by Jack Whyte
He moved away to his right, sweeping the branches of the trees back with one arm as he cautiously skirted the very edge of our small cliff. Curwin hawked and spat loudly, and as he did, the giant Saxon I had been aiming at earlier sprang into view again, running hard towards the stream bed, crouched over, followed by a horde of others. I snapped off a quick shot at him and missed, but brought him to his knees with my second arrow, only to watch him being knocked aside by one of his followers who staggered, almost lost his balance then lurched forward and fell over the bank of the stream and out of sight. I saw another fall sprawling, shot by Curwin, and then another as I brought down one more. And then there were no more Saxons in sight.
"Orvic," I yelled. 'They got past us, into the stream bed. Six or seven of them."
Curwin was standing by my side. "They can't get up here without coming out of the cut. I'll hold 'em." Then he was gone, vanished into the trees at my back.
I could hear the twanging of Orvic's bowstring on my right as he fired rapidly, and shouts and yells drifting up from below on his side. Nothing moved below me.
"Orvic, do you need help? You want me there?"
"No, damnation, stay where you are. None of these whoresons are going anywhere." A pause, then, "Where's Curwin?"
"Gone to keep them pinned in the stream bed."
Something snapped in front of my face and I jerked my head back in sudden terror, hearing an arrow smack into the bole of the tree beside me. I looked down, but saw no sign of the archer. To my right, Orvic had stopped shooting.
"They've got bows," I yelled.
"I know." His voice startled me, coming from close behind me. I swung round and saw him leaning against a hawthorn tree, his face ashen, his homespun tunic crimson with the blood from where an arrow had pierced him cleanly, angling upward beneath his left collarbone. As I stared at him in shock, his knees folded and he fell forward onto his face, driving the shaft right through his shoulder.
Now I heard shouting from beneath again, and swung back to my watch, drawing my bowstring back as I turned. There were Saxons running again towards the stream, but now they were faltering, turning as they ran, and some were standing, staring backwards. I dropped one of the latter, driving an arrow into the base of his skull, hammering him down the slope. Before I could nock another, however, they were all running back downhill again, away from me, and I looked beyond them to see the Romans who had held the farm charging towards them in a tight, hard knot of clustered horsemen, swinging in hard across the Saxons' rear from my right and herding them northward, down the slope towards another distant band, a much larger band, of advancing cavalry. My own! I dropped my bow and ran to Orvic, pulling my knife. He was unconscious. I cut through the arrow, quickly and without gentleness, just below the flights, and pulled the rest of the shaft out through his wound in the direction it had travelled. He felt nothing, and I ripped part of my tunic and stuffed both sides of the wound, entry and exit, binding the packing in place with both our bowstrings. As I was finishing, Curwin arrived back, crowing with pleasure and relief, but as he saw what I was doing he stopped in his tracks.
"It's not as bad as it looks," I told him. "A clean wound, and shallow, angled upward. Looks like it glanced off his rib-cage and went beneath his collarbone. Nothing vital hit, as far as I can see. He'll mend and pull his bow again with the best of us."
I left the two of them together, , Orvic still unconscious, and began to make my way down to where the last movements of the drama below were being played out. From above, I could see that the Saxons were dying hard, expecting no quarter and giving none, each of them evidently prepared to go down fighting. In spite of myself, I felt a surge of admiration for their stubborn, pagan courage. The remnant of the fighting was sweeping away from me as I walked alone through the carnage of the battlefield among maimed and dead men. I stopped and turned around, looking up to the point from which I had so recently been shooting. The cliff below it looked unscalable from here, impregnable, towering above me like the wall of a fortress and backed by the grand sweep of the hillside leading up to the escarpment, the face of which was laced by the silvery cascade from the stream. The point itself looked far more distant and inaccessible from here than it had felt up there. I could see no sign of Curwin or Orvic. I became aware of my own shadow, stretching ahead of me westward, up the hill, and it shocked me to realize the sun had not yet reached its noonday zenith.
I heard my name shouted, and turned back to the valley to see Donuil cantering towards me awkwardly, holding the reins of his horse and my own in one hand and clutching my helmet beneath his other arm as though it could anchor him to his beast's back. Moments later, mounted and helmed and feeling much bigger and more in control of my destiny than I had afoot, I gave Donuil my bowstave and quiver and trotted ahead of him towards the gathering that marked the final outcome of the running fight. Apart from a brief word of thanks, I had said nothing to him and he left me to my thoughts. Moments later, I saw Lucanus and made my way to where he was bending over one of our young troopers. I told him about Orvic up on the point above, and he dispatched two stretcher-bearers to bring the big Celt down to safety, warning them against dropping their burden on the steep slope. That done, he returned his attention to the trooper at his feet, ignoring me completely.
"How many casualties, Lucanus?"
"Too many. Five dead, seven wounded including your friend up on the hill. This one's the worst."
"How bad is he?" The young trooper was unconscious.
"Axe wound to the thigh, as you can see, knife wound in the kidney, and probably a broken skull. He won't recover." He still had not looked up. Sighing, I left him to his work and looked around me.
The centre of activity, now that the fighting was over, was a densely packed group of horsemen, some of them my own, milling together on my right in the grip of the euphoria that always accompanies survival after a fight. At the centre of this eddy, I could clearly see a small group of four or five uniformed officers talking to some of my own officers, all of them set apart by the dignity and calmness of their bearing. I kneed my horse towards them as they moved towards me, making their way with authority through the press surrounding them, and as they came, some of my own troopers recognized me and raised a cry of welcome, bringing all of them surging to surround me in a great circle. In the middle of this circle, I came face to face with the strangers, and a silence fell around us.
"Caius Britannicus?"
The speaker was evidently their leader, and as I nodded, I drank in every detail of the man. He was older than me, considerably older, somewhere in his mid-fifties, I guessed, but he had the unmistakable bearing and authority of a professional soldier and a born leader. His uniform was magnificent: helmet, breastplate, armoured kilt and leggings of rich bronze inlaid with gold, all worn over a tunic so white that it dazzled the eyes. A rolled cloak of magnificent deep blue lay tethered over his horse's withers.
"That is my name."
"Well met, then! We are all greatly in your debt. I know not where you and your men came from, but I thank God you did, when you did." He pointed upwards, towards the point at the top of the cliff behind me. "Had it not been for your arrival and the assistance we received from someone up yonder, I doubt that any of us would have lived to see the sun set today. The heathen had us neatly trapped and would have picked us off one at a time." He glanced back at me and smiled then, his whole face transformed into a glow of warmth, and seemed to shake himself mentally. "But please," he said, pointing towards the ruined farm in the distance. "Allow me to be hospitable. We spent last night among the ruins down there, little thinking we would have unwelcome guests by morning, and we were comfortable for a while. Will you and your men be my guests for today?"
"Happily," I said, already feeling a profound liking for the man. I turned to where my troop leader Cyrus Appius sat listening on my right and told him to collect the men and bring them on down to the farm. The few wounded would be tended by Lucanus and the s
quad seconded to him for that purpose.
"Forgive my asking, but why did you allow them to hold you trapped you like that?" I was riding beside the leader, conscious of the fact that he had not told me his name. "I mean, you're cavalry. You could have broken out easily."
"Aye, but there are not enough of us. Less than twenty fighters. We could have broken out, but we have priests with us, a large party of them. They would have been easy pickings for the Saxons. Couldn't just leave them there, could I? By the time I broke out, fought through them, regrouped and swung around again to attack, the Saxons would have been inside, behind the walls, and they would have been able to keep us out. I did not think I could make it work, so I had decided to stay where I was and fight it out. They had us by at least three to one. But where in Hades did you come from? You're not Regular Army, that's obvious, since there is no Regular Army in Britain any more. So who are you? And what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere with two hundred cavalry? And how did you come upon us?"
My horse had fallen back slightly as the stranger was talking, and now I kneed him forward, coming up alongside the man again. "We're on our way north and, as I said, we were hunting. Some of the towns we've passed seem plague-ridden, so we've avoided them. But because of that, we've been unable to buy food, so I sent out hunting parties this morning. My own party was up on the escarpment there when we heard the noise of your fight. The rest you know."
He swung his head around, looking at me wide-eyed. 'That was you, up there? The bowmen, up on the cliff?"
I shrugged and grinned. "Yes, myself and two others. We saw you from the top of the escarpment yonder, up by the falls, and we came down to help. Donuil, here, ran back and roused the others and brought them down by the road over there to the north."
He blinked again, his eyes filled with something like awe. "Well, Commander," he said eventually. "You leave me with nothing to say, but you will forgive me if I regard you for a while as some kind of deus ex machina, for your arrival and intercession seem truly supernatural." I shrugged again, suddenly uncomfortable and unsure of how to respond. He changed the subject abruptly. "You're headed north, you say. So are we. To Verulamium."
Now I grinned at him. "I had guessed as much. It's the only reason I could come up with for your being here. I reasoned that you must be escorting priests to hear Germanus the Bishop debate with our bishops." He drew his horse to a halt and turned to look more closely at me, hitching himself sideways to see me better, an expression I took to be one of rueful surprise on his face. I grinned again. "Am I correct?"
His mouth twisted into a small grin, too, and he twitched his head in a gesture that fell only slightly short of acknowledgement.
"Almost," he said. "I am Germanus the Bishop."
XXXIII
My first impressions of Bishop Germanus and his associates were chaotic—a series of disconnected images rendered the more haphazard by the giddiness and excitement of victory, with the milling, undisciplined euphoria it generated, and then further befuddled by my profound shock over Germanus's revelation of his own identity. A warrior bishop was alien to my experience, a complete contradiction in terms to one who had grown to manhood knowing bishops only as gentle, frequently reclusive men of peace and pacifism. I had known, of course, that Germanus had been a soldier, with a long and successful career as an Army Staff Officer, and that he had retired as a full Legate—a General commanding an entire Army Group. But I had given no thought at all to the means by which the transition from general to bishop, from man of war to man of God, had been achieved. Somehow, through sheer indifference, I had allowed myself to accept, without consideration or question, the notion of a nebulous, mystical metamorphosis of the nature of the man involved—from militant to penitent; from chalk to cheese; from one archetype to another. Now that I was shocked into confronting my own malformed expectations, I immediately acknowledged the impossibility involved. It was inconceivable that Germanus the Bishop would react to aggression and physical threat in a way that was fundamentally different from the reaction one would expect of Germanus the Legate. The man before me now was an anomaly unlike any other in my experience: a devout man of God, thoroughly trained and experienced in warfare. It was a radical and unexpected combination.
Germanus must have read my consternation in my eyes, for he laughed suddenly and pulled his mount into a high, prancing turn that left him close to me on my left side, and leant forward to speak for my ears alone.
"Our gentle Master bade us turn the other cheek to those who would defame us, Caius Merlyn, but he seized a whip Himself when He was outraged in the Temple." He nodded towards the Saxon corpses that littered the hillside. "Turn the other cheek to such as these, my friend, and they'll rip off your Christian ears, before they remove your head." He smiled at me then, a warm and friendly smile. "See to your troops. We'll talk back at our camp yonder."
We exchanged nods and I watched him ride off with his followers before I turned to my own men, who were even now assembling their formations. Lucanus, I saw, had already sent the wounded, on a series of litters, down to the camp below and was now riding slowly towards me. I waited until he reached me and then gave the signal to my men to move off, pulling aside with him to watch them ride past. In the distance, behind them, our heavy wagons were trundling slowly down the road from the ridge above.
"Well, Lucanus? How badly did we fare?"
"Six wounded, none seriously now. The seventh died— the one with the axe wound. We were fortunate to escape so lightly. Who was that you were talking to? Their leader?"
"Yes, in more ways than one. That's the man we came to hear. Bishop Germanus."
I watched his eyes widen in amazement, much as my own must have done.
"A bishop? Leading cavalry?"
"No," I told him, grinning. "A soldier, doing God's work as best he can."
"That is obscene."
"No it's not, Luke. It's different, I'll grant you, but there's nothing unnatural about it when you consider the man and his life." I stopped and sniffed, scenting my own hypocrisy. "Mind you," I went on, "I must admit I thought as you did, at first—until I'd had time to adjust to the reality of the situation." I told him then what Germanus had said to me. Lucanus looked around him at the scattered Saxon corpses and sighed.
"Do warrior bishops drink good wine?"
I laughed. "I have no idea, but I hope so. Let's find out."
We followed our men down to the ruined farm.
Our original estimate from the top of the ridge had been quite accurate. There were twenty-eight men in Germanus's retinue, and of those, fourteen were clerics of varying description. Four of them, I discovered later, were bishops like Germanus, from Gaul and Italia. They were a strangely featureless group, these clerics, ranging in age from the late teens to the mid-forties, I guessed, all of them distinguished by their lack of individual distinctiveness. They were dressed alike, for the most part, in long, plain robes of brown, black or grey homespun cloth, and while several of them wore stout leather belts to waist their robes, there were others who wore a plain length of rope as a girdle, reminding me unpleasantly of the zealot priests who had invaded Camulod. I would discover later from Germanus that these symbols of poverty were manifestations of a growing inclination towards austerity among some churchmen, a proclivity being fostered by the adherents of the Monasticism that was now becoming an increasingly prevalent influence among the religious community in Rome, having spread there from Greece and the Eastern Empire.
The remainder of the party, who had formed the wedge of cavalry that had rescued us, were very different, both in character and in appearance. These men were soldiers, with the uniform, bearing, and manner of soldiers, although the latter was restrained out of respect for the piety of the group they were escorting.
Their commander, a tribune called Marius Tribo, was a gregarious young man who treated his two young subalterns, the decurions Plato and Rufus, with strict yet tolerant authority and goodwill. Plato an
d Rufus, for their part, used a similar approach with their troopers, a nine-man squad who had obviously served together long enough to be the kind of close friends that only serving soldiers can be. Tribo told me, over a cup of excellent wine, that they had been stationed in Gaul for the past four years, campaigning against the Burgundians, who were threatening to take over the entire country. They had already done so, for all intents and purposes, he admitted. There was now no more than a corridor along the north-western coast where Roman forces could feel any degree of security. He, his two subalterns and nine men were all that remained of his original force of eighty—two complete cavalry squadrons. Replacements had stopped reaching them a year before, and they had been delighted when they were ordered to escort Bishop Germanus and his four episcopal companions to Britain to attend the debate in Verulamium. The rest of Germanus's party would assemble there. The lesser churchmen in the present group had joined them in Britain, on the road from the south coast.
As Lucanus and I stood talking with Tribo and his two decurions, Germanus himself approached the fireside where we stood and, taking me by the elbow, nodded pleasantly and made an excuse for taking me away. I followed him to another fire set apart, where no one was cooking and none could overhear us. He had removed his armour and now wore only his simple, white tunic and leggings.