When Death Birds Fly

1

“The temporary rescue of Italy entailed the permanent ruin of Gaul. A vast horde of Vandals, Suebi and Alanas, escaping from the central European domination of the Huns, crossed the ill-defended Rhine, and fanned out across the interior provinces, threatening to invade Britain. Italy was powerless to help, and the British proclaimed a native emperor… He crossed to Gaul, and expelled the invaders; but they withdrew the wrong way, not back across the Rhine, but across the Pyrenees into Spain. There most of them stayed. The (Suevi)… descendants still inhabit northwestern Spain; the Vandals passed on, to leave their name in Andalusia, ultimately to found a stable kingdom in what had been Roman Africa.”

– John Morris, The Age of Arthur

That same purple night of summer lay on another coast far to the south and west; on Brigantium in the Suevic kingdom. Here in northern Hispania the night was graciously warm and all but cloudless. The spacious harbour with its triple bays sighed and surged with the tide.

In a richly tapestried chamber, five men conferred ’neath the beams of a low ceiling. At the head of the smooth-topped oaken table sat Veremund the Tall, king of this land. Though his long legs were stretched out he was not the tallest of this extraordinary gathering. At his right hand sat his kinsman and advisor, tawny-moustached Irnic Break-ax in his tunic of blue with its crossed sets of yellow stripes; Zarabdas the mage, once a priest of Bel in Syria and now among the Suevic king’s most valued servants, was at his left. His dusky skin, forked jet-black beard and expressive dark eyes, no less than his eastern robes among the fair, Germanic Suevi, gave him an air of strangeness and alien mystery that Zarabdas was not ashamed to exploit. No charlatan, this dark mage among people whose hair ranged in hue from nigh white to a medium brown, and seldom that dark. His powers and learning were real. So too were the theatrical instincts he had cultivated, along with his impressive robes.

“Wisdom alone,” Zarabdas had told his king, “will not gain one a hearing.”

They three dominated and ruled the Sueves who dominated northwestern Spain. They three sat at table’s head, and did not dominate that gathering.

The other men at the stained and battered table were more memorable still. Neither Germans nor Easterners nor even Celts were these twain, neither members of royal family nor wizards-in the usual sense. They did possess a certain wizardry at tactics, and at relieving laden ships of their cargoes. And at the bloody work of sharpened steel. Indeed one of them combined dark hair and dusky skin with pale Celtish eyes, though they were so deeply set in their slits as frequently to appear darker.

The one was an immense Dane with an immense red beard. His physique seemed to crowd the low room, compressing the others into corners. When he lowered his voice others were put in mind of distant thunder; when he raised it, of thunder bursting directly above their heads. Was a voice that had long led men, had competed with sea-storm and battle-din to be heard, and never could accommodate itself long to more polite indoor tones. The chest whence it emanated bulged like twin shields and gold armlets and ornaments flashed on the giant.

The fifth man of that gathering went cleanshaven as if to flaunt his scars of past combats. He was without ornaments though his black tunic was bordered with gold. His square-cut black hair and dark, somber face made a setting of startling contrast for the cold, narrow eyes in their slitted niches. His rangy body bespoke and radiated a different sort of power from the massive Dane’s; swifter and more compact. His hands, one of which gave pensive support to his chin while the other lay relaxed on the table before him, were long-fingered and sinewy with tendons prominent on their backs. The right had been scarred; as had his face, more than twice. With weapons or unaided, those hands knew all there was to know about the business of killing.

King Veremund, and his brother Irnic, and his mage Zarabdas. And their two… guests. At this moment dreams of these latter two troubled the sleep of a Frank named Sigebert One-ear. Only days agone, they and their crew of reivers, searaiders, had done the Suevic king a high service. Now they spoke of matters more mundane, though of little less import.

They were Wulfhere Hausakluifr and Cormac mac Art of Connacht in Eirrin.

“Trade!” King Veremund said, nigh exploding the word from under his droopy yellow-white moustache. “Shipping! I said once that it has been worse than poor these thirty years, and this supernatural terror that has haunted our shores all but destroyed it. Because of you, my friends, the terror is now destroyed… and yet that is only a beginning. There are other dangers.”

“Pirates,” Cormac said, without the sign of a smile.

“Foul bloody seagoing dogs who cannot be countenanced,” Wulfhere added, and when he grinned his full beard moved like a fiery broom on his barrel of a chest.

Zarabdas the mage muttered, “Set a thief…”

“True, you and your reivers have done well,” Veremund the Sueve went on. “You have also had your losses. Are there more than twoscore able men left to work your ship Raven-and to fight?” The question was rhetorical; Veremund knew there were not. “I would copy the Vandals. I would make my nation powerful on the sea, though we began as a race of horsemen far to the east-as they did. Meseems the best course were to employ renegade Vandals to make up your numbers, and shipwrights from the same source. Do you agree?”

Cormac mac Art frowned while Wulfhere impetuously answered at once, though with a brave effort to be tactful in a king’s presence and conceal his disgust with such a suggestion.

“It’s in no way the same, lord King. Look you: these Vandals did begin as an inland horsefolk, like you Suevi. But they did not end their travels in this Hispania, as your own Sueves are doing. The Vandals crossed into Africa generations since, lest they be trapped and destroyed. At that they had to be given sea transport by some Romish lord in Carthage… What was the fool’s name, Cormac?”

“Bonifacius,” the Gael answered. “It was their aid he was wanting, against a Roman rival. Fool, indeed! He might as well have imported plague. There was another such fool, in Britain. It’s Jutes and Saxons he is after inviting over his threshold. His name was Vortigern. Jutes and Saxons rule many gobbets of Britain now, men without the price of twenty cows calling themselves ‘kings’ and gaining land, followers-and more than twenty cows.”

The latter words were spoken for the benefit of Irnic, Zarabdas and the king, to whom Britannia was only a word, same’s Eirrin its neighbour, which they knew of as Hivernia or Hibernia, these Suevi. Wulfhere knew the story of Vortigern and his importation of Hengist; knew it as well as his Gaelic blood-brother. He should have done. Hengist the Jute was Wulfhere’s greatest enemy. The Dane’s blue eyes glittered coldly at thought of that burly Jutish tiger, but Hengist was far away in northern waters-the lying treacherous triple-dealing bastard.

But it was the Vandals that mattered, this far south.

“Aye, Bonifacius,” Wulfhere said in his resonant rumble. “Well, he’s dead now and no matter his name save on Loki’s list of Great Fools. The Vandals took Carthage for themselves. Now they’ve made themselves the greatest sea power on the Mediterranean.” He lurched forward, and his elbow jarred down onto the table as he pointed. “But what worth be there in that? The Mediterranean is enclosed and tideless as a washtub. Once it was Rome’s lake and now it’s the Vandals’! Fine for children to go swimming in… but lord King, it’s a man’s ocean ye have to deal with here!”

Noting that everyone at table had leaned a bit back from him, Wulfhere let his shoulders and his voice drop a bit. “The Vandals still build their ships to the Romish pattern. Believe me, that is not suited to the wild Atlantic or the Bay of Treachery yonder!” He waved a mighty arm, thickly pelted with red hair, unerringly in the direction of the sea off Brigantium. Wagging his big head, Wulfhere leaned back and spoke as if he were a Greek lecturing a class.

“None but the boldest of Vandal captains dares venture past the Pillars of Heracles, as they call ’em, and up these Hispanic coasts. Those I and the Wolf,” he said, now indicating Cormac by banging a fist off the Gael’s thigh, “have met-in their blundering triremes-we have sailed merry circles around.”

He paused, as if working out his own sentence to be sure he’d stated what he intended. Wulfhere’s command of his native tongue was hardly a scholar’s; his Latin was ghastly, and so most men spoke, in this part of the world. At that it was better than when he and Cormac had arrived here awhile back, having fled the soldiery set on them by that Sigebert fellow whose pretty face they’d ruined.

“Rings around Romish triremes built by Vandals in Carthage,” he said again, savouring the sound and thought of it. “I suppose ye’d wish your own navy to do the same.”

Cormac mac Art’s dark, sinister face showed some small tension about mouth and jaw. Only Zarabdas, by watching him closely, observed it.

“You suppose rightly, Captain,” Veremund the Tall said. “I am answered.”

Cormac relaxed as unobtrusively as he had tensed for trouble. Few kings indeed would accept such truculently declaimed outspokenness so mildly. Veremund, though, was like unto no other king Cormac had met-and was the first the Gael had found whom a man might respect and like. The Sueve knew the uses of forebearance without being weak-or even appearing so, to intelligent men of craft.

How are these Sueves after having got a good man as king, anyhow? Cormac mused. Unique, Veremund is.

While the Gael thought thus, it was Irnic Break-ax who spoke. “What of the Basques, then? They have been seamen from ancient times, and surely they know Treachery Bay as well as heart could hope for! I am told they build goodly ships.”

Cormac was impressed even while his face went cold. From a commander of horse-warriors and kinsman of the king, it was a sound evaluation. Irnic spoke true. Basque shipwrights and sailors would be worth the having. Cormac did not like to disillusion the man with whom he’d developed camaraderie.

“True for yourself,” he said. “It’s better for the purpose the Basques are than Vandals would be-were there any getting them. But there is not. It’s fiercely independent and clannish they are; more so than the Gaels of Eirrin, and that’s saying much. In their time they held off the Romans from their mountain valleys, and they held off the Goths, and by the black gods!-they are fell toward outsiders. Never will they be lifting a hand for someone not of their own race, unless it has a weapon in’t, and that for the spilling of blood and doing of red death.” Cormac mac Art’s sword-grey eyes looked broodingly back into his own past for a moment. “At base they be the same folk as the Silures of west Britain, and the Picts of Alba,” he said low, “although the latter bred with another race in the long ago; a strange race, squat and apish, the signs of which can still be seen on them. Their breed and mine have an enmity older than the world.”

Cormac, whom men called the Wolf, did not exaggerate. Older than the world was that feud, indeed… or older than the world as it now existed. Vague memories of former lives and other epochs stirred in his brain, tempting him to lose the present in that strange reverie others called ‘the rememberings’ that sometimes seized him without warning. Cormac rejected its lure with all his iron strength of will and focused on the visages of the two Suevi below their barbarically knotted hair.

“An ye doubt me, my lords,” he said grimly, “send ambassadors to these people. Set beside the northern Picts, it’s the very flower of gentleness they be-and even so ye’d do well to send men ye can spare.”

King Veremund doubted not, nor was he inclined to put Cormac’s test to trial. The Basques of the Pyrenees were far closer neighbours of his than were the Vandals. He knew all about them.

“What of the Britons of Armorica?” Zarabdas asked. “Are they not skilled in these arts?”

“They are so,” Cormac admitted. “Their ancestors crossed the sea from Britain, most of them from Cornwall. The pulse of the sea is after being in their blood since long before Rome was a power. For the lure of your wealth, lord King, they could be had, though it were better elsewise. It’s Celtic Britons those folk be, by blood and language. It’s too fiery a mixture they’d be making with Danes and Suevi.” Cormac shook his head, leaned back, and showed Veremund an implacable expression. “Nay, as we’re to be replenishing our crew and bring yourself the master-shipwright ye desire, lord King, it’s a longer voyage than that is called for.”

Veremund blinked, started to speak, glanced at Irnic. Wulfhere added to the case Cormac had presented:

“Besides,” he grunted, “Danes build ships better, and sail ’em better, every day of the year.”

King Veremund’s fine brow furrowed in thought. He looked at his cousin Irnic, and though he did not speak his mind Irnic was able to follow its turning. The king much desired the service of these men-needed them, in truth. He was loath to send them excessively far beyond his reach.

“A longer voyage,” the King of the Sueves repeated. “Even unto the land of the Danes?”

Wulfhere Skull-splitter chuckled. “It’s there most Danish men are to be found.”

Wulfhere… plague take ye… Cormac thought, but the king and his two advisors showed no offense at the Dane’s over-plain words. Veremund visibly considered. The thoughts moving in his head were as convoluted as the thick, barbaric knot of his hair; a twisted 8 atop the back of his skull.

“So be it,” he made concession at last. “One does not ask aid of experts and then tell them how their work should be done. The Powers speed you on your journey and bring you safe back to Galicia. Rest easy that while you’re away, your wounded shall have no less care than mine own hearth-companions.”

Cormac smiled in sardonic appreciation of this gentle reminder: the king held hostages against any deceit or failure in what he doubtless saw as the reivers’ duty. A low rumble of laughter filled Wulfhere’s bull-throat.

The giant said, “The shipwright I have in mind is a man named Ketil, lord King. He is far-travelled. In his early youth he was apprentice to an itinerant boat-builder who helped Saxon families-and sometimes entire villages-cross the water to Britain. Since then he’s lived among the Franks and the Frisians; aye, and those Armorican Britons too, in pursuit of his trade. What last I heard, he had settled to family life in Jutland.”

“Then would he wish to leave them for our service?” Veremund asked, with a hand at his brown beard. “It’s a long journey to make for a promise.”

“To found a sea-fleet for a king, I am thinking he’d be unable to resist! He is the master of his craft and has made it an art, and loves it as-as I do mine, by the Thunderer! Moreover, news of your wealth in silver will sweeten him greatly, King of Sueves! When we show him our offspring of your enchanted chain, lord King, there will be no sailing fast enow for Ketil!”

Half-smiling, Cormac thought on Veremund’s wealth in silver. Wealth indeed!

In the king’s treasure room lay a chain of massive links of silver, twelve of Wulfhere’s stridey paces in length. Dwarves had forged it long aforetime, under the direction of their king Motsognir. It had the unique and most desirable property of growing new links when heated in fire, so that it could spawn new wealth forever, were its power not abused. Cormac and Wulfhere had earned five paces’ length of such new growth. It was theirs, to take where they would-and it was silver indeed, and permanent. Yet, at Wulfhere’s words Veremund’s eyes narrowed a little at realization that they meant to take it out of Galicia.

And yet… it made little difference. They had earned the payment. Were they so short-sighted not to return to him, they were not the men he wanted, after all. The thought and concept had occurred to Zarabdas, though as yet it but toyed at the edge of the king’s mind: wealth was power. Unending wealth could lead to absolute power. With a goodly fleet and good leaders of good weapon-men, along with clever merchants and diplomats-that chain could change the course of history and make Veremund the Tall master of Europe-and beyond.

“With your permission, lord King?”

Was the dry, scholarly voice of Zarabdas the mage. Veremund’s gesture assured him of utter freedom.

“Cormac mac Art,” the easterner began, and his dark eyes were intent as, those of a ship’s lookout in dangerous waters. “I know that naught will turn you from this voyage. Yet I foresee it will be filled with such danger, physical and else than physical as well; as even you have seldom confronted. Monsters and sorcerers loom dark athwart your path, and wraiths of haunted darkness flap among the shadows of the time-to-come on wings of death. Whether you will triumph, or they, I cannot know. In this only can I advise you hopefully: do you keep ever on your person the golden sigil that once you showed me. It will aid you.”

Cormac’s dark face remained impassive, despite his surprise. The object Zarabdas spoke of was an ancient golden pendant in the shape of a winged serpent. It had come to the Gael as most things of value come to a pirate: in the way of plunder. He had kept it, though mentally disavowing superstition. Even now it hung agleam against the black linen of his tunic. Mac Art’s hand did not go to it at its mention as any other’s would have done; this man was not like any other.

“Ye say so, mage? Ye’re after telling me otherwise not long since, when ye named this pendant no more than a piece of jewellery.”

“A blind,” Zarabdas said, his expressive hands making light of the matter. “A distraction. You were a foreigner come to our shores, with pirates and by night. I did not know you. Besides, I was not sure of the object’s nature. Since then, I have found mention of it in my books, and one rude drawing. The winged serpent is an Egyptian sunsymbol, mac Art, and far older than the winged disc of Atun that the saintly if impractical Pharoah Akhenatun caused to be worshiped. Yea, older and more powerful as well.”

“Why, that bauble almost wound up betwixt the breasts of a mere taverngirl of Nantes,” Wulfhere said, forgetting that the young woman he mentioned was now quite close to the King of the Sueves of Galicia, whose wife had died in the service of Lucanor’s god of ancient evil.

Zarabdas took no notice whatever of the Dane’s blurted words. His dark gaze remained on mac Art, and intense. “I believe the sigil adorned the prow of one of the mystical boats of Ra, long and long agone, in which souls were ferried to the sun-god’s paradise. Although,” the mage urbanely added with a wave of his hand that rustled his robe’s full sleeve, “you must know this, mac Art. You yourself spoke of its power to protect you, on the day we met.”

“Aye,” Cormac nodded brusquely. He had said something of the sort, to bluff Zarabdas and test his knowledge. Was not the first time a lie of expediency had enveloped a kernel of truth.

So far as Cormac knew, the Egyptian sigil had no more magical power than a stone he might pick up in the fields. Could wearing the turquoise, amid certain incantations, make one fearless? Was the aventurine the sacred power-stone of dead Atlantis? Might the amethyst as so many believed, heighten shrewdness, particularly in matters of trade and business? Zarabdas might now be attempting to befool him in return. He might even be both sincere and correct, though the likelihood of that seemed small. It scarcely mattered. Cormac had kept the sigil because it was after all gold, and of value. He would continue to wear the golden serpent beneath his mail on the off chance of its aiding him-though he’d not be depending on it. He put no faith in such trinkets.

“And should it fail you, Cormac,” Irnic Breakax said smiling, “your sword-arm must make good the lack!”

Cormac shrugged. “My wits and my sword are all I’ve ever trusted.”

“Well then, my lords,” Wulfhere said, pouring ale down his throat, “I sail with the Wolf here as soon as our ship is provisioned.” He looked about at pleased expressions. “And if this settles all our business, I know where two eager wenches await me-and by Wotan, I’d be cruel did I keep them waiting longer!”

Veremund grinned, all strain off him. “By all means, Captain Wulfhere, go and join them,” he said, doubtless thinking of the woman who was his own new interest.

“As for me,” Zarabdas said, “I have studies to pursue.”

Irnic Break-ax advised that he had promised himself a night-long drinking bout with the comites of his cousin’s bodyguard, and asked Cormac if he would like to join them. The dark Gael shook his head.

“Perchance later. With thanks, Irnic.”

He departed conference chamber and Kinghouse, and took his thoughts and seat-stiffened limbs for a walk. He strolled through the nighted streets of Brigantium. A tall man, leanly muscled and powerful, moving lightly in his black, gold-bordered tunic. He was accustomed to the weight of link-mail over leather, but now, although he had sworn no oath of allegiance, he had become a king’s man and enjoyed a king’s favour. Such made a difference.

Even so, the scabbarded sword at his side thwacked his leg with each pace, and a long double-edged dirk was sheathed at his other hip. The habits of his violent outlaw life had begun firming of necessity when he was but fourteen. Mac Art was more comfortable armed.

Men looked at him strangely as he passed. Native Hispano-Romans with curly dark hair they were, for the most part considerably smaller than he. He was swift and deceptively powerful for one so rangy, as some of these knew. He was not much more like their Suevic overlords than he was like unto them. Many were but squatters in dilapidated houses, with little to do but loaf and stare. Only a tiny part of the legacy of Rome: detritus. The Roman-built city’s population had declined since the great days of Empire.

Was not natural for mac Art to move unpurposefully through a darkened city without being approached by women, but so it was in Brigantium. He did receive a couple of smiles that might have been tentative invitations. He walked on.

Cormac came to the waterfront district, which was in even poorer state than the rest of the city. Hardly a craft save fishing boats was moored at the long white docks. Uncrowded and unmanned, the boats looked lonely, stark. Seawater slapped on stone with a melancholy sound, as if lamenting Brigantium’s past busy importance. The one Gael of Eirrin in all the land smelled the open sea, and longed to be under weigh.

Cormac knew well the reason for the harbour’s lack of activity.

Of late months the sea had become a source of dread and eerie terror, round about Galicia’s coasts. Ships had been destroyed by a nameless agency, and on nights otherwise gentle. Men’s lives had been smothered out in the old Roman lighthouse tower where they tended Brigantium’s fiery beacon. For long and long none knew what unnatural force slew them. Wreckers had been at work-but of no natural kind, nor with natural powers, nor from natural motives.

To this coast had Cormac and Wulfhere sailed, accomplishing the nigh impossible, and they had known none of the horror haunting their destination. Behind them they left treachery and blood and marine-loaded warships bent on their doom. And they had almost fallen the wreckers’ victims when they approached Galicia in their long ship Raven, storm-driven and weary.

The Gael’s grey eyes shifted within their slitted dens. Now the beacon-light burned bright and safely in the many-tiered tower that reared up immense at the harbour entrance. Cormac smiled his bleak, unhandsome smile at memory of the day he had first seen that structure, and at what he’d found therein. A tower of death it was then, and he had entered and ascended to discover the smothered, blood-drained corpses of men with horror in their glassy eyes. He recalled his first meeting with Veremund the Tall, King of the Suevi, and the pact they’d made between them. For sanctuary and reward of silver, Cormac and Wulfhere agreed to rid Brigantium of the mysterious horror that haunted it.

Ultimately that had cost Danish lives, and it had cost Galicia one of its physicians, and the king his own wife.

Cormac stared at the tower and remembered that desperate night when he’d abode there, awaiting that which came. Masses of moving, crawling kelp, either sentient or sent, came rustling and dripping up out of the dark sea. It climbed the tower like phantasmal ivy, with a thousand thousand tendrils and a thousand thousand leech-like mouths for the drinking of the blood of men.

Only Cormac’s foresight, and the firewood and quicklime he had stored in the tower by day, allowed him and his companions to withstand the soulless onslaught. Had been a hideously near thing, even so.

Then had the Gael discovered the source and nature of the attacks. With his eyes he had seen the ancient, plague-evil minions of R’lyeh’s black gods, horrors of another age and long dormant-or so it had been thought. He’d heard their hissing, croaking voices, and had fought them hand to hand. Worst of all, he had discovered the hidden sect of humans and semi-humans that worshiped those ancient challengers of humankind, led by the king’s own physician… and his ensorcelled queen.

Even the strife-scarred brain of Cormac mac Art preferred not to remember how that had ended.

Still, it had ended. The wide sea rolled quietly, holding naught now save its own normal dangers. They were entirely enough. Lucanor the physician, revealed as Lucanor the mage, Lucanor the traitor to more than his king-to his own humanity-had escaped with his life.

Doubtless fled the kingdom, the Gael mused. Only the dark man-hating gods he worships know where that Romano-Greek dog cowers now!

Cormac gave his head a jerk to clear it of what had been. He was not the sort of man to dwell in the past; were he so, he could not bear the memories of all his ugly yesterdays. The physical act and resolve changed his mood; the desire for solitude dropped from him like a funerary cloak.

He wheeled from the hissing, slapping plain of the sea. Surely Irnic and the comites would be deep in merry carouse by now! The Gael turned his steps again toward the king’s hall and strove to forbid himself to think.

As he approached a stand of dark, pointed trees that sighed like surf in the night breeze, someone appeared. Muffled in a long, long cloak, someone stepped from between two pines, and beckoned him. Cormac’s hand slid across his middle to the sword-hilt on his left hip while his slitted eyes warily searched the deeper shade behind the cloaked figure. Once already had men attempted to do murder on him in this land.

Then he recognized the stance, the way of moving, the poise of that small exquisite head. He spotted the glitter of jewels in high-piled hair. He knew Eurica, the king’s younger sister. Cormac’s teeth snapped together, biting into silence the curse that sprang to his lips. Though she was of age and technically a woman at fifteen or sixteen, Eurica had led a protected life and was very, very young-as Cormac had been an eerily older man, in terms of maturity, at that same age.

Clenched teeth ground. The princess was enamoured of him, or the glamour of him-or had been. How she felt now he neither knew nor over-much cared. Once she had come to his room at night. He had got her out of there posthaste. To him she was most attractive, aye-and a child, and… simply a blistering nuisance. And a danger to his life greater than any armed foe. Cormac had had it to the eye teeth with the daughters of kings. And Princess Eurica here… alone with him at night… even good men had been slain for less.

He greeted her civilly. That much circumstances forced him to do.

“Only in harpers’ tales do kings’ sisters walk out unattended, my lady, and with the most recognizable head in the land displayed. Who be watching over yourself, and from where?”

“You are brusque as ever, Cormac mac Art.” Her girlish voice held displeasure. “There is-well, there is someone watching. That could not be avoided. Yet I promise you, she is my most trusted attendant, who nursed me when I was little. My attendant, not my royal brother’s.” Her voice dropped an octave, with ignorance of having reminded him of the very reason they must have no meeting, not even low-voiced converse. “She will not betray us, Cormac.”

“Will she now?”

Cormac was, considerably less trusting. He wished he could think of some way painlessly to make the point that there was no “us” to betray, and that without sounding finicking or priggish. None suggested itself. Peradventure she could be affrighted away…

“Royal persons have been stabbed in the back by attendants erenow, Eurica.”

“Not by my Albofled!” the princess assured him, with impatience on her. “Oh, Cormac-she’s out of earshot, and were she out of seeing-range as well, I’d be in your arms this instant!”

“And I’d be hanging from a gallows tomorrow,” Cormac said stiffly, “or fleeing this land with blood of the king your brother’s henchman on these hands.”

“Be not foolish,” she said indulgently, going royal. “How should he know? As for fleeing the land… Cormac, oh Cormac, I have heard you are about to do that in any case. Is it true?” Close by now, she looked up and her eyes shone.

“No, my lady.” Call her not by name, he told himself. Be not moved. Aye, it’s attractive she is, and more than willing. It’s also a silly and theatrical brat she is. Many her age are, but how to tell a king’s sister so?

“But there has been talk of a long and perilous voyage into the north!”

Eurica’s eyes were large, aglisten in the starlight. To her, the north was a legendary place of floating mountains and cold grey seas, of fierce monsters and savage manslaying giants, where corpses walked and all men were Wulfhere’s size-six and a half feet, unshod-and blood was drunk smoking. Aye, and truly, along with the ordinary business of living and tending crops in a land where winter was like unto an unwanted relative that came early and stayed late, all those things had been known to exist and to happen.

“You hear much,” Cormac said, and damned himself for a weak, weak answer worthy of any boy.

“So I do,” Eurica said smiling. Nor did she reveal that her source of the northbound rumour was one of the bed-wenches even now sporting with Wulfhere. Her smile suddenly vanished. “Cormac, you may not return for a year! You-you may not return at all! I beg you, remain here and be safe!”

Safe with you, he thought. Safer battling him who sleeps in sunken R’lyeh, sister of a proud ruler! “My lady,” he said, striving to push his brain to choose words, “that I may not do. It’s a mission for the king that Wulfhere and I’ll be undertaking. We cannot now go back on our agreement and still keep his friendship-even did we wish to change our minds. Which I surely do not.”

“Why?” Eurica looked anguished. “What is this mission that your life must be risked for it, who has already saved our land?”

“A matter of ships and shipbuilding that will bring new life to the kingdom, and perhaps more,” Cormac said, and listened to her snort her scorn. “For me, my lady, a purpose. Aimless roving and plundering has been my lot since I went into exile from my own far Eirrin. A man Eirrin-born does not forget his green homeland. I’d not be complaining; a wild life and merry it has been, but now desire is on me for something more.”

The instant the words left his mouth he knew his blunder. Desire was a word Eurica could relate only to herself. Eyes ashine, forgetting the watcher among the trees, she enwrapped Cormac with her arms and rose on the veriest tips of her toes to kiss him with passion.

He was not made of steel and ice. His sinewy arms gripped her hard, firm warm young flesh tight and fatless over patrician bones. He forgot calculation in the madness aroused by her soft body and sweetly moving tongue. She moaned with delight and strove to press herself through him.

“You will not go,” Eurica said with assurance.

That aided him to break the brief spell. “After that, it’s more convinced I am that I must go, lady Princess. For surely my need of the king your brother’s favour is all the greater, now.”

“Go then,” Eurica whispered. “Each day you are gone will seem ten days, Cormac. When you return, there will be something more than aimless roving and plundering for you. I promise it, Cormac.”

She kissed him once more, swiftly, and broke away to run for the dark trees, gathering her cloak about her as she flew.

Cormac stood moveless. At last his teeth showed in his grim, sardonical indication of a smile. What was the dear youngster thinking of? Her hand in marriage and half the kingdom, peradventure?

I promise it, she had said. Promises were cheap, and this one she had no power to keep. That power lay in her brother’s hands, though she doubtless had no thought of dissemblance and meant what she said with such sweet heat.

The Gael’s black brows drew together. Aye now; there is that. Her brother. Did he and Wulfhere build the navy King Veremund wanted, as Cormac knew they could do, then might the king indeed consent to his sister’s marriage with an outlaw pirate? Cormac mac Art was self-exiled from Eirrin. He was not an outlaw in this land of Galicia, and when a king approved of what a man did, he was not then a pirate.

It would bring me position and power, on these new shores.

And do I want such, an it mean marriage?

Samaire, he thought, and though it was the Gaelic word for daybreak, it was not the sun’s dawning he thought of.

These were questions for the future, he told himself firmly. A long voyage awaited him now, as did Irnic and the comites… and a woman Cormac mac Art had taken unto himself here, a woman who was no princess and no virgin, and whom a man could tumble with, with no thought of far-reaching consequences.

Alone in the darkness, Cormac laughed aloud, and forgot Eurica. With a wolf-like step the son of Eirrin continued on his way to the king’s hall.