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

mortal blow. But Modred and his allies had killed their future and imperilled their homes, so the traitors must pay before the Celts could begin the healing process. Perhaps a new dragon would rise from dead, cold ashes.
    The Matricide was dead. There was no body to display on the walls of Deva, for the High King’s warriors had stabbed, torn, chopped and kicked at it on the battlefield after Artor had dealt the killing blow. Artor’s own body had been spirited away by the three queens and taken down the long road leading to Glastonbury in the south, while his warriors took their bitter chagrin out on the Matricide’s corpse. Modred was gone into the great darkness, and his remains were beyond the justice of his enemies.
    But several of Modred’s allies remained alive. They were free, breathing and cowering in hidden places, still hoping to escape the vengeance of the victors of the battle of Camlann. For those men whose anger burned the brightest, the greatest prize became King Mark of the Deceangli tribe, that ruler who had forsaken his oaths of fealty and been seduced by Modred’s empty promises of land and gold. This lordling was assailable, for his body had not been found when the battle was over.
    Mark had fled the field when he became aware that Modred had been slain. Whether King Artor survived his wounds or not was of little importance to Mark, who ordered his surviving forces to retire behind their own borders in a hasty and craven retreat. No man, wounded or suffering, was spared during his mad dash to safety. The Deceangli had always prided themselves on the courage of their warriors, and on that numbing, bone-jarring ride the tribesmen cursed their failure on the battlefield and the cowardice of their king, who had determined that they must live for ever with the shame of their flight.
    The Deceangli weren’t alone in their shame and impotent anger. The tribes would remember Deva with the taste of wormwood on their tongues and they would dream of vengeance as they searched the north for pockets of Pictish resistance. In ruthless determination to salvage some shreds of honour from the civil war, the kings ground their teeth and vowed that someone would pay for the debacle. Mark knew he was living on borrowed time in his fortress beside the river at Canovium, and prayed that Artor’s death would plunge the kingdoms into chaos. Which, of course, it did.
    While Mark was a weak man with a coward’s sense of self-preservation, he understood the frailties and self-delusions of other men. The power vacuum left by Artor’s death weakened the alliance of kings, so each tribal group drew back to its own boundaries and watched its neighbours with untrusting, self-absorbed eyes. Mark wasn’t forgotten, simply put aside until the wounds of his pursuers were cleansed and healing, and the old rhythms could reassert themselves.
    For months, Mark hunkered down in the Canovium fortress, which possessed living rock from the heart of the mountains at its back, the river that rose near Dinas Emrys at its feet and huge ramparts of earth protecting his hall at its crown. Canovium had never suffered the ignominy of defeat, for it had been sited with self-defence as the prime consideration.
    ‘Let them come,’ Mark crowed at those times when he had drunk enough wine to numb his sharp, avian intelligence. ‘They’ll break their backs on my walls. That old bastard Artor is worm food now, so who is left to call me to account? Bedwyr? A Saxon slave in his youth, and now the master of nothing but trees! Gawayne? He’s even older than his damned uncle, and his lands in Rheged are under constant attack from Saxon scum. He’ll not leave his broad acres to settle old scores – not unless he’s got a death wish. Who else is there to care who should live or who should die?’
    But, drunk or sober, Mark did not forget the enigmatic king of the Ordovice, a tribe of great power in the west. Bran was said to be linked to the old king by