The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  “How so, Bishop?”

  “Because the process of finding Merlyn might be a slow one. My messengers have to cross the breadth of Britain before they can start spreading the word of their quest with any hope of success. From then on, every priest and bishop that they meet will join the search and spread the word, and sooner or later one of them will find Merlyn. From that moment, a copy of a letter from me will be brought to Merlyn, and his response will be quickly brought back here to me.”

  “Your pardon, but did you say, a letter? Will you write but one?”

  “I will.” But then he smiled at me. “And I will write it tonight and have three score copies of it prepared tomorrow, so that each of the twenty priests I intend to dispatch will carry three copies with him to distribute when he arrives in Cambria or Cornwall. Thus there should be at least one copy of the letter within easy reach, no matter where Merlyn may prove to be.

  “But once Merlyn’s response is brought back here to me it would be well, I think, were you here to witness it and my reaction to it … including whatever decisions might necessarily be attached to that. Thereafter, once you are apprised of all that is happening and aware of what remains to be done by the various parties involved, you may return to Camulod with all speed, carrying that information and knowing that you have saved time by removing the need for someone to come from there to here and back for the same purpose. And in the meantime, knowing you have borne the tidings ahead of us, my fellow bishops and I will be able to follow at a pace more suited to our age and dignitas. Do you agree?”

  Listening to the old man’s logic as he explained his thoughts, I could find no grounds for disagreeing with him, but since he was talking in terms of months of waiting, I immediately began to feel guilt over the prospect of keeping Cyrus and his thirty troopers here, and consequently absent from their duties in time of war, for such an extended period. I spoke with Perceval and Tristan about my concerns on that and they agreed with me, so I immediately sent for Cyrus and thanked him for his company on our outward journey. As soon as he heard me say those words, he raised an inquiring eyebrow and began to fidget with his helmet, which he had been holding in the crook of one arm, its rim against his hipbone. He and I had become good friends over time, and now he looked at me as a friend.

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Of course. Sit by the brazier there, and I’ll join you. Throw me your helmet.” He tossed it to me and I laid it on the table at my back, then moved to sit across the brazier from him. “You have something to say, so say it.”

  He slouched in the chair, his feet outstretched toward the brazier’s heat, and crossed his arms, resting his chin in the crotch of his right thumb and forefinger. “You’re sending me back to Camulod.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? And what are you going to do once my men and I are gone?” .

  “We’ll be staying here, probably for a few months, until word arrives from Merlyn. Then we’ll return to Camulod with messages from Enos.”

  “Hmm. You believe that is the best thing you can do at this stage?”

  “At this stage, yes.”

  “Good, then my men and I will stay with you, because you’ll need us on your way back to Camulod.”

  “No, that’s going to be too long for you to be absent from your duties in Camulod. There’s a war going on there, is there not?”

  “No, that’s over. My duty is to see to your safety. That’s what I was ordered to do. That is what I will do.”

  I shook my head. “I cannot allow you to do that, Cyrus. Your place and your primary duty is in Camulod. You and your men are wasted here and it’s easy to see the effect this idleness is having on them. They have nothing to do here, and there’s nothing worse for any soldier than being stuck in a boring place with nothing to do. You need to get them back on the road and back into shape, as quickly as you can. We really don’t need you now. We are perfectly safe here in Verulamium and we will be equally safe on the route home, now that we’ve traveled it once. We’re aware of the dangers we might face, and we will be on guard against them when the time comes. We are no longer the four green tyros who landed here from Gaul.”

  Cyrus sat silent, staring at me through narrowed eyes for what seemed to me like a very long time, and then he nodded and snorted loudly. “Right. You obviously mean what you have said.”

  “I do.”

  “Aye, well, I’d best start making ready for the road. You’re right, my men are growing fat and lazy and fractious. But I’ll have them whipped back into condition within five days of leaving here.” He stood up and went to collect his helmet, running his fingers around the surface of the leather headband before settling the casque firmly on his head. “We’ll probably leave the day after tomorrow. It will take a full day, I expect, to provision ourselves and make our gear ready for use again. I’ll see you before I go, and then I’ll look forward to seeing you again when you reach Camulod.”

  I stood up and nodded to him and he snapped me a perfect salute before whirling and marching from my quarters.

  We settled down to pass the winter peacefully in Verulamium.

  It snowed heavily toward the middle of the month, and that snowfall turned out to be merely the first of many as the temperature plummeted to depths that everyone swore were unprecedented. The snowstorms were accompanied by strong winds that whipped the snow into strange and wondrous drifts that served to isolate the countryside, so that travel became impossible and supplies of food and fuel were used up in those places where people were stranded. We were bored beyond belief, although our boredom was alleviated by the need to seek out new supplies of fuel and food.

  Neither I nor my three companions had experienced a winter to compare to this before. It snowed only infrequently in central Gaul, even in the deepest winter, and when snow did occasionally fall, it seldom remained on the ground for longer than a day or two. It never fell and froze and remained for weeks and months as it had this year in Britain. Consequently none of us had ever hunted in the snow before, and we discovered it to be an entirely different kind of science, calling for skills that we had never learned. Fortunately, however, we found excellent teachers among the group surrounding Symmachus, the tall, distinguished-looking man we had noticed when we first rode into Verulamium.

  Symmachus was a Roman name, but the man who bore it, although he carried it proudly enough, was a Briton through and through. He claimed direct descent from the ancient Cornovii, the warrior people of northern Cambria whose indomitable strength and refusal to succumb to the Roman invaders in the time of the Emperor Claudius had necessitated the building of the giant legionary fortress of Deva that had housed the ten-thousand-strong complement of the Twentieth Legion, the Valeria Victrix, for upward of three hundred years. Sometime in the course of that three hundred years, Symmachus maintained, a Roman officer had managed to bypass the disapproving frowns and scowling menace of the Cornovii elders and wed himself to one of their daughters, adding his bloodlines and his Roman name to the annals of the clan. The Valeria Victrix was gone now, with all the other legions, Symmachus told us on the first night we spent in his company, but their enormous fortress was still there in Deva—it was Deva, he declared—and so were the Cornovii, although they had fallen out of the habit of calling themselves by any special name and simply called themselves the People of the Hills in their own dialect and Cambrians in the common Coastal Tongue. Symmachus was their king, and he and his people, numbering in the region of five thousand men, women, and children, now made their home in the ancient fortress, which they called Chester.

  He was a strange man, Symmachus, and for reasons of his own he never liked me and never acknowledged me as the leader of my small group. Instead, he addressed himself to Perceval, as the eldest of our group, at all times, thereby steadfastly refusing me the legitimacy of place that would have been accorded by his addressing me in person. Tristan in particular was highly offended by Symmachus’s attitude toward me, but I went out of my way to
make light of the situation because I knew what it was about me that the king resented most of all.

  Symmachus was accompanied by his wife and two daughters. The wife, a lady called Demea, was still young and exceptionally beautiful, a radiant, laughing creature with bright yellow hair and wondrous green eyes. All the men in the town were at least half in love with her, and the recognition of that truth afforded the king much amusement and enjoyment. After all, he was a strong and well set up man in the prime of life, and his young wife was most obviously besotted with him. And indeed, as we had quickly discovered, his wife’s love for Symmachus was the reason he was here in Verulamium, so many miles from home. They had been married now for eight years and were without children of their own, the two daughters being the progeny of Symmachus’s first marriage.

  The Lady Demea, a devout Christian, had heard about the miracles attributed to Saint Alban, all of them centered around his shrine in Verulamium, and had prevailed upon her doting husband to bring her here, where she could beg the saint in person to intercede for her in Heaven and bless her with a pregnancy. That Demea was fully confident her prayers would be answered was evident to anyone with eyes to see, and the manner in which she and her husband conducted themselves made it plain that they were giving Heaven every opportunity to bless their endeavors. Thus, it was evidently not his beautiful young wife who was the cause of Symmachus’s distemper.

  It was his daughters, I believed—or one of them, the elder of the two—who cost him sleepless nights and justified, in his mind at least, his continuing disapproval of me. The daughter’s name was Cynthia—again a Roman name, or perhaps even Hellenic—but she was obviously not, by her very coloring, the daughter of Demea. Cynthia’s real mother, a black-haired, blue-eyed woman from the far northern lands beyond Hadrian’s great wall, had died years earlier, giving birth to her second daughter when Cynthia was only four years old. Cynthia was now almost sixteen, breathtakingly lovely and desirable and making not the slightest attempt to conceal her attraction to me.

  It made no difference to Symmachus that I went to great pains to distance myself from his daughter and avoid her company. He saw nothing of that. In truth, while I acknowledged Cynthia’s great physical and facial beauty, I experienced no attraction to her beyond the first few days of knowing her, and she herself had given me the reason to feel the way I did.

  Young Bors had fallen in love with her from the moment he set eyes on her, and he was utterly incapable of hiding his infatuation. I know how true that is because I was there when he saw her for the first time and I almost laughed aloud at the spectacular transformation that came over him: his eyes went wide and then almost glazed over and his mouth fell agape and it seemed to me that he forgot how to move. He simply stood there, gazing at her slack jawed and openmouthed, incapable of speech or movement.

  Of course, Cynthia saw it immediately. Unfortunately, however, her recognition of his stunned submission to her beauty brought out her worst attributes. Where I took pains immediately to dissemble and conceal my delight in my young servant’s reaction to her beauty, Cynthia proceeded from the first to exploit it ruthlessly, treating Bors shamefully and using him imperiously and cruelly, keeping him dancing attendance on her and accepting his every adoring look as no more than her due while she deliberately spurned him, belittling him and insulting him.

  Her behavior, uncalled for and excessive as it was, upset me deeply because it impressed me as being quite natural and unfeigned. I found it repellent that she should be so quick to cause my young associate pain, for no reason other than his natural attraction to her beauty. Bors was my servant, and although I strove to keep our relationship as one of master to apprentice, I had found him to be a willing worker and a conscientious student, as well as a naturally friendly and enthusiastic soul—his truculence and sullen behavior had vanished within hours of our setting foot upon the road to Britain. He had done absolutely nothing to earn Cynthia’s displeasure, but she poured wrath and disdain about his head in equal and unstinting measure, treating him far less kindly than most people treat animals, and I soon found myself harboring a deep feeling of dislike for her that I was never able to disguise completely.

  Cynthia, of course, believing entirely in her own allure and fascination, was never able to bring herself to believe that I could be genuinely immune to her attractions, so that the more I attempted to avoid her and discourage her, the more determined she became to enslave me with her charms and to bend me to her will. Unfortunately, thanks to my education and my many talks with Bishop Germanus concerning women and the rules governing a decent man’s behavior toward them, I was never quite able to bring myself to tell her how deeply she had taught me to dislike her, or how her treatment of Bors repulsed me. That would have been too cruel, by my own assessment at that time, although it occurred to me not long afterward that had she been male and my own age I would have thrashed her soundly for her hectoring cruelty and ordered her to stay well clear of me until she had learned how to control the baseness of her nature.

  This, then, was the reason for the tension between the two of us all the time, and that was what her father reacted to with such hostility. His reading of the situation was wrong, of course, but I could hardly come right out and add insult to his imagined injuries by telling him that I found his firstborn daughter ill natured, morally unattractive, and generally unpleasant and that I would far rather spend time with her quieter, far less aggressive and offensive twelve-year-old sister, whom she called the Brat. And so Symmachus distrusted me because he felt I lusted for his daughter, and I resigned myself to being spoken to through Perceval at every turn.

  Symmachus was a warrior, however, and he had heard tales of Camulod, and he wanted to know if it was feasible that Merlyn Britannicus and Camulod might consider an alliance with himself and his people in Deva. His question caused a long, uncomfortable silence because none of us was qualified to answer it with anything resembling authority, although I felt that the distance between the two locations alone—almost two hundred miles—would render impossible the kind of arrangement that the king was thinking of. I said as much, and although he seemed to accept the logic of my explanation after examining it for a short time, I could tell that Symmachus was not too happy with me for having stated the obvious and created difficulties for whatever it was he had been considering. Once again, however, I kept silent, venturing no more opinions and showing no more signs of curiosity.

  Symmachus and his party had been on the point of leaving for home when the weather broke in mid-December, effectively stranding them in Verulamium for several more months, and so it was that we came to know him to the extent that we did. Although I found him less than comfortable to be around, I had no such difficulties with his companions, who were in fact his family’s bodyguard. I came to know several of them very well, and my friends and I spent many pleasant hours with them among the woods, learning to hunt as they did in deep snow. They, in their turn, were fascinated with the spears given to me by Tiberias Cato. The Cambrians had never seen their like, but were unimpressed by the information that no one else had, either. They were quite convinced that somewhere along the edges of one of their northern mountain lakes they would soon find reeds long enough and strong enough to dry and shape into light, strong, durable spear shafts like mine. I made no effort to convince them otherwise, for they simply would not have believed that people had already scoured the reaches of the Empire looking for such things.

  They were particularly fascinated by the technique I used to throw the weapons, and by the accuracy I managed to achieve, although they pretended to be overly concerned about the amount of time I spent practicing. They were correct in that. I did spend inordinately large amounts of time practicing that winter, but there was little else to do most of the time. When the weather was too cold and the snow too deep to do much outside, I converted the largest hall in the basilica into a practice arena, piling all the cots and tables and benches up against one long wall and throwing
my spears from one end of the vast hall to the other. The distance was slightly less than forty paces, which was ample room for practicing throwing with accuracy, and I had ranged a series of tables and benches of differing heights across one end of the room so that I could make my way from one side to the other, jumping or stepping from one level to another and throwing from any of them as I went. At the far end, I had mounted a series of five boards to serve as targets, each of them painted with pitch in approximately the size and shape of a man. My watchers were amazed that I could announce my targets from any throwing height, specifying the area I would hit—head, chest, thigh, and the like—and then hit accurately from thirty to forty paces distant eight times out of any ten. That, to them, was magical. To me, it was the result of incessant hours of brutal, unrelenting work.

  As time passed the weather eventually grew more pleasant, and as the worst of the snow began to melt and disappear, I was able to move outside to practice on horseback. Everyone else did the same, of course, happy to be able to ride out again after having spent such a long time immured by the heavy snow. The others rode abroad, however. I was more than content to ride by myself most of the time, exercising constantly in the courtyard that Enos had originally allocated to the cavalry mounts from Camulod. It was not a large space, but it was suitable for my needs, offering me sufficient room to wheel and weave and to accustom myself again to the rhythm and disciplines of casting a spear with accuracy from the back of a moving horse. Again, watching me at work, my new companions from Cambria, who rode small, sturdy mountain ponies and were not at all familiar with large horses, merely shook their heads and looked at each other in rueful recognition of my interminable folly. All of them, at some time over the winter, had taken their turn at trying to throw my spears, and some had tried much harder than others. None of them, however, had had the slightest success in mastering even the basic elements of the throw.