‘Release me, then,’ said Harald, knowing that Gotthelm understood the way that Harald would escape his curse.
Gotthelm eased his sword from its sheath, and Harald laid him down on the snow, among the red crystals of his own blood. Gotthelm pressed the point against Harald’s chest. ‘There? Will that be a mortal and yet allow you a chance to survive?’
‘What choice have I but to find out the hard way?’
‘Then make ready for my steel, my strong young Innocent … make ready …’
But before he could thrust, his gaze went beyond Harald, his eyes widening in shock.
‘Harald! Watch out!’
Too late.
In the moment’s shock the blade shifted. Then a heavy body slammed against Harald from behind, and he felt himself impaled on Gotthelm’s blade while a razor sharp knife slashed agonisingly across his throat.
He twisted, feeling the life pump from his neck in great spurts, feeling the cold metal draining his soul from his severed heart.
Gotthelm was above him, weeping. The girl’s manic laughter echoed in his ears.
Blackness took him …
A hand grasped his hand, as he had grasped the cold fingers of his father. Gotthelm’s voice was a haunting cry. ‘I shall not forget you … I shall not forget you … May merciful gods guide your quest.’
Stars spun; a great dark vortex sucked him down.
His cry, then, was the first cry of a new-born baby; but for a while, for many years, Harald Swiftaxe would lay dead in the void between ages, sensing nothing, but preparing to begin his quest again, in whatever world the gods saw fit to take him to.
THE BULL CHIEF
Dedication
This is for Bryn and Greg and Simone and Sheila
Who climbed the ramparts of Dinas Powys with me,
and we were Kings of the Castle.
PART ONE
The Emissary
CHAPTER ONE
Dyfed, AD 492
This was the end, then! After seven days at sea, weakened by hunger and exhaustion, he was to be smashed to pieces on the rocks of the very coast that had been his destination, all that time ago.
How sour the humour and whim of fate could be. To have fought so hard for his Warlord, to have discovered so much, and to have come so close, so near to bringing his news to the very fort from which he had been dispatched – and then to be cheated by those seas in which he had swum as a boy – to be killed by those rocks from which he had dived as a youth, when the war with the Saxons had seemed so far away, so many years distant!
What wouldn’t he give, now, for the strength of that great warrior across the sea, the invulnerable warrior, the Mad Bear who could mean so much to the Briton’s cause against the advancing heathens!
But he had no strength, not now, not any more; and there was no way of letting Arthur know of his plight, and of what he had discovered, far away, in the boglands of Eriu …
Crouched on the cliff top, overlooking the narrow, rocky cove, a small boy watched as the tiny long boat was swept through rain and billowing waves towards its inevitable destruction.
The cold autumn rain drove from the sea and almost blinded him. He huddled lower and swept back his long, black hair, peering out across the violent sea in his efforts to try and discern the vessel more clearly. There was a man lying in the bottom of the boat, and the boy could not tell at this distance whether he was alive or dead.
Waves broke against the soft, grey sand and already wood and fragments of leather equipment were washing on to the beach; soon the boat would smash against the dark, crystalline rocks that poked above the waves like teeth, and then the beach would become littered with the remnants of this strange arrival.
Before the boy could find his legs, however, and run to the beach ready to pick up the pieces, two brown-robed monks appeared at the far end of the grey sands and came swiftly towards the rocks. They lifted their skirts high, bare feet and white legs moving fast and urgent as they covered the ground towards where the boat would soon be pitched ashore by the storm winds.
The boy huddled deeper into his sodden wool garments, feeling the icy rain send chill fingers deep into his flesh. This first rain of the new season had come inland swiftly and taken him by surprise, and only the sight of the helpless boat had kept him by the shore, looking outwards, yonder, to the invisible land of the Gaels – Eriu.
He recognised the monks and immediately shivered with something more than cold.
The older of them carried a small crucifix before him, lifting it above his head with his right hand, whilst with his left he grappled and clutched at his robe. His bald head, not even rimmed by a thin circle of hair, glistened in the rainy daylight; water ran from his beaked nose, made him appear to be crying voluminous tears.
The younger monk, a taller individual, dark-haired save for the small shaved patch on the crown of his head, reached the shoreline first, and stood in the incoming tide watching as the boat smashed and shattered.
When the occupant was thrown from the craft and floundered helplessly in the churning waters, this younger religious plunged into the sea and a few minutes later dragged the drowning man on to the beach.
The stranger lay on his back, his eyes closed, his mouth open as if he were drinking the driving rain, washing the salt from his throat; his arm was across his face and he lay senseless.
Even from his vantage point, high above, the boy could discern the richness of the stranger’s apparel – bear-fur jerkin and thick, leather leggings; he wore jewelled rings on his fingers and the stones sparkled in the fragmentary light like the white-flecked ocean. A pendant that hung around his neck seemed to be of a carved ivory animal, and ivory was a rarely seen jewel in these inaccessible parts of the country.
The boy dropped to his stomach, wondering who the shipwrecked man could be. The monks too seemed to be puzzling over the stranger, but his clothes and general appearance marked him out as a man of Powys, a mountainous province to the north, and the interest in him did not last long.
The older monk knelt on one knee and blessed the exhausted man repeatedly. The younger monk reached down and pulled the warrior’s short-bladed sword from its slings.
As the crucifix was held above him so the young monk thrust the sword into the warrior’s belly and swiftly, then, they stripped the corpse of clothes and jewels. When the body lay naked and bloody, the sword still erect and deeply embedded in the man’s gut, the two monks blessed themselves and the sea and ran, skirts lifted high, but staggering beneath their cumbersome armfuls of loot; they were soon gone, back to the tiny monastery on the cliff, half a mile from where the boy still lay and watched.
The rain washed the blood from the man’s body; the sea nudged the spreadeagled limbs, moved the corpse inland as the tide edged further up the beach.
Then the body reached up and pulled the iron blade from its flesh, cast the weapon away and began to moan.
At the moment when his own sword was thrust deeply and agonisingly into his belly, Uryen of Powys had remembered what the village seer had told him when he was a child of twelve: you will die, when you finally die, by the hand of God.
As a Roman Christian by birth, Uryen had welcomed the prophecy, if only because it was easy; as a quiet believer in the old gods he had welcomed it because this Christian God was gentle, and he had always secretly desired a gentle death; as an emissary of the war chief, Arthur, however, with news that might mean the end of the Saxon advance, he did not welcome that prophecy coming true, not in this angry way, not at this desperate time.
He fought to keep the life spirit in his body, struggled to retain consciousness, to hold back the departing vital force that threatened to slip from his corpse like the blood from the sword wound in his stomach.
The rain might have drowned him, or the sea carried him outwards when the tide turned, but a small boy came to his assistance, adding his thin-armed strength to the great strength of the dying warrior; suddenly Uryen was being hauled up the saturated grey
sands and into the dry shelter of a rock overhang.
There he relaxed, his hands clutching the gaping wound in his body, his eyes watching the frightened, yet dedicated youngster, who made him comfortable and then ran away, shouting back that he would get help, that his father would help him.
Even if Uryen had wanted to shout his thanks he couldn’t have; but he sensed the genuine concern of the lad and allowed unconsciousness to take him, and the last he heard for a while was the crash of the autumn storm sea and the dull sound of rain pelting across the beach.
When he next opened his eyes he was in darkness; he could hear rain, distantly, but he was warm now; the bitter cold of the sea and of his saturated clothes was gone. There was the hardness of a wooden pallet below his back, and the softness of fur coverings across his body, drawn up to his chin.
He could smell food, meat smells; and the tang of ale, which made his mouth water after so long drinking sea spray.
There was a movement beside him and when he stared at it he saw a small girl, backing away from him, open-mouthed, wide-eyed. She was about ten, and dressed in a ragged but adequate woollen dress that hung from a neatly tied cord around her neck down as far as Uryen could see, somewhere below her knees. He thought she looked starved; her face was thin and framed by ratty hair, drawn and twisted into shapeless plaits. But she was clean.
‘Don’t be frightened of me,’ he said quietly, finding that though he wished to speak firmly, loudly, his body could muster no more strength than would allow him to speak in a whisper.
Immediately the girl ran to his side and peered closely at him.
‘Are you really Arthur?’ she said. ‘My brother says you are.’
Uryen tried to laugh, but was unable to. He stared at the dark ceiling where strands of dry thatch poked through the rough wooden beams. He shook his head.
Where had he come ashore, he wondered, feeling the rising of a wave of panic. They knew about the warlord here, but didn’t know him to look at. They must live at the ends of the earth, he thought, and that could bode ill for my mission.
He looked back at the girl and smiled. ‘Arthur … where is he? Where are his armies now? Do you know?’
The girl shook her head, remaining silent.
The door of the small round-house opened and two shapes came towards him, one large, one small, the small shape scurrying across to him and peering into his eyes. He recognised the boy who had dragged him up the beach. Memory of the beach made him aware of the ache in his belly, and beneath his wraps he felt down his flesh until he found the herbal compress across the gaping wound. When he touched the flesh, pain shot upwards to his heart and down into his groin and he knew that these people, for all their country ways, could not really cope with a wound as deep and vicious as that. It was festering, and it marked out his time in days and hours.
Trying not to think of the certainty of his death he smiled at the boy. ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said. Behind the lad an old man appeared, white-bearded, white-haired, dressed in loose green shirt and short, tattered breeches. The man’s eyes were full of age, full of survival, and he knelt beside Uryen of Powys and reached out to touch the warrior’s forehead. He detected the heat and the two men’s eyes met and an unconscious exchange of understanding passed between them, unnoticed by the children.
‘Are you Arthur?’ demanded the boy excitedly. Again Uryen shook his head.
‘Arthur camps not far from here,’ said the old man, and Uryen’s heart surged.
‘Where? At Caer Dyv?’
‘Near there,’ said the old man. ‘He has rebuilt the small fort that lies to the east of Caer Dyv; he has called it Din Powys.’
Uryen felt instantly more relaxed. Wherever he had come ashore he was where he had intended to be, on the southern coast of Dyfed, and not more than two days’ hard ride from Penn Ichen where this fort lay. He had feared that Arthur would be at the Saxon front, but perhaps there was a pause in the vicious struggle for conquest and survival which had been the reason for Uryen’s mission across the channel.
The boy said, ‘I got back your pendant. Look.’ He held up the ivory amulet, carved in the shape of a bull, that Arthur had given him when he had left. The Druid, Marban, had instilled some magic property into the amulet (to the disgust of the Christian monks) and said it would quell the fighting spirit of all Celtic men of true blood in the ancient land of Eriu; this would give Uryen a chance to talk of fighting-assistance to the warlords there, who called themselves kings although they were little more than tribal chiefs.
Reaching out for the pendant, Uryen found himself staring into the boy’s bright, green eyes. The warriors of Eriu were green-eyed, and their women too – flame-haired and green-eyed. In this, his homeland, the brown and green were equally mixed. The Roman spirit had left its mark, even though Uryen and his tribe, as well as all the tribes of these western provinces, felt themselves to be Celts, pure and ancient. That they were not, that they were half Roman, was a fact they preferred, these days, to forget, even though the Roman warlord, Ambrosius, had paved the way for Arthur’s knights to block the Saxon advance, five years before.
‘How did you get it?’ he asked the boy.
‘I chased the monks out of their monastery,’ he boasted. ‘They’re really quite meek and tame. They’ll loot bodies, but won’t risk a beating.’
Uryen remembered the monks, standing over him with that pagan cross symbol that had impressed so many of his neighbouring tribesmen. Even Arthur was under its strangely unmagical spell; Uryen was less impressed.
Even so, the monks with their sword-shaped icon had very quickly converted Uryen to their way of thinking, but with the biting edge of his own blade, and not the soft edge of their tongues.
He pressed the pendant back into the boy’s hand. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Owain,’ said the boy, excitement clear in his voice. ‘And that’s my twin sister, Reagan. When we’re a few years older we shall fight together for Arthur.’
Uryen turned his head to stare at the girl. The resemblance between the two of them was apparent, now: the same confidence, the same green eyes, the same determined look about the whole expression. Reagan nodded vigorously. ‘I’m as good with a sword as Owain. He can’t beat me.’
‘I can with a sling,’ said the boy sharply, staring angrily at his sister.
‘And who can run the fastest?’ said the girl, equally annoyed.
Uryen reached out and touched the girl’s shoulder, smiling. ‘I believe you will both be among the best of Arthur’s horsemen,’ he said. ‘But unless I get a message to Arthur, there will be no battle for you to fight in.’
The old man bent closer, pushing the boy aside. ‘Quickly then. I shall send Owain to the fort.’
A sudden spasm of pain racked Uryen’s body and he screamed. Darkness threatened to take him but he found himself being bathed in cold water and the pain subsided.
‘Fetch him here, fetch him fast,’ he gasped, as the agony of his belly wound reasserted itself with a vengeance. He closed his eyes against the pain and felt the touch on his clenched fist of the boy’s soft hands.
‘Fetch him fast,’ he whispered again, but when he felt the boy slip away he reached out to stop him. The bull pendant lay on the pallet and he picked it up and again pressed it into the boy’s hand. ‘Show him this. Tell him – ride until he drops, because my hours are badly numbered.’
The boy glanced at the old man who rose and they both left the house. The girl stayed, bathing Uryen’s forehead, silent but for the sadness in her breathing. When Uryen heard the sound of a horse galloping across the saturated turf outside he relaxed and slept. The pain dulled and for a while he drifted through the battles and pleasures of his thirty years of life.
How much time passed Uryen of Powys never knew; there seemed to be moments of sudden light which he took to be dawn, and then slow times of increasing dimness, which he counted as dusk. The rain came in fits and starts, and there was movement about the sma
ll round-house, repairing a leak in the thatch, and pushing stronger shutters against the tiny, low windows which gave a view of the grey sands and the restless tide.
Sometimes he was cold, and other times his fever increased until he felt himself afloat in a sea of sweat. Sometimes he cried, and then the girl, Reagan, was always there, bathing his face, feeding him spoonfuls of some gritty paste that left a pleasant and fruity aftertaste, though the swallowing was hard. He guessed it was a gruel of some description in which the local herbalist had mixed healing, or pain-killing plants that were unpleasant to taste.
The pain came and went, but the smell when he lifted the fur blankets was awful. If the girl noticed she said nothing, but kept close by him at all times, vanishing, perhaps, only when he slept.
He awoke, once, to the sound of a strange murmuring, and opening his eyes he saw a monk, young of face, thin of arm, kneeling by him and uttering the mystical words of the distant Romans, making the pagan sign that Uryen hated so much. He had not the strength to brush away the wizard, but closed his ears to the words and thought of his mission, and the women and the fervour of the old gods that the Erismen possessed still.
The monk was not one of the two who had tried to kill him, but to Uryen all Christians were the same, all were as bad as all others: invaders, blasphemers.
If not for Ambrosius, and the effect that great and valiant warlord had had upon the youngsters who had been raised in the fort on the Gloslyn river, far away to the north in Guined, if not for him then there would be no cross of this One God anywhere near to Arthur and his chieftains. But Arthur was a Christian, and so were his commanders, and his men, and the women and children of the tribes that scattered this side of the Saxon front; even the sheep, even the rats, blessed themselves at dawn and at dusk. All but Uryen. All but the doubter, as Arthur called him (though Arthur himself seemed uninterested in the Roman God at times, as if he were more concerned with killing, which was as it should have been.)