The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  The young woman’s name was Rosalyn, and she was the most beautiful proof of the existence of God that I had ever seen, because logic dictated beyond dispute that perfection such as hers could not exist had God not shaped it personally with His own hands. She was tall and lithe and lissome and lovely, with a wide, laughing mouth and a neck like a swan’s. Our love was pure, for two simple reasons: we never had any opportunity to make it otherwise; and I never found the courage to profess my love to her.

  So abjectly did I fail in finding that courage, in fact, that I could barely summon up sufficient nerve to sit in the same room with her and listen to her laughing and talking with her friends. It would have been impossible for me to sit at her feet and talk to her the way I saw other young men doing so effortlessly, making her laugh and singing to her. I could never have found the courage to do that. And yet I know she was aware of me, and she always had a warm and friendly smile for me, and frequently she spoke to me, although only for a short time after we first met. Whenever she did speak to me or ask me a question, I would be overcome with shyness and would stutter and stammer and blush with shame and confusion and frustration. And so, out of kindness, I believe, she stopped addressing me directly.

  She was a new arrival to Benwick, I learned within moments of having seen her for the first time. Her father was a merchant of some description and traveled widely. I heard that, and I knew it, and yet I failed somehow to understand that she was likely to move on again as quickly as she had arrived. And so she did, after a month-long stay, and I was devastated. One morning she was simply gone, with her entire family, and no one could tell me where they had gone to, or even which branch of the crossroads they might have taken. Inconsolable, I took to riding off alone and spending days on end in the woods, living on birds and small animals that I had shot or snared.

  I had been out for three days on one such occasion and had spent an entire morning fishing bare-handed for trout basking in deep holes beneath river stones before I caught a truly magnificent specimen, scooping it out of the water and throwing it high onto the bank behind me. As I turned to go and collect my prize, the sun struck me square in the face, dazzling me sufficiently to allow me to see only the shape of a tall man suddenly looming above me, his shoulder blocking part of the sun’s orb so that he was thrown into silhouette. Cursing, I scrabbled to one side, clutching for the dagger in my belt, but as I unsheathed it and surged to my feet I was aware of my assailant moving, and then an arm closed around my neck from behind, a strong hand clamped tightly over my wrist, and a familiar voice spoke into my ear.

  “Hey, be still! My only thought in coming here was that you might have food enough for both of us.”

  It was Ursus and I almost fainted with relief, but instead I kicked backward, hooking one foot behind his ankle, and pulled him down with me as I fell.

  Afterward, when we had stopped wrestling and laughing in our enjoyment of meeting again, I went in search of the enormous trout I had thrown up onto the bank behind me. I found it twitching in the last stages of expiry, its skin covered with leaves and dry grass, and turned back to brandish it at Ursus, finding him brushing the crushed grass and leaves from his clothing.

  “Food enough for both, as you requested. Why don’t you start a fire while I clean this, and then you can tell me what brings you here.”

  It was another half hour before he set aside the bowl from which he had been eating and pulled himself to sit upright, facing the fire.

  “What brings me here. Isn’t that what you asked? Well, I suppose you did. I came to visit you, since I knew you were nearby.”

  “But you’re supposed to be in Carcasso.”

  “I was, and now I am not. I’ve had enough of Carcasso.”

  “Was Duke Lorco there when you got home?”

  “No, he wasn’t. And not a word’s been heard about him. You and I may be the last two living people to have seen him alive. Because he’s dead now. Not a doubt of that in my mind. He’s dead, long since. Probably since the day he vanished ahead of us.”

  “He wasn’t very good, was he?”

  Ursus glanced at me quickly, tilting his head. “What d’you mean, good? As a soldier? Is that what you mean?” He made a face that managed to be noncommittal. “He wasn’t any worse than a number I’ve served under. He was a fair man, Lorco, reasoned in his judgments and quite likable for a military commander. But he was sloppy. Lax. And that was reflected in his command. That’s the reason we got jumped, in our little hunting party. Duke Lorco never worried too much about sending out scouts or outriders, so neither did his people. Mind you, he never really needed to, until the very end when he did need to, and by then it was too late to change old habits. It cost him dearly. Us, too.”

  Ursus snorted and spat. “I made my report to the appropriate authorities when I got back and everybody listened very carefully and made appreciative noises, but I could tell nobody really cared, one way or the other. Lorco had been gone for six months and more by then and his replacement was well settled in and quite happy with his situation.

  “Still, appearances had to be preserved, and so they sent me out again, at the head of a search party of a hundred troopers, to retrace our route one more time and make every effort to discover what had happened to the Duke and his party … .

  “Of course it was futile, but I knew that going in and so I didn’t exactly rupture myself searching under every stone. The invading troops, whoever they might have been, were long vanished by the time we got back, and so we were able to travel quickly, but we stopped and asked questions at every stage along the way and we learned absolutely nothing. Didn’t even find a single soul who remembered seeing them south of the point where we lost them. We found a few who could remember the party heading north, but nobody, anywhere, saw them coming back until we reached the points north of where the Duke and his people vanished. The people up there remembered seeing him coming and going, but that was when we were still with him.

  “It took us a month, but by the end of that time we had established that the Duke had vanished and would not be coming home again.”

  “So what did you do then, once you were sure of that?”

  Ursus picked up his bowl again and scooped some wood ash into it, after which he began to scour it with a cloth from his belt. “We moved on, up to Treves and the military headquarters there. Lorco had been expected to return there some time earlier, I had to tell them what had happened and that the Duke would not be coming back. We stayed in Treves for a time, but no more than a few weeks, since we didn’t belong to any unit there, and then we headed back south for Carcasso, where we disbanded. None of us felt very uplifted by what we had failed to achieve, I can tell you, but I was the only one of us after that without an employer. With Lorco officially dead, I had no real paymaster and I detested the pipsqueak who had taken over Lorco’s position.

  “I hired myself out eventually to another commander, since a man has to eat, but I was bored with the life and bored with the work, policing taverns and throwing drunks who might have been me into the cells beneath the civic center. That’s no fit work for a soldier.”

  He looked at me and grinned his white-toothed, wolfish grin. “So I decided to move on, in search of greener pastures, and here I am. I was mere miles away, heading north again, and decided on the merest whim to veer west and see what you’ve been up to, so now it’s your turn.” He leaned back and made himself more comfortable, crossing his ankles and clasping his hands behind his head, his smile still in place. “Speak to me, boy!”

  Overjoyed to see him sitting across from me again, for I had honestly believed his friendship gone from my life forever, I told him all about the momentous things that had happened since he and I had parted months earlier. He had heard nothing about Gunthar’s War since leaving Benwick, and I found that close to unbelievable at first, although when I thought about it afterward, in the context of the times in which we were then living, it became less so. From a distance of surprisingly
few miles away, the upheaval of Gunthar’s War appeared to be little more than a messy family squabble.

  That he had heard nothing about our little war, however, also meant that Ursus had heard nothing of the death of my cousin Samson or of the ascension of Brach to the King’s chair. I told him about those things first, and then went on to describe as much as I could remember of the conduct of the war, surprising myself more than him by the paucity of detail I was able to recall. Only after that, and having answered all his questions, did I permit myself to move on to talk about my own thoughts and deliberations since the war had ended. Once launched on that topic, however, I went into great detail about all that I had considered and about my decision to avenge the murder of my parents and my grandfather, and to reclaim my father’s kingdom from the usurper Clodas.

  When I finally ran out of words, Ursus sat silent, staring into the distance. I wanted to speak his name, to ask him what he thought and if he would come with me to help me claim my birthright, but I had sufficient wit to know that he would speak when he was ready and not until then, and that if I spoke to him too soon I might interrupt his train of thought and defeat my own wishes. And so I held myself in peace, with great effort.

  “All this thinking you’ve been doing,” he said eventually. “Where does Germanus enter into it?”

  I blinked at him. “Germanus?”

  “Aye, Germanus. You remember him, don’t you? He’s a bishop, up in Auxerre, to the north.”

  I felt my face reddening, not merely at his sarcastic tone but in instant recognition of my own stupidity. But Ursus had not finished.

  “Auxerre is far closer to where you wish to be than Benwick is. It’s almost within spitting distance of Ganis. It is certainly within attack range. So Germanus will probably be more able to help you gain your ends than Brach. Brach has promised to lend you men to help you win back your kingdom, and I don’t doubt he will, but how many men can he afford to send out now, in view of the losses he has sustained? Germanus has the reputation of a warrior, even though he is a saintly bishop nowadays. His blessing upon your expedition would bring out followers in their hundreds. I would be prepared to wager on that. So, if Germanus blesses you with his support, then he will probably also be willing to make arrangements that would enable Brach to reinforce you by sea, say from Massilia to Lutetia, navigating upriver from the western coast. I’d venture to say that would be a more attractive prospect to Brach than sending his horsemen off on an overland expedition that could weaken his home defenses for months on end. Don’t forget, Brach knows how easily Duke Lorco disappeared with all his men.”

  I nodded, albeit unwillingly, and mulled over his words for a while before looking at him again. “What should I do, then?”

  He shrugged. “Decide on nothing until you’ve met with Germanus. He’ll know what you should do and he’ll have no difficulty explaining it to you. Leave word with Brach that you’ll send word to him with one of Germanus’s priests about your future plans. You’re almost seventeen, Clothar, not forty-seven, so you should have plenty of time to plan correctly and plan carefully. No need to go charging off to meet your destiny before you catch your breath.”

  And so it was that I bade farewell to my family and friends easily and in good faith, and once again set out to travel north to the ancient town of Auxerre and the Bishop’s School that waited there.

  BOOK THREE

  HOLY MEN AND SORCERERS

  VII

  BISHOP GERMANUS

  AS WE APPROACHED the walls of the bishop’s town of Auxerre, Ursus remarked on how peaceful it was, but I could hear the ingrained skepticism in his voice even as he said the words. One of the first lessons a mercenary ever learns, he had told me long before, is that outward semblances of peacefulness hold no guarantees of harmony or tranquility. An arrow can strike you just as dead, just as quickly, from an idyllic setting of calm as it can amid the seething anthill of a battlefield.

  It was an afternoon in the middle of an autumn that had not yet stopped being summer, and the trees in central Gaul had barely begun to yellow. We were riding slowly, enjoying the heat of the late-afternoon sunshine and feeling no great need to cause ourselves discomfort by hurrying unduly. Ahead of us the western and southern walls of the town that was our destination crested the shoulders of a high hill and met on the summit, their junction fortified by the defensive thrust of a square guard tower. Ursus reined his horse in tightly.

  “You know,” he said, sounding intensely frustrated, “that tower is about as useless as nipples on a bull.” He glared over at me as if expecting me to argue with him. “I mean, if I’ve ever seen a more stupid, witless place to build a defensive tower, I don’t know where it was. Who would ever mount an attack up there, I ask you? No matter what side you attack from, you would have to carry every bit of gear, every ladder, every heavy weapon up there with you, and once you’re up there, you’d still be looking up at the tower, inviting them to throw things down at you.”

  I was grinning at him, knowing he was nowhere close to being as angry as he was pretending to be. “That’s true,” I said. “But then, if they hadn’t built that tower up there, there would be nothing to prevent an enemy from climbing up the hill and scaling those walls, perhaps even while another attack was happening lower down. That would—”

  “Shsst!” He held up his palm to silence me. “Listen. What’s that?”

  I had heard something, too. I cocked my head to the south, listening intently, and heard it again—the distant but unmistakable clack and clatter of wooden training swords. “Someone’s fighting, over there.”

  Ursus had already spurred his mount and I followed him, angling down the slight slope and to his right in order to catch up with him, and together, knee to knee, we rounded the base of the hillside and galloped into a shallow valley. I realized immediately what was going on and waved Ursus down as I reined my horse in gently, slowing him to a canter.

  “It’s my old teacher,” I told Ursus. “Tiberias Cato. That’s him, up there on the hillock, supervising sword training. On days like this he often brings his classes out here, away from the school and from the town. I used to love it when he brought us here. It always felt as though we had escaped for the afternoon.”

  As we drew nearer to where Cato stood on the summit of his tiny knoll, I counted twelve boys gathered around him, all of them now listening intently to what he was saying and ignoring our approach completely, which was purely unnatural. The sight of it made me smile, remembering that even on those few occasions when whatever Cato had to say was boring, you never dared to show that you were less than enthralled by what he was telling you, and you never, ever looked away in search of diversion … not if you wished your life to continue being bearable.

  But then, when we were perhaps a hundred paces distant, Cato himself turned his head to peer at us, then turned back to his class and continued speaking. Moments later, the boys all came to attention and saluted, then in unison began to walk back toward the town gates, traveling in pairs and walking unhurriedly and with dignity as befitted representatives of Bishop Germanus and his associates. Tiberias Cato watched us pull our horses to a halt in front of him.

  “Clothar,” he said. “You finally return. Be welcome.” His eyes moved to Ursus, sweeping him from head to toe. “And you are?”

  “Magister,” I interposed, “this is my friend Ursus, which is a shortened form of Ursus the Bear-killer. Ursus, this is the teacher of whom you have heard me speak so often, Magister Tiberias Cato.”

  Ursus nodded graciously to Cato. “Master Cato,” he murmured, “I feel as though I know you well already, simply from what I have learned of your teachings.”

  “My thanks to you, Master Ursus, for your courtesy.” Cato threw me a sidewise glance, on the point of making some biting comment, I was sure, but he held it back and invited us to dismount and walk with him. As I slid to the ground, I saw how his eyes flicked to the hilt of the sheathed spatha by my side. I brought myself to at
tention and unclipped the sword from the ring at my belt, and held it out to him, wordlessly. He took it from me with both hands, the fingers of his right hand fitting around the hilt with the ease of long usage, then drew the blade halfway from its sheath, bringing it up close to his eyes to inspect the edge. Finally he pushed the blade home and looked at me.

  “I thought this had been lost long since, with Phillipus Lorco … and you, too, for a long time. How came you by it?”

  Quickly I told him of the trap that had been sprung on us, describing how I had seen my friend Lorco die, and went on to relate how I had later found Lorco’s horse with the spatha still hanging from its saddle. “So now it is my pleasure to return it to you, Magister.”

  His eyes widened and he thrust the weapon back into my hands. “Return nothing. The sword is yours.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, appraising me carefully. “You have aged, boy. You have grown up and changed—for the better, I hope. Does the prospect of fighting and warfare still excite you as it used to?”

  I saw no benefit in lying to him, and I shook my head gently. “No, Magister,” I said quietly. “That admiration and the yearning for such things wither quickly when men begin to die around you. I have no urge in me now to fight or go to war again, nor do I think I ever will have such a need again. But if war comes to me”—I shrugged my shoulders—“why then I’ll face it and I’ll deal with it. My thanks to you, Magister, on that score, even although they are belated.”