The Circle of Stone (Darkest Age) (11 page)

‘I . . . I have some skills I might try,’ she admitted at last. ‘But there is so little hope...’

‘Won’t you at least try?’ Wyn broke in. ‘Do you think I’d turn away
any
hope – so much as a feather’s worth? I’ll fight for Reinhard while there’s breath in my body.’

‘But if he should die,’ Eolande whispered.

The woman’s eyes blazed. ‘Then I’ll fight for my neighbours, and for their children. What else is there to do?’

Eolande closed her eyes for a moment, then let her hands fall. Slowly, she raised her head to look at Wyn, and when she spoke her voice was clear.

‘I will try,’ she said.

They carried Edmund by his hands and feet, with a sack tied over his head.

It made no difference to his sight, of course. Even as he flailed and kicked, he was reaching for the eyes of one of his captors to see where they were taking him: away from the road and deeper into the hills. The filthy rag in his mouth was choking him. As he tried to spit it out, he cast his sight behind him, back to the camp. He had always recoiled from using his skill on his own companions, but now, for an instant, he borrowed Cathbar’s eyes, and saw Eolande running towards him, weeping.

He managed to get rid of the gag, took a deep breath and yelled with all his strength.

‘Help! Cathbar! I’m here...’

Something hit him hard in the stomach. At the same time the sacking was drawn tighter over his mouth and nose. Winded and gasping, he kicked out more violently and heard one of the men curse as they broke into a run. Edmund hung
between them, jolted at every step, his mouth full of sacking and his head swimming with the smell of mouldy grain.

He did not know how long they carried him. The foul air inside the sack sickened him and he could not draw enough breath into his lungs. He tried to borrow the sight of one of the men, but all he could see was the rocky ground ahead, and his vision was beginning to blur. He flailed his trapped arms as the men began to climb. The grip on one arm loosened suddenly and he fell, the side of his head hitting the ground with a violent blow. He lost his hold on his captor’s eyes, and darkness closed over him.

He woke from a confused dream of fire and bloodshed. He was lying on the ground, and for a moment he felt pure panic, not knowing where he was or how he had got there. The figures from his dream still filled his mind: men and women sprawled on the ground, red-lit by the flames burning their homes. He opened his mouth to cry out – but the cry died unspoken when he felt rough cloth over his face.

Memory flooded back. Edmund’s head throbbed where he had hit it; he tried vainly to bring his hands up and realised that they were tied together. So were his feet. He could hear voices now: his captors, sitting and talking a little way away from him. He sent out his sight cautiously towards them and saw four bearded men, lounging at their ease on a quiet hillside: grey stone and thin, yellowed grass, with patches of green further down. Edmund suppressed a groan. They were
resting: they must be confident that they had thrown off the pursuit. He was alone.

The men talked in low voices, in Dansk, but with a strange, nasal accent that made it difficult to hear what they were saying. Edmund made out a few words: ‘boy’; ‘our pay’; ‘by noon’. One of them grunted and rose to his feet, and the man whose eyes he was borrowing turned to look at a heap of rags and ropes on the ground nearby. The heap shifted – and Edmund hurriedly regained his own sight as heavy footsteps crunched towards him.

The sack was pulled from his head and he blinked up at a scowling face, the beady eyes almost lost between heavy black brows and a bristling moustache. ‘He’s awake,’ the man called. ‘Let’s go.’

He reached down to cut the rope around Edmund’s feet and yanked him upright. ‘You walk from now on, boy,’ he growled.

They tied a rope around Edmund’s waist, pinning his arms to his sides. Two of his captors each took an end, walking on either side of him and pushing him onwards if he slowed. They spoke little to him, apart from curt orders to move faster, and Edmund kept silent. What if the men had taken him as a hostage – could they already know who his father was? If they didn’t, they would not find out through him. He could speak passable Dansk by now, but he would not risk being betrayed by his accent.

The men kept up a relentless pace, cursing Edmund when he stumbled, but did not harm him otherwise. But his head
pounded, and it was difficult to keep his balance with bound hands, so that as the path became steeper and more uneven he tripped more and more frequently. Before long every step was an effort, and he walked with his eyes fixed on his feet, not daring to look up.

By the time the sun was halfway up the sky, even his captors seemed to be feeling the strain. Some distance up the steepest slope they had climbed, Edmund slipped and fell again, skinning his wrists, and this time the men let him lie. They sat down and took out food and drink, though the moustached man grumbled about wasting time. Edmund, bone-weary, was grateful to lean against a rock and accept the strip of meat and flask of sour ale that they handed him. At least his kidnappers were not savages, he thought: if he found no chance to escape, perhaps he could plead or bargain with their commander for his freedom.

Even if it meant revealing who he was?

The brief rest gave Edmund some of his strength back, but he was relieved beyond measure when they finally reached the top of the hill. No camp was visible in the foothills below, but Edmund, casting his sight down, was not surprised to find men there, laying fires, and plucking freshly killed birds. He wondered who they could be. Surely not the marauders who had ploughed up the road behind them: the scene he had glimpsed seemed too orderly to be a bandits’ camp.

Their road was all downhill now. As the sun passed its height, Edmund heard the sound of distant voices, and next
moment two armed guards stepped out from an angle of the rock to challenge them. The guards nodded in recognition, and one of them ran ahead while Edmund’s captors led him around a final outcrop to a level plain, full of noise and activity.

The camp was set up in the shelter of a sheer, rocky cliff, around a small spring that welled up a dozen feet from the foot of the stone wall. Men were everywhere: guarding the camp’s boundary; sharpening weapons; repairing tents. The shelters were made from animal skins and furs, pegged into the ground with metal spikes. Edmund knew that this was no band of outlaws, nor even the retinue of some local lord. He was looking at a king’s army.

His captors pushed him forward, and Edmund staggered with exhaustion. They had taken the rope off him, but he knew there was no question of running now: he doubted whether his legs would hold him up much longer.

‘I’ll be glad to be rid of this one,’ said one of his captors, rubbing his arm where Edmund had kicked him.

‘I just hope he’ll do,’ complained the moustached man. ‘I still say he’s too young to know anything.’

While Edmund was wondering what he meant, the man took him by the arm and propelled him towards the largest of the tents. He stopped at the entrance, cleared his throat and called out in a softer and more respectful tone than any Edmund had heard him using.

‘My Lord? It’s Viridogard – back with the prisoner.’

Someone answered at once: ‘Bring him in. What are you waiting for?’ His voice was deep, testy and somehow familiar to Edmund. The moustached man twitched the flap of hide aside and gave Edmund a violent shove that sent him sprawling into the tent. There were three men inside, crowded around a wooden chest with a map spread out on it. An oil lamp filled the air with fumes and blurred their faces.

‘Pick him up,’ said the deep-voiced man. This must be the chief of the army: even seated, he was taller than the others, and his voice held the ring of authority. The men on either side of him rose, but Edmund hauled himself to his feet before they could reach him, and stood glaring at the shadowed faces on the other side of the lamp. All three men laughed, but when the one in charge spoke again, his voice was dissatisfied.

‘He’s barely more than a boy. You take a full day, and this is what you bring me?’ Viridogard started to protest, but the chief cut him off. ‘You’ll be paid: I don’t go back on my word. Wait outside now.’

The moustached man backed away and left. The chief turned to one of his companions. ‘I doubt this one will be able to help us – and that’s another day lost, if so. But let’s have a look at him.’

Edmund felt as if the ground had shifted underneath his feet. Up till now the man had been speaking Dansk, like everyone else he had met in this land. But the words he had just heard were in English. And the voice was almost as familiar to him as his own.

‘
Father?
’

There was a long silence. Then the chief rose from his seat and strode around the chest to Edmund, taking his shoulders with both hands. He was not the towering giant of Edmund’s memories, but his shoulders were just as broad and his blue eyes as piercing as the picture he had kept in his mind’s eye for more than two years.

‘Edmund?’ the man whispered. ‘What in the name of all the gods are you doing here?’

Heored had dismissed his two captains, and now he and Edmund sat alone in his tent, seated on stools at the king’s campaign chest. The map had been cleared away and Heored had sent for food: bread, dried fruit and good ale as well as pigeons his men had been roasting on their fires outside. The camp’s healer had plastered Edmund’s head with a strong-smelling bran poultice, and a bed of furs had been laid out for him against one wall of the tent. Edmund glanced at it longingly once or twice, but his father still had much to say to him.

‘What are you doing here?’ Heored demanded as soon as his men had left. ‘Why have you left your mother?’

‘She sent me away.’ Edmund watched his father’s face in the smoky lamplight as if re-learning an old lesson: the coppery beard, broad brows and level gaze that he remembered so well. But there were unfamiliar lines around the eyes – lines of age and authority. Edmund faltered for a moment: this was
not just his father, but King Heored, ruler of Sussex, leader of one of the most feared armies in Britain.

Heored listened gravely as Edmund told him about the marauders who had raided their home shores, and Branwen’s decision to send him to safety with his uncle in Francia.

‘It was wisely done,’ his father said, but Edmund thought his face clouded for a moment.
I’m still a boy to him
, he thought.
If I’d been a warrior, like him, I’d have stayed to protect my mother, not run away
.

He told Heored of the shipwreck that had stranded him in Dumnonia, his companionship with Elspeth, the boat-master’s daughter, and the dragon, Torment, that had hounded them.

His father’s eyes widened. ‘I’ve heard of such beasts,’ he admitted, ‘but I always thought them a fable.’

It was clear that tales of monsters and shipwrecks were not Heored’s chief concern.

‘So you’ve been travelling across country, living by your wits and your sword,’ he said, approvingly. ‘I left you as a child – and now I see a son who can stand by my side.’ He summoned a servant to refill Edmund’s cup. ‘Tell me of the fighting you’ve done,’ he demanded. ‘Have you kept up your training?’

‘I have,’ Edmund said eagerly. ‘I’m a fair archer now. I’ve had plenty of practice in the last few weeks, hunting for food.’

Heored nodded, but Edmund suspected it was not the answer his father had wanted. ‘I hope your swordsmanship’s as good,’ he said. ‘There’s battle ahead of us, and I’d have you standing with me.’

‘I’ve been travelling with King Beotrich’s man, Cathbar. He’s a good teacher,’ Edmund told him.

He did not explain that it was Elspeth, not himself, whom Cathbar had been training in swordplay.
A son who can stand by my side
, his father had said, and Edmund had felt a pride he had never known before. But could he really be that son?

When he had first gazed at his father’s face, so familiar and yet so strange, Edmund had wondered how he must look to Heored. Without thinking, he had borrowed his father’s sight, seeing a slight boy with pale, earnest eyes, his wrists and ankles protruding from ill-fitting clothes. For a moment, he had shared his father’s amazement at how tall he had grown . . . and something else, a flash of concern, or unease. It happened in an instant – then Edmund had released Heored’s sight, overcome by a sense of trespass. He remembered his father’s view of the Ripente: he had made use of their help at times in battle, but he had always spoken of the men with disdain, as tools liable to turn in the hand. To Heored, Ripente were not men or women with a skill but a separate race, to be treated with suspicion – and Edmund remembered with a shock that he had once thought the same himself. He would tell his father the truth, but not yet.

There were other things that he was reluctant to talk about, too. He said nothing of Elspeth’s crystal sword, fearful that Heored would not believe him. He spoke of Cluaran as their companion and guide on the road, but did not mention the minstrel’s Fay blood. And he talked of Loki only as an escaped
enemy: a merciless killer and fire-raiser; a danger to the land. His father was fighting armies – how could Edmund tell him that he had been pursuing a god?

Heored listened to his account of the journeyings in the Snowlands with a sort of impatience. It was only when he spoke of their arrival in the land of the Danes that his father regained his interest.

‘So you arrived less than a week ago! Was there any fighting in the north of the country? Bands of wandering men?’

‘Not in the north,’ Edmund said. ‘We’ve seen signs of both since we came south.’ He repressed a shudder. ‘It’s as if it’s always happening just ahead of us.’

‘They’re centred around our camp,’ his father said with certainty. ‘If I could only draw them to attack us, we might rid the world of a plague! But they’ll only prey on the weak – cowards that they are.’

‘You know who they are, then?’ Edmund was surprised.

Heored shook his head. ‘I know not who they are but I know what they have done. After two years of fighting in Northumbria we finally beat back my cousin’s enemy and sent them back to Gwynedd. My men and I headed for the harbour at Northumbria, ready to sail back to Sussex, but found that the port was being ransacked by Danes from across the sea.’ He smacked one hand into the other. ‘We managed to see them off and with half a dozen ships we followed them and played them at their own game by sailing to their shores.’