The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (68 page)

M
inna handed Rórdán to Nessa and slowly got to her feet, shading her eyes to see the figure who had appeared at the edge of the trees. The guards were brandishing their spears, demanding his name.

His hands were up away from his sword, but then he looked past them directly at Minna, and she couldn’t breathe. His tunic was stained, his riding boots caked with mud, long hair caught in a black horse-tail that left a ragged fringe framing each cheekbone. New muscles squared his jaw and widened his shoulders, and at first her frozen mind refused to recognize him. But he was balanced gracefully on the balls of his feet despite his weariness, and she knew that stance too well.

She had to brace herself to meet his eyes, their vivid blue leaping to catch hold of her, dragging her forward so she stumbled. Distantly, she gestured at the guards to let him through. The men lowered their spears and suddenly she and he were facing each other alone.

‘I know,’ was all he said, and there in his face was the sorrow of a man.

Her voice cracked. ‘I thought I would die; I wanted to.’

‘And yet you are here, Minna. Alive.’

A pause, as her hands rose and dropped at her side, helpless to express. ‘I gave him all of me,’ she whispered.

‘I know, Tiger.’ His voice broke on the name, but his gaze was tender, implacable. ‘He is gone, though, and you are alone.’

She flinched at that. ‘I have my son, and something great to accomplish, something I must do.’

He took another step forward, holding her with that brilliant gaze. ‘And what about the end of each day, when you are wearied and heartsick? What will fill those hours by the fire?’ That clever face, that knowing mouth were touched now by sadness and wisdom, and his eyes were entirely open. He let her see in, and the understanding came through her like a ray of sun. He had travelled far and hard for many long months; he had been through the fire and annealed. Just like her.

Protests tangled in her throat, but then she heard Cahir’s whisper.
Don’t dishonour me by dying, too
. Did he say it before he faded? Did he say it now?

Suddenly Cian was turning away …
Was he leaving
? Minna staggered forward, her hand at her mouth. But he was only digging in his pack, dropping it back on the ground. ‘I brought something for you,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I brought it a long way.’ His long fingers were holding it on his palms.

‘Not … a fig,’ she gasped.

Cian released a breathless laugh. ‘I couldn’t find a fig, Tiger. It’s only a plum, and a very dried-up, wrung-out plum it is, too.’

Guilt turned in Minna, but life crested over it all – life demanding she heed it, and a love that would hold fast over long years, a steady glow to warm her. There was more than one fate.

‘Do you want it?’ Cian asked. The plum came flying through the air, brown and withered but gleaming, and suddenly Minna was back in the bright sun of the Eboracum marketplace.

She didn’t even bother trying to catch it, her feet taking her onwards without her mind’s say, and with every step her heart beat a lifetime of moments to come. She stopped, hovering a hand’s breath from him. ‘I am not ready.’

‘I will wait,’ he said.

EPILOGUE

AD 410

O
n a windy ridge above the great Roman Wall, two men sat silently on their horses. Behind them in the hollow of the hills milled the rest of their company, shining with polished iron and bronze in the cold leaf-fall sun. One held aloft a standard that streamed out in the wind above their heads. A scarlet boar on a white background.

‘So it is true then, brother,’ one rider said. His horse danced forward a few steps, as restless and high-blooded as its master.

The other man did not move. He was just past forty, but tall and well-muscled with no sign of bowing in his broad shoulders. On his flowing auburn hair sat a gilded helm, boasting a magnificent crest in the shape of a boar. He thrust his chin into the wind, staring down at the dark line of the Wall snaking across the bare moors. ‘We have been watching them for a long time. They were drifting away gradually, some here and there, but now it seems some call has come, and … well, you can see for yourself.’

‘I would have to, otherwise I would not believe it.’ The first man was younger than his brother, his lithe build and quick hands on the reins belying the threads of grey in his black hair.

Ahead, on the other side of the low moor, smoke streamed above the little Roman fort, drifting away to join the greater haze above the windy plateau. To the east, fading spires marked out other forts. At each there was a burning, but it wasn’t cooksmoke.

For months, ragged Roman soldiers had been heading away from the Wall south and east on foot, but now the nearby fort was clustered with carts, and the small figures of men and women holding babes were gathered about, loading in their belongings.

Watching from the hills, the armoured men of Alba had seen the same thing repeated all along the Wall: buildings being dismantled, vital parts salvaged and the rest piled on bonfires and burned. There was no panic. There was no fighting. There was just abandonment.

An exodus that those in Alba had yearned for, hoped for, dreamed of for so many hundreds of years.

Rórdán, King of Dalriada, narrowed his green eyes, his calm exterior hiding the excitement beating in his heart. He knew the tales of his ancestors as well as the calluses on his palm, rubbed there by his sword.

And it had been his fate to see this: the ending of Rome’s authority not just over Alba, but over the whole isle of Britannia.

For his scouts told him the army, the laws and taxes were all disappearing from its shores, as the Emperor deserted the Province. The people who were left would have to live beside his own, and make what they would of this land. A land unto itself, at last.

Rórdán could not speak. In his usual way, it was when things burned his soul that he was most silent, most still. His brother was of a different cast, however. ‘By Manannán’s balls and breath!’ Lassar jerked the horse around again, his vivid blue eyes alight. He wore no helmet, preferring the freedom of the wind in his long, black hair. ‘If this is true, then I must fly home to the mountains as fast as I can! Mother has to know about this immediately.’ With one kick, he was by Rórdán’s side. ‘It has all come to pass,’ he cried, his voice betraying the passion his brother held inside. ‘Just as she said; just as she told us!’

Rórdán looked away from the smoke, meeting the flame of his brother’s gaze. Every night of their boyhood the stories had flowed, the telling growing greater as the numbers of their mother’s people grew. There, in the clear mountain air, the pools became mirrors, Mother said; mirrors of the world outside. And in them she had seen this.

‘Go then, but get ready to turn around and come right back,’ Rórdán remarked drily. ‘She’s going to demand to see this for herself.’

Lassar grinned, white teeth flashing. ‘It’s breeding season, and end of harvest. She’ll have a fine time dragging Father away from his fields and his cattle.’

‘And he’ll have a fine time refusing her.’

Lassar cocked a dark brow at his brother. ‘Can I take some of your guards with me? You know all our sisters will plead to come, too – I’ll never hear the end of it.’

Rórdán was staring intently into the smoke, then suddenly he laughed and shook his shoulders free of the weight of years. ‘Since there is nothing more to watch for, brother, it looks as if I can indeed spare warriors to send with you.’

Heads close, they spoke together as they trotted their horses down into the hollow, but there Lassar’s lathered mount would not stand, picking up the tension in his master’s legs. ‘Sa! I must fly right now, or I’ll never bear it!’ Lassar and Rórdán clasped wrists and kissed on both cheeks.

‘And after Mother and Father see the Wall, come to Dunadd on your way home.’ Rórdán’s eyes were now sparkling like his brother’s. ‘We must celebrate, and there are feasts, songs and dances to be had before the snows close in.’

With a smile and a yip, Lassar let the stallion have his head, and raced away northwards to the higher hills. Rórdán trotted up to gaze out at the clearing smoke one more time before gathering his men under his boar standard, and striking out west at a more thoughtful pace.

Behind them, as the weeks and then months passed, the sun crept its way across the Wall, as it always had.

But now it gilded expanses of mossy, tumbled stone and rotting wood, broken gates and fallen roof timbers. It darkened the gaping doorways of the barrack blocks, throwing long shadows of the towers across the hills.

And then a day came when there was no longer even a hint of smoke, and the high plateau of rippling grass bore witness to nothing more than a lonely wind and kestrel cries.

Historical Note

Dalriada and Picts

Mythical and ancient sources say that warriors and kings from the Dalriada kingdom in Ireland settled in the west of Scotland, in Argyll, around
AD
500. This brought them into conflict with the native inhabitants, known to the Romans as Picts. Though the tradition is therefore strong that a Dalriadan kingdom was established in western Scotland from Ireland, historians and archaeologists are divided over whether this actually included a movement of people, or merely ideas and language, and whether these spread from Ireland to Scotland or vice versa.

Regardless, Dark Age Christian sources then report that the Dalriadan kings, with their seat at Dunadd in Argyll, warred with the Pictish kings in the east of Scotland for many years, through the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. In
AD
843, the two peoples were joined by the accession of the Dalriadan king Kenneth MacAlpin to the Pictish throne, a man who was possibly descended from the Pictish royal line through his mother (some sources hint that the native peoples of Scotland passed their royal blood through women). After this, the Picts seem to disappear as a separate people from history, and Irish Gaelic became the language of Scotland, and Gaelic kings its rulers.

In this trilogy, I proposed that the ‘Irish invasion’ began centuries earlier, around
AD
80, involving the arrival of a few nobles who intermarried with the original tribe in the area (the partnerships of Rhiann and Eremon, and Conaire and Caitlin, in
The White Mare
and
The Dawn Stag
). By the time this last novel opens, the Dalriadan Irish in the west and the Picts in the east are entrenched as opposing forces in Scotland, the former tracing their royal lineage through males, the latter through females.

The Great ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ of AD 367

The major Roman events portrayed in this novel were documented by a late fourth-century Roman writer called Ammianus Marcellinus. He records that in
AD
367 Britain was subject to a concerted invasion by a host of barbarian peoples on the northern frontier: the Picts attacked the north; the ‘Scots’ (whom I have named Dalriadans) and the Attacotti, possibly from the Western Isles, attacked the west; and the Saxons from northern Germany the east coast. Though there had been previous raids by combined Alban forces, most notably in 360 AD, nothing like this had been unleashed on Britain before, and was distinguished by the uncharacteristic co-operation of the barbarians involved. There were indeed scouts and spies – the
areani
– that roamed north of the Wall and were quartered in the outpost forts, and at this juncture they were apparently lured by bribes to turn traitor to the Roman administration, providing information to the enemy which aided their attacks.

Fullofaudes, the Dux Britanniarum, was surprised, cut off and ‘overcome’; Nectaridus, the Count of the Saxon Shore, was slaughtered in battle. The barbarian hordes, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, penetrated deep into the south-east of England and caused havoc, breaking into small bands to plunder the rich villas and undefended towns. At the same time the order of the Roman army had completely disintegrated, with the cohesion of units destroyed and leaderless bands of soldiers roaming at will.