Warlord 2 Enemy of God (22 page)

‘So why did God ignore us?’ Sagramor asked.

Arthur hushed the Numidian. ‘What is done is done,’ he said. ‘What happens next is our business here.’

But what happened next was up to Aelle rather than to us. He had won the first victory, though it was possible he did not know the extent of that triumph. We were miles inside his territory and we faced starvation unless we could trap his army, destroy it, and so break out into land that had not been stripped of supplies. Our scouts brought us deer, and once in a while they came across some cattle or sheep, but such delicacies were rare and not nearly sufficient to make up for the lost flour and dried meat.

‘He has to defend London, surely?’ Cuneglas suggested.

Sagramor shook his head. ‘London is populated by Britons,’ he said. ‘The Saxons don’t like it there. He’ll let us have London.’

‘There’ll be food in London,’ Cuneglas said.

‘But how long will it last, Lord King?’ Arthur asked. ‘And if we take it with us, what do we do? Wander for ever, hoping Aelle will attack?’ He stared at the ground, his long face hardened by thought. Aelle’s tactics were clear enough now, the Saxon would let us march and march, and his men would always be ahead of us to sweep our path clean of food, and once we were weakened and dispirited, the Saxon horde would swarm around us. ‘What we must do,’ Arthur said, ‘is draw him onto us.’

Meurig blinked rapidly. ‘How?’ he inquired, in a tone suggesting Arthur was being ridiculous. The Druids who accompanied us, Merlin, Iorweth and two others from Powys, were all sitting in a group to one side of the Council and Merlin, who had commandeered a convenient ant hill as his seat, now commanded attention by raising his staff. ‘What do you do,’ he asked mildly, ‘when you want something valuable?’

‘Take it,’ Agravain growled. Agravain commanded Arthur’s heavy horsemen, leaving Arthur free to lead the whole army.

‘When you want something valuable from the Gods,’ Merlin amended his question, ‘what do you do then?’

Agravain shrugged, and none of the rest of us could supply an answer. Merlin stood so that his height dominated the Council. ‘If you wish something,’ he said very simply as though he was our teacher and we his pupils, ‘you must give something. You must make an offering, a sacrifice. The thing I wanted above all things in this world was the Cauldron, so I offered my life to its search and I received my wish, but if I had not offered my soul for it, the gift would not have come. We must sacrifice something.’

Meurig’s Christianity was offended and he could not resist taunting the Druid. ‘Your life, perhaps, Lord Merlin? It worked last time.’ He laughed and looked to his surviving priests to join the laughter. The laughter died as Merlin pointed his black staff at the Prince. He kept the staff very still, its butt just inches from Meurig’s face, and he held it there long after the laughter had stopped. And still Merlin held the staff, stretching the silence unbearably. Agricola, feeling he must support his Prince, cleared his throat, but a twitch of the black staff stilled whatever protest Agricola might have made. Meurig wriggled uncomfortably, but seemed struck dumb. He reddened, blinked and squirmed. Arthur frowned, but said nothing. Nimue smiled in anticipation of the Prince’s fate, while the rest of us watched in silence and some of us shuddered in fear, and still Merlin did not move until, at last, Meurig could take the suspense no longer. ‘I was jesting!’ he almost shouted in desperation. ‘I meant no offence.’

‘Did you say something, Lord Prince?’ Merlin inquired anxiously, pretending Meurig’s panicked words had jolted him out of reverie. He lowered the staff. ‘I must have been daydreaming. Where was I? Oh yes, a sacrifice. What do we have, Arthur, that is most precious?’

Arthur thought for a few seconds. ‘We have gold,’ he said, ‘silver, my armour.’

‘Baubles,’ Merlin answered dismissively.

There was silence for a while, then men outside the Council offered their answers. Some took torques from about their necks and waved them in the air. Others suggested offering weapons, one man even called out the name of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The Christians made no suggestions, because this was a pagan procedure and they would offer nothing but their prayers, but one man of Powys suggested we sacrifice a Christian and that idea prompted loud cheers. Meurig blushed again.

‘I sometimes think,’ Merlin said when no more suggestions were offered, ‘that I am doomed to live among idiots. Is all the world mad but me? Cannot one poor blinkered fool among you see what is plainly the most precious thing we possess? Not one?’

‘Food,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ Merlin cried, delighted. ‘Well done, you poor blinkered fool! Food, you idiots.’ He spat the insult at the Council. ‘Aelle’s plans are predicated upon the belief that we lack food, so we must demonstrate the opposite. We must waste food like Christians waste prayer, we must scatter it to the empty heavens, we must squander it, we must throw it away, we must,’ he paused to put stress on the next word, ‘sacrifice it.’ He waited for a voice to be raised in opposition, but no one spoke. ‘Find a place near here,’ Merlin ordered Arthur, ‘where you will be content to offer Aelle battle. Do not make it too strong, for you don’t want him to refuse combat. You’re tempting him, remember, and you must make him believe he can defeat you. How long will it take him to ready his forces for battle?’

‘Three days,’ Arthur said. He suspected that Aelle’s men were widely scattered in their loose ring that escorted us and it would take the Saxon at least two days to shrink that ring into a compact army, and another full day to shove it into battle order.

‘I shall need two days,’ Merlin said, ‘so bake enough hard bread to keep us barely alive for five days,’ he ordered. ‘Not a generous ration, Arthur, for our sacrifice has to be real. Then find your battleground and wait. Leave the rest to me, but I want Derfel and a dozen of his men to do some labouring work. And do we have any men here,’ he raised his voice so that all the men crowding about the Council could hear, ‘who have skills in carving wood?’

He chose six men. Two were from Powys, one bore the hawk of Kernow on his shield, and the others were from Dumnonia. They were given axes and knives, but nothing to carve until Arthur had discovered his battleground.

He found it on a wide heath that rose to a gentle summit crowned by a scattered grove of yew and whitebeam. The slope was nowhere steep, but we would still have the high ground and there Arthur planted his banners, and round the banners there grew an encampment of thatched shelters made from branches cut from the grove. Our spearmen would make a ring about the banners and there, we hoped, face Aelle. The bread that would keep us alive as we waited for the Saxons was baked in turf ovens. Merlin chose his spot to the north of the heath. There was a meadow there, a place of stunted alders and rank grass edging a stream that curled south towards the distant Thames. My men were ordered to fell three oaks, then strip the trunks of their branches and bark, and afterwards dig three pits into which the oaks could be set up as columns, though first he ordered his six carvers to make the oak trunks into three ghoulish idols. Iorweth helped Nimue and Merlin, and the three loved that work for it allowed them to devise the most ghastly, fearsome things that bore small resemblance to any God I had ever known, but Merlin did not care. The idols, he said, were not for us, but for the Saxons, and so he and his woodcarvers made three things of horror with animal faces, female breasts and male genitalia, and when the columns were finished my men stopped their other work and hoisted the three figures into their pits while Merlin and the woodcarvers tamped their bases with earth so that at last the columns stood upright.

‘The father,’ Merlin capered in front of the idols, ‘the son and the holy ghost!’ he laughed. My men, meanwhile, had been making a great stack of wood in front of the pits, and onto that wood we now piled what remained of our food. We killed the remaining oxen and heaved their heavy corpses onto the pile so that their fresh blood trickled down through the layers of timber, and onto the oxen we heaped everything they had hauled; dried meat, dried fish, cheese, apples, grain and beans, and on top of those precious supplies we put the carcasses of two newly-caught deer and a freshly slaughtered ram. The ram’s head, with its twin horns, was cut off and nailed to the central pillar. The Saxons watched us work. They were on the stream’s far bank and once or twice, on the first day, their spears had hurtled over the water, but after those first futile efforts to interfere with us they had been content to just watch and see exactly what strange things we did. I sensed that their numbers grew. On the first day we had glimpsed only a dozen men among the far trees, but by the second evening there were at least a score of fires smoking behind the leaf screen.

‘Now,’ Merlin said that evening, ‘we give them something to watch.’

We carried fire in cooking pots down from the heath’s low summit to the great pile of wood and thrust it deep into the tangle of branches. The wood was green, but we had stacked heaps of dry grass and broken twigs into the centre, and by nightfall the fire was raging fiercely. The flames lit our crude idols with a lurid glare, the smoke boiled in a great plume that drifted towards London and the smell of roasting meat wafted tantalizingly towards our hungry encampment. The fire crackled and collapsed, exploding streams of sparks into the air, and in its fierce heat the dead beasts twitched and twisted as the flames shrank their sinews and exploded their skulls. Melting fat hissed in the blaze, then flared up white and bright to cast black shadows on the three hideous idols. All night that fire seethed, burning our last hopes of leaving Lloegyr without victory, and in the dawn we watched as the Saxons crept out to investigate its smoking remnants.

Then we waited. We were not entirely passive. Our horsemen rode east to scout the London road, and came back to report bands of marching Saxons. Others of us cut timber and used it to begin constructing a hall beside the shrinking grove on the heath’s summit. We had no need of such a hall, but Arthur wanted to give the impression that we were establishing a base deep in Lloegyr from which we would harass Aelle’s lands. That belief, if it convinced Aelle, would surely provoke him to battle. We made the beginnings of an earthen rampart, but lacking the proper tools we made a poor showing of the wall, though it must have helped the deception.

We were busy enough, but that did not stop a rancorous division showing in the army. Some, like Meurig, believed we had adopted the wrong strategy from the start. It would have been better, Meurig now said, if we had sent three or more smaller armies to take the Saxon fortresses on the frontier. We should have harassed and provoked, but instead we were growing ever hungrier in a self-made trap deep in Lloegyr.

‘And maybe he’s right,’ Arthur confessed to me on the third morning.

‘No, Lord,’ I insisted, and to prove my point I gestured north towards the wide smear of smoke that betrayed where a growing horde of Saxons was gathering beyond the stream. Arthur shook his head. ‘Aelle’s army is there, right enough,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean he’ll attack. They’ll watch us, but if he has any sense, he’ll let us rot here.’

‘We could attack him,’ I suggested.

He shook his head. ‘Leading an army through trees and across a stream is a recipe for disaster. That’s our last resort, Derfel. Just pray he comes today.’

But he did not come, and that was the end of the fifth day since the Saxons had destroyed our supplies. Tomorrow we would eat crumbs and in two days more we would be ravenous. In three we would gaze defeat in its horrid eyes. Arthur displayed no concern, whatever doom the grumblers in the army suggested, and that evening, as the sun drifted down over distant Dumnonia, Arthur beckoned for me to climb and join him on the growing wall of our crudely constructed hall. I clambered up the logs and pulled myself onto the top of the wall. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing east, and far off on the horizon I could see another smear of grey smoke and beneath the smoke, its buildings lit by the slanting sun, was a great town bigger than any I had ever seen before. Bigger then Glevum or Corinium, bigger even than Aquae Sulis. ‘London,’ Arthur said in a tone of wonder. ‘Did you ever think to see it?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

He smiled. ‘My confident Derfel Cadarn.’ He was perched on the wall’s top, holding onto an untrimmed pillar and staring fixedly at the city. Behind us, in the rectangle of the hall’s timbers, the army’s horses were stabled. Those poor horses were already hungry, for there was little grass on the dry heathland and we had brought no forage for them. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ Arthur said, still gazing at London,

‘that by now Lancelot and Cerdic could have done battle and we’ll know nothing about it.’

‘Pray Lancelot won,’ I said.

‘I do, Derfel, I do.’ He kicked his heels against the half built wall. ‘What a chance Aelle has!’ he said suddenly. ‘He could cut down the best warriors of Britain here. By year’s end, Derfel, his men could hold our halls. They could stroll to the Severn Sea. All gone. All Britain! Gone.’ He seemed to find the thought amusing, then he twisted about and looked down at the horses. ‘We could always eat them,’ he said. ‘Their meat will keep us alive for a week or two.’

‘Lord!’ I protested at his pessimism.

‘Don’t worry, Derfel,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve sent our old friend Aelle a message.’

‘You have?’

‘Sagramor’s woman. Malla, her name is. What odd names these Saxons have. You know her?’

‘I’ve seen her, Lord.’ Malla was a tall girl with long muscular legs and shoulders broad as a barrel. Sagramor had taken her captive in one of his raids late in the previous year and she had evidently accepted her fate with a passivity that was reflected in her flat, almost vacant face that was surrounded by a mass of gold-coloured hair. Other than that hair there was no one feature of Malla’s that was particularly attractive, but somehow she was still oddly alluring; a great, strong, slow, robust creature with a calm grace and a demeanour as taciturn as her Numidian lover.

‘She’s pretending to have escaped us,’ Arthur explained, ‘and even now she should be telling Aelle that we plan to stay here through the coming winter. She says Lancelot’s coming to join us with another three hundred spears, and that we need him here because a lot of our men are weak with sickness, despite our pits being filled with good food.’ He smiled. ‘She’s spinning endless nonsense to him, or I hope she is.’