The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  He pulled his horse into a rearing turn and sank his spurs into its flanks, and as he and his two fellows disappeared beyond the fringe of trees in the distance I realized for the first time that Gunthar’s War was over. It had happened very suddenly and very tamely, with the death of single man from natural causes, but it had caused as much carnage and grief and misery as any other war during its brief existence.

  I stood there for what felt like a long time after Tulach’s departure, staring toward the point where he had entered the distant trees and been lost to my sight. Gunthar was dead and the war was over. The knowledge was there in my mind, as was my acceptance of it, but I had yet to feel the impact of its meaning. Gunthar was dead. There was something outrageous about that, something obscene in the casual, matter-of-fact banality of it. One of Bishop Germanus’s favorite sayings came into my mind, and I heard his voice repeating it sonorously: In the midst of life we are in death. I knew what it meant, knew that it was a warning to humankind of how tenuous their hold on life really is, but I knew too that it was a ludicrous commentary in this case, because we here in Benwick had been living for months in the midst of death. And now Gunthar was dead, casually gone, snuffed out like a flame in a draft. Vanished.

  And as my thoughts moved on to all the other deaths he had occasioned in his brief, demented passion, I grew angrier than I had ever been before—angry at Gunthar for having died so selfishly and dismally, depriving me of the pleasure of killing him with my own hands and avoiding the vengeance of the many thousands he had wronged and betrayed. I found that I was angry at God, too, for permitting such a grossly indecent fiasco to take place … so many lives lost and squandered so needlessly when the executioner was fated to collapse and die in his own blood and effluent and at the intervention of no one.

  Another of the Bishop’s sayings came to my mind. Sic transit gloria mundi … the glories of this world pass quickly … Gunthar, the arch-enemy, sprawled, befouled by his own wastes, in front of a dead fire, his blood-filled eyes glaring from a blackened face. Seeing him there, in my mind’s eye, I began eventually to think that perhaps, perhaps, there was a justice and a kind of vengeance implicit in the manner of his being struck down while in a fit of rage. But I had no impulse to forgive God for the wasted, blighted lives he had permitted the madman to effect.

  Later, I know not how much later, I hawked and spat and turned to walk back across the drawbridge and into the castle. No one had sought to disturb my solitary vigil and no one made any attempt now to intercept or interrupt me as I made my way back to my bed and my interrupted sleep.

  The suddenness of the war’s end threw me completely off balance, changing my life instantly from one filled with chaotic urgencies and burgeoning despair into one in which I had nothing substantial to do, and all the time in the world to dedicate to not doing it. We were aware that there had been Burgundian invasions to the north of our lands, but no evidence of any threat to us in Benwick had materialized, and so we paid no attention to anything outside our own boundaries and were content to wallow in the lethargy that settled suddenly upon those of us who had been most heavily involved in the fighting. The experience could have been a damaging one—I can see that clearly now with the assistance of hindsight—but before I had the opportunity to drift into any set pattern of idle behavior, I recalled a comment that Ursus had made months earlier, during our long journey to the south, on a day when we had been forced to go out of our way and make a wide and difficult detour to avoid a large bear with three cubs.

  The sow had settled herself, with her trio of charges, by the side of a mountain river that swept in close at one point—a matter of several paces—to the edge of the narrow path we had been following through difficult, hilly terrain for two days. We saw her fishing in the white water of the rushing stream just as the last stretch of the downhill pathway swooped down from where we were to the riverside where her cubs tussled with each other by the water’s edge, still too small and too young to brave the current. It would have been folly to attempt to pass them by unseen, and we had no desire to kill the creatures, so we had muffled our curses and cursed our misfortune and scrambled painfully upward, leading our horses slowly and with great difficulty, high and hard, scaling the steep hillside with much muttering and grumbling until we reached the summit and were faced with the even greater task of making our way back down again in safety toward the narrow, well-trodden path that was our sole way out of the hills in the direction we were heading.

  We had made the ascent in something more than an hour, but it took us three times that long to go back down again, because of our horses and the need to find a route they would accept. In the late afternoon, however, looking down from high above the path we had left that morning, we saw it choked with Burgundian warriors heading directly toward the sow and her cubs, and we knew beyond doubt that, had it not been for the animals, we would have blundered directly into these people and probably died there.

  That experience had seduced Ursus into a philosophical frame of mind for the remainder of that day, and he had said something to the effect that God sometimes throws us valuable gifts disguised as uncommon and annoying nuisances. The memory of that occasion, coming when it did, made me look at my sudden idleness as a gift of time in which to take stock of my life. After ten consecutive days, however, during which I did nothing at all, other than to think deeply about who I was becoming and what I had achieved, I found myself not only unable to arrive at any clear decisions about my life, but not even able to define any new perspectives on which to base decisions. And this despite the fact that I knew there were decisions I must make.

  Discouraged by the entire exercise and feeling both foolish and inadequate, I went to Brach and apologized for what I was sure he must see as my laziness and lack of attention to duty in the days that had passed. When I told him I had been thinking, however, instead of being as angry at me as I had expected him to be, Brach laughed and asked me if I knew what I had been searching for. When I merely blinked at him and told him I had no idea, he laughed even more and told me to go away somewhere and think further, and at greater length, this time in isolation and free of all distraction. Once I had arrived at some kind of conclusion about what I wanted, I was to come back and tell him.

  I took him at his word and did as he suggested, and this time, as he had indicated I might, I came to terms with something that had been troubling me without my being really aware of it. I would be seventeen years old on my next birthday, which meant that Clodas of Ganis-had been ruling in my father’s stead, unchallenged, for that length of time, and my parents were still unavenged.

  I was a man now, I realized, fully grown and very different from the boy who had traveled south from Auxerre mere months earlier, and all the impediments to my ability to seek my vengeance had been removed by the simple passing of time. Now Brach was King of Benwick and I had proved my loyalty to him, time and again. I had little doubt that he would demonstrate his loyalty to me by rewarding me with an escort of warriors to help me to reclaim my own throne in Ganis.

  I returned to seek Brach out, filled with enthusiasm, and to his credit, he made me welcome and honored his promise to listen to whatever might have emerged from all my thinking. That evening, after the main meal, he dismissed all his attendants so that the two of us could be alone while he listened closely to everything I had to say. When I had finished speaking, however, instead of leaping to his feet and wishing me well as I had anticipated he would, my cousin, in his new role as King Brach, sat silent, musing and nodding his head. Impatient as I was to gain his consent and blessing for the expedition I was planning, I nonetheless saw that he had more on his mind than I knew about and so I disciplined myself to sit in silence and wait for the cousin who was now my King to arrive at a decision.

  Brach did not keep me waiting long. He rose quickly to his feet and began to pace back and forth in front of me, talking more volubly and fluently than I had ever heard him speak in all the time I had known
him.

  He knew my intentions concerning Clodas of Ganis, he told me, and he remembered and acknowledged his father’s promise to assist me in bringing the usurper to justice for the slaughter of my family. That would happen, he told me, and he promised that I would be well supported by warriors from Benwick when the time came for me to march against Clodas. Now, however—and he asked me very graciously to try to see this situation from his viewpoint—was not the time.

  Were I to strike out northward now as was my right, he told me, Benwick would not be able to offer me any assistance in my quest. As King of Benwick, he was now constrained by the same concerns that had beset his father, Ban, years earlier, in that he had a domain to govern and a people to serve and sustain and feed, and both kingdom and people were ravaged, weakened, and depleted by war. The hostilities were ended, certainly, but now the entire kingdom had to be rebuilt and returned to its former condition of wealth and strength. He looked me straight in the eye at that point and told me there was a task for me here in Benwick, and that if I would accept it, he would undertake to equip me, once it was completed, with the men and resources I would need to press my campaign against Clodas in the north.

  I found no difficulty in seeing things from his newly acquired viewpoint and agreeing that his suggestions were both sensible and worthwhile. Clodas had spent seventeen years in ignorance of the fact that he would die at my hand, and I saw no great hindrance to my plans in permitting him to live a little longer while I attended to other duties. And so I threw myself into rebuilding the affairs and the welfare of our little kingdom—although it seemed anything but little to me at that time—as wholeheartedly as I had committed myself to the war that had ravaged it. Rebuilding, however, meant in this instance exactly what it said, and it involved the physical labor of working side by side with the ordinary people of Benwick, most of them farmers, reerecting the buildings—and sometimes that meant entire villages—that had been destroyed or damaged during the conflict. It was brutal and difficult work, but greatly satisfying in that the results achieved were plainly visible, and somehow another three months slipped by while I sweated and strained and labored with my hands just as painfully and exhaustingly as any farmer who ever cleared a patch of land by cutting and uprooting trees.

  I had seen my Aunt Vivienne several times since my uncle’s death, but not often and not with any kind of regularity, and although she invariably treated me with great kindness on those occasions when we did meet, it was plain for me to see that the special relationship I had enjoyed with her during my childhood had faded and been forgotten by her. She had become an old woman in the meantime, as Brach had warned me, and the traumatic events of the brief war between her sons had greatly affected her.

  It was Aunt Vivienne, nevertheless, who first reminded me, after Gunthar’s War, that I had promised Germanus I would return to Auxerre, and on that single occasion there was nothing at all about her, either in appearance or demeanor, to suggest that she was in any way less in command of herself and her emotions than she had ever been. On the contrary, she struck me as being very much in command of herself and completely recovered in every way from the outrages perpetrated upon her well-being by her husband’s firstborn son. I had met her by accident that day, passing through an open area within the castle walls on my way to meet Brach. The sun was shining and the air was balmy, and my aunt was sitting alone in a sunny area in one corner of the enclosed yard, near to where I was passing. I had not. seen her at all before she called my name, because I was distracted by my own thoughts, my mind full of the things I had to tell Brach in the course of the brief meeting I had been able to arrange with him, and when I heard her voice, close to me and completely unexpected, it brought me up short, so that I had to grapple with my surprise before I could say anything sensible.

  “Aunt Vivienne! What are you doing here?” That wondrous question popped out before I could contain it, and it betrayed the depth of my momentary confusion.

  My aunt smiled at me warmly, disconcerting me even further. “I live here, Clothar. This is my home. What else need I be doing, other than being here?”

  Her gentle irony brought me to my senses and I felt the blood flushing my cheeks. “Forgive me, Aunt Vivienne,” I muttered, embarrassed without reason. “I simply had not—”

  “—expected to find me here,” she completed my thought, smiling again. “Well, I felt no surprise, because I was sitting here thinking about you when you walked through the gateway over there.”

  “You were thinking about me? But—” She gave me no reason to embarrass myself further, however, for with both hands she was already holding up an unrolled papyrus. “This is a letter from Germanus, from Auxerre. It was delivered to me yesterday by a traveling priest who carried it from Lugdunum. It was written some time ago, I fear, and he had only then heard of … of the death of the King.” I had noticed, as we all had, that since her husband’s death, Queen Vivienne—she bore the honorific still, at the specific wish of her son Brach—had not spoken Ban’s name, referring to him only as the King. Now I merely noted her use of the term but otherwise ignored it completely, along with the hesitation that had preceded it, and she continued. “The purpose of his letter was of course to express his sympathy and condolences on our loss, and he described for me some of his oldest and fondest memories of the times he and … the King spent together. He is a wonderful writer, you know. But before he finished his letter he wrote at some length about you, and about the plans he has for you.” At that point, very much the Queen I remembered, she paused and tilted her head to one side, as though reconsidering me from some new viewpoint.

  “I read all the correspondence you brought from Germanus when you first arrived, you know.” I raised my eyebrows politely but said nothing and she went on. “Chulderic took charge of it, of course, when the King died, but he brought it directly to me before allowing anyone else to read it, and I read it all and even absorbed it … . I suppose God in His mercy had buffered me at that point from the full realization of what had happened, but He nonetheless permitted me to read and understand what the Bishop had to say. And then I, in my turn, passed the information on to Samson, who had become king by then, and now Brach has it all.”

  Again she paused, and pursed her lips, and this time her head tilted in the other direction. “You must have done very well in school, because the Bishop speaks very highly of you, both in this letter and in the first missives you brought down to us, and it appeared to me in reading all he had to say that he has great things and high-flown tasks in mind for you. But he mentioned most particularly in this letter that you had promised him, before you left Auxerre, that you would return once your errand to the King was complete. Do you recall that promise?”

  As she asked the question, she released her grip on one side of the letter and the papyrus snapped shut, curling itself into the rolled shape it had been in for the duration of its long journey from Auxerre to here. I nodded in response, feeling my breast fill up with dismay, for I had been working assiduously to avoid remembering that promise, made first to Germanus and then reiterated to King Ban before he died, and I had almost been able to convince myself that Ban’s death had changed everything and absolved me of the need to be true to what I promised. Almost, however, is an indeterminate and unconvincing word and in the meantime the Queen was watching me closely, waiting for me to answer. I cleared my throat and answered her quietly. “Yes, Aunt,” I said. “I remember making the promise, but—”

  “I am glad of that,” she interjected, giving me no opportunity to add to my admission, almost as though she wished to run no risk of hearing me attempt to renege on anything. “Because the Bishop was most emphatic that I should remind you of it. He is aware of how much must have changed in your life, he says, with the death of the King … your uncle … . But it is even more important now, he believes, more important than ever, that you return to Auxerre. He entreated me most specifically to tell you that, and to add my voice to his own in urgin
g you to return north.”

  She stopped short, eyeing me resolutely as though defying me to disagree. “You will return there, will you not?”

  I had no other option than to nod my head in agreement. “Yes, Aunt Vivienne, I will. But not until my tasks here are complete. I promised Brach that I would not head northward until I had completed the assignment he set me.” I saw no need to add that in heading northward I had been talking of marching against Clodas and Ganis.

  “What assignment was that?”

  I had half expected her to ask me that and I was ready. “The task of rebuilding Benwick.”

  “Rebuilding Benwick?” The beginnings of her old smile flickered at her lips and I felt a rush of love for her and for the Lady Vivienne I remembered. “A Herculean labor, surely, for a man as young as you? I have heard that you are a born leader and a mighty warrior, but a kingdom rebuilder? Are you to rebuild all of it?”

  “Well, no,” I answered, feeling, foolish, knowing she was twitting me. “Not all of it. I am not doing it alone. But I did promise, and I am not quite done.”

  “And when you are? Done, I mean?”

  “Then I shall return to the north, my Lady, to Auxerre and the Bishop.”

  She inclined her head graciously. “Then thank you, Nephew Clothar, for that. Now help me to my feet, if it please you.” She reached out imperiously and I stepped forward to take her hand and help her to her feet, where she continued to clutch my fingers as she leaned forward to peer into my face. “You look much like your father,” she murmured. “But you still have your mother’s hair and brows. Now, if you would, you may walk me to my chambers.” I was honored, and walking with my back straight and my shoulders squared, very conscious of her hand resting lightly on my forearm, I led my aunt, the former Queen of Benwick, slowly into the castle and eventually up the long, sweeping staircase to the suite of rooms she had shared for so many years with her husband the King. And yet, walking proudly as I did, I nonetheless felt a tiny squirming of guilt in my gut over the reasons I had given for not returning to Auxerre immediately. I had told my aunt no lies, but I had greatly exaggerated the extent of the few responsibilities I still owed to Brach, because the simple truth was that I had no desire at all to leave Genava. I had fallen in love for the first time in my life and was completely enthralled.