Arthur Imperator

by Paul Bannister

  The soldier knew the list of waystations by heart. “We could be in Glevum, called Gloucester, by nightfall.”

  “Stop here, I need an hour,” Guinevia ordered.

  The next minutes were bustling ones as the soldiers set up a security cordon, sent scouts out to survey the distance and picketed the horses. Guinevia took a pouch of soft leather and walked away from the carriages and the stamping horses. The guard captain gestured eight of his men to form a discreet inner ring around her as she chose a large beech tree and sat in its shade. From the leather pouch, she drew out her looking-block of obsidian and rested it in her lap, closing her eyes to meditate before she looked into the gleaming dark glass. It took nearly two difficult hours, but the sorceress sent out her mind to trace the course of the water whose essence had somehow signalled to her. She traced it upstream into a ridge of hills that rose abruptly from a wide plain, but saw nothing except the shadows of water sprites and a wispy hint of the source spring’s fern-green goddess, an ancient from before the time of the builders of the stone dances of the west.

  She turned her mind downstream, flickering fast as the flight of a kingfisher along the water, seeing the little rill grow and join with larger streams, to add itself into rippling brooks and become an exuberant, tumbling young river. She saw it slow and ease into a wide, willow-lined reach bridged with Roman stone, where homes stood on either bank. Then it widened more, to flow powerful and brown with silt towards the welcoming salt sea that led still further to the immensity of the ocean called Atlanticus.

  But she saw no threat, and shook her head in puzzlement. Her inner core knew there was one. Guinevia screwed up her eyes and rubbed them, then pored again into the dark depths of the volcanic glass. At her volition, she seemed to soar away from her view of the green Atlantic rollers that approached the land in serried, smooth-crested ranks, to see from the height of an eagle or hawk, a view opened to her mind by the wonderful charts of Myrddin. Below her, the southwestern peninsula of Britain jutted its claw into the ocean, seeming to grasp at the steep rollers, now curling white at their crests and blowing spume as they moved at the rocky teeth of the land.

  And she saw the threat. A Roman fleet was moving around that land’s end, and was heading in a long, straggling line just off the cliffs and sea islands of Dumnonia. They were sailing towards the wide mouth of the estuary that gradually narrowed to a river, a brook, a stream and finally right to the rill at her feet. The shock of knowing hit her with a jolt, a hurt and burn in her soul. She wanted to tear her mind away, but rode the hurt, and forced her reluctant mind’s eye downwards, closer to the blue sails and banners, rigid in the wind, of the Roman flotilla.

  They were pitching, rolling hard, she saw. Men were vomiting over the sides, the hoisted sails were so minimal as to be almost bare poles, but those small triangles of canvas held taut by what obviously were gale-strong winds were driving the fleet rapidly along the coast, with the winds dead astern. An invasion force was headed for the estuary of the Severn, and Britain was asleep to its threat. Guinevia was the only person on the whole island who knew of it, and she must communicate her knowledge to Arthur, or he would be caught between two Roman armies and crushed.

  Her first thought was to send a telepathic message to Myrddin, and she tried desperately hard to do that, but could not break through the curtain wall of protection the sorcerer had created while he worked on his own business.

  She rose and ran back to the guard captain. She gave him scribbled messages for Arthur. He assigned four young horse soldiers to deliver one to Londinium, and three more to ride to the coast near Dover, where she expected the other Roman attack. Either course was futile, she knew. Two, maybe three days to reach Arthur, plus several days to scrape together enough forces, and that only if he could spare them from the other threat. Then there would be several more days to march them to the west, where they would be already exhausted, to confront an enemy long established ashore… She thought of the garrison at Caerleon, but knew Arthur had already moved its legion to the southern coast. The western gate of Britain was open and undefended.

  “We must go to Gloucester,” she commanded the guard captain. “Now, quickly.”

  XXXVII Caria

  Far out in the Atlanticus, storm winds were brewing howling fury and thundering waves which they threw against the high grey battlement cliffs of Moher in western Hibernia. The gale shrieked across the arrays of vast green rollers that pounded the sea rocks of the peninsula of the Dumnonii and drove those walls of water, foam-flecked and awesome in their battering power, towards the Severn Sea.

  The same blasting storm that was racing the Roman fleet along the rocky north coast of the peninsula and into the mouth of the Severn was also piling up tall, pyramid-shaped mountains of saltwater behind the fleet, where terrified, vomiting soldiers who were so much helpless cargo could only watch as the cursing sailors fought to keep clear of the destructive claws of the shore. A few of the fleet did fall away and were smashed into flotsam and bloodless corpses on that shore, but most passed between the breakwater islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm in safety. Even in those more sheltered waters, the pitching from the vicious seas was so fierce, and the fleet scudded along at such breakneck pace from the powerful following gale that no commander, determined as he might be, could even consider turning for the shore.

  Guinevia knew it. She was standing on a stone bridge over the Severn that ran from a gravel terrace on one side of the river to the fortress on the other that stood above the flood plain at Gloucester. Above her bowed head was a small vapour cloud. Behind her closed lids she was fiercely focused, viewing the onrushing fleet whose energies were coming to her through the water. She knew she had to do something, and she did what she knew best. She called on her goddess, on Myrddin’s help and on Myrddin’s gods.

  The Druid was an adept of the sea god Manannan mac Lir, an elemental and powerful Celtic deity who was familiar to the sorceress. In her mentor Myrddin’s name, she implored Manannan’s help. Almost at once, the wind rose and began to whip her hair and cloak, streaming them behind her like banners.

  Without conscious knowledge, she dimly understood what was being placed in her mind. She grasped that the estuary of the river is so shaped that it funnels the tide into an increasingly narrow channel, one that begins five miles wide, but narrows to less than one hundred paces. Even as the inflowing tide is squeezed by the compressing banks, the river bed also rises, creating a tidal range that is the second highest anywhere in the world.

  This March day saw a thousand-year confluence of events that spelled utter disaster for any craft caught in the estuary. It was the time of the vernal equinox, the year’s highest tide. It was also the day of a new moon, which threw its extra gravitational pull into the equation and tilted an ocean to slop against Britain. Then there was the vast storm pounding in from the Atlanticus, which came from the exact southwest direction that could cause most damage. It provided a gale-driven blast to push up huge slabs of water into some of the world’s biggest ocean waves. The perfect storm of highest tide, gravitational pull, huge winds, and a great mass of racing waters all combined, then was forced into a funnel-shaped channel. In minutes, it jetted a towering surge wave inland at incredible speed. Caught in that torrent was a flimsy Roman fleet manned by seasick, terrified sailors.

  The Romans were being carried like flotsam on the surge of the tide, racing past the low shoreline, afraid or unable to turn for the pitiful shelter of the land by the force of the gale-driven saltwater torrent. The tide which 260 times a year runs at the speed of a cantering horse, was now pouring in faster than any horse could ever attain and the steersmen were no more able to control their vessels than a child could control a paper boat on a raging mountain stream.

  Guinevia had no knowledge of that, but she did know that Manannan would want a price for his help. She stumbled from the bridge, holding onto the parapet against the blast. Her soldiers were circled around uneasily, well aware of the meaning
of the uncanny vapour cloud that had not been whipped away by the wind, and shuffling to avoid catching the eye of the sorceress. Guinevia caught at her flying cloak and wrapped it around her slender self. She scanned the area and found a strangely exhilarated Caria watching from the shelter of the trunk of a big elm.

  “Did you call this in by magic?” the Hibernian asked, eyes sparkling.

  “I did,” said Guinevia shortly, adding: “but it might not be enough.”

  Caria eyed her speculatively. “Can I help in your magic?” she said.

  “Possibly,” Guinevia said slowly, “possibly, you could be the most important element of it.”

  It took several minutes for the Druid sorceress to explain matters, but Caria was calm. “We Celts do not die,” she said with dignity. “We go on to the feasting halls of Tir na Nog, and maybe one day we come back for a short time, but to cross the bridge of swords in honour would be a splendid thing. I am not so attached to this existence anyway.”

  Guinevia looked at her thoughtfully. “If I sacrifice you to Manannan, who is the gatekeeper to the next world, you will feel just a little pain and you will go in glory. However, there are very few sacrifices who immolate themselves willingly. If you chose to go to Manannan by your own hand, he would take you as his honoured bride and as one of his queens, for you would be a rare and wonderful creature in his Tir na Nog, the place beyond the setting sun.”

  Caria drew herself up to her own small height, a proud and courageous figure. “If I do this, will the bards sing of me?” she said simply. Guinevia nodded. Caria looked at her again and said with the faintest quaver in her voice. “Would you hold my hand while I do it?”

  At that moment, the howl of the wind halted abruptly and the silence was so complete that the two women heard twigs fall to the ground from the winter-bare trees. “That is Manannan’s answer,” said Guinevia gently. “I will hold your hand on the knife, and he will wait for you with his arms wide.”

  The girl bowed her head, and her response came in a whisper. “Then we should do it.”

  The blast began again as the women stepped from the shelter of the trees and struggled against the wind to the centre of the bridge arch. Even as they watched it, the water level was rising fast, pushing against the piers, threatening to swamp the banks. “It will not be long now,” Guinevia whispered into Caria’s ear. “Stand here, put your hands on the parapet and lean forward a little.” The girl obeyed, her lips white and moving soundlessly. “Don’t be afraid, it will be like a nettle sting, no more,” said the Druid.

  She reached under her cloak and extracted a bone-handled knife with a slender, leaf-shaped blade, and positioned herself behind the Hibernian. “They won’t be angry with me for pretending to be a sorceress, will they?” Caria asked anxiously.

  “They’ll be amused that you fooled those stupid men, my darling,” said Guinevia, putting the bone of the knife handle into the girl’s hand and wrapping her own hand over it. “Her fingers are small, like a child’s,” she thought sadly. She raised the blade to the girl’s neck. “Are you ready?” Caria nodded, wordless.

  “Look down the river, see how fast the tide is…” and Guinevia abruptly drew both the knife and the girl’s unresisting hand sharply across her throat, pulling towards herself hard and deep. She felt the scrape as the slender, sharp blade touched the spine, the suck and cling as the muscles held the blade for a moment. The girl’s head lolled alarmingly and a gush of blood jetted out over the stonework and into the turbulent, foaming river, a momentary blur of pink, then once more sliding green and white.

  Guinevia, her hand, wrist and forearm bright crimson with the oxygen-rich arterial blood, unwrapped her arms from their affectionate embrace of the body and gently tilted the girl forward. She slid over the parapet headfirst and fell the few short feet to the water that was rising greedily to take her.

  Guinevia nodded. A tear glistened at her eye and her arms slumped by her sides, the knife dangling. “Go,” she said, “Go to Manannan mac Lir, gatekeeper between worlds. The feasting at Tir na Nog waits for you. Be at peace, lovely Caria. You are no more a slave, you are a queen now, and the bards will sing of you often.”

  Far down the surging, boiling tideway, a luminous green shape stirred under the distorting mantle of the ocean. A giant man shape, it seemed possessed of long hair that waved like seaweed, ridged rocky arms and rounded shoulders like barnacle-crusted coastal boulders, and a torso rippled like the hard sand on a wide northern beach. The shape seemed to push at the waves above it, and a boiling, surging wall of water that was crested with a thick cap of white foam rose up.

  The tidal bore raced into the Severn estuary at better than the speed of a galloping horse. As it went east, it speed never lessened, but its height increasingly towered over the land. The backwash from the confining banks surged behind the first torrent to form five or six stacked waves and soon the last rollers were four or five times the height of a man. And, the tumbling, roaring green and white wall thundered down on the Roman fleet.

  An archer saw it first. He raised his head from retching helplessly over the stern and saw the ranked, stacked waves hurling themselves towards his ship. His shouts did little good. The wall towered over the galley, crashed it end over end, and drove it, ram first, into the sea bed. One after the other, the Roman flotilla was swamped, crushed and battered under in the grinding, pounding churn of those huge waves. Some went to the river bed, some were hurled ashore in splinters, and the tidal wave swept through the snaking bends of the river, carrying everything before it.

  Most of the men who died never knew how it happened. In one moment, they were racing upriver, the next, their ship was upended, toppled, speared into the sea bed, into a riverbank, into another ship. Soldiers armed and armoured for battle had no hope of surviving in that chaotic maelstrom of churning green water, but some few did, and were washed ashore pounded and weak, either to be killed or to be enslaved.

  Guinevia still stood on the bridge arch. She reached under her cloak to the leather bag she had slung over her shoulder. From it she took a rounded, linen-wrapped bundle and unfolded the cloth. Inside was the girl’s sad collection of divining tools: a few neck bones and an old skull. The sorceress cupped it in her hands, kissed it gently and extended her arms out above the racing water. The skull made hardly a splash, and the Druid walked away. She was a hundred paces from the bridge, on the gravel ledge high above the river when the racing tidal wave thrashed against the bridge, washed over the parapet, and greedily took with it the last traces of the blood of the girl who had sacrificed herself.

  Something resounded in Guinevia’s soul, a sense of great peace, and far to the west, under a heaving green mantle of salt water, a luminous figure welcomed a small, pale blonde girl to joyous life in a world beyond this one.

  XXXIII Invasion

  Maximian never knew it, but he landed his expedition on the exact beach near Deal that Gaius Julius Caesar had used three and a half centuries before. Unlike Julius, the current Emperor of the West arrived unopposed. No howling, blue-painted Britons, no spear-throwing cavalry charges, no struggling ashore encumbered, against nimble foes.

  Maximian’s ships deployed neatly, ground ashore gently on the flat, open strand and had a beach head established and military screen thrown out wide within an hour or two, all without sight of opposition other than a handful of pony soldiers viewing from a distance. They would, he knew, take word to Arthur, but the landing, the critical part of an invasion, was going smoothly, and the Serb was unflustered. He began moving centuries of men off the beach and onto the hinterland downs, sent out horse-mounted scouts and watched approvingly as his beachmasters efficiently supervised the offloading of the supplies and impedimenta.

  The first British cavalry arrived on the downs at dawn the next day. They were too late. The Romans were already well established, and quickly drove them off before they began a disciplined advance on Dover, an easy two hour march away. There, Arthur’s admiral Grimr had j
ust returned from a patrol to the west, and was hastily moving elements of his fleet out of the harbour. He knew the fort could not resist the landed legions and he had no intention of allowing his precious ships to be captured, but he did have a plan.

  As the Romans moved west, Grimr’s squadron bypassed them on the strait and sailed east to the landing ground. The Suehan found a collection of British troops gathered in a standoff with the small force that was guarding the beached barges and galleys and in a quickly-arranged joint operation, swooped in to burn the grounded fleet while the foot soldiers fought the ship guards. By the afternoon, the Romans, for better or worse, could no longer retreat and sail away, at least until a new fleet arrived from Gaul.

  Meanwhile, the Romans took Dover.

  Like the admiral Grimr, the small garrison inside the old fort realized that the legions would quickly overpower them, and most simply melted away from the walls and fled west, heading for the fleet’s main base at Port Chester. Dover’s commander, a silver-haired old soldier wounded at Dungeness, stayed with his post, watched the legionaries march in and was crucified on the lighthouse that overlooked the straits. He was relatively fortunate. Other defenders were skinned alive and salted, several were roasted above a pit fire. It was notice that the invaders would tolerate no resistance and wanted full cooperation with their demands for tribute and supplies. The farm folk hastened in with their waggons loaded.

  Maximian spent several days regrouping and listening to the news of his scouts and spies. He had lost his fleet, but he had a harbour, he had an undamaged force on shore and he had an open road to Londinium.