It was rapidly getting dark. Soon the only light would come from the flames of the braziers, which marked each row of tents and from the torches fixed at intervals along the fortress wall. Ursula thought the whole camp a fire hazard. She would have liked to wash her face and wash the acrid taste of vomit from her mouth but water was in short supply. They did not know how long they would have to remain in the fortress where the only source of water was one deep well and a number of barrels brought from Camulodunum along with the ale and other foodstuffs. The flickering flames made dark, bulky shadows of armoured men. Order was gradually emerging from the chaos of their arrival. Everyone was again in their right places and the watch was set. Guards patrolled the walkways above the wooden battlements, protected by its wooden palisade. There was little noise, only the whisperings and rustlings of nearly one thousand exhausted men and horses settling to their rest, the regular footfalls of the watch, and the crackling flames of the braziers. It was difficult to talk except in murmurs.
To Ursula’s surprise, Arturus was talking with Taliesin when they arrived. He had removed his armour and was dressed in the ordinary homespun tunic favoured by most of the civilians Ursula had seen. He got to his feet when she and Dan ducked into the low tent.
‘Please join us,’ said Arturus courteously.
Taliesin gave Ursula a hard, appraising look. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Rhonwen!’ As she said the name, Ursula felt her gorge rise and she was very afraid she was going to be sick again.
Taliesin looked questioningly at Dan.
‘I don’t know. I can’t sense anything, but Ursula always was affected by Rhonwen.’
Dan spoke calmly, working hard to ignore the emotions he could feel battering against his awareness, demanding to be acknowledged and shared. Arturus was awash with nervous excitement, Taliesin with weariness and trepidation, but it was Ursula’s feelings that were the most disturbing. She was afraid, with a visceral fear that twisted at Dan’s own guts and made his stomach churn.
‘Well, try harder to sense something, you’re the one with all the empathy,’ Taliesin said testily.
‘I’m sorry to ask you to do something that might be painful to you, Gawain, but I believe you could help us. We know that Rhonwen is Aelle’s Begrunen, his wise woman. He does what she advises. We need to know what she is up to. I know she is a witch and uses the Devil’s power to deceive. Our men need to be prepared if she has anything planned, particularly if it is aimed at Lady Ursa, who the men revere.’
Dan looked at Ursula, doubtfully. She was looking at him pleadingly.
‘I don’t know what Taliesin wants me to do. I think he wants me to fish about in your thoughts to try to feel what you feel – at least we might be able to find Rhonwen that way. Do you mind?’
There was a pause before Ursula answered, but Dan knew that she shrank away from such an intimate invasion of herself as much as she did from Rhonwen’s unspecific malevolence.
‘Can you do that?’
‘I don’t know. Taliesin seems to think I can.’
‘I don’t know, Dan. This mind talk is all right because you hear only what I want you to – don’t you?’
Dan nodded, which mystified Taliesin and Arturus who were watching the two silent Combrogi heroes expectantly.
‘I don’t think I want you to hear more than that. I suppose I have to let you, but I’m scared.’
‘Me too.’
Dan reached out to hold Ursula’s large hand. Her palm was sticky with sweat, in spite of the coolness of the evening. She did not withdraw.
‘Here goes then.’
Dan closed his eyes and Ursula gripped his hand with almost painful force. As he tried to feel what Ursula was feeling the pressure on his hand eased. That was a relief, she’d been crushing his bones. Then he realised why the pressure had eased – he was feeling his own hand holding Ursula’s! It felt cooler. He perceived that it made him/Ursula feel calmer. At the same instant he perceived something else, something fearful, something bad that made his thoughts skitter in panicked confusion. Something was hunting him/Ursula, a malevolent presence. Dan could feel it waiting for him/her, like the memory of a nightmare. He was swallowed up by this feeling and was also peripherally aware that there was a kind of confusion of consciousness – that things were not usually this way. Dan no longer existed. Dan did not feel uniquely Dan feelings nor Ursula feelings. There was a losing of himself in Ursula-ness, a drowning in the mental flow of Ursula, her stream of consciousness. Somehow, at some instinctive level, without a question ever being raised, a decision was made to pursue the nightmare to its source. The Dan/Ursula awareness was very afraid, but there was no other choice. They were blind and deaf hurtling towards the source of the nightmare, feeling the mental chill of another hostile mind, yet having no senses with which to perceive.
‘Bird! Be a bird!’ a part of them shrieked silently into the emotional maelstrom.
Ursula/Dan tried to be a dove and a pigeon at the same time. They became something and it flew. With that becoming came sight and hearing and the dizzying perspective of flight. There were Aenglisc everywhere, an army of foot soldiers, in mail shirts and ridgehelmets, or spangenhelm. Rhonwen stood in front of a huge crowd, her face ravaged by fire, her dark hair wild and matted. Her garments were hung with skulls and bleached bones so numerous that her own form was lost beneath them; so many that they clinked and scraped together as she moved in some variant of the danse macabre. She now seemed a half-mad figure, frothing at the mouth, her eyes glazed and her pupils eerily dilated as though she were drugged. She was chanting. Her beautiful voice was as ravaged by hard use as her beauty. The words were hoarse and harsh and were screamed rather than sung. The meaningless syllables sent shudders down the bird form that was the eyes and ears of Dan and Ursula. The air thrummed with magic and fury. Rhonwen was pouring her venomous hate into a roughly made, clay figure that may have been intended to represent Ursula. There was no time for thought, or rather thought and action were one with this bird that was made of thoughts. It flew down towards the upturned face of Rhonwen and dived for her face, pecking and beating its wings, which became entangled in the mass of her heavy, dark hair. To the Ursula/Dan bird it felt as if talons clawed the scarred flesh of Rhonwen’s burnt cheek. Whatever happened, the chanting stopped abruptly and with it the malevolent power died away, and the fear dissipated and the strange fusion of being ceased.
Dan felt Ursula’s hand crushing his and opened his eyes at the same instant that he gasped for air. He saw, with his own eyes, Arturus cross himself and Ursula let go of his hand. He was himself again. He breathed deeply and shook his head like Braveheart did when wet, as if to rid himself of the strangeness that still clung to him.
‘Are you all right, Ursula?’
There was a pause. Dan could see intelligence return to Ursula’s frightened eyes. She swallowed hard and wiped the sweat from her hand on her tunic, almost as if she were checking that she still was what she had been before. Ursula took a deep breath and answered, woodenly, reflexively as if in shock.
‘Yes, thank you. That was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.’
Given the number of weird things that had happened to Ursula in recent months, that was no inconsiderable claim, but Dan agreed with her. Taliesin was still looking at him expectantly.
‘We found Rhonwen. She was acting like a mad woman, shrieking and wearing all these bones. She’d made a model of Ursula – I think she was trying to harm her through the figure.’
Arturus did not pause to question how Dan had gained the information. He accepted that Dan had found the means to spy on the army and was only interested in what he had discovered.
‘How many men were with her? Please think, Gawain.’
‘I would say near a thousand – wouldn’t you agree, Ursula?’
Ursula nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think they were all infantry. I sensed no large numbers of horses. There were a group of maybe fifty archers and I saw a good number with throwing axes, but most had only swords and shields. I don’t think there were more than a thousand, no, not more than a thousand.’
‘And where were they?’
Ursula and Dan looked at each other. It was hard to accept that their recent experience had taken place in any real time or place. They had arrived wherever Rhonwen was, instantly.
‘I don’t think it was far from here,’ Dan volunteered hesitantly.
‘It was near the sea – I could taste the sea.’
‘Yes, yes, you’re right.’
‘If they camp there tonight the vanguard could be here by midday tomorrow.’ Arturus looked thoughtfully from Dan to Ursula, and back. ‘It is clear that Gawain and the Lady Ursa can speak without words, yes?’
Dan and Ursula nodded.
‘We could use such a talent. I will think about it. Do you know what the witch plans to do?’
Dan and Ursula both shook their head, and with a half smile of regret, the High King left. Ursula thought there must be some residual link between herself and Dan because for one instant she felt Dan recoil from the thought of having to repeat their recent experience. It had not been as bad as she had feared but it must have been worse for Dan. She could almost taste the flavour of his thoughts in her mind. It had been a terrible, intense, self-destroying closeness but a small fraction of Ursula was newly aware of loneliness without him. She felt a little hurt that he did not feel the same way.