Warriors of Camlann

N. M. BROWNE

To my sister, Laura,
without whom I would never
have become a writer

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Acknowledgements

Afterword

Dan gripped Ursula's hand as if his life depended on it. It was possible that it did. The oily ice of the yellow mist clung to him. It made his flesh recoil. He fought the urge to run through it in panic. He did not want Ursula to know the extent of his fear. He could not see her. Only the warmth of her calloused hand reassured him. He felt her grip tighten as she moved ahead, pulling him, then he too was through it. His body shuddered with shocked relief. He was through the mist. There was an all but inaudible pop and they were through it together, but in a place of total darkness.

To his surprise Ursula did not release her grip. He was relieved to feel the slight tremor of her hand. Good. She was scared too. It was Ursula who spoke first.

‘We managed to stay together at least.' Her voice was little more than a whisper. She sounded unusually vulnerable. Maybe because she thought they were back home, in their own world where she would have no
sorcery and no strength. She would no longer be Boar Skull the great Combrogi warrior or Ursula Alavna ab Helen, the sorceress; she would just be Ursula Dorrington of 10G, unpopular and powerless. Ursula would feel the loss almost like a bereavement. He knew just how she felt. His own throat seemed dry, unused. He croaked a question.

‘Are we home?'

‘How, by Lugh, should I know?'

Dan grinned. She had answered him in the language of the Combrogi. At least they would still have that. Back in their own world they would be the only two who spoke what he supposed must be a form of ancient Celtic. Now, that would raise a few eyebrows.

In the darkness he felt for his sword ‘Bright Killer'. It made him feel safer. It was still there. He had been worried about arriving in a twenty-first-century car park, a Celtic longsword at his hip. He had been worried about a lot of things, perhaps the wrong things: a twenty-first-century car park would have been an embarrassing place to arrive, dressed as ancient Celts from another world, but at least they would have known where they were. This not knowing was far worse. The darkness seemed to press against his eyes. He felt the familiar pulse of adrenalin – fight or flight. There was no one to fight and nowhere to run. His warrior's readiness threatened to degenerate into panic.

‘What do we do now?' At least his voice was still steady – croaky, but steady.

‘Did you bring a tinder box?'

‘I didn't think we'd need one.' Dan did not add that he'd hoped to arrive home in the twenty-first century.

‘Dan, I'm scared. What if this isn't home?'

He heard the slight break in Ursula's voice, the rise of panic. Ursula did not panic.

She carried on: ‘And then, what if it is?'

He knew what she meant. They had left their ordinary lives months, maybe even years, ago. The mist had claimed them then too. They had wandered into it and found themselves transported into something very like first-century Britain; found themselves fighting with Celtic warriors under the leadership of the young Celtic king, Macsen, against the might of Rome. They had become accustomed to strangeness, to magic, and to fear, but such familiarity didn't help Dan much now. He was still afraid, and so was Ursula. In that place which he thought of as Macsen's land, she had discovered a gift for sorcery. She had learned to call up the mist and bend it to her will, or so they had thought. They believed she could control the mist, use it to bring them home – to Dan's sister and Ursula's mother, to school and normal life. It looked like they'd been wrong. They had wanted so much to go home but even the thought of it brought its own worries. Could they live a normal life? Dan had
been a warrior, more than that he'd been a berserker. The Bear Sark, they had called him – a title synonymous with murderous madness. He had killed not once, but many times, in a frenzy of savagery. He could not undo what he'd done and what he'd done would always set him apart. What if it happened again when he was back home? What if he killed again? He'd be locked up. In first-century Britain he'd been a hero. He had seen terrible things, done terrible things; he knew his own wild capacity for violence and it frightened him.

Dan squeezed Ursula's strong hand. He did not know how to answer her. He knew exactly what she meant.

It was a cold and strangely quiet night. Dan strained his ears for the sound of traffic but could hear nothing. By twenty-first-century standards he had become a good tracker. He'd learned to listen and to feel, to take in all the information his senses could offer, to analyse and to react. The soundless darkness offered no information. By the standards of any time he had become a formidable warrior. He had learned to use his mind and body as a weapon, a honed instrument for his will. Here in the stillness of this nowhere landscape he felt as vulnerable as the schoolboy he'd been before. A large part of him wished he were still that boy. He licked dry lips and shivered. They could be
anywhere
or any
when
. If by some miracle Ursula had brought them home, then how long had they been away? Would his sister be worried
about him? Would she have given him up for dead? If Ursula had got them back to the right time, had she got them back to the right country? Long-suppressed doubts assailed him. He did not want to share them with Ursula. She might think he didn't trust her. He held her hand more tightly. Her powerful fingers squeezed his.

‘Can you see anything?'

As his eyes adjusted to the near total absence of light, he found that he could, a little. The ground all round them seemed grey and featureless. His instinct told him they were on a grassy hill but he could not account for that feeling. That did not matter. Instincts could keep you alive when rational thought left you for dead.

‘I can see enough.'

‘Let's go then.'

‘Where?'

‘Wherever there is to go.'

Dan almost suggested Ursula speak English again – to get back into practice. He didn't quite have the heart. The rhythm of the Combrogi tongue gave him an obscure sense of comfort. It helped to dispel some of his disquiet, his discomforting sense of foreboding.

They walked for a while. The terrain was not difficult. They had become more used to horseback than hiking over the previous months, but even so Dan set a good, ground-eating pace. He had been long
enough away from a wristwatch to have given up thinking of time primarily in minutes and hours. He estimated they had walked for the best part of a duty watch. The darkness dissipated in the characteristically gradual way of a clouded dawn. In all that time they had seen no lights, no house, and no road. They walked on uncultivated land, endless fields of coarse grass broken only by thickets of gorse and scrub. These were not good signs.

‘I've messed up, haven't I?' Ursula sounded sullen. She'd let go of Dan's hand some time back. He knew that she was grinding her teeth. In the wan light her face looked grim and distant like she'd looked before – when she'd been just the big lumpy girl no one had liked at school. He hated that look. It was a reminder that the bond between them must weaken. Ursula's wild courage had saved him more than once. He had trusted her completely. Once they were home things would not be the same – could not be the same. He didn't like that thought.

He looked at her, really looked at her, as he had not done for a long time. That surly look of hers was almost the only thing about Ursula that had not changed over their time together. Her pale, blonde hair had grown and now hung almost to her shoulders framing a fine boned, but strong-looking face. Ursula was over six foot tall. Where once her height and bulk had marked her out as almost freakish, now her taut-muscled frame marked her
out as beautiful. She was unlikely to be unpopular or powerless again. Would they still be friends?

Her face creased with a frown and he realised she was still waiting for him to answer.

‘We don't know that you've messed up – not yet,' he said encouragingly.

‘Dan, we
can't
be home. Don't try to humour me! We'd have found some sign of civilisation before now. Wherever we are – I hate it. I feel so lost. I can't feel anything anymore.'

The new, beautiful, Ursula sounded as distressed as he'd ever heard her. If he'd not known her better he would have thought she was about to cry.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I can't feel the magic here. It's not home, Dan, but it's not
there
either; it's not Macsen's world. It's horrible. I feel all empty. I'd forgotten how it was before. Dan, how am I going to manage without it?' She looked at him in desperate appeal with eyes that were no longer the emerald green of a sorceress but the cool blue of the schoolgirl Ursula.

He opened his mouth to comfort her, then stopped, silenced by his awareness of an abrupt movement in the bushes. A figure appeared suddenly from the dark thicket, moving swiftly towards them. Dan's hand was on Bright Killer faster than thought. Something struck him, a hard blow. He never saw what.

Ursula watched open-mouthed as four men rushed towards her. She saw everything in one frozen moment: the bearded men in tunics and leggings; their bare heads, their long hair the colour of her own; their swords and small knives thrust towards her; their mouths open, screaming something – a war cry, a shout of triumph? The sound ripped the air, there was a thud and all else was silence. One of them had thrown a stone with deadly accuracy from a slingshot. It lay where it had landed, stained with blood. In the grey light the crimson blood welling around Dan's head showed up bright as neon against the pale yellow-green of the grass. Ursula could not react. She stared at the spreading redness. She could see nothing else.