When Death Birds Fly

4

Usconvets’s command was reduced to a reeking shambles where dead and dying men lay about while barely a dozen stood on their feet to receive his orders. He glared wildly about at them. All, all had the semblance of things come slinking hideously from a salt grave, both the upright and the prone. The Basque pirate felt a nigh-irresistible urge to draw his dagger and stab himself through the heart.

A leader of men, he mastered himself. And from egregious defeat and despair and near-madness was born a blazing anger.

The stranger, Lucanor. He caused this.

“Into the sea with the bodies,” Usconvets commanded, and watched without tears while it was done. “Now pull, pull for home. We have a reckoning to exact, there!”

“What of the others?” a man asked. He was unrecognizable, as were they all.

His leader turned what appeared to be empty eye-sockets on the third of their ships, which Raven was nearing fast. He asked wearily, “What can we do?”

Usconvets asked it of no one, and none answered.

Raven came alongside her prey with a grinding of timber. “Ho, Wolf!” her captain bawled. “Be not greedy and hoggish, man-leave some for us!”

The Gael showed teeth and answered with one short word.

Of the six Danes who had followed him onto the ship of enemies, three remained alive and one of those was down with a spear through his thigh. He kept murmuring “Gudrid,” which Cormac felt was at least better than the “Mother” he’d heard too many times. Nevertheless the downed man fought on. He dragged a Basque down beside him, even while he groaned. When the fellow attacked him with a dagger the Dane gained a wrestling lock on his arm, snapped it with a stomach-turning sound, and soon was grimly strangling the Basquish weight with a forearm across the throat. His thigh pumped red.

Cormac and the others of his shipmates stood together, holding the deck by plying swords and ax till their arms were weary to the bone and breath was a rasping torment. Yet they had held, and held still. Now came salvation in the form of more than thirty raging comrades with Wulfhere Hausakluifr at their head.

Of forty Basques, Danish arrows and Cormac’s hand-to-hand fury had left three-and-twenty. They lasted not long. In a horrid joyless orgy of blood, the Danes showed them no quarter but cut them down to a man.

In horridly short order all lay lifeless in a welter of red that rose and rose in the bailing well-but not to Danish senses, for they saw blood that was curdled, stinking and black; and flowed not copiously, because it came from bodies already dead. The prodigious ax of Wulfhere broke the timbers of that unclean craft, and they left it to sink.

“Hah!” he grunted, cleaning that ax that had slain so many men and now a ship as well. “Cormac… saw ye the like of those fish-eaten dead men ever afore? I wonder what they can have wanted with us?”

Cormac said unsmiling, “Listen, bush-face, it’s no attempt I’m making to give ye the lie, but what I saw was not fish-eaten corpses. Basque fighting ships I saw, and Basque weapon-men acrewing them. What’s more, all lived and were hale.”

“Wha’?” Wulfhere stared. “It cannot be!”

“It is-or was,” Cormac told him. “Illusion, Wulfhere. One of us was deceived. Let us not be arguing which, for the present. Come-where else of late are we after meeting with false appearances asea?”

Wulfhere stared blinking. “Who could forget? In Galicia! I see where this breeze blows. Was that Lucanor’s work, there! And Lucanor escaped and is alive, alive-and with no love for us.”

“Aye”

Both men reflected in silence for a space.

They’d had to face a supernatural barge made all of white fretted bones, a fell impossibility that rode the waters nonetheless, and bore a false guide-light to lure ships to their destruction. Nine pale, pale sea-women had graced its deck, seeming to lounge while they worked their magic. Nor had it been easy to attack and slash such opponents. With their Danes and some of King Veremund’s Sueves, Cormac and Wulfhere had done-and discovered the eerie beauty of those women to be a lie. When their true forms had been revealed, hardened pirates had shuddered to see them. Sea-spawn, and not human. Worship of Cthulhu, the monstrous tentacle-faced god who slept in drowned R’lyeh, had been at the heart of the business, and all the cultists in Galicia had sought to do was bring up that humanity-hating god and make him supreme.

Aye, and the cult’s priest had been Lucanor of Antioch, formerly physician to the king’s wife, poor dead woman.

“Lucanor,” Wulfhere said. “He incited these… Basques? To attack us? Cormac, they were Basques, and mortal men? Ye be certain of this?”

“It’s what I’m after seeing. My guess would be that Lucanor is after casting that foul illusion over them to affright us and make us easy prey. The greater fool he.”

“Aye! Right!” Wulfhere grinned broadly. “He must ha’ forgot we’ve dealt with such glamours afore.”

Cormac finished his careful cleansing of his sword and set aside the torn short-cloak he had of a dead foeman. “The Basques had not, Wulfhere. They cannot have liked it. Methinks they saw each other just as you saw them. By the blood of the gods! It would be shaking any man’s nerve, to see his battle-companions all mouldering corpses! It wonders me not that the last ship turned back without fighting, and the other fled when it could! The mage blundered badly there. Three ships against our one! All might have gone differently had he restrained himself from his tricks, or played with the sea, or wind, or something.”

“I am grieved,” Wulfhere said bleakly, “that I cannot have that blackbird between these hands.”

Cormac shrugged and clapped him on the shoulder. “Would it were so! Well, mayhap the Basques who fled yonder will do to him all that ye’ve a wish to, and more. They’ll not be loving him for what happed there to-day.”

“A good thought.” And Wulfhere showed his big teeth again.

He moved forward then, shouting orders. What ailed them? The sea-fight was over, and they had this perdurable Gaulish coast to put behind them. Was it their wish to fight Goths and Saxons as well?

It was not. Seven Danes had died in that red shambles. He with the transfixed thigh joined them in the night, muttering the name of his Gudrid, because too much blood had run out of him. For the crew, it was so much pirates’ work. Cormac and Wulfhere, who commanded between them, felt darkness touch their spirits, although neither spoke of it.

We began with forty men. Now it’s two-and-thirty we have, and ten of those wounded, and a long journey yet to make.

Wulfhere did not seem to wonder why Cormac alone had seen the Basques in their true appearnace. To the Gael, meticulously scrubbing and picking cruor from his chaincoat, it was a question that called disquietingly for an answer-and he had none. Unless… unless it was the golden sigil he wore beneath his armour? The Egyptian amulet.

Had Zarabdas’s advice been sound after all, and his words truthful?

Lucanor too had a long journey to, go. For him there was no ship. His divinations warned him of what was in store, for Cormac had been right about the mood of the surviving Basques. A stranger had come among them, crushed and done face-loss on their trusted diviner, and persuaded them to action-which had been only disaster; all loss and no gain.

Lucanor only just escaped into Gaul with his life. Hungry, weary and destitute, with many leagues between him and the city of Nantes, he cursed his evil fortune. In one of his rare moments of clear sight, he cursed himself for not planning the affair better.

For a brief while there he had triumphed. The Basques had been eager to do all that he wished. Had he been content to leave its execution to them… had he not used sorcery to lend them an aspect of ghoulish terror that somehow had not frozen the marrow of those damned Danes after all…

Past, past and done. Nor was Lucanor capable of further sorcery now. He dared not risk the exhaustion such would entail.

So Lucanor traveled north as the lowliest peasant traveled, footsore in the dust and heat of summer and by no means sure he would reach his destination without succumbing to illness-or having his throat cut by robbers so ill-advised as to accost a man with nothing.

His self-pity increased as he walked.

His face worked and worked, and his high opinion of himself returned. He bethought him of Sigebert of Nantes; Sigebert One-ear, and Lucanor’s face worked. A German. A loutish barbarian was that one, under his polished manners, and a pretentious man, in truth was Sigebert. Far from so civilized as Lucanor thought himself-or so wise.

Still… Lucanor was forced to make an admission, even to his arrogant self. The Frank is a crafty planner. The two of us should make a team for the reckoning with. Walking alone in his filthy robe, Lucanor nodded sagely. Aye!

If only my legs and this left calf and my stomach hold out. If only I can reach the fellow…