by M. K. Hume
As dawn broke, the sky was pallid with a light cloud cover, like the face of a corpse whose features were blurred by death. Myrddion awoke with those first frail shafts of light, but on this particularly ominous day his eyes were gritty from too little sleep and soured after the haunting dreams that had pursued him during the night. Throughout the meagre hours of darkness that followed the burial of Willa Major, the young healer had dreamed disjointedly of burning crofts, butchered children and Willa Major’s strange green eyes. Wakefulness was a mercy compared with the black beast of his dreams.
Finn Truthteller and Cadoc stirred with equal unwillingness, but what was left of the congealed stew must be heated and fed to a small cluster of elderly, confused peasants who were loath to return to the road that led to the northwest. While Brangaine heated the stew with the child Willa lying close by her, the men set to work dismantling the leather tent and preparing their horses for travel. Once the old ones were fed, they would be eased on their journey away from the town that had bled smoke on the previous day. But Myrddion and his companions must go forward to face whatever horrors lay before them at Tournai.
‘Should we take our time, master? Perhaps we’d be wise to bypass whatever is up ahead. I’m not anxious to face whatever these poor people are fleeing. And who are the Huns anyway?’
Cadoc looked so alarmed that Myrddion knew he must explain their situation. Only willing men should go forward into such an uncertain future.
‘The Hun is a wild tribe noted for its ferocity,’ he replied as calmly as he could in a vain hope of placating the frightened women. ‘But we must go on. How far could we safely travel if we went off the road? What would become of us if a wheel broke on the uneven ground? Wouldn’t we be more likely to stumble into danger? Besides, we are healers. Like it or not, our oaths bind us to try to relieve suffering.’
He pointed along the roadway leading to the south. ‘There is much suffering in that direction. Should we avoid it? Or should we go on?’
Cadoc and Finn shuffled their feet. Myrddion could tell that their first reaction was to counsel caution, but their natural anxiety was at war with their equally powerful sense of service. Cadoc ducked his head and reddened with shame.
‘We should go on, master, even if we are frightened of what we might find,’ Finn decided slowly, while Cadoc nodded his agreement.
Yet, paradoxically, Myrddion was forced to admit to himself that wiser men would have given the town a wide berth. However, he remained true to his mentor’s stricture that the sick must be tended, regardless of his presentiments of imminent disaster. Myrddion was terrified of being constrained and becoming the unwilling vassal of another powerful lord, for he could not forget the bonds that had tied him to Vortigern, broken only when the Celtic king was burned alive in his own hall. He was determined that he would never willingly serve a temporal lord again, but equally determined to remain true to his oath, despite the knowledge that to continue with the journey could bring disaster on himself and on his friends.
Eventually, with their bellies full of food and carrying clean water, the old folk trudged away to an uncertain future, freeing the healers to resume their hazardous trek. Every mile covered weighed on the hearts of the three men, for they had personally experienced the dreadful fact of warfare with its callous disregard for the frailties of innocent flesh. Only Brangaine was happy, for Willa had awakened, had endured the dressing of her burned shoulder and arm with uncomplaining green eyes and was now sucking her thumb and drowsing as she rocked to the soporific sway of the wagon.
The skies seemed wider and bluer than those above the landscapes of Britain for, as Myrddion had already seen, much of the heavy forest growth had been stripped away by the Romans, leaving the sacred groves deserted and bare. The lands of Gaul were filling with strange tribes – the Franks, the Visigoths and the Alemanni. The populace also worshipped alien gods, although Rome still kept a tenuous hold on the reins of power. Flavius Aetius was growing old and tired, and the smoke over Tournai was merely an omen of the troubles that were to come as the wily old general weakened.
The spring sun was pleasantly warm on Myrddion’s face and he would have taken pleasure in the new clarity of light in this unfamiliar land had he not seen the piled detritus of fleeing families. A cart with a shattered wooden wheel lay tipped on its side in a ditch beyond the road, while here and there abandoned cooking pots, empty water skins, old blankets and even the bloating corpse of a dog lay where they had fallen. A single, broken sandal was crushed under Myrddion’s wheels and he felt a physical wrench as he looked back to see it ground into the soft dust under the hooves of Cadoc’s horses. A man had worn that sandal and now must wander barefoot on the cruel stones that clad the roadway.
The day was far advanced when the small cavalcade reached the centre of the thinly forested wood beyond which Tournai awaited them. To their left, a river could be seen and heard through the light veil of woodland that partly concealed its rush-choked banks. The land here was rich and the farmers who lived by the river’s margins had fared well off the bounty of silt-rich land and plentiful water. Filled with foreboding and weary to the bone, Myrddion called a halt to their journey, for even the indefatigable Cadoc was beginning to falter. Whatever lay ahead, the healers needed sleep, or they would be of no use to anyone on the morrow.
The night was still and cloudless, and carried no signs of the usual light spring rains. The stars shone clearly like holes picked in black wool hung before an oil lamp. Cadoc swore he could reach out his hand and touch them, while Brangaine sang softly in her deep, slightly off-key voice to soothe Willa as the little girl succumbed to sleep. Finn joined in the mournful folk song, which told of a child stolen away to the Otherworld and of a mother destined to mourn until her life ended, leaving Myrddion to fight the prickle of tears behind his eyes. Unloved by Branwyn, his own mother, the healer knew that an empty space existed in his soul where she should dwell, but she had rejected her first-born son as a consequence of her rape. Indeed, Myrddion still bore a scar on his head where Branwyn had tried to brain him with a rock many years earlier. The sound of Brangaine’s simple peasant song made his heart sore, but the past could not be changed, no matter how the young man yearned for Branwyn’s love. Eventually he fell asleep to the sound of soft crooning voices and, for once, no dreams pursued him in the still, fragrant night that embraced them under the trees.
Morning brought sadness and a reminder of human brutishness. As the wagons cleared the wood, a wide swath of agricultural land lay before them, divided into small parcels by low walls of fieldstone that had been taken from the cleared paddocks. The walls were unmortared, but careful husbandry had ensured constant repair of these proofs of civilisation and order. Until recently, green shoots had blurred the tilled, brown clods of soil, but now the young grain and vegetables had been trampled flat or cropped by grazing horses and hungry men. Flattened earth, charred cooking fires and burned peasant huts bore mute witness to a large army of cavalry and foot soldiers who had been careless of hygiene and the future uses of the earth. In places, the walls had been breached and the scattered, head-sized rocks had been used to construct temporary hearths. Animal bones and feathers lay scattered randomly around these fireplaces, and rudimentary latrine trenches fouled the air with their stink. None the less, Myrddion reasoned that this force, under its deceptive carelessness, was well organised and travelled fast. Only two days had passed since Tournai had burned, but in that time a large company of warriors had disappeared like smoke into the Frankish landscape.
The town of Tournai lay at the epicentre of a great circle of land that had been scarred by the flotsam of an army. Its walls seemed to be intact, although Myrddion could see the burned inns, huts and primitive shop-fronts that had sheltered around its Roman skirts. Ominously, birds of prey circled its defences and carrion seekers covered a dark mound piled haphazardly against its fire-blackened flanks.
‘Dead things,’ Cadoc whispered. ‘The birds are feeding.’
; ‘And the dogs,’ Finn Truthteller added, as dark shapes slunk away from the mound, which seemed to writhe with unclean life.
‘Perhaps some people still remain alive in Tournai,’ Myrddion muttered, but his voice lacked any real hope. ‘At any rate, we must do what we can if there are any survivors.’
Cadoc and Finn shrugged, but each climbed back into his place on the wagons as they resumed their slow journey.
A huge fire had been lit across the road and the travellers paused to examine the scarred roadway. Corpses had been burned here in an ordered cremation, although the remains, once the fire had cooled, had been pounded into splinters. Myrddion realised that the pitiful mementos of once-strong warriors had been carefully gathered for those who waited, far away, for the return of their menfolk.
‘At least this army has respect for its own dead,’ Myrddion muttered to no one in particular. ‘Perhaps they might have spared the children of the town.’
‘Not the Hun, if Tournai is their work,’ Finn replied in a voice that was pregnant with world-weariness. ‘From the descriptions of those peasants who fled from Attila, I doubt we’ll find anything but corpses in this accursed place.’
The horses shied away from the smell of death, and Myrddion’s gorge rose as he led his pair, afoot, off the road and past the ashes that filled the roadway. Here and there lay isolated fragments of bone from dismembered corpses, such as jaw or knee splinters. Small pieces of metal from oxhide breastplates had been overlooked by the enemy horde who, even though they burned their dead with respect, had clearly contrived to collect every item of armour that could be reused by prudent warriors in battles yet to come.
‘This small heap of ash is all that remains of the enemy dead, indicating that very few of them became casualties in comparison with the civilian defenders,’ Finn Truthteller muttered as he turned over a tiny fragment of skull with his booted foot. ‘Whoever they are, these warriors are skilled in the arts of war.’
‘Or the citizens of Tournai put up very little resistance,’ Myrddion murmured in agreement.
‘Peasants and traders are rarely skilled in the dance of death. Perhaps they threw themselves on the mercy of the attacking army.’
‘More fool them, if they did!’
As the road turned towards the walled town, another dark mound revealed itself to be a pile of dead bodies that had been flung haphazardly into one spot to spare the army from any threat of disease. Kites, crows, ravens, domestic cats and even stray dogs rose angrily from their feast and slunk or flew away from the approach of the wagons to wait until they could return to their feeding. By what was left of the dress of the ransacked and partially stripped bodies, the healers could tell that these citizens had been farmers or traders, men who had found that pitchforks and domestic knives were no match against iron swords, spears and arrows.
But of all the casualties, the children affected them the most. The lower arm of one small child lay under a heap of tangled adults, fingers already gnawed away to stumps by scavengers and its palm mutely appealing for mercy, while nearby a large bird hopped away from the belly of a young boy. Finn cursed and threw a rock at the ungainly creature, which turned one baleful, yellow eye towards him before slowly taking to the wing.
‘All creatures of the earth must eat,’ Brangaine murmured from the wagon, one hand covering the eyes of Willa, who was sucking her thumb in distress. ‘Are these dumb beasts any less deserving than us? At least the scavengers clean up the mess that men have left in this place of tears.’
As the wagons moved inexorably forward, the remains of the gates of Tournai slowly hove into view.
Timber trunks had been used to fashion a war machine that could take advantage of the only weakness in the walls of the town. Myrddion could see the large tree trunk that had been used as a battering ram to smash the great latch open, and the remains of fires that had been set to burn the timbers and weaken the planks around the iron-braced supports. The expertise of the attackers was obvious to any eyes that understood the ruthless trade of war. Tournai’s defences had been breached by a determined, brutal and well-organised enemy.
Shattered timbers were all that remained of the huge double gates, and the healers soon found more corpses lying in untidy piles where they had perished. As Myrddion and his apprentices walked into the cramped space within the gate, it was plain that these men had tried to defend the town. Their weaponry was clearly Roman in design, but they were obviously incapable of protecting themselves against an army intent on rape and plunder. Most of the bodies were of old men or very young boys on the brink of adulthood, causing Myrddion to wonder about the fate of the able-bodied. A few black-fletched and broken arrows spoke mutely of defences that had been mounted in the stone houses closest to the wall, and Cadoc found the corpse of one boy whose ruined hand still held a slingshot.
Search as they might for any sign of life during the gruesome day that followed, the healers discovered that Tournai was a dead town, stripped of anything of value and then burned. No wounded survivors, no items of value and no hope remained after the passage of an army whose aim was complete destruction.
As the wagons skirted the city walls, Finn caught a flash of light in the trees to their right. For a brief instant, he expected armed horsemen to ride threateningly out of the lengthening shadows under the trees, as if the reflection of light on a sword blade had betrayed the presence of watchers. Then cold reason overrode his moment of panic as he realised that the army was long gone, for their tracks were quite evident in the trampled grasses, heading towards the south where, the healers had been told, the town of Cambrai, a Frankish centre, lay open for plunder.
‘I saw something flash on the edge of the forest,’ Finn murmured softly to Myrddion. ‘Someone is still alive, but they seem keen to remain in hiding.’
Myrddion followed Finn’s pointing arm with his quick black eyes. At first the hidden survivor was elusive, but then, just when the healer was about to turn away, weak sunshine struck a reflective surface and pinpointed its position under a coppice of trees.
‘We’re being watched, master,’ Finn said reflectively, as he fumbled for his long knife under the seat of the wagon with one booted foot.
‘I see it, Finn! If this observer wants us, then he’ll find some way to approach us. I’ll not risk the women and our tools of trade to explore the forest. Every tree could hide an enemy warrior.’
The wagons creaked into movement, the groan of the huge iron-braced wheels almost drowning the sound of the horse’s hooves as they slid on the rough stone surface. The steady slap of one open flap of the wagon’s leather cover was a comforting counterpoint to the complaint of the wooden axles. With one eye on the far-off forest, Finn Truthteller urged the horses into greater effort with a deft flick of the reins.
No survivors crowded the roads. No terrified peasants clustered around the wagons for an illusion of comfort. The cleared farmlands were fecund with growth, but every wooden dwelling had been looted before being gutted by fire. Even the dead became commonplace as their remains swelled in the sunshine. Sickened, Myrddion gave the order that they should push on to whatever lay ahead, leaving the bodies to be absorbed back into the earth whence they had come. Three men could never hope to bury so many.
The healers travelled for three days, finding game wherever they could in the dark shadows of the forest. Although hunger was beginning to hollow their bellies, Myrddion was not yet sufficiently desperate to hack half-rotted meat from the corpses of beasts that the marauders had placed in streams to foul the water and poison what remained of the local citizenry.
On the fourth day, as they crossed a narrow bridge, the healers saw Cambrai before them. The town had been warned of the approach of the enemy, so the devastation was less obvious outside the solid rock walls that protected the city. Terrified by the smoke from burning Tournai, the peasants had begged for shelter within Cambrai’s defences. The walls possessed a cyclopean strength, for the Romans who had built the city had lear
ned to trust nothing and no one in this brutish country. The legions had brought order and prosperity to Cambrai, but ambitious kings now squabbled over the proceeds of peace.
Once again, the travellers saw the evidence of the burning of the enemy dead, as at Tournai, but the patch of scorched earth here was larger in size, the charred remains less scrupulously honoured and the mute possessions of dead warriors less carefully sifted. Myrddion gathered that Cambrai had resisted her rapists, and guessed that the enemy had taken time to ensure that she paid terribly for her impudence. Long before they reached the shattered gates, the stench of swollen corpses, burned meat and hot, cracked stone warned the healers that there would be nothing left alive within.
‘Our watcher is still with us,’ Finn Truthteller hissed as he caught a glimpse of telltale sunshine reflecting on metal at the edge of the tree line.
‘Aye,’ Myrddion murmured. ‘He’s been keeping pace with us for days, but he’ll approach when he’s good and ready.’
Finn Truthteller stared at his master with the intensity of a mature warrior who is faced with an enigma. Master Myrddion was so young, barely old enough to take a sharp knife to his beardless cheeks, but the lad possessed that rare quality of inscrutability, coupled with the patience of wild things that wait on the edges of dark places for any unwary animal or man who intrudes on their domain. Observing his master’s raven hair, and the black eyes that seemed to trap the light so effectively, Finn could understand why King Vortigern had been prepared to sacrifice a younger Myrddion to appease the gods and the spirits of the earth. Sometimes, Myrddion frightened Truthteller with those obsidian eyes that saw everything and revealed nothing.
Impatiently, the warrior flexed his stiff shoulders in rejection of such superstition. His master was clever beyond measure and old beyond his years. If the lad could wait to discover what threat the forest sheltered, then so could he, a grown man and a wounded soul whom only Myrddion had tried his best to heal.