Next day it did indeed rain, and they were able to catch drinking water aplenty. It was good that they did; they left not the island that day, either.
Chapter Seventeen:
The Wizard Strikes
Three more days passed, and still the will of Thulsa Doom prevailed.
At least there was the fresh water Bas had promised. As he had said too, the ship from Eirrin was found each morning untouched by the baleful wizard. They saw him no more; daily they saw evidence of his power.
Lugh contrived to gain them fresh meat. Though it was stringy, there were few complaints about the two birds he brought down with his bow-at cost of one broken arrow, three lost, and two retrieved from the bodies of the pale seafaring birds. Others of their ilk, too far distant to be reached by arrows no matter how strongly loosed and skillfully directed, the company looked upon with open envy.
The soaring, inanely screeking birds came and went as they pleased. The birds were free. The birds found what food they needed on other islands less inhospitable than Samaire-heim and, faring as they did well asea on their broad, current-catching wings, plucked forth those shining fish so careless as to cavort at the surface. The birds were free, mobile, and free too of the frustrating overwork and muscles strained for naught.
Thulsa Doom had no quarrel with birds.
Salt water fish seemed to avoid the isle, but meagre and dwindling supplies of food were supplemented by the catching of one great silver-blue denizen of Manannan’s abode-upon the spearing and landing of which burly Cet mac Fergus became a hero. Two other smaller fish were merely picked unheroically up from the sands whence they had been borne and tossed by wind-swept water, and left gasping behind when the wind died and the sea receded.
Men sought shellfish among the rocks surrounding the island that had become their prison, and were unrewarded-though punished with skinned shins and one wrenched wrist.
“It’s only me right wrist,” Duach said with an attempt at a shrug and a grin, for the slim but accomplished swordsman from the Slieve Cuilinn area of northern Dalriadia was left-handed. But no one laughed.
The druid had drunk little, eaten nothing at all, and spoken hardly more. Bas remained busy with his accumulation of oak and patched-together symbols and his muttering-and, ever accompanied by at least two others, his “reading” of the many pictures and glyphs on the castle walls. All knew he was working on their behalf against a wizard far more accomplished and experienced. Nevertheless that failed to prevent a growing impatience with Bas as day followed dreary day of imprisonment; the men of Eirrin fell out of infatuation with him on whom they’d set such hopes.
“He seeks to save us all, and he fasts on our behalf,” Cormac told Findbar mac Lirchain, after the Meathman had snarled against Bas.
“Fasts-so do we all fast!” Findbar retorted. “And what sustenance has our enemy?”
“Ye saw his… face,” Samaire said. “The wizard died years agone-centuries agone. He has no need of sustenance-as ye will not, an ye lean not on that hull-here comes the wind again!”
Day after day, winds that rose on the instant from nowhere drove them back-and then died as abruptly once they’d manhandled the ships well up the strand and taken what shelter they could against the island’s forbidding walls of stone; there was no lee side.
Night after night they slept in the castle, all together along the upper defense hall and complaining of the snoring of Wulfhere and Cet and Lugh. Thence they repaired each even at dusk, carrying their provisions-which they returned to the ships each day in their new attempts to depart this place of Hel.
With ample opportunity to grow sick at the sight and smell and sound of each other in this constant frustration and enforced proximity, they did. Laden with the spoils of Norsemen they’d not had even to slay, they sought only to leave Samaire-heim. And daily the power of Thulsa Doom drove them back.
Cormac had still his confidence and his rope, and he plotted and murmured a secret plan. Thus, on the second night after their confrontation with the wizard they’d not seen since, the company of fourteen laboriously gained the mesa paralleling the castle’s upper storey. Thence they hurried silently in the dark to the ships. In silence they forced Quester down to the tidewaters for a perilous attempt to ply treacherous shoreward waters by night.
The wind came, and cursing they set their shoulders to the stern of the long boat whose bow they’d just been apushing. Then the wind died… and on its last sighs came borne the sound of mocking laughter.
There were more frowns and angry words and curses than cooperation that third day. Returned to the castle once more, Cormac mac Art relieved himself of a lecture. Some received it with set teeth; others with sheepish looks; Findbar with a sneer he would not disguise.
Thulsa Doom must have had means of witnessing that scene, for that night he made another direct attempt at gaining his ends. Later, the survivors of that new horror could only reconstruct what took place from imagination and supposition. Somehow the wizard must have lured Findbar from their midst while all others slept; that, or the sullen Meathman awoke to nature’s call and ignored the one overweening rule. He fared from his companions, and outside, and there he found his weird. Dawn was acoming, the sky going from black to deep blue lightening to an orange-shot grey in the east, but the enemy worked swiftly.
Some faint noise awoke Wulfhere rather than Cormac, who had striven the hardest on the day previous and, his brain full of frustration and plans that came to naught even in the thinking, had lain long awake. It was Wulfhere awoke his former reaving companion, quietly.
“Half our number have left us,” he whispered. “Look.”
Creep-footed, Cormac moved to one of the arrow-niches from which their first approach to this isle, months agone, had been contested by the two Norsemen left as guards. He peered forth into a chill morning just greyed with dawn.
Far out across the plain, a knot of men was just on the point of entering the narrow gorge slicing through the towering wall of stone that separated plain from beach. Cormac opened his mouth to call out; closed it. He sighed.
“Let them go Wulfhere “ he murmured “It’s not they are Thulsa Doom’s prey; they can escape him thus, without me.”
“And if they take Quester rather than the Britonish ship?”
Again Cormac mac Art heaved a weary sigh. “Can we have the heart to contest them? Fight those men, my picked men, for the right to leave me-and live?”
Wulfhere frowned deeply, but said nothing, and his friend turned from the embrasure. He glanced about at those remaining, all asleep-and then he went spear-stiff and peered close.
“Blood of the gods! Up, up all, and into your armour!”
While those sprawled lumps of shadow stirred and sat up to become human beings and then rose, Cormac’s words drove sleep from them and determination into their hearts.
“All the others have departed us, but a few minutes past. Look about ye-it’s all the water and all the food they’ve taken! It’s abandoned to die we are, not from the sorcerer, but from the death that comes more swiftly than starvation-thirst!”
Chapter Eighteen:
Steel Against Sorcery
They clad themselves hurriedly in armour of leather and steel. Buckling on sheaths and scabbard belts, they settled helmets over skulls and took up their bucklers. When they left the castle of Atlantis at a trot, ax or sword was naked in every hand, including that of Bas. Solemnly, without a word, the druid had descended to the great hall and there girt up his robe with a Norseman’s broad belt. He took up a Norse ax as well, after slipping the buckler of a dead Dane up his arm as though he well knew how to wear and use it.
Even so, weapon-gripping hands were few. The loyal remnant of Cormac’s fourteen now consisted only of Samaire, Wulfhere, Brian, Lugh called Manhunter, and Bas. They were six; eight had left surreptitiously, apparently to abandon them with nothing to quench their thirst.