Web of Deceit (5 page)

Seeing, without arms, or hands,

With many ribs, and its mouth in its middle.

Anglo-Saxon riddle

All the healers felt
dislocated. The road they travelled was long, broad and still well maintained, although hedges of hawthorn were beginning to encroach onto the carriageway. Beyond the hedges, or over the low walls of stones that had been ploughed out of the fields, farms proliferated across the flat and fertile land. But Myrddion also saw signs of neglect where fields remained unploughed and crops
had not been planted in the late winter. Many of the simple stone crofts were obviously deserted, for doors gaped open and many thatched roofs had collapsed.

‘It looks as though most farmers of the Cantii tribe have fled from the lands around Dubris,’ Myrddion reported to Finn and Cadoc, after he had ridden off to explore a one-room cottage and cow byre just beyond the roadway. ‘The croft has been stripped bare and all the livestock has gone. I saw no signs of violence, no bodies and no bones, so the farm must have been abandoned. The tribe is probably on the move into the west, taking everything of value with them.’

‘I can’t imagine deserting the home where the ashes of my ancestors have rested for hundreds of years,’ Finn murmured, his eyes dark with empathy.

‘This retreat will become commonplace for
all
the tribes of Britain if Ambrosius can’t find a solution that will pin the Saxons down on the east coast,’ Myrddion replied with morose fatality. ‘I wager we’ll meet many refugees on the road between here and Segontium.’

Yet, for all the despondency of the travellers, birds still sang sweetly in the thickets, wild flowers sweetened the dust from the roadway with drifts of perfume and the sky remained a clean-rinsed blue barred with white, scudding clouds.

The land is as it has always been, Myrddion thought. It’s only we ants who crawl upon it who have changed. After we are dust, the land will continue.

Although they were travelling in easy stages for the comfort of the women and children, the party began to overtake slow-moving family groups trudging wearily towards Durovernum. The men and boys were afoot, herding their few cattle and sheep before them, while horses and oxen drew farm carts laden high with furniture, children and baskets of live fowl. Dogs scouted ahead on the orders of their masters. The faces
of the women were drawn with loss and care, because they were venturing into the unknown and dooming their children to landlessness. Ashamed by their retreat, the farmers refused to look directly into the eyes of the chance-met strangers.

On several occasions before they reached Durovernum, the travellers stumbled over newly erected fortifications constructed by Saxons from massive tree trunks. Saxon farmers now tilled the soil and they shaded their sun-dazzled eyes with their hands as the healers’ wagons passed. When they recognised Celtic faces, they spat into the newly ploughed furrows of black soil, causing Myrddion’s stomach to tighten with concern.

But no lasting trouble came from these signs of enmity. On one occasion, tall warriors forced the healers to halt their oxen. Knowing they could never hope to outrun the troop of Saxons, Myrddion instructed his companions to keep their mouths shut while he negotiated with them. Then, with his heart in his mouth, he explained that they were healers who had just returned from Gaul, where they had served King Merovech during the wars against Attila the Hun. Shamelessly name-dropping, he claimed the protection of his friendship with Hengist, and because his Saxon was passable the ruling thane gave them free passage through his domain, provided they treated a number of minor ailments suffered by his men.

Gratefully, Myrddion complied, thanking their luck that this Saxon lordling was more interested in acquiring land than Celtic heads.

‘Some of our farmers seem to be fighting back,’ Myrddion commented in Celt as he lanced an infected wound in the thigh of a tall, red-haired warrior. ‘This injury is a puncture wound and was probably caused by a hay fork or some similar farm implement.’ As his scalpel found the deep-seated abscess, vile-smelling pus gushed out of the wound. ‘Ah! Got it!’

He grimaced with
satisfaction, for his patient had fainted. Swiftly, the healer cleaned up the discharge and began to swab out the wound with raw alcohol. The sudden stab of pain caused the warrior, barely twenty years of age, to come to his senses. The young man began to sweat profusely, so Myrddion called for honey in hot water to counteract the shock.

‘Good for them,’ Cadoc replied laconically as he struggled with a broken tooth in the mouth of an older Saxon who gripped his stool with white-knuckled hands, while he tried to suppress a moan of terror. For country dwellers, broken teeth were almost unendurably painful and this stoic patient had suffered for some time. Cadoc noted cynically that the Saxon must have been a favourite of the gods, for no abscess had formed on the root of the tooth.

‘Gently, Cadoc! Remember that we’ve vowed to avoid harming our patients.’

Cadoc grinned as he brandished the offending tooth in his pliers and then stooped to staunch the sudden rush of blood. ‘Aye, master. At least this old fellow won’t die of the brain disease, for the tooth cavity is quite clean.

Finn allowed himself a sour grin. ‘I know I’m being uncharitable,’ he snapped as he prepared herbal painkillers and drawing ointments to leave with the patients. ‘But I can’t see that it would hurt the Saxons to bathe a little more frequently. They smell worse than Cadoc’s armpit.’

‘Enough foolishness, Finn! Have you smelled our peasants from downwind in recent times? They’re none too precious about bathing either. You’ve lived in the Roman way for far too long.’

‘Since birth, master, and it’s not hurt me,’ Finn retorted. ‘The Romans had a fondness for Dyfed and Gwent, and left their fortresses and their baths up and down the coast. And we sickened less for the sake of a little oil and clean water.’

As Myrddion knew that Finn was correct, he permitted the conversation to lapse
and moved on to a new patient sporting a painful bunion.

Eventually, with the grudging thanks of the local thane ringing in their ears and carrying a gift of several leather flagons of Saxon beer from the man with the broken tooth, the healers took to the road again. The whole party felt relieved when Durovernum hove into view.

At first the town seemed unchanged, although Saxons now made up over half of the population. Many Celt craftsmen had stayed in the old Roman settlement, because their skills were still needed and welcomed, even though outland masters now controlled their day-to-day lives. But a new crop of younger Saxon traders were burrowing deeply into the life of Durovernum. These newcomers were inclined to treat any travellers with suspicion, so the healers soon felt resentful, hostile eyes following their movements through the heart of the township.

Finn’s eyes flashed with anger as they passed a simple Christian church that had been burned to the ground and stripped of any objects of value. Old death seemed to hang over the ruins and this taint, perhaps, accounted for the fact that the land hadn’t been converted to another purpose. A young sapling and lush weeds grew out of the foundations, further cracking and lifting old slabs of stone that had served as flooring in the small, simple structure.

‘To kill men and women who have dedicated themselves to the service of their gods is a very serious sin,’ Cadoc whispered, his eyes narrowing with disgust. ‘When I spoke to some of the warriors back at the fortress, I gathered that they save their greatest scorn for the priests and nuns of the Christian orders, for they believe them to follow a Roman religion. The Saxons still hold a passionate hatred for the Romans and all that they stood for.’

‘I’ve been told they hate the Christian habit of refusing to fight back whenever a religious community is attacked,’ Myrddion added. ‘Perhaps, for all their protestations, the Saxons
understand that it is wrong to kill defenceless men and women who are so pious that they pray and honour their god while they’re being murdered.’

‘Perhaps they just don’t like anyone who isn’t of their own kind,’ Rhedyn hissed angrily from the wagon. ‘Perhaps they like to kill, and that’s the end of it.’

‘Who knows?’ Myrddion said quietly. ‘I’m not convinced that the Saxon race is naturally wicked or that they are more violent than we are. Their motives are foreign to us, so perhaps they’re just different. I wouldn’t choose to hate them simply because I don’t understand them.’

Rhedyn flushed, but she squared her rounded shoulders defiantly. ‘Then I’ll hate them enough for both of us, master. As far as I’m concerned, it will always be sinful to slay people who are harmless and innocent.’

‘Aye. But few of us are truly without sin, Rhedyn.’

Agreeing to disagree, Rhedyn held her tongue, and the small party quit the city to set up camp beyond the walls of Durovernum.

Word of their trade had preceded them, so they were kept busy for the remainder of the day in the mundane practice of their craft. It was always so, for healers provided a small hedge against disaster, a bulwark when illness came calling or accident threatened to turn fragile human flesh into dust. Serious disease rarely came their way, for such patients lived or died quickly, but ambulatory sufferers were fast to seek out a cure when healers arrived in their town.

The treatment of non-fatal ailments served the purpose of providing Myrddion and his assistants with much-needed information about the political and social realities of this small corner of the world. Farmers and townsfolk loved to gossip, especially about the lives of the great ones, as long as there was no danger in it for them, so they talked and talked to distract themselves from the pain of broken
teeth, rheumatic fingers and ingrown toenails, and the healers listened and remembered what they heard.

The Saxons spoke fearfully of Uther Pendragon, younger brother of Ambrosius, High King of the Britons, and said that his ferocity and ruthlessness matched the most brutal of the Saxon thanes. No cruelty seemed beyond him, so simple men speculated that the many years of exile, after his family’s escape from the wrath of King Vortigern, had left a permanent, unhealed scar on his soul. The murder of his oldest brother, Constans, had created in him an unquenchable thirst for revenge on his mortal enemies – a group that was large and varied. Now, as the strong right arm of the High King, Uther led Ambrosius’s warriors into unceasing battle against the Saxon forts and villages. He showed no mercy towards his enemies, and was renowned for treating women and children as harshly as fully grown warriors. As justification for this barbarity, he boasted openly that lice breed and even nits spread and grow as they infest healthy hair. In his opinion, it was far better to destroy all parasites, especially when they were still growing and unable to resist.

Myrddion remembered Uther’s cold blue eyes and shuddered at such a callous metaphor, knowing from experience that men such as the prince were capable of almost any horror in pursuit of their ambitions. It was six years since he had treated a jagged wound on the warrior’s arm, but the memory was still vivid enough to leave him in no doubt that, if he saw the need, Uther Pendragon would turn the whole land into a sterile desert.

On the other hand, Ambrosius was honoured for possessing a more reasoned approach to the wars he was forced to fight. When the High King led offensives against the Saxons, Angles or Jutes, he spared women and children and took orphans to be raised as slaves and servants. Ambrosius believed that small children, when they were removed from their families before they had become imbued with outland culture, could
be trained to become useful Celts as they grew. His moderate approach was applauded by the Celts, but scorned as weakness by the Saxon traders. Wisely, Ambrosius forbade any Saxon merchants from straying onto his lands, having learned that infiltration via commerce was soon followed by an invasion that used the intelligence gained by the merchants.

Myrddion had never met Ambrosius, but he was impressed by what he heard of the High King’s strategic planning and his analytical assessment of the political realities of life in Britain. He understood instinctively that Ambrosius was seeking to absorb the barbarians, rather than waiting to be gobbled up by the sheer weight of their encroaching numbers.

‘Ambrosius is an astute ruler,’ Myrddion told his fellow healers as they shared the information they had learned during their ministrations to the sick. ‘May he live long, for his method of dealing with the Saxon menace is likely to work. If they can be harnessed to his throne as vassals, perhaps Celts and Saxons can live together amicably. We are not so very different, under the skin. Remember Captus, King Merovech’s officer at Châlons? He was a perfect example of a man of common sense who had learned to deal fairly and reasonably with men of many races.’

Myrddion spun a pretty eating knife on his palm, the blade Captus had given him when they parted after the Battle of the Catalaunian Plain. The Frank officer had been amusing company and was fiercely devoted to his land but, like many of his race, he had discovered that the earth must be shared if it was to flourish. Captus recognised that constant warfare turns fertile acres into scorched desert.

‘Aye, Ambrosius holds the fate of the west in his hands, so we must be thankful that the High King’s common sense and Uther’s brilliance as a warrior have kept the Saxons stalled at Londinium, although the brothers must be constantly vigilant. Heaven help us if the heirs
of Constans should ever perish.’

‘Then I’ll pray for them . . . hard,’ Cadoc said ironically. ‘I’ll even pray for that bastard Uther. I’ve only seen him the once, but I know why superstitious folk whisper that his sire was a dragon. I could easily believe it, once I’d met the son of a bitch.’

‘Master?’ Brangaine called from the shadows. The flickering from the fire softened her harsh, middle-aged features and exposed the delicate bones under her weather-beaten complexion. Long acquaintance and familiarity can blind the keenest eyes. With a pang, Myrddion recognised that she must have been a lovely creature in her youth.