The flats to the south of Din Guardi were a grand place for mindless exercise. For a while the whole troop rode in contented silence. While talks were in progress, both Arthur and Coel had forbidden any private sorties amongst the Anglian populations, and Coel’s men had been just as cooped up in the fortress as the kings in their debating hall.
Sun struck off the sea, flashing between dunes to their left, blue and bronze lights turned blood-red through Lance’s eyelids as he tried to squint against it. Apart from Balana, the horses had been standing overfed in their stables for days. Soon they got into the swing of a good long pull, and scarcely needed urging. The air was rich with salt and gorse. Lance, whose world had contracted to the sweetness of pure action, to the satisfaction of flying wing to wing with Art, was sorry when the sight of a village in the distance ahead recalled him to his sense of purpose, the work they’d come out here to do.
Art had remembered it too. “Garbonian!” he yelled above the pounding of hooves. “Is that Spindlestone?”
The prince drew alongside. “Yes. The heughs, anyway. Hamlet’s a mile or so south.”
“Britons? Friendly?”
“Last time I looked, Your Majesty. Nothing but a mill, some crags—they call them heughs—and a few stone huts, though.”
“I don’t care how small it is, sir,” Art said sharply. “Didn’t one of the farmers who came to the fort this morning say he was from there?”
“I think so.”
“That’s where we start our search for these godless raiders, then.” He signalled to the knights and troops, and Lance watched them fall into a rough defence formation around him. None of them seemed keen to take the rear, and after a moment, when Art’s attention was fixed on the track ahead, he slowed Balana up to cover the gap.
The open turf became fields, divided by the lie of the land more than any force of ownership. The earth was good enough, but full of sand, and Lance read in the bare winter soil the signs of a struggle for subsistence.
He couldn’t understand the Anglians’ habit of raiding here. Yes, there was the odd stronghold like Coel’s, tribal kings whom the Romans had left rich, but they were desperately thinly scattered. The spoils from the hamlets, the farms, must be scarcely worth the wear to their horses’ hooves. They had a history of conquest, he supposed, a warrior’s inheritance that drove them on.
And yet here too the damage did not look like the work of men. Lance saw a burned-out trail ripped through a wheatfield, just as he had on his way to Din Guardi the day before. Long, thin, twisting, leaving the soil bare, the stubble blackened. In the corner of a paddock, five sheep were down, raw chunks torn from them. How was it that Art wasn’t seeing it?
None of the others were, either. They were riding like good Roman equites, eyes fixed and forward, now that the gallop had become a patrol. Lance thought about overtaking to point out to Art or Guy the strange destruction, but now they were being funnelled out of the fields and onto the track to the village, and their rear was vulnerable. He settled Balana down to a stolid canter, kept her on the middle stripe of grass that bisected the track, muffling the thud of her hooves so he could listen, and he kept the watch.
***
Three farmers, the miller and his brothers. A blacksmith who doubled up as a baker, and the wives and children belonging to these men. That was the population of Spindlestone Heughs. Prior to last night’s raid it had been twice that—or three times or ten; it was almost impossible to tell. The survivors were in utter disarray.
Lance, arriving half a minute after the others, had thought the destruction complete. Doors gaped open, and the fire lay in ashes beneath the cold forge. A few skinny mongrel dogs ran out to snarl at the horses, but these were the only signs of life. Drawing Balana to a standstill in the little square around which the few houses were clustered, he was in time to see Arthur lower his head and clench his hands on the reins in a spasm of rage.
Then, one by one, the little crowd had emerged, from haylofts, ditches, the shadows of the wood that topped the crags, all the places they must have sought refuge the night before. Arthur dismounted, and the men and women clustered around him, telling him five different stories at once. Art looked round. “Lance!” he demanded. “Where have you been? None of these people speak Latin, and they don’t understand me. What are they saying?”
Lance swung down from Balana and listened. He got a little further than the southern king, but the villagers’ dialect was so obscure, their accent so rich, that he too was only picking out one word in ten. Coel’s soldiers, some of them local, gathered round and tried to help, which somehow worsened matters, until Arthur made an angry gesture of cut-off. “All right!” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll find the bastards who did this, I swear. If they’ve taken your children, I’ll bring them back. I’ll find them.”
Chapter Eleven
He ordered two of Coel’s men to stay behind and help restore order, and gave the eldest miller a pouch of coins, indicating to him with signs that he should distribute them. Then he sprang back into the saddle and rode off, Lance and the others in tow, leaving the villagers to stare after them, a small, bewildered huddle.
Lance let him be for a while. His profile was coldly set, hard to read. The lane that led from the village was even narrower than the one they’d followed into it, and seeing that Guy had taken up the rear, Lance let Balana draw abreast and canter alongside. He said, gently, “Arthur.”
He came back from a great distance. To Lance’s surprise, he found a smile. “Yes, Lance?”
“I didn’t understand much of what they were saying. But…”
“But you did get some of it, and you’ve been waiting in the hope that at some point my face might start looking less like a boar’s arse.”
“Something like that,” Lance admitted. “It didn’t sound to me as if they were complaining about raiders. They said… They kept saying that the worm had come.” Art turned on him an expression of blank incredulity, but he braced up and continued, “Also that… all their cows had been milked dry in the night.”
The words hung strangely in the chilly air, like the reverberation of a bell. Arthur rode on in silence a few paces. “Are you saying to me you believe that these poor people are under siege by some… unnatural beast? Some dragon or giant bloody worm?”
Lance hadn’t decided. He’d only been reporting what he knew. But hearing Art put it like that made him shake himself. What did he believe? In Anglian raiders, obviously. Anything else was absurd. “No,” he said. “No, of course not. It was just strange.”
“I know. But they were in shock, Lance. Half of what they had was destroyed last night. A kind of madness comes on ordinary men after that kind of loss. For a while they’re not themselves. Believe me, I’ve seen it before.”