For King and Country

by Robert Asprin

  She lifted a sodden, red-eyed gaze, lips trembling. "Yes," she whispered, gulping to try and contain her grief. "He will. The gods have made you wise, Medraut." She rested her brow against his chest for a moment. "I want to go home, husband, but there is no home to return to. What manner of beast is this Lailoken, to do such a thing?"

  "He is a Saxon," the boy said helplessly. "It is the only answer I can offer."

  The slender princess of Dalriada lifted her gaze once more and even Medraut froze at the look in the girl's eyes. "Then the Saxons must die."

  She spoke briefly in Gael to Riona Damhnait, who nodded.

  "They say Brythonic queens lead warriors in battle," Keelin said in a cold, hard little voice. "It is time I learned the custom of my husband's people. Come, Medraut, let us prepare our respective peoples for war."

  "Yes." He turned to find Father Auliffe standing behind Morgana. "Father, you and Cleary must organize the fisherfolk of Lochmaben to spread the alarm. Galwyddel rides to war. Warn Strathclyde to strengthen the garrisons along the northern border in case we fail to persuade Dallan mac Dalriada of British innocence, but send the bulk of our own fighting strength south, against the Saxons. I will not permit such butchers to remain a threat to our people. Any of our people," he added, drawing Keelin firmly to his side.

  Auliffe hesitated only a fraction of a second, recognizing as clearly as Morgana that the reins of power had just been transferred to the new king of Galwyddel and his queen. The aging abbot nodded. "I grieve for all of us," the priest said quietly. "It shall be done. Go, my king, and try to prevent further death among our new kinsmen."

  Less than a quarter of an hour later, they were aboard the fishing sloop, crewed by grim-faced men who knew the risk as well as their passengers, and accepted that risk for their new king and queen's sake. Morgana watched and wept and stared out to sea, raking the dark horizon for the faintest hint of moon-touched sails.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Trevor Stirling and Ancelotis caught up with Artorius just a few miles short of Caer-Birrenswark, by riding three good horses into the ground, switching mounts at three of the fortified towns in Galwyddel. Artorius had done the same thing, they discovered, but was traveling at a slightly less frantic pace, which gave Stirling and the king of Gododdin the chance they desperately needed to catch Artorius up. They passed a column of foot soldiers heading south out of Galwyddel, presumably the men Morgana had sent to Caer-Badonicus, and—of greater surprise—they met Lailoken, the minstrel, who was also heading south.

  "Have you seen the Dux Bellorum?" Ancelotis asked, flagging the minstrel down.

  Lailoken gave him a searching look, then nodded, pointing back the way he'd come. "Aye, perhaps ten miles further on. He was moving fast. Is there trouble?"

  "I've a message for him. They said in Caerleul you rode out with Queen Morgana?"

  "That I did," the minstrel nodded, "but I left her these several days past. She had private business away from Caer-Birrenswark and when a queen is not in residence, there's little enough work for a court minstrel."

  "You don't know where she's gone, then?"

  "That I don't, I'm afraid. Myself, I'm riding south, to join kinsmen."

  A glint of some private mirth the minstrel did not wish to share caught Stirling's attention, but Ancelotis was too distracted by worry to notice. "Godspeed to you then, and the less said of this, the better."

  "I am the soul of discretion," the minstrel murmured, sweeping a bow from the waist, a bow that held an elusive, mocking quality, disturbing Trevor Stirling once again, but Ancelotis was already putting heels to his horse's flanks, sending them galloping down Artorius' trail. Only ten miles more to catch him and Ancelotis was waiting for nothing and no one.

  Their fourth horse was beginning to show the strain, when the Dux Bellorum finally came into sight. Ancelotis pulled loose the signal horn strapped to his saddle and gave a good, loud blast that carried a long way. Artorius pulled up and turned in the saddle, peering back with one hand raised to shade his eyes. They came thundering down the final stretch of road, the lathered horse blowing with distended nostrils.

  "What news?" Artorius asked tersely as Ancelotis pulled his mount to a sliding stop.

  "The same that sent you racing for Caer-Birrenswark," Ancelotis replied, voice grim. "I'll not believe ill of Morgana, whatever you've been told. Nor will Thaney, who begged me to ride after you."

  Artorius' glare made summer storms seem mild. "This is my affair! As Dux Bellorum—"

  "If you were here as Dux Bellorum, the cataphracti would be riding at your heels."

  The jibe scored; Artorius flushed a dark red. "Morgana is my stepsister, which makes it a personal matter."

  "And she is my sister-in-law, which makes it a personal matter to me, as well."

  The measuring look Artorius leveled at him only served to stiffen Ancelotis' resolve and left Stirling very glad, indeed, that this man was not his declared enemy. At length, Artorius let go a weary sigh and turned his gaze to stare down the road toward Caer-Birrenswark, the uppermost tower of which could just be seen across the treetops. "I am desperately hoping history will not repeat. It would be agony to condemn Morgana, as I once was forced to condemn Marguase."

  "Morgana is no poisoner. Nor will I believe her a traitor without a great deal more proof than whatever letter Covianna handed you."

  A startled look broke loose. "Thaney knew about that?"

  "Oh, yes. She persuaded the minstrel to confess to it, after you left Caerleul in such a tearing hurry, without a word to anyone."

  Artorius snorted. "I pity the poor minstrel, then. Your niece is a woman I would not care to cross."

  Ancelotis grinned. "In that, we are fully agreed. May I see the letter?"

  The Dux Bellorum hesitated, then fished into a leather satchel strapped behind his saddle and handed over a folded bit of vellum. Ancelotis read it quickly, while Stirling attempted to make out what it said. He could understand spoken Brythonic, thanks to the merging of his mind with Ancelotis', but the written form still baffled him. Ancelotis translated silently, leaving Stirling groaning under his breath. It looked very bad, indeed, if this were an accurate rendering of the conversation Covianna claimed to have overheard. Alliance with the Irish, through a marriage between Medraut and the heiress to Dalriada... Little wonder Artorius had rushed north to try and stop Morgana from committing irrevocable folly.

  He had just handed back the scrap of vellum when several fast-moving horsemen appeared from the direction of Caer-Birrenswark. Artorius muttered, "More bad news, it looks like," an assessment Ancelotis was forced to agree with, particularly when the riders came close enough to identify as soldiers of Galwyddel's cataphracti. When their officer recognized the Dux Bellorum, they drew to a halt to greet Artorius. The man spoke without preamble.

  "Have you seen Lailoken, the minstrel?"

  A queasy sensation hit Stirling square in the gut as Ancelotis answered. "I spoke briefly with him, some ten miles further back." He gestured down the road that led toward Caerleul.

  "Then we may yet catch the bastard. King Medraut sent us to fetch the god-cursed traitor back for trial."

  Even as Ancelotis gasped, the Dux Bellorum said in a soft and dangerous voice, "King Medraut? Mean you not Queen Morgana?"

  The officer hesitated, clearly upset by that piece of news, as well as whatever disaster Lailoken might have unleashed. The man cleared his throat, then said, "No, it was King Medraut who gave the orders to find the minstrel. The abbot of Caer-Birrenswark himself drew up the agreement to transfer the throne of Galwyddel to Medraut. That news was startling enough, but the lad, er, the new king has also married."

  An unhappy look darkened the man's eyes. "It seems utter insanity, but Father Auliffe has lent the support of the Holy Church to Medraut's marriage and I cannot imagine a man less likely to support treason. Medraut has married the heiress to Dalriada, you see, and the abbot swears it is a good alliance with nothing of treachery in e
ither the girl or her father. The hope was to secure the northern border between Strathclyde and Dalriada against invasion. And it might have worked, truly it might, only..." He hesitated.

  "Only what?" Artorius growled, eyes dark and grim.

  "Only Lailoken has betrayed all of Britain. He's a Saxon agent, in the pay of King Aelle."

  "Lailoken, a Saxon spy?" Ancelotis asked, eyes widening in astonishment. "How can that possibly be proved? I've seen the man in my brother Lot's court and he spent a week or so entertaining the soldiers of Caer-Iudeu. You saw him yourself, Artorius, at Rheged's festivals. He's a comic buffoon and a passable minstrel, but a spy?"

  The officer nodded, eyes bleak. "A Saxon spy and much else as well, I fear. There is far worse news than Medraut's marriage to Keelin of Dalriada. Lailoken is a poisoner. A monstrous saboteur. While he and Medraut visited Fortress Dunadd to arrange the marriage with King Dallan mac Dalriada, he poisoned the entire city, poisoned the wells, at least that's what Father Auliffe and Queen Morgana suspect. A Briton slave escaped across the border into Strathclyde and rode for Galwyddel with the news that all of Dunadd is dead, down to the infants at their mothers' breasts. Vomiting, convulsions, paralysis—it was no natural plague that killed those poor bastards." Distress roughened the man's voice.

  The image struck Trevor Stirling with a familiar sense of horror, even as Ancelotis and Artorius went stiff with shock. Biological warfare was a reality Stirling had witnessed before, in the twenty-first century, but neither the king of Gododdin nor the Dux Bellorum had any experience with such atrocity.

  "The whole town?" Artorius whispered. "My God, Dalriada will massacre every Briton in Strathclyde before marching into Galwyddel!"

  "Not if we can catch Lailoken and hand him over to the Irish," the officer muttered. "Queen Morgana and King Medraut have taken ship to try and catch Dallan mac Dalriada before he returns home, to try and convince him it was Saxon treachery, not Briton. Queen Keelin and her Druidess have gone with them, to try and prevent utter disaster."

  Artorius just shut his eyes. "Oh, God, watch over her," he groaned.

  Ancelotis muttered agreement, while Stirling tried to sort out a confusing issue that puzzled him immensely. The murder of an entire town by some form of biological weapon was entirely in keeping with an agent of the Irish Republican Army. But why would Brenna McEgan massacre the Irish? It made no sane sense. The IRA terrorist had come here to further Irish interests, so why destroy the very Irish settlers who were destined to form the political and social structure of the entire Scottish Lowlands?

  If McEgan had poisoned Caerleul, or even Artorius, it would have been perfectly understandable. But not Dalriada. And if Brenna McEgan had not killed every soul in the Irish colony's capital, who had? The Saxons? It was difficult to credit such a notion, when the sixth century's natives were completely unfamiliar with the ways in which a whole settlement could be taken out with chemical or biological agents.

  Artorius was asking, "And Morgana has already left for Dalriada? You're sure of that?"

  The officer nodded. "Father Auliffe said she took sail from the Lochmaben coast, by way of a fishing sloop, trying to catch up with Dallan mac Dalriada's ship."

  "Whether or not she succeeds," Ancelotis said quietly, "there is nothing you and I can do to change what will happen between her and the king of Dalriada. All we can do is strengthen the northern garrisons against invasion and turn our own attention to the Saxon threat in the south."

  "King Medraut has already ordered riders north to warn Strathclyde of the danger to the border forts. Just in case."

  "Then we must ride south," Artorius said heavily. "And pray God the Irish believe her. For myself, I must suspend judgement against Morgana and Medraut until the war with the Saxons has been decided, one way or the other."

  "Agreed," Ancelotis murmured, half sick with grief and worry.

  They turned their horses about and set out in pursuit of Lailoken. They had gone perhaps three miles when one of the men back in the line of cataphracti broke into song, a stirring, cadence-rich marching tune which brought the hairs on Stirling's arms and nape standing straight up. He drew rein sharply, trying to locate the singer.

  "Where did you hear that?" he demanded.

  The soldier blinked in surprise. "One of the minstrels was whistling it at Caer-Birrenswark. I hadn't heard it before and asked him to teach it to me. It's good for the riding, don't you think?"

  "Oh, yes, it's a snappy little tune," Stirling agreed darkly. "Let me guess? He learned the tune from Lailoken?"

  The man stared in absolute shock. "Aye, that's what he said. He'd been to Caerleul and learnt it there, from Lailoken. How did you know? Is it a Saxon tune, then?" the man asked worriedly.

  "In a manner of speaking." Stirling was cursing himself as the worst fool ever to put on the uniform of the SAS. All the little clues he had failed to notice before had fallen neatly into place the instant he heard that particular song. It was a marching song, all right. An Orange marching song. One of the Orangemen's favorites, in fact. It wouldn't even be written for more than a millennium and a half. If Lailoken had been singing it, he could have learned it from only one soul: Cedric Banning. The man whose British affectations had struck Trevor Stirling as odd, that first night, the kind of snobbery a status-seeking colonial might display—or a very clever man wishing to pass himself off as one.

  And he'd worn a paisley scarf, must have been laughing at Stirling the whole time they'd sat in that pub, wearing such a blatant, insulting clue and watching the SAS officer blunder his way right into the trap Banning had set up. Brenna McEgan hadn't killed Terrance Beckett. Banning had. McEgan must have been planted by the IRA as a countermeasure against an Orange terror plot. The bruises on her face—and on Banning's knuckles—floated into his mind's eye, another humiliating clue he'd ignored. McEgan must have walked into the lab right on the heels of the murder. And Banning, clever bastard, had led Stirling straight down the garden path with that note about her ties to Cumann Na Mbann.

  It was entirely possible that she had been part of that terrorist group. It was also entirely possible that she was innocent of everything Stirling—and London—had suspected of her. And Cedric Banning had excellent reason to poison an entire Irish city. Stirling wondered who, exactly, had tipped off London that an IRA mole had infiltrated the lab staff? Banning himself? Trying—with embarrassing success—to divert attention from his own agenda? It hardly mattered, now that the damage had been done.

  The question of how he'd done it was answered shortly enough. Moving at a steady gallop, they covered the remaining miles rapidly, only to discover that their quarry was no longer on the road. He had bolted, abandoning his packhorse, which they found grazing at the verge of the Roman highway, snatching up greedy mouthfuls of grass. A search of the horse's panniers brought to light several wine bottles and ceramic jars, all carefully stoppered, with the corks and sealed lids bound down with twists of heavy twine.

  Artorius held one of the glass bottles up, peering curiously at the lumps visible inside. "It looks like chunks of meat and rotten vegetables."

  "Don't open any of them!" Stirling warned sharply, seeing all too clearly how Banning had committed the atrocity at Fortress Dunadd. Botulism toxin. He felt an utter and complete fool, with no way to undo the damage already wrought. Damage which might well have destroyed Stirling's entire future, with no way to tell until the equipment shut down at the end of a year—and no guarantee that it even existed any longer, to be shut down. From this end of history, there literally was no way to tell.

  Worse, yet, was the damage Banning could still do. Using botulism, the man could literally poison every Irish town and farmhold from Londonderry to County Kerry and further south, to Cork. All he'd need was a cover story—and what better cover than a traveling minstrel, bringing news of a marriage of alliance between Dalriada and Galwyddel? He wouldn't even have to mention it had ended in treachery, since no one in his wake would survive long enoug
h to find out differently.

  Stirling had to shut his eyes against the vision of all Ireland dying, leaving the island wide open for Saxon invasion. Banning was an Orangeman and the Orangemen were descended from pure Anglo-Saxon stock. An Orangeman could take no better revenge than to utterly annihilate the entire Irish population, while simultaneously stirring up war between Dalriada and Galwyddel—at a time when his Saxon ancestors were laying waste to the entire south of England. Divide British attention between war at both ends of the island and the Saxons would conquer it all, the entire British Isles, in one fell swoop. Frosting on the cake would be a few bottles of death emptied into the wells of strategically important Briton strongholds.

  The question was, which way had Lailoken and his unseen guest bolted? West, to Ireland? To spread the word of alliance and treachery, while quietly leaving mass murder in his wake? Or south, to join his Saxon kinfolk and take to Aelle and Cutha the secret of biological warfare contained in these monstrous little bottles?

  In low, terse tones, Stirling told Artorius as much as he could, without compromising Ancelotis' status as his host. Artorius listened in black silence, then spat to one side.

  "We'll have to split our forces, meager as they are. Two riders west, toward the coast, two east, in case he's bolted for Dewyr, as Cutha did. The rest of us will ride south, toward Caer-Badonicus. And pray God we catch him before he reaches his paymasters."

  Staring utter disaster in the face, whichever way Lailoken had bolted, they mounted their war-horses in silence and set out in grim pursuit.

  * * *

  Dawn's first hint of oyster light had touched the eastern sky when one of the sailors who'd climbed the mast to act as lookout spotted sails dead ahead.

  "I see them!" he shouted, pointing. "He's landward of us, rounding the tip of Kintyre!"

  Morgana's heart lurched into her throat and Brenna gripped the gunwale, fingers turning white in the crepuscular light. At her side, Keelin clutched Medraut's hand and braced herself against the wild pitching of the boat as the captain turned the tiller, sending them on a tack that would take them on a shorter and faster route, seaward of the longer, looping journey Dallan mac Dalriada's crew had chosen, keeping closer to land. The Irish king's sails rose up out of the sea as they narrowed the gap, plowing deep into the troughs while the sails rattled and snapped taut again on the new course.