by Simon Lister
They left Leofrun in the cave and collapsed it on top of her. The spring animals would find her but there was little they could do about that. Despite her death they resumed their journey in better heart than they had finished the previous one. They were fed, as were their horses, albeit lightly, and rested too but the fresh snowfall made travelling arduous as they led their strung-together horses beside them. The basket-like snowshoes they wore reduced the depth they sank at each step but the horses had no such luxury and they struggled as the group laboured on in a muffled silence broken only by their own strenuous breathing.
Hour by hour the snowfall lessened until it stopped altogether and the clouds drifted apart on a light wind that barely brushed those on the ground. The stars appeared in sporadic gaps above them and they congratulated themselves on having kept to their course through the storm though Cei knew they had just been fortunate the wind had not veered on them.
Ethain, standing up on a horse for a better elevation, searched the lightening landscape for signs of the Adren pursuit but with the sky still partly obscured by clouds he could not see far. For as far as he could see, there was no evidence of pursuit and they took heart from this and Merdynn led them on, changing direction slightly to make towards the northwest.
As the miles edged behind them the ground started to gently slope upwards until the plains were left behind and before them was once more a country of shallow, forested valleys and modest bare hills. From a vantage point on the first of these low hills Cei stopped and waited for the banked clouds to drift away from the moon, which Merdynn assured him would happen soon.
An hour passed and the moon was still obscured. Cei paced back and forth along the hilltop weighing up the need to see if they were still being tracked across the plain against the time they were losing whilst they waited. He told the others to wait beyond the brow of the hill to minimise the chance of them being seen from the plain. Merdynn was leaning against a lone, stunted tree and he smiled brightly at Cei as the Anglian Warlord paced by glowering at him.
Eventually Merdynn’s promised moon shone from a winter sky that was still scattered with the last trailing vestiges of the snow clouds. Ethain was promptly summoned and he searched the plains that stretched out into the dim distance. The pale white landscape was patched by the cloud shadows that slowly slid across it. For a long while Ethain was still as he scanned the country below and Cei watched his face closely. He saw the sudden start of fear in Ethain’s eyes and knew he had spotted them. Ethain took an automatic step forward as if the extra yard would show him that his sight had played him false.
Cei swore, demanding from the nearby Merdynn an explanation how the Adren could have followed them through the storm. Merdynn pointed out sharply that it was not his fault then fell silent as he remembered it probably was his fault that they were being pursued in the first place.
‘Are they following our tracks?’ Cei asked peering fruitlessly out across the plain in an effort to see what Ethain saw.
‘I don’t know! I can’t see our tracks from here! They’re a good day's travelling away,’ he replied angrily. He had been sure that the plains would be clear and was clearly shocked to have found they were not. ‘Besides, our tracks must still be covered where they are now. How can they hunt us if the snow’s covered our tracks?’
Cei turned to Merdynn for an answer to Ethain’s question but Merdynn just pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows as he shrugged.
‘We’d, umm, better get moving though, don’t you think?’ Merdynn finally said to the staring Cei who turned and strode back to where the others were waiting. Ethain and Merdynn followed him.
The rest of the group were standing around their horses and gazing down into the valley.
‘They’re still following us,’ Cei announced.
Several swore in disbelief.
‘How near are they?’ Aelfhelm asked.
‘A day’s journey, perhaps less.’
They swore again, regretting now the time they had wasted waiting only to find out that they were still being shadowed.
‘There’s a fire down there,’ Cuthwin said quietly.
Cei realised they had all been looking down into the valley below. He followed the direction of Cuthwin’s outstretched arm. A few miles along the valley floor a thin pall of smoke trailed skywards in the moonlight.
‘Looks like a small cluster of huts, difficult to tell, they look no more than mounds of snow,’ Aelfhelm said.
‘People live in these lands?’ Cei asked Merdynn.
‘There’s some scattered villages, herders mostly. They trade with the Bretons.’
Without anything more being said they set off down the hillside, towards the smoke and away from the distant Adren.
As they approached the source of the rising smoke they saw that there had indeed been a village here, only five rudimentary round huts huddled closely together but a village nonetheless. Only the smoke rising listlessly above the central mound gave any sign that the dwellings were still inhabited.
The huts looked to have been turf roofed and they sat low on the ground but as they led their horses between the first two they could see that the roofs had collapsed and the winter snow had covered them completely. Whoever had lived here had clearly abandoned them and left. Except for the central one.
Cerdic left his horse with the others and approached the low door to the central hut. It was off its hinges and leant across the opening and it looked as if it had been smashed down and then poorly patched together again. Cerdic looked back at the rest of the group then bent down to enter.
There was a dull thud and he recoiled clutching his head. Another stone flew from the cover behind the hut opposite and smacked into his heavy cloak. He drew his sword and charged his attacker. The others drew their weapons and went to join him but before they rounded the side of the hut, Cerdic emerged holding up a struggling young boy who looked to be only nine or ten years old. From his hand dangled the offending weapon, a worn and well-used sling.
Trevenna burst out laughing and the others joined in.
‘The little bastard could have had my eye out with that,’ Cerdic said, still holding the child off the ground by the scruff of the neck.
‘Oh, the songs they’ll sing of brave Cerdic!’ Trevenna called out to more laughter.
‘I ought to skin the bugger,’ Cerdic muttered, his pride far more hurt than his head.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll tell them back home that it was a herd of ravenous wolves!’
‘Pack. Not herd,’ Merdynn corrected her.
‘Oh a pack isn’t big enough to tell of young Cerdic’s bravery!’ Trevenna added with glee, enjoying her revenge for the song Merdynn had taught them and which Cerdic had taken great delight in turning against her. It did not bother her that Cei was the chief culprit. His turn would come.
Cerdic put the boy down and he immediately tried to scamper away but he was firmly held by his ragged cloak. He looked terrified and Trevenna felt guilty for indulging herself whilst the child was plainly frightened out of his wits by these strangers. Cerdic’s discomfort was not over yet. The door to the hut was flung outwards and another child raced at Cerdic and kicked him in the shins before he could grab hold of his new assailant.
‘Don’t stand there bloody laughing! Help me control the little animals!’
Trevenna, to her shame, sat down on the snow seized by her laughter. Only Aelfhelm was of any mind to help and he strode across to Cerdic and, bending his tall frame, lifted both children off the ground, one under each arm.
‘Where do you want their skinned hides hung, Lord?’ He asked Cerdic and Trevenna hooted with delight.
Cei indicated the hut and Aelfhelm carried them inside the dwelling they had clearly been using. Both the boy and the girl, who looked slightly older, were still struggling and Aelfhelm told them to both sit still in a tone of voice that struck them as one not to argue with. Merdynn went and sat beside them and told them not to worry, they meant them
no harm and were only passing through their village.
Cei was going to kick out the fire when he noticed that the entire room was stacked to the low roof with piles of cut, smoked meat. The Adren were still the other side of the hill and too far away to see the thin smoke from this fire so he left it. He decided they would stop for an hour and eat a hot meal before the last long leg of their journey to the Breton villages.
He told Thruidred to strip the moss and mould from the logs stacked by the fire and told Godhelm to go outside and block the smoke-hole in the roof. It would get smoky in the hut but better that than a constant stream rising into the winter night, he reasoned. Thruidred threw the stripped logs onto the fire and they smoked less.
The two dark haired and unkempt children watched cautiously as the strangers began boiling water over the now roaring fire. When it burned down to charcoal they would cook some of the meat that these children had in abundance.
Merdynn started to gently ask the children questions. At first their answers were monosyllabic. They were in equal measure frightened and fascinated by the strangers who were largely ignoring them as they hurriedly went about preparing their meal. Occasionally one of them would pass by them and ruffle their already tousled hair, remarking on what scruffs they were. They were more than scruffy. The whites of their round, wide eyes contrasted sharply with the black, ingrained dirt on their faces. Cei’s warriors looked no cleaner and were indeed a good deal dirtier but there was a feral quality about these two children who had been abandoned to fend for themselves in the winter darkness.
Merdynn’s patient and gentle questioning began to bring results. The answers they had did nothing to reassure the adults around them and gradually the warriors became silent as they went about their tasks, listening to the children’s tale.
The girl’s name was Charljenka and her younger brother’s was Nialgrada. One of the village’s goatherds had strayed to a distant hill and the two children were sent to bring it back to the village. The unwelcome task had saved their lives. It was after the Lughnasa festival and the sun had already set. Most of the village’s stock and supplies had already travelled to the Breton villages by the sea. The villagers were about to take the journey to the coast, where they spent the dark months, and had been seeing to the final necessary tasks before the onset of winter when the monsters had come.
Merdynn asked them who the monsters were and could they describe them? Nialgrada studied his fingers and fidgeted but Charljenka sensed the interest from the adults around her and described what had happened.
The two of them had been rounding up the goats in a wood on a hill a few miles away when the valley below them had filled with shadows. The shadows had made straight for the village and soon after they could see the smoke of the burning huts from where they hid on the hilltop.
Merdynn asked her to describe these shadows. One or two of the warriors suppressed a shudder as she sat staring in the dancing firelight while she solemnly described the monsters that had destroyed her home. It was not natural for a girl as young as this to talk with such a quiet intensity about such horrors.
Trevenna sat silently appalled at herself, that she could have had a laughing fit as these two children attacked Cerdic when only the gods knew what nightmares had persecuted them.
The young girl described the shadows as a horde, more numerous than flies on fresh dung in summer. Evil, shambling creatures with the armour of cockroaches. Their cloven hands carried great goats’ horns, sickle-sharp. They had passed through the valley as silently as the wind through long grass. They were herded by moon-bright helmeted men on horseback.
Charljenka stopped and stared at the fire. The room was silent and everyone watched her through the thickening smoke.
Nialgrada spoke up in a quiet, small voice, finishing what his sister had started. He called them the Soul Stealers of the Shadow Lands. He had just about reached the age where he no longer believed the stories told to scare children into obedience but he knew the Soul Stealers were real now. He had seen them.
The warriors looked at each other. They knew that the children only described what they had seen in the familiar terms of their daily lives but none had heard the Adren described or explained so completely before. More than one of them made the sign to ward off evil.
Merdynn and Cei looked at each other. They were thinking the same thing. If the Adren had passed through here then they would have gone on to the coastal villages of the Bretons. And that would mean that the Adren were both before and behind them.
*
Cei led his warriors from the small village of clustered hovels. He and Merdynn had agreed that they had little choice but to continue on towards the Breton coastal villages despite the news from the two children about the Adren. They had no doubt that the Adren would have attacked the Bretons but Merdynn hoped that at least the main village would have held out as it was perched high on a cliff top with its back to the sea and a narrow headland before it. It was in any case the only option they had.
The children had been keen to come with them and Cei didn’t feel he could leave them alone in their deserted home. Doubtless the rest of the village’s inhabitants would have been massacred and their bodies taken on by the Adren for meat. The warriors were careful not to speculate about the fate of the villagers in front of them but the two youngsters had sensed something was being kept back and they grew distrustful once more.
The village had been emptied of any supplies not already taken on to the coast and without winter feed for the goats, and not knowing the way to the coast, the children had slaughtered their small herd and smoked the meat. They may have been village children with little or no knowledge beyond their narrow lives but they knew everything that there was to know about goats it seemed. Cei’s warriors now travelled with their horses’ flanks adorned with haunches of smoked goat.
Charljenka and Nialgrada travelled with Ethain, sitting on his horse as he walked beside them, telling them tales and answering questions. Leah was surprised that their distrust for the warriors did not seem to extend to Ethain. Her affection for Ethain had been waning fast but this newly discovered talent for being able to make the children happy and perfectly at ease with him gave her pause for thought.
Trevenna had been hoping to become friends with them to make up for acting the way she had when they first met but they had rebuffed her efforts as they had Aelfhelm’s and the others. Only Merdynn and Ethain enjoyed their trust. This side of Ethain surprised Trevenna too and as she slogged through the snow she wondered why it should surprise her so.
Only Leah and Trevenna were preoccupied with the young goat herders, the rest of the warriors dwelt upon the fact that a band of Adren was still remorselessly tracking them and that they were likely to be heading straight towards a larger contingent. They were not happy about either prospect but they clung to the hope that the Bretons were somehow still alive and holding out in their cliff top fortress.
If they were not then Cei was at loss about what to do next. He had been feeling increasingly unsure about his choice to abandon their quest east. During the storm it had seemed the only wise and sensible option but now that the travelling was easier, coupled with the fear of being bracketed by two Adren forces, he was not so sure he had made the right decision. It was not just Arthur depending upon the success of their journey east. The Wessex Warlord had made it clear that in the face of the overwhelming number of the enemy poised to invade, Britain’s only chance of survival depended on Cei’s success. Had he doomed the lands of Britain to defeat at the hands of the Adren? The questions circled in his thoughts like patient carrion.
Merdynn was more concerned with the immediate future and he studied the landscape as the miles passed by hoping to recognise a hill, wood or valley that would position the Breton village in his mind. The trouble was that he rarely visited the Bretons in winter and the land changed under the long darkness, deep snow hid the rivers while fields and hills took on a masked uniformity. He was
becoming more and more concerned and was on the point of suggesting that the others lay up somewhere while he went ahead alone when a hill rose before them crowned by a single ancient oak tree. He was so relieved to see it that he felt like he was seeing an old friend, one he had begun to expect not to meet again.
They were about ten miles away from the Breton village and he nonchalantly informed the others. They were encouraged not to have seen either any evidence of the Adren that had attacked the children’s home or any sign of those who pursued them. Merdynn suggested that they detour a few miles to the North where another spur of land jutted out into the sea and from where they might get some idea of whether the Breton fortress was still inhabited without getting too close to any Adren that may be in the vicinity.
Cei agreed and they changed course to meet the coast to the East of the Breton headland. As they covered the last few miles Cei questioned Merdynn about the Breton village and why he hoped it might still have held out against the Adren.
The way Merdynn described it the village did indeed seem like a fortress. The original fortifications had been built many hundreds of years ago to keep the Bretons’ stock and harvest safe in the winter from marauders who came from deep within the Shadow Lands. Over recent generations the raids had diminished and Merdynn speculated that it was probably because the raiders themselves had fallen to the growing might of the Adren overlords but the raids had been so devastating that the Bretons had continually repaired and replaced the fortifications.
The main village was set on the seaward edge of a headland. Devilishly windy and wet, and altogether a thoroughly miserable place to live, Merdynn added, remembering his various visits to the place. The headland narrowed as it joined the main coastal cliffs and a huge wall had been constructed of rocks and stone. It stood fifty-feet high and was at least twenty-feet deep at the top and deeper still at the base. It stretched from side to side across the narrow neck of land with sheer cliffs dropping down either side to the sea. As if the height alone was not enough, a broad, deep ditch had been dug in front of the wall making it appear taller yet.