by Gavin Smith
It was an interesting choice, Britha thought. She would have dismounted to attack. The back three rows of the column formed up. Their longspears became a wall of pointed metal enchanted with Fachtna and Britha’s blood magics.
‘Make way! Move!’ Fachtna was pushing his way through the men and women of the Cigfran Teulu towards the rear of the column.
Ysgawyn rode in the third rank of horsemen on the causeway. Under normal circumstances he would have attacked on foot, but the horses they rode were from the Otherworld. They would not shy from iron spearheads like normal horses and he was impatient to taste the meat of the last of the Atrebates. The slaughter at the Crown of Andraste had been a fine thing, but there had been no challenge, no warriors. They had sneaked away like cowards, and he wanted the power of the four who had defied his army at the gate.
Ahead they could see the three lines of Atrebates. Six abreast, they had levelled their longspears but had no armour or shields. Gwydyon rode in the second rank. The squat, massively built, scarred war leader held up his hand to bring the column to a halt.
‘Sound the carnyx,’ Ysgawyn whispered to the man next to him, who lifted the long curved brass instrument to his lips. The head of the carnyx was in the form of a horse’s skull in bronze. Normally they would not sound the horn. Normally they were as quiet as the dead when they attacked.
The deep bass note of the carnyx sounded out over mud, marsh and water. Bress moved to the side of the curragh and looked north towards the two islands and the mainland. Ettin joined him. Bress noted that he now carried a great axe with a double head made of two crescents of bronze. On his shoulder Ettin’s second head, that of a painted man with a lacquered beard and dark hair, remained silent. The tall pale man glanced at his second with distaste.
‘If he has told you all he can, let him die,’ Bress said.
‘There,’ Ettin said pointing. Though some miles away yet, they could make out the horses on the causeway.
‘Cowards! Your king begged for mercy while we ate his flesh, raped the corpses of your women and fed your children to our wolves!’ one of the Corpse People shouted, a rider in the front rank. He opened his mouth to shout again. The casting spear broke his teeth on its way through his head. Fachtna kept moving through the ranks of the Cigfran Teulu borrowing another two casting spears as he went. He stopped just behind the last three ranks.
‘They will charge,’ he said.
‘Horsemen will not charge a wall of spears,’ one of the warband replied.
‘They will charge. You must not break. You must hold. Those of you not in the front three rows, lend your strength and push. Put your spears in the horses. Push them deep and up – make them rear – you understand me?’
The warriors around him did not look happy but they nodded. Morfudd was otherwise occupied in the rearmost rank preparing to receive the charge.
‘First give me some room.’ Fachtna had seen who had given the order to halt the horses and the man behind him who had given the order for the carnyx to be blown, presumably to warn the black curraghs. Across the channel on the other island the mad jeered and called for their blood.
With a simple gesture Gwydyon ordered the advance. The three horses in the front rank, one of them now ridden by a truly dead man with a casting spear through his head, charged. The line of horses behind them moved forward at a slower pace.
Hands changed their grips on the hafts of longspears. Feet shifted for better purchase on the causeway. Despite Fachtna’s words, they expected the horses to shy from the spears at the last moment. Closer, the horses becoming larger, their colouration told of their heritage, known from dark tales told around the campfire or late at night when the warriors were children. Those they had thought, until recently, to be unkillable dead rode the Otherworldly steeds.
As the horses reached the spearheads they all but leaped into them. Spears pierced horseflesh. Horses screamed. The spears soaked in the blood of the daughter of their goddess and her champion held, somehow, and did not splinter. Men and women slid back on the causeway; those behind them pushed, stopping the slide, adding their strength to the three rows of spears, giving them the strength to hold their ground.
One of the horses, the one with the dead rider, a longspear nearly all the way through its body, opened its mouth impossibly wide. Its teeth were those of a predator. It bit the face off the spearman who’d run it through. The dead man, his face a bloody ruin, did not fall. The press of the melee held him up. A warrior in the third rank, who’d just seen her lover’s face bitten off, screamed and despite the press lifted her spear and pushed herself forward to run the weapon through the horse’s skull.
‘And step!’ Morfudd cried. And somehow they did. The two remaining horses reared. Spears forced them back. One of the riders fell off his steed, impaling himself on three spears, but they did not drop due to the press of bodies.
The other horseman in the front row stabbed out with his longspear as his shield caught blow after blow. His spearhead ran through the head of the woman next to Morfudd.
‘And step!’ Morfudd screamed, furious now as her friend’s hot blood splattered her face. And again they did, holding their dead up in the press of bodies as they went.
Fachtna had pulled his boots off. He climbed up onto the shoulders of the spearmen and -women and ran from shoulder to shoulder over the warband, his bare feet giving him more purchase. Then he leaped. Powerful leg muscles, infused with what Britha would have thought of as the magics of his people, carried him over the heads of the first rank of horsemen as the spears in their flesh forced the rearing horses over and into the mud of the marsh.
Fachtna threw both his casting spears in mid-air. The rider next to Gwydyon died, a spear in his chest. Gwydyon raised his shield just in time, the spear meant for his head hitting the shield, its point piercing the wood.
Fachtna tore his sword out of its scabbard. His spear had made Gwydyon raise his shield so that his face was covered. Fachtna swung as he came in. The ghostly singing blade cut straight through Gwydyon’s shield and then continued its path through his body and then through his screaming horse’s flanks.
Ysgawyn watched the warrior he had seen from afar the other night land in front of him as his warband leader’s torso slid diagonally off the rest of his body. The man spun and sliced upwards with his sword, held two-handed. Ysgawyn threw himself back off his horse as it was decapitated. The warrior kicked at the horse as it toppled and came straight for him. Ysgawyn lost interest in the fight and leaped from the causeway onto an island in the marsh.
None of the horsemen near Fachtna seemed interested in fighting him. He watched the Corpse People’s king flee across the marsh as he tried to recover his breath.
Behind him the Cigfran Teulu charged the second rank, butchering the horses and killing the last remaining rider. Soon they were killing the third-rank riders as they tried to turn their horses. Morfudd was next to him now.
The rest of the horsemen were turning their horses as best they could to make their escape. Those close to the front were in disarray. Horses reared; others jumped into the marsh and got bogged down or broke their legs. There was no battle now, just killing. It could have gone very differently. The Corpse People could have ridden straight through them, but the Cigfran Teulu had held.
There was a savage grin on Morfudd’s blood-spattered face. The warband’s blood was up. They were feeling the rush of combat.
They had lost three fighters. Fachtna had respectfully suggested to Morfudd that they recover all the weapons that had been blessed with the blood magics. He, along with some of the warband, took discarded Corpse People’s shields. Unfortunately they did not have time to strip the dead of their armour.
Fachtna was impatient to get going. Tangwen had scouted ahead a little. The hunter could see that one of the curraghs had come close to the shore and warriors, the tips of their spearheads glinting in the sunlight, were making their way across sandbanks to the island. The giants were moving
too, but none were approaching them.
Morfudd and Fachtna joined Britha and Teardrop at the front as Britha moved ahead to keep an eye on Tangwen. Some of the moonstruck wretches had made it to this side of the channel and more were following, but they seemed happy to wade around in the mud, occasionally throwing it at the warband but not getting any closer.
‘We need to move more quickly,’ Teardrop told Morfudd, who nodded and turned to hurry her warriors.
Britha was coming to the conclusion that she hated beaches, or indeed any body of sand close to water. She wished for night. She wished for enough woad to cover herself and the warband, and she wished for a warband who would fight naked.
Instead what she saw was a line two deep of a hundred demon-ridden Lochlannach spearmen standing on a sandbank, a curragh in the water behind them and behind that two of the horribly misshapen giants towering over the ship. She remembered broken chariots and horseflesh and the mangled bodies of the warriors of the Cirig. What were they thinking? They could fight the spearmen, just, with the help of blood magic, but the giants?
‘Each one of us only has to kill two of them,’ Morfudd said. ‘With your help we will triumph.’ But she was looking uncomfortably at the giants. They knew them to be excellent swimmers despite their deformed limbs and the horrific growths that sprouted from their rough skins.
‘We will not fight with you,’ Teardrop told her. To Britha’s surprise this seemed to come as a relief to the warband leader.
‘You will fight the giants then?’ she asked. The Cigfran Teulu had acquitted themselves well, but the giants were something else. The dead looked like people and subsequently were found to be so, and fighting them had been comparable to what they had done in the past. The giants, however, were things that should not be, things from stories told by the bards out of their colleges to the west beyond the plains of the dead. Giants were thought to be long dead.
‘No.’
Fachtna frowned at Teardrop, who had been staring at the giants as if searching for a way to kill them. The warband had spilt onto the sand at the end of the causeway, and the two forces were eyeing each other. There had been no point in hiding.
Morfudd turned on Teardrop. She did not flinch away from his strange eyes. ‘Then I call you craven, demon!’ she spat.
‘We need you to carry the fight as close to the water as you can, and indeed into the water if possible,’ Teardrop told her.
‘And then what?’ Morfudd asked.
‘Die well.’
Morfudd stared at him. Then she started laughing.
‘Your sacrifice will not be so that we can escape.’
‘I will fight with you, at the start,’ Fachtna told her. Teardrop opened his mouth to object. ‘Don’t worry. I will meet you in the water.’
‘The water?’ Tangwen said. ‘Did you see the people tied to the poles?’
As the discussion went back and forth around her, Britha could not shake the feeling that the water was her home. Where she should be. She knew that beneath its surface she would hear a song calling her back.
‘What about stealing a boat?’ Tangwen asked.
‘We don’t have time to break the magics that control them,’ Fachtna told her.
‘We’ll be fine in the water,’ Britha said. ‘I’ll protect you.’
Teardrop was looking at her, almost smiling. Britha did not see what they had to smile about. From here the wind carried the smell of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people kept in close captivity, the cries, their pleas. From here they could better appreciate the sheer size of the wicker man as it towered above them.
Britha stripped off her robe and cut her rope belt in two with her sickle. Half of it she tied to her spear as a sling. The other half of the rope she tied to the sickle, which she slung over her shoulder. Tangwen took off her trews but tied the long rough-spun shirt she was wearing between her legs. She had left the bow and looked sad to see it go. Teardrop used some thong to make a sling for his staff, but both he and Fachtna assured the others that they could swim fully clothed and in Fachtna’s case armoured, though both removed their boots.
The Atrebates marched out, their shield wall a little sparse as they only had the shields they had taken from the dead Corpse People. The Lochlannach stood between them and the water. At first it looked like the Cigfran Teulu would close in the usual style, but they then picked up the pace a little, though Fachtna dropped back and then stopped. The warband charged. As they did, they screamed the name of their dead king. Morfudd had reminded them of everything they had lost. She had told them how all those who had died by the hand of the invaders were watching them now from Annwn. She had reminded them that the Cigfran Teulu were not the pretend dead of the Corpse People; they were walking dead and the only thing left was the formality of actually dying. She told them that they did not have to care about their lives any more.
As they charged, many of them with wide smiles on their faces, few with any fear, their feet kicking up wet sand as they ran, they shifted direction to concentrate on the left flank of the Lochlannach line, as they looked at it. Because they were outnumbered, this meant that the Lochlannach could wheel around and hit them in the flank and eventually the rear, but that did not matter today.
He would need more matter. Fachtna felt the sand beneath his feet as his flesh grew roots and started sucking it in, cycling the sand through conduits in his flesh to the implanted assembler in his stomach. The assembler converted it at a molecular level to L-tech nanite-augmented flesh. He would only be able to handle the vast increase in mass and the large amounts of energy needed to sustain it and still move for a very short period of time. Already as he grew, his flesh warping and becoming monstrous, the heat bleeding from him was turning the sand around his feet to glass. The pain was becoming unbearable. That was the reason for the berserk fury. If not for the riasterthae frenzy, no warrior would be able to survive. He started to glow from within. Fortunately his armour was designed to shift with his warped riasterthae form and was able to deal with the extremes of temperature. His last action before the agony forced him to lose himself to the frenzy was to draw his rapidly oscillating thermal blade. His last thought was, Kill the giants.
The thing that was once Teardrop became aware of the glow first. He turned and saw what Fachtna had become. The warrior was huge now, a mountain of unsustainable muscle mass that glowed from within, contorted, no longer human, features that told of the agony of his flesh, steam shooting from a blow hole in his head. There was a look of horror on Teardrop’s face.
‘Too soon!’ he shouted. Britha turned and glanced behind her. She had a moment to see what Fachtna had become. The glance was not nearly long enough for her to understand.
The warband threw their casting spears at the last moment. Few hit their mark; that wasn’t the point. They aimed high, then, still running, swapped the longspears or swords that they had in their free hands into the hands they would wield them with just as they hit the Lochlannach line. The casting spears made the Lochlannach raise their shields high.
Morfudd led the charge. She closed only slightly ahead of the rest of her people. Her shield got her past the spear point on one side. She held her spear vertically and slid it down the spears on the other side, pushing them away from her. She kicked up the shield of the one she had hit. Couldn’t get her spear to bear, so she let go of it and dragged her sword out of its scabbard and opened up his chest. Her shield was stuck so she let go of it. She kicked out against the Lochlannach spearman in front of her, knocking him back into the second line. Since she had drunk the blood of the newcomers she had felt stronger, faster and more powerful than ever before. She held her sword two-handed, and as the already wounded Lochlannach was pushed back towards her, she cleaved him open with a cut from shoulder to hip. She then became furious that she could not get the corpse out of the way quickly enough to get at the second rank. The force of the charge had carried them forwards. Morfudd was standing in water now. She had not notice
d.
It was hard not to get caught up in it. Inside her, the urge to disappear into the water and the burning in her blood that wanted to kill competed. Whispers from her spear – even now its haft was burning – agreed with the lust for violence that burned inside her.
She ran at the line, wet sand under her bare feet, the salt smell of the sea strong in her nostrils despite the stink from the wicker man, the screams and pleas of the captives now drowned out by battle cries and iron and wood meeting flesh and bone.
The Cigfran Teulu line hit the Lochlannach just ahead of her. Spears slid under shields, searching for bodies to bury themselves in. As the enemy spearmen lifted their shields, Atrebates leaped onto them, riding them as they threw themselves sword and spear first into the Lochlannach’s second rank.
Britha leaped high and far. For her there was a moment’s tranquillity. She heard nothing, the din of battle lost for a moment. There was just the sea and the bright blue sky as her salmon leap carried her over the heads of the Cigfran Teulu and the Lochlannach. Then the bloodlust was back as she stabbed down with the spear in mid-air. She felt the spear’s craving for flesh as it was driven home into the chest of one of the Lochlannach in the second row. Britha almost lost her grip on the spear but managed to hold onto it as the weapon’s head split into branches and grew through its victim’s ribcage. The path of her flight pulled the spearman over backwards into the water. Britha landed with a splash. The spearhead reformed and she wrenched it out of the dead man’s chest.
Screaming as she hewed her sword from one side to the other into anyone foolish enough to get close to her, Morfudd suddenly found herself knee deep in bloody red water with no enemies in front of here. They had fought their way through, she thought exultantly.
She turned. The ferocity of their attack had demolished the two lines of Lochlannach on the flank they had hit, but the other was wheeling to hit them in the back, presumably in response to some unheard order from some unseen leader.
