by Jack Whyte
I paused, watching him. He glowered but made no attempt to speak. I continued. "Let me add this. You are a big, strong, well-made man and you might think to seek me out and challenge me privately, man to man, some time when I am not on duty." I shrugged my shoulders. "With sufficient provocation you might possibly provoke me into fighting you. Should that happen, I will thrash you, but hear me now, Ironhair, and hear me clearly. If that does happen, no matter what the outcome may be, I swear to you by the blood of the crucified Christ that you will be banished from this Colony forever, immediately thereafter, upon my preordained decree. My rank, as Legate Commander of Camulod, never goes off duty. Do you understand me?"
He blinked, glowered and turned his back on me again, and the wagon lurched into motion. I watched its progress for several moments longer and then pulled my horse into a rearing turn and aimed him towards the gateway.
I began my downhill ride in anger, my pride offended by the man's audacity, but I quickly recalled the unforeseen support so freely made available to me from the very people he had sought to use against me. No thanks necessary, Merlyn! By the time I reached the bottom of the hill road and pointed my horse towards the route to the concealed valley in the hills that held the remains of my wife and child, I had regained my normal humour, aided greatly by the realization that, for the first time that day, my head was clear and my body felt well.
That feeling of well-being lasted for the duration of my trip to Avalon, the name I had given to my secret little vale, but the sight of the lonely grave by the waterside, and the empty hut nearby, with its hanging, broken door quickly banished my good humour. The grave was weed-grown, although I had swept it clean only five or six weeks before. I knelt beside it and cleaned it again, digging with my fingers to loosen the roots of the persistent weeds that had re-established themselves so quickly. My task complete, I prayed quietly for a while, remembering the beauty of the silent young woman who lay beneath the dirt, and trying to visualize the child she might have given me which now lay mouldering beside her.
When I eventually rose to my feet again, feeling the coldness of the damp earth drying on my knees, I approached the hut and went inside. It was as I remembered it from years before, except that the coverings on the bed had been removed at some time, exposing the woven hempen rope netting strung across the frame. The rest of the interior, including the few furnishings, lay covered in dirt and old, wind-blown leaves. Even the window, hand-made from pieces of precious, almost transparent glass, was coated with dirt. I looked from the window to the long-dead fireplace, feeling my throat swell with the pain of remembered happiness as I recalled the evenings I had spent sitting there with Cassandra, warm and content in the flickering light of the flames, knowing that the comfort and warmth of the bed behind us was ours alone. As I turned to leave, I noticed the broom in the corner by the window, and remembered making it for Cassandra. I stepped to it and took it in my hands, and looked again around the tiny room, which she had always kept so clean and full of fresh flowers, and I began idly to sweep up some of the dried leaves that lay at my feet. I had no thought of cleaning the place, but what began as a listless, almost aimless recollection of my wife's use of this simple instrument somehow became a determined assault on the years of neglect, so that in a short space of time the room was clean again, no single leaf remaining. I then used the ends of the broom to sweep some of the encrusted dirt from the window glass and ended up polishing each of the glazed sections with a rag from my saddlebag, after which I washed the rag in the lake and used both it and the broom—the latter awkwardly—to scrub and then wash the woodwork of the small table, the two chairs and the plain wooden chest at the bottom of the bed. Only when I had done that did I think to open the chest, and there, wrapped in the skin of a huge black bear, I found all of the sleeping furs we had used, and I plunged my face into them, giving way to my grief at last as I smelled the faint, familiar fragrance of the dried herbs she had used to keep them fresh and purge them of their natural, feral odours.
Much later, emptied at last of tears and self-pitying grief, I rose again and looked around me, then went out to where my horse stood cropping grass and unsaddled him, removing his bridle, too, after I rubbed him down, so that he could roam free. It took but a short time to find kindling and firewood, and as that day drew to an end I sat once more in the leaping firelight, knowing that the broken door must be mended soon if this place were to remain fit for me to live in again. When darkness had fallen completely, I piled the fire high with stout logs and undressed slowly, before climbing naked into the pile of furs that smelled so strongly of her presence and her spirit. I lay awake for hours, it seems, recalling scenes from our happy past, feeling her presence all around me in the flickering shadows thrown by the dancing flames. Somewhere outside, from time to time, a dove cooed, the sound gentle and comforting, soothing the almost pleasant ache within me.
I was awake soon after dawn broke the following morning, and then, having thrown myself naked and bed-warm into the waters of the lake and towelled myself dry by the edge of Cassandra's grave with the lining of my cloak, I decided that I was not yet ready to ride back to Camulod. I was hungry, and I felt wonderful, at peace with myself and my life for the first time since regaining my memory, so I spent an hour fishing and broke my fast on two succulent trout. I spent the remainder of the morning simply lazing around after hauling a fresh supply of firewood from the depths of the woods that occupied most of the valley. Eventually, however, I could procrastinate no longer and I took the road homeward around the middle of the afternoon. Even then, I took a longer route home than was necessary, aware of the needlessness of secrecy now that Cassandra was gone. Yet I had always been jealous of the privacy afforded me by the enchanted and enchanting little place I called Avalon, and aware of a genuine need to keep all signs of my coming and going disguised from others' eyes. My father had known the place many years before I did, and so had Publius Varrus, and although neither of them had been fanciful enough to name the valley, neither had betrayed its location to anyone else other than Aunt Luceiia. Both men had told me long before, when I was a mere boy, that I should keep the knowledge of this spot close to myself, because it would afford me sanctuary at times when I required to be alone, free of the problems of others. Now, besides myself, only five other living souls that I knew of were aware of its existence: Luceiia Britannicus, Daffyd, my Druid friend and his two apprentices Tumac and Mod, and Donuil Mac Athol, my former hostage, now my friend, whose continuing absence had now begun to worry me in spite of the fact that I knew my concern was foolish. He had been gone six weeks, but I had mentally accorded his task three months. Six more weeks, then, might well elapse before I had any real cause for concern about his welfare. On the other hand, the child Arthur could come to harm in the foreign place where he was held, in spite of the fact that it was Donuil's home, long before Donuil returned to Camulod and then travelled with me across the sea to his home in Hibernia, which he called Eire.
I rode in a dream, so lulled by my own unaccustomed peace of mind that I committed errors of carelessness for which I would have had my own troopers harshly disciplined. Almost without noticing, I reached the Cut and swung my horse into it, lost in the beauty of afternoon and the peaceful trilling of the myriad birds in the forest on either side of the path I travelled. It was only the flight of a hare that made me take note of where I was, as it leaped almost from beneath my horse's feet, startling him so that he reared and would have thrown me had I not already been leaning forward, slouched over my saddle horn. The hare went bounding ahead of me, straight as the crow flies, up the narrow incline of the Cut for a good two hundred paces before swerving suddenly to disappear among the heavy growth on my right. Startled by my own heedlessness, I began to pay more attention to my surroundings, but the day was still peaceful and I remained at ease. Soon I began to wonder, as so often before, about the origins of this anomalous stretch of unfinished road that had been called the Cut since time immemorial.
It was, or had been, the beginnings of a road; there was not the slightest doubt of that. As a boy, I had dug, with Uther, and found the base layers of the Roman construction. The anomaly lay in the fact that the road had been begun but never completed. The Romans had been meticulous and painstaking in their road-building. Once they began, they always completed their constructions; except, apparently, in this one particular case.
Local legend had it that, in the earliest days of the Roman conquest of Britain launched by the Emperor Claudius but conducted by Aulus Plautius, Legio II Augusta, the Second Legion, known as the Augusta, under the command of Vespasian, who would later become Emperor, had begun to build a march route north-westward into the lands of the Durotriges, the original Celts of our region, intending to establish a fortress on the north coast of the Cornish Peninsula. The Durotriges, however, had proved to be as warlike as the Iceni in the northeast and had contested the Roman right of way hotly, harassing the expedition to such effect that the roadworks had been abandoned before they could be completed, the troops involved being required much more urgently further to the southwest. In the aftermath of a hard-won Roman victory, in which the Durotriges, in alliance with the Dumnonii of the far southwest, went down to defeat, the Augusta had settled in Isca, and no purpose had ever emerged for the abandoned road, which had thus been left unfinished. Now, four hundred years later, its path was still clearly discernible, particularly here where it ran arrow-straight for eleven miles before ending abruptly in deep forest. All it had lacked was the finishing layer of paving stones, and the solidity of its construction—it had been incised right down to bedrock along this stretch—had successfully withstood the ravages of the forest for four centuries. An occasional large tree grew out of its foundations, belying its subsurface density, but by and large the Cut retained its essential nature, a long, straight, treeless, man-made incursion into the heart of the thick forests of Britain.
The gradient I had been following was so gentle as to be almost imperceptible, but I knew that anyone approaching me from the opposite direction would be looking down on me and would be aware of me for miles before I became aware of them. I travelled less than two miles along the Cut, however, before veering off to my right and making my way downhill again into more open grassland beyond the heavy forest, about ten miles from Camulod. I could see open land ahead of me, screened by only a fringe of trees, when I found the entrails of a deer which, from the condition of the remains, I knew had been killed the previous day, and probably late in the afternoon or early evening. It took no great degree of woodcraft to tell that there had been four or five in the hunting party; no care had been taken by anyone to conceal the signs of their presence. Cautiously, I followed the signs and found an abandoned encampment less than a mile away, which I estimated had housed upwards of twenty men, several of them with horses. The ashes of the four fires I found were still warm, one of them almost hot enough to contain live embers, so whoever these people were, they had moved on only recently and were still close by. Returning to my horse, I took my helmet from where it hung on my saddle horn and fitted it snugly on my head, fastening the chin strap.
I travelled more quickly now and far more circumspectly, taking the shortest, most direct route to the Colony while seeking the most concealment I could find, intent on raising the alarm. What kind of traveller, I asked myself, leaves an encampment late in the course of a day? I had immediately dismissed any possibility that they might be my own people. This party was made up of horsemen and foot-soldiers. Their signs were clear. Our patrols were never mixed, they were either one or the other, and our foot-soldiers wore hobnailed boots. The footprints I had seen around the fires were smooth-soled, lacking the hard edges common to our footwear. I rode around and down the side of a hill to find myself trapped in an open amphitheatre surrounded by dense trees. I saw movement on my right first, a flash of yellow among the greenery, and then the unmistakable glint of light upon iron. I swung hard left, kicking my horse uphill, but before I could begin to ride that way I saw five men above me, watching me. In my first glance I saw their horned helmets and large, round Saxon shields. Wrenching my mount around I saw, too, that I had been cut off from behind, where another four Saxons, armed with axes and shields, had strung out across my escape route. Germanicus continued to turn, dancing on his hind legs, and I saw the yellow that had first appeared to me, a bright yellow tunic, worn by a huge, bearded man who now stood in the open, surrounded by a group of eight or nine others. All of them had either spears or axes, the Saxons' favourite weapon, and I cursed myself uselessly for having left Camulod without my great bow. I accepted that I was a dead man; it was only the manner of my death that had to be resolved now. And then I saw my escape route: a narrow cleft in a massive stone outcrop on the hillside some fifty paces ahead and to my left, a natural split in the rock, offering me at least the hope of a defence. I dug my spurs into my horse's flanks and charged ahead as my assailants began to run towards me from all sides.
I had never paid any great attention to this spot before, although I had ridden this way several times, so I had no knowledge of what lay ahead of me beyond the entrance to the narrow ravine I entered. Just beyond the entrance, the surface levelled out and the sides began to recede, and I gave my horse his head, beginning to hope, but the floor of the defile curved to the right and beyond the turn the crevice suddenly pinched out, leaving me facing unscalable walls of rock. I pulled up and turned to ride back to face my pursuers, drawing the long sword from where it hung from the side of my saddle, knowing that the best place to meet them was the narrow entrance to the ravine. I stopped, swung my sword, took a long, deep breath, and as I did so, I heard a voice shouting above my head.
"Surrender, Caius Merlyn! You've won me my wager and you're getting too old to be allowed out riding by yourself, anyway!"
Stunned, I raised my head and saw Donuil laughing down at me from where he perched on a ledge of rock at the top of the cliff. Beside and behind him, one hand resting on Donuil's shoulder, my brother Ambrose stood grinning, his long, golden hair shining in the sunlight, and his other arm holding a large, metal helmet adorned with an enormous pair of Saxon horns.
As I sat there, overwhelmed with incredulous relief, I felt the fear and tension drain from my body like some ethereal form of sweat, while Donuil came leaping down the face of the cliff like a mountain goat to drag me bodily from my saddle and sweep me up into a great bear hug. Still too stunned to react, I was aware of the unyielding bronze of my cuirass, which saved my ribs from being crushed by his massive arms, and of the sight of my brother, who had donned his helmet and now followed Donuil's downward route more sedately, a smile of sheer pleasure lighting his handsome face. I felt my feet leave the ground, and then I felt Donuil lose his balance so that we fell with a crash and rolled on the sparsely grassed floor of the narrow gully. Reaction set in then and I began to wrestle back, straining and wriggling to achieve a headlock on the big Erse prince who was mauling me, and feeling a brief, short-lived surge of real anger at what they had done to me. Donuil, however, was bigger and heavier than I was, and so my anger was quickly dissipated by struggling with the sheer bulk of him and eventually we both relaxed, by mutual consent, to lie staring and grinning stupidly at each other like a couple of boys.
As my breathing began to return to normal, I turned my head, still sprawled backwards on my elbows, to look up to where my half-brother, Ambrose Ambrosianus Britannicus, my father's son by another woman, stood grinning down at me. My father's son by a woman other than his wife, my mother . . . The thought caused me no concern, for I knew the amazing, seemingly incredible truth behind it. Picus Britannicus, our father, had known nothing of what transpired between him and Ambrose's mother. He had been badly wounded at the time, his throat and neck mangled by an arrow that had pierced his mouth, and he had spent months under the influence of strong opiates, bound to his bed much of the time to keep him from thrashing about and further injuring his head, which was muffled in bandage
s. And during that time, the young wife of his aged and noble host had used the faceless, wounded man like a stallion, in the secrecy of night, attempting to impregnate herself with his seed in order to produce an heir for her feeble but beloved husband. She had succeeded, but the consequences had been tragic for her husband and for her. My father had never seen her face or even known of her existence, and had remained in ignorance of all of this, believing for a long time that the hazy, episodic fragments he could recall were no more than erotic dreams brought on by his drugged condition and his own rude, virile strength. He had told me the tale himself, decades later, but even then he had been ignorant of having sired a son. Only after my father was dead had I encountered my half-brother, a mere six months my junior and my living likeness, in the kingdom of Vortigern, king of Northumbria.
All of these thoughts rushed through my mind in the blinking of an eye and did nothing to impair the smile that spread across my lips at the sight of Ambrose grinning down at me. He nodded, silent, and then, removing his horned helmet again, he combed his fingers through his thick hair and shook it out around his head before stepping towards me, one hand outstretched to help me rise. I took it and pulled myself to my feet where I stood watching him as he stared back into my eyes. I began to raise my arms and he met me halfway, hugging me in silence.
It was a strange experience, hugging this man, almost a total stranger and yet blood of my blood, bone of my bone, and resembling me more closely than my own reflection in the few mirrors into which I had gazed. Therein, my face was always altered by the colour, texture and sheen of the reflecting metal, be it bronze or silver. The face in front of me now, when I leaned back to arm's length to look at it, holding him by the shoulders, bore no such metallic inconsistencies. The skin was darkened by the sun, as was my own, and the hair above the broad forehead grew thick and yellow, just like mine. If anything was different between us, I thought, it must be simple size. Ambrose, like Donuil, was bigger than I; not greatly bigger, perhaps not even noticeably, but he seemed to me to bulk larger than I did, his shoulders more massive, his forearms heavier, his eyes a hair's breadth higher than my own.