Dark Age

by James Wilde

  ‘Ah, what were we going to do?’ Solinus wafted his hand as he turned away. ‘Set him free so he could report back to Motius? Then we’d have the whole horde on our heads. You know as well as I do, he was dead the moment we captured him.’ He glanced back at the corpse, thought for a moment, then spat on it before he walked away.

  ‘We didn’t have to kill him,’ Comitinus muttered. ‘He was one of us. I drank with him in the tavern once.’

  Bellicus sheathed his knife. ‘We’ve got what we want. There’s only one thing that matters now. Keep your thoughts on that.’

  For a while they moved east through the fringes of shadowy woods of elm and ash and then made camp for the night, little more than shelters of branches and leaves. After they’d feasted on duck baked in clay, Bellicus slipped away.

  Nestled in the twisted roots of a venerable oak, he looked up through a gap in the canopy to the night sky. His hound collapsed with a sigh next to him, resting his head on his master’s thigh.

  ‘Will this finally wipe the blood from my hands, Catulus?’ he murmured. ‘Will anything? It feels like a smith’s tongs crushing my heart, this secret I’ve kept for so long. This secret only you know, boy. If I could make amends to Lucanus … if I could unburden myself … I might once again be the man I was, when there seemed to be light in the days to come. But how can I tell him I murdered his father, my true friend? A drunken night in the Wilds, a fight over a woman … ah, I have a terrible temper, Catulus. And I am a fool who deserves all the punishment the Fates can give me.’

  His thoughts rushed north across Britannia, beyond the wall, and into that long ago night, as it had done so many times. That red rage. His fists pounding. And Lucanus the Elder, the then leader of the Grim Wolves, tumbling back over the crag, and down, and down, to the river below. He’d never found the body, and he’d hoped that some day his friend would walk back into Vercovicium and give him the thrashing he deserved.

  But days became weeks became months became years, and he’d learned to accept the truth. And he’d stand with the young Lucanus, ruffling his hair, teaching him how to scout and fight and survive a bitter night in the Wilds as his father would have taught him if he had lived.

  Every time he looked in the boy’s face, and heard his prayer that the gods might bring his father back to him, he felt that pang bite deeper into his heart. It had never eased. No man should have to live that way. But he deserved it.

  ‘We will bring Catia back to Lucanus, Catulus. Even if it costs me my life.’

  ‘And well it might.’

  Bellicus jumped to his feet at the low, rumbling voice. ‘Who’s there?’ he growled, snatching out his sword. ‘Show yourself.’ Catulus scrambled upright, his hackles rising.

  ‘Remember, when you make your plans, you are not alone.’

  Snarling, Bellicus strode in the direction of the voice. ‘I said show yourself.’ He waved the sword from side to side, turning full circle as he peered into the gloom beneath the branches. The woods were deserted.

  ‘Catulus. Find him,’ he demanded.

  The dog raced off, only to return a few moments later with nothing to show.

  Bellicus stared into the dark. Had it been his guilt speaking?

  You are not alone.

  For a while, he stood beside the oak as the cool breeze whispered through the leaves, weighing those words.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Messenger

  THE RED BANNER fluttered against the clear blue sky. Beneath it, Scoti and Picts milled as tents were wrenched down and bales were loaded into creaking carts, horses whinnying as they were fed and watered for the journey to come.

  Catia breathed in the reek of sour sweat and fruity dung; piss and shit and woodsmoke. The lavender scent of her villa at Vercovicium was a fading memory.

  She snagged fingers through her matted blonde hair and gave up. They’d looked after her well enough since she’d been taken captive, but for the only woman in the camp there were no concessions or comforts. She lived as they did.

  And yet it was not a bad life. In Vercovicium they’d always considered those who lived beyond the wall savages. Yet these men had fine songs and stories, observed their laws, loved their kin and were good farmers too, and they had some writing as well, to record their accounts.

  Easing through the throng, Catia felt lascivious gazes settle on her. She pushed up her chin, swallowing her bitterness at the knowledge that she was safe only because their leader, Erca, had placed her under his protection.

  And there he was, barking orders above the din of axes and swords being sharpened. Sparks from the campfire glittered in a halo around his wild mane of black hair.

  ‘You’re going to take me into battle with you?’ she demanded.

  Erca narrowed his dark eyes. ‘I’d wager you’d fight better than half the men here.’

  ‘Give me a blade, then. I’ll show you what I can do.’

  The Scot nodded, his smile tight. ‘If we were riding to battle with an equal foe, I would think twice about taking you with us. The field of blood, shit, mud and dying is no place for women. But the Romans have shown their true nature. At the first sign of a fight the army ran like whipped curs. Cowards, all of them. We will be at the sea in weeks. Britannia will be ours. And then …’ He looked towards the horizon, dreaming, no doubt, of Rome and all its riches.

  ‘Lucanus—’

  Erca laughed. ‘Ah, the man you love. A mud-crawling scout who thinks himself a warrior-king. He has some sense of strategy, I’ll give you that, and a fire in his belly.’ He swept an arm out to indicate the extent of his war-band. ‘But we here are few and he’d still be hard pressed to defeat us. The rest of our army? The Saxons in the east, the Alamanni … the Attacotti? With a feeble band of farmers and merchants who have likely never lifted a sword until this time?’

  ‘Will you think the same when you’re staring down the length of his blade?’

  ‘Put him out of your head. You will not see him again, not in this world.’ She heard the irritation in Erca’s voice and was pleased.

  The bear-like leader snapped round to where two bickering men had come to blows. ‘Logen!’ he bellowed.

  Catia watched a small, rat-faced man with long greasy hair thrust his way through the crowd. Logen of the Fire’s Heart marched up to the brawlers and landed a vicious kick on the back of the right knee of the one nearest. As the man collapsed, howling, Logen whipped out a knife and stabbed it towards the chest of the other man. He hissed something that Catia couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, the barbarian blanched and hurried away. Logen glanced back at Erca and nodded. Erca returned the nod.

  When the leader turned back to Catia, he seemed to have softened. He glanced down at her swelling belly and she realized she was unconsciously cupping it with her hands.

  ‘Has the sickness passed?’ he asked, not without a hint of tenderness.

  ‘The herbs your wood-priest gave me helped.’ She thought of Lucanus and wished she had been able to tell him the child was his before they were torn apart.

  ‘You will need a man to care for you when your child is born.’

  ‘You? You would raise a child that is not your own?’

  ‘You would rather do it by yourself? And starve?’ Catia saw his cheeks colour, but he glowered at her.

  ‘And your offer is not because then you have full control of the royal blood?’ She heard the sardonic tone thick in her voice.

  ‘Think what you will. My offer was true.’ The Scoti leader looked up, thinking. ‘Still, your child will have some value, that I can’t deny. You were chosen long ago, by the gods, or the wood-priests, or the witches, or all at once, to bear the bloodline of the King Who Will Not Die, so we are told. By now you must have realised that there are many out there who will seek to take control of you and your offspring. A wise woman would know she needed a protector.’

  ‘I don’t need anyone.’

  ‘You’ve already lost one child,’ he spat, then caught himsel
f.

  Catia felt her face become like stone. The grief hadn’t gone. She wondered if it ever truly would. The only way to survive would be to make an accommodation with it, as she had with her husband Amatius, all those years when he had beaten her until she bled. The price then had been saving her father, and the family, after her mother Gaia had fled with her uncle, stealing everything they owned. Amatius’ family money had allowed them to rebuild what they once had, and, she was sure, prevented her father from taking his own life in the pit of his despair.

  Now she hoped Amatius was dead. She wouldn’t mourn him. But Marcus, her beautiful son, murdered by Amatius’ hand … every morning she felt as if her heart was being torn out when she thought of him.

  But she would survive.

  She held up her hand with its missing finger, taken by those Eaters of the Dead under Erca’s orders, gnawed on, and then sent to Lucanus as a message. ‘We know what happens when you seek to protect me.’

  He had no answer to that, but it still didn’t seem to trouble him unduly. For hard men like Erca, a little suffering was to be endured and forgotten.

  ‘You will come round,’ he said, turning away.

  Once the camp was broken, she trudged beside the horses like some slave on the march south. Logen watched her like a hawk at all times.

  A few times since her capture she’d tried to creep away in the dark of the night. They’d dragged her back and given her the hand to teach her a lesson. Erca knew she wouldn’t relent. His men had been told that anyone who let her get hold of a blade would face his wrath.

  As they lumbered along Via Devana, riders galloped up with word of the progress of other bands and then rode off to the next. Catia felt stunned by the level of organization. They had been planning this a long time.

  They broke the journey before sunset. As dusk crept in, the sky darkened in a blink and a summer storm roiled overhead. The bonfire sizzled and spat as the deluge began. When night fell, she sat alone under the overhang of Erca’s tent, listening to the drumming of the rain.

  Through the trees, she could see the flickering lights of the small fires the warriors had lit under the sheets of their own shelters. She imagined them hunched around the flames, eyes down. Did they give any thought to the folk they had slaughtered? Did their hearts soar at the thought that Britannia with all its comforts and its kindnesses had been thrown into a pit, possibly not to recover until her child had grown old?

  She thought she might feel hatred for what they’d done, but she didn’t. Inside, she felt numb. She wanted nothing more than to escape, with Lucanus at her side, to a safe place where her child could be born.

  Let the world burn.

  As the squall settled overhead, she heard the sound of running feet splashing through the swelling puddles. Motius, the leader of the Carrion Crows, darted under the overhang. He was naked to the waist, as always, his torso and the left side of his face a mass of black tattoos that made him appear as if the darkness had half swallowed him. Though he was one of the arcani, like Lucanus, she had always feared him, and now she loathed him, for the treachery that had brought about the destruction of her home. He didn’t give her a second glance.

  ‘Erca,’ he barked.

  The leader of the Scoti eased through the flaps of the tent, a wooden cup in his hand. Catia eyed his cold expression and realized he didn’t like Motius either; only tolerated him for his undoubted skills as a scout.

  ‘What is it?’ he grunted.

  ‘Laedo is missing.’

  ‘Probably sheltering from this foul weather.’

  Motius shook his head. ‘His trail vanished. That means either he hid it himself, or someone who knew about trails wiped it away so that wherever he is now he couldn’t be traced. Either way it means we have enemies out there.’

  Catia felt her heart leap. Could it be that Lucanus had come for her? The excitement was followed by a pang of fear and she prayed it couldn’t be. What could he do but die here? No, better he left well alone and lived. She could shoulder her own fate.

  Erca turned up his nose. ‘Here? In the far north? This land is ours. No enemy could survive. We’d find them in no time.’

  ‘Aye. So you think. But I stand by what I say.’

  Erca shrugged and waved his cup, sloshing wine. ‘Take your men, then, and see what you can find.’ He stepped back into his tent.

  Motius stood there for a moment longer. Catia suspected he was simmering with resentment at the casual way his concerns had been treated. When he did finally turn, he flashed one glance at her, and she felt a chill. There was murder in that look, and she was certain that if she had not been under Erca’s protection Motius would have slit her throat there and then, just because he could.

  She curled up where she sat, and weariness brought sleep quickly despite her racing thoughts. She dreamed of her child as yet unborn, so clearly that she could see the features, and he looked like Lucanus. In her mind’s eye she saw him wielding that bronze sword of his father. But the night was pressing in around him, and when she jerked awake, her cheeks were wet with tears.

  It was still dark, but the storm had passed. She could hear the steady patter of drops falling from leaves, but there was a stillness beyond it. She felt relief when she breathed in the cool freshness. Recognizing the sound of hoofbeats drawing nearer, she pushed herself up. Perhaps that was what had woken her. Motius returning with his missing Crow?

  A moment later she heard a whinny, and then a guttural voice demanding directions. For some reason she couldn’t understand, her spine prickled with warning and she crept around the side of the tent where she couldn’t be seen.

  The new arrival pounded up and she heard him bark Erca’s name. The flaps slapped back. Erca would not be pleased at being woken.

  ‘I’ve been sent by Arrist, the King in the South,’ the stranger growled. ‘You have a woman here. I’ve been commanded to take her, alive if I can. If not I’ll just take her head.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Candle Gutters

  THE HAND CLAMPED over Catia’s mouth and a voice hissed in her ear. ‘If you value your life, make no sound.’ And then she was flying backwards, arms clamped against her sides, her feet kicking. Away from Erca’s tent where the messenger was now deep in conversation with the Scot leader, past lines of rain-soaked shelters into the deep gloom of a cluster of ash trees.

  She slammed into the sodden earth. For a moment she lay there, trying to decide whether she should fight or run. When she craned her neck round, she looked up into the rat-face of Logen of the Fire’s Heart. He was peering back along the way they had come, head cocked, listening for any sound that would indicate they had been followed.

  ‘Never touch me like that again,’ she snarled.

  ‘This is for your own good.’

  ‘I’ll decide what benefits me.’ She dug her fingers into the wet leaf mould to stifle her temper.

  ‘Erca has ordered me to keep you out of sight. To keep you safe.’

  ‘Am I too valuable a prize to lose?’

  Logen shrugged, gave nothing away. He turned his gaze back in the direction of his master’s tent.

  ‘That messenger—’

  ‘Is from Arrist, the bastard king who rules the Pictish lands just north of the wall. He’s heard of you. Thinks you might be useful to strike a bargain that will bring down the last of the opposition.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t Erca hand me over?’

  Logen narrowed his eyes at her. ‘No one knows much about Arrist. He came out of nowhere. Seized power through bloody slaughter. But we’ve heard enough grim tales of his rule to know you would not be treated as well as you are here. And then you would be killed.’

  ‘Erca risks angering this Arrist by not handing me over?’

  ‘You ask too many questions,’ Logen snapped.

  Catia stirred at the sound of voices. The messenger was leaving. Once he was gone, Logen reached out for her wrist, but she snatched her hand away and strode in fron
t of him to Erca’s tent. Throwing aside the flaps, she marched inside.

  Erca watched her from under hooded brows.

  ‘Am I supposed to thank you?’

  ‘I expect nothing. I require nothing.’ Erca flicked a hand to dismiss Logen.

  ‘What are your plans for me?’

  ‘I have none.’

  ‘And I should believe you?’

  ‘I don’t lie. Your kind call us barbarians. But I have as much honour as any Roman.’ He sniffed. ‘More, I would say.’

  ‘The only reason you would risk a battle with your ally Arrist is that you think you’ll gain more power by controlling me and my child.’

  Erca turned away. Catia grasped his shoulder and instantly regretted it. He spun round, his eyes blazing. ‘I’m not interested in power, not like that. Those are the games the wood-priests play, not me.’

  ‘Not so long ago you were ready to do anything to lay claim to my son … to Marcus.’ She felt the blood pulse in her temples. For the first time she couldn’t understand this man.

  ‘And now I think differently.’

  ‘Why?’

  Erca retreated a step. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, wouldn’t look at her at all. Did he think so little of her?

  ‘We’ll take Britannia. Perhaps even Rome. I’ll have as much wealth as any man could enjoy in a lifetime. Why would I need more than that?’

  Catia studied him for a moment. She didn’t want to believe a word that came out of his mouth, but her instinct told her he was speaking the truth. ‘So what now?’

  Erca poured a cup of wine and handed it to her, a kindness he’d never shown her before. She sipped it, enjoying the sweetness on her tongue. It seemed like a lifetime since she had tasted any.

  ‘Arrist won’t give up. He’ll send the messenger back. Make some threats. If you’re not handed over, he’ll come and take you himself, war or not.’

  ‘Then answer me: why would you risk a fight with your ally?’ Her thoughts were racing, but nothing made sense.

  And then he did look at her, fleetingly, and she was surprised by the rare softness in his eyes. ‘It may be I’ll have to send you away,’ he said, as if he’d already answered her question.