"The whole town?" Artorius whispered. "My God, Dalriada will massacre every Briton in Strathclyde before marching into Galwyddel!"
"Not if we can catch Lailoken and hand him over to the Irish," the officer muttered. "Queen Morgana and King Medraut have taken ship to try and catch Dallan mac Dalriada before he returns home, to try and convince him it was Saxon treachery, not Briton. Queen Keelin and her Druidess have gone with them, to try and prevent utter disaster."
Artorius just shut his eyes. "Oh, God, watch over her," he groaned.
Ancelotis muttered agreement, while Stirling tried to sort out a confusing issue that puzzled him immensely. The murder of an entire town by some form of biological weapon was entirely in keeping with an agent of the Irish Republican Army. But why would Brenna McEgan massacre the Irish? It made no sane sense. The IRA terrorist had come here to further Irish interests, so why destroy the very Irish settlers who were destined to form the political and social structure of the entire Scottish Lowlands?
If McEgan had poisoned Caerleul, or even Artorius, it would have been perfectly understandable. But not Dalriada. And if Brenna McEgan had not killed every soul in the Irish colony's capital, who had? The Saxons? It was difficult to credit such a notion, when the sixth century's natives were completely unfamiliar with the ways in which a whole settlement could be taken out with chemical or biological agents.
Artorius was asking, "And Morgana has already left for Dalriada? You're sure of that?"
The officer nodded. "Father Auliffe said she took sail from the Lochmaben coast, by way of a fishing sloop, trying to catch up with Dallan mac Dalriada's ship."
"Whether or not she succeeds," Ancelotis said quietly, "there is nothing you and I can do to change what will happen between her and the king of Dalriada. All we can do is strengthen the northern garrisons against invasion and turn our own attention to the Saxon threat in the south."
"King Medraut has already ordered riders north to warn Strathclyde of the danger to the border forts. Just in case."
"Then we must ride south," Artorius said heavily. "And pray God the Irish believe her. For myself, I must suspend judgement against Morgana and Medraut until the war with the Saxons has been decided, one way or the other."
"Agreed," Ancelotis murmured, half sick with grief and worry.
They turned their horses about and set out in pursuit of Lailoken. They had gone perhaps three miles when one of the men back in the line of cataphracti broke into song, a stirring, cadence-rich marching tune which brought the hairs on Stirling's arms and nape standing straight up. He drew rein sharply, trying to locate the singer.
"Where did you hear that?" he demanded.
The soldier blinked in surprise. "One of the minstrels was whistling it at Caer-Birrenswark. I hadn't heard it before and asked him to teach it to me. It's good for the riding, don't you think?"
"Oh, yes, it's a snappy little tune," Stirling agreed darkly. "Let me guess? He learned the tune from Lailoken?"
The man stared in absolute shock. "Aye, that's what he said. He'd been to Caerleul and learnt it there, from Lailoken. How did you know? Is it a Saxon tune, then?" the man asked worriedly.
"In a manner of speaking." Stirling was cursing himself as the worst fool ever to put on the uniform of the SAS. All the little clues he had failed to notice before had fallen neatly into place the instant he heard that particular song. It was a marching song, all right. An Orange marching song. One of the Orangemen's favorites, in fact. It wouldn't even be written for more than a millennium and a half. If Lailoken had been singing it, he could have learned it from only one souclass="underline" Cedric Banning. The man whose British affectations had struck Trevor Stirling as odd, that first night, the kind of snobbery a status-seeking colonial might display—or a very clever man wishing to pass himself off as one.
And he'd worn a paisley scarf, must have been laughing at Stirling the whole time they'd sat in that pub, wearing such a blatant, insulting clue and watching the SAS officer blunder his way right into the trap Banning had set up. Brenna McEgan hadn't killed Terrance Beckett. Banning had. McEgan must have been planted by the IRA as a countermeasure against an Orange terror plot. The bruises on her face—and on Banning's knuckles—floated into his mind's eye, another humiliating clue he'd ignored. McEgan must have walked into the lab right on the heels of the murder. And Banning, clever bastard, had led Stirling straight down the garden path with that note about her ties to Cumann Na Mbann.
It was entirely possible that she had been part of that terrorist group. It was also entirely possible that she was innocent of everything Stirling—and London—had suspected of her. And Cedric Banning had excellent reason to poison an entire Irish city. Stirling wondered who, exactly, had tipped off London that an IRA mole had infiltrated the lab staff? Banning himself? Trying—with embarrassing success—to divert attention from his own agenda? It hardly mattered, now that the damage had been done.
The question of how he'd done it was answered shortly enough. Moving at a steady gallop, they covered the remaining miles rapidly, only to discover that their quarry was no longer on the road. He had bolted, abandoning his packhorse, which they found grazing at the verge of the Roman highway, snatching up greedy mouthfuls of grass. A search of the horse's panniers brought to light several wine bottles and ceramic jars, all carefully stoppered, with the corks and sealed lids bound down with twists of heavy twine.
Artorius held one of the glass bottles up, peering curiously at the lumps visible inside. "It looks like chunks of meat and rotten vegetables."
"Don't open any of them!" Stirling warned sharply, seeing all too clearly how Banning had committed the atrocity at Fortress Dunadd. Botulism toxin. He felt an utter and complete fool, with no way to undo the damage already wrought. Damage which might well have destroyed Stirling's entire future, with no way to tell until the equipment shut down at the end of a year—and no guarantee that it even existed any longer, to be shut down. From this end of history, there literally was no way to tell.
Worse, yet, was the damage Banning could still do. Using botulism, the man could literally poison every Irish town and farmhold from Londonderry to County Kerry and further south, to Cork. All he'd need was a cover story—and what better cover than a traveling minstrel, bringing news of a marriage of alliance between Dalriada and Galwyddel? He wouldn't even have to mention it had ended in treachery, since no one in his wake would survive long enough to find out differently.
Stirling had to shut his eyes against the vision of all Ireland dying, leaving the island wide open for Saxon invasion. Banning was an Orangeman and the Orangemen were descended from pure Anglo-Saxon stock. An Orangeman could take no better revenge than to utterly annihilate the entire Irish population, while simultaneously stirring up war between Dalriada and Galwyddel—at a time when his Saxon ancestors were laying waste to the entire south of England. Divide British attention between war at both ends of the island and the Saxons would conquer it all, the entire British Isles, in one fell swoop. Frosting on the cake would be a few bottles of death emptied into the wells of strategically important Briton strongholds.
The question was, which way had Lailoken and his unseen guest bolted? West, to Ireland? To spread the word of alliance and treachery, while quietly leaving mass murder in his wake? Or south, to join his Saxon kinfolk and take to Aelle and Cutha the secret of biological warfare contained in these monstrous little bottles?