Too, according to words accompanied by blood from the lips of an old woman dying of obscene wounds, this band of fivescore was accompanied by a shaman she swore had sent a writhing foggy darkness on the tiny settlement of Baile Ablaich. Ablach! No more; all its apple trees were tattered, chopped, seared and singed and some still smoking with their smoldering.
There was no more Appletown; there could hardly be said to be apple trees, for soldiers could not pause to attempt to quench flames so hot they ate at living trees.
Now, in this silence-heavy, fog-enshrouded glen of Osraige, Cormac felt the pale white mist all about and it seemed he felt the silence as well. The fog was palpable; the silence seemed so. Surely it was unnatural. When he tilted up his helmed head he did not even have to squint at the sky. Was late in the morning-for those who rose with the sun or before, it was. The Eye of Behl should have burned off this damned creeping fog that was ever the bane of wet Eirrin with its high coasts and low damp inlands.
And surely there should be some sounds, he thought; this was as though their hearing had been stoppered against the world, as if the fog were chill, wet woollen pressed over their ears.
Knowing that Forgall was but three paces to his left, Cormac turned that way, to say so.
And the fog seemed to be lifted, straight up as though by a great invisible hand, from knee-to chest-level. It flowed in the manner of a swift mountain stream, in the manner of wind-chased clouds shredding into pale streaming tatters. At that instant the awful shriek arose, from only a few paces directly ahead. A short, burly, dark, figure erupted from the fog-hugged earth as if ejected by the springy grass. It was a human form, if Picts were indeed human. And it sprang to attack.
That swiftly the squat dusky men of Pictdom were all about and rushing to kill.
Attack cries sliced the air and ululated like wolf-howls. The enemy had been lying await, sprawled flat and cloaked by the tall grass and misty fog-or foggy shaman-sent mist.
The first to spring up screaming was soon silent; he leaped directly at Cormac and was allowed to impale himself with ghastly neatness on a spearhead that was swung to meet him on pure defensive reflex. The spear went all the way through the leaping demon; with a grunt, Cormac released it and drew his sword.
And then that murky glen was plunged into howling battle of volcanic ferocity. The fog lifted to shoulder-level, so that Cruithne could see and Leinstermen had to bend or squat to bring their eyes under the cloying greyness. No Gael doubted sorcery now; the fog had lingered long enough for them to be well into the meadow and surrounded-and then risen to give vision to the waylayers when they had need to see.
The world became very loud and time rushed as it does only for lovers and those encompassed by battle.
Bracing their feet on marshy earth with grass nearly to their knees, men who had thought themselves tired hewed and fended, slashed and stabbed. Mindlessly malevolent, Picts came at them with spear and stone-headed ax-and swords and axes too of good Celtic steel and manufacture. Baneful blows they struck in that attack of appalling suddenness and ferocity. Mail and flesh were rent open in woundy gaps. Donn, Lord of the Dead, rose up happily and spread his arms to welcome the souls sent rushing from ruined bodies.
A man staggered backward past Cormac with a spear-haft seeming to grow from his chest like a ghastly stalk, and Cormac did not recognize Fithil the Strong, nor did he recognize Bress Lamfhada who with a scythe-like swipe slew the slayer. Feet stomped grassy loam now sprinkled with blood, whilst blades of flinty stone and of steel slashed in sparkling blurs and whirls of silver and showers of crimson.
A spearhead struck to clash ringingly on the rim of Cormac’s shield so that bright sparks flew and danced and he lashed back with a slash that clove the attacker’s buckler and tore it from a brown arm in which a bone snapped. Past him leaped a Pict like a maddened wolf, a primal, totally savage blood-lust blazing in his terrible eyes. The aboriginal cried out hideously when the sword of Forgall Aed’s son sank hilt-deep in his neck. Down he sank, whiles Cormac tore into red ruin a dusky face behind a sundered shield.
The constant clash and grate of steel was a din that smote the ears and gave threat to eardrums. Amid that awful clamor of steel and flint, wood and iron rose the battle-shrieks of Picts, and curses, and the wretched cries, moans, and blood-wet gurgles of the wounded and dying.
The dark warriors ravened into the foe they hated. They were heedless of steel, heedless of death. They were also far more vulnerable with the Gaels’ carapaces of rippling steel links or coats of shining, hardened leather, and the warriors of Pictdom died in their mania. Steel-hacked corpses strewed the sod, and blood created muddy patches.
Still the attackers came, as if from the very ground itself. In their numbers and their ferocity, they took scarlet toll.
Lugaid the Fox, who had one day lent Cormac a tunic of Leinster-blue, smote a Pict like a thunderbolt, the way that he sundered chest and heart within, and a spear smote him the way that he was staggered but was saved by his mail, and he slashed maniacally to deal out death to that stocky attacker, and wounded still a third after a duel of minutes, and then even while the wood of a Pictish spear-haft splintered on his buckler and his feet skidded on on a carpet of blood-slick grass, a furiously driven spear sliced through his leather cuirass as though it had been linen, and on through the padded jack beneath, and tore into his belly an inch below the sternum. A reeking puke of scarlet gushed from Lugaid’s mouth and he fell to lie twitching. He’d have been a long time dying and in agony, but was surely not mercy that prompted his slayer to wrench forth the spear and drive it into the face of Lugaid the Fox. And Lugaid was still.
From behind, Cas mac Con took off that dark warrior’s head in a mighty stroke that began as a blurred arc of silver and ended in one of crimson.
While Cormac parried and feinted with the teeth-gritting savage before him, another stuck his shield with such force that its edge cut Cormac’s chin, and he’d have died of the first Pict sure had not another’s sword taken off the savage’s arm just below the shoulder; the Connachtish youth never knew who thus saved his life. Already he had saved one, by the unwarlike expedient of kicking a Pict directly in his buttocks; the melee had deepened and thickened now so that single combats were the exception rather than the rule.
Chin dripping red, Cormac staggered back-
And slipped and fell, his boot skidding off a bloody severed hand. He looked up at the leggings of a man who stepped across him to drive his sword deep into a dusky body, and Cormac was saved twice that day. He came up lunging, to drive his own blade so violently into the side of a grinning foe that he had to fight it free of clutching ribs.
“Blood of the gods,” Forgall spat out, “ye’ve saved my life again!”
“It’s twice my own’s been saved,” Cormac panted, “and I’ve no idea by whom-uh!”
He turned the ax-blow on his shield, twisted, turned the back swing, and girded steel into that Pict’s flank. “How many of these devils-uh!-are there?” That grunt was elicited by his having to twist-yank to free his blade.
“Too-damned-many!” someone muttered angrily from his left, and Cormac almost grinned.
He turned in time to see the speaker die, and the slayer was away then and Cormac had no notion who slew that Pict, or indeed whether instead he escaped. It was then the blood-mist came before Cormac’s eyes, and hung there, and he saw only enemies, targets for his ravening sword. He had experienced the berserker battle-lust just once afore, and did not know that it was on him.