Tear Of The Gods. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ as he could, driving his horse relentlessly forward, doing all he could to widen the gap, to give his people a fighting chance at survival. If they could break through the other side of the Roman battle line, some of them might survive to fight another day.

      A tall Roman rose up on his right side, his battle-ax already in motion, but Myrrdin took the blow on the buckler strapped to his left arm. The shield shattered, smashed to pieces by the force of the blow, but it served its purpose, giving Myrrdin time to thrust his sword deep into the other man’s chest, killing him where he stood. The Iceni chieftain turned in the saddle, searching for his next foe.

      The spear came out of nowhere, whistling through the air with all the grace of a weapon of war doing just what it had been designed to do. It struck him high in the right side. As luck would have it, he’d been in the midst of turning and the projectile drove into the narrow gap his mail coat failed to cover at his armpit, burying itself deep in his chest.

      It was like being buried in an avalanche of ice, his sword falling away from fingers gone suddenly numb, his grip on the saddle loosening as he lost the feeling in his legs, and he tumbled from his mount to lie in the mud of the battlefield as the fight raged on around him.

      As his vision began to narrow and the darkness closed in, Myrrdin could have sworn he felt the torc about his neck pulse in time with his heartbeat.

      2

      Annja Creed studied the decapitated heads on the table in front of her.

      Two of them had their eyes closed, as if they’d died peacefully in their sleep, but Annja knew better than to trust in simple appearances. There had been nothing peaceful about their passing; the fact that they were sitting on the table minus the rest of their bodies was proof of that, she thought wryly. The eyes of the third were open and surprisingly free of detritus from the bog. From her position in front of the table, the dead man’s eyes seemed to stare directly back into her own, as if he were as intently curious about her as she was about him. It would have given most people the creeps, but after all she’d been through over the past few years since inheriting Joan of Arc’s mystical sword, she barely even noticed.

      The heads had been unearthed in an isolated peat bog several hours north of London in the West Midlands. She’d been invited to the site just over a week earlier by an old friend from the British Museum, Oxford University professor Craig Stevens.

      From what he’d explained over the phone, a pair of farmers had reported seeing a head staring up at them out of the bog while they were out hunting. Further investigation revealed that the two men hadn’t been hunting at all, but rather running an industrious little business on the side selling cut peat for fuel. They hadn’t wanted the police to know that the section of the bog they were harvesting didn’t belong to either of them.

      “Of course, when it comes to decapitated heads, the police tend to be a bit pushy,” Craig said with a laugh, something Annja didn’t have any trouble believing.

      The detective in charge had seen enough bog mummies to know the difference between a recent murder and one that had happened a few centuries before. He dumped the head in Craig’s lap, given his specialty in Iron Age Celtic cultures, in an effort to avoid as much paperwork as possible. Craig was more than happy to take care of the problem.

      It had only taken a few days at the site before a second head turned up and that had been enough to get Oxford University to fund a small dig to see what else might be present. Annja had worked with Craig on a previous dig in Wales and he’d called to let her know that he was looking for a few experienced hands to help him out. Did she think she could make it?

      It had been a while since she’d had the chance to work an actual dig. The cable television show she cohosted, Chasing History’s Monsters, had kept her incredibly busy for the past few months, rushing around the world to highlight one legend after another. As had her unofficial role as protector of the innocent and the bearer of the mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc. A week or two with her hands in the mud doing honest-to-goodness science was just what she needed.

      But when she’d called her producer, Doug Morrell, in New York to get the time off, he’d gone ballistic.

      “Are you insane?” he cried when she finished laying out her request. “We’re talking decapitations, human sacrifices and bog mummies here! How can you think of leaving us out of it?”

      Quite easily, she’d thought at the time, but she knew if she stiffed Doug now he’d only get even with her later. He’d saddle her with hours of editing work or, even worse, handle it himself. And if he did that, who knew what would show up in the middle of one of her episodes? She still hadn’t forgotten the bloody mechanical shark incident….

      In the end, they’d cut a deal. The show would pay for her airfare and her expenses while on-site and in return she’d deliver enough material to put together a special double feature on bog mummies, druids and ancient Celtic culture. It was as good as she was going to get and she quickly got Doug off the phone before he decided the episode wouldn’t be complete without a full-scale reenactment of a druidic ritual, preferably with plenty of special effects and a well-endowed blonde as the sacrificial centerpiece. If it drove ratings, Doug was all for it, science be damned.

      She’d landed at Heathrow the day before, headed to a hotel and slept off the jet lag. This morning she rose early and set out for the dig site in a rented Land Rover. The dig was pretty remote; it took her until early afternoon to reach the landing stage where the rest of the vehicles were parked and then another hour of hiking up and down a series of hills thick with birch groves before finding the camp on the far side, down near the edge of the bog.

      Annja bumped into one of Craig’s graduate students, a curly-headed guy named Zeke, just after arriving at the site and Zeke had been kind enough to offer to let “Dr. Stevens” know she was here. While waiting, she spotted the heads through the open flap of a large canvas tent, like those used by army encampments the world over. She wandered in to take a look.

      Up close she could see that each head was held upright in a frame of clear polymer, designed no doubt to protect the artifact while at the same time allowing the scientists to study all three dimensions at once. It was a clever piece of equipment, one she hadn’t seen before, and she was moving in for a closer look when a cheerful voice boomed out from behind her.

      “At last, she arrives!”

      Annja jumped in surprise; she’d been so intent on her examination of the heads that she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. Working with bog mummies was an entirely new and exciting experience for her.

      Craig looked much as he did the last time she’d seen him—a bear of a man with a thick beard and a mop of unruly hair the color of pine sap. He towered over her at six and a half feet and she could have easily hidden behind his nearly three-hundred-pound body if she’d ever had the need to, but his imposing size was a complete contrast to his open and general ebullient nature.

      “Now we can do some real work!” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, before crossing the space between them in that smooth gliding gait that always looked so out of character on such a large man. He wrapped her in one of his trademark hugs.

      When he finally released her, and she double-checked her ribs to be certain they were all still intact, she couldn’t help but smile at him in return. One thing about working with Craig: his good humor was infectious.

      “You’ve got an interesting interior decorator,” she said, nodding at the heads on the table behind her.

      Her fellow archaeologist СКАЧАТЬ