“Policy,” Cormac said, straight-faced. “An angry foe cannot think.”
He thought on it, whiles Wulfhere made churlish complaint about how wine left one with a drawn mouth and thirst curable only by tankards of ale. Hengist was not to be taken lightly. The grizzled devil had achieved what no Caesar ever had; a lasting foothold in Britain. His name thundered over the North and Narrow Seas like a storm. Wulfhere had told naught but truth of the man’s early deeds; all those things Hengist had indeed done. Aye, and he’d grown more terrible in his grizzled eld, not less.
“Hengist,” Cormac said with a grim matter-of-factness, “likes to kill.”
“And he’d rather betray than drink!” Wulfhere snarled.
“Has age brought him no infirmity?” Morfydd asked.
“Only in the head,” Wulfhere said.
But even that was not true. Hengist was crafty and clever as ever. A giant he was, huge and powerful as Wulfhere, despite his grey mane and beard like brine or hoarfrost. None knew the number of his years, because nigh all of his generation were dead. Threescore years and more, surely. Hengist remained-and flourished. Year after year he raided, plundered, slew in ever wilder excess. He showed no sign of weakness or mercy. It was as if by behaving as a wildling yunker he could cheat death itself. Some thought he had; some thought him supernatural.
Hengist had no need of plunder. Piracy was his pleasure these days, not his livelihood, for no livelihood was necessary to him. King! Had he wished, he might have sat at ease in his dun on the Isle of Thanet, which commanded the trade of the north, and grown yearly richer without lifting a hand.
He did not. He feared that. Aye, he feared precisely that, did Hengist, who feared neither god nor man nor demon. Others might believe him immune to age. He knew better.
Women no longer interested him. Each winter the fear gnawed in his brain that his lungs or thinning blood would betray him in the cold, so that he, Hengist the terror of the wide seas, would die unworldly in straw. Each summer he fared and bullied forth in greater fury, hoping for a warrior’s end. Each summer it eluded him. He sought the occasion of death, but slew and slew and showed his wiles and thus avoided the fact of death. As sometimes haps when a man actively seeks Hel’s embrace, she passed him by as though he bore a charmed life. And she filled her chill hall with those he made enemies, and then corpses.
In a few summers more, surely, he must find himself too ill for voyaging. No choice would be his then but to decline and rot like a sessile tree.
That fate Wulfhere Skull-splitter had every intention of sparing him.
“So,” the Dane said, softly now, “Hengist is nearby, eh?”
“It’s… other business we have in hand, Wulfhere.”
“Surt’s burning breath!” The voice lifted to a roar again, as Wulfhere proved how man could be mule. “Other business? Other business! YOU go and farm pigs, Cormac! This is my business! This is a debt owed to my slain crewmen, to my betrayed grandsire, and I’ll not let it slip unregarded into time for Ver-”
For Veremund or all the silver ever mined from this earth, he was about to say, Cormac knew, and Cormac forestalled him. He raised his voice against the Dane’s in a bellow that rendered Wulfhere’s words incomprehensible.
“Blood of the gods! Now ye’d shift to Latin and spout veritas odium parit, would ye?” he cried, striving to warn. “Must we squander the men we have left on every grudge ye’ve ever harboured? What of Sigebert One-ear, yonder in Nantes, opening his windows to the stench of Thorfinn’s green rot? Let us be dealing with him, at least, ere we concern ourselves with three shiploads of Jutes and an unknown horde of Saxons!”
’He and Wulfhere stared at each other while their hosts remained very still, nervously swallowing.
“Besides,” Cormac said on in a more moderate tone, having quelled Wulfhere’s giving away of secrets, “we cannot go hunting jutes over the water, Wulf. It’s overhauling Raven wants; have ye forgot?”
Wulfhere drew and gusted forth a sigh to fill a galley’s sail, and his belt buckle flashed aureate. “Aye, that’s true,” he said, grudgingly. Having given some vent to his wrath, he began to use his wits-he who’d once said in a time of quiet that Cormac was his wits. “Hmmm, hmmm. Look ye, Wolf, we must draw Raven up the shore and dry her out, or her timbers will soon be waterlogged, and she too heavy for rowing. Well it is that your Armorican summers be bright and warm, Prince! Then the battle-bird must have her careening and re-caulking, for if such work be done not this summer, will mean greater delay next year.”
“True.”
Another sigh; grudging and mournful. “That we cannot afford.”
“Aye. True also,” Cormac said relentlessly.
“Well, then… it needn’t disadvantage us, surely? It were maybe foolish to use Raven in any case. Our battle-bird of the seas is too well known on these coasts. Surprise be the way to deal with Sigebert.”
“Right,” Cormac said, recognizing the nigh wheedling tone of his comrade and playing him as only he could. “Right as the words of a spaewoman.”
“Ah… well then…” Wulfhere’s voice trailed off. “What think ye that we should do?”
Cormac gave him a gift: “Going to be keeping your own plan back to test mine, is it? Why, that must depend on our host. What say ye, Howel? Will ye be lending us a ship, that we might be making a little run to Nantes?”
Howel was sure not to glance at Morfydd, who was frowning. “And gladly!” His smile was genuine. He knew that Wulfhere had been angling for this favour, but knew not how to ask it for himself. The Dane was after all a stranger, while Cormac was the corsair prince’s friend, known to him of old. “It’s the right man ye ask for the loan of a ship, Cormac Art’s son! Ha! When that first Caesar came to these shores, he was amazed to find my ancestors building better ships than any in use on the Mediterranean! He defeated them only because the wind failed them at a crucial time. Even then many escaped to the west of Britain. Great seafarers we have been, in all the generations since! We builded seaworthy ships of oak when the men of the northern lands hadn’t yet heard of sail! No force in that. I’ll be providing you both the means for faring to Nantes-and ye will bring me that verminous Frank’s other ear, won’t ye?”
Wulfhere blew flutteringly through his lips in the manner of a restive horse. He’d his own ideas about the respective merits of southern and northern ships. He was also the prince’s guest. Heroically, he refrained from speaking.
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.