The White Mare: The Dalraida Trilogy, Book One (35 page)

‘We have the element of surprise,’ Eremon was saying. ‘They are only ten on foot; we are six, mounted. We can storm them from the higher ground here, down into the valley. I don’t want anyone to stop and fight. Our swords are longer and we have the weight of the horses. Cut down as many as you can and keep going.’ He shaded his eyes. ‘A little way east we saw tracks leading to a ford. Cross that and it’s clear to the hills. We’ll regroup there, on the other side.’

Colum slapped his sword and grinned. ‘At last, some real fighting to do!’

‘Eremon,’ Rhiann spoke quietly. ‘What about me?’

He seemed to focus on her then, and his battle light faltered.

‘Lord,’ Rori put in, ‘I long to whip these Roman dogs, too. But if you wish, I could circle around with the lady and cross the ford.’

Eremon’s face cleared. ‘Rori, you are a brave and resourceful man.’ Somewhat contradicting these fine words, Rori blushed. ‘But wait until you hear our attack,’ Eremon added. ‘We won’t let any get near you.’

With one look around at the men, Rhiann knew that nothing she could say would divert them. Eremon’s movements were quickened with an energy and sureness he had not shown for days, and the priestess in her understood that he needed to do this. To purge himself, perhaps, of what had gone before.

Fergus returned with the Roman, Didius, and Eremon ordered the men to tie him over Rori’s horse. When that was done, Rhiann struck
out with Rori along the base of the ridge, stopping herself from looking back.

Eremon’s breath stirred the blades of grass before his face. He was on his belly behind the trees that fringed the settlement, checking his count of the soldiers again.

They were armoured differently from the patrol they had seen ten days before, and had the fair look of the northern sea-peoples, rather than Latins. Samana told him that Agricola had auxiliaries from other parts of the Empire with him. Perhaps these were Bavarians.

A rutted cart path ran down from the ridge between two roundhouses, their roofs alight in sheets of crackling flame. Through the smoke, three soldiers were loading sacks of grain on to a cart, and four were driving a handful of bony cattle out of the one rickety pen. The other three were engaged in less productive pursuits; Eremon saw one pulling himself off the still body of a woman, her skin white against the red clay path; the other two were taking their turns with a girl-child, who lay splayed in the gateway. The bodies of the menfolk lay about the burning houses. As Eremon tensed to rise, torn by a desire to save the child, the last man rolled off her, fumbling with his tunic, and then reached down to cut her throat.

Eremon crept back to his mounted men in the shadow of the trees, and grimly slid on to his horse. Jerking his head, he got them into formation behind him, and slowly and silently unsheathed his sword, raising it above his head.

They could just hear the shouts of the soldiers, hear the cartwheels rumbling. They would be grouped now, close together. Eremon took a deep breath and slashed the sword down, kicking hard.

The horse burst out of the trees like an arrow from the string. Conaire was racing on the path by his side, and Eremon heard the grate of his sword leaving its scabbard, and then they were both yelling the war cry of Dalriada.

‘The Boar! The Boar!’

They rounded a bend in the track in a hail of mud. The soldiers were frozen to the spot, staring up with wide eyes. They had only a moment to drop their sacks and try to draw their weapons, but it was too late.

Eremon’s attackers careened into them like a driving fist, trampling some beneath the flailing hooves. In the confusion, Eremon’s horse reared, and he found himself staring down into the wild bearded face of one of the soldiers, his short sword aiming for the stallion’s belly, a snarl of spittle on his lips.

It seemed to Eremon then that the man’s features shifted into the sneering mask of Agricola himself, and with one great yell he gripped both hands around Fragarach, slashing crossways, and the man’s throat
erupted in a spray of bright blood. The heavy body dropped between the horse’s hooves, just as another man came screaming at him from behind, his sword over his head. Eremon had little time to wrench his horse around, tangled as it was in the fallen man, but Conaire had just dispatched a soldier with his initial drive, and now he pivoted in his saddle and thrust out desperately, and his sword-tip slashed across the second man’s arm, opening it to the bone.

With a scream of pain, the soldier stumbled, his iron helmet slipping, and Eremon, his horse freed, swept his blade down across the back of his unprotected skull. Bone cracked, and the man dropped. Panting, Eremon caught Conaire’s eye, before they kicked the horses onwards.

Ahead, he saw Colum struggling with a man who sought to pull him from his mount, but with a fierce cry Angus was suddenly there, his blade dripping blood, and he drove it into the man’s neck beneath his helmet guard. Fergus was already riding hard ahead, and Eremon paused only long enough to see Colum and Angus leap away, with Conaire in front, before Eremon, too, urged his mount from the farmstead, along the riverbank.

As he went he glanced back over his shoulder, counting swiftly. Eight men lay without moving, some at the back of the cart, two at the head of the oxen team, and the rest tangled among the bodies of those they themselves had killed. The other two were alive but too badly wounded to ride, crawling in agony on the path.

Catching his breath, Eremon kicked the horse along the bank and across the ford, water spraying up all around him, blood pounding in his veins, Fragarach singing in his hand.

Rhiann’s throat ached.

From the far side of the ridge, snatches of ringing swords and cries came on the wind. She knew that sound well; far too well. She knotted her fingers in the horse’s rough mane, her head low on her breast as if she could shut out the sounds.

She was so sunk in memory that she hardly noticed when the cries stopped, until Rori’s urgent voice penetrated her haze. ‘Hurry, my lady!’

She looked up. They were at the ford, and Rori had almost crossed over. Shallow foam swirled around his stallion’s legs, as he anxiously scanned the path on the far bank. ‘I can hear my lord just ahead. Hurry!’

She nudged her horse through the overhanging willows and into the rushing water. But as her mare crunched across the gravel and lurched up the bank, as Rori’s face registered relief, there was a high whine, and a javelin thudded into a deep cart rut not two paces from Rhiann’s shoulder, its shaft vibrating. She jerked, crying out in shock, and her horse shied.

She heard Rori curse, as his mount, laden with the Roman’s weight, leaped away from the riverbank in terror, and glimpsed him struggling to haul it back. Ducking low over her rearing horse’s neck, Rhiann tried to urge it forward, and with relief recognized Eremon’s voice, faintly. ‘Fly! As fast as you can! All of you!’

From behind Rhiann now came the dreaded shout in Latin, and the splashing of many feet over the ford. She glanced under her elbow, and saw a red cloak, and the sun glancing off armour, and men pouring from the trees they had just left.

Terror gripped her heart in a fist, and she kicked the horse again, but although it at last burst into a gallop she was so far behind …

The thorn-scrub that fringed the track tore at her hair, and all she could see was a jumble of branches and confused slices of sun and shadow. Another javelin whizzed by, and her horse screamed, stumbling in its stride. It was hit!

Now a set of hooves sounded behind her, closing in, and she knew it would be the mounted commander of the Roman troop, like the one she had argued with so many days ago, the one with hard eyes.

‘Eremon! Eremon!’ The whipping branches dragged at her braids until hair fell into her eyes, and she could not see him. The javelins had stopped falling, but the galloping hooves behind were louder, as her horse slowed and began to limp.

Then a hard arm gripped her waist, dragging her to another saddle, and she fought instinctively, clawing at the face above with her nails.

‘By the Boar, woman, let me be!’ She stared up into Eremon’s eyes, for once alight with fear. ‘Now lie flat!’ He pushed her face down, and she flung her arms around his stallion’s neck, nose buried in horse sweat and mud. She felt the muscles in the beast’s forelegs bunch as Eremon wheeled him, and the shifting of Eremon’s thighs against her back. And the clash of blades rang in her ear.

The mounted man behind screamed a curse in British this time, and then all Rhiann could hear were grunts and hard breathing, and she felt each blow of the Roman’s sword on Fragarach shake Eremon’s body.

There was a quick, thrusting movement, another curse, and the fall of something heavy to the ground.

Eremon wheeled the horse again and kicked it hard. ‘Ya!’ he yelled, slapping the reins, which just missed Rhiann’s nose. Then the cascade of hooves began again, and she saw the earth rushing past beneath.

Eremon’s breath was rasping in her ears, but to her it sounded as sweet as music.

After Eremon unhorsed the centurion, the path was quickly swallowed in a defile that led up into the lower reaches of the hills. Perhaps Agricola was regarding that as a natural barrier, for although Eremon did
not let them slow until they had cleared the pass to the great Loch of the Beacon, they neither saw nor heard any more of the invaders.

The mountains crowding the loch rose steeply from the black waters below, leaving only a narrow stony path. Above them, the peak of the Beacon snagged the clouds, drawing them in a dark cloak about its shoulders. The riders clattered beneath a misted waterfall, and in the dusk, turned west into a high, clouded glen where Eremon at last let them halt.

For the first time he loosened his hold on Rhiann, and she slid to the wet carpet of moss and ferns, too tired to speak. After a while, there was the bloom of fire among the dark trees, and a shadow crossed it as Eremon came with his warmed cloak for her shoulders. ‘Here, this is for you.’

‘No, you’ll need it.’ As Rhiann said this, her teeth chattered.

Eremon squatted down next to her. ‘It is shock; it happens to all of us the first few times. Look! You’re shivering.’ He wrapped the cloak around her, and it enveloped her shoulders with a comforting weight.

‘Thank you.’ She held his eyes. ‘Thank you.’

He knew of what she spoke, and looked down at the cup he carried, before holding it out to her. ‘I would have done the same for any man here. That’s what happens when you join my warband.’

‘You don’t need a woman here.’ She took the cup and sipped the mead, feeling warmth coming back into her limbs. ‘I should never have fallen back like that … it was foolish.’

He brushed dried mud from his thighs. ‘Our attack on the men raiding that farmstead … it wounded you, and that is why you faltered.’

She said nothing. In the fading light, she could see that his right arm was drenched in blood to the elbow, and there were spatters of something else on his tunic that she did not want to identify. Pressed against him as she had been, it would be smeared on her own skin. She swallowed hard.

‘I heard tell in the dun that you witnessed a raid that killed your foster-family,’ Eremon ventured.

She wanted to deny it; did not wish this tender part of her to be exposed. Yet he had saved her life. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I saw it all.’

He nodded once, sharply. ‘War is my business. Yet I am sorry that my attack on those soldiers grieved you so.’

She sighed. ‘You were defending my people, I know that. Yet still I react badly to such scenes.’ The wedding night flashed into her mind. Was he thinking of this, too? ‘I’m sorry I was careless.’

‘No,
my
guard was down – that was even more foolish. I should have made sure you were already across.’

‘No, the fault was mine. I endangered us all.’

A flare of firelight caught the shadow of his crooked smile. ‘Perhaps that’s enough guilt for one night, for both of us.’

‘No, no, it’s not enough.’ She took a breath, for her next words were difficult to say. ‘I miscalculated, Eremon. I assumed where Samana’s true loyalties would lie, but I was as wrong as I could be. We should never have come, and it was all my doing.’

His eyebrows rose, and she hunched deeper into his cloak. ‘I will never tell you what to do in such matters again.’

He straightened, and a hand came down on her shoulder in a friendly pat. ‘If I thought that the truth, I wouldn’t take you anywhere. Now sleep; we stay until morning.’

She watched his retreating back, mystified.

Chapter 33

I
n his dark northern hall, Maelchon received the craftsman Gelur. Kelturan’s orders to resume work on the broch had been passed on. Gelur was the foremost wood-worker of the kingdom, and also skilled with shaping stone, so he had been set as the master over the construction.

Gelur was tall for the islands, with hair so black it was nearly blue, but his skin was marked all over by the scars of the pox he’d had as a child. ‘My lord,’ he began, twisting his hands before him. Maelchon watched him with satisfaction, letting the fear grow.