Andrew Offutt - The Tower of Death

Yet the Gael of Eirrin was young. Cormac mac Art had less years on him then his looks made credible. Younger he was than he had let even Wulfhere know, or than the mighty Dane would have believed. In outward seeming he had become more Spartan than Celt, though his race’s fanciful, extravagant temper had not quite been ground out of his soul.

He was not beyond dreaming of a return to Eirrin in wealth and power, to claim one unforgotten girl whose face still troubled his sleep.

(Years had passed. She was girl no longer, but woman, and married woman, he was painfully certain.)

Nor had wealth or power come his way on the reiver’s path. He’d scars and red memories and a reputation to show for it, naught more. The haul at Garonne-mouth had been the richest ever to fall into his hands, and now, like others, it had slipped from between them. Not in itself, but as a foundation to build on, that booty might have made him at last able to buy justice at home-and that justice in this world usually had to be bought, Cormac knew well.

He ground his teeth in a fury of frustration as he fled through the Gaulish night. The womanish presence was distinctly unwelcome, merely a further burden.

Clodia kept pace with them. They were fighting men in their heavy battle-gear, and she unburdened. They had come through a long wearing day; she was fresh. These helped lessen the men’s advantage of longer legs and harder condition, and above all she matched their pace because she dared not do otherwise.

The young woman ran, with skirt lifted about her thighs, its ends tucked through her girdle. Pale legs flashed. She ran through streets and convoluted lanes, swam an inlet the men were tall enow to wade (and in their iron, were constrained to) and then plunged further through mud and reeds.

Clodia reached the ship staggering; her breath had the sound of tearing cloth.

Behind them wavered a line of torches, and hounds were baying.

“Get under weigh!” Wulfhere commanded. “By the shields of Asgard, we have half Nantes breathing up our backsides! We stepped into a trap, companions, and someone will pay for it. But do we bide here, the paying will be done by us!”

Cormac heaved himself over the thwarts, streaming water. Clodia, wading out, stepped in a sink-hole and screamed.

“ Help mee! Abandon me here and you murder me!”

An oar pivoted her way. She seized the blade, and felt her legs pull free of the sucking mud. Cormac, his black mood increasing if such were possible, stood impassive. Wulfhere turned from giving orders, showed his teeth in something not a smile, and raised a hand with the fingers tensely clawed.

His meaning: Thor strike you, shut her up!

With a curse, Cormac leaned far out and grabbed Clodia’s skirt. It was the nearest thing to his hand, its ends having come loose from her girdle, and she having got one knee precariously over the oar.

He dragged her, sliding, along the oar-shaft. She stuck briefly, and then tumbled aboard with her sodden skirt ripping up the seam. Her legs were stockinged up to the thighs in slate-coloured, ill-smelling mire.

Clodia looked about as erotically fetching as a halfdrowned kitten, and her language withered the reeds for thirty paces around.

Raven’s square sail rose on its long yard, to fill with the land-breeze. She began to move. The line of torches dropped away astern.

Cormac watched the bright smears fade in the night almost with regret, for he’d have relished further fighting in that moment. It would have been more enjoyable than thinking, for what had he to think upon that was good?

The grey pallor of false dawn was showing when Raven cleared the Loire’s mouth. Clodia huddled as small as possible. She was among cut-throats and slayers who might do as they pleased to her, with only their leader’s word to restrain them. Most Viking captains would give her to their men, and afterwards to the sea. She did not look for that from Wulfhere, yet neither did she suppose he’d pamper her.

It’s slavery in a foreign land for you, girl , she told herself grimly. Yet it was preferable to what would happen to her father. She sniffed-and looked thoughtfully at the Gael.

“ Warships! ” someone howled.

It was naught but the truth. Out of the half dark came the shapes of two Roman galleys, with war-men tough as the Visigothic marines, and better disciplined, on their decks. Jolted out of his bleak introversion, Cormac stared while his thoughts took urgent form, like layers of pearl, around the word again!

Planned , he thought, all planned , and the vow of blood-vengeance formed in the back of his mind. For now…

They could not fight and win.

Southward down the coast lurked aroused, alert and blood-hungry enemies.

Westward along Lesser Britain’s shores, they would inevitably be run down when dawn appeared. Nor was dawn far off.

“Cormac?” Wulfhere said tranquilly. “Methinks they truly have us this time. We will taste mead and ale in Valhalla this day; or do we fare to Helheim, we’ll go there escorted with due honour. Not even you can trick us out of this.”

“Had we time, I’d bind ye to a wager! Southwest is our way, sea-wolves! Cut across the open water, and if they dare follow they are not Romans, but seamen! Be ye with me?”

Jaws dropped and crewmen muttered. Some raised cries of protest.

Better to die in clean battle, they said, bathing their weapons, than lie cold in the arms of Ran! For only fools did other than follow the shore on their voyaging, clinging close as sea and shoals permitted. From choice, they never ventured far out to sea. Like all former invaders, the Germans who crossed the water to Britain did so where it was narrowest.

Concerning the wide gulf lying north of Spain, it was more feared than the open Atlantic itself, for the winds and currents that unpredictably stirred it. The Cantabrian Sea, it was called by Roman geographers; to seamen who named it out of their own experience, it was the Bay of Treachery.

Raven had not ventured far from land even when dodging the Gothic biremes, and at that the water had been wicked. Cormac now urged what was frighteningly worse.

Clodia was appalled.

She had never been on the sea in her life, but she had heard sailors talk in her father’s wine-shop, and seen how they gripped their drinking jacks when they spoke of Treachery Bay. An she needed further proof that it was terrible, she had it when bloody-handed pirates, to whom the death grip of battle was something to joy in, showed trepidation at the thought of braving it. That they gainsaid their captain’s blood brother aloud gave her courage to cry her opinion.

“Madness!” she yelled in a voice that cracked in a squak. “Mac Art, this folly of yours will murder me-murder us all! Your men have-”

Cormac rounded on her with a snarl. The Saxon knife he’d once taken from a man who had no further use for it glittered in his fist. The other he clenched in her redbrown mass of hair, drawing back her head so that her white throat was offered to the blade.

“Twice now,” he said conversationally, “have ye insisted we be bent on your murder, wench! Now ye’ll be closing your mouth and keeping it so, or this little blade and I will see to it that ye’ll have been a seeress who predicted her own death!”

He released her. She staggered, tripped and sat down. Her eyes were chestnut-round. Cormac turned to the men on the benches. Them he addressed with biting scorn.

“Ye heard that? A woman who never felt a deck under her feet, and she sounds no worse than ye soft-bellied cod! Wulfhere’s Killers! Ha! Look at him there, ready to vomit for shame! What say ye, Skull-splitter? Shall we swim the Bay and leave them to snivel at the Romans?”