by Jack Whyte
"Well, then, my question was simple enough: How long is it?"
Uther was now completely mystified, but he drew a deep breath and answered firmly, "I don't know. No one could tell, until they had measured it. They're all different. Every piece of rope is different."
"Good lad, you are absolutely correct! Every piece of rope is different. And so is every piece of fear. That's why the question you just asked me is so difficult to answer. How does a person learn to deal with fear? There could be a thousand different answers to that, because one man can have a thousand different fears, all of them biting him at the same time. He might be afraid of falling from high places, and he might be afraid, too, of drowning in deep water. Can you see how that might work? Good. But at the same time on the same day he might also be afraid of being punished by the King for something he did, and of being punished differently by the one of the King's advisers for something else that he forgot to do. He might be afraid, too, of going home to face an angry wife that night because of something he did earlier that day or the night before, and afraid, at the same time, of his neighbour's dog because it always growls at him when he passes by. He might be afraid of thunderstorms and lightning, and afraid of being made to look foolish in front of his friends. You see what I mean? Being afraid can be really complicated. Here, let's stop by the trough there and clean some of the blood off you."
As Garreth carefully cleaned the cuts and scrapes on his legs, Uther thought about all he had learned that day. Most of his attention, of course, was taken up with what was happening right there, with people stopping and staring and whispering among themselves, some of them speaking to Garreth Whistler, although none of them had the courage to come right out and ask Garreth plainly what he was about.
Finally Garreth straightened up again and dried his hands by rubbing them against his leggings.
"There," he said, his eyes still on the job he had done, "that's better. Now, I've thought about a way to answer your question." He turned and began walking again this time slinging his light, circular shield so that it hung down his back from his left shoulder, and Uther fell proudly in step beside him. They walked again until the crowded village square with its staring busybodies, as Garreth called them, had fallen far behind them. Then Garreth led Uther over to the base of a large old elm tree, where he lowered himself to the ground between two moss-covered roots and rested his back against the trunk.
"Suppose there was a place—a very special place—where you went to do the same thing every day. What do you do every single day without fail? Can you think of something, something you always do—other than peeing?"
Uther thought hard for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head. "I always look each morning to see if I can see the top of the Dragon's Head."
The Dragon's Head was the highest headland to the northwest, closest to Tir Manha, and local lore had it that if the peak were visible in the morning, free of clouds, the day would remain fair.
Garreth nodded. "Where do you look from?"
"In front of our house."
"Is that the best place to see it from?"
"No. I like to see it from the top of Denny's Hill; it's clearer form up there."
"That's good. Now suppose you were in the habit of going there every single morning, up to the top of Denny's Hill to look at the Dragon's Head, and then one morning you found a big dog up there, a very unfriendly dog who had decided to live there and did not like you intruding. Suppose you tried to win him over and befriend him, but he wouldn't have it, and he attacked you every single morning without fail and eventually started biting you. What would you do? Remember, he's a very big dog."
"I. . ." Uther bit down on what he had begun to say, and instead thought quietly for a long time. Garreth waited patiently, and eventually the boy nodded to himself. "I . . . I would find some other place where I could see the mountain."
"Aye, and so would most other people. But there's something wrong with that solution. Can you tell me what it is?"
Uther sat staring, his eyes troubled and his brow slightly furrowed, and Garreth tried a different tack.
"Would you be happy with your new viewpoint, think you?"
The boy sat mum, considering that, then shook his head. When he spoke, he sounded unsure of his answer. "No . . . I don't think so . . ."
"Of course you wouldn't, because what you did was run away from a brute beast! You are more clever than all the dogs that were ever whelped, so how could you possibly be happy about having let one beat you at anything? Now, suppose that, instead of running away, you had gone looking for a good solid stick, like a club, and carried it with you, so that every time the dog attacked you, you whacked it, just once, really hard across the snout. What do you think would happen then? I'll tell you what would happen: that dog would soon stop attacking you, because it would learn, very quickly, that attacking you earned it a sore snout every time. Dogs can be stupid, just like people, but unlike a lot of people, they do learn lessons.
"So here is what we are going to do, you and I. We are going to teach you to how fight against big dogs. We are going to see to it that no matter who attacks you in the future, he'll go running off with a bleeding snout and his tail between his legs. You wait and see; it won't take long. But, first, we have to ask your grandfather the King to permit us to work together. I am his personal champion, after all, so I can't really teach you unless he approves. Shall we go and find him?"
From that day forward a great part of Uther's life, and perhaps the most important part, was spent in the company of Garreth Whistler, who taught the boy not only how to fight, but also how to live his life, first and foremost as the grandson of King Ullic, but then as a future warrior, approaching the world with decency, honour and a sense of responsibility for himself and his own actions.
King Ullic, seeing the advantage to be gained from the bond between his champion and his young grandson, soon appointed Garreth to be responsible for Uther's overall moral and military development, transforming him from teacher and trainer to bodyguard and mentor.
With Garreth's help, by the time Uther turned eight, he had earned the opportunity to begin a formal cavalry-training program during the summer months he spent each year in Camulod with his cousin Cay, starting out at the very beginning as a stableboy and groom. And so when Uther's burning desire to become a Camulodian trooper overcame all else in the boy's awareness, Garreth Whistler decided, with a strong degree of reluctance, that, as an extension of his duties, he too should learn the elements of horsemanship and cavalry warfare in order to maintain his authority over his young charge. To his surprise, however, he discovered that the discipline of horsemanship brought him new and demanding challenges and a fierce enjoyment the like of which he had never known. Consequently, he threw himself into it with more enthusiasm than anything he had ever undertaken before, so that in less than half the time normally required to train a trooper, Garreth Whistler had surpassed his training mates and gained the right to seek promotion.
He held back from that, however, because he was a Cambrian warrior first and foremost, and he knew he could never be a Camulodian. Garreth Whistler knew exactly where his loyalties lay.
Uther, unfortunately, did not. But then, Garreth was twenty-two when he first learned to ride a cavalry horse, whereas Uther, achieving the same feat, was barely nine, his entire world filled to the exclusion of all else with the pressing need to learn and to master kills that intrigued and excited him. Uther had no consciousness of arcane things like loyalties.
Uther lived—or so he had always implicitly believed—in the best of all possible worlds. Ever since he had been five years old and able to think for himself, he had lived in parallel states of euphoria. Each year he would be shipped off from his home in Tir Manha to spend the late autumn, winter and early spring months with his maternal grandparents in Camulod, along with his first cousin, Caius Merlyn Britannicus. Then, in the full flush of late springtime, when the Cambrian mountains were finally free of snow and the rugged
countryside around his parents' home was decked in its brightest, most promising greenery, Cay would accompany him back to Tir Manha to spend the remainder of the spring, the seemingly endless summer and the early autumn months in the Cambrian mountains among Uther's father's folk. Over the space of three long boyhood years, this was how his life had been lived, and as far as Uther and Cay were concerned, so it would continue forever.
To Uther's mind, each of the two places had its own delights. Camulod, in his eyes, was more of a temple than a fortress, a place dedicated to the military virtues defined and epitomized by men like his uncle, Picus Britannicus, the Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, and the heroic officers and troopers who served in his command. It was a light-filled world of superb horses, fine armour and disciplined, military training—a paradise for a boy like Uther. There everything existed in a carefully prescribed manner and for a set, clearly defined purpose. Even the buildings, beginning with the magnificent Villa Britannicus, contributed to the nobility of the place. They were spacious, elegant and luxurious, with central heating and sophisticated bathing facilities. Each time Uther went to Camulod, he embraced it with a delight that was sustained by the excitement of the place until the very day he departed. And each time he left, he marvelled again at the paradox that governed his leaving, his grief offset by the gut-level excitement he felt to be escaping its stringent disciplines and returning to the freedom of a carefree boy's life in his father's home in Cambria, with ghostly stories at night around the fire and wild, unsupervised adventures among the mountains and forests where his father's people lived.
Camulod and Cambria were both home to the boy, and he was equally welcome in each of them, but he had always been aware of the significant differences between the two places, for they were poles apart in almost everything, including the way the people dressed. Each time he made the transition from one place to the other, he would find it jarring for the first few days. He wondered, from time to time, if Cay felt the same way, but he had never discussed it with his cousin, feeling, somehow, that by speaking of it he would be demeaning himself in some strange fashion. Every time that thought popped into his mind, he ignored it until it went away. But it persisted, and it always made him feel guilty and somehow disloyal. Cambria suffered, in many ways, by comparison with Camulod, and Uther was afraid that if he once gave in to the folly of examining the differences too closely, they would overwhelm him.
Strangely enough, however, all the differences that concerned him were physical. He had never believed that the actual people of Camulod and Cambria were different from each other in any major respect until he heard some of his Cambrian elders, clearly disgruntled, muttering darkly about "them others, in that damned Camulod place . . ." and he came to wonder how and why some people seemed to delight in making an insult of the word.
He asked Garreth about it one day. The King's Champion looked up from the sword he was sharpening and stood thinking for a long moment before nodding his head and returning to his task. Watching the big man and thinking that he was going to say nothing more, Uther rephrased his question, offering it this time as a comment rather than a direct inquiry. Garreth, however, had merely been considering how to answer, and now he nodded towards a high-legged stool, indicating that Uther should perch on it. When the boy was seated, Garreth inspected the sword blade closely, then laid it carefully on the bench at which he had been landing, and he pulled another stool over close to Uther.
He had been expecting this kind of question for some time now, he told the boy, surprising him greatly.
"Otherness . . ." Garreth began. "Well, people like to be surrounded with things they know." They were most comfortable, he explained, with familiar situations, and they felt best when they were dealing with people and circumstances they knew and understood from past experience. So anything unknown . . . anything unfamiliar was unwelcome and untrusted. Strangers to any group were always regarded initially with fear, suspicion and hostility. Even among animals, a single, differently coloured whelp among an entire litter would be singled out by its litter mates and killed. People who were noticeably different from their neighbours usually suffered because of it. It might be the occupants of a single house or it might be a gang of boys or even an entire clan, and occasionally it might expand to include an entire people, like Cambrians as opposed to Ersemen or Caledonians. And then the result would be war.
In most instances, though, Garreth said, things never got quite so serious. Small numbers brought small outcomes. It might take lime to resolve those differences and settle all the fears attached to them, but usually the differences came to be first accepted, then ignored and then forgotten altogether.
After that conversation, thinking about what Garreth had said, Uther began to see things in a different light, and he did not like what he saw. He found his memory teeming, all at once, with remembered insults—freely offered by unsmiling men—that he had absorbed and ignored at various times over the previous few years, failing to recognize the barbs for what they were. And all of them, he saw quite suddenly, had had to do with Camulod and with his yearly journeys there to visit his mother's childhood home and live among her people. Each time he returned from Camulod, and for a period each year before he left Cambria to go there, he had been forced to swallow and ignore more than a few sneering comments and cruel jibes that cast slurs upon himself and upon his mother's people.
That recognition hit him hard and unexpectedly, and it left him with absolutely no understanding of how he had incurred such ill feelings. He had never knowingly done anything that would give offence to any grown-up person, and he could not see how his annual stay in Camulod could be harmful to anyone. But the truth was that the men of Cambria, and most particularly the older men, strongly disapproved of the time Uther Pendragon spent in Camulod. And, naturally, that gave rise to the question of why this should be so . . . a question that Uther, a small boy, was unqualified to answer.
With a few more years behind him, however, Uther became utterly convinced that the Cambrians' scorn of Camulod and all things Camulodian was built upon envy and plain jealousy. In terms of all the finer things of life, Camulod had everything that Cambria lacked. As he grew older and used more and more of the facilities that Camulod had to offer, Uther came to appreciate his annual half-year there more and more, and to look forward to his return to his own home less and less. Each year, he was more and more hard-pressed to guard his tongue every time some smug clansman cast a slur upon his absence, or his friends, or where he spent his time away from Cambria. These slurs were usually couched in the kind of question that asked, "What have they got there that we don't have?" and, "Why would you want to waste so much time with them?"
In response, Uther would have given anything to be able to shout out the list of truths that would answer such smug questions: that Camulod had baths and hot water and steam, and that the people there looked clean, were clean and smelled clean, so that he didn't have to hold his breath when he first met them in order to give his stomach time to settle at their stench; that Camulod had large and spacious buildings and houses filled with clean, warm air, centrally supplied by furnaces that burned all year long; that the cattle in Camulod were kept in barns, in stalls and stables, and did not live in the houses with their human owners; and that Camulod had smart, uniformly armoured soldiers—disciplined garrison troops and cavalry, mounted troopers trained to work and fight together as invincible military units.
None of these things did he ever say to any of his father's people, but all of them remained in his mind every day while he was at home in Tir Manha, because he pined for Camulod, with its baths and horses and troopers, its rolling grasslands and lush forests, and perhaps most of all for its carefree laughter and light- hearted camaraderie, so dyed-in-the-wool different from the scowling dourness that was normal among the dark-skinned people of his own mountainous homeland. He pined for those things, and as he grew older month by month, he writhed with guilt because of that, but he
kept the guilt well hidden, and not even Garreth Whistler suspected its existence.
One day, when he had been feeling particularly disgusted with himself for what he had come to perceive as chronic and shameful disloyalty to all that was his own, Uther asked Garreth Whistler to tell him what he had been thinking of on that first day years earlier when he had decided to look out for the small boy he had found in the cattle byre.
Garreth's tuneless whistle died immediately, and he stopped what he was doing. Caught off guard by the sudden, unexpected question, he gazed speculatively at his young charge.
"What's making you itchy, then? You've never asked me that before." Uther shrugged but made no attempt to respond, and Whistler's eyes narrowed. "Are you feeling all right? You look . . . different. Are you coming down with something?"
Uther shook his head. "I don't think so. I feel the same as I always do. What did you think that day?"
"How d'you expect me to remember that after all this time? Can you remember what you were thinking on any particular day that long ago?"
"Yes, I remember thinking that you would laugh at me when I saw you coming into the byre."
"Do you, then?" Garreth's pause was less than a heartbeat in length. "Well, you were wrong, weren't you? I didn't laugh at you."
"No, you didn't. But what did you think?"
Garreth had been scaling rust from an iron breastplate that someone had unearthed from a patch of ground outside the walls, close by the main gateway to Tir Manha. It was the front half of a Roman cuirass and it had been buried for a long time, so that Garreth was not sure he could salvage it. But well-made iron armour was invaluable, and so he was trying, rubbing the pitted, scaling metal industriously with an abrasive mixture of sand, wood ash and tallow. Now he placed his tools carefully on the ground beside him and wiped his tallow-slick fingers on a rag tucked into his belt.