by Jack Whyte
We struck off deep into the woods and rode in a long semicircle for the better part of half an hour, until we were sure we had left the enemy night camp far behind us, and we came out onto the road again. From that point on, free of the need to worry about being seen, we traveled as quickly as our mounts could carry us. The daylight lasted long after we had expected it to fade, so that it was still not completely dark by the time Ursus reined in and led us off the road, along a narrow but clearly marked pathway that took us, as he had promised, to a dry and sturdy, draft-proof haven that was stocked with an ample supply of cut and split firewood, carefully piled beneath sheltering eaves that had been extended for that purpose. We had a fire going within minutes of arriving and we ate in comfort and then bedded down in the luxury of two narrow, hand-built cots, with our wet clothes hung and stretched out around the inner walls, steaming toward dryness in the heat from the fire.
I was almost asleep when Ursus spoke for the first time in nigh on half an hour, and his words snapped me back to wakefulness.
“Be prepared for anything tomorrow, Clothar, and expect it to be worse than anything you can imagine. You hear me?”
“Aye. But why would you say that?”
“Because that is the only way to go, as a thinking man. Going in expecting the very worst, anything you find that’s less than that will appear to be welcome. I have the feeling that we are about to be involved in a struggle, you and I—perhaps a civil war between brothers—whether we like it or no. The stakes are high enough to justify a war, no doubt about that—a kingship and its power for the winner. I don’t believe in auguries but I mislike the way things have fallen out, these past few days. This brother of yours, Gunthar, sounds like a bad one to me. He does not strike me as the kind of man who’ll be content to sit quietly back and run the risk of being frustrated and deposed. Granted, he doesn’t know yet that King Ban dispossessed him, or that Ban himself is dead, but he does know Ban was seriously wounded, and that in itself might have been enough to make him react according to his true nature.
“I hope I’m wrong and everything is well, and I would be happy to admit within a few days that I’ve been speaking like an old woman tonight, but we’ll find out the truth tumor-row, when we reach Genava. Sleep well, in the meantime, and hope the rain stops before dawn. At least we’ll start out warm and dry in the morning, which is more than can be said for Beddoc’s cattle.”
With that, Ursus turned noisily around in his bed and was snoring heavily in the space of what seemed like several heartbeats, but his last words had bereft me of any easy ability to sleep and I lay awake with my own thoughts until the fire had died out completely and even the roaring of the rain on the roof dwindled into silence.
How would Gunthar react, I wondered, now that Ban’s last decision had been made public? I had always been as one with his half-brothers in believing him to be abnormal in his responses to being thwarted or crossed in any way, and we had often laughed derisively at his excessive reactions on such occasions, declaring him, among ourselves, to be insane and beyond redemption, simply because we had had no fear of him in those days, confident in our father’s protection and in our own conviction that Ban’s firstborn son was different in almost every way to each and all of us. But the last time I had laughed thus, I was less than ten years old and knew nothing of the world. Six years had elapsed since then and I had barely thought of Gunthar in all that time. How had he changed during those years, I wondered now, and I doubted that any change he might have undergone would be for the better.
It was more than conceivable, I thought, that Ursus was exactly correct and that we might be hovering on the verge of falling into a situation that was beyond our control, within the next few days. And thinking that, I fastened upon the phrase, beyond our control, and tried to think what that meant. My entire life, I realized now lying there in the flickering firelight, had been entirely under the control of other people, King Ban, Chulderic, Tiberias Cato, and Bishop Germanus foremost among them, until the day of the ambush in which Lorco lost his life. Since then, from that day forward, I had thought I was controlling my own life without help, but by then I had become dependent upon Ursus, exchanging one mentor for another so that even now, gazing into the future, I was being guided by his wisdom and experience. Be prepared for the worst, he had said, because that way anything less looks like a reprieve. I tried earnestly to envision the very worst that could occur to us in the days ahead, but all I could think of in those terms was Lorco’s head suddenly changing shape and bursting apart with the impact of the arrow, because that was the very worst thing that had ever happened to me. I could not imagine anything ever being more dreadful than that, and thinking that, I must have drifted off to sleep.
BOOK TWO
BROTHERS AND COUSINS
V
GUNTHAR AND THEUDERIC
GUNTHAR’S WAR. I have no idea why I still think of that squalid episode in those terms. It was Gunthar’s, certainly; he brought it about and he was the dominant participant, but it was not a war. It never came close to being a war.
Wars have at least an illusion of grandeur and respectability attached to them; there is always the notion involved that, in a just war, some of the participants are motivated by high ideals and honorable intentions and that they fight to defend and protect something of value. Gunthar’s War stirred no such thoughts. There was nothing noble or inspiring within its entire duration to stir the minds or imaginations of adventurous boys. The people ranged against Gunthar and his depravity, myself included, fought out of sheer terror and desperation, knowing that to do less, to refuse to fight, was to surrender their lives and their entire world to the dementia of a murderous degenerate. Gunthar’s War was a morass of filth and wretchedness from beginning to end. Nothing good came out of it. It was a bloodbath of mindless slaughter and godless atrocities too foul for the ordinary mind to accommodate, and merely being involved in it was a disgusting experience, easily the bleakest and blackest part of my early manhood.
Even so, I came of age in the course of it, and I learned much about the ways of men, because it presented me a study in treachery and an object lesson in how one evil man can spawn corruption and perdition and thrust it on to other, better men. Gunthar’s “War” was no more and no less than a vicious internecine squabble. It was born of greed, betrayal, duplicity, and the lust for power, and it demeaned and came nigh to destroying everyone caught up in it.
We rode into it, literally, the morning following our night in the shepherd’s hut.
I had been dreaming for years of the first view I would have of King Ban’s castle after my lengthy absence, and I had seen every detail of the place clearly outlined in my memory, so that even in the pouring rain, which had not abated in the slightest overnight, I found myself almost laughably anxious as Ursus and I approached the brow of the last rise in the road that concealed the castle from our view. And then we were level with the top and I was gazing hungrily at the sight that awaited me, only to find that it was vastly different from what I remembered leaving behind me six years earlier.
An enormous ditch had been dug around the entire castle, and the excavated earth had been used to build a steeply sloping rampart on the far side, in front of the castle walls, which thus became a secondary line of defense rather than the primary one. The work had been done very recently, too. I could see that by the rawness of the logs that had been used to stabilize the slope of the earthen wall. It was a classical Roman fortification of vallum et fossam: an unscalable, ramped wall of earth and clay excavated from, and used to back, a deep and dangerous protective ditch. The defenders were all but invulnerable, at the top of the sloping wall, where they could overlook and annihilate their attackers, who had to cross the exposed ditch and then fight their way up the steep clay face. In this instance, however, the effect of the fortification was doubly enhanced by the towering height of the castle walls that loomed behind the earthen one, for the stone battlements were more than twice as h
igh again as the new ramparts at their foot, and the defenders up there could shoot down easily and without fear of counterattack into the mass of any attackers who might dare to attempt a crossing.
Ban’s castle, I saw at a glance, was now invulnerable behind its new defenses, accessible only by an imposing and weighty drawbridge, which for the time being lay open, bridging the chasm of the ditch. Perhaps the assembled might of the Empire would be able to bring Ban’s castle down now, but even that was questionable. The fortress beside the lake had its own deep wells, ensuring an ample and permanent supply of fresh water for the garrison, and any successful attack against it must entail a prolonged land siege and a simultaneous naval blockade to prevent reprovisioning of the garrison from the lake side of the defenses. Anyone with any awareness of the logistics involved in such a venture knew too that the Empire no longer had such naval power at its ready disposal.
I was aware of Ursus sitting tall beside me, taking everything in.
“All that looks new,” he said. “Must be for the Burgundians.”
“Alamanni. Chulderic said the Alamanni were on the march.”
“Aye, but didn’t he say at the same time that the Burgundians were causing him more trouble than the Alamanni ever had? Whichever’s right, he’s gone to a power of trouble to deter one or both of them. I wouldn’t like to be the attacking commander responsible for capturing that place now. Once that bridge goes up, there’s no way of getting it down again if the defenders don’t want you to.”
I had been staring at the bridge as he spoke, having recognized it as a masterpiece of defensive engineering from earlier times, one of the great Roman drawbridges. I had heard of such devices from my tutors at the Bishop’s School and had examined ancient drawings and plans for building them, but I had never seen a real one, and now I wondered who had designed and built this one.
Even from where we sat on the hill’s crest gazing at it, and even through the drifting curtains of heavy rain, I could see that it was solid and massive, the bridge deck itself roughly thirty paces in length and fashioned of long, straight logs carefully selected for their uniform size and thickness. They had then been hand sawn, lengthwise, and squared so their sides would fit together, after which they had been covered with a layer of thick, heavy planking set crosswise and secured in place with heavy metal spikes. But that was merely the smallest and least important part of the construction. A drawbridge, no matter how soundly built the bridge deck might be, was completely useless if it could not be raised and lowered, and therein lay the challenge of construction. The end of the bridge on our side of the great ditch overlapped the edge of the excavation by several paces and fitted into a deep channel that had been carefully dug to accommodate its thickness and to bring its surface level with the ground. The far end, however, on the castle side, was very different.
The bridge deck there terminated a good ten paces, perhaps even fifteen paces, beyond the edge of the ditch in what appeared to be a high, blank wall of stone, so that traffic crossing the ditch had to turn sharply right at that point, immediately veering again to enter the protection of the curtain wall that shielded the approach to the main gates. Halfway between the edge of the ditch and the wall at the end of the bridge deck, however, a huge log, two long paces in diameter, had been carefully sunk across the approach and firmly anchored into the ground above the narrow edge of a long, deep pit, the high, vertical sides of which had been lined with logs to guard against subsidence. The pit had originally been dug as a sawpit for the dressing and shaping of the enormous matched logs that formed the foundation of the bridge deck, but it had been sited in that specific spot to serve another, more enduring purpose: the log across the end of the pit, between it and the ditch, was the fulcrum of the bridge, and the blank wall at the bridge end was merely the front surface of a massive counterweight that made it possible for the drawbridge to be raised and lowered with the help of an intricate system of windlasses and pulley hoists. The counterweight itself comprised several thick sheets of iron, hand riveted and bolted to the thick beams of the bridge deck’s end and then surmounted with great squared blocks of solid granite that were secured to the metal plates in turn by welded straps of iron a handspan wide and a thumb’s width thick. When the bridge was raised, the counterweighted end sank into the pit. Twin towers of massive logs flanked the pit right and left and contained the system of giant windlasses and torsion brakes that enabled crews of men to raise and lower the bridge by means of pulleys and enormous chains of iron links.
“You’re right,” I said belatedly. “Once that bridge is up, there’s no way across. The place is impregnable.”
“Aye. So what will you do if your brother Gunthar’s seized it?”
“He is my cousin, not my brother.”
“Cousin, brother, makes no difference to my question. What if he has taken the place?”
“He hasn’t.” I pointed to where a military standard was visible on the highest peak of the battlements above the main gate. “That’s still King Ban’s standard.”
He squinted at it. “How can you tell? It’s a length of soaked, bedraggled fabric beneath a Roman eagle standard on a staff. That’s all I can see, through this rain. It could be anyone’s.”
“No, because it’s pale blue and gold. Even wet and dirty, those colors are recognizable. And they’re Ban’s colors. He was always most particular about visible insignia, and he issued personal colors to each of his four sons with much ceremony as they attained manhood. Gunthar’s is pale green with a wide yellow border; Samson’s is two broad lateral bars, scarlet and white; Theuderic’s is bright yellow with a broad diagonal band of black, from right to left; and Brach’s is blue and white vertical stripes. Had Gunthar moved to usurp the kingship, his green-and-yellow banner would be hanging up there now.”
“Perhaps he forgot to change it. Could he do that, forget such a thing?”
I glanced at him, wondering if he was being facetious, but then I shrugged. “Gunthar is not the kind of man who forgets details of that kind. Appearances are everything to him, which is part of his particular … charm. You’ll understand when you meet him. What Gunthar chooses to show you and what you actually see are seldom the same thing.” I turned again to look at the rain-drenched blue-and-gold standard on the walls and shook my head, this time more decisively. “No, had Gunthar taken over already, he would want everyone to know it—immediately—and one of the most obvious ways to achieve that would be to hoist his standard, his colors, above his fortress for all to see.”
“He sounds like a wonderful fellow,” my companion drawled. “But speaking of things that are there for all to see, there’s not much to see here at all, is there? Were it not for that cluster of guards above the main gate there, I would have thought this place was deserted.”
I looked again, at the walls this time rather than at the bridge. There were some guards above the main gate, as he had said, but there was no one else in sight, and the so-called guards had not yet seen us, although we had been there long enough to examine their new defenses in detail. I felt a kick of sudden misgivings stir in my gut and sat straighter in the saddle, taking up the slack in my reins.
“You’re right. They’re too few, and negligent. They have not even looked in this direction since we arrived. We had better get down there.” I kicked my horse into motion and heard, rather than saw, Ursus’s mount fall into line behind me, and all the way from there to the final approach to the bridge I kept my eyes fastened on the men above the main gates.
They finally noticed us when less than sixty paces separated us from the end of the bridge, and then there was a startled flurry of movement, accompanied by a high-pitched challenge. I ignored it completely and kept moving, headed for the bridge deck, and the challenge was repeated. I called to Ursus to follow me and put my horse to the gallop, covering the intervening space in what seemed like a mere instant before I was listening to the thundering of our hooves on the wooden deck. A solitary arrow zipped past me
, missing me by several paces before it disappeared in the muddy bottom of the ditch. As soon as we were across the bridge and safe in the shadow of the castle walls, concealed from further fire by the curtain wall in front of us and the overhang of the battlements on our left, I pulled my horse to a halt and we waited for the arrival of the defenders of the castle. Moments later we heard the main gates behind the curtain wall creak open and then came a rush of feet as the “guard” came running to confront us.
They spilled around the edge of the curtain wall and swept back toward us, surrounding us and brandishing swords and spears, all of them shouting at once so that no word of what they were saying could be heard. I sat motionless, my weapons clearly sheathed and untouched, my arms folded across my chest. Ursus, I knew, was doing the same, watching me sidelong and following my lead in everything.
I knew we were in very real danger, particularly since it now appeared that there was no one really in charge here. Any one of these people might decide at any moment to end this situation and make a hero of himself by cutting us down to annul the insult we had offered them by penetrating their defenses so easily. I did not dare to move, for fear of provoking a murderous response. But then came a bellowing roar from another voice behind the curtain wall, and around the corner lurched a man I recognized, albeit with great difficulty and only after scrutinizing him for some time.
It was my old childhood friend Clodio, who, for as long as I could remember, had been in charge of the standing guard at the castle gates. Ever an outwardly bad-tempered, loudmouthed blusterer, Clodio had always been more bark than bite, and he had taken a liking to me when I was a mere toddler staggering about the courtyard with a bare bottom. Throughout my childhood he had treated me with respect and a special consideration due, I now knew, to the fact that he was one of the few who knew the secret of my true parentage. King Ban and he had been boyhood friends and comrades in arms for many years, saving each other’s lives on several occasions, and in consequence he had always enjoyed the King’s special favor in times of peace, although, for some reason no one had ever defined or even divined, he had steadfastly refused to accept advancement beyond what he himself had decided was his natural station. Clodio, if ever I met one, was a man who had always been content and well pleased with his life, confident in himself and in the friendship, loyalty, and high regard of his king. It once amused me to think of the King as being loyal to Clodio, but it was simple truth, and Clodio’s loyalty to the King was so much a part of him that no one would ever have seriously thought to question it.