The Forest King

by Alex Faure

  THE FOREST KING

  BOOK TWO OF THE GREEN LABYRINTH SERIES

  Alex Faure

  Copyright © 2019 Alex Faure

  All rights reserved

  Chapter One

  The clash of swords, the crackle of flames, and the battle cries of the enemy were all that there was.

  Darius’s sword met a Celtic dagger, and the dagger went sailing into the shadows. The Celt tried to flee, but Darius plunged his sword into the man’s chest, a swift kill—the only kind he could tolerate. He tripped a Celt who darted past him towards the centre of the fort, then rammed the hilt of his sword into his head.

  Attervalis, one of only two remaining Roman forts on the island of Hibernia, was in flames, with Celts pouring in on two sides. Darius, former commander of the third fort, now reduced to ruin, fought side by side with Marcus, who had been in charge of Attervalis for a matter of days.

  Darius was struck by the absurdity of the symmetry, that once again it was him and Marcus standing together against the Celts. Not hammering new roads and forts into that green wilderness, but watching as another symbol of Rome’s might crumbled around them.

  “Marcus, behind—” Darius began, just before a Celtic warrior, six and a half feet tall at least, lunged out of the chaos.

  Darius only just managed to dodge. He took a glancing but painful blow to his side from the flat of the Celt’s sword. He assumed a defensive position and parried several of the Celt’s thrusts. But he was a Robogdi warrior, and his next feint struck Darius’s sword from his hand. Darius saw his own death shine clear in the man’s eyes.

  Marcus disengaged from his own battle with two Robogdi with flippant ease, knocking a dagger aside and then shoving one Celt into another, and raced to Darius’s side. Discarding sportsmanship entirely, he stabbed the big Celt through the back.

  “You’d best stay back, Commander,” Marcus said with a shadow of his old wry humour. Then he shoved Darius hard into the wall. The Celt who had been about to gut him from behind met Marcus’s steel instead, and after one quick slash across the neck, he was falling. Marcus turned to meet a new opponent before the man hit the ground.

  Darius drew himself to his feet and recovered his sword. He considered joining the fight, then thought better of it. He wasn’t proud where his fighting abilities were concerned, and he could see that he would only disrupt the fearsome rhythm of Marcus’s swordplay. Darius watched, shamelessly awed, as Marcus dispatched enemy after enemy, every third stroke a death-blow, every movement precise and calculated.

  Every so often, one of Marcus’s opponents would be knocked down, only half-wounded, and on these occasions Darius hastened forward to deliver the killing blow before the man could rise again. At one point, he began to wonder if Marcus might single-handedly win them back the fort. It was a foolish hope. The Celts kept coming, and many didn’t even bother with Marcus and Darius anymore. They charged into Attervalis, some carrying torches, and fewer and fewer were hindered by Roman soldiers. The air soon grew heavy with smoke.

  “Marcus!” Darius wrenched him back before he could charge one of the torch-bearers. About him were strewn dozens of pale-skinned corpses, some lying on top of each other. “The fort is lost. We must retreat.”

  “What?” Marcus stared at him. He face was speckled with blood, but he was no longer in shock—fighting had restored him to himself.

  “Retreat,” Darius repeated. The word was like ash in his mouth. He felt trapped in a nightmare he had lived before, though at least there was no nightfire clouding his judgment this time. “We cannot win against their numbers. We must make for Undanum.”

  Marcus blinked at him. Then he turned with a vicious curse and began to pummel the body of a dead Celt. Darius allowed him to exhaust himself.

  “This is impossible.” He said it plaintively, and Darius knew he meant more than the fort.

  “Follow me.” He darted away without checking to see if Marcus followed. A moment later, he heard the man huffing at his back.

  Darius and Marcus called what soldiers they could find to their side. The rest was smoke and chaos, but eventually they managed to find their way to the gate in the southern wall that was hidden from outside view, placed there only in the event that escape was necessary. If they hadn’t had Marcus with them, it was unlikely they would have made it, but the man fought like someone possessed, seeming incapable of fatigue or ordinary human emotion.

  This is the man Fionn bested, Darius thought numbly. He began to wonder how he could have been so sure of the Roman position after losing Sylvanum. Even after the destruction of his fort, in his heart he had never really doubted that Rome would prevail in Hibernia.

  What other foolish certainties was he clinging to? How else would this savage green land manage to turn his every belief on its head?

  They managed to escape the fort with perhaps one hundred soldiers. Marcus, his eyes red from the smoke or his own fury, refused to leave at first, wanting to gather more men, but Darius knew that if they did, the Celts would realize their plan and descend upon them.

  Once they escaped the burning fort, the way was no easier. Though they attempted to skirt around the position the Celts had taken in the forest, they nevertheless encountered pockets of the enemy. Fortunately, they met no Robogdi assassins, and the men and women they did stumble across seemed surprised to see them. Clearly the Celts had not anticipated that Rome would retreat.

  They lost one man to a female Celt who had clearly been tailing them through the trees, but no more than that. The sounds of Attervalis and battle sunk away, and they were left with the nighttime sounds of the forest.

  “This is a most unfortunate sequel,” Marcus said, echoing Darius’s earlier thought.

  “We’ve saved more men this time,” Darius said. What he felt must have shown on his face, for Marcus said no more.

  *

  After they had been travelling for perhaps two hours, they reached a stream. They paused to drink and fill the waterskins the men had managed to collect from an unburnt storehouse. They had some food supplies too, which they carried in packs, but they were so meagre that Darius encouraged the men to save them for later, though none of them had eaten since midday.

  “How far to Undanum, Commander?” one of the soldiers said. He was a dark-skinned African, and he seemed to be one of the few who had taken a philosophical view of their predicament. His gaze as he scanned the dark woods was wary but calm. It wasn’t clear who he was addressing, so Darius allowed Marcus to respond.

  “A day, perhaps,” he said. “Likely we will encounter Celts between here and there. Some may be pursuing us at this very moment; I can’t be certain we killed all those we encountered at the edge of the forest. Be ready. We will be marching through the night.”

  Darius watched with an assessing eye as the men absorbed this. He spoke a few quiet words to Marcus, then moved among them, stopping to speak to those soldiers who had given in to mutinous mutters as their commander spoke. After allowing each man to vent his frustrations, he reassured them as best he could. He then drew aside the dark-skinned man—whose name was Quintus—and tasked him with ensuring they left no man behind as they fought through the dense woods. This was partly a ruse. Darius wanted Quintus to ensure that none of the disaffected broke off into small groups to plot mutiny.

  It was, of course, madness to mutiny at this juncture, but Darius had seen men driven to worse fits of irrational rage when disaster struck and everyone was clamouring for someone to blame. Quintus took his meaning readily enough, even giving Darius a wink.

  They met no Celts that night, though that may have been because they strayed from a direct route to Undanum. Neither Darius nor Marcus had made their way to the fort through the forest before, but had always
taken the beaten horse track to the north. For obvious reasons, the track was not a possibility, and it was far too easy to become turned around in the woods, where the canopy often closed completely above them, blocking out the stars. At dawn, they used the sun’s position to adjust their course, but they had lost several hours to the forest.

  Daylight brought them back on track, but it also brought several skirmishes with the enemy. Whoever was leading the main force of the Celtic army had clearly got wind that a Roman party had made it out of Attervalis, and sent out warriors in search of them. The first attack caught them by surprise, and they lost three men before Marcus managed to work his way to the forefront of the panicking Roman force and almost single-handedly put down about twenty Celts. They carried on, a little shaken, and the next attack found them more alert. After defeating a third party of Celts around midday, they encountered no more enemy forces.

  Darius began to wonder at the haphazard nature of the Celtic response to their escape. Perhaps they considered a party of less then a hundred Romans of little consequence, but Darius still found it hard to believe that they would allow them to reach Undanum so easily.

  The terrain grew steeper in the last few hours, rising and falling in a series of hills and infuriating gorges choked with underbrush and wet, slippery stones. Finally, they broke free of the dense wood, entering a landscape of thinning trees spaced far enough apart for several men to walk abreast.

  It should have come as a relief, but Darius soon found himself missing the cover the forest provided. Ninety-odd men moving across open country were not easy to hide. Fortunately, the shadows were deepening as sunset approached.

  Marcus, walking at the head of the company, clambered up a hill and called, “There.”

  Darius followed. Undanum was still a mile or two away, partly obscured by branches and visible only as slivers of solid stone, but it was there. They’d made it.

  “But what…” Marcus squinted. Then he paled.

  “What is it?” Darius said.

  Marcus rubbed his eyes. “Surely not,” he muttered. “Cloud, more likely. Come on.”

  Puzzled, Darius followed him, and the other men fell in. Marcus increased the pace to a jog, but the men made no complaint. There was a palpable sense of relief hanging over the company that chased away exhaustion. Soon there would be walls around them, and food in their bellies, and beds where they could sleep and forget—if only for a few hours—the tragedy that lay behind them.

  Marcus was still out in front when he stopped still, as if he had walked into a wall. Darius called the men to halt and they did so with minimal awkwardness, only a few crashing into each other.

  “Marcus, what—” Then Darius saw what Marcus saw, and his heart froze in his chest.

  One of Undanum’s walls was gone. It lay in rubble upon the purple moors. Smoke wafted off the fort, which they would have smelled had they not been upwind of it. There was no movement.

  “Gods,” Marcus said, and would have fallen to his knees had not Darius stopped him. The soldiers had caught sight of the ruined fort now.

  “The Celts must have come directly here as soon as they unloaded the weaponry from the Minerva,” Marcus said in a strange, flat voice. “I wonder if they even received our message requesting reinforcements.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.” Darius’s own voice sounded strange to his ears. He almost wanted to feel something—horror, or fury—but there was only this terrible numbness. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what the Celts were waiting for—for Undanum to send soldiers to Attervalis, leaving their own fort undermanned.”

  “Divide and conquer,” Marcus murmured. “Those soldiers never reached us.”

  Darius looked back at the men. The numbness wasn’t wearing off, and it took him a moment to gather himself. “Our only option now is to head for the harbour at Attervalis, and from there, sail to Britannia.”

  “On the Daedalus?” Marcus said. “Don’t you think it likely they’ve already set fire to it?”

  “Yes,” Darius admitted. “But I think there’s an equal chance that they believe us to be bested by them—which would hardly be surprising. Perhaps they won’t see the necessity of destroying the trireme. Clever strategists these Celts may be, all men can fall prey to the drug of success.”

  He could see the wheels in Marcus’s head turning. “If we were to reach the Daedalus, we would need cover of darkness.”

  Darius looked up at the sky. It was mostly concealed by cloud—there would be few stars visible tonight, and likely no moon. “We shall get it, if we can reach the harbour by morning.”

  Marcus nodded slowly. “That will be possible if we follow the coast; it’s much easier terrain.”

  “Commander!” one of the men cried, and then came a series of shouts and the sound of swords unsheathing.

  Darius whirled. A small group of Celts had burst from the forest, and were now gazing at the Romans with astonished looks on their faces. Clearly, they had not expected to find nearly a hundred Romans gathered there—not that they could see the entire Roman force from that angle; the trees still provided some cover. The Celts gave a cry, and charged the closest soldiers. Behind them came more Celts, and then more. The sounds of battle soon filled the moors.

  “No!” Darius grabbed Quintus as he ran towards the fight. “Make for the harbour at Attervalis. It’s our only chance at escape. Go now, before they get their bearings.”

  Quintus stared at him for a moment, and then his innate level-headedness reasserted itself. “You heard the commander,” he shouted at the men at his side. “Let’s go, now!”

  They sprinted off. Darius struck down a dark-haired Celt who moved to follow them. There did not seem to be any Robogdi assassins among them, and the Celts were simply dressed in a way that put Darius in mind of Fionn. Were they Volundi?

  Darius killed a second Celt. He managed to send another dozen soldiers hurrying after Quintus and the others—the Celts were not numerous, and if Marcus could manage to take them down, there would still be hope of escape.

  Three soldiers had been drawn deeper into the woods and were now surrounded by four Celtic warriors, among them two women who fought with the ferocity of their male counterparts. Darius ran to help them. He had lost sight of Marcus, who had naturally moved to the forefront of the fight. As he ducked under a tree branch, he felt something strike the back of his head.

  For a moment, he kept running, his momentum carrying him. But then the world seemed to turn upside down. The next thing Darius knew, he had fallen onto his face, and something warm trickled down his scalp. The Celt who had struck him raced past to help his fellows, his boots sending a spray of dirt across Darius’s face. Then Darius was aware no more.

  Chapter Two

  Darius woke in a stream.

  He was dimly aware of pain in his head and arm, which he had just landed on. He spluttered and tried to force himself onto his back, for the water was sloshing against his nose and mouth, but someone did it for him.

  Darius gazed at the Celt who had dunked him in the stream. He was thin, with blonde hair greying at the temples. The man called something over his shoulder, and another Celt appeared. They dragged Darius from the water and bound his hands with coarse rope. Then they left him on the riverbank.

  Darius coughed out the water in his lungs, then tried to stand. His head spun, and he fell down again. Bile rose in his throat as his head throbbed and his vision swam. He tried to focus on the voices around him. He heard only the Hibernian tongue interspersed with the occasional laugh. It was night, though a hint of light remained in the sky. After a few moments, the nausea receded, and he managed to turn his head.

  A few yards away lay the motionless body of a Roman soldier. Darius couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, but from the quantity of blood pooled about him, he guessed the latter. Through the trees, he saw two Celts pacing around a clearing, sometimes calling out to their fellows. They seemed to be searching for something—othe
r Roman survivors, perhaps? They hadn’t killed Darius for a reason. Perhaps they planned to ransom him.

  Hysteria rose within him. The Celts had destroyed all the Roman forts in Hibernia—who would they collect their ransom from?

  He forced himself to breathe deeply. The situation was dire, but he had been captured by barbarian forces before. And it was entirely possible that Agricola, once he learned of their predicament in Hibernia, would request additional legions from Rome. Darius simply had to stay alive until then, and do his best to preserve the lives of the other survivors.

  When the older Celt returned and hauled him to his feet, he was almost calm. The man gestured with a dagger, and Darius walked in the direction he indicated without protest. He came to the clearing, where he found ten Roman soldiers, also with their hands bound, being guarded by several dozen dagger-wielding Celts. The soldiers showed palpable relief at the sight of Darius, and he nodded at them. It was important for the men to see that their commander was calm, that he accepted the circumstances as a regrettable but sometimes unavoidable consequence of war.

  In fact, the sight of the men had lifted Darius’s spirits as well. He found it a small comfort that so few soldiers had been captured alongside him. Perhaps Marcus had managed to lead the others to the trireme. Darius hoped so. He hoped that Marcus wasn’t one of the motionless bodies he could dimly make out through the trees.

  They stood in silence for some time. Darius’s head continued its steady throbbing, but it improved slightly after one of the Celts passed around a waterskin. No one attempted to speak; the soldier who had greeted Darius had been struck across the face for his daring, and no one was eager for the same treatment. In any event, what was there to say?

  Finally, they were ordered to move out, the Hibernian command accompanied by gesturing that was perfectly intelligible. The soldiers looked to Darius as if for instruction, and he nodded calmly before moving to obey the Celt. The other men fell into step behind him.