Адриан Голдсуорти - The Encircling Sea

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?’

Ferox looked around him at the young faces, most of all Bran, who had for the moment given up trying to sneak glances at the brown-haired girl in the hope that her cloak had slipped open to reveal her bare torso. He wondered what Acco and Brigita had said about him. It seemed mere chance that had brought him and the others here, and yet the druid had spoken of a purpose and a task ahead of him. There would be fourteen of them, for he could not count Bran and somehow sensed that the mother, for all her skill, would not fight.

Fourteen was not many, even if they managed to climb this cliff and get inside the stronghold. They might be able to help the main assault, or they might be surrounded and slaughtered if the attack bogged down or failed.

‘Give me my sword,’ he said.

THE STRONGHOLD LAY on a narrow headland on the north side of the bay. Its two stone ramparts crossed from shore to shore. The first was about fifteen feet high, including a simple four-foot-high stone parapet. A ditch ran in front of it, filled with a dribble of water, which would make it slippery if nothing else. The first wall had an open entrance near the sea on the left, which the pirates had blocked with a small wagon piled up with sacks and barrels. Behind the first line the land climbed, and added to the height of the second rampart, where the stone was reinforced with timber and topped by a wooden parapet, much like the one at Vindolanda or any other army base. A man on the second wall could easily throw missiles down onto the first or into the ditch in between them, but it would be much harder to shoot back at them. The main gate was on the right, protected by a tower. Inside were houses, arranged without much sense of order, and the ground rose as it narrowed. A single house stood inside a wicker fence at the end of the promontory, looking down over the bluffs.

Around the anchorage there were a dozen or more houses, a mix of the round native type and low rectangular huts were dotted around the open country, but all were empty by the time the Romans landed. The pirates left behind a small merchant ship drawn up on the sand, a few scant possessions in the buildings, and the smoking hulk of a trireme, burned almost down to the waterline. The glow of its fiery end had guided the convoy to the harbour. It seemed a strange gesture, and Crispinus wondered whether it was meant to show that the pirates would fight to the end because they had chosen not to escape. He saw no sign of unexpected allies eager to help.

‘You reckon at least one hundred and fifty fighters?’ Crispinus had already asked the question several times.

‘At least that, my lord, and probably a good few more.’ Vindex gave the same answer. ‘We may not have seen their whole strength. A good few are dead or won’t be fighting anyone for a while.’ The Brigantian had arrived as they were landing, accompanied by a Batavian, both of them shouting that they were friends to avoid being mistaken for Usipi. He had told them about the fight at the tower, and of Ferox’s plan to burn Cniva’s warship.

‘But he didn’t get near it. The Red Cat says they met a band of warriors who took the centurion and the others away. The ship was already burning. He reckoned that the warriors may have done it, but could not say for sure. They all left by boat after that.’

Crispinus was not inclined to count on help from mysterious allies, and preferred to believe that the pirates had made a grand gesture of their own. They certainly looked determined enough. He was three hundred paces from the outer rampart and he could see it lined with dark figures carrying black shields.

‘Say two hundred or so,’ Aelius Brocchus concluded, ‘along with women and others who can throw or drop rocks if they cannot swing a sword.’ If the cavalry prefect resented the presence of the military tribune, he did not show it. Crispinus had travelled back quickly from Hibernia, and by luck as much as the shipmaster’s judgement had sighted Brocchus and his ships already at sea and joined them. In spite of his youth he was senior, so assumed command of the expedition. A victory here would do much to round off his first spell with the army, adding to his earlier achievements and the promised corona civica.

Cerialis had gone with thirty Batavians to secure the tower and his lady. They had found a small cart by the houses, and the men dragged this along to help carry the wounded. That was more than an hour ago, and they ought to return before too long.

‘No archers, you say?’ Brocchus said.

‘A couple,’ Vindex said. ‘But not that good.’

‘Slings?’

‘None we saw.’

‘Good,’ the prefect said. ‘So javelins will be the big danger, and stones thrown by hand. He turned to one of the centurions commanding a trireme. ‘Are the ladders long enough?’

‘Should be, my lord. I cannot see how deep the ditch is behind the first wall, though. If it drops a lot, then they may not reach.’ They had brought four ladders with them, each a little over twenty feet long, for Brocchus had guessed that the pirates’ lair was likely to have some sort of stronghold. He wished now that he had brought more. Men had been sent to scour the buildings, but there were no timbers long enough to be made into ladders. The sailors had produced ropes with grapnels on the end, but he doubted that anyone other than the ships’ crews would have the skill to climb them.