For King & Country (13 page)

The trouble was, no one, not even the scholars and archaeologists, knew where "Badon Hill" was supposed to be, which made Stirling's job trying to protect Artorius from being killed there a bit trickier. And Artorius was still pacing.

"We daren't show weakness before Cutha, old friend," he growled, pinning Ancelotis' eyes with a cold, hard look of anger. "Creoda may be a fool, but Cutha is another breed altogether. Aelle sends his son to us as spy, more than emissary, with Prince Creoda as means to a Saxon end." Steel-grey eyes glinted. "He'll challenge us to a test of arms, I have no doubt of that. Exhibition games with a darker purpose. Your brother's death will at least give us an excuse to stall them for a bit. We can declare traditional funerary games in his honor, even at Caerleul, to pay respect. King Meirchion Gul of Rheged will not stint Lot's memory, for Queen Thaney's sake, if for no other reason."

Ancelotis winced inwardly. "Thaney, surely, has not forgiven her father?"

Artorius grinned. "You know your niece better than anyone, Ancelotis. To my somewhat shaky knowledge, she has not forgotten any more than she's forgiven, but she remembers all too clearly the debt she owes you and Morgana, for helping her escape Lot's anger. Besides, the matter of paying proper tribute to her father's memory touches her honor as princess of Gododdin and queen of Rheged. And Thaney," Artorius chuckled a trifle grimly, "is a creature of honor, which you know only too well."

Ancelotis snorted. "That she is. All right, I won't worry about Thaney."

"Good. The funerary games will give us both the delaying tactic and excuse we'll need to gather all the kings of the north for council. It will also give us the opportunity to meet the challenge Cutha will inevitably deliver in the manner which best suits
us.
Fortunately," a nasty smile flashed into existence, "the Saxons are
infantrymen
. They ride horses only to
reach
the battlefield. They cannot match our heavy Roman cavalry, eh?"

Stirling bit back sudden panic.

He'd never been on a horse in his life.

Artorius frowned. "You're still pale, old friend. Would to God you could rest and recover your strength, but there simply isn't time. It's a long ride to Caerleul, if we hope to arrive before Cutha and his
gewissan
fool, Creoda. Damn, but it's a hellishly bad time for Lot to've gone riding after Pictish raiders! And the women, bless their good intentions, will slow us even further."

"Women?" Stirling blurted before Ancelotis could curb his tongue.

"Aye," Artorius nodded glumly. "Covianna Nim, who brought the news and insisted on riding with me to fetch Lot. Ganhumara, who would not hear of Covianna riding alone with me and demanded the right to accompany us. It's no fit time for Ganhumara to set foot outside the garrison at Caerleul, rail as she will about her status as battle queen in her own right. But she will throw her royal blood into the argument and, as queen of Guendoleu, I cannot ignore her demands, as I might a lesser wife's."

Artorius sighed, with the look of a man hard pressed to maintain peace on the home front, even as Stirling tried to take in the notion of that slender girl leading warriors into battle.

"And Morgana, of course," Artorius added, "will be riding with us. She must give her vote as queen of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw." Stirling nodded, worried that the real delay wouldn't be the women and not daring to admit it out loud. Artorius rested a hand on his shoulder. "Can you ride, Ancelotis?"

"I'll manage," Stirling growled, tugging uneasily at the gold torque around his neck. It wouldn't do for not-yet-crowned King Ancelotis to develop a sudden nervousness of travel by horseback. He sighed. He'd have to work doubly hard to make sure King Ancelotis didn't sprawl onto his royal backside in the dust, trying.

The ceremony was a brief one, startling in its sixth-century simplicity. It took place in a large room that clearly served as the
principium,
or headquarters building, of the fortress atop Stirling Cliff. There were no murals, here, just cracked plaster over well-shaped stones roughly the size of bricks. The floors were simple stone flagging, once again joined with skill. Oil lamps burned bright, hanging from the soot-streaked ceiling, resting in iron lamp stands along the walls, cheering up the heartlessly plain room with flickers of golden light across ceiling and walls. The room was big enough to have served as officers' mess, war room, and dance hall, with large tables of rough-hewn wood and enough chairs to accommodate a meeting of a hundred, without any difficulty.

And there were enough men in the room to have filled every one of those chairs, all of them waiting for his arrival. Ancelotis was greeted informally by a rousing cheer from the men of his command and formally by one group of twelve, all of them older men with grey in their hair, who served Gododdin as a senior council of advisors. Among them was a Christian priest, distinguishable by his long, monkish robes, which were nevertheless of good quality, and by the cross he wore, an ornate and beautiful Celtic cross of exquisite workmanship. He was holding a gold torque that Ancelotis, at least, recognized as having been his older brother's.

"Ancelotis," the priest greeted him solemnly, "because time is of the essence, do you swear before Christ to uphold the laws of Gododdin and protect her from all threats until your nephew is of age to rule in your stead?"

"I swear it," Ancelotis replied, voice hushed with grief.

"Wear the royal torque of the kings of Gododdin then, and pass it on to Gwalchmai when the time is ready."

Ancelotis pulled off the torque he had worn all his adult life, then bent his head, for the priest was shorter than he. Lot Luwddoc's royal torque was far heavier around his neck, with a weight of more than poured and beaten gold. Queen Morgana, grey eyes brilliant with unshed tears, kissed each of his cheeks by turn and it was done. In a moment of brilliance or madness, Stirling wasn't sure which, Ancelotis turned to Morgana's nephew Medraut, who had watched the proceedings with shadowed, hurt eyes and a neck bare of any adornment.

His mother had been executed, leaving him with uncertain status in their carefully measured world. Ancelotis gave the boy his own, princely-rank torque. "I make you the holder of my honor, Medraut. Guard my own torque as you would guard the welfare of your family, and remind me that I am king only to save Gododdin for the sons of Morgana and Lot Luwddoc."

The boy's eyes widened, glowing with the shock of unexpected honor as Ancelotis placed the golden ring around the boy's neck. Morgana, watching from the side, allowed the tears to fall unheeded, as Medraut was transformed from an awkward boy, uncertain of his welcome and place, to a young man with purpose and the respect of his elders.

"I will not fail you, Ancelotis!" the boy swore, gripping Ancelotis' proffered hand and forearm in a tight grip.

The watching councillors of Gododdin, momentarily startled by the move, began to nod as they saw the wisdom of the thing, binding Morgana's nephew—until now an unknown factor in the politics of the north—firmly to the new king.

"Councillors of Gododdin," Ancelotis said quietly, "I thank you for the faith you've placed in my trust. Please take my brother's body home and see to it he is buried with all honors. Nothing but the safety of the realm could tear me away at such a time, but the Saxon threat must be met and countered."

The councillors bowed, murmuring assent and understanding. Then it was done and Ancelotis went striding across the hall, determined to leave as quickly as possible. The sun was just rising above the hills to the east, toward the distant Firth of Forth, when he and Stirling emerged from the Roman fortress of Caer-Iudeu with Artorius on their shared heels. Not that Ancelotis could actually
see
the sun. Heavy violet smudges of cloud, thick with unshed rain, raced overhead, casting a deep gloom over the fortress walls, the sprawling rooftops of the town below the cliff, and the forested mountains beyond.

Caer-Iudeu was larger than a fort, which generally covered a mere one to four hectares of ground, but was considerably smaller than a twenty-hectare fortress. The wall enclosing it ran along all four sides, studded with wooden watchtowers every few meters. Long, narrow stone barracks followed the classic Roman camp pattern, roofed in overlapping sandstone shingles, heavier and more permanent than clay tiles and the Romans' favorite roofing material for these northern forts. Workshops and granaries were visible, as well, along the neatly ordered streets inside the fortress walls. The fortress was a beautifully maintained symbol of organized military power, one that must have an ongoing, deep psychological impact on the Pictish tribes to the north.

Judging from the position of the sun, the chill in the air, and the canopy of blazing crimson and gold amongst the trees down at the foot of the cliff—many of them already winter-bare—he'd arrived in late autumn, always a raw season in Scotland. The forests were a startling change from the bleak hillsides Stirling was used to seeing from this vantage point, high on the cliff of Stirling Castle—which would not exist for more than a full millennium. He curled his lips slightly at memory of the modern Scotsman's bitter, private joke about his wild, open hillsides, so popular with tourists.

The Scots lived in the wettest desert on the face of the earth, a landscape of low scrub and heather, kept deforested by high populations of sheep and large herds of deer. The sheep and the deer were carefully maintained by the landed nobility—many of them English—for their enjoyment in the kingly sport of hunting. Even native Scots landowners found it lucrative to maintain large deer herds, the better to earn money from enthusiastic tourists who came for the hunting. The dour hills weren't good for much else, really, besides growing timber, and money could be had far more quickly from sportsmen than from a stand of trees that took decades to mature.

Stirling had forgotten that the wilds of Scotland had once worn a thick mantle of virgin forest, filled with eerie shadows, drifting fog, and white-water cataracts roaring down through untamed glens. Early morning sunlight spilled through occasional rents in the clouds, striking the ancient trees with golden fanbursts. The forest had been cleared a good hundred yards from the outer stones of the Roman wall around the town, providing a wide perimeter of open ground across which an attacking army would have to charge, exposing themselves to fire from the defending fortress.

A full hundred horsemen of the Briton
cataphracti
waited, already mounted on massive animals that must have been the direct ancestors of medieval chargers. They greeted him with a great shout that sent the rooks flapping in alarm from nearby trees. The men were beating the flats of their swords against their shields. Ancelotis returned the salute even as Stirling's first real shock detonated behind their shared eyes. The faces of a startling number of those cavalrymen bore distinctly
Oriental
features—and the ones who weren't Asiatic still looked Middle Eastern, Iranian, perhaps. They looked for all the world like a band of the Great Khan's hordesmen—or refugees from Darius' Persian army—lifted out of Central Asia by a playful godling and dropped in the hills of Scotland.

He stared at the Asiatic horsemen, trying without much success to figure out where the devil they'd come from. Ancelotis' silent answer struck him with the strength of a thunderclap:
Sarmatians!
Memory stirred even as the impact of the word detonated. Sarmatian auxiliarymen... Thousands of the wild horsemen, Sarmatians and Alanians from the Hungarian plains to the steppes of Russia and even as far away as Central Asian Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, had joined the Roman legions as auxiliary forces, mainly in the
cataphracti
—and the
cataphracti
was Artorius' strongest weapon, giving him a winning edge over Saxon invaders, an edge slated to last for more than fifty years, all told. There must have been
thousands
of Sarmatians stationed in Roman Britain, along Hadrian's and the Antonine Wall.

Aye, Ancelotis said with a hint of amusement in his thoughts, fifteen thousand Sarmatians in all, the records say, were sent by Rome to patrol the border. A fair number of them decided Britain suited them better than Italy, so they stayed when the legions left a hundred years ago. Stayed and married the Briton girls who'd captured their wild hearts.

Stirling was speechless. Among the best cavalrymen of the ancient world, the Sarmatians had held their own against Scythians, Persians, Germanic tribes, Gauls, Parthians in the deserts of the Middle East, and Carthaginians in Northern Africa. Over the millennium and a half separating Stirling's time from this one, the Sarmatian blood of the men who'd elected to remain in Britain must have been diluted until virtually no trace of Asiatic features remained in the gene pool.

But in a.d. 500, barely a century had passed since the departure of the legions—and a century was not nearly enough time to dilute the bloodlines of several thousand Asiatic warriors. He caught glimpses of battle pennons and shields bearing what must have been Sarmatian symbols, since only those men with Asian features carried them. Most of their spears were topped with bronze dragon heads, to which cloth banners had been tied, fluttering like windsocks, mouths wide open, with tails that ended in streamers flying wild as their Asiatic owners. And the symbols painted on their shields... A sword plunged into a stone was shocking in this context and left him wondering about the connection of that particular image with Arthurian lore.

Artorius, the Dux Bellorum who commanded the Sarmatian
cataphracti
...

Ancelotis said silently, When Artorius was still a young lad, not yet turned seventeen, but already showing signs of promise as a shrewd and successful war leader, he persuaded the Sarmatians of Gododdin to finally give up their pagan gods and follow Christian ways. They began referring to him as the man who pulled the Sarmatian sword from its sacred stone, a true war leader who replaced their centuries-old tribal icon with a new god and new ways of worshiping. They also say he's the only mortal man ever born worthy to drain their sacred cup of heaven, like enough to Christ's grail, it wasn't so difficult for them to switch their allegiance to Artorius' new god. It didn't hurt, of course, that Uthyr Pendragon was one of their own...