Death of an Empire (7 page)

‘Willa,’ Myrddion repeated. ‘Was that her name, I wonder, or the name of her child? I suppose we’ll never know, so we’ll let them both be called Willa. It’s a pretty name, a version of Willow, I presume, and certainly sorrowful enough for times like these.’

So Willa Major was buried in a hastily dug hole off the Roman road leading to the south. Myrddion was unable to spare any cloth for a shroud and, as she had carried nothing but the child, she was returned to the earth in the clothes she wore, unprotected from the cold and the rain. The moon was down when the first clods of earth struck her white, upturned face, and Finn Truthteller had to turn away as he remembered a crueller interment in his past. Quickly and economically, Myrddion and Cadoc filled in the
shallow grave and placed a fieldstone over the spot where her head had lain.

‘The Mother will protect her,’ Myrddion reminded his friends, ‘as She protects all who lay down their lives for their children.’

Brangaine found herself weeping for her own lost hopes of bearing children, which had passed when her man died in Vortigern’s army. ‘I’ll see to the child. Little Willa will not die, I swear!’

‘But she’ll be scarred, Brangaine, no matter how well you care for her, and I cannot say if her arm will ever work as it should,’ Myrddion warned her, knowing that tendons seared by fire often lost all flexibility.

‘No matter; the babe will survive,’ Brangaine swore and scuttled away to the wagon where the child was lying in her nest of old woollen rugs.

‘I swear that woman grows stranger every day,’ Cadoc said to no one in particular as he watched the widow heave her thickened body into the wagon. ‘Still, she’s a good worker and her flat cakes are marvellous.’

The three men trudged back to the wagons in Brangaine’s wake. A light rain began to fall, perfectly matching Myrddion’s mood of disappointment and regret. For the healer, every patient who passed beyond the shades hung on his shoulders like a heavy weight.

‘Shite!’ Cadoc swore. ‘Now it’s going to piss down with rain. The gods alone know what’s in store tomorrow. I can tell you, master, I didn’t like the look of that smoke in the distance, and we’re heading in that direction. Whatever lies ahead cannot be good.’

‘Aye, tomorrow may be difficult, but for now what can healers do but sleep when Fortuna offers us the leisure? To your pallets, both of you, for we must be alert in the morning.’

Yet despite his sensible advice to his friends, sleep eluded
Myrddion, no matter how he tried. He had set forth on this quest with the enthusiasm of a boy, without a single thought of what it might cost along the way. He was beginning to understand that the journey to learn his true identity would not be concluded by simply finding his father. Perhaps his quest would only be achieved by learning painful lessons about his self.

MYRDDION’S CHART OF THE ROUTES TAKEN BY ATTILA’S FORCES DURING THE INVASION OF FRANCE

CHAPTER III

A GRISLY TRADE

As dawn broke, the sky was pallid with a light cloud cover, like the face of a corpse whose features were blurred by death. Myrddion awoke with those first frail shafts of light, but on this particularly ominous day his eyes were gritty from too little sleep and soured after the haunting dreams that had pursued him during the night. Throughout the meagre hours of darkness that followed the burial of Willa Major, the young healer had dreamed disjointedly of burning crofts, butchered children and Willa Major’s strange green eyes. Wakefulness was a mercy compared with the black beast of his dreams.

Finn Truthteller and Cadoc stirred with equal unwillingness, but what was left of the congealed stew must be heated and fed to a small cluster of elderly, confused peasants who were loath to return to the road that led to the northwest. While Brangaine heated the stew with the child Willa lying close by her, the men set to work dismantling the leather tent and preparing their horses for travel. Once the old ones were fed, they would be eased on their journey away from the town that had bled smoke on the previous day. But Myrddion and his companions must go forward to face whatever horrors lay before them at Tournai.

‘Should we take our time, master? Perhaps we’d be wise to
bypass whatever is up ahead. I’m not anxious to face whatever these poor people are fleeing. And who are the Huns anyway?’

Cadoc looked so alarmed that Myrddion knew he must explain their situation. Only willing men should go forward into such an uncertain future.

‘The Hun is a wild tribe noted for its ferocity,’ he replied as calmly as he could in a vain hope of placating the frightened women. ‘But we must go on. How far could we safely travel if we went off the road? What would become of us if a wheel broke on the uneven ground? Wouldn’t we be more likely to stumble into danger? Besides, we are healers. Like it or not, our oaths bind us to try to relieve suffering.’

He pointed along the roadway leading to the south. ‘There is much suffering in that direction. Should we avoid it? Or should we go on?’

Cadoc and Finn shuffled their feet. Myrddion could tell that their first reaction was to counsel caution, but their natural anxiety was at war with their equally powerful sense of service. Cadoc ducked his head and reddened with shame.

‘We should go on, master, even if we are frightened of what we might find,’ Finn decided slowly, while Cadoc nodded his agreement.

Yet, paradoxically, Myrddion was forced to admit to himself that wiser men would have given the town a wide berth. However, he remained true to his mentor’s stricture that the sick must be tended, regardless of his presentiments of imminent disaster. Myrddion was terrified of being constrained and becoming the unwilling vassal of another powerful lord, for he could not forget the bonds that had tied him to Vortigern, broken only when the Celtic king was burned alive in his own hall. He was determined that he would never willingly serve a temporal lord again, but equally determined to remain true to his oath, despite the
knowledge that to continue with the journey could bring disaster on himself and on his friends.

Eventually, with their bellies full of food and carrying clean water, the old folk trudged away to an uncertain future, freeing the healers to resume their hazardous trek. Every mile covered weighed on the hearts of the three men, for they had personally experienced the dreadful fact of warfare with its callous disregard for the frailties of innocent flesh. Only Brangaine was happy, for Willa had awakened, had endured the dressing of her burned shoulder and arm with uncomplaining green eyes and was now sucking her thumb and drowsing as she rocked to the soporific sway of the wagon.

The skies seemed wider and bluer than those above the landscapes of Britain for, as Myrddion had already seen, much of the heavy forest growth had been stripped away by the Romans, leaving the sacred groves deserted and bare. The lands of Gaul were filling with strange tribes – the Franks, the Visigoths and the Alemanni. The populace also worshipped alien gods, although Rome still kept a tenuous hold on the reins of power. Flavius Aetius was growing old and tired, and the smoke over Tournai was merely an omen of the troubles that were to come as the wily old general weakened.

The spring sun was pleasantly warm on Myrddion’s face and he would have taken pleasure in the new clarity of light in this unfamiliar land had he not seen the piled detritus of fleeing families. A cart with a shattered wooden wheel lay tipped on its side in a ditch beyond the road, while here and there abandoned cooking pots, empty water skins, old blankets and even the bloating corpse of a dog lay where they had fallen. A single, broken sandal was crushed under Myrddion’s wheels and he felt a physical wrench as he looked back to see it ground into the soft dust under the hooves of Cadoc’s horses. A man had worn that
sandal and now must wander barefoot on the cruel stones that clad the roadway.

The day was far advanced when the small cavalcade reached the centre of the thinly forested wood beyond which Tournai awaited them. To their left, a river could be seen and heard through the light veil of woodland that partly concealed its rush-choked banks. The land here was rich and the farmers who lived by the river’s margins had fared well off the bounty of silt-rich land and plentiful water. Filled with foreboding and weary to the bone, Myrddion called a halt to their journey, for even the indefatigable Cadoc was beginning to falter. Whatever lay ahead, the healers needed sleep, or they would be of no use to anyone on the morrow.

The night was still and cloudless, and carried no signs of the usual light spring rains. The stars shone clearly like holes picked in black wool hung before an oil lamp. Cadoc swore he could reach out his hand and touch them, while Brangaine sang softly in her deep, slightly off-key voice to soothe Willa as the little girl succumbed to sleep. Finn joined in the mournful folk song, which told of a child stolen away to the Otherworld and of a mother destined to mourn until her life ended, leaving Myrddion to fight the prickle of tears behind his eyes. Unloved by Branwyn, his own mother, the healer knew that an empty space existed in his soul where she should dwell, but she had rejected her first-born son as a consequence of her rape. Indeed, Myrddion still bore a scar on his head where Branwyn had tried to brain him with a rock many years earlier. The sound of Brangaine’s simple peasant song made his heart sore, but the past could not be changed, no matter how the young man yearned for Branwyn’s love. Eventually he fell asleep to the sound of soft crooning voices and, for once, no dreams pursued him in the still, fragrant night that embraced them under the trees.

Morning brought sadness and a reminder of human brutishness.
As the wagons cleared the wood, a wide swath of agricultural land lay before them, divided into small parcels by low walls of fieldstone that had been taken from the cleared paddocks. The walls were unmortared, but careful husbandry had ensured constant repair of these proofs of civilisation and order. Until recently, green shoots had blurred the tilled, brown clods of soil, but now the young grain and vegetables had been trampled flat or cropped by grazing horses and hungry men. Flattened earth, charred cooking fires and burned peasant huts bore mute witness to a large army of cavalry and foot soldiers who had been careless of hygiene and the future uses of the earth. In places, the walls had been breached and the scattered, head-sized rocks had been used to construct temporary hearths. Animal bones and feathers lay scattered randomly around these fireplaces, and rudimentary latrine trenches fouled the air with their stink. None the less, Myrddion reasoned that this force, under its deceptive carelessness, was well organised and travelled fast. Only two days had passed since Tournai had burned, but in that time a large company of warriors had disappeared like smoke into the Frankish landscape.

The town of Tournai lay at the epicentre of a great circle of land that had been scarred by the flotsam of an army. Its walls seemed to be intact, although Myrddion could see the burned inns, huts and primitive shop-fronts that had sheltered around its Roman skirts. Ominously, birds of prey circled its defences and carrion seekers covered a dark mound piled haphazardly against its fire-blackened flanks.

‘Dead things,’ Cadoc whispered. ‘The birds are feeding.’

‘And the dogs,’ Finn Truthteller added, as dark shapes slunk away from the mound, which seemed to writhe with unclean life.

‘Perhaps some people still remain alive in Tournai,’ Myrddion muttered, but his voice lacked any real hope. ‘At any rate, we must do what we can if there are any survivors.’

Cadoc and Finn shrugged, but each climbed back into his place on the wagons as they resumed their slow journey.

A huge fire had been lit across the road and the travellers paused to examine the scarred roadway. Corpses had been burned here in an ordered cremation, although the remains, once the fire had cooled, had been pounded into splinters. Myrddion realised that the pitiful mementos of once-strong warriors had been carefully gathered for those who waited, far away, for the return of their menfolk.

‘At least this army has respect for its own dead,’ Myrddion muttered to no one in particular. ‘Perhaps they might have spared the children of the town.’

‘Not the Hun, if Tournai is their work,’ Finn replied in a voice that was pregnant with world-weariness. ‘From the descriptions of those peasants who fled from Attila, I doubt we’ll find anything but corpses in this accursed place.’

The horses shied away from the smell of death, and Myrddion’s gorge rose as he led his pair, afoot, off the road and past the ashes that filled the roadway. Here and there lay isolated fragments of bone from dismembered corpses, such as jaw or knee splinters. Small pieces of metal from oxhide breastplates had been overlooked by the enemy horde who, even though they burned their dead with respect, had clearly contrived to collect every item of armour that could be reused by prudent warriors in battles yet to come.

‘This small heap of ash is all that remains of the enemy dead, indicating that very few of them became casualties in comparison with the civilian defenders,’ Finn Truthteller muttered as he turned over a tiny fragment of skull with his booted foot. ‘Whoever they are, these warriors are skilled in the arts of war.’