The White Mare: The Dalraida Trilogy, Book One

by Jules Watson

  ‘It’s safe,’ she said in her own language, touching his shoulder. When he looked up, she saw that his face was not as crumpled or tear-stained as the shaking shoulders had led her to expect. Instead, his eyes were bright as they darted around.

  ‘You are mine now,’ she said slowly in Latin, and shrugged, smiling. ‘If you serve me, I can keep you safe. You can learn our words. Then we can speak.’

  He nodded, the colour flushing back into his cheeks.

  It was as she turned to lead him, hobbling, towards her own house, that she became aware of a slight figure hovering near her elbow. ‘Lady?’

  It was Caitlin, her helmet under her arm. She was pale beneath the grime, and Rhiann’s practised eye fell on a dark bruise along her jaw that had not been there before. This girl, for she could not help but think of her as a girl, was being hard treated. ‘Congratulations on your win.’

  Despite her previous bravado, Caitlin darted wide eyes towards Didius, then along to the King’s Hall, where Eremon and Conaire had gone. ‘I did not know that the prince was your husband, lady,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘All the camp is talking of him: his sword, the warband he is gathering.’ She took a deep breath, steeling herself. ‘Do you think that he will let me join?’

  Rhiann glanced at the bruise again. ‘You know that you will need to leave your home and live here. What about your family?’

  Caitlin’s blue eyes slid down. ‘They’re not really my family,’ she confessed. ‘But they won’t like it, all the same, because my hunting keeps them in meat. My furs bring them wealth. That is why I come to you now. You seemed … kind.’ She smiled shyly, and something about the set of her mouth caught Rhiann’s attention. Again, that sense of familiarity nagged at her.

  She patted the girl’s arm. ‘My husband demanded levies from the other clans, so he can certainly demand that your family release such a talented archer into his care. For the cause.’ She held Caitlin’s eyes. ‘You will have your wish.’

  Some understanding passed between them of what they truly spoke, and Caitlin propped her helmet back on her head with a relieved air.

  Rhiann avoided asking Eremon anything until she judged that he had cooled down after their altercation. Yet though he ignored Rhiann herself, he readily agreed to her request, and took Caitlin’s solemn and over-elaborate vow of allegiance with some veiled amusement.

  As they both left the hall, Rhiann sensed Caitlin’s glowing excitement begin to dim. Looking again at those bruises and the shadow of fear in Caitlin’s eyes, Rhiann decided to set aside her gathering expedition and accompany the girl to the river camp to tell Fethach of her decision.

  Among his scruffy, bickering, black-haired clan, Caitlin’s colouring blazed out like bronze against dull iron. It was as she said, Rhiann thought, watching a glowering Fethach thrust Caitlin’s small pack at her – there was no possibility in the Mother’s name that Caitlin shared any blood with these people. So how had she come to belong to them?

  Caitlin turned away from the jumbled tents and scratching hounds without so much as a backwards glance. It may have seemed heartless, especially as Fethach’s wife set up an obligatory wailing and show of tears, but Rhiann, watching Caitlin closely, thought she could guess what sort of home life the girl had enjoyed.

  She brought up the subject of parentage as they returned to the King’s Hall. Caitlin waved her hand. ‘Warriors did battle in our valley with Damnonii raiders. After it was over, Fethach’s wife found me, a babe, caught under one of the dead man’s bodies. She took me in.’

  ‘That’s all you know?’ As Caitlin walked, Rhiann was admiring the feline grace that would suddenly suffuse the girl’s movements when she was unaware; the grace of a hunter, a bowman. No, she was surely not made to live out her life hidden away in the mountains. She had the stamp of something else upon her; Rhiann’s senses fairly hummed with it.

  ‘Fethach’s half-wit sister also said once that my blanket was of fine blue wool. And there was a shell necklace – but I broke it when I was small.’ Caitlin smiled. ‘I’m of warrior blood, I am. I’ve always known that. And now, at last, I’ll have the chance to prove it!’

  Eremon tested the spear-tip on his finger, and smiled as a drop of blood welled up on his skin.

  ‘The best we can make in the time,’ Bran said gruffly, wiping soot from his face with his hand.

  ‘You have outdone my expectations,’ Eremon replied, surveying the pale shafts of new spears with satisfaction, the piles of studded shield bosses, ready to go to the woodworker’s shed, the mounds of arrowheads.

  As Eremon left the smithy, taking the spear to test its balance, there came a trumpet call at the gate. A party of men on horses was riding under the tower, and Eremon saw silver hair flowing from beneath a helm of iron.

  Lorn dismounted and strode up to him. ‘We received the news of your planned attack.’ The young warrior’s gaze was distant, fixed at some point over Eremon’s shoulder. ‘My father requested that I come to lend you the aid of my arms, and those of my clansmen.’

  To keep an eye on me, more like, Eremon thought. He knew that the Dun of the Sun bred good fighters. But would the extra strength be worth the disruption? Lorn’s rivalry with Eremon would make him a weak link, and this warband must act as one man.

  ‘I would be honoured to accept your aid,’ he replied carefully. What could he say? Lorn’s father was one of the most powerful Epidii nobles. It was likely that only fear of reprisals from Eremon’s kin had prevented him from yet mounting a direct challenge for the King’s Hall.

  Lorn looked directly at Eremon now, disdain in his pale eyes. ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘In four days. Tonight, I will brief the chieftains’ sons on the plan.’

  ‘Then I will be there.’ Lorn nodded at his men, and they followed him up the village path to the houses of his kin.

  Eremon watched him go. He knew why old Urben had sent Lorn here. A man would soon lose power if he kept to his dun, away from the centre of tribal defences. Urben did not want Eremon winning any glory that was not shared by his son.

  As Eremon returned to the hall, he chewed on his lip, trying to weigh up the risks. Lorn was impulsive and fiery, and chafed at following Eremon’s lead. Yet he commanded many good fighters. And what of his father’s men, his father’s might?

  At last Eremon sighed, for there was only one answer. He could not refuse Lorn’s aid: it would shame Urben’s whole clan, and antagonize the council. Such a rift between two men would soon widen to a tribal divide.

  Suddenly, Agricola’s face swam into Eremon’s mind, the mouth curved with customary contempt. He would be pleased by such a rift, for that is how the Romans won power.

  ‘And so you will not have it,’ Eremon muttered, and, lifting the spear, drove it into the ground at the door of the hall.

  Full of misgivings, Rhiann stood on the palisade above the cheering crowds at Dunadd’s gate. The horse fair was over, but all of the visitors had stayed to see the spectacle of the warband’s departure.

  Eremon was taking 200 of the best-trained warriors, and though the day was heavy under cloud, still the mailshirts shone, and helmets and spear-tips glittered, newly burnished, as lines of men marched out of the gate across the causeway, shouting war songs.

  All of the fear of the Romans had been focused here this day, and in defiance, had emerged as fighting spirit. The energy of the milling crowd grew and swelled behind the wedge of marching men, pushing, thrusting, like the arm that sends the blade home.

  Linnet heard her niece’s sigh. ‘It will be well, daughter,’ she murmured, her eyes on the men filing past below.

  Rhiann folded her arms. ‘I still don’t understand why he needs to do this. It’s too dangerous.’ Far off, at the head of the lines, she glimpsed Eremon’s dark hair flowing from beneath his boar-crest helmet.

  ‘Something drives him,’ Linnet replied. ‘He seeks to make his name, and soon. You understand this, surely?’

  Rhiann dropped her a
rms. ‘And when did you become such a defender of my husband, aunt?’ she teased, pursing her lips. ‘Can I not use your ear to complain about him? Is this not what wives do?’

  Linnet smiled serenely. ‘I think it sits hard on you to remain behind. Perhaps your journeying has made your heart restless!’ She reached out, as she often did, and tucked Rhiann’s hair behind her ear.

  ‘That’s what he said!’ Rhiann grumbled. But then she felt Linnet’s hand freeze, and her eyes fixed on something below them.

  ‘Who is that woman?’

  Rhiann followed her gaze. Below them, a familiar figure in buckskins was waving up at her madly. Before she left, Rhiann had managed to get Caitlin into a bath, with heated water and soapwort, to scour off the years of dirt ground into her skin. The wooden tub behind Rhiann’s bed-screen had to be emptied twice, much to Brica’s disgust, before the water ran clear.

  Now, with her helmet under her arm, her clean hair tumbling down her back, the girl’s features stood out. ‘That is Caitlin,’ Rhiann answered, waving back. ‘An archer, from a small steading in the far south. She came here to join Eremon’s warband. She is exceptionally skilled, I hear.’

  Linnet’s face had drained of colour. ‘Where, exactly, is she from?’

  Rhiann thought hard. ‘She told me that her home is hard under the Maiden’s Hill, near the Loch of the Beacon.’ Puzzled, she looked down at Caitlin, now striding happily away with the foot warriors, and back to Linnet. ‘Do you know her? I feel that I do, more so now that we’ve scraped off that dirt. But she’s never been here before. There is some question over her parentage …’

  ‘Question?’

  ‘A mystery.’ She attempted a smile, alarmed at Linnet’s pallor. ‘Actually, everything about her is a mystery! You’ll like her, she—’

  But there she broke off, for Linnet abruptly turned away, pulling her hood around her face, though the day was warm enough. ‘I must go.’

  Rhiann’s priestess ears picked up the control that Linnet was exerting over her voice. ‘Aunt, what is it?’

  She reached out a hand, but Linnet edged away, her face hidden by the folds of the hood. ‘Leave me be. I must go.’

  Rhiann frowned, as Linnet pushed through the cheering people on the palisade and disappeared down the stairs to the ground. Baffled, she turned back to the warband, but Caitlin’s small figure was now lost in the ranks of marchers, and only the battle trumpets floated back on the wind.

  Chapter 37

  The stone had been digging into Eremon’s ribs for hours. But he had other things on his mind, so he only shifted on his belly so that the stone began to dig in somewhere else. ‘There, do you see?’ He kept his voice to a murmur.

  The Damnonii chieftain, lying next to him on the ground, shifted his aged bulk more uncomfortably. ‘Yes, I see.’

  They lay among the trees at the crest of a low hill. Across a stream that fed into the River Clutha, a ridge rose in terraces of oak and elm. Crowning the bare ridge-top, the half-built palisade of the fort stood out against the sky like teeth in an antler comb. Men and oxen crawled up and down a narrow path, hauling logs from the woods below.

  ‘Every day is the same,’ Conaire put in. ‘As soon as it is light, they go to the river bottoms for timber. It will be finished within a day or so.’

  Eremon flashed a grin at the Damnonii chieftain. ‘We have you to thank for getting us here, Kelan, before their defences were complete.’

  The old man licked sweat from his lip. ‘I told you when we met that my people seek revenge. When the eagle-men began this fort, so close to our villages, we could stand no more.’ He shook his shaggy head. ‘The people still needed a prince’s call to act. A call our own princes would never give, now that they have been bought with Roman silver.’

  ‘Cowards!’ This was muttered by a younger warrior lying next to the chieftain, a battered helmet pulled down so far that only his dark eyes glittered from beneath it.

  ‘Peace, nephew,’ the chief replied. ‘Save your fire for when you lead the men in my name. Make me proud.’

  ‘We will all be proud,’ Eremon assured him. ‘Agricola’s boot seeks to crush us. But we will only hack it off at the ankle, again and again, until he seeks no more.’

  They wriggled on their bellies away from the hilltop and out of sight, before rejoining the other men. To avoid detection, the warband had been broken into many groups, which now lay hidden among the trees.

  ‘So,’ Eremon said, when the leaders of each troop were gathered around his map, scratched into the hardened river mud, ‘I have watched as long as I dared, but we must act now, before they finish their walls.’

  ‘Do we have the numbers?’ Finan asked, leaning on his sword.

  Eremon nodded. ‘We match their numbers, since Kelan here managed to gather so many Damnonii men. Now, is everyone clear on the plan? This is our last chance to speak.’

  As he said this, his eye fell on Lorn, whose cheeks darkened with a betraying flush. Eremon had not given him the command of any wing, yet he attended such meetings as if he had. ‘I don’t understand why we need this trickery,’ Lorn declared. ‘If our numbers are even, then our charge will be enough!’

  Eremon breathed out silently. ‘I’m not arguing this again. You are going to follow my plan to its last detail, or you don’t join the raid.’

  Lorn’s chin jutted out. ‘I command my own men, and you cannot stop me from joining the fight.’

  ‘Yet I command the warband, so you follow my orders. You and your men look to Kelan’s nephew, understand?’

  In answer, Lorn clapped his helmet on his head. ‘I will see you at the gates.’

  Later, Conaire and Eremon lay hidden in a thorn thicket on higher ground far behind the fort. ‘You take a chance with that Epidii cub,’ Conaire remarked, fingering the tips of his throwing spears.

  Eremon hefted his boar shield, craning to see through the branches. ‘I know, brother. But I seek to keep the peace after this raid, and I’ve tried to give him the most harmless of roles.’

  Conaire snorted. ‘Harmless, him? As harmless as a trapped wolf, he is. Those jaws can still snap.’

  Eremon’s eyes followed the distant figures digging the fort ditch. ‘So long as they snap at the Romans, and not at me.’

  ‘My lady!’ Brica hurried into the stable, her hands tucked in her cloak. She stopped before Rhiann, the shuffling of her feet betraying her distress.

  ‘What is the matter, Brica?’ Rhiann ducked under Liath’s neck and waded through the straw to the stall gate.

  The little woman took a deep breath. ‘My lady, I know that I should not be speaking with you here. But – I must.’

  ‘Yes, Brica. Slow down now. What is wrong?’

  Brica shook her head, and wisps of black hair escaped her head scarf. ‘When you were forced to take him, I held my tongue, I did. I vowed to serve you, and you are She. But all the men … so many men! Blood-letters, killers … they reek of it!’

  The woman had spoken of little but the forced marriage these last moons, but Rhiann had no idea she was so deeply affected. ‘Yes, I know,’ Rhiann said gently, resting the horse-comb on the paling. ‘But we must make of it what we can, and–’

  ‘No!’ Brica was trembling now, and Rhiann suddenly realized it was not with fear, but fury. ‘I cannot! And now the prince of Erin has brought this murderer … this child killer … here. A Roman! And he is in my house!’

  Ah. Rhiann nodded. ‘I know this must be of concern to you, but really, he is harmless. He is not even a warrior.’

  ‘No!’ Brica dropped her eyes. ‘No! I cannot be near these men any more. This prince. For nearly two years I have served you, but the Mother would not ask this of me now, I know it!’

  ‘Then what are you saying?’

  Brica seemed to gather herself. ‘I must return to the Sacred Isle, mistress. I have been thinking of it for some time, and now I … know … that I can serve you no longer.’

  ‘I see.’ Rhiann looked at the
woman more keenly. ‘Brica, I would never keep you here against your will. You have served me well.’

  ‘Thank you, lady.’ Brica spoke stiffly now. ‘A trading party leaves tonight. I can go with them as far as Caereni territory. There, I have kin who will take me home to the Sacred Isle.’

  Rhiann nodded. ‘Then go, with my blessing. I would give you gifts to take to the Sisters, to Nerida and Setana. Will you carry them?’

  ‘Yes, lady.’

  Rhiann was thoughtful as she walked back to her house, but she could not pretend that she would miss Brica. The woman treated Rhiann as if she was the Goddess herself, rather than a person. This often made living with her less than comfortable.

  Rhiann sighed. She would need a new maid then, someone young this time, perhaps. Rhiann had offered Caitlin a bed in her home when she returned from the raid, realizing that she had no kin, and a household consisting of one Roman and a half-wild woman warrior would test even the stoutest heart. She needed someone with courage. Who would complement such a group?

  And then she had it. Of course – Eithne! The daughter of the fisher family.

  The women of the dun would expect her to choose someone of a higher rank, perhaps, as a maid and companion; one of the craftsmen’s daughters – the bronze-smith or the master-carpenter. But Eithne was quick and clever, and not as serious as Brica. Yes, she would be a fine choice.

  Her mind made up, Rhiann turned back to the stable. She would take Liath and go to ask Eithne herself right now. It was a fine afternoon for a ride. And soon, she really must visit Linnet. There had been no explanation of her sudden departure, nor had she returned to Dunadd.

  That it was to do with Caitlin was obvious. But what it could be was as much a mystery as the girl herself.

  ‘By the great Mars, what is that?’ The auxiliary raised himself in his saddle for a better view, peering past the oxen teams lumbering up from the river.

  His companion pulled his horse’s head shy as a pair of unburdened oxen, tossing their horns, squeezed past a loaded team. ‘It’s a herd of cattle, sir. A large herd!’