Andrew Offutt - When Death Birds Fly

Such were the precursors. Behind them, huger even than they, rode a lone horseman. Although a wide-brimmed hat obscured his face, one icy eye glittered from its shadow, merciless and forbidding as the spear he carried. Loping like hounds by the feet of his eight-legged steed were two wolves. Even as he watched, Wulfhere saw the nearer throw high its head to howl. The second shivered between the ragged clouds.

Then they were gone, rushing eastward.

“Hel’s teeth!” Wulfhere croaked. “Battle-brother, tell me, even if ye lie, that I’ve not been stricken with madness! Tell me that ye also saw! “

“I saw,” Cormac muttered, shaken as few had seen him. He breathed hard, and swallowed with effort. “I saw right enow, and I’m thinking that this be no wise time to mention the name of your Hel of the death-demesne.”

“A true word. Yon bloody-handed hags might be her very daughters.” Wulfhere laughed harshly, and stopped the noise short when he heard how it sounded. “To think the foolish poets make them honest, virtuous war-maidens, those Valkyrior! I’ll break the back of the next who chants such stuff in my presence.”

Cormac stared. “Wulfhere-”

“What is it?”

“What is it? A pertinent question! Of what be ye talking? ”

“Eh? Cormac, was yourself showed them to me. Ye saw them first! Valkyrs, their arms dripping gore, riding the sky along with the birds of battle-death, and their father Odin behind them attended by his wolves. It’s a portent. Some great battle is brewing over eastward. The Father of Victories doesn’t ride abroad for little things.”

Cormac mac Art continued staring.

At last he said, “Suppose I tell ye what it is I am after seeing. A hunting pack of pure white hounds, Wulfhere. The dazzle of them like new snow in the sun or bright foam on the sea. And their ears a burning-scarlet, and their jaws as red, open and baying. They ran as if they’d run down the world and make it their prey! I saw not your Father of Victories looming behind them. Was a figure of Vastness all cloaked in grey shadow, riding a grey horse. Upon the rider’s head were twelve-tined royal antlers, and the pale death-fire played over them like slow lightning. His face I could not see, and by the gods, it’s glad of it I am!”

Wulfhere was staring at his blood-brother as if the Gael had come up daft.

“Wulfhere, it was him we call the Grey Man, the lord of death and rebirth. Among the Britons it’s as Arawn the Hunter he’s known, and it’s Cernunnos also he has been named: the Antlered God. Nigh as many names and titles he has with him as your Odin! Yet it’s him I saw, not the Father of Victories.”

Baffled and angry, Wulfhere struggled not to say aught he’d regret, such as giving Cormac the lie to his face. The dark Gael was not lying. Even Wulfhere, whose perceptions were far from subtle, could see that Cormac was in earnest. He’d seen what he claimed to have seen. Yet-Wulfhere knew what he had witnessed.

“Ye must have been mistaken, Wolf,” he said at last. “This death-lord of yours… ye took the One-eyed All-father for him, that’s all.”

“Since when,” Cormac snapped, “does the One-eyed have an antlered head and bear a hunting horn jewelled with black stars?”

“Oh, he bore a hunting horn gemmed with stars now, did he? That’s a thing ye forgot to mention the first time around!”

Cormac opened his mouth, was struck by the argument’s absurdity, and shut it with an audible click of teeth. Glancing into Norn’s midship deck, he saw that which turned his mind swiftly to practical matters.

“Wulfhere,” he said, “let us agree that each of us saw something , and it was a dark omen, whate’er the details. But by all the gods, it’s down there we’d best go and take control at once, or the Armoricans and our Danes will be panicked together. Look at them!”

The Skull-splitter did. Three of Odathi’s mariners were yammering in his face whilst the rest were attending but poorly to ship’s duties, and the reivers’ two-and-thirty Danes were muttering among themselves with every sign of unease.

“Right you are,” Wulfhere growled, clambering down from the high sterncastle. “Do you handle the Bretons, Wolf. You are closer to them by language and race.”

He himself confronted his own men, glaring. “What be this havering?”

“We’ve seen the valkyrs riding,” muttered Einar. “This venture’s accursed. Best we turn back and try another time!”

“Not for all the valkyrie that ever stirred up war!” thundered his leader. “Why do ye suppose they ride for us? I say they ride to fetch Sigebert One-ear, and I’ll show ye how right I am when we reach Nantes! Turn back? Now there’s a thought, Einar. And we could do so; beg these Britons to take us the way we’ve come, and us barely a few hours out of the Mor-bihan, because we saw spectres in the clouds! Aye. That’d be a fine explanation to make the man who loaned us this ship. No dishonour therein at all. We could still hold up our heads.”

Wulfhere’s heavy sarcasm had the desired effect. Men glanced sheepishly at each other. Some looked to the now empty sky. None spoke further of turning back.

When Wulfhere turned around, he saw the Armorican seamen back at work. He didn’t ask how Cormac and Odathi had managed it. Mayhap they had simply convinced the crew that the Danes would slaughter them all, did they falter.

What they had seen, they did not dwell on. The vengeful hunger was in them to rend the guts of Sigebert One-ear, and each sea-mile brought them nearer to Nantes. The wind held. By nightfall they had reached the mouth of the Loire. Another day’s sailing up the wide estuary would bring them to the port.

“We’ll go on by night an ye wish,” Odathi said. “Will be slower, more careful going, but what of it? Thirty-odd Danish seamen there be, to work the ship while mine sleep, and none will spy them from the river-bank in the dark.”

“It’s well!” Wulfhere said eagerly. “That will see us at the city’s docks i’ the forenoon.”

“Let’s be having the smallest noise we may, then,” Cormac advised. “It’s far voices carry across water at night and there just may be someone listening somewhere who knows Danish when he hears it.”

Thus Norn moved up-river through the short summer night, a shadow of vengeance ghosting over the waters.

At last, false dawn lightened the sky.

“Time ye were all getting below,” Odathi said. “I’ll awaken the lads, and we will bring the ship to the docks.”

“Aye,” Cormac said curtly. He disliked this part of the scheme. It had on it too much the smell of placing his fate in another’s hands. “Leave yon hatch open, Odathi. We’d suffocate were it closed and battened.”

Wulfhere descended into Norn’s capacious hold, grumbling. “It likes me not, to skulk down here!”

“Nor I,” Cormac said. “Knud, and yourself, Half-a-man-do off your armour and look as much like common seamen as ye can.”

“What?” Halfdan Half-a-man, so-called by reason of his shortness, did not see the necessity. “To what purpose?”

“So that ye both may keep watch above decks when Odathi goes ashore. Odathi I’m inclined to trust, but he has eight seamen by my count, and… it requires only one traitor savouring reward for our heads to ruin all. Ye’re to take a fighting knife each, and if any Briton save the sailing master and whoe’er chooses to go with him should try to leave the ship-prevent it! No wish is on me to be trapped in this hold by Sigebert’s soldiers.”

“Sound sense,” Wulfhere nodded. “How certain be ye that ye may trust Odathi?”

“I’m not. Naught in this world is certain, but that we must chance. Someone has to go ashore, and it’s too conspicuous we both be. And the rest of us here be too clearly warrior Danes.”