Dark North

by Paul Finch

  There were quiet murmurs as the Emperor’s officials focused their attention on Trelawna. Lucius introduced her as a Gallic countess whom he had liberated from the clutches of one of Arthur’s more evil knights, and whom, once New Rome’s victory was complete, he would take as his bride. The Emperor’s welcoming smile remained in place, but hardened a little as he pondered this. Trelawna couldn’t help wondering if Emperor Lucius felt he should be the one deciding who his nobles should marry.

  “Let’s not run before our horse to market, tribune,” Lucius intoned, shaking himself back to the matter at hand. “Our situation is this. Thanks to the free-companies, we have the Breton Treasury in our grasp. As you’ve seen, Nantes is completely embattled and will shortly fall. I have also sent strong detachments to surround the chateaux Fougeres and Vitre. Their garrisons respond to our demands with jeers, but will be less obstinate once their king is in chains. When this particular part of the campaign is complete – and I anticipate that imminently – Brittany will have ceased to exist as an independent power. Thus, when King Arthur arrives, he will be landing in Roman-occupied France. There will be every justification to drive him back into the sea, and once that is done, to pursue him to his own shores, which, given that he will have lost most of his soldiery on this futile mission, we shall storm with ease.”

  Trelawna listened with fascination, wondering if the Emperor genuinely believed what he was saying or if it was simply bravado. As far as she was aware, so far he had not won any kind of notable victory. Rennes had fallen to a horde of brigands, and Nantes, which faced the full might of New Rome’s army, was still holding out.

  “Things have turned out better than I could have hoped,” Emperor Lucius said, his eyes bright. “Not two hundred miles from where we now stand, Julius Caesar signaled his power to the world with an extraordinary triumph over Vercingetorix at Alesia. Our triumph will be greater still.”

  Again, Trelawna recalled her histories. Julius Caesar had been in command of a highly professional force, and the ancient Gauls had been disorganised savages. She appraised Lucius as he continued to enthuse about the inevitability of victory. He was clearly a charismatic leader. He seemed young to her, almost boyish, but he was likeable and energetic, and it could not be denied that so far at least, his conquests had run smoothly and to schedule. But she could not help wondering how many of his foes had been cowed by his Imperial name, and the sheer size of his armies, rather than his proficiency on the battlefield. King Arthur and his knights had trod a more difficult path. They had scrapped and schemed and fought and parleyed, in the mud and rain, in the frost and snow, enduring every conceivable hardship. They’d used brawn and brain in equal measure, through one war after another, never knowing defeat. In every way they had earned the power and reputation they enjoyed.

  Even as Emperor Lucius drew Rufio to the table where the plans and maps were laid, and even though the other Roman officers, seasoned and well-trained, crowded around in quiet confidence, Trelawna felt her first pang of concern that she might have joined the losing side.

  Fifteen

  DESPITE EMPEROR LUCIUS’S soaring confidence about the campaign, New Rome was not to have everything its own way in Brittany.

  Serving in Emperor Lucius’s army were two North African princes, two bothers – Jalhid and Priamus. Their lands in Cyrenaica had been overrun during New Rome’s reconquest, and they and some twelve thousand of their finest warriors had now been compelled to serve on the campaign in Gaul. The brothers had differing views on this matter. Jalhid was the older by twenty years; he knew better than his younger sibling, or so he assumed, the value the Romans placed on their loyal allies, and the riches and power that could be had in the service of the Empire. Priamus saw only that his tribe, who had finally established their own rulership after rising against the Vandals and destroying them, had suddenly been made slaves again. Priamus also did not share his brother’s belief that all men were cruel and lustful, and that suffering was the inevitable consequence of Man’s quest for power. As such, when Emperor Lucius’s spies brought news to Nantes that the first of King Arthur’s contingents were landing at Brest, and Priamus was dispatched with his six thousand troops to reinforce Consul Gainus at Rennes, the Moorish prince was appalled to witness the depredations committed by Gorlon and his forces.

  All the way to Rennes, they encountered villages laid waste, fields and vineyards reduced to blackened ruins, trees groaning beneath the weight of dangling corpses. The final straw came when Priamus’s scouts drew his attention to the remains of a free-company camp abandoned by the roadside. Concealed amid the trees was a fire-pit with a charred pole laid across it, on which were mounted the remains of several children, broached like young birds. Priamus at once convened a meeting with his senior officers, and the decision was reached that they would sooner serve the Devil than pay fealty to any potentate who permitted such atrocities. They thus proceeded west, but now veered away from Rennes, intent upon traversing the whole of Brittany if necessary until they met Arthur’s forces, with whom they would hold parley.

  News of this mutiny reached Consul Gainus, who, having finally opened the Treasury, had been living in Rennes like a king. Enraged, Gainus called ten squadrons of cavalry from the Roman force now barracked in the city – five thousand men in total – and rode out at their head, determined to capture and punish the transgressors. Twenty miles west of the city, in a barren, rocky region, they were ambushed by Breton irregulars bolstered by forward companies of Arthur’s army acting under the joint command of Sir Gawaine and Sir Lancelot. A fierce melee was joined, and for a brief time the numerically superior Romans looked to be getting the better of it, until a third party arrived on the battlefield – Priamus and his Moorish warriors. The Romans had pushed the Britons onto a broad hillock, where they subjected their shield-wall to relentless attacks, but now Priamus charged into Gainus’s right flank, causing panic and confusion.

  The Roman formation broke, and there was a stampede to escape. The Britons took advantage, mounting up and galloping downhill, overrunning what remained of the Roman camp. Many Roman officers were slain, Gainus among them. The rest of the Roman force fled east towards Rennes, a shredded relic of what they once had been.

  On the battlefield, Prince Priamus surrendered his army, explaining that his days of servitude to Rome had ended. The Moors made a strange sight for the eyes both of Briton and Breton alike, with their dark faces and curled black beards. They wore polished steel corselets over flowing silken garb, and steel helms only the upper spikes of which were visible above their ceremonial turbans. When they fought, they did so with great courage and skill, wielding lances, short, double-curved bows which they could shoot from horseback, and long crescent swords.

  Despite the strangeness of such allies, Gawaine – as always, energetic and hearty – congratulated Priamus on this decision, and said that he should join his host with theirs. However, Priamus was reluctant. He knew that his brother, Jalhid, still lived in Rome’s favour and would never switch allegiances, which meant that Moor would at some point be fighting against Moor, and Priamus could not be party to that. Lancelot thus proposed a compromise. He suggested that Priamus and his troops should voluntarily become prisoners-of-war. If they laid down their arms, they would be escorted out of Brittany and into the lands held by Childeric – maybe to Paris itself, a neutral capital from where they could watch the rest of the campaign as observers.

  Priamus and his men did as requested. They turned over their weapons, and allowed Lancelot and Gawaine, with four hundred knights and men-at-arms and six hundred infantry, to escort them to the kingdom’s northeast border.

  WHEN NEWS REACHED the garrison at Rennes that Consul Gainus was dead, there was great concern. Second-in-command to Gainus had been Romeus Baldoni, a portly fellow who in civilian life had been a merchant and land-owner, and whose main position in the military was as Staff Prefect. Throughout the many campaigns of Emperor Lucius, he had organised logistics, built
camps and served as secretary to the various fighting-men he had served under. He had never himself seen the face of battle.

  Baldoni now sent a frantic missive to Nantes to the effect that he and his reduced command were in dire peril. The return mail, signed by Emperor Lucius himself, instructed Baldoni to re-fortify Rennes, and reassured him that fresh forces would soon be en route to relieve him. In the meantime, the traitor Priamus could not be allowed to escape and Baldoni was ordered to send the only mobile force he had left – Gorlon and his free-companies – in pursuit. Relieved on several counts, not least because the free-companies themselves made him nervous, Baldoni passed the orders to the ogre captain, who yet again was given express permission to ‘do his worst.’

  Gorlon relished his new commission, as it meant that he and his army could head north. This would bring them into the orbit of towns and villages as yet untouched by the war, which he could plunder with impunity – and this he did, delaying often so that he and his followers could thoroughly enjoy these fruits of their labour. This was also wine-growing country, so his army finished most days’ work not only replete with theft and rapine, but also drunk and insensible. If his mission in Brittany was becoming a lawless holiday, Gorlon had no great concern. He saw no actual value in taking the Moorish captives his paymasters sought – even if they had wealthy families back home that might trade for them, North Africa was too far away for business to be done – so the pursuit was pressed in leisurely fashion.

  Lancelot’s scouts continually reported these developments. With a baggage of prisoners who were happy to go quietly, he was able to deploy more and more men in his rearguard until this was virtually the entirety of his force, with only a token handful to perform the escort duty. He finally opted to make his stand at a pass between low hills, filled with dense woodland. Unusually, it had not rained in Brittany for nearly two months, so the wood was tinder-dry. This suited Lancelot even better, as did the market town of Dol, located on its western flank. His first action was to evacuate Dol as the free-companies would soon be arriving, but to leave stores of food and wine there which could easily be found. His own troops were arrayed east of the wood, though first he had parties of sappers hang many skins filled with naphtha23 from its high boughs.

  In late afternoon, Gorlon and his companies entered Dol in their usual fashion, riding pell-mell along the streets, hurling torches. When no-one fled screaming, they dismounted and began to search. They found no living soul to vent their wrath upon, but of course there was a wealth of food and drink. Suspecting the villagers had left these offerings to buy off his ferocity, the ogre captain opted to pitch his camp here for the night. He would still destroy the town, but only in the morning.

  Dusk was descending when Lancelot, Gawaine and groups of other mounted knights emerged from the wood, their colours and badges prominently displayed. With much shouting and blowing of horns, they charged the free-company pickets, slaughtering many at their posts, and sending the remainder scampering into the town. Roused from their drunken slumbers, the rest of the freebooters armed themselves. When they learned that vivid crests were borne by those assailing them, their greed was ignited. Arthur’s knights were no ordinary knights: they counted dukes, barons and princes in their order; even one or two, made hostage, would be worth a fortune. The freebooters were even more encouraged to attack when they saw that their enemies were few, and now galloping back into the wood as though to escape.

  A mad pursuit was launched, the freebooters leaping onto their mounts half-dressed for battle, weaving between thickets and tangled trees, and in the darkest depths of that place, where their numbers became irrelevant, they were met head-on by a furious counter-charge.

  Lancelot and Gawaine wrought brutal execution. Swords and axes rose and fell in shimmering, moon-lit patterns as the knights hacked their way in and out of the straggling, disordered horsemen, felling them to every side.

  “This is no trouble at all!” Gawaine laughed, as he and Lancelot passed each other in the noisy gloom.

  “They still outnumber us ten to one,” Lancelot replied. He stood in his stirrups to peer into the depths of the wood. It was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, but figures were battling back and forth, blundering into one another, cramming every glade with distorted, chaotic forms.

  Realising the time was right, he put his hunting horn to his lips, and blew a single, piercing blast. At once, those knights and men-at-arms still locked in combat struggled free and rode away along pre-determined paths, Lancelot and Gawaine among them. They rode hard and recklessly, for they knew they only had seconds before the six hundred archers ranked to the east of the wood poured death into its naphtha-filled branches.

  Gorlon wasn’t worried about the welfare or even the lives of his fellow freebooters. He’d shed no tears to see their broken bodies hanging from the scaling-ladders at Rennes. He felt no apprehension now as more and more of them galloped furiously into the darkened tangle of trees. After all, the fewer those remaining, the more there was of the final haul to go around. And he wasn’t alone in this philosophy. There were several wise heads among the free-companies, most of whom had come to serve as Gorlon’s lieutenants.

  Pepe la Lieux, real name Ranulf Guiscard, was the son of a Frankish lord who, with no fervour for the law of primogeniture, had murdered two of his three older brothers before being discovered. The free-companies had made a convenient bolt-hole for him, but now, with the unerring instinct for survival that all noblemen possess, he came to share Gorlon’s suspicion that a trap was closing.

  Darra O’Lug was an itinerant monk who had prowled the leafy byways of Ireland preaching ‘redemption through sin.’ From village to village he took his perverse gospel, debauching the young girls trusted to his ministry. On being chased out of Ireland, he had arrived among the free-companies, finding like-minded companions. He had particularly enjoyed the daughters of Rennes, but now he, too, could sense that it was time to depart.

  Baroni Benevento was a Genoese merchant who had earned himself the soubriquet ‘Death-Dealer’ for his provision of mercenary forces – plus expert torturers and assassins – to private wars. Only when Roman hegemony was restored over Italy’s great merchant cities, and his business rivals filed charges of embezzlement against him, did Benevento take his military market-place on the road, heading north into Gaul, where at the time the jockeying forces of Frank, Saxon and Visigoth still had scores to settle with each other. But first he settled a few of his own, sending his bravos to silence those business rivals who had offered evidence against him. Then, as now, it had come to Benevento that it was time to leave.

  Sir Turgeis of Coutrances was a knight turned robber, known as the ‘Jackal of the Southeast,’ whose band had terrorised the highways of Aquitaine for many a year. When he was eventually captured and hanged by the roadside, so thick were the thews in his neck, and so clumsily tied was the hangman’s knot, that he survived an entire night on the gibbet and when, in the morning, the local executioner – a village bumpkin of the first order – came to cut him down, he turned the tables on that oafish official, binding him hand and foot and suspending him from the gibbet instead. Whether any of his accomplices who had also been hanged by the roadside had survived the night, he cared too little to check, and made off quickly on the executioner’s cart. For Turgeis, self-preservation was an overriding priority.

  This was the case where all these men, and others like them in Gorlon’s makeshift command, were concerned – so much that they watched in silence as one disorganised company after another rode into the darkling wood, yelling like demons. Long before Lancelot’s fire engulfed it, they saw that the days of the freebooter army were over. So thinking, while the battle raged amid the trees, they furtively stuffed whatever spare loot they could find into bolsters, loaded their wagons and packhorses, and vacated the town of Dol to the north.

  Lancelot’s archers used incendiary arrows, with clumps of tightly-bound pitch-soaked fleece fitted just below th
e arrowhead, ignited in braziers of hot coals. Their bodkin tips, projected by the powerful, thick-staved longbows favoured by Arthur’s infantry, easily penetrated mail and leather coats and continued to burn deep inside their targets’ bodies. Of course, in the depth of night, clean shots were impossible – not that they were needed.

  A rain of fire slashed down through the tinder-dry foliage of the wood wherein the freebooters milled, covering every quadrant and puncturing the skins of naphtha hanging in the canopy.

  The blood-red glare of the exploding skins lit the landscape for dozens of miles. On the crest of a hill just north of Dol, Gorlon glanced back, his misaligned features awed as he gazed on the inferno. By his reckoning, almost the entirety of the free-companies had blundered headlong into the disaster. Even as he and his officers watched, frantic figures could be seen floundering in the white-hot heart of a conflagration which roared from the forest floor to a hundred feet above the tips of the tallest trees.

  IT WAS AT first light, when the smog of smoke and morning mist had cleared, and Lancelot, Gawaine and their men-at-arms advanced on horseback through the ash and embers. Scenes of horror greeted them: scores of fallen men, more than they could count, lay huddled together, blackened, twisted, and melted into each other. A fortunate few were riddled with arrows and had probably died swiftly; some had perished on their own blades; others had been incinerated in attitudes of prayer, desperately seeking shrift before plunging into that even more terrible fire. The stench was nauseating, eye-watering.

  “We couldn’t beat them in a straight fight,” Lancelot reminded Gawaine, who nodded grimly, for once every jest knocked out of him. “They were too many. They’d have killed our men as surely as the unarmed villagers they massacred so routinely.”