Dawnflight (The Dragon's Dove Chronicles Book 1)

by Headlee, Kim

  “I asked Merlin to add that Caledonian custom for the benefit of Father and the rest of my clansmen, not for myself.” She recalled the private conversation in the bishop’s workroom, scant minutes before riding to the bonding ritual. Swept along by the tide of events, she hadn’t noticed anything odd at the time. Hindsight was telling a different tale. “I’m amazed he agreed so readily.”

  “Maybe it was his way of apologizing for advising me against accepting your clan-mark.”

  “Maybe.”

  Self-doubt, planted by Merlin, grew within her. She disengaged her hands, stood, and walked to the window overlooking the inner courtyard of the praetorium, but from the mental tirade there was no escape.

  “Does the One God care so much about a mark on the skin?” With the hand of her sword arm resting over her heart, she slowly stroked her clan-mark. She couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper: “Does this mean I’m really not a Christian?”

  His chest pressed to her back as his arms twined about her waist. His lips were warm against her neck. The aromatic essence of his victory crown lingered like a halo.

  “I believe God cares more about what’s in our hearts than what’s on our bodies. But some people”—he sighed—“priests, especially, can get strange notions sometimes.”

  Strange notions, indeed. It was all too confusing.

  “I have to be careful,” Arthur continued. “So do you now. The Church holds a lot of sway. Not so much over the regular army but the common folk. Our auxiliaries.” He started massaging her shoulders. “I think allowance could be made for you, that you received the mark before you became a Christian. But me—” His hands stilled. “One day, I will wear the Argyll Doves for you.”

  “You cannot risk the wrath of priests.” She suppressed a shudder. “I won’t let you.”

  “I will find a way. I promise.” The steel in his tone melted as he asked, “What made you turn to Christ?”

  Contemplating the moonlit courtyard, she grappled not with the answer to his question but with the idea of whether she should say anything. Regret over her conversion was not the issue; her most recent taste of the sacramental wine had affirmed the rightness of the decision. But what would her consort think of a warrior and leader of warriors who had forsaken the religion of her people because she had been afraid of her prophesied destiny?

  She leaned against his chest, feeling his arms tighten protectively around her, grateful that he seemed willing to let her take her time. But she knew he wouldn’t be put off forever. “It is the way of my people to ask help from the god who is most able to grant it.” The secret threatened to lodge in her throat. Resolutely, she pushed it out. “Only the One God proved strong enough to help me face my doom.”

  He clamped a hand on her shield arm and spun her to face him. “What do you mean, your doom?” She saw no reproach in his eyes, only profound concern.

  Gyan translated the words of the prophecy into Breatanaiche.

  “I’m certain the High Priest meant Urien.” The doubts fell silent at last. She reached up to caress his cheeks. “Now that I have you, Arturus, my Roman love, that fate no longer awaits me.”

  Her lips parted in an invitation he wasted no time to accept.

  THEY LAY entwined as love had left them, naked and wreathed with the blended tang of sweat and sex. Gyan had already yielded to sleep. Arthur couldn’t blame her; it had been one hell of a long, emotional day. She nestled with her head pillowed on his chest, a soft smile bending her lips, her breathing slow and even, the fingertips of her left hand twitching against his flesh in the transport of her dreams. He hugged her gently. The twitching stopped, but she didn’t wake.

  Fatigue and wine were doing their level best to send him into his own dreams. But he couldn’t stop pondering what she had said.

  His Christian conscience chastised him for paying heed to a pagan prophecy, yet some small part of him refused to ignore the matter. Though his father was Roman, he was the son of a Brytoni woman, and Caledonians traced their lineage through the mother…

  No. It was absurd. He was a soldier, not a chieftain. Thanks to his father, his feet trod a different road: Roman-built, and dusty, and hard. The only accolades along the way would be those he would win for himself, not bestowed by she who had pushed him into this world. But now, he had a companion to share the trials and triumphs of his journey.

  As he brushed his fingertips over the azure lines of the dragon that ramped around her left forearm, his heart surged with the great love he felt for her. She was incontestably his, just as he was hers. Caleberyllus would never let him forget that.

  And as long as he had breath in his lungs and strength in his body and fight in his soul, no one was ever going to come between them.

  Explicit Liber Primus

  kdh, MCMXCVIII, recognoscantur MMXII

  Psalm 139:9-10 NIV, Soli Deo Gloria

  Author’s Notes

  PRECIOUS LITTLE IS known about the period following the withdrawal of the Roman legions in about A.D. 410. From the only surviving contemporary British source, a sermon of woe written by Christian cleric Gildas “the Wise” in the mid-6th century, one can infer that it was a period of political, economic, social, military, cultural, and religious chaos. The British fought not only amongst themselves for leadership to fill the power vacuum they inherited from the Romans, but also against the various invaders from the Highlands, the Continent, and Ireland. Everybody had a different agenda, and a different means of pursuing that agenda, covering both ends of the moral spectrum and points in between. Faith flagged—not just faith in whatever divine power one chose to worship, but faith in their leaders, each other, and themselves.

  Tradition asserts that roughly fifteen hundred years ago, a leader arose from the tumult to weld the sundry factions into a strong, prosperous nation, buying a generation of peace for his people. Tradition names him Arthur. Tradition also acknowledges that he had help in many forms: prophets, advisers, heroes, and friends.

  I postulate that Arthur’s assistance came, first and foremost, from his wife. And not merely to weave his cloak and embroider his shield cover and use his banner to dry her tears while languishing in the cold castle, wondering whether he was going to return alive.

  Over the years, as I devoured every Arthurian title I could find, fact as well as fiction, one thing became clear to me: Guinevere has taken a bum rap. And she’s in good company, along with Cleopatra and even “Good Queen Bess,” Elizabeth I, who had a fair share of detractors. The female Pharaoh Hatchepsut, who habitually wore a fake beard, was all but lost to us until recently. And the 9th century’s Pope Joan, who held the office for two years, has been the subject of one of the biggest coverups ever instigated by the Roman Catholic Church. A woman of true power is anathema to her male peers, chroniclers, and historians.

  But it is not my intent so much to exonerate Guinevere as it is to present a version of her story plausible enough to explain how the medieval and later versions, rife with themes of lust, adultery, and treason, might have come to be. To that end, I have striven to create as accurate a picture of late-5th-century Britain as possible, avoiding such words as potato and tartan. This is by no means a claim of perfection, and if I’ve overlooked something obvious, I welcome the opportunity to learn from readers’ comments.

  A warrior-queen Guinevere is not as farfetched as it might sound. Writers of antiquity, men like Diodorus Siculus and Ammianus Marcellinus, traveling in what was then known as Gaul (modern-day Western Europe), recorded their observations of Celtic society at about the time of the birth of Christ. These writings included commentary on Celtic women, who were noted to be at least as strong and fierce in battle as their husbands, if not more so. By this time, some Celtic tribes already had begun migrating into Britain. There they encountered an ancient aboriginal race, the Picts, living in what is now the Scottish Highlands.

  What is known about the Picts is sketchy at best. Historians are even unsure what they called themselves. Pict is
derived from a Latin term for “painted people,” a reference to the custom of painting their bodies with woad dye. The stone carvings these mysterious people left behind are either hieroglyphic or runic in appearance, and as yet no Rosetta-Stone equivalent has been unearthed. This is a mournful situation for the historian and anthropologist but gives rise to all sorts of fascinating possibilities for the novelist.

  It is generally believed that the Picts were a proud, warlike race, not unlike their Celtic neighbors. Evidence suggests that over the centuries, they intermarried extensively with the Scotti (Irish) and various continental Celtic tribes, engendering a unique cultural blend. This blend can be seen in the sharing of physical characteristics, deities, modes of dress, warfare, and language. I have taken the approach that by the opening of Dawnflight in the waning years of the 5th century, this blending process is well under way.

  One distinctly Pictish aspect that seems to have remained intact is the nature of their society. Evidently, women shared clan leadership responsibilities with their menfolk, and descent was usually traced through the mother. Theirs was an integrated society, unlike the Celts who, by all reports, were highly segregated.

  With regard to the Picts’ language, of which precious little is known, I have used Scottish Gaelic as a starting point, often with modifications as the need arose. Thus were born terms like cù-puc, àrd-banoigin, and àrd-ceoigin.

  On the subject of names, I decided that my classically educated Romano-Celtic Arthur deserved a sword with an inherently Latin name, Caleberyllus, rather than using either the Brythonic Caledfwlch or its Latinized form, Caliburnus, both of disputed etymology.

  I also took the liberty to invent or borrow distinctive names for many of my characters; in particular, Ogryvan, Angusel, and Gyanhumara. Ogryvan is derived from the Welsh Gogfran, who appears in an ancient triad as “a giant” and the father of one of the three Guineveres (Gwenhwyfar in Welsh) to whom Arthur was supposedly married. Angusel is based on King Auguselus of Scotland, mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain as one of Arthur’s staunchest supporters.

  As for my title character, arguably the oldest known form of her name is Guanhumara. But my character needed a version that would yield a suitable nickname, and Guan just wasn’t it! Neither was Guin. She also needed a name that would not conjure preconceived notions in the mind of any reader with a passing familiarity with the Legends, which in my opinion Guinevere does, and so, to a lesser extent, does Gwenhwyfar. Hence, Gyanhumara, or Gyan, as she’s known to friends and kin: chieftainess, warrior, leader of warriors, the barbaric foil to Arthur’s civilized Roman ways…and the best portion of his soul. (1998)

  (Wytheville, VA, 2012) What began as an effort to correct the errors in my pluralization of invented “Pictish” terminology blossomed into entire sets of idiomatic language that my characters of the various races use to refer to themselves and to each other. As I studied the old languages, Scottish Gaelic in particular, I realized I could mine the vocabulary to invent more epithets, euphemisms, endearments, and mythology. Hence my inclusion of the Glossary, with more than 225 entries that apply to this text, including place-names and the identification of their present-day sites.

  And, why not? It is my hope that this series will become at least eight books (including two that chronologically precede Dawnflight), and all of these works exist in some stage of development. Since I had planned to re-release Dawnflight, I decided it was going to benefit from all this world-building too.

  The appendix titled “People” is also new for this edition, as are my line-art character totems. When ebook programming evolves to employ the entire HTML command set, I will include a table that identifies characters with their totems. My beta-test versions did not yield a consistently acceptable look across the different ebook readers, so I elected to stay with plain text.

  Fans of the original edition may notice wording differences and, in a few notable places, much more substantial revisions to the text, though I left the storyline intact. This novel began life in its present form 25 years ago; I can add thirteen to that if I choose to count an earlier effort that had Guinevere as a Roman noblewoman named Vennevria, niece of the Roman emperor, and Arthur as a Southern British Celt named Artos, which also ended with their wedding. In some respects, Dawnflight is not the novel I would have written today, but this edition comes a lot closer to my present writing style.

  Closer yet is its sequel, Morning’s Journey, which already existed as a complete draft in 2002, though some of its material began in a much longer version of Dawnflight dating to 1992. Morning’s Journey also has undergone extensive revisions, and it is now available for sale. Work on volume 3, Raging Sea, is in progress.

  Appendix I: People

  ENTRY FORMAT:

  Full Name (Pronunciation). Brief description, which may include rank, occupation, clan, country, nickname(s), name’s origin and meaning, banner, and legendary name. Place-names and other affiliations are given in the person’s native language.

  Approximate pronunciation guidelines are supplied for the less obvious names, especially those of Scottish Gaelic and Brythonic origin. When in doubt, pronounce it however it makes sense to you. Or purchase the audiobook edition of Dawnflight, featuring lovely narration by the Scottish-born Dorothy Dickson!

  Accolon. Centurion in First Ala, Horse Cohort, Dragon Legion of Brytoni army; Urien’s second-in-command and friend. Clan: Moray, Dalriada, Brydein. Legendary name: Sir Accolon.

  Adim Al-Iskandar. Arms merchant, hails from Constantinopolis. Name origin: variant of “Adam Alexander.”

  Airc. One of the warriors bound by treaty to join the Horse Cohort of the Dragon Legion of Brydein. Clan: Argyll, Caledon. Name origin: Scottish Gaelic àrc (“cork”).

  Alain. Heir to the chieftainship of Clan Cwrnwyll of Rheged, Brydein. Husband of Yglais; Arthur’s brother-in-law. Legendary name: King Alain Le Gros.

  Alayna (ah-lah-EE-nah). Chieftainess and Àrd-Banoigin of Clan Alban of Caledon. Widow of Guilbach (Gwalchafed); Angusel’s mother. Name origin: Scottish Gaelic àlainn (“beautiful, elegant, splendid”).

  Alun. Officer at Ayr Point signal station, Maun.

  Ambrosius Aurelius Constantinus. Late Dux Britanniarum. Elder brother of Uther; father of Merlin. Nickname: Emrys (EM-rees). Legendary name: Ambrosius.

  Angusel mac Alayna, a.k.a. Anguselus. Àrd-Oighre of Clan Alban of Caledon. Son of Alayna and Gwalchafed. Nickname: Angus. Name origin: inspired by Scottish Gaelic an càs (“the trying situation”), sàl (“sea”). Legendary name: Sir Lancelot du Lac.

  Annamar ferch Gorlas. Daughter of Gorlas and Ygraine; Arthur’s half sister; wife of Loth of Clan Lothian. Clan: Cwrnwyll, Rheged, Brydein. Legendary name: Queen Margause.

  Antoninus Pius. Second-century A.D. Roman emperor, of the Aurelii family, who ordered the construction of the Antonine Wall in Britain.

  Arthur map Uther, a.k.a. Arturus Aurelius Vetarus, a.k.a. Artyr mac Ygrayna. The Pendragon, Dux Britanniarum (succeeded Uther). Son of Uther and Ygraine. Clan: Cwrnwyll, Brydein. Nickname: Artyr. Banner: scarlet dragon rampant on gold. Legendary name: King Arthur Pendragon.

  Arturus Aurelius Vetarus. See Arthur. Latin name loosely based on the ancient Roman format and in this story means “Arthur of the Aurelii, son of Uther.” After Abar-Gleann, some of his officers suggested that he add “Caledonius” (“Conqueror of Caledonia”) to his string, in grand old Roman tradition, but he declined.

  Artyr (ar-TEER) mac Ygrayna. See Arthur. Caledonaiche matronymic name format meaning “Arthur, son of Ygraine.” Name origin: Scottish Gaelic ar tir (“our country”).

  Bedwyr (BAYD-veer) map Bann. Highest-ranking officer (commander) of the Brytoni fleet. Son of Chieftain Bann. Clan: Lammor, Gododdin, Rheged. Legendary name: Sir Bedivere.

  Bohort. Centurion in the Brytoni army, Ayr Point garrison commander. Legendary name: Sir Bors de Ganis.

  Bryalla. Maidservant at Arbroch. Clan: Argyll, Caledon.

/>   Brychan (BREE-kahn). Guardsman at Port Dhoo-Glass.

  Caius Marcellus Ectorius. General (legate) in the Brytoni army, Camboglanna garrison commander. Son of Ectorius; Arthur’s foster brother. Nickname: Cai. Legendary name: Sir Kay the Seneschal.

  Catullus. Decurion in command of the Second Turma, First Ala, Bear Cohort, Dragon Legion of Brydein.

  Colgrim. King of the Angles. Banner: crimson eagle on white.

  Conall. One of the warriors bound by treaty to join the Horse Cohort of the Dragon Legion of Brydein. Clan: Argyll, Caledon.

  Conchobar. Late Laird of the Scáthaichean of Eireann. Father of Cuchullain. Banner: silver wolf running, on pine green.

  Cuchullain (koo-CULL-len) og Conchobar. Laird of the Scáthaichean of Eireann (succeeded Conchobar). Son of Conchobar; husband of Dierda. Nickname: Cucu. Banner: silver wolf running, on pine green. Legendary name: Cú Chulainn.

  Cynda (KEEN-dah). Gyanhumara’s wet nurse, confidante. Clan: Argyll, Caledon.

  Dafydd (DAHV-eeth) the Elder. Brytoni slave at Arbroch. Katra’s husband; father of Mari, Dafydd the Younger, and Samsen. Name origin: Brythonic variant of the name David.

  Dafydd (DAHV-eeth) the Younger. Son of Dafydd the Elder. Name origin: Brythonic variant of the name David.

  Dierda (dee-ER-dah). Scáthaichean noblewoman. Wife of Cuchullain. Nickname: Dee. Name origin: variant of the name Deirdre.

  Drustanus. Nephew of Marcus. Legendary name: Sir Tristan.

  Dumarec. Chieftain of Clan Moray of Dalriada, Brydein. Urien’s father. Banner: black boar’s head on gold.

  Ectorius. Late general (legate) in the Brytoni army. Father of Cai; foster father of Arthur. Legendary names: Sir Ector, Antor, Anton.

  Elian (EHL-ee-ahn). Centurion in the Brytoni army, Tanroc garrison commander. Dumarec’s cousin. Clan: Moray, Dalriada, Brydein.

  Erec. Guardsman at Port Dhoo-Glass.