Authors: Paul Bannister
While Arthur was planning a festival, Myrddin the sorcerer was again playing with fire. He had ended his experiments to build a flying chair after his trials with a propellant made from salt petre, sulphur and charcoal, a secret the Qinese called ‘exploding bamboo,’ had failed in so spectacular a manner even he realized the dangers.
Myrddin had enjoyed some success with flying firedrakes. Their whooshing fireballs had stampeded a Saxon shieldwall but they were largely uncontrolled weapons. The king had commanded him to develop something similar, but one that was not so unpredictable. “They’re useful the way war elephants are useful,” Arthur had said. “That is, as a scare tactic which might or might not work.”
Myrddin swatted at his robe, which was smouldering from misdirected sparks, and his housekeeper-cum-factotum, Jogrovea, ran to damp it with a cloth.
“You should be more careful with thos
e explosives,” she scolded him.
Myrddin snorted. “He wants these things or war elephants to stampede the enemy. “Can you believe Arthur would consider using elephants? They get them drunk, then turn them loose and they attack anyone, from either army. They kill as many of their handlers as they do of the enemy
. Firedrakes work much better.”
“As you like,” the servant said, giving his robe a final pat and tutting under her breath. “I’ll mend that later. Can’t you find a safer way,” she asked him. “Can’t you just get fire from the sun or somewhere?”
Myrddin glanced up at Sol, casting a pallid light on the upper slopes of Yr Wyddfa, the sacred mountain of Wales. Its snow-topped peak loomed over his home, Ty Ffynnon, the squared-stone Fountain House named for the bubbling clear spring that served it. “There’s not enough power from him here,” he said thoughtfully, “though that engineer Archimedes did well in Greece. I expect Sol’s more powerful there, being closer to Olympus.” The sorcerer was thinking of how the Greek had used a burning glass, or maybe an array of angled mirrors to destroy some of the Roman fleet at the siege of Syracuse.
Guinevia had told him about that, she’d read it in the days when she had collected a library of scrolls, or maybe he’d heard it from those astrologer-priests who’d brought him so much useful information from Nineveh. “Perhaps,” he said, tugging at his earlobe in thought, “I could use polished metal mirrors to focus what heat there is.” He strode through the courtyard of his square stone house to his work chamber and began sketching on a wood shaving with a piece of charcoal. “Bronze,” he said aloud. “Thin sheets of bronze, shaped like a sea shell to focus the rays to one spot…” He clapped his hands for Jogrovea. “When you go to Menai next, tell the smith to come here to talk to me,” he ordered. “Tell him to bring some thin s
heets of bronze with him, too.”
At age 17, Milo was already a man. He was tall, fair like his mother and moved with quiet confidence and grace. Guinevia was unusually maternal, and could hardly keep her hands off him, fussing with his tunic, touching his shoulder, brushing a speck of dust from his face. He grinned at me over her head and I raised an eyebrow. The fortress at Chester was a brighter place since my son had arrived.
It was about a year and a half since his wedding and we had not seen him since that handfast ceremony in damp Alba. Sintea, small and dark, had shone that day, but here in the south, away from her native land, she was shy and reticent. It may have had to do with Guinevia’s fearsome reputation as a powerful Druid, for my lover was also from Alba, was the daughter of a king, and had long been known by repute to her fellow Pict. Sintea’s shyness may, I thought, also have to do with the fact that an alliance of Pictish chieftains had boiled Guinevia’s father alive and perhaps the girl knew more about that than she would say.
Milo was speaking. “Mother, I’m fine,” he laughed, “no, really, I’m braw.” He was adapting the language of his new associates, I noticed.
“You look thin, son,” Guinevia
said, still patting at his arm.
“Puppy fat’s all gone,” Milo said proudly, “all this hunting and weapons training keeps me from getting too fat. I killed two boars last month, speared them myself. Those were some hunts!”
Guinevia gasped. “That’s dangerous,” she remonstrated. “You’re only a boy, you shouldn’t…”
I interrupted. “He’s fine, he’s a man now,” I said. “He has to hunt and swing a sword if he’s to be a king. Stop fussing, woman. Get back to your distaff and spindle.” I said it in good humour, but Guinevia fired a look at me anyway. However, she stayed silent, before she turned away, tugging Sintea with her as she left. Her back spoke volumes, but I ignored it.
“Now, about this festival,” I turned to Milo. “I’d like you and Sintea to greet the crowds, and I think it would be good if you acted as starter to the big race each day… “ We discussed the format , then began wrangling about whether a pair of big horses, Frisians like my war horses could make a better team than smaller, more nimble beasts. “The little ponies might be pushed aside by the big fellows, but I suspect the big fellows won’t be quick enough in the turns. Let’s go and talk to the Sarmatians, they’ll know.”
We walked out, attended by my three big dogs. The first were Bjarne and Tobes. These two were serious, vicious war dogs, trained to the hunt, to remain silent and obey hand signals and to cripple a man on command, but their young kennelmate was the bellowing hound Nuncius. He was a big red dog who joyfully alerted us to all who came near, hence his name: ‘The Announcer.’ By his very nature, he would never make a war dog, yet as a pup he was so endearing that he escaped the cull.
This day, all three dogs for once ignored me but trailed Milo slavishly as we went to find my cavalrymen in the horse lines, grooming and tending their mounts. One was drawing off some of his horse’s blood, preparing to make a soup. He tapped a hollow tube into the jugular vein and let about a pint flow into a wooden bowl, grinning at us. “Good for the horse, blood letting,” he said. I nodded.
“Tasty, too,” I said. He offered us a sample, but I refused, so his woman went into their wagon for something. I considered the canvas-topped vehicle with interest, considering that after two centuries or more since they had been brought to Britain by the legions these people of the Steppes still maintained their ancient disdain for living in houses.
The wife brought out some fermented mare’s milk, a faintly alcoholic drink that is one of their food staples, and diffidently offered it to us. I drank some and smacked my lips to show appreciation, but Milo politely refused and we walked on to view where soldiers and slaves were setting up the chariot-racing circus.
Chariots had been the key to our defeat of the Romans. We had persuaded Britain’s jarls to send their antique war waggons from all corners of the islands for use against the Caesar Constantius Chlorus and his troops. We had only just massed the chariots in time to bring them out as a surprise weapon, but the stratagem had worked and we successfully hurled them at the invading legions on the shingle of Dungeness.
Those old chariots were essentially mobile platforms for missiles. The charioteer raced his paired horses in, then the warrior at his side used the chariot’s impetus to boost to fearsome levels the velocity with which he hurled his javelins or fired his arrows. Some acrobatic warriors would even run light-footed down the pole between the horses to stab down at the enemy. Often the spearman would leap off to fight on foot while the charioteer withdrew a short distance, ready to race his combatant to safety if needed.
Because the horses available to our forebears were not large, and could not pull the heavy carriages the Romans used in their track racing, the British fighting chariots had to be light, so were fashioned from wickerwork. They also had to provide a stable platform for the archer-warrior. This they achieved by suspending the fighting deck on rawhide straps from hooped willow branches, which acted as shock absorbers.
But the light weight that gave the chariots their prized nimbleness and had been key to Boadicea’s butchery of the North Spanish legion two centuries before meant they were fragile, and they could not be used in rough or marshy terrain. They had enjoyed a short period as effective weapons but were superseded by cavalry archers, a force more flexible and less likely to break down. My own Sarmatians were skilled horse archers, and used a proven tactic of galloping close, then turning their horse to fire from that elevated platform, over his hindquarters.
The chariots might not be the war waggons they once were, but as an entertainment, chariot racing was highly prized. At Chester, we did it the Roman way, on what the men called Car the Bear’s Circus, or more properly, the Circus of Caros, in a bend of the River Dee. The racecourse whose name was a tribute to my Latin name Carausius, was a long, divided rectangle, 400 paces by 200, rounded at its ends into semicircles. The ground was soft turf, which eased some of the pain of the competitors’ frequent falls.
Races began from traps at the north end when a rope was dropped and the dozen or so chariots fought for position to be first around the stone pillars that marked each end. Rounding the pillar was no guarantee of safety, though. The two straightaways were separated by a stone wall ‘spine’ and the charioteers were expert at forcing their opponents into it, smashing their wheels and their hopes of victory. This, they called ‘shipwreck,’ and drivers and horses were not infrequently killed.
The spectators watched the carnage from slopes alongside the gardens which ran under the red sandstone walls of the fortress. Some simply tied up their boats and ships on the riverbank and watched from the comfort of their own floating stands.
For the week of the festival, sailors skilled at handling rigging and canvas had erected awnings to shelter the crowds from rain showers or the summer sun, and stalls selling food, drink, the colours of the racing teams or any kind of merchandise from jewellery to livestock popped up like mushrooms under their welcome protection. The area was thronged, and everywhere, there were men with leather bags of coin willing to accept wagers on the races at odds their slaves recorded.
Humans were the same everywhere, I mused. The crowds were all wearing the colours of their favourites, just as in Rome, where I’d seen how people dedicated themselves to one or other of the factions, regardless of who the chariot drivers were. Four major racing clubs were dominant and each had its theme. The Greens were dedicated to verdant Spring, the Reds to Mars, the Blues to the heavenly skies and the Whites to the Zephyr of the west wind. Other, lesser teams sported colours such as purple or gold, and many of the factions adopted distinctive styles of clothing or hair. The young men who supported the Greens, for example, wore Persian-style moustaches or beards, the Reds dashingly wore tunics with wide sleeves and the Greens favoured the shaved heads and drooping, long moustaches of the Huns and Vandals.
We had our own history of chariot racing in Britain, and enough tradition had come with the legions that rival groups had established themselves and sponsors eager for political popularity and clout had come forward. Some even imported skilled drivers from Gaul or Greece, as the public often saw omens in which colour triumphed at the races. Apart from paying for horses and riders, these would-be office holders also underwrote the trainers, veterinary surgeons, grooms, guards, saddlers and sundry attendants needed for a successful faction.
I didn’t care to be put at risk of ill omens, so did not associate myself publicly with one colour or another – too much opportunity for harmful, negative inferences to be drawn from a wrecked chariot, I thought. For me, I preferred the blood sport of the arena, but this week was about a celebration of Britain and its future ruler and it would not do to have men hack each other to death to greet the future.
Grabelius was at my side, an armful of scrolls clutched to his chest. “We’re having some horse races first,” he said, “with acrobatic jockeys who can ride two horses at once while fighting each other. They’ll also do tests, like picking up a piece of cloth from the ground at the full gallop, spearing a tent peg with a lance, lying on their horses at full stride, jumping over hurdles, that kind of thing. The crowd likes it, and it’s a fine warm-up for the chariot races, which are the big attraction.”
“What ha
ve you planned there?” I asked.
Grabelius grimaced. “Plenty, lord,” he said. “There will be about a score of races each day, two and four-horse teams, we’ll have parades of our heavy cavalry and some demonstrations of their skills, including a cavalry charge or two directly at the spectators. I just hope the boys can pull up the Frisians in time,” he added.
I grinned. “We’ll also parade Milo and Sintea around the circus each day, to throw donatives to the crowd. I’ve arranged for
iubilatores
to whip up the crowd with some joyful screaming when that happens,” he said. “And, one other thing: Milo wants to compete as a driver. Will that please you?”
The request was not unexpected. I knew his mother was determinedly set against it, but the boy was 17, a married man and a future king. “He should do it,” I said. “Just make sure he is in the two-horse chariot races, not the four.” That, I hoped, would preserve him from the worst of the shipwrecks. I didn’t want my heir killed for the amusement of the mob. And, if he won, his popularity would soar. “See to it that he gets the best horses,” I added. Grabelius nodded. He’d already have h
ad that organised, I knew, but…