Andrew Offutt - When Death Birds Fly

At Usconvets’s satirical tone Kuicho lapsed into a silence that compressed his lips. His stare remained baleful nonetheless, and it never left the stranger called Lucanor.

“Talk, then,” Usconvets said, again in Latin.

Lucanor eyed him calculatingly with that odd burning gaze. “Your race is ancient, sea-chieftain,” he said, so quietly. “The Vascones have been great sailors and builders of ships since the world began. Are you pleased with the way the world wags nowadays?”

“Bascones vivent, Roma fuit,” Usconvets said with wicked simplicity; “The Basques exist; Rome has perished.”

“You are bold.”

The pirate’s dark eyes narrowed to stare into those darker ones. “What then shall I complain of?”

Lucanor, mage of Antioch, made an expansive Oriental gesture that flapped the sleeve of his robe. “The Saxon sea-rovers, perchance? The Heruli? The Armorican corsairs? Even the men of Hivernia, who sometimes raid this far from home? Once it could be said, and truly, that the Cantabrian Sea belonged to the Vascones. Now every wave of it is contested by others.”

Usconvets laughed. “You mean that every wave flings up their drowned corpses on the strand! Others may dare the sea yonder, Lucanor; we, and only we, know it. The Cantabrian Sea belongs to us because we belong to it. My people will still be here when the Saxons, the Heruli and those others are a memory! ”

So softly Lucanor said, “What of the Suevi?”

Those he named were a Germanic tribe, like the stronger Vandals; they were Suebi to the Basques. They had come into Spain with the Vandals and had stayed behind when the Vandals under their ruthless, crafty king crossed the strait to Africa. Now the Suevi held the northwest of Hispania for their own, despite the Goths who raided the rest of the peninsula-except, of course, for the demesne of the Basques.

“What of them? We will be here long after they have gone, also! Besides, we are speaking of the sea. The Suebi do not fare asea. They are landsmen utterly.”

“Praemonitus, praemunitus,” Lucanor said. “Their king plans to make them a sea power.” The man’s sunken eyes flamed with a consuming hatred; Usconvets noted. “He has hired men to help him do so. The Vandals did as much, remember, under a strong king who knew what he was about! And in the end the Vandals sacked Rome. The Suevi are first cousins to the Vandals.”

Usconvets nodded slowly. “Forewarned,” he said, “is as you said forearmed. What men has he hired, this first among the Sueves?”

Shivering with the force of his enmity, Lucanor said, “Wulfhere Splitter of Skulls, and Cormac mac Art.”

“Ahh…”

Usconvets well knew those names. No man plying the pirate’s trade along the western shores of Gaul could fail to know them. The Suevic king’s plans had seemed laughable, at first. Now the firelight danced on Usconvets’s face to show its concern, and Lucanor noted.

“Were you to slay them,” the dark-faced mage said, “the matter would end aborning. I can aid you to do this thing.” His eyes were black. They pierced.

Tenil swore hotly. “My man, will you listen to this trouble-maker? He hates the Dane and the Hivernian, that’s clear, and would make you the tool of his spite. Could be no plainer! What be his squabbles to us?”

“Naught,” Usconvets said nodding, and shortly. “Naught in any way, woman. Yet an he speaks the truth in these other matters… aye, I will listen.”

“You are in error,” Kuicho warned him.

“By the Sun above me! I will decide that! Continue, stranger.”

Lucanor’s I have him! was a fleeting smirk. “These red swine are sailing from Brigantium, in quest of shipbuilders for King Veremund. They will find them. Unless… They will befoul these waters with their accursed presence within five days at most. Best it would be for yourself and all Vascones, sea-chieftain, did they never leave them. And is not Cormac mac Art’s race the ancient enemy of your own? The man is a Gael of Hivernia. Blood of Atlantis and Cimmeria runs in his body-”

“Not of Atlantis!” Kuicho snapped, bristling, betraying his understanding of Latin. “ We are the race of sunken Atlantis, we and no others.”

This Kuicho believed, for it was the tradition of his people. Lucanor knew better. The Basque race had its origin in the Pictish Isles west of Atlantis, in those ancient days before two awful cataclysms had changed the shape of the world. It did not astonish, that millenia of word-of-mouth repetition had confused the Pictish Isles with Atlantis itself.

“So you say,” the mage said sharply. “None the less, were Cimmerians and Picts as brothers in the long ago? Were the Gaels and Basques as brothers, here in Hispania? Is not the blood debt between them and you ancient, and heavy, and scarlet? The Danish Skull-splitter and Cormac mac Art are coming here, with one ship and scarce forty men! Slay them all, sea-chieftain, for the sake of what was and to prevent what may be!”

Lucanor stopped himself. Though he panted with passion, his cunning told him he had said enow. To harangue the pirate further would be to lose so proud and willful a man. He stood and watched, thinking hatred, while Usconvets considered the scheme without making reply.

Usconvets was tempted by the prospect of a good rousing fight, and who knew what rich plunder might be aboard the Raven of the Skullsplitter and mac Art? Besides, it was certainly true that he did not wish the Suevic kingdom to grow powerful asea. Yet-Tenil and Kuicho had much of right with them, too. Usconvets neither liked this stranger nor cared to be, used in his machinations.

“Now I will speak!” Kuicho cried. “I know you, Lucanor, you who worship the Black Gods of R’lyeh, accursed and banished since before there were men! I know also this man you speak of, aye who he is and who he was as well, this Cormac mac Art. I too have my powers, lackey of Cthulhu, and ways of knowing what other men cannot. In former lives he was friend to my people, this undying ka that is presently Cormac mac Art. In times to come he will be our friend again.”

Usconvets, like Lucanor, stared at his old companion Kuicho, and when he felt Tenil’s hand slip into his he was not loath to press it.

“Once he was King Kull of Valusia,” Kuicho was saying, his eyes seeming to flash like polished gems in the firelight. “Then his war-companion and blood-brother was Brule the Spear-slayer and his ally the chieftain Ka-nu. His ancestor in the body he now habits was Cormac, Prince of Connacht, ally in battle to Bran Mak Morn who was the last great king of the British Picts. I see; I know. Kull is Kormak the Kelt!”

For a moment later Kuicho stared at Lucanor, and then he rounded on Usconvets. “And this too I see! Follow the counsels of this man and he will lead you to disaster, Usconvets!”

The pirate was troubled, and showed it. “Well, you say one thing, old friend. This… Luke says another. You both claim powers common men do not have. Suppose you strive together? I shall be guided by the advice of the victor.”

Although he spoke it slowly, as a thought said aloud and a suggestion only, the savage laughter in his eyes belied that. Both Lucanor and Kuicho knew that refusing was not among their choices. Usconvets ruled, by being Usconvets. He amplified that fact by making a sweeping gesture that said it plain: Get ye at it, both!

Basque and Graeco-Roman faced each other; the tall lean man in the unkempt robe and the tall stringy one in nothing much; a stark figure of humankind with roots running back thousands of years-and full consciousness of those ties to past times and lives.

They faced each other in the firelight, and that swiftly it began.