Reports from his scouts the night before indicated that as of yesterday the Romans had no definite knowledge of the approach of the Pictish army-that construction continued apace, and that there was no evidence of reinforcements marching northward. A few scouts yet remained to spy out the camp until their attack-and they would give warning if such reinforcements did arrive. Bran smiled wolfishly. By now the Romans must know of his approach. He pictured the confusion within the half-finished fort as the legionaries desperately rushed to throw a last shovel of dirt, lay a last slab of turf to the wall-knowing that in another instant they must seize weapons and fight for their lives.
No place for cunning stratagems this day. Pictish arrows would pin down the defenders along the unfinished rampart, while the mass of his army swarmed over the outer ditches on bridges of felled trees and stormed the weaker sections of the wall. The Picts outnumbered the defenders, and once they succeeded in breaching the turf-wall, Bran was confident his warriors could overwhelm the Romans within. If cynical old Gonar did not share his confidence, it was because the Pictish king was still flushed with his victory over Marcus Sulius several months previous-and Bran still remembered laying waste to the forts along Hadrian’s Wall not many years before.
For a moment Bran thought back on those wild days. He was just in his middle-teens, son of the chief of a minor clan-but a youth who dreamed great dreams, who saw in those days of fire and pillage the vision of Rome swept into the sea, of a new Pictish nation…
A pair of scouts galloped headlong toward the Pictish van. Bran cut short his musing and instinctively grasped swordhilt. The men rode as if the hounds of hell were hard on their heels.
“What is it!” Bran demanded. “Have more legionaries come up from the Wall? An ambush…?”
“Milord!” gasped the first scout. “The Roman camp!” He choked for words, fumbling like a stricken idiot.
Bran caught the paleness of the man’s face, the stunned look of horror. He shook the man roughly.
“Tell me, damn you!”
“It is a camp of dead men!”
4
FALSE DAWN
The aura of death hung over the Roman camp like a tangible pall. Already carrion crows by the hundreds hovered about the ruined fortifications-somehow reluctant to descend upon the hideous banquet strewn below. Bran saw their black-winged cumulus overlying the camp as the Picts approached.
As his scouts blurted out their frightened and incoherent reports, Bran first wondered whether some dark spell had stricken them all with stark madness. But as one man after another corroborated their account of wholesale massacre and of horror transcending mass carnage, Bran struggled to grasp what surely must be some inconceivable Roman stratagem-some unthinkable deception to entrap the Pictish army.
Yet such a ploy defied all logic and sanity-and Bran had fought the Romans long enough to know their tactics were founded on superior discipline and equipment, not on some insane artifice such as this. Nonetheless…
An anxious murmur rose from the Picts as distorted versions of the scouts’ reports passed from mouth to mouth. Suspicious of some hellish Roman trick, Bran’s army advanced with extreme vigilance.
Such caution was needless.
The early-morning skies were clear and blue, but there would be no battle today. Within the ruined camp the shadow of death overcast all, and crawling horror leered and gibbered over each mutilated corpse.
The wall of turf was breached at several points-undermined, Bran noted uneasily. Undermined, as were the heaps of broken stone and masonry that had been watchtowers. Tents, half-finished barracks and principia-all lay smashed and strewn about the hundred-acre enclosure, as if some demented titan had run amok here. Destruction was both wanton and complete. Someone had taken time to do a thorough job of seemingly maniacal vandalism.
Someone…
Something…
Yesterday two thousand Romans were at work here. Today the Romans were still here, but for them there would be no more battles. Their corpses…
Even cold-blooded old Grom was shaken, his battle-scarred face showing sickened disbelief as they picked their way through the wreckage of the fort. Grom swore in awe.
“By the gods! Where are their heads!”
Bran swallowed, wondering whether this might not be another nightmare. In the bright blue light of the spring morning, two thousand headless corpses sprawled as hideous evidence that some unspeakable horror had held mad revelry here in the night. Presumably two thousand-some of the mutilations…
“Are there no other bodies?” Bran asked in a strained voice. “Where are the bodies of the warriors who did this?”
“I see none,” Gonar answered. “Only Roman dead.”
“Grom! Have the men search thoroughly for bodies other than those of the Romans,” Bran ordered. “And have them search beneath the wreckage for survivors. I must know who did this!”
“Cormac na Connacht…?” offered Grom-knowing it could not be so.
“Cormac’s Gaels do not take heads for trophies!” Bran scoffed. “Nor do any of the Celts on so mad a scale as this ghoulish butchery! Let the men search well for any evidence of who did this. And bring me the scouts who were to spy upon the Romans through the night!”
The Pictish king dismounted. Followed by Gonar he walked among the carnage, studying each grisly corpse, each tangle of wreckage.
“They died near midnight, Gonar,” Bran decided. “And they must have been all slain in one sudden overwhelming attack. See-their limbs have only begun to show the rigidity of death. Most likely there was no warning until they were aroused from sleep by the attack.
“Whoever slew the Romans had time to enjoy his triumph,” Bran continued, looking about the camp. “Time to strip weapons and armor from the dead. Time to carry away their own dead. Time to hack away the head of every man here. By the gods! This is all madness! This has the features of some unthinkable jest!”
Grom shook his shaggy head. For once the sight of butchered Romans foiled to fire his heart with savage glee. Here, there was something wrong, something inhuman…
“An army did this,” Grom muttered. “Yet how could an army have attacked and withdrawn-and only miles from us-without our knowledge? That they massacred the Homan dogs proves they shared our hatred of Rome. But they could not have been Celt or Pict-else they would have allied with us-unless they knew not of our presence here. Were they reavers from the sea?”
“We are two days hard march from either coast,” Bran reminded him. “There is nothing here to tempt such pirates to come inland.”
“Then have the Britons of the South risen against Rome?” Grom wondered.
“Without our knowledge? Impossible! Were it so, the South is crowded with Roman towns and forts for their taking.”
“Then who?”
“Tell me, Grom-and I give this crown of iron to you.”
The old warrior muttered to himself and moved on with his bandy-legged gait. Gonar spoke in a voice for only Bran’s hearing.