Divided We Fall

by Gareth Mottram

  Chapter 14

  Dropping In

  The air howled past Will’s ears and his stomach pushed up into his mouth. Thrill and terror overwhelmed him as he plummeted helplessly to the river.

  Then it seemed like a wooden board smashed into the soles of his feet and he was knifing down through freezing water. Ice cold burned his skin and shocked his whole body.

  Will spread his hands wide and kicked madly. He quickly stopped spearing through the water and slowed to a stop. Finally, he began to rise but the current pulled and swirled him to one side and the other. His lungs burned as he struggled for the light of the river’s surface and his mind began to haze over. The last few moments flashed through his thoughts: the twins aiming their bows at him as Puck swung them to the side of the bridge, then loosing their arrows over his head into the screaming Picts and howling vargs pounding just feet behind them; the jump onto the bridge wall and Rowenna’s shout from the first of two boats pulling out from the far bank.

  And then the fall.

  Will broke the surface. Light burst over his face and he drew in the sweetest breath of his life. Water splashed in his mouth, and he coughed, desperate to suck in more air. He forced himself to calm down and just concentrate on keeping his head mainly above water.

  Rowenna’s sword and his clothes pulled down at him, threatening to drag him under again. The current was pushing him at a runner’s pace downstream and the fort and bridge were falling behind, already out of slingshot range. Cold bit at every inch of his skin but adrenaline kept him swimming. He tried to kick towards the nearest bank - it was so far away.

  I’m going to have to drop Rowenna’s sword.

  Another wave washed over him, and another just as he tried to take a breath. He coughed and started to sink as his hands scrabbled for the belt buckle, his determined kicking not enough to keep him up.

  ‘Will, Will - over here.’ A muffled voice reached him through water-blocked ears and the river’s roar.

  Then louder. ‘Will, behind you – keep away from the hull.’

  Will gave up on the belt and used his hands to turn around. The current yanked him backwards, and a bow bore down on him.

  Desperately, he kicked to one side and pushed himself away from the boat. The sharp prow rushed past him, but the hull clipped one shoulder. It felt as if a bull had charged into him and his arm immediately started to stiffen. Then hands were grabbing at his clothes, backpack straps and under his arms, vice-like fingers digging deep into his numbing flesh.

  He was hauled half out of the water and held there. Water streamed down from his hair across his eyes. A huge blurred face sneered at him and a wave of onion breath hit him.

  ‘He’s nearly dead, might as well throw him back in.’

  ‘Pull him in, Osbert – now,’ Rowenna’s voice shouted from somewhere – a commanding alto despite its forced volume.

  Osbert dangled him for a moment more, then hauled him roughly over the side and dropped him face-down into the boat.

  For a moment, Will just lay there, smelling damp wood and feeling stupidly grateful to be out of the freezing river. Water still filled his ears and his world was just a muffled roar of river water and waves of stabbing cold.

  Bridget. Puck. Were they safe? Will struggled to sit up, sodden clothes making him twice as heavy as normal and his violently shivering muscles not helping at all.

  He was sitting in water, sloshing around in the bottom of an eight-oar longboat. Osbert sat almost filling a two-man bench in front of him. He was pulling hard at an oar, his massive hands wrapped around the wood as if he meant to throttle it. Bragg sat on the other side of the narrow gangway, pulling at his own oar and sneering down at Will. In front of him were Sigbert and Eric, their big muscles making light work of rowing as they totally ignored the half-drowned Will and scanned the west bank.

  A wave of heat washed over Will’s back and he stifled a cry. He twisted around, half expecting to see the reaper in the boat with them.

  Wyatt knelt in the bottom of the boat, both hands hovering over one of Alston’s legs and moving slowly along it. A white haze enveloped the lobber’s limb under Wyatt’s hands and as it passed over the red and peeling skin, it left it pink and whole.

  Will stared at the white haze – he had never felt anything from clerical magic before but then, healings were normally held behind closed doors in churches.

  Wyatt noticed him watching and paused. ‘What are you staring at, nithing? If you had done a better job of holding the tower, I wouldn’t have to be wasting Wotan’s power to save a lobber’s legs.’ The acolyte took one long, disgusted look down his nose at Will, then turned back to his magic.

  Just behind the two of them Brant pulled at an oar. He nodded at Will and gave one of his small, rare smiles. Puck sat on the bench to his side, rowing surprisingly smoothly despite his long limbs making him look like a trapped spider. He cast an appraising glance over Will, winked and turned to watch the shore.

  And standing above them all, steering at the helm at the back of the boat, was Rowenna. She smiled down at him for a delicious moment then returned to watching the river

  Will nodded then looked around. They were cutting quickly through the choppy river water, the oars working with the current as it pulled them along hungrily. The bridge was already far behind them and about to disappear around a bend. A second boat paralleled them twenty yards away. Wade, the second skirmisher had the helm and the two huscarls, Bada and Eadwald, pulled at the oars. Gwen and the twin lobbers were also rowing hard. Will could understand the three of them abandoning him and two other outsiders, but he could hardly believe that they had just run off and left Alston to be killed as well.

  Finally, Will’s clearing vision found Donal crouched alone towards the bow, bent over and scooping out water with one of the Shield’s helmets.

  Suddenly, Will sat up straighter, staring around. ‘Where’s Bri—' he began, then stopped as she straightened up from the floor of the other boat. She looked more like a drowned rat than he thought possible for a human.

  Everyone had made it… apart from Iver. Will tried and failed not to think of him making his last stand as the wild Picts and their beasts swarmed all over his tower.

  ‘Don’t just sit there like some flopping codfish,’ Osbert said, kicking him, ‘bale out the water before we sink.’

  Will focussed on the bottom of the boat, his mind still numb from the exhausting chase and how close they had all come to being killed. The water level was getting higher, sloshing around him as he knelt. At least his sopping clothes soothed the slingstone bruise swelling painfully on his back.

  ‘You heard - get on with it, nithing,’ Bragg barked and swung his helmet to hit Will’s shoulder. ‘If you pathetic cowards had held at the tower instead of running then we would have had more time to fix up these old tubs.’

  Maybe you big, chain-mailed, heavily armed Shields could have stayed to hold the tower – it’s kind of your thing.

  Will took the helmet and started baling out. It would have been useless to argue – their running away from spiders would just make Bragg howl with laughter.

  For long minutes, Will bailed out the water as fast as he could. It didn’t seem to get much lower but at least it didn’t rise any more.

  They fell into a working silence. The forest trees whipped by on either side as they sped down the river. Will thanked the god, Wade, for the current, whisking them away from the Picts. Will wasn’t as religious as he should be, but he knew Wade was god of the sea, so he probably took credit for rivers as well.

  He knew from Master Tolan’s geography lessons that the river widened and slowed down further south but even so, they should reach Yeavering in about a day. It would take Godric five days’ forced march to get his warbands there – if they had survived the attack on the Anvil.

  Almost an hour downstream from the River Fort, Wyatt spoke up. ‘I think most of the vargs and Pict runners have finally tired – I’ve seen glimpses of only
two or three of them in the last ten minutes.’

  ‘Pathetic cowards,’ Osbert mumbled.

  Oh – glad us tower defenders aren’t the only ones, Will thought, but kept his head down.

  Suddenly, yelps and snarls erupted from the trees some way from the riverbank.

  Then there was silence.

  They all stared at the dark, slowly swaying trees as the river rushed them away.

  After a moment, Osbert gave a short laugh. ‘Praise the gods – the bloody dogs must have run into some foresters or their traps.’

  ‘It was over very quickly for that,’ Puck said. He was now rowing next to Alston. The lobbers legs showed through his burned breeches, the muscles flexing and relaxing under his now near-normal skin. Alston hadn’t so much as glanced at Will since getting in the boat.

  ‘You’d be over very quickly if you ran into a proper Angalsax man-trap, fool,’ Osbert snapped back. ‘Now put your scrawny body to work on that oar - I want to be at the forester’s settlement by evening. We can pull in and swap these rotting tubs for something that actually floats.’ Almost as an afterthought, he looked up at Rowenna. ‘What say you, Princess?’

  Rowenna scanned the trees for long moments before answering. ‘Agreed - if the Picts haven’t got there first.’

  They sped on.

  *** ***

  ‘There’s the settlement,’ Rowenna announced from the helm. ‘It looks untouched. Thank the gods they left this one alone.’

  Will looked up, his neck muscles twinging at the unusual movement after a day of bailing out water from the bottom of the boat.

  The sun was dipping lower, setting the river to sparkle with dazzling diamonds and lighting a huge clearing in gold. Just appearing around a slow curve, were at least a score of well-made, wooden buildings of all sizes. They rose up from the cleared earth and were dominated by a large hall built close to the treeline. Piles of tree trunks and neatly stacked planks lay along the shore and five wide jetties jutted out into the water.

  Will managed a smile. They had passed two staging posts between here and the River Fort, but both had been blackened, burnt-out husks with tendrils of smoke the only movement to be seen.

  Osbert grunted. ‘Too many Forrester archers here for the craven Pict scum who stole our boats and the main force won’t come this far east - it pulls them thirty miles off the straightest path from the Anvil to Yeavering.’

  Will ached all over but went back to bailing out. More and more of the hastily daubed tar Rowenna and the others had used to patch up the boats had gradually been washed out and they were slowly sinking.

  ‘And the woodsmen stink worse than the savages themselves,’ Bragg said, ‘the smell alone would keep them away.’ Osbert took one hand from his oar to cuff his apprentice but grinned to himself.

  Idiots, Will thought. Bernicia’s forest communities might be a bit basic and pretty isolationist, but they provided much-needed, expertly hewn wood to the kingdom as well as tons of charcoal. All of which was floated and boated down-river and into Yeavering’s harbour or further on to their coastal towns and forts.

  Floated and boated. Will snapped his head up. There were no boats docked on the landing stages – none at all.

  The hope of a replacement vessel and no more bailing had been keeping him going for the last four hours.

  Bridget’s boat closed in on there’s as they neared the settlement. She smiled in sympathy with Will, raising her own bailing-out helmet.

  Perhaps fifty men and women gathered on the shore as their boats headed to either side of the central jetty. They were all dressed in loose-fitting leggings and tunics of various shades of brown and green. Each carried a short bow and had a ten- to twelve-inch seax hanging from their belts. More armed figures melted out from the trees and walked towards the shore as they swung towards the jetties.

  ‘Savages,’ Osbert growled, ‘hiding in the trees like scared rabbits.’

  Rabbits that could have turned us into pincushions before we knew they were even there. Anyway, wouldn’t scared rabbits dive down burrows, not hide in trees?

  ‘Can’t tell the women from the men,’ Bragg said.

  ‘Aye,’ Sigbert added, ‘they all do the same work, from cooking to chopping down their beloved trees and shooting their little arrows.’ He grinned, a mouth full of big, tombstone teeth splitting his face. ‘Women trying to match men in everything - stupid.’

  Will risked a quick glance up at Rowenna, steering them expertly towards the jetty despite the still-strong current. She was the most competent person he knew – man or woman. Whilst Angalsax women weren’t allowed in the shield wall, they were recruited into the ranks of lobbers and skirmishers. Bernicia could not defend both her section of the Romani Wall and her long sea border without women swelling warbands’ ranks. Obviously, most Shields thought the warbands could do without women altogether – not surprising as they also considered all lobbers and skirmishers to be largely a waste of marching rations.

  Rowenna caught Will’s look and raised her eyes to the sky – she was ignoring the Shields as well. Fight the battles that needed fighting.

  Will gave her a quick smile. When he got into the ranks of the shield wall, he would alter their attitude bit by bit. Things needed to change before that though. Somehow, they needed to accept that a diverse-weapons army was the way forward - they would all need each other’s strengths and skills to get through this Pict invasion.

  A sharp kick sent Will flat on his face in the water slops. Osbert laughed, quickly followed by the other Shields. ‘Tie her up, nithing – before she sinks thanks to your pathetic bailing.’

  Will picked himself up and jumped stiffly onto the jetty as Rowenna brought them neatly alongside. As he moored the boat to one of the many posts, he saw the foresters had formed a semi-circle around the jetties. Whilst none of them had actually nocked an arrow, they looked about as welcoming as the Picts who had hunted them along the Romani Wall.

  Bridget joined him from tying up her boat. ‘How’s your back?’

  Will stretched. ‘Broken, I think. I’ll never bail out another helmet full of water as long as—'

  Bridget quickly side-stepped and pulled him with her as Osbert and the shields barged past.

  Brant stepped out in front of them. His huge frame with the giant battle axe strapped across his back almost filled the jetty. Osbert stopped almost nose to nose with him – an inch shorter but even broader and more heavily muscled in the shoulders.

  Brant held the champion’s angry stare for a moment then turned to offer his hand to Rowenna.

  She nodded graciously and rested her fingers lightly on his as she jumped out. Wyatt scrambled out to stand just behind her, straightening his habit and putting on his imperious face.

  With their princess in the lead, they walked along the creaking jetty to meet their not-so-welcoming committee.

  Chapter 15

  Forest Encounters

  Two men and three women, late middle-aged or older, waited for Rowenna on the shore. They stood close enough to the jetty to force Rowenna to stop on the narrow strip of wood. A bright-eyed, whip-thin woodsman of perhaps forty stepped just in front of the other four as the rest of the foresters waited in a semi-circle behind. They stood as still and patient as tree trunks.

  ‘Greetings, Princess Rowenna,’ the thin man said, ‘I am Wurt, speaker for the Forester Council.’ His voice was surprisingly rich, a little like Puck’s when the jester was telling one of his epic tales to the court. He didn’t smile like Puck though – his face was unreadable. It could have been carved in oak.

  Rowenna gave a small smile and waited, holding the man’s gaze.

  Will swallowed as he saw Osbert’s hand move to his sword hilt. Bow, or Osbert will have your head… and then your four-score bowmen will pepper us with arrows as we all stand here in a nice long queue for them.

  Wurt either remembered his etiquette or decided he quite liked living. He bowed and the elders and other foresters did the sam
e behind him.

  Will breathed out. The Foresters were fiercely independent but still technically subjects of King Godric. Judging from their appearance, the two hundred or so men, women and children clearly had other bloodlines mixed in with Angalsax. Most rarely left the vast forests apart from sailing their barges up and down the river for trade with Yeavering and the smaller river towns down to the coast.

  ‘Greetings, Wurt,’ Rowenna said in her formal, addressing-the-masses voice. Will hated that voice. In one of his more rational moments, he’d worked out it was because it just emphasised the social distance between the two of them.

  Rowenna carried on despite Will’s feelings. ‘You have suffered an attack?’ She nodded to one of the pillars supporting the jetty – a Pict crossbow bolt lay deeply embedded in it.

  ‘Aye – two days ago, just before dawn. Two hundred or more, over-crowded in all manner of craft pulled in. They stole all our barges and left. They paid a price for it though.’ He looked to his left where the blackened remains of a fire darkened the shoreline. Scraps of singed plaid lay in the ashes.

  Rowenna nodded. ‘We have much news to tell but little time – we must reach Yeavering as soon as possible. Our boats need repairing, weapons replacing… and a hot meal would be very welcome.’

  Wurt glanced back at the elders who nodded after just a moment. He turned back to Rowenna. ‘We will help. You can talk to the Council in private in the hall whilst our shipwrights look at your boats. We’ll give you what weapons we can spare.’

  Wurt beckoned a bowman and a woman wearing a belt full of tools over as he spoke. Then, without waiting for a response from Rowenna, he turned. The crowd parted and the five elders led the way to the large hall near the trees.

  ‘Puck, Wyatt, Brant come with me,’ Rowenna said, ‘everyone else take the chance to rest – we won’t be here long.’

  She followed the elders through the silent crowd, all staring at her as if she were something out of a myth.