When Death Birds Fly cma-3

by Andrew J Offutt

  Cormac only nodded.

  Raven crawled on across the water. She had a start, but was frightfully undermanned. Each of the three pursuing ships had nearly her full tale of rowers. The twelve strong men in Raven pulled until their hearts threatened to break.

  It was not enough. The Saxon ships drew nearer with every stroke.

  Sudden as striking birds of prey, Armorican galleys swept out of the dark. They had guessed the portent of Saxon war-shouts and the urgent beat of oars. Drocharl and the other captains had promptly moved to the rescue, in strict silence that they might not lose the advantage of surprise. Now, as they swept past Raven and bore down on the enemy warships, they raised a battle-cry that drowned out that of the Saxons.

  These were weapon-men of Bro Erech, hot for battle against their hereditary foes, hot for vengeance because their prince lay low. They howled like devils. Flung a hail of javelins into the Saxon ships. Grappled to them. Meanwhile, Raven’s dozen occupants worked fiercely to turn her and reach the fighting. They had been left behind while others went before them into the strife, and they were not accustomed to that.

  With a rending and crashing of oars and a grinding of timbers, the warships met. A solid wall of shields along the Saxon rail balked the Armorican onslaught for a few moments; then the sixteen Danes aboard Drocharl’s ship broke through it. The Armoricans widened the rift with hacking sword and ax. Elsewhere, without heavily armoured Danes to aid them, the more lightly equipped Armoricans made ferocity do. Each Saxon warship became a hell of red chaos, and payment was taken in blood for the Mor-bihan raid.

  Then Raven arrived.

  Wulfhere entered the fray roaring, a swiftly-acquired helmet on his head, a linden shield on his left arm. He swung the great ax he had not abandoned even for the long swim ashore to Fritigern’s Isle. His chest was still bare. He hardly noticed. Not often did Wulfhere fight in the fashion of a berserk, unarmoured, but he’d no objection to doing so when he must. Cormac went beside him in plundered scale-mail, his sword striking like an adder’s fang. The timbers underfoot swiftly became greasy with blood.

  “Away!” Drocharl roared at last. “More ships come to aid these swine! Beseems their chieftain has bestirred himself! Out of here!”

  The other captains, with Cormac, took up the cry and the responsibility of enforcing it. Cormac, Wulfhere, and all their Danes withdrew aboard Raven, with a score or so Armoricans. They rowed. Behind, of three full ships’ companies that had set out from Kent, scarcely enough of Hengist’s Saxons remained alive to make up one-and most of those were sore wounded.

  “We harmed not your ships, Fritigern!” Cormac bawled, and Wulfhere guffawed.

  Fritigern’s four ships gave chase until dawn before turning back.

  “Hai, Drocharl!” Cormac bellowed to the Armorican captain, in the morning light. “Are ye after fulfilling your oath?”

  “I made a beginning!” Drocharl shouted back. “Two! Two that I’m certain of, y’understand-was dark and confused in that brawl! There may ha’ been others, but I’ll count only those I’m sure on! Well-there be other Saxons in plenty.”

  “Aye,” Cormac agreed, “there are that.” For once, the Gael was grinning exuberantly. He turned to Wulfhere and clapped the redbeard on his mighty shoulder. “Blood of the gods, ole splitter of skulls! It went perfectly! Not a thing went amiss! We’ve not lost another man, even in the fighting. And nigh half of us battling without war-shirts, too! Belief had begun to be on me that we could do naught with success, so bad has our luck been!”

  “Aye,” Wulfhere agreed, with as much wistfulness as enthusiasm. “Yet I would fain ha’ fought Hengist and slain the curson! I looked for him in the fighting-I called him by name! He was not there. Still senseless on the beach from that nice little blow he took, I suppose.”

  “Ah well,” Cormac consoled him. “Ye did call him niddering and coward to his teeth, and a hundred men are after witnessing it.”

  “Rather would I ha’ split him to his teeth,” Wulfhere grunted. He scratched his chest, and Cormac saw him wince. “Curse these talonmarks! They burn like fire still.”

  Aye, Cormac thought, and worry was on him. That is a matter we must be seein’ to, when again we reach Bro Erech.

  18

  The Lord of Death

  Three days to Fritigern’s Isle; two nights and a day to achieve their object; three days more to return. So it fell out, and they entered the Morbihan to learn that Howel was recovering. Although desperately weak and in pain, as he would be for a while yet, he would live and not be crippled.

  “His wounds are avenged then,” Morfydd said though without smiling. “It is well! And Hengist-he lives yet?”

  She sat in her lord’s hall, wearing a plain gown of dark red and no jewellery on her save two rings. Present too was a very different Cathula, exquisitely clean and attired in what was surely the finest skirt-red-and embroidered bodice-white on yellow-she’d ever worn… and uncertain as to what to do with her hands. Despite that entirely ordinary insecurity, the look of latent madness had not left her.

  “Aye, curse him,” Wulfhere answered Morfydd, in surly wise. “Hengist lives.”

  The pleasure of striking back at his enemy and venting his frustrations in battle had left the Dane. His cheeks had gone lank. Sunken in their sockets, his blue eyes were ringed with dark flesh and stared bright as with a fever. The constant daggerish pain of the black owl’s stigmata had begun to waste even him.

  Morfydd took note of these signs. She recognized their meaning. Concern sat on her brow. She considered, as if weighing words she had rather not utter; words whose very wisdom she gravely doubted. Yet at last she spoke.

  “Wulfhere: Sigebert has used magical sendings against you. Is it your wish to do likewise by him? You may find it possible.”

  “Eh?” Wulfhere started, blinked, became closely attentive. “How?”

  Cormac remained silent. He cared little for the sound of this.

  “The Antlered God, the Lord of Death, is abroad with his hunting pack,” the lady Morfydd said, with utmost seriousness. “So much we know of surety. In earthly phrasing, it is possible to give his pack a scent to follow and cry, them on the chase. Great hate, strongly directed, can do this, an it be focused in a place of power such as the stone circle in Broceliande. Now here we have a triad who greatly hate Sigebert One-ear: your own self, Cormac; and Wulfhere, and Cathula. With me to guide and direct, your combined ill-wishing can raise the death-gods of Arawn. And set them abaying on Sigebert’s track to harry the soul out of his body and into the realm of Donn.”

  Cormac’s mouth assumed an ugly shape. Cathula said with dreadful eagerness:

  “Yes!”

  “Suppose it fails?” Cormac demanded with hostility.

  “That were hideously dangerous for us all,” Morfydd said. “Arawn is a god, not some lackey to be whistled up and despatched on errands! When the doom is loosed, it strikes where it will, and whom. The lord of Death, the Dark Huntsman, and his pack can as easily descend upon the ill-wishers as on those wished ill. Even should that not befall… the casting is a fearful strain, and could leave us broken in body and spirit. I tell you this: I would fear to do it. I’d not be so much as speaking of it, were it not that I foresee Sigebert One-ear will do great harm to Bro Erech one day, unless he be destroyed.”

  “He-will-be-destroyed,” Cormac said. He spoke dispassionately, though the look in his grey eyes was far from neutral. “It’s Wulfhere and I who’ll be seeing to that, and without the use of sorcery. Ye’ve put belief on me about the danger that’s in it, Lady Morfydd. An I have learned aught in this life, it is that gods are not to be used as weapons… or meddled with-or trusted! It’s my own wits I’ll be trusting to bring me to Sigebert’s throat, and this sword to open him a second mouth therein.”

  Though he’d naturally ‘shown interest, Wulfhere growled agreement.

  “No!” Cathula fair shouted, forgetting herself in her fervor. “Where be your manhood? Where be your
hate? Be ye twain reivers or whimpering babes? An ye dare not do this thing, I will do’t-alone!”

  “You will not,” Morfydd said, in a perfectly equable tone. “You speak with the loud voice of ignorance, and under a prince’s roof. I pardon it, and ask Cormac and Wulfhere to do the same despite your insults, for you have suffered much.”

  Cormac’s shrug said plainly that the outburst of a peasant girl could not hurt him. Was beneath him to inflict punishment for it. Wulfhere said, “Aye-but look ye to your manners, wench. Not all are as forbearing as I and Cormac.”

  “Now attend me,” Morfydd said vehemently. “Put this thing from your mind, Cathula! Even with the stress of the summoning shared among three, and I to direct, the peril were worse than deadly. For one alone, and that of an ignorant village girl-yes, ignorant-no matter how strong your hate, this were madness and utter destruction for you. I’ll by no means abet it, and there’s an end.”

  Cathula’s stare was sullen and fanatical. She dared attempt one further sharp protest and was as sharply silenced by Morfydd, and dismissed from the hall. Even she was not so driven as to take the matter to the point of further argument. The stubborn look in her eye, however, had not altered.

  19

  The Battle of Soissons

  “The ravens are flying!”

  So the word had been uttered, in Midgard and in worlds beyond. Now had the ravens gathered for the feast. Whichever side conquered, in this war, the ravens would be victorious as well: servants of the Lord of Death, death-birds of the battlefield; eaters of death-glazed eyes.

  Syagrius, Consul of the Empire, better known as King of Soissons, went forth from his city to meet the Frankish threat. He chose not to remain behind walls and subject Soissons to a siege. Informed by spies that Clovis and Ragnachar were raising a war-host, Syagrius had at once sent word to the counts of the appropriates cities: raise levies and march! Conferring with them, he had flatly refused to subject Soissons to a Frankish siege:

  “No, my lords. The barbarians have chosen their time too well. At any other time, we might retreat behind walls and wait while hunger and desertion thinned their ranks. Now, the harvest is everywhere ripe to feed them. I will not permit them to lay it waste, or destroy it myself to forestall them. They have no cavalry, and we have-Gothic mercenaries, no less! We will cut the Frankish host to pieces just as did the Gothic horsemen at Adrianople, a hundred years agone. Oours is the discipline, the heavy armour, the superiority with missile weapons. The Franks can better us in one respect only: Numbers. They will find it insufficient.” Thus had spoken Syagrius, and thus was the die cast.

  Now he sat his heavy Gothic charger under an overcast sky full of lead and slate, and watched the Frankish host approach. It looked as if the entire nation of the Franci was on the march. They covered the plain as a river in flood-time. The creak and clank, the odours of leather and iron and unwashed bodies flowed ahead of them even to Syagrius’s aristocratic nostrils. He wrinkled them in distaste.

  A Roman, this Syagrius. A proud one: last heir to the mighty tradition of soldiering and rule. A Consul of the Empire he was, insofar as the Empire meant aught in these times. He bore too the title magister militum: commander of Gaul’s mobile field forces. His clean-shaven face might have been represented on an antique coin. He wore the panoply of a Roman general from another time; ornate, red-crested helmet with engraved and gilded cheek-pieces, inlaid cuirass and greaves, and a flowing scarlet cloak. His sword, however, was pure business: a plain Gothic cavalry spatha. A weapon for use, not show.

  He looked with intense bitterness upon the enemy host. The Frankish contingent of his own army had deserted to Clovis and Ragnachar in the night, three thousand strong. (Too late, Syagrius could guess why.) As a result, he now faced twenty thousand foes with a force of nine thousand.

  The three thousand Gothic heavy cavalry Syagrius led himself would decide the battle. These were lancers in scale-armour tunics and plain round casques, their iron cheek-pieces covering the temple and reaching down to the chin. Their massive horses wore armour of boiled leather over their chests and heads.

  Two thousand archers and stingers waited in ordered ranks on the hillsides above. The Gothic cavalry had been swiftly disposed on a saddleback ridge between them. To the rear, legions of armoured infantry provided backing, four thousand men all told. The foot soldier had become ever less important in Roman armies since the crushing defeat of the legions at Adrianople, and phalanx formation had returned with all its vulnerability.

  Syagrius hoped not to have to commit these legions to a charge. Far rather would he have them stand their ground and let the Franks weary their strength against them. In truth, he had doubts of his foot. They were essentially limatani-border soldiers. Their purpose and training was in the main defense. Aye, and surely they must defend this day; defend the last tattered fragment of the Empire in the west!

  Syagrius would gladly have exchanged them all for another thousand horsemen.

  The Frankish horde now moved to the attack. They came in long, straggling columns. They wore no mail but only close-fitting trousers and leather vests. Few had so much as helmets. Their steady walk became a brisk, jolting trot… which increased to a dead run as a harsh, rolling battle-cry burst from their thousands of throats. The very earth took note-and would for all time.

  The Roman archers drew their bows-to the chest merely, as their forebears had always done, an act at which Wulfhere’s Danish longbowmen would have laughed. Alongside them, slingers fitted murderously heavy leaden balls into the pouches of their weapons, and whirled them so that they hummed. Roman might, ancient and disciplined.

  The Frankish rush came on. The earth quivered beneath the pounding of their feet. A few shaken spirits in the Roman lines let fly their missiles too soon, and were scathingly cursed by their officers. Closer the barbarians came, roaring, their feet drumming the earth. And closer yet. At last the order was given.

  A hellish hail of arrows and leaden balls tore into the Franci. The sling-missiles were the more to be dreaded, for their shocking power was awful. Where one of those murderously heavy balls struck a man on the head, it killed him instantly; where one struck an armoured leg, it shattered that limb; where one struck the body, it smashed ribs, driving them into the lungs, or ruptured internal organs and dropped its victim writhing on the grass.

  A volley. Two. A third, when the leading Frankish columns seemed almost close enow to breathe in the Romans’ faces.

  Trumpets sounded the charge for the Roman horse.

  The squadrons began to move, surging down over the ridge where they had waited. These big horses under such heavy burdens did not gain full speed quickly; was like an avalanche of bone and iron, slow in its beginnings and inexorably gaining momentum and power. The Roman archers and slingers retreated up the hill-slopes on either side, moving in disciplined order and leaving open lanes. Through these cavalry rushed in a mailed torrent.

  The Franks bayed like wolves. A cloud of javelins and missile-axes swept with an awful hum between the horsemen and the sun, to slash down into the Roman ranks. Here a man reeled from his saddle, shrieking while he clawed at the wreckage of his face. The ax fell to cripple a companion’s horse. There a nine-barbed javelin tore at an angle into a dun war-horse’s side just behind the rib cage, and deeply pierced its guts. It screamed hideously and collapsed, rolling over on the javelin, breaking the shaft. Its rider’s leg was crushed and maimed under the animal. The horse struggled to rise, spraying bloody urine. Its terrible screams went on and on, so eerily close to human sounds.

  The charge had been shaken somewhat-without being impaired. Its impetus was sufficient to pound a stone wall into rubble. The squadrons thundered onward. Hooves tore up the hillside and snapped javelins as if they’d been twigs. Clods of earth flew high from the chargers’ hooves. Black dots against the sky, spinning in air, raining earth and sod and roots. Iron-tipped lances lowered to turn the charge into an awful moving wall of teeth. Bodies braced in
the saddles; horsemen’s sinewy thighs clamped.

  The crash of impact rocked the sky and reverberated for miles.

  Men were instantly impaled, spitted through, swept aside like winnowed grain, stamped under the war-horses’ feet while their eyes stared huge as fishes’. The cavalry of Syagrius swept on, uncheckable, a flood-tide on the plain. A threshing machine. The Frankish lines had been broken, ripped apart like rotten cloth. Arrows and sling-missiles came howling down to complete the slaughter.

  Yet only the van of the Frankish host had been destroyed.

  Its power scarcely abated, the charge rushed on against the remaining columns, the greater mass of the foe. Again javelins and throwing-axes shadowed the sky. That Frankish hand-artillery took hideous toll. And horses pounded on.

  Fools, Syagrius thought, with part of his mind as he rode. Had they discipline, or even sense, they would ground their spears and make a solid wall of shields; spear-butts braced, points jutting out and upward that our horses might impale themselves by their own momentum. It is what the Saxons would do…

  Many of the Romans had broken or lost their lances. These drew swords or lifted hideous four-bladed maces from beside their saddles. Those who still bore lances leveled them anew. Smeared and dripping. Hooves thundered. The earth shook. Birds had fled for a mile around. Ravens waited.

  Again resounded that crashing awful shock that no human flesh could withstand, however massed. Again the ragged barbarian columns crumpled. Bone shattered. Bodies were riven and men vanished under the blurring fury of hooves. Blood splashed and soaked into the thirsty ground and clods pattered down upon it.

  This time the charge had spent itself. Its order was broken. As for the Franks, they had possessed little in the way of order to begin with, and scarcely missed it. Their wild ranks eddied. With order failed, those unaccustomed to it grew stronger. The barbarians closed about the horsemen in a storm of angry flesh. The battle became a vast boiling howling melee.