by Jack Whyte
I nodded my head, more and more impressed with each observation I heard from this man's lips.
"That is exactly as it should be," I said, soft-voiced. "I have been thinking of it ever since surrendering my own weapons, and I can see no other means of ensuring your own safety. You offer a privilege, as you have said, and privilege entails an obligation to the privileged. Abuse of it is, by definition, unforgivable. The fact that your community should benefit from it is incidental, yet part and parcel of the arrangement."
"Good. So you are a man of sense, as well as dreams. You accept, then, that you would be bound by my laws in return for whatever privilege it is that you seek."
"Of course."
"Of course? Without knowing those laws?"
I shrugged. "I've heard enough of your ideas to know that whatever laws you impose would be sane and, in all probability, sensible."
"Hmm," he grunted. "Seek, then. What is it that you want?"
I pondered my answer, then spoke briefly.
"A place to rear a child in safety."
He made no immediate response. Instead, he turned his gaze away from me to stare out across the valley where, at a level only slightly above our heads, a bird of prey made lazy circles against the clear blue sky, planing on rigid wings that caught the air and bent it to the creature's will. Three times we watched it circle in widening loops until, without warning, it tucked in its wings and fell like a stone. After it had vanished, lost to view beneath the lip of the cliff, my companion remained motionless for moments longer, and when he spoke he did not look at me.
"What kind of child requires the shelter of an unknown land to grow in safety?" I knew immediately that I had phrased my plea as badly as was possible, but he was still speaking. "Don't tell me, for I have no wish to know. I think the knowledge might be perilous."
I grimaced, knowing he could not see me, and tried to keep my voice calm. "How so?"
"How so?" He turned back slowly towards me as he repeated my question. "Well, let's suppose—let me suggest—some ways in which that might be so ...
"Suppose a child lives in the care of a man like yourself, a man of substance, wealth and influence who is concerned for him. And let's suppose this man to be a friend of someone like your friend Connor Mac Athol, who has lands in Eire, and even newer lands far to the north in Alba—that land you call Caledonia. Would it not seem reasonable that this friend might undertake to offer shelter to the child, in either place? Ample space in each to raise a single child, you'd think ... Unless the child's own parentage might imperil his very life among Connor's folk. That makes the child a threat, dangerous to others.
"But more than that, suppose this child is unsafe in his home ... in Camulod ... He must be, else why the need to shelter him elsewhere? Now, were I you and had to hide a child for any reason, I would hide him close to home. A child's a tiny thing, beneath most people's notice, so I would spirit him away, perhaps far away, but into some neighbouring region. Not east or south, for fear of Saxons and the like. More probably to the south-west, to Cornwall perhaps, now Lot is dead. Most of all, however, were I you I would be tempted to the north and west, to Cambria, to the Pendragon lands, among my own allies. There I could find some safety for the child ... Unless, of course, his parentage—and hence the very threat of his existence— were such that he might meet his death there, too."
The silence grew long before I broke it.
"How much do you know?"
"Among all these suppositions? I know nothing. I did not even know you were alive until I saw your face this morning, and I suspected none of this before you told me what you want." He shook his head and puffed his breath out through swollen cheeks.
"Merlyn, I did not become king of this place by being stupid. Who is this child? It must be a boy, a son and heir, but whose? It's the distance that concerns me. Surely you see that."
"What distance?"
"From Camulod to here! Why not Cornwall? You never fought there. You have no enemies in Cornwall, or had none when I met you there. Has that changed?"
"Indirectly."
Derek frowned. "What kind of an answer is that? Do you or don't you?"
I shrugged. "I do, but that is not the problem. The child has."
"So I was right. The child is endangered because of who he is. Who is this prodigy? And why should I imperil any of my own to succour him? Are you surprised that I should ask? If he has enemies swarming in such numbers and in so many places while he's but a brat, what will the future hold for him as he begins to grow?"
I pushed myself to my feet and moved away from him, presenting him with my back as I leaned against a tree close by the edge of the abyss. I was shaken by the accuracy of his conjecture and by the ease with which he had recognized and grasped the difficulties facing me.. From my single statement, which I had foolishly thought to be innocuous, he had instantly inferred the essential truth of all that my presence in his lands implied. I had come to Ravenglass in response to the promptings of a dream, expecting, I now realized for the first time, to gull a man I had assessed to be a lumbering, untutored, semi-savage oaf. Instead, I had found myself assessed and accurately classified by a clever and subtle mind at least the equal of my own.
One thing I saw clearly: Derek's knowledge, incomplete as it was, now constituted a grave threat to my designs. I would have to defray the damage done so far, and without lying.
"I'm impressed," I said, turning to him and attempting a smile. "From one comment you have built a remarkable structure. Within that, your suppositions are close to the mark in some respects—far off in others. Overall, nevertheless, they are entirely misdirected. The dangers you divined from Connor's folk do not exist. Refused a lodging here, we are prepared to go with him to Eire. I was born here in Britain, however; as you know, and would prefer to stay here if possible. The same holds true for the new lands of which you spoke, in Caledonia. But the holdings there, I'm told, are small and new—primitive islands in the western sea. I prefer comfort.
"As for the south-west, you have the gist of it, but not the whole. I have an enemy there now, a man I banished into exile, one Peter Ironhair." I went on to tell him of Ironhair, his eviction from Camulod, his flight and his unsuccessful bid for power in Cambria as champion of the demented prince Carthac Pendragon, and his subsequent alliance with the new ruler in Cornwall. I did not lie, but I confined my truths to my own dealings with Ironhair, making no mention of the boy.
Derek listened in silence, and when I had finished, he sat watching me, gnawing on the inside of his cheek.
"So this Ironhair seeks vengeance on the boy?"
"No, he seeks revenge on me. He knows my feelings for the boy and knows the duty I have undertaken to see him into manhood and into his inheritance. The boy will rule in Camulod one day. He's my only heir, though not my son. Ironhair knows he could damage me more by harming the lad than ever he could by killing me, in any fashion."
"Who is the boy?"
"My cousin Uther's son, Arthur Pendragon."
Derek had been scratching his beard, but his fingers stilled as I spoke and his eyes grew wide. "Uther Pendragon, the man I killed?"
"Aye. The boy is heir to Pendragon, thus this Ironhair perceives him as a threat to his own power, his eventual kingship there. The man is mad. You could become king of the Pendragon before Ironhair could."
Derek had been shaking his head as I said the last words, barely listening to me, but now he looked back at me in outrage.
"You say this Ironhair is mad, and yet you ask me to give shelter to a boy whose father died at my hand? What does that make you? Or me, were I fool enough to listen? You would expect me to spend the remainder of my life waiting for him to grow up and claim the blood price?"
"Not true! Of course not! That would never happen, and the boy will never know."
"Never?" Derek's voice was swelling with scorn and an anger born, I felt sure, of guilt. "How not? You know, I know, the gods know! And who else might know, only t
he gods can tell! But one of them—someone—will tell him, soon or late."
"I would not, nor would you. And no other knows."
"Pah! And I should accept your oath on that?"
"You should, it's freely given."
"You take me for as big a fool as you. Why should I?"
"Perhaps because you owe him a life, in return for his father's."
He sat gaping at me, speechless, then grunted explosively and hauled himself to his feet.
"You leave tomorrow," he growled, and he made his way directly to his horse.
I followed Derek in a curious frame of mind, in part disappointed by my failure to enlist his aid, but also relieved at my success in diverting his attention from the truth he had come so close to grasping. That danger, I now felt, was safely past, and with its passing my own task of finding safety for the boy had been simplified. The very name of Pendragon of Cambria, son of the ravager of Cornwall, was proof enough for him, I knew, of my need to hide the child. I could live easily with Derek's knowledge of that portion of the truth, since it entailed sufficient complexity to satisfy his curiosity, and that, in turn, satisfied me. I knew he would seek no other explanation and that the secret of the rest of the boy's parentage and his claim, through his mother, to Cornwall and to Eire would be safe.
As I rode down the narrow hillside track behind him, I found myself wondering how angry Derek really was, for I could discern no stiffness in his posture. He rode easily, slouched on the garron's back, his weight inclined towards me and against the slope, allowing the horse to pick his own route downward. I made no attempt to speak to him, contenting myself with going over all that had been said and wondering how I might have presented my petition more effectively. And in thinking of that, I began to imagine his reaction could he have known the true danger I . might represent to his people—a danger that had nothing to do with the boy, or with who I was, but far more with what I suspected I was.
I had a skin disease of some kind, and I had come to believe, despite the derisive guffaws of my good friend Lucanus, our beloved and much respected physician and surgeon, that it was leprosy. Lucanus had thought me mad and deluded, initially, upon hearing of my suspicions, and had been predisposed to make light of what he called my fanciful imaginings, until he realized how deeply concerned and afraid I was. Once he had seen my fear, he set out to calm and reassure me. He had worked among lepers all his life, he told me, gazing deeply into my eyes, and in the space of decades at the work had never known a single person to become afflicted after only a short exposure to the disease. My exposure to it, and to lepers, he insisted, had been less than one day, and I had had no physical contact with any of them.
I listened to him despairingly, yearning for comfort, but I remained unconvinced, because my affliction, whatever it might be, evinced itself incontrovertibly in the form of a dry lesion, a single blemish—on the right-upper quadrant of my breast—that bore all the classic signs of being leprous, according to Lucanus's own description. It was an area of deadness on my chest, less than the size of the ball of my thumb, white in the centre and reddish around the edges. It was impervious to pain, or to any sensation at all, and the hairs that grew within its borders were white, too. Peering closely at this phenomenon, Lucanus agreed that it might, indeed, be a leprous lesion, but then he sat back on his heels and blithely rattled off a long and reassuring list of other things it might have been, ticking each off on his fingers as he named it.
At that point, relieved beyond description, I told him dispassionately about my unsuccessful attempt to rescue his friend Mordechai Emancipates, a physician who had contracted leprosy from his own work with lepers, from the hillside crevasse into which he had fallen. I told him about my own injuries and my useless attempts to save Mordechai's life, and about how I had finally emerged from that place, covered in his blood and my own, leaving Mordechai's body behind me. In telling this story, I saw the first flicker of doubt on my friend's face. He asked me again how much blood had been spilled there, in the crevasse. How much of mine and how much of Mordechai's? How much of Mordechai's had spilled on me?
I had no way of answering his questions accurately, for the night had been dark and wet and cold and I had been unaware, much of the time, that we were even bleeding, but I could see that die awareness of what I had described was troubling my listener. He confessed to me that the mingling of tainted blood with healthy caused him some concern, although he could not be certain why. He had once found and purchased an ancient treatise on this very topic, he said, a scroll written many years earlier by a noted physician and scholar, but he had never studied it, or even taken the time to really read it thoroughly. The mention I had made of mixing my blood with Mordechai's had recalled it to his mind. He would make shift to find the scroll, he promised me, and to master its contents, but he had been searching for it fruitlessly ever since our conversation, unable to recall what he had done with it or when he had last seen it. Until he found it, Lucanus would withhold his final diagnosis and judgment on my condition, and the threat of leprosy would hang over my head like Damocles's sword.
The illness—the leprosy, in my stubborn conviction— was not fatal in or of itself as I had always, in my ignorance, believed. It was a disfiguring disease, and horribly so, involving as it did the gradual disintegration of the digits and limbs and the facial features, but it did not cause death, save in the bleakest cases, When people died of hunger through an inability to feed themselves.
Leprosy! In spite of my revulsion at the thought of it, I found myself, incredibly, smothering a smile at the thought of what Derek's reaction to such knowledge might have been had I mentioned the matter during our discussion.
Derek and I had reached the edge of the trees and were now on the point of entering the pathway through the piled up stones bounding the cultivated fields. Derek grunted and straightened up to his full height, abruptly reining his horse to a halt and craning his neck to gaze along to the left of the line of stones. My own mount stopped when he was nose to tail with the other, but Derek was already moving again, turning his horse off the track and into the boulder- strewn ground among the trees. Curious, I followed him, our progress slow as our garrons ventured forward delicately and with great care on the uneven, treacherous ground.
"By the light of Lud," Derek growled. "Look at the size of that whoreson."
On the lower edge of the miles-long pile of stones, concealed from me until now by Derek's bulk and the bole of a silver birch, a great, gaunt wolf lay sprawled in death, its back arched violently against nature in the extremity of its last convulsion. Its enormous front toes were spread wide like the fingers of some hairy giant's hand, and its entire hindquarters, including its heavy tail, were stiff with blackened blood. The air was filled with the hum of the thousands of green and blue flies that swarmed upon the carcass.
Derek had already swung down from his horse, and I watched as he made his way cautiously over the loose- piled stones to where he could reach the dead beast. Ignoring the swarming flies, he bent his knees and grasped the front and hind legs closest to the ground, then straightened with a grunting heave, throwing the carcass onto its other side. The cause of death came into view at once: a flighted, blood-encrusted arrow protruding from the right side of the belly, its smooth shaft slashed and gouged by the frantic creature's snapping teeth. The wolf, a full- grown male, was larger than any I had seen in the southern regions, and it was grey, with whitish tinges in its coat. Standing on its hind legs, I thought, this thing could have rested its elbows on my shoulders and its maw would have engulfed my face.
"Gut shot," Derek said. "Owen was right." He stretched a hand to run his fingers through the ruff of fur beneath the massive neck. "Fine pelt. A shame to lose it. This one was in his prime. Look at that."
"That" was the creature's canine teeth, bared in its dying snarl ..They were long and shining white, unmarred by stains. Derek straightened up and moved back to his horse.
"Who's Owen?" I asked h
im. He kicked his horse into motion, leading the way back to the track again.
"My son, my first-born. Shot at this thing last night, just at dusk, about two miles from here, along the valley. He was in the fields. It was running along the wall there, on the other side. Couldn't tell whether he had hit it or not—grey light, grey wolf, grey stones. Couldn't find his arrow afterwards, of course, but that meant nothing. He shot into the stones, so it could have deflected in any direction. He'll be glad to know he shot the beast, but he'll be sick when I tell him how big it was. A good robe wasted, that's all he'll think of."
We rode clear of the stones and his garron broke into a loping gallop, challenging my own to keep up with him, and for a space we let them run. When they finally slowed their pace, I rode up alongside the king again.
"How many sons do you have, Derek?"
We were close to the road by this time, and he did not respond until we had reached it and turned right, towards the town.