Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The late spring morning was alive with new color and the sounds of birds desperate to attract a mate.
Lucius rode one of the Celtic ponies, which Sorcha led in the same way she had led him after he was captured.
Its choppy short gait jarred his spine with every step as they hurried along the valley crisscrossed by streams.
The Britons were eager to reach their next destination, which he had gleaned was a fort on the coastline.
From the greeting they expected to receive, it must be held by an important chieftain.
This morning, they had passed another settlement in the distance but hadn’t altered their direction to visit it.
He had no idea what had passed between the Britons last night.
He couldn’t follow the rapid conservation.
Whatever had been said had upset Sorcha and at first confused the youths.
Halfway through the altercation, the tension had gone out of the boys’ shoulders, but they had still listened intently to Alina as she spoke to Sorcha.
Afterwards, when Alina had led her daughter away, Sorcha had looked as limp as a well-loved straw doll. Whatever the issue, it had had a cataclysmic effect on the indomitable woman.
Garamaros had remained behind and looked around the circles of boys’ faces. “I’m sorry,” he had said. Lucius had understood those words. “…old story and I… alter what… you think… your mother or… me.” Those were the only other words Lucius had understood.
The younger two boys had stepped forward and hugged him. “No,” they said. The older ones had looked at him with speculation in their eyes and shrugged.
Garamaros had patted their shoulders. “I’m glad,” he seemed to say.
The six lads had gone to their sleeping pallets after that, their measured steps and bowed heads suggesting minds occupied by all they had been told.
Now it was approaching noon, and Lucius saw the first signs of pasturage. Woven wicker fencing divided the gently rising land into fields. Instead of sheep with almost full-grown lambs gamboling around them, the fields were empty.
Another mile onwards and they reached arable land. The newly ploughed earth had been churned up by multiple hooves. Lucius looked around for any sign of the inhabitants of the settlement above.
Something was seriously wrong here too.
Then Sorcha was racing his horse, Maximus, towards the fort that occupied the peninsula ahead. Lucius’s mount, jerked into a rough gallop, snorted in surprise. Lucius grabbed the saddle with his bound hands and clamped his legs onto the pony’s sides.
Even so, he was bounced and jolted.
Sorcha’s brothers followed at the same panicked pace.
They crossed a stream that fronted the settlement and surged towards the earth ramparts that defined the site. The wagons were left behind far behind.
The great timber entrance gates hung open and damaged. The riders careened through the gateway into the settlement. As fast as their approach had started, it halted, their mounts sinking back on their haunches.
Sorcha and her brothers leaped down onto the ground, turning this way and that to take in the scene. Lucius remained mounted—he could assess his surroundings better that way.
Before them was carnage.
The bodies of warriors and working men lay strewn where they had fallen. All the roundhouses looked ransacked. Smoke still rose through their thatched roofs. This attack was recent. His training kicked in. “Remount and arm yourselves!” he yelled.
They turned to stare at him uncomprehending of his words, only alarmed by his voice of command. “Epos. Epos,” he shouted, using their own word for horse, waving them onto their ponies. They looked at him with questioning looks, but remounted.
He urged his pony forward beside Maximus and leaned over to grasp his spatha that Sorcha still wore, whisking it from its scabbard. She yelped in surprise and tried to stop him.
Too late, he had it in his grip.
He pushed it into her hand and shouted to her brothers, indicating the sword. “Arm yourselves!”
Finally understanding, they drew their bows and arrows, daggers, and slings. He held up his bound wrists indicating with a dip of his head towards them that he wanted Sorcha to cut his bonds.
She shook her head.
“Release me. Give me a weapon. I can help you,” he said.
Again, Sorcha shook her head. Instead, she held the sword defiantly pointed at him.
Finally, Garamaros arrived, driving his wagon through the gateway at a fast pace. He halted beside the inner wall. The second wagon, driven by the youngest boy, Munganos, and bringing Alina, was still some way behind.
Garamaros’s face transformed in horror and dismay.
“Whoever did this could be here still,” Lucius said.
“Aye,” Garamaros agreed.
“Give me a weapon,” Lucius pleaded.
Garamaros shook his head. “Not this time. Wait at the gate for Munganos and Alina.” He pointed from Lucius to the gateway.
“Don’t let them enter until we have checked each house for enemies.
If we are attacked, get Alina and the boy away to safety at the hillfort we passed, then to Dun Cam.
Agreed?” With the urgency of the moment, Garamaros had slipped from Lucius’s language into his mother-tongue.
Lucius got the gist of the order. He dipped his chin once. It galled him to be sent back to safety rather than face an enemy head-on. Him, a Roman officer, sent to look after a woman and a child. He rode back to the center of the gateway to halt the second wagon.
All was silent except for the distant waves crashing on the cliffs below the fort.
Lucius watched the small group approach the largest roundhouse—undoubtedly the chieftain’s. What would they find there?
Sorcha stumbled out of the building to retch over a wicker fence. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pleasant. Garamaros followed her out. He shook his head at the eldest youth, Maonos who waited outside. “No survivors. Oglach died defending his family,” he said to the lad.
Wasn’t Oglach the chieftain Sorcha was to marry?
The craftsman put his arm around Sorcha’s shoulders, but she straightened, still white-faced and trembling, and shook him off. More detritus from last night’s fracas?
The second wagon halted before the gateway.
“No further. Searching for enemies,” he said, taking hold of the wagon’s reins and pointing within. Alina craned to see what was going on inside, but kept her seat and held Munganos in place.
Confident they would stay where they were, Lucius dismounted and strode off to inspect the settlement by himself, careful to approach only the houses that had already been searched.
That no one noticed or cared whether he stalked the settlement unsupervised, albeit with bound hands, showed the magnitude of this turn of events.
Reaching the furthest extent of the site, he peered over the edge of the cliff.
Surely there was a track down to the bottom that the villagers used to access the beach at low tide?
He searched around without any luck, until he climbed over some boulders. Beyond them was the faintest of paths leading down the cliff face. He followed it for a little way until he was confident it must lead to the bottom, then returned to the gateway.
It took some time to fully search the Dun Creg settlement. Afterwards, Maonos and Sorcha looked pale, clearly troubled by what they had seen.
Garamaros beckoned the second wagon inside. “We will empty the main roundhouse and establish Alina and Sorcha there,” he ordered.
“No,” said Lucius. “Until we can repair the gates and increase our defenses, the main roundhouse is too open and exposed. We should occupy one or two houses near the cliff edge. There is a track down that we could use if we are attacked.”
Garamaros translated his suggestion to the others.
Sorcha looked askance at Lucius, and replied in a stream of Briton, which Garamaros relayed to him. “But couldn’t we be attacked from there also? Perhaps that was the direction of the attack.”
Lucius shook his head at the suggestion. “Those slain were defending the gate. They were killed from the front, from that direction, not from behind as though they were running away from the cliffs.”
Garamaros rubbed his chin with an index finger. “I think Lucius is right.”
“Who did this?” Sorcha asked, sweeping her arm around the scene of devastation. “Romans? Dumnone? If it was Romans, we should find somewhere safer.”
“Not Romans,” Lucius replied.
Sorcha lifted an eyebrow.
“Wrong weapons,” he said. Many wounds on the fallen consisted of slashing cuts from the longer swords of the Britons, rather than the piercing thrust of a Roman gladius.
“How would Romans get here from the south coast except via the route we used?” Maonos asked.
Garamaros translated for Lucius.
“By sea, but they would not just hit here and leave. They would occupy the fort or set up a marching camp nearby,” he answered.
Garamaros nodded his acceptance of the explanation.
“Lucius, Maonos, and I will clear the houses closest to the cliffs, then move all the bodies outside the fort. Alina and Sorcha, please set up our camp based around those houses. The youngsters need to collect firewood, set snares and hunt for game, without going far from the fort.” After dispensing his orders, Garamaros stalked off towards the cliff, Sorcha beside him.
Lucius hurried to catch up. “We need to build a ditch and rampart around the houses we occupy so we can defend them. From tomorrow we must repair the gates, build weapons, and create earthen barriers behind the gate to funnel any enemy that attacks through it into our fusillade.”
“What is he saying?” Sorcha demanded.
“Military strategy for defending this place when there are so few of us.”
Sorcha halted. “And you would trust him?”
Garamaros, who had kept walking, stopped and faced Sorcha. “Yes.”
Hah! Garamaros trusted him. Why not, after all he’d done for them? Garamaros said more, but Lucius couldn’t understand it fully. Didn’t matter. Garamaros was defending him. He was sure of that.
Lucius swallowed his smile.
What was wrong with this woman, that she still despised him? He had not tried to escape, he had saved her and Maonos from capture by the chieftain of Dun Cam, and he had warned them today of the danger here. Why could she not trust him?
They found no bodies in the first of the clifftop houses. Sorcha started resetting the fire in the central hearth of the cold house.
Lucius and Garamaros departed for the next building. There, they were not so fortunate, or at the next house.
By the state of the corpses they found, Lucius estimated that the attack had occurred the previous day.
Rigor mortis was passing, but decomposition was not apparent.
He assumed the women and children had been taken as slaves by the attackers, as well as anything of value.
The absence of livestock implied all the cattle, sheep, goats, and horses had been driven away by the attackers.
Why had the attack happened? Were these tribes in a constant state of warfare? That was information his commander could use to his advantage. Yet escape remained problematic so far inside enemy territory and distant from the Second Legion.
They piled the bodies outside the ramparts. “Tomorrow, we bury them,” Garamaros said.
Later, tired, dirty, and disgusted by the job, Lucius searched for a water barrel.
How he longed for a session in a Roman bathhouse.
The lukewarm water of the tepidarium to ease his aching muscles, the steam of the caldarium to cleanse his body, and a plunge into the ice-cold water of the frigidarium to re-invigorate him.
Just thinking of that long-ago bliss made him groan with disappointment. The best he could hope for here was a good sluicing with water or a dip in the cold stream outside.
How did Sorcha keep herself smelling so fresh and her hair as clean as the tresses of a wealthy Roman matron with slaves aplenty?
Why did they not bring slaves from Mai Dun?
As the family of a king, surely they had them.
Had they been needed for the defense of the fort?
By now Mai Dun must be close to falling into the hands of the Second Legion.
The settlement, massive though it was, could not survive a siege such as the Roman army would deliver.
Why did that knowledge not give him as much pleasure as it had a week ago?
Was it because he now knew some of the barbarians who had lived there, and that the deaths of those in the fort, or their enslavement, would cause these people pain?
Barbarian though they were, they had treated him well—certainly better than his own people would have treated them had they been captured instead of him.
His frustration with not being able to talk easily with any of them except Garamaros was growing.
He wanted to understand them better and he could only do that if they could communicate fully.
His lips twisted in wry amusement at the realization he particularly wished paraulare—parley—with the intense and alluring Sorcha.
Beneath the ramparts, Lucius found a barrel full of water. He washed his hands and face. With his wrists still bound, he couldn’t take off his tunic.
Instead, he undid his boots and kicked them off. Then he unfastened the leather belt that held up his trousers. They puddled around his ankles before he stepped out of them and kicked them out of the way. He released the tie that held his loincloth in place. He sent it to join his trousers.
Washing his body one-handed was a frustrating experience.
If he pulled his tunic over his head, he could wash it so it stank less.
He tried to strip it off with his bound hands, wriggling his head and shoulders, but was making little progress. Two hands grasped either side of the material and yanked the tunic over his head. It slumped on his forearms.
Lucius spun around to thank whoever had assisted him. The words died on his lips.
Sorcha.
She stood before him, looking him up and down as though he was a prize horse for sale. Except her mouth was agape and her eyes wide open.
Was that admiration on her startled face?
Could it be possible this beautiful, strong woman felt as attracted to him as he to her? He closed his mouth and formed a smile. Holding her gaze, he held out his wrists for her to undo his bindings. “Obsecro. Please.”
What would he do if she released his hands?
Finish his longed-for wash? Run naked into hostile territory?
Or pull her into his arms and see where his physical attraction to her would lead?
At this moment, he favored the latter choice.
One corner of his mouth lifted higher at the irony of his preference.
She made no move to comply.