Marrock walked to the curtained-off bedchamber at the back of the dome-shaped home. Towering over six feet, he stooped to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling and quietly admired his wife, Ariene, nursing their youngest one-year-old son. With her back turned, she was the epitome of beauty, her hips shaped like a daffodil bulb. He could wrap his hands around her tiny waist. The shimmer of her silver-blonde hair reminded him of lustrous wolf fur. He bent over to nibble her neck, but when she turned and winced, he knew his grotesque face repulsed her. Though some had said the same about his wife, he found the purplish birthmark on her forehead and eyelid as part of her allure. He gave Ariene a faint smile and crawled around his older sleeping son, barely two, to watch his youngest suckle her breast. Thank the gods both of his sons had fair smooth skin, ruddy cheeks, and hair as red as the rising sun.
When Ariene was pregnant with each, she beseeched the Mother Goddess to bless her children with comely looks absent any marks. She was granted her wish. Some people from the village said the boys had the faces of gods.
Marrock felt a twinge of regret that he once had similar features as his sons. That was until seven years ago when Catrin summoned the ravens to peck out chunks of his face. Every day since, he had to live with relentless pain that at times became unbearable on cold wintry days. The only way he could escape the suffering was to shape-shift into a wolf. Just then, he sensed his wolf pack calling out to him for a hunt.
Only blood and raw flesh could assuage his hunger pangs now.
First, he had to tell his wife that he would be away that evening.
An ear-racking wail jerked Marrock from his predatory craving. He looked down to find his older son hanging onto his leg. Not only did Marrock’s face throb, but his ears rung from his little warrior’s shrieks. He lifted the boy and shook him. “Enough!”
The boy’s face scrunched and he screamed his lungs out until his skin turned ice blue, and he went limp.
Marrock glanced at Ariene. “That boy of yours needs to control his temper and take a breath.”
Ariene rolled her eyes. “Set him down. He will be quieter when he wakes.”
Laying the boy next to Ariene, Marrock said, “I need to go to the forest and join my wolf pack.”
“Will you be gone long?”
“As long as it takes for my wolf’s essence to give me a sign about what to do in the meeting with the Roman senator.” Marrock sat next to Ariene. “Did you speak to your father about including me in the council? I fear he wavers on his promise to place us as rulers over the Cantiaci kingdom.”
Ariene picked up the waking toddler while juggling the younger at her breast. “I have told Father that he needs to speak with you on all matters, but my pleas fall on deaf ears. He insists a political marriage between my brother, Adminius, and one of Amren’s daughters might give him what he needs to wield control over the Cantiaci.”
“Bahhh!” Marrock spat. “I swear to the gods of the Otherworld that I will never let this happen! Nothing can stand in my way of taking what is rightfully mine. And you, my beloved, will share in the glory as my queen.”
Ariene reached for Marrock’s hand. “I also desire this. I want my people to look at us with respect and not avert their eyes as if we are monsters.”
“That still happens to you?” Marrock asked, grimacing. “I had hoped those minions had accepted the marks on our faces as signs from the gods that we are their divine messengers.”
“Well … I do not see it that way.” Ariene paused. “Some of the people believe I was born with the mark of an evil spirit.”
The sadness in his wife’s face reflected what Marrock felt every time a person cringed at his hideous face. He reassured her, “I promise this will all change.”
Ariene asked with pleading eyes, “Why not stay here with me when you connect with your wolf?”
Marrock stiffened. “I need the forest’s temple stillness.” He staggered to his feet, trying to avoid hitting his massive shoulders against the wall. “I need to go. Walk me to the door.”
Ariene pushed herself up, the baby’s mouth still clutching her nipple and the toddler clinging to her skirt. Shifting the youngest boy to her hip, she walked with Marrock to the entryway where he leaned over, dodging his son’s punch, to kiss his diminutive wife on the cheek.
Now ready to join his wolf pack, he pushed the door open.
Outside, Marrock walked around the house nestled in a clearing. A half-morning ride from the Catuvellauni capital, his domain provided him the isolation he needed to conjure spells and perform sacrifices. Beside his thatched-roof house was a small plot of land where his wife grew awful-tasting turnips that made his stomach cramp. Toward the back of the home were corrals for white cattle, sheep, and a couple of pigs—their meat more agreeable to his predatory stomach.
He continued his journey into the forest where a canopy of trees, thickets, and vines snaking from branches obscured the sunlight, making it difficult for him to find the patchwork footpath of gravel and grass. The path meandered around a majestic beech, to a scrubby hazelnut, and between some white willows—trees that provided natural ingredients for his concoctions. He finally spotted the towering oak that rose above the verdure landscape. Near the oak, he yanked some creeping plants away to reveal skulls lodged in carved-out cavities in a wooden gateway. At the bottom were children’s skulls, some of which had been stillborn babies. Higher up were the cracked skulls of unfortunate travelers who Marrock had sacrificed. At eye level, he found his most precious skull wrapped in white linen. He carefully pulled it out, and unraveled the fabric from the cranial bone. He lovingly gazed at its empty eye sockets.
“Hello, Mother.”
The clenched jaw did not respond. For Marrock, there was something pure and spiritual about the silent skull. It was the temple that encased his mother’s soul before she was brutally beheaded by his father, King Amren.
Marrock recalled the day, almost twenty years past, when his father forced him to watch his mother’s execution. Since then, he recited his mother’s curse word-for-word every morning to emblazon him to pursue his ambition of overthrowing his father. To do so, he knew he had to ally first with the mighty Roman Empire. With Cunobelin and the Romans now wavering on their support for his claims, he was no longer sure if he could fulfill his mother’s curse.
Rubbing the skull’s eye sockets, Marrock again relived the horror when he was an eight-year-old boy watching his beloved mother’s head fly off her body. He should have caught the head, not the dim-witted Agrona who let it slip through her hands and thump on the ground. When Marrock knelt to touch his mother’s head, rivulets of blood stained his hands.
Emptiness rotted away Marrock’s soul. Two weeks after the execution, he dug his mother’s head out of the refuse heap. The sight of maggots slithering in and out of the nasal cavities, eye sockets, and teeth made his stomach roil with disgust. The putrid rotten-egg odor made him retch.
Then a compulsion to remove the filth from his mother’s head took control of him. He polished her skull as brilliant as the full moon at its zenith. Using vinegar-soaked cloth, he wiped the greenish-black slime away from his mother’s face and rinsed her head in healing pond water. For a week, he soaked the head in a vat of urine to remove any residual filth away from the bone, then meticulously scraped off all the hair with a knife and polished the bone with a whetstone. This was the first head he enshrined in the Gateway of Skulls.
Until he was a young man, Marrock believed his mother’s soul resided in the skull, but Agrona informed him otherwise. “Queen Rhan’s soul possessed me the instant her severed head slipped through my hands. I am your mother, Rhan.”
Marrock at first refused to believe Agrona, but he slowly accepted the Druidess, the same age as him, was indeed the essence of Rhan. Although Marrock knew the skull was an empty vessel, rubbing its smooth surface soothed him before joining the wolf pack. He s
at down on thick grass, crossed his long legs, and placed the skull on his lap. Eyes fixed on the setting sun’s crimson light filtering through the trees, he chanted:
Red Wolf, join my soul.
Forge my thoughts and body into wolf form.
Take me forward to the sunset of my father’s demise
And to the dawn of my rising.
Reveal the portal from which I will reap new powers.
A light flashed in Marrock’s mind, a sign he had connected with his red wolf’s essence, his eyesight sharpening and ears hearing the crunch of faraway twigs. The next step was to shape-shift. His jaw tensed in anticipation of the ordeal when he began the transformation. He howled from the horrific pain racking his body. His head spun in a vortex of white light. It felt as if glass shards were blasting into his brain.
An instant later, he felt a cold breeze whisk past his face and below him, he found wolf paws bouncing off the ground. His heart beat faster, keeping pace with his stride. Around him were three she-wolves and a juvenile male forging as a unified pack with him. The wolf companions understood his true essence—a predator born to cull weaker creatures from his kingdom. The pack followed him without question and worshipped him as the horned god who blessed them with bountiful prey.
Born under the blood moon, Marrock believed he was destined to reap the dark powers of the Ancient Druids. With god-like abilities to summon nature’s forces and to shape-shift, he would strike fear into his enemies like lightning bolts. Then he would overthrow his father and conquer all tribal kingdoms on the isle. Ultimately, he would clamp the people under the power of his jaws.
The musky odor of a deer suddenly tantalized Marrock’s nose. He moved toward a meadow where he saw an eight-point stag, a doe, and their fawn grazing. With so few wolves in his pack, he knew they could not overtake all the deer in an outright chase. He changed his strategy: move upwind, surround the prey, and maneuver them into a weakened vantage.
Marrock slowed his pace to a crawl. He growled at the nearby slate-black wolf and directed her to the other side of the glade. The other wolves hid in the thickets and quietly waited for his signal. For the plan to work, the Black needed to chase the deer toward the other wolves. She must bring the fawn down, forcing the stag and doe to defend their young. He sensed the black she-wolf’s excitement when he finally gave the command.
The Black leapt between two hedges and three strides later locked her fangs around the fawn’s hind legs while the stag and doe dashed toward the woods. As Marrock anticipated, the stag slowed, veered, and lowered its antlers in full charge at the Black that was pulling the struggling fawn down to the ground. Just as the stag lowered its head to thrust the antlers into the Black’s side, Marrock and the silver-furred wolf lunged at the stag’s flanks. His fangs sheared through the thick hide and into tissue. The stag’s powerful body jolted and twisted, shaking Marrock off. The next instant, he felt sharp antlers thrust into his side, knocking the air out of him. His head then spun from the motion of tumbling and rolling on the ground until he smacked against a tree trunk. Slightly dazed, he watched the stag disappear into a grove of hawthorn trees.
His attention then turned to other wolves surrounding the Black as she tore the hide away from the fawn’s belly to expose the guts. The pompous glint in the Black’s stare caught Marrock’s eye. The bitch reminded him of his step-mother, Rhiannon—the Regni slut who stole his birthright and feasted on what was rightfully his. The bitch’s insolence of solely devouring the meat before him, the alpha male, made his blood boil. Infuriated, he sprang to his paws and charged the Black. Snarling and baring his fangs, he forced the Black away from the carcass.
The she-wolf cowered and pressed her head on front paws in a bow. From deep in his throat, Marrock growled and snapped his jaws, reinforcing he was alpha male. The Black scooted back and crept to the nearby brambles. The other wolves took their rightful place at the blood-soaked feast and heartily gorged on the baby deer’s tissue, sinew, and blood.
Marrock’s powerful jaws crunched the fawn’s head and cracked the skull open. Through the cracks in the bone, he sucked out the brain and fed on the fawn’s essence. With his hunger sated, another physiological need took hold of him.
The aroma of the silver wolf in heat excited him. The Silver bit at his neck and yelped. He playfully tossed his head and pounced at her. She jumped back and teased him with her musky scent. He sniffed and licked the sumptuous tissue under her tail, the taste driving him mad with lust. Only the Silver could appease his libido. He mounted the she-wolf and wrapped his front legs around her girth to thrust into her, his head dizzy with euphoria.
The ecstatic delirium was disrupted when he heard shrieks that ran a shiver down his spine. Ravens, circling overhead, swooped one-by-one down on the fawn’s body. The other wolves made faint attempts to ward off these unwelcome scavengers. The ravens dodged the wolves’ jaws while scooping bloody tissue into their elongated beaks.
Cunning creatures, Marrock fumed. Foragers always stealing my meal.
Agrona told him that ravens carried souls to the Otherworld. The raven’s ability to fly readily between the spiritual and mortal worlds was a power a wolf did not have. Only Catrin, born with the raven spirit, had this ability.
The sun’s gold light suddenly pierced through the trees and projected a vision before Marrock. The antlers of the stag were entangled in the branches of a hawthorn. Nearby was a rosewood staff capped with a gold globe. On the globe’s polished surface was etched the image of the sun god driving a two-horse chariot. When he touched the staff, electrical charges webbed from the surface of the globe into him and then flashed through the air into the antlers.
When Marrock drew out of his vision, he found himself in his human form sitting near the oak under streams of twinkling stars. Head pounding, he sat there for awhile orienting himself to the human world, his breathing labored.
When his mind finally settled, he flinched from the stabbing pain in his side where the stag had butted him. He staggered to his feet and stumbled blindly through the pitch-black forest, stretching out his hands to detect any obstacles. Lumbering between the trees, he mulled over the vision’s meaning and then words mystically tumbled out of his mouth. “The power lies in the head. The gateway of skulls connects to the portal.”
By the time Marrock reached home, he realized that for him to summon the dark powers of the Ancient Druids from the Otherworld, he must place his father’s skull with the others in the archway. Considering it further, he must also harvest the skulls of the bitch queen, Rhiannon, and her daughters, to serve as a conduit to the forces from the Otherworld. He could then summon the mystical energy to meld with his enemies’ minds to subdue them while the forces of nature destroyed them.
Though the meaning of the sun god’s emblem on the staff’s globe confounded Marrock, he knew the staff was symbolic of the Ancient Druids’ ability to draw magic from the Otherworld. With the potential that Cunobelin might concede to King Amren and withdraw his support, Marrock recognized that he had to win Rome’s alliance, so their legion could help him overthrow his father. He could no longer rely only on Ariene to influence her father for support.
Somehow, someway, he must retrieve the Apollo staff’s authority to assure his legacy as the King of all Britons.
20
Out of Ashes
Give me a glorious victory in Britannia, so I can rise out of the ashes of my fallen forefathers—Mark Antony and Iullus Antonius.
In the tented Roman headquarters near the Catuvellauni capital, Senator Lucius Antonius again read the letter from Emperor Tiberius and groaned. After all the meticulous planning he and his compatriot, Praetor Marcus Licinius Crassus Frugi, had done to prepare for the invasion of Britannia, everything was starting to fall apart. Ever since the mysterious death of the emperor’s son, Tiberius was losing heart for invading. There had to be a way he could convince the emperor o
f the necessity of conquering the isle rich in farmlands and metals that would add substantial wealth to the imperial coffers. If Lucius demonstrated his political prowess by spearheading the invasion, he would assure his ultimate ambition of being elected as consul. Perhaps, he could persuade the emperor’s most influential confidant, Praetorian Prefect Sejanus, to speak in favor of the expedition. He would write his oldest son, Brutius, to gain Sejanus’s ear about the benefits of the invasion.
Lucius sighed. If only Marcellus was more malleable to his will like his older brother. With comely features resembling Mark Antony, Marcellus would be a perfect match for Praetor Frugi’s daughter. The nuptial agreement between the families would be another step for Lucius’s elevation to consul.
Lucius mumbled, “What on earth happened to Marcellus that changed him so much the last two years?”
Up to the age of sixteen, Marcellus had demonstrated the qualities of becoming a successful politician—a top student in oratory, rhetoric, and military strategy. But, earlier in the year, Lucius had to quell ugly rumors that his youngest son had been hauled drunk to the family villa after bedding a harlot. His greatest fear was Marcellus would repeat the curse of the Antonius men who drew women like ravens to carrion.
Lucius grimaced, recalling his humiliation after being banished to Gaul when his father, Iullus, was accused of adultery with Augustus’s daughter and forced to fall on his sword. It was only after the death of Augustus that Tiberius allowed him to return to Rome. Lucius clawed to give Marcellus every advantage for success that he never had. Still, his son recklessly squandered all that away. Perhaps, the barbaric Cantiaci could enlighten Marcellus on the errors of his ways while he was held as their hostage.
The sound of loud footsteps entering the tent drew Lucius out of his contemplation. Looking up, he found Tribune Decimus Flavius saluting on the other side of the table piled with scrolls, wax tablets, ink bottles, and styluses.
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