The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (52 page)

In a misty, birch-clad bowl of the hills, the Dalriadan king and his commanders stood in a reverent circle around two of Darach’s younger druids. One held on his open palms the sacred talismans – two boar tusks, yellowed with age.

Cahir stared down as the druid stepped around the circle, coming before the warriors one by one. The tusks were Eremon’s, gifted to Gabran to replace the ones Eremon and Conaire sacrificed at the Hill of a Thousand Spears. They were for Hawen, the boar god: his own cruel weapons. All these years they had been kept in a fur-lined box in the druid temple, and in Cahir’s memory never been taken forth. For they were battle tokens, and his people had not been to open war for centuries, only skirmishes and raids.

Now, they had been brought forth for him alone: Cahir son of Conor.

The second druid held out Cahir’s sword to the warriors, chanting under his breath. Ruarc took the sword and, briefly closing his eyes, his lips moving in a vow, sliced the meat of his palm. Making a fist, he squeezed blood in droplets over the yellowed tusks, his face transfigured. One by one the other warriors did the same, and Cahir took their fervent, unspoken oaths into his heart.

At last the sword came back to Cahir himself. He nicked his own skin and watched the blood mix with his men’s, smearing the tusks. This was to bind them all to him and to their ancestors. This was to give them victory.

Every nerve singing, Cahir strode away through the smoke as the druids burned the entrails of a deer, their arms spread to the sky. Ruarc hurried to his side, matching his step. ‘Where shall we range the spears, my lord?’

Cahir took his helmet from under his arm and put it on. The iron strips at cheek and neck were cold on his skin, steadying his heart. ‘The Roman cavalry are always on the wings. Put ours on our right, then ride over to Gede and get his to the left.’

Ruarc nodded and loped away. The wooden spears had been his inspired idea, for the Albans could not bring horses by sea and therefore were at a disadvantage from the Roman cavalry. One night, around the feasting fires after the taking of Luguvalium, Ruarc suggested felling tall, young trees and sharpening their ends into stakes, their tips hardened in the fire. These could be placed at the warriors’ feet, hidden in the heather, and when the cavalry charged they would lift them up and block the onslaught. His king agreed, and Ruarc had detailed men on felling and sharpening duty at once.

Cahir watched Ruarc go, his lime-stiffened hair a golden mane around his head. Now they were taking action, he had become a focused, settled presence, and a critical link in his chain of command to the younger warriors.

He was yanked back from these thoughts by Alban war-horns screeching discordantly along the ridge above him – there must be movement in the Roman ranks to the south. He made his way over the hill to his boar banner, staked out between two poles in the still air, the scarlet boar rushing to the attack across its white background. His heart soared to see it.

Silently, his men finished preparing him, for the arming of a king was a sacred act. Mellan helped Cahir don his mailshirt, and Gobán buckled his sword-belt at his waist. They checked the laces of his boots, tight around the knee so they would not trip him when he was running. Finally, Fergal took up Cahir’s war shield and fitted it over his knuckles.

Weighed down by iron, Cahir adjusted his stance on the edge of the ridge, bracing his shoulders. Below him, as the mist lifted, the Dalriadan and Attacotti armies flowed down to the plain on the right of battle, the west. In the centre were Fergus’s Erin warriors, and on the far flank, the east, the Picts were gathered in their thousands. And all so eerily silent, beyond the coughs, the mutters and curses, the clank of armour and weapons.

No, not silence
. An instinctive denial shot through Cahir. Too long had his men been voiceless. Now they faced an honourable battle, in full strength, and just like the heroes of old they must cry their courage to the gods.

Slowly raising his wood and hide shield above his head, Cahir struck it with the hilt of his unsheathed sword so it boomed over the murmuring throng. He drew a great breath, then bellowed it out: ‘The Boar!’
Thud
. He struck the shield again. ‘The Boar!’
Thud
. ‘The Boar!
Thud.
‘The Boar!’

Around Cahir heads turned, and in moments up came thousands of shields borne aloft, and swords shimmering in the mist, and the Dalriadans broke into one war chant:
The Boar
! The blows of the swords formed a primal drumbeat, urgent and stirring, gradually growing faster and louder. It was a racing heart; pounding blood. Mellan leaped on the spot, waving his blade, screaming at the top of his lungs, and the young men followed, yowling like wildcats.

The chants and drumming spread, first to the Dalriadan warriors of Erin who cried out the same, sharing the blood of the boar; and then to the Picts, though their war cries were unintelligible at this distance. It didn’t matter, though, for the din rose and ebbed together, soaring and crashing, the spears being pounded up and down alongside so the light caught in blinding ripples across the ranks.

With a savage smile Cahir stood silent now and let the sound penetrate his body, lifting him up to the heavens. And the last lines from the prophecy came into his head:

Hear your blood call you,

Raise the boar above you,

Make an end, battle-lord,

The red-crests come
!

Cian stood among the massed Roman infantry, and, as the war shouts of Alba rolled over the plain, he felt the blood drain from his muscles. Wearily he tried to grasp at strength, at anger, but his body and soul were too brutalized for even a tattered remnant of that feeling. Instead, he stared dazedly at the massed wraiths now growing clearer as the mist lifted.

Finally it blew away on the wind and revealed to his exhausted eyes a sea of men that covered all the hillslopes to the north: an ocean into which he could only cast himself and drown.

‘We are dead,’ someone hissed next to him.

Cian spared him no glance, by habit shifting his grip on his short-sword, though he felt no fear, only despair. There had been too many months of raids in freezing cold and dark, Picts lunging out of black woods and sleet-filled valleys, swords honed. Too many men whose blood had spattered his own flesh – enemy and comrade, Alban and Roman – staining it for ever.

He had thought to expunge all pain and doubt in the heat of fighting; that he would cleanse himself. But the opposite happened. His wound still cramped, as though his body carried a memory of being broken. He was thin and stooped, his bones sticking out from the fever that had wasted him. But worse, when he at last returned to duties his battle-lust was bone-dry. Instead of the empty silence he craved, Picts stalked his dreams, blurring into Dalriadan faces and then to Minna, dark-haired and sorrowful. The shades of the men he had killed were piled on his shoulders, weighing him down.

Cian licked his dripping chin, wondering distantly if his sweat mingling with the rain meant that at least his body was preparing itself for battle, even if his heart could not. Crouched in the misty darkness before dawn, he had decided that today he would seek a final release. His own death was the only path remaining now.

The barbarian war-chants, rising and falling, built a pressure in the air like a coming storm. For a moment Cian thought of the sound itself growing strong enough to fell him, so he could simply lie there and stare at the sky as the other soldiers poured over and crushed him.

‘Whore-sons.’ A soldier spat the words, a gob of sticky mucus just missing Cian’s boot. They called this one Red, for his copper hair and stark freckles. He was running his finger over his sword-blade, rhythmically, obsessively, ignoring the blood that beaded the tip. ‘At least we’ve got them in one place at last. Here we can make an end; the Dux will fix it.’

He glanced at Cian, his sharp, sour face even more pointed from a lack of good food, and from looking over his shoulder and never sleeping. His thick hair was sodden, stuck to his drawn cheeks. He was Red, but they also called him black-heart, for his hatred for the blueskins outmatched anything Cian could muster. For a soft southerner – from Eboracum way, that’s all Cian knew – he had turned as savage as the enemy. Red didn’t even realize there was no difference now between himself and those he skewered on his spear. But Cian knew.

‘What the hell is keeping him?’ Red growled, peering through the last tatters of fog to the Dux’s command post.

‘We can’t attack first.’ Cian summoned some distant memory of tactics. ‘Let them come on and expend themselves across the boggy plain; then we can approach from high ground.’

Red snorted, his finger flicking along the sword-edge like a licking tongue. Blood dripped on his knee. ‘What would you know anyway,
pretty boy
?’

Cian turned his back, shuffling his stance on the muddy slope. The sun was slicing through the breaking mist when at last the Roman trumpets blew, and men were herded into formation by their commanders. Lines were straight-drawn, swords unsheathed from waists, helmets adjusted, spears braced. Prayers ran through the men like a wind, the Christos named along with the old gods of Rome, and the more ancient gods of Gaul and Britannia.

Officers strode back and forth, shouting last orders – in contrast to the barbarians who were spending their final moments whipping each other into an ever-greater frenzy, so none would feel fear and pain, so they could run at twice the speed, spear with double the strength.

Cian dragged his thoughts away from that maelstrom of noise.
Where were the cavalry
? Perhaps the Dux wanted to keep them in reserve. As if there might be a later.

The Roman horns blared again and were answered by the shriek of the barbarian war-trumpets, as if two great eagles fought in the skies above. The lines of soldiers around Cian pulled in tighter. The barbarians broke ranks with an enormous mass shout and onward rush to the ridge. Cian was pushed forward by the weight of his comrades and was suddenly stumbling down the slope. There was no turning back.

But he didn’t want to turn back. He wanted to let the wave take him and bear him down into the void.

When the armies met, the clash of arms, shields and bodies resounded off the rocks with the roar of a hundred-year storm battering the coast.

Fullofaudes watched through narrowed eyes, his desperation becoming despair as he saw the barbarian tide wash over his ranks, his lines wavering then breaking, before being shored up by the more experienced soldiers.
Seven thousand to thirty …
He must not think like that; there must be something he could do, some strategy that would enable his force to prevail.

Shouting at his commanders, he heard the horns screech and saw the scouts racing back and forth, passing on orders. Men were pulled out, reformed and forced back into the line. Throngs of soldiers and enemy warriors struggled in a turmoil below him, their weapons a frenzy of blades, the heather and turf slippery with blood. Screams, curses and shrieks pierced the air, as if the harpies of legend flew above in their fury, wafting about them the stench of death. There was so much blood that the hot, copper smell of it even reached Fullofaudes on his hill, drifting over the dank dew of morning.

He watched, but after barely an hour it was inescapable: his army was hopelessly outnumbered, their regulation armour a desperate island of order and civilization in the midst of the clashing colours, ragged furs and tattoos of the tribes; the fury of a wild sea overwhelming the stalwart land. No, it would not be!

His last chance was his cavalry reserves. The barbarians had none, and horses were all but invincible against infantry, his five hundred riders the equivalent of three thousand on foot. Orders were bawled from the hill, then passed via trumpet signal, and in moments the cavalry came thundering around the shoulders of the slope, one wing on the left and one on the right. His senior officers gathered around him, all of them straining to see.

The more far-sighted shouted in despair a moment before Fullofaudes realized what was unfolding before his disbelieving eyes. As the cavalry bore down on the barbarian warriors, they held firm almost to the last moment, and only when it looked like certain death for the Albans there rose from the ground a forest of stakes, each the length of three men, their bases dug into the ground and sharpened tips held up at an angle to meet the oncoming charge.

The Dux’s oath left his lips a moment after the cavalry crashed over those stakes, racing too fast to avoid the collision. Horses were lanced through bellies; men through their necks; others flung free of their saddles to break their limbs on the ground. Fullofaudes could only watch as his prized cavalry soldiers were torn off their wounded horses, each fighter disappearing under a mass of hacking barbarians. He wanted to turn his face away, to rail, to cry out, but he could not.

‘Send all remaining reserves in,’ he barked to his officers, their faces white as bone, as their horses wheeled restlessly at the smell of death. Drawing his sword, the Dux spun his stallion. ‘We have to throw everything at them. Let us make a good end.’