by Jack Whyte
He did not know Nemo at first, and he failed at first even to recognize the token that she brought to him from Uther. Eventually, however, he took it from her, unwillingly she thought, and clutched it tightly in his hand, sitting down on a stump close to the fire and gazing at his clenched fist for a long time before opening his fingers and staring down at what he held. It was a plain, waxen seal, marked with a cross, the same token she had brought to him and to his father on several occasions. He sighed and spoke, but his voice was so low that Nemo could barely hear. She tried to move closer to where he sat, but her guards, who had received no orders to release her, held her back.
"Lord," she said loudly enough to penetrate his trance, "Lord Lagan, read the words from Uther, the King."
He sucked in a breath and turned to look at her, then waved the guards back.
"Your name is Nemo."
"Aye, lord."
"I remember you. Uther Pendragon is your King. Lot was my King, and I served him well. What of your King?"
"He is in Cornwall, lord, at war with Lot, and he calls for you to join him."
"He calls for me. To join him. Why should I? None but a fool would ever trust a King."
Nemo did not know how to respond to that, and so she stood silent for a while.
"You say he is at war with Lot? You lie. I am at war with Lot from night to night, and I have seen no sign of your King."
Still Nemo said nothing. The letter she had given Lagan lay where he had dropped it, unread, by his feet. Finally she pointed to it.
"Read his words. Lord Lagan. He wrote them for you weeks ago. He was marching then to attack Lot in the north."
Lagan looked from Nemo to the letter at his feet, and back again. "Words," he said. "Words win no fights. My wife and son were killed in order to send words to me."
"Read them, lord. I have brought them a long way for your eyes."
Lagan sighed again, then pointed his foot towards another stump close to the one on which he sat. "Sit. Eat." He turned to one of his men. "Bring him food." Then he reached down and picked up the package at his feet, breaking the seal with his thumb and spreading the folded paper that lay inside the leather wrapping, and for a time he sat whispering to himself as he read the closely inscribed words. Shortly after that, without another word to Nemo, he issued orders to assemble his army and prepare to march north.
Nemo looked on in amazement as his army gathered in the darkness between the fires in almost complete silence. It was not a large force. She estimated it as being less than one-quarter the size of Uther's. But she was struck by the air of grim determination that radiated from the men. They were all heavily armoured in a featureless mixture of odds and ends and bits and pieces of equipment, and beneath this ill-assorted gear they wore plain, drab clothing, in some cases little more than poorly tanned animal skins, that showed no uniformity of any kind and bore nothing in the way of marks or colour patches to distinguish them even to each other. They were heavily armed, too, with weapons of every description, from spears to heavy clubs and long, thick staves, and the majority of them carried shields slung across their backs. She saw bowmen among them, and axemen, but most carried spears and a sword of some type.
They moved in a silence that seemed almost sullen, with no orders being issued and no signs of any predetermined formations. And she saw no signs of levity or humour anywhere among them, not even the black humour of bored and frightened warriors. She had been told they marched and fought at night, using the darkness itself as a weapon to spread fear and terror among their enemies, and now it seemed right to her that they should move in such grim silence.
Only as his men began to move away into the trees, leaving their small fires still smouldering, did Lagan Longhead turn to look at her again. He gave no indication that she should come with them, but she interpreted his look as an invitation and moved to walk behind him. He stopped walking immediately and looked her up and down from head to toe.
"You have no weapons, no armour?"
"No, lord, save this." She showed him the short, thick-bladed dagger concealed beneath her tunic. "King Uther warned me not to go armed. I was to find you and attract no attention until then from anyone. I could run away from any threat like this and not be thought worth following. If anyone did follow me, the dagger would have been enough."
Lagan stared at her and then turned to one of the group of men surrounding him.
"Noric, find him some armour and a sword."
The fellow he had spoken to jerked his head in a sign for Nemo to follow him, and he led her to what served as Longhead's quartermaster's stores, a small handcart piled high with an assortment of armour and weaponry, most of it heavily stained and crusted with old blood. She searched quickly and dressed herself in a battered metal breastplate with a thick leather back-protector, both pieces slightly too small for her, a dented helmet that fitted her tolerably well and an ancient Roman kirtle of armoured straps that protected her groin. She even found an old Roman short-sword with a scuffed sheath and a serviceable belt, and a heavy, ungainly shield, rectangular in shape, made from layers of hardened bull hide, studded with iron lozenges and reinforced in the back by latticed strips of wooden lath. By the time she and her guide caught up with Lagan again, she felt prepared to defend herself adequately in the event of a fight.
They marched all night, although marching was a word that no Camulodian would have applied to their progress. What they did was walk steadily and slowly, threading their way by moonlight, always northward, through endless groves of stunted trees separated by expanses of barren, rocky, heath-covered ground that was treacherous and dangerous underfoot. They kept going even after the moon went down, picking their way more slowly in pitch darkness but progressing steadily enough by the light of the stars to make her believe that these Cornishmen were somehow gifted with better eyes than other men.
And then, in the first dim greyness of dawn, when the dew on the ground had turned to mist that rose up to shroud them all in wet, ghostly wreaths, they walked straight into the path of another large force of men advancing eastward from their left.
Longhead's scouts had detected the advancing enemy, but not in time to permit any avoidance of the danger. Lagan's clansmen fell back as far as they could and went to ground immediately, lying motionless and hoping to stay concealed while the other group passed by, and they were almost successful, but one unit of the advancing enemy swung far to the right of their fellows, literally walked onto some of Longhead's men, and the die was cast.
The Cornishmen, prepared, made the most of the surprise their unsuspected presence caused, but they were outnumbered from the start, and the enemy were better equipped, many of them wearing shirts of ring-mail that could deflect the sharpest spear point. Slowly, the tide of the fight turned against the Cornishmen.
Nemo had lost sight of Lagan in the opening moments of the battle, and she suspected that he might be dead. She herself was isolated at one point, soon after she first smelled the smoke of burning grass, with a score or so of Cornishmen, and they formed a defensive knot, standing shoulder to shoulder and battling in grim near-silence with the endless stream of men who surged towards them out of the smoke-filled mist. And then Nemo was struck on the head and knocked to the ground, unconscious.
When she regained her senses some time later, she was choking in dense smoke, but she was fully aware of where she was and of the danger she was in, lying alone and defenceless on the ground. Her head was aching violently, and she had to vomit before she could struggle back to her feet, at which point she discovered that she had lost both her helmet and her shield. She still held her sword in her hand, however, her knuckles sore from clutching it, and as she stood weaving, fighting for balance and blinking her eyes until her vision cleared, she saw another sword lying close by. Her world stopped swaying moments later and she bent and snatched up the second weapon.
The knot of men with whom she had been fighting had been reduced to half their number while she lay u
nconscious, but they were still close by, and as soon as she saw them she ran to join them again, hacking and slashing at the exposed backs of the few enemies between her and her former companions, knowing that she would be safer in the group than she would be alone. Some time after that, fighting on the extreme edge of the dwindling knot of clansmen, she sensed a threat to her left and swung around just in time to take a spear thrust in her side. As her attacker ripped his spearhead free, she flew at him in a rage, feeling no pain from the wound, and slashed her short-sword across his throat, severing the arteries there so that he fell away in a spray of lifeblood. She fell then, too, on top of him, and the mixture of their blood must have made it appear that they were both dead, for no one leaped forward to finish her off.
She had been fighting for what seemed like hours, although she had no idea of how much time had actually passed, and she was growing weaker by the moment. Her arms were heavy with fatigue, her entire body slick with blood, much of it her own, and she had to contend with the ragged pain of the deep wound in her left side, where the spear point had penetrated beneath the edge of her ill- fitting body armour and then been ripped out again. Its barbed edges had torn through flesh and muscle, and even though she had barely felt it at the time, her attention focused tightly upon killing her assailant, the pain was now threatening to overwhelm her. She knew that if she did not rest soon and staunch the wound somehow, she would simply fall down and die, or be killed as she lay helpless. Even as the thought passed through her mind, her knees gave way and she fell heavily, almost losing consciousness in a blinding flash of agony. And yet her awareness of danger was so strong that she immediately began to struggle to her feet again, digging the point of the longer of her two swords into the ground and attempting to use it as a prop to pull herself back to her feet. But she could not rise. She managed to struggle up until she was kneeling on one knee, leaning heavily on the sword, but she could go no farther, and her eyes teared over with the effort.
Only then did she realize, hazily, kneeling and swaying weakly from side to side, that she was alone and the fighting had passed her by. The only sounds of conflict she could hear were distant now, muffled by the roaring of the flames in the nearby trees.
Someone moaned aloud close by her, but there was no threat in the sound, and she ignored it. Another man screamed repeatedly in long, sustained crescendos, but he, too, was far away, somewhere off to her right.
She lowered herself to all fours, retaining her grip on her short- sword, and began crawling slowly towards a huge beech tree, aware that the ground at its base was covered with thick, springy moss. When she reached it, she pushed herself up until her back rested against the bole and then set to work to remove the armoured breastplate that she had borrowed from Lagan Longhead's supplies. It had been made for a shorter body than hers, and that had left the gap found by the spear point that had almost killed her.
Weak as she was, her fingers could not cope with the blood-slick straps and buckles of the harness, and so she cut the leather, shrugged out of the armour and then pulled up her tunic, baring the wound. It was wide and deep, and strips of raw flesh hung in tatters where the barbs of the spear had been ripped free. Blood welled from the long trench and flowed down over her hip. She gritted her teeth and struggled to pull the leather scrip at her side around to where she could reach into it, and from it she pulled a thick wad of cloth, the pads and binding strips she carried to deal with the monthly flow of her menses. She untied the bundle, setting the long strips aside and wadding the larger pieces into one thick pad, and then she tore up a double handful of the sphagnum moss she was sitting on and packed it as tightly as she could into the raw wound, sucking in her breath and biting down hard against the pain. She held the moss in place until the sickening waves of fresh pain receded, and then she carefully placed the cloth pad over it and bound it tightly in place with six long strips of cloth, each of them wrapped twice around her waist and knotted as tightly as she could pull them.
The pain lessened immediately, and the dressing felt tight and strong as she pulled her tunic back down, then cinched her wide leather belt closely around her, pulling it until she could hardly breathe and then using the point of her small eating knife to pierce a new hole in the leather strap. After that, she laid her sword across her knees and leaned back against the tree, wiping the blood from her hands with another handful of moss and then reaching into her scrip again for a small package of dried, smoked venison. It was practically inedible, and she had no appetite, but she knew she needed the strength and sustenance it would provide. It tasted and felt like tree bark in her mouth at first, but she persevered, chewing doggedly until her saliva had softened the stuff and she could taste the rank, smoky flavour of it. It was a large piece of meat, and she forced herself to sit there and gnaw at it, mouthful after mouthful, until it was consumed, and she felt her eyes begin to close against her volition.
Nemo opened her eyes suddenly, surprised that she had dozed off, her heart flaring with panic. No one was near her. She was still sitting propped against the bole of the beech tree, and the pain in her side had diminished to a dull ache. She fumbled gently at the dressing on her side, testing it. Nemo checked her hand then for signs of fresh blood, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped.
Moments later, she again heard the sound that had snapped her from her doze. It was a sustained, agonized screeching, coming from a tortured throat, a demented, inhuman series of shrieks that set her teeth on edge and caused a formless, queasy stirring in her guts. She knew it was a man screaming and vaguely remembered having heard it earlier, but it seemed to her that the screaming had been more distant then. Now it was close by, and it sounded far worse than it had, and that frightened her, because she knew that such a thing could not be possible. No man who was wounded badly enough to produce such sounds could possibly move anywhere. Her entire skin rose up in a gooseflesh of superstitious horror as the thought came to her that the demonic sounds might not be coming from a man at all but from some hideous goblin, drawn from the blackness of the underworld by the smell of all the blood that had been spilled here in this place.
She was on her feet, holding her breath and clutching the hill of her sword in both hands before she even knew she could move. Her head was filled with the ungodly screaming in the middle distance, and until the sound died away into silence she stood staring about her wildly, her back pressed against the trunk of the tree. Then she became aware of the stillness that surrounded her. The morning mists had evaporated and the winds had died away, and because of that the fires had died down so that the blackened trees on her right only smouldered now, angry smoke drifting silently upward on the edges of her sight, rising into lowering rain clouds. No bird sang and no breath of air disturbed the sullen calm. No sound of battle or movement anywhere. Nothing except the sound of her own heart pounding in her ears. Nemo looked about her at the carnage, unable to count the corpses that littered the ground, observing the way the bodies of her former companions all lay together where they had fallen, in a clear line that ended in a tangled knot of bodies, a long windrow of corpses showing the direction and distance of their slow advance into annihilation.
Suddenly the screaming came again, louder and more agonized than before, and this time she could tell where it was coming from, directly ahead of her when she turned slightly to her left. The ground there rose gently to a low ridge, and the sounds were coming from beyond that. And then, because it was the last thing in the world that she wanted to do, she sheathed her sword slowly and began to move towards the awful noise, biting down hard and pressing her left hand against the bulky dressing over the wound in her side as she placed one foot carefully ahead of the other, step after faltering step, surprised that she was even capable of movement. Slowly, painfully, she moved towards the low ridge, bending into the rising ground and leaning for support on everything and anything that came close to her and was big enough to bear her weight.
She saw the crown of the trees even
before she breasted the ridge, and her throat closed up in terror as she recognized immediately what they represented: a Druidic circle of ancient oaks, towering over the scrub trees that surrounded them. But still she moved forward, until she reached the crest of the low ridge and could see them clearly, and she was appalled but unsurprised to hear that the unearthly screaming was issuing from there. Her eyes were filmed with tears from the effort of climbing the slight incline, but a huge image of her long- forgotten father's face, hated and feared throughout her childhood, interposed itself between her and the circle. He had come for her, she knew, and the screams were his—rage and anger, hatred and despair blended into one demanding, unforgiving summons. A chill shook her entire body, reminding her of the bowel-loosening terror she had known once before, when she had chased the witch, Cassandra, to her lair. But she had killed the witch. Perhaps, if the gods willed it, she could kill the ghost of Leir the Druid the same way, with black iron. Unsteadily, her head reeling. Nemo drew her sword again and moved down towards the ring of oaks.
She was unaware of time passing as she crossed the distance to the nearest tree in the circle, making her way slowly and painfully around and between the clumps of hawthorn and hazel that had grown up around the perimeter of the circle over countless years. All her attention was focused upon the screaming, which seemed to grow weaker and less strident as she approached. Finally she reached the first great tree and leaned against it, her face against the bark, her legs shaking with fear and her entire body drenched with clammy sweat as she tried to will herself to straighten up and move on. And as she leaned there, exhausted, a hand clamped on her shoulder.