The Savage Isle

For Becca. We did it.

‘We are the last people on earth, and the last to be free…’

Tacitus, Agricola (XXX), H. Mattingly trans.

CHAPTER ONE

Britannia AD 42

The waxing moon played guide as the men threaded the woody defile. Stooping trees, a gauntlet of jagged, moss-clad rocks, the clawing grasp of shadow-cloaked briars.

The men funnelled onto a narrow track, steps muffled by a blanket of leaves. From up high, on slopes choked by the lush canopies of oak and beech, an owl’s hoot pierced the sounds of their rasping breaths. Further off, amongst the deeper, darker realms, wolves broke into mournful song.

The men pressed on, following a leader gleaming in winged helmet and exquisite mail. Spear points caught and twisted the pearl-grey light above their heads.

They came from the north, these war-givers.

Raised from every village and farm, every modest steading, and every ridged and fortified hill, they had gathered in their masses beneath the banner of the twin white serpents and surged like a great tide onto the tracks and fields that would lead them to their enemy. Through the moon-gilded hours they had swept, crossing ditches choked by holly and foxglove, over rolling fields and spirit-haunted forests, beseeching the gods to favour their endeavours. Now dawn approached, and still they flowed, like an iron river, ever southwards, and with them came blood and horror.

Cullen moved in a half-crouch, slowly, with great care, one shadow amongst so many beneath the whispering boughs. Above him, the canopy was thick enough to blot out a sun that dazzled the flower-dotted meadows beyond. Within this forest-world, only a dim, greenish twilight illuminated the track of gnarled roots and tangled underbrush. The air was thick with damp and decay, tinged with the bitter tang of toadstool and nightshade, but underneath it all, he caught the scent – acrid, pungent, unmistakable.

He halted, braced on the balls of his feet, heart quickening. His knuckles bone-white where they clasped his spear.

The wolf was close.

He stooped lower, fingers brushing the ground. The soft earth yielded to his touch, and there, pressed into the mud, was the fresh imprint of a paw, larger than his hand. The breath caught in his throat, his mouth instantly parched. He twisted his neck, keeping the rest of his body utterly still, searching the deep murk, senses dagger-sharp. The shadows were long and twisted, the silence heavy, unnatural.

A breeze stirred the branches above. Cullen’s hand tightened around the spear haft, the rough wood grounding him, reminding him of his purpose.

Another scent reached him, sharper now, mingling with the wolf’s musk. Blood. He moved painstakingly forward, driven by a morbid curiosity, his body taut with anticipation. As he pushed through a dense thicket, the forest seemed to close in around him, the trees leaning closer, their branches like skeletal fingers clawing at the sky.

Then he saw it – a patch of disturbed earth, the leaves stained dark, almost black in the dim light. The remnants of a kill, but the body was gone, dragged away. Cullen’s stomach lurched. The wolf had been here, had fed here, but where was it now?

A branch snapped in the distance, and he froze, the sound ricocheting through the silence like a thunderclap. His eyes darted towards the noise, but the gloom revealed nothing. The dark seemed to pulse, the forest holding its breath, waiting.

He stood still as stone, every muscle tensed, straining to hear past the pounding of his heart. But there was nothing, save the caw and cackle of crows beyond the high, latticed branches, tumbling on the breeze, ignorant to his hunt. Cullen swallowed hard, the wolf-stench and blood still ripe in his nostrils. He knew he had to keep moving, to find it before it found him, or, more crucially, before it found his goats.

Even as he started out, he heard it. Fragments on the breeze. A whispering sound, nebulous and indistinct. But this gave him pause, for the noise was not what he had expected. Words, though muffled and shapeless. Human voices.

He scrambled off the animal track and slipped through brambles and ferns, the wolf forgotten for now, making his way to the treeline some two hundred paces away, ears straining to catch the sounds again. A ditch formed the wood’s edge, before the trees gave way to a flower-strewn meadow, and Cullen slid down into its rocky base. It was shallow, gouged from the chalk by long-dead hands to mark a long-forgotten boundary, but deep enough to conceal a whip-thin youth dressed in pale yellows and greens that made him blend with the forest.

He crawled up to the brow. The ditch brimmed with lush stands of bracken, limbs of ash and lime, and the tangled, leafy talons of dogwood and elder, concealing all. Yet, with arms locked straight, Cullen could elevate his head beyond the lip to look out across the meadow. Deer, three or four, grazed far off, meandering carefree through fetlock-high grass. A pair of buzzards circled lazily, wingtips splayed like stretched fingers, ruminating on their next meal with high, mournful screeches.

Voices again, away to his right. Louder now. Closer.

His guts convulsed. Something large slid, almost imperceptibly, through tall grass and gnarled branches at the field’s edge, tracking the treeline. It was well camouflaged, and he might have considered it the movement of a stag or even his wolf, but for the speech of more than one man, reaching him in unintelligible scraps. He almost stood up, waved his arms, called out a greeting. But something was not right. Something in the tones, the accents. It screamed of the unusual. The foreign. He swallowed down fear.

Where were the goats? Cullen pictured the stand of trees, too far away for comfort, in which he had left them to graze. Could bandits have come to steal the herd? He silently swore. His mother would flay him alive.

He slunk back, slid further into the recess, and set down his spear, pulling the leather strap and pebble-pouch from the waist-tie of his braca. He regarded them, feeling suddenly devoid of knowledge, as if he no longer knew how to sling a stone, his mind empty.

More voices. Louder, closer.

Icy fingers dabbed at the nape of his neck. He wanted to retreat, to sink back into the embrace of the wood and find a hollow in which to curl. But there were strangers abroad. He could hardly ignore it. He had seen sixteen winters, after all. Almost a grown man. Gritting his teeth, he resolved to discover the identity of the strangers. He returned to the crest, palms tormented by bits of twig, dried leaves and shards of bark, and inched aside the bracken fronds, stems parting like a curtain, their rustle achingly loud to his ears. He held his breath. Eased forward on hands and knees until his face and shoulders brushed the outermost ferns. Directly ahead, the meadow, painted in brilliant colour, hummed with life. Except the deer had gone. And the buzzards, still calling, soared far higher than before, mere specks before the blue vastness.

He looked to his right. Nothing.

When he looked left, what he saw almost made him cry out. It was indeed a man, but not one he had ever before seen. He was tall and lean, with short hair the colour of dark gold, sculpted with hardening paste into sharp spikes. He was no farmer or smith. Cullen could not see his face, for the man strode away southwards, down the meadow’s gentle slope in the direction of the town, but a want of features did not alter what was instantly clear. He wore not a stitch above his waist, and his back and shoulders writhed with fantastical beasts, painted in a deep blue by an expert hand so that they coiled and struck with the shifting of his muscles. In his left hand a long, oblong shield scraped the edges of the ferns, causing them to sway and whisper. As it turned with his gait, twin serpents were revealed above and below the iron boss, daubed in white, jaws wide and fangs long. In his right hand he gripped a tall throwing spear, while at his midriff, suspended from a chain of linked iron rings, hung a long sword, its scabbard nestled against the wool of braca chequered in red and brown.

Pulse pounding, Cullen glanced to the right as he made to leave. He was forced immediately to screw up his eyes before a low bank of dazzling light, as if the sun had fallen from the sky to hover just above the grass. Even as he shrank away, he knew that Belinos had not condescended to walk the mortal realm. Rather, it was the brilliant play of summer rays upon a mass of polished metal. So much metal. The air caught in Cullen’s lungs, knotting and twisting, as though vines crept about his ribs, paralysing him so that he simply stared, dumbstruck. Men – a lot of men – were emerging from the trees.

Spear tips bobbed high like shimmering banners. Most were bare chested or leather-clad, but some wore breastplates and mail shirts, reflecting the sun in beams, while ornate hilts and chapes, armlets and torcs glittered like jewels. These were men like the first, but more, so many more. More straight swords, more long spears, belts slanted over hips under the weight of scabbards and daggers. There were bows hooked over shoulders and leather slings dangling from palms.

They all came this way, dozens upon dozens, stepping out from the forest as if the Underworld disgorged all its demons at once. A high, droning call rolled out from their midst. It made Cullen’s skin crawl. It was the call of the carnyx. Chilling, lingering, doleful. The song of war and of death. And, as he slunk back into the ditch’s embrace, he heard someone shout. They had seen him.

Cullen ran like a hound-harried fawn, terror giving wings to his feet. He would not stop; could not. At his back he could still hear the shouts of his pursuers and the awful drone of the carnyx. The tribe bearing the twin serpents were the Catuvellauni, the most warlike of all the nations. They were here for war. For blood. The knowledge turned his bowels to water.

He smothered the thought, crushed it savagely, unwilling to face it as he crashed and stumbled and cursed his way out through the last of the trees. He bounded a pair of shallow gullies and tore into an open slice of meadow. A flock of sparrows erupted from the tall grass on all sides, making him swear in fright, though it did nothing to slow his legs, and he pumped his knees high against the rasping blades.

He ran ever westwards and soon drew near the dun of Calleva. He looked to his right, searching for signs of movement. That was where the great road lay. A conduit joining his people’s territory to their neighbours’ in the north. That was where the warriors would be. Because it was those very neighbours who had come for blood. Those neighbours who had come this brightest of days with darkest intent. Their emblem, daubed on shields and bodies, had told him as much. The Catuvellauni enthusiasm for vicious bloodletting was well known. And now they had turned their ire upon the Atrebates. Cullen’s people. Tentacles of fear crept up his spine.

Cullen moved nearer to the road, hanging back in the low branches, ignoring the needling of brambles at his flanks. The broad thoroughfare, first cut when the tribe had crossed the sea from Gaul to escape Caesar’s ire, but widened and metalled in recent years by King Berikos, vanished southwards in a sweeping bend. It was patched with horse dung and marked by the deep grooves of cartwheels. A gutter ran down the nearside edge, finished in smooth river cobbles, and he crouched beside it, listening.

There was nothing but birdsong and the incessant chirrup of insects. Stillness reigned amongst the trees and on the road and in the air. Perhaps, he thought with a surge of hope, the men who had so cruelly stumbled upon the morning’s secret tryst had been nothing more than bandits. Catuvellauni, for certain, but a rogue company, stranded or banished. But that, whispered a nagging voice, belied the full battle-paint and their brazen proximity to the capital of a rival tribe. Nor did it explain the presence of a carnyx player. The instrument was a war-horn.

And yet.

Cullen prayed to all the gods that would spring to his racing mind, and to all the gods he promised to recall later. He begged them to make this morning an aberration. An hour of horror that would prove to be little more than waking nightmare. The kind of blood-dream the Wise Ones spoke of when they emerged from those magical stupors induced by brews of flower and fungus. Because the Catuvellauni were not here. The road was empty.

Feeling a swell of relief, he ventured out into the open, and sprinted for the town, leaning into the curve of the road as he rounded the forest-flanked bend, and almost careening headlong into the rearmost rank of the Catuvellauni horde.

Cullen hauled himself to a stop, skidding, clamping a hand across his mouth so as to stifle the yelp that surged up from within. They were a multitude. A serpent made of flesh and iron and bronze, with spines fashioned from spear tips, stretching away to disappear around the next bend in the road, all clouded in the dust that roiled up from hundreds of pounding feet. Somewhere a drum called out the pace, low and constant, and more carnyxes brayed like the beasts after which they were ornately fashioned.

Cullen thanked the gods and the forefathers, the spirits of the road and the sprites amongst the bracken. Because, in the midst of their marching, the warriors had not noticed him. Nor did they see him return to the trees, plunging through the branches on the opposite side with breath held to burning point and heartbeat raging. And then he was running again, concealed from the road but parallel to it, desperate to reach Calleva’s gates before the bristling rows of painted killers. Slaughter was coming, and his people had to be warned.

Slaughter had already arrived.

He had sprinted. Crashed and stumbled and cursed, bounced from tree to tree, all the while rehearsing the warning that would be delivered in breathless but authoritative style to the watchmen at the gates and maybe, just maybe, in the presence of Berikos himself. But he had taken leave of reality, he realised, as he crossed through the eerily desolate outer earthworks. A ditch and rampart that would, on any other occasion, present a formidable obstacle to any incomer larger than a mouse. Arrogance, he told himself, as he ran past a twisted corpse that still clutched a shield bearing the horse-mark of the Atrebates, had fooled him into thinking that this scrap of a lad, too meek to take his tribe’s warrior tests, could somehow affect the way the day played out. He plunged through a little orchard and knew that he was too late.

Of course he was too late. Of course the Catuvellauni had reached the town before the scampering boy, and of course King Berikos’s patrols had long since raised the alarm. There was a joke in there, somewhere, Cullen suspected. One about a delusional child who thought he could act the hero.

All he could do was climb an expansive, spiral-trunked tree and silently curse his own hubris as he watched the attack unfold in slack-jawed impotence. In the clearing that separated orchard from town, a score of chariots criss-crossed the scrub, bearing the enemy’s leaders. The charioteers, status marked by metal circlets about their heads, steered deftly, while behind them, conspicuous on the wickerwork platforms, their crowing lords seemed like bizarre beasts to Cullen, torsos gaudily decorated, hair adorned with painted feathers, and necks and wrists heavy with thick golden torcs. They barked orders at messengers who ran forth to convey word to the invaders, who were already at the main gates. And those gates, painted with the sacred symbol of the three-tailed horse, yawned wide.

Cullen leaned in, pressing close to the tree for better concealment. He wrapped an arm around the trunk, parted a clump of leaves with the other, and pushed his face to the opening. He could see a good deal from here, all the way to the grandest structures that dominated the centre of the town. What he saw put an icy grip around his heart. He had always considered the great Calleva nothing short of a miracle. He knew there were larger and more impressive settlements. Traders often brought news of ports to the north and west, teeming with men and ships and goods more exotic than a youthful mind could begin to invoke. They described the bustling cities – grander than any dun to be found in the Isle of the Mighty – that dotted the great empire across the sea, the home of strange creatures, impossible innovation, and exquisite works of art. And the itinerant poets would weave elaborate tales of Rome itself, the very centre of the world, conjuring magic in word and song across his mother’s blazing winter hearth. Cullen and his sister would huddle in the crisp cold, revel in the heady wood-smoke, and hang on every word. Yet Calleva remained the most inspiring place in his small sphere. The expansive enclosure of roundhouses, great halls and swarming streets seemed so incongruous, so very unlikely, set as it was within forbidding and endless woodland, that he felt sure that the first building posts must have been driven into the soil by the very gods who dwelt amongst the leafy boughs. The lands of his people were ancient. Far older than the Atrebates themselves, who had come in desperation, generations before, with a voracious Rome expanding at their heels. As those ragtag fugitives had found shelter from their enemies, they had coalesced under the leadership of ambitious kings, and as the tribe had set down strong roots, so Calleva had sprung like a sapling from the earth, thriving with the tribe’s natural talent for trade and their links with far off peoples. A village, then a town, then a fortified city, honoured with the status of a chieftain’s dun.

This great hub, then, was a meeting point for any with wares to trade. A junction where news, goods and coin were exchanged in a perpetual blur. A beacon in the darkness. And Cullen would come out of the pastures to simply stare. To drink the place in. Its smells and its sounds. Life, unbridled and unabashed.

It was his Rome, and now it was burning.

He looked out from his high vantage, wide-eyed and scarcely breathing. The huge settlement, ringed by a deep ditch and spiked bank, was already shrouded in poisonous smoke, white, black and yellow. Folk screamed. They scattered; ants from a kicked nest. They dashed through door skins as thatches lit up, one to the next, in a contagion of flickering flame, and crashed into one another as they scrambled to find a place of safety that did not exist. Cullen could see children hiding in nooks and crannies, behind cartwheels and at the foot of fence panels, but the gates – those great, redoubtable gates – gaped invitingly, their sentries cut down in the first throes of the attack. Warriors lay twisted and bloodied in the streets, the flotsam of a fight, but whatever defence had been offered had been snuffed out in short order. The totems of the twin snakes, cast in iron and fitted to long staffs, swept through the acrid miasma, bobbing like the prows of ships in morning mist, and the invaders snarled and jeered, drunk on killing. They strutted like cockerels as they swung iron and spilled blood, pouring through the broad thoroughfares in a raging torrent. Past the din of the animal pens, livestock maddened by the stench of smoke. Past the storage pits, the homes and forges and workshops, as rooftops began to collapse, one after another.

These were places Cullen knew. He could picture the faces of those whose livelihoods depended upon the stricken buildings. A red-haired swordsmith. A one-eyed maker of fine chariots. A woman whose expertise in the working of leather was famed for miles around. The white-bearded bone and antler carver, the portly grain seller, the heavy-jowled merchant whose wares ranged from metals to slaves to the very finest jewellery.

All was chaos. All was fire. All was noise.

Cullen shifted his gaze to the Grand Path, the greatest of the roads, aligned with the sunrises and sunsets of midsummer and midwinter, and bounded on either side by massive, carved stones. He traced its route into the haze. The story was the same. The sea of roundhouses, large and small, spewed a terrified population with nowhere to go. The enemy bands roved and chased and cheered. After so many years of wrangling on the borders of their territory, stealing cattle and launching small raids in retribution for minor slights, the tribes of this part of the world had settled into a period of relative stability. The Atrebates butted up against the Dobunni and Durotriges to the west, the Catuvellauni to the north, the Cantiaci to the east. They held dominion over the Belgae and Regneses and a dozen smaller clans on the south coast. All the borders were held in a tense state, often in continual flux, but held they were. Yet even one so green as Cullen could see that this was no raid. No simple application of pressure. It was conquest. Pure, simple and brutal.

He let his gaze drift across the rooftops, to the long halls that marked Calleva’s beating heart. The large salt-seller’s premises, with its pile of broken briquetage out front, and the Roman oil-trader’s house, its phalanxes of curved amphorae just visible through the noxious fug. Beyond them, flanked by twin guard-posts that now appeared to be vacant, was the huge, rectangular hall that contained the very throne of the king. Around it clustered the grand temples to Epona, Taranis, Belinos and Lugus. All now under attack. All disgorging their human contents for the waiting blades.

Cullen shuddered. Tasted salt where tears collected at the corners of his mouth. His eyes tracked the chariots again, alighting on one that was finer than the rest, gold leaf reflecting the sun like hot iron sparking. Its passenger had long hair, dark as raven feathers and braided with coloured beads. As Cullen watched, the warrior bounded from the platform, deftly avoiding his driver, and ran along the traces to balance upon the yoke, his throwing spear poised at his shoulder. Cullen was mesmerised. The skill, the balance, the raw power.

A magpie settled in the canopy near his head, its jarring cackle making him start. He glanced up. The beady blackness of its eyes bore into his own. The spark of blue on its flank caught the sun, shimmering as it skittered along the branch. An evil omen, meant for him alone. Why, he wondered, when he was lucky enough to be outside of Calleva’s boundary? Why would the creature pick Cullen out when so many faced immediate peril?

The magpie sprung out suddenly, a smear of black and white upon lush green. Cullen watched it go, and the realisation struck him as sure as any spear thrust. He hugged the rough bark of the trunk and descended to earth in one grazing slide.

The undersides of his forearms smarted as he ran, still wet and fresh from the skinning they had taken. He paid them no heed whatsoever. Nor did he care for who might have seen him cross the wide road. Calleva could fend for itself – or not. All that mattered now was reaching his mother’s steading, away to the south, and he raced through the woods not even bothering to check for pursuers. If the Catuvellauni were already at Berikos’s seat, then the tiny hamlet occupied by Cullen’s extended family would be the very next place they would reach. It was no longer a matter of raising the alarm, but purely of survival. The magpie omen was clear as crystal.

The trees gave way to dusty scrub, patched with tall stands of purple-topped thistles, their spiny clutches snagging his clothes, even as the braying of a dozen distant carnyxes gave wings to his feet. He prayed the gods would open his mother’s ears. That she would hear the war-horns and know to run for the hills. Even so, he needed to see it with his own eyes. Walk into an empty village and know for certain that every soul had long since fled.

Chastising himself viciously for the tiredness that crept up his legs, he leaned into his strides, pounding the soil, demanding vigour they did not possess. He leapt over a stream that babbled its amusement as his landing foot found a knot of slick dung that dispatched him halfway down the bank. He scrambled up, slinging a filthy curse over his shoulder at whatever sprite dwelt amongst the reeds. Then he was through a row of distinguished alders that he knew well, their conical, fissured trunks like old friends, beckoning him home, and into a dense stand of oak that cast him in immediate shadow. He slowed. A sudden sense of dread gave him pause, and he scanned the gloom. He could feel them now. Moving in the trees, wraiths in the watery light. The land – all the land – was crawling with Catuvellauni. Infested with them. In his mind he saw them as demons. Minions of some ancient and terrible magic, though that did not change the reality. They were behind him, certainly, but also to the front.

A few paces ahead, the land dropped sharply, forming the side of a lane that had sunk through centuries of use. He made for the slope, sliding on his side, all the way to the foot, making to cross the lane and scale the far bank. He glanced back up at the oak and alder. Moving between the ageless trunks, silent as wildcats, he caught a flash of metal and woad. They were coming.

CHAPTER TWO

Cullen’s lungs were bursting as he laboured into the village. He stumbled to a ragged halt as he crossed the shallow ditch, doubling over between the gateposts to clamp hands on wobbling knees, leg bones suddenly turned to water. He had found the gate open, which had given concern, but he was overcome with relief to see that no smoke choked the spaces between the buildings. No killers stalked the grassy paths. No one screamed.

Gradually, he edged into the compound. Eight roundhouses huddled together within the stockade, his mother’s, the largest, at the centre. There were grain pits along the inner edge of the defensive ring, glistening dew-ponds, fly-clouded middens, and livestock pens that would normally be guarded by small boys with large dogs. None were to be seen. The place was empty, and as silent as the burial ground on the far side of the stockade. He closed his eyes, whispering thanks to each and every deity that sprang to mind. The Atrebates were being put to the sword at this very moment, but at least his family had survived.

He twisted to glance up at the sloping meadow, topped by the dark treeline through which he had come. There was a low hump halfway down. A natural feature that would, in winter, shield the compound from bitter winds. In summer it would host a lookout, though it was vacant now, left for the gently swaying grass. He guessed whoever had been in position that morning had done their job, for the alarm had clearly, thankfully, been raised.

With that, he made his way into the village. The first two houses were small, perched either side of the main path leading from the gate. Home to families of four apiece, kin on his mother’s side, their walls were decorated in rich red and yellow swirls. One had a goat’s skull nailed above the door, the other’s lintel etched with a detailed carving of a hammer. Cullen made for the latter, the smith’s mark declaring his cousin’s mastery at the forge. He thrust his head beyond the door skin, taking a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Empty, save a small fire, remnants glowing orange. He pulled away, blinking in the sun, searching for signs of life. They had not been gone for long. Then he heard voices further off. Deeper into the settlement. Fearing they were the words of invaders, he ducked in close to the smith’s house, pressing against the cool wall beneath the overhanging thatch. He held his breath and squinted along the line of the path, a tongue of brown bisecting the grass, beyond the largest roundhouse to the collection of smaller huts at its far side. He noticed a ripple in one of the door skins, then a small head emerged. A child. A little girl, with a daisy-chain strung about her neck. His half-sister, Fi, waved uncertainly. Cullen’s heart twisted in his chest.

He burst from his hiding place and lurched into a run. He was tired still, dog tired, but he screamed all the same, bellowing at the people gathered within the house to flee immediately. The skin rumpled as it was hauled back. More faces in the doorway. All children he recognised. He read concern on their features, but not fear. Not the blanched look of abject terror the day deserved. Whatever they were hiding from, it was something they assumed – they had been told – would eventually pass. So he screamed again and again as he drew closer, beseeched them to get out, to run for their lives, and gradually they were coming out into the open. Five, ten, twelve little bodies, more. But he realised they were no longer listening to him. All those wide eyes had shifted to another place. Somewhere above him and beyond. He slewed to a halt, twisting as he did, still ten paces from the group.

Up on the meadow, spreading rapidly across the low ridge like spilled oil, were men. Painted men, armoured men, savage men. Huge, loping, slavering hounds wove between and beside them. On one flank, a skinny youth with a mop of fair hair clutched a long brass tube vertically before his face. Its ends were curved, forming something akin to a serpent. The central portion was straight, while the flared lower mouthpiece and upper bell were horizontal, thrusting in opposite directions. He put the mouthpiece to his lips. The bell, outward facing, was styled like the gaping maw of a roaring beast, and through it came the sound that chilled Cullen to the marrow. It was loud and long and mournful, like the call of a stag, and at its behest, the warriors of the Catuvellauni surged down towards the village.

The children screamed, scattered like mice before an invasion of cats. Cullen reached for Fi, but her little hand was gone in an instant, her body whipped away amongst the others as though it had been snatched up by a whirlwind.

Begging for Belinos to protect her, Cullen went instead to the big roundhouse. His mother’s home. His home. The place where his heart felt warmest, where his dreams were best. He had known other boys, those with the rarefied blood of chiefs in their veins, who were not raised at their mother’s hearth or father’s knee. Sent instead to the territory of distant kin, or that of an honoured foe, there to see out the years of fosterage to learn valuable skills and forge new alliances. But that path had been closed to Cullen. His father had died, his uncle too, and duties about their steading had fallen at his feet while still a stripling. He did not mind, of course, for it was his mother’s land, held by her line for generations, since the time before the great migration from the kingdoms across the Narrow Sea. She was a Dobunni, of the ancient blood, his mother. A people as old as the oaks and the groves and the rivers. It was his father, with those deep chestnut eyes and darker complexion, that bore the blood of a foreign line. His forebears came from the lands the Romans called Gaul. They had settled here generations ago, eased the natives out of the area and established their own kingdom, in time becoming as much a part of the soil as any of the island’s diverse peoples. But that was ancient history. What Cullen knew was that his father had been smitten upon first laying eyes on his mother. He had brought a dozen goats and five head of cattle to the match. She had brought the land upon which they staked out their roundhouse, their animal pens, their grain stores and their future. Her family had come. His father had taken more wives and whelped more children, and the little community had thrived, even after their gruff patriarch had returned to the soil. Thrived, that was, until now.

He dragged aside the heavy skin and peered into the black maw of the house, blinking hard as he scraped fingertips over the totems of stag, bear, eagle and horse that were sunk into the doorpost. When his eyes had adjusted, he stepped in, quickly scanning the interior. There was no one home. He half jogged into the wide space. Smooth cooking stones and a trio of scuffed iron pots circled a still-warm fire that was bridged by a large and elaborate fire-dog. Bowls were positioned about the edges, unwashed and left for the flies. They had vacated this place in a hurry. But where were they now, the adults? As if he did not know.

The sound of battle provided the answer. He wrenched himself round as the clashing song of iron and bronze played suddenly outside. Of course, his mother had not abandoned the children to their fate. He should have known better. They had been hiding somewhere within the stockade. Beside a ditch, perhaps, or in one of the grain pits. And now they had emerged to defend their homes, and tears pricked hot at Cullen’s eyes again, because he knew that they would all die. They should have fled. Should have taken what belongings they could carry and dissolved into the wilderness. They had underestimated the raid, assuming it was a matter of simple theft, of cattle or slaves. But they had not been to Calleva. Not witnessed the sheer numbers committed to its sacking. He could see it now. His proud mother, leading her sisters and the few remaining men, would have planned an ambush that would be simple, bloody and swift. Utterly ignorant of the reality. He froze behind the door, a statue in the darkness, and listened with rising horror as shouts turned to screams and the fragrant scent of wood smoke rapidly soured to the acrid fug of burning thatch.

Footsteps passed across the front of the roundhouse, scraping the dust, a shadow skittering through the bar of light beneath the draped skin. The sound jolted the inertia from his bones. He turned back. He would hide. There was no point fighting. Even so, his eyes went up and to the right, roving the stout crossbeam where the family’s weapons should be. The hooks and nails were mostly empty. His father’s old sword and throwing spears, half a dozen knives and a club of knotted blackthorn; all gone. Only the spare axe remained, its haft smoothed by years of use, but it was another made for his father. The iron blade was fearsome, but far too heavy for Cullen to swing, while the haft was as long and thick as his own arm. The rest of the weapons were outside at this very moment, he knew. His proud mother, rich red hair, long and unkempt, dazzling in the sunlight, would be wielding them as expertly as any man, snarling and grimacing in the eye of this savage storm as she hurled and thrust and hacked, teeth bared like a crazed animal. They all fought when necessity called. Any man or woman who could lift a spear would be expected to play their part. Cullen shuddered at the thought, fear zinging through his body. At sixteen, it was almost two full years since he had begun to practise the war games at which he was expected to become adept, yet he was still too scrawny to heft a full-bladed sword with any efficacy. He was useless, and he knew it. He was old enough, though, to earn his place at the fire by watching over the precious herd. Sharp eyes and a penchant for his own company had sealed him the role, and life had been acceptable enough. The other children would tease, and his mother would suffer the occasional barb from his father’s other wives, but out in the woods Cullen was his own lord. He talked to the goats, pissed in the brambles, and watched the clouds drift by. As ambivalent to the ways of war as he was to the skills of the smith or the songs of the poets.

He skirted the fireplace and scrambled over a row of low wooden benches, diving into the piled pelts of the sleeping area behind. He sprawled over the deep nest of fleeces and furs that so recently kept snug his kin, noting with a sickening pang the exquisite cloak of thick beaver pelts that was his mother’s favourite. Scrambling on hands and knees until he reached his own space, undisturbed this past night, he lunged for the dark void beyond, the gap between the tightly rolled cloth of his pillow and the house’s broad posts, groping in the dirt with both hands. Cullen did not