The hut was growing hotter, and Flavius opened his eyes again. “Burn…” he whispered.
“Fire!” Aquila shouted, and Correus heard the crackle of flame. Someone had flung a torch over the Romans’ heads and set the sloping thatch of the hut roof alight. Correus hacked at the iron links, and his sword snapped in his hand, halfway up the blade. Aquila and two others had torn their cloaks off and were trying to smother the flames, but the roof was too high, and in a moment it was blazing like the pony shed. Flavius lay still, watching it burn. “They wouldn’t… kill me. I tried… Burn… and do it… for them…”
“Damn you!” Correus shouted. “You’re not going to burn!” He dug frantically at the links with the broken hilt end of the blade and felt one give. A burning twist of straw dropped down onto Flavius’s body, and Correus flung it away and wrenched at the chain. “Move! Damn you, help me!”
Flavius seemed to recognize him for the first time. As Correus screamed at him, he rolled to one side, and Correus wrapped the chain around the post and pulled. The weak link opened a little more.
“Get out, sir, it’s coming down,” Aquila shouted.
Correus jammed the thick hilt end of his sword in the open link and twisted it, prying the ends apart. He wrenched the next link through the opening and flung the two ends away from him.
“I’ve got it!” They pulled Flavius to his feet and through the doorway as the roof crashed in behind them.
Outside, his men had formed a wall between the hut and the avenging Britons. Correus could see their locked shields in the flames that gave the scene a red, unearthly glow, while the Britons howled and hammered at their flanks, striving to push them back against the fire. They held like a rock, and Correus’s pride in them welled up even as he realized that the whole force of Carn Goch was turned on them now, and soon the wall would break.
“Fall back!” he shouted.
Cornelius came up from the chaos and took Aquila’s place. “I’ll help the commander!” he yelled above the tumult. “We need you to get us out o’ here! That line’s gonna go!”
Aquila lunged into the press of bodies, and soon the locked wall of shields began to fall back, splitting around the burning hut, enclosing Correus and Cornelius with their burden in their midst, while the Britons came after them. Slowly they drove the Roman lines back on the men behind them, but the first century had kept a corridor open to the gate, and they parted to let the retreating soldiers through, then closed ranks around them. The Roman soldiers had long since flung their pilums into the pursuing host of the Britons, which grew by the minute as the warriors in Carn Goch stumbled through the wreckage to converge on the Romans. The Romans were stabbing with short swords now at any warrior who ventured too close, and the front ranks of shields were splintered or weighed down with half-embedded spears. Spears were beginning to fly over their heads into the press of stumbling men, and someone moved up beside Correus and Cornelius and flung his shield above their heads.
“Get your shield up!” Flavius shouted. “I can walk!”
“I don’t have a shield!” Correus shouted back. “Lean on me, damn it, or you’ll fall!”
They were at the gateway now, and the retreat slowed and bottlenecked as the center stumbled through and the Britons pressed the flanks backward against the stone wall.
“Hold formation! Hold!” Correus heard Aquila’s voice ring out above the noise, and slowly the flanks began to right themselves, fanning out in a semicircle of locked shields that fell backward like a funnel through the gates. They were clear of the gate now, and Flavius was stumbling beside him as they ran.
“Here, sir!” Someone pushed a bridle into his hands, and he turned to Flavius. “Can you ride?”
Flavius nodded. “Help me up.” Correus put his hands around his brother’s waist and lifted, and Flavius jumped and flung himself across the saddle. He slipped and cried out as he caught at the saddle with his mutilated hands, but in a moment he was upright in the saddle and reaching for the reins.
“Better let me lead him, sir.”
Flavius shook his head. “Just… knot them for me.”
The legionary hesitated, and Correus nodded. “Do as he says.” Flavius could ride any horse Poseidon had ever put breath in, with or without his hands. The legionary knotted the reins and tossed them over the horse’s neck, and Flavius put his heels to its flank.
Correus caught the horns of his own saddle and swung up as the last of his men poured through the gateway of Carn Goch. The rear guard had brought the horses up as soon as the gates had first opened and were waiting now, bridles in hand. The fleeing soldiers mounted and wheeled them in their tracks as the Britons raced after them and a fall of thrown spears rained down on their heels.
They set their horses’ heads to the slopes below Carn Goch and, as they hit the level ground, kicked them into a gallop. The Demetae chariots were in flames, but their horses could be caught and ridden, and the Romans numbered only a hundred and sixty.
Less now, Correus thought, seeing a riderless horse with Roman trappings running in their midst. He could see Flavius ahead of him, unmistakable in a white tunic, and watched fearfully as he swayed in the saddle. Prideful fool. Correus put his horse into a flat run and began to draw level with his brother. “Flavius! Draw in!”
Flavius slowed and turned to him, his eyes moonlight-bright and fevered in his broken face. “I can… ride,” he said.
“You aren’t a centaur! Damn you, you’ve made your point. Draw rein.”
“To ride double and let you kill Antaeus? That is your… best horse isn’t it?” Flavius’s eyes glittered with the fever and the stubborn determination that fever can bring with it to hold with a death grip to a single point.
Correus began to feel he was conversing with his own nightmare. “So I can go back to the governor and tell him I got you out of Carn Goch and lost you when you fell off your horse?” He yanked furiously at Flavius’s bridle.
Suddenly Flavius began to laugh, his head thrown back to the moonlight and his mouth bleeding where it had split open again. “He… wouldn’t like it, would he? It would be… such a… waste.” He pulled back the reins, and his mount slowed to a walk. “But just in case…” His voice was thick, but there was a note of triumph in it. “You can tell him… they don’t know.” He slumped forward onto the saddle horns.
Correus swung off his own horse and up behind the saddle of Flavius’s. He tied Antaeus’s reins to the rear horns and wrapped his arms around his brother’s waist. They moved out again through the moonlight, toward the river and Moridunum.
VI Aftermath
The child Ygerna huddled into the red stone walls of Carn Goch and made herself small. She still had one of Gruffyd’s chariot ponies by the halter, and she reached up and rubbed its silky nose for comfort. The pony stamped and blew softly down its nose. The chieftain’s sons had come running to pull the ponies out of the blazing hall almost as quickly as Llywarch had bundled her through the door, and seeing her, Maelgwn, the eldest, had thrust the halter ropes into her hand and bade her mind them. Now he would be angry, she thought, that one had panicked in the fire and pulled away.
Carn Goch was a shambles of blackened timber and overturned cookpots, the few animals that had not been driven off by the Romans milling aimlessly through the rubble. Gruffyd’s silver-mounted chariot stood near the smouldering embers of the guest hall, listing over on a broken wheel, but it must be the only unburned chariot in Carn Goch.
The men had gone to gather in the straying ponies and cattle, and she supposed that Llywarch must have gone with them. There was no one else in Carn Goch but the dead and wounded and a Druid in a singed robe who was tending them. The hut where they had chained the Roman was gone, leaving only a circle of burned thatch with half the mud wall still standing, leaning in toward the burned-off stump of the center post. She had thought that the Roman had burned with it and been briefly glad that he had found that way out. But Llywarch, coming back in the first gray li
ght, had told her that it had been the Roman that the other Romans had come for, and they had taken him with them. At least if that was what they had wanted, they wouldn’t be back, she thought, crouching down against the wall. The Romans were the unknown terror of her nightmares, inhuman marauders who stalked the land to prey on unruly children in her nurse’s vivid warnings and had later been given a more real and no less frightening status as an implacable armor-plated army sent to destroy her home, her land, her gods – every safe and familiar thing. When the Roman ships had been sighted off the coast, she had been almost paralyzed with terror. And when the war band had gone back to fight for Dun Mori and come away with a captured Roman, curiosity had fought with fear for hours before she could summon the courage to steal a look at him.
It had been a surprise, almost a shock, to find the many-headed monster of her dreams was nothing but a man with an oddly angular face, smaller, than most of her tribesmen, tied to his horse. His tunic was ragged, his shoes were only leather soles with straps to lace them to the ankles, and his hair had been cut short. She wondered if his captors had cut it to shame him, and then she remembered Llywarch telling her that all the Romans cropped their hair that way and thought it no disgrace. But still he was alien, frightening, and the horror she had felt later when the screams started had been only the involuntary sympathy of a child for something in a trap. She had backed her pony away to her proper place on the trail before Llywarch could miss her.
Where was Llywarch? It was midmorning now, and the men were beginning to come back with the strayed animals. There were no women. They and their children had been sent away into the safer holdings hidden in the hills, but Llywarch had refused to go with them, insisting instead that he and Ygerna stay with the war band until the alliance and the marriage agreements had been reached. Bendigeid was not the most patient of men, and he would be meeting now with Cadal of the Ordovices and would want Gruffyd’s answer to bargain with.
Ygerna rose stiffly and tried to shake out the tattered cloth of her gown. Somewhere there must be water to wash in. She was barefoot, and her shoes were no doubt part of the smouldering wreckage of the guest hall, but she was still a royal woman of the Silures. Llywarch wouldn’t like it if she presented herself filthy and smelling of the fire to Gruffyd and his sons. The men had dragged in a pile of cut saplings behind the ponies and were putting up a pen at one end of the hold. She could leave Gruffyd’s pony there.
She led him to where the other ponies were tethered to a rope line and gave the white flank a pat of farewell. The pony had been her only company for most of the terrifying night, and she felt alone without him now.
“Here, child, have you been holding on to that beast all night?” one of the men said, sinking a sapling into one of the old postholes of the cattle pen.
“It’s the chieftain’s horse,” Ygerna said. “I was afraid to let him go. The other one got away in the fire.”
“Well, you can leave him with me,” the man said. “And we picked up his mate with the rest of them, so you needn’t worry.” This must be the Silure maid Bendigeid was offering for young Maelgwn, he thought, taking in her scratched and sooty face and the tangle of black hair down her back. She didn’t look old enough to leave her own mother, much less make babes for Maelgwn. And she was thin as a fence rail, but that might be just the hard days on the trail. “Here now, have you had anything to eat?”
“Not since yesterday noon.”
“Well, there’s a kettle and a fresh tub of water over there by the Druid’s fire. Go and have some soup and a bit of a wash, and the world will look some brighter, I expect.”
“Thank you. Have… have you seen Llywarch my kinsman?”
“He’ll be with the chieftain, I’d reckon,” the man said. “Maelgwn and some of the others have gone after the Romans, but they won’t be catching them now. Better to have saved our breath. But the chieftain and your kinsman rode back in a bit ago, friendly enough, so maybe they’ve made agreement.”
“Yes.” Ygerna gave him an unhappy smile. “Yes, I expect they have by now.” With his chariots in ashes and the Romans on his heels, Gruffyd needed Bendigeid’s help too badly to argue.
“Well, go and eat while there’s still some left,” the man said kindly. “I’ll tell them where to find you if you’re wanted.”
Ygerna found the soup kettle, and she ate quickly out of the iron ladle that was stuck in it and splashed her face and hands in the barrel of water that was one of the ones left full when they had given up trying to fight the fire. There was a boy her own age not far away, fitting a new shaft onto a throwing spear, and she went over to him.
“I need a comb.”
The boy looked up briefly and returned to his spear. “Then go you and find one.”
“Mine was burned,” Ygerna said, remembering that she had been a woman for more than six months, and a royal woman at that, and he would not be a man for another year. “Give me yours, and mind your tongue better.”
The boy gave her a long look, taking in the gold fillet in her tangled hair and the girdle of enameled links that belted her gown. It had been fine once, of soft red wool with a purple thread running through it. Ygerna stamped her bare foot impatiently, and he shrugged and reached into the pack beside him for a rough bone comb.
It was missing two teeth, but it served well enough. She sat down beside him and began pulling the tangles out. “I am Ygerna,” she said after a moment, remembering her own manners.
“My name’s Tegid,” the boy said. “I am spear bearer to Lord Sgilti.”
“You aren’t old enough!”
“I will be a man at Beltane,” the boy said indignantly. “I bet I’m older than you. And I saw the Roman’s messenger and showed him to Sgilti and the chieftain.”
“The Romans took him away again. Did you know?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t my fault. And Sgilti says I may stay by him. His driver was killed in the fire. I was right – the Roman was important.”
“Important enough to bring more Romans after him,” Ygerna said. “Didn’t it bother you when they… when they… We could hear the screams in the guest hall.”
“When they put him to the question?” Tegid said. “Of course not. I told you, I am nearly a man.” But she thought there was a whiteness at the comers of his mouth.
“It bothered me,” Ygerna said in a low voice. “I tried to remember he was a Roman, but…”
“Women always mind these things,” Tegid said comfortingly. “Anyway, he’s gone now. I expect we’ll have to go, too, now that our chariots are burned. Is Bendigeid your uncle going to send us more?”
“I don’t know,” Ygerna said. “They don’t tell me things like that.” She put the gold fillet back in her hair. “Thank you for the comb.”
Tegid put it in his pack and looked her over. “You look some better,” he said. “Not much like the girl Maelgwn was tumbling at Dun Mori, though.”
Ygerna sighed and stood up. “I’m a royal woman,” she said bitterly. “It doesn’t matter if I’m pretty.” She turned away toward the main gate, her thin feet picking their way carefully through the cinders on the ground.
Tegid watched her go. “I think you’re pretty!” he called after her suddenly, but he couldn’t tell if she had heard him or not.
As she had been told, Llywarch was with Gruffyd, the chieftain, near the main gates, and she quickened her step when she saw him. He had his hand on a pony’s bridle, and she recognized it as one of the black team they had ridden behind on the road to Dun Mori. As she approached, he swung into the saddle and then looked down at her as an afterthought.
“Llywarch!”
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said, not altogether truthfully. “You are to bide here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the king your uncle. To bring up his war band,” Llywarch added, looking at Gruffyd. “The terms are agreed to, so you will bide with Gruffyd’s women now.”
“But—” Yger
na bit back the words and nodded. With the chariots gone, the Demetae war band would be no match for an attacker. They would have to leave Carn Goch. Until Bendigeid’s warriors could meet them, they would pull back into the hills where the women and babes were hidden. Ygerna watched bleakly as Llywarch kicked his horse down the slope and turned westward. Gruffyd’s women wouldn’t want her. Especially not the girl Maelgwn had been tumbling at Dun Mori. Ygerna remembered her – one of the queen’s women, a year older than Maelgwn, with a round, pretty face and a bounce to her walk like a plump bird’s. She had giggled with the other girls over “the Silure witch” the day Ygerna came to Dun Mori, and she would like it even less to have her wed to Maelgwn.
For the others, it was dislike born of fear; fear of the Silures with their lordly ways, who were stronger and more powerful than any tribe in West Britain.
“Go and make yourself useful then.” Gruffyd laid a hand, not unkindly, on her shoulder and pointed to where the Druid was tending the wounded. “You can be a help there. And there’s wood to be brought for the Midsummer Fires. The god won’t wait for his due because it comes somewhat inconvenient.”
Ygerna remembered that she also was a Silure. “As soon as I have seen to my own things. The ashes have cooled enough now to see if there is anything left un-burnt.” She turned away, her thin back very straight in the bedraggled gown, toward the remains of the guest hall.
* * *
“I have left the girl.”
Bendigeid smiled, a not altogether comfortable expression on the king’s face. “Then Gruffyd of the Demetae has seen the wisdom of my arguments.”
“Gruffyd of the Demetae has a Roman legion on his tail,” Llywarch said, “and a hold full of burned chariots. He had little enough choice.”
“The Morrigan take him! He has waited too long!” Bendigeid slammed his hand down on the low wall beyond which the sheer cliffs of Perth Cerrig dropped down to the sea. His black eyes glowed with fury. “See, we saw the Romans’ galleys go by, and they turned and made for Dumnonia. And then turned back as like as not and caught Gruffyd sitting on his tail in Dun Mori!”
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