by Whyte, Jack
He spun and left us, adjusting his sword and armour as he strode to the stern, where he set two seamen to hauling in the rope securing the small, sail-equipped rowing boat the sailors used for everything too petty for the larger galley to achieve. As soon as the tiny vessel was alongside, he climbed over the side and leapt down into it, then cut the rope that tethered it to us. Free of its line, the boat responded instantly to the pull of the water, falling away behind us at a startling pace as Donuil fought, leaning into the tiller, to bring its nose around to meet the waves that threatened to engulf it. Everyone had watched his passage the length of the galley, but until he swung his leg over and dropped from sight into the boat, their interest had been mere curiosity. Now Dedalus and his group surrounded me and Shelagh.
"What's going on?" Dedalus asked for all of them. "Where's Donuil off to?"
I held up my hand, bidding him wait as we watched Logan's galley ship oars, the banks of sweeps rising to the vertical, the vessel ceasing all forward motion as Donuil's boat approached it. As he came close alongside, someone threw a line, and he secured it to his boat, so that the small vessel swung in under the larger's side. I could see Logan leaning over, shouting, but could not hear his words. Presently, I saw movement behind Logan, and four armed men swung themselves down, one after the other, to join Donuil. As soon as they were safe, he cast off again and the tide swept him behind the galley, out of our sight. Moments later, Logan's oars dipped again and his crew began to pull. By the time it had moved far enough to reveal Donuil's craft again, the little boat had hoisted sail and was scudding away towards the distant land. I turned then to the others.
"Donuil had to leave," I told them. "There was something he had to do, some business neglected in the heat of leaving." They stared at me as though I were twitting them.
"We had guessed he had to leave," Ded said.
"Well then," I smiled. "What more can I say?"
He shook his head, and his eyes flickered briefly towards Shelagh. "Well," he sighed, "it must be a matter of great import for Donuil. If such a matter had been mine to deal with, no matter who else thought it important, I would have set the world on end to save the doing of it for a better day. I'd have to be an older man than he before I'd tend to anything if it meant leaving my love on a ship bound for another land."
I relented slightly, for the sake of Shelagh, nodding my head in acquiescence. "Some information came into his possession, something I knew and he did not. . . something I told him with no anticipation of how he might react. He chose to leave and rejoin his father." That was as close to the truth as I could come without admitting to my dream and opening a full Pandora's box of troubles. I looked from face to face, seeing the friendship there and feeling guilty for my reticence.
"My friends, when I have decided how I should proceed henceforth, and when I have learned something of the outcome of Donuil's sudden departure, I will tell you what has occurred here today. But accept this: Donuil had no other recourse open to him, once he had heard what I told him. It would not be possible to turn the galleys back without losing time that might be vital to the survival of our friends in Athol's kingdom."
Ded had one more comment. He eyed me shrewdly. "Do you believe he took the proper course?"
I looked him in the eye. Did I, in fact, believe it? I nodded. "Yes, Ded. I do."
"So be it, then. I've not known you lacking in judgment in the past, so I won't look for it now." He looked now at Shelagh, and then back at me. Will you translate my words for the lady?" I nodded, and he turned again to Shelagh. "Lady, until your man returns, we—all of us—will be at your command, so call on any one of us without delay should there be anything you require . . . among us, we can handle anything. Your man may be a heathen and a giant, but he has earned our friendship and our trust." A growled chorus of assent from the others confirmed what he had said.
Shelagh had been staring at him, her head cocked to one side as she listened, and now as I translated what Dedalus had said, she blushed, a dark flood of red stealing over her face. She nodded graciously and whispered, "I thank you."
On that, the men turned as one and left us to ourselves, Shelagh, Liam and me.
The remainder of the voyage passed quickly and uneventfully, apart from a short visit from Feargus, who boarded us nimbly from the little boat that brought him from his galley as soon as Logan had taken the tow from him. He was much less angry than I had expected, listening to my explanation— the same one I had given to my own men—in silence. I his reaction afterwards was much akin to Ded's, too, save that Feargus accorded the good judgment in the affair to Donuil, who was, when all was said and done, he pointed out, the son of Athol Mac Iain and much like his father in his thinking. He spent some time with Liam and Shelagh after he had done speaking with me, and then returned to his own galley.
Thereafter, the weather and the wind both held, and the moon rode in a clear sky overhead throughout the night, so that we kept both our consorts in sight at all times. At dawn on the third day, dark clouds came rolling towards us from the west. The new day had already revealed the broken skyline of land directly in our path, however, and Feargus now had no fears of foundering. Logan was towing us again and heavy rain squalls were breaking around us by the time we drew near enough to the coast to begin looking for landmarks. Never having seen the coast of Britain from the sea before, except in leaving it, my men and I were useless to the lookouts, but Feargus and Logan both knew where we were, and soon we changed direction, speeding diagonally under full sail and oars to the south until we gained, and passed, a point of land that stretched out farther than any other. The massive inlet we found beyond it, we were told by those on board who knew, was really an outlet, the mouth of the estuary to the south of Cambria, which now lay directly on our left. The ruins of Glevum lay ahead of us, farther in, on the south bank.
We felt the change in motion as soon as we entered the estuary, and soon we noted the changed colours of the water beneath our vessel. None of us had been sick at sea, to the great surprise of our Eirish oarsmen who, I sensed, felt cheated because of that. Before the sun had risen halfway up the sky, we were sweeping along between the banks of a broad but rapidly narrowing river mouth, with sand flats and shoals on either side of the deep channel we followed. As we progressed, a low ground fog clung to the land on either side like smoke, obscuring our view, but the water ahead of us was clear of it. The wind died suddenly, blocked by the land around us, and four men hauled down the sail, so that, in the absence of wind and waves, the galley's hull hissed audibly through the water between strokes of the oars. And as we progressed, the fog receded, until the banks lay clear and open and the huddled buildings of a town emerged from the distance. Glevum.
A short time later, there came a shout from Logan's galley, and a series of hurried manoeuvres, and the heavy tow cable went slack and was thrown overboard by four more men. The loud clacking of a wooden winch came clearly afterwards, as Logan's crew hauled the bulky cable aboard.
We were in mid-stream, but now our oarsmen went to work again and brought us slowly towards the town that lined the bank, and we saw the very wharf from which we had stolen the barge, mere weeks before. All three ships came to rest a safe distance from attack, but none of us saw any signs of life. The desolate ruins seemed empty. Uneasy nonetheless, I had my bow strung and an arrow nocked as soon as we were within bowshot—my bowshot, which none other could match.
Feargus was first on the wharf, surrounded by his men, a number of whom he sent to scour the seemingly empty buildings. He stood there without moving, his arm extended to hold us away until the word came back that it was safe. As soon as he received it, he waved us in and set his men to finding ways to bridge the space between deck and dock for our horses.
It took close to two hours before we were unloaded and the little man turned to me with a sniff and a smile. "Well, Master Merlyn, you are home again, and so's Lord Donuil, safe in his own land."
"Aye, Feargus." I glanced
to where Liam, Shelagh and some others stood with the woman Turga and the babe she held close to her. Young Arthur had reached the age at which he grew restive quickly in confining arms, and he was wriggling mightily. But Turga held him easily. I turned back to Feargus.
"Do you have time to walk with me awhile?" I saw him start to frown and pressed on. "I wish to speak to you of Donuil, and his departure, but it is for your ears alone. I could not speak of it aboard the galley, with so many about."
He nodded. "Aye, then. Let us walk."
"Good. I will not waste your time."
During the next quarter hour I told him my strange tale, holding back nothing in spite of my fear of his reaction. I had determined that since he was King Athol's most trusted associate, he had every right to know the reason for the strange defection of his chief's son. And so I told him of my dream, and of Donuil's reaction to hearing of it. Feargus listened closely, walking head downward, his hands clasped behind his back, and I could not see his face. When I had finished, he stopped and looked up at me, chewing a ragged end of his long moustache.
"One of your men told me the Druids had the raising of you?"
"Aye." This was half word, half laugh; he had surprised me. "Some of it, at least. My grandsire's people in the hills had Druids among them. Some of them were my teachers."
"Did you tell them aught of your Sight?"
"No. In those days I had not been aware of it."
"Aye, well, treat it with respect. It is a gift, and a curse, given to few men. Do not abuse it."
"Don't abuse it?" I was astonished. "Then you don't think I should be banished from the haunts of men?"
The look he flashed me was of pure scorn. "Old women's fancy, that! Punishment born of terror and the fear of the unknown; sorcery and the like. No man with a mind of his own can doubt the existence of the nether world. We talk of gods, which means we give credence to things other than natural. Your gift is not unnatural, Master Merlyn, merely unusual. Your visions come to you in sleep, do they not? Nothing is more natural or more needed than sleep." He grinned, sudden and wicked. "In the meantime, I'll be in Caledonia the day after tomorrow, and back home in Eire within the week following that. The Lord Donuil will not lack swords to do his bidding after that. When this is over, and the vermin plaguing us are sent back home licking their wounds, I'll bring Lord Donuil back to his Lady myself. You have my word on that."
As we stood on the wharf, watching them depart with Shelagh's empty galley in tow again, it did not cross my mind to doubt him. We watched them until they had shrunk to dots in the distance, and then I turned to Rufio and Dedalus with the word that we ourselves should prepare to leave— to discover that they, along with me, Liam, Quintus on his litter, the women and the child, were all who remained on the wharf. Farther along, on the stony road fronting the warehouses, our two trainees were working with the horses.
"Where are the others?"
"Searching the buildings for a pair of wheels. Quintus still cannot walk or ride, you know." Dedalus spoke without expression, but Rufio grinned at me and jibed, "That sounded insubordinate to me, Commander, now that we are back in Britain. Am I not right?"
"Yes, it was insolent, Centurion Rufio. But then, it was Dedalus who spoke, was it not? We have to consider the source from which the matter springs." I turned away smiling and moved to Quintus, who lay watching me, his back propped against a bundle of saddle blankets.
"How are you feeling, Quint?"
He smiled and touched his hand to the thigh beneath his covers. "I'll mend, Commander. I doubt if even Lucanus could have bettered the work done on this leg by the boys. It's clean, it's sound, it's all sewn up, and healing rapidly. I don't know who it was that choked me and half-killed me, but I'm glad he did, whoever it was. I'd hate to have been conscious when this bone was set. I saw it when they hauled me from the sea."
"Aye—" I was interrupted by a shout from along the wharf, and watched Benedict and Cyrus approach, pulling a two-wheeled cart. Even from a distance it looked agued, rocking from side to side alarmingly. As they drew closer, the reason became clear. The thing was ancient, with high, ungainly and badly warped wheels lacking a large number of spokes. The others began to appear, drawn by the noise, all of them empty-handed, and the chorus of cheers and jeers grew louder as the crowd around the sad old cart grew.
Quintus had been gazing at all this in alarm and as the small procession reached us he called out to Cyrus. "Hey, I can't ride in that! The thing will fall apart and I'll be thrown out and break my leg again."
"Well, walk then, ingrate! In all this town there's only one conveyance, and we are worn out finding it for you, and you would turn up your nose at it?" Cyrus was delighted with his find and his infectious gaiety encouraged the spontaneous good feelings of returning home. I called them to order and we began inspecting the cart. Benedict, who was something of a carpenter, offered some quick, monosyllabic suggestions of how to improve and strengthen the frame and sides, but there was nothing to be done about the wheels, he said emphatically in the crude way common to soldiers everywhere. I told him to do the best he could, and he began issuing orders, so that by mid-afternoon the cart had been much improved, even its shaky wheels strengthened by struts of planking from a dismantled door, placed hexagonally around the decrepit rims and fastened into place with horseshoe nails, then reinforced with cross-braces. We piled Quintus, Liam, the women and the child into the body of the cart with as much extra baggage as the contraption would hold, hitched our most placid horse between the shafts, and made our way from Glevum to the southeast, towards the leper colony of Mordechai Emancipatus.
BOOK THREE
THE SAXON SHORE
XIX
It was the taciturn Benedict who put into words the happiness we all felt at coining home. Ded and I had been riding at the head of our small column and, on being relieved by Philip and Paulus, had fallen back to check that all was well behind. We found Falvo riding where he should be at the rear, but peering back over his shoulder, where there was no sign of Benedict, who had fallen behind, presumably to relieve himself. Falvo was about to go back to check on him, but we bade him ride on, and Ded and I kicked our horses to a canter in search of our missing companion. We were not alarmed, merely being cautious.
We came upon him almost immediately, standing by the side of the road, concealed by a thicket of evergreens that overhung the roadway, his reins in one hand and his head bent, staring down at something green he held in the other. As we approached him, he looked up and waved what he was holding. It was a large, broad-leafed weed of some kind. When we reached him, I saw the mark between the cobbles at his feet where he had uprooted it.
"What have you there? Looks like a weed."
"Aye. Growing in the road."
I looked at Dedalus and he raised one eyebrow in return, saying nothing. One seldom knew what went on in Benedict's head. Now, however, he had chosen to show more eloquence than Ded or I had ever suspected him to possess.
"I saw a lot of Empire when I was a boy, long before I came here, but until now I never thought to note how dangerous growth is." Slowly and with great deliberation, Dedalus crossed one arm over his chest and leaned the other on it, masking his mouth behind cupped fingers and schooling his face to show no expression. I, too, fought hard not to smile, but Benedict did not notice. "Today it's a weed, growing between the stones," he continued, gazing down at the uprooted plant he held. "In ten years, it'll be a tree . . . In a hundred years, this road will be destroyed." He looked up at us. "Until we went to Eire, I never thought about roads. It never even crossed my mind that some lands might have no roads. Gaul has roads. Even the Saxon lands have roads. The whole Empire has roads."
"Rome never conquered Eire," I said, no longer feeling the urge to smile.
"I know, but I've only come to see that now," Benedict said, turning his gaze to me. "No Roman conquest means no roads. So Rome means roads . . . And roads mean towns at each end and along them . . . So without R
ome, we'd have no place to go and no way of arriving. And here I am, forty and more years old and never knew that till now! I've spent much of my life being glad the Romans left Britain, but I'll spend the rest of it being glad they came . . ." He threw the weed aside and climbed onto his horse, then rode off back towards the column without another word to either of us. Dedalus looked at me wide-eyed, his face still extravagantly empty of expression. I shrugged and kneed my horse into a turn.
"I think he means he's glad to be back home."
"Aye," Ded agreed. "A veritable Benedictish benediction. Amazing."
We had ridden fifteen miles after that incident, counting the milestones, when Rufio, who had been ranging a mile and more ahead of us, came spurring back, waving his arms as soon as he came into view. A large body of armed men was approaching, he reported. He had managed to remain unseen only by good fortune, having picked up the signs of their movements as they crested a hill ahead of him, about three miles from where we were now. He had left the road immediately and made his way back along the verge, hidden by foliage, until he no longer risked being seen, and then had galloped the rest of the way. He had been too far away to recognize anything about them, he reported; they might be friend or foe, but they outnumbered our small party, as far as he could estimate, by no less than three to one.
We had to assume, as Rufio had, that all strangers were enemies, so my first concern was for the cart holding Quintus and the women. I ordered Liam Twistback, who held the reins, to get the vehicle off the road and out of sight among the trees as quickly as he could. Then, while Liam was looking around for a place to leave the road safely, I turned my attention to our extra horses, setting Cyrus, Paulus and Philip to assist our two trainees in leading the animals from the road, too, spreading their exit points as widely apart as possible in a short time to obscure the evidence of their exit. That done, I turned back to hiding the cart. It was a slow and awkward process, hampered by the poor condition of the cart itself and its high, narrow wheels, which sank alarmingly into the soft ground, leaving deep tracks. I assigned three men to that task, too: Benedict to lead the horse forward by its halter, steadying it and eliminating the need for a driver, and Falvo and Paulus to walk alongside, one by each wheel, to help maneuvre it among the bushes and obstructions that littered the ground. I followed behind it with Dedalus, both of us working to conceal the signs of its passage.