Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

A braying of trumpets drifted from the west: it was a peal that announced the return of the riothamus and his army. All over the dunon work was abandoned, and everybody ran to the gate.

In the six years since Regina and Brica had been brought here, the predations of the rebellious Saxons from their fastnesses on the east coast had become a severe problem across southern Britain.

In her long conversations with Artorius about his diffuse foe, she had learned much about the Saxons. For a start they weren’t really “Saxons,” even though that was what everybody called them. After they had erupted from their homeland in the north of Germany, the Saxons had become sea pirates, traversing the Mare Germanicus, which facilitated links among Jutland, Frisia, and Francia. Now nobody could precisely say who or what they were — they were all kinds of Germanics — not that that mattered if you were on the receiving end of a Saxon blade.

The Saxons were not savages. Some of the booty Artorius had brought home from his wars, particularly the fine metalwork, was as beautiful and complex as anything she had ever seen. But they were not remotely civilized in the Roman sense. They were not even like the Vandals and Goths and Franks who were moving through Gaul. Those barbarians often tried to ape the rulers they displaced, and even tried to maintain the forms of society that had prevailed there, with more or less degrees of incompetence.

But the Saxons were adventurers, wanderers, marauders, pirates. They were certainly not capable of running anything like the old imperial administration — and besides, Regina thought ruefully, in Britain there really wasn’t much left of the old system to run anyhow, for it had all collapsed even before the Saxons got here. The Saxons actually seemed to hate the towns and other relics of the Empire. They were intent not just on plunder but also on massacre, conquest, and destruction.

The only choices for the natives were to serve the new rulers, to flee — or to die. Many people had indeed fled, it was said, either to the west and north, the harsher mountainous lands beyond the effective reach of the old diocese, or else they had gone overseas to the growing British colonies in Armorica. Great stretches of the countryside were depopulated altogether.

But Artorius and his growing armies had formed one of the few foci of resistance to the marauding Saxons.

With a mixture of Roman discipline and Celtae ferocity, even before the present campaigning season Artorius had scored nine significant victories. People had come flocking to his hill fort capital, and the petty warlords and rulers who had emerged from the collapse of the old diocese had been keen to vow their allegiance to him — Vortimer, for instance, son of Vortigern, who had tried to avenge his father’s destruction by Hengest. As Artorius’s power, influence, and reputation grew, he was slowly earning his self-anointed title of riothamus , king of kings. Not that Regina trusted many of the bandits he dealt with, many of whom she suspected of making equally vivid declarations of loyalty to the Saxon warlords.

Despite such doubts, she had no choice but to cling to Artorius, for he was a beacon of hope in a terrible time. And despite all his efforts the Saxon advance was a wall of slow-burning fire that left nothing but a cleansed emptiness behind it: Roman Britain was suffering a slow, terminal catastrophe.

The army came in a great column of thousands of men and as many horses. The foot soldiers yelled and struck their shields, the cavalry raised their slashing swords so they glinted in the low autumn sun, and the trumpeters blew their great carynx trumpets, slender tubes as tall as a man and adorned with dragons’ mouths.

As the first of the booty wagons was hauled up the steep path toward the gate, Regina saw that it was piled high with heads — the severed heads of Saxons, complete with long tied-back hair and heavy mustaches, heads piled up like cabbages on a stall, their rolled-up eyes white and their skin yellow-white or even green. Behind the cart a prisoner walked, attached by a length of rope wrapped around his hands. He was a big man with a golden torc around his neck. The skin of his face was broken and caked with blood and dust. He had evidently been dragged all the way from the site of his defeat, for he was staggering.

Women and children ran down the slope from the dunon, anxious for news of their husbands, brothers, fathers. Regina held her place, just outside the gate. It was like something out of the past, she thought wonderingly, an army from four or five or six centuries ago, the kind of force that must once have met the Caesars.

And yet Artorius had made great changes. To those old Celtae forces, fighting had been ritualistic. Armies would draw up to face each other, would make a racket and an elaborate display, and only small teams of champions would be sent to do battle together. And they couldn’t sustain a long campaign: Celtae armies, recruited from local farmers, had been forced to disperse when the crops needed harvesting. All that had had to change when the Romans had come with their propensity for pitched battles with decisive outcomes: The Celtae had quickly learned the techniques of long campaigns and massed slaughter.

Now the Romans were gone, but their lessons lingered. Artorius had been assiduous. He had even picked Regina’s brains over what she could remember of Aetius’s reminiscences of the comitatenses . Now Artorius’s warriors were an effective and mobile fighting force, just as capable as the Romans’ of waging a pitched battle — and of mounting a summer-long campaign.

But Artorius’s practices were increasingly laced with a primitive darkness.

Regina knew the old beliefs, spouted by Myrddin and others. To take the head of your enemy was to possess his soul, so when these Saxon heads were mounted on stakes around the walls of the hill fort their souls would keep out danger. Regina wasn’t sure how much of this Artorius believed, but she could see how he used its symbolism, working on both friend and foe, to cement his victories.

Regina lived with barbarians, and was the mistress of a warlord. But she could live with that until, as she always promised herself, things got back to normal, and the Emperor returned with his legions to sweep out the Saxon marauders, dissolve the petty native kingdoms — including Artorius’s — and restore Roman dignity and order, so that this brief and bloody interval would come to seem no more than a bad dream.

Now here came the riothamus himself, at the head of his army.

At the gate, Artorius embraced Regina. He was hot, his armour scuffed, and she could smell the stink of his horse. “We have won great victories, my Morrigan. Everywhere the Saxons lie slain, or they run away at the sound of our trumpets. They are falling back to their fastnesses in the east, but perhaps next season—”

“Your deeds will live on for a thousand years, riothamus .”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like Myrddin. However I hear a ‘but’ in your voice …”

“But your collection of severed heads would have appalled Vespasian.”

His face clouded. “The Caesars aren’t here. They abandoned us to the Saxons. I do what I have to do. In fact—” Artorius turned speculatively, looking east, the direction of Europe and the rump of the Empire. “Perhaps, in fact, now that we are strong, we should be planning what to do about the Caesars and their betrayal of Britain.”

She studied his face, alarmed, uncertain; she had never heard him talk of such plans before. But he was lost in his proliferating thoughts of future battlefields.

One of his lieutenants came to him. “We are ready for the show, riothamus .”