The Dragon Lord

by David Drake

  "Balls," the Dane said, almost as if he were reading his companion's mind. "You've spilled your guts to me, don't know why I shouldn't do the same. It doesn't matter, anyway. . . . Ever wonder why I go by my mother's name, Thurid?"

  Mael shrugged. "I've known other northerners who did. There was Odd Kari's son we met that night in Hippo. . . . I figured your mother raised you after your father died before you were born.

  "Oh, he lived till I was ten," Starkad said. "Only thing is, he never married my mother. Ran off with her, took three months of her temper and her tongue—which wasn't a bad record; I had ten years of them but I made it a point never to see the bitch after I left home myself. But my father dumped her in Grobin among the Letts. He was a trader, you see."

  "It's a better man who makes his own name than takes one left for him," Mael said, glad that Starkad's secret was nothing worse than bastardy.

  Starkad laughed again. "You mean, I'm a bastard so many other ways it's no surprise to find I'm one in simple truth? Well, that's nothing that's ever bothered me—as many bastards as I've scattered around the world, I'll not fret to've been bred on the wrong side of the blanket myself.

  "But you see, what happened is my mother went back to her father's house—I can guess now how she earned her passage. But she wouldn't tell anybody who the man had been, even when they tried to beat it out of her. They wanted a virgin's price out of whoever it was, for honor's sake, you know. They were respectable people. Except for mother. She was a strong-minded bitch, I give her that.

  "I grew—fast," Starkad continued, spreading his big arms wide as much to display as to stretch the muscles. "When I was ten, I was as big as any sixteen-year-old. Any sixteen-year-old to come out of Ireland," he corrected himself with a grin. "And that summer I was in Hedeby with my mother, standing looking at the cutlery in a booth an Italian Jew ran. My mother grabbed me by the shoulder—have I said she was a big woman? She turned me to face down the boardwalk. 'D'ye see the man there?' she whispered. 'He's Steinthor Steingrim's son.'

  "Well, I'd sooner have looked at knives and axes, but he was a striking fellow. Bigger than most. He looked old at the time, but I know he can't have been but thirty, thirty-five. He had a bright blue mantle with tassels down one side, and a belt of silver plates that he hung a sword from. And my mother said, 'He's your father, child. When you grow to be a man you must kill him for the dishonor he brought to both of us.' I reached out my hand and took a hatchet from in front of the Jew. He shouted but I was already running down the boardwalk. My father, that was Steinthor, saw me coming but he thought I was just a thief. He spread his arms to stop me and I put the axe to its haft in his forehead. I kept on running and at the docks I jumped aboard a freighter that had cast off. The owner signed me on to his crew. I was big, like I said, and—I still had the bloody hatchet in my hand."

  Mael touched his tongue to his lips. He started to speak, realized that the sympathy he had been about to show would only have underscored the uncorrectable. Instead the Irishman said only, "I'm sorry."

  Starkad lifted half his mouth in a wry smile. He said, "It's not that I killed him, or that there wasn't reason to have killed him—I've never needed much reason anyway, you know that. . . . But I've never killed another man just because some bitch of a woman told me to. And that won't go away, Mael, however long I live."

  Mael leaned over and punched Starkad lightly in the chest. "Some day I'll tell you about the day I killed my sister's husband," the Irishman said. "But just for now I'd sooner leave confession to the Christians and talk about something that matters. Just what is Arthur trying to accomplish here? I haven't had a day awake in the camp, but you've been around long enough to notice things."

  "Yes, I've talked to some of the long-service folks," Starkad agreed. "Come on, it's a pretty day. Let's take a walk outside and feel how nice it is not to be training some damn fool way or other."

  The ground immediately around the recruit billets had been trampled bare. The men walked the fifty yards over into the shade of a small stand of poplars. Children played and called around the buildings, ignoring the pair of warriors. Starkad watched them with a mild affection sharply at variance with the way he looked at adults.

  "He's building quite an army, Arthur is," the Dane said quietly. "They say he wants to conquer the world. He's bringing the whole world together under his banner to do it, too."

  "Yes, there were men from at least half a dozen tribes in the group they stuck us in the other night," Mael remembered aloud. "And they were all fresh recruits like us."

  "Anybody willing to make a business of war," Starkad said. "Didn't used to be that way, though. Arthur started with what troops he could raise from his own tribe. Most of the Britons, though—they're soft; their guts rotted away under Rome. Arthur got a few to join up besides his own tribesmen, the Votadini, but only a man here and a man there. Nothing that was going to stop the Saxons. The landowners and the bishops'd pay Arthur to fight for them, but they wouldn't give him men to fight with. He used their money at first to hire other Romans from the Continent, folk that had been beaten once by the Germans moving into the Empire. Some of them were willing to fight again. That was where Lancelot came from, and Lancelot was when the rest all changed."

  "Lancelot," Mael repeated thoughtfully. "Sure, I know where I heard of him before. He was Syagrius' right-hand man."

  "That's right," Starkad agreed. "The last Roman to think he was Emperor of Gaul. They tell me Lancelot got away from Vesantio with his life and a fast horse when Clovis mousetrapped the Roman army there. He got to Britain, anyway, and to Arthur . . . and Arthur started hiring anybody who'd sign on, leaving it to Lancelot to figure how to whip them into shape. Everybody gets a horse and a coat of mail if they don't have one. Everybody gets the same weapons and has to use them the same way—lance, sword, and bow. They thought they were going to make me leave my axe behind in a fight because they haven't issued one to everybody."

  "Think they'll just ignore you?" Mael asked. "There're a couple thousand of them and two of us, you know."

  Starkad nodded seriously. "Yeah, I thought about that, figured if they were as stubborn as I was, they were going to kill me sure. But I looked around and there were the Huns—you know. Wear what they please, carry what they please, do damn near what they please, so long as they fight like Huns. So the first morning you were gone, the cadre took us out to practice with swords on six-inch posts they'd set up in a field. And I showed them why I carried an axe, not a sword—and I spent the afternoon hammering in new posts. But they stopped fucking with me about my axe.

  "You just have to be good, is all," the Dane concluded complacently.

  Mael laughed. Starkad had noted the same point that Arthur had mentioned to Mael at the cave—and made use of it. "Sure, if the Saxons'll just plant themselves ankle deep and wait, you'll play hell with them. But the sort of mix we trained with—that's normal for the Companions."

  "For the last five years," the Dane said. "The old sweats, the Britons who've been with Arthur from the beginning—they complain and they don't care who's listening, Briton or German or Greek. They say Lancelot's doing the same thing the Vortigern"—Starkad used the British title for High King—"Vitalis did fifty years ago, hire Saxons to fight Picts, and hire more Saxons, until—bam! The Saxons cut everybody's throats one night and take over half the country."

  The Irishman snorted. "Idiots. I'll call Lancelot a lot of things, but not stupid. Anybody can see the difference between this and what Vitalis did."

  "Looks pretty much the same to me," Starkad said flatly.

  Mael looked at him. "Hey," he said, "you're not supposed to do the thinking, right? Mess with my job and I'll get mad and, oh, piss on your ankles or something." He punched Starkad's chest.

  The Dane smiled. "Okay, so tell me, oh learned man."

  "Vitalis hired groups," Mael explained. "He'd bring over a shipload of Saxons and settle them at a river mouth or a favorite landing spot of the Picts. They
'd have their own government, their own thegn to lead them, and, after a little while, the kings followed the bulk of their tribes over. You don't come first if you've got a soft place at home, but when things seem settled in Britain and the land's so much better, you move in and be king there. And if there're locals there already who think they're in charge but they don't have any soldiers of their own—well, so much the worse for them.

  "But Arthur isn't enlisting tribes, right?" Mael continued. "Just men. And they aren't from one tribe together and they aren't under their own leaders, they're under his. They don't even use their own weapons or their own language in his army—unless they're too good to waste, my heroic friend."

  Starkad nodded in slow agreement. "Everyone who's been here any time calls him Leader," the Dane said. "And they don't have any ties but to him, you're right. I guess I could take any of the Companions—never met a man I couldn't—" Starkad paused, looked at Mael and rephrased his statement. "Never fought a man I couldn't take, some things I'll likely die without being sure. But even one at a time the Companions I've seen are good. And they don't fight one at a time, they move every man together, and I think maybe they could beat any army they didn't choose to get out of the way of."

  The Dane fell silent and frowned. "I'm not much for following anybody," he continued at last. "I guess that's why you and I've knocked around so many places But I think most of the Companions I've met here—Goths and such-like as sure as the Britons, anybody who's been around him for a while—most of them would follow Arthur to hell if he wanted to lead them there. And they'd expect to ride back, too."

  "He does things I wouldn't have expected," admitted Mael. "He got his dragon. Damned if I see what good it'll do him, but he wanted it and he got it. I'd sooner cuddle an asp, myself."

  Starkad's eyes had been picking among the trees and fields around them. They focused. "Your—Veleda's coming," the Dane said.

  Mael turned. Veleda had emerged from the wooded path a hundred yards away. Her hair was richly white in the sun's eye. Her face, never tanned, looked more gray than pale, and her expression was as tight and wasted as that of a day-old corpse. The Irishman stepped out of the shade toward her, got a better look, and began to run, with Starkad pounding a step behind him. Veleda fell into Mael's arms, trying to smile.

  "What happened to you?" Mael demanded in a voice so calm that only Starkad could have heard the lethal threat underlying it. "Who did this?"

  "No, no," the woman protested feebly. "Nobody did anything to me. Except myself. And I can walk."

  Mael lifted her, his right arm supporting her thighs and his left hand her shoulders. "Sure," he said, "and I can carry you—which is how we're going to get back to the room. What did you do?" Veleda weighed only a hundred pounds or so, and the ordeal seemed to have drained away much of even that slight bulk. She lay supple in his arms, her hair brushing his knees as he walked.

  "You've got enough of your own ways to tempt death," Veleda replied. "Leave me to mine. We all of us do what has to be done. There are things I'd never do for myself that I will for mankind and the earth."

  Beside them Starkad grunted, a comment though wordless. Veleda raised her head from Mael's breast and said, "Yes, so urgent as that, Dane. There's a knot being tied in the fate of all the world, very soon in the future. Merlin's foolish toy is part of it, I'm certain. . . ." Her head fell back and she added in a whisper, "But those who speak to me aren't ones you can order to speak clearly, tell this and thus and why. They give answers as they please, and they care very little for men."

  Mael turned sideways to fit Veleda through the doorway to their billet. He laid her down on the nearer bed. "Do you know a man named Biargram Grim's son?" the woman asked unexpectedly.

  Mael frowned. "I do," said Starkad, seating himself carefully on the edge of the other bunk. "Biargram Ironhand, yes; a thegn of some note. He's a big man, big as me. I remember people guessing at which of us would win a catch-as-catch-can if we met—though we never did. But that was a long time ago. He must be fifty now and a graybeard."

  "A Dane?" Mael questioned.

  "A Saxon," Veleda corrected him. "He has a shield and a spear, and I need you to get them."

  Starkad chuckled. "Biargram'll be as glad to give them up as he would be his left eye and both balls," the Dane said. "Besides which, we have a trip to make to Saxony and back. Want us to bring you the moon besides, along the way?"

  "Starkad," the woman said wearily, "I mean it. And the weapons are here in Britain—that much I'm sure of."

  "Why do you need them?" Mael asked.

  "I don't know." Veleda saw the Irishman's face close and winced herself in frustration. She reached up and caught his hand, saying, "Mael, I don't know, but there's no doubt at all in my mind that I do need them, that I will need them soon, in a very few days or weeks—and that you and all the rest of the world besides depend on the weapons being in my hands when the need comes. But if you won't believe me, I can't make you believe."

  After a moment, Mael's fingers closed on hers. "I believe you," he said.

  "Sure, Biargram could've brought his folks across," Starkad agreed. "From what I hear, the country from the Bight to the Elbe's getting to be as empty as a vestal's cunt. Every Saxon and Jute's migrating to Britain. But I don't see how that puts us any forwarder. It's not just what the Saxons would do if we came skulking around—and believe me, Biargram's shield's been in his family more years than anybody can count—but besides the Saxons, neither you nor I can even get out of this damned camp without being used for archery practice."

  "Umm," thought the Irishman aloud. He sat beside the woman, his hand still turned with hers. "I think we could arrange that. You know this Biargram—"

  "A little. A damned little."

  "—and nobody here is going to be able to prove it's only a nodding acquaintance if you say otherwise. Sure . . ."

  "Could I have some water?" Veleda asked Starkad as Mael's mind clicked over plans that began to mesh like clockwork.

  Mael's mouth dropped in embarrassment at not having offered something without being reminded. His hand snatched the drinking gourd from its peg on the wall. It was empty.

  "There's a well at the south end of the buildings," Starkad said.

  "Would you go get us a gourdful, then?" Mael asked, holding the container out to his friend.

  Starkad did not reach for it as expected. "She's your woman," he said.

  Mael blinked. All he said aloud was, "Yes, I guess that's true." He stood, adding to Veleda, "I'll be back in a bit."

  When the Irishman was gone, Starkad said fondly—facing the open doorway rather than Veleda—"His mind works all the time. By the time he comes back, he'll have figured how to get the two of us away from Arthur and then back with the gear you want. Very bright fellow, very." The Dane switched his gaze straight at the woman. His blue eyes struck her like twin hammers. "But he's not German. He didn't sit by the fire when he was a little boy, listening to the women telling stories about the things they only said to each other. About the days when the spirits were all women and their priestesses ruled everywhere. And the most powerful of all the priestesses was the Veleda, in those days that are only dreams now.

  "How old are you, Veleda?"

  "You won't tell him," she said, not a threat or a question, only a statement of fact like the fact that his hair shaded from blond to red and that the vein in his neck pulsed as his heart beat.

  "I wouldn't do anything to hurt him," Starkad agreed quietly. "He thinks you're a witch, and he's found he can live with that. The truth isn't so important to me that I'd hurt a friend for its sake." The Dane's voice changed. "But one more thing I'll tell you. You may be priestess or witch or goddess yourself; you may have any power you please and be able to live forever; but you'll live the rest of eternity in two parts if you harm a hair of that man's head. I don't doubt that you can kill me, but no power this side of hell or the other will stop me if I come after you with my axe."

 
"I won't hurt him," Veleda said. There was neither fear nor doubt in her voice. She smiled. "A man could have a worse friend than you, Starkad. Or a woman."

  Mael strode through the doorway with the filled gourd in his hand. He gave it absently to Veleda. "Starkad," he began, his face vibrant, "this will work. There's not a man of Arthur's who could prove you're lying, and besides—they'll all believe it's true. You see—"

  He bubbled on, too distracted by his coming triumph to notice the glance that Starkad exchanged with Veleda.

  Chapter Nine

  From the top of a low hillock Arthur and a dozen men of his staff and bodyguard watched two troops performing mounted evolutions in concert. Lances lowered, the hundred Companions advanced at a trot across the broken pasture in a double line abreast. As they approached the wooded margin of a stream, Arthur gave an order to his cornicine who then blew a three-note call on his silver-mounted cow horn. The horsemen raised their lance points and wheeled left in parallel files. One man fell off. In the center, the formation clotted awkwardly where a swale threw the timing askew.

  Lancelot cursed. "Ragged, ragged. They do that in front of Saxons instead of willow trees, and there'll be a massacre."

  "That's why we train them, isn't it?" the king retorted. On horseback his clubfoot was scarcely noticeable.

  One of the bodyguards looked away from the maneuvering troops, back along the path that led to the villa. The man grunted. "Sir," he said, to Lancelot rather than the king. Arthur was too exalted to be bothered with details of intruders.

  Lancelot turned, his eyes following the bodyguard's. "Face around, boys," he said in a flat voice which none the less carried to all the men around the king. To the cornicine Lancelot added, "Bring the troops in." Two notes and then two more sang out. The exercising Companions pivoted left again and rode toward their Leader.

  "The Irishman, Mael, and his Dane friend," Arthur observed.

  "So it seems," agreed the big Master of Soldiers. Lancelot unsocketed his lance, bringing it forward though still vertical. Its butt spike rested on his toes. The other Companions were also readying themselves unobtrusively, drawing swords and slipping their arms through shield loops. One of them, an Armenian, carried a bone-stiffened composite bow. He swung his horse sideways so that its body concealed his hands stringing the bow and nocking an arrow.