The Hallowed Isle Book One

by Diana L. Paxson

  “You were a raw lump, but I have made of you a mighty weapon for the hand of the destined king. But let the lord who makes use of you remember that truth is a two-edged sword. . . .”

  Then he was taken from the anvil and sheathed in something soft and warm, and sank into a sleep of darkness too deep for dreams.

  Ambros woke slowly. He ached as if he had been beaten all over, but at least he was warm. One eye opened, and then the other. He lay wrapped in the cloak on a bed of sweet-smelling grasses, but above and to either side of him he saw stone. With a shiver he realized that he was lying inside the mound. Still, the light had to be coming from somewhere. Wincing, he turned over, and saw at the end of the passageway a pale square of sky. He caught a whiff of woodsmoke and then the scent of meat, and his stomach rumbled.

  After a struggle, he freed himself from the cloak and crawled toward the daylight.

  There was the fire, as he remembered. But there was no wagon, only a muddy horse cropping the grass. Blinking, he peered at the man who sat toasting strips of venison over the flames. The broad shoulders were familiar, but they did not belong to the smith. It was Hengest who was sitting there.

  The Saxon lifted a strip of meat and handed the end of the skewer to Ambros. It was hot, but perhaps his encounter with the smith had been a dream, for he was furiously hungry.

  “How did you find me?” he asked when he had finished the first piece and was working on a second one.

  “I followed the White Horse,” came the reply. “For my people, the white stallion is holy. The way he runs tells the priests what is to be. Sometimes when a tribe must move, they loose the stallion, and where he goes they follow. You also see the future—I knew he would lead me to you.”

  “Did the Vor-Tigernus send you after me?”

  “My lord is not happy—” Beneath the grizzled mustache Hengest’s lips twitched. “But in this he does not command me.” His blue gaze fixed the boy. “Our wise men teach that Woden, who gives the ecstasy that carries men to victory in battle, gives also staves of verse to the shope, and the spirit speech of the witega, the wise-man. I think that you belong to the god.”

  He frowned, and gripped a hank of grass. Earth crumbled dark between his fingers as he lifted the clod. “This is a good land, and my people are hungry for a home. You said that the White Dragon would conquer.”

  “I do not remember—” Ambros whispered.

  “Then the god gave you the words. This land will belong to us, and we to this land.”

  Ambros shook his head, denying it, but the stones of the barrow, that had seen so many peoples pass, told him that it was true.

  Ambros did not protest when Hengest took him back to Vitalinus, nor did he repeat what the Saxon leader had told him. The Vor-Tigernus had heard the prophecy; if he did not heed Ambros when he was inspired, he was unlikely to believe what the boy said in his ordinary senses. But from that day, Ambros avoided the Saxons.

  For a time, Ambros dared to hope he had been mistaken. He was growing fast now, as if the hammering he had received from the blacksmith—from Govannon himself, and Brigantia, if he had not been dreaming—had unbound his limbs, which seemed to lengthen day by day. Hengest’s son Octha and a chieftain called Ebissa, who was his nephew, were sent to garrison the lands below the wall, and the Picts kept close to their own hearthfires. Ambrosius did not dare to challenge the Vor-Tigernus again.

  But while Ambros gained in height, Hengest gained men. Keel after keel rowed past Tanatus to beach their boats where Caesar had landed. Others ran ashore below the white cliffs at Dubris, and their crews marched overland to Durovernum. Prince Gorangonus lived a prisoner in his own city, but the Over-King would not hear his complaints.

  In the year that Ambros turned sixteen, the distant storm whose lightnings had played upon the horizon for so long broke upon the British in all its terrible power.

  Cantium had been more than sufficient for Hengest’s original war-band, but it could not support the horde that had followed them. Hengest no longer came to Londinium; it was Godwulf who presented his demands for more gold. But the Vor-Tigernus had already given the Saxons all the gold he had.

  And so the Saxon wolves turned at last upon the poor sheep they had guarded, and all the south and east of Britannia were engulfed in blood and fire. Venta Icenorum vanished, Camulodunum was overrun; the gate of Lindum was burnt down. And if walled towns fell, how much more vulnerable were the isolated villas and farms. Where the Saxons did not strike, fear of them wielded a keen-edged sword. Everywhere folk fled, and even when the first fury of the revolt ebbed, they did not return.

  But in Londinium, the Vor-Tigernus clung grimly to his imperium. The barbarians were not invincible. Even the terrible Attila had been defeated by Aetius at the Catalaunian fields. Vitalinus had sons, Vortimer and Categirnus, who were now come to manhood, and together they set out to reconquer Brittannia.

  V

  THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

  A.D. 458

  “AMBROS SON OF MADERUN, YOU ARE WELCOME TO LUGUVALIUM—” Amlodius led the guest toward the hearth. “We have not seen you here in the north for far too long.”

  Igierne resisted the temptation to whirl around to look at him. At twenty, a married woman with a child of her own, she was surely too mature to leap up because the Vor-Tigernus’s prophet had come. Then her father and his guest moved into her line of sight and her eyes widened; kinsman though he might be, she had never seen anyone like Ambros before.

  His height was not so surprising—her own father was tall. But she had never encountered so hairy a man. The hair of his head had been trimmed, but his eyebrows bristled, and the short beard merged with the dark hair that grew thickly on neck and his arms below the embroidered borders of his sleeves. No doubt his legs, covered by loose breeches of fine wool, were furry as well. Then his swift, evaluating glance, moving over the assembly, crossed hers. For a moment black eyes stared into blue.

  He is proud, she thought, marshalling her own self-respect to withstand that scrutiny. He has reason to be. All men had heard how even as a child Ambros had confounded the wise. During the Saxon wars he had become the Vor-Tigernus’s most valued counselor. He wore the garments of a prince, and around his neck hung a pendant of a running stag on a chain of gold. Then his gaze passed on, and she let out her breath in a long sigh.

  “Sit—” said Argantel, gesturing to a servant to bring food. “You have had a long ride.”

  “I have, but my lord wished to honor you by sending his message through one who is kin.”

  Ambros’s voice was deep, with a curiously husky timbre. They said his father had not been human, and Igierne could believe it, for the red glints in his hair were the only feature he shared with his mother’s kin.

  “The proclamation states that we have defeated the Saxons. Horsa was killed at Rithergabail, but Hengest holds Cantium, and his son, Octha, the old Iceni lands. Is that a victory?” Amlodius asked as they sat down.

  “It is all the victory we will have in this generation.” Ambros threw back the folds of his mantle, a druid’s cloak, checkered in many colors and held by a silver pin, and took his own seat. “He has given both his sons to defend Britannia. If the princes of the West and North would fight under his banner, the Saxons might be swept from our shores, but they will not do so, and he will not submit himself to Aurelianus. Therefore this treaty that Hengest has offered is the best outcome we are likely to achieve.”

  “But a partition!” exclaimed one of the other men. “It is a recognition that they will never go away.”

  “This Wall that you guard so carefully is a partition, but the religion and culture of Rome are found in Dun Breatann as well as in Luguvalium. Men from every part of the world have become good sons of Britannia. We will trade back and forth across that border, and in time they will learn our ways.”

  Amlodius laughed. “I suppose you are right. My own grandfather came from the same lands as Hengest, but I am a Roman.”

 
“And you are one of the masters of the North. Vitalinus summons all the great lords who are sworn to him to come to Sorviodunum by the first day of May. His sons may be gone, but it will be well for the Saxons to know what strength is united against them when the treaty is made.”

  Amlodius frowned. Igierne had been surprised, when she arrived for this visit, to realize that his fair hair was now all turned to silver and the massive shoulders a little bowed. In contrast, her mother, despite a sprinkling of silver at the temples, seemed young. It would be a long trip for an old man, but he was nodding in agreement.

  “It has been many years since I visited the South. I would like to see what the Saxons have done to the land.”

  “They have destroyed it,” said one of the men who had come with Ambros’s escort, “as the wolf who gains entry to the sheepfold in his bloodlust rends and slays far more than he can devour.”

  “We drove them back, but we cannot force those who fled before them to return,” said another. “Good farms lie abandoned, and the towns that remain are dying, for there is no way to get the goods made in one place to market in another. And the weather has been so bad these past years it seems that even God has turned against us, and is giving the coastlands back to the sea.”

  The servant brought round a tray of silver cups and Argantel poured wine from a pitcher made of Roman glass. Igierne sipped appreciatively. In Dumnonia, they had wine often, brought over by the ships that traded with Gaul, but this was an old vintage, hoarded in the cellars of the Roman fort.

  One of Ambros’s men asked where the wine had come from, and Amlodius began to talk about the vintages he had known as a young man. With a start, she realized that Ambros was watching her. Argantel followed the direction of his gaze and smiled.

  “I forget that you will not have met my daughter, Igierne.”

  “You are the wife of the Prince of the Dumnonii—” he stated, as if, she thought with a spurt of irritation, he were labeling her. But she smiled sweetly in return.

  Igierne had grown accustomed to being viewed as an appendage of Gorlosius when she was in Dumnonia, but returning to the North, she had begun to think of herself in the singular once more. What was he seeing, she wondered, beyond a tall woman with her father’s fair hair?

  “I was married three years past, and have a little daughter who is just a year old.”

  Morgause was auburn-haired and strong-willed like her grandmother, and Igierne loved her dearly, but it had been a relief to get away from her for a little while.

  “It is well that you are both here at the same time,” Argantel said softly. “You two are the only heirs in the next generation of the line of Artorius Hamicus, and it is in my mind to take this opportunity to teach you the rites of the Sword.”

  Ambros’s eyes widened. “My mother told me its history, but I thought the priestesses—”

  “On the Isle of Maidens it is guarded, but it can be touched only by those of our line. Will you come, son of Maderun, and take up the priesthood that is your heritage?”

  For a moment something unfathomable stirred in his dark eyes; then they became opaque once more. He nodded, and Igierne felt her heart bound in her breast and did not know if it beat with anticipation or fear.

  It was inevitable, as they rode south from Luguvalium, that Igierne should find herself often in the company of her cousin. Argantel rode in a horse-litter, but Igierne was mounted on a sturdy hill-pony, and Ambros on a bigger mount of the old cavalry breed. He was interested in her impressions of Ambrosius Aurelianus, who had guested with them several times at Bannhedos, and she, of course, was curious about Vitalinus and the Saxon woman he had married.

  “She went back to her father when Hengest broke faith with the king. Among her people it is a woman’s right to leave a marriage, and though they were wed in a Christian ceremony, I think in her heart she was a heathen still. But it is true that she was very beautiful.”

  He frowned, and Igierne wondered if that beauty had stirred him. She had observed that he did not look at women with lust, as some men did, but rather as if they were a puzzle to be solved.

  “To be pagan is not so great a sin in the North,” said Igierne. “I was raised to be a priestess and my mother’s heir, though it proved necessary for us to make an alliance with Dumnonia. Perhaps when I have given Gorlosius a son I will take my daughter and return here.”

  He looked at her curiously. “Do you not love your husband?”

  The undertone of bitterness in her answer surprised her. “Love has little to do with the matings of princes. From me he expects fertility and faithfulness, and he gives me support and protection. Like most of the Dumnonian lords he has interests in Armorica. He may have a concubine there—I have never asked.”

  She kept her eyes on the road ahead, where the great crouching shapes of the hills guarded what lay within. The country around Luguvalium was rolling, and in Dumnonia one always felt exposed to the immensity of sky. But the Lake country was a land set apart; those whom it called to itself might find a path through the wooded dales, but the way could not be forced by an enemy.

  “Among our people it was not always so,” he said softly at last. “The druids teach that the king serves the land and if need be, dies for it. But it is through the queen that he touches its power. But not since the days of Brannos, I think, have we had a High King of all Britannia, and even he had no Tigernissa, no High Queen.”

  “My mother is Branuen, the hidden queen who performs the rites for the sake of the land, and I suppose that I will bear that mantle after her.”

  “But what if Branuen and Tigernissa were the same woman, a priestess-queen? Might not the king then become Brannos as well as Vor-Tigernus, a sacred king who would rule over a golden age?” His voice trembled, and turning, she saw that he too was staring at the holy hills.

  “Have you seen this in a vision?” she asked softly.

  “A vision?” He shook his head. “I have learned more certain ways to foretell what the future holds, and the magic, if need be, to change it.”

  As their journey continued, Igierne continued to consider his words. He sounded very confident, but Ambros was by his very nature a creature half of myth and magic. If he seemed arrogant perhaps he had reason. As for herself, the latest, and it seemed to her the least, in a long line of priestesses, what power could she have in a world where priestesses were becoming as legendary as the gods they had served? If men honored her it was only because she was the daughter of one great lord and the wife of another.

  And yet, as they wound their way into the hills, Igierne felt herself slipping backward in time. Her mother, also, seemed to become younger as the Lake grew near. But Ambros grew strange, as if the veneer of sophistication which he had acquired in the Vor-Tigernus’s court was peeling away to reveal some other being, more ancient and elemental, that lived within. He spoke less and looked around him more, and when they paused to rest the horses he would dismount and move to the edge of the forest with a grace so alien and still that she half-expected him to disappear into a tree.

  On the fourth day of travel they reached the top of the pass. From here they could look down into the vale whose center was the blue lake with its tree-crowned islands.

  “There lies the Holy Isle—” Igierne pointed to the largest, which lay close to the eastern shore. Here and there the gold of thatched roofs gleamed from among the trees; the long feasting hall, the roundhouses where the priestesses lived, and a little apart from the others, the House of the Sword. “We will be there by the time night falls.”

  “I will be glad of it,” he answered harshly. “This wilderness makes me afraid.”

  Igierne looked at him in surprise.

  “—Not of the mountains,” he added then, “but of myself. When I gaze at these hills the great prophet and learned counselor of Vitalinus seems a crawling insect that one shiver of the ground could knock away. And if I am not the Vor-Tigernus’s mage, what am I?”

  She nodded. “I have sen
sed that strangeness in you. It is different for me. Here, I come into my own power.”

  He considered her curiously. “Is it because you are a woman, I wonder, or because—” He did not finish the thought, but turned to gaze down at the Isle of Maidens as if it could give him his answer.

  As soon as he stepped through the door Ambros could scent the power. He stared around the House of the Sword, hair lifting along his spine at the growing sense that something that had been patiently waiting was now awakening. Light flickered madly across the floor as Igierne fixed torches in the sockets, and the draperies that shrouded the altar flared suddenly crimson. He found himself watching her as he had ever since he came to the North: a swift glance, swiftly turned away, lest she should see. Was it because she was a woman of his own blood that he felt drawn to her, or was there some other reason, that he was not yet ready to understand?

  He heard Argantel draw a careful breath, then she pulled the cloth away from the Sword, murmuring words of praise and salutation to the spirit that lived within.

  The blade stood upright in a block of stone. Perhaps half its length was free; its surface, of some polished metal that had neither tarnished nor rusted during all these years, gleamed red in the light of the fires. Ambros did not use weapons, but he had learned to judge them. The cross-guard was plain, but the hilt had been wound with gold wire. It was a sword sturdy enough to serve a warrior, with a stark elegance worthy of a king.

  “I will teach you the prayers later,” said the priestess. “Tonight I will do no more than introduce you. . . .” She lifted the cage which held the cockerel. “But it is for you to make the offering. Daughter, you must assist him.”

  Biting her lip with concentration, Igierne extracted the fowl from the cage. Ambros looked from her to her mother in confusion.

  “What, have you never killed a chicken for the pot?” Argantel laughed. “Well it is time you learned!”