No Such Place - Part 1
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Happy Halloween, everyone. (I come bearing the Dark Ages a trick a treat for you all!
Title: No Such Place - Part 1
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, Roma Antiqua, Germania, Wales, Mother Gaul, France; King Arthur and associated personages.
Words: 7500 in part 1.
Rating: R. A solid, hard, don’t take your children to see it in the theater R.
This (and future installments) contains the following: 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, mood-whiplash, gerontophilia, heads on pikes, and meta. All of which is perfectly understandable, as it takes place in:
Timeline: the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.
Summary: Not the King Arthur story you think it is.
Note: England is referred to as Albion or Britannia through this story, because he isn’t England yet…though that’s about to change. Wales is referred to as Cymry, for the same reason.
No Such Place
axis powers hetalia
Mithrigil Galtirglin
449 A.D.
“Britannia,” Rome says from the doorway.
Albion hasn’t heard that voice in years-almost half a century. The fae sputter angrily and scurry away, leaving Albion’s back unprotected. Rome sounds-well, ill, older and worn, as if Rome is recovering from a wound in his throat. Was it inflicted sometime after Boadicea drove him off? Or is-
Albion doesn’t turn around, and goes back to mending his shoe.
“C’mon, Britannia, I know I’m not a ghost yet.” There are steps on the stone floor. He’s coming nearer. “I won’t stay long, I can’t, I’m just here to fend off your big brothers and then I don’t know what’s-”
“Talk,” Albion says, still without turning, and he doesn’t put the needle in his hand down either.
Even if he can’t see it, he knows what Rome’s smiles feel like. “You’re still feisty,” Rome says, and “I still like it,” and his shadow chills Albion’s back. “I guess it’s too much to ask you to look at me when I’m talking to you?”
“You don’t tend to ask for things,” Albion reminds him.
Rome laughs. “I don’t at that.” It’s the same laugh as ever, and it makes Albion shiver. “And it’s not as if I can change, right? Not like you, you’re still a boy…”
That-almost gives Albion enough pause to turn around. Almost. “Just say what you want to say.”
“Well, maybe you can’t change after all.” He steps closer-did his foot drag? No, no, Albion won’t look. “It’s more important than a lot of the things I’ve told you, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Another laugh, overhead; Albion curls over his mending, brandishes the needle. Rome stops, though, and only speaks. “You were serious, weren’t you? About wanting to be a bigger empire than I.”
There’s no need to answer that; Rome knows.
“Thought so. So when you do-when you try, I mean, you’re going to try, whether you do it or not-don’t do it the way I did. ‘Cause, well, I think, I did it wrong.”
Something drips onto Albion’s shoulder.
He won’t scream. He won’t scream, and he won’t flinch, but that doesn’t mean he’ll look. He won’t look. “I could have told you that.”
“You could have. You might have.” Rome’s hand comes down on Albion’s upper arm. It’s-it’s cold, for Rome, not what Albion remembers, not-
-not enough for Albion to hold back from stabbing it with the needle.
Rome doesn’t cry out in pain. Rome doesn’t make a sound at all, or at least not one that comes out of his throat. His skin, though-his skin squelches.
Albion is hauled up by the shoulders, and slams his eyes shut, won’t look, won’t look. “Go away,” he yells, and he wishes that magic worked on Rome so he could Name him.
“I will,” Rome says. “I am. That’s the point.”
Albion shivers in the dark behind his eyes. Rome has him, by the neck and the wrist and the voice-Rome draws Albion’s hand nearer, and puts it on his body-
“I told you. I think I did it wrong.”
The wound is warm and swollen, sticking and foul. Something bubbles and pops where Albion is forced to touch, and he smells filth and fire. Rome guides Albion’s fingers through all of it, a deep puncture with ridged walls and scabs that peel away under Albion’s nails, and Albion wants to yell and scream and run and drown himself in the nearest river and can’t.
“There you go,” Rome murmurs, laughing to himself, laden pained laughter that makes Albion’s throat stop up. “That’s my warning to you, boy. That’s the end I’m coming to. I thought you could stand to know.”
Albion still can’t speak, but he thinks that last whimper sounded somewhere between no and how?
Rome sighs. Albion feels it. “Remember I told you, you have to know your enemies?”
Albion nods, or hangs his head to stop it from spinning.
“I really should practise what I preach, huh.” Rome-Rome ruffles Albion’s hair, his thick chapped fingers pushing through the mess of it, thumbing at Albion’s eyebrows. “I forgot mine. I thought he loved me for a second.”
As Rome lets his hands off Albion’s wrist and face, Albion stands still, eyes ground shut, fists clenching around the filth from Rome’s wound. Rome takes him by the hand again, forcibly uncurls Albion’s fist-hisses in pain, and then drops the needle into Albion’s palm.
“You might not want to keep using this,” he says.
Albion cries. But if he doesn’t open his eyes, the tears won’t come out, right?
Rome can hear it, though; Albion knows that his throat is throbbing, that his nose is filling up, that even if the tears aren’t escaping the sounds that come with them are. Rome cups Albion’s cheeks, thumbs at his lips and nostrils and the aching hollows under his eyes, and says, “That’s something I haven’t seen before. You hid that from me, didn’t you, Britannia?” When Albion doesn’t answer him, Rome embraces him, crushes him to his chest. “It worked.”
The wound smears over Albion’s cheek. He kicks Rome and turns and runs, out of the room and out of the house, all the way to the river. When it’s over his head, he opens his eyes, stares into the water until it stings. He comes up for air and pretends the tears never came at all, and scrubs his hands with gravel until they bleed.
-
Sometime not quite 500 A.D….
Albion now makes his home on the cliffs where Rome first found him. He has tired of the river that runs east, and its city, and its bridges. The fae keep to him now, and comfort him, and tell him that he is his own again, and no matter how often Albion asks them, am I meant to feel so empty?, they do naught but laugh, and if it is meant to be less cruel than Rome’s laughter Albion does not think so.
His dearest unicorn (whose name is Gregarious but Albion calls him Grigory so as not to be cruel) strolls with him along the precipice in companionable silence. They watch the water push against the rocks, and kick smaller stones down to join it, Grigory with his nose and hooves, Albion with his toes. He never did mend that shoe, and wears none now, letting the earth harden his feet. The pebbles fall so far that Albion can’t hear them, but he knows that Grigory can because the unicorn makes a little excited huff sound just after Albion sees them splash.
The years should have been happier with Rome gone, and not just gone but gone, surely; if a Nation has been wounded so deeply, even an Empire, he will die, just as a man so afflicted will die. Albion pats Grigory on the flank, and then strokes all the way up to his cheek, making the unicorn turn and meet his eyes. He asks, not what he so often does, but “Have I gotten smaller?”
Grigory tilts his head, confused.
Albion closes his eyes, shakes his head to dismiss his own question. “Forgive me,” he says, and resumes his petting. “It’s just that for my kind, the more people who want us, the bigger we grow. So now that Rome’s gone, I thought I might be smaller again and not notice.”
In response, Grigory lifts his neck, pulls up to his full height over Albion, even going up on his hind legs a moment. Albion feels he ought laugh, it does look comical, but though the gesture is funny its meaning is not. But Albion smiles, at least, the jibe is not mean-spirited-
Grigory screams, and staggers sideways, spraying crystalline red blood on Albion’s cheek.
An arrow-there’s an arrow through him, from the side that faced the cliffs-deep in him, deep enough that both sides are bulging and Grigory is down. Albion pulls the unicorn’s head into his lap and touches him, urgently now, making him look up, “Look at me, Grigory, look now-see, I’m here, if you can see me you can get up, come on, Grigory, get up-”
-it’s not the first arrow to fly, there’s another and another and another-one hits Grigory in the belly, it’s foul, things leak and smear over his silver hide and Albion bows over him to save himself from the hail.
It terrifies him, makes him shake; someone who can see the fae. Someone who can shoot them.
Grigory whines, tongue frothing and teeth bared. His mouth is framed in pink and gold, his horn buried in the tall grass.
Albion is taller than the grass.
He looks up, over the edge of the cliff, to the other side of the channel. His breath calls up a spell that will let him see that far; he is a Nation, and cannot be barred from that. A row of ships is advancing, cruder than Rome’s but no less majestic, of darker wood with lighter sails. At the prow of the foremost ship stands a man with long golden hair, in plaits that beat on his armour in the wind, and he carries a bow that is taller than he. With the aid of the spell, Albion can even see the Nation’s eyes; they are as blue as Grigory’s horn.
When Grigory pleads with him again, Albion takes out his dagger and stabs him through the eye, to end it fast. As the arrows fall around him, he saws the unicorn’s horn from its head, and leaves the rest to haunt the Saxons.
-
Albion runs. Dagger out, toes bleeding, the scent of Grigory still threaded in his cloak and the fae snapping overhead and at his heels, he runs, away from the cliffs and the coast and the tall grass. Wings flap behind him, the larger fae and the birds that can hear them, crows and hawks and owls, and soon their screeches drown out Albion’s feet crushing the fallen leaves.
Again, he thinks, and worse, and more, and Rome, you bastard, they’re here for you, not me. There comes a rhythm to it, attuned to his breath as it heaves and lags. Not for me. Not for me.
The forest gives way to a field, and the light of the fae chasing him bleaches every blade of grass. Albion closes his eyes, bolts across it, west, away from the light and the sun. He doesn’t care if it’s Cymry’s place, Cymry should know too-
“Oof-hey-ow!”
Albion crashes into something-well, more to the point, some one. He opens his eyes-it’s okay to cry when you’re hurt, and he skinned his knees on the way down, and he should tell the person sorry and move on and-
“-Ow…” the person under Albion-a boy, a human boy? with hair that’s about the colour of river carp and a very skinny body-groans, trying to sit up with Albion still tangled in his lap. “Watch where you’re going!”
Albion wrinkles his nose at him. He doesn’t say sorry, but he does untangle himself and sit back on his knees. His feet-his feet don’t feel like running anymore.
The boy scrunches up his nose too, but it’s more like a twitch. “Is there a battle? Whose city are you coming from?”
Right, Albion thinks, Grigory’s blood. Oh, and mine. “I’m very tired,” he says, which isn’t really an answer, but it’s true either way, and once he falls asleep in the strange boy’s lap there’s nothing else to be done for it.
Grigory is on his feet. He is still dead, of course, but that doesn’t matter where Albion is now. Without his horn-with a bulb of flies and maggots where it should be-his head is bowed low to the ground, and his bloodshot eyes are glowing. But he is still Grigory and Albion still wants to hold him, so he does.
Albion can see all of himself now-he’s crossed into a place not his own, a silver stone castle on a hill. The Saxons climb over the cliffs, and that golden-haired man is leading them, taking slow steps that cover miles. They retrace the rivers inland, up toward Caledonii and his Picts, west to Cymry’s place, and all between. Albion swings himself up onto the dead unicorn’s back and ignores the blood that wells up against his thighs, and Grigory carries him, as swiftly as only the dead can be, to walk beside the golden-haired man.
The golden-haired man looks at him, his eyes steady and hateful and sad. He asks Albion if he is Rome’s.
Albion does not answer him.
Something very bony is caught between Albion’s legs, and he realises that he didn’t sleep alone.
He’s very awake now; he turns his head and tries to reach down for his dagger or Grigory’s severed horn, but someone’s removed his belt, presumably the someone who’s currently wrapped around Albion like an eager squirrel on a tree. When Albion can turn enough and focus he can see that it’s the human boy from last night. His nose is buried in the crook of Albion’s shoulder, and their knees are all tangled together under two starchy blankets and on top of a third, which is itself mostly atop a heap of straw.
Oh, thinks Albion, that’s all right, then.
He tries not to stir so much, and looks the human boy over. He appears a little younger than Albion is now; under ten years old, surely, with his round ruddy face and no hair anywhere but his head, and there’s a lot of that. It probably curls when it is clean, which right now it isn’t. Naked as they are, the human boy is nearly as skinny as Albion, and it’s worse for being the scrawny sort of skinny, like Albion had been before Rome started training him. Albion pokes the boy’s upper arm, and there’s not much muscle there at all. He probably can’t shoot or swordfight very well yet.
That poke does wake him up, though.
Albion tries to turn his face away and bury it in the straw. It doesn’t work, and he ends up getting a mouthful of the boy’s hair. And some of it gets between his teeth too. Albion grimaces. The boy smiles.
“Are you better?”
“Did something happen?” Albion scrunches his nose.
The boy does too, and laughs. “Well, you fell over. And you couldn’t walk anymore. So I brought you here.”
“Where is here?”
“My uncle’s fortress. I serve his son. They’re Briton, though.”
“You’re not?” Albion doesn’t mean to sound disappointed, just-
“Nu-uh. Well, they say I’m not. My uncle and my cousin, I mean. And they’re Christians too. But if King Emrys says I’m his nephew that means his brother is my father and if he’s Briton his brother must be Briton too so I don’t know how that works.”
Emrys, Albion thinks, and translates, Ambrosius, and says, “I made it to Dinas Emrys?”
“Well, you made it almost here. I carried you the rest of the way. Was there a battle? Uncle told me to warm you and make sure you woke up in case you had a message. Do you have a message?” The boy clings to him, props himself up on his elbow so he can look down at Albion and then cover his own mouth, remembering, “Oh-you never said whether you were better! Should you be sleeping?”
“No, I-I wasn’t wounded, just tired. I ran from the Channel. From Dubris.”
The boy’s eyes go wide-like a fish, again. “You ran all the way from Dubris?”
“There are Saxons there.” Saxony himself is there. “They shot my friend.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy says, and bites his lip. “Was that whose blood was on you?”
“Yes-” and Albion realises he’s unarmed, “-and his horn, too, his horn was with my weapons and-”
“Don’t worry, they’re right over there.” When the boy lifts his hand to point, he loses his balance and falls on top of Albion, and Albion goes oof, and the boy says “Sorry!” again and scrambles, and soon they’re tangling and laughing and Albion can’t remember caring about a human this much, not even Boadicea.
He won’t ask the boy’s name, that’s not polite, but soon they’re holding each other in the straw and the blankets and laughing and Albion whispers, “What do people call you?”
“Arth,” he says, “because I yelled like a bear when I was little and didn’t speak at all else. They call me Wart now, even though I haven’t got any. What do people call you?”
His true Name catches in his throat. “Britannia,” he says, it’s true enough.
“-But that’s a girl’s name. Shouldn’t it be Britannicus? Or Pretani, if it’s where you’re from, not who you are?”
“No,” Albion says, “I-am Britannia.”
The boy-Wart, Albion decides, Wart-looks at him only a little harder than before, and smiles, wide-and gap-toothed. “Oh.” And then, innocent and eager, “That must make it a lot easier to run all the way from the Channel!”
-
Wart’s uncle is Ambrosius Aurelianus, and this fortress is Dinas Emrys, and if Cymry is anywhere he should be here. Once Wart has gotten Albion some clothes and run to tell his uncle that the messenger is awake and the Saxons have invaded, Albion is running over the dragon-flues with his finger pricked, tracing between the wood and mortared stone and calling his brother.
By Name, if I have to, he threatens in the spell. So you’d better come now, Cymry, I know you can hear me-
“If it isn’t the runt,” Cymry says, bored as ever, and when Albion turns around to glare at him he’s sitting on the nearest tree, his long legs dangling well over Albion’s head. “So Rome’s done with you?”
“Rome’s dead,” Albion snaps, “or very nearly, and this has nothing to do with it.”
“Of course it doesn’t.” Cymry’s got a small sling-stone in his hand, and is rolling it between his spindly fingers, walking it over the knuckles and looking at that instead of Albion. “You think that Germania’s invading because he wants you?”
-well there goes the message. “You knew?”
“Hard not to, runt. I’ll tell you, though; he’s not. He wants Rome, and he thinks that Rome left something in you for him to finish off.” Cymry throws down the stone. “Yes, it is all your fault.”
Albion bites his own thumb and sucks on the blood, glaring up at him. “Well it’s probably good for you to fend them off too.”
“As far as my borders,” Cymry says. “It’s not my place to clean up after you.”
Albion sneers at him. ”You don’t understand. Saxony can see the fae-”
“That’s their problem, then, isn’t it.”
“It’s our problem too!” He takes Grigory’s horn out of his belt and holds it up, makes sure Cymry can see it even if he pretends he doesn’t. “They’re like what we are, aren’t they?”
Cymry jumps down from the branch and snatches Grigory’s horn right out of Albion’s hand. He’s so tall-is he taller than Caledonii now? thinner, yes, but maybe taller-that even when Albion jumps he can’t reach it. But Cymry isn’t laughing at him, just looking the horn over, holding it close to his eyes and nose.
“No, they’re not,” he says, and starts walking away-and taking the horn with him. “And it’s disrespectful of you to think so. Not to mention act so.”
“It’s not-”
“It is,” Cymry says, “to us.”
Albion catches up with Cymry and kicks him behind the knee. He gets thrown down the hill for his trouble-but just before he hits his head against a tree he thinks that at least it worked.
“Welcome,” the dragon says.
Albion sits up and nods to him. There’s no light here at all, except for what’s haloing the dragon’s one visible eye. He doesn’t know which dragon it is-there are supposed to be two of them-but the pervasive smell of blood and the fact that the dragon is addressing Albion at all makes him think that it’s Cymry’s, the red one, beneath this hill. Unless the white dragon plays with little Nations before he eats them. “Hallo,” he tells the dragon in kind, deciding it doesn’t matter. “Are you better?”
“Was I ill?” the dragon returns without humour.
“Hundreds of years ago. But are you better?”
The dragon touches his cold tongue to Albion’s nose. Albion flinches but not away, and soon it is darker around him as the dragon’s wings close in. In the scant light, he sees that he was wrong, and the scales are leathery white.
This time, Wart wakes him up.
It’s very quick; one moment Albion is convinced that he’s going to be eaten up, and then next he’s being shaken and touched and subject to “Britannia, Britannia?” over and over in a voice that for just one petrefying moment sounds like Rome all over again.
Which would explain why the first word out of Albion’s mouth is a very loud “No!”
But then Wart isn’t touching him anymore and there’s straw flying everywhere and-and Wart is sniveling.
Albion blinks and covers his mouth. “I mean-” That doesn’t work so he uncovers it and tries again, “Wart, I’m sorry, it was-”
“A witch-dream?” Wart wipes his nose, and maybe comes a little closer. “I’m sorry. I have them too. Did I become part of it?”
“-yes,” Albion thinks, stuttering a little on it. “But not as you. You have bad dreams?” he asks, eager to get off the subject of his own.
“Mhm.” He scoots forward on his knees; it is cold outside the blankets, and it looks as if he wants to duck back under them, but thinks Albion won’t let him. “But I don’t remember them when I do. I try to forget,” he says sheepishly. “Cai says that’s best.”
“Who’s Cai?”
“My cousin. He’s going to be a warlord like uncle Emrys! I told you, I serve him. Can I come under the blankets again?”
Albion smiles and lifts them a little.
Wart scrambles under, and it kicks some of the straw away but now that they’re both under it’s going to be warmer anyway. Albion drapes one of his arms out and Wart settles against him, coltish knee to even more coltish knee. They pull the blankets over their heads, and Albion thinks that total dark might be worse but he’s not about to admit it.
“Do you forget your dreams?”
“I don’t forget anything,” Albion says. “Well. I try not to. Sometimes I remember wrong. But I do remember.”
“Even dreams?”
“Even dreams. Bad ones especially.” The good ones are rarer and harder to forget.
“What was this one about?”
“The dragons under the fort. I spoke to the wrong one. He’s stronger than Y Ddraig Goch, and he ate me. I think Vortigern wanted him to eat me.”
He can feel Wart’s nose wrinkle against his neck. “Who’s Vortigern?”
Albion thinks a little, and tries, “Gwerthym.”
For a moment, Wart stops breathing. Albion pokes him. “S-sorry. I think that’s something I forgot.”
“He thought he was one of my kings,” Albion explains. “I think he must be dead now. Or Saxon, which is worse.”
“Uncle Emrys says they’re going to invade.”
“They already have. That’s why I’m here.”
Wart nods. He doesn’t quite hold Albion closer, but it is cold out there, and they lean nearer together. “Then we’re going to meet them in battle, aren’t we?”
“Sooner or later,” Albion says.
“Good,” Wart says, “that’ll make Cai happier. He so wants to fight. And he says that Saxons are good for killing, because you don’t go to hell if you do.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“My mother. Uncle Emrys says so. Or he says that father said so anyway. But I don’t think I meant it. I would have liked to know her.”
Albion closes his eyes. It’s even darker behind them, and redder somehow. “My mother is dead too.”
“Nations have mothers?”
“Yes,” Albion says, very softly, because it is a secret. “Sometimes, at least. And I have brothers, too, and a sister. They miss Mother too, I think.”
Wart whispers as if it’s not just a secret, but a precious thing; it’s as if his words are cradled in air. “Did you know her long?”
“Not very. My brothers think I killed her too. That’s why they hate me.”
-He’s never told anyone that before.
-
“I won’t be joining you,” Cymry says, some months later when Emrys has gotten the army together.
“I don’t need you,” Albion responds in kind. “Give me back Grigory’s horn.”
Cymry says, without laughing, “No.”
-
“No, like this,” Albion says, and makes a diagonal overhand cut, then reverses it. “See how much more chance you have of hitting the enemy that way?”
“Yes,” Wart says, and bites his lip before mimicking the effect, not as poorly as he used to. He’s about Albion’s size now; it’s been more than three years, and they’ve gained a swathe of ground all the way across Mercia, and it shows on them both but especially Wart, who actually is growing. He’s still thin as a reed, though, for all the work Cai makes him do, and the best Albion can do is teach him to use it.
His stomach churns whenever he says something that Rome once taught him. But whenever it works, there’s this buzz at the base of his skull, like the one he gets when he dances with the fae or eats the honey that goes into mead, and then Wart laughs and smiles and it’s all right, then.
They make another two dozen of that same cut. These are real swords, spatha they dug up from an old stone fortress at Venonis. So they’re longer and heavier than perhaps either of them should be swinging about, much less making cuts in the air with, but it should put some muscle in Wart’s arm this way.
When it’s time, Albion says, “Next one,” and demonstrates a backhand cut straight across the middle. “This won’t work again until you’re taller, but it’s good now. Imagine someone Cai’s size in front of you.” Wart closes his eyes and does. “Now make the cut. Where did you hit him?”
“Over his knees,” Wart says. “Oh! I get it! And it won’t work until I’m big because until then the chest armour gets in the way!”
Wart hasn’t seen battle yet; the army has, but Emrys keeps the young boys out of it, taking care of the horses and the supplies and the treasure while the bigger men fight. Albion’s stayed by Wart most of the time-it wouldn’t be good for Saxony to find him. But he knows Wart has seen what kind of armour a Saxon wears because it’s their job-it’s the job of all the youngest ones-to go out among the dead and take what’s theirs.
They cheerfully practise that cut, again and again. Wart never complains about his arm being tired, but Albion’s is growing so, and he decides, “Only one more today. And not a cut, a stab.”
Wart nods. “We’re not going to actually do that though, right?”
“-oh. Maybe we should wait until after a battle so you can stab someone who’s already dead so it won’t matter.”
“Right. And there’s to be a battle a little south of here, Uncle thinks. Sometime before the moon changes again.” Wart stretches, with the sword over his head-it drags his arm down, and he drops it in the grass. Albion laughs, and so does Wart, and when they’re mostly done with that they gather their things and return to the camp.
Albion has not revealed himself to Ambrosius Aurelianus. It is not for any dislike of the man-beyond, well, that for a claimant Briton he is as Roman as they come, from his golden skin to his ties to an Emperor who is now quite dead. But though Albion has spoken of the arrival of Germania at Dubris, and the strength of their forces, Albion does no more than serve him as a page and scout. It has been a short enough time, and no man bats an eye at how Albion has not grown, and Wart is mum on the matter as well.
But dreams come, bidden or un-; perhaps of Ambrosius, or Emrys, or whatever posterity shall call him. In the dreams, when they are good, this campaign is successful, and lasts only another year or less-all lands are his from Viroconium to Camulodunum, from the cliffs of Dubris in the south to Hadrian’s Wall in the north-no, beyond that, beyond that, if Emrys is that skilled he will take all of Caledonii’s lands for Albion too, and wrest Cymry’s from him, and all of the island will be Albion’s-and Wart will see it too, and not as fields of corpses and their spoils.
So in these dreams, the good ones, he addresses Emrys Wledig, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and grows tall enough to see into his eyes and thank him.
And in the bad dreams, he remembers that Ambrosius is Roman.
Wart will wake Albion up after the worst of them. It’s a very gentle thing, now, just a hand over Albion’s eyes or a whispered, shh, any louder and I won’t be the only one to hear you. Sometimes they really are the wrong things to say and do-and Wart gets skittish and apologises, but by then Albion’s awake and it’s not anyone’s problem but his.
Albion tells all his dreams; Wart doesn’t have to ask anymore. So he knows about Rome, and about Albion’s older brothers and sister and how cruel they are to him, and about the fae. Wart loves the fae and wishes he could see them. Albion tells him that he probably can and just doesn’t know it.
“Does it hurt, to be a Nation?”
“…As much as it hurts to be a human, I suppose,” Albion says, “but I’ve not tried it, so I don’t know.”
These past three years-almost four!-Albion’s learned how to tell when Wart is smiling, even in the dark. “Can you? Try to be human, I mean?”
“I don’t think so. Can you try to be a Nation?”
Wart laughs. “Well, I do think so. I mean, I don’t think I can make myself not get any older like you but if you tell me what it’s like to be you aside-from-that I can try.”
Albion holds him close, and thinks it over. “All right.”
“And if I can be you then you can be me! So tell me what it’s like.”
…Albion laughs too. “Well…well, it means that what happens to the land happens to me. And the people in it too. I mean, if there’s a famine I’m hungry even if I have food of my own, or if there’s a storm it makes my bones ache even if where I actually am is dry.”
Wart nods.
“It’s also a kind of being everywhere, not just where I am. Which is a bit like what I already said, I guess, but not quite. It means I’m thinking about my people in Durnovaria even when I’m up here in Verulamium, and the people guarding the wall up north even if the Saxons can’t get there. If it’s really important I can actually get to them too, but I’m always thinking about it, and I can see it if I try. Some of the dreams are really that.”
“So that’s how you know what the Saxons are doing even if they’re too far off to scout.”
“Yes. Because they’re doing things to my people, and my people are me.”
Wart holds him a bit closer, a bit tighter. “That’s hard to think about.”
“Good things too,” Albion says. “I feel the victories out there even when we’re losing here. Your uncle isn’t the only one fighting, you know. It-it feels very good, when my biggest brother can’t pass the wall. Even if it’s a wall Rome built to keep him out, it’s still my wall. So even when it’s hard here, with you, there’s that.”
“It’s…it’s hard to be here with me?”
Albion gulps. “No, no, not at all. But war is.” He lowers his voice, he hadn’t told it to get louder but it did, and- “War hurts, even when I don’t do any of the fighting.”
“Because the soldiers are your people, and your people are you.”
“Right.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“All manner of places. But-but all wars are different. I mean, a famine hurts your belly and a storm hurts your bones, but war…this war hurts all over, because Saxony just wants me for his, or gone. Probably gone.”
“Saxony is a man too?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he like?”
Albion shudders, like a bowstring, like that bowstring. “Saxony-Rome called him Germania, so I think he’s all of the tribes, not just one, but… He’s a very large man, almost a giant. He has long, straight hair, and he wears it in braids. He wears armor like the things we’ve stolen from the field, but cleaner, like he has someone to shine it,” like I shined Rome’s, “and he carries a sword on his back and a bow that’s bigger than he is.”
Wart is…is listening, like it’s a story.
“I’ve never spoken to him. But I’ve seen him the way my people see him, and I’ve seen him myself, and Rome used to tell me things too, so-so I know Rome didn’t like him, but wanted him all the same. I know he’s proud, and very strong and…and not mean, but he doesn’t have any mercy. Or at least he tries not to have any.”
“And you have to fight him?”
“Probably.”
“But you’re so small.”
“Well yes, but…but maybe I’ll grow in time.”
“What makes you grow?”
“Being wanted,” Albion says.
“Well, I want you,” Wart says, and holds him tight. Well now, there’s getting to be a bit of strength in his arms. “Will that work? If I want you a lot?”
Albion smiles, and holds him right back. “I hope so.”
-
“Camulodunum is in sight, sire.” Another two years, and the band has nearly cut the south off from the north entirely.
“Praise God,” Ambrosius says, and unrolls a map. “Their numbers?”
“Six hundred horse at least, and four times that on foot,” Albion says. But he leaves out, and their Nation, who has seen that I am here.
“So they have numbers.” Ambrosius gives Albion a look. “Do we have surprise?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do we have, then?”
Albion closes his eyes. “All the ground we’ve gained already. They should be afraid of us by now.”
That makes Ambrosius smile, briefly. They talk for a while more, about the dispersal of the Saxon forces, about how they’re making use of all the earthwork that Albion himself dug five centuries ago (or six?) to keep everyone else out, and all else that Albion has seen. It isn’t enough, and he’ll look for more, but he can’t tell Ambrosius much more than that.
Well, he could. But he doesn’t want to, somehow.
From the highest point in Camulodunum, Albion can see the Mare Germanica, and knows that the name does not deserve the sea.
He can see from the highest point in Camulodunum, even though he isn’t there himself, because his people are. Some of them are dying; those are easier to usurp the eyes of, since their minds are half-gone. Many of them see their killers before they fall. Others see those outside the battle, those beacons of stillness in the chaos. Albion sees Saxony, efficient and terrifying, his plaits banded with gold and tipped with blood, his sword much the same. The battle is lost, Albion is certain of it, and it’s worse that he knows he isn’t there.
So he looks through the eyes of the dying men, shuts out the sounds of their failing bodies, and watches in one battle, six years of war undone. Ambrosius Aurelianus calls a retreat, and the man whose body Albion is watching through reaches out to beg him, no, stay, my king, I am not yet dead.
And no, that man is not yet dead; he is not yet dead when the squires of the Saxons come rifling through the bodies, unclasping armor and uncoupling swords, ripping arrows out of the warrior’s wounds before the scabs trap them in. There are dozens of boys, like Wart was and Albion might be, and they scrabble through the corpses for weapons and coins and rations, and all but the eldest blink back tears at the stench.
A boy comes to Albion-to the body Albion is seeing through-and looks into the eyes. The boy is-is beautiful, Albion thinks, even if his face and nose are smeared with blood. He is mostly naked, plainly older than Albion, with fine curly hair the colour of the sun, and eyes that are blue but have no ice in them at all. He leans close, his face almost against the dying man’s mouth, and between the smells of filth and death Albion cannot breathe-
The beautiful, perfect, lucky boy blinks at Albion, and then calls over his shoulder:
Maman! Maman, this one still lives.
“Britannia! Britannia, stop-”
“Wart?” Oh god, there’s no one there to hold, just the bodies and the grass and the arrows-that’s how this one dies, arrows, they never hit him where he wanted and-
“-yes, Britannia, yes, it’s me, just me-Britannia, stop-”
“-My Name,” he chokes, “-is A-”
“Shh.” Hands clamp onto Albion’s shoulders, they’re Wart’s, they’d better be, if they’re not Albion’s going to rip them out and the arms right with them and “-Britannia, what happened?”
Albion tries to look and can’t, and if he can’t look he’ll just lean, topple until his head hits something. It does, before the straw and the blankets; his forehead hits cured leather. Wart is wearing armour now, he’s almost old enough for it and almost, after a battle like that, is good enough.
Wart whispers, to answer for him, “You were at the battle, weren’t you.”
“So were you.” When Albion catches some of his breath, it forces his cheeks into a wry smile. “I can smell it.”
“Sorry.” He pulls Albion closer. “Cai fell. I took his horse.”
“Is he dead?”
“I think so. He’s not back yet.”
“Now I’m sorry-”
“Britannia.” Wart slips a hand under Albion’s chin, and makes him turn it up. “Tell me what you saw.”
The curtain to the room is open, and there are torches in the hallway, and more than half of Wart’s face is bathed in the light. He’s still smooth-cheeked, except for all the grit that’s on him, and still skinny. His hair’s filthy too, caked into points instead of curls and so thick with muck that Albion can’t see the colour at all. The armour’s too big and the tunic’s too small but the cowl of his cape is just right and fixes both of those, and even if there aren’t any more gaps in his teeth he’s Wart and that’s enough.
“Well I know we lost,” Albion mutters, to start. “Most of what I saw was…after that.”
He doesn’t cry, so Wart doesn’t move, Albion knows that’s how it works. Wart just prompts Albion with his eyes, with the faintest of nods.
“Saxony isn’t the only Nation there.” All that comes out with the better part of Albion’s breath, and he closes his eyes, takes time to recover the rest. “I was in the body of a dead man, one of ours-well, almost dead-and you know, they do what we do, when the battle’s over, they go out and pick the corpses apart just like you and I did, remember?”
“I remember.”
“And there was a boy, not as old as you, but bigger than I-and he started picking my body apart like a crow. His skin was like that too, like a bird’s foot. He had-he had very long fingers on his hands. And when he saw I wasn’t yet dead, he-he called for his mother. She was dead, you know. Dead but not. Dead but there. I-”
Wart-Wart puts his hand through Albion’s hair. “You don’t have to say it.”
“Yes I do!” It’ll just…take him a while. He gathers the breath for it, tries again. “She was walking. Her body was alive. But when the boy called her over I could see into her eyes and there was nothing there at all. She-she didn’t have any,” he mouths, because that chills him to say, “there were holes where they should be and I could see all the way into her brain. It was rotten. But she was alive. And she was the boy’s mother, and they were Nations like me-the woman was Gaul, Rome…Rome told me what he did to her, I just hadn’t seen it before. And the boy was her son. Their son. Or Germania’s, I’m not sure. I don’t think Rome was sure either. That’s why he did it.”
The torches flicker, just outside the curtain. One of them drowns. Wart shivers, and Albion does too.
“He-Germania, Saxony-he means to make a gift of me to that boy. That Nation. The one with the mother, why can he have one, he doesn’t have to bury his, and-and he’s so beautiful, and-and I hate him-”
Wart clings to Albion before either of them can actually cry.
They together wind up leaning into and then settling onto the straw. The blankets are still between their legs, but their chests are touching, and even if the buckles of Wart’s armour are scratching on Albion’s chest he doesn’t mind. And he doesn’t mind that Wart smells like mud and the battle and the straw itches and he’s kind of heavy and there are so many reasons for Albion to be angry and sad-but he doesn’t mind, not like this.
“Wart?” he whispers, and makes it a question too.
He lifts his head from where it had nestled into Albion’s shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
“-Yes.” Albion whispers, and doesn’t lie. “I don’t want to be-”
“I know,” Wart says, louder, and he probably does know. “You shouldn’t have to. I won’t let it happen.”
Albion thinks he’s going to cry again. He doesn’t want that to show either. But he can’t turn his face away, Wart is looking at him, and-
-and so he puts his hand in Wart’s hair too and brings their faces closer instead.
It’s hard to look when you’re that close. Their foreheads are touching. Then their noses. Then their mouths. And-and it feels good when their mouths touch, so Albion tries to keep it that way, and he remembers that when humans and the fae couple with each other they do this part too and he blushes.
Wart pulls away just enough to see that (though he could probably feel it anyway, Albion would swear that his cheeks are burning). Albion tries to turn away, but Wart’s got a hand on the back of his head, so that doesn’t work. “Britannia?”
“I’m sorry, I just-”
“You want to kiss me?”
Whatever the answer is-there may be more than one of them-it catches in Albion’s throat and makes it swell.
Wart closes his eyes and opens them, too slow to be a blink. “Can Nations do that? I mean, with humans?”
Albion remembers, Rome, and all the times he- “Yes. Yes they can.”
“Oh,” Wart says, and smiles. “Good.”
So they kiss and touch until they’re too tired to anymore, and then they try to sleep, but that doesn’t work. Albion squires Wart out of his armor, and they kiss for a while longer after that, curled together naked in the straw. And then in the morning, they do that again, until they’re told that it’s time to break camp, the Saxons are coming.
-
.
Citations for Part 1:
The Fall of Rome and The Roman Departure from Britain.
A handy map.
Ambrosius Aurelianus / Emrys Wledig, and .
Vortigern and Y Ddraig Goch.
The idea of “Wart” as a name for young Arthur was popularized by T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.
More of the historical bases for Arthurian Legend will of course be presented in later installments.
On to Part 2
.
Happy Halloween, everyone. (I come bearing the Dark Ages a trick a treat for you all!
Title: No Such Place - Part 1
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, Roma Antiqua, Germania, Wales, Mother Gaul, France; King Arthur and associated personages.
Words: 7500 in part 1.
Rating: R. A solid, hard, don’t take your children to see it in the theater R.
This (and future installments) contains the following: 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, mood-whiplash, gerontophilia, heads on pikes, and meta. All of which is perfectly understandable, as it takes place in:
Timeline: the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.
Summary: Not the King Arthur story you think it is.
Note: England is referred to as Albion or Britannia through this story, because he isn’t England yet…though that’s about to change. Wales is referred to as Cymry, for the same reason.
No Such Place
axis powers hetalia
Mithrigil Galtirglin
449 A.D.
“Britannia,” Rome says from the doorway.
Albion hasn’t heard that voice in years-almost half a century. The fae sputter angrily and scurry away, leaving Albion’s back unprotected. Rome sounds-well, ill, older and worn, as if Rome is recovering from a wound in his throat. Was it inflicted sometime after Boadicea drove him off? Or is-
Albion doesn’t turn around, and goes back to mending his shoe.
“C’mon, Britannia, I know I’m not a ghost yet.” There are steps on the stone floor. He’s coming nearer. “I won’t stay long, I can’t, I’m just here to fend off your big brothers and then I don’t know what’s-”
“Talk,” Albion says, still without turning, and he doesn’t put the needle in his hand down either.
Even if he can’t see it, he knows what Rome’s smiles feel like. “You’re still feisty,” Rome says, and “I still like it,” and his shadow chills Albion’s back. “I guess it’s too much to ask you to look at me when I’m talking to you?”
“You don’t tend to ask for things,” Albion reminds him.
Rome laughs. “I don’t at that.” It’s the same laugh as ever, and it makes Albion shiver. “And it’s not as if I can change, right? Not like you, you’re still a boy…”
That-almost gives Albion enough pause to turn around. Almost. “Just say what you want to say.”
“Well, maybe you can’t change after all.” He steps closer-did his foot drag? No, no, Albion won’t look. “It’s more important than a lot of the things I’ve told you, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Another laugh, overhead; Albion curls over his mending, brandishes the needle. Rome stops, though, and only speaks. “You were serious, weren’t you? About wanting to be a bigger empire than I.”
There’s no need to answer that; Rome knows.
“Thought so. So when you do-when you try, I mean, you’re going to try, whether you do it or not-don’t do it the way I did. ‘Cause, well, I think, I did it wrong.”
Something drips onto Albion’s shoulder.
He won’t scream. He won’t scream, and he won’t flinch, but that doesn’t mean he’ll look. He won’t look. “I could have told you that.”
“You could have. You might have.” Rome’s hand comes down on Albion’s upper arm. It’s-it’s cold, for Rome, not what Albion remembers, not-
-not enough for Albion to hold back from stabbing it with the needle.
Rome doesn’t cry out in pain. Rome doesn’t make a sound at all, or at least not one that comes out of his throat. His skin, though-his skin squelches.
Albion is hauled up by the shoulders, and slams his eyes shut, won’t look, won’t look. “Go away,” he yells, and he wishes that magic worked on Rome so he could Name him.
“I will,” Rome says. “I am. That’s the point.”
Albion shivers in the dark behind his eyes. Rome has him, by the neck and the wrist and the voice-Rome draws Albion’s hand nearer, and puts it on his body-
“I told you. I think I did it wrong.”
The wound is warm and swollen, sticking and foul. Something bubbles and pops where Albion is forced to touch, and he smells filth and fire. Rome guides Albion’s fingers through all of it, a deep puncture with ridged walls and scabs that peel away under Albion’s nails, and Albion wants to yell and scream and run and drown himself in the nearest river and can’t.
“There you go,” Rome murmurs, laughing to himself, laden pained laughter that makes Albion’s throat stop up. “That’s my warning to you, boy. That’s the end I’m coming to. I thought you could stand to know.”
Albion still can’t speak, but he thinks that last whimper sounded somewhere between no and how?
Rome sighs. Albion feels it. “Remember I told you, you have to know your enemies?”
Albion nods, or hangs his head to stop it from spinning.
“I really should practise what I preach, huh.” Rome-Rome ruffles Albion’s hair, his thick chapped fingers pushing through the mess of it, thumbing at Albion’s eyebrows. “I forgot mine. I thought he loved me for a second.”
As Rome lets his hands off Albion’s wrist and face, Albion stands still, eyes ground shut, fists clenching around the filth from Rome’s wound. Rome takes him by the hand again, forcibly uncurls Albion’s fist-hisses in pain, and then drops the needle into Albion’s palm.
“You might not want to keep using this,” he says.
Albion cries. But if he doesn’t open his eyes, the tears won’t come out, right?
Rome can hear it, though; Albion knows that his throat is throbbing, that his nose is filling up, that even if the tears aren’t escaping the sounds that come with them are. Rome cups Albion’s cheeks, thumbs at his lips and nostrils and the aching hollows under his eyes, and says, “That’s something I haven’t seen before. You hid that from me, didn’t you, Britannia?” When Albion doesn’t answer him, Rome embraces him, crushes him to his chest. “It worked.”
The wound smears over Albion’s cheek. He kicks Rome and turns and runs, out of the room and out of the house, all the way to the river. When it’s over his head, he opens his eyes, stares into the water until it stings. He comes up for air and pretends the tears never came at all, and scrubs his hands with gravel until they bleed.
-
Sometime not quite 500 A.D….
Albion now makes his home on the cliffs where Rome first found him. He has tired of the river that runs east, and its city, and its bridges. The fae keep to him now, and comfort him, and tell him that he is his own again, and no matter how often Albion asks them, am I meant to feel so empty?, they do naught but laugh, and if it is meant to be less cruel than Rome’s laughter Albion does not think so.
His dearest unicorn (whose name is Gregarious but Albion calls him Grigory so as not to be cruel) strolls with him along the precipice in companionable silence. They watch the water push against the rocks, and kick smaller stones down to join it, Grigory with his nose and hooves, Albion with his toes. He never did mend that shoe, and wears none now, letting the earth harden his feet. The pebbles fall so far that Albion can’t hear them, but he knows that Grigory can because the unicorn makes a little excited huff sound just after Albion sees them splash.
The years should have been happier with Rome gone, and not just gone but gone, surely; if a Nation has been wounded so deeply, even an Empire, he will die, just as a man so afflicted will die. Albion pats Grigory on the flank, and then strokes all the way up to his cheek, making the unicorn turn and meet his eyes. He asks, not what he so often does, but “Have I gotten smaller?”
Grigory tilts his head, confused.
Albion closes his eyes, shakes his head to dismiss his own question. “Forgive me,” he says, and resumes his petting. “It’s just that for my kind, the more people who want us, the bigger we grow. So now that Rome’s gone, I thought I might be smaller again and not notice.”
In response, Grigory lifts his neck, pulls up to his full height over Albion, even going up on his hind legs a moment. Albion feels he ought laugh, it does look comical, but though the gesture is funny its meaning is not. But Albion smiles, at least, the jibe is not mean-spirited-
Grigory screams, and staggers sideways, spraying crystalline red blood on Albion’s cheek.
An arrow-there’s an arrow through him, from the side that faced the cliffs-deep in him, deep enough that both sides are bulging and Grigory is down. Albion pulls the unicorn’s head into his lap and touches him, urgently now, making him look up, “Look at me, Grigory, look now-see, I’m here, if you can see me you can get up, come on, Grigory, get up-”
-it’s not the first arrow to fly, there’s another and another and another-one hits Grigory in the belly, it’s foul, things leak and smear over his silver hide and Albion bows over him to save himself from the hail.
It terrifies him, makes him shake; someone who can see the fae. Someone who can shoot them.
Grigory whines, tongue frothing and teeth bared. His mouth is framed in pink and gold, his horn buried in the tall grass.
Albion is taller than the grass.
He looks up, over the edge of the cliff, to the other side of the channel. His breath calls up a spell that will let him see that far; he is a Nation, and cannot be barred from that. A row of ships is advancing, cruder than Rome’s but no less majestic, of darker wood with lighter sails. At the prow of the foremost ship stands a man with long golden hair, in plaits that beat on his armour in the wind, and he carries a bow that is taller than he. With the aid of the spell, Albion can even see the Nation’s eyes; they are as blue as Grigory’s horn.
When Grigory pleads with him again, Albion takes out his dagger and stabs him through the eye, to end it fast. As the arrows fall around him, he saws the unicorn’s horn from its head, and leaves the rest to haunt the Saxons.
-
Albion runs. Dagger out, toes bleeding, the scent of Grigory still threaded in his cloak and the fae snapping overhead and at his heels, he runs, away from the cliffs and the coast and the tall grass. Wings flap behind him, the larger fae and the birds that can hear them, crows and hawks and owls, and soon their screeches drown out Albion’s feet crushing the fallen leaves.
Again, he thinks, and worse, and more, and Rome, you bastard, they’re here for you, not me. There comes a rhythm to it, attuned to his breath as it heaves and lags. Not for me. Not for me.
The forest gives way to a field, and the light of the fae chasing him bleaches every blade of grass. Albion closes his eyes, bolts across it, west, away from the light and the sun. He doesn’t care if it’s Cymry’s place, Cymry should know too-
“Oof-hey-ow!”
Albion crashes into something-well, more to the point, some one. He opens his eyes-it’s okay to cry when you’re hurt, and he skinned his knees on the way down, and he should tell the person sorry and move on and-
“-Ow…” the person under Albion-a boy, a human boy? with hair that’s about the colour of river carp and a very skinny body-groans, trying to sit up with Albion still tangled in his lap. “Watch where you’re going!”
Albion wrinkles his nose at him. He doesn’t say sorry, but he does untangle himself and sit back on his knees. His feet-his feet don’t feel like running anymore.
The boy scrunches up his nose too, but it’s more like a twitch. “Is there a battle? Whose city are you coming from?”
Right, Albion thinks, Grigory’s blood. Oh, and mine. “I’m very tired,” he says, which isn’t really an answer, but it’s true either way, and once he falls asleep in the strange boy’s lap there’s nothing else to be done for it.
Grigory is on his feet. He is still dead, of course, but that doesn’t matter where Albion is now. Without his horn-with a bulb of flies and maggots where it should be-his head is bowed low to the ground, and his bloodshot eyes are glowing. But he is still Grigory and Albion still wants to hold him, so he does.
Albion can see all of himself now-he’s crossed into a place not his own, a silver stone castle on a hill. The Saxons climb over the cliffs, and that golden-haired man is leading them, taking slow steps that cover miles. They retrace the rivers inland, up toward Caledonii and his Picts, west to Cymry’s place, and all between. Albion swings himself up onto the dead unicorn’s back and ignores the blood that wells up against his thighs, and Grigory carries him, as swiftly as only the dead can be, to walk beside the golden-haired man.
The golden-haired man looks at him, his eyes steady and hateful and sad. He asks Albion if he is Rome’s.
Albion does not answer him.
Something very bony is caught between Albion’s legs, and he realises that he didn’t sleep alone.
He’s very awake now; he turns his head and tries to reach down for his dagger or Grigory’s severed horn, but someone’s removed his belt, presumably the someone who’s currently wrapped around Albion like an eager squirrel on a tree. When Albion can turn enough and focus he can see that it’s the human boy from last night. His nose is buried in the crook of Albion’s shoulder, and their knees are all tangled together under two starchy blankets and on top of a third, which is itself mostly atop a heap of straw.
Oh, thinks Albion, that’s all right, then.
He tries not to stir so much, and looks the human boy over. He appears a little younger than Albion is now; under ten years old, surely, with his round ruddy face and no hair anywhere but his head, and there’s a lot of that. It probably curls when it is clean, which right now it isn’t. Naked as they are, the human boy is nearly as skinny as Albion, and it’s worse for being the scrawny sort of skinny, like Albion had been before Rome started training him. Albion pokes the boy’s upper arm, and there’s not much muscle there at all. He probably can’t shoot or swordfight very well yet.
That poke does wake him up, though.
Albion tries to turn his face away and bury it in the straw. It doesn’t work, and he ends up getting a mouthful of the boy’s hair. And some of it gets between his teeth too. Albion grimaces. The boy smiles.
“Are you better?”
“Did something happen?” Albion scrunches his nose.
The boy does too, and laughs. “Well, you fell over. And you couldn’t walk anymore. So I brought you here.”
“Where is here?”
“My uncle’s fortress. I serve his son. They’re Briton, though.”
“You’re not?” Albion doesn’t mean to sound disappointed, just-
“Nu-uh. Well, they say I’m not. My uncle and my cousin, I mean. And they’re Christians too. But if King Emrys says I’m his nephew that means his brother is my father and if he’s Briton his brother must be Briton too so I don’t know how that works.”
Emrys, Albion thinks, and translates, Ambrosius, and says, “I made it to Dinas Emrys?”
“Well, you made it almost here. I carried you the rest of the way. Was there a battle? Uncle told me to warm you and make sure you woke up in case you had a message. Do you have a message?” The boy clings to him, props himself up on his elbow so he can look down at Albion and then cover his own mouth, remembering, “Oh-you never said whether you were better! Should you be sleeping?”
“No, I-I wasn’t wounded, just tired. I ran from the Channel. From Dubris.”
The boy’s eyes go wide-like a fish, again. “You ran all the way from Dubris?”
“There are Saxons there.” Saxony himself is there. “They shot my friend.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy says, and bites his lip. “Was that whose blood was on you?”
“Yes-” and Albion realises he’s unarmed, “-and his horn, too, his horn was with my weapons and-”
“Don’t worry, they’re right over there.” When the boy lifts his hand to point, he loses his balance and falls on top of Albion, and Albion goes oof, and the boy says “Sorry!” again and scrambles, and soon they’re tangling and laughing and Albion can’t remember caring about a human this much, not even Boadicea.
He won’t ask the boy’s name, that’s not polite, but soon they’re holding each other in the straw and the blankets and laughing and Albion whispers, “What do people call you?”
“Arth,” he says, “because I yelled like a bear when I was little and didn’t speak at all else. They call me Wart now, even though I haven’t got any. What do people call you?”
His true Name catches in his throat. “Britannia,” he says, it’s true enough.
“-But that’s a girl’s name. Shouldn’t it be Britannicus? Or Pretani, if it’s where you’re from, not who you are?”
“No,” Albion says, “I-am Britannia.”
The boy-Wart, Albion decides, Wart-looks at him only a little harder than before, and smiles, wide-and gap-toothed. “Oh.” And then, innocent and eager, “That must make it a lot easier to run all the way from the Channel!”
-
Wart’s uncle is Ambrosius Aurelianus, and this fortress is Dinas Emrys, and if Cymry is anywhere he should be here. Once Wart has gotten Albion some clothes and run to tell his uncle that the messenger is awake and the Saxons have invaded, Albion is running over the dragon-flues with his finger pricked, tracing between the wood and mortared stone and calling his brother.
By Name, if I have to, he threatens in the spell. So you’d better come now, Cymry, I know you can hear me-
“If it isn’t the runt,” Cymry says, bored as ever, and when Albion turns around to glare at him he’s sitting on the nearest tree, his long legs dangling well over Albion’s head. “So Rome’s done with you?”
“Rome’s dead,” Albion snaps, “or very nearly, and this has nothing to do with it.”
“Of course it doesn’t.” Cymry’s got a small sling-stone in his hand, and is rolling it between his spindly fingers, walking it over the knuckles and looking at that instead of Albion. “You think that Germania’s invading because he wants you?”
-well there goes the message. “You knew?”
“Hard not to, runt. I’ll tell you, though; he’s not. He wants Rome, and he thinks that Rome left something in you for him to finish off.” Cymry throws down the stone. “Yes, it is all your fault.”
Albion bites his own thumb and sucks on the blood, glaring up at him. “Well it’s probably good for you to fend them off too.”
“As far as my borders,” Cymry says. “It’s not my place to clean up after you.”
Albion sneers at him. ”You don’t understand. Saxony can see the fae-”
“That’s their problem, then, isn’t it.”
“It’s our problem too!” He takes Grigory’s horn out of his belt and holds it up, makes sure Cymry can see it even if he pretends he doesn’t. “They’re like what we are, aren’t they?”
Cymry jumps down from the branch and snatches Grigory’s horn right out of Albion’s hand. He’s so tall-is he taller than Caledonii now? thinner, yes, but maybe taller-that even when Albion jumps he can’t reach it. But Cymry isn’t laughing at him, just looking the horn over, holding it close to his eyes and nose.
“No, they’re not,” he says, and starts walking away-and taking the horn with him. “And it’s disrespectful of you to think so. Not to mention act so.”
“It’s not-”
“It is,” Cymry says, “to us.”
Albion catches up with Cymry and kicks him behind the knee. He gets thrown down the hill for his trouble-but just before he hits his head against a tree he thinks that at least it worked.
“Welcome,” the dragon says.
Albion sits up and nods to him. There’s no light here at all, except for what’s haloing the dragon’s one visible eye. He doesn’t know which dragon it is-there are supposed to be two of them-but the pervasive smell of blood and the fact that the dragon is addressing Albion at all makes him think that it’s Cymry’s, the red one, beneath this hill. Unless the white dragon plays with little Nations before he eats them. “Hallo,” he tells the dragon in kind, deciding it doesn’t matter. “Are you better?”
“Was I ill?” the dragon returns without humour.
“Hundreds of years ago. But are you better?”
The dragon touches his cold tongue to Albion’s nose. Albion flinches but not away, and soon it is darker around him as the dragon’s wings close in. In the scant light, he sees that he was wrong, and the scales are leathery white.
This time, Wart wakes him up.
It’s very quick; one moment Albion is convinced that he’s going to be eaten up, and then next he’s being shaken and touched and subject to “Britannia, Britannia?” over and over in a voice that for just one petrefying moment sounds like Rome all over again.
Which would explain why the first word out of Albion’s mouth is a very loud “No!”
But then Wart isn’t touching him anymore and there’s straw flying everywhere and-and Wart is sniveling.
Albion blinks and covers his mouth. “I mean-” That doesn’t work so he uncovers it and tries again, “Wart, I’m sorry, it was-”
“A witch-dream?” Wart wipes his nose, and maybe comes a little closer. “I’m sorry. I have them too. Did I become part of it?”
“-yes,” Albion thinks, stuttering a little on it. “But not as you. You have bad dreams?” he asks, eager to get off the subject of his own.
“Mhm.” He scoots forward on his knees; it is cold outside the blankets, and it looks as if he wants to duck back under them, but thinks Albion won’t let him. “But I don’t remember them when I do. I try to forget,” he says sheepishly. “Cai says that’s best.”
“Who’s Cai?”
“My cousin. He’s going to be a warlord like uncle Emrys! I told you, I serve him. Can I come under the blankets again?”
Albion smiles and lifts them a little.
Wart scrambles under, and it kicks some of the straw away but now that they’re both under it’s going to be warmer anyway. Albion drapes one of his arms out and Wart settles against him, coltish knee to even more coltish knee. They pull the blankets over their heads, and Albion thinks that total dark might be worse but he’s not about to admit it.
“Do you forget your dreams?”
“I don’t forget anything,” Albion says. “Well. I try not to. Sometimes I remember wrong. But I do remember.”
“Even dreams?”
“Even dreams. Bad ones especially.” The good ones are rarer and harder to forget.
“What was this one about?”
“The dragons under the fort. I spoke to the wrong one. He’s stronger than Y Ddraig Goch, and he ate me. I think Vortigern wanted him to eat me.”
He can feel Wart’s nose wrinkle against his neck. “Who’s Vortigern?”
Albion thinks a little, and tries, “Gwerthym.”
For a moment, Wart stops breathing. Albion pokes him. “S-sorry. I think that’s something I forgot.”
“He thought he was one of my kings,” Albion explains. “I think he must be dead now. Or Saxon, which is worse.”
“Uncle Emrys says they’re going to invade.”
“They already have. That’s why I’m here.”
Wart nods. He doesn’t quite hold Albion closer, but it is cold out there, and they lean nearer together. “Then we’re going to meet them in battle, aren’t we?”
“Sooner or later,” Albion says.
“Good,” Wart says, “that’ll make Cai happier. He so wants to fight. And he says that Saxons are good for killing, because you don’t go to hell if you do.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“My mother. Uncle Emrys says so. Or he says that father said so anyway. But I don’t think I meant it. I would have liked to know her.”
Albion closes his eyes. It’s even darker behind them, and redder somehow. “My mother is dead too.”
“Nations have mothers?”
“Yes,” Albion says, very softly, because it is a secret. “Sometimes, at least. And I have brothers, too, and a sister. They miss Mother too, I think.”
Wart whispers as if it’s not just a secret, but a precious thing; it’s as if his words are cradled in air. “Did you know her long?”
“Not very. My brothers think I killed her too. That’s why they hate me.”
-He’s never told anyone that before.
-
“I won’t be joining you,” Cymry says, some months later when Emrys has gotten the army together.
“I don’t need you,” Albion responds in kind. “Give me back Grigory’s horn.”
Cymry says, without laughing, “No.”
-
“No, like this,” Albion says, and makes a diagonal overhand cut, then reverses it. “See how much more chance you have of hitting the enemy that way?”
“Yes,” Wart says, and bites his lip before mimicking the effect, not as poorly as he used to. He’s about Albion’s size now; it’s been more than three years, and they’ve gained a swathe of ground all the way across Mercia, and it shows on them both but especially Wart, who actually is growing. He’s still thin as a reed, though, for all the work Cai makes him do, and the best Albion can do is teach him to use it.
His stomach churns whenever he says something that Rome once taught him. But whenever it works, there’s this buzz at the base of his skull, like the one he gets when he dances with the fae or eats the honey that goes into mead, and then Wart laughs and smiles and it’s all right, then.
They make another two dozen of that same cut. These are real swords, spatha they dug up from an old stone fortress at Venonis. So they’re longer and heavier than perhaps either of them should be swinging about, much less making cuts in the air with, but it should put some muscle in Wart’s arm this way.
When it’s time, Albion says, “Next one,” and demonstrates a backhand cut straight across the middle. “This won’t work again until you’re taller, but it’s good now. Imagine someone Cai’s size in front of you.” Wart closes his eyes and does. “Now make the cut. Where did you hit him?”
“Over his knees,” Wart says. “Oh! I get it! And it won’t work until I’m big because until then the chest armour gets in the way!”
Wart hasn’t seen battle yet; the army has, but Emrys keeps the young boys out of it, taking care of the horses and the supplies and the treasure while the bigger men fight. Albion’s stayed by Wart most of the time-it wouldn’t be good for Saxony to find him. But he knows Wart has seen what kind of armour a Saxon wears because it’s their job-it’s the job of all the youngest ones-to go out among the dead and take what’s theirs.
They cheerfully practise that cut, again and again. Wart never complains about his arm being tired, but Albion’s is growing so, and he decides, “Only one more today. And not a cut, a stab.”
Wart nods. “We’re not going to actually do that though, right?”
“-oh. Maybe we should wait until after a battle so you can stab someone who’s already dead so it won’t matter.”
“Right. And there’s to be a battle a little south of here, Uncle thinks. Sometime before the moon changes again.” Wart stretches, with the sword over his head-it drags his arm down, and he drops it in the grass. Albion laughs, and so does Wart, and when they’re mostly done with that they gather their things and return to the camp.
Albion has not revealed himself to Ambrosius Aurelianus. It is not for any dislike of the man-beyond, well, that for a claimant Briton he is as Roman as they come, from his golden skin to his ties to an Emperor who is now quite dead. But though Albion has spoken of the arrival of Germania at Dubris, and the strength of their forces, Albion does no more than serve him as a page and scout. It has been a short enough time, and no man bats an eye at how Albion has not grown, and Wart is mum on the matter as well.
But dreams come, bidden or un-; perhaps of Ambrosius, or Emrys, or whatever posterity shall call him. In the dreams, when they are good, this campaign is successful, and lasts only another year or less-all lands are his from Viroconium to Camulodunum, from the cliffs of Dubris in the south to Hadrian’s Wall in the north-no, beyond that, beyond that, if Emrys is that skilled he will take all of Caledonii’s lands for Albion too, and wrest Cymry’s from him, and all of the island will be Albion’s-and Wart will see it too, and not as fields of corpses and their spoils.
So in these dreams, the good ones, he addresses Emrys Wledig, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and grows tall enough to see into his eyes and thank him.
And in the bad dreams, he remembers that Ambrosius is Roman.
Wart will wake Albion up after the worst of them. It’s a very gentle thing, now, just a hand over Albion’s eyes or a whispered, shh, any louder and I won’t be the only one to hear you. Sometimes they really are the wrong things to say and do-and Wart gets skittish and apologises, but by then Albion’s awake and it’s not anyone’s problem but his.
Albion tells all his dreams; Wart doesn’t have to ask anymore. So he knows about Rome, and about Albion’s older brothers and sister and how cruel they are to him, and about the fae. Wart loves the fae and wishes he could see them. Albion tells him that he probably can and just doesn’t know it.
“Does it hurt, to be a Nation?”
“…As much as it hurts to be a human, I suppose,” Albion says, “but I’ve not tried it, so I don’t know.”
These past three years-almost four!-Albion’s learned how to tell when Wart is smiling, even in the dark. “Can you? Try to be human, I mean?”
“I don’t think so. Can you try to be a Nation?”
Wart laughs. “Well, I do think so. I mean, I don’t think I can make myself not get any older like you but if you tell me what it’s like to be you aside-from-that I can try.”
Albion holds him close, and thinks it over. “All right.”
“And if I can be you then you can be me! So tell me what it’s like.”
…Albion laughs too. “Well…well, it means that what happens to the land happens to me. And the people in it too. I mean, if there’s a famine I’m hungry even if I have food of my own, or if there’s a storm it makes my bones ache even if where I actually am is dry.”
Wart nods.
“It’s also a kind of being everywhere, not just where I am. Which is a bit like what I already said, I guess, but not quite. It means I’m thinking about my people in Durnovaria even when I’m up here in Verulamium, and the people guarding the wall up north even if the Saxons can’t get there. If it’s really important I can actually get to them too, but I’m always thinking about it, and I can see it if I try. Some of the dreams are really that.”
“So that’s how you know what the Saxons are doing even if they’re too far off to scout.”
“Yes. Because they’re doing things to my people, and my people are me.”
Wart holds him a bit closer, a bit tighter. “That’s hard to think about.”
“Good things too,” Albion says. “I feel the victories out there even when we’re losing here. Your uncle isn’t the only one fighting, you know. It-it feels very good, when my biggest brother can’t pass the wall. Even if it’s a wall Rome built to keep him out, it’s still my wall. So even when it’s hard here, with you, there’s that.”
“It’s…it’s hard to be here with me?”
Albion gulps. “No, no, not at all. But war is.” He lowers his voice, he hadn’t told it to get louder but it did, and- “War hurts, even when I don’t do any of the fighting.”
“Because the soldiers are your people, and your people are you.”
“Right.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“All manner of places. But-but all wars are different. I mean, a famine hurts your belly and a storm hurts your bones, but war…this war hurts all over, because Saxony just wants me for his, or gone. Probably gone.”
“Saxony is a man too?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he like?”
Albion shudders, like a bowstring, like that bowstring. “Saxony-Rome called him Germania, so I think he’s all of the tribes, not just one, but… He’s a very large man, almost a giant. He has long, straight hair, and he wears it in braids. He wears armor like the things we’ve stolen from the field, but cleaner, like he has someone to shine it,” like I shined Rome’s, “and he carries a sword on his back and a bow that’s bigger than he is.”
Wart is…is listening, like it’s a story.
“I’ve never spoken to him. But I’ve seen him the way my people see him, and I’ve seen him myself, and Rome used to tell me things too, so-so I know Rome didn’t like him, but wanted him all the same. I know he’s proud, and very strong and…and not mean, but he doesn’t have any mercy. Or at least he tries not to have any.”
“And you have to fight him?”
“Probably.”
“But you’re so small.”
“Well yes, but…but maybe I’ll grow in time.”
“What makes you grow?”
“Being wanted,” Albion says.
“Well, I want you,” Wart says, and holds him tight. Well now, there’s getting to be a bit of strength in his arms. “Will that work? If I want you a lot?”
Albion smiles, and holds him right back. “I hope so.”
-
“Camulodunum is in sight, sire.” Another two years, and the band has nearly cut the south off from the north entirely.
“Praise God,” Ambrosius says, and unrolls a map. “Their numbers?”
“Six hundred horse at least, and four times that on foot,” Albion says. But he leaves out, and their Nation, who has seen that I am here.
“So they have numbers.” Ambrosius gives Albion a look. “Do we have surprise?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do we have, then?”
Albion closes his eyes. “All the ground we’ve gained already. They should be afraid of us by now.”
That makes Ambrosius smile, briefly. They talk for a while more, about the dispersal of the Saxon forces, about how they’re making use of all the earthwork that Albion himself dug five centuries ago (or six?) to keep everyone else out, and all else that Albion has seen. It isn’t enough, and he’ll look for more, but he can’t tell Ambrosius much more than that.
Well, he could. But he doesn’t want to, somehow.
From the highest point in Camulodunum, Albion can see the Mare Germanica, and knows that the name does not deserve the sea.
He can see from the highest point in Camulodunum, even though he isn’t there himself, because his people are. Some of them are dying; those are easier to usurp the eyes of, since their minds are half-gone. Many of them see their killers before they fall. Others see those outside the battle, those beacons of stillness in the chaos. Albion sees Saxony, efficient and terrifying, his plaits banded with gold and tipped with blood, his sword much the same. The battle is lost, Albion is certain of it, and it’s worse that he knows he isn’t there.
So he looks through the eyes of the dying men, shuts out the sounds of their failing bodies, and watches in one battle, six years of war undone. Ambrosius Aurelianus calls a retreat, and the man whose body Albion is watching through reaches out to beg him, no, stay, my king, I am not yet dead.
And no, that man is not yet dead; he is not yet dead when the squires of the Saxons come rifling through the bodies, unclasping armor and uncoupling swords, ripping arrows out of the warrior’s wounds before the scabs trap them in. There are dozens of boys, like Wart was and Albion might be, and they scrabble through the corpses for weapons and coins and rations, and all but the eldest blink back tears at the stench.
A boy comes to Albion-to the body Albion is seeing through-and looks into the eyes. The boy is-is beautiful, Albion thinks, even if his face and nose are smeared with blood. He is mostly naked, plainly older than Albion, with fine curly hair the colour of the sun, and eyes that are blue but have no ice in them at all. He leans close, his face almost against the dying man’s mouth, and between the smells of filth and death Albion cannot breathe-
The beautiful, perfect, lucky boy blinks at Albion, and then calls over his shoulder:
Maman! Maman, this one still lives.
“Britannia! Britannia, stop-”
“Wart?” Oh god, there’s no one there to hold, just the bodies and the grass and the arrows-that’s how this one dies, arrows, they never hit him where he wanted and-
“-yes, Britannia, yes, it’s me, just me-Britannia, stop-”
“-My Name,” he chokes, “-is A-”
“Shh.” Hands clamp onto Albion’s shoulders, they’re Wart’s, they’d better be, if they’re not Albion’s going to rip them out and the arms right with them and “-Britannia, what happened?”
Albion tries to look and can’t, and if he can’t look he’ll just lean, topple until his head hits something. It does, before the straw and the blankets; his forehead hits cured leather. Wart is wearing armour now, he’s almost old enough for it and almost, after a battle like that, is good enough.
Wart whispers, to answer for him, “You were at the battle, weren’t you.”
“So were you.” When Albion catches some of his breath, it forces his cheeks into a wry smile. “I can smell it.”
“Sorry.” He pulls Albion closer. “Cai fell. I took his horse.”
“Is he dead?”
“I think so. He’s not back yet.”
“Now I’m sorry-”
“Britannia.” Wart slips a hand under Albion’s chin, and makes him turn it up. “Tell me what you saw.”
The curtain to the room is open, and there are torches in the hallway, and more than half of Wart’s face is bathed in the light. He’s still smooth-cheeked, except for all the grit that’s on him, and still skinny. His hair’s filthy too, caked into points instead of curls and so thick with muck that Albion can’t see the colour at all. The armour’s too big and the tunic’s too small but the cowl of his cape is just right and fixes both of those, and even if there aren’t any more gaps in his teeth he’s Wart and that’s enough.
“Well I know we lost,” Albion mutters, to start. “Most of what I saw was…after that.”
He doesn’t cry, so Wart doesn’t move, Albion knows that’s how it works. Wart just prompts Albion with his eyes, with the faintest of nods.
“Saxony isn’t the only Nation there.” All that comes out with the better part of Albion’s breath, and he closes his eyes, takes time to recover the rest. “I was in the body of a dead man, one of ours-well, almost dead-and you know, they do what we do, when the battle’s over, they go out and pick the corpses apart just like you and I did, remember?”
“I remember.”
“And there was a boy, not as old as you, but bigger than I-and he started picking my body apart like a crow. His skin was like that too, like a bird’s foot. He had-he had very long fingers on his hands. And when he saw I wasn’t yet dead, he-he called for his mother. She was dead, you know. Dead but not. Dead but there. I-”
Wart-Wart puts his hand through Albion’s hair. “You don’t have to say it.”
“Yes I do!” It’ll just…take him a while. He gathers the breath for it, tries again. “She was walking. Her body was alive. But when the boy called her over I could see into her eyes and there was nothing there at all. She-she didn’t have any,” he mouths, because that chills him to say, “there were holes where they should be and I could see all the way into her brain. It was rotten. But she was alive. And she was the boy’s mother, and they were Nations like me-the woman was Gaul, Rome…Rome told me what he did to her, I just hadn’t seen it before. And the boy was her son. Their son. Or Germania’s, I’m not sure. I don’t think Rome was sure either. That’s why he did it.”
The torches flicker, just outside the curtain. One of them drowns. Wart shivers, and Albion does too.
“He-Germania, Saxony-he means to make a gift of me to that boy. That Nation. The one with the mother, why can he have one, he doesn’t have to bury his, and-and he’s so beautiful, and-and I hate him-”
Wart clings to Albion before either of them can actually cry.
They together wind up leaning into and then settling onto the straw. The blankets are still between their legs, but their chests are touching, and even if the buckles of Wart’s armour are scratching on Albion’s chest he doesn’t mind. And he doesn’t mind that Wart smells like mud and the battle and the straw itches and he’s kind of heavy and there are so many reasons for Albion to be angry and sad-but he doesn’t mind, not like this.
“Wart?” he whispers, and makes it a question too.
He lifts his head from where it had nestled into Albion’s shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
“-Yes.” Albion whispers, and doesn’t lie. “I don’t want to be-”
“I know,” Wart says, louder, and he probably does know. “You shouldn’t have to. I won’t let it happen.”
Albion thinks he’s going to cry again. He doesn’t want that to show either. But he can’t turn his face away, Wart is looking at him, and-
-and so he puts his hand in Wart’s hair too and brings their faces closer instead.
It’s hard to look when you’re that close. Their foreheads are touching. Then their noses. Then their mouths. And-and it feels good when their mouths touch, so Albion tries to keep it that way, and he remembers that when humans and the fae couple with each other they do this part too and he blushes.
Wart pulls away just enough to see that (though he could probably feel it anyway, Albion would swear that his cheeks are burning). Albion tries to turn away, but Wart’s got a hand on the back of his head, so that doesn’t work. “Britannia?”
“I’m sorry, I just-”
“You want to kiss me?”
Whatever the answer is-there may be more than one of them-it catches in Albion’s throat and makes it swell.
Wart closes his eyes and opens them, too slow to be a blink. “Can Nations do that? I mean, with humans?”
Albion remembers, Rome, and all the times he- “Yes. Yes they can.”
“Oh,” Wart says, and smiles. “Good.”
So they kiss and touch until they’re too tired to anymore, and then they try to sleep, but that doesn’t work. Albion squires Wart out of his armor, and they kiss for a while longer after that, curled together naked in the straw. And then in the morning, they do that again, until they’re told that it’s time to break camp, the Saxons are coming.
-
.
Citations for Part 1:
The Fall of Rome and The Roman Departure from Britain.
A handy map.
Ambrosius Aurelianus / Emrys Wledig, and .
Vortigern and Y Ddraig Goch.
The idea of “Wart” as a name for young Arthur was popularized by T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.
More of the historical bases for Arthurian Legend will of course be presented in later installments.
On to Part 2
.