From the top of a low hillock Arthur and a dozen men of his staff and bodyguard watched two troops performing mounted evolutions in concert. Lances lowered, the hundred Companions advanced at a trot across the broken pasture in a double line abreast. As they approached the wooded margin of a stream, Arthur gave an order to his cornicine who then blew a three-note call on his silver-mounted cow horn. The horsemen raised their lance points and wheeled left in parallel files. One man fell off. In the center, the formation clotted awkwardly where a swale threw the timing askew.
Lancelot cursed. "Ragged, ragged. They do that in front of Saxons instead of willow trees, and there'll be a massacre."
"That's why we train them, isn't it?" the king retorted. On horseback his clubfoot was scarcely noticeable.
One of the bodyguards looked away from the maneuvering troops, back along the path that led to the villa. The man grunted. "Sir," he said, to Lancelot rather than the king. Arthur was too exalted to be bothered with details of intruders.
Lancelot turned, his eyes following the bodyguard's. "Face around, boys," he said in a flat voice which none the less carried to all the men around the king. To the cornicine Lancelot added, "Bring the troops in." Two notes and then two more sang out. The exercising Companions pivoted left again and rode toward their Leader.
"The Irishman, Mael, and his Dane friend," Arthur observed.
"So it seems," agreed the big Master of Soldiers. Lancelot unsocketed his lance, bringing it forward though still vertical. Its butt spike rested on his toes. The other Companions were also readying themselves unobtrusively, drawing swords and slipping their arms through shield loops. One of them, an Armenian, carried a bone-stiffened composite bow. He swung his horse sideways so that its body concealed his hands stringing the bow and nocking an arrow.
Mael and Starkad were on foot, fully armed but not actively threatening. Both wore their shields slung behind their backs. Mael's sword was sheathed and Starkad rested his axe helve in the palm of his hand. The bearded head was hooked over the Dane's shoulder. The rectangular peen of it facing forward was no reassurance to Lancelot who had seen it crush the stone from his hands, but it was as innocent a fashion as any in which the big weapon could be carried.
When they were twenty feet away, Lancelot dropped his point at the men on foot and called, "That's far enough."
Neither Mael nor Starkad appeared concerned by the implied threat. Starkad even took another half step before halting. Unlike his guards, Arthur, too, appeared to be relaxed. He rested part of his weight on his hands crossed on his right front saddle horn. "Leader," Starkad thundered at the king, "I claim the right to be freed from my oath to you so I may end a blood feud. That feud I swore long ago, so I must follow it now and leave you."
The berserker spoke clumsy Celtic, his inflections Danish and his idiom, such as it was, more Irish than British. Arthur frowned. Beside him the cornicine started to giggle. As if he had been ordered to explain, Starkad continued, "Kari, Tostig's daughter, married in her first youth the bonder Ulf Svertlief's son of Tollund and then, at his death, Asgrim Walleye, second son of—"
"Blood of God, Dane!" Arthur burst out. "If you've got to tell your story, tell it short or get your butt back to where it belongs. You're supposed to be training this afternoon, aren't you?"
Starkad blinked. He pursed his lips in concentration, then said, "Of this marriage—" he raised his voice as the troops of horsemen reined up noisily behind Arthur, awaiting further command—"was born Asa, niece to me through Tostig's line, who married the Saxon thegn Biargram—"
Arthur flushed and swung toward his Master of Soldiers, a furious command ready in his open mouth. Mael forestalled him, stepping forward with a hand laid on the Dane's shoulder to silence him. "Lord," he called in Latin. "Let me cut his tale down."
Arthur calmed slightly and turned. "Quickly then," he said.
Mael licked his lips. "My friend's niece wed a thegn named Biargram," he said, "a Saxon. He sent her home after a year but kept the dowry. The girl's family couldn't get it back since none of them wanted to take on Biargram. Starkad, here, had already been outlawed so there wasn't anything he could do, but he swore he'd kill Biargram if the two of them ever walked a land with no seas or mountains between them.
"And in mBeal Liathain last week, a Saxon sailor told me Biargram had brought his tribe here to Britain."
"That's right," said Arthur. As though his mind was riffling through a packet of military communiques, he continued, "He and his household, all told some two hundred, crossed over several years ago in four keels. They joined Cerdic—the traitor!" The king's face went momentarily bestial as he hissed the last words. Calmly he continued, "At last report they'd been settled near Clausentum and were doing quite well. But what is that to me?"
Mael was an educated man with an educated man's trick of assuming someone less well educated was also less intelligent. The Irishman kept his face smooth, but a clear sight of Arthur's mind at work frightened him in a way the flashes of bloodthirsty madness had not. "Lord," he said, "my friend is headstrong and worse, you know that. Once he gets a notion, you can't drag it away from him with a team of oxen. He's convinced now that he has to go track this Biargram down. We're brothers in a real way, he and I; we've mixed more blood on battlefields than ever womb-mates had in common. I have to go with him."
At the word "have," Arthur's eyes narrowed and a venomous smile spread across Lancelot's face. "Oh, aye," Mael snapped, the Celtic phrasing seeping through with emotion, "you can kill us, can you not? A pleasant time you'll have to do it, aye, but you can. And what will it gain you, to kill two men and save your enemies the labor of it?"
Arthur began to laugh. "And so I should send men on leave into the middle of the Saxons, because somebody diddled somebody's niece out of her dower share? No, I don't think I'll begin running my army that way, not just yet. Get back to your duties."
Behind Arthur, the cornicine added, "Sure, they're likely spies for Cerdic, Leader."
Unexpectedly, Lancelot reached over and laid his fingertips on the back of Arthur's hand. "No, Leader," he said. "Let them go."
Arthur looked at him dubiously. Lancelot continued, "They've asked your leave to go; your authority suffers nothing to grant the request, and your camp discipline, I understand—" he cocked a grim eye at Mael; the Gaul's speech was still slurred by thick lips and a swollen nose—"will improve. Let them go."
"And if they are returning spies?" the king asked, but as a genuine question.
"They'll leave the woman," Lancelot pointed out—that had been no intent of Mael's, but he dared not deny it—"and besides, if they are traitors, it's best we be shut of them."
"Leader," Mael put in, "I brought you—" he realized that Arthur might not want the skull and its purpose released to a hundred men, even his own men—"what you know of. I know you realize . . . how risky that job was. It was harder, perhaps, than even you fully understand. But I brought the thing back where scarcely another could have done; and if you give us leave now, I swear by whatever you wish that I'll come back myself and with my friend here, if there's life in either of us."
"Blood feud," Arthur repeated. He laughed again, loudly and without humor. "I have a blood feud, too . . . with the whole world, I sometimes think. It'll bow its neck to me some day, yes. . . . Go on, take this Saxon's head or leave your own, it's all the same to me. But if you enter the hall of Cerdic your master, tell him what you have seen here—and in the cave. And tell him that one day I will be coming to serve him in the fashion that traitors are served. It would be well for him if he had fallen on his sword before that day."
Mael dipped his head in acquiescence. Starkad, following the motion as he could not the words, nodded also. The two men turned and began walking back the way they had come, the Dane's axe-edge winking as it split sunbeams.
"Leader," they heard Lancelot say when he thought it was safe to speak to his king, "I'll ride back with them, arrange an escort to the Zone for them—and a guard for the woman."
Arthur nodded grimly. His mind was fixed on his memory of Cerdic, the British lordling who had weighed the danger of Saxon mercenaries against Arthur's growing tyranny—and had called in Saxons. The king's right hand twisted on the saddle horn as if it were a sword hilt, the knuckles as white as the skin across his cheekbones. Lancelot clucked to his horse and trotted toward the men on foot before they disappeared around a curve in the trail. Behind him, Arthur was giving orders in a normal voice to the exercising troops.
Mael and Starkad waited around the bend for the Master of Soldiers. The overt changes in their stances were slight but significant. Mael had thrust his left arm through his shield straps. Starkad's axe, though still on his shoulder, faced forward and was ready to strike. Both men were tense, certain that Lancelot would not have come alone to slay them, but knowing also how much the Gaul hated them both.
"Gently, heroes," Lancelot said. His grin had split a scab on his damaged face. A tiny runnel of blood streaked his chin. "I'm going back to make everything easy for you, to see that you're issued food and don't have any trouble with our own patrols."
"Why?" the Dane demanded bluntly.
"Oh, not because I like you," the big Gaul chuckled. "I've spent every day since—this—" he touched his swollen nose—"thinking about how I was going to kill you both. And it wasn't that easy, you know, because frankly, a duel didn't seem very practical. And though I certainly could have found a group of men to do what was needed, that would have been expensive in one way or another. Then there was always the uncertainty of how the Leader would react . . . ." Lancelot's voice dropped unintentionally as he thought about his king. "He's . . . one can't be sure with him, you know. No one can."
Lancelot cleared his throat, regaining his normal insouciance. The three men were walking down the trail, horseman in the center, like closest friends. "And of course I thought of poison," Lancelot continued, "but there was the problem of getting you both at the same time, and from what I hear of this woman you've brought back, Irishman, maybe poison wouldn't be a good bet so long as she's around.
"But you come and say that you want to walk into Cerdic's kingdom and chop off the head of one of his Saxon barons. That's fine, yes; I'll help you get started any way I can. I never quarrel with the will of God, Irishman."
Lancelot's mighty laughter boomed around them as they trudged toward the villa.
* * *
The captain of the Cirencester Patrol was a Frank named Theudas, no more of a natural horseman than Starkad himself was. He dismounted with Mael and the Dane at the furthest point of his patrol area, twelve miles southeast of the walled town that was the pivot of Arthur's domain. The score of men in the patrol began nibbling bits of sausage and cheese in the drizzle, talking in low voices and hugging their cloaks tighter to their mail shirts.
"You're welcome to keep the horses, you know," Theudas said. "The warrant you brought from Lancelot says to aid you in any way short of sending men into the Zone."
The two friends continued to unlash their gear from their mounts. "That bastard Lancelot probably hoped this beast's spine'd open me up to the shoulders from beneath," Starkad grumbled. He arched his back, massaging his buttocks with both hands. "Don't know that I'm sure that it hasn't already. No, I thank you, but I'd just as soon walk some."
Both Mael and Starkad wore their body armor, though their steel caps were lashed to their packs. On their heads were droop-brimmed hats of leather, protection against the traveler's twin foes: the sun that might come out to bake them and the rain that now collected in jeweled ropes sliding from the leather. The packs themselves were thin rolls of oiled canvas containing a week's rations and nothing else. Grunting, the men slung their shields and then the packs over them. They carried spears in place of walking staves. Each spear had an oak shaft as tall as a man and as thick as a woman's forearm. Mael's sword and dagger were sheathed while Starkad's axe was slung under his right arm in its carrying loops, the head nodding free against the iron ringlets of his mail coat.
"Hell of a poor day to go off," Theudas said somberly.
"Not exactly a bloody social event," grunted Starkad in reply. To his companion he added, "Ready?"
"Half a sec." Mael shifted his target so that its lower edge no longer rubbed his hipbone. On an eighty-mile hike, the constant friction would raise a blister the size of a drinking cup, even through the iron mail.
"Don't know why the Leader wants to send spies into Venta anyhow," the Frank continued. "God knows, the Saxons aren't like us, running an army together on thirty minutes' notice. When they mount something it takes weeks, and Cerdic isn't planning anything of the sort. We know that, here with the Patrol. There's always somebody slipping into Glevum or Corinium to see a relative—or run away from their master, or maybe just to make a little by trading the part of their crop they hid from the thegn who owns the lands they farm. Sure, Saxons, too. We don't care, and Cerdic, he doesn't have the men to stop it, the cavalry. If he put his lumbering infantry out in little vedettes, the Leader'd ring the whole Southern Squadron out. We'd eat the Saxon patrols alive before they could do jack shit. Naw, this sector's quiet. It's Aelle who's about to raise hell in the North."
"Okay," said Mael. "Let's go, Starkad."
"There's going to be fighting, then?" the Dane asked. He wasn't looking at Mael, but he held a hand toward the Irishman to indicate he had heard the request.
"Sure is," agreed Theudas. "Aelle—he calls himself king, has most a' the Saxons north of Londinum—he's raised his levies and must be ready to march by now. On Lindum, likely; he's got big eyes. Tried to get Cerdic and the rest to send some housecarls for the work. The good thing about the Saxons is they don't like each other a bit more than they do us." The Frank scowled. "Or than the North British bastards of the Reged like us, come to think."
"Mael," asked Starkad with a worried look on his face, "do you suppose we're going to miss the fighting?"
"We're going to root here in this goddamn place if we stand around talking much longer," the Irishman snapped.
"Umm," said Starkad. He waved to the Frank and said, "Well, we'll be seeing you again soon, you bet." Mael had already stumped off along the road. Grunting a little with effort, the Dane lengthened his own stride to catch up. The patrol of Companions vanished into the mist behind them, though the clink of their equipment sounded long after the horsemen were out of sight.
Mael's sandals clinked also. The drizzle irritated him. He knew he was in a bad mood, knew also that it was worse than foolish to let his friend's relative good humor irritate him still further. Mael kept his mouth shut and let an occasional remark by Starkad and the dull ringing of hobnails stand as the only sounds between him and the Dane for over a mile.
Finally Starkad said, "Hard damn road, isn't it?" The Irishman grunted. This time Starkad pursued the matter. "I mean, I think if I'd had to walk on this before, I'd have taken that Frank up on his offer of horses, huh?'"
Mael's anger swelled. Then the ridiculousness of it struck him. He began to laugh. "Hey," he said, "the least Lugh could have done for us is to give us decent weather to get killed in, don't you think?"
"Huh?"
"Look," Mael explained, relaxing and feeling as if chains had dropped away, "you know damn well what our chances of getting out of this in one piece are. Don't you?"
"Well," Starkad temporized, "we've gotten into some pretty tight places before, too. You always find ways out of them." He patted his axe. "You and this, hey?"
The Irishman snorted. "Sure, and that guarantees that any fool thing we get into is going to be fine, sure. And this August it's going to rain pieces of gold for my birthday. Well, right now I think I'm going to know you maybe three days longer, if we're lucky. I don't guess I want to spend that time pissed at you because I don't like the weather. Forgive me?"
Starkad cleared his throat. "Oh," he said, "that's okay. I don't much like the rain, either. And I sure wish we had something to ride on, now."
"Such chance as we've got," Mael explained, "pretty much makes us walk. On horses we'd get a lot of attention. The British were horsemen long before Arthur mounted his whole army, but on the eastern side of the Zone a horse marks you. I want us to blend in with the—human countryside."
Starkad looked doubtful. "I might pass for Saxon," he said. "Wotan's eye, I've got a cousin who wed one, though they both drowned. He was no kin to Biargram, either. But I don't see you, brother, looking anything but a black-hearted, crop-haired Irishman to anybody with eyes to see."
"Sure, but that's all right—now," Mael said. "You know what happened when Hengst first made his play against the Vortigern?"
Starkad nodded. "They cut and burned everything British around that didn't have walls, until the British got organized."
"Right. And what happened then?"
"They got their balls kicked between their ears," Starkad answered. "Got too confident. They found the locals might not like to do their own fighting, but if they had to . . . Horsa had his skull nailed to the gates of Lindum; Hengst himself got shut up on an island in the Thames, eating harness leather and wondering if he was going to make it through the winter. A damned near thing, from the stories I've heard."
"Very near," Mael agreed. "And there wasn't a bit of help coming from the Continent to get them out of the hole, either. People don't pull up stakes to migrate into the middle of a disaster. They stay home and plow their own bit of dirt, even if it's sandy and the weather'd make this wretchedness—" he shook his head and scattered a coil of droplets from the hat brim—"look like balmy summer or, if they've got to move, they go south to Italy or east to try the Greek emperor's pay for a while.
"And the Saxon kings have learned that. Arthur's planning something. Maybe nobody knows just what or just who's going to be first. But they damned well know what'll happen to them if they wait till their backs're to the wall before they go looking for help. Aelle up north seems to be getting his punch in early, but I'm betting that anybody who can handle a sword can find a bunk in one thegn's house or another's. And I don't guess they'd much care what tongue his mother sang him lullabies in. Wandering housecarls don't ride horses, but looking Irish isn't going to call me to mind, particularly."
The rain was with them all day, and it was their only companion. The War Zone separating Saxon from Briton was a wasteland, proof that if neither side won a war, then both sides lost. Between the two races, across the center of the island, lay a no-man's-land that the British had given up but the Saxons could not hold. In the daytime, both sides might use the irregular ribbon for pasture. Their armed guards stayed nervous and watchful. Despite that, all too often they were unable to protect their herds or themselves against skulking bands of Saxons or a sudden brutal thrust by a troop of Companions.
Evening came late and almost indistinguishably from the wan daylight that preceded it. Although they were well within the territory that Cerdic claimed and taxed, the country to either side of the road was as barren as that of the Zone to the north. Cattle lowed in the near distance, however. Once the smell of wood smoke disclosed a cook fire whose plume was hidden in the mist.
To the left loomed a settlement, Saxon but burned out like the occasional Roman building Mael and Starkad had passed earlier. Mael pointed his thumb at the ruins. "They thought they were safe," he said. "There's no place safe within a half day's hard ride of Arthur's outposts. Straight down the road, torching everything that'll burn and slaughtering everything that's alive. No time for looting or prisoners, but sure, you can teach Saxons that civilized men are just as bloody-handed as the barbarians they despise. Any houses that stand, even this deep in toward Venta, are going to be far enough off the road that raiders won't chance ambush to hunt them out of the woods."
Starkad laughed. "Well, I wasn't raised to be a farmer, my friend. And if you were, you hid the fact well enough the time we tried our hands at it. . . . No doubt this destruction's very awful and I should feel miserable about it, but right now I'm a lot more concerned about whether there's a roof left to keep some of this damned rain off us for the night."
Mael squinted at the sky. "Yeah, well," he said. "Not likely we're going to find a better place."
One of the outbuildings had not been burned. Its door was wrenched off, and rotted grain floored the lightless interior. Mael settled himself glumly in a corner, deciding whether to strip off his armor for comfort or leave it on for safety. The metal creaked and galled him every time he moved. Cursing under his breath, the Irishman pulled the mail over his head and began to unlace his gambeson as well.
Starkad ducked back into the rain. Mael heard his axe thock loudly. Mael froze, then realized that the blade had rung on the wood, not metal or bone. He resumed undressing as the Dane continued to chop in the gloom. After a few minutes, Starkad returned. He was clutching an armload of wood lopped from the roof beam of one of the houses.
"You're not going to build a fire?" Mael grumbled.
"Sure I am," said Starkad. He dumped the billets and leaned his axe against the wall. Drawing his big dagger, he began to slice curls from a log.
"It's too wet to burn. And anyway, it's not safe. Even if you don't burn us both up, you'll call down some patrol of Cerdic's. Then it'll all be over."
"This is dry on the inside," the Dane said, pointing to the billet he was shaving. "Go ahead, you light it. You're better at striking a spark than I am. And as for a smoke hole—" Starkad stood, his hair brushing the thatched roof even though he hunched. He raised his axe. With a single swift thrust, he straight-armed the head through the thatch in the corner diagonal to Mael. A quick twist enlarged the hole so it could pass enough smoke to keep the fire from smothering those it warmed. Water dripped in.
Mael scowled. "You think you can cure everything with your damned axe?" he demanded.
Starkad looked at him coolly. "Yes, pretty much. You think you're going to live forever?" The Irishman stayed silent. Starkad pressed, "I want to be warm and a little drier. This wood may smoke, but it's not going to toss any sparks into the thatch. And as for bringing Saxons down on us, we're going to meet Saxons anyway. Tyr's arm, Mael, that's what we're here for. We're going to have to talk our way out or fight our way out. We may as well be a little more comfortable tonight and meet 'em now, as meet 'em tomorrow in the rain."
Mael sighed and hitched around his wallet. With a pinch of dried moss from it and the shavings for a bed, he struck his firesteel on a flint until he had a small fire smoldering. "All yours," he said. "If it goes out, you light the next one."
Starkad, smiling, fed the fire with small doses of wood while he accomplished other domestic tasks. The Dane was generally cheerful on shipboard, too, Mael thought sourly to himself. That was because as a rule there would be killing at the other end of the voyage. Starkad covered the doorway with his cloak, pinning it to the withies supporting the thatch with his shoulder brooch and Mael's. The garment was of unbleached wool, so densely woven that it was virtually waterproof. A baulk of wood at the bottom kept the cloak firm against random gusts of wind. The shed began to warm at once. The stolid orange light of the fire did as much for Mael's disposition as the heat itself. He unlaced his sandals and began to strip the wool leggings from beneath them, humming under his breath. Smoke glazed the air. The odor of wool and bodies ripened as the shed heated. That was normal and inevitable; if Mael had a regret, it was that the fire lacked the peculiar pungency of peat-fueled ones like those with which he had been raised.
Starkad slid his own boots off. He cursed, but more in amazement than real anger. The condition of the ball of his foot would have justified a fiercer reaction. A blister three inches across had formed on the sole and burst. The skin hung in shreds. The cloth with which the Dane had packed his boot was glued to his foot by a film of pus and blood. Starkad dribbled a little beer from his canteen to loosen the fabric. "Told you that damned road wasn't fit for a man," he said.
Mael whistled in horror. "Are you going to be able to go on?" he asked. "That looks terrible."
"No problem, unless they get so slippery I keep falling down," Starkad joked. He was peering at his left sole where the callus seemed intact.
"Manannan, but you've got a nice mind," Mael muttered with a grimace.
"Don't see why you aren't having any problem, though," the Dane continued. "It's a damned hard road. I'd think it'd eat anybody's feet as fast as mine."
"No, I've got the gear for it," Mael explained, toeing one of his sandals over to his friend to examine. The sole was thick and multi-layered, studded on the bottom with a dozen hobnails. The iron was bright with recent wear, but a tracery of rust had already begun to hatch-mark the abrasions. The sandal was bound to the foot and high up the leg by straps that could be adjusted precisely. They gave a firm fit whether they were laced over cloth or leather against the cold, or bare skin in a hot climate. The footgear copied the Roman caligae, the sandals that had carried legionaries across the whole Mediterranean Basin and beyond. Mael had found it the most practical gear for a man who might have to walk far on a multitude of surfaces, so long as he was willing to accept weight in exchange for sturdiness. "Those buckets you wear," he said to Starkad, "may keep you dry and work well enough on dirt, but they let your foot slide around inside too much on a solid surface. And these roads were built solid."
"Damn well were," the Dane agreed, wriggling his toes toward the fire as he rummaged in his pack for a biscuit. "What'd they do, quarry 'em out of the bedrock? Must've been built a hundred years ago, too."
"Longer ago than that," Mael said. He leaned back against the wall, flexing his muscles so that the rough wattling would rub his shoulders. "I watched a slave gang trench through a road like this, digging a drainage ditch outside of Hispalia. . . ."
"Hispalia?" Starkad repeated. "Three years ago when the city senate was hiring to stiffen their militia against the Goths? We were both there, and I don't remember any road being cut."
"That's because you were in a whorehouse, as usual."
"Oh." Starkad frowned, then nodded. "You find the damndest things to do with your time when you could be screwing," he said. "What did the road look like?"
"Six feet thick and built like a fortress wall laid on its side," Mael said. He closed his eyes to remember. "Three and a half feet of rubble base. Six inches of rammed tufa to level it. Six inches of flints on top of that. Ten inches of pebble gravel set in loam. And then on top of everything, six-inch flagstones set in concrete. I tell you, they built roads to last, the Romans did. And they'll last a lot longer than the empire did that built them."
Starkad shrugged. He had taken a whetstone out of his pack and begun stroking the fine edge back onto his axe blade. Mael fell asleep with the gentle skritch, skritch of stone on steel sounding a warrior's lullaby in his ears.