Web of Deceit (42 page)

‘Be quick!’ Myrddion summoned his flagging will and forced the two warriors onward while Cadoc and his companions continued to search for the last of the survivors. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll let him die after surviving this long in that stinking shit.’

Andrewina Ruadh had come running with Rhedyn on her heels. Slower because of his crutch, crippled Dyfri followed, and all three stared at Myrddion in surprise. They were unused to his cursing, and were equally perplexed by his distracted, irritated expression. Over this last summer their master had become increasingly silent, so that even the irrepressible Cadoc had been unable to lift his spirits or make him smile.

‘Summon bearers to take him to the surgery. These dolts will kill him if they continue to carry him like a sack of old turnips.’

Two
men materialised out of the nearest tent and ran to obey their master’s orders. Indifferent to the blood and caked filth that stained their clean robes, they carefully carried the wounded warrior to the hospital tent.

‘I need hot and warm water, clean cloths, and something to cut these rags off his body,’ Myrddion ordered, struggling to regain his usual crisp decisiveness. He stripped off his own mud-fouled tunic and sluiced his body with river water, wincing at the sudden chill against his goose-pimpled skin. Andrewina Ruadh, who was now simply known as Ruadh, handed him a length of old linen which he used to dry his torso. Then he donned his leather apron, which the women had cleaned since the bloodbath of surgery had finished in the middle hours of the afternoon.

‘My thanks, Ruadh,’ he whispered before turning to the other woman. ‘Rhedyn – lay out my tools without touching the blades.’ He felt the older woman stiffen, so he tried to smile in apology, although the muscles of his face felt stiff and unnatural. ‘I’m sorry, Rhedyn. I know you’d never do such a thing. I’m just tired.’

‘It’s been a long day, master,’ Rhedyn replied softly, accepting his apology. Her plain face and grey hair showed the marks of her hard labour as his assistant, but her eyes were clear and content. She had put aside the ugly and dangerous status of camp follower when she had first decided to follow the boy healer who treated her like a person of value. Now, eleven years later, she had travelled the world and gained an extended family of the heart, so she worshipped the man who had given her respect and purpose. But now she was worried about him, so she gave him little pats and caresses as she helped him to tie back his long hair.

Before lifting the wounded man on to the surgical table, the bearers lowered him gently on a length of oilskin outside the tent and carefully removed his leathers and armour. What could not be unlaced was cut away with old scalpels, until some tanned flesh was exposed
to permit Myrddion’s careful examination.

The warrior was powerfully built with long, whipcord muscles that indicated stamina, and Myrddion deduced that he was probably a cavalryman judging by the calluses on his hands. The battle had been fought on foot, for horses were useless in this landscape of mud and forest.

But who or what the survivor was would be immaterial if he died.

Ruadh handed him a large bowl of warm water and a precious piece of sea sponge which he used to sluice the body as clean as possible. Working in tandem with her master, Ruadh used cloth to dry the cleansed areas of skin as quickly as possible, paying particular attention to the man’s face and his flaccid penis. When Myrddion raised one eyebrow at her, Ruadh coloured and explained that men cared about their manhood only fractionally less than their honour.

Myrddion laughed naturally for the first time that day, and Ruadh congratulated herself silently for giving a man she loved so much a moment’s respite from his black moods.

Now that his patient’s face was clean, Myrddion recognised one of Uther’s strongest and most vocal allies.

‘It’s Prince Luka of the Brigante, Ruadh. We must save him if we can. Fetch Dyfri and ask him to prepare stimulants – the man’s lost too much blood.’

Luka’s initial wound appeared to have been a deep puncture in the shoulder which had obviously not totally incapacitated the hard-bitten warrior. But it must have slowed him down, as a number of cuts and slashes across his forearms, hands and knuckles showed he had narrowly avoided killing blows. The real damage had been done by a blunt instrument that had struck him on the forehead. Myrddion gently pressed his fingers round the ugly, odd-shaped bruise and was concerned when he sensed a faint irregularity in the skull. Brain fever killed slowly but inexorably, so Myrddion checked the back of the head, the
ears and the mouth with great care.

‘Why do you always check the side of the skull opposite to the wound, master?’ Ruadh asked as she helped a bearer to lift Luka’s unconscious body on to the battlefield table.

‘I have observed that there is often damage to the brain on the opposite side of the skull to where the initial blow fell. I’ve seen it many times when the bone has been breached and the patient has unexpectedly died. In the past, I have occasionally carried out a post-mortem examination on the skulls of such patients.’

‘You’ve opened the skull?’ Ruadh gasped, wide-eyed, as her hands worked unconsciously to staunch the slow leak of blood from the shoulder wound.

‘Aye. Perhaps I have sinned, but the warriors I examined were mostly Saxon and all were very, very dead. What I learned has helped me to save other lives, but I would be obliged if you remained silent on this matter. The Christian Church forbids us to cut open any corpses and who knows how Uther would react to such information about me.’

‘I could more easily die than betray you, master,’ Ruadh replied earnestly. ‘But what did you find?’

Any person not initiated into the alien world of battlefield medicine would have found this conversation very disconcerting, but Myrddion’s fingers didn’t hesitate as he explored Luka’s shoulder wound and cleaned it thoroughly of the mud that had fouled it. His scalpel opened the wound still further and, with a grunt of satisfaction, he used his forceps to retrieve a fragment of leather that had been driven into the injury. In truth, healers often spoke of other things as they struggled with death over the supine bodies of damaged men. Perhaps it was the only way they could remain sane.

‘The brain, which is the source of our thoughts – indeed, all of our senses – is greyish pink, and very soft. It is a network of blood vessels and I don’t understand a fraction
of how it works. The skull protects it as a glass or pottery container protects our unguents and liquids from harm. What happens when you shake a jar of cream? Or you thump the jar on one side? The contents always hit the other side of the jar with some force. If the cream was our brain, there would be damage where the jar was struck and further injuries where the cream bounced against the other side of the glass.’

‘Your knowledge is amazing, my lord.’ Ruadh’s eyes were so starry with adoration that Myrddion flinched. ‘In some ways, it opens my eyes to the mysteries of the gods.’

‘I can stitch this shoulder wound now, Ruadh, so I need needles and gut.’

As she prepared his tools, Myrddion looked across at her and smiled, for he was eager to divert the topic of conversation into safer areas. ‘Do you ever regret the loss of your children, far away to the north of the Vallum Antonini? When Uther freed you to return to your home, I never understood why you stayed in the south. I’m grateful, of course, because you’re a budding herbmaster who could one day rival the great Annwynn herself, and she is the best I’ve ever known. But you have cut yourself off from your childhood kin as well as your own children. Why would you be so . . . rash?’

As he spoke, Myrddion’s fingers deftly packed seaweed paste and radish into the wound and stitched it temporarily with a single knot. Ruadh assisted with eyes and fingers that were calm and still.

‘I loved King Ambrosius in my way, so the Pict life was barred to me for ever once I realised how I felt about him. If I was a true wife and mother, I should have killed him while he slept – indeed, I planned to do so when he took me to his bed for the first time. I even had a small fruit knife that could have been used to stab him through his sleeping eyes. But I couldn’t do it. I’m not squeamish, as you know, but I looked at Ambrosius’s care-worn face and remembered his gentleness, and I
couldn’t make my hands obey me. He was sweet and loving, my lord, for all he was a king. I regret that I never kissed him, for to do so would be the last betrayal of my dead husband and my lost children. But I wish I had, Master Myrddion, so that he would know that I had come to love him before he died.’

By now, Myrddion had stitched most of the nastier superficial wounds on Luka’s arms and Ruadh had begun to bandage them with neat expertise.

‘I still don’t understand why Ambrosius’s death didn’t set you free.’

‘I felt in my heart that I had betrayed the Picts, while I had rejected my tribal kin years ago. I was lost – until the day you took me in because of the love you had for my dead lord.’

‘So your place here is based on personal honour?’ Myrddion laughed. ‘Many men say that women can’t really understand the concept.’

Ruadh’s fingers stilled, trembled, and then resumed their careful, efficient movements.

‘Those clods would be wrong, master. Women have their own code, which is as rigid and unbending as anything a man can devise. But few men try to understand us as my lord Ambrosius did. He was a rare king . . . and an even rarer man.’

‘Aye, he was that.’

Together, they examined the huge lump on Luka’s forehead and decided that the elaborate boss of a shield had probably caused it, hence the strangely mottled purpling.

‘What can we do, master?’

Myrddion shook his head regretfully. ‘Nothing, Ruadh,’ he whispered. ‘We must keep him very still and force liquids down his throat – milk for preference – and hope that he wakens of his own volition. I’ll not despair until I have no other option.’

‘Then I’ll pray to the Blessed Virgin
for him – and for you. Perhaps God might still have plans for this young man. After all, he is still alive when thousands of others have perished.’

Several more men were found alive, but all succumbed to their wounds without regaining consciousness. As his bearers carried away the last of the bodies for communal burial, Myrddion regretted that battlefields could not be organised to save as many lives as possible. The healer had hired a score of body servants and trained them in the rudiments of first aid so that they could stop bleeding and carry wounded men off the battlefield after the fiercest of the fighting had left behind its trail of dead and wounded warriors. Lives were saved by this simple expedient, and Cadoc’s tasks were made significantly easier as he need no longer expend his energies in bringing back the injured himself. A significant proportion of Myrddion’s apprentice healers were youths, and the training herbmasters were either women or men like Dyfri who were crippled in some way. The healers no longer depended on warriors to provide the brute strength needed at the field hospitals. The extra hands saved lives.

As full darkness fell, Luka’s condition remained unchanged. Myrddion was tired, not from recent physical exertion, but from years in the saddle and at battlefields that blurred together in his memory. But worst by far was the need to mitigate the endless caprices of Uther Pendragon.

After his initial grief, and his crowning amid the magnificence of the newly built Christian church in Venta Belgarum, Uther began a campaign of attrition against both the recalcitrant tribal kings and the Saxon thanes. Gone were the days of the judgment halls where justice was dispensed with mercy as well as punishment. Despite Myrddion’s best efforts, Uther made snap decisions about petitioners, whether they were the humblest peasants or the most offensive noblemen. More than once, Myrddion had risked his head by intervening when Uther had
flagrantly ignored reason to either settle old scores or exercise a rather skewed ruling.

During the two winters that he had spent in Uther’s service, Myrddion had ridden countless miles as he tightened and extended his spy network, while checking that the tribal kings were fortifying the outposts in accordance with their oaths to the High King. He was now viewed as Uther’s creature, so the prejudice and dislike he had suffered in his youth were laid on him anew – and two-fold. The tribes feared Uther, but they obeyed him sullenly, for the gods alone could guess what he would do if he was gainsaid – or betrayed.

So Myrddion suffered a crushing isolation that was only assuaged when he dwelled in the house of the healers, where laughter and a spirit of enquiry still reigned. In his scriptorium, Myrddion could study, assemble his opus on herbal curatives, train eager young men to serve on the battlefield and enjoy the company and laughter of children. Had he not possessed this peaceful haven, Myrddion suspected that he would have broken his oath to Ambrosius, and run.

In the darkness, as Myrddion checked several scores of patients who seemed likely to survive, Botha sought him out. The tall captain of Uther’s personal guard carried a nasty slash across the thigh which had almost castrated him, but Myrddion imagined that the unfortunate Saxon never had a chance to repeat the blow. Botha was a superlative warrior and a man whose life was ruled by a finely honed sense of honour which governed all aspects of his life.

‘The High King wants you, Myrddion, and you know how quickly he expects you to obey,’ he said with a wry grin. Both men were slaves to Uther’s whims.

With a flash of irritation, Myrddion permitted himself to scowl.

‘Then he’ll have to wait until I dress that cut on your thigh. It’s very high and likely to become infected because the muscles bunch with your every movement. Strip to your loincloth,
Botha. If you argue, we’ll only be delayed further.’

When, tightly bandaged and on tenterhooks, Botha finally ushered Myrddion into the High King’s tent, Uther was pacing irritably. Something in the king’s eyes gave Myrddion a frisson of apprehension.

‘You took your time, Botha. You’ve permitted the healer to flout my orders, as usual.’