Bran Mak Morn: The Last King Read online

  � have become somewhat familiar with the maze of Roman politics during my stay in this accursed waste of mud and marble,�said he, �uring a war on the wall, Titus Sulla, as governor of this province, is supposed to hasten thither with his centuries. But Sulla cares little for opposing the spears of the heather �so he sends Caius Camillus, who in times of peace patrols the fens of the west. And Sulla takes his place in the tower of Trajan, knowing that he has naught to fear there except an occasional raid by the wild Britons of the West. Ha!� He gripped Grom with steely fingers.

  �rom, take the red stallion and ride North! Let no grass grow beneath the stallion� hoofs! Cormac na Connacht has been brooding because there was no war �well, bid him mount for the slaughter! Tell him to sweep the frontier with sword and torch! Let his wild Gaels revel in slaughter. After a time I will be with him. But for a time I have affairs in the west.� Grom� eyes gleamed. Without a word he turned and left the presence of the king, who stepped to a barred window and gazed out into the moonlit street.

  �ait until the moon sets,�he muttered grimly, �hen I�l take the road to �Hell! But before I go I have a debt to pay.� The stealthy clink of a hoof on the flags reached him.

  �e�l pass the gates,�he muttered, �ot even Rome can hold a Pictish reiver! With the gold I gave him, and his own craft, he�l find a key to every gate between this house and the heather! Now I�l sleep until the moon sets.� With a snarl at the marble frieze-work and Doric columns, as objects symbolic of Rome, he flung himself down on a couch, from which he had long since impatiently torn the cushions and silk stuffs, as too soft for his hard body. Hate and the black passion of vengeance seethed in him, yet he went instantly to sleep. The first lesson he had learned in his bitter hard life was to snatch sleep any time he could, like a wolf that snatches sleep on the hunting trail. Generally his sleep was as light and dreamless as a panther�, but tonight it was otherwise.

  He sank into fleecy grey fathoms of slumber and in a timeless, misty realm he met the tall, lean white-bearded figure of old Gonar, the priest of the Moon. And Bran stood aghast for Gonar� face was white as driven snow and he shook with deep terror. Well might Bran stand aghast for in all the years of his life, he had never seen Gonar the Wise show any sign of any fear.

  �hat now, old one?�asked the king, �oes all well in Pictdom?� �ll is well in Pictdom where my body lies sleeping,�answered old Gonar, �cross the void I have come to battle with you for your soul. King, are you mad, this thought you have thought in your brain?� �onar,�answered Bran somberly, �his day I stood still and watched a man of mine die on the cross of Rome. What his name or his rank, I do not know. I do not care. He might have been a faithful, unknown warrior, of mine, he might have been an outlaw. I only know that he was mine; the first scents he knew were the scents of the heather; the first light he saw was the sunrise on the Pictish hills. He belonged to me, not to Rome. If punishment was just, then none but I should have dealt it. If he was to be tried, none but I should have been his judge. The same blood flowed in our veins; the same fire maddened our brains; in babyhood we listened to the same old tales, and in youth we sang the same old songs. He was bound to my heart-strings, as every man and every woman and every child of Pictland is bound. It was mine to protect him; since I could not, it is mine to avenge him.� �ut in the name of the gods, Bran,�expostulated Gonar, �ake your vengeance in another way! Return to the heather �mass your warriors �join with Cormac and his Gaels, and spread a sea of blood and flame the length of the great Wall!� �ll that I will do,�grimly answered Bran, �ut now �NOW I will have a vengeance such as no Roman ever dreamed of! Ha, what do they know of the mysteries of this ancient isle, which sheltered strange life before Rome rose from the marshes of the Tiber?� �ran, there are weapons too foul to use, even against Rome!� Bran barked short and sharp as a jackal.

  �a! There are no weapons I would not use against Rome! My back is at the wall �I will fight her with what weapons I can! By the blood of the fiends, has Rome fought me fair? Bah! I am a barbarian king, with wolfskin robes and an iron crown, fighting with my handful of bows and broken pikes against the queen of the world! What have I? The heather hills, the wattle huts, the spears of my shock-headed tribesmen! And I fight Rome �with her armored legions, her broad fertile plains and rich seas �her wealth, her steel, her gold, her mastery and her wrath. By steel and fire I will fight her �and by subtlety and treachery �by the thorn in the foot, the adder in the path, the venom in the cup, the dagger in the dark �aye,�his voice sank somberly, �nd by the worms of the earth!� �ut it is madness, this plan of yours,�cried Gonar, �ou will perish in the attempt �you will go down to Hell and you will not return! What of your people then?� �f I cannot serve them I had better die,�growled the king.

  �ut you cannot even reach the beings you plan to use,�cried Gonar, �or untold centuries they have dwelt APART. There is no door by which you can come to them. Long ago they severed the bonds that bound them to the world we know.� �ong ago,�answered Bran somberly, �ou told me that nothing was separated from the stream of Life �a saying the truth of which I have often seen evident. No race, no form of life but is close knit somehow, by some manner, to the rest of Life and the world. Somewhere there is a thin tie-rib connecting they I seek to the world I know. Somewhere there is a Door. And somewhere among the bleak fens of the west I will find it.� Stark horror flooded Gonar� eyes and he gave back crying: �oe! Woe! Woe to Pictdom! Woe to the unborn kingdom! Woe, black woe to the sons of men! Woe, woe, woe, woe!� Bran awoke to a shadowed room and the starlight on the window bars. The moon had sunk from sight though its glow was still faintly evident above the house tops. Memory of his dream shook him and he swore beneath his breath.

  Rising he flung off cloak and mantle, donning a light shirt of black mesh-mail, and girting on sword and dirk. Then wrapping his wide cloak about him, he silently left the house. A moment� groping in the stable and he placed his hand over the stallion� nose, checking the nicker. Working without a light he swiftly bridled and saddled the great brute, and went into the shadowy side-street, leading him. At his girdle hung a pouch heavy with minted gold that bore the stamp of Rome. He had come to Ebbracum to pose as an emissary of Pictdom, and to spy. But being a barbarian, he could not play his part in sedate dignity. He retained a crowded memory of wild feasts, where wine flowed in fountains; of white bosomed Roman women who, sated with civilized lover, looked on a virile barbarian with something more than favor; of gladiatorial games; and of other games where dice clicked and tall stacks of gold changed hands. He had drunk deeply and gambled recklessly, after the manner of barbarians, and of late his luck had been good. He had had a remarkable run of luck, due possibly to the indifference with which he won or lost. Gold to the Pict was so much dust, flowing through his fingers. In his land there was no need of it. But he had learned its power in the boundaries of civilization.

  He came almost under the shadow of the wall and saw ahead of him loom up the great watch-tower which was connected and reared above the wall. One corner of the castle-like fortress, furtherest from the wall, served as a dungeon. Bran left his horse standing with reins hanging to the ground, in a dark alley and stole forward.

  The young officer Valerius was waken from a light, unquiet sleep by a stealthy sound at the barred window. He woke and sat up, cursing softly under his breath as the faint-starlight that etched the window-bars fell across the bare stone floor and reminded him of his disgrace. Well, in a few days he� be out of it, and let any man or woman gibe at him! Damn that insolent Pict! But wait, he thought suddenly, what of the sound that had wakened him.

  �ssst!�a voice from the window.

  A friend? If so, why so much secrecy? Valerius rose and crossed his cell, coming close to the window. Outside all was dim in the moonlight and he made out but a shadowy form close to the window.

  �ho are you?�he leaned close against the bars, straining
his eyes into the gloom.

  His answer was a sudden snarl of laughter, a long flicker of steel in the starlight. Valerius reeled away from the window and crashed to the floor, clutching his throat, gurgling horribly as he tried to scream. Blood gushed in torrents through his fingers, forming about his stiffening body a pool that reflected the dim starlight dully and redly.

  Outside Bran glided away, swift and fleeting as a shadow, without pausing to peer into the cell; he knew his stroke had gone home. In another minute the guard would round the corner on their regular round. Even now he heard the measured tramp of their iron-clad feet. Before they came in sight, he had vanished, and they clomped stolidly by the cell-window with no intimation of the corpse that lay on the floor within.

  Bran rode to the small gate in the western wall, unchallenged by the sleepy watch. What fear of foreign invasion in Ebbracum? �and certain well organized thieves and women-stealers made it profitable to the watchmen not to be too vigilant. But the single guardsman at the western gate �his fellows lay drunk in a nearby brothel �lifted his spear and bawled for Bran to halt and give an account of himself. Silently the Pict reined closer. Masked in the dark cloak, he seemed dim and indistinct to the Roman, who only caught the glitter of his cold eyes in the gloom. But Bran held up his hand against the starlight and the soldier caught the gleam of gold; in the other hand he saw a long gleam of steel. The soldier understood and between the choice of a golden bribe, or a battle to the death with this unknown rider who was apparently a barbarian of some sort, he did not hesitate. With a grunt he lowered his spear and swung the gate open. Bran rode through, casting a handful of coins to the Roman. They fell about his feet in a golden shower, clinking against the flags. He bent in greedy haste to retrieve them and Bran Mak Morn rode westward like a flying ghost in the night.

  Chapter .3.

  Into the dim fens of the west came Bran Mak Morn. A cold wind breathed across the gloomy waste, and against the grey sky a few herons flapped heavily. The long reeds and marsh-grass waved in broken undulations and out across the wastes a few still meres reflected the dull light. Here and there rose curiously regular hillocks above the general levels, and gaunt against the somber sky, Bran saw a marching line of upright stones �menhirs, reared by what nameless hands?

  Beyond these fens lay the foothills that grew to the wild mountains of Wales where dwelt still wild Celtic tribes that knew not the yoke of Rome. A row of well-garrisoned watch-towers held them in check. Even now, far away across the moors, Bran could glimpse the unassailable keep men call the Tower of Trajan.

  Human life was not utterly lacking, even in these barren wastes. Bran met the silent men of the fen �reticent, dark of eye and hair, speaking a strange mixed tongue whose long blended integrals had forgotten their pristine separate sources. Bran recognized a certain kinship in these people to himself, but he looked on them with the scorn of a pure blooded patrician for men of mixed strains.

  Not that the common people of Caledonia were altogether pure-blooded �they got their stocky bodies and massive limbs from a primitive Teutonic race which had found its way into Caledonia even before the Celtic conquest of Britain was completed, and had been absorbed by the wild Picts. But the chiefs of Bran� folk had kept their blood free from foreign admixture since the beginnings of Time, and he himself was a pure-bred Pict of the Old Race. But these fen-men, over-run repeatedly by British, Gaelic and Roman conquerors, had assimulated the blood of each, and in the process, almost forgotten their original language and lineage.

  Only in Caledonia, Bran brooded, had his people, once masters of all Europe, resisted the flood of Aryan conquest. He had heard of a Pictish people called Basques, who, in the crags of the Pyrenees called themselves an unconquered race; but he knew they had paid tribute for centuries to the ancestors of the Gaels, before these Celtic conquerors abandoned their mountain-realm and set sail for Ireland. Only the Picts of Caledonia had remained free, and they had been scattered into small feuding tribes �he was the first acknowledged king in five hundred years �the beginning of a new dynasty �no, a revival of an ancient dynasty under a new name. In the very teeth of imperial Rome, he dreamed his dreams of empire.

  He wandered through the fens, seeking a Door. Of his quest he said nothing to the dark-eyed fen-men. They told him news that drifted from mouth to mouth �a tale of war in the north, the blast of war-trumpets along the winding Wall, of gathering fires in the heather, of flame and smoke and rapine, and the glutting of Gaelic swords in the crimson sea of slaughter. The eagles of the legions were moving northward and the ancient roads resounded to the measured tramp of the iron-clad feet. And Bran, in the fens of the west, laughed, well pleased.

  One grey evening he strode on foot across the moors, blackly etched against the dimly crimson fire of the sunset. He felt the incredible antiquity of the slumbering land, as he walked like the last man on the day after the end of the world. Yet at last he saw a token of human life �a drab hut of wattle and mud, set in the reedy breast of the fen.

  A woman greeted him from the open door, and Bran� somber eyes narrowed with a sudden suspicion. The woman was not old, yet the evil wisdom of ages was in her eyes; her garments were ragged and scanty, her black locks tangled and unkempt, lending her an aspect of wildness well in keeping with her grim surroundings. Her red lips laughed but there was no mirth in her laughter, only a hint of mockery, and under her lips her teeth showed sharp and pointed like fangs.

  �nter, master,�said she, �f you do not fear to share the roof of the witch-woman of Dagon-moor!� Bran entered and sat him down on a broken bench while the woman busied herself with her scanty meal which cooked over an open fire on a squalid hearth. He studied her lithe, almost serpentine motions, the ears which were almost pointed, the yellow eyes which slanted curiously.

  �hat do you seek on the fens, my lord?�she asked turning toward him with a supple twist of her whole body.

  � seek a Door,�he answered, chin resting on his fist, � have a song to sing to the worms of the earth!� She started upright, a jar falling from her hands.

  �hat is an ill saying, even spoken in chance,�she stammered.

  � speak not by chance but by intent,�he answered, �y the mottles on your skin, by the slanting of your eyes, by the taint in your veins, I speak with full knowledge and meaning.� Awhile she stood silent, her lips smiling but her face inscrutable.

  �re you mad, man?�she spoke, �hat in your madness you come seeking that from which strong men fled screaming in old times?� � seek a vengeance,�he answered, �HEY I seek may give me that vengeance.� She shook her head.

  �ou have listened to a bird singing; you have dreamed empty dreams.� � have heard a viper hiss,�he growled, �nd I do not dream. Enough of this by-play. I came seeking a link between two world; I have found it.� � need lie to you no more, man of the North,�answered the woman, �HEY you seek still dwell beneath these sleeping hills. They have drawn apart, further and further from the world you know.� �ut they still steal forth in the night to grip straying women on the moors,�said he, his gaze on her slanted eyes. She laughed wickedly.

  �hat would you of me?� �hat you bring me to them.� She flung back her head with a scornful laugh. His left hand locked like iron in the breast of her scanty garment and his right closed on his hilt. She laughed in his face.

  �trike and be damned, my northern wolf! Do you think that such life as mine is so sweet that I would cling to it as a babe to the breast?� His grasp fell away.

  �ou are right. Threats are foolish. I will buy your aid.� �ow?�the laughing voice hummed with mockery.

  Bran opened his pouch and poured into his cupped palm a stream of gold.

  �ore wealth than all the men of the fen ever dreamed of, together.� Again she laughed. �hat is money to me? Put up your rusty metal.� �ame me a price,�he urged, �he head of an enemy �� �his!�she laughed, and springing, struck cat-like. But the dagger splinte
red on the mail beneath his cloak and he flung her off with a loathing flirt of his wrist which tossed her sprawling across her straw-strewn bunk. Lying there she laughed up at him.

  �ery well! I will name you a price!�She rose and came close to him, her disquietingly long hands fastened into his cloak, � will tell you, Bran Mak Morn, king of Caledon! Oh, I knew you when you came into my hut with your black hair and cold eyes. I will lead you to the door of Hades if you like �for a price. And that price shall be the kisses of a king! What think you of my wasted and bitter life, I whom mortal men loathe and fear? I have not known the love of men, the clasp of a strong arm, the sting of human kisses, I the were-woman of the moors! One night of love, oh king, and I grant you your desire!� Bran eyed her somberly; he reached forth and gripped her arm in his iron fingers. And an involuntary shudder shook him at the feel of her sleek skin. He nodded slowly, and drawing her close to him, forced his head down to meet her lifted lips.

  Chapter .4.

  The cold grey mists of dawn wrapped Black Bran like a clammy cloak. He turned to the woman whose slanted eyes gleamed in the grey gloom.

  �ake good your part of the contract,�he said roughly, �ive me a key to Hell.� � will,�the red lips smiled terribly, �o to the mound men call Dagon� Barrow. Draw aside the stone that blocks the chamber and enter. The floor of the chamber is made of five great stones, each eight sided, four grouped about the fifth. Lift out the center stone �and you will see!� �ill I find the Black Stone?�he asked.