by Jack Whyte
Camulod still burned, and the sight of it smoking there upon its hilltop hardened everything within me. I remembered Daffyd the Druid talking of Lot's fortress in the west, and how it was said to be impregnable, and I swore an oath to send it tumbling, logs and stones and men, into the sea.
I found myself becoming more aware of the life and the pain yet present in many of the men about me. Their screams and moans and pleas for help seemed to grow louder all the time, until my head was filled with the chaos of them, but I ignored them all, friend and foe alike. And then I saw a horse, alive and well it seemed, standing head down, about two hundred paces from where I was. I approached it with caution, having no wish to frighten it again, but it stood calmly and let me take it by the bridle. It was almost exhausted, its flanks and withers scummed with sweat and blood. I hoisted myself up on its back and began to walk it towards our camp, realizing from its stirrups and the length of them that its previous rider had been one of our men with legs far shorter than my own. Having been afoot for so long, I was surprised by how much I could see from the height of a horse's back. The entire battlefield now took on a familiar perspective and, relieved of the need to walk, I began to look around me more carefully.
About three hundred paces short of the armed camp Popilius had built, I came across another of my men, this one alive. He was Polidor, a centurion in my own troop, and his left arm was bound up in a tourniquet above the elbow. I brought my horse sidling up to another* dead animal and clumsily helped Polidor to climb up behind me. Not a word passed between us until he was mounted and clutching me with his good arm.
"How bad is it, your arm?" I asked him.
He answered me through clenched teeth, his voice harsh and sibilant, "Bad enough, Commander, bad enough."
"Well, if this horse can hold us both up for a few moments longer, we will make it back to the camp there. Where did our army go?"
"Don't know, Commander. Probably chasing Lot back to Cornwall."
"I hope not! The last I Saw of them, they were heading north."
The poor horse was staggering by the time we were seen from the walls. The camp was not fully manned, obviously, but there was a garrison of sorts and some of them came running to meet us. Above us, Camulod smoked sullenly. I helped Polidor down to outstretched arms as gently as I could, and saw him safely laid on a bier made of a shield slung between two spears. Then I kicked my exhausted horse to a walk again, in through the north gate, where willing hands were waiting to help me down and remove my battered armour.
XXII
"Did you know you had this, Commander?"
I looked tiredly at the arrow one of the men was holding out to me. "No, where was it?"
"Lodged in your armour, sir, at the shoulder."
"In the back?"
"Yes, Commander, between the joints."
I shook my head. "Didn't feel it. Careful, it might be poisoned."
The trooper held it up to the light and then his face registered amazement. "By the gods, Commander, I think it is! There's a coating of some kind on the iron."
I felt the goose-flesh of horror stirring on my neck again. "Let me see that. Give it here." I held it up to the light as he had done and saw what looked like a residue of silvery- green crystals on the iron tip. They resembled nothing I had ever seen before. I shuddered in loathing and threw the thing from me. "It might well be. The very thought of it sickens me. Be careful of it!"
The trooper who had handed it to me had moved to retrieve it. He picked it up, holding it very carefully, and peered again at the discoloured tip. "Well," he said, almost to himself, "we'll soon find out."
"And how will you do that, Trooper? Do you intend to try it out?" My voice sounded slurred to my own ears, so tired was I.
"Yes, Commander. On one of those whoresons over there." He nodded to a huddle of prisoners I had not noticed.
"You will do no such thing!"
"Why not, Commander?" His look was one of hurt innocence. "I will simply scratch one of them. If it's not poisoned, then there's no harm done. If it is, then we will know who used them last time."
I blinked at him, remembering the harmless arrow that had nicked my wrist, and remembering that this arrow, the one he held so cautiously, had lodged within a fraction of a finger's breadth from my neck. I nodded. "Go ahead, then."
He crossed directly to the group of prisoners, seized one of them by the arm, pulled him out of the group and scratched him deeply with the arrowhead. The prisoner gazed at the wound, dull-eyed, for several moments and then raised his eyes to me, his injured arm held stiffly, so that the small, bleeding wound inside his elbow joint was plain to see. His face was empty of any expression.
I turned away to the centurion beside me. "Water. I need to wash some of this mess off."
"I have already ordered it, Commander."
I saw two soldiers approaching, bearing jugs of water, and then I heard a strangled moan from behind me and whipped my head around to look. The prisoner's face was no longer vacuous; it was a rictus of pain and terror as he held his injured arm out stiffly in front of him. Even as my mind accepted what we had done to him, his moan changed to a high, gurgling scream and he threw himself to the ground, writhing in agony, tearing at his arm and jerking it as though trying to wrench it from his body. I opened my mouth to shout, but nothing emerged, and we stood there, horrified beyond expression, watching the fellow go into paroxysms, arching his back clear of the ground so that he was supported only by his head and his heels until he toppled sideways, scissoring and writhing. It was the most awful spectacle any of us had ever seen. My mind was screaming. That should have been me! That should have been me! until one of the centurions suddenly regained his senses and put the suffering man out of his misery with a swift, merciful, chopping arc of his short-sword. Yet even after the man's head was severed, the body continued kicking and convulsing, spraying great gouts of blood around the yard.
I swallowed the bile in my throat with a great effort and looked for the man who had scratched the prisoner. He stood transfixed, his face as white as death, the arrow lying at his feet where it had fallen from his nerveless fingers.
"You were correct," I heard myself say. "Pick up the arrow and keep it safe for me. Treat it with care to protect its coating. I will have need of it later." I turned then to the ashen-faced soldiers who had brought my water. "Bring that into the tent there. I will wash now."
I washed myself in a haze of cold detachment, dousing my whole head in the water that remained, and then I dressed again in my armour and the tattered remnants of my great, black cloak. My body felt refreshed, I remember, but my mind seemed numb, and I was conscious only of what I had to do next. When I emerged from the tent I found Popilius himself awaiting me, and the camp filling up with dusty, bloodied and weary soldiers.
"Commander Merlyn." Popilius's voice was full of concern. "Are you unhurt? We had thought you dead."
I reassured him mechanically and asked him what had happened in the fort above. His face immediately became troubled but he could tell me nothing other than that whatever had occurred had taken place after nightfall. Since then he had had neither the time nor the opportunity to learn of conditions there.
"So be it," I said, "I shall discover for myself. I am going up there now. What about Lot? Where is his army?"
"Scattered, Commander, what is left of it. Destroyed."
"And Lot?"
Popilius shrugged his big shoulders. "No one seems to know, Commander. He may be among the dead."
"No." I heard the disgust in my voice. "Not that serpent. His kind seldom die that way, with honour. He must have run."
Popilius sounded dubious. "If he did, then he did it quickly, Commander. Uther's men were in his camp within minutes of their first charge."
"Oh, Popilius, he did it quickly, rest assured of that. But he cannot run far enough. Britain is no longer big enough to hide that man from me." I glanced towards the hilltop. "Form up your men, Popilius, and let's go
see what waits for us in Camulod."
He cleared his throat, as though apologizing for his next words. "It cannot be too bad, Commander. The cavalry came out They would not have done that had they been hard pressed."
'True enough, but did my father lead them?"
"I don't know, Commander."
"Well, let's go up and find out how bad the damage is. It worries me that no one has come out yet."
He was determined to be sanguine. "They'll all be fighting the fires."
"Aye, and glad of our help,"
Popilius was right. Every able-bodied person in the fort was fighting die fires, most of which appeared to be under control by the time we arrived. It was only as I entered the gate into the smoke-filled yard and saw the extent of the damage that I thought of the Armoury and the treasure that lay hidden beneath its wooden floor, and my heart leaped into my mouth. The courtyard was chaotic, criss-crossed with lines of firefighters swinging leather and wooden buckets from hand to hand from the great reservoir tanks by the west wall. The yard was awash in filthy, soot-scummed water. I left Popilius deploying his men to the bucket lines and made my way as quickly as I could to the west wall, against which Uncle Varrus had built his house and Armoury. Miraculously, I found the building intact, but surrounded by a phalanx of Uther's Celtic bowmen. The thatch had been fired in places, but the flames had not had time to take proper hold before being doused with water from the nearby tanks. As I approached the bowmen I heard my name being called and Donuil came towards me, accompanied by his guardian, Centurion Rufio. Both men were black with soot from head to foot, but they were the first faces I had recognized since my arrival.
"Donuil," I snapped, one eye on the bowmen, "What has been happening here? What is going on?"
He drew a great, gulping breath, trying to suck fresh air into his lungs when there was none. "It was the wizards, Merlyn, Caspar and Memnon. They escaped from their cells in the middle of the night and opened the gate in the rear wall. There were men waiting outside. They had come up the cliffs at the back."
I was stunned. "They escaped? How? That should not have been possible. They were heavily guarded, were they not?" Both men nodded in assent. "Then how could they escape?" I saw the troubled look in both men's eyes and pounced on it. "You know. Tell me. How could they escape?"
Donuil's low voice contained a hint of truculence. "I told you, Merlyn Britannicus, before you left, when first they came. These men are necromancers—wizards, magicians, servants of death. They have powers that ordinary men lack."
"Rubbish! This was treachery. They must have suborned a guard."
"No, Merlyn!" The big Scot's tone was categorical. "That is not the way of it. They killed all the guards. It was magic of some kind. I woke in the night and went to check on them, for I fear them, as you know. Rufio came with me. When we arrived, the cells were open and the guards all dead. Not violently dead, mark you. We thought at first they were asleep."
"Damnation, Donuil, what you tell me is impossible! How could chained men kill their guards from inside a locked cell?"
"It is not impossible! The men were dead and the prisoners gone. I know not how they did it, but they did it! We raised the alarm immediately, but were not in time to stop them from opening the gate at the back. We managed to close it again, but a large number of men got in."
"How many?" There was something wrong here, but for the moment it eluded me.
The two men looked at each other and guessed, "Fifty? Perhaps sixty."
"And fifty men did all this?" I waved my arm at the desolation around us.
"They had fire arrows. They fired the thatch."
"How many are left? I presume they are in there?" I indicated my uncle's house.
"We don't know, Commander. Perhaps ten or twelve. They.. .they have hostages."
I felt my skin crawl again, as it had over the poisoned arrow. "Who?" But I already knew.
It was Rufio who answered me. "Your aunt, Commander, the Lady Luceiia. Her women. Some others."
"My father," I said, unable not to say it. "Where is my father?" Silence. "Where is he?"
"Dead, Commander."
The silence stretched on for an eternity, and finally I heard Rufio speak again, his voice sounding distant. "They killed him in his bed before they opened the gate." His voice rang in my ears like a brazen bell. My knees gave Way and I felt Donuil grasp me and hold me up. I hung there, letting him support my whole weight until my head cleared.
Finally I whispered, "Where is he now?"
"Still in his bed, where we found him."
"Wait here." I left them and made my way to my father's sleeping quarters, oblivious to my surroundings, uncaring where I stepped.
It was as they had said. My father, General Picus Britannicus, had died in his bed. But not asleep. The bedclothes tangled around his bare legs told me of a struggle and an image flashed into my mind of an earlier struggle from which he had emerged alive. His body hung backwards, his head and shoulders between the edge of his cot and the floor, so that I could not see his face. There was blood everywhere. I looked op at the light streaming in through the tiny, sooty window above his bed and my soul felt empty. I walked around the bottom of his cot and tried to lift him onto it, to arrange him with more dignity than his killers had left him, but he was rigid and cold. The gaping wound in his throat had completed the work begun by a Pictish arrow so many years before.
I abandoned my futile attempts to move him and sat on the edge of his cot for a long time, careless of the blood that lay congealed beneath me, remembering the roughness of his voice that I would hear no more, and staring at the massive hand that stretched stiff and clawlike at the end of his rigid arm as though still clutching at life. And as I stared, my resolution hardened.
By the time I emerged once more into the courtyard, I was fully in control of myself again. Somewhere close by a baby was wailing and the sound prompted the thought in me that I might never weep again. Donuil and Rufio were still where I had left them, facing towards me, waiting for me to come back. The ring of bowmen still faced inward, towards the Armoury. The fragrance of cooking food caught at my nostrils. Either the kitchens were undamaged or Ludo was improvising. The noise in the courtyard was appalling. There was smoke everywhere, swirling and eddying among the buildings. I was conscious of all of these things, affected by none of them.
My mind was focused totally on the problem of getting the magicians and their hostages out of the Armoury. I knew in the coldness of my soul that had they not held my Aunt Luceiia there, I would have stormed the place and sacrificed the other hostages. But Luceiia was there, and I could take no risks with her safety—the more so since she was now the last survivor of the original Colonists of Camulod. One clear thought kept returning to my mind, to be suppressed time and again, until I could no longer deny the lightness of it and was forced to admit that it represented the only route open to me, even though the risk that it entailed was petrifying.
I spoke to Donuil and Rufio. "Wait for me here, I have some arrangements to make. Let no one make a move against those people in there until I return, is that clear?" They both saluted me and I left to make my preparations.
I returned within the half hour and went straight to Donuil. "Have these magicians seen you?"
"What do you mean, Commander?"
"I mean have they seen you here? Do they know you are here willingly?"
He frowned, thinking, "No, Commander. I have been careful to avoid them."
"Did they see you in your father's hall?" He nodded, frowning. "And do they know of your father's high regard for you?"
He nodded again. "Aye, they do. I heard them speak of me as my father's favourite son, even though I was not firstborn."
"Good." I reached out and grasped his forearm. "How would you like to earn your freedom today?" The measure of my need of his assistance was implicit in my offer and he was astute enough to realize that immediately. His eyes narrowed.
"My freedom?"
He seemed about to scowl at me. "How would I do that?"
"By performing a service for me."
"A service." His expression was difficult to read. "What kind of service?"
"A pretence of being what you are, a prisoner, but an unwilling one."
"Pretence?" Now he frowned. "I do not understand."
"It's not difficult," I told him. "These people—these magicians, as you call them—hold my aunt hostage. She is one of the two people in the world I hold most dear. The only way I can think to save her life is to put it at risk in an exchange of hostages."
He was silent for the space of a few heartbeats, then, "You mean me, in exchange for her?"
"Yes."
He frowned again and shook his head. "It won't work, Commander. These men care nothing for me."
"No, but Lot does, or he will, as soon as he comes to realize that he can increase his influence over your father and impress your sister by producing you safely from captivity. He would see you as a political tool of great power— a means of fortifying his alliance with your father and his people."
The young Scot was far from stupid. He saw the flaw immediately. "But Lot is gone, Commander. As soon as he reaches his home he will see the truth of things, that our army was broken. Our forces would be useless to him now."
"I disagree, but that is not important here. The point is that these people don't know the truth of it. They will seek to make the exchange for the advantage of handing you over to Lot. They will see a golden advantage to themselves in that. Which of them is the stronger?"
He shrugged. "Neither is stronger than—"
I cut him off impatiently. "Nonsense. In any and every partnership there is a dominant and a subservient partner. That is human nature. Think! Which of them makes the decisions?"