The Sorcer part 1: The Fort at River's Bend cc-5

by Jack Whyte

  Somehow, arriving from the sea and entering the bustling confines of the high-walled fort, my mind had formed the notion that the fort was all there was. I had expected to emerge into open farmland beyond the walls. Instead, I found myself at the edge of a thriving vicus, the township that had grown around the fort for hundreds of years until it stretched farther than the eye could see, in the shape of a large funnel, its narrow spout blocked by the eastern wall of the fort itself and its swelling shape defined by the steep, tree-clad hillsides stretching up and away on either side.

  We were standing at the edge of a congested marketplace, the tables of the closest vendors 'placed against the walls flanking the gates at our back, and chaos swirled about us. The air was filled with the sounds and smells of animals and poultry, the voices of the crowd that thronged around and between the stalls and the cries of the vendors whose wares were everywhere in evidence, in an enviable display of prosperity and wealth. There was fresh produce of all descriptions, from onions and fat leeks to green- leafed clumps of growth that I had never seen before. The smell of fresh-baked bread came from my left now to mingle with the odour of fish from somewhere ahead of me. I smelled the heavy musk of frying garlic, and saw a stall with deep, metal dishes and a stone-framed fire on which a woman fried fresh shrimp, stirring the mass of them with a large, heavy wooden ladle. Saliva spurted from beneath my tongue, reminding me that I had not eaten since the previous night.

  "Market day," Derek grunted, needlessly. "Come on." .

  I stayed close to him as he picked his way among the crowds, nodding from time to time and sometimes returning a spoken greeting to those who called him by name. Ahead of us on our left and towering above the intervening stalls, I saw the sandstone walls and arched roof of yet another Roman building. I caught his arm.

  "What's that place over there?"

  "The bathhouse. That's where we're going."

  Moments later, I heard my own name shouted. Sean the navigator grinned at me from behind a baker's stall, where he stood clutching a steaming pasty. I waved to him then had to hasten to catch up with Derek, whose height alone had prevented me from losing sight of him among the press of bodies.

  I now began to notice others of our crew among the crowd, but few of them saw me, and those who did ignored me, apart from an occasional cool nod. The Sons of Condran were there, too, I saw, but neither group paid the slightest attention to the other, and when I jostled one of Liam's men by accident, he passed me by with no more than a grunt and a surly look. From then on, I concentrated only on keeping Derek in sight.

  TWO

  The crowd thinned out as we approached the bathhouse, the densely packed stalls giving way to pens and larger, open spaces containing livestock: cattle, swine, goats, horses of the local mountain breed known as garrons and unkempt, brown-wooled sheep, as well as flocks of hens and geese and ducks and one gathering of regal swans, their wings evidently clipped to prevent them from flying.

  "Over here." Derek made his way directly to a dreary- looking collection of flimsy buildings. The bathhouse's western and southern wings defined a bare, open, L-shaped space that sheltered a herd of shaggy garrons. A humpbacked little man with violently crossed eyes, working among the horses, saw me and came scuttling to meet me, scowling as he weaved between the bodies of the animals that prevented him from seeing my companion. As soon as he recognized Derek, however, he stopped, then turned about and disappeared again among the horses.

  I glanced at the king. "Do many people react to you that way?"

  He almost smiled. "That's Ulf. He never speaks."

  "Never? Is he mute?"

  Now he did smile. "Only when he's sober. He has a tongue like a pike's jaws when he decides to use it. Most of the time, thank the gods, he chooses to be silent." He said no more, turning away to look about him, and I began idly counting the horses, but I lost track of the milling bodies before I reached twenty.

  "Are these all his? For sale?"

  Derek grunted. "They're mine. He tends them for me." As he spoke, the little man re-emerged from the depths of the herd, leading two bridled garrons. He handed one set of reins to each of us—flat-braided ropes attached to simple head stalls with metal bits—and vanished silently again.

  Derek led his horse to a nearby block of wood and used it to mount, swinging his leg easily over the horse's back from the top of the block. I followed his example. It had been too many years since I had vaulted to the bare back of a horse, and I had no wish to make the attempt here and fail. I dug my heels in gently and the animal beneath me twitched his ears, plainly wondering if the stranger on his back could be ignored or should be heeded. I reined him sharply, pulling his head down as I kicked again, letting him feel the strength of my legs, and he moved forward contentedly, leaping ahead to catch up with his companion.

  At one point, as we rode past a long, low building almost on the farthest edge of the town, I saw something that caught my attention. A man had suddenly stopped moving, on the point of entering the building. I looked directly at him but saw only a dirty, yellow tunic and a full beard before he pushed the door open and went in. Nevertheless, I knew he had been staring at me, not at Derek.

  'That place over there on our left, what is it?"

  Derek glanced where I was pointing. "An alehouse."

  "You mean a tavern?"

  "That's what I mean."

  Moments later we had passed beyond the limits of the town and were riding among dense trees that grew right to the edges of the road on either side. Derek kicked his garron to a canter and mine stayed with him without urging. Soon we passed out of the trees into an area of open fields through which the road ran arrow straight. The few buildings I could see on either side were evidently storage sheds and shelters, and the borders between individual fields were difficult to define, consisting mainly of slightly differing patterns of growth. In the continuing silence from my companion I looked about me curiously.

  The valley through which we now rode was perhaps a mile in width at this place, and had obviously been reclaimed over a span of ages from the forest that wooded the steep hillsides to left and right. Ahead of us, on either side, the hills rose higher as they marched inland, until the highest I could see, in the far distance, were crowned with crags and rearing cliffs, some of them shrouded in what was either cloud or snow.

  "How far does the valley extend, Derek?"

  He glanced at me, frowning slightly at my interruption of his thoughts. "About six miles. To the edge of the mere."

  "The mere? What mere is that?" I asked from pure contrariness.

  "The mere. It has no name. It's just a mere like any other."

  "Six miles. And the farmland extends all that way?"

  "No, only as far as the soil permits. The land rises and the rock breaks through about four miles from here."

  We had reached a division in the fields on our left.

  Ripening grain gave way abruptly to a crop of coarse- leafed plants I recognized as being some form of kale. Derek swung his mount off the road, leading us along a narrow, well-beaten path between the two crops, heading directly for the treed hillside about half a mile distant.

  "Where are you taking me?"

  "To a place where I can think and we can talk."

  We rode thereafter in silence broken only by the plodding of hooves and the song of birds, until the narrow track reached the end of the field at the entrance to a vee-shaped notch in what I had assumed, from the moment I first saw it in the distance, to be a chest-high wall of stone running the entire length of the valley. As we approached, however, it became apparent that what we were facing now was not so much a wall as an accretion—I can think of no other word—of stones, some of them barely larger than pebbles, others that looked large enough to defy the powers of a single man to move them. All of them had been piled haphazardly to form a barrier I now realized was no less than twenty paces thick. As I stared, my mind numbed by the enormity of this rock pile, Derek's horse entered the
passage that pierced the middle of the heap, and mine ambled contentedly after him.

  "Where did all these come from?"

  "From the ground, the fields." Derek drew rein and hitched himself around to look back at me. "We have a local jest that we grow more, and bigger, stones than we do crops. They work their way up to the surface every winter. Our people spend months each year clearing them out and dragging them over here, and the next year there's a brand new crop of them. It never ends. It's been going on since before the Romans came."

  I looked at the stones piled on my right, some of which reached higher than my head. "I can see that, but that's more than four hundred years!"

  "Far more. Our people were farming here a long time before that."

  "Is it the same on the other side of the valley?"

  "It's the same everywhere."

  "I don't understand—you said you had no stone for building."

  Derek threw me a scornful look. "I said nogood stone. I meant sandstone, stone that can be quarried, cut and dressed. Most of what you see here is useless for building. It's too small, too loose, too brittle and too much trouble. Hurry."

  The trees began again on the other side of the barrier, and our path took us up and beyond the crest of the hill to where, just below the summit, the hillside terminated in a high cliff. Beyond it lay another valley, this one still choked with trees, and on our left stretched the sea.

  Derek sat still for a few moments, admiring the view, then dismounted and tethered his horse, nodding for me to accompany him as he led the way to a shallow, grass- floored shelf above the cliff's edge, where he seated himself comfortably, his back against the bole of a tree. I found a spot by his side, wedging my back comfortably between two thick clumps of grass on the hillside behind us. Thereafter, we sat in companionable silence for a spell, gazing out across the valley and squinting against the glare of the sparkling sea in the distance, each of us composing in his own mind, I had no doubt, the words that he would use to frame his ideas most persuasively. We had come here to think and talk, after all, not merely to enjoy the vista. Derek's voice broke in on my thoughts.

  "Sang ... Sank ... What was that word you used?"

  "Sanctuary."

  "Sanctuary, aye ... You said it meant shelter or respite, and I asked you from what. Now I'm asking you again. No one will interrupt us here." He looked sharply at me. "Why are you smiling?"

  I shook my head. "It occurs to me that we are totally unable—any of us—to anticipate what's going to happen next at any time. Last night, when we dropped anchor outside your harbour ... even this morning as we approached your wharf ... I had no idea in my head about what kind of reaction the sight of me might provoke in you. I was trying to prepare myself for anything—from outright violence, to disinterest, to a refusal of permission to land."

  He had been plucking at the end of his moustache, eyes narrowed in concentration, lips pursed as he watched me speak.

  "Why would you expect violence? You and I have never quarrelled."

  "No, but neither have we shared a common cause. Nominally, on the two occasions when we met, we did so in enmity as warriors of Cornwall and Camulod."

  "Aye, well, that was one-sided on the first occasion. I thought then that you were with us. It was not until we met the second time that I knew otherwise. Frankly, you didn't cross my mind between those times. I thought about you often after our second encounter, though. I was damned glad to get away from you on that beach."

  "How so?"

  "I thought you would kill me."

  "Kill you? You threatened to kill me, if I fought you."

  "I did. And I'd have tried. But I'm a mere man, no match against a warlock." There was absolute sincerity in his voice and in his eyes.

  "Warlock? I am no warlock, Derek. I'm an ordinary man like you."

  "Hmm. An ordinary man who .sees his friends die in his dreams and knows the timing and the exact style of it, describing the scene and the weapon used long afterward, when he was nowhere near the place. That's far from ordinary in my mind. I told you that day on the beach you'd been touched by the gods and I wanted no dealings with you. And here you are again, except that this time you come seeking me after a dream. I warn you, others have dreamed of me, ere now—enemies who dreamed and schemed while they were yet awake. They are all dead. Why should I regard your dreams as different from theirs? It takes no great intelligence to see that you have schemes in mind, as well as dreams, since you are here."

  "My presence here bears no menace for you, Derek. You'll take no harm from my arrival. I come as a supplicant, seeking assistance that I think lies within your power to grant."

  "My power ... " He shifted his body and dug a pebble from beneath his hip, flicking it out and away and watching as it fell into the abyss in front of us. "You know, a wise man once told me that the most vicious enemies a king can make are those he once contrived to help. That sounds strange, eh? It did to me, at the time, for I was young. I asked him what he meant, and I've never forgotten his answer. He said that kindness frequently breeds hatred—that there is a type of man—and woman, too—in whom resentment simmers all the time, like an evil brew, and nothing brings it to a fiercer boil than feeling obligation." He waited, watching me closely for a reaction.

  "I can see some of what you mean," I began, "but not, I think, the depth of it. Judging from your words, it seems you would apply the measure to everyone you meet, whereas I see its application in only a few. Wherein lies the difference?"

  He sniffed, then made a clicking noise with his tongue "We are wandering from our track, but perhaps it's worth it. Tell me, Merlyn Britannicus, how often do you dream these wondrous dreams of yours?"

  "Not often. Once every year or so, perhaps even less."

  "They always involve people?"

  I had to think about that. "I don't really know. I think so."

  "Do you like people?"

  "Like people? You mean people in general?"

  "That's what I mean, people in the mass."

  "I've never really thought about that, but I suppose I do."

  "Well, I don't. I like my friends, I like my family— some of them, anyway—and I like a number of people I have come to know casually without befriending them, if you know what I mean. But I find the mass of people, the faceless, impersonal herd, to be unlikable. They are generally mean-spirited, envious, grasping, untrustworthy, unclean and vicious."

  I listened in amazement, recalling the last time I had met this man and watched him violate and slaughter an injured woman, my own wife's sister, Ygraine, on a beach littered with corpses. I knew, however, that this was no suitable time to recall the incident to his attention.

  He had fallen silent, his eyes on my face, searching. "What are you thinking?"

  I shrugged elaborately, but I knew I had to respond honestly. The king of Ravenglass was no man's fool, and I knew I had not yet begun to penetrate the depths of him.

  "I'm surprised to hear you say the words you've spoken. The image they suggest does not fit with what I saw in Ravenglass today."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Well, I'm not sure where I'm leading, but it seems to me that if you truly feel the way you say you do, if your dislike of others is as deep as you describe, then that would inevitably be reflected in the way you govern your people. And yet I saw no signs of fear of you, or of dislike, among the people I saw today."

  He grunted deep in his chest. "That simply proves my point. They are untrustworthy."

  I looked him straight in the eye. "That's not true, and you don't even expect me to believe it. Do you?"

  When he answered, I detected a glint of humour in his eyes. "Go back to what I said before," he said. "I like some people I have come to know casually without befriending them."

  "A whole town full of them?" He shrugged and I continued. "Perhaps a kingdom full?"

  "No! Stay with the town, for now. Those who live there are those with whom I can live."

  "And th
e others, beyond the town?"

  "In the farms, you mean? Those too."

  "So? That would make you a good king, Derek, not a cynic or a misanthrope."

  "A what?"

  "Someone who hates everyone."

  "Aye, well, Fortune has made me a king, and so I can have those people I dislike stay far away, as long as I possess the strength to hold them off."

  "And the seven years?" I saw from his expression that he had not understood me. "You told me you have not had a sword in your hand for seven years. That indicates a lack of need for harshness."

  "Does it? I think not. I said I had not held a sword. I didn't say I've lost the ability to swing one."

  I smiled and raised my hands in surrender. "So be it. You said at the start that we were drifting off topic. Now we've done it again. Why did you ask me about liking people?"

  "Because we were talking about resentment. I was seeking it in you. I choose to believe that the majority of people are ruthlessly self-centred. That ruthlessness is all- important to a man in my position, to be ignored at his peril. People like those I'm speaking of, the resentful ones, see kindness in others—or call it tolerance, compassion or forbearance, what you will—as a weakness to be exploited. Yet at the same time—and here is where it made no sense at all to me at first—they perceive that acceptance of any kindness indicates a weakness in themselves. That means the wise man should be wary of those to whom he has shown favour in the past, because such people will convince themselves that, in preferring them, he has somehow demeaned them."

  I sat staring at him, greatly impressed by wisdom I had never thought to find in such as he, but before I could respond in any way he spoke again.

  "And that brings me back to you, and the request you have not made. What will you ask of me, and how will I respond, and how will this new word ... this 'sanctuary' ... affect my life in time to come?"

  I made no move to respond. He had more to add.

  "You and I don't know each other, Merlyn the Dreamer, but I find myself wondering what you must think of me, and I'm concerned ... And that surprises me, because I seldom think about such things. Why should I bother with what others, strangers, think of me? We've met but twice before, and each time then I was my warrior self. My other self, the man who rules and governs his people, you have never met. I know you are Roman, in background at least, and that leads me to suspect you might think you have some advantage over me, a plain, untutored Celt. If that is true, then be aware of this: the word you spoke to me today is new to me, but the application of it exists already, here in Ravenglass. Liam, the son of Condran, will eat and drink and sleep tonight with all his men, cheek by jowl with Connor, son of Athol, and all his. In Ravenglass alone and nowhere else I know of in all these lands could such a thing occur without blood being shed. That, I believe, is a form of sanctuary. But it is one they may enjoy only by obeying" my laws: no weaponry, no fighting, and no harm to me or mine. Transgression earns immediate banishment with forfeiture of privilege, and there is no appeal or possibility of leniency."