M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon (49 page)

Standing in a small semicircle of dead and dying Jutes, Arthur came out of an odd kind of trance. He had been conscious of everything that had gone on around him with a jewel-bright precision, but a clear glass barrier had stood between him and his emotions so that many of the horrors he had witnessed had seemed to be happening to someone else.

The day hovered on the verge of misty rain, but so far the weather had not had any particular effect on the pattern of the battle. The fog had been clammy and every surface seemed to be damp, but the defenders of the ditch and mound had been spared the discomfort of fighting in the sleety rain that early winter often brought. Arthur stared up at some overflying geese as they moved in a wedge formation, far above the low, scudding clouds so that they were only intermittently visible. He could imagine the proud, barred wings that reminded him of old Pictish men covered with dark tattoos commemorating battles beyond counting, and he wished he could be flying with them, away from this place and the death that surrounded him.

When Havar retreated, teams of men from the Celtic reserves poured across the causeway between the ditches and began to move the bodies of the dead Saxons into large piles. Arthur was appalled when he saw an Ordovice tribesman casually cut the throat of one Jute warrior who was still twitching, deftly avoiding the jet of blood that arced from the carotid artery.

‘Are we animals then, that we act like the Saxons whom we so revile?’ Arthur muttered as he watched another warrior, an Atrebate, strip massy golden arm-rings from a dead thane, and he turned his head away when the same man lifted a flaccid hand with golden rings on the thumb and index finger. Without being told, Arthur knew immediately that this corpse robber would cut the digits from the hand to collect his trophies.

Arthur looked across at Germanus. He was still only half aware of the world around him, but sickened to the core by what he had seen. Germanus showed more sangfroid, having watched men act like brutes on the Continent for twenty years, but he understood the shock experienced by Arthur and Gareth, both of whom were profoundly ashamed of their own people and their avaricious behaviour.

‘Your shield, Arthur. I’d rather you didn’t go without it again. You could have been killed – or one of us could as we attempted to cover you,’ he said mildly, to draw Arthur’s attention away from the growing piles of corpses. Arthur’s fey mood made the arms master nervous, worried about this peculiar blankness that had come over his charge in the middle of a major battle. He ordered Arthur to sit and the young man did so, settling himself on a patch of soil so bloodstained it looked as if the earth itself was wounded.

‘What’s that?’ he asked vaguely, pointing at a coarse cloth bag on which Gareth was sitting. Germanus decided that the boy was in a kind of odd survival shock as the automatic responses to danger that had saved him during the battle slowly began to dissipate.

‘It’s a gift from Father Lorcan. A sand bag. We may need to use it if an accident occurs with the Marine Fire,’ he replied quietly, as if to a child. Arthur had fought like a demon in the battle, inhuman in his speed and deadliness, and the arms master was now convinced that this boy-man had been born specifically to salvage what was possible from the destruction of the west. Like a demon-spawn, he had ignored minor slashes and injuries while attacking the most crazed and vicious fighters and killing with machine-like precision. Perhaps God was allowing him this short period of confusion during the lull in the battle so he could begin to accept the blood he had shed in the early hours of the dawn. Arthur’s fellow warriors on the British line were already treating him cautiously, as if he was mad or had been blessed with the frenzy of the gods. Germanus watched Gareth cleaning the sticky, clinging mud from his pupil’s sword and the Dragon Knife until they seemed untouched and unsullied, and wished he could do the same for their master.

At the very limit of the bowmen’s reach, Havar paced and raged as he waited for Cerdic’s orders. Havar had never felt the true sting of failure in his life, and now that he knew its taste he found the flavour to be as bitter as gall or wormwood. Worse yet, he felt as though he was a smaller man in the eyes of his thanes because of his failures. Cerdic had called them back from the enemy. Havar had been instructed to retreat. Unthinkable! ‘By the jokester god’s balls, they’re only Celts!’ he roared at a hapless warrior who was trying to replait his locks during the hiatus. ‘Where did they get the strength to do this to me? And who the fuck is the warrior in the red cloak?’

No one answered, because no one knew. Besides, sensible men made themselves scarce when Havar lost his temper.

From his vantage point, Havar scanned the front line of the British defenders. Finally, he found three oversized men together, two of them caring for the largest of the three. In size they could have been Jute or Saxon, or even Dene, who were taller yet, but their armour showed their allegiance very clearly, now that Havar had the luxury of examining them at his leisure.

‘Can you see the device on that clod’s chest, Erikk? It’s something in red,’ Havar said, irritable because thirty-five years had robbed his eyes of their clarity.

‘It’s some form of winged creature,’ the boy answered. Erikk was Havar’s eldest son and this battle was his first taste of blood. ‘I’ve got it! It’s a red dragon with its wings outspread.’

‘So the White Dragon battles the Red, Erikk. It seems that legends still walk the earth.’

Perversely, the symbol of the Red Dragon emblazoned across his enemy’s chest comforted Havar. All men knew that the dragon was the favoured beast of the gods: no ordinary adversary had defeated the Jutes.

While Havar waited, Cerdic examined the results of the British cavalry attack in person. Men had literally cooked within their armour, and survivors were anxious to tell him that water did not quench the strange fire but seemed to feed it, sending out blazing particles that set fire to other men nearby. The fire stuck to a man’s skin, like sap or gum, and ate through skin, flesh, muscle and bones. Sickened, Cerdic knew that he was looking at the work of a demon, a force that no man or king had the right to wield.

‘Cynric!’ he called. More and more, he could feel fluid building in his lungs, and he knew that his life span would soon be cut short. But his brain still worked with efficient clarity, like the wooden cogs of a Roman war machine he had once seen, the wheels and great, notched gears working seamlessly together to kill and maim. Cerdic knew his mind was like that machine, only faster and sharper, and he determined to set it to work against this great evil. In a wholly northern way, he cursed those who wielded this fury – the madmen who had stolen the fires of Udgaard.

‘The Britons cannot be allowed to control this devil’s brew. Up till now, we’ve made it easy for them to use it against us, because we have kept our troops away from theirs. The fire itself makes no distinction between Saxon or Briton. Look, Cynric – just two containers of devil’s fire did this.’

Cerdic’s arm swept across the scorched ground around the well, and the blackened lumps that lay beneath the scattered piles of soil used to drown the fire, fists raised and skulls opened like strange flowers of bone as the brains boiled within them. Anything human in those lumps of carbon had vanished in a slice of the Christian hell transported to earth.

Besides the destruction of most of their supplies, too many men had perished for Cerdic to forgive his enemy. The devastation was far beyond the normal losses inflicted during warfare. Bran had turned this war into a personal conflict, and Cerdic and his son would not rest until the Britons paid the full blood price for their hideous murders. Over two hundred men had died – a fraction of his force, but a terrible blow to the morale of the rest.

‘They will not be able to use this weapon on our warriors if we can gain entry to Calleva, or if we can force them to fight us at close quarters in the ditch and on the mound. I doubt they are prepared to kill their own men.’

Cynric waited patiently. He understood the sharpness of his father’s wits, and appreciated that Cerdic’s decisions would almost certainly determine the fate of his army in the next phase of the battle.

‘The reserves to the south of the eastern gate are to be placed under Havar’s command and he must be ordered to take the northern sector of the ditch and mound at all costs. Do you understand, Cynric? Havar must win.’

‘Yes, Father. I will ensure that Havar is told of your orders. But what shall we do with the reserves to the south-west?’

‘They must be ready to move as soon as they are ordered into the attack. I want them to maintain pressure on the ditch where it is thinly protected along the southern section, at the points where Havar has yet to mount a sustained offensive. You, son, are in charge of penetrating the ditch and the mound. Once through the defensive line, you will destroy the command tents and crush the British reserves that remain behind the mound. Let Havar absorb the main thrust of the British defences while you set your men into a wedge and break through. Is that understood? Everything will depend on it. You must break through their lines. I am putting almost every man into the fray, so don’t fail me.’

Cynric looked dazed. ‘But we’ll be risking everything, including our lives and our freedom, on these worthless fields, Father. There’ll be no reserves, and no support. What if Havar fails? What if I fail?’

‘You must not fail, Cynric! The devil’s fire must not be used upon us again. You must be so close to the Britons that they won’t be able to use that . . . that monstrous potion without killing their own warriors. We’ve stood toe to toe against Bran of the Ordovice on many occasions. He’s not the Dragon King – and we outnumber the Britons by about two to one. What more do you want? They might have the advantage through the firestorm at this moment, but nothing is certain in a battle.’

Cynric agreed, but every instinct told him that his father was wrong. Cerdic had panicked because of the nature of the weapon used against them and the hellish deaths it had caused. But Cerdic was the bretwalda. Who was Cynric to question his father’s decisions? Cerdic had earned the right to call himself king of the Saxons through skirmish and battle, although Cissa had vied with him for the title. But Cissa was dead, and Cerdic now ruled the lands that stretched from the Wash to the Litus Saxonicum. He would be obeyed without question, even if he led his warriors to destruction in this new and grotesque hell. But nothing in Cynric’s orders demanded that all of his force should attack at once. Cynric determined to divide his troops into two groups and keep half of his men beyond the range of the Celtic bowmen until he was sure that Cerdic’s strategy would work.

Yes, he would wait. After all, how could that hurt?

Two hours is an eternity on the battlefield, especially if you are waiting for your enemy to make up his mind. The Jutes beat their sword hilts against their shields and screamed insults at the Britons, inviting them to leave the safety of their little ditch and fight them man to man, instead of hiding behind their shields and their bowmen. Meanwhile, the Britons stood or sat in their rows, bolstered by the unseen men from their reserves who were waiting behind the mound. The veterans drank copiously from their ale or water bottles, and took what pleasure could be got from gossip, singing or telling ribald stories about their officers or the tribal kings.

Arthur had gradually come out of his odd period of weakness and had shaken his head when he saw the bloody piles of dead stacked at the northern end of the ditch. Much evidence of the conflict had soaked into the ground, or had been scattered on the churned earth. An earring torn out of the lobe that had held it was trodden into the mud. Across a puddle of half-congealed blood, a broken sword waited for the familiar hand of its owner to lift it once again. Arthur stared at the relics of violent death and began to vomit.

After Arthur’s stomach had emptied, Gareth used a clean corner of the ruined red cloak to cleanse his mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ Arthur said, and realigned his blood-spattered chest plate. ‘I must have killed many men to find myself in this state, but it’s only now that I realise how much butchery we’ve carried out this day. I’m not making much sense, am I? This was your first battle too, Gareth, but you’re not acting like a silly child. So what’s wrong with me? I vaguely remember losing my shield and using the Dragon Knife instead. Someone else seemed to be fighting inside my body. I don’t understand.’

Germanus heard the ragged edges in Arthur’s voice. The enemy was still very close, far too close for his charge to have self-doubts at the start of another sortie. He knew they would come again – there was no doubt of that – so Arthur must be patched together or he’d perish while worrying whether he was, in fact, a madman.

‘Every warrior is different when he first stands shoulder to shoulder with his friends and tries to kill his enemies. Some, like Gareth, see it as a task that must be completed. For him this battle is the culmination of years of training with his father. His mind is razor sharp because he has been prepared to expect every detail.’

‘I was also trained, as well you know,’ Arthur interrupted. ‘I was prepared just as carefully as he was. You were my master.’

‘And I passed on to you everything I learned over twenty years of killing and surviving. But other factors came to light on the battlefield today, factors that do not concern Gareth. You are the son of a warrior, the grandson of a warrior, the descendant of warriors back as far as you care to look along your bloodline – and all those warriors were kings. You are measured by a higher standard than Gareth. Those members of your family who were too generous, too caring or too sensitive died before they could father children. Even the women of your blood are warriors. But you, Arthur, are a good, kind and happy man at heart. You don’t love the killing fields, and you draw people to you because you have no real desire to inflict harm on anyone.’

Arthur looked to one side. Germanus had been making sense until the last part of his explanation. A flake of dried blood marred Arthur’s thumbnail and he flicked it away in disgust. Good? Kind?