The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  “Now, I have a task for you, should you be willing to accept it.”

  I straightened with a jerk, aware that I had been woolgathering.

  “Anything, Father,” I said. “Anything, and gladly.”

  “Hmm. Enthusiasm, without knowing what is involved? Thank you.” Smiling at his own observation, he crossed to the armchair on the other side of the fire and sat down, tugging at the voluminous folds of his outer garment and shifting in his seat until he had adjusted everything and could sit in comfort. “I want you to go home,” he said, and then, before I could react, he held up his palm to forestall me. “I have just returned from Britain, as you know, and much has happened while I was over there—happened here, I mean, in Gaul, not merely in Britain.”

  I nodded, silently, and waited.

  “I was supposed to spend last night in Lutetia, for no other reason originally than the fact that it lies on the direct route here from the coast. But it is also a central point for irregular gatherings of bishops, and one of those was convened while I was in Britain, in response to several urgent matters that arose unexpectedly and could not safely be postponed. It was known that I would be returning shortly from Britain, but couriers were dispatched to find me sooner and to summon me to the gathering in Lutetia as quickly as I could travel. They missed me on their first pass because I had made a detour for reasons of my own, and by the time they found me I was preparing to leave for home, so they only gained a single day on my planned schedule. Thus I arrived in Lutetia one day earlier than I had intended, and spent not one but two nights there, conferring there with my pastoral brethren.”

  His face clouded, and he sat staring for a space of moments into the flames in the fire basket, but then he collected himself again and straightened slightly, looking me in the eye. “You may or may not have heard mutterings of what is going on in the world outside our school, but there is widespread unrest, and troublesome events are shaping up here in Gaul … very real threats of another war, which is the last thing any of us needs. These threats are arising from several sources. Most particularly, however, they are emanating from the lands of the Burgundian tribes, to the south and west of where we sit today. The imperial military intelligence people have been warning us for years now that the Burgundians are poised to spill out of their present holdings in an attempt to conquer all of central and southern Gaul, and first and foremost, from my perspective, those are not good tidings for the Church. The Burgundians, as you know, are not Christian and are, in fact, violently opposed to us and to our faith. They seem to delight in killing priests and bishops and in persecuting the faithful wherever they find them, and so we—my brother bishops and our clergy—will be using all the influence at our disposal, marshaling and channeling our combined resources to deflect and disarm the rebels’ initiatives however and wherever we can—working in conjunction, of course, with the legions.” Again he paused, considering his next words.

  “It was forewarnings of a Burgundian revolt that caused the Imperial Administration in Treves to summon Duke Lorco here from his base in Carcasso, but I have received forewarnings, too, from my own sources, concerning another aspect of the same revolt, and that is why I require your assistance—not because you are a doughty fighter and a champion of God’s work, although you show all the signs of growing into such strengths, but because you are Ban’s nephew and adopted son and Ban is my friend. And so I would have you leave here in four days’ time, bearing messages from me to your kinsman Ban and traveling with your friend Stephan Lorco and his father the Duke when they leave to return to their own lands in the south. Their journey home to Carcasso will take them within sixty miles of where you live, and I have asked the Duke to provide you with an escort from his group for that short portion of the journey that will remain to bring you to Genava. He assures me that he will see you safely delivered home. Will you do this for me?”

  “Of course, Father,” I said, attempting to mask my disappointment at being sent home from school before my just time had elapsed. Even as I voiced my consent, however, I saw that he had told me nothing other than that he was sending me away. Because King Ban, my uncle, was his friend, he had said, Germanus wanted me to leave his school and go home. For what purpose? And if it were only to bear messages, why would he send me and not a fast-riding courier? Beginning to grow increasingly confused, I bit down upon my rising panic and forced myself to try to speak what was on my mind. “You want me to carry a message to King Ban … from you and in person … but what do you wish me to tell him, Father?”

  He seemed completely unaware of my discomfiture and merely smiled, shaking his head very slightly in dismissal of any concerns I might have. “Nothing that you need lose sleep about. I will put everything into words on paper in the next few days, because it is of extreme importance that I say what must be said properly, with no possibility of being misunderstood. I shall therefore write, and rewrite, and write yet again. It will be sufficient for you to carry the missives that I write to your uncle the King, thereby assuring him that they come directly from me to him, as a friend. That done, and having spent some pleasant and restful times with your aunt, the Lady Vivienne, you will hie yourself back here as soon as may be, for this is merely the first such task I have assigned to you and by the time you return I will have great need of you … .” He broke off, arching one eyebrow. “You wish to say something.”

  “I … I am to return, then, Magister? I thought you were sending me away for good.”

  “I am sending you away for good, boy—for good reason and to even better purpose. I am sending you upon a mission for the well-being of God’s Church and her faithful servants, which means, in effect, that I am sending you upon God’s own work. But I am far from being finished with your education, if that is what you really meant to suggest. I have much in mind for you, and hone of it entails sending you back to Genava permanently as a punishment for having reached the age of sixteen.” He smiled. “In truth, I see little of Genava in your future, my young friend, at least for several years. That is, at least in part, why I am sending you home on this mission. It will give you an opportunity to take your leave of your family again before moving on to the next level of your endeavors.”

  As his words washed over me I felt relieved, elated, and exalted. I would be called upon to do a man’s work here in central Gaul, it seemed. I felt the merest twitching of guilt in acknowledging then that I had been dreading my eventual return to Genava, fearing that the life I had known there previously would suffer gravely now by comparison to all that I had known here in Auxerre. Now, however, with the blessing bestowed by these new duties, I could return gratefully to the lakeside to revisit and embrace all my old friends and loved ones before taking off yet again on expanded adventures.

  I had yet another cause for relief and exultation in my breast on that occasion, although I would have been loath to mention it to my august mentor. When it first occurred to me that I was being sent away, never to return to the school, my chest had filled up with the unanticipated and panic-stricken fear of being unable to fulfill my vengeance—that long-standing promise to myself that I would one day pursue, confront, and cut down the usurper Clodas of Ganis as just punishment for the murder of my parents and my grandfather, his own true king, Garth of Ganis. Were I to be sent home now, I had realized, dismissed from the school before officially achieving manhood, I might never have the opportunity to fulfill my dreams in that regard. Still a mere boy, I would have no voice in Benwick when I went back and that, allied with my reluctance to go back and live in what I now perceived to be a backward and inferior region, might easily combine to make it impossible for me to escape from the humdrum of daily life by the lakeside.

  It was an unjust thought and one that was already causing me to feel guilty and ungrateful by the time I realized that I was wrong and Germanus was not banishing me permanently. As soon as that awareness dawned, however, I lost all feelings of fear and guilt in the burst of elation that flooded over me. I w
ould return to Auxerre, and I would finish my schooling and my training, and I would leave the Bishop’s School as a warrior with all the skills, all the abilities, and all the weight of years that would enable me to claim King Ban’s promised assistance in my quest to regain my own rightful kingdom.

  When I left the bishop’s quarters that afternoon, I was bubbling inside with excitement, and every philosophical thought that had simmered in my mind earlier had been obliterated by the import of what I could now look forward to doing and being. I had four days left as a schoolboy; four days to wrap up the raiment of my time as a student; after that, like a chrysalis shedding its outer skin, I would be reborn as an entirely new being: a man and a warrior dedicated to the greater glory of God.

  IV

  URSUS

  I DO NOT KNOW where I was on the day my boyhood came to an end, but I remember the occasion very well because the horror of it never left me and still has the power today to stir the hairs on the nape of my neck and make me shudder with dread. I can recall every aspect of the countryside that surrounded me that day, and most particularly I can remember with absolute clarity the last scene I saw before my world was suddenly changed for all time.

  I never have known, however, exactly where we were that day. It was our fourth day out of Auxerre, heading south at a leisurely pace. We were riding two abreast, twelve of us and one two-horse wagon. Our party was strung out along a surprisingly hard-packed path that followed the osier-lined left bank of a broad, muddy-brown river that eddied sluggishly, its waters looking thick and viscous beneath a sun that was too bright and too hot for the time of the year, even in southern Gaul. It had been raining heavily to the north and east of us for two entire days; although we ourselves had not seen as much as a storm cloud in the skies around us, there was no mistaking the signs in the river. We had watched the water level rise alarmingly these past two days, swelling and filling up the channel until the banks had entirely vanished and the sullen waters spilled over in several low-lying places to flood the fields on either side. We had managed to remain on slightly higher ground at all times, however, and nothing untoward had happened to us. The river was swollen to the point of threat, but yet the ground around us and ahead of us was firm and almost drought-dry.

  Paralleling our path on the left, some distance away but easily discernible, was the wide, dusty swath carved by the small army of Duke Phillipus Lorco as it passed by earlier that morning. We were a hunting party, dispatched the previous afternoon to harvest fresh meat for the troopers, and we had done well that morning, so that now, approaching midday, we were riding to rejoin the main body of our party, avoiding the dusty track stirred up by the earlier troops and staying on the narrow, hard-packed riverside path. The light four-wheeled wagon we had with us was loaded with six large deer carcasses—enough meat to keep everyone in the one-hundred-and-twenty-strong main force smiling and well fed for several days.

  Lorco and I were riding together at the very rear of the loose column, close behind the wagon with the butchered deer, and although it was an unpleasant place to be, what with the swarming flies and the thick stink of the fresh, congealing blood that attracted them, it was nonetheless a spot that kept us safely out of sight of our two current nemeses, Harga, the Sergeant-at-Arms, and Dirk the Huntsman, both of whom had been charged by Lorco’s father to watch us closely and keep us out of mischief. They were an ill-matched and foul-tempered pair, and neither of them even tried to like us or to tolerate us. To them we were nothing more than an imposition, an accursed nuisance to be frowned upon, shouted at, and generally held in subjection. And so we naturally set about immediately finding ways of thwarting them and doing as we wished. To that end, we were hiding from them at the rear of the meat wagon as we plotted our escape from their supervision.

  Harga and Dirk lent themselves easily, albeit unknowingly, to our mischief. No one with eyes to see would ever describe either one of them as comely, and so we had named them Castor and Pollux, the heavenly twins, thinking ourselves extremely witty. We were now out of their direct line of sight, safe behind the tailgate of the wagon as we enjoyed a laugh at their expense. For their part, the two jailers rode on side by side, unaware of us or of our disdain.

  Disturbed by our passage, an enormous flock of crows rose up with a clatter of flapping wings from a recently plowed field to our left and then wheeled away from us, cawing and screaming raucously as only crows know how. Mildly surprised at their number, I watched them go, following the dense cloud of them easily with my eyes until they disappeared into the leafy masses of a trio of huge old conical trees that stood like tapered, towering candles in the distance, close by a distant stretch of river that caught the afternoon sun’s light in a silvery dazzle of reflected brightness.

  Lorco had fallen behind me by half a length, his horse stomping and cavorting, protesting at the cloud of horseflies that swarmed around us, and as I turned in my saddle to speak to him one of the flies landed on my nose and began crawling down, toward my mouth. I brought up my hand to brush it away as Lorco said, “That’s the biggest flock of crows I ev—”

  My life changed at that instant, blasted by a sight I should never have seen.

  I saw what happened because I was looking directly at Lorco’s mouth as his lips formed the words. I heard the sounds that accompanied the event and noted them because they were so strange and jarring. And both sight and sounds were seared indelibly into my memory. And yet I failed utterly to comprehend what I had heard and seen … and even now, I find myself wondering which came first, the sight, or the sounds? Such was their speed when they occurred that they were indistinguishable,’ but in a hundred dreams throughout the year that followed, they broke apart, sounds and sight, and took place again and again, inexorably and appallingly, sometimes sight followed by sound, sometimes the other way around, but always with the power to snap me sharply awake, gasping and filled with terror.

  As my fingers brushed at the end of my nose, dislodging the tickling fly, Lorco’s entire head appeared to change shape. It was a phenomenon too brief to register, but I saw, or it seemed I saw, his entire head, flex in less than the blink of an eye, the way a reflection will sometimes undulate in a calm, dark pool when an unseen fish passes beneath. It was as though all the bones of his skull had suddenly been replaced, for a mere flicker of time, by a liquid-filled bladder of some kind. It lurched and instantly reformed itself. And as this odd event occurred I heard alien noises: an abrupt, violent hiss and a ripping, rending, meaty sound that terminated in a solid, crunching thunk! as something propelled Lorco toward me with great force, jerking him forward from the waist as his face split asunder in a welter of blood and flying pieces of whiteness that I would later come to recognize as teeth and fragments of shattered bone.

  I did nothing, frozen in the instant by disbelief and feeling something within me grasped and crushed in the grip of a massive fist of solid, icy coldness that I could not even begin to recognize. I saw my best friend’s suddenly ruined face come thrusting toward me, a spray of blood bursting from his ruptured mouth, filling the space between us with a red, wet mist, and then I saw his eyes, wide and terrified, shrieking at me in eloquent silence, begging me to tell him what had happened. Unable to move, I saw his horse begin to spin and carry him away from me, and as he began to topple sideways to the ground I finally saw the arrow that had killed him. It was a heavy, iron-headed war arrow, triple-bladed and wickedly barbed, and it had struck the back of his neck, severing his spine before passing through the cavity of his mouth to shatter his upper front teeth and emerge through the base of his nose.

  Even as Lorco pitched forward, and knowing that he would crash headfirst to the ground, I still had not begun to comprehend what had happened. Then I heard shouting, and saw movement ahead of me, and looked up toward the rear of our train in time to see the man who had shot Lorco preparing to loose another arrow at me. I remained frozen, but fortunately my horse was already reacting uneasily to the panic it sensed in its com
panion. It reared sideways, tossing its head and whinnying, and I watched the arrow spring from the killer’s bow and leap across the intervening space between us to hiss by me so closely that I felt its passing. And now, as my panicky mount spun me around, I saw that our entire party was surrounded and outnumbered by a swarm of strangers, most of them armed with bows. Even as I looked I saw Harga go down with two arrows in him, one of them deep in his skull behind the right ear, having pierced his leather helmet.

  Fool, I remember thinking, seeing the silvery iron helmet hanging from his saddle. He should know better than that. I should have, too, for my own helmet hung close by my knee, but I was a mere boy, not a soldier, and so I absolved myself.

  Then clarity returned and terror threatened to overwhelm me as I saw that I had mere moments in which to save myself or die. I could see six of my companions, not counting Lorco, already sprawled in the dirt of the path, and I saw several of the enemy take note of me sitting there, high up and empty-handed on my fine horse. One of them was almost within reach of me by that time, an outstretched hand grasping for my reins. I snatched them myself, barely in time, and pulled them tight, swinging my horse around hard, striking the man with its shoulder and sending him sprawling.

  Someone shouted urgently, a warning to someone else to catch me before I could escape, but I was already spurring my horse hard, roweling him viciously in my need to get away from there. Another form leaped up at me, attempting to seize my bridle, but my horse was already surging forward. I kicked out with a savagery born of desperation and the man fell away as the thick, iron-studded sole of my heavy riding boot connected with his ear. I dug with my spurs again and now I could feel the strength of the horse beneath me as he strove to leap away from the gouging torment of the pain in his sides.