Chapter Five

Stirling came awake slowly. The final thought he'd taken down into darkness with him was still reverberating through his mind. Let it all have been some terrible nightmare...

Unhappily, the scents and sounds and unfamiliar sensations coming from his immediate surroundings bore nothing in common with anything in the twenty-first century.

No such luck, then. It was entirely too real.

Stirling opened his eyes, to find that he lay sprawled across a fur bag of straw, which he vaguely remembered from a weltering confusion of images connected more or less solidly with his abrupt arrival in the sixth century. Someone had draped another fur across his body as a blanket. His dreams had been a hellish mixture of scenes: horseback combat, men in rough woolen tunics and padded leather armor dying from swords thrust through their bellies and throats; Belfast in flames, Orange terror squads shooting down women and children; the flash of heavy spears, a horde of blue-tattooed men swarming across a fallen rider, the crimson splash of blood across a muddy field, across a battered desktop, across pavements in Clonard...

He blinked away the disturbing images and studied the room, instead. It was well constructed and larger than he'd expected, some three by four meters. The ceiling was whitewashed plaster, stained with smoke and soot from pottery oil lamps, several of which hung from hooks in the corners of the room. The wicks had been trimmed low, sending a soft golden light through the room. The floor was utilitarian, made of simple stone flagging, although the stones had been shaped with skill and well mortared. The walls were plaster over stone, with murals of hunting scenes painted on them.

The style reminded him of Roman wall paintings, which surprised him. There were no Roman remains of this type anywhere near the Scottish Lowlands, not that Stirling had ever heard of, anyway. Plenty of small forts and watchtowers, in a line roughly paralleling Antonine's Wall and the Gask Ridge, with another line of them down along Hadrian's Wall in the border counties, but nothing like a villa with murals of this quality. Where exactly was he, then?

He was still puzzling it over when Ancelotis' part of his dual awareness woke up and tried to come to terms with the invader inside his skull. After one reflexive attempt to shout for help, Ancelotis and Stirling reached honorable compromise: they declared a truce in the interest of learning how to walk again. Trying to walk, with two fiercely competitive minds in the driver's seat—each of them utterly and ruthlessly determined to take charge of their shared body—landed them flat on the floor within two steps. They landed hard, jarring every bone against a floor that was startlingly warm under their shared skin.

Both of them swore aloud and creatively, with the curses breaking out in a mixture of Brythonic Welsh and modern English. Stirling rigidly ordered himself to stop thinking in his own native language. He couldn't afford to lapse into English when anyone else was around. Cedric Banning would find him faster, true, bringing him an ally, but Brenna McEgan would hear, as well. He'd certainly change history if Ancelotis was, in fact, the person Stirling's gibbering terror thought he might be, and McEgan and her unknown host slid a dagger through his ribs because of Stirling's carelessness.

I am in over my head, Stirling realized despairingly.

Explain why, Ancelotis' voice demanded abruptly, shocking Stirling half witless with the first clearly articulated words Stirling had been able to understand. Why would this McEgan want to murder the brother of a dead king of Gododdin? McEgan, that's a foul, Irish clan name, is it not? Are you some Druid's soul from the Otherworld, sent to warn and guard me from the Irish threatening our western coast? You're too late for my brother's life, if you've come to warn of us against the Picts. They've had him under their knives and war clubs already, and nearly the Dux Bellorum and myself with him.

Uh... Sprawled on a sixth-century stone floor, it seemed as good an explanation as any he might offer. Close enough, he thought carefully back at his host. I'm afraid I don't know anything about Picts and I'm sorry about your brother. I've lost a great-uncle to war and most of my comrades-in-arms, as well. The pain of his lost command, blown apart in Clonard, was a sickness in his gut.

It was not, perhaps, anything like losing one's brother, evidently right in front of his host's eyes, given the memory images bursting into Stirling's awareness, but it was enough to convey understanding of the loss—and a deep understanding of battle, as well. The images in Stirling's memory, of the entire city block in Clonard, Belfast, erupting into flame with whole buildings falling into ruin, was enough to stun Ancelotis silent, awed and horrified.

And this is the manner of war you fight? Enough flame and brimstone to cause even the bishop of Rome to flinch in dismay? May Afallach and his nine daughters of the Underworld preserve us, then, if Christ cannot, for we've nothing to stop that sort of death in our midst.

Stirling wanted to reassure his host that such death could not be reproduced in the sixth century by one man, working alone, but he could produce no such reassurance. It was a simple enough fact that he himself could have produced a crude but perfectly serviceable black powder, difficult to do if one didn't know the proper proportions, relative child's play if one did—and Sterling most assuredly did. And he would have bet several cases of Bibles that Brenna McEgan did, as well. And all it needed for a bomb was a containment vessel to hold the black powder.

A wooden keg or common crockery wine jug would suffice, since one didn't need to worry about building up sufficient pressure to launch a projectile, as one would need for a gun or a far simpler mortar or cannon. And the earliest of those, after all, had been made from church bells. Stirling was fairly certain that even Britain, as cut off from Rome as it must have been for the past hundred or so years, could supply a good-sized bronze bell.

I won't lie to you, he admitted. There's a great deal of destruction she could wreak on you and yours. Brenna McEgan must be found and stopped. She's an Irish terrorist. That is, she murders for political gain. It's my job to find and stop her. I suspect, he added grimly, that it's the Dux Bellorum she'll try to kill. I can't think of another reason for her to have chosen this particular time and place.

After a long moment, during which Stirling could literally feel Ancelotis thinking rapidly, another carefully verbalized question came back. And how will you find her?

I don't know, Stirling was forced to admit. She'll be hiding in someone's mind, just as I am borrowing yours. Dreadfully sorry, but I couldn't think of any other way to stop her. After a moment's further consideration, he added, There's another man who's come, a learned man who will help us, if we can identify him without risking your life. Unfortunately, I could easily do just that by accidentally exposing my presence in McEgan's company. Banning is his name, Cedric Banning. My own is Trevor Stirling. I was born not far from here, he added hopefully. Close to the city we call Stirling, where my ancestors have lived for generations.

An unexpected chuckle startled him as Ancelotis took the memory images from Stirling's portion of their shared mind and recognized the landmarks. Stirling, is it? There is truth in your mind, Stirling of Stirling. Truth is a powerful force, great enough to overcome even the barriers between worlds. It's Caer-Iudeu, we call it. Artorius was raised on that mountain I see in your memory, with that remarkable fortress you've built atop the cliff. We Britons should build half so well. Alas, the Romans departed with our finest engineers nearly a century ago. Artorius was, thank whichever God you prefer to worship, brought north for fostering, out of the short-lived kingdoms at the heart of the dragon lands of the south.