When Death Birds Fly cma-3 Read online

  Noting that everyone at table had leaned a bit back from him, Wulfhere let his shoulders and his voice drop a bit. “The Vandals still build their ships to the Romish pattern. Believe me, that is not suited to the wild Atlantic or the Bay of Treachery yonder!” He waved a mighty arm, thickly pelted with red hair, unerringly in the direction of the sea off Brigantium. Wagging his big head, Wulfhere leaned back and spoke as if he were a Greek lecturing a class.

  “None but the boldest of Vandal captains dares venture past the Pillars of Heracles, as they call ’em, and up these Hispanic coasts. Those I and the Wolf,” he said, now indicating Cormac by banging a fist off the Gael’s thigh, “have met-in their blundering triremes-we have sailed merry circles around.”

  He paused, as if working out his own sentence to be sure he’d stated what he intended. Wulfhere’s command of his native tongue was hardly a scholar’s; his Latin was ghastly, and so most men spoke, in this part of the world. At that it was better than when he and Cormac had arrived here awhile back, having fled the soldiery set on them by that Sigebert fellow whose pretty face they’d ruined.

  “Rings around Romish triremes built by Vandals in Carthage,” he said again, savouring the sound and thought of it. “I suppose ye’d wish your own navy to do the same.”

  Cormac mac Art’s dark, sinister face showed some small tension about mouth and jaw. Only Zarabdas, by watching him closely, observed it.

  “You suppose rightly, Captain,” Veremund the Tall said. “I am answered.”

  Cormac relaxed as unobtrusively as he had tensed for trouble. Few kings indeed would accept such truculently declaimed outspokenness so mildly. Veremund, though, was like unto no other king Cormac had met-and was the first the Gael had found whom a man might respect and like. The Sueve knew the uses of forebearance without being weak-or even appearing so, to intelligent men of craft.

  How are these Sueves after having got a good man as king, anyhow? Cormac mused. Unique, Veremund is.

  While the Gael thought thus, it was Irnic Break-ax who spoke. “What of the Basques, then? They have been seamen from ancient times, and surely they know Treachery Bay as well as heart could hope for! I am told they build goodly ships.”

  Cormac was impressed even while his face went cold. From a commander of horse-warriors and kinsman of the king, it was a sound evaluation. Irnic spoke true. Basque shipwrights and sailors would be worth the having. Cormac did not like to disillusion the man with whom he’d developed camaraderie.

  “True for yourself,” he said. “It’s better for the purpose the Basques are than Vandals would be-were there any getting them. But there is not. It’s fiercely independent and clannish they are; more so than the Gaels of Eirrin, and that’s saying much. In their time they held off the Romans from their mountain valleys, and they held off the Goths, and by the black gods!-they are fell toward outsiders. Never will they be lifting a hand for someone not of their own race, unless it has a weapon in’t, and that for the spilling of blood and doing of red death.” Cormac mac Art’s sword-grey eyes looked broodingly back into his own past for a moment. “At base they be the same folk as the Silures of west Britain, and the Picts of Alba,” he said low, “although the latter bred with another race in the long ago; a strange race, squat and apish, the signs of which can still be seen on them. Their breed and mine have an enmity older than the world.”

  Cormac, whom men called the Wolf, did not exaggerate. Older than the world was that feud, indeed… or older than the world as it now existed. Vague memories of former lives and other epochs stirred in his brain, tempting him to lose the present in that strange reverie others called ‘the rememberings’ that sometimes seized him without warning. Cormac rejected its lure with all his iron strength of will and focused on the visages of the two Suevi below their barbarically knotted hair.

  “An ye doubt me, my lords,” he said grimly, “send ambassadors to these people. Set beside the northern Picts, it’s the very flower of gentleness they be-and even so ye’d do well to send men ye can spare.”

  King Veremund doubted not, nor was he inclined to put Cormac’s test to trial. The Basques of the Pyrenees were far closer neighbours of his than were the Vandals. He knew all about them.

  “What of the Britons of Armorica?” Zarabdas asked. “Are they not skilled in these arts?”

  “They are so,” Cormac admitted. “Their ancestors crossed the sea from Britain, most of them from Cornwall. The pulse of the sea is after being in their blood since long before Rome was a power. For the lure of your wealth, lord King, they could be had, though it were better elsewise. It’s Celtic Britons those folk be, by blood and language. It’s too fiery a mixture they’d be making with Danes and Suevi.” Cormac shook his head, leaned back, and showed Veremund an implacable expression. “Nay, as we’re to be replenishing our crew and bring yourself the master-shipwright ye desire, lord King, it’s a longer voyage than that is called for.”

  Veremund blinked, started to speak, glanced at Irnic. Wulfhere added to the case Cormac had presented:

  “Besides,” he grunted, “Danes build ships better, and sail ’em better, every day of the year.”

  King Veremund’s fine brow furrowed in thought. He looked at his cousin Irnic, and though he did not speak his mind Irnic was able to follow its turning. The king much desired the service of these men-needed them, in truth. He was loath to send them excessively far beyond his reach.

  “A longer voyage,” the King of the Sueves repeated. “Even unto the land of the Danes?”

  Wulfhere Skull-splitter chuckled. “It’s there most Danish men are to be found.”

  Wulfhere… plague take ye… Cormac thought, but the king and his two advisors showed no offense at the Dane’s over-plain words. Veremund visibly considered. The thoughts moving in his head were as convoluted as the thick, barbaric knot of his hair; a twisted 8 atop the back of his skull.

  “So be it,” he made concession at last. “One does not ask aid of experts and then tell them how their work should be done. The Powers speed you on your journey and bring you safe back to Galicia. Rest easy that while you’re away, your wounded shall have no less care than mine own hearth-companions.”

  Cormac smiled in sardonic appreciation of this gentle reminder: the king held hostages against any deceit or failure in what he doubtless saw as the reivers’ duty. A low rumble of laughter filled Wulfhere’s bull-throat.

  The giant said, “The shipwright I have in mind is a man named Ketil, lord King. He is far-travelled. In his early youth he was apprentice to an itinerant boat-builder who helped Saxon families-and sometimes entire villages-cross the water to Britain. Since then he’s lived among the Franks and the Frisians; aye, and those Armorican Britons too, in pursuit of his trade. What last I heard, he had settled to family life in Jutland.”

  “Then would he wish to leave them for our service?” Veremund asked, with a hand at his brown beard. “It’s a long journey to make for a promise.”

  “To found a sea-fleet for a king, I am thinking he’d be unable to resist! He is the master of his craft and has made it an art, and loves it as-as I do mine, by the Thunderer! Moreover, news of your wealth in silver will sweeten him greatly, King of Sueves! When we show him our offspring of your enchanted chain, lord King, there will be no sailing fast enow for Ketil!”

  Half-smiling, Cormac thought on Veremund’s wealth in silver. Wealth indeed!

  In the king’s treasure room lay a chain of massive links of silver, twelve of Wulfhere’s stridey paces in length. Dwarves had forged it long aforetime, under the direction of their king Motsognir. It had the unique and most desirable property of growing new links when heated in fire, so that it could spawn new wealth forever, were its power not abused. Cormac and Wulfhere had earned five paces’ length of such new growth. It was theirs, to take where they would-and it was silver indeed, and permanent. Yet, at Wulfhere’s words Veremund’s eyes narrowed a little at realization that they meant to take it out of Galicia.

  An
d yet… it made little difference. They had earned the payment. Were they so short-sighted not to return to him, they were not the men he wanted, after all. The thought and concept had occurred to Zarabdas, though as yet it but toyed at the edge of the king’s mind: wealth was power. Unending wealth could lead to absolute power. With a goodly fleet and good leaders of good weapon-men, along with clever merchants and diplomats-that chain could change the course of history and make Veremund the Tall master of Europe-and beyond.

  “With your permission, lord King?”

  Was the dry, scholarly voice of Zarabdas the mage. Veremund’s gesture assured him of utter freedom.

  “Cormac mac Art,” the easterner began, and his dark eyes were intent as, those of a ship’s lookout in dangerous waters. “I know that naught will turn you from this voyage. Yet I foresee it will be filled with such danger, physical and else than physical as well; as even you have seldom confronted. Monsters and sorcerers loom dark athwart your path, and wraiths of haunted darkness flap among the shadows of the time-to-come on wings of death. Whether you will triumph, or they, I cannot know. In this only can I advise you hopefully: do you keep ever on your person the golden sigil that once you showed me. It will aid you.”

  Cormac’s dark face remained impassive, despite his surprise. The object Zarabdas spoke of was an ancient golden pendant in the shape of a winged serpent. It had come to the Gael as most things of value come to a pirate: in the way of plunder. He had kept it, though mentally disavowing superstition. Even now it hung agleam against the black linen of his tunic. Mac Art’s hand did not go to it at its mention as any other’s would have done; this man was not like any other.

  “Ye say so, mage? Ye’re after telling me otherwise not long since, when ye named this pendant no more than a piece of jewellery.”

  “A blind,” Zarabdas said, his expressive hands making light of the matter. “A distraction. You were a foreigner come to our shores, with pirates and by night. I did not know you. Besides, I was not sure of the object’s nature. Since then, I have found mention of it in my books, and one rude drawing. The winged serpent is an Egyptian sunsymbol, mac Art, and far older than the winged disc of Atun that the saintly if impractical Pharoah Akhenatun caused to be worshiped. Yea, older and more powerful as well.”

  “Why, that bauble almost wound up betwixt the breasts of a mere taverngirl of Nantes,” Wulfhere said, forgetting that the young woman he mentioned was now quite close to the King of the Sueves of Galicia, whose wife had died in the service of Lucanor’s god of ancient evil.

  Zarabdas took no notice whatever of the Dane’s blurted words. His dark gaze remained on mac Art, and intense. “I believe the sigil adorned the prow of one of the mystical boats of Ra, long and long agone, in which souls were ferried to the sun-god’s paradise. Although,” the mage urbanely added with a wave of his hand that rustled his robe’s full sleeve, “you must know this, mac Art. You yourself spoke of its power to protect you, on the day we met.”

  “Aye,” Cormac nodded brusquely. He had said something of the sort, to bluff Zarabdas and test his knowledge. Was not the first time a lie of expediency had enveloped a kernel of truth.

  So far as Cormac knew, the Egyptian sigil had no more magical power than a stone he might pick up in the fields. Could wearing the turquoise, amid certain incantations, make one fearless? Was the aventurine the sacred power-stone of dead Atlantis? Might the amethyst as so many believed, heighten shrewdness, particularly in matters of trade and business? Zarabdas might now be attempting to befool him in return. He might even be both sincere and correct, though the likelihood of that seemed small. It scarcely mattered. Cormac had kept the sigil because it was after all gold, and of value. He would continue to wear the golden serpent beneath his mail on the off chance of its aiding him-though he’d not be depending on it. He put no faith in such trinkets.

  “And should it fail you, Cormac,” Irnic Breakax said smiling, “your sword-arm must make good the lack!”

  Cormac shrugged. “My wits and my sword are all I’ve ever trusted.”

  “Well then, my lords,” Wulfhere said, pouring ale down his throat, “I sail with the Wolf here as soon as our ship is provisioned.” He looked about at pleased expressions. “And if this settles all our business, I know where two eager wenches await me-and by Wotan, I’d be cruel did I keep them waiting longer!”

  Veremund grinned, all strain off him. “By all means, Captain Wulfhere, go and join them,” he said, doubtless thinking of the woman who was his own new interest.

  “As for me,” Zarabdas said, “I have studies to pursue.”

  Irnic Break-ax advised that he had promised himself a night-long drinking bout with the comites of his cousin’s bodyguard, and asked Cormac if he would like to join them. The dark Gael shook his head.

  “Perchance later. With thanks, Irnic.”

  He departed conference chamber and Kinghouse, and took his thoughts and seat-stiffened limbs for a walk. He strolled through the nighted streets of Brigantium. A tall man, leanly muscled and powerful, moving lightly in his black, gold-bordered tunic. He was accustomed to the weight of link-mail over leather, but now, although he had sworn no oath of allegiance, he had become a king’s man and enjoyed a king’s favour. Such made a difference.

  Even so, the scabbarded sword at his side thwacked his leg with each pace, and a long double-edged dirk was sheathed at his other hip. The habits of his violent outlaw life had begun firming of necessity when he was but fourteen. Mac Art was more comfortable armed.

  Men looked at him strangely as he passed. Native Hispano-Romans with curly dark hair they were, for the most part considerably smaller than he. He was swift and deceptively powerful for one so rangy, as some of these knew. He was not much more like their Suevic overlords than he was like unto them. Many were but squatters in dilapidated houses, with little to do but loaf and stare. Only a tiny part of the legacy of Rome: detritus. The Roman-built city’s population had declined since the great days of Empire.

  Was not natural for mac Art to move unpurposefully through a darkened city without being approached by women, but so it was in Brigantium. He did receive a couple of smiles that might have been tentative invitations. He walked on.

  Cormac came to the waterfront district, which was in even poorer state than the rest of the city. Hardly a craft save fishing boats was moored at the long white docks. Uncrowded and unmanned, the boats looked lonely, stark. Seawater slapped on stone with a melancholy sound, as if lamenting Brigantium’s past busy importance. The one Gael of Eirrin in all the land smelled the open sea, and longed to be under weigh.

  Cormac knew well the reason for the harbour’s lack of activity.

  Of late months the sea had become a source of dread and eerie terror, round about Galicia’s coasts. Ships had been destroyed by a nameless agency, and on nights otherwise gentle. Men’s lives had been smothered out in the old Roman lighthouse tower where they tended Brigantium’s fiery beacon. For long and long none knew what unnatural force slew them. Wreckers had been at work-but of no natural kind, nor with natural powers, nor from natural motives.

  To this coast had Cormac and Wulfhere sailed, accomplishing the nigh impossible, and they had known none of the horror haunting their destination. Behind them they left treachery and blood and marine-loaded warships bent on their doom. And they had almost fallen the wreckers’ victims when they approached Galicia in their long ship Raven, storm-driven and weary.

  The Gael’s grey eyes shifted within their slitted dens. Now the beacon-light burned bright and safely in the many-tiered tower that reared up immense at the harbour entrance. Cormac smiled his bleak, unhandsome smile at memory of the day he had first seen that structure, and at what he’d found therein. A tower of death it was then, and he had entered and ascended to discover the smothered, blood-drained corpses of men with horror in their glassy eyes. He recalled his first meeting with Veremund the Tall, King of the Suevi, and the pact they’d made between them. For sanctuary and reward
of silver, Cormac and Wulfhere agreed to rid Brigantium of the mysterious horror that haunted it.

  Ultimately that had cost Danish lives, and it had cost Galicia one of its physicians, and the king his own wife.

  Cormac stared at the tower and remembered that desperate night when he’d abode there, awaiting that which came. Masses of moving, crawling kelp, either sentient or sent, came rustling and dripping up out of the dark sea. It climbed the tower like phantasmal ivy, with a thousand thousand tendrils and a thousand thousand leech-like mouths for the drinking of the blood of men.

  Only Cormac’s foresight, and the firewood and quicklime he had stored in the tower by day, allowed him and his companions to withstand the soulless onslaught. Had been a hideously near thing, even so.

  Then had the Gael discovered the source and nature of the attacks. With his eyes he had seen the ancient, plague-evil minions of R’lyeh’s black gods, horrors of another age and long dormant-or so it had been thought. He’d heard their hissing, croaking voices, and had fought them hand to hand. Worst of all, he had discovered the hidden sect of humans and semi-humans that worshiped those ancient challengers of humankind, led by the king’s own physician… and his ensorcelled queen.

  Even the strife-scarred brain of Cormac mac Art preferred not to remember how that had ended.

  Still, it had ended. The wide sea rolled quietly, holding naught now save its own normal dangers. They were entirely enough. Lucanor the physician, revealed as Lucanor the mage, Lucanor the traitor to more than his king-to his own humanity-had escaped with his life.

  Doubtless fled the kingdom, the Gael mused. Only the dark man-hating gods he worships know where that Romano-Greek dog cowers now!