The Dragon Lord Page 3

  The four other horsemen wore rings, however; their chief's had been washed with silver so that his torso danced in the torchlight. Among Arthur's Companions, as in most professional armies, it was customary to flaunt wealth in fine equipment. The only proviso was that one's arms must not appear more valuable than one's ability. Besides their mail shirts, the cataphracts wore leggings faced with scales or rings on the outer sides. The insides of their thighs were covered only with leather, not simply because armor was unnecessary there but because iron would have robbed the riders of the firm grip they needed to stay on their horses. Their saddles had four low horns, two front and two behind—and no stirrups at all. Keeping mounted in a fight was a major part of the training each Companion received.

  "Lancelot, what in the name of the crucified God are you doing?" demanded the silver-armored horseman.

  Lancelot used the broken stone beside him as an anchor and pulled himself into a sitting position. He tried to speak but blood or a dry throat choked him. He spat out a tooth on the ground. One of his own men knelt beside the Master of Soldiers and ripped a strip of linen from the hem of his tunic. Another Companion splashed the rag with beer from the goatskin bottle hanging at his waist. Together, as carefully as artificers preparing a pharaoh for eternal burial, the two soldiers sponged away at the damage to Lancelot's face.

  "Lord Gawain," one of the training cadre blurted, his eyes flicking back and forth from Starkad to the mounted man, "it was—"

  "I'll wait for your captain to tell me, thanks," interrupted Gawain with a mildness that bit. The trooper bobbed apologetically. No one else spoke aloud while the two Companions worked on Lancelot.

  Nearer the wall, two Herulians and a Frank were tending to Lancelot's object lesson. The remaining recruits had drifted toward them. The nursing gave the men something to focus on instead of the cataphracts and their battered officer. Hot looks came out of the motley throng, directed against the isolated Mael and Starkad. The torches had burned down to embers and a trickle of fire, but they had dimmed gradually enough that those present could still see each other.

  "1 think they've just written us out of the human race," Mael said to the Dane. He tossed his head toward the recruits in lieu of a more respectful gesture. "They think they'll all be punished for what I did to that prancing dandy . . . and they've seen enough of Arthur's discipline to worry about it."

  "What we did to that one," Starkad corrected softly, staring at his right hand as he clenched and unclenched it. Feeling seemed to be returning. "Men and dogs, Irishman, men and dogs . . . Give me a wolf pack any day. Wolves tear out no throats but their enemy's—or their dinner's, of course. But wound a dog and the ones he's been running with will be the first on him. Since they're the nearest." The Dane flexed his hand again, turned it over to show curls of hair as heavy and dark as copper wire crawling down the back of it. Even Starkad's fingers were hairy, except for the skin over his knuckles. Those patches gleamed pale in the torchlight for not being shadowed by hairs. "We could run," he said in the same tones of bored unconcern.

  Mael had been watching the riders with a frank, friendly smile on his face. The Irishman looked as if he could not imagine what their dismounted fellows of the training cadre were telling them in low murmurs. "No, I don't think so," Mael said. "I don't feel quite like I'm about to die yet, and I surely would die if we ran." He grinned sidelong at Starkad. "Of course, you may be about to die, my friend. That stone was probably a valuable Roman relic—and you've heard how this Arthur is about Roman things."

  The Dane chuckled, reaching across to knead Mael's skull brutally. They were in this as in most things—together. Call it friendship or a wish to die. "Next time I'll have sense enough to use the edge on his skull," Starkad said. "At least I'll be able to use both hands if I have to, later."

  Mael continued to study the Companions. Men in armor were no rarity now in any army apart from the Irish. Long past were the days in which Rome's legions faced hordes of shrieking Germans protected by no more than a loin clout and a wicker shield. Rome had educated her barbarian neighbors. Part of the process had been by example, survivors around camp fires telling how their points skidded from bronze corselets. Even more destructive of Rome's superiority had been her practice of hiring enemies as auxiliaries, training them in armored tactics for twenty-five years—and all too frequently having the men return to their tribes across the Rhine or the Danube to pass their training along. When the naked mobs became effective heavy infantry, Rome's own period of lordship was soon to end.

  But while the Companions' armor was common enough for warriors who could afford it, their array of weapons was not. From the right side of each saddle, just ahead of the rider's knee, hung a quiver of arrows. A bow was cased to the left, balancing the quiver. Horse archers had been a staple of Oriental warfare for centuries, but they had never been popular among the armies of Western Europe. Even in nations to whom mounted bowmen were standard, the nobles who could afford full armor carried swords and sneered at the drudgery of daily archery practice. These Companions were equipped with both armor and bows. Either Arthur had issued expensive mail to all his forces, or his discipline was so rigid that even the wellborn were forced into finger-burning, muscle-knotting archery exercises. Perhaps both were true. Brief experience suggested to Mael that they both were. The Irishman wondered where Arthur got the money and the authority to put such a program into effect.

  Like the dismounted cadre, the riders all carried swords sheathed along their left thighs. The varied richness of the weapons suggested the rank and wealth of the bearers. The hilts ranged from plain wood, in the case of the two troopers wearing scale armor, to Gawain's, which was of iron forged in a single unit with the blade and quillons. The metal was carven and heavily inlaid with gold and ivory. Its owner's calloused hand had smoothed the hilt to a perfect fit for him, proving the weapon was no useless toy for ceremony.

  One further weapon completed each cataphract's arsenal, a weapon which Mael knew for the most deadly and difficult to master of all. In tubular sockets hanging from the right rear of the saddles stood twelve-foot lances. The heads were four-sided pyramids, narrow and a foot long. A tang joined each point to an ash shaft two inches in diameter and as smooth and straight as an artisan could fashion.

  Lances have only rarely in history been popular. A lancer gets the first stroke at an enemy, but if he misses, the speed of his charge thrusts him into the hands of his foe with no way to strike again. A light javelin can be flung from a distance or its shaft raised to block a hostile blow. A lance is like a glacier, massive and unidirectional. It is too heavy to throw, too clumsy for protection. Worse, when saddles lacked stirrups as these did, a clumsy lance thrust was as likely to dismount the lancer as to slay his opponent.

  And yet trained lancers were the terror of every field on which they fought. Lances killed with the unanswerable certainty of catapults, but even greater than their material effect was the moral. A line of glittering lance-heads plunging nearer, backed by dust and thunder and tons of armored horsemen, was soul-shattering.

  Mael frowned inwardly, though his face remained bland. He could appreciate the Companions, for he had been raised a fighting man and spent his life in the service of war. But these men were simply too good, too perfect. To conceive of and train them had been works of genius—but a damned bloody genius it must be. It was natural for men to kill and, aye, to make a business of killing. But to turn slaughter into an intellectual exercise was as warped as for a woman to lust after a bull, and the progeny was apt to be as evil. Lancelot sucked beer into his mouth, wincing at its astringence. He spat after swizzling it around. The second mouthful he swallowed. Only then did he look up at Gawain who was waiting with a hunter's patience while his men fidgeted. "Well?" Lancelot said, shaping the word very carefully.

  "The Leader needs to talk to two of the new recruits," Gawain said. Both men spoke Latin but with markedly different accents. The variation was less regional than a matter of
education. Although Britain had scholars and orators the equal of any on the Continent, Gawain had never been trained by such. The Votadini, his tribe and his Leader's, valued other skills than those of civilization. "He sent us to bring them now—the Irishman, Mael mac Ronan, and the Dane who joined with him."

  Mael looked at his friend. He popped the big man's shoulder with the heel of his hand and said "See? That's why I hate to do anything final. You just can't tell what's going to turn up."

  Starkad snorted, oblivious to the staring faces around them. "They could still be taking us out to chop us."

  "They didn't have any reason to chop us until now," Mael responded cheerfully, "and nobody got a message out of the arena to those guys." Tugging Starkad by the left shoulder, the Irishman stepped toward Gawain and his half squad. "Here we are, friend. Much as we hate to leave this happy gathering."

  Gawain's chuckle was full and appreciative without being in the least friendly. "I'd intended to put you both on pillions to get you to headquarters," the slim captain said, "but now that I've seen your friend I'll be damned if I have a horse try to carry him and one of my boys besides. You can walk, and we'll all be happiest if you don't waste time at it." Gawain glanced back at Lancelot. "Good night, Master," he said with an ironic salute. Then, to his men and their charges, "Let's go."

  Chapter Two

  The horsemen wheeled and rode out of the arena. Gawain set a pace that brought Mael and Starkad immediately to a jog. Beyond the gateway the Companions formed two lines abreast. With the recruits sandwiched between them—as much escorted as under guard, but under guard beyond doubt—they rode back through the darkened countryside toward the villa that was Arthur's main base and headquarters. The nearest town, Moridunum, the market place for the region, was five miles southward. There were no civilians closer than that except for dependents.

  The route to the villa took the company past the recruit lines near the arena. They were of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, recently built and broken up internally into tiny one- and two-man cubicles. There were a hundred units in blocks of ten with common walls. Each had a door in front facing the latrine, a window in the back, and barely enough floor space for beds and the personal effects of the occupants. Only transients and trainees were quartered there; veterans had billets attached to the main building. The semi-private rooms were not intended as benefits to the recruits. There was no enclosure in the area in which more than a dozen men could gather and conspire because of the separation. When the trainees assembled, it was either under the eyes of the cadre or during meals in the huge mess hall in the main building. Then the new men were mixed with no less than equal numbers of hard-bitten veterans.

  Arthur was under no illusions as to how his discipline would be received by mercenary recruits, and had the recruits not been bloody-handed killers already, they would have been of no use to the king. His control measures were as carefully considered as every other part of the training.

  Mael jogged along with the horses easily, holding his shield close to keep it from battering him at the end of its neck strap. His legs were long, his chest large, and if the Irishman had not deliberately trained for running in the decade since he left the Ard Ri's Guard, then still he was not a man to be concerned about a half-mile jog. He looked over at Starkad. The Dane had dropped back two steps and caught the nearest horseman's quiver in his left hand. Using the horse to smooth his own pace, a psychic rather than physical crutch but no less real for that, Starkad was pounding along without evident concern. He and the horseman had exchanged brief glances when he attached himself. Sensibly, the Companion had made no protest. The Dane was ignoring the light shield, letting it flop against his breast. In his right hand he carried his axe at its balance near the head. Its shaft worked up and down behind him like a pump handle as he ran. Mael grinned and stopped worrying about his friend.

  The villa they approached was a two-story building of stone and stucco. A taller block of apartments had been recently constructed of lath and plaster along the back. The kernel of the villa had been raised in the time of Trajan and expanded piece by piece over the centuries following. At the villa's zenith and that of Roman Britain in the early fourth century, the building had been filled by slaves who lived in its rambling halls and turned raw wool into fine woven cloth under awnings in the central courtyard. With the change from sheep to wheat, the surrounding country had been broken into tenant holdings and the slave gangs had disappeared. Rooms were closed. In earlier ages the owners had been occasional visitors from London or the Continent; now they became permanent residents.

  Then the Irish came. Though they did not burn the building, for the next century it was occupied only by travelers and the bandits and deserters who were an increasing feature of the times. When Arthur grasped power, he found in the villa his safe base in the center of what remained British in the face of the Saxon onrush.

  Gawain drew up at the front entrance. Once a portico had led to it, but the columns had been wood and long since burned in cooking fires. The high oak doors had been replaced. They stood open, displaying the lamplit hall and the remainder of the squad on guard duty that night.

  "Pass on through," Gawain said to Mael with a sardonic smile. Turning a little further he added to Starkad, "You'll have to leave your axe."

  "I'd as soon die holding it," the Dane replied. His chest was heaving and his face was flushed from the run.

  "Well, that's the choice," Gawain agreed without emotion.

  "Give me the axe, lunk," Mael said. He reached out, touching the shaft with his fingertips but not trying to grasp the weapon. "Indeed, they may kill us. Assuredly they will if you insist on posturing."

  Mael spoke in Danish, softly enough and more quickly then he thought the Companions could follow. "This one doesn't posture, my friend. He'd as soon kill us as not. And that'd be a damned foolish way to die." The Irishman closed his hand over the axe. "If they attack us, I'll let you use my rocky head for a club." He lifted the weapon from Starkad and handed it to Gawain.

  The British captain weighed the axe and tried its balance. "Sometimes I wish I had the size for one of these," he said to Mael with a grin as lethal as a wolf's. Mael grinned back, knowing that if he had toyed with this man as he had with Lancelot, one or both of them would already be dead. Gawain would simply not have accepted any conclusion short of death in such a challenge.

  Mael and Starkad passed through the doorway and its gauntlet of lounging guards. The roof of the hall was opened by an impluvium which funneled rainwater down into the decorative cistern in the center of the hall. The architectural design was normal in Italy, miserably uncomfortable during British winters. The concession that Mediterranean style had made to northern weather was to close the three doorways off the hall with solid panels instead of leaving them open.

  One of the Companions tapped deferentially on the left-hand door, then opened it to an order grunted from within. Mael started through. Starkad touched his shoulder and said, only half in jest, "No, I lead and you cover my back. Just like any battle." He entered the room ahead of the Irishman.

  There was no obvious danger inside, only two men reclining at the head and side of an intarsia table. Neither man was prepossessing, Mael thought. There was certainly nothing in the younger of them to make fighting men refer to him so naturally as Leader. And then the two looked up, and Mael felt their eyes on him. The Irishman grinned, because he had to do something with his face before these men, each in his own way as deadly as Gawain.

  "Starkad Thurid's son," Arthur said, not a question but a vocalization of notes jotted somewhere inside his skull. "Starkad Grettir."

  The Dane nodded, stiff-backed and hostile. He had already measured the distance to the king. He knew he could leap it in time for a single skull-cracking blow, even if a spear from behind had gone through him.

  "And Mael mac Ronan." Arthur was not the hulking bear of a man rumor on the Continent had him. The Saxons who returned from Britain needed an exc
use for their fears, a snarling monster to lead their enemies, a beast with swords the length of flails and muscles that could lift an ox. This man, forty and slim except in the shoulders; more gray-haired than gray-bearded, but with much of gray in his beard as well; three or four inches less than Mael's height, though the unclasped cloak over his lower legs hid the exact length they stretched—this was no creature for whom a Saxon warrior could articulate a terror that his fellows could understand.

  Mael didn't care who understood. He had seen the Companions and had now seen Arthur himself. Both the man and what he stood for were frightening.

  "I need an Irishman to take a trip home for me," the king said. "Merlin here—" he nodded toward the older man on the side bench. The wizard's lips had been working silently ever since Mael and Starkad had entered the room—"needs the skull of a water monster as lived once in your lakes. Have you heard of such?"

  Very formally and carefully, Mael said, "I left Ireland for reasons that seemed good to me—and better yet to some who stayed home. I have no wish to die and less to return to Ireland—which may well be different ways to say the same thing"

  The king took a swallow of ale and brushed foam from his moustache with the back of his hand. Merlin beside him continued to mutter, using the butt of his willow whip to divide a puddle of ale. The two dollops of thin fluid stayed separate after the wand passed instead of flowing back together. Arthur was saying, "You're Irish, after all. You can blend in, not attract attention as Lancelot would or Gawain. Call yourself something—oh!" And the king broke off with a gleeful chuckle at his insight. "Of course, of course—you already do. It's a matter of only a few days and back, you see, nothing to tax a disguise."