by Simon Lister
‘Take the bastards with you…’ she muttered under her breath and gripped her sword tightly.
What happened next surprised her. She had expected the Adren to rush the Uathach from all sides making the most use of their greater numbers but if anything they seemed to draw further back. Only the old man’s warriors advanced on the Uathach line and they numbered no more than Gwyna’s band. She watched as they charged into the Uathach and seconds later the frantic clash of battle rolled down the hillside to her.
The battle was ferocious, short-lived and shocking; the Uathach had been slaughtered in less than a few minutes. Morveren stared in opened-mouth disbelief as the old man’s warriors stepped back to make way for their master. She counted them as best she could from her position and reckoned the fifty Uathach had killed no more than ten of these new Adren warriors.
She felt sick and was about to turn away from the massacre on the hill when she saw that the parting warriors had revealed one surviving Uathach who was weapon-less and down on one knee as if injured.
*
Gwyna’s dazed stare came back into focus and she gazed at the carnage around her. She had managed to keep her band together during the ambush that their Cithol guides had led them into and somehow she had kept them together as they had fought their way out of the trap. They had fought rearguard after rearguard during their long retreat through the Winter Wood and always the Adren had paid dearly for each of her fallen Uathach warriors. Until now. She stared uncomprehendingly at the bloody death all around her and finally she brought her eyes to the enemy who had so quickly overwhelmed them.
Her head was still ringing from the blow she had taken and blood flowed from her scalp and down one side of her face. She tried to wipe it from her cheek and neck with the palm of one hand but only succeeded in smearing it further across her pale skin. She felt for the knife tucked into her belt and drew it as she staggered back to her feet. She lurched forward and only just stopped herself from pitching headlong to the ground. A figure was moving towards her and she turned to face him with her knife before her.
The old man looked her in the eyes and levelled his staff at her. He slowly lowered the staff until it was pointing to the ground at her feet and Gwyna sagged to her knees. The knife fell from her limp hand and she knelt in the long grass looking up at the old man with an equal mixture of hate and fear.
‘You will deliver a message to Arthur.’ The old man’s lips had not moved but the voice filled her head and she cowered before him. ‘The old fool he sent east has failed and his warriors are slain. In return for destroying what was mine in the Cithol City I will destroy this feeble land and every living creature in it. His people and every trace of their existence shall be wiped clean from the history of this Island. My shadow guard will hunt down Arthur and his warriors and slaughter them as they slaughtered those around you. That is the price of standing against me. Take this message to Arthur.’
She managed to raise her head but the old man had gone and with a swift glance to either side she could see that the Adren soldiers were already filing away. Most of the old man’s guard were leaving with their master but five remained standing before her. Gwyna looked at them and knew immediately what they intended to do. She grabbed for the knife but as she picked it up it was kicked from her grasp. She leapt to her feet but another foot slammed into her stomach and she doubled over gasping for breath. She was kicked from behind and she crashed to the ground. Two of the warriors grabbed her by the wrists and held her face-down in the grass where she struggled fiercely as her trousers were cut away.
*
Morveren watched the nightmare with tears of anger and shame running silently down her face. She kept telling herself that had they been ordinary Adren soldiers then she would have raced headlong into them but she had seen these warriors fight and knew she was no match for five of them. With her short bow she would have stood a good chance of killing them before they could cover the distance to her but with just her sword she knew she was no match for them. Part of her urged her to go to Gwyna’s aid anyway; it was the right thing to do and she would have expected Gwyna to do the same if their positions were reversed. The same part of her argued that even death was better than witnessing this while cowering under cover. She knew for certain that neither Arthur nor Morgund would stay hidden no matter what odds faced them and she tried to reason to herself that at least they might be able to overcome the five on the hillside but she suspected that none of the war band would do as she was doing now; even the diminutive Ceinwen would fling herself at Gwyna’s attackers. But whatever it took to do what she felt was right, in spite of personal cost, she realised she did not have it and the shameful tears of that acknowledgement burned her eyes.
She desperately wanted to leave the terrible scene behind her and strike out for the West but she felt compelled to stay until they finally ended Gwyna’s nightmare by killing her and so she watched while they each took their turn before leaving the still figure lying in the grass alongside her dead companions.
When they had left the hillside and disappeared after the others Morveren got slowly to her feet and trudged towards where the Uathach had been massacred. Each step was more reluctant than the last and she came to a stop twenty yards from the prone figure of Gwyna. She could not bring herself to go straight to her and instead she wandered among the fallen Uathach to make sure that none were still alive. She soon realised that the Adren had already made sure of that and instead she counted the dead from the old man’s guard. Eight. Fifty-odd Uathach warriors had only managed to kill eight of the Adren warriors. She felt a streak of justification in not intervening in Gwyna’s death and despised herself for it. In that moment she realised that she would never tell anyone that she had witnessed it all and done nothing; and she despised herself for that too.
Finally she turned to where Gwyna lay and was shocked to see her crawling towards one of her dead warriors. She raced across to her and Gwyna turned to face her with a look of terror on her battered and bloody face.
‘Gwyna! It’s me, Morveren, it’s all right.’
But nothing was right at all and Gwyna stared at her with a look of pure hatred. Morveren knelt down beside her and much to Morveren’s surprise Gwyna pushed her weakly away. Morveren stared at her in confusion as she hauled herself the last yard to the sprawled warrior and with one hand clamped between her bruised and bloody legs she tried to unfasten the belt of the dead man’s trousers. Morveren saw what she was doing and helped her pull the woollen trousers from the dead warrior and handed them to her.
Gwyna took them, unable to meet Morveren’s eyes, and painfully pulled them on over her legs. Morveren had no idea what to say and no idea why the Adren had left Gwyna alive. She watched helplessly as Gwyna finally belted the trousers around her waist. She tried to stand but was unable to do so and she turned fiercely to Morveren, ‘Help me up.’
When she was standing she gripped Morveren’s tunic and brought her face close to Morveren’s.
‘If you say a word of what happened here to anyone then I’ll make you wish it had been you here and not me.’
Morveren stepped back in shock and Gwyna nearly tumbled to the ground without her support. She reached out a hand and Gwyna grabbed at it to steady herself.
‘Get me my sword,’ she said pointing to where it fallen.
Morveren took her arm from Gwyna’s clutch half expecting her to collapse but Gwyna remained on her feet swaying slightly and clenched in pain with the same look of loathing on her face. Morveren fetched her sword and told her there was a stream nearby.
With Morveren’s arms around her they gradually made their way down the hill. With every painful step Morveren could sense Gwyna’s resentment and anger towards her. It was not until they reached the stream and Gwyna was washing away the blood that she realised that Gwyna would despise her for the rest of her life; not because she had hidden and watched, she had no way of knowing that, but because she alone knew what happened, and that
shamed and humiliated the Uathach girl beyond endurance.
With a half-muttered explanation Morveren left Gwyna at the stream and hurried back to the carnage on the hillside to see what she could scavenge for their journey westwards. To her surprise she found that the Adren warriors had left behind the swords of their dead comrades and she picked one up to study it. She hesitated over whether or not to take them with her but they were far finer than most she had seen so she bundled them up in a cloak together with two spare water flasks and heaved it over her shoulder to carry back down the hill. She stopped for a moment and looked out over the Winter Wood. The fires had encroached to the heart of the forest and a pall of smoke stretched for miles as it tumbled upwards reaching out for the East.
As she made her way towards the stream she tried to fathom Gwyna’s attitude towards her. She could understand Gwyna’s fear, anger, humiliation and guilt at having lost a battle in which her warriors were all killed and understood that those feelings would be compounded by the nightmare that had followed, but she could not understand why her hatred should be directed at her. She concluded that it must be because Gwyna had lived when she would rather have died and having to face Morveren was the inescapable proof of that. She was still puzzled why the old man had let Gwyna live. That in itself was perversely the greatest humiliation for her. She dreaded the journey back to Caer Cadarn with Gwyna and dreaded equally her first meeting with Arthur when she would have to lie to him about what exactly happened here and the passive part that she had played in it.
*
Ceinwen stood at the exit of the tunnel with Elwyn, the Anglian boat captain. The long journey through the maze of tunnels under the Winter Wood had been a personal nightmare for him; for one used to the open horizons of the sea, the dark and narrow passageways underground had been a sore trial but if nothing else Elwyn was bloody-minded and doggedly persistent and he would rather have plummeted into an unexpected and unseen abyss than voice the fears he had felt.
Several times during the long hours underground the world about them had shaken bringing rocks and earth cascading down around them and several times they found themselves backtracking to seek alternative routes. Once they had come to an exit but fires had been raging through that part of the forest and they had been forced to turn back and seek another route. Had it not been for the Cithol, who they were technically escorting, then they would have soon become hopelessly lost and almost certainly would have died in the endless underground mazes. Thankfully and much to Elwyn’s relief the last few miles had been through a relatively large and straight tunnel. They now stood at the exit to this tunnel surveying the ruined landscape before them. Behind them and resting in a line against the wall were Terrill and Seren together with the several Cithol they had come across who were also fleeing the devastation of the Veiled City.
‘Looks like the fires have passed,’ Elwyn said, staring at the charred stumps and scorched earth of the Winter Wood.
Ceinwen detected the note of relief in his voice and wondered if it was because the fires had swept on eastwards or whether he was just glad to be rid of the claustrophobic tunnels. She cast a glance at him and guessed it to be the latter. He was not all that much taller than she was but there any similarity abruptly ended; he was broad and strong and his cropped fair hair and pugnacious features matched his truculent and stubborn nature.
‘Glad to be out of the tunnels are you?’ Ceinwen asked half-smiling at him.
‘Tunnels are for rats,’ he replied just as Terrill joined them. He just stared unrepentantly at the Cithol.
Terrill still looked shocked from the events back in the Veiled City and his first view of the fire-ravaged woodland did nothing to improve his state of mind. He just stood and gazed blankly at the desolation before him as if he were unwilling or unable to accept the terrible transformation of the Winter Wood.
Ceinwen felt a surge of sympathy for him. He had been one of the few to go against Lord Venning’s decision not to defend the city from Lazure and he had witnessed the terrible repercussions of his Lord’s decision. Any satisfaction Terrill may have felt from being wholly vindicated had been entirely lost when he witnessed how his city and people had been ravaged by the Adren invaders. To make matters even worse the very person he had put his faith in to defend the city had ultimately destroyed it. He had no idea what Seren must be feeling as she had gone through even more including having to watch while Arthur coldly killed her father. Terrill had been unable to bring himself to talk to her during the long journey underground and in any case they had needed all their remaining strength and will just to carry on moving. As he looked out on the smoking wreckage of the Winter Wood he felt the last vestiges of that strength and will drain away from him. He sat down heavily and with a finality that clearly suggested he could go no further.
‘Terrill, we have to go on,’ Ceinwen said gently, recognising the obvious signs of defeat in his slumped form and vacant stare.
‘No,’ he replied. He said it without any trace of defiance. He was just stating a simple fact.
Ceinwen looked to Elwyn who shrugged. Arthur had asked her to escort Seren and Terrill to Caer Cadarn but they had picked up more than twenty Cithol during their escape from the city and she knew it would be difficult to force them all to follow her. She knelt down by Terrill and spoke to him quietly and reasonably. ‘You have to come with us. You can’t stay here. Where would you live? What would you eat?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Ceinwen realised he no longer cared about what happened to him so she changed her tack, ‘The Adren will find you eventually. Seren’s in a bad way already. She may lose the child if we can’t get her to some proper shelter where she can rest safely. And what do you think will happen to her if the Adren find her?’
This seemed to elicit some response from him but Ceinwen feared it had only deepened his despair further as he bowed his head to his knees hiding his face. She pressed on, ‘The others will look to you now. You’re a captain and they’ll expect you to make the decisions for them. Our horses aren’t far from here so Seren won’t have to walk for long and then we can all get to safety.’
She had no idea how near they were to their horses and she feared that safety was still far from guaranteed but she knew that Terrill did not need to hear either of these facts just now. One thing was obvious to her; they could not stay here at the mouth of the tunnel and she had to convince Terrill about that.
‘Your horses aren’t far from here?’
‘Less than an hour’s walk,’ Ceinwen said, ignoring Elwyn’s sceptical glance.
‘And you have wains to carry us in?’
Ceinwen confirmed that they did but she had forgotten that the Cithol had never ridden horses and she was certain that there would be no carts or wains to carry them. She put the issue of transport to one side, determined to face only one problem at a time.
‘Where would we go?’ Terrill asked now looking at her.
‘Caer Cadarn or Caer Sulis. Perhaps on to the Haven.’
Terrill seemed to lose interest again and he returned to staring at the ground. After a minute or two of silence he said quietly, ‘Why? We won’t be welcome there. We betrayed the Britons. There’s nothing for us there.’
‘There’s nothing for you here either – except death at the hands of the Adren!’ Ceinwen was beginning to lose patience despite her sympathy for him. Terrill shrugged as if he did not care about his own fate.
Elwyn was a practical man and his unbending attitude when he knew he was right had earned him a certain respect among the southern war bands. Not many people had flatly refused to do Arthur’s bidding but he had done just that during the storm at the cove on the Shadow Land coast when he had refused to put the longboats to sea despite the Adren closing in on their position. But he was not a patient man and Terrill’s attitude infuriated him.
Before Ceinwen could stop him he bent down and lifted the Cithol to his feet. ‘Listen to me. You didn’t betray us so y
ou’ve nothing to fear by coming west with us. If you don’t care about your own life what about your wife’s and her unborn child?’
Terrill gazed at him blankly. Ceinwen stared at him too. Elwyn swore in frustration and nodded to Seren as she approached them, ‘What about her?’
Terrill looked from Elwyn to Seren and back to the warrior holding him before finally saying, ‘Her?’
‘Yes!’
‘She’s not his wife,’ Ceinwen said, understanding his mistake and laying a hand on Elwyn’s arm.
‘And it’s not my child,’ Terrill added, shaking himself free from the Anglian’s grip.
‘She’s not your wife?’ Elwyn echoed as he let the Cithol from his grasp.
‘And the child I carry is Arthur’s.’
They both stared at Seren as Terrill took a step away from them.
‘Did you know that?’ Elwyn asked turning to Ceinwen.
‘No. No, I didn’t.’
‘Bloody hell, no wonder he wants us to get her to Caer Cadarn.’
‘I’m standing right in front of you,’ Seren pointed out reasonably and for a moment the haunted look left her face and something about the tilt of her chin and the hint of playful reproach in her voice reminded Ceinwen of the girl she had first met in the Winter Wood; the girl who had taken Arthur’s arm to show him the Winter Garden.
‘I’m sorry. We had no idea that, well, it’s Arthur’s child that you carry,’ Ceinwen gabbled at a loss for the proper words.
‘Well, that decides it then,’ Elwyn said and walked back into the tunnel. He was addressing the Cithol there in a clear voice that was loud enough for them all to hear.
‘We’re going to be pushing on for Caer Cadarn straight away and Seren’s coming with us. We want you to come with us too. There’s food and proper shelter there and you’ll be welcome to it. Stay and face the Adren if you prefer and you’re welcome to that too. We’re leaving now.’
