M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon Read Free Page A

world they had inherited.
    The people of Mamucium remembered the witch woman’s message, and passed it on to every person they met. They repeated the tales of shame to their children and grandchildren, and did not spare themselves in the telling. And, like all sensible men and women among their tribe, they turned their eyes to the east. And they waited.

CHAPTER I
    RETRIBUTION
    This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
    – Every nighte and alle,
    Fire and flet and candle-lighte,
    And Christe receive thy saule.
    From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,
    – Every nighte and alle,
    To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last;
    And Christe receive thy saule.
    ‘The Lyke-Wake dirge’
    When a great king dies, the earth shudders on its axis and even the sun and stars seem less bright and permanent. When King Artor died, no words were sufficient to describe the sudden stutter in the lifeblood of the Celtic nations. There was no time for mourning, only a terror of what would come, now that their protector had perished.
    Ultimately, autumn followed a spring and summer of civil war between the Celtic tribes. The farmers obeyed the ancient laws of the earth and harvested their crops, storing grain in neat conical stone and mud granaries, while apples, fish, meat and vegetables were dried and pickled to see out the long winter. Furrows were dug in the bare earth, still crowned with the last dry stalks of an earlier crop, and birds came to feed on worms and beetles disturbed by the wooden ploughs. Careless of the fate of kings, the soil has rhythms that cannot be gainsaid by grief or hardship. Planting, weeding, harvesting and ploughing – the pattern will go on until the end of time.
    In Deva, the violated streets and burned buildings still bore raw scars of the conflict that had ravaged a noble Roman city, one that had been an open metropolis for as long as men could remember. Those citizens who had escaped fire and sword crawled out of the rubble and began to set stone on stone and rebuild, for human beings are impelled to labour whenever everything they cherish has been desecrated. Build, destroy, rebuild . . . so the rhythm of cities mimics the patterns of the soil, for the trading ships would come again in the spring, bearing trade goods from the Middle Sea, and the lifeblood of Deva would begin to circle once more. But first, men must mourn their losses.
    When the cold winds came, women wept for their empty beds and murdered children, while on Cadbury Tor an empty throne stood in the great hall of King Artor. No man, no matter how powerful or able, dared to rest upon the hard wooden seat. The Celtic warriors who patrolled the Roman roads harried the Picts back to their hollows beyond the Vallum Antonini, where they licked their wounds, smiled below their woad tattoos and waited, knowing that their old hatreds would finally bear fruit. The Warrior of the West had reigned for as long as most men had been alive, and few remembered the chaos of the Great Dragon’s rule when the crazed Uther Pendragon had fought the invading Saxons until old age and madness left him brooding impotently in Venta Belgarum. In those final years of inaction the Saxon barbarians had burned churches and torn down cities of stone before constructing their simple timber buildings and crude palisades in their place.
    Later, under King Artor’s long and peaceful rule, the Celtic peoples had prospered, but Artor had died by the hand of his nephew, Modred the Matricide, and no new king had yet been elevated to assume the throne of the Britons.
    Pain and loss were followed by collective anger in the rhythm of men’s hearts before hope could finally begin to grow. A rage for all things lost and broken, a fury for the uncertainty of the future and a realisation that the tribes had contributed to their own defeat scoured the spirits of the warriors, leaving a cleaner, brighter anger that demanded to be sated. Still disorganised, the Saxons had not dealt them their