Andrew Offutt: When Death Birds Fly

“Cormac,” Karlsevni Ratnose gasped, “your clever ideas will slay us all yet.”

Cormac clapped him on the shoulder. “Come, man, it’s a fine long restful drive ye’ve had, when ye might have had to walk! Cease leaning upon the wheel and making mouths like a speared fish. We’ve work to do.”

’ Heavy wicker hampers were unloaded, and carried into the deserted house. Meanwhile the ox-drivers pitched all the camouflaging wool into one cart, making one full load of it. The full cart then rumbled away to market, the two empty ones to an inn-yard. Two dozen northrons licked their lips at the thought of that latter destination.

The wicker chests contained their war-gear and they busked themselves swiftly. Out of the question to wear it while they rode in the ox-carts, hidden under wool! So much metal, leather and padding would have killed them with heatstroke. They had suffered enow in their tunics!

The hampers contained goatskins of water, also. The stuff was warm. The Danes drank it eagerly, none the less. They had a deal of lost sweat to make good.

“Ah, for some ale!” mourned Knud the Swift.

“Be cheerful,” Makki Grey-gull consoled him. “Belike ye’ll be drinking Valhalla’s mead by next sunrise.”

Wulfhere looked ghastly, and not because of his suffocating ride in the cart. His broad face had the semblance of a hollow-eyed, red-bearded skull. Was all Cormac could do to hold his own features impassive as he glanced at his friend.

“Word seems out concerning the Frankish conquest, and truly,” he remarked, chiefly for something to say. “The countryside is in a ferment! Saw ye the smoke upon the horizon? That cannot be Frankish troops, marauding here so soon. A sign of some peasantish revolt, I’m thinking, inspired by panic. It’s placid enow they seem, closer to the city. It wonders me how long that will last.”

Wulfhere shrugged. “No knowing.”

“An they’ve sense on them, the country folk on the great estates will support their masters to the hilt, for once. A Frankish war-host on the march be like a plague of locusts for stripping the country. Remember ye that one small war-band we had to hunt down in Frisia, a couple of years past? They left a trail like to that of a thousand berserkers!”

“Aye.”

Cormac heard himself talking too much, especially by contrast with Wulfhere’s taciturn replies. He forced himself to shut up. Morfydd had said that a possible remedy for his giant friend’s decline lay in the death of Lucanor Antiochus, had she not? Then death should be Lucanor’s portion, were he guarded by all the legions of Rome!

Wulfhere spoke, wearily. “It’s a fool’s errand, this, Cormac. Ye and the lads ought not be here. I’m thinking my weird is upon me, and I were best to meet it without dragging friends into Hel’s cold arms.”

Cormac snorted. “Ye may be dying, for all I know. When ye begin talking thin-blooded caution and resignation, then it’s far wrong something is! Yet as a matter of simple pride, ye ought to resent dying at the hands of such a verminous thing as Lucanor!”

“Lucanor will be waiting for us, prepared.”

“It’s not Lucanor who gives the orders in this partnership he’s after forming, Wulf. To that I’ll take oath. It’s Sigebert who’s master, and it’s much else Sigebert has to think on. I’ll answer for it, yon two-legged serpent be fuller informed of the war than we, or indeed any man on Gaul’s western shore. It’s little foresight he’ll be having to spare for Wulfhere and Art’s son Cormac. Nor will Sigebert be foreseein’ that we’d dare attack him again, in Nantes itself!”

Wulfhere sighed gustily. “It may be. I know not.”

Cormac shook his head. A different Wulfhere, this one, indeed!

Neither of them knew what Lucanor had once said to his Frankish master; that Wulfhere would lie dead of the black owl’s talons within five months at the longest. They knew not of his other boast that, for all his great strength, Wulfhere must become incapable of fighting or other great exertion in forty or fifty days. Such had been Lucanor’s estimate, and thrice a dozen days had since passed.

Wulfhere’s little war-band hid in the empty house while the hours passed. Immediately after sunset they’d set forth, to move by devious ways on Sigebert’s mansion. There, if no better opportunity offered, they would scale his walls and make a frontal assault.

Ere resorting to aught so desperate, though, Cormac meant to capture one of Sigebert’s guards. He’d force the Frankish hog to say whether Sigebert and Lucanor were actually within the manse.

An they were not, it would become necessary to learn where they were. Cormac thought it bade fair to be a tricky, demanding night, with poor prospect of success and a likely one of death for them all… and it never entered his head to complain or reconsider.

Nor anybody else’s. This was for Wulfhere; dying Wulfhere.

The clamor began well before sunset. The sharp ears of Knud caught it first. Cormac confirmed the Swift One.

“By the light of Behl-there’s a riot somewhere!” The Gael grinned maliciously. “All the better. This cursed city cannot hold too much confusion for me, this night!”

All gave listen intently to the uproar, which was in a distant quarter of Nantes. Shouting and babble, with noises of breaking, merged into an undifferentiated hubbub. Screams of starkest agony rose briefly above the background. Cormac grimaced.

“A religious rampage,” he guessed. “Some poor fools are being ripped apart for not believing as their neighbours do! Such haps all the time among these believers in the gospel of peace and love. Mayhap it will even spread city-wide, ere it ceases or the Count’s men put it down. Time to string your bows.”

In silence, it was done. Cormac did not consider the bow a true weapon-man’s weapon, despite its usefulness. Still a mob of howling religious fanatics ranked in his estimation more as vermin than men. More than once he had seen what they could do to “heathens” and “heretics.” He’d no intention of wasting high-minded scruples on such creatures.

“Cormac,” Wulfhere said in a voice like a groan, “yon be no mere gutter mob! Hearken-there! Was the clash of weapon-steel, or I’ve never heard it.”

Cormac listened briefly. “Aye… Right ye be, old sea-dragon, and there’s the neighing of a big horse, too. Meseems it came from the direction of the gate we entered in the forenoon? Those other sounds be more toward the heart of the city. I wonder me, now…”

“What do you wonder?”

“Little of use. For the present let us wait, and see what befalls.”

The uproar continued. Once it almost died away. Once they heard unmistakably the clop-clop of numerous hooves, the creak and jingle of horse-harness amid the chiming of the war harness of men. This rattle and clop passed along Nantes’s broader and better-paved streets. There followed the ragged tramp of inexperienced men trying to march together-many men, although how many was impossible to guess.

Whoever they were, they shortly ran into fierce opposition. The racket of real combat echoed between walls: war-cries, death-yells, striving and slaying. By this time Cormac and two others had climbed to the roof of their hideaway. That vantage showed them a leaping red glow beneath a pall of smoke in the southern part of the city, near the waterfront. Westward, a flaming sunset blinded their eyes. From that quarter came clearly on the wind the sounds of rioting. Ugly it was, and beastlike. The more purposeful violence of fighting men, soldiers, now seemed concentrated toward the center, where the public buildings rose hard by the market square. Wherever they looked, the city was in chaos.