Andrew J. Offutt
When Death Birds Fly
Kieth Taylor
“The Roman empire is beheaded; in the one City, the whole world dies… All things are doomed to die… every work of man is destroyed by age… but who would have believed that Rome would crumble, at once the mother and tomb of her children. She who enslaved… is herself a slave.”
– St. Jerome, A.D. 415
“Gaul was lost to the Empire. If the ruling class of Auvergne held out against Euric the Visigoth… it was for the sake of the new-won independence rather than from loyalty to Rome. Further north, Syagrius, son of Aegidius, animated by the same spirit, became a de facto ‘king’ of Gaul between the Somme and the Loire.”
Prologue:
The Black Owl
“For these are the birds of death; the Owl, a predator of the night, and the Raven, presider over battlefields.”
Sorcerous evil swooped above Nantes on broad black wings. Hate and Evil slept fitfully in the nighted city below. Those two dark forces called to each other as land to restless sea. Black wings slanted downward, riding the wind. The warm summer’s night seemed to shiver around the ragged edges of swooping night-wings spreading broader than a man’s height.
Sigebert of Metz, more lately called Sigebert One-ear, stirred in his bed and muttered. Much strong wine without water had gone down his throat earlier this evening, more than one cup drugged by his physician, a man tight-lipped against his patient’s cursing. The wine brought Sigebert no peace, him most men would have said deserved no peace.
A recent sword cut had caught and torn one corner of his sensuous mouth, plowed messily along his cheek, and shorn off the ear on that side of his head. The raw pain of it came into his dreams even through the fiery fumes of drugs and drunkenness. Even so, in Sigebert the hate was stronger than the pain. Through his villainous brain burned visions of a sinewy, tigerish Gael of Eirrin and a huge ax-wielding Dane.