Andrew Offutt: The Tower of Death

Raven had lost impetus in her turn, and lacked space to gather it anew. It was the bireme’s own hungry speed did the work.

Her double bank of oars shattered on Raven’s prow and beneath her keel, as so many rowan wands under a coulter’s blade. The broken ends whipped back within the hull to do gruesome carnage among the rowers. Backs broke, ribs went in pieces, brains flew from their enclosing skulls in gobbets of pink and grey mud.

Marines on deck went sprawling. Some stayed on their feet by clutching the deck-rail, as did Athanagild on his bridge. He stood appalled, maddened, infuriated. Again he beheld Wulfhere Hausakliufr, and this time far closer, but untouchable, arrogant, like a tower of iron aquiver with mirth. He laughed in their amazed Gothic faces as he passed.

“Go home to your mothers!” was the advice he gave them.

“Loose! Loose arrows!” Athanagild screamed at his archers. “Feather me that great hog! Kill him! Kill him! A hundred solidi for the man who does!”

Wulfhere heard, and remained standing in the bow long enough to be sure he was almost the sole target for the next flight. Then he ducked beneath the dragon-head beside Cormac, and covered them both with his shield, off which a shaft or two rattled. Most rebounded from the hammered copper that armoured the prow, or hissed in the sea, which made it an arrow-flight wasted.

“Loose again! Kill the rowers! Curse you, ready the dart-thrower! ”

Modern artisans proved hardly equal to those of former times; the dart-thrower’s mechanism had jammed after one shot. Upon gaining that bit of news Athanagild raised his fists and addressed Heaven in raving blasphemies. His god, that one Cormac called the Dead God, took no note.

Meanwhile, the Danish galley had made a close turn around the crippled bireme, and was running for the open sea once more. Athanagild’s archers rained arrows on them with grim method as they passed, so that fourteen men were wounded and two more slain. As Raven had but forty oars functioning and the second bireme was close upon her, all in all no one was any longer amused.

They left land-shelter for an ugly cross-chop brewed by Ran, who spread nets for ships, in one of her bitchiest moods. Less poetically, the inimical sea here was due to the jut of the Armorican peninsula to the north, and the mass of Spain to the south, lending their complications to the heavy swells from the Western Ocean. Raven began to buck and wallow like a drunken walrus; the Visigothic ship drew nearer.

Cormac went aft to watch, covering the steersman with a shield.

Another huge iron-headed dart plunged into the sea, a spear’s length astern. Three flights of arrows followed, and at the third, Cormac gasped and sank down. Wulfhere, amidships, saw and hastened aft.

“Cormac! Have they killed ye, man?”

“I’m-winded,” the Gael bit forth. He grinned. “The mail, and this leather sark and padding under it, kept the point from my hide. Them and their little four-foot bows!”

“Ah,” Wulfhere mourned, lest the other accuse him of waxing sentimental, “it’s a bad day and growing no better. I dared hope then that we’d be rid of ye.”

Raven mounted a swell that slopped brine inboard. Then the sea vanished from under her, and she dropped her belly into the trough in a way that slammed teeth together and rattled spines. Men got desperately to work, bailing.

“Wulfhere,” Cormac said, “It’s too heavy we be. Man-the wine must go.”

“WHAT?”

“The wine,” the Gael repeated. “It must go.”

The big Dane’s dismay very nearly equalled Athanagild’s. Cormac’s cold voice cut through his expostulations, his protests and all loud anguish. They were wallowing like hogs in muck, and less happily by far. The Visigoths were having their sorrows, but soon they’d be so close that even their bowmen could not continue to miss-unless the reivers lightened ship. At the same time they’d be littering the sea with the menace of bobbing massive casks to trouble pursuit. They’d float, though not high; immediately below the surface, most likely. It had to be done.

Wulfhere turned away. Cormac cursed hotly; the Skull-splitter’s strength was needed for the work, and he chose to mope!

The Gael called Hrut Bearslayer to him. The silent carl, not quite right in the head from a sword-cut thereon, was the one man of the crew whose bulk and strength equalled Wulfhere’s. He was single-mindedly loyal to Cormac besides. Word was passed along. The oar-men, working in pairs, unlashed the casks and tipped them over the side. Cormac and Hrut between them disposed of the three in the stem. They rolled and tumbled away behind.

Cormac, watching, saw one shatter on the bireme’s ram, and another, lifted by the swell, slam and break on the craft’s carvel-built side. Planks were sprung. The sea was abruptly sweetened and darkened, while some lookout cried a warning at the Goth’s masthead… and mac Art was satisfied.

The more so for Raven’s now riding the waves lightly as a bird.

The water remained savage, but the crew was used to dirty weather. They were often out in it by choice, as naught made better concealment-and the weather itself was now fair enough, save for this gusty, unpredictable wind. The bireme, carrying a hundred weapon-men who did not row, and all their gear, fell behind. Raven was away and at large.

Erelong, the Gael went forward to where Wulfhere gloomed at the waves like a man-shaped thundercloud. Cormac shook his head in exasperation, and set a hand on his friend’s burly shoulder.

“Ah, Splitter of skulls… the world has not ended! It’s the best of the plunder we have yet, and tonight will see us in Nantes, guesting at the merchant’s table. Ye ken well he has a cellar the gods in Tir-nan-Og might envy, and that even your vast self cannot drink dry. Not to be mentioning his daughter, and there isn’t a feater bawd on these coasts.”

“ Cormac ,” Wulfhere said, not turning.

The Gael sighed, and shrugged, and left him to mourn. The ship must be looked after, even if the great souse’s heart was breaking. The mast must needs be stepped again, here on the choppy sea, and sail raised. Was a task fit for the chastisement of Loki, and enough to make him, were he present, wish to be back in his dry comfortable cave with the vipers. Then they might ship oars and beat northward under canvas.

They left the sea reddened in their wake, with blood and richest wine.

CHAPTER TWO: Two Pirates, A Trap, and Clodia

As Burdigala to the Garonne, was the city of Nantes to the Loire. And, blessedly, it was part of a different realm. Philip the Syrian had called it “the Roman Kingdom,” and with cause.

Its ruler was Roman by birth, education and loyalty. Master of Soldiers he’d been; his title now was Consul of the Empire, bestowed on him by the Emperor Zeno, who sat in Constantinople and had nothing that mattered to do with him. In law he was an official, representing Zeno. In practice he was independent, and the barbarians who had overrun the rest of Gaul were nothing if not practical. They thought of him as a king, and called him a king- Rex Romanorum .

His name was Syagrius. Consul Syagrius; King Syagrius.

He no more approved of pirate forays along his shores than did Alaric of Toulouse.

For this reason, Wulfhere took his galley up the Loire with secretive care, and anchored her two miles from the city. The plunder was loaded into a fishing boat he had paid for, grudgingly, as he was robber by profession. It was Cormac’s advice, crafty and well-reasoned as usual, to do this remarkable thing. It was certain as aught could be that the fisherman who received their coins would not run bleating to the law. The law would question him by increasingly strong methods as a matter of course. That was assurance enow of his shut mouth, and less like to attract attention than his death or disappearance.