Ravens of Avalon (22 page)

Her gaze met that of Ardanos, sitting in the shadows near the door, and she thought he was wondering, too. He had grown thin in the past weeks, with hollow cheeks and haunted eyes. Always before he had had a wry comment or a cheerful word, but in the past weeks he had been uncharacteristically quiet. They had not been tempted to dance together at Beltane, for the defenders had not had wood enough for a bonfire. He no longer tried to persuade her to his bed, and that was the most disturbing sign of all. But she had grown silent, too.

She looked away.
If we speak, we are afraid we will have to admit that there is no hope of victory …

“The Romans out there outnumber us,” Caratac said with quiet intensity. “Their legions outnumber the Durotriges as they did the Tri-novantes when we fought on the Tamesa. But they
do not
outnumber the Britons of Britannia! If we do not give up, if we make them bleed for every hillfort, every river crossing, every foot of ground, there will come a time when the gold and grain they can seize from us cease to be enough to pay for the lives of their men.
That
is why we must hold out as long as we can, and if we are driven from this stronghold we will retreat to another. We
can
outlast them. This is our land!”

Perhaps even Caratac would have quailed, a year ago, if he had known what was to come, but it was clear to Lhiannon that he could not do so now. The others might surrender, but he must continue. He had paid too much already to give in.

But what if the Romans felt the same way? What if every legionary who fed the Morrigan’s ravens strengthened General Vespasian’s resolve to destroy those who had brought him down?

Outside someone raised the alarm. Cursing, the chieftains snatched up their swords and crowded through the door. Slipping and sliding in the mud, one hand holding their shields up in a linked mass to repell missiles from above while the other gripped a sword, the Romans were assaulting the ramparts yet again.

t was not until midsummer that the rain let up at last.

Great shining fortresses of cloud drifted slowly eastward, having surrendered all their store of rain, leaving the sun as victor on a field of blue. At the Dun of Stones, besieged and besiegers alike paused a moment in their labors, turning toward the light like flowers as the strengthening sun drew moisture from the soaked ground of the dun in curls of steam. The humid air lay heavy in Lhiannon’s lungs, but it would dry, and the mud on the slopes of the dun would dry, and the Romans would attack again.

Overhead ravens were circling, dark and bright in turn as their glossy wings caught the light of the sun.
Be patient,
she thought.
Soon you will feed!

She stripped down to her linen undertunic and draped her blue robe over the thatch of her roundhouse, then began to undo her braids.

“Your hair is like spun sunlight …”

She felt a touch and turned almost into Ardanos’s arms.

“And you like a faerie child in your pale gown, with your white arms gleaming in the sun.” Smiling a little, he began to work at the tangles with which she had been struggling.

“Mud-colored around the hem, though it is kind of you to say so …” she answered as steadily as she could. “But if death is coming, at least I will face it in dry clothes.”

“Probably … almost certainly, I would say,” he answered with an attempt at his old sardonic detachment. “When I looked over the palisade there seemed to be a lot of activity down the hill. The Romans are moving the ballistas into position for an assault, with no attempt to do so unobserved. And why should they? Whenever they choose to assault us we can only meet the attack with what we have. Which is not much. We have almost no arrows, and even the supply of slinging stones is getting low.”

“And a fortress cannot run away,” she agreed.
Nor can those trapped inside it.
But there was no need to say that aloud.

He finished working on the second braid, combing the strands out with his fingers so that they lay soft upon her shoulders, shining in the sun.

“How is it that lack of food only makes you more beautiful?” he said then. “You were almost too thin before, but now your spirit shines like a lamp through your skin …” For the last week the food ration, never ample, had been cut. The Romans might not have expected them to hold out for so long, but Antebrogios had never expected the Romans would have the patience for so long a siege.

Ardanos had grown gaunt as well. She saw now how he would look when he was old, if indeed either of them survived to see old age. At this moment it hardly mattered. To hear that gentle note in his voice, to see that light in his eye, was what she needed now. If he was fey, then so was she. It was not only hunger that made her lightheaded as she moved into the circle of his arms.

he activity in the Roman camp continued all afternoon. In the dun, the evening meal was quiet, but the cooks served out the best of the food that remained. There was only water to drink, but the chieftains pledged each other as if it had been wine.

“If this night we are fated to fall, we should go rejoicing,” said Ardanos as the horn came to him. “The Romans we kill may go down to gloomy Hades, but for us the Blessed Isles are waiting, until it is time to enter the Cauldron and be born anew.”

The Isles of the Blessed, or the Otherworld the faerie woman showed me …
thought Lhiannon. If that lady should open such a gateway here and now would she go through it? Not alone, she thought, looking at Ardanos. Never, if she had to take that road alone.

“By all the gods, you men of the Durotriges will surely feast among the heroes,” exclaimed Caratac. “None ever fought more bravely, or endured so well.”

“None ever had such noble chieftains to lead them,” came the response from the men.

When the meal was over, Lhiannon and Ardanos wandered out past the empty livestock pens, looking up at the stars. The men who walked the ramparts were singing. When they paused, one could hear a murmur like distant thunder from below. But here on the pile of straw where Ardanos had spread his cloak, it seemed very still.

Lhiannon rested her head upon his shoulder. They were both still fully clothed, and he had made no move to change that. She could feel a regular quiver beneath her palm, as if she held his heart in her hand.

“I never thought it would be in such a time and place when I finally lay with you in my arms,” Ardanos said at last. “Or that it would be enough to simply hold you, and know that this is where you chose to be.”

The more ascetic among the Druids starved themselves to achieve a state in which the flesh would no longer hunger. Perhaps that was what had happened to her and Ardanos, or perhaps it was that in the place where they were now, beyond all the distractions of ordinary life, they could speak soul to soul.

“When they come,” he whispered after a little time had passed. “When they break through, will you come with me to the Blessed Isles? They will know us for Druids, and they will drag us captive through the streets of Rome and give us to the beasts in the arena if they take us alive.”

“Yes, my love. But not yet. There are brave men here, and it would be wrong to desert them too soon.”

He laughed a little at that and kissed her forehead. “I never doubted your courage, Lhiannon.”

The stars were growing pale as the full moon climbed the sky. On such a night it seemed impossible that soon men would die. The Romans called the moon a chaste goddess. Could they not see that to break the peace of this night with violence was a blasphemy?

Lhiannon sat up, lifting her hands to the skies. “Holy Goddess, holy Goddess,” she sang:

“Upon the world of warring men look down and make their hatred cease. O holy Goddess, hear us now, oh hear our prayer and give us peace …”

As if in answer, a ball of fire arced across the face of the moon. It landed on a thatched roof and began to burn.

“Goddess have mercy on us all. It has begun!”

More fireballs fell, some catching buildings, others sizzling on the ground. From the gate came shouting. As she and Ardanos started toward it, a warrior ran past them screaming, clothes streaming flame. She screamed herself as a bolt from a ballista whipped past and skewered another man to a wall.

Farther along the wall men were shouting. Fire billowed up where the logs of the palisade had caught and men scrambled back from the fl ames .
This is what the storms prevented,
Lhiannon thought numbly.
I am sorry I cursed the rain …

Bands of men dashed here and there as the alarm was shouted from different parts of the wall. She and Ardanos separated to get the chests where they had kept their remaining bandages and surgical tools; when she emerged from her hut, she saw one of the chieftains grab Ardanos’s arm. The man pointed toward the other end of the dun and he nodded, cast one desperate glance back at her, and started off at a run.

Now they were bringing wounded into the space before Antebro-gios’s house and laying them on blankets brought from those huts that were not yet in flames. Lhiannon hurried to the nearest, who had a bal-lista bolt through his thigh. The shaft was a stout piece of ash wood a little over two feet long, but all she could see protruding from his flesh were the three fins on the end. An arrow could have been broken off, but this shaft was too thick; she would have to pull it. There was not much blood; they could hope it had not severed an artery.

“Hold him,” she said to the man beside him, whose leg would need splinting next. Grimacing, he nodded, and leaned his weight on his companion as she gripped the shaft beneath the fins and gave a sharp tug. Her patient screamed and then went limp. Lhiannon gritted her teeth and pulled again, using all her strength. She felt something give, then the thing came loose, the evil quadrangular head spattering blood across her skirts. More blood welled from the hole. She grabbed a wad of wool and pressed down hard, then bound it tightly in place.

The wound ought to be washed out with wine. The man should be kept quiet and fed infusions of white willow for the pain. She could even do it, if he lived—if any of them lived—through the next few hours. As it was, he might live until morning and die of infection thereafter. He might survive to live in slavery and wish he had died today.

But they were setting a man before her with a splinter from a smashed log through his shoulder, and here was another whose knee had been crushed by a catapulted stone. Her awareness narrowed to the next decision, the next incision, to red blood and firelight and pain. Men screamed and bled beneath her hands, some fainted, and some of them died. Once when she looked up she saw the moon glowing red from the smoke in the air. No chaste goddess she—this was the bloody shield of Cathu-bodva, the moon of war.

The regular hollow boom that shook the earth beneath her might have been her heartbeat. It was only when men began to run past that she realized the Romans were attacking the gate. Despite all the missiles the defenders could rain down upon them, the locked shields they called the “tortoise” were protecting the men who swung the ram.

She saw Caratac in all his battered splendor shouting a group of warriors into position at the top of the steep slope that ran down to the gate.

“Get out of the way!” One of Antebrogios’s house-guard yanked her to her feet and shoved her toward the roundhouse. “Take cover! You can’t help them now!”

Where was Ardanos? Lhiannon hesitated, staring wildly at the confusion of moving men. There was a rending groan and the great bar across the gate cracked and fell. The timbers shivered beneath another stroke; held in place by the rocks piled behind them, they splintered under the impact of a third great blow. The defenders reeled beneath a new shower of missiles as the first armored enemies squeezed through.

She edged back until she was huddling beneath the overhanging roof of the roundhouse, but she had to see! More Romans were pouring through the gap. Steel clashed as they drove against the Britons waiting there. She heard Caratac’s war cry. A sword skittered across the ground to her feet and she picked it up, then dropped it again. She was a healer; her heart was torn by anguish, but even now there was nothing within her that answered to the Morrigan’s rage.

The embattled knot of men were moving toward her. As she realized it, the defenders broke and ran. She saw Caratac rise up from the tumult, laying about him with great strokes of his long sword. Romans reeled back from the terror of that blade and for a moment the space around him was clear. He leaped forward, saw her cowering, and hauled her into the shadow behind the house.

“They shall not have me or you either, priestess! The palisade is down on the west side. Come with me!”

His arm was like iron around her waist. Half dragged, half running, she fled from house to house as the battle raged on. As they neared the palisade she thought she saw Ardanos’s white robe in the midst of a group of running warriors. She tried to call out to him, but she had no breath. Then Caratac was thrusting her through the splintered gap in the logs; she tripped and rolled down the bank. He slid down after her, pulled her over the second bank, and together they skidded down it into the darkness beyond.

Lhiannon looked back. The sky above the hill was red; most of the houses must now be burning. A haze of heat and smoke obscured the sky. Or perhaps her vision was dimmed by tears.