The Bear King, page 19
part #3 of Dark Age Series
At least it took them away from the barbarian war-bands.
As the day drew on, Lucanus raised his arm and they dropped beside a still pool beneath branches so thick they offered the coolness of a temple. In the shadows, the surface was as black as a mirror reflecting the night sky.
Mato cupped his palms and scooped a handful of the water to his dry lips. ‘The wood-priests are cunning, we know that,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking long about this—’
‘Don’t think too hard.’ Solinus thrust his head into the lake and then shook it like a wet dog.
‘—only the worthy will find a way through, Myrrdin said. The path is a maze, that’s certain, designed to lead the unwary off by their nose. But it’s clear, too, they have set guardians along the way.’
‘Whoever Catia encountered,’ Comitinus interjected.
‘And whoever crept in like ghosts to smear blood upon our pelts,’ Mato continued. ‘The first were warriors, the second …’ He shrugged. ‘The forest folk? They’ve lived too long away from civilization. They sheltered the druids during the long, lonely years after Rome came to Britannia and tried to wipe them out. And only they would have the woodland skills to creep into our camp without disturbing us.’
Bellicus looked around. The woods were so shadowed it was impossible to see far, and the silence was profound. But Lucanus knew that was no guide. The forest folk were invisible in their world.
‘We should take care,’ he said with a nod. ‘Even here … especially here … we shouldn’t let our guard down. Treat these old ways as we would if we were trekking across an open plain while the barbarians roamed near by.’
Once they were rested, Lucanus heaved himself up and jogged on. Dusk drifted down, but they couldn’t afford to slow their pace. Nor could they light a torch for fear they would be seen.
Their voices rolled back and forth, keeping them sharp and their night-eyes focused, as they had all learned to do in those long treks north of the wall.
‘We’re adrift here in the west,’ Mato said. ‘Cut off from news of what is happening across Britannia, throughout the empire.’
‘That’s a good thing, if you ask me,’ Solinus grunted. ‘All that news is likely to be bad. Who wants to hear that?’
‘What if Rome really is abandoning Britannia, as the centurion told Lucanus?’ Comitinus said, his voice low. ‘Without the legions, without the coin, the trade, the repairs to the roads, the protection offered to citizens … Why, I can foresee a dark age sweeping in faster than a spring tide, and then we’ll be taken back to the days of constant tribal wars, endless power-hungry conquerors, sacrifices, starvation …’
‘You’re a seer now?’ Solinus snorted. ‘And a miserable one at that. You think the towns will just fall apart when the legions aren’t here to protect us? You think the trade will stop once Rome pulls back its borders? What keeps us going is men and women, their wits, their hunger.’
‘What do you say, Bellicus? Do you think we’re staring into the long night of a dark age?’ Comitinus asked.
‘Keep running,’ the big Grim Wolf grunted. ‘All I’m thinking about is getting to the end of this road in front of me without losing my life.’
Moonbeams cut through the gloom here and there, transforming the trees into grey phantoms. At least it gave them some light to see by. Lucanus found his thoughts drifting off to the Attacotti, his cold shadows, and he wondered how close they were. Close enough to reach out and—
A howl jolted him from his thoughts and he dug in his heels. Comitinus slammed into his back and he heard Bellicus and Mato cursing behind him.
‘Solinus?’ he shouted.
Solinus had taken the lead for that section of the journey. Lucanus squinted, but he could no longer see the Grim Wolf’s silhouette. There was no movement ahead at all.
‘Solinus?’ he said, his voice lower.
‘Stop talking and help me!’
Lucanus edged forward until he felt a hand grip his arm and Comitinus’ breath warmed his ear. ‘Not another step. Look down.’
A ragged circle darker than the surrounding gloom had opened up in the path. One pale hand clutched at a shattered branch, the rest of Solinus lost in the swimming blackness of the hole.
The Grim Wolves scrambled around the edge of the pit. Bellicus leaned over, grabbed Solinus’ wrist and hauled him up. ‘You have the luck of the gods,’ the big man grunted.
Once Solinus was massaging his wrist in the long grass beside the track, Mato struck his flint, lit a handful of dry leaf mould and dropped it into the hole. In the brief sizzle, Lucanus saw that the pit was about two heads deeper than Bellicus’ height. The bottom was covered with sharpened branches.
‘Gave way under my feet,’ Solinus muttered.
‘If you hadn’t acted quickly you’d be dead for sure,’ Comitinus said.
Lucanus peered into the dark ahead. ‘We knew this road would be dangerous, but it seems now we can’t even trust the ground beneath our feet.’
‘We could step off the path. Follow alongside,’ Comitinus ventured.
‘Knowing those bastard druids, that’s exactly what they’d think we’d do.’ Bellicus cracked his knuckles. ‘The next trap may well be there.’
Mato snatched up a broken branch, snapped off the end so that it was the right length, and edged along the path, jabbing the ground in front of him.
‘At that rate I’ll be a broken-backed old man before we reach that bastard cauldron.’ Solinus jumped to his feet. ‘That’s probably what they want. Win the prize, but your life gets sapped away on the journey. In the end, it’s not a prize worth having.’
‘And the next trap might not be a pit of stakes,’ Comitinus said. ‘It could be an axe swinging from a branch. Take the top of your head off.’
‘Why are you wasting your breath talking?’ Bellicus rumbled. ‘There are only two choices. Go on, go back.’
Lucanus walked up behind Mato on the path. ‘Then we don’t have a choice at all.’
On they pressed into the night. With each step, Lucanus felt his chest tightening. More wasted moments that could cost Catia her life. Yet they’d barely trudged a thousand paces when Mato called out for them to stop. He knelt, examining a way-stone. Another stood nearby. And another. In the grey light, Lucanus could just make out a crossroads in their trail, the original path plunging on ahead with another crossing it.
‘Which way?’ Mato asked.
‘A maze,’ Comitinus muttered. ‘Of course it is.’
‘Keep on this track,’ Lucanus commanded.
For another thousand paces, they marched. But then Lucanus heard Mato’s feet begin to squelch and the track came to an end at a vast bog.
‘No way through,’ Mato said with a deep sigh.
Lucanus bowed his head, then ordered his men to retrace their steps.
At the crossroads, they turned on to the trail to their right. In no time at all they came to another crossroads. Another path chosen at random. Another crossroads, and then another. A second dead end. A third. More crossroads.
Mato stumbled to a halt. ‘Though it pains me to say it, I can’t tell which way we’ve been and which way we haven’t yet tried,’ he said in a weary voice.
‘Which way is up and which way is down?’ Solinus said, spitting. ‘Bollocks. We’re lost.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Bridge
THE GRIM WOLVES BOUNDED THROUGH THE TREES, GREY PELTS flying behind them. Baying. Hunting.
Ahead of them, the two raggedy men scrambled on. Brambles tore at their raw ankles. Branches lashed their faces. Arms flailed, both of them in the grip of terror.
And who could blame them? When the Grim Wolves had come across them, one had been digging up bulbs of wild garlic with his bare hands, the other checking traps for game birds. What must they have thought when they heard that yowling and saw the wolf-men crashing towards them through the sunlit woods?
Now Solinus and Comitinus swept off to the left flank, Mato and Lucanus to the right, circling, drawing in for the kill. Bellicus lowered his head and hurled himself down an incline, driving his prey to claw their way up a muddy bank. Two crows flapping and fighting over carrion, that’s what they looked like, he thought, with their mud-streaked woollen cloaks and torn leggings. Skin almost black from the filth of life in the forest, white eyes staring out of smeared faces.
They reached the top of the bank and Bellicus roared, causing birds to take flight from the high branches in a thunder of wings. The two hunters wrenched their heads round, faces twisted with dread. When they looked ahead once more, the rest of the Grim Wolves formed a line in front of them.
One of the men flung himself face down, whimpering. The other snatched out a short-bladed knife and swung it back and forth. Eyes glittering, he bared his teeth like a cornered beast.
Solinus swatted the knife hand away and punched the man squarely in the face. He went down like a felled tree, dead to the world.
Bellicus hunched over the cowering man and snarled a hand in the back of his cloak. When he’d been hauled to his feet, the captive continued to whine, flapping his hands as if he was wafting away a fly.
‘Still your tongue,’ Bellicus snarled, ‘or my friend here will do to you what he did to that one.’ He tapped the unconscious hunter with his foot.
‘Then we’re going to slit both your throats, cook you over a fire and feed on your flesh,’ Solinus spat. ‘Because that’s what we do to woodland rats.’
The man stopped his whining and hung his head, but he was trembling so much Bellicus thought he might fall to the ground in a daze.
‘You hear what we say?’ Solinus tapped the tip of his knife against the man’s throat.
‘Aye-uh.’ He stuttered something in the thick, barely comprehensible dialect spoken by these forest-dwellers. Bellicus turned over the words and decided he’d said, ‘Don’t hurt me. I’m a hunter, nothing more. I only want to be left alone.’
The Grim Wolf thrust him beside his unconscious companion. ‘Sit there. Stay silent.’
‘Find some wood for the fire,’ Lucanus commanded. ‘My belly’s empty and I want to taste how rich their meat is.’
Smirking, Comitinus and Mato made a play of collecting fallen branches. Their conscious captive didn’t see, though. His head was bowed, his shoulders heaving.
Bellicus leaned in to Lucanus and whispered, ‘Is this what we’ve been brought to – pretending to dine on human flesh like those dogs the Attacotti?’
‘It rightly fills all with revulsion,’ the Wolf whispered back. ‘So what better way to make the point that we are not men to be easily dismissed?’
Bellicus wasn’t sure about that, as he increasingly wasn’t sure about this old friend who had returned from the other side of death. Lucanus had changed, no one could doubt that, but it was a change that had begun long before the Attacotti had stolen him away, when he’d ordered the slaughter of the druids on the high moor. Was this what it meant to be a king? If that were so, Bellicus would never covet a crown.
Behind him he heard a sudden scuffling and then the pounding of footsteps disappearing into the woods. The pagan was already vanishing among the trees, leaving his unconscious comrade behind.
‘As easy as getting a dog to dig up a bone,’ Bellicus said.
‘What if they don’t come?’ Comitinus asked.
‘They’ll come,’ Solinus said.
Bellicus wasn’t so sure. ‘Will they risk a fight to save one lone hunter?’
‘That depends how honourable they are,’ the Wolf replied.
The decision had come to him when they’d collapsed, exhausted, in that maze of paths the night before. ‘We don’t let the druids write our story for us,’ he had said then. ‘The wood-priests’ intention is clear. Follow this labyrinth until it dooms us. No, there has to be another way.’
And there was, or so he hoped. Break the labyrinth. Make their own road.
‘If his friend has the ear of an honest leader, they’ll come to save their fellow,’ he went on. ‘These forest folk are bound close, a tribe in many ways, albeit one that shuns the life of the town and of civilization. But our actions won’t easily be forgiven.’
‘What’s done is done.’ Bellicus searched the dense forest. ‘We’ve prodded the sleeping dog. We’d best keep our wits about us and our swords close to hand.’
The rest of the day passed, and the night too. Taking it in turns to keep watch, they peered into the dark beyond the fire, ears cocked for the faintest footstep. Their captive was bound to a tree, and gagged. All of them could feel his cold gaze as they moved about the camp. When dawn broke, they jumped up from their slumber, swilled down some water from the skins, and were ready.
Mato’s curlew call rang out in the middle of the morning. Swords flew to hands and the Grim Wolves stepped into line facing the direction of the alarm. Mato raced back a moment later.
Lucanus pressed a finger to his lips as he searched the woods. No sound reached his ears beyond birdsong. But now he could see movement, a shadow here and there among the dense vegetation.
The Wolf frowned. Was that a bear stalking towards them? He tracked the hulking shape moving through the holly and the elder. A glimpse here – a massive head; a peep there – what looked like claws long and sharp enough to rake out a man’s throat with one swipe.
Then the bestial figure rounded a holly bush, and Lucanus saw it was only a man. But what a man. A giant, he was, standing several hands taller even than Bellicus, the skull sitting low on hunched shoulders. A mane of brown hair and a beard thick and long, wild and tangled with leaves and ivy. Burning grey eyes set deep in shadowed hollows and a black slash of a mouth filled with brown and broken teeth almost lost in the matted fur.
Life in the wilderness had stripped any fat from him and crafted a body like granite, Lucanus could see. A mottled grey shift flapped down to his knees. Those claw-hands were so big they could have crushed a man’s skull. His filthy bare feet were long and skeletal and hairy, the toes clutching at the soil.
Other figures loomed behind him, but none so imposing. All of them looked more beast than man, with unkempt hair and blackened skin. Ditches were their beds, branches their roofs, and if they did build homes they would no doubt be little more than burrows. These people had long ago fled Rome’s rule. Perhaps it was true, as some said, that their ancestors had escaped the first invasion and the destruction of the old ways and the slaughter of the druids at Ynys Môn.
For the briefest moment, Lucanus felt he was not looking at the reflection of the distant past, but peering into days yet to come. Was this what waited for them all when Britannia was finally abandoned, when the trade routes failed, and the towns collapsed and weeds covered the roads? Was this the dark age that the druids had sought to prevent when they created their story of the saviour, the King Who Will Not Die?
He shuddered, despite himself.
The giant came to a halt, those huge hands falling to his sides. No fear there, Lucanus could see. The monster turned his head slowly, eyes burrowing deep into each of them in turn. When he was done, he nodded. He’d seen nothing that troubled him.
‘They’re all mad,’ Bellicus breathed. ‘The madness of the Wilds.’
Lucanus saw it in their eyes too. All the arcani knew of that insanity which settled on a man too long away from the company of others and the comforts of civilization. The whisper of the woods lured them back to the state of beasts.
‘Men of towns,’ the giant growled, ‘you have called us from the trees by your actions.’ The dialect was thick, the words slow and rolling. Lucanus heard ‘Yow ’ave cold us …’
‘We will gut you as we do a deer, and let the stream take your blood away,’ the tall man continued.
‘You have wronged us,’ the Wolf replied.
‘How so?’
‘We’ve been stalked since we first set foot on this trail. Wolves set upon us. Others who have come this way have been attacked—’
‘That is the way it has always been. Any who choose to walk the druids’ road must know their lives are at risk. They are to be tested. That is the way.’
‘That’s your way. The wood-priests’ way.’ Lucanus shook Caledfwlch. ‘This is the sword of the gods and with it I can cut through the ropes that bind us to the old way. And if that means cutting through you, and everyone who stands with you, so be it.’
The giant shook with silent laughter. ‘You men of towns, you think you’re wise and so strong, but you know nothing. Wisdom only comes from hearing the whispers of the gods in the branches. Strength comes from surviving the knives of winter. Come at us, if you will.’ He held up one hand and waggled his fingers and thumb. ‘This is all you are. We have the numbers of the blades of grass in the field, and we do not stop when we are threatened. We come like the tide.’
‘Try it, then,’ Bellicus snarled, levelling his blade. ‘This is my scythe for your blades of grass. You may well swamp us, but how many are you prepared to lose to win this fight?’
Silence fell on the crowd of forest men.
Lucanus held the giant’s eyes. ‘You are their king, yes? And so am I. Then here is my bargain, from one king to another. You and I will fight. No other lives need to be lost here.’ He nodded towards the captive tied to the tree. ‘And he will be set free now, to show that you can trust us.’
The giant looked Lucanus up and down. His gaze settled on the stump of the missing arm, and he laughed again, like the rumble of distant thunder. ‘You would fight me? Men of towns, so great in your ways! And to the winner …?’
‘When I defeat you, you’ll show us the road to the Fisher King and then you’ll let us be.’
The giant laughed again. ‘I’ll fight you, half-man. And I accept your terms. Word will come when the time is right.’
Lucanus nodded and Comitinus cut the captive free. Without another word, the forest men turned and vanished into the trees.
‘Are you mad?’ Bellicus blared.
‘Why didn’t you let Bellicus fight?’ Solinus added. ‘Look at him, he’s like an oak. And you …’
