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Trevor Stirling swallowed very hard. Tried to brace himself. "Right. Do it, then."
The last thing he heard was a chorus of good-luck wishes from the scientists.
Then a very large mule kicked him between the eyes.
Lailoken the minstrel, a dark man full of dark ambitions and angers, bitter from professional failures and personal losses, strode down the verge of the ancient Roman road which angled westward out of Gododdin, singing to an audience of bracken, cracked stones, and rainclouds. His harp and flute lay nestled at the bottom of the rucksack hitched over his shoulder, wrapped in waterproof sealskin bags which were, along with the instruments themselves, the most valuable things he owned. Without them, he would've been utterly pe
Between sunset the previous night and dawn this morning, Lailoken had been chosen by the gods of old, the gods of thunder and blood sacrifice and revenge. They had singled him out as a worthy vessel and rode with him now, in his own mind. Ba
And they both hated the Irish with cold, murderous passion.
Who would not hate them? Ba
Lailoken understood the need for vengeance. He had watched Irish invaders hack his little family to death before he could run across the fields from the plowing to fight for them. The Irish had struck him down as well, leaving him for dead after laying open his head to the bone, but God had seen fit to let him live—the better to take vengeance upon the people who had shattered his world at the end of Irish swords.
He had taken to the road, vowing never to farm or marry again. Lailoken had wandered from the Antonine Wall on the farthest northern border to Caer-Lundein in the south, a city almost abandoned now with the threat of Saxon invasion sending farmers and town-based traders alike scurrying toward the closest hill forts they could find, refurbishing the ancient walls and beating pruning forks and plowshares into swords and long, wicked spearpoints. From the dying city of Caer-Lundein, he had wandered west to Cerniw, where the Merry Maidens stood in a great circle, nineteen foolish girls turned to monolithic standing stones for daring to dance on a Sunday. He had loved Cerniw, where the Minack Theater lay dreaming in the summer twilight, its worn golden stones remembering the Roman engineers who had built it, centuries previously, flocking in to watch the ancient Greek dramas and the bawdy Roman comedies performed in it over a span of more than four centuries.
Lailoken had played his harp and flute for money at Minack, standing on the semicircular stone floor where even the whisper of the breeze carried with the clarity of bronze bells, and his music floated magically to the highest tier of stone seats and drifted above the sea, skimming out across the deep turquoise waters of the Purthcurno Bay, with its lacework fringe of breakers spilling across the shingle.
And from Cerniw, the long journey north again to Caerleul, along the Roman roads to Rheged and Strathclyde and up to Caer-Iudeu, nestled deep in Gododdin's mountain passes which guarded the way into Pictish country. Somewhere along the way, after months of starving as a desperately mediocre instrumentalist and singer, Lailoken had discovered a meager talent for composing poetry and a slightly greater one for making men laugh at the songs he sang.
He employed those talents well, hiding his rage and the black dreams of vengeance behind foolish smiles while drunken soldiers and celebrating sailors with more money than sense gathered in tavernas to spend their hard-earned pay on cheap wine, cheaper women, and Lailoken's raunchy comic bravado. They roared with laughter and tossed him coins by way of approval and gave him answers as freely as the wine flowed, when he asked about the Irish in the port towns and trading centers he was able to reach.
It was his dearest prayer to strike a blow that all of Ireland would bewail, leaving her screaming widows to rend their clothing in grief. Oh, yes, Ba
Lailoken had never been happier in his life.
As they walked, Lailoken answered his new god's questions about where he had been, and where he had pla
The Dux Bellorum? Ba
Enemies? Lailoken asked, startled. Have the Irish infiltrated spies into Caerleul itself?
No, I speak of other enemies. Creatures of my own kind, two of them, fools and criminals who would stop me if they could. I must discover them, Lailoken, discover who has sheltered them, as you have sheltered me, and destroy them utterly. No matter who serves them as host or hostess. Do you flinch from killing a woman, Lailoken? Or a traitor?
He considered the question. Lailoken knew he would have had no more qualms about killing an Irish woman than he would have had about squashing lice. They had taken his woman and children away forever and deserved to lose their own, in return. But a Briton woman? That disturbed him. Still, if the woman harbored an enemy who would betray the Briton people... She would deserve a traitor's death, were she born of royal blood.
Aye, Lailoken answered grimly. I would kill such a woman, or a man traitorous enough to harbor any creature favorable to the Irish. With my own hands, if necessary.
In that case, Ba
He was lying on the ground. At least, it felt like the ground. Hard, lumpy, uneven beneath back and shins. He could smell smoke and dirt and rank human sweat, unpleasant odors that triggered a ballooning headache. Or maybe the headache had been there first. Disorientation swept him every few seconds, while his thoughts gibbered in a voice not quite his own.
It wasn't precisely like hearing voices inside his head. It was more like some previously unfelt part of himself was making its presence known, as though a portion of his personality which had been submerged was now fighting to free itself from Stirling's internal censors. The sensations reminded him, oddly, of colliding air masses, which boiled up into storm fronts before mixing into something that was neither a cold front nor a warm front, neither high pressure nor low, a hybrid sort of weather that was wildly unpredictable.