M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon (22 page)

CHAPTER VII

OUTLAWS

Never break a covenant, whether you make it with a false man or a just man of good conscience. The covenant holds for both, the false and the just.

Zoroastrian scripture, ‘Avestan Hymn to Mithras’, verse 2

Panting with exertion, thigh muscles screaming with strain as he ploughed into the cover of the small copse, Arthur launched himself onto flat ground and collapsed, prostrating himself behind a fallen tree trunk. With a quick glance back the way he had come, he saw the clear and unmistakable scars of his footsteps in the pristine snow. Swearing and sweating, he turned his attention to the farmland spread below him.

At first, the landscape appeared undisturbed. Low walls of fieldstone had been piled up to create rudimentary pens and to protect fields of grain that had long been harvested. A stream struggled through a long line of willows at the very base of the hill, its waters half frozen and silent. The croft rested near the stream on a small rise that would protect it from rising waters in the thaw. Off to one side was a barn where the croft’s cows and single horse were stabled during the winter, along with Crookback’s chickens and any sheep that were too young or too old to forage for themselves. Here the farmer kept his grain, which was milled downstream then stored in barrels for personal use or for trade and barter. Workmanlike, the farm had flourished for a century or more, safe in the knowledge that other fortresses kept outlaws, thieves and Saxons away from these hills and the quiet, bucolic existence of Britain’s rural population.

At first glance, the farm seemed untouched, and Arthur sighed with relief. Then his eyes followed a last, dismal trail of smoke and saw that it was rising from the barn, not from the cottage.

Cupping his eyes with the heels of his hands, he struggled to shake off the snow-blindness that made details difficult to discern from a distance. There! The roof of the barn, which was made of crude wooden slabs instead of the usual thatch, was scarred along the highest point of the pitch.

‘Everything is so still,’ the boy whispered to himself to break the unnatural silence. ‘It’s all too quiet if the barn has caught fire. Surely there’d be signs that Ednyfed had fought the blaze.’

Even though an internal voice screamed at him to run for home, Arthur forced himself to scan the terrain below him. He could see several mounds at the front of the barn where the churned snow and what lay there had been covered with a thin dusting of pristine whiteness, but he refused to accept the evidence of his eyes and turned his attention back to the unnaturally silent cottage.

The door was firmly shut, but two ravens cawed raucously on the circular thatched roof as if warning the boy to come no closer. Superficially, the cottage seemed untouched, but many blurred footprints had poured in and out of the door, including one set that headed in his direction.

What to do? Reason told Arthur that he should run back the way he had come and raise the alarm, but the thought of Rab and his brothers steadied him. They could be hurt and bleeding, and his retreat might result in their deaths. Although his heart was beating painfully in his chest, he removed a store of pebbles from his pouch and loosened his knife in its scabbard. The weapon was little more than a toy and the blade was thin from honing, but Arthur knew it wouldn’t fail him if it were needed.

If the farm had been attacked, why hadn’t it been set alight and burned to the ground? Arthur’s brain answered the silent question: the owners of those footprints don’t want Ratae or Venonae to know that there are outlaws on the loose. If the heavy snowfalls continue all winter, the authorities might remain ignorant of what has happened here until the spring thaw.

But I don’t know what
has
happened, Arthur’s rational mind replied.

So you’ll have to find out for yourself, won’t you? And then you must let Father know as soon as possible.

Before he could change his mind, the boy thrust his knife between his teeth, touched the sling round his neck, clutched the pebbles in one hand and lunged down the hill on his belly, hoping that any watchers would thus miss his fast approach to the nearest wall of the farm. With his eyes darting from left to right, he leapt over the fieldstone and almost landed on Rab’s corpse on the other side.

‘Fuck!’ Arthur swore when his foot skidded on the frozen head of his friend. Crouching, with bile in his throat and a silent apology to Rab on his lips, he turned the stiffened body onto its back.

Rab’s eyes stared up at the grey sky with the distant glare of someone who has travelled far into the Otherworld. His skin was very white, and his eyes were set deeply back in his skull. Crystals of snow were trapped in his tousled hair, as well as in his dark eyelashes, while his mouth was still contorted in a scream of defiance or an agonised appeal. Rab had been caught at the wall where he had run with the desperation of a fleeing child. Arthur could see the spray of arterial blood across the black stones, telling him where Rab’s exposed throat had been cut from behind with a casual slice of a knife or a sword. Rab’s clothing was stained to the hems with his lifeblood, which had frozen stiff in the hours since his death.

‘He was dead before I left the palisades,’ Arthur murmured aloud for comfort. The body had been expertly searched, and even a bronze amulet that Rab had always worn round his throat as a talisman had been stolen. Under the frozen blood on his neck, Arthur could see a blue line in the white flesh where the leather cord had been snapped off by an impatient hand.

Arthur’s every sense was on full alert as he made his way to the cottage, poised to turn and run at the first hint of threat. He kept low, bent almost double, and followed the half-filled trail of Rab’s running feet until he reached the cottage door. He noticed the large, blurred shapes of the pursuer’s footprints and guessed that the outlaws had worn the flat overshoes of wicker that made walking on snow so much easier. Back in his sleeping alcove in Arden, Arthur kept an old battered pair of these snowshoes, but such encumbrances were of little use in the forest so he had chosen to leave them behind. Now he wished he had brought them, for they would have been very useful on this flat, exposed stretch of ground.

With his mind cringing from images of his dead friend, he could guess at the scene that would greet him when he entered the cottage. But knowing and seeing were two very different things. If his information were to be of any serious use to Bedwyr, he must face whatever lay within, even if the child in him shuddered at the thought of what he might find.

Ednyfed Crookback had defended the small, one-room cottage with his hoe to the best of his ability. Inside the confined space, a spray of blood on the mud-daubed walls seemed to indicate that at least one of the attackers had suffered a wound. Ednyfed had done his best to bar the door, but his dishevelled nightwear spoke of a stealthy attack in the middle of the night. No warning had come from the farm dog, which was probably one of the snow-covered shapes at the front of the barn.

A hoe, no matter how sharp, could never be a match for swords, so except for the first lucky sweep Crookback had had little chance to protect his family. He had died from a long, looping sword cut under the arm that had wielded the hoe. The sword had cloven deeply into his chest, leaving a gross, gaping wound in its wake that gave the farmer no chance of survival. By the angle of the dead man’s head and body, Arthur realised that Ednyfed had probably still been alive when his family had been slaughtered in front of him, and would have been in an agony of spirit far worse than any physical pain. The direction of his wide-eyed gaze led Arthur to the next victim. The boy had suffered a sword cut that almost separated his head from his body. Mercifully, the lad must have died instantly.

No quarter had been given to the other children, whose throats had been cut when they tried to hide behind their mother’s skirts. For her part, Cathella had taken longer to die, although Arthur could barely understand the brutality of a rape that was followed by a casual knife thrust in the throat. The knife was old and rusty, and the warriors had left it in the fatal wound like an obscene brooch. Because of its aged, worn haft, Arthur thought the knife must have belonged to the cottage, and the outlaws hadn’t even fouled their own weapons with Cathella’s blood. She was less important than the farm dog in their eyes, a morsel to be tossed away when her purpose was done.

Arthur dragged his friend’s shift down to cover her spread legs, even though it was stiff with her frozen blood. He had never considered the fate of women caught up in warfare before, but now he imagined his mother in such a position and a slow, red anger began to build in his chest, a visceral response to the arrogant, murderous force that had destroyed this place. In the silence of the bloodstained cottage, he realised that his breathing was ragged and tears were pouring down his cheeks. In a daze of pity, he tried to close the eyes of Cathella’s staring corpse, but they were stiff and unresponsive. The hut stank of blood and urine, and he started to vomit weakly into the straw. Even as he retched, his brain began to sizzle with the growing tide of rage and he wished with all his heart that he was big enough to follow the outlaws and make them pay for the evil they had inflicted on these hard-working, gentle people.

Once he stumbled out of the cottage, Arthur took a grim pleasure in firmly closing the door to frustrate the still-cawing ravens. Reluctantly, he moved towards the barn. The snow-covered mounds proved to be the shaggy farm dog and several butchered sheep, while another half-dozen frightened beasts huddled in a corner of the simple wooden structure. The carcasses showed evidence that the outlaws had carved out the choicer cuts of meat to take with them when they departed. Conscious of the needs of the surviving animals, Arthur lugged a bale of hay out of a barred storage room inside the barn and spread it for them to eat until Bedwyr arrived. A few remaining chickens roosted on the highest rafters, but Arthur could imagine how easily most of the flock had been carried away after their necks were wrung. The birds flapped their wings in warning at the boy, but soon fluttered down from their safe perches when he scattered several handfuls of grain onto the hard sod floor.

Looking up, he saw the scars of burning in the sturdy oak beams of the barn where a stray spark from a torch had ignited the lighter roof staves. The ceiling had burned, but the tough oak rafters had resisted the flames, so only one corner at the back of the roof had collapsed. ‘That’s why the buildings seemed sound from the top of the hill,’ he murmured to himself, taking comfort from the small sound of his own voice.

Then he heard a soft mewling from somewhere within the pile of fodder in the grain store. With apologies to the dead Crookback for further disturbing his handiwork, Arthur moved the barrels of grain to reveal what was left of a litter of kittens. New tears sprang to his eyes at this random act of cruelty. A snowshoe had crushed the babes while their broken mother lay in a tangle of smashed bones, defiant to the death as she had tried to protect her little ones. But there, in a far corner of the hay bales, a single kitten still lived. This was the strongest of the litter, one whose adventurous spirit had ensured it was out wandering in its restricted world when the marauders had come with death in their hands and feet.

In an unconscious need to ensure that something survived this charnel house, Arthur scooped up the small ball of fur. Despite an attempt to use its immature claws and teeth to puncture his hands when he thrust it deep inside his furs, the frightened kitten was quickly seduced by the warmth of its new nest. At first it nuzzled against his flesh in a fruitless search for milk, but then, unsatisfied, it curled into an indignant ball and promptly went to sleep.

‘It’s time to go, little one. Father must know what has happened so that Rab and his family can be given a decent burial, while the other farmers in the district must be warned that an enemy is on the move along the fringes of Arden Forest.’

Like his birth father before him, Arthur was quick to act once he had formulated a plan in his mind. Without a backward glance, he headed back to the farmhouse, hugging the ground as he used the footprints he had already created to retrace his steps. He hoped that if the outlaws returned they would be confused by this simple ploy, but he was clever enough to know they wouldn’t be fooled for long. Once in open country, he would have to put his trust in the gods to hide his tracks during the dash to Arden, whither he must run as fast as the deep snow and his cumbersome furs permitted.

Still following his earlier trail, he reached the shelter of the wall and paused to close Rab’s eyes, using two of his precious pebbles to hold the eyelids down. Several crows waited on the stones, examining him closely with their black beady eyes. They flapped their ragged wings just out of striking distance, but Arthur chased them off temporarily by using another pebble to kill one of them with his sling. However, he knew that the scavengers would be back as soon as he moved away, so he rolled Rab’s shirt over as much of his friend’s frozen face as he could before embarking on the muscle-straining climb to the top of the small hill, keeping his profile as low as possible. The warnings in his head still shrieked of danger. With a disconcerting feeling of being watched, he made his way doggedly up the slope, ignoring the strain that such strenuous exercise placed on his thighs.

He could see nothing amiss and his ears heard nothing that threatened danger, but still he took out his knife and clenched it in his mitten-clad palm, certain that peril was near at hand. His grip on the handle of the knife was impeded by the fingerless glove, so with mental apologies to his mother he stripped off the mitten and shoved it inside his shirt beside the sleeping kitten. Then, taking care where he placed his feet and keeping the noise of his passage to a minimum, he pushed his way up the last ten feet of the incline.

Within the protective shelter of the copse, Arthur took a deep, shuddering breath and dropped to one knee. The noise in his head suddenly became a solid wall of high-pitched keening, so he rolled backward instinctively. Whether he saw the sudden fall of blood drops from above or heard the scrape of boots on a tree branch, he had responded to the warning instantly, and his quick reflexes saved him. A fur-wrapped savage hit the ground awkwardly in the exact spot where he had been kneeling just a second before.