The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (59 page)

‘They’ve split their forces?’ Eremon repeated hoarsely. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

The man nodded and leaned on his spear with both hands, his eyes shining in the glow of the sputtering flame. ‘My lord, we tracked them far enough to know they’ve committed to this division. Half their men will be nearing the Loch of the Salmon as we speak.’

‘And the other half ?’ Lorn asked, the edge in his voice betraying profound excitement.

The scout’s teeth gleamed in the half-dark. ‘They’ve retreated to the Loch of the Beacon, and set up camp on its shores.’

Eremon gazed at the rock shelf above Lorn’s head, its crevices black with shadow. His heart had leaped into life, pounding with insistence against his chest as if demanding his attention. They have left us a force of two thousand men by the loch;
two thousand
, to our thousand.’

‘Much better odds,’ Colum murmured, to his left.

‘Then, by the Mare, we can take them!’ Lorn laughed, slapping his thigh. ‘What do you say, prince? Shall we storm them at dawn?’

Eremon fought to think clearly through the tide of elation that swept his breast. They’d listened, his gods. They favoured him once more! He slowly rose, placing his palm against the cold rock to centre himself. The evening wind that came over the peaks above caught at his face, and the sudden chill focused his mind.

‘No,’ he said at last, addressing the crescent of faces lit up in the torch’s glow. ‘We will attack tonight, when they are sleeping. There will be enough moonlight, once the wind clears these few clouds. The Caereni archers can go in first, to shoot the sentries. This will buy us a little time. Then we cross the palisade and run down their tents.’

Lorn sprang to his feet, one fist clenched. ‘Then I will be first to bury my sword in a Roman neck!’

There were murmurs of approval from the other Epidii warriors, and the atmosphere was instantly charged with a fierce exultation.

Across the leaping of the torch-flame in the wind, Eremon fixed Lorn with a calm gaze. ‘I honour your courage, son of Urben, yet we can’t allow any wild rush in the dark. It’s too dangerous, once the Romans all awaken.’

Lorn’s pale eyes narrowed dangerously, but Eremon stilled him with a raised hand. ‘This is the time to act as one beast, as they do, with control. I want to use the formation we have practised: over the bank; kill as many as possible in their tents; then undertake a controlled retreat at an appointed time. If we break apart as a group, they will soon wake and organize a counter-attack.’ He held Lorn’s gaze. ‘We cannot risk leaving Dunadd at their mercy.’

Lorn’s mouth worked with frustration. ‘The gods have put this chance in our hands! We must meet it as Albans, shouting the war cries so the gods know we fight for them!’

‘This we have done already, for moons.’ Eremon’s voice betrayed his own irritation. He and Lorn would never see eye to eye on the question of Roman versus Alban tactics. ‘But now we have a chance to attack a Roman camp on open ground –
this
, at last, is where our practice can bear fruit! We can’t let our forces fragment, and that’s my final word.’

Lorn looked as if he dearly wished to argue further, but then he seemed to remember his vow of allegiance, as he always did, and at last his eyes slid away. ‘Well,’ he added, with a familiar toss of that silver head, ‘when a Roman throat meets my sword, I won’t care how it got there.’

As the troop leaders dispersed to rouse their drowsing men from the heather, Eremon called Fergus to fetch him a Caereni messenger. ‘Go to Conaire at the rockfall and tell him what has happened,’ Eremon ordered the messenger. ‘I want him ready to withdraw as soon as he gets news of our progress. He’s not to be there when Agricola comes back up that valley from the other side, understand?’

The messenger nodded and trotted away, and after Fergus had gone to clean his weapons Eremon leaned his forehead on his arm, staring down at the guttering torch. He could not believe his luck – first the desertion of the Damnonii scout, and now this. Rhiann’s dream had to be true, then. The Albans were meant to triumph over the Romans. The gods decreed it.

He smiled to himself and rubbed his sprouting, itching beard with his shoulder.

The arrow that took the Roman sentry in the chest just missed his heart, and so allowed him enough time to watch a dark tide of men flow over the silvered plain before him. Down the ditch they poured, and up the bank to where he lay, sprawled between two of the wooden stakes that had been stabbed into the ground just that day to form the camp palisade.

Then the haze around the sentry’s sight thickened, and he sensed the heavy tread of boots all around, the brush of fur on his face and stink of sheep wool, before a cold blade caught the moonlight above him. Then he knew no more.

Deep in sleep, one of the eight soldiers in the tent nearest the gate was woken by a horse’s whinny, and as he blinked and yawned, struggling to adjust his eyes in the dark, the whinnies were joined by faint cries of alarm.

But he only got as far as freeing his hand from his bed roll to grasp for a weapon, when the tent flap was torn asunder by a sword thrust. Immediately, the sloping leather walls were rent by a flurry of whirling blades and stamping feet, and he only had one moment to wonder if it was the gods come to earth in one slicing, many-legged beast of fury, before he, too, fell into darkness.

Eremon kept his shield close to Colum on his left side, giving him protection while keeping his own right hand free to wield his blade in a stabbing motion, different from the sweeping slashes they were used to. Fergus to his right did the same, and so on down the line. It was a rough approximation of the Roman fighting fashion, even though their longer swords were not as suited to it as the short Roman
gladius
. Yet it ensured that his men stayed together in one block.

Eremon risked a glance back at the lines behind him and to either side. All of the Epidii warriors were tightly bound, rolling over the Roman camp, rending and stamping down the tents, and stabbing the men within. Some knots of fighting had broken out away to his right, as the Roman soldiers on watch and those who’d reached their weapons scrambled to put up a defence. But there Eremon glimpsed Lorn’s hair, as the Epidii king rallied the Albans and laid into the defending men with his own formidable sword.

Eremon dodged a fire pit outside a tent, scattering coals with his sword, and knocked a stand that held the standard and weapons of the men inside clattering to the ground with a contemptuous thrust. Then he shouted to draw his own line onwards, to where fresh ranks of tents beckoned. These were already a mass of movement as panic-stricken Roman soldiers stumbled out into their own fires, greeting the oncoming Albans with cries of terror.

Eremon drove in with his shield edge and slashed and stabbed with his sword, barely noticing the hot blood that spattered on his hands and face, the screams and sudden clouds of choking smoke as his men set the tents alight.

He worked methodically, Colum on one side, Fergus on the other, and when at last he realized that the surviving Romans had managed to group into formation at the edge of the camp, trapped against the loch shore, Eremon shouted the order to retreat. At least a third of the enemy were dead or wounded, and he had no intention of becoming locked into an even fight with the rest. Down the lines, the retreat order was repeated, and the Alban force began to fall back.

As they streamed from the camp, over the torn remnants of the brushwood gate, Eremon stood off to one side near a stand of alders, barking orders and peering through the billowing smoke. Fergus and Colum had led the nearest warriors free, yet by the clash of swords over on his right Eremon realized that some of the men were still engaged in hand-to-hand fighting. He roared at them until he was hoarse, and at last they appeared through the smoky gloom, fighting as they retreated.

As they reached him, Eremon took a step forward, judging it time to abandon his own post. Just then, he caught a whirl of movement from the corner of his eye, and instinct took over. He swept his sword around in an upwards arc as something struck him with force in his flank and, with a cry of anger and fear, he stumbled, slashing at the wild Roman eyes that swam before him.

The tip of Eremon’s sword caught the man’s neck, snagging in his tunic, and Eremon wrenched his shoulders around to grasp the hilt with both hands and drive it deep into the flesh beneath. With a grunt the man fell, and Eremon tripped over the body and sprawled on his face, his helmet rolling free on the ground.

Immediately, someone yanked his hair and then his shoulder. ‘By all the gods!’ Lorn thundered, as the remnants of his men raced around him for the gate. ‘Your own orders were to be away, brother, so why dally here?’

Stumbling to his feet, Eremon was unable to answer, for the blow under the edge of his mailshirt had taken the wind out of him. But when he swayed, Lorn cursed and caught him around the waist. ‘Lugh’s balls,’ he muttered, and held him away, staring into Eremon’s face with puzzlement. Then Lorn slowly pulled one hand away from Eremon’s left side, and Eremon saw, as if from far away, that his palm was running with something that shone black in the moonlight.

‘You there!’ Lorn cried. ‘Grab that horse, and you two, help me with the prince and his weapons! We must be away from here,
now
!’

CHAPTER 54

I
n the morning light, the peaks of the mountains threw sharp, jagged shadows over their lower flanks, and the river was a silver thread in the dark cleft of the valley. Agricola balanced unsteadily on top of the now-abandoned rockfall, looking down the eastern path on the other side, his hand shading his face from the low sun.

He knew now why the trail was empty and silent, for a few moments ago a courageous, desperate messenger had arrived from his camp by the loch, to bring Agricola the news of his Ninth Legion.

Agricola did not shade his eyes this way to better observe his eastern forces, for they were recovering and regrouping – and burning the dead. He did it so he did not have to look into the faces of his officers; so he could grind his teeth methodically, and stare into space with burning eyes; so no one asked him questions or ventured opinions or tried to make him feel better.

Seven hundred men had died in one night, because of his decision.

He should somehow have sensed the significant Alban force lurking in the mountains. Despite his own scouts scouring the land ahead of them, they had remained invisible. Yet the men who attacked his camp were no rabble of peasants with scythes, or even a desperate band of local warriors. The messenger described a highly organized warband, attacking the camp with an Alban rush, but then switching to Roman tactics, with deadly effect.

It was stamped with the mark of the Erin prince, Agricola had to admit. Somehow – the gods knew how – he had flown here from the north ahead of the Roman force. For a crazy moment, Agricola actually wondered if the prince was magical somehow: a sorcerer, or a demi-god like Hercules or Achilles. At the least, he was well blessed by his own gods. How in Jupiter’s name had he known they were coming?

From the west, a cold breeze blew up the back of Agricola’s neck, finding its way underneath the guard of his helmet. But he did not turn to face it. He would not turn to face the west.

He only had a little more than 3,000 men left, and the odds had now tipped. It was far too risky to go on, with a force of 1,000 Albans under the Erin exile’s control lurking somewhere near, and Agricola’s own army in unfamiliar terrain. It could easily turn into another cat-and-mouse game, just like two years before, and this was not what Agricola had been expecting. His men would become trapped in these barren hills until the snows and storms found them – and after all the defeats of the last few months, he could not afford to lose even a few hundred more.

With a great force of will, Agricola breathed out, dropping his shoulders beneath the fine, red cloak that covered his bright breastplate. The prince had won this round, damn him to Hades. Perhaps a war such as this could never be won this way.

Slowly he turned, his eyes looking through his officers arrayed behind him. He was silent for so long that some of them began to stir, leaning on their sword-hilts, sweeping off their helmets.

Yet Agricola was remembering his own words to Samana, given in a firelit tent two years ago:
I will goad them, and taunt them, until I bring them all to bay in a place of my own choosing, and then I will crush them
.

Fresh to Alba, Agricola had known then what to do. Yet since then he had allowed himself to be seduced into this pointless game with Eremon of Erin and the Caledonii king. Now it was time to return to his earlier, and mercifully clearer plan. This season was all but over, and he would have to admit defeat and send his men back to their winter quarters in the south. But next season…

I must corner them in one place, like hounds with a stag
. The stag was fiery, yes, formidable and strong and wild. But the hounds always won, for they listened to their master and worked as a pack, and so the stag was brought down and its throat torn out.

Agricola dropped his hand and turned to his officers, a kernel of renewed determination cooling the pain and shame in his breast. ‘We will return to base, and there lay plans to avenge our comrades, and in the name of our emperor scour these barbarians from this land!’

Relief flowed over his officers’ faces, as they saluted him. ‘In the name of the emperor!’

The news of the great victory resounded among the Alban mountains with the force of an eagle’s cry.

This time, Rhiann wanted the people of Dunadd to outdo themselves in their welcome, to receive their warriors with the biggest homecoming they had ever seen.

A muddy, road-weary rider came in, informing her of the expected arrival of the warband in three days, and she then lost no time in sending out a request for people to don their best cloaks and dresses, and all their jewellery. Many nobles had left for the remote duns when they first heard of the Roman advance, but with the news of victory they came streaming home.