M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon

by M. K. Hume

  ‘But you still haven’t told me who fought like the boy in red,’ his companion repeated.

  ‘It was the Dragon King himself, my boy. I saw him standing and fighting as close to me as you are now. And the boy out there on the battlefield today was King Artor’s twin. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Lord Bedwyr’s wife played the game of the two-backed beast near to twenty years ago. But you didn’t hear that from me.’

  That had been many months ago, and no opportunity to use the information had arisen since then, but when Mareddyd had recognised his enemy in the party he had seen at Cataractonium he had realised immediately that this was his chance to achieve his longed-for satisfaction at last.

  He’d ridden out of Cataractonium as if the Wild Hunt was hot on his heels. Uncaring for the value of horse flesh, he had nearly killed two beasts in a desperate dash to reach Vinovia before the Dumnonii party arrived. Then, anxious to set his plans in place, he had sent a message to a renegade Saxon trader he knew, a man who had influence with Saxon war parties.

  Mareddyd had come north to forge links with the Saxon traders who valued the cider, wool and pork that was produced in the Dobunni lands. The young prince was no fool when it came to matters of business, and he realised that only those kings who built strong connections with the Saxons would survive the catastrophes that were to come. His father and grandfather refused point blank to have dealings with the enemy, considering that any tribesmen who did so had forgotten their honour and were traitors to the British cause.

  Mareddyd scoffed at his kinsmen’s arguments, but he was too wise to openly express his plans. What his grandfather didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. People who lived in the past tossed around words like ‘traitor’ without understanding what was necessary if you wished to survive and prosper. For Mareddyd, the meeting with this particular trader was useful, for the northerner’s contacts would make a great deal of money out of their association, ensuring that the Saxons owed him. That much he understood about Saxon pride.

  Mareddyd drained his mug again and felt the warm beer curdle in his gorge. He had some difficulty believing his luck. After a few words, coins had been exchanged at Vinovia’s best inn and Mareddyd had discovered that Eamonn had come north with his sister Blaise. The red-headed slut was called Maeve and she called the leader of the party ‘brother’. The group was a fine clutch of Celt nobility, far from the comfort and protection of their tribes. When he wanted to do so, God showed his favour in strange ways. Mareddyd grinned happily, allowing his white teeth to flash in his tanned face. Finally, Fortuna was turning his way.

  Arthur tried to keep the party moving quickly along the Roman road. They travelled by daylight, and Arthur insisted that they moved well off the road and the open ground that ran beside it when they stopped to rest. As a further precaution, all fires were banned at night. At first, Blaise complained about cold porridge and dried meat, but Maeve proved to be Arthur’s unexpected ally and convinced the Dumnonii princess that to warn outlaws that a party, including four females, was travelling on the open road would be foolish. With surprising tact, she persuaded Blaise that any deprivations they suffered turned each meal into a picnic, and the girls and their maidservants competed with each other to find the most interesting ways of serving cold food.

  ‘Your sister is a treasure,’ Eamonn told Arthur cheerfully, nodding in Maeve’s direction. ‘Blaise is far more pleasant now that Maeve talks sense to her. If I have any say in the matter, I’ll recommend to King Geraint that he treats her like the princess she is. Congratulations, Arthur. Maeve is a sensible girl.’

  ‘I can’t take any credit for Maeve’s virtues, Eamonn. I really don’t know her as well as I should, but you’re right when you call her a treasure. I’ve never known her to be so animated.’

  Arthur refrained from sharing his most pressing worry with Eamonn. The itch at the back of his skull had returned. While he was taking every precaution within his power to ensure their anonymity, something in Vinovia had set his extra sense on edge, despite the fact that nothing in the grimy, multi-racial town had given him any obvious reason to be on his guard.

  Vinovia was a frontier town where interaction and trade were engaged in by Saxons and Celts alike. As an erstwhile Roman garrison, the abandoned fortress had always had a village around it that catered to the basic tastes of the legionaries. In its prime, women, drink, trade and amusements had robbed the soldiers of any spare coin they might have had on those occasions when the army bothered to pay them. While the Roman soldiers had sworn that Vinovia was the arse-end of the world, their absence had caused a financial loss to the gambling and whoring establishments that relied on their patronage.

  But frontiers always need a Vinovia. The small town was situated on the road leading to the wall, so it was the perfect meeting place where Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Jews and Celts could set up deals, make trading alliances and exchange coin for a range of practices.

  Some interaction and communication was necessary between the peoples who shared this bitterly divided country. Farmers on both sides still produced wool, grain and other commodities which needed markets if the population was to survive and, with luck, prosper. Goods still filtered into the north of Britain from the lands of the Franks and the Visigoths, and this trade too was necessary to both sides in the conflict. Vinovia had its own special dangers, but they were less obvious than those of many of the hamlets, villages and towns that Arthur’s party had successfully passed through during their journey.

  But Arthur had developed an inordinate belief in the accuracy of his inner voice, so he was determined to take every precaution he could.

  Blaise continued to remain close to Arthur, as if she had belatedly recognised that he was central to the party’s security. Since they had left the nameless village far to the south where she had, for the first time, confronted the realities of life in dangerous territory, she had developed a healthy respect for her brother’s friend, although she was still unsure whether she liked him very much.

  ‘He’s nothing like your father or your other brothers, is he?’ she had whispered to Maeve as they hovered on the edge of sleep, while still three days’ journey from Cataractonium. Both girls were exhausted after weeks in the saddle, and both were suffering from the dust and heat of summer.

  Maeve rolled over, wincing as her tender thighs protested at the movement. Leaning on one elbow, she examined her friend with the clever, owlish expression of a very tired girl.

  ‘No, he’s my half-brother, and his father was a very important man. No one talks about it very much, but we all know that Arthur has skills and raw talents that the rest of us will never possess. We don’t care, though, because we love him. Arthur’s a very special person, Blaise. Lasair worships him, and Nuala says he’s her ideal man. Yet he’s the kindest brother anyone could ever want, considering he can’t be expected to treat younger siblings as amusing company.’

  ‘Eamonn says he’s an exceptional warrior,’ Blaise replied, chewing over Maeve’s praise with her meticulous, detail-obsessed thought processes.

  ‘I couldn’t say about that. But I have watched him all my life, and in every type of weather he’d be out in the courtyard, bare-chested, exercising and practising movements with his knife, sword, bow, spear, shield or any other weapon of death you can think of, including a sling.’ Maeve yawned delicately, like a slender tawny cat. ‘You should see him with a sling – he’s death on legs.’

  ‘How can you speak of him so, Maeve? You say you love your brother, yet you refer to him in such a manner?’ Blaise’s face lit up with anger at her friend and her black eyes were sharp and glittering with something a little stronger than annoyance.

  Unfortunately, Blaise was an angry girl and had been difficult from birth. God, or Satan, or Fortuna, it didn’t matter which, had played a cosmic joke on her. She should have been born a boy, just as her name implied. She hadn’t been intended to wear skirts, play the whore with a seductive fan or work at domestic duties
when she wasn’t gravid with child. Blaise knew that she had been destined for a life where she could be more active and self-determined than her female sex permitted. And so, regardless of the season or the celebration, she remained permanently at war with her world.

  Suddenly, Maeve recognised the warrior behind the black eyes of her eleven-year-old friend. ‘I’m beginning to think you like Arthur, Blaise, or at least the idea of him,’ she gasped with sudden insight. ‘I think he’s your ideal man too. Heavens, Gilchrist will have some hard work to do to keep up with my brother.’

  ‘There you go, Maeve, reminding me of the purpose of this journey just when I was feeling content with life.’ Blaise giggled endearingly. ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing, because my situation might become dire. I’ve never even seen Gilchrist. He could be ugly, or short, or unmanly, for all I know.’

  ‘Or he might like boys more than girls. He might like to sew and weave, or be a farmer, or wear women’s clothing.’ Maeve was listing the most outlandish and ignoble traits she could think of, and both girls collapsed into a series of helpless giggles. At that moment they were children, but for the most part the girls spoke and thought like little adults. Within two years, by the time the moon blood first came to them, both girls would be married. In three years, they would be mothers or they would be dead. Too many young women died in childbirth, and the odds were that one of them would perish in a welter of blood and pain after hurried sex entered into to produce the children who would perpetuate the tribal structure. In the unenlightened world of the tribes before the arrival of the Romans, the lowliest male slave had more freedom than a noblewoman, but Boudicca, the Iceni bitch-queen, had begun a slow change in male attitudes. Now the Saxons, who were patriarchal in the extreme, had set back the status of women once more.

  Maeve’s mind must have danced ahead to the same conclusion. ‘Do you ever wish that you’d been born a man, Blaise?’

  ‘Ever? Always! I used to say it wasn’t fair, but half of all babies are girls so childbirth is always a game of chance. I wish I was Eamonn. I’d be grateful every day, just for the freedom to wear trews.’

  The girls giggled again at the thought, which would have shocked their mothers and brought down the anger of the Church upon their hapless heads. But they didn’t care.

  ‘To run without skirts tangling round my knees,’ Blaise whispered longingly.

  ‘To be able to climb a tree without risking death,’ Maeve added.

  ‘To go fishing in a coracle.’

  ‘To learn to swim in a lake.’

  ‘To get my hands dirty, growing trees and building my own tree house.’

  ‘To go hunting.’

  ‘We could go on forever, but everyone, including our families, would think we were moon mad.’ Blaise looked sad and defeated. ‘That’s why we like each other, Maeve. Both of us hate living the way we must.’

  ‘I have a huge list of things I don’t want to do, starting with spinning,’ Maeve said.

  ‘And weaving, sewing, mending, darning, knitting . . .’ Blaise grinned in the darkness.

  ‘Cooking, cleaning, planning menus, preserving fruit, drying fish and meat, collecting eggs . . .’

  ‘Sitting down to pee, wearing so many clothes, being polite at all times . . .’

  ‘Smiling until my jaws ache.’ Maeve was now well into the spirit of the game.

  ‘Being sold off to the highest bidder like a cow,’ Blaise added bitterly.

  ‘Never learning to do more than basic counting and simple reading, and pretending that all men are better than we are, no matter what oafs they might be.’ By now Maeve’s tone was almost, but not quite, venomous. She finished the litany of ills with this decisive, cynical statement and Blaise nodded her agreement. ‘I have read in Arthur’s scrolls of a society of women in Greece who lived without men, finding all their pleasure in each other.’

  Blaise’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I don’t think I overly fancy that prospect,’ she decided. ‘It would be fine to live and work together, but I don’t know about the other parts of it.’

  ‘There always seem to be drawbacks to the way we are expected to live our lives, don’t there?’ Maeve’s voice was sad.

  The girls settled down in their simple leather tent, which was barely big enough for two. Outside, the wind sighed quietly in the coppice and an owl screeched as it killed something small in the enveloping darkness.

  Arthur stepped away from the shadow of the trees. While not spying, he had heard every word the sleepy girls had uttered inside their tent, and he had a mountain of unfamiliar emotions to consider. Like most men, he had never really considered the plight of women, having been raised to believe they lived the lives that they desired. What Maeve and Blaise had described was a form of slavery. With something perilously close to shame, he looked skyward and thanked the Christian God who had seen fit to have him born a male.

  While Arthur was experiencing his new appreciation of the nature of womanhood, Mareddyd waited at the inn for the messenger that he had been told to expect. The go-between did not appear, and as he was unused to waiting for anyone or anything Mareddyd’s temper was stretched to breaking point.

  Out of a dearth of choices, the young prince took his pleasure with the plain serving woman who lived at the inn. Typically, he never paused to consider her status. She was just another female, conveniently close to hand, whose plain looks and servile manner made her a non-person in his eyes, simply a convenient receptacle for his juices.

  As he was staying in the best room of the inn, it required only an order to the innkeeper for the woman to present herself at his room. She soon arrived, shivering, and trying to look as small and inoffensive as possible.

  ‘Strip,’ Mareddyd ordered from the grimy, flaxen sheets on the bed. ‘Have you bathed recently, girl? I’d like to stay clean.’

  ‘I wash every week, master. My hair was cleansed only yesterday.’

  He had wondered what was different about her and now he saw that her hair had the fluffy look of freshly washed locks. It was golden blond, speaking of northern heritage, but the amber lights in the lamplight reminded him of Arthur, so when he took her roughly on the coarse mattress he made no effort to be gentle or to spare her. Before she was kicked unceremoniously onto the floor, her body was covered with bruises and bites, and her quiet weeping had left runnels of tears and snot on her plain, high-boned face.

  When she fled from the room, he caught a glimpse of the innkeeper waiting in the corridor with a woollen blanket, which he draped around the girl’s shoulders as soon as she appeared. But Mareddyd barely bothered to wonder why a man of substance would care about a serving wench. In fact, he was asleep within moments of blowing out his candle.

  On the morrow Mareddyd was feeling a little better, especially when he had broken his fast with a bowl of unsalted porridge, new milk and a boiled egg. It was served by the same girl, whose swollen face and livid throat showed the marks of his fingers, leaving him with an odd feeling of mixed shame and triumph. In his mind, he had defeated Arthur on her body in some weird exchange of human desire and transmutation. By the middle of the day, however, forced inactivity and a sense that he was being treated with a marked lack of respect had blunted his pleasant mood.

  As he left the inn to face a day of heat and steamy rain, a disreputable man in a dirty grey cloak, hooded to disguise his face, came up behind him.

  ‘Master Mareddyd?’

  The Dobunni prince nodded tersely.

  ‘The man you enquired after will meet you at the cross of Saint Fidelma, two miles to the north. One hour from now – right?’

  Before Mareddyd could answer, the man had disappeared into a narrow back alley. Mareddyd was disinclined to follow him, since he reeked of the distinctive smell of the piggery. Besides, the alleyway was dark and forbidding.

  An hour later, the Dobunni was pacing impatiently on the only road leading north which boasted a crossroad of sorts, if the track that crossed the paved Roman construction
could aspire to such a lofty description. Its only mark of distinction was a single standing stone, decorated with Celtic interlace, that formed an ancient rustic cross.

  Suddenly a group of four very tall men appeared out of the long grass at the side of the road. They were as silent as ghosts. One moment the road was empty; the next second they were ranged around him on the shoulder of the passageway. The men were very fair, robust and white of skin. They were armed to the teeth and he was at their mercy.

  ‘Are you Mareddyd, the so-called tribal prince from the south?’ the tallest man asked in guttural, halting Celtic. He was clearly uncomfortable with the language, but as Mareddyd had never bothered to learn a single word of Saxon he was forced to persevere.

  ‘Yes, I am the heir to the Dobunni throne. I am Mareddyd, but names are unimportant considering our business together.’ His arrogant tone failed to impress the warrior, who merely raised one pale eyebrow and looked down at him with pale eyes that said nothing, but lacked the respect that Mareddyd felt was his due. As he gazed at the warrior, he saw the suggestion of a sneer around his bearded, thin-lipped mouth.

  ‘What business could we possibly have together?’

  ‘One involving mutual profit,’ Mareddyd replied crisply. ‘You’ll earn a large cache of gold from our exchange, and I’ll get satisfaction from taking my revenge on an enemy of note.’

  ‘I like plain speaking,’ the northerner answered. ‘What coin can I earn, and how must I earn it?’ He leaned negligently on a long, single-bladed axe, one that was quite unlike the normal Saxon weapon. By its long handle and the warrior’s casual use of its shining length, Mareddyd registered that he was a man of some importance among his race.

  ‘I cannot accept that you’re a Saxon,’ he said bluntly, and the tall man narrowed his eyes with suspicion.

  ‘What could a man like you have heard of a man like me?’