Without a word, Wulfhere rose. He hefted ax and buckler. Looked at the other man. And bent his knees in warrior’s combative crouch. Nor was there friendship in his eyes.
Still without a word, the towering Dane put up his shield before him, holding it like a battering ram, and came rushing. The mighty ax swung on high even as he charged-maintaining his eerie silence.
“DAMN ye, man!” Cormac bellowed in his horror and frustration.
He stood his ground. To the left he let his dark eyes flicker, a telltale act to a man of Wulfhere’s experience and expertise. At the last possible instant in the face of the other’s rushing charge, Cormac hurled himself to his right.
Wulfhere’s stroke had already commenced, and the adjustment of his aim to his own right was begun, for the Dane knew when he saw an opponent’s eyes picking out the direction of his evasive dodge!
But that sideward glance had been a sophisticated feint on Cormac’s part. Nor was Wulfhere swift enough now to halt his charge and ax-swing… nor, disconcerted by his chosen enemy’s leaping in the direction opposite the expected, to avoid tripping over the leg Cormac left stretched behind.
Wulfhere must have felt triumphant to see that his foeman had inadvertently got his back to the cliff and could no longer give ground with such facility. Cormac had given no thought to the cliff but indeed had backed to within arm’s length of it without knowing, so overwhelmed was his mind by this inexplicable attack.
Without so much as a cry of any sort, Wulfhere Skullsplitter flew out into cavernous space and rushed down through the depthy void that separated cliff from sea.
“NO!” Cormac roared, and jerked himself up into a squat, twisting half about to stare… down.
Now he had his frame of reference for measuring distance from cliff’s edge to tide-washed rocks. Now he had a point of comparison that enabled a man with a seaman’s eye to judge distance.
The twisted, mailed body that lay on the ragged rocks below could be concealed by his uplifted index finger. Now Cormac could assume that the distance separating him from the broken, stone-pierced corpse of his former comrade and friend was more than twenty times the length of his own body.
Wulfhere did not so much as twitch.
“Ah, Wulfhere,” Cormac muttered, and his voice caught in his throat. “Damn ye, man… why?”
Chapter Twelve:
When Companion becomes Lover
Cormac mac Art slumped, lying on his side and breathing through his open mouth.
He stared down and down at the moveless, broken body of him who had been his best friend. But the Gael’s dark, stricken eyes hardly saw that smashed, twisted form that lay over a hundred feet below.
What he saw was behind his eyes. Wulfhere was dead. Cormac remembered all the years with Wulfhere…
There had been the time on dreary little Iona, off Alba’s rocky westward coast. He had been climbing, foolishly and rashly as it fell out. And fell was the word. Tumbling and rolling and flailing, Cormac fell-and Wulfhere Skullsplitter moved his bulk with astonishing swiftness. He broke the Gael’s fall with his own huge body, not without a sore bruising to both men.
“It’s wolf ye are, not goat,” the Dane had said with equanimity, once they were again on their feet. “And do shout out next time ye be of a mind to try such a leap, Gaelic madman… this time I barely moved fast enow!”
Madman, Cormac thought now, and he heaved a sigh. Surely he had just been attacked by a madman.
Why?
Cormac recalled those several occasions on which he had, according to the battle-loving Dane, “cheated” him of his beloved ax-hewing.
“Selfish son of an Irish pig-farmer!” Aye, Cormac could hear the huge man’s grumble even now, chiding him for such as having “slain more than his share,” or silently, savagely striking down foemen ere Wulfhere had reached the scene of sword-reddening combat.
“This world holds no place for a lone wolf, Wolf,” Wulfhere had told him once, off the Isles of Orkney. Aye, and it was a team they’d become.
Cormac remembered a daring raid on Saxon shores. He shook his black-maned head, remembering…
Wulfhere, slipping in a glittering sheet of blood to fall with heels high, had been fair game for a grinning Saxon wielding an ax that rivaled the weight of Wulfhere’s own. In his desperate rush to be there in time, Cormac had been forced to set foot on the fallen Dane’s broad chest in order to drive his blade straight up through the Saxon’s intestines. The man died with his triumphant grin replaced by a look of great surprise. His own momentum bore him down on the Gael’s blade so that its point appeared reddripping at his back. In toppling, the Saxon downed his slayer. Onto Wulfhere both fell. Beneath the two bodies, one quick and one stare-eyed dead, Wulfhere Hausakluifr had groaned.
“Get ye off me, black-eyed Gaelic hog! Think ye that ye be without weight?”
Cormac shoved away the corpse and scrambled off his friend. “It’s your worthless life I’m after saving,” he grumbled, dragging himself to his feet to find none remaining afoot but Danes; he and Wulfhere and their company had triumphed once more.
“HA!” Wulfhere bellowed, grunting his way to his feet. “I merely lay taking my rest, in wait for him! Wouldn’t he have been surprised when I caught his ax in both hands and gelded him with it! And ye had to spoil it, and walk all over me withal! Think ye I be a carpet, Cormac, damn ye?”
“Nay, Wulfhere, only the greatest liar abroad on the Narrow Seas!”
The two battle-reddened men had looked at each other, and about them their crew, men of Wulfhere’s Dane-mark, awaited their countryman’s reaction to that insufferable word.
The tension lasted not long.
Dark, cleanshaven Gael and huge red-bearded Dane were soon both laughing, with the bigger man clapping a ham-like hand to each of the other’s shoulders with force enow to stagger him.
“Liar am I, eh?” Wulfhere Hausakluifr roared. “Blood brother!”
“Blood brother!” Cormac called, and all about them gore-shining blades rose in a delighted Danish hail.
Blood brothers, the dark Eirrin-born Gael and the red-bearded ruddy-cheeked northerner.
Remembering, Cormac bit into his lower lip and sighed again, heavily. He recalled the depth of their relationship, their way of working together… For gold, the two reavers had undertaken to contract their crew to a mission for an unlikely employer: Gerinth, one of the Britonish kings. With care and shrewdness the Gael had worked out his plan. It was beyond Wulfhere’s understanding.
“I am done seeking to reason out your actions,” Wulfhere had growled. And he had acquiesced to Cormac’s plan, which led to battle after gore-smeared battle. A fine scheme it had been-and that fine scheme might well have come to naught without the giant Dane and his flailing ax.
Aye, Cormac thought now. Wulfhere had said the same afore that time, and after. And always he had followed Cormac’s stratagems natheless. But… what mad reason was there now for this action of Wulfhere… his last action?
Cormac stared down twenty times the length of his body at the corpse of the best fighting man, the best companion he had ever known. Misery and despair fell on mac Art. They added their burden to that of foreboding, the menace of resistless vengeance from an unknown sorcerer for reasons no better understood.
Why, Blood-brother?
Cormac turned away, blinking.
Lying there at cliff’s edge, he touched his coil of rope. He considered the ridiculous: to make it fast and clamber down, back-walking the sheer seawall. To what purpose? To twist the blade of self-torturing remorse in himself by looking upon a dead friend?-he felt it sharply enow already. To see the bright too-familiar scarlet of Wulfhere’s life all over those rocks? To look into staring eyes and force himself to tears? To see the face of a dead blood-brother whose blood had all run out? To ask of an unhearing corpse his torturing question… why?