Warriors of Camlann Read online

  Warriors of Camlann

  N. M. BROWNE

  To my sister, Laura,

  without whom I would never

  have become a writer

  Contents

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Acknowledgements

  Afterword

  Chapter One

  Dan gripped Ursula’s hand as if his life depended on it. It was possible that it did. The oily ice of the yellow mist clung to him. It made his flesh recoil. He fought the urge to run through it in panic. He did not want Ursula to know the extent of his fear. He could not see her. Only the warmth of her calloused hand reassured him. He felt her grip tighten as she moved ahead, pulling him, then he too was through it. His body shuddered with shocked relief. He was through the mist. There was an all but inaudible pop and they were through it together, but in a place of total darkness.

  To his surprise Ursula did not release her grip. He was relieved to feel the slight tremor of her hand. Good. She was scared too. It was Ursula who spoke first.

  ‘We managed to stay together at least.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper. She sounded unusually vulnerable. Maybe because she thought they were back home, in their own world where she would have no sorcery and no strength. She would no longer be Boar Skull the great Combrogi warrior or Ursula Alavna ab Helen, the sorceress; she would just be Ursula Dorrington of 10G, unpopular and powerless. Ursula would feel the loss almost like a bereavement. He knew just how she felt. His own throat seemed dry, unused. He croaked a question.

  ‘Are we home?’

  ‘How, by Lugh, should I know?’

  Dan grinned. She had answered him in the language of the Combrogi. At least they would still have that. Back in their own world they would be the only two who spoke what he supposed must be a form of ancient Celtic. Now, that would raise a few eyebrows.

  In the darkness he felt for his sword ‘Bright Killer’. It made him feel safer. It was still there. He had been worried about arriving in a twenty-first-century car park, a Celtic longsword at his hip. He had been worried about a lot of things, perhaps the wrong things: a twenty-first-century car park would have been an embarrassing place to arrive, dressed as ancient Celts from another world, but at least they would have known where they were. This not knowing was far worse. The darkness seemed to press against his eyes. He felt the familiar pulse of adrenalin – fight or flight. There was no one to fight and nowhere to run. His warrior’s readiness threatened to degenerate into panic.

  ‘What do we do now?’ At least his voice was still steady – croaky, but steady.

  ‘Did you bring a tinder box?’

  ‘I didn’t think we’d need one.’ Dan did not add that he’d hoped to arrive home in the twenty-first century.

  ‘Dan, I’m scared. What if this isn’t home?’

  He heard the slight break in Ursula’s voice, the rise of panic. Ursula did not panic.

  She carried on: ‘And then, what if it is?’

  He knew what she meant. They had left their ordinary lives months, maybe even years, ago. The mist had claimed them then too. They had wandered into it and found themselves transported into something very like first-century Britain; found themselves fighting with Celtic warriors under the leadership of the young Celtic king, Macsen, against the might of Rome. They had become accustomed to strangeness, to magic, and to fear, but such familiarity didn’t help Dan much now. He was still afraid, and so was Ursula. In that place which he thought of as Macsen’s land, she had discovered a gift for sorcery. She had learned to call up the mist and bend it to her will, or so they had thought. They believed she could control the mist, use it to bring them home – to Dan’s sister and Ursula’s mother, to school and normal life. It looked like they’d been wrong. They had wanted so much to go home but even the thought of it brought its own worries. Could they live a normal life? Dan had been a warrior, more than that he’d been a berserker. The Bear Sark, they had called him – a title synonymous with murderous madness. He had killed not once, but many times, in a frenzy of savagery. He could not undo what he’d done and what he’d done would always set him apart. What if it happened again when he was back home? What if he killed again? He’d be locked up. In first-century Britain he’d been a hero. He had seen terrible things, done terrible things; he knew his own wild capacity for violence and it frightened him.

  Dan squeezed Ursula’s strong hand. He did not know how to answer her. He knew exactly what she meant.

  It was a cold and strangely quiet night. Dan strained his ears for the sound of traffic but could hear nothing. By twenty-first-century standards he had become a good tracker. He’d learned to listen and to feel, to take in all the information his senses could offer, to analyse and to react. The soundless darkness offered no information. By the standards of any time he had become a formidable warrior. He had learned to use his mind and body as a weapon, a honed instrument for his will. Here in the stillness of this nowhere landscape he felt as vulnerable as the schoolboy he’d been before. A large part of him wished he were still that boy. He licked dry lips and shivered. They could be anywhere or any when. If by some miracle Ursula had brought them home, then how long had they been away? Would his sister be worried about him? Would she have given him up for dead? If Ursula had got them back to the right time, had she got them back to the right country? Long-suppressed doubts assailed him. He did not want to share them with Ursula. She might think he didn’t trust her. He held her hand more tightly. Her powerful fingers squeezed his.

  ‘Can you see anything?’

  As his eyes adjusted to the near total absence of light, he found that he could, a little. The ground all round them seemed grey and featureless. His instinct told him they were on a grassy hill but he could not account for that feeling. That did not matter. Instincts could keep you alive when rational thought left you for dead.

  ‘I can see enough.’

  ‘Let’s go then.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wherever there is to go.’

  Dan almost suggested Ursula speak English again – to get back into practice. He didn’t quite have the heart. The rhythm of the Combrogi tongue gave him an obscure sense of comfort. It helped to dispel some of his disquiet, his discomforting sense of foreboding.

  They walked for a while. The terrain was not difficult. They had become more used to horseback than hiking over the previous months, but even so Dan set a good, ground-eating pace. He had been long enough away from a wristwatch to have
given up thinking of time primarily in minutes and hours. He estimated they had walked for the best part of a duty watch. The darkness dissipated in the characteristically gradual way of a clouded dawn. In all that time they had seen no lights, no house, and no road. They walked on uncultivated land, endless fields of coarse grass broken only by thickets of gorse and scrub. These were not good signs.

  ‘I’ve messed up, haven’t I?’ Ursula sounded sullen. She’d let go of Dan’s hand some time back. He knew that she was grinding her teeth. In the wan light her face looked grim and distant like she’d looked before – when she’d been just the big lumpy girl no one had liked at school. He hated that look. It was a reminder that the bond between them must weaken. Ursula’s wild courage had saved him more than once. He had trusted her completely. Once they were home things would not be the same – could not be the same. He didn’t like that thought.

  He looked at her, really looked at her, as he had not done for a long time. That surly look of hers was almost the only thing about Ursula that had not changed over their time together. Her pale, blonde hair had grown and now hung almost to her shoulders framing a fine boned, but strong-looking face. Ursula was over six foot tall. Where once her height and bulk had marked her out as almost freakish, now her taut-muscled frame marked her out as beautiful. She was unlikely to be unpopular or powerless again. Would they still be friends?

  Her face creased with a frown and he realised she was still waiting for him to answer.

  ‘We don’t know that you’ve messed up – not yet,’ he said encouragingly.

  ‘Dan, we can’t be home. Don’t try to humour me! We’d have found some sign of civilisation before now. Wherever we are – I hate it. I feel so lost. I can’t feel anything anymore.’

  The new, beautiful, Ursula sounded as distressed as he’d ever heard her. If he’d not known her better he would have thought she was about to cry.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t feel the magic here. It’s not home, Dan, but it’s not there either; it’s not Macsen’s world. It’s horrible. I feel all empty. I’d forgotten how it was before. Dan, how am I going to manage without it?’ She looked at him in desperate appeal with eyes that were no longer the emerald green of a sorceress but the cool blue of the schoolgirl Ursula.

  He opened his mouth to comfort her, then stopped, silenced by his awareness of an abrupt movement in the bushes. A figure appeared suddenly from the dark thicket, moving swiftly towards them. Dan’s hand was on Bright Killer faster than thought. Something struck him, a hard blow. He never saw what.

  Ursula watched open-mouthed as four men rushed towards her. She saw everything in one frozen moment: the bearded men in tunics and leggings; their bare heads, their long hair the colour of her own; their swords and small knives thrust towards her; their mouths open, screaming something – a war cry, a shout of triumph? The sound ripped the air, there was a thud and all else was silence. One of them had thrown a stone with deadly accuracy from a slingshot. It lay where it had landed, stained with blood. In the grey light the crimson blood welling around Dan’s head showed up bright as neon against the pale yellow-green of the grass. Ursula could not react. She stared at the spreading redness. She could see nothing else.

  It was as if she had never been Boar Skull, never spent months in training, never defended herself in hand-to-hand combat. Numb with shock and loss she let them take her. She had left her sword in Macsen’s land but she could have tried to defend herself. She made no attempt to fight as they snatched Bright Killer from Dan’s lifeless grip. She made no attempt to run when they roughly bound her hands. She did nothing when they ripped the eagle brooch that Macsen had given her from her tunic. They spoke to her in a language she didn’t know – they were not of the tribes – that much she knew – she spoke all their many dialects. The strangers smelled powerfully of peat fires and stale sweat and the pungent stench of fish. They stood close enough for her to smell the alcohol on their breath. Dirty, calloused hands caressed her roughly. It was as if it was happening to someone else. They refrained from doing her harm. She was not sure why. The tallest, who was still a few inches shorter than Ursula, cooed endearments and then signalled for her to be lifted bodily away. She did not resist. She had never been more lost. Once, when she was a sorceress, when she had wielded magic, when she had been able to shape-shift, she had almost become trapped in the form of an eagle. Even then she had not felt more lost than this. The world had shrunk until there was just one thing in it: the blood welling around Dan’s pale face and his utter stillness.

  She had let Dan down. She had not known their attackers were there. Always before, she had sensed danger. This time, she had sensed nothing. It was her fault. Dan relied on her for such things. She tried to reach for the magic. She needed the magic, had never needed it, never wanted it more. But she expected what she found – nothing. There was no magic in her. She was alone and helpless in an unknown place. Dan was dead.

  Chapter Two

  The sun was high in the sky before Ursula had recovered her wits sufficiently to take in her surroundings. She was not back home. Her attackers, whoever they were, tied sound knots. Straining on them only tightened them further. They had carried her bodily to a cart and had transported her, bound and gagged, to some other place, a dark place that smelled, like them, of fish and filth. The road they had travelled had been uneven and pitted with holes, and the wooden cart in which they’d thrown her was no more than a wooden box on wheels. Ursula had been thrown against it so constantly that she was sore and badly bruised. She did not think she had broken any bones.

  All the long, cold, painful journey, Ursula had wept for Dan. She had wept silently until her vision blurred and her head throbbed to the rhythm of her grief. Dan was the only friend she had ever had – the only person who had risked death for her – and the only certainty in all the strangeness they had experienced since they first went through the Veil. She could not believe he was gone. It had happened too quickly. There had been many times, after she and Dan had joined the Combrogi, when she had readied herself to die or to see Dan die. Today, death had found them both so unprepared. How could Dan, the Bear Sark, the mightiest fighter the Celts had ever claimed for their own, be killed by a stone from a well-aimed slingshot? Her memory was full of Dan: Dan smiling, Dan listening, Dan fighting in his berserker madness. Most of all she thought of Dan falling, Dan falling as the stone hit home, and blood surrounding him like a dark halo.

  Why had she not fought their attackers, grabbed Bright Killer herself to avenge Dan? There was no doubt in Ursula’s mind. Dan could not have survived the force of that blow. There was no doubt in her mind that she should have saved him. There was no doubt in her mind that it would be a struggle to survive this new strangeness without him, but her own life was in danger and she had to try. She had to concentrate on staying alive.

  Ursula had become practised at a certain kind of mental discipline – the kind she’d needed to release her sorcery. She called on that practice now and almost broke down again at the emptiness she felt. There was no sensation of power. There was no awareness of electric energies thrilling through nerves and neurons.

  She listened to her own trembling breath and only then, in this new and fragile state of calm, did she become aware of some other presence in the cold, dark place where the men had trapped her. Someone or something else was breathing quietly, raggedly.

  She could not get up. Both her hands and feet were bound, though fortunately not together. She had seen prisoners tied that way – hands to feet, their backs arched like a bow. There had been charred corpses in that position in Alavna. She was not tied like that – and she was grateful. With some uncomfortable manoeuvring, jarring fresh cuts and bruises from her time on the wooden cart, she managed to get herself into a semi-seated shuffling position. With painful slowness she explored her prison. She was inside some large rectangular stone structure. There were three bodies lying against the wall furthest from her. Two were un
questionably dead, though not yet cold. The hard impacted earth of the floor was wet and sticky there. Ursula was glad of the darkness. She did not want to see what had been done to them. Fear tightened in the pit of her stomach. She remembered Alavna, and the slaughter she had seen there. No sight could be worse than that. She forced herself to continue her exploration. She had been a warrior. She could bear whatever she had to face here.

  The darkness disorientated her. Her thighs cramped with the effort of movement. She gritted her teeth against the pain. After an agony of shuffling, she reached the third body. It still breathed. Reasoning that anyone imprisoned with her was at least an enemy of her captors and might thus be her friend, she started to speak. She did not attempt to speak in English. English was not for her the language of blood and pain and fear. She spoke instead in the languages of the Combrogi, in the tongue of the Silures, the Carvetii, and the Ordovices, in the ancient warrior tongues. ‘Are you hurt? Are you sick?’

  A dry voice whispered from a parched throat, ‘Water. Give me water!’

  The sandpaper voice shocked Ursula. She found herself trembling with more than the awkward muscle-straining exertion. He spoke in Latin, the language of her old enemy, the Ravens.

  She recovered herself quickly and answered in the same language. Even without the power of her living, pulsing magic she could still remember words she had learned with its aid.

  ‘I have no water. I’m a prisoner too. Do you know where we are? Do you know a way out?’

  The man was wracked with a spasm of something that, in other circumstances, might have been a laugh. Ursula failed to see the funny side of their predicament.

  Eventually, he calmed himself sufficiently to rasp, ‘You can’t not know who has captured you. Where have you been living? The people who captured us are slavers – Aenglisc slavers.’ The man struggled for breath. ‘We’ll be dead or shipped a long way from here before the day’s out.’

  Dan would have known who the Aenglisc were, but she could no longer ask him. The realisation of that was like a stab wound – she almost buckled under it. She shied away from the pain of it.