by Jack Whyte
I rode on, trying to rid my mind of such thoughts by dwelling on other things. Derek of Ravenglass came back into my mind, and I pondered our bizarre encounter days earlier, and the strange lack of ill will I bore him then and now. He had killed my cousin Uther Pendragon, but in so doing he had, in the oddest way, restored to me my faith in Uther himself, a faith that had died the day before I had set out to find him and kill him. For, as I had told Connor, I had believed that Uther, my cousin and dearest friend, had brutally slain my wife and unborn child. Derek of Ravenglass, by killing Uther and despoiling him of his arms and armour, had given me cause to doubt my belief again, based as it was upon logic that I now suspected might have been flawed from the outset.
Confronted that day with Derek where I had expected Uther, since he wore Uther's distinctive armour, I had seen what I might not have seen had I, in fact, met Uther. I looked to Uther's saddle bow hung an iron-balled flail with a leather-covered handle. Derek had agreed to give it to me, and it hung now from my own saddle bow. The red paint that coated its short chain and the heavy, iron ball on the end of it was chipped and battered from much use. Now, as I rode, I unhooked the weapon and grasped the handle, swinging it up to catch the weighty mass of the ball in my left hand, where I examined it closely. The thing had been the death of many men, but I knew now, almost beyond a doubt, it had not taken the life of my Cassandra. I had believed, before seeing it in Derek's possession, that I had found the selfsame flail sunk in the muddy bottom of a shallow mere, close by the spot where my wife had met her death. I had assumed it Uther's, for at that time I knew of only two such weapons and Uther had made them both, one for me and the other for himself. I had been carrying my own, many miles away, when my wife was killed. Uther had vanished from Camulod again, as he used to do, without a word. His guilt, once I had found the flail and recalled other profound suspicions, had been glaringly self-evident to me.
I sighed now, and reslung the weapon from its hook, remembering my father and his startling example, recounted to me at his own expense, of the requirement for moral men to be willing to accord the benefit of doubt when faced with a lack of solid proof, no matter how great the circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing.
In the few years that had elapsed since Uther's invention of this fearsome tool, years through which I had remained immured, all memory and knowledge driven from my head by a battle wound, others had copied Uther's design and the weapon had become widely used. I knew that now, but my knowledge was very recent. Someone had used one to murder my wife and the child she carried. Someone, but evidently not Uther. Or was that evident? My memory stirred again with suspicion. Perhaps he made another, identical, to replace the one he had lost. I shook my head violently, attempting to dislodge the thought, and as I did so I heard the crows.
My flesh crawled with revulsion at the familiar sound, the anthem, the very death-watch of war. The discordant cacophony was still far off, but I kicked my horse to a faster gait, dreading what I should shortly face but unable to tolerate the thought of allowing the grisly feast ahead of me to pass uninterrupted for a moment longer than I could help.
The stream bed narrowed dramatically at one point, throwing its waters higher and more strongly, as though to impede my passage, and the banks became suddenly rocky and precipitous, looming high above me as though to shut out the light of day. The channel turned sharply right and then left again, rising steeply, and then I reached the end of the broken water and emerged suddenly into a clearing where the high wall on my left fell away abruptly, leaving an open, thickly treed glade along the river's grassy edge where the water flowed smooth and deep. On the right, the cliff loomed still, harsh and unyielding.
I pulled my mount to a clattering halt, scanning the scene before me. White and black. For long moments my eyes refused to acknowledge what confronted them. The white was naked flesh, bleached and blood-drained, for a chaos of once-fierce warriors lay stripped of everything, including any semblance of humanity. The black was dried blood, torn flesh and flap- winged scavengers. Outraged, I screamed my anguish and sent my mount charging through the shallows, splashing mightily and dislodging the gorging birds from their repast so that they rose in an angry, fluttering cloud, their caws of panicked warning deafening me. I reined in my horse when we reached the bank, hauling him back onto his haunches as I gazed in horror at the scene around me. Corpses, hundreds of them, it seemed, lay sprawled and tangled, piled in confusion, with, here and there, the solitary, lonely- looking, swollen-bellied body of a horse among them. From the trees around me, the crows and magpies chattered and scolded, warning me away from what was now theirs, and above their sound, I slowly became aware of another more pervasive, the buzzing of a million swarming flies.
My stomach churning with the need to vomit, I forced myself to look around me carefully, knowing immediately I had no hope of finding Uther's body. These ravaged corpses had been thoroughly despoiled. No weapons lay abandoned on the ground, no clothes, no armour, no signs of the camp I knew had been here. No order governed the disposition of the bodies, either; friend lay entwined with foe, united, inseparable and indistinguishable. The flies held dominion here; they and the scavenging birds the only living creatures in sight.
Disgusted, and shaking with nausea, I turned my horse around and left that awful place, following the outline of a clearly trampled path, and there, mere paces from my passage, I found Uther Pendragon.
There was no mistaking him, even after three days of death His size, his hair, and the hideous, gaping, ragged-edged wound in his lower back, just where I had seen, known and felt it in an awful dream, left no room for doubt. He lay where Derek of Ravenglass had left him after stripping him, alone by the base of a great, dead, hollow pine, spread-eagled among a welter of tumbled, rotting boughs so that his right foot stuck grotesquely skyward, his knee caught in a fork of one of them. The green and blue carpet of flies that coated him finally overwhelmed me, and I fell from my saddle to the ground, retching helplessly.
Later, when I was strong enough, I staggered to my feet and covered my mouth and nostrils with a cloth, tying it in place to leave my hands free for the task. It was the work of mere moments to drag some of the dried-out tree limbs to where he lay and pile them over him. Moments more, and I had struck flint to steel and breathed a small flame to life. I tended it carefully and watched it grow to become ravenous, and then I fed its hunger with Uther's pyre. Remounting my horse, I sat and waited until the leaping tongues of flame soared high enough to lick at, then ignite the long-dead wood of the great hollow pine above him. Only when I was sure that the conflagration could not be stopped did I move my horse away. Then a neighbouring tree, another pine, its inner growth dark and dry, flashed into violent, blazing fury, throwing a sudden cloud of flames and whirling sparks into the air, startling me. Grass fires were breaking out already from the flying sparks. The entire glade would burn, and all that it contained. The air had grown thick and black with whirling smoke and departing birds, and the fury of the fire that consumed Uther Pendragon, nurtured by burning pine sap, already hid him from my view.
"Farewell, Cousin," I whispered, feeling a desolation the like of which I had never known. "Your son will think well of you, I swear."
I departed then, quickly, leaving everything behind me to the cleansing flames.
III
I had ridden through a war-torn landscape on my journey to Cornwall and the southwest, but the return journey demonstrated to me just how little of it I had really noticed. Then, I had ridden fuelled largely by an outrage kindled by my own, personal anger at Uther and what I believed him to have done, and partly by my shock at the stories of the atrocities committed by my own men, the soldiers of Camulod, under his leadership in the war against Lot. The sights I had seen had been those I wished to see on that stage of my journey, those that would feed my rage against the cousin who had wronged me. I had looked for them diligently and had found them in profusion, but in the seeking of them, I had ridden oblivious
of other, more terrible spectacles.
Now, much less than a month later, I returned by the same route, sickened by the carnage I had seen in Cornwall, appalled by the senseless squandering of so many young, healthy men. I rode in full awareness now of the path of war and warriors and the havoc they had wreaked between them. The burned and ruined cottages now gave off a sullen, all-pervading stench of bitter smoke and charred embers that spoke wordlessly of desolation and despair. The sight of hanging corpses that had angered me earlier seemed insignificant now on my homeward ride, the smell of them hardly noteworthy now, the swarms of flies and scavenging birds attracted to the mouldering bodies negligible by comparison with the sheer enormity of the numbers of dead and maimed and crippled soldiers littering the landscape I had newly quit. I rode through all of it in a state of almost total despair.
Only once on the journey did I come across any sign of danger, and it might have been no more than my frame of mind that made it seem thus. Early one bright morning, new-risen from a bed of thick-piled grass that had done little to ease my uneasy wakefulness, I emerged from a dense copse on the banks of a shallow river to find myself confronting four armed and mounted men on the other bank. A single glance told me I knew none of them, nor recognized their style of dress. They were all armoured, after a fashion, in mismatched, bossed leather garments, breastplates and leggings, and they all carried leather-covered shields. On seeing them, a deep and sullen anger overtook me and I stood upright in my stirrups, drawing my long sword and passing it to my left hand and then unhooking Uther's heavy flail from the saddle bow and swinging it around my head, daring them wordlessly to challenge me. They exchanged sullen glances among themselves and then swung about in unison and rode away, kicking their shaggy horses to a gallop that soon bore them from my sight.
I drank from the stream and went on my way, acutely aware for the remainder of the day that they might be waiting somewhere ahead of me, hoping to take me by surprise. I saw no sign of them, however, and by the following clay had forgotten them.
Three days later I came again to the hostelry where I had heard the chastening tale of the visitations of the armies of Lot of Cornwall and Uther Pendragon—Uther of Camulod had been the name they gave him, to my angry dismay. The place had been owned by a man called Lars, who had turned out to be the long-lost eldest son of Uncle Varrus's old friend Equus. In the course of a pleasant evening with him and his wife and her brother Eric, a merchant, I discovered not only that Eric made his living largely by trading amicably with the Saxons who had settled the lands to the southeast of Isca, but that the people of the entire region around that city thought more kindly of their recently arrived Saxon neighbours than they did of Uther's armies and the forces of Lot of Cornwall. Those sentiments, outrageous as they had seemed to me upon hearing them, had begun to seem almost acceptable a short time later, when viewed in the context of what these people had suffered at the hands of their fellow countrymen. Now the hostelry lay empty and abandoned, all the doors and windows boarded over. I hoped that they had made their way safely northward to Camulod, as I had urged them to.
It began to rain, as it had rained when last I passed this way, and for the next two days I rode through heavy, intermittent squalls that soaked me to the skin and turned the world into a place of dripping, miserable, lightless shades of grey.
The sun came out again on the third day to reveal to my unprepared eyes a scene untouched by war. From that moment on, I rode through green and pleasant landscapes where men worked peacefully and fearlessly, it seemed, in their own fields, as if the struggles of ambitious warriors had no existence in this land.
I avoided Isca and Ilchester, the desolate town closest to Camulod, keeping my distance from the great Roman road and riding across country now, through heavily wooded land, towards the borders of our Colony, feeling a shapeless joy stirring in me as I began to recognize landmarks. By the time I realized I would not, despite my wishful thinking, arrive home before darkness fell that day, I had reached the beginnings of that area closest to our lands, where the dense forest began to yield to the openness of our fertile valley. I knew exactly where I was now, and remembered a favoured campsite from my youth, a grassy, moss-soft bed beside a rippling stream, concealed from casual view by a screen of thick bushes and a waist-high embankment that once had marked the edge of a much greater stream than flowed there now. Only as I approached within bowshot of the spot, riding almost carelessly in the gathering dusk, did I realize that the site was already occupied.
I drew rein immediately, holding my horse still, wondering if I had been seen moving through the dense shadows beneath the widely spaced trees, and sat there for long moments, every sense alert. I had no idea who was there by the stream, and reason told me that here, on my home lands, it was more likely to be a friend than otherwise, but my recent travels had shown me graphically that nothing in this land today should be taken for granted and that it behoved a cautious man to entrust himself fully to his own instincts for self-preservation.
Germanicus stood stock-still beneath me, his ears pricked forward, as alert as I. He, too, had heard what I had: either a grunt of pain or a bark of laughter from the direction of the hidden bank. Moments passed slowly, and then the sound came again. A man's voice, speaking normally this time, too far away for me to hear the words. The tone, however, told me I was unobserved; I detected no urgency, no warning note. Slowly, taking pains to move in silence, I dismounted and led my horse to the nearest tree, where I tethered him securely with the bole between his bulk and the direction from which the voice had come. I removed my war cloak and folded it across my saddle, then unharnessed my long sword from where it hung against the horse's side and slipped it through the ring at my back between my shoulders, where I could unsheathe it quickly. That done, I retrieved and strung my great bow, slipped my left arm through the sling of my quiver and nocked an arrow before moving forward cautiously towards whatever awaited me.
It took me a long time to cover the hundred and fifty paces to a spot where I could hope to see beyond the protective fringe of bushes that screened the campsite. At the outset, I moved with extreme stealth, hoping to number the group ahead of me by the sound of their voices. As I progressed, however, it became clear that one man was doing all the speaking, and I grew confident that he was alone with perhaps one other. I increased my pace slightly after that, although still moving with great care, until finally I heard a second voice, which was unmistakably feminine. This was an unknown voice, but it was young, and with its utterance came an end to any immediate threat of danger. One man and one young woman together in a secluded spot seldom offered threat to anyone. Unless, I revised, it be to a stealthy stranger creeping up to invade their privacy.
I coughed, as though clearing my throat of phlegm, and a man's head sprang into view directly ahead of me. His eyes met mine and both of us froze for a space of heartbeats. He was bareheaded, not only unarmoured but unarmed, and I saw his eyes fly wide as his mind registered the danger implicit in my helmed and crested head and the high cross-hilt of the cavalry sword slung behind my shoulder. Recognition flared in me and my own shock was as great as his as I took in the thin, aquiline set of his swarthy features and the narrow peak of hair that swept forward to split the expanse of his wide forehead, leaving his greying temples almost bald.
"Cay!" he said, almost conversationally, managing to sound surprised and unruffled at the same time. He had collected himself far more quickly than I. "Where in Hades have you come from? And afoot?"
I was on the point of answering when his companion raised her head above the bushes separating us, confounding me further. She was very young and extremely beautiful, although the height of the intervening shrubbery prevented me from seeing lower than her chin, which, by the angle at which it was stretched, told me she was standing on tiptoe to peer at me. I was aware of straight, black, glossy hair, and large, bright blue eyes that were opened wide as though before an apparition. It occurred to me later that I
probably looked as startled as she did, for this bucolic solitude was a situation in which I had never expected to find my good friend Lucanus.
"What's the matter?" Lucanus's head was tilted slightly to one side as it always was when something puzzled him.
"Nothing," I assured him. "Nothing at all. I simply did not expect to find you out here, so far from your Infirmary."
The young woman had disappeared.
"Well, come and join us. We were just about to set off for home."
"To Camulod?" The idea almost made me laugh. "You're too late. You'll never get there before dark."
"Nonsense, Caius. Lots of time. Come, come in."
"Fine," I shrugged. "Let me fetch my horse. I left him beneath the trees back there, since I didn't know who you were."
In the few moments I required for my task I had time to regain my mental composure. I had never know Lucanus to consort with a woman, and I had known him for many years. Never, in all those years, had I seen him alone in the company of a woman other than by casual or accidental circumstance. So it was no more than natural, I told myself, that I should be amazed to find him here, so far from anywhere, alone in the company of an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.