leaned on his spear and peered into the misty dimness toward the distant hills and the head of the sea loch. There was no sight nor sound of humanity in the great gloomy glen that probed deeply into the hard belly of the looming mountains. He had vague recollections of being somewhere in this area on a raid when he had been very young. Perhaps it had been his first raid, but he wasn’t sure. Whoever lived in this area would hardly be out on the prowl on such a foul night, and it was unlikely they would come near the barrow at night in any case, much less in day light.

Calgaich returned down the hill and gathered armloads of the dry bracken, which he carried to the barrow and deposited just within the entrance. Then he returned to the top of the hill. He thrust his head forward to peer and sniff into the dimness like a stalking wolf until he was satisfied that there were no humans about the area. Still, it bothered him that someone dwelt not too far away.

He came softly down the hill and paused near the rock outcropping. Something moved at his feet, and from sheer instinct he stamped his foot on a small creature. He heard the dying squeak of a hare. Something ran over his feet and he struck out with the butt of his spear to pin another hare to the ground. He bent and twisted its neck. A third hare leaped from shelter and sped down the slope. Calgaich whirled and poised the war spear. The hare cut sharply to the left but the tip of the blade spitted it to the ground.

Calgaich grinned in the dimness as he walked to where the spear still quivered through the body of the hare and into the soft turf. “Poor sport for you, my brother,” he consoled the spear.

He carried the limp hares into the barrow. The fire had burned down to embers. He looked about for the woman. “There is food here to be cooked,” he said to the shadows.

Cairenn came out slowly. Calgaich's face cracked into a grin. She wore his tunic, which reached below her knees. The folds of the material did little justice to her figure.

Calgaich flung down the hares. “Skin and prepare them,” he ordered.

“I don't know how,” she admitted, looking with distaste at the dead animals at her feet. “I was never a serving wench.”

“And highborn, I suppose?” he asked sarcastically.

“Yes,
fian,”
she said, raising her eyes to him, remembering a time when she was not a slave.

Calgaich grunted. He knelt beside the fire and drew his dirk. He swiftly skinned and gutted the hares as Cairenn watched. He spitted them on peeled branches and then rigged a forked rest for them over the fire. It was all done in a matter of a few minutes. He looked sideways at her. “Surely you can sit here beside the warmth of the fire and see that the food does not burn, woman. Or is that, too, beyond a lady?”

There was a swift shadow of anger across her face. “In my land my father was the equal of yours and commanded many men; and the bravest warrior among them was my betrothed. I did not bloody my hands with the common table fare, nor tend the fires which cooked it.
I
gave the orders to the serving wenches who did that work. But there are other things I know.” She remembered the warm hearths of her father’s
rath,
of long evenings of tales and song, and her anger grew. "My fortune has changed, and I like it not—this dark and silent chamber—
but I have not changed.”

He stood-up and wiped his hands on his breechclout. “I will not raise my hand to you this time. Listen to me! We are not in my country of the Novantae. It will take days of living and running like hunted animals, and perhaps some fighting as well, before we can reach it. I can fight for you, but you must run for yourself, and there are other things you must and will do, and one of them is the preparing of the food I will find for us. Is that understood?”

"Yes,
fian,”
Her anger was spent. First, they must survive.

"My name is Calgaich,” he snapped testily.

"I am a slave,” she said bitterly. That, and no more. It was not the first time she had so answered him.

Calgaich made a wide bed of the thick bracken while the tempting odor of the roasting hare flesh filled the barrow. He seemed not to notice Cairenn watching him. She looked down at the hares as she turned them.
One bed,
she thought. He means to have me this night. A fine bridal chamber. She smiled wryly.

Calgaich looked at her curiously as she smiled. She was a strange one, this woman of the Ordovices. He spread his cloak out beside the fire. "The cloak will be fairly dry when it’s time to sleep. Still, the good wool is warmed by the heat of the body even when it’s wet.” He sat down crosslegged in the fashion of the Celts, on the man’s side of the fire.

She watched him covertly as they ate, avoiding his curious glances. It was warmer now in the chamber and she was getting deathly weary. It had been a long time since they had left Hibernia.

"What is your home like, Calgaich?” she asked.

"Like any other, woman.”

"That’s not so. I saw the way you looked when you tried to pierce the mist with your eyes as we entered that deathtrap of a bay. No man who did not greatly love his home would have sailed so eagerly into the rock jaws of Nodons as you did.”

His eyes were like granite chips. It was the same reaction she had gotten from him when she had asked about the lash scars on his back.