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

by Jack Whyte

  "Why would they be stupid?"

  He had lost interest in the far mountain top as a source of peril and was totally absorbed in scanning the ground about his feet, so that he answered without looking up at me. "Because they would have to climb up there first. That would be stupid, when there's no need. And they'd be visible for much too long on the way down ... then they'd have to climb back up from the gully before they could become dangerous to anyone. By then they'd be dead."

  The red sandstone columns of the eastern gate-tower were looming in front of us by this time, and he darted ahead of me to disappear into the passageway. By the time I emerged from the portals after him, he was already half a hundred paces ahead of me, running up the long, overgrown but clearly discernible roadway that led to the flatfish drilling area beneath the frowning escarpment of the mountainside. In the south-eastern distance, I could see a tiny ribbon of the road that crested the pass between this peak and its neighbour and continued to its end by the town Derek had told me of, by the side of the Great Mere. At the crest of the road the boy stopped running, and stood, looking about him. I lengthened my stride to catch up to him.

  "It's flat, Merlyn," he said as I reached him. "Why didn't they build the fort up here?"

  He was right. We were standing on the edge of an area that was as flat as the great campus training ground beneath the hill of Camulod, although much smaller.

  "It's more than simply flat, Arthur. It's been flattened deliberately, by men. But it's not big enough to hold the fort. You see that ramp over there?" He looked to where a narrow, sloping ramp led up to a slightly higher area that overlooked the space beneath. He nodded, slowly, his face showing puzzlement. "That's been built up, too. Can you guess why?" He shook his head, slowly. "I'll give you a hint. Think of Camulod."

  Arthur shook his head, frowning. "I don't know what you mean, Merlyn ... unless you're talking about the campus. But then it doesn't make sense, Why go to all the trouble to clear just enough ground for a training area? Why not do it properly the first time, and build the camp on the flat area?" He answered his own question immediately, his whole face lighting up in a smile. "Because of time! They couldn't! This was done long after the fort was built, when there was time to do it at leisure. So it is only a training field. And that's the reviewing stand up there, just like the one built into the hillside of Camulod."

  He was gone in a moment, his long, slim legs flashing as he ran and climbed to the reviewing stand, from which he looked down at me. Then, seeing that I had turned to look elsewhere, and apparently thinking himself unwatched for the moment, he became the child again, raising his hands formally and throwing himself into an unsuccessful handstand. He could not quite succeed in bringing his feet together, so that for a long, ludicrous moment he teetered there, reversed, his legs scissoring wildly before he toppled, slowly, the wrong way, to land flat on his back at great disadvantage to his dignity. Quick as a flash, he was on his feet again, dusting himself off and glancing at me almost furtively to see if I had noticed his misjudgement. I gave no sign, and he strode to the edge of the reviewing stand closest to me, drawing himself erect and frowning fiercely.

  "Attenn-shun! Dress files and form your ranks on the right of line! Wait for it, Britannicus, wait for it! Hutt!"

  I drew myself to attention and snapped a punctilious salute, which the boy returned with equal gravity.

  "Permission to retire, Commander?" I asked.

  "Permission granted. Dismissed."

  I saluted again, spun about and began to make my way towards the gates again, hearing his feet flying over the ground to catch up with me.

  "Will this place be ours, Merlyn? Will we live here?"

  I looked at him. He was walking almost sideways now, gazing up at me with wide, anxious eyes, the full circles of his gold-flecked irises completely visible. His lean rump bore unmistakable traces of his hand-standing misadventure.

  "It's possible, as I said earlier, but would we wish to? That's what we have to ask ourselves. That's why we're here today ... to answer that question."

  "I would!"

  I grinned. "I know you would, but that's only because it's an abandoned fort on a high mountain pass and the weather's still fine. As you said yourself, earlier, it'll be very different up here in the rain and snow. I promise you, you'd be even more aware of that with the cold winds howling through all the cracks in the walls and everything frozen solid, including your hands and feet. The adventures you think you could have here with your friends in the summertime are hardly sufficiently strong grounds for having all of us move up here to live permanently. I hope you will agree with that?"

  His face fell and he lowered his head. He remained silent until we had entered the fort again and swung right, following the perimeter walk towards the northern gate. But it was not in his nature to give up without a fight. "We could fill in all the cracks in the walls, could we not?"

  I laughed aloud. "Aye, perhaps we could, lad, and mount new doors and spread skins over those to keep the draughts out. All of that we could do, although it would entail months and months of work by every single person among us, including you and your friends. But there would still remain the matter of survival, of living from day to day." I stopped and laid my hand on his shoulder, waiting for him to look up and meet my eyes. "Look, Arthur, I'm not saying we will not stay here. We may well do exactly that. But you heard what I said to the others before we came in here, did you not?" He nodded.

  "Well, then, you know how important I believe it to be for everyone to form his own opinions on this, since it is a grave matter affecting everyone. We will pool those opinions in the form of a discussion, leading to consensus and only then to a decision. That's the democratic way of doing things."

  The boy gazed at me, his eyes narrowing, and then his face creased into a smile. "I know it is, but I heard you say to Dedalus and Connor on the galley, days ago when you were talking of the wars in Cornwall, that democracy works best under an enlightened and determined leader."

  He had me flatfooted. I had to glance away quickly, covering my mouth with one hand to conceal my rueful smile, before I could look at him again. 'True, I did say that, but I didn't know you were listening. In this instance, however, and notwithstanding what I said to Dedalus and Connor, because there are so few of us involved here and all of them my friends, I am determined to allow the will of all the others to prevail."

  "Until you decide they're being timid, of going wrong, or they aren't able to make up their minds properly to agree with your opinion." His face was straight now, although his eyes were dancing, and I found myself disbelieving once again that he was only eight, approaching nine years old. If his intellect continued to expand at its present rate, this child, already one to reckon with, would be a most formidable adult.

  I nodded, equally straight-faced. "That is extremely impertinent, young man, and none of our group could ever be described as timid. But ... " I allowed myself a tiny smile. "You're right, of course. Could you think otherwise?"

  He giggled, something he rarely did, and ran ahead of me, towards the north gate. As I followed him, I looked about me idly to my left, towards the body of the fort. In the distance, I saw Dedalus emerge and then disappear again behind an intervening wall, and Lucanus came into view from the end of the Via Principalis, the east-west axis of the fort, his hands clasped behind him as he walked, looking up at the walls and roofs of the granaries that towered above him. I caught his eye and waved to him, and he began to make has way towards me.

  "Well," he began, offering a sardonic little grin as he approached. "I presume it's safe to speak again?"

  "It always was, for you. Unless you've found some compelling reason why we can't live here, from a medical viewpoint. Have you?"

  "No, not one. What does the boy think of it?"

  "What would you expect? He's a boy. He loves the place. His own personal fortress."

  "So you're pleased with his reaction? Good. What were you two talking about
for so long before the gates?"

  I was scanning the fort again. Dedalus had disappeared and no one else seemed to be moving. "About the construction of the place. The gate-towers and the stone. The child is amazing, Luke. Has everyone else finished already?"

  "I doubt it. I heard voices in the granary as I passed, though, so someone's already broken your rule." He was smiling again.

  "Were they arguing?"

  "No, it sounded as though they were discussing something engrossing."

  "Merlyn, come and see what I've found!" Arthur was waving to me from close by the north gate.

  I glanced at Luke, who was also watching the boy. "I knew if there was anything at all to find in here, he'd find it. His eyes have been fixed on the ground since we came back in through the eastern gate. Let's go see what he has."

  Whatever it was, it was very small. Arthur held it between his fingers and examined it closely, glancing towards the ground between him and the wall from time to time as he waited for us to reach him. As soon as we were close enough to be able to see what it was, he thrust his hand towards me.

  "Look, it's gold. I found treasure. I saw it shining in the grass there, beneath the wall. There are black ones, too."

  He had found a small cache of coins, one of them gold. I moved to where he pointed and, kneeling down, I peered among some loose stones, where I found several small, black and dark-brown metal tokens. The black ones were silver, long tarnished, and the brown ones copper. I had no doubt the purse some legionary once lost had lain here and rotted completely away. They would never have been found, had not the boy's bright eye been caught by the dull sheen of the only golden piece among them. I gathered them up, eleven of them, and tried to see the likenesses they bore, but they were tarnished beyond recognition. Not so the boy's, however. As I straightened up he thrust it at me, and I took it and held it up to the light.

  "Who's the man on the front, Merlyn? Is he an emperor?"

  The gold coin was small, and well worn, and I had to squint to decipher the crude lettering around its rim. When I did, I felt a shiver stir the hairs along my neck. "No, Arthur," I murmured, aware of my own wonder, "this is no emperor ... although he might have been, for he dreamed great dreams." Reverently, I handed the coin to Lucanus, who peered frowning at it, his eyes weaker than mine. "That is Marcus Antonius, Arthur," I continued. "The friend, some say the son, of Julius Caesar himself. Mark Antony, whose concubine was Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. He must have minted his own coins to pay his legions, in Egypt, and one of them made its way here, to lie in wait for you."

  The boy was gazing at the coin Lucanus still held up in front of him. "Mark Antony!" His voice was as hushed as mine had been; he knew of Mark Antony from his lessons. "Did he come to Britain?"

  It was Luke who answered him, handing the coin back to the lad. "No, Arthur, Mark Antony died in Egypt, fighting against his former friend, Julius Caesar's nephew Octavius, who then crowned himself emperor and took the name Caesar Augustus."

  "Caesar Augustus? The one above the main gates?"

  Luke made a face and looked to me fen: guidance. "I don't know. I didn't look. Most unobservant of me. Merlyn?"

  I grinned at him, but spoke to the boy. "The answer is yes and no. Octavius Caesar Augustus was the first emperor. He was also the first divine emperor. All the others that followed named themselves after him. The one above the gates was Hadrian Caesar Augustus, remember?" He nodded, and I continued. "But think of your find this way, Arthur. In every fight there is a winner and a loser, and the Fates, often at whim, it appears, decree which shall be which. Had they decided otherwise the day Mark Antony fought Octavius Caesar, you might now have been holding a likeness of the first emperor of Rome in your hand."

  "Hmm." He closed his fist tightly around the coin. "May I keep this?"

  "Of course. You found it."

  "I know you said he wasn't a god, Merlyn, but how could they even try to make him one?"

  I smiled. 'They couldn't. Gods are immortal. That was sheer flattery. They called him a god, but he was only a man, and he proved it by dying like all other men. Have you noticed you were right about the gate, too? There's only one portal." I ignored Lucanus's raised eyebrow.

  "I know, I saw it. Let's go and look outside." The boy stepped between us and took hold of our hands, wrapping his fingers around two of mine, and led us out, tugging impatiently, beyond the gates. Just a few paces brought us to the cliff's edge, where we all three stopped in awe, smitten by the spectacle before us.

  Beneath our feet, the cliff face fell vertically, bare of vegetation for most of its vertiginous plunge to a shattered ruin of scree and fallen boulders seemingly miles beneath our perch. Its far-flung edges were lost among the forest of trees that stretched from there as far as we could see in every direction. We had been riding through that forest all morning, but seen from above, it was like a thick, green mat covering everything except that tumbled, lethal wasteland directly at our feet. Even the road and the river Esk, which I knew were down there, almost directly beneath us, were concealed by the denseness of the overhanging tree- tops. Arthur, who had let go of Lucanus to lean closer to the edge, but whose hand still clutched my Own, drew back instinctively from the gulf, drawing close to my side even though there was no danger of his falling. When he turned to look up at me, his eyes were enormous.

  "How far down is it?'

  "I've no idea." I tried to keep my voice light, since I could see there was no need to warn him of the danger here. "But the beautiful part of it is that it's too far up ever to be a threat to this place. No army could climb that, nor any single man I've ever met."

  "No." He moved forward again, bending cautiously from the waist. "All those rocks, did they fall from die cliff?'

  "Aye, they did, every one of them. That's why there are no trees on the cliff face. But there's grass on many of the ledges down there, and it's thick in places, so nothing has fallen recently."

  "Hmm." He sounded far from convinced. But then, after a few mole moments' contemplation of the abyss itself, he turned his eyes outward to where the oak- and ash- and beech-covered hills shepherded the valley westward to the sea beneath low, cloudy skies of varying greys. There was nothing there to mar the forest's deep-green mantle. The peaks behind us, to the south and east, were hidden by the walls that reared at our backs. Only to the north-east did the high cliffs of the largest Fells shrug themselves free of timber.

  "It's beautiful, isn't it, Merlyn? So different from Camulod."

  "Aye, lad, it is. You think it more beautiful?"

  "No-o, and yet yes. The mountains ... "

  "You've never seen Cambria, have you?"

  He threw me a glance, much more an eighteen-year- old's than an eight-year-old's, that included Lucanus and told both of us that I knew very well he had not. I grinned.

  "You will, some day, I promise you, and you'll find that the mountains there, too, are beautiful, and very, very different."

  "Different from these? How can that be?"

  I shook my head. "As soon as you see them, you'll know. They're higher, for one thing. On some of them, in the highlands, the snow never melts. Their crests are white all year round."

  He looked up at me in open disbelief. 'That's impossible. The summer sun would melt it."

  "Not in Cambria, Arthur, nor anywhere else where the mountains are high enough."

  "High enough for what? To escape the sun?"

  I shrugged. "I suppose you might put it that way. They don't escape the light, but they do evade the heat. It's a known fact that, no matter where you are, the higher you climb above that level where the land meets the waters of the sea, the colder the air becomes. If you climb high enough, you reach a point where even the summer rain falls as snow." I grinned at him. "It's true! Ask Lucanus. He and I have ridden into summer storms, on uphill journeys in high land, where the rain turned to snow as we rode higher. And we've turned around and ridden down again, out of the swirling snowstorm to where there wa
s no sight of snow and the rain still fell. Didn't you notice how cool it became today, when we started climbing the hill out of the valley to come up here?"

  He nodded, remembering. "But why, Merlyn? Why is that?"

  "I wish I could tell you, lad, but I can't. Luke, do you know?"

  Lucanus shrugged his shoulders slowly. "No, I do not. But I know it is true. Heat seems to be heavier than cold, Arthur, if you can imagine such a thing, because it always grows colder, the higher you climb. And yet heat rises upward from a fire, so that the upper part of a room is always much warmer than the temperature at floor level. Contradictory, in the extreme, but true, nonetheless, and defying explanation."

  "Hmm." The complexities of the abstraction were too much for the boy, and he dismissed them. "Does this valley have a name? Do you know?"

  "I don't really know," I answered him. "I know the river we crossed down there is called the Esk, so this would be the valley of the Esk."

  He was staring towards the western horizon, where it flattened visibly beyond the shoulder of the farthest, mist-hazed hill. "Could we see the sea from here, on a bright day?"

  I followed his gaze. "I think we could. That flat part is the line of it, I believe. It's out there somewhere."

  He turned to face the wall of the fort. "And what's beyond the crest of the pass where the road goes over?"

  "Another valley, I imagine, and another, and then eventually another town like Ravenglass, at the end of the road."

  "Was there a fort there, too?"

  "Aye, and a vicus. As I said, a town just like Ravenglass."

  "Cumbria ... " He murmured the ancient name of the region surrounding us, drawing it out so that the "m" became a resonant hum. "What's the difference between Cumbria and Cambria?"

  I smiled, raising an inquisitive eyebrow towards Luke, who merely shrugged and made a face indicating ignorance of this, too. "They're both ancient names. There was probably no difference, at one time. They might be the same name, differing only in the way the people say them ... And before you ask me what it means, I'll tell you I don't know. But all of it is Britain, Arthur." And some day it could be yours, I thought. "Come now, we'd better go back into the fort and look at what is there. You'll have questions aplenty then, I'll wager."