The Sorcer part 2: Metamorphosis cc-6

by Jack Whyte

  Derek almost interrupted him before he could finish, with a loud, woofing grunt of approval that grew into an appreciative roar of acclamation as the others joined in the applause. Benedict looked about him almost truculently, flushing with doubt filled pleasure.

  I grasped him roughly by the shoulder. "You're absolutely right, Ben. We must be ready here when Huw returns—fully prepared, fit and ready to march." I turned to Philip. "When Lucca's squad is rested, send them back immediately with full approval of his plan. He is to delegate the harbour command to his best subordinate and then bring his two thousand here in person with the supply train, and as many extra rations and supplies as he can provide." I stood up and flexed my shoulders. "Right, then, my friends. We'll proceed as before, since there's not much we can do until the others arrive, but I want your men at their fighting best when we leave here. That might be in a week, or it might not be for several more than that, but in the meantime, I want to see our people training for real war again. We've all grown lazy, I suspect, in the past few months of inactivity. I want to see the evidence that sloth is outlawed, from this moment on. That's all."

  I left them there and went looking for hot water, regretting once more the fact that the bathhouse here was irredeemable.

  Tertius Lucca arrived within the week, at the head of a massive train of wagons filled with weaponry, supplies and provisions. The day of his arrival was consumed in seeing to the disposition of his force, the allocation of quarters to his two thousand men and an inventory of the wealth he had brought with him. Then, the following morning, a short time before noon, a hard riding messenger arrived from our most northern outpost with the word that an unidentified force, numbering in excess of two thousand men, was converging on us from the north and west In spite of my great hopes for Huw's success in rallying his people, it seemed to me it was yet too soon for such a host to have sprung up, even from Huw's most determined efforts, and so I sounded a general alarm. But hard on the heels of that first messenger, a second arrived almost before our trumpets had stopped clamouring, bearing the word that the approaching force had been identified as Pendragon.

  Astounded and delighted, I took advantage of the furore stirred up by the alarm and rode out northward at the head of a hundred cavalry troopers to greet Huw Strongarm on his triumphant return. Instead I found Llewellyn striding ahead of his men, very much in command, and though my welcome to him was no less genuine, I found myself wondering what had become of Huw himself.

  Llewellyn came to me directly and grasped my horse's bridle strap. Huw was still in the north, he told me, headed now into the Pendragon strongholds in the east and southeast of Cambria, gathering strength with every day. He had wanted to send these first two thousand south to me, so that I could begin a northward sweep, penetrating the central highlands, where Carthac was creating havoc at the head of a marauding mob of mercenaries. He hoped that I would be willing to use my troops as mobile walls in the valley floors of the mountain ranges, solid bulwarks to confine and demolish the detritus of Ironhair's levies as the Pendragon bowmen flushed them down from the hilltops.

  I smiled to' hear Huw's message endorse the exact stratagem urged by Benedict a week earlier. Already I could perceive the change that responsibility had effected in Huw Strongarm: he had left me as a subordinate and an ally; now, scarcely two weeks later, he was addressing me as an equal, and perhaps even as one subordinate to him, submitting orders thinly disguised as requests through his own subordinate commander. I was not displeased by this in any way. Huw had sent two thousand men to me in earnest of his unswerving good faith and was off gathering more. The number surprised me, and I .asked Llewellyn how many men the Pendragon might field.

  "In total? More than ten thousand, I would estimate, of fighting age."

  "Good God! I had no idea there were so many. Five thousand fighting men, that I could see. It seems to me my cousin Uther commanded that many."

  "When? In Lot's War? That was a long time ago. We are a numerous people, Caius Merlyn, and we're farmers before anything else. It's true our farms are small, nowhere near as rich or fertile as yours in the south, but they need equal tending and even harder work because of that. Five thousand was the smallest number of Pendragon men your cousin led, in the final years of the Cornwall affair, but he always left a greater number at home in Cambria, tending the land. We lost too many men down there. The last battle cost us dearly, but now we have recovered. And this war is here, on our own land, in our own fields. We'll win it quickly now, with Huw to lead us and with your help, so every man in Cambria will do his part. Huw should bring five thousand more, I'd guess, and others will come later."

  I was still astonished and sat looking about me for several moments before looking back to him. "Let's head back to camp. Will you ride with me, if I offer you a horse?"

  Llewellyn looked at me and grinned. "Aye, willingly, but will you unhorse one of your own for me?"

  I turned to look at Bedwyr, who had been listening to all of this, and he was already dismounting. Once on the ground, he offered his reins to Llewellyn, who accepted them with a nod of thanks and swung himself easily up into the saddle as Bedwyr caught Rufio's good arm and swung himself up behind him, to ride double.

  I watched Llewellyn's mount to the saddle in surprise, and he read it in my face. "Rufio taught me how to. ride," he said. "I learn quickly."

  "It would seem you do." I kicked Germanicus into motion and Llewellyn rode beside me on my left, knee to knee, back to our encampment. As we rode, I took up the conversation where we had left off. .

  "Five thousand more? How will Uderic react to that, I wonder?"

  Llewellyn turned towards me but did not look at me. He kept his head down, his one eye fixed, it seemed to me, on Germanicus's ears. "Uderic? He won't react at all. He's dead." Now he glanced at my face and read my shock. His own face again wore a sardonic grin. "Uderic had difficulties with the word we spread about his conduct with the Outlander Ironhair. He didn't enjoy hearing himself being called what he was, and so he challenged Huw. Should have been a wiser man and simply left, but then, Uderic never was a wise man. They fought. It was brief."

  "So now Huw is king indeed."

  "Hah! I thought that was all settled between you and him! Huw Strongarm has no interest in being king. Did we not go through all that? Huw's War Chief of Pendragon and that's all he Wants to be. He sees his task as settling the land for its new king, King Uther's son. Mind you, they tried to make him king, after he killed Uderic, but he laughed at them and told them all that's what their problem has been since Uther died—too many people looking to be king, and none prepared to do the heavy work. That shut them up."

  We rode in silence after that, and when I broke it again it was to speak of something that had been in my mind for several days, ever since Ben had made his prediction.

  "I would like to make Huw a gift of some kind, Llewellyn, a mark of my respect for the stance he has taken. What would be appropriate to give to the War Chief of Pendragon? I could offer him armour, or weapons, but I think he has no need of either—certainly not of the kind we wear and use. Can you think of anything that might please him?"

  "Aye, one of those." We had arrived at our encampment, and I looked to see what it was that he had identified so quickly, but nothing obvious presented itself to me. Llewellyn read the incomprehension on my face and pointed straight ahead. "One of those. That big tent of yours."

  "What, you mean my command tent?"

  "Aye. Huw doesn't have one. There isn't one such tent in all of Cambria save this. What better gift could you present to a War Chief than such a visible symbol of his power? A big, wide, leather tent with a high, lofty roof, where he can assemble and meet with his own leaders in all kinds of weather, warm and dry in the foulest times. That were a kingly gift, were it within your power to bestow it. D'you have another one like it?"

  I laughed aloud and slapped him on the back in my delight. "Llewellyn, you are a man of great discernment. It is,
indeed, the perfect gift and Huw Strongarm should have one. Not only do I have another, I have a new made one, never used, its leather panels still smelling of smoke and tanning and its poles and guy ropes clean and free of grime or dirt Tertius Lucca brought it with him but yesterday, in one of his wagons—an unexpected gift from the Council of Camulod, for my use. It will be Huw's, instead, because despite the laudable concern of the Council, my own trait there is in perfect condition. Well done, Llewellyn, Well done. Now, is there anything that you would like?"

  He answered me promptly. "Aye, there is. I'd like a horse of my own, and a saddle. " He was grinning widely now, the left side of his face twisted. "I find I love to ride. I would not take it with me when I'm with my own, but when I go with you, I'll go in pride and comfort. "

  "So be it, my friend. Visit our horse lines and pick out the horse you want then speak with Philip about a saddle. But you know that, once the horse is yours, you'll have to care for it yourself?"

  "Aye, Merlyn, I know it. Rufio is a thorough teacher. He's the man you should have teaching young Arthur, not me. "

  I grinned and nodded. "I might agree, but Arthur has long since learned everything Rufio had to teach him. Now he teaches Rufe! That's why I need you for him: new tricks, new Cambrian skills and new techniques, to keep the lad on his toes. "

  We struck camp the following morning. I had dispatched written messages to Camulod, acknowledging receipt of the supplies and bidding Ambrose to sit there until he heard again from me, since I knew not where we might end up and we had no need of reinforcements at this time. I also sent off messengers to Huw Strongarm, bearing the gift of his new command tent—the messengers who carried it had spent hours the day before learning to erect and diamante it—and apprising him of what we intended once we had penetrated the central highlands.

  We would march north and east towards the ancient gold mines of Dolaucothi, where it seemed most likely that Ironhair and Carthac might be found, grubbing for gold in the ancient workings. I invited him to send messengers to us there, since, were we unable to find our quarry in Dolaucothi, we would then face two optional, equidistant choices of route. One, to the north and east again, was a Roman fortification with no Roman name I knew of; to Llewellyn, it was simply the Roman place at Colen, in the middle of Cambria. To the north of that, a full day's march to westward, was Mediomanum, the last of the Roman forts of central Cambria. To the southwest from Dolaucothi, on the other hand, lay the famous fort at Cicutio, a long held stronghold of the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix. That would have been my natural choice, had I been free to make it, but the choice of our final destination would be based upon Huw's information regarding the enemy's whereabouts.

  Once out of Moridunum that morning, we made our way quickly towards Dolaucothi, heading into the mountain glens that sank deeper and deeper into shadow as the hills surrounding them grew higher. Not a single day passed from then on without groups and bands of silent men joining us from the hills as we moved, swelling our ranks until our numbers rose to top nine thousand. So rapid and so visible was this influx that, despite our newly refurbished stores, the logistics people in our quartermasters' company grew concerned at the number of mouths we had to feed. But food came to us without our seeking it, sent in from villages and hamlets and from solitary farms along our route, few of them ever seen by us, since we kept to the valley bottoms and most of the dwellings we passed nestled in the shelter of the thick treed hillside slopes.

  As I sat on a hillside outcrop one morning, reviewing the turnout as my army swept by my perch, I noted the division that had grown apparent in my forces and paid more attention to Llewellyn's Celts than to my own troopers. Dour and silent, grim faced and self absorbed, these newcomers woe different from the Pendragon Celts our soldiers had known before. These were hillmen, the true Pendragon people, born and bred among mountain solitudes that seldom knew the presence of Outlanders, and they held themselves apart from the rest of us with a fierce, distrustful and self centred pride. They made it plain, without words, that they marched with us in answer to the call of their people and their land; they owed no allegiance to us, or Camulod, or any other Outlandish power. They marched in utter silence, for the most part, and they bristled with weapons of all shapes and sizes, the most prevalent among them the great weapon known as the Pendragon longbow. Every man, it seemed, now carried a bow stave as tall as himself, and at least one quiver of long arrows made from the wood of ash saplings and flighted with goose feathers.

  The sheer quantity of bows perplexed me, for I knew from my own readings of the chronicles of Publius Varrus and my own grandfather, written mere decades earlier, that these weapons had then been few and precious, numbering in the mere hundreds. Ullic Pendragon, Uther's grandfather, had decreed in those days that the new longbows were the property of the people; no man could own one as his personal possession. Each man served as the custodian of a bow for a time, responsible for its upkeep and well being, then passed it on, at the end of a year, into another's keeping. Many of the bows I was seeing now had been among those protected by that very law and were now fifty, sixty and more years old.

  For decades now, Druids had walked these lands searching for yew trees in their journeying, and planting and cultivating new groves of yew wherever they found places suited to their growth. And as increasing supplies of yew staves were brought home, the number of bow and arrow makers had grown, too, and mastery of the skills required to make the weapons had become the greatest art of these fierce folk.

  I took note then of the bows themselves and found more room for surprise. All of the longbows I had ever seen before were round in section, each carved with loving care from one dried, cured stave of yew. Some of these I was seeing now were different, apparently rectangular in section like the huge, laminated bow I owned myself, now far more than a hundred years in age arid polished with a patina of untold decades of close care and maintenance. The Varrus bow, as I thought of it, was compound in make up, with a double arched shape—two bows, in fact, above and below the carved handhold at the centre—made in flat layers of some dark, exotic wood backed by hand shaven plates of animal bone and braided strips of sinew, glued and dried to iron hardness, the whole crafted and bound and baked by unknown means in Africa by a long dead Scythian master and defying duplication here in Britain.

  When Llewellyn himself passed by me I asked him about these new bows, and he confirmed what I had suspected. They were, in fact, made in laminated sections, although they each possessed the single arch of the traditional Pendragon longbow. Most of them were made of ash, he said, though some were still of the rarer yew. The original round bow required a stave of specific dimensions and properties, thickness and straightness being the first two of these. Since not all saplings grow straight, it followed logically that not all were suitable for making bows. But the Pendragon bow makers remembered that the Varrus bow, on which all their new bows were based, had been laminated in sections. In consequence, some had continued working with the lesser woods which, though they lacked the resilient strength of yew, yet had other valuable qualities: dense, narrow grain and pliability. Someone, then, had discovered that a suitable length of sawn ash, well cured, kiln-dried and straight edged, could be split laterally with great care and then rejoined, bonded with impermeable glue, the pieces reversed so that the grain of one piece opposed and reinforced the other. That done, the resultant stave could be hand planed, shaved and tapered to produce a formidable weapon, lesser in strength than the long yew bow, but nonetheless efficient and deadly when it came to piercing enemy armour, even from great distances , Absorbing that, I thanked Llewellyn courteously and then moved on alone, thinking about what had been achieved in the art of warfare, almost within my own lifetime, here in this land of Britain. The huge longbow itself had sprung from nothingness within a hundred years, inspired by the enormous bow that now rode with my own baggage. The cavalry who rode now in extended formation to my right existed only because I myself had stumbled up
on the secret of the stirrups that now supported each trooper's feet. The long, cross hilted sword that hung suspended from an iron ring between my shoulders was one of only three similar weapons in the entire world. The iron ball that hung from my saddle bow, secured by a thong around its short, thick wooden handle and swinging on a length of chain, had first been made by my cousin Uther and was now in widespread use, a lethal, deadly flail that, whirled around his head, gave a man five times his own strength in combat. And the long and slender spears, lightweight and almost flexible yet indestructibly strong, carried by the majority of my own troopers, had sprung from our need to have a weapon that our men could use effectively from horseback, on the run. Even our cavalry, I now realized, had doubled upon itself, expanding its effectiveness, with the development of the Scouts.

  As I rode, deep in thought, I realized how easy it had been to take all these weapons and developments for granted, and to assume that everyone possessed them. But of course, that was not the case. Few people, beyond Camulod and Cambria, had ever seen their like; no people were equipped to stand against them, and none had the skills, the years of training or the discipline in fabrication to duplicate them. At that precise moment, it came to me with the force of a revelation that if we used our forces and advantages properly we would truly be invincible in war.

  That evening, I convened a meeting. I wanted to share my new found revelation with my companions, my subordinates and my allies. My listeners—among them Llewellyn and several of his captains, as well as my own troop commanders—sat in silence for a long time, mulling over all that I had said. Though much of what I had told them they already knew, none of them, for all that, had seen the truth of it in its largest dimensions. The value of the exposition made itself immediately apparent the following day, implicit in the new air of confidence and good humour everywhere as the commanders communicated their own enthusiasm, mostly by attitude alone, to their troops.