Camulod Chronicles Book 3 - The Eagles' Brood

by Whyte, Jack

  He had lain unconscious all night long, and had struggled in and out of awareness for most of the following day. Only a short time before my arrival had he managed to pull himself out of the hollow where he lay and to attempt to find someone to help him. He had seen me coming, and had recognized me, but had been unable to call to me. Fortunately I had noticed him moving, and now he had passed on the warning, making it my responsibility: Uther Pendragon was headed blindly southward, through rough and roadless terrain that made for heavy, slow going, into a confrontation that he thought would give him the advantage of surprise. Instead, he would find Lot waiting for him with two armies and the sea at his back, while a third army followed hot on Uther's own heels. Uther and his entire force would be annihilated.

  Even as I listened, hearing the tortured frailty of his voice and the shallowness of his breathing, I was deciding that I would have to leave young Bassus there alone. He was dying, and rapidly—of that I had not the slightest doubt. But I had to be on my way immediately. I could not afford the luxury of waiting with him even for a short time, and both of us knew that. He would die, and I would—I must—leave him to handle it alone. My personal feelings for Uther were of no importance now, beside the imperative need to find him in time to warn him to turn his army and the men of Camulod around and away from the fate that awaited them.

  Bassus finished speaking and fell backward, his eyes closed. I knelt above him, the fingers of one hand grasping his wrist, feeling the still-beating pulse. Sighing, and feeling wretched, I began to rise to my feet and as I did so a cloud of fluttering, fighting crows and gulls swept along the hillside, their jarring voices tearing at my ears. The eyes beneath me snapped open and the dying man followed me flight of the birds with wide, horror-filled eyes. I bent forward and laid my hand on his forehead. It was cold and clammy. I felt his head move in a negative, his eyes still staring. He tried to say something else and I bent closer to hear. And then, in a voice so weak that I could barely make it out, he told me to go, but begged me to kill him first, not to let the crows at him while he still lived. A chilling rush of fear and revulsion swept over me. How could I kill him? He was my friend and had given me nothing but loyalty and obedience. How could I reward him by killing him?

  And then, of course, the answer came to me in terms that I could not refute. I could not save him, nor could I remain with him until he died. The lives of too many others depended upon my speed and every moment was too precious now. But neither could I abandon him, leaving him to await, in terror, the arrival of the first filthy carrion crow to alight on his face and pluck out an eye while he was still alive. I wrestled with the truth of that for what seemed an eternity before I nodded silently to him. He read my expression correctly, nodding his own thanks in return. I stood erect, telling him to close his eyes. He did so, and I drew my long cavalry sword, placing its point carefully beneath the arch of his ribs, angling it upward. He drew one last, deep breath and held it, and I dropped, throwing my full weight onto the hilt of the sword, driving it deep into his heart. He convulsed, his legs kicked wildly once and then he was still.

  I turned him on his face to hide his brown eyes from the crows, and then I piled what rocks I could find around him in a symbolic gesture of burial. Only then did I clean my blade, before transferring my saddle to my spare mount and riding off quickly without looking back, leading the black and the pack-horse. It was mid-afternoon.

  Towards nightfall, I almost rode into disaster, coming upon a group of five mounted men riding towards me. Fortune dictated I should be almost completely screened from their sight at first, however, hidden by a fringe of branches on the last trees of a small copse of stunted hawthorn through which I had been riding, following a narrow, well-worn path. They were approaching the copse, talking among themselves and clearly expecting to meet no one. All five wore brown tunics with a black boar painted or embroidered on their chests. I knew after only the quickest glance around me that I had no chance of hiding from them. There was nowhere to hide, and if I tried to run they would hear me. They were close enough to see me plainly already, if they had but looked. I had no choice.

  The first man was flung from his horse's back by the force of my arrow before his closest companion realized anything had happened. Stunned by the suddenness of his friend's death, the fellow made the mistake of turning in his saddle to see what had happened to him. My second arrow struck him in the neck, piercing the stretched skin beneath the point of his backward-craning jaw and knocking him, too, over his horse's rump. I killed a third man before the two remaining cursed and broke apart, to right and left, only one of them having seen me, finally, among the branches ahead of them. I snapped a shot at him but missed, and then they were away from me, galloping their horses at top speed. I swung my own mount around and headed back the way I had come, pulling off the path eventually and heading deeper into the copse, to my right. I heard voices behind me, and then a horn blowing. They would be close behind me, I knew, for one of them had seen, even in his fright, that I was alone.

  They chased me for hours, higher and higher into the low hills, and only when night fell did I feel safe enough to dismount in a bush-filled hollow and feed my beasts before trying to snatch some sleep, rolling myself in my cloak and stretching out almost under the hooves of my three horses.

  I had lost my pursuers. The following morning, creeping cautiously through the mists of early dawn on the hillside, straining my eyes and ears, I could see or hear no signs of them. I saddled up and moved out slowly, taking care to move in silence and to stay well clear of higher ground where I might be seen from below. Towards mid-morning I headed downhill again and angled my search once more in the direction of the broad path trampled by the armies moving ahead of me. All that day and the next I rode, seeing signs of death all around me, but hearing no human voice and seeing no signs of life.

  Then, towards the middle of the afternoon of the third day after my encounter with the Cornishmen, I came on the aftermath of an extensive battle and rode slowly into a landscape that threatened to shrivel the mind. The killing ground was an enormous meadow, scattered with stunted trees and spread out at the base of a hollow formed by the sides of four shallow hills. Bodies lay everywhere, strewn in windrows and stacked in formations, scattered at random and heaped in piles, men and animals together. The fighting was over, but it had ended only very shortly before my arrival. The screams and moans of wounded men and horses were deafening, and the stink of blood and offal was a tangible presence. Hundreds of men and women moved through the chaos, drawn from I knew not where. Many of them were helping the wounded, although I knew that many others were plundering friend and foe, living and dead alike. Others, soldiers of both armies, were killing wounded horses, silencing their awful screams. No one approached me or sought to hinder me as I rode through the madness. Here and there I could see pairs of men, running in tandem, carrying stretchers. Other pairs moved more slowly, their stretchers loaded with wounded. I traced the centre of their activity and made my way to where they gathered, recognizing first one and then several of our own medics as I approached.

  Mucius Quinto was in charge of the assembly ground. He was a grey-haired veteran almost as old as Lucanus, to whom he was second in command. I found him, flanked by two strong young soldiers, kneeling beside a young man whose breast was thick with blood. Quinto and his people had cleared an area on the eastern side of the great field, and had assembled rows and rows of wounded and dying men from both armies, dozens of rows and hundreds of men, more being brought in all the time. His helpers were our own soldiers, for the most part, although I saw many wearing the brown and black tunics of Lot's Cornishmen. There were no soldiers here in this field now, no enemies; only tired and grateful survivors. There were Druids there, too, moving among the wounded, and a scattering of women here and there, camp followers, I supposed, too stunned to really care. No matter who they were, they were working to appease the pain of the men who had been soldiers and were now men again, br
oken and bleeding.

  Quinto did not even look up at me when I drew rein beside him. I climbed down from my saddle and stood watching as the young man at his knees, no more than a boy in truth, shuddered, convulsed and died, his blank and empty eyes staring up into mine. Quinto paused, his hand outstretched where it had frozen at the sound of the boy's death rattle, then his shoulders seemed to slump and his hand moved again, changing direction to close the staring eyes gently. He paused again, as though collecting himself, and then he was up and moving to the next man, while his two companions picked up the dead youth by the wrists and ankles and carried him away to make room for another. Before they had moved out of his sight Quinto was leaning over the new man, checking for a pulse, then flipping the man's tunic up to cover his dead face. He moved on again as two other men removed that body, and I moved with him. He still had not looked at me.

  An ear-shattering scream erupted suddenly from a nearby knot of men clustered tightly around a table, all of them soaked in blood and hunched in a tense struggle to restrain someone beneath them, and I heard the distinctive rasp of a saw going through living bone. Quinto glanced towards the sounds, half checked his step, and then moved on to examine the next man in line. I stepped close to him.

  "Quinto."

  He turned on me, prepared to savage me for my interruption, then gaped in recognition and I saw his eyes move wonderingly the length of my clean, unbloodied, armoured body.

  "Merlyn." His voice was lifeless, belying the surprise in his eyes. "-Where did you come from? A rescue? You're too late."

  I shook my head, holding his gaze. "No, Quinto, I'm alone. What happened?"

  "What happened?" His face twitched into an abrupt laugh that was chilling in its bitterness. "What happened? Can't you see? We had a war. A whole war in the space of two or three hours, and we lost." He looked away from me, his voice dropping as his eyes moved around the ranks of dead and dying. "God, how we lost! And what we've lost! A generation, Merlyn...an entire generation.... There'll be no quick recovery from this..." His voice died away completely, then resumed, his tone now hard and angry. "We weren't vanquished, Merlyn. We were utterly and completely crushed.. shattered and scattered.. .There must have been ten of them for every one of us. Outlanders, mostly. Ersemen. We didn't have a chance, and Uther led us in here blindly to this... this slaughter ground."

  "How, Quinto? What happened? And where's Uther now?"

  Quinto sniffed and wiped his nose wearily with his sleeve. "I haven't got time to talk. There's too much to do and I should be cutting. Some of my assistants are very young, and untrained—untrained for carnage on this scale, at any rate." He moved away and I followed him and three of the next four men he looked at were already dead. The fourth, a Cornishman, had a shattered leg. Quinto sent him to the cutting table. The next man, one of our own, was also dead, his chest crushed into a large, ball-shaped depression. Quinto shook his head.

  "Your cousin's toy," Quinto grunted. "I wonder if he ever thought, when he came up with that bright idea, to see it used against his own people? And look at this." He had stooped to kneel beside another man, whose entire jaw had been shattered and torn away from his upper face. "Tell me, Caius Merlyn, what in the face of the sweet Christ's mercy can ever justify this kind of savagery by one man to another?

  Or any of this madness?" I barely heard what he said. My mind was still on the wound the previous man had borne, made by what Quinto had called my cousin's toy.

  "Quinto, what did you mean by my cousin's toy?"

  He didn't look at me as he answered, intent as he was on attempting to repair the shattered face beneath him. "Just what I said..." He shook his head. "This is hopeless. Nothing I can do. At least he's not conscious..." Now he looked up at me and began rising to his feet again. "Your cousin Uther's toy. The flail he made; the ball on a chain. It's been—what—three years since then? Now the damn things are everywhere. I suppose you just can't keep a good idea secret."

  My head was reeling. What was he telling me? He had moved on again and I had to step quickly to catch up to him, clutching at his sleeve.

  "What do you mean, they're everywhere? I haven't seen any."

  He frowned, angry at such trivial talk in the face of so much need. "Then you must be blind. What else do you think could make a wound like that, crushing bones to jelly?" He jerked his thumb savagely towards the man with the crushed chest. "Half the men in Camulod have them, and more than half the men in Lot's damned army, it appears. Now leave me alone. I've got work to do."

  But I had not been blind. I had been oblivious and without memory. I still clutched his sleeve, recognizing his impatience. "I'll leave you alone, I promise, but I must know. Where is Uther? And where is Lot of Cornwall?"

  He wrenched his arm free, turning away from me, then stopped and looked back at me with a granting sigh.

  "They're together, wherever they are. Where else would they be? When he saw we were beaten, Uther escaped with his reserves to the south—there, between those two hills. I saw them go. So did Lot. He was up on that hill, over there to the east. We had been in a running fight with an army of Ersemen who'd been chewing at our heels for days. I was with Uther and the leading party when we came out into this valley and he saw a chance to turn and fight them. He led us up there, onto the flank of that hill, and as we began to climb it, getting ready to turn and face the enemy, Lot led an army over the top above us, and another entire army, thousands of men, came through the two passes on either side of us. We were trapped from the outset. They'd been waiting for us to do exactly what we did. From then on, it was pure slaughter. Uther managed to cut his way sideways, across the hill and down across the field here and up the eastern flank, but he had less than a thousand men with him. Once there, there was nothing he could do to help anyone. It was all over too quickly. Lot had the advantage from the outset and it kicked the guts out of our men. And when some of our people tried to surrender, they were cut down anyway, so the rest of us prepared to die fighting.

  "That's when Uther decided to run..." A long pause. "Uther's no coward. I know why he ran. He knew that if he escaped, with the women, Lot would follow him forever and the rest of us left here might have a chance."

  "With the women? What women?"

  He looked at me as though I should have no need to ask such a simple question. "Lot's women. The queen and her people... Any way, that's what happened. Lot and his savages took off after Uther's group and left us fighting. But all his people followed him, even the ones who were engaged with us. When they saw the others leave, they left us and followed them, and the fighting was over. That was about three hours ago. The rest you know."

  "How did Uther come by Lot's queen?"

  He shook his head, dismissing my question as trivial. "I can't tell you that, Commander. I do not enjoy your cousin's confidence. I only know that we collected her in passing from one of Lot's strongholds, after we started our march south."

  I did not know what to make of this information, but I dismissed it as unimportant beside the urgency of my pursuit of Uther.

  "I have to find them."

  "Then God go with you, Caius Merlyn. You'll need His help."

  "Which way should I go from here?"

  He nodded towards the south. 'They left by that southern valley. Be cautious, Merlyn."

  "I will, my friend. Farewell."

  I left him to his work and remounted my horse, closing my eyes and ears to the miserable sights and sounds around me, and for the next quarter-hour I picked my way carefully through that awful field.

  I had almost won clear of the battlefield when I heard my name being called. I drew rein and looked in the direction of the voice, and there was Popilius, our senior centurion, sitting against the bole of a small tree less than thirty paces from me. I was shocked at almost failing to recognize him at first glance. Popilius had always been my exemplar of military propriety, polished and shorn and brightly armoured, upright and solid and thoroughly dependable in every circu
mstance. The man at whom I found myself gaping now was different from the image I carried of him in almost every respect.

  He was without armour, for one thing, and his right thigh was swathed in bandages crusted with dried blood and dirt. His left arm was cradled in a sling made of coarse, grey woollen cloth torn from a blanket, and the fingers of the hand that protruded from its cradle were curled and clawlike, also wrapped in blood-stained bandages. The entire left side of his face was bruised into a blackened mass, and his hair, which I suddenly noticed for the first time was long and" white, hung unkempt and matted over his forehead, which bore the striations of pain like horizontal bars above his eyes. His chin was coated in grizzled, grey-white stubble. Popilius had grown old, very suddenly.

  I leaped from my horse and made my way to where he lay sprawled, almost supine, against his tree trunk. An empty wineskin lay beside him and I smelled its harsh, sour vinum on his clothes and on his breath. He was lucid, however, and his forehead was cool to my touch, and I quickly assured myself that his injuries were not life threatening. He told me he had taken a sword slash to the thigh and an arrow through the forearm in the running fight the day before they blundered into Lot's trap. He had been a non- combatant this day, helpless to influence anything, watching the entire, catastrophic battle in frustrated rage from the deck of a wagon Quinto's people had been using to transport the wounded. No one had paid him any attention, either during or after the battle. He had not eaten anything since the night before, and had drunk all his wine, finishing it gluttonously hours earlier in hope of finding oblivion from the horror that surrounded him. He had thought he was dreaming when he recognized me riding by, a vision in my cleanliness and wholeness.

  I could not simply leave him there as I had found him. He was Popilius Cirro, one of the last of my father's most trusted friends, and he deserved some show of care from me. Forcing myself to stifle my restlessness and the urging that prompted me to rush on callously in my pursuit of Uther, I fed him from my own supplies and spent some time changing the dressings on his wounds, using strips torn from a spare, clean tunic from my saddle bags. That done, I found some water on a nearby wagon, probably the one he had occupied, and washed him as well as I could, before helping him to move and arranging him as comfortably as possible on a grassy knoll.