Andrew Offutt: When Death Birds Fly

Veremund grinned, all strain off him. “By all means, Captain Wulfhere, go and join them,” he said, doubtless thinking of the woman who was his own new interest.

“As for me,” Zarabdas said, “I have studies to pursue.”

Irnic Break-ax advised that he had promised himself a night-long drinking bout with the comites of his cousin’s bodyguard, and asked Cormac if he would like to join them. The dark Gael shook his head.

“Perchance later. With thanks, Irnic.”

He departed conference chamber and Kinghouse, and took his thoughts and seat-stiffened limbs for a walk. He strolled through the nighted streets of Brigantium. A tall man, leanly muscled and powerful, moving lightly in his black, gold-bordered tunic. He was accustomed to the weight of link-mail over leather, but now, although he had sworn no oath of allegiance, he had become a king’s man and enjoyed a king’s favour. Such made a difference.

Even so, the scabbarded sword at his side thwacked his leg with each pace, and a long double-edged dirk was sheathed at his other hip. The habits of his violent outlaw life had begun firming of necessity when he was but fourteen. Mac Art was more comfortable armed.

Men looked at him strangely as he passed. Native Hispano-Romans with curly dark hair they were, for the most part considerably smaller than he. He was swift and deceptively powerful for one so rangy, as some of these knew. He was not much more like their Suevic overlords than he was like unto them. Many were but squatters in dilapidated houses, with little to do but loaf and stare. Only a tiny part of the legacy of Rome: detritus. The Roman-built city’s population had declined since the great days of Empire.

Was not natural for mac Art to move unpurposefully through a darkened city without being approached by women, but so it was in Brigantium. He did receive a couple of smiles that might have been tentative invitations. He walked on.

Cormac came to the waterfront district, which was in even poorer state than the rest of the city. Hardly a craft save fishing boats was moored at the long white docks. Uncrowded and unmanned, the boats looked lonely, stark. Seawater slapped on stone with a melancholy sound, as if lamenting Brigantium’s past busy importance. The one Gael of Eirrin in all the land smelled the open sea, and longed to be under weigh.

Cormac knew well the reason for the harbour’s lack of activity.

Of late months the sea had become a source of dread and eerie terror, round about Galicia’s coasts. Ships had been destroyed by a nameless agency, and on nights otherwise gentle. Men’s lives had been smothered out in the old Roman lighthouse tower where they tended Brigantium’s fiery beacon. For long and long none knew what unnatural force slew them. Wreckers had been at work-but of no natural kind, nor with natural powers, nor from natural motives.

To this coast had Cormac and Wulfhere sailed, accomplishing the nigh impossible, and they had known none of the horror haunting their destination. Behind them they left treachery and blood and marine-loaded warships bent on their doom. And they had almost fallen the wreckers’ victims when they approached Galicia in their long ship Raven , storm-driven and weary.

The Gael’s grey eyes shifted within their slitted dens. Now the beacon-light burned bright and safely in the many-tiered tower that reared up immense at the harbour entrance. Cormac smiled his bleak, unhandsome smile at memory of the day he had first seen that structure, and at what he’d found therein. A tower of death it was then, and he had entered and ascended to discover the smothered, blood-drained corpses of men with horror in their glassy eyes. He recalled his first meeting with Veremund the Tall, King of the Suevi, and the pact they’d made between them. For sanctuary and reward of silver, Cormac and Wulfhere agreed to rid Brigantium of the mysterious horror that haunted it.

Ultimately that had cost Danish lives, and it had cost Galicia one of its physicians, and the king his own wife.

Cormac stared at the tower and remembered that desperate night when he’d abode there, awaiting that which came. Masses of moving, crawling kelp, either sentient or sent, came rustling and dripping up out of the dark sea. It climbed the tower like phantasmal ivy, with a thousand thousand tendrils and a thousand thousand leech-like mouths for the drinking of the blood of men.

Only Cormac’s foresight, and the firewood and quicklime he had stored in the tower by day, allowed him and his companions to withstand the soulless onslaught. Had been a hideously near thing, even so.

Then had the Gael discovered the source and nature of the attacks. With his eyes he had seen the ancient, plague-evil minions of R’lyeh’s black gods, horrors of another age and long dormant-or so it had been thought. He’d heard their hissing, croaking voices, and had fought them hand to hand. Worst of all, he had discovered the hidden sect of humans and semi-humans that worshiped those ancient challengers of humankind, led by the king’s own physician… and his ensorcelled queen.

Even the strife-scarred brain of Cormac mac Art preferred not to remember how that had ended.

Still, it had ended. The wide sea rolled quietly, holding naught now save its own normal dangers. They were entirely enough. Lucanor the physician, revealed as Lucanor the mage, Lucanor the traitor to more than his king-to his own humanity-had escaped with his life.

Doubtless fled the kingdom , the Gael mused. Only the dark man-hating gods he worships know where that Romano-Greek dog cowers now!

Cormac gave his head a jerk to clear it of what had been. He was not the sort of man to dwell in the past; were he so, he could not bear the memories of all his ugly yesterdays. The physical act and resolve changed his mood; the desire for solitude dropped from him like a funerary cloak.

He wheeled from the hissing, slapping plain of the sea. Surely Irnic and the comites would be deep in merry carouse by now! The Gael turned his steps again toward the king’s hall and strove to forbid himself to think.

As he approached a stand of dark, pointed trees that sighed like surf in the night breeze, someone appeared. Muffled in a long, long cloak, someone stepped from between two pines, and beckoned him. Cormac’s hand slid across his middle to the sword-hilt on his left hip while his slitted eyes warily searched the deeper shade behind the cloaked figure. Once already had men attempted to do murder on him in this land.

Then he recognized the stance, the way of moving, the poise of that small exquisite head. He spotted the glitter of jewels in high-piled hair. He knew Eurica, the king’s younger sister. Cormac’s teeth snapped together, biting into silence the curse that sprang to his lips. Though she was of age and technically a woman at fifteen or sixteen, Eurica had led a protected life and was very, very young-as Cormac had been an eerily older man, in terms of maturity, at that same age.

Clenched teeth ground. The princess was enamoured of him, or the glamour of him-or had been. How she felt now he neither knew nor over-much cared. Once she had come to his room at night. He had got her out of there posthaste. To him she was most attractive, aye-and a child, and… simply a blistering nuisance. And a danger to his life greater than any armed foe. Cormac had had it to the eye teeth with the daughters of kings. And Princess Eurica here… alone with him at night… even good men had been slain for less.

He greeted her civilly. That much circumstances forced him to do.

“Only in harpers’ tales do kings’ sisters walk out unattended, my lady, and with the most recognizable head in the land displayed. Who be watching over yourself, and from where?”