Night & Demons (27 page)

Someone had fired the
Service’
s catapult before joining the rout. The bolt glanced off the waves, probably useless even if better aimed. Men were streaming away from the shore, their shouts drowning the thunder of the penteres’s drummer hammering out the strokes as the bronze prow boiled through the glassy sea. There were only two men on her deck now, the helmsman and the Admiral himself. Even as I watched the helmsman dived overboard and the Admiral took the wheel. Probably the crew had no idea of what was happening; their only view was through the oarslots and ventilator gratings.

“Run, you fool!” someone shouted in my ear and it was Antiopas, my captain. But I could not move for it was not yet time, though the god was as fire in my hand.

“The bench,” I whispered, “I should be on the bench.”

“Run!”

An arm snaked over the side and wrapped about the rail. The
Flyer
shuddered as she slid off the beach and continued to slant into the water toward the great weight that was dragging her down. I stared into the water as the ship lurched again and two more arms rippled up, two arms and a chalk-white beak larger than I was.

Antiopas screamed and slashed with his sword, not at the tentacle that curled toward him but the god in my hand. Then our bow heaved up and disintegrated, hurling us shoreward, as the
Dominator
’s oak and gold and great bronze ram smashed through the
Flyer
and ground what was beneath her into the mud of the bottom forever.

We buried our dead—and there were many, for the penteres had crumpled to the mast step—beneath an honest mound with none of the decaying marble to defile them. The gold we gave to the sea, may it lie there forever. Yet still there is that which rots unburied in my mind, and my dreams are ill dreams for a sailor.

THE LAND
TOWARD SUNSET

Jim Baen and I were friends for the last thirty-odd years of his life. When he realized he was dying, he called and asked me to write his obituary; his ashes are scatterered in the grove beside my house.

During our friendship, Jim—as editor and then as publisher—published the lion’s share of my fiction. There is a causal relationship between the two facts, but it’s not the simple one that some people have assumed.

At Karl Wagner’s birthday party in December 1980, one of the writers present announced to the gathering, “David Drake sells books and I don’t just because he’s a friend of Jim Baen!” The fellow made the statement aloud because he was drunk, but I’m sure the Jack Daniels had merely loosened his tongue rather than putting the idea in his head.

Jim as editor at Ace had bought my first book, the collection
Hammer’s Slammers,
when other houses had turned it down. That edition sold over 300 thousand copies, and the stories have never been out of print in book form since.

I was grateful to Jim for taking a chance on me. He was pleased at the sales (which were good enough that editors whom I’d never met took notice of me). That business success brought Jim and me into greater friendly contact from which a very close friendship grew.

If I’d simply gone for the money, I probably would have earned more during the ’80s than I did by sticking with people whom I liked and trusted—mostly Jim and his Ace publisher, Tom Doherty. I’m pretty sure that my career would be in worse shape now, though; and my life would certainly be and have been less good.

As far as our business relations went, Jim turned to me when he had a screwy notion (when he needed a rewrite man on Newt Gingrich’s first book,
Window of Opportunity,
for example), and in turn he indulged my whims. One of those whims became the Robert E. Howard Library, which Jim handed me to edit after he had bought the rights to Howard’s non-Conan fantasies.

Jim didn’t like either heroic fantasy or Robert E. Howard’s writing, but he knew I loved both. He bought the rights as a playhouse for me without saying a word ahead of time. We were
friends.

My deal with Jim was that I would edit up to eight volumes (I did seven; there wasn’t another volume of material that I wanted to preserve) and that I would write a pastiche novelette to fill out the Cormac Mac Art volume. I would be paid a thousand dollars for the novelette, and Jim gave me my choice of a two percent royalty on Cormac or one percent on all the volumes.

I took the one perecnt, which was a good plan. The Robert E. Howard Library became a nice little profit center for me and Baen Books both over the next few years. Doing business with friends doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad businessman.

Cormac Mac Art was a 6th century Irish reiver whom Howard created in an attempt to sell to the adventure magazines. None of the stories he wrote about the character sold during Howard’s lifetime, but they were dusted off and published during the Conan/sword and sorcery boom of the ’70s.

I bought the small-press Cormac collection
(Tigers of the Sea)
when it appeared in 1974, but the character didn’t enter my writing life until 1977. Then Andy Offutt, who was writing a series of Cormac pastiches for Zebra Books, asked me to provide him with a Cormac plot outline. When Andy rejected the result, I changed the character’s name and developed the plot into my first novel:
The Dragon Lord.

“The Land Toward Sunset” is the story I wrote for the collection. I did not try to copy Howard’s style: this is a David Drake story, using Howard’s themes and character. And the character isn’t really Cormac but Turlogh O’Brian, a fantasy version of Cormac whom Howard created for
Weird Tales.

Putting together a collection, let alone a series of collections, is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. I could have added the two Turlogh stories to the Cormac volume of the REH Library, but then I would have needed to write a Bran Mak Morn story to fill out
that
volume. For a lot of reasons, I preferred to write about Cormac.

I’m pleased with the novelette on rereading, but I’m also amused at the little bits which I threw in because they fascinated me at the time (and often now as well). A close reading will show that at the time I wrote the story, I thought the myrrhine of the Romans was agate. I now believe the term referred to Blue John (banded fluorite), but my error is enshrined here.

I’ll close with one final anecdote about the project, though it involves not this novelette but the conclusion which I wrote for an unfinished Cormac story
(Tigers of the Sea).
The leader of a Pictish warband is wearing a headdress of feathers plucked from the tail of the black sea eagle: the erne (or ern). I had never seen the word appear outside a crossword puzzle. Thanks to Cormac Mac Art and the Robert E. Howard Library, the bird got to take a bow in a real sentence.

* * *

“S
troke!” bellowed Cormac Mac Art from the starboard bow oar. Stormwinds shredded his voice—even
his
voice—before the words carried down the thirty pairs of Viking rowers.

On the quarterdeck the captain, Wulfhere Skullsplitter, leaned vainly with all his bearlike might against the steering oar. The corposant glowed on the peak of Wulfhere’s helmet, on the tips of the powerful Danish bow he slung even at this venture across his chest, and on the hairs of his red beard blowing like a bonfire in the storm.

“Stroke!” Cormac cried. The wind clawed the command and braided it into the mindless shriek of a seabird, another sport of the storm. He should have saved his effort for the oar, nineteen feet of straight-grained pine, salt-crusted and fighting the Gaelic reiver’s strength as if it too were viciously alive.

They’d gambled against the weather, hoping to strike Saxon steadings in a season when no raiders were expected. The weather had thrown the higher dice, blasting out of the northeast with a laughing fury.

That
storm was natural. It had tossed and buffeted the pirates, flinging them along a course the windgods chose, but the ship was well-found and well-manned. They would have ridden it out in time, then made their way back to England and plundered with violence redoubled for their oar-strained muscles.

Now winds and currents gripped to drag the vessel straight to Hell. Doom’s glowing portal gaped to starboard, closer every heartbeat despite anything the tired oarsmen could do.

“Stroke!” Cormac pulled, his feet braced against a strake and his buttocks rising from the sea chest which supported him on the recovery stroke. The bow oar, longer and therefore heavier than those of the lower-riding stern, flexed dangerously against its deer-antler thole.

Where nothing but storm should be, a purple-green, unnatural hoop of light a hundred feet in diameter drew the vessel. The rising arc towered unmoved despite the gale; the lower half-glowed through the white-capped sea. Wind and water roared toward the hoop’s hazy throat, bearing the raiders with them.

The Danes were stark Vikings who had faced death a hundred times in the dance of swords and axes. Cormac had thought no disaster could cow them, but this Hell-sent apparition had crushed many of the men to apathy. They sat on their sea chests, watching with dull eyes as their doom approached.

Even so, at least a score of the pirates were rowing, men nearly as strong as Cormac himself. Their oars would have driven the supple longship through calm seas faster than a man on shore could walk. For all their efforts, the vessel continued to slip sideways toward the glowing circle.

Wulfhere leaned outward to fight the counterthrust on his steering oar, a ten-foot slab carved from the heartwood of a mighty oak. The oar’s deep bite from the roiling sea was not enough to overcome the uncanny pull of the current. Wulfhere’s mouth was open, bellowing defiance to whatever god or demon gripped his ship and crew. The quavering corposant that now clung to all the vessel’s peaks and edges was itself stained by the hoop’s purple-green light.

“Stro—”

But before the vain command was flung to the wind’s mockery, Cormac saw Wulfhere—his oathbrother, his companion of a score of bloody battles in which they two stood back to back and defied the world, his
friend
—lurch over the rail of the longship. It was not the oak which had given way before the Dane’s desperate might, but rather the knot of tough spruce root which bound the oarshaft to the wort in the vessel’s side.

Still clutching the tiller, his face bearing a look of surprise, Wulfhere pitched head first into the waves. For all the Dane had been born at the water’s edge and had sailed the pirate seas since before he was twelve, he could no more swim than he could fly.

Vikings shouted in muffled consternation at this new disaster on the brink of a still-greater one. Cormac dropped his oar and mounted the rail. Like his friend, he was fully armed. This blind storm could have swept them together with another ship, and all ships were foes in these Viking seas. The survivors would have been the crew which had prepared for instantaneous slaughter.

Now Cormac’s sword, his steel cap, and the coat of fine ring mail which had protected a Roman officer in the days before the empire’s ruin were only so much weight and hindrance to his movements. No matter.

The Gael went into the sea in a clean dive, his eyes fixed on his sinking friend. The Dane still gripped the steering oar, but his armored weight was too great for the oak to buoy to the surface.

Cormac reached Wulfhere in three powerful strokes. He grasped the collar of the Dane’s iron-scaled corselet. The current was as fierce as a millrace.

For a moment the circle of light was a glowing bar above and beneath the struggling pair. Then the apparition closed behind them and Cormac felt an instant of vertigo. He fell toward nothing at all.

The transition from nowhere to
somewhere
was as abrupt as thought. There was no impact, only the shock of cold stone flooring beneath Cormac and awareness that purple-green light streamed through the pillared side-aisles and clerestory windows of a vast building.

Cormac scrambled to his feet. Wulfhere rose simultaneously, iron-shod boots clashing on the floor. Without discussion or even consideration, the long-time companions placed themselves back to back, a sword’s length apart, as they surveyed their new surroundings.

The Dane moved with a catlike grace that belied his bulk. He slipped from his belt the bearded axe he favored; Cormac drew his longsword.

“Where
is
this place?” Wulfhere demanded peevishly.

Above them arched a dome three hundred feet in diameter, gold or gold-plated unless the eerie light tricked Cormac’s eyes. The dome rested on sixteen massive pillars, arranged in pairs. The shafts were of red-veined yellow marble with sharp-edged fluting of the Doric order, but the bases and capitals were ornate and apparently solid silver.

The dome was at one end of a rectangular building six hundred feet long. The remainder of the structure formed a pillared courtyard, an anteroom to the domed sanctum of what was clearly a temple. Nothing moved but the whispering breeze.

Cormac glanced again at the floor set with stone hexagons three feet across their parallel flats. The veined yellow marble formed roseate patterns with slabs of black and with pure white slabs, though the bilious light stained the latter to its own hue. The blocks were bedded into place with strips of metal—not lead, but rather gold so pure that it was as soft and pliable as lead.

The huge structure had an aura of age as uncanny as the evil light which bathed it.

“What is this place?”
Wulfhere shouted. His voice woke echoes from the pillars and then, a half-second delayed, from the dome above them.

A crowd of men and women poured in through the temple’s front entrance, chittering to one another. The folk had brown complexions and were so short that Cormac’s first thought was of a tribe of monkeys playing in ancient ruins.

There were nearly a hundred of them. They wore clothing so dull and shapeless that it required a moment’s consideration to be certain it was of woven fabric rather than the pelts of beasts.

Cormac’s shield, a small buckler, was strapped to his back. He tugged it free, settling the paired handles into his left fist. The iron boss and rim themselves were useful weapons, though none of this crowd appeared to be armed.