Boudicca came over and grasped Swiftaxe’s arm as the warrior rose and began to cry out with pleasure.
He turned to the woman. ‘At last! In just a few days I shall have what I need!’
Then he saw her look, the terrible expression in her eyes. ‘Swiftaxe,’ she said, ‘in just a few days there will be nothing left on Mona but ash, dust and decaying corpses. Suetonius Paulinus and a great Legion have made it their major campaign task to destroy the druid stronghold there, and I fear there is nothing that any of the gods can do to prevent it.’
For one awful moment Swiftaxe could not believe the words she spoke. Then he raised his face to the skies and began to scream. The scream grew louder, echoing into the darkness, and finishing only when all the air in his lungs was exhausted. He raised his axe and brought it down to the ground with an enormous blow that drove the blade deep into the marsh, pushed even deeper as his heavy frame slumped down upon the haft for support as he gave vent to his anger and frustration with tears and cries of rage.
None who watched him could hear the haunting laughter of the bear.
CHAPTER 5
Fleet-footed as grey fenland hares, the three of them returned, after dawn, to the fortified town of Venta. A heavy mist hung across the marshes and running was treacherous, but all three were skilled in the techniques of the hunter who often has to pick his way through deadly ground in pursuit of his game.
After a while they came to a roadway that had been built, some years before, by the Romans. Flat stones, subsiding slightly in the middle and overgrown in places with the hardy, dogged grass of this land, the road nevertheless made travel easier. They followed it gratefully, peering ahead into the fog.
Swiftaxe suddenly held up his hand and the three of them stopped. Ahead, clearly audible through the stifling mist, they could hear the metal trappings of a horse rattling.
They remained still and soon the man on horseback realised that the approach of those on the road had ceased. Swiftaxe heard his voice murmur something and a moment later there came the sound of the horse walking stiffly and slowly across the stones.
Another sound began. The rhythmic rattling and pacing of a squad of fully equipped and armed men.
The decurion came out of the fog, peering ahead and smiling grimly. His horse was tall and brown, its wide hooves white-haired and sturdy. It snorted as it walked and shook its head, an Icenian horse giving warning to the Icenian Queen who faced it. The man on its back, high-crested helmet bright polished and bare-plumed, his sword drawn and held to his side, raised the weapon in salute, then grinned. ‘Welcome back lady,’ he said, ‘we’ve been looking for you.’
Behind him a squad of some twenty men appeared from the fog, reds and browns showing bright through the whiteness, the bronze sparkle of their helmets and mail less prominent than the armour of their leader. They carried pila and wide, oval shields, and they watched Boudicca and her daughters with the blank and hungry expression of prisoners.
‘Are you so worried?’ demanded Boudicca angrily. ‘Are you so worried by one repressed Queen that you cannot allow her a night away from her fortress?’
The decurion shrugged, a gesture half-hidden by the scale armour that decked his shoulders. He beckoned her forward with his sword. The Roman squad parted into two lines, one along each side of the road, intending to close around the three Britons when they walked forward.
‘I never question orders,’ said the decurion. ‘Others, higher in rank than myself, are worried by you. Please step forward so we may escort you back.’
Boudicca made no move, smelling a trick even as Swiftaxe breathed through his teeth, sensing the same treachery.
The Roman said, ‘You, Horned Warrior, are wanted too. Your brother and yourself are to accompany a detachment of men west to join General Suetonius Paulinus. They want you because of your strength. I have orders to escort you to Venta to join your troop.’
Swiftaxe could see the tension in the knuckles of the soldiers who stood behind the horseman. He knew that their orders were anything but safely to conduct them back.
He also recognised a good horse when he saw one, and realised how useful the animal could be to him.
He stepped forward and Boudicca, after hesitating for a moment, followed. The decurion turned his horse about and rode the proud beast towards the ranks of his men.
At this most unsuspecting moment Swiftaxe hurled his axe at the man’s back, running to follow it. He had vaulted on to the horse’s back as it reared up, pulled in agony by the screaming man who tumbled from its saddle, dragging on the reins. Swiftaxe wrenched his weapon from where it had driven through the soldier’s armoured backplate and almost cut his chest in two. Then he swung it high, and gave way to the awful beast that surged forward, its claws opening, its jaws parting, its growl of pleasure almost deafening as it voiced itself in the Berserker’s scream.
Only four of the legionaries came at him, each thrusting his pilum at the manic figure in the saddle.
He struck the tips of the spears, then reached down through the spinning, red-stained world that had become his awareness, and took their lives with shocking ease. The others in the squad backed away, and when Boudicca, throwing off her cloak, ran at them, only two stood their ground, the rest imagining – perhaps – that she too would be possessed of the same berserk fury.
She battled with the two stalwart legionaries, and found her sword striking shield time after time until, in frustration, she kicked out at each in turn and bowled them over, straddling each one in a few seconds and driving her blade into their throats.
She turned, bloodstained and smiling, to greet Swiftaxe.
His axe struck at her, narrowly missing her, and the return blow would have taken off her head had she not parried the stroke with her sword.
The Berserker was insane in its blood rage and as long as the warrior form that stood beside it was alive, it strove to pluck her life. It knew no sides, knew no honour … it distinguished between no man or woman. It killed everything it could, and now it tried to kill the Queen of the Iceni.
The woman was too fast for the Berserker, but the effort tried her sorely. She refused to run, knowing – from stories she had heard – that the fury would pass away in a few minutes.
At length the Berserker’s screaming ceased and the man closed his eyes, raised a hand to clutch a deep wound in his arm.
Caylen Swiftaxe took control of his body again and, breathing heavily, slumped forward in his saddle. He realised what he had been trying to do, and was shocked and upset by his helplessness in controlling it.
He was also amazed at Boudicca’s swordplay, deft weapon-play that had enabled her to survive where most others would certainly have fallen.
When she was sure he was as calm as he should have been, she reached up and rested her hand on his wrist.
‘With ten like you,’ she said, ‘I would rise up and kick these Romans out of my land right now.’
Swiftaxe grinned and wiped blood from his aching arm. ‘Thank the sword of Llug there is only one of me, for I am a danger to myself as well as to those I love and those who are set against me.’
‘There is one love that you must carry with you always,’ said the woman, her own breath ragged as she relaxed following the fight; sweat glistened on her skin; her tunic clung to her body and Swiftaxe could not tear his gaze from her, so hungry was he for this Queen of a land that had fought his own people so bitterly until they had been united in defeat at the hands of callous invaders from the east.
‘What love is that? Love of you? In the short time I have known you I have indeed come to love you, as one warrior loves and admires another. I would like there to be a chance for my love to extend further.’
Boudicca shook her head, but her smile was one that showed she was flattered. ‘I am too old to know more love than I have felt for Prasitagus my husband. The love I talk about is that for your own land, and for the freedom of the waters to run deep and the air to blow hard, and for
the sons of the earth that spawned you to walk that earth with pride, and without worry.’
A shadow passed across Swiftaxe, and through his mind – it was the shadow of another time, and he remembered how, in just four centuries, this noble woman’s dream would have decayed completely, along with the Roman villas and roads. A new invader would be storming the lands, and only the high grounds to the west, where the Silures bitterly clung to their mountain strongholds, only there would the spirit of the Britons fly as free and natural as the air and the waters that run, even now, more shallow than a decade before.
‘Once I have found what I seek,’ he said, leaning down from the horse to stroke the hair from Boudicca’s face, ‘I shall come back. I must race to Mona and beat the Legions there, and I shall be hard pressed to achieve that aim. But if I do, and if the gate opens for me and I find a way of release from the curse that binds me … Boudicca, I shall lend my sword arm to your cause. May Cernunnos guide the horns of your bull. May Llug’s spit sharpen your swords. May Ogmios open the earth to your dead.’
Boudicca said nothing, but hugged her daughter to her body and slapped the flank of Swiftaxe’s horse with her blade. The Horned Warrior turned the steed into the dispersing fog and rode across the fens to the west.
There had been tears in the red Queen’s eyes.
PART TWO
The Ancients
CHAPTER 6
The island sanctuary of Mona, in the West
How many days did he ride west? He lost count.
One day was much like another, with limbs and back aching from the saddle and the jarring pace of the horse.
How many nights did he force his way onwards through rain and biting wind until desperation and fatigue claimed both the animal that bore him, and the Horned Warrior himself? He lost count. When he saw stars he lay and watched them. When the elements were against him he huddled beneath a tree or in a cave, and when he heard the first snorting and pacing of the beast, he rose immediately and pressed on.
He passed through the northern extremes of the lands of the Catuvellauni, and the southern lands of the Coritani, his own people. He followed limestone trails, and high-backed ridges; he rode in the shadow of sandstone cliffs, and skirted the sombre darkness of enormous forests. He rode along rivers whenever he could, for both man and horse could ride the longer for the constant refreshment of cold fluid on their skins.
He fought his way through the lands of the Cornovii, skirting villages and fortified hills, but always skirmishing with the red-trousered warriors who objected to his presence, though months earlier they had watched from a distance as the Legions of Rome had marched northwards through the perimeters of their territory. What age-old pride made them think they could hold against the might of the eastern empire, Swiftaxe wondered, as he listened to their abuse whilst riding on from a briefly savage scene? What proud people, he reflected for hours afterwards, that they stand so bold and brave in defence of their ancestral homes, and will fade so quickly when the Eagle turns its unblinking, hostile eye upon them.
He rode through the land of the Deceangli, and saw the waste that had been laid there, the smoking ruins, and the butchered bodies of women and children, and warriors who had lost, in death, that stiff-haired pride they had worn in life. Their heads watched him, slack-jawed, from the crushed and battered palisades of a hundred settlements that had asked for nothing more than to protect a way of life older by a thousand years than the bronze-and iron-armoured men who had stormed through their tiny streets, men who had laughed without understanding as they had stolen the soul of the land as well as the people who had been birthed by the land.
He came to the tribal valleys of the Ordovici, and found the same, and his mind reeled with bitterness, his heart thundered with anger, his eyes wept at the sight of so much destruction.
A long figure riding through the wind-blown ashes of a land, he came at last to the Legion.
They were camped along a hill that was the very edge of the peninsula, overlooking the deep water straits that separated the land of the Ordovici from the island sanctuary of Mona.
The ground had been cleared, here, though not by the Romans alone. The high forests, and rock-scarred mountains, suggested that many generations had been involved in making habitable those tracts of land that were now passable and grazable. In the valley, hidden from the hostile eyes on Mona, the ruins of several settlements still glowed and smoked in the dusk, and as Swiftaxe rode through the trees on one side of that valley he found he could see for miles to the west; all he could see was the rising smoke and flickering yellow flame of conquest.
The Roman tents, across the valley where they could overlook the straits, flapped and probed towards the sky, hugging the scarred and rock-studded ground. Beyond them were lights, shining out of an enormous distance, and Swiftaxe realised he was looking across the hidden waters to the land of the druid élite.
He kicked his horse down a winding trackway which several generations of farmer warriors had carved into the now ruined valley. He rode between smouldering roundhouses, and across the remains of animal pens, and long, low-roofed stables. Domestic animals roamed the hills and river-ways, released from their subjugation to the Britons, and swift enough to outrun the Roman vanquishers. Swiftaxe slaughtered a pig and slung its carcass across the rump of his horse.
The hill bordering the water straits was steep, but not high, and he galloped in a winding path up the grassy slopes to the stiff and anxious patrol that waited for him. Their swords were drawn, their eyes wide in the dimness as they sought to identify this lone rider. The decurion finally sheathed his weapon and called, ‘The Horned Warrior! Fetch the Centurion!’
Swiftaxe discovered that the main detachment from Venta, and from several other garrisons in the east, had not yet arrived to swell the heavily depleted forces of Paulinus’s Legions. The war against the Ordovici had been very hard, and losses on both sides crippingly large, though the missives that had been dispatched to Rome had said nothing of the sort, of course.
Effectively, no one here knew that Swiftaxe had slaughtered a patrol of Romans and deserted; no one knew that he had been discovered conspiring with Queen Boudicca. No one knew that in fact he was a greater danger to the Legion than were the druids who waited across the water.
He had arrived ahead of his own bad news.
He was grateful for that, for now he would not have to attempt to bluster his way back into the army, nor fight his way out of the camp and cross the water alone. But he knew that the troop from Venta was not far behind him, perhaps four days at the most, and that when they came then his own situation might be questioned rather too closely for comfort.
Smug in the knowledge – the Centurion had appraised him of the plan of action – that by the time the small force of men arrived the conquest of Mona would be complete, and he would be on his way elsewhere, Swiftaxe relaxed, and led his horse to the stabling rails.
He ate and drank, and cleaned his wounds and his flesh of dirt and blood. He changed his clothes, and polished his helmet, sitting apart from the suspicious legionaries in the camp.
The night advanced. He left the tent and walked through the camp to the highest ground that he could find so that he might look around at the full night scene.
This was just one camp among many. He could see the fires of six others burning on this edge of land for several miles; the northern coast fell sharply along most of its length, a difficult descent to the waters of the Mona Straits, and in places a narrow shelf of land at sea level could be dimly seen by the light of an outpost fire. The shapes of rafts and strange devices could be seen here, indistinct in the flickering yellow light; there was also much activity of men, still building and preparing for the invasion.
The waters were wide; there was talk of a few narrow places for an easier crossing when the tides were low, but the mud was deep and treacherous. There were no good fords across the straits, which were only a few hundred paces wide, but were impassable exce
pt by boat. And even boats were going to be difficult to handle in those tricky waters, as a small force of men had already discovered.
One hundred men had launched into the water in flat-bottomed rafts, beginning their journey as the tide had ebbed; the current had carried them fast, but they had rowed forward very hard and would have landed easily on the opposite shore, save that the tide had started to rise again!
The sea gods had saved this trap especially for the Romans, it seemed; Neptune could be heard laughing as he divided the flow of waters around the island of Mona so that one half of the tide came in from the western end of the straits, and the other half of the tide from the east, some minutes later. The rafts had become hopelessly difficult to control, had upturned in the sudden turbulence, and only twenty of the hundred men had been saved. Half of the eighty who had escaped drowning had been carried to the Mona shores and set upon by hordes of screaming women.
Their heads now watched the Roman Legions from forty stakes on high ground across the water, sombre dark shapes against the starry skies. Their dismembered corpses had been strewn, naked and much carved with the symbols of evil spells, along the water’s edge. No man, then, could come ashore without stepping across the cursed remains of a countryman.
Not even a trained and hard-faced Roman legionary would be able to put that from his mind as he beached for the attack.
Mona was much in darkness, though fires burned in many places, and particularly around the heads of the killed Romans so that all through the night the gruesome sign of their earlier defeat would be there. Shapes moved in the darkness, running fleet and half-invisible through the trees and across the rocky slopes. At times, when the noisy wind ceased to sing in his ears, Swiftaxe could hear chanting voices raised in spell-song. He looked about the island but could see no vast shapes moving, no invoked gods manifesting.