The Dog and the Wolf (38 page)

I did this, he thought. I let the sea in over Ys.

I believed that would be the end. I would turn home with my vengeance taken, the ghosts of Breccan and my men who died here set at peace. But the strife wears on. She will not let me go free.

A horn sounded, so faint at its distance and against the wind that he might never have been aware. His eyes told his ears of it. Tiny at their remove, men swarmed from behind the amphitheater. Blink of metal bespoke others hurrying down from the houses where they had laired.

Ambush.

The warriors saw too. They milled about and shouted. Niall’s glance swung past them. They’d be outnumbered. Retreat to the currachs—deadly slow. The enemy would arrive before more than a handful could escape, and trap the rest on the cliff edge. He raised his spear for war, his shield for silence. “We’ll hold fast where we are, lads, and reap them as they come!” he cried. Smoke rose thick from the amphitheater wall. His illwishers had kindled a beacon.

3

Six or seven miles thence, a watcher on a hilltop spied the signal. Wind tattered it, but surely yonder fire burned for a single reason. Shouting, he sped down the path that twisted among trees, to his village.

It was half a dozen huts on a tiny inlet where a stream ran into the sea. Its boats were gone. Men were out fishing. They would not return till sundown, if then. War or no, they had a living to haul out of the water.

Yet several craft like theirs lay drawn ashore. On the cove a larger smack rode at anchor, eyes painted forward
on the black hull. Farther out was a merchantman, magnificent and awesome to simple folk.

The boy yelled and pounded on doors. Men came forth. Others stirred from boats or beach where they had idled away their days. Weathered countenances worked. Oaths rattled. “At last, at last. … Is it true, now? … Lir, I promise You the best of my every catch for a year. …”

“Avast!” bawled Maeloch. “We’ll go see!”

A number pounded after him up the hill. “Aye,” he panted, “no mistaking that. The King’s fighting. Quick and go to him!”

When they got back, Evirion Baltisi had had himself rowed in from his ship. He had spent the weary time of waiting there, often wishing he had stayed longer in Thule and come home too late for this. Better a bunk aboard than a smoky hut so crammed with visitors that a man couldn’t leave at night for a piss without stepping on them. Now eagerness blazed in him.

Maeloch was more matter-of-fact. They conferred briefly while the crews gathered whatever weapons they owned, launched their boats, hastened out. Women and children watched from the village. Most stood mute. Some waved, farewell, farewell, luck fare with you.

Evirion’s boat took Maeloch to
Osprey.
Her crew numbered more than the fishermen of old. She carried as many fighters as had been willing to ride with the skipper. Hence rations had grown short, tempers vicious, while yonder summons tarried. He’d begun to wonder if the damned Scoti would ever arrive. Staying here like this would hardly have been possible if it weren’t in territory which had been Ysan. To these uncouth and impoverished folk also, the city was their life. These days they hoped for protection by Audiarna; but they remembered.

The vessels stood out to sea and started west. They scarcely made a fleet, nine boats with five or six men apiece,
Osprey
with a score, and
Brennilis.
The ship was good-sized, her crew trained in arms, and a number of landsmen had joined them. As they traveled, two more boats slanted in to take part—fishers from the village who happened to see. It was their war too. Still, the force seemed a puny thing to throw at Niall of the Nine Hostages.

“A single slingstone ’ull do for bringing any wolf down,” Maeloch growled into his beard.

He stood in the bows, watchful. Waves chopped leaden, streaked and crested with white. The smack rolled, plunged, groaned to their thud and splash against her. Oars creaked on thole pins. Wind thrummed mast stays. It was a south wind, but bitter and steadily rising. Starboard the land loomed dark and ever more sheer. Surf foamed at its feet. Mist ahead, which should not be in air like this, dimmed sight of its western end. The sun had become a sallow shield low above an unseen horizon. Cormorants wheeled in hueless heaven, blackness aflight. With only sail,
Brennilis
kept well out, lest she be driven around. Seeing her thus dwindled was a lonely thing.

“Well do it, regardless,” Maeloch muttered. “Don’t s’pose I can bring ye Niall’s head, but how’d ye like a gold ring off his arm, Tera?”—Tera, who after two years was fruitful with their child, first of his children since Betha and all theirs drowned with Ys. “Ye’ll have your revenge, little Princess Dahut, we’ll give ye your honor back.”

4

Dusk fell early in the forest. The sun was beyond the trees and the moon had not yet risen above them. Heaven reached gray-blue over the stealthily flowing Stegir, but beneath the king oak gloom deepened.

Within the cabin was nearly full night. Nemeta put aside the bowl into which she had stared unwavering for hours. She could no longer make out the water within it, drawn from the witch-pool and tinged by drops of her own blood. Whatever visions had drifted there must now form themselves from the half-shapes behind shut eyes. She did not think they would be any more clear.

Wind soughed outside, a noise as of the sea. Two boughs rattled together like clashing swords.

She rose from her cross-legged position on the floor. It had left her joints stiff and painful. Chill wrapped around
her nakedness. Well though she knew this room, she must fumble a while before she found her snake staff.

She stretched herself on her narrow bed, hands crossed over the pole. Its top rested at her throat, the mummified head on her small breasts, the scales down her belly, the rest of the wood against her groin and between her legs. Staring into blindness, she whispered in Ysan, “Mother, I’ve cast what few, weak spells I know. Help me. Come to me, mother, from wherever you have wandered, come lend me the wings that once were yours. I will fly to my father.”

5

Gratillonius knew the battle would be chaos. Combats never obeyed any man’s plan; and here he led no soldiers, but a gathering of colonists, rustics, outlaws, barely leavened by some aging veterans and former marines. Working as a whole was beyond their grasp. And they must take the offensive, cast their bodies against sharpened metal, hold down the fear that even legionaries always felt, that told a man to use his common sense and run away. Gratillonius could only form squads of those who knew each other and hope they would hang together and so keep heart in the rest.

The Scoti were warriors by trade, skilled, well-armed, contemptuous of death. They lacked Roman discipline but could keep an eye on the chieftain’s standard and each ward a comrade as well as himself. They numbered about two hundred, Gratillonius fleetingly gauged. Against them he had almost twice as many, who fought for their homes—though the enemy fought for life—That was his solitary advantage.

Since he could not oversee and try to guide operations like Julius Caesar, he took sword and shield himself. He went with the old legionaries. While waiting for this day they had drilled, a little of the craft had come back to them from their youth, they tramped side by side and struck the Scotic flank like a single engine. Drusus was
their actual officer. Gratillonius pressed forward on his left but held ready to go elsewhere as necessary. On Gratillonius’s left, a step behind him, his fellow Briton Riwal carried the banner that marked the commander’s place. It was blue, with an eagle embroidered in gold. Julia had made it for him. Her eyes had sometimes been red, but she sewed on and kept silence.

Her man Cadoc was with Amreth and the other Ysans. Nearly all of them untrained and poorly equipped, they were less a unit than a gang of individual men who tried by ones or twos to bring down individual foes. The marines gave a small core of steadiness, though they themselves had scant experience. Still more did the fear of shaming oneself before a neighbor stiffen the will to fight.

Much the same was true of the Osismii. Pacified these past four hundred years, they were brave—no timid man had answered the call that went secretly over the forest trails—but knew nothing of affrays except for private brawls that seldom ended in death. They too rushed, slashed and hacked, fell down or fell back, tried again in the same man-to-man awkwardness, or dithered about dismayed by lifetime friends who lay gruesomely dead or shrieked for pain in the clutter and stink of entrails.

Rufinus and his wolves were the appalling manslayers, murder made flesh. They skulked about, watched for a chance, leaped in with a snap of weapons like jaws, were gone before a return stroke could reach, harried and hooted and grinned. From the sides their archers and slingers coolly waited for a clear target, then let fly and hit as often as they missed. When a band of Scoti made a desperate rush after them, they laughed and faded off on dancing feet.

Once the Confluentians collided with such a sallying party, away from its main group, and cut it to pieces at whatever cost to themselves. The sight brought Gauls to blood lust and they attacked in a mass that almost reached the barbarian lord. His guards drove it back in confusion, and its losses were hideous, but many a Scotian sprawled gaping at the sky. Every islander harvested was a loss Niall could ill afford.

Thus Gratillonius saw the struggle, whenever a respite
allowed. A part of him weighed what he learned, gauged how the work went, told him to push onward. Then he must rejoin Drusus’s troop, and for the next while forget all reason, all self. It was cut, thrust, parry, feel the shock of a blow given or taken through metal and bone to the marrow, glimpse an opponent’s face contorted into a Medusa mask, engage an arm whose owner was a blur behind a shield, let sweat sting eyes and salten lips and make underpadding sodden and hilt slippery, haul air down a dry fire of a throat, shake at the knees and know he was not a young man any longer. Clash, clang, thud, scream, gasp filled the universe. He lost footing on soaked ground and lived because Drusus covered him while he got back up. He recollected vaguely how he himself had saved Riwal when a giant of a Scotian broke through the Roman line. He fought.

Betweenwhiles he would catch sight of his goal. Niall reared high in the tumult, helmet like a sun, cloak like a rainbow, unmistakable. His sword and his voice rang. Surely he had suffered injuries, but nothing showed, no stone or arrow found him, he seemed as far beyond fatigue as Mithras at war. How could his sworn men do other than die at his feet?

Suddenly timelessness tore across and time was again. Gratillonius stood on Point Vanis with only the wind and the plaints of the wounded about him. A blackness swept across his eyes, a whirling, he nearly fell. Riwal caught his arm. Steadiness returned and he looked around.

A remnant of Scoti had rallied and hewn their way out of the trap. The cliff trail being denied them, they were headed the other way, toward Ys. They moved in a band, less than a hundred, ragged, reddened, stiff with hurts and weariness, steel dimmed by blood, but together and defiant. At their head, under his own flamboyant flag, blazed the helmet of Niall.

The battlefield was heaped and strewn with dead men, crippled men—hard to tell which grimaced the more horribly—and shields, arrows, spears, slingstones, swords, axes, daggers, bills, sickles, hammers, clubs, some broken, some bent or blunted, some ready to kill afresh. Blood dripped, steamed, glared bright or darkened with early
clotting. Brains, guts, pieces of people littered the grass. Gulls had begun to crowd overhead. Their mewing grew loud, impatient.

Gauls and Ysans, such as could, lay or sat or stood droop-shouldered, exhausted. Gratillonius saw a couple of them vomit; doubtless more had already. A number had shit in their breeks. The veterans rested more calmly about Drusus. Gratillonius felt a rush of relief when he found Cadoc nearby, arms lifted in prayer. Rufinus’s woodsrunners were the coolest. Several of them still had vigor to go about cutting the throats of Scoti and trying to do something for casualties of their own side.

That outfit had suffered the least, though its losses were severe enough. Gratillonius tried to count. He couldn’t, really, but he estimated he’d spent a hundred men. That much out of four hundred would have cost him his command in any proper army. But he didn’t have one, of course. The Scoti had died in equal numbers merely because each man of them had two against him.

And the chief devil among them was still alive.

Rufinus approached. “We’re not finished yet,” he said.

Gratillonius’s gaze followed his finger. They happened to be in view of Scot’s Landing. The reinforcements had arrived. Gratillonius recognized Evirion’s ship, anchored at a safe distance, and
Osprey
closer in. Smaller craft plied to and fro, bringing fighters ashore. The first were now bound up the trail. Several were aboard the Scotic galleys. Apparently those had been captured without bloodshed.

Rufinus guessed Gratillonius’s thought. “No, the enemy didn’t try to hold out on the water,” he said. “They understood right away it was hopeless and made off. Yonder.”

The sun was very low, dull red and deformed behind the mists. Had the battle taken so long? Or, rather, had it taken no longer than this? Things were hard to make out on the heaving gray of the waves. Gratillonius shaded his eyes and squinted. Mosl of the leather boats were loose. The Scoti must have manned them with skeleton crews and fled as fast as possible. They were bound west along the point. Oars sent the light craft skimming, graceful as flying fish.
Osprey
threshed in pursuit, but heavier, with
more freeboard to catch the south wind, had no chance of interception before the fugitives were past the headland. Through Gratillonius flitted an image of Maeloch roaring at his rowers and his Gods.

“Let ’em go,” he said mechanically. “They’ll carry the tale home.”

“No,” Rufinus answered. “That kind don’t run to save themselves. They’ll make for the bay, with the idea of landing and joining what’s left of Niall’s troop. What they’ll actually do is take them off.”