When Death Birds Fly

21

Five weeks had passed since that fateful Midsummer’s Eve. The month of July was ending and sickles flashed bright in the fields as the peasantry, men and women alike, cut the heads of grain. These would be threshed and stored. Later the stalks would be scythed down for straw, and finally the gleaners would pick through the dusty stubble. These harvest weeks were a time of hard, hot work.

A pretty peasant girl in patched, dun-colored skirt drove a flock of geese along the road toward the frowning city gates. Her goal was the market within. Three ox-drawn wains followed her at their usual plodding pace. Indeed, these seemed to move more slowly than most such wagons, the yokel drivers hardly troubling to employ their long ox-goads. Mayhap they were half asleep from the heat. Mayhap they wished to remain behind the girl with her flock, for she was more than pretty enow to distract the attention of the guards at the gate.

They were chaffing her bawdily, one fumbling after her breasts, as the great wooden wheels rumbled by. The wench’s geese scattered, gossiping in annoyance. She swore with as much authority as either guard could have done. One of these drew himself up on the rim of each cart in turn and gave the contents a casual glance.

“Wool for market,” he told his companion, who did not appear greatly concerned. Neither of them so much as spoke to the ox-drivers. They were too interested in the wench, who was interested in naught save getting her flock of geese under control again, and passing through the city gate unraped. Was fortunate for her the guards happened to have an immediate superior who was strict about such matters-while his men were on duty, anyhow.

The oxen plodded; the carts creaked. Somehow they missed their way in the narrow, winding streets of Nantes. Instead of the market-place, they came to halt in the weed-grown courtyard of a deserted house.

“Nobody about,” one of the drivers grunted.

Another rattled on the side of each cart in turn with his ox-goad. The fleeces upsurged and parted. Bearded Danes in tunics burst out of the wool, gulping the sweet light air. The suffocating heat under the fleeces had turned their faces black-purple and they sweated rivers. Aye, and fleeces had been packed under and around them as well, lest the guards should go so far as to open the wagons’ tail-boards. This they had endured all down the long straight approach to the city’s gate, beneath the sun of high summer in Gaul.

“Cormac,” Karlsevni Ratnose gasped, “your clever ideas will slay us all yet.”

Cormac clapped him on the shoulder. “Come, man, it’s a fine long restful drive ye’ve had, when ye might have had to walk! Cease leaning upon the wheel and making mouths like a speared fish. We’ve work to do.”

’ Heavy wicker hampers were unloaded, and carried into the deserted house. Meanwhile the ox-drivers pitched all the camouflaging wool into one cart, making one full load of it. The full cart then rumbled away to market, the two empty ones to an inn-yard. Two dozen northrons licked their lips at the thought of that latter destination.

The wicker chests contained their war-gear and they busked themselves swiftly. Out of the question to wear it while they rode in the ox-carts, hidden under wool! So much metal, leather and padding would have killed them with heatstroke. They had suffered enow in their tunics!

The hampers contained goatskins of water, also. The stuff was warm. The Danes drank it eagerly, none the less. They had a deal of lost sweat to make good.

“Ah, for some ale!” mourned Knud the Swift.

“Be cheerful,” Makki Grey-gull consoled him. “Belike ye’ll be drinking Valhalla’s mead by next sunrise.”

Wulfhere looked ghastly, and not because of his suffocating ride in the cart. His broad face had the semblance of a hollow-eyed, red-bearded skull. Was all Cormac could do to hold his own features impassive as he glanced at his friend.

“Word seems out concerning the Frankish conquest, and truly,” he remarked, chiefly for something to say. “The countryside is in a ferment! Saw ye the smoke upon the horizon? That cannot be Frankish troops, marauding here so soon. A sign of some peasantish revolt, I’m thinking, inspired by panic. It’s placid enow they seem, closer to the city. It wonders me how long that will last.”

Wulfhere shrugged. “No knowing.”

“An they’ve sense on them, the country folk on the great estates will support their masters to the hilt, for once. A Frankish war-host on the march be like a plague of locusts for stripping the country. Remember ye that one small war-band we had to hunt down in Frisia, a couple of years past? They left a trail like to that of a thousand berserkers!”

“Aye.”

Cormac heard himself talking too much, especially by contrast with Wulfhere’s taciturn replies. He forced himself to shut up. Morfydd had said that a possible remedy for his giant friend’s decline lay in the death of Lucanor Antiochus, had she not? Then death should be Lucanor’s portion, were he guarded by all the legions of Rome!

Wulfhere spoke, wearily. “It’s a fool’s errand, this, Cormac. Ye and the lads ought not be here. I’m thinking my weird is upon me, and I were best to meet it without dragging friends into Hel’s cold arms.”

Cormac snorted. “Ye may be dying, for all I know. When ye begin talking thin-blooded caution and resignation, then it’s far wrong something is! Yet as a matter of simple pride, ye ought to resent dying at the hands of such a verminous thing as Lucanor!”

“Lucanor will be waiting for us, prepared.”

“It’s not Lucanor who gives the orders in this partnership he’s after forming, Wulf. To that I’ll take oath. It’s Sigebert who’s master, and it’s much else Sigebert has to think on. I’ll answer for it, yon two-legged serpent be fuller informed of the war than we, or indeed any man on Gaul’s western shore. It’s little foresight he’ll be having to spare for Wulfhere and Art’s son Cormac. Nor will Sigebert be foreseein’ that we’d dare attack him again, in Nantes itself!”

Wulfhere sighed gustily. “It may be. I know not.”

Cormac shook his head. A different Wulfhere, this one, indeed!

Neither of them knew what Lucanor had once said to his Frankish master; that Wulfhere would lie dead of the black owl’s talons within five months at the longest. They knew not of his other boast that, for all his great strength, Wulfhere must become incapable of fighting or other great exertion in forty or fifty days. Such had been Lucanor’s estimate, and thrice a dozen days had since passed.

Wulfhere’s little war-band hid in the empty house while the hours passed. Immediately after sunset they’d set forth, to move by devious ways on Sigebert’s mansion. There, if no better opportunity offered, they would scale his walls and make a frontal assault.

Ere resorting to aught so desperate, though, Cormac meant to capture one of Sigebert’s guards. He’d force the Frankish hog to say whether Sigebert and Lucanor were actually within the manse.

An they were not, it would become necessary to learn where they were. Cormac thought it bade fair to be a tricky, demanding night, with poor prospect of success and a likely one of death for them all… and it never entered his head to complain or reconsider.

Nor anybody else’s. This was for Wulfhere; dying Wulfhere.