‘Reagan,’ said Owain, kicking the sleeping form.
The warrior jerked upright, hand going instantly to sword-hilt, face – such a smooth face – etched with shock and surprise.
The cowl fell from the face, and golden brown hair flowed out, around her neck. Her green eyes stared at Arthur, her moist lips closed, then faintly smiled. She knelt up, pushing the furs aside, so that her slim, small-breasted body was tautly outlined in her tunic of skins and leather belt. Then she held out her hand which Arthur took and firmly pressed with both of his.
‘An eagle,’ said Arthur. ‘Who bides her time, then swoops. I remember Owain telling me that, and I knew it to be true, because my brother, Uryen, had hinted as much to me. Welcome Reagan.’
Reagan tossed her head so that her hair swept back from her face. She was a beautiful young woman, but hard, hard. There was the look of a warrior about her, and Niall, though he felt the stirrings of lust for her as a woman, recognised that she was leather to a normal woman’s silk, steel to the soft and pliable wood of a wench who was content to cook and sew and lay beneath the scarred body of a warrior.
‘These,’ said Arthur, ‘are two of the three men I most trust. This is Bryn of Morgannwg – ugly isn’t he? Never mind his scowling face, there are none better than he when it comes to odds of a hundred to one. Kei you shall also meet; he has a prior engagement with a valley that is marked on no map. But this … this handsome man here, who speaks our language worse than a dog, whose body bears more scars from last nights skirmish than my own, this is what your ride from Dyfed was all about, young Owain. This is the weapon of madness, the invincible warrior that Uryen was so desperate to tell me about. Niall Swiftaxe of Connacht. Niall the Strong. No other name matters, though you may hear him called by many.’
Owain rose to his feet and walked across to Niall. Only a few years separated them in age, but they were as tall as each other, and though Niall’s muscles were more consolidated than the youthful muscles of the other, they looked equal of strength and pride. Owain smiled and reached for Niall’s hand. Niall took it, but his eyes went to the amulet around the boy’s neck.
Owain said, ‘It was given to me by Arthur himself, who inherited it from a war queen. It is filled with magic. It protects the wearer against the blade of any true born Celt, reserving his death for battle, therefore.’
‘When it hung about my neck,’ said Niall carefully, ‘it was merely an amulet, a sign of strength. There was no magic in it then.’
Arthur rose to his feet, his dark eyes questioning. ‘When … when you wore it? Tell me, friend Berserker, when did you wear it?’
‘Many years ago,’ said Niall. ‘I wore it when I killed my brother. I wore it …’ he was about to say when he’d been tricked by a lusty woman, but he knew, he knew, that Arthur’s queen could be none other than that same woman, and he wished no trouble with the Bull Chief of the Britons, who wore an invincible armour of his own. While Niall was invincible by virtue of his berserk rage, Arthur was invincible because of something far more subtle, far less tangible; Arthur was legend, and legends never die, and that made Niall afraid of the tall man, and he held his tongue.
‘I lost it during a skirmish,’ he said. ‘The amulet was taken as booty, and where it went from then I don’t know.’
But Arthur had sensed the lie.
‘By the Cross of Jesus,’ he said softly, invoking his strange god, ‘it seems destiny had planned our meeting before we were hardly aware of death. Who took the amulet from you? Was it a woman?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Niall. ‘The person who took it from me was a wizard – a trickster – I would not swear to that person’s sex, despite what my eyes told me.’
He remembered feeling just that at the time, as he had rolled in agony in the stable.
‘And do you demand the return of the amulet?’ asked Arthur.
Owain made a noise of anger, reached up to protect his icon. His right hand gripped the bronzed hilt of his sword and his eyes stared narrowly and threateningly at Niall. ‘I shall kill you if you try.’
Niall blazed red as he sensed anger approaching, and his whole body began to heat and enflame, ready to take life indiscriminately. The blood in his head beat loud, and redness rose before his eyes. Owain saw this and backed away, unsheathing his sword in one easy motion. Reagan, standing up now, restrained him. Owain shook her off roughly, but he calmed. The girl stared at Niall and Niall himself subsided from the wave of fury that might so easily have engulfed him.
Arthur laughed, slapped the boy on the shoulder. ‘Not only a fine spirit, but a sensible head, still intact,’ he winked at Niall. ‘And a valuable sister too!’
Reagan acknowledged the compliment with a half smile and a slight shake of her head, which sent her golden hair swirling about her face. Niall noticed that her own hand rested on her sword. The weapon hung from a thick belt that was tightly bound around her waist, pulling the fabric of her tunic in to show the slimness of her body; the tunic was short, reaching only to the middle of her thighs, and it had bunched up during her sleep and her firm, white flanks caught every man’s desire who watched her, giving, as they did, an unsubtle hint as to the delights of her belly.
‘You both have wounds to repair, I notice,’ said Arthur, indicating the slashes and grazes on their legs and arms. ‘Get them properly tended to. We have two herbalists of considerable skill, if they weren’t killed last night. If they were, then a Druid lives nearby. When he isn’t calling down the forces of Taran to destroy the Christians here, he’s quite helpful.’
Abruptly Arthur strode away. Owain watched him go then smiled at Reagan; Reagan was staring at Niall and her brother seemed unhappy about this. He said something to her that Niall – still unused to the language – did not catch. Then Owain himself left, walking in a youthful parody of Arthur’s easy stride, hand resting lightly on sword, body lithe in his leather tunic. Reagan crouched and rolled up their sleeping furs, and Niall went back to the house to fetch tools.
There was much repair work still to do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As soon as the wooden palings were repaired the fort rested easy. The work had taken most of the day, and after the sleepless night before most of the men were fatigued to the point of dropping. Niall returned to the main house and curled up on the floor against one wall. Bryn the Merciless was already there asleep.
In the darkest hour of that night Arthur too came in and slept for a few hours. His sleep, like Niall’s, was fitful. Surprise attacks always left a man uneasy.
During the day that followed the Saxon dead were properly looted and their corpses dragged to a pit where they were unceremoniously burned. The Welsh dead were placed on wagons that were fetched from nearby communities, and returned to their homesteads. A few were cremated on pyres within sight of Powys, and Arthur watched the dark smoke rising into the overcast sky, and he cried.
Niall failed to understand his emotion, though both Owain and Reagan seemed to share his grief, and Arthur acknowledged this.
Some miles away, two fishing communities had been pillaged by the Saxon raiding party, one of them having fallen to the sword only very recently, probably on the Saxon’s retreat. The women in this village had been abused and slaughtered; those in the second village had been taken.
Arthur called a war council.
‘We can’t defend the southern coast,’ he said angrily, ‘because the channel is too wide. It is impossible to police it properly. Once Cerdic realises the full implication of that, he will be back in force. We must strike at him now, chase him beyond his own frontier. It is becoming less and less safe to retreat here after our skirmishes. Powys fort is too small, the whole of southern Morgannwg is far too vulnerable.’
‘I agree,’ said Kei. ‘We routed Cerdic at the Ora, and now we have smacked him in the eye when he thought he could retaliate with a small force. What is needed right now is a second massive blow, right at the heart of his army. Kill Cerdic himself and w
e have killed one limb of the Saxon movement towards us.’
‘Cerdic, no doubt, has figured that we have been thinking along just these lines.’ Bryn’s tone, Niall thought as he listened, was tinged with sarcasm.
‘We might lessen our vulnerability,’ said Kei, stroking his sword as he spoke, ‘by appealing to the Erish reivers, who sail the coastal waters, to cease their hostility.’
Bryn glanced sourly at Niall, a look that told Niall much of the man’s contempt for him and his kind.
Niall said, ‘Appealing to the Sea Wolves would be like appealing to Thunder to stop. They are as much outcasts from tribal society as am I, indeed, as were the fiana with whom I rode.’
Arthur laughed, and Niall looked puzzled. The warlord said, ‘Thunder is one of the Great Gods, isn’t it? I thought it did as your Druids asked.’
‘Rarely,’ said Niall, remembering the frightening storms that swooped so quickly from the ocean, across Slieve Mor, the dark mountain, and down to the fortified settlement where he had lived as a child.
‘I was also thinking,’ said Arthur, ‘that many of your fiana brethren are fighting for me, or kiss the earth of a strange land because of such temporary allegiance. Might not the Sea Wolves be convinced to fight with us?’
Again Niall shook his head. ‘Booty is their interest, and war is too high a price to pay to achieve that interest. No, you must concentrate on limiting all Saxon advance to the land frontier, and then police it with your cavalry with such vigilance that you will appear to be in a thousand places at once. That is the only way.’
Bryn snorted his contempt. ‘The Erisman has spoken. Maybe we should make him warlord. Maybe we should make him the Bull Chief, or should I say Bear Chief.’
‘There is something of the dragon in us all,’ said Arthur. ‘And something of the bull too. There is also a little of the bear in every sword stroke we make, something of that same madness that afflicts our valuable mercenary. Niall speaks my thoughts exactly, in case you’re interested.’ Bryn growled unhappily, stared at Niall darkly. Arthur went on, ‘My good queen is even at this moment leading a cavalry force along the frontiers to the north, assessing the numbers of the enemy that are building up to the east of the City of the Legion. Speed and strength behind our striking, those are indeed the secrets of success in the forthcoming wars.’
His eyes burned with excitement and intensity; his whole body was tense as he sat on the hard floor, his arms around his leather-clad legs, his hair falling free down his back. Lean and languid, his whole bearing was so impressive that Niall found his heart thundering with excitement and his mind roaring with the thoughts of war and victory that this man’s great strength and leadership promised.
Following Arthur, following this man who was younger, yet, than Niall himself, there would surely be no defeat in field battle!
‘When she returns,’ Arthur said softly, ‘we shall strike again, quickly, magnificently. My dragons,’ he glanced at Bryn and Kei. ‘My bears,’ he met Niall’s gaze. ‘My lions, and my bulls, and my cubs … young Owain …’ Pleasure at the thought of the boy manifested itself in his thoughtful expression. Then he grinned, and drew out of the small fire a burning ember which he held before his face, so that his eyes were red and flaming in the shadows of the house. ‘We shall ride together, a force of men such as the country has never before seen!’ His excitement grew. ‘Bright will our swords shine, loud will be the screams of war, deafening the thunder of weapon on shield. Leatherclad, my dragons, sparkling helms and sweating, steady steeds, we shall ride in a Roman arrow straight towards Cerdic’s very heart, and strike him, strike him! Dead!’
Distantly, as he finished speaking, a wailing chant went up, as the wives of the dead were conducted through their grief by a latin priest. The sound stirred Niall deeply, but it seemed to hold no significance for Arthur.
Shortly after dusk, his wounds aching almost unbearably as the healing potions did their duty, Niall wrapped himself in furs and crept into the darkness of his corner of the house. His thoughts fled home, to rolling green hills and the distant, mist shrouded giants that were mountains, spreading down the western peninsulas like a vast chain, separating a hundred lands from the easy routes of tribal migration. He thought of his father, and the cosy settlement that he had governed. He thought of Cathabach and clutched his snow sword warmly; how soon he had forgotten the bizarre nature of his weapon. How quickly it had become just a weapon for killing, something that men did so well, no matter whether they were filled with magic or not.
His thoughts lingered most extensively on the war queen who had come close to being his first woman; he had forgotten the hurt of that moment, but the memory of her body, naked and gleaming in the half light, open and inviting to his butting rage … that memory stirred agonies within him. He had long since eased the agony of inexperience. There were few women in the communities around the fort that Arthur had not brought to his secret weapon during the few weeks Niall had been with him. But that woman who had spared his life, who had taken his amulet and run into the night, her memory made him burn; he burned with desire and with anger, and he begged sleep to take him and release him from the burden of his shame and hurt pride.
He knew that Grania was Arthur’s queen. It could be no other, and what other woman – fighting in the north, two hundred miles distant – what other woman could still affect her husband so that he declined the warmth of all other women’s bodies, even though it was his right, as Bull Chief, to choose whom he wished from the community?
Niall grew aware that Arthur was sitting on his low pallet, staring thoughtfully at the small fire in the centre of the floor space. He was bored with inaction, and in pain from his wounds. It was too soon to chase after Cerdic, and he would not leave, anyway, without his queen; one battle without her by his side was enough. He would not risk two.
Niall watched him, straining to see the expression on the man’s face but unable to because of the bad light. Arthur rose and stripped off his iron-studded leather armour; white in the fire-light, he was leaner, more wiry than Niall had thought. His member stood out stiffly before him, and no doubt he too thought of his queen, and memories and frustrations haunted him.
He settled on to his pallet and stared at the ceiling. Niall relaxed, tried again for sleep.
But a second figure slipped into the house. It was not Bryn, nor Kei. They were both womanising some miles from the fort, in one of the farmsteads where there was a surfeit of widows.
After a moment, as the figure slipped out of its clothes and revealed a white and memberless, small-breasted figure, Niall realised that this was Reagan, the ‘cub’.
No cub now as she laid herself down on Arthur, reached to his stiffness and stroked it with slow and sensuous motion. Arthur – perhaps as surprised as Niall by this unexpected gift – slowly brought up his arms and ran his hands lightly down the girl’s body. She moaned at his touch, and there was something about her tone, something about the way her voice almost broke, that reminded Niall of his own sensation in the stable house at Cnocba.
The girl was still virgin. She had offered herself to Arthur for her first consummation.
And Arthur knew it. He caressed her body for what seemed like ages, while she moved on him, reaching and fondling him, sliding down in an awkward way to kiss his staff, but reluctant to do more. Increasingly she pressed her lips to his, and in the shadows of the house Niall found his desire heightening, and the pain in his groin worse than the pain of any wound.
But then Arthur whispered something to her and she froze; in the silence Arthur’s voice was a calm murmur; Reagan’s voice was an urgent whisper; the urgency changed to disappointment.
She slipped from Arthur’s bed, stood above him, naked and perfect in her slimness, the budding of her womanhood a tantalising and vulnerable goal for any lusty young man.
As she gathered up her clothes Niall saw the tears in her eyes. Arthur was still lying on his back, his arm across his face, hiding sight of everyt
hing but his queen from his mind.
Noisily Niall shifted, and Reagan glanced at him, holding her clothes before her breasts as she stared at the shapeless mass in the corner. Then she realised who lay there, and walked across to him.
Niall grinned and reached out to tug the tunic from her grip. She slipped into the furs with him and he wasted little time with idle love talk or gentle, warming caresses. He pushed her arms above her head and pinned her hands with his own left hand; with his right he traced a firm and sensuous contour down her body, opening her with a dexterity he would never have believed possible a few months ago. He entered her, then, breaking her quickly, giving her no time to think about the pain. He loved her, both roughly and gently, but for a long, long time, and when she finally started to cry Arthur threw a boot across at them, growling for them to be quiet.
In the morning, Reagan kissed him very long and hard before she slipped out of his furs and dressed. The lissome young girl, her thighs red from her night’s efforts, the womanliness of her such an obtrusive presence, became transformed into something totally alien to that womanliness; hard, mean, a sword hanging in quick unsheathing position from her broad hips, her breasts bound tight and firm beneath leather breastplates. Niall watched her go, stepping lightly, happily into the misty dawn, and he couldn’t help laughing.
Arthur threw his other boot. He had been watching Niall, and perhaps in the cold light of dawn he regretted having rejected such a perfect young woman in favour of memories of his wife.
Bryn and Kei, both horribly ill with mead and indulgence, were in a worse state than they had been after the attack on the fort.
Arthur kicked them out of their furs, and then stretched, pushing the thatch roof up with his extended limbs.
He grinned.
‘We’ve rested long enough,’ he said. ‘I think the time has come to abandon this fort, at least for the moment, and ride eastwards until we find my queen. The augurs tell me she is on her way.’ When Bryn sounded surprised, Arthur looked guilty. ‘Not a very Christian thing to do, I know, but the augurs are very helpful at times. Come on you dogs, we go to war. Up you get and rouse the camp, otherwise they’ll sleep all day in this freezing mist. Where’s the house keeper?’ He bawled for the woman who should have struck new life to the fire before dawn. She came scuttling in, her arms filled with wood, a huge cauldron swinging from her grasp.