Andrew Offutt: When Death Birds Fly

“Yes.”

“Sigebert!” Cormac said it as if it were a curse. “Are there no bounds to the destruction that evil dog has wrought?”

“He is dead,” Morfydd said. Was not a question, the way she uttered it.

Cormac nodded. “I and Wulfhere and this man saw to that, in Nantes. Ye have knowledge of this?”

“In essence, as I know who it is you ride with. Cathula failed then, poor child… she did what she did to no purpose, and gave all she had.”

“I cannot say,” Cormac said thoughtfully. Sigebert One-ear’s last shrieked words came ominously back to him. “It’s in my mind that she just may not have failed, Morfydd. If so, he suffers… forever.”

The hounds!-aahhhh, mercy, no, no, the hounds, the hounds…

The seeress replaced the cloak over Cathula’s body. “Tell me of it ere you do depart for Danemark, an you will, Cormac. For now, there is naught here to delay you. I will see Cathula fittingly buried, and give her soul such repose as I can. I’ll follow in your tracks when that is done.”

Cormac only nodded. Solemn and silent as a funeral cortege, they passed by, one hundred men and five. The deposed Roman king and the outlawed Gaelic descendant of kings led them. Their hooves drummed a slow dust-muffled tattoo that was as a dirge on the ancient road. They vanished slowly, into the green distances of the forest. Morfydd gazed at the litter with its covered burden.

“A short life, and cruelly wasted,” she murmured, “and a terrible end thereto. The gods do not care, little Cathula. I tried to warn you. Now, you must go as you came, a shadeflower fast fading and soon forgotten.”

She lifted her head. The strange, far-seeing eyes azed after the riders.

“And what of you? The living, and the dead? Cormac, Wulfhere, Syagrius, Bicrus, Sigebert? When the stars have turned but a little way farther in the sky, who will remember you? Or the names of the kingdoms you strove for?”

The echoes of a hunting horn jewelled with black stars seemed still to ring through the glades of Broceliande.