When Death Birds Fly

13

Expectancy wafted sweet over Howel’s land. Every farmstead and tiny village felt it. From the town of Vannes it was shut out in a measure, held at bay by the stone walls, the stone streets, and the stone houses, and by the disapproval of the Church. Yet as Midsummer Eve approached, many folk went out through the gates even of Vannes, to travel north. They went alone, and in pairs and in family groups. The roads Rome had built were yet in sufficiently good repair to make the going easy. Two such intersected in the ancient, sacred forest of Broceliande, where a number of Druid groves had survived the axes of Caesar’s men because secrecy and magic had kept them hidden.

Then came Prince Howel himself, from his island estate in the Little Sea. His indigo-sailed galley rowed into the harbour of Vannes with the prince, his lady and a bright entourage aboard-conspicuous among which were a massive redbeard from the northern lands and a grim, dark warrior in dark mail.

“I mislike cities,” Howel said, sniffing the air. Rank it was with the taint of rubbish and sewage in too-great amounts. “They stink, and hem a man in. We’ll be parting for Broceliande on the morrow, but this night I must pay a courtesy call on Bishop Paternus.” He smiled with heretical sarcasm. “Would you and Wulfhere like to bear us company, Cormac?”

The Gael’s thin lips curled in answering mockery. “Not I, thank ye. I’ll not be speaking for Wulfhere. He might enjoy it. What say ye, old sea-dragon? Here’s a golden chance to have mended those mildewed places in your soul.”

Wulfhere snorted. “Thanks for naught, hatchet face! The last time I spoke with one o’ these cross-worshiping bishops was in Britain. Some swindling smith had taken me for a gull, so I showed him his mistake by hauling him into church by the scruff of his dirty neck, and a haltered heifer with my other hand. I cannot say which bawled louder! I forced the local bishop to marry them there before the altar. It might have been a good joke, but the Christian marriage ceremony proved so tame it fell flat, and I burned the church to ease my disappointment.” Wulfhere shrugged: “I cannot say if this Paternus has heard of it, although he may have done. ‘Tis sure that if he’s heard any sort of description, he’ll know me by it… there be not two men like me anywhere…”

“Agreed, and the gods be thanked!”

“Thus I’ll bide here.”

Morfydd smiled. “You are splendidly tactful, Captain. I’d as soon do likewise, but among other things, I’ll not have this robe-wearing fellow think I fear to confront him.”

So Howel and Morfydd, with a few trusty personal servants, spent the night in the house of Bishop Paternus. The rest of their entourage readied horses and provisions under the orders of Garin. All preparations were well made by the time the rulers of Bro Erech returned the next morning.

Their party was strongly armed against robbers or possible raiding bands of Franks; they met with none. Wulfhere showed some disappointment. His muscles would grow flabby, he complained, from lack of exercise. Yet a certain awe was apparent even in him, as they followed the Roman road deeper and ever deeper into the Forest of Broceliande and he began to have some notion of its vast extent. Nor was the giant easily awed. Hailing from the land of the Danes as he did, Wulfhere Skull-splitter was familiar with country covered by great tracts of impenetrable forest. But Broceliande had a timeless, brooding presence like unto naught Wulfhere had come upon elsewhere.

They left the road, leading the horses in file by winding paths. Men swore while they lugged chests and bundles in the tail of the party. A rearguard, burdened by weapons and mail only, followed them. Cormac and Wulfhere marched with those men, through a world composed entirely of trees. The sky hung low.

The paths led gradually upward. At last they came to a low hill with shelters and cooking places newly refurnished around its foot-and atop it, like a crown, reared a circle of regularly spaced standing stones.

Prince Howel had disappeared. None made comment, or asked questions. They knew that his part in the Midsummer rites was to personate the Antlered God, and no mortalman could take so mighty a spirit upon himself without going apart from other men to prepare. Was one of the mysteries, and it was not for the speaking of.

The pilgrims of ancient Celtia ate their last meal before the rites were to be held. Then, with great thoroughness, they covered the cookfires with earth and stamped the embers to extinction. The like was being done with all fires, throughout the land. Not a coal or rush-light was left burning, nor would any be kindled anew until the prince’s fire was seen to blaze on this one hill. They were similar, the ceremonies of Midsummer here in Armorica, to the rites of Beltaine as they were held in Eirrin…

Cormac drew his thoughts sharply away from that. He had promised himself he would cease to think of Eirrin.

Night came down. The dark was warm, breathing and heavy, like some great live creature embracing the world in arms of black velvet. The stars hung all fuzzy and dim, aureoled in fog. Tendrils of sluggish mist coiled among the stones of the sarsen circle. Somewhere in the wood an owl hooted. No Celt he, some wag said.

In the very center of the ring, a conical stack of logs and brushwood had been heaped. Now three men in their youth came in from the dark, and Morfydd blessed each one as he knelt, tracing a sign before his face. They set to work to make fire. Their labour was hard and long. Soon they were sweating in the warm night, while their hands ached from constantly spinning the large bow and drill.

Gathered outside the stone circle, the people were no less tense. Would this be the year it failed? No fire, however skillfully the chosen ones worked? No renewal of life?

The drill sang its persistent song. The firemakers felt pain become part of the bones of their hands. Sweat ran into their eyes and dropped from their lashes, and they strove while the waiting mass held its collective breath.

Then, at last, came the grey twists of smoke… the glitter of sparks-and the first bright tiny flame! It leaped white in the punk and straw, then grew to feed on wood. The needfire at the center of the stone circle began to crackle.

A wild, joyful cry arose from the crowd, cut short abruptly by awe. Enthroned before the fire, indifferent to its growing heat, was a tall figure, naked, oiled and shining, with the head and antlers of a royal stag. The antlers that won the doe in battle, that grew, and fell, and were yearly renewed in the way of all life. The antlers of Arawn, lord of death and desire and rebirth.

They hailed him in ecstasy, whiles the needfire grew.

Two by two, they slipped between the grey stones and began the Long Dance of Midsummer. It threaded in and out of the circle, moving ever in a sunwise direction. Out there in the dark, on the hillside below the stones, vats of liquor were ready, and the dancers scooped wooden cups full as they went. Moving in the interlocking spirals, they lit torches from the central fire and carried them outward again, until they resembled a swarm of bobbing fireflies.

The dancing grew wilder. It wasn’t on account of the liquor, which in truth was scarcely needed. Fires began to shine fuzzily on other hills, through the light fog, signalled by the beacon of the prince’s blaze.

Seemingly of its own accord, the Long Dance fulfilled its pattern, and ended.

Two powerful figures rushed from opposite sides of the circle. With the high-burning needfire between them and the immobile, antlered form, they met to clash like fighting bucks. Rebounding, they began to circle each other.

One wore leggings of grey wadmal, a black leather tunic and helmet. Pinned cape-fashion across his shoulders was a grey wolfskin. Its fierce jaws snarled beneath his own clean-shaven jaw. He’d a dark face, and grim. His slitted eyes shone in the firelight, cold as winter ice.

The other was gold, as his antagonist was onyx. Yellow-haired and yellow-moustached, he was fair of skin deeply bronzed by the summer sun. Save for golden ornaments and sandals, his tough limbs were bare. He wore a warrior’s tunic of brown leather over a madder-dyed orange shirt. Upon his breast jolted the Egyptian sun-symbol of the golden winged serpent.

Of course, he’d never have dreamed of wearing such a thing into a real fight, to irritate and distract him. Not bouncing free in this wise. He’d have worn it under his tunic, if at all.

Each symbolic combatant carried a shield with a bull’s-hide cover, the dark man’s black, the other’s pied brown and white. Only their actual weapons differed in kind as well as hue.

Cormac’s was a mace. Its handle was made from the heart of a century-old oak, seasoned well and hardened in fire. The grip had been wrapped in black leather and bound tightly with iron wire. The striking head was scarred, battered lead. Although a ceremonial weapon rather than a warfaring one, it could brain a man at a stroke, given a strong man to wield it. Cormac sensed its sorcerous power as he hefted the thing. It suited him. He liked the way it felt in his hand.

Garin’s spear was ancient and ceremonial as the mace. Yet it too was a functional, well-made weapon. Too short for throwing, it had been fashioned for stabbing and thrusting solely. To balance the broad-headed blade of gilded bronze, a solar orb of the same metal had been affixed to the butt. Thus could a man reverse it quickly in his hand to strike with either end.

Garin was playing at that now, a series of showy juggler’s tricks and feints with spearhead and weighted butt alternately.

Cormac mused grimly, It’s little this would gain him in real combat. Unless-

It happened even as he thought of it, a sudden crosswise blow with Garin’s brindled shield. Swift as light-or, more aptly, as a fissure in winter’s ice-Cormac’s shield was interposed. The two rang like muffled drums.

There followed harsh, bruising struggle, spear against mace, shield against shield, shield against spear, shield against mace. The leaping fire threw gold over them, and deep shadows. The warriors lost the sense of being themselves.

In small remote crannies of their minds they remained men, fighting as men-but the major part of their souls was possessed by contending Powers, even as Howel’s. They were ancient as Celts, ancient as Cimmeria and Atlantis, as the world. Garin, the brightness of summer, knew he must drop and lose at last; not because it was arranged and so rehearsed, not even because Cormac mac Art was the better warrior, though he was. No. The thing was inevitable as Fate, as the turning seasons.

Mace slammed on Garin’s shield with an impact that shook all his bones. He thrust with his spear. The point struck through black bullhide and slewed awry, scoring splinters from the wood beneath. Garin reversed the spear sharply and upon the instant, so that the bronze ball on the butt swung over to strike Cormac’s shoulder. Garin pulled the blow at the last instant, not to snap the bone. Cormac’s shield sagged low as it would not have done had they truly been seeking each the other’s life. Garin, excited, thrust into the gap so left in Cormac’s guard.

His spear-point never reached its mark.

Cormac unprecedently lunged with the mace. His arm and the handle formed one straight line, as if he held a sword. The steely strength of his wrist and fingers was taxed to the point of anguish to keep that leaden head from wavering. Yet he did.

He too pulled his blow at the last instant. Instead of crushing Garin’s throat, the blow sent him to the ground choking helplessly for breath. The bronze spear dropped from his twitching fingers. On Garin’s breast, the golden sigil from Egypt jumped flashing with his attempts to breathe. He clenched his left hand spasmodically on the grips of his forgotten shield.

From the people of Bro Erech rose the sound of a faint, drawn-out sigh. Winter stood grimly triumpliant above the champion of warm summer, a promise and a warning that winter would return. Yet it was bearable now, at this time of year. Were it to happen at the Midwinter feast it would be unbearable, a sign that the world would die into bleak darkness forever.

Cormac sighed deeply with them, descending centuries to become himself again. The fire crackled and bellowed at his back.

A wild yell burst from hundreds of throats.

Something terrible came.

Out of the sky it slid on black wings five men’s height in span. They beat fiercely, braking it above the stone circle. The monster dropped sharply. All saw huge flexing talons and fiery yellow eyes like embers from hell.

The demon came down on Cormac as an eagle drops on a hare.

Instinctively Cormac flung himself flat and rolled aside. Mace and shield he retained; they hampered him briefly, in getting to his feet, but he did so with creditable swiftness despite that. His sharp wits had already told him what he had glimpsed, and he wasted no time in inner complaint that it was impossible. It was there, and to be dealt with.

The black wings thrashed like gale-blown sails; black sail.

The naked man in the stag’s head mask had risen from his seat, quite humanly amazed. He crouched a little, his empty hands spread as if to grasp something. Garin, still choking for breath, had also gained his feet, somehow. He was a warrior. He had weapons in his hands. Here was a threat.

Bro Erech’s people remembered the sight for decades, and talked of it to their children. The circle of ancient, firelit stones; the roaring central blaze, gold and vermilion and pure white, gouting sparks to the sky; the Antlered God, arms outspread, seen through the flames; the demoniacal black predator, flapping like a spurred fighting cock ready to leap and strike and rend; and the armed personifications of dark Winter and golden Summer, rushing upon it from different sides.

Garin thrust with the consecrated spear. It glittered hotly as the sun-symbol on his breast, given him by Cormac.

The black owl flapped madly away from him, whirling upward. Its pinions sent gusts of wind through the stone circle, and the fire danced wildly. Despite the warmth of the night and the fire’s parching heat, that wind was numbingly cold.

Garin reeled. Cormac set his teeth and stood fast, waiting. He expected the black owl to descend on him again.

It did not. Wulfhere Skull-splitter had shouldered his way forward, colossal in the leaping firelight. He lacked both armour and weapons-he’d been occupied with a pretty Armorican wench he’d caught to himself for the Long Dance and its aftermath-yet little seemed he to care. He came striding on and him no Celt, his bearded mouth stretched wide and venting a Danish battle-cry.

The black owl swooped upon him, eerie horror itself.

Full on his mighty breast it struck, sinking hellish talons into chest muscles like slabs of weathered topaz; glared at him from a range of inches. The cruel beak snapped, eager to strip his face from the front of his head.

Wulfhere caught the awful thing by the neck. Snarling, he sank his fingers deep. Clearly he meant to wring its head off. Maddened by pain, he might have done it, had he grappled a thing of flesh and blood. But there was no solid resistance to his grip. His iron hands encountered what seemed layer on layer of shadow-dark feathers, numbingly cold. The strength went out of his arms.

For one of the few times in his life, Wulfhere Skull-splitter knew fear.

Cormac reached him. Swinging the mace with all the power of his deadly war-arm, he struck the black owl a blow that might have shattered the skull of a bullock. An ordinary weapon had achieved naught; the leaden mace, like Garin’s spear, had been sacred in Midsummer’s rites time out of mind. It had gathered to itself power of a sort the new Church rejected with horror. So much the worse for the Church! To this place the power of cross and book did not extend.

The battered, stone-dull lead sank deeply through the black owl’s body. It shrieked once, hideously, an unbearable screech that tore men’s ears. There ensued a moment of preternatural cold, a sickening fetor, and the being was gone… was gone, as a bursting bubble is gone, without a sign.

Wulfhere staggered against one of the stones. He steadied himself with a spadelike hand. With the other, he clutched at his breast in the way of a man with a dagger in his heart. The black owl’s talons had sunk tearing into his flesh. Cormac had seen it himself. Yet Wulfhere’s tunic did not hang in shreds as it rightly should. Nor was there aught of blood.

The big Dane realized it himself, through his bewilderment of pain.

“Surt and all the giants!” he snarled. One-handed, he tore his tunic in half from neck to waist. It hung agape, exposing a curling mat of copper-red hair, over chest and belly muscles like one of the moulded cuirasses worn, long ago, by high-ranking Roman officers. Still cursing vehemently, Wulfhere ran his fingers through the shaggy mat, testing the hide beneath.

There was no blood. Incredibly, the skin remained unpierced. Yet… not unmarked.

Morfydd had drawn nigh, holding a fiery brand above her head. In a voice unlike her own, she said, “I beg you, stand still… so. Now let me see, Captain…”

She reached up, her diminutive stature making it a stretch for her. Cool fingers parted the Danish giant’s chest-hair. For once, Morfydd the wise-woman turned pale.

Black as pitch, two groups of stigmata showed on Wulfhere’s fair northern skin, centered upon the nipples. They were the marks of predatory talons. In each group, one pair of claw-marks stood above the nipple and another pair below, as they would be made by two claws facing forward and two back, in the fashion of owls.

“Hell!” Wulfhere said harshly. “I’ve never had pain like this from such tiny pinpricks erenow! ‘Tis cold, too, like the stab of daggers frozen in ice for ten thousand years! Think ye that shadowthing had venom on its claws?”

“Not of any material kind, perhaps,” Morfydd answered. “Tis outside my experience-and against most of it! Cormac? Have you seen such a thing as this?”

Cormac was watching the sky, alert lest the black-winged monster return. He did not trust its obliging disappearance. Yet he saw no sign of it, either then or again that night.

To Morfydd’s question, he was forced to answer nay.