When Death Birds Fly

22

The clamor began well before sunset. The sharp ears of Knud caught it first. Cormac confirmed the Swift One.

“By the light of Behl-there’s a riot somewhere!” The Gael grinned maliciously. “All the better. This cursed city cannot hold too much confusion for me, this night!”

All gave listen intently to the uproar, which was in a distant quarter of Nantes. Shouting and babble, with noises of breaking, merged into an undifferentiated hubbub. Screams of starkest agony rose briefly above the background. Cormac grimaced.

“A religious rampage,” he guessed. “Some poor fools are being ripped apart for not believing as their neighbours do! Such haps all the time among these believers in the gospel of peace and love. Mayhap it will even spread city-wide, ere it ceases or the Count’s men put it down. Time to string your bows.”

In silence, it was done. Cormac did not consider the bow a true weapon-man’s weapon, despite its usefulness. Still a mob of howling religious fanatics ranked in his estimation more as vermin than men. More than once he had seen what they could do to “heathens” and “heretics.” He’d no intention of wasting high-minded scruples on such creatures.

“Cormac,” Wulfhere said in a voice like a groan, “yon be no mere gutter mob! Hearken-there! Was the clash of weapon-steel, or I’ve never heard it.”

Cormac listened briefly. “Aye… Right ye be, old sea-dragon, and there’s the neighing of a big horse, too. Meseems it came from the direction of the gate we entered in the forenoon? Those other sounds be more toward the heart of the city. I wonder me, now…”

“What do you wonder?”

“Little of use. For the present let us wait, and see what befalls.”

The uproar continued. Once it almost died away. Once they heard unmistakably the clop-clop of numerous hooves, the creak and jingle of horse-harness amid the chiming of the war harness of men. This rattle and clop passed along Nantes’s broader and better-paved streets. There followed the ragged tramp of inexperienced men trying to march together-many men, although how many was impossible to guess.

Whoever they were, they shortly ran into fierce opposition. The racket of real combat echoed between walls: war-cries, death-yells, striving and slaying. By this time Cormac and two others had climbed to the roof of their hideaway. That vantage showed them a leaping red glow beneath a pall of smoke in the southern part of the city, near the waterfront. Westward, a flaming sunset blinded their eyes. From that quarter came clearly on the wind the sounds of rioting. Ugly it was, and beastlike. The more purposeful violence of fighting men, soldiers, now seemed concentrated toward the center, where the public buildings rose hard by the market square. Wherever they looked, the city was in chaos.

“’Tis a proper night we chose!” Cormac muttered. “We can move openly through the streets, achieve Sigebert’s death and escape with ease in this madness-if we survive. The gods know our chances seem better than aforenow.”

He descended. In the smaller of the house’s two courtyards, he found Wulfhere frowning at a Gallo-Roman boy to whose arm clung a girl perhaps four years younger than his ten or eleven. Was understandable, with two dozen waraccoutered Danes hemming her in.

“See what’s come avisiting, Cormac!” Wulfhere said. “They fled the rioting… sought a place to hide, this one says.” He jerked a thumb at the boy. “We were just wondering what to do with them.”

Cormac bent a slit-eyed, intimidating stare on the boy. In Latin, he demanded, “By what is this upheaval caused?”

The boy stammered. “Mercy, mighty lord! I… I do not understand.”

“No? It’s mad this city of yours has gone, with rioting: fighting and arson. Any fool can see that. It’s the why of it I want. Either ye can tell me, or not-and the more ye can tell me, lad, the less inclined we are to do harm on ye.”

More boldly then, the boy asked, “Will ye let my sister be?”

Cormac was impressed with the courage of that, in these circumstances. Even so, he did not allow his grim features to soften. Barely glancing at the terrified girl, he said, “She’s too young for ravishing. Besides, it’s bigger, harder quarry I’m concerned with this night. Now speak while my patience lasts.”

“I will, lord! There-there’s been war with the Franks. Our king, Syagrius, has been d-defeated. The shouting in the street says he’s come home. He’s here now, with his army! Some are for him and some think to submit to the Frankish king, Clovis. As ye say sir, the city has gone mad. Be merciful-this is all I know.”

“Ye’ve no knowledge of what Count Bicrus has done about it?”

“Lord, I have heard a dozen things rumored, ere we were separated from our family. Some say he has turned against the king! Others say that he is dead and the other, uh, officials divided-and others that he stands for the king. I cannot say which is true, lord.”

“Likely not. Now attend: we will do no harm on ye. By my advice, ye’ll be hiding yonder, in what was kitchen and larders. All solid stone, with easy access to the courtyard. An this house takes fire, ye’ll not be burned, or trapped to suffocate in the smoke either. There be hidey-holes, too, where no looters ought to find ye, supposing any trouble in this disused shell of a place, as I think they will not. Understand me?”

“Yes, lord!”

“Good. Keep together and quiet, and I hope soon ye are with your family. My friends and I depart now.”

And, after Cormac had told his companions of the exchange, they did leave the place, on their dark errand. Boy and girl watched them tramp away through the courtyard. Both were amazed that such terrible men had not slain them out of hand for the mere sport of it. That wore away enough for them to become sensible children. They hid where Cormac had recommended.

Making a path through the congested streets of Nantes was not easy, even for armoured men with shields and swords or axes. Once the company stopped while Cormac gave listen to a fat man haranguing a crowd. He spoke in favour of King Syagrius, and cursed Count Bicrus for fleeing the city in manner cowardly. Mac Art listened but briefly ere he was convinced that this jiggle-belly knew no more than the boy they had queried-and, while unlike the boy, would never be so honest as to admit his ignorance. Cormac gestured and he and his men pressed on. They were peculiarly his, now, with Wulfhere so obviously and pitifully weakened.

Because they knew Nantes well and Sigebert’s manse had belonged to the customs inspector they’d formerly dealt with, Cormac and Wulfhere were able to find the place. No happiness was on them to find it locked and barred. The place appeared deserted.

“I’ll wager One-ear’s not here,” Wulfhere growled. “That one will have declared for whichever side he thinks apt to win, and be active somehow.”

“True for you, Wulf,” Cormac agreed nodding. “Still, there must be servants, a housekeeper; a few guards at least, for us to be questioning.”

“That pig Lucanor may be here!” Knud snapped. Hopefully.

None stayed them as they broke in. Sadly, neither Lucanor nor his master was to be found. Sigebert had left not so much as a guard or two. Belike he deemed it too petty a precaution, with a kingdom’s fate in the balance-and his own shining future. Yet it was as Cormac suggested: a few servants remained, and the formidable housekeeper, Austrechilda. She knew far more.

Austrechilda was stubborn. Two men had to hold her face in a bowl of water to make her speak. Even then it appeared that she might rather drown than divulge what she knew. A tribute to her character, mayhap-or to Sigebert’s ability to inspire fear. Cathula had told mac Art of Austrechilda. Not until she had come up for the sixth time, snorting and choking and blowing water through her nose, did she decide that talking was preferable to dying now, though Sigebert might have to be faced later.

“He-he-” she gasped. “-he’s at the manse of Count Bicrus. Some days agone… he and the municipal-curia and the… bishop, declared support for the Franks. What’s become of the Count I know not. It’s-ulp! ulp! in my mind that he-he’s dead. Now the city is divided… and my lord Sigebert sits in the Count’s manse, whilst the forces he has raised battle Sy-Syagrius and his men.”

Cormac swallowed and digested that while he demanded, at once: “What of Lucanor Antiochus? It’s a fleshy-faced man I speak of, with a thin blade of a nose, and airs about him. Where might he be found?”

“With-the lord Sigebert.” Austrechilda quaked into a long fit of coughing. “She may sit,” Cormac told the Danes who held her. To Wulfhere: “This makes sense, I’m thinking.

Wulfhere nodded. “Dark plots and treason, with Sigebert in the midst of it. Aye. An he’s against this king, I be for Syagrius!”

“Away out of here then, to the Count’s rath!”

That manse stood nearby, close to the forum and basilica. Lurid firelight made the great square almost as bright as it had. been ere sunset, for several buildings were ablaze. Towering flames created great lamps. The square was choked with men, all revealed in that evil light of orange and yellow. Armoured horsemen rode down foot soldiers or smote them with sword and mace, while they were being speared or sworded in their turn. In adjacent streets and alleys, other foot soldiers seemed to be fighting on the side of the mounted men: Syagrius’s. The city was indeed divided.

“Blood of the gods! It’s little difference our two dozen men will make, in that butcher’s yard!” Cormac looked around, his eyes invisible within their slits. “Aye… best we place ourselves on some rooftop, choose targets for arrows, and shout ‘Syagrius!’ as our battle-cry. Peradventure in a while we shall be able to essay more without getting ourselves killed for naught.”

Men looked at him who’d become General Cormac, and at Wulfhere who coughed in a sudden eddy of smoke. “Aye,” the giant said, and his eyes watered.

The Danes implemented the plan swifttly with out standing on ceremony. They chose the building whose roof looked best for their purpose, and they forced a way into it. A horseman actually struck at Halfdan, who ducked and gave no return stroke. The horse bore that surprised Goth on by, while the scalemailed men vanished into the building. They gained the roof by the simple expedient of breaking a large hole in the tiles. Between fire and Wulfhere’s ax, the roofs of Nantes were suffering much this night. Soon they’d found a place to stand and aim: a small terraced roof-garden that they might have reached less forcefully had there been less haste on them.

Below, Frankdom’s supporters had had their fill. Doggedly they retreated, still fighting and forming a semblance of ranks before the dead Count Bicrus’s manse. Seeing them drawn up thus, Cormac blinked incredulously. Be this all of them left alive?

Probably not. Many must have melted into the maze of streets, deserting. Few of those remaining still had shields. Those who had were placed in the forefront. Between them and the mailed horsemen was a grisly morass of dead or wounded. That and the short distance made a mounted charge impossible. The horse-soldiers began dismounting, to finish the night’s work afoot. Cormac noted that orders were given by a man in red-crested helm and tattered cloak of crimson.

“It’s Sygarius hisself that must be.”

“And a beautiful target he’d make were we against him,” Wulfhere rumbled, “asitting up there on his big horse with his fine helmet and cuirass! Our arrows would nail it to his backbone! Why stand we gaping? Shout and loose!”

The Danes laughed, and obeyed. Their bellowed “SYAGRIUSSS!” rolled over the square to bring heads around in bewilderment, just as two dozen arrows sang over the carpet of dead and dying. They thudded deep into the ranks of Frankish supporters. Six shafts actually drove through shields, to flesh themselves lightly in the men holding them. Others found throats, and brains and thighs.

Another flight, humming high-voiced, and another. Danish arrows slew Franks to aid Romans and Goths. Each volley was accompanied by a new roar of “SYAGRIUS!” The enemies of the defeated consul-king continued to go down; not spectacularly, collapsing in a mass, but with a nerve-wracking, inexorable steadiness.

Cormac was not comfortable watching easy butchery. “Knowledge is on him whose side we’re on, unless he be fool. Let’s be going down to announce ourselves.”

“What-by our true names?”

Cormac paused at that. “Hm! Best not, perhaps. We come from Bro Erech with a score to settle, with the One-ear. That is all Syagrius need know of his-allies.”

Wulfhere agreed and ordered his Danes to hold fast and continue pulling string until he called for them. He followed Cormac from the roof then, into the slaughter-reeking square. Franks were bawling for bows, and finding none, and going down. Two strangers emerged from the building whose roof rained feathered death.

They faced each other in the midst of the shambles, those men of war; the Roman commander with his tired face and battered, gore-crusted cuirass fitted to his torso, astride his wounded horse; the gigantic Dane with his great beard and ever-thirsty ax; the dark, sombre Gael in his shirt of black mail, treading over the slain in the light of a blazing city. Once Cormac slipped, in a puddle of sticky scarlet.

“ Meseems it’s to the Consul Syagrius I speak.”

“I am he. And yourselves?” Tired that voice-and still powerful.

“Our names mean naught,” Cormac said, lying mightily. “Mawl of Bro Erech I am, and this be Brogar, a Dane. It’s to settle a score with Sigebert One-ear we’ve come. He is hated by many.”

“I believe it,” Syagrius said drily. “Look there! They retreat!”

Unable to withstand a merciless arrow-storm that struck them down gradually and horribly efficiently yet could not be fought, the supporters of Frankdom withdrew through the gates into the late Count’s manse. The heavy gates slammed with a crash.

“Save your arrows!” Wulfhere roared to his men. “Come down here! This night’s work is to be finished hand to hand!”

While mounted men blinked at that Olympian voice, Cormac spoke to Syagrius: “Be Sigebert in there?”

The consul looked into that face with its incongruous grey eyes, and he recognized a man of his own kind; a man other men followed. Besides, Syagrius had reason to be grateful. Of his Goths, some six score survived. Within the manse and its ground waited Sigebert with fifty Franks and something like a hundred Gallo-Roman traitors. Two dozen such fighters as he now saw entering the bloody square might well turn the scale, especially as they seemed fresh. The giant called Brogar and the dark swordsman who gave his name as Mawl looked worth another dozen, by themselves alone.

Therefore Syagrius said, “The swine now calls himself Count of Nantes, from which I infer that Bicrus is dead. A very good man, Bicrus. As for me-I am here now partly because of Sigebert’s machinations. Ere he left Soissons he corrupted a part of my army. The result was that those men deserted me when my need was the sorest. That slimy bas- With Count Bicrus murdered,” Syagrius went on almost dully, “all hope of rallying now seems lost. I must flee into exile or die here in Gaul. But by the saints, I shall settle accounts with Sigebert of Metz first!”

“This boon I ask,” Cormac said. “Let us have him.”

“You ask much.” Syagrius frowned. “Still… were it not for your archers, I might have lost the fight in merely clearing yon gateway…”

“A good man,” Wulfhere said. “I’d never ha’ admitted that!”

With no change of expression or tone, the consul said, “Suppose we go in together, and agree that Sigebert belongs to him who lays hands on him first?”

Cormac mac Art never had to reply to that suggestion he liked not.

The black owl appeared.

Huge, malevolent and horrific, it dropped from the flame-lit sky. At its awful screech Syagrius’s war-horse reared. Not even its training could hold the beast steady in the face of such eldritch terror. The horse threw its rider and bolted. The consul fell heavily.

The black owl rushed down on him with another ear-splitting scream. Its wings were black brooms, thirty feet from tip to tip, that drove the summer air in gusts. Its eyes flamed yellow. Its beak was stretched wide for cracking bones while its feet flexed like twin arrays of metal hooks. Other war-horses scattered in blind fear before it.

Cormac’s sword was in his hand without his conscious thought. He slashed at the monster-and felt gooseflesh when his sword passed through its body to no effect. It glared, gathered sinewy legs beneath it, and made a hopping spring at the Gael. He went down beneath it.

“Ah no,” Wulfhere, groaned, “not the claws-not him too!”

For Cormac all was suddenly darkness, fetor and unnatural cold. The vast black wings were a buffeting storm about him. Talons fastened in his thighs with eightfold stabs of agony. The beak darted at his face.

Cormac’s hands leaped up. He seized death’s’ own throat, as Wulfhere had done on Midsummer’s Eve. Like Wulfhere, he found nothing tangible to grasp. Black feathers. Numbing, weakening chill. Neither flesh nor bone resisted his grip to make it effective. The pain of its talons left him not even breath to cry out.

They rolled and thrashed amid the rubble of war, man and monster, and only one was in pain, awful pain. Cormac’s free hand stabbed and slashed with his sword-uselessly. That cruel gape of a beak came closer.

Advice flashed into Cormac’s mind as he knew he was to die; advice from Zarabdas and later from Morfydd.

Against every instinct of the weapon-man, he let fall his sword.

Fumbling beneath his mail, barking his knuckles, he tore the Egyptian sigil from his neck. In his haste he broke the chain, whose links cut sharply into his skin ere they parted. Cormac never noticed. He thrust the emblem of the winged serpent, of the Sun, into the black owl’s face. And the monster fell back. In that heartbeat of time, Cormac attacked.

His hands gripped the broken ends of the chain as it had been a strangler’s knotted rope. He twisted the pendant hard about the black owl’s neck. It was inspired, that move: for the first time there seemed to be resistance; solid purchase to his grip. Was as if the old amulet had lent substance to the creature. As if? Like it or no, the Gael knew that was precisely what was happening.

The monster thrashed frenziedly in attempt to flee. Its talons came out of Cormac’s thighs. The vast wings beat. Cormac squinted in that wind and hung on while he knotted the broken ends of the pendant’s chain immovably together. The round, sinister head turned then; the beak attacked. Instinctively mac Art flung up his arms to shield his face, and hurled himself backward.

The black owl whirled up with an awful shriek. When Cormac tried to climb at once to his feet, he discovered that his legs would not lift him. He groaned at the caustic pain in his muscled thighs; he, who had not groaned when years before he’d been tortured by Picts. The best he could do was rise to one knee. Blood of the gods it’s crippled me!

Nor had the black owl gone. It fluttered wildly in air above the corpse-gutted square. Cormac stared, and thought of an immense black moth that blundered back and forth between invisible walls, seeking escape from a confinement it could not understand. Battering its own wings and body with mindless persistence. A monster presence over Nantes.

Then it began to burn.

It burned. Bright golden fire encircled its neck like a blazing torc. The dazzle hurt the eyes of every staring watcher. Metal poured molten from a crucible had been less painfully brilliant. The flame, fell and preternatural as the victim, spread along the black owl’s wings to their very tips, streaming behind, shedding sparks. They fell in bright array toward the watchers below, and winked out in air.

Sunfire, Cormac thought, while his back crawled.

The dark soul of Lucanor the mage thrashed in the bright fire it had tempted once too often. The blaze covered its head, took its head. It screamed one final awful cry and lurched aloft. It flew higher, higher, higher, until there was but a brilliant spark in the sky, a phoenix pyre from which there would come no renewal… and then naught.

Silence filled the square. Owl and fire had vanished, and amulet.

Wulfhere broke that silence: he destroyed it. He had staggered and clutched at his mighty mailed breast as the black owl was destroyed. Now he cried out in amaze and relief, and it was a bellow.

“The pain is gone! Gone! It-I’ll wager the talon-marks are vanished, too! Cormac; the curse is lifted! I’m whole again! WHOLE!”

Cormac’s legs had been freed as suddenly of the crippling pain. He rose. He stood. Crom and Behl! He’d felt that agony for mere moments. It awed him to realize that Wulfhere had endured it for weeks; had given orders, fought battles, slept, led his men while under such a burden.

“I’m fieeee!” Wulfhere thundered. “I shall live!” He lifted ax and fist to the sky, a titan on spraddled legs like treetrunks. “HAAAAA!”

In a shaken voice the Consul Syagrius asked, “What was that horror?”

Cormac shook his head. “We know not. It’s attacked us afore, a monster seeking destruction. It’s gone, whatever it was.”

“Gone, aye. It is in my mind that but for you, Mawl, I should have fallen its victim.” Syagrius smiled grimly. “I can offer little reward any longer, but for what it is worth, I renounce any claim to Sigebert of Metz! He is yours, Mawl.” The Roman threw aside the remnant of his military cloak and raised his sword. “Now let us go in there and take him!”

They gripped hands in a silent sealing of their purpose, and Wulfhere’s huge red-furred hand rested atop both of theirs to make a triple clasp. Then they gathered their men and moved to the attack.