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  He took a deep draught of watered red wine, shuddered at the bitterness of the thin vintage, and nodded to the image of Antenociticus. “Aye,” he said. “You, hinny, should have had more about you.” Candless had mixed feelings about being a Christian bishop.

  The old ways and the old gods he felt were best but after he had witnessed the conquest of his Damnoni clansmen and the death of his king Alpin, struck by a missile from a British ballista at the siege of Edyn’s Burh, he had considered it wise to leave the lowlands of the Pict kingdom. If he did not, he knew, he would join the shuffling, chained coffle of slaves headed south from the land sometimes called Alba. He would be bound for a life labouring on roads and bridges under new masters around the distant, sunlit sea the Romans claimed as their own.

  Instead, the warrior from the misty Forth had used his wits and his evasive skills, dodged the slave catchers and happened across an unwary monk with a mule, food and, best of all, a churchman’s caped habit. Candless took the lot, announced himself to those he later met as an ecclesiastic and began a new life of respect, donations and private lessons in granting indulgences to pretty females.

  Scripture says an ending to all good things must be, and Candless’ reversion to his old raiding life brought him to grief. He found himself as a captive escorted into the emperor Arthur’s military camp at Chester, was noted as useful by his captors and began a novel chapter of his adventures as an evangelist for his new lord. Glib-tongued and armed with a handful of fake ‘true nails of the Holy Cross’ and an inspiring sermon to persuade military recruits to follow the king, he thrived.

  This night, he sat in an arched stone hall at the head of a table groaning with stolen victuals. His followers were eating, drinking and noisily boasting of their day’s accomplishments. The dark-haired young lovely in the fine wool shift who sat alongside the bishop was sipping her watered wine and stroking his thigh. “Have some beef, my pet,” she urged him. “I know you’ll like it, or my name’s not Tiaba.”

  Candless shook his head, silent and pensive. “Try the eels,” she urged, “they’re delicious.” The bishop grunted, uninterested. “Try this pudding, just a morsel.” He ignored her. The bishop was pondering his concerns, and they were considerable. He had been a captive of the emperor Arthur, but had been given a chance at redemption. His duty was to raise an army of Jesus followers to aid the imperator against the Romans as well as against the waves of Saxons who were crashing against Britain’s shores.

  Candless had used a handful of bloodied nails taken from crucifixion victims – they were prized as amulets – and advertised them to the gullible as the nails from the One True Cross. The warrior bishop had made a sad error, however.

  He had promoted his crusade against the Romans as God’s will and vengeance against those heathens from Italia who oppressed Christians. The ploy had worked, and Candless had raised a considerable force of zealots eager to defend their faith. It went wrong when the Romans had unexpectedly withdrawn from Britain to face a larger threat to their empire. The Christian army Candless had so carefully raised, and that Arthur had trained and equipped, had melted away when the Romans departed, as they saw no need to battle invading Saxons whom they felt held no threat to their religion.

  The loss of the Christians left Arthur short-handed, and the imperator, Candless reflected gloomily, was not a man one wished to disappoint. The big brutal fellow had been a hardened professional soldier since his teenage years, seemed to have no finer emotions except for his dog, and certainly had no compunction about killing in cold blood if it was either expedient or could be an example to encourage others.

  Candless, mindful of his broken promises, had been extremely wary of retribution after the Jesus followers reneged, and had scrambled to pull together a Pictish force consisting of his old comrades in arms and a band of loot-seeking mercenaries. These he had led to the banks of the River Humber, where Arthur had trapped the latest Saxon invaders, and Candless’ men had arrived in time to assist in the slaughter.

  It was probably just sufficient to earn him a reprieve from Arthur’s displeasure, but the bishop was canny enough to know that the imperator would still want a Christian army raised, and was mindful that Arthur had not become more merciful in success. He had not only ordered most of the Saxon captives butchered because it would be inconvenient to keep them as prisoners, but had executed their king himself.

  “He even beheaded a Caesar,” the bishop marvelled aloud to the uncomprehending girl alongside him. “The man’s mad, or truly thinks he can defy all of Rome and her legions. Now he wants to take on the Romans on their own ground, and I’ll have to supply him with a Christian army.

  “I don’t think four iron nails are going to inspire enough joy for Jesus,” he muttered, as the girl stroked his leg. “Aye, it was so much easier when we had all the old gods,” he said, glancing up at the small stone statue of Antenociticus that occupied a niche in the wall. “Local gods for local people, eh? The old gods are best.”

  Chapter IV - Firedrake

  At that moment in northern Wales, the sorcerer Myrddin was saying much the same thing. Since he had enjoyed a long visit from a group of Assyrian and Afri mystics who had come to confer on how to placate the gods who had shaken their fabled city of Nineveh to dusty rubble, Myrddin had been experimenting with some of the knowledge they gave him.

  He had appreciated the sorcerers’ astrological insights into star patterns and readings, of knowing when the sun would be eaten by the moon and when it was best for crops to be planted or sacrifices made.

  But the knowledge that most intrigued the tall, hawk-nosed wizard had been brought by spies from beyond the rammed-earth wall that separated the lands of the imperial Qin dynasty from the territory of the round-eyed foreign devils. It was a secret the Qinese had kept to themselves for several hundreds of years, and it was the technique called ‘exploding bamboo’.

  In their language that was ‘baozhu’ and the result was used to scare away demons and evil spirits. The Assyrians had learned of it from an acolyte refugee, and although they had themselves used it only in a limited way, they brought the formula to Myrddin as part of their information exchange. The Qinese priests, they told him, combined salt petre, sulphur and charcoal in an exact mix, packed it into hollow bamboo canes and ignited the highly-combustible ‘fire dragons’ they created into a shower of sparks and explosions.

  Myrddin had been quick to recognise the mix as a propellant that could realize his long-held dream of making a flying chair, and after the departure of the Assyrians, he had shattered the calm of the sacred Welsh mountain Yr Wyddfa with booming experiments.

  So far, he had only succeeded in setting fire to several chairs, and blowing one of them into fragments, but he had also employed the materials as a war machine for Arthur, creating panic and disarray in the Saxons’ battle ranks at the Humber by sending pyrotechnic firedrakes whooshing and sparking at the terrified invaders.

  Now, Myrddin was neglecting everything, even his much-loved vegetable garden in the compound of his mountain home, to devote time to some more smoky, noisy experiments.

  “You’ll set yourself on fire again,” his gardener Pattia scolded him. A small, bustling woman who had been enslaved when her rebellious Parisi tribe were captured by Arthur, she had been freed by Myrddin after her alertness had saved him from raiders. She pointed to the charred sleeve of his grey scholar’s robe and raised a significant eyebrow as she stared at the blackened remains of his burned-off brows.

  The fearful sorcerer, whose power could crackle from his crystal-blue eyes and freeze the blood of kings, nodded humbly. He might be the offspring of a king’s daughter and an incubus, the son of no father deliberately sired to restore the ancient gods’ hold on Britain, but he often ceded control to his tiny, strong-willed gardener.

  “Go and be about your business, woman,” he said gruffly, “and stop stealing my asparagus.” But, Pattia noted, he obediently turned away from his mixtures and bamboo canes an
d went inside to his viewing chamber, astrological charts and scrolls. She smiled secretly, and moved on.

  Chapter V - Spies

  Destroying the enemy’s ability to return to Britain seemed to me to be the priority. If we could strand Maximian on the continental mainland, we could regroup and recruit against the day he planned to return.

  I needed information from the spy network that my treacherous aide Allectus had established. That man had sold me to my enemies and had paid for it when his heart was torn from his body by my Druid witch lover, but his failings did not extend to the quality of the information I received from inside the empire of Rome. I could discover what my enemies were doing by asking my spies, and I also, through Guinevia my lover, had a supernatural means of seeing their actions. For now, the human eyes would suffice.

  Aides sent out my commands, and within ten days or so I had a picture of Maximian’s activities in the land of the Belgae. Rome’s northernmost settlement, Forum Hadriani, was between the great rivers Rhine and Meuse, which were linked by a canal. I knew the place well, as I had been taken there as a boy escaping slavers, and had served my apprenticeship as a sailor on those rivers. The city was connected by canal to both vast waterways close to where they emptied into the German Sea. It was a bustling frontier town and military garrison, the last outpost before troops went to face the swarming tribes across the Rhine, and it was the site of the Romans’ chief shipyard in the northern colonia. What my spies reported confirmed my fears. The Romans were building invasion barges. I sent an aide to ask Guinevia to come to my chamber.

  The daughter of a Pictish chieftain, Guinevia was a Druid, a seer, my lover and the mother of our son, Milo. Because the Painted Ones passed on royal power matrilineally their kings were not succeeded by their sons but by their brothers, nephews or male cousins through the female side of the clan. This meant that our son Milo could attain his maternal grandfather’s chieftaincy, should he aspire to that position, since the old chief had been betrayed and boiled alive by rival clansmen.

  Guinevia had been driven nearly mad when she had psychically viewed this foul death, an ill effect of her astonishing power to mentally see events at a distance. The ability was natural, she assured me, a gift of remote viewing of a far-away happening. It was achieved by simply relaxing into a near-meditative state and allowing her trained mind to visit a target site. The key seemed to be in reporting what she saw, without attempting to interpret it. Her modus operandi was to relax, to send out her inner eye to the desired place, and to speak her impressions aloud for a scribe to record them. Only later would she attempt to interpret what she had seen.

  To assist her viewing, she would look deep into the smokiness of a block of volcanic glass called obsidian, and she had many times successfully brought me information about the activities of my enemies who were operating hundreds of miles away. The only drawback was that her viewing was just that: visual impressions. She had no means of hearing what the subjects of her psychic spying were saying.

  It was my most secret weapon, this ability to be informed of my enemies’ actions. What I was considering now was the actions of those I wanted as friends. It had to do with the next king of Pictland. Some time before, my forces had besieged the Pictish leader King Alpin in his cragtop fortress of Edyn’s Burh, the stronghold that dominated the Forth valley, and a lucky shot, or unlucky if you were the king, from a ballista had toppled him from the rampart. The crown of Alba, as Pictland was sometimes called, passed rightly or wrongly to the chieftain Oengus, who declared himself ‘Rex Pictorum,’ or ‘King of the Picts.’ Alpin’s would-be successor, a Gael called Kinadius mac Ailpin was furious at being denied his heritage, and murdered Oengus and several other candidates to the throne to secure it for himself. These assassinations I had to view with a cool and wary eye.

  I had several times sent forces across the Wall of Hadrian to settle the feuding tribal bands, and I had no desire to continue the expense and bloodshed indefinitely. The Painted Ones were like no other enemies, they were seemingly uncontrollable. In peace, they fought each other; in uprisings against their masters, they were howling madmen who threw away their shields to fight, often naked, and even their fearsome womenfolk fought nude alongside their men.

  Despite the punishments I had inflicted, they seemed to be oblivious to me, their supposed ruler. Every treaty I had made with them had been broken. Even the threat and several-times fulfilled promise of scorching their land and sending hundreds of them into slavery had failed to get their continued obedience. For now, Kinadius was my vassal, but I foresaw him at the centre of uprisings once I moved my forces away to deal with the Romans or Saxons.

  My idea, which I planned to suggest most delicately to Guinevia, was to marry our 13 years old son Milo to Kinadius’ daughter so as to establish him on Kinadius’ death as the ruler of Pictland. My son would be my vassal, as I was Imperator of Britain, but he would be trustworthy and as independent as I could make him. It also helped enormously that he had a valid claim to the throne, as matrilineal descendant of Guinevia’s chieftain father, and I hoped the Picts would respect that.

  All of this I set about explaining to Guinevia when she arrived, but I could have saved my breath. “Of course,” she said. “Why did it take you so long to see this? I have already been in contact with my cousins. King mac Ailpin has a suitable daughter, and a wedding can quickly be arranged.” The noise of my jaw hitting my chest could probably have been heard outside the door.

  Guinevia smiled gently. “I am of royal blood. We think about lineage, alliances, heritage and family all the time.” I looked at her with fresh eyes. This lovely creature, graceful, composed and feminine, could still shock me with a glimpse of the inner steel and resolution that drove her. It was usually concealed, but evidence of its existence lay in her calm survival of events that would have turned most of us into haunted shells of ourselves. Here she had already calmly planned a dynasty while I, the imperator of the islands, had barely formed the idea.

  Quickly, I nodded. “This was not the main thing I asked you in for,” I stumbled over the lie. “I was wondering if you could view the things that are happening in Maximian’s shipyards…” Guinevia looked at me sharply. Her mind was planning a wedding. “Later, of course,” I said.

  Chapter VI - Galerius

  Diocletian sorely missed his palace and its luxuries. His campaigns against the Sarmatians across the Danube, against the tribes of the Tirol and Black Forest and of the pesky Persians who had threatened Syria had kept him in the field for several long years. To spread the load, and put out fires elsewhere in his eastern half of the empire, he had appointed the onetime herdsman Galerius as his junior Caesar. Now, he was beginning to have some doubts about the man the troops mockingly called Armentarius, or ‘The Shepherd’ because, the emperor was finding out, he was an especially cruel and violent man.

  Diocletian was not queasy about spilling blood. He came from a line of emperors who had put 600,000 humans to death for entertainment purposes. Trajan himself, one of the Five Good Emperors, once held a 123-day circus that saw 5,000 people and 11,000 animals slaughtered in the arena. Reports that Galerius was merely cruel meant little. A few limbs amputated, a few eyes gouged out, a number of idle or mutinous soldiers flogged to death was normal currency in that place and time.

  But what Diocletian’s spies reported was that the Caesar kept a herd of feral pigs and would feed victims to them for his amusement. The prisoners always knew what was coming: they had their teeth knocked out and hair chopped off because the pigs’ digestive systems didn’t cope well with them. Some wretches, for extra amusement, were taken to the arena, publicly blinded, then sewn into animal skins so they could crawl but not run from the carnivorous swine, others were skinned alive and covered in salt. It was all for the emperor’s amusement, and to create an example for his troops and the peoples they conquered.

  It worked. The Shepherd had cowed a rebellious flock of Carpiani and marched the entire tribe down th
e shores of the Adriatic, across Macedonia and into Pannonia, where he forcibly resettled them. He had also inflicted a great defeat on the Persians, an especially sweet victory as they had overwhelmed his Roman force the previous year. After that loss, Diocletian had expressed his displeasure and shown his teeth by making the defeated Galerius walk a mile alongside his chariot before he would speak to him.

  He made it up to me well though, Diocletian thought, considering the massive plunder Galerius brought back from the Persians, and the general had settled King Narses’ nonsense probably for decades by taking all his land west of the Tigris.

  But, plunder and territory gained or not, Diocletian was unhappy to be sleeping in his campaign tent on the Danube when his magnificent palace at Split was standing empty. These barbarians, he thought, why do they never learn that we will subdue them over and over again? It was the same, he thought, with those Christians.

  I’ve been tolerant of them for a long time, he thought, I let them into my armies, took them as servants in my palaces. They’ve had prosperity and security while I’ve been emperor, even been allowed to build their churches in my cities, but they turned against me when all I wanted to do was restore the old ways and glories of Rome.

  Diocletian thought back to the visit he’d had from Galerius after the palace in Nicomedia caught fire. A Christian plot, Galerius told him, it was not caused by a lightning strike at all. The Jesus followers needed to be disciplined, they were always making trouble. That came on the heels of the imperial priests’ complaints that when they sacrificed to the gods, the Christian officers in his guard could be seen crossing themselves. It changed the way the auguries could be read, it polluted the pagan ceremonies, they said.

  The emperor took it seriously. He himself was the reincarnation of Jupiter, and was a being so exalted that all who came into his court must kneel to kiss the hem of his robe. He was, too, a believer in reading the future, and if these Christians were a profanity to the true gods, they should be curbed. He ordered more auguries taken, and the oracles were unanimous: the Christians did indeed bode ill for the imperial purple and the gods should be shown that Diocletian did not favour them.