‘Others feel differently.’ The druid waved a hand towards Brigita and the cluster of young warriors. ‘It is their fight, for their reasons, and it is up to them to tell you if they choose. They will fight it in their way, not yours, but my heart tells me that you should go with them. You have a task to perform on this day, and so I shall not kill you. Do not presume that I will be so indulgent the next time we meet. You have chosen your path and must follow it to the end.’
‘Don’t we all do that?’
The druid ignored him. ‘I foretell that it will be a bitter end, that you will suffer much and lose all that is most precious to you. And for what? Oaths sworn to Rome and its emperor?’
‘An oath is an oath,’ Ferox said, quoting his grandfather, ‘and a faithless man is nothing.’
Acco must have recognised the words. ‘The Lord of the Hills was a greater man than you will ever be, and yet he failed, and gave in to Rome at the end. He should have fought until his last breath.’ The druid drew a short bronze knife from a sheath on his belt. He ran the blade across his palm, and tipped his hand on its side so that the blood ran down. ‘He was the greatest of the Silures.’ Acco rubbed his hand across Ferox’s forehead. ‘You are a Roman, and one day soon you will die with all the others.’
Ferox blinked because some of the blood had got into his left eye. Once it was clear he stared up at the druid.
‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ he said in Latin, for he knew that the druid spoke the language.
Acco licked the cut on his palm and then spat onto the pebbles. ‘What would a poet and a Roman know of such things?’ He said no more and simply strode away towards the boats. The spearmen went with him. ‘Dog,’ the druid called, without looking back, and the little mongrel scampered awkwardly after him. The smell of the old man and his pet lingered after they had gone. Ferox wondered about his last words, for it seemed that he had known the saying came from Lucan’s Pharsalia, although the poet claimed that this was what the druids believed.
The warriors pushed the long slim boats out into the water and then jumped in. Acco sat in the stern of one, his back to the beach and he did not glance back. The great red ball of the sun rose above the horizon ahead of them, while overhead the gulls burst into a frenzy of harsh cries, one calling out and others answering. A single long canoe remained on the shale.
Bran untied him, and they sat there, waiting. After a while Brigita came over to them. ‘Come,’ she said.
Nine young men sat in a circle at the edge of the beach, a few in trousers and the rest in the tunics of the kind favoured by Hibernians. Six of them had smooth chins, not yet requiring the touch of razor, and the other three were not much older. One had cultivated a thin moustache, and he might have been seventeen, but no more. He was the only one wearing a mail shirt, although several others had bronze or iron helmets, all of them simple bowls with stubby neck guards and cheek pieces. All had stout shafted spears lying on the ground beside them, several with large, jagged edged blades, and a couple of slim javelins. All of them had swords, mostly the long slim blades of the tribes, some pointed and some blunt.
The three women were a little older, although none were much more than twenty. One had blonde hair and wore a scale cuirass, alternate scales gilded and polished bright. Another was a redhead, in a short cuirass of horn and hide of a type Ferox had seen now and then among the Sarmatians on the Danube. He wondered how it had travelled to this faraway place, because the wearer had the look of the Creones about her. The third woman was the one they had saved from the pirates. Her tunic was badly torn, and her repairs had left it as little more than a skirt. It left her breasts exposed, and it was odd that no one, with the exception of Bran, paid any attention, for she was a handsome woman, if stern, her brown hair plaited and made into three coils.
All three women wore short tunics, and had bare legs apart from the soft calfskin boots that covered their shins. The redhead and the blonde had helmets resting beside them, and both were wrapping their long plaits into a tight ball so that they could put them on. All three women wore swords at their belts, similar in fashion to those of the young lads, and like them had a spear and a pair of javelins. Shields were a mixture of shapes and sizes, from the little square and round ones favoured by many northerners to big oval and hexagonal ones.
If Ovidius had been here he would no doubt have spouted Herodotus and spoken of amazons. In truth, the boots and tunics did give them something of the look of those mythical female warriors. Their skin was fair, almost the white of so many paintings, since they were all Britons or Hibernians. Ferox had seen Brigita fight and knew her skill, and in this place there seemed nothing at all unnatural about a band of warriors including both women and men. All of them, even the ones who were no more than boys, moved with the care of long hours of training, never wasting effort and doing what they wanted to do and no more. They were not soldiers, and in some ways reminded Ferox more of gladiators or even athletes.
Sitting in the middle of the circle was a silent figure covered in a long, hooded cloak. Brigita led him between a couple of the sitting warriors. ‘These are my sisters and brothers,’ she said, and then stopped suddenly. He looked at her, then at the hooded and cloaked figure, but no one said or did anything. The gulls were still shouting.
The queen placed her hands on either side of his face and stood on the balls of her feet to kiss him. It was sudden and more than a little aggressive, as well as pleasant. It was a long kiss, and then it was over and she stepped back. ‘I was curious,’ she said. ‘I am not curious anymore.’ The warriors, male and female alike, laughed, sounding much like a group of children.
‘Enough games.’ The voice was husky without being manly. Throwing back her hood, a woman stood up. She was not especially tall, and her arms were big enough to suggest strength without seeming out of proportion. Her hair was a dark blonde, long and unbraided, her eyes a deep brown, and her skin darker than was common among the tribes. Ferox wondered whether there was some Roman or Mediterranean blood in her family, for it was more than the shade that came from long exposure to sun and wind. He guessed that she was less than forty, perhaps a good deal less, although it was hard to tell. She wore a simple tunic in a drab blue-grey, had a sword at her belt and the same boots as the other women, but had neither armour nor helmet.
‘This is my mother,’ the queen said, bowing her head.
Ferox guessed that it was a kinship of oaths, like her brothers and sisters.
‘My name is not for you,’ she said gruffly. ‘Some call me a witch or hag.’ The lines of her face were strong, not pretty or soft in any way, and yet striking. ‘These are my children, bound to me by oaths and come to learn from me if they prove worthy, as others have come in the past to learn from my mother and all the mothers back until the start of all things.’
‘I had often thought that you were a fable,’ Ferox said. ‘And feel now as if I was walking in a song.’
‘Then the song must carry us with it,’ she said. ‘It is time for a reckoning. Your people attack the dun from the land?’
Ferox nodded. In the past he had found Acco to be well informed.
‘They will have a hard fight. We will see whether we can help them, but we must come by another path.’
‘There is a place where the cliffs can be climbed,’ Brigita explained. ‘I climbed it once when I was training. It was hard, but I reached the very top of their stronghold, where it reaches a peak.
‘Cniva and all his kind must die,’ the ‘mother’ said. ‘Brigita tells me that you are a warrior of renown. She says that you fight well, if a little crudely.’ Thank you kindly, Ferox thought, and wondered whether that was the mark of a good soldier. ‘My children are the best of many tribes. A few have fought and killed. Most have not. I teach them to fight alone. Today, you must lead them. Will you do that?’