Berserker (Omnibus) (25 page)

‘Don’t be frightened of me,’ he said quietly, finding that though he wished to speak firmly, loudly, his body could muster no more strength than would allow him to speak in a whisper.

Immediately the girl ran to his side and peered closely at him.

‘Are you really Arthur?’ she said. ‘My brother says you are.’

Uryen tried to laugh, but was unable to. He stared at the dark ceiling where strands of dry thatch poked through the rough wooden beams. He shook his head.

Where had he come ashore, he wondered, feeling the rising of a wave of panic. They knew about the warlord here, but didn’t know him to look at. They must live at the ends of the earth, he thought, and that could bode ill for my mission.

He looked back at the girl and smiled. ‘Arthur … where is he? Where are his armies now? Do you know?’

The girl shook her head, remaining silent.

The door of the small round-house opened and two shapes came towards him, one large, one small, the small shape scurrying across to him and peering into his eyes. He recognised the boy who had dragged him up the beach. Memory of the beach made him aware of the ache in his belly, and beneath his wraps he felt down his flesh until he found the herbal compress across the gaping wound. When he touched the flesh, pain shot upwards to his heart and down into his groin and he knew that these people, for all their country ways, could not really cope with a wound as deep and vicious as that. It was festering, and it marked out his time in days and hours.

Trying not to think of the certainty of his death he smiled at the boy. ‘Thank you for your help,’ he said. Behind the lad an old man appeared, white-bearded, white-haired, dressed in loose green shirt and short, tattered breeches. The man’s eyes were full of age, full of survival, and he knelt beside Uryen of Powys and reached out to touch the warrior’s forehead. He detected the heat and the two men’s eyes met and an unconscious exchange of understanding passed between them, unnoticed by the children.

‘Are you Arthur?’ demanded the boy excitedly. Again Uryen shook his head.

‘Arthur camps not far from here,’ said the old man, and Uryen’s heart surged.

‘Where? At Caer Dyv?’

‘Near there,’ said the old man. ‘He has rebuilt the small fort that lies to the east of Caer Dyv; he has called it Din Powys.’

Uryen felt instantly more relaxed. Wherever he had come ashore he was where he had intended to be, on the southern coast of Dyfed, and not more than two days’ hard ride from Penn Ichen where this fort lay. He had feared that Arthur would be at the Saxon front, but perhaps there was a pause in the vicious struggle for conquest and survival which had been the reason for Uryen’s mission across the channel.

The boy said, ‘I got back your pendant. Look.’ He held up the ivory amulet, carved in the shape of a bull, that Arthur had given him when he had left. The Druid, Marban, had instilled some magic property into the amulet (to the disgust of the Christian monks) and said it would quell the fighting spirit of all Celtic men of true blood in the ancient land of Eriu; this would give Uryen a chance to talk of fighting-assistance to the warlords there, who called themselves
kings
although they were little more than tribal chiefs.

Reaching out for the pendant, Uryen found himself staring into the boy’s bright, green eyes. The warriors of Eriu were green-eyed, and their women too – flame-haired and green-eyed. In this, his homeland, the brown and green were equally mixed. The Roman spirit had left its mark, even though Uryen and his tribe, as well as all the tribes of these western provinces, felt themselves to be Celts, pure and ancient. That they were not, that they were half Roman, was a fact they preferred, these days, to forget, even though the Roman warlord, Ambrosius, had paved the way for Arthur’s knights to block the Saxon advance, five years before.

‘How did you get it?’ he asked the boy.

‘I chased the monks out of their monastery,’ he boasted. ‘They’re really quite meek and tame. They’ll loot bodies, but won’t risk a beating.’

Uryen remembered the monks, standing over him with that pagan cross symbol that had impressed so many of his neighbouring tribesmen. Even Arthur was under its strangely unmagical spell; Uryen was less impressed.

Even so, the monks with their sword-shaped icon had very quickly converted Uryen to their way of thinking, but with the biting edge of his own blade, and not the soft edge of their tongues.

He pressed the pendant back into the boy’s hand. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Owain,’ said the boy, excitement clear in his voice. ‘And that’s my twin sister, Reagan. When we’re a few years older we shall fight together for Arthur.’

Uryen turned his head to stare at the girl. The resemblance between the two of them was apparent, now: the same confidence, the same green eyes, the same determined look about the whole expression. Reagan nodded vigorously. ‘I’m as good with a sword as Owain. He can’t beat me.’

‘I can with a sling,’ said the boy sharply, staring angrily at his sister.

‘And who can run the fastest?’ said the girl, equally annoyed.

Uryen reached out and touched the girl’s shoulder, smiling. ‘I believe you will both be among the best of Arthur’s horsemen,’ he said. ‘But unless I get a message to Arthur, there will be no battle for you to fight in.’

The old man bent closer, pushing the boy aside. ‘Quickly then. I shall send Owain to the fort.’

A sudden spasm of pain racked Uryen’s body and he screamed. Darkness threatened to take him but he found himself being bathed in cold water and the pain subsided.

‘Fetch him here, fetch him fast,’ he gasped, as the agony of his belly wound reasserted itself with a vengeance. He closed his eyes against the pain and felt the touch on his clenched fist of the boy’s soft hands.

‘Fetch him fast,’ he whispered again, but when he felt the boy slip away he reached out to stop him. The bull pendant lay on the pallet and he picked it up and again pressed it into the boy’s hand. ‘Show him this. Tell him – ride until he drops, because my hours are badly numbered.’

The boy glanced at the old man who rose and they both left the house. The girl stayed, bathing Uryen’s forehead, silent but for the sadness in her breathing. When Uryen heard the sound of a horse galloping across the saturated turf outside he relaxed and slept. The pain dulled and for a while he drifted through the battles and pleasures of his thirty years of life.

How much time passed Uryen of Powys never knew; there seemed to be moments of sudden light which he took to be dawn, and then slow times of increasing dimness, which he counted as dusk. The rain came in fits and starts, and there was movement about the small round-house, repairing a leak in the thatch, and pushing stronger shutters against the tiny, low windows which gave a view of the grey sands and the restless tide.

Sometimes he was cold, and other times his fever increased until he felt himself afloat in a sea of sweat. Sometimes he cried, and then the girl, Reagan, was always there, bathing his face, feeding him spoonfuls of some gritty paste that left a pleasant and fruity aftertaste, though the swallowing was hard. He guessed it was a gruel of some description in which the local herbalist had mixed healing, or pain-killing plants that were unpleasant to taste.

The pain came and went, but the smell when he lifted the fur blankets was awful. If the girl noticed she said nothing, but kept close by him at all times, vanishing, perhaps, only when he slept.

He awoke, once, to the sound of a strange murmuring, and opening his eyes he saw a monk, young of face, thin of arm, kneeling by him and uttering the mystical words of the distant Romans, making the pagan sign that Uryen hated so much. He had not the strength to brush away the wizard, but closed his ears to the words and thought of his mission, and the women and the fervour of the old gods that the Erismen possessed still.

The monk was not one of the two who had tried to kill him, but to Uryen all Christians were the same, all were as bad as all others: invaders, blasphemers.

If not for Ambrosius, and the effect that great and valiant warlord had had upon the youngsters who had been raised in the fort on the Gloslyn river, far away to the north in Guined, if not for him then there would be no cross of this One God anywhere near to Arthur and his chieftains. But Arthur was a Christian, and so were his commanders, and his men, and the women and children of the tribes that scattered this side of the Saxon front; even the sheep, even the rats, blessed themselves at dawn and at dusk. All but Uryen. All but the doubter, as Arthur called him (though Arthur himself seemed uninterested in the Roman God at times, as if he were more concerned with killing, which was as it should have been.)

Oh Arthur, Arthur … if I could just have had the life to watch you win your war, and then to teach you what I have learned from the kings of Eriu, about gods who mean so much, so much to us all, while this One God, this carpenter, means so little to death and conquest, and things of importance
!

The pain returned, and with it a difficulty in breathing that made him gasp and moan, so that now he was attended at every moment by anxious women, with round, sweet faces and full moist lips, and he had not even the strength to beg a kiss, but watched them as they bathed his body, and changed the thick plant compress on the green and black gash in his belly, where the festering viscera spread their poison further towards his vital core.

Perhaps only the thought of Arthur kept him alive, but then Arthur was a symbol of such survival and had been so since the great Ambrosius had fallen beneath the Saxon swords at Camulodunon. Arthur! Warlord of Hope! And his image gave Uryen of Powys the strength to fight back the bony hands of death, the descending veil of dark, until one day, when it rained loudly and mournfully …

The door of the round-house was flung open.

A horse whinnied distantly and clopped away across wooden mud-walks, snorting its breathlessness, the sound loud despite the drum of rain on turf and thatched wood. Cold wind brought Uryen to consciousness, the smell of grass, of autumn mist and rain, a smell that he loved, the smell of nature, of life.

The girl drew back, her last touch to his lips a gentle finger’s touch as if she made her final farewell. He watched her go, her skinny body lost in the shapeless dress as she darted round the walls, in awe of someone who came near to the deathbed.

He was a giant of a man, tall and broad, with dark hair that hung in great waves about his shoulders. When he stood upright his head nearly touched the wooden rafters that supported the thatch. A thick leather jacket was tied
with silver chain about his chest, and his legs were protected with strips of cowhide woven in and out of a thick pair of cloth breeches. He wore boots up to the knees, with spikes down the inner faces of them so that he could pain his horse into moving fast. About his waist was buckled a glittering bronze and gilt belt, and from the belt hung a Roman sword, short and broad, the gift to him from their foster father, Ambrosius Aurelianus. Legend said it was the sword of Caesar himself, the conqueror of this island who now lay four hundred years dead. As it had won for Caesar great victory over the Gauls of the continental lands across the channel, so it now won for the Britons great victories over the Saxon heathens who swarmed across the eastern lands of Albion.

Uryen of Powys reached out his right hand and felt it gripped by the broad and powerful fingers of this man who now knelt beside him.

Dark eyes searched his own; tears warmed the gaze. Naked of face, the jaws as strong and firm as the rest of his giant physique, Arthur of Powys gazed into the dying eyes of his foster brother.

For a while there was silence, save for the rain, the wind, the nervous stamping of the horses outside. Raised voices and occasional laughter told of the presence of Arthur’s troops, sheltering and resting and wishing they were anywhere but in this small community here on the west of the peninsula that probed from the land of Dyfed into the sea.

The boy Owain, exhausted from his ride, stood in the doorway watching the two warriors. His belly was full since Arthur, whilst riding hard for the coast, had made sure that the young messenger had maintained his strength. He was weary only from lack of sleep and from eight days in the saddle having rested his aching limbs only during the two hour stop at the fort (so small, he had thought – he had imagined a huge and majestic castle on a hill, and had found an earthen rampart no wider than this, his own communal holding).

But he felt now an enormous pride, and even his sister had kissed him for the strength of his will and the enormity of his achievement. He had brought Arthur and Uryen together before death had cheated the warlord of his emissary. Only Owain knew that the men were foster brothers, for he had heard what had passed between them in their first moments together. Why the relationship was a secret he didn’t know, but he understood, as he watched, why the two, the giant warrior Arthur and the pale featured Uryen, why they cried so much in these first minutes of their meeting.

There was talking, then, urgent talking as Uryen told Arthur of what he had found, what he had learned, and Reagan left the round-house with her father so that only Owain remained. He crept round the wall and entered shadow, where the light coming in through the roof hole and the several thin windows never reached.

Arthur had bent close to the dying warrior, and Uryen spoke in whispers, sometimes choking, sometimes gasping for breath, but always talking on, urgently and steadily.

He told of warrior bands called fiana. Owain caught the name only once, but he understood what they were: fierce bands of naked warriors who had rejected the communal laws of their tribes and had become a law unto themselves, riding across the land, making their swords available to any king – so many kings in this country across the sea – who could pay their price.

He told of the kings themselves who were prepared to cease their raiding of the coastal towns of the western kingdom of Albion, and even to join with Arthur to fight the Angle and Saxon armies as they steadily advanced towards the mountain strongholds of the west.