Gemini Thunder (13 page)

The remaining eighty-five druids began to prepare food and mead-cups and garlands of mistletoe for the arrival of their ‘misunderstood’ northern guests.

‘Quick, get her out of there,’ screamed Desmond in Twilight’s ear.

As the fifty Viking charged at the unseated and bloodied Combe cavalry, the thunder of many more hooves mixed with the bellowing of blood-scenting bears could be heard. Spurred on by the explosions taking place ahead of them, other Viking bands began to home in on the scene. Another salvo of thunderbolts landed in the midst of the carnage as the twins, firing and moving rapidly around the sky, pressed home the attack on the Combe cavalry.

The dazed Gode, blood streaking down her face, turned to face the oncoming Viking, the first of which with huge axe raised was almost upon her. Aided by the leading bears slashing and gnawing at the disorganized and bloodied cavalry and their thrashing horses, the charging Viking began their battle howl. Gode raised her arm in a futile attempt to fend off the double-handed cleaving death strike, which was flashing down upon her unprotected head.

It connected with nothing but the tree trunk against which, a moment earlier, the defenceless Gode had been leaning.

Desmond gulped a huge sigh of relief but kept quiet as the young moonshiner beside him had his magical hands very full as they zipped around the sky, dodging thunderbolts and returning them. Homing in on the twins’ quickly changing positions, Twilight called to the pica to keep clear of the area. The twins began returning thunderbolts to the source of his trajectories as advised by their mother but were always too late. As soon as they returned fire he was gone. Suddenly, for a fleeting moment the Wessex veneficus appeared standing alongside his companion high above the tree line. Both twins fizzed off a multiple salvo before immediately moving to a different position.

Which landed with earth-shattering explosions in the middle of the rapidly advancing Viking.

‘Time to go,’ said Twilight.

‘What did you do with Gode?’

‘She is here, safe.’

They appeared in a clearing some distance away from the fighting. Gode was sitting in the centre with eyes closed and sword in her right hand. The blood streaming down her face from a wound to her head was beginning to congeal. Twilight motioned for Desmond to speak.

‘Gode?’ said the enamoured young man quietly.

Her eyes sprang open and she began to raise the sword.

‘It’s me, Desmond, and Twilight the Wessex veneficus. We have come to take you back to King Alfred’s camp.’

‘My men?’ she mumbled. ‘What happened to my men?’

‘They’re all dead,’ said Twilight bluntly. ‘Most of them were killed along with their horses by the thunderbolts. The others were hacked to death by the Viking and bears. Take hold of my hand.’

‘Are you sure they’re all dead?’

‘Absolutely. Come.’

Later that day the pica delivered a message to their liege-lord. On the way to Chippingham some of the Viking had come upon Stonehenge. Guessing that it was an important place to the Celts, they had slung ropes around two of the massive cross stones and pulled them to the ground. Only the commands of their chieftain to get a move on toward Chippingham had stopped them doing any further damage. It was one thing to raise hovels to the ground as they passed through; now they were tampering with a force far greater than anything mortal. This was one of only two sites in the whole of the Britains that was beyond human reach, an edifice placed and used for a purpose that governed the entrapment of the cowering dead at the annual Equinoctial Festival handled by Twilight. If the Viking were victorious at Chippingham, the second site would be next on their list of visits.

Avebury and the great semicircle of ninety-nine destiny stones.

Desecration of that sacred place must
never
be allowed.

By midmorning the main Viking force was nearing Lacock. Advised by the twins of the Druidical Order and its purpose and potential use for information, Guthrum decided to send a scouting party forward accompanied by the twins. He was extremely surprised when they came back and said the entire abbey had turned out to meet them in their best white cloaks and had placed tables of food out for the occasion.

‘It’s a trap,’ he growled to the twins.

‘If it is,’ replied Go-uan, ‘we cannot find any sign of it. These druids are essentially pacifists more interested in spreading the word of their cult. They could have run or even gone behind Alfred’s lines, but they chose to stay and entreat with us. Something else that might be useful. We caught up with a small band of druids who had chosen to leave. Under threat of a very bloody death they told us that the leader of the cult, a druid called Ebroin, is the brother of Alfred’s wife. We showed our gratitude by leaving them with the bears. They will be crimson smears on the Wessex landscape by now.’

The
jarl
thought for a moment.

‘This land is full of religions, cults, and orders, all going their separate ways.
We
will show them that the only true way is that of Ymir, Father of the Giants and the Norse deity led by Odin and Thor.’

The twins bowed in homage to his words.

‘How many are there at the Order?’ growled Guthrum, getting back to his warrior role.

‘No more than eighty-five. They are unarmed.’

‘Any sign of that devil spawn of a veneficus?’

‘He is licking his wounds with the main army in Chippingham. We wiped out a hundred of their cavalry last night and only lost ten of our own.’

Guthrum grunted his satisfaction. That was the sort of odds he liked.

‘Are you sure about this veneficus? He cost us seven hundred lives in Winchester. If you are not sure, you know what’s waiting for you.’ He gripped his huge axe handle to emphasize the point.

‘We are sure. Although this spawn of the devil called Twilight has perfected a method to shield his aura and therefore remain undetectable to us, we have found another way. As you know before we released his companion, Desmond, we placed a small aura plant on him. That’s how we were able to surprise them with our thunderbolts when they tried to ambush us in the forest last night. We detected Desmond, and where Desmond is, his rune-slaying, whore-mother of a moonshiner will be close by. At this moment the plant tells us that they are both with Alfred’s main force.’

Guthrum looked across at Ove Thorsten, head of the chieftains and his number two. A barely perceptible nod passed between them.

‘Thorsten will lead a small force to smash the druids into a crimson spume and send their pagan souls to
Hel.
We will gorge on their entrails and leave the rest to the weevils. Then burn the buildings and eat the food. We will capture and interrogate this Ebroin and four of his seniors.
Tyr
will bless our efforts with the sacrifice of these druids with much feasting around his heavenly table. ‘

‘
Tyr
,’ shouted Thorsten, licking his lips in anticipation of the slaughter.

‘I don’t think that the twins suddenly turning up at the ambush site when they did was the result of what the long magus called ‘the otherworld consequences of spell-bindery,’’ said Twilight thoughtfully. ‘What he meant by this was the effect of an enchantment having a positive outcome by chance alone. The twins’ creativity and timing were too immaculate for chance.’

‘Do you think they knew where we were?’ asked Desmond.

‘I know so.’

‘How, if your aura was undetectable?’

‘You, my young companion.’ He reached out to one of Desmond’s blond pigtails and extracted a small hazelnut. ‘This was the main reason they released you, not my threat to their mother. They placed this in your hair. It holds a very faint glow of their own aura signature, which they can detect from a reasonable range. They guessed that wherever you were, I would be close by, and this was their way of countering our lack of an aura. This makes us traceable.’

Desmond looked at the tiny nut kernel in Twilight’s hand.

‘Clever,’ he said grudgingly.

‘It was and it completely fooled me. The aura glow this little nut was giving off was so small I never noticed it. They were searching for that glow from high in the night sky when we appeared over the forest and set up the ambush. Staying high they waited and watched until we moved. They then purposefully sacrificed the first small group of seven Viking to make us think the ambush was working. When we then committed Gode’s entire mounted force to the larger group, they released their thunderbolts, warriors, and bears for maximum damage.’

Gode, who was sitting with them in Alfred’s tent, a crude linen cloth around her head after Desmond had tenderly and overly bathed the gash with a potion suggested by Twilight, shuddered.

‘Thanks to you I was the only survivor.’ Desmond blew on his nails and put on his best heroic countenance. ‘It was nothing,’ he said dismissively. Twilight reached over to Desmond’s pigtail and pushed the small

nut kernel back into place. ‘What are you doing?’ he cried. ‘They will know where we are!’ ‘Precisely.’ The Wessex astounder smiled. ‘This might just be the opportunity we were looking for, the chance to separate the Dog Star Sirius from the side of Orion.’

Ove Thorsten’s group wasted no time getting to Lacock and mercilessly cutting down every one except five of the white-cloaked druids as they stood with a benign smile on their faces beside the laden tables of food. This time there were no bloodcurdling screams from the attackers, no charging horde, and no catatonic killing frenzy. There was no need. A Viking just walked up to each one and hacked the poor unfortunate to death with one mighty blow as he stood there with his arms out in a gesture of brotherly welcome. After the first few of their fellow druids died in front of them, those left didn’t bother to even try to run. It was pointless. The floor-length white cloaks and sandals made that an impossibility, and these savages would like nothing better than some undefended sport as the druids tripped and fell under the slashing axes. Accepting death when it was that certain and accompanied by a complete and utter lack of hope left only two things to ponder.

Will I be able to stand quietly as the axe falls?

Who did it matter to, anyway?

Like quiescent irenics coming to a calm inner bargain with themselves, the remaining druids set their faces to a grim-visaged inevitability, dropped their arms to their sides, put their chin on their chest, and began to wonder if all they had been taught about the afterlife was true. Knowing that time left on earth amounted to a few precious blinks of the eye gave a lucidity to the life lived that etched some past events in spectacular relief. The surprise was that the faces of those barging into subliminal focus during these brief moments of soliloquy were, for the most part, not the expected loved ones, but a series of random strangers who had played little or no part in that life.

Death was already proving a contrary master, and they hadn’t got to it yet.

Some druids even continued to smile a welcome at their killer as he raised his weapon, in a vain attempt to perhaps wrinkle out one decent shard of humanity that would stay his hand. Two of them began to sing, and one, deranged, perhaps, or ready to try anything, took his cloak off.

All in vain. A gasp from the nearest druid signalled the imminence of the end. The double-handed swords and axes hissed downward upon unprotected necks with the lethal precision and singularity of the executioner. Denied their individual carillon of bells, each bloodied, separated body slumped to the hard, compacted ground in a stream of carmine fluids outside the abbey gates where they had assembled for the greeting. The blood of eighty submissive druids, who had allowed themselves to believe their leader, ran in rivulets away from those gates.

As they should have done.

From King Alfred’s defensive positions upon the naturally eroded terracettes around the rolling hills of Chippingham, his men could see the smoke rising from the abbey at Lacock. Alfred, de Gaini, Gode, Desmond, and Twilight sat in Alfred’s tent. Twilight had just returned from an invisible transformation to the sky above the abbey.

‘I’m afraid they have captured Ebroin,’ he said. ‘With four other senior druids he has been buried in the ground, only their heads showing. They have been tortured, and in a macabre sport the Viking have made hard balls from the brains of the other dead druids by mixing them with lime and baking until hard over the blazing embers of the abbey. They are then rolling these balls at the exposed heads of the buried druids. Everyone else is dead, beheaded, then hacked to pieces. All the abbey buildings have been burned to the ground.’

Alfred sighed deeply. ‘Yet more despicable and barbaric acts. The brutality of these Viking knows no bounds, has no limits. Their only form of innovation is how to torture and kill with ever more ingenuity and pain. Although she was expecting it, Elswith will be devastated,’ he said . ‘I have sent her and Hild with an escort to her family in Wales. They will be safer there.’

He paused for a moment.

‘Elswith is with child. It will be our firstborn.’

They all considered this for a moment before Desmond blurted out, ‘Twilight can tell when women and animals are pregnant by looking into their bodies. He can even tell what sex the baby will be.’