The Blood of the Iutes: The Song of Octa Book 1 (The Song of Britain 4)

by James Calbraith

  “Not necessarily,” I say.

  He glances back at me. “You have yet another idea?”

  “The walhas are on our side as long as I have this,” I say, drawing the legate’s letter from my satchel. “And there are still some soldiers left between here and Trever.”

  “That little fortress on the pass,” says Hildrik.

  “Icorig,” I nod. “I talked to their Praetor on the way here. I can talk to him again.”

  “This time, I’m coming with you.”

  Two days later, with the fyrd camped in the foothills of Arduenna, at enough distance from Icorig to not be considered an immediate threat, Hildrik and I ride up to the fortress’s northern gate.

  “Back so soon?” Praetor Falco asks, once we meet in his room in the barracks. He looks at Hildrik. “Weren’t you supposed to bring back Hildebert and his army?”

  “Change of plans,” I say. “Hildebert’s army… might still come — but not as friends.”

  The Praetor’s eyebrow rides high. “I’m not even going to ask. Am I to give my fort over to Salians now?”

  “That will not be necessary,” says Hildrik. “We come as allies, marching to relieve the siege of Trever.”

  “Out of goodness of your hearts, I suppose.”

  “I’d lie if I said we’re not counting on some recognition for our efforts,” Hildrik replies. “But I have enough gold for my needs right now — your towns and villages are safe.”

  Back at Tolbiac, Hildrik went to check on the pots of gold and silver, buried in a secret spot outside the town walls by Pinnosa, as payment for the escort to Trever; satisfied that the gold was still there, Hildrik left it in the ground. “No need to burden ourselves with it now,” he told me, “we’ll get it out on the way back.”

  “We would, however, like to make use of the walls of your fortress,” I interject. “To protect our rear — and yours — as we move south. Temporarily, of course.”

  The Praetor laughs. “Haven’t you seen what the place looks like? I have twice as many people to feed as this fort was built for. And you still want to add more?”

  “Not add,” I say. “Replace.”

  He stops laughing abruptly and leans back to the table. “You want me to leave my fort to your barbarian horde? How is that different from just giving it to Hildebert?”

  “I’m not Hildebert,” says Hildrik. “We Salians did not conquer the land we live on — we accepted it as gift from Rome, and we’ve been your allies ever since. We know how to honour agreements — as long as you walhas honour yours.”

  “Our warriors are fresh, well-fed and rested,” I add. “Yours are hungry, tired and no doubt bored of sitting here waiting for the enemy. Come with us instead. Help us save your kin in Trever.”

  He rubs his chin in thought. “I put little trust in the oaths of a barbarian warlord,” he says. “You, I trust even less,” he adds, pointing at me. “You carry the Imperator’s seal, but you’re a nobody, coming from nowhere. You say you’re the son of some king from a distant land, but I only have your word for it. And on that word, you want me to give you the keys to my fortress?”

  He scoffs and leans back. “But you’re right about one thing. We are bored and tired. To our north and to our south, a war rages, and we’re stuck in the middle with nothing to do but sharpen our swords, training muster, and milling grain for our potage. For years, we saw warbands and armies pass us by. We told ourselves that we were valiant and important, guarding this vital pass, but the truth is, we were just too insignificant and too far from anywhere for anyone to care about us.”

  “Then you’ll agree to our proposition?” I ask eagerly.

  “I’ll think about it. First, I need to send a courier to Tolbiac, to see if there’s any truth to what you’re saying.”

  “Of course,” Hildrik agrees. “You can take my Thuringian steed.”

  “Our Gaulish ones will do just fine,” Falco replies with a scowl. “I still have some left. Now leave before I change my mind.”

  The Praetor is not one for wasting time. Soon after we leave the fortress, a courier gallops past us, leaving us in a thick cloud of dust.

  “He’ll do it,” says Hildrik.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  “I know a warrior itching for glory when I see one,” he replies. “There’s a fire in this Praetor that’s been left smouldering for too long. He could almost be one of us.”

  “I told him the exact same thing last time. He’s more like a Frank — or a Iute — than a Roman.”

  He smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “You know, I never understood why my father, and Clodio before him, insisted on an alliance with your people. I can see now what they saw in you.”

  “You look terrible,” says Ursula.

  “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  We all are. My bones ache. My shoulders burn. My backside is sore. We have been marching for the past few days at the brisk pace of a Legion. Hildrik was right — the soldiers from Icorig were all itching for a fight so badly we could barely keep up with them as they rushed towards Trever. The fyrd column spreads out for miles now. Last night, the slowest of the warriors camped so far from the front that we’re now forced to wait for them to catch up to us before we can conquer the last stretch of the Arduenna highway, and climb the tall cliffs overlooking the Mosella valley.

  “Are you sure that’s all it is?” She reaches out to check my forehead for fever. “You’re not burning — but you do seem ill.”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s just —”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not just my body that is tired. My whole mind is numb, too. I talked to Praetor Falco today, and I could barely string a sentence in Latin. In the end, we had to speak in broken Frankish.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing important,” I say with a shrug. “Setting up patrols and trying to establish contact with Trever. But it was just one thing too many. These last few weeks have been a daze; plotting, conspiring, making decisions that could impact the fate of the Empire, or the Salian kingdom… It is all too much. I’m just a boy. How long has it been since we chased each other through the woods of Robriwis? Since we saw that liburna for the first time?”

  “I…” She puts a hand to her head. “Lord’s wounds, I can’t even remember!” She laughs. “Three months? Four? It was just before Easter…”

  “Something like that,” I say. “But it feels like a lifetime. So much has happened.”

  “It was certainly… an adventure,” she says. “And it’s not over yet.”

  “It almost is. One way or another.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After Trever… We’re going back home. I need rest. We all need rest.”

  She brushes her hair from her eyes — she hasn’t cut it since we left Britannia, and now wears it loose, longer than I’ve ever seen. It suits her — she looks like a Frankish warlord.

  “It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’ve extracted all the possible favours from Hildrik’s betrothed — I mean wife?”

  “How did you —”

  “Audulf and I came back early that night.” She chuckles. “You mewed under her like a flayed cat. But now she’s married, that’s not going to happen ever again, is it?”

  “We haven’t even talked since,” I admit. “But, no, that isn’t why I want us to go back home.”

  “The war is not over yet — what about helping the Empire, what about the Goths and the Burgundians? We could still see so much more of Gaul, win so much more glory.”

  “What use is a handful of Iutes in the war between the Imperators?” I say. “The battles at Lugdunum and Arelate will involve tens of thousands of warriors — even Hildrik’s fyrd will amount to little more than a mention in the chronicles, if that. Trever is the last place where we can make a difference. Besides, I can’t keep the Hiréd away for so long. The longer Betula and her men are here, the more chance there is Aelle will try
something — or have you forgotten there’s a war brewing back home, too?”

  “Sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” she replies. “We will follow you wherever you go, as always.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that,” I say. “I wish I wasn’t the one who needs to make all these decisions on my own.”

  “But you’re not on your own.” She leans over and gives me a warm, tight hug. “Audulf and I are always here for you. And so is Betula now. It’s alright.” She strokes my back. “We’ll go home soon. I’m sorry — I should’ve noticed how much of a strain all of this was on you.”

  To my surprise, I sense tears running from my eyes — tears of exhaustion and relief.

  “Horses,” I say. “I hear horses.”

  Ursula pulls back and looks over my back in the direction of Trever. “It’s Falco.” She shields her eyes from the sun. “One horse is riderless.”

  I leap up, wipe my eyes and mount the pony to meet the returning Roman soldiers.

  “What happened?” I ask Falco.

  “Saxon foragers, a dozen of them,” he replies. “We routed them, but lost Claudius.”

  Hildrik rides up to us. He’s only wearing his breeches. “Did you get them all?”

  He shakes his head. “A couple got away. Now they know we’re here.”

  “Then there’s no point wasting any more time,” decides Hildrik. “We move out now, before Odowakr has a chance to strengthen his defences in the rear.”

  “What about the others?” I ask wearily. I was hoping for at least an hour more of rest while our stragglers pulled up to the front.

  “They’ll have to catch up. Right now, speed is more important than numbers. Gather your Iutes, aetheling. We go to war!”

  The rope snaps, the wooden spoke flies, released from tension, until it hits the cross-bar. A stone ball, black against the bright blue sky, soars through the air. It draws a slow, inevitable arc towards Trever’s mighty walls. As it begins its descent, it accelerates until, at the end of the arc, it smashes into the stones with an earth-shattering crash. A plume of stone and brick dust shrouds the place of impact from sight for a few seconds. When the view clears, a new scar appears in the wall.

  We’re too late. Odowakr finished his engines sooner than I hoped. Two more machines release their loads. One, a giant ballista, shoots a bolt the size of a footman’s pike. It hits the roof of one of the round towers, flies right through it, bursting broken tiles and wood shards up in the air, before vanishing somewhere over the city. The third machine is similar to the first one, but instead of a stone ball, it launches a basket filled with burning pitch and charcoal. The missile, leaving an arc of black smoke behind it, strikes the battlements, scattering the flaming debris all over the parapet. A defending soldier’s clothes catch fire; he stumbles and falls to his death from the wall, a screaming, flailing torch.

  The crews gather around the three machines, bringing them all back into place after recoil, arming them up, loading, aiming; the entire process takes ten, maybe fifteen minutes, before the missiles are released again. The barrage is slow but relentless; I can see cracks in the Trever walls forming already. Near the bridge gatehouse, where most of the missiles hit, the stone balls churned out a deep, rubble-filled fissure. There are few soldiers out on the battlements — the others must be hiding from the deadly bolts of the ballista. Their absence explains the other new flaw in the city’s defences: the hole in the bridge is being filled in, with Odowakr’s men working hard to throw great planks of oak wood over the gap. Soon, the only thing that will stand between the barbarian army and the city will be the half-ruined gatehouse. To make sure that it doesn’t stand for long, a fourth siege machine is being constructed on the western side of the bridge, under the watchful eye of Odowakr’s surviving engineers: a great battering ram, a beam of a mighty beech tree, bound with iron at the tip, suspended on ropes from a wheeled frame, shielded from arrows by a roof of wooden planks and animal hides.

  Beyond the wall, the city burns. The flaming missiles have taken a dreadful toll, spreading the fires all over Trever, from the vaulted roofs of the bath house, to the lofty dome of the Praetorium. I see no vigiles trying to put down the fires, and I guess that at long last, the city must have run out of water — and soldiers. I imagine this, more than anything else the machines have done, has finally brought terror of the siege into the minds of the city folk. They can no longer hope to just wait it out; now, they all need to start fighting for survival — or give up the city.

  Most of the Saxon army is now gathered on the western side of the river, waiting either for the siege engines to make a breach in the walls, or for the ram to smash through the gate, whichever comes sooner. They are settled in several large camps along the river’s edge, in a concentric crescent, with the machines in the middle of it all, surrounded by a rectangle of raised earth and a primitive stockade. The fortification is far from finished. It’s unlikely Odowakr would have felt the need to defend himself from the threat of an attack from Trever — he must have started it when the news of our march from the North reached him.

  Unfinished or not, the earthen wall and the stockade, the concentric lines of camps, all mean Hildrik will need to come up with something more intricate than a simple head-on attack on the engines. But it is not all bad news; the great warband gathered on the shores of Mosella may look intimidating, but if the words of the foragers seized by Falco’s men in the woods are to be believed, things are not looking great for Odowakr’s worn-out army.

  “We’re out of food,” the captive says. The fact that he shares this information with us willingly, without any coercion on our side, is proof enough how low the morale of the Saxons has deteriorated. “We have to go ever deeper into the woods, ever further out into the fields to gather supplies.”

  The Saxons have grown restless. It is still late summer here in northern Gaul; there is some fruit and game in the woods, but the grain has not yet grown tall enough for harvest. The men we caught were emaciated, their skin covered in lesions and blemishes of famine. One of them was coughing blood.

  “These engines are our last chance,” they told us. “The clan chieftains are grumbling. If we can’t breach the walls soon, we’ll just have to pack up and go home.”

  Perhaps worst of all, there were rumours of the Romans finally mounting a relief effort for the beleaguered city, though not even our captives truly believed in them.

  “Some of our raiding parties reached the outskirts of Mettis. We were pushed back by the garrison there, but nobody saw any trace of a gathering army. Yours are the first enemy troops we’ve seen in months.”

  There is still hope, then, for Dux Arbogast and his trapped soldiers — but how long this hope would last, we have no way of knowing. With the entire bank of Mosella occupied by the enemy camps, it’s too risky for anyone to try to reach the city the usual way — an outpost of Alemannic axemen now guards the crossing at the old bridge. When I was leaving Trever, the Dux assured me that the city could hold for at least a month more; but with the stone balls pounding mercilessly at the walls, the ballista bolts skewering the defenders, the flaming baskets spreading flame and destruction throughout the districts, how much more of this assault can they really withstand?

  The machines belch their loads again. With each shot, the missiles strike with more accuracy. Two stone balls hit the same spot on the parapet wall; the second one crushes a segment of the battlement, and anyone who was unfortunate or foolish enough to hide behind it.

  “I don’t know much about walls and sieges,” says Audulf. “But that weakened fissure can’t hold for more than a couple of days, if they keep hitting it like this.”

  “You may be right,” I say, although I’m no more of an expert in these matters.

  “Don’t these machines look shoddy to you?” says Ursula. “It wouldn’t take much to destroy them, if we could somehow get past all those guards.”

  She’s right; the siege engines, though devastating in their imp
act on the city’s walls, don’t appear to have been built with resilience in mind. After each shot, the crews take longer to refasten the ropes, tighten the screws, patch up the splintered wood. I consult the plans I took from Trever; I can’t make out much of the engineers’ strange symbols and Hunnic runes, but the drawings are clear enough. The engineers, running out of time and supplies, sacrificed quality over speed. They built their machines to last just long enough to make one breach. A single breach that would be enough for the barbarian army to pour into Trever and slay everyone inside — or force Arbogast to surrender.

  “One strike of my axe and I would snap that crossbeam like a twig,” boasts Audulf.

  “If we could destroy them, it would save Hildrik having to fight his way through Odowakr’s entire army,” I say. “We would end this siege in one stroke.”

  “It’s impossible,” says Audulf. “Look at how many of them there are. And those fortifications…”

  “It’s difficult,” I say. “But not impossible…”

  “You have an idea,” says Ursula, grinning. “I thought you said you were too weary to think of any more plans.”

  “Fortunately, I had this idea before my mind went numb,” I reply. “I just didn’t know when and how to use it — until now.”

  A noise coming from the direction of the Hiréd’s tents interrupts my final speech to the Iutes.

  “What is going on there?” I ask, annoyed.

  “Sounds like women arguing,” notes Seawine with a lewd grin.

  I listen closer — he’s right. One of the voices is Betula. The other…

  “Basina? What is she doing here?”

  Hildrik’s army is on the other side of the camp, getting ready to march out to face Odowakr in the final reckoning between the two warlords. Basina should be at her betrothed’s — husband’s, I correct myself — side, not here with the handful of Iutes. I walk up to see what’s happening.

  “Out of the question,” says Betula firmly. “I don’t know you or your men. I don’t know how they fare in battle, or how well will they listen to my orders.”