But there is not. It’s fiercely independent and clannish they are; more so than the Gaels of Eirrin, and that’s saying much. In their time they held off the Romans from their mountain valleys, and they held off the Goths, and by the black gods!-they are fell toward outsiders. Never will they be lifting a hand for someone not of their own race, unless it has a weapon in’t, and that for the spilling of blood and doing of red death.” Cormac mac Art’s sword-grey eyes looked broodingly back into his own past for a moment. “At base they be the same folk as the Silures of west Britain, and the Picts of Alba,” he said low, “although the latter bred with another race in the long ago; a strange race, squat and apish, the signs of which can still be seen on them. Their breed and mine have an enmity older than the world.”

Cormac, whom men called the Wolf, did not exaggerate. Older than the world was that feud, indeed… or older than the world as it now existed. Vague memories of former lives and other epochs stirred in his brain, tempting him to lose the present in that strange reverie others called ‘the rememberings’ that sometimes seized him without warning. Cormac rejected its lure with all his iron strength of will and focused on the visages of the two Suevi below their barbarically knotted hair.

“An ye doubt me, my lords,” he said grimly, “send ambassadors to these people. Set beside the northern Picts, it’s the very flower of gentleness they be-and even so ye’d do well to send men ye can spare.”

King Veremund doubted not, nor was he inclined to put Cormac’s test to trial. The Basques of the Pyrenees were far closer neighbours of his than were the Vandals. He knew all about them.

“What of the Britons of Armorica?” Zarabdas asked. “Are they not skilled in these arts?”

“They are so,” Cormac admitted. “Their ancestors crossed the sea from Britain, most of them from Cornwall. The pulse of the sea is after being in their blood since long before Rome was a power.