by Jack Whyte
The breathless silence continued as I collected my cloak from the back of my chair and swung it hard over my shoulders, feeling the weight of it settle upon me like a cloak of iron ring mail. "Now my duty here is done and my responsibilities as Guardian of this place are many." I looked at him again. "Your duty, as a conscientious councillor from this day forth, yet lies ahead of you and I have not the slightest doubt you can do it brilliantly if you so wish. Valerius Mirren, may we now adjourn?"
As the hall began to empty, Peter Ironhair was left standing alone.
This time there was no throng of people waiting to applaud me as I left the hall. The Council had disbanded quietly, its members making their way to their separate destinations in silence, their minds dealing one way or another with all that had transpired that day.
I stopped by the Infirmary to let Lucanus know how things had gone, but he was not there. Ludmilla sat at Luke's table, writing diligently in a small, clear hand, adding to a long column of numbers that filled the page that lay in front of her. She had not heard me approach, in spite of my nailed boots, so total was her concentration. I stopped beyond the doorway, looking at her, seeing the way the light from an open window brought out the lustre in her hair, making its blackness shimmer. As I stood there, hesitant to interrupt her and aware of an unusual tension in my guts, she looked up and saw me.
"Commander Merlyn, good day. Is there something I can help you with?"
"Good day to you, Lady Ludmilla. I was looking for Lucanus."
She looked surprised. "He went to the Council gathering."
I shook my head. "No, he was not there. I would have seen him. When did he leave?"
"Hours ago."
"Hmm." I nodded my thanks and turned to go, aware of an urge to remain, and yet unknowing whence it came.
"Popilius Cirro is recovering."
Her words brought me around in the doorway. "He is? How well?" Popilius was our senior soldier, primus pilus, First Spear of Camulod. I had last seen him far to the south, in Cornwall, where he had lain apart from the field of the last great battle of Uther's army, surviving the slaughter because he had been wounded in an earlier skirmish. He had contracted pneumonia afterwards, on his way back to Camulod with a special escort, and had lain comatose since his arrival.
Ludmilla smiled, a fleeting thing that bared her white teeth for a mere instant. "Extremely well. He awoke this morning, some time before noon, as though he had been asleep merely since last night, rather than since last month. He was hungry, he said."
"Hungry." I cleared my throat. "May I speak with him?"
"I cannot think why not, although he may be asleep again. He is extremely weak." She stood up, and I watched as her long robe settled around her. "I'll take you to him."
Popilius was not asleep, and I saw his eyes light up with pleasure as I walked towards the cot in which he lay. He was an old man now, I saw. When last we met, I had been shocked by his white hair and the white stubble upon his unshaven cheeks. The Popilius Cirro I had known prior to that meeting had been a hardened, veteran centurion, a vision of solid, military ruggedness, clad at all times in crisp, spotless clothes and shining, polished armour. The man who looked up at me now from the narrow cot looked like that other's grandfather. His beard was thick and snowy white, with only a patch of brown beneath his lower lip. Equally white, thick hair lay coiled in tresses on his pillow, and his eyes were sunken deep above hollowed-out old man's cheeks that sagged around deep-graven lines from the edges of his nose to the sides of his thin, lipless mouth.
"Commander," he said, his voice a breathless wheeze. "You came away safe."
I reached out and took his hand, smiling broadly to hide my distress at his condition. "Aye, Popilius, I did. Does that surprise you?"
His eyes narrowed. "What about Uther?"
I shook my head. "I was too late to help him. He is dead. I burned his body." "Lot?"
"Dead, too, old friend. They are all dead." I felt his fingers go limp. "Now, how much longer are you going to lie here in this useless bed? We have need of you."
He closed his eyes and nodded, his face betraying nothing of his thoughts. "I know you do . . . I am aware of that." His eyes opened again suddenly and he peered at me, almost squinting as he searched for something in my eyes. "Your mind, Commander. . . are you still well?"
I grinned at him. "Aye, Popilius, better than I ever was, and back on duty as I have not been for years."
He squeezed my hand, grunted a sigh, and relaxed again. "Good," he whispered. "That's good."
I waited for more, but gradually realized that he was fast asleep. I disengaged his fingers from my own and left him there. Ludmilla had gone.
I made my way to my aunt's house from there, having no wish to sit alone in my own quarters, and there in the family room I found Luke and the others of my minor council assembled and waiting for me, well launched already upon a celebration of the day's events. Everything had gone exactly as we had planned it, and Mirren was revelling in the admiration his performance had inspired. I added my own congratulations and accepted a cup of deep red Gaulish wine from my great-aunt, who merely smiled at me and squeezed my wrist to show her approval. The mood of that gathering was one of gaiety and self-congratulation, and I allowed it to wash over me unheeded, attempting to keep my own mind empty of anything resembling urgency. The week that had passed had been a long and industrious one, and I felt tired with a bone-deep, aching weariness that was rendered sufferable by the success of what we had worked for.
It was only long afterwards, after the others had all departed and left me alone with Aunt Luceiia and Lucanus, that we came to any discussion of the less pleasant aspects of what we had achieved. Aunt Luceiia had rung the small brazen gong that sat by the doorway to the servants' quarters and asked the girl who answered its summons to fetch another jug of the rich wine of which I had already drunk too much. When the maid servant had gone, my aunt looked from one to the other of us and smiled again, a gentle, patient smile. "Well," she observed, "I can see that you two still have much to talk about, and I may go to bed convinced you will not be talking of me behind my back." She looked at me. "Caius, you have done well today. Your father and my husband and my brother would all have been proud of you." Her gaze widened to include Luke. "I have ordered more wine, in case you feel the need of it. I know you have no need of my opinion thereupon. Now I have work to do elsewhere. It is not late enough, but I will wish a good night to both of you." And she was gone.
Luke drained his goblet. "God, this is good wine!"
"The best," I concurred, "and probably the last of it. Any day now, we'll be drinking watered vinum."
Luke shook his head with drunken solemnity. "No, you exaggerate, my friend. Your blessed aunt, endowed with her sagacity, would not permit the bottom of the barrel to be reached without making alternative arrangements. She has amphorae hidden elsewhere, have no doubt. I would be prepared to wager she has made arrangements with the quartermasters to renew the cellars."
"Well, if she has, she has even more of my admiration than before, and I did not think that could be possible. As for hidden amphorae of this, there can be very few of them and they must be well cached. We haven't taken a delivery in years." Lucanus had not heard me. His brow was creased in thought.
"Ironhair," he said. "What do you intend to do about him?"
I chewed on the inside of my upper lip for long moments as I thought about his question. Finally I shook my head. "I've done what I intended to do about him. I've drawn his teeth."
"Before he ever had a chance to bite. You think he'll take it lying down?"
"Lying down, standing up or leaping around, Luke, I couldn't care less. It's done."
"Aye, but is it finished?"
I sighed and rose to refill his goblet from the jug on the table. "Aye, it is finished, one way or the other." I could tell from the weight of it that the jug was almost empty. I poured slowly, half a cup for each of us, the last drops falling individually
into my own cup. "Either he will accept the decree, in which case he may be disgruntled but will constitute no threat, or he will rebel . . . in which case he'll be banished and will also pose no threat."
"You like him, don't you?"
I sat down again, placing the empty jug on the floor by my foot. "I could. I think there might be much in him to like."
Lucanus sniffed. "He'll be a bad enemy, Cay."
"How? What can he do, except dislike me if he stays in Camulod? He won't confront me, and the thought of his displeasure holds no fears for me."
"Hmm. What about Lucius Varo?"
"What about him? Lucius is a politician. He'll create no waves, and he'll survive. What he cannot achieve one way, he'll attempt to gain another way. We're aware of him; we'll watch. What time of day is it?"
Lucanus blinked. "I have no idea." He got to his feet and moved to the doorway, opening it and leaning out into the passageway, where he peered towards the atrium at the far end. He spoke from the doorway. "It's getting dark." He returned to the couch opposite me. "Afternoon drinking, I have remarked in the past, steals more time than procrastination. Popilius came back to us today, by the way, just before noon. He's going to recover, it seems, in spite of all my fears. I stayed with him for several hours. That's why I missed the Council session."
"I know. I saw him before I came here. I went looking for you, but found Ludmilla instead."
As I spoke, the inner door opened and Ludmilla herself entered, carrying a jug of wine. Both of us blinked at her and started to rise. She raised a hand. "Please, stay as you are. I only bring this." She placed the jug on the table against the wall and left as quietly as she had entered. My voice started to stop her from leaving, but my tongue, or some other part of me, would not permit the utterance of the words. I subsided, blinking owlishly at the closed door that shut her from my sight. Luke blew out his breath in an explosive rush. He pushed himself erect from his couch and crossed to the table, where he refilled his goblet before bringing the jug to mine.
"Well, Caius Merlyn, what think you of my student?"
"Ludmilla?" I thought about that for a moment and then smiled. "She strikes me as being a wondrous fine student."
"No, Cay, she is an excellent student, a gifted student, perhaps a divinely inspired student. . . but a mere student, nonetheless. Her wondrousness is of a different order. As you have noticed, she is a wondrous woman."
"What d'you mean, 'As I have noticed'?" I felt myself flush, and was embarrassed that I should.
"What do I mean?" He laughed aloud. "Come, Cay, admit it, you are taken with her. A blind man could see that, and why should you not be?"
"Nonsense!" The denial emerged terse and angry-sounding, and the sound of it wiped the laughter from his face. He straightened up, languidly.
"Oh, then I beg your pardon, Caius Merlyn," he drawled, making no attempt to hide the mockery in his tone, and I found myself growing angrier, even though I knew I had no cause and was overreacting beyond logic.
"Fine, then," I snapped. "My pardon is extended—graciously," I added, in a gentler tone, breathing deeply, fighting for composure. "I find Ludmilla admirable, simply because of the terms in which you have spoken of her, but I have no special awareness of her as a woman."
"No special awareness. . . I see. You find her undesirable?"
"Yes!" Far too abrupt, I told myself immediately, and then began again. "No, that is untrue. I find her very . . . attractive, I suppose would be the word, were I attracted to her." Lucanus looked down at his cup, masking his face with his free hand. "Besides," I went on, "I have no allure for her. She is your student, your devotee." I straightened in my own seat now, drawing a deep breath. "What do you plan for her?"
He lowered his hand from his face and raised his goblet in my direction, a slight smile on his lips. "Plan for her? What do you mean? Or should I take that merely as it emerged? I plan, if anything, that she shall become a gifted surgeon, woman though she be. God knows, she has the gifts and the abilities to make me proud of having taught her."
" Taught her? Is that all?"
His smile seemed to grow wider. "All? What more could there be?" His pause was brief, but I sensed a change in the direction of his thoughts. "Caius, when we first met, you did not like me. You told me so in no uncertain words, do you recall?"
I did, and nodded my acknowledgment. He sniffed. "Why did you feel that way, can you remember?"
I shook my head, recalling it clearly. "I was an idiot, young and intransigent, arrogant and conceited. I thought I knew everything there was to know of men and life. It struck me that you had no sense of humour; that you were staid and pompous; humourless. Yes, that was it."
He nodded, looking into his cup. "Hmm! Quite natural, I suppose. It was a mutual thing. I found you equally distasteful, although I never told you so. And yet, as time progressed, and circumstances brought us together more and more, our antipathy changed to something vastly different. We became friends."
I grimaced, stretching the skin around my mouth and eyes, trying to shake off the wine haze. "So?" I asked. "What has that to do with Ludmilla?"
"Nothing at all, and everything. How long have we been friends now?"
I thought about that. "Five years? Six, perhaps seven."
Something in his eyes, something enigmatic, alerted me to the import of what he would say next, yet when they came his words caught me unprepared. "Seven. And how often have you known me to consort with women?"
I shrugged, puzzled. "Seldom. Never, in fact."
" That is correct." He nodded. "Now tell me, have you ever wondered about that?"
"No," I said, and then paused, frowning. "At least, not until I found you at the campsite with Ludmilla. Then I wondered."
"As well you might, and should have." He shrugged, made a tiny face, sipped his wine and then sat back against the couch. "Caius, my friend, I, as a man, have little use for women."
I felt something sag within me, some bracing, deep within my being, that had been stressed with the anticipation of bearing a different weight from that which it now felt. Luke watched me, that same enigmatic smile playing about his mouth.
"Does that dismay you, Cay?"
I merely shook my head, unable to articulate a response. His smile grew wider.
"You have loved a woman, Cay, and found happiness therein. I never have, but then, I have never sought what you sought and found. It is not in me." He voiced each of those five words separately, leaving their emphasis to fall upon my ear like five clear notes upon a harpist's lyre, then leaned forward quickly, his eyes fastened upon mine as consternation bloomed across my face. "Wait, Cay!" he said, before I could respond. "Before you say a word, or think a thought, consider this: the man from whom you have just heard those words is your close friend Lucanus."
I sat back, leaning away from him, struggling to keep the disgust that roiled inside me from showing upon my face.
"What difference does that make?"
He seemed unruffled, but I detected something, a settling, a guardedness descend about his eyes. "Difference, Cay? What difference should it make? None at all. I have not changed in any way since we began to speak of this." He drank again, unhurriedly and naturally. "I have not changed in any way since first we met, or since we became friends. I am myself. Lucanus the physician. Legionary Surgeon. Your friend. I have merely admitted that there is no intimate place for women in my life."
I could no longer sit still and face him. I rose to my feet, feeling the drunkenness falling away from me as though I had been doused with cold water. Stooping, I placed my goblet on the tabletop in front of me and then stepped away from him, my eyes sweeping around the walls of this familiar room as though seeking an anchor, a point of reference from which I could regain my lost perspective.
"How can it not make a difference, Luke?" I barely recognized my own voice. "There is a vast difference."
"In what?" I heard the challenge in his voice.
"In everything!"
"You mean in your opinion, do you not?"
"Yes, I do, since you push me to admission. It is unnatural, it seems to me, to say what you have just said. How can a man be natural, if he has no place for women in his life?"
"Unnatural? I said no intimate place, Cay, not no place."
"Place, space, need, desire, they all boil down to the same thing in terms of men and women, Luke. The need for intimacy exists in all of us. It is an inescapable part of life, one of man's primal urgencies. In normal men, it demands the closeness of a woman."
"And therefore men untouched by such demands must be unnatural. Is that what you are saying?"
"Of course it is!"
"Of course it is. Why then, you are unnatural."
The enormity of that left me speechless for a moment. I was unnatural, when he had just confessed to being homosexual? He pressed on.
"Ludmilla is a beautiful woman, by anyone's criteria. She is young, strong, lovely, healthy, intelligent, articulate and free of encumbrances, and yet you feel no attraction to her. Even worse, it seems to me, you are prepared to fight against the mere suggestion you might find her pleasing. That, my friend, is unnatural."
"Wait, wait. Wait just a moment!" In my haste to interrupt him I was almost shouting. "My feelings, or the lack of them, for Ludmilla have no bearing here."
Now he blinked at me in astonishment, and a brief silence fell between us before he continued. "Are you serious? Then tell me, please, what has?"
I shook my head hard to clear it, thinking I was missing something of importance. "Lucanus," I said. "I am becoming confused, and angry. Let me speak slowly and clearly here. Any feelings I may have for Ludmilla, or for any other woman, are not at issue when we are talking of what is natural and what is unnatural. It is your tastes that are unnatural, your lack of a place for women, which amounts—can only amount—to a love for men. That love, while not uncommon, I've been told, could never be called natural or normal!"
"Oh!" His voice was soft, almost hurt. He rose to his feet again and made his way to the wine jug, where he poured for himself before offering the jug to me. I shook my head. When he had poured, he turned back towards me, resting his buttocks against the table's edge.