The Pict

The Pict by Jack Dixon

Reviewed by Mary Simonsen, author of Pemberley Remembered.

“The battle had been raging for almost an hour before the sun broke the eastern horizon. The new light of the rising sun flashed across Cruithne’s axe . . .” Right out of the gate, the book begins with maces and battle axes flying as the Scythians, ancestors of the Picts, an ancient tribe of Scotland, fight the latest of many battles against the hordes pressing in on them from the eastern steppes of Eurasia. Guided by their warrior leader, Cruithne, the Scythians retreat to the west until they arrive at a northern sea where they must take to the water or submit. Thus begins the epic voyage that will eventually take the refugees to the far north of Caledonia. For a thousand years, a loose confederation of tribes, each with its own leader, inhabited the Highlands, occasionally joining forces to defeat a common enemy. But their peaceful co-existence ended when the Romans, who had defeated the Britannic tribes to the south, began to march north toward Caledonia. After the massacre of an entire village of the Selgovaii by the Romans, the Pictish tribes once again come together to fight off the legions sent from Rome to conquer them. Calach, a young warrior who possesses the courage and spirit of Cruithne, is chosen as their leader. Outnumbered by the Romans by ten to one, Calach understands that it is only by waging guerilla warfare that the Romans can be defeated. Other than one major battle, little is known of the Picts’ war against Rome except that these primitive people were able to stop the advance of the seasoned and battle-tested Roman legions. Jack Dixon creates a surreal landscape where the eerie sounds of a hundred pipes precede the Picts’ attacks on a Roman camp, and phantoms tattooed with demonic symbols emerge silently out of the night to kill their sleeping enemy. But the Romans didn’t expand their empire by lying down and playing dead, and Calach pays a personal price in a battle to finish off the Romans. The momentum of the story builds with each chapter as the warriors arise from the mists of their hills and valleys to fight, retreat, regroup, and fight again in their determination to keep the Romans from making any further incursions into their ancient lands. Over the centuries, the Picts ceased to exist as a separate people, and together with their Celtic neighbors, became the ancestors of today’s Scots. Because of the thin historical record and few artifacts yielded by archeological digs, Jack Dixon must spin a tale from his own understanding of the times, the landscape of the Highlands, and the other inhabitants of Scotland who did leave a record. In this he was successful. The sounds of the bodhran drums pulse throughout the book, leaving the reader wanting to know more about the warriors who fought against the might of the greatest empire on earth and prevailed.