When Death Birds Fly cma-3

by Andrew J Offutt

  “Not if they know who daggered him, sir,” the warrior reminded with the freedom of a barbarian.

  Sigebert let it pass. “That is why,” he said gently, “I wish his body concealed for the present, and naught said. I shall inform the bishop and curiales that, when my poor lord Count heard of my lord Clovis’s victory, he promptly fled the city and has gone I know not where. You would argue further?”

  “No sir. That’s to say-with respect, sir-” The warrior’s words seemed to lodge in his throat under Sigebert’s limpid hazel stare. “Will they believe that, knowing Count Bicrus?”

  “Of course not! However, I can persuade them it is to their advantage to feign belief. An they assume the Count has indeed turned craven, they will more readily excuse doing so themselves. I’ll wager that ere they leave this chamber, they will have convinced themselves it is true.” Sigebert smiled until the warrior did. “Now do as I bade you concerning our late friend here! He’s hardly ornamental. His presence disturbs me. And return me my dagger afterward-cleaned.”

  Later the warrior repeated those words to his companions, when they had carried out Sigebert’s orders. “Aye! Just that way he said it, with the Count’s body on the floor between us. And return me my dagger afterward-cleaned. He might ha’ been saying, ‘Have food brought me in an hour!’ By the gods! It’s in my mind that he’s right when he claims the city officials will decide it be safest to believe him!”

  The man was not smiling; Sigebert, at that moment, was. Bicrus had proved stubborn; Bicrus had been efficiently removed. Sigebert had not deemed it advisable to tell him of Clovis’s promise to make Sigebert One-ear the Count of Nantes. He would, however, tell these others. Should they think to unite against him and his half-hundred men, they could whelm the Franks easily. Still, Sigebert hardly thought they would dare. Not once they knew they would have to answer to Clovis for it afterward!

  Aye! By nightfall, I shall in effect be Count of Nantes! Ere the month was out, he would possess that title and authority in law, and be in high favour with the new lord of the kingdom as well. That, or he would be a rotting corpse…

  It depended on the outcome of the session he had convened. Sigebert believed it would go his way. Even so, there was doubt enow to make his villainous heart beat high with the excitement of the gamble. It daunted him not. Unlike Lucanor, Sigebert One-ear had at least the courage of his own evil.

  21

  Fleecing Nantes

  Five weeks had passed since that fateful Midsummer’s Eve. The month of July was ending and sickles flashed bright in the fields as the peasantry, men and women alike, cut the heads of grain. These would be threshed and stored. Later the stalks would be scythed down for straw, and finally the gleaners would pick through the dusty stubble. These harvest weeks were a time of hard, hot work.

  A pretty peasant girl in patched, dun-colored skirt drove a flock of geese along the road toward the frowning city gates. Her goal was the market within. Three ox-drawn wains followed her at their usual plodding pace. Indeed, these seemed to move more slowly than most such wagons, the yokel drivers hardly troubling to employ their long ox-goads. Mayhap they were half asleep from the heat. Mayhap they wished to remain behind the girl with her flock, for she was more than pretty enow to distract the attention of the guards at the gate.

  They were chaffing her bawdily, one fumbling after her breasts, as the great wooden wheels rumbled by. The wench’s geese scattered, gossiping in annoyance. She swore with as much authority as either guard could have done. One of these drew himself up on the rim of each cart in turn and gave the contents a casual glance.

  “Wool for market,” he told his companion, who did not appear greatly concerned. Neither of them so much as spoke to the ox-drivers. They were too interested in the wench, who was interested in naught save getting her flock of geese under control again, and passing through the city gate unraped. Was fortunate for her the guards happened to have an immediate superior who was strict about such matters-while his men were on duty, anyhow.

  The oxen plodded; the carts creaked. Somehow they missed their way in the narrow, winding streets of Nantes. Instead of the market-place, they came to halt in the weed-grown courtyard of a deserted house.

  “Nobody about,” one of the drivers grunted.

  Another rattled on the side of each cart in turn with his ox-goad. The fleeces upsurged and parted. Bearded Danes in tunics burst out of the wool, gulping the sweet light air. The suffocating heat under the fleeces had turned their faces black-purple and they sweated rivers. Aye, and fleeces had been packed under and around them as well, lest the guards should go so far as to open the wagons’ tail-boards. This they had endured all down the long straight approach to the city’s gate, beneath the sun of high summer in Gaul.

  “Cormac,” Karlsevni Ratnose gasped, “your clever ideas will slay us all yet.”

  Cormac clapped him on the shoulder. “Come, man, it’s a fine long restful drive ye’ve had, when ye might have had to walk! Cease leaning upon the wheel and making mouths like a speared fish. We’ve work to do.”

  ’ Heavy wicker hampers were unloaded, and carried into the deserted house. Meanwhile the ox-drivers pitched all the camouflaging wool into one cart, making one full load of it. The full cart then rumbled away to market, the two empty ones to an inn-yard. Two dozen northrons licked their lips at the thought of that latter destination.

  The wicker chests contained their war-gear and they busked themselves swiftly. Out of the question to wear it while they rode in the ox-carts, hidden under wool! So much metal, leather and padding would have killed them with heatstroke. They had suffered enow in their tunics!

  The hampers contained goatskins of water, also. The stuff was warm. The Danes drank it eagerly, none the less. They had a deal of lost sweat to make good.

  “Ah, for some ale!” mourned Knud the Swift.

  “Be cheerful,” Makki Grey-gull consoled him. “Belike ye’ll be drinking Valhalla’s mead by next sunrise.”

  Wulfhere looked ghastly, and not because of his suffocating ride in the cart. His broad face had the semblance of a hollow-eyed, red-bearded skull. Was all Cormac could do to hold his own features impassive as he glanced at his friend.

  “Word seems out concerning the Frankish conquest, and truly,” he remarked, chiefly for something to say. “The countryside is in a ferment! Saw ye the smoke upon the horizon? That cannot be Frankish troops, marauding here so soon. A sign of some peasantish revolt, I’m thinking, inspired by panic. It’s placid enow they seem, closer to the city. It wonders me how long that will last.”

  Wulfhere shrugged. “No knowing.”

  “An they’ve sense on them, the country folk on the great estates will support their masters to the hilt, for once. A Frankish war-host on the march be like a plague of locusts for stripping the country. Remember ye that one small war-band we had to hunt down in Frisia, a couple of years past? They left a trail like to that of a thousand berserkers!”

  “Aye.”

  Cormac heard himself talking too much, especially by contrast with Wulfhere’s taciturn replies. He forced himself to shut up. Morfydd had said that a possible remedy for his giant friend’s decline lay in the death of Lucanor Antiochus, had she not? Then death should be Lucanor’s portion, were he guarded by all the legions of Rome!

  Wulfhere spoke, wearily. “It’s a fool’s errand, this, Cormac. Ye and the lads ought not be here. I’m thinking my weird is upon me, and I were best to meet it without dragging friends into Hel’s cold arms.”

  Cormac snorted. “Ye may be dying, for all I know. When ye begin talking thin-blooded caution and resignation, then it’s far wrong something is! Yet as a matter of simple pride, ye ought to resent dying at the hands of such a verminous thing as Lucanor!”

  “Lucanor will be waiting for us, prepared.”

  “It’s not Lucanor who gives the orders in this partnership he’s after forming, Wulf. To that I’ll take oath. It’s Sigebert who’s master, and it’s much e
lse Sigebert has to think on. I’ll answer for it, yon two-legged serpent be fuller informed of the war than we, or indeed any man on Gaul’s western shore. It’s little foresight he’ll be having to spare for Wulfhere and Art’s son Cormac. Nor will Sigebert be foreseein’ that we’d dare attack him again, in Nantes itself!”

  Wulfhere sighed gustily. “It may be. I know not.”

  Cormac shook his head. A different Wulfhere, this one, indeed!

  Neither of them knew what Lucanor had once said to his Frankish master; that Wulfhere would lie dead of the black owl’s talons within five months at the longest. They knew not of his other boast that, for all his great strength, Wulfhere must become incapable of fighting or other great exertion in forty or fifty days. Such had been Lucanor’s estimate, and thrice a dozen days had since passed.

  Wulfhere’s little war-band hid in the empty house while the hours passed. Immediately after sunset they’d set forth, to move by devious ways on Sigebert’s mansion. There, if no better opportunity offered, they would scale his walls and make a frontal assault.

  Ere resorting to aught so desperate, though, Cormac meant to capture one of Sigebert’s guards. He’d force the Frankish hog to say whether Sigebert and Lucanor were actually within the manse.

  An they were not, it would become necessary to learn where they were. Cormac thought it bade fair to be a tricky, demanding night, with poor prospect of success and a likely one of death for them all… and it never entered his head to complain or reconsider.

  Nor anybody else’s. This was for Wulfhere; dying Wulfhere.

  22

  The Soul of Lucanor

  The clamor began well before sunset. The sharp ears of Knud caught it first. Cormac confirmed the Swift One.

  “By the light of Behl-there’s a riot somewhere!” The Gael grinned maliciously. “All the better. This cursed city cannot hold too much confusion for me, this night!”

  All gave listen intently to the uproar, which was in a distant quarter of Nantes. Shouting and babble, with noises of breaking, merged into an undifferentiated hubbub. Screams of starkest agony rose briefly above the background. Cormac grimaced.

  “A religious rampage,” he guessed. “Some poor fools are being ripped apart for not believing as their neighbours do! Such haps all the time among these believers in the gospel of peace and love. Mayhap it will even spread city-wide, ere it ceases or the Count’s men put it down. Time to string your bows.”

  In silence, it was done. Cormac did not consider the bow a true weapon-man’s weapon, despite its usefulness. Still a mob of howling religious fanatics ranked in his estimation more as vermin than men. More than once he had seen what they could do to “heathens” and “heretics.” He’d no intention of wasting high-minded scruples on such creatures.

  “Cormac,” Wulfhere said in a voice like a groan, “yon be no mere gutter mob! Hearken-there! Was the clash of weapon-steel, or I’ve never heard it.”

  Cormac listened briefly. “Aye… Right ye be, old sea-dragon, and there’s the neighing of a big horse, too. Meseems it came from the direction of the gate we entered in the forenoon? Those other sounds be more toward the heart of the city. I wonder me, now…”

  “What do you wonder?”

  “Little of use. For the present let us wait, and see what befalls.”

  The uproar continued. Once it almost died away. Once they heard unmistakably the clop-clop of numerous hooves, the creak and jingle of horse-harness amid the chiming of the war harness of men. This rattle and clop passed along Nantes’s broader and better-paved streets. There followed the ragged tramp of inexperienced men trying to march together-many men, although how many was impossible to guess.

  Whoever they were, they shortly ran into fierce opposition. The racket of real combat echoed between walls: war-cries, death-yells, striving and slaying. By this time Cormac and two others had climbed to the roof of their hideaway. That vantage showed them a leaping red glow beneath a pall of smoke in the southern part of the city, near the waterfront. Westward, a flaming sunset blinded their eyes. From that quarter came clearly on the wind the sounds of rioting. Ugly it was, and beastlike. The more purposeful violence of fighting men, soldiers, now seemed concentrated toward the center, where the public buildings rose hard by the market square. Wherever they looked, the city was in chaos.

  “’Tis a proper night we chose!” Cormac muttered. “We can move openly through the streets, achieve Sigebert’s death and escape with ease in this madness-if we survive. The gods know our chances seem better than aforenow.”

  He descended. In the smaller of the house’s two courtyards, he found Wulfhere frowning at a Gallo-Roman boy to whose arm clung a girl perhaps four years younger than his ten or eleven. Was understandable, with two dozen waraccoutered Danes hemming her in.

  “See what’s come avisiting, Cormac!” Wulfhere said. “They fled the rioting… sought a place to hide, this one says.” He jerked a thumb at the boy. “We were just wondering what to do with them.”

  Cormac bent a slit-eyed, intimidating stare on the boy. In Latin, he demanded, “By what is this upheaval caused?”

  The boy stammered. “Mercy, mighty lord! I… I do not understand.”

  “No? It’s mad this city of yours has gone, with rioting: fighting and arson. Any fool can see that. It’s the why of it I want. Either ye can tell me, or not-and the more ye can tell me, lad, the less inclined we are to do harm on ye.”

  More boldly then, the boy asked, “Will ye let my sister be?”

  Cormac was impressed with the courage of that, in these circumstances. Even so, he did not allow his grim features to soften. Barely glancing at the terrified girl, he said, “She’s too young for ravishing. Besides, it’s bigger, harder quarry I’m concerned with this night. Now speak while my patience lasts.”

  “I will, lord! There-there’s been war with the Franks. Our king, Syagrius, has been d-defeated. The shouting in the street says he’s come home. He’s here now, with his army! Some are for him and some think to submit to the Frankish king, Clovis. As ye say sir, the city has gone mad. Be merciful-this is all I know.”

  “Ye’ve no knowledge of what Count Bicrus has done about it?”

  “Lord, I have heard a dozen things rumored, ere we were separated from our family. Some say he has turned against the king! Others say that he is dead and the other, uh, officials divided-and others that he stands for the king. I cannot say which is true, lord.”

  “Likely not. Now attend: we will do no harm on ye. By my advice, ye’ll be hiding yonder, in what was kitchen and larders. All solid stone, with easy access to the courtyard. An this house takes fire, ye’ll not be burned, or trapped to suffocate in the smoke either. There be hidey-holes, too, where no looters ought to find ye, supposing any trouble in this disused shell of a place, as I think they will not. Understand me?”

  “Yes, lord!”

  “Good. Keep together and quiet, and I hope soon ye are with your family. My friends and I depart now.”

  And, after Cormac had told his companions of the exchange, they did leave the place, on their dark errand. Boy and girl watched them tramp away through the courtyard. Both were amazed that such terrible men had not slain them out of hand for the mere sport of it. That wore away enough for them to become sensible children. They hid where Cormac had recommended.

  Making a path through the congested streets of Nantes was not easy, even for armoured men with shields and swords or axes. Once the company stopped while Cormac gave listen to a fat man haranguing a crowd. He spoke in favour of King Syagrius, and cursed Count Bicrus for fleeing the city in manner cowardly. Mac Art listened but briefly ere he was convinced that this jiggle-belly knew no more than the boy they had queried-and, while unlike the boy, would never be so honest as to admit his ignorance. Cormac gestured and he and his men pressed on. They were peculiarly his, now, with Wulfhere so obviously and pitifully weakened.

  Because they knew Nantes well and Sigebert’s manse had belonged to the custom
s inspector they’d formerly dealt with, Cormac and Wulfhere were able to find the place. No happiness was on them to find it locked and barred. The place appeared deserted.

  “I’ll wager One-ear’s not here,” Wulfhere growled. “That one will have declared for whichever side he thinks apt to win, and be active somehow.”

  “True for you, Wulf,” Cormac agreed nodding. “Still, there must be servants, a housekeeper; a few guards at least, for us to be questioning.”

  “That pig Lucanor may be here!” Knud snapped. Hopefully.

  None stayed them as they broke in. Sadly, neither Lucanor nor his master was to be found. Sigebert had left not so much as a guard or two. Belike he deemed it too petty a precaution, with a kingdom’s fate in the balance-and his own shining future. Yet it was as Cormac suggested: a few servants remained, and the formidable housekeeper, Austrechilda. She knew far more.

  Austrechilda was stubborn. Two men had to hold her face in a bowl of water to make her speak. Even then it appeared that she might rather drown than divulge what she knew. A tribute to her character, mayhap-or to Sigebert’s ability to inspire fear. Cathula had told mac Art of Austrechilda. Not until she had come up for the sixth time, snorting and choking and blowing water through her nose, did she decide that talking was preferable to dying now, though Sigebert might have to be faced later.

  “He-he-” she gasped. “-he’s at the manse of Count Bicrus. Some days agone… he and the municipal-curia and the… bishop, declared support for the Franks. What’s become of the Count I know not. It’s-ulp! ulp! in my mind that he-he’s dead. Now the city is divided… and my lord Sigebert sits in the Count’s manse, whilst the forces he has raised battle Sy-Syagrius and his men.”