“You suspect, my king-don’t you.”
Bran Mak Morn scowled. There was an uncanny hush to the scene. Only the motionless dead and the baffled Picts who gazed at their intended opponents in awe mingled with fear. In the silence he could hear the mournful cry of the ravens and rooks who gathered overhead-hear the somnolent buzz of the black clouds of flies that swarmed over the butchered flesh. To his nostrils came the sweet-sour reek of blood-drenched earth, of torn flesh and dangling entrails. The bittersweet stench of death drowned the scents of heather and spring morning. There was only a nebulous ghost of smoke from the embers of the Romans’ fires-all the more strange that the raiders had not put the camp to the torch.
And there was a fouler taint. Bran drew a deep breath. Underlying the scent of death he could sense an acrid reptilian musk-a stomach-wrenching stench like the miasma from a serpent’s den. That reptilian scent was ever so feint-but it was there.
Bran recognized that stench. And looking at the undermined wall, he remembered that night of dread when the impregnable Tower of Trajan had toppled upon its defenders…
“These men were slain by the blades of warriors,” Bran protested. “That much is obvious at a glance. Though I cannot say at whose hands they died, their slayers perforce were men.”
Sharp-eyed Gonar suddenly stooped to scrabble through the debris at an angle of a fallen wall. He straightened and extended to Bran Mak Morn the grisly relic he found there.
“Are you certain, Wolf of the Heather?”
Bran’s dark face for an instant lost color enough to highlight the shadows beneath his eyes. It was a severed forearm that Gonar had uncovered. Small and slender as a woman’s-but sheared from neither woman nor child. The fingers were hard and lean as a lizard’s toes; the nails were stubby spatulate talons. The dead-white flesh was hairless, though mottled with tiny scales, and the congealed blood that oozed from the stump exuded a reptilian stench.
“It would seem the victors here were not entirely successful in removing all traces of their casualties,” Gonar mordantly observed. “And while the Romans died by sword and steel, it may have been no human hands that wielded those blades.”
“I think it best no one else see this,” Bran told him-hurriedly wrapping the artifact in a scrap of cloak. “The Romans, after all, keep strange pets from strange lands-parrots and apes and spotted jungle cats. Who are we to say what beasts might not lurk in far-off corners of Asia or Africa?”
A shout from Grom spared Gonar the necessity to reply.
With growing unease, Bran Mak Morn made his way through the wreckage of the camp to where Grom anxiously called to him. A group of Picts stood murmuring fearfully, clustered about a circle of earthworks.
Then Bran reached the frightened group and saw that his initial impression was wrong. Freshly turned earth was heaped all about, but no Roman spade had shaped this tumulus. Surrounded by a mound of earth and crumbled rock, a circular pit opened from the ground just inside the wall of the camp. Roughly twenty feet across, the pit dropped to a sheer depth of at least fifty feet. There its sides suddenly sloped away at an angle, and the shadowy passage was totally blocked with clods of earth and broken stone. A miasma emanated from the pit that was at once suggestive of the foulness of a newly opened crypt and of the acrid musk of a vast serpent den.
“The Romans thought to dig a well here, and instead broke through the ceiling of an underground cavern,” Bran brusquely explained. “The mountains here are honeycombed with such caves.”
He tried not to look at the freshly torn turf whose roots were only starting to dry in the bright morning sunlight.
Grom rose from the brink of the pit. He held his gnarled palm to his face-then in sudden disgust he wiped his hand against the broken sod-continued to wipe at the foulness that clung to his fingers. His eyes held Bran’s in mute question.
But the Pictish king had already noticed the drying gobbets of slime that edged the pit-that made a grey sheen in the sunlight along the depressed streak in the earth that crossed the enclosure to the crushed and splintered barracks-and then returned as a silver band flecked with rust-red blotches. Bran thought of the mucoid trail of some unthinkably huge slug.
Bran Mak Morn did not share his thoughts with the others. Already the insidious whisper of panic stole through the Pictish ranks.
“Fungus,” he said sharply. “Some slime-mold from the cavern walls.”
Grimly Bran strode away from the gaping wound in the earth, whence something loathsome had crawled forth and, hideously sated, crawled back again. Two thousand of his enemies lay horribly slaughtered, yet there was no joy in the Pictish king’s heart. The earth had spewed forth some eons-buried horror-of that he was certain, and beyond that all was madness. Let old Gonar unravel the enigma of headless corpses and plundered fort, of unknown raiders who slew and vanished, of a severed demon’s arm and a burrow that led to hell.
As Bran quitted the nightmare-laden enclosure for the free heather without, he again heard his name hailed. In the distance he recognized Bocah, one of the clan chiefs.
Quickly Bran plunged across the expanse of moor beyond the Roman camp and climbed toward the crest of the low ridge where Bocah and several of his clansmen awaited him.
“My king,” Bocah explained, “We have found Nron, one of those who were to spy upon the Roman camp during the night. Of the others we can find no trace.”
A glance at the tight-lipped faces already had told Bran that the Pictish scout would not make his report. Bran followed Bocah’s gesture.
“Bury him,” ordered Bran Mak Morn gruffly, wondering what vision of madness had blanched the young warriors hair before insurmountable horror had burst his heart.
5
BAAL-DOR
The weather broke during the night, and the cold rain of spring drenched the morning and the day that followed. As the chill torrent washed away the grey ashes of their campfires, so did the army of the Picts melt away beneath the icy breath of horror that followed their retreat from the Roman camp.
Strangely, it was a retreat. No triumphant return-although not a Roman remained alive and the Picts had sustained virtually no casualties. Had it been otherwise-had the Picts come upon a massacre that was plainly the work of the Gaels or another of Britain’s savage tribes-there would have been a let-down, an emotional anticlimax over being cheated of their expected battle-yet with it a shared feeling of triumph that their allies had conquered a common enemy. But this… Had they found the Roman camp devastated by some deadly plague, the shock could not have been greater.
Bran Mak Morn had massed his army with visions of glory and triumph, of loot and slaughtered enemies. They would have followed him against any army Rome could muster-shouting their ancient war cries and wielding their blades with no thought save to slay until no foeman answered their feral challenge. Instead their king had led them to a scene of nightmare horror-a silent field of death where elder horror slithered up from the abysses of racial memory to whisper mad secrets dead eons had not quite buried…
Only Bran’s indomitable will had averted total panic. While terror shadowed their sodden retreat, bit by bit his army disintegrated. Small knots of warriors drifted away silently, to return in uncomprehending fear to their scattered villages-there to speak in frighted whispers of what they had seen-and to dwell upon the ancient legends of the Pictish race.