Calgaich the Swordsman (9 page)

Calgaich nipped at the jug constantly while he tirelessly examined the weapon. He was completely absorbed and fascinated by it. He turned it back and forth to let the firelight play upon its polished surface. He tested the keen edges. Now and then he would tap the metal against the stone wall and then would listen to something that only he could hear emanating from within the blade itself. His scarred face grew flushed with the outer heat of the fire and the inner heat of the usquebaugh.

Cairenn leaned back against the wall and drew her cloak about her. "Why did you bring me with you from Eriu, fian
?”
she asked him.

"A gift from a king is not to be scorned.”

"I have held you back.”

He shook his head.

"Perhaps you would not have had to fight Girich if it had not been for me.”

He swung the sword and then eyed her across it. "You think that I fought only for you?”

She blushed. "I did not know.” She picked at the handle of her dirk. "You haven't treated me as a cumal
,
Calgaich.”

"There has hardly been time, woman.”

She looked at the bed she had made against the wall. Surely tonight . . . "Was it because you knew what would happen to me at the court of King Crann?”

He shook his head.

"Are you telling me the truth?” she persisted.

He stopped studying the blade and raised his head. The look on his face frightened her.

"I did not mean that you lied!” she cried.

Calgaich leaned forward. The sweat dripped from his lean face into the embers at the edge of the fire and little spurts of steam arose to becloud him. "Then, what did you mean?”1he asked in a low voice.

"They thought I was a witch. You knew that.” Her voice was low.

"Well, are you?”

It was very quiet in the chamber. Wood snapped in the fire. The wind moaned about the outer walls. A wolf howled.

"They said that eyes such as yours can enthrall a man so that he can't see your true face or body, only that which you want him to see,” Calgaich said.

"Do you believe that?” Cairenn's eyes held his gaze.

Finally, he shook his head.

"You don't seem certain.”

Calgaich leaned back against the wall and drank deeply from the jug. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and eyed her shapely legs, wrapped in the boy's trousers and crossgartered. He raised his eyes to where her sheepskin jacket had swung open. The swelling curves of her breasts, dewed with sweat, now glistened in the firelight. He would not look at her green eyes. Supposing it was true?

He felt the good usquebaugh working with him. There had hardly been time to bed her. She had a body that could shake a man’s reason. The thought of that body ran through his mind in recurring images as he sat across the fire from her. Still, there was his vow. A man’s honor must come first, above all else, and to Calgaich the honor of his father must be returned to him—the chieftainship of the clan. If a man were to break his vow, he would destroy his honor, and in so doing would not be able to serve his father. It was a rigid code. Calgaich knew no other.

“Will there be danger in your country?” she asked, breaking his reverie.

“I told you before that I don’t know.” He eyed her body again. “Not to one such as you. A man would be a fool to use that body of yours and then put you to death.”

“There are things worse than death,” she reminded him, pulling her sheepskin jacket together.

He passed a caressing hand along the blade of the sword. “Woman’s reasoning,” he sneered. He looked up at her. “Why are you here but to satisfy a man's hunger—the same as food and drink to him?”

She blushed and looked away from him.

Calgaich looked thoughtfully into the fire. “Babd Catha will soon enough fly over the country of the Novantae,” he murmured.

Babd Catha, the fearsome Raven of Battle. Cairenn shivered a little despite the heat. Babd Catha usually appeared before a battle attired in her blood-red cloak, with her eyebrows reddened, and mounted on a chariot drawn by a grotesque horse. To inspire horror, she would then change into the form of a huge raven who would gloat over the bloodshed, inducing panic and weakness among the contending warriors.

Calgaich was still hunkered down by the bed of embers when she went to bed in the shadows. She stripped off her trousers and jacket and then made the ritual right-hand turn to ensure good fortune before she bundled herself into Calgaich’s great tartan cloak. Utter weariness overcame her. Her belly was full and it was warm beneath the cloak.

She closed her eyes and soon lost contact with the little world in which Calgaich and herself alone existed.

Once during the night she opened her eyes. The only light came from the butt end of a log, which was a rounded mass of glowing red. Calgaich still sat with his back against the wall, the sword across his lap and the whiskey jug between his legs. His head was back and his mouth was open as he slept the sleep of the drunken. Above the moaning of the bitter night wind she heard the distant howling of the wolves.

She lay there awake thinking of this strange and violent man who could kill so easily and who seemed to have no fear at least of man. Yet he had taken time to cover the face of a little dead child to protect its eyes from the ravens. He was the outlawed son of a chief; a man who had killed his own cousin over a woman. Still, he had decided to return to his own country across a dangerous wintry sea, fighting against a score of Picts who had been sent to stop him. He had fought Girich the Good Striker, a champion of the Picts, and had defeated him so that he and Cairenn could pass freely on their way. He held a helpless slave woman in bondage and yet he had never taken her in bed. The wonder and the strangeness of it all ran through her tired mind as she drifted off to sleep again.

Calgaich awoke in the coldest hour before the dawn. His arm wound had stiffened and his muscles were sore. He winced as he felt about on the floor for the jug of barley spirits. The liquor fumes bedeviled his senses. He placed splinters of wood in the ashes and blew on them until the fire caught hold. He threw the last of the wood onto the rising flames. Then he drank deeply, again and again, until the warmth of the whiskey and the fire crept through his body. As he looked across the leaping flames at the huddled figure of the woman in the bed, the thought of her smooth, white nakedness began to work on him.

“The vow, Calgaich mac Lellan,” Calgaich said aloud. “Remember the vow that you made in order to return to Morar.”

He closed his eyes. He had vowed not to bed any woman until he could return to his betrothed Morar as a free man.
Any
woman? He knew well enough that when he had been in the whiskey, he had bedded women.

“Whores,” he muttered. Surely they didn't count. Then there had been the women the drink-maddened fianna had raped on several of their wild raids against the enemies, of King Crann. Did they matter?

Calgaich shook his head. His long fair hair covered his flushed face. He raised the whiskey jug and drank. It sucked dry. He hurled it across the chamber, where it shattered against the far wall. The woman stirred in her sleep and called out a little.

Calgaich closed his eyes. The vision of her came instantly into focus—her 'high, proud breasts with their pink buds; her smooth, rounded flanks and the lovely long legs. After all, she was a cumal
,
a chattel, a slave only, and his to do with as he liked.

He stood up, throwing a hovering giant shadow on the wall. He wet his dry lips as he peeled off his tunic and trousers and dropped them on the floor. He stripped off his breechclout. He wiped his hands on his muscular thighs. “The gods forgive me,” he murmured. He walked to the bed.

Calgaich stripped back the tartan cloak and saw the warm whiteness of her like a luscious seed within a dark pod. He lay down beside her. She moved a little and spoke out sleepily. The next thing she knew she was jolted out of her warm sleep by a cold firm body being thrust hard against hers. She opened her eyes and looked up into his shadowed face. His dry lips bruised her soft lips. His hard hands passed down her shoulders to toy with her full breasts, tarried there awhile and then felt down her belly to the triangular meeting of her lower belly and thighs.

For a moment or two she struggled silently and fearfully, while his hilt-callused hands, now surprisingly gentle, toyed with and caressed her tense body. She relaxed gradually and slowly began to respond to him. She wrapped her arms about his neck and drew him closer to her. She placed her hands alongside his sweating face and tried to look into his eyes in the dimness. Calgaich quickly turned his head aside to avoid her gaze. He was fearful that he might see something in her eyes to prove she was a witch.

The fire gave a last dying flicker, and, as if it were a signal, Calgaich forced apart her legs and thrust his knees in between them. She raised her legs and spread them as far apart as she could. One of his hands penetrated between her legs and caressed her slowly at first and then faster. She drew him down to her. She winced and cried out a little as he forced her, pushing into her very depths, spreading her wide.

By the gods, she was tight! Calgaich thrust harder. She groaned a little, but it was not a groan of pain. Soon Cairenn began to respond to his steady drive and they worked in perfect rhythm until at last they finally exploded together.

Calgaich rolled from on top of Cairenn. “By the gods!” he cried in wonder. “A virgin!” He dropped his head and passed out into a heavy drunken sleep.

Cairenn slept no more that night. Instead, she lay listening as somewhere in the cold darkness of the predawn in the wind-haunted hills a brother wolf to Calgaich the Swordsman raised its voice in the lonely, eerie howling of its kind.

“Listen!” Calgaich cried out.

Faintly, ever so faintly on the wings of the southwest wind, there came the hollow booming of the sea.

Calgaich had led the way from before the dawn light until the early dusk for four long days, striding on through a lonely, wild-looking country with distant low mountain peaks still capped with snow, which shrank visibly every day in the warming rays of the sun, for spring was just beginning. Tiny flashing rivulets wound their way down the steep slopes, dropping here and there into miniature, tinkling waterfalls or spreading out into shallow, wind-rippled pools on the level areas that glistened like silver shields from the reflected sunlight. They had passed lonely lochs surrounded by thick stands of conifers, some of them hardly a spear's cast across and surely haunted by the dreaded kelpies, or so Cairenn thought, the water spirits who were said to fancy young girls, preferably virgins.

Cairenn had turned her head away from that thought, but something else had been planted within her as well as the strong seed of the fierce and moody man who strode through the heather like an avenging spirit and who had hardly spoken to her or looked directly at her since the day he had forced her. Whatever Calgaich had said to her or done to her in the four long days of their journeying had made little difference to Cairenn. She knew now, in addition to losing her maidenhead to him, that she had fallen in love with him.

The morning sun was bright on the land on the morning of the fifth day's journey. Calgaich raised his head like a questing wolf. “We're not far from the
rath
and fortress of my people, Cairenn. We can't very well enter it boldfaced. I don't know what welcome I'll get. There might be bloodshed. I'll have to find a place of safety for you while I go on. If anything happens to me, you know what will happen to you.”

She dropped her pack to the ground and placed her hands at the small of her back. Her back, thighs and private parts had ached dully for four days and not from the traveling alone. Calgaich had been surprisingly gentle with her at the time, but there had been a subdued fierceness, almost a desperation, in the act of consummation.

He looked sideways at her. “Where’s your tongue, woman?”

She shrugged. “What difference will it make? If you are slain by your own people, my fate is assured. If not with your Novantae, it will be others who take me. I’m a chattel, Calgaich. Nothing more.”

“It was the whiskey, woman.”

She looked up at him. “I was not thinking about that. But, was that
all
it was? Only the liquor? Wasn’t there anything else?”

“You talk like a woman!” he said harshly.

“Calgaich,
l am a
woman.” Her voice was soft, her eyes held his.

Calgaich looked away from her. Yes, he knew she was a woman, but his only thought now was his return to his father’s land, and to Morar.

“Not far from the
rath
is the steading of my old teacher of the hunting craft. Guidd One-Eye may be the only one among the Novantae I can trust, at least until I see what the situation is. You can stay with Guidd until I meet with my uncle Bruidge.”

“And if you don’t return from that meeting?”

He shrugged. “You just said you were a chattel. I can leave you with anyone I please.”

His words stung her, even though she had said them only moments before. “Like Guidd One-Eye?” she asked bitterly.

Calgaich ignored her anger as his face cracked into a wide grin. “Wait until that horny old bastard sees you!” He slapped a thigh and broke into laughter.

Cairenn turned away from him and picked up her pack. A chilling foreboding crept through her tired mind and body, and she did not want to think about what lay ahead anymore. “Let's see this Guidd One-Eye, Calgaich, if that is to be my fate.” She moved a few steps away from him, waiting to resume their journey and again trying not to think about the past she had left behind.

Calgaich led the way toward the sea. There was a springing eagerness in his stride; an inner urgency that drew him toward the great estuary in the distance.

A rushing, whirring sound came to meet them as though a sea storm was gathering its strength to sweep in over the land. The wind was rising. It brought that sound with it, mingled with the calling and crying of great birds, which had a thrilling, drawing quality to it.