When Death Birds Fly cma-3

by Andrew J Offutt

  Cormac gave his head a jerk to clear it of what had been. He was not the sort of man to dwell in the past; were he so, he could not bear the memories of all his ugly yesterdays. The physical act and resolve changed his mood; the desire for solitude dropped from him like a funerary cloak.

  He wheeled from the hissing, slapping plain of the sea. Surely Irnic and the comites would be deep in merry carouse by now! The Gael turned his steps again toward the king’s hall and strove to forbid himself to think.

  As he approached a stand of dark, pointed trees that sighed like surf in the night breeze, someone appeared. Muffled in a long, long cloak, someone stepped from between two pines, and beckoned him. Cormac’s hand slid across his middle to the sword-hilt on his left hip while his slitted eyes warily searched the deeper shade behind the cloaked figure. Once already had men attempted to do murder on him in this land.

  Then he recognized the stance, the way of moving, the poise of that small exquisite head. He spotted the glitter of jewels in high-piled hair. He knew Eurica, the king’s younger sister. Cormac’s teeth snapped together, biting into silence the curse that sprang to his lips. Though she was of age and technically a woman at fifteen or sixteen, Eurica had led a protected life and was very, very young-as Cormac had been an eerily older man, in terms of maturity, at that same age.

  Clenched teeth ground. The princess was enamoured of him, or the glamour of him-or had been. How she felt now he neither knew nor over-much cared. Once she had come to his room at night. He had got her out of there posthaste. To him she was most attractive, aye-and a child, and… simply a blistering nuisance. And a danger to his life greater than any armed foe. Cormac had had it to the eye teeth with the daughters of kings. And Princess Eurica here… alone with him at night… even good men had been slain for less.

  He greeted her civilly. That much circumstances forced him to do.

  “Only in harpers’ tales do kings’ sisters walk out unattended, my lady, and with the most recognizable head in the land displayed. Who be watching over yourself, and from where?”

  “You are brusque as ever, Cormac mac Art.” Her girlish voice held displeasure. “There is-well, there is someone watching. That could not be avoided. Yet I promise you, she is my most trusted attendant, who nursed me when I was little. My attendant, not my royal brother’s.” Her voice dropped an octave, with ignorance of having reminded him of the very reason they must have no meeting, not even low-voiced converse. “She will not betray us, Cormac.”

  “Will she now?”

  Cormac was, considerably less trusting. He wished he could think of some way painlessly to make the point that there was no “us” to betray, and that without sounding finicking or priggish. None suggested itself. Peradventure she could be affrighted away…

  “Royal persons have been stabbed in the back by attendants erenow, Eurica.”

  “Not by my Albofled!” the princess assured him, with impatience on her. “Oh, Cormac-she’s out of earshot, and were she out of seeing-range as well, I’d be in your arms this instant!”

  “And I’d be hanging from a gallows tomorrow,” Cormac said stiffly, “or fleeing this land with blood of the king your brother’s henchman on these hands.”

  “Be not foolish,” she said indulgently, going royal. “How should he know? As for fleeing the land… Cormac, oh Cormac, I have heard you are about to do that in any case. Is it true?” Close by now, she looked up and her eyes shone.

  “No, my lady.” Call her not by name, he told himself. Be not moved. Aye, it’s attractive she is, and more than willing. It’s also a silly and theatrical brat she is. Many her age are, but how to tell a king’s sister so?

  “But there has been talk of a long and perilous voyage into the north!”

  Eurica’s eyes were large, aglisten in the starlight. To her, the north was a legendary place of floating mountains and cold grey seas, of fierce monsters and savage manslaying giants, where corpses walked and all men were Wulfhere’s size-six and a half feet, unshod-and blood was drunk smoking. Aye, and truly, along with the ordinary business of living and tending crops in a land where winter was like unto an unwanted relative that came early and stayed late, all those things had been known to exist and to happen.

  “You hear much,” Cormac said, and damned himself for a weak, weak answer worthy of any boy.

  “So I do,” Eurica said smiling. Nor did she reveal that her source of the northbound rumour was one of the bed-wenches even now sporting with Wulfhere. Her smile suddenly vanished. “Cormac, you may not return for a year! You-you may not return at all! I beg you, remain here and be safe!”

  Safe with you, he thought. Safer battling him who sleeps in sunken R’lyeh, sister of a proud ruler! “My lady,” he said, striving to push his brain to choose words, “that I may not do. It’s a mission for the king that Wulfhere and I’ll be undertaking. We cannot now go back on our agreement and still keep his friendship-even did we wish to change our minds. Which I surely do not.”

  “Why?” Eurica looked anguished. “What is this mission that your life must be risked for it, who has already saved our land?”

  “A matter of ships and shipbuilding that will bring new life to the kingdom, and perhaps more,” Cormac said, and listened to her snort her scorn. “For me, my lady, a purpose. Aimless roving and plundering has been my lot since I went into exile from my own far Eirrin. A man Eirrin-born does not forget his green homeland. I’d not be complaining; a wild life and merry it has been, but now desire is on me for something more.”

  The instant the words left his mouth he knew his blunder. Desire was a word Eurica could relate only to herself. Eyes ashine, forgetting the watcher among the trees, she enwrapped Cormac with her arms and rose on the veriest tips of her toes to kiss him with passion.

  He was not made of steel and ice. His sinewy arms gripped her hard, firm warm young flesh tight and fatless over patrician bones. He forgot calculation in the madness aroused by her soft body and sweetly moving tongue. She moaned with delight and strove to press herself through him.

  “You will not go,” Eurica said with assurance.

  That aided him to break the brief spell. “After that, it’s more convinced I am that I must go, lady Princess. For surely my need of the king your brother’s favour is all the greater, now.”

  “Go then,” Eurica whispered. “Each day you are gone will seem ten days, Cormac. When you return, there will be something more than aimless roving and plundering for you. I promise it, Cormac.”

  She kissed him once more, swiftly, and broke away to run for the dark trees, gathering her cloak about her as she flew.

  Cormac stood moveless. At last his teeth showed in his grim, sardonical indication of a smile. What was the dear youngster thinking of? Her hand in marriage and half the kingdom, peradventure?

  I promise it, she had said. Promises were cheap, and this one she had no power to keep. That power lay in her brother’s hands, though she doubtless had no thought of dissemblance and meant what she said with such sweet heat.

  The Gael’s black brows drew together. Aye now; there is that. Her brother. Did he and Wulfhere build the navy King Veremund wanted, as Cormac knew they could do, then might the king indeed consent to his sister’s marriage with an outlaw pirate? Cormac mac Art was self-exiled from Eirrin. He was not an outlaw in this land of Galicia, and when a king approved of what a man did, he was not then a pirate.

  It would bring me position and power, on these new shores.

  And do I want such, an it mean marriage?

  Samaire, he thought, and though it was the Gaelic word for daybreak, it was not the sun’s dawning he thought of.

  These were questions for the future, he told himself firmly. A long voyage awaited him now, as did Irnic and the comites… and a woman Cormac mac Art had taken unto himself here, a woman who was no princess and no virgin, and whom a man could tumble with, with no thought of far-reaching consequences.

  Alone in the darkness, Cormac laughed aloud,
and forgot Eurica. With a wolf-like step the son of Eirrin continued on his way to the king’s hall.

  2

  When Wizards Duel

  “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.”