by Jack Whyte
EPILOGUE
As Derek of Ravenglass spurred his newly acquired warhorse to overtake his men, a solitary figure, dressed all in black, with polished leather and burnished silver armour, an enormous, double-arched bow slung diagonally across his shoulders over his cloak, emerged from the valley less than two miles to the north of him and resolutely turned his mount westward along the riverbank towards the sea. Merlyn Britannicus, fully and painfully restored to conscious awareness after a two-year hiatus, had no knowledge of his exact location. He knew only that his cousin Uther was somewhere ahead of him, and that some time soon he would find him and confront him before taking vengeance for a murdered wife and child.
For more than a week now, Merlyn had been riding south and west through the war-ravaged peninsula of Cornwall, following the wide-trampled path of large bodies of men moving ahead of him. Who these men were, and whether or not the groups were large enough to constitute armies, he could not tell, but he knew beyond dispute that his cousin's original army had been harried and beset at every step of their journey. The bodies strewn along his present route, some of them charred beyond recognition as friends or enemies, bore eloquent testimony to the hard-fought progress Uther Pendragon had won.
Until he rode into the devastation of the battleground to the north two days before, however, Merlyn had believed in the myth of his invincible, implacable cousin. He had been completely unprepared for the story of Uther's ignominious Might from the battlefield, and the two reports he heard, from Mucius Quinto and Popilius Cirro, the two senior surviving officers among the battered remnants of the Camulodian army, were sufficiently similar, in one overriding respect, to close his mind to other disparities.
Both men described how Uther had fled the battlefield, accompanied by a party of captured, high-born women, one of them Ygraine, the wife of Gulrhys Lot himself.
Merlyn had been confounded and outraged to hear of this new evidence of his cousin's perfidy, for as soon as he heard Ygraine's name, he knew who she was: the sister of his own murdered wife, Deirdre, whose brutal death he was now riding to avenge, convinced that it had occurred at the hands of Uther. That Uther should now have abducted Ygraine, insult upon infamy, hardened Merlyn's heart completely against the man who had once, and for so long, been nearest and dearest to him. Had any doubts lingered in his mind about the Tightness of his mission, these tidings of Ygraine had destroyed them.
It mattered nothing to Merlyn that Mucius Quinto had suggested, not unreasonably, that Uther, by his flight, had saved the lives of all the men yet living in the valley. Nor, by the same token, did it cross his mind to doubt the surgeon's accuracy when he told Merlyn that his cousin had ridden off at the head of a thousand mounted men, the entire cavalry complement of the force with which Uther had left Camulod. Merlyn had no interest in explaining, excusing or justifying his cousin's apparent cowardice. He wanted only to overtake the red-and-gold-clad King and bring him to justice. Every other consideration was superfluous beside that driving need. And so he had taken leave of the two veteran Camulodians and gone hunting once again for Uther, his armour and equipment clean and sparkling, unsullied by the dirt of either battle or long travel.
The following morning, he found the Cornish King, Gulrhys Lot himself, recognizable even over the gap of years since Merlyn had last set eyes upon him, hanging at the end of a rope thrown over the bough of a huge tree, but so great was his urgency to overtake Uther that he barely took time to examine the corpse or wonder who had hung it there. He was mildly mystified, certainly, by its mutilation and by the fact that its severed hands and feet had been stuffed into a large, richly brocaded bag that bore the crest of Pendragon on its face. Strangely, the King's great seal, a solid mass of gold, had been left intact upon the finger of one hand. He took it as proof of the man's death, but wasted no time being curious about the why or wherefore of the execution. Nor did he pay the slightest attention to the ruined, skull-cleft corpse that lay nearby at the edge of the clearing. Gulrhys Lot, he knew, had richly deserved to die a hideous death, and there must have been hundreds of men who would have been happy to provide one.
Turning to leave, however, he hesitated and then swung back to face the dangling corpse, suddenly filled with a swelling, angry resentment. This dead and bloodless hulk was the miscreant responsible for the war that had blighted and blasted southwestern Britain, but far worse than that, this corpse had been the dictator of countless deaths, among them the murder of Merlyn's own father, Picus Britannicus. That in itself demanded some form of vengeance, even post mortem. Merlyn kicked his horse forward, dismounted and began to build a pyre beneath the body, beginning with a tiny blaze and then feeding it until it roared so that he could scarcely approach it. There was no lack of dead wood lying close by, and so he soon had a huge conflagration blazing, the flames reaching as high as the corpse's waist, burning its clothing and licking at the rope across its chest. Merlyn sat his horse and waited until the rope gave way, dropping the body into the inferno, and then he turned and rode away, his mind fixed once again upon his cousin.
The riverbank pathway Merlyn now followed was narrow and dangerous in spots, but it was the only path available, and he could see plainly that it had been taken by scores of riders ahead of him. He rode forward attentively, keeping his horse tightly reined, and soon came to a place where an ancient, enormous tree had fallen clean across the river, bridging it from bank to bank, its ruined top blocking the path and forcing him to dismount and lead his horse around the obstacle.
There, within the screen of trees at the edge of the forest, he found more than a score of bodies, three of them wearing the dragon crest of Pendragon emblazoned on their Camulodian armour, and when he emerged on to the path again, he saw more corpses in the riverbed, some floating, face down and bloated, while others appeared frozen in position on the stones of the opposite bank, killed as they had tried to fight their way across. Numbed, however, and sick of the sight of so much death, Merlyn felt no compulsion to cross the stream bed to see what had happened over there, and so rode past, unknowing, within a hundred paces of his cousin's naked body.
A short time later, the pathway widened, allowing him to make swifter progress through a landscape littered with the remnants of battle. He noted in passing that the corpses he could recognize by their clothing and equipment seemed far fewer than those they had slain, and that one tight-knit group of dead had fought to the last man, falling as they had stood, in a compact, circular formation, their shields lying beside them. Having no knowledge of Ygraine's bloodguard of Eirish clansmen, he saw them merely as Outlanders who had sold their lives dearly against other Outlanders, and accepted the anomaly as one more of the inexplicable mysteries in what he thought of now as Uther's War. The direction of flight and light, however, told him that Uther's party was still alive and still ahead of him, and so he rode ever faster, his horse's flanks beginning to show the marks of his pitiless spurs.
Only at one point did his resolute pursuit of his cousin falter. Resuming his journey after pausing by a brook to eat a hurried bite of food in the middle of the day, he emerged suddenly into a clearing where he found a burned and gutted farmstead and the slaughtered bodies of the family that had lived there. Only the mother remained alive, demented by grief, kneeling beside her murdered baby, staring dry-eyed into madness and horror. He had stopped and dismounted, thinking somehow to help her, but she attacked him with the savagery of a trapped animal, clawing and biting, ferociously protective of the tiny, pathetic body in front of her, and he withdrew hurriedly, flinging himself back into the saddle, sickened with anger and a great, helpless shame as he galloped away from the wretched scene.
Less than an hour after that, he reached the top of a cliff overlooking the sea and saw a broad trail of hoofprints stretching away along the shoreline below to his left, moving from west to east. Knowing that he was closing the distance between himself and his quarry, he set off again at a determined gallop down the hill and up onto the top of the n
ext, where he was rewarded by the distant sight of his cousin's unmistakable red cloak, with its gold embroidered dragon.
Despite the legendary reputation for sorcery that would later accrue around his name and memory, Merlyn Britannicus was first and foremost a man, with all a man's limitations, including a tendency to short-sighted hubris and self-delusion. So intent was he upon his hunt and the long-delayed vengeance that lay ahead of him that his recognition of his cousin's presence was instantaneous and categorical. It would never have crossed his mind that what he saw was only Uther's clothing and colours. And so, his anger cold now, and focused, he set spurs to his horse again and thundered downward from his high viewpoint, using the animal cruelly as its hooves devoured the distance between him and the group ahead. He had accepted that his destiny involved confronting and then fighting his blood cousin, and he was prepared to accept the consequences, whether he lived or died in the struggle.
As he flogged his horse westward, parallel to the distant shoreline on his right and keeping to the firm footing of the ridge above the soft beach sand, he overhauled his quarry rapidly but remained far removed from the activities along the waterside. Thus, from a distance far enough to be confusing, he witnessed events that defied his understanding, for Uther, who was supposed to be escorting and protecting the Cornish Queen and her female attendants, now seemed to be chasing them, bent upon their capture, and even more mystifying, the women were being fiercely and successfully protected by a group of men wielding long, Pendragon bows that ought, by rights, to have been aligned with Uther's force.
By the time he realized that the large boat he could see drawn up above the high-water mark on the distant beach was to be the end of the long flight, Merlyn was too late to affect the outcome of the incomprehensible events across from him. His horse, tiring rapidly after its long run, scrambled down the slope towards the beach and then surged through fetlock deep sand that drained the last resources of its strength, and Merlyn watched in impotent horror as Uther's mounted men, still far beyond the reach of even Publius Varrus's great African bow, reached the women clustered around the boat and plunged among them. The women's screams reached his ears as the mounted men, acting in concert, reached down and began hauling the women up to hold in front of them, using the female bodies as living shields against the lethal arrows of the bowmen, who had fallen back in formation and were wreaking destruction on the horsemen.
The tactic was successful, because, for long, fatal moments, the ranked bowmen hesitated, unwilling to shoot at or through the women, and by the time they rallied and began to shoot at the horses, instead of their riders, the enemy were on them and the bowmen broke ranks and scattered, to be hunted down and slaughtered.
By the time the last bowman had been killed, only Uther himself, two of the women and six other riders remained alive upon the bloodied beach, and as he continued to struggle towards the others, incapable of even raising a shout, Merlyn watched Uther pull one of the women down onto the sand to violate her, having stabbed her last surviving companion. Seeing it, he knew with sickening, heartbreaking certainty that all his suspicions about his cousin—about the darkness and the demonic fury that dwelled inside him—had been true, and yet they fell short of the evidence of depravity now unfolding before his eyes.
Some time later—a period that his intellect told him could have been no more than an hour, but which seemed to his exhausted body to have lasted much, much longer—Merlyn Britannicus stood peering outwards from the boat that he had first seen lying high and dry upon the beach while a skirmish seethed around it, mounted men attacking others on foot, male and female both, some of whom struggled uselessly to drag the vessel towards the waterline. Now the boat was afloat, and he was in it, drifting farther and farther away from the distant beach and its scattering of lifeless, bloody bodies.
A gust of cool wind came from nowhere, pressing his sodden tunic against his skin and raising gooseflesh. He shivered, glancing back to where his black ring-and-leather armour lay piled on the deck where he had thrown it. the planks beneath and around it soaked and water-stained. From there, his eyes moved again to the dry, black bundled bearskin that lay against the short mast in the middle of the deck. He shook his head as though in disbelief before crossing his arms over his chest and then turning away again, back to face the rapidly receding land.
He could see his horse standing there, still watching him alertly, its ears pricked high towards him, but now as he watched, it turned away, lowering its head and began to drift off in search of forage. On the sand, he could see the silver-and-black heap of his discarded war cloak, and he remembered throwing it down there across his huge double-arched bow. The bow was still strung, he realized, and he wondered how long it would last before the bowstring stretched or snapped. Then, realizing that he was allowing himself to be distracted, he grunted and pushed himself away from the boat's side to examine yet again the alien mass of gear, ropes and tackle that lay neatly arranged on all sides of him. He vaguely knew that all of it was required for manoeuvring the vessel, but Merlyn Britannicus had never been on a boat in his life and could barely begin to decipher the meaning of any of the meticulously laid out equipment. He recognized the oars, neatly piled in rows the length of the vessel on both sides, but they were all enormous, made for use by two or perhaps three men standing abreast. He knew, too, that the vast bundle of cloth hanging between two cross-shipped spars at the foot of the mast was a sail, and he could see the ropes and pulleys that had to be used to haul it up to where it would catch the wind. But the sail itself was dense and heavy, made from multiple layers of cloth, and the top spar to which it was attached had four thick ropes leading to it, each threaded through its own pulley block at the mast top. He knew that it would require at least one man hauling on each rope, all working simultaneously, to drag the heavy top spar and its burden up the thick stubby mast, so he felt no temptation to attempt anything so futile on his own. Besides, he thought, there was not a breath of wind.
But the boat was drifting helplessly, and he knew just enough about such things to know that a boat adrift was a boat in danger.
Frustrated, he flung himself around again to face the beach, only to find that the boat had swung about, and the land now lay behind him to his right. Muttering a curse, he crossed the deck and leaned on that side, where he discovered that the beach had changed into a shoreline while his back was turned. His horse had disappeared from view now, and even the strewn bodies that remained were barely visible, shrunken to tiny coloured patches against the now narrow, dun strip of sand.
Merlyn felt the boat tilt alarmingly beneath him, caught by a wave, and his stomach heaved so that he had to fight off a surge of nausea. He gazed mutely at the water stretching between him and the land, noting the dark green of its depths and estimating the distance he had drifted. Even by the time he had first pulled off his armour after climbing aboard, he had been too far from land to risk swimming back, especially with a burden in his arms.
He turned and looked again towards the motionless black bundle by the mast, and keeping his eyes fixed on the bearskin, he shrugged out of his wet tunic and spread it over the rail of the boat. Then, naked, enjoying the heat of the sun on his skin, he sank slowly down to the deck, stretching out his legs and leaning back against the sun-warmed wood of the sloping side and allowed himself to think deliberately about what had happened that afternoon.
He had been ill prepared for the surprises that awaited him there on that beach—less ready to face them than he had been to face anything in his life—and their arrivals had smashed him like a succession of hurled boulders.
First, the sight of Uther stripping away his armour to violate the last surviving woman, inspiring in him a furious anger and a white-hot lust for vengeance: vengeance for his own dead wife and for all the other countless, screaming souls who had been so mindlessly slaughtered and condemned by Uther's lust for war and rapine. Incapable even of raising his voice, Merlyn had put spurs to his exhausted ho
rse and begun to make his way laboriously forward through yielding, shifting sand to where he could face and kill his treacherous cousin.
Uther's six surviving horsemen, surprised by Merlyn's unexpected appearance, had judged his intent easily and come cantering towards him, intent on killing him. He was barely aware of them, even as he stood in his stirrups with an icy fury and slaughtered them one after the other with lethal, arm-long arrows from his enormously powerful African bow, according them only the time it took him to take aim. almost casually, before dispatching each of them with a single murderous missile.
Uther had seen him coming, finally, and he abandoned the woman on the ground, hauling himself hurriedly up into his own saddle and then swinging his mount awkwardly around to confront Merlyn, preparing to meet his death.
Even now, remembering, Merlyn's mind could not encompass the stunned incredulity that had made him reel in the saddle when he discovered that the man facing him, riding Uther's horse and wearing Uther's armour, was not Uther Pendragon, and that the running fight he had observed from the distant cliffs had been the opposite of what it had appeared to be. It seemed to him now that his mind, his entire awareness, had simply rebelled at the impossibility of everything and stopped functioning for a while, causing what he could only think of now as a featureless and frightening blankness within him—a strange and noise-filled emptiness that he could still recall but could not define.
When Merlyn's mind had begun to work again, the fellow facing him had still not moved. And yet something within Merlyn had moved within that time; something deep inside him had shifted and rearranged itself and changed him forever.
When the man removed Uther's huge helmet, Merlyn recognized him as an enemy he had once met and almost befriended, a giant of a fellow from the far northwest of Britain who called himself a King, Derek of Ravenglass. Merlyn stared in stupefaction, but no shock of recognition could combat the shock that had preceded it: the absence of Uther.