by Angus Watson
He wandered down to the riverbank. A couple of swans stood up, arses waggling like elderly washerwomen’s. They gave Ragnall a We’re not scared of you, in fact you should be scared of us, but we were leaving anyway look, launched themselves into the river and drifted off downstream. You didn’t often see swans in populous southern Britain those days because people tended to eat them. Ragnall took the sighting as a good omen.
He walked upriver and soon found two straight young poplars. He cut down the trees and stripped them with the iron hatchet that had come all the way from the Island of Angels as part of their camping kit. “When you travel by horseback, you can travel heavy,” he remembered Drustan saying when they set out what seemed like a lifetime ago. He chopped a pace’s length off each of the poplar poles, then lashed the four spars together with leather strips to produce a rectangular frame with four shafts. The shape reminded him of the shark’s egg cases – mermaid’s purses, Anwen had called them – that littered the Island of Angels’ beaches. Again, that conjured images of just a few days before, when he’d had a family and a fiancée. He almost slumped to the ground with grief for his parents and brothers, but stiffened himself and got back to work.
The adult poplars nearby provided plenty of sticks and twigs for weaving through the frame to create a bed. He dragged the litter back to their camp and found his teacher still asleep. He built up the fire to keep animals away, checked Drustan again, then headed off up the road to explore.
Chapter 18
“This is it, boss,” said Savage Banba, riding next to Weylin on a fresh horse. The one she’d ridden to Bladonfort could no longer walk. Banba looked fine though. Very fine, despite her long ride and sleepless night. He was impressed. He’d also enjoyed their visit to the grain store that morning and it seemed that she had too.
He put his romantic musings aside as Kanawan appeared in the valley below them. It looked peaceful and innocent. He smiled.
He rode on, then called a halt when he saw a woman walking up the hill towards them, unhurriedly, hips swinging. Her blue dress stretched to compress her ample bust, clung to her eye-catching pelvis, then stopped coquettishly just above her knee. Leather sandal twine criss-crossed her shins, as if inviting Weylin to climb her legs with his lips and teeth, lifting that light skirt … He shook his head. Play could come later.
“You must be Zadar’s men?” she said, flicking her dark hair and looking up coolly at the mounted troops.
“We are. You have Flynn?”
“I’m Ula, Queen of Kanawan. And you are?”
“Weylin Nancarrow, Warrior in Maidun’s Fifty, representative of Zadar. Do you have Flynn? I will not ask again.”
“Fifty? I heard that Lowa Flynn had made it more like forty?”
“It’s always fifty. If someone leaves or dies, they immediately move someone up from the—”
Weylin heard a snigger behind him.
Makka! He needed to look tougher. He put a hand on his sword pommel. “But that’s nothing to do with you. Do you have Flynn?”
“Perhaps I do. Perhaps I don’t. What is the reward?”
Oh Bel. Weylin had no idea what the reward was, or even if there was one. There probably wasn’t. A curse on Dionysia for dying. She’d have known how to handle this. He was no good at lying, not to strangers anyway.
“You will be in Zadar’s favour, which is the greatest reward there is. Please just hand her over.” He heard a stifled guffaw from Ogre and realised that he needed to be a good deal more uncompromising and hard-faced. “Or we’ll ride into your village and kill people until you do.”
Ula regarded him fearlessly. Weylin felt uncomfortable. “All right,” she said eventually. “I’ll give you Flynn. And her companions. But only three of you can ride down into the village to collect them. The rest wait here.”
“We need food. We’ll all ride down.” Weylin was taking charge.
“I will not have my village full of soldiers that you cannot control, so no, you will not all ride down. But we will give you enough food for your return to Maidun. You can send three people. Two to guard the prisoners, one to carry the food.”
Weylin looked back at his troop. They were grinning as if enjoying his indecision. They were enjoying his indecision, he realised, all together. They must have all been talking about him behind his back, and were now united in mockery. Bel knew it had happened enough times in the past for him to recognise it. They had the look of a group who’d been slagging someone off and were watching their character assessment proven. His ears became hot.
“Ten of us will come. The rest will wait here.”
The woman looked awkward. “All right,” she said eventually.
Yes! thought Weylin. I win.
He picked nine of them.
“I’m coming as well,” said Ogre.
“No, you are not,” Weylin commanded. Ogre shrugged and relented. Double win, thought Weylin.
Twenty paces away Lowa licked her thumb and smoothed a fletching feather on her half-drawn arrow, keeping her eyes fixed on the Maidun troop as they split into two. Weylin led one group down the hill to Kanawan. The remainder dropped their reins and let their horses have their heads to pull at the roadside grass.
She’d told Ula that Weylin would insist on sending more riders down into the village than she said he could, and that had happened, but she hadn’t expected the squad to be so large. Even split into two, there were too many. And it was a shame that Weylin was one of those heading downhill. She’d wanted to kill him herself, to avenge Cordelia. She should have asked Ula to keep him alive, but you can’t think of everything. It had been tricky enough organising the yokels into a decent ambush while making sure their druid didn’t kill Dug with his care. You never knew with druids. Some seemed to work miracles, others could cripple a healthy person in minutes with their cures.
She looked along the old boundary ditch. Good. Nothing moving. Spring and the twenty older girls were all nicely tucked down, resisting the temptation to look up at the invaders. What they’d be like once the fighting started … Lowa had baulked at the idea of using the girls for the ambush, but after a day’s training from Spring they were by far the best slingers in the village. Somehow the little girl knew things about sling work that most Warriors didn’t, and she seemed to be preternaturally capable at communicating her skills.
They had a good position too. Along much of the edge of the ditch between the girls and the riders were coppiced hazels. These were trees that had been repeatedly cut back, so they grew in fans of thick sticks rather than trunks. These sticks were woven together to create mobile fences and pens for livestock, but they also made an excellent defensive wall. The girls would be able to shoot through the gaps, and the horses should theoretically shy at the idea of charging through them. Still, twenty young girls and her against … She counted fourteen riders left on the hill, most of them Warriors.
She could hear their conversation. “Weylin is an idiot,” seemed to be the central theme. There was her old friend Savage Banba. She hadn’t seen her at the Barton party where her women had been killed, but it was a safe bet that she had been there. She recognised most of the others too. Banba was the most useful in a fight, as far as Lowa knew, so she’d go first.
A little behind, whispering together, were Ogre and his two henchmen. So it looked like they were working for Zadar after all. She’d entertained the idea that, since they were Spring’s old gang, they’d actually been after the girl with their dogs. That they were here in Weylin’s troop proved that Lowa had been their prey all along.
Weylin and the others were almost at the bottom of the hill. She waited. She looked along the line of girls to check them again. Spring looked very relaxed. Hang on a minute, thought Lowa, she’s asleep. The Warrior archer looked about for a stone to bung at the child.
“They’re in there. Go and get them.”
He had seen the pan-shaped structure on his way down the hill. Ula was pointing along the passage that led into it
. The entrance corridor was strongly constructed from heavy oak planks, with leather nailed to its pointed roof for waterproofing, and a hefty oak door reinforced with iron bands. A nice job. This was a rich village. But if they all went in and the door was closed behind them, they’d be trapped.
He turned. Queen Ula was looking at him with an expression of loathing and disrespect. Behind her a clutch of slack-jawed villagers were staring at him as if he were a dancing polecat. They did not look dangerous. His nine had dismounted, tied up their horses and were all now looking at him, the hint of a smile on a few of their faces as if happily anticipating another fuck-up. He didn’t want to walk into a trap, but he didn’t want to look cowardly in front of these bastards, who already thought he was a fool. Bel, sometimes he hated life. What to do? Sweat ran down his back like cold grease.
“Why don’t you send them out here to us?” Weylin asked.
“I’d love to,” said Ula, “but they’re more than we can handle. We managed to chain them to the wall in there, but it wasn’t easy. They killed three of mine and I don’t want to lose any more. Surely a Warrior like you should be able to handle them?” She nodded at his boar necklace. Weylin looked down at it and heard a cough of laughter from one of his men.
“Why is that door so thick?” he said quickly, hoping to catch her off guard.
“We use the ring for auctioning cattle. They’d kick through a weaker door.”
That seemed reasonable. Oh Fenn! What would Dionysia do? He could feel his troops’ disdainful eyes boring into his brain.
On the hill Lowa held her breath. It had looked like Weylin was about to go into the arena, but he’d stopped. Had he seen through their plan? Surely not. This was Weylin after all. But if he and his Warriors didn’t go into that arena, a lot of people were going to die. Shit. She thought about running down, but she was needed up here. Even with her, the girls would be lucky to take out fourteen soldiers without losing at least a couple of their own. She’d promised Ula her plan was solid.
She hadn’t expected so many.
Chapter 19
A plank lay across the roadside ditch, leading to a gap in the gorse hedge. Ragnall ducked through it. Straightening up on the other side, he found a group of standing stones encircled by a low bank. Tall beech trees leaned in overhead to create a cool, shady, high but cavernous leaf-walled chamber. The nine upright stones, about his height, were the centrepiece. Each stone was roughly conical, a pace and a half in diameter at the bottom, tapering to a domed top.
It was a stone henge. He’d been taught about them and seen a few. They were ancient places of worship where long-gone people had worshipped gods which had disappeared when their people had been defeated and enslaved, as was the way. If a tribe was conquered, it adopted the conquering tribe’s gods because those had proved to be more powerful than their own defeated deities.
Stone henges and other standing stones had once been as common as today’s forest shrines, but for centuries they’d been seen as nothing more than sources of building material and obstacles to be cleared so that crops might grow or sheep might graze more freely. Those left were in remote places, far from agriculture and building, so it was weird to find one here, in the well populated south-west, with all the stones still standing and well maintained. Clearings like this would become overgrown in no time, so somebody must have been tending to it.
He walked around the circle. Perhaps, thought Ragnall, there was a tribe nearby which saw it as a curiosity to be preserved. Or maybe … Maybe they’d strayed into the territory of an obscure tribe that still worshipped the old gods. The clearing suddenly seemed cooler. He jerked round at a sound. It was a squirrel.
A thought struck him. Maybe this was a magic place. Maybe the ancients had commanded magic and these menhirs acted as a focus. Maybe that in itself kept it from growing over. Maybe the gods had meant him to find it …
There were several slugs around the base of one of the stones. He picked one up and glanced about. Definitely nobody around. He stared at a dry leaf, willing it to burst into flame. Nothing. He squeezed the slug, still looking at the leaf. He felt the slug pop. He carried on staring at the leaf, commanding it to consume itself with fire, beseeching Danu to give him the power to make it do so.
Nothing happened.
Chapter 20
“OK, we’ll get them, but you go in ahead of us.” A masterstroke, that last idea. It had come to him from nowhere. Weylin congratulated himself on his ingenuity. Or was that Dionysia looking after him from the Otherworld?
“All right.” Ula agreed without a moment’s thought. The Kanawan queen walked into the corridor. So it couldn’t be a trap.
“Come on everyone!” Weylin followed. Lowa Flynn was so close. He felt a nascent erection pressing against his trousers.
The whole building was a very weird construction, just the sort of thing that remote tribes with too much time on their hands got up to. The corridor was about twenty paces long and noisy with the jingle of his Warriors’ ringmail as they crowded in. He turned round to tell them to stop jostling, then turned back. There was a burst of light as Ula pushed open the door at the end of the corridor. Then she raised her hands – and flew up out of sight.
What the … ? The outer door slammed shut behind his troops and he heard bolts slide into place. It was a fucking trap! For Bel’s sake, why did it always happen to him?
“Don’t panic,” he said, trying not to panic. “We’re heavily armed, and there’s one door still open. On the count of three, we rush it. One, two…” He paused and heard a loud whistle from outside. What did that mean? “Three!”
Lowa heard the whistle from the arena. She leaped back onto the bank of the ditch, drew, aimed at Savage Banba, and loosed.
Banba flew backwards off her horse as if she’d been tugged by a rope. The other riders looked about in panic. Lowa shot another. They spotted her. She shot another. The riders hesitated.
Lowa knew their dilemma. When ambushed by projectile weapons like bows or slings, cavalry could either flee or ride down their attackers. Unless you were already almost out of range, attack was usually the best defence. But that went against a person’s and his or her horse’s instincts, so it was a decision that only the most experienced made immediately. Even then, it could be difficult to get the horse to go along with it. She drew, aimed, loosed and another rider flew from his horse. That decided them.
“Attack!” shouted one. They pulled out weapons and heaved on reins. Lowa shot another before the charge started. Five down, nine to go. She shot the lead rider before they were fifteen paces away. The next went down before five.
“Now!” said Lowa.
Along the ditch the girls leaped up, swung slings and loosed stones at the riders. Lowa saw a couple fall, and shot one more herself before another was right on her and a sword was swinging at her face.
Chapter 21
Yet again the gods had shat all over Weylin. His soldiers lay dead around him. Sixty or so tribespeople peered down at him, javelins primed. Somehow the first three volleys of their wicked little spears had missed him. He closed his eyes and waited.
“Hold!” Queen Ula’s voice. “You. Weylin.”
Weylin opened his eyes. “Yes?”
“Why does Zadar want Lowa?”
“I don’t know.”
A few people jeered.
“If you tell me, I’ll consider letting you live.”
Oh crap, thought Weylin. It was obvious what had happened here. They’d caught Lowa, sent out the shout, then Lowa had used her twisty ways to persuade them that she’d been wronged. He could see why she might think that she’d been hard done by. (Ha! he thought. Screw you, Dionysia. I can think from another person’s point of view.) But that didn’t explain why they’d taken her side against Zadar. They must be mad.
But now, more importantly, what could he say that would persuade Queen Ula to let him live? He couldn’t think of anything. Why did Zadar want Lowa dead anyway? He had no idea and
couldn’t begin to guess.
“I really don’t know,” he said.
“Oh well,” said Ula, “then I’m afraid I have no choice…”
A thought appeared in Weylin’s head as if Dionysia had shot it there with a sling from the Otherworld. “But I do know why I want her dead.”
Ula looked at him for several heartbeats.
“Why?” she asked
“She murdered my wife.” Weylin nodded. The lie was easy because it wasn’t even a lie. Brilliant.
Ula sat back. Her eyebrows converged and lifted like two caterpillars squaring up for combat. Was this his chance?
“And she killed my brother and my best mate.”
“Why?”
“Zadar … wanted to talk to her. That’s it, nothing more. My brother and a guy called Atlas – lovely guys, family men, had ten kids between them – were sent to get her. She killed Atlas before they’d even seen her with that Bel-cursed bow. They never had a chance. She shot my brother in the back as he ran for cover. I don’t know why she did it. I guess she’d done something to make her scared of Zadar. People said that she’d murdered others, and it’s true that a lot of people she didn’t like disappeared.
“Then we were riding along the next day, heading back to Maidun. An arrow came out of nowhere and killed my wife, and I saw Lowa riding away over a hill. So I don’t know why Zadar wanted to talk to her in the first place, but I know why I want her dead.”
“But Zadar killed her whole troop of archers? And her sister?”
“Who told you that?”
“She did.”
“Far as I know, she didn’t have a sister. She certainly didn’t have a troop of archers.”
Ula was looking worried. Maybe he was going to get away with this. Ula whispered to a man, who left the arena.