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

by Jack Whyte

  "What is it?"

  "Nectar. We call it 'sweet flames.' It's supposed to be an aphrodisiac."

  She raised herself higher on an elbow. "A what? Aphrodisiac? What does that mean?"

  I sipped, deliberately slurping noisily. "A love potion to promote desire and to extend performance."

  "Ooh ... " Her eyes went round with wonder and mischief. "And does it work? Will I regret the drinking of it?"

  "I don't know, lass. Do you think you might?"

  "Only if it fails us." She started to laugh, softly at first and then more unrestrainedly, and eventually I found myself laughing helplessly with her, filled with elation and a feeling of release and great relief, so that years fell away from me. We rolled about on die bed she had prepared for us, spilling more than the occasional drop of wine. And soon we had drunk the pot dry, talking and laughing all the while and taking delight in the learning of each other, free of constraint. And as we talked and laughed and took delight, we kissed; and as we kissed, we ventured further, so that soon our clothes were cast aside and we lay intertwined, exulting in the newfound beauty of each other, uncaring if the aphrodisiac were real or not. We had no need of it. And I fed the fire from time to time. And when the sun came up it found us still awake, rejoicing together at the advent of a time that stretched and stretched ahead of us without a care.

  PART TWO

  Mediobogdum

  FOURTEEN

  In the late summer of that first full year of our residence, the first overland expedition from Camulod arrived with our new supply of horses, making their way, to the great excitement of everyone in the fort, over the high saddle of the pass above and to the east of us.

  Anticipating that they might be arriving someday soon, I had begun posting guards on the peak above the pass several weeks earlier, and so the horn announcing their arrival had sounded as soon as they came into view, permitting us ample time to assemble our own small force and change into our military trappings, seldom used in those peaceful days of building, to welcome the newcomers appropriately.

  A stirring sight they made, too, their weapons and armour and equipment flashing in the westering sun as they wound their way down from the heights to our gates, a journey of some third of an hour. They moved in what seemed like an endless file, four wide. Two squadrons of cavalry rode front and rear, with the foot soldiers and extra horses in place between them, the latter haltered and strung together in sets of four, with the outer horse on each rank, alternating right and left, being ridden by a trooper.

  Ambrose rode at the head of them all, beneath my own

  great, black-and-white standard with the silver bear, which had become the standard of Camulod. Watching his approach from my vantage point on our fort's south-east tower, I felt my heartbeat quicken and my breath speed up in a very strange fashion. It was like watching myself ride towards me, which was in fact, as I had to remind myself, precisely the effect Ambrose was looking to achieve. In the eyes of the people, he rode as Merlyn of Camulod, and even I might have been convinced to believe it. The effect on young Arthur and his three friends, however, was far more salutary.

  Arthur had always been smitten by the heroic aspects of Uncle Ambrose, as he called him. On this occasion the boy was actually struck dumb by the splendour of the Camulodian approach. I have no doubt the reasons for his reaction were many and mixed. It might have been occasioned by the fact that we ourselves had been away from Camulod for more than a year by then. It might also have been augmented by the fact that we seldom wore armour nowadays in Mediobogdum, and were more akin to farmers and artisans—in appearance and dress at least—than to soldiers and warriors. Then again, it might have been due to the simple apparition of a large, disciplined force of regimented, heavily armed men and horses in a place where we had grown accustomed to seeing the native warriors going about on foot, or on shaggy ponies, individually.

  Whatever the reasons, when the vanguard of the Camulodian troops arrived and Ambrose himself sat smiling down at us, immense in his high-crested Roman helmet and heavy, shimmering and highly polished plate armour, flanked by his three senior troop commanders, young Arthur walked forward alone, wordlessly, his eyes shining, his hands held out to relieve Ambrose of his heavy shield. My brother grunted, looking down at the boy, and then swung easily down from his high saddle, passing the shield to him with one hand and reaching out to ruffle his hair with the other; he paused, then, the gesture incomplete, and changed his mind, contenting himself with gripping Arthur cordially by one shoulder before moving directly to embrace me.

  "He's too big to be greeted as a child now," he whispered as we hugged each other. I said nothing, stepping back to clear the way for the others at my back to move forward.

  When all the introductions had been completed, Ambrose released his three troop commanders to supervise the settling of their men and horses on the flat parade area outside the eastern gate, where the infantry that had accompanied them were already laying out their tents and gear in the traditional Roman style. A group of us moved into the fort and up onto the eastern wall, where we could see what was going on. From that viewpoint, it was Lucanus who observed that this old fort had never seen such a gathering of military might before. At its most active time, shortly after it was built, it might have held five or six hundred men, although we had strong grounds to doubt that it had ever been so fully garrisoned, but it had never seen more than a hundred heavy cavalry mounts at once. As Lucanus pointed this out, Derek, who had been staying with us for a week at that time, stood silent, his arms folded on his chest, his bearded chin resting on the gorget of his leather breastplate as he stared at the horse camp that now filled the parade ground. This was, I knew, the first time he had actually seen the kind of peacetime force that Camulod could field, and he was impressed, aware that this was merely a patrol dispatched several months earlier and barely missed in Camulod.

  When I had told him, at the time of Ambrose's departure months earlier, that we would be having visitors by land from Camulod, the king had been perturbed, fearing that such an open use of the rear road to Ravenglass might point the way for others afterwards, but he had been mollified when I pointed out that the reason for the visit was to leave a defensive garrison of cavalry behind, and that it would be relieved and replaced by newcomers on a regular, twice-yearly basis. The reality of having a solid, well- trained garrison to guard his back had made light of his fears of invasion from that direction.

  Finally, once Ambrose had satisfied himself that all was well in hand and that the troops would have no difficulties settling in, I managed to take him aside and sequester him in the steam room of our bathhouse, having first made sure that we would not be disturbed. There, after he had enjoyed the first flush of pleasure at being able to relax and cleanse himself of the soil of his long journey, I was able to question him about his passage from the south, developments in Camulod and most particularly about the matter foremost in my mind: the new sword that was to be forged from the Lady of the Lake.

  He set my mind at ease on the latter question immediately. My concerns about the sufficiency of metal in the statue had been unfounded, he said, because it had quickly become apparent, upon a cursory examination of the rough-sculpted form, that Publius Varrus could only have used about one-third of the total mass of the Lady for the making of Excalibur. Joseph and Carol together had developed the formula that led to this conclusion: Excalibur, when finished, would have weighed approximately half as much as it did on first being forged. The difference in weight would have been shed in filing, trimming and chiselling the metal into its final shape and size. The surprising and welcome news, then, was that there ought to be enough metal remaining in the statue of the Lady to fashion two identical swords, if such was my wish.

  That gave me pause. Was it my wish to have two duplicate Excaliburs?

  The question was no sooner asked than answered. These swords were representations, not duplicates; they would be practice swords and, as such, would be
subjected to much overuse and great indignities. Better to have two of them, therefore—particularly since Excalibur could then remain concealed. That resolved, my next question concerned the length of time it would take to make both. Ambrose's response was an eloquent shrug of his shoulders. He would not return to Camulod until the start of winter, he pointed out, and until he did, Carol would make no start upon the second piece. The first might well be complete by then, but even so, it would remain in Camulod until the following spring.

  I had to content myself with that, and for a long time · we spoke little more of things political, since all Ambrose now wanted to do was bathe and steam and close his eyes and mind to everything except the pleasure of the moist heat as it leached away his tired and aching stiffness. That process, however, had no deleterious effect on his ability to talk about his own home life and his family in Camulod. Ludmilla had borne him beautiful twin daughters, one radiant blonde and the other raven-haired, late in the summer of the previous year, and their father was enraptured with them, entirely unimpressed by the prevalent opinion that daughters were a burden to a man. He had named them Luceiia and Octavia, in honour of the Britannican ancestors whom he had discovered only after meeting me in Verulamium years earlier, and I believe he could have talked of them happily in his sleep.

  Ludmilla was thriving, he reported, and had sent her love to all of us, but most especially to her beloved mentor Lucanus. She had assumed overall responsibility for the medical welfare of the Colony on Luke's departure, at his insistence, and under her supervision all matters of health and hygiene in Camulod were carefully policed and well- maintained. Her staff had grown with the arrival of a young surgeon who had been trained by die military in Antioch, and who had made his way to Camulod purely on the strength of stories about Luke that he had heard in his travels in south Britain. There, having met Ludmilla and no doubt tested her abilities in his own way, he'd decided to settle and practise his skills in Luke's superbly built Infirmary.

  From there, our conversation drifted pleasantly to other topics, all of them quite trivial and all of them making me slightly nostalgic for the life and folk of Camulod. By the time Ambrose began to bestir himself and show any inclination to talk seriously again of "important" matters, I had already decided it would be selfish of me to keep his tidings from the others, and equally inconsiderate to keep the pleasures of the baths from my brother's troopers. And so we dressed and left the bathhouse to those who were no less in need of its seductive joys than he had been.

  Within the hour, we had assembled the remainder of our initial group, including Donuil and Shelagh, and made our way outside the fort to sit informally in a casual grouping at the top of the chasm that guarded our rear, and there Ambrose told us all the details of his journey from the south. Arthur, of course, was there with his three bosom friends, Bedwyr, Gwin and Ghilleadh, the four of them perched, still as stone pillars, fearful that they might be dismissed. Everyone ignored them, and they eventually settled down to listen.

  My brother brought surprising but welcome tidings. The towns he had passed through in his journey, having lain abandoned and neglected for years, were now being inhabited again—not in any highly organized fashion, he reported, but there were definite signs of revitalization. Glevum and Aquae Sulis, in particular, he said, each had populations now of several hundred people, although the new citizens, rather than living in the indefensible Roman ruins, preferred to dwell on the outskirts of the towns, finding security in rapid access to the safety of the deep forest in case of attack. The bridge outside Glevum, over the Severn River, had been repaired and reinforced and was once more, as it had always been, a natural gathering point for people from north and south of the river wishing to trade. Elsewhere, too, he told us, along the great Roman road the people were now calling the Foss Way, because of the wide ditches or fossae that lined it on both sides, small centres were springing up where natural routes crossed the high road. People were organizing themselves again in small communities, looking to their own defences, planting crops and even clearing new ground in many places, because that section of the land, at least, was relatively peaceful and unplagued by war. No Saxon hordes had penetrated this far north and west, to date, and raids from Eire were now few and far between. I had little doubt, on hearing that, that thanks were due there to our alliance with Athol's Scots, and to the damage done to the Sons of Condran in the past year.

  Ambrose and his troopers had been welcomed everywhere, once the realization had spread ahead of them— magically, it seemed—that they were not intent on pillage and raiding. The sight of strongly armed and disciplined warriors who posed no threat, and their promise to return that way again regularly in the future, had put new heart into people all along the great road, which, he informed us in response to a question from Dedalus, was surprisingly in superb condition, still almost free of weeds and erosion. I smiled at Ded when he asked his question, knowing he was remembering our comrade Benedict and his prediction, on returning from Eire a decade earlier, about trees destroying die roads in Britain, given time. Ambrose went on to talk of the force he had brought with him: three squadrons of cavalry, each forty strong, and a full Roman maniple of infantry consisting of ten twelve-man squads.

  Ambrose turned to me directly, saying he had thought to leave four squads of infantry with us, in addition to the squadron of cavalry we had discussed. Could we feed such numbers? I looked to Derek, silently inviting him to speak, since his would ultimately be the task of feeding them. We had no fields of crops, up here on our plateau, and all our food, save wild meat and freshwater fish, was grown by Derek's folk and traded to us in return for our help in their fields and in the forest, plus our commitment to assist them should the need arise to defend their town. Derek thought for several moments and then shrugged, smiling slightly. Forty-eight trained warriors and their officers, he admitted, might be an asset worth making the occasional sacrifice to keep and feed.

  Ambrose smiled and nodded. Our new garrison would remain with us, he said, for five months, at the end of which they would be relieved by an incoming complement of troops, and this would go on, twice each year, for as long as we had need of such strength.

  From these, Ambrose broadened his discourse to include such tidings as be had from other places. Cornwall was quiet and apparently mending itself, he said, with no news of war or trouble coming out of there. Cambria, too, was at peace, with Dergyll Ap Griffyd's rule continuing in strength and amity. But word had come out of the north, brought by Connor's ships, of an army being assembled in the far north-east, beyond the ancient Wall, in die lands of a king called Crandal, of whom I had never heard. He intended to raid southward into Northumbria, which would bring his forces into conflict with Vortigern and his Danish mercenaries. None of us hearing Ambrose doubted that the invaders would be stopped in Northumbria. Hengist's Danes would keep them occupied and make them wish they had remained in their northern lands. No news had come to Camulod of Vortigern or Hengist, so Ambrose presumed they both were flourishing. Otherwise, he believed young Horsa's warriors, free of his father Hengist's iron rule, would have come spilling south and west.

  With such a willing audience hanging on his every utterance, Ambrose could easily have talked for far longer than he did, I suspect, but he had other matters to concern him and so had to take his leave of his listeners as the afternoon was wearing on towards twilight. His troops were new here, he pointed out, unused to the fort and their new quarters, and he owed it to them to make sure that they were disposed as well as they could be, and that the arrangements were well in hand to feed them all their first meal here in Mediobogdum. As he strode off, leaving the rest of us to wonder at the tidings he had brought to us, Arthur and the other three lads trotted at his heels like well- trained dogs.

  Shortly after that, I found my own reasons for leaving and made my way to my quarters,- where I sat in the gathering darkness for some time, mulling over everything I had heard that day.

  The foremo
st thing on my mind as I sat there was the matter of the new practice swords. The how and why of using them had plagued me for some time, although I had then considered only having one, plus Excalibur itself. Ostensibly, Arthur would use the new weapon to learn the skills he would require to -use Excalibur to best effect. However, the matter was more thorny than that, and the difficulty lay in the danger of employing any such weapon without accidental harm to the user, be he novice or expert. A weapon that could cut through iron, as these could, would make short work of any flesh and bone that came against its edge, so I must make sure, from the outset of our planning, that I became familiar with the tricks and techniques and tendencies inherent in these blades long before young Arthur ever handled one of them.

  As though they were fresh written in my mind, I recalled the words with which Publius Varrus had described the damage to his forearm from the very first of the long- bladed swords Equus had made. Equus and he had discovered immediately that the new, long blades, when used against each other, behaved as no blades ever had behaved before, their tempered-metal tongues rebounding and leaping from each other with a hungry power fed to new extremes by the length of the arc of their swing. And those swords, I knew, had been mere tempered iron, lacking the magical essence—the mysterious skystone metal—that gave Excalibur its fearsome strength and edges. Excalibur's cross-guard would, I knew, discount some of that danger, stopping a glancing, sliding blow to the forearm, but I could not rely on that alone to safeguard the boy.

  Now that we were to have two replicas, however, the way became simpler, and I decided to include Dedalus, Rufio and Donuil in the exploratory training program with the new weapons. Among the four of us, we would be able to determine the properties of the new blades and the expectations their users should and should not have of them. The boys, in the meantime, could be set to work learning the heft and mastery of the new wooden training staves, strengthening their young limbs to hard usage as they did so. Then, as we four adults devised the ways and means of best using the new, keen blades in combat, we would pass on those knacks to the boys, teaching them variations in the ways they swung their staves, so they would learn to use the new, long swords before they ever knew the swords existed. I relaxed then, having formulated that design, feeling in my heart that it was right.