by Jules Watson
She bowed her head over Cahir’s sword, struggling to hold it up. ‘My lord.’ Her voice sounded small amid that vast crowd. ‘As your lennan I arm you and send you to war. In this way, may the blessings of the Goddess also be laid upon you and your endeavours.’ And bring you safely back to me, she added silently.
Cahir placed his hand over the scabbard. ‘My lady,’ he acknowledged, and stood with his arms out so she could belt it on him as the noblewomen had done for their warriors. It was awkward, but she must not let the tip touch the ground. Every eye was fixed on her as she self-consciously sank to her knees to fasten the buckle, leaning around him. His breath brushed her brow, sending a tremor through her, and when the sword lay against his thigh he helped her to her feet.
A deafening cheer went up from the warriors, echoing back from the hills and across the water. Those on the ships struck their swords on their shields, making a noise like rolls of harsh thunder. In the midst of that roar, Cahir held Minna’s eyes. ‘Can you see it?’
Confused for a moment, Minna smiled softly. His love. ‘I can see it.’
Then, to her surprise, Cahir did not kiss her formally on both cheeks, but claimed her mouth instead, impetuous and passionate. The cheering swelled, and Minna could still feel the last hint of warmth on her lips even as he turned away to board his ship. The boar banner rippled over his head in the wind, and his men closed about him. He was hers no longer.
She stayed there as the ships left the bay, the banks of oars rising and dipping, the sails filling out as they reached the open sea. Only when the command ship disappeared around the headland did she take a shuddering breath.
She could not turn back to land, though. She knew all the noblewomen stood there, watching to see what she might do now that she was alone here. As she paused, struggling with herself, a touch came on her shoulder.
It was Riona, smoothing a cloak across her swelling belly. ‘Lady,’ she said, her voice raised to carry, ‘if you would be so good as to come to my mother-in-law’s house, she would like to share a cup of mead with you. One of my nephews has a rash, and she requests your help if you would give it.’ Minna swivelled to shore, with a grateful smile at Riona.
There was a moment of indecision as together they reached the knot of noblewomen. Then one with a babe-in-arms detached herself and strode boldly towards Minna. She nodded respectfully, and, as the child began to wail, Riona broke in. ‘The Lady Breda is worried for her son.’
‘He cries all the time,’ the woman murmured, jiggling the boy on her hip. ‘And he holds his belly. I fear …’ her haughty face twisted, ‘that he is not well.’
So this would build the bridge. Minna straightened, and reached out for the child.
BOOK THREE
SUNSEASON, AD 367
Chapter 47
Fullofaudes raced his horse along the ranks of men, its hooves spattering mud around his ears. He pulled up at the lip of the hill so abruptly that the horse shied.
At first the Dux said nothing, gazing into this cursed mist that had fallen over the rolling hills below the Wall. It was only now being burned off by a rising sun. ‘Do we know the numbers?’ he bellowed to his officers, sitting on their mounts beneath his standard.
Their faces sported the same carefully blank expressions, but Fullofaudes saw in their eyes the stark fear he was trying to suppress. ‘Not yet, sir,’ one said, clearing his throat. ‘We can’t see far enough, so I have sent riders along the fringes to determine the extent of the enemy force.’ Fullofaudes watched his lips move. The enemy force. Tugging off his helmet, he ran his hands through sweaty hair, conscious of the grime coating his face and muddied armour. He was not his usual self, precise and hard: he was undone.
The first message had been a brutal shock. He received the news in Brigantes territory, after quelling another riot about taxes. A sudden attack had been launched by Picts landing at the eastern end of the Wall. So many warriors had stormed the shores that the forts had either been taken or abandoned. Fullofaudes thundered back north with cavalry and infantry units drawn from his hinterland forts, furious but ultimately confident.
Now, after three days, he had gained no sleep, and his mind and body were struggling. More messages had come in, relentless messages, and with each one his world had darkened around him. What he had thought was another sporadic raid, like the Pictish one three years ago, turned out to be something entirely different.
A force had not only landed in the east, but an even bigger one had invaded the west, with scores of boats and columns of warriors pouring down from the northern moors and across the Erin sea. Two armies, west and east, swarming together like ants.
Then more riders came in. Luguvalium fallen. His outpost forts destroyed. His scouts scattered. The Wall burning. He barely had chance to abandon his positions and regroup his forces here in the hills, to stop the barbarians heading any further south.
Worse was to come, though. When Fullofaudes summoned his reserve troops he discovered that four vexillationes of cavalry, two thousand men, had already been annihilated by a night raid on one of the recently reoccupied outpost forts to the north. How did the Picts know where they were stationed, when he had ordered its occupation a secret?
That question still gnawed on his exhausted mind, but there was no time to digest its implications. This behaviour went against everything he knew about the northern peoples – that they were squabbling beasts whose infighting did his work for him. This was something not seen for centuries; they had joined together in a great alliance, the first since Agricola’s days. And unless the Dux was willing to abandon the north of Britannia to their fire and swords, he must accept the terrible challenge of open battle.
Spurring the horse to the edge of the ridge where the ground fell to scree, Fullofaudes peered into the mist, which was breaking now in ghostly swirls. He could just glimpse dark masses of men on the farther ridge, although as yet they were silent, like wraiths emerging from another world, another time. He curbed his fears and his wandering mind once more. They were men, and they could die.
His scouts came galloping back, milling about on sweaty horses behind him. Unable to see clearly, they had ridden perilously close to the enemy flanks on west and east, hazarding a rough count of men. As they stammered the numbers to him now, Fullofaudes did not turn around in the saddle. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand or more. It could not be. He had seven thousand, if he was lucky, the rest spread over the Province, guarding the borders and coasts.
Fullofaudes knew he was on the edge of an immense precipice. Dread and disbelief clawed at him, threatening to break him.
Then the drizzle began to lift, revealing rank upon rank of tattooed faces, wild hair and beards, tattered banners and shaggy cloaks. The dark, endless masses blanketed the opposite ridge, covering the ground for miles around.
‘Dear God … Jupiter and Mars … Mithras …’ he gasped, calling on every god he knew.
*
‘… by Hawen, lord of the boar …’ Cahir murmured.
In a misty, birch-clad bowl of the hills, the Dalriadan king and his commanders stood in a reverent circle around two of Darach’s younger druids. One held on his open palms the sacred talismans – two boar tusks, yellowed with age.
Cahir stared down as the druid stepped around the circle, coming before the warriors one by one. The tusks were Eremon’s, gifted to Gabran to replace the ones Eremon and Conaire sacrificed at the Hill of a Thousand Spears. They were for Hawen, the boar god: his own cruel weapons. All these years they had been kept in a fur-lined box in the druid temple, and in Cahir’s memory never been taken forth. For they were battle tokens, and his people had not been to open war for centuries, only skirmishes and raids.
Now, they had been brought forth for him alone: Cahir son of Conor.
The second druid held out Cahir’s sword to the warriors, chanting under his breath. Ruarc took the sword and, briefly closing his eyes, his lips moving in a vow, sliced the meat of his palm. Making a fist, he s
queezed blood in droplets over the yellowed tusks, his face transfigured. One by one the other warriors did the same, and Cahir took their fervent, unspoken oaths into his heart.
At last the sword came back to Cahir himself. He nicked his own skin and watched the blood mix with his men’s, smearing the tusks. This was to bind them all to him and to their ancestors. This was to give them victory.
Every nerve singing, Cahir strode away through the smoke as the druids burned the entrails of a deer, their arms spread to the sky. Ruarc hurried to his side, matching his step. ‘Where shall we range the spears, my lord?’
Cahir took his helmet from under his arm and put it on. The iron strips at cheek and neck were cold on his skin, steadying his heart. ‘The Roman cavalry are always on the wings. Put ours on our right, then ride over to Gede and get his to the left.’
Ruarc nodded and loped away. The wooden spears had been his inspired idea, for the Albans could not bring horses by sea and therefore were at a disadvantage from the Roman cavalry. One night, around the feasting fires after the taking of Luguvalium, Ruarc suggested felling tall, young trees and sharpening their ends into stakes, their tips hardened in the fire. These could be placed at the warriors’ feet, hidden in the heather, and when the cavalry charged they would lift them up and block the onslaught. His king agreed, and Ruarc had detailed men on felling and sharpening duty at once.
Cahir watched Ruarc go, his lime-stiffened hair a golden mane around his head. Now they were taking action, he had become a focused, settled presence, and a critical link in his chain of command to the younger warriors.
He was yanked back from these thoughts by Alban war-horns screeching discordantly along the ridge above him – there must be movement in the Roman ranks to the south. He made his way over the hill to his boar banner, staked out between two poles in the still air, the scarlet boar rushing to the attack across its white background. His heart soared to see it.
Silently, his men finished preparing him, for the arming of a king was a sacred act. Mellan helped Cahir don his mailshirt, and Gobán buckled his sword-belt at his waist. They checked the laces of his boots, tight around the knee so they would not trip him when he was running. Finally, Fergal took up Cahir’s war shield and fitted it over his knuckles.
Weighed down by iron, Cahir adjusted his stance on the edge of the ridge, bracing his shoulders. Below him, as the mist lifted, the Dalriadan and Attacotti armies flowed down to the plain on the right of battle, the west. In the centre were Fergus’s Erin warriors, and on the far flank, the east, the Picts were gathered in their thousands. And all so eerily silent, beyond the coughs, the mutters and curses, the clank of armour and weapons.
No, not silence. An instinctive denial shot through Cahir. Too long had his men been voiceless. Now they faced an honourable battle, in full strength, and just like the heroes of old they must cry their courage to the gods.
Slowly raising his wood and hide shield above his head, Cahir struck it with the hilt of his unsheathed sword so it boomed over the murmuring throng. He drew a great breath, then bellowed it out: ‘The Boar!’ Thud. He struck the shield again. ‘The Boar!’ Thud. ‘The Boar! Thud. ‘The Boar!’
Around Cahir heads turned, and in moments up came thousands of shields borne aloft, and swords shimmering in the mist, and the Dalriadans broke into one war chant: The Boar! The blows of the swords formed a primal drumbeat, urgent and stirring, gradually growing faster and louder. It was a racing heart; pounding blood. Mellan leaped on the spot, waving his blade, screaming at the top of his lungs, and the young men followed, yowling like wildcats.
The chants and drumming spread, first to the Dalriadan warriors of Erin who cried out the same, sharing the blood of the boar; and then to the Picts, though their war cries were unintelligible at this distance. It didn’t matter, though, for the din rose and ebbed together, soaring and crashing, the spears being pounded up and down alongside so the light caught in blinding ripples across the ranks.
With a savage smile Cahir stood silent now and let the sound penetrate his body, lifting him up to the heavens. And the last lines from the prophecy came into his head:
Hear your blood call you,
Raise the boar above you,
Make an end, battle-lord,
The red-crests come!
Cian stood among the massed Roman infantry, and, as the war shouts of Alba rolled over the plain, he felt the blood drain from his muscles. Wearily he tried to grasp at strength, at anger, but his body and soul were too brutalized for even a tattered remnant of that feeling. Instead, he stared dazedly at the massed wraiths now growing clearer as the mist lifted.
Finally it blew away on the wind and revealed to his exhausted eyes a sea of men that covered all the hillslopes to the north: an ocean into which he could only cast himself and drown.
‘We are dead,’ someone hissed next to him.
Cian spared him no glance, by habit shifting his grip on his short-sword, though he felt no fear, only despair. There had been too many months of raids in freezing cold and dark, Picts lunging out of black woods and sleet-filled valleys, swords honed. Too many men whose blood had spattered his own flesh – enemy and comrade, Alban and Roman – staining it for ever.
He had thought to expunge all pain and doubt in the heat of fighting; that he would cleanse himself. But the opposite happened. His wound still cramped, as though his body carried a memory of being broken. He was thin and stooped, his bones sticking out from the fever that had wasted him. But worse, when he at last returned to duties his battle-lust was bone-dry. Instead of the empty silence he craved, Picts stalked his dreams, blurring into Dalriadan faces and then to Minna, dark-haired and sorrowful. The shades of the men he had killed were piled on his shoulders, weighing him down.
Cian licked his dripping chin, wondering distantly if his sweat mingling with the rain meant that at least his body was preparing itself for battle, even if his heart could not. Crouched in the misty darkness before dawn, he had decided that today he would seek a final release. His own death was the only path remaining now.
The barbarian war-chants, rising and falling, built a pressure in the air like a coming storm. For a moment Cian thought of the sound itself growing strong enough to fell him, so he could simply lie there and stare at the sky as the other soldiers poured over and crushed him.
‘Whore-sons.’ A soldier spat the words, a gob of sticky mucus just missing Cian’s boot. They called this one Red, for his copper hair and stark freckles. He was running his finger over his sword-blade, rhythmically, obsessively, ignoring the blood that beaded the tip. ‘At least we’ve got them in one place at last. Here we can make an end; the Dux will fix it.’
He glanced at Cian, his sharp, sour face even more pointed from a lack of good food, and from looking over his shoulder and never sleeping. His thick hair was sodden, stuck to his drawn cheeks. He was Red, but they also called him black-heart, for his hatred for the blueskins outmatched anything Cian could muster. For a soft southerner – from Eboracum way, that’s all Cian knew – he had turned as savage as the enemy. Red didn’t even realize there was no difference now between himself and those he skewered on his spear. But Cian knew.
‘What the hell is keeping him?’ Red growled, peering through the last tatters of fog to the Dux’s command post.
‘We can’t attack first.’ Cian summoned some distant memory of tactics. ‘Let them come on and expend themselves across the boggy plain; then we can approach from high ground.’
Red snorted, his finger flicking along the sword-edge like a licking tongue. Blood dripped on his knee. ‘What would you know anyway, pretty boy?’
Cian turned his back, shuffling his stance on the muddy slope. The sun was slicing through the breaking mist when at last the Roman trumpets blew, and men were herded into formation by their commanders. Lines were straight-drawn, swords unsheathed from waists, helmets adjusted, spears braced. Prayers ran through the men like a wind, the Christos named along with the old gods of Rom
e, and the more ancient gods of Gaul and Britannia.
Officers strode back and forth, shouting last orders – in contrast to the barbarians who were spending their final moments whipping each other into an ever-greater frenzy, so none would feel fear and pain, so they could run at twice the speed, spear with double the strength.
Cian dragged his thoughts away from that maelstrom of noise. Where were the cavalry? Perhaps the Dux wanted to keep them in reserve. As if there might be a later.
The Roman horns blared again and were answered by the shriek of the barbarian war-trumpets, as if two great eagles fought in the skies above. The lines of soldiers around Cian pulled in tighter. The barbarians broke ranks with an enormous mass shout and onward rush to the ridge. Cian was pushed forward by the weight of his comrades and was suddenly stumbling down the slope. There was no turning back.
But he didn’t want to turn back. He wanted to let the wave take him and bear him down into the void.
When the armies met, the clash of arms, shields and bodies resounded off the rocks with the roar of a hundred-year storm battering the coast.
Fullofaudes watched through narrowed eyes, his desperation becoming despair as he saw the barbarian tide wash over his ranks, his lines wavering then breaking, before being shored up by the more experienced soldiers. Seven thousand to thirty … He must not think like that; there must be something he could do, some strategy that would enable his force to prevail.
Shouting at his commanders, he heard the horns screech and saw the scouts racing back and forth, passing on orders. Men were pulled out, reformed and forced back into the line. Throngs of soldiers and enemy warriors struggled in a turmoil below him, their weapons a frenzy of blades, the heather and turf slippery with blood. Screams, curses and shrieks pierced the air, as if the harpies of legend flew above in their fury, wafting about them the stench of death. There was so much blood that the hot, copper smell of it even reached Fullofaudes on his hill, drifting over the dank dew of morning.
