The attackers were attacked by a madman. The raging Gael cut his way forward without looking back to see whether any comrades followed him.
Half a dozen did. Despite the horror of what they thought they saw, they noted too that Cormac was fearless and that hideous corpses fell before his one-man charge. The Danish pirates were not backward about discovering that what they perceived as living dead could die again, and fall like men. Leggings and arms were splashed warmly. Crimson runnels spilled over the ship’s timbers.
Wulfhere’s instincts were to plunge after his blood-brother. But Wulfhere commanded Raven. He cursed and cheered Cormac equally and without bias, while knowing he durst not follow into the blade-reddening action he loved. His archers were still speeding volleys onto the two remaining Basque ships. Close upon them now, those vessels were bearing down in foam-sided furrows white as new samite.
“Belay that!” Wulfhere roared in a voice like an ocean-storm. “Bend to rowing, ye geldings! Would ye be cracked like a nut betwixt tongs? Lay alongside that one, the nearer-we’ll grapple to her! Ugly bastards, aren’t they! Best we aid them along to Ran’s arms where they belong, lads!”
His broad face darkened with passion above his flaming beard. Ax upraised, his immense height increased nearly to seven feet by his horned helmet, Wulfhere Skull-splitter was a fearsome sight. The bitter necessity of leaving mac Art fighting for his life made the giant’s rage greater, if such were possible. He loosed another hideous bellowing cry that froze Basque blood into marrow and whitened dark faces. He gnashed his teeth and foam speckled his vast beard like white-hot flame amid red.
Glaring, he brandished his terrible ax and raved threats against the ship he had designated for assault. He cursed each moment that passed ere the first grappling hook could fly.
To Wulfhere-as to all left aboard Raven-they moved against a vessel of unnatural life-in-death. All too recently he had coped asea with foes otherworldly and inhuman. Now his eyes assured him that death’s head liches stared at him from sockets like thumb-gouged holes, and thirsted for his blood. Yet he never hesitated, nor did his men.
Grappling hooks flew gleaming like dragon’s teeth. Some bit into wooden strakes while others missed because the ship’s structure was not what they saw it to be. Those men reeled in and tried again even as feverish fishermen, the while Raven drew closer by means of those lines that had found purchase. Wood creaked and water hissed and gurgled as the two craft swung close.
Wulfhere Hausakluifr was first over the side, in a flying leap that should not have been possible to a man of such size. Like those of a mad giant his big feet crashed to the deck of the other vessel. Behind him swarmed his men, yelling in the way of wolves or berserks. They rattled onto the Basque craft, tall fair men all agleam in armour of glittering bosses or lapping scales sewn to byrnies of boiled leather.
Counting their leader, the Danes numbered five-and-thirty. While their arrows had left about that many Basques to face them, the Danes in general were bigger men, and armoured besides.
Faces of corrupting death leered at them. Weapons hacked and stabbed in fists with tattered grey flesh raveling around knuckles of bare white bone. The northerners’ noses were deceived, too, for the stink of death was as of an old burial-barrow torn open. Yet their very revulsion nerved the Danes to fight with transcendent fury.
Axes and swords swung and hacked, flashing like lightning bolts playing about the deck, and where they struck crimson sprang up. Basques went down. Attackers had been attacked; attack became massacre.
Wulfhere strode raving through the melee. His ax rose and fell, chopping and streaming, in a racket of cloven bone and metal. In his mighty arms it described huge horizontal eight-figures in air, the interlocked circles formed of a scarletdotted blur of grey, so swiftly did he swing his ax. A sword rushed at him and the shield of the man just behind Wulfhere rushed forward. It did not stop, and a seemingly half-decayed face shattered around the iron boss. Teeth clattered onto the deck. Wulfhere plunged on. He disdained a shield; he had his ax. Thus! and a head flew from ragged shoulders. Thus! and blackened stinking bowels burst from a belly that had appeared swollen tight with putrefaction.
The third ship wavered. Its oars contradicted one another. Then it turned about and fled the battle become massacre. It vanished into the blue dusk and was seen no more.
Usconvets, aboard the ship Wulfhere and his men were rapidly making into a slaughter-yard afloat, saw it happen. From behind the grisly magical illusion that masked his face, the Basque pirate cried out in despair.
“Cut free! Part those grappling ropes and break off the fight!”
His men rallied, fired by desperation and the example he showed them.
Yet still they did not fight as they ought, and could. The illusion encompassed the vision of all save Cormac. What the Basques saw bracing the Danes was not their chief, but a foully animate corpse. It did not inspire them, though it shouted in a voice that was nearly Usconvets’s. Had Wulfhere not seen how things stood, and been content for his own reasons to let the “liches” depart, his Danes would have surely devastated the ship from end to end. They had almost done so in any case.
“Let them go!” Wulfhere thundered. “By the Hammer! Whatever landfall they can make is welcome to them! Back aboard Raven, ye bloodhungry dogs! Cormac’s needing us!”
His voice blared above the din of the fighting like one of the Romans’ big buccina horns. When men did not obey him swiftly enow, he whacked them lightly-by his standards-with the flat of his gore-dripping ax and shoved them to the rail with his other hand, big as a foot. And ever he roared at them to move, move, and cursed their tardiness.
They tumbled into Raven and pushed off, leaving the Basques to go where they could.
4
Usconvets’s command was reduced to a reeking shambles where dead and dying men lay about while barely a dozen stood on their feet to receive his orders. He glared wildly about at them. All, all had the semblance of things come slinking hideously from a salt grave, both the upright and the prone. The Basque pirate felt a nigh-irresistible urge to draw his dagger and stab himself through the heart.
A leader of men, he mastered himself. And from egregious defeat and despair and near-madness was born a blazing anger.
The stranger, Lucanor. He caused this.
“Into the sea with the bodies,” Usconvets commanded, and watched without tears while it was done. “Now pull, pull for home. We have a reckoning to exact, there!”
“What of the others?” a man asked. He was unrecognizable, as were they all.
His leader turned what appeared to be empty eye-sockets on the third of their ships, which Raven was nearing fast. He asked wearily, “What can we do?”
Usconvets asked it of no one, and none answered.
Raven came alongside her prey with a grinding of timber. “Ho, Wolf!” her captain bawled. “Be not greedy and hoggish, man-leave some for us!”
The Gael showed teeth and answered with one short word.
Of the six Danes who had followed him onto the ship of enemies, three remained alive and one of those was down with a spear through his thigh. He kept murmuring “Gudrid,” which Cormac felt was at least better than the “Mother” he’d heard too many times. Nevertheless the downed man fought on. He dragged a Basque down beside him, even while he groaned. When the fellow attacked him with a dagger the Dane gained a wrestling lock on his arm, snapped it with a stomach-turning sound, and soon was grimly strangling the Basquish weight with a forearm across the throat. His thigh pumped red.