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Anthony Riches

The Eagle's Vengeance

Prologue

‘Silence! Silence for the king!’

King Naradoc of the Venicones smiled thinly at the ritual command, more usually issued to the noisy crowds of warriors who thronged the tribe’s royal hall when he held audiences with his people. On those days when the tribe’s elite gathered to pay homage to their ruler the hall would be filled with the noise of men competing to be seen and heard, each of them accompanied by half a dozen of the biggest and most fearsome members of his household, every one of them covered in the swirling blue tattoos that were the tribe’s distinguishing feature, their weapons surrendered at the massive arched doorway under the watchful eyes of the king’s guard. Each clan’s heavily tattooed champions would rub shoulders as they waited for the king’s entrance, friendships and enmities playing out in jocular exchanges that all parties knew would end in swift punishment if they were to escalate beyond mere words, no matter how barbed they might be. With the hammering of an iron-shod staff, wielded against the thick wooden floorboards by Naradoc’s shaven-headed and hard-faced uncle Brem in his appointed role as the enforcer of the royal will, the gathered clan heads would swiftly fall silent. Turning as one man they would bow towards the throne into which Naradoc would already have settled, and he would gesture regally to them, displaying his acceptance of their obeisance.

But not today. While the hall was as thickly wreathed with smoke from the fires that warmed its air as ever, the wide open space before the king’s throne was all but empty. It had been cleared for this audience at Brem’s suggestion, the older man’s expression inscrutable as he had delivered his opinion on the matter of exactly how their unwanted guest should die.

‘It would be better not to shed this man’s blood publicly, my lord King. The Selgovae will not take his murder lightly, whether he be disgraced and banished or not.

Naradoc had nodded sagely at the wisdom of the proposal, and had thereby consented to have no presence in The Fang’s hall beyond that required to ensure their security, a handful of his guards whose loyalty was beyond question. Behind him he could hear the sounds of four men taking their seats in smaller versions of the throne arrayed in an arc: his uncle, brother, cousin and nephew, the remnants of a royal family grievously reduced by the tribe’s losses in battle with Rome two years before. Glancing round he saw Brem’s hideously disfigured huntsman who now went by the name of Scar, so horribly wounded in the battle that had taken Naradoc’s brother that for a time it had seemed unlikely that his wounds would ever heal. The Romans had left him for dead on the battlefield given the slim chance that he would ever make a saleable slave. The cicatrice that covered half his face, part bone-white and the remainder a gruesome ruddy shade of red, gave him such a fearsome aspect that the king found himself perpetually amazed that he had managed to gather about him a score and more of the tribe’s young women. Over the last year he had honed them into a sisterhood of hunters, their single-minded ferocity in capturing and torturing Romans from the wall forts reducing most warriors who fought alongside them to an uneasy combination of unrequited lust — for the Vixens were renowned for their chastity and, some men muttered, their fondness for each other — and unease at being around women who took pleasure in hacking off their captives’ sexual organs and stitching the dried remnants to their belts. When the scrapings and rustlings had died away to silence, the king waited a moment longer before tossing a question over his shoulder, consciously copying the style his brother Drust had been wont to employ during the years that had preceded his ill-fated decision to go to war alongside the Selgovae people.