The Last Archdruid

From the high stones of the northern wall, the land lay open like an unrolled map, and upon it crept a darkness that was not the shadow of clouds. It moved with the patient certainty of a tide, and where it passed the frost-touched fields lost their gleam. Lord Riley stood very still, his hands resting upon the cold parapet, his long hair stirring in the wind that came down off the moors. Below him the city of Yorvik breathed its evening smoke, ignorant yet of how short its peace would be. The army of the Norman duke filled the valley road. Spears caught the failing sun in countless thin glints, like reeds of iron sprouting from the earth, and the dull thunder of hooves and marching feet rolled up the slope long before the banners could be read. Yet Riley could read them already. He had seen such things before, in other ages, under other kings whose names had since crumbled into the mouths of children's rhymes. The knowledge did not comfort him. "They come slow," said a deep voice at his shoulder. Harold the Brute leaned his great frame against the merlon, his axe slung across his back, the iron of it dark as a winter pond. "Slow means they mean to stay. A raider hurries. A conqueror takes his time." "He has taken his time with all of England," Riley answered. "Wessex bowed. Mercia bowed. Even the proud halls of the south have learned to kneel and call it wisdom. We are the last lamp burning, old friend, and he is coming to snuff it." Harold spat over the wall, a small defiance against so vast a thing. "Let him try the snuffing. The walls are stone, the men are willing, and I have counted four hundred spears that will not run." He paused, and his pale eyes narrowed at the host below, measuring it the way a woodsman measures a tree he must fell. "Though he has brought more than four hundred. He has brought four thousand, and horses besides. And those." He nodded toward the lumbering shapes drawn by oxen at the column's rear, draped in hides. "Engines. He builds towers to look over our heads and rocks to break our teeth." Riley said nothing. He watched the foremost riders fan out across the lower meadows, neat and disciplined, claiming the ground as a hand claims a cloth. There was no waste in their movement, no boasting. That was the most frightening thing of all. The Vikings of his captain's blood had come howling, with fire and song; these men came as masons come to a quarry, sleeves rolled, certain of the work. "We cannot win it with spears," Riley said at last, and the quietness of his words made them heavier than any shout. Harold turned to him fully. "Then you say we should open the gate? Bend the neck like the rest of them?" "I did not say that." "You said we cannot win." "I said we cannot win it with spears." Riley looked down at his own hands, broad and unmarked though they had gripped weapons in years no living memory recorded. "There are other ways of winning, Harold. Older ways. Ways my fathers' fathers knew before any church was raised on this island, before the Romans cut their straight roads through the green." The big man went still. He had served at Riley's side for nine winters, had drunk with him and bled with him and buried good men beside him, and in all that time he had asked no questions that were not given to him to ask. But he had seen things. A wound that closed too clean. A storm that turned from the harvest as though shooed by a shepherd. A lord who looked the same the day he came as the day the grey first dusted Harold's beard. "I have wondered," Harold said slowly, "why the years do not touch you. I told myself it was good living and a clear conscience." A grim smile tugged the braids of his beard. "I knew that for a lie. A man with your conscience would have aged twice as fast." "My blood is not all of this island," Riley said. He kept his eyes on the gathering host, for it was easier than meeting his friend's gaze. "On one side, kings out of the cold sea, the same gods you whisper to when you think no one hears. On the other, the priests of the oak and the standing stone, the ones the legions hunted across the water and slaughtered upon the shore of Anglesey. They thought they had ended us there, in the smoke and the screaming. They were wrong. One thread was left. It runs through me, and it is fraying, and it has slept a long while because waking it costs more than you would believe." The wind keened along the battlements. Far below, the Norman trumpets sounded, thin and golden, announcing camp. "Then wake it," Harold said. "You do not know what you ask." "I know what I see." The captain set a hand the size of a shield upon Riley's shoulder. "I see four thousand men come to burn the only home I have left, and I see the one man who might stop them telling me his hands are tied by old fear. Diligence, you taught me once. Do the hard thing because it is the right thing, and do it well, and do not wait for an easier day. That day never comes, you said. Was that only a saying to keep the watch awake?" Riley closed his eyes. The power coiled in him answered Harold's words before he did, stirring like an old hound that hears its master's step. It would not be a gentle thing, the waking. It would ask blood and grief and pieces of himself he was not sure he could spare. And once roused it would be seen, and once seen it would be hunted, as it had been hunted before, to the last child of the last grove. "If I do this," he said, opening his green eyes upon the darkening valley, "I become the very thing William fears most. Not a lord. Not a rebel. Something his priests have no prayer to bind. He will not rest while I breathe." "Good," said Harold the Brute, and his hand tightened, warm and sure. "Let the new king lose some sleep. We have lost enough." Below them, the first watchfires of the Normans bloomed in the dusk, a thousand small stars fallen into the grass, and Yorvik stood between them and the night.