Free The Bull and the Spear - 05 by Michael Moorcock Page A

mist. The hounds which remained alive instantly began to drive over the walls and run back down the hill until there was not a single living dog remaining in Caer Mahlod. Then the mist began to lift, rushing back towards the forest as if drawn behind Kerenos like a cloak. Once more the Horn sounded.
     
    Some men were vomiting, so terrible was the sound. Some men screamed, while others sobbed.
     
    Yet it was plain that Kerenos and his pack had had enough sport for that day. They had shown the people of Caer Mahlod a little of their power. It was all they had wanted to do. Corum could almost understand that the Fhoi Myore might see the battle in terms of a friendly passage of arms before the main fight began.
     
    The fight at Caer Mahlod had brought about the deaths of some four and thirty hounds.
     
    Fifty warriors had died, men and women both.
     
    "Quickly, Medhbh, the tathlum !" King Mannach, wounded in the shoulder and bleeding still, cried to his daughter. She had put one of the round balls of brains and lime into her sling and was whirling it.
     
    She let fly into the mist, after Kerenos himself.
     
    King Mannach knew she had not hit the Fhoi Myore.
     
    "The tathlum is one of the few things they believe will kill them," he said.
     
    Quietly they left the walls of Caer Mahlod and went to mourn their dead.
     
    ‘ 'Tomorrow,'' said Corum,' ‘I will set off upon this quest to find your spear Bryionak for you and bring it to you, clutched in my silver hand. I will do all mat I can to save the folk of Caer Mahlod from the likes of Kerenos and his hounds. I will go."
     
    King Mannach, aided down the steps by his daughter, merely nodded his head, for he was very faint.
     
    "But first I must go to this place you call Castle Owyn," said Corum. "That I must do first, before I leave."
     
    "I will take you there this evening," said Medhbh.
     
    And Corum did not refuse.
     
     
     
    THE THIRD CHAPTER
     
    A MOMENT IN THE RUINS
     
     
    Now that it was late afternoon and the cloud had dropped away from the face of the sun—which melted the frost a little, warmed the day and brought traces of the odor of spring to the landscape—Corum and the warrior princess Medhbh, nicknamed 'of the Long Arm' for her skill with snare and tathlum, rode horses out to the place which Corum called Erorn and she called Owyn.
     
    Though it was spring, there was no foliage on the trees and barely any grass growing upon the ground. It was a stark world, this world. Life was fleeing it. Corum remembered how lush it had been, even when he had left. It depressed him to think what so much of the country must look like now that the Fhoi Myore| their hounds and their servants, had visited it.
     
    They reined their horses near the edge of the cliff and looked at the sea muttering and gasping on the shingle of the tiny bay.
     
    Tall black cliffs—old and crumbling—rose out of the water. The cliffs were full of caves, as Corum had known them at least a millennia before.
     
    The promontory, however, had changed. Part of it had fallen at the center, collapsing into the sea in a tumble of rotting granite, and now Corum knew why little of Castle Erorn remained.
     
    "There is what they call the Sidhi Tower—or Cremm's Tower. See?" Medhbh showed him what she meant. It lay on the other side of the chasm created by the falling rock.' 'It looks man-made from a distance, but it is really nature's work."
     
    But Corum knew better. He recognized the worn lines. True they seemed the work of nature, for Vadhagh building had always tended to blend into the landscape. That was why, in his own time, some travellers even failed to realize that Castle Erorn was there.
     
    ' 'It is the work of my folk,'' he said quietly.' 'It is the remains of Vadhagh architecture, though none would believe it, I know." She was surprised and laughed. "So the legend has truth in it. It is your tower!"
     
    "I was born there," said Corum. He sighed. "And, I suppose, I died there,