The two Friesian stallions Corvus and Nonios that Lycaon had spirited out of Gaul were at stud, carefully separated in pens at opposite ends of the paddock and the tribunes thought that a number of mares were already pregnant. Meanwhile, the task of taming and training the wild horses was well under way and already 50 or more cavalrymen were mounted and working with their steeds, wheeling, forming and reforming in squadrons. Several dozen cavalrymen were working with foot soldiers, having the infantrymen hang on alongside their stirrups, taking great bounds and leaps as the horsemen cantered towards the ‘enemy’ lines. The tactic was a successful one to deliver a surprise attack, fast, for the arrival of infantry right behind the shattering shock of a cavalry charge was almost guaranteed to break an enemy line.
The tribunes nodded approval. “By spring, we’ll have a viable cavalry force,” said Lycaon contentedly. The duo strolled out of Cragus’ quarters to view a decurion who was demonstrating the correct way to knot up a horse tail to prevent it being grabbed by an enemy in combat. “You also braid the mane, to stop all that loose hair getting in your way if you’re a horse archer, or if you’re swinging a sword or pointing a lance,” he declared.
Cragus saw that the horse on which the decurion was demonstrating had a bloody handprint painted onto the shoulder. He nudged his companion to draw his attention to it.
“It’s a Celt thing,” said Lycaon. “It’s to bring fortune in battle. The story is that a bloodied, dying Celtic hero gave his horse a last, farewell pat and left his handprint on there. He was such a hero, the groom never cleaned the blood away and soon all the warriors imitated the decoration.” Lycaon turned away. “We’d better get a report together for Arthur,” he said. “Herd management, halter training, remounts, horse archer equipment, forage bags, he wants to know the status of everything. Bring those lists of yours, would you?”
XXI Candless
The bishop stood on the rampart that was once the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire, and looked south into Britain. He had climbed to the top of a watchtower on the 74-mile stone wall built at the orders of Publius Aelius Hadrianus, but even though the tower was many times a man’s height above the berm and deep defensive ditch of the Entrenchment, he could see only mist and cloud. On a fine day, unlike this one in the month of Mars, he knew he would have been able to view miles into the rolling countryside where shepherds watched for wolves and eagles, and for raiders like himself.
This bishop was no ordinary cleric. He looked the part: he wore a surplice and wide leather belt. He assumed the tonsure and, on a gold chain around his neck, wore the tau-rho looped cross of a follower of Christ, but he also hung a well-used gladius sword on his hip, and kept a punching knife discreetly out of sight under his cloak. Beneath his tunic, on his shoulder was the tribal tattoo that marked him as a Painted One, a Pict, and his startling blue eyes and fair hair attested to a long-ago Scand ancestor.
Bishop Candless was born in Dunbar, beside the sea forth where the Votadini buckled the belt at Pictland’s waist. He had fought the British when they took the steep-sided clifftop fortress that controlled the valley of the Forth. He had seen his king, Alpin, killed by a lucky bolt from a ballista there and he had finally been forced to flee the legions when they had outflanked and surprised the Damnoni with a makeshift floating bridge across an ‘unpassable’ sea inlet.
Candless was not a bishop in those days, he was a maddened howling warrior with bare chest and whirring blade, but the invaders had rolled up the tribes, sent coffles of slaves to the southern markets and burned the settlements of the Painted Ones.
Candless had gone on the run. While making his way near the crumbled timber-and-turf relics of the Antonine Wall, high tide mark of the empire, he had come across a cleric on a mule and had elected to relieve him of the responsibilities of both office and wealth. Rather than be spotted as an escapee of the last rout, he had assumed the cleric’s robe, money purse and animal and had in turn been received well as a holy man. With scant Latin, an engaging manner and a newly-shaved head, he began a successful career as a mendicant, seeking food, shelter and frequent comfort in return for his prayers. He modestly let it be known that the faithful believers, and only they, could sometimes see the blessed nimbus that surrounded his saintly pate, and a few declared that indeed it was visible.
“Somf,” he would say to his congregants, “et pax,” using a mix of invention and pig Latin on blessings they all received humbly and offering indulgences to some of the female congregants that they especially enjoyed.
Now he was looking for his next opportunity, but was foiled by the mist. The bishop grunted in disappointment. Nothing to see. He climbed laboriously back down from the milecastle’s tower and strolled to where three men waited with horses.
“Customs post. Long time since they were here to collect taxes, eh?” one of the men said, nodding to where the outline of a fortification marked the ground. “They were good at taking. They even took all this – timbers, stones, the lot.” Standard practice, thought Candless, who was no military fool. When they moved on, the Romans removed everything for use elsewhere and sealed the ground with a layer of clay and turf. They left nothing for the enemy. He didn’t bother to tell his brigands, just grunted at the comment. He had other things on his mind.
I too had plenty on my mind. One of the regular couriers from Segontium had travelled by Myrddin’s house to gather news of the sorcerer and of Guinevia, and I heard that she was planning to be back in Chester soon. My problem was that I was in Londinium overseeing improvements to the Saxon Shore fortifications and chivvying the chieftains of the Catuvellauni and Tribantes clans. I wanted them to support the overmatched Cantii to push back the Saxons who were establishing themselves in that tribe’s territory on the Downs. The invaders had already seized a couple of small hamlets and two valuable iron ore quarries, and their roaming bands of marauders were a threat to travellers to Dover and Chichester. So far, they had not menaced any major settlements, but that was just a question of time. I needed that tribal cooperation, and I needed to muster my troops soon, especially to have my cavalry at training.
It was early spring, the weather would be right in a few weeks, and once the barley and wheat crops were planted I could call territorial forces away from their gardens and grain fields to supplement my soldiers. The balancing act was a delicate one. Just as we waited for fair weather to release our farmer-soldiers, so too did the Saxons wait, for then they would be reinforced by the ships that brought warriors with their land-hungry settlers. The farmers wanted a place to grow their crops and their families, so they hired soldiers to help them establish a foothold, and the warriors came for the rape and loot. For the Britons, the result was the same. They lost their lives or their land, and in many cases their freedom vanished in unhappy circumstances, too. Fair-skinned females and children brought a premium in the slave markets of the south.
Also on my mind was the growing threat from north of the Wall. I’d sent an expeditionary force up there a few years ago. They’d taken the great fortress on the rock above the Forth more by good fortune than anything, but a smart move had outflanked the next force of Picts and then it was just a question of marching down the old line of Roman garrisons and mopping up the rebels. Evidently time had worked its usual healing on memory and the Picts had forgotten their punishment, for reports were coming to me of raids across the old Wall, of citizens taken into slavery, homes and crops burned and flocks driven off.
A courier stamped into my quarters, dust-covered, sweat-stinking and streaked with horse spume. He saluted the old way, fist to heart, and handed over a soft leather pouch that had been sewn closed, then sealed with wax. I looked him over. He was young and he looked very tired.
“Where have you come from?” I asked as I picked up a small knife and sliced the stitching.
“From Chester, lord,” he said, still at attention.
“Relax, fellow,” I said, “that’s a long ride.”
“Two days, lo
rd, I was told to make speed,” he said proudly. I looked up sharply. “Watling Street, lord,” he said in explanation. “The mansios and staging posts are very good.”
The dispatch rider referred to the hostelries and stables at regular intervals along the road that bisected Britain. A government rider with authority could change horses every dozen miles, constantly riding a fresh mount, to bring important news at incredible speed. This dispatch had to be vital. It was.
I recognized at once my steadfast Guinevia’s clear hand and school-grammar-correct Latin. The message was brief. In one of her seer’s meditations, she had sent her mind to view her father at his compound on the River Tay, near Bertha. This town was the ultimate limit of the Roman empire, the place where the Picts had forced Rome’s legions to a halt. Since then all kings of the Picts had been crowned there, seated on a sacred stone of authority, and the place had become a symbolic centre of resistance to their southern neighbours. It was also a running sore for me.
The Picts had broken every treaty we’d made, they’d made their promises, taken the concessions and then continued to raid and plunder south of the Wall, taking hundreds of Britons into slavery, driving off the herds and burning crops, settlements and farms. I’d overlooked their non-payment of agreed tributes but they had taken the gesture as weakness and had become insolent, and now, a threat.
What Guinevia saw had caused her heart to crack. Her father was in discussion with four other Pictish chieftains, all of whom she knew, for she had once acted as my ambassador and had gathered their solemn oaths of peace while we fought the Roman invasion. Now she was viewing them plotting, but worse was to come. The man with whom they were dealing was my own treasurer and tribune, the wolfish Allectus, disguised in the habit of a Christian monk.
As she observed from her faraway chamber, she saw the traitor hand over my legate’s fustis, the baton of office I had received from the Emperor Persicus himself. It was a stolen token that he would be ruler once I was deposed. She saw the chart Allectus laid before the five chiefs. On it, they sketched the divisions they would make of the lands they would take while I was engaged with the Saxons in the south. Lastly, she saw them each make a cut in the palms of their hands, then clasp them in brotherhood. A blood oath, a mingling of life forces, and all of it against me. I crumpled the scroll with its report of treachery and threw it into the fire. Allectus had shaken hands on his own death warrant, but how was I to serve it? I had to return to Chester and take up the reins before I became an executioner’s victim. What they planned, I did not know. I could guess they would join forces to confront me. If I acted quickly, I could meet them separately, with the reduced forces I had available in the north. They might be sufficient, or they might not, but I did not dare to draw other forces to meet them. I could not ignore the huge threat of the Saxons, which was growing by the week.
It was a deadly game of chess, and I would send my mounted knights to hold the Saxons while I took my foot soldier pawns north, to crush the Picts. And, I swore to myself, I’d have the head of that treacherous cleric Allectus. He would be a bishop removed from the chequerboard, thanks to my queen and her magic. I had no inkling of what that vision had cost her.
XXII Piddock
Matters moved as swiftly as the couriers I sent out from Londinium. I summoned Guinevia urgently back to Chester, where I was going to be very soon, for I needed the information she could gather from her psychic spying. I ordered the cavalry tribunes to move their forces from the training grounds near Aquae Sulis to Londinium. They should be readied for action on the southern downlands which favoured their movements and which were where the Saxons were gathering. The Narrow Sea fleet that was based in Portus Chester, where it could take advantage of double tides each day, I ordered moved to Dover to intercept and sink incoming Saxons before they set foot on Britain.
I gambled on the security of the west country, and moved most of the garrison at Caerleon north to Chester, where they would re-equip and continue north to the western end of the Wall. There, they would join the strong force which I had already dispatched from Chester. Meanwhile, apart from a small garrison to hold the fortress, the troops at Eboracum were to cross the Wall at its eastern end, scout the dispositions of the rebel Picts and form a pincer with the combined legions from Chester and Caerleon.
The movements would strip our western garrisons nearly bare, but we could put horses and ships against the Saxons in the southeast, and catch the Picts in the north between a crushing hammer and immovable anvil. The rest was in the hands of the gods. I just hoped they were listening, I thought morosely as I hastened back to Chester. Events seemed to show that they were not.
It was a long and bloody summer of fire and sword. The British fleet took a bad battering, but it turned back a wave of ironclad Saxons, and many brave men struggled and drowned in their armour as the longships sank in the straits. The Suehan sea raider Grimr, who was now serving Arthur, distinguished himself time and again. By chance, it was his ship that caught and engaged the galley of the Jute Alaric, the man who had found Grimr stranded on a Frisian island. Alaric wanted revenge for the death of his commander Web and led his raiders in a mead-maddened charge over the gunwale, killing the Suehan captain Bjalf in the first moments of the battle, but Grimr’s men had prevailed and vengefully took no captives that day. Alaric died hardest, drowned slowly on the end of a rope towed behind their ship, but his was not the last death that day.
When the invaders’ flotilla turned back, Grimr followed them at a distance and after dark, sent a fireship into their fleet. It destroyed four ships, took a score of lives and blunted the Saxons’ willingness to sail against us again at any time in the near future.
On the downlands, the cavalry tribunes Lycaon and Cragus had some success, too. They shattered a Saxon shield wall with their charging line of horses and their tactic of racing infantry to the attack as they clung to the cavalry steeds, but the relatively raw equestrian force had not inflicted the heavy casualties needed to inflict a decisive loss on the Saxons. Equally, the British infantry was a force too small to take on the greater numbers of invaders. The weeks of skirmishes ended without conclusion, but the fleet’s victories meant at least that the Saxon threat did not grow, and each land encounter left the cavalry more experienced and confident.
In the north, the pincer movement failed. The nimble Picts escaped Arthur’s trap, retreating quickly into the heather before they could be surrounded, and although Arthur’s troops took a number of captive Votadini, the tribes dispersed to fight another day. Worse, Allectus had learned through his spy network of Guinevia’s viewing of his treachery, and suspected her father the chieftain of betrayal.
In vengeance Allectus executed him by boiling him alive. The seer had seen and felt her father’s agonizing death, and it had driven her to near-madness. She had survived the kidnap of herself, her nurse and her son. She had witnessed the deaths of her guards, and survived that. However, the serpent of vengeance that had been dormant had stirred when she learned that one of the kidnappers who had abused her was still alive. Her bruised mind that had once rejected the idea of vengeance was changed when she saw the images of her father, her own beloved father, dying in agony in a boiling cauldron.
The men who plotted against her lover Arthur had condemned him as a traitor and had given him an unbearable death. Guinevia could not take this latest horror. She did not know if her father had betrayed Arthur, but she knew his fellow chieftains had certainly betrayed him. She knew too, that treachery was rampant. Arthur had been betrayed by Allectus his treasurer, and she herself had been stolen and abused brutally. The game was cruel, so she could be cruel also. She would, she decided, use her new power to exact punishment.
The once-gentle Druid became fearsome in her quest for vengeance, and turned to the old druidical ways of sacrifice. She slaughtered a Pictish slave as offering to her witch goddess Nicevenn and swore to give that leader of the Wild Hunt the heart of Allectus in return for his death. A coldn
ess had permeated her once-generous spirit, and the only time Guinevia seemed to be her old self was when she cradled her child, crooning and murmuring, but Arthur was dismayed to overhear just what blood-freezing promises she was making to the toddler, and wondered for his lover’s sanity.
Elsewhere in Britain, the Hibernian raider Muirch Iron Sword, who had persuaded his crew to allow three women warriors into their raiding party, had joined forces with the brigand bishop Candless and his troop after confronting them at the sack of a coastal abbey.
Candless had arrived from the landward side, drawn by the smoke plume of burning farm buildings. He walked into the yard where Muirch had the abbot stretched across a hurdle. The Gael was beating the churchman’s bare backside with the scabbard of his sword to encourage him to reveal where the community’s silver was buried.
“Ye’ll have to do better than that. We clerics have leather arses and knees from all our pew-polishing and kneeling,” Candless called out.
Muirch interrupted the beating, which he was quite enjoying, having during his boyhood endured a few priest-administered thrashings himself.
“Who are you?” he asked, genuinely astonished that anyone would walk in on a group of raiders. It was even more surprising that the bold intruder was dressed in the habit and cross of a Christian monk, although he noted the fellow did have a useful-looking sword at his hip.
For his part, Candless, while confident that he and his handful of scar-knuckled brawlers could handle any sailors, was equally astonished to see women among the marauders.
The belted bishop ignored Muirch’s challenge. “Who,” he said, “are these harpies?” His instinct to dismiss the two tall Celts and the diminutive haruspex was a mistake he never repeated. Flame-haired Karay and blonde Jesla both bridled. They easily overtopped Candless as they closed on him, but his eye was taken by the slight figure of Caria the Sybil. She advanced, hissing as she high-stepped towards him, and levelled two fingers directly at his eyes.
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