He breathed as Sualtim had taught him, and thought the thoughts that Sualtim had taught him, to still his panting and his racing pulse. And he waited. Like a great cat crouched in a tree where he had no business being, he waited soundlessly and without the slightest movement save his breathing.
They came. Quietly they came, these woods-wise devils, so that he heard them only seconds before they were passing beneath his perch: He held his breath. Sword-grey eyes full of malign intent glared down at them, and the Picts knew it not.
They passed like shadows beneath him, squatty broad men numbering a score and more. They went on, moving inland. In the darkness below, they became invisible almost immediately. Cormac heard a cry of delight; they had discovered the arrow. He heard them break into a trot. He released his breath very slowly, drew in another, just as slowly and quietly. He heard nothing. He waited longer. The Picts passed from earshot, and no others came; why post a rear guard when they came from the sea and were pursuing one who fled afore them so precipitately that he dropped an arrow?
Cormac clambered down. He took a difficult, necessarily circuitous route back to Glondrath.
The long march at least served to keep him warm. It was dark in the forest; darkness cloaked the sprawling meadow of Glondrath when he emerged from the woods and took up a trot. As he passed a low house, a dog barked. Others joined that one, as dogs would in the night, whether or no they smelled or saw aught. Lights began to appear. Trotting, Cormac called out his own name, again and again. He heard the people that had been his father’s charges calling back and forth, repeating the identification-with relief. Grimly purposeful, spattered with blood that was not his, he strode past without making reply.
“Cormac! All good be with ye! Nervousness has been on ust that-”
Cormac interrupted the speaker ere he’d finished voicing his anxiety; he recognized Fedelm, called Iron Jaw after a horse’s kick had but bruised his face.
“Be fetching your weapons, Fedelm! Picts are well inland.”
Fedelm blinked. The cloaked youth strode on, a great stalking cat full of purpose. Never had Fedelm mac Conain had words of command from mac Art. Yet there was that about the grim young face, the way the words were spoken… Fedelm turned and set out for the barrack at a run.
Cormac approached the rath-house. There a great ring of black iron swung from the branch of a centuried oak, swung at the end of a rope thick as a man’s wrist. From a peg formed by a broken-off branch hung an iron rod by its rawhide tether. Cormac’s feet had not stopped moving when he had snatched the rod and struck the hoop a mighty blow. Then he thrust the rod through that ring of iron, within which two men could have stood, and began circling his arm.
The clangour of Glondrath’s alarum shattered the night with iron sound, so that even the dogs were shocked into silence.
Cormac paused in his clanging: “PICTS” he bellowed, and clanged the signal-hoop the more. Other voices took up the cry, and others, and ere he had ceased tormenting the iron ring men, were running, some mayhap bright-eyed with the rosy haze of ale fumes, but all bearing arms and armour.
Soon he was surrounded. Weapon-men aided each other into armour of chain and leather whilst they waited with scant patience for the arrival of others, and the words of the son of their dead lord. Some had brought torches, and none failed to perceive that there was blood on the big youth.
“The bow of Aengus Domnal’s son,” he shouted, holding high that weapon of treachery. And then Cormac mac Art told the first of the expedient lies he was never to hesitate to use, throughout his blood-smeared life. Was only a slight omission of fact, this time. “SLAIN, is Aengus! SLAIN, is Midhir! Pi-i-i-ictssss,” he bellowed, turning threequarters of a circle the while he called out the hated word. “Two I slew, and one escaped-and it’s these eyes saw him come up from the strand with a score and more of his ugly fellows. Armed to the teeth they be and tramping through the wood as though they own it-or intend to!”
Cries of horror and anger rose, and he had no more need of words; the men of Glondrath but waited to be led to the enemy that had plagued them for many tens of years.
“Fergus!” Cormac shouted. “Well I remember your injured arm, and cease your striving to hide it! Pick ten men to remain and defend, light torches and arm every woman and child lest the Picts double back! Hurry, man!”
Few were anxious to be chosen; Fergus looked about and about, and called ten names, one by one. He was roundly cursed more than once.
“Fergus the Horse is in command here-keep ye a close watch! We others will not be after returning till we’ve hacked them with point of spear and edge of blade!”
And ten remained, and the rest followed him in a mob, and Cormac mac Art was a leader of men.
Chapter Five:
Exile of Glondrath
The blood thirsty thrave followed the son of their former lord through the nighted wood. Raging like wolves they were, eyes aglitter with rage and malice under the twinkle of the ever-restless starshine. Once they’d come upon the Pictish trail, it was easily followed, and they fair loped through the dark forest until they came to the low-built house of a woodcutter. Then their cries rose higher with their ire, those men of Connacht, for the house was splashed with gore and the door stood open to the night.
Within, the family had been slain as they sat at table, and horrors had been perpetrated on their bodies. A dread silence fell upon the weapon-men then, and all heard the voice of the youth they followed without question. For Cormac mac Art stood in that house of gore and atrocity and swore by the earth beneath him, by the heaven above him, and by the sun that traveled daily to the west, that he would seek no rest by day nor sleep by night until this peaceful family of innocents was avenged.
A man called out from behind the house then, and once again they were on the trail he had found, a blood-trail now, for Picts were wont to let their axes drip where they would.
Farther into the woods they rushed abristle with spears. Cormac and some few others strove to hold them silent lest the quarry hear, and lie in wait, to set upon the hunters.
But no. The Picts were blooded. The scent was in their broad nostrils, and they sought more. Another house the pursuers found, with its door torn half from its leathern hinges the way that it swung drunkenly. Bright blood splashed that door. Blood splashed the floor within, and ran down the walls. Here again had there been slaughter, and only the good wife of this murdered man was armed; she lay ax hacked and deliberately mutilated, with a carving knife in her fist. There was no blood on it, only on her and round about her. In a lovingly-wrought cradle lay a babe; its face was dark and its neck broken. The marks of powerful fingers were still in the fair skin of its throat.
On through the cloud-haunted night rushed the Gaels of Eirrin, baying the Pictish trail.
Even at the forest’s eastern rim they came upon a third house-and here battle raged. Yelling dark men sought to do massacre on another family. Amid torchlight and blood-chilling Pictish shrieks, a farmer and his big-built, deep-bellied wife battled the yelling savages, and with them their two slim sons. It was farm tools against knife and short-helved ax and flint-tipped spears, and the outcome was inevitable-though the Gaels fought valiantly to set a high price on their lives.
The men of Glondrath broke from the woods like the slavering pack onto the fox they’d long chased. No less than seven Picts were down in their blood ere their fellows knew they’d been counter-attacked. The others turned then, beset by well-armed warriors rather than untrained farmers-and two more Picts went down in seconds. One fell prey to the long handled hoe wielded by a lad of no more than eleven or twelve; the other was opened by the adze of the youth’s father.
“Into your house!” bellowed a man at Cormac’s side.