by James Wilde
‘What little faith you have.’
Myrrdin had ghosted up behind her. The wood-priest leaned on his staff, a wry smile on his lips. Ringlets of black hair tied with leather thongs framed a tanned, thin face, and he scrutinized her with those dark, fierce eyes. The black tattoo of the snake curling along his cheekbone to his jawline seemed to be watching her too.
‘I have plenty of faith. In myself.’
‘Lucanus the Wolf may not yet have the greatness of the Pendragon in him, but he’ll grow into it. You should listen to the Hecatae. They’ve watched him long enough to know his true worth.’
Amarina eyed the wood-priest as he stepped beside her. He always looked as if he was enjoying some private joke at everyone else’s expense.
‘The Hecatae and others,’ he continued. ‘Strong voices have spoken out for him.’
‘I’d say a man like you doesn’t leave much to chance, or faith.’
‘I commune with the gods—’
‘The gods have their plans and you have yours, wood-priest. And who is to say which one influences the other?’
Myrrdin laughed under his breath. ‘Schemers come in many shapes and sizes. You would know that.’
They stood in silence as another blast of the whistle rang out, Mato signalling that all was well. The sentries would be ready for them.
‘There’s no need to run from us. You have a part to play,’ the druid said.
‘I have no stomach to play any part in your game. Not one that will likely have me dying in a ditch while you dance away to safety.’
‘There is a need to usher the King Who Will Not Die into the world—’
‘Your need, wood-priest. To bring you druids back into the position of power you once held before Rome came and cut you out like a canker.’
‘All who live on this isle will gain when the Bear-King comes.’
‘You wood-priests weave your plans across long years. That’s how you’ve survived the Roman scourge, in the deep forests and the wild places far from man. Why should I care what happens after I’m gone?’
She glimpsed movement among the trees on the other side of the river, and four figures eased out into the early light.
‘Lucanus has put his trust in you,’ she said. ‘But he’s a simple man who lost his father too young. No one has told him the way of the world.’
‘And you are much wiser, I suppose.’
‘You keep up with this pretence of a prophecy for the sake of those whose wits are not sharp. It brings new recruits tramping to this camp to lay down their lives. If you told them the truth, that the royal bloodline ended when the boy Marcus was killed, and that the barbarians will smash them into the mud and march over their shattered bodies—’
‘Oh, there will come a King Who Will Not Die. Have no doubt of that.’
‘Ah. You plan to set Lucanus’ mare to breeding again. What if the barbarians have already done with her?’
Myrrdin said nothing.
Amarina swallowed her derision at the wood-priest’s attempt to maintain his lie and watched Lucanus and Mato splash through the shallow water at the ford with two boys in their wake.
Once they’d squelched up the muddy bank, Mato said without introduction, ‘Speak sense to him. He’s my good friend, but he’s also a jolt-head of some renown.’
Amarina narrowed her eyes at Lucanus.
‘He is set to ride into the heart of the barbarian horde to find Catia and rescue her,’ Mato continued.
Amarina sighed. ‘This is your doing, Myrrdin. You’ve given him a gold crown and now he thinks he can do anything.’
‘Don’t mock me, Amarina,’ Lucanus muttered. She could see the worry etched in his face now.
‘Why would you think of throwing away your life?’ the wood-priest asked.
‘That Pictish king, Arrist, has learned Catia is a captive of one of the war-bands. He’s planning to use her to make me surrender, or he will end her days.’
‘And you think you should die as well?’ Amarina asked. ‘What good is there in that?’
‘I have to do something—’
‘You’d trust Bellicus with your life, yes? Is there any man stronger or braver?’
Lucanus didn’t answer.
‘If any can bring Catia home, it’s Bellicus and Comitinus and Solinus. Those Grim Wolves are risking everything to save her … and for you.’
‘They might already be dead,’ the Wolf spat.
‘If they are, you wouldn’t fare any better.’ She softened her tone, watching him struggle with his emotions.
‘Have faith. Your wolf-brothers don’t march into the enemy’s territory alone,’ Myrrdin said.
‘What allies are there?’
‘The gods are on their side.’
Amarina saw the wood-priest’s sly smile. More secrets. What was he hiding?
The druid pushed his staff forward as if it were a wand about to cast some magic spell. ‘These words may sound harsh, but they come from the heart. Once you accepted the crown of the Pendragon, you gave up all rights of a common man. You are the war-leader now, the Head of the Dragon, and that is all you are. Not a lovelorn man desperate to save the life of the woman who holds his heart. Not a grieving father to a boy who was not your son. You lead, and you fight, and yes, if need be, you die, for the sake of the people of Britannia.’
‘Not often do I say this, but I’m in agreement.’ Amarina half turned and swung a hand out to the jumble of makeshift tents stretching away from the riverbank. The first blue wisps of smoke were winding up from the morning fires. ‘You’re the difference between life and death for these men. Walk away and they’ll surely die. No one here has been forged in the fires of this war like you. No one else understands the minds of the barbarians. No one else has the authority to lead. You might not want this burden, Lucanus, but the wood-priest is right: it’s yours.’
Amarina hoped her words were strong enough to steady him. If she were to buy some time to find a way out of this predicament, and keep her head on her shoulders, she’d need this army to protect her.
Lucanus looked across the sprawling camp. Her heart was as cold as stone, but for once she felt it go out to this man who had had responsibility thrust upon him. She could almost see the lines deepening on his face.
After a moment, he nodded and marched away towards his new army without another word.
Myrrdin leaned close and Amarina breathed in the sweet smell of herbs from the balm with which he anointed his skin during his daily ritual.
‘See, you have a part to play,’ he murmured. ‘No king stands alone. They need good men and women around them to keep them on the path of virtue. We are all his strength in times of weakness. Would you turn your back on that?’
And the day ended with fire too. The western sky blazed crimson and gold, the trees stark silhouettes against it. In the camp, the sticky aroma of bubbling stew mingled with woodsmoke. Blades whined against whetstones, an accompaniment to the lilting songs of the men hunched over their hearths.
Amarina sat cross-legged in the entrance to her tent. Across the baked mud of the path, Aelius wiped grimy sweat from his father’s brow. Menius was ashen, his rheumy eyes barely seeming to register anything that passed in front of him. The old man had been hollowed out ever since his daughter had been taken.
‘If you choose to leave, you know we’ll come with you.’ Decima was lying on her belly beside her, chin resting on her hands.
‘I’m still weighing where the benefit lies.’ Weighing where we are least likely to die. Lucanus had decided they should march for Londinium at dawn. They would be safe there, he promised.
‘Wait. Listen.’ Galantha cocked her head.
At first Amarina thought the other woman had recognized some old song. But then she heard another high-pitched sound cutting through the music of the camp.
A distant shrieking, growing closer.
Hauling herself out of the tent, she stood for a moment, feeling her skin prickle to goosef
lesh. Then she hooked up the hem of her dress and hurried in the direction of the noise. Towards the river.
At the water’s edge, she shielded her eyes against the ruddy glare and realized the cause of the din. Upriver, birds, a cloud of them, blackening the sky.
Decima and Galantha ground to a halt beside her, breathless.
‘I’ve never seen the like, not at this hour,’ Galantha said.
‘What ails them?’ Decima asked.
Amarina’s gaze dropped to the turgid grey waters. Black smears were drifting. Birds would swoop down to them, then soar up high. Others fought just above the surface of the river, a confusion of flapping wings and pecking beaks. She felt her teeth set on edge at the spiralling shrieks.
As realization dawned, she spun round, shouting, ‘Away! We must be away!’
Her words had barely died when the low blast of a horn cut through the birds’ frenzy.
Corpses were drifting in the current, so many of them they threatened to block the flow from bank to bank. In the wake of the bodies, what she had taken to be the reflected light of the early evening sky was a trail of lifeblood. Fresh kills.
The birds swooped and fed, swooped and fed.
‘They’ve slaughtered their captives.’
Amarina looked round at the voice, low and heavy with anger. Lucanus was studying the river of bodies. ‘They don’t need slaves to slow them down. They’re coming.’
‘So we keep running,’ Amarina said, hearing the bitterness in her voice. Like deer, herded and exhausted until the moment they would be cut down.
Another blast of the hunting horn rang out.
Mato raced up. ‘Our scouts have just returned. What we feared has come to pass. The second attack has begun. The horde is pressing from the north and the west.’
Lucanus whirled. ‘Break up the camp. Away!’ he bellowed, picking up Amarina’s cry. ‘Away!’
Amarina watched the river for a moment longer, remembering the slaughter at Vercovicium when the invasion had begun. The ferocity. The relentlessness. The unimaginable numbers, wave after wave crashing down upon what had once been Rome’s impregnable Fortress Britannia. Crashing down until their target had been smashed to pieces. Then she turned and hurried towards the din rising from the camp and whatever fate awaited her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the Trees Speak
Not far from Ratae, the Britannic heartlands
IN HIS TOMB in the cold earth, Bellicus stiffened under the blanket of ashes and the charred bones of men he had never known. He choked on the reek of endings.
The ground thrummed. Horses riding by. Footsteps circling the hiding place he’d clawed out of the soil with his fingers, drawing across him the remnants of the burned village and the victims who’d once lived there.
He imagined rough hands dragging him out into the light. A blade slicing across his throat. He mouthed a silent prayer.
The footsteps thumped closer.
A gruff voice called out in one of the guttural barbarian tongues – he couldn’t tell which through the earth pressing against his ears.
Silence for a moment. He stiffened again.
Then a splashing, a heavy stream. Taking a piss.
Bellicus held his breath until the warrior was done and his footsteps ebbed away. The barbarian bastard would be rejoining the war-band that Bellicus and his fellow Grim Wolves had seen riding across the sun-parched land.
This was how it had been ever since they had parted company with Lucanus and Mato on that dismal June night beside Marcus’ grave, when they had vowed to bring Catia home. Creeping through dense woods into a land thick with the enemy. Crawling along ditches. Crouching in the shallows of rushing rivers, waiting for the icy moment of discovery. Hiding. Sweating. Always knowing that death could strike at any moment if they let their watchful gaze waver.
He’d clung in the low branches of an oak while Picts had swarmed a spear’s length beneath him, afraid their dogs would smell him out, or he would slip into their midst and be hacked to pieces. He’d submerged himself in a bog, with only a hollow reed in his mouth for breath. He’d cowered behind rocks in the dark of the night as their horses thundered by on both sides.
In the end, they’d learned that the safest hiding places were in the burned villages, among the bodies, or what was left of them. And there were plenty of those. At times it seemed all of Britannia was a wasteland. A kingdom for rats. The barbarians expected no threat from those villages they’d already destroyed. But still they came, closer, closer, always searching, for more plunder, or slaves, or to inflict more slaughter.
It was only a matter of time.
When he heard the beat of the hooves fading away, he waited for a few more moments and then dragged himself out of his grave. His mane of silver-streaked red hair was clotted with white ash.
Solinus was already sitting on charred timbers, cleaning the filth from under his nails with a knife. He looked up, wrinkled the scar that quartered his face, and returned to his task. ‘If Galantha saw you now, you’d stand as much chance of a tup as that one-balled no-cock Decra. Not for all the gold in Rome.’
Not far from his feet, the earth heaved. Muffled cries echoed, growing increasingly frantic. Bellicus kicked some clods away, then leaned down and hauled another man out of his hiding place. Shuddering with panic, their companion sucked in a draught of fresh air.
‘You stamped that dirt down, you bastard,’ Comitinus gasped.
Solinus grinned. ‘Arms like wet straw, you.’
Comitinus was like a sapling and would probably snap with a single blow from a strong hand. There was no meat on him, even less than there had been before they began their exhausting trek behind the enemy’s lines.
Bellicus prowled to what had once been the village’s edge and crouched among blackened wood punching through a sea of ash. The war-band was already riding towards where Via Devana carved through the grassland. Sometimes he dreamed he would see reinforcements from Rome marching up that road from the south, helms gleaming in the sun, standard held proud. But with each day that passed, he knew it was a fading hope.
This was the world they had inherited. No point wishing like children.
He whistled, and his dog Catulus bounded out from where it had been hiding. ‘Good boy,’ he murmured, scrubbing the shaggy fur of the Agassian. The hound was small and slender, but if any of those barbarians had ventured near him, they’d be missing chunks of flesh now.
As he tried to stop his fingers trembling by running them through the dog’s rough coat, he looked out across the patchwork of woodland and grass and lake. He frowned. A smudge blurred in the distance, like a cloud-shadow though the sky was clear. He breathed in, and for the first time in many a day tasted fresh air not marred by the reek of new burning.
Back at their hiding place, Solinus and Comitinus were bickering and he cuffed them both before saying, ‘The barbarians are moving. This might be our chance.’
A bubble of blood burst on filthy flesh. Frightened eyes ranged. Bellicus dug the tip of his knife a notch deeper into the neck of his captive.
‘Answer my question,’ he growled.
‘We were allies once. Friends, even. You wouldn’t harm me.’ Laedo forced a gap-toothed grin, wrinkling the black spiral tattoos that covered the left side of his face. He shook his head, a little too hard, and the beads braided into his long hair rattled.
‘You were no friend of mine,’ Solinus said as he paced around the kneeling man. ‘You’d have cut my throat in my sleep for the one coin in my purse.’
Laedo was one of the Carrion Crows, the group of arcani who had scouted for the army of Rome out of the fort at Vindolanda. The Crows spent more time alone in the Wilds than was wise, living on berries and roots. Too long out there turned men to beasts and brought a madness that was hard to shake, all the arcani knew that. Bellicus grunted as he looked into the man’s roaming eyes. He’d never liked them.
They’d spied Laedo loping along beside one of the
war-bands and tracked him for most of the night and day as he scouted for any untouched villages to plunder. He was too confident, there in the heart of that ravaged land. His guard was down and they’d taken him easily.
‘We’re in this pit of shit because of you,’ Bellicus said, unable to resist digging his knife a little deeper. The captive howled.
‘You betrayed us all,’ Comitinus added. ‘The job of the arcani was to protect Britannia from attack. But you sold us all out. Taking the barbarians’ gold to deceive those you had fought beside.’
‘And your leader Motius is worse than any of you,’ Solinus spat. ‘Mad and fierce as a rabid dog. I hate that fucker.’
Laedo bared his teeth. ‘We were betrayed long before by those we called master, you know that well. All the pay that never came, though we risked our lives daily in the Wilds. No respect—’
Solinus thundered a foot into the captive’s leg and he howled again. ‘It’s the army, you whining cunt. Nobody respects anybody. We have a job to do and we do it.’
Bellicus held up a hand. ‘I’ll ask again. You were always a man who kept his ears open. What have you heard of Lucanus’ friend Catia? Do your new masters still have her captive, or …’ He let the question hang.
‘Is she dead? No, she lives.’ Laedo looked up from under his lids, his voice sullen.
‘Where?’
‘In the camp of Erca, a day’s march south of Ratae, by the banks of a river, the Mease, not far from the line of Via Devana.’
‘Has she been harmed?’ Comitinus demanded.
‘They’re treating her well.’ Laedo smirked. ‘Erca favours her. Now, I have answered your questions, as old friends do. Set me free—’
Solinus thrust his sword into the Crow’s chest and twisted it. Laedo’s features jerked into a startled expression. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Once he’d slumped on to his back, Solinus dragged out his sword and wiped it on the dead man’s tunic.
‘Why did you do that?’ Comitinus cried. ‘We’re not murderers.’