Worms of the Earth | Page 7

Britain was completed, and
had been absorbed by the Picts. But the chiefs of Bran's folk had kept
their blood from foreign taint since the beginnings of time, and he
himself was a pure-bred Pict of the Old Race. But these fenmen,
overrun repeatedly by British, Gaelic and Roman conquerors, had
assimilated blood of each, and in the process almost forgotten their
original language and lineage.
For Bran came of a race that was very old, which had spread over
western Europe in one vast Dark Empire, before the coming of the
Aryans, when the ancestors of the Celts, the Hellenes and the Germans
were one primal people, before the days of tribal splitting-off and
westward drift.
Only in Caledonia, Bran brooded, had his people resisted the flood of
Aryan conquest. He had heard of a Pictish people called Basques, who
in the crags of the Pyrenees called themselves an unconquered race; but
he knew that they had paid tribute for centuries to the ancestors of the

Gaels, before these Celtic conquerors abandoned their mountain-realm
and set sail for Ireland. Only the Picts of Caledonia had remained free,
and they had been scattered into small feuding tribes--he was the first
acknowledged king in five hundred years--the beginning of a new
dynasty--no, a revival of an ancient dynasty under a new name. In the
very teeth of Rome he dreamed his dreams of empire.
He wandered through the fens, seeking a Door. Of his quest he said
nothing to the dark-eyed fenmen. They told him news that drifted from
mouth to mouth--a tale of war in the north, the skirl of war-pipes along
the winding Wall, of gathering-fires in the heather, of flame and smoke
and rapine and the glutting of Gaelic swords in the crimson sea of
slaughter. The eagles of the legions were moving northward and the
ancient road resounded to the measured tramp of the iron-clad feet.
And Bran, in the fens of the west, laughed, well pleased.
In Eboracum, Titus Sulla gave secret word to seek out the Pictish
emissary with the Gaelic name who had been under suspicion, and who
had vanished the night young Valerius was found dead in his cell with
his throat ripped out. Sulla felt that this sudden bursting flame of war
on the Wall was connected closely with his execution of a condemned
Pictish criminal, and he set his spy system to work, though he felt sure
that Partha Mac Othna was by this time far beyond his reach. He
prepared to march from Eboracum, but he did not accompany the
considerable force of legionaries which he sent north. Sulla was a brave
man, but each man has his own dread, and Sulla's was Cormac na
Connacht, the black-haired prince of the Gaels, who had sworn to cut
out the governor's heart and eat it raw. So Sulla rode with his ever-
present bodyguard, westward, where lay the Tower of Trajan with its
warlike commander, Caius Camillus, who enjoyed nothing more than
taking his superior's place when the red waves of war washed at the
foot of the Wall. Devious politics, but the legate of Rome seldom
visited this far isle, and what of his wealth and intrigues, Titus Sulla
was the highest power in Britain.
And Bran, knowing all this, patiently waited his coming, in the deserted
hut in which he had taken up his abode.

One gray evening he strode on foot across the moors, a stark figure,
blackly etched against the dim crimson fire of the sunset. He felt the
incredible antiquity of the slumbering land, as he walked like the last
man on the day after the end of the world. Yet at last he saw a token of
human life--a drab hut of wattle and mud, set in the reedy breast of the
fen.
A woman greeted him from the open door and Bran's somber eyes
narrowed with a dark suspicion. The woman was not old, yet the evil
wisdom of ages was in her eyes; her garments were ragged and scanty,
her black locks tangled and unkempt, lending her an aspect of wildness
well in keeping with her grim surroundings. Her red lips laughed but
there was no mirth in her laughter, only a hint of mockery, and under
the lips her teeth showed sharp and pointed like fangs.
"Enter, master," said she, "if you do not fear to share the roof of the
witch-woman of Dagon-moor!"
Bran entered silently and sat him down on a broken bench while the
woman busied herself with the scanty meal cooking over an open fire
on the squalid hearth. He studied her lithe, almost serpentine motions,
the ears which were almost pointed, the yellow eyes which slanted
curiously.
"What do you seek in the fens, my lord?" she asked, turning