by Jack Whyte
Popilius Cirro, one of the last surviving veterans of the imperial legions left in Britain, was one of the few men in the world whom Uther Pendragon regarded with awe. Ever since Uther had been a snot-nosed boy, he had walked in fear of the big man, whom he had never seen in any condition other than impeccable, whether that referred to his uniform dress, his dignity or his conduct and deportment.
Now Uther found a Cirro he had never seen before, stripped of his polished armour and wearing only a white, knee-length tunic that was torn and heavily stained with blood. His hair, normally covered completely by his heavy, ornate helmet, was thick and completely white, matted and plastered to his scalp with sweat. The senior centurion was propped up stiffly in a camp chair, his back against the bole of an enormous oak tree, his face pale and haggard and his eyes sunken and feverish, the skin beneath them beaded with sweat. His entire left thigh was swathed in thick, blood-blackened bandages and his right arm was tightly bound and strapped against his chest to keep it immobile, but the steadfast old campaigner was deep in conference with the senior officer cadre of the army. The group surrounding him, gathered in a semicircle beneath the boughs of the oak tree, included Strong- arm and Whistler, representing the Pendragon bowmen and Dragons respectively, and his own Camulodian cavalry and infantry commanders headed by Dedalus.
Most of the officers turned to look at Uther as he approached, then turned quickly back to Cirro, as though afraid to look away from him for too long, lest he expire between one breath and the next. Cirro himself was the only one who did not look away again from Uther. He merely stared, solemn-faced, and nodded in greeting as the King approached.
Uther knew that everyone there was aware that he had brought hack women and a baby to join their party, and he knew, too, that their curiosity about who these people were and why they should have come with him must be immense. He himself had offered no explanation to anyone and had warned his own people to keep silent. Now he fully expected that Cirro, despite his obvious pain and exhaustion, would demand to know what was going on, as was his right as commander of the Camulod contingent of the army.
Uther marched directly up to the older man, laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and asked him how he was feeling, knowing that the question was stupid and yet unable to stop himself or to think of anything more appropriate to say.
Cirro waved away Uther's concerns with a gesture of his left hand and then surprised him by making no reference at all to Uther's absence or to the newcomers he had brought back with him. He had more important matters to communicate and discuss before relinquishing his command.
They had defeated the German mercenaries, he reported, speaking sibilantly through clenched teeth, but had lost more than a hundred men in the encounter and almost as many again with serious wounds. More than sixty of their casualties had been infantry soldiers, but twenty of them had been Pendragon bowmen, isolated and cut down by unexpected enemy manoeuvres. Another half score and more had been cavalry brought down by arrows or, in a few instances, by the axes and spears of the enemy. Almost before the echoes of the fighting had died away, however, scouts from the rear had come running to report the advance of another, far larger host from the north, this one apparently composed entirely of Erse Galloglas. The veteran German mercenaries who had caused them so much trouble had numbered in the region of seven to eight hundred men, according to Cirro's best estimate, but the new force streaming towards them appeared to be almost twice as large as that.
Listening to the infantry commander's report and recognizing the effort and the pain involved in making it, Uther sucked in his breath and held it, realizing that he had committed a great error in judgment. He had assumed, when the German mercenaries attacked with so much strength and purpose, that this was the army he had been warned about, and that the earlier identification of it as an Erse force had been wrong. Now, faced with the reality of a second, larger host where he had anticipated only one, he was forced to reassess the odds he might be facing, and he was daunted by his own sudden uncertainty and his ignorance of what was really happening. This second army had to be the Galloglas enemy that Ygraine had named earlier, the Ersemen who called themselves the Sons of Condran, and they must have been landed, exactly as she had described, from a large fleet of Erse galleys somewhere to the northwest above the Shelter. Visualizing that, Uther felt the first, unfamiliar sensations of panic in his breast, stirrings that he grimly fought down, forcing himself to consider his revised options as dispassionately as he could. Turning his back on Cirro and the others, he reviewed the possibilities now swarming in his mind.
It now seemed highly unlikely to him that the mercenary force he had been fighting, which had come from the same northerly direction, could have been an advance unit of the Galloglas army. The temptation to accept it as such was strong, but when he looked squarely at the evidence, the combination of disciplined, battle- hardened imperial mercenaries and undisciplined Erse warriors in the same force was too alien to imagine. Besides, he told himself, he had been engaged with the mercenaries for a day and a half. Had the Ersemen been part of the same force, no matter how dilatory, undisciplined or unwilling, they would have caught up to an advance guard long before the end of that encounter.
Whence, then, had the Germans come, and where had they been going? And if Ygraine's report was accurate and yet another licet had now landed Lot himself on the coast nearby, where had it originated? It hardly seemed possible that it could be part of the same Erse fleet. But then, if it was another fleet entirely, who commanded it, and how large a fighting force had it disgorged on his western flank?
Compressing his lips into a thin line, he swung back to face Cirro and the others, who had all been standing silent, waiting to see how he would react to the word of this new threat. Wasting no words, he told them that the women he had brought back with him were Lot's Queen, Ygraine—the real one this time—and her companions. In clipped tones that permitted neither interruption nor comment, he explained, to the astonishment of most, that his spy in Lot's camp had been the Queen herself, and that she was sister to Merlyn's Erse friend and former hostage Donuil, and also to Merlyn's own dead wife, Deirdre. She had a child with her, Lot's acknowledged heir, Uther said, declining for the time being, on a sudden impulse, to name the child as his own. He told them that Ygraine was to be picked up from the southwest coast by her brother Connor, who commanded the fleet of galleys owned by their father, King Athol Mac Iain of the Erse Scots, and that he, Uther, as commander in chief of the combined Camulodian and Cambrian armies, had undertaken to get the Queen to the meeting place safely, both in reward for her loyal and dangerous aid to this point and in order to keep the Erse King neutral in this war, and in recognition of the strength and the bargaining power Lot's legitimate heir would offer them as a hostage.
He also told them about Ygraine's latest report of the landing in the west, and that Lot himself was now bearing down upon the fort in which the Queen had been held, only a few miles from where the Camulodian army now stood.
He ended by telling them bluntly that, in his opinion, the combined odds stacked against them at this time were too great to defy, but he was surprised by the intensity of the relief he felt when all of them, Popilius Cirro included, agreed with him immediately, making no attempt to debate or deny his conclusions. The best thing they could do, based upon all the knowledge they now had, Cirro said in a greatly weakened voice, would be to withdraw immediately, as quickly and as discreetly as they could, heading directly southward as fast as they could travel until they were clear of any threat from Lot's newly landed fleet and its cargo of warriors on their westward side. After that, once they were safely out of the way of Lot's incursion from the west and ahead of the Galloglas behind them, they could change direction and make their way directly southwest towards the mouth of the River Camel, where they might fortify themselves for a while and await the arrival of the galleys Connor was sending to carry his sister home.
Uther listened now in silenc
e, stifling his own doubts. He had no wish to see Ygraine sail off across the sea to Eire, carrying his son, but on the other hand, he was equally sure that he had no wish for her and the child to remain in Cornwall, in danger of being taken and killed out of hand by Gulrhys Lot. He said nothing of that, however, confining himself to agreeing with the general plan of evasion and hoping that Nemo would find them before they struck southwestward with news of Lagan Longhead, his whereabouts and the number of men in his command.
Uther ratified Dedalus's promotion to immediate, overall command of the infantry, satisfying Cirro, and then moved to see to his senior officer's comfort. Two of Cirro's own troopers lifted him gently onto a stretcher and carried him away to one of the hospital wagons, with the senior medical officer Mucius Quinto walking beside them, and as soon as they had gone, Uther turned his attention to the rest of his arrangements. The infantry, now approximately nine hundred strong but strengthened by the addition of Herliss's thirty clansmen and the Queen's fifty-man bodyguard, was to be dispatched within the hour to march south at maximum speed, escorting the baggage and supply train with its inclusion of the Queen's women, while the thousand cavalry, including Uther's Dragons and supported by Huw Strongarm's four hundred bowmen, would make its way more slowly behind their march, searching for a suitably open spot that they could use as a battleground on which to detain and deter the oncoming Galloglas.
Once he had found such a place, Uther explained, he intended to hold the enemy there long enough to permit the infantry and their charges to forge well ahead of pursuit. The Pendragon bowmen would do what they did best in any defensive situation, demoralizing and decimating the approaching enemy from a great distance until the Galloglas came close enough to be engaged by the cavalry. At that time, the bowmen would disperse and move ahead swiftly to follow and eventually rejoin the infantry, leaving the horsemen to savage the Galloglas in a holding action that Uther believed could be completely victorious. When this engagement was complete and the Ersemen demoralized, the cavalry would disengage and then catch up quickly with the remainder of his army, moving at three to five times the speed of the infantry column or of any Galloglas still functional enough to pursue them.
It was a good plan and it might have worked well, had the Galloglas behaved as Uther expected. Instead they hung back and refused to be drawn into a fight, melting away from sight of the Pendragon bowmen every time a force was sent against them. The lack of conclusive action was frustrating and time-consuming, and Uther found himself growing more and more aware that his men were tiring rapidly. He was still deep in hostile territory and highly vulnerable, separated from his woman and their child, under threat of attack from almost every direction and yet completely ignorant of where his main enemy was.
In the end, after another day of little progress, he dismissed his bowmen shortly after sunset to catch up with the infantry column, then posted doubled guards and rallied his troopers to be mounted before dawn and ready for anything.
Only one unexpected event occurred to add to his discomfiture as he waited in vain for the Galloglas to meet his expectations. Owain of the Caves came to him as he was sitting by his campfire, having just dismissed his bowmen. Uther was glad to see the taciturn Northerner, but Owain had not come to exchange pleasantries. He spoke, as he always did, directly and to the point.
"Why are you bothering with this Queen and her brat?"
Uther gazed up at him in surprise, but answered mildly enough. "Because I must. I made a promise and am honour bound to keep it."
"What promise? To see them safely out of your own power?"
"If you want to see it that way, yes, that's what I promised."
"Then you're a fool, Pendragon. More the fool than I would ever have thought you could be. They're Lot's creatures and they'll be the death of you. The brat's his flesh and blood. Better you slit their throats, all of them, and leave them here beside the road. That's what he would do to yours. You'll see no joy of this."
"Oh," Uther said, his voice still mild, "I think you might be wrong."
"Aye, well I know I'm not. They'll be the death of you. I said it and I mean it. Bear that in mind. As for me, I want no part of it. Give me the word and I'll kill them for you. Otherwise, I'm leaving."
"They are not to be harmed, Owain."
"So be it. Fare thee well, for as long as may be." The big Celt spun on his heel and stalked away.
Uther was sorely tempted to call him back and tell him the truth, but there were too many eager ears about, and he chose to say nothing for the time being, unaware that he would never see Owain of the Caves again.
The dawn came, and Uther led his cavalry on a surprise attack across a broad front that took the Galloglas completely by surprise and sent them reeling, scattered in every direction and apparently demoralized and terrorized by the co-ordinated force of the charging squadrons of horsemen, a phenomenon the like of which none of them had ever encountered. After the initial impact of the charge had shattered any semblance of resistance or cohesion among the Ersemen, Uther allowed his troopers to harry their fleeing foes for a while, and the reports of the slaughter they achieved were impressive, even allowing for the natural exaggerations of excited warriors in the heat of blood lust, lie knew that the Galloglas, despite their vaunted savagery and courage, were no match for his cavalry under any circumstances. They could not even run away, since the horses chasing them were faster than they were, and their weapons were puny and useless against the mass, weight and height of the uniformly armoured troopers, most of whom fought with whirling iron flails that smashed men into nothingness.
When he judged that the rout had lasted long enough, Uther ordered the recall to be sounded and marshalled his men into their squadrons again. They had not lost a single trooper in the dawn attack. He swung them around and led them southward at a fast trot, determined to catch up quickly to the group ahead of them. It look him all of that day, but by the time night fell his army was reunited, and they seemed to have won free of any threat of immediate attack. He was able to spend the night, finally, sleeping with Ygraine in his arms while their son slept in a cot alongside theirs.
Uther was brought back harshly to reality, however, when the alarm went up some time before dawn and he came awake to the sound of clashing weapons and screaming men. He rolled out of bed before he even knew where he was, reaching for his sword belt and unsheathing his weapon even as he moved, and it took him several moments after that to become aware that he was as naked as the blade in his hand. By that time, he was already outside his tent, trying to see what was happening around him, and as he stood glaring into the darkness, seeing only indistinct moving forms and unable to distinguish friend from foe, someone came hurtling towards him, arm upraised to strike.
Uther instantly anticipated the downward slash of the weapon and stepped forward to his left, bending low to avoid the path of the blade that was hissing towards him. and then lunging on his right foot to stab with his long sword, feeling the point plunge home beneath his assailant's upraised arm. The man screamed as Uther twisted the blade before tearing it loose again to pivot completely on his left heel, sweeping his sword around in a full turn to bring the edge of the blade smashing down in a backhanded slash to the falling man's exposed neck. As the man fell away, Uther was already moving forward in a crouch, looking for another target, but then he heard his name being shouted and turned to see Garreth Whistler and four fully armoured troopers running towards him. Whistler seized him by the arm and pushed him back towards his tent, telling him to get dressed and that he and the others would guard the Queen's tent while Uther armed himself.
Uther emerged again a short time later, once more the King, fully dressed and armoured, but the attackers, whoever they had been, had already been beaten off. The entire camp was still in an uproar, and as Uther stepped out of his tent, sword in hand. Whistler was in the act of pulling himself up into his saddle. As soon as he saw Uther, he pointed to where another trooper held the King's mount,
fully saddled and ready. Uther ran directly to the horse and heaved himself up into his own saddle, then stood upright in his stirrups, trying to make sense of everything he was seeing. Dawn was already flushing the eastern sky, and where he had been able to see only darkness and shadows mere moments earlier, he could now recognize individual men in the growing light. But nowhere could he see any enemies. He twisted in his saddle to look back at Whistler, who was moving up to his side.
"Who were they?" he shouted.
"Who knows? Whoever they were, they knew what they were about. They penetrated two rings of guards—one mounted and the other afoot—without letting a squeak out of any of them." Whistler's horse reared and he fought the animal down, grim-faced, "One thing's certain—two things, in fact: they were after the horses, and they must have friends out there close by. I can't imagine an unsupported group of under a hundred men attacking a force of this size otherwise, unless they were all crazed. They might be our Galloglas friends from yesterday, regrouped, but I doubt that. I don't think the Ersemen could have reorganized themselves that quickly after the treatment we dealt them. But the fact that they even tried this tells me there are others like them close by, and we might have them down on our heads at any moment. We're striking camp now."
"Good man." Uther pulled back on his reins, dancing his horse in a circle, his eyes taking in everything around him. "How many men did we lose, and who's chasing the raiders?"
"No one's chasing anyone—we don't know what's out there. As for the guards, I've sent one of my people to do the rounds of the sentry posts. My guess is that we lost at least ten, but it might have been twice that. How these people were able to approach mounted men and pull them down in silence is something I intend to find out. Apart from that, we lost a few men during the fighting here in camp. We could have lost you, too, the same way, leaping around bare-arsed in the open like some demented hermit. Ah, there's my man. I'll be back as soon as I have some answers."