by Jack Whyte
The Lance Thrower
( Camulod Chronicles - 8 )
Jack Whyte
Jack Whyte has written a lyrical epic, retelling the myths behind the boy who would become the Man Who Would Be King--Arthur Pendragon. He has shown us, as Diana Gabaldon said, "the bone beneath the flesh of legend." In his last book in this series, we witnessed the young king pull the sword from the stone and begin his journey to greatness. Now we reach the tale itself-how the most shining court in history was made.
Clothar is a young man of promise. He has been sent from the wreckage of Gaul to one of the few schools remaining, where logic and rhetoric are taught along with battle techniques that will allow him to survive in the cruel new world where the veneer of civilization is held together by barbarism. He is sent by his mentor on a journey to aid another young man: Arthur Pendragon. He is a man who wants to replace barbarism with law, and keep those who work only for destruction at bay. He is seen, as the last great hope for all that is good.
Clothar is drawn to this man, and together they build a dream too perfect to last--and, with a special woman, they share a love that will nearly destroy them all...
The name of Clothar may be unknown to modern readers, for tales change in the telling through centuries. But any reader will surely know this heroic young man as well as they know the man who became his king. Hundreds of years later, chronicles call Clothar, the Lance Thrower, by a much more common name.
That of Lancelot.
To my wife, Beverley
PROLOGUE
I SAW THE BIRD lying in a pool of sunlight as soon as I came into the room. It was in the far corner over by the fireplace I built when I first came here a score and more years ago. I recognized its still form and felt immediate regret as I realized why its familiar song had been missing from my bedchamber that morning. The brightness of the pool of light in which it lay told me what had happened: the bird had flown in through the window and then, blinded in the sudden darkness of the room, had dashed itself against a wall and died.
It was a blackbird, a tiny, glossy creature whose only other color was its brilliant orange beak. As I bent over it and peered at the forlorn way one of its wings lay spread on the stone floor, the thought came to me that nothing about this little being gave any hint of the miraculous power and volume of pure song contained within its fragile frame. When this bird sang, men could hear it from miles away on quiet summer evenings. Its voice, its song, and its magical power transcended and confounded the physical smallness of the singer.
I crouched cautiously, aware of the brittleness of my aging knees, and picked the dead bird up, cradling it in my hand and folding its already stiffening wings, noting the way the tiny head lolled on its broken neck. So small it was, and yet such a great loss to me in my early-morning awakenings and to everyone else its song reached. A blackbird—a merle, to the local Franks—a voice of purity and immense beauty, silenced forever. And then, merely in the recalling of its Frankish name, another, heavier wave of grief swept over me without warning; connections and associations swarmed in my mind, and my eyes were all at once awash with tears. I drew myself erect and inhaled a great, deep breath to steady myself, reaching out to lean on the stone breast of the fireplace, and then I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and looked about me at this bare room that holds so many memories and uncompleted tasks.
We have no need of open indoor fires here in the warmth of southern Gaul, but when I first came to these parts many years ago, my mind was filled with memories of long, pleasant nights spent in another land far to the northwest, sprawled in comfortable chairs before a roaring fire set into a stone-built chimneyed hearth, and so I indulged myself and built such a hearth here, in my new home. Once I had built it, of course, reality asserted itself, and to my wife’s gentle amusement the fire was seldom lit. But I would often sit for hours in front of the silent hearth in the long autumn evenings, gazing into the dried logs and dreaming of things gone, and as time passed the habit endured while the memory of warm firelight faded. Since my wife died, I have been the sole user of this room, and I have lit the fire four times, purely for the pleasure of gazing into the heart of flames and interpreting the pictures I imagined I saw there. Today would have been the fifth occasion, had I not found the bird.
Moments after I had picked up the small corpse, I found myself outside, scraping a shallow hole with my heel in the grass beneath the window, then kneeling to use my dagger to deepen the hole into a grave. I buried the blackbird there, refusing to ask myself why I should be doing such a thing, and then I returned directly here and dragged this heavy table to the window, after which I sat down to write for the first time in years. And here I am, writing about a dead songbird and the memories it brought back to me.
Ten years ago, a full year after the death of my beloved wife and prompted by an urging I could not deny, I made the saddest journey of my life, although at the start of it I thought nothing could surpass the sadness I had known throughout my later years. I laid aside my rich clothing and dressed myself as an ordinary, undistinguished man, then made my way, in a strong, tight boat that belonged to an old and honored friend, across the narrow seas to Britain.
I did not go alone. That would have been extreme folly for a man of my age, even though I refuse to consider myself old. Besides, those who love and care for me had quickly decided, upon hearing what I had in mind, that I must be mad to think to risk my life upon the seas and journey to a land notorious for its savage peoples and their alien ways. They thought at first to prevent me somehow from going at all, but then, seeing I was determined to go despite them, they insisted that I travel with an escort. So I selected the youngest of my three sons, Clovis, and nine of his closest friends and companions to accompany me. These were all young warriors, still unwed and approaching their prime, and armed with the finest weapons our armorers could make—long-bladed swords and axes of the finest tempered iron—so that no one could have denied that they were the best protection I could have. And thus accompanied, I set out for Britain with the tolerance, if not the unstinted blessings, of my advisers.
My youthful escorts called themselves knights, claiming adherence to the Order established decades ago in Britain when I was their age, and I had long since become tolerantly inured to the images their fancies conjured in me. I no longer made any attempt to dissuade them from their error, for they paid my protestations no attention when I did, considering me an old and querulous man, worthy of honor and respect, perhaps, but a relic nonetheless of a generation whose time had passed, and hence no longer quite aware of the potency and immediacy of modern events, customs, and times. Despite my silence, however, and notwithstanding their own insistence upon believing otherwise, they were not knights. All their enthusiasm and all their dedication to the ideals they cherished was mere self-delusion, because they had never knelt before the King to undergo the Ceremony. And so I had come to tolerate both their delusions and their deference to me, aware that they sought no more than to honor me and my long-dead friends in their insistence upon cleaving to the form and rituals of what we had once called knightly conduct.
That said, however, I did not permit them to journey with me as knights. They traveled as I did, in plain, dull, homespun clothes that, while they did nothing to disguise the strength and bulk of the wearers, yet made them seem less visible than their normal rich and brightly colored clothing would have. I made it plain to each and to all of them that we were traveling into danger in a land that I had once known well but which had since degenerated into chaos and anarchy, peopled by savage hordes of invaders, and that sumptuous clothes and rich armor and trappings would invite unwelcome attention. We would not be making a triumphal progress, I warned them time and again. This
journey was mine alone and it was one of contemplation, a pilgrimage. They would escort me, at their own behest, purely to keep me safe from harm in a strange land. If they chose not to dress themselves in drab colors and walk afoot, they were at liberty to remain at home in Gaul.
They brought their weapons with them, of course, but the armor that they wore was plain and old—sturdy, well-worn leather instead of metal, yet serviceable and strong. Our intention, and again I went to great lengths to make this very clear before we left our home, was to appear strong enough to defend ourselves wherever we went but not wealthy enough to attract predators. They grumbled and complained as I expected, but they soon recovered their good humor in the prospect of a great adventure, and we set out in early summer, as soon as the spring gales had blown themselves out.
We gained our first sight of Britain near the island men call Wight, and turned west immediately to make our way along the coast, sailing toward the setting sun until we eventually cleared the hazardous, rock-strewn tip of the peninsula of Cornwall and swung back to head northeastward along its other coastline, seldom varying our distance of a quarter mile from the land. Cornwall was a bleak and inhospitable place, protected by high, precipitous cliffs and jagged, broken rocks over which the breaking waves spumed constantly. Although the sight of it brought back a flood of memories, I kept my mind directed farther north, to where the location of the single stone church the King had built would be visible from far out to sea. Glastonbury, men called the place, and its high tor reared up from the marshes that surrounded it, protecting Britain’s first ecclesia in its lee. We sighted it the following afternoon, when the sun was halfway down the fall from its zenith, and overcome by sudden, deep misgivings, I decided immediately to turn our boat around and find a sheltered beach to the south, where we could disembark and spend the night before approaching Glastonbury early in the day.
There were people watching us from the slopes of the rising ground to the northeast as we approached the shore in the presunrise light the next morning. They stood in groups of two and three, or stood alone, and I could detect no signs of hostility or fear in them as we drew closer. Nevertheless, I scanned them carefully as our oarsmen brought us in toward the land, and only when I could distinguish them individually did I allow myself to breathe peacefully again. All of them were men—no women in sight anywhere—and that single fact assured me that these were the latest of the line of anchorites that had subsisted here in this barren yet sacred place for hundreds of years.
I had never been able to discover why this lonely, inhospitable place, huddled among its surrounding salt marshes, should be held sacred. Its origins were shrouded in ancient mystery, but tradition held that the Druids in antiquity had inherited the hallowed place from the priests and worshippers among the ancient race who had ruled this land and called it Alba since the beginnings of time, long ages before the founding of the village in Italia that would one day be known as Rome. The Druids themselves had never made a dwelling of the place, to the best of my knowledge, and yet the legend went that Glastonbury had always been a place of worship. The high tor that reared above it was said to be hollow, constructed by the gods themselves to shield a gateway to the Underworld, and wise men shunned it, afraid of being lost forever in the enchanted maze of twisting paths that girdled and encircled the tor’s heights and slopes.
Two of my young companions leaped into the shallows before we grounded on the sand and offered to carry me ashore, but I waved them away and lowered myself carefully until I stood in knee-deep water, and then I waded ashore and waited, eyeing the people who stood there watching us. For a long time no one spoke, on either side, but eventually one frail and bent old man moved forward, leaning heavily on a long staff, and made his way to where I stood, and as he came I noted the plain wooden Cross he wore about his neck, suspended on a leather loop. I waited until he reached me and then bowed my head to him in greeting. He was older than me by far and I recognized him, although I could not recall his name. As his rheumy eyes gazed into mine, I watched for a similar spark of recognition. None came, and I turned to my son Clovis and gave him the signal we had arranged.
Clovis stood slightly behind me, his arms filled with a thick roll of heavy woolen cloth, woven on our broad Gallic looms from the spun wool of the hardy sheep of southern Gaul. At my nod, he stepped forward and knelt to lay the roll of cloth at the feet of the old master, whose eyes softened with pleasure as he looked at it. It was not a great gift, from our viewpoint, having cost us nothing but the time it took our weavers to make it, but it would clothe this entire community in fresh, new garments, perhaps for the first time in many years. The old man looked back at me then, and I addressed him in the language known as the Coastal Tongue, the trading language, an amalgam of a score of languages that had been used along the coasts of Britain and the mainland for hundreds of years, asking him if we could leave our boat in the shelter of his bay for several days. He nodded deeply, maintaining his silence, and I bowed again and turned back to my boat to make my final arrangements with our captain. He and his men would wait for us here, and I assured them we would be gone for mere days: five at the most, and probably less.
Within an hour of stepping ashore, my ten companions and I were on our way inland, striking first to the northeast around the base of the tor and then swinging south and east again, following the fringes of the extensive salt marshes on our right. I was the only one of our party who was mounted, riding the single shaggy garron owned by the community of Glastonbury, and it occurred to me now, looking down on them, that my youthful companions, used to riding everywhere, were completely unaccustomed to walking for any sustained length of time. They would be sore and weary when they laid themselves down that night and the nights that followed, for long miles stretched ahead of us, and every pace would be across rough country unworn by human passage. For the first time, the reality of that troubled me.
None of these men, I knew, had any idea of why we were there or why it was so important to me to make this long and seemingly pointless journey. But they had come, and they were ready for anything I might demand of them, simply because I had invited them to accompany me into this foreign land on a quest of some kind, a quest whose roots lay hidden in bygone times, in what was to them my unfathomable past. Looking at them now, I felt the difference between my age and theirs. They saw themselves embarking upon an adventure, whereas I was more than half convinced that this journey was folly, bound to generate nothing but grief and pain and disillusionment. Knowing nothing of this Britain, they were filled with excitement over what it might hold in store for them, whereas I had known the land too well in former times and knew it could now hold nothing for me that was good. All that was good and wholesome in my youth, Britain had sucked from me long since, condemning me to exile in the place across the seas that had once been my home and had since become my prison. There was nothing I could hope to find here except perhaps the remnants of a dream, the last, tattered shadows of a vision that had once, for a brief time, achieved blinding reality before being destroyed by the malice of ignorant, venal men.
Thinking of that, I called my company to a halt and sat facing them, moving my gaze from face to face as they stood looking up at me, awaiting instructions of some kind. I smiled at them, incapable of resisting the inclination.
“Well, my young friends,” I began. “Here we are, in Britain. Look about you now and take note of what you see, because I doubt you may have really looked since we landed here.” I watched with interest as their eyes began to register their surroundings, their initial, tolerant indifference gradually giving way to a range of emotions, none of which approached happiness or excitement. I broke in on their thoughts just as they began to show signs of starting to talk among themselves.
“Britain,” I said loudly, bringing their eyes back toward me. “It may not seem the fairest land you have ever seen, but I had friends here once who swore that it was. There are no vineyards here, no hillsides rich with grapes,
and the summer sun that shines later today might leave you cool and longing for your own warm breezes. It can be hot here, but in fact it seldom is. The winters are brutal, too, cold and long and wet … always damp and dank and chill. And yet this is a land where great ideas and noble ideals took root and flourished for a time, a time you have all heard about … and although it was a tragically short and strife-torn time, yet it was wondrous. It was a time without equal, a time without precedent, and it was my time in the way that today is yours … the time of youth, of dreams and high ideals.”
Their expressions were thoughtful, their eyes flickering back and forth from me to one another and sometimes to the drab landscape surrounding us. I nodded and spoke on.
“Such a time might never come to Gaul, lads, for in Gaul we love our comforts far too much. We have grown too somnolent for such things, too lazy, basking in the warm sun of our provinces. It takes a place like this island, Britain, where the sun is frequently a stranger and cold is more familiar than warmth, to keep men moving and to spur them on to pure ideals, great deeds, and high activity. And on that point of high activity, you are about to discover what I mean. You will walk today as you have never walked before … fast and far and over rough country.” I saw a few smiles break out and nodded in acknowledgment. “You find that amusing, some of you. Well, that pleases me. But save your smiles and guard them close, and bring them to me fresh when we camp tonight. I warn you, there are no horses out there waiting to be taken and bridled, not today—or if there are, I shall be much surprised. By the time the sun goes down today, before we are halfway to where we are going, you will all be footsore and weary, with aches and pains in places you don’t even know exist at this moment. And then, once we reach our destination tomorrow or the day after, depending upon what we find, we will turn around and retrace our path.” I looked at each of them, one after the other, moving from left to right, and they stared back at me with ten different expressions, ranging from tolerant amusement to shining eagerness, and even to truculent suspicion. I reached down to fondle the ears of the beast beneath me.