Page 31 of Warrior Queen
Chapter Eleven
In the morning,the sun came out, chasing away the last of the rain clouds. After a breakfast of hard bread and the cold remnants of last night’s stew, that made me nostalgic for toast and marmalade, we mounted up and set off once more along the road. An advance guard rode on ahead, in case danger lay close by, and a rearguard took up position a mile behind us.
We continued due north through the wide marshy valleys of a maze of rivers, most passable by fords, a few by less than well-maintained bridges. On both sides of our road, the drier lands climbed to distant, thickly forested hills, and in the hazy far west, the Welsh mountain peaks rose in jagged teeth.
Grazing sheep dotted the rough grassland up to the dark forest edge, and here and there a few deer ran for cover when we approached. Small farmsteads, like the ruined one we’d stayed in last night, huddled above the marshlands on dry spurs of ground. Only the smoke rising from their thatched rooftops told us they were occupied.
“I thought about your idea overnight,” Merlin said, edging his horse in beside Alezan, as overhead a couple of angry crows mobbed a peregrine falcon, intent on driving it away. “They say new ideas are best slept on.”
“Unlike that lumpy ground where we chose to camp.”
He chuckled. “You seem to have a knack of choosing the spot with the most roots and rocks.Mybed was very comfortable.”
“What conclusion did you come to?” I asked, ignoring his jibe. “Does it still seem to you as useful as it did last night, when you were half drunk on all that cider?”
He snorted with laughter. “I’m never drunk.”
As that didn’t merit an answer, I waited for him to go on.
“I think it could work, but it requires the cooperation of all the kings. And that you might not get. Some of them are so parsimonious they won’t want to have good horses standing idly by to hand over to riders from another kingdom. Meirchion of Rheged to name but one.”
We’d had experience of that king’s lack of willingness to help anyone else when we’d been fighting along the Wall. Meirchion was one of those kings who unless he himself was directly threatened, would not see danger to others as something he needed to bother about. Probably many of the kings were like that.
“But some of them will think it’s a good idea, surely?” I had to rein in Alezan as she took an ears-back swipe at Merlin’s horse. Not a team player, she really could be very grumpy with other horses. “And we can persuade them it’s in their own interests. They’ll see that, won’t they?”
Alezan swished her tail in protest and tossed her head, snatching at the bit.
Merlin shrugged. “We can but try. I think Arthur will agree this is a good suggestion.” He paused, brows knit. “Is this an idea from your world? Is it how you send messages there?”
I bridled. “Sort of…” I couldn’t tell him we no longer needed anything more than a computer keyboard or a cell phone, could I? To bridge the entire planet. Although he’d brought me here from my world, he had next to no knowledge of what it was like.
He flashed me a confident smile. “Then it should work.”
If the other kings could be brought into line.
Our way continued across the low-lying borderlands between England and Wales, straight as Roman roads usually are. No gentle curves, just a few angled turns, because their surveyors didn’t go in for curves. Too fiddly.
Around midday, in thick forest, we stopped to rest our horses and eat a meal of onions and hard cheese, washed down with warm cider. One thing about long journeys on horseback– most meals, no matter how sparse and plain, tasted like the food of the gods.
We’d just remounted and set out again when galloping hooves sounded. From around the turn ahead of us, two of our scouts appeared, belaboring their horses with the ends of their reins used like whips. In a flurry of kicked up gravel, they yanked their horses to a sliding halt in front of us, the beasts snorting from the exertion, sweat darkening their flanks and flecks of foam adhering to their coats.
“Milady,” gasped the first one. “Milord Merlin. Ahead of us. Irish raiders. Their full army. Not far ahead.”
A buzz of excitement rose from behind me as the message filtered back as if by osmosis.
“How many? Going which way?” Merlin snapped, staring past the two young men as though he expected the Irish to come running over the brow at any moment.
The young warrior shook his head. “Heading north, same as us. Too many to count. Three hundred– maybe four. All on foot though, as is their habit.”
A big army indeed.
“What of the High King’s army?” I asked, trying hard to keep my voice calm. “No sign of them?”
He shook his head again. “We saw no one but the Irish. Two miles ahead.”
At least that meant we could take a moment to stand and decide what to do without them coming upon us. Four hundred against our sixty would have been terrible odds.
Merlin shook his head as though to clear it. “They’ve not come by the same route as we have, or we’d have seen plenty of signs of their passing. They must have come along the foothills of the mountains to the west, across country, keeping their feet dry. Maybe they don’t know about the old legionary roads.”
