When Death Birds Fly

8

“It took two or three centuries-from the fourth to the seventh-for the decline of the Roman Empire to pass into the creation of medieval Europe… Little by little the Roman roads disappeared beneath the weeds…”

– Larousse Encyclopedia of Ancient and Medieval History

The big black horse crested the rise above a forest glade. It stood for a moment, silhouetted all sleek and shining against the summer sky, while its rider looked this way and that and cocked ear for the sound of the hounds. His finely shaped mouth twisted unhandsomely into a snarl of displeasure. Rotten was the hunting, this day!

A lithe, athletic figure and richly clad, he none the less presented a bizarre appearance, atop his black horse. A stiff mask of black leather covered the man’s brow and cheeks: Indeed, it concealed all his face down to the jawline save for the nose, mouth and chin. The mouth, at least, had healed.

Another man rode up beside him, not so well mounted or clad; his huntsman.

“By death” the masked man snarled. “As well might the weather be howling storm as this bright summer that is a lie, for all the game we’ve roused! I ought to have you flogged, Vafres!”

Vafres’s craggy face lost colour. When his master spoke of flogging he was seldom merely giving vent to idle talk. Nor was it any small punishment for a man to receive.

“I ha’ aroused yourself game when no other man could, sir,” he protested, with respect. “And will again, if ’m spared. This today ’uz the luck o’ the chase. ’Tis God’s will, belike.”

“God’s will!” Sigebert One-ear said contemptuously. “Be silent!”

They had fared far afield in their quest for game. Sigebert decided they were out of the Roman kingdom altogether, and into the forests of Lesser Britain. He knew not for certain, and cared not. He was who he was. He hunted where he would. Armorican peasants and villagers could be no different from other such vermin. Let them beware and be wary.

Behind the leathern mask, hazel eyes narrowed. An arm sleeved in beautiful russet leather soft as cotton lifted, and he pointed to westward.

“Your sight is sharp. There! A village among fields, is it not?”

“Aye sir.”

“We will gather the dogs and make for it. Who knows? There may be some amusement to be had.”

Sigebert’s hand had tightened unconsciously as he turned toward Vafres, and his horse made slight objection to the pressure at its mouth. Sigebert jerked viciously, with both hands. The animal grunted and backed in its attempt to escape the hurtful pull. Vafres shivered, and this time not on his own account. The long ride and lack of game had put his foul-mooded master in a still fouler disposition. Seeking amusement in a little peasantish village, and him in such a mood, could mean that not only the horse would feel his ire. Yet Vafres ventured no comment, but made efficient shift to collect the deerhounds.

They set out through the winding forest ways toward the village, with Sigebert cursing low branches as though they reached out for him apurpose.

Normally he was more urbane than at present, not that he was then more reassuring to be with. He merely inflicted terror in a soft voice. Now, however, his raw facial scars were sending him mad. Pain sent the arrogant young man’s reason aflying. The mask protected his cheek and ear from wind, as it would for some time yet ere they became insensitive enough to tolerate weather. Was his sweat that caused the agony now; it soaked into the mask’s padded lining and irritated the scars so that they itched fiercely. Naturally they could not be scratched and a perverse pride forbade the Frank’s taking the thing off to wipe his face.

The pain of his missing ear was worse. Hot skewers seemed to jab into his head through the hole and burn his brain.

“May those pirate scum be accursed and accursed,” Vafres heard his master mutter, as he savagely broke away a leafy branch.

Sunlight slanted down through dense leaves to scatter coins of brightness on the forest floor. They shifted liquidly across Sigebert’s cloak and the watered-silk hide of his magnificent horse as he rode. After him came Vafres on his grey nag, and the trotting hounds with their tongues out. All trod silently on the soft game trail flanked by haw and willow-herbs.

The grey-skirted woman gathering firewood was taken by surprise. Tall she was, big boned and gaunt, aged beyond her years. Hers were the eyes and lined face and gnarled hands of a work animal. She had added more sticks to her sizable bundle and was lifting it to her shoulders when Sigebert came upon her.

She looked around, up, and stared. Her dull eyes widened at sight of the tall black horse bestridden by the finely-clad man in the macabre mask. Black-masked, black-cloaked, black-vested man on a black horse. Black gloves holding the reins. She stared.

Sigebert looked at her contemplatively. She had no beauty and thus did not interest him. His first impulse was to ride her down. Then another thought struck him and, throwing back his head, he laughed wildly.

At that laugh without mirth the woman dropped her bundle and fled.

“Vafres!” Through the neatly-pared holes in his mask, Sigebert’s eyes now showed sparkling and merry. “I’ve raised quarry at last! The master teaches his servant how to ply his trade! Now I shall have sport!”

He laughed again and tugged off one glove to thrust two fingers into his mouth. Whistling up the hounds who came happily and hopefully, he bayed them on the peasant woman’s track.

Already she had run far down the winding forest path, racing desperately with her skirt about her hips. Blue-veined legs churned, greybrown with dirt. Doubtless she thought she’d set eyes on that monster Satan, spoke of by the priests.

By the time Sigebert’s pack was well started, she had emerged from the wood and fled across the cleared ground bordering her village. No need had she of a backward glance; her ears told her what pursued. The hounds of Hell!

Without hesitation she legged it across the fields, a pathetically ludicrous figure that took a wide ditch in a leap to land running on harshly knotted calves. Yonder lay the houses and the small stone church. All were stoutly built, as they had to be for fear of beasts and robbers. Her own house stood nearest. Her heart pounded and her feet pattered and she thought that surely she could reach it. She’d no time to cosset such weaknessess as the pounding of her heart, the rawness of her throat and the beginning burn in her calves. She shrieked her man’s name as she ran.

Behind her streamed dogs and riders, black mask on tall black horse. The man shouted and laughed maniacally; the dogs bayed and slavered, loping.

Outside the quarry’s hut, in the shade of its projecting thatch weighted at the corners of cord-wrapped stones, her man sat fitting a new handle to a reaping hook. He heard her scream, call his name. At first the dull fellow had not recognized the mortal fear in her voice, but took it for shrewishness. When she screamed to him again, and then again, and he heard those other sounds, he lifted his head, much irked. Then he simply gaped.

His wife, whom he oft berated for her slow movements, was running like the wind toward him. Behind her flowed a river of black and brindle hounds, amid a hellish clamour. And behind them galloped a horseman on a tall jet steed, riding as if he owned the world. His rich black cloak flapped about him and streamed like a hellish banner. This man the peasant had never seen afore. He did not have to know him or of him. He knew the kind.

His wife drew close enough for her man to see her bulging eyes, the gape of her mouth and straining cords of her throat as she sucked for air. He stood frozen, staring. She staggered and her arms windmilled and she recovered and came on. The hounds were thirty paces behind her and loping, running faster than she and closing the distance.

They came like the wind itself, and the wind came from Hell. Now the peasant could hear the ragged whistle of his wife’s breath. He calculated distance…

He moved at last.

Handle and reaping hook dropped, apart. He darted into the hut and slammed the door with all his strength, literally in her face. Her nails clawed splinters from the rough wood she’d helped him hew from a great tree. She was hurled back by the impact and her nose and mouth were bloody. Even her shriek emerged as a bubbling moaning cry.

Sigebert’s baying hounds loped and leaped and covered her from sight and the noise was hideous.

Cathula had been working in the fields when terror came riding across them. Like her father, the girl of not-quite fifteen stood frozen and appalled for a long time, staring at her fleeing mother and the chasers. When Cathula acted, it was in a very different fashion from her father. He had seen the choice: aid his wife and die with her; hold open the door for her and slam it-and be dragged out to die with her, or try to save himself. He had opted for pragmatism. The peasant was beyond emotion.

Scrambling out of the ditch whose sides she had been trimming with a hoe, Cathula ran fleetly toward the awful scene by the hut. The hoe came with her, clamped in a grimy hand become a vise.

“Mother! Mother, NO!”

Sigebert saw her coming. Under the mask, his brows rose. With a smile on his mouth, he urged his mount between Cathula and the snarling yapping raging pack.

The girl did not hesitate. Squinting up at him where he towered over her, she planted her feet and snapped her other hand onto the hoe’s handle. She swung it thus, like an ax, with the determined purpose of imbedding the blade in his head.

The leather mask moved urgently aside. Sigebert felt and heard the hoe’s edge hiss past the one ear that remained to him. The handle struck his shoulder so hard that the wooden stave broke, and the iron blade fell harmlessly away on a short stick. Before the astonished Frank had recovered himself, Cathula was spitting fury and thrusting at his belly with the splintered end of her hoe handle.

The thing gashed his forearm ere Sigebert gained a grip on the crude spear.

He pressed his knees hard to the black horse’s flanks, and Sigebert’s thighs and calves bunched with the musculature of any accustomed rider who had many times remained mounted only through the use of those sinews. Dragging Cathula close, he caught her by the arms. He managed to haul her across the saddle before him without toppling from it himself. Was no easy task, with the girl fighting him frenziedly and squealing the while. The horse whickered nervously. The broken hoe handle fell to the ground. Still smiling, Sigebert seized his captive’s brown hair, which hung in oily sheaves through being dirty. He struck her in the throat in such a way that she had to end resistance and fight for breath. Her eyes bulged and she made gasping choking sounds; airless sounds.

Sigebert dragged her up to set astride his horse, dragging her hands behind her back and high between her shoulder blades in a relentless double lock. She was strong and coming on fifteen; Sigebert was at prime male strength.

“Now-bitch-do you but watch!”

Little there was to watch, now. His savage dogs had made short work of their ghastly task. Vafres beat them away from their shredded, disjointed kill. Their jowls ran scarlet. At sight of what remained of her mother, Cathula made a sick mewling sound and shut her eyes. Her tiny belly lurched.

“Vomit over my leggings and I’ll impale you on that hoe handle,” Sigebert told her. He bent this way and that to run his gaze appraisingly over his catch.

The brown hair might have been a lot cleaner. So might her tight young skin, and mud from the ditch blackened her feet. Still, the pressure of her taut backside was most pleasant and her rucked-up skirt displayed enticing legs, and her body was better.

“Not bad,” Sigebert muttered, to none but himself. “She may even prove pretty, once she has been cleansed.” And he added in a mutter, “-and de-loused. Vafres!” He tossed a purse to the huntsman. “Coax that quivering coward out of its hovel and give it a gold piece for its offspring, here. Nay, stay!” He laughed in a burst, as at a fine jest. “Nay, give him thirty silver ones instead! That is more appropriate for a betrayer! Then follow me on the road. I return to Nantes forthwith.”

No longer did the Frank sound petulantly harsh. High good humour fair shone from him. As for the possibility that Vafres might take the purse and flee in another direction, Sigebert never considered it. How would such as Vafres explain his possessing so much money? Besides, even with such resources he lacked the personal resource to try.

Cathula had ceased her struggles. She stared at the blank, unrevealing wood of her home’s door-her father’s door, barred from within-and her eyes were blue ice. Slowly she turned her head toward the village church. There stood a spare figure in black, silent and unmoving. The black horse passed him by at a walk, and the priest of the cross said naught.

Sigebert turned his masked face to look directly on the man. He shuddered and sank to his knees, soiling his soutane as he drew the sign of the cross in the air. Perhaps he superstitiously believed that Satan had come to his village. Perhaps he was not far from wrong. It scarcely mattered. Once a man and then a priest and now neither, he uttered no denunciation and called down no curse in the name of his hanged and risen god.

Having done naught, he now said naught.

Sigebert went on, at the walk. Even the trees of the forest seemed to draw away. Cathula sat still, arms twisted and held high behind her back. She did not test her captor’s grip. The big horse came to the long, dustyy road leading east.

“There is no place you can flee where this horse cannot follow and trample,” Sigebert said, and released her arms.

Knowing they were too stiffened to be of use for a few moments, he thrust both his hands in under her upper arms, grasped her firmly, shook her. Her teeth clacked before she clamped them together. When he let go, she made no attempt to twist free. He had clutched her where none other had touched her, high on her chest. She swallowed, compressed her lips, and made no attempt to twist free of the one hand he kept on her. With the other he took up the reins.

She could not escape him; there was naught in the village to which she could return or cared to, and nowhere else to go. Sitting quietly before the Frank who had so casually destroyed her mother’s life and seemed bent on hers in a way she well knew, she gazed blindly ahead. Her mouth was a line that might have been sliced across her face with a dagger.

“What a fortunate wench you are,” Sigebert told her, speaking in her ear. His fingers moved and she sat stiff, not letting him feel her flinch. “I’ve a house in Nantes such as you have never seen, with linens and silks you may wear when you are somewhat cleaner-and doff by lamplight when I so bid. By Death, but you will live a life such as you’d never have known else! You should thank me!”

Silence.

“Mute, Ha?” His fingertips ground in. “No bad thing either, an it be true. Many men wish their women were voiceless-nay, I remember you cried out, yonder. Well then, Empress Theodosia, you merely need encouraging to speak!”

Sigebert kicked the black horse into a wild gallop-and let go any hold on his captive.

He rode superbly, a flowing part of his mount. Cathula jolted and bounced. Her head rocked and flew wildly back and forth and her hair stung the lower part of Sigebert’s face. Desperately and yet surreptitiously, she let one hand slip forth to grasp the horse’s mane. He had seemed so tall; now lethal hooves flashed in the dust of the road close, so close beneath her. To fall would mean broken bones at the least.

Even so she uttered not a word, whether to curse or to beg, nor did she gasp save when it was slammed from her lungs by sheer impact of flying horse on hard turf.