The Coming of Dragons: No. 1 (Darkest Age)

by A. J. Lake

  For Tana Holmes Coulson ~ welcome

  Contents

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  This Is The Book Of How Torment Came.

  Map

  Chapter One

  Black. Then blinding white. White like split bone.

  Then the wind hit. There was a sound of crashing timber like ten thousand falling trees, and the trading ship Spearwa stood end-up in the waves.

  But it was the lightning that had done the damage. The mast was riven from top to bottom and the sail bent towards the deck like a furled swan’s wing, pale in the darkness.

  One of the spar’s long arms sliced past Edmund’s ear, missing by a hair’s breadth.

  ‘Come on!’ bellowed the tillerman, yanking him off his feet, urging him on across the pitching deck. Within seconds the rain had soaked through Edmund’s thin linen tunic and leggings. He gasped at the cold. But at least his boots were good. They kept him from falling as he groped through sleeting darkness, cracked his elbow on the deck house as some oarsmen pushed by, yelling to save the foremast. He saw them wrestle with fouled lines, then haul in the flapping leather sail.

  For a moment Edmund saw Ship’s Master Trymman standing with the rest of the rowers, yelling his commands – until the rain fell like a curtain and the master was gone, his voice drowned out in creaks and cries.

  As they reached the shattered mainmast, the tillerman stopped dead and shot a look into the hammering storm. Edmund looked up too. The lightning lit a squall of hail that stung his cheeks like angry bees. He threw up a hand to shield his face, but as he did, he glimpsed something else through the flashing hail. Something that could not be there.

  Fire? Surely I saw fire! He squinted up, probing the blackness between the lightning bolts. And sure enough, there it came again. A great red tongue that scorched through the dark like furnace flames.

  ‘Gods be with us,’ the tillerman mouthed, and Edmund echoed his prayer, as again the ship yawed and the waves reared up like the cliffs of Broniel.

  ‘Hang on to the mast!’ the tillerman yelled in his ear. ‘Tie yourself to it!’ Then he was gone, shooting across the tilting deck like a stone across ice.

  But Edmund could not move. His eyes were fixed on the sky, searching the blackness for the red flashes. There! And again there. As if some gods-smith were forging fire-bolts on his anvil, the red hot sparks ripping through the sky.

  He did not see the wave until it slammed his legs from under him. As the deck fell away, he slid down it, the rail flying to meet him, the boiling sea beyond. The rail won’t stop me, he thought. I’ll be swept to my death!

  But at the last moment he grabbed hold of the spar, the one that had nearly brained him earlier. It was wedged against the rail and, still flat on his back, Edmund clung on for dear life as another wall of water sluiced over him. When he shook the sea from his eyes, he found himself staring up at a face. A girl’s face, with eyes of fierce amber.

  ‘Use this!’ the girl cried, throwing him a rope. ‘Or you’ll rip your arms off.’ The rope’s other end was wound fast round the mast stump. Edmund hauled himself up towards it, binding the rope tightly round his hands.

  He saw the girl had already tethered herself to the mast, made a cat’s cradle of ropes round waist and chest to ride out the storm. Her calmness astonished him.

  ‘You’re the shipmaster’s daughter,’ he shouted above the wind, his teeth clattering as he shivered from cold and wet and fear that tasted like steel against his tongue.

  ‘Elspeth Trymmansdaughter,’ she yelled back. ‘And you’re the passenger. The one who never leaves his cabin.’

  ‘I’m here now,’ he muttered.

  ‘Not for long,’ the girl said flatly.

  And then Edmund realised it wasn’t only he who was shuddering. The Spearwa herself was shaking from stem to stern, the timbers screaming beneath his feet.

  Eyes half-closed to the lashing spray, Edmund clung to the wet rope, cursing himself for a coward. He was a king’s son, heir to Heored of Sussex, and here he was shivering like a whipped dog when he should be facing death with a man’s resolve. It was what his mother would expect. He tried to straighten himself and meet the girl’s stare, but suddenly all he could see was his mother’s face: her dark eyes and brown hair. Her kind looks. He saw her brave smile as they had parted at the Noviomagus quayside two days before.

  She had been so worried for his safety on this voyage. When she had discovered that the ship’s master was a follower of the new Christian faith, she had spent an hour at their household shrine, sacrificing to the Lady Donn and to her namesake goddess, Branwen, begging them to bless Edmund’s journey. She had chosen this packet-boat because it took the long route, hugging the coast to avoid the pirate Danes who prowled the eastern seas. Only once they reached Dunmonia, the Isles’ most westerly realm, would the boat take to the open sea and cross the Channel.

  ‘Avoid questions,’ his mother had commanded with a last fierce hug. ‘Stay out of sight, and talk to no one but the shipmaster. If you must speak, say your father is a merchant fallen on hard times. That he went to Gaul to sell his cloth and has sent word for you to join him.’

  As Edmund had listened to his mother’s instruction, his eyes had pricked with tears. He’d blinked them away, of course. At eleven years old he was almost a man and to cry was shameful. He’d drawn himself up to his full height, as if to give his mother no quarter.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he had demanded. ‘Why aren’t you coming with me?’

  As soon as he had spoken he wished he hadn’t. He saw the pain dart in her eyes. But when she spoke it was in the level tones of a wise queen, not an indulgent mother.

  ‘You know that very well, Edmund. Your father may never return, and when this madness is over someone must take up his burden. Who would that be, if this ship went down with both you and me on board?’

  And now the Lady Donn and the goddess Branwen had deserted him, leaving his mother alone in Noviomagus. Edmund wondered how long it would take for news of the shipwreck to reach his father’s kingdom fifty leagues away. He thought of the homeland he would never again see – the rolling downlands and fair pastures and good farms – and his throat tightened till he could hardly breathe.

  A shriek of tortured wood shocked him to his senses. Something scraped against the keel and again the ship shook from end to end. He heard the shipmaster bellow an order, saw the girl suddenly straining in her rope web. This time he saw fear in the amber eyes.

  She was shouting at him, but the wind whipped her words away. He caught only ‘rocks!’ and ‘Manacles!’.

  It was enough. Even a landsman like Edmund knew of the Manacles, the merciless basalt fangs that reared from the sea south of Stannan Head. Scarcely a moon passed without some unwary ship ripping her keel out on them. Edmund peered across the water and saw only darkness, blotched with foam. But soon the oarsmen’s frantic yells were echoing Elspeth’s words – ROCKS! MAN-A-CLES! LOOK OU-UT! – and the crewmen fought to turn the sail on the only surviving mast.

  ‘What can we do?’ Edmund cried.


  ‘Tell your gods your sins,’ replied the girl.

  Edmund glanced round with mounting panic. Sailors slid all over the deck as the giant waves rolled over the salt-stained planks. In horror Edmund watched an oarsman dashed against the rail, then tossed in the sea. As the deck dipped further, he glimpsed a white hand raised in brief appeal; then nothing but the reeling waves. The other rowers barely spared their shipmate a glance, but bent to their oars as if all the fiends of hell were at their backs. They know, Edmund thought. They know all is lost.

  He turned to Elspeth, but her eyes were closed. Perhaps she was praying. He thought of his mother’s gods and wracked his brains: had he offended the sea god Llyr, or Manawydan lord of winds? Again his eyes flew to the sky …

  By all the gods! As if walls of sea weren’t bad enough! Now the world was spinning on its head like some frenzied top.

  On its head!

  Instead of looking up, he was looking down, down at the sea that pitched all around him. Down into the blackness where he was being tossed. And from this new sky-view he could see the Spearwa, its timbers straining. He could see tiny creatures, spindly two-legged things, scattered on the deck. Waves swatting them back and forth like a man swats flies. Soon, he thought, soon all would be gone, the planks blown apart; the sea empty once more.

  Only one tiny soul looked up at him, its face a white disc topped with pale hair. Its eyes wide; its mouth a dark O, and opened in a scream that filled his head …

  Edmund was watching himself. He was seeing himself clinging to the mast rope. And the screaming would not stop. And then his eyes came back to him and he squeezed the lids shut to stop their eerie looking. He shut his mouth too, silenced the scream, and then, dizzy and trembling, clung like a barnacle to the sea-drenched ropes.

  A slap of spray brought him to his senses. He blinked salt out of his eyes. He was back on deck with the storm raging around him, men battling frantically at their oars. Nearby, the girl was watching him with a strange look in her eyes. What had she seen? Before he could ask her, the ship grounded with an ear-splitting crash; the deck blew apart, sending Edmund spinning.

  This time there was no spar to save him. On his back, half-stunned, the next wave caught him as it swept down the breaking deck. But just for an instant, before the sea took him, Edmund glimpsed the sky and saw it.

  A great, winged shape hovered above them, larger than the ship itself. It gleamed an unnatural blue in every flash of lightning. An eye the size of a warrior’s shield looked down with cold purpose on Edmund. And the mouth, a fiery cave with stalagmite teeth, grinned wider as the ship broke in two.

  Chapter Two

  As the waves reared like walls, Elspeth felt her faith slip away. Lord, what have you done? How could the sea she loved so well become her deadly foe? She shut her eyes tight and braced herself in her mesh of ropes as the Spearwa plunged beneath the waves. Down through the drowning swell they pitched, till she thought they would never right themselves again.

  Never had she seen such a storm, not in all her life at Dubris port, as well known for its roaring winter seas as for its towering white cliffs, from which you could see Gaul on a clear day. She had not seen a storm like this in all the three years she had been sailing with her father, and they had endured their share of gales off Penseance many times over.

  But this storm was different. It had blown up from nowhere – out of a calm spring night.

  Now with every crack of timber, cold terror gripped her. Not that she would let that pale, scared boy see her fear. She was a seafarer, and proud to ply a trade more usually the domain of men. The sea was her life, her love, since her mother had died of fever and her father had brought her aboard. Some of the crew had muttered darkly, of course; there had been some hard looks at first, but she had won them over. She’d learned fast, reading the compass, helping her father check the goods in the hold against the tally sticks, even reefing the sails with Master Seaman Harkiron. And now, at eleven years old, it was well known that one day Elspeth Trymmansdaughter would succeed her father and become master of the Spearwa.

  But now all seemed to be lost, and Elspeth thought fearfully of her father, still battling with the tiller, and longed to be at his side in this war with the sea.

  When the pale boy screamed her eyes snapped open. Ahead a black spur reared up like the tower of the godshouse at Bradwell, with more columns of basalt behind like black dragon’s teeth. But the boy stared only at the sky. What had made him cry out like that?

  Crash!

  The Spearwa slewed into the massive pillar of rock. Elspeth clung tight to her harness. But the boy had nothing to hold him fast. When the deck reared up, he went sprawling backwards to the starboard rail. In a moment he was gone, swallowed by the sea.

  Screams and curses rang in Elspeth’s ears, but then they too were drowned. Next came more terrible crunching of splitting wood. Father! But her scream blew away with the spray, into the dark where only chaos ruled. She saw one of the sailors – Bron, she thought – pitch past her. As he fought for a footing on the deck it seemed he was dancing. The next moment he hit the rail smack in the ribs and folded forward into the sea.

  Now the boards beneath Elspeth’s feet began to crack like kindling. She gasped as the ropes clutched like a snake. If she didn’t loose the knots, the tumbling mast stump would drag her through the hold and snap her back like a twig.

  But the knots were slick and swollen with water, and Elspeth’s hands were stiff with cold.

  She fumbled for the scaling-knife at her belt; prayed to her father’s stern-faced god that it still had an edge from the last time she’d stropped it. All fingers and thumbs, she sawed at the first rope, and then at another, while around her the Spearwa gave up its struggle against the rocks and sank, piece by piece, into the frothing sea.

  She felt the mast list towards her, the planks sagging beneath it. Now! Now she must move. She struggled out of the remaining ropes. But one foot was caught. It twisted painfully as the mast leaned closer still. She tugged, and tugged again, and dragged it free as the mast crashed through the planks where she had just been kneeling.

  Elspeth turned to stern: that was where her father would be. But before she had gone two steps, the remaining deck planks parted under her feet and she fell in a storm of rent wood.

  Down and down she plunged.

  For an age Elspeth floundered. Strong swimmer she may have been, but the sea’s cold stunned her – and made her desperate to cling to this life. After all, her father might not be dead. She forced herself to think, to move. Which way is up? her mind screamed. At last she kicked her legs, arched her back and, finding gravity’s pull, pushed through the churning swell towards the surface. On and up she fought, and just when she thought her lungs would burst, she breached the waves and gulped down ragged shards of air.

  But again the waves took her down, tossing her round and round like a rag doll in a mill race. She let it take her. To fight now would use up precious energy. And so three times more she rose and fell, gulping a mouthful of air whenever she could. On the third time a great bolt of lightning lit up the rocks below her and the basalt spires of a seabed city reared up through the hissing waves. In desperation, Elspeth twisted away, struggling with every breath in her body.

  Gasping, she broke the surface, into the frenzy of rain and hail. She cast about for sign of the Spearwa, but what with the night and the stinging spray she could scarcely see two yards ahead. No men. No wreckage.

  ‘Father!’ she screamed. ‘Father, where are you?’ But the crashing of sea on stone drowned out her cry.

  She felt the fight drain out of her then. What was the point? She was tiring fast. She could not win this battle with the waves. But just when she thought to give up, the storm threw her an unexpected gift. A wooden chest broke the surface close by. With a burst of new strength, she struck out for it and caught hold of one of its handles. It was oak chased in iron, sturdy and strong and seemingly proof against the waves. Elspeth clung
to it, gasping and gathering her strength.

  The next thing she saw was a body. She almost let go of the chest with the shock of it. Like all Dubris children she knew what the sea did to the dead. Scenes of white, bloated faces, seaweed-twined limbs flooded her mind. But she forced herself to look for it again among the tossing waves. It might have been any one of the Spearwa’s crew: Beron or Inch. It could have been her own father! He could still be alive!

  She searched about her for the wave-born figure. Then she saw it, a dark, limp form in the jagged sea. This time she struck out towards it, leaving behind the sea-chest haven.

  The waves dragged her crazily to right and left, threw her like a ball, and the rain and spray merged in a world of snarling water.

  When she saw the body again it was a few yards to her right. Clawing her way through the heavy swell, she snatched a sleeve and hauled it to her. It was lighter than she had expected, and moved easily. And then she saw why: it was not a seaman, but the boy, Edmund. Alive or dead she could not tell – but dead for sure if she couldn’t get him back to the sea chest.

  She looked for it again in the darkness, knowing her own death was certain if she didn’t find it. Beside her the boy dipped beneath the waves, and again she hauled him to the surface. And just when she thought all was lost, there was a hideous flare of red light and in its glow she saw the chest was no more than five yards away. She hooked one hand around the boy’s neck, and struggled clumsily towards it. Please, she thought. Please let us reach the chest …

  The sky bled fire like a bullock with its throat cut. Aagard bared his teeth in the dark and mouthed a silent curse. From turbid East to drowning West, men would be staring in horror into that blood-boltered sky. Aagard winced as he saw more bursts of fire across the sea. A great evil had been loosed in this night’s storm, with worse to come.

  The old man turned from the sea with a sinking heart. There was nothing he could do about the storm, and at this moment he had more pressing business. Life and death business, if he was not mistaken. He trudged along the rain-drenched beach, counting his steps in the face of the storm.