by Jules Watson
‘We came here to challenge them in open battle, lady,’ Calgacus had reminded her gravely. ‘This is exactly what we planned, your prince and I.’
Rhiann now buried her face in her shaking hands. Perhaps she was just going mad after all. She felt as if she were overflowing, her body straining to contain her love and fear for the baby, her terror for Eremon and the constant whispering of this other world.
Soon, she gave up all pretence of sleep. For the remainder of that endless night she held a wakeful Caitlin and sang under her breath to the baby, using her voice and her sense of the child to anchor her in Thisworld, to keep her fear for Eremon at bay. At the first hint of dawn, she and Caitlin said their farewells to Calgacus and were led by two of his warriors to the hill on the western side of the battleground, where they found a place to gaze out on the sea of pearl-grey mist below.
Rearing from it to the south was the Hill of a Thousand Spears. In reality it was not one hill, but a long ridge with many peaks that ran east-west, the eastern peak a pointed outcrop surrounded by an old hill fort. Rhiann stared hard at the ridge, searching for some kinship, yet its granite tors remained impassive.
‘Sister.’ Caitlin was by her side, holding out a wooden cup of steaming broth. ‘This will warm you.’
In the centre of the summit of their hill was a cleared space beneath a leaning rock, and there the two guards had made a small fire, propping over it a skin bag of water, barley and beef bone.
‘It will be hot today,’ Caitlin observed, looking likewise to the north for Eremon and Conaire.
Rhiann nodded, and sighed. Heat was tiring; it tormented with thirst, drew sweat into eyes, made sword-grips slippery. Still, no day was a good day for battle. Not to a woman.
One of her sister’s cheeks was smudged with dirt, and she had donned the old battered helmet she had been wearing the first day Rhiann saw her. That helmet and the quiver of arrows across her back had helped Caitlin to throw off her outer mantle of fear, yet the tight lines of her mouth and shadowed eyes could not be so easily hidden. Rhiann instinctively searched her mind for some comforting words, and realized all of them had been said.
Yet suddenly a change came over Caitlin. Following her sister’s gaze, Rhiann narrowed her eyes into the rising sun. It seemed that something glittered once on the far edge of the plain.
With a yelp, Caitlin threw her arms around Rhiann and kissed her soundly on the head. ‘There are horses, and men on their backs with many spears.’
Rhiann’s blood drained from her face, then rushed back in a wave. Disentangling her limbs, she pulled herself awkwardly up the rock to balance there.
‘I am going!’ Caitlin called over her shoulder, already leaping from boulder to boulder towards the tethered horses. ‘But I will come back soon!’
Breathless, her fingers twisting into knots, Rhiann watched her sister disappear. Then she swung back to the plain, craning to see more without overbalancing. Among the stirring masses of men revealed by the lifting mist, she could discern nothing clearly, and eventually she gave up, and carefully levered herself back down on the rock. She must wait for him to come to her.
The sun was falling full on the rocks below when Eremon at last arrived, Dòrn picking his way up the steep path. Rhiann wondered why he did not look up to her, and then suddenly her heart was chilled with an odd sensation; that somehow she did not know this man who approached her.
When the horse lurched up the last rise, Rhiann rose to her feet, and only then could she see what the shadows had hidden before. Eremon was naked from the waist up, and though he seemed to have made some token effort to wash, his skin was still smeared with dirt in places, and the tint of blood, dulling his blue tattoos. Streaks had spattered his fine helmet, and there were cracked remnants of dried blood in the creases of his knuckles where they rested across his reins. Yet it was on looking into his eyes that Rhiann finally understood what Eremon had meant, that last morning in camp, about what he would need to call forth, and how it would take him over until its job was done.
Dòrn came to a stop a few paces from Rhiann, shaking his head and pawing the earth. Without a word, Eremon freed a bag that was tied to his saddle, a rough pouch of hide, soaked through with blood as if it had been dipped in a pool of it. Then he threw that bag at Rhiann’s feet.
When he spoke at last, he didn’t seem to want to meet her gaze. ‘In my eyes,’ he whispered, ‘a man could as soon take your honour as take the moon from the sky. But I do not understand how women reckon these things.’ He pointed his chin at the bag. ‘There, I bring the man parts of him, in exchange for what was taken from you. Burn them, or bury them as you will.’
Rhiann stared down at the bag in dawning horror, the full realization arriving as a blow to her belly. Then she glanced back at Eremon, and it was the hard light in those familiar eyes, burning in a pale face, that finally brought home to her that war had reached them. It wasn’t the sight of tens of thousands of men, or the sun rising on a battlefield, or the trumpets, or flashing weapons. It was the look of a man she loved, who had gone somewhere she could never follow.
Something of this must have been revealed in Rhiann’s expression, for without another word Eremon turned Dòrn and started back down the hill. ‘Eremon!’ His name sprang to Rhiann’s lips as only a faint cry, yet abruptly the horse halted. For a moment they were both still, until with a sharp yank of the reins Eremon urged the stallion back up the hill.
Rhiann rushed forward then when he drew rein, and pressed her lips desperately to his hand, heedless of the taste of dried blood. She squeezed her eyes shut, determined not to weep.
At first Eremon’s touch on her hair was uncertain, awkward, but then his fingers grew more sure, more tender, as he traced the line of her jaw, her cheek. Finally he lifted her chin, and now Rhiann couldn’t see the savagery, only the straight line of his shoulders, the tilt of his head and the calm strength in his eyes.
Words fell from her lips then as they had from Linnet, unbidden, unthought. ‘Do not forget the east,’ she said. ‘Yet know also when to turn away.’
Eremon did not question her, but merely drew a deep, shaking breath. ‘I will remember.’ He leaned down from his fighting saddle, and there in the early sun of that new day, kissed her softly. ‘Remember me also.’
He was a little way down the hill when he reined in again and turned in his saddle. ‘Rhiann, there is something you should know. You took Maelchon’s sight, and by that I was able to defeat him.’ He held her eyes. ‘It was you therefore who truly dealt the killing blow, and should claim the honour of it.’
Slowly, Rhiann nodded, unable to speak past the choking lump in her throat. She stood and watched him pick his way back down to the plain, until he was swallowed by the edges of the war camp.
Then, Rhiann burned the bloody bag on the campfire, and sent the smoke as an offering to her Goddess.
The blood of the yearling calf soaked into the torn-up earth before the Roman camp gate, as the haruspex, arms raised to the sky, exhorted Mars, Venus Victoria and Fortuna to grant victory this day.
The mist from the stream that ran between the camp and the hill was still clearing, yet from horseback Agricola could see his armoured warriors drawn up perfectly in battle formation: the auxiliary infantrymen in the centre; the cavalry on the flanks; and the legions at the rear, directly in front of the defensive turf banks, delved the day before.
At the head of each maniple of 160 men stood standard bearers, with their wolfskin headdresses and, at the head of each legion, the aquilifers holding aloft the bronze eagles. Beside the officers’ horses were the trumpeters, ready to transmit the order to march once Agricola had given his address to the troops.
The marshalling ground was quiet, each man staring straight ahead in his line, the only movement their breathing and the occasional stamp of a hoof or shake of harness. It was so silent that, from a league to the south, Agricola could hear a faint murmur of weapons and voices. Chaos, waiting for them.
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br /> He drew breath for his speech, pausing for a moment to let his eyes travel up once more to the outline of the great ridge, mottled with heather along its bare spine. So many aspects of Alba drifted in the realms of mist and dreams – the weather, the people, the boundaries of tribe and alliance. Agricola had found nothing that was solid, except one thing: the uncompromising bones of the land. They were strong, unyielding, unchanging.
This clarity now appealed to him. Since Samana’s death, nothing foreign had entered his sight or psyche. All emotion had receded, leaving in its wake nothing more, nor less, than the clean, focused mind with which he had first entered Alba.
Annihilation, as a goal, left pleasingly little room for uncertainty.
CHAPTER 70
A sudden gust of wind blew the smoke of the burning flesh straight into Eremon’s face, and he coughed, leaning back on his knees. When the acrid stench cleared, he blinked his watering eyes. It would be easy, now, to let the smoke of this offering blind him, to buckle his sword on and go mindlessly back down the Hill of a Thousand Spears to join the army. Yet he could not.
Thirty thousand men were risking their lives because of his decisions, his efforts, and though he could not look on all their faces, he would damn well look into the eyes of his own men –those whom he had dragged across the sea from Erin, and now, perhaps, condemned. He owed them that, for all the others who would fall this day.
On the other side of the fire, Aedan’s solemn face swam into view, his eyes fixed on the flames licking at the base of the haunch of boar meat, which rested on a small pyre made of rocks, bracken and ash twigs. Eremon did not know what the bard saw there in the smoke they were sending to their Erin god Hawen. Nor did he need to know – there was no going back now. Last night the Romans had made camp to the north-east, and were even now forming up in ranks outside its hastily erected bank, for Eremon could see them from this ridge-top. Yet the horns would let Eremon know when Calgacus needed them back.
His gaze shifted to Rori now. The youth’s face was streaked with dirt, his lips pressed together as he watched the smoke drift up into the sky. Eremon was put in mind of the storm that brought their boat to Alba, and how Rori’s lip had quivered then in fear. Eremon had not seen that kind of terror unman Rori for many moons.
He glanced then at Colum, chewing the end of a stick, and Finan, his sword brother of long ago. They rarely showed fear, for it had been ground out of them in the same way they honed their swords, over many years. They simply followed where their prince led, and this realization flared as another sick lurch in Eremon’s gut. Good men, they were, who trusted him without question.
So was Fergus, his fierce, eager young face bringing back to Eremon so clearly the memory of his close friend Angus, dead these two years after rescuing Eremon from his own folly. He was where he wanted to be, Caitlin had said then. Eremon wondered now if that would indeed be enough for them all, when he called in the debt of their sworn oaths.
A fresh waft of smoke caught at the back of Eremon’s throat, but he closed his nose and let it bathe him. This offering was going to Hawen; perhaps it would take Eremon’s fierce hopes with it if it touched his skin. And the Caereni archers had painted over Eremon’s tattoos with woad and blood, drying and stiff now across his naked chest and belly, so something of the Stag might be taken in the smoke, too.
Eremon’s fingers went to his bare upper arm, stroking the ridged surface of the boar tusk that was tied there on its leather thong. As he did, his eyes met Conaire’s, and he saw the same idea dawning there. Swiftly, Eremon picked at the thong as Conaire began to untie the matching tusk from his own arm and gave it to Eremon with a smile. The two tusks chinked faintly in his palm as his fingers closed over them.
Eremon rose then, and stood before the small pit they had delved next to the pyre. ‘My lord,’ he murmured, raising his arms, his two fists together, ‘let your weapons be restored to you in exchange for giving Your strength to our own. Bring us victory this day, so that we may return to Erin and pay our respects on Your own soil.’
Eremon pressed his lips to the tusks and laid them in the hole, beckoning to Rori with a flick of his hand. The other men rose from their knees, and with a few words each, deposited their offerings in the pit: an arrow from Rori; an engraved spear-point from Fergus; and an arm-ring from Colum, won in a game of fidchell. From Finan came the dagger he kept at his waist. Eremon gazed at it with surprise – it was not jewelled, but the leather sheath was scarred and stained from years of use, and even the blade had been nicked in an ill-advised fight years before. Unable to speak, Eremon reached out blindly to clasp Finan on the shoulder.
‘Nay, lad,’ Finan murmured as he turned to go, his weathered face creasing for a moment into a smile. ‘Don’t spend such on me or Colum – we’ve lived a good and long time. What can be better for an old warrior than that his last fight is the greatest yet?’
In silence Eremon watched them leave the hill crest one by one, filing down the path towards the northern slope, where the Alban army was assembling.
‘I have no gift to offer yet,’ Aedan said then, laying his harp over his hands as Eremon often did with his sword. ‘Yet I once told you I would be here to sing your glory, and that will be my offering.’ His grey eyes shone. ‘I will craft a song of your deeds this day, lord, that will reach Hawen himself on the wind, telling him of the bravery of one of his favourite sons.’
‘That is a fine gift,’ Eremon said, taking Aedan by his slight shoulders. ‘Yet put something in it of your own bravery in the face of the Orcadian king, and I will be happy.’ Without a hint of a blush, Aedan bowed formally, shouldered his harp and strode away, his cloak flapping in the rising sea breeze.
‘It looks as though it will be hot,’ Conaire remarked, reaching for his mailshirt.
Suddenly, Eremon’s strength deserted him, and he collapsed onto the nearest boulder, his bloody tunic crushed in his hands, as all the tension of the rite finally made itself known. Slowly, he drew in one breath and then another, taking the pieces of himself that had broken apart as he looked at his men, and pushing them back together. He needed to be whole this day, of all days.
‘All I have done has been to bring me here.’ His own words sounded far away to his ears, as he strove to capture the parts of him still floating above this scene. Yet it still seemed unreal. Below to the north he’d glimpsed the sunlight glittering on Roman spears: 10,000 spears, and all no doubt held in perfect alignment. In contrast, from the hillside on which the Albans were assembling came a muted, confused roar of voices, weapons, horses, pipes and drums.
‘No,’ Conaire contradicted quietly, buckling on his sword. All you did has prepared you for this, but this is not why you came to Alba, brother. And this is not all you are. Remember that.’
‘Then what am I?’ Wearily, Eremon stood and drew his stinking tunic over his head, then reached for his mailshirt and began tying the thongs under his arms. From far away, Roman trumpets blew, and the sense of unreality grew as his blood began to beat loudly in his ears.
Conaire stood before him, grave beneath his polished helmet. ‘You are the best of friends, a fine husband and, soon, a father.’
Eremon snorted, and picked up his sword from the fire. ‘And I don’t do any of those things well enough!’ Briefly, he raised his face to the sun. He wanted to take that in, that one small sensation, before all the soft senses were overrun by the noise and the blood and heat.
‘Eremon.’ He opened his eyes to see Conaire staring at him with creased brows, his golden hair already sticking to his forehead with sweat. ‘I tell you this, because I want you to remember what you have to live for. You are war leader, but do not sacrifice yourself to that.’ Conaire’s fingers closed around his sword-hilt, and his gaze, so unusually intense, devoid of his old lightness, pinned Eremon to the spot. ‘You did not bring them here; you do not have to stay if all is lost.’
Eremon’s smile faded as he looped his sword-belt around his waist, then clasp
ed Conaire by the shoulder. ‘I could say the same to you, brother, for you are all those things and more.’
‘I never forget what I have to live for,’ Conaire answered, looking north to the low hill where Caitlin waited.
CHAPTER 71
Noise was to be Alba’s first weapon, as her warriors waited in the strengthening sun of that new day to see whether the Romans would take up the challenge. And when the distant lines of the enemy appeared on the edge of the cleared plain, the Alban army, arrayed all over the north-facing slopes of the ridge, set free a tumult to shake the Romans where they stood.
First the strident calls of the boar-head trumpets cleaved the air, joined by the clashing horns and screaming bone pipes, all of it echoing off the clefts of the rocks until it multiplied on itself, spiralling upwards into a cacophony of rage and growing blood-lust.
Then the battle songs began, rising and falling on the discordant din of instruments, the bards standing on the yokes of the chariots to sing and chant, each tribe and clan striving to outdo the other. There were oaths being shouted, too, and curses and prayers for victory, and the men were whipped into an increasing frenzy by the druids, who stalked the lines with arms raised, their robes sweeping out like the wings of war crows.
In between the lifted ranks of glittering bronze trumpets, the banners of wolf and bear and stag streamed out in the wind, their poles shaken in frenzied hands, stabbed into the earth and raised again to make the standards soar and dip, and the sun glanced off gleaming leather and iron weapons in a confusion of piercing light and shadow, as the warriors leaped and danced, shouted and screamed, and brandished their spears and swords in the air.
In the midst of all this chaos, Eremon sat astride Dòrn, close to Calgacus in his gilded chariot. The Caledonii king was splendidly arrayed, with a war helmet of eagle shape, its bronze nose-guard a sharp beak, its winged crown sheathed in gold. He wore a leather breastplate, tooled and gilded, and over that a fringed cloak woven with many colours. His chariot horses were black, and they stamped and snorted within coral and enamel-studded harnesses, their eyes rolling white beneath horned war masks.