Authors: Paul Bannister
The smith had ridden the half day’s journey from the straits of Mona, the sacred island where the Druids had been slaughtered by the Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus, and arrived at Myrddin’s stone house at the head of the pass. His pack horse was loaded with the thin beaten bronze sheets the sorcerer had commanded.
Myrddin was warned of the man’s approach and came from his vegetable garden to meet him. He looked at the metal sheets and wasted no time. “I want these shaped like a shallow dish,” he said, showing the smith a sketch he’d made. “They must be more than an arm’s span wide, curved to a hand’s depth, and I want them burnished like mirrors.” The sorcerer took one of the sheets and tested it, bending it back and forth in his hands. The metal gave off a dull roar like thunder and Myrddin’s hooded eyes widened. He shook the metal sheet, holding it by one end and the thunder echoed again. The smith nodded, dully. “They’ll do that,” he said uninterestedly. The magician’s agile mind was busily assessing possibilities. Creating your own thunder could be a very useful thing, he thought. He put the idea aside for now.
“Make me six of these dishes,” he instructed, jabbing at the sketch, “and make me a seventh that is twice the size. Also, make stands for each that will allow me to adjust them.” To himself, the magician thought: “If I position them accurately, I can gather Sol’s rays with the six smaller ones and reflect them onto the larger to use it as a burning glass.” Aloud, he told the smith: ”I will send a slave with more silver in a month’s time. Have all of them ready. I’ll keep two of these sheets here.”
That night, the moon rose and turned an ominous rust-red, staying so for more than an hour. The sorcerer could conceive no reason for the augury, if augury it was, and he half-dismissed it, although he recalled that once, after such a blood moon, there had been a summer drought and the cops had failed. He pondered the phenomenon, wondering if his manufactured thunder had somehow caused it, then merely filed it away in his mind. The gods would send more warnings if needed. They would indicate what were their wishes. He turned his thoughts back to making a burning mirror.
He was eager to test his idea, and only two weeks later, ahead of the time he had suggested, he and two slaves rode into Menai to visit the smith and see how far he had come with the bronze mirrors. As the sorcerer arrived in the settlement, he looked across the strait at the isle of Mona and his face darkened. He could not forget what he knew, for the events of two and half centuries before still resonated with followers of the old religion.
The brutal Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus had brought his armoured cohorts to slaughter the Druids and had a well-conceived plan to overcome the obstacle of the straits. He had built flat-bottomed barges to carry the foot soldiers across the treacherous channel while the mounted troops, mostly archers, used inflated skins as flotation aids, and swam with their horses.
“We were waiting for them,” muttered Myrddin, seeing in his mind’s eye the array of British warriors who had gathered along the shore all those years ago. In the necromancer’s vision, he also saw the black-cloaked, tangle-haired women who ran screaming imprecations and waving burning torches towards the incoming Romans. The legionaries paused uncertain on the gravel beach, then under the hard shouts of their general and his officers not to be frightened of a group of dirty, mad women, lined up in sawtooth formation and tramped forward behind their big bronze shields.
As always, the armoured and disciplined legions crushed their opponents. The Britons barely withstood even the initial shower of heavy javelins and war darts before the shield wall was battering them backwards and the stabbing points of the gladius swords were killing the half-naked warriors.
“They even burned the sacred groves,” Myrddin told himself as he remembered the ancient chants of the bards. “They slaughtered our Druids, enslaved our warriors and our women and destroyed the haven of our gods. We shall never forgive them that.” His eyes, which could hold the cruelty of the gaze of a hawk, hardened.
“We shall never forgive, nor forget,” he repeated. He turned his gaze away from the dark, low horizon and kicked his mule’s ribs, urging the beast towards the smithy. The sun came from behind clouds, and something caught the sorcerer’s eye. The tidepools below him were blood-red. A shiver ran down the magician’s spine and he turned his beast’s head towards the shore to investigate. More blood, first shining on the land, and now on the sea, he thought.
Soon, he saw that the phenomenon was in the water itself, carried on the incoming tide, an ominous red tide that flowed down the straits where the Druids had been slaughtered. It came from dense clouds of something floating just below the surface of the water, some sea-bloom that he had never seen before. He walked down the shingle to taste the water. Salt, not blood. Along the beach at the high tide mark were dead birds and fish and even a seal pup, its body unmarked and unmolested by the raucous gulls, of which there seemed, his subconscious mind noted, far fewer than usual.
He walked over to examine the dead seal. Its flipper seemed to point meaningfully to the west, beyond Mona. Several bedraggled herring gulls dead lay on the sand, looking as if they were in formation flying east, away from the threat the seal was indicating. The sorcerer pulled his cloak a little tighter and remounted his mule. These omens, the blood-red moon and her acolyte red tide and the warnings in the bodies of creatures of the sea god Mannan mac Lir needed to be interpreted and their message relayed to Arthur, urgently. “Man is standing alone,” he murmured. “This is a time of a decline of the old gods and if we do not act on their warnings of disaster to come, the Christian god will rise and supplant them.”
Myrddin, shaken at the clarity of the warnings, abandoned his visit to the smith, instead ordering the slaves to collect the bronze mirrors, to pack them carefully and to bring them to his house. He himself turned his mount’s head west for Ty Ffynnon, his viewing chamber and a rendezvous with the supernatural.
Two nights later were preparations complete. He had taken a draught made from forest mu
shrooms, gazed into his viewing bowl and made his mind open to the gods’ messages. Then the sorcerer lay down to dream a vision of death. The green fields and hills of Britain were strewn with corpses, and as Myrddin swooped low like a hawk to view them, he saw they were blistered and blackened as if scorched by contact with the wings of the Furies. He knew this was a clear directive from the gods, but what was he to do? Were they saying it was inevitable, that the pale horse of death would cross the land, or was this some warning of what might be unless…? He had to find out.
The next night, Myrddin braced himself. He had dreamed of corpses, now he would visit the dead. Necromancy was always difficult and very dangerous, but he had prepared carefully and had done this before. The air in the chamber was cool and the water surface in the viewing bowl seemed to glow as it reflected the candles’ light. The sorcerer had taken another draught of an infusion of dried woodland mushrooms and lit one of the candles he had calibrated to measure how much time he was away from the physical world. He usually surfaced from his drug-induced, dreamlike viewings with a raging thirst and no knowledge of how many hours, or even days he had been unaware of his surroundings. He hoped to make that measurement with a beeswax candle, grasping just another grain of knowledge that might lead to more understanding.
He felt the familiar buzzing as the drugs took effect and leaned over the dark surface of the water bowl that would yield the images he sought. He experienced the tremble of fear that was also usual when he visited the land of the dead. Was this the time that Kimro, Norse keeper of the path between worlds, who led the souls of the dead to their eternal homes, was this the time she would not lead him back to the world of sunlight, birdsong and blossoms?
The water surface seemed to swirl before his stare, small explosions of light streaked across his vision and a formless shadow began to take shape, making a file of humans that stretched away from him.
Myrddin sensed a reassuring hand at his shoulder, the touch of Kimro to tell him he was safe from the hounds of hell that guarded the gate, and the line of figures before him came slowly into focus.
First stood Caratacus, the king who had defied Rome’s legions and faced down his enemies in their own hall while wearing the shackles of a condemned man. Myrddin took in the dead king’s long moustaches and fair hair, pallid against the ashen colour of his face, glanced at the familiar great badge of office, an amber and silver clasp at the shoulder of his cloak, then raised his eyes to the long column of spectres lined behind the warrior king.
They were all as the necromancer had seen them before. First behind Caratacus was Britain’s greatest queen, red-maned Boadicea, whose spearmen had wetted their blades with the blood of 70,000 Romans in the costliest rebellion that Rome had ever known. At her shoulder stood the mythic warrior Brutus Darian Las, called Greenshield, behind him was ranked Cyllin from the western mountains, the Caledonian Calgacus and the transvallum chieftains Oengus and Albanac.
From the time when Gaius Julius Caesar waded ashore at Deal came Cunobelinus who rallied the tribes against the general who returned to seize Rome, and behind him stood two more of those who tried to turn back Caesar’s armoured ranks: Cogidunus of the Iceni and Boadicea’s betrayed husband King Pratsutagas.
Cloaked and hooded behind these stood Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes of the north, a tribe the Romans had never been able fully to suppress, and behind her, stretching away into the cloaking dark, continued the column of the spectres of rulers of Britain’s forests and mountains, a column that went back to the days of Odin and the most ancient gods and spirits of the land.
Myrddin viewed the silent spectres and spoke without words. “The gods are sending us omens, a blood moon, and a blood tide. We have found and retrieved the lost Torc of Caratacus that was the symbol of many of you and have honoured it, but now I have been given a dream of a swathe of death that will come to Britain. I do not understand. I need your help.”
The sorcerer bowed his head in unaccustomed humility, and he received the message from Britain’s royal dead. He understood from it that he had to fulfill the requirements he had heard before, but even that might not be enough. The scything of a crop of souls might not be averted, the old gods might never return, Britain might again be brought under the armoured heel of the conqueror. Nothing was guaranteed
The knowledge crushed the soul of the sorcerer. This time, if he were not allowed to leave the Underworld, if he could not once more make the reverse journey to the stone house under Yr Wyddfa’s sacred mountain, he would not care. If he went back to the living, he would be going back to a land of living death. Arthur and the green land of Britain were doomed. Maybe it would be be
tter to stay in the Underworld.
Milo looked like a living statue, holding high an ivory baton that was topped with a golden eagle. He was wearing a wreath of gold leaves on top of his ash-blond hair, and had on a scarlet tunic under a tunic of the finest Tyrian purple.
Guinevia,
maternally proud, was ecstatic. “He looks like Jupiter himself,” she gushed.
I looked at her, amused. I had not seen her this way since our son was a small child. My iron-willed pagan was softening.
My gaze turned back to Milo, poised above the race track in front of his throne of the presiding aedile. He held up his baton in his right hand. In his left was a square of white linen that he was about to throw down to signal the trumpets to sound for the first chariot race. The silence was palpable, with only the stamping and snorting of the horses disturbing the near-religious moment.
Five chariots were aligned, awaiting the brazen call and the drop of the rope that presently blocked their start. White, blue, green, red and purple, each chariot, horse and driver was covered in the favours of his faction; around the circuit blocks of the same colours showed where their supporters sat and stood.
The linen dropped, the brass sounded, the rope fell and in a clash of contact and thudding of hoof beats that were drowned by the surf roar of the crowd, the races began.
The beasts hammered by in a blur of colour, manes braided and interwoven with ribbons, tails knotted and held high, breastplates gleaming with polished metal plates. The whip-wielding drivers were in bright tunics of their faction’s colour, helmeted and wrapped from thigh to calf in bright leggings. They wore the reins fastened around their waists, but kept a sharp-edged knife ready either at their belt or in a wicker basket inside the chariot body. It would be used to slash themselves free in case of disaster.
The carriages churned the turf and battered against each other at the U-turns around the stone pillars, the stronger outside horses, usually stallions, hauling at their loose traces as they ran the longer curve, the inner horses, mostly mares, more tightly harnessed to pivot the vehicle around the turning post.
The charioteers’ heads swivelled endlessly, as danger from being rammed could come from behind or on either side if they led, or could come from a stalled or crashed competitor ahead if they followed. Canny drivers aimed to edge their rivals into the stone spine that ran down the track centre – one broken wheel was enough to disable a chariot; others opted to outrun the pack.
In a typical race, men and horses rounded the turning posts 14 times, every single one a fine opportunity for a shipwreck, and the crazed dashes down the straights were no safer.
And the crowd loved it. They cheered for their favourites, gave generous applause to the victors and acknowledged the skill and bravery even of those who crashed or were rammed. Race followed race and the rituals were observed religiously. The aedile dropped the signal to start, the racers battled, the winner was declared and presented with his prize by the starter and did a lap or two of honour, acknowledging the crowd and sometimes leaping out onto the shafts to display his acrobatic skills as his horses ran free.
One famous charioteer, Sinan of Moesia, had been brought from Gaul at the expense of the Green faction whose luminary, a wealthy merchant called Mullinus, was seeking political office, and he was celebrating his fifth victory when he climbed the steps to where Milo and Sintea were sitting with his wreath and prize purse.
A muscular, powerfully-built man, Sinan bowed low before the young couple, and Milo laughed and made a joking reference to the trickles of sweat that made marks through the dust on the charioteer’s face. Sinan straightened, smiling, then sneezed explosively, barely in time to turn his head away from Milo. I saw Sintea flinch and realize she must have caught a little of the spray, and the charioteer was apologising: “Dust, my lady, I must have eaten a meal of it.” Sintea was dabbing at her face, the little incident was over, and the victor turned to wave to the crowd, holding high his coin purse. I noticed that he sneezed again, several times, as he picked his way down the steps to the arena.
An intermission followed and acrobats and dwarf jesters were amusing the crowd. “That juggler troupe never arrived,” I said to Cragus, “The one from Dover that Mullinus spoke so highly about.”
“Mullinus knows everybody, lord,” said Cragus. “I’ll ask him when they are going to get here. There was a good minstrel he was bringing from th
ere, he never arrived, either.”
“Ah well, “I said, more careless than I should have been, “there’s a week to go, they’ll likely
be here in the next day or so.”
At dusk that evening, as Guinevia and I sat talking with Milo, Sintea had retired early, saying she had a headache, my majordomo slipped quietly into the chamber to announce a visitor, if I would receive one.
“It is the trader Mullinus, lord,” he said. “I explained that you were with your son but he was pressing, and says the matter is important.”
I nodded permission. I knew Mullinus. A decade before, he was wearing my dead father’s silver and amber badge of office when I collided with him outside the public bath at Colchester. He told a long story about escaping a slaver in Belgica while wearing the man’s cloak, which happened to have the badge fastened to it.
Mullinus was a successful trader and something about his story rang true, so I did not kill him, and he gracefully handed over my inheritance. By one of those connections that have the Fates roaring with laughter, Mullinus had bought my mother as a slave and had fallen in love with her. When I was a boy, she was enslaved by the same sea raiders who killed my father, but only after she had ensured my escape.
I had met her years later but I was no longer the child who had run from slavery. My life as a soldier had hardened me. I felt little for her, and our reunion was not sentimental, on my part at least. In fact, I had only grimaced when word came five or so years ago that she had died of a fever. Some fools criticise me for it, but I have lost close comrades to death, disease and captivity and I have little room for grief any more. I’ll feast with them in Asgard, the gods willing, as I plan to die with a sword in my hand.
Mullinus was standing before me and I tore myself away from my thoughts. Something about the trader was good, although I knew he put sand in his salt and water in his wine. After all, he was in business to make profits. “Are you prospering?” I asked, taking in his fine fur-trimmed robe and the thick gold chain at his throat.
“I have made a few good decisions, lord,” he bowed. “Even a blind squirrel can sometimes find a nut.”
I laughed and offered him wine. “Unlike the stuff you sold, it’s unwatered,” I said.
He shook his head, ignoring the jest. “I have come on what may be
an important matter,” he said.
“Sit,” I said. Milo stood to leave, but Mullinus said:”Your son should also hear,” and the boy sat down again. The story Mullinus told made my heart freeze. A Hibernian trader who had raced from Dover, fleeing to his native isle had informed him of a plague outbreak in the south.
“Whatever it is, it acts rapidly,” he said. “There are reports of people who go to bed healthy and who do not wake up the next dawn. The trader told me of a physician who went to attend a patient stricken with it, and the doctor died before the patient did, the next morning. I think it is like that great pestilence which struck during the time of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.”
This, I knew had struck just over a century ago and took more lives than any war or epidemic ever recorded. Historians said that as many as one citizen in every ten across the empire had died in an incredible fury of fast-moving fevers. The deadly Antonine Plague was marked on its victims by its speed: most died within three days, and by hideous, unmistakable symptoms that included large, hard black buboes that rose and swelled in its victims’ crotches and armpits, inflicting incredible pain, fever and delirium.
“In the days of Marcus Aurelius, they had the same bloody flux, the foul, stinking breath and the coughing of blood that is being seen in Dover,” said Mullinus, who clearly knew his medicine. “Their bodies were blistered with boils that were sometimes as big as apples, black, red and oozing blood. These are not symptoms of anything but death by deadly plague, and the Hibernian told me the men of Kent are fleeing anywhere they can.”
The Celt who brought this news did well to race to put a sea between himself and the plague, I thought grimly. If it truly were the same pox that decimated Marcus Aurelius’ empire and had also claimed the life of the emperor Gothicus not 30 years ago, the British faced an invisible enemy more fearful and more deadly than any Saxon or Pict. How, I wondered, could we defeat this ghoul from the Underworld? I called a conclave. This was too important a matter for one man, however powerful an emperor, and I wanted every advice I could get..
Soon, my officers, my wizard, my counselors and even a wretched creature who claimed to be a Christian prelate – by Mithras, how I longed for my warrior-bishop Candless’ council here – were present. I outlined the situation. They listened. I called up in myself all the virtues the Romans had inculcated in me. To be tough, to be pragmatic and to take pride in military discipline and virtue. I did not want a panic, I did not want some hysteric fumbling away control of the situation, which probably we could not control, anyway. Suppressing an anxious gulp, I spoke as calmly as I could.
The first thing, I said, was to disperse crowds. I knew from campaigning that an army which camped in the same place for too long would inevitably be weakened by bad humours of the air and poisoned water. Once I had used the tactic against an enemy, sickening his troops by pouring sewage into the water upstream of his drinking supply. If people had fewer contacts with others, the chances of contracting the plague must be reduced, I reasoned. So first, I would cancel the games and disperse the crowds. I would also send my family away to safety, Milo and Sintea back north to Alba, Guinevia could go to Myrddin in his remote Cambrian mountains. Maybe I could close the city walls and keep out all strangers. That action could be ordered across the kingdom. I could forbid travel, close the roads, close the harbours. If we could confine the plague, we might be able to prevent its spread.
I would order sacrifices to the gods, too, they would help; I should mount guards on the aqueducts which supplied water to our cities, to ensure that no rotting bodies found their way into the drinking water. We had best guard the granaries and warehouses, too against desperate men. There were many obvious steps and I called for an aide to begin taking orders. This was no enemy I could defeat with a shield wall, but swift action to isolate the invisible death humours could save much of the population. I knew I would get the cooperation of local thegns and chieftains, as their interests and mine ran together.
Guinevia’s rapid step sounded on the flagstones outside the chamber. She had heard the news already I supposed, from Milo
, who had hurried to his bride. Guinevia was pale. “Matters are bad,” she said, “Sintea is vomiting and feverish.” Matters got much worse. Our Pictish princess died long before the first wolf light of the morning.