When Death Birds Fly

2

“The Basques… claim that they are the only unmixed descendants of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula. This claim has some basis, for in 19 BC, when the Roman conquest of Spain had been completed, the Basques [Vascones] were already established and managed to maintain their independence. Their love of freedom and independence has characterized their entire history.”

– J.S. Roucek

“They formed a single cultural unit, reinforced by traditions, by a strong sense of racial homogeneity, and by the Basque language…”

– Encyclopedia Britannica

In the fishing village well to the east of Galicia, people rejoiced. True, fishing villages seldom knew rejoicing when pirate ships came down on them, and three such were drawn up on the fine yellow sand of their bay. But villagers and pirates alike were Basques, or Vascones as the Latin had it, as the sea the Romans called Vazcaya was Basquaya to these folk who had named it, or Bascaya sometimes called Biscaya. To them who had so long known it, that sea of ever-shifting winds was not the Bay of Treachery that strangers named it.

A driftwood fire roared and crackled, hurling sparks high into the purple dark and mingling its scent with that of the salt sea. Other tempting aromas filled the nostrils of the pirate chieftain: wine and roasting whale meat and blubber yielding its oil in cauldrons.

Lithe this man Usconvets was, with his fine musculature well displayed: for he wore only a leather kilt. With his dark skin, lean, straight-featured face and black eyes, Usconvets quite resembled a former king of the British Picts named Bran Mak Morn, who had lived some two hundred and eighty years before. Usconvets did not know of that likeness. He would never know it, and had he known would have deemed it a matter for no particular interest or comment. The Basques had never at any time chosen a king or suffered one, or divided themselves into commoners and aristocrats. Nor had another people ever succeeded in imposing a king on the Basques. The Roman Empire had tried, and failed, and the Gothic Empire after it.

Neither had the Picts of far-off Britain bowed to Rome. Their racial kinship with the Basques was recognizable now only in the lines of the Pictish chiefs. Their followers amid the Caledonian heather had otherwise become a grotesque, distorted image of the race that produced them. Of this Usconvets did know, though only by rumour and hearsay.

Such matters were of minimal interest to him. Usconvets the pirate was interested in his immediate people; Usconvets was interested in Usconvets.

Now he bit deeply into succulent whale steak. Its juices flowed down his throat to strengthen him. Immediately his stomach cried out for more. Usconvets was a hungry man. He had earned this eating. Had been his spear that slew the whale, far out on the blue sea. The village would feast on this catch for days!

Watching his black-haired rovers disport themselves, he grinned. Some, paired with girls of the fishing village, danced with all the violent energy of the flames that limned them black and gold. Others had gone from the firelight with chosen partners. Yet others ate and drank, talked and sang with the high exuberant animation of their race.

“Usconvets.”

He looked at Tenil, daughter of the village headman-the “first among equals” in the phrasing of the thrice-proud Basques. Usconvets had married her a year agone, and so far as he was concerned she had no equal. Just now his strapping woman Tenil sweated profusely from the heat of the rendering kettles, and she smelled of the whale oil, and the pirate leader wanted to pull her down beside him and embrace her here and now. Overwhelmed by sight and smell of her and unaccustomed to resisting whims, he did so.

“Wait! Trouble!” Tenil gasped, fending him off. Such was not her wont at all, and Usconvets frowned his surprise. “Hear me, Usconvets… there is trouble abrewing. Kuicho thinks the same. We have been talking-see, there he comes.”

Aye, there Kuicho came. Usconvets’s hands remained where they were on his woman, one clutching, but the fingers ceased moving. Trouble? He watched Kuicho without enthusiasm. Taller the man was than the pirate by a little, and far thinner, and so much older that Kuicho’s hair and beard had no right to remain so black. He stood straight as a wand. Strange were his eyes; he looked into distances that had naught to do with mundane horizons. He could read omens in the wind, Kuicho could, and in the flight of birds and the crash of surf, and he could foretell the weather. The pirate leader had learned to listen to this far-seer who had sailed with him for years.

“Tenil speaks of trouble,” Usconvets said, releasing his woman with a reluctance he showed by keeping a dark hand on her thigh.

“Worse than trouble,” the older man told him darkly. He hunkered down and bent his head close. “It is evil blacker than the secret pits of the sea. A stranger is here in the village; a Roman.”

Usconvets felt lazy with food and drink and preferred to remain so. Besides, he wanted Tenil in his arms again. Carelessly he said, “Even Romans are not that bad, Kuicho. They are no longer so much trouble! Why did the people suffer him to stay on?”

“Suffer him to-” Tenil clenched formidable fists in bitter fury. “My brothers strove to drive him away with sticks. When he stared at them and spoke to them, they stumbled and fell down and could not get up-like babes learning to walk! He bade them keep their distance else he do worse.”

“He has our tongue?”

“Latin only, I think,” Tenil said, looking uneasy. “His meaning was plain without a shared language. Still, you have Latin and it is you he wishes to speak with. He said your name.”

“Orko!” the pirate swore, springing to his feet. “All this-and from the time we landed, not a word to me? Not even from you?”

“None dared say! You arrived in such jubilation! I came to tell you, just now.”

“None dared say because your brothers tripped over their own feet! Where is this… terrifying stranger?”

“In yonder hut, alone,” Kuicho said somberly, and he pointed with a bony arm. “I am told he has abode there for two days, neither eating nor drinking. Such has the sound of a sorcerer’s fast. Those who dared approach the hut turned back pale and shuddering ere they reached it. I know something of such things, and I tell you that they were wise. Already the place smells of darkness and the abyss, and him here so brief a time.”

“It is only a hut,” Usconvets growled.

Yet he rubbed his lean jaw reflectively and stared about at the fisher-folk with new eyes. Of a sudden it seemed to him that their revels were too intense, as if they would deny a brooding fear that haunted them all. Darkness and the abyss, was it-and the demon-prowled pits of the sea!

“He would speak with me? Then he shall, and he’ll not enjoy it! By Orko,” the pirate swore, invoking for the second time his Basque thunder god, for even his ship was named Odots: thunder. “I’ll drag him forth by the heels!”

Tenil’s hand closed hard on his arm and he felt the bite of the ring she wore; he’d taken it off an imperial ship two years agone. At feel of the harsh tension in her body he stared at her, astonished. She was not looking at him. She stared at something else, away on his left. Something tickled at Usconvets’s armpits as he turned his head in that direction and, for some reason he could not name, he felt cold.

A man stood at the edge of the leaping firelight.

This was the dread Stranger who invoked such fear and low-voiced talk?

He did not look so awesome. Once magnificent, his body-enveloping green robe was filthy from hard travel and neglect. Too, it fitted less well than once. The man had lost flesh in his journeying. Nor had two days’ complete fasting helped him regain it. Nor was he tall. All this Usconvets saw at once, and that the fellow’s greasy black hair and beard had become as unkempt as the rest of him in his days of hard traveling.

Hmp. Had he any noteworthy feature at all, it was the black eyes that smouldered above a nose like a blade. Rara avis in terris!

“Who are you?” the pirate demanded, in Latin. “What do you here?”

“Nomen mea Lucanorem est,” the stranger said in a quiet voice: “My name is Lucanor. I seek the sea-chieftain Usconvets.”

“Behold him! Mine this village is! A woman of it I have married. Trouble here you have caused, and you not of my people.”

“Not so, chieftain. I protest that I have done no harm, and none I intend. Naught have I taken, beyond space to rest. I have not eaten of your food, though I had power to demand it. Now only to talk I wish.”

Kuicho muttered in his own language that the man was an unctuous liar. Usconvets motioned the tall man to silence. Kuicho would not heed: “He has not eaten because he is about some sorcery or divination that required fast!” he blurted in Eskuara, the language of the Basques; Kuicho, who affected to have no Latin. “I tell you, this man brings evil!”

Usconvets grinned, for he was a pirate and long since had trained himself to show only confidence, or rage. “Then best he should not see us quarrel! Fret yourself not, friend. I am about to listen to him, not grant his every whim. Surely there is about him no appearance of a man of great power.”

At Usconvets’s satirical tone Kuicho lapsed into a silence that compressed his lips. His stare remained baleful nonetheless, and it never left the stranger called Lucanor.

“Talk, then,” Usconvets said, again in Latin.

Lucanor eyed him calculatingly with that odd burning gaze. “Your race is ancient, sea-chieftain,” he said, so quietly. “The Vascones have been great sailors and builders of ships since the world began. Are you pleased with the way the world wags nowadays?”

“Bascones vivent, Roma fuit,” Usconvets said with wicked simplicity; “The Basques exist; Rome has perished.”

“You are bold.”

The pirate’s dark eyes narrowed to stare into those darker ones. “What then shall I complain of?”

Lucanor, mage of Antioch, made an expansive Oriental gesture that flapped the sleeve of his robe. “The Saxon sea-rovers, perchance? The Heruli? The Armorican corsairs? Even the men of Hivernia, who sometimes raid this far from home? Once it could be said, and truly, that the Cantabrian Sea belonged to the Vascones. Now every wave of it is contested by others.”

Usconvets laughed. “You mean that every wave flings up their drowned corpses on the strand! Others may dare the sea yonder, Lucanor; we, and only we, know it. The Cantabrian Sea belongs to us because we belong to it. My people will still be here when the Saxons, the Heruli and those others are a memory!”

So softly Lucanor said, “What of the Suevi?”

Those he named were a Germanic tribe, like the stronger Vandals; they were Suebi to the Basques. They had come into Spain with the Vandals and had stayed behind when the Vandals under their ruthless, crafty king crossed the strait to Africa. Now the Suevi held the northwest of Hispania for their own, despite the Goths who raided the rest of the peninsula-except, of course, for the demesne of the Basques.

“What of them? We will be here long after they have gone, also! Besides, we are speaking of the sea. The Suebi do not fare asea. They are landsmen utterly.”

“Praemonitus, praemunitus,” Lucanor said. “Their king plans to make them a sea power.” The man’s sunken eyes flamed with a consuming hatred; Usconvets noted. “He has hired men to help him do so. The Vandals did as much, remember, under a strong king who knew what he was about! And in the end the Vandals sacked Rome. The Suevi are first cousins to the Vandals.”

Usconvets nodded slowly. “Forewarned,” he said, “is as you said forearmed. What men has he hired, this first among the Sueves?”

Shivering with the force of his enmity, Lucanor said, “Wulfhere Splitter of Skulls, and Cormac mac Art.”

“Ahh…”

Usconvets well knew those names. No man plying the pirate’s trade along the western shores of Gaul could fail to know them. The Suevic king’s plans had seemed laughable, at first. Now the firelight danced on Usconvets’s face to show its concern, and Lucanor noted.

“Were you to slay them,” the dark-faced mage said, “the matter would end aborning. I can aid you to do this thing.” His eyes were black. They pierced.

Tenil swore hotly. “My man, will you listen to this trouble-maker? He hates the Dane and the Hivernian, that’s clear, and would make you the tool of his spite. Could be no plainer! What be his squabbles to us?”

“Naught,” Usconvets said nodding, and shortly. “Naught in any way, woman. Yet an he speaks the truth in these other matters… aye, I will listen.”

“You are in error,” Kuicho warned him.

“By the Sun above me! I will decide that! Continue, stranger.”

Lucanor’s I have him! was a fleeting smirk. “These red swine are sailing from Brigantium, in quest of shipbuilders for King Veremund. They will find them. Unless… They will befoul these waters with their accursed presence within five days at most. Best it would be for yourself and all Vascones, sea-chieftain, did they never leave them. And is not Cormac mac Art’s race the ancient enemy of your own? The man is a Gael of Hivernia. Blood of Atlantis and Cimmeria runs in his body-”

“Not of Atlantis!” Kuicho snapped, bristling, betraying his understanding of Latin. “We are the race of sunken Atlantis, we and no others.”

This Kuicho believed, for it was the tradition of his people. Lucanor knew better. The Basque race had its origin in the Pictish Isles west of Atlantis, in those ancient days before two awful cataclysms had changed the shape of the world. It did not astonish, that millenia of word-of-mouth repetition had confused the Pictish Isles with Atlantis itself.

“So you say,” the mage said sharply. “None the less, were Cimmerians and Picts as brothers in the long ago? Were the Gaels and Basques as brothers, here in Hispania? Is not the blood debt between them and you ancient, and heavy, and scarlet? The Danish Skull-splitter and Cormac mac Art are coming here, with one ship and scarce forty men! Slay them all, sea-chieftain, for the sake of what was and to prevent what may be!”

Lucanor stopped himself. Though he panted with passion, his cunning told him he had said enow. To harangue the pirate further would be to lose so proud and willful a man. He stood and watched, thinking hatred, while Usconvets considered the scheme without making reply.

Usconvets was tempted by the prospect of a good rousing fight, and who knew what rich plunder might be aboard the Raven of the Skullsplitter and mac Art? Besides, it was certainly true that he did not wish the Suevic kingdom to grow powerful asea. Yet-Tenil and Kuicho had much of right with them, too. Usconvets neither liked this stranger nor cared to be, used in his machinations.

“Now I will speak!” Kuicho cried. “I know you, Lucanor, you who worship the Black Gods of R’lyeh, accursed and banished since before there were men! I know also this man you speak of, aye who he is and who he was as well, this Cormac mac Art. I too have my powers, lackey of Cthulhu, and ways of knowing what other men cannot. In former lives he was friend to my people, this undying ka that is presently Cormac mac Art. In times to come he will be our friend again.”

Usconvets, like Lucanor, stared at his old companion Kuicho, and when he felt Tenil’s hand slip into his he was not loath to press it.

“Once he was King Kull of Valusia,” Kuicho was saying, his eyes seeming to flash like polished gems in the firelight. “Then his war-companion and blood-brother was Brule the Spear-slayer and his ally the chieftain Ka-nu. His ancestor in the body he now habits was Cormac, Prince of Connacht, ally in battle to Bran Mak Morn who was the last great king of the British Picts. I see; I know. Kull is Kormak the Kelt!”

For a moment later Kuicho stared at Lucanor, and then he rounded on Usconvets. “And this too I see! Follow the counsels of this man and he will lead you to disaster, Usconvets!”

The pirate was troubled, and showed it. “Well, you say one thing, old friend. This… Luke says another. You both claim powers common men do not have. Suppose you strive together? I shall be guided by the advice of the victor.”

Although he spoke it slowly, as a thought said aloud and a suggestion only, the savage laughter in his eyes belied that. Both Lucanor and Kuicho knew that refusing was not among their choices. Usconvets ruled, by being Usconvets. He amplified that fact by making a sweeping gesture that said it plain: Get ye at it, both!

Basque and Graeco-Roman faced each other; the tall lean man in the unkempt robe and the tall stringy one in nothing much; a stark figure of humankind with roots running back thousands of years-and full consciousness of those ties to past times and lives.

They faced each other in the firelight, and that swiftly it began.

The Basque diviner seemed inhumanly tall and straight, his leanly muscled lines nigh unbroken by clothing and the firelight playing upon him. Yet about the other man’s rumpled, insignificant figure the shadows thickened and swirled. Only the sounds of the surf disrupted the stillness-and something seemed to perch on Lucanor’s shoulders or to erupt from his body. Partially merged with that robed form, a part of him, it seemed to ruffle vast black wings. Tenil’s face paled, and it was from the grip of Usconvets’s fingers on her hand. They stared, and she was of no mind to beg for release. Usconvets would have taken his oath that the stranger’s eyes blazed yellow as candle-fire or the stone called topaz. The pirate’s bold heart chilled within him. Tenil turned her face away from Lucanor, into her man’s bulgey chest.

The villagers were silent. Many had surreptitiously fled or slipped away into the darkness. Fearsome sorcery hovered over their village, and the air was laden with a miasma of the preternatural.

All knew that forces strove just as had there been the clash of steel on iron and wood and the grunt of striving warriors. Two stares met and clashed and challenged. Kuicho’s eyes, stretched wide in his masklike face, mirrored the stars that seemed to stumble as they were called on to feed the power that mage turned on mage. Lucanor’s eyes had narrowed. Their abnormal, xanthic, lambent glow might have been some trick of the firelight… but Usconvets did not believe it.

He felt it, palpable as heavy fog or low clouds: mighty forces surged between these two and no two weapon-men ever strove the harder with sharpened steel.

Both men’s faces gleamed and then they were sweating huge drops, though they stood motionless. They strove mightily, without moving from where they stood and without so much as raising their arms. Kuicho’s bare long limbs could be seen to tremble with effort, with focused energies.

The very air between the moveless combatants sang and vibrated with unseen forces. Usconvets knew that he watched war, eerie and of the shadow-world with powers drawn from the minds and those breathless gulfs between the stars, and that combat was no less than the striving one against the other of two enemy ships on stormy waters. Did he know doubts then, at having pitted his old companion against the newcomer whose appearance was obviously deceiving, as a long, lean rangy man could be strong as one with muscles like stones?

He had cause to be. As abruptly as it had begun, it ended. Kuicho shrieked, shook and twitched like an aspen in a gale, clutched at his eyes-and crumpled to the sand.

Instantly Lucanor reeled as with release of some mighty tension, and the illusion of the great winged thing surmounting and sharing his body vanished. Yet he fell not. Too, he no longer seemed aught save a most ordinary man. Breathing in great gasps, he stared at Usconvets.

“Vici,” he croaked; I conquered.

Usconvets swallowed again so that his voice emerged strong. “What of Kuicho? Is he dead? By Orko, if he has died our bargain is void-and your life as well, stranger among Basques!”

“He lives,” Lucanor said thickly; another short Latin word. “He will… be ill for many days, however. He… drained himself… as the conflict has cost me hard. Ah! Cthulhu fhtagn! Give me meat and wine!”

He seemed to fall to his haunches. Squatting shapelessly, he bowed his head.

Usconvets waved a hand to indicate that the Antiochite be given what he wanted. Out of a certain morbid curiosity he asked, “Have you no further need to fast?”

“My need is for strength,” the mage mumbled. He received meat, and began to eat. “Does our bargain stand, sea-chieftain?”

“Aye,” the Basque said, almost unwillingly. “Usconvets is loyal to his word. Show me the ship Raven and I fall upon it with all my -strength.”

“That is good hearing,” Lucanor said, past a steaming mouthful of whale meat. Delight as much as exhaustion fed his tremors now. “I have time, not immensities of time, but it suffices… to regain my strength, and then to fast for another day, and to perform certain divinations… yes. When they appear, you will know, lord. You will know.”

None failed to note that of a sudden Lucanor had become curiously servile. Mayhap because of the expenditure of so much energy, and strength? Whatever the reason, Usconvets took cue from it at once.

He nodded curtly. “Then eat,” he said. “It has long been my thought that Wulfhere Skullsplitter-the great oaf!-ought to have stayed in his cold northern waters. Now he shall learn it himself, by the Sun above me!”