Read Calgaich the Swordsman for Free Online Page B

arms.
    “You've never seen the warrior patterns?" he asked with a slow smile. He moved closer to the firelight and tapped the designs with his fingertips. “I received my first solid food from the tip of my father's dirk. When I was two years old, they needle-pricked the warrior patterns on my chest and arms and then rubbed in the blue woad. When I was nine years old, I started my fosterage under my father's younger brother, Bruidge of the Battle-Axe. I started my warrior training then. We threw the sleg, the light spear, at first against straw targets daubed in different colors. Our spear teacher was Felim of the Long Arm. There was none better.” His voice rose in a chanting lilt and he seemed again to look far beyond the barrow and beyond the mist-shrouded hills and grim, wolf-fanged mountains to his homeland. “We threw the sleg with all our young strength at the straw targets as Felim called out their particular colors. To hit the wrong target was shameful. To miss altogether a disgrace! For six years we cubs ran with our own pack, hunting under the guidance of Guidd One-Eye, who was like a wolf himself in the forest. We handled the hounds and rode the shaggy ponies. We learned to handle the light chariots over the roughest ground. We learned swordsmanship and the infighting of the dirk. We hurled the sleg , and the heavier gae, until we could handle the great laigen, the hand lance, until we had no peers in the work! There were none better! And Calgaich mac Lellan was the greatest of them all!”
    Cairenn fed the fire. She was used to the boasting of her own Ordovician kinsmen and more so to that of the mad Hibernians. All those of Celtic blood were alike, great boasters and fighters, quarrelsome and touchy. Their honor, such as it was, was not easily satisfied, except by payment of blood.
    Calgaich wiped the sweat from his face. The mystical light died in his gray eyes. He stared at her as though suddenly realizing she was there.
    "The scars on your chest, fian?” she asked. He seemed to want to talk.
    "The bite of the blade; the slashing of wolf fangs.”
    She gathered her courage. "And those on your back?”
    His face became set and dark with the congested blood beneath the skin. For a moment she thought he was going to strike her. Her questions had finally proved too many for him. At last he turned away from her and picked up his clothing. He held the clothing out to her. "Dry them, woman!” he ordered harshly. He reached for his spear. "Give me the cloak,” he added.
    "It is all I have,” she protested, pulling it more closely around herself.
    "Give it to me!”
    She stood up and tried to give him eye for eye, but it was of no use. He reached out and stripped the cloak from her nakedness. He did not even look at her as he flung the cloak about his own shoulders and walked into the passageway that led to the outer world. She heard the dull clashing of the bronze bosses on the hide door as he passed out into the dusk.
    She shivered as she passed her tapered hands down her body, feeling her outthrust breasts and her nipples hardened by the cold instead of the heat of passion. Calgaich was a strange man. The thought of him possessing her gave her a curious intermingling of images. She had a delicious scared feeling of having him overpower her to slake his hunger in her young, virginal body, and a wanton desire to throw herself at him so that she, too, might slake the fire she felt deep within her bowels.
    Her eyes flicked about the gloomy chamber. Evidently no one had been here for many years. Dust was thick where the water did not drip. Soon ruin would overtake the barrow. The Damnonii or whoever had worshipped here after the time of the Little Dark People would hardly come back now. They had left something behind, however, in addition to the votive offerings of the polished greenstone axe heads and the broken bronze axe heads. They had left behind them a feeling of intense and indescribable evil.
    Cairenn