Andrew Offutt: The Tower of Death

They wanted the pirate heavy laden. Easy meat. They let us be robbed for that-and killed to a man for aught they knew, had we not received quarter!

Our fine overlords. Our bloody Gothic protector!

Gervase’s hands had slackened. Now they gripped anew, with the insensate pressure of vises. A vein beat and coiled in his temple like a frenzied blue worm. The battling furies in his heart found expression in eight words.

“Carve ’em like mutton! Give ’em hot hell!”

Which side he meant to encourage was known only to his god.

The Danes saw the warcraft appear with no dismay, and even no particular surprise. The very madness of waylaying a ship at the mouth of the Garonne, when Cormac had suggested it, had made it irresistible. They had known the risk. Wulfhere had shouted for very delight, called the Gael sword-brother, and dealt him a clap on the back to have staggered a lesser man. He was unaffectedly happy now as he had been then.

“Will ye give look at that?” he rumbled. “Wolf, we are not to be cheated of battle after all.”

Cormac answered only a nod, but he was not unhappy about that prospect.

The biremes rushed on, driven each by two banks of oars to Raven’s one, and thrice fifty rowers to Raven’s three score, and them sentenced criminals urged to their work by ropes’ ends-knotted. Each warship had a barnacled bronze-tipped ram jutting from her prow below the water-line, and a hundred Gothic marines on her deck.

Tough-handed war-men they were, in hard leather cuirasses studded with iron, and round iron caps, armed with buckler and spatha , the thirty-inch single-edged Gothic sword. One in three was equipped too with short bow and full quiver. Ordinarily the Danes would have laughed at such, for they were archers the masters of any in the southern German tribes. Now though they had spent four days in ambush in hostile country. The weather had been wet, very wet, and so were their bowstrings, even the spares.

Cormac’s slitted gaze ran the length of the biremes, for he saw them broadside-on as, they raced to intercept.

Mounted on each afterdeck was an engine such as he’d not seen till now, a dart-thrower resembling a huge crossbow. The Greeks had used them ere Rome’s empire arose, never mind fell, and Cormac had vaguely heard of them, garbled as ancient sorceries. He’d thought the techniques lost, and well lost. Someone had worked at reviving them.

Someone , he thought, is concerned about us.

Marine archers lined the rail of the leading warship. Their bowstrings hummed, and thirty arrows hurtled at Raven . Of that first volley, most fell short, hissing as the water took them, and none found a home in flesh.

“Out to sea!” Wulfhere thundered. “Let’s find how these Goth lubbers take rough water!”

Crew and ship were as one; Raven turned due west. Iron-muscled backs and limbs put explosions of energy into rowing. But the galley was heavy laden, and while her change of direction had postponed the meeting, the Gothic biremes were gaining at every oar-stroke. The leader would be running beside them soon, and within arrow-shot, and then the Goths would loose volley after volley.

But-Cormac grinned hard- an we win beyond that sheltering bulge of land to northward first, the Gothic aim’ll suffer! Wulfhere was right.

The dart-thrower banged.

Cormac saw a bolt long as he was tall spring over the sea. It flashed above the heads of his straining rowers to pierce the water for a fathom ere it lost force. The Gael did not see, but starkly imagined, its four-bladed iron head. Such a thing would split Raven’s overlapping strakes as Wulfhere’s ax broke mail.

The dart-thrower’s crew was winching back its cable now for another shot.

“Behl’s fiery eye!” he said between his teeth. “Were our archers in fettle, we’d be dropping ye all stone mortal slain about your engine!”

The bireme ploughed on. Now it lagged a ship’s length behind Raven , now half, and now it edged in, foot by foot. The archers loosed again.

The war-shields hung along Raven’s foaming thwarts were some protection, and helms and byrnies more. These arrows, though, were shot to fall from above. Some skewered brawny arms or calves. One man had the sudden sight of a feathered shaft pinning his hand to his oar; burning pain followed. Another felt naught, for as he bent forward in a stroke, an arrowhead drove through his offered neck between helm and byrnie. He was instantly dead. His oar trailed useless, fouling others.

Knud the Swift justified his by-name by leaping to the bench, heaving the corpse aside and seizing the oartimber. Three benches behind him, the man with the nailed hand coldly broke off the arrow-shaft and freed himself.

“Relief here!” he growled.

And the gap of water separating bireme from clinker-built northern galley grew straiter.

Wulfhere had gone thoughtful, hefting his giant’s ax. The head was large as his two hands together, and weighed all of seven pounds. The Gothic helmsman stood in plain sight but no, the Skull-splitter decided, besides being loath to part with it, not even he could hurl this particular ax quite so far. He drew the smaller one from his weapon belt.

It was a short-hafted Frankish weapon, meant for throwing, of the kind that bore the name of that fierce, treacherous tribe-a francisca . He’d practiced long hours with it and knew to the nail’s width its properties in flight.

“The helmsman, Cormac,” he said. “If I bring him down, can ye remember that ye be seaman these days, and not tending pigs in Eirrin any longer? And give the right order?”

“It’s a seaman I was ere ever I saw your mattress of a face,” the Gael said.

Wulfhere, grinning, brought the Frankish ax back over his mailed shoulder, edge upward, and braced a wadmal-clad knee the size of a shield-boss in the bow. The missile-ax made two full turns over thirteen paces, he knew, therefore one in half that; and for targets beyond or between such ranges, one must impart more spin or more drag so that the weapon struck with edge flying foremost.

The blue eyes in their mesh of weather wrinkles judged the distance with experienced calm.

A further flight of arrows hummed, sped almost straight up now, so close were the adversaries. Wulfhere heeded them no more than had they been a swarm of gnats. He’d cautioned Cormac to do what was necessary, knowing that he might be dead himself. His hairy, thick-muscled arm swung forward.

The Frankish ax glittered through five full turns in the sea air… and sank, as into a turnip, through the helmsman’s temple.

He’d scarcely begun to fall when Cormac barked, “Up oars to steerboard! Turn, turn hard about! Towards the Goth! ”

One heartbeat’s pause of pure amazement-and the the crew obeyed. Straight up from the water rose the line of oars on Cormac’s right, while the rowers to port-side doubled their already bone-cracking efforts, so that a couple of oars broke off short in strong hands. Raven turned in perhaps but three times her own length, while her timbers made cracking protests. The bireme’s ram came thrusting through seething water to gore her-but the helm was untended, veering, for a bare sufficiency of confused moments aboard the Goth.

Raven had come fully about, swifter than the Goths had deemed possible in a ship her length. Her copper-sheathed prow now aimed directly at the bireme’s port line of oars.

Blind and captive below decks, urged on by thrashings, the bireme’s rowers took her to disaster.

Athanagild Beric’s son, bulging-eyed on her bridge, screamed, “Backwater! Back water!”

But there was hardly time to say it, much less see it done.