Andrew Offutt: The Tower of Death

“Veremund. Verem-aye! A king with ideas, I’m told. It’s trouble with the Goths he and his people are after having. It ought not harm our credit an we let him know the Goths are after having trouble with us… and he’ll be knowing that anyhow.”

“How much trouble,” Wulfhere asked, “and how bad?” After a moment he added, “The Sueves with the Goths, I mean.”

That Cormac knew, but he also knew his own brain was working little better.

“There is the meat of it, Cormac. And be they at odds still, or at peace? For all we know, they now be Gothic vassals.”

Cormac, silent, laboured at remembering. The conquests and dispossessions that had boiled across the known world in the last hundred years were beyond any man’s power to keep straight in his head. The writhe and surge of humanity in this that the “Saints” called the fifth century in the reign of their Lord had been like unto the winds of Treachery Bay. Those in Britain, that Cormac was more familiar with, were complicated enow.

The Gael stalked through his own mind, sorting. Blood of the gods, how many places he’d been, how much he knew of the world! And to think that but eight years agone he’d been but a provincial boy who’d thought he had the world because he’d slain a bear of Connacht, alone and with a dagger!

He said at last, “No, it’s no Gothic vassals these people are. The Sueves came down into Spain with the Vandals and the Alans, a long lifetime agone. The Sueves remain, though they were squeezed westward; the Vandals and the Alianis have crossed into Africa and become one people. The Goths, I was hearing, did subdue these Suevi three or so times, on behalf of the Romans. The first time and the second, the Goths have the lesson and then returned to those lands ceded them over in Gaul. Hmp! Roman diplomacy at work, I’m not doubting, and them with no desire to see the Goths grow too powerful.”

Cormac squinted darkly at the sky, reflecting.

“The last time matters fell out differently. The Sueves were waxing fierce once again, under a king named Remismund; they had taken Lisbon, this one Germanic tribe! It was that city’s own Roman governor himself who oped the gates to them! By then Euric had just become king over the Visigoths, and he marched them over the mountains once more, to rout the Sueves.”

“I know about Euric ,” Wulfhere rumbled. “Ha! All know about Euric. He did well, that one.”

Aye; by the wild standards of his day, Euric the Visigoth had done well. Remismund the Sueve, knowing himself threatened, was so daring as to make appeal to the Emperor himself in Constantinople. He was ignored. In the mean time, Euric’s Goths conquered southeastern Hispania right handily, and occupied Lusitania with swaggering men of ever-shifting eyes. They swiftly tore loose the Suevic hold on Lisbon and enforced Suevic submission, even to making them accept the creed of the Arian Church. Euric the Goth, “terrible by the fame of his courage and his sword,” ruled from the Atlantic to the Rhone, from the Mediterranean to the Loire. Nor had he recognized even nominal bonds with the Empire, as had his predecessors. A proud fire-eyed man, Euric, who ruled in no name but his own-and made the world to know it.

And he sired Alaric, Count Guntram’s unbeloved liege.

“He did well,” Cormac mac Art said nodding. “Sorrow’s on him he had no heir worthy of him. King Alaric the Second! Huh! Alaric the Timid is closer to the truth, and that previous Alaric who conquered even Rome itself must be turning in his grave with shame! It’s quiet the Sueves remained while Euric lived-but he’s two years with the heroes, and the Sueves know well what this King Alaric is. And by repute their king is all that Alaric is not.”

Wulfhere slipped fingers into his beard to scratch briny encrustations. “I make water on repute , Cormac! Oft it means naught more than a rumour here, a boast there. Ye sound like Veremund’s housepet. Have ye certain knowledge of aught he’s done for this repute of his?”

The dark-visaged Gael smiled grimly. “Well, it’s no great battles Veremund of the Sueves has fought, nor has he taken cities-the which is only wisdom, as he’s not ready. Yet all the shrewder Goth lords in Hispania can see him working towards it. The man’s after taking pains to deal fairly with the Roman land-owners, Wulfhere, as the Goths do seldom. Veremund even speaks decent Latin; better than mine, and mine is none so bad. It signs to me that he wishes to rule a kingdom, not an enclave of conquerors who stand less than steadily on the necks of a subject people… who’d still be there after the conquerors vanished. That he has a golden welcome for skilled smiths and armourers is no rumour, but fact. Stand on it. Always I try to know where such men are going, and-by Behl’s burning eye!-so do the merchants. The last time we were in Lisbon, I had it from the governor himself-”

“What?”

“-the governor’s daughter herself, late one night, that it’s Veremund who’s behind the incursions of river pirates on the Duera. Petty stuff, and they but petty rogues who’ve never sniffed the open sea. Methinks it’s meant for a first trial of how far he can go. King Veremund affects to know naught of them, and promises to hang any he catches.”

Wulfhere chuckled.

“No certainty’s on me of this, Skull-splitter, and ye can be making water on it for wine-shop babble if ye like: But Veremund has sent envoys to the Cantanabrian Mountains over eastward, to sound the people there. He’s not like to be receiving firm answers this early in the game, even if such be true. Still, it says something of this Suevi king, that such a story can be told and believed.”

“The Goths must be spineless or mad, to sit on their saddle-galled backsides and do naught! I’d have this Veremund’s hall in ashes and himself in pieces!”

“As would I. As would full many of the Goths. But they and we are not kings. Their ill luck it is that their king remains far away with his Egyptian whores, and will not be putting his armies into motion. Worse that the very landscape, with mountains sprawled across it like dragons, makes campaigning so hard.”

Behind them somewhere, Clodia squealed and a man laughed; Cormac and Wulfhere did not so much as turn.

“Surely aught of unity will never prevail in this land, Wulfhere, as it does in Eirrin-almost-with our- its peoples united under council and High-king-almost. Aye,” Cormac said softly, almost wistfully, “and with all the learned men and artisans moving freely where they will in the practice of their crafts… and them sacrosanct, by law and ancient usage.”

Wulfhere was silent, leaning against the inner hull and picking his fingernails with his teeth. Aye, he knew his battle-brother Cormac for one of the prideful Eirrin-born, and such men never forgot. Not like us Danes , Wulfhere thought, who know other men are equal to us… except the Norse, and the Swedes, and the Romans o’course, and those damned namby Britons, and of course the idiot Germans who…

“Was Strabo,” Cormac was saying on, “who likened Hispania to an oxhide outspread, not only in shape but in hue and relief, all dried and cracked and puckered. Other great differences there are, even where the terrain is flat. The weather for one, and the peoples. These Sueves-they are a fierce independent lot. The Basques are the same. They should be! It’s the same stock they are as the Caledonia Picts, when all’s said and done-or Eirrin’s Firbholgs. Only the Tuatha de Danaan by their sorceries were able to prise loose the Firbholgs’ hold on Eirrin. And it was no easy time my ancestors had, in winning Eirrin from the Danan breed!”

Wulfhere noted how his comrade had availed himself of the opportunity to point out the superiority of the people who had exiled him, but the Dane said naught. Were all Gaels of Eirrin such as his shipmate and battle-brother Cormac mac Art, the Eirrish would surely own half the world and statues of Crom and Behl would stand in Rome.