No Such Place - Part 2
.
I wish I could have posted earlier, but...
Title: No Such Place - Part 2
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, Roma Antiqua, Germania, Wales, Mother Gaul, France; King Arthur and associated personages.
Words: 7000
Rating: R. A solid, hard, don’t take your children to see it in the theater R.
As before, I warn for: Gangrene, inappropriate Imperial attentions to an underage Nation, inappropriate attentions from an underage Nation to an underage human, inappropriate attentions from an of-age human to an underage human (though entirely consensual), horror tropes, Name magic, fraternal abuse, National-fraternal abuse, violent death in battle, violent death outside of battle, the Fair Folk being unfair, Nations being unfair to the Fair Folk, sexual fantasy, magic-kink, gerontophilia, heads on pikes, too many names with not enough vowels, and meta. Oh, and this time, there’s more sex.
Timeline: the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.
Summary: Not the King Arthur story you think it is.
Back to Part 1
Sometime around 500 A.D…
It takes less time to lose ground than to gain it.
Of the eight years Albion has been afield with Ambrosius’ clan, six of them were spent getting to Camulodunum, and two of them retreating all the way back to Dinas Emrys. It could be worse: Cymry could know. He probably does, actually, but as long as he is more inclined to gloat silently Albion will give him no invitation to express his opinion of Albion’s choice of hero.
The fortress seems to swell out of the earth like the egg of a spider, the surrounding trees shrinking beside the stone. Those left behind have reinforced it with dark stone and iron, in cruel swirling spires, staggered with tall slits for bowmen to fire through. Albion wonders if the dragons beneath the mound have suffered in turn.
He is beside Ambrosius-Emrys, Albion corrects himself, within these walls he is to be Emrys-as the general is greeted by the armsman he left behind, with laughter. “Back so soon, your Majesty?”
“Let it not be in disgrace,” Emrys says. “I trust we’ve the reserves to hold the heathens off?”
“Depends on how many of them there are, doesn’t it?” He laughs again: Emrys doesn’t, and neither does Albion, nor do any of the souls within earshot. But the grey armsman looks askance at all of them, his bushy white eyebrows tucking up with the wrinkles on his forehead, and challenges them to a man. “Well? How many are there?”
Albion, who knows better, answers with and for the rest: “Two thousand, four hundred of them horse.”
“Well, that’s not so bad,” the armsman, says, much to everyone’s indignant surprise. “no, no hear me-”
“Or me,” says the younger but still not young man emerging from the fortress gate behind him, with Cymry at his side.
Albion hears the ash in Emrys’ greeting. “I suppose you brought them with you from the wall, Wythr.”
“Under your flag, brother.” Wythr grins-Albion shivers, and wishes that the corners of that man’s mouth would hide behind his moustaches. “Many’ll follow the dragon to his hoard.”
“Well then I hope you promised them something we could spare.”
“There’ll be glory enough in this war,” Wythr says, with a glance at Cymry behind him. “Men remember that, where Rome couldn’t reach.”
-
“Give me Grigory’s horn.”
“It’s not a horn anymore, and no.” Cymry rests his hand on the wall instead of the curtain, as if he never meant to pull it aside.
Albion snarls at his back. “What did you do with it?”
“I made use of it.”
“I could have-”
“Not this. You don’t think this way yet.”
“I could-”
“No, you can’t. You’re too busy playing at war, runt.”
“It’s not playing!”
“Fine, then it’s losing.” Now Cymry opens his eyes-they’d been closed?-and tugs the curtain aside, takes a torch in his other hand and steps into the dark. “Are you following me?”
“I know where you’re going,” Albion says.
Cymry tsks between his teeth, but doesn’t tell him not to follow.
The stone stairs wind down and become earth; the rich gold torchlight is thickened with its own smoke. Cymry ducks when the ceiling and walls grow tighter, but Albion has no such problem, and takes the steps, only once tripping up when the shadows swallow the hem of Cymry’s cloak and he steps on it in the dark.
“Watch where you’re going,” Cymry sighs when he recovers.
Albion wrinkles his nose. “Watch we’re you’ve been.”
If Cymry rolls his eyes, op there, Albion cannot see it-and when the stairwell ends and the hollow begins, Albion can see nothing at all.
The dragons are disturbed.
They’re not fighting now-or not yet-or if they are they’ve taken a rest from it, and have closed to opposite sides of the cavern. Cymry goes to his red, or Albion thinks so at least, since the torchlight’s nearly gone.
“Shh,” Cymry says, stroking the dragon’s flank. “How is it?”
The dragon raises his head from the earth, and Albion can feel it scrape and shake. “Cold,” the dragon hisses in answer.
Cymry tells him, “Good,” and continues to stroke him. The dragon purrs an unsteady rumble of steam, and it makes the torch flicker. Albion bends and takes up the hem of Cymry’s cape, just in case. Of course Cymry chides him for it: “Scared, runt?”
Albion harrumphs. “The white dragon’s still here too, you know.”
Steam gathers and dribbles down, and the torch goes out entirely. “Tell me why I should care.”
This isn’t the sort of thing he wakes up screaming from, but Albion does shake, even after Wart twines his arms about him. Wart is nearly a real soldier now, so they have a place where the straw is packed into sewn cloth rather than just heaped under blankets, and Albion nestles into all of that at once.
“My brother is not afraid of this war at all,” Albion tells Wart, when Wart perks up an ear and cheek to listen. “He thinks to let Saxony destroy me, and then content himself with that.”
“But isn’t it good, to not be afraid?”
Albion props himself up on his elbows, and looks at Wart to assure that there was only simplicity in those words.
It’s true; Wart, though not a boy any more, clearly a young man, still has that acceptance and light behind his eyes that only the old and the young seem to keep. Scant hairs darker than the ones on his head frame the slight frown on his cheeks, and Albion remembers to ask him:
“Wythr is your father, isn’t he?”
“He is,” Wart says, “and he’s not afraid either, you can see that. But he’s not afraid because he’s strong, and there’s nothing wrong with knowing that.”
“There is if the enemy knows you are too, and plans for it.” Albion leans down and rests his chin on Wart’s chest. There’s going to be hair there too, isn’t there. “How strong is he?”
Wart considers a moment, rolling his eyes up in his head as if to count. “I don’t know. I don’t know him, really. But I do know that he makes me think he’s strong enough.”
“But that’s dangerous,” Albion says. “My eldest brother is like that. And so was Rome.”
“Yes, but aren’t they strong too?”
“-Well yes,” Albion says, “but not strong enough. I mean. Rome’s dead now, and Germania killed him, which means Germania is stronger, and-”
“And does that mean that my father might be stronger than your brother, even if he’s a Nation?”
Albion frowns. So does Wart. But then Wart laughs while Albion is still trying to ponder it out, and he throws his arms over Albion’s back and holds him closer.
“You’re right,” Wart says, “I don’t know, I can’t know. Yes he’s my father but I don’t know him at all, so he might be a braggart or-or worse, I don’t know.” His laughter is getting lower with the rest of his voice, and Albion can feel that where their chests are pressed together. “And he can’t be stronger than a Nation. That’s daft!”
Albion tries to smile, now that Wart is. It nearly works. “I don’t know,” he mutters, “you could be stronger than I, at least.”
“Oh, could I?” Wart laughs again, and grips his hands on Albion’s upper arms to hold him and lift, sort of. “Shall we test it?”
“I accept your challenge!” Albion, well, tries not to shout, and grabs onto Wart’s arms to wrestle him too.
They tangle on the mattress, Wart’s long arms and legs almost unwieldy compared to Albion’s much shorter ones. Albion gets himself twined high on Wart’s chest but Wart, well, is stronger, and pries him off, half by the scruff of his neck. Once he gets Albion’s back to the straw he tries to pounce, but Albion is quicker, and wriggles between Wart’s legs to come out the other side and jump onto his back. Wart gasps, and almost cackles, and grabs ahold of Albion’s ankles to spin him around and fling him off, onto the mattress again. He pins Albion down by the wrists and knees and kisses him, soundly and suddenly.
Albion is-Albion is just fine with that, even if it’s a kind of being bested, and kisses Wart too. They’ve been kissing with tongues since they found out it was nice, so Albion opens his mouth and lets his slip out. Wart does as well, and they let their tongues do the tussling for a bit instead of their bodies. It’s pleasant, this way, and warm, and so Albion fights it a little more, twists his body and tries to escape Wart’s hold. “You can’t-win me,” he tries to say, and isn’t sure how much of it gets out.
“I can,” Wart says, stronger, “I’ve got you,” and this time Albion feels a little bit of teeth in the kiss but doesn’t mind at all, since that means Wart is smiling. He smiles too, and bites on Wart’s lip, and Wart-and Wart moans, and squirms, but not away.
Albion lets his teeth part, and lets Wart’s lip go, but decides that’s another way to win, and tries to capture it again. It’s easy, starting with a kiss, and Albion chews on it a little this time, and Wart holds on tighter, presses down harder.
He’s really rubbing himself against Albion now, steady strokes of his hips like he’s riding a horse. When Albion lets his teeth off Wart’s mouth, Wart pulls his face away and kisses Albion but not on the lips, on the chin, and before Albion can tell him that he missed he does it again but lower, under, and then on Albion’s neck, right in the centre. Albion chokes, and the sound and heat go right to where Wart is kissing him.
Wart-Wart bites him there, a little, not hard, just enough to speak through. Albion thinks he’s saying Britannia but isn’t sure, there are other things he feels, around his wrists and on his thighs and between them, and-
-oh, oh no, no, not this.
He tries to say, Wart, no, but only the name comes out, and that means Wart doesn’t stop-doesn’t stop kissing or rubbing that part of himself on Albion’s thigh. Albion tenses up as much as he can, not in the fighting way but in the defending way-if his throat’s too tight to say anything his body should be too, and Wart needs to know, Wart will stop if he knows.
“…Britannia?” His lips leave Albion’s skin.
He knows.
“Oh-oh, Britannia, oh god-” All the glass leaves Wart’s eyes, and all the heat, and he says it, pulling away. “What did I do, I don’t-”
“No, but-but I do,” Albion whispers. “It’s not your fault, just stop, it’s fine-“ He says that again, he should, “It’s fine, it’s fine…”
Wart nods. “Just…just stop,” he repeats, just as quietly. When the words leave him he hangs his head, as if he could be looking down at himself, but his eyes are closed.
Albion presses his wrists up against Wart’s hands, and he lets go; when he tries to lift his legs out from under Wart’s knees, Wart takes a breath, and then crouches back on his heels. His erection is still flushed and heavy-looking, and Albion averts his eyes, turning onto his side in the straw.
“I-” Wart starts, and Albion can’t feel him looking at all. “I’ll go…do something about this.”
Albion tells him, as confidently as he can, “All right.”
Before Wart gets up, he slips on the blankets; Albion feels them lift, and then drop over his body, up to the chin. Wart goes several steps away, out of the light but not out of the room. He makes low sounds, laden with unsteady, irregular breaths. If Albion squints-and he does, through the dark, and only once-he can see Wart’s shoulders, one braced against the far wall, the other rising and falling, the arm taut against his body.
When Wart comes back, Albion’s face is to the mattress, and the straw is poking through, jabbing him in the cheek. Wart lays beside him, atop the blanket, not under it. He smells faintly of salt and sweat, much more than usual.
“I know it’s-I know it’s going to happen again, so…so should we stop kissing?” he asks.
Albion’s just as uncertain. “I like kissing you,” he says, and it’s true, so he makes it sound as true as he can. “And I like that you want me, even like that, but-”
“But you’re a Nation,” Wart finishes for him.
He’s wrong. “No. I’m a child.”
Wart blinks. “And I’m not?”
-
As usual, the moot begins with Emrys calling Wythr daft.
“No, no, brother, hear me,” Wythr says, and holds back those of his men who would have been content to throttle Emrys right there. “I agree with you that we might draw them south. It’s Britannia the Saxons want, not the parts of the Isle that aren’t. Or at least not now, not if they have any sense.”
“You’re assuming that the Saxons have sense.”
“Well, so are you.”
“No, I’m assuming that their greed is greater than it. They are here. They will continue to push west now that they have seen they can beat us, and they know that it will be easier if they crush us now. If we draw them south, we draw them only as southerly as we must, that should they crush us we at least have an avenue of retreat.”
“And I say that should they crush us are the words of a coward.”
It’s Emrys’ turn to hold back the angriest of his men; unlike Wythr, he does it with merely a gesture of dismissal. “Brother, you do ill to call me a coward in my own keep.”
Wythr smiles and puts hip his palms. “Sorry, Ambrosius, I guess since I was here while you were out being Roman I forgot it was yours.”
“Be that memory of yours as it may,” Emrys says through visibly grit teeth, “it is mine, and you are a guest, and if the bonds of our fraternity do not stay me from throwing you out, then only those of patriotism will suffice. We would do well to at least defend the same country.”
After a smirk up at Cymry, over his shoulder again, Wythr turns back to Emrys and nods. “I can be persuaded. But I think you’ve forgotten that there’s more than one country on this Isle.”
Emrys’ eyes are raised, and somewhat darkly, surrounded by the shadows of his senior commanders, all seething. He sits straight on his chair, and does not rise from it. “However many Nations, the Germania sees no borders.”
Albion takes a sidelong step nearer, and puts his hand on Emrys’ shoulder.
On the table between him and his brother, Emrys overturns his map and weights it at the corners with three stones and an empty tankard. Albion’s uncertain picture unfurls, and Cymry marked clearer to the west, Caledonii beyond the wall in the north. The roads Rome built through him are marked in solid red (Albion shivers) and the fortifications, both his and Rome’s, are green. Emrys removes an arrow from his quiver, and holds it like a quill, to point, scratching through the vellum. “All this land is theirs,” he starts, circling through Albion’s eastern provinces, as far in as Ratae and Venonis and Claustenum. “The Ermine road is as good as lost, but for your forces at the wall; they are advancing on Fosse and Portway. You say we should go father south, and defend Durnovaria? Surely you see the risk, if we make to take that, and they take Lindinis first. We have no escape then but Cornwall or the sea, and we all know how welcome you are at Cornwall.”
Men on both sides laugh at that; the boys do not. Most of them are too young to understand the historicity of that joke, and in Albion’s case he understands too well.
When Wythr is done laughing, he answers, “But they’re expecting to meet us at Lindinis, aren’t they? We’ll overshoot them south, and head them off before they get to us.”
“And if we fail?”
“Must you always consider that we might? That doesn’t make for good fighting.”
“No, but it makes for soldiers who sell their lives rather than throw them away.”
Again, Wythr has to restrain his men. Even those who do not protest glower at Emrys. Cymry seems to be the only one on Wythr’s side without anger, and he, at least to Albion’s eyes, looks thoroughly bored.
“Now you hear me, brother,” Wythr is snarling, “I may be less a king than you, but I’m just as much a leader of men. And this may be your house, but these men here are just as many my people, and I can tell you that any implication that their friends lost their lives under my command and didn’t make the Scots pay dearly is like to get you killed.”
Emrys closes his eyes, sets the arrow on the table, and then opens them, even calmer than Cymry. “And I could tell you to let them loose and prove it, brother, but I place a price on my life that I don’t expect you want to pay.”
Albion dreams of Rome:
It is a scenario he knows well, worn through with familiarity; they bathe together in the river that flows through Londinium, and the skies are grey and swollen with recent warm rain. Albion polishes Rome as he would armour, with sand and a tattered cloth, and he stands on a slippery rock to reach Rome’s neck and shoulders.
Rome hums, low in his throat. It could be praise at first, but at some point it slips into murmured song, deep and out of tune.
“Oh, I had a lady in Thrace,” (the song goes)
“With more lips than the two on her face.
She said to begin
I should just put mine in,
But I wasn’t so sure of the place.”
He asks Albion if he likes it. Albion winces and doesn’t answer. So Rome keeps singing, louder and clearer.
“Then after, the girl from the Nile;
We fought about that for a while.
But right at the end,
She learned how to bend,
And she took it like that with a smile!” Rome grins, and rolls his shoulders, splashing about in the river. “Get it in deep, Britannia, right there, I can feel the knot.
“The pretty girl up by the Seine
Could go at it again and again.
But to my surprise,
She averted her eyes.
It’s a good thing she’s got one for pain!
“I’m trying to write another verse,” Rome goes on, and reaches up to cover Albion’s wet hand with his own. “You want to know who about?”
The hand shaking Albion awake isn’t Wart’s. It’s much larger. He hadn’t been screaming before; he almost does now, but-
“Shh!”
“-ah-Ambrosius? Sire?”
“Where is my nephew?” The king’s eyes are hollowed in the dark.
“I don’t know,” Albion breathes. “He’s not here?”
“If he were here I’d not be asking,” Emrys says, and there might be a hint of a smile in the torchlight. “Doesn’t he always sleep by you?”
Albion doesn’t mean to stammer, “Yes, but-we’ve quarreled, these months.” It’s a better explanation than the truth.
Emrys makes a sound like ah, and raises the torch. “Walk with me, then. You’ll know where to find him.”
Albion nods his assent, and shucks off the blankets, pulls on a tunic and boots and weapons and his cloak. Once his head is through the cowl, he looks the long way up through the dark at Emrys and suggests, “He’s been talking about Wythr a lot lately. Perhaps he’s-gone over there?”
“Has he, now,” Emrys mutters, only half a question. “It’s only natural for him to want his father’s attention, considering he’s never had any of it.”
That sounds particularly derisive. Albion is moved to ask, as he follows Emrys out past the curtain, “But has Wart been a trouble to you?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Emrys admits. “He takes orders, at least, which is more than I can say for many young men like him. He knows his place.”
But his place is with me, Albion thinks, so why isn’t he here?
They wind through the halls of Dinas Emrys, their heels crunching through roots and rushes on the floor. Albion finds himself briefly fascinated with the way their shadows stretch in the light of dozens of torches, flickering off the accoutrements of hundreds of men-at-arms. Albion discovers something oddly fascinating in that; when they are at war, they are terrible, but at repose the soldiers are no less beautiful than then, and there is something about how the men regard Emrys that Albion envies.
It changes, somewhat, as they near the section of the fort that Emrys has relegated to Wythr and his company from the Wall. Though the torches grow more numerous, with them the shadows are stranger, and Albion sees things in them, the prickle of a rat, the curl of a cricket. He’s not afraid of those, but he is somewhat wary of what he’s not seeing that drives them into the light, and he skitters closer to the train of Emrys’ long cloak. It’s a deep orange wool that Albion wishes he could match all the torches to, except for the hem, which is paled and thickened by mud where it drags on the stone.
Emrys looks down at him, when he notices that. His smile is odd; not warm, but not wry. “You’ve been a boy a very long time, haven’t you?”
“One might say so,” Albion says, still uncertain of whether he must say why-
“And will repelling Germania make you a man, or must you first be unified?”
-ah. He does not have to explain. “I think the latter.”
Emrys nods, and the smile has faded when his face is again revealed to the torches. “A pity, then, that there are those who would keep you at the mercy of your brethren.”
His hand is not quite offered, but Albion takes it, just as they reach the chamber that the most of Wythr’s men have convened in.
Laughter swells out of the room, as if there was too much to begin with, and Albion covers his eyes as if to block it. It’s a joyous sound, woven with the slapping of tables and thighs, the rustling of straw, the sloshing of ale. Wythr, not at the head of a great board but near its centre, is in the midst of a story, gesturing as he recounts it. Wart is among the men intent, though from where he sits, he probably cannot even see his father’s face, let alone his eyes.
Emrys says nothing to interrupt, and the room is noisy enough that his silence is unobtrusive. He looks to Wart until Wart regards him, and then makes a motion with his hands, come hither. Wart’s eyes shade, and then draw in on Albion’s; Albion gulps, and then nods, as earnestly as he can.
No one marks it when Wart gets up from the table, save the man who eagerly swipes his portion of the bench. And it takes some time, and some doing, but Wart weaves through the crowd until he gets to the curtain-and once in the hall, kneels and addresses Albion, and not the king. “Is something wrong? Did I miss a dream?”
“It’s more important that you missed a different kind of visitation,” Emrys says, above them both. “Your post is your post, Wart.”
“Not when the watch isn’t mine,” Wart counters, rising-but then switches to only one knee instead, and keeps his head down. “Sire.”
“And if Germania stormed this keep, and you were caught in the chaos of the wrong army?”
“It’s not the wrong army.” Wart sounds so guileless about it that it gives Albion pause; there’s no insult meant at all. “We’re fighting for the same thing, right?”
Wart is near enough Albion’s level that he should be able to see the uncertainty in his Nation’s eyes. If that is what just startled him, well, Albion is grateful.
Emrys puts his hand on his nephew’s head, and rests it there, still. “Cai is dead, Wart. You should be by me.”
“But I’m not Cai. And my father is alive,” he says, with a glance back at the common room as another joke is told, heard, laughed at, and missed by the rest in the hall. “I think he should like to know me.”
“You mean that you should like to know him.” Emrys corrects, “and I know him, and I think that he should not.”
Wart closes his eyes. “You don’t mean that.”
“You do not tell me what I do and don’t mean, Wart.” Just as there was no malice in Wart’s words, there is no anger in Emrys’. “If he has shown interest in you at all, it is not as a son. He has nothing to leave you; he needs no heir.”
“He has this. He has his corps.”
“And they follow him, and not you. They are brigands, Wart, some of them literally, and they flock to strength, not name.”
“…Then you haven’t made me strong, Sire?”
Emrys withdraws his hand from Wart’s head. Wart looks up, follows his uncle’s fingertips and the line of his arm, and Wart’s eyes are earnest and sad-and older.
“If you haven’t, let him try,” Wart neither pleads nor commands. “Or let me try by him. I want to be-for you,” he says, to Albion, to Albion first, “for you both-”
“I don’t want you to rule by strength,” Emrys says, urgent at last. “Look at your Nation. He does not want a brute.”
“He does not want a lover either.”
-firelight surges behind Albion’s eyes, and crickets chirrup and rats gnaw on their fellows’ bones, and Albion cannot feel anything at all. He cannot see Wart still kneeling before him and Emrys, cannot see Emrys, cannot move or breathe or blink or swallow. Wythr’s men laugh and carouse, and the torches on the wall flicker and fray the shadows, so many shadows, there are dragons in the shadows-
Albion can’t even cry. That’s the only possible reason that he isn’t.
When he wakes, now, it isn’t from a dream. He is staring at the wall, and Wart is gone, and the corners of Emrys’ cloak are batting at Albion’s sides. Emrys lifts him and coddles him, as he would a babe or a wounded soldier, and carries him back the way they came, and all Albion can think is that this is wrong, and so is he.
-
“We will split the forces,” Emrys decrees at this moot, some half a year later at least. “Take your men to Badbury Rings, brother, and be done with it; yours may march with mine as far as Aquae Sulis. My scouts report the same as yours, I do not doubt. We’ve no time at all.”
“It’s a small island,” Wythr says. “We’d better cross it quickly. And if the Saxons come to you first, you can bet your best we’ll cut off their retreat.”
“And if they come to you?”
“Make yourself comfortable in your Roman baths,” Wythr says, leering. “We’ll join you there to celebrate.”
Albion does not ask, and what if they attack you both at once, because he knows they don’t dare consider it.
-
Albion is at both battles of Badon Hill.
The Saxons split their forces not because they know, but because there are so many of them that it is prudent. They split off Portway at the remains of Calleva, and from there three quarters go straight east, as Emrys predicted-and a quarter sweep toward Sorviodunum and Wythr, because they know he is there. By the time Albion sees it Emrys already knows, about the greater force at least, and is fortefying the hill, deepening the earthworks that haven’t been used for almost six hundred years. There’s not much he can do but station his best and commission the rest to dig until the enemy arrives.
Albion is not among the best, nor is he strong enough to dig. He squires Emrys.
In the shadows between his fingers as he buckles the king’s armour on, Albion can see Wythr’s forces, a day’s hard ride to the south. Wart is deep in the cavalry, far from his father, more concerned for him than the black row of Saxons at the edge of the forest. Wythr has his hand raised, signaling the archers, and Albion can read his lips, aim for the horses-
“Britannia.”
-he can be here now. “Yes, sire.”
“Let me win you back,” Emrys says.
Once Albion has clasped the gauntlet over Emrys’ wrist, he lets it down and bows his head. “I want you to try.”
Emrys doesn’t smile. He turns from Albion and swings up onto his horse, rises a bit to spread the orange cape beneath and behind him. He rides forward, to rally his men at the northeastern point of the hill, and leaves Albion to hide, wait, and see.
Or feel-feel, when he trips on a stone trying to find cover in the earthworks and hears arrows thrilling past the shell of his ear, not here, and there the horses are shrieking. Froth hits Albion’s face and when he reaches up to wipe it away his fingers are dry.
He can’t see Wart at all. He can’t hear Wart at all, just Wythr and the commanders, barely, over the orders that the Saxons are shouting in retaliation, there-and here. Here, now, they’re close enough to really hear and really see and Emrys is bellowing at them, mow them down, pikes ready, thin the ranks before we charge-for Britannia- they take up the cry, here and here alone, for Britannia, for King Emrys, for Cymry!
Is Cymry here?
It’s too late to care. The battle is upon both hills and Albion’s in both and neither, wherever it’s thickest and hardest to see. Wythr’s archers reload and fire another volley before the armies are too close to risk arrows. Emrys’ first ranks of cavalry rush down the hillface, the sun and the kerns at their backs, glowing even after the blood sprays up on their arms.
Albion closes his eyes. It does not stop for hours, and he sees every moment, every solider with a thought to him as he falls, every sword thrust forward in his name, every Saxon horse keeling sideward to crush its rider. Men cough and horses froth, and commanders shout, and in the chaos the Nations are dizzy and ill. Albion claws at the sides of his head, the trampling’s all on the inside, not the out, and when Wythr stabs the banner of the red dragon through the heart of a Saxon chief and into the hilltop, Albion does not know if he screams or cries.
A great cheer wells up through someone’s ranks, but not here, not Emrys’, here they are losing, and Albion topples onto the side to muffle the nightmares in the earth. He wants the fae, he wants Grigory, he wants his brothers and his mother and Wart, but the fae that are here are reveling in the slaughter and Grigory is dead and his brothers loath him and his mother is gone and Wart-Wart is in his father’s ranks and not Albion’s anymore-
War goes on longest when the armies are well-matched. Emrys’ fits to the Saxons like two halves of a broken plate, clashing as if that would put them together again. The noise is terrific even after the dead outnumber the living, on either side or both; Albion feels the lives, a thousand of his own, and enough Saxons spent to kill them. He feels the blood seeping into his skin, commingling with his own.
In a searing pulse of clarity, Albion’s eyes flare open, not here but in the thick of the earthworks. He is behind Emrys on his horse, clinging to his cape and the flank of the beast, ducking so that Emrys can swing his sword. The innards of two dozen or more Saxons drip and drape across his arm and the neck of the horse, and the fae have surrounded him, feeding on what he gives.
A thrown dagger passes through Albion’s back, and Albion knows it will strike Emrys true. He hangs his head and sighs, and tells the fae that they ought not take this king, for he would rather find his Christ in death. They laugh, but they permit it.
Those who see Emrys fall cry out in rage-or cheer, if they are Saxon-and a third yell blasts in from the south, in the new darkness. Wythr’s men bring fire, and horses and horns, and the Saxons are caught between Britons drunk on fury at the death of their king and Wythr’s hounds for glory.
As Albion watches and the sun sets entirely, this Saxon horde is slaughtered to a man.
-
In the heaviness of the following dawn, Albion goes out among the dead. Some have been moved; where Emrys fell, his cape has been lashed to a spear and raised, the red dragon painted crudely in blood on its centre. Wind unfurls the wool and carries with it the cries of the unlucky living, those broken in the grass, those mad where they lay. Albion regards them in turn, and takes what they offer, be it words or entreaties or an unwarped arrow, to whet and fletch and fire anew.
Of course he sees that golden boy again, beneath him on the hill, where the dead are more Saxon than Briton. This time, though, they are both actually there to see, and Albion is the first to look.
They crouch at either end of a corpse so thoroughly trampled it could be either of theirs. Albion is prying off the dead man’s boots; the Son of Gaul is salvaging the leather rings that bound its hair. Albion stiffens and stands, and it’s so sudden that the Son of Gaul notices. He looks up, curious eyes over curious cheeks-and then he smiles. He offers his hand forward, the undersides of his fingernails as stained as the leather across his palm, and his pale thin eyebrow curls up, daring Albion to take it.
“Gallia!” a woman calls. The name is more a moan than a shout, coming from even further away, down by a cluster of ruined horses.
The golden boy turns and looks toward the sound of his name-or the name that Rome must have given him, at least-and scampers off. It’s his mother calling, Gaul herself, and the only thing that sets her apart from the corpses that surround her is that she stands upright, turning her head on its threadbare neck as if she could see out of those hollow eyes. Gallia laughs, clambers over the fallen soldiers and embraces her about the thighs, nuzzling at her stained and tattered skirts. She totters a bit with the force of it, and sets herself down on the swollen belly of a dead horse, and Gallia nestles into her lap. He paws his cheek on her thigh, and her withered hand settles into his hair, and the flies swarming around them glint like spelt honey in the sun.
He opens his eyes, and seeks Albion’s out, and asks with them, Do you want to play too?
Albion has never dreamed of being asleep, but that’s what this is. He is on a mattress with straw that does not poke through, and Wart’s arms are around him and beneath him. It is warm, here, as if they have just been kissing, but there are no blankets and Albion can see all the way down his body to his toes. He stretches and wriggles them against Wart’s, and then turns to do the same with his nose. Albion realises that their bodies are the same length again, and it is the happiest dream he has had in a very long time-
“Britannia?”
-Wart. “Wart!” Albion turns and runs, up the hill and out of whatever magic is working through his head. He trips on the spike of someone’s dented armour, scrapes his palms on the earth, but it doesn’t matter at all, he doesn’t mind, he’s borne worse for the sake of worse men and Wart-
Wart is a man now, isn’t he.
Albion slows, when he sees him. There is no shade at all this high on the hill, and Albion shields his eyes to block out some of the sun, to permit him to see more than just Wart’s black silhouette. His armour is so filthy that it doesn’t shine at all, and he’s stained with blood higher than the caps of his boots. His ragged hair can’t quite hide the hair on his cheeks, not even in shadow, but his mouth is still young, still gaping as he catches his breath.
There are bodies between them, but Albion clambers over them, to get to the clearing and stand at Wart’s feet. Wart kneels to Albion’s level, and puts his arms around Albion’s shoulders and his face against Albion’s chest.
“I was so afraid,” he whispers. “Father, he-he didn’t win it for you.”
“But you did,” Albion says, his arms too trapped to hold Wart back. “And that’s enough.”
-
They bury Ambrosius Aurelianus with honour, at the ring of great stones between the two battle hills. Albion’s mother is also interred here, though much deeper. He tells no one this (not even Wart, well, not yet), so that only Cymry glares at him for thinking it. Wythr is king now, and calls himself Bendragon. It’s taken up with a cry, all those soldiers wishing him long life as they lay his brother Emrys to glorious rest.
Albion will have no more of it.
He takes Wart by the hand, and leads him aside, far from the revels and the pain. “You’re coming with me to Cornwall,” he tells Wart, and hopes he can sound imperious about it, no matter how small.
Wart laughs. Even if it’s deeper now, it still makes Albion ache. “Well then, I suppose I am. What’s in Cornwall?”
“Some things I know about you that you don’t,” Albion says. “But you have to believe me before I tell them.”
“I do.”
Albion’s heart nearly breaks to ask, “Can you prove it?”
Wart nods, and closes his eyes. He pulls up to his full height, and reaches over Albion’s shoulder, palm open skyward. He whispers in a breath, and one of Albion’s faeries quirks in interest, out from the fire-shadows of the great heelstone. The faerie flits through the grass, hopping to Wart in three great bounds, and reaches up to chomp on the tip of Wart’s finger and hang there, flailing its rabbitish legs.
When the creature’s teeth bite down, Wart grits his, wincing at the pain. “They can hear and see me now,” he says, “and I them. So I can’t betray you ever again.” The little creature hefts itself up into Wart’s palm and settles there, stroking the hurt with its ears. Wart smiles, at it, and then at Albion. “I’m at their mercy if I do.”
Albion blinks back tears, and repeats, “You’re coming with me to Cornwall.”
-
.
Citations for Part 2:
Ye olde handy map.
I used limericks for Rome’s song for two strong reasons: one, because the form lends itself to being raunchy as all fuck, and two, because limericks are Dactylic, like a lot of ancient poetry.
Wythr Bendragon.
The Battle of Mons Badonicus. As the location was quite uncertain, I opted to apply two of them, proximate, to suit the story’s needs.
The location at which Albion’s mother is buried.
On to Part 3
.
I wish I could have posted earlier, but...
Title: No Such Place - Part 2
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, Roma Antiqua, Germania, Wales, Mother Gaul, France; King Arthur and associated personages.
Words: 7000
Rating: R. A solid, hard, don’t take your children to see it in the theater R.
As before, I warn for: Gangrene, inappropriate Imperial attentions to an underage Nation, inappropriate attentions from an underage Nation to an underage human, inappropriate attentions from an of-age human to an underage human (though entirely consensual), horror tropes, Name magic, fraternal abuse, National-fraternal abuse, violent death in battle, violent death outside of battle, the Fair Folk being unfair, Nations being unfair to the Fair Folk, sexual fantasy, magic-kink, gerontophilia, heads on pikes, too many names with not enough vowels, and meta. Oh, and this time, there’s more sex.
Timeline: the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.
Summary: Not the King Arthur story you think it is.
Back to Part 1
Sometime around 500 A.D…
It takes less time to lose ground than to gain it.
Of the eight years Albion has been afield with Ambrosius’ clan, six of them were spent getting to Camulodunum, and two of them retreating all the way back to Dinas Emrys. It could be worse: Cymry could know. He probably does, actually, but as long as he is more inclined to gloat silently Albion will give him no invitation to express his opinion of Albion’s choice of hero.
The fortress seems to swell out of the earth like the egg of a spider, the surrounding trees shrinking beside the stone. Those left behind have reinforced it with dark stone and iron, in cruel swirling spires, staggered with tall slits for bowmen to fire through. Albion wonders if the dragons beneath the mound have suffered in turn.
He is beside Ambrosius-Emrys, Albion corrects himself, within these walls he is to be Emrys-as the general is greeted by the armsman he left behind, with laughter. “Back so soon, your Majesty?”
“Let it not be in disgrace,” Emrys says. “I trust we’ve the reserves to hold the heathens off?”
“Depends on how many of them there are, doesn’t it?” He laughs again: Emrys doesn’t, and neither does Albion, nor do any of the souls within earshot. But the grey armsman looks askance at all of them, his bushy white eyebrows tucking up with the wrinkles on his forehead, and challenges them to a man. “Well? How many are there?”
Albion, who knows better, answers with and for the rest: “Two thousand, four hundred of them horse.”
“Well, that’s not so bad,” the armsman, says, much to everyone’s indignant surprise. “no, no hear me-”
“Or me,” says the younger but still not young man emerging from the fortress gate behind him, with Cymry at his side.
Albion hears the ash in Emrys’ greeting. “I suppose you brought them with you from the wall, Wythr.”
“Under your flag, brother.” Wythr grins-Albion shivers, and wishes that the corners of that man’s mouth would hide behind his moustaches. “Many’ll follow the dragon to his hoard.”
“Well then I hope you promised them something we could spare.”
“There’ll be glory enough in this war,” Wythr says, with a glance at Cymry behind him. “Men remember that, where Rome couldn’t reach.”
-
“Give me Grigory’s horn.”
“It’s not a horn anymore, and no.” Cymry rests his hand on the wall instead of the curtain, as if he never meant to pull it aside.
Albion snarls at his back. “What did you do with it?”
“I made use of it.”
“I could have-”
“Not this. You don’t think this way yet.”
“I could-”
“No, you can’t. You’re too busy playing at war, runt.”
“It’s not playing!”
“Fine, then it’s losing.” Now Cymry opens his eyes-they’d been closed?-and tugs the curtain aside, takes a torch in his other hand and steps into the dark. “Are you following me?”
“I know where you’re going,” Albion says.
Cymry tsks between his teeth, but doesn’t tell him not to follow.
The stone stairs wind down and become earth; the rich gold torchlight is thickened with its own smoke. Cymry ducks when the ceiling and walls grow tighter, but Albion has no such problem, and takes the steps, only once tripping up when the shadows swallow the hem of Cymry’s cloak and he steps on it in the dark.
“Watch where you’re going,” Cymry sighs when he recovers.
Albion wrinkles his nose. “Watch we’re you’ve been.”
If Cymry rolls his eyes, op there, Albion cannot see it-and when the stairwell ends and the hollow begins, Albion can see nothing at all.
The dragons are disturbed.
They’re not fighting now-or not yet-or if they are they’ve taken a rest from it, and have closed to opposite sides of the cavern. Cymry goes to his red, or Albion thinks so at least, since the torchlight’s nearly gone.
“Shh,” Cymry says, stroking the dragon’s flank. “How is it?”
The dragon raises his head from the earth, and Albion can feel it scrape and shake. “Cold,” the dragon hisses in answer.
Cymry tells him, “Good,” and continues to stroke him. The dragon purrs an unsteady rumble of steam, and it makes the torch flicker. Albion bends and takes up the hem of Cymry’s cape, just in case. Of course Cymry chides him for it: “Scared, runt?”
Albion harrumphs. “The white dragon’s still here too, you know.”
Steam gathers and dribbles down, and the torch goes out entirely. “Tell me why I should care.”
This isn’t the sort of thing he wakes up screaming from, but Albion does shake, even after Wart twines his arms about him. Wart is nearly a real soldier now, so they have a place where the straw is packed into sewn cloth rather than just heaped under blankets, and Albion nestles into all of that at once.
“My brother is not afraid of this war at all,” Albion tells Wart, when Wart perks up an ear and cheek to listen. “He thinks to let Saxony destroy me, and then content himself with that.”
“But isn’t it good, to not be afraid?”
Albion props himself up on his elbows, and looks at Wart to assure that there was only simplicity in those words.
It’s true; Wart, though not a boy any more, clearly a young man, still has that acceptance and light behind his eyes that only the old and the young seem to keep. Scant hairs darker than the ones on his head frame the slight frown on his cheeks, and Albion remembers to ask him:
“Wythr is your father, isn’t he?”
“He is,” Wart says, “and he’s not afraid either, you can see that. But he’s not afraid because he’s strong, and there’s nothing wrong with knowing that.”
“There is if the enemy knows you are too, and plans for it.” Albion leans down and rests his chin on Wart’s chest. There’s going to be hair there too, isn’t there. “How strong is he?”
Wart considers a moment, rolling his eyes up in his head as if to count. “I don’t know. I don’t know him, really. But I do know that he makes me think he’s strong enough.”
“But that’s dangerous,” Albion says. “My eldest brother is like that. And so was Rome.”
“Yes, but aren’t they strong too?”
“-Well yes,” Albion says, “but not strong enough. I mean. Rome’s dead now, and Germania killed him, which means Germania is stronger, and-”
“And does that mean that my father might be stronger than your brother, even if he’s a Nation?”
Albion frowns. So does Wart. But then Wart laughs while Albion is still trying to ponder it out, and he throws his arms over Albion’s back and holds him closer.
“You’re right,” Wart says, “I don’t know, I can’t know. Yes he’s my father but I don’t know him at all, so he might be a braggart or-or worse, I don’t know.” His laughter is getting lower with the rest of his voice, and Albion can feel that where their chests are pressed together. “And he can’t be stronger than a Nation. That’s daft!”
Albion tries to smile, now that Wart is. It nearly works. “I don’t know,” he mutters, “you could be stronger than I, at least.”
“Oh, could I?” Wart laughs again, and grips his hands on Albion’s upper arms to hold him and lift, sort of. “Shall we test it?”
“I accept your challenge!” Albion, well, tries not to shout, and grabs onto Wart’s arms to wrestle him too.
They tangle on the mattress, Wart’s long arms and legs almost unwieldy compared to Albion’s much shorter ones. Albion gets himself twined high on Wart’s chest but Wart, well, is stronger, and pries him off, half by the scruff of his neck. Once he gets Albion’s back to the straw he tries to pounce, but Albion is quicker, and wriggles between Wart’s legs to come out the other side and jump onto his back. Wart gasps, and almost cackles, and grabs ahold of Albion’s ankles to spin him around and fling him off, onto the mattress again. He pins Albion down by the wrists and knees and kisses him, soundly and suddenly.
Albion is-Albion is just fine with that, even if it’s a kind of being bested, and kisses Wart too. They’ve been kissing with tongues since they found out it was nice, so Albion opens his mouth and lets his slip out. Wart does as well, and they let their tongues do the tussling for a bit instead of their bodies. It’s pleasant, this way, and warm, and so Albion fights it a little more, twists his body and tries to escape Wart’s hold. “You can’t-win me,” he tries to say, and isn’t sure how much of it gets out.
“I can,” Wart says, stronger, “I’ve got you,” and this time Albion feels a little bit of teeth in the kiss but doesn’t mind at all, since that means Wart is smiling. He smiles too, and bites on Wart’s lip, and Wart-and Wart moans, and squirms, but not away.
Albion lets his teeth part, and lets Wart’s lip go, but decides that’s another way to win, and tries to capture it again. It’s easy, starting with a kiss, and Albion chews on it a little this time, and Wart holds on tighter, presses down harder.
He’s really rubbing himself against Albion now, steady strokes of his hips like he’s riding a horse. When Albion lets his teeth off Wart’s mouth, Wart pulls his face away and kisses Albion but not on the lips, on the chin, and before Albion can tell him that he missed he does it again but lower, under, and then on Albion’s neck, right in the centre. Albion chokes, and the sound and heat go right to where Wart is kissing him.
Wart-Wart bites him there, a little, not hard, just enough to speak through. Albion thinks he’s saying Britannia but isn’t sure, there are other things he feels, around his wrists and on his thighs and between them, and-
-oh, oh no, no, not this.
He tries to say, Wart, no, but only the name comes out, and that means Wart doesn’t stop-doesn’t stop kissing or rubbing that part of himself on Albion’s thigh. Albion tenses up as much as he can, not in the fighting way but in the defending way-if his throat’s too tight to say anything his body should be too, and Wart needs to know, Wart will stop if he knows.
“…Britannia?” His lips leave Albion’s skin.
He knows.
“Oh-oh, Britannia, oh god-” All the glass leaves Wart’s eyes, and all the heat, and he says it, pulling away. “What did I do, I don’t-”
“No, but-but I do,” Albion whispers. “It’s not your fault, just stop, it’s fine-“ He says that again, he should, “It’s fine, it’s fine…”
Wart nods. “Just…just stop,” he repeats, just as quietly. When the words leave him he hangs his head, as if he could be looking down at himself, but his eyes are closed.
Albion presses his wrists up against Wart’s hands, and he lets go; when he tries to lift his legs out from under Wart’s knees, Wart takes a breath, and then crouches back on his heels. His erection is still flushed and heavy-looking, and Albion averts his eyes, turning onto his side in the straw.
“I-” Wart starts, and Albion can’t feel him looking at all. “I’ll go…do something about this.”
Albion tells him, as confidently as he can, “All right.”
Before Wart gets up, he slips on the blankets; Albion feels them lift, and then drop over his body, up to the chin. Wart goes several steps away, out of the light but not out of the room. He makes low sounds, laden with unsteady, irregular breaths. If Albion squints-and he does, through the dark, and only once-he can see Wart’s shoulders, one braced against the far wall, the other rising and falling, the arm taut against his body.
When Wart comes back, Albion’s face is to the mattress, and the straw is poking through, jabbing him in the cheek. Wart lays beside him, atop the blanket, not under it. He smells faintly of salt and sweat, much more than usual.
“I know it’s-I know it’s going to happen again, so…so should we stop kissing?” he asks.
Albion’s just as uncertain. “I like kissing you,” he says, and it’s true, so he makes it sound as true as he can. “And I like that you want me, even like that, but-”
“But you’re a Nation,” Wart finishes for him.
He’s wrong. “No. I’m a child.”
Wart blinks. “And I’m not?”
-
As usual, the moot begins with Emrys calling Wythr daft.
“No, no, brother, hear me,” Wythr says, and holds back those of his men who would have been content to throttle Emrys right there. “I agree with you that we might draw them south. It’s Britannia the Saxons want, not the parts of the Isle that aren’t. Or at least not now, not if they have any sense.”
“You’re assuming that the Saxons have sense.”
“Well, so are you.”
“No, I’m assuming that their greed is greater than it. They are here. They will continue to push west now that they have seen they can beat us, and they know that it will be easier if they crush us now. If we draw them south, we draw them only as southerly as we must, that should they crush us we at least have an avenue of retreat.”
“And I say that should they crush us are the words of a coward.”
It’s Emrys’ turn to hold back the angriest of his men; unlike Wythr, he does it with merely a gesture of dismissal. “Brother, you do ill to call me a coward in my own keep.”
Wythr smiles and puts hip his palms. “Sorry, Ambrosius, I guess since I was here while you were out being Roman I forgot it was yours.”
“Be that memory of yours as it may,” Emrys says through visibly grit teeth, “it is mine, and you are a guest, and if the bonds of our fraternity do not stay me from throwing you out, then only those of patriotism will suffice. We would do well to at least defend the same country.”
After a smirk up at Cymry, over his shoulder again, Wythr turns back to Emrys and nods. “I can be persuaded. But I think you’ve forgotten that there’s more than one country on this Isle.”
Emrys’ eyes are raised, and somewhat darkly, surrounded by the shadows of his senior commanders, all seething. He sits straight on his chair, and does not rise from it. “However many Nations, the Germania sees no borders.”
Albion takes a sidelong step nearer, and puts his hand on Emrys’ shoulder.
On the table between him and his brother, Emrys overturns his map and weights it at the corners with three stones and an empty tankard. Albion’s uncertain picture unfurls, and Cymry marked clearer to the west, Caledonii beyond the wall in the north. The roads Rome built through him are marked in solid red (Albion shivers) and the fortifications, both his and Rome’s, are green. Emrys removes an arrow from his quiver, and holds it like a quill, to point, scratching through the vellum. “All this land is theirs,” he starts, circling through Albion’s eastern provinces, as far in as Ratae and Venonis and Claustenum. “The Ermine road is as good as lost, but for your forces at the wall; they are advancing on Fosse and Portway. You say we should go father south, and defend Durnovaria? Surely you see the risk, if we make to take that, and they take Lindinis first. We have no escape then but Cornwall or the sea, and we all know how welcome you are at Cornwall.”
Men on both sides laugh at that; the boys do not. Most of them are too young to understand the historicity of that joke, and in Albion’s case he understands too well.
When Wythr is done laughing, he answers, “But they’re expecting to meet us at Lindinis, aren’t they? We’ll overshoot them south, and head them off before they get to us.”
“And if we fail?”
“Must you always consider that we might? That doesn’t make for good fighting.”
“No, but it makes for soldiers who sell their lives rather than throw them away.”
Again, Wythr has to restrain his men. Even those who do not protest glower at Emrys. Cymry seems to be the only one on Wythr’s side without anger, and he, at least to Albion’s eyes, looks thoroughly bored.
“Now you hear me, brother,” Wythr is snarling, “I may be less a king than you, but I’m just as much a leader of men. And this may be your house, but these men here are just as many my people, and I can tell you that any implication that their friends lost their lives under my command and didn’t make the Scots pay dearly is like to get you killed.”
Emrys closes his eyes, sets the arrow on the table, and then opens them, even calmer than Cymry. “And I could tell you to let them loose and prove it, brother, but I place a price on my life that I don’t expect you want to pay.”
Albion dreams of Rome:
It is a scenario he knows well, worn through with familiarity; they bathe together in the river that flows through Londinium, and the skies are grey and swollen with recent warm rain. Albion polishes Rome as he would armour, with sand and a tattered cloth, and he stands on a slippery rock to reach Rome’s neck and shoulders.
Rome hums, low in his throat. It could be praise at first, but at some point it slips into murmured song, deep and out of tune.
“Oh, I had a lady in Thrace,” (the song goes)
“With more lips than the two on her face.
She said to begin
I should just put mine in,
But I wasn’t so sure of the place.”
He asks Albion if he likes it. Albion winces and doesn’t answer. So Rome keeps singing, louder and clearer.
“Then after, the girl from the Nile;
We fought about that for a while.
But right at the end,
She learned how to bend,
And she took it like that with a smile!” Rome grins, and rolls his shoulders, splashing about in the river. “Get it in deep, Britannia, right there, I can feel the knot.
“The pretty girl up by the Seine
Could go at it again and again.
But to my surprise,
She averted her eyes.
It’s a good thing she’s got one for pain!
“I’m trying to write another verse,” Rome goes on, and reaches up to cover Albion’s wet hand with his own. “You want to know who about?”
The hand shaking Albion awake isn’t Wart’s. It’s much larger. He hadn’t been screaming before; he almost does now, but-
“Shh!”
“-ah-Ambrosius? Sire?”
“Where is my nephew?” The king’s eyes are hollowed in the dark.
“I don’t know,” Albion breathes. “He’s not here?”
“If he were here I’d not be asking,” Emrys says, and there might be a hint of a smile in the torchlight. “Doesn’t he always sleep by you?”
Albion doesn’t mean to stammer, “Yes, but-we’ve quarreled, these months.” It’s a better explanation than the truth.
Emrys makes a sound like ah, and raises the torch. “Walk with me, then. You’ll know where to find him.”
Albion nods his assent, and shucks off the blankets, pulls on a tunic and boots and weapons and his cloak. Once his head is through the cowl, he looks the long way up through the dark at Emrys and suggests, “He’s been talking about Wythr a lot lately. Perhaps he’s-gone over there?”
“Has he, now,” Emrys mutters, only half a question. “It’s only natural for him to want his father’s attention, considering he’s never had any of it.”
That sounds particularly derisive. Albion is moved to ask, as he follows Emrys out past the curtain, “But has Wart been a trouble to you?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Emrys admits. “He takes orders, at least, which is more than I can say for many young men like him. He knows his place.”
But his place is with me, Albion thinks, so why isn’t he here?
They wind through the halls of Dinas Emrys, their heels crunching through roots and rushes on the floor. Albion finds himself briefly fascinated with the way their shadows stretch in the light of dozens of torches, flickering off the accoutrements of hundreds of men-at-arms. Albion discovers something oddly fascinating in that; when they are at war, they are terrible, but at repose the soldiers are no less beautiful than then, and there is something about how the men regard Emrys that Albion envies.
It changes, somewhat, as they near the section of the fort that Emrys has relegated to Wythr and his company from the Wall. Though the torches grow more numerous, with them the shadows are stranger, and Albion sees things in them, the prickle of a rat, the curl of a cricket. He’s not afraid of those, but he is somewhat wary of what he’s not seeing that drives them into the light, and he skitters closer to the train of Emrys’ long cloak. It’s a deep orange wool that Albion wishes he could match all the torches to, except for the hem, which is paled and thickened by mud where it drags on the stone.
Emrys looks down at him, when he notices that. His smile is odd; not warm, but not wry. “You’ve been a boy a very long time, haven’t you?”
“One might say so,” Albion says, still uncertain of whether he must say why-
“And will repelling Germania make you a man, or must you first be unified?”
-ah. He does not have to explain. “I think the latter.”
Emrys nods, and the smile has faded when his face is again revealed to the torches. “A pity, then, that there are those who would keep you at the mercy of your brethren.”
His hand is not quite offered, but Albion takes it, just as they reach the chamber that the most of Wythr’s men have convened in.
Laughter swells out of the room, as if there was too much to begin with, and Albion covers his eyes as if to block it. It’s a joyous sound, woven with the slapping of tables and thighs, the rustling of straw, the sloshing of ale. Wythr, not at the head of a great board but near its centre, is in the midst of a story, gesturing as he recounts it. Wart is among the men intent, though from where he sits, he probably cannot even see his father’s face, let alone his eyes.
Emrys says nothing to interrupt, and the room is noisy enough that his silence is unobtrusive. He looks to Wart until Wart regards him, and then makes a motion with his hands, come hither. Wart’s eyes shade, and then draw in on Albion’s; Albion gulps, and then nods, as earnestly as he can.
No one marks it when Wart gets up from the table, save the man who eagerly swipes his portion of the bench. And it takes some time, and some doing, but Wart weaves through the crowd until he gets to the curtain-and once in the hall, kneels and addresses Albion, and not the king. “Is something wrong? Did I miss a dream?”
“It’s more important that you missed a different kind of visitation,” Emrys says, above them both. “Your post is your post, Wart.”
“Not when the watch isn’t mine,” Wart counters, rising-but then switches to only one knee instead, and keeps his head down. “Sire.”
“And if Germania stormed this keep, and you were caught in the chaos of the wrong army?”
“It’s not the wrong army.” Wart sounds so guileless about it that it gives Albion pause; there’s no insult meant at all. “We’re fighting for the same thing, right?”
Wart is near enough Albion’s level that he should be able to see the uncertainty in his Nation’s eyes. If that is what just startled him, well, Albion is grateful.
Emrys puts his hand on his nephew’s head, and rests it there, still. “Cai is dead, Wart. You should be by me.”
“But I’m not Cai. And my father is alive,” he says, with a glance back at the common room as another joke is told, heard, laughed at, and missed by the rest in the hall. “I think he should like to know me.”
“You mean that you should like to know him.” Emrys corrects, “and I know him, and I think that he should not.”
Wart closes his eyes. “You don’t mean that.”
“You do not tell me what I do and don’t mean, Wart.” Just as there was no malice in Wart’s words, there is no anger in Emrys’. “If he has shown interest in you at all, it is not as a son. He has nothing to leave you; he needs no heir.”
“He has this. He has his corps.”
“And they follow him, and not you. They are brigands, Wart, some of them literally, and they flock to strength, not name.”
“…Then you haven’t made me strong, Sire?”
Emrys withdraws his hand from Wart’s head. Wart looks up, follows his uncle’s fingertips and the line of his arm, and Wart’s eyes are earnest and sad-and older.
“If you haven’t, let him try,” Wart neither pleads nor commands. “Or let me try by him. I want to be-for you,” he says, to Albion, to Albion first, “for you both-”
“I don’t want you to rule by strength,” Emrys says, urgent at last. “Look at your Nation. He does not want a brute.”
“He does not want a lover either.”
-firelight surges behind Albion’s eyes, and crickets chirrup and rats gnaw on their fellows’ bones, and Albion cannot feel anything at all. He cannot see Wart still kneeling before him and Emrys, cannot see Emrys, cannot move or breathe or blink or swallow. Wythr’s men laugh and carouse, and the torches on the wall flicker and fray the shadows, so many shadows, there are dragons in the shadows-
Albion can’t even cry. That’s the only possible reason that he isn’t.
When he wakes, now, it isn’t from a dream. He is staring at the wall, and Wart is gone, and the corners of Emrys’ cloak are batting at Albion’s sides. Emrys lifts him and coddles him, as he would a babe or a wounded soldier, and carries him back the way they came, and all Albion can think is that this is wrong, and so is he.
-
“We will split the forces,” Emrys decrees at this moot, some half a year later at least. “Take your men to Badbury Rings, brother, and be done with it; yours may march with mine as far as Aquae Sulis. My scouts report the same as yours, I do not doubt. We’ve no time at all.”
“It’s a small island,” Wythr says. “We’d better cross it quickly. And if the Saxons come to you first, you can bet your best we’ll cut off their retreat.”
“And if they come to you?”
“Make yourself comfortable in your Roman baths,” Wythr says, leering. “We’ll join you there to celebrate.”
Albion does not ask, and what if they attack you both at once, because he knows they don’t dare consider it.
-
Albion is at both battles of Badon Hill.
The Saxons split their forces not because they know, but because there are so many of them that it is prudent. They split off Portway at the remains of Calleva, and from there three quarters go straight east, as Emrys predicted-and a quarter sweep toward Sorviodunum and Wythr, because they know he is there. By the time Albion sees it Emrys already knows, about the greater force at least, and is fortefying the hill, deepening the earthworks that haven’t been used for almost six hundred years. There’s not much he can do but station his best and commission the rest to dig until the enemy arrives.
Albion is not among the best, nor is he strong enough to dig. He squires Emrys.
In the shadows between his fingers as he buckles the king’s armour on, Albion can see Wythr’s forces, a day’s hard ride to the south. Wart is deep in the cavalry, far from his father, more concerned for him than the black row of Saxons at the edge of the forest. Wythr has his hand raised, signaling the archers, and Albion can read his lips, aim for the horses-
“Britannia.”
-he can be here now. “Yes, sire.”
“Let me win you back,” Emrys says.
Once Albion has clasped the gauntlet over Emrys’ wrist, he lets it down and bows his head. “I want you to try.”
Emrys doesn’t smile. He turns from Albion and swings up onto his horse, rises a bit to spread the orange cape beneath and behind him. He rides forward, to rally his men at the northeastern point of the hill, and leaves Albion to hide, wait, and see.
Or feel-feel, when he trips on a stone trying to find cover in the earthworks and hears arrows thrilling past the shell of his ear, not here, and there the horses are shrieking. Froth hits Albion’s face and when he reaches up to wipe it away his fingers are dry.
He can’t see Wart at all. He can’t hear Wart at all, just Wythr and the commanders, barely, over the orders that the Saxons are shouting in retaliation, there-and here. Here, now, they’re close enough to really hear and really see and Emrys is bellowing at them, mow them down, pikes ready, thin the ranks before we charge-for Britannia- they take up the cry, here and here alone, for Britannia, for King Emrys, for Cymry!
Is Cymry here?
It’s too late to care. The battle is upon both hills and Albion’s in both and neither, wherever it’s thickest and hardest to see. Wythr’s archers reload and fire another volley before the armies are too close to risk arrows. Emrys’ first ranks of cavalry rush down the hillface, the sun and the kerns at their backs, glowing even after the blood sprays up on their arms.
Albion closes his eyes. It does not stop for hours, and he sees every moment, every solider with a thought to him as he falls, every sword thrust forward in his name, every Saxon horse keeling sideward to crush its rider. Men cough and horses froth, and commanders shout, and in the chaos the Nations are dizzy and ill. Albion claws at the sides of his head, the trampling’s all on the inside, not the out, and when Wythr stabs the banner of the red dragon through the heart of a Saxon chief and into the hilltop, Albion does not know if he screams or cries.
A great cheer wells up through someone’s ranks, but not here, not Emrys’, here they are losing, and Albion topples onto the side to muffle the nightmares in the earth. He wants the fae, he wants Grigory, he wants his brothers and his mother and Wart, but the fae that are here are reveling in the slaughter and Grigory is dead and his brothers loath him and his mother is gone and Wart-Wart is in his father’s ranks and not Albion’s anymore-
War goes on longest when the armies are well-matched. Emrys’ fits to the Saxons like two halves of a broken plate, clashing as if that would put them together again. The noise is terrific even after the dead outnumber the living, on either side or both; Albion feels the lives, a thousand of his own, and enough Saxons spent to kill them. He feels the blood seeping into his skin, commingling with his own.
In a searing pulse of clarity, Albion’s eyes flare open, not here but in the thick of the earthworks. He is behind Emrys on his horse, clinging to his cape and the flank of the beast, ducking so that Emrys can swing his sword. The innards of two dozen or more Saxons drip and drape across his arm and the neck of the horse, and the fae have surrounded him, feeding on what he gives.
A thrown dagger passes through Albion’s back, and Albion knows it will strike Emrys true. He hangs his head and sighs, and tells the fae that they ought not take this king, for he would rather find his Christ in death. They laugh, but they permit it.
Those who see Emrys fall cry out in rage-or cheer, if they are Saxon-and a third yell blasts in from the south, in the new darkness. Wythr’s men bring fire, and horses and horns, and the Saxons are caught between Britons drunk on fury at the death of their king and Wythr’s hounds for glory.
As Albion watches and the sun sets entirely, this Saxon horde is slaughtered to a man.
-
In the heaviness of the following dawn, Albion goes out among the dead. Some have been moved; where Emrys fell, his cape has been lashed to a spear and raised, the red dragon painted crudely in blood on its centre. Wind unfurls the wool and carries with it the cries of the unlucky living, those broken in the grass, those mad where they lay. Albion regards them in turn, and takes what they offer, be it words or entreaties or an unwarped arrow, to whet and fletch and fire anew.
Of course he sees that golden boy again, beneath him on the hill, where the dead are more Saxon than Briton. This time, though, they are both actually there to see, and Albion is the first to look.
They crouch at either end of a corpse so thoroughly trampled it could be either of theirs. Albion is prying off the dead man’s boots; the Son of Gaul is salvaging the leather rings that bound its hair. Albion stiffens and stands, and it’s so sudden that the Son of Gaul notices. He looks up, curious eyes over curious cheeks-and then he smiles. He offers his hand forward, the undersides of his fingernails as stained as the leather across his palm, and his pale thin eyebrow curls up, daring Albion to take it.
“Gallia!” a woman calls. The name is more a moan than a shout, coming from even further away, down by a cluster of ruined horses.
The golden boy turns and looks toward the sound of his name-or the name that Rome must have given him, at least-and scampers off. It’s his mother calling, Gaul herself, and the only thing that sets her apart from the corpses that surround her is that she stands upright, turning her head on its threadbare neck as if she could see out of those hollow eyes. Gallia laughs, clambers over the fallen soldiers and embraces her about the thighs, nuzzling at her stained and tattered skirts. She totters a bit with the force of it, and sets herself down on the swollen belly of a dead horse, and Gallia nestles into her lap. He paws his cheek on her thigh, and her withered hand settles into his hair, and the flies swarming around them glint like spelt honey in the sun.
He opens his eyes, and seeks Albion’s out, and asks with them, Do you want to play too?
Albion has never dreamed of being asleep, but that’s what this is. He is on a mattress with straw that does not poke through, and Wart’s arms are around him and beneath him. It is warm, here, as if they have just been kissing, but there are no blankets and Albion can see all the way down his body to his toes. He stretches and wriggles them against Wart’s, and then turns to do the same with his nose. Albion realises that their bodies are the same length again, and it is the happiest dream he has had in a very long time-
“Britannia?”
-Wart. “Wart!” Albion turns and runs, up the hill and out of whatever magic is working through his head. He trips on the spike of someone’s dented armour, scrapes his palms on the earth, but it doesn’t matter at all, he doesn’t mind, he’s borne worse for the sake of worse men and Wart-
Wart is a man now, isn’t he.
Albion slows, when he sees him. There is no shade at all this high on the hill, and Albion shields his eyes to block out some of the sun, to permit him to see more than just Wart’s black silhouette. His armour is so filthy that it doesn’t shine at all, and he’s stained with blood higher than the caps of his boots. His ragged hair can’t quite hide the hair on his cheeks, not even in shadow, but his mouth is still young, still gaping as he catches his breath.
There are bodies between them, but Albion clambers over them, to get to the clearing and stand at Wart’s feet. Wart kneels to Albion’s level, and puts his arms around Albion’s shoulders and his face against Albion’s chest.
“I was so afraid,” he whispers. “Father, he-he didn’t win it for you.”
“But you did,” Albion says, his arms too trapped to hold Wart back. “And that’s enough.”
-
They bury Ambrosius Aurelianus with honour, at the ring of great stones between the two battle hills. Albion’s mother is also interred here, though much deeper. He tells no one this (not even Wart, well, not yet), so that only Cymry glares at him for thinking it. Wythr is king now, and calls himself Bendragon. It’s taken up with a cry, all those soldiers wishing him long life as they lay his brother Emrys to glorious rest.
Albion will have no more of it.
He takes Wart by the hand, and leads him aside, far from the revels and the pain. “You’re coming with me to Cornwall,” he tells Wart, and hopes he can sound imperious about it, no matter how small.
Wart laughs. Even if it’s deeper now, it still makes Albion ache. “Well then, I suppose I am. What’s in Cornwall?”
“Some things I know about you that you don’t,” Albion says. “But you have to believe me before I tell them.”
“I do.”
Albion’s heart nearly breaks to ask, “Can you prove it?”
Wart nods, and closes his eyes. He pulls up to his full height, and reaches over Albion’s shoulder, palm open skyward. He whispers in a breath, and one of Albion’s faeries quirks in interest, out from the fire-shadows of the great heelstone. The faerie flits through the grass, hopping to Wart in three great bounds, and reaches up to chomp on the tip of Wart’s finger and hang there, flailing its rabbitish legs.
When the creature’s teeth bite down, Wart grits his, wincing at the pain. “They can hear and see me now,” he says, “and I them. So I can’t betray you ever again.” The little creature hefts itself up into Wart’s palm and settles there, stroking the hurt with its ears. Wart smiles, at it, and then at Albion. “I’m at their mercy if I do.”
Albion blinks back tears, and repeats, “You’re coming with me to Cornwall.”
-
.
Citations for Part 2:
Ye olde handy map.
I used limericks for Rome’s song for two strong reasons: one, because the form lends itself to being raunchy as all fuck, and two, because limericks are Dactylic, like a lot of ancient poetry.
Wythr Bendragon.
The Battle of Mons Badonicus. As the location was quite uncertain, I opted to apply two of them, proximate, to suit the story’s needs.
The location at which Albion’s mother is buried.
On to Part 3
.