It was known from stories told by mother to daughter and in the oak circles of the dryw that the Auld Folk would conduct rites and offer sacrifice in an attempt to appease or even curry favour with malevolent gods. Often the dryw of the Pecht would carve symbols of power onto the stones to counter the magic of the Auld Folk and their awful gods. Clearly this had not been done here.
The sense of power was palpable. The feeling of being on the edge of a storm was very strong but even now fading. She could feel the earth moving beneath her, vibrations that grew fainter even as the lightning flickered out. The sucking wind had long since subsided. At an instinctive level she knew that violence had been done to the very fabric of the land.
Britha walked around the stones slowly, looking for tracks, moving in a widening circle. In the soft earth beneath the trees she finally found signs. Two sets of tracks, both men by the length of stride and depth of the imprint, both carrying either spear or stave and, again judging by the depth, at least one of them armoured. One wore boots of a type she was used to seeing, though if she had been forced to guess she thought they looked more like the boots that the southron tribes wore, or even the warriors from the isle far to the west. The other man’s boots, the one who was unarmoured, were something else entirely. They had a hard sole of a type she had never seen before. She wished Talorcan were here. He had taught her how to track and hunt and would be able to get more from the tracks. She tried to ignore the tears welling in her eyes. She had to concentrate on what she was doing. Many of her tribe were still alive, though they might be little more than hosts for demons. The tracks headed south and east.
There’s no gain in courting trouble, Britha decided. She would continue south but keep away from the direction the tracks were going. Perhaps if she was lucky they were Otherworldly enemies of Lochlannach.
Britha found the first crow feeder some distance from the smoking village. The gaping wound was in his back yet he wore armour, though he had left his shield and spear behind when he had fled. The crows took flight at her approach. She took the time to spit on the coward’s corpse. She had a good mind to roll him into the Black River. He had no business being taken into the sky by the crows and the ravens. Then she remembered that these people worshipped a god of water.
‘If they are craven enough to bend a knee then this god gets what he deserves,’ she muttered, but she did not have the time to carry the coward’s corpse to the water, or any of the other corpses she saw.
Britha had seen her first glimpse of the Black River from the top of a cliff in the forested hills overlooking the mouth of the river. She’d only ever heard of the river in stories before. If anything it was larger than the Tatha. The north bank was a series of wooded hills and cliffs overlooking the river, which was studded with rocky islands, though the water did not look particularly black to her. More stone-grey under the overcast sky. She saw no demon ships either, though smoke rose from a number of places along the shore.
It had started to rain by the time she made it down to the village. It was the sort of constant drizzle that soon soaked through and made you feel very cold, though the cold still wasn’t bothering her.
The village was a series of crannogs connected by a network of bridges over the water. The crannogs were very similar to the roundhouses that Britha was used to: wattle and daub walls, conical thatched roofs held up by internal pillars lashed together with nettle rope. However, these crannogs were built on stilted platforms over the grey water.
The bridges between the houses and the land were made of strong branches cut to size and could be pulled up to isolate the buildings from the shore and each other. This defence had done little good against ships and giants. More than one of the crannogs looked like the top had been torn open, presumably by one of the giants standing in the river.
The village told the same story as her own and the others on the banks of the Tatha. They had come for the people. They had taken food as well. Those warriors who resisted were quickly killed. The tracks told of people herded onto dry land, along the pebble beach and back into the water to climb into a curragh. If she was reading the tracks correctly, then they had split their forces and only one of the curraghs had attacked this village. She guessed that the attack had taken place at least two days ago.
She looked down at one of the bodies. It was headless. The body was the largest and well fed, covered in patches of scale-like woad tattoos, and was also, judging by its hands, the oldest. Britha reckoned he had been the chief. She wondered if his head now rode on Ettin’s shoulder. She hoped that Cruibne was free from that torment at least. The headless warrior’s body wore scaled armour, a small fortune in metal, but it had been left. All the scales made him look like a fish, a true servant of their sea god. Judging by his wounds he had at least tried to fight. He had died on the smooth pebbles down by the waterside. He had charged them as soon as they came ashore.
‘Treat him well, you bastard,’ she told the river.
Britha stood on the platform that circled the furthest crannog from shore. She had had to lay the bridges back down to get there, and more than a few had been broken, presumably by the giants. She stared out across the river and out to the sea to the east, hoping to see the black curraghs but they were presumably long gone.
Sighing, she turned to look through the broken wall and roof of the crannog. The entrance faced to the east, she guessed to greet the dawn. Opposite the opening she saw an altar, carved from driftwood, the crude figure of the sea god, a scaled large-eyed man. Too Britha’s eye there was something grotesque and unsettling about the figure.
Britha cast her eyes back to the beach. The smoke had not been from the crannogs. They had left the stilt village but burned the tiny fleet of fishing curraghs and log canoes. Even if they hadn’t, if the Black River was anything like the Tatha then the tides and currents were treacherous and she would need the guidance of a local to make a crossing. She would have to head further west, deeper into the kingdom of the sea god’s people, to cross. The Lochlannach would make even more distance, but they had to be going somewhere and the land could only be so big, she thought.
Britha heard movement behind her as she looked over the seemingly calm, grey surface of the river. She loosened the grip on her spear slightly and turned around.
It was one of the Goddodin, of that she was sure. He was no spear-carrier though; he had the look of a king’s champion, the kind of massively built man that Nechtan had loved to fight because they always underestimated his speed and size. ‘They won because people feared them, not because they were good fighters,’ she remembered him telling her before he killed the last champion that Finnguinne had brought onto Cirig land.Britha wondered why the man still lived. Had he been craven? The patchwork of scars that covered his torso showed that he had not been afraid of wounds in the past, but she knew that each man and woman only had so much courage and could reach a point when all of it had been harvested. He staggered towards her, dragging his longspear and shield over the wooden bridge to the platform she stood on.
‘I did not do this,’ she said. Though he would not know her tongue. The Goddodin shared the same language of the people known as the Britons, who, like the Pecht, were made up of many different tribes. All of them were gods-slaves, to hear tell of it.
The champion was not far from seven feet tall – he towered over Britha. He wore fur leggings and trews, and his naked torso was covered in intricate blue woad scales. The top of his shaved head was likewise tattooed. Britha reckoned that his god made him ashamed to fight skyclad and that the tattoos were meant to make him look like a fish, or maybe it represented armour. The dead warriors she had seen had been similarly tattooed but not as extensively.