Sir Doughall mac Unust mac Cadal

Or, three crowns sable shown smaller and closer together than usual in pale, impaled with azure, a bull salient or shown larger than usual

### Religion

converted to British Christianity from heathenry

### Personality

enthusiastically and boyishly adventurous, haunted by grim fear

### Notable

Honest 17, Reckless 16, Valorous 16, Arbitrary 16, Suspicious of Vortigern +2, Loyalty (Family) 20, Loyalty (Lord) 18, Sword 17, Spear 19, Hate (Vortigern) 16, Hate (Non-Berroc Saxons) 13, Hate (Cambrian Tribesmen) 16, Woodland Curse (all Stalk rolls while in a forest or wood get a -5 penalty)

### Manner of Death

Gloriously killed by Hengest Wictgilssunu, grandson of Witta Wectasunu, great-great-grandson of Woden in single combat

## Appearance

### Physique

not an ounce of body fat, with a beautifully defined upper-body triangle

### Style

boyishly bright, often slightly soiled and worn mussed

## Family

### Father's Class

warrior of the ruling sept of the ruling clan of the Kingdom of Escoce

### Holdings

Tisbury (Salisbury County), Beggarsford and Lovestream (Jagent County)

### Relatives

Cadal (grandfather), Sir Unust mac Cadal (father), Lady Brigid (mother), Lady Æife ferch Eddarrnonn (wife)

## Position

### Liege Lord

Count Robyn, called the Grand Knight of Salisbury

### Squire / Handmaiden

Bridei mac Talorgen (448 to 456 e.v.), Marleon ap Badur (457 to 463 e.v.), Sagrennan ap Evemyant (464 to 469 e.v.)

### Holdings

Tisbury (Salisbury County), Beggarsford and Lovestream (Jagent County)

### Notable Treasures

the magical spear known as Piercer, the decorated Saxon sword Serpentbreath

## Early Life

Born on the edge of the ruling sept of the ruling clan of Escoce, Doughall enjoyed a childhood drenched in the rewards of Pictish raids into Cumbria and Icenia, the watchtowers that had stopped them until then having been destroyed the year after Doughall's birth. It was as charmed a life as any Pict in Caledonia could have. His father Unust was one of the very first knights in that northern land, and so the results of the raids were rich for him.

But no fallen watchtower could herald victories for a dozen years, and so the wealth ebbed as Doughall grew. He was on the cusp of squiring when High King Constantin came up from the south to seal the end of the increasingly paltry raids. In fact, it was he who noticed that the High King entered the same corridor as his aunt Glenna had shortly before. His innocent recounting of this fact led to months of fatherlessness, as the Bull sent Unust on a dark errand.

## Squired

Upon Unust's return, Doughall was swiftly squired to his own father, an oddity among the Cymru but much more common among the Picts. It was at his side that Doughall finally dived into the depths of the feud between the Decantae and the Shadowfooted Cait, about which he had been eagerly gulping down whatever gossip he could find since it started while his father was away. Doughall's heart swelled with adventure and an early taste of glory as he helped his father defend Decantae holdings.

A teenager's ready and argumentative tongue broke free of the bounds of propriety once or twice when Sir Unust told him that they had been assigned to protect the Holly-Wearing Decantae and the Ce Ap Gilgedi as they settled the abandoned land of Jagent at the invitation of Dux Vortigern. In the end, however, the Bull quieted his ardor during his childhood initiation. Sealed in beneath tattoo ink, this restraint and his refusal to leave his father's side won over his boyish adventure-lust and they traveled to the distant land of Cornwall. After some time there, a closed-in darkness began to temper Doughall's wide-eyed rush through the brambles and thickets of life and into dreamed-of stories. The Cymru all around blamed the two tribes of Jagent for the murder of High King Constans, and Doughall saw the murderous hunger for vengeance in their faces, and he heard his father's pleas for the Pictish community to focus on defense rather than striking back at a distrusted Vortigern.

Unust was not a nice man, and Doughall was fast becoming his copy; though he grinned more readily still than his father and was more eager to lift the blade and drive his heels into his horse's flank than his father, those grins became increasingly gallowed and sarcastic. It was a fearful time, though one that quickly faded into seeming peace, with nothing but Irish raiders and fruitlessly chasing legendary beasts. One might have thought that the quick extinquishing of such a quickly flaring flame would have left Doughall with a lesson about the unnecessity of worry and fear, but it is not so. Without a climactic ending, it left the squire trapped in an unfinished feeling that would haunt his ready smiles the rest of his life.

## Jagent

Doughall's dreams of his father being present at his knighting were cruelly ended mere months before the ceremony when Sir Unust finally succumbed to the lingering gift given him by the Battle of Linden Pool, a deathly pneumonia. Nonetheless, Doughall was knighted. By chance, the King's Progress was passing through Beggarsford at the time, and so the ceremony was performed by High King Vortigern himself.

Going along with the High King's general counsel to avoid decisive action to remove the Irish raiders from Cornwall while his Saxon mercenaries are busy in Caledonia, Doughall spent the first two years of his knighthood harrying the invaders in casual raids alongside warriors from the Dumnonii. However, such a life grows glory like a crop grows in drought ~ boredom creeps in like the dry yellow on dying leaves. Doughall began to grow unsettled and to speak against Vortigern's idling complacency in the lap of his mistress Rowena, daughter of the Saxon chief Hengest. Knights, Doughall began to say loudly and often, are not walls but mounted; they must move. Stories heard a thousand times become stale and inedible like bread gone long past the status of trencher, an insult to place at a lord's seat for them to eat upon, and new stories must be boldly made, else weakness would be on the face of one's family and predators whether barbaric or seemingly friendly are likely to strike.

Despite the increasing vocality of Doughall's unrest, he was among the throngs who attended Vortigern's lavish marriage to Rowena, enjoying the chance to experience the pleasures of the royal life for a scant few days. There, he saw Vortigern announce that he was giving Cantii Civitas to King Hengest. He also witnessed the leader of the Cantii executed for high treason when he objected to such a large gift being made of his people's lands. That pinched look born in the weeks after Constans's death returned to Doughall's face, even as he languidly explored the variety of fruits and ales available at the feast, his laughs growing as brittle as summer grass. He found himself afterwards gravitating to the Dumnonii delegation, keeping himself on the edge of their buzzing questions.

In the 451st year of the era vulgaris, Doughall discovered the ravages of his own indiscretion in voicing his complaints. High King Vortigern sent him among what he discovered to be a multitude of fellow dissidents to reinforce the forces led by the Roman commander in Gaul, one Aetius by name, against the onrushing wave of Huns laying waste to Gaul. They met battle at Chalons and, lonely while so far away from his family, Doughall acquitted himself with honor but without the verve necessary to buy him renown.

Only a handful of months at home were Sir Doughall's after Chalons before he was needed once more, sent to aid the Dumnonii against increasing Irish raids. Despite the ready friendship of the Dumnonii for their foreign allies, it was quickly becoming clear to Doughall exactly what Vortigern's game was, to exhaust and harry those who disagreed with his policies by wasting their time in travel to foreign battles, no doubt hoping that a tired arm and repeated chance would allow one enemy or another to fell them. Beneath Doughall's usual tenacious boyish enthusiasm, a new dark emotion warred with the old familial protectiveness. He was weary of this game.

It turned out that, in temperament, Doughall was not his father's son after all, and he grew tired of the hate that was happening.

## Marriage and Rebellion

That weariness wielded recent memories in its battles, reminding Doughall of a Salisbury knight who had spoke to him of the beauty of women upon that plain. One in particular had figured highly in the Cymru's tales, a woman by the name of Lady Æife of Tisbury, and his description of her had elicited many sighs from Doughall's Pictish throat. As the warriors began to ride back to Jagent from Dumnonia, Doughall noticed the victorious strength of these memories. He spent the next two years ignoring events in his homeland, focused only on his pursuit of Lady Æife's hand in marriage, finally winning his prize the year before the Vandals sacked Rome. Doughall moved to his wife's home, hoping to get a chance to recreate himself free from Vortigern's vengeful command.

Unfortunately, Doughall's attempt at liberation did not fully succeed, as, with a marriage nearing a year old, he is sent back to Cornwall to defend Dumnonia once again, this time with the addition of Cornovii at his back. Even his usually ready smile could no longer dam the feelings rioting within him, and Doughall's complaints grew more vocal and loud. Other rebellious subjects of the High King began to gather around him, looking to the young knight as a leader of the opposition. These other dissident knights brought whispers with them of a gestating rebellion, child of Vortigern's sons Vortimer and Katigern. In 456 e.v., the rebellion was born, and Doughall raised the magical spear known as Piercer in its support.

Battle was met at Aylesford. Katigern and Horsa killed each other while in its bloody midst, and Piercer met bear-shirt. Sir Doughall and the berseker battled back and forth, combat-magics struggling for dominance, until finally Piercer found a hibernating spot in the berserker's fearsome garb and slipped its way into the all-too-human flesh below. It is said that a brief lull in the struggle against tyranny spread a short distance around them as seasoned warriors stopped to watch. None believed Doughall in the years afterward when he claimed that his fight was as important, if not more, to the duel between Katigern and Horsa in the eventual rebel victory, but that rarely held his tongue silent when drink had made it enduringly quick. The tales always ended with him lifting the ceremonial blade at his side, as finely decorated as crude Saxon artisanry could make it, to tell his listeners that the Saxon's final dying breath carried what were probably the only Cymric words he knew. "Serpentbreath," he sighed, one finger indicating the sword Doughall lifted from a body already going cold. Looking at its shine, Doughall had been known to muse that even barbarians like he and the Saxons could have honor enough to challenge that of the civilized Cymru.

It was his second proudest day of that year, the year in which his son, whom he named Uhtred, was born.

Sir Doughall was there, too, when the next year held Vortigern's counter, crushing the rebel defenders against the very walls of Crecganford in the Saxon Kingdom of Kent. Despite the noted heroism displayed by him and his fellows, however, and the numerous storied feats of both body and cunning that they performed (well-attested enough for even skeptics to concede their truth), the treacherous Cambrian king ended the day victorious. That lurking bitterness that twisted Doughall's ever-ready smile rose again, tasting of bile, for it seemed that his samhladh had disowned him. No longer the son of the Bull, he felt he should turn now to this strange god the Cymru themselves worshipped. Maybe there was more honor to be found there. Or at least Vortigern's head.

## Family

In the following years, his smiles soured, Doughall retreated from the affairs of kings and lands. High King Vortigern broke tribes into counties, and it failed to rouse him as it was a cowardly scribal attack. Vortimer gathered rebels to his cause once more, it did not rouse Doughall, who claimed he needed time to journey the Otherworld to meet this Christ and befriend Him. He spat when his fellows abandoned Logres for Brittany, but did nothing more. Three years Piercer rested above Serpentbreath, displayed in a place of honor on Tisbury's wall. The only times Doughal's smile was as boyish and unabashed as it once had been were when he was playing with Uhtred and Galan (who was a year younger).

Three years matched by three sons. In 461, Doughall's wife gave birth to triplets, but only one survived the month. Doughall went, drunken and reckless, to hunt wild boar and drown his sorrows at this loss. Drink and boars are a heady recipe, however, and no sooner did he come upon his prey than did Sir Doughall mac Unust mac Cadal find himself torn and bleeding red to stain green leaves and green grass. A knight came to him then, strange and with a wild halo of blond hair. Sir Jareth, he said his name was, and he said he'd come to take a bit of the burden of northern wildness from him. At first, Doughall spat in the fairy's face and told him that if the woods wanted to swallow him up, at least he would be in the lands of his ancestors and his newly-taken infant sons. Jareth simply smiled with a soft and false compassion and asked after the fate of Doughall's surviving newborn. Defeated, Doughall agreed to a longer life at the simple cost of his kinship with the forest. He had yet three children living, after all, and they deserved a father.

Newly revitalized in his desire to win a virtuous land for his children to grow in, and now more civilized than before, Sir Doughall rode out once more with Vortimer to meet the remaining southern Saxons off Thanet. It was Ebbsfleet that saw Sir Doughall's return to the rebel army, and it was in the milling about before the battle that he witnessed Queen Rowena Hengestsdohtor arriving to visit her son. She claimed to be there to convince Vortimer to cease the attacks on her father, but Vortimer's pale, pained countenance afterwards led many tongues ~ Doughall's among them ~ to tell tales of poisoned wine brought by a treacherous Saxon mother. All the moreso did those tongues wag when Vortimer died during the battle.

Doughall has spent many hours over the course of his life on his knees, giving thanks to his new god that he did not travel to the Giant's Dance upon Mount Ambrius in Salisbury when Vortigern invited all the now-kingless rebel leaders to negotiate for peace. If he had, he would have died at the hands of Saxons as treacherous as that of their filicidal queen. Instead, he spent much of the year chasing traitorous Saxons in small skirmishes.

Doughall's last legitimate child was born in 464 e.v. while Doughall was fighting off Saxon pillagers at his assigned garrison. The child was given the name Brochin mac Unust mac Cadal. Eager to return his smile to the pure boyish grin it once was, and shake off the twin haunting grimnesses that had spiced it these many years, Doughall paid the Saxon tribute the next year to buy himself some time with his sons.

## An End to Tyranny, and to Doughall

And then, everything changed. The Savior of Britain unfurled his great Pendragon banner on the shores of Totnes in 466, an army of 10,000 (a third of which were knights) at his back. Happy times were these, and Doughall's face smiled as it had many years before when that savior's brother still ruled the land. His dourness banished, his smile was left with only the boyishness it had never lost, no longer adulterated. Though he couldn't be there in that first battle against Prince Æsc of Kent, Doughall with a whoop sped to join his forces in the minor battles afterwards, fighting alongside Duke Eldol of Glevum when they subdued Corinium. Grey-haired knights have been known to argue whether Duke Gorlois or Sir Doughall was the greater inspiration to the troops that year, at least when Doughall's sons have nearby ears. Nonetheless, the question is sensical enough to be asked, and that says a lot.

Unfortunately, Beggarsford and Lovestream were inhabited mostly by Picts of the Holly-Wearing Decantae, the tribe in Jagent that believed they should side with the rightfully elected High King Vortigern against Aurelius Ambrosius. As Jagent County erupted into a war of Pict vs. Pict, Decantae vs. Ce, Reindeer vs. Boar, they almost desultorily cut ties with their rebel lord, declaring themselves independent of him and in favor of Vortigern.

Lady Æife and his children had to make do without Sir Doughall for months on end, as his youth flooded back into him, carried by Saxon and loyalist Cymric blood as it washed over him. At Carlion-on-Usk, they trapped High King Vortigern, and would have killed him, too, if his barbarous Cambrian allies hadn't arrived to save him. Messengers told his family this, and the word "Cambrian" became a cussword at Tisbury. Once again, Doughall fought with storied bravery and astonishing feats, both at Carlion and in the battles that spun off from it over the rest of the year. The months continued their inexorable march even as Doughall and the rest of Aurelius's army did. After two years of either fighting, recovering from a fight, or riding hard to meet a new fight, they finally managed to trap Vortigern in Ganarew Castle on Mount Snowdon. No Cambrian tribesmen remained to save him, and even God himself made his displeasure clear, sending down fire from the heavens at the request of one of his priests. Divine wrath purged Ganarew and Vortigern within from the face of the world. This was not a fight where a soldier's arm mattered much, and Doughall knew it, resigning himself to the drudgery of keeping ragged hordes from overwhelming the army and chasing Paschent's followers to the edges of Saxon lands.

He was there, afterwards, to see the crown returned to a virtuous head. He nodded his head at the creation of the Kingdom of Lyonesse and frowned at that of the Kingdom of Cornwall, before cheering as the Ce Ap Gilgedi were given Jagent County as their own. After a couple months spent celebrating ~ long enough, just, for visions of Tisbury and his beloved family to begin pulling Doughall's heart homewards ~ the army headed out again. Hengest had joined with Octa and Eosa in Eburacum. Vortigern's mess still had to be cleaned up, even with him gone. Battle was met in the Kingdom of Roestoc, first at Maisbeli and then at Conigsborough. Doughall fought admirably in the first battle, even distracted as he was by thoughts of home, and was spurred to heights of bravery worthy of song in the second by the idea that it would be the end, and he could return with a soul unfettered to Tisbury.

It was the end, and his soul was unfettered. For Sir Doughall mac Unust mac Cadal met Hengest Wictgilssunu himself in battle, and even held his ground against that fierce barbarian who claimed to be but four generations descended from Woden himself. Doughall stood, unmoved but for the maneuvering of his blade, for two handfuls of moments. This pause it was that allowed Duke Eldol to reach the target of his vengeance.

Duke Eldol himself delivered the spear Piercer to Tisbury, still slung on the back of the one who bore it.

The next year, Duke Gorlois crushed the Holly-Wearing Decantae in Jagent, all but eliminating them from the lands of Britain. He chose to reward one of his knights with lordship of one of the captured manors ~ Beggarsford and Lovestream. If the Duke of Cornwall ever knew of Sir Doughall's family's claim, he simply didn't care; it was no longer theirs.