The Saxon Shore cc-4

by Jack Whyte

  "Come now, they must have families!"

  He cut me with a glance. "They have mates, and broods. No more." He looked around at the heavily treed land beyond the beach. "We are in their lands now. Deep within them. It is not a good place to be. I blame myself. We should have remained together."

  "Don't," I told him, accepting the almost supernatural fear I sensed in him. "That would have changed nothing. You did what you thought was for the best, and it was. It was the fog that brought us to grief, not your leadership. Now, here's what I want to do. I agree with you about Donuil. He should go with you, and you must take our wounded fellow, Quintus, too." I cut Donuil's protest short with an upraised hand and continued speaking to Feargus. "As for an escort of your men, we won't need them; they would only slow us down. Fortune has been with us so far. Now all we require is a short time to allow us to dry our gear completely and make a fresh start. After that, we'll head north, following the coast as closely as we can, and try to keep in touch with you. Are there any settlements along the coast between us and where we are going?"

  "Nah." His headshake was emphatic. "If there had been, we would not be here like this, undisturbed."

  I looked back to Donuil. "How far is a league? In Roman miles? He said we are almost ten leagues too far south."

  "About three miles to a league, I think, but that's only a guess. I'm staying with you."

  "No, Donuil, you are not. You will travel with Feargus." Again I stopped his protest before it could be uttered. "Remember why I came with you, man! If we should meet any of these Wild Ones and fail to make it through, then at least the child will have a chance to return home to Camulod in your care. I know I can rely on you for that."

  He looked at me long and hard, then sucked his lower lip between his teeth. I stared back at him, waiting. Finally he sighed and jerked his head in a nod. "Very well, Caius Merlyn. So be it. I do not like it, but I will do as you say. Just see that you come safe through."

  I grinned at him, feeling much better. "I will, Donuil. I have no intention of dying at the hand of anyone as degenerate as the people Feargus describes. In fact, I have no intention of dying at all, ever." I turned back to Feargus. "Do any of your men use spears?"

  "Spears? Aye, many of them do. Why?"

  "Because I would like to borrow some. We have our shields, but only three of us carry spears and it seems to me now that we might all have need of more. We will be riding fast and hard, and if we have to fight these demons you describe, I would choose to fight from horseback, at a run, and with a strong spear in my hand."

  He grunted. "I wish all requests were that easy to grant." He swung on his heel and shouted to one of his men, sending him running back towards the platform at the rear of the galley. He returned moments later, accompanied by three others, each of them bearing an armload of assorted spears. The weapons all looked heavy and serviceable and were of varying lengths.

  "Excellent," I said, nodding my approval. "We won't need anywhere near that many, but there are enough to let each of my men pick one that suits him. My thanks. We can be prepared to move out from here within the hour. That should give us five, perhaps six hours of travel time before nightfall; close to your ten leagues, if fortune smiles on us and we're lucky enough to avoid your savages."

  Feargus looked impressed. He turned his head to look towards our horses. Donuil, however, shook his head, looking doubtful.

  "I think not, Merlyn. You won't be able to move that quickly. No roads, remember? The entire route along the coast is heavily forested. You'll be riding through trees and underbrush the whole way. It could cut your normal speed by half."

  From the outset, it seemed as though Donuil had the right of it. We said our farewells within the hour, some time shortly after noon, and rode into the forest, leaving him staring after us from the deck of Feargus's galley. By the time we had progressed the distance of a bowshot, our speed had been reduced to a slow, torturous walk, and I knew that none of us had ever encountered a wilderness such as this. My vision of a steady, cantering passage had already been proved ludicrous by the difficulty our mounts had found in even placing their hooves to walk. Every step offered a potential hazard, threatening a broken leg or ankle, for this ground, beneath a canopy of mighty, soaring trees, had never been cleared. The forest was beautiful, but utterly alien and apparently unpenetrated by man; every leaf and twig and tiny branch, every limb and tree trunk that had ever grown here, down through the ages, had fallen in the course of time in random chaos and lain undisturbed thereafter. There was a verdant, lush stillness everywhere that choked all sound and made the rich greenery of Britain's great forests seem anaemic and tawdry by comparison. Moss clung to the tree trunks here as it did over there, but the moss of Eire was thicker, fatter, and it grew everywhere; on the ground, on the rocks, on the countless fallen trees, some of them enormous, that littered the ground in every stage of decay, and on the upper portions of the trees themselves, hanging in green garlands from the branches. The earth under our hooves was of rich, reddish loam beneath the carpet of dead leaves that coated it, and crusted with fungi of all shapes and sizes, many more of which also clung to the boles and branches of the trees. A few of those, I knew, might be edible, but many more would be deadly, and I had no way of knowing which was which in this new and threatening land through which we rode.

  To our left, inland as we made our plodding way northward over the forest bed, the terrain rose vertically in a series of ancient, green-scummed cliffs from which giant slabs and boulders of granite had been wrenched in ages past and now leaned drunkenly in every conceivable posture, as green and lichen-scabbed as the cliffs that had mothered them. Huge trees grew up there, too, upon the cliffs and slabs and boulders, clinging impossibly to the living rock by vast networks of roots that stretched across, between, along and around the fissures in the stone, and everywhere grew clumps and thickets of brilliant, ancient-looking ferns, many of them taller than a mounted man. Little light penetrated the roof of leaves high above, but wherever a ray of sunlight did succeed, it shimmered gold-green in the silent, surrounding darkness. I was aware of rich, reddish-brown fecundity everywhere I looked, but the pervading impression was of total greenness.

  I was in the lead, and now I hitched myself around in my saddle, looking back to Dedalus, who was following me closely. He saw me turn and shook his head, and the disgust in his face was echoed in his tone as he called to me. "You thought to make thirty miles before nightfall? We'll be lucky to make one at this rate." His eyes shifted from my face to the wilderness ahead of us. "Mind you," he added, "the ground's rising. We might ride out of this soon, if we're not just climbing a hill with a down slope on the other side."

  I glanced forward again and he was right. There was a definite upward slope to the land ahead. I pulled my horse aside and waved him past me, telling him I would catch up later. Then I sat and watched my pitiful little parade as it trooped by me, offering a word or two to each rider in turn. There were eight of us left—ten, counting the herd boys—of the original group of fourteen, Lucanus had been the first to depart, as planned. Metellus was dead. Quintus with his broken leg and Prince Donuil had gone with Feargus and Logan. But we still had all the horses except the three that had been killed. Eight men, two stripling boys and twenty-seven horses. I cursed myself for my folly in bringing all of them across the sea. They were behaving placidly, nonetheless, and for the time being I had no great concern over them. When the last of my men had passed me, nodding wordlessly to my greeting, I fell in behind him, immediately aware of the beneficial effect twenty-six sets of hooves in single file had had on the ground underfoot, and there faced a dilemma: were I to pull aside now and attempt to overtake the entire train to regain the point, I should be risking my horse irresponsibly on the uneven ground. I decided to remain where I was for a time. And then, within a matter of moments, the man directly ahead of me changed his gait, kicking his horse to a trot, and as I followed him I saw the file ahead of him extending to my l
eft. Dedalus, at the point, had evidently found and was now following a game trail that led along the bottom of the towering cliffs on our left.

  Our pace picked up steadily as soon as we were all on the beaten path of the narrow track, and after a mile or so it quickened again as the main path widened after converging with yet another, that joined it from our right. I saw the junction as I drew level with it, and followed it idly backward for several paces with my eyes before suddenly reining in my horse and returning to look more closely. It was a deer track, but I had never seen deer tracks like those I gazed at now. Each hoofprint, clearly visible in the soft loam of the beaten pathway, looked as large as my horse's own, and yet the signs were undeniably those of a cloven-hoofed deer. The track itself, now that I looked at it more closely, was far broader than a mere game track should have been. Unable to doubt what I was looking at, I shook my head in wonder and then rode to catch up with the others, grappling with the outlandish idea of a deer as large and heavy as a cavalry horse. I had lagged behind about a hundred paces, and as I cantered to catch up I took note of the way the path had widened. I called to the last man ahead of me to warn him I wished to pass and was able to do so quite easily, so that my progress from the rear to the head of the column was swifter than I would have thought possible mere moments earlier. As I drew abreast of Dedalus, he glanced at me, his eyes crinkled.

  "No roads in Eire, huh? This is almost as good as one of ours. Not as straight, and narrower, but serviceable enough."

  "Aye, Ded, but have you thought to ask yourself what made it?"

  I caught his glance from the corner of my eye. "What d'you mean? Deer made it."

  "I know, but if the wolves and bears in this place are as big as the deer I hope we don't meet any."

  He frowned at me, and then raised himself in his stirrups, peering forward at the ground between his horse's ears.

  "By the Christus," he muttered, in a voice filled with awe. "I hadn't noticed! You're right. What kind of deer are these?"

  "Very large deer, Ded. We can only hope they have deer-like natures and no horns."

  The game path was clearly ancient. Saplings had grown up along its edges in many spots, sprung from seeds scattered in the dung of its users, and their leafy branches brushed against us on both sides as we rode in silence for a spell, travelling two abreast easily now at a steady lope on the gently rising gradient that showed no signs of coming to a crest. At one point, where a giant tree had fallen across the track long years before, the route switched sharply, following the enormous trunk for many paces before bending tightly again to pass beneath the bole that continued angling sharply upward to its torn-up base, where ancient roots more than four times the height of a mounted man reared far above us. Whatever its cause, the great tree's downfall had created a clearance, sweeping lesser trees to ruin in its wake, so that now the space around it was filled with light and lesser growth. Ded was looking back at the place where we had passed beneath the tree. We had had to duck our heads to do so, but only very slightly, which indicated to me that the animals who used the path required almost the same clearance as we did. Dedalus was evidently thinking the same thing, for I heard him mutter "Big deer!" again, beneath his breath. Now he looked up towards the blue sky visible above us.

  "You know, Merlyn, it occurs to me that we might be enjoying unusual weather in this land of Donuil's."

  "How so?"

  Before answering, he leaned sideways from his saddle and grasped a trailing garland of moss, tugging it free of the branch from which it hung and holding it towards me. "This stuff. It requires moisture. Haven't you noticed how green everything is? And all the fungi? It must rain here all day, every day, seems to me . . . And if that's the case, it's going to be a whoreson to live here without rusting up solid, our weapons and armour and all."

  He was right and I was on the point of agreeing with him when he jerked up his arm, holding it high and cutting me short. "Wait!" His eyes stared fixedly into the middle distance over my shoulder. "What was that?" The men behind us stopped, too, some of them having seen his upraised arm, but the noise of their movement masked whatever it might have been that had alerted Dedalus. I swung around to look where he was looking, my ears straining to hear anything beyond the sounds we made ourselves.

  We waited, motionless, our senses on edge, even our horses seemingly spellbound. Nothing stirred. After long moments, Dedalus relaxed, blowing out his breath and settling back in his saddle. "There's nothing there, but I could have sworn I heard something."

  I dismounted without speaking and he watched me as I pulled my bow stave from its fastenings beneath my saddle skirts.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Feeling vulnerable." I fished a bowstring out of my scrip and strung the bow, bracing it with my knee, then hung a quiver of arrows from my saddle horn before remounting.

  Dedalus was smiling. "Not used to seeing you jumpy."

  I raised an eyebrow at him. "It happens. Keeps me alive sometimes. If we have to leave this path for any reason, we'll have to do it slowly." I nodded towards the tangle of broken trees all around. "My arrows give me speed. It's being unprepared that's dangerous. Let's go."

  He pulled on his reins and raised himself up in the stirrups. "All right," he announced. "False alarm, but keep your eyes and ears—"

  His voice was drowned by a bellow of rage from very close by. Something came charging towards us from our left, against the base of the cliff. I saw the wild, surging movement of it, and had the immediate impression of low- slung, solid bulk and sorrel brownness before the creature came clearly into view, causing panic among our close-packed horses. It was a boar, massive and fuelled by rage, and it attacked in a terrible, weaving, impossibly swift charge, right into the middle of our column. The untended horses scattered, screaming in terror, from the rank, feral stink of the beast. Before I could even swing my mount around, the nightmare creature had caused death, scything wildly with the strength of its brutal neck and shoulders, its wicked, spiralled tusks slashing to right and left, ripping upwards into the soft bellies of two of the animals within moments of reaching them.

  "Spears!" Dedalus was yelling from behind me. "Get down there! Use your spears!"

  The pathway between me and the slaughter, comfortably wide a moment earlier, was now all too narrow and completely impassable, choked with men and rearing, fear-crazed horses. Forcing my own panic down, I looked around me, searching for some way to ride back to where the chaos was spreading, but it was hopeless, and I was forced to watch the utter disintegration of my force under the attack of a brute beast. The noise of the conflict escalated madly, the shouts of men mingling with the screams of the animals. No sense of order remained anywhere in our cavalcade, every man trying uselessly to control his demented horse. Impatiently, curbing Germanicus grimly and using his bulk as a battering ram, I forced my way back through the press until I could see some of what was happening. Five men surrounded the enraged boar, I could see now, two on horseback, three on foot, and as I saw them one of the men afoot, Rufio, leapt in and stabbed the beast deeply, thrusting the spear with his whole body, the shaft clutched in both hands and tucked beneath his arm. The creature reared and spun, showing another, broken spear in its right flank, and in its awesome rage flicked Rufio into the air and out of my sight. And then suddenly, with a final, deafening squeal of pain and rage, it broke off its attack and fled into the trees. Long after it had gone, the horses continued to plunge and scream in terror and the men waited tensely, glaring about them, anticipating its return.

  It took us a full hour and more to regroup. The panicked horses had scattered widely, in spite of the impossible terrain, and we had the devil's own trouble catching some of them. By the final accounting, we were five horses poorer, three of them disembowelled by the beast, one with a broken leg, and one with a haunch so lacerated by a slashing tusk that it had no hope of surviving the remainder of the journey through such hostile land. Rufio, for whose life I had feared, was mer
ely stunned and hideously bruised. He had landed in a tree, like a javelin shot from a catapult, and fallen heavily to the ground. The others were merciless in their treatment of him, calling him "the Bird Man," a name he was to carry for the rest of his life, although it was eventually shortened, as all such names are. Rufio, from that day forth, became The Bird.

  When order was finally restored, I authorized an hour's rest. It was unlikely the boar would return now, and it seemed pointless to me to push on any farther without giving everyone a chance to recover. A good rest, followed by an early camp and a solid night's sleep, it seemed to me, would do all of us good.

  Sometime later, Dedalus's voice close by my ear snapped me out of a doze. I roused myself and looked at him questioningly. He looked at Rufio, who lay sleeping beside me, and then he raised his eyes towards the sky. "I was saying it's very obvious, to me at least, that there are no Outlanders around here. That commotion would have been audible for miles in every direction. No one's come to see who caused it, so I think it's safe to say that no one will." He stopped, waiting for my response.

  "So? What are you telling me?"

  He shrugged his shoulders and ducked his head, managing to appear sheepish and conciliatory at the same time. "Nothing, but that boar was badly wounded and bleeding heavily, arterial blood or I'm a blind man; two spears lodged in him when he broke away, both deep and well-placed, one of them intact so it would hamper him in running far through that." He nodded towards the surrounding undergrowth. "So, he's probably lying close by here, at the end of a plain blood trail. If I'm right, and I'm prepared to wager against anything you might wish to part with, we could have, for the price of a short walk, fresh-killed pig tonight. We have a clear sky, fresh water close by, an injured companion, and we're all tired. It has been an eventful day. We've been shipwrecked, half drowned, abandoned, lost in an alien forest and savaged by a ravening beast that cost us five prime horses. And yet there's more grazing here, of a kind, for the remaining stock than any other place we've seen since setting out this morning, and we have a master with us"—he bowed his head and clenched his fist over his heart in mock modesty—"of the art of dressing and roasting fresh-killed pig with garlic, onions and truffles."