Warriors of Ethandun (6 page)

He hadn't opened the wrapped sword since he'd found it in his locker. He had been shocked to see it there that first day he'd been allowed back at school once the charges against him had been dropped. It made a kind of crazy sense, he supposed. He would not have wanted his sister or his father to come across it at home, and at least his locker had a combination lock. Now he finally unwrapped the sword, his sword. He was surprised to see that it had a new belt and scabbard – fine work too, though neither Celtic nor Roman. He fastened it over his hip where it fitted easily. He would have been lying to himself if he didn't admit that it felt good to have it there again.

He perched on the almost-dry ground and listened hard, sniffing the air for clues. It was very quiet. The wind was cold and it rustled through the reeds. Overhead a bird called. The air smelled of mud and stagnant water, of wet grasses and distant woodsmoke. That was it then. There was no smoke without fire and he needed a fire before he developed hypothermia. He was shivering very badly and his teeth were chattering. His trainers were sodden, so he took them off and wrapped them round his neck by their laces. His socks were horrible too, so he stuffed them in his pocket. Then he began to pick his way carefully across the marshland, through the thick mist, following the elusive smell of woodsmoke and baking; he was almost sure he could smell baking.

In the poor light he fell into further bogs and twisted his ankle so that he had to rest and catch his breath. He had no great instinct for magic, unlike Ursula, who had known at once that she had no magic in Arturus's land. He could not sense any human thoughts, which was a great relief to him. He knew himself to be tough – tougher than most boys his age – but he couldn't stand to experience that again. He didn't
feel
magical in this world; all he felt was cold and wet. He didn't want anything to do with magic – it brought only trouble – but, on the other hand, it would be good to know if that magical bond he had with Ursula still persisted. He shut his eyes and tried to think of her. It wasn't difficult. His memory was full of her: the time she conjured an eagle, the time she turned herself into a man, the time she wore the mask of Arturus, and all the many times when she was just herself. They had been so close in those other worlds, and in their own they had become like strangers again. He tried to search her out with his mind; he willed it, but it didn't work … He had no idea where she might be.

He was worried about her but he knew he was being stupid. If one thing had been proved time and again, it was that Ursula could take care of herself. The landscape gave him no clues as to his location. He was in marshland, that was all. He could be back in the land of the Celtic leader, Macsen, when most of Britain was wild and untamed – but a bit of him hoped that he wasn't. Much though he admired Macsen for his skill in battle and his courage and decisiveness in fighting the Ravens, he was
altogether too handsome and perfect a specimen of manhood for Dan to be happy for Ursula to see him again. He wasn't surprised that she was so keen to come back through the Veil, and it wasn't just about the magic. Ursula had always had a bit of a thing for Macsen. He knew he was being stupid and that concerns about Ursula falling in love with a Celtic king ought not to be top of his priority list at that moment, but he couldn't help but hope that Ursula had not found herself at the court of a king while he struggled through a mire. He smiled grimly to himself. It struck him that in his adventures through the Veil he had grown so used to discomfort that he did not even waste energy worrying about his own unpromising circumstances. He waited until the pain from his ankle began to pass before he struggled to his feet. The light was fading quickly and he forced himself to limp forward further and faster. It would not be clever to be lost in a marsh when darkness came.

He followed his nose and the homely scent of smoke and baking until he stumbled on a small house, set on a sizeable piece of solid-seeming land, a small island surrounded by streams and bogs.

It was not much bigger than a large shed, but he was very glad to see it. It was a long single-storey affair thatched with rushes and plastered with mud. Now that he was closer he could detect the stink of the midden, of ordure, of dung and damp dirt mingled with the pungent smoke from the fire, which glowed a welcoming orange in the murky half-light through the homestead's open door. He saw a few pot-bellied pigs and three or four chickens
scratched at hard-packed reed-strewn ground. It was clear enough from all this that he wasn't in his own century, but he'd guessed that already.

What he didn't know was whether this was a land at peace or war. Should he take off his sword belt? He was about to call out a warning and a greeting, a request for a place at the sparking fire, but he had another problem: he did not know what to shout out. What language did they speak here? Thanks to his experiences through the Veil and, no doubt, a little bit of magic, he had mastered the languages of the Combrogi tribes and the Latin of the first and fifth centuries. He knew a few words of Aenglisc too, but only curses and the like. In the main he had fought the Aenglisc, not conversed with them.

Dan hesitated for a moment outside the dwelling and gently eased Bright Killer out of its scabbard. It moved as smoothly as ever. Taliesin had looked after it well.

‘Hey!' he shouted. It was a kind of multi-purpose greeting. He peered through the open door into the fire of the single room; the smoke made his eyes water and the brightness of the fire blinded him to whatever lay in the shadowed gloom away from it. Gradually he made sense of what he saw.

A man was sitting by the fire, facing the doorway. He had a knife in his hand and, as Dan approached, he got rapidly to his feet. Dan did not take in too much of the detail of his appearance other than the knife and the fact that he held it like he knew how to use it. He was an older man, well muscled but not tall. The hairs of his sparse beard looked auburn in the fire's glow.

Dan, crouching in the low doorway, moved his own hand away from his sword hilt and showed him his empty palms. The man spoke to him in a rush of guttural nonsense, a tirade of harsh syllables. Dan didn't understand a word. He needed the warmth of the fire though, and the man made no effort to attack him, just looked ready to stab him if he did anything untoward. Dan was not much of an actor but he did what he had to do and put on a dumb show, moving deliberately so that his innocent intentions would be clear. He shivered melodramatically and rubbed his arms as if to warm them, then pointed first at the fire and then at himself.

The man neither nodded nor shook his head. Dan took a gamble and, stooping, walked inside. The knife man watched him. Through the smoke Dan could see that he had very intense blue eyes in a weathered face. He didn't look like a man who missed much. Dan was suddenly conscious that he was still dressed in his sweatshirt and school trousers, with his trainers hanging round his neck. It wasn't a costume designed to make him blend in. Knowing what was to come he'd left his watch, phone and iPod in his locker at school, but there had been little he could do about his clothes.

Dan moved very carefully and deliberately towards the fire. He kept his hands visible at all times and smiled maniacally to show his goodwill. The man did not loosen his grip on the blade, which Dan was sure was a scramaseax, an Aenglisc weapon, something longer than a belt knife but shorter than a sword. That was not good news. He racked his brains for any Aenglisc words, but his wits
seemed to have deserted him. He did not think the Aenglisc spoke Latin but he tried using it anyway. The man appeared shocked and said something in reply. It was horribly mangled, but when the man repeated it for the third time Dan thought he caught the word that Arturus used to describe his priest and confessor. The man thought Dan was a priest. It might have been wiser to play along with that, to pretend that he was a cleric of some kind, but Dan preferred honesty – or at least what honesty he could manage without speaking a word of the other man's language. He shook his head and shrugged elaborately in the hope that the man might accept that he regretted that he could not describe himself so easily. He mimed opening a book and reading – to tell the man that he was some kind of student. The chances were that no such occupation existed in whatever world he had come to, but he did not want to suggest that he was a warrior. He was done with fighting. The man became very animated then and laid his knife ostentatiously beside him on the ground – close enough to grab should Dan prove troublesome, but still relinquishing the weapon and putting Dan a little further out of danger. Dan felt more confident.

The man was obviously not stupid and quickly realised that Dan did not understand him; he simply held out his hand to warm it by the fire, indicating that Dan should do the same. Dan inched closer to the blaze and allowed some of the tension to leave his shoulders. Warmth was good. Dryness was good. He did not know anything about this place but he knew how to take advantage of brief
moments of pleasure. He was warming up. There was the possibility of food and of shelter, and no one had tried to kill him yet. Dan was all too aware that there were worse ways to enter a new world.

Ursula felt the power of the Veil enfold her. It engulfed her, burned against her skin. She breathed it in and breathed it out again … It was terrible to know that there was so much power there, locked in the yellow droplets of mist. It was a kind of torture to perceive all that power there for the controlling and to have no means to direct or to access it.

Ursula knew she should have waited for Dan. She knew that once separated they would not emerge together on the other side. But she had seen the look on his face when he saw what she'd done to the tree. She had seen his expression change, seen his familiar mask of bland indifference cover his horror and his confusion. The very blankness of his face was a criticism, and she didn't need Dan to criticise her. She knew that she'd behaved badly with Lucy, but she didn't know how to stop. Dan would forgive her if he understood how the need for magic drove her – how it was an ache in her heart, a terrible gnawing hunger that had to be fed, an itch in her very soul that could not be scratched. She felt sick with it, weak
with need. Needing it had made her careless, absentminded, so that she'd nearly done more harm to Lucy than she had intended. But the girl had had it coming in a way. She was stupid not to know that Ursula was at the end of her tether, on the very edge of a kind of madness, teetering on the brink and likely to fall in if she didn't get away. If only Dan and she still shared their old link. If he could know her thoughts for even a millisecond, she knew he'd understand. He'd know that she only did what she had to do, that there was no real choice. He would not expect her to endure that terrible exile. He would not expect her to stay in school when she could sense the hidden magic of a whole world locked away and out of her reach.

She ran through the Veil, fighting its gluey oiliness that clung to her clothes and her hair, desperate to be free of it, to get to Macsen's world, where her magic waited. She burst out of the Veil screaming, only to find herself in a forest clearing on a warm sunlit afternoon.

She stopped screaming. It was so peaceful. Magic no longer buzzed like a mosquito in her ear, insistent, demanding and outside her. The air was clean, and high overhead, where a latticework of dark branches made patterns against a pale blue sky, the first buds of spring were appearing. Birds sang. Ursula took a deep breath that quickly became a sigh. It was OK. She had magic here. It was inside her again. Her heart beat to its rhythm, her blood pumped to its pulse. She felt the power coursing through her veins, through her nerves, through her every cell, making her whole self tingle, making her whole self
alive again at last. It was like water to a desiccated plant, air to a drowning man. It was a kind of ecstasy. But there was too much of it. It made her dizzy. She fell to her knees, unable to balance the weight of her head upon shoulders that were pulsating with power. She tried to crawl on all fours towards the great trunk of an ash tree. As the bare skin of her knees touched the soft earth she felt the magic rising through her with even greater force. It was hard to remember who she was or where she was. She leaned heavily against the tree, feeling the sap rise through it as the magic rose through her.

It was magnificent, overwhelming, more than she had dreamed of. She closed her eyes and felt the roots growing beneath the ground. She called to them and more grew. Like snakes slithering through the earth they twined around her, keeping her anchored, keeping her close to the earth from which the power came. It was barely spring but she willed the tree to bear leaves to shelter her and low branches to shield her from the rain. It was so easy. It needed no effort on her part to request these things and then all that she asked for suddenly was there. There was no gap between thought and action: it was as straightforward as tucking her own hair behind her ears.

She could sense all the small creatures going about their business, saw the wood briefly through their eyes, smelled and heard all they did, and still her awareness had found no limits. She found an eagle flying high above the forest and borrowed its eyes to see in sharp focus her own body lying, still as a corpse, beneath the tree – such a small tree viewed from this distance. She sent her will
back to the tree root and the solid tree trunk and urged both to grow bigger and stronger so that they would mark more clearly the spot where she, the vessel of such magic, lay resting, testing out the limits of her power.

It was intoxicating, but wearying. She sent her awareness more deeply into the earth, through the lines of power that bisected it. She let herself flow through streams and riverbeds, under homesteads and halls, into the dreams and thoughts of men and then away again to share the hunger of the hunting wolves. And all of it meant nothing and everything; all of it was the same. She could see whatever she wanted to see and there was no sound that she could not hear if only she listened. Her body burned with the power in her and in the heated ground where she lay the bulbs blossomed as if spring had already come.