Warriors of Camlann (2 page)

It was as if she had never been Boar Skull, never spent months in training, never defended herself in hand-to-hand combat. Numb with shock and loss she let them take her. She had left her sword in Macsen's land but she could have tried to defend herself. She made no attempt to fight as they snatched Bright Killer from Dan's lifeless grip. She made no attempt to run when they roughly bound her hands. She did nothing when they ripped the eagle brooch that Macsen had given her from her tunic. They spoke to her in a language she didn't know – they were not of the tribes – that much she knew – she spoke all their many dialects. The strangers smelled powerfully of peat fires and stale
sweat and the pungent stench of fish. They stood close enough for her to smell the alcohol on their breath. Dirty, calloused hands caressed her roughly. It was as if it was happening to someone else. They refrained from doing her harm. She was not sure why. The tallest, who was still a few inches shorter than Ursula, cooed endearments and then signalled for her to be lifted bodily away. She did not resist. She had never been more lost. Once, when she was a sorceress, when she had wielded magic, when she had been able to shape-shift, she had almost become trapped in the form of an eagle. Even then she had not felt more lost than this. The world had shrunk until there was just one thing in it: the blood welling around Dan's pale face and his utter stillness.

She had let Dan down. She had not known their attackers were there. Always before, she had sensed danger. This time, she had sensed nothing. It was her fault. Dan relied on her for such things. She tried to reach for the magic. She needed the magic, had never needed it, never wanted it more. But she expected what she found – nothing. There was no magic in her. She was alone and helpless in an unknown place. Dan was dead.

The sun was high in the sky before Ursula had recovered her wits sufficiently to take in her surroundings. She was not back home. Her attackers, whoever they were, tied sound knots. Straining on them only tightened them further. They had carried her bodily to a cart and had transported her, bound and gagged, to some other place, a dark place that smelled, like them, of fish and filth. The road they had travelled had been uneven and pitted with holes, and the wooden cart in which they'd thrown her was no more than a wooden box on wheels. Ursula had been thrown against it so constantly that she was sore and badly bruised. She did not think she had broken any bones.

All the long, cold, painful journey, Ursula had wept for Dan. She had wept silently until her vision blurred and her head throbbed to the rhythm of her grief. Dan was the only friend she had ever had – the only person who had risked death for her – and the only certainty in
all the strangeness they had experienced since they first went through the Veil. She could not believe he was gone. It had happened too quickly. There had been many times, after she and Dan had joined the Combrogi, when she had readied herself to die or to see Dan die. Today, death had found them both so unprepared. How could Dan, the Bear Sark, the mightiest fighter the Celts had ever claimed for their own, be killed by a stone from a well-aimed slingshot? Her memory was full of Dan: Dan smiling, Dan listening, Dan fighting in his berserker madness. Most of all she thought of Dan falling, Dan falling as the stone hit home, and blood surrounding him like a dark halo.

Why had she not fought their attackers, grabbed Bright Killer herself to avenge Dan? There was no doubt in Ursula's mind. Dan could not have survived the force of that blow. There was no doubt in her mind that she should have saved him. There was no doubt in her mind that it would be a struggle to survive this new strangeness without him, but her own life was in danger and she had to try. She had to concentrate on staying alive.

Ursula had become practised at a certain kind of mental discipline – the kind she'd needed to release her sorcery. She called on that practice now and almost broke down again at the emptiness she felt. There was no sensation of power. There was no awareness of
electric energies thrilling through nerves and neurons.

She listened to her own trembling breath and only then, in this new and fragile state of calm, did she become aware of some other presence in the cold, dark place where the men had trapped her. Someone or something else was breathing quietly, raggedly.

She could not get up. Both her hands and feet were bound, though fortunately not together. She had seen prisoners tied that way – hands to feet, their backs arched like a bow. There had been charred corpses in that position in Alavna. She was not tied like that – and she was grateful. With some uncomfortable manoeuvring, jarring fresh cuts and bruises from her time on the wooden cart, she managed to get herself into a semi-seated shuffling position. With painful slowness she explored her prison. She was inside some large rectangular stone structure. There were three bodies lying against the wall furthest from her. Two were unquestionably dead, though not yet cold. The hard impacted earth of the floor was wet and sticky there. Ursula was glad of the darkness. She did not want to see what had been done to them. Fear tightened in the pit of her stomach. She remembered Alavna, and the slaughter she had seen there. No sight could be worse than that. She forced herself to continue her exploration. She had been a warrior. She could bear whatever she had to face here.

The darkness disorientated her. Her thighs cramped
with the effort of movement. She gritted her teeth against the pain. After an agony of shuffling, she reached the third body. It still breathed. Reasoning that anyone imprisoned with her was at least an enemy of her captors and might thus be her friend, she started to speak. She did not attempt to speak in English. English was not for her the language of blood and pain and fear. She spoke instead in the languages of the Combrogi, in the tongue of the Silures, the Carvetii, and the Ordovices, in the ancient warrior tongues. ‘Are you hurt? Are you sick?'

A dry voice whispered from a parched throat, ‘Water. Give me water!'

The sandpaper voice shocked Ursula. She found herself trembling with more than the awkward muscle-straining exertion. He spoke in Latin, the language of her old enemy, the Ravens.

She recovered herself quickly and answered in the same language. Even without the power of her living, pulsing magic she could still remember words she had learned with its aid.

‘I have no water. I'm a prisoner too. Do you know where we are? Do you know a way out?'

The man was wracked with a spasm of something that, in other circumstances, might have been a laugh. Ursula failed to see the funny side of their predicament.

Eventually, he calmed himself sufficiently to rasp,
‘You can't
not
know who has captured you. Where have you been living? The people who captured us are slavers – Aenglisc slavers.' The man struggled for breath. ‘We'll be dead or shipped a long way from here before the day's out.'

Dan would have known who the Aenglisc were, but she could no longer ask him. The realisation of that was like a stab wound – she almost buckled under it. She shied away from the pain of it.

Were the Aenglisc the same as the English? Why were they fighting Romans?

Ursula had fought Romans before. In Macsen's land, the land she had just left, they had been known as Ravens and there they had been her enemy. She would not jump to any conclusions about this new situation. This Roman might yet turn out to be her enemy, but he may also be able to help her.

‘We'd stand a better chance of escape if we could free my hands and feet. They've tied me up.'

It was inconceivable to Ursula that she would try to escape without trying to release her fellow captive – even if he were a Roman.

‘Do you have a buckle or anything sharp I could use to cut the rope?'

Ursula had seen rope bonds cut with miraculous ease in many a film. It had to be possible. Could a hundred Hollywood action movies be wrong?

‘You are wasting your time. These men are professionals. Once you're caught that's it.'

Never overly blessed with patience, Ursula's tone was shot with steel.

‘Do you have anything sharp or not?'

‘No. But …' There was a pause. ‘Lady, are you of gentle birth?'

Ursula was taken aback.

‘What do you mean? What has my birth to do with anything?'

‘Marcellus – the corpse beside me – he carried a knife strapped under his tunic. They may not have found it.'

Ursula swallowed hard. Did she want to grapple with a corpse or did she want to be an Aenglisc slave? She rested a moment, gathering her strength and her courage.

‘Tell me, Roman, what is your name?'

While the man, Ambrosius Larcius, spoke, she listened hard and thought of Kai, the warrior who had been almost like a father to her in the world she'd just left. He might have
boasted
that he could rob a corpse with both hands tied behind his back. She smiled a grim, private smile. The Combrogi did things like that. He would have found her squeamishness amusing. She could hear his amused laughter in her mind. Kai had respected a man's spirit as much as anyone, but he regarded an enemy's corpse as no more than a carcass.
Thinking of Kai brought tears to her eyes – eyes she thought had been drained of them – but it helped her to do what she had to do. Fumbling a little because everything was slippery with gore, she managed to get her cold fingers around the knife. She dropped it several times and cursed – Combrogi warriors' curses she rather hoped the man Ambrosius Larcius would not understand. If he did, he would certainly never again ask her if she was of ‘gentle birth'.

At last, she had the knife, a serviceable Roman knife, kept sharp as a good soldier's blade.

‘I have it!' Ursula told Larcius rather curtly. She liked the thought of giving a Roman a weapon about as much as she had liked the thought of recovering it from a dead man. Nerves made her voice sound more brutal than she had intended. ‘You must cut my bonds with it. Nick so much as a hair on my arm and you will join Marcellus. Believe me, I'm not of gentle birth and I would kill you.'

She did not think that was true. For all her experience as a warrior among the Combrogi, she had not become so brutalised that she could kill a wounded man in cold blood. Larcius believed her though, which was what mattered. She heard his sharp intake of breath. He was injured in the upper arm, a sword wound deep enough to disable but not to kill. He had not been bound, but was too shocked to pose much of a threat to the
Aenglisc. He was almost too shocked to be any use at all to Ursula. She kept the steel in her voice as she told him what to do. The rope was sturdy and Larcius was shaking, though whether from fever, fear, the shock, or the blood loss, Ursula did not know. She did not much care. It took a long time to cut through the rope and Ursula had to curb both her tongue and her temper but in the end she was free. The return of blood flow to her hands and feet was painful. She stamped her foot to relieve her cramp, and then heard something. Someone was coming. She grabbed the knife from Larcius and threw herself to the ground. Her movement was so sudden and the floor so hard she had to muffle a cry of pain. Outside, someone was talking loudly. A door opened and light flooded the room. Ursula was almost blinded as the tallest of her captors threw another bloodied body into the prison. She only saw the body's face for a moment but she would have known it anywhere, instantly. It was Bryn, Dan's Combrogi squire. The last time she had seen Bryn it had been to say goodbye as she left him in Macsen's land, before stepping into the Veil. How could he be here? What was going on?

Bedewyr gingerly approached the prone figure on the ground. The huge dog guarding the body was the size of a donkey and its slavering jaws were large enough to engulf a man's head.

‘Is he dead?' Petronax's voice was harsh.

‘I don't know. That hell-hound won't let me get close enough to find out.' Bedewyr sounded embarrassed. He did not like to admit to fear but then the beast threw back its head and howled like its wolfish antecedents. Bedewyr could feel each hair on his scalp lift in atavistic terror.

‘Have you no meat left? Throw the dog some food!' Petronax did not attempt to keep exasperation from his tone. Keeping his eyes on the beast, he groped in his saddlebag for the remains of their lunch. The meat was dried and far from tempting but Petronax was good with animals. He knew it would serve.

‘Here boy! Look! We mean no harm to your master.
We can help.' He kept his voice low, his tone comforting, and his movements steady. The wolf dog ceased his howling and took the gift of meat but its eyes never left Petronax's own.

The body, sprawled on the ground, was that of a tall, dark-haired youth. There was a wound at the back of his head, the side of his neck and jerkin were caked in the rusty brown of dried blood. Petronax extended his hand cautiously towards the body to feel for a pulse. The man lived.

‘It's all right, boy, we'll take him with us. Here, Bedewyr, lend me your strength.' The hound growled, but permitted him to lift the unconscious man, with Bedewyr's help, towards the spare mount. What Bedewyr lacked in initiative was more than balanced by his powerful physique and youthful strength.

The unconscious man was hardly smaller than Bedewyr himself, with the hard muscles of someone used to heavy labour or the butchery of war. He was clean-shaven and youthful – probably no more than sixteen or seventeen summers. His long dark hair was tied back in a braid – a soldier? Petronax looked at the youth's hands – they were as calloused as any swordsman's. He was a soldier; there could be no doubt. The proof lay in the scabbard of unusual intricacy and beauty that hung from his hip. It was of ancient design, gilded, in perfect condition and empty – a rich soldier
then, maybe a mercenary without his sword. Petronax helped Bedewyr secure the stranger as comfortably as possible to the horse and surreptitiously inspected him for further clues as to his origin. There were none. His clothes were nondescript – good-quality tunic, cloak and trews – though somewhat unusual in style. He had no visible tattoos, no crucifix and no amulet. Petronax's characteristic curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied.