by Jack Whyte
"I see. But how has Ygraine suddenly become so important?"
"I—" Lot stopped short, then began again. "Your Uncle Balin is in Eire. Did you know that?" Lagan merely shook his head. He had heard nothing of his father's brother in many months, and they had barely spoken at all since Balin's return to Cornwall. "Well, he is. I sent him there more than a month ago to maintain contact with old Athol. Now he has sent word to me—it came last night—that the old man is taken with a desire to see his daughter and so may visit us this summer."
"Ah, and so you need the Lady Ygraine here, comfortably installed and living as your Queen before he comes. Well, that's understandable."
The King's face was a flinty mask, showing no trace of humour or tolerance. "It pleases me to hear you say so, but the understanding of others matters nothing to me. I find it politic that she should come here now to be with me, so that her overfond father, old and doddering as he may be, will have no reason to withdraw from this alliance on the grounds that I have mistreated his daughter."
Lagan looked his friend squarely in the eye. "But you have. Gully. You can scarcely deny it. Perhaps mistreated is too harsh a word, but you have neglected her." He ignored the cold blankness of Lot's eyes and pressed on. "You may think I'm being too bold, but I believe you have to ask yourself if you really believe you can undo the damage already done to the lady's pride. She must already be resentful, hidden away where she is. She probably feels she has been slighted and ignored for all these months." He paused, meeting the King's angry stare without blinking, speaking eye to eye, friend to friend. "I have never understood why you sent her to live with my father out there in isolation on the coast."
Now Lot smiled, but the effort it cost him was obvious, and the result was more of a grimace than anything else.
"She is a shrew. Lagan, worse than all the other six combined. There can be no peace with her and me beneath the same roof tree. Besides, I have sons enough. She was a price I had to pay to form this alliance— an evil-tempered wife unlit to wield a besom. Now, however, things have changed . . . my needs paramount among them. I will bring her back into my household now for the sake of my kingdom, above all. I will honour her publicly as my Queen and perhaps I'll even sire a get on her . . ." His eyes drifted off again, fixed on some inner space, and then he snapped back to attention. "And speaking of sons, how is yours, the warlike young Cardoc?"
Lagan's face lit up. "Apart from Lydda, he is the greatest delight of my life. Every time I come back home, even if I've only been away for a matter of days, he seems to have grown another hand's breadth taller."
"Aye, and that reminds me, you almost did not come back at all last time, and I had to wait for days to learn of it."
Lagan looked uncomfortable for a few moments, and then smiled and shrugged. "It was not worth mentioning. It was over and done with, and no harm incurred."
The King made a tutting noise between his teeth. "You really must take people with you when you ride away, Lagan. For a man with the name of Longhead, you can be remarkably stupid and stubborn sometimes. I heard about the escapade, but there were no details. What happened?"
Lagan shook his head and shrugged his wide, strong shoulders. "Nothing much, but I was lucky that Docca and his fellows came along when I hey did. I rode too close to a band of louts who were braver and more numerous than I at first suspected. We were exchanging . . . opinions, when Docca arrived."
"Aye. Docca opined that you had killed three of them by the time he reached you."
"Four, but I was glad to see him. I didn't know he was there until one fellow fell away from me with an arrow in his eye. The tussle didn't last long after that. It's amazing how shortened odds can sap some strong men's courage." Lagan turned away and reached for his sword belt and cloak. "I was careless that time, it's true, but it taught me a lesson. Still, I prefer to travel alone, and most of the time I have no trouble." He thrust one arm completely through the loop of his sword belt and allowed the sheathed weapon to dangle while he swung the cape up and over his head to settle comfortably over his shoulders. "And now I should go home and tell my wife I'm going away again. Do you really want me to leave today?"
Lot nodded, his half-smile back in place. "Aye, I do. We have little time now, it appears, and every hour might be precious. Were it not so, I would otherwise leave you to take your own time in going and returning."
"Aye. Well, my father will doubtless have to gather your weapons from his various castles before he can send anything back here, so there will be a wait involved. Will you want me to remain and come back with the wagons, or should I return immediately with word of how long it will take?"
"Well, we must leave that to your father and you, to a degree, at least." The King made a display of deliberating, drumming his fingers reflectively against the back of his chair before continuing. "But if it looks like being less than, say, ten days, then you might wish to remain there to oversee the proceedings and then ride back here with the train. If it looks like taking any longer than that, though, I think you should come back at your earliest opportunity and advise us as to the length of time we will have to wait before the material is in our possession."
"Good, so be it." Lagan quickly buckled his belt about his waist before picking up his cup and draining it, smacking his lips. "I will take my leave of you, then, and go and kiss my wife and son before I take to the road." He swung away and then stopped, clearly considering some idea that had newly occurred to him. "D'you know, I think I might take Cardoc with me. It would do him good to see his grandfather, and the journey will be a relatively safe one, crossing our own territories. Besides, I had promised to take him fishing."
The King's hesitation was so minute that it almost did not happen at all. "Then take him, my friend . . . and the lovely Lydda, too. She will enjoy that as much as the boy. So be it you are sure they will not slow you down. If I need you for anything, it will be unimportant enough to wait another day. Go and take pleasure in your family, but bear in mind that this task on which you ride has a large degree of urgency and import."
The smile faded from Lagan Longhead's face. "Aye," he said. "You're right, as ever. Perhaps it would not be a good idea, after all."
"There will be other times, then. Take them when you return, and you will have as much time as you want, if Camulod has not come round our ears."
"Aye, I'll do that. Farewell, then."
As the door closed behind Lagan Longhead, the smile faded slowly from the King's face to be replaced with a look of pouting, heavy-eyed displeasure. He plucked moodily at his heavy lower lip, frowning thoughtfully at the solid oaken door, and then he rose and made his way slowly to the window, where he placed one hand on the central pillar of the window and leaned through to look out into the empty courtyard. Thunder rumbled far away, and he leaned further forward to look upward, twisting his head and craning his neck to see that the blue sky had vanished, replaced by a thick canopy of dark grey cloud. Gulrhys Lot grunted deep inside his chest, and then turned away, moving directly towards the long work table where Lestrun had placed the two scrolls.
Lagan was deep in thought as he strode from the King's residence, ignoring the guards completely. He was not totally lacking in cynical awareness of the King's ways and moods, and the final little piece of manipulation had not escaped his recognition. He had known even as he spoke the words that he was making a mistake in announcing his desire to take his son with him, but the impulse had been overwhelming, and once begun, he had no way of unsaying it. In consequence, he had known before he finished speaking that he would not be allowed to take the boy. Better to have held his tongue and simply taken the lad, than to have mentioned the possibility of doing so to Lot, because Lot's demands on one's loyalty, as everyone knew, were absolute. He would brook no weakness, no distraction, under any circumstances. He insisted ruthlessly that he be the centre and the only focus of attention, and many a warrior had learned to his cost that he could not marry while the King had need of him. La
gan kicked at a pebble in his path, cursing himself for his enthusiasm and wishing he had kept his mouth tightly closed.
Despite the urgency of Lot's demands and the willingness of everyone involved to fulfill them, it was no small matter for Herliss to amass everything he had been asked to supply and then prepare it for safe delivery. The siege engines, in particular, presented a problem in transportation that almost proved insuperable until one bright fellow had the idea of stripping the wheels and axles from the heavy wagons and attaching them directly to the massive timbers of the devices themselves.
The huge Roman siege engines had never been designed to travel great distances. They were massive, cumbersome affairs constructed for strength, stability and endurance, built with solid wheels to provide them with a degree of mobility but intended in that respect purely for positioning each apparatus and, in the case of the artillery pieces, for altering the field of fire they commanded during battle. They were meant to be manhandled but had never been intended for overland travel.
Duke Emrys had acquired them somehow at the time of the Roman withdrawals from Britain, and knowing their worth, he had taken them into his custody and guarded them against a future need. They had been dismantled carefully, the component pieces clearly marked and numbered for reassembly, but they had been in storage for decades since then, split up for safety among Herliss's four coastal forts. In the intervening years the enormous wagons originally used to transport them had been used for other purposes, scattered and eventually lost. In consequence, Herliss faced an enormous task, and he dared not take the risk of mixing or misplacing the component parts of each device, be it ballista, catapult or storming tower, for the men who would transport and reassemble them had had no training in such things.
The time flew by, so that Lagan quickly found himself on the wrong side of Lot's ten-day division, with yet another two weeks' work to go, according to his father, before all the individual pieces would be ready for moving. He had spent all of his time on the south coast moving among the four forts, and by the time he realized that he would have to return with the unwelcome word of delay to Lot, he had not yet found time to visit Queen Ygraine in his father's home fort of Tir Gwyn some twenty to thirty miles inland.
Reluctantly, without having seen or spoken to the Queen, he bade his father farewell and set out again for Lot's stronghold of Golant, bearing the news that Herliss would be ready to move northwards with his treasures in no less than two weeks. Lot, Lagan knew, would not be happy with the tidings. But then, he reflected, Ygraine the Queen was likely to be even less happy at the prospect of being reunited with her husband. According to Herliss, Queen Ygraine did not hold Gully in high regard.
So busy was Herliss that he barely noticed his son's departure. His mind was too full of logistical concerns to leave time for family matters. He was content, knowing that he would follow Lagan within weeks and would finally be rid of the wearying responsibility for all Lot's stored goods.
As for the Queen, Ygraine, she remained unaware for days that her husband had taken note of her again and summoned her to Golant, or even that Lagan had been in the south. The word of her imminent journey came to her eventually from Herliss, whom she had grown to regard almost as a father. Ygraine listened to what he had to say but made no complaint. She understood all too well that Herliss had no choice but to deliver her upon Lot's instructions, and so she accepted the inevitable. But she could find little in his tidings to look forward to, and so filled was her mind with the unwelcome prospect of being reunited with her estranged spouse that it would never have occurred to her to wonder about her own safety on the journey from Herliss's stronghold to Lot's.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
The ambush, swift, terrible and thorough, was rendered all the more terrifying by the small amount of blood actually shed. And in the duration of it, within the space of moments, Ygraine's status changed from Queen to hostage. Caught completely unprepared, her escort, strong though it was, had no chance of counterattacking. One moment they were marching in good order through a wide, shallow valley under bright, early-spring sunlight, and the next they were caught squarely between two parallel masses of alien warriors, grim- faced and silent, terrifyingly different from any she had known before. They had literally sprung from the ground on either side of the narrow road, already grouped in attack formations and aiming hundreds of great longbows in massed ranks.
She was amazed, however, at how clearly she was able to see what happened in the momentary chaos that followed. Her escort had already begun to surge into a disciplined but already useless attempt to rally some kind of defensive formation, and in the middle of the protective swirling of her own personal bodyguard, at the time when the first hail of arrows should have been wreaking ruin and havoc amongst her protectors, Ygraine, Queen of Cornwall, daughter of Athol Mac lain of Eire, perceived clearly and unmistakably that someone, for some unknown reason, was withholding death and mass destruction.
Only one group of warriors, under the personal command of Gylmer, her husband's most faithful and hotheaded captain, succeeded in forming a shield phalanx and moving forward to engage the enemy on the sloping hillside above. They had barely left the road, Gylmer on his mountain pony riding in their centre, rallying them, when they were slaughtered, all twenty of them obliterated instantly by a lethal rain of long, deadly arrows, fired with appalling accuracy from the other hillside, behind them. Ygraine heard the missiles hissing overhead, moving from right to left, and spun to look, thus avoiding the actual sight of the death that fell upon her quickest men so suddenly, and she was stunned to see that none but the farthest ranks on the right of the hill behind her had fired, in response to some hidden, but deadly signal. They were already stringing new arrows when she swung back to see what they had done. Not a man of the twenty remained standing. And no single bowman in the ranks facing the slaughtered men seemed to have loosed a shot.
The warning was not lost on anyone, including Herliss, the grizzled veteran commander entrusted by her husband with the task of shepherding his Queen and a valuable train of goods and provisions between two of the royal strongholds that dotted his territory. As Ygraine caught sight of Herliss now, his yet-unhelmed head flung back in outrage and his right hand raised above his head, fist clenched, to rally his forces, she recognized the fury and hopelessness that swept across his face as he slowly lowered his hand.
Herliss, the only remaining mounted man in the train, was stunned by the swiftness of this defeat, by its totality and by his own helplessness. They had sprung from the ground like devils, pouring up out of holes and trenches dug in the soft hillsides on either side of the narrow, rutted road, the only warning of their coming the sudden, shocking sight of rectangular sections of grass- covered ground being lifted up and thrown aside to give them passage. And as they came, they had drawn their bows, arrows already nocked, forming themselves with daunting speed into solid blocks of death: tight, disciplined, inexorable; ranks spaced far enough apart to enable each to fire over the heads of those beneath them; drawn weapons pointed grimly down towards the long train reeling in disorder and panic below. Young Gylmer, as usual, had been the first man to react, kicking his pony forward with a shout and attracting the attention of his men before panic could overwhelm them. But Gylmer had died for his decisiveness, and his men had been struck down with him, destroyed by a response so quick and so complete that every man who saw it knew it had been planned for just such a move.
Now Herliss looked about him, assessing his ruin. Men hung in impossible postures of indecision everywhere he looked, as though frozen in place in the blink of some mad god's eye. Among them, in the very centre of the roadway, the Queen's group of women eddied, as yet too stunned to have begun screaming. Behind him, he could hear wails of panic rising from among the wagon-drivers. Only the Queen's personal bodyguard of Ersemen seemed prepared to match the threat of the massed ranks above. They had formed a circle, their shields a solid wall behind which they now crouched, gri
m-faced and prepared to die about their lady.
A stillness fell over everything. The voices behind Herliss died away, and in the silence, the men up on the hillside lowered their threatening bows, relaxing the tension in their arms. It was then that Herliss became aware of a truly frightening truth: only half of them had been aiming. As the bows were lowered, the other half were raised, extending the promise of death, and yet withholding its delivery. And still nothing moved on the valley floor.
Herliss drew a deep breath, aware of the Queen's eyes staring at him. He was the King's Commander. Gulrhys Lot would hang and disembowel him for what had already occurred. His sole alternative was to meet death on terms he chose himself, no matter how onesided. He straightened his back and drew his heavy, bronze-bladed sword, bringing up his arm again, as slowly as he had lowered it, expecting to be shot down at every moment.
"No, Herliss! No! I forbid it!" The Queen's voice cut through the silence. "Everyone, hear me! Lay down your weapons."
A few turned their heads towards her, including Herliss.
She spoke again, her voice ringing. "Are you all mad? Can you not see? They have no wish to kill us. If they did, we would be dead! Lay down your weapons." She could see that some of them wanted to believe her, but no one moved to comply with her command.
"The woman's right, Herliss!"
The words came booming from the chest of a giant man who stood some thirty paces away on the hill behind her, and she spun to face him, as did all the others. He wore no helmet, and he had thick, black hair and a full, close-cropped beard that masked his features almost entirely. He was also one of the few on the hillside who carried no bow. His hands were empty, crossed over his chest, the index finger of each one hooked into the armholes of his breastplate, the other fingers spread on the swelling muscles of each arm. He looked completely at his ease. A mustard-yellow, ground-length cloak was thrown back over his shoulders, and his armour was of toughened, layered bull hide, studded with lozenges of black iron. Even from afar, separated from him by the protective circle of her bodyguard, Ygraine could see his bright blue eyes blazing, flashing with either humour or scorn, she could not tell which. As her eyes found him, he spoke again, directly to Herliss, who sat staring from his horse's back, the hand holding his sword still partly raised.