The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (58 page)

All the energy went from her and she curled up, arms about her belly, staring at the shadows on the wall. The soldier’s last words beat on her heart, one by one, until abruptly she began to weep for Donal, her tears dripping on the scratches and cuts that marked her. The light moved across the floor and dimmed as she cried, her grief and her guilt like the seizure of poison.

For the first time she tasted the full bitterness of being a
seer
, and how those bindings could strangle, tight about her neck as any slave-ring.

Two days later, she was taken away in the dead of night. Whether this was to avoid Maeve’s wrath, Minna never knew. The
optio
was not among the soldiers who guarded her.

In those first hours on the dark road, stumbling on the end of a rope, she discovered the reason for her swift removal. Her escort of ten muttered among themselves, their voices carrying in the cold. The northern army was scattered, with no central command. It wasn’t safe to keep the prize of the barbarian king’s whore in Luguvalium, where insurgents might take the town again. They needed to put her directly in the hands of someone who could decide how to use her best. This was to be Nectaridus, the Count of the Saxon Shore. They were taking her south, far from Alba.

Minna had little time to absorb this. No man was willing to lay hands on her after the
optio’s
interview, but that didn’t stop the small torments, the nips of pain that blended into one wound on her soul. The men prodded her with spear-butts, striking her in the ribs and legs with glancing blows until she was a mass of bruises, trying desperately to protect her belly. When they wanted her to move faster they used the barbed points.

She soon learned that if she raised her eyes she would receive a blow from a fist, and once, the crack of a lance across her skull. Warding signs came, too, of course: the crossed fingers and spit in her face. They tripped her to kneel at the end of every day, and poked her awake with spears.

So the desolated landscape through which they moved became no more than a blur of suffering.

The air was rancid with smoke, and all around were blackened shells of abandoned buildings, and the bodies of warriors of both sides choking streams and piled behind breached walls. The stink of rotting corpses and taint of smoke, the bleating of wandering sheep and cawing of ravens soon merged into one dark nightmare pierced with jabbing pains.

She stumbled along with her head down. Donal was dead. She repeated that litany to keep her feet going. This punishment was for Donal and the others, hung by their necks from the town walls. So Minna would endure and not fall. She would not die of exhaustion, or sorrow, or guilt, or the sting of cut flesh.

It would take more than that, for the sake of her baby.

In daylight, the land was almost deserted of life. The soldiers moved stealthily by hidden paths, avoiding the barbarians picking over burned farmsteads around them. Gradually, as Minna’s pain became constant, her mind broke free and drifted above her. And she realized that, as her body was bruised by her own people, cursed and spat at, cut and shoved, something in her was inexorably draining away. It gathered in from every part of her body, then flowed out of her feet to the earth.

Out went the old life and loyalties. The kinship with Broc, her unknown father, her dead mother. The heartbeat of Rome, of Eboracum, of Master and Mistress and the Villa Aurelius. Being Roman. Being Minna-the-nurse. Being someone else’s. All of it went, bleeding away in that tormented journey across a blasted land. Only the echo of Mamo remained, for she was wound into Minna’s soul.

So, step by step, Minna was stripped of her previous lodestones – blood, identity, birth – and what was left was a different being. She became only Minna of Dalriada, beloved and
seer
of the king. She found the mother in her, strong and fearless for the baby.

She would be these things alone, for the short span of time left to her.

*

Six weeks after the barbarian armies landed in the north, the Count of the Saxon Shore, Nectaridus, hastened to confront them at Lindum with only the five thousand men he had left, and another thousand who had escaped the northern slaughter.

The Albans had chosen their battleground, using all those fine, straight Roman roads to march down in time to pick the raised ground above an expanse of boggier earth. The irony was not lost on Cahir, that their passage was made so much easier because of Roman engineering.

Behind them they left a land stained with smoke, and scoured of the people who had fled in terror before their armies. Food was there for the taking – the crops in the grain-stores, the meat on the hoof – and the Picts and Dalriadans were well-fed and rampant with eager bloodlust.

The Romans, however, were stunned by the Dux’s defeat, and had been driven north by their Count at a forced march. According to the Alban scouts, they were exhausted, disorganized and terrified.

Cahir smiled to himself. It could not have been better.

Chapter 54

T
wo days later Cahir raced down the high ground above Lindum towards the sea, his legs pumping, his sword held high beneath his streaming boar banner. His men bellowed as they ran. Around him, the advance of the Alban warriors was a great ocean swell breaking on a shore – a roar from thousands of throats, the flow of bodies a turbulent rush.

On his right flank Gede and his Picts were a screaming turmoil of hatred, with gaping mouths and rolling eyes. On Cahir’s left came Fergus of Erin’s men, red hair flying like the manes of their wild horses, their shields a battering wall; and the little, dark Attacotti, their arrows a rain of iron. And somewhere behind the embattled Roman army, another five thousand Saxons had just poured in from the shores of the estuary.

The Romans were caught between Saxons, sea and Albans like soft metal between hammer and anvil.

Screaming as he charged up and down on a white horse, the helmeted Nectaridus had put his army’s back to the coast. Now they were turning in horror at the sudden and unexpected appearance of the blond-haired savages from over the Northern Sea.

Racing across trampled fields of barley, Cahir’s keen senses picked up the shock that dawned over his opponents as Saxon horns droned over the battlefield, their raven banners darkening the sun. The Romans turned and saw them, and a wail went up that was swallowed by the barbarian war cries all around.

Cahir grinned triumphantly. In his heart, this made up for Eremon’s shock and despair that day at the Hill of a Thousand Spears when he turned to see another Roman charge from the east. He touched his sword-hilt to his chest as he ran, in honour of his ancestor.

The Roman shield wall and disciplined lines of men again disintegrated at the sheer force of the Alban charge, and Cahir found himself fighting hand to hand with men who struck out desperately, not skilfully, sobbing as they went down. And he carried the fire of a whole people in his heart, the fury of centuries, and so the embattled Romans around him fled from the light in his eyes.

His days of being a measured fighter were over, as all his pain flowed out, and with a wild yell he drove the point of his sword between the collar-bones of the shouting man before him. As the man died, Cahir saw himself reflected in his eyes, the culmination of every Roman nightmare – a towering barbarian with a blood-spattered face.

He whirled again. Another man fell as flesh met his blade. Then he was hock-deep in blood, mired in writhing men, with rents opened in flesh by swords, and bellies skewered by spears. In the recesses of Cahir’s mind it reminded him of maggots in a battle-wound, a wriggling mass of legs and arms.

A knot of men cleared around him, and he paused to wipe blood from his eyes, leaning on his sword. Gede had found a slight rise of ground and stuck his hawk banner in it. Seemingly oblivious to the danger of javelins or arrows, he was standing there challenging any comers on the exposed slope. Cahir was immediately arrested by his first sight of the Pictish king fighting, for in the other battle Gede had been on the far flank.

In contrast to his men, Gede surrendered to no wild plunges or screaming. He had taken a cut on his temple that washed his tattoos in gore, but his expression remained set. Though Gede was slight, Cahir had never seen any man move so swiftly, darting under the guard of his opponents again and again. He employed a unique tactic where he spun just
before
he reached the end of a sword lunge, suddenly reversing his momentum, taking the other fighter by surprise. Gede would twist at the waist halfway, driving the blade home in an unexpected flash of speed and force.

Over and over again Cahir watched Gede do this, as bodies piled up around his feet. And all without offering one sound or even a grimace, with an intense focus and lithe grace that made Cahir’s belly lurch. It was a dance of death.

Then the space around Cahir collapsed into chaos again, and he had to put all thoughts from his mind and deal with the increasingly desperate Romans – outnumbered, surrounded and hopeless.

It didn’t take long, two or three hours, for the Roman army to flee into retreat. The final blow was when Fergus of Erin and his men fought through to Nectaridus himself, and the Erin king drove a broken spear-shaft into the Count’s throat.

After that the panicked Roman soldiers turned and, like a tide on the ebb, began streaming away south, leaving their wounded and dead. The Picts and the Saxons raged after them, pursuing them into the forests where the marsh and fields rose to low hills. From the woods soared the sounds of screams and the clash of iron.

Rallying Ruarc and Mellan, Fergal and Gobán, Cahir went racing after his own men to pull them back from that sickening pursuit of the helpless wounded. Their path took them dashing through patches of trees and splashing over streams, shouting for their warriors.

At last Cahir paused by the remains of a farmstead as Ruarc and his other commanders forged on, bellowing out the orders for the Dalriadan bands to return to camp. Suddenly, he was alone in the ruins.

Catching his breath, he tugged off his helmet and stretched his jaw, which had taken a blow from a Roman fist. As the battle-fury drained away, his body complained from a dozen different injuries. The muscles in his flank cramped where they had torn, he had wrenched his neck, and his knee throbbed where he had twisted it on muddy ground. There were shallow wounds on his forearms, a deeper cut on the mound below his thumb, and a graze across his brow that trickled blood into his eye and stung more than all the others. And only now did all the little irritations rise up: the itch of sweat, the insect bites rubbed raw by his mail-shirt, the dryness in his throat.

In that moment after great danger, when the mind is still dazed, Cahir thought,
I would have done better not to wait until I was an old man to fulfil this prophecy
. And that made him laugh bleakly and rub his face. Minna’s cloth was tied around his wrist; now he touched it gently with his finger, the linen so dirty with blood and mud it was unrecognizable to anyone but him.

He looked over the ruins of the farm. The pale walls were smeared with soot, the red roof-tiles scattered and crushed on burned floors. He went looking for a well, and found one on the other side of a row of apple trees. Shouts and screams still drifted from the woods to the south, and moans and bellowed commands from the battleground to the north.

He tested the rope on the well, but the bucket in its depths didn’t move. Tormented by thirst, he leaned over the shallow drop, peering down. Against the circle of water he saw something tangled up in the bucket, and, as it turned slowly, he realized he was looking into the dead eyes of a naked child, staring up from a bloated face. She must have been about Finola’s age.

His hand fell from the knotted rope. Her skin was the texture of fish, spongy and pale, and her long, dark hair trailed like seaweed. Cahir saw she had not died by drowning, for a gaping slit marked her throat, which was white and drained of blood. The Picts had already raided these lands days ago, as the kings laid battle plans in Gede’s tent.

Cahir found himself striding blindly away, but at the edge of the yard he turned back. ‘May the Mother take you to her breast, little one,’ he muttered.

For that is what Minna would have wanted.

Night had fallen across the battlefield, and from the slopes of a dark hill Cahir watched the plain.

Below him, the encampment of the great army was a blanket of stars, with fires stretching out for leagues, and from their massed glow came snatches of drunken song and choruses of war chants.

Drawing a breath, he turned to his left. There, around the shoulder of the hill, burned the immense pyres of the Alban dead, larger and more brooding than these sparks of the living. Druids tended them, watching over the departing spirits. He swung to his right. Over a vast area to the south flared other fires. Gede’s men and the Saxons had been let loose over the land, and those fires were farms and woods set alight, and fields and crops put to the torch. These were more scattered, burning in wavering sheets or incendiary bursts of flame.