Andrew Offutt - When Death Birds Fly

“Well, naturally,” Howel said nodding. “How old were you?”

“I was not! Hengist is old , Prince, old-he’d lived too damned long twenty years agone! He gave aid to those Danes of Jutland’s north! Aye! He who had broke his oath to Hnaef once Hnaef was dead, now broke his oath to Finn the Jute whilst Finn yet lived, and helped the Danes to slay him! Victorious, the Danes returned home, and their kinswoman Hildeburg with them. Hengist was left in Frisia-in power!”

Wulfhere paused and stared at Howel until the prince shook his head in disgust, and the giant went on.

“Thought ye the Franks were treacherous, eh? Now Hengist became a pirate chieftain-and one for the reckoning with. Natheless Frisia was and is no good place to live. He looked about with his pig’s eyes, bethinking him of a better place to make his home.”

“Aye, and I know what happened after,” Howel said.

Wulfhere went on as if he’d not heard. “Was the worst thing that halfwit king of the Britons, Vortigern, ever did! To hire Hengist and seven shiploads of his wolves to fight the Picts, once the Romans were well gone and Britain unprotected by the legion and beset from many sides. Thor’s thunder, any man who knew Hengist could have predicted the outcome. He commenced calling in other sea-rovers who wanted homes in a land that squelched not under their feet. In great numbers they came, like called pigs to the trough.”

Cormac, from in-sloping Eirrin that squelched under foot as often as not, and well familiar with Britain’s fogs and fens, was almost smiling. Almost.

“When Vortigern saw what was happening,” Wulfhere said, when a movement of facial muscles indicated Howel might essay to speak, “he sought to stop it. Too late, too late. He dealt with Hengist , prince among princes of treachery. Naturally, Hengist turned against him . And now now old Vortigern’s dead and Hengist’s a king himself. In Britain , as well ye displaced Britons know… calling himself not Jute but Englisc , along with the Saxons who have also moved in, jowl to cheek with Angles.”

“King,” Cormac said, and again in the tongue of Eirrin: “ Righ! King of a tiny patch like Kent! King over as much of Britain as his hand and hams will barely cover!” Wulfhere was his old friend, a friendship conceived in prison and born in escape and grown asea to be ripened by the saving each of the other’s life, more than once. One sneered at one’s friends’ enemies.

“All this I know,” Howel said, indicating the wine. “Still, Kent is a wealthy little patch of Britain.”

Wulfhere jerked, sloshed the wine he was pouring and glowered. “Hengist swore loyalty to my own grandsire and then proved false! He is Loki’s left hand and my own blood-enemy. Aye, blood-enemy. I snatched some loot out of his hands, years agone. He revenged himself by taking captive eight of my men. At my offer to ransom them, he laughed. The leprous pig-snouted dog hanged them with his own hands, then sent me their corpses with the message that he wished me joy of them!”

“Peace, Wulf,” Cormac said quietly. “Ye cannot have thought on you that other folk know the story of all the blood-feuds ye have with all the rovers afloat! Blood of the gods, it were simpler to tally those ye have not enmity with. They cannot number above a dozen.”

“Listen to him!” the huge redbeard snorted. “Ye have made foes of your own in plenty, battle-brother. Hengist for one! Ill-will hung betwixt yourself and him ere ever I met ye. Who was it took that grey madman’s battle-standard of white horsetails from the middle of his camp, and has crested his helmet with ’em every since?” And he indicated mac Art’s helm, which was unusually ornate for his sombre, unbejeweled attire, with its flowing crest.

“Policy,” Cormac said, straight-faced. “An angry foe cannot think.”

He thought on it, whiles Wulfhere made churlish complaint about how wine left one with a drawn mouth and thirst curable only by tankards of ale. Hengist was not to be taken lightly. The grizzled devil had achieved what no Caesar ever had; a lasting foothold in Britain. His name thundered over the North and Narrow Seas like a storm. Wulfhere had told naught but truth of the man’s early deeds; all those things Hengist had indeed done. Aye, and he’d grown more terrible in his grizzled eld, not less.

“Hengist,” Cormac said with a grim matter-of-factness, “likes to kill.”

“And he’d rather betray than drink!” Wulfhere snarled.

“Has age brought him no infirmity?” Morfydd asked.

“Only in the head,” Wulfhere said.

But even that was not true. Hengist was crafty and clever as ever. A giant he was, huge and powerful as Wulfhere, despite his grey mane and beard like brine or hoarfrost. None knew the number of his years, because nigh all of his generation were dead. Threescore years and more, surely. Hengist remained-and flourished. Year after year he raided, plundered, slew in ever wilder excess. He showed no sign of weakness or mercy. It was as if by behaving as a wildling yunker he could cheat death itself. Some thought he had; some thought him supernatural.

Hengist had no need of plunder. Piracy was his pleasure these days, not his livelihood, for no livelihood was necessary to him. King! Had he wished, he might have sat at ease in his dun on the Isle of Thanet, which commanded the trade of the north, and grown yearly richer without lifting a hand.

He did not. He feared that. Aye, he feared precisely that, did Hengist, who feared neither god nor man nor demon. Others might believe him immune to age. He knew better.

Women no longer interested him. Each winter the fear gnawed in his brain that his lungs or thinning blood would betray him in the cold, so that he, Hengist the terror of the wide seas, would die unworldly in straw. Each summer he fared and bullied forth in greater fury, hoping for a warrior’s end. Each summer it eluded him. He sought the occasion of death, but slew and slew and showed his wiles and thus avoided the fact of death. As sometimes haps when a man actively seeks Hel’s embrace, she passed him by as though he bore a charmed life. And she filled her chill hall with those he made enemies, and then corpses.

In a few summers more, surely, he must find himself too ill for voyaging. No choice would be his then but to decline and rot like a sessile tree.

That fate Wulfhere Skull-splitter had every intention of sparing him.

“So,” the Dane said, softly now, “ Hengist is nearby, eh?”

“It’s… other business we have in hand, Wulfhere.”

“Surt’s burning breath!” The voice lifted to a roar again, as Wulfhere proved how man could be mule. “Other business? Other business! YOU go and farm pigs, Cormac! This is my business! This is a debt owed to my slain crewmen, to my betrayed grandsire, and I’ll not let it slip unregarded into time for Ver-”

For Veremund or all the silver ever mined from this earth , he was about to say, Cormac knew, and Cormac forestalled him. He raised his voice against the Dane’s in a bellow that rendered Wulfhere’s words incomprehensible.

“Blood of the gods! Now ye’d shift to Latin and spout veritas odium parit , would ye?” he cried, striving to warn. “Must we squander the men we have left on every grudge ye’ve ever harboured? What of Sigebert One-ear, yonder in Nantes, opening his windows to the stench of Thorfinn’s green rot? Let us be dealing with him, at least, ere we concern ourselves with three shiploads of Jutes and an unknown horde of Saxons!”

’He and Wulfhere stared at each other while their hosts remained very still, nervously swallowing.

“Besides,” Cormac said on in a more moderate tone, having quelled Wulfhere’s giving away of secrets, “we cannot go hunting jutes over the water, Wulf. It’s overhauling Raven wants; have ye forgot?”