Alex Archer - Tear Of The Gods

We don’t stand a chance.

Myrrdin shook his head, clearing it of such defeatism. The simple fact was he no longer had any choice; there was nowhere else to run. He’d never get his men through the bogs on the other side of the hills before the enemy could catch up with them. He had no choice but to stand and fight.

Like all good commanders, Myrrdin wanted that fight on his terms, not the enemy’s, which was why he’d assembled his men along the crest of the hill while the Romans attempted to set up camp in the valley below. He hadn’t been able to choose the field on which they would meet, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t choose the time.

And that time was now, before the enemy got themselves organized and settled in.

He brought his horn to his lips and blew a long blast. The sound echoed across the valley, like a great voice shouting from the hilltop, and Myrrdin smiled in defiance as he watched the Roman soldiers milling about in response.

Behind him, his men took up the call to battle, pounding the flats of their swords against their shields, calling up a frightful racket, letting the spirits know that there would soon be newcomers, friend and foe alike, entering the land of the dead. Bare-breasted women moved among the ranks, screaming in hatred at the Romans massed below and whispering words of encouragement to their men, stoking the twin fires of courage and power.

Myrrdin let it build for a few minutes, allowing his men to whip themselves into a killing frenzy, and then, when he judged the time was right, he raised his right arm above his head, his fist clenched for all to see, and then brought it slashing downward.

Like a breaking wave his army surged into motion, pouring down the hill toward the enemy, shrieking their war cries as they went.

With a joyous shout, Myrrdin spurred his horse and joined them, thundering down toward the rapidly forming enemy line. Behind him came the rest of his horse soldiers, their voices raised in harmony with his own.

Ahead of them the Romans stood shoulder to shoulder in a long, unbroken line, waiting with disciplined ease for the enemy to make contact, their oversize shields held before them to form a wall. As the Iceni warriors closed in, the Romans unleashed a blistering rain of stones and spears from behind the protection of that wall, hoping to blunt the force of the attack. The Iceni had faced the Romans before, however, and they were ready, having expected just such a move. Almost as one they bent low over their mounts, their heads sheltered by the animals’ long necks, and as a result the majority of them made it through the storm unscathed.

Mere yards separated the two forces and Myrddin felt his lips peel back from his teeth as he bared them at the enemy like a wild animal defending its den. Heart racing, blood pumping, he let out another shout of defiance and drove his horse right into the ranks of the enemy, smashing aside that wall of shields, trampling those foolish enough to stand firm in the face of the attack under the hooves of his battle-hardened mount. Beside him, his horse warriors did the same, smashing aside the Roman line, creating a breach for their foot soldiers to exploit as they caught up with the charging cavalry.

In seconds the orderly nature of the Roman defense had dissolved into chaos.

The air was full of the coppery scent of fresh blood, the smell of leather and sweat, the screams of the injured and the dying. Myrrdin slashed about him with his sword, hacking at anyone who got close enough, striking down as many of the enemy as he could, driving his horse relentlessly forward, doing all he could to widen the gap, to give his people a fighting chance at survival. If they could break through the other side of the Roman battle line, some of them might survive to fight another day.

A tall Roman rose up on his right side, his battle-ax already in motion, but Myrrdin took the blow on the buckler strapped to his left arm. The shield shattered, smashed to pieces by the force of the blow, but it served its purpose, giving Myrrdin time to thrust his sword deep into the other man’s chest, killing him where he stood. The Iceni chieftain turned in the saddle, searching for his next foe.

The spear came out of nowhere, whistling through the air with all the grace of a weapon of war doing just what it had been designed to do. It struck him high in the right side. As luck would have it, he’d been in the midst of turning and the projectile drove into the narrow gap his mail coat failed to cover at his armpit, burying itself deep in his chest.

It was like being buried in an avalanche of ice, his sword falling away from fingers gone suddenly numb, his grip on the saddle loosening as he lost the feeling in his legs, and he tumbled from his mount to lie in the mud of the battlefield as the fight raged on around him.

As his vision began to narrow and the darkness closed in, Myrrdin could have sworn he felt the torc about his neck pulse in time with his heartbeat.

Annja Creed studied the decapitated heads on the table in front of her.

Two of them had their eyes closed, as if they’d died peacefully in their sleep, but Annja knew better than to trust in simple appearances. There had been nothing peaceful about their passing; the fact that they were sitting on the table minus the rest of their bodies was proof of that, she thought wryly. The eyes of the third were open and surprisingly free of detritus from the bog. From her position in front of the table, the dead man’s eyes seemed to stare directly back into her own, as if he were as intently curious about her as she was about him. It would have given most people the creeps, but after all she’d been through over the past few years since inheriting Joan of Arc’s mystical sword, she barely even noticed.

The heads had been unearthed in an isolated peat bog several hours north of London in the West Midlands. She’d been invited to the site just over a week earlier by an old friend from the British Museum, Oxford University professor Craig Stevens.

From what he’d explained over the phone, a pair of farmers had reported seeing a head staring up at them out of the bog while they were out hunting. Further investigation revealed that the two men hadn’t been hunting at all, but rather running an industrious little business on the side selling cut peat for fuel. They hadn’t wanted the police to know that the section of the bog they were harvesting didn’t belong to either of them.

“Of course, when it comes to decapitated heads, the police tend to be a bit pushy,” Craig said with a laugh, something Annja didn’t have any trouble believing.

The detective in charge had seen enough bog mummies to know the difference between a recent murder and one that had happened a few centuries before. He dumped the head in Craig’s lap, given his specialty in Iron Age Celtic cultures, in an effort to avoid as much paperwork as possible. Craig was more than happy to take care of the problem.

It had only taken a few days at the site before a second head turned up and that had been enough to get Oxford University to fund a small dig to see what else might be present. Annja had worked with Craig on a previous dig in Wales and he’d called to let her know that he was looking for a few experienced hands to help him out. Did she think she could make it?

It had been a while since she’d had the chance to work an actual dig. The cable television show she cohosted, Chasing History’s Monsters, had kept her incredibly busy for the past few months, rushing around the world to highlight one legend after another. As had her unofficial role as protector of the innocent and the bearer of the mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc. A week or two with her hands in the mud doing honest-to-goodness science was just what she needed.