The King's Cavalry Read online

  Myrddin had experimented with this ‘baozho’ of the Han people in hopes of making a flying chair, but all he had really found was that certain salts gave off different colours when the exploding tubes rocketed across the paddock outside his home. Guinevia had gleaned the results of his tests, written them down and given me a copy, which I had kept against the day I needed to scare enemy cavalry horses.

  This day, beside the Tiber, I planned something slightly different, and signalled “Fire!” to our ballistae operators, who applied burning tapers to the incendiaries. Then I waved my great sword Exalter high to send our cavalry lines forward at the trot, and we all rode blindly into the fog bank we had created. It went murderously better than I could have hoped.

  Maxentius’ men, eager for loot and glory, wrongly guessed we were retreating under cover of the smoke, and broke their shield wall to run forward. As they did, out of the bank of white fog came flaming missiles of rocketing, exploding flame. It was, they felt, another attack and signal from the gods like yesterday’s terrifying fireball from heaven.

  And, right behind that maelstrom of white smoke and exploding red flame came a thundering solid rank of demon-black horses with ghost faces, ridden by glowing-visaged devils behind red and white shields, all of us swinging heavy weaponry and galloping in unearthly silence out of a void of white.

  No general could expect his men to stand against demons from Hades, and Maxentius’ men were no exception. Most threw down their weapons and knelt in abject surrender. Some turned to flee and we spectral demons of the Wild Ride hacked and thrust and trampled bloody ruin on them. I was there, abandoning my heavy lance to the wretch spitted on it, now it was Exalter swinging effortlessly, hot blood slick to the shoulder, not even a mark on my shield from unresisting Romans.

  The bloodlust was swamping me, my ears were roaring, the world had slowed and I was godlike. Powerful, immortal, swift. Crunching blows, the wet flap of a scalp sliced open, the gaping mouth of a deep cut into a fleeing man’s neck. I heard my cavalry commander Celvinius howling like a mad wolf as he hacked and thrust through the enemy ranks. The butchery was cruel as we trampled panicked men underfoot, and slashed and sliced into their unguarded heads and shoulders and backs.

  The mob, because the once-proud Roman legions had turned into a stricken mob, fought each other to squeeze onto the pontoon bridge of boats, but it was a logjam of terrified humanity pursued by mounted demons from hell. On our left wing, it was a rout, a slaughter, and the Tiber ran streaked with the blood of Rome’s sons.

  On our right, the picture was different. Maxentius’ prateorian guard fought stubbornly to hold a perimeter around the end of the part-repaired stone bridge and their left flank infantry, which had been pushing our forces back began retreating across it in fair order. We were out of the smoke now, and the breeze had freshened, dispersing the worst of it, but we still drove the enemy’s flank backwards towards the pontoon bridge until the drawbridge on it collapsed under their weight and cut off that retreat.

  Now, I swung my riders to the right, and we hammered into the side of the praetorians’ perimeter. They had no hope. Too many of their allies were trying to push through their shield wall to get to the narrow wooden planks of the repaired stone bridge; the intruders were splitting their armoured defences apart. And then the crushing weight of the heavy British cavalry fell onto them.

  Corvus was rearing, slashing with his huge hoofs at the faces of the soldiers before us, Exalter was swinging and thrusting seemingly of his own accord, chopping and clearing a swathe like a reaper in a hayfield, and the praetorians, pride of the empire, broke and ran.

  But 500 British cavalry were on their flank, and we cut them off from the broken bridge. Many died where they were trapped, on the north bank of Rome’s river. I glimpsed Maxentius himself, on his horse, looming above the melee and pushing towards the Tiber’s bank. Later, we learned that he was thrown from his mount and drowned in the river, pulled under by the weight of his armour.

  Dusk was now falling, our men looked like butchers, splattered with blood from wrist to shoulder, and the bonfires that had provided the screening smoke lit the shambles that was the killing field at the Milvian Bridge. Platoons of Constantine’s men were hacking the heads off corpses. They’d take them as prizes to be displayed in the city, where they’d be paraded, then thrown into open pits for dogs to fight over. Sometimes, I thought, their relatives would see the heads of their loved ones among these gruesome trophies, and the Romans called us barbarians?

  Over there, Maxentius’ sullen soldiers were being herded at spearpoint, and Constantine was picking his horse’s way through the tidelines of dead that showed where the shield walls had once stood.

  “Your Frisians and your Sarmatians under Celvinius turned the battle,” he said generously. “And the fire dragon magic was an inspiration.” I didn’t say that I had used Myrddin’s explosive sorcery once before, on the banks of a northern river, with some decidedly risky results. There are some things you do not admit, even to an emperor. Anyway, I was hungry, tired and sticky with the blood of others, my face glowed luminously, and I wanted to cleanse myself.

  “Lord,” I said, “the gods be thanked.”

  And I rode to find my tent, unaware as yet that my pagan troops and pagan magic had cleared the way for the Christians to defeat my gods and take over the world.

  XXI - Compensate

  We fished Maxentius’ body out of the Tiber – it was difficult to retrieve as his heavy parade armour had caused him to sink deep into the mud - and decapitated it. Then we paraded the severed head with hundreds of others through the streets of Rome in a triumphal procession that attracted cheering crowds. Constantine was popular, he threw out donatives of gold and silver from Maxentius’ pay chests, and he cemented the people’s feelings for him by standing on the steps of the Senate house and declaring Christianity the state religion, although I noted that he also made a less-public sacrifice of two white bulls at the temple of Jupiter.

  The emperor announced amnesty for Maxentius’ former supporters and sent his dead rival’s head to Africa, where it was sent through the streets of Carthage as proof of his defeat and as an unsubtle hint to discourage further hostilities, which aim it accomplished.

  Constantine quietly disbanded the surviving praetorians and liquidated their senior officers, a shrewd move to prevent the rise of another barracks emperor. In their place, with a pleasant compliment to the British cavalry and our decisive action at the bridge battle, he appointed a number of horse units to his personal guard. I noted that they carried reflex compound bows of bone and sinew, almost exactly like those of the British Sarmatians whose forefathers came from the Steppes.

  “Unusual,” I murmured.

  “Those things can kill at 200 paces,” he said proudly.

  “You’ll have your men shaping their skulls with bound planks next, Lord,” I said.

  “They’ll be Roman Huns.” He laughed. “If I could have 10,000 disciplined Hunnic cavalry, I could rule the world.” I shook my head.

  “Just 500 British are enough,” I boasted, and he grinned.

  “Plus the occasional fireball from the gods,” he said. That too, I thought. What had it meant?

  The fireball had obliterated several small settlements and created a deep crater plus a scattering of smaller ones around it. It had certainly inspired our men to victory and that was helping the rise of Christianity. My pagan self had inadvertently acted against our gods’ interests. Slowly, the realisation grew in me. I had pushed the gods further away from Britain. How could I possibly compensate? I groaned aloud. I had to get back to my kingdom and put matters right.

  XXII - Search

  Myrddin and Guinevia had a disastrously slow trip from Eboracum. Twice, they had broken carriage wheels on the rugged gritstone approaches to the Pennine spine of Britain, delaying them for days. Then a late autumn storm blew in and swamped the land, forcing them to wait until the near-impassable flooded tracks had dried
sufficiently for wheeled transport.

  Next, Myrddin contracted a fever with an attendant high temperature, vomiting and gastric distress and Guinevia, alarmed, opted to lodge where they were, at a moorland sheep farmer’s long house. The pagan priestess was forced to send back most of their escort because there was no accommodation for them and, mindful of her kidnap, she confined everybody, including the shepherd and his family to the house and bothies to prevent word of their presence from spreading.

  It took the sorcerer a fortnight to recover sufficiently to be able to travel again, and Guinevia heaved a sigh of relief when she could send back one of the two remaining guards to bring the others. Even that simple task took time. He lost his way, was delayed and finally blundered across his comrades after wasting more time, and then the party had to make the tiresome, sleet-chilled moorland trek all over again.

  Myrddin, at the sheep farmer’s home, was alert and bright-eyed, if weak, and was spooning mutton broth into his mouth when he said casually: “There was a huge battle in Rome a week or two ago, I saw it.” Guinevia looked up from her lettering.

  “What battle?” she asked, more sharply than she meant.

  “Arthur won a great victory for the emperor, I told you, I saw it,” the sorcerer said testily. Guinevia put down her pen.

  “Tell me about it,” she said quietly.

  “Oh,” said Myrddin airily, “all the usual nonsense of a battle, men and horses dying, confusion and blood everywhere. The ravens will be feasting now. They always go for the dead men’s eyes first, you know, I’ve seen it a number of times.”

  “Is Arthur safe?” Guinevia demanded, mentally chiding herself for not sending out her mind to view matters. She had overlooked the activities of her son Milo in remote Pictland from time to time, but with caring for Myrddin and being preoccupied with this search for the torc… “Is Arthur safe now?” she repeated.

  “Oh, I’m sure he is fine,” said Myrddin, “I saw him with that emperor fellow, Constantine. He had blood splashed all over him, but he seemed unwounded for a change. I’d say they had just finished a battle, and I am fairly sure they were at Rome, or near the place. It was an important vision, I knew that. Look, is there any more of this rather good mutton?”

  Guinevia rapped on the table and the scared-looking wife of the shepherd scurried in. “Give him more broth,” she said curtly, “and the minute you hear anything about the rest of our escort, tell me.”

  Two days later, the soldiers straggled in, weatherbeaten, wet and cold, leading fresh carriage horses. Guinevia allowed them a night’s rest, and ordered the troop to be ready for a dawn start. She bought sheepskins from the shepherd and piled them on Myrddin in the carriage to protect him against the November chill. For herself, wrapped in her hooded cloak of fine wool, nothing mattered except ending this journey. She sat anxiously looking through a gap in the raeda’s leather curtains for hours as it descended the frosty hills and rumbled over the frozen plain towards Chester. Three times, the blood-red sun rose low and cheerless at their backs, and finally, late in the third afternoon, she saw their destination and sighed with relief.

  Myrddin was sleeping as the carriage rolled under the red sandstone arch of the east gate and Guinevia slipped quietly out to give her maids instructions about caring for the exhausted sorcerer. Then she threw a palla cloak around her shoulders, pulled up the warm hood and went to look.

  Her mind jangled with the prophecy: “The son of no father and a king who is false to his god will recover a Druid’s treasure to mollify Britain’s deities. Seek a farmer’s bull in his floor.”

  “Well,” she thought, “the son of no father is Myrddin all right, and if Arthur has won a great battle for the Christians, that can’t be good for Mithras and the rest. Arthur has to placate Mithras by finding the Druid’s treasure. I can do that for him.” She called for a bodyguard to accompany her, and set out to walk the old Roman walls, looking for an arrow slit and a grating.

  *

  Far to the north, Bishop Candless was also seeking treasure. The self-appointed cleric was back in his Pictish clan’s territory at Dunpelder, a hilltop fortress near Edyn’s Burh where he had safely delivered some splintered fragments of the True Cross and three long iron nails reputedly used in the Crucifixion of the Jesus god.

  He had discreetly put away the painted banner whose miraculous face of Christ had washed off in the rain just before the battle at Alesia. “It sairved its purpose and inspired the troops,” he had growled to his bodyguard captain, Bilic. “By a miracle, the face went away once its work was done.”

  Now, from the altar of his new church, which stood close to the growing pile of a cathedral that would house the relics, he delivered another message. “The saint Cyriacus led the Empress Helena of Rome to the sanctuary in holy Jerusalem where these sacred objects were secretly kept,” Candless intoned almost weekly to his flock. “And the Empress entrusted our humble selves to be guardians of them. We must spread the word of their powers, for they will wash away sins and allow the faithful a place in heaven.”

  As the most significant religious icons on the northern shores of Europe, they would also bring in thousands of pilgrims, the bishop reckoned, creating great wealth and power for his church. Life was good, and he had plans for a secret cellar under the cathedral that would act as his treasury.

  The cellar would double as a private temple to Mithras, so he planned it to have raised platforms, a water supply and a drain, as well as ramp access so that a sacrificial animal could be led down into the place, as well as one or two other necessary additions. “The old gods are not powerless,” he muttered to Bilic, who carried on his bicep a tattoo of the Phrygian cap symbol of Mithras, “even if these Christians think they’re taking over.”

  At the exact time Candless was planning his temple to maintain his bonds with Mithras, Guinevia was seeking the magical torc that could bring back Mithras and the other gods. She had walked the walls of Chester over and over, and had located a dozen arrow slits that seemed to match the one pictured in Agricola’s mosaic. The requirements seemed simple: the arrow slit should be keyhole shaped, and be on the eastern wall, so the rising sun would shine through it. There should be space inside the wall where a gridded well or cellar entrance should be, ruling out many more slits where the wall was shadowed by a building. But the sorceress could not make the match.

  After several days’ search, she did what she did best: she went to the castrum library, where supply records, personnel lists, orders from Rome and a whole catalogue of scrolls was stored. “Find me a plan of the old castrum from the days of Agricola,” she told the clerks. “And hurry. It is important.”

  The next afternoon, a slave brought a dusty, crackling scroll to the sorceress. “My master sends his apologies for the delay, it was difficult to find, but this, lady,” he said, “seems to be the original scheme of the fortress.” Guinevia nodded her thanks and unrolled the map. She scanned the eastern ramparts, there was the gate, there was a watch tower she knew from her search. What was inside the wall?

  A small letter, an ‘f’, was inscribed to the south of the tower. Guinevia’s eyes scoured the map for an explanation. There was none, but other solitary ‘f’ markings were dotted seemingly at random in other places. She looked again at the tower and its nearby ‘f’ on the east wall. Nothing remarkable, there were 22 such towers about 60 paces apart, all around the walls. “Ogmia, goddess of powerful words,” she pleaded, “help me.”

  The noun burst in Guinevia’s mind. “Fons.”

  She physically started. “A spring!” she said aloud. Suddenly the thin line with ‘aq’ written alongside that ran straight eastwards for about a mile meant something. It was an aqueduct from a sacred well, chief source of the camp’s water. But, she reasoned, a military camp needed a more protected water supply, hence the water wells, springs or fountains marked inside the walls. The Romans had dug their own emergency wells as an addition to the less-defensible main supply.

  Gu
inevia hurried out, calling for a maid, and with the dusty scroll in hand, went quickly to the eastern wall. She counted off the guard towers, marked the arrow slits and searched the view inside the walls. There was no well there, but there was the blank wall of a brick and tile building. “Guard!” she summoned a sentry. “What building is that?”

  “Officers’ club, lady,” he said briefly.

  “It looks large,” she said.

  “It is, lady,” agreed the sentry. “They have an exercise hall, three or four thermae bathing halls, hot and cold plunge baths, even a hypocaust to keep their feet warm. It’s for officers only.” Guinevia glanced at him, hearing the note of envy.

  “It seems very big,” she said.

  “It’s 85 paces per side,” said the sentry. “I know. I get guard duty there sometimes.”

  “Thank you.” She turned away.

  So, Guinevia mused, it looked like Agricola had chosen to hide the sacred treasure down a well, but he picked the wrong spot. Someone had built a vast baths on top of it. It could be under water or under the fires of the hypocaust…what other jokes do the Fates have in store, she wondered?

  XXIII - Torc

  It was good to be on a ship again, especially one that was scudding along before a brisk wind. Sometimes I wished I’d stayed as a pirate-hunting admiral and left the land-soldiering to someone else. At the very least, as a sailor I didn’t have far to march on my mutilated foot, I thought sardonically. Plus, my monkey mind reminded me, sailors don’t have to dig a marching fort every afternoon, and sleep in a decent bed most nights.

  A lookout interrupted my self-conversation, and I replayed his shout mentally to hear what he’d said: “A sail, a sail!” I began to sweep the horizon, following the direction off the steerboard bow in which the fellow was pointing, and caught a glimpse of blue canvas among the grey-green waves. We were through the Gates of Hercules, heading north towards Gaul along the Astorian coast. It was probably still a bit far south for pirates, but the blue told me it was likely a Roman warship. A small number of them were in pirate hands now, but we had no fear, ours was a genuine warship in which I was travelling at Constantine’s order.