by Jack Whyte
I sat silent as I listened to him speak of all of this and then, when he had finished, I pointed out that if what he suspected came to pass, it would be to our great advantage, since nothing would then threaten us and there would be no armies to march against Camulod. He sat staring at me for some time, then smiled and nodded, saying nothing more, and soon after that, worn out from our exertions in the saw-pit, we crawled off to sleep. Ambrose and Dedalus and Rufio would be foregathering in the morning, to come to terms on some of the basics of fighting with the ash staff. I had other things to do.
TEN
In the week since our return from Ravenglass, I had thought long and hard about the letter I wished to write to Germanus in Gaul, and what it should contain. Now I set aside the last of several sheets of notes I had made and sat back, rubbing at my eyes and flexing my shoulders. I wondered how much time had passed since I had sat down to my task after leaping from my bed in the pre-dawn darkness to light a lamp and pace the floor, struggling with my unruly thoughts. Instead of writing a letter, I had found myself deeply engrossed in making notations on the topics with which I wished to deal in the missive.
Idly I counted the sheets and found six of them, each covered with densely packed script—too little of it, I knew, touching upon or concerned with the question that plagued me more than any other: the matter of the boy's education. The extent of the boy's potential, his abilities and talents and his astounding, vibrant mind, so far advanced beyond his small sum of years, left me bereft of the words to write of them. On the point of starting to read my copious notations over, I felt a wave of mounting frustration and pushed them away instead, rising up impulsively from my chair and beginning to pace the room as restlessly as I had in the darkness before daybreak, aware of the tension roiling in my chest and tightening the back of my neck.
On one transit of the outer and far larger of my two rooms, I glanced through the open doorway of my sleeping chamber and saw the untidy rumple of my unmade bed, and the sight of it made me stop in mid-step with the realization of how greatly I had changed since coming to Ravenglass and Mediobogdum. Throughout my entire life, raised as I had been with a soldier's discipline, the first thing I had done, every morning, was to straighten, remake or stow away my bed before proceeding to whatever else I had to do that day. It was as natural to me as breathing, something done without consideration or a conscious thought. Now, however, the sight of that unmade bed brought home to me the hugeness of the changes that had swept through my life in recent months and years.
My life, I now realized, was no longer my own in the thoughtless, intimate way it had ever been, even in the days when I lived with the woman I loved as my wife. Now I was living for other people—the most important of them Arthur, but the others claiming my attention and my concern nonetheless. My priorities were theirs; my cares were theirs; and my duties revolved entirely around them. I told myself, as soon as the thought occurred to me, that duties always revolved around others, but the difference was clear and stark in my understanding: the duties I had known before leaving Camulod were structured, military and exact; they were definable and thus predictable; and they entailed a reciprocity in their execution—rewards, in the form of recognition, a sharing of responsibility, and an occasional relief from that responsibility in return for performance. That was no longer true. Nowadays, the responsibility was unrelenting.
Knowing I was being self-indulgent and self-pitying, I stepped resolutely into the bedchamber and reached down to grasp the blanket on my bed, just as someone knocked on the outer door of my quarters.
"Enter, the door is unlocked," I shouted, and then, curious to see who had come calling, I leaned back on my heel, craning my neck. When the door swung open, I was amazed to see Shelagh thrust her head through the opening and call to me.
"Cay? May I come in?"
"Shelagh! Of course you may come in. Since when must you await my bidding?"
The surge of pleasure I felt at the sight of her and the sound of her voice drove every thought of dissatisfaction from my mind, but yet I made no move to go into the outer room. The opportunity to benefit from the fact that I could see her while remaining out of her sight loomed too large for me to ignore, so I remained where I was, watching her through the open door of my darkened bedchamber. She leaned further into the room, keeping her hand on the door handle and looking about her, searching for me, and then, just as her eyes fastened on the doorway beyond which I stood in shadow, I saw that she had someone with her, standing close behind her on the threshold.
I strode out towards her, smiling a welcome, just as she entered, beckoning whoever was behind her to follow. The sight of the newcomer quickly slowed me to a halt, halfway across the intervening space. It was the young woman who had smiled at me the evening of the feast, the one called Tressa, whose high, full breasts and laughing eyes had disturbed me so greatly. Now I found myself confronted by those eyes again, staring at me, wide and alert, as though slightly startled, and I was immediately aware that her breasts were, indeed, high and full and impossible to ignore, causing the clothing that should have concealed them to enhance the sweep of their upper surface instead, and then drape vertically from their points. Shelagh saw none of this exchange of looks, and I was fleetingly aware of feeling grateful for her preoccupation with whatever she was looking at or searching for. She took one last, sweeping look around the room and then straightened, facing me.
"It's dark in here, and even dustier than usual. Merlyn, this is—"
"Tressa. I remember her from Ravenglass. Welcome, Tressa."
The young woman dimpled and flushed with pleasure, buckling one knee and shyly whispering, "Mester Cahy." I turned to face Shelagh squarely, feeling ridiculously aware of the other woman and strangely guilty for that very awareness, as though, in taking notice of her, I had sinned through disloyalty to Shelagh.
"How may I serve you? You must forgive me, I fear I am unused to having women here in my rude quarters."
"Aye, that's obvious." Shelagh was smiling, her eyes twinkling and full of mischief. "I have brought Tressa here to see what she must do. She will be looking after two of you, yourself and Lucanus, keeping your quarters clean and bright and aired, and mending your clothes and whatever else may require looking after."
"But—"
"No, no buts, Cay. That is the law, according to Shelagh, and you will save us all much grief and inconvenience if you will simply accept it as decreed. You men are the great ones for laying down laws, but there are times when women's laws are better and more sensible, and this is one of them. You work on those things that concern you,
and Tressa here will keep your surroundings neat and clean enough to make your work as pleasant as may be. Do you understand me?"
"But—"
"But? Pardon us, Cay, but we came here apurpose. Now, if you will stand aside, I wish to show Tressa her duties. Tressa, come."
I stood gape-mouthed and watched them as they examined every vestige of my quarters, talking between themselves and taking note of everything they thought to change or better. My initial annoyance passed, and soon I found myself taking pleasure in the sight of both of them. Tressa was no beauty, but she was young and radiant with health, buxom and sprightly enough to suffer little side by side with Shelagh's older, glowing loveliness. Both women were round and full where women needed to be both, and as they spoke together, both laughed quietly from time to time. Presently they completed their examination and returned to where I stood by the window.
"Well," Shelagh said, "I've shown Tressa what's in store for her. She'll keep out of your way, as much as possible, doing what she has to do during the day while you're about your business. The only reason you will have to know that she's about will be the uncustomary pleasantness with which you will be surrounded from now on. Good day to you."
Tressa bobbed, with her shy smile, and whispered my name again, her soft Cumbrian brogue doing strange things to the vowel sounds, and then they were gone, leaving me f
eeling as though I had been paraded, inspected and assessed—all of which was true. I stood at the window, watching them as they went out, and after they had gone from sight I remained there, peering out at the weather.
Between the top of the fort's outer wall and the line of the overhanging eaves above my window, I could see blue sky and small, white clouds scudding across it at a speed that suggested a high, brisk wind. Suddenly the room seemed dark and cold, unnaturally quiet now that the women's voices had been added, then subtracted. I strode to the door, collecting my cloak from a peg as I went outside into the brightness of the mid-morning sunlight.
I found nothing unusual in the silence that greeted me. Even with the recent growth in our numbers, tripling our presence here, fifty people were barely noticeable in a fort built to house six hundred, and the times when all fifty were present within the fort were few and far between. I knew that the wood-gathering party was in the forest again that day, as it had been for the previous seven, so that took care of at least ten men and probably closer to a score. Ambrose was out with Dedalus and Rufio, practising with the staves that fascinated him nowadays. Shelagh and Tressa had disappeared, presumably to join the other women who would all be indoors at their women's work at this time of day, and the boys would already be out beyond the walls, the morning hours of their tuition long over. Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard the sound of high, girlish voices; many of the newcomers had brought young families along with them, and the place was now bright with children of both sexes, where before there had been only the four boys from Camulod. I saw only one other living soul, one of the newcomers whose name I had not yet learned, as I made my way to the northern postern gate. We exchanged silent nods in passing and then I was outside, walking forward the few paces that took me to the edge of the precipice overlooking the valley at the rear of our perch.
Ahead of me to my right, on the far north-eastern side of the valley, the Fells soared up to tower over me. But it was the valley far beneath my feet that drew my attention, because the entire floor of it seemed to be alive, writhing with movement like woven matting covering a swarm of rats. The carpet, as I well knew, was made of enormous oak trees, and the turbulence that agitated them was caused by massive gale-force winds blowing inland from the western sea, twelve and more miles away along the vale of the Esk. Even here, on the heights above, the power of that wind was undiminished, buffeting me with heavy blows as it surged up the unyielding face of the cliff at my feet.
I stepped even closer to the edge, aware of my own foolishness yet seemingly powerless to resist the urge to look down at the cliff face itself. The pressure of the wind increased, becoming a solid, living thing, so that I had to force myself forward into it, leaning out against its power while listening to my mind screaming at me to step back and stop being a fool. It was a strange sensation, hanging there, leaning my weight into that wind for what seemed a long, long time, knowing that if it died without warning I would, too, falling out into the space that taunted me. For long heartbeats I felt convinced that by merely spreading my arms and diving outward I would find the power of flight and might swoop like a bird, in safety, down to the trees beneath. I even raised my arms, holding them out before me and feeling the pressure of the air beneath them filling the folds of my cloak and lifting it to flap like wings about me, before I blinked and stepped back, dropping my hands to my sides and feeling my cloak subside and the hair settle down on my head again as the direct flow of air from beneath was interrupted by the edge of the cliff. As I stepped back, the wind died, without warning, as I had feared it might mere moments earlier. For a count of four heartbeats the air was utterly still and I shuddered with horror, clearly imagining my own body plunging downward into the abyss over which I had so recently been poised. Then the gale returned with a blustering, muffled roar, and I stepped away resolutely, turned my back on the valley and re-entered the fort, making my way straight to the stable where Germanicus was tethered.
Moments later, I left the fort again through the main, southern gate, waving to Lucanus, whom I had noticed walking the interior perimeter road dose against the wall. As I emerged from the gateway and kneed my mount along the approach to the main road, passing the bathhouse and cresting the rise that hid the fort itself from the roadway, I glanced upward to my left, to where the narrow ribbon of the road snaked its way up the final approach to the pass to the next valley, and my eye was arrested by a flash of white. Reining in my horse, I looked more carefully and saw that the whiteness was at least one of the piebald ponies belonging to the four boys, although there was no sign of the boys themselves. Curious, I swung Germanicus eastward when I reached the road and kneed him upward, towards the saddleback of the pass.
I knew the boys came up here often, particularly during the winter months, when they had spent their days sledding down from the heights. I myself had made no attempt to approach the crest of the pass since the first and only time I had been up there, late in the autumn, long before the first snowfall of the winter. I had forgotten how unimaginably steep the incline of the roadway was. As we ascended, Germanicus was forced to lean further and further into each mounting step, battling to force his weight and mine upward, his shod hooves scrabbling and sliding on the hard, slippery, cobbled surface of the roadway as he fought to negotiate each tightly twisting curve on the serpentine slope. I found myself imagining again the agony and grief of the legionaries and wagon drivers who must have sweated and racked themselves struggling to control heavy-laden wagons, drawn by teams of oxen and mules, on such an impossibly pitched surface, only to face even greater difficulties on the downward slope beyond the crest.
As I approached the summit, sheltered now from the buffeting of the wind by the sheer, towering cliffs of the mountainside on my left, I drew rein and dismounted, determined to walk the remainder of the way out of pity for my noble horse. The single pony that had attracted my attention was close by, his reins tethered, I could see, by a heavy stone, and I recognized him as Primus, Arthur's own mount. He looked as though he had been ridden hard, over muddy ground, for all four of his legs, his long tail and the underside of his belly were caked with mud. Of the animal's owner I had yet to see the smallest sign.
Now, however, my eyes were attracted by a suggestion of movement among the short grass on the rocky bank by the side of the road. Only when I took a step closer did I realize that I was looking at the scarcely visible, barely rippling movement of a thin, unbroken sheet of water that was flowing straight down from the last vestiges of snow still melting on the heights far above.
Intrigued, I moved closer still, stepping off the edge of the road into the shallow, pebble-filled ditch and leaning forward to brace my outstretched hand against the rock face, breaking the thin sheet of icy water so that it buckled and surged, shockingly cold against the warm skin of my hand and wrist as I bent forward to peer closely at the vegetation. With a tiny thrill of wonder, I discovered then that what I had thought to be grass was actually an astonishing mixture of delicate, intricately structured mosses of incredible complexity, and tiny, bulbous-leaved plants, many of them bearing minuscule flowers of white, yellow, blue and every colour of red, from pale pink to deep, blood crimson. All of these, in hundreds of thousands,, clung tenaciously to the very surface of the stone, rooted in an endless web of minute fissures in what had seemed a wall of solid rock. Between these fissures, beneath the flowing sheen of water, the stone was coated with lichens in a wondrous range of colours from pale yellows and greens, through ochres and umbers and purples and browns deepening all the way to black—a miniaturized vista of hues and textures the like of which I had never seen or imagined. I remained there, lost in the wonder of my discovery, losing all track of the passage of time, until I became aware, gradually at first and then with increasing urgency, of the loss of sensation in my chilled hand. Smiling foolishly then, I straightened up slowly and, chafing my hand dry with the lining of my cloak, found young Arthur Pendragon staring down at me from the c
liff face above me and to my left.
"Merlyn, what are you doing? What are you looking for?"
I nodded a greeting. "Arthur. I came looking for you, first, because I saw your pony from below, but when you found me I was looking at the plants on the stone face, here, and the way the running water covers them. What have you been up to?"
"Nothing." He bent his knees and began making his way down towards me, balancing easily with one outstretched hand touching the stone face behind him.
I turned and climbed the short distance back to where Germanicus stood waiting for me. I gathered his reins and stood again for a spell, staring in wonder at the greenery that had assumed again, from this distance, the appearance of short, bright grasses. Germanicus whickered gently and butted my shoulder with his muzzle, and I turned lazily around to gaze back downward to where our fort lay beneath us, to all outward appearances devoid of life, its walls presenting an aspect of impregnability I knew they could not maintain in reality. There was a fire, as always, in the bathhouse, the smoke from the furnace chimney spilling lazily to pool in a freakishly sheltered pocket and billow there for a while like an errant cloud before being sucked upward at one end of the hollow, into the teeth of the wind, where it curled over the wall and scattered rapidly into nothing.
Arthur jumped down onto the edge of the road with a thump and came towards me, but only when he was almost within arm's reach did I see the swollen bruise on his right temple and the encrusted rims of blood that framed his nostrils. I had not noticed it before because I had been looking up at him from beneath, on the wrong side. Now it was evident that his right eye was blackening impressively, its upper lid swollen and sore looking. He saw me notice, and his face flushed with what I took for discomfort. I stepped closer to him and took his chin in my hand, tilting his head back and up.