Pendragon, p.1
Pendragon, page 1
PENDRAGON
BOOK 2 IN THE CHRONICLES OF ARTHUR
PETER GIBBONS
For my family, as always.
Men went […] with a war-cry,
Speedy steeds and dark armour and shields,
Spear-shafts held high and spear-points sharp-edged,
And glittering coats-of-mail and swords,
He led the way, he thrust through armies,
Five companies fell before his blades.
[…] He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress
FROM ‘Y GODODDIN’, A WELSH POEM WRITTEN BY THE BARD ANEIRIN IN THE SIXTH CENTURY
CONTENTS
Map
The Great Sixth-Century Kingdoms of Britain
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Glossary
Historical Note
More From Peter Gibbons
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Peter Gibbons
Warrior Chronicles
About Boldwood Books
THE GREAT SIXTH-CENTURY KINGDOMS OF BRITAIN
After the collapse of the Roman Empire in 400ad, the legions left Britain to descend into a place of constant, brutal warfare. By the sixth century, the island is ruled by fierce kings from behind crumbling Roman strongholds and menacing hilltop fortresses. The south-east and western kingdoms have fallen to marauding Germanic invaders known as Saxons. The Saxons are a warlike people from across the sea, first invited to Britain by Vortigern, a weak king of a small kingdom, to aid him in his wars against the rival kings of Britain.
Rheged – Located close to Cumbria in modern-day England. Ruled by King Urien from his seat at the Bear Fort. Warriors of Rheged carry the bear sigil upon their shields.
Gododdin – A kingdom in Britain’s north-east, close to modern-day Northumberland and East Lothian. Ruled by King Letan Lyddoc from his fortress Dunpendylaw. Gododdin’s warriors march under a stag banner.
Dal Riata – Kingdom on Scotland’s west coast, covering what is now Argyll.
Dumnonia – Ruled by King Uther Pendragon. Dumnonian warriors march to war with a dragon sigil upon their shields. Located in Britain’s south-west, mainly in modern-day Devon, Somerset and Cornwall.
Gwynedd – Ruled by King Cadwallon Longhand. Located in north Wales and Anglesey.
Elmet – Ruled by King Gwallog. Located in the area around modern-day Leeds, reaching down south to the Midlands. Elmet’s warriors wear the lorica segmentata armour and red cloaks of the Roman legions.
Bernicia – Lands lost to Ida, the Saxon conqueror. Covers what is now south Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, and Durham. Its warriors once fought beneath the proud banner of the fox.
Deira – Lands stretching along much of Britain’s west coast, which fell to Saxon invaders in Vortigern’s Great War.
Lothian – Ruled by King Lot, encompassing what is now south-east Scotland.
Powys – Ruled by King Brochvael the Fanged. A large and powerful kingdom in what is now central Wales.
Pictland – Lands occupied by the Picts in Scotland’s north.
Demetia – Lands in the south-west of what is now Wales. Ruled by King Morholt and his Irish warriors who took the kingdom by force.
Gwent – A kingdom between the Rivers Wye and Usk, in what is now south Wales. Ruled by King Tewdrig.
Lyndsey – A Saxon kingdom lying between the River Humber and the Wash, ruled by King Cwichelm.
Benoic – A Brythonic kingdom on the borders of Armorican Brittany and Gaul, ruled by King Ban.
Cameliard – A Brythonic kingdom in Brittany, neighbour to Benoic. Ruled by King Leodegrance.
1
542AD, BRITAIN
Arthur brought war to the Saxons.
He led his savage black-cloaked warriors ranging deep into the kingdoms conquered by Saxon invaders a generation ago, hunting the enemy in the lands the Britons called Lloegyr, the lost lands. A man of no kingdom, Arthur was a lord of war without subjects, lands, hall, wealth or title. Arthur had nothing but his reputation and one hundred warriors oathsworn to fight and die under his command, and Arthur fought to push the Saxons back and stem the tide of their inexorable advance. His men called him lord, as did the kings and warlords who ruled Britain’s other kingdoms born in the wake of a decayed, collapsed and withdrawn Roman Empire. The title of lord was a mark of respect, an honour bestowed upon him not because he was the son of a great comitatus or war leader, but because he was what they needed him to be. A brutal warlord to strike fear into the hearts of the ruthless Saxon invaders. The raiders and killers who had come to Britain’s shores with their ships, flaxen hair, axes and an unquenchable thirst for battle, land, slaves and glory.
On a spring morning when frost steamed from heath and meadow like the breath of Arawn, Lord of the Underworld, Arthur led five score warriors across a wide pasture. He was a tall man of twenty summers, but already bore the marks of battle on his lean, scarred face. Wet grass soaked through his boots and with each breath clouds came from his mouth in billowing gusts. A boy had rubbed Arthur’s chain-mail clean with sand and its links shone like a dragon’s scales beneath his night-black cloak. Heavy shields of linden-wood boards bossed and rimmed with iron clanked against ash-wood spears as Arthur’s war band marched across the eerily still meadow. A dog barked in the village beyond, wandering amidst Saxon pit dwellings, their hovels dug into the ground and walled with wattle and topped with grey winter-soaked thatch.
‘Flank them,’ Arthur said, turning to Dewi, a lugubrious veteran and capable captain. ‘The women and children can go. The warriors die.’
‘Forgive me, lord,’ said Dewi with an upside-down smile. ‘The women and children will fetch a good price at the slave markets and we need food and ale.’
‘No slaves. Women and children will spread word of what they see here. Take whatever food and livestock we can find.’
Dewi nodded and barked a well-practised order. Two score warriors loped off east and west to surround the Saxon settlement whilst Arthur marched straight towards its middle like an arrow.
‘This place is home to the men who raided Rheged’s borders last summer,’ Arthur called to his men. ‘You all remember the village with the twins. Now is the time for vengeance.’
The sight of a pair of small girls, twins with chestnut hair and milk-white skin left butchered in a blood-spattered barn, would never leave Arthur’s mind. Another horror to join the army of dead folk who lived on inside Arthur’s head, their fetches haunting him, demanding vengeance, urging him to strike on behalf of the sheep fallen to vicious Saxon wolves. His men needed little reminding, but Arthur wanted that memory burning in their hearts as they fought an enemy on stolen land Britons had once called home.
Arthur touched the bronze disc at his neck and the silver cloak pin he wore inside of his belt for luck as he splashed through a babbling brook and strode up its shallow bank. Two dozen Saxon hovels lay between older, timber-built British houses. Smoke rose from thatch and earth-clad roofs, and the same dog continued to bark, straining at a hemp rope tied to a wooden post. A woman came from a dark doorway with a greasy fur about her shoulders and long, braided hair. She carried a clay pot towards the brook and shrieked as her eyes fell upon Arthur in his bright helmet topped with a plume of raven feathers, his chain-mail coat of armour, heavy shield and the sword belted in a red scabbard at his waist. The sword. Excalibur. A gift from Merlin the Druid. Once named Caledfwlch by Neit, god of war, when she was forged in the distant mists of time. Ambrosius Aurelianus had wielded her glorious edge during the Great War, and now she belonged to Arthur.
The woman dropped her clay pot and ran. She slipped in the mud and scrambled to her feet, diving into the darkness of her hovel. Arthur took two more strides and a big man burst from the same leather-covered doorway, his golden hair long and his beard hanging in two great braids across his bare chest. He carried a Saxon war axe in one hand, the seax which gave his people their name in the other. The Saxon bellowed at the top of his voice, rousing his people, warning them of the war band come to kill them on a bright and frosty morning. Balin of the Two Swords hurried past Arthur, reaching for the blades strapped to his back. Balin drew a sword across each shoulder and approached the axeman, blades held wide. The Saxon bellowed a rumbling guttural challenge, and he swung his axe in a mighty blow to take Balin’s head from his shoulders. But Balin ducked beneath the bearded axe to open the Saxon’s belly with his sword’s edge. The Saxon fell to his knees, clutching at the gaping wound, holding in his insides with bloody hands. Balin reverse swung the blade in his left hand and cut off the man’s head with one clean blow.
Arthur drew Excalibur. Its ancient blade scraped on the wooden throat of its fleece-lined scabbard. He caught a whiff of the lanolin smeared upon the sword to protect its god-forged blade. He pointed Excalibur towards the village, and his warriors whooped for joy, exultant at the chance to kill their enemies. More Saxon men stumbled from their homes, eyes bleary with sleep, clutching axes, seaxes and spears. They came to defend their stolen village and the families within. A grey-bearded Saxon with a mouth full of brown teeth came at Arthur, his spear levelled and hate in his pale blue eyes. Arthur batted the spear point away with the flat of Excalibur’s blade and let the Saxon’s momentum take him into the blood-hungry black cloaks, who cut the enemy down without mercy or hesitation.
Arthur left the slaughter to his warriors, to his hard men who had spent the last two years in constant warfare. They were the Saxon-killers, the men who hunted the enemy beyond Lloegyr’s borders, taking the fight to a foe who would otherwise spread like a plague into the Britons’ borderlands of Rheged, Elmet and Gododdin. The howling of terrified women melded with the furious war cries of their warrior husbands. Men from across the narrow sea who had crushed the Britons and conquered the eastern coastline, casting its kingdoms to ruin and enslaving populations with their devastating Saxon war-cunning.
Arthur marched through the snarl of hovels, barns, pigsties, chicken coups and mud-slathered pathways. Ahead, a Saxon hall loomed above the smaller dwellings, little more than a barn topped with a ship’s prow badly carved to resemble a rearing eagle. A dirty-faced woman clutched an urchin into her skirts and then ran, following her people towards the perceived safety of their lord’s hall. Saxon chiefs lived in such halls along with their retainers, his hearth troop of oathsworn warriors. It was the same in every Saxon village Arthur destroyed. He had a question for their headman, their chief, their lord. The same question he had asked a dozen such men in the last year, and he would not stop searching until he found the answer.
Six Saxon warriors charged from the hall. Men with drooping moustaches and hard-baked leather breastplates. They carried heavy shields and leaf-shaped spears and they charged at Arthur, eyes full of fear and faces set hard towards their enemies. Arthur flexed his hand around Excalibur’s hilt, the blade perfectly balanced, the sword singing its blood-lament to him above the sounds of the dead and dying. He hefted the heavy shield in his left hand, fingers curled around the wooden grip within the bowl of its iron boss. Balin of the Two Swords rushed to Arthur’s side, and they met the Saxons head on. At the last moment, when he could see the ale stains on their breastplates and smell the acrid stink of their sweat, Arthur surged forwards. He drove his shield into the enemy opposite him, crashing its rim into the bottom half of the Saxon’s shield. It tilted forward and banged against the man’s shins, and he gasped in horror as one of Balin’s swords snaked over the shield’s edge and tore out his throat. Arthur turned, smashing Excalibur through a spear shaft, and drove his shield rim into the spearman’s face, crushing his nose and smashing teeth.
Arthur left the remaining enemy warriors to Balin. Swords rang and men howled in pain as Balin lunged, parried and cut with the precision of a master swordsman. Arthur went to the hall, catching glimpses of his men charging from the flanks, roaring their attack with a fury to dim the sun. He reached the hall’s steps, fallen logs set into a grass-covered knoll upon which the hall perched, its eagle prow glaring down at Arthur with hateful, white-painted eyes. He kicked the door open, and a warrior charged him clutching a long-handled war axe. The axe scythed through the air, cutting through the stink of smoke, stale ale and curing meat. Arthur caught the axe on his shield and the impact jolted up his arm and shoulder. He let go of the shield, and the axeman kept moving, bullying Arthur back with his broad shoulder so that Arthur’s sword hand became trapped under the Saxon’s arm. Arthur reached down with his left hand and pulled the heavy stone sceptre, as long as a man’s arm from elbow to fingertip with three wicked faces carved into its bulbous head, free from his belt. He whirled the sceptre around and slammed it into the Saxon’s head, crushing his skull with a loud crack. The sceptre came away with the cruel faces carved into its head dripping with blood, matted with hair and bone.
Arthur stepped into the gloomy hall, lit sparingly by a mean hearth fire and two spluttering rushlights. Wide-eyed women stared at him from the room’s edges, and men cast their eyes down, unwilling to meet the eyes or challenge from the blood-spattered warrior who had turned their morning to ruin.
‘I am Arthur of the Britons,’ he shouted in Saxon. Arthur had learned the invaders’ language to better understand his enemy, and the people crammed into their lord’s hall gaped to hear a Briton speak their mother tongue.
The women and old folk in the hall screamed as a tall warrior spat at Arthur and, in response, Arthur flicked Excalibur with his wrist, slashing open the Saxon’s cheek. Holding Excalibur and the bloodied sceptre out before him, Arthur made sure all the people inside the hall could witness the horror. They saw the terrible face of a war that Arthur’s people had been subjected to ever since King Vortigern invited the Saxons to Britain’s shores to fight against his fellow kings in a war for overlordship.
‘How dare you attack us?’ said a croaking voice. A heavy-paunched man in a yellow cloak limped towards Arthur from the hall’s dark recesses. He wore a bronze circlet upon his brow and a thin silver chain wrapped about his sagging jowls. ‘I am Othere, and these are my people.’
‘Your people raided across the border last summer. They stole cattle and sheep, slaughtered three families, and left murdered children to rot in the ashes of their parents’ homes. I have come to you for those people. I am their vengeance and their wrath.’
‘Take cattle and sheep. Take horses if you wish, but still your blades, young warrior. Let my people be.’
Arthur stalked between the Saxons, who shuffled and cowered away, leaving a pathway upon the rush-covered floor between him and village leader. ‘You gave the order for last year’s raid, Othere?’
‘I did. All men raid. Your people raid. We are warriors.’
‘You came to Britain from across the narrow sea?’
‘Just so. I came with Horsa, one of the first of our warlords to set foot on these shores, with nothing but my axe and have built for myself a lordship.’
‘You have grown fat and rich on stolen land, and built your wealth on a mountain of corpses. I seek a woman, Othere. A woman with blue eyes and hair the colour of a crow’s wing. She is a young woman of my people, a nobleman’s daughter captured by Saxon warriors two summers ago when your people lost a battle at the river Glein.’
‘I remember it well. My son died that day, and my nephew.’
‘The woman?’
‘There are many Wealas women with blue eyes and black hair, young warrior. How should I remember one slave girl amongst a flock?’
Wealas. The word sent a shiver of anger across Arthur’s shoulders. It was the term Saxons used to describe Britons, and in their cruel tongue it meant slave. The missing girl was Arthur’s foster sister, Lunete. Saxon warriors had captured her on the eve of Arthur’s glorious victory over a Saxon horde beside a glistening river, and he had searched for her ever since.
He held up the heavy stone sceptre. ‘I took this from King Ida of Bernicia when I cut off his hand. I killed his son, Ibissa, and laid waste your army. Has anybody in this hall seen a girl of my people with blue eyes and black hair?’ Arthur realised he was shouting, and that Balin and Dewi had entered the hall.
The Saxons stared at Arthur with hateful eyes and mouths twisted in contempt. He sighed. Othere breathed heavily, like a cow waiting to be milked. His rheumy eyes flicked from Arthur to the sceptre, and a pale tongue licked across thin lips. Arthur turned on his heel and marched towards the door.
