by Chris Page
‘Stop,’ screamed Desmond Kingdom Biwater hysterically, jumping to his feet. ‘That’s Combi, Nation, and Billy and Milly!’
The Celtic longbow men again strained their willow-shafted arrows back to the tips in preparation for the command to fire on the four bears.
‘Celtic bowmen, hold your fire!’
Issued by Twilight, the command cracked down the Celtic lines like a clap of thunder. The veneficus with a tear-stricken Desmond suddenly appeared out in front of the Celtic lines standing amid the dead and twitching bears from the previous attacks. Twilight was facing the Celtic bowmen with his hands held up to add emphasis to his words.
He repeated the command again in stentorian tones and turned to face the bears. The tension in the arrow arms were eased as the bowmen paused.
‘Combi, Nation, it’s me,’ shouted Desmond tearfully. ‘Don’t do this. Come with me, we are friends. Come.’
With his arms outstretched in welcome, Desmond appealed to his charges as he and Twilight walked toward them.
Both Combi and Nation paused. With their sensitive noses full of the scent of dead bears’ blood and driven on by the venefical liegeman, every sinew in their large, powerful bodies cried out to go onward and destroy.
Yet there was something in the voice and demeanour of the young man facing them that said no, stay, we are friends, we are together.
And can be again.
The deadlock was broken by Billy and then Milly, who, in an abundant and joyful exhibition of youthful exuberance and love, rushed up to Desmond. Too young and unencumbered by the venefical liegemen hold, or care, all they could see was their beloved master, who had always been very good for a cuddle and a tidbit. Receiving them on his knees, the young troubadour tenderly stroked and murmured to his charges.
Combi and Nation both turned their great heads back toward the Viking lines as if receiving commands to go on. Twilight, ready to freeze them both, could see the confusion in their simple minds as they struggled with the problem of which command to obey: the newly acquired venefical overlord or the old and kind friend and master.
Both armies held their breath as the confrontation played itself out.
Twilight spoke directly to Desmond’s mind.
Remind them of Sir Valiant and Lord Scroop.
As both the confused bears turned back to him, Desmond spoke again.
‘Combi, Nation, don’t you remember our little troupe? Sir Valiant, the horse, and Lord Scroop, the crazy old parrot?
‘Lord Scroop, King of Britain, at your service.’’ Desmond did a very credible imitation of Scroopy’s one and only cackle.
Both large bears looked at Desmond and their two capricious offspring enjoying having their ears tickled. Then back at the Viking lines.
Twilight felt the confusion melt away as the venefical bonds were broken.
‘They’re okay now,’ he said to Desmond softly. The young troubadour went to his two big bears and they hugged tenderly.
As they walked back toward the Celtic lines with both large bears locked to Desmond’s thighs and Billy and Milly playfully nipping at their parents, every soldier cheered his heart out. The music, the bears, all the portents were with the Celts.
Which was made all the better for the big hug Gode gave Desmond.
Just moments before the Viking launched an all-out attack on every front.
Chapter 6
Ike Penbarrow, third generation waterman, poled his flat-bottomed, hollowed-out wooden punt easily and quietly through the late autumn swamps of the Summerland Levels. It had been a good day by any standards. Draped over the front of the punt was a dead deer fawn, a tender beast at its best age for spit roasting over an open fire and then eating. He’d bartered that for the delivery of two punt loads of roofing reeds to a villager building a new home due to a fire in which he’d lost both his hovel and his wife. Nothing got a new and pretty wife quicker than a new hovel built on a decent-sized hide of property. By Ike’s feet was a goat’s gourd of mead, exchanged for a load of cut young willow boughs for weaving into baskets, and wrapped up in some dirty linen at the back of the punt were two new sickle blades exchanged for a load of charcoal to Ernie Wicks, the blacksmith over at Burrow Bridge.
The blacksmith was a regular customer, needing charcoal every few days to fire his kiln to the high temperatures required to heat metal to the glowing orange required to work it. The charcoal, which Ike collected and smoked himself, was always of a good and consistent quality, which, when added to the regular waterway delivery, provided Ike with a good supply of metal implements from Ernie Wicks to be used for other barters.
The rivers, streams, and seasonal swamps of the Levels provided Ike with everything he and his family needed. What he couldn’t grow, collect, hunt, or fish for, he bartered. With eight children of his own, four grandchildren, and a wife to look after, he needed every bit of help he could get to maintain the small Penbarrow hamlet on the side of the River Cary where they all lived. With two sons in their late teens, both with their own wives and children, he also got some occasional help, but neither of them, to Ike’s disappointment, amounted to much, preferring idolatry and idleness to paid activity. Not like his youngest boy, Ifor, who at just eight years of age took every opportunity to go with his trading, bartering, swapping, and eye-always-open-for-a-deal father. With the other five children being girls who stayed with their mother, that pretty much left Ike and Ifor as sole providers of the Penbarrow hamlet.
Unless you included the ‘other’ activity of his wife, Gretchen, which occasionally provided something for services rendered.
That of being a ‘seeresse.’
When, twenty years ago, Ike had gone through the hand-fasting ceremony with Gretchen, she had been, like her mother before her, a ‘simpler’ or herb lady. This involved the relatively innocent occupation and husbandry of growing, understanding, and using herbal plant-lore as a balm for bodily disorders. This was usually demonstrated through the making of an herb-based poultice to be laid on a wound or painful area, or a liquid to be drunk or rubbed in with lard or grease. Since having the ten children, two of them stillborn, Gretchen had branched out from the understanding and application of ‘simpler’ ways, into the black arts and pagan activities of spells, charms, rites, and superstitions.
Celts have a fascination and following for such activities, but in Christian terms, whatever it was referred to by the locals, this was witch territory. Fortunately there weren’t many Christians in the Levels. For them there was only one punishment for a witch.
Death by stoning.
And the girls, Ike’s daughters, were right there with their mother such that the Penbarrow hamlet was beginning to get a reputation throughout the area as a sanctuary and healing place for those of a more diabolical calling.
A coven.
Although the outer kin-bonds between Ike and his family remained in place, his simple but effective life of supply and demand was losing ground to the black arts practiced by Gretchen and the rest of them. Even Ike’s grandchildren were being instilled in the dark ways. Most evenings he and Ifor tied up the punt and carried in whatever their day had brought them, to a stony, sullen, and unwelcome silence if they interrupted some rite or other taking place in the main hovel where Ike and his family lived. Occasionally the rite would be taking place in one of his son’s hovels next door, and Ike and Ifor would be greeted with an unoccupied, cold space where the fire had long since gone out and there was nothing in the cooking pot. The low hum of chanting from the next hovel didn’t do much for the hunger in Ike and Ifor’s stomachs, and the plain fact was none of the rest of the family seemed to care very much. Ike’s head-of-the-family and bread-winning status always seemed to take a back seat nowadays to the practicing of the black arts led by his wife. She had forsaken the traditional wifely associations with nurturing, hearth, fire-lighting and cooking, in favour of diabolism
. Her world now seemed consumed by demons, fauns, satyrs, vampires, werewolves, and night-goers of unexplained entities.
When Ike tried to warn her that no good would come of these practices, she scoffed at him and told him to get on with his own business or she might put a spell on him.
Ike Penbarrow was a simple Wessex man born and bred on the Levels, who had been proud of his ability to provide for his large and growing family through his own labours. He didn’t personally hold much sway with any religion or rite, and although in the earlier days of their union he had availed himself occasionally of one of Gretchen’s herb potions to cure a disorder, this latest stuff left him particularly cold. Especially if, as the many rumours circulating around the Levels had it from folk fleeing from the north, the devoutly Christian King Alfred was fighting a rearguard battle against the Viking in Chippingham; a battle that if lost would likely direct him and his army this way. Defeated kings and fugitives from one tyrant or another had long sought the relative security of the mysterious and ever-changing waters and swamplands of the Summerland Levels in wintertime. In such cases Ike’s vast knowledge of the area and the seasonal changes, coupled with his ability to supply whatever was needed, could be useful. In the meantime he would continue to teach the young Ifor the rudiments of his reed and willow business and pass on this knowledge, as his father had taught him.
You never know when it might come in useful.
The vanquished cry, the victors’ shout,’ tis terror within and slaughter without.
The words from Virgil’s Aeneid came into Twilight’s mind as he watched the battle unfold.
This time Samuel Southee couldn’t save the life of his lifelong friend Clem Fossey. Three Viking hit him, Nathaniel Stubbs, and Fossey at the same time, and he was busy with his own private battle when Clem took the full force of a double-handled sword slash across his red-and gold-emblazoned chest. Without any armor on, it was a deadly blow. Rolling to one side, Southee felt the wind of the huge axe wielded by the one he was facing as it grazed his shoulder. Such was the force that it stuck firmly in the ground, leaving the Viking’s neck exposed as the giant invader tried to pull it out. Southee’s spear entered the back of the blond-haired neck just below the metal helmet rim, and with a great scream the heavily tattooed invader fell on top of Fossey. Kicking the dead Viking aside, Southee looked for any sign of life from his friend as the fading heart pumped blood from his gaping wound. Fossey groaned once and then his eyes glazed over and he was dead.
‘Watch out!’ Nathaniel Stubbs screamed at him, and he turned to face another demented Viking with a big orange-coloured shield, his sword already halfway toward Southee’s stomach. Turning inside the thrust, Southee slammed his metal-helmeted head upward into the Viking’s face with all his might. Stunned, the invader spun around and fell face downward on top of his shield. Both Stubbs and Southee slammed their spears into the Viking’s back, and he screamed once before death took him. Pulling his spear out, Stubbs went down under the weight of another attacking Viking before he could get the spear up and in position. As those two hacked at each other on the ground, Southee managed to release his own spear from the back of the dead invader just in time to turn it upward as another Viking, this one without a helmet, came hurtling over the small earthen barrier. The force of the invader landing on the spear tip snapped it off and hurled Southee to the ground. The Viking rolled to his feet with blood spurting from his mouth and Southee’s spear tip and an arm’s length of wooden shaft protruding from his ribs. As the bloodied invader tried to raise his axe, life suddenly ebbed from him and he collapsed to the ground.
Stubbs, meantime, his face bloodied and one arm hanging limp, had somehow managed to turn his assailant and now sat astride him trying to get a telling blow in with his good arm. As he raised his short sword, the Viking underneath him stabbed upward with a sharp dagger right into Stubbs’s heart. Pushing the dead Nathaniel Stubbs off him, the Viking began to roll to his feet and turn, before Southee, screaming like a banshee at the loss of all his friends and cohort leader, slashed the Viking across the cheek, sending him screaming back to the ground with his face opening into two halves. A concentrated push with his short sword into the Viking’s stomach finished him off.
Further along the Celtic defensive line, the order went out to fall back to their secondary positions. As they did so, a perfect semicircle of explosions suddenly ripped the ground apart under the advancing invaders’ feet as Twilight released the one hundred thunderbolts he had buried earlier. Many of the invaders who had followed through after the Celts had retreated were blown to pieces in the explosions together with their already dead comrades, Celts, and bears. As Twilight had told Alfred, released thunderbolts always receive the same in kind, and sure enough, the venefical twins suddenly fired salvo after salvo onto the Celtic defences before Twilight could pinpoint their position and return the compliment to silence them.
The ending of the explosions brought about a lull in the battle as both sides took time out to lick their wounds. Edward de Gaini hurried quickly to King Alfred’s side.
‘Near fifteen hundred men dead and a further eight hundred wounded past the point of fighting, my lord.’
Alfred shook his head.
‘Two thousand, three hundred men lost. That’s almost half of our entire fighting force. And the Viking?’
‘At least a thousand dead. Our men fought gallantly and well, and the thunderbolts did their job. They also had many wounded, but I have no way of knowing how many.’
‘Can we hold out against another attack?’
‘Touch and go, my lord. There are now great gaps in the defences that cannot be plugged. The invaders will seek out those gaps and press home their attacks.’
‘Mr. Veneficus?’ Alfred formally addressed Twilight, who had just appeared.
‘I think it’s probably time for you and Guthrum to have a private talk,’ said the astounder. ‘He is losing a great many men as well and does not have any way of getting others.’
Alfred looked at de Gaini.
‘Can you guarantee the king’s life?’ asked the battle leader. ‘We all know what happened to Godleman and Ebroin.’
‘There are no guarantees in this business, but I can try.’
‘Could you kindly see if it can be arranged,’ said the king quietly. ‘I ought to at least try to prevent further slaughter.’
King Alfred wishes to hold talks with Guthrum.
Does he now? We will ask if King Guthrum wants to talk to Alfred.
There won’t be any sneaky tricks this time, no axes or bears. I will be there to ensure it.
Will you? How utterly devious of you, and so will both of us. We have spoken to Guthrum. He wants to know what Alfred wants to talk about.
It was my idea that they talk. King Alfred wants to try and prevent more unnecessary slaughter.
Oh, does he? That won’t impress Guthrum; he likes slaughter as do all Viking.
Another battle like the last one and you won’t have enough men left to fight.
Neither will you. We have spoken to King Guthrum again. He is particularly keen to meet you, veneficus. He has not forgotten the seven hundred warriors you killed in Winchester.
I will be there with King Alfred and Edward de Gaini, his battle leader.
Then we will be there with King Guthrum and Ove Thorsten, his regional chieftain.
No animals, no weapons.
We agree.
Alfred’s three-man party rode out slowly on horseback. Picking their way carefully through the torn and twisted bodies of warriors and bears, they neared the middle ground between the two armies where Guthrum, Ove Thorsten, and the twins awaited. Neither side carried a white flag; this was a meeting of equals.
‘They do not have any arms or animals,’ murmured Twilight as they approached the Viking party.
The twins were, no doubt, assuring Guthr
um and Thorsten of the same. They were also mounted.
Both parties paused a few yards apart, and there was silence as they studied each other. For Guthrum and Thorsten, Alfred and de Gaini, this was the first time they had been close enough to actually see the faces of their enemy leaders.
Neither side was surprised. The swarthy, heavily tattooed faces of the Viking command remained inscrutable as they studied the equally inscrutable but pale and unmarked faces of the Celtic king and his battle leader. Full-growth, blond facial hair studied wispy beards. Twilight remained completely motionless, his coal black eyes glowing faintly as he studied the mental processes of the Viking jarl and his tough-looking chieftain. Before they set off he’d put a block on Alfred and de Gaini’s minds so that they could not be read by the twins. He was pleased, at first, to see that the twins had not thought to do the same with Guthrum or Thorsten, although having quickly scanned both the invader minds and finding they were completely devoid of anything other than an intense hatred for those in front of them and everything they represented, he could see that there was no real need for the twins to block them. No deep, dark thought processes there, no clever stratagem for winning the battle, just a pure, undiluted, and vitriolic hatred for Celts and a burning desire to kill them allied to an allegiance to their Norse gods.
Guthrum’s face displayed undiluted loathing as he fixed bloodshot eyes on Twilight. His horse moved skittishly, and he dug his heels into it cruelly and hauled on the reins to keep it still.
The twins giggled.
‘Well, we’re here,’ they said simultaneously.
Edward de Gaini spoke, indicating Alfred on his left. ‘This is King Alfred of Wessex.’
Alfred nodded. ‘And I am Edward de Gaini, the king’s battle leader.’
Guthrum’s eyes blazed. He pointed at Twilight and a guttural stream of Norse curses issued from his mouth. The twins were about to translate when Twilight’s mouth opened and he answered with an identical but longer stream of guttural Norse curses. Identical in language but as Norse curses go, Twilight’s had more than the edge in quality, penetration, and descriptive power. Guthrum’s red eyes almost popped out of his head. He again opened his mouth to explode more berserker hatred, but then a strange thing happened.