Andrew Offutt: When Death Birds Fly

Below, Frankdom’s supporters had had their fill. Doggedly they retreated, still fighting and forming a semblance of ranks before the dead Count Bicrus’s manse. Seeing them drawn up thus, Cormac blinked incredulously. Be this all of them left alive?

Probably not. Many must have melted into the maze of streets, deserting. Few of those remaining still had shields. Those who had were placed in the forefront. Between them and the mailed horsemen was a grisly morass of dead or wounded. That and the short distance made a mounted charge impossible. The horse-soldiers began dismounting, to finish the night’s work afoot. Cormac noted that orders were given by a man in red-crested helm and tattered cloak of crimson.

“It’s Sygarius hisself that must be.”

“And a beautiful target he’d make were we against him,” Wulfhere rumbled, “asitting up there on his big horse with his fine helmet and cuirass! Our arrows would nail it to his backbone! Why stand we gaping? Shout and loose!”

The Danes laughed, and obeyed. Their bellowed “SYAGRIUSSS!” rolled over the square to bring heads around in bewilderment, just as two dozen arrows sang over the carpet of dead and dying. They thudded deep into the ranks of Frankish supporters. Six shafts actually drove through shields, to flesh themselves lightly in the men holding them. Others found throats, and brains and thighs.

Another flight, humming high-voiced, and another. Danish arrows slew Franks to aid Romans and Goths. Each volley was accompanied by a new roar of “SYAGRIUS!” The enemies of the defeated consul-king continued to go down; not spectacularly, collapsing in a mass, but with a nerve-wracking, inexorable steadiness.

Cormac was not comfortable watching easy butchery. “Knowledge is on him whose side we’re on, unless he be fool. Let’s be going down to announce ourselves.”

“What-by our true names?”

Cormac paused at that. “Hm! Best not, perhaps. We come from Bro Erech with a score to settle, with the One-ear. That is all Syagrius need know of his-allies.”

Wulfhere agreed and ordered his Danes to hold fast and continue pulling string until he called for them. He followed Cormac from the roof then, into the slaughter-reeking square. Franks were bawling for bows, and finding none, and going down. Two strangers emerged from the building whose roof rained feathered death.

They faced each other in the midst of the shambles, those men of war; the Roman commander with his tired face and battered, gore-crusted cuirass fitted to his torso, astride his wounded horse; the gigantic Dane with his great beard and ever-thirsty ax; the dark, sombre Gael in his shirt of black mail, treading over the slain in the light of a blazing city. Once Cormac slipped, in a puddle of sticky scarlet.

“ Meseems it’s to the Consul Syagrius I speak.”

“I am he. And yourselves?” Tired that voice-and still powerful.

“Our names mean naught,” Cormac said, lying mightily. “Mawl of Bro Erech I am, and this be Brogar, a Dane. It’s to settle a score with Sigebert One-ear we’ve come. He is hated by many.”

“I believe it,” Syagrius said drily. “Look there! They retreat!”

Unable to withstand a merciless arrow-storm that struck them down gradually and horribly efficiently yet could not be fought, the supporters of Frankdom withdrew through the gates into the late Count’s manse. The heavy gates slammed with a crash.

“Save your arrows!” Wulfhere roared to his men. “Come down here! This night’s work is to be finished hand to hand!”

While mounted men blinked at that Olympian voice, Cormac spoke to Syagrius: “Be Sigebert in there?”

The consul looked into that face with its incongruous grey eyes, and he recognized a man of his own kind; a man other men followed. Besides, Syagrius had reason to be grateful. Of his Goths, some six score survived. Within the manse and its ground waited Sigebert with fifty Franks and something like a hundred Gallo-Roman traitors. Two dozen such fighters as he now saw entering the bloody square might well turn the scale, especially as they seemed fresh. The giant called Brogar and the dark swordsman who gave his name as Mawl looked worth another dozen, by themselves alone.

Therefore Syagrius said, “The swine now calls himself Count of Nantes, from which I infer that Bicrus is dead. A very good man, Bicrus. As for me-I am here now partly because of Sigebert’s machinations. Ere he left Soissons he corrupted a part of my army. The result was that those men deserted me when my need was the sorest. That slimy bas- With Count Bicrus murdered,” Syagrius went on almost dully, “all hope of rallying now seems lost. I must flee into exile or die here in Gaul. But by the saints, I shall settle accounts with Sigebert of Metz first!”

“This boon I ask,” Cormac said. “Let us have him.”

“You ask much.” Syagrius frowned. “Still… were it not for your archers, I might have lost the fight in merely clearing yon gateway…”

“A good man,” Wulfhere said. “I’d never ha’ admitted that!”

With no change of expression or tone, the consul said, “Suppose we go in together, and agree that Sigebert belongs to him who lays hands on him first?”

Cormac mac Art never had to reply to that suggestion he liked not.

The black owl appeared.

Huge, malevolent and horrific, it dropped from the flame-lit sky. At its awful screech Syagrius’s war-horse reared. Not even its training could hold the beast steady in the face of such eldritch terror. The horse threw its rider and bolted. The consul fell heavily.

The black owl rushed down on him with another ear-splitting scream. Its wings were black brooms, thirty feet from tip to tip, that drove the summer air in gusts. Its eyes flamed yellow. Its beak was stretched wide for cracking bones while its feet flexed like twin arrays of metal hooks. Other war-horses scattered in blind fear before it.

Cormac’s sword was in his hand without his conscious thought. He slashed at the monster-and felt gooseflesh when his sword passed through its body to no effect. It glared, gathered sinewy legs beneath it, and made a hopping spring at the Gael. He went down beneath it.

“Ah no,” Wulfhere, groaned, “not the claws-not him too!”

For Cormac all was suddenly darkness, fetor and unnatural cold . The vast black wings were a buffeting storm about him. Talons fastened in his thighs with eightfold stabs of agony. The beak darted at his face.

Cormac’s hands leaped up. He seized death’s’ own throat, as Wulfhere had done on Midsummer’s Eve. Like Wulfhere, he found nothing tangible to grasp. Black feathers. Numbing, weakening chill. Neither flesh nor bone resisted his grip to make it effective. The pain of its talons left him not even breath to cry out.

They rolled and thrashed amid the rubble of war, man and monster, and only one was in pain, awful pain. Cormac’s free hand stabbed and slashed with his sword-uselessly. That cruel gape of a beak came closer.

Advice flashed into Cormac’s mind as he knew he was to die; advice from Zarabdas and later from Morfydd.

Against every instinct of the weapon-man, he let fall his sword.

Fumbling beneath his mail, barking his knuckles, he tore the Egyptian sigil from his neck. In his haste he broke the chain, whose links cut sharply into his skin ere they parted. Cormac never noticed. He thrust the emblem of the winged serpent, of the Sun, into the black owl’s face. And the monster fell back. In that heartbeat of time, Cormac attacked.

His hands gripped the broken ends of the chain as it had been a strangler’s knotted rope. He twisted the pendant hard about the black owl’s neck. It was inspired, that move: for the first time there seemed to be resistance; solid purchase to his grip. Was as if the old amulet had lent substance to the creature. As if? Like it or no, the Gael knew that was precisely what was happening.