Authors: Paul Bannister
The Votadini horse lines held 15 or so beasts, but we left them and their guard alone, skirting wide as we did not wish to alert the animals, but soon I found myself outside the stone-and-timber church. The place was familiar to me, we had once used it as a camp during a campaign against the Picts, and the two hall sentries were at points outside the building where I expected them to be. They were not alert, one was actually dozing upright, leaning on his spear shaft, and my troopers swiftly and quietly dispatched them, hand over mouth, torso hauled back onto a seeking knife blade that slid under the ribs and punctured the heart. They dragged the bodies a distance from the hall and retrieved the dead men’s helmets, cloaks and spears.
I kicked off my boots, tucked them into my belt and went silent and barefoot over the flagstones outside the king’s chamber. There was enough activity inside to tell me that Kinadius was likely still in residence and I cut and eased up a corner of the leather window covering to peek into the hall. A dozen retainers were eating and drinking, the king himself was in conversation with a dark-haired girl who sat alongside him at the high table. A solitary guard stood behind the king, leaning on the tapestry that draped the wall. He was eyeing the girl and looking bored. I counted the rush lights in their wall brackets. Four. Two hounds were lolling, panting in the firelight from the vast stone fireplace, which boasted a proper chimney to take away the smoke. I moved around the building to the kitchens and waited.
After a period, a kitchen boy came out to empty a pot of greasy water and I quietly lifted him out of the door’s light with my hand over his mouth. He was too terrified to struggle.
“What have they done with the bishop?” I murmured in his ear. “Make a noise and I’ll slash your throat.” To emphasise the threat, I pricked his neck with my knifepoint. “He’s locked up, maste
r,” he said, his voice squeaky.
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“I was once his servant, master, and they told me I’d be locked up with him if I did not do what they said.”
It seemed probable. “They nailed him up, master, and they killed the trooper,” he said helpfully. To encourag
e him, I jabbed his neck again.
“And the prison? Where is it?”
“In the old temple under the church, master,” he squeaked.
“
Who’s in the kitchen?”
“The fat woman cook and the kitchen maid,” he said. As if on cue, I heard a girl say: “That boy’s gone off again, I bet he’s in the hall sneaking food.” A woman responded: “I told him before to go and get more firewood, he’s probably gone at last. If he hasn’t, I’ll scratch his head with a ladle when he comes back.”
I took a moment to think. If Candless was in the old temple of Mithras, he’d likely only have a single guard, either on the concealed door from the church, or outside the treasure vault door in the temple itself. The latter was most likely where the bishop was held. I muttered a couple of instructions to one of my troopers, and he took the boy with him as guide. The most agile of the troopers got another assignment, to locate an amphora of cooking oil in the storeroom and to get it undetected onto the hall roof.
The remaining two troopers and I moved towards the hall. I recalled that there was a window behind the tapestry on the east wall where Kinadius sat, a window not used because of the chill winds off the German Sea, and I headed for it. The troopers put on the helmets and cloaks of the Votadini guards we’d killed and took up position, spears prominent, in the shadows by the door on the west side of the hall. While we waited, I put on my boots again, and took out my big silver-and-amber jarl’s badge of office from my pouch, to pin it at my shoulder. I wanted no error, I wanted men to know who had come to exact revenge. By this, they would know they were not safe anywhere, not even in the comfort of their own halls, from the wrath of Arthur.
In a short time, our roof climber hissed that he was in place, a little later the kitchen boy scuttled to me, pale-faced and scared by the threats he’d received, to whisper that the temple guard was unconscious and Candless, badly wounded, was free and being helped to our horses.
My pulse was steady, slow and even. The battle calm was on me and the only decision I had to make was when to begin. The longer I could give Candless to cover the mile or so to our horses, the better, but the longer we waited the more chance there was of discovery. The kitchen boy was crouched next to me, and I fumbled a coin fr
om my pouch and gave it to him. “Go, keep quiet, say nothing,” I said and pushed him away. He slid into the darkness towards the kitchen. Some moments later, I heard the woman scream. He’d instantly told her, I knew.
Bitterly,
I thought I should have simply killed him, or at least have kept him close, but there was no time for recriminations. I put the thoughts aside. It was better to start matters. I called softly up to our man on the roof and he tipped the oil down the chimney. I waited for a commotion inside the hall and slit the leather of the sealed window at the time the fire began billowing smoke into the chamber. I heard the singing falter and stop and I was sliding through the window behind the tapestry, sword unsheathed. Happily, the bodyguard had not changed his position and I emerged from the tapestry’s cover without bumping into him.
One single upswing of Exalter caught him under the jaw, breaking it and knocking him unconscious at once. The hall was filled with shouts of alarm and men were kicking over benches and scrambling across the long table for their spears, but then the rush torches were falling to the floor as my two troopers who, unchallenged because they looked to be Kinadius’ own men, calmly hacked the four brackets from the walls.
Few of Kinadius’ men had swords, most were separated from their spears. We four attackers had surprise, choking smoke, swords and a plan and we were invincible. I turned from the slumping body of Kinadius’ bodyguard to the king himself. He knew me by my size, badly-scarred face, voice and by the great amber and silver badge of office I wore at my shoulder.
“You are a coward and a traitor,” I roared, beating his sword away before he could even half-draw it. My blow lacerated his hand. “We swore a blood oath and you broke it. Worse, you murdered my boy.” Kinadius backed into the corner, nursing his wounded hand, his eyes flickering from side to side, seeking his rescue. The room was dimming as the smoke spread and the greasy rushes underfoot added to the fog, smouldering as they were from the fires started by the tumbled torches.
As planned, my troopers were beating a fighting retreat. From a sideways glance, I registered a spearman turn and start towards me where I had his king trapped. My time was ebbing. “For Milo,” I said full into Kinadius’ face and I spat into his eyes. Before his blink had ended and before he could properly raise his unwounded hand to wipe his vision free, I had grasped my left hand to Exalter’s ricasso and, two-handed, backswung the long blade horizontally at his temple, leaning my full weight and power into the scything blow.
The swirling-patterned steel removed just the merest tip of his ear, then sliced off the crown of the treacherous Pict’s skull. It was like topping a boiled egg. A mess of grey-blue brain spattered across the tapestry, besmirching its hunting scene of dogs and deer, and a thin jet of oxygen-bright blood squirted sideways.
I continued the swing unbroken in time to catch the levelled shaft of the spearman’s weapon as he lunged at me. Exalter bit deep, splintering the tough ash wood so the blade dangled useless from a fragment of the shaft. The man took a pace backwards, dropping his broken spear and fumbling for his dagger, but I reversed Exalter and lunged overhand, still two-fisted, to spear him point-first into the throat.
He went backwards, clutching at the gouting wound, sat sprawling and looked in bafflement at the spreading pool as his life’s blood pumped onto the floor in front of him. I moved sideways and yanked at the tapestry, which sagged to the floor and revealed the slashed-open leather of the window. My exit was clear, I was paces ahead of two more oncoming spearmen but I wanted something first.
A menacing sweep of Exalter drove the men at arms backward and in the gloom I stepped on something that crunched under my feet. There! I reached down and touched soggy mop-like thing. It was a bloody hank of Kinadius’ long hair and the cap-like piece of severed skull and scalp from which it grew. I picked up the grisly thing, which still dripped grey pulp, backed cautiously to the window and scrambled out and around the building.
My troopers had pushed a small cart into the doorway and that blockage, plus the menace of their swords kept the Picts inside in the choking smoke. We slipped away into the gloom, pausing by the Votadini horse line to scatter their beasts, then set off as silently as we could for the copse and our own mounts. Not a single spearman attempted to follow us, the attack had been so sudden and unexpected, they were still reeling and disorganised from the shock.
Candless, his guide and our horse guard were waiting. We mounted up, rode for an hour or more, then stopped at a crofter’s steading to splint and patch Candless’ injured limbs. Then we moved on again, and trotted our mounts south.
We crossed the Wall at a Tyne bridge unchallenged by two surly guards who kept their distance after warily viewing our arms and bloodstained equipment. We rode for three days, over heathland and woods, crossed the Humber at the familiar ferry and covered the rolling miles of Ermine Street to Eboracum, but did not stop there. Instead, we stayed at Selletun, south of the pestilence-ridden city and the newly-turned earth of the mass grave pits outside its walls, at the Roman manor now occupied by the trader Mullinus.
Years before, he had purchased my mother after she was taken as a slave by sea raiders and had installed her as his mistress. I learned that she had died of the pestilence just weeks before, but the news did not cause me great grief. That part of my soul had long since withered away, as effectively I had been an orphan and was raised to brutality by the Roman army.
I brushed aside Mullinus’ sympathies and told him to find a physician to tend Candless. This was no easy task, given the claims of the plague victims on those desperately overworked men, but a judicious mix of flattery, threats and gold worked, and the trader produced a ringletted Greek to doctor the wounded Pict, who was still grumbling about the treasure he had lost.
In the meantime, I conferred with Eboracum’s garrison commander about potential threats from beyond the Wall, although with his seriously depleted cavalry wing of Dalmatians and Vangiones from the upper Rhine he was in poor position to do much. I promised him reinforcements while privately wondering where I would find them, and left my warrior bishop to recover in Selletun, away from the plague.
Before I rode away, I was visited by the smith Gimflod, who had heard of my arrival and left his forge to bring me the sword of power he had been commissioned to make, and it was a thing of beauty like Exalter.
Longer than the average gladius, in its hilt this sword incorporated a pyramid-shaped purple and yellow crystal from the Bluion mine in the limestone country of Britain. This ancient cavern where the Romans mined the prized crystal was the place where for two centuries the gilded eagle standard of the Ninth Spanish legion had been hidden from the rebel Britons. By a series of god-sent miracles, I had found the icon and used it to rally the superstitious troops behind me as I seized the throne of Britain and became its new emperor.
The crystal in the sword, said the sorcerer M
yrddin, would inform the gods of our loyalty to the old religion when we gave the sword as sacrifice. In addition, in a bow to the new religion of Christ followers, the swordsmith had incorporated into the blade a small band of iron from one of the nails used to crucify their Jesus god. These two powerful links to gods both old and new, Myrddin said, would be joined with the gift of the ancient symbol of Britain’s kings, the golden Torc of Caratacus. To them both would be added a gift of blood royal. This, the sorcerer said, might induce a return of the old powers and favour of the island’s own deities. Only then could we have relief from the wars, plague and uncertainties that were overwhelming our people.
I looked thoughtfully at the beautiful sword, seeing the shadowy, swirling patterns along the blade that reason told me were traces of the twisted and hammered strips of iron and carbon that made it but that superstition told me were ghost images of the gods and ancestors waiting to be released by a new agreement with the heavens.
The thoughts made my spine tingle and I scabbarded the blade and wrapped the whole thing in fine wool before fastening it to my saddlebag. A half hour later, Exalter at my side, a handful of Rhenish Vangiones troopers clattering behind me, I was spurring Corvus towards the windswept, airy spine of the Pennines, last obstacle between us and the fortress at Chester.
And on that journey across the roof of Britain, dangling from my saddlebow was the grisly, blood-blackened scalp and partial skull of the Pictish chieftain who had murdered my son. It was my gift to his mother Guinev
ia, but it would not be enough.
My lovely Druid Guinevia Avenae, adept of the god Ogmia, lord of letters and law, was also a priestess of Nicevenn, witch goddess of the terrible Wild Hunt, and she possessed abilities to see afar, to commune with the dead and to command the powers of the sea god Mannan mac Lir. Royal-born in Alba, north of the wall of Antoninus, she was mentored by the great wizard Myrddin and had learned the secrets and suffered the mental and physical wounds that elevated her to the highest ranks of the Druids.
I had seen her make magic, and knew that within her ran a core of tempered steel. Her ability to psychically view events at great distances had made her invaluable to me as a military advisor, but that same gift had brought her, unsoftened, the terrible news of our son’s death. The vision of Milo, bloodied and dying, had made her relive the nightmare she suffered in viewing the torture death of her chieftain father, boiled to death by Picts, and even the steel of Guinevia’s mind snapped.
We spoke of our son, and I briefly told her of taking the head of his murderer, which brought up her dark-circled eyes to mine. “You have his head?” she asked quietly. I sent a slave, and the fellow brought the gruesome trophy. Guinevia hissed and spat at the thing, then took it and wrapped it carefully in a scarf, allowing a small smile to flicker across her lips. “I shall make this into a drinking bowl,” she said quietly. “there is much power in it.” I shuddered inwardly at the thought of what she might do with that potent icon, and how it could condemn the Votadini chieftain’s soul to unspeakable torment in the Underworld. Then as always, I hardened my heart. The foul, treacherous brute had murdered my boy. He deserved all he would receive, and the trophy seemed to have brought some crumb of comfort to Guinevia.
She twisted the pentagram ring she wore, and I saw it glow as the magic flowed, but she did not linger to speak with me more, and retreated to her viewing chamber, a place where she could focus her inner eye and send out her mind to other parts of the land. I expected that she was also brewing vengeful disaster and doom for the clan of the dead Kinadius mac Ailpin. I tried to speak with her but she shook her head silently, and retreated behind her locked door, so I left her to grieve. I’d consult Myrddin, who knew the keys to her Druid mind, as soon as he returned from visiting the Standing Stones. Meanwhile, I had to plan matters, there was a kingdom to run.
The sea lord Iacco Grimr was waiting for me, as were my horse commanders, Grabelius and Celvinus. I had not seen my admiral for some time, it was good to see him, bluff and uncomplicated, and we clasped wrists in the old Roman way. He gave me a report of his activities, and he had been busy these last months.
After our battle with Guthric and his Saxons at the River Chelmer, Grimr had trapped and butchered the crew of the one long ship that had gone upriver, intelligently sparing a handful of them to sail back to Frisia and take news of the plague they had seen in our villages. Guthric himself had succumbed to the pestilence, as he and the other Saxon captives had been set to clearing and burying plague victims and almost to a man, those who handled the dead had joined them in their grave pits. This news, too, was sent back as a deterrent to others who would invade Britain.
From Colchester, Grimr had sailed west, glad to exchange the befouled land of dead and dying for the fresh salt air and cold green waves of the Narrow Sea. He had linked with couriers from Dover and Caerleon and received news of the West Country men who were rallying against me, and he had acted ruthlessly. Those Dumnonian rebels never expected what Grimr brought to them. He and his fleet of six long ships sailed into the drowned river valleys of the Exe, Tavy and Fal and devastated the land. They burned the crops and settlements, slaughtered the beasts and enslaved scores of hapless folk while their chieftains and warriors were elsewhere, hurling their men uselessly against our stronghold of Caros Camp.
This was an ancient hillfort earthwork dug by a people whose bones had long since crumbled into the mother soil, and was the keystone of my western defences. Once called Cadbury, it was a steep limestone hill south of the Roman bath town of Aquae Sulis and it commanded the surrounding plain, dominating a route along which invaders were naturally funnelled. It is military fact that those who live in mountainous land are hard to subdue, so those lands become the breeding grounds for armed struggle.
But when insurgents wish to raid or make war, they have to come to the flatlands, and there they meet their enemy. Britain has several areas of highlands: Alba in the north, which I controlled from my fortress at Eboracum; Cambria in the west, exit from which was controlled by the garrisons at Chester and Caerleon, and Dumnonia in the southwest, whose entrance to the fruitful lands of Britannia was blocked by the stronghold of Caros Camp.
The ancients had ringed the slopes with four lines of deep, spike-filled ditches with sheer, smoothed banks and later generations had topped the summit with a 25 feet high stone wall fully 16 feet thick. Timber palisades and fighting platforms added to the girdle of defences, and I had ordered the construction of more watchtowers, double gates and turnbacks that sometimes led to blind traps.
Attackers had to struggle steeply uphill through narrow stone and timber passages between those rings of defences before they finally met the daunting stone walls at the top. These enclosed an18-acre, rabbit-nibbled grassy plateau where beasts could be herded and kept safe in time of uprising or invasion. The plateau had a good supply of sweet limestone water from three wells, a large timber hall, barracks, storehouses, granary, workshops and a small palace inside its top ring of walls, but the most dominant feature was the signal station with an iron cage of kindling and lumber. This towered high above the topmost walls and could send fiery news of danger far across the lowlands.
That news had gone out weeks before, and my plague-ridden forces would respond, but the defenders sent word that there was little urgency. The Dumnonian invaders had been utterly impotent against the defences, had suffered severe losses and had resigned themselves to besieging the place, camping well outside the range of the defenders’ ballista or bowshot.
The siege ended in disorder when news came of both the attacks on their homeland and of the plague sweeping the south, and the Cornovi king’s men began to melt away like snow in spring sunshine. They hurried back to their farms and sheep walks, terrified of the blackened blisters that could take their lives in hours, and arrived rueful to find their homes and land devastated. It would be, I thought with bitter satisfaction, many years before the Dumnonians attempted to stab me in the back again, now that they had seen the long and terrible reach of my sea power.
But Grimr had not ended his coastal sweep with the forays against Dumnonia. He had rounded the southwestern end of the land that projected itself into the rollers of the Atlanticus and, departing from Dumnonia’s northern coasts, he had crossed the Severn Sea to western Cambria whence pleas for help had come, telling of Hibernian sea raiders.
Astonishingly, some of these waterborne warriors were women, and even more astonishing was to hear that several of those Amazons were actually the leaders of the sea bandits. Most famous among them were a flame-haired archer called Karay, and a raven-tressed witch named Norgol, who kept a pack of war dogs and claimed to be a lycanthrope – a human able to assume the form of a wolf.
“I met this Norgol myself,” said Grimr. “She had a dozen big dogs equipped with leather breastplates, with collars that sprouted knife points and sharp blades and had ankle rings with more blades sticking out of them too. The brutes were huge, and their handlers said they came from mastiffs that mated with tigers.
“We came across them after we sighted smoke on the other side of a headland and went to investigate. We found two Hibernian ships beached there while the raiding party was inland. Because we came unnoticed from around the promontory, they had little warning and we were ashore without resistance until this Norgol came back to her ships with her fighting dogs. Two of them disembowelled one of my archers, but our spearmen killed all the dogs, although they were terrible weapons. I shot one with my own crossbow and it died hard, but then, so did the Hibernians we took on.”
Grimr’s disciplined warriors withstood the single crazed charge of the sea raiders and their dogs, then methodically crushed them with a shield wall. The wolf-woman herself was taken alive, spitting, scratching and hissing imprecations despite being bloodied and battered during the clifftop fight. “I sent her to Caerleon, to the castrum,” said Grimr. “She’ll make fine entertainment in the arena and may the gods save any gladiator who gets her and doesn’t know his business.”
My admiral had not found the other sea raiders under Karay, who had been pillaging along the northern Cambrian peninsula, disregarding the Bloodshields whose land it was, and one of the captives from Norgol’s boat spoke of her in awed terms. “These are not ordinary women, lord,” he told Grimr. “They descend from the warrior queen Sgathaich, who taught the great Cuchalainn himself how to fight, and from Aoifa of the Druids.
“Our queen, Norgol descends from the fairy Niamh Golden Hair, queen of Tir na Og, land of the young. She is the daughter of the sea god Mannan mac Lir and Norgol inherited magical powers. She can turn herself into a wolf. She has been seen with bloodied mouth and lamb’s wool on her clothes in the hours after a sheepfold was raided by a wolf and several beasts killed.”
Grimr, a pragmatist, shrugged. “She may eat lamb, and so do I,” he said. “It’s best roasted, but wolves don’t know that. We’ll see how wolfish she is when she’s in the arena armed with a trident and net, not her fangs. We’ll put a swordsman in a lambskin up against her.”
Grabelius and Celvinus were grinning at the exchange, and they too had news for me. Several small raiding parties of Saxons had been turned back along the line of the Car Dyke, a waterway I had ordered dug to move heavy supplies from Londinium to Eboracum. “It’s a useful frontier,” said Celvinus, “because the Saxons are coming from the east and we get news of them from the watermen, so can rush forces to where the invaders are. It means we use relatively few troops to monitor and halt them. Better news is that the plague has discouraged them, and few new settlers are arriving, so maybe soon we can drive out the ones already in our eastern lands.”
It did not seem likely in the near future, I thought gloomily. The messengers I had sent out had not yet returned, so I had little hard news of my plague-hit people and troops in the south. I did have a sketchy account from a wandering monk who claimed that in some villages a handful of people had survived unaffected even while they cared for loved ones with the pestilence. One man, the unkempt monk assured me, had lost his blackened and rotting fingers and toes but had somehow lived.
I knew I should first ascertain accurately what had happened – or indeed was still happening – and I muttered a prayer to Mithras, god of soldiers, and fingered his bull amulet, the one I kept hidden under my tunic’s neck.
“We had best go south, to Caerleon, to survey what damage the pestilence has done, and to mop up any Dumnonians still infesting the region,” I said. “Send word to Myrddin. I want to confer with him. He was going to the Standing Stones and may well already have returned to Caerleon or to Caros Camp. We’ll leave early next week, after we’ve readied the men and put this garrison into condition in case the Hibernians think of raiding along the Cambrian coast.” With that, I was off to my chamber. I needed a long, long night’s sleep.