Free Bran Mak Morn: The Last King by Robert E. Howard, Gary Gianni Page B

forget this is a dream! All seems so real. But it is �of course it is! Well, then, if I die I will but awaken as I have done in times past. Lead on, king of Caledon!� Cormac, going to his warriors, wondered. Surely it was all a hoax; yet �he heard the arguments of the warriors all about him as they armed themselves and prepared to take their posts. The black-haired king was Neid himself, the Celtic war-god; he was an antediluvian king brought out of the past by Gonar; he was a mythical fighting man out of Valhalla. He was no man at all but a ghost! No, he was mortal, for he had bled. But the gods themselves bled, though they did not die. So the controversies raged. At least, thought Cormac, if it was all a hoax to inspire the warriors with the feeling of supernatural aid, it had succeeded. The belief that Kull was more than a mortal man had fired Celt, Pict and viking alike into a sort of inspired madness. And Cormac asked himself �what did he himself believe? This man was surely one from some far land �yet in his every look and action there was a vague hint of a greater difference than mere distance of space �a hint of alien Time, of misty abysses and gigantic gulfs of eons lying between the black-haired stranger and the men with whom he walked and talked. Clouds of bewilderment mazed Cormac� brain and he laughed in whimsical self-mockery.
    III
    �nd the two wild peoples of the north
    Stood fronting in the gloam,
    And heard and knew each in his mind
    A third great sound upon the wind,
    The living walls that hedge mankind,
    The walking walls of Rome.� Chesterton
    The sun slanted westward. Silence lay like an invisible mist over the valley. Cormac gathered the reins in his hand and glanced up at the ridges on both sides. The waving heather which grew rank on those steep slopes gave no evidence of the hundreds of savage warriors who lurked there. Here in the narrow gorge which widened gradually southward was the only sign of life. Between the steep walls three hundred Northmen were massed solidly in their wedge-shaped shield-wall, blocking the pass. At the tip, like the point of a spear, stood the man who called himself Kull, king of Valusia. He wore no helmet, only the great, strangely worked head-band of hard gold, but he bore on his left arm the great shield borne by the dead Rognar; and in his right hand he held the heavy iron mace wielded by the sea-king. The vikings eyed him in wonder and savage admiration. They could not understand his language, or he theirs. But no further orders were necessary. At Bran� directions they had bunched themselves in the gorge, and their only order was �hold the pass!
    Bran Mak Morn stood just in front of Kull. So they faced each other, he whose kingdom was yet unborn, and he whose kingdom had been lost in the mists of Time for unguessed ages. Kings of darkness, thought Cormac, nameless kings of the night, whose realms are gulfs and shadows.
    The hand of the Pictish king went out. �ing Kull, you are more than king �you are a man. Both of us may fall within the next hour �but if we both live, ask what you will of me.� Kull smiled, returning the firm grip. �ou too are a man after my own heart, king of the shadows. Surely you are more than a figment of my sleeping imagination. Mayhap we will meet in waking life some day.� Bran shook his head in puzzlement, swung into the saddle and rode away, climbing the eastern slope and vanishing over the ridge. Cormac hesitated: �trange man, are you in truth of flesh and blood, or are you a ghost?� �hen we dream, we are all flesh and blood �so long as we are dreaming,�Kull answered. �his is the strangest nightmare I have ever known �but you, who will soon fade into sheer nothingness as I awaken, seem as real to me now, as Brule, or Kananu, or Tu, or Kelkor.� Cormac shook his head as Bran had done, and with a last salute, which Kull returned with barbaric stateliness, he turned and trotted away. At the top of