The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  “That’s how Frotto’s mother knew I am not really your son. I’m too dark skinned.”

  “Nonsense. She knew because Vivienne had not been with child—you can’t hide that—and you were suddenly here. It’s true our boys are all tow-headed like me, but that counts for naught.”

  I bowed my head, afraid that what I had to say next might anger him. “If it please you, Sire, I asked you what my father was like, and you told me how he looked, but what I really meant was, what manner of man was he?”

  “Hmm.” His mouth quirked upward, but not in a smile. I could see him nibbling at the inside of his cheek. “I know not how I can answer that … . He was the kind of man who turned heads everywhere he went. He had … he had a certain way about him that told everyone, without a word being spoken, that here was someone to note and admire—not because he was comely to look upon, although he was that, too, but because he filled a room with his presence and he … he seemed to glow with authority and promise.”

  “Tell me about him, if it please you.”

  “I suppose if I ask you what you would like to know, you’ll say everything.” He was smiling again and I nodded. He nodded back. “Aye, well, let’s see what comes to mind.” A log collapsed in the brazier and sent up an explosion of sparks, some of which swirled outward, one of them landing on the King’s leggings. He flicked the tiny ember to the floor, then rose to his feet again. He picked up another length of fresh wood and used it to poke the fire down before he thrust it deep into the heart of the flames. “He wasn’t a Frank, you know, not really, although his mother was. That’s how he got his Frankish name, Childebertus.”

  “Chillbirtoos;” I repeated, savoring the sound of it.

  “Aye. You’re three-quarters Frank yourself, through your grandmother and your mother, but the other fourth is all your father’s blood.”

  That stunned me, for I had never thought of myself as being anything other than a Frank. “What was he, then?”

  “He was a Gael, from Britain. Remember, I met him in the army, when I was with the legions. He came to us from Rome, as a recruit, and had been living there for most of his life, but he was born in Britain. By the time we left the legions, his father, Jacobus, had died, and so he had no reason to return to Rome. He came here to Gaul with me instead and met your mother shortly after that, when I began to pay court to her sister.”

  “A Gael …” There was something wondrous in the sound of that.

  “Aye, but there was more to him than that, according to his father’s account. I never met your grandsire Jacobus, and Childebertus never spoke about him much, but Germanus told me more about your family, years later. He had come to know your grandfather in Rome, where they were both lawyers, and it was Jacobus who later introduced Germanus to the woman who would become his wife. She was a kinswoman of the Emperor Honorius, so that in marrying her, Germanus himself formed some kind of kinship with the Emperor. They became friends, too. It was Honorius himself who convinced Germanus, after the death of his wife, that he should give up the law and become a soldier. But that’s Germanus’s story, not your father’s.

  “What Germanus told me was that your father’s family could trace their paternity, the bloodline of their fathers, directly back through twenty generations to the province of Judea, to the time of the Christ himself and beyond that. That seemed unbelievable to me when I heard about it, but Germanus said it was a solemn matter of great family pride and he had no doubt of the truth of it.”

  I had no interest in that story, for my mind had fastened on the place-name he had mentioned. “Judea?” The name was strange to me. “Is it in Britain?”

  “No, nowhere near it.”

  “But I thought the Gaels all came from Britain.”

  “No, that’s not so, either. Many are from northern Gaul … Gaul, Gael, it’s the same basic word. But Judea is the land where Jesus, the Christus, was born.”

  “That was Galilee.”

  “No, Galilee was the region he lived in, just as this place we live in now, Genava, is a region of Gaul. The Scriptures tell us Jesus was born in a place called Bethlehem, but he lived in the town of Nazareth. All three—Galilee, Nazareth, and Bethlehem—are in Judea. The people who live there call themselves Jews.”

  I had heard of the Jews, but I had thought they all lived in a place called Jerusalem. I knew nothing more about them, or what being a Jew entailed, except that I had been told long before, by my earliest tutor, that the Jews had used the Roman law to crucify the Christ and were therefore guilty of the Blood of the Lamb. The words still rang in my mind, and although I had never understood their meaning, the condemnation they contained had sounded grim and unforgivable. This sudden revelation that my father might have shared that guilt appalled me. “My father was a Jew?”

  “No, he was a Christian. Well, by his ancestral blood and descent he was Jewish, I suppose, but by belief he was a Christian. One of the most sincere Christians I ever met. It can be confusing, all this talk of Jewish creed and Jewish blood, but I’ve seen enough spilt blood to know that it’s all red—doesn’t matter who it comes from. It’s impossible to distinguish the shed blood of a black Nubian from that of a blond Northerner or a flat-faced, brown-skinned Hun. I don’t even know who my own grandfather’s grandsire was, let alone where he came from, and I don’t care. I know where I belong, and that’s enough for me. But according to your own family historians—and they took great care of their clan’s history—your father’s ancestors have been Christians for four hundred years, and numbered among the very first followers of the Creed.”

  “Are they small people, the Jews?”

  The King smiled, perhaps at me, perhaps at a memory. “You mean in size? No, not if they resemble your father. He was taller than me, by the width of his fist, and broader across the shoulders. He was a big lad, Childebertus. But he was half Frank, half Gael, remember. Most of his Judean traits, if ever there were any, might have been bred out of his clan long since. He was dark of skin, as you are, but no darker than many a Roman I’ve met born and bred in Italia, so I can’t judge by that.

  “But Judea is a desert land with a fierce sun, from what I’ve heard, so the people there must be dark skinned, and they probably dress differently because of the heat in their homeland. Here in our land, however, wearing the same clothes we wear, who would know how to tell them apart from others? You’ll meet some folk who’ll tell you that the Jews are accursed, because they crucified the Savior. That might be true, it might not. I prefer to make no judgments on it. And I know, that when it comes to God and godly matters, there will always be people who claim to have exclusive access to God’s ear and wishes. Well, let them all make their judgments without involving me. They will, anyway. What I know is that my dearest friend, the finest man I ever knew, took pride in his Jewish descent and was taught to revere the memory of his Judean forefathers. So why should I believe what others mutter when I have my own memories to prove that they are wrong?”

  I sat rapt, absorbing his every word and believing, and a sudden question came to me. “Why did you say my nose will be straighter than my father’s?”

  Suddenly his grin was wolfish. “Because his was bent, broken in a brawl.”

  “Were you there?”

  King Ban of Benwick laughed. “In the thick of it. I saw the blow that did the damage, a flying fist. I was flat on my back between your father’s feet and he was defending me when someone—I didn’t see who it was—smacked him from the side. A wide, fast, looping swing from a clenched fist—almost ripped his head off. I saw the punch land and the blood fly and poor Childebertus went sideways, head over heels. I tried to go to him, but I couldn’t stand up. So I stayed on my hands and knees until my head stopped spinning, and by that time things had begun to settle down. Tavern brawls seldom last long. They’re undisciplined, and they tire people out quickly because everyone is drunk. Anyway, by the time I got to him, still on all fours, your father was sitting up, trying to stanch the bleeding. He
bled like a throat-cut pig—I can still remember it—and his nose was twisted right across his face, from left to right. We tried to straighten it—myself and a few others—but we didn’t get it quite right, and it set crooked. That was the real start of our friendship.”

  “You were drunk? You?” I was awestruck, barely able to believe what I was hearing, but the King had no thought in his mind now of his dignity, enjoying the recollection of his tale too much.

  “We were all drunk that night. We had just come back that afternoon from a long ten-day patrol in which we’d lost two men during a freak storm, when we were near to drowning in torrential rain. It happened four days into our patrol and to this day I have never seen anything to equal it. We were blinded by it, deep among the trees. The light simply vanished—went from day to night before we could adjust to it—and our horses were terrified by the lightning and the noise. We were, too, for that matter.

  “Anyway, we could see nothing and lightning was striking all around us, huge trees splitting and exploding into flames. It was absolute chaos, but we couldn’t stop, not there. We had to keep moving, hoping to find a clearing where we could dismount and calm the horses.

  “Instead, we found a big raiding party that had crossed from the northern Outlands on the other side of the Rhine. We rode right into the middle of them without seeing them, and I doubt if they saw us, either, until we were among them. They were sheltering, too, hundreds of them, among the trees and bushes. We had to fight our way out of there, outnumbered by at least five to one, but they were afoot and we were mounted. We were lucky, nonetheless. Things might easily have gone much worse for us. We were in heavy forest and the underbrush was thick. Our horses couldn’t make headway, let alone maneuver, and they were fetlock-deep in mud. If the raiders had been able to surround us completely we would all have died there. Fortunately they were as surprised as we were, and equally hampered by the storm and the darkness. But two of our men went down before we could ride clear of them.”

  “Did you leave them behind?”

  He glanced at me sharply. “Our men? No, we did not. We don’t do that. We rode clear of the area and waited until the storm broke and the raiders moved on, the following day. Then we went back and buried our two men, and after that we followed the raiding party at a distance until they emerged from the forest. As soon as they were out in the open where we could fight to our own advantage as cavalry, we attacked and destroyed them.”

  “But you said they outnumbered you five to one.”

  “Aye, but one cavalryman is more than equal to five men on foot, unless they’re Roman infantry.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Close to two hundred, perhaps a score or so more.”

  “And you were forty? Two squadrons?”

  “No, only one squadron, a full turma. There was myself, the squadron commander and his two decurions, and forty troopers, one of whom was your father—minus the two killed in the first encounter. That’s why we were drinking the night your father had his nose broken. We were bidding farewell to our dead comrades.”

  “Then why were you fighting one another? Would your two dead comrades have enjoyed that?”

  The King’s eyes went wide with surprise and then he smiled, shaking his head. “Aye, they would, could they have seen it. But we weren’t fighting among ourselves, Clothar. There were other soldiers there that night, from an infantry detachment. They thought we were being too noisy and we thought they were being insulting. One word led to another, and eventually someone swung a fist or threw a drink, and it was all of us against all of them. Someone hit me with something—probably a pitcher or a table bowl—and I went down and your father jumped across to protect me, straddling me and fighting off all comers until I could regain my senses. Unfortunately, I was not quick enough and someone got him, too.”

  “Why didn’t you straighten his nose properly?”

  “We couldn’t. We could barely see it, let alone straighten it. By the time we started, his face had swollen up like a cow’s udder. His eyes were puffed into slits and turning black already and his cheeks looked as though he had apples stuffed in them. Even without all the blood, he was a disastrous sight. It took him more than two weeks to look normal again. Besides, his nose looked better afterward, bent as it was. It simply added character to his face. He’d been almost too pretty before that, a boy wearing soldier’s clothing. The broken nose made him look more like a man and … dangerous. That was how your mother described him to her sister when she first met him. She said he looked dangerous. Evidently not sufficiently dangerous, however, to frighten her.”

  “Had you and he not been friends before then?”

  “No. I barely knew him before that night. He had been with us for less than a year—a recruit, and an outsider, at that. Most of the men in my command at that time were my own—my father’s men, I mean, from here in Genava—and we had been together from the start. We were part of a cavalry division based on the Rhine river, which is too heavily forested to be good cavalry country at the best of times. It was a mobile force, never less than four hundred strong, never more than five hundred, and it was constantly being split and reformed, elements distributed as needed at any time among the serving legions in the region. I was one of five senior commanders, all of us under the overall command of the legate Suetonius Marcellus, who we used to say must have been born astride a horse. He was a fine man—killed in a silly little skirmish a few years after that, shot out of his saddle by an arrow that deflected up off his cuirass, went between the guard flaps of his helmet, and caught him under the chin. Germanus gave me the division after that, but while Suetonius was alive he and I worked well together, which means he trusted me well enough not to interfere in the way I ran my own command. I had three squadrons of forty, and a full hundred of those were Genavans from Benwick. I was not yet their King at the time, but I was my father’s firstborn son and therefore his heir, and that meant that my men were mine ahead of Rome’s, so be it that we did as Rome required of us. Suetonius respected that and never tried to split us up.

  “Your father was the youngest of our officer trainees. And he was also the best looking, which might have been unfortunate. In soldiering, a comely face can be a disadvantage. Some of my veterans thought that anyone who looked so young and pretty could not possibly be taken seriously. Fortunately for him, however, he was a fine horseman, a natural rider even among our Franks, who consider themselves the Empire’s best. That saved him much grief, because it won him the respect his physical appearance might otherwise have cost him, and over the months since he had joined us a few of my younger officers had grown to like him and befriended him.

  “By the time the fight was over that night, he was one of us. Things began to change between him and me. I had been impressed by the way he had fought above me, straddling me while I was down—it’s difficult not to like someone who will fight and fall for you—and so I began paying more attention to him.

  “He was six years younger than I was, seventeen to my twenty-three, a man in years and yet not fully grown, but big and strong, with every sign of becoming formidable. And as I watched him, I recognized him as a natural leader. The men assigned to him behaved well for him, always, and he was never at a loss in the training exercises we set for him. According to all the reports I had heard, read, and evaluated, Childebertus was resourceful, intelligent, adaptable, and above all flexible in his thinking. Without exception, all his supervisors had the same thing to say about him, although their words may have varied: “The more difficult the problem we set him, whether in logistics, tactics, or strategy, the more easily he seems to solve it.”

  Somewhere beyond the heavy shutters a cock crowed and the sound startled both of us, bringing the King’s head up sharply. He crossed quickly to the window, where he opened both sets of shutters and peered out and upward, into the darkness, waiting for the sound to be repeated. Sometime later, when he was satisfied that it would not
be, he secured the shutters again and came back to the fire.

  “Sky’s clear. Clear enough to confuse that stupid bird into thinking it was dawn. For a moment there I thought we had lost the entire night and we still have much to talk about. Are you tired?”

  “No! No, Father, not at all. I’m wide-awake.”

  He squinted sideways at me, pursing his lips, and then evidently decided I was being truthful. “Good. You can sleep late tomorrow. I’ll tell Chulderic.” He busied himself replenishing the fire, then set the poker among the embers to heat again. I could tell from the way he kept his eyes on his task that he was thinking deeply about what he would say next, but I dared to interrupt him anyway.

  “Father?”

  “What?”

  “Will you tell me about how my father died?”

  He was bent over the brazier, keeping his eyes on the fire, and he twisted the iron poker in its bed before straightening up. “No, because Chulderic can do that much better than I could, so you should hear that tale from him. He was there at the time, and he had been your father’s loyal man for years. I’ll tell him you need to know what happened, and he’ll tell it to you as he saw it.” He read the expression on my face accurately. “Don’t fret yourself, I’ll make sure he wastes no time before telling you. But in the meantime, you and I have something else to talk about.”

  I gazed at him, wondering what he meant.

  “Germanus,” he said, as though that should have been obvious to me. “We need to talk about Germanus, you and I. He will be here within the month. I told you that. What I did not tell you is why that is important, for you.” He cleared his throat loudly and spat into the brazier, then wiped his lips with the sleeve of his tunic before he continued. “He is to be your teacher.”