Andrew Offutt: The Tower of Death

Sigebert’s gaze kept roving to her whilst he considered. He obviously enjoyed the outward signs of her fear.

He made up his mind.

“No. Wealth and happiness? They are more to be hoped for from my lord the king than a pair of foreign reivers. Take them! ”

Like fierce hounds unleashed, the soldiers bayed forward.

Wulfhere’s ax sprang aloft, light as a withe in a child’s hands. The foremost Frank hurtled back again, breast caved in, a scarlet ruin of a man. He fouled the legs of two of his mates. As one stumbled, he felt the cold sliding intrusion of Cormac’s point in his throat. A short Frankish ax banged on the Gael’s helmet, turning his head. Fuzzy lights crossed Cormac’s vision. On a born sworder’s instinct, and all the training and experience that had been his portion since, he struck backhanded.

A drawing stroke with the edge it was, and it opened his assailant’s side through leather and flesh to the spine. Entrails bulged out like a host of escaping snakes, and steel grated on bone.

Clodia seized the moment’s opportunity to hide the Egyptian sigil in her hospitable bosom.

Her father, less greedy or less calm in emergency, thought he saw an opening and barged for the doorway. The flat of a Frankish ax clouted him negligently on the side of the head, impelled him through the frame and dropped him senseless a pace or two beyond it.

And Wulfhere killed another man, and Black Thorfinn the second that had fallen before him.

Cormac twisted lithely aside from a hurtling ax-edge, dropped to one knee beneath a second, and drove the point he favoured over the edge under a leather tunic and deep into a Frankish groin. The man made a high whistling shriek like a snared rabbit, and folded double on his way to the encrimsoned floor. Wulfhere’s ax clanged and crashed, and there was company for Nestor’s severed head.

In bare moments, Sigebert had been left with three men standing. The smile had vanished from his mouth to be succeeded by something like horror. He drew his sword from its gilded sheath.

Black Thorfinn met his weird then. With a raucous battle-cry in his teeth, he cut at Sigebert. A soldier interposed his buckler. Thorfinn’s sword shrieked along the rim; his point, by a freak of chance, snagged the corner of Sigebert’s mouth and ripped upward through his cheek, to slice the ear from his head on that side.

The same soldier swung his ax. It split the scale byrnie to chop through Thorfinn’s ribs and open his lung.

The Frankish lordling staggered, but did not fall. Red howling agony filled his head. He saw the man who had hurt him. By naked instinct, he thrust home.

Thorfinn, stricken already, his armour gaping, had half a foot of steel rammed through his navel. The irony was that never but in pain-maddened frenzy would Sigebert have used a thrust at all. Swordplay was entirely with the edge, and of all men only Cormac mac Art seemed to appreciate what the point could do; the Gael used it deliberately and constantly. He had learned the art’s efficacy long ago in Eirrin, of a fine weapon-man. A dead man, one of too many dead bloodying the Gael’s life-wake.

Thorfinn fell, gasping. Sigebert stumbled through the door and half-toppled downstairs, screaming for the men who surrounded the place. The three remaining soldiers retreated as far as the head of the stairs, dragging the inert Balsus with them.

Cormac slammed the door and dropped its bar. “Out of this!” he grunted.

“But my father!”

“Stay here, then.”

Clodia chose not to do that. She wrenched open the door on the room’s far side, and the reivers followed her out. They left a bloody shambles behind them, as often they’d done afore, the lamplight shining on gore and cloven metal. Then the door closed after them.

The trio stood in a musty darkness in the main part of the warehouse, on a crude railed gallery that ran about it on three sides. The floor below was stacked with ship’s goods: barrels, bales and bundles; canvas and thin dressed leather for sails and pitch for caulking; oil and candles and salt meat, rope and cord and twine. And concealed among it all, as leaves in a forest, such trade items as were never bought for sailors. They would be found and confiscated for certain, but there was no time to resent that.

At the warehouse’s far end were strong double doors-with more Franks waiting hard by them, the blaze-eyed Cormac guessed.

Within reach though was rope in plenty, and Wulfhere’s ax knocked a hole in the roof with a couple of careless blows. He boosted Clodia through it first, as she was the lightest. Cormac followed, mounting on the Dane’s vast shoulders. The while Wulfhere made scathing remarks about his weight, his clumsiness and the unclean state of his feet, so offensively near his captain’s nose.

Cormac vanished nimbly through the hole, braced his feet on the beam Wulfhere’s ax had exposed, and lowered the rope.

Like the beam itself and Cormac’s steely muscles, it creaked as the Danish giant climbed out of the warehouse. Mother-naked and bone dry, Wulfhere weighed nigh two and three-quarters hundred pounds. In full war-gear he went far over three hundred, and it was not just anyone, any body, who could play his anchor-man.

As he had come up last, he went down first.

Cormac gripped Clodia, growled, “Wulfhere! Catch! ” and tossed her unceremoniously from the roof. She squeaked, biting off her scream.

The young woman was solidly made, and her impact in Wulfhere’s arms from such a height drove even him to his knees. He let her slip to the ground, giving her a pinch for luck.

Cormac knelt for a brief space on the roof, listening from that vantage to the noises borne on the night air.

Sigebert was shrieking his wrath and pain yet, somewhere at the front of the building. The citizens of Nantes were raising a racket in the background, while soldiers in the warehouse came blundering after their lawful prey. Cormac wished fiercely there’d been time to fire it about their ears. With a jerk of his head, he slid down the rope.

Aground, he sliced the rope through with his sword as far above his head as he could reach. Mayhap the Franks would miss seeing it now-at any rate, the first time they passed the spot. And if they missed it then, it was like they would obliterate their quarry’s tracks in the mud with their own trampling feet.

The three legged it.

The dark twisting alleys of the Nantes waterfront were as well known to all the trio as Raven’s deck to Cormac and Wulfhere. To the eastern Franks, they were an unknown maze.

“Now, girl, we part,” Cormac said. “By the great Lord of the Mound, we got ye clear of yon trap, but we’ve not adopted ye! Go your way.”

She gulped. “I dare not. You s-saw what manner of man is that Sigebert. He’d have used me; now he will torture me besides.”

“Then do not be letting him catch ye. There’s all the world open to ye.”

“Not for a woman alone. The Devil, Cormac! I’ve nowhere to go. ”

“Aye, Wolf,” put in Wulfhere. “The lass has the right of it.”

Cormac swore savagely. “The soft-headed great gomeral ye are! So then; come with us, girl, if ye can be matching our pace. But it will tax yourself. Blood of the gods!”

He spoke not another word till they reached the ship, and few then. A black Gaelic melancholy akin to madness was upon him, with its immediate cause in the loss of the boatload of plunder, the richest they had taken yet.

But the loot, as loot, meant little.

What it had symbolized to Cormac, he was hardly aware himself. He was exile, outlaw and pirate, and these dark facts had the casual treachery of kings for their direct cause. It was not strange that they had marked him. Lacking any home but Raven’s deck, or any safety but that to be found in his weapon-arm and his companions’, he lived for the day each day, trying to forget the past and with no confidence at all in his future.