A Fragile Peace Read online

  “Now, about this festival,” I turned to Milo. “I’d like you and Sintea to greet the crowds, and I think it would be good if you acted as starter to the big race each day… “ We discussed the format , then began wrangling about whether a pair of big horses, Frisians like my war horses could make a better team than smaller, more nimble beasts. “The little ponies might be pushed aside by the big fellows, but I suspect the big fellows won’t be quick enough in the turns. Let’s go and talk to the Sarmatians, they’ll know.”

  We walked out, attended by my three big dogs. The first were Bjarne and Tobes. These two were serious, vicious war dogs, trained to the hunt, to remain silent and obey hand signals and to cripple a man on command, but their young kennelmate was the bellowing hound Nuncius. He was a big red dog who joyfully alerted us to all who came near, hence his name: ‘The Announcer.’ By his very nature, he would never make a war dog, yet as a pup he was so endearing that he escaped the cull.

  This day, all three dogs for once ignored me but trailed Milo slavishly as we went to find my cavalrymen in the horse lines, grooming and tending their mounts. One was drawing off some of his horse’s blood, preparing to make a soup. He tapped a hollow tube into the jugular vein and let about a pint flow into a wooden bowl, grinning at us. “Good for the horse, blood letting,” he said. I nodded.

  “Tasty, too,” I said. He offered us a sample, but I refused, so his woman went into their wagon for something. I considered the canvas-topped vehicle with interest, considering that after two centuries or more since they had been brought to Britain by the legions these people of the Steppes still maintained their ancient disdain for living in houses.

  The wife brought out some fermented mare’s milk, a faintly alcoholic drink that is one of their food staples, and diffidently offered it to us. I drank some and smacked my lips to show appreciation, but Milo politely refused and we walked on to view where soldiers and slaves were setting up the chariot-racing circus.

  Chariots had been the key to our defeat of the Romans. We had persuaded Britain’s jarls to send their antique war waggons from all corners of the islands for use against the Caesar Constantius Chlorus and his troops. We had only just massed the chariots in time to bring them out as a surprise weapon, but the stratagem had worked and we successfully hurled them at the invading legions on the shingle of Dungeness.

  Those old chariots were essentially mobile platforms for missiles. The charioteer raced his paired horses in, then the warrior at his side used the chariot’s impetus to boost to fearsome levels the velocity with which he hurled his javelins or fired his arrows. Some acrobatic warriors would even run light-footed down the pole between the horses to stab down at the enemy. Often the spearman would leap off to fight on foot while the charioteer withdrew a short distance, ready to race his combatant to safety if needed.

  Because the horses available to our forebears were not large, and could not pull the heavy carriages the Romans used in their track racing, the British fighting chariots had to be light, so were fashioned from wickerwork. They also had to provide a stable platform for the archer-warrior. This they achieved by suspending the fighting deck on rawhide straps from hooped willow branches, which acted as shock absorbers.

  But the light weight that gave the chariots their prized nimbleness and had been key to Boadicea’s butchery of the North Spanish legion two centuries before meant they were fragile, and they could not be used in rough or marshy terrain. They had enjoyed a short period as effective weapons but were superseded by cavalry archers, a force more flexible and less likely to break down. My own Sarmatians were skilled horse archers, and used a proven tactic of galloping close, then turning their horse to fire from that elevated platform, over his hindquarters.

  The chariots might not be the war waggons they once were, but as an entertainment, chariot racing was highly prized. At Chester, we did it the Roman way, on what the men called Car the Bear’s Circus, or more properly, the Circus of Caros, in a bend of the River Dee. The racecourse whose name was a tribute to my Latin name Carausius, was a long, divided rectangle, 400 paces by 200, rounded at its ends into semicircles. The ground was soft turf, which eased some of the pain of the competitors’ frequent falls.

  Races began from traps at the north end when a rope was dropped and the dozen or so chariots fought for position to be first around the stone pillars that marked each end. Rounding the pillar was no guarantee of safety, though. The two straightaways were separated by a stone wall ‘spine’ and the charioteers were expert at forcing their opponents into it, smashing their wheels and their hopes of victory. This, they called ‘shipwreck,’ and drivers and horses were not infrequently killed.

  The spectators watched the carnage from slopes alongside the gardens which ran under the red sandstone walls of the fortress. Some simply tied up their boats and ships on the riverbank and watched from the comfort of their own floating stands.

  For the week of the festival, sailors skilled at handling rigging and canvas had erected awnings to shelter the crowds from rain showers or the summer sun, and stalls selling food, drink, the colours of the racing teams or any kind of merchandise from jewellery to livestock popped up like mushrooms under their welcome protection. The area was thronged, and everywhere, there were men with leather bags of coin willing to accept wagers on the races at odds their slaves recorded.

  Humans were the same everywhere, I mused. The crowds were all wearing the colours of their favourites, just as in Rome, where I’d seen how people dedicated themselves to one or other of the factions, regardless of who the chariot drivers were. Four major racing clubs were dominant and each had its theme. The Greens were dedicated to verdant Spring, the Reds to Mars, the Blues to the heavenly skies and the Whites to the Zephyr of the west wind. Other, lesser teams sported colours such as purple or gold, and many of the factions adopted distinctive styles of clothing or hair. The young men who supported the Greens, for example, wore Persian-style moustaches or beards, the Reds dashingly wore tunics with wide sleeves and the Greens favoured the shaved heads and drooping, long moustaches of the Huns and Vandals.

  We had our own history of chariot racing in Britain, and enough tradition had come with the legions that rival groups had established themselves and sponsors eager for political popularity and clout had come forward. Some even imported skilled drivers from Gaul or Greece, as the public often saw omens in which colour triumphed at the races. Apart from paying for horses and riders, these would-be office holders also underwrote the trainers, veterinary surgeons, grooms, guards, saddlers and sundry attendants needed for a successful faction.

  I didn’t care to be put at risk of ill omens, so did not associate myself publicly with one colour or another – too much opportunity for harmful, negative inferences to be drawn from a wrecked chariot, I thought. For me, I preferred the blood sport of the arena, but this week was about a celebration of Britain and its future ruler and it would not do to have men hack each other to death to greet the future.

  Grabelius was at my side, an armful of scrolls clutched to his chest. “We’re having some horse races first,” he said, “with acrobatic jockeys who can ride two horses at once while fighting each other. They’ll also do tests, like picking up a piece of cloth from the ground at the full gallop, spearing a tent peg with a lance, lying on their horses at full stride, jumping over hurdles, that kind of thing. The crowd likes it, and it’s a fine warm-up for the chariot races, which are the big attraction.”

  “What have you planned there?” I asked.

  Grabelius grimaced. “Plenty, lord,” he said. “There will be about a score of races each day, two and four-horse teams, we’ll have parades of our heavy cavalry and some demonstrations of their skills, including a cavalry charge or two directly at the spectators. I just hope the boys can pull up the Frisians in time,” he added.

  I grinned. “We’ll also parade Milo and Sintea around the circus each day, to throw donatives to the crowd. I’ve arranged for iubilatores to whip up the cr
owd with some joyful screaming when that happens,” he said. “And, one other thing: Milo wants to compete as a driver. Will that please you?”

  The request was not unexpected. I knew his mother was determinedly set against it, but the boy was 17, a married man and a future king. “He should do it,” I said. “Just make sure he is in the two-horse chariot races, not the four.” That, I hoped, would preserve him from the worst of the shipwrecks. I didn’t want my heir killed for the amusement of the mob. And, if he won, his popularity would soar. “See to it that he gets the best horses,” I added. Grabelius nodded. He’d already have had that organised, I knew, but…

  IV - Blood Tide

  The smith had ridden the half day’s journey from the straits of Mona, the sacred island where the Druids had been slaughtered by the Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus, and arrived at Myrddin’s stone house at the head of the pass. His pack horse was loaded with the thin beaten bronze sheets the sorcerer had commanded.

  Myrddin was warned of the man’s approach and came from his vegetable garden to meet him. He looked at the metal sheets and wasted no time. “I want these shaped like a shallow dish,” he said, showing the smith a sketch he’d made. “They must be more than an arm’s span wide, curved to a hand’s depth, and I want them burnished like mirrors.” The sorcerer took one of the sheets and tested it, bending it back and forth in his hands. The metal gave off a dull roar like thunder and Myrddin’s hooded eyes widened. He shook the metal sheet, holding it by one end and the thunder echoed again. The smith nodded, dully. “They’ll do that,” he said uninterestedly. The magician’s agile mind was busily assessing possibilities. Creating your own thunder could be a very useful thing, he thought. He put the idea aside for now.

  “Make me six of these dishes,” he instructed, jabbing at the sketch, “and make me a seventh that is twice the size. Also, make stands for each that will allow me to adjust them.” To himself, the magician thought: “If I position them accurately, I can gather Sol’s rays with the six smaller ones and reflect them onto the larger to use it as a burning glass.” Aloud, he told the smith: ”I will send a slave with more silver in a month’s time. Have all of them ready. I’ll keep two of these sheets here.”

  That night, the moon rose and turned an ominous rust-red, staying so for more than an hour. The sorcerer could conceive no reason for the augury, if augury it was, and he half-dismissed it, although he recalled that once, after such a blood moon, there had been a summer drought and the cops had failed. He pondered the phenomenon, wondering if his manufactured thunder had somehow caused it, then merely filed it away in his mind. The gods would send more warnings if needed. They would indicate what were their wishes. He turned his thoughts back to making a burning mirror.

  He was eager to test his idea, and only two weeks later, ahead of the time he had suggested, he and two slaves rode into Menai to visit the smith and see how far he had come with the bronze mirrors. As the sorcerer arrived in the settlement, he looked across the strait at the isle of Mona and his face darkened. He could not forget what he knew, for the events of two and half centuries before still resonated with followers of the old religion.

  The brutal Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus had brought his armoured cohorts to slaughter the Druids and had a well-conceived plan to overcome the obstacle of the straits. He had built flat-bottomed barges to carry the foot soldiers across the treacherous channel while the mounted troops, mostly archers, used inflated skins as flotation aids, and swam with their horses.

  “We were waiting for them,” muttered Myrddin, seeing in his mind’s eye the array of British warriors who had gathered along the shore all those years ago. In the necromancer’s vision, he also saw the black-cloaked, tangle-haired women who ran screaming imprecations and waving burning torches towards the incoming Romans. The legionaries paused uncertain on the gravel beach, then under the hard shouts of their general and his officers not to be frightened of a group of dirty, mad women, lined up in sawtooth formation and tramped forward behind their big bronze shields.

  As always, the armoured and disciplined legions crushed their opponents. The Britons barely withstood even the initial shower of heavy javelins and war darts before the shield wall was battering them backwards and the stabbing points of the gladius swords were killing the half-naked warriors.

  “They even burned the sacred groves,” Myrddin told himself as he remembered the ancient chants of the bards. “They slaughtered our Druids, enslaved our warriors and our women and destroyed the haven of our gods. We shall never forgive them that.” His eyes, which could hold the cruelty of the gaze of a hawk, hardened.

  “We shall never forgive, nor forget,” he repeated. He turned his gaze away from the dark, low horizon and kicked his mule’s ribs, urging the beast towards the smithy. The sun came from behind clouds, and something caught the sorcerer’s eye. The tidepools below him were blood-red. A shiver ran down the magician’s spine and he turned his beast’s head towards the shore to investigate. More blood, first shining on the land, and now on the sea, he thought.

  Soon, he saw that the phenomenon was in the water itself, carried on the incoming tide, an ominous red tide that flowed down the straits where the Druids had been slaughtered. It came from dense clouds of something floating just below the surface of the water, some sea-bloom that he had never seen before. He walked down the shingle to taste the water. Salt, not blood. Along the beach at the high tide mark were dead birds and fish and even a seal pup, its body unmarked and unmolested by the raucous gulls, of which there seemed, his subconscious mind noted, far fewer than usual.

  He walked over to examine the dead seal. Its flipper seemed to point meaningfully to the west, beyond Mona. Several bedraggled herring gulls dead lay on the sand, looking as if they were in formation flying east, away from the threat the seal was indicating. The sorcerer pulled his cloak a little tighter and remounted his mule. These omens, the blood-red moon and her acolyte red tide and the warnings in the bodies of creatures of the sea god Mannan mac Lir needed to be interpreted and their message relayed to Arthur, urgently. “Man is standing alone,” he murmured. “This is a time of a decline of the old gods and if we do not act on their warnings of disaster to come, the Christian god will rise and supplant them.”

  Myrddin, shaken at the clarity of the warnings, abandoned his visit to the smith, instead ordering the slaves to collect the bronze mirrors, to pack them carefully and to bring them to his house. He himself turned his mount’s head west for Ty Ffynnon, his viewing chamber and a rendezvous with the supernatural.

  Two nights later were preparations complete. He had taken a draught made from forest mushrooms, gazed into his viewing bowl and made his mind open to the gods’ messages. Then the sorcerer lay down to dream a vision of death. The green fields and hills of Britain were strewn with corpses, and as Myrddin swooped low like a hawk to view them, he saw they were blistered and blackened as if scorched by contact with the wings of the Furies. He knew this was a clear directive from the gods, but what was he to do? Were they saying it was inevitable, that the pale horse of death would cross the land, or was this some warning of what might be unless…? He had to find out.

  The next night, Myrddin braced himself. He had dreamed of corpses, now he would visit the dead. Necromancy was always difficult and very dangerous, but he had prepared carefully and had done this before. The air in the chamber was cool and the water surface in the viewing bowl seemed to glow as it reflected the candles’ light. The sorcerer had taken another draught of an infusion of dried woodland mushrooms and lit one of the candles he had calibrated to measure how much time he was away from the physical world. He usually surfaced from his drug-induced, dreamlike viewings with a raging thirst and no knowledge of how many hours, or even days he had been unaware of his surroundings. He hoped to make that measurement with a beeswax candle, grasping just another grain of knowledge that might lead to more understanding.

  He felt the familiar buzzing as the drugs took effect a
nd leaned over the dark surface of the water bowl that would yield the images he sought. He experienced the tremble of fear that was also usual when he visited the land of the dead. Was this the time that Kimro, Norse keeper of the path between worlds, who led the souls of the dead to their eternal homes, was this the time she would not lead him back to the world of sunlight, birdsong and blossoms?

  The water surface seemed to swirl before his stare, small explosions of light streaked across his vision and a formless shadow began to take shape, making a file of humans that stretched away from him.

  Myrddin sensed a reassuring hand at his shoulder, the touch of Kimro to tell him he was safe from the hounds of hell that guarded the gate, and the line of figures before him came slowly into focus.

  First stood Caratacus, the king who had defied Rome’s legions and faced down his enemies in their own hall while wearing the shackles of a condemned man. Myrddin took in the dead king’s long moustaches and fair hair, pallid against the ashen colour of his face, glanced at the familiar great badge of office, an amber and silver clasp at the shoulder of his cloak, then raised his eyes to the long column of spectres lined behind the warrior king.

  They were all as the necromancer had seen them before. First behind Caratacus was Britain’s greatest queen, red-maned Boadicea, whose spearmen had wetted their blades with the blood of 70,000 Romans in the costliest rebellion that Rome had ever known. At her shoulder stood the mythic warrior Brutus Darian Las, called Greenshield, behind him was ranked Cyllin from the western mountains, the Caledonian Calgacus and the transvallum chieftains Oengus and Albanac.

  From the time when Gaius Julius Caesar waded ashore at Deal came Cunobelinus who rallied the tribes against the general who returned to seize Rome, and behind him stood two more of those who tried to turn back Caesar’s armoured ranks: Cogidunus of the Iceni and Boadicea’s betrayed husband King Pratsutagas.