They had halted on a crest of high ground, where Din Guardi dominated the whole seaward horizon. The shape of it resonated deep inside Lance’s mind. He was looking at the dragon’s furthest stretch, her vast sleeping head, lapped by white sands and the cold north sea. “How far away are we, Drusus?”
“No more than ten miles. But this is the most dangerous stretch—we have to take care. The land’s half overrun with Anglian settlers and pirates, and... Well, you’ll see for yourself. We’ll approach through the villages where we have friends. Follow me.”
Lance started to obey, then drew Balana to a halt again. The question he hadn’t meant to ask was in his mouth before he could prevent it. “Is it true that Arthur’s to be married?”
Drusus frowned. He gave Lance a curious look, not unsympathetic. “Once more, it’s a thing that you’ll have to see for yourself. But, yes, his marriage is planned. If he lives.”
The last words blew away unworthy thoughts—disbelief, a first ache of jealousy—like sand from wind-scoured stone. Art could marry a hundred times, if only he would rise from his sickbed whole. It was his duty as king. Who knew what political alliances he would seal by taking a bride from among the tribes of the Old North?
Or perhaps he’d just fallen in love. A shiver ran through Lance, and he settled his cloak around him before following Drusus downhill and back onto the track. After all, what had Lance been to him? A day and a night, Art’s hands on him so tender and skilled that his experience, all the lovers he’d taken before, had shone out of him like sacred light. He’d never said otherwise. He’d told Lance the truth of it easily, with all the sweet pride of his nature. Except for the Beltane with his half-sister Modron, he was untouched by priestly fears or restrictions. It was better so.
When he and Drusus broached a seven-mile radius of the castle, he began to notice strange changes. The flatlands were sparsely dotted with small farms and hamlets. In these, the travellers were given a cautious welcome. Until the coming of the Romans, this land had been Votadini territory, and, just as at Vindolanda, these fierce Celts had absorbed their conquerors. They worked the sandy soils for a living, called themselves Britons just as Lance did. They had recognised Lance and Drusus as their own, Roman credentials displayed in their dark hair and the fine horses they rode. The women brought them bread and wine, eager to tell them how some of their own sons had gone to try their fortunes in the army of King Artorius.
This close to Din Guardi, though, many of the farms were deserted. Lance saw no smoke rising from their chimney holes, and no dogs came running to bark around his horse. The silences near the dwelling places were strange. Lance, the cautious hunter, eased ahead of Drusus and began to lead them down tracks with better cover, avoiding the open heath. If Drusus was amused by this takeover bid from the newcomer, he gave no sign.
The empty fields and houses didn’t look like the work of invaders. The buildings were mostly untouched. The damage seemed confined to the fields. There were odd barren places in the stubble, broad streaks where the earth was exposed. These marks gave Lance a weird pang of fear at his heart, stalwart traveller as he was, and the horses snorted and boggled at them too, and carried their riders past at a gallop.
Simpler on the face of it were the bodies of dead cattle they encountered from time to time. Cattle raids had been a fact of Lance’s life since boyhood. If the thieves were too few in number to herd the beasts away, they would catch one and kill it on the spot, butcher from it as much as they could carry, and disappear, leaving such sorry remains as the ones he and Drusus were seeing now, half-decayed and tainting the breeze with the stench of decomposition. But when he looked more closely—pushing Balana’s flanks with his heels, because she didn’t like these corpses any more than she had the poisoned fields—he didn’t recognise the wounds on them.
Surely Anglian raiders would be no less skilled than Pictish ones at stripping down a cow. They wouldn’t randomly rip and tear. One of the beasts had been cleaved clean in two, only the hindquarters left behind, the rest nowhere to be seen.
If this was the work of pirates, they were savage ones. Lance, on full alert now, began to make his way with more caution still, gesturing to Drusus to keep behind him. He hadn’t come this far to be ambushed in the shadow of Din Guardi itself. And yet, as they approached the dune meadows that rolled and gleamed to the south, he forgot his bewilderment and unease. There it was. The fort on the rock.
From this distance, it was hard to see that there was a fort there at all. The kings of the Old North had no desire to blazon out their strongholds. They hadn’t won; they didn’t own Britannia. They were under siege. The castle was only a group of single-storey halls, enclosed behind a wooden palisade. A couple of the buildings had a second floor, and the tower a precarious third, but that was all.
Lance loved it. He couldn’t define the sense of welcome that shone out from it. Arthur was there. A joyful conviction took hold of him: Art must still be alive. Once more he conquered his impulse to break cover and gallop on. He and Drusus had no guarantee that the stronghold remained in allied hands. In the time it had taken the messenger to reach him and return, Anglian raiders could have seized the place, and he knew the kind of welcome he could expect from them.
He trotted Balana into the lee of one of the dunes, gestured to Drusus to stay where he was, then dismounted and scrambled up onto a crest to take a better look. Stretching out in the prickly marram, he smiled. There were so many harebells you could almost hear them ringing in the wind. And all he could think about, looking at Din Guardi rock, was that he had come home.
No, not bells. The percussion of galloping hooves on wet sand. Two horsemen emerged from the dunes in the distance. They weren’t trying for concealment—to attract his attention, rather. Lance shifted to get a clear view. Then one of the men rode right out onto the beach, and hoisted a white flag adorned with a proud red dragon. He was waving it excitedly from side to side. Lance broke cover, Drusus following at a more sedate pace behind him.
Once the horses were within yards of one another he reined in hard, scattering sand. It was Gaius, all right—older and heavier, his homely visage not improved by a new scar that gaped down one cheek, but his old friend from Vindolanda still. “Guy!”
Gaius passed the Pendragon flag to his companion and heartily caught Lance’s outstretched hand. “Lance! I knew it was you. No-one else crosses open ground like a weasel chasing a snake. I laid a bet with that fool Garbonian that it was. And I’m short on cash. I staked my horse on you.”
“In that case, I’m doubly glad to be here. And... I can tell from your face that I needn’t have galloped quite so hard. Please tell me I’m right.”
“When my brother heard you’d been sent for, he got out of bed, told everyone he was fine and went back to work, knocking the warlords’ heads together in the debating hall.”
Lance lifted his face to the frail winter sun. Its light seemed to fill him. The fear that had driven him relentlessly across moor and dune fell away. “Thank God.”
“Yes. We had a sharp time with him, though. Forgive me for taking you away from your people.”
“You didn’t. At least—that problem’s been solved for me. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“You can stay?”
“For as long as I’m needed.”
Gaius nodded. He was smiling, but his eyes were shadowed. “That’s good. Drusus, ride on. You did well to bring our Lance home in one piece. I’ll see him the rest of the way.”
He waited until the messenger had set off down the beach. His own man fell back to a discreet distance, and he and Lance turned their horses’ heads toward the castle. “I have to tell you something,” he began, his voice unsteady for the first time since Lance had known him. “We lost Ector.”
Lance went cold with shock. He hadn’t known the old man for long, but he’d seemed as permanent as rocks and earth. “I grieve with you,” he said awkwardly. “What happened to him?”
“He was killed in a raid on our camp further south. It wasn’t the ending he’d have chosen for himself—they slew him in his sleep, his sword undrawn.” Guy negotiated the crest of a dune, and shot Lance a tired, anxious look. “I mourn for him, but my brother took it worse. I don’t know if he blames himself or the Saxons more.”
“Poor Ector.”
