by Jack Whyte
"That's what I mean. Did you tell him the story?"
"I did, yes."
"How did he react?"
"Shock, and concern. Both, I felt, quite genuine. But he didn't believe the story of her magical disappearance. He knew you had something to do with it."
"How could he know that?"
"He didn't know anything, Cay. He merely said it smelled like one of your tricks."
"What tricks?" I remember the injured innocence in my voice before the next thought occurred to me. "You didn't tell him how we did it, Father? Did you?"
"No, I did not, nor did he ask me."
"I wonder if he asked Titus?"
"I asked Titus that. He didn't."
"So," I shrugged my shoulders, hitching my armour so it hung more comfortably, "shock, concern and no guilt. Good for Uther." I shook my head. "I'll be glad when this affair is over, one way or the other."
The next day I rode out to the valley to check on Cassandra, hoping to find her much improved. She was. I could see that the moment I opened the door of the hut. She was sitting up against the wall, feeding herself with a spoon from a bowl that Daffyd held for her. I looked around the interior of the tiny room.
"Hello, Daffyd. Where are the boys?"
"Hello, yourself, Princeling. They are gone. I sent them home days ago. They were driving me mad, cooped up in here like a couple of randy weasels."
"How is she?" She was staring at me over Daffyd's shoulder and her eyes were enormous, far bigger than I remembered. The bruising had begun to heal, and her whole face was now a mottled, yellow colour, tinged with blue in places. There were a couple of small scabs on her eyebrows, and around her mouth where her lips had been split open.
"She is recovering. Don't you think she looks better?"
"Aye, she does. How are her teeth?" I did not know what had prompted me to ask that.
"Oh, she'll bite again. They are all still there. Two were a little loose, but they are stiffening. She's young and she's healthy and mending fast."
"Good. Any broken bones?"
"No, and her eyes are fine, before you ask. But she is deaf, and mute, as we suspected. Here, come over here and hold this bowl for her. I have to make water."
I took the bowl and he went outside and I heard the gush of his urine against the wall of the hut. Up close, the girl's face was a sight to marvel at: it was one enormous bruise, from brow to chin. Her eyes were fixed on mine, and she made no move to resume eating from the bowl. I moved it slightly towards her, indicating that she should continue to eat, but she just stared at me and her eyes filled with tears, throwing me into a state of consternation. Women's tears had always unnerved me and, with this woman in particular, I was totally at a loss as to what I should do. I stared, appalled at the great drops of liquid that seemed to hang forever on her lashes before plummeting down her yellowed cheeks, and then, looking around frantically for something to dry them with, I found a cloth of some kind lying beside me and snatched it up, moving clumsily to pat the wetness from her face. She flinched at the contact and, as I realized how painful her face must be, I flinched, too, in sympathy, and then she smiled at me through her tears and my stomach turned right over.
I had never seen her smile before, nor had I ever seen a smile to equal this. It transformed her whole face, lighting it up from within, bruised and discoloured as it was, and changing it into a thing of ethereal beauty. I was undone on the spot. Even today, decades later, I can remember realizing that that tremulous, slow, painful smile had ensured that I would never seek a smile from any other woman. Even the fact that the movement stretched her tender, healing lips and made her wince again in pain did nothing to disenchant me. I was already lost. She dropped her eyes to the bowl I had abandoned, and I picked it up again and held it out to her. She began to eat again, or sip, as delicately as a fawn drinking from a pool. I lost all track of time and sat there, rapt, until the bowl was empty, when she tapped it with her spoon and smiled again, bringing me back to awareness.
"I thought you thought her ugly, boyo?" Daffyd's voice came from right behind me, but I didn't take my eyes from her yellow face.
"I did, Daffyd, but I had never seen her smile. I must have been blind."
"Aye, or preoccupied, perhaps. Anyway, from the way she's looking at you, she doesn't find your face too frightening."
"Hmm." I was gazing at her face. "Daffyd, how... How are her... other injuries?"
"Her body openings? They're healing. She will be fine, in her body, at least. In her mind...I just don't know, Merlyn. I've seen women who have been violated in war, some of them brutally. They've taken it in their stride, for the most part. But I have only ever seen two women who were treated like this before, outraged for no apparent reason with what had to be a mindless violence. Neither of them was ever the same afterward."
I felt a chill in the pit of my belly. "What do you mean? In what way? Who did it to them? Was it the same man?"
"No, no, the two were years apart." He moved away from the table and gave his attention to the fire in the small, open hearth, blowing carefully on the embers and then feeding in sticks one at a time until the fire was blazing heartily again. In the meantime, I sat staring at Cassandra who stared right back. Finally satisfied, Daffyd straightened up and turned back to me.
"The first man was really insane. Completely possessed. Threw himself over a cliff and killed himself and good riddance. The other one, years later, was never caught. Never knew who he was."
"How long ago was this, Daffyd?"
"The last one? Oh, must be ten years gone, now."
"You said the first one was possessed. Do you believe in possession?"
He looked at me severely, quirking one eyebrow. "Anyone who doesn't is a fool."
"Then you believe in evil." Aunt Luceiia had used the word to describe the priest Remus.
"Of course I do. If you believe in good, boyo, you've got to believe in evil."
I was uncomfortable with that, with his loose definition of the idea I was grappling with. I looked again at Cassandra. She was the antithesis of everything with which I was trying to come to grips. I shook my head in a qualified denial of what Daffyd had just said. "No," I said, "the opposite of good is bad, Daffyd. Evil seems to me to be far beyond mere badness. It's something else altogether."
Daffyd was looking at me strangely. "What are you trying to say, Merlyn?"
I could only shake my head. "I don't know, Daffyd. But this..." I nodded towards the silent girl on the bed. "It seems to me that anyone who is truly evil must be unfit to live."
"How many such people, truly evil people, do you think there are in this world, boy?"
'Truly evil? I don't know that, either, but there can't be that many. I've never met one." Something ticked in my memory. "Wait, though! I'm wrong. I have met one. One person." My memory was churning now, spinning out a long, connected series of images. "When Uther and I were boys, we met Lot, the son of the Duke of Cornwall. He and Uther fought, and tried to kill each other. I mean, it was no boys' fight, Daffyd. They went at each other with swords and both were wounded. My father dragged them apart before they could kill each other. Thinking of it now, I remember Lot as evil...profoundly, unbelievably wicked, through and through, for the sheer pleasure of it...almost mindlessly bad, but not endowed with the saving grace of mindlessness, for he knew exactly what he was doing."
"Hmph! Do you feel the same way about Uther?"
"Uther? Gods, no!" I was genuinely shocked.
Daffyd smiled slightly. "I'm glad to hear that, boyo. Lot of Cornwall, eh? Funny, now, you should pick him. You're not the first I've heard say such things about him. He's a bad one, all right. Calls himself King Lot now, he does. Rules out of that fort that his old father built himself after he saw your Camulod. Quite a place, they tell me."
I was intrigued by the tone of his voice at the mention of this fort of Lot's. "Have you seen it? The fort?"
He hunched in scornful dismissal of the suggestion. "No, never been do
wn that way. Better things to do with my time, haven't I? But they built it right on the edge of the sea, I'm told, on the top of mi island that's cliffs on all sides. No way to capture it, they say. It's a stronghold, no doubt about that."
"Does it have a name, this stronghold?"
He shook his head. "Not that I know of, but then I don't care, do I, boyo? But by all accounts, it's an unusual place. Perhaps you'll see it for yourself one day."
"Perhaps I will, Daffyd, although I hope not. I should not be welcome there."
"Aye," he grunted, "I dare say you're right. Conquerors are seldom made welcome any place they go."
"Conquerors? Why would you say that? You've just told me the place is impregnable."
"No, boyo," he responded. "You're starting to forget all the lessons I taught you. You've forgotten already how to use your ears. What I said was, "they say there's no way to capture it," but who are they? And yet, if people want to pay attention to them, whoever they are, then nobody will even try and the place might never be taken at all, so it would be proved impregnable, wouldn't it? You see?" He was staring at me.
I nodded. "I think so."
"That's good, then, for what I said, and what you thought I said, were not the same thing at all. But I'll tell you one thing, and you should hear me clearly: there's not much good farming land down that way, and if Lot of Cornwall is as big a swine, or a king, as they say he is, he is going to come your way, sooner or later. He has people to feed, so I would say sooner is closer to reason than later. And when he does—notice I'm not saying if he does—you are going to have to teach him his place, you mark my words."
XII
Few struggles can be more fruitless than the bitter, silent battles that a man in love will fight with his own meagre store of words. The odes that I wrote in praise of Cassandra and the new view of life she brought to me were pitiful, but I struggled on, blind to the truth: there are no adequate words to describe what I was feeling. Cassandra, on the other hand, had no need of words at all. Hers was a world without words, a world of total simplicity in which her feelings shone clearly through her eyes and permeated her whole being.
After that first occasion when she smiled at me, I made myself stay away from the valley for a whole week. I had to be strict with myself, for each day I seemed to find a hundred and one good reasons for going there. For seven days I was haunted by a vision of those great, grey eyes. By the time I did return, the bruising had faded entirely from her face and I again found myself staring unashamedly at her, wondering how I could ever have thought her plain or unattractive. I stayed for three days on that occasion, and the happiest times of the three days were her mealtimes, when I fed her because she was still too weak to sit up on her pile of skins and eat her food unaided. She seldom looked directly at me and seemed unaware of my constant scrutiny of her face, which had now become the most beautiful thing in my world.
When I returned again, a week later, she was able to walk, although still very weak. From that time on she improved daily until soon there was no sign at all of the injuries she had sustained. Nor was there any sign of the extreme melancholy that had marked her when we first
found her crouched by what we could only assume to be the bodies of her parents. She was a complete delight to me. It was obvious that Daffyd had been her saviour. He alone had brought her back, not merely from the abyss of the injuries she had sustained, but from the mourning that had cloaked her when we found her.
And then, riding towards the valley one morning, eight weeks to the day from the time we had found her, I received the surprise of my life. I was always at pains to vary my approach to the valley. This time I had used the longest route available to me, heading out north from Camulod and swinging east and then southward in a long arc once I was safely out of sight of the walls. This roundabout approach required two more hours in transit than the shortest alternative, and I tended to use it only in fine weather, since it followed no path and called for careful passage through several stretches of low, boggy ground that could be well nigh impassable during or after bad weather. Once started on this particular route, however, I never had to worry about being seen, since my way lay far from the borders of our closest farm, and its inhospitable terrain held no attraction for casual visitors. The greater part of the path I took, apart from the low-lying, boggy areas, was heavily wooded and strewn with huge, fragmented rocks. Only as I began to approach the low hills that contained my valley and its precious secret did the swell of the land begin to breast upward through the covering of trees until I finally found myself riding among grassy slopes above shallow, tree-filled vales.
The early morning sun had grown warm on my shoulders and on my horse's back that day, lulling me until I drifted mindlessly along, paying no attention to the scene around me and allowing my mount to pick his way at his own pace. I was jerked back to awareness, however, by a sudden, half-seen flash of whiteness moving quickly in the valley below me to my right.
My reaction was instinctive, in spite of the instant chaos of my thoughts. I reined in immediately, every muscle tensed to hold myself and my mount immobile as I scanned the area in which I had seen, or sensed, the movement. Exposed as I was on the side of the hill, I found myself on the edge of blind panic, unable to decide what I should do next. I could discern no further movement in the valley below and, aware all at once of the rhythm of my heartbeat pounding in my ears, and struggling against an unreasoning terror of discovery, I fought to control my breathing and my fears. Even had I been seen, I reasoned, no harm had been done and I was still more than a mile, almost two miles, from my destination, so that I yet had a choice of three directions ahead of me, any of which would lead me well away from the hidden valley.
And then, as I hung there, agonizing, the movement flashed again and I saw a human form, white clad, in the valley bottom, running away from me, its passage masked by dense foliage. I caught only a glimpse of the runner, and it may have been the speed with which he disappeared from sight that sent me plunging downhill in pursuit, reins loose, allowing my horse to pick his own way across the sloping hillside. We were quickly down, and I pointed him in the direction of the runner, leaving him free thereafter to choose his own route swiftly and easily among the trees while I concentrated on avoiding low-hanging branches. A swing to the left around a thick-boiled oak took us to the lip of a narrow, steep-sided depression that fell away rapidly beneath us as my willing horse launched himself up the sloping edge, his great muscles bunching and thrusting easily until he had driven us upward twenty paces and more above the floor of the depression. There the ground leveled again and I drew rein, searching the cleft below for any sign of my quarry. After the thunderous clatter of my horse's heavy hooves on the rocky, sparsely turfed ground, I could at first hear nothing other than his blowing breath and the creaking of my own saddle and equipment. Gradually I became aware of the deep silence. No bird song disturbed the stillness and nothing moved anywhere. I was on the point of swinging around to ride down again to look elsewhere when I heard a distant, grunting sound that seemed to come from the only large tree in the small gorge, some hundred or so paces to my left. I looked that way and saw the most astonishing sight.
I had read in my uncle's books of creatures he had seen in Africa that lived in trees and had the ability to climb so swiftly that they seemed to fly among the branches. Now one such creature met my sight, dressed in human clothing, a brief tunic of spotless, brilliant white. Of course, as soon as I had recovered from my initial surprise and adjusted to the distance separating us I realized it was a boy, but never had I seen a boy who climbed in such a manner. As I gazed in amazement, he pulled himself up effortlessly to stand on a stout branch far above the ground, then crouched there, gathering himself, gazing upward and balancing on all fours, before launching himself in a flying leap to grasp another bough above him and swing himself nimbly onto it, spreading his legs and scissoring them to grasp the limb, then gliding flu idly, with no sign of effort, to where h
e sat astride the branch, at a dizzying height above the rock- strewn forest floor. There, without pausing to look around him, he repeated the entire sequence and so continued, seeming indeed to fly upward, until the limbs of the huge tree grew so closely together that he was able to use them simply as a step-ladder, practically running upward to disappear completely among the thick foliage at the apex of the tree.
Although my reason told me that this was simply a boy, when I lost sight of him at last I had to suppress a shiver of superstitious dread, an old and formless fear stirred by remembered tales of dryads and forest sprites. And then as I sat there unmoving, he descended again, dropping from branch to branch and limb to limb as though falling wildly, yet every move and every leap timed and controlled to perfection so that again I felt the stirring of goose-flesh, this time caused by incredulous admiration.
He leaped nimbly to the ground from the lowest fork of the tree and disappeared again among the bushes before I thought to rouse myself and swing my horse around to give chase.
Down and around we thundered, my horse and I, gaining the valley floor and swinging back hard to cover the ground between us and the fleeing boy, and as I rode I wondered who he might be. We emerged at full gallop from the cover of a thick clump of bushes and yet again I hauled my mount to a halt, so that he slid, stiff-legged, his haunches almost on the ground while I stood in my stirrups in amazement. Before us, the far wall of the ravine in which we rode rose sheer for thirty paces and more, and on the flat sward at its feet the boy stood staring upward, his eyes fastened on the cliff above him. Before I could move, he sprang forward and began to swarm up the stony, grass-covered face. No more than thirty paces and a thin screen of leaves parted us, but I knew that he was unaware of me, having neither seen nor heard my approach. I kicked my heels into my horse and then, just as it began to move forward, the boy stopped climbing and looked sideways, allowing me to see his face for the first time.
It was Cassandra! The realization stunned me. Her name sprang to my lips and I kicked my horse harder, urging him forward, but she had already made her choice of direction and now her total concentration was on the cliff face and her climb. I shouted again, knowing as I did so that she could not hear me. I waved wildly, but her concentration was absolute. In almost less time than it takes to describe, she had reached the rim of the cliff and disappeared beyond it without once looking back. But I had had ample time to look at her, and wonder how I could ever, even from a hundred paces, have erred in thinking she could be a boy.