The Tower of Death cma-2

by Andrew J Offutt

  At the warehouse’s far end were strong double doors-with more Franks waiting hard by them, the blaze-eyed Cormac guessed.

  Within reach though was rope in plenty, and Wulfhere’s ax knocked a hole in the roof with a couple of careless blows. He boosted Clodia through it first, as she was the lightest. Cormac followed, mounting on the Dane’s vast shoulders. The while Wulfhere made scathing remarks about his weight, his clumsiness and the unclean state of his feet, so offensively near his captain’s nose.

  Cormac vanished nimbly through the hole, braced his feet on the beam Wulfhere’s ax had exposed, and lowered the rope.

  Like the beam itself and Cormac’s steely muscles, it creaked as the Danish giant climbed out of the warehouse. Mother-naked and bone dry, Wulfhere weighed nigh two and three-quarters hundred pounds. In full war-gear he went far over three hundred, and it was not just anyone, any body, who could play his anchor-man.

  As he had come up last, he went down first.

  Cormac gripped Clodia, growled, “Wulfhere! Catch!” and tossed her unceremoniously from the roof. She squeaked, biting off her scream.

  The young woman was solidly made, and her impact in Wulfhere’s arms from such a height drove even him to his knees. He let her slip to the ground, giving her a pinch for luck.

  Cormac knelt for a brief space on the roof, listening from that vantage to the noises borne on the night air.

  Sigebert was shrieking his wrath and pain yet, somewhere at the front of the building. The citizens of Nantes were raising a racket in the background, while soldiers in the warehouse came blundering after their lawful prey. Cormac wished fiercely there’d been time to fire it about their ears. With a jerk of his head, he slid down the rope.

  Aground, he sliced the rope through with his sword as far above his head as he could reach. Mayhap the Franks would miss seeing it now-at any rate, the first time they passed the spot. And if they missed it then, it was like they would obliterate their quarry’s tracks in the mud with their own trampling feet.

  The three legged it.

  The dark twisting alleys of the Nantes waterfront were as well known to all the trio as Raven’s deck to Cormac and Wulfhere. To the eastern Franks, they were an unknown maze.

  “Now, girl, we part,” Cormac said. “By the great Lord of the Mound, we got ye clear of yon trap, but we’ve not adopted ye! Go your way.”

  She gulped. “I dare not. You s-saw what manner of man is that Sigebert. He’d have used me; now he will torture me besides.”

  “Then do not be letting him catch ye. There’s all the world open to ye.”

  “Not for a woman alone. The Devil, Cormac! I’ve nowhere to go.”

  “Aye, Wolf,” put in Wulfhere. “The lass has the right of it.”

  Cormac swore savagely. “The soft-headed great gomeral ye are! So then; come with us, girl, if ye can be matching our pace. But it will tax yourself. Blood of the gods!”

  He spoke not another word till they reached the ship, and few then. A black Gaelic melancholy akin to madness was upon him, with its immediate cause in the loss of the boatload of plunder, the richest they had taken yet.

  But the loot, as loot, meant little.

  What it had symbolized to Cormac, he was hardly aware himself. He was exile, outlaw and pirate, and these dark facts had the casual treachery of kings for their direct cause. It was not strange that they had marked him. Lacking any home but Raven’s deck, or any safety but that to be found in his weapon-arm and his companions’, he lived for the day each day, trying to forget the past and with no confidence at all in his future.

  Yet the Gael of Eirrin was young. Cormac mac Art had less years on him then his looks made credible. Younger he was than he had let even Wulfhere know, or than the mighty Dane would have believed. In outward seeming he had become more Spartan than Celt, though his race’s fanciful, extravagant temper had not quite been ground out of his soul.

  He was not beyond dreaming of a return to Eirrin in wealth and power, to claim one unforgotten girl whose face still troubled his sleep.

  (Years had passed. She was girl no longer, but woman, and married woman, he was painfully certain.)

  Nor had wealth or power come his way on the reiver’s path. He’d scars and red memories and a reputation to show for it, naught more. The haul at Garonne-mouth had been the richest ever to fall into his hands, and now, like others, it had slipped from between them. Not in itself, but as a foundation to build on, that booty might have made him at last able to buy justice at home-and that justice in this world usually had to be bought, Cormac knew well.

  He ground his teeth in a fury of frustration as he fled through the Gaulish night. The womanish presence was distinctly unwelcome, merely a further burden.

  Clodia kept pace with them. They were fighting men in their heavy battle-gear, and she unburdened. They had come through a long wearing day; she was fresh. These helped lessen the men’s advantage of longer legs and harder condition, and above all she matched their pace because she dared not do otherwise.

  The young woman ran, with skirt lifted about her thighs, its ends tucked through her girdle. Pale legs flashed. She ran through streets and convoluted lanes, swam an inlet the men were tall enow to wade (and in their iron, were constrained to) and then plunged further through mud and reeds.

  Clodia reached the ship staggering; her breath had the sound of tearing cloth.

  Behind them wavered a line of torches, and hounds were baying.

  “Get under weigh!” Wulfhere commanded. “By the shields of Asgard, we have half Nantes breathing up our backsides! We stepped into a trap, companions, and someone will pay for it. But do we bide here, the paying will be done by us!”

  Cormac heaved himself over the thwarts, streaming water. Clodia, wading out, stepped in a sink-hole and screamed.

  “Help mee! Abandon me here and you murder me!”

  An oar pivoted her way. She seized the blade, and felt her legs pull free of the sucking mud. Cormac, his black mood increasing if such were possible, stood impassive. Wulfhere turned from giving orders, showed his teeth in something not a smile, and raised a hand with the fingers tensely clawed.

  His meaning: Thor strike you, shut her up!

  With a curse, Cormac leaned far out and grabbed Clodia’s skirt. It was the nearest thing to his hand, its ends having come loose from her girdle, and she having got one knee precariously over the oar.

  He dragged her, sliding, along the oar-shaft. She stuck briefly, and then tumbled aboard with her sodden skirt ripping up the seam. Her legs were stockinged up to the thighs in slate-coloured, ill-smelling mire.

  Clodia looked about as erotically fetching as a halfdrowned kitten, and her language withered the reeds for thirty paces around.

  Raven’s square sail rose on its long yard, to fill with the land-breeze. She began to move. The line of torches dropped away astern.

  Cormac watched the bright smears fade in the night almost with regret, for he’d have relished further fighting in that moment. It would have been more enjoyable than thinking, for what had he to think upon that was good?

  The grey pallor of false dawn was showing when Raven cleared the Loire’s mouth. Clodia huddled as small as possible. She was among cut-throats and slayers who might do as they pleased to her, with only their leader’s word to restrain them. Most Viking captains would give her to their men, and afterwards to the sea. She did not look for that from Wulfhere, yet neither did she suppose he’d pamper her.

  It’s slavery in a foreign land for you, girl, she told herself grimly. Yet it was preferable to what would happen to her father. She sniffed-and looked thoughtfully at the Gael.

  “Warships!” someone howled.

  It was naught but the truth. Out of the half dark came the shapes of two Roman galleys, with war-men tough as the Visigothic marines, and better disciplined, on their decks. Jolted out of his bleak introversion, Cormac stared while his thoughts took urgent form, like layers of pearl, around the word again!
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br />   Planned, he thought, all planned, and the vow of blood-vengeance formed in the back of his mind. For now…

  They could not fight and win.

  Southward down the coast lurked aroused, alert and blood-hungry enemies.

  Westward along Lesser Britain’s shores, they would inevitably be run down when dawn appeared. Nor was dawn far off.

  “Cormac?” Wulfhere said tranquilly. “Methinks they truly have us this time. We will taste mead and ale in Valhalla this day; or do we fare to Helheim, we’ll go there escorted with due honour. Not even you can trick us out of this.”

  “Had we time, I’d bind ye to a wager! Southwest is our way, sea-wolves! Cut across the open water, and if they dare follow they are not Romans, but seamen! Be ye with me?”

  Jaws dropped and crewmen muttered. Some raised cries of protest.

  Better to die in clean battle, they said, bathing their weapons, than lie cold in the arms of Ran! For only fools did other than follow the shore on their voyaging, clinging close as sea and shoals permitted. From choice, they never ventured far out to sea. Like all former invaders, the Germans who crossed the water to Britain did so where it was narrowest.

  Concerning the wide gulf lying north of Spain, it was more feared than the open Atlantic itself, for the winds and currents that unpredictably stirred it. The Cantabrian Sea, it was called by Roman geographers; to seamen who named it out of their own experience, it was the Bay of Treachery.

  Raven had not ventured far from land even when dodging the Gothic biremes, and at that the water had been wicked. Cormac now urged what was frighteningly worse.

  Clodia was appalled.

  She had never been on the sea in her life, but she had heard sailors talk in her father’s wine-shop, and seen how they gripped their drinking jacks when they spoke of Treachery Bay. An she needed further proof that it was terrible, she had it when bloody-handed pirates, to whom the death grip of battle was something to joy in, showed trepidation at the thought of braving it. That they gainsaid their captain’s blood brother aloud gave her courage to cry her opinion.

  “Madness!” she yelled in a voice that cracked in a squak. “Mac Art, this folly of yours will murder me-murder us all! Your men have-”

  Cormac rounded on her with a snarl. The Saxon knife he’d once taken from a man who had no further use for it glittered in his fist. The other he clenched in her redbrown mass of hair, drawing back her head so that her white throat was offered to the blade.

  “Twice now,” he said conversationally, “have ye insisted we be bent on your murder, wench! Now ye’ll be closing your mouth and keeping it so, or this little blade and I will see to it that ye’ll have been a seeress who predicted her own death!”

  He released her. She staggered, tripped and sat down. Her eyes were chestnut-round. Cormac turned to the men on the benches. Them he addressed with biting scorn.

  “Ye heard that? A woman who never felt a deck under her feet, and she sounds no worse than ye soft-bellied cod! Wulfhere’s Killers! Ha! Look at him there, ready to vomit for shame! What say ye, Skull-splitter? Shall we swim the Bay and leave them to snivel at the Romans?”

  “Never,” Wulfhere assured him. “We have Raven, and we hold her. I say we cross Treachery Bay, and toss overboard any who dispute that. Let them do the swimming! Ordlaf?”

  Ordlaf Skel’s son the steersman, who had not joined the outcry, spat over the stern. “I’ll succeed, chieftain. And even should I fail, there’ll be none able to twit me.”

  Wulfhere boomed happy laughter. “I’m served by one man, at least! You hear, codfish? Oh-ho-ho! It will be an adventure! Who is there that doesn’t fight? But this thing was never done afore, that I’ve heard of! Now bend your backs, or you will be having to fight ere the Romans reach you, and with me! But do make it a speedy decision. Yon galleys be not standing still!”

  His persuasiveness carried the debate.

  Thus it was that the top-heavy Roman warcraft saw Raven vanish whither they dared not follow. Even then, the pursuers did not guess the resolve that was aboard the pirate craft. The Roman commanders assumed she had put back to the coast in the hour before dawn, and wasted their day searching bay, cove and channel for her. By then she was far out on the heaving grey sea, with low-pitched grumbling on her benches, and prayers to Lord Aegir and the Thunderer.

  Clodia was lucky, and over-lucky, not to be sacrificed to the sea people.

  CHAPTER THREE: The Bay of Treachery

  Grey.

  Grey sea under grey sky.

  And Raven pressed betwixt the two on a surging horizon while the sky grumbled and now and again bellowed like a beast jealous of its territory.

  The ocean swells grew out of Ran’s breathing belly like monsters prowling the grey world. Slowly they gathered, rising, rolling. To those who watched from the little ship tiny on the sea as a fruit-fly at an imperial banquet, it was as if they had the leisure of all time to watch them form. Then the swells were fulfilled. They peaked like wet mountains beneath the keel, the sun striking lights from them like mica in granite. For a stricken heartbeat the crew of Raven looked down a glassy tilt of forever.

  And then they slid down it. Faster the ship went, and faster still, tobogganing insanely-to the next wet mountain that bulked up even as a grey colossus. Should the steersman fail to keep her head aright, Raven would wallow and do her best to gulp in half the Bay called Treachery-and go swiftly to the bottom.

  Ordlaf held her. He plied the weighty steering-oar with neither panic nor hesitancy. Even so, Raven took water. Men were kept bailing all the while, and all the while more water sluiced over the deck and into the bailing well. No; was hardly the best of jobs. But then neither was Ordlaf’s: Nor was Wulfhere’s, for he was master of Raven and thus responsible.

  All this, while the weather stayed fair.

  The girl from Nantes attached herself to the end of one oar-bench, as a limpet to its rock. She quickly became abominably seasick. Her lovely complexion went all greenish and she suffered the humiliation of retching and chucking until there was naught left in her stomach. After she loosed the first spasm inboard, someone seized her by the neck and flung her to the wale like a puppy not yet trained.

  “The fish want it,” she heard the Danish pirate say. “We do not.” And the callous dog had himself a feel of her while he was at it.

  Much later, she crawled back to her old position. She was still miserable, and now there was no relief. Her stomach was empty, and sureness wasn’t on her that she had not vomited up her guts as well.

  Then the weather worsened.

  The men from the fjord-sliced north had it that Thor created thunder by hurling his hammer “Miller,” which struck with a shower of sparks that was lightning; indeed his keep was called Bilskirnir, Lightning; and that sleepy Aegir was lord of the sea below. But Aegir mostly slumbered. Not so his wife Ran, who had the temperament of a she-cat in heat and no toms about. The Tyrannis of Cormac’s people was probably the same as the nordic Thor. Not so Lir, who was the sea, and his son Manannan. And was Manannan MacLir ruled the waters of salt. It mattered not who was right; the Saints or “Christians” said the father of their Dead God ruled land and sea on all the ridge of the world, the pompous jackals, and the Romans of the old way had it that Neptune did.

  Perhaps they were all right, aye and the Greeks too with their Poseidonis. Whatever the case and Whoever ruled: He or She was restless.

  Now restlessness became anger.

  The wind that gave Treachery Bay its name began it, in roaring gusts. It blew at random from eight several directions and all at once. Forty feet tall, the mast creaked and its foot-thickness began to seem frail. The sail cracked and boomed with the winds’ unpredictable shifts. At first, Wulfhere tried trimming it accordingly, but his orders were useless ere they could be carried out; a new wind pre-empted. Judging from the darkening sky, worse was accusing.

  Wulfhere dolorously bade his men lower sail.

  Wind-roughened water seethed abou
t, complicating the ocean-swell. The longship bucked and slammed. Raven was become the sea’s prisoner. Clodia lost her grip, lurched three paces and fell, banging her hip that was wide and wide for childbearing. She whimpered, knowing she’d bear a colourful bruise. The girl who’d never afore been asea sought some new haven, any place to anchor herself, and again she missed hold. Clodia tumbled across the foredeck with a noise that sounded more like exasperated protest than aught else-though it broke on a note of despair. As if to add insult to injury, the wind screamed angrily at her and hurled a great splash of cold water over the merchant’s daughter.

  Impatient hands, big hands and leathery-rough of palm and calloused fingers, seized on her and Clodia first squeaked, then made a grateful noise.

  It was Cormac mac Art who tucked her under a battle-hardened arm, and paused to seek and be sure of his balance. Clodia hung there, a dazed, dead weight. In a plosion of long swift strides, Cormac gained the mast. He hugged its solid thickness with his one free arm, again pausing.

  Wind blew so hard as to bang him with his own sword-scabbard. Setting his feet on the X of crossed beams that were braced within Raven’s sides to support the mast, he lashed Clodia thereto. This task he performed impersonally as he might have seen to a loose bit of cargo.

  She’d be safe now from plunging overboard or disrupting working men, and no nuisance in her landhugger’s clumsiness.

  Cormac remembered something.

  Without ceremony, he plunged a hand between Clodia’s excellently blooming breasts. Astonished, the young woman knew the fleeting thought that this was scarcely the time, but she made no objection. She instead smiled, and lifted her wet face.