Cormac himself slew the last of the ten Franks and in his impatience he hurled the follow from the topmost stair. At last, Cormac mac Art faced Sigebert One-ear of Metz, of Soissons, of Nantes; of Frankdom.
The Frank wore a light-flashing cuirass of moulded leather. Refulgent steel epaulettes guarded his collar-bones; an oval of convex steel polished to mirror brightness guarded his bowels. Almost as strong as mac Art’s mesh-mail, that cuirass, and a deal lighter. For the rest, he wore a leather helmet strengthened with iron placques, carried a buckler rather than the large Frankish shield, and held, with seeming negligence, a long Frankish sword.
“How impetuous we are tonight,” he murmured. “What, pirate? No big talk? No blather of how I’m to answer to you now for that moronic crewman of yours? What was his name; the one who slashed my face?”
“Black Thorfinn,” Cormac said, slitted swordgrey eyes watchful. “Nay, no talk. Time enow for that when you are dead, Sigebert, dead. Should I fail, there be Wulfhere to come. But should I fall in combat with such as you, I’ll have deserved it!”
“No argument.” Sigebert smiled. He was facing his end, Cormac thought grudgingly, like a man with more to be proud of. “Oh yes, I see Wulfhere. He’s too big to miss. How is your health lately, redbeard? I’ve heard reports of-”
The sword, no longer negligently held, leaped for Cormac’s neck. The Gael’s own blade turned it aside with a teeth-torturing scrape of metal. A less experienced man had surely been taken off guard by Sigebert’s mocking banter, and died for it. That cut had been startlingly swift. Cormac bashed back, was rebuffed by shield, shoved hard, pounced to the landing-and only just ducked under a slash that hummed like a breeze.
Mac Art fought coolly, making no showy displays of skill. For now, he was content to hold to the defensive and make trial of Sigebert’s swordsmanship. Determination was on him to take no chance of underestimating this man. Others had done that; among them, mayhap, was Count Bicrus.
The blades flickered and rang. Cormac’s battered shield met Sigebert’s unmarked buckler with a great bam and crash. They struck, feinted, circled. A thrust of Cormac’s was deflected over Sigebert’s shoulder by the well-handled buckler. In return, the Frank cut slantingly down at the side of Cormac’s knee in an effort to cripple. His sword met the edge of Cormac’s shield, cut in through the already much abused rim, and stuck there. Mac Art strained to give his buckler a quick turn in hopes of disarming or dragging off balance. The Frank twisted his hilt the other way so that his blade tugged free and he sprang backward. For him, it had been a nasty moment. Mac Art attacked with a sword seemingly flailing, pressing his advantage. Sigebert eddied away from him like mist, knowing the Gael to be stronger and longer of arm. Now he ceased the retreat, for to turn further had exposed his back to the top of the stair and those who watched, and “honourable fight” was a game for boys. Came a brief savage flurry, almost body to body, legs straining and swords a bright flashing cross of steel between the two men. Their grunts and the stamp of their feet mingled with the sound of clashing steel. Then Sigebert had slipped aside and was safely away from the stair. The rushing after him of Cormac’s shield was impressive for the strength in the Gael’s left arm, but Sigebert avoided it and flashed a smile at Cormac’s grunt.
Aye, Sigebert knew something about the work. He’d a natural talent for it, a coordination of hand and eye and brain. This was the encounter for which he had been obsessively training, half hoping for it. In addition, that early training he had indolently allowed to lie fallow for years had come back to him. He remembered it all, and knew much, and was strong and uncommon fast. Nerve he had too, combined with a devious imagination-and naught in the least resembling a scruple.
Even so, Cormac mac Art could match him on all those grounds save the last-though in combat he also paid no mind to scruples. His advantages of reach and strength were offset by the hard fighting he’d already done this night. There remained his endurance and long experience. These had been hammered into the scarred Gael bone-deep, through years of feud, war, exile, seafaring in all weathers and all seasons; through bitter imprisonment that few others could have survived. These were in his muscle and his heart; in his very marrow by now. They were qualities that Sigebert One-ear, whose life on the whole had been pampered, could never match.
Slowly, the Frank was forced to realize it. In him grew the chilling knowledge that he neared the end of his powers, while this grim dark wolf he faced had yet to extend himself fully.
A try for the neck was caught on buckler. That shield leaped at him, so that he was only just able to get his own shield up to catch the sword-edge that followed Cormac’s offensive use of seventeen pounds of iron-banded wood.
Sigebert had one trick left him. So far, he had used only the edge of his blade. Sure that the Gael was deceived and that withheld knowledge would work, Sigebert feinted once, twice, bringing Cormac’s shield low-and thrust straight for the throat in a bright, flashing line.
A similar tactic had slain the highwayman in awful surprise. Now, mac Art’s swordblade was there. It caught the Frank’s and swept it out of line with a flash and hideous grate of metal, burrs grating along notches and burns. The Gael laughed savagely. Below, so did Wulfhere.
“Now for that I’ve been waiting since we began dance, Frank! Ye fool! Ye did death on one of our men in such wise when we paid our visit to the custom house, remember? I saw his body, thrust through the hollow of the throat. Were ye after thinking I had not eyes to notice it or wits to know what it betided? Blood of the gods! Aye, and when ye warded my own thrust so neatly this night, ye did sureness on me. Now try your last and be accursed, One-ear!”
With a howl of pure frustration, Sigebert flung himself on Cormac mac Art, stabbing, slashing. Again and again his blade banged and skirled off Cormac’s shield, and then his time came and the blades glittered and flamed together one last time and Sigebert’s sword, quite unstained by blood, rattled on the marble. His own sword-arm poured red, laid open from elbow to wrist.
Sigebert’s eyes glared wildly. He was helpless.
“Wulfhere,” Cormac said, low and deadly, and the Morrigan had never been grimmer.
Wulfhere knew what was meant, and came without his ax.
“Romans crucify a man,” he rumbled. “We northrons have another way.”
They stripped a snarling Sigebert of his leather cuirass and threw it aside. He growled like a mad dog, spitting in their faces, snarling, cursing them vilely. Then, while four Danes held him down, Wulfhere drew dagger. He thrust, sliced; again; he cut the blood-eagle on the Frank’s body, the dreadful northlands death Wulfhere had never inflicted on an enemy and never would again.
Sigebert screamed like a soul in hell when he saw what would be done. His bulging eyes stared at the ceil, but he saw it not. Horribly rearranged, his body, too, bulged unnaturally.
Many were the things he might have seen: Black Thorfinn, writhing in agony, screaming likewise while infection bloated his belly and death’s clean mercy was withheld from him; or Cathula’s mother torn apart by hounds while her daughter watched, or that daughter’s later cruel reduction and use; or Count Bicrus of Nantes struggling across a tiled floor in his blood… or a score of other victims of whose fates the pirates knew naught. Uncounted treacheries lengthened the list of Sigebert’s crimes.
He might have beheld any or all of his victims, come from the grey lands of death to witness their murderer’s end. He did not.
He beheld great, misty spaces. An emptiness beyond his little comprehension. Bounding out of the mist came a hunting pack fit for nightmares; pure white hounds, save for the ears of them that were red as their gaping fanged mouths and glowing eyes. Coursing down through the night to harry the soul out of his body; to hunt it fugitive through nine eternities. Behind those beasts, towering on a great horse with flaring nostrils, came a shadow-cloaked Huntsman whose head was crowned with royal antlers. Sigebert saw what few saw; the terrible Lord of Death, god of the Celts of
Britain and Armorica and Gaul and other lands as well.
And Sigebert knew, and his final screams formed coherent words while the bones burst from his blood-eagled body.
“The hounds!-aahhhh, mercy, no, no, the hounds, the hounds!”
Syagrius did not flinch to see the thing done. He had intended himself to have the traitor crucified, a death equally dreadful and longer drawn out. He saw only justice. Not without pleasure, he watched Sigebert die.
They found Lucanor in one of the upper chambers. He was unmistakably dead, shriveled as if by fire though neither charred nor blistered. Had his neck been cut, as by a tight-drawn chain, all round? None could be sure.
So, then. King Veremund would be glad to learn that death had been done on the mage who had destroyed his queen, body and mind and soul. Cormac and Wulfhere cared but little. The man who had died at the head of the marble stair had been more dangerous than forty such as the mage, for all Lucanor’s powers of sorcery.
Count Bicrus’s body they discovered below. It was wrapped, with cynical pretense at respect, in a shroud.
“It is over then,” Syagrius said wearily. “Poor Bicrus was the last hope left me. I might as well have fled south at once. I have achieved little save to spend lives and burn a part of the city.”
“Blame Sigebert for that, not yourself,” Wulfhere said gruffly. Almost he clapped the Roman on the shoulder, but remembered the man’s freshly splinted arm. “Let the city-and Gaul-take care of itself, as it will. I and Cormac mean to go away from here and get mightily drunk until dawn, and it’s my counsel that ye do the same. What say ye?”
Consul-King said to pirate. “I say lead on!”
24
The Dark Huntsman
The long dusty road shimmered in summer’s haze. At its end lay the town of Vannes, and the enclosed stretch of water known as the Mor-bihan, with the open sea behind it. There waited the lean pirate ship named Raven. Other ships lay in there too, to carry a deposed king and his followers into exile.
The death birds had flown. The Raven of the sea and the ravens of war; the owl had flown and fallen to a better huntsman, and the eagle of Rome and at last the stern eagle of the northlands. Now there was only Raven.
Big Gothic war-horses paced steadily toward the waiting ships. Their hooves clopped, lifting dust in yellowish puffs.
Three men rode at the cavalcade’s head, mailshirted and helmed. One carried his arm in a sling and yet sat his horse as if born to the saddle. His two fellows rode more clumsily. One, dark and grim with a scarred face, trailed from his helm a horsehair crest as white as the Roman’s was red. Nor looked he happy in the saddle. The third man, whose horse laboured most, was a giant in a mail corselet and a northron’s casque on his head.
Behind them, awkwardly, rode a round score of Danes, shifting their buttocks in the saddles and wishing for oar-benches instead. After them paced fourscore and two Gothic horsemen. Silent they were, not even grinning at the sight the Danish pirates made ahorse. All showed signs of hard travel and harder fighting. Dusty they were, and sweaty, and with wounds on them.
Cormac glanced back. He knew this tired procession represented history amaking. The Vandals misruled Carthage; between them the Visigoths and Sueves held Hispania; Odovacar the German was master of Italy and Rome itself; and from Britain the last legions had been withdrawn threescore years agone. The splendours of southern Gaul belonged to the Goth and to the Burgund. Gaul’s western peninsula was become again what it had been before Rome’s first Caesar; wholly a land of Celts. Syagrius had been the last consul in Gaul. The “Roman Kingdom” of Soissons had been the last, the very last fragment of the Western Empire.
Now it too was gone, fallen to red-handed barbarians. Rome had conquered and occupied Gaul; Rome rode away at Cormac’s side.
Was naught to mac Art, true. Still, the mood of the man with whom he rode communicated itself to him. Gone, all gone. He fell suddenly prey to the inborn, irrational nostalgia of the Gael. A sense of evanescence was on him, and of things passing away. Blood fertilized soil and only Time conquered.
Wulfhere drew him back with a grunt and an indicative nod. By the roadside up ahead, a small group tarried. Cormac recognized the woman; tiny she was with broad hips and erect, graceful carriage, with strands of grey in her flowing black hair, despite her youth. What, he mused, should Morfydd be doing out here at this time?
To Syagrius he said quietly, “Do give the halt by yon people, will ye?”
The Roman did not question, but gave the order. Danes sawed and tugged without competence at their horses’ mouths so that the animals milled even while the Goths smoothly drew rein. With exchanged glances and no words, they aided the Danes in quieting their mounts.
“Good hail, Cormac,” Morfydd said. “I foresaw we should meet here.”
“Give you good day, Morfydd. It’s news you bring?”
“I traveled hither in hopes of preventing it.” She indicated a litter on the roadside grass at her feet. It bore a motionless shape covered by a cloak. “Cathula would not listen. She ran away, Cormac. Not from her enemies this time, but from her friends. By the time I learned she was gone, she had too long a start. Child, child!” Morfydd shook her head. “She walked to the standing stones in Broceliande, to do what I forbade. You remember?”
“Aye,” Cormac answered, his mouth going dry. “A thousand years agone it seems… but I remember. And the rest of it happed? That which you warned of?”
“You guess aright.” Morfydd’s voice was sorrowful. With respect, she drew the cloak from Sigebert One-ear’s last victim.
Cormac looked. A wind from the outer gulfs seemed to blow past him and chill his flesh. Only a girl! None would have believed that Cathula had died such, a young girl. The wind-stirred hair framing her face had gone white. Her body was shrunken as with great age; her open eyes were opaquely filmed as with cataract. Tough-souled though mac Art was, his thin lips writhed involuntarily back from his teeth. He sucked a short breath between them. Aye. Sigebert’s last victim, drained of its soul.
“She tried to summon the Wild Hunt, herself alone?” he said, asking for confirmation, not because he doubted. “This was the result?”
“Yes.”
“Sigebert!” Cormac said it as if it were a curse. “Are there no bounds to the destruction that evil dog has wrought?”
“He is dead,” Morfydd said. Was not a question, the way she uttered it.
Cormac nodded. “I and Wulfhere and this man saw to that, in Nantes. Ye have knowledge of this?”
“In essence, as I know who it is you ride with. Cathula failed then, poor child… she did what she did to no purpose, and gave all she had.”
“I cannot say,” Cormac said thoughtfully. Sigebert One-ear’s last shrieked words came ominously back to him. “It’s in my mind that she just may not have failed, Morfydd. If so, he suffers… forever.”
The hounds!-aahhhh, mercy, no, no, the hounds, the hounds…
The seeress replaced the cloak over Cathula’s body. “Tell me of it ere you do depart for Danemark, an you will, Cormac. For now, there is naught here to delay you. I will see Cathula fittingly buried, and give her soul such repose as I can. I’ll follow in your tracks when that is done.”
Cormac only nodded. Solemn and silent as a funeral cortege, they passed by, one hundred men and five. The deposed Roman king and the outlawed Gaelic descendant of kings led them. Their hooves drummed a slow dust-muffled tattoo that was as a dirge on the ancient road. They vanished slowly, into the green distances of the forest. Morfydd gazed at the litter with its covered burden.
“A short life, and cruelly wasted,” she murmured, “and a terrible end thereto. The gods do not care, little Cathula. I tried to warn you. Now, you must go as you came, a shadeflower fast fading and soon forgotten.”
She lifted her head. The strange, far-seeing eyes azed after the riders.
“And what of you? The living, and the dead? Cormac, Wulfhere, Syagrius, Bicrus, Sigebert? When t
he stars have turned but a little way farther in the sky, who will remember you? Or the names of the kingdoms you strove for?”
The echoes of a hunting horn jewelled with black stars seemed still to ring through the glades of Broceliande.
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When Death Birds Fly cma-3 Page 23
