The Saxon Shore cc-4

by Jack Whyte

  I watched him walk away, his ungainly yet strangely graceful gait silhouetted briefly against the larger fire close by, and then I was alone. A few moments longer I sat there, staring into the flames beside me until my eyes teared, and then I swung myself around to face the sea, allowing the flames to heat my back. I was fire-blind at first, and the darkness before me was total, but as my eyes adjusted to the night again, the looming shape of the galley's hull came into focus, its outline leaping up high above me to blot out the star-pricked sky. I leaned backward, craning my neck to see the top of it and remembering how enormous it had seemed the last time I had seen it thus, from beneath, as I floundered helplessly in the waters that bore it so easily.

  The sounds of Connor returning brought me back from my recollection and I turned to face him where he stood by the fire, eyeing me with that same, strange expression I had marked before.

  "Where did you find the horse?"

  I shrugged my shoulders. "Where I left him."

  He looked surprised. "The very spot?"

  "No, not exactly. I had left him ground-tethered. He is trained to stay where I leave him, but I had been gone for many hours. He's an intelligent beast and had wandered away from the shore to the nearest forage. He stayed there."

  "Hmm. And the bow?"

  "Where I left it, too, with my arrows. The very spot. It wasn't hungry."

  He thrust the tip of his tongue behind his lower lip, digesting that without smiling.

  "I have never seen such a large bow. Those others we found on the strand are as long, but differently made."

  "Aye," I concurred. "It's different, unique, I think. It came from Africa, many years ago, long before I was born. It belonged to my great-uncle Varrus." I saw no point in adding that the others, the Pendragon longbows as they were becoming known, had been modelled upon my own, for length, at least, since the Pendragon had no means of fashioning the layered, double- arched complexity of the great bow's compound structure of wood, horn and sinew.

  "Varrus?" Connor's eyebrow had ridden up on his forehead. "What kind of a name is that?"

  "It's Roman. His full name was Gaius Publius Varrus."

  "So your uncle was a Roman? And who else had a hand in the making of you? Romans were small, I'm told, and dark of skin. Your yellow hair and the height of you makes me doubt you're purely Roman . . ."

  I said nothing in response to this and he considered my silence for long moments before turning away abruptly and jerking his hand in a gesture that meant I should accompany him. I rose and followed him, our path skirting the larger bonfire and plunging into the darkness again to where a glow, shrouded by the massed figures of many men, announced another, smaller fire that could not possibly afford warmth for the hushed throng that surrounded it.

  The crowd parted at our approach, allowing us access to the small fire and the sight that had held them all so rapt. The woman we had brought with us knelt there, head down, her milk-swollen udders bare to the night and the eyes of all as she suckled the tiny, gluttonous starveling she held tenderly in her arms, and as I watched them, my throat swollen suddenly with a feeling close to grief, I saw the tears that fell from beneath her hair to land upon the child. Someone among the fierce Eirish warriors surrounding her moved forward and quietly placed a blanket over the woman's shoulders, smoothing it into place and draping it across her to cover the nursing baby, whose eyes were closed now in sleepy, well-fed bliss.

  How long I stood there, I cannot recall, but presently I felt Connor's fingers on my arm, and I went back with him to his own fire where we seated ourselves again and he poured another cup of mead for each of us. No one came near us after that, and we sat without talking, he staring into the flames and I staring at him as we sipped at our cups.

  We had not found his sister Ygraine on the shore. She and her slaughtered women, with the bodies of the birney's entire crew, had been swept out to sea by the incoming tide that had borne me away in the birney. The sole corpse we had found floating naked in the sea had been one of them, but a stranger to Connor. Where her clothes had gone I could not tell, but deprived of them her body had possessed nothing to signify rank or station. What we had found was merely a dead woman, drifting alone and bereft, as all corpses are, of any human dignity. Ashore, only the corpses of some of Uther's bowmen remained, lying where they had died in their last stand on the dunes above the high tide mark with several of those commanded by Derek of Ravenglass, the man who had killed my cousin Uther Pendragon and stripped him of his armour, donning it himself and thereby causing me to pursue him, mistaking him for Uther.

  Connor had refused to believe his sister dead, in spite of my story and of the evidence scattered along the shoreline. That there had been a fight of some sort, he could see; that some women had been involved, and had been killed there, he was prepared to accept, having seen one of them. The death of his own sister, however, the Queen of this wild region of Cornwall, whom he had come to rescue and return to her father's hearth, he simply refused to accept without the evidence of his own senses. He had my own admission that I had never seen Ygraine before that encounter, and that, allied with the fact that the woman found floating in the sea was a stranger to him, cast doubt over the identity of the dead woman I had named Ygraine of Cornwall.

  I could have convinced him otherwise, I knew beyond question, simply by telling him of my own wife, Deirdre, his is other sister, whom he had thought dead for more than a decade. For Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, as she had been known in childhood, had lived beyond the time of her supposed death, vanishing from Eire and travelling to Britain by unknown means, where, years later, we two had met and loved each other for the space of one short, wonderful year. I had known Ygraine the instant I set eyes upon her, for she could have been twin to my Deirdre, whom I had known as Cassandra. For some inchoate reason, however, one which I remained unable to define even to myself, I had said nothing of any of this. Something, some foreknowledge, some formless but potent caution, barred me from speaking these thoughts aloud. Three times I had been on the point of telling him, but on each occasion I had found myself robbed of speech. Bewildered, even slightly panicked by the premonition that seemed to force me to remain silent, each time I had swallowed hard and covered my confusion in silence, refusing to think about it thereafter. Now it had returned, unsought. Perhaps, I thought then, watching him, it had to do with the manner of the dreadful death that had come upon my wife. Deirdre had been murdered, pregnant with our child, while I was far from home on the affairs of Camulod, the colony established by my grandfather Caius Britannicus and his comrade and brother-in-law Publius Varrus.

  Connor broke into my thoughts.

  "I think I have decided what to do with you, Yellow Head."

  I glanced at him, forcing myself to react casually, as though his comment were of minor import. "That's interesting," I heard myself say, and some interior part of me was surprised by the calmness of my own voice. "Do you intend to tell me about it?"

  My restraint was rewarded with a bright, amused, slightly surprised grin. "Of course," he answered, the whiteness of his even teeth startling in the reflected light of the leaping flames. "And you can be assured you are the first to know of it."

  "Well, my thanks for that, at least. It's pleasant for a man to know that his fate has not been common gossip before he learns of it." He returned his stare to the fire at that, disdaining, I thought, to respond to my ironic tone, and a brief silence fell, quickly dispelled by me. "How long must I wait?"

  Connor pursed his lips and ejected a stream of spit into the fire. "My mouth tastes like the floor of a bear's cage," he grunted. "Have you ever seen a caged bear, Yellow Head?"

  "Aye, several." My thoughts had leapt back in time to my boyhood and the books of Publius Varrus; to the description of the caged bear he had pitied and then forgotten immediately on the day he met the girl dressed in blue who was to haunt his dreams for years.

  "And?"

  I blinked at him. "And what?"
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br />   "What think you of bears?"

  "What should I think of bears? If anything, I should wonder, I suppose, why you would compare a foul taste in your mouth to anything bearish."

  "Don't you think there's something unnatural about a caged bear?"

  "Aye, there is, but there's nothing unnatural about a bad taste in one's mouth. If you insist on the analogy, however, then I must say that of all the animals I know, the bear least deserves to be caged. It is the most intelligent of beasts I've ever come across."

  He smiled now, and there was an element of wistfulness, perhaps of sadness in his smile. "I know what you mean. It was a bear, as you know, that ate my leg."

  "Ate it?"

  "Well, no, not exactly. It bit me. Severed the muscles of my calf, and they festered. I owe my life to one man in our company at the time who was not afraid to cut off my leg in the face of threats on his own life. He chopped me at the knee, cleanly, with an axe. One blow. Placed the axe in position, and then hammered it home with an iron maul. Drove me into unconsciousness, and almost into dementia afterwards. Thank all the gods of Eire, he had told his assistant what to do after that to cauterize and staunch the wound, because Lachie—the man you slew—struck him dead when I screamed out."

  There was not much open to me then in the way of response, but I seized on what he had said about his saviour. "He was a physician, then?"

  "Who, the man who saved me? No, he was a Druid."

  That really surprised me. "Lachie killed a Druid?"

  Connor nodded. "Aye. Stone dead. And lived accursed thereafter."

  "Hmm . . ." I paused, collecting my thoughts. When he showed no inclination to speak further, I went on. "So, pardon me for asking, but what has all this of bears to do with your decision regarding my fate?"

  "Your fate?" He laughed aloud. "Hardly your fate, Caius Merlyn, in the sense I think you mean it. I have not pondered the death of you."

  "Ah! Then what have you pondered, if I might presume to ask?"

  "Your life, and the manner of it."

  "My life." I stared at him, unable to decipher his expression. "The manner of it." I felt foolish even as I uttered the banality, but he laughed again and reached down between his feet to retrieve the mead flask.

  "You're something of a bear yourself, Merlyn. That long black cloak of yours with the big silver emblem on the back marks you as one; a bear, a warrior, a formidable foe"—he pulled the stopper with his teeth and spat it out onto the ground before continuing as he poured for himself—"or a staunch and intelligent ally." He proffered the flask and I leaned forward to take it as he went on. "So, here is what I have decided. I must go home soon to my father's Hall, perhaps without my sister." I held my horn cup on one knee and poured carefully, my eyes on my task, my ears straining for every subtlety of his voice. "If that should come to pass, my father Athol will not be happy to see me back empty-handed, but by then I'll have little option other than to face his wrath. I cannot remain on land here, with a mere hundred or so men, not knowing where to begin to seek Ygraine—not when the land is acrawl with hostile armies. You tell me Lot is dead, and I see no reason to doubt you. Men die in war, and leaders are human, too, and die as men do from time to time. Ygraine is strong. She has her own bodyguard, and they loyal to her to a man, since they are all her own, my father's people. She knows I will be here, waiting for her, and so I shall stay, keeping myself offshore, for as long as I can. A month, at most. She should be here long before that."

  "And I?" I turned as I asked the question, to find his gaze fixed steadily on me, his eyes twinkling beneath raised brows.

  "You, Yellow Head? You are my surety against returning completely empty-handed. You hold my brother Donuil, whether as prisoner or friend, I neither know nor care. Tearlach and the others think he is dead. I choose to believe you. Donuil was—and is—greatly beloved by my father, the king, and by me, too, let it be said. You shall bring Donuil to me, and I shall take him home with me, and when you do, you may have the child back, safe and sound and in good health now that he has a nurse."

  "What? You expect me to ride off and leave the child here with you?"

  "You expect me to allow you to ride off, taking the babe with you, and no assurance that you will return, other than your word?"

  I had risen to my feet in anger. "My word has been taken before now, and never found lacking!"

  He ignored my anger and did not answer for the space of several heartbeats, then in a musing voice he said, "Aye, but by whom? Your friends and equals? I am an Outlander to you, man. No bonds of honour tie a civilized man's word to such, not even in my country." His calm reply chastened me. I sat down again, my mind racing.

  "A month, you say?"

  "Aye, at most, a month."

  "And what if. . . what if trouble befalls you?"

  "Trouble? You mean if we are attacked? We won't be on land. We'll sail off and return when it is safe."

  "Unless another galley finds you."

  He shrugged. "Aye, there is that, in which case we shall fight, and we shall likely win. Mine is a large galley, and a fierce crew."

  "A month might not be long enough."

  He laughed, half in scorn. "For what? How far must you travel to this home of yours . . . what did you call it?"

  "Camulod."

  "Aye, Camulod. Is it more than two weeks' journey from here? It can't be."

  "No," I agreed. "No more than six days, seven at the most, but Donuil may not be there when I arrive. I told you, he had ridden out to the northeast at my request, at the same time I left Camulod, to search for someone. He may not have returned, may not even have found the man he seeks. It could be months before he returns."

  Now it was Connor who rose from his seat, his face set in displeasure. He dropped his cup on the ground by his side and twitched his cloak so that it settled about his body. "In that case, Yellow Head, seek ye the child in Eire, in my father's Hall, for that is where he will be." I moved to protest, but he cut me short with a stabbing gesture of his left hand. "Enough! No more discussion. Be satisfied I choose to trust you thus far. I know how you value the child, although I know not what he is, or means, to you. Suffice it that you are prepared to die for him. I can make use of that, since it means you'll be prepared to live for him as well, and thus return my brother to his father's hearth. A hostage for a hostage, no? You will leave tomorrow, in the light of dawn. You have your horse and your bow. Your armour and the rest of your weapons are there, all of them, inside my tent. Take them, and then find yourself a place to sleep, in the morning you will leave. No one will hinder you and we two shall meet again either here within the month, or in Eire when you arrive there. Until then, farewell."

  He turned on his false leg and made his way towards the clustered forms of his lieutenants around the main fire. I watched him leave and then finished the mead in my cup, setting the flask down carefully after replacing the stopper, then I collected the bulky bundle of my weapons, helmet and armour from the darkness inside the doorway of his tent. I thought of searching out the child and his new nurse, but I knew not where to begin looking. Instead, I carried my gear to where I had left Germanicus, unsaddled him, and spent a half hour rubbing him down with coarse sand-grass before leading him away from the firelight to a place beyond the beach where he could graze and I could sleep for the remainder of the night.

  Sleep would not come, however, and I lay awake thinking bleak thoughts. Finally, I sat up, lifted my tunic and unwound a long strip of cloth from around my waist where I had tied it the previous day. Secure between its folded layers was a small, leather pouch, and I tipped its contents into the palm of my hand. Two massive golden signets, one of them on a thin gold chain—the red dragon seal of Pendragon and the savage, curl-tushed boar seal of Cornwall—both held in trust for the infant who now lay sleeping somewhere close by, warm and at peace for now in the milk-sweet embrace of his new nurse. I replaced the rings in the pouch, hearing the solid, heavy clink they made in meeting, and retied
them securely about my waist, and then I rolled myself in my cloak and sought sleep once more, this time successfully. My last waking thought was of Uther Pendragon, lying cold and long days dead on a riverbank, somewhere to the west of us.

  The sound of voices woke me in the darkness before dawn as the camp stirred into life. I rose slowly and sleepily and dressed in my full armour before moving to saddle my horse, tightening the cinches securely before hauling myself up onto his back. It felt good to feel the weight of my swordbelt again and the solid cover of my iron, leather-lined helmet. New fires were springing into life all along the narrow strand that fronted the sea, and I could smell the briny tang and hear the roar of waves washing up as the tide came in, the sound amplified strangely by the ear flaps of my helm. I kicked Germanicus into motion, and rode directly west, recalling clearly the directions of Derek of Ravenglass, and had no difficulty in finding the mouth of the river on whose banks Uther Pendragon lay unburied. The great white stone Derek had described as marking the entrance to the river's channel was visible from far away, and when I reached it I swung inland, moving through the shallows by the riverbank, allowing the big black to pick his own way among the boulders that littered the bed of the stream. The river scarcely merited the status Derek of Ravenglass had accorded it, being no more than a broad, shallow stream, slightly over fifty paces wide at its broadest, where it flowed out to join the sea. Within the channel, cool and tree-covered, it dwindled rapidly in the space of a hundred paces to less than one third that size. It was pleasant there, however, for the day, young as it was, had already grown more than merely warm, and the twelve heavy miles along the sandy beach from the site of Connor's galley had heated both my horse and me uncomfortably. Three miles upstream, the Ravenglass king had told me, I would find the remains of Uther and his men, mixed with a number of Derek's own.

  From time to time as my horse carefully picked its way upstream, I came to deep and pleasant-seeming pools trapped behind fallen logs or dug deep- channelled by the fall of water from some minor obstacle higher in the stream bed, which rose steadily as we moved inland. Each of them tempted me to dismount and bathe, for I was itchingly aware of the long passage of time since I had last been truly clean. For all that, however, I had no real desire to yield to the impulse here. Somewhere upstream, I knew, the bodies of a substantial number of slain men lay scattered in and around this stream; mutilated bodies that had been dead for days. I thought of Lucanus and his horror of polluted water, and I recalled my horror—God! had that been mere days ago?—when, just as I stooped to drink from another stream, I had suspected wrongness, and had found other slain men, men whom I had known, floating a short way upstream, swollen obscenely, their leaking fluids fouling the water around them.