by Jack Whyte
That startled me sufficiently to bring me to a halt. Retorix, Arthur told me, had finally grown tired of Ironhair's excesses, his posturing and his fundamental cowardice, and had abandoned him and his designs. Since then. Retorix had emerged as the most able independent leader in all of the far southwest, and had assumed the leadership of all the clans of that much brutalized territory. I listened, then shook my head, accepting what he told me with no more than a disbelieving grunt.
"Well," Arthur said, a few paces later. "Here we are. It's not palatial, is it?"
I gazed at the darkened, decrepit house I shared with Enos and some of his bishops. "No, it's not the Villa Britannicus, but it has almost half a roof intact, the walls shut out the wind, and it is warmed by the hot air of argumentative bishops. " I faced him again. "What will you do now, when you leave me here?'
He glanced at his shadowy escort. "Sleep, I suppose. There's not much else to do. " I smiled, remembering the roistering times I had enjoyed here twenty years before, in the makeshift tavern we had called the Carpe Diem.
"Well, it is Lent, " I murmured. "A sombre time of year. The bishops would look disapprovingly on open taverns on the very night the Christ hung bleeding for our sins. Sleep well, lad. Tomorrow night, you must stand vigil by the altar all night long, and the next day, you will be crowned High King. So have a deep, sound, restful sleep tonight. "
He stepped close and I felt the warmth and love of his embrace, in spite of his unyielding armour. I stood by the door until he disappeared from view, flanked by his Pendragon shadows.
There was no one in the large room adjacent to the entranceway when I looked in, but a fire burned brightly in the brazier and the air was bright with the radiance of at least a score of the fine, waxen candles that were the prerogative, it seemed to me, of clerics. In one corner, the sleeping pallet used by Bishop Enos lay neatly, its pristine condition indicating that he, at least, had not yet returned that night. The entire house was silent, and so I entered and crossed directly to the fire, where I stretched out my chilled fingers to the flames, feeling the phantom tingling they produced in my burned left hand, and looked about me.
The furnishings were Spartan, purely temporary and all portable, for this house had lain abandoned for decades, occupied only by rodents and insects. There was a scattering of folding chairs and tables, all of diem brought to Verulamium on the pack mules of various bishops, and a number of sawed logs that served as seats whenever Enos held a meeting here. Other than that, the room was empty and bare. Its upper walls were constantly veiled in darkness, since the skylight opening that once admitted light had been sealed up and boarded over sometime in the distant past. The lower walls, which now glowed in the candlelight, were of a honeyed, earthen colour that had faded unevenly; they were stained now with creeping dampness in places, but they must once have been quite beautiful. The floor had been swept since we arrived, and perhaps even washed; its mosaic tiles were clearly visible in spots, but the ingrained dirt and dust of years had obscured its colours.
One of the tables not far from the fire held a jug of water, which was all that Enos drank, and another that I knew was full of mead, for I had filled it earlier that day. Beside the jugs lay a sharp knife, a thick, hard wedge of cheese covered with coarse cloth, and a loaf of rough, wheaten bread that had come fresh from the oven that morning and lay concealed under a covering of white, clerical cloth. I moved one of the chairs and the smallest table close to the tire and sat down, throwing back my hood and shaking out my hair, then combing it between my spread fingers—one of the few activities for which my clawed left fingers were quite adequate. I was tired and it felt good to sit and stretch out my legs. This had been a long, tense day, its proceedings and the manner of their presentation crucial to the plan that we had crafted with such painstaking care over the past few years.
Mere moments later, feeling the stirrings of an unfed appetite, I rose again and cut myself a portion of bread and cheese, poured a cup of mead and carried them back to my chair. Thereafter, enjoying the almost silent flickering of flames in the stillness and peace of the room, I sat staring into the fire, but looking into the past.
I had not swung a sword nor mounted upon a horse since the day my brother died. My burned flesh and twisted sinews would permit neither activity. Arthur had sent me home to Camulod attended by a physician and borne in a commissary wagon specially adapted to my needs, and I had swung for long days in a cradle suspended from a frame his carpenters had bolted to the wagon's bed for that purpose, inspired by the similar device built by Connor Mac Athol's craftsmen to support their one legged captain while he was at sea. Then, for months thereafter, at home in Camulod, I recuperated under the loving care of Ludmilla, whose loss of her husband Ambrose resulted, once her initial bereavement, pain and grief had passed, in the transferral of some portion of her love for him to me. She grew determined that I would survive my wounds and overcome them, as had both Connor and Publius Varrus in their time. She hectored me constantly to exercise my damaged limbs to exhaustion and beyond, driving me to more and greater exertions, stretching my maimed and fire scarred muscles until they would perform for me again and finally enable me to walk erect. I limped, at some times more than others, and my left arm and hand were practically useless, but the rest of me was whole and strong.
It was Ludmilla, too, who eventually recognized my leprosy. But she had been trained in the medical arts by Lucanus, who had had no fear of the disease and had been filled with admiration and great sympathy for his friend Mordechai Emancipatus, who had worked for decades among those afflicted, eventually contracting it himself. Luke had taught Ludmilla that the disease was not readily contagious, and that it was not fatal, but brought death solely from lack and want and the tragic inability of lepers to find food, shunned and proscribed and dreaded as they were by everyone. She had seen my lesions and known them for what they were, and she and I had talked for hours about the consequences that must lie in store for me, if ever my affliction became known.
And it was Ludmilla, finally, who showed me my salvation in the fact that people now lived in fear of me and shunned me for my sorcery. She brought out my night clothes, the long, black, hooded cloak and the ankle length, pocket hung underrobe that had concealed me in my nocturnal campaign against my enemies in Cambria and which Derek of Ravenglass had carried back to Camulod for me. Ludmilla pointed out that they were equally suited, if not more so, for concealing me and my disfigurement from prying eyes in the light of day. The large, capacious hood would completely mask my face within its shadows, and the long sleeved arms would hang below my finger ends when I required them to. I could benefit from men's fear of me and my sorcery by using it to elude their far, far greater fear of leprosy. Seeing me dressed, as they thought, for sorcery, people would flee from me in terror, and that same terror would completely protect me against their curiosity.
While I had been recuperating from my wounds, Arthur had been at war in Cambria. Thrust into leadership by the death of Ambrose and my own removal, he overcame what some might have been tempted to regard as a premature elevation with the unstinting and committed support of Huw Strongarm. War Chief of the Pendragon, Huw immediately proclaimed the untried young leader to be the son of Uther Pendragon and the natural, incontestable king of all his people. That championship, coupled with the instantaneous commitment and loyalty of his own senior Camulodian commanders, whose trust in Ambrose and myself transferred itself with ease to our young ward and cousin, quickly enabled Arthur to display the true genius that belied his youth.
My killing of Carthac had indeed destroyed the ties that held his rabble together, but it had also destroyed the illusion of legitimacy that supported Peter Ironhair in his campaigns in Cambria. With Carthac dead, Ironhair's Cambrian cause was lost, leaving him only naked aggression to explain his continuing presence. His mercenary levies soon disintegrated, fleeing in all directions from the wrath of Arthur's infantry. Some of them sought to join with Horsa's Danes, who
were a separate force, but the Danes would have none of them and turned them away to take their chances against our forces.
Arthur, acting alone in the planning stage but immediately thereafter delegating responsibility to Ambrose's former infantry commanders, designed and laid out a brilliant campaign plan for mopping up the remnants of Carthac's old host. Dividing his forces into maniples and cohorts in the Roman fashion, and employing the tactics used by Gaius Marius four hundred years earlier—tactics that I myself had explained to him when he was but a boy—he had sent his fighting units out to work in close coordination, quartering the territories assigned to them and working with mounted Scouts who served as liaisons between the units. As soon as the elements of his campaign were in place, he prosecuted it ruthlessly, offering no quarter to an enemy who had forfeited all right to clemency by their own atrocities against the common people of the land they had pillaged.
Then, when that effort had been launched, Arthur had turned his mind, and his cavalry, to deal with the Danes, who were the major threat.
Horsa's fierce warriors were of a different order from the rabble that the infantry pursued, and Horsa's own military abilities came into sudden prominence when Arthur brought the might of Camulod to bear on him. The inconclusive battle I had witnessed on the day when I slipped into Ambrose's camp had taught Horsa much: he had learned that when he held the high ground and used his shield walls, he was as safe from our cavalry as he would have been behind the walls of a fortified town. From that day forth, therefore, he fought with an eye to the high ground and the integrity of his defences. My own one man campaign of nightly poisonings and murder aided him in this, for I had succeeded all too well. After three months of nocturnal terrors, the Danes had suspended their practice of roving the land and fighting in small, independent bands. Through fear of Merlyn's Vengeance, they had coalesced into a tight, cohesive group, a real army, three thousand to five thousand strong, moving as one potent force, and they were formidable.
Arthur's cavalry was lethal to the Danes whenever they were caught in the open and unsuspecting of attack, but such occasions were few and happened only at the outset of that new stage of the war. Horsa soon learned that attack was always imminent, and he held his men in tight restraint, ready at any time to throw up their shield walls and hold Arthur's cavalry at bay. That strength, however, quickly became his biggest weakness, since his powerful axemen could not deploy their weapons while the shields were in place, interlocked. Furthermore, to frustrate the cavalry, these shield walls had to be raised on sloping ground, above the horses, since on flat ground the weight of surging horseflesh could simply batter them down. This upward slanting of the enemy's forces made them excellent targets for the long Pendragon arrows.
And so the war became a struggle between a hedgehog and a tortoise, with neither side able to win a conclusive battle and Horsa's army losing steadily by attrition. Arthur's cavalry denied the Danes access to the low ground and, stranded among the hills, the enemy could achieve nothing of value. To his credit, Horsa saw the truth of this very quickly and began to lead his army back towards the coast, fighting fiercely all the way and losing heavily among the hills to the deadly Pendragon bowmen. Arthur kept pressing fiercely at their heels the whole way, throwing his mounted weight time and again to storm the shield walls. He pressed the fight to the very edges of the beach that offered Horsa access to the anchored fleet that awaited him and his men, to ferry them home again. There, Arthur halted his advance and set his cavalry to form a solid wall about the crescent of sand that he could easily have set awash in Danish blood. His clemency was easily explained, he told me later, by the fact that Horsa had been a brave and clever enemy who had learned that he could never conquer Cambria and hence would not return. Should he and Horsa meet again, elsewhere, each would respect the other and renew their battles on new ground. So Arthur Pendragon sat and watched his enemy's fleet sail off to safety.
Connor Mac Athol, Arthur discovered later, had been ravaging that fleet relentlessly since shortly after its arrival, and had caused great damage. His biremes and his galleys skirted the edges of its anchorage like hungry wolves, avoiding the counterattacking vessels sent to fight them and raiding at random and at all hours, burning and sinking ships by night and day. In consequence, the vessels that bore the Danes away from Cambria were far fewer, and far more heavily laden, than their captains had expected they would be.
In the meantime, one of my own deep held wishes had been denied me. Peter Ironhair was dead, and the knowledge was like bitter ashes on my tongue. Ambrose had told me many times that I spent too much time thinking of Ironhair and the vengeance I would take on him when finally we two came face to face, and now that all my hopes of that revenge were gone, I was curiously relieved, no longer burdened by the hatred that had driven me for so long. He had somehow fallen foul of his own ally, Horsa, and had died for it; none of us would ever know the how or why of what occurred. I was intrigued, though, that his promise in my vision had been fulfilled. I had never set eyes on him again, nor had anyone else from Camulod except Philip, who commanded the patrol that found him hanging from a tree in an abandoned Danish camp. The irony of that was not lost on me, for his predecessor in Cornwall, Gulrhys Lot himself, had suffered the same fate, hanged from a tree by hands unknown.
All of this had taken place before the end of summer, mere months after my departure from Cambria, and with campaigning time to spare, Arthur quickly moved to consolidate his victories. He dispatched a strong force of horse and foot, conveyed in three swift journeys by Connor's massive biremes, into Cornwall, under Philip, to clean out the nests that had sheltered Ironhair and his verminous followers. The remainder of his force he led himself in a lightning swift sweep up the length of Britain, following the western slopes of the mountain chain that bisects the land. He was spreading a message of his own as he progressed: a message that the time was ripe for the folk of Britain to unite and throw out the foreign invaders who swarmed everywhere. Camulod stood for freedom from invasion, he proclaimed, and offered strength and support to those who would join it in the fight to drive the aliens from Britain's shores.
He did encounter opposition as he swept northward, but very little. The mere sight of the thousands of heavily armed horsemen ranked behind him had a pacifying and reassuring effect, even for those kings who might have felt threatened by his coming. By the time he turned eastward, following the line of Hadrian's Wall towards the sea that divided Britain from its would be conquerors, his name and fame were spreading ahead of him. Following the road south from the wall to where it crossed the wide river at the old Roman fort of Longovicum, he found a garrison of sorts in residence, under siege from a large army of Saxons who had sailed upriver from the coast, some twenty miles away. Taking advantage of the Saxons' surprise, Arthur split his forces and attacked immediately, destroying many of their beached longboats with burning arrows and smashing the clumps of men who ringed the old fort's walls. The king of that region was a man called Viticus, who was now in Verulamium for the great ceremony.
Within a year of coming to command, Arthur Pendragon had proclaimed himself the length and breadth of Britain, rallying the people and their separate kings to join his cause and form a united front against the Outlanders, and in the doing of it, he had discovered that our Camulod was not the only Roman settlement of its kind in Britain. There were several such, apparently, but none were so well established and maintained, and none had cavalry.
It was on Arthur's return to Camulod that I presented him with my own parade dress armour, telling him that I had no more need of it, and with the even more splendid armour that his own father had worn. He was greatly moved, and his eyes tilled with sudden tears, but from that moment on, he chose to wear my armour, claiming it to be the armour of Camulod. His father's armour, he maintained, he would reserve for dignified and ceremonial occasions, when he would wear it in proud tribute to Uther.
"Merlyn? Forgive me, my friend, I had no thought to s
tartle you."
I had not even heard the door open behind me, and I leaped to my feet, spilling some of my mead. But then, swiftly recovered, I waved away Enos's concern. He smiled and crossed directly to his pallet, removing his long travelling cloak as he went. As he folded his cloak carefully. I poured a cup of water and cut a small portion of cheese and bread for him, knowing he would eat little of it. He accepted it with a word of thanks.
"You had no difficulties?" he asked.
"No, but Arthur almost caught me in the act."
He laughed quietly as I told him what had happened, then went on to talk about the proceedings planned for the following day. As he talked I thought about the difference between his gentle, speaking voice and what I thought of as his command voice. No longer young, he was gaunt and stooped from the hardships of his pastoral life, which involved constant travel in all weathers as he carried the Word to his far scattered flock. Yet he was vibrant in everything he did, radiating a calm and massive conviction, and he had been indefatigable in his efforts to ensure that this unprecedented gathering would take place as planned, and would present a spectacle the likes of which this land had never seen. That much of it must be arranged in secrecy seemed only to fuel his enthusiasm, and he had handled his far flung congregation of bishops as deftly as a successful legate must handle his legions.
Throughout the ceremonies early that afternoon, he had spoken strongly and clearly, instructing the assembled throng on the Roman history of the great theatre, and on the ceremony about to take place, and I had been as fascinated as anyone, listening to him speak with such authority and certainty. Then he had led us through the steps necessary to make the conversion from theatre to ecclesia, from house of entertainments to House of God, beginning with the sanctification of the place of worship. Upon his signal, a long procession had advanced from the grounds outside the doors and made its way down through the watching, spellbound crowd. More than a hundred bishops, led by thurifers spreading clouds of sweet incense, came forward slowly, chanting the Creed in unison. The majestic prayer, the formal declaration of the Christian tenets devised and perfected and inscribed at the Great Council of Nicaea more than a hundred years earlier, had raised the hairs on my neck as I listened to it sung by the chorus of voices.