The Tower of Death cma-2

by Andrew J Offutt

  Cormac’s groping hand found the Egyptian sigil, all that was left of his hard-won loot. He plucked it forth.

  “Doubtless it’s keeping it warm for me ye were, just,” he said with flat-voiced cynicism. “Thanks. If drown I must, it’s as a man of property I’ll be going down to visit the son of Lir.”

  “You great swaggering boar!” she screamed out, eagerly hitting upon an object for her misery and wrath. “You-you fathom of scars and ill manners! You with your mailshirt cleaving to ye like a second skin with the crusted sweat and blood and stink of the five years you haven’t had it off! I know now why your enemies run away in droves! The sole reason your friends do not the same-”

  She railed on. It was not true, but he said nothing. She added several imaginative hypotheses about his friends. Cormac had ship’s matters to attend to, wherefore he paused but long enow to drop the winged serpent about his own neck, beneath the battle-gear and cloth. Then he turned away, and Clodia knew with rage that she was already forgot. Hardly comforting; she knew well that she was a savoury, ripe morsel for male lust. And this one couldn’t even be bothered bidding her hush, or denying her allegations, or so much as slapping her.

  Little cause had she to feel hurt. He’d made her safe, assuming Raven survived.

  The weather remained foul and the wind continued to veer wildly and shriek like the Ban-Sidhe or Banshee of Cormac’s own homeland. Men broke their backs rowing and bailing, and snatched what rest they might between turns. Ordlaf Skel’s son manned the steering-oar until he was nigh dropping, and Wulfhere relieved him then, to stand braced like the Colossus of that southern isle called Rhodes.

  Again and again the wind shifted direction and tried to creep up behind them like a hungering hyena, or blow Raven onto her side.

  A howling squawl hit them like a hammer of Thor. It tossed the ship about as if she’d been a chip in rapids, and none slept while that lasted. Had Raven turned broadside-on to those maniacal seas, she must have capsized in a moment-as she almost did in any case.

  Minutes of high excitement became hours of anguish.

  After midnight, they enjoyed a spell of clear weather. Men sagged and breathed through open mouths while with dull eyes they stared at wet boards.

  Cormac, passing the mast on his way to rest, was put in mind of Clodia. Hours had passed. He paused to free the sodden bundle with stringing hair gone dark with wet and frost-flecked with brine. The knots binding her to the mast were soaked stiff and salty, hard as lumpy iron nodules out of a cold forge. Annoyance that had driven another man to shrug and forget it made the Gael persist, while a sailor’s respect for good cord kept him from simply cutting it. His tough fingers opened the knots at last.

  Clodia virtually fell away from her support.

  “Thank you, Cormac,” she gasped, and she meant it. Conviction had come on her that, left there longer, her limbs had begun to rot off. A like thought had occurred to Cormac. Yet necessity was on them to raise sail, and Clodia had been in the way.

  “Cormac…”

  His face remained impassive despite the piteous appeal of her voice and face. “Ye live, Clodia. And it’s not as my guest ye be aboard.” And he went from her.

  By scanning the stars through wind-shredded gaps in cloud, and by Behl the sun as he shook off the dark and reigned anew, they discovered that they were far off course. Now Clodia of Nantes knew the reason that men of the sea ever equivocated with words such as should and with luck and good fortune when they answered the simple question: “How long will it take?” For none could ever be sure. A journey by sea might take two days or ten-or three months, an a ship, was blown so far off her course and then afflicted with calm.

  Erelong, those aboard Raven had contrary winds to fight again. These rose to such a patch that not sail only, but mast as well had to be lowered, else both had gone by the board. The wind shrieked like mad hags babbling inanities and lightning lit the sky with lurid flashes, followed by the crash of thunder.

  Thor was angry.

  Aegir was awake, and angry.

  Ran was angry. And what care had the son of Lir for a girl of Nantes, and boys and men of Dane-mark, and one long exile from Eirrin?

  It went on that way for five days.

  Save for two other such respites that were all too brief, their time on the Bay of Treachery was consistently as bad as the first day, or worse.

  They were fighting a sea that deserved all its fell repute, that hated humans and drowned whales while tearing down cliffs. Its bottom must be crowded with ships and bones, assuming that many had been foolish enough to come abroad here. A lesser ship than Raven and her crew had not been seen again save as fragments of axhoned wood torn by wind, and sodden corpses washed up on far beaches. With weaker leaders, even that crew might have given up from weariness and let themselves rest-in the nets of Ran.

  Two of the wounded men died.

  Two others, able-bodied companions, were lost in the hell of the sea for a moment’s missed footing; in truth, Ubbi was gone because he’d released his grip on his oar long enough to pick his nose.

  Four deaths, and they received no comment aside from muttered oaths and a fare-thee-well. There was not even time to think good thoughts of those men. The Danes could mourn their comrades later, so long as they did not join them. And so long as former comrades returned not as liches; Those Who Walk after Death.

  During one of the respites, idly talking men decided that Aegir and Ran had naught to do with this awful stretch of water, and the skalds must merely have failed to make mention that here reigned Loki and his ugly get, Hela who ruled the underworld. Clodia was willing to think them right, as she had already decided they were the coldest, meanest, bravest and most competent men under heaven.

  On the fifth day the winds steadied, and fell.

  Raven rocked gently on the water become glassy plain, and weary survivors of wrathful, treacherous winds basked in the gentleness as in sweet bed-linen. Men sagged, or merely crumpled and slept, or rose and stretched-and then slumped. Up went the sail, and it was hardly less relaxed than the men beneath.

  In twilight, they espied a dark coastline. After the cloudy sundown a land-breeze roved out to bring the welcome scents of earth and forest. Yet was too soon to rejoice; as leaders, the Gael and the huge Dane had to decide what landfall might portend. Nor was thinking easy for them, with fatigue on their bodies and brains like thrice-filtered poison.

  They spoke with great deliberation and exaggerated care and what, in fresher state, they’d have deemed thick simplicity, the Gael in particular.

  “Yon be Hispania,” Wulfhere said. “Must be.”

  “Hispania,” Cormac agreed. “And the northern part. Most likely the north-west. Galicia. That is the name they call it by. Galicia.” He paused to ponder, and that ponderously. “Have we enemies here?”

  “I think not. Ye’ll not believe me, Wolf, but this is one coast where I’ve never done business. Farther south, aye. Never here.”

  “Nor I.”

  “Strange.”

  “Umm.” Cormac was bethinking him of former days, when he’d led a band of Eirrin’s reivers and men had named him the greatest such sea-wolf since Niall of the Nine Hostages.

  Aye, Cormac an-Cliuin had plundered farther south than this too, all the way to Africa’s sparkling shores and within the very blue, blue Mediterranean. Yet it chanced that he had never put in at Galician shores, not even for naught so harmless as to lift a few cattle for fresh eating. He’d taken nary a drop of Galician booty off a ship, to his knowledge. There could be naught against him here, in this northwest corner of Hispania… save his reputation, o’course, should he chance to meet with narrow, finicking men.

  He raked through his tired memory for what he knew of this land.

  The people here were an insular lot, he seemed to recall, not the sort to care what he and Wulfhere had done in other places, to other peoples. The Galicians were just as separated from other men as the sea-roving tigers of Raven.
Some German tribe held the mastery here, didn’t it? Aye-what was it they were called, now. An amalgam of tribes, an old group united in-

  “Sueves!” the Gael said aloud.

  “Slaves?”

  “Na, redbeard: Sueves. The Suevi. The people who rule this land.” He slapped his knee, on which the watered, salted leather had gone dry and hard as old bark. “Fine, then! They’ll not be hanging us unless on principle, and-”

  “Principle?” Wulfhere’s tone was truculent.

  “We are pirates, Wulf! We can make ourselves understood by them. It’s a German people they are, or were. I had their king’s name, once.”

  “Ah! One Veremund the Tall. That his height is what a Dane would reckon ‘tall’ I misdoubt, though. Umm… the name’s all I know of him.”

  “Veremund. Verem-aye! A king with ideas, I’m told. It’s trouble with the Goths he and his people are after having. It ought not harm our credit an we let him know the Goths are after having trouble with us… and he’ll be knowing that anyhow.”

  “How much trouble,” Wulfhere asked, “and how bad?” After a moment he added, “The Sueves with the Goths, I mean.”

  That Cormac knew, but he also knew his own brain was working little better.

  “There is the meat of it, Cormac. And be they at odds still, or at peace? For all we know, they now be Gothic vassals.”

  Cormac, silent, laboured at remembering. The conquests and dispossessions that had boiled across the known world in the last hundred years were beyond any man’s power to keep straight in his head. The writhe and surge of humanity in this that the “Saints” called the fifth century in the reign of their Lord had been like unto the winds of Treachery Bay. Those in Britain, that Cormac was more familiar with, were complicated enow.

  The Gael stalked through his own mind, sorting. Blood of the gods, how many places he’d been, how much he knew of the world! And to think that but eight years agone he’d been but a provincial boy who’d thought he had the world because he’d slain a bear of Connacht, alone and with a dagger!

  He said at last, “No, it’s no Gothic vassals these people are. The Sueves came down into Spain with the Vandals and the Alans, a long lifetime agone. The Sueves remain, though they were squeezed westward; the Vandals and the Alianis have crossed into Africa and become one people. The Goths, I was hearing, did subdue these Suevi three or so times, on behalf of the Romans. The first time and the second, the Goths have the lesson and then returned to those lands ceded them over in Gaul. Hmp! Roman diplomacy at work, I’m not doubting, and them with no desire to see the Goths grow too powerful.”

  Cormac squinted darkly at the sky, reflecting.

  “The last time matters fell out differently. The Sueves were waxing fierce once again, under a king named Remismund; they had taken Lisbon, this one Germanic tribe! It was that city’s own Roman governor himself who oped the gates to them! By then Euric had just become king over the Visigoths, and he marched them over the mountains once more, to rout the Sueves.”

  “I know about Euric,” Wulfhere rumbled. “Ha! All know about Euric. He did well, that one.”

  Aye; by the wild standards of his day, Euric the Visigoth had done well. Remismund the Sueve, knowing himself threatened, was so daring as to make appeal to the Emperor himself in Constantinople. He was ignored. In the mean time, Euric’s Goths conquered southeastern Hispania right handily, and occupied Lusitania with swaggering men of ever-shifting eyes. They swiftly tore loose the Suevic hold on Lisbon and enforced Suevic submission, even to making them accept the creed of the Arian Church. Euric the Goth, “terrible by the fame of his courage and his sword,” ruled from the Atlantic to the Rhone, from the Mediterranean to the Loire. Nor had he recognized even nominal bonds with the Empire, as had his predecessors. A proud fire-eyed man, Euric, who ruled in no name but his own-and made the world to know it.

  And he sired Alaric, Count Guntram’s unbeloved liege.

  “He did well,” Cormac mac Art said nodding. “Sorrow’s on him he had no heir worthy of him. King Alaric the Second! Huh! Alaric the Timid is closer to the truth, and that previous Alaric who conquered even Rome itself must be turning in his grave with shame! It’s quiet the Sueves remained while Euric lived-but he’s two years with the heroes, and the Sueves know well what this King Alaric is. And by repute their king is all that Alaric is not.”

  Wulfhere slipped fingers into his beard to scratch briny encrustations. “I make water on repute, Cormac! Oft it means naught more than a rumour here, a boast there. Ye sound like Veremund’s housepet. Have ye certain knowledge of aught he’s done for this repute of his?”

  The dark-visaged Gael smiled grimly. “Well, it’s no great battles Veremund of the Sueves has fought, nor has he taken cities-the which is only wisdom, as he’s not ready. Yet all the shrewder Goth lords in Hispania can see him working towards it. The man’s after taking pains to deal fairly with the Roman land-owners, Wulfhere, as the Goths do seldom. Veremund even speaks decent Latin; better than mine, and mine is none so bad. It signs to me that he wishes to rule a kingdom, not an enclave of conquerors who stand less than steadily on the necks of a subject people… who’d still be there after the conquerors vanished. That he has a golden welcome for skilled smiths and armourers is no rumour, but fact. Stand on it. Always I try to know where such men are going, and-by Behl’s burning eye!-so do the merchants. The last time we were in Lisbon, I had it from the governor himself-”

  “What?”

  “-the governor’s daughter herself, late one night, that it’s Veremund who’s behind the incursions of river pirates on the Duera. Petty stuff, and they but petty rogues who’ve never sniffed the open sea. Methinks it’s meant for a first trial of how far he can go. King Veremund affects to know naught of them, and promises to hang any he catches.”

  Wulfhere chuckled.

  “No certainty’s on me of this, Skull-splitter, and ye can be making water on it for wine-shop babble if ye like: But Veremund has sent envoys to the Cantanabrian Mountains over eastward, to sound the people there. He’s not like to be receiving firm answers this early in the game, even if such be true. Still, it says something of this Suevi king, that such a story can be told and believed.”

  “The Goths must be spineless or mad, to sit on their saddle-galled backsides and do naught! I’d have this Veremund’s hall in ashes and himself in pieces!”

  “As would I. As would full many of the Goths. But they and we are not kings. Their ill luck it is that their king remains far away with his Egyptian whores, and will not be putting his armies into motion. Worse that the very landscape, with mountains sprawled across it like dragons, makes campaigning so hard.”

  Behind them somewhere, Clodia squealed and a man laughed; Cormac and Wulfhere did not so much as turn.

  “Surely aught of unity will never prevail in this land, Wulfhere, as it does in Eirrin-almost-with our-its peoples united under council and High-king-almost. Aye,” Cormac said softly, almost wistfully, “and with all the learned men and artisans moving freely where they will in the practice of their crafts… and them sacrosanct, by law and ancient usage.”

  Wulfhere was silent, leaning against the inner hull and picking his fingernails with his teeth. Aye, he knew his battle-brother Cormac for one of the prideful Eirrin-born, and such men never forgot. Not like us Danes, Wulfhere thought, who know other men are equal to us… except the Norse, and the Swedes, and the Romans o’course, and those damned namby Britons, and of course the idiot Germans who…

  “Was Strabo,” Cormac was saying on, “who likened Hispania to an oxhide outspread, not only in shape but in hue and relief, all dried and cracked and puckered. Other great differences there are, even where the terrain is flat. The weather for one, and the peoples. These Sueves-they are a fierce independent lot. The Basques are the same. They should be! It’s the same stock they are as the Caledonia Picts, when all’s said and done-or Eirrin’s Firbholgs. Only the Tuatha de Danaan by their sorceries were able to prise loose t
he Firbholgs’ hold on Eirrin. And it was no easy time my ancestors had, in winning Eirrin from the Danan breed!”

  Wulfhere noted how his comrade had availed himself of the opportunity to point out the superiority of the people who had exiled him, but the Dane said naught. Were all Gaels of Eirrin such as his shipmate and battle-brother Cormac mac Art, the Eirrish would surely own half the world and statues of Crom and Behl would stand in Rome.

  Cormac fell into withdrawn silence. Wulfhere moved aftward. Cormac but gazed at the nearing coast as if that clotted extent of darkness fascinated him.

  It did not. It was one more foreign and likely hostile shore. He’d seen many such. Not the least intimation came to him of rare events waiting, or any high promise. At present he was, after all, a very weary man.

  From behind him a slap resounded, along with an angry exclamation in a woman’s offended voice. The sounds mingled with Wulfhere’s belly-deep chuckle and the gentle slap of water along Raven’s hull. The Gael sighed. After coming so far at cost of such immense labour and peril, all gods defend them, they had to arrive with a woman aboard! Where did Wulfhere find the inclination?

  “Quiet,” he bade them, not deigning to turn.

  Clodia made complaint, none the less. “But this huge man-mountain persists in-”

  “Quiet.”

  “And for why?” Wulfhere demanded. “It’s little we have to fear of Veremund’s Galicians here asea. River barges and fishing boats manned by native Spaniards are not going to trouble Raven, would ye say? Has Veremund warships? I never heard of it. Nor did yourself.”

  “So. I did not,” Cormac made admission. He yawned. “I’m needing quiet while I think-remember that? Thinking? I’ll admit Veremund’s being shipless is a thought that will mayhap bear following out-another time. The Sueves’ fathers knew all they knew of the sea from travellers’ tales, as did the Vandals once… but the Vandals learned seamanship.”

  “Of a sort,” put in Ordlaf. If Ordlaf of Dane-mark knew of a better helmsman than himself on all the seas, no one was likely to learn it from the lips of any aboard Raven.