As she practised, her remote viewing became easier and she found that sometimes, especially if she put her impressions down as sketched images, she could send her mind abroad without assistance in recording the fleeting pictures she saw. It became a daily routine, to send her inner eye to Chester to view Arthur; to float it north into the land of the Picts to see how her father was, in his chieftain’s compound near the River Tay, or to send it across the Narrow Sea to look at the lost citadel of Bononia, where the Romans were again masters.
Myrddin was impressed by his pupil’s ability to view afar, and produced some of the aids he used in his own work: a looking glass of highly-polished silver, made by Romans, a square of obsidian he said had come from a north country of ice and fire and spouting mountains, and a curious spiralling mirror whose back was coated in an amalgam of quicksilver.
He handed Guinevia the obsidian and asked her to look into it. She viewed some smoky half-images that seemed to move.
“It’s hard to tell,” she said.
The sorcerer nodded. “Use this, watch until you feel drawn into it, then look into the obsidian.” The enchantress looked into the whirling black depths of the spiral mirror, and soon felt as if she were about to fall into a deep and wide cavern. Myrddin recognised the moment and pushed the obsidian slab before her. Her eyes slid into the glistening volcanic glass like a seal into water. Just as clearly as if she were present, she was viewing Arthur, pacing the parapet outside his chamber in Chester. She saw his cloak thrown back over his shoulder, clasped by his amber and silver jarl’s badge of office. He was tugging at his jaw, obviously deep in thought as he came towards his invisible, uncanny watcher. He came closer and closer, then vanished as if he’d walked right through her ghost, and Guinevia seemed to zoom back to the sun-speckled room where Myrddin was watching her. “You saw him,” he said flatly. “You have the gift.” It was a gods’ gift, he knew, that one day would save Britain.
She saw me, I found later, just after I had received word through Allectus’ spies that a strong Saxon force had established itself on the downlands south of Londinium. My problem was that it was late in the year. By the time I had raised enough of an army to tackle them, we would be in winter snows and frozen mud. In any case, I really did not have the force I needed, not until my cavalry was mounted and trained. We had not long before defeated the Romans in a desperately close battle, and only with an extraordinary coalition of the tribes gathered against their hated, voracious, onetime masters’ re-invasion.
At this time of year, the tribes were harvesting, and when that was done, they would be gathering the beasts for the seasonal slaughter and salting of those for which there was insufficient room in the byres, which could not be fed through the long winter. There was no national threat, those tribes would reason, and no sensible chieftain in the remote north or southwest would countenance sending his men to a faraway fight just to expel from the lands of the Cantii some fairly harmless settlers, as they would see them. Let the Cantii fight their own battles, would be the reaction, it’s only a bit of land.
I sighed as I paced the parapet, the resting hounds raising their eyes from their paws each time I came near them. My choices were limited, and the best of them seemed to be to leave the Saxons alone for the winter while my cavalry was trained. Spring would be soon enough to take the horsemen to the killing fields, to face the fur-clad warriors with their fearful seax swords and double-bladed axes. I grieved for the new widows of the southeast and for the fresh-turned soil of the long graves there, where their menfolk rested, but I had to consider that even for war and battle, there is a season.
In Wales the weeks went by and Myrddin tutored his pupil Guinevia in the religious mysteries of the sacred oak and mistletoe, of potions to heal and poisons to kill, of the fungi that brought on prophetic dreams and of the solemn rites of human and animal sacrifice that made power flow through conduits like her silver pentagram ring.
“We are all immortal,” he told her. “The gods view a sacrifice as receiving an honoured guest. It is not cruel, it is a respectful gift of a life to gods who will welcome the one you sacrifice. Important ceremonies require important gifts, and we often joyfully release our most favoured people, the sons and daughters of kings, to go early from this life to the feasting halls of the gods.
“In turn,” the enchanter explained, “the gods send some of their power to us Druids, for we are the conduits between man and the afterlife. You need to create and open these channels to yourself,” he continued. “I will not always be here, and there is a great deal of work to do. As an adept, and my acolyte, you must be as powerful as possible, to help accomplish what we have to do.”
Myrddin was speaking as the living incarnation of generations of Celtic power that stretched to Britain from faraway Dalmatia. His was the voice of Britain’s oldest deities, the gods of mountains, forests and rivers, and especially of the sea god Manannan mac Lir, who was Myrddin’s personal great deity. The sorcerer explained himself calmly, almost casually: “I am the son of no father. The old gods sent a demon to sire me on a king’s daughter so they could restore their hold on Britain. That was broken by these Christ-followers, which is a pity, because we would allow their new god to join our old ones, but they insist there can only be one deity. It’s why Rome has persecuted them for not recognizing their Augustus and it will only get worse.”
Guinevia nodded. She knew the Christ people were traitors because they said theirs was the only god, and refused to acknowledge the Augustus emperor as one, so furious Rome had killed their stubborn selves in thousands. She had heard of crucifixions, of men being thrown to beasts, of drownings, mutilations and burnings, but could not understand any of it. But there was a distraction.
Myrddin told her: “An important man is coming, and will be here soon.” How he knew was beyond the knowledge of ordinary men, but he looked into the volcanic glass each day, and he saw the future, or the present that was still to come.
XIX Magi
Just a few days later, an unusual group processed up the misty pass, dark-complected men, hawk-nosed and black-eyed, shivering despite their layers of fur and wool.
“They are,” Myrddin said smug as always when his predictions came true, “men of Assyria, men from the birthplace of mankind.” And so they were, except for two of the party who had come even further than the legendary land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They were bronze-black men from the eastern shores of a great land south of Carthage, in Afri, called Ophir, or Saphir, a land of precious stones, much gold and a prized, scented wood called algum. Those two brought ivory and cedar wood as gifts, had tales of cats bigger than horses and of river horses that lived under water and could swallow a man. In their own land, they were great sorcerers, Myrddin knew, and they had come – a great compliment – to this small and misty northern island to confer with him.
Guinevia was also honoured by them, as women held high rank in learning in the libraries of Aegyptus, and Myrddin had also made plain that she was his acolyte and prized pupil. In turn, as she healed, she learned some of their magic, and heard of the wonders they had seen, from the mountain-shaped gardens of Nineveh, which they said hung in the sky like clouds and were the great work of their king Sennacherib.
“To see it, you must sail beyond the sunset,” they told her, a concept that made her marvel. There are, she asked timidly, lands beyond the sunset? The magi understood. We have come from a fine city called Ephesus, they told her gently, a place dedicated to the fertility goddess Artemis, and it is so famed that the harbour is always crowded with a hundred or more ships from all over, pilgrims who come to seek the goddess’ blessing. Travel, they explained was less dangerous, easier even, in the relative calms of what the Romans arrogantly called Our Sea, but which others called the Midland Sea. One day, you will travel on its calm waters and warm zephyrs and see the fine temples and palaces.
The wise men spoke, too, of mystical things and practical things, of spells and potions and c
harms, of medicine and of long watercourses to bring rivers to cities, and a bronze screw that could raise that water hundreds of arm-spans high. They told of Sennacherib’s enormous palace, its steps studded with precious stones, its statues of alabaster and its roofs covered in gold leaf. They explained how, centuries before dung-stinking Rome had brought water to itself, the shining limestone city of Nineveh had channelled crystal-clear waters in aqueducts to every street. But the gods had not been kind. In one short day, they had shaken the city to rubble, collapsing great buildings, killing people, causing fires and plague. Now that fabled city of hanging gardens, gold and alabaster was ruined.
It was, the magi said, their duty to find how to placate their gods, to collect the knowledge they needed to restore their civilization. So these scholars had travelled long, hard months to find the wise men who could help. In turn, they shared knowledge the Assyrians had learned of star patterns and readings, of times when the sun would be eaten by the moon, of tides and weather, omens and prophecies. They brought a bewildering mass of knowledge, some of it gleaned from ancient lore, some of it from far travels. They had met men who travelled the Silk Routes, which were a variety of travellers’ roads from the farthest lands of the East, even beyond the wood and rammed-earth wall that forms the boundary of the land of the imperial Qin dynasty. These travellers had exchanged knowledge and goods, so they had learned of a demon-defeating technique the Qinese called ‘exploding bamboo,’ or ‘baozhu’.
The orientals who shared their secrets said their priests had known of this for several hundred years. By making a mix of kitchen ingredients and packing it into a bamboo tube, the package made a combustible fire dragon that could later be ignited to scare off ghosts and evil spirits in a shower of sparks and explosions. Myrddin was especially intrigued by this, and the wise men worked with him to detail those ingredients, salt petre, charcoal and sulphur, and their correct quantities so he could create some of the mix. The magician had an idea to build a flying chair with what he realized could be a new propellant, and vanished for days into his workroom. He took his experimenting outside soon after an incident when his bushy eyebrows were scorched off, and began a week of open air trials that sorely tested the calm of his flock of sheep.
Guinevia had little interest in the smoking, fizzing, exploding fire drakes Myrddin created, but she talked at length with the visitors. She earned their respect as an adept practitioner of the art of divination by examining the entrails of a sacrifice, and the men from Nineveh and Assur told how their priests had created mazes to represent the entrails of animals. These were useful in divining medical problems, or to determine crop planting times, and their ancient library held texts of divination from centuries before, but their sacrifices were always of animals. Guinevia, a practitioner of hepatoscopy, or the art of reading entrails, was able to tell them how she had sacrificed human men and how their auguries differed from the animal ones of the Mesopotamians.
She told of the gross mule trader she had once had disembowelled and how the shape and position of his liver had matched exactly those of a hog, but his colon’s odd colour had warned of the near-death of her emperor, a precise omen she had never seen in an animal sacrifice.
“The gods must have appreciated us sending a human to them,” she concluded, “and they spared my lord.”
The exchanges were valuable, and Guinevia soaked it up, but she retired nightly with her brain reeling. Dazed or not, she learned and retained and absorbed and quantified as the winter came on and Myrddin’s now-crowded house became a college of sorcerers. Happily for Guinevia, she had small Milo for comfort. He helped her both to heal from her ordeal and to fix in her mind what she had learned each day. In the evenings, when the braid-bearded men of the east put their foreheads close and talked with Myrddin, she would slip away to her small son and tell him what the day had brought. Her fierce determination to learn, to absorb this astonishing knowledge of a secretive priesthood drove out the painful memories, and recounting the day’s doings to small Milo clarified them in her agile mind. As the months passed, she had an astounding education put in front of her, and she retained it.
Not too long before, Guinevia had been a bruised and bloodied captive. Now, her powers were increased dramatically. She had become a potent sorceress who casually used small magics, and owned channels through which she could access some very powerful and elemental forces for good, or evil, too, should she choose that road. She had paid the high price of learning with the agony required of a full divine, and had been tempered in her own mental fires. Now, the time was coming for her to make the journey back to the fortress of her emperor to practise her dark arts. Whether she would use them for good or for ill, to take revenge on men like those who had tormented her was still in question. A thought flickered across her mind. One of those brutes who had abused her and threatened the life of her child was still alive. He had escaped when his village was sacked and his kin were sent into slavery. But he still lived, unpunished. In the once-clear mind of the sorceress from beyond the Wall of Hadrian, where memories are long and inherited feuds run deep, a dark stream now ran. And somewhere, a malicious demon stirred inside her.
XX Corvus
Behind them on the hillside was an ancient tribal symbol, the giant white figure of a horse, made centuries before from trenches cut and filled with crushed chalk. It was a fine sight but the tribunes Cragus and Lycaon had no eyes for it. In front of them on the rolling grassland was a corral, raw new wood gleaming in the sunshine, containing a horse herd of about 100 animals. They were grazing, standing quiet. All, that is, except two young stallions that were stamping and snorting, posturing and baring their teeth at each other as they began a contest for leadership.
“Best separate them two, sirs,” said a cavalry decurion, an auxiliary of the northern Brigantes tribe. He was a grizzled old soldier who had been recruited by the Romans, served his time, retired when his legion left for Gaul and had recently been unwillingly swept up from his comfortable, illegal life as a horse trader.
“Er, yes, sergeant,” Lycaon said, wondering how on earth he was to dominate a great brute of horseflesh equipped with teeth and hooves and with its mind on sex and fighting. The decurion looked morosely at the two tribunes.
“Ah’ll do it, sirs,” he sighed in a gust of stale wine breath.
“Would you, please?” drawled Cragus, unconvincingly pretending he himself was on the verge of stepping up to the task. The decurion gave him a disbelieving look from a face as hard as a hoof.
“Aye, happen I might,” he said, taking a length of rope from the rail and stepping into the corral. The two tribunes watched in awe when the soldier walked up to the two pawing stallions. “Piss off, you,” he snarled at one horse, flicking a hand at the stallion he judged was losing the blustering match. The animal backed away, but its opponent was not going so quietly.
As the decurion strode up to it, the horse reared, pawing the air with its hoofs. The soldier acted as if this was an everyday event, which for him it might well have been, stepped up between the horse’s flailing legs and reached upwards with his right hand. As the surprised stallion began to come down, he seized its muzzle in a particular way and to the officers’ astonishment brought the beast directly and easily to its knees.
The soldier stood above the humbled stallion, still gripping its muzzle somehow, and spoke to it. Then, after a long minute, he released the horse. It staggered to its feet and stood, head down, quivering. The decurion casually looped the rope around its neck and led it quietly to the rail, where he tied it. “Let t’bugger think on it for a few minutes,” he said cryptically.
Cragus, all pretence of equine expertise abandoned, looked slack-jawed at the soldier. “How the devil did you…?” he said, his voice tailing off.
“Ah,” said the decurion, “tha puts thy fingers up t’nostrils as they come down. Makes their eyes water a bit, then you tell ‘em that if they boogers you about onny more there’s lots where that come from. Th
ey allus listen.” He turned back to the tethered horse and released the loop of rope. “Right, cock,” he said, smacking the horse on the rump, “off tha goes, and behave.”
Cragus looked at the soldier carefully. No disrespect, just casual competence. “Stop by my adjutant when you’re done,” he said, “and tell him to give you a skin of the Rhenish wine from my store. Tell him to make it the good stuff, you’ve done well.”
For the first time since he’d been drafted from his cushy billet and his woman in Colchester, the decurion grinned. “Aye, sir, thanks,” he said. “Ah will.”
Lycaon nodded to his fellow tribune. “With operators like that, we’ll have a cavalry faster than Arthur thinks,” he said. “Now, did you say you had more than one wineskin in that wretched hovel of yours?” The pair sat and wrangled happily over their Rhenish, discussing progress and plans for their horse breeding and training program.
So far, matters were going well enough. Cragus’ recruitment efforts had paid off, with 180 or so horse guards recruited who were experienced in equine husbandry, and a steady trickle of recruits was still arriving from south of the Wall, where once the Romans had maintained a cavalry force of about 800 men. Many of those horse soldiers were Sarmatians or their descendants, some of the 5,500 hostages taken from their homeland and stationed in Britain a century before. They lived, as they always had, in carriages not in houses, even after they were given land grants, and seemed to spend all their waking hours on horseback.
“Those fellows,” said Lycaon, who’d recruited a contingent from Ribchester where horse farms were noted as immune to the depredations of wolves, “those fellows ready their horses for long journeys by withholding their fodder the day before they go, and only allowing them a little water. Even Pliny knew of it. He said they could ride 150 miles non-stop with such preparation.”
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