The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (20 page)

Cahir faced him in the saddle. ‘I know there is hardship,’ he said quietly. ‘But I will make sure you have enough grain. We have stores in Dunadd.’
Stores that are fast emptying
, he amended silently. ‘I need some time to think of other options.’

‘And what about next year?’ Finn said harshly. ‘And the year after? Gods, Cahir, they are bleeding us dry!’ Anger was bright in his weathered face. ‘You can think, but I’m going to refuse. I’m not giving in any more.’

Cahir drew a deep breath. ‘I understand your anger and, by Hawen, Finn, I share it.
But I need to buy time.
There is no easy way out here, no clear path, and I cannot have your people’s blood on my hands.’

‘Perhaps nothing is ever clear.’ Finn wrapped his reins around his meaty wrists. ‘But when our ancestors fought against the Romans at the Hill of a Thousand Spears, was that an easy way out, Cahir? They did it against all odds – in fact, they didn’t care about the odds. They fought because they had to, for their own pride, their own blood!’

For a moment Cahir was silent, trying to steady his heart. ‘I have listened to the bard tales more times than I can count. Eremon was wise as well as brave. He
did
care about the odds. He thought, mistakenly, that they were in his favour, which is the only reason he agreed to fight the Romans. He
thought
, Finn, he did not act rashly.’

Finn looked as though he’d been slapped. ‘He acted boldly, with honour, and all I care is that he acted.’ Abruptly, he wheeled his horse. ‘I’m going to ride with my own men, and get as far away as I can from these Roman scum before I vomit up their damn wine.’

He rode back to the rear, avoiding Cahir’s eyes.

The riders split as they approached the Clutha inlet, Finn and his men turning for their dun. He saluted grimly to Cahir, and Cahir nodded and turned away, smouldering with shame.

He was ashamed he had not taken a lance and driven it through the Dux as he sat there at the council table with that smug smile.
And if I had, I would already be dead, and my people led to Roman slavery.
Cahir stretched his throat to the sea air coming up the valley from the west. Sometimes the royal torc sat heavy around his neck, an honour and a burden both.

Donal and Finbar were, as always, only a few steps behind. ‘You did the right thing, lad,’ Donal said softly. These two – ruddy, balding Donal and greying Finbar – were still warriors to respect. They did, however, retain the disconcerting habit of seeing the young man in Cahir; the boy who had been idealistic and excited about life.

‘Did I?’ Cahir glanced at them. ‘My heart is with Finn, but we don’t have the forces for battle against the Romans. There it is.’

Finbar scratched his stubbled chin. ‘There are no easy answers, lad. But we are all here alive and hale, so we’ve played it well so far.’ His grey eyes were opaque, though, and he adjusted his sword-belt with a grim hitch.

Behind, the proud warband was a mass of sodden men, their flashing jewellery and arm-rings dulled, their hair dripping and clothes muddied. Ruarc, Mellan and their friends had subsided into glowering silence. Cahir wondered what action they thought he could take in a fort of hundreds of Roman soldiers, with thousands more on the Wall a few miles away.

What would Eremon have done? He set his face to the north, where the highlands rose in a dark line over the Clutha. Would he have found a way out?

Whenever Cahir asked that question, however, and yearned for an answer, it never came. Nearly three hundred years had passed since Eremon and Conaire lived. Cahir had no doubt they would be enjoying a blessed life in the Otherworld now, leaving behind only the pressure of questions unanswered and the gnawing shame of failure.

In the dark inside him, he wondered if he simply was not worthy of Eremon’s counsel, or whether it was just that Eremon was too far now, too distant in time to give any aid to the man who had ascended his throne.

A young man who needed that wisdom, that comfort, and instead was alone.

One of Finn’s warriors caught up with Cahir and his men two days later, in a narrow valley in the highland mountains.

They were watering their stallions in a rushing stream when the slopes of the glen reverberated with the sound of a horse being whipped madly along the path behind them. Cahir’s heart stopped when he recognized the rider, and even as the man threw himself to the churned mud at his feet, he was bracing himself for the blow.

The warrior stammered out his story as his tears fell on his shaking hands.

Finn had only just arrived home when Roman soldiers came from the Dux demanding the tax from the harvest on the spot. There was no room for compromise. The soldiers formed a ring around the gates of the dun, their javelins readied. Finn went up on the walls and threw their demand back in their faces, saying his people would starve.

Without warning, a Roman javelin skewered one of Finn’s men to the palisade. Roaring, the chieftain leaped to his horse, exhorted his warriors to follow, tore open the gates and charged the Roman line.

Cahir’s eyes glazed over as the tale spilled out. He saw nothing before him but Finn’s proud face, his defiant expression. The warriors threw themselves on those lances with their chief, the messenger finished huskily, and there they all died. The Romans took the grain and rode away without a backwards look.

A deathly hush fell over the Dalriadan warriors, as the stream thundered between its rocks. The hill-slopes pressed down on them, the wet bracken red as blood, the peaks glowering far above, shrouded in cloud.
They followed him home
, was all Cahir could think.
They knew from his face at the council table that he was resistant, and so they followed him and forced his hand. They gave him no way out.

Nausea roiled in his belly. Finn had lived fifty years – years of fighting, loving and loyalty – but this man mattered less to the Dux than a swatted gnat. For Fullofaudes did this solely to send a warning to Cahir himself. He knew it in his heart, where this outrage, this sorrow, was lodged now like a barb.

‘Then we will ride back!’ Ruarc pushed the others aside, his face contorted with fury. ‘We will hunt down every one of the Roman dogs and stake them to the ground with our spears!’ He brandished his lance, the fox-tails tied to its haft swinging. A cheer went up, and, in an instant, seething anger turned to anticipation and excitement.

Cahir pulled his shattered mind together. Gods, yes, that was exactly what he longed to do: bury his sword in a Roman belly and twist it on its hilt. It was so compelling, so compulsive. But no, no. He shook his head to clear it. Too dangerous, too soon. His best warriors were here with him, the defenders of Dunadd. ‘No!’ he bellowed. ‘That is not my order!’

The war-shouts died. Ruarc turned to him with a feral smile. Cahir knew then that he wanted this confrontation. ‘You call yourself our king?’ Ruarc screeched. ‘Your own chief gets slaughtered by the Roman-kind and you will do
nothing
? You will turn your back and let them kill us without fear of reprisals?’

Fury coursed through Cahir’s body: at the Romans, at Ruarc, at himself. ‘That is what they want! We go back there and attack the fort and the Dux’s army will be upon us, riding us down to Dunadd.
Dunadd. Think
, for one moment in your life! Of course they are watching us; of course he will have hundreds of soldiers at the ready, outnumbering us by many times! We would be walking into a death-trap; he wants the provocation.’

Ruarc barely heard him, his temper set free. ‘No! We whine and bow our heads enough. It’s time to fight back, time to show we are Dalriadans, Albans, warriors of the gods Lugh and Manannán and Hawen!’ He pointed at Cahir. ‘And I say we have been led by a coward long enough!’

The warriors gasped and murmured, drawing back, catching the reins of the nervous horses. Ruarc and Cahir were left alone on the edge of the rocky defile that fell to the foaming stream.

Cahir’s body had tensed from crown to feet: this cub needed swatting back into place. At least now he could release his rage, not to kill but to disarm, to subdue. With a roar that bounced off the valley sides, he snatched his sword from its scabbard, the pain over Finn flooding him. ‘
On, then, come on
! You challenge me enough with your words, now do it with your blade!’

Uncertainty flickered over Ruarc’s face.
Yes, come on
, Cahir thought, crouching low. Slowly, Ruarc unsheathed his own blade. As a boy he had watched Cahir duel many times, and once witnessed him repel a Pictish ambush. In his cocky pride, though, perhaps he had forgotten. Or he might think Cahir was getting old. If so, he was a fool, for the king’s sword-arm was strengthened by years of suppressed frustration, enough to override an eleven-year age gap: Ruarc was only twenty-one, Cahir thirty-two. He wasn’t creaking and stiff yet, he wasn’t grey, he wasn’t beaten. But he was furious and ashamed.

Snarling, Ruarc and Cahir circled each other. But Cahir gave Ruarc no time to think, leaping in so suddenly with a bellow that Ruarc was taken completely by surprise. Forced on the defence he stumbled back, desperately blocking his king’s sword, until Cahir tripped on a loose rock and Ruarc plunged into the breach.

Back they staggered, forward they lunged, sliding down the muddy slopes and skidding on pebbles. The warriors were entirely silent but their eyes followed every move, the tide changing between Ruarc on the attack and then Cahir.

Cahir was in a towering rage, but after many years of practice could hold his mind clear and cold. Ruarc, however, was all passion and fury, and that made him sloppy. Suddenly, he tried to get under Cahir’s defences with a risky and hopeless leap that the king merely sidestepped. The sodden earth gave way at the side of the path and Ruarc stumbled to one knee. Cahir was on him in the next breath, flicking the younger man’s sword away so it tumbled through the air, its point digging into the soil.

That should have been the end of it. However, with a scream of fury that startled all the horses, Ruarc immediately leaped on top of Cahir, bearing him down with his fists.

The two men rolled to the bottom of the slope by the stream, their grunts drowned out by the roar of water. With the danger of blades removed Cahir could at last let himself go, and like boys they threw themselves desperately at each other, rolling one way and then the other, hands scrambling for purchase in the mud. Fists came flying, as first Ruarc and then Cahir was pummelled.

After a while, Cahir’s greater height and bulk began to win out, and eventually he managed to toss Ruarc over and clamber on his back, pinning him in a headlock. They were stuck like that, dripping sweat and spatters of blood from cut lips, covered in mud so only their white eyes showed in brown faces.

‘Will you yield?’ Cahir demanded, gulping air.

Ruarc said nothing, spitting out bloody saliva.

‘
Will you
?’

‘Aye,’ Ruarc muttered at last. ‘I yield.’

Cahir knelt by his prone body, panting. ‘Now you will at least concede I am no coward.’ He scrubbed mud from his face with his sleeve. ‘I will do what is best for my people, and you must surrender to that.’

Ruarc’s shoulders were heaving, but he still lay face down. ‘We can no longer sit on our hands,’ he hissed. ‘This is not what we were made for – we need our glory!’

As I need mine.
Cahir looked down at Ruarc’s bright hair, matted now with muck and twigs, and saw a boy who only spoke what his own soul cried. Here they were with blades and fists when in truth their hearts beat the same.

He straightened and rose. Gods, his arms ached! ‘I know what you feel, what you want,’ he said quietly. ‘But until you walk in my footsteps, you cannot know my burdens.’

Ruarc staggered to his feet, and the eyes he turned on Cahir were hurt more than wrathful. ‘The people should live free or not live at all!’ he declared passionately. ‘If we become like the Romans then we have truly died anyway. Why can’t you see this? Why do you bind us so?’

‘Because you cling to an impossible dream.’ The words were sawdust in Cahir’s mouth; old, dry and leached of life. With slow dignity, he sheathed his fallen sword and, turning away, climbed the slope. Forcing himself not to stagger, he passed through the silent men to his horse, and there despatched ten warriors to go with Finn’s man to guard their dun and carry promises of food and aid. The man kissed his hand, hollow-eyed.

Then Cahir rode away up the trail without looking back, Donal and Finbar scrambling to their horses after him. He did not look to see if Ruarc was following.

Chapter 19

M
inna and the girls were collecting roots in the hills above Dunadd on a cold, clear day when a distant horn signalled the return of the king.

Two crusty old warriors had escorted them, but they ignored Minna, avoiding her eyes. They thought she could curse them, Keeva had confided with sly amusement, poison them with her herbs and, for good measure, even see inside them. Minna smiled grimly, easing the last bulbous root from the wet soil. For once, she did not mind such fancies.