Berserker (Omnibus) (43 page)

His eyes burned with excitement and intensity; his whole body was tense as he sat on the hard floor, his arms around his leather-clad legs, his hair falling free down his back. Lean and languid, his whole bearing was so impressive that Niall found his heart thundering with excitement and his mind roaring with the thoughts of war and victory that this man’s great strength and leadership promised.

Following Arthur, following this man who was younger, yet, than Niall himself, there would surely be no defeat in field battle!

‘When she returns,’ Arthur said softly, ‘we shall strike again, quickly, magnificently. My dragons,’ he glanced at Bryn and Kei. ‘My bears,’ he met Niall’s
gaze. ‘My lions, and my bulls, and my cubs … young Owain …’ Pleasure at the thought of the boy manifested itself in his thoughtful expression. Then he grinned, and drew out of the small fire a burning ember which he held before his face, so that his eyes were red and flaming in the shadows of the house. ‘We shall ride together, a force of men such as the country has never before seen!’ His excitement grew. ‘Bright will our swords shine, loud will be the screams of war, deafening the thunder of weapon on shield. Leatherclad, my dragons, sparkling helms and sweating, steady steeds, we shall ride in a Roman arrow straight towards Cerdic’s very heart, and strike him, strike him! Dead!’

Distantly, as he finished speaking, a wailing chant went up, as the wives of the dead were conducted through their grief by a latin priest. The sound stirred Niall deeply, but it seemed to hold no significance for Arthur.

Shortly after dusk, his wounds aching almost unbearably as the healing potions did their duty, Niall wrapped himself in furs and crept into the darkness of his corner of the house. His thoughts fled home, to rolling green hills and the distant, mist shrouded giants that were mountains, spreading down the western peninsulas like a vast chain, separating a hundred lands from the easy routes of tribal migration. He thought of his father, and the cosy settlement that he had governed. He thought of Cathabach and clutched his snow sword warmly; how soon he had forgotten the bizarre nature of his weapon. How quickly it had become just a weapon for killing, something that men did so well, no matter whether they were filled with magic or not.

His thoughts lingered most extensively on the war queen who had come close to being his first woman; he had forgotten the hurt of that moment, but the memory of her body, naked and gleaming in the half light, open and inviting to his butting rage … that memory stirred agonies within him. He had long since eased the agony of inexperience. There were few women in the communities around the fort that Arthur had not brought to his secret weapon during the few weeks Niall had been with him. But that woman who had spared his life, who had taken his amulet and run into the night, her memory made him burn; he burned with desire and with anger, and he begged sleep to take him and release him from the burden of his shame and hurt pride.

He knew that Grania was Arthur’s queen. It could be no other, and what other woman – fighting in the north, two hundred miles distant – what other woman could still affect her husband so that he declined the warmth of all other women’s bodies, even though it was his right, as Bull Chief, to choose whom he wished from the community?

Niall grew aware that Arthur was sitting on his low pallet, staring thoughtfully at the small fire in the centre of the floor space. He was bored with
inaction, and in pain from his wounds. It was too soon to chase after Cerdic, and he would not leave, anyway, without his queen; one battle without her by his side was enough. He would not risk two.

Niall watched him, straining to see the expression on the man’s face but unable to because of the bad light. Arthur rose and stripped off his iron-studded leather armour; white in the fire-light, he was leaner, more wiry than Niall had thought. His member stood out stiffly before him, and no doubt he too thought of his queen, and memories and frustrations haunted him.

He settled on to his pallet and stared at the ceiling. Niall relaxed, tried again for sleep.

But a second figure slipped into the house. It was not Bryn, nor Kei. They were both womanising some miles from the fort, in one of the farmsteads where there was a surfeit of widows.

After a moment, as the figure slipped out of its clothes and revealed a white and memberless, small-breasted figure, Niall realised that this was Reagan, the ‘cub’.

No cub now as she laid herself down on Arthur, reached to his stiffness and stroked it with slow and sensuous motion. Arthur – perhaps as surprised as Niall by this unexpected gift – slowly brought up his arms and ran his hands lightly down the girl’s body. She moaned at his touch, and there was something about her tone, something about the way her voice almost broke, that reminded Niall of his own sensation in the stable house at Cnocba.

The girl was still virgin. She had offered herself to Arthur for her first consummation.

And Arthur knew it. He caressed her body for what seemed like ages, while she moved on him, reaching and fondling him, sliding down in an awkward way to kiss his staff, but reluctant to do more. Increasingly she pressed her lips to his, and in the shadows of the house Niall found his desire heightening, and the pain in his groin worse than the pain of any wound.

But then Arthur whispered something to her and she froze; in the silence Arthur’s voice was a calm murmur; Reagan’s voice was an urgent whisper; the urgency changed to disappointment.

She slipped from Arthur’s bed, stood above him, naked and perfect in her slimness, the budding of her womanhood a tantalising and vulnerable goal for any lusty young man.

As she gathered up her clothes Niall saw the tears in her eyes. Arthur was still lying on his back, his arm across his face, hiding sight of everything but his queen from his mind.

Noisily Niall shifted, and Reagan glanced at him, holding her clothes before her breasts as she stared at the shapeless mass in the corner. Then she realised who lay there, and walked across to him.

Niall grinned and reached out to tug the tunic from her grip. She slipped into the furs with him and he wasted little time with idle love talk or gentle, warming caresses. He pushed her arms above her head and pinned her hands with his own left hand; with his right he traced a firm and sensuous contour down her body, opening her with a dexterity he would never have believed possible a few months ago. He entered her, then, breaking her quickly, giving her no time to think about the pain. He loved her, both roughly and gently, but for a long, long time, and when she finally started to cry Arthur threw a boot across at them, growling for them to be quiet.

In the morning, Reagan kissed him very long and hard before she slipped out of his furs and dressed. The lissome young girl, her thighs red from her night’s efforts, the womanliness of her such an obtrusive presence, became transformed into something totally alien to that womanliness; hard, mean, a sword hanging in quick unsheathing position from her broad hips, her breasts bound tight and firm beneath leather breastplates. Niall watched her go, stepping lightly, happily into the misty dawn, and he couldn’t help laughing.

Arthur threw his other boot. He had been watching Niall, and perhaps in the cold light of dawn he regretted having rejected such a perfect young woman in favour of memories of his wife.

Bryn and Kei, both horribly ill with mead and indulgence, were in a worse state than they had been after the attack on the fort.

Arthur kicked them out of their furs, and then stretched, pushing the thatch roof up with his extended limbs.

He grinned.

‘We’ve rested long enough,’ he said. ‘I think the time has come to abandon this fort, at least for the moment, and ride eastwards until we find my queen. The augurs tell me she is on her way.’ When Bryn sounded surprised, Arthur looked guilty. ‘Not a very Christian thing to do, I know, but the augurs are very helpful at times. Come on you dogs, we go to war. Up you get and rouse the camp, otherwise they’ll sleep all day in this freezing mist. Where’s the house keeper?’ He bawled for the woman who should have struck new life to the fire before dawn. She came scuttling in, her arms filled with wood, a huge cauldron swinging from her grasp.

Even before the sun was fully up the tents of the army had been dismantled and packed into carts and across horses. Women bustled about, grey woolen dresses smeared with dirt and ash, making sure that provisions were properly packed, and canteens for water and mead adequately filled. Warriors pulled on thin leather armour, slinging the thicker shirts of bone and iron links across their saddles. They led off in small groups, out through the palisade and then slipping and sliding down the steep walls of the hill on which the fort had been built.

Riders departed in several directions to fetch the warrior bands that had been distributed among the various local settlements; most of these would not join Arthur until they reached the deep ford across the Saefern, and by then, by the time they reached the no-man’s-land between the two opposed peoples, the force of men behind this Bull Chief would be in the order of a thousand.

Not a vast host compared to the several thousand against them, but men with the strength of great conviction, and the defence of their homeland closest to their hearts. Each man who rode with Arthur was worth any ten horned-pagans.

One particular man was worth a hundred.

Niall rode behind his warlord and felt a certain sadness at leaving the small but pleasant fort behind. When they returned the full damage done by the skirmish would have been repaired by the local folk, but by then the unpredictable Arthur might have decided to make his stronghold elsewhere.

He had once boasted of forging a path straight through the Saxon ranks, almost due east, and taking the fabled city of Camulodonum, but this was no doubt mere fancy. To the south, however, there was a mighty fortress. Its beacon could be seen from Dinas Powys, as the original builders – the Siluresians in the north, the Dobunni in the south – had intended. The enclosure area of the great fortress was ten times the size of the small stronghold in Wales. The warlord who occupied Din Dobun, the great fortress on the Yeo river, was a man called Mark, an old man, now, who had fought with Ambrosius, and had been a true friend to that great man. Mark could be subdued and brought round to Arthur’s way of thinking.

All that, all those dreams, were for the future.

For the moment, it was a gathering of forces, including the re-uniting of Arthur with his Erish queen, and then a mighty strike at Cerdic, who was camped, so it was believed, to the north of the plain and city of Sorviodunon. The name meant nothing to Niall, save that mention of the plain brought back a memory of the central boglands of his own country, and he again longed to return there.

He rode with true born Celts, even though they were not ashamed of the Roman in them, but he could not cope with a people who paid no homage to the gods, though they told folk stories of the days when those same gods had walked the hills of Wales as tall and as proud as they walked the mountains of Eriu. He had been so glad to quit the land of his blood. Now he missed it, his soul drawn to it by the intangible bonds between a man and the soil that has nurtured him in life.

As they rode, Niall felt the misery of the spirit that worked his arms in battle; the Bear, perhaps even Swiftaxe, or the ghostly memories that were
Swiftaxe, all the haunting presences in his skull sensed that soon they would be cast away, into a never ending darkness. One more orgy of killing, one more blood fury, and then it would be south, and east, into the Saxon owned lands, to find the ring of henges. Arthur had even agreed to come with him, to show him the way.

Niall smiled with satisfaction as he rode, slouched in the saddle, unaware of the cold that pierced his thin green shirt and soft cotton breeches.

They were a straggling line of horsemen, numbering some two hundred. Dull leather and faded cotton were all they wore for the moment; shields, some round, some a strange elongated shape (which Arthur had said was Roman style) hung easily from the leather straps across the horses’ withers. Weapons were carried on small carts, each warrior riding with only his sword and dirk. Javelins and bows were rarely used by these men of Wales in field battle.

The column walked easily on, through shaded valleys and along the banks of fresh and icy streams. They stopped for water and rest, and then rode at a gallop to surmount a small ridge, where the entire force of men clustered and shifted with excitement as they saw the wide and straight flow of the Saefern in the distance.

Through woods, then, the noise of talking and the whinnying of horses causing birds and animals to scatter in flight; the wheels of the carts creaked and complained and the heaps of iron-tipped weapons rattled and clashed as they were dragged by unhappy horses across the bumpy ground.

At length they emerged on to some low downs, the forests behind them, the river to the fore; low ridges broke the straight horizon, and on each side too there were drumlins and forested knolls that made it difficult to see for many miles.

Someone cried a warning, and the host of men turned around to see what the danger was.

On a ridge, some two miles distant and to the north, two riders were motionlessly watching them.

‘Bring the hawk!’ called Arthur, and a small warrior, his dark hair tied back in a single plait, urged his horse noisily forward. Staring up at the almost indiscernable figures the man watched them, narrow eyed, for just a second.

‘Saxons,’ he said. ‘They look weary. They have probably ridden from the shallow ford at the Leden tributary. The flanks of their mounts are moist with sweat. One wears a helmet of leather, the other the helmet of a leader. They both sit uneasily in the saddle.’

Bryn the Merciless guffawed at that. ‘A Saxon would prefer to ride belly down across the saddle!’

‘Not all of them,’ said Arthur, remembering the crack horsemen that Cerdic had sent against them at Cerdicesora.

The two riders slipped into the trees and were gone. Arthur stood in his stirrups, making Niall’s eyes widen for he had not noticed these strange and new horse-gearings before. He had rejected them from his own trappings as he hadn’t understood their purpose.