The Saxon Spears Read online

  tHE SAXON SPEARS

  The Song of Ash

  Book One

  JAMES CALBRAITH

  Published December 2019 by Flying Squid

  Visit James Calbraith’s official website at

  jamescalbraith.wordpress.com

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  Copyright © James Calbraith, 2019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Fan fiction and fan art is encouraged.

  BRITANNIA MAXIMA, c. 430 AD

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Villa Ariminum

  Adelheid: Lady of the Villa, wife of Master Pascent

  Ash: Seaborn, a foundling raised at the Villa

  Eadgith: Bladesmith’s daughter

  Fastidius: Only son of Adelheid and Pascent

  Fulco: Frankish bodyguard of Master Pascent

  Pascent: Master of the Villa, husband of Lady Adelheid

  Paulinus: Priest and tutor

  Quintus Natalius: Master of the nearest Villa to the east

  Londin

  Brutus: Centurion of Londin praetorium guards

  Catigern: Elder son of Dux Wortigern

  Fatalis: Bishop of Londin

  Odo: Decurion of the Gaulish cavalry in Cantiaca

  Worangon: Comes of Cantiaca

  Wortigern: Dux of Britannia Maxima

  Wortimer: Younger son of Wortigern

  Iutes

  Three brothers:

  Eobba: lost at sea

  Hengist: chief of the Iutes of Tanet

  Horsa: chief of the Iutes of Londin

  Rhedwyn: daughter of Eobba

  Beadda: commander of Hengist’s household guard

  Saxons

  Aelle: chief of the Saxon warbands in Andreda

  Eirik: Geat, chief of a warband in Western Andreda

  Hilla: New recruit in Eirik’s warband

  GLOSSARY

  Aesc: Saxon spear

  Ceol: Narrow, ocean-going Saxon ship

  Centuria: Troop of (about) hundred infantry

  Centurion: Officer in Roman infantry

  Comes, pl. Comites: Administrator of a pagus

  Decurion: Officer in Roman cavalry

  Domus: The main living structure of a villa

  Drihten: War chief of a Saxon tribe

  Dux: Overall commander in war times, in peace time – administrator of a province

  Fulcum: Roman shield wall formation

  Hiréd: Band of elite warriors of Drihten’s household

  Gesith: Companion of the Drihten, chief of the Hiréd

  Mansio: Staging post

  Pagus: Administrative unit, smaller than a province

  Seax: Saxon short sword

  Spatha: Roman long sword

  Villa: Roman agricultural property

  Wealh, pl. wealas: “the others”, Britons in Saxon tongue

  PLACE NAMES

  Andreda: Weald Forest

  Anderitum: Pevensey, East Sussex

  Ariminum: Wallington, Surrey

  Arn: River Arun

  Cantiaca: Kent

  Corin: Corinium, Cirencester

  Dorce: Dorking, Surrey

  Dorowern: Dorovernum, Canterbury, Kent

  Beaddingatun: Beddington, Surrey

  Britannia Maxima: a province of Britannia, with capital in Londin

  Britannia Prima: a province of Britannia, with capital in Corin

  Eobbasfleot: Ebbsfleet, Kent

  Londin: Londinium, London

  Loudborne: River Wandle

  Medu: River Medway

  New Port: Novus Portus, Portslade, Sussex

  Regentium: Chichester, Sussex

  Robriwis: Dorobrivis, Rochester, Kent

  Rutubi: Rutupiae, Richborough, Kent

  Saffron Valley: Croydon, London

  Stone Bridge: Alfoldean, Horsham

  Stur: River Stour

  Tamesa: River Thames

  Tanet: Isle of Thanet, Kent

  PART 1: 428–440 AD

  CHAPTER I

  THE LAY OF ASH

  With both hands, I grasp a thick stick and thrust it deep into the wet sand. Huffing and puffing, I run it in a straight line from the edge of the water to a pool I had dug previously out of the dry part of the beach. A roaring wave, taller than myself, crashes down before me; the bitter, straw-coloured foam laps at my feet and flows into and over the canal, destroying everything I’ve built. Undeterred, I start again.

  Suddenly, I sense I’m being watched. The lone silhouette of a rider sits atop a ridge of dunes that shimmer in the sun to the east of our village. Even from this distance, I can tell he’s a stranger. Nobody in the village rides horses as tall as this one.

  Though the rider is alone and far away, he’s enough to stir a panic. Hurrying feet stomp the drying nets, frightened voices cry out throughout the village; a mallet beats a sheet of brass in alarm. A man picks me up from the sand. I cry: my work is far from finished, and I don’t want to go back to the hot and stuffy hut while the rare summer sun is still high in the sky. But it’s not the hut that I’m taken to.

  All the villagers have gathered on the gravel spit. A long, narrow boat, big enough to fit half of the village in its depths, slowly fills up with passengers. It has a single sail of red cloth, marked with a black horse’s head. I remember all the women of the village working on that sail. I remember them weaving the pattern adorning the red cloth: a face of an old, bearded, one-eyed man in a grey hooded cloak.

  “Foh ina!” cries the man holding me as he hands me over to a fair-haired woman. She sits me down on a wooden bench. The wind blows from the land and fills out the sail. The ship grinds against the gravel as it slides into the sea.

  The same narrow ship, heaving in a storm. Black, wrathful clouds in the sky, rain lashing at my face and hands, blinding, piercing. I open my mouth, but the roar of the wind silences my cries. A strong arm grasps at my blankets. The grip slips as the boat heaves and sways on the waves, then returns. The single mast shatters, a gust tears the red sail away into the darkness. The boat rolls to one side. The gripping hand slips one last time. Water, freezing cold and pitch black, covers my head. I gasp, choke, drown.

  A face appears in the darkness, lit up from within: an old, bearded man, one eye missing, in a grey hooded cloak. He stares at me and then mouths some words, but I can’t hear him over the roar of the storm. He laughs and disappears. The strong hand returns and pulls me out of the darkness.

  I reach out to hold on to something — anything; the butt of an oar strikes my arm, and I tumble to the bottom of the boat. The man before me struggles to hold the ship straight against the raging currents. I don’t see them, but I know there are thirty others like him on the boat, fifteen on each side. Though I understand that we’re in danger, I don’t yet understand how much. I don’t yet know that the kind of ship we’re on, called a ceol, is only good for sailing up rivers and along the muddy shores of our homeland, not for traversing the raging northern ocean. That without the mast and the sail, no matter how valiantly the oarsmen fight, we are as good as doomed in this hellish storm.

  The strong hand picks me up again and sits me firmly on a wet plank. My shoulder hurts. Still crying, I turn to the sea. The downpour’s curtain splits open for a moment and I glimpse
black shapes dancing on the billows, curved and sharp, like dried leaves. Two more ceols, thrown about by the same ravenous forces. A great swell separates us from them, and the ships disappear from sight.

  I hear the woman to my left praying. In the memory, I can’t see her face through rain and tears. All I see is her hair, fair, flowing in twin braids, like streams of molten gold. She holds a small, screaming bundle in her arms. The man to my right doesn’t pray — he’s cursing the gods, and wrestling the oar as if he was taming a raging ox.

  A lightning bolt tears the sky over our heads. The prow leaps upwards as our ship strikes a reef and, for a blink of an eye, we’re all hovering in the air. Then I hear a terrible noise, louder even than the thunder’s rolling roar: the hull planks tearing apart from the strain. As the boat falls down into the churning, roiling depths, so do I. The strong hand reaches after me, but this time it’s too late and the fingers grasp only at the water. The darkness engulfs me. With a panicked gulp, I swallow the ocean — and the ocean swallows me.

  There are other memories, flashes, glimpses of another life erased from my mind by the passage of time.

  A slave market in a small coastal town, my tiny baby frame squashed between the oiled thighs of two Germanic thralls. The smell of their sweat mixes with the odour of my fear. My legs hurt — the slave monger is forcing me to stand. I cry and pee myself. He slaps me. His hand is bigger than my head.

  They give me my first name there. Among other nameless slaves I am known simply as the Seaborn — a call given to all the foundlings washed away on the rocky beaches of this inhospitable coast.

  A swaying, stuffy darkness inside a four-wheeled wagon. The vehicle turns from a smooth, metalled road onto a dirt track, and the clattering and clanking of the rigid undercarriage wakes me up. The yellow dust gets everywhere. I cry again, and a woman tries to rock me back to sleep, but she’s too gentle — I’m used to rougher caresses — and I remain disconsolate. Her hair is not as bright as that of the woman on the boat. It’s mousey and thin, her eyes round and dark, set deep within a sad, fair face. She gives me my second name, in a language I don’t yet understand — she calls me Infantulus.

  A flat, stone floor under my bare feet, surprisingly warm, radiating some inner heat. I’m in a vast, colonnaded hallway, presented to my new “family”: a couple of elderly house servants, ordered to take me into their cramped, dark, round-walled mud hut and raise me as their own. I sense their hostility. In years to come, they will call me by many names, none of them pleasant. I am an unwelcome disturbance in their already difficult life. I start to cry. I’m crying a lot in these memories.

  But there is a snag. I can’t tell how many of these fragments are my real memories, and how much my mind had made up from what I was later told. I know now what a small-town slave market looks like, and what it’s like to be inside a four-wheeled wagon, ratcheting its way along a dirt track. And although the floor in my Master’s bath house is no longer heated, it does not take a great leap to imagine what warm paving stones must have felt like. No, I can’t be certain of the veracity of any of those memories.

  Except that first one. It’s the only one I’m sure of, for one reason: I have never seen the open sea since that fateful, cruel storm which separated me from my people. And I could not make this image up from the references of my childhood. The only water I know is the Loudborne, a fast-babbling stream that runs south of the Master’s property fuelling the lumber and grain mills and the fish ponds dug into its banks. Strain as I might, I cannot make this clear current resemble in any way the dark, churning, demonic depths of the angry ocean. The vision must be true. And so I cling to it as if to a family heirloom — the only reminder of whatever life my real parents had imagined for me… Except, that is, for the rune stone hanging at my neck.

  As I lean down to look at my reflection in the Loudborne’s now calm current — it’s a dry summer, and the stream has grown as lazy and slow as the bumblebees bouncing off the lavender stalks along the southern bank — I see the blue rune stone dangling from side to side from its leather cord. It is a miracle that I still have it, not only that I managed to hold on to it through the storm, drowning, and any subsequent misadventures, but that the slave monger allowed me to keep it. I can only assume he deemed the mystery of the stone worth a few coins added to the value of the nameless Seaborn child. A lost chieftain’s son, perhaps? A princeling from a faraway land?

  The slave monger’s instincts were right. It must have been the necklace that brought me to the attention of Lady Adelheid, my future Master’s wife, as she browsed the market. She probably wasn’t planning on buying any slaves that day — certainly not a useless, mewling child. I chuckle as I imagine the conversation she must have had with her husband, explaining her reasons for the purchase.

  I hold the stone on an outstretched palm. It’s the size of a May beetle’s carapace, bluish-grey and polished, with a single mark carved into it. It used to be inlaid with gold at some point, now only a faint trace of the metal remains, glinting in the sun. The mark is that of a single vertical stem with two parallel arms coming off it at an angle at the top. I was told it’s a Saxon rune for Ash tree. And because it was the only identifying item in my belongings, it became my third name, a name that would stay with me the longest: Ash.

  It is a good name, one that I’m eager to live up to. Ash is a tall, proud, fast-growing tree, prized for its many uses. I want to be strong and useful, too. I want to repay my Masters for their kindness — after all, if they hadn’t bought me, I’m certain the slave monger would have thrown me back into the sea.

  I didn’t care for the “kindness” of the old couple who nursed me in those early years. I never even learned their names: for me they were always the “old man” and the “old woman”. The “old man” expressed the entirety of his feelings towards me through grunts and thumps on the head. Not that I saw much of him. He worked as an attendant at the villa’s bath house, responsible for heating the water for the morning and evening ablutions, keeping the pipes clean and maintaining the hypocaust. When he returned, his fists smelled of soap and lead.

  The crone was too old for manual labour. I’d guessed she used to be a weaver in her younger days, for sometimes, when the aching in her bones and joints allowed, she’d venture to the riverside to pick rush and willow, with which she then mended the baskets and brooms around the house. I often sat beside her, holding the bundle of willow stalks and watched her dry, grey, twig-like fingers dance around the wicker. Seeing somebody skilled perform a task they enjoyed was one of the very few pleasures I could afford back then.

  She did not have it in her to enjoy the main duty the Master gave her — raising and nurturing me into a useful slave. First, she had to teach me the tongue of the Britons, a burden she and the old man had proven uniquely unsuitable for. Theirs was a harsh, rough peasant talk, a mix of every tongue ever spoken in this land. The man had a smattering of Roman terms necessary for his job at the bath house, but other than that, their vocabulary was limited almost solely to matters of countryside, with a selection of grunts and mimes supplementing whatever other words may have been required in a more challenging conversation.

  “Pig,” the hag croaked, pointing a stick at the wallowing animal. “Hog.” She pointed again. I did not understand why she’d used two words for the same type of creature. The stick cracking over my head was the only explanation. “Pig! Hog!” she’d repeat, annoyed.

  The only time I heard her speak full sentences was when she prayed. And pray she did plenty. Every day after the morning meal, at noon, and before the cena, she’d stand before the grey slab of slate with an ugly cross scratched into it, spread her arms apart, bend them at the elbows, lower her head and recite a prayer as simple as it was fervent.

  I had been too little to have had any faith instilled in me by my real parents, and so these daily prayers were my first encounter with a god — or the God, as I’d later learn. I did not understand what kind of being lived insi
de the slab of stone, but I did think it either weak or indifferent, since it never seemed to answer any of the woman’s prayers.

  Several times a year all the inhabitants and workers of the villa would cross the river and come to a gravel-strewn plot of land outside a high-roofed whitewashed timber building at the edge of an old burial ground. For most of the year it was used to stock hay, timber and empty amphorae, but on those special occasions, it would become the focus for a religious ceremony, the Mass. The first time the old crone dragged me there, the noise and the stench of several dozen people gathered in a tight crowd all around me was unbearable, so naturally, I started crying. But I grew stronger and braver by the next year — thanks in no small part to the old man’s kicks and knuckles — and I asked the woman to bring me closer to the building itself. Grudgingly, she complied. We pushed through the crowd until I was able to peer into the mysterious darkness.