Uther cc-7

by Jack Whyte

  He need not have worried, for if Uric had even thought of the journey from that viewpoint, he must have dismissed the thought immediately as irrelevant. He had far more important matters on his mind. His only words to Uther were instructions to go at once to the head cook and ask him to fill Uther's saddlebags with enough provisions to keep the two of them, father and son, well fed for the next forty-eight hours. And as soon as he had the supplies, including a plentiful quantity of drinking water in skin bags that they could hang about their ponies' necks, Uther was to arm himself with a full quiver of arrows for his bow—a boy-sized version of the huge Pendragon longbow made especially for him by his grandfather's own bow-maker—and rejoin Uric at his tent as quickly as he could. Uric wanted to be away and headed for home within the quarter hour, he said, and Uther needed no further urging.

  Once on the way, they rode hard, pushing their mounts for maximum speed but taking great care at the same time not to overtax the beasts, as they had but one animal each. Since the actual hunting was done on foot, they had taken one horse each along with them purely as a measure of luxury and self-indulgence. Now they rode in a way calculated to cover distance most economically without exhausting their ponies, riding at a walking pace for a mile or two, then increasing their gait to a canter for a similar distance and then to a loping run for an equal space, avoiding any flat-out gallop that would tire the animals unduly. And for one quarter of every hour, they would dismount and allow the animals to graze and refresh themselves.

  Uther had hoped to be able to talk to his father at greater length and more intimately once they were on their own, away from the others, but he could see that his father's attention and concerns were focused elsewhere. Most of the questions he asked Uric in the first hour of their journey were met with grunts or with utter silence, and the few responses that he did receive were distracted and practically incoherent. Uther soon accepted his father's preoccupation and fell silent, riding thereafter with his own thoughts for company.

  It was plain to him that his father was very deeply troubled by the tidings that had come from Tir Manha, although Uther himself could see nothing dire in the message he had heard. Grandfather Ullic had fallen from his Thinking Stone and injured himself, but there seemed to Uther to be no reason for great concern in that. Uther had seen the Thinking Stone a thousand times and had clambered all over it when he was no more than an infant, and the thought of anyone, and most particularly his Grandfather Ullic, hurting himself badly through a fall from its edge to the ground seemed ludicrous to the boy. No more than five days earlier, Ullic himself had sat on the very edge of the Thinking Stone with his buttocks on the stone itself and his feet on the ground, resting his hands on his bent knees while he talked with Uther. At its centre the stone was probably the height of one tall man sitting on the shoulders of another, but its top surface was enormous, easily ten long strides across and almost twice that in length, and gently rounded like a huge, smooth egg. It would be impossible, Uther knew, to fall directly to the ground from the boulder's highest point. And yet, Ullic's advisers would not have sent the runners looking for his father without good cause. Ullic himself would have chewed holes in their hides if they had.

  Uther could see worry stamping itself more visibly into Uric's face. His grief and his concern for the King gradually became so evident, and his impatience and frustration with the slowness of their progress so pronounced, that Uther eventually found himself anticipating the worst and beginning to come to terms with the formerly inconceivable notion that King Ullic Pendragon might actually be in danger of dying as a result of unimaginable injuries.

  In Uther's short lifetime he had known three invincible, unmovable, impermeable personalities: Ullic Pendragon, Uric Pendragon and Garreth Whistler. All three of these men were his heroes, and their indestructible permanence anchored his own identity. He had never ever considered any of them to be capable of dying.

  When they reached home, they found their worst fear confirmed: the King was dead.

  As was the custom in such cases, and hard on the heels of Uric's formal confirmation that the dead man was his father, Uric was taken to attend a gathering of his clansmen and was formally named the new Chief, assuming his father's duties and the Chief's chair left empty on Ullic's death. He was distraught, his mind overwhelmed by his loss, and he showed little appetite for the tasks to which he was being appointed and no interest at all in the ceremony surrounding the event. The Druids were prepared for that, however, and moved around and about him as though he were functioning as normally as they were so that the rites and legalities of succession were quickly observed and ratified by Druidic custom. King Ullic Pendragon had been dead for three days, and Uric was now Chief of Pendragon, the rightful occupant of the Chief's chair.

  All of these thoughts passed through Uther's mind now as he sat staring at the bier and the armoured corpse displayed upon it, laid out for the burial rites. Ullic Pendragon—if this were really he—lay flat on his back, his eyes held shut by two small, flat pebbles and his hands crossed on his abdomen, loosely clasping the hilt of his sword, a Roman short-sword made for him personally by his close friend Publius Varrus of Camulod, Uther's other grandfather. Publius Varrus himself was there too, sealed across the bier from Uther with his wife Luceiia Britannicus Varrus by his side, both of them gazing at the corpse on the bier and thinking their own thoughts, paying their respects in silence.

  Finding himself in the intimate presence of death for the first time and looking at the corpse of his beloved grandfather, Uther discovered that he seemed to be incapable of the kind of grief he could see overwhelming everyone around him. He had no time for grief, it seemed to him, and no capacity for grieving. The body, laid out in all its finery upon the bier in the Great Hall, surrounded by heaps of fresh-cut blossoms and aromatic herbs and pine boughs, looked quite like someone else's notion of King Ullic. Uther could hardly believe that it was really his Tata. The nose was too sharp-edged and bony, for one thing, and the cheeks too grey and sunken, creating hollows in the face of this fellow that were never visible in the laughing face of Ullic Pendragon. And this man, whoever he might have been, was visibly smaller, over all, than Ullic Pendragon. His arms, despite their familiar, silver-chased leather armbands, were far slighter, much slenderer than Ullic's massive forearms, and his hands looked skeletal, bony and thin-skinned, with brownish blotches on the backs of them. Ullic's hands were enormous and filled with life, strong and deft in everything they did. Even the dead man's beard looked different from Ullic's. Ullic's beard was iron- grey and rich, a dense and bristling bush concealing his mouth, chin and neck from the wind and other people's eyes. The beard on the dead man was a wispy, sad thing, unkempt and unimposing.

  Uther was far from convinced that the dead man was King Ullic Pendragon.

  He could see, nonetheless, that everyone else believed it. His mother's eyes were swollen and red from constant weeping. She had been weeping when he and his father arrived home from their journey, and she had not ceased since. His father had been weeping too, and although Uther found that hard to credit, there was no doubting the evidence of his own eyes. Uric's eyes were as red and as swollen as his wife's, and his cheeks were grimy with smeared soot from the fire, where he had sat huddled for hours, shrouded in whirling smoke and staring into the coals, occasionally wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand.

  Uther's grandparents had also brought Cay with them from Camulod to honour the dead King, who had been Cay's uncle- eldest brother to Enid, the mother Cay had never known. Cay now sat behind Uther, slightly to his left. A quick backwards glance over his shoulder revealed that his cousin was sitting with his eyes closed, and the thought occurred instantly to Uther that he might be asleep, tired out by the swift and unexpected journey from Camulod That thought then led to a ludicrous vision of Cay snoring aloud and startling himself awake, outraging everyone, family and Druids, and for a long time after that Uther had a hard time fighting an insane compulsi
on to laugh out loud. He had no wish to laugh, but the urge to bray out guffaws of mirth was almost insuperable, and he was terrified that he might give in to it and disgrace himself.

  Desperately then, in a frantic effort to divert his thoughts, Uther stared at the bier and tried to think of all the ways he had heard of to dispose of a dead body. Everyone died, he knew, but it had somehow failed to register in his mind prior to this episode that "everyone" included all the members of his own family. Ullic Pendragon had been but the first to go in Uther's lifetime, but now, looking at his grandfather's bier, Uther realized for the first time that within Ullic Pendragon's lifetime he, too, had had to stand and bid this kind of farewell to beloved family members . . . his own grandparents, born more than a hundred years before King Ullic's death, and his own parents after that. He accepted, too, for the first time, that just as surely as Uric Pendragon was now mourning the passing of his father, Ullic, he, Uther, would one day have to mourn Uric and his mother, Veronica, and the kindly couple from Camulod who were his mother's parents. All of them were bound to die.

  His mind reeling with the anticipation of so much loss and sorrow, Uther scrabbled frantically inside his mind for something to distract him from such thoughts and remembered that he hail been counting ways to dispose of bodies that had ceased to live and breathe. He forced himself to focus upon that again, willing himself to empty his head of everything but the logistical problems caused by death.

  The fact that everyone died entailed the logical conclusion that everyone's body had therefore to be disposed of. This was a novel and astounding thought for Uther. He looked around the gathering assembled to say goodbye to King Ullic and made a cursory attempt to estimate the number of people there. It was well over a hundred, all of whom must die eventually. From there, he visualized the population of Tir Manha, as he had seen it at official festivals and functions. So many people, he thought. So much death. How could I have reached the age I have without falling over corpses everywhere?

  Everybody died, and astounding as it might seem, those left alive were able to absorb the deaths and deal with the remains of those who died. And everyone, all of the peoples in the places he had known in his short lifetime, appeared to do so differently. He knew, because he and Cay had discussed it once a few years earlier, that in Camulod most people were buried according to the Roman military system. Individuals were usually buried standing upright, in the case of men, or sitting upright if the corpse was female. None of the adults he had asked, including his Grandfather Varrus, had been able to tell Uther why this should be so, but some of them, after discussing it among themselves for a time, had suggested that the custom of upright burial had come into being in the early days of the Roman Republic's foreign expansion and conquests, when the need to dig postholes for temporary fortifications, and sometimes in search of fresh water, had still been commonplace. For those purposes, army units had carried wide iron augers the breadth of a man's shoulders in their supply trains. These devices could drill a vertical hole into soft ground as quickly as two-man teams could twist the handles in a circle. And once the cylindrical hole was dug, a corpse could be dropped into it feet first, then quickly and completely covered, leaving a narrow, vertical grave that was less likely to be seen by enemy searchers than a horizontal one. That had apparently been important in early, pre-Christian times, when vengeful enemies would seek out and disinter dead soldiers, knowing that a desecrated grave would deny its soldier occupant access to the Underworld.

  For burials involving larger numbers of people, Uther had learned, the Romans had used mass graves, and the bodies laid in those were covered in quicklime to aid the process of dissolution and to burn away the stink of rotting flesh.

  In Cambria, he knew from experience and observation, most of the common people were not buried at all but were instead closely wrapped in cloth or leather bindings and hoisted up to lie on burial platforms among the branches of the sacred trees until their flesh had been consumed by the creatures and spirits of the air, and their hones polished by wind and weather. The noble families and the Druids, on the other hand, were usually burned after death, although exceptions to that rule were common, and the smoke and essence of their burning was offered up as a sacrifice to all the ancient gods of the Cambrian pantheon.

  Great Chiefs and Kings, however, were treated differently upon their deaths. From time immemorial, Celtic Kings and Chiefs had been laid to rest in longhouses. These were dwelling places built entirely beneath the surface of the ground, then stocked with everything the occupant might require during his passage to another life and finally sealed protectively against the curiosity of living men before being buried under a high-piled mound of earth. Ullic Pendragon would be buried thus today, on the third day following his death, and the presence of his earthly remains, secure in his longhouse, would bring blessings on his people. He would be entombed in his finest clothing and armour, but he would be entombed alone, and his weapons would go into the longhouse with him. In the very ancient past, Uther knew, slaves and servants would have been killed and sealed into the longhouse with the King, to serve and protect him on his journeys through the Land of the Dead. Ullic's great war helmet, the Eagle Crown made for him as War Chief-—a rank that could only be won by physical prowess in battle and had nothing to do with the hereditary rank of clan Chief—would go into the grave with him too, to signify his rank and status to the spirits he would meet on his long voyages. No one else could ever wear it after Ullic's death, and the next War Chief of the Pendragon Federation would have his own Eagle Crown fashioned and built to fit his head alone, and that was as it should be.

  The Druids were singing a mournful, undulating dirge, and the pungent smell of burning pine needles and green mistletoe made Uther catch his breath, drawing him out of his reverie. Across from him, on the other side of the King's bier, something flashed in the dim light and attracted his eyes. It was a golden pendant, resting on his grandmother's breast. Now he focused on the golden trinket and stared at it, until his gaze drifted up towards her shoulder and the shawl she wore to cover her long hair. The shawl was a strong, dark, vibrant blue, and the dress beneath it was a lighter, even brighter hue, so that each brought out the warmth and texture of the other and emphasized the brightness of Luceiia Varrus's blue eyes. Uther had no idea of his grandmother's age, but he was suddenly struck with the awareness that, old as she was, Luceiia Varrus was the most beautiful woman present at the King's funeral. Publius Varrus sat beside her, and as Uther looked at him, a quick thought enlightened his mind. Publius Varrus was dressed as he always was on formal or festive occasions, in one of the military-looking suits of soft and supple multicoloured leathers that were made for him by his own wife. This suit, sombre and sober, befitting the occasion, was made of pliant, dark brown leather, trimmed with a black key design, with a short, waist-length outer garment of thicker, highly polished plates of hide loosely and decoratively sewn together to resemble an armoured cuirass. Publius Varrus looked magnificent. Both he and his wife stood out sharply because of the clothes they wore and the way they wore them, and that realization slung Uther into remembering the guilt that consumed him every lime he returned to Tir Manha from Camulod. It always felt to him at those times that he was returning from light into darkness, from laughter into grimness, from carefree happiness into careworn anxiety and apprehension. Publius and Luceiia Varrus were like magpies among daws. They burned like beacons against the drabness of those surrounding them, including Uther's own parents, who were among the best-dressed Cambrians in the gathering. Uther allowed his eyes to move critically now across the spectrum of the gathering. He felt the tugging of old guilt again, but this time he was able to ignore it. Tata Ullic was dead, and he would never see him again, but it had not been as dreadful as Uther had feared it would be. It hardly hurt at all inside. And after today his grand lather would be buried underground, and everybody would go home again to their own homes, wherever they were. And best of all, he himself would return
to Camulod with Cay.

  The Druids' chanting rose to a crescendo and died quickly away. Uther crossed his arms on his chest and bowed towards the bier with the Chief Druid and everyone else, whispering goodbye to Ullic the King as he did so.

  Within the month, in response to the urgent summons of the Chief Druid, the seven Chiefs of the Pendragon Federation assembled to select a new King from among their own number to fill the place left empty by Ullic's death. Their unanimous choice, to no one's surprise other than his own, was Uther's father. Uric.

  BOOK TWO

  Greetings, Daughter, from your father and myself, both of us are well, our health better than it might he, considering how ancient we are grown, and for that we give thanks to God.

  My grandson came to visit me this morning, to say his farewells and tell us that he is to leave for home tomorrow. It was the size of him, and the speed of his growth from infant to man, that made your father and me face up to the fact that we are, too rapidly, growing old. His visit reminded me, too, that the seasons have flown by again and that if I am to write to you this year, it must be done today.