Andrew Offutt: When Death Birds Fly

In the cloudy skies vague shapes loomed as if exulting in the slaughter. Hugest of all was a cloaked, implacable figure on a phantom steed. Were those wolves coursing belly-down before him, or a pack of crimson-eared hounds? No man who saw them was able to say. Did wild horns wind?

King Syagrius noticed none of it. Jupiter and Mithras were far from here, and none saw Iesu, and Syagrius was consummately busy. He rode and fought with a kind of inspired madness in knowledge that the Frankish host must be shattered now or not at all. His sword rose and fell, streaming red. Rome was Soissons; Soissons was Rome; and for Rome he fought as his kind had on this soil for nigh onto six hundred years. He hacked and slashed and hacked, grunted without ever shouting or cursing. The business was to slay and Syagrius, Roman, slew. The trained warhorse under him killed as fiercely as he. Its hooves splashed into flesh and broke bones, its iron jaws caught an enemy by the upper arm, lifted him bodily from his feet and shook him, shrieking, until the biceps tore loose and he dropped in a ruined heap. Syagrius slashed and hacked and slashed.

Incredibly, the Franks were not breaking. They fought like the wild men they were. Closing in, they hacked at the hind legs of horses, hamstringing them with great strokes of axes and long, double-edged swords. They seized riders and dragged them down into the dust and blood of the battlefield. There they strove against heavily mailed men; strove with hand-ax or dagger or bared snarling teeth. Bloody madness reined under a crown of sharpened steel and iron. The screaming of maimed horses was even more horrible to hear than that of butchered men. Clanging weapons were as the anvils of a thousand pounding smiths. Men were butchered and died, and horses, and men and men and men.

Syagrius leaped clear as his own horse crashed headlong. Its thrashing hooves brained a Frank who thought to take the Roman commander’s head. Syagrius’s sword, washed with blood and streaming blood, bit through the temple of a glaring savage and into his brain-pan. The fierce eyes glazed and the long-hafted ax fell.

Dismounted among his foes, his shield somehow lost in the fall, Syagrius accepted that he was a dead man. It did not seem to matter. Naught mattered, save taking as many of these barbarian swine as he could into the next world with him. He struck out ragingly. A sword broke on his blood-smeared cuirass and he opened the belly of the Frank responsible.

“My lord! My lord!”

The deep-throated yell announced the arrival of a score of horsemen. Their leader bashed out Frankish brains with his mace even as he shouted. His other hand gripped the rein of a riderless horse. Blinking, shaking sweat from his eyes, Syagrius recognized his aide, Bessas the Goth. Too, he saw that for this instant he stood alone. The battle had eddied around him, in one of those unpredictable and constant freaks of war. Seizing the saddle, he mounted.

Syagrius well knew that but for Bessas’s most timely arrival, he must have died. Yet there was no time to thank the Goth. Syagrius looked about him, and even his strong heart was chilled.

Death!

Nothing but death. Mangled forms and reeking gore.

How many survived, of his splendid cavalry? One man in four? One in five? the foot legions had moved forward in phalanx, and the Franks were breaking those formations, swarming about them, dragging and hacking men down without recking the cost. Even as Syagrius saw them and watched, the limatani faltered. In a moment more they were in full flight.

The Franks , Syagrius had said, can better us in one respect only: Numbers. He had forgotten their half-insane ferocity, or underestimated it. Who could believe this rage to slaughter, this willingness to die?

A Roman could. “God!” he said hoarsely. Then, to Bessas, “Help me rally the horsemen remaining. The Frankish losses have been terrible too. We can reach the city… hold it against them…”

Bessas shook his head. “We couldn’t hold the city now, sir. Let them have it! We can only go there and die. We can ride to the western districts and raise fresh levies. Sir.”

Syagrius blinked. “Aye,” he said slowly. “Aye! We’d no time to raise forces from those regions; the Franks moved too quickly-but now we will have. The barbarians will waste much time in… looting.” He ground his teeth at that thought. He had said it though; it was as good as done. He accepted. “The best man in those parts is that Bicrus, Comes over Nantes. With his backing I can raise all the country from Nantes to Orleans and march north again. Aye, Bessas! Naught will replace what we have lost here… but the Franks cannot replace their losses either, and they are frightful. Nor can they raise a new army, for the bloody barbarians are outside their own country!”

He did not add that they must move swiftly, ere the municipal counts in the north made formal submission to Clovis. He did not add that all hope now hinged on the strength and loyalty of Bicrus, whose example would be required to prevent the bickering counts of the west from doing likewise. Hope was slight enow without such words to dampen it the more. The Lord of Death reigned.

“To Nantes then, sir?”

“To Nantes,” Syagrius said, with a fire of decision that burned away his weariness even while his sword-arm commenced to tremble. “As swiftly as may be! Aye-and in Nantes there is a small errand to be accomplished apart from our main business, now I think on’t. I sent Sigebert of Metz there, to take up the post of chief customs assessor because I had my suspicions of him. Suspicions! Holy Savior! Now I see that he suborned the Franks in my army! That snake prepared them to desert to Clovis and Ragnachar! Need I tell you what is to be done with him when we find him, old friend?”

Bessas spat emphatically. “Nay sir. Ye have no need to tell me, sir.”

“Well horse-it’s Rome you carry now. Fly!”

By sunset, Syagrius and Bessas were riding for the Seine at the head of a grim band of three hundred men. Just over half of them led spare mounts. All were bone-weary from battle and carried such provisions as they had managed to snatch.

Miles behind them, swooping strutting ravens were glutted until they could only just hop. Staring eyeballs vanished down avian gullets in their thousands. Clovis and Ragnachar were utterly victorious. Yet of the twenty thousand men they had led south, barely eight thousand survived to march to the gates of Soissons.

The surface of the black glass mirror swirled smokily, then cleared to its normal vitreous sheen. Lucanor laid it flat on the table and sighed deeply. Sigebert, looking over his shoulder, had seen naught in that surface save the vaguest of moving shapes. They might well have been shadows of his own fancy. Yet they had aroused in him a strange unease.

Lucanor sighed again as he emerged from his far-seeing trance, and Sigebert barked “Well?” because he could restrain himself no longer.

“Victory,” the mage answered. “Utter victory for Frankdom. Syagrius met the host of Clovis and Ragnachar north of the city. His army inflicted fearful losses-and was itself all but annihilated.”

“Ahhh,” Sigebert breathed. Then, suspicously, he added, “But is it truly so? How may I know?”

“I have said so,” Lucanor was so injudicious as to say. “Believe it or not, as you please. I saw. Syagrius has survived the battle and escaped the field. He rides for Nantes at this moment, with some three hundred of his Gothic cavalry. They will camp in the open tonight, I daresay. Having fought a hard battle, so that most of them bear wounds, ’tis unlikely they can continue at their utmost speed. Nor is a Gothic war-horse the swiftest of beasts, especially when it carries a fully armoured man. Yet Syagrius will not waste time. ’Tis a journey of some-what?-two hundred and fifty Romish miles as the raven flies. More, by road. Methinks he cannot arrive in much less than seven days.”