Andrew Offutt - When Death Birds Fly

Lucanor bowed deeply, less in submission than to hide the bitter hatred he feared his face was showing.

Prince Howel kept a manse in the town of Vannes. Romish and all of two centuries old, the house had been well built. It would not tumble in Howel’s lifetime. True, it showed its years, as must any oldster. Tapestries concealed the cracked yellow stucco of the exedra’s walls-without reaching so high as to hide the half-obliterated peacock frieze near the ceiling. Here and there a broken floor tile lay waiting to trip a man and make him curse. Morfydd had furnished the place in the manner of her own people, with heavy chairs and couches strewn with shaggy carpets in several hues.

“Behl protect!” the lady of Bro Erech was saying, seated on a pelt of golden tan. “As he truly did! Were it not for the sigil ye carried from Hispania, Cormac, that had been an ill night for us all. The monster showed itself vulnerable to your mace, as well-yet did not seem to fear it half so much as the power of our lord the Blessed Sun. Were I your menaced self, I’d be keeping the winged serpent upon my body at all times hereafter.”

“I shall,” the Gael replied grimly. “Another gave me the selfsame advice, in the Suevic Kingdom. It’s hardly wise I was to forget it.”

Wulfhere slouched against the wall, saying naught. Wulfhere was hurting and all knew it. The battered planes of his face were harsh with unassuagable endurance of pain. Morfydd had promised to do for him what she could, once they returned to the island where her sorcerous effects were kept. She had admitted to holding little hope. With hope or no, it never became a warrior to whimper. Wulfhere endured in silence.

Cormac likewise said naught. His heart was twisted within him by concern for his battle-brother, yet his way had never been to talk when he could not do. One tiny clue; the faintest trace of the means to effect a cure, and he’d follow it over the sea-rim and into the lairs of demons, if needful. They had no such clue.

“A strange thing, this,” Prince Howel said. “Once, not so long agone, concern was on us to know the meaning of those omens ye saw asea, Cormac. Trifling it seems now, when I can give ye the answer.”

“Seems? Maybe.” Curt and moody the Gael felt, and something of that was manifest in his voice. “And yet-ye’ve knowledge, Howel?”

“Aye, even though the rites were disturbed.” Howel’s eyes seemed to look into haunted distance beyond the world. His voice reverberated with a timbre not quite canny. “The god came upon me. I rode through vast spaces on a great, death-grey horse and saw the world spread below me like a tapestry that unfurls. Fields no bigger then squares of quilting. Houses mere chips of wood. Spectres moved in the sky above, and Phantom armies, and there was a confusion of many noises. My face turned eastward, and there I saw war abuilding. ’Tis Frankdom that marches! Frankdom that lifts its axes against the swords of the Roman Kingdom! The cousin-kings Clovis and Ragnachar lead their hosts within the month. I know it. Syagrius will meet them in strength. Corpses of men slain redly will cover the ground, and rivers in the Frankish marches will run crimson, even to the sea. Such is the meaning of the omens I saw. I know it,” he repeated, and all understood that he was not sure how he knew.

“Blood of the gods,” Cormac said softly, into a shaken quiet. “Said ye this thing seems ‘trifling’?”

Howel made no answer. Morfydd spoke in a brittle voice, as if afraid.

“It is not. But it scarcely need trouble yourself, Cormac, save insofar as there be plunder to be had out of it. Me thinks my lord means that Wulfhere’s plight is of great moment to him and to you.”

“Truth,” Cormac acknowledged.

Prince Howel had recovered his normal voice and demeanor. “We may have to look to ourselves here, should the Franks win. They may not rest content with ravaging the Roman Kingdom only.”

Gloomy silence rested in the chamber. Wulfhere stirred, scratching the depths of his beard. Even that appeared to have lost its fiery hue, somehow reduced to drabness.

A knock at the door jerked them from their reverie.

“It is Garin, my lord,” a voice answered Howel’s query, and was bade enter.

The tall golden warrior came in wearing an expression of puzzlement. He gave formal greeting to his lord and lady, and a more casual one to the pair of reivers.

“Lord, this is a strange thing, and one that concerns Cormac if anybody. A wench is here, a young woman-”

Cormac’s eyes rolled in Wulfhere’s direction, and he frowned. No comment from the Dane. The inveterate womanizer was hurting and feeling low, to say naught about who might be concerned with the advent of a young woman!

“Strange? Strange how, Garin?”

“Strange,” the shore-watcher said emphatically. “You must see her to know! Yet I’d not trouble ye with her, save that she mentions Sigebert One-ear. Claims she was a prisoner in his house, and escaped.”

Wulfhere came alive. “Sigebert?” He glanced at Cormac, whose cold eyes had narrowed while he stared expectantly at Garin.

“Aye,” Garin said. “She’s a peasant wench-only a girl really, dirty, footsore and ragged from travel. Even so she’d be pretty beyond the common, were it not for…”He hesitated, as though he could not find proper words for the framing of his thought. “Have ye interest in what she has to say?”

“It’s a trick,” Wulfhere growled. “Sigebert has sent her to gull us! What peasant wench could escape his snaky clutches?”

“Not many, in truth,” Cormac agreed. “Yet as a trick, it seems too simple-minded for that Frankish cur. It’s something subtler he’d be conceiving. But-the more fools we to send her away without so much as hearing her! Howel, Morfydd-is objection on ye to Garin’s bringing her to this chamber?”

“I’ve none,” Howel said readily. “Let it be now. Indeed, it’s interested I am myself.”

Morfydd chuckled throatily. “After hearing that, I know I must stay! Best to have a woman present anyhow. An she’s false, she may need-frightening. But an she’s true, it’s more likely she will want reassuring.”

“Fetch her in then, Garin, the Prince of Bro Erech ordered, and they exchanged glances, and soon they were gazing on her.

Cormac mac Art, hard son of a harsh age, hewed to a trade savage and ruthless even for his time and place. His comrade’s sobriquet Skull-splitter was an earned one. Prince Howel, too, was a pirate who had spilled his share of blood. The Lady Morfydd lived in the same world as they, and knew well what it was like. None of them was naive, simple or inexperienced.

Nevertheless something about this girl chilled them all. She entered the chamber hesitantly, with Garin guiding her by a hand on her arm above the elbow; perhaps lest she take fright and flee. An that were his motive, Cormac thought, he had erred. The girl showed no fear of confronting such high-seated folk. Her hesitant steps were surely due to hunger, exhaustion-and something more. She looked as if she no longer belonged in her body or was quite aware of walking on solid ground. The blue eyes had a remote, empty look.

“Who are you, girl?” Morfydd asked gently. “Lady, my name is Cathula.” She spoke softly. “I lived in a village north of here…” She looked at Howel. “Is you-be you Prince Howel, lord?”

“I am.”

Cathula turned her eyes to the immense, redbearded warrior behind her, and then to the dark Gael. For the first time the direct focus of living concern entered her gaze. “And ye twain-”

“I am Cormac mac Art.”

Cathula considered that speaker. The height and sinewy, tigerish power of him, the scarred face. Somehow his scars did not repel her as Sigebert’s had done. On the Frank’s fair skinned, almost girlish visage, sword-scars were a sickening disfigurement. Cormac mac Art had never been pretty. The scars were part of him, and belonged; to the dark, sombre mask of his features, they made little difference. Too, mac Art’s facial scars were years older than Sigebert’s. Time had faded them somewhat.