The Lance Thrower cc-8

by Jack Whyte

  “Arthur? Why do you wait for him? Do you bear letters for him, too? And have you been carrying them about with you for a year and more?”

  I smiled. “No, no letters for him. But for years I have been hearing much about Arthur Pendragon from Bishop Germanus, who heard of him through Merlyn and developed a correspondence with him personally when the king was but a boy. And now that my mission for the Bishop is complete and the bishop himself is dead, I intend to offer my sword and my services to Arthur, if he will have me.”

  “Oh, he will have you. Never fear on that.”

  Something in the way he spoke the words prompted me to ask, “You sounded very positive when you said that. How can you be so sure?”

  He grinned again. “Because I know. I can speak without fear on behalf of the Riothamus when I say he needs good and loyal men. You said you brought friends with you?”

  I nodded, “Aye, two of them, Perceval and Tristan. They are brothers. And we have a fourth with us, a servant lad called Bors, who has the makings of a fine warrior.”

  “Hmm. And what of Perceval and … what was the other’s name? Tristan?”

  “Aye, what mean you, what of them?”

  “Are they fighters?”

  I laughed, a single bark. “Do you mean will they measure up sufficiently to be acceptable to your Riothamus? Aye, they’re fighters and they’ll stand up to anyone. Both are mercenaries of long standing and of the highest order, and they’re nobly born. Had they been with me when I chanced along here, we would have taken on all of you.”

  “Hmm.” The Magister grunted again and smiled, “Tell me your name again, if you will?”

  “Clothar.”

  “Aye, Clothar.” He nodded, slowly, repeating it almost beneath his breath, “Clothar. It is … different. I’ve never heard that name before.”

  “It is common enough where I come from, and it is purely Frankish. Am I permitted to ask your name?”

  He grinned and looked me in the eye, showing me his white, even teeth. “If I tell you my name will you show me the secret of your spears?”

  I knew he was baiting me, gulling me in some manner, but I could not see how and I shook my head, smiling still, but now uncertain of what was happening here. “I have already said I would. I said so before we fought.”

  “That’s true, you did.” He drew himself up straight and drew in an enormous breath, and his smile was open and completely forthright. “Come then, return to Camulod with us and make me known to these friends of yours, Tristan and Perceval, who have come so far with you to join the Riothamus. I am Arthur Pendragon, and men—some men—call me Riothamus, High King of Britain. But Riothamus, no matter who says it, is a mere title. I have yet to earn the right to it, to fill in the truth behind it, and I fear I have a long way to go before I can admit to the name without feeling inadequate.”

  He paused, and then nodded his head once, quickly, and when he resumed he looked me in the eye again, no trace of a smile on his features. “But my given name is Arthur, and I am the Chief of Pendragon, and so be it you were serious about joining with us, I think we two could become friends. What say you, Clothar the Frank?”

  My jaw had fallen open as he began to speak, and I knew I was gaping like a simpleton, but now I dropped to one knee in front of him, meaning to kiss his hand as I would a Bishop’s, but he caught me by the arm and pulled me back to my feet. “No, no, none of that. I have done nothing yet to earn that kind of treatment, and you have newly knocked me on my arse. Folly, then, to follow that by kissing my hand.” He smiled again. “When the time comes to swear loyalty to me, I will let you know. For the time being, if you feel a need to be ceremonious, you can call me Magister, as the others do. Now, what about those spears you have? Will you show me how and why they are different from ours?”

  Before I could respond, I had to breathe deeply and calm my racing, exultant heart. I could hear a blackbird piping somewhere among the woods to my right and another, equally melodious and exultant, singing its heart out behind us, and hearing them both united in a paean of triumphant, all-consuming beauty, I felt all at once that anything would be possible in this new land to which I had brought my friends with the thought of serving this impressive man. And when I felt able to speak again without quavering, I nodded my head, partly in acknowledgment, partly in respectful awe.

  “Aye, Magister,” I said, addressing my King thus for the very first time, “I will.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The thesis

  In approaching this story, I was forced to come to terms with a few historical realities that bore heavily upon my vision of how the legend of King Arthur came into existence. In my mind, the entire story revolves around the Arthur/Guinivere /Lancelot triangle, and everything that occurs in the legendary tale is attributable to the humanity—and the human weaknesses—of the King himself, the dysfunctional nature of his marriage to Guinivere, and their joint attraction to the brilliant foreign warrior known as Lancelot.

  But here’s the rub: Lancelot of the Lake, Lancelot du lac, is a French name, and Lancelot himself, the legend tells us, was a French knight who crossed the sea to England expressly to serve as a Knight of the Round Table at King Arthur’s Court. Well, even making allowances for legendary exaggeration, that simply could not have happened in the middle of the fifth century, because in those days England was still called Britannia and what we call France today was still Roman Gaul.

  It would not be until at least a century later, when the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain finally came to an end with the tribes called the Angles emerging as the dominant force, that the country would begin to become known as the land of the Angles—Angle land, and eventually, England.

  By the same token, Roman Gaul would not become known as France until much later, when the invading Franks finally established their dominance over their arch rivals, the Burgundians. Over time, the Frankish territories became the land of the Franks—France—while the Burgundians remained in their own territories of Burgundy.

  Reputedly wonderful horsemen, the Franks are the people generally credited with bringing the stirrupped saddle to western Europe, and from the time of their first appearance in the Roman Empire, along the Rhine River in the third century, they had a reputation for being blunt-spoken and utterly tactless, probably because their original tongue contained few of the subtleties of Latin or Greek. Be that as it may, we still use the term “speaking frankly” to denote directness and an unwillingness to mince one’s words. There were two main tribal branches of Franks: the Salian Franks, who lived in what is now northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and the Ripuarians, who lived in the southwest of France and in what is now Switzerland.

  Clothar is my interpretation of Lancelot. Academic opinion indicates that the name Lancelot probably developed from the Latin word lancearius, a Roman military denomination that was probably similar to the European lancer regiments of the nineteenth century. In Clothar, I have posited a Frankish horse-warrior who comes to Britain, befriends the High King, Arthur, and earns himself an undying reputation as an archetypal hero, the character who will be called Lancelot centuries later by French storytellers who have heard of his fame and his exploits, but have lost awareness of his real name.

  The names

  It was an anomaly of Roman society that the names given to children appear to us to be relatively unimportant, but it is true that many children were named simply according to the order of their birth. The first three or four sons of a family might be called Gaius or Caius, Marcus or Paulus, but the fifth son was likely to be Quintus, which means fifth, and thereafter, in large families, would come Sextus and Septimus or Septimius (sixth and seventh). Octavius Caesar, who would name himself Caesar Augustus, was the eighth son of his parents.

  Roman place names give us problems today, too, because they are Latin names and the modern cities that have replaced the Roman originals all have different names. For the sake of authenticity in a story like this, however, it w
ould be really jarring and unnatural to use the modern place names, and so I have supplied a list (below) of the most important place names in this story, along with their modern equivalents. The most obvious and enlightening example of this usage is the Roman fort at Lutetia in Gaul. It was originally built during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and its sole purpose, situated as it was on a critical river ford, was to keep a lid on the warlike activities of the local tribesmen, a clan called the Parisii. That fort, Lutetia, has since grown to become the city of Paris.

  ROMAN NAME MODERN NAMEGenava GenevaAutessiodurum AuxerreTreves TroyesMassilia MarseilleCarcasso CarcassonneLutetia ParisLugdunum LyonsCenabum Orleans

  Language

  The major difficulty an author faces in writing historical fiction is that of language. Language is constantly evolving and we have no real knowledge of how people spoke and sounded, in any language, hundreds of years ago. I have chosen to write in standard English, but even that is a relatively new development, since the language was only “standardized” in the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, there was no orthographically correct way to spell anything. Most of the characters in my stories would have spoken in the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Gallic tongues, while the major characters, like Bishop Germanus and his associates, would most probably have conversed in Latin. In those instances where people of mixed tongues met and mingled, they would have spoken the lingua franca of their time, although the real lingua franca, literally, the Language of the Franks, had not yet come into common use. But throughout history, whenever people of mixed tongues and races have come together to trade, human ingenuity has quickly developed basic, fundamental languages to fit the needs of the traders. In Africa, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that language was Swahili. In Oriental Asia, it was Pidgin. We do not know the name of whatever trading language was dominant in fifth-century Europe but I have chosen to call it the Coastal Tongue, because the coast was the interface point for most traders.

  There are many terms and expressions used in this story, however, for which there is no modern equivalent, and there are others that seem modern and up-to-date when in fact they are genuinely ancient. I have addressed a few of these in the notes that follow here. Modern readers are sometimes surprised, for example, to find the term and title “Duke” being used in the ancient world, but the word originally sprang from the Roman army, where a man who had distinguished himself by demonstrating spectacular heroism and leadership could earn himself the title of dux, which is the Latin word for a leader, a man who is foremost among his companions, and out of that title came the English title of Duke.

  In much the same way, people in North America today tend to feel proprietorial about nouns like “corn” and “bannock,” not realizing that corn has always been the generic Old World term for any kind of grain and that bannock—the simplest form of unleavened bread—is common to every primitive society, no matter what they call it. The Celtic clans of Scotland and Ireland have always called it bannock, and it was their use of the name that the aboriginal peoples of America adopted. The plant Americans call corn, on the other hand, is known as maize in Europe, where it is a coarse, mealy grain fed to cattle. American sweet corn really only came to be known in Europe during and after the Second World War.

  Another problematical word for us is the Roman word “mile,” because a modern mile is 1,760 yards, or approximately 1,500 meters. The original Roman mile came from the Latin word mille, meaning a thousand, and a mile was one thousand paces long. Bearing in mind that the average Old World Roman was less than five feet six inches tall, their marching pace would have been short, probably in the range of twenty-six inches to twenty-nine inches, making their mile shorter than a modern kilometer.

  And then there are the latifundiae. Few people today have any concept of how highly organized, and even industrialized, the Roman Empire was, sixteen and seventeen hundred years ago. The Romans had a thriving stock market and a highly refined and regulated real estate industry, and the food production and distribution system they constructed to feed their citizenry, founded upon a system of enormous ranches and collective farming establishments called latifundiae, was extremely sophisticated even by today’s standards. These were private enterprises, run by corporations and funded and owned by investors, and they produced grain, cattle, wines, fruits and vegetables, and other commodities in huge quantities for shipment to markets throughout the Empire.

  The Latin word magister gives us our modern words “magistrate” and “magisterial,” but it was a word in common use in the Roman Army in the fifth century. In terms of its use, it appears to have had two levels of meaning, and I have used it in both senses throughout this book: The first of these was the literal use, where a student or pupil would refer to his teacher or mentor as magister (master) with all appropriate deference. The second usage, however, resembled the way we today use the term “boss,” denoting a superior—officer or otherwise—whose title entails the accordance of a degree of respect but falls far short of the subservience suggested by the use of the word “master.”

  Similarly, the word ecclesia gives us our modern word “ecclesiastical,” but the original meaning of the word was a church, particularly a permanent church, built of stone.

  Citrus wood is well documented as being the most precious wood in the Ancient World, but we have no idea what it was like. No trace of it survives. It is one of the earliest known instances of a precious commodity being exploited to extinction.

  And finally, a word about horse-troopers. Roman cavalry units were traditionally organized into turmae (squadrons) and alae (battalions). There were thirty to forty men in a turma (the singular form of turmae) and the strength of the alae ranged anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four turmae, which meant that a cavalry battalion could number between four hundred eighty and nine hundred sixty men. The contus, a substantial, two-handed cavalry spear, was the weapon of many heavy cavalry turmae and those troops were known, in turn, as contus cavalry.

  FORGE BOOKS BY JACK WHYTE

  THE CAMULOD CHRONICLES

  The Skystone

  The Singing Sword

  The Eagles’ Brood

  The Saxon Shore

  The Fort at River’s Bend

  The Sorcerer: The Metamorphosis

  Uther

  The Lance Thrower

  Praise for Jack Whyte and the Camulod series

  “Of the scores of novels based on Arthurian legend, Whyte’s ‘Camulod’ series is distinctive, particularly in the rendering of its leading players and the residual Roman influences that survived in Britain during the Dark Ages.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Whyte has done an excellent job of constructing a viable pre-Arthurian world. His fifth-century Europe is evocative, earthy, and well researched.”

  —Romantic Times

  “As Whyte waves off the fog of fantasy and legend surrounding the Arthurian story, he renders characters and events real and plausible.”

  —Booklist

  “Whyte shows why Camulod was such a wonder, demonstrating time and again how persistence, knowledge and empathy can help push back the darkness of ignorance to build a shining future.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Whyte’s story has an undeniable power that goes beyond the borrowed resonances of the mythic tales he’s reworking.” a

  —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “A rousing historical adventure, full of hand-to-hand combat, hidden treasures, and last-minute escapes, a refreshing change from the many quasi-historical, politically correct Arthurians out there.”

  —Locus on The Skystone

  “It’s one of the most interesting historical novels that I’ve ever read and I’ve read plenty.”

  —Marion Zimmer Bradley on The Skystone

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE LANCE THROWE
R

  Copyright © 2004 by Jack Whyte

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Forge Book

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  eISBN 9781466822191

  First eBook Edition : May 2012

  First edition: October 2004

  First mass market edition: November 2005

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