[A Dream of Eagles 01] - The Skystone

by Jack Whyte (ebook by Undead)

  From time to time we heard rumours of increasing raids along the Saxon Shore. Magnus's departure with so many troops had not gone unnoticed, it appeared. The forces left to garrison the island were spread too thin to do a proper job, and on one of his visits, Alaric told us their morale was very low, since they were constantly faced with the problem of doing too little too late.

  Like the Franks with their horses, these Saxon raiders were a new form of warrior. They came by night, landed in darkness and attacked at daybreak. They operated most of the time in single boatloads of thirty to fifty men. They could attack a hamlet, burn it, steal all that they could carry, sate their lusts for flesh and blood and be back at sea again before the word of their attack had reached the garrison troops who were supposed to stop them. The only danger they faced was the prospect of meeting a naval patrol, but the seas were big, and the patrols were few.

  In the autumn of 387, a boatload of Saxons infiltrated the river estuary to the north-west of us. There they left their ship and struck far inland, being careful to avoid the towns in the area and somehow managing to escape discovery.

  They struck the most northerly of our villas. Fortunately, most of our people were out in the fields at the time. A squadron of our soldiers was in the area and smelled the smoke of burning thatch carried on the wind. I was in the area myself, passing by with a small escort of men and wagons on my way to Aquae Sulis for supplies. It was Lorca, one of my wagon-drivers, who made me aware that something was wrong. His nostrils were sharp, and had he not been with us we might have ridden by without noticing anything amiss. He smelled the familiar stink of burning thatch and told me what it was. Although I doubted him at first, I sent two of our strongest runners to check on it and find out where the faint smell was coming from.

  Less than two hours later, I was in hiding on a shrub-covered knoll overlooking a narrow pathway that was ditched on both sides, and hoping that my cursory reading of the land and routes available had been accurate. They had, and the enemy played right into our hands. We had surprise on our side, and the fight was brief and bitter. I had split my force and found myself fighting with the larger of my groups against the enemy's vanguard, a fearsome band of brutal fighters. The majority of the raiders fell back from our first attack and found themselves cut off by our second party. I was dismounted, fighting on foot, and one of the fleeing raiders found my horse and took it. He was the sole survivor of his party, and I hope he had thews of iron for he must have had to row their long boat homeward alone.

  Murder was done much further back from where I fought, where the fleeing enemy met our second fighting force. Although the men of their vanguard fought to the death and went down fighting, each and every man, the ones who fled our first attack were made of softer stuff. When I went back to check my own rear guard; I found the path littered with enemy corpses piled one on the other like firewood. Along the path of flight, all of the enemy were very soundly dead.

  What to do? This was a dilemma I had faced before. The enemy was vanquished, but justice had not been done. We should have had prisoners — wounded, at least. Some should have survived. I found myself looking at the heaped dead and recalling the words of condemnation uttered centuries earlier by a chieftain of the Picts: "They make a desert and they call it peace." He had been describing the atrocities of Julius Agricola's army when it attempted to conquer the highlands of Caledonia, and my grandmother had adopted his words as her favourite expression for the inhumanity of the military mind.

  I sighed to myself and sent for the centurion who had commanded the rear guard, only to find that he was dead. So were his two decurions, which left no one in authority over the surviving soldiers of the squadron. Then I knew what had happened: fear, excitement, blood-lust and the need for vengeance had run rampant here among these young, untested soldiers.

  Feeling like a hypocrite, I assembled them and excoriated them, telling them all a few blistering truths about responsibility and about murder. Certainly, they were soldiers, but they were also Christians, each of them having swom his oath of loyalty upon the cross, and the Christian Commandment was specific: Thou shalt not kill. In the heat of battle, I told them, there was remission; then, kill or be killed took precedence over the Commandment. Afterwards, however, when the danger passed, the rule resumed its dominance. The killing of any man who was no longer fighting was murderous.

  I was careful to look at no single man too closely during this harangue, and to make no specific accusations, for this particular task struck home to my own innermost problems, and I knew too well the despair I felt from time to time to want to foist anything like it onto these young men. They had done well, after all, in their first engagement. I excused them on the grounds of their lack of experience and let them off the hook with a stern warning that, in future, they would be held responsible for such atrocious slaughter. When I had finished, I assigned one of my own men to them as acting centurion and sent them back to the Colony with the news of the raid, while I continued with the remainder of my men towards Aquae Sulis.

  BOOK FIVE

  The Dragon's Breath

  XXX

  Two days later, on a dull, overcast afternoon in Aquae Sulis, I was still pondering "the soldier's dilemma," as I thought of it. When is it permissible to kill and when is it not? I had discussed the matter in the past with Caius and with Bishop Alaric, and at no time had we reached a satisfactory conclusion either way. The existence of the soldier is predicated upon a perceived need to kill, for any of a dozen reasons, and yet the Christian law is categorical and absolute: Thou shall not kill.

  I had just purchased a wagonload of hemp for rope-making and had left my retainers to load it while I made my way to the public mansio to eat. I was deep in thought and more or less unconscious of my surroundings when I gradually became aware of a commotion ahead of me in the crowded street. Had I been less preoccupied, I might have noticed it sooner and gone around another way, but by the time I became aware of it, I was in the marketplace and surrounded by a densely packed crowd. I made my way with some difficulty to the edge of the roadway and hoisted myself precariously on a raised gutter-stone, bracing myself with my hands on the shoulders of the man in front of me and lifting my head above the crowd to see what was going on.

  A horse-drawn coach, a wealthy man's conveyance, took up almost the whole of the thoroughfare just ahead of where I stood, and as I looked, its grossly fat occupant was hauling himself up from the cushioned seat, preparing to climb down. An expression of distaste was stamped on his face as he scanned the crowd that thronged around him. gawking at his wealth. His retainers bustled about, forming a wedge and clearing a pathway through the crowd to the entrance of the building he was obviously headed for. less than four good paces from where I stood, perched on my small eminence. One of these retainers, a mindless-looking hulk with the face of an ape, pushed an old woman roughly from his path with a shout.

  "Way! Make way for Quinctilius Nesca!" So unexpected was the name, here in this place, that my head flew up in shock and I jerked my eyes back to the occupant of the coach. He was just on the point of stepping down into the street, and willing hands were supporting his huge arms to ease his grotesque weight. As I turned my face towards him, our eyes met. It must have been my expression of surprise and shock that alerted him, for there was nothing else to distinguish my face among the multitude. His eyes narrowing, he reached his right hand back to the framework of the open coach, holding himself there, half in and half out of the conveyance as he stared at me, and I saw suspicion dawning in his eyes. Too late, I cursed the vanity that had made me keep my grizzled beard, for in a Roman town a well-trimmed beard stands out among clean-shaven faces and wild, unkempt bushes. I hung there frozen, my eyes locked on his, incapable even of looking away from him as I saw his hand come up and point at me and his mouth frame the unheard words, "You there! Come here!"

  My skin crawled with panic, for I knew I was staring death in the face and I could not move. I thought of
brazening the confrontation out, but I knew that my first limping step would betray me. All he had seen until now was my grey beard, but something in the look of me had alerted him; let him once see my crippled gait and I would be dead meat. Now he was shouting, drawing the attention of his men to where I was perched, looking down on them.

  "Bring that man to me!" He was yelling, pointing at me. "That one! The grey-beard there!" The simian-faced brute closest to me had turned and seen me, and now he started to move towards me through the densely packed bodies separating us, his clawed fingers stretching to take hold of me. The sight of his blackened, snarling teeth brought me to my senses. I shoved the man whose shoulders I had been leaning on right into his grasp, sending both of them reeling as I threw myself backwards into the crowd. As I disappeared from view I heard a howl go up, and I knew that I was running for my life. I used my shoulders like battering rams, ploughing through the crowd, aware of the fright and incomprehension on the faces of the people I was jostling. Then suddenly I was free of the press and diving into a narrow passageway between two buildings. It was a short alleyway leading to a common midden behind the tenements that fronted the street, I came out into this and dodged to my right, along the wall, hearing as I did so the clatter of running feet in the alley behind me. I was running hard in the style I had developed, a series of limping leaps, using my bad leg only to balance me for the next leap with my good one. It was awkward and not at all aesthetic, but it covered ground at a good rate over short distances.

  An open door appeared on my right almost immediately and I swung myself inside, into near-total darkness. It was a stable of some kind, full of straw and animal smells. I saw the dim outline of a ladder ahead of me, stretching up in darkness to a second level, but it did not attract me. I had not run far enough yet to hide, and the chase was too hot behind me. I flung myself into a dark corner by the door, pressing myself back into the wall behind an untidy sprawl of forks and shovels, and drew my sword.

  I listened to the running feet approach and come to a stop outside the open door, less than a step from me had the wall not been between us. There were two men, both of them breathing heavily. I held my own breath, feeling the pulse hammering in my throat, hearing the silence of their motionless pause grow and extend for an impossible length of time. As clearly as if I could see them, I knew they were standing side by side, peering into the blackness beyond the doorway where I stood. Gradually their breathing steadied and then one of them spoke.

  "What d'you think? He's in there?"

  The other's voice was a low growl. "Oh, he's in there, all right. No place else he can be. He didn't have time to go anywhere else. He's in there."

  "I'll get help."

  "No!" The command was barked, and I could imagine the expression of surprise on the first one's face. "You'll get no one. We'll handle this ourselves."

  "Why? The others are around here somewhere. It won't take a minute to get them."

  "We don't need help, you fool! Use your head, for once in your life. Don't you know who this whoreson is?"

  "No." The voice sounded vaguely plaintive. "Who is he?"

  "I don't know his name. Nobody does. But you remember a few years ago we were all told to find a grey-bearded whoreson with a twisted leg? Nesca was offering ten golden auri. Remember? It must be at least five years."

  "Aye, I remember that. No one ever found him. You think this is the same one?"

  "I don't know, but the whoreson has a grey beard and a twisted leg and he ran. You want to share ten gold auri with the others?"

  There was a short silence, then, "What if he's not the right one?"

  "If he's dead when we take him back, he's the right one. You think they're going to question a corpse? Let's go in and get him."

  I took a deep, silent breath as they stepped into the doorway and stood there, so close to me that I could smell them. I could have reached out and touched them from behind the pile of fork handles between us.

  "It's dark," the smaller of them breathed.

  His companion took one step into the gloom and crouched there, his head moving as he scanned the darkened space in front of them. He held a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. The smaller one moved forward, too, and noticed the ladder stretching upwards into the gloom. He touched the other's arm, nodding towards it. Neither of them so much as glanced behind in my direction. They were convinced that I would have sought safety in the darkness ahead of them.

  I looked hard at them in the light that fell through the doorway. The large one was the one with the apelike face. Neither of them wore armour of any description.

  Ape Face pointed to the ladder and signalled to his companion to go up, indicating that he would remain there, on the floor, and they both moved forward cautiously, scanning the shadows ahead of them. Then, apparently satisfied that I must be up above, the big one signalled again, more urgently, for the other to go up the ladder. The smaller man started to climb, slowly, using only his right hand, his sword clutched in his left, his eyes straining up into the gloom above him where he thought the danger lay. Ape Face stayed where he was in the middle of the floor, about four paces from me.

  I transferred my sword into my left hand and grasped the hilt of the skystone dagger in my right, my arm stretched across my body, not daring to unsheathe it lest the sound alarm them before I was ready. When the climber reached the eighth rung, I judged the time was right and launched myself like a lance, my left arm extended to cut down the distance between Ape Face and myself and my right whipping the skystone dagger out of its sheath. The point of my sword took the big fellow low in the back with all my weight behind it, and as he arched away from the stabbing blade I brought my right hand whipping round in an arc and plunged the dagger, point first, up into the softness beneath his chin, driving for the brain, killing him instantly. I released the sword immediately and kept on turning with the impetus of my swing, pulling the dagger free and dropping to my right knee as my right arm came back behind my head ready to throw.

  The man on the ladder made a perfect target. His companion's death had come so suddenly and unexpectedly that he was caught completely by surprise. He teetered there, gaping at me lacking the presence of mind even to shout and presenting the full breadth of his chest for me to aim at. I threw with all my strength, aiming for the centre of his chest. The skystone dagger made a silver streak and thudded into the hollow at the base of his throat, cutting his chance of screaming forever. His chin snapped downward against the hilt; his eyes flew wide and his mouth moved uselessly, making a wet, gurgling, choking sound. Then he fell slowly forward, bolt upright, crashing head-first to the floor. I was beside him almost as he hit the ground, pulling my dagger from his throat. I cleaned the blade roughly on his tunic and then scrambled to the body of his ape-faced companion, rolling him over without ceremony to retrieve my sword. My heart was hammering in my ears and I was ready for anything, fully expecting the noise of the killings to have been overheard. But the moments passed, and no one appeared in the doorway; I heard no shouts of alarm.

  My eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness by this time, so that the shadows were no longer quite so black, and the sprawled corpses appeared to be lit now by bright sunlight. I looked about me more carefully. There were bundles of hay piled in one rear corner of the stable and a tall heap of straw in the other. Apart from those, the place was empty. I reviewed my options and discovered, not to my surprise, that I had virtually none. I could stay there and hide, or I could try to run. My own companions were less than two streets away from me, still loading our wagon with hemp, but it might as well have been twenty miles. I was a marked man. The whole town would be looking for a grey-bearded man with a limp, and there were people everywhere. I might be able to hide my face somehow, but I couldn't possibly walk without limping. I had to stay there and hope for the best, which meant that I had to hide the bodies of Ape Face and his friend.

  It took me several minutes of strenuous pulling and hauling to drag
them over to the piled bundles of hay and rearrange the stooks to cover them, and at every second I expected someone to appear in the open doorway to the midden. Finally I had them lying together and almost out of sight. I broke the binding of two bundles and scattered loose hay over their sprawling forms, and then I crossed the floor and scattered loose straw over the blood that lay puddled where they had fallen, stamping it down to soak up the moisture and scattering more fresh stuff on top of that. There was a lot of blood, and as I tried to hide it I was thinking ironically of my debate with myself on the morality of killing. Satisfied at last that I had done all I could to hide the signs of violence, and more conscious than ever of the door that gaped so widely onto the midden, I withdrew into the opposite corner from the corpses and crouched behind the pile of straw, my eyes fixed on the white rectangle of light. I did not even consider climbing up into the loft. I was trapped badly enough, there on the ground. This was one of the few occasions when I experienced no urge to vomit after violent action. That would come later, only after all danger was past. I had another sickness in my gut that told me I would have to wait a long time.

  I gave not a moment's thought to the possibility that one of my own men might unwittingly betray me to Nesca's people. My own soldiers were encamped a few miles from the town, in a clearing within sight of, but well hidden from, the road. The six men who had come into town with me were all farmers and all taciturn. They did not enjoy having to travel to the town and they had no trust in, or patience with, the people who made their living there. If asked by any stranger about having seen a limping, grey-haired man, they would automatically assume I was in trouble, and they would deny any knowledge of me. At the same time, I hoped, they would start looking for me themselves.