Shadow Lands Trilogy Read online

  Arthur tried to clear his eyes and focus on the ground where his steadily dripping blood was already staining the snow. With an effort he slid off the horse and immediately crumpled to the ground as his leg gave away beneath him.

  Ceinwen turned at the sound of Arthur’s curses. She instinctively checked to make sure that the horse was not silhouetted against the sky and then returned to scanning the hillside for any sign of pursuit. She absently brushed at the tears stinging her eyes and noticed her hands were trembling. She knew she was in shock; that her mind was lagging a long way behind the events of the last hour.

  Only a few hours ago she was the healer in a peaceful village, the wife of the village tain and mother to a vivacious daughter whom she loved more than life itself. She gazed down at the village and told herself once again that her husband, daughter and village were all dead. The last twenty years of her life had been wiped away in the horror of the last hour but she was not yet able to accept it or to understand where that left her now.

  She had seen others experience what she was now feeling, or not feeling, but that had been over twenty years ago when she was with the Wessex war band. It wasn’t difficult to remember the scenes from the villages that had been attacked by the Uathach but even the brutal raids of that time didn’t compare to what she had just witnessed.

  She had been a teenager back then, fearless because she had nothing to fear losing, courageous because life stretched before her with endless possibilities, but she had left that life behind a long time ago and was now a very different person. She turned and looked at the man sitting in the snow: the man she hadn’t talked to in twenty years and the reason why she had left the Wessex war band.

  Arthur looked across to her, ‘Are they following yet?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then give me a hand here.’

  She stayed where she was.

  Arthur turned his attention back to his leg and using both hands he gingerly examined the arrow still embedded in the back of his thigh. He could not remember if any of the spent arrows he had seen had barbed arrowheads and cursed himself for not noting it. Without looking over to Ceinwen he asked, ‘Did you see if any of the arrows were barbed?’

  ‘No, they were just two-sided,’ she replied without thinking.

  Kneeling up he took a small vial and a water bottle from one of his saddlebags then drew his knife and cut a slit along his ox-hide trousers where the arrow had penetrated. He poured water around the arrow shaft that protruded from his leg to clear away some of the blood then tore several strips off his cloak using the knife.

  Ceinwen looked back down the hill to see if there were any signs of pursuit but it seemed the attackers were still busy in the village below. She crossed over to Arthur and stood beside him. He ignored her and putting the torn strips in his mouth and clamping his teeth on them, he eased the knife into the arrow wound until he could feel its tip. Opening the wound with his knife he gently pulled the arrow free, grunting in pain as he did so. Blood pulsed out but did not spurt and Arthur breathed a sigh of relief through the strips clamped firmly in his mouth.

  Ceinwen knelt beside him and folding some of the strips into a solid pad she pressed it against the gash in his thigh and soaked the area with the liquid from the vial that he passed to her. The muscles in his thigh spasmed and he grunted again as the liquid burned in the deep cut. Ceinwen tightly wound the other strips around his leg to hold the pad pressed against the wound.

  Next he examined his shoulder where he had taken a blow from one of the curved swords. It was bruised and ugly but the cut was not deep, his heavy leather jerkin having taken most of the force from the blow. He repeated his actions with the water and the vial but did not try to bandage it. Using a stirrup as a handhold, and with Ceinwen’s help, he hauled himself upright. With the horse on one side and Ceinwen on the other, he hopped on one leg to where Ceinwen had been studying the village below.

  As he studied the hillside for any sign of movement he absently felt for his sword. Neither it nor the scabbard hung from his belt. He remembered losing the scabbard in the hall when he had to free his sword quickly but did not remember leaving his sword at any point. He looked around the blood-covered snow but did not see it there either. He thought it must have flown from his grasp when the arrow had sent him sprawling. He saw no movement on the hillside. He had hoped that perhaps some of the villagers had made it across the river but without horses... he left the thought unfinished and tried to make out what was happening in the village below.

  ‘Can you see what’s happening down there?’ he asked her.

  It was not easy to see much in the gloom but the whole village was crawling with the assailants. Some of the buildings were already on fire and she could see flames springing from the thatch of her roundhouse down by the lakeshore.

  ‘They’ve found the loaded supplies, I can see them being dragged out of the barns and oxen being yoked to them. Some of the houses are being fired,’ she answered, surprised at how emotionless her voice sounded.

  ‘The main hall?’

  ‘No, that’s still intact. There seems to be one figure on a horse directing the others.’

  ‘But no mounted warriors?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘No,’ she answered, unable to take her eyes away from the desecration of her village. As she watched, the full horror of what had happened began to sink in; her family, her friends, her home – all dead and destroyed.

  Arthur took her by the shoulders and turned her away from the scenes below, ‘I swear to you we’ll hunt down every last one of those bastards, even if we have to hunt them through the winter and through the Shadow Lands, we’ll hunt them down and we’ll kill every last one of them. We’ll track them to their homes and we’ll slaughter their women and children and then we’ll burn their homes to the ground in payment for they’ve done here.’

  Ceinwen looked at him and, for the first time since he had arrived at her village, she saw him for the man he now was and not as the man she once used to know. She saw the hatred burning in his eyes and knew he meant to do exactly as he said. She had seen him fighting in the hall and, staring into his gray eyes now, she felt sure that the man standing before her could and would kill the families of his enemies for what they had done to her village. She realised she wasn’t the only one to have changed over the last twenty years; for all the emotions she had once felt for or about Arthur, fear had not been one of them but as he stared down at her she suddenly realised she was afraid of him.

  She stepped away from him, leaving him clinging to the saddle for support, and said quietly, ‘We need to get away from here.’

  Arthur motioned for her to mount the horse first, ‘We’ll make for Eald and warn Ruadan and the others about this Shadow Land army.’

  Ceinwen stared at him in surprise, ‘My brother’s at Eald?’

  ‘He rode with me across the Causeway. He and the others are getting Eald ready for the journey – I told you this back in the hall.’

  ‘You didn’t say Ruadan was leading them!’

  Arthur shrugged and impatiently gestured for her to mount the horse. She did so and Arthur painfully pulled himself into the saddle behind her and they made their way across the hillside on one last sweep before leaving the scene behind them. They found no fleeing survivors on the hillside. Neither had expected to but both had wanted to make sure.

  Arthur told her to take the main way that ran through the forests from the now dead village of Branque to Eald. It was more open but it would be much quicker and he wanted to get the warning to his warriors as quickly as possible. They rode for several hours without speaking; Ceinwen weeping silently for the dead and Arthur fighting the pain from his leg. In an effort to take his mind from the flaring agony of each jolt he pondered the attack on Branque. It had been years since anything similar had happened. He remembered when he was no more than a young teenager the Uathach had raided a North Anglian village. It was the first time he had seen such a slaughter since
his own childhood. Even then they had not slain so indiscriminately. He had only seen the aftermath and while many had died more had been taken as slaves, particularly the women with children. Most of the dead had been killed trying to defend their young. Less than half the marriages produced any children and every birth was regarded as a precious blessing just as every child taken represented the stealing of an already tenuous future.

  What he had just witnessed did not make sense. Through the waves of pain he tried to think it through: they must have been after the harvest supplies – that made sense with the sun setting and the long winter ahead, but why the senseless slaughter in the hall? There must have been close to five hundred armed attackers – that was nearly as many as the combined warriors of Britain. Where did such an army come from and why? All for one undefended village? The questions repeated themselves and Arthur realised he was close to delirium. He struggled to remember where the next way-station was on this road. It would be abandoned for the winter but it would offer them shelter and a place to re-examine his wounds.

  They rode on for several hours, down the rough, wide path between endless rows of tall pine trees, the sun low in the sky and hidden by the forests to their right that stretched further than either of them knew. He fought the delirium but the questions kept returning. No such Uathach army had existed since he was a child. They raided in clans, no more than twenty or thirty and never across the seas to this part of Middangeard.

  The assailants were not Uathach, he was sure of that. They had all worn similar armour, black and uniform – no Uathach raiding band had ever worn uniform armour. The black shields he had seen all had the same device on them, a white vertical stripe with three prongs radiating from the top, possibly a star he thought. The attackers had displayed a feral, ferocious quality that had reminded him of the way he had once seen rats, maddened by winter hunger, attack a lamb. He tried to remember the ones he had seen without their helmets on and was fairly certain that they had all had black hair, so black it was almost blue, and their facial features set them apart from any peoples he had seen before. He shook his head fearing that his delirium was clouding his memory and turning them into something they weren’t.

  He was relieved to see the way-station ahead in a wide clearing to the side of the road. He pointed it out to Ceinwen and she directed the tired horse towards it. Arthur gently lowered himself down to the ground while Ceinwen opened the stable doors and walked into the darkness. The horse followed her and Arthur, with one arm crooked around the pommel of the saddle, let it half-carry him into the stable. Ceinwen automatically emptied some feed into a trough and taking the saddle off the horse began to wipe the sweat off its flanks.

  Arthur watched her for a moment then taking two buckets hanging from the wall he limped out to find the well. He came back seconds later and collected the longbow and quiver from his saddle then resumed his search for the well, using the stout longbow to take the weight from his right side. When he had collected the water and put one bucket before his horse, Ceinwen set about building a small fire on the floor and started boiling some water.

  Arthur cleaned the wounds on his shoulder and leg and re-dressed them with fresh strips. He re-applied the liquid from the vial while Ceinwen made a light broth from his rations and the water. When the meal was ready they ate in silence. They had both been preoccupied with their own pain and had barely spoken to each other since leaving the hill above Branque but now that they were sitting opposite one another and sharing a meal the silence seemed to weigh heavier and both were aware of it. The two decades since their parting had taken them each down very different roads and, for all that they might have shared in the past, it seemed they had little common ground now – except for Branque, and neither wanted to talk of that yet.

  Eventually it was Ceinwen who broke the silence, ‘How’s your leg?’

  ‘Better now I’m off that horse.’

  She nodded in reply and Arthur saw how pale and drawn her face was. Her eyes were red and puffy and her voice sounded flat and lifeless.

  ‘Can I look at what herbs and ointments you have?’ she asked.

  Arthur pointed to one of the saddlebags and she got heavily to her feet and inspected his supplies.

  ‘There’s not much here,’ she said picking through the meagre supply.

  ‘You’ve kept up your practice as healer?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Yes, for all the good it can do anyone now,’ she replied bitterly.

  Arthur was thinking quite the contrary but he kept his thoughts to himself. ‘You should try to get some sleep. I’ll keep watch for a while then we’ll ride on to Eald.’

  Ceinwen felt too exhausted to disagree; all she wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep hoping never to wake again. She watched as Arthur forced himself to stand and collect a blanket before limping out of the stable with the aid of his longbow. She knew it was unfair to blame him for what had happened at Branque, it had just been coincidence that they had been attacked while he was there, but neither was she able to thank him yet for saving her life during the attack: she wished that he hadn’t.

  Arthur felt overwhelmingly drowsy but forced himself to cross into the forest on the far side of the roadway. He found a sheltered place some way back in the trees and slumped down awkwardly with his back against a trunk and watched the road leading back to Branque.

  *

  He awoke with a start. Through the trees he could see horses and figures moving about the stables. The dark grey clouds still scudded in from the East and the light was poor. He quietly got to his feet and quickly leant against a tree for support as the pain hammered through his body from his wounded leg. Wiping the sudden sweat from his brow he strung his longbow and drew an arrow from his quiver. Moving silently and slowly he worked his way closer to the roadway. There were five horsemen, two had dismounted and he presumed that they were around the back of the stables. The horses had been ridden far and were blowing hard.

  Arthur crept closer, half-drawing the longbow. The two figures emerged from the side of the stables and briefly conferred with the others then one approached the stable door and readied to open it. Arthur recognised the tall, thickset figure with his wild thatch of brown hair that had increasingly grown to resemble a crow’s nest as the years went by.

  It was Ruadan, his second-in-command and Ceinwen’s brother. The two of them had joined the Wessex war band as young teenagers, over twenty-five years ago now, and they had immediately fallen in with Arthur and Trevenna, and the young Anglian, Cei. The five of them had been inseparable for several years but other duties had gradually taken them apart; Cei had growing responsibilities in Anglia, Merdynn would take Arthur away for months at a time, and then the chain of events had started that ended with Ceinwen leaving the war band and living across the Causeway in Branque. Arthur and Ruadan had since been through many battles and many raids together but their friendship was never on the same footing after Ceinwen had left.

  Arthur watched the group by the stables. They were all from the band he had left at Eald and he wondered where the others were and why these five were here. Ruadan was talking to Mar’h and Balor and, as he watched, Morgund sauntered across to join them. In many ways the four of them constituted the heart of the Wessex war band and Arthur was about to call out to them but he rarely got the chance to observe his second-in-command and two of his captains without them knowing he was nearby, and he was curious enough to wait and watch for a while.

  Mar’h was the elder of the two captains, a few years younger than both Arthur and Ruadan. He was a tall man with a dark complexion and a slight stoop to his wiry frame which, together with his long, straight black hair and hooked nose, gave him something of the appearance of a vulture or a raven. It was a resemblance he vehemently denied whenever Morgund cheerfully pointed it out to him.

  Arthur had taken a risk when he made Morgund a captain in his war band. It had been a few months since his selection and he hadn’t yet stopped strutting – much to Mar�
��h’s and Balor’s amusement. He was slightly shorter than Mar’h but of a much heavier build and his black-skinned, shaven-headed, muscular appearance was nothing if not imposing but the warrior’s most striking feature was his pale blue eyes. People seeing him for the first time couldn’t help but stare at the unexpected contrast between the blue eyes and dark skin, and, depending on whether it was a man or woman, it often gave him the opportunity to find either offence, where none had been intended, or encouragement, where none was actually being offered. At twenty-eight he was relatively young to have a captain’s responsibility but Arthur had gambled that the only way to curb the young man’s natural recklessness and explosive aggression was to force upon him the sense of responsibility he so patently lacked. Largely it had paid off; the only aspect it hadn’t changed was Morgund’s complete lack of conscience or restraint when it came to women, indeed, if anything his new position had encouraged those particular and relentless pursuits.

  The fourth member of the cadre was Balor but where the other three had been warriors from an early age he had only been with the war band for the last ten years. He had joined about the same time that Morgund became a fully-fledged member of the war band. Only Arthur knew the whole story behind Balor leaving his life as a woodcutter in the Wessex forests at the age of thirty-five and requesting to join Arthur’s warriors. Mar’h and Morgund had spent many drunken hours in the long winter months speculating about Balor’s story and the more favoured theories revolved, of course, around a hypothetical woman. Typically enough, Morgund’s more colourful speculation involved two women and a young girl but even he had to concede his theory was flawed when Mar’h simply pointed to Balor and asked if he really, honestly thought so. Balor was not cut from the usual warrior mould. He was a broad, bald, angry five foot four with a grey beard and blue eyes, and he only had two moods; either he was in a sullen, brooding sulk or incredibly good humoured and barking out his infectious laugh. He wasn’t known for his subtlety and his loud, argumentative and generally combative social skills rarely left anyone in any doubt where they stood with him.