The Circle of Stone (Darkest Age)

by A. J. Lake

  The sack was pulled from his head and he blinked up at a scowling face, the beady eyes almost lost between heavy black brows and a bristling moustache. ‘He’s awake,’ the man called. ‘Let’s go.’

  He reached down to cut the rope around Edmund’s feet and yanked him upright. ‘You walk from now on, boy,’ he growled.

  They tied a rope around Edmund’s waist, pinning his arms to his sides. Two of his captors each took an end, walking on either side of him and pushing him onwards if he slowed. They spoke little to him, apart from curt orders to move faster, and Edmund kept silent. What if the men had taken him as a hostage – could they already know who his father was? If they didn’t, they would not find out through him. He could speak passable Dansk by now, but he would not risk being betrayed by his accent.

  The men kept up a relentless pace, cursing Edmund when he stumbled, but did not harm him otherwise. But his head pounded, and it was difficult to keep his balance with bound hands, so that as the path became steeper and more uneven he tripped more and more frequently. Before long every step was an effort, and he walked with his eyes fixed on his feet, not daring to look up.

  By the time the sun was halfway up the sky, even his captors seemed to be feeling the strain. Some distance up the steepest slope they had climbed, Edmund slipped and fell again, skinning his wrists, and this time the men let him lie. They sat down and took out food and drink, though the moustached man grumbled about wasting time. Edmund, bone-weary, was grateful to lean against a rock and accept the strip of meat and flask of sour ale that they handed him. At least his kidnappers were not savages, he thought: if he found no chance to escape, perhaps he could plead or bargain with their commander for his freedom.

  Even if it meant revealing who he was?

  The brief rest gave Edmund some of his strength back, but he was relieved beyond measure when they finally reached the top of the hill. No camp was visible in the foothills below, but Edmund, casting his sight down, was not surprised to find men there, laying fires, and plucking freshly killed birds. He wondered who they could be. Surely not the marauders who had ploughed up the road behind them: the scene he had glimpsed seemed too orderly to be a bandits’ camp.

  Their road was all downhill now. As the sun passed its height, Edmund heard the sound of distant voices, and next moment two armed guards stepped out from an angle of the rock to challenge them. The guards nodded in recognition, and one of them ran ahead while Edmund’s captors led him around a final outcrop to a level plain, full of noise and activity.

  The camp was set up in the shelter of a sheer, rocky cliff, around a small spring that welled up a dozen feet from the foot of the stone wall. Men were everywhere: guarding the camp’s boundary; sharpening weapons; repairing tents. The shelters were made from animal skins and furs, pegged into the ground with metal spikes. Edmund knew that this was no band of outlaws, nor even the retinue of some local lord. He was looking at a king’s army.

  His captors pushed him forward, and Edmund staggered with exhaustion. They had taken the rope off him, but he knew there was no question of running now: he doubted whether his legs would hold him up much longer.

  ‘I’ll be glad to be rid of this one,’ said one of his captors, rubbing his arm where Edmund had kicked him.

  ‘I just hope he’ll do,’ complained the moustached man. ‘I still say he’s too young to know anything.’

  While Edmund was wondering what he meant, the man took him by the arm and propelled him towards the largest of the tents. He stopped at the entrance, cleared his throat and called out in a softer and more respectful tone than any Edmund had heard him using.

  ‘My Lord? It’s Viridogard – back with the prisoner.’

  Someone answered at once: ‘Bring him in. What are you waiting for?’ His voice was deep, testy and somehow familiar to Edmund. The moustached man twitched the flap of hide aside and gave Edmund a violent shove that sent him sprawling into the tent. There were three men inside, crowded around a wooden chest with a map spread out on it. An oil lamp filled the air with fumes and blurred their faces.

  ‘Pick him up,’ said the deep-voiced man. This must be the chief of the army: even seated, he was taller than the others, and his voice held the ring of authority. The men on either side of him rose, but Edmund hauled himself to his feet before they could reach him, and stood glaring at the shadowed faces on the other side of the lamp. All three men laughed, but when the one in charge spoke again, his voice was dissatisfied.

  ‘He’s barely more than a boy. You take a full day, and this is what you bring me?’ Viridogard started to protest, but the chief cut him off. ‘You’ll be paid: I don’t go back on my word. Wait outside now.’

  The moustached man backed away and left. The chief turned to one of his companions. ‘I doubt this one will be able to help us – and that’s another day lost, if so. But let’s have a look at him.’

  Edmund felt as if the ground had shifted underneath his feet. Up till now the man had been speaking Dansk, like everyone else he had met in this land. But the words he had just heard were in English. And the voice was almost as familiar to him as his own.

  ‘Father?’

  There was a long silence. Then the chief rose from his seat and strode around the chest to Edmund, taking his shoulders with both hands. He was not the towering giant of Edmund’s memories, but his shoulders were just as broad and his blue eyes as piercing as the picture he had kept in his mind’s eye for more than two years.

  ‘Edmund?’ the man whispered. ‘What in the name of all the gods are you doing here?’

  Heored had dismissed his two captains, and now he and Edmund sat alone in his tent, seated on stools at the king’s campaign chest. The map had been cleared away and Heored had sent for food: bread, dried fruit and good ale as well as pigeons his men had been roasting on their fires outside. The camp’s healer had plastered Edmund’s head with a strong-smelling bran poultice, and a bed of furs had been laid out for him against one wall of the tent. Edmund glanced at it longingly once or twice, but his father still had much to say to him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Heored demanded as soon as his men had left. ‘Why have you left your mother?’

  ‘She sent me away.’ Edmund watched his father’s face in the smoky lamplight as if re-learning an old lesson: the coppery beard, broad brows and level gaze that he remembered so well. But there were unfamiliar lines around the eyes – lines of age and authority. Edmund faltered for a moment: this was not just his father, but King Heored, ruler of Sussex, leader of one of the most feared armies in Britain.

  Heored listened gravely as Edmund told him about the marauders who had raided their home shores, and Branwen’s decision to send him to safety with his uncle in Francia.

  ‘It was wisely done,’ his father said, but Edmund thought his face clouded for a moment. I’m still a boy to him, he thought. If I’d been a warrior, like him, I’d have stayed to protect my mother, not run away.

  He told Heored of the shipwreck that had stranded him in Dumnonia, his companionship with Elspeth, the boat-master’s daughter, and the dragon, Torment, that had hounded them.

  His father’s eyes widened. ‘I’ve heard of such beasts,’ he admitted, ‘but I always thought them a fable.’

  It was clear that tales of monsters and shipwrecks were not Heored’s chief concern.

  ‘So you’ve been travelling across country, living by your wits and your sword,’ he said, approvingly. ‘I left you as a child – and now I see a son who can stand by my side.’ He summoned a servant to refill Edmund’s cup. ‘Tell me of the fighting you’ve done,’ he demanded. ‘Have you kept up your training?’

  ‘I have,’ Edmund said eagerly. ‘I’m a fair archer now. I’ve had plenty of practice in the last few weeks, hunting for food.’

  Heored nodded, but Edmund suspected it was not the answer his father had wanted. ‘I hope your swordsmanship’s as good,’ he said. ‘There’s battle ahead of us, and I’d have you standing with me
.’

  ‘I’ve been travelling with King Beotrich’s man, Cathbar. He’s a good teacher,’ Edmund told him.

  He did not explain that it was Elspeth, not himself, whom Cathbar had been training in swordplay. A son who can stand by my side, his father had said, and Edmund had felt a pride he had never known before. But could he really be that son?

  When he had first gazed at his father’s face, so familiar and yet so strange, Edmund had wondered how he must look to Heored. Without thinking, he had borrowed his father’s sight, seeing a slight boy with pale, earnest eyes, his wrists and ankles protruding from ill-fitting clothes. For a moment, he had shared his father’s amazement at how tall he had grown . . . and something else, a flash of concern, or unease. It happened in an instant – then Edmund had released Heored’s sight, overcome by a sense of trespass. He remembered his father’s view of the Ripente: he had made use of their help at times in battle, but he had always spoken of the men with disdain, as tools liable to turn in the hand. To Heored, Ripente were not men or women with a skill but a separate race, to be treated with suspicion – and Edmund remembered with a shock that he had once thought the same himself. He would tell his father the truth, but not yet.

  There were other things that he was reluctant to talk about, too. He said nothing of Elspeth’s crystal sword, fearful that Heored would not believe him. He spoke of Cluaran as their companion and guide on the road, but did not mention the minstrel’s Fay blood. And he talked of Loki only as an escaped enemy: a merciless killer and fire-raiser; a danger to the land. His father was fighting armies – how could Edmund tell him that he had been pursuing a god?

  Heored listened to his account of the journeyings in the Snowlands with a sort of impatience. It was only when he spoke of their arrival in the land of the Danes that his father regained his interest.

  ‘So you arrived less than a week ago! Was there any fighting in the north of the country? Bands of wandering men?’

  ‘Not in the north,’ Edmund said. ‘We’ve seen signs of both since we came south.’ He repressed a shudder. ‘It’s as if it’s always happening just ahead of us.’

  ‘They’re centred around our camp,’ his father said with certainty. ‘If I could only draw them to attack us, we might rid the world of a plague! But they’ll only prey on the weak – cowards that they are.’

  ‘You know who they are, then?’ Edmund was surprised.

  Heored shook his head. ‘I know not who they are but I know what they have done. After two years of fighting in Northumbria we finally beat back my cousin’s enemy and sent them back to Gwynedd. My men and I headed for the harbour at Northumbria, ready to sail back to Sussex, but found that the port was being ransacked by Danes from across the sea.’ He smacked one hand into the other. ‘We managed to see them off and with half a dozen ships we followed them and played them at their own game by sailing to their shores.’

  He had caught up with the Danes when they were almost in their home harbour, he said; had attacked one ship with burning arrows and sunk it. But the rest had escaped; abandoned their boats and fled inland, Heored reported scornfully, to hide from their pursuers in the forest.

  ‘But they fought you,’ Edmund said, remembering the battlefield he had crossed only the day before. ‘You lost men.’

  Heored’s face clouded. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Our men grow restless here; only yesterday I allowed a party of them to go hunting, and the Danes waylaid them as they returned.’ He thumped the chest with his fist. ‘What kind of men are they? We’re invaders in their land! They should be banding together to drive us out . . . yet they hide from us and harry us little by little, like common bandits.’

  ‘Perhaps they are,’ Edmund ventured.

  Heored was suddenly very still. Edmund felt the weight of his stare as he went on: ‘There are many bands of men in this place who are quick to murder their own people for little or no gain.’ He told his father about the men who had churned up the road, and the trail of devastation they had left behind them; the murder of the pedlar Menobert and the tales of attacks on homesteads. ‘They’re not like common brigands,’ he said. ‘They don’t even seem to rob their victims – just destroy everything in their path.’

  Heored stood up, upsetting his stool and nearly knocking over the lamp. ‘My scouts brought back rumours of this,’ he said. ‘But they’re hired men, from the harbour towns, and not to be relied on. They told tales of an army of madmen attacking the villages, and I told them to bring me proof: capture a man from this army, and let me question him.’ His pacing had brought him back to Edmund. ‘And they brought you.’

  Heored smiled suddenly, and for a moment he was the father Edmund had known as a child. ‘And I’m glad of it, Edmund. Tonight I’ll gather my captains, and we’ll plan what use to make of your news. But for now, we’ll toast your return.’ A servant stepped forward, but Heored dismissed him impatiently and poured two cups of ale himself, pushing one over to Edmund. ‘If what you say is true, we’ll maybe not be here much longer. A rabble of madmen!’ He drank deeply. ‘And when we’ve beaten them, I’ll send to Aelfred in Francia to let him know you’re with me. He can reach your mother from there more easily than I can from here.’

  ‘But he’s not there!’ Edmund said without thinking, and cursed himself. His uncle Aelfred – the sorcerer Orgrim – was someone he had not yet mentioned to his father. How could he tell Heored that his own brother-in-law was a sorcerer who had turned against his king? But there was no escaping it now. As briefly as possible, he told his father what he knew of Aelfred’s recent history: his coming to Wessex in an exchange of hostages; his study of sorcery and his attempt to seize power from Beotrich.

  ‘I was there when . . . when his treachery was discovered,’ Edmund said. ‘He is in prison now. But no one else knows his true name, or his link to our family. He has lost his sight, and I think his reason as well.’

  Heored had sunk down on his stool again, and rested his head in his hands. When he looked up his face was haggard.

  ‘I should have guessed,’ he said at last. ‘I never wholly trusted him, promising though he was. I never told you, Edmund, but he . . . his family . . . have a skill which . . .’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘Well, the seeds of treachery were always in him. Your mother is the soul of honour, but when I heard she had entrusted you to Aelfred, I confess I had my doubts.’

  He said no more, but Edmund felt a coldness descend on him. He knew! he thought. My father knew all the time that Aelfred was Ripente – and he distrusted him because of it. How could he ever tell the truth about himself now?

  ‘Enough of that!’ Heored exclaimed, rising from his seat. ‘You’re here now. I must make you known to the men, and arm you. I’ll not have you going weaponless in enemy territory, even for a day.’ He strode to the tent-flap. ‘Teobald! Alberich! Nils!’ he called. The three captains came up at a run.

  ‘Summon the armourer,’ Heored commanded. ‘This is my son, Edmund of Sussex. He fights with us from now on. He’s to have sword and armour as befits his rank.’

  The three men bowed, and Teobald led Edmund to the armoury, where a thickset old man in stained leather offered him a dozen different swords to try.

  ‘It’s an honour to have you here, young prince,’ the old man said, as he helped Edmund into leather armour and a bulky breastplate. ‘Your father’s a soldier as well as a king, and it’s good to see his young one following in his footsteps.’

  ‘That it is,’ Teobald agreed. ‘King Heored is always in the thick of the battle,’ he told Edmund. ‘There’s no danger that he won’t share with us – and his men love him for it.’

  Edmund heard himself clanking as Teobald led him back to his father, a round helmet on his head and the hilt of his new sword hitting the breastplate at every step. He wondered what Elspeth would think if she could see him like this. But his heart lifted to see the pride in Heored’s eyes.

  ‘Now you look like a soldier!’ his father exclaimed. ‘Draw your sword!’
Edmund obeyed, and to his amazement the three captains bowed before him.

  ‘Welcome, Heored’s son!’ Teobald cried, and the other two captains echoed him. Edmund stood straighter inside the cumbersome armour, and raised the heavy sword above his head. I’m the son of a hero, he told himself.

  ‘Come with me to inspect the camp,’ his father said. ‘Tonight we’ll hold a council, and these captains will hear what you’ve told me. And tomorrow I’ll send a party of men to bring your companions here. There are women among them, you said? I’ll give them safe conduct back to our ships – see them safely on their way before we prepare for battle.’

  Edmund almost laughed at the idea of trying to send Elspeth away. ‘No need for that,’ he told his father. ‘My companions are here by choice, all of them. They won’t leave until they’ve found . . . our enemy, and killed him.’

  ‘And how do they expect to do that?’ Heored exclaimed. ‘Two women and a minstrel?’

  Edmund could not answer. He and Elspeth had not discussed what she could do against the demon now that the sword was gone.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be,’ his father was saying. ‘Your place is with me now.’ He took Edmund by the shoulders, his face serious. ‘I’ve left your education too much to others. You’ll be King of Sussex after me some day, Edmund: it’s time you began to learn your duties.’

  And maybe it was for the best, Edmund told himself, as he followed Heored to be shown to his men. His father was a great warrior, with an army at his command. Surely, once Edmund had proved himself, Heored would help in the fight against Loki? Whatever it took, he promised himself, he would make his father proud of him.

  Chapter Ten

  Eolande made them move Wyn’s son into the open and take him downhill, to where grass grew. Cluaran and Cathbar could not avoid jolting the young man as they carried him, but he was too deeply unconscious to notice. Elspeth, following behind with Wulf, hoped they were not too late.