by Jack Whyte
Nennius listened to this open-mouthed, his huge, lustrous eyes glistening and gleaming above the lines of black kohl painted on their lower lids. He made no attempt to interrupt Nemo, but as soon as the other had finished speaking, he waved a hand expressively and nodded deeply, saying he could understand perfectly why Nemo should have been so upset. But really, he added then, his eyes gleaming wickedly, it was not really accurate to speak of the young woman as "some young wench." Her name was Deirdre, and she was the Commander's new wife.
Pretending to be startled. Nemo raised herself up on one elbow, her face, as much as she could make it, a picture of astonishment. The Commander's wife? Commander Merlyn was married? When had that happened, and how? Ten days before, Nennius said, smiling still at the effect of his announcement . . . No, Nemo had heard absolutely nothing, had known nothing. If word had gone to Cambria, to King Uther in Tir Manha, then it had clearly passed Nemo on the road. Ten days since the wedding? But the woman was big . . . about to give birth. Where had she sprung from? Where had Merlyn Britannicus been hiding her?
Nennius threw up his hands and shook his head before slapping Nemo on the bare flank to indicate that their session was at an end. The birth was far from imminent, he said, despite appearances. From what he had been told, there yet remained at least two months of carrying time before the Lady Deirdre's burden would be dropped. But then, as Nemo sat upright on the edge of the stone plinth, tucking the large towel into place about her hips, Nennius admitted that, to his great frustration, he had been unable to unearth any information from anywhere about the woman's former whereabouts. She was from Eire, the daughter of some heathen Eirish King, that much he could affirm, for she had turned out to be the sister of the Eirish Prince Donuil, the big fellow Merlyn had taken as a hostage two years earlier during Lot of Cornwall's first attack on Camulod. She could not have come directly to Camulod from Eire, however, gravid as she was, not without dire sorcery of some kind being involved, for Merlyn had not been away from Camulod for longer than two or three days at a time in more than a year.
Whence, then, had come the pregnancy? As far as Nennius had been able to discover, and as plain logic dictated, the Lady Deirdre must have been living somewhere nearby throughout the entire year, at least. Yet no one in Camulod—no one anywhere, for that matter— had ever seen her before the day she had ridden into the fortress, close on a month earlier, blooming with health and beauty and yet nonetheless as ethereal as a mountain sprite, riding on a light cart and accompanied by Caius Merlyn and his great-aunt, Luceiia Varrus.
Nemo expressed surprise then, in her usual surly manner, that Nennius had not been able to worm some kind of information about the young woman from some of her servants or associates. She must have said something in the course of a month to indicate where she had been and where she had come from . . . unless she was mute.
But she was mute, Nennius replied, and Nemo felt as though every vestige of air in her lungs had been kicked out as her mind made a sickening series of connections and a number of things all fell into place at the same time.
The Cassandra woman! No wonder the Lady Deirdre hail looked so familiar at first sight—though the well-dressed, high-born lady with the hugely swollen belly bore but little resemblance to the pallid, emaciated waif Nemo had found kneeling in the forest so many months before. How long ago had that been? Nemo thought back quickly and realized that nigh on three whole years had passed since then.
They had found the girl, an insipid, lacklustre little thing, while on a routine perimeter patrol of the Colony, and she had ridden back to Camulod behind Uther's saddle, with her arms clutching him around the waist. In lime they had discovered that she was mute, and they had called her Cassandra. Three years ago!
Realizing that she had stiffened into immobility and that Nennius was watching her closely, his head tilted to one side with the force of his concentration, Nemo made an enormous effort to relax her body and breathe normally while she simultaneously fought to school her face into betraying nothing of her shock. She muttered something barely audible about mute people, and then, suddenly inspired, she looked Nennius in the eye and asked him if mute people could hear anything. His eyes flew wide and he spread his hands, suggesting that he did not know, and Nemo nodded her head sagely and walked away slowly while he was still confused, offering her thanks as she left. Then, highly pleased with her own unusually glib performance, she dressed quickly and left the bathhouse, her mind teeming with thoughts of the Cassandra woman.
Cassandra . . . the very name twisted Nemo's guts, because it struck directly to the root of the trouble between Uther and Merlyn. She remembered that night . . . in the private quarters Uther and Merlyn once referred to as their games room. Nemo had never been able to discover precisely what had occurred, because only Uther and Merlyn were present at the time and neither of them spoke of it afterwards. The waif Cassandra had been there too, however, along with a small number of other women, all of whom disappeared from public sight the following day, permanently, leaving Camulod in a covered cart.
Nemo had witnessed only a few important scenes of the drama: Cassandra bursting from the games room, apparently running for her life. Merlyn appearing at the door a few moments later, unclothed, but ducking back inside and closing the door when he saw the guard watching him. Uther storming out, clearly in a fury. She discovered later that Uther, accompanied by a small group of his Dragons, rode out of Camulod then and returned home to Cambria. The girl Cassandra had been abducted that same night and dragged or carried into a barn, where she had been beaten, ravaged and brutalized, and then abandoned by her attacker, who had clearly thought her dead, and whose identity was never established.
Cassandra had been discovered the following morning, barely alive, and Germanus, the senior military physician in Camulod, had worked hard for hours to save her life while Merlyn Britannicus, as Officer in Command during his father's absence on a patrol, fearing for the young woman's safety, arranged to have her placed under heavy, constant guard. And then, in the middle of the following night, the woman called Cassandra had disappeared without a trace, evidently by sorcery, from a building that was heavily guarded inside and out.
Rumours had flown in all directions for a long time after that, including one that Merlyn had foreseen Cassandra's disappearance in a dream. That rumour formed the basis for the other whisperings that Merlyn was a sorcerer of some kind. Nemo had also heard a rumour, believed by some, that Uther had been responsible for beating the girl, but that was clearly so foolish and so contradictory to the facts that Nemo merely shook her head and disregarded it completely.
One thing she did know, however, and it came from no rumour. The lifelong bond between Merlyn Britannicus and Uther Pendragon was broken that night of the fight in the games room. From then onward, the two men, who had been inseparable for so long, were seldom in each other's company again.
Nemo had never dared come out openly and ask Uther what had happened between them that night, and he had never offered to tell her, but she had been convinced then, and was still convinced, that the woman Cassandra was at the bottom of it. Before Cassandra had been found in the forest, Uther and Merlyn had been closer than brothers for five and twenty years, but then, within three days of her appearance in their lives, that bond had been severed.
It had taken no great leap of imagination at that time for Nemo to connect Cassandra with all the kitchen tales of witchcraft and malice that she had absorbed during her miserable childhood among the Druid's people, and she had quickly come to perceive her as a witch, sent to destroy the bonds between the two magnificent young men who had become known throughout the countryside as the Princes of Camulod. How else could she have escaped, unseen, from a guarded room? Once convinced, Nemo had then spent months looking for the woman, determined to force the creature, somehow, to undo the damage she had done, or failing that, to ensure that she would no longer pose a threat to Uther Pendragon. But Cassandra, it seemed, had indeed vanished, s
wallowed up and absorbed by the darkness of night.
After a year had elapsed without further sight or sound of her, Nemo had eventually forgotten her. More accurately, she had ceased to think of Cassandra as a real, living person, but she remained aware of the damage the witch had done.
And now, after three years, Cassandra had returned, carrying Merlyn's child. How it had been made was a mysterious matter, and Nemo's blood chilled as she thought of the old women's tales she had heard in her childhood, tales of enchantment and witchcraft, sorcery and the seldom mentioned magic, the arcane, terrifying, secret lore that was named for the learned men who practised it, the magi. She had heard the tales about Merlyn, too, since her arrival in Camulod, tales that whispered that he was a magus, a practitioner of the dark arts, and Nemo was not one to dismiss such a possibility out of hand.
Nemo was convinced that Cassandra, or Deirdre as she apparently called herself now, was a witch, returned as a different person to ensnare Merlyn with the lure of her young body. And that she had clearly been able to do so, in utmost secrecy, was fundamental proof to Nemo that she was right in her suspicions. Merlyn had fallen to the witch's lure, and because of Merlyn's weakness, Uther's peace of mind would soon begin to crumble, and with that her own life would crash in ruin once the word of what the witch had wrought was carried home to Tir Manha.
Nemo knew she had but little time remaining in which to counteract Cassandra's evil, and so she bent her mind to recalling what she could of the kitchen lore she had heard years before regarding the killing of witches. She remembered some fat old woman from her childhood bending over a bubbling pot of stew that steamed deliriously, sprinkling a handful of chopped herbs into the pot and declaring to all the world that there were only two means of inflicting death upon witches without taking the risk of their returning to drag you, screaming, to the fiery underworld. One was fire, the old woman had said, tugging at a burning log and causing an explosion of fierce heat and whirling sparks and embers. A witch burned was a witch destroyed. The other means involved the use of iron, but Nemo could not recall what the old fool had said about it or how it was supposed to be used. The only other thing she could remember from the old woman's ranting was that the iron used to kill a witch could never again be used by human hand. That made no sense to her, now that she came to think of it again, because the iron weapon of any man's choice would be a sword . . . sometimes a spear, perhaps, or an axe, but in most cases it would be a sword. And what fool would risk attempting to kill a witch, knowing that if he were successful he would lose his most valuable weapon? But the task of grappling with that thought was too taxing for her, and so Nemo stopped thinking about it. Either way, she decided, using fire or iron, she would find a way to defeat the witch's designs. She would watch carefully and wait, and then take any option offered to her.
Two days later, Merlyn Britannicus left Camulod at the head of a large body of troops made up of four cavalry squadrons, each forty troopers strong, plus all the support equipment and personnel required to keep such a force in the field for a month or longer, including commissary wagons, a water wagon and extra horses. There were one hundred and seventy-five fighting men in the group, including officers and exclusive of the commissary staff and herd boys, who brought the overall number up to just over two hundred. The expedition made a fine and imposing spectacle as the troopers rode out through the main gates of Camulod and down the winding roadway to the plain beneath, but they were not riding to war. They were headed for the distant town of Verulamium to attend a debate between Christian bishops that would supposedly decide on great and important matters having to do with the gods and how the workings of men's minds in that regard would be judged in times to come. Nemo had had it explained to her by several people, but it all sounded to her like wasted time and effort, and it made her glad she was no Christian. But thanks to all of that, Merlyn had gone from Camulod, leaving his wife behind.
Witnessing the departure that day. Nemo turned her face to where Cassandra, the Lady Deirdre, watched her husband ride away and waved to him each time he turned back to look at her, and her guts burned with loathing, as though she had eaten something indigestible.
She found it surprisingly easy to remain in Camulod unnoticed for the week that followed Merlyn's departure. Nemo was under no great pressure to return to Tir Manha, and so she had no reason to concern herself over being late in reporting there. Her face and uniform had become sufficiently familiar within Camulod to enable her to remain hidden there in the fortress in plain sight simply by drawing no attention to herself and taking great care to remain out of the path of anyone in authority who might wonder why she was lingering so long after she had delivered her dispatches and fulfilled the tasks allotted to her. She simply left the fortress each night and camped, either on the hillside beyond the walls or in the woods by the edge of the training ground below, and it quickly became apparent that as long as she changed her campsite every night, never remaining in the same place twice, she could remain completely unnoticed. She re-entered the fortress each day through the main gates, but revolving duty guaranteed that the guards were never the same from day to day. Her daily visits to the bathhouse were the only part of her routine during that week that had consistency, and they were noticed only by Nennius, who, if he thought at all about the length of Nemo's stay on this occasion, made no mention of it.
For the entire week during the daylight hours, she charged herself with watching the house of Luceiia Varrus, wailing for the Lady Deirdre to emerge and then following wherever she led. The witch seldom ventured out alone, but she came out at least once a day, either with the Lady Luceiia or with one or other of the women of the Varrus household. Even when she did move abroad alone, however, she kept to the busiest public thoroughfares, and Nemo never had the slightest chance of approaching her.
But then, at the end of the week, something different occurred, and watching it unfold. Nemo realized she was watching something that had been planned, and her heart began to race with excitement. The witch, dressed in a gaudy robe of brilliantly bright yellow, rode out of Camulod alone, mounted on a small, light cart with high, narrow wheels, pulled by a single horse. Nemo watched from a distance as a procession of servitors from the Varrus kitchens loaded the cart at mid-morning with a variety of foodstuffs and provisions—clothing and blankets and bedding—and she estimated that the cart contained enough resources to last two people comfortably for perhaps a week. But no second person emerged to join her, and Nemo finally began to hope that this would be her opportunity. Then, sure enough, as noon approached, Luceiia Varrus herself emerged from the house and embraced the other woman, then stood watching and waving as Cassandra rode away alone, handling the reins herself and making a leisurely progress through and beyond the main gates, where she proceeded down the hill.
Nemo followed on foot as far as the gates and watched the cart as it turned onto the eastward road towards the great Roman high road that ran north and south the length of Britain. Then she went directly to the stables and saddled her own mount. After that, it took only a few moments to collect her kit from where she had left it in care of the stableman, and she was soon on her own way, occasioning neither notice nor comment as she walked her horse out of the gates and down the hill. Only when she had reached the bottom of the hill did she kick her big bay gelding into a canter and then to a full gallop, allowing the animal to stretch its muscles while it devoured the distance separating its rider from her quarry in the light cart ahead of them.
Moving at full speed, Nemo missed the place where Cassandra had swung off the east road and headed southward, to her right. Fortunately a brief glimpse of startling yellow attracted her attention as she galloped past. She then hauled hard on the reins, bringing her horse to a skidding halt, and stood up, first in her stirrups and then climbing up onto her saddle, to see better over the bushes that intervened between her and the spot where Cassandra, still moving at the same leisurely pace, was disappearing into a grove of tr
ees, headed towards the low hills.
Aware that she would never have seen where Cassandra had gone had it not been for the brightness of the other woman's clothing, Nemo realized that she had best take care that nothing about her costume betray her in the same way. It was a summer afternoon, and her armour, cuirass and helmet were of burnished metal. A flash of reflected sunlight could easily indicate her presence. Moving quickly then. Nemo removed her helmet and hung it from her saddle horn by its chin-strap. She then unrolled her long, thick riding cloak and wrapped it about herself, covering the shiny parts of her armour completely. She wrapped one end of the cloak around the dangling helmet, covering it and tucking the material between the helmet and her saddle. That done, she struck away from the road again, pushing her horse hard towards the spot where she had last seen Cassandra.
For two hours she followed Cassandra high into the hills, far from any path, noticing how faint and indistinct were the signs that even narrow, iron-tired cartwheels left in the hard ground. Unwilling to trust in Cassandra's supposed deafness. Nemo rode quietly throughout her pursuit, as careful to make no sound as she was to remain unseen, and kept far away from her quarry. But then Cassandra vanished, and Nemo thanked the gods that she had been watching when it occurred. Had she not, she might have fled in superstitious terror when her quarry vanished between one heartbeat and the next. What she saw was Cassandra and her cart apparently sinking into the earth, turning backwards as they did so. Frightened, Nemo nevertheless gathered her reserves of strength and crept forward, using extreme caution and preparing herself to flee at every step, to investigate what she had seen, and when she reached the point where Cassandra had vanished, she sat high in her saddle, looking down at the entrance to a steep path that doubled back on itself, shrouded on either side by dense bushes, and descended rapidly into a declivity impossible to detect from more than ten paces distant. She pulled on her reins and raised herself until she stood fully upright in her stirrups and gazed around her, her head tilted backwards in an attempt to gauge, from the height and density of the bushes and trees in front of her, just how large and deep this fold in the earth might be.