by Jack Whyte
Not once in the entire four months of her sentence did Nemo Hard- Nose set eyes on Uther. In the close confinement of chain duty, she was utterly incapable of tending to her self-appointed duty to protect and serve Uther, and she found that intolerable.
Nemo harboured few illusions about Uther or about herself, but she and Uther saw what happened in the marketplace that day in Glevum very differently. Uther suspected that Nemo had seen him flirting with the woman, Anna, and had been jealous. He was wrong. Uther was her god, and Nemo knew that mere mortals cannot hope to rut with gods. What Nemo had seen and noted was the threatening demeanour of the giant Mark, who had stood glaring at Uther while Uther spoke to Anna. Nemo, standing among her squad mates, had defined a threat in the big man's attitude and had immediately decided to bring him down simply for his overt disapproval of Uther. She had launched her attack without warning the moment Uther walked out of sight. The woman, Anna, had been included in her ire solely because she had been the catalyst that had precipitated the threat against Uther. In the course of chastising Anna's giant lover. Nemo had sought to punish the woman almost casually, in passing, as an incidental indication of her disapproval.
As soon as she and her companions were released from custody at the end of their four-month sentence. Nemo spruced herself up and appeared in her best uniform outside Uther's quarters, where she requested and received permission to report to him for duty. Escorted into his presence, she stood at attention until he turned to look at her, his face devoid of expression.
"So," he said, "Trooper Nemo. You've been released to duty. Did you enjoy your stay with the provost martial?"
Keeping her stance perfectly rigid, she assured him that she had not enjoyed it and did not intend ever to repeat it again. He nodded then and reiterated formally what he had already intimated in his opening words to her: that she would be starting out again from the beginning, demoted to the lowly rank of trooper. That did not concern her; she had lost her ranking as troop leader more times than any other trooper in her intake, but she had always managed to win it back through sheer guts and determination. Uther then dismissed her so that she could meet with her decurion commander.
Nemo was troop leader again within the month, and she worked hard after that at keeping her nose clean and her performance as close to perfect as was achievable, so that within the year, she had won promotion to decurion, the highest rank she had ever attained. No one really expected her to keep it for long, but this time, she swore to herself, things would be different. She was determined to remain a decurion, and months eventually passed into seasons without her earning a single demerit, let alone a demotion.
During the years that followed, Uther and Merlyn became men in fact as well as in name, passing from eighteen years old to twenty- two, and their professional abilities as soldiers matured and became finely honed and unimpeachable. They became known behind their backs by their admiring and sometimes resentful men as the Princes of Camulod, and the life they led was a full and rewarding cycle of duty, achievement and enjoyment. Nemo Hard-Nose soon became inured to the sight of the processions of beautiful young women that came and went with unfailing regularity through the private quarters that Uther and Merlyn called their "games rooms." The numbers of women and the degrees of hilarity and high living fluctuated only in response to the presence or absence of Merlyn's father, the Legate Picus Britannicus, who was still the Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, and whose disapproval was the only thing that could really keep the two young men in line. Uther's grandmother, the widowed Luceiia Britannicus Varrus, also exercised great power over the behaviour of her grandson and great- nephew, but she was seldom seen around the fort; she preferred to spend her time alone in her home with the women of her household.
Towards the end of the fourth year, however, in the autumn, Uther and Merlyn found a young woman in the forest at the far end of one of their regular perimeter patrol sweeps when they had been riding apart from each other. Nemo's squad was there with Uther at the time, and it was Nemo who first saw the young woman kneeling on the ground among the saplings in a clearing away from the road as she rode by. Investigation would show that the young woman, who seemed to be unable to speak, was mourning the deaths of two elderly people who were lying beside her and who everyone supposed were her parents. There were no signs of violence on either of the bodies and no obvious signs of sickness. Nemo sent one of her men riding to fetch Uther, and after a cursory examination of the scene, Uther ordered two of his men to dig a grave and bury the dead. Then he swung the young woman up to ride behind him, where she remained until they arrived back in Camulod. By the time they got there, it had been established that the young woman was mute, and in the need to call her something, one of the young commanders gave her the name Cassandra, after the tragic prophetess of Troy.
On the night they returned from the patrol, in the privacy of Merlyn's games room, something happened between the two cousins that would permanently damage their relationship.
Uther disappeared in the middle of the night, taking only a few of his Dragons and riding away without informing anyone where he was going or why he was leaving so suddenly. That same night, the young woman called Cassandra was savaged and beaten to the point of death. She survived, however, and was confined under heavy guard in the surgeon Lucanus's infirmary. Then the following night, she disappeared from a guarded room in a building ringed with guards, and people started whispering that Merlyn had used sorcery to spirit her away. The woman Cassandra vanished completely from Camulod.
Shortly after that. Nemo began to pick up disturbing snippets and fragments and mutterings—nothing that made complete sense and nothing more definite than vague rumour, but the cumulative effect was that whatever might be wrong between the two commanders, Uther and Merlyn, the woman Cassandra was at the root of it all.
Merlyn, it appeared, suspected Uther of something nameless but reprehensible. It could not have been the attack on Cassandra, Nemo reasoned, because she knew that Uther had left the fort during the midnight watch, shortly after storming out of the games room. One of the Dragons from her own squad had been on guard duty outside the tower that night and saw him stride away, and still others had been posted at the main gate of the fort and checked Uther and a half score of their fellows through there shortly thereafter. They had told her, too, that Uther was in no sweet frame of mind.
Uther returned directly to Tir Manha upon leaving Camulod on the night of his quarrel with Merlyn, and many months would pass before he returned. He sent word of his whereabouts to Picus Britannicus immediately upon his arrival home in Cambria and requested that his Dragons be dispatched to join him there. He had need of them, he said, for the next stage of their training, which would be in the lowland valleys of the southeastern part of the country. Picus sent the Dragons home immediately, under the command of their own Cambrian officers, of whom Nemo was one. But it was not to be her fate to remain in Tir Manha, for Uther immediately sent her back to Picus in Camulod bearing important messages, and after that time she lived neither in one place nor the other, the majority of her time being spent on the road between them.
Uther could not stay away from Camulod permanently, however, no matter how disagreeable the circumstances of his departure had been. He had duties and responsibilities to attend to, and his conscience would not permit him to ignore them for long. On his eventual return, he and his cousin Merlyn, despite the unresolved tension between them, were jointly honoured by Picus Britannicus, who presented his two youngest commanders with sumptuous new armour and identifying standards. Uther received a magnificent new cloak, banner and shield, all bearing the device of a great golden dragon woven in thin gold wire on a deep red background. The blazon was similar to the ages-old red dragon emblem of his Cambrian Pendragon people, but it was subtly different so that it would be personal to Uther. To top off the gift and render it perfect, Picus included a new high-plumed bronze helmet in the Roman officers' style, complete with ornate, hi
nged cheek-flaps to guard and conceal his face in battle. Merlyn, at the same time, received a black war cloak lined with soft white wool and bearing the blazon, woven in fine silver wire, of Merlyn's own insignia: a mighty, rearing bear with spread arms and enormous claws, commemorating his killing the largest bear anyone in Camulod had ever seen while armed with nothing more than a large spear. Like Uther, Merlyn also received a new war helmet, this one made, like his personal armour, of black enamelled iron and crested in alternating tufts of black and white horsehair. With it also came a new standard and shield, each bearing his device, the silver bear on black.
The following day, however, word arrived that Camulod was under attack from two directions. One of the outlying farms, a stock- breeding operation in the south of the Colony, had been robbed, its entire two-hundred-man garrison wiped out. And simultaneously, an invading fleet of Erse galleys had landed in the north, their presence reported by King Uric's people, who had seen the galleys passing upriver. Lot of Cornwall had engineered his first double assault on Camulod, and from that day onward, Camulod would be almost constantly at war with Britain's southwestern most region.
After the initial outbreak, with that successful raid against the Colony's southernmost farm, the war progressed swiftly. Under the overall command of Picus Britannicus, Uther and Merlyn split their forces, Uther riding south and west against Lot and Cornwall with seven hundred highly mobile cavalry, while Merlyn headed north with four hundred cavalry and three thousand foot soldiers to stop the invading Ersemen. Merlyn's campaign was completely successful, ending in the capture of a high-born Eirish hostage, but Uther's cavalry was ambushed and decimated along the northern coast of Cornwall by an enemy force using poisoned arrows, which killed every one of Uther's men who sustained even a scratch from their envenomed tips.
Uther was not completely convinced, however, that his attackers were Lot's people, for there was sufficient evidence to the contrary to raise genuine doubts. A short time before the attack, his scouts had found the remnants of a massacre in which some sixty people had been stripped, then bound and slaughtered. Lot himself, speaking through a Christian bishop sent out to Uther as an intermediary, claimed that those were his own people, captured unawares and slaughtered by a strong force of seaborne raiders of unknown origin. That unexpected claim was sufficient to give Uther pause and make him doubt himself. The murderous group who attacked his force had overshot themselves foolishly, expending all their poisoned arrows far too quickly, so that the survivors of Uther's army, still more than six hundred strong, were able to rally and pursue their erstwhile attackers. But the attackers had galleys waiting for them right below the cliffs where the attack had occurred, and they were afloat and at sea before Uther's men could close with them. Uther had to wonder if Lot might be telling him the truth. His gut feelings told him otherwise, that the sixty dead might well have been the sweepings of Lot's jails expediently disposed of simply to hide Lot's guilt in the ambush; but his training in logic, acquired in Camulod under his Uncle Picus, suggested the contrary. And so he gave Lot the benefit of the doubt and released the bishop to return to Cornwall, despite his strong conviction that the man of God would rather have remained a captive in the custody of Camulod.
The bishop's visit was followed rapidly by the arrival of two strange-looking, foreign-born envoys called Caspar and Memnon, who claimed to have been sent as ambassadors from Lot, King of Cornwall, to Picus Britannicus, the Legate Commander of Camulod. Uther arranged to accompany them safely to Camulod, but beyond that he paid them little notice, and his failure to question their motives or to examine them more closely would cost him and Camulod dearly.
Within a day of Uther's bringing the strangers home to Camulod, the men were recognized, and Merlyn was able to identify them as spies and sorcerers, the men responsible for Lot's poisoned arrows. He threw them into jail in full expectation that their master, Lot, would be following hard on their heels, knowing that he had his two loyal creatures on the inside and expecting to find Camulod lulled into a false sense of security. Merlyn was correct, and Lot's treachery almost captured Camulod, but forewarned, Merlyn's and Uther's combined armies were able to defeat Lot's forces and rout them.
While the defeat of the forces from Cornwall was taking place down on the plain below the hill of Camulod, however, Lot's sorcerers managed inexplicably to escape from their cells, and thus they were able to open the rear gate of the fortress to a party of their own people sent to burn the place down.
That attack was discovered and fought off before it could develop fully, but still the fighting inside the fort was fierce and bloody. The back alleys of Camulod, close to the rear wall, were choked with corpses before the rear gate could be securely shut again. Many of the buildings within the walls had been set alight and were already uncontrollably ablaze.
When Uther and his cavalry abandoned their pursuit of Lot's fleeing forces and came riding back to Camulod a few days later, a thick column of black smoke brought them spurring from its first sighting, and only as they approached the fort did they notice that there were no signs of ongoing battle. Great open pits had been dug on the plain below the hill of Camulod, and the corpses of the slain were being interred there beneath layers of quicklime. The smoke that they had seen was from a funeral pyre. Only then did they learn that Picus Britannicus, their leader and Legate, had been murdered in his bed during the sorcerers' escape and before the night attack. Uther found his cousin Merlyn standing by the pyre, one of the chief mourners. Battle weary and still in their armour, Uther and his men stood silently at the back of the crowd to observe the rites and honour the dead.
Within a matter of mere weeks, more tragic tidings arrived in Camulod, brought personally to Uther's attention this time by Garreth Whistler. Another army raised by Gulrhys Lot, this one a compact, deadly effective striking force built mainly of foreign mercenaries, had invaded Cambria near the time when Lot's main army was attacking Camulod. This small, hard-hitting force, barely large enough to deserve the name army, had created havoc, having caught the Pendragon Federation totally unprepared for invasion from the south and ill-equipped to adapt with any kind of speed to counter a sustained attack from that direction. Uric's people and the concentration of his forces had always been primarily attuned to threats emerging from the northern boundaries of their lands, both coastal and landward.
Despite their unpreparedness, the Federation had nonetheless managed to respond with admirable speed to this new threat, Garreth reported, and the Pendragon forces had rallied well under great pressure. Meradoc, the dominant Chief of the Llewellyn clans, had distinguished himself in the campaign, as had young Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon, who at sixteen was the youngest Chief of a Pendragon clan in living memory. At the peak of the short, bloody campaign that followed the invasion, however, the insurgents were brought to battle, and in the course of the fighting, Uther's father, King Uric Pendragon, had been killed, felled by what had turned out to be a poisoned arrow.
Uther met the news with blank incomprehension. He heard the words and accepted them, but his mind failed utterly to accept or to even consider their import. Nemo was standing by, awaiting his instructions on some matter that would now never be mentioned again, and she watched him closely, prepared to jump forward and catch him if he fell. His eyes had gone strangely dead as though he had lost all ability to focus on anything, and he began to nod his head as though agreeing with some voice inside him that spoke to him alone. He reached behind him with one groping hand and found the chair on which he had been sitting. Pulling it towards him automatically, he lowered himself very slowly to its seat and then asked Garreth for word of his mother. Where was she now? Did he need to go to her immediately, or would she come to Camulod to her own mother, Luceiia Varrus? And when would his father be buried and where?
Garreth Whistler looked uncomfortable, and his gaze went from Uther to Merlyn Britannicus and then to the other senior officers of Camulod's garrison. The report he wou
ld now deliver, he told them, had come directly from Meradoc, the ruling Chief of the strongest of the three Llewellyn clans in the Federation. King Uric was already buried, he reported. He had been dead for ten days now and was buried within hours of his death in the place where he had fallen. The enemy had been all around the Llewellyn position, and Chief Meradoc's overriding priority was to rescue his own people from the trap in which they found themselves. The formalized, royal burial of what was by then essentially no more than one more corpse among hundreds had had to be set aside. There would be opportunity later, Meradoc had decided, to mourn and honour the dead King once the living were secure and safe again and the enemy was put to flight.
Uther showed no reaction to any of this, and so it was Merlyn who asked Garreth what King Uric had been doing among the western Llewellyns when he should have been with his own forces in south Cambria. Garreth turned his head towards Merlyn and sniffed before glancing towards Uther, who sat staring vacantly back at him. After a moment, evidently having decided that Uther's attention was engaged elsewhere, Garreth turned back to Merlyn and the others.
From the moment word of the invasion of Cambria first arrived in Tir Manha, he explained, King Uric had delegated command of his own Pendragon clansmen to him, Garreth Whistler, as the King's Champion. From then on Uric had spent most of his time touring the territories of the Pendragon Federation, accompanied by a small escort of hand-picked warriors, rallying and encouraging the fighting men of the other federated clans and demonstrating his support for each of his Chiefs in turn.