The Tower of Death

CHAPTER ONE: Trap for A Pirate

At the mouth of a reedy creek perched a raven with whetted beak and talons flexing. Dark was the predator, with sharp eyes for that which would feed her. Yet this raven was no bird, but a ship. And unlike her namesake, Raven was no scavenger of corpses, unless it were the great sprawling corpse of Rome’s empire in the west. She was a fighting bird.

Two men stood in her bow in the morning light. Athanagild had described them without error, save in one point only. Yet still he had not conveyed their presence; to accomplish that would require a bard aflight on the inspiration of his demon.

Wulfhere was immense, and no less; a man huge of height and thew, with fire-blue eyes under thickets of brow and a beard like a conflagration. Though he was restless with waiting, he moved not save to fondle the great ax he held across the front of his body and, once in a while, to sigh. At such times his scale byrnie expanded as if it were hard put to contain him. That was but illusion, though a remarkable one. On the Danish giant gleamed heavy golden buckles, studs, and armlets. His war-gear was adequate and more. In his belt gleamed the whalebone hilt of the broad-bladed dagger sheathed there, and a smaller ax was tucked through that same broad thick belt at his other hip. Against his knee leaned a shield like a scarred moon of battle.

Athanagild’s one mistake had been in saying that the Skull-splitter overtowered him by a foot. It was half a foot only, though the high bull’s horns adorning the Dane’s helmet made it seem the more; Wulfhere affected the style of his ancestors. But then Athanagild’s one sight of Wulfhere Hausakliufr had been from a distance. The which was confirmed by the fact that Athanagild Beric’s son was yet alive. Wulfhere was only five inches over six feet…

The man at his side was equally still, and seemed more at his ease in that moveless waiting. Leanly muscular in his shirt of black link-mail, Cormac mac Art of Eirrin wore no ornaments on his darkish skin. Strange this was, in one of a race whose men loved to adorn themselves, and never more splendidly then when they went forth to fight. This Gaelic Celt, though, had ceased long since to care for show. He was all stark professionalism as he scanned the nearby sea, casting an occasional searching glance into the reeds behind him. Had they moved contrary to the light sea breeze, he’d have issued a warning. For copper-beaked Raven lay in ambush here as in the jaws of a bear-hopefully a sleeping one.

Cormac, Wulfhere, and their crew of Danes lurked in no less than the home waters of the Visigothic kingdom’s Garonne fleet. In truth, from where he stood at Raven’s bow, Cormac mac Art might have hurled a stone into the River Garonne’s estuary. Moreover, just the other side of that great estuary nestled Saxon settlements, and Saxon pirate ships along with some few thousand Saxon fighting men under a dozen independent chieftains-and every one was willing to be known as friend to Wulfhere’s greatest enemy, Hengist the Jute, King of Kent over in Britain.

Four nights agone they had lowered Raven’s sail, unstepped her mast and rowed softly in with muffled oars. Since then they had eaten cold food only, spoken almost never, and then not above whispers. They had endured the mosquitoes and midges. As Cormac seemed scarcely to notice them, someone had murmured low that any gnat biting the sombre Gael knew it would die horribly.

Waiting strained them sore, and chafed men of action. They endured. They exercised as best they could by arm-wrestling on the oar benches, and straining betwixt them with braced feet and backs.

Rather nearby, other men than they were weary of waiting.

On the estuary’s northern side, two galleys of the Visigothic royal fleet lay tucked behind a woody point of land. Athanagild Beric’s son, treading the deck of one ship, tugged his heavy moustache and frowned at his marines, who were eating their supplies at a deplorable rate. Had he known the men he’d been ordered to capture had been almost within shouting distance for days, unseen and undreamed of, Fleet Commander Athanagild might have suffered a seizure.

The while, beating up the coast from Bayonne in the merchant tub Thetis, came one Gervase, a plain sea captain. He squinted brown eyes northward, and then at the coast; Gervase was both fearful of Saxon war-boats and hoping for a Gothic galley on patrol.

My luck, he thought morosely, to meet the Saxon pirates so near safe harbouring!

An odd sort of voyage, too; the whole distance around Spain, and having to pay toll to the Vandals on the way. Curious. He spat to landward, with the wind. It wasn’t long since those towheaded heretical bastards would have taken the whole cargo, and slaughtered the crew for being Orthodox. A lot of them still would, and did. But Gaiseric was the man who had made their seapower, and he was a decade in hell.

The Vandals were not the terror of all the Mediterranean any longer, but only the western half… and learning that one did not kill a cow for its milk. Still, they were unchancy, and it had been good to see the Pillars of Hercules fade into distance.

It was strange, though, the way the backers had insisted on this route. They had brassed up so readily, too, with the Vandal’s toll. Not like them at all. From Narbo to Toulouse by road, and then down the river to Burdigala by barge, that was the proper route! Simpler and the Devil of a lot safer.

Aye, but the royal court was at Toulouse. The Gothic king might have decided to buy the lot-at his price. Likely enough the backers had decided the Vandals were a better risk. In any case the danger money was coming to Gervase for it.

Had he known that his backers and the Count of Burdigala had of a purpose set him out as bait for pirates, he might well have dropped in a fit at the same time as Athanagild. Both men were thus protected by lack of knowledge.

At the creek-mouth, a fox barked twice.

Sudden fierce eagerness filled Wulfhere’s Danes; not often did foxes bark from treetops. One of their own, called Halfdan Half-a-man for his short stature, swung nimbly down from branch to branch to soggy earth and made for the ship. An oar swept out over Raven’s strakes. The blade grounded on the creek-bank and Halfdan walked up it, a stocky personification of delight. He took shield and ax without having to think on it the while he moved forward to give word to his chieftain.

His grin told the news ere his tongue could form it. “It’s the one! Or if not, there be two corbitos for Burdigala under brown canvas with a pale three-sided patch!”

“How does she ride?”

“Heavy! By Aegir the bountiful, there’s wine in her hold, as ye were assured! And outrun Raven such a’ round-bellied seagoing walnut could not, even were she riding light!” Halfdan smacked his lips. “We will drink tonight.”

“Ahh,” Wulfhere gusted, in a bliss of anticipation. “Push out, then, ye thirsty sons of Dane-mark! Reward is ours!”

Cormac said naught, and his grin was a bare skinning of teeth as he drew his sword. Dark and smooth-shaven was his face, of a sinister cast not amended by the scars upon it, or the cold narrow eyes grey as his weapon-steel. His visage was fitly framed in the cheek-pieces of his helmet, a hard leather casque strengthened with plaques of black iron. Its flowing horsehair crest was the nearest thing to ornament he had on him, and even that to a purpose; was a lasting taunt to Hengist’s Jutes, for the White Horse was the badge of their royal house, and they fought under a standard of white horsetails.

Held vertically, oars thrust down into the creek-bed, poling Raven forward.

As she slid lithely out to where she had more waterroom, the poling men seated themselves and ran their oars out horizontally. Their two-score benchmates did the same. The blades dipped raggedly, cut into water, and fifty strong men pulled back against its resistance.

Raven sprang forth on a bright sea glittering with scales of hot gold.

Knud the Swift, in the stern, called staves for his comrades to row by, and they rowed hard. Water peeled back white from Raven’s copper-sheathed prow. It hissed by the strakes. Oars lifted shining, swept back, dipped, and men drove them forward again, revelling in the free use of muscles too long cramped. Work? Naught of the kind! A touch of healthy exercise to get the kinks out before they bathed their weapons!

“Brightly flash the oar-blades,

Washing in the whale’s bath,

Dipping in the salty

Ale of Aegir’s daughters.

Better is the brew there,

Casked in yonder cargo,

Where the wine of Eastland

Waits for Wulfhere’s killers.

“Ye that row to steerboard,

Raise your oars and rest them,

While the wights a-portside

Turn us to the grappling.

See, the southron sailors,

White with terror-madness,

Hunch like hunted conies

With the stoats among them.”

In truth, it was not such a large brag. The crew of Thetis was more than two to one outnumbered, and every man able plainly to see it. Nor might they have stood against the wild slayers out of the north, even at level odds. As for an attempt at flight… Raven was making three ship’s lengths to the fat corbito’s one. It was unfair, so close to home-and mad and raving mad the pirates must be, to be trying it! Demons from the reddest pits of hell they seemed, a-glimmer with metal scales and bosses and horned like Satan, their dark ship a dragon fit to carry such creatures.

The voyage had been hard and weary, and this to be its ending! Unfair.

Raven was so close now that Gervase could see the Danish leader’s face, aye, and his henchman’s, too. Gervase knew them at once. Not a seaman on these coasts but had heard of the ruddy giant with his ax and burning beard, and the dark-visaged sworder in black mail.

The heart of Gervase turned cold. Yet at the same time he felt hope stirring, for it was said that these twain were not given to wanton slaying of the helpless. And helpless he was, and all his crew.

Captain Gervase licked his lips and shouted through cupped hands, “Quarter!”

Wulfhere loosed a roar of laughter. “O-ho-ho-ho-ho! Quarter ye’re asking? Oh, little man, little man! You cheat us of a good fight!”

“Not such a good fight as that,” Gervase called wryly back, considering the aspect of his men. “But such as we can put up, unless you promise us our lives, we will give you. And more than that!” he added in sudden inspiration. “We’ve casks and casks of good wine below. Do you board us bent on slaughter, I’ll take two men and smash them open myself!”

The Skull-splitter ceased to laugh. “Ye be a monster!” he bellowed. “A black-hearted monster!”

Cormac mac Art laughed. It was untrue that he never did so, and he did like grit.

“Let him have his way, Wulfhere,” he advised. “I’ve a notion how this can be turned to our account. Let me be having his ear.”

“I had rather let you have his whole head,” Wulfhere grumbled.

“Ahoy, trader! Do but these things and we grant ye life. Be ye running your tub ashore, and that swiftly, then set your crew to loading your cargo aboard us. Swiftly, ye hear? Swifter than the like was ever done aforetime! And remember the price, do ye fail!”

Gervase looked once at the dark, scarred face, and turned to scan again his disheartened crew. None but a madman on the breast of the sea would have opted for resistance.

“Done!” he said.

And done it was. A spear’s cast from the nearby white beach, Thetis let down both iron anchors and Raven grappled to her. Cormac was first on her deck, with four men eager at his back, among them Knud the Swift and one warrior with hair black as the Gael’s own, a rare sight among northerners.

“The lighter stuff first, and most costly,” said Cormac. “It’s silk ye have aboard, and rare gems and spices. There is ivory too, balsams and jewellery that’s after being looted from Egypt’s king-graves. It’s unwise ye’d be for attempting to deny it. Show me.”

Betrayed! Gervase thought bitterly. But who could have done it in such detail? None surely, but the factor who directed the lading. And Gervase promised himself that he’d see the man torn by bears-if he survived this day.

For the pirate’s list was true to the item. The bolts of cloth the sailors threw down to Wulfhere were not all of silk; some were Egyptian cotton loomed so fine and shining that the difference was not evident at a glance, and nigh as rare as silk, here in the west. They were stowed in the bow, with the boxes and packets that came also from Alexandria, the incense and pepper and the all but priceless sugar.

And Wulfhere, thirsty Wulfhere, had scarcely a glance for any of it.

“The wine!” he demanded.

The wine was brought forth. Sailors levered oaken casks from their cradles in the hold, and trundled them to the hatchway. Ropes were knotted about them with a fearful care to make them secure, and brawny men drew them on deck, flashing uneasy sidewise stares the while. The casks were lowered over Thetis’s side and received with joy by the wild crew of Raven. Swiftly those men lashed their prizes firmly to bench-ends with a proper eye to balance and distribution so that Raven should continue to ride the sea well.

All was accomplished with a will and speed that no stevedore on Burdigala’s docks had ever approached.

Since Raven was both a leaner vessel than Thetis, and shallower of draught, she could not take the entire load. Still, by canny stowing the Danes made a fair shift towards it.

No more than an hour later, the Danish galley carried twenty-three casks of red Falernian; three were lashed crosswise in a row in the stern with ten more on their sides along each row of oar benches, so positioned as not to impede the oarsmen-and them sitting appreciably closer to the sea than they had been.

Cormac and his four sword-comrades added their weight to the load.

“Now if ye’ll be casting off our grapnel-irons,” he said, “it’s farewell we’ll be bidding ye, with due thanks for your hospitality-and a caution not to raise your anchors whilst we be in sight.”

Gervase nodded glumly. The grapnels were prised loose to thud down aboard the galley. The Danes raised an ironical cheer as they pushed off from Thetis’s plump side. Gervase’s square wind-burned face darkened; anger got the best of caution.

“Laugh when you’re out of Count Guntram’s reach!” he yelled after them.

None aboard Raven had Latin but Cormac and Wulfhere, and only the former was fluent. No Latin was required, however, to recognize the name Guntram. The Danes replied with laughter, boos and rude gestures. Then they settled to rowing.

Gervase, watching them go, gripped the timber of his ship’s rail till his knuckles showed the colour of the bone beneath.

Raven’s oars marched smoothly, like the jointless legs of some strange water-centipede, yet this time they imparted speed but gradually. Out and out across Garonne-mouth moved the pirate craft, turning for a nor’westerly course.

Not the least of Gervase’s warring feelings was wonder that he lived.

His passions were to be further moved, and that in moments. For while the corbito rolled at anchor, he saw-beyond the departing Raven, on the estuary’s north side-shapes move and emerge. With bulging eyes he recognised them as biremes of the Garonne fleet. They too had their masts unstepped and their decks clear for fighting.

Master Gervase struck his fist on the rail in explosive joy.

That was his first response, but then he was not the swiftest of thinkers.

Two warships! Raven captured or sunk! The cargo recovered! Such pirates as survived hanging on a gibbet, after appropriate tortures!

Then it struck him.

They must ha’ seen the whole business, from first to last! Why-blight ’em with boils from where they lay, they couldn’t ha’ helped it!

Why didn’t they appear sooner?

The answer became obvious as soon as the question was posed.

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.

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.

In darkness the fishing boat came to the waterfront of Nantes.

Its precious load was covered with sacking and old fish-nets. The three who rode in it wore long enveloping cloaks of coarse wool, under which they carried their helmets. One was a flame-haired giant; another was dark, scarred and leanly muscular; the third likewise black-haired, the single Dane of such colouring in Wulfhere’s crew. Black Thorfinn, he was named.

They moored the boat before a dockside warehouse. One end of it had been made into living quarters and a grog-shop, where any might come and go with a ready excuse, if not always without suspicion.

Wulfhere and Cormac were too striking to show themselves even in such a place, and made their way to a less public door. There they knocked in a certain rhythm. A balding Gallo-Roman in stained tunic came to let them in. He did not look at all a financial match for Philip or Desiderius Crispus, which was as he liked it.

“Cormac,” he said in greeting. “Skull-splitter.”

“Our very selves. And Thorfinn ye’ll not be knowing.

He has no word of Latin, Balsus, but give him to drink and he will not pine for conversation. He’s here to help with our load.”

More than that, he provided excuse for them to talk among themselves in Danish if they wished. The advantage was that Balsus Ammian would comprehend not a word. Cormac’s early life had not left him a trusting man.

“Plunder,” the merchant said, closing the door and replacing the bar. He found the word about as enticing as gout, to hear him, but his dark eyes gleamed. “It is a bad time for trade, Captain, but aye, we can discuss it.” To the brutal-faced hulk attending him he said, “Back to your bouncing, and tell Clodia we have guests warranting our best. Hungry, thirsty guests new from a sea voyage.”

The chucker-out’s nose had told him as much. With a grunt, he went through to the grog-shop, whence were borne odours of sausage, ale, wine, tar and sweat on gusts of argument, laughter, bawdry and alleged song.

Balsus led the way up creaking stairs to a room hung with cheap tapestry and rugged with sheepskins. Its odour was musty, but the pirates had sat in far worse. The lamps Balsus lit from his candle, puffing, burned scented oil. Cormac wondered idly how much could be got from rendering their host, and him wheezing like a walrus ashore after a rise of stairs…

They threw off their wadmal cloaks, and seated themselves with a creak and chime of battle-harness. The chairs held firm, even Wulfhere’s. They had been in this house erenow.

“Well, Captain,” Balsus said, “I’d never ask you-no, no, far from me the thought-to talk business neither drunk nor dined. You are famished, not so?”

A nod from Cormac and a vehement rumble of Wulfhere’s belly assured him it was.

“But a hint, an intimation while you eat-perchance a sample?” The hand of Balsus flashed in air, fingers partway curled into graspy claws.

Cormac, who yet carried his helmet in the crook of his arm, produced from it a wooden casket, and something else. That something glinted in the lamplight with gold and lapis lazuli and breathtaking jeweller’s art.

It certainly took their fence’s breath, and his face showed agony at the need to handle it casually. The bauble dangled, turning on its fine chain, from his graceless fingers, the sigil of a writhing winged serpent. His skin seemed to tingle at its nearness. It had not the look of mere ornament, though it was that, and wrought by a master; it impressed as a formal talisman.

Might it be? Cormac, watched him closely.

“It’s forgetting the casket ye seem to be,” the Gael murmured, and set down his helmet beside his leg.

“Time and to spare,” returned the merchant, dissembling too late. “One doesn’t wish to be hurried. By Saint Augustine! Frankincense!”

The aroma pervaded the room above that of the lamps.

“And more of the like yonder,” Cormac told him. “Spices, gums, jewels, and rolls of silk still dry in their covers. Our finest haul yet, so let us be having no more natter of how bad is trade nowadays. Your hands do betrayal on ye, man. It’s downright palsied with eagerness they are.”

“H’m. A splendid haul, yes. Not to be denied, but such-distinctiveness-brings its own problems, good my sirs. Makes it all but impossible to dispose of, do you see?” The fingertips of Balsus now massaged his palm.

Cormac stared back at him, unwinking. His hard boned face looked more sinister than ordinarily. Wulfhere, no fool, did not try to match that intimidating performance. He simply looked benign, and patient with his fellow man’s gaucheries.

Into the room and the moment, breaking the tension, came Balsus’s daughter Clodia.

A shrewd, spirited presence she, possessed of redbrown eyes and dense red-brown hair, with hips a-sway and skirt a-rustle. The tray she bore upheld an ale-jug large as a bucket, and four pewter tankards. Had been a goodly feat of strength on her part to bring it upstairs, but she knew it would last, in this company, one avid breath after it was poured.

The healthily-constructed young woman set it down on the table with gusty relief.

“Captain Wolf!”

She perched on his knee, took Cormac’s face between her hands and kissed him with knowledge and willingness enough to melt the grimness from his mouth. Nor was Cormac over susceptible. She knew him from the days when he had led his own crew of reivers from Eirrin, wherefore she and her father called him “Captain” even yet, for courtesy’s sake-a fancy to which Wulfhere was not mean-minded enow to object.

“And our walking menhir all shaggy with lichen!” she added, bussing Wulfhere with equal warmth. “You need not tell me. My beloved father has been trying to cheat you again.”

She poured the heavy brown ale. The three did not so much drink as breathe it in. She poured again, this time including her father in the round, and that finished the jug. Clodia put it aside.

“Garth”-this was the chucker-out-”will be waddling in like a goose with a keg in his arms. Sausage and cheese and a roast sucking-pig will come after; the man who ordered it will be desolate to hear that it fell in the fire, but we’ll feed him costless on something else-ohh!”

Her eyes had fallen on the Egyptian sigil. She picked it up with a murmured, “Beautiful,” and was about to slip it over her head when Balsus snatched it away. He did more. He struck her fiercely and snarled a curse.

Seeing Cormac’s eyes upon him, coldly speculative, he muttered something about “the jade’s getting above herself.”

The Gael knew well there was more. Balsus Ammian’s daughter had a business head as good as his own, and better judgment of men. Not only for her services as barmaid did her father have her attend such meetings as this. No. Something about the pendant itself had aroused his touchy possessiveness. Balsus must be deeply moved, else he’d conceal it better.

That, Cormac thought, will increase our profit from this night.

He wondered what the bauble’s significance might be.

Clodia had retreated to Wulfhere for comfort, which he charitably provided with a hand up her skirt. Her tears quickly dried, she fussed and wriggled and slapped him lightly without making aught of real efforts to get away; she did glance sidewise to see the effect of this byplay on Cormac. He was paying not the least attention; no care on him if Wulfhere were to set her astride his lap and go him to work in earnest.

The edge removed from his thirst, Cormac poured down his ale at a slower rate. His custom was not to touch wine until business was settled, and until they had food in them, their trading would not even be discussed. But there was news to be had that did not bear directly upon business, and Cormac had always an ear for news.

Balsus dropped the winged serpent on the table beside the casket.

“Handsome,” he said casually. “Yes. But as I mentioned, trade becomes ruinous. And there are bribes. The custom-house must document, for lawful credibility, such goods as I buy from you… the which is naturally not done for love. Its chief grows more and more demanding. I’ve cut back his profits, and chanced the sale of more common goods without telling him, but what you bring tonight is not of that class. ’Tis conspicuous-such as none but kings or great nobles can purchase. Such folk are finicky over forms of law, if not their letter.”

“We can spare ye the danger and worry,” Cormac said bluntly. “It’s kings and great nobles there are in the west of Britain whose fathers never bowed to Rome. These are not, I promise ye, finicky with forms of law. It’s no such foolish questions as where we got it they’d be asking.”

“There now, father, see what you’ve done!” This from Clodia, leaning on Cormac’s shoulder. “This customs official Nestor is greedy, true-but he takes what he can get, and sweats and shivers o’ nights, I shouldn’t wonder, lest the Consul get wind of his… private transactions. What can he do but complain? Nay, he’s that eager to tumble me he scarcely even does that-the fool, hankering to mix business with venery!” (Which was Cormac’s own opinion on the matter, and the reason he had not tumbled Clodia in the years of their acquaintance.) “I doubt he so much as suspects he’s been cheated.”

Someone found that cue too apt for resisting.

An object, impelled up the stairs by a casual toss, arced through the doorway left open for the promised ale. Its distinct sodden thump on the floor drew their eyes, which widened, Balsus’s and Clodia’s in profound horror. The object rolled to a terminus and tilted a face of starkest agony towards them.

Balsus croaked involuntarily, “Nestor!”

Cormac did three things, and on the instant, and so near simultaneously that the difference was not a practical issue. He shoved Clodia violently away lest she cling to him in shock. He sprang to his feet, overturning his chair. He ripped sword from sheath with a harsh metal whine.

And one action more he took. Stooping, he snatched his helmet and covered his square-cut black mop with it.

All this was done whiles Wulfhere and Thorfinn were rearing upright, in an explosion of hair-trigger response too swift for the eye. Then Cormac was ominously, totally still again, a strip of edged pointed steel in one hand and readiness to kill in every line of him. Yellow lamplight shone on his mail and helmet.

Men seethed into the room, ten or a dozen, disposing themselves either side of the door.

Cormac recognized them as Franks.

Ax-armed they were, in long leather vests and closefitting trews; with the backs of their heads shaved bald, most of the remaining hair drawn up in a thick tress on top of the head and the rest combed forward in a fringe over their brows, they could be from no other tribe.

No half-civilized Goths or Vandals had they here, but untamed killers out of the forest marches.

“Let nobody,” a voice came from the dark beyond the door, “move a finger.”

The speaker sauntered in. Lithe and handsome, indeed over-handsome, begemmed and perfumed and shaven, his dark brown hair exquisitely barbered in Roman bangs, he was a picture. Limpid hazel eyes were scarcely needed to complete it; despite their colour, though, they had even less warmth in them than Cormac’s. Too, they were as watchful, if not so slitted and deep-set.

Wulfhere looked infinities of scorn at him. The Dane’s horned helmet stood on the table. Coolly, deliberately, he set it on his shaggy head. The stranger betrayed no irritation.

“A defiant fellow,” he said affectionately. “A fearless, overgrown rat in the woodwork of the kingdom! You are going to squeak like a mouse between the claws. I have some clever iron devices that will reduce you to manageable size, a nose here, a finger-joint there. And your glowering, dark-visaged friend.”

None answered him. He lifted the head of the customs official by the blood-splashed hair.

“This fool could tell you; were he not forever dumb. But perchance his expression says enough. He did not die graciously… and he did suspect.”

Thump went the ghastly thing on the table. Clodia started. The stranger lifted a brow in appreciation of the sight that made.

“Your late friend Nestor contracted a fever last month, and thought it was plague. He called for a priest right enow, and he couldn’t babble his confession sufficiently fast. The priest broke the confidence of confessional to gain favour with his bishop, Remigius of Reims… and in my turn I owe the bishop a favour, now. There is always proof to be had when one knows where to look for it. The king was pleased… behold in me the new customs assessor of Nantes!

“My name is Sigebert. It will be better known for this night’s work-a fortunate one for my future, eh? The new broom sweeping briskly, as they say. One fat traitorous merchant and a trio of sea-pirates on the first night of my office, all for torment! I judge your profession aright, do I not? Methinks I can even guess your names, or two of them. The Count of Burdigala might pay well to have you handed across the Loire into his hands. My king would approve the transaction, I am sure.”

Sigebert loved, Cormac noted, the sound of his own sweet voice. Aye, and in particular when it was explaining how clever he was. Cormac despised the man, but he remained silent.

Sigebert raked the woman from hair to feet with sparkling eyes.

“You need not suffer, my dear,” he said politely. “Unless of course you’re of firm mind to join your father and this low company you’ve fallen into, whither they are bound. Let me advise you: welcome me instead to Nantes in appropriate fashion.”

Clodia shuddered. Her father, no doubt, would have pleaded for leniency, but he was too terror-stricken to find his tongue. Such was never a fault of Cormac’s, and he felt that Sigebert had orated long enough.

“Be not a fool, man,” he said. “I suppose none of your soldiers is after having a Latin education? They do not look it.”

“They apprehend not a word we are saying.”

“And I’d lay wagers that it is not by chance. Well, then-take ye Nestor’s private arrangements unto yourself, as ye have his house and station. Accept our bond that we will deliver ye full accounting of all we… find, asea, and a third share in the profits. They ought to suffice for such splitting, with the Nantes customs assessor to pass us intelligence. And that ye may look better than him who preceded ye, to be sure, we’d be looting no Roman craft. In such wise it’s happy and wealthy we’ll all be!”

Sigebert considered the swiftly sketched proposition. Watching, the Gael began to believe he had talked his way out of this trap.

He knew Sigebert’s kind. There were Franks in some numbers at the court of Soissons; their kingdom lay to the east, where they had been settled as federates of the Empire. The polite fiction was that they were still its subjects. Franks made up a large part of King Syagrius’s army. Much rarer were polished courtiers like this one, but they existed, wearing Latin speech and Latin education like their jewels, and Sigebert had seemingly learned Latin calculation as well. It had not changed him.

Under costume and manners this Sigebert was Frankish to the marrow: treacherous, bloody and cruel.

Thus too had Clodia assessed him, with no difficulty. She knew men. When she thought of having to please this one abed, and gave thought to what that might involve, claws of panic terror ripped at her mind. She could not help shaking.

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.

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?”

“Never,” Wulfhere assured him. “We have Raven, and we hold her. I say we cross Treachery Bay, and toss overboard any who dispute that. Let them do the swimming! Ordlaf?”

Ordlaf Skel’s son the steersman, who had not joined the outcry, spat over the stern. “I’ll succeed, chieftain. And even should I fail, there’ll be none able to twit me.”

Wulfhere boomed happy laughter. “I’m served by one man, at least! You hear, codfish? Oh-ho-ho! It will be an adventure! Who is there that doesn’t fight? But this thing was never done afore, that I’ve heard of! Now bend your backs, or you will be having to fight ere the Romans reach you, and with me! But do make it a speedy decision. Yon galleys be not standing still!”

His persuasiveness carried the debate.

Thus it was that the top-heavy Roman warcraft saw Raven vanish whither they dared not follow. Even then, the pursuers did not guess the resolve that was aboard the pirate craft. The Roman commanders assumed she had put back to the coast in the hour before dawn, and wasted their day searching bay, cove and channel for her. By then she was far out on the heaving grey sea, with low-pitched grumbling on her benches, and prayers to Lord Aegir and the Thunderer.

Clodia was lucky, and over-lucky, not to be sacrificed to the sea people.