Dragon's Child (44 page)

Unpredictable as always and, having won Gruffydd’s acceptance of their relative roles, Caius changed his plans.

‘The snow’s coming.’ Caius looked skywards. ‘So the sooner we’re on our way, the easier the journey will be. I’m sorry, messenger, but I’ve decided not to wait.’

He began to stride towards the small knots of cavalrymen.

‘On your feet, you idle curs. We’re off to meet with the Dux Bellorum. Take only what you can carry easily for we depart immediately!’

The unfortunate Signus, one of the warriors, had been in the process of cutting a sheep’s throat. His arms were covered in blood to the elbows but, obediently, he thrust the corpse away from him without further argument.

Gruffydd noted that all of these warriors obeyed Caius instantly - and all held a respectful affection for their commander. The Roman officer appeared to be a contradiction in terms.

‘Will you join us for the journey, Gruffydd?’

‘Nay, my lord,’ Gruffydd replied. ‘My horse needs resting. But you may expect to see me at Venonae with Myrddion, my master.’

‘That storm crow! Very well. We’ll meet again soon.’

Turning to his sergeants, he barked out his orders for the troop.

‘Ulf, find my brother’s messenger a bowl of food and fodder for his horse, and then get your arse moving. I intend to be long gone when the snow starts to fall.’

Snow was actually falling in thick blankets before the troop mounted quietly and vanished away into the darkening light.

Gruffydd was finally alone with the dead.

The snow mercifully blanketed the bodies of warriors, most of whom had been hacked to pieces where they fell. Ever the planner, Caius had ordered his men to collect their spent arrows and weaponry, but it seemed to Gruffydd that the bodies of the enemy warriors had been needlessly desecrated. The gaping wounds in their bodies could only have been inflicted on men already prone upon the earth, while their women were curled into foetal balls with their throats cut and their eyes staring wildly at the grey sky.

When he peered inside the shells of the huts, he found even his strong, battle-hardened gorge rising in his throat. Blackened bodies clutched even more terribly burned children, their ages and sexes burned away with their hair and clothes, so that sooty finger bones seemed to summon him to them with the rictus of flame.

‘The crows will feed well on these Saxons,’ Gruffydd murmured to himself. ‘Perhaps Caius intends this brutality as a warning.’

But, in the secret parts of his brain, Gruffydd knew that he would be watching Artorex’s foster-brother very, very closely from this time onward.

One fact was certain. Gruffydd could not sleep and rest his horse in this charnel house for the five or six hours needed to recover their strength. He must be gone long before dawn, and even if it meant sleeping in the snow, he must clean the stink of death from his nostrils.

His horse whickered its discontent and shied away from the bloody carcass of the dead sheep. Even in the growing darkness and the light snow, Gruffydd saw a beaten path leading away from the village and guessed that it led to water. Perhaps he could wash the stink from his hands in a running stream, no matter how cold the water might be.

Immediately, he noticed that booted feet had made deep indentations in the muddy path. Gruffydd felt sick once again when he discovered a smaller footprint, partially covered by a grown man’s spoor. At least two people had passed this way towards the river, so his instincts screamed at him to choose another route to find shelter and water. But curiosity was ever Gruffydd’s weakness. His thirst to know the best or the worst of human nature had made him the most able of Myrddion’s agents.

The shallows at the edge of the river were thick with dead weeds and flower heads. Willows dipped over the water which already had a thin, perilous skin of ice. Were it not for blood trails on the dead grass stems, the river bank would have been chilly and beautiful in its stark simplicity. Near a huge, half-dead willow, Gruffydd’s horse shied and rolled its eyes whitely in fear.

After he had tethered his mount to a sapling, Gruffydd dropped on to all fours and crawled under the spreading cavern of the willow’s branches. A powerful smell of blood, urine and faeces, and something else indefinable, almost drove him back into the open air. The darkness in this makeshift cavern was almost impenetrable but, as Gruffydd’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could make out a huddled figure leaning against the scabrous trunk of the ancient tree.

The body before him was of a young and very fair girl. Even laced with rivulets of blood, her hair was a translucent wave of blond-white. Her face was pale and free of blemish except for the wide, staring eyes that were an intense blue, even in the dim light. They were filmed over with agony and horror.

The ground beneath her was soaked with blood.

Gruffydd sighed and raised the cloth of her skirts that had already been pulled up to her knees. He recoiled in disgust.

She had been raped, of that there was no doubt, for semen and blood stained her thighs. But Gruffydd could see that there was a great slash in her pregnant belly, for the distended, fair skin was now flaccid and empty. Even the dangling, liver-coloured cord had been cut through, and he noticed with horror that her hands had been sliced to the bone as she fought to save the life of her unborn child, even as her own life force ebbed. Gruffydd could imagine her running as fast as her swollen belly would allow before she was caught by a soldier and dragged into this dark place where no one, except for the gods, could see her shameful death.

Gruffydd also noticed that her blood was still wet.

She had bled to death - and recently.

Sickened, Gruffydd backed out of the charnel house under the willow tree. Her child was undoubtedly dead and well beyond his aid. He thought of his wife and sons at Venta Silurum, safe from attack and rapine, and thanked god that Artorex did not sanction such gruesome deeds. The Dux Bellorum had but one weakness in Gruffydd’s eyes, and that was his unaccountable trust in Caius.

Gruffydd began to walk his horse upstream to move away from this tainted tomb, but a cry, as thin and frail as a newborn kitten’s, caused him to halt. His ears strained to find its origin.

There! He heard the cry again. Somewhere beyond the willow and its grisly occupant, the whimper of a child could be faintly heard.

‘It can’t be alive. No child could live in this cold.’

But the feeble, failing cries drew him behind the tree to a place where the reeds were choked in ice. He discovered the babe caught in the withered grasses.

Careful not to fracture the ice, Gruffydd scooped up the child, saw that the cord had not been knotted off and used a strip of leather from his hair to tie the stump of umbilical cord where it joined the tiny belly. The child was blue with cold, but perfect, so Gruffydd could only surmise that the thick, dead grasses and reeds had offered some warmth and shelter, sufficient to keep a girl child with a strong life force alive for a brief time. She was beautiful and must have been close to full term, marred only by a great bruise around her right ankle where a man’s hand had swung her and then tossed her among the dead flowers.

Gruffydd seethed. He swore to himself that an animal who would commit deeds such as had been carried out in this desolate place deserved to die, while the child should live to know that the murderer had followed her mother to Tartarus.

But first, Gruffydd must save the child from freezing to death for, even though he placed her inside his tunic against his heart, he could feel her life force weakening.

Upstream, Gruffydd fetched dry sticks and made a fire, a risk in enemy territory, but he had no doubt he could pass himself off as a Saxon who had found the ruins of Durobrivae, and now sought to save the life of an orphaned child. He foraged in the ruined village to discover any rags, lengths of cloth or pots that had been overlooked, but the troop had been extremely thorough in their pillaging.

His eyes turned to the dead sheep. At least its wasted corpse might now serve a useful purpose.

Quickly and efficiently, Gruffydd skinned the beast. Speed was necessary so the task was not carried out as neatly as he would have liked, but the fleece would make a good swaddling cloth till the babe was warmed sufficiently to survive. Then, with silent apologies to the dead woman, he retrieved a length of her dress that wasn’t stiffening with her blood to help with the cleansing of the child.

Casting one last look at the remains of the young woman, he noticed a curiously-designed bronze pin that had been used to hold back her hair. The rapist had obviously missed it in his haste. Gruffydd knew that every child deserved some trifle that would remind her of her birthright and a mother whose name she would never know, so he thrust the small item of jewellery into his belt pouch.

The fire was burning strongly by the time he returned, and his simple pannikin quickly heated the cold water from the stream. As he washed away the evidence of birth, the baby’s flesh slowly warmed and a little pink took the place of the ominous blue colouring. Even the birth sac must have helped to save the life of the child, Gruffydd decided.

He wrapped her in the length of cloth and then covered her entirely with the fleece, the bloody side outward.

‘It’s a blood-soaked beginning for you, my girl, and it will be all for nothing if I can’t find you some milk.’

The hide of the sheep’s carcass was sticky and rank against Gruffydd’s skin as he returned the child to the inside of his shirt. The babe had been crying weakly, but the beating of his heart offered comfort and she seemed to doze in the warmth of his body.

The cow byres were empty and partially burned. A dead calf lay stiffening pathetically, its tender flesh blistered and its hindquarters hacked at by knives.

Sickened anew, Gruffydd turned away and walked deeper into the marshes where paths criss-crossed the swampy ground, his ears straining for the distinctive sound of a cow bell.

Eventually, he heard the familiar, tinny peal he sought and, light-footed, he followed the sound until he found a brindled cow bellowing in distress. Her udders were swollen and distended and Gruffydd knew that her calf was dead.

He stroked the babe with its silken head against his breast.

‘You are lucky, my child, lucky beyond the counting of mortal men,’ he muttered to himself. ‘For now you have food.’

He led the cow back to the river bank, taking care to avoid the cow byre and the swelling body of the calf. Her eyes were soft and desperate, but the cow permitted him to milk her, filling his pannikin once more.

By using a strip of fine cloth from his tunic, Gruffydd dribbled milk into the tiny rosebud mouth.

This process was not a success, for the child had no idea how to swallow. Gruffydd tried again, this time soaking the cloth in milk and placing it in her mouth.

The child sucked.

The process of feeding the babe was long and cumbersome, but eventually she gave a great burp and closed her midnight-blue eyes.

Hours had been devoted to feeding the child, during which time his horse had foraged for grass and broken the ice to drink at the water’s edge. Night was waning when he was finally on his way, encumbered by the cow, for he must take the babe’s source of nourishment with him.

Never had a journey seemed so long. The child’s wrappings needed regular washing, and Gruffydd was forced to sacrifice his best tunics to keep her clean. At the same time, her feeding seemed to take forever and he soon devised a way to feed the child while on the move, even on horseback, once the cow had yielded its supply of milk.

In fact, to keep the cow healthy, Gruffydd found himself drinking more milk than he had ever deemed necessary in his entire life. Even his horse partook of the supply and then looked at its master with affronted, scornful eyes.

As Gruffydd slowly continued with his journey, the odd hamlet he deliberately visited was happy to exchange a pail of milk for clothing more suited to a baby. He could have sold the cow a dozen times over, but although she slowed his journey, Gruffydd could not afford to leave the beast behind.

Eventually, to the laughter of the townsfolk, Gruffydd arrived at Venonae, three days late, and trailing a cow behind him. The fortress was built of grey stone on the highest peak of a range of hills and its slit windows overlooked the undulating, wooded country that stretched away towards the east like a great green coverlet.

When he was ushered into Myrddion’s presence, the master was not amused.

‘The audience is already over, Gruffydd - and I was blind to the situation in the east,’ Myrddion snarled. ‘What possessed you to take so long? And why a cow?’

Gruffydd began to give a detailed explanation of the discovery of the babe, but was immediately interrupted by his master.

‘Do you realize that Uther Pendragon is dead? The High King has been with the shades of his ancestors for nearly three months. Typically, Morgan’s been tardy in her tidings. The peace forged by Uther is broken, and the jostling for the throne has already begun.’

‘Oh, shite!’ Gruffydd could think of nothing more intelligent to say. He realized the security and safety of the west had been torn away in those few words.

‘Morgan has just informed Artorex of the situation, with some pleasure, and he then called in his captains for a discussion to determine what strategy would now be adopted by his warriors. I was blind and deaf at the meeting because my best agent - you - was conspicuously absent. I’ve no idea what Artorex has decided to do - and Venonae is in the eye of the storm.’

He glared at the unfortunate Gruffydd.

‘Of one thing we can be sure. We can have no doubt that Morgan, bitch that she is, is enjoying herself hugely. And, no doubt, Morgause’s eldest son, Gawayne, is already seeking the location of the symbols of Uther’s kingship - his sword and his crown.’