Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

I frowned. "Invariably? I find that hard to accept."

"That is your right." He stopped abruptly, and then his voice changed, becoming more pensive, less outraged. "Look you, Merlyn Britannicus, I know not how it is in your land, this Camulod, but my mind tells me, from the very look and presence of you, that it must be similar to here. Here in Eire we have always known that people cannot live together without laws. The laws of each clan may differ in substance, but each has laws, and rulers, kings and chiefs and family heads to make and defend those laws, and you would be surprised to know how little most of them differ, even among clans and groups set far apart. The people you so innocently called the Wild Ones have no laws. None at all. They know no loyalties, even among themselves. They live in savagery and they are completely merciless. Woe betide any man, woman or child unfortunate enough to encounter them alone."

"Come now, they must have families!"

He cut me with a glance. "They have mates, and broods. No more." He looked around at the heavily treed land beyond the beach. "We are in their lands now. Deep within them. It is not a good place to be. I blame myself. We should have remained together."

"Don't," I told him, accepting the almost supernatural fear I sensed in him. "That would have changed nothing. You did what you thought was for the best, and it was. It was the fog that brought us to grief, not your leadership. Now, here's what I want to do. I agree with you about Donuil. He should go with you, and you must take our wounded fellow, Quintus, too." I cut Donuil's protest short with an upraised hand and continued speaking to Feargus. "As for an escort of your men, we won't need them; they would only slow us down. Fortune has been with us so far. Now all we require is a short time to allow us to dry our gear completely and make a fresh start. After that, we'll head north, following the coast as closely as we can, and try to keep in touch with you. Are there any settlements along the coast between us and where we are going?"

"Nah." His headshake was emphatic. "If there had been, we would not be here like this, undisturbed."

I looked back to Donuil. "How far is a league? In Roman miles? He said we are almost ten leagues too far south."

"About three miles to a league, I think, but that's only a guess. I'm staying with you."

"No, Donuil, you are not. You will travel with Feargus." Again I stopped his protest before it could be uttered. "Remember why I came with you, man! If we should meet any of these Wild Ones and fail to make it through, then at least the child will have a chance to return home to Camulod in your care. I know I can rely on you for that."

He looked at me long and hard, then sucked his lower lip between his teeth. I stared back at him, waiting. Finally he sighed and jerked his head in a nod. "Very well, Caius Merlyn. So be it. I do not like it, but I will do as you say. Just see that you come safe through."

I grinned at him, feeling much better. "I will, Donuil. I have no intention of dying at the hand of anyone as degenerate as the people Feargus describes. In fact, I have no intention of dying at all, ever." I turned back to Feargus. "Do any of your men use spears?"

"Spears? Aye, many of them do. Why?"

"Because I would like to borrow some. We have our shields, but only three of us carry spears and it seems to me now that we might all have need of more. We will be riding fast and hard, and if we have to fight these demons you describe, I would choose to fight from horseback, at a run, and with a strong spear in my hand."

He grunted. "I wish all requests were that easy to grant." He swung on his heel and shouted to one of his men, sending him running back towards the platform at the rear of the galley. He returned moments later, accompanied by three others, each of them bearing an armload of assorted spears. The weapons all looked heavy and serviceable and were of varying lengths.

"Excellent," I said, nodding my approval. "We won't need anywhere near that many, but there are enough to let each of my men pick one that suits him. My thanks. We can be prepared to move out from here within the hour. That should give us five, perhaps six hours of travel time before nightfall; close to your ten leagues, if fortune smiles on us and we're lucky enough to avoid your savages."

Feargus looked impressed. He turned his head to look towards our horses. Donuil, however, shook his head, looking doubtful.

"I think not, Merlyn. You won't be able to move that quickly. No roads, remember? The entire route along the coast is heavily forested. You'll be riding through trees and underbrush the whole way. It could cut your normal speed by half."

From the outset, it seemed as though Donuil had the right of it. We said our farewells within the hour, some time shortly after noon, and rode into the forest, leaving him staring after us from the deck of Feargus's galley. By the time we had progressed the distance of a bowshot, our speed had been reduced to a slow, torturous walk, and I knew that none of us had ever encountered a wilderness such as this. My vision of a steady, cantering passage had already been proved ludicrous by the difficulty our mounts had found in even placing their hooves to walk. Every step offered a potential hazard, threatening a broken leg or ankle, for this ground, beneath a canopy of mighty, soaring trees, had never been cleared. The forest was beautiful, but utterly alien and apparently unpenetrated by man; every leaf and twig and tiny branch, every limb and tree trunk that had ever grown here, down through the ages, had fallen in the course of time in random chaos and lain undisturbed thereafter. There was a verdant, lush stillness everywhere that choked all sound and made the rich greenery of Britain's great forests seem anaemic and tawdry by comparison. Moss clung to the tree trunks here as it did over there, but the moss of Eire was thicker, fatter, and it grew everywhere; on the ground, on the rocks, on the countless fallen trees, some of them enormous, that littered the ground in every stage of decay, and on the upper portions of the trees themselves, hanging in green garlands from the branches. The earth under our hooves was of rich, reddish loam beneath the carpet of dead leaves that coated it, and crusted with fungi of all shapes and sizes, many more of which also clung to the boles and branches of the trees. A few of those, I knew, might be edible, but many more would be deadly, and I had no way of knowing which was which in this new and threatening land through which we rode.

To our left, inland as we made our plodding way northward over the forest bed, the terrain rose vertically in a series of ancient, green-scummed cliffs from which giant slabs and boulders of granite had been wrenched in ages past and now leaned drunkenly in every conceivable posture, as green and lichen-scabbed as the cliffs that had mothered them. Huge trees grew up there, too, upon the cliffs and slabs and boulders, clinging impossibly to the living rock by vast networks of roots that stretched across, between, along and around the fissures in the stone, and everywhere grew clumps and thickets of brilliant, ancient-looking ferns, many of them taller than a mounted man. Little light penetrated the roof of leaves high above, but wherever a ray of sunlight did succeed, it shimmered gold-green in the silent, surrounding darkness. I was aware of rich, reddish-brown fecundity everywhere I looked, but the pervading impression was of total greenness.

I was in the lead, and now I hitched myself around in my saddle, looking back to Dedalus, who was following me closely. He saw me turn and shook his head, and the disgust in his face was echoed in his tone as he called to me. "You thought to make thirty miles before nightfall? We'll be lucky to make one at this rate." His eyes shifted from my face to the wilderness ahead of us. "Mind you," he added, "the ground's rising. We might ride out of this soon, if we're not just climbing a hill with a down slope on the other side."