Uther cc-7

by Jack Whyte

  At the time of his death, Uric was visiting Chief Meradoc's host of Llewellyn warriors, the largest and strongest armed force in his overall command, and prior to that he had spent time among the warriors of the Griffyd clans with their Chiefs Cativelaunus of Carmarthen and Brynn of Y Gaer. When his visit to Llewellyn was complete, Uric intended to move on to visit the army of Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon.

  Enemy activity had been thick and heavy around the Llewellyn territories just prior to Uric's arrival, Garreth told them, and the fighting was heavy enough that Meradoc sent word to the King warning him of the extreme danger and suggesting that Uric postpone his visit. Uric, however, would have none of that and insisted on holding to his original schedule, and so he and his escort had ridden into Llewellyn's lands and died there.

  At that point Uther spoke again in a flat, emotionless voice, demanding news of his mother, and Garreth turned back towards the younger man.

  The Lady Veronica, Uther's mother, he reported, had been devastated by her husband's death but had recovered quickly, showing great strength and resilience. It had been her original intent, he said, immediately after her recovery from the shock of the news of her husband's death and burial, to return to Camulod in order to be with her mother. But she had changed her mind, for reasons known only to herself, and decided to remain in Tir Manha. at least for the time being. She wrote a letter to her mother, Luceiia Varrus, explaining her thoughts and her decision to remain in Cambria. Garreth had delivered that earlier.

  Uther nodded his head slightly and then made no more effort to communicate with anyone. For a time no one moved or spoke, everyone apparently grappling with the complexities of the changes that had occurred within the past short space of weeks. Garreth Whistler, however, had not yet completed his purpose in coming to Camulod in person, and in order to emphasize the importance of what he had yet to communicate, he dropped to one knee in front of Uther's chair and grasped Uther's wrist tightly, forcing the younger man to look up into his eyes.

  "You're Chief now, boy. And you can be more than that, if you so wish, if you move quickly enough. Daris the High Priest has sent me to bring you home for the Choosing. In truth, he has grave doubts about your suitability, but give him his due, he wishes you to have the opportunity that is yours by right as a Pendragon Federation Chief. It will happen soon, the Choosing—this is no time for our people to be without a King. And if you harbour any hope or wish at all of following your father and grandfather to the King's seal, you have to come with me, and soon. You have to take your place among the other Chiefs for the judgment and the vote. If you come late, you'll lose your chance, for choose they must, and quickly. Do you hear me, Uther? Do you understand what I am telling you?"

  Uther had listened in silence, his staring eyes fixed on Garreth Whistler's face. Now he sat for a while longer, empty-eyed. Then he sucked in his cheeks and nodded to the Champion, speaking in a voice barely above a whisper.

  "I hear you, Garreth. I understand. But I must think. I need time to think."

  He stood up and walked from the gathering without another word, not to be seen by another living soul for two days. Garreth's tidings had been grim enough, but no one had expected Uther to be so badly shaken by them or that he would shut himself off from all contact with anyone while he came to terms with his own grief.

  He emerged from his seclusion on the morning of the third day and sought out Garreth Whistler immediately. Uther was stern- faced and showed none of the eager enthusiasm that had always marked him in military matters.

  "We will go," he told the Champion tersely. "But we will need a week beforehand—no more than that—to drill the Dragons. See to that for me, if you would, starting immediately. Drill them until they drop, cursing you and me. They've been getting fat and lazy for the past few months. I want them to be at their peak when we ride into Tir Manha. If I am to be King, and I intend to be, they'll be the central core of my new armies, and I need them to be magnificent, to stir envy and admiration among our young Pendragon men and generate new troopers. See to it, if it pleases you. I'll join you later today and work with you from then on, but I have matters to attend to first."

  Garreth Whistler only nodded, offering no comment, and watched the young Chief stride away.

  Uther went straight to Nemo and summoned her to ride with him. She followed him to the stables and then rode close behind him as he left through the main gates of the fortress, merely waving in response when Merlyn called to him from afar and spurring his mount out onto the downhill road to the plain beneath.

  They rode hard and far, and neither of them spoke a word for more than an hour when Uther finally drew rein and turned his horse around, ignoring Nemo's mount as it sidled and stamped beside him. He led them back and around by a circuitous route to a slight rise overlooking the broad drill plain below the fortress from the northeast, the same spot from which he and Merlyn had watched Camulod burning luridly against the night sky a mere two months earlier. Now from this distance, even in the bright morning sunlight, no sign could be seen of any damage to the fortress, and there was nothing visible to indicate that anything had changed here in years. Even the three huge mass graves that had been dug on the plain were no longer visible, for the earth that covered them had been levelled and compacted by thousands upon thousands of hooves since normal cavalry training resumed following the cleanup after the battle that was waged there. They sat together in silence for a while, looking at the fortress so seemingly secure upon its distant hilltop, and then Uther spoke over his shoulder.

  "We have lived through the end of an era. Nemo, you and I." Nemo made no response, and after a few moments Uther continued: "Do you know what an era is?" He turned to glance at her as she shook her head, and then he looked away again, gazing at the distant towers of Camulod's walls.

  "An era is a period of time. Nemo—a long period of years or even decades, sometimes centuries—that can be measured from a clear starting point to an ending. They tell us the Roman general Julius Caesar came to these shores decades before the birth of the Christians' Christus among the Hebrews, and that the last of the true Romans, the Emperor Constantine the Third, left Britain in the year I was six. That means the Romans remained here in Britain without leaving for more than four hundred years. That was an era." He glanced at Nemo again and smiled, shaking his head gently. "You don't know what I'm talking about, but what I am saying is true. That fortress over there on its hill belongs to another era, a more recent one . . . an era that overlapped the Roman one, beginning before I was born, before my father had even met my mother."

  He waved his hand towards the distant buildings. "Before my grandfather, Publius Varrus, came here, there was no fortress on that hilltop. There was no Colony, no Camulod. There was no cavalry here, no garrison and no alliance between Pendragon and these people. And there were no longbows among the Pendragon. Did you know it was Publius Varrus who was responsible for bringing the longbow to Pendragon? Well, it was. He brought a giant bow with him from Africa, and our people admired it greatly. They sought to make others like it. and our long yew bows were born. All of those things have come to pass since Publius Varrus married my Grandmother Luceiia almost fifty years ago. Their marriage, in many ways, marked the beginning of the era."

  Uther's voice faded into silence, and Nemo sat staring at him, waiting for him to continue. He did not even glance in her direction. keeping his gaze fixed on the hilltop fort, and she sat on his right, less than half a pace to his rear, her close-set eyes fixed unblinkingly on the point of his jaw. watching for the tiny initial flexing that would herald his next words. She was, as always, content to wait upon his pleasure.

  "It began with Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus; it grew with Ullic Pendragon and Picus Britannicus; and it ended with the deaths of the last of them, my Uncle Picus's short months ago and my father Uric's weeks ago." Uther hawked and spat. "Camulod will continue to exist, and it will grow and prosper, I've no doubt of that. Merlyn
Britannicus will keep it safe and hale. But it will never be the same again, because the treachery and greed of Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall have brought about changes that were never foreseen. He has destroyed the calm of Camulod as surely as the serpent destroyed innocence in the garden the Christian priests talk about. And such changes can never lie unmade. And that means that Camulod—my own Camulod that has fed and nourished me since I was a boy—is ended."

  He kicked his horse into motion, keeping its head directly towards Camulod, and Nemo's fell properly into step beside him, maintaining a half-length space behind him so precisely that Nemo had need of neither reins nor bit.

  "And so now we must return to Tir Manha," he continued, speaking to her without looking at her. "And this time, I think, we will stay there. It is my home, after all—everyone delights in telling me so—and it has been yours, too, for so long that I'll wager you can't even recall where you came from in the first place. But I will tell you a secret. Nemo, that no one else in Camulod would ever suspect: I do not want to go back there, not to live, and especially not now that my father is dead. I have no wish to go back to what everyone else insists on calling my home . . . grim old Cambria with its harsh-faced people. I have no need of their ill-mannered glowering, and I cringe at the very thought of living with their foul- tempered and humourless dislike day after day, year after year. My father's death, far, far too soon, has taught me that a man is a fool to live in hopes of a better tomorrow. I have a thousand better ways today to spend what time remains ahead of me, and I have brighter, lighter and more pleasant places in which to spend it. . ."

  Nemo glanced sharply at him then, her curiosity piqued as he made a noise in his chest that almost sounded like a smothered laugh. "You know. Nemo, I sometimes thank the gods that you exist, for if you did not—" He left that thought unfinished and then resumed again immediately. "There is not another person in the entire world to whom I could confess this openly in the absolute knowledge that it will never be passed on. So here is my dark and dire secret: I would prefer to spend my entire life here in Camulod, without ever having to return to Cambria and Tir Manha. That does not sound like such a massy secret, does it? And yet it is, for if that word got out among my friends, I wonder just how many of them would remain my friends . . . I could not tell that truth even to Merlyn, because I fear he might take it amiss and see it as a threat to his designs for Camulod, thinking that I might seek to undermine him here. And I would not. Nemo, believe me. I would not.

  "But this is my life's centre. Nemo, this—" He stood up in his stirrups and waved his hand broadly, indicating the entire countryside that surrounded them and the looming towers of the fortress on the hill ahead of them. 'Tir Manha has a beauty that I can't dismiss and can't deny—the sight and smells of the land move me and stir up my blood in a way I can't describe. But Camulod has become my home, far more than Tir Manha has ever been. My father and my mother lived in Tir Manha, and so did Grandfather Ullic, and because of that I returned there every year . . . But it was my mother who insisted, first and most strongly and ever afterward, that I should spend as much time as I could in Camulod. And I have always, ever since my earliest boyhood, been eager to return to Camulod when the summer waned and the weather began to change.

  "And why would I not? Even you, Nemo, must resent returning home each year. Think of all we relinquish when we do . . . Think of all the things we have in Camulod that people lack in Cambria! Baths, for one thing—and bathing is one mighty, all-eclipsing thing! Hand in hand with bathing, Nemo, in a scented, wondrous silence, walks a more than pleasant absence of revolting people smells.

  "And then there are hypocausts—furnace-fed hot-air ducts—and heated buildings. Floors that are warm in winter and rooms that are high and bright because the warmth coming through the hypocausts allows you to live in them without having to block all the exits and shut out all the light. And space, Nemo! Think about space—high- ceilinged vaults and room to walk about upright and at ease. You can't do that in the gloomy, low-roofed huts of Cambria."

  Nemo listened in wonder. She was used to hearing him speak, but she had never heard him go on like this before, not at such speed. His voice was far more forceful, it seemed to her, than she had ever noticed before, his words appearing to rattle one against the other as they spilled from his mouth. And then, quite suddenly, he was silent again, and the only sounds to be heard were the thudding of their horses' hooves and the creaks and jingling of saddlery. She waited, and just when she was beginning to think he really would say no more, he spoke again, his voice more normal now.

  "Of course, you might be tempted to ask me, if you cared at all, why it should be that my mother, who had every intention, according to Garreth Whistler, of returning to Camulod after my father's death, should have changed her mind at the last moment and decided to stay in Tir Manha. If it is really such a dreary place as I believe it to be . . ." He turned to look at Nemo.

  "Are you tempted to ask that. Nemo? No, I can see you are not. Well, I'll answer it anyway. I believe my mother has decided to remain in Cambria because she fears that if she does not stay there . . . if she comes home to Camulod while I am here . . . then I might not return to Tir Manha at all and might forfeit my blood rights, my birthright and my Chief's rank and title. And there are numerous people, myself not least among them, who would say she had good reason for such fear . . . But they would all be wrong. Nemo, all of them. Because I will go back. I am going back. It may be that I am going back for all the wrong reasons a man could conjure up. But I am going back."

  He stopped for a moment and then snorted again with the same smothered, ironic mirth that he had used against himself earlier. "Strange, is it not? After years of listening to Cousin Merlyn going on and on about duty and how sacred it is, often boring me to tears with his righteousness, I am now the one who is incapable of doing what I want to do because my duty forbids it. Well. . . it does, and none of it is Merlyn's fault. I must go to Tir Manha and release my mother to return to her mother, knowing that I will stay and do what I must do. I am my father's son. Nemo, and I am Ullic Pendragon's grandson and Publius Varrus's grandson, and no man among the three of those was ever known to shirk a duty or be irresponsible. I am clan Chief, and there is no escaping that, for I promised my father to take up the task and do it properly . . .

  "I might not be chosen King, but by the gods, if I am not, it will not be because I was not there when the Chiefs took up their chairs. Not all the people are grim miseries, and they will need the strongest King that they can have. And I believe that means I must be King . . . at least for the duration of this war with Cornwall. After that, when we are all at peace again, who knows? I might give up the King's seat. It could be done, no reason why it could not be . . .

  "Anyway, if I am to be King, we must go soon. Whistler says, and I believe him. I have a few things I need to do before we leave, nevertheless. The Dragons need a week's training, and I need to spend some time with Commander Merlyn planning strategy and future tactics for any joint campaign we might have to fight against Lot. I have a strong feeling that it will be a case not of if but of when. So, Nemo, as I see it, we will be leaving very soon for Tir Manha. If you have anything that you must do in Camulod before we leave, then see to it."

  Nemo nodded her head deeply but said nothing. In her mind, however, she reviewed everything she might need to do before departing, and her list was very brief.

  BOOK FOUR

  The Choosing

  Dear Mother,

  Two weeks have gone by since they brought me word of Uric's death. Two blank, empty weeks spent in nothingness. I remember seeing Daris, the Chief Druid, approaching me that day, and I remember being frightened by the look on his face. After that, I can remember nothing until yesterday, when I saw Daris again. He had come this time to ask me when I wished to leave for Camulod, and I did not know why he would ask me such a thing.

  It was then that I discovered that I have been living in some kind of waking dream. A
ccording to Daris, I have been acting normally and showing commendable strength throughout my ordeal, but the truth is that I have been aware of none of it. I know only that my husband, my beloved Uric, is dead.

  Daris tells me that I have been calmly and rationally discussing leaving Tir Manha to come and live with you in Camulod. It seems strange to me that I would not remember saying such things. But yet another part of me, after a sleepless night last night, now knows that it is true.

  When I first heard Daris speak of this yesterday, I had no doubt, despite my shock, that it was a fine idea and the sensible thing to do. My husband is gone, I told myself, and my son is already in Camulod. No need, I thought, for me to remain in Tir Manha—Uric's home but never really mine.

  But at that moment, in making that admission to myself, all the pain of my loss came home to me and overwhelmed me. For the first time that I know of since my husband's death, I wept. And then I lay awake all night long, surprised to know that my mind was filled with unfamiliar yet familiar thoughts and even decisions.

  Daris spoke to me at great length about the ceremony of picking a new King for the Pendragon people, an event known as the Choosing.

  This Choosing will now take place as close to Midsummer as may be possible due to the upheavals of this war. There are two traditional Choosing times each year: Midsummer and Midwinter, with Midsummer being the more potent. My Uric will be replaced then by a new King selected from among the current Chiefs.

  I have been through it once before, when dear Uncullic died and Uric was selected as the Chosen One by his fellow Chiefs, all seven of them, including Uric, voting in conclave. At that time I thought little of it. It seemed inevitable to me that Uric would assume his father's position, becoming the fifth in his direct line to serve as King of the Pendragon. It was plain for all to see that Uric was the best man.