Bas commenced anew. “Then we must keep our prisoner, as our duty to all humankind, for dead Thulsa Doom cannot otherwise be slain.”
And he was fixedly, madly bent on horrid vengeance against Cormac mac Art-or him he had been in the distant past.
As they sat in tight-lipped silence, the ship on that calm sea rocked as though gale-struck. Groans rose as stomachs seemed to be wrenched, seemed to somersault. Then all was still but for the gentle breeze that swept Quester away from Kull’s isle they’d named Doom-heim, toward distant Eirrin. Thulsa Doom reappeared, helpless at the mast.
“Da-a-m-m-mnnn ye!” he ground out, and he was still.
Two ships that were in truth long boats slid across the sea in a gentle breeze, bearing history and horror.
The eyes of Bas were signally bright and wide, and he looked skyward. His hands fingered the symbols of his gods and their powers, which were those of nature, like the green of his robe. The others realized that he wrestled now with Thulsa Doom, whose powers were of darkness and illusion, rather than nature and the light.
Then Samaire was calling out. “There was a rocky little island-there! It-it’s gone!”
Her companions looked about, and in a babble of voices they agreed. The exiled princess of Leinster was right. The sea had changed; the world had changed. Bas turned from them, paced in his woods-green robe to the wizard.
“May ye be damned! It’s again and again ye’ve tried, tried amain and it’s both failure and success ye’ve grasped, isn’t it? Ye did break through into your other dimension-but ye’ve brought us with ye, into a different world!”
PART ONE
Chapter One:
“I slew Wulfhere years ago!”
The ship wallowed slowly along, towing Amber Rowan seaward on a northwesterly bearing, away from the isle of horror and death.
Aboard sat its pitifully tiny crew: a druid in lunula of gold and soiled robe of green; a weapon-woman whose hair blew orange in the sun of autumn, and three weapon-men-one of them but little past his first beard-growth. The woman bore a lurid bruise on one thigh, gained while wielding sword as few women had done.
These were the crew of Quester; the passenger stood bound to the mast in the only way he could be held. The picture he presented was monstrous and horrible. The owner of any onlooking eyes not aware of the prisoner’s nature and powers would surely have been shocked at the seeming cruelty of his captors.
He writhed, and now and again he complained of cold, the cold of steel blades piercing his body and holding open its wounds.
But he did not bleed.
The lovely little breeze had grown now, riffling the sea and tugging at their hair. Quester slid smoothly over the nigh flat plane of the sea. Amber Rowan followed like a dog at leash, in turn seeming to lead a long white trail of foam.
The second ship was empty, crewless, of no present value. It only slowed them, and already they had had to swing wide, to avoid the Wind Among the Isles that had once wrecked Cormac and Wulfhere, and to avoid too the isle the Gael had named after the sea-god of his people:, the Ire of Manannan Mac Lir. But Wulfhere Skullsplitter and Cormac called an Cliuin, the Wolf, had spent long years riding the breast of the sea, a-reaving. Wulfhere was not capable of leaving behind a perfectly good seaworthy craft. Cormac was not capable of leaving behind a perfectly serviceable ship either-unless it was absolutely necessary.
Fortunately, necessity had not risen. An it did, the son of Art hoped with sincerity that the necessity was direfully pressing. Else it was argument there’d be, between impetuous overconfidence heightened by headlong, bulling strength, and the practicality and ever-thinking mind of mac Art. There had been many such arguments. Nor had Cormac always won his way, and he bore scars and the memories of intimate acquaintances with death as mementoes of those times he had yielded to the Dane’s boyish inclination to bull forward regardless of odds or terrain.
Now, however, sea and wind were good, Thulsa Doom was their prisoner, and ahead lay the unnamed isle that was their immediate goal.
Cormac well remembered it. Here they had landed to tarry briefly afore, he and Wulfhere and Samaire and her brother Ceann mong Ruadh. As now, there had been then the need to take on water. Wulfhere had groaned when good ale had been emptied from leathern bags that they could be filled with fresh sweet water. Too, it was much in love with personal cleanliness the people of Eirrin were. Samaire and Ceann had insisted on bathing. At that Cormac had groaned-and climbed high to keep watch. Apparently the forested island was unpeopled, and Cormac had taken his turn abathing, whilst Wulfhere kept the needless lookout.
Now, cleverly making use of the wind and daringly defying it all at once, the Dane brought them skimming in to that same paradisic isle. It rode the sea south of Britain like a floating emerald, fragrant and richly green.
Trees still rose high and full-leafed from the high stony banks standing over the water, and birds still sang their joy of the place that seemed made for their kind. Crystal water still tumbled many feet from a pile of steep grey rocks to splash into the little inlet that formed a perfect sheltered harbour. Into it, with an expertise hardly equalled on the Narrow Sea or any other, Wulfhere of the Danes brought Quester.
Amber Rowan proved rather more difficult; laughing and splashing despite the horrid presence of their prisoner, they accomplished it.
Wulfhere aided Cormac into his mailcoat while Samaire reminded them both that this green spot on the sea had proved uninhabited. Her own jacket of leathern armour lay on the deck; she wore only a soiled tunic of blue, and the usual boots that rose up under it.
Cormac gave her a dark look.
“So was Doom-heim unpeopled,” he told her, and he buckled on his sword. He turned to Brian, who had his own coat of small-linked, Eirrin-made chain ready in his hands and was obviously preparing to accompany the man he adulated. Cormac raised a staying hand.
“I will climb up there, above the waterfall, and keep the watch. I have done it here afore. Do you help them take on water, Brian-and bathe.”
Brian frowned. He looked up at the tree-crowned cliff, back to Cormac, and glanced at Samaire. Bathe? Three men and a woman?
Cormac smiled. “The matter of bathing here has been accomplished afore, Brian I-love-to-fight. Surely ye can work it out, as we have the matter of answering calls of nature, four men and a woman aboard ship!” Cormac looked at Bas.
“I will remain aboard, with-him,” the druid said.
With a nod, the Gael turned and made his way to the prow, There he slung his buckler onto his back, girt high his sword, and squatted, measuring distance with his eyes. He sprang several feet onto a shelf of rock that sprouted curling roots like listless serpents. Mail jingling, his buckler thumping his back, he scaled the cliff’s face as he had done four months previous. It was not a difficult climb.
Samaire stood watching, shaking her head. Ever the so-cautious and ever-watchful pirate, her dairlin Cormac!
She sighed, watching him with a pensive smile. It was not that she had been instantly attracted to this hardly handsome man, back when she was but a girl and he a boy who concealed his age to fill the role of weapon-man in her father’s employ twelve years agone; she had recognized him even then, as did those others who liked or loved inexplicably at what they thought of as first sight.
It was first sighting only in this life, this one of many, last but not final in a long line of lives, an unending and unbreakable chain of carnate existences extending into the time that had been and aye, into the time that was yet to be. Samaire knew; whether Samaire Ceannselaigh of Leinster had been of Atlantis or Valusia, or indeed had even known this King Kull they spoke of, she was not certain. It mattered not. She was certain that afore now she had known the life-force or soul or ka that had been incarnate as Kull, and as Conan, and Cormac, and others between. The when of it was unimportant. The names they’d borne in past lives were unimportant. Now was important. This time, and the time to come, the beyond-Now. Cormac, and Samaire, and Tu, linked across the millennia that sprawled like the star-strewn skies.