Bard I (32 page)

The bard flew over its head, gripping his sword fanatically. Far better to fall on the blade than meet Tosti’s rush unarmed. No deliberate thought, but a night-long ferment of rage, fear and hate went into that determination.

The leather bag containing Golden Singer flew elsewhere, cast from his back as he’d been cast from the gelding’s. Felimid hit the earth, drawn in on himself with the elasticity of a stoat. The jolt shook his guts and brain, but he rolled somehow, and found himself standing. Instinct had betrayed the wolf; he’d paused to rip out the gelding’s throat. The nearest live flesh was the most tempting.

‘Come!’ Felimid panted. ‘Come on!’

The beast snarled. Time seemed to waver, to flow sluggish as congealing wax, and the moment in which they faced each other was very long in passing. Jaw dripping red, wrinkled muzzle. with jagged black scars twisting through the white fur, and ice-pale eyes, uncanny in the beast’s head, mirrors of a ravening hate: These things the bard saw.

‘Come on!’ Felimid said again.

Behind him, the sky-rim was lightening. The first sun-ray would flash over it like a hurled spear, at any moment. The wolf paused, wanting in a frustration that maddened to accept the invitation, to spring and tear, But the changing was imminent, the silver shone too brightly. He fled.

Nothing made of natural flesh could have overtaken him. Felimid didn’t try. Gone. The wolf had gone, like water vanishing into sea-sand as a wave ebbs. The glorious Sun lifted.

Felimid was unhurt. Bruises, a wrenched muscle in one leg, a sore heel and arm; trifles. As he’d flown out of the saddle, his sword, held point-first in front of him, had sheathed itself in turf at a shallow angle almost to the hilt, and as Felimid had rolled over to come to his feet, the blade had been torn out of the ground again. He’d had exceptional good luck not to sheathe it in his own body.

Limping, he looked for and found the harp, Golden Singer. She hadn’t a mark on her. By rights there should have been nothing in the bag but smashed wood and a tangle of shining strings. He shuddered at the thought. Though the harp-bag was supposed to have the power to keep whatever it contained safe from damage, it was a power Felimid preferred not to test.

The horse was well out of any pain. Tosti Fenrir’s-get had utterly destroyed its throat. now splintered white bone showing through a wreckage of torn meat. It was not the fall that had broken its neck. Felimid had heard the poor brute scream after it went down; yes, after. A wicked creature, but game; it had deserved better.

He’d been chivvied a long way. Now he stood deep in King Oisc’s lands, and with no horse. Tosti was King Oisc’s man. He could summon help if he lived to do so, for he’d shed the skin and resumed human form. He must have done. Shapeshifters couldn’t run as beasts in daylight—Tosti Fenrir’s-get was a man, naked and unarmed, who could not be far distant.

Felimid found the wolf’s trail. Before long, the limping quadrupedal tracks became a man’s even stride. A huge man-even naked and unarmed, Tosti was a danger.

Felimid never paused. He remembered those other wolves in Oisc’s pit, and the fight in Cerdic’s barn. This long night’s ride had been only the last of the terrors Tosti had made him endure; the very last, one way or another.

The downs rolled smoothly away, green-gold on the crests, grey-green with shadow in the wide dips between, like an ancient, fertile sea. Native Britons had farmed it for generations, and then it had been taken over for Roman estates. Lately, it had been the first choice of incoming Jutish yeomen. There were no patches of woodland where a man might lose himself, no running streams in sight to wash out his tracks.

A hill rose before him, little but abrupt. Coarse tussocks grew between stones, and boulders crowned it. Tosti’s tracks ended at the bottom. He must have mounted the hill from stone to stone, leaping-no other means could fail to leave tracks the bard could see, save sprouting wings to fly.

The blood throbbed in Felimid’s heart and brain as he climbed. His gaze roved back and forth after motion, or any color or shape that did not belong. A rabbit bounded away, showing the white under its tail.

Felimid saw something else white. Unlike the rabbit, it stayed motionless, long and wide as a finger on the hill’s bouldery crown. A fragment of chalk? A spatter of bird dung? Something about its shade and texture made Felimid think not. A sudden eddy of wind tossed it up, revealing the tail-tip of a wolfs empty skin. Felimid climbed on. Sometimes, he was a very stubborn man.

From the corner of one eye he glimpsed an explosive spring and lift; Tosti, great and sinewy, hurled a heavy rock as a child throws a ball. Felimid jumped like a seared wildcat. The rock grazed his hip, taking away a hand-sized patch of hide and sending him sprawling.

Tosti ripped another sizeable boulder out of the hillside, as if it had been a turnip. Felimid rose, ignoring the pain. Tosti topped him by half a foot, with great Jean muscles as hard as ships’ cables; the rock he’d plucked up was a yard across, and maybe a foot through the middle. He handled it with terrifying ease. His dreadful face grinned.

Felimid swung his blade at the giant’s left wrist, but Tosti turned his rock like a shield. Metal clanged, pale hot sparks jumped, and numbness ran up Felimid’s arm to the elbow. Tiny things wriggled on the wet dark underside of the rock. Almost contemptuously, Tosti slung the rock into Felimid’s arms. It carried him stumbling backwards and bore him down. Tosti ripped up another, and loomed above Felimid to crush him into the ground.

Felimid did not roll aside. The sword of Ogma whirred in a low scything sweep, and bit into Tosti’s leg at the side of the knee. It severed the tendon like a seamstress’s knife cutting thread. The edge went on through muscle and cartilage, chopping into bone, and that leg collapsed. Tosti went down with the rock still in his hands.

The bard thrust once.

Kincaid’s needle point entered Tosti from the right, below the floating rib. It led the way through Tosti’s lung, and both edges widened the wound behind it. The windpipe split apart, and the great vessel that left the manwolf’s heart. Felimid half turned the blade as he drew it back. Blood and air ran down its grooved channel.

Tosti heard the storm-sound of Wotan’s daughters riding. He saw their cold eyes. With his life’s blood bursting in his chest like the geysers of Helheim, he shouldn’t have been able to speak, but, somehow, he did.

‘I curse you,’ he whispered.

Then he settled and rolled heavily, like a log. A bursting scarlet river ran from his mouth. Felimid seized his drenched beard and cut off his head.

Felimid sat on the stone that had almost crushed him. His forearms rested on his knees, his bands hung slackly from his wrists, and he watched the dead man as he’d done for long minutes. He held his sword-hilt in loosely curled fingers; a sticky redness glued it to his hand. He felt strange, as if sitting some distance away from himself.

I’m alive, he thought. I’m alive, and Tosti lies there. It’s over between us. I can see, and breathe . . . I’ll have this day that he would have taken from me. He’s dead.

He’d an odd difficulty believing it. Maybe the huge body would leap up, and replace its head on its shoulders, and fight again. It didn’t seem plausible that anything mortal could have finished Tosti Fenrir’s-get.

At last he dragged the huge corpse among the boulders, and placed its severed head under one bent knee to keep the ghost from walking. Then he worked hard for an hour to raise a cairn over Tosti’s form, ignoring his own pain-racked body. When the stones were heaped high as Felimid’s chin, he spread the wolfskin atop them to mark the grave, weighting it down so that the wind would not blow it away. No Jute of Kent who found the cairn could fail to know who and what, Jay beneath it.

‘The maker of corpses, the maker of verse;

You might have done better, I might have fared worse.

Wolf! Man! Sleep with your curse!’

T
HE
BARD
WAS
WEARY
,
AND
SLEPT
FOR
SOME
HOURS
. He awoke ravenously hungry, and cut steaks from the dun gelding. Although they were tough, he chewed assiduously, gaining strength from the meat. Then he saw the riders.

For an icy fracturing of time, he thought they were Sergius and his Bulgars. Their number was the same, and they had a martial look. After watching a little longer he knew they were not the same men, and whistled in relief.

Sergius had ridden a grey mare, his greasy killers ponies. These riders bestrode tall powerful war-horses, bigger even than the dun gelding had been. Their casques and mail shirts glittered in the sun. There could not be two war-bands in Britain so mounted and armed. He hoped he was right. They appeared to be following the dead gelding’s trail, and he couldn’t outrun them.

Before long be faced them, a half circle of horsemen, some of whom he recognised. They were Count Artorius’s men; marked by hard fighting and hard sleeping, shields battered, helmets dinted, cloaks rent and stained, smelling of sweat and smoke, they were still the hope of Britain. A kind of glory clung to them.

‘Felimid!’ Young Gareth of Dun Eiddyn exclaimed, and his elder brother Gaheris echoed him. ‘What do you here?’

‘Yes,’ their leader agreed. ‘What do you here; and what in the name of all the saints has been happening to you?’

Him, too, Felimid knew: he’d been a cataphract of the Empire once, and served on the Danube against the Slavs and Huns. An expedition against them had resulted in his capture. Enslaved, he’d been traded down some great German river and become a Saxon thrall. His masters had crossed the Narrow Sea to Britain like many others of their kind, and once there, the thrall from the East had escaped. Now he was a horse-soldier again, fighting for what was left of Rome in this island.

Felimid said, ‘Good hail, Palamides! I promise you, I’ve passed such a day and might as you’d scarcely believe”

Black eyes studied him. ‘Probably. I can see this; you require a meal in your belly and some rest before you think of talking.’

‘I’ve had some rest,’ Felimid answered. yawning. ‘I’ve had a meal too . . . of sorts . . .’ He swayed on his feet.

‘But true for you. I’d be none the worse for more.’

‘Then join us.’

‘I thank you. But tell me first, for the love of the gods, what do you here? Were you after searching for me?’

‘No, Felimid. I had not thought you were in these parts. The lads and I have been harrying Saxons, and we’re soon to rejoin the Count at Verulamium. When Gareth came upon prints of a horse almost as tall as ours, fleeing a wolf huger than it had any right to be–well, then my curiosity would not let me ignore the matter. I might have known the rider would be you!’

Later. over a meal and a fire, the bard told the ten of Sergius, and his evil looking troup. Palamides listened hard, his clean-shaven face pensive, and never interrupted. Nor did he ridicule the bard’s claim to have sung ten fierce warriors helpless. He knew that bardic powers were real and had been even greater before the Cross, before the Romans.

‘I can tell you the fellow lied to you,’ he said at last.

‘I’d guessed that much.’ Felimid laughed. ‘Saints’

bones! Garbage! If there ever were martyred saints in that one’s family, the rest must have married badly ever since!’

‘Oh, most irreverent one, that isn’t what I meant. I was thinking of the tale be spun about coming from Aries. He never could have sworn Bulgars to his service so far west. In Thrace perhaps, or on some shore of the Euxine, perhaps in Constantinople itself, but not in Aries. Then why should he say so? Aries or Constantinople, it’s all the same to a Briton; the other end of the world.’

‘Maybe he wasn’t knowing that,’ Gareth suggested, nettled.

‘And desired to make the journey he’d taken seem smaller, and so less important? It could be. Felimid. Did he give nothing away?’

‘Hmm.’ Chin on his knees, arms wrapped about his legs, Felimid searched his memory, the trained memory of a bard. ‘There was one thing. It signified little to me, but the way he said it echoed of some private meaning. I asked him what his ancestors had traded in. He answered, “In lead and a shut mouth.”’

‘Lead and a shut mouth,’ Palamides repeated. His eyes gleamed suddenly. ‘By Peter! Did he so?’

‘Can you riddle it?’ asked the bard.

‘I believe I can. More than lead comes out of lead mines. There is silver, too. Britain was a great source of both, mind you, before the legions marched away; I’ve heard that British silver once supplied the mints of Gaul — and that when the legions left, before it became terribly plain that they’d never come back, many citizens hid their treasure against pirates and rebels in hope of better times. More than one never had a chance to dig it up again, I’ll wager. Perhaps some cache of the sort is what this Sergius is hunting for.’

‘A long journey he’s made,’ Felimid said, ‘for a table service and maybe a casket of coins.’

‘Far too long a journey, for that,’ Palamides agreed. ‘It must be a greater hoard. Did this Sergius not say to you that his ancestors dealt in lead? He could not resist boasting that they were great magnates, either. What if his family had been lessees of a mine, or more than one? Why, Maximus had his own mint in London when he’d usurped the rule of Britain, not long before the end.’ Palamides grew excited. ‘Suppose this family I am hypothecating helped supply the silver, and for all we know, operated the mint! Much could have stuck to their fingers, and they might have amassed even more after the legions left. Suppose they were too greedy, and waited too long, and were forced to flee very quickly, leaving the bulk of their wealth behind? Well hidden, it goes without saying.’

The cataphract’s teeth glinted in the firelight. ‘I daresay there is nothing in it, but if it should be true, the Count of Britain can make better use of this treasure than any stranger whose family lived in Britain a hundred years ago.’