A Fragile Peace Read Online Free

instructed, jabbing at the sketch, “and make me a seventh that is twice the size. Also, make stands for each that will allow me to adjust them.” To himself, the magician thought: “If I position them accurately, I can gather Sol’s rays with the six smaller ones and reflect them onto the larger to use it as a burning glass.” Aloud, he told the smith: ”I will send a slave with more silver in a month’s time. Have all of them ready. I’ll keep two of these sheets here.”
    That night, the moon rose and turned an ominous rust-red, staying so for more than an hour. The sorcerer could conceive no reason for the augury, if augury it was, and he half-dismissed it, although he recalled that once, after such a blood moon, there had been a summer drought and the cops had failed. He pondered the phenomenon, wondering if his manufactured thunder had somehow caused it, then merely filed it away in his mind. The gods would send more warnings if needed. They would indicate what were their wishes. He turned his thoughts back to making a burning mirror.
    He was eager to test his idea, and only two weeks later, ahead of the time he had suggested, he and two slaves rode into Menai to visit the smith and see how far he had come with the bronze mirrors. As the sorcerer arrived in the settlement, he looked across the strait at the isle of Mona and his face darkened. He could not forget what he knew, for the events of two and half centuries before still resonated with followers of the old religion.
    The brutal Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus had brought his armoured cohorts to slaughter the Druids and had a well-conceived plan to overcome the obstacle of the straits. He had built flat-bottomed barges to carry the foot soldiers across the treacherous channel while the mounted troops, mostly archers, used inflated skins as flotation aids, and swam with their horses.
    “We were waiting for them,” muttered Myrddin, seeing in his mind’s eye the array of British warriors who had gathered along the shore all those years ago. In the necromancer’s vision, he also saw the black-cloaked, tangle-haired women who ran screaming imprecations and waving burning torches towards the incoming Romans. The legionaries paused uncertain on the gravel beach, then under the hard shouts of their general and his officers not to be frightened of a group of dirty, mad women, lined up in sawtooth formation and tramped forward behind their big bronze shields.
    As always, the armoured and disciplined legions crushed their opponents. The Britons barely withstood even the initial shower of heavy javelins and war darts before the shield wall was battering them backwards and the stabbing points of the gladius swords were killing the half-naked warriors.
    “They even burned the sacred groves,” Myrddin told himself as he remembered the ancient chants of the bards. “They slaughtered our Druids, enslaved our warriors and our women and destroyed the haven of our gods. We shall never forgive them that.” His eyes, which could hold the cruelty of the gaze of a hawk, hardened.
    “We shall never forgive, nor forget,” he repeated. He turned his gaze away from the dark, low horizon and kicked his mule’s ribs, urging the beast towards the smithy. The sun came from behind clouds, and something caught the sorcerer’s eye. The tidepools below him were blood-red. A shiver ran down the magician’s spine and he turned his beast’s head towards the shore to investigate. More blood, first shining on the land, and now on the sea, he thought.
    Soon, he saw that the phenomenon was in the water itself, carried on the incoming tide, an ominous red tide that flowed down the straits where the Druids had been slaughtered. It came from dense clouds of something floating just below the surface of the water, some sea-bloom that he had never seen before. He walked down the shingle to taste the water. Salt, not blood. Along the beach at the high tide mark were dead birds and