When Death Birds Fly

19

“The ravens are flying!”

So the word had been uttered, in Midgard and in worlds beyond. Now had the ravens gathered for the feast. Whichever side conquered, in this war, the ravens would be victorious as well: servants of the Lord of Death, death-birds of the battlefield; eaters of death-glazed eyes.

Syagrius, Consul of the Empire, better known as King of Soissons, went forth from his city to meet the Frankish threat. He chose not to remain behind walls and subject Soissons to a siege. Informed by spies that Clovis and Ragnachar were raising a war-host, Syagrius had at once sent word to the counts of the appropriates cities: raise levies and march! Conferring with them, he had flatly refused to subject Soissons to a Frankish siege:

“No, my lords. The barbarians have chosen their time too well. At any other time, we might retreat behind walls and wait while hunger and desertion thinned their ranks. Now, the harvest is everywhere ripe to feed them. I will not permit them to lay it waste, or destroy it myself to forestall them. They have no cavalry, and we have-Gothic mercenaries, no less! We will cut the Frankish host to pieces just as did the Gothic horsemen at Adrianople, a hundred years agone. Oours is the discipline, the heavy armour, the superiority with missile weapons. The Franks can better us in one respect only: Numbers. They will find it insufficient.” Thus had spoken Syagrius, and thus was the die cast.

Now he sat his heavy Gothic charger under an overcast sky full of lead and slate, and watched the Frankish host approach. It looked as if the entire nation of the Franci was on the march. They covered the plain as a river in flood-time. The creak and clank, the odours of leather and iron and unwashed bodies flowed ahead of them even to Syagrius’s aristocratic nostrils. He wrinkled them in distaste.

A Roman, this Syagrius. A proud one: last heir to the mighty tradition of soldiering and rule. A Consul of the Empire he was, insofar as the Empire meant aught in these times. He bore too the title magister militum: commander of Gaul’s mobile field forces. His clean-shaven face might have been represented on an antique coin. He wore the panoply of a Roman general from another time; ornate, red-crested helmet with engraved and gilded cheek-pieces, inlaid cuirass and greaves, and a flowing scarlet cloak. His sword, however, was pure business: a plain Gothic cavalry spatha. A weapon for use, not show.

He looked with intense bitterness upon the enemy host. The Frankish contingent of his own army had deserted to Clovis and Ragnachar in the night, three thousand strong. (Too late, Syagrius could guess why.) As a result, he now faced twenty thousand foes with a force of nine thousand.

The three thousand Gothic heavy cavalry Syagrius led himself would decide the battle. These were lancers in scale-armour tunics and plain round casques, their iron cheek-pieces covering the temple and reaching down to the chin. Their massive horses wore armour of boiled leather over their chests and heads.

Two thousand archers and stingers waited in ordered ranks on the hillsides above. The Gothic cavalry had been swiftly disposed on a saddleback ridge between them. To the rear, legions of armoured infantry provided backing, four thousand men all told. The foot soldier had become ever less important in Roman armies since the crushing defeat of the legions at Adrianople, and phalanx formation had returned with all its vulnerability.

Syagrius hoped not to have to commit these legions to a charge. Far rather would he have them stand their ground and let the Franks weary their strength against them. In truth, he had doubts of his foot. They were essentially limatani-border soldiers. Their purpose and training was in the main defense. Aye, and surely they must defend this day; defend the last tattered fragment of the Empire in the west!

Syagrius would gladly have exchanged them all for another thousand horsemen.

The Frankish horde now moved to the attack. They came in long, straggling columns. They wore no mail but only close-fitting trousers and leather vests. Few had so much as helmets. Their steady walk became a brisk, jolting trot… which increased to a dead run as a harsh, rolling battle-cry burst from their thousands of throats. The very earth took note-and would for all time.

The Roman archers drew their bows-to the chest merely, as their forebears had always done, an act at which Wulfhere’s Danish longbowmen would have laughed. Alongside them, slingers fitted murderously heavy leaden balls into the pouches of their weapons, and whirled them so that they hummed. Roman might, ancient and disciplined.

The Frankish rush came on. The earth quivered beneath the pounding of their feet. A few shaken spirits in the Roman lines let fly their missiles too soon, and were scathingly cursed by their officers. Closer the barbarians came, roaring, their feet drumming the earth. And closer yet. At last the order was given.

A hellish hail of arrows and leaden balls tore into the Franci. The sling-missiles were the more to be dreaded, for their shocking power was awful. Where one of those murderously heavy balls struck a man on the head, it killed him instantly; where one struck an armoured leg, it shattered that limb; where one struck the body, it smashed ribs, driving them into the lungs, or ruptured internal organs and dropped its victim writhing on the grass.

A volley. Two. A third, when the leading Frankish columns seemed almost close enow to breathe in the Romans’ faces.

Trumpets sounded the charge for the Roman horse.

The squadrons began to move, surging down over the ridge where they had waited. These big horses under such heavy burdens did not gain full speed quickly; was like an avalanche of bone and iron, slow in its beginnings and inexorably gaining momentum and power. The Roman archers and slingers retreated up the hill-slopes on either side, moving in disciplined order and leaving open lanes. Through these cavalry rushed in a mailed torrent.

The Franks bayed like wolves. A cloud of javelins and missile-axes swept with an awful hum between the horsemen and the sun, to slash down into the Roman ranks. Here a man reeled from his saddle, shrieking while he clawed at the wreckage of his face. The ax fell to cripple a companion’s horse. There a nine-barbed javelin tore at an angle into a dun war-horse’s side just behind the rib cage, and deeply pierced its guts. It screamed hideously and collapsed, rolling over on the javelin, breaking the shaft. Its rider’s leg was crushed and maimed under the animal. The horse struggled to rise, spraying bloody urine. Its terrible screams went on and on, so eerily close to human sounds.

The charge had been shaken somewhat-without being impaired. Its impetus was sufficient to pound a stone wall into rubble. The squadrons thundered onward. Hooves tore up the hillside and snapped javelins as if they’d been twigs. Clods of earth flew high from the chargers’ hooves. Black dots against the sky, spinning in air, raining earth and sod and roots. Iron-tipped lances lowered to turn the charge into an awful moving wall of teeth. Bodies braced in the saddles; horsemen’s sinewy thighs clamped.

The crash of impact rocked the sky and reverberated for miles.

Men were instantly impaled, spitted through, swept aside like winnowed grain, stamped under the war-horses’ feet while their eyes stared huge as fishes’. The cavalry of Syagrius swept on, uncheckable, a flood-tide on the plain. A threshing machine. The Frankish lines had been broken, ripped apart like rotten cloth. Arrows and sling-missiles came howling down to complete the slaughter.

Yet only the van of the Frankish host had been destroyed.

Its power scarcely abated, the charge rushed on against the remaining columns, the greater mass of the foe. Again javelins and throwing-axes shadowed the sky. That Frankish hand-artillery took hideous toll. And horses pounded on.

Fools, Syagrius thought, with part of his mind as he rode. Had they discipline, or even sense, they would ground their spears and make a solid wall of shields; spear-butts braced, points jutting out and upward that our horses might impale themselves by their own momentum. It is what the Saxons would do…

Many of the Romans had broken or lost their lances. These drew swords or lifted hideous four-bladed maces from beside their saddles. Those who still bore lances leveled them anew. Smeared and dripping. Hooves thundered. The earth shook. Birds had fled for a mile around. Ravens waited.

Again resounded that crashing awful shock that no human flesh could withstand, however massed. Again the ragged barbarian columns crumpled. Bone shattered. Bodies were riven and men vanished under the blurring fury of hooves. Blood splashed and soaked into the thirsty ground and clods pattered down upon it.

This time the charge had spent itself. Its order was broken. As for the Franks, they had possessed little in the way of order to begin with, and scarcely missed it. Their wild ranks eddied. With order failed, those unaccustomed to it grew stronger. The barbarians closed about the horsemen in a storm of angry flesh. The battle became a vast boiling howling melee.

In the cloudy skies vague shapes loomed as if exulting in the slaughter. Hugest of all was a cloaked, implacable figure on a phantom steed. Were those wolves coursing belly-down before him, or a pack of crimson-eared hounds? No man who saw them was able to say. Did wild horns wind?

King Syagrius noticed none of it. Jupiter and Mithras were far from here, and none saw Iesu, and Syagrius was consummately busy. He rode and fought with a kind of inspired madness in knowledge that the Frankish host must be shattered now or not at all. His sword rose and fell, streaming red. Rome was Soissons; Soissons was Rome; and for Rome he fought as his kind had on this soil for nigh onto six hundred years. He hacked and slashed and hacked, grunted without ever shouting or cursing. The business was to slay and Syagrius, Roman, slew. The trained warhorse under him killed as fiercely as he. Its hooves splashed into flesh and broke bones, its iron jaws caught an enemy by the upper arm, lifted him bodily from his feet and shook him, shrieking, until the biceps tore loose and he dropped in a ruined heap. Syagrius slashed and hacked and slashed.

Incredibly, the Franks were not breaking. They fought like the wild men they were. Closing in, they hacked at the hind legs of horses, hamstringing them with great strokes of axes and long, double-edged swords. They seized riders and dragged them down into the dust and blood of the battlefield. There they strove against heavily mailed men; strove with hand-ax or dagger or bared snarling teeth. Bloody madness reined under a crown of sharpened steel and iron. The screaming of maimed horses was even more horrible to hear than that of butchered men. Clanging weapons were as the anvils of a thousand pounding smiths. Men were butchered and died, and horses, and men and men and men.

Syagrius leaped clear as his own horse crashed headlong. Its thrashing hooves brained a Frank who thought to take the Roman commander’s head. Syagrius’s sword, washed with blood and streaming blood, bit through the temple of a glaring savage and into his brain-pan. The fierce eyes glazed and the long-hafted ax fell.

Dismounted among his foes, his shield somehow lost in the fall, Syagrius accepted that he was a dead man. It did not seem to matter. Naught mattered, save taking as many of these barbarian swine as he could into the next world with him. He struck out ragingly. A sword broke on his blood-smeared cuirass and he opened the belly of the Frank responsible.

“My lord! My lord!”

The deep-throated yell announced the arrival of a score of horsemen. Their leader bashed out Frankish brains with his mace even as he shouted. His other hand gripped the rein of a riderless horse. Blinking, shaking sweat from his eyes, Syagrius recognized his aide, Bessas the Goth. Too, he saw that for this instant he stood alone. The battle had eddied around him, in one of those unpredictable and constant freaks of war. Seizing the saddle, he mounted.

Syagrius well knew that but for Bessas’s most timely arrival, he must have died. Yet there was no time to thank the Goth. Syagrius looked about him, and even his strong heart was chilled.

Death!

Nothing but death. Mangled forms and reeking gore.

How many survived, of his splendid cavalry? One man in four? One in five? the foot legions had moved forward in phalanx, and the Franks were breaking those formations, swarming about them, dragging and hacking men down without recking the cost. Even as Syagrius saw them and watched, the limatani faltered. In a moment more they were in full flight.

The Franks, Syagrius had said, can better us in one respect only: Numbers. He had forgotten their half-insane ferocity, or underestimated it. Who could believe this rage to slaughter, this willingness to die?

A Roman could. “God!” he said hoarsely. Then, to Bessas, “Help me rally the horsemen remaining. The Frankish losses have been terrible too. We can reach the city… hold it against them…”

Bessas shook his head. “We couldn’t hold the city now, sir. Let them have it! We can only go there and die. We can ride to the western districts and raise fresh levies. Sir.”

Syagrius blinked. “Aye,” he said slowly. “Aye! We’d no time to raise forces from those regions; the Franks moved too quickly-but now we will have. The barbarians will waste much time in… looting.” He ground his teeth at that thought. He had said it though; it was as good as done. He accepted. “The best man in those parts is that Bicrus, Comes over Nantes. With his backing I can raise all the country from Nantes to Orleans and march north again. Aye, Bessas! Naught will replace what we have lost here… but the Franks cannot replace their losses either, and they are frightful. Nor can they raise a new army, for the bloody barbarians are outside their own country!”

He did not add that they must move swiftly, ere the municipal counts in the north made formal submission to Clovis. He did not add that all hope now hinged on the strength and loyalty of Bicrus, whose example would be required to prevent the bickering counts of the west from doing likewise. Hope was slight enow without such words to dampen it the more. The Lord of Death reigned.

“To Nantes then, sir?”

“To Nantes,” Syagrius said, with a fire of decision that burned away his weariness even while his sword-arm commenced to tremble. “As swiftly as may be! Aye-and in Nantes there is a small errand to be accomplished apart from our main business, now I think on’t. I sent Sigebert of Metz there, to take up the post of chief customs assessor because I had my suspicions of him. Suspicions! Holy Savior! Now I see that he suborned the Franks in my army! That snake prepared them to desert to Clovis and Ragnachar! Need I tell you what is to be done with him when we find him, old friend?”

Bessas spat emphatically. “Nay sir. Ye have no need to tell me, sir.”

“Well horse-it’s Rome you carry now. Fly!”

By sunset, Syagrius and Bessas were riding for the Seine at the head of a grim band of three hundred men. Just over half of them led spare mounts. All were bone-weary from battle and carried such provisions as they had managed to snatch.

Miles behind them, swooping strutting ravens were glutted until they could only just hop. Staring eyeballs vanished down avian gullets in their thousands. Clovis and Ragnachar were utterly victorious. Yet of the twenty thousand men they had led south, barely eight thousand survived to march to the gates of Soissons.