by Jack Whyte
There were twelve of us in the boys’ corps at that time, ranging in age from eight through sixteen, and there was no implication, in our calling him Magister, that we might all be slaves to his mastery … except that, of course, we were, utterly and abjectly. Chulderic was not a man to defy, to deny, or to challenge. His discipline was renowned, and none of us would ever have dared to question it or to rebel against it. He was merciless, demanding, and implacable in his expectations and pitilessly critical of all our efforts to do well and to win his praise. And yet sometimes he would relent, and would bark or grunt an unintelligible sound that was his only indication that one of us might have—might have—achieved a barely acceptable standard in something we had attempted. But now here he was, speaking to me in a quiet voice like a normal man.
He had swung his horse to face me as I addressed him and for a moment I quailed, expecting him to rebuke me for impertinence, but he merely looked at me with a peculiar expression, then nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“We could not tell you, before now. You were too young to know such things. They were too dangerous for you to know because, being a child, you would have asked a thousand questions and prattled to anyone who would listen, and sooner or later word would have reached the wrong ears.” He scratched at his beard with his fingertips, then tucked in his chin and peered down along his nose, stretching a single long white hair out to where he could see the end of it. “Hmm,” he grunted, and then twisted the offending hair around his finger and jerked it out by its roots. “More and more of those in there, nowadays.”
I had no way of knowing if he had meant me to hear that, but I was stricken with awe to see this unexpected aspect of a man who had terrified me for years, and yet all I could think to do then and there was look more closely at his beard. It was black and long, neatly trimmed at the ends and very straight, with little curl to it. But I could see white strands among the black, now that he had drawn my attention to them.
“I knew him longer than I’ve known you,” he continued. “And I’ve known you all your life, since the day you were born. He was my friend, your father, as well as being my employer.”
“Your employer?” I was no longer afraid, my apprehension swept away completely by his suddenly revealed humanity. “You mean you worked for him?”
“Aye, I did. Does that surprise you? I worked for him gladly. I was his Master-at-Arms long before I came here to join King Ban.”
“But the King said he was in the army with you, and that you first met my father there, too, when he joined you fresh from Rome.”
Chulderic nodded, deeply and slowly. “That is true, we all met in the army, and we grew close over the next ten years. Mind you, I was no more than a common soldier in those days, only newly appointed to command a single squadron, whereas the three of them—Ban, your father, and latterly Germanus—were all field officers. But they chose to trust me and my judgment, for reasons of their own, and I somehow became their confidant, their messenger whenever they had need of one. But the day came, as such days always must, when we left the armies, all four of us at the same time, because we had fulfilled all our obligations. Our campaign was finished and our work was done and we were finally freed to go home. They were free to go home, I should say. I had no home to go back to. Your father knew that, and so he invited me to ride with him and be his man, in return for my board and keep and a parcel of land to call my own, an undisputed place to lay my head at day’s end. Sounded to me as though I wouldn’t find a better offer, and I never did.”
“Did you know my father when he lived in Rome?”
He shook his head. “No, I did not. He had done his stint in Rome before he joined us, and I know he was glad to get away from it.”
“What did he say about it?”
“I can barely remember, it has been so long, but it will come back to me if I take time to think.” His chin tilted upward as he gazed at me with narrowed eyes. “Jump down now and run to the stables. Pick yourself a horse and come back here as quickly as you can. King Ban would have me tell you what I know about your father and mother, all of it in one day, and so I will, but I will be able to do it more easily if we ride. I never was a man for sitting indoors and talking. I need fresh, blowing air to keep my head clear when I am thinking. Go you now.”
I ran like the wind all the way to the stables, where I quickly found the senior groom and told him why I needed a horse. I picked out my favorite, a black gelding almost as tall as the one Chulderic rode, and saddled it quickly, tightening the girth securely before I swung myself up onto the big animal’s back. Then, mounted, I sat for a few moments inhaling the odors of the stable before I nodded to the groom to open the door, and I listened, as I rode out, to the sounds my horse’s hooves made on the floor of packed earth and straw. I remember quite clearly the sensations of stretched tension and thrilling excitement that filled my chest that day as I rode back to where the Master-at-Arms was waiting. He watched me approach and kicked his horse into motion as I drew near him. For a while we rode in silence, side by side, as we walked our mounts among and between the buildings outside the walls of King Ban’s castle.
As soon as we had passed the last of the houses, Chulderic kicked his horse to a canter, then to a lope, and finally into a gallop, and I kept close to him, barely half a length behind him and to his left, exulting in the surging power of the big animal between my knees and the way the wind ruffled my hair. We did not gallop far, however, before he pulled back on his reins and slowed to a canter, saying there was no point in overtaxing the animals.
The path he had chosen stretched upward, rising gently and consistently over the course of two miles to the crest of a ridge that ended in a high cliff and offered a breathtaking view of the lake hundreds of feet below. As we approached the summit and the steepest part of the climb, we dismounted and led our horses, but they were both panting as hard as we were when we reached the top and stopped, overlooking the vista before us.
“Now that is a sight worth beholding,” Chulderic said. “Large enough to be a sea, yet still a lake of fresh water.”
He looked about him, then dropped his horse’s reins on the ground and went to sit on an old log that some previous visitor had dragged close to the edge of the cliff.
“Come. Sit.”
I did as he bade me, and for a while we sat staring at the view and waiting for our breathing to return to normal.
“Your father joined the army on his sixteenth birthday, did you know that?” I shook my head. “Aye, well, he did. That’s the traditional age for boys to become soldiers, as you know. Has been for hundreds of years, stretching right back to the earliest days of Rome, when every soldier was a farmer and every farmer was a soldier. But it doesn’t happen much today, at least not among the wealthy.”
I said nothing, and he continued after only a brief pause. “Your grandfather Jacobus was wealthy—your father’s father, that is. He was from Britain, a lawyer. Traveled to Rome to study there, and then remained to practice his craft, at which he was apparently very good—one of the best in the city, I’ve been told. He could easily have arranged to keep his son at home and out of the army, had he so wished. But he didn’t. He let the boy go when he wanted to, and was quite content to do so. Strange relationship between those two, for father and son: they liked each other—loved each other might not even be too strong a way to put it. You don’t see that too often among civilized people. Everyone likes to talk about the tightness of family bonds and the obligations of blood relationships and kindred, but it’s all lip service, nine times out of ten.
“Anyway, your father had always wanted to be a soldier, ever since he had grown big enough to make a hero out of one of his cousins, Medroc, another migrant Briton. Medroc was a senior officer in the Household Guard, the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, and Honorius himself thought very highly of him, trusting him as he trusted few others. From the way your father spoke of him, time and time again, Medroc must have been a sight to behold in
his golden parade armor—enameled sky blue insets in cuirass, helmet, and greaves, a high horsehair crest on the helmet, dyed sky blue to match the enamel insets, and a military cloak of sky blue cloth, trimmed with gold edges. I would have enjoyed seeing that myself. I’ve heard of the finery of the Household Guard, but I never saw any of them.”
“But you came from Rome, Magister. How could you not have seen them?”
He pursed his lips as he looked at me, one eyebrow rising high on his forehead. “Because they were in Constantinople with the. Emperor when I was in Rome, that’s how. Rome hasn’t really been the Imperial City since the time of Constantine, and that was more than a hundred years ago, as near as spitting. The Roman garrison troops in my day—I mean the permanent troops who never left the city—were famed, and still are, for the ornate richness of their uniforms and armor. They made ordinary troops like us look like beggars, even in our parade uniforms. But the Household Guard were the elite troops of the entire Empire, handpicked from the best of the best for their size, appearance, and prowess, and privileged as no others ever were. Their blue-and-gold uniforms were legendary.
“From the first time your father set eyes on Medroc in his fine plumage, he dreamed of someday becoming one of the Emperor’s Guard. The lad’s career was clearly laid out, all the way from basic training under Cousin Medroc’s watchful eye, to a solid and rewarding position as an officer in the Household Guard, thanks to his family’s influence. It was all cut-and-dried and carefully arranged.”
He looked at me, making sure that I was listening closely before continuing. “But there’s a lesson there, lad, concerning your father and his cousin that you should keep in mind from this time on: the trouble with things that are too neatly cut-and-dried is that they often break when a strong wind comes up, because they’re too dry to bend. Your father had been in the Household Guard for less than a year, still a snotty-nosed trainee recruit, when Medroc got himself killed during a garrison mutiny in the far south of Gaul, near the border with Iberia.”
“Iberia? What was he doing there? Was he traveling with the Emperor?”
“No, but he was traveling for the Emperor, carrying urgent dispatches from Honorius himself to the legate commanding in southern Gaul, and he arrived in a mountain town along his route just in time to get himself and his men safely bedded down for the night and soundly to sleep before the garrison mutinied. The garrison commander, who from all later reports was a complete pig, was assassinated in the darkest hour of the night, along with all his officers, and Medroc awoke shortly after that to find himself being dragged out of bed. He was a witness to their mutiny, and they knew him to be a loyal and trusted officer of the Emperor, because they opened and read the dispatches he was carrying. They killed him right there, probably before he really understood what was happening to him. Of the twenty troopers in his escort, two were lucky enough to escape that night and survived to raise the alarm. So that was the end of Cousin Medroc, and of your father’s dreams of an illustrious career in the personal service of the Emperor.
“Medroc’s death went unnoticed for a long time, as far as I can tell, lost sight of in the confusion and upheaval of the campaign against the mutineers. It was a hard campaign, too. I remember it because it was my first. I had been in the army for several years by then, but that was the first time I had ever been called upon to fight, and it was the only time I ever had to fight against our own, Roman soldiers just like us. We had no idea what had driven them to mutiny, or if, under the same conditions, we might have been tempted to join them. Fighting them was not a pleasant experience, from that viewpoint alone.
“But besides that, the success of the mutiny from the outset had attracted malcontents and deserters from all over southern Gaul, so that what had started out as a town garrison with an arguably legitimate grievance soon grew to something else entirely, approaching the size of an army … a rabble, certainly, but strong in numbers. Strong enough to defeat the first few units sent out to contain them and put the mutiny down. They won those opening actions easily, because the men sent out against them underestimated almost everything about them. But those early, easy victories were the worst things that could have happened to them. They grew too confident after that. They honestly thought they could win in mutiny, the damn fools—even proclaimed one of their own as Emperor just before we brought them to battle after six weeks of floundering around in mud and rain. That was it. We killed every last one of them, one way or another. Them that survived the fighting died the way mutineers always die, some of them flogged to death, some hanged, and others beheaded. The four ringleaders, soon identified by turncoats desperate to save their own lives, were crucified … the only modern army crucifixions I’ve ever heard of.”
Chulderic fell silent after that, and I had the good sense to say nothing and simply wait for him to start talking again.
“At any rate,” he began, finally, “by the time the dust settled after all that, the faithful Medroc had been forgotten, long since replaced by some other talented and brilliant young man who doubtless looked just as fine in his parade armor, and Medroc’s protégé, young Childebertus, had become just another faceless trainee with no influence and not even seniority to protect him. It didn’t take him long to discover that his relationship with Medroc had been resented by more than a few of his fellows, and his life within the Household Guard became very unpleasant very quickly.
“A call went out around that time for volunteers for a new, highly mobile cavalry force to be stationed on the Rhine river, where the difficulty of keeping invaders out had not grown easier in three hundred years. The new force was to be an elite one, and well paid, to compensate for the danger and hardship involved in what they had to do. Your father had always loved horses and was a natural cavalryman. He recognized salvation when he saw it, and he became one of the very first applicants for the new force. Within months of that he was here in Gaul, transferred out of the Emperor’s Guard and into the new cavalry division. That’s where he met me and the King, although Ban was only Ban of Benwick at that time.” He broke off and looked at me again, his brow creased in thought. “Did Ban already tell you all this?”
I nodded. “Yes, Magister … some of it, anyway.”
“Then what the blazes did he want me to talk to you about if you already know what I’m supposed to tell you?” This was more like the Chulderic I knew, snappish and impatient with anything he saw as being trivial or time wasting, but he said no more after that first outburst, and I dared to speak up once more.
“About how my parents died, Magister—I asked the King last night to tell me and he would not, because he had not been there to see it for himself. But he told me you had witnessed all of it, and he said you were far more able than he to tell me the truth of what happened.”
“Hmm.” There was no sign of impatience in the old man now. He stuck out his lower lip and gazed into the distance across the lake. “He was wrong, then. I was nearby, but I was not there. Had I been there, I would not be here today.” He straightened his back and stood up. “Come, ride with me again while I try to find words for you.”
Chulderic and, I remounted and made our way down the slope, veering more and more to the left as we descended, so that by the time we regained level ground we were far from where we had begun our climb to the summit. Once again we rode in silence, traversing a landscape of grassland scattered with clumps of scrub willows, alder, and hawthorn while Chulderic searched his mind for memories he could describe. And then, without sign or warning, he began again.
“We had barely left the army life behind us when Childebertus first met your mother. I remember that clearly. It must have been within the first few weeks of our liberty.
“We were on the road home, I remember, but we were barely out of the German territories, headed south toward Benwick and moving at our own pace, still full of the heady feelings of freedom after so many years of regimentation and routine, and Ban had just finished telling us a story that none
of us believed. He told us he had been betrothed, years earlier and at his father’s insistence, to an unknown woman. We thought he was gulling us, trying to hoodwink us for his own ends, and when we pressed him for more details, calling him a liar and a lout—which we could do because we were his friends—he admitted that he had been thirteen and she a mere infant at the time. But he swore he had never even seen her, so he could not say if she had one head or two, and we all had a good laugh over his foolishness. He could see we were still unconvinced, nevertheless, and so he told us she was the daughter of one of his father’s oldest allies, a king called Garth of Ganis, who ruled over a federation of clans among the Salians, the northern Franks, in the rich lands to the south of the Rhine delta. Her name was Vivienne of Ganis, and he swore to us that before leaving home to come on this campaign, he had renewed his pledge to marry her, sight unseen and for the good of his people, when he returned victorious from the wars. Well, he was returning now, he said, and curious to see what kind of burden he had been saddled with to please his father, and so he was going to visit her father’s place, Ganis, on the way south, since we would be riding close by it, to the eastward.
“Well, we were his friends, so we were not gentle with him when he told us about that. In fact we roasted him for a long time as we rode southward, but when we drew close to where he was to leave us, we decided we should all accompany him to inspect this mysterious intended bride. We proposed it in jest, but instead of being angry, Ban made it plain he was glad that we would be with him when the time came for him to step forward and identify himself to his future wife and her father.” Chulderic paused and smiled. “With us around him, it would be obvious that he was being truthful in saying he was on his way home from the wars and had stopped only to pay his respects to his father’s old friend in passing, and there would have been no question of his simply dropping by to examine his betrothed. Mind you, had the lady turned out to be less than beautiful, Ban would have been forewarned and able to conduct himself appropriately thereafter, in terms of the speed with which he might rush to take up his solemn marriage duties.