by Jack Whyte
The Eagles' Brood
( Camulod Chronicles - 3 )
Jack Whyte
From Kirkus Reviews
In the author's The Skystone (1996), set in the last years of the Roman occupation of fifth-century Britain, the sword Excalibur was forged, presaging the reign of King Arthur years later. This time, the narrator, grand-nephew of the forger of the sword, is none other than that (traditionally) eerie being, Merlin the sorcerer--sanitized here to the most high-minded of soldiers who survives wars, betrayal, and a tragic love affair. Caius Merlyn Britannicus, born in a.d. 401, is the son of the Commander in Chief of the forces of the fortress/town of Camulod, a community of Romans and Britons. Merlyn's best friend from boyhood is his cousin Uther Pendragon, a mighty warrior and the son of a Celtic king, though with a terrible temper that can show itself off the fields of war. Torturing Merlyn is the suspicion that it might have been Uther who brutally beat the waif whom Merlyn will name Cassandra after she violently resists Uther's sexual games. The deaf and dumb Cassandra (her real identity will be a surprise) is healed and then secluded, eventually becoming Merlyn's wife until her savage death. There are wars and invasions, waged principally by King Lot of Cornwall, wars that bring awful innovations like poisoned arrows. There are also theological conflicts, since the free-will doctrines of Pelagius are condemned as heretical by the Church. Merlyn's trek to a seminal debate of theologians is marked by skirmishes--he rescues the warrior/bishop Germanus at one point--and by the discovery of a half-brother. All ends with the deaths of those fierce antagonists Lot and Uther, and with Merlyn holding up Uther's baby son by Lot's dead queen, a baby who hasthe deep golden eyes of . . . a mighty bird of prey . . . a King perhaps, to wield Excalibur.'' With plenty of hacking and stabbing, pontifications, dogged sex, and a few anachronistic mind-sets: another dipperful from the fertile Arthurian well, sans magic but brimful of action.
A DREAM OF EAGLES
The Sky stone
The Singing Sword
The Eagles 'Brood
The Saxon Shore
The Sorcerer: Book I: The Fort at River's Bend
To my wife Beverley
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have dedicated each book in this cycle to my wife, Beverley, because she has been the one who has lived with the writing of it—one single, huge chronicle—since its inception in 1978, in a condition that too frequently verged upon what used to be known as "grass widowhood." To this point, however, I have made no other attempt to acknowledge any other contributions or contributors, irrespective of, or perhaps because of, the fact that there have been so many.
Few things can be more daunting than the contemplation of the task of writing, then refining and eventually finding a publisher for a first book, let alone a quartet of books, when you are a complete unknown. There are legions of people who rush to warn you of the impossibility of what you hope to achieve. Heartfelt thanks and appreciation, therefore, to all my friends who didn't. So many people have endeared themselves to me over the years by not saying "Are you still slugging away at that?" that it would be impossible to name them. Some, however, have been even more supportive.
Bob Sharp of Calgary, Alberta, is the man who got me started on this whole thing, the only man I have ever met whose reading tastes and mine coincide absolutely. We sat together one day, fifteen years ago, wondering how the sword got into that stone and how the boy was able to pull it out. Suddenly I remembered something from my boyhood, a lightning succession of synapses triggered immediately, and I knew how it had been done!
Robert A. Willson of Calgary demonstrated early on that he could recognize a winner in Caius Britannicus, and Peter C. Newman steadied and readied me on my first public appearance as a bona fide Author, Ray Addington of Vancouver, B.C., went digging in the antique shops of Colchester to find five Roman pennies that Publius Varrus might have handled. My friend Bill McKay demonstrated to me most effectively that a creative artist is seldom truly effective as a pragmatic businessman, and then shook his head ruefully as he held me aloft to drip dry. Alma Lee of the Vancouver Writers' Festival and Ann Cowan of Simon Fraser University guided my feet towards succour in the form of Marian Hebb, literary lawyer extraordinaire. Joyce Elliott, a friend for many years, read the original manuscript before anyone else and thereafter kept me on the straight and narrow path of fidelity to my tale.
Professor Jim Russell of the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of British Columbia advised me on where to dig for information on Roman Britain. I should state here, however, that any errors of authenticity in my work are attributable only to my fiction, and not to Jim's guidance. My friend Michael McCrodan read the first manuscript in draft and refrained from discouraging me.
There are many more, but most specifically I wish to thank my editors, Kirsten Hanson and Catherine Marjoribanks. These ladies, between them, taught me what objective professionalism can achieve when allied with fervent enthusiasm. To each, and to all, my thanks.
Jack Whyte Vancouver, British Columbia November 1993
The Legend of the Skystone
Out of the night sky there will fall a stone
That hides a maiden born of murky deeps,
A maid whose fire-fed, female mysteries
Shall give life to a lambent, gleaming blade,
A blazing, shining sword whose potency
Breeds warriors. More than that,
This weapon will contain a woman's wiles
And draw dire deeds of men; shall name an age;
Shall crown a king, called of a mountain clan
Who dream of being drawn from dragon's seed;
Fell, forceful men, heroic, proud and strong,
With greatness in their souls.
This king, this monarch, mighty beyond ken,
Fashioned of glory, singing a song of swords,
Misting with magic madness mortal men,
Shall sire a legend, yet leave none to lead
His host to triumph after he be lost.
But death shall ne'er demean his destiny who,
Dying not, shall ever live and wait to be recalled.
PROLOGUE
I cannot think of Camulod without thinking of horses. They were everywhere and they dominated my boyhood. The life of the place revolved completely around them—them and the men who rode them—and the earliest sights and smells I can remember are those of the stables. Almost half of the entire hilltop on which the fort was built was given over to stables and exercise yards, and a huge, barren campus, or drilling ground, had been created on the plain at the bottom of the hill. At any hour of the day, you would find up to a dozen separate groups of horsemen there, wheeling and manoeuvring at the walk, the canter or the gallop, and sometimes charging in great, massed formations, so that in the summer months a pall of dust hung over the plain and never settled. Horses, and the noises and the smells of horses, were a constant and unchanging fact of life in Camulod, and every generation of them bred there was bigger than the one that had produced it.
I did not know that at the time, of course, because I was a boy, and to my eyes they grew ever smaller. As a very small child I was dwarfed by the horses of the mounted troopers I admired as gods. As a boy of eight, they still made me feel small until I mounted one of them. But as a youth, approaching man's stature, I found that they had become reasonably sized.
Throughout my boyhood, Publius Varrus, who was my great-uncle and my guardian in the absence of my father, kept entire crews of smiths working in revolving shifts in six separate smithies, four within the fort itself and two more in our villa on the plain beneath the hill. The fort smithies were completely dedicated to the needs of the cavalry. Two of them made nothing but horseshoes and harness and armour.
A third made nothing but nails, thousands upon thousands of them: nails for horseshoes and nails for building barracks and stables and stalls; small nails and studs for boots; and rivets for leather and armour. In later years, this manufactory also produced the bronze and iron wire for the tiny loops that we joined to make the chain link armour our horsemen used. The fourth smithy in the fort produced weapons for the riders: spears, swords and daggers, fitting products for the largest and the noisiest forge of all.
On the plain below, the villa smithies supplied the rest of our Colony, producing all of the farming tools and implements and the thousands of utensils required for their daily working needs by a population of upwards of four thousand people.
In Camulod today, the fort, the smithies and the great, barren drill field below the hill lie empty and unpeopled. The villas that it guarded are no more. They are burned, torn down, despoiled, defaced, their glorious mosaics ruptured and destroyed. The Colonists who lived there are dead for the most part, the few, forlorn survivors scattered on the winds. I alone remain, ancient in years but filled with youthful memories, living hidden in the hills close by the Colony, in solitary sanctuary, railing at the heavens by night, and thanking them by day for leaving me with my hands, and my mind, sufficiently intact to allow me to set down my tale.
I have no sense of faith that men will read the words I write. None live whom I would wish to read this tale, and only few who could. The men who roam this land at will today are brutal, fierce in their savagery and awful in their pagan ignorance. They know no gods but Lust and Gluttony, no love but Satiety, and their women match their baseness. The art of reading and writing is dead in Britain. And yet I write, because I must. Mine is the only voice left, though muted to scratchings on parchment, to tell this tale of what once was and what might—could—have been.
All of the treasures that filled Camulod are shrunk to four, and they are lodged with me here in this small stone hut. One is a window of glass, so clear and fine as to be almost transparent. One is a mirror of lustrous, polished silver, owned by my aunt Luceiia long ago—I retain it in memory of her beauty, keeping it clear and untarnished, but have not dared to look into it these thirty years. Another is the wondrous, shining sword that is my sacred trust. It lies securely hidden in the pit concealed at the rear of my dwelling.
The fourth of these treasures has value to my eyes and mind alone. It is a tiny mountain of papyrus and fine parchment, covered in the writing of four clear, separate hands, one of them my own.
Now that I am old and toothless, I am driven to continue and complete the chronicle begun by my grandfather Caius Britannicus almost a century ago, and carried on by his friend, my great-uncle Publius Varrus. Even my father, Picus Britannicus contributed a few of his personal evaluations and followed this family's tradition of struggling to find words to write down to describe the lives we have led.
I have been a scribbler since childhood, aping Uncle Varrus, who would spend hours each day writing in his parchment books. But I could frighten myself, I think, were I to give way to the awe I feel when I open my chests of parchments and papyrus and look at the sheer bulk of what still remains of all I have collected. For years now, I have been winnowing these writings, burning the major part, the trivia, and setting aside those elements essential to the telling of my tale. The first part is done, and ashes lie mounded in a shrunken, rain-sodden hillock in front of my house, here in my hidden valley in the hills. My sole remaining task is to arrange the remnants in sequence and provide sufficient additional details to bridge the few gaps that yet persist. All I require to achieve that end is time, and time I have—time in abundance. Longevity is my penance; fidelity to my tale, my burden.
This tale is mine, to a great extent, since mine was the living of it. Much of what I have written, however—the parts I did not experience directly—I discovered simply because I am Merlyn and men feared to lie to me, believing me magical. I did not care to disillusion them, since it suited my purpose later in life to be both magical and feared. Those attributes ensured my solitude, and therefore my freedom to do what I must do, and I taught myself well to be uncaring of what men thought of me.
I taught myself well, I say, but it was far from easy. I was not always lonely, nor feared and shunned by men. As a boy, my name was Cay, short for Caius Merlyn Britannicus, and I had a sunny childhood, unmarred by pain or sorrow. As a young man, I enjoyed my status as a leader in our Colony and my life was filled with laughter, with adventures, and with friends. Later still, I learned the joys and the grief of love—and lived beyond them, filling my days with duty as men did at that time, until my forty-second year. Only then did I learn the awful secret that divorced me forever from the lives of other, ordinary men and brought to me the status of Sorcerer and all the allied pains of solitude.
I was born in the year that brought catastrophe to Britain: .the first year of the new, fifth century from the birth of The Christ, the year the Christians call 401 Anno Domini. The world our fathers had known disappeared forever in the course of that fateful year, when the great change began, and yet the awful significance of the change itself was slow in penetrating our world.
It was not that the word spread slowly—the speed of calamitous news is always swift—but this cataclysm was so huge, so overwhelming in its implications, that it defied credence, so that people, hearing the news and passing it along to others, remained themselves unwilling to countenance the truth of it. It was so appalling, so terrifying in its ramifications, that people would not talk of it. They could not digest it. They could not believe it. Yet neither could they long avoid it, for the emptiness of the roads, stretching unmarched for mile after silent mile, bore witness to the truth of it. The brashness of thoughtless children playing noisily in the streets of the deserted camps bore witness to the truth of it. The keening of abandoned women, deserted in thousands throughout the land, bore witness to the truth of it. And the terror of the people of the eastern and southeastern coasts and of the northern reaches below the great wall Hadrian had built bore witness to the truth of it.
The Eagles had departed, flown away. The Legions had been called home. The Armies were gone, leaving only a skeleton presence to maintain a show of strength while the Empire struggled for its life elsewhere. Within six years, even the few legions left behind had followed that first exodus, and after four hundred years of Pax Romana—Roman peace, protection and prosperity in Britain—the country lay soft and undefended, at the mercy of her enemies.
BOOK ONE - Hatchlings
I
I was six years old by the final year of the great evacuation, awakening to my life in the colony we called Camulod, which, like Rome itself, had been built on a hill and dedicated to the high ideals that built the great Republic. It was Publius Varrus's wife, my great-aunt Luceiia, who had thought of naming the Colony Camulod, in honour of Camulodunum, her brother's—my grandfather's—birthplace, an ancient place sacred to Lod, war god of the tribe of Celts the Romans had named the Trinovantes. Today men call it simply Colchester, meaning the fort on the hill, but her brother had refused to use that new, brash, graceless name. By modifying the ancient name to fit a new location, Luceiia Britannicus had honoured both her brother and his monument.
One of the first lessons I learned in extreme youth was that things had not always been as they were. Camulod had not always been rich in horses, nor had its economy been purely equestrian. It had been my own father who had changed everything, I learned, the year that I was born.
My father was Picus Britannicus, and his title was Legate, or General. He was Supreme Cavalry Commander and Deputy in Britain for the great Flavius Stilicho, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the Emperor Honorius. In the year of my birth, 401 in the Year of Our Lord and the eleven hundred and fifty-fifth year of Rome, Alaric, war chief of the barbarian Visigoths, had threatened invasion of the Roman heartland itself. He had penetrated as far as Stilicho's home city of Milan before Stilicho was able to assemble an army by means o
f an emergency summons for all uncommitted Legions to return to Italia to combat the threat. My father, a close personal friend of Stilicho as well as a trusted colleague and confidant, had answered that summons, embarking immediately with most of his troops and as many horses as he could transport in the time and the vessels available to him. The remaining stock, no less than six hundred and eighty prime animals, he had left in the care of his father, my grandfather, the proconsul Caius Britannicus, who had been named by Stilicho Legatus Emeritus—Supreme Commander—of the Irregular Armies of South-west Britain. The charge implicit in my grandfather's title was the interim governance of the south-west, and the protection of its territories against invasion, pending the return of the Imperial Legions following the defeat of Alaric and his Visigoths.
By the time word arrived of my father's departure, however, my grandfather was dead, murdered by a madman, and my great-uncle Publius Varrus had assumed command of our Colony. Uncle Varrus knew what Caius Britannicus would have wanted him to do, and so he used my grandfather's seal and sent out soldiers to accept the consignment of horseflesh. This immediate quintupling of the Colony's herds had a revolutionary and permanent effect on the Colony. Victorex, the stablemaster, had to increase his staff of grooms and stablemen tenfold, and farms that had been under the plough had to be given over completely and immediately to the keeping of livestock. But the concerns voiced over the loss of arable land in this exercise were quickly stifled by the realization that this great influx of mounts gave us the capability to reclaim previously abandoned lands, and even to break new ground, since our corps of mounted troopers quickly became large enough to permit constant patrols in strength, and continuous protection for all the workers employed on these lands.