by Jack Whyte
“I won’t.” I looked again to where the Lady Vivienne sat watching me. “But what will I call you now?”
“Hmm?” The King’s deep-chested grunt betrayed his surprise, but he answered me immediately. “You’ll call us what you always have—Father and Mother. Why should you not? Nothing has changed. We will still call you Clothar and you will continue to be as much a son to us as you have always been. We will continue to be your parents, in the eyes of everyone who knows no better. It’s safer to keep it that way.”
“But why, Father? Why is it safer, I mean?”
His swift frown of impatience with my slowness died as quickly as it had sprung into being. “Because you are yet at risk. Your father’s murderer is still alive and well, and he is powerful, damnation to his black, worthless soul. Better that we do nothing that could betray you to him, for if he even suspected that you live he would send men to kill you, and he would not stop until you were dead, because fatherless boys grow up to be men capable of seeking vengeance for their fathers’ murders.”
I thought for a moment, then asked, “Who is this man, Father?”
“His name is Clodas. Clodas of Ganis. At least, that’s what he calls himself now and will for a few more years, unless God smites him dead in the meantime. But he was no more than plain Clodas, a minor chief among your father’s clans, before he set eyes upon your mother and began his scheming. In the end, he slew both your parents and your grandfather and usurped your grandfather’s holdings, stealing his very name.”
“But why didn’t you fight him, kill him, take revenge on him?” In my ten-year-old eyes, Ban of Benwick was omnipotent and invincible in war. I found it incredible that he should not have exacted vengeance long ago on the slayer of his friends and family.
His mouth twisted wryly before he glanced from me to his wife and back. “A fair question, I suppose. And one that I have often asked myself, even knowing all the answers. I couldn’t, Clothar. That’s the only answer I can give you. I could not, for many reasons, none of which might make any sense to you today.”
“Why not? Because I’m just a boy?”
He shrugged and almost smiled, but then he sobered. “Aye. That’s right.”
“But you’ve just told me I’m to be a man, from this day on. It’s time to grow up, you said, and face the truth … to leave childhood behind and face the world of men. Isn’t that what you said? Tell me, then, as a man.”
He inhaled deeply, straightening his back, then blew the air from between pursed lips. “Very well, as a man, then. I had my hands full here when all this happened, and the news came but slowly to us. We heard nothing about it for months—more than half a year. It was only when Chulderic arrived the following summer, bringing you and your nurse, that we found out what had occurred.”
“Ludda came with me? She is from Ganis, too?”
“No, not Ludda. Your first nurse died. She was sick with a fever from the journey when she arrived and she died within a few days. Ludda came to us after that, because she had lost her own child at birth and had milk, so she could feed you.”
“How old was I?”
“Young—not yet a year.”
I thought about that, then dismissed it. “You said you couldn’t fight this man Clodas because your hands were full. Full of what?”
He half grinned at my unconscious humor. “Many things,” he said with a shrug, “and most of them like sand, threatening to run through my fingers and be scattered on the winds no matter what I did. I had a war to fight, first and foremost. The Alamanni were threatening to wipe us out, and my father was newly dead, killed fighting them. I had to take his place or see our home and our people go down into ruin and destruction.”
I nodded gravely, trying to impress him with my understanding, for I knew the truth of what he said from my own lessons. The man whom I had always thought of as my grandfather until that day, King Ban the Bald, had been the first true king of Benwick, awarded the title by the Emperor Theodosius in recognition of thirty years of loyal service to the Empire. He had ruled Benwick well for twenty-five years after that and had fallen in battle against the Alamanni, at seventy years of age, the year before I was born.
Before becoming a kingdom, Benwick had merely been a territory settled by our people. Frankish tribes had swept into Gaul years earlier from the north and east, overcoming all opposition to become the predominant people in most of the ancient Gaulish lands that lay west of the Alps, with the exception of the central and southwestern territories held by the Burgundians. The rulers of Benwick were from a far-wandered clan of the tribes of Franks known as the Ripuarians, who had drifted southward in large numbers from the Germanic regions of the Rhine River over the course of more than a hundred years. Ban the Bald had been hereditary chief of the clan, but from the moment he returned to them at the head of a small army of Roman-trained warriors, they had prospered under his new kingship and had established a new society, complete with laws and defenses, within a very short time.
Even so, they had not enjoyed sole possession of their new lands for long, for the route their forefathers had followed down and across Gaul attracted other wanderers, most notably the German tribes the Romans called the Alamanni, who were also looking for a place to settle. When the first of these new arrivals saw the beauty of our rich lands around the Lake of Genava, they decided they had wandered far enough, and so they spread out among and around our settlements and began to set down roots of their own.
For some time after that, we coexisted peacefully with them. But the Alamanni kept on coming south, in ever-increasing numbers, and soon there was no more room for newcomers. Tensions sprang up between the incoming land-hungry migrants and our own people and soon grew into hostilities that quickly escalated into full-scale war. That war had lasted longer than my lifetime and had ended only two years before, when our forces, better trained and more disciplined than the masses of Alamanni migrants, finally won a decisive and bloody victory over an army more than twice their numbers.
After that battle the enemy, shattered by their enormous battle losses, had sought terms to end the conflict, and it had been agreed by the leaders of both sides that the Alamanni would withdraw their southern border northward by fifty miles, leaving us to live unrestricted in our own small region on the southern shores of Genava. It was a great triumph for Ban of Benwick. But still, I thought, the war had been over now for two years and our whole country was at peace and growing prosperous again, yet Ban had done nothing about seeking vengeance against this Clodas. Even as the thought formed in my mind, however, the King anticipated it.
“Even although we are now at peace, I can make no move against Clodas yet. He is too far removed.”
“Where is he?”
“Far to the north and west, in the Salian regions on the borders of Germania. Five hundred miles from here, at least.”
“Five hundred miles?”
“Aye. What did you think? I told you it took Chulderic more than half a year to reach us after the murders. He could have been here sooner, had he been mounted and had an escort, but he was alone and on foot, traveling through hostile territory all the time, and he had a woman and a baby with him.”
“Five hundred miles …”
“A long way, Clothar. Not a journey to be undertaken lightly, even with an army at your back. It would take years of preparation for us to wage a campaign that far away from home, even if it did not mean having to fight our way every single step from here to there. And even were I ready now, I couldn’t take my army away for that length of time. The Alamanni would break the treaty as soon as we set out, and there would be nothing left for us to come home to when our campaign was over.”
This was information I did not want to hear, and yet it puzzled me. “Why would you have to fight every step of the way, Father?”
“Because we would be traveling through other people’s territories. No one wants a foreign army marching through their lands, even if it doesn’t threaten them with wa
r. Armies have to eat, and they eat off the land, and that land already belongs to people who need the food themselves, so they will fight fiercely to protect it. We would have to fight our way northward and westward for five hundred miles. That would be madness. And we are not a seagoing people, so we could not make the journey by water.”
“Then we can never take revenge for my father and mother.”
“No, that is not what I said.” He paused, gazing directly into my eyes until he was sure I was listening intently. “What I said was that when you are ready—strong enough and grown into your own manhood—Benwick will give you soldiers enough to claim your kingship.”
“Germanus,” my mother said, and both of us looked at her, me thinking that she had meant Germania, the land King Ban had mentioned moments earlier. But then she said it again. “Tell him about Germanus.”
The King frowned. “I intend to, Vivienne, as soon as I may.”
I looked from one to the other of them. “Who is Germanus?”
“A friend.” The King looked at me again, his eyes narrowed. “You’ll remember what I said about your father and I being brothers in arms. I said there were three of us, one of them a man who outranked both of us by far. That was Germanus, Legate Commander of the Imperial Armies of Gaul, appointed by the Emperor Honorius himself.”
“An Imperial Legate Commander? He was my father’s friend?”
“Friend and brother, as he was to me. The three of us were as peas in a pod for years. But whereas your father and I were warriors and minor kings, Germanus had great power at his command, with almost a hundred thousand troops at his disposal before he left the legions. He left the same year your father and I left, but where we returned to our former lives, Germanus joined the Church. He is a bishop now, still wielding great power, though of a different kind, and people are saying he has become a worker of miracles, a very holy man.”
He thought about that for a moment, and then smiled. “Your father would find that amusing. I do, too, God knows, because the Germanus we knew as young men loved to laugh at other people’s folly and he was no one’s idea of a very holy man. He was a fine man, completely admirable, among the best of the best by anyone’s standards: strong, courageous, afraid of nothing and absolutely trustworthy.” He smiled again, a savage kind of grin. “And now that I think of it, he worked miracles even then, years ago … but those were miracles of soldiering—achieving the impossible, it sometimes seemed, with very few resources.” His smile faded but remained in place, as though at something only he could see. “He was always a noble man, Germanus, when we three rode together … honest and straightforward as the day is long … . But we would never have thought of him as holy.”
“What does holy mean?” I asked.
“mean? I’m not sure what it really means. Devout, pious, unworldly, and possessing sanctity, I suppose. A man of God. It means all of those things yet more than all of them, for a devout and pious man—an ordinary bishop, for example—cannot expect to cast out devils easily or bring dead people back to life. A man needs true holiness to do such things. Yet I have heard tales of my friend Germanus doing them, and often. And they are tales from people I know and trust.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s here, in Gaul. He is the Bishop of Auxerre, about two hundred miles northwest of where we sit now.”
“Oh-zerr?” I had never heard of such a place. “What kind of name is that?”
“It’s what the local people there call their town. What more explanation do you need? Its old Roman name was Autessiodurum, back in the days of the Caesars when that part of Gaul was officially called Gallia Comata. But I suppose Autessiodurum was too much of a jawbreaker for the local folk, much the same as Gallia Comata turned out to be. It’s been hundreds of years since anyone has called that region Gallia Comata.”
“Comata? That means long-haired. How could that be the name of a country?”
The King grinned at me, his fine white teeth flashing. “Because all the people who lived up there were long-haired back then, when Julius Caesar first came strutting, thinking to conquer us. That was the explanation I was given, anyway, when I asked my tutor the same question at about your age.”
“What were we called, then?”
“We?” He laughed. “Your people were Salian Franks. They lived up there, below the Rhine River. This part of Gaul down here was called Gallia Cisalpina, Cisalpine Gaul, because the Alps lie between us and the northern borders of Italia. My people called themselves Ripuarian Franks—but do not ask me what that means because I have no idea. The Romans, however, called us all Gauls.”
“So why did people in Auxerre stop calling it Autessiodurum? I like that name.”
Another smile and a shake of his head. “Why do people do anything? I can’t tell you anything about that, lad … other than that they were Gauls and they wanted nothing to do with any Roman place called Autessiodurum. They’d had their own name for the place, long before the Romans came.
“Anyway, it’s Germanus’s home country. His family have been there for hundreds of years and own most of the land for many miles around. Or they used to own it. It has new owners nowadays, apparently. I’ve heard tell, again from people who know, that when he swore allegiance to the Church, as a bishop, Germanus turned over all of his possessions to his superiors, keeping nothing for himself, since he has no heirs.”
“He gave away everything?”
“Aye, to the Church.”
“Why?”
“You will have to ask him that for yourself. He will be here within the month. The letter I was reading when you came to me today was from him. We have not seen each other since our legion days, and he will be passing close to here on one of his missions, so he will stay with us for a few days.”
“Will you be spending lots of time with him while he is here?”
“All of it. Why would you ask that?”
“Will you tell me more about my father before he comes?”
He looked slightly surprised. “Aye, I will.”
“When?”
He turned his eyes away from mine to look at his wife, and I looked at her too, wondering what was passing between them. The Lady Vivienne simply smiled at him, her lips curving faintly upward, but her face was very pale. He nodded, tensely, I thought, and then looked back to me.
“Tonight, if you would like that. It’s almost dinnertime now, and I have guests to look after. You eat, then go to bed at your appointed time, and I will wake you when I am done with my tasks. You and I can talk then and no one will interrupt us.”
As though she had received some signal that I missed, my mother—and that word seemed suddenly strange to me—rose and crossed to where I sat, then stooped to kiss my cheek and told me gently to go and take my place with my brothers in the dining hall. As I left the room, I could feel both of them watching me.
I was so excited that evening that I did not believe I could possibly sleep when bedtime came. I ate without awareness of eating, my eyes fastened on King Ban and his guests at the head table as I willed the King to look toward me and nod some kind of acknowledgment of his promise. But he paid me no attention, his entire being focused upon the entertainment of his guests at the high table, and shortly after they had finished their meal and left the hall, Ludda came looking for me to gather me up and supervise my bedding down for the night. Ten years old and more than halfway to manhood I might be, but my nurse’s word still ruled my behavior.
On this occasion, however, I made no demur about going to bed. I was looking forward to lying awake in the warm darkness, thinking about my real father and mother and imagining the tales King Ban would have to tell me. And of course, once in bed and warm, I fell straight to sleep.
I awoke to the sound of my name, to find the King standing above me, holding a flickering lamp.
“Up, boy. Or would you rather stay there and go back to sleep?”
Almost before he had finished speaking, I was rolling out of bed, wide-
awake, my heart already hammering. In anticipation of being summoned, I had gone to bed still wearing my tunic and leggings, and as I groped for my felt shoes the King threw me a heavy, fur-lined robe that had been folded over his arm.
“Here, put this on. It’s cold tonight.”
I followed him quickly, clutching the warm, heavy robe around me as he led me down the great curved staircase and back toward his day quarters. I had no idea what time of night it was, but I knew it must be very late because it was so cold, and because the hallways were utterly deserted and several of the bracketed torches lining the walls had burned themselves out. King Ban did not look back at me but strode directly to his private quarters, where he threw open one half of the heavy doors and swept through. I closed the door quietly behind me, looking around me in surprise. The room was awash with the leaping light of flames from a huge number of fine candles and a roaring log fire in the brazier in the hearth. The windows were firmly shuttered and secured against the night, and it was warm in there for the first time ever, to my knowledge.
“Sit, over there.”
I sat in the comfortably padded chair the King had indicated, on the left side of the hearth, and he crossed to its twin on the other side, but he did not sit down immediately. He stood with one hand on the back of the chair and stared back toward the door. I looked to see what he was staring at, but there was nothing.
“Where is the man?” As he spoke the words, the door swung open again, and Guntram, Ban’s veteran personal servitor, entered carefully, holding the door ajar with his buttocks as he stooped to gather up two steaming jugs.
“Worthy lad,” the King addressed him, “I was beginning to think you might have died in the kitchens.”