Pendragon

by James Wilde

  About the Book

  Winter AD 367, and in a frozen forest beyond Hadrian’s Wall, six scouts of the Roman army have been brutally murdered.

  Their mutilated bodies were discovered by an elite unit led by Lucanus. Also called the Wolf, he knows the far north to be a foreign land, a wild place ruled by barbarians, inhabited by daemons and witches – a place where the old gods live on. It is not somewhere he would willingly go and to him this ritual slaughter reeks of something altogether more dangerous.

  But when the child of a friend is taken captive, Lucanus feels honour-bound to journey beyond the wall and bring the boy back home. He is not alone. For this is a quest that will span an empire – from the pagan monument of Stonehenge to the kingdoms of Gaul and the eternal city of Rome itself – a search that will embroil a soldier and a thief, a cut-throat and a courtesan, a druid and even the great Emperor Valentinian. And what is revealed will reverberate down the centuries …

  From the bestselling author of Hereward comes an epic new historical adventure of betrayal and bloodshed set during the bleakest of times – a time when civilization itself was foundering, when the world faced a dark age and was in need of a hero.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Part One: The Dragon

  Chapter One: The Arcani

  Chapter Two: Falx

  Chapter Three: Catia

  Chapter Four: The House of Wishes

  Chapter Five: Somewhere a Wolf Howls

  Chapter Six: The Trail

  Chapter Seven: The Deal

  Chapter Eight: The Arrival

  Chapter Nine: Corvus and Pavo

  Chapter Ten: Foul is Fair

  Chapter Eleven: The War-Band

  Chapter Twelve: The Dwarf

  Chapter Thirteen: The Serpent

  Chapter Fourteen: The Old Gods

  Chapter Fifteen: Ghosts in the Night

  Chapter Sixteen: A Small, Dark Room

  Chapter Seventeen: City of Gods

  Chapter Eighteen: The Lake

  Chapter Nineteen: The Sword

  Chapter Twenty: The Battle Lost and Won

  Part Two: The Fall

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Hunt

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Camp

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Eaters of the Dead

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Blood Pit

  Chapter Twenty-Five: A Voice in the Dark

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Flight

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Season Turns

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Fall

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Final Hour

  Chapter Thirty: Escape

  Chapter Thirty-One: On the Trail of the Dragon

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Survivors

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Single Scream

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Chalice

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Pendragon

  Part Three: The Dark

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Morrigan

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Old Friends

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Crossroads

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Short As Any Dream

  Chapter Forty: Old Crows

  Chapter Forty-One: Lord of the Greenwood

  Chapter Forty-Two: In the Marshlands

  Chapter Forty-Three: The Song of the Lark

  Chapter Forty-Four: Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolf

  Chapter Forty-Five: Among the Stones

  Chapter Forty-Six: Sol Invictus

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by James Wilde

  Copyright

  For Elizabeth, Betsy, Joe and Eve, as always.

  Brutus! there lies beyond the Gallic bounds

  An island which the western sea surrounds,

  By giants once possessed, now few remain

  To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.

  To reach that happy shore thy sails employ

  There fate decrees to raise a second Troy

  And found an empire in thy royal line,

  Which time shall ne’er destroy, nor bounds confine.

  Geoffrey of Monmouth

  And in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners relay the torch of life.

  Lucretius

  One by one, the torches are extinguished. Shadows drown the great works of man. Stars dim. Candles gutter.

  The world is slowly turning from the light.

  In Rome, senators and soldiers do not yet see their time is passing. In Gaul, emperors and kings continue to fight their ceaseless battles along the frontier. And in Britannia, fair Albion, cut-throats and courtesans, wise men and warriors, go about their business as if nothing will ever change.

  But it will. And soon.

  A new age is coming.

  The threads are being measured, and cut. In the weft and weave, a pattern emerges. But which thread is spun with gold?

  Which one leads to the King Who Will Not Die?

  Myrrdin, A History of the Bloodline of Arthur, the Bear-King

  PART ONE

  The Dragon

  There was a world … or was it all a dream?

  Homer, The Iliad

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Arcani

  AD 367, Late winter, north of Hadrian’s Wall, Britannia

  THE SNOWS HAD come at the night’s deepest, ghosting the black branches. Now, with the thin light of a new day streaking the heavens, the grass glittered and the ground was as hard as iron where it rolled down to the line of trees.

  Through those white wastes, the Grim Wolves prowled. Five of them, men as fierce, as unyielding, as the creatures whose name they took and whose pelts they wore upon their backs. To their masters in the army of Rome, they were their eyes and ears in a dangerous terrain, where a savage enemy waited to seize on any opening. Scouts, wilderness men, who roamed the dense forests and deep valleys beyond the edge of empire, seeing all.

  Arcani, they were called by the soldiers who manned the wall’s defences.

  The hidden ones.

  Lucanus, known to all as the Wolf, held up his hand and the thump of feet slowed, then stopped. His bones were aching from the biting cold, which penetrated even his furs and his oiled leather armour and his breeches. He tugged his grey woollen cloak tighter, although it would do little good. Around the hearth-fires, folk were already grumbling that this winter would never leave, as they said every cold season. Perhaps this year they would be right.

  ‘What do you say, Bellicus?’

  The Wolf watched his second in command crouch down. Bellicus, wise counsellor, sometimes foul-tempered drunk counsellor. He often wondered what he’d do without his friend. Be found out as not quite good enough to fill his father’s shoes, he supposed.

  Bellicus hunched shoulders broad enough to bear a stag, and shook his long red hair and beard, both now streaked with silver. ‘See, here,’ he boomed, waving his hand towards a trail of broken stalks in the long grass. He looked back, eyes the colour of a winter sea in a face whipped to leather by the harsh northern wind. ‘Five men would do it.’

  Lucanus nodded, pleased. ‘Mato?’

  The tallest man there flexed a body as slender as a sapling. Pushing his head back, he flared his nostrils and breathed in. ‘Smoke, upon the wind. Cold now, though.’ He flashed a grin, eyes sparkling in the first light.

  ‘If the Ravens have been taken by surprise out here, they won’t be coming home,’ Solinus snorted. Ah, Solinus, so much acid dripping from every word. Lucanus wondered if he’d been so sardonic before he got the scar that quartered his face.

  ‘Let a little sunshine in, brother,
’ Mato said. ‘Sometimes hope is all we have.’

  Solinus crooked an eyebrow. ‘See what hope buys you next time you’re pleading with Amarina at the House of Wishes.’

  Mato laughed at that.

  Lucanus cracked his knuckles. Twenty-eight summers and he felt like an old man sometimes. At least he was still getting stronger, still wiser. If he was to keep the respect of these fine men, he would need to become as good a leader as his father had always been.

  ‘Do we turn back?’ The voice was almost lost beneath the moan of the wind. It was the fifth of them, Comitinus, a worrier, but that brought caution and it had probably saved his life on more than one occasion.

  Lucanus searched the treeline. No sign of movement, anywhere. If there were enemies, they would be deep in the forest.

  ‘Bellicus, Mato, with me,’ he commanded. ‘Solinus, Comitinus, stay here and watch our backs.’

  The three scouts loped through the thigh-high grass. As they neared the trees, the wind whined among the branches and in it Lucanus could hear the voices of the spirits warning him to slow down, take care: death waited. Perhaps even his father’s voice.

  Heeding the warning, he lurched to a halt. The dark swelled among the ghostly skeletons of the ash trees. The silence was strained, as if the whole forest were holding its breath.

  Once he felt certain they were safe to proceed, he raised his left hand and snapped it forward. The Grim Wolves edged into the trees. There, Lucanus could smell the hint of smoke in the air. Mato had been right: a fire had burned hard, now dead.

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, his thoughts drifted back to Micico, the leader of the Ravens, hunched by the hearth at the fort at Banna, nursing the leg wound that had prevented him from going out beyond the wall with his brothers. The Ravens were another of the bands of arcani scouts – a unit was stationed at each of the forts along the wall – and they had already lost one man, mauled to death by a bear in the hills beyond the forest. The remaining three were scouting closer to home, following a trail of whispers of a Pictish war-band threatening an attack on one of the settlements.

  Lucanus recalled the note of worry in the Ravens’ leader’s voice. His men should have been back by sunset. They could well have been pursuing the trail deep into the north. But Micico was old and seasoned, and he trusted the tightening of his gut, he said. When he pleaded for aid, how could Lucanus ignore him?

  Cocking his head, the Wolf listened for the crunch of feet upon hoar frost among the trees. The barbarians were rarely silent. Most of the time you could hear them across vast tracts, lumbering like cattle through the vegetation, chattering and cheering and singing.

  Only the soughing of the wind reached his ears. He felt his shoulders loosen and his fingers slipped away from his sword-hilt.

  As blades of pale light eased among the shadows, the Grim Wolves crept to the edge of a large clearing. In the centre the black bones of charred timber pushed up through a sea of ash. Stumps dotted the ground all around, the creamy wood splintered by axe strikes.

  ‘They cut down trees for this fire, made it a big one,’ Bellicus said.

  ‘And made the clearing bigger too.’ Mato looked around at the way the vegetation had been flattened deep into the gloom beneath the canopy. ‘This was no protection against the cold of the night.’

  ‘A gathering,’ Lucanus said. ‘A council. But why here, why now?’

  Mato strode into the circle. ‘With keen eyes, we should be able to make a wager on the numbers who came. Not a few, I would say.’ His words drained away as something caught his eye on the far side of the cold bonfire.

  Lucanus recognized the way his wolf-brother’s body stiffened and he drew his sword. Bellicus prowled to the edge of the folds of ash.

  ‘Here are the Ravens,’ he said.

  Three bodies were strung among the trees, wrists and ankles bound to the trunks, slaughtered like cattle for the pot. Lucanus let his gaze drift across the ragged remains, legs hanging by a flap of skin, arms gone here and there, the severed limbs tossed into the trees.

  The heads had all been taken. They would be on stakes somewhere, their magic conferring power on the victors.

  Lucanus felt a cold sweat trickle down his back. The arcani never fell to the barbarians. The scouts were too skilled in creeping and hiding and watching, their senses too sharp to be caught unawares by the men of the north.

  ‘Wait.’ Mato’s warning rustled out, almost lost beneath the wind’s moan. Crouching in front of one of the corpses, he circled a finger in the air above a gaping wound.

  Lucanus dropped to his side, seeing instantly what the other man had noticed. ‘Teeth marks. No beast did that. A man.’ Craning his head up, he saw the remains in a different light. Here and there the flesh had been pared away by a sharp blade. One of the arms lying on the cold ground had been gnawed.

  The Wolf jumped to his feet, his levelled sword swaying from side to side. This was not the work of Picts or Scoti. They did not eat the flesh of men.

  ‘Wait,’ Bellicus said. Lucanus glanced back and saw him crouching, his head cocked to one side, his brow furrowed.

  ‘If not the Picts, then what?’ Mato’s face had hardened like stone, but his darting eyes revealed all the horrors that danced through his head.

  Then what. Not who.

  ‘Wait,’ Bellicus said again, louder this time. He was on his feet, backing away, searching the woods.

  Before he could urge his companions to stay calm, Lucanus glimpsed what Bellicus must have sensed: movement away in the trees. Shadows flickered in the silver light, flitting from oak to ash to holly. Turning slowly, he could see the forest coming alive on all sides.

  Silent as the arcani, silent as the grave.

  ‘Away!’ Lucanus’ voice soared through the stark branches. ‘Away!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Falx

  ‘TELL THE OTHERS nothing.’ Lucanus glanced back across the grassland. Nothing moved along the treeline. He breathed more easily; they’d escaped by the skin of their teeth. ‘For now, at least. I need time to talk this over with Atellus before Solinus blurts it out when he’s at the bottom of his cup in the tavern.’

  ‘What did we see?’ Mato gasped, his breath ragged from the sprint up the slope towards the wall.

  ‘The Eaters of the Dead.’ Bellicus shook his head. ‘Stories to frighten children. We thought.’

  ‘Why here?’ Mato pressed. ‘Why now?’

  Lucanus had no answer to that.

  A lightning-blasted oak loomed up on the ridge ahead, alone in that grassland like a twisted old man with his skeletal arms outstretched. Lucanus broke off a knob of bread from the provisions in the pouch at his hip and set the morsel among the tangled roots. Kneeling, he bowed his head in silent prayer. If the god of this place accepted the offering, all would be well.

  They heard the others bickering long before they crested a ridge and saw them. Lucanus loosened his shoulders and put on a grin.

  Solinus was following the passage of a kestrel sweeping overhead, the scar quartering his face crinkling as he squinted into the sun. ‘Look at that wind-fucker. I wish I was up there with him, not down here with you, you miserable bastards.’

  ‘You’re talking about me, aren’t you?’ Comitinus glared.

  ‘You are a miserable bastard, that’s true.’

  Lucanus wagged his finger at Solinus. ‘What did I tell you? Don’t bait him.’

  ‘Let him fight his own battles. I’d be happy to give him a kick up his arse.’

  ‘You’ll get a kick up the arse,’ Bellicus growled and Solinus instantly fell silent.

  Mato stepped in and put his arms round the shoulders of the two men. ‘Brothers, we are all weary, with little to show for it. Save your arse-kicking for the tavern.’

  ‘Of course, he’d lose.’ Comitinus arched a brow.

  Bellicus turned and looked out across the sea of swaying grass. Lucanus watched his friend’s hunched shoulders, his lingering stare, unease in
every line of his body, but the others were too caught up in their conversation to see.

  ‘No sign of the Ravens?’ Solinus asked. ‘I tell you now, those three bastards are warm by a fire, tupping Pictish girls.’ He pulled out the knife he used for whittling and began to clean under his nails.

  ‘Back to the fort,’ Lucanus called in a cheery voice to end that strand of conversation. ‘You’ve earned a night of comforts. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’

  He felt a stab of pride as he watched the tight-knit band move off. All of them had proved themselves. They’d faced their wolf and won. Drenched in its blood, under the light of a full moon.

  Bellicus the fierce. Mato the light-bringer. Solinus the sardonic. Comitinus the worrier. All so different that if they’d met in another life they would never have been friends. But now they’d become of one mind, one spirit, with the eternal pack.

  His thoughts flew back to his own day of death and rebirth. He became something better then, he had no doubt about that. The night had been as cold as this one was, ten days after his father had disappeared in the Wilds and they could all be certain he wouldn’t be coming back. For hours he’d tracked his beast into the darkest depths of the forest. It was an old wolf, a seasoned hunter, its fur streaked with silver, as was right. Lucanus was doing the pack a service by ending its time upon this world in glory and allowing a new, younger king to rise up.

  The moment had come, in a clearing surrounded by ancient, twisted yew. The wolf was exhausted, old legs worn, snorts of breath long and juddering. And then it had turned and those amber eyes had locked with his. In that stare he was sure he saw understanding, as if it knew what was to come, and accepted it as part of the endless cycle. Its time was done. A new power would rise.

  Slaked in its blood, he’d loped home and found his bed. In that sleep of the bone-weary, he dreamt that the great wolf came to him and welcomed him into the pack. Just a dream, the folk in the settlement had said with a laugh.

  But everyone who underwent that rite had the same dream.

  Gold rimmed the orange roof tiles of Vercovicium. Lucanus shielded his eyes against the glare from the low sun of the new day and picked up his step. Although frost still glittered in the long shadows cast by the fort’s stone walls, the greens and browns and purple of the rolling countryside floated under hazy light.