Winter Serpent (6 page)

Suddenly, the scene turned into one of battle. Some angry words exploded and two of the Northmen, their faces contorted with rage, hacked at each other with the spears they had been using for sport. Doireann was astounded to see their faces change so swiftly, becoming ferocious, bloodthirsty. The crowd tripped up one of the fighters and he went sprawling. His opponent was quick to leap on him and drive the spear into his shoulder. He was pulled away by a man in a leather vest with a horsetail fixed to his helmet. The man held rank of sorts; he cuffed the victor about the head and shouted at him. The rest, bent double with laughter, hauled the wounded man off and dumped him into the water. Then they proceeded to bathe.

Sweyn undressed behind a boulder and joined them. He had an enormous belly which he eased carefully into the cold water.

Doireann shrank from what was going on. Her eyes hurt from the over-bright sunlight and her ears were deafened with the noise. She managed to choke down some of the food, feeling that she must eat now or begin to starve. The giant Jarl seemed to share her lack of appetite. He sat with his head sunk forward, not touching his bowl. She tried to speak to him, but he gave no sign that he heard. She bent to look into his face. He seemed in a stupor. This, then, was his reward for dragging himself from his bed. They were all monsters, madmen.

She put down her bowl and moved away from the hunched Jarl. There was nothing she could do for him, certainly nothing she could say which would persuade him to go back to the log hall. She guessed that he was bent on
showing himself to the others to hold his leadership over them. Or to show his great fortitude.

She walked away from the campfire, the group of raucous bathers, slowly. Before her were the woods at the foot of the cliff. Even now, escape might be possible. The Norse chieftain with his cracked head was a dangerous burden. If she should do something wrong in ignorance, caring for him, or if he should suddenly worsen of his own accord, with his wound and his fever, the Northmen would undoubtedly kill her.

The little forest made a dense cover at the cliff base. There was a path ending here, somewhere, which led along the rock ledges to the headlands above. But she had been struck before with the difficulty of escape from the Viking camp. Anyone making his way up the cliffs would be easily seen from below. And if she could outrun the heavy-footed Northmen, which was doubtful, it was likely Calum’s sea watch was somewhere above. She wished suddenly that she knew where the Picts were now. Her mother’s people had probably moved their sheep to the spring pastures and were scattered in the rough country beyond Cumhainn. Or, with the Northmen in the loch, they were hiding in the mountains.

She glanced back at the Northmen by the fire. Sweyn Barrelchest had come out of the water and was standing there, warming himself. He was watching her.

She abruptly sat down on a rock. Escape was useless. It had been an idle thought, but she felt as though the idea marked her with a guilt for all to see. She did not want them to come after her. She must go into the woods for a moment, but not now. The trees were so close that she could almost reach out and touch them, the underbrush thick with vines and brambles.

Another Northman had come up to Sweyn Barrelchest and, following his stare, stood watching her also. She looked away innocently at the sea gulls diving over the waters of the loch, and then down at her hands clasped on her knees.

Just then the second Northman bent his head to Sweyn Barrelchest and said something. They both laughed. Sweyn looked away, and the other bent to fill his bowl at the fire.

She waited until she was certain they would not begin watching her again, and then she stood up and went quickly into the woods. The underbrush was indeed thick. She scratched her hand on a bramble at once: a blackberry, with hooked thorns and green shoots already showing. She saw a small open clearing ahead, but moved away from it. She must hurry, or they would come in after her.

She was straightening the hem of the arasaid when she heard a small noise. She had a fearful, startled thought of a wild animal close to her and hurried
from the spot. But the noises followed. Something, a thrown twig, hit her shoulder. And although she could see the beach ahead of her and was almost out of the trees, she looked back.

A Pict, snub-nosed and squat, was standing deep in a clump of hollies. Only his head showed, the face lined with the fierce blue tattoos of his people.

She was too near to the beach and the eyes of the Northmen to speak to him. This was very dangerous. The Pict must have been waiting patiently for her all the morning, lurking in the woods just outside the camp. Only a Pict, the most skilled of hunters and stalkers, could have crept so close.

He put his finger to his eye silently.

I watch
.

His finger circled his breast.

We watch
. The Cruithne, the Picts, watch.

She could see Sweyn Barrelchest, his hands on his hips, looking impatiently at the woods. She turned and plunged toward the beach, a last trailing vine of the forest catching at her ankle. She stopped to disentangle it.

Let the Picts watch, she thought in desperation, if this was all they could do to help her. It was foolish to put one’s trust in the dark people; they were always full of windy plots of one sort or another which came to nothing. She must face her trouble alone.

2

The Pict, whose name was Barra, sank back down into the holly bushes, grimacing at the noise of the stiff, sharp-pointed leaves. Cover was difficult this time of the year; the thin sprouting vines and shrubs were not enough to hide the stalker. He had had to go
from evergreen to evergreen, and the accursed holly was the worst of all. It rattled like an old woman’s bones when he moved, and cried out to the world that someone was hidden in its depths.

At least he was well within the thicket of trees, and the Northmen did not seem interested in the woods now that Doireann nighean Muireach had left them. He squatted on his heels, breathing shallowly, his eyes half-closed, alert but patient. He had most of the day to spend in this manner. When the Northmen left the beach he would begin the slow movement through the underbrush to the foot of the cliff and then, in the night’s darkness, up the steep path on the ledges. He did not like the look of this meadow now. With the Northmen’s house in it and their ships outside the bar, it had the look of a trap. There was water all around, and the only way out was up the narrow path.

A bird lit in the holly branches and looked at him with black, shining eyes, turning its head from side to side in the grave, silly way of birds. Barra stared back at it unblinkingly, his own eyes as black and gleaming as the other’s.

It had been necessary to come down from the shieling, the pasture, in this way. He was satisfied. Nod Doireann nighean Muireach, daughter of Ithi of the Picts, would know that her mother’s people were close by. They, at least, were not like the Scots; they did not abandon their kind without effort. And this had been easy enough. It was the boast of the Cruithne that they could pass as the hawk’s shadow, that they could lie hidden in a bog for two days unseen, and yet mark the speech of all who passed unawares. This was the way it should be, for this was still their land, the land of the ancient dark people.

In the beginning of time, the tales of the Picts said, those who held the land north of the wall of the old Romans were all Picts. It was the misfortune of the old race that the Gaels who called themselves Scots had come to take the land from them, coming in ships from over the sea in Eire. This part that the Gaels had claimed they now called Dalriada, and they had set up their king in Dunadd. But the east of Alba was still ruled by the king of the Cruithne in Inverness. Split in two the land now was, on the west held by the Gaelic-speakers and on the east by the speakers of the old tongue, the dark people, who remembered what they had once held and how their chiefs had once dug their earth houses in the spot which was now called Coire Cheathaich.

This had all happened a long time ago. The earth houses had long been trampled by the cattle of the Scots chieftains in Cumhainn, and the Cruithne who remained in the loch kept the herds for the Gaels and did their hunting, although they kept their own tongue and their blood ties and kinship. And, as things will happen, there was some mingling of the two peoples. Muireach macDumhnull was one of those who had married a Pict. The old chief had taken Ithi, a princess of the dark people, as his wife, and his children had been of both houses. The old chieftain had been a wise man who ruled the Gaels and the Cruithne firmly and put down the bloody feuds which plagued both races.

How could it be, the Picts had since asked one another, that a just God could take away the fair and honored old chief, Muireach, and allow the Red Foxes, Calum macDumhnull and his brother, to set themselves up in his place. Yet this is what had come to pass when the old chief’s son Fergus had been killed in the wars in Lothian. The old man had been struck with the news of his only son’s death and had taken to his bed, grieving and feverish. There had been sick children in the hall, but no one had thought the old man was more than grief-stricken. They had never thought he would take a child’s illness.

Yet as the day passed they saw him become black-faced and choking, and they knew that his death was upon him.

As he lay in bed the old chief’s rasping breaths could be heard through the house and into the yard, and the men of the Coire gathered to listen and shake their heads. Muireach macDumhnull, who had been a famed warrior, knew also that he was doomed, and he cursed, the evil way death was coming upon him. He begged the women to prop him up in his bed and put his shoes on his feet and his sword in his hand, but they would not. Instead, they called the priests from Iona who came with bells and crosses to pray loudly and long over the sound of the old man’s cursing and choking. Whatever then Muireach could have said about his will in the matter of a new chief was drowned in the racket. In a fit of temper and strangling he lay back on the bed and died.

The clans of Lorne, the chieftains both high and low of the kingdom of the Dalriad Scots, gathered to do him honor in his death. Kinsmen and kinswomen from the capital at Dunadd, from far Ulaidh in Eire, traveled to his burying feast with their slaves and horses until there was a great throng in Cumhainn. Macoul, who was chief over all the petty chieftains of Lorne District, came with fifty chiefs and they were chosen to build the funeral fires and sing the warriors’ laments, it being well-known that only chiefs may bury a chief.

In the last day of the feasting the nobles came to Muireach’s bier and thrust their torches and spears into the ground and began the wailing that was old as the Gaels in the west. The kinsmen in their checkered woolens struck their copper shields together many times so that the air was shattered with the noise and the glens echoed to the grief for the departed.

Since Muireach macDumhnull claimed the blood of kings they did not bury him in Cumhainn but bore him down to the sea, over the bar of the loch, to Iona, the lonely barren isle, the place of ancient pagan barrows and the Christian graves. There they buried him in the ground, and because the days of the druids were not quite forgotten, they stuffed oak leaves into his hands and bread into his mouth for the last journey into the darkness of death.

On the trip back through the rough inland passages Ithi, the old man’s wife, threw herself from the boat into the sea and sank like a stone. The priests were greatly displeased and prophesied much woe would come from such evil custom.

The priests were right. Calum macDumhnull proclaimed himself tanist, or chief apparent, at once, and called upon his hulking brother Donn as captain of the dun to support him. The clans were confused and angry, and an appeal was sent at once to Macoul, the high chieftain, and to the Ard-Ri in Dunadd. A distant cousin who had good claim to the kinship hurried to the
Coire to meet with the dissatisfied clans in Cumhainn, but on the journey he met with a mysterious accident and his warriors turned back. Calum macDumhnull had met with the Macoul and persuaded the high chief to let him continue as tanist for a while, until a proper chieftain could be chosen. Calum was clever, and he was quick to begin the changes, backed by his brother’s might, which drove out the decent men from the Coire, and left only stragglers and crofters and broken men without clan ties eager to make uncertain gain for themselves.

Calum was lucky. He had invincible luck. And his twin brother Donn was stupid but very strong, with a wild boar’s courage. The High King in Dunadd, the Ard-Ri, was busy with his wars with the Angles in Lothian and could not interfere with what seemed like a lawful succession well-bolstered by kinship. In vain the clans protested that there was no law now in the Coire, quarrels and the spilling of blood being common even under the chief’s roof. Vengeance suits and claims of injustice were ignored by Calum macDumhnull and he made no pretense of sitting in judgment in matters contrary to his own interests. The priests were driven away, crying scandal to heaven, and the bishop at Iona was provoked into putting Cumhainn under a ban. The monks would not come there to baptize the children nor legalize the marriages. Wise men avoided the place and gave it the name of a nest of thieves, and worse.

Calum was satisfied. He was chief in an age which set no store by his peculiar talents, and he had come far for his skinny, devious person. Unfortunately, he could find no woman of equal rank to live with him. He had been forced to take to himself Sine, a herder’s daughter, as large and dull and slow-moving as he was quick and clever. It had once been thought that Calum would marry the child of Muireach, Doireann, when she was of an age to wed, but Doireann had hated her cousin and foster brother from the moment that he had put her dead father’s cloak about his shoulders and stepped upon the standing stone to take his chief’s oaths.