When Death Birds Fly cma-3

by Andrew J Offutt

  Again Cormac looked at the approaching trio of ships. He saw ships crewed by staring weaponmen. Is that the way of it, he thought. Illusion and seeming-and I immune!

  He wasted no time in attempt to convince his fellows that what they saw was unreal. What mattered was to make them fight. An they were still the men he knew, they’d do so. He raised strong voice.

  “All who row not, string your bows!” he commanded. “Swiftly, swiftly! Teeth of Fenris, be ye children to quake at sorcerous illusion? Ivarr-come man, feather me thatun standing by the mast! Those are men, men!”

  The three strange vessels were swiftly overtaking Raven. White water furled back past what all save Cormac saw as skeletal ships: naked wooden ribs, grown over with mussels and barnacles and trailing masses of dismal kelp like ragged nets. Sails blew aflutter in rotting rags from the yards. The oars that rose and dipped were decayed or broken. Yet in spite of all, the death-ships moved across the sea at a better pace than Raven.

  Aye, and to all but the Gael their crews were men long since drowned.

  Wulfhere saw horrid white eyes, that had rolled up to stare blankly like those of landed fishes. Blue-grey were their skins and slick with corruption, like wet slate. Sea-lice had eaten them here and there to form hideous patchwork. Such men were dead-and they rowed.

  Those not naked wore garments that seemed only rotting sackcloth and leather; that hung in tattered ribbons from their ghastly bodies. In dreadful silence they brandished weapons yet able to bite, though corroded by brine.

  With coldness like drift ice in his stomach, Ivarr obeyed Cormac’s order. Oh, he had no misgivings about his ability to hit his ghastly target. What the Dane dreaded and half expected was to see it continue standing with his arrow betwixt its visible ribs. What could an arrow be, to something dead and rotting that yet moved and challenged the living?

  The bowstring said thunng and Ivarr’s barbed shaft keened out over the water accompanied by his curse-and prayer. The arrow skewered the shape by the mast. Through the belly it took him, and Ivarr saw the creature tumble and fall down, kicking. So saw the other archers, and so did Cormac mac Art, though what he saw topple was a living human, an armourless Basque.

  “Well done!” Cormac called, as if ’twere an accomplishment more than standard, for the need for encouragement was obvious to him. He knew how to motivate men, by praise and threat, by shaming and challenge. “What ails the rest of yet, that ye gape and delay? Shoot for the rowers!”

  Heartened at the falling of the supposed lich in the manner of an ordinary sailor of blood and flesh, they loosed their arrows in flights of ten. Speeding angry bees seemed to hum shrilly over the sea.

  The Danes were marksmen, who made the finest bows and produced the most deadly archers in all the lands about the Baltic. Oarsmen in the foremost of the attacking vessels began to suffer.

  “Ye see?” Wulfhere bellowed. “Weapons can destroy them-WE can destroy them! Hard about! To portside now, and ram that weed-grown hulk!”

  Oars increased stroke on the same side of Raven as its great steering-paddle; those opposite were raised but not shipped. The slender pirate craft came about hurling white water in a close circle. The foremost Basque ship continued to plow in. Raven’s coppery beak was now directed at the broad side of the attacker. The Danes bent to their oars with renewed will and a savage enthusiasm.

  Unlike her enemies, Raven was fitted for ramming. Her bows had been strengthened, and braced within, sheathed in scales of hammered copper without. Her dragon’s head laughed savagely the while she bore down on the enemy. And now the Basques saw what was intended, even as they saw their prey’s speed increase.

  The Basques strained mightily to avoid the impact. They succeeded only partly.

  Raven’s deadly beak, driving fiercely through the water, did not bite amidships; instead it smashed one of the Basque’s long steeringsweeps with a terrible grinding popping crack-and with a crash, half-shattered the stern. A splinter of wood thick as his arm and longer than he drove through a Basque’s body as if it had been a hurled spear. His ship lurched violently over while he gurgled death. Crew and marines flew through the air like hurled toys to plop-plop into the water like so many clods of dirt.

  Cormac’s sword glittered bare. The glitter in his sword-grey eyes was no softer and his lips drew back from his teeth in a wolfish snarl. The dark Gaelic rage was upon him. Reason shrank and battle-frenzy ruled his brain and body. He only just remembered to snatch up his shield.

  “HAAAA!” he yelled earsplittingly. “Sunder them!”

  He sprang to Raven’s shield-rail as though he knew no encumbrance of sword and ten-pound helm of steel over sponge and forty-pound mailcoat and heavy buckler of wood and iron; and thence he pounced down into the Basque ship. Another ugly feral cry tore from him.

  His round shield, thrust ahead of him into snarling black-bearded faces, deflected two spear-heads while breaking off another it happened to meet squarely. Basques went down under this mad assailant’s greater weight, sore surprised and disconcerted by a man who used seventeen pounds of buckler as an offensive weapon.

  Cormac swung that lindenwood shield more, in a bone-breaking arc this time, to gain space for himself. Springing fully erect, he ruthlessly stamped the head of a man downed by his leap. An ax banged on his shield and his own elbow was driven into his side, mail against mail in a rasp of steel links. His sword replied. The point ran into a man’s side; a man Cormac never saw. More surprise for the enemy: Cormac mac Art was fond of using his point. He yanked it free in a sluicing spurt of blood and slashed sidewise without ever looking at the foe whose arm he destroyed.

  The attackers were attacked by a madman. The raging Gael cut his way forward without looking back to see whether any comrades followed him.

  Half a dozen did. Despite the horror of what they thought they saw, they noted too that Cormac was fearless and that hideous corpses fell before his one-man charge. The Danish pirates were not backward about discovering that what they perceived as living dead could die again, and fall like men. Leggings and arms were splashed warmly. Crimson runnels spilled over the ship’s timbers.

  Wulfhere’s instincts were to plunge after his blood-brother. But Wulfhere commanded Raven. He cursed and cheered Cormac equally and without bias, while knowing he durst not follow into the blade-reddening action he loved. His archers were still speeding volleys onto the two remaining Basque ships. Close upon them now, those vessels were bearing down in foam-sided furrows white as new samite.

  “Belay that!” Wulfhere roared in a voice like an ocean-storm. “Bend to rowing, ye geldings! Would ye be cracked like a nut betwixt tongs? Lay alongside that one, the nearer-we’ll grapple to her! Ugly bastards, aren’t they! Best we aid them along to Ran’s arms where they belong, lads!”

  His broad face darkened with passion above his flaming beard. Ax upraised, his immense height increased nearly to seven feet by his horned helmet, Wulfhere Skull-splitter was a fearsome sight. The bitter necessity of leaving mac Art fighting for his life made the giant’s rage greater, if such were possible. He loosed another hideous bellowing cry that froze Basque blood into marrow and whitened dark faces. He gnashed his teeth and foam speckled his vast beard like white-hot flame amid red.

  Glaring, he brandished his terrible ax and raved threats against the ship he had designated for assault. He cursed each moment that passed ere the first grappling hook could fly.

  To Wulfhere-as to all left aboard Raven-they moved against a vessel of unnatural life-in-death. All too recently he had coped asea with foes otherworldly and inhuman. Now his eyes assured him that death’s head liches stared at him from sockets like thumb-gouged holes, and thirsted for his blood. Yet he never hesitated, nor did his men.

  Grappling hooks flew gleaming like dragon’s teeth. Some bit into wooden strakes while others missed because the ship’s structure was not what they saw it to be. Those men reeled in and tried again even as feverish fishermen, the while Raven drew closer by me
ans of those lines that had found purchase. Wood creaked and water hissed and gurgled as the two craft swung close.

  Wulfhere Hausakluifr was first over the side, in a flying leap that should not have been possible to a man of such size. Like those of a mad giant his big feet crashed to the deck of the other vessel. Behind him swarmed his men, yelling in the way of wolves or berserks. They rattled onto the Basque craft, tall fair men all agleam in armour of glittering bosses or lapping scales sewn to byrnies of boiled leather.

  Counting their leader, the Danes numbered five-and-thirty. While their arrows had left about that many Basques to face them, the Danes in general were bigger men, and armoured besides.

  Faces of corrupting death leered at them. Weapons hacked and stabbed in fists with tattered grey flesh raveling around knuckles of bare white bone. The northerners’ noses were deceived, too, for the stink of death was as of an old burial-barrow torn open. Yet their very revulsion nerved the Danes to fight with transcendent fury.

  Axes and swords swung and hacked, flashing like lightning bolts playing about the deck, and where they struck crimson sprang up. Basques went down. Attackers had been attacked; attack became massacre.

  Wulfhere strode raving through the melee. His ax rose and fell, chopping and streaming, in a racket of cloven bone and metal. In his mighty arms it described huge horizontal eight-figures in air, the interlocked circles formed of a scarletdotted blur of grey, so swiftly did he swing his ax. A sword rushed at him and the shield of the man just behind Wulfhere rushed forward. It did not stop, and a seemingly half-decayed face shattered around the iron boss. Teeth clattered onto the deck. Wulfhere plunged on. He disdained a shield; he had his ax. Thus! and a head flew from ragged shoulders. Thus! and blackened stinking bowels burst from a belly that had appeared swollen tight with putrefaction.

  The third ship wavered. Its oars contradicted one another. Then it turned about and fled the battle become massacre. It vanished into the blue dusk and was seen no more.

  Usconvets, aboard the ship Wulfhere and his men were rapidly making into a slaughter-yard afloat, saw it happen. From behind the grisly magical illusion that masked his face, the Basque pirate cried out in despair.

  “Cut free! Part those grappling ropes and break off the fight!”

  His men rallied, fired by desperation and the example he showed them.

  Yet still they did not fight as they ought, and could. The illusion encompassed the vision of all save Cormac. What the Basques saw bracing the Danes was not their chief, but a foully animate corpse. It did not inspire them, though it shouted in a voice that was nearly Usconvets’s. Had Wulfhere not seen how things stood, and been content for his own reasons to let the “liches” depart, his Danes would have surely devastated the ship from end to end. They had almost done so in any case.

  “Let them go!” Wulfhere thundered. “By the Hammer! Whatever landfall they can make is welcome to them! Back aboard Raven, ye bloodhungry dogs! Cormac’s needing us!”

  His voice blared above the din of the fighting like one of the Romans’ big buccina horns. When men did not obey him swiftly enow, he whacked them lightly-by his standards-with the flat of his gore-dripping ax and shoved them to the rail with his other hand, big as a foot. And ever he roared at them to move, move, and cursed their tardiness.

  They tumbled into Raven and pushed off, leaving the Basques to go where they could.

  4

  No Crown of Laurel

  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, t
hey 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.