They had for twenty five years fought for provinces and kings and borders and most of the time had not understood or cared about any of that. They did it to defend each other and after a quarter century of doing so you'd think it would have gotten stale. Maybe it did. But here they were again. The three Veterans Valerian Tarquin and Rusticus. Rusticus' son Drusus returned from the wars in the south with his lieutenant Seaxneat and their company of hired swords. Clad in suits of chain and crossing the moor in the sun through clouds of steam disgorged by the snow as the top layer melted. The mercenaries sang a song. It wasn't one the elderly Veterans recognized but the theme was familiar.
Drusus rode the Colony's one horse. His own horse had been stolen by the Horned Ladies after his father Rusticus took it on a stealth operation. That horse returned. It made upset sounds and the symbols painted on its body in woad tried to communicate something. Blue handprints. Was something wrong with the horse? No, it was the other way around. Rusticus recognized that the horse was distressed because something happened to its owner.
They weren't marching by daylight. They stood at the foot of the mountain amid a field of boulders and old menhirs. They didn't remember how they got there, other than they walked. They didn't remember how the situation with the Saxon who fucked Drusus' sister was resolved. Who was left behind to guard the camp. The moon and a fire somewhere up the mountain illuminated the scene. Someone sang in the language of the Horned Ladies.
The enemy was ahead of them in complex terrain, an uphill fight. Drusus managed the formation and Tarquin walked point. He spotted the skirmishers and shouted the alarm before the javelins skewered the formation. The Veterans caught the wooden points of the thrown spears on their shields. Three mercenaries fell. The Romans surged up the hill and cut down one of the Horned Women as the rest fled up the slope laughing. One of the men was dead, one injured so badly he couldn't walk, one was still mobile. Drusus loaded the wounded men onto the draft horse and the maniple continued uphill to the ritual site.
Rusticus looked down at his lorica to find one of the rings burst. The wooden point had struck him in the chest hard enough to penetrate his mail. What he thought was blood leaking through his clothing beneath was actually a stain from the red handprint on his chest. Not Saturnia's palm. Not a blue woman's palmprint. Red. A man's. The palm now split by a gash where the point of the spear scraped away the underlying protection from the spell. He remembered Martial pressing a hand to his chest.
The light came from a clearing. A bowl in the mountains where the Horned Ladies lit a bonfire and stood swaying as they sang. They Veterans recognized a trap. With the mercenaries they worked their way around the edge of the glade. Without the fire behind the silhouettes night-blinding them they realized that the one in front of the fire was a bound man. The woman standing over him held a wave bladed bronze dagger. The bound man shouted prayers in Latin with a Brittonic accent, the way every Roman and Romanized Celt talked. He asked Zeus and Christ and Mars and the Horned God to save him from being ritually sacrificed by this crazy bitch.
The Veterans threw their javelins and the priestess dropped. One of the singing women took her place and raised the dagger. The Veterans tossed darts and charged. They cut their way to the prone man before they realized the women were all dolls. Wicker and cloth and plant fiber that fell away under their merciless assault. The man wore Roman clothing but his skin was covered in woad and tattoos. He laughed at them. Around the edge of the glade, torches sparked to life. They were surrounded.
The mercenaries freaked out. Drusus rallied them. It was a trick, useless against disciplined troops. Valerian struck the bound man, who laughed as his blood filled the spiral grooves in the stone below. Tarquin realized what was about to happen and tried to staunch the flow through the pattern. It was too late.
From the treeline, a raspy voice. An old woman on a palanquin held by four robed figures. She croaked that the giant would destroy the colony. Their children, the young ones, would be spared. Vectica would ensure they survived. Their wives would go into its maw. She grinned so her teeth were visible in the firelight. There was a woman next to her. Shorter and skinnier than the last time they saw her, when they cut her head off, but unmistakable in her horned mask.
The Horned Ladies rushed out of the treeline and fell upon the encircled warriors. Tarquin led the maniple together in a tight formation to break out of the ambush and escape into the narrow defile at the south end of the glade. The Veterans hacked their way through the blue-painted Celts. Martial's magick saved Tarquin and Valerian from ax and sword wounds, then dissipated. The old lady in the chair raised a sword in her gnarled fist and blessed the warriors of her tribe. The woman in the mask cried out from behind the massed fighters and ensorceled several of the mercenaries, peeling them off the group so they wandered into the dark. The horse carrying the wounded bolted. Rusticus turned and ran out through the entrance. They needed him in the shield wall but all he could think about was his wife and the daughter who didn't have a sword and shield and helmet and coat of mail to protect her.
Drusus, Valerian, Seaxneat and Tarquin held the passage. Their overlapping shields stopped the Picts from pressing home the attack through sheer weight of numbers. It was an even fight until Seaxneat shoved Drusus forward into a pair of incoming spears.
As you'll recall, ser, we fight for the strongest.
He offered by way of explanation for the betrayal. The Romans lashed out at him but he ducked behind his new barbarian allies. The women tried to drag Drusus away but Valerian stood over him like the Greeks over Patroclus' body and drove them back. Tarquin hurled his last javelin at the horned woman. He caught her in the chest and she disappeared from view. Then he stooped behind his shield and stabbed with his spatha until a hooking cut over his shoulder caught him in the back of the neck and killed him.
_cropped.jpg)
Rusticus stood on the mountain and watched the giant cross the landscape toward the Colony. It was far away but in his vision it looked so large that it took up the entire horizon. The starlight caught its face through the clouds. It had a suggestion of eyes but no teeth in its horrible sucking maw. Like a baby magnified to great size and cast in stone.
A spark came from the Colony. The Latinized barbarian didn't recognize it at first because it was inverted. Lightning arcing from the earth upward. Not Jupiter beating his wife or fucking his cupbearer or punishing a mortal who attracted his attention. Lightning, gathered in the hands of a man and tossed so it caught the approaching giant in the face. The monster stood, stupidly, perhaps never alive at all but certainly dying. The body collapsed under its own weight. The boulder head broke and rolled and stopped short of the Colony wall. Rusticus turned and ran back toward his comrades and his son.
Valerian fought savagely as Drusus struggled to stand. The Horned Ladies poisoned their weapons but after a moment of nausea he rose to fight beside his uncle. Behind the greatly diminished ranks of the tribe (the Veterans by this point had killed eight or ten of them) the woman in the horned mask crept up behind the old lady on the palanquin and slashed her throat. The surviving Celts withdrew with Seaxneat from the battle line, leaving only Valerian and Drusus. The mercenaries stood alongside their former enemies. The horned woman spoke in a voice that was different from and identical to how she sounded the last time they spoke. When she married Valerian's son and Rusticus cut off her head. She told him they were still family. That she didn't want to kill her father in law when they could build a new tribe together.
Valerian realized Tarquin was dead. He leaped forward and lashed out at Seaxneat. The mercenaries pincushioned the Roman with spears and he died. Which was the scene Rusticus returned to. His comrades dead and his son alone against the enemy battle line of traitors and barbarians. If they ran they'd be run down. They couldn't hold the passage alone. From under a toadstool, in the dark, a voice. Peg Leg's enormous nose and beady eyes peering out from under the mushroom. The offer was still good.
Rusticus immediately told the fairy to take his son away from here.
Dad, no! Don't
Shouted Drusus before he disappeared. Which left Rusticus as the last man standing. He tossed his last dart and struck the horned woman in the mask. He didn't see if it killed her. Her tribe fell upon them. He caught their weapons on his shield and killed one, maybe two. Then he too was gone, though not spirited away by a wild shade to rule as human king of fairyland.
At the Colony, the women assessed the damage. Vectica and the two mercenaries left to "guard" the settlement and the Saxon who returned after deflowering Vita's daughter were dead, their plot discovered by Thracius before they could take hostages. The only casualty was a self inflicted wound. Martial, ever the malingerer, had injured himself to get out of fighting. He lay dead with his own throat slashed, fuel for the spell that slew the giant. His wife Saturnia tried to maintain emotional control. The immediate threat was gone but there could be another attack. More use for her magick. She gave in to grief and slashed her arms with the same bronze blade that her husband used to dispatch himself. The mourning rite of her tribe which she instinctively fell back on. Despite how much she hated them and the monster they summoned, which her husband gave his life to destroy. Martial's kids cried and begged their mom not to hurt herself.
The other wives and children stood on the palisade and kept watch. The distant bonfire still blazed in the mountains. No mercenaries or Horned Ladies came back to the Colony.
Neither did the Romans.
No comments:
Post a Comment