by Jack Whyte
I smiled at Huw, feeling suddenly very tired. I fought off the weariness and swung my feet over the side of the cot to the floor, bracing myself with my hands on the edge of my bed. The room swayed again, but then held steady, and I forced myself to breathe deeply again.
"Send him to me later, would you? I would like to thank him personally for saving my life. "
Huw Strongarm made a dismissive noise with his pursed. lips. "Llewellyn? Forget that, Caius Merlyn. He won't thank you for thanks, and he won't thank you for making him feel obligated to you for noticing. He won't thank you for anything, in fact, and the best thanks you can give him is to stay far from him and say nothing. "
My smile broadened to a grin and I shook my head. "Can't do that, my friend. Send him. I'll find a way to thank him— a way that he will like. " I paused, wondering how I might even begin to make that last statement true. "You like him, this Llewellyn. And he has your especial trust, I suspect. "
Big Huw nodded. "Aye. As I said, he doesn't look like much—an ugly, ill looking whoreson and that's a fact—but one of my sisters married him some years ago, seeing the man beneath the ill used countenance, and now she thinks she's chosen by the gods and he's the god who chose her. He has been good to her—to her and for her—and to everyone around him, too. Apart from the mess that is his face, there's not a flaw in his make up. He's the best of the best. "
As Huw turned to leave, picking up Owain's bow to take it with him, I stopped him with a gesture of my hand. It was an impulse, and just as capriciously I changed my mind. I shook my head and waved him away again, but still he hesitated.
"What? You wanted to say something?"
"Aye, but it's pointless. Owain's dead. I was merely going to say I wish I could have looked him in the eye one last time before he died. "
Huw nodded again, then he grinned a crooked grin. "Aye, well, you might still look him in the eye, but you won't get much out of him in response. I'll send Llewellyn to you later. "
I watched him go, wondering what he could have meant, but I soon dismissed it and turned back to the others.
"Donuil, is there any word of Connor?"
"He's patrolling the coastal waters with his fleet, hoping to intercept Ironhair in the other big bireme.
"Philip?"
Philip interrupted his conversation with Benedict to face me, and as he did so I held out my hand to him. He grasped my wrist and I pulled myself to my feet, gripping him strongly and using his solid bulk to anchor myself against the unsteadiness that threatened to dump me unceremoniously back onto the cot. Once I had steadied myself, I loosened my grip on his arm. I stood spread legged, still unsteady but feeling the strength sweeping back into my legs with every heartbeat. I looked at Benedict now, over Philip's shoulder, remembering that I had sent him away earlier to look for any signs of Uderic's contingent.
"Ben. Did you find anyone out there?"
He grunted a negative, emphasizing it with a shake of his close cropped head. "We searched for about an hour, but the ground's too hard up here to hold a trail of any kind. Once beyond the end of this valley, there were three separate ways they might have gone without climbing the hills. I suspected they might have split up and gone in all three directions, but I didn't want to split my forces on the strength of suspicion alone, so I brought our people back. "
I nodded, accepting his judgment, and spoke to Philip. "Well, what have you to tell me about Connor?"
Philip shook his head slightly. "Nothing, really. I know nothing more concrete than Donuil has already told you. But Connor said to tell you that he'll sweep steadily north, doubling back as necessary from time to time to make sure the waters at his back are, as he put it, kept clear of offal. He'll stay dose to the coast, though, and maintain a land watch from every galley. Should you want or need him to touch shore, his people will be watching for three equal fires set burning side by side. That will summon Connor. Four fires will summon all the fleet When they see either signal, they'll land with the next high tide. His assumption was that you'll keep penetrating northward, hugging the western shore. "
"Good, so be it" I took my first hesitant step then, and made my way completely around the cot unaided, watched by all of them. When I had done so, I reversed myself and did it again. "I'm fine, " I told them then. "Nothing wrong with me that a short sleep won't cure. Will you leave me now? Wake me if anything happens. If any messengers arrive, I want to hear what they have to say immediately. Thank you, gentlemen. "
They left me alone then, all save Quinto, who hovered nearby, watching me anxiously as I lowered myself back to the cot and closed my eyes. I could tell he was loath to leave.
"What is it, Quinto? What do you want?"
He cleared his throat. "I want you to sleep, Caius. Will you drink a potion if I prepare it for you?"
I opened my eyes again and squinted up at him, wondering whether I could trust the soldier in him to prevail over the physician. "Aye, " I grunted, "providing you can guarantee your potion will not keep me laid out here for days, unconscious. I need to keep my wits about me, much as I need to sleep. If they have cause to wake me, I want to come awake alert and able to do anything I need to do. Can you ensure that?"
"Yes, I believe I can. A simple sedative, to help you sleep, that's all I'll give you. Three or four hours should see its force dissipate. After that, you ought to be yourself again. "
"Ought to be? Not will be?"
He dipped his head sideways. "Ought to be. My calling is physician, not magician. "
"Hmm. So be it. Go and fetch your foul brew, then. "
He left immediately, but by the time he returned I was already deeply asleep, and the potion sat unused on the folding table beside my cot.
TEN
Quinto's sleeping draught was the first thing I saw when I awoke by myself several hours later, just before sunset, feeling completely normal again.
Someone had set a leather basin in a frame beside my. cot, and I rose easily and rinsed my face in the cold water from a leather bucket that hung beside it from a tripod. After that, I went outside to see what was happening.
The fort was bustling, jammed to capacity, bodies moving everywhere. A sprawling community of leather campaign tents had been established in the surrounding meadows. Perhaps because of the brief spell of injury I had endured, my sense of smell seemed unusually acute, and I stood for a while with my head tilted back, singling out the various aromas that filled the late afternoon air: the smell of horses and dung from the huge area at the rear where the horse lines had been set up; heavy wood smoke from hundreds of fires; and then the more elusive scents of cooking meats and bread baking among coals. Someone not far from me was frying smoked, salted ham, and from another direction, fleetingly, came the smell of wild onions and garlic. As the mixture of unmistakable savours entered my nostrils , it brought the saliva spurting from beneath my tongue, reminding me that I was ravenously hungry.
I began to look about me, searching for the familiar outline of the large field cooks' tent that served us as a commissary on campaign. As I did so, I noticed something I had missed before, and my jaw dropped in astonishment as I realized that I must have passed within a few paces of it without seeing it.
The corpse of Owain of the Caves had been decapitated; his head had been stuck on a sharpened stake and set up outside the building in which I had lain unconscious. That was what Huw had been trying to tell me in his cryptic way. Now, as I saw it, with its pallid, waxen, moustached face framed by lank, dull brown hair, all thoughts of hunger fled.
I stepped closer to the atrocious thing, at war within myself. This, I knew, was Pendragon justice, an example set up for others to note and take warning from, and yet a terrible outrage stirred within me, evoked by its mere presence. I wanted to snatch the disgusting thing off its spike and hurl it from me as hard as I could, but I also knew that the last thing on earth I wished to do was touch it. I imagined myself clutching it by the hair and whirling it around my head before I th
rew it, scattering gouts of congealed blood in a circle, feeling the greasy hair slipping through my fingers. Instead, I merely shuddered in revulsion and forced myself to stand there, close to it, and look at it, remembering the man whose head this once had been.
He had been a ferocious mid successful warrior who had served my cousin Uther well and honourably in his time, fighting throughout Lot's War as one of Uther's most trusted captains. Only after Uther's death, for reasons that would now forever be unknown, had Owain turned away from his service, from his own Pendragon loyalties and from Camulod, selling himself to Ironhair and working thereafter to set that upstart in place as ruler of the Cambrian Pendragon. To that end he had conspired to bring death to Uther's own son, and he had finally, willingly, given up his own life in the attempt to achieve that goal. Why? What land of powers did Ironhair possess that could subvert a man as strong as Owain of the Caves and induce him to turn against his lifelong loyalties? I had asked myself the same question a hundred times before, and I had never come any closer to answering it than I was now. Strangely, as I stood gazing at the lifeless head, wondering vainly what thoughts, desires and drives had filled it during life, I found my horror at its presence leaving me, draining away. I finally nodded to it, gazing into the open, opaque eyes. "Rest then, and settle your own debts with God, " I murmured.
As I turned to walk away, one of the men squatting at a nearby cooking fire stood up, watching me. Though my view of him was obscured by thick smoke, I saw enough of him at first glance to be struck by his physical appearance. Whoever he was, I thought, he dressed to be noticed. He was of medium height, and well made, with a narrow waist that tapered from wide, straight shoulders. He wore a short, startlingly beautiful cape of winter ermine furs, one end thrown back over his left shoulder so that the black tips of its outer fringe of tails hung in a brilliant bar across his chest. White and black were his colours, enhanced by silver metalwork and jewellery. I wondered fleetingly who he was, but as soon as the smoke cleared and I saw his narrow, ravaged, hatchet face, I knew he was Llewellyn One Eye. I stopped short, gazing right back at him and struggling to disguise my reaction to his hideous disfigurement.
Then I turned my head slightly to indicate the staring trophy on the stake, pitching my voice so he would hear me clearly.
"This is your work, Llewellyn?"
He came towards me, walking slowly, clutching a cooked leg of some kind of bird in one hand. When he reached my side, he looked at the head on its stake and bit off a mouthful of meat before he made any attempt to answer me. I felt my hunger come back, stronger than ever, as I watched him chewing. He inspected the impaled head as though he had never seen its like before.
"Aye," he said eventually, speaking around the mouthful of meat he had wadded into one cheek. "It's mine. Does it displease you?"
I felt myself start to smile. "No, he's well dead, and your arrow saved my life. I wanted to thank you."
He looked at me sideways, tilting his head strangely to see me with his single eye, the right one. "Horseshit," he said, disparagingly. "Your sword saved your life, and his next arrow would have been for the boy. I thought you were dead before I loosed my shot. Besides, I was shooting for myself. He was a treacherous whoreson, that one, a disgrace to his name and his people."
"How, and why? Because he fought for Ironhair?"
Now Llewellyn turned to look me full in the face. "No, because he sold himself to Outlanders. He was a Pendragon born and bred, a son of these mountains, and he betrayed his birthright and his people. For that he died. It matters not what the Outlander's name was, except that it was other than Pendragon."
"What happened to your eye?" I had been staring at Llewellyn as he spoke, analysing the startling horror of his face, and the question had left my mouth before I was even aware I was going to ask it. He went very still, and then he cocked his head to one side again, peering up at me with his good right eye, thrusting the disfigured side of his face into grim prominence.
"An accident," he said, mildly. "When I was a boy, apprenticed to an iron maker. I was puddling iron and the metal splashed." I winced at the thought, but he went on as though be had not noticed. "It caught me in the eye and splashed down onto my cheek and nose. The smith pushed my head into a tub of water and expected me to die. I didn't So when the iron drops had cooled, he plucked them out of me... Well, some he had to cut out, I've been told, because the flesh was roasted into them. But I was out of my senses at the time, so I don't remember that You can see the shapes of them, if you look close."
He suddenly leaned nearer to me, cocking his head in an invitation to examine his disfigurement and even though I knew he expected me to cringe and pull away, I looked. Sure enough, I saw the evidence clearly. One large, tear shaped drop had settled on the plane of his left cheekbone, its tail stretching upwards and in towards his eye, where its ferocious heat had blinded him on that side, burning away the eye and carving a channel deep into his lower lid. As it healed, the tension of the scar tissue had twisted and pulled the skin and flesh downward, exposing his eye socket horribly and creating a deep fissure down the distorted flesh beneath the eye to join the large teardrop. Three other drops had landed on his face, as well. The smallest of them was in the hollow of his nose, just above the pad of his left nostril, another fell on the outer end of his upper lip, and the third, almost as large as the main splash, had caught him on the outside of his face, beneath the crest of his cheekbone close to the ear, searing a deep hole there before trickling down the line of his jawbone and melting the flesh as it rolled.
Afterwards, as the flesh healed, the shape and depth of the injuries had resulted in the grotesque facial mutilations that now set this man apart. The entire left side of his face was a sight to frighten children, with a leering, empty eye socket set above a ropy network of scars leaving no discernible trace of normal humanity. Above the edge of his mouth, emphasizing the terrifying differentness of this face from all others, a circular hole the size of a fingernail showed his eye tooth and the gum that held it.
He was staring at me intently, waiting for me to say something that would betray my revulsion. But I felt none.
"Yes, you're right. The marks are plain. Four drops—two small, two larger, one of them huge. At least you still have your teeth."
He glared at me for a moment, and then his face creased into a huge grin. He finished chewing the food in his mouth and swallowed, before sucking at a tooth on the right side of his mouth and rubbing his lips with the back of his hand.
"Huw told me you wanted to talk to me. What was it about?"
"I told you, I want to offer you my thanks, but Huw warned me you would accept no gratitude. Do you still work with iron, or—"
"Did the experience frighten me away?" He laughed, a single bark. "No, I kept at it and I'm an ironsmith now, save when we're at war. Then I'm a Pendragon, first and foremost, and so I fight."
"An ironsmith."
"Aye, you might say iron's a part of me." He laughed again. "It certainly consumed a part of me, but I'm more careful now, by far. Do you know anything of smithing?"
"But little. When I was a boy, I had a favourite uncle who was a master of the craft. A man called Publius Varrus. He taught me something of forging and shaping iron."
Llewellyn stood slightly straighter. "I know the name. You own his great bow now, do you not?"
"I do. How did you know that?"
"Huw told me about you, and I've seen the badge he wears, the one with the arrow nicks in it."
I nodded, remembering with pleasure the time I had matched shots with Huw. Both of us had landed arrows side by side within the tiny circle of the brooch his wife had give® him, filling the space so closely that our arrowheads had left parallel nicks in the upper and lower edges of the silver bauble's inner rim. Huw wore the brooch as proudly as a Roman centurion, might have worn the corona on his breastplate. Another thought occurred to me.
"Tell me, how did you know the Cave Man's next arrow would h
ave been for the boy?"
"I didn't, until Huw told me what you said."
I looked straight at Llewellyn now, assessing the man, gauging his mettle. "And have you any idea why he tried to kill the lad, even before me?"
"Aye, he thought him someone else. Young Arthur Pendragon."
"Hmm. And what do you know of Arthur Pendragon?"
Llewellyn twisted his mouth up in what might have been a lopsided smile, except that it exposed the tooth beneath the hole in his cheek. "He's Uther's son, they say. Sired upon Lot of Cornwall's willing wife."
He took another bite from the leg he held in his hand, and I distinctly heard the juicy sound of the meat ripping away from the bone. "Is there any left where that came from?"
"Aye, or there was when I left the fire. Come." He led me back, and as we approached, the two men who sat there yet stood up.
Llewellyn waved his hand from me to them. "Gwynn Blood-Eye and Daffyd, Merlyn of Camulod. Daffyd's our cook, and better than any you have brought with you, I'd wager. Gwynn Blood-Eye's here because he's the only whoreson in this place who's uglier than me! Sit you."
I nodded to the two men and sat down on a rock, gazing at the whole, spitted carcasses of two fowls that still hung above the fire, the grease from them dripping onto the coals beneath and flaring in small, furious bursts of fire. A large pile of bones lay on a square wooden platter close by Daffyd's feet and a half eaten carcass clung to another spit. As I sat down, the man called Gwynn Blood-Eye, who indeed had one eye that was the deep red of blood, with no discernible iris or pupil, reached down to his side and passed me a wooden board like the one that lay by Daffyd. I thanked him and balanced the thing on my knee as Llewellyn reached across the fire, deftly lifted off another spit and then slid the carcass of the bird free of its spike and onto my platter.