by Jack Whyte
"Good." Turning to leave, Uther stopped once again. "Think on this, too, while you're about it. I prefer to do my own killing, with my own weapons. Should you choose to stay with us, you will live in new ways and in new days. And if I ever call upon your services, you will deliver them openly, by my side and shoulder to shoulder with my friends, my companions and my warriors."
There was no response, and he walked away through the long grass, swinging his bedroll up over his shoulder and thinking deeply.
Chapter SIXTEEN
Daris ap Griffyd, son of Darin and grandson of the revered and long-dead Druid Derwent, stood high above the temple gazing down from the eastern heights of the earthen wall that sheltered the sacred place, vainly trying to empty his mind of distractions. Behind him and far below, the tide of movement and noise that had driven him away in a vain search for peace and quiet showed no sign of abating. It was, he knew, the inevitable accompaniment to a great gathering of people, but, coupled with the discord of his seething thoughts, it made it impossible for him to concentrate on what he should be doing. Grimly, conscientiously, he squeezed his eyelids shut and forced himself to focus upon what must be.
He would stand here again tomorrow, in this precise spot, but on that occasion he would be dressed in the spare but splendid regalia of Chief Druid, his bright red robes brilliant in the sunlight, his beard and his long white hair brushed and carefully combed beneath the leafy corona of mistletoe that would crown his head. The same great staff he bore today, the symbol of his rank as High Priest, would be in his right hand as always. It was a solid shaft of dried and polished oak, its upper length chased in spiralling whorls of beaten silver that swept up to enfold a sun disk of solid gold, a hand's span in diameter. He would stand alone then, too, isolated by his rank. But twelve paces beyond him, on either side, the people of the clans, awed into quietude for once by the solemnity of the occasion, would crowd along the circumference of the wall, waiting for the day's ceremonies to begin. Their presence in the temple itself would profane the sacred rites to be observed there that day, so the top of the protecting wall, where he stood now, was the closest they would come to the ceremonies below.
Daris willed away the vision of the crowd and concentrated only upon the place where they would gather. The triune symbolism of the site pleased him—a circle within a circle within a circle—and he breathed deeply in a pattern of long, regular breaths designed to permit him to immerse himself in its peaceful symmetry and to ignore the debilitating tension in his guts.
The outer circle on which he stood was a massive earthen wall erected by his people when the first rapacious Roman legions came to Britain, hundreds of years before. It had been built for one sole purpose: to protect and defend the hallowed ring of sixteen uniformly quarried and dressed menhirs—standing stones each twice the height of a man—that formed the second circle. This was the original temple created untold ages earlier by craftsmen who might have been Daris's own ancestors, although the ancient legends spoke of another, older race of smaller people who had lived here in the long-forgotten past. Fortunately, the wall had never been required, because although the Romans felt driven to eradicate the Druids of Britain, they never felt a need to invade or own the ancient temples that the Druids had built. In consequence, the original circle of ancient stones remained as it had been since time immemorial.
Twenty long paces, each interval exact, separated each of the standing stones from the baseline of the surrounding defensive wall, and the circle of stones itself was thirty great strides in diameter, the precision of the whole demonstrating that, no matter who the ancient architects and builders were, they possessed quarrying and construction skills the like of which were quite unknown in the land today.
The third circle, carefully laid out within the ring of the menhirs, was temporary, purely ceremonial: Daris himself had supervised its arrangement that very morning. This was a ring of eight large, solid, wooden chairs, each placed with great care five paces in front of a specific stone, so that the chair's occupant sat with his back to that stone, flanked by two others. Each chair was separated from the one directly facing it across the circle by twenty paces, and the chairs were as uniform as the menhirs, save for one. The one designated for the King was larger than all the others, though carved from the same ancient, blackened oak. It sat in front of the menhir at the westernmost point of the ring's circumference and faced directly east, towards the rising sun.
Tomorrow. Daris hoped and prayed, only the King's chair would sit vacant, for the King was dead. Tomorrow, all the seven Chiefs of the Pendragon Federation—given the blessing of the gods—would convene here to choose another King from their own ranks. And when the King was chosen and duly set in place upon the great King's seat, then one of the Chiefs' chairs would remain empty until the King died. Because the Chief ruled by right of heredity, the rank passing from father to son, that succession was usually a formality, with an appointee from the King's family sometimes filling the post during a boy's minority. Only very seldom, when a king died with no son to claim the Chief's chair, was the succession resolved by the elders of the clan council.
But would all seven Chiefs be present come the following day? That question was the reason for Daris's tension and ill temper. The Choosing must proceed regardless, and that, Daris suspected, might be disastrous for the people. There was already much ill feeling in the matter of this Choosing, for the choices were severely limited and none of the options was pleasing to everyone, or even to a clear majority. Three of the seven ruling Chiefs were too old to occupy the King's seat, another was too young, and a fifth was too infirm. All five were thus disqualified from kingship by ancient law, save for the possibility of ruling for a brief period in time of dire need— that gap the Romans called an interregnum—between the death of one King and the legal Choosing of the next. There would be no interregnum here, on this occasion. Two Chiefs were qualified to assume the King's place and sacred seat, and one of those was already in attendance at the Gathering.
Daris snorted and gripped his staff tightly in both hands until his knuckles whitened. His gaze flicked from one side of the inner circle to the other, singling out the chairs of the two men eligible to be chosen. The laws determining who might serve as a reigning King among the Celtic peoples were clear and specific. The King must be physically unblemished, in the prime of manhood and sound in limb and wind; he must be a warrior of high repute, renowned in battle and in hunting; and he must have wealth enough to provide his people with relief in times of great hardship. Both of these men were qualified in all the main respects, but Daris knew that each of them had serious shortcomings, flaws which, while they did not contravene the ancient laws, were yet strong enough to cast doubt on either one's ability to serve the people as he ought. Although Daris himself would have no vote in the Choosing of the King, as High Priest he must look to the welfare of the people. His opinions on the candidates were expected, and would be duly considered and heeded by most of the seven Chiefs. Daris had not yet raised his voice on behalf of either man, and that fact had not gone unnoticed. His silence, if it continued much longer, would be considered irresponsible by those who looked to him for guidance and support.
Daris turned away from the temple and looked outward and down to his left towards the distant encampments—one large and the other much smaller and set apart—that had sprung into being within the week that had passed. The wide, pleasant meadow in which they had been built had already been obliterated and turned into an arid wasteland by the comings and goings of thousands of people and livestock, and Daris knew from past experience that it would take a year and more for the pasturage to return to its normal lushness. But then, he reflected, these Gatherings—happening once in five, ten or a score of years—were the reason the meadow had been carved from the surrounding forest in the first place.
For as long as Daris could remember—and that remembrance included all the memories also held and passed down to him by those elders who h
ad died during his lifetime—the ordinary people of the clans in this part of south Cambria had called themselves the Pendragon Federation. This term was not strictly accurate, however, and there were ambitious people in the crowd down there for this Gathering who would do anything in their power to substitute their own name for that of Pendragon. An attempt to do precisely that would be made at this coming Choosing.
Three clans made up the Federation: Llewellyn, Pendragon and Griffyd. The Romans, when they first arrived, had issued their own names to the clans, misunderstanding everything about them, from their makeup to their ancient holdings. Durotriges, they had called the southernmost, and Belgae the people directly to the north of those, not realizing, in their foreign ignorance, that these were people of the same ancestral blood, and that they were Pendragon, possessors of the land flanking the great estuary to the north of the peninsula that the Romans had called Cornua, the Horn, now known as Cornwall. The other two great clans, the Llewellyns and the Griffyds, from the southern half of Cambria on the western side of the estuary, the Romans had named the Silures and the Demetae, foolish names thrust by an invader on an unconquered people. In the aftermath of their adjustment to the Roman "conquest," the three clans mingled peacefully, melding their holdings so that they could coexist in peace and relative strength without attracting the ire of the conquerors, and over the hundreds of years that then elapsed, that mingling evolved into a federation, dedicated to preserving their joint holdings.
Three clans, Daris reflected now, but seven distinct groups among them: three Llewellyn, two Griffyd and two Pendragon, each ruled by a Chief. The attraction that had bonded them one to the other in the beginning had been self-serving—each of the three clans had hoped to preserve and enhance its own status through alliance with the others— but all three had prospered equally, sharing the benefits of their closeness. And so it had come about that for more than twenty generations now, the seven Chiefs had chosen from among their own ranks a King whose voice would speak for all the people and whose primary duty was to safeguard all of them from Rome's displeasure. From those earliest days, no clan-directed rule had governed the Choosing of the King; no sequence of clan names had been applied; no precedence or preference had been permitted. Each new King had been selected by his peers, acknowledged as the most suitable among them for the task and chosen according to the ancient law.
As Rome's presence and rule settled into peaceful occupation and civil administration, and its soldiers and citizens learned to live in the comfort and security of their wall-girt towns, the people in the remote mountain regions, among them the clans of the Federation, were largely left to live their lives as they wished, so that the Kings ruled in their own right and organized their own local defences against raiders in those far-flung rural areas where Rome had no desire to penetrate. The responsibilities of the King of the Federation were many and varied, but in essence they boiled down to being present and available at all times to act as paramount Chief, final judge and arbitrator in legal disputes among members of the three clans. While it was the responsibility of each individual Chief to settle disputes and other matters pertaining to the law amicably within his own clan, there were invariably situations in which an outside, clearly unbiased judgment was required in order to reach final settlement. Those judgments fell to the ruling King, or, when a King had died and no replacement had yet been selected, to the seven men who served on the Council of Chiefs.
Over the centuries, the Pendragon clan, thanks to the prowess of its warriors and the wealth accumulated by its thrifty traders, grew to be more powerful than the others, despite the fact that there were but two Pendragon clans as opposed to three Llewellyn, and for five generations past Pendragon had provided all the men selected in the Choosing as best qualified for Kingship, the greatest of those being Ullic Pendragon, father of the dead King Uric. The five successive Pendragon Kings had all been good men and good kings—good enough to have their name adopted as the Federation's own.
The home of the Pendragon was located on the southern side of the great estuary of the river that flowed by Glevum, nigh on a hundred miles to the north. There had once been a Roman garrison posted nearby, but it had never been a major or important posting, and the stone buildings erected there had soon fallen into neglect once the Province of Britain had been welcomed into the Pax Romana, the vaunted "Roman Peace" that had subjugated the entire civilized world for a thousand years and ensured the Imperial welfare. Much more important than the small Roman fort, however, was the ancient hill fort that overlooked it, which had survived there, according to local legend, for nigh on six hundred years. Its name was Tir Manha, meaning the Place of Strength, and it was as serviceable as it had ever been. When the Romans left their tiny buildings, the Pendragons moved back into Tir Manha, and over the ensuing decades and centuries it proved to be a perfect place from which to govern the diverse peoples and territories of the Federation. The mainland of Cambria, with its former Roman administrative centre of Caerdyff, lay less than an hour's journey by boat across the estuary, and the rest of the Pendragon lands lay to the south and east, with the great Tor of Glastonbury rising up out of the extensive sea marshes directly to the southeast, and the other ancient hill fort—the one that became Camulod—some five leagues, or fifteen Roman miles, to the south and east of that again.
Now, Daris knew, at least one man would like to see the end of the Pendragons' predominance. Meradoc, the strongest of the Llewellyn Chiefs, lusted for the King's seat and had been pleading his cause with the other Chiefs for months strongly enough, Daris feared, that he might win. The Chief Druid's eyes widened as this thought occurred to him, for until then, Daris had been unaware that he actually feared it. He sucked in a great breath and blew it out noisily, thrusting that thought away, too, as his eyes scanned the scene laid out before him.
King Uric had been dead now for almost two months. But the Federation was at war, and Daris had been forced to withhold the summons until a lull developed in the fighting. Now they had begun to assemble. Meradoc had been the first of them to arrive, six days ago, and four of the seven were now present, with their retinues, in the smaller of the encampments below. Three of those were the Llewellyn Chiefs, Meradoc, Cunbelyn and Hod the Strong, and the fourth was young Huw Strongarm, Chief of the northern Pendragon yet no more than a boy. Three yet remained to come, and two of those were the eldest of elders, Cativelaunus of Carmarthen and Brynn of Y Gaer, Chiefs of the Griffyd clan. Those two would arrive within the hour, for they were travelling together and their party had been seen that morning crossing the river ten miles to the north.
The only Chief now missing, with no word of his whereabouts, was the remaining Pendragon, young Uther, son of the dead King Uric, and it was he who was causing most of Daris's anxiety, for despite his being the only Chief not actively involved in the war in Cambria, Uther was the one who must stand against Meradoc Llewellyn, and Daris had serious doubts that he would—or should—do so. He sighed and muttered a curse beneath his breath. It was already too late for Uther to arrive in time. The odds were piled too high against him now. Accept it and be glad, he told himself. You're far too old a fool to be wasting time in wishful thinking.
The Choosing would take place tomorrow when the sun god rode highest in the summer sky, his benevolent influence at its greatest peak. The law was sacrosanct, backed by a thousand years of history, established long before this Federation ever gathered to choose Kings of its own. No man could interfere with it and none might force a cancellation or postponement of the solemn rites. The Chiefs would choose at noon.
Far away to the east, where the road met the forest's edge, Daris saw signs of movement where none had been before, and he watched for a while as a body of travellers came slowly into view. He felt his heartbeat surge at his first sight of them, but even as he began to hope, he recognized that this was the double retinue of the two Chiefs whose coming had been announced earlier. Daris sighed and swallowed his disappointment, then turn
ed to make his way down from the wall. As Chief Druid, he should be present to welcome the two senior Chiefs when they arrived.
Moving slowly, he made his way out through the passageway formed by the overlapping ends of the protective wall, turning to his right as he emerged and pacing steadily towards the distant encampment that housed the Chiefs. He felt no need to hurry: he had no wish to reach the Chiefs' camp ahead of the newcomers. If he did, he might be accosted as he waited, and entreated or enticed to take some kind of stance concerning the upcoming Choosing. Daris had no need of that and no intention of allowing it.
It was Uther Pendragon's uncaring irresponsibility that grated on the Chief Druid. Daris himself had always been responsible, aware of his calling even as a child. Many of the boys with whom he had been apprenticed to the Druidic brotherhood had been there because they were placed there, committed by their families for any of a hundred reasons, from dire poverty to some bright, attractive talent noted and remarked upon by one of the Grey Brotherhood, as the Druids were called among the people.
That was not the case with Daris. He had been born to the Brotherhood. His idolized grandfather was one of the greatest Druids the people had known, and he had never, throughout his entire life, considered any other way of life. He studied hard at every task to which he was set, absorbing the arcane mysteries and knowledge of the priesthood as eagerly as he learned the great songs and sagas that were in the Brotherhood's safekeeping as guardians of the history of the people. Daris had long since lost count of the number of these sagas he had committed to memory, but he never ceased to be grateful for his own capacity to store them in his mind and recall them at will. Retention of the tales, and absolute fidelity to the ancient form and content of them, was but one of his responsibilities. Daris knew duty and fidelity to duty, what it was and what it entailed. And in his eyes, Uther Pendragon did not.