Andrew Offutt - When Death Birds Fly

Lithe this man Usconvets was, with his fine musculature well displayed: for he wore only a leather kilt. With his dark skin, lean, straight-featured face and black eyes, Usconvets quite resembled a former king of the British Picts named Bran Mak Morn, who had lived some two hundred and eighty years before. Usconvets did not know of that likeness. He would never know it, and had he known would have deemed it a matter for no particular interest or comment. The Basques had never at any time chosen a king or suffered one, or divided themselves into commoners and aristocrats. Nor had another people ever succeeded in imposing a king on the Basques. The Roman Empire had tried, and failed, and the Gothic Empire after it.

Neither had the Picts of far-off Britain bowed to Rome. Their racial kinship with the Basques was recognizable now only in the lines of the Pictish chiefs. Their followers amid the Caledonian heather had otherwise become a grotesque, distorted image of the race that produced them. Of this Usconvets did know, though only by rumour and hearsay.

Such matters were of minimal interest to him. Usconvets the pirate was interested in his immediate people; Usconvets was interested in Usconvets.

Now he bit deeply into succulent whale steak. Its juices flowed down his throat to strengthen him. Immediately his stomach cried out for more. Usconvets was a hungry man. He had earned this eating. Had been his spear that slew the whale, far out on the blue sea. The village would feast on this catch for days!

Watching his black-haired rovers disport themselves, he grinned. Some, paired with girls of the fishing village, danced with all the violent energy of the flames that limned them black and gold. Others had gone from the firelight with chosen partners. Yet others ate and drank, talked and sang with the high exuberant animation of their race.

“Usconvets.”

He looked at Tenil, daughter of the village headman-the “first among equals” in the phrasing of the thrice-proud Basques. Usconvets had married her a year agone, and so far as he was concerned she had no equal. Just now his strapping woman Tenil sweated profusely from the heat of the rendering kettles, and she smelled of the whale oil, and the pirate leader wanted to pull her down beside him and embrace her here and now. Overwhelmed by sight and smell of her and unaccustomed to resisting whims, he did so.

“Wait! Trouble!” Tenil gasped, fending him off. Such was not her wont at all, and Usconvets frowned his surprise. “Hear me, Usconvets… there is trouble abrewing. Kuicho thinks the same. We have been talking-see, there he comes.”

Aye, there Kuicho came. Usconvets’s hands remained where they were on his woman, one clutching, but the fingers ceased moving. Trouble? He watched Kuicho without enthusiasm. Taller the man was than the pirate by a little, and far thinner, and so much older that Kuicho’s hair and beard had no right to remain so black. He stood straight as a wand. Strange were his eyes; he looked into distances that had naught to do with mundane horizons. He could read omens in the wind, Kuicho could, and in the flight of birds and the crash of surf, and he could foretell the weather. The pirate leader had learned to listen to this far-seer who had sailed with him for years.

“Tenil speaks of trouble,” Usconvets said, releasing his woman with a reluctance he showed by keeping a dark hand on her thigh.

“Worse than trouble,” the older man told him darkly. He hunkered down and bent his head close. “It is evil blacker than the secret pits of the sea. A stranger is here in the village; a Roman.”

Usconvets felt lazy with food and drink and preferred to remain so. Besides, he wanted Tenil in his arms again. Carelessly he said, “Even Romans are not that bad, Kuicho. They are no longer so much trouble! Why did the people suffer him to stay on?”

“Suffer him to-” Tenil clenched formidable fists in bitter fury. “My brothers strove to drive him away with sticks. When he stared at them and spoke to them, they stumbled and fell down and could not get up-like babes learning to walk! He bade them keep their distance else he do worse.”

“He has our tongue?”

“Latin only, I think,” Tenil said, looking uneasy. “His meaning was plain without a shared language. Still, you have Latin and it is you he wishes to speak with. He said your name.”

“Orko!” the pirate swore, springing to his feet. “All this-and from the time we landed, not a word to me? Not even from you?”

“None dared say! You arrived in such jubilation! I came to tell you, just now.”

“None dared say because your brothers tripped over their own feet! Where is this… terrifying stranger? ”

“In yonder hut, alone,” Kuicho said somberly, and he pointed with a bony arm. “I am told he has abode there for two days, neither eating nor drinking. Such has the sound of a sorcerer’s fast. Those who dared approach the hut turned back pale and shuddering ere they reached it. I know something of such things, and I tell you that they were wise. Already the place smells of darkness and the abyss, and him here so brief a time.”

“It is only a hut,” Usconvets growled.

Yet he rubbed his lean jaw reflectively and stared about at the fisher-folk with new eyes. Of a sudden it seemed to him that their revels were too intense, as if they would deny a brooding fear that haunted them all. Darkness and the abyss, was it-and the demon-prowled pits of the sea!

“He would speak with me? Then he shall, and he’ll not enjoy it! By Orko,” the pirate swore, invoking for the second time his Basque thunder god, for even his ship was named Odots: thunder. “I’ll drag him forth by the heels!”

Tenil’s hand closed hard on his arm and he felt the bite of the ring she wore; he’d taken it off an imperial ship two years agone. At feel of the harsh tension in her body he stared at her, astonished. She was not looking at him. She stared at something else, away on his left. Something tickled at Usconvets’s armpits as he turned his head in that direction and, for some reason he could not name, he felt cold.

A man stood at the edge of the leaping firelight.

This was the dread Stranger who invoked such fear and low-voiced talk?

He did not look so awesome. Once magnificent, his body-enveloping green robe was filthy from hard travel and neglect. Too, it fitted less well than once. The man had lost flesh in his journeying. Nor had two days’ complete fasting helped him regain it. Nor was he tall. All this Usconvets saw at once, and that the fellow’s greasy black hair and beard had become as unkempt as the rest of him in his days of hard traveling.

Hmp. Had he any noteworthy feature at all, it was the black eyes that smouldered above a nose like a blade. Rara avis in terris!

“Who are you?” the pirate demanded, in Latin. “What do you here?”

“Nomen mea Lucanorem est,” the stranger said in a quiet voice: “My name is Lucanor. I seek the sea-chieftain Usconvets.”

“Behold him! Mine this village is! A woman of it I have married. Trouble here you have caused, and you not of my people.”

“Not so, chieftain. I protest that I have done no harm, and none I intend. Naught have I taken, beyond space to rest. I have not eaten of your food, though I had power to demand it. Now only to talk I wish.”

Kuicho muttered in his own language that the man was an unctuous liar. Usconvets motioned the tall man to silence. Kuicho would not heed: “He has not eaten because he is about some sorcery or divination that required fast!” he blurted in Eskuara, the language of the Basques; Kuicho, who affected to have no Latin. “I tell you, this man brings evil!”

Usconvets grinned, for he was a pirate and long since had trained himself to show only confidence, or rage. “Then best he should not see us quarrel! Fret yourself not, friend. I am about to listen to him, not grant his every whim. Surely there is about him no appearance of a man of great power.”