Dark North mkoa-3

by Paul Finch

  “Much like the freedoms of those many lands New Rome reacquired.”

  “I love this new-found reaffirmation of your loyalty to Arthur’s realm, Trelawna… now that his man is hot on our heels.”

  “If only he were coming as Arthur’s man. There’d be a possibility he might show some restraint.”

  “Oh, dear Christ, alarm me no further!” Rufio wheeled his horse around to continue uphill. “Your barbarian friends are nothing but ignoramuses! They may win the odd battle, but there are other powers in this world! Powers they cannot imagine!”

  Twenty-Six

  Bishop Malconi reasoned that the smaller his party, the less chance there was of it being noticed. Thus, aside from his travel-coach — a solid wooden box plated with steel, once overlaid with fabric bearing the red and gold lions of Ravenna, but now clad in simple rustic brown — he journeyed north with only his ten bodyguards, who wore their hauberks under cloth and were armed unobtrusively.

  Such anonymity served its purpose as he passed through the dusty villages and rural towns of Lombardy, but when he left lowland Italy behind and entered the Ligurian foothills, he became afraid that he now wasn’t protected enough. The bleaker and wilder the terrain, the more the bishop travelled with his coach shutters bolted, his bright eyes glued to a viewing slot too narrow for even a broad-headed arrow to penetrate.

  Even in late summer, with the meadows still green and only tinges of red in the trees, this was a desolate region. The few people they saw were illiterate shepherds who lived in turf huts, the only livestock sheep and goats. The higher they rose into the great Alpine massifs, the more this meadowland fell behind them, until soon they were following narrow ways amid misty crags, or winding through dense pinewoods. The road was increasingly difficult, churned to porridge by rain and hardened again by the summer sun so that it was all ruts and divots.

  Night was a particular challenge — for that was when they heard things. After dark, Malconi would not even venture out of his carriage. He now wore mail himself and sat rigid inside, his face beaded with sweat. Outside, his bravos — not quite as afraid as he, but still on edge — slept around their fire, two of them always standing guard, listening to the encircling woods and to the cries and gibbers of unnatural creatures.

  On the final day of the journey, high above the world, they toiled onto an undulating ridge, a narrow spine of rock along which the final leg of the road was laid. The vast gulfs to either side were a test of a man’s steel; one needed only to stray a yard from the road and he would plunge to his doom. With early afternoon came rain, heavy and teeming, and after the rain a miasmal gloom. By late afternoon, they were relieved to find bluffs approaching, and soon they were following a narrow passage between sheer walls of granite.

  “Make haste!” the bishop called through the roof of his coach. “We are almost there.”

  The driver did not make haste, for the alley was so tight that he could barely advance without the carriage’s wheel hubs scraping on rock. Several times the way was blocked by iron portcullises, now rusty and thick with moss. Far overhead, on the stone lintels of these gateways, were walled and roofed guard-posts, but no guards were on duty. In each case it took two of the bishop’s men to scale these great iron frameworks and work the crank-handles, slowly lifting the obstructions out of the way.

  At last, with dusk falling, they came to a point where the passage ended, and a bottomless chasm lay before them. On the far side sat the arched entrance to Castello Malconi, although at present the drawbridge was raised and out of reach. Wearily, the bedraggled party gazed up.

  “Sister!” Malconi cried. “Sister, we seek admittance!”

  After what seemed an age, a lone figure appeared on the black battlements: Duchess Zalmyra. She wore a fleece shawl; her long, tar-black hair was bound in a scarf.

  “Zalmyra… your passage gates are unmanned!” Malconi called up to her. “How can this happen in a time of trouble?”

  “It has happened,” she called back, “because, thanks to your master, there are no men to operate them.”

  “If by ‘my master’ you mean Emperor Lucius, you’ll be shocked to know that he is dead.”

  “Hardly shocked, brother.” She still made no effort to have the drawbridge lowered.

  “For God’s sake, Zalmyra! Arthur’s army is on the move. It heads southward through France, sacking every Roman-held castle or town.”

  “You seemed unconcerned by this possibility a few weeks ago.”

  “That was before I knew Arthur had put a price on my head.”

  Her voice crackled with scorn. “How little foresight you princes of the Church show.”

  “Open the gates, I beg you!”

  She shrugged and turned away.

  With much squealing and grinding of cogs, the drawbridge was lowered. Malconi almost ran across it, his guards and coach following at a more sedate pace.

  His sister met him in the courtyard. Malconi could only regard the deserted parapets with mouth agape. “You have no household guard?”

  “Most died at the Vale of Sessoine,” she replied.

  “Then we are in very serious trouble.”

  “You have your Praetorians. Will they not suffice?”

  “Against the whole of Arthur’s army, which grows stronger by the day? Now, I hear, the Franks have joined him; they call it ‘liberation,’ the insolent curs. Everything Childeric has he owes to Rome, yet now he accuses us of tyranny and says his people are glad to be free.”

  “And who wouldn’t?” Zalmyra chuckled. “Emperor Lucius called the Franks his servants. King Arthur had the wisdom to call them friends.”

  “This is madness, complete madness.”

  “If so, it’s a madness cooked up by your beloved Simplicius.”

  “He may save me yet. I can’t believe he’d cut off his strong right hand without resistance.”

  Zalmyra laughed again. “He sacrificed fifty thousand men at Sessoine. Why would he not sacrifice you?”

  Malconi’s voice became desperate. “Proclates of Palermo and Pelagius of Tuscany have been named as well. Warrants for our arrests have been issued. But surely Arthur won’t make good on this threat? We are men of the Church.”

  “Arthur may consider that you have betrayed the Church,” she said.

  “Betrayed…?”

  “Not the Church of Simplicius, that tottering palace of wealth and intrigue. But the people of Christendom, the ocean of innocent souls entrusted to you and your kind by Jesus Christ, and abused and neglected ever since.”

  “But that isn’t true.”

  “Hah! Tell the people of Brittany.”

  Malconi felt butterflies in the pit of his belly as he recalled the stories he’d heard about the war-crimes committed in Brittany. Neither he, nor any other churchman, had ordered such depredations, but neither had they sought to stop them. “Say you’ll give me refuge. Zalmyra, I beg you…”

  “Don’t beg, Severin,” she said disparagingly. “In the name of your carpenter God, don’t lower yourself to that. I’ll give you refuge. Of course I will.”

  “And you’ll find new men, new soldiers with which to fight?”

  “I need no soldiers. When the Vandals came against our bastion… half a million of them died in the valley below, and they landed not a single blow on us.”

  “But Arthur won’t attack from the front. He’s too clever…”

  “Arthur won’t attack at all, you fool. He is otherwise engaged. But there will be a challenge… in due course.”

  “You think you can meet it?”

  “I already have. He’s a flesh and blood man. Very human. But strong. I got close enough to sense that much.” She smiled strangely. “No matter. The agents of our defence are abroad on the slopes of these mountains even as we speak.”

  Malconi remembered the cries and gibbers in the benighted vales below. “Don’t tell me you’ve unleashed demons?”

  “Ask me no questions, brother, and your prissy Christ
ian conscience can remain clear.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Wulfstan braced his foot against the corpse and tugged on the sword-hilt. With a grating of bone, he freed the weapon.

  “Roman falcata,” he said, holding the bloody blade aloft. “Seems our friends are falling out among themselves.”

  “How long?” Lucan asked.

  “Well… this fellow was killed about a day and a half ago.”

  “We’re gaining on them,” Turold commented.

  Wulfstan nodded. Before they departed The Red Gauntlet, its landlord had informed them that, just short of a week earlier, a party of New Rome’s soldiers had passed by in the company of two women, one young and fair, the other matronly.

  Lucan glanced across the rock-strewn hillside. The encircling pinewoods were deep, filled with impenetrable shadow. It was easy to imagine someone observing them, though everything he’d learned about his quarry so far suggested he was in headlong flight, not thinking rationally enough to launch an ambush.

  Less than half a day later, they encountered a village.

  It was located at the lower end of a narrow defile. The first they saw of it was a stockade made from pine-logs, the gate partly open. Roofs of houses, thatched with sticks and firs, were visible beyond. There was no sound, and no sign of movement on the village rampart. Lucan and his men reined in about sixty yards away. They were within bowshot, but still nothing happened.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Malvolio said tightly.

  For once Benedict didn’t dispute with him.

  “Disperse,” Lucan said quietly.

  The horsemen fanned out into a broad skirmish-line. Steel clanked as visors were snapped shut. With shields raised and spears lowered, they advanced. For several moments the only noise was the snuffling of horses and the clumping of hooves.

  Still nobody appeared on the village stockade.

  They halted again, about thirty yards short.

  “That open gate is a clear invitation,” Wulfstan said, voicing a suspicion Lucan shared, “but it isn’t a risk I’d take if I was them. My lord… I don’t think there’s anybody here.”

  “Everyone, hold your ground,” Lucan said, climbing from the saddle. He glanced to his archers, who were mounted nearby, arrows nocked. He made eye contact with them, and they nodded their understanding.

  He put his helmet on, brandished his shield and, drawing Heaven’s Messenger from the scabbard hung over his wolf-fur, continued on foot. The village gate remained ajar, although the narrow gap afforded no glimpse of what might wait on the other side.

  The gate swung open easily when Lucan pushed it.

  Immediately beyond there was a large weapon which the Romans called a ‘Scorpion’: a wheeled crossbow with a pivotal base, two thick bundles of sinew rope twisted down the centre of its rectangular frame, adding immense torsion power. Eighteen four-foot bolts currently rested in its grooves, its hempen string at full stretch. But there was nobody there to aim it, or to release the missiles. The village’s main street, which was narrow and stony, was also deserted. Lucan ventured through and stepped around the war-machine. To his left a ladder led up to the guard-walk on the stockade, which was also unmanned. He looked further afield. The houses were simple affairs, log-built and of varying shapes and sizes. In the centre of the road lay a stone trough filled with water.

  Everything he saw told him that this settlement had been abandoned; doors stood open, windows were half shuttered, but he knew that something was wrong. And then he began to spot clues: red-spotted feathers scattered in one of the animal pens; a wood-axe lying on the road with its handle broken. Some of the window shutters, he realised, were hanging from twisted hinges. Open doors had been smashed in, their timber frames splintered.

  He turned back to his men and signalled. They advanced on foot, leading their steeds.

  “This place was sacked,” he said, as they joined him.

  Wulfstan lifted his visor. “By our Roman friends? I didn’t think they’d have the wherewithal.”

  “I’m not sure.” Lucan forbade them from watering their horses at the trough, and ordered them to search the village, and to be cautious. Now that he looked more closely, he saw what appeared to be claw marks on some of the smashed doors. Blood was daubed in many places. And yet there were no bodies.

  “Whoever attacked, they didn’t come through the front gate,” Wulfstan noted. “This Scorpion hasn’t even been discharged.”

  “How did they get hold of such a weapon?” Turold asked.

  Maximion dismounted alongside them. “Some of the men probably did military service. They may have looted it from a battlefield, or perhaps been granted it as a boon for good work… something to protect their village.”

  “So where are they?” Turold asked.

  “My lord… my lord!” came a shrill voice. Benedict, at the far end of the main street, Malvolio beside him. They stood in front of a barn, the door to which they had just opened, but they now stood back, grim-faced. Alaric reached them first. He half-entered the barn, only to back out with a grimace. The rest of the men converged. Lucan shouldered his way through last, waving away a cloud of droning flies.

  The villagers were heaped inside.

  Or what remained of them was, a great tangled mass of torn flesh and contorted limbs. It was not just the men; there were women and children too, even small babies, all steeped in thickening blood. Their skulls had been crushed and their throats ripped out. Belly cavities gaped, and coils of glistening intestine were strewn about like strings of sausages. Bizarrely, their animals lay beside them: dogs, chickens and goats, even a shaggy highland cow, all rent and mangled in a frenzied, bestial attack.

  “Our Roman foe did this?” Turold said, aghast.

  “No,” Lucan replied. “This is something else.”

  “These bodies are practically fresh,” Wulfstan said. “My lord, these people have only recently been slain.”

  “And they were dumped in here because the sight of them would have alerted us before we entered the village,” Turold added.

  Lucan spun around, shouting: “Prepare for attack… quickly!”

  They clumped together in the main street, weapons drawn, watching over the rims of their shields. The village remained deserted.

  There was a prolonged silence. A slight breeze whipped up eddies of dust. Down at the far end, near the entry gate, the horses grew skittish, pawing the ground and tugging at their tethers.

  And then there was a chilling, ululating cry, and a huge object came whistling through the air. At first Lucan thought it a boulder, but when it struck full on Benedict’s helmet, crumpling it like tin, he realised it was the anvil from the smithy.

  On all sides, figures scuttled into view — on the roofs of the houses, at the ends of alleyways. They crouched, simian-fashion, their thick, muscular forms covered with dark, greenish-grey fur, their faces and elongated snouts striped blue and scarlet.

  “Apes!” someone shouted. “In these mountains?”

  “No ordinary apes!” Maximion replied, equally astonished. “The Berbers call them baboons! These beasts dwell in Africa!”

  “Do they normally carry weapons?” someone else said, stunned to see that many of the creatures carried stones or lengths of timber.

  More and more of the baboons now appeared, hemming in the small party of warriors. Though squatting or crouching, they were the size of men. They snarled, roared and screamed, their fang-filled mouths gaping horribly.

  At the far end of the street the horses panicked, ripping their tethers and bolting this way and that. One ape, a grotesquely vast specimen, had smashed its way in through the gate. It must have been concealed somewhere down the valley, following the men in to spring the trap, closing off their only avenue of escape. With a deafening howl, it grappled with one of the packhorses, lifting it bodily and bouncing it down across its knee, shattering its spine.

  This was the signal for attack.

  With a chorus of
demonic screams, the simian tribe hurled their missiles and surged forward, leaping and scrambling over each other, two or three to every man. The mesnie fought back with a courage born of desperation. Gerwin buried his pole-axe in a baboon’s skull. With a single stroke of Heaven’s Messenger, Lucan cut clean through one simian neck and shore deeply into another. But the assailants were stronger, faster and fiercer than their human opponents. They shrieked like damned souls as they battered and tore and bit, dragging their hapless targets to the ground. Brione of Bullwood had his faceplate rent away, and his eyes clawed out by jagged, dirty fingernails.

  Alaric fended them off with his shield, before it was yanked from his grasp. He drove his sword through the belly of one baboon, only to be struck on his sallet with a heavy stone, which knocked him senseless. He toppled to the ground behind Lucan. Lucan spun around, distracted by that and by Wulfstan, who he saw face-down in the dirt as two of the beasts pounded him with rocks.

  Lucan lunged, his blurred steel striking in lightning flashes, shredding flesh, fur and muscle. On all sides, his men were beaten with clubs and mauled by claws and teeth in a frenzy of speed and savagery. Hundreds of the apes flooded the compound, and now their gigantic leader, having killed three horses, lumbered forth. It grabbed two men up, one in either hand, and slammed them on the ground, like a washerwoman drying rags. Its third victim was Malvolio, who, having fortuitously impaled one of its smaller cousins in the breastbone, was snatched into the air before he could even shout. The abomination glared at him face-to-face, and then flung him, cart-wheeling, over the heads of his comrades.

  Maximion had grabbed up a spear, and tried to hold them off with its barbed point as he backed towards the nearest longhouse. “Earl Lucan!” he cried. “Earl Lucan!”

  Lucan glanced around. Maximion was pointing into the building. It would be easier to resist this ravening horde in an enclosed space than out in the open. Two more baboons came at him, leaping, howling. He smashed the iron boss of his shield into the face of one, and smote the other in the groin, dragging Heaven’s Messenger sideways, ripping the brute in half, its blood and intestines exploding.