M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon (42 page)

Still confused, but aware that he had deeply hurt Bedwyr, Arthur nodded his head and they began to ride. Fortunately for their continued safety, heavy forest flanked both sides of the narrow road, so they could almost have been in Arden under the thick canopy of oak, elm, yew and hazel. Bedwyr knew the Saxon mentality as few men could, so he insisted that they ride through the thicker parts of the forest, rejecting the road as a death trap. Even so, Arthur felt eyes boring into the back of his neck throughout the whole journey, although his nerves were quietened a little by the absence of the early warning screams inside his head.

Spinis was a timber-cutting centre, where sawn logs were lashed together and sent down the river to nearby towns to be used in construction. It had always been a small settlement, although its isolated population boasted a small monastery and nunnery, and thus far the need for lumber had also blessed it with a certain degree of neutrality, although in time its sawmills would undoubtedly have fallen into Saxon hands as the invaders extended their trade in the district. Nevertheless, Cerdic, the king of the West Saxons, had recently decided to hasten the invasion process and send a clear, unequivocal message to all Britons that their days in the south were numbered.

Bedwyr and Arthur smelled Spinis well before they arrived. Any soldier recognises the stink of old death, which is green, sweet and sour by turn. The vile waves of sickly rot caused their horses to bridle long before Spinis came into view.

‘Behold,’ Bedwyr hissed as he dismounted and lashed his reins to a stout sapling. ‘The Saxon response to a peaceful surrender.’

The trees suddenly gave way to a small clearing within which was a low-walled compound. An open gate hung on rickety hinges, but Arthur could see no evidence that it had been broken open by force. The smell was worse now, thick and cloying. Bedwyr wound a length of cloth around his mouth and nose. ‘Look around, Arthur! See the answer that Cerdic gave to the abbot when that worthy, peace-loving churchman surrendered the monastery to him.’

Within the compound, a small wooden church took pride of place, attached to a small building housing the common eating area by a small cloister. The distinctive nave and apse made the church’s Roman antecedents very clear.

The rest of the compound consisted of small circular structures made of unmortared stone roofed with thatch. These building were no wider than a man’s outspread arms and were barely tall enough for a small occupant to stand upright. Arthur glanced inside one, half expecting to find a swollen body within the cramped quarters, but the tiny cell was empty except for a pallet stuffed with grass. This was a place where a monk prayed and slept in those times when he wasn’t working at his labours from dawn to dusk. These men lived a spartan existence, one that gave them time for reflection and perfect silence.

‘The monks were in the church praying for their abbot, who had left his altar to confront Cerdic’s men.’ Bedwyr’s voice was sad and gentle. ‘When we became aware of this atrocity, we found a lay brother who had managed to escape, although he was badly wounded. He told us what had happened in the church. Personally, I believe the Saxons permitted him to escape so that the story would circulate among our foot soldiers and peasants. The message was very clear:
Our gods are stronger than your gods, and we will prevail!
I’m not a Christian any more. My faith was burned away many years ago, but I admire bravery, and the abbot showed his balls when he faced an armed troop of Saxons and Jutes with only his crucifix to defend him.’ Bedwyr frowned. ‘He held some hope that these men had come in peace, I imagine, for the monastery possessed nothing of value except the food they had stored for the winter. And they would have given it all away without a second thought, so their deaths were pointless. Go, my son, and see what the abbot’s prayers have earned him.’

Arthur suddenly noticed the silence of the monastic compound. No birds stirred in the meagre vegetable patch or sang in the pruned fruit trees beyond the church. When he looked skyward, none were flying in the air over the compound. The stillness was eerie.

The young man moved forward carefully and gazed at the body where it had been left by the Saxon warriors. The church was constructed out of split wood on a plinth of roughly laid stones, and the abbot’s headless corpse lay across the steps leading up to the plinth. His head, with its contorted face under a roughly cut tonsure, was lying four feet away where it had rolled, trailing a slime of gore. Around the body, blood had jetted from the severed arteries so that the steps and plinth had been sprayed with an arc of sanguine red. The abbot’s hands were empty. He was unarmed.

Within the miniature basilica, the monks had prayed as they waited to die. Even those capable of resistance had obeyed their abbot’s exhortation and gone to their deaths on bended knees, their hands folded before them in prayer. Before the altar, they had been cut down like kindling in a callous disregard for human life that was staggering in its coldness. Rumours of Saxon murder and looting of churches had been rife for decades, for the Saxons had no respect for any religion other than their own, but this slaughter was a special atrocity, because these monks offered no threat whatsoever to the attackers.

Sickened to his soul, Arthur couldn’t leave this scene of horror, although every instinct told him to run to Bedwyr and admit that his foster-father’s judgement was correct. He was unable to tell whether curiosity or sick revulsion kept his eyes riveted on the still forms, which were bloated with corruption and covered with clouds of iridescent flies. Yet within his brain something cold and calculating could discern exactly what had been done to the victims.

The closest corpses belonged to a huge, hulking man who stood over six feet tall and a smaller, elderly monk of very small stature. The older man was obviously a victim of some kind of bone deformity, for his spine was twisted so that his head poked upward from between his hunched shoulders like a curious tortoise.

The larger man had attempted to protect the elderly monk using his own body as a shield, an action that should have won admiration from his attackers, but such had not been the case. Men with huge swords and sharp, double-headed axes can finish a conflict against unarmed men in seconds, but Cerdic’s warriors had chosen to extend the murder for their own entertainment. The large man had died slowly, probably from loss of blood, and every breath must have been agonising. An arm that had been almost severed at the wrist was raised in a futile attempt at protection, and Arthur could see how the blood had pumped out across the kneeling forms of both victims. A sword wound had pierced the larger man’s gut, but the blow was clearly designed to inflict pain rather than to kill. Arthur could imagine the big man attempting to hold his ruined hand in place over his friend while hunching his body to protect his wounded belly.

The Saxons had tried to break the bond of peace and love that had obviously existed between the two victims. In the eyes of their killers, death was not sufficient. Christians claimed that love was the greatest rule of their order, while the second commandment was the promotion of peace among all people, regardless of race. Bedwyn was right: Cerdic had set about using the monks’ instincts of self-preservation and their sheer terror to prove that their religion was a fraud. There was a reek of cruelty in the tiny church that was even more powerful than the smell of corruption.

Arthur could read Cerdic’s thinking in the bodies that lay, swollen and inhuman, under their coverlet of parasitic insects. He could see the daggers proffered by the warriors to each of the monks and could hear the whispered temptations.
Kill him, and I might let you live
. Most men would leap at the chance to breathe a little longer, but the large monk took his vows seriously. And every time he refused to harm his companion, he was wounded again by his tormentors. How easy it was to see this pattern repeated again and again by the Saxon warriors as they approached pairs of monks before the altar. Had the single survivor, the lay brother, submitted to the primal instinct to save his own life? One thing was certain: that brother would never whisper his sins to his fellow tribesmen, even in his sleep.

The large monk hadn’t surrendered his loyalty to his friend. Pierced by half a dozen wounds and bleeding freely from each breach of his hard, muscular flesh, he had continued to position himself between the Saxons and the elderly brother. Finally, he had been pushed impatiently to one side. Then, although the old man’s hands were still outspread with the palms upward in supplication, his throat had been cut when the murderers had tired of their cruel game. With the last of his strength, the larger man had crawled to his friend and fallen down beside him as he died. The tragic story of courage and love was clearly visible for any intelligent man to read.

‘Do you understand now, Arthur? Do you
see
?’

‘Yes. How could I not?’

The game had continued as the attackers turned the small basilica into a charnel house. Eviscerated and half strangled, one man had been crucified on the altar in a nasty parody of the Christian ritual. The Holy Book had been torn to pieces, the pages defecated and urinated upon before being jammed down the throat of one of the victims, choking him. One by one, the monks had died in increasingly painful ways as Cerdic’s men tried to force the servants of the Christian God to betray their faith. Ironically, they had saved their most creative and frustrated punishments for the few Saxon-born converts present, the perception of racial betrayal no doubt adding to their frenzy. As a final insult, some wit had drawn an upside down cross on the whitewashed walls, yet in the end, as their cracked and broken voice boxes mumbled prayers as they died, the monks effectively defeated their murderers by not surrendering to terror.

How Cerdic must have raged, for Arthur could see the mark of a heavy boot on the side of one dead monk’s face – a pathetic voicing of the Saxons’ impotent fury. Then the Saxons had left the monastery. But they were far from finished with Spinis.

Later, when Arthur and Bedwyr arrived at the small nunnery on the other side of the village, the young man was greeted with a scene that would remain burned into his brain for the rest of his life. Cerdic had not bothered with tests of loyalty from the nuns, for they were women and unworthy of any dignity. After viewing their corpses, Arthur came to the realisation that everything about Christianity must be anathema to Saxons and Jutes. He began to understand also that a refusal by the able-bodied to defend themselves was deemed to be cowardice by Cerdic’s warriors. But the violent rape and evisceration of helpless women, old and young, was beyond Arthur’s comprehension. A potent and ugly illustration of human evil was openly displayed in the small cells where elderly women had perished, raped by any implement to hand, including birch brooms, swords and even the large crucifix that had stood in the basilica. The younger nuns had been dragged away for the pleasure of the Saxon foot soldiers. None survived.

Finally, Arthur couldn’t bear the litany of violence any longer. He was only sixteen, and he could find no excuse for what he saw, even cultural differences, hatred and ignorance. He began to vomit uncontrollably until his belly was empty and he could no longer stand without assistance. Such had been Cerdic’s contempt for the citizens of Spinis that nothing had been permitted to live, not even livestock or domestic dogs. Nor had the bodies been buried or burned. They had been left in their filth and blood to teach the Britons what their fate would be in the conflicts to come.

‘You should be able to see now that no honourable peace can ever be brokered with such men,’ Bedwyr murmured as Arthur leaned on the side of his terrified horse.

‘I do, Father. The animals who did this can’t be true warriors by any definition, and they would regard any offer of peace as weakness on our part.’ But although he did not say so, Arthur was sure that not all Saxons could be the same, and they should not be treated as if they were.

Fortunately, Bedwyr was ignorant of his son’s private thoughts. ‘Can you see now why I was so angry with you? Sooner or later, Arden will fall to these savages, or else we may find ourselves starving to death within its boundaries. Can you imagine your mother in the hands of men such as these? Your sisters?’

‘No, Father, I can’t,’ Arthur murmured. He hid his eyes in distress. ‘Surely we should bury these poor people. I will dream of their corpses for the rest of my life. Can we dig a grave for them?’

Bedwyr shook his head and spurred his horse back into the forest until Spinis was a place of darkening shadows behind them, and the scavengers slunk out of the shadows to continue their feeding. Arthur was forced to follow.

‘We will come back and bury what is left with honour and respect when spring comes and the Saxons we now face are dead. They don’t respect us, you see. They deem civilised behaviour to be weakness, and their gods are devoted to courage, duty, war and strength. These attributes are not bad things, but taken in conjunction with their loathing for change and any culture other than their own they become very dangerous.’

‘They must have some weak points,’ Arthur reasoned. ‘Otherwise there’s no point in our struggle. Better we should leave for the wild places as the Picts did before our ancestors drove them out of Britannia. I don’t believe we should allow our entire culture to be destroyed in a pointless struggle to survive.’

Bedwyr pulled his horse to a halt under a huge oak tree that must have first broken the soil nearly a thousand years earlier. Mistletoe and other symbiotic plants clung to its ancient branches and scarred trunk, but although it had been rent by storms and lightning over the centuries and was now withered by age, it was still strong, healthy and growing at its heart.

‘Look at this tree, Arthur,’ the old man said, his white brows furrowing as he spoke. ‘That’s us! I finally understand what Artor meant when he explained that all his struggles and all his battles were not in any expectation of winning ultimate victory, but because he wanted breathing space for the Saxons to grow and change.’