Death of an Empire (6 page)

‘The Huns, whoever they might be, are on the move,’ he told them as he demolished his first plate of stew. ‘The local people are terrified, although Gesoriacum is unlikely to be attacked.’

‘King Vortigern told me that the Huns under Attila threatened Rome . . . although he could easily have been wrong,’ Myrddion said doubtfully, knowing that Britain rarely received useful intelligence from the Frankish side of the Litus Saxonicum. None the less, the name Attila caused his tongue to tremble. ‘Did the people say why the Huns have come so far to the west – why they are at war with the people of Gaul?’

‘A Roman general called Flavius Aetius has pissed them off by returning their gift to its original donor.’

The widows giggled, while Truthteller made an incredulous grimace at the thought that any passably intelligent general would make such a mistake of protocol. Cadoc began to refill his bowl with stew while continuing his explanation of what he had heard from the villagers.

‘No, Truthteller. The gift from the Huns was a dwarf called Zerco, and this Aetius seems to take a dim view of treating human beings as inconsequential presents to be exchanged at will. Unfortunately, the Huns chose to view Aetius’s mercy as an insult.’

‘Does the cause of the conflict really matter?’ Finn asked. ‘The Huns will invent a reason to be offended if they truly desire a war. Is Flavius Aetius an able warrior?’

‘So they say. He is the best that the Empire has left – which isn’t saying much. Do you want to become embroiled in this war, master? Perhaps we can recoup our losses from the voyage.’

Myrddion looked doubtfully at his narrow fingers as he cleaned his bowl with a scrap of bread. Was his father this particular Flavius? For the first time, the healer considered the difficulty entailed in finding a man with such a common gens, even though the name had a noble history.

‘What else have you heard of this Flavius Aetius?’ he asked as artlessly as he could manage. If the general’s age indicated that the man could be his father, he might reconsider his decision to avoid the war.

‘I only know what the marketplace gossip tells me,’ Cadoc responded. ‘He is said to be about sixty years old. His mother was Italian, of no real birth, and he is of Scythian descent. He calls himself Roman because he served at the imperial court and was trained at the Tribuni Praetoriani Partis Militaris. He’s been
the most successful of the Roman commanders for near enough forty years.’

Myrddion nodded with relief, his resolve firming. We must pass through Gaul as quickly as possible so that we can reach Rome and Ravenna. No more crazed kings, hungry for glory. And no more generals ready to spend the life-blood of their young conscripts like copper coin. He could dismiss this particular Flavius from his consideration on the grounds of his age and the impurity of his blood.

‘Then he will have to defeat the Huns without us. I am weary of battles and dying men.’

‘But master . . .’ Cadoc rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in an age-old gesture.

‘Yes, I know we are stripped of our wealth, but we’ll not starve. The peasants will keep us fed for the sake of a little clean healing on our part. We will take the road to the east, then turn south for Tournai once we reach the river.’

Knowing their master’s moods, Finn and Cadoc did not argue. They were, after all, sensible men. They recognised that it was only because he was still young that Myrddion never stopped to think how high-handedly he made the decisions for the entire party, taking their loyalty and sense of obligation for granted.

Their fast broken, the healers set off on the next leg of their journey and soon put the squalor and vigour of Gesoriacum far behind them. The day was all that early spring should be – soft breezes, puffball clouds and sweet new grass with its clean smell of fresh beginnings. On the Roman road that lay ahead of them, the countryside was flat, greening and welcoming, with occasional small villages clustered in the fecund fields where green shoots had already broken through the brown sod. Exhilarated, Myrddion breathed it in.

In every village, peasants stopped them to request simples that would cure chest colds, or for the more mundane tasks of pulling teeth, alleviating earache, or removing thorns, splinters or chips of metal from inflamed flesh. The villagers expressed their thanks in a language a little like Saxon or in bastardised Latin, and paid for the treatments with vegetables from the winter store, apples put down in the autumn, a brace of coney or quail or, on one memorable occasion, a whole haunch of venison. The weather conspired, along with the gratitude shown by the villagers, to induce a holiday mood for which the healers were extremely grateful. For far too long, they had waded through blood, hideous wounds and the agony of doomed souls to atone for the poisoned desires of petty princelings.

So it was with surprise that Myrddion discovered that he was irritated by the slow, steady pace of their journey. These lands had been tamed and seemed well tended, but there was an alien quality in the lack of heavy forest or hills that raised flinty heads into the sky. So few miles separated them from the lands of the Celts, yet the Roman rulers of this gentle place had felled the ancient forests and killed the old gods in their sacred groves. Something else was beginning to take their place, but Myrddion could not see the shape of the new force that was, even now, bringing death and destruction to these quiet hamlets.

The small party finally reached the river Ranus had mentioned, where the road turned in an arc towards the south.

‘Good. Now we must keep our ears sharp,’ Myrddion told them. ‘The lands around Tournai belong to the Frankish king, so we may stumble across his warriors before too long.’

‘That’s lovely,’ Cadoc muttered sardonically, while Finn Truthteller simply flicked the reins and urged his pair into movement.

After some days of uneventful travel, their horses suddenly became restive and Myrddion felt a frisson of alarm shiver
down his backbone. There was no discernible reason for his presentiment of danger, but Myrddion was aware that dumb creatures were often warned of trouble long before the blunted senses of men picked it up. He knew that only a fool would ignore such warnings.

‘Go back to the other wagon and tell Finn to keep his sword close at hand,’ Myrddion instructed Cadoc. ‘Like the horses, I can smell trouble on the wind.’

Cadoc scanned the horizon with his keen, warrior’s eyes. ‘There’s smoke over the forests to the south, master. And the birds are unusually silent. I don’t like it.’

‘Hmph,’ Myrddion muttered, as he retrieved his sword, resplendent in its fine hide scabbard, and slipped it under the seat of the ponderous wagon. ‘We go on!’

The first refugees appeared within the hour, on foot, or pushing barrows laden with their meagre possessions. Myrddion’s experienced eyes noted that the haggard peasants were all women, old men or children. Several bore nasty burns or sword wounds as they trudged ahead with fixed eyes and the shocked, blank stares of people who had nowhere to go but away from the homes where they had lived their entire lives. Cadoc saw one woman carrying a small child whose arm was burned from shoulder to wrist, and was forced to stand in front of her before she would interrupt her steady, mile-devouring pace.

‘Let me take care of the babe for you, mother,’ he murmured, making sure that his voice was gentle and without threat. ‘My master has a salve to soothe the little one’s pain.’

The woman stopped as if her leg muscles had forgotten how to work. Cadoc took the partially wrapped, silent child from her nerveless fingers, while Myrddion wordlessly motioned to Rhedyn to seat the woman out of the sun and see to her comfort. Finn and Cadoc began to set up the wagons and unharness the
horses before lighting a fire, heating water and assembling Myrddion’s tools of trade.

‘Business is coming, master,’ Cadoc murmured softly so as not to disturb the almost comatose infant in his arms. ‘I can feel it in my water.’

‘Aye, fortune has set her face against my hopes for a quiet journey to Constantinople,’ Myrddion replied. ‘Bare the child’s body. The little one is far too quiet, and I fear she isn’t long for this world.’

The little girl could hardly have been older than two years. She had sustained an ugly, blistered burn that began across her shoulder and extended down to her wrist, leaving her perfect, delicate fingers untouched. The flesh had swollen under the blackened and blistered skin, but the mother had been unable to treat the gross injury.

‘She must have snatched the child out of a burning hut, gathered what she could carry, and fled. Normally, immediate treatment for burns is vital, but in this case the application of goose grease or dirty wrapping would have made our task even harder. For the moment, I must cut the skin where it’s not breached to ease the swelling and blistering, so I’ll need a little poppy juice.’

The child felt like a rag doll in Cadoc’s hands, but he knew his master had the gods’ own skill in his sensitive fingers. If Myrddion believed that this child still possessed a frail chance of survival, then Cadoc would also fight for her right to live. The soldier in him remembered the agony of his own burns and his soft Celtic heart ached for the agonies that this little girl would experience – if she survived the treatment. He laid the child down naked on a clean cloth spread by Rhedyn, and fetched knives, salves and the poppy juice.

Once the child had been treated to Myrddion’s satisfaction, and laid in a nest of clean wool in the larger wagon, the healer turned
his attention to the mother and the growing crowd of refugees who had abandoned their mindless, numbed trek to nowhere. Most of their injuries were minor, including the wounds resulting from the trek itself, such as blistered hands and feet, but Myrddion, Finn and Cadoc took pains to treat each villager, promising them clean water, hot stew and a safe place to rest if they tarried for a while. Several able-bodied women had helped to raise one of the leather tents and those old men and women who had exhausted themselves to escape the town of Tournai rested under its shelter on the untainted grass.

As for the child’s mother, all Rhedyn’s skills and gentleness couldn’t coax a single word from her bitten lips. The woman seemed impossibly old to have borne such a young daughter, but as none of the other fleeing refugees professed to know her the healers could gain little insight regarding the damage to her mind.

But her body was another matter entirely.

The woman sat hunched over like a crone and rocked in time with the music that she alone heard in her head. When Myrddion and Cadoc attempted to examine her, she tried to beat them off with her fists and her teeth, a resistance that was made more dreadful by its silent violence. With great difficulty, and at the cost of a badly bitten thumb, Myrddion forced poppy juice down her throat until her feverish struggles slowly ceased.

With silent apologies to the woman’s modesty, Myrddion checked her body for any sign of injury. Deep in her groin, he found an arrow embedded with a small length of shaft visible above the reddened flesh. His heart sank at the absence of blood loss.

‘Is she bleeding inwardly, master?’ Cadoc whispered as he wondered at the fixity of will that had kept this nameless woman on her feet over so many agonising miles, while carrying such a painful wound.

‘Aye, she must be. This arrow must have pierced her gut hours ago, which is why her skin is so hot and the child hasn’t been treated. The evil humours are killing her from within.’

‘Should we remove the arrow, master?’ Cadoc’s voice was sad, for women as brave as this one should die by their own fireside, not maddened with pain on an endless, pointless journey.

Myrddion shook his head and squared his shoulders. Hard experience had taught him that there was no point in struggling with death once the internal organs were breached and poisoned.

‘What would be the purpose? It would only cause her more pain. Cool her flesh with soft compresses and ask Rhedyn to stay with her. I’ll leave more of the poppy juice with Rhedyn to ease her journey into death. Whoever she was, she is beyond our help.’

Cadoc heard the anger in his master’s voice. Although Myrddion had long outgrown his boyhood, his short life had taught him that adult strength meant nothing when he was faced by the ugly truth of his own ignorance. Some wounds were beyond his ability to heal, and he railed silently at the gods who allowed children to grow to the age of love and reason – and then killed them so capriciously.

‘We’ll go no further today,’ he decided. ‘We seem to have fed all who need our services, even if we have been forced to strip our food stores to nothing. They’ll need something in their bellies if they are to survive the hardships that lie ahead. Besides, other sufferers will find us soon enough, so perhaps they can replenish our supplies.’

As he spooned food into a wooden bowl for a toothless old crone who blessed him in her strange tongue, Cadoc watched the sun reach its highest point and begin the long slide down the sky towards the horrors of night, although for now it still shone sweetly and the scented air was just as delicate as it had been during their early morning travels. Yet the unmistakable stink of violent
death seemed to have wafted to their encampment from the south, where smoke still rose like an impudent finger, or a warning of horrors that were yet to come.

The wounded woman began to convulse at nightfall. Cadoc and Finn held her down, but her whole body was as hot as fire, as if she blazed inwardly from some terrible conflagration of the spirit. As her body arched until only her head and heels touched the earth, Cadoc feared her spine would break, and prayed to the Mother that her death would be swift.

Myrddion laid his cool hands on her feverish forehead and whispered words of comfort in her ear, promising that if her child should live, then he would care for her until her death. Insensible to these words of release, the woman’s heels drummed on the hard earth and a long, anguished exhalation of breath escaped through her clenched teeth. Then she slumped as if an invisible hand had cut all the tendons and muscles in her body, leaving a boneless shell of flesh. Her eyelids snapped open, exposing irises that were a strange transparent green, but there was no sense or understanding in them. A single word escaped lips that were bitten and bleeding, and then she was dead.