In the meantime, I conferred with Eboracum’s garrison commander about potential threats from beyond the Wall, although with his seriously depleted cavalry wing of Dalmatians and Vangiones from the upper Rhine he was in poor position to do much. I promised him reinforcements while privately wondering where I would find them, and left my warrior bishop to recover in Selletun, away from the plague.
Before I rode away, I was visited by the smith Gimflod, who had heard of my arrival and left his forge to bring me the sword of power he had been commissioned to make, and it was a thing of beauty like Exalter.
Longer than the average gladius, in its hilt this sword incorporated a pyramid-shaped purple and yellow crystal from the Bluion mine in the limestone country of Britain. This ancient cavern where the Romans mined the prized crystal was the place where for two centuries the gilded eagle standard of the Ninth Spanish legion had been hidden from the rebel Britons. By a series of god-sent miracles, I had found the icon and used it to rally the superstitious troops behind me as I seized the throne of Britain and became its new emperor.
The crystal in the sword, said the sorcerer Myrddin, would inform the gods of our loyalty to the old religion when we gave the sword as sacrifice. In addition, in a bow to the new religion of Christ followers, the swordsmith had incorporated into the blade a small band of iron from one of the nails used to crucify their Jesus god. These two powerful links to gods both old and new, Myrddin said, would be joined with the gift of the ancient symbol of Britain’s kings, the golden Torc of Caratacus. To them both would be added a gift of blood royal. This, the sorcerer said, might induce a return of the old powers and favour of the island’s own deities. Only then could we have relief from the wars, plague and uncertainties that were overwhelming our people.
I looked thoughtfully at the beautiful sword, seeing the shadowy, swirling patterns along the blade that reason told me were traces of the twisted and hammered strips of iron and carbon that made it but that superstition told me were ghost images of the gods and ancestors waiting to be released by a new agreement with the heavens.
The thoughts made my spine tingle and I scabbarded the blade and wrapped the whole thing in fine wool before fastening it to my saddlebag. A half hour later, Exalter at my side, a handful of Rhenish Vangiones troopers clattering behind me, I was spurring Corvus towards the windswept, airy spine of the Pennines, last obstacle between us and the fortress at Chester.
And on that journey across the roof of Britain, dangling from my saddlebow was the grisly, blood-blackened scalp and partial skull of the Pictish chieftain who had murdered my son. It was my gift to his mother Guinevia, but it would not be enough.
XIX - Cadbury
My lovely Druid Guinevia Avenae, adept of the god Ogmia, lord of letters and law, was also a priestess of Nicevenn, witch goddess of the terrible Wild Hunt, and she possessed abilities to see afar, to commune with the dead and to command the powers of the sea god Mannan mac Lir. Royal-born in Alba, north of the wall of Antoninus, she was mentored by the great wizard Myrddin and had learned the secrets and suffered the mental and physical wounds that elevated her to the highest ranks of the Druids.
I had seen her make magic, and knew that within her ran a core of tempered steel. Her ability to psychically view events at great distances had made her invaluable to me as a military advisor, but that same gift had brought her, unsoftened, the terrible news of our son’s death. The vision of Milo, bloodied and dying, had made her relive the nightmare she suffered in viewing the torture death of her chieftain father, boiled to death by Picts, and even the steel of Guinevia’s mind snapped.
We spoke of our son, and I briefly told her of taking the head of his murderer, which brought up her dark-circled eyes to mine. “You have his head?” she asked quietly. I sent a slave, and the fellow brought the gruesome trophy. Guinevia hissed and spat at the thing, then took it and wrapped it carefully in a scarf, allowing a small smile to flicker across her lips. “I shall make this into a drinking bowl,” she said quietly. “there is much power in it.” I shuddered inwardly at the thought of what she might do with that potent icon, and how it could condemn the Votadini chieftain’s soul to unspeakable torment in the Underworld. Then as always, I hardened my heart. The foul, treacherous brute had murdered my boy. He deserved all he would receive, and the trophy seemed to have brought some crumb of comfort to Guinevia.
She twisted the pentagram ring she wore, and I saw it glow as the magic flowed, but she did not linger to speak with me more, and retreated to her viewing chamber, a place where she could focus her inner eye and send out her mind to other parts of the land. I expected that she was also brewing vengeful disaster and doom for the clan of the dead Kinadius mac Ailpin. I tried to speak with her but she shook her head silently, and retreated behind her locked door, so I left her to grieve. I’d consult Myrddin, who knew the keys to her Druid mind, as soon as he returned from visiting the Standing Stones. Meanwhile, I had to plan matters, there was a kingdom to run.
The sea lord Iacco Grimr was waiting for me, as were my horse commanders, Grabelius and Celvinus. I had not seen my admiral for some time, it was good to see him, bluff and uncomplicated, and we clasped wrists in the old Roman way. He gave me a report of his activities, and he had been busy these last months.
After our battle with Guthric and his Saxons at the River Chelmer, Grimr had trapped and butchered the crew of the one long ship that had gone upriver, intelligently sparing a handful of them to sail back to Frisia and take news of the plague they had seen in our villages. Guthric himself had succumbed to the pestilence, as he and the other Saxon captives had been set to clearing and burying plague victims and almost to a man, those who handled the dead had joined them in their grave pits. This news, too, was sent back as a deterrent to others who would invade Britain.
From Colchester, Grimr had sailed west, glad to exchange the befouled land of dead and dying for the fresh salt air and cold green waves of the Narrow Sea. He had linked with couriers from Dover and Caerleon and received news of the West Country men who were rallying against me, and he had acted ruthlessly. Those Dumnonian rebels never expected what Grimr brought to them. He and his fleet of six long ships sailed into the drowned river valleys of the Exe, Tavy and Fal and devastated the land. They burned the crops and settlements, slaughtered the beasts and enslaved scores of hapless folk while their chieftains and warriors were elsewhere, hurling their men uselessly against our stronghold of Caros Camp.
This was an ancient hillfort earthwork dug by a people whose bones had long since crumbled into the mother soil, and was the keystone of my western defences. Once called Cadbury, it was a steep limestone hill south of the Roman bath town of Aquae Sulis and it commanded the surrounding plain, dominating a route along which invaders were naturally funnelled. It is military fact that those who live in mountainous land are hard to subdue, so those lands become the breeding grounds for armed struggle.
But when insurgents wish to raid or make war, they have to come to the flatlands, and there they meet their enemy. Britain has several areas of highlands: Alba in the north, which I controlled from my fortress at Eboracum; Cambria in the west, exit from which was controlled by the garrisons at Chester and Caerleon, and Dumnonia in the southwest, whose entrance to the fruitful lands of Britannia was blocked by the stronghold of Caros Camp.
The ancients had ringed the slopes with four lines of deep, spike-filled ditches with sheer, smoothed banks and later generations had topped the summit with a 25 feet high stone wall fully 16 feet thick. Timber palisades and fighting platforms added to the girdle of defences, and I had ordered the construction of more watchtowers, double gates and turnbacks that sometimes led to blind traps.
Attackers had to struggle steeply uphill through narrow stone and timber passages between those rings of defences before they finally met the daunting stone walls at the top. These enclosed an18-acre, rabbit-nibbled grassy plateau where beasts could be herded and kept safe in time of uprising or invasion. Th
e plateau had a good supply of sweet limestone water from three wells, a large timber hall, barracks, storehouses, granary, workshops and a small palace inside its top ring of walls, but the most dominant feature was the signal station with an iron cage of kindling and lumber. This towered high above the topmost walls and could send fiery news of danger far across the lowlands.
That news had gone out weeks before, and my plague-ridden forces would respond, but the defenders sent word that there was little urgency. The Dumnonian invaders had been utterly impotent against the defences, had suffered severe losses and had resigned themselves to besieging the place, camping well outside the range of the defenders’ ballista or bowshot.
The siege ended in disorder when news came of both the attacks on their homeland and of the plague sweeping the south, and the Cornovi king’s men began to melt away like snow in spring sunshine. They hurried back to their farms and sheep walks, terrified of the blackened blisters that could take their lives in hours, and arrived rueful to find their homes and land devastated. It would be, I thought with bitter satisfaction, many years before the Dumnonians attempted to stab me in the back again, now that they had seen the long and terrible reach of my sea power.
But Grimr had not ended his coastal sweep with the forays against Dumnonia. He had rounded the southwestern end of the land that projected itself into the rollers of the Atlanticus and, departing from Dumnonia’s northern coasts, he had crossed the Severn Sea to western Cambria whence pleas for help had come, telling of Hibernian sea raiders.
Astonishingly, some of these waterborne warriors were women, and even more astonishing was to hear that several of those Amazons were actually the leaders of the sea bandits. Most famous among them were a flame-haired archer called Karay, and a raven-tressed witch named Norgol, who kept a pack of war dogs and claimed to be a lycanthrope – a human able to assume the form of a wolf.
“I met this Norgol myself,” said Grimr. “She had a dozen big dogs equipped with leather breastplates, with collars that sprouted knife points and sharp blades and had ankle rings with more blades sticking out of them too. The brutes were huge, and their handlers said they came from mastiffs that mated with tigers.
“We came across them after we sighted smoke on the other side of a headland and went to investigate. We found two Hibernian ships beached there while the raiding party was inland. Because we came unnoticed from around the promontory, they had little warning and we were ashore without resistance until this Norgol came back to her ships with her fighting dogs. Two of them disembowelled one of my archers, but our spearmen killed all the dogs, although they were terrible weapons. I shot one with my own crossbow and it died hard, but then, so did the Hibernians we took on.”
Grimr’s disciplined warriors withstood the single crazed charge of the sea raiders and their dogs, then methodically crushed them with a shield wall. The wolf-woman herself was taken alive, spitting, scratching and hissing imprecations despite being bloodied and battered during the clifftop fight. “I sent her to Caerleon, to the castrum,” said Grimr. “She’ll make fine entertainment in the arena and may the gods save any gladiator who gets her and doesn’t know his business.”
My admiral had not found the other sea raiders under Karay, who had been pillaging along the northern Cambrian peninsula, disregarding the Bloodshields whose land it was, and one of the captives from Norgol’s boat spoke of her in awed terms. “These are not ordinary women, lord,” he told Grimr. “They descend from the warrior queen Sgathaich, who taught the great Cuchalainn himself how to fight, and from Aoifa of the Druids.
“Our queen, Norgol descends from the fairy Niamh Golden Hair, queen of Tir na Og, land of the young. She is the daughter of the sea god Mannan mac Lir and Norgol inherited magical powers. She can turn herself into a wolf. She has been seen with bloodied mouth and lamb’s wool on her clothes in the hours after a sheepfold was raided by a wolf and several beasts killed.”
Grimr, a pragmatist, shrugged. “She may eat lamb, and so do I,” he said. “It’s best roasted, but wolves don’t know that. We’ll see how wolfish she is when she’s in the arena armed with a trident and net, not her fangs. We’ll put a swordsman in a lambskin up against her.”
Grabelius and Celvinus were grinning at the exchange, and they too had news for me. Several small raiding parties of Saxons had been turned back along the line of the Car Dyke, a waterway I had ordered dug to move heavy supplies from Londinium to Eboracum. “It’s a useful frontier,” said Celvinus, “because the Saxons are coming from the east and we get news of them from the watermen, so can rush forces to where the invaders are. It means we use relatively few troops to monitor and halt them. Better news is that the plague has discouraged them, and few new settlers are arriving, so maybe soon we can drive out the ones already in our eastern lands.”
It did not seem likely in the near future, I thought gloomily. The messengers I had sent out had not yet returned, so I had little hard news of my plague-hit people and troops in the south. I did have a sketchy account from a wandering monk who claimed that in some villages a handful of people had survived unaffected even while they cared for loved ones with the pestilence. One man, the unkempt monk assured me, had lost his blackened and rotting fingers and toes but had somehow lived.
I knew I should first ascertain accurately what had happened – or indeed was still happening – and I muttered a prayer to Mithras, god of soldiers, and fingered his bull amulet, the one I kept hidden under my tunic’s neck.
“We had best go south, to Caerleon, to survey what damage the pestilence has done, and to mop up any Dumnonians still infesting the region,” I said. “Send word to Myrddin. I want to confer with him. He was going to the Standing Stones and may well already have returned to Caerleon or to Caros Camp. We’ll leave early next week, after we’ve readied the men and put this garrison into condition in case the Hibernians think of raiding along the Cambrian coast.” With that, I was off to my chamber. I needed a long, long night’s sleep.
XX - Caerleon
Candless was grumbling to me about his lost treasures, so I knew my militant bishop was getting better. He’ been badly treated by his fellow Picts, who had nailed him to the door of his own church with the same spikes he claimed came from the holy cross of Christ. The crucifixion had broken one arm and mangled the other, but the bishop was a hard man, a painted, former Pict warrior, and he had shaken off his wounds and was thirsting to return to Dun Pelder to reclaim his hidden treasure.
“We’d hacked up some beautiful church plate, just for you and your paymasters,” he grumbled, “and I don’t know exactly where it is any more.” I knew that Candless had been surprised while he was working on the silver and had sent one of his men off to hide the plunder, which he called ‘donations from the faithful’ but the man had been killed in a skirmish without telling where it was hidden.
“I’ll have to dig up half of Dun Pelder now,” the bishop grumbled, “and me with two useless arms.”
“Use your teeth,” I said unsympathetically “or your big mouth. You probably only lost a fraction of what you’ve stowed away.”
He ignored my flippancy. “There was a lot of table silver, some Christian altar plate, and my best Roman officer’s uniform.” That made me gape at him.
“Isn’t it enough that you’ve assumed the robes of a bishop?” I said. “Now you want to be an emperor, too?”
He had just start to huff and puff in protest when Guinevia entered the chamber and we both started to our feet.
One look at my lovely sorceress told me volumes. She had stayed hidden away in her quarters for days, brooding and doing I knew not what, but her appearance shocked me. She was pale, her eyes were deepset and ringed with dark shadows, she was painfully thin. She did not greet me but said abruptly: “I need to speak with Myrddin. Where is he?” The simple question was a surprise, for Guinevia could send out her questing mind anywhere and usually could tell me of distant events and places. If she could not find Myrddin, he did no
t wish to be found, I thought.
All I said was that he had gone to the Standing Stones but by now could be in Caerleon, or Caros Camp, or back to his stone house on the mountain. “He is not at the Fountain House, Ty Ffynnon, I looked,” she said calmly, informing me that she had sent her psychic eyes into the high mountains of Cambria. So, I thought, the crafty wizard was shielding himself, hiding even from you, his pupil. Does he not trust you? What is he doing? Guineva read my thoughts – she always could – and bridled a little so some colour flushed her cheeks. “I shall go to Caerleon,” she said. “Please have carriages prepared for me and my women.” I nodded.
“We’re going, too,” I said, gesturing at Candless, who shook his head, then changed his mind when I glared at him. “Your treasures can wait, bishop. I need all our resources now so many have died.”
So it was that we took Watling Street, one of the fine military roads that joined Britain’s principal military fortresses of Eboracum, Chester and Caerleon. As the Nont Sarah, it bridged the Pennine spine of Britain from Eboracum to Chester where it joined Watling Street and continued south through the eastern marches of Cambria to Stone Street and on to Caerleon. This fortress at the head of the Severn Sea was deliberately sited to command the approaches to Britain from the southwest peninsula or from the western wilds of Cambria.
During the Roman occupation, it was the permanent base of the Second Augusta legion, just as Eboracum housed Ninth and Sixth Spanish, and Chester was the base of the 20th Valerian. This day, as we trotted our mounts over the smooth stones, I pondered on the vast strength of those 6,000-man legions and wondered what fraction of my own forces had survived the black death of foul buboes and boils rising painfully on the throat, armpits and groin. I also wondered uneasily if it were wise even to be venturing into the plague lands, and touched the vinegar-soaked leather mask I wore loose at my neck.
A Fragile Peace Page 10
