“A babe with a withered arm and crooked back,” Gonar scoffed. “Othna let Berul live only because he feared to die without male issue, and that the ancient line of Mak Morn would thus be extinct.”
“Perhaps Berul will have a son, and he a son…”
“May there be sons of sons for another age to come,” mourned Gonar, “I see naught but wo for Pictdom. Truly today was the last great moment of our race, and now are left only memories of ancient glory. Memories that will fade…”
Utha bit off a bitter retort. One of his captains climbed toward him from the gorge below.
“The Romans still hold the cavern mouth,” he reported. “Calidius demands Othna’s promise of safe passage to the Roman wall. Else…”
His voice trailed away as he gained the crest and saw Othna’s still form.
“By the Moon-Woman, I’ll give the Romans an answer to their demands!” swore Utha wrathfully. “Roll boulders into the cavern’s mouth! By the gods, pull down half the mountain over their rats’ burrow!” He shook tears from his eyes and brandished his fist. “If they dare not give open battle, we’ll grant them a lingering death in the darkness of the earth! Their tomb shall be a cairn to tell of our greatest victory-and their dying moans shall gladden Othna’s heart in hell!”
The order was given, and a thousand willing hands seized boulders and pry-bars-toiled for into the night to roll countless tons of stone over the mouth of the cavern in Serpent Gorge. By dusk the doomed screams of those within no longer penetrated the rising cairn…
Seasons passed. The bones of Legio IX Hispana-the Lost Legion-bleached silently beneath the heather and gorse that bloomed ever more verdantly for the decay that now enriched the sparse Highland soil. Within the river gorge spring freshets washed away the debris of mouldering bone and armor, rotting timber and harness-until at length only the silent cairn in Serpent Gorge stood witness to the blood that once flowed there.
Eighty years passed…
1
TAINT OF THE BLACK STONE
Mist cloaked the heathered hills in the stark blackness that had swallowed the moon in the hour before dawn. Ash-choked embers of a hundred campfires made sullen bits of light along the rolling waste. The night skies were obscured by the veil of fog, so that at a distance the dark hills and dying fires seemed to be a cloud-locked firmament with a scatter of dim red stars.
About the fires three thousand or more warriors lay in fitful sleep fretted with dreams of coming battle. Here and there small knots of men sat awake, talking in low voices and sharpening iron weapons to a final hone. Beyond the dismal glow of the fires, sentries watched in the mist.
Where burned an outlying fire, another kept watch beside a solitary sleeper. Like those about him, the watcher had the appearance of a stunted giant-his massive shoulders and thick chest cast of a mold too large for his gnarled limbs. His savage face and sloping brow were twisted in concern as he stared down at the sleeping man.
Wrapped in a wolfskin cloak thrown over a light shirt of black mesh-mail, the recumbent figure was a man of medium height. The rubrous glow of the dying fire was reflected in the lambent depths of the strange red gem centered in the iron crown that encircled his high forehead and straight black hair. The sleeper’s skin was of the same bleak darkness of the North, and his hawklike features bore a certain racial similarity to those of the ogreish warriors grouped about him. There the resemblance ended, as if the brutish tribesmen were no more than a degenerate caricature of the man who wore the iron crown.
If the savage warriors who squatted by their smouldering fires resembled misshapen apes, the aspect of the sleeper evoked the image of a panther. Even deep slumber could not dispel the alert vitality of his compact frame, the savage potential evident in hardmuscled shoulders and loins, corded neck and deep chest. Lines of exhaustion etched his well-formed features, and the face beneath the gemset crown was that of a youth in his late twenties.
But his youthful face was shadowed with a burden that belied his years, and it was clear to the brutish sentry that more than anticipation of the coming battle was robbing his liege’s sleep of restoring peace. For nightmare had claimed the fretful slumber of Bran Mak Morn-again, as it had for so many nights before.
The dwarfed giant stretched out a calloused hand, then hesitated. His king had scarcely caught more than an hour’s rest during the past several days of forced march. He would need all his great strength come the dawn; better uneasy sleep than no rest at all Had the Pict understood the full horror of the nightmare in which his king now writhed, he would have awakened him from this tortured sham of sleep in an instant.
Chill sweat beaded the sleeper’s face, and behind closed lids wide-staring eyes looked upon the past.
Again the sentinel stones of Dagon’s Ring rose about him, and Bran Mak Morn stumbled as in a trance through that ominous circle of lichen-clad menhirs-a circle that in the space-defying geometry of dream seemed to extend in endless repetitions through other planes and dimensions. The silent monoliths were a maze-a vortex of elder horror from which his mind could no more extricate itself than could his shambling footsteps turn away from their twisting course toward the altar that awaited.
Sick flame in pre-Adamite darkness, the phosphorus-smeared altar drew him toward the horror that lurked in its shadow as certainly as a candle beckons a moth to blackened-winged death. And capering about the altar, her sinuous figure doubly mottled by smears of phosphorescence and the stigma of her heritage-Atla, the half-human witch of Dagon-moor. Bran’s gorge rose again at the memory of those seemingly jointless limbs entwined about his own naked flesh, or her serpentine tongue searching his throat in a kiss of loathsome passion…
The witch-woman’s lithe form postured obscenely upon the altar. Her red lips parted in a pointed-toothed smile. “Welcome! Welcome, King of the Picts!” she shrilled, opening her arms to him. “Have you returned to seek once more my sweet embraces?” Bran’s voice shook with loathing. “No madness, no vengeance could ever force me to seek again your serpent’s kisses.”
Ada’s laughter mocked his revulsion. “Then you seek again a Door to Those Below?”
A stirring in the shadows about the circle of dark stones. Bran glimpsed the shifting turmoil of stunted bodies creeping past the stone pillars-a stealthy advance of slanted, glowing eyes-barely discerned shapes of dread to whose benighted souls even the witch-fire gleam of the altar was a light to be shunned. “There are weapons too foul to use even against Rome!” Bran snarled. His voice echoed-mocking him.
Atlas derisive laughter raced through the hideous sibilants of the lurkers in the shadow. “Too foul? Too foul! And what of the fool who wields them?”
The half-glimpsed shapes cavorted between the menhirs, edging ever closer. Their ophidian whispering was a derisive menace, tearing at his nerves as the grating shrill of talons on slate.
Brans hand sought for swordhilt. “All past! All done!” he roared in defiance. “In one blind moment of rage I summoned the Children of the Night-but never again! Go back to your lairs of slime and abomination, you worms who shun the bourne of men!”
Cold iron gleamed in Bran’s fist and death shone in his dark eyes, but the witch-woman’s laughter scorned him.