“Not all of Eirrin?”
“Be not greedy, my love.”
“Hmp. And have you no pretty words for me, dairlin boy?”
“None,” he told her, but he showed her instead, so that she had need of few words.
Chapter Twelve:
Picts!
Cormac returned to a garrison in uproar. Torches blazed on high and bobbed about in the upraised hands of his fellows. Voices rose in a cross-ranging cacophany of commands and queries and replies. Harness jingled, and mail; swords and knives in their oiled sheaths were being buckled on over armour of leather and linked chain. Horses whickered or neighed shrilly in apprehension or plain displeasure as they were hauled forth and harnessed. Men hurried in a dozen directions on a score of errands, their paths crossing and crisscrossing. Cormac heard the wheels of waggons and carts. Men grunted while they loaded on supplies.
“Eochu! What-”
But the Lightning-hand ran on, on someone’s orders, buckling on his sword the while.
“Here you, get your-Partha! Malingering?”
Cormac stared into a pair of icy grey-green eyes above a long nose. “The opposite, Bress. I have night’s leave; it’s early I’ve returned. What is all this?”
“Picts!” a man shouted, rushing by all ajingle. Two spear-butts dragged behind him.
Cormac echoed the word, gazing about at a semi organized bedlam of preparations. “Picts! Here?”
“Idiot!” Bress snarled. “Duck’s anus! Of course not here. Into battle gear with ye-we march at once.” And after a glower, the Long-arm executed a self-conscious heel-and-toe and stalked off.
Cormac hadn’t time to seethe. He learned the situation while he made himself ready for battle-march. The Cruithne had raged across that tip of Munster that surged up betwixt their land and Osraige. They were in Osraige; across that tiny realm’s northern strip leaving a wake of blood; the Picts were in western Leinster!
A fort of Osraige was overrun and its garrison slain to the last man; a fort of Leinster, too, had been attacked and burned out. Of its garrison, as well as the two hundred Blueshirts so recently sent to firm up defenses… who knew how many lived, if any? Farmhouses were ablaze in Leinster. Women and children lay dead, having been raped and mutilated; men were dead and a whole little settlement destroyed. Priests had been deprived of those bodily parts for which they claimed no use; druids lay headless.
Munstermen marched northward; Leinsterish forces hurried down from the garrisons along the Meathish border; now the forces of Forgall and others were to hurry westward “with all despatch and more,” in hopes of stopping the incursion, and surrounding the Pictish invaders, and destroying them.
Hurriedly Cormac gathered up armour, weapons, and field-kit. Within an hour, Forgall’s Coichte and several other such Fifties were amarch through the night. Supply-wains creaked and rattled along under cursing drivers. Mayhap it was midnight, Cormac mused; mayhap before. It was either the eve of Behltain or the day itself; one of the Celts’ two great annual celebrations.
What a day for the onslaught of those Pictish demons, with great fires being readied for the spring rites!
Chapter Thirteen:
In the Glen of Danger
Mist rode the post-dawn air so that the sun was but a pallid glow somewhere beyond a sky the colour of dirty pearls, hanging low over the fog-cloaked glen. Through this chill gloom moved weary Blueshirts, seeking the Picts who’d eluded them for a full week.
Oh, they’d found evidence enow. Bodies they had found, mutilated corpses caked with blood and eerily alive with flies. Burned homesteads. Slain dogs, butchered horses. But of Picts…
Twice had these men come on Pictish war-parties, but only that: small groups of the nearly naked, black-eyed devils, all too many of whom wore Celtic trinkets and carried Celtic weapons taken from corpses. Twice had the searching Gaels crushed the burly dark men in blood-letting combat. Leinsterish losses were few. But these had been rencontres with two little raid-parties, hardly anything approaching a main Pictish body.
And that was all there had been in a full seven days of marching, tramping, sweating, searching. A week of tension. A full week of searching, and of constant disappointment mingled with their tension. A week: plenty of time for men to grow disgruntled and apprehensive and tense and, naturally enough for soldiers forced to walk and walk in full battle array, spears ready but without the release of battle, to complain.
Contrary to their expectations, there was no such entity as a Pictish army.
Oh, the invasion was a major one, right enough. It consisted, though, of the warriors of several separate tribes of Pictdom. Each was intent on its own purposes, and booty, and glory. All pillaged and murdered in several directions at once. Without unified purpose, without semblance of unified command or a single strong leader. There were tales of one, and of a powerful shaman, too. But no soldiers had seen them.
The men of Forgall mac Aed’s Coichte, part of Commander Conan Conda’s Notri da Ceadach-Three-hundred-wanted and needed action, the adrenalin release of tension, the clamor of battle and the joy of doing something. Even men who had little stomach for blade-reddening were more anticipatory than aprehensive, now.
Partha mac Othna who was Cormac mac Art had taken a cut from a flint ax on his cheek and another across his right forearm, from a captured Celtic sword. The sword was re-captured. The wounders were dead. And while his wounds were but minor cuts, Cormac knew they’d be scars on him, all his days.
He was tired. All the Blueshirts of Conan Conda’s command were tired; as much downcast they were, as weary. And ever, ever wary, despite their growing conviction that the Picts were as unseasonable frost giving way to the sun of a clear morn; the devils had always been there afore them, but seemed to have melted away. This doubly damned slog-work enforced quiet and care, the skin prickling; this constant tramping about in tension without the relief and release of combat was maddening. It made men feel far more tired than they were.
And now-now, this morning, it was worse.
Visibility was such that one’s shield, held out from the body by a strong arm, was but a dark blurring blob without detail or even its proper round shape. Someone to Cormac’s left muttered quite succinctly, “Excrement.”
Cormac agreed in silence. Cess. This cess-pool of a soupy fog, cold through leather leggings; this whole maddeningly frustrating quest: cess. It was Glean na-Guais they tramped, Danger Glen; it should have been called Glen Cess or Cess-pool!
He waded through it. Tall grass wheeped against his boots.
All around him others waded through it. Occasionally there was a little splurch or splash followed by a muffled curse, as a man stepped into a pool of water based in mud. Elsewise there was only the whisper of cloth, the occasional jingle of mental fittings, the creaky rustle of armour of boiled leather, and the strange, metallic susurrus of mailcoats.
Fog and mist. And the sun up. Cormac frowned, considering, glancing about-at pale greyness.
The picts had their druids or priests: shamans; sorcery was hardly unknown to them. Here, now Cormac was most wary of the position of his little company, on quest apart from the main army of three hundred. He was most aware and wary of the environment. It was unnatural, mist-haunted, tained with the reek of dark sorceries. For three days now they had been at the seeking out of a band of a hundred or so particularly vicious and successful foes. This band of savages was apparently led by a madman-that leader who might well become chief of a united Pictish force, for it was known he had begun with but twenty.