When Death Birds Fly

24

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held Hispania; Odovacar the German was master of Italy and Rome itself; and from Britain the last legions had been withdrawn threescore years agone.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 the 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.