The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  It was a measure of my own growth in the months that had passed recently, however, that I saw him as a boy, although the fact that I was looking at him through a man’s eyes did not occur to me until much later.

  “You sent for me, Magister.”

  “Aye, I did,” Cato growled. “And I thank you for coming.” He ignored the slight quirk of the eyebrow that was the boy’s only response to his sarcasm. “You know Clothar of Benwick, I am sure. He is visiting us for a short time before leaving on a mission set for him by Bishop Germanus.”

  Bors looked directly at me for the first time and inclined his head courteously.

  “Of course, I remember him well,” he said, and then to me: “I was there when Stephan Lorco fought you for the Magister’s spatha. You should have won.”

  “I have it here,” I said, tilting the hilt forward for him to see. “I was with Stephan when he was killed in an ambush, and I carry the spatha and use it now in remembrance of him.”

  “Aye, that’s right, Lorco is dead, too, isn’t he?”

  I was left speechless, not so much by the comment as by the tone in which it had been uttered, but Cato had been ready for something of the sort, I think, because his response was immediate.

  “Aye, that’s right, as you say, he is. But Stephan Lorco was killed in battle, doing what he had been trained to do!”

  That was not quite true, for poor Lorco had not even had time to see that we were being attacked, but I kept silent, watching for Bors’s response. He said nothing, however, and his only movement was to bite gently at his upper lip, but I clearly saw the pain that filled his eyes. Cato saw it too, I believe, for he spoke again in a gentler voice.

  “Anyway, as I said, Clothar is leaving on a mission for Bishop Germanus. It will be dangerous, and Clothar is young to be entrusted with such responsibility, but the bishop chose him above all others for the task because he has great faith in this young man, as do we all. Since leaving here, he has fought in a short but brutal civil war in his own lands in Benwick, and has distinguished himself greatly. And he, too, knows what it is to lose close family, his parents first, and then his guardian and two brothers in this recent war. Bishop Germanus thought it might be good for you to speak with him while he is here. I thought so, too, which is why I sent for you. I know not what he might say to you, or even if you wish to speak with him, but here he is, and here you are, and I will leave the two of you alone.”

  “Wait, Magister, if you would,” I said. He had been on the point of turning away but he stopped and looked at me with raised eyebrows. “I would like you to hear what I have to say to Bors.” The boy’s face was now set in resentment. I am not normally impulsive, but I knew I had to speak now what was in my mind and heart, and what was there was newly born in me, completely unconsidered and spontaneous.

  “There is a man in Britain, Bors, two or three years older than I am and therefore less than five years older than you, who will soon be crowned as King of Britannia. His name is Arthur—Arthur Pendragon—and I have been told by the bishop himself that the man commands an army of heavy cavalry the like of which has not been seen since the time of Alexander the Great. Britain is being invaded as I speak, by a tide of different peoples from across the seas to the east of the island. The hordes are drawn to Britain’s wealth since the Roman legions left the island two score years ago. All of them are pagans, and they seem set to destroy God’s Church in Britain and to wipe out all signs of Christianity in the path of their conquest. Arthur Pendragon’s army is the only force that can gainsay them and hurl them back to where they came from.

  “His teacher, a wise and powerful man called Merlyn Britannicus, is a beloved friend to Germanus, and has shaped the new King in much the same fashion as Germanus has trained us, in compassion and decency, but also in military strength, dedicated to the preservation of the laws of God and man and using the full force of his military power to back his convictions. I am to leave for Britain within the days ahead, carrying missives to Merlyn and to the Christian bishops of the land, bidding them rally to Arthur’s support and to mobilize the earthly powers of God’s Church on behalf of the new king.”

  I drew a deep breath, not daring to look at Cato, and continued. “I will deliver my dispatches to Merlyn, and to the bishops, in accordance with the wishes of Bishop Germanus, and then I may return home to Gaul. But it is in my mind that I like the notion of this new King and his campaign to save his country from the pagan hordes, and so I may stay there, to ride and fight with him, so be it that I like the man as much after meeting him as I now enjoy the idea of what he represents. I’ll take you with me, if the idea pleases you. Will you come?”

  The boy’s eyes were wide with disbelief. Finally, when he realized that we were both gazing at him, waiting for an answer, he gulped breathlessly, then whispered, “Do you—?” He swallowed, but when he spoke again his voice broke into a squeak on the first utterance—quickly mastered, but nonetheless indicative of his youth. “Do you mean that?”

  I glanced at Cato, whose fierce, bushy eyebrows were now riding high on his forehead. “Do I mean that? Mark this, Bors, and mark it clearly. If you do come with me, it will be as my assistant—an extension of your training under my care. I will be the master, you the apprentice. You will not travel as a warrior, or as the equal to myself or my companion Perceval, although in time you may develop into both. For the time being, however, your duties will be onerous and will revolve purely around my needs—my weapons, my armor, my horses, my provisions, and any other requirements I might have. In return, I will be your guardian and your trainer and teacher, in trust for the faith placed in me by Bishop Germanus and Magister Cato here. But I warn you, I will be your master, until such time as you have proved to me that you have progressed beyond the point of needing to be taught.

  “And I warn you, too, incidentally, that you will find few people who will tell you that questioning your master’s honesty and truthfulness is a beneficial or clever way to set out upon such a relationship. This one time, however, I will ignore the slur. Yes, I mean what I say, and you still have not answered me. Will you come with me to Britain?”

  His eyes had filled with tears and for a moment I thought they would spill over, but he blinked them fiercely away and turned apprehensively to Cato, who met his question with an upraised hand. “Don’t come to me for guidance. As the man says, he will take you in trust for Bishop Germanus and myself. If you want to go, I have a horse picked out for you.”

  The young man who walked away from us a short time later still walked with purpose and determination, but there was an air of excitement about him that had not been there when he first arrived.

  “That was … sudden,” Cato said when we were alone again. “Unexpected, but well done, I think. I have the feeling you will not regret your impulsiveness.”

  With Bors dismissed, Cato suggested that I follow him. I never could listen to a suggestion from Cato without hearing an order, and so I rushed to keep up as he walked back toward the camp.

  “That spatha was never meant to be the prize, you know,” he growled. “I suppose I would have gotten around to giving it to you eventually, but I had something else in mind that afternoon. Then you went and fouled everything up by letting Lorco win.”

  He led me into a low hut and into the tiny cubicle that served him as both home and workspace. There he pointed toward the farthest corner, where two sheaves of spears were stored.

  “Those are what you should have won that day,” he said. “Won as a prize, upon the field, they would have been a trophy and would have saved me from the taint of playing favorites by giving them all to you. Now there’s no need to fret over any of that. They’re yours, a gift. Do you remember how to use them?”

  I certainly did. He had brought these strangely strong yet lightweight, delicately shafted spears with him from the land where he had been raised, the land of the Smoke People. Each spear was tipped with a long, tapering, triangular metal head that came to a need
le point and could, when well thrown, penetrate even the finest ring mail. The shafts were of the strange sectional and intensely hard wood that Cato called bambu. They were wondrous weapons, their slight weight and utter straightness permitting them to be thrown with great accuracy by anyone who had perfected the tricks of using them. On its most elemental level, the technique required an aptitude for wrapping the shaft quickly in the coils of a thin leather thong. With the thong gripped in the throwing hand, the hurled spear would begin to spin as the thong unwound, adding to its velocity and force. It was a wonderful weapon, and unique.

  “They weigh next to nothing, but their length makes them awkward to transport,” Cato said. “But that’s why I went to such trouble choosing the boy’s two horses. You can pack one quiver of these on each side of the packhorse and stow the rest of its load around them. You have two bundles there, with just over a score of spears in each. Might seem like a lot, particularly when you’re traveling with them, but it isn’t, believe me. The things are irreplaceable, so every one you lose or break takes you one step closer to having none.”

  Once again I was left fumbling for words by the munificence of such an unexpected gift, and the protests and objections that emerged from my lips sounded inane and self-serving even to me. In response to my witless question about what he would do once he no longer had them in his possession, Tiberias Cato merely smiled and cocked an eyebrow.

  “What will I do without them? Much the same as I have done with them these past twenty years, which is nothing at all. But I’ll have less difficulty in resisting the temptation to use them to rid myself of some of the weaker sisters among our students. I frequently used to imagine myself standing in the middle of the practice ring, picking the slackers right off the backs of their circling mounts. So by taking these out of my reach, you’ll be assuring the future safety of the students. They are yours, Clothar, as is the spatha and the legate’s armor. Use them as we know you can and will, and we’ll make no complaints.

  “Now, let’s go and find something to eat. Young Bors can pick these up for you later.”

  Five days after that conversation, we rode into Lutetia to inquire after Perceval’s brother Tristan, making our way directly to the garrison headquarters, where we were told we would have to speak to the adjutant.

  Perceval, I had decided on the day we left Auxerre, while I was still decidedly drunk with power on the assumption of my new role as mission commander, would no longer be known as Ursus. Now that his father had been dead for more than a decade, I argued, he had no longer any convincing need to conceal his given name and could stand tall as who he was by birth, Perceval of Montenegra. We were embarking upon a new life, I pointed out to him—bound for a new land where no one would ever have heard of Montenegra and where he could, if he so wished, begin a new existence, free of whatever taint he believed had clung to him thus far.

  Ursus had been hugely unimpressed with my idea and my enthusiasm for making it real. Stubborn would not have been too strong a word to describe the strength with which he initially tried to resist it. He had refused even to consider the change at first, let alone accede to it, having been plain Ursus for so long, but he gradually relented under my incessant urging and my indisputable logic, and agreed to a trial—a purely temporary assay of the change—for a period of three months, stipulating only that he would never claim or acknowledge any association with the name of Montenegra, tied irremediably as it was to the memory of his detested father. That, he asserted, would be too much for him to stomach and so I accepted his refusal on that point.

  In due time the adjutant returned, a pleasant fellow with the Roman name of Quintus Leppo, and assured us that no Tristan of Montenegra was recorded in their annals. Before Perceval could voice his disappointment, however, the adjutant volunteered the information that there was, or there had been, a Tristan of Volterra in their ranks until very recently.

  Perceval’s head snapped up on hearing that. Volterra, he had once told me, had been a region in his father’s holdings of Montenegra. Where might we find this Tristan, he wanted to know immediately, and the adjutant asked him why he wished to know. When Perceval said he was his brother and produced the letter he had received, Leppo broke out in smiles and suddenly became a mine of information. Tristan, it transpired, was a close friend of his and still shared lodgings with him on the principal street of the old settlement of Lutetia. He had served out his mercenary contract and was spending some time in retirement now, debating whether to remain in the north or to seek employment for his skills elsewhere.

  Barely an hour after that, we knocked on the door of Tristan’s lodgings and found him at home alone. By the end of that night, after he and his brother between them had drunk more beer and mead than I had ever seen in my life, it was decided that he would ride with us to Britain, sharing his brother’s fortunes and leaving future wealth or penury to the falling of the dice.

  That decision did not displease me. I had formed an immediate liking for my friend’s younger brother, who was, I decided upon seeing him for the first time, close enough to me in age to be an equal—three or four years, I thought, flattering myself hugely, was a negligible difference. He was also one of the fairest, fine-looking young men it had ever been my pleasure to encounter. Indeed, the way the young women in the bar in which we drank that evening—the brothers drank, for the most part, while I merely marveled at their capacity for consuming the potions I could not stomach—fawned upon and draped themselves around the blond young man astounded me and made me vaguely envious.

  Tristan, in truth, was something to behold. He was fair in the way that few other than the northern people of the snowy lands are fair. His hair was so pale that in certain lights it looked pure white, and his eyes were big and bright, piercingly blue with that hue that only certain flowers can possess. No trace of beard or mustache marred the smooth, gold-bronzed perfection of his face.

  He liked me, too, from the outset, which is always a sure sign of future friendship, but what moved me most of all was the pure, undiluted, and unquestionable love and affection that he evinced for his long-lost brother from the moment of first seeing him and recognizing him there on the threshold of his lodgings. This was a man, I felt, who could ride with me anywhere.

  He owned two horses and a full supply of armor and weaponry. He was, he assured me, a mercenary and a professional, prepared to sell his skills and his expertise to anyone who measured up to the criteria he demanded in an employer.

  When we arrived in Gesoriacum, four riders and eight horses, we found Joachim, the first of Germanus’s three preferred sea captains, in residence, preparing to return to sea in search of one last cargo to trade and money to be earned before the end of the trading year. I gave him Germanus’s token of the lapis lazuli ring, and we discussed the price of hiring his boat and crew for our voyage.

  We sailed for Britain at high tide on the following day.

  I learned about the sickness of the sea on that brief voyage, for the Narrow Seas were rough and unfriendly to mariners, and their harsh lesson was to stay with me throughout my life.

  Although I hated Joachim when, after two days of unimaginable agony, he suggested that we avoid the south coast known as the Saxon Shores and veer to the west, around the horn of Cornwall and then north to Glastonbury on the western coast, there came a day when the dawn was bright and golden and I looked out from the prow of the ship to see the high hill he named as Glastonbury Tor looming above the flat shores to the east of where we crept forward through a calm, still sea.

  VIII

  BISHOP ENOS

  I HAD NEVER SEEN such an inhospitable place. Britain, the vaunted land of riches famed by Julius Caesar and the Emperors Claudius, Hadrian, and Trajan, was a hole without any redeeming features that I could discern. For the first seven days after our arrival on its coastline, heavy, driving rain fell incessantly and left us chilled to the bone, shivering in our armor and unable to escape the damp, appalling misery of the place. Th
e moist, cold air contaminated every place we found during that time that might conceivably have offered us anything resembling accommodation or comfort and left us sniffling with discomfort and close to despair over the sheer foulness of the climate.

  Perceval expressed best what we were all feeling late one soggy afternoon, after we had been vainly trying for the better part of an hour to light a fire using sodden wood. “I hate this damnable place,” he said, “and I resent having to live in constant motion, afraid to stand still for more than a few moments lest my armor rust up and lock solid and I be stuck here forever.” It was an inept attempt at humor, but we were in sore need of humor by that time.

  We had made to land at Dubris, originally, that being the easiest access point in the long line of high, white chalk cliffs that formed much of the southernmost coast of the island. An entire stretch of coast there, several miles in length, offered long, shallow beaches and safe havens set into vales and niches along the great white cliffs and had provided the landing place for Caesar’s legions on his earliest exploratory expedition to Britain. But even before we had begun to sail in toward the land we had been aware of large numbers of armed warriors lining the clifftops and watching us with intense, unmoving hostility, evincing absolutely no signs of welcoming activity. Joachim, our ship’s captain, held back, eyeing the spectacle warily and looking distinctly unhappy, and I moved to stand beside him.

  “You look displeased, my friend. What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head without looking at me, his gaze fixed on the distant clifftops. “I don’t know,” he growled, “but something’s far from right.”

  “How so?”

  Now he glanced at me, sharply. “I told you, I don’t know. All I know is something’s wrong. If I knew what it was I wouldn’t have to say I don’t know, would I? But that’s new.” He waved a pointing finger toward the men lining the cliffs. “I never seen that before, and I’ve landed here a hundred times and more. This is a port, a trading town, and I’ve always been welcomed here no matter who was in command of the place … and it’s changed hands more times than a copper coin. But I’m not welcome here this time … a blind man could see that. I’m going to stand away and change course for a safer berth.”