Good advice for the farm family, with a boiling knot of stout warriors come to their succor. Yet none of the four obeyed, but held their ground before their besieged home while steel blades flashed like streaks of liquid silver in the starlight and carved out a path toward them.
The dusky men of Pictdom pressed back one upon the other; they gave ground toward the house; a good sturdy farmwife swung her scythe to open up one of them, all across his muscular back. A huge-shouldered savage lunged at Cormac with his spear, a Celtic staff with dark iron point. So savagely did Cormac chop down that weapon, just behind the head, that the butt came up hard into the wielder’s armpit and like to have lifted him clear off the ground, for all his muscular weight. Beside mac Art, Dungal Big-head drove his own spear into that Pict and through him, so that Dungal had to let go his haft and draw sword. A spearhead scraped across his buckler and sparks danced; like a ravening wolf Cormac slashed sidewise. In a flash of steel the attacker’s head was made to hang only by a shred of flesh and a twinned fountain splashed both Dungal and Cormac with scarlet.
“It’s a fine team we are, Cormac!” Dungal cried, grinning.
The young son of Art said nothing, nor did he smile.
It is what had happened, that the battle-rage had come upon him. He hacked and slashed and stabbed, even half-braining a foeman with his buckler’s edge. No man should have been able to jerk and slash with the heavy shield in that wise; Cormac in this combat was no normal man. Nor did he smile even in triumph, for he thought only of slaying Picts. On them he laid his needs for blade-reddening vengeance, for he could not slay him who had done death on Art and on Midhir.
A chance use of his sword sent the blade girding deep into the vitals of a dark ax-wielder, and in the back of his mind mac Art recorded the fact that a stabbing thrust was efficacious indeed when all about him were swinging their weapons. Was a lesson learned long and long agone by the Romans, though few others on the ridge of the world used their blades as stabbing weapons.
Around him men groaned and toppled, spitted and hacked so that blood bespattered wounded and dead, dying and unscathed alike. Indeed men with no wounds upon them looked sore blooded, whilst others who had taken severe cuts knew it not in the mindless blaze of battle-lust.
About the farmhouse the night-battle whirled and eddied, blades of steel and iron and flint flaming and flashing.
No Pict escaped. All were slain, with edge and point of sharp-edged steel. A man of Glondrath died cursing like a madman with his last breath this side of Donn’s demesne; two others were sore wounded and a third bore a woundy cut that would be a long-time ahealing; scratches and minor cuts were widespread among the company. Cormac, having suffered only a couple of scratches, had no idea how many apelike savages he’d laid low; he was told he had downed four and wounded a fifth so that another’s ax slew him easily, but mac Art had been as if in a trance and could not swear to so much as one.
Seven and twenty Picts bled their last on the grounds of Labraid mac Buaic, and afterwards weeds grew all too well there. None of Labraid’s family was slain or sore wounded, though the older son had sustained a cut he loudly hoped would leave a scar there on his forearm, and Labraid’s wife Uaithne had wrenched her back-in swinging the curved scythe with which she saved her life from a short-hafted ax. With cloth from their scantling supply the farmfolk tended the wounds of their rescuers, the while they learned that the band of weapon-men was led by the son of Lord Art, and him dead these two days.
Food and ale offered Labraid, though in truth he was no man of wealth. While his men loudly accepted, the new temporary lord of Glondrath made mental note to send both a cask of (better) ale and a fresh-slain boar to this house.
Loud were the cries, and cups were lifted high as Celtic spirits. New and noisy praise was heaped upon the youthful battle-leader. He heard new comparisons of himself with both Cuchulain and that great Cormac afore him. But on this occasion there was no adolescent swelling of the head and chest of Cormac mac Art. On his mien was the stern-set face of a man; in his mind were only two slain men: Art mac Cumail and his friend Midhir.
And still was he quiet when he led his company back through Connacht-Shield Wood, having reminded them of those who waited at Glondrath, and knew not whether to keen or cry joy. Behind them along the broad path they followed this time, those triumphant men of Connacht dragged seven and twenty Pictish corpses. And two men bore Eochu Fair-hair, to present to his sorrowing parents and sweetheart.
Though weariness was on him, mac Art detoured to take up himself the body of Midhir, that no forest beast might feast on the man.
Joy at the triumphant return outweighed sorrow in Glondrath, and was long afore many were asleep, and in truth the result of that undertaking was a rich harvest of babes, nine months thence.
Wounded Eber and Curnan survived the night, and druids and attending women announced that both would live to fight another day-though the former would most probably limp. Early on that morning of the morrow, a white-bearded druid and a beardless youth went to the house where Midhir’s wife Aevgrine keened her grief. When they emerged the tall, rangy youth bore the arrow he himself had drawn from Midhir’s eye.
Sualtim Fodla had watched the boy-man steel himself to that unhappy task, and he saw now that Cormac was not ill of his night of bloodletting, followed by this ugliness. And Sualtim frowned. For men who never knew illness after battle, and were not nauseous at such as the drawing of an arrow from the eye of a dead friend, were to be feared. Cursed of the gods they were said to’ be, and destined thereby for lives in which blood ran in scarlet rivulets. In a flash of manadh, or druidic foresight, Sualtim saw that indeed so would it be for Art’s son. He knew too in that instant that the youth must not tarry here.
“Cormac.”
Cormac looked at the druid.
“Glondrath holds your doom, Cormac mac Art.”
Cormac blinked, though he did not pale. “It held my father’s,” he pointed out.
“Remain here and it’s no other birthday ye’ll be seeing, mac Art. It is what I see for you, an ye remain in Glondrath, that nothing of your skin or your flesh will escape red doom, except what the birds will bring away in their beaks and claws.”
Cormac compressed his lips. “Walk with me, mentor.”
They walked, and in the meadow’s northern end Cormac drew an arrow from beneath his cloak and handed it to the druid, along with that which had slain Midhir.
“What see ye, mentor?”
“Call me Sualtim, Cormac; ye be boy no longer. Hmm-I shall not be saying that I see two arrows.” He studied both shafts. “I see two arrows made by the same hand, from the wood of the same tree.”
“So.”
“An ash. Aye, and feathered by the same goose, or I miss my guess and these eyes are become older than I’m thinking.”
“Ye see well, mentor. Two arrows from the same tree indeed, and from the same goose their fletching, made by the same hand. And-from the same quiver.”
“Aye. Those two stripes, now, are no emblem familiar to me.”
“Nevertheless, m-Sualtim, it’s these arrows will lead us to the slayer of Midhir.”
“Aye.”
“And, most probably, of the slayer of my father as well.”
“Probable.”
And Cormac led the druid through the forest, and Sualtim made no plaint at the length of their trek, nor even the difficulty of its other end. Then they stood over the body of Aengus Domnal’s son.
“One of these arrows ye saw me draw forth, from Midhir, Sualtim Fodla. The other I took from that empty quiver there at Aengus’s hip. Here be Midhir’s murderer.”
The druid stared at him, and then his shoulders drooped with his sigh. “Aye,” he said, and it was a whisper. “And if I must believe that, and I must indeed, then I believe too that Aengus slew the Lord of Glondrath.”
Cormac said naught.
The druid stooped by the corpse, found before them only by the birds they’d frightened away; was why Cormac had on yester eve covered Aengus’s face. The dead man wore a sundisk of bronze, on a beaded cord of leather. It flashed in the druid’s hand. Surely for no particular reason unless it was a flash of prescience or intuition, Sualtim turned over that sigil of the Old Religion of the Celts. He made a grunting sound of surprise then, as if struck. He looked up at Cormac. The latter bent, and stared.