The Tower of Death cma-2

by Andrew J Offutt

  Cormac and his four sword-comrades added their weight to the load.

  “Now if ye’ll be casting off our grapnel-irons,” he said, “it’s farewell we’ll be bidding ye, with due thanks for your hospitality-and a caution not to raise your anchors whilst we be in sight.”

  Gervase nodded glumly. The grapnels were prised loose to thud down aboard the galley. The Danes raised an ironical cheer as they pushed off from Thetis’s plump side. Gervase’s square wind-burned face darkened; anger got the best of caution.

  “Laugh when you’re out of Count Guntram’s reach!” he yelled after them.

  None aboard Raven had Latin but Cormac and Wulfhere, and only the former was fluent. No Latin was required, however, to recognize the name Guntram. The Danes replied with laughter, boos and rude gestures. Then they settled to rowing.

  Gervase, watching them go, gripped the timber of his ship’s rail till his knuckles showed the colour of the bone beneath.

  Raven’s oars marched smoothly, like the jointless legs of some strange water-centipede, yet this time they imparted speed but gradually. Out and out across Garonne-mouth moved the pirate craft, turning for a nor’westerly course.

  Not the least of Gervase’s warring feelings was wonder that he lived.

  His passions were to be further moved, and that in moments. For while the corbito rolled at anchor, he saw-beyond the departing Raven, on the estuary’s north side-shapes move and emerge. With bulging eyes he recognised them as biremes of the Garonne fleet. They too had their masts unstepped and their decks clear for fighting.

  Master Gervase struck his fist on the rail in explosive joy.

  That was his first response, but then he was not the swiftest of thinkers.

  Two warships! Raven captured or sunk! The cargo recovered! Such pirates as survived hanging on a gibbet, after appropriate tortures!

  Then it struck him.

  They must ha’ seen the whole business, from first to last! Why-blight ’em with boils from where they lay, they couldn’t ha’ helped it!

  Why didn’t they appear sooner?

  The answer became obvious as soon as the question was posed.

  They wanted the pirate heavy laden. Easy meat. They let us be robbed for that-and killed to a man for aught they knew, had we not received quarter!

  Our fine overlords. Our bloody Gothic protector!

  Gervase’s hands had slackened. Now they gripped anew, with the insensate pressure of vises. A vein beat and coiled in his temple like a frenzied blue worm. The battling furies in his heart found expression in eight words.

  “Carve ’em like mutton! Give ’em hot hell!”

  Which side he meant to encourage was known only to his god.

  The Danes saw the warcraft appear with no dismay, and even no particular surprise. The very madness of waylaying a ship at the mouth of the Garonne, when Cormac had suggested it, had made it irresistible. They had known the risk. Wulfhere had shouted for very delight, called the Gael sword-brother, and dealt him a clap on the back to have staggered a lesser man. He was unaffectedly happy now as he had been then.

  “Will ye give look at that?” he rumbled. “Wolf, we are not to be cheated of battle after all.”

  Cormac answered only a nod, but he was not unhappy about that prospect.

  The biremes rushed on, driven each by two banks of oars to Raven’s one, and thrice fifty rowers to Raven’s three score, and them sentenced criminals urged to their work by ropes’ ends-knotted. Each warship had a barnacled bronze-tipped ram jutting from her prow below the water-line, and a hundred Gothic marines on her deck.

  Tough-handed war-men they were, in hard leather cuirasses studded with iron, and round iron caps, armed with buckler and spatha, the thirty-inch single-edged Gothic sword. One in three was equipped too with short bow and full quiver. Ordinarily the Danes would have laughed at such, for they were archers the masters of any in the southern German tribes. Now though they had spent four days in ambush in hostile country. The weather had been wet, very wet, and so were their bowstrings, even the spares.

  Cormac’s slitted gaze ran the length of the biremes, for he saw them broadside-on as, they raced to intercept.

  Mounted on each afterdeck was an engine such as he’d not seen till now, a dart-thrower resembling a huge crossbow. The Greeks had used them ere Rome’s empire arose, never mind fell, and Cormac had vaguely heard of them, garbled as ancient sorceries. He’d thought the techniques lost, and well lost. Someone had worked at reviving them.

  Someone, he thought, is concerned about us.

  Marine archers lined the rail of the leading warship. Their bowstrings hummed, and thirty arrows hurtled at Raven. Of that first volley, most fell short, hissing as the water took them, and none found a home in flesh.

  “Out to sea!” Wulfhere thundered. “Let’s find how these Goth lubbers take rough water!”

  Crew and ship were as one; Raven turned due west. Iron-muscled backs and limbs put explosions of energy into rowing. But the galley was heavy laden, and while her change of direction had postponed the meeting, the Gothic biremes were gaining at every oar-stroke. The leader would be running beside them soon, and within arrow-shot, and then the Goths would loose volley after volley.

  But-Cormac grinned hard-an we win beyond that sheltering bulge of land to northward first, the Gothic aim’ll suffer! Wulfhere was right.

  The dart-thrower banged.

  Cormac saw a bolt long as he was tall spring over the sea. It flashed above the heads of his straining rowers to pierce the water for a fathom ere it lost force. The Gael did not see, but starkly imagined, its four-bladed iron head. Such a thing would split Raven’s overlapping strakes as Wulfhere’s ax broke mail.

  The dart-thrower’s crew was winching back its cable now for another shot.

  “Behl’s fiery eye!” he said between his teeth. “Were our archers in fettle, we’d be dropping ye all stone mortal slain about your engine!”

  The bireme ploughed on. Now it lagged a ship’s length behind Raven, now half, and now it edged in, foot by foot. The archers loosed again.

  The war-shields hung along Raven’s foaming thwarts were some protection, and helms and byrnies more. These arrows, though, were shot to fall from above. Some skewered brawny arms or calves. One man had the sudden sight of a feathered shaft pinning his hand to his oar; burning pain followed. Another felt naught, for as he bent forward in a stroke, an arrowhead drove through his offered neck between helm and byrnie. He was instantly dead. His oar trailed useless, fouling others.

  Knud the Swift justified his by-name by leaping to the bench, heaving the corpse aside and seizing the oartimber. Three benches behind him, the man with the nailed hand coldly broke off the arrow-shaft and freed himself.

  “Relief here!” he growled.

  And the gap of water separating bireme from clinker-built northern galley grew straiter.

  Wulfhere had gone thoughtful, hefting his giant’s ax. The head was large as his two hands together, and weighed all of seven pounds. The Gothic helmsman stood in plain sight but no, the Skull-splitter decided, besides being loath to part with it, not even he could hurl this particular ax quite so far. He drew the smaller one from his weapon belt.

  It was a short-hafted Frankish weapon, meant for throwing, of the kind that bore the name of that fierce, treacherous tribe-a francisca. He’d practiced long hours with it and knew to the nail’s width its properties in flight.

  “The helmsman, Cormac,” he said. “If I bring him down, can ye remember that ye be seaman these days, and not tending pigs in Eirrin any longer? And give the right order?”

  “It’s a seaman I was ere ever I saw your mattress of a face,” the Gael said.

  Wulfhere, grinning, brought the Frankish ax back over his mailed shoulder, edge upward, and braced a wadmal-clad knee the size of a shield-boss in the bow. The missile-ax made two full turns over thirteen paces, he knew, therefore one in half that; and for targets beyond or between such ranges, one must imp
art more spin or more drag so that the weapon struck with edge flying foremost.

  The blue eyes in their mesh of weather wrinkles judged the distance with experienced calm.

  A further flight of arrows hummed, sped almost straight up now, so close were the adversaries. Wulfhere heeded them no more than had they been a swarm of gnats. He’d cautioned Cormac to do what was necessary, knowing that he might be dead himself. His hairy, thick-muscled arm swung forward.

  The Frankish ax glittered through five full turns in the sea air… and sank, as into a turnip, through the helmsman’s temple.

  He’d scarcely begun to fall when Cormac barked, “Up oars to steerboard! Turn, turn hard about! Towards the Goth!”

  One heartbeat’s pause of pure amazement-and the the crew obeyed. Straight up from the water rose the line of oars on Cormac’s right, while the rowers to port-side doubled their already bone-cracking efforts, so that a couple of oars broke off short in strong hands. Raven turned in perhaps but three times her own length, while her timbers made cracking protests. The bireme’s ram came thrusting through seething water to gore her-but the helm was untended, veering, for a bare sufficiency of confused moments aboard the Goth.

  Raven had come fully about, swifter than the Goths had deemed possible in a ship her length. Her copper-sheathed prow now aimed directly at the bireme’s port line of oars.

  Blind and captive below decks, urged on by thrashings, the bireme’s rowers took her to disaster.

  Athanagild Beric’s son, bulging-eyed on her bridge, screamed, “Backwater! Back water!”

  But there was hardly time to say it, much less see it done.

  Raven had lost impetus in her turn, and lacked space to gather it anew. It was the bireme’s own hungry speed did the work.

  Her double bank of oars shattered on Raven’s prow and beneath her keel, as so many rowan wands under a coulter’s blade. The broken ends whipped back within the hull to do gruesome carnage among the rowers. Backs broke, ribs went in pieces, brains flew from their enclosing skulls in gobbets of pink and grey mud.

  Marines on deck went sprawling. Some stayed on their feet by clutching the deck-rail, as did Athanagild on his bridge. He stood appalled, maddened, infuriated. Again he beheld Wulfhere Hausakliufr, and this time far closer, but untouchable, arrogant, like a tower of iron aquiver with mirth. He laughed in their amazed Gothic faces as he passed.

  “Go home to your mothers!” was the advice he gave them.

  “Loose! Loose arrows!” Athanagild screamed at his archers. “Feather me that great hog! Kill him! Kill him! A hundred solidi for the man who does!”

  Wulfhere heard, and remained standing in the bow long enough to be sure he was almost the sole target for the next flight. Then he ducked beneath the dragon-head beside Cormac, and covered them both with his shield, off which a shaft or two rattled. Most rebounded from the hammered copper that armoured the prow, or hissed in the sea, which made it an arrow-flight wasted.

  “Loose again! Kill the rowers! Curse you, ready the dart-thrower!”

  Modern artisans proved hardly equal to those of former times; the dart-thrower’s mechanism had jammed after one shot. Upon gaining that bit of news Athanagild raised his fists and addressed Heaven in raving blasphemies. His god, that one Cormac called the Dead God, took no note.

  Meanwhile, the Danish galley had made a close turn around the crippled bireme, and was running for the open sea once more. Athanagild’s archers rained arrows on them with grim method as they passed, so that fourteen men were wounded and two more slain. As Raven had but forty oars functioning and the second bireme was close upon her, all in all no one was any longer amused.

  They left land-shelter for an ugly cross-chop brewed by Ran, who spread nets for ships, in one of her bitchiest moods. Less poetically, the inimical sea here was due to the jut of the Armorican peninsula to the north, and the mass of Spain to the south, lending their complications to the heavy swells from the Western Ocean. Raven began to buck and wallow like a drunken walrus; the Visigothic ship drew nearer.

  Cormac went aft to watch, covering the steersman with a shield.

  Another huge iron-headed dart plunged into the sea, a spear’s length astern. Three flights of arrows followed, and at the third, Cormac gasped and sank down. Wulfhere, amidships, saw and hastened aft.

  “Cormac! Have they killed ye, man?”

  “I’m-winded,” the Gael bit forth. He grinned. “The mail, and this leather sark and padding under it, kept the point from my hide. Them and their little four-foot bows!”

  “Ah,” Wulfhere mourned, lest the other accuse him of waxing sentimental, “it’s a bad day and growing no better. I dared hope then that we’d be rid of ye.”

  Raven mounted a swell that slopped brine inboard. Then the sea vanished from under her, and she dropped her belly into the trough in a way that slammed teeth together and rattled spines. Men got desperately to work, bailing.

  “Wulfhere,” Cormac said, “It’s too heavy we be. Man-the wine must go.”

  “WHAT?”

  “The wine,” the Gael repeated. “It must go.”

  The big Dane’s dismay very nearly equalled Athanagild’s. Cormac’s cold voice cut through his expostulations, his protests and all loud anguish. They were wallowing like hogs in muck, and less happily by far. The Visigoths were having their sorrows, but soon they’d be so close that even their bowmen could not continue to miss-unless the reivers lightened ship. At the same time they’d be littering the sea with the menace of bobbing massive casks to trouble pursuit. They’d float, though not high; immediately below the surface, most likely. It had to be done.

  Wulfhere turned away. Cormac cursed hotly; the Skull-splitter’s strength was needed for the work, and he chose to mope!

  The Gael called Hrut Bearslayer to him. The silent carl, not quite right in the head from a sword-cut thereon, was the one man of the crew whose bulk and strength equalled Wulfhere’s. He was single-mindedly loyal to Cormac besides. Word was passed along. The oar-men, working in pairs, unlashed the casks and tipped them over the side. Cormac and Hrut between them disposed of the three in the stem. They rolled and tumbled away behind.

  Cormac, watching, saw one shatter on the bireme’s ram, and another, lifted by the swell, slam and break on the craft’s carvel-built side. Planks were sprung. The sea was abruptly sweetened and darkened, while some lookout cried a warning at the Goth’s masthead… and mac Art was satisfied.

  The more so for Raven’s now riding the waves lightly as a bird.

  The water remained savage, but the crew was used to dirty weather. They were often out in it by choice, as naught made better concealment-and the weather itself was now fair enough, save for this gusty, unpredictable wind. The bireme, carrying a hundred weapon-men who did not row, and all their gear, fell behind. Raven was away and at large.

  Erelong, the Gael went forward to where Wulfhere gloomed at the waves like a man-shaped thundercloud. Cormac shook his head in exasperation, and set a hand on his friend’s burly shoulder.

  “Ah, Splitter of skulls… the world has not ended! It’s the best of the plunder we have yet, and tonight will see us in Nantes, guesting at the merchant’s table. Ye ken well he has a cellar the gods in Tir-nan-Og might envy, and that even your vast self cannot drink dry. Not to be mentioning his daughter, and there isn’t a feater bawd on these coasts.”

  “Cormac,” Wulfhere said, not turning.

  The Gael sighed, and shrugged, and left him to mourn. The ship must be looked after, even if the great souse’s heart was breaking. The mast must needs be stepped again, here on the choppy sea, and sail raised. Was a task fit for the chastisement of Loki, and enough to make him, were he present, wish to be back in his dry comfortable cave with the vipers. Then they might ship oars and beat northward under canvas.

  They left the sea reddened in their wake, with blood and richest wine.

  CHAPTER TWO: Two Pirates, A Trap, and Clodia

  As Burdigala to the Garonne,
was the city of Nantes to the Loire. And, blessedly, it was part of a different realm. Philip the Syrian had called it “the Roman Kingdom,” and with cause.

  Its ruler was Roman by birth, education and loyalty. Master of Soldiers he’d been; his title now was Consul of the Empire, bestowed on him by the Emperor Zeno, who sat in Constantinople and had nothing that mattered to do with him. In law he was an official, representing Zeno. In practice he was independent, and the barbarians who had overrun the rest of Gaul were nothing if not practical. They thought of him as a king, and called him a king-Rex Romanorum.

  His name was Syagrius. Consul Syagrius; King Syagrius.

  He no more approved of pirate forays along his shores than did Alaric of Toulouse.

  For this reason, Wulfhere took his galley up the Loire with secretive care, and anchored her two miles from the city. The plunder was loaded into a fishing boat he had paid for, grudgingly, as he was robber by profession. It was Cormac’s advice, crafty and well-reasoned as usual, to do this remarkable thing. It was certain as aught could be that the fisherman who received their coins would not run bleating to the law. The law would question him by increasingly strong methods as a matter of course. That was assurance enow of his shut mouth, and less like to attract attention than his death or disappearance.

  In darkness the fishing boat came to the waterfront of Nantes.

  Its precious load was covered with sacking and old fish-nets. The three who rode in it wore long enveloping cloaks of coarse wool, under which they carried their helmets. One was a flame-haired giant; another was dark, scarred and leanly muscular; the third likewise black-haired, the single Dane of such colouring in Wulfhere’s crew. Black Thorfinn, he was named.

  They moored the boat before a dockside warehouse. One end of it had been made into living quarters and a grog-shop, where any might come and go with a ready excuse, if not always without suspicion.

  Wulfhere and Cormac were too striking to show themselves even in such a place, and made their way to a less public door. There they knocked in a certain rhythm. A balding Gallo-Roman in stained tunic came to let them in. He did not look at all a financial match for Philip or Desiderius Crispus, which was as he liked it.