Cormac swallowed and digested that while he demanded, at once: “What of Lucanor Antiochus? It’s a fleshy-faced man I speak of, with a thin blade of a nose, and airs about him. Where might he be found?”
“With-the lord Sigebert.” Austrechilda quaked into a long fit of coughing. “She may sit,” Cormac told the Danes who held her. To Wulfhere: “This makes sense, I’m thinking.
Wulfhere nodded. “Dark plots and treason, with Sigebert in the midst of it. Aye. An he’s against this king, I be for Syagrius!”
“Away out of here then, to the Count’s rath!”
That manse stood nearby, close to the forum and basilica. Lurid firelight made the great square almost as bright as it had. been ere sunset, for several buildings were ablaze. Towering flames created great lamps. The square was choked with men, all revealed in that evil light of orange and yellow. Armoured horsemen rode down foot soldiers or smote them with sword and mace, while they were being speared or sworded in their turn. In adjacent streets and alleys, other foot soldiers seemed to be fighting on the side of the mounted men: Syagrius’s. The city was indeed divided.
“Blood of the gods! It’s little difference our two dozen men will make, in that butcher’s yard!” Cormac looked around, his eyes invisible within their slits. “Aye… best we place ourselves on some rooftop, choose targets for arrows, and shout ‘Syagrius!’ as our battle-cry. Peradventure in a while we shall be able to essay more without getting ourselves killed for naught.”
Men looked at him who’d become General Cormac, and at Wulfhere who coughed in a sudden eddy of smoke. “Aye,” the giant said, and his eyes watered.
The Danes implemented the plan swifttly with out standing on ceremony. They chose the building whose roof looked best for their purpose, and they forced a way into it. A horseman actually struck at Halfdan, who ducked and gave no return stroke. The horse bore that surprised Goth on by, while the scalemailed men vanished into the building. They gained the roof by the simple expedient of breaking a large hole in the tiles. Between fire and Wulfhere’s ax, the roofs of Nantes were suffering much this night. Soon they’d found a place to stand and aim: a small terraced roof-garden that they might have reached less forcefully had there been less haste on them.
Below, Frankdom’s supporters had had their fill. Doggedly they retreated, still fighting and forming a semblance of ranks before the dead Count Bicrus’s manse. Seeing them drawn up thus, Cormac blinked incredulously. Be this all of them left alive?
Probably not. Many must have melted into the maze of streets, deserting. Few of those remaining still had shields. Those who had were placed in the forefront. Between them and the mailed horsemen was a grisly morass of dead or wounded. That and the short distance made a mounted charge impossible. The horse-soldiers began dismounting, to finish the night’s work afoot. Cormac noted that orders were given by a man in red-crested helm and tattered cloak of crimson.
“It’s Sygarius hisself that must be.”
“And a beautiful target he’d make were we against him,” Wulfhere rumbled, “asitting up there on his big horse with his fine helmet and cuirass! Our arrows would nail it to his backbone! Why stand we gaping? Shout and loose!”
The Danes laughed, and obeyed. Their bellowed “SYAGRIUSSS!” rolled over the square to bring heads around in bewilderment, just as two dozen arrows sang over the carpet of dead and dying. They thudded deep into the ranks of Frankish supporters. Six shafts actually drove through shields, to flesh themselves lightly in the men holding them. Others found throats, and brains and thighs.
Another flight, humming high-voiced, and another. Danish arrows slew Franks to aid Romans and Goths. Each volley was accompanied by a new roar of “SYAGRIUS!” The enemies of the defeated consul-king continued to go down; not spectacularly, collapsing in a mass, but with a nerve-wracking, inexorable steadiness.
Cormac was not comfortable watching easy butchery. “Knowledge is on him whose side we’re on, unless he be fool. Let’s be going down to announce ourselves.”
“What-by our true names?”
Cormac paused at that. “Hm! Best not, perhaps. We come from Bro Erech with a score to settle, with the One-ear. That is all Syagrius need know of his-allies.”
Wulfhere agreed and ordered his Danes to hold fast and continue pulling string until he called for them. He followed Cormac from the roof then, into the slaughter-reeking square. Franks were bawling for bows, and finding none, and going down. Two strangers emerged from the building whose roof rained feathered death.
They faced each other in the midst of the shambles, those men of war; the Roman commander with his tired face and battered, gore-crusted cuirass fitted to his torso, astride his wounded horse; the gigantic Dane with his great beard and ever-thirsty ax; the dark, sombre Gael in his shirt of black mail, treading over the slain in the light of a blazing city. Once Cormac slipped, in a puddle of sticky scarlet.
“ Meseems it’s to the Consul Syagrius I speak.”
“I am he. And yourselves?” Tired that voice-and still powerful.
“Our names mean naught,” Cormac said, lying mightily. “Mawl of Bro Erech I am, and this be Brogar, a Dane. It’s to settle a score with Sigebert One-ear we’ve come. He is hated by many.”
“I believe it,” Syagrius said drily. “Look there! They retreat!”
Unable to withstand a merciless arrow-storm that struck them down gradually and horribly efficiently yet could not be fought, the supporters of Frankdom withdrew through the gates into the late Count’s manse. The heavy gates slammed with a crash.
“Save your arrows!” Wulfhere roared to his men. “Come down here! This night’s work is to be finished hand to hand!”
While mounted men blinked at that Olympian voice, Cormac spoke to Syagrius: “Be Sigebert in there?”
The consul looked into that face with its incongruous grey eyes, and he recognized a man of his own kind; a man other men followed. Besides, Syagrius had reason to be grateful. Of his Goths, some six score survived. Within the manse and its ground waited Sigebert with fifty Franks and something like a hundred Gallo-Roman traitors. Two dozen such fighters as he now saw entering the bloody square might well turn the scale, especially as they seemed fresh. The giant called Brogar and the dark swordsman who gave his name as Mawl looked worth another dozen, by themselves alone.
Therefore Syagrius said, “The swine now calls himself Count of Nantes, from which I infer that Bicrus is dead. A very good man, Bicrus. As for me-I am here now partly because of Sigebert’s machinations. Ere he left Soissons he corrupted a part of my army. The result was that those men deserted me when my need was the sorest. That slimy bas- With Count Bicrus murdered,” Syagrius went on almost dully, “all hope of rallying now seems lost. I must flee into exile or die here in Gaul. But by the saints, I shall settle accounts with Sigebert of Metz first!”
“This boon I ask,” Cormac said. “Let us have him.”
“You ask much.” Syagrius frowned. “Still… were it not for your archers, I might have lost the fight in merely clearing yon gateway…”
“A good man,” Wulfhere said. “I’d never ha’ admitted that!”
With no change of expression or tone, the consul said, “Suppose we go in together, and agree that Sigebert belongs to him who lays hands on him first?”
Cormac mac Art never had to reply to that suggestion he liked not.
The black owl appeared.
Huge, malevolent and horrific, it dropped from the flame-lit sky. At its awful screech Syagrius’s war-horse reared. Not even its training could hold the beast steady in the face of such eldritch terror. The horse threw its rider and bolted. The consul fell heavily.
The black owl rushed down on him with another ear-splitting scream. Its wings were black brooms, thirty feet from tip to tip, that drove the summer air in gusts. Its eyes flamed yellow. Its beak was stretched wide for cracking bones while its feet flexed like twin arrays of metal hooks. Other war-horses scattered in blind fear before it.
>
Cormac’s sword was in his hand without his conscious thought. He slashed at the monster-and felt gooseflesh when his sword passed through its body to no effect. It glared, gathered sinewy legs beneath it, and made a hopping spring at the Gael. He went down beneath it.
“Ah no,” Wulfhere, groaned, “not the claws-not him too!”
For Cormac all was suddenly darkness, fetor and unnatural cold. The vast black wings were a buffeting storm about him. Talons fastened in his thighs with eightfold stabs of agony. The beak darted at his face.
Cormac’s hands leaped up. He seized death’s’ own throat, as Wulfhere had done on Midsummer’s Eve. Like Wulfhere, he found nothing tangible to grasp. Black feathers. Numbing, weakening chill. Neither flesh nor bone resisted his grip to make it effective. The pain of its talons left him not even breath to cry out.
They rolled and thrashed amid the rubble of war, man and monster, and only one was in pain, awful pain. Cormac’s free hand stabbed and slashed with his sword-uselessly. That cruel gape of a beak came closer.
Advice flashed into Cormac’s mind as he knew he was to die; advice from Zarabdas and later from Morfydd.
Against every instinct of the weapon-man, he let fall his sword.
Fumbling beneath his mail, barking his knuckles, he tore the Egyptian sigil from his neck. In his haste he broke the chain, whose links cut sharply into his skin ere they parted. Cormac never noticed. He thrust the emblem of the winged serpent, of the Sun, into the black owl’s face. And the monster fell back. In that heartbeat of time, Cormac attacked.
His hands gripped the broken ends of the chain as it had been a strangler’s knotted rope. He twisted the pendant hard about the black owl’s neck. It was inspired, that move: for the first time there seemed to be resistance; solid purchase to his grip. Was as if the old amulet had lent substance to the creature. As if? Like it or no, the Gael knew that was precisely what was happening.
The monster thrashed frenziedly in attempt to flee. Its talons came out of Cormac’s thighs. The vast wings beat. Cormac squinted in that wind and hung on while he knotted the broken ends of the pendant’s chain immovably together. The round, sinister head turned then; the beak attacked. Instinctively mac Art flung up his arms to shield his face, and hurled himself backward.
The black owl whirled up with an awful shriek. When Cormac tried to climb at once to his feet, he discovered that his legs would not lift him. He groaned at the caustic pain in his muscled thighs; he, who had not groaned when years before he’d been tortured by Picts. The best he could do was rise to one knee. Blood of the gods it’s crippled me!
Nor had the black owl gone. It fluttered wildly in air above the corpse-gutted square. Cormac stared, and thought of an immense black moth that blundered back and forth between invisible walls, seeking escape from a confinement it could not understand. Battering its own wings and body with mindless persistence. A monster presence over Nantes.
Then it began to burn.
It burned. Bright golden fire encircled its neck like a blazing torc. The dazzle hurt the eyes of every staring watcher. Metal poured molten from a crucible had been less painfully brilliant. The flame, fell and preternatural as the victim, spread along the black owl’s wings to their very tips, streaming behind, shedding sparks. They fell in bright array toward the watchers below, and winked out in air.
Sunfire, Cormac thought, while his back crawled.
The dark soul of Lucanor the mage thrashed in the bright fire it had tempted once too often. The blaze covered its head, took its head. It screamed one final awful cry and lurched aloft. It flew higher, higher, higher, until there was but a brilliant spark in the sky, a phoenix pyre from which there would come no renewal… and then naught.
Silence filled the square. Owl and fire had vanished, and amulet.
Wulfhere broke that silence: he destroyed it. He had staggered and clutched at his mighty mailed breast as the black owl was destroyed. Now he cried out in amaze and relief, and it was a bellow.
“The pain is gone! Gone! It-I’ll wager the talon-marks are vanished, too! Cormac; the curse is lifted! I’m whole again! WHOLE!”
Cormac’s legs had been freed as suddenly of the crippling pain. He rose. He stood. Crom and Behl! He’d felt that agony for mere moments. It awed him to realize that Wulfhere had endured it for weeks; had given orders, fought battles, slept, led his men while under such a burden.
“I’m fieeee!” Wulfhere thundered. “I shall live!” He lifted ax and fist to the sky, a titan on spraddled legs like treetrunks. “HAAAAA!”
In a shaken voice the Consul Syagrius asked, “What was that horror?”
Cormac shook his head. “We know not. It’s attacked us afore, a monster seeking destruction. It’s gone, whatever it was.”
“Gone, aye. It is in my mind that but for you, Mawl, I should have fallen its victim.” Syagrius smiled grimly. “I can offer little reward any longer, but for what it is worth, I renounce any claim to Sigebert of Metz! He is yours, Mawl.” The Roman threw aside the remnant of his military cloak and raised his sword. “Now let us go in there and take him!”
They gripped hands in a silent sealing of their purpose, and Wulfhere’s huge red-furred hand rested atop both of theirs to make a triple clasp. Then they gathered their men and moved to the attack.
23
The Soul of Sigebert
The gates shattered before a makeshift ram. Cormac, Wulfhere and Syagrius were first through the opening. Gothic mercenaries and piratical Danes poured after them, shouting. The owl was dead. The men of Raven attacked; the death-bird’s crew flew into Sigebert’s keep.
Cormac remembered little of that fight. The black Gaelic battle-frenzy came on him, that madness peculiarly his that would prompt a minstrel of Britain to say, “At such times he is more terrible then Wulfhere, and men who would face the Dane flee before the blood-lust of the Gael.”
His red-streaked sword flashed and seemed to spring lithely before him, opening throats so that blood came gushing forth; striking into entrails. No shield a man could bear was adequate to protect him from that inhuman sword-arm, however skillfully he handled it. Cormac was a henchman of death who stalked grimly among those Franks and struck like a fanged snake.
Beside him strode Wulfhere, a two-handed ax-man exulting in his freedom from the cold agony that had dwelt near his heart for so long. He was irresistible and terrible. Shields broke like crusts of bread under his ax. Men died headless or half sundered. Swords skidded off the blade that destroyed their wielders.
And there was Syagrius. Defeated, deposed, careless of life, the Roman fought like a demon. His kingdom was lost. All he wanted here was vengeance. He took it and was resistless in his uncaring advance. Sigebert’s Franks fell to his whistling steel, and Gallo-Roman traitors. That night any man who tried to stand before one of the three leaders-or could not flee-died.
Aye, and the trio’s men followed their example mightily.
There, across a gore-spattered and corpse-strewn courtyard, stood the doors of the mansion, shut and barred. Sweeping away the last opposition, Goths and Danes together brought up the ram. Molten lead came splashing down from above. Men fell back with howls and curses. Leather leggings smoked and were holed by hissing splashes. Up came shields, high. And those men moved to batter down the doors under an armoured roof of wood and metal. The ram thundered; the bars burst. The foreigners swarmed in, attacking foreigners in the manse built so long ago by the foreign conquerors whose last consul now stomped in under a helmet crested with scarlet little different from the one worn by that first Caesar called Caius Julius.
Ten Franks faced them, ranged on a marble staircase. At its head stood the man they sought, and his smile was all mockery. “It is pleasant,” Sigebert said, “to see men so eager for my company. My lord Syagrius, I see.” One-ear bowed with a flourish. “And speaking of company-you lower yourself, once-king, by consorting with pirates who await the rope. Do you know the men flanking you to be Cormac mac Art and
Wulfhere Skull-splitter?”
“Indeed?” Syagrius glanced interestedly at his allies. “Is this true? I see that it is! Last week I might have had to order your deaths; today: well met! I’ll not allow you to sow dissension this time, Sigebert, traitor! Thanks to you, I no longer rule Gaul and have no responsibility to enforce the law against these men… even had I power and inclination to do, which I have not. I am come here to deal with you. So are they. Since they have a prior claim, in a manner of speaking, I have relinquished mine in their favour.” With the courtesy of a king, he turned to his piratical allies. “I have done speaking, my friends. Consider the dog and son of a dog yours.”
“You Franks,” Cormac called. “Will ye be dying needlessly with your unworthy master, or leave him to me?”
One of the Franks spat on the stair without taking his gaze from Cormac’s eyes. There was no other answer, and none of Sigebert’s men moved.
“Brave men ye be, and loyal,” Wulfhere said rumbling, “but foolish. Think again. By my beard, ye shall live to go free.” He stared at a Frank. “We come here for justice. You and I have no quarrel. Why die for him?”
At that consummately sensible suggestion, Frankish laughter was a baying of trapped wolves. “We’ll see who does the dying, an ye’ve the hardihood to be first up these stairs!” one jeered. “Come and eat steel!”
Wulfhere sighed. In their place, he’d have used the same words.
“Have it your way,” he said, and gripped his ax-haft high up and far down.
The notched and dripping weapons of the attackers crashed against the unblooded ones of the defenders. Murder seethed on the stair; blood spilled over the marble. The noise within those walls was as the anvil-pounding of a god. Wulfhere’s ax dropped one Frank with a shattered hip and, twisting a bit, brained another on the return stroke. Syagrius, weary from combat and travel and combat again, at last proved a little too slow. A blow from a Frankish shield-rim broke his arm. His sword clattered down the stair. Timely intervention by a Goth and a Dane in combination saved his life. They trod over a glaring Franci corpse and fought on toward the top.
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